EU reaches deal on critical climate policy after marathon talks

19.12.22

News

EU reaches deal on critical climate policy after marathon talks

Several outlets carry the news that the European Union has agreed to, as Politico reports, a “major overhaul of the bloc’s flagship carbon market and a brand new fund to protect vulnerable people from rising CO2 costs”. The measures were agreed on by EU negotiators in the early hours of Sunday as part of a “jumbo” trilogue that started on Friday morning, adds the outlet. It continues: “Touted as the cornerstone of Europe’s climate efforts, reforming the Emissions Trading System (ETS) is key to achieving the goal of slashing 55% of CO2 emissions by 2030 from 1990 levels…As part of the hard-fought compromise, EU brokers stipulated that power generators and heavy polluters covered by the ETS will have to curb their pollution by 62% by the end of the decade, 1% more than what the European Commission had initially proposed. Waste will be covered by the scheme from 2028, with potential derogations until 2030. The deal also mandates that all the revenues generated by the carbon market ‘shall’ be spent on climate action…Free CO2 certificates, given to industry to remain competitive against rivals from outside the bloc, will be phased out entirely by 2034 as a planned Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism is due to enter into force from 2026 at the end of a three-year transition period. The commission and the council sought an end-date of 2036, while the parliament fought for a speedier phaseout by 2032. The border tax covers cement, aluminium, fertilisers, electric energy production, hydrogen, iron and steel. However, negotiators stopped short of introducing rebates to protect exports, arguing they would have proven incompatible with World Trade Organization rules.”

German MEP Peter Liese, who steered the negotiations on the bill, is reported saying: “We just found an agreement on the biggest climate law ever negotiated in Europe.” The Financial Times notes that EU member states have reached a deal on the “world’s first major carbon border tax”, adding that the deal has “sparked controversy with the EU’s main trading partners, who say it will expose their industries to unfair competition”. Reuters says the deal was reached after “30 hours” of negotiations and that the “provisional deal still needs to be formally adopted by the European Parliament and the European Council”. Le Monde says that the “carbon market will be progressively extended to the maritime sector, intra-European flights and waste incineration sites depending on a favourable report by the commission”. It adds: “The commission had proposed a second carbon market targeting building heating and road fuels, but the plan raised concerns as European households grapple with soaring energy prices exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. If energy prices continue to spiral, the application of this part of the agreement will be delayed by a year. Funds from this second market will go to a ‘Social Climate Fund’ designed to help vulnerable households and businesses weather the energy price crisis.”

Meanwhile, in other European news, the Financial Times says the “region’s leading industrialists” have warned that “Europe risks falling behind the US in attracting investment in its efforts to tackle climate change as regulatory burdens threaten to hold back growth”. It quotes Björn Rosengren, chief executive of ABB, said that while the “drive towards sustainability is quite clear”, the challenge was to “do it in a way that does not destroy Europe . . . when other people are taking different actions”. And the Times reports that “Qatar has threatened to cut off energy supplies to Belgium and Europe in a row over a corruption scandal that has shaken the European Union”.

UK: Hydrogen ‘too costly and inefficient’ to heat homes

The Times

Several UK outlets cover a new report by MPs which concludes, reports the Times, that “hydrogen is too expensive and inefficient to become a substitute for natural gas in home heating…and it is likely to have only a niche role in the UK’s efforts to reach net-zero emissions”. The newspaper adds: “The Commons science and technology committee said that it was ‘not likely to be practically and economically viable for mass use’ in heating homes. It warned that there would be significant ‘cost, technological and infrastructure challenges’ and that hydrogen was only likely to be a niche fuel where electrification is not possible. Proponents say that hydrogen could offer a green alternative to gas using existing pipeline infrastructure. Hydrogen is overwhelmingly produced from fossil fuels that require carbon capture and storage, which is not deployed at the scale required to make a significant contribution to emissions reductions. Creating ‘green’ hydrogen without fossil fuels needs a huge amount of cheap renewable electricity, which the UK does not have. The government has said that it will make a decision later this decade on how significant a role hydrogen will play in areas such as domestic heating.” The Independent quotes committee chair Greg Clark MP who says: “Hydrogen can play an important role in decarbonising the UK’s economy, but it is not a panacea. There are significant infrastructure challenges associated with converting our energy networks to use hydrogen and uncertainty about when low-carbon hydrogen can be produced at scale at an economical cost. But there are important applications for hydrogen in particular industries so it can be, in the words of one witness to our inquiry, ‘a big niche’.”

In other UK news, the Independent reports the nation has signed a new agreement with EU and North Sea neighbours on developing renewable energy. The news outlet says: “Ministers hailed the move as ‘essential’ for the delivery of Britain’s net-zero goals and ‘bolstering’ energy security. The memorandum of understanding was signed by climate minister Graham Stuart on Sunday. It enables the UK to work with the North Seas Energy Cooperation (NSEC), which includes the European Commission, to develop renewable projects, specifically those linking energy interconnectors and windfarms. The agreement represents a renewal of Britain’s relations with the NSEC after Brexit. The UK will not regain its membership, but the European Commission said it will benefit from a ‘privileged framework for co-operation’. The offshore grid links Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway. The initiative is expected to support the UK’s targets to increase offshore wind fivefold to 50GW and deliver 18GW of electricity interconnector capacity – up from 8.4 GW today – by 2030.”

Meanwhile, the Independent reports that new analysis by the New Economics Foundation and Oxfam shows that the UK government is “spending a billion pounds less on cutting domestic emissions than it is expected to raise through carbon taxes over the next 12 months, contradicting its own principle that ‘the polluter pays’”. It continues: “The UK emissions trading scheme – which charges certain businesses for emitting greenhouse gases – is expected to raise £6.5bn this year, more than six times the £1bn it raised in 2021-22…but despite the significant projected windfall, the government has only allocated £5.5bn to cutting carbon emissions domestically this year.” The Press Association reports that the “government has been criticised for failing to consider the worsening climate crisis in Rwanda as it seeks to deport some asylum seekers there”. The newswire says: “A freedom of information request to the Home Office by Christian Aid revealed the department did not conduct a climate risk assessment into the impact on the lives of people being sent to the African country.” And the Independent carries a news report under the headline: “More than half of homes do not meet 2025 energy efficiency target.”

Finally, the Press Association carries the comments of Oliver Dowden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who said yesterday that people can have “confidence” there will not be blackouts this winter, save for “some very, very major external shock that would affect the supply of power into this country”. The Mail on Sunday prominently carries the views of “Westminster insiders” and a “source close to” the climate-sceptic former energy minister Jacob Rees-Mogg who claim that “Britain is facing the prospect of rolling power cuts, with the Met Office being blamed for not giving enough warning of the severe cold snap that has strained energy supplies”. (There have not been any blackouts during the prolonged cold spell which has ended today in the UK, plus the Met Office warned in early October that November and December were “likely to see a higher incidence of northerly airflows, preventing mild, moist air flowing to the UK from the Atlantic Ocean and increasing the potential for cold snaps with some threat of snow and ice, mainly in northern areas”.)

COP15: Summit on ‘pact with nature’ enters final stretch

BBC News

“With only hours left to secure a global agreement to stop the destruction of nature, delegates at a UN summit are considering a new draft deal,” reports BBC News, adding: “A compromise text has been put forward in a last ditch attempt to build consensus among nearly 200 countries…A new text of the agreement was released on Sunday by China, the official president of the summit, which is also known as COP15…The text has been passed to ministers who are expected to discuss the proposals behind closed doors. Environmental groups said these were nervous hours…Tony Juniper, head of the government’s advising body for nature in England, tweeted that the new plans were too weak, saying calls for ambition on finance must be matched by stronger ambition for nature recovery.” The Financial Times says: “Negotiators have proposed targets to protect roughly one-third of the planet as part of UN talks aimed at striking a global deal to reverse the destruction of nature. The talks, which have been taking place in Montreal over the past week and a half, are pushing to create what is being dubbed a ‘Paris Agreement for nature’, referring to the 2015 global deal in which 189 countries pledged to limit global warming to 1.5C. As part of the final draft of the agreement, released a day before talks are scheduled to conclude on Monday, the presidency proposed that by 2030 at least 30% of the planet’s land and oceans should be ‘effectively conserved’, while at least 30% of ‘degraded’ land and ocean ecosystems should be under ‘effective restoration’ programmes.” (See Carbon Brief’s video interviews with a range of delegates on what they want to see from the deal.)

Der Spiegel carries an article titled “no climate protection without species protection – and vice versa” saying that, according to “optimistic scenarios”, the regeneration and protection of forests, moors or mangroves on the coasts could provide more than a third of the greenhouse gas reductions by 2030 that are necessary to achieve Paris goal of limiting warming to below 2C. German environment minister Steffi Lemke has called the draft of the final agreement “brave” and that it “contains many points that point in the right direction”, reports Deutsche Welle. In the “decisive phase”, Lemke will continue to work “to ensure that the international community resolutely fights the extinction of species”, adds Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Meanwhile, the Guardian reports on a new study which concludes that “Earth could lose more than a 10th of its plant and animal species by the end of the century on current trends”.

++In the last few moments, a deal has been reached in Montreal – despite some objections from forest nations in Africa. Carbon Brief will publish a detailed summary of the negotiations and outcome later this week.++

Investors ramp up pressure on Big Oil firms to set 2030 climate targets

Reuters

A group of investors has, reports Reuters, “tabled resolutions urging four of the world’s top oil and gas companies to set broad climate targets for 2030, reviving pressure on the sector after a year that saw governments shift their focus to energy security”. The newswire adds: “Activist group Follow This said it had co-filed the resolutions with six major institutional investors managing $1.3tn in assets ahead of the annual general meetings of BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil and Shell next year. In the resolutions, the investors call on the companies to set targets to reduce by 2030 greenhouse gas emissions including those from fuel sold to customers, known as Scope 3 emissions, which account for the vast majority of the sector’s pollution.”

China’s renewable energy capacity expands in Jan-Nov

Xinhua

China’s installed capacity of renewable energy has “continued to expand in the January-November period amid the country’s pursuit of green development”, Xinhua writes. The state news agency notes that, according to the data from the National Energy Administration (NEA), the country’s top energy regulator, by the end of November, China’s total installed power generation capacity reached about 2,510GW (gigawatts), rising 8.1% year on year. Specifically, the “installed capacity of wind power grew 15.1% from a year ago to 350GW, while that of solar power came in at 370GW, a yearly increase of 29.4%”, the article adds.

Separately, another Xinhua article says that China’s automobile exports “maintained growth momentum” in November 2022, according to data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers. Citing the data, the article adds that Chinese car manufacturers exported 329,000 cars last month, expanding 65% year on year.

Meanwhile, Caixin Global carries an analysis by Wang Tao, the head of Asia economics and chief China economist of UBS Investment Bank, who focuses on the “key takeaways” from China’s Central Economic Work Conference (CEWC) which concluded on Friday. She writes that the “much-awaited” annual event outlined the Chinese government’s “main economic objectives and policy plans” for 2023, adding that in the conference readout the senior leadership put the “stabilisation” of growth, the “labour market” and “inflation” as its “top priorities”, plus “urged government agencies to improve collaboration and increase macro policy support”. Xinhua also covers the meeting, saying that “delivering an important speech at the conference, president Xi Jinping reviewed the country’s economic work in 2022, analysed the current economic situation and arranged next year’s economic work”.

Additionally, Voice of America writes that rising domestic demand is “forcing Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to cut back or halt natural gas exports to China, prompting a shakeup of regional energy markets and a rethinking of trade relationships across Central Asia”. It adds that US experts have been “urging the west to invest in the region’s energy infrastructure, arguing that this kind of support ‘will create steady partners and balance Chinese and Russian ambitions’”. Al Jazeera reports that the US has announced a new “China House” entity at the US Department of State, tasked with “consolidating policymaking related to China amid growing tensions between the two superpowers”. It adds that relations between the US and China have “long been strained” and some “expect the rivalry to grow as China asserts itself as a global power”. However, leaders such as Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi have pointed out that “cooperation between the US and China, the two largest economies in the world, is essential for progress on issues such as climate change”, the article highlights. Finally, the state-run newspaper China Daily has a comment piece by Andrew Leung, president of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, who writes that President Xi’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia came “on the heels of OPEC’s open defiance of the US’ demand in response to the Russia-Ukraine conflict”.

Germany gets its first LNG terminal in record time

Manager Magazin

In the “race to replace Russian gas”, the first floating liquid “natural” gas [LNG] terminal was opened in the German city Wilhelmshaven on Saturday, reports Manager Magazin. “By the end of next year, we are expected to have an import capacity of over 30bcm [billion cubic metres] of gas,” the outlet quotes German chancellor Olaf Scholz saying, referring to further LNG terminals under construction planned along the German coast. Die Zeit quotes Scholz saying that with existing and planned terminals Germany’s energy supply will be “independent of the pipelines from Russia”. Around 6% of Germany’s gas requirements are to be fed into the grid via the terminal in Wilhelmshaven each year, the outlet explains. However, Euractiv reports that environmental activists “fear that operating the floating LNG terminal could do serious damage to the environment, like when chlorine is used to wash facilities and is then piped into coastal waters”. It quotes Constantin Zerger from Environmental Action Germany (DUH) saying: “For us, that is the height of ignorance.”

Elsewhere, Tagesschau reports that the EU Commission has approved the nationalisation of the German “crisis-ridden” energy groups Uniper and Sefe, formerly Gazprom Germania, by the federal government. It says that both companies “got into difficulties” due to the ongoing European energy crisis. In the future, the ministry of finance will be responsible for Uniper and the economy ministry for Sefe, adds Deutsche Welle.

Finally, Reuters reports that more than a third of the electricity fed into the German power grids between July and September came from coal-fired power plants, compared with 32% in the third quarter of 2021, according to German statistics office Destatis. Nevertheless, another news by Reuters says that renewable energy accounted for 47% of German power consumption in 2022, up 4.9 percentage points from a year earlier “thanks to favourable weather conditions”, German industry groups said on Friday.

Comment

Witness to paradise being lost: my year in the dying Amazon

Jonathan Watts, The Guardian

The Guardian’s Jonathan Watts has written a personal account of his year spent living in the Amazon: “The election victory of Lula was a gasp of fresh air. But can he rein back the destructive forces unleashed by Bolsonaro? It will not be easy and it will not be cheap. Tens of thousands of illegal miners will have to be relocated and retrained. The forest communities they have co-opted into land clearance, alcoholism and prostitution will need support and their traditional practices treated with more respect. The Brazilian economy, which has become ever more dependent on agriculture and mining, will need alternative ways to generate income. Lula will have to find a way to work with a hostile congress and a sceptical agricultural sector, while strengthening forest protection and Indigenous rights. All of this will require one thing that has not happened since the first European colonisers set foot on this continent – the outside world will need to value the forest more alive than dead. One way or another, this year has to be a turning point. With the fire storm on the horizon, I have seen more than enough of paradise lost. The wild abyss of the Amazon can not go on as it is. The womb of nature must not become her grave.”

Meanwhile, the Financial Times carries a comment piece by David Kabua, the president of the Marshall Islands, under the headline: “If the Marshall Islands can support green shipping, so should everyone.” The Guardian has published a comment piece by author Fatima Bhutto who says the photo shared with her of “a newborn held aloft in Pakistan sums up the sheer injustice of the climate crisis”, adding: “Pakistan is responsible for less than 1% of global emissions; we are not climate criminals but climate victims.”

In other comment, the Observer‘s Robin McKie argues that, “despite the hype, we shouldn’t bank on nuclear fusion to save the world from climate catastrophe”. The Sunday Telegraph’s climate-sceptic columnist Janet Daley claims that “scientific dissidents are again silenced and ostracised for their opinions”. In the Daily Express, the climate-sceptic columnist James Whale suggests using “less package wrapping” to battle the changing climate.

Finally, the Observer carries a news feature about “the neighbours turning their London street into a solar power station”. And Climate Home News has published the first two articles from India in a four-part series on “the human cost of sugar”.

Science

Quantifying flash droughts over China from 1980 to 2017

Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres

Flash droughts – droughts that develop rapidly over a short period of time – became more intense and longer-lasting in China over 1980-2017, according to new research. “The widely used standardised precipitation evapotranspiration index, with traditional time scales longer than one month, cannot easily capture flash drought signals,” the authors say. They propose a new index for monitoring droughts, with a higher temporal resolution. Flash droughts were stronger and longer in western and northern China, the paper finds. It adds: “As the intensity of flash droughts increased, the impact of precipitation decreased, while temperature and net radiation gradually played leading roles.”

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