The European chemicals industry will be wiped out in a decade, with the loss of 6m jobs, unless politicians wake up to its chronic lack of competitiveness, the man at the centre of last year’s Grangemouth dispute has declared. Jim Ratcliffe, the majority owner of chemicals giant Ineos, has written to Jose Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, warning that the chemicals industry is heading for the same fate as the textiles sector. He says a toxic cocktail of high energy costs – inflated by green taxes – feedstock prices in “another league” to those in America and the Middle East and uncompetitive labour are leading to the rapid closure of Europe’s chemical plants. --Alistair Osborne, The Daily Telegraph, 7 March 2014
Aiming at the heart of President Obama’s strategy for fighting climate change, the Republican-controlled House voted Thursday to block the administration’s plan to limit carbon pollution from new power plants. The bill targets Obama’s proposal for the Environmental Protection Agency to set the first national limits on heat-trapping carbon pollution from future power plants. It’s part of the GOP’s election-year strategy to fight back against what Republicans call a “war on coal” by the Obama administration. The bill passed by a 229-183 vote. Ten Democrats, mostly from coal-producing states or the South, joined Republicans in support of it. Three Republicans opposed the bill. --Matthew Daly, The Associated Press, 7 March 2014
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has downplayed evidence that the global climate is considerably less sensitive to greenhouse gases than climate models are estimating, a new paper says. Published by Britain’s Global Warming Policy Foundation think tank, the new paper says clues to weaker climate sensitivity have all been referred to in the IPCC’s recently published Fifth Assessment Report. “However, this important conclusion was not drawn in the full IPCC report, it is only mentioned as a possibility, and is ignored in the IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers,” the report says. --Graham Lloyd, The Australian, 7 March 2014
The "certainty" that underpins European and UK climate policy may be wildly misplaced, as the models that the climate science establishment presents to politicians as evidence run far too hot. That's according to a report released yesterday by UK think-tank the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Nic Lewis doesn't disagree that CO2 contributes to global warming - and most of the additional CO2 is caused by humans. The science today, however, shows around half a degree of surface temperature warming manifesting itself over the next 70 years. This the most important climate discovery in recent years - and you may reasonably think it should have grabbed the headlines. --Andrew Orlowski, The Register, 6 March 2014
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has downplayed evidence that the global climate is considerably less sensitive to greenhouse gases than climate models are estimating, a new paper says. Published by Britain’s Global Warming Policy Foundation think tank, the new paper says clues to weaker climate sensitivity have all been referred to in the IPCC’s recently published Fifth Assessment Report. “However, this important conclusion was not drawn in the full IPCC report, it is only mentioned as a possibility, and is ignored in the IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers,” the report says. --Graham Lloyd, The Australian, 7 March 2014
The reason [for Russia’s military intervention] is part of the Kremlin's long-term and officially stated (if you bother to look for it) great game: energy imperialism. That is, recovering Russia's global superpower status via the the chief weapon at its disposal: its oil and energy clout. Since the break-up of the USSR, Russia has brooked no opposition, using militaristic means whenever necessary, to recover that which was lost when the Berlin Wall - and Soviet global power - fell. Neither has it been reluctant to use energy as a key bargaining weapon. The blueprint for all this was formally laid down in May 2009, when a Kremlin security document, approved and published by the Russian Security Council, explicitly sanctioned the use of military force in pursuit of the goal of returning Russia to "energy superpower" status. The report specifically cited the Caspian Sea region as a key area of potential conflict. --Peter Glover, Breitbart, 7 March 2014
