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The device that reverses CO2 emissions

Frank Swain - BBC — Wed, 07 Apr 2021 07:21:12 +0000

(Image credit: Carbon Engineering)

Cooling the planet by filtering excess carbon dioxide out of the air on an industrial scale would require a new, massive global industry – what would it need to work?

The year is 2050. Walk out of the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum in Midland, Texas, and drive north across the sun-baked scrub where a few remaining oil pumpjacks nod lazily in the heat, and then you’ll see it: a glittering palace rising out of the pancake-flat ground. The land here is mirrored: the choppy silver-blue waves of an immense solar array stretch out in all directions. In the distance, they lap at a colossal grey wall five stories high and almost a kilometer long. Behind the wall, you glimpse the snaking pipes and gantries of a chemical plant.

As you get closer you see the wall is moving, shimmering – it is entirely made up of huge fans whirring in steel boxes. You think to yourself that it looks like a gigantic air conditioning unit, blown up to incredible proportions. In a sense, that’s exactly what this is. You’re looking at a direct air capture (DAC) plant, one of tens of thousands like it across the globe. Together, they’re trying to cool the planet by sucking carbon dioxide out of the air. This Texan landscape was made famous for the billions of barrels of oil pulled out of its depths during the 20th Century. Now the legacy of those fossil fuels – the CO2 in our air – is being pumped back into the emptied reservoirs.

If the world is to meet Paris Agreement goals of limiting global warming to 1.5C by 2100, sights like this may be necessary by mid-century.

We have a climate change problem and it’s caused by an excess of CO2. With direct air capture, you can remove any emission, anywhere, from any moment in time – Steve Oldham

But step back for a moment to 2021, to Squamish, British Columbia where, against a bucolic skyline of snowy mountains, the finishing touches are being put to a barn-sized device covered in blue tarpaulin. When it becomes operational in September, Carbon Engineering’s prototype direct air capture plant will begin scrubbing a tonne of CO2 from the air every year. It is a small start, and a somewhat larger plant in Texas is in the works, but this is the typical scale of a DAC plant today.

“We have a climate change problem and it’s caused by an excess of CO2,” says Carbon Engineering chief executive Steve Oldham. “With DAC, you can remove any emission, anywhere, from any moment in time. It’s very powerful tool to have.”

Most carbon capture focuses on cleaning emissions at the source: scrubbers and filters on smokestacks that prevent harmful gases reaching the atmosphere. But this is impractical for small, numerous point sources like the planet’s billion or so automobiles. Nor can it address the CO2 that is already in the air. That’s where direct air capture comes in.

The number of things that would have to happen without direct air capture are so stretching and multiple it’s highly unlikely we can meet the Paris Agreements without it – Ajay Gambhir

If the world wants to avoid catastrophic climate change, switching to a carbon-neutral society is not enough. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that limiting global warming to 1.5C by 2100 will require technologies such as DAC for “large-scale deployment of carbon dioxide removal measures” – large-scale meaning many billions of tonnes, or gigatonnes, each year. Elon Musk recently pledged $100m (£72m) to develop carbon capture technologies, while companies such as Microsoft, United Airlines, and ExxonMobil are making billion-dollar investments in the field.

“Current models suggest we’re going to need to remove 10 gigatonnes of CO2 per year by 2050, and by the end of the century that number needs to double to 20 gigatonnes per year,” says Jane Zelikova, a climate scientist at the University of Wyoming. Right now, “we’re removing virtually none. We’re having to scale from zero.”

Carbon Engineering’s pilot plant in British Columbia is the “cookie-cutter” model for much larger DAC plants (Credit: Carbon Engineering)

Carbon Engineering’s plant in Squamish is designed as a testbed for different technologies. But the firm is drawing up blueprints for a much larger plant in the oil fields of West Texas, which would fix 1 million tonnes of CO2 annually. “Once one is done, it’s a cookie-cutter model, you simply build replicas of that plant,” says Oldham. Yet he admits the scale of the task ahead is dizzying. “We need to pull 800 gigatonnes out of the atmosphere. It’s not going to happen overnight.”

Blue-sky thinking

The science of direct air capture is straightforward. There are several ways to do it, but the one that Carbon Engineering’s system uses fans to draw air containing 0.04% CO2 (today’s atmospheric levels) across a filter drenched in potassium hydroxide solution – a caustic chemical commonly known as potash, used in soapmaking and various other applications. The potash absorbs CO2 from the air, after which the liquid is piped to a second chamber and mixed with calcium hydroxide (builder’s lime). The lime seizes hold of the dissolved CO2, producing small flakes of limestone. These limestone flakes are sieved off and heated in a third chamber, called a calciner, until they decompose, giving off pure CO2, which is captured and stored. At each stage, the leftover chemical residues are recycled back in the process, forming a closed reaction that repeats endlessly with no waste materials.

We’re past the point where reducing emissions needed to take place. We’re locking in our reliance on DAC more and more – Jane Zelikova

With global carbon emissions continuing to rise, the climate target of 1.5C is looking less and less likely without interventions like this.

“The number of things that would have to happen without direct air capture are so stretching and multiple it’s highly unlikely we can meet the Paris Agreements without it,” says Ajay Gambhir, senior researcher at the Imperial College Grantham Institute for Climate Change and an author of a 2019 paper on the role of DAC in climate mitigation.

The IPCC does present some climate-stabilizing models that don’t rely on direct air capture, but Gambhir says these are “extremely ambitious” in their assumptions about advances in energy efficiency and people’s willingness to change their behaviour.

“We’re past the point where reducing emissions needed to take place,” says Zelikova. “We’re locking in our reliance on DAC more and more.”

DAC is far from the only way carbon can be taken out of the atmosphere. Carbon can be removed naturally through land-use changes such as restoring peatland, or most popularly, planting forests. But this is slow and would require huge tracts of valuable land – foresting an area the size of the United States, by some estimates, and driving up food prices five-fold in the process. And in the case of trees, the carbon removal effect is limited, as they will eventually die and release their stored carbon unless they can be felled and burned in a closed system. (Read more about why planting trees doesn’t always help with climate change)

The scale of the challenge for carbon removal using technologies like DAC, rather than plants, is no less gargantuan. Gambhir’s paper calculates that simply keeping pace with global CO2 emissions – currently 36 gigatonnes per year – would mean building in the region of 30,000 large-scale DAC plants, more than three for every coal-fired power station operating in the world today. Each plant would cost up to $500m (£362m) to build – coming in at a cost of up to $15 trillion (£11tn).

Climeworks’ facility near Zurich, Switzerland, sells the CO2 it captures to nearby vegetable growers for their greenhouses (Credit: Alamy)

Every one of those facilities would need to be stocked with solvent to absorb CO2. Supplying a fleet of DAC plants big enough to capture 10 gigatonnes of CO2 every year will require around four million tonnes of potassium hydroxide, the entire annual global supply of this chemical one and a half times over.

And once those thousands of DAC plants are built, they also need power to run. “If this was a global industry absorbing 10 gigatonnes of CO2 a year, you would be expending 100 exajoules, about a sixth of total global energy,” says Gambhir. Most of this energy is needed to heat the calciner to around 800C – too intense for electrical power alone, so each DAC plant would need a gas furnace, and a ready supply of gas.

Costing the planet

Estimates of how much it costs to capture a tonne of CO2 from the air vary widely, ranging from $100 to $1,000 (£72 to £720) per tonne. Oldham says that most figures are unduly pessimistic – he is confident that Climate Engineering can fix a tonne of carbon for as little as $94 (£68), especially once it becomes a widespread industrial process.

A bigger issue is figuring out where to send the bill. Incredibly, saving the world turns out to be a pretty hard sell, commercially speaking. Direct air capture does result in one valuable commodity, though: thousands of tonnes of compressed CO2. This can be combined with hydrogen to make synthetic, carbon-neutral fuel. That could then be sold or burned in the gas furnaces of the calciner (where the emissions would be captured and the cycle continue once again).

Surprisingly, one of the biggest customers for compressed CO2 is the fossil fuel industry.

As wells run dry, it’s not uncommon to squeeze the remaining oil out of the ground by pressuring the reservoir using steam or gas in a process called enhanced oil recovery. Carbon dioxide is a popular choice for this and comes with the additional benefit of locking that carbon underground, completing the final stage of carbon capture and storage. Occidental Petroleum, which has partnered with Carbon Engineering to build a full-scale DAC plant in Texas, uses 50 million tonnes of CO2 every year in enhanced oil recovery. Each tonne of CO2 used in this way is worth about $225 (£163) in tax credits alone.

It’s perhaps fitting that the CO2 in our air is eventually being returned underground to the oil fields from whence it came, although maybe ironic that the only way to finance this is in the pursuit of yet more oil. Occidental and others hope that by pumping CO2 into the ground, they can drastically reduce the carbon impact of that oil: a typical enhanced-recovery operation sequesters one tonne of CO2 for every 1.5 tonnes it ultimately releases in fresh oil. So while the process reduces the emissions associated with oil, it doesn’t balance the books.

Though there are other uses that may become more commercially viable. Another direct air capture company, Climeworks, has 14 smaller-scale units in operation sequestering 900 tonnes of CO2 a year, which it sells to a greenhouse to enhance the growth of pickles. It’s now working on a longer-term solution: a plant under construction in Iceland will mix captured CO2 with water and pump it 500-600m (1,600-2,000ft) underground, where the gas will react with the surrounding basalt and turn to stone. To finance this, it offers businesses and citizens the ability to buy carbon offsets, starting at a mere €7 (£6) per month. Can the rest of the world be convinced to buy in?

Enhancing the growth of vegetables in greenhouses is one application for the CO2 captured from the air by DAC (Credit: Alamy)

“DAC is always going to cost money, and unless you’re paid to do it, there is no financial incentive,” says Chris Goodall, author of What We Need To Do Now: For A Zero-Carbon Future. “Climeworks can sell credits to virtuous people, write contracts with Microsoft and Stripe to take a few hundred tonnes a year out of the atmosphere, but this needs to be scaled up a millionfold, and that requires someone to pay for it.

“There are subsidies for electric cars, cheap financing for solar plants, but you don’t see these for DAC,” says Oldham. “There is so much focus on emission reduction, but there isn’t the same degree of focus on the rest of the problem, the volume of CO2 in the atmosphere. The big impediment for DAC is that thinking isn’t in policy.”

Zelikova believes that DAC will follow a similar path to other climate technologies, and become more affordable. “We have well-developed cost curves showing how technology can go down in cost really quickly,” says Zelikova. “We surmounted similar hurdles with wind and solar. The biggest thing is to deploy them as much as possible. It’s important for government to support commercialization – it has a role as a first customer and a customer with very deep pockets.”

Goodall advocates for a global carbon tax, which would make it expensive to emit carbon unless offsets were purchased. But he recognizes this is still a politically unpalatable option. Nobody wants to pay higher taxes, especially if the externalities of our high-energy lifestyles – increasing wildfires, droughts, floods, sea-level rise – are seen as being shouldered by somebody else.

Zelikova adds we also need broader conversation in society about how much these efforts should cost. “There is an enormous cost in climate change, in induced or exacerbated natural disasters. We need to do away with idea that DAC should be cheap.”

Risk and reward

Even if we agree to build 30,000 industrial-scale DAC plants, find the chemical materials to run them, and the money to pay for it all, we won’t be out of the woods yet. In fact, we might end up in a worse position than before, thanks to a phenomenon known as mitigation deterrence.

Facilities in Iceland are among those aiming to mineralize CO2, to lock it out of circulation in the atmosphere as a long-term solution (Credit: Sandra O Snaebjornsdottir)

“If you think DAC is going to be there in the medium- to long-term, you will not do as much near-term emissions reduction,” explains Gambhir. “If the scale-up goes wrong – if it turns out to be difficult to produce the sorbent, or that it degrades more quickly, if it’s trickier technologically if turns out to be more expensive than expected, then in a sense by not acting quickly in the near-term, you’ve effectively locked yourself into a higher temperature pathway.”

Critics of DAC point out that much of its appeal lies in the promise of a hypothetical technology that allows us to continue living our carbon-rich lifestyles. Yet Oldham argues that for some hard-to-decarbonize industries, such as aviation, offsets that fund DAC might be the most viable option. “If it’s cheaper and easier to pull carbon out of air than to stop going up in the air, maybe that is what DAC plays in emission control.”

Gambhir argues that it’s not an “either-or” situation. “We need to rapidly reduce emissions in the near-term, but at the same time, determinedly develop DAC to work out for sure if it’s going to be there for us in the future.” Zelikova agrees: “It’s a ‘yes, and’ situation,” she says. “DAC is a critical tool to balance out the carbon budget, so what we can’t eliminate today can be removed later.”

As Oldham seeks to scale up Carbon Engineering, the biggest fundamental factor is proving large-scale DAC is “feasible, affordable and available”. If he’s successful, the future of our planet’s climate may once again be decided in the oil fields of Texas.

The emissions from travel it took to report this story were 0kg CO2. The digital emissions from this story are an estimated 1.2g to 3.6g CO2 per page view. Find out more about how we calculated this figure here.

CO2, to lock it out of circulation in the atmosphere as a long-term solution (Credit: Sandra O Snaebjornsdottir)

Source: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210310-the-trillion-dollar-plan-to-capture-co2

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Bill Gates-Backed Carbon Capture Plant Does The Work Of 40 Million Trees

CNBC — Wed, 07 Apr 2021 07:44:37 +0000

The post Bill Gates-Backed Carbon Capture Plant Does The Work Of 40 Million Trees first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Time to Define European Autonomy

Robin Niblett — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 09:49:23 +0000

No matter who succeeds Angela Merkel in the chancellery, Germany will need to focus on building stronger European strategic autonomy in order to be a strong and valued partner to the United States—and to other liberal democracies around the world.

Angela Merkel’s foreign policy did not stretch Germany. It inspired and disappointed its allies in equal measure. She was tough on her most indebted eurozone partners during the financial crisis of 2010–12, as most German voters demanded, but Germany backstopped a massive increase in the ECB’s financial commitment to those countries, as most outsiders recommended. She championed the plan for a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the United States but did not try to force it through overgrowing popular hostility in the European Union. She stood up to Russian President Vladimir Putin after his annexation of Crimea and orchestrated the EU sanctions that continue to affect the Russian economy, but she supports the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

She spoke out boldly against former US President Donald Trump’s values-free America First philosophy when he took office but avoided a rupture in the transatlantic alliance. She has championed the Paris Agreement and the green focus of the NextGenerationEU recovery fund, but Germany’s transition away from high-carbon electricity generation remains slow. One of her boldest moves—opening Germany’s borders in 2015 to someone million migrants fleeing Syria and other conflicts—was forced on her by circumstance, and she then balanced it by negotiating a tawdry deal with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to staunch the flow.

Avoiding Risks

In many ways, Merkel’s foreign policy record encapsulates the outside view of Germany as an international actor. It is a powerful country that lies at the intersection of many of the world’s most significant fault lines—geographically and thematically. It has the means to tilt the balance of European foreign policy in its preferred direction, but it often avoids the burdens and risks that such overt leadership would entail.

In which direction might German foreign policy turn after Merkel’s departure? Will it continue to reflect her deft balancing act, keeping Germany safe, but pushing difficult decisions into the future? Will it become more inward-looking, especially in a post-COVID-19 context, if German voters demand a clearer prioritization of their national interests? Or will it build on the many positive aspects of Merkel’s legacy and strengthen German support for a more collective and, potentially, powerful European voice?

Choices Are Limited

The future course of German foreign policy does not lie in its own hands. The changing international context will have a strong bearing on the choices future governments will make.

There is no more important bellwether for future German foreign policy than the policies of its principal global ally, the United States. Even an internationalist Biden administration is unlikely to recover America’s role as global leader, despite President Joe Biden’s proclamation that his foreign policy will “place the United States back at the head of the table.” The US faces huge internal challenges, and many of its allies remain wary of America’s longer-term reliability. As EU Council President Charles Michel put it on January 20, 2021, the same day as Biden’s inauguration, “the EU chooses its course and does not wait for permission to take its own decisions.”

Nevertheless, the United States will remain the most powerful, well-resourced democracy in the world, and the indispensable guarantor of Germany’s and Europe’s security. With President Putin planning to extend his presidency into the 2030s, Russia will remain a “spoiler” country across Europe and the world. Without US support, the threats it poses to the security of individual European states could become more pronounced. In this context, Washington will continue to demand that Europeans share a greater burden of Euro-Atlantic security, and Europeans, Germany included, will have to meet the challenge.

Absent some 1930s style financial collapse, China will become ever more powerful, especially across Asia Pacific, Africa, and parts of Latin America. Germany and Europe will be unable to counter-balance China’s growing influence alone, including the spread of its authoritarian security structures and opaque political and economic approach to governance. They will need to coordinate closely with the US and other like-minded countries and put flesh on the bones of some sort of European Indo-Pacific strategy. Failure to do so would have negative impacts on European economic interests in the region and on rules-based multilateralism.

An Unstable Environment

Europe’s southern and Mediterranean neighborhood will not stabilize any time soon. Governments in North Africa and the populous Gulf and Arab states will struggle to deliver hope and opportunity to their growing young populations, given the entrenched failings of domestic governance. Turkey’s future is uncertain, as hopes for democratic renewal could be overwhelmed by the populist lure of neo-Ottoman rule. These nearby challenges will pale into insignificance if Africa’s fast-expanding populations fail to enjoy economic opportunity and continue to be ravaged by violence and the effects of accelerating climate change. Future German governments would do well to sustain Merkel’s investment in Africa’s future, which may prove to be one of her most important European legacies.

The EU itself faces multiple internal challenges: a significant minority of voters are increasingly skeptical of the process of European integration; economic divisions between and within European countries are being deepened by the COVID-19 crisis. And a sometimes defensive, sometimes belligerent UK is cutting at the economic strings that inevitably bind it to its EU neighbors—disrupting EU politics and business. The bulk of Germany’s foreign policy attention will be spent managing relations with its European neighbors and EU institutions, irrespective of the major challenges beyond.

The “How,” Not the “What”

The focal areas of Germany’s future foreign policy are fore-ordained; they will not be “new,” whoever enters the Chancellery later this year. What will matter will be the “how,” not the “what” of German foreign policy. Some of the “how” will be tactical—how much more German and EU money to deploy on stabilization efforts in the Sahel? How quickly to raise defense spending toward agreed NATO targets? Which Chinese investments to welcome and which to block? Whether to leave Nord Stream 2 “dormant” if it is completed. Each tactical decision will signal how seriously Germany takes the new international context and its support for a unified European response.

But there is a bigger “how” question that will define the character of Germany’s future foreign policy: it concerns where Germany stands on the question of how to build European “strategic autonomy” and “sovereignty” to deal with the new strategic context. Germany’s political influence, financial means, and market power will be central to deciding how this plays out.

Understandable Ambivalence

There has been an understandable ambivalence toward European strategic autonomy under Merkel—born of the suspicion that it might leave Europe in a strategic limbo between America and China and weaken the transatlantic alliance which remains so central to German and European security.

This ambivalence is well-placed. France’s President Emmanuel Macron’s view that Europeans, “cannot accept to live in a bipolar world made up of the US and China” presents Germany and Europe with a false choice. Because there will not be a bipolar world. China does not have the allies to build its own pole, and America’s allies—in Europe as in Asia—would not follow the US to such a destination if the Biden administration were to try to make it a reality.

Moreover, there is no third-way option for Europe. The citizens and polities that together comprise Europe—EU members and non-EU alike—are intrinsically part of the world’s liberal democratic camp, notwithstanding some recent, marginal back-sliding. The growing global assertiveness of China and Russia creates a congruence of interests among the liberal democracies across the Atlantic, and with other US allies—Japan, South Korea, Canada, Australia, among others—that is systemic, not temporal.

A Strong and Valued Partner

This is reflected in the way that France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and other European countries are developing Indo-Pacific strategies that will complement the heightened US focus on the region. It also applies to those policy areas which are most symbolic of European strategic autonomy—over data governance and trade, for example. In both areas, there is more that unites German, European, and US approaches than divides them, given the potential spread of Chinese state surveillance into global data governance and the economic threats posed by state-dominated economic systems.

This all means that the EU cannot be truly sovereign or autonomous, even if it were to overcome the perennial difficulties of trying to exercise collective action among 27 member states with very different external priorities and cultures. Europe’s strategic autonomy is conditional on the existence of a strong and sizeable community of other states, indispensably including the US, that share its commitment to liberal democratic systems of governance.

So, Germany’s future foreign policy needs to focus on building European strategic autonomy not for its own sake, but to enable Europe to be a strong and valued partner to the US and to other liberal democracies around the world which share the same core commitments to open societies, respect for individual and minority rights, the rule of law, and separation of powers. Germany’s indispensable new role should be to help the EU commit to inclusive forms of autonomy built around these principles.

Robin Niblett is director and chief executive of Chatham House in London.

Source: https://ip-quarterly.com/en/time-define-european-autonomy

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The post Time to Define European Autonomy first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Time to Define European Autonomy

Robin Niblett — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 09:38:30 +0000

Avoiding Risks

Choices Are Limited

The future course of German foreign policy does not lie in its own hands. The changing international context will have a strong bearing on the choices future governments will make.

An Unstable Environment

The “How,” Not the “What”

Understandable Ambivalence

A Strong and Valued Partner

Robin Niblett is director and chief executive of Chatham House in London.

Source: https://ip-quarterly.com/en/time-define-european-autonomy

[Disclaimer]

The post Time to Define European Autonomy first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Biden to Face Long List of Foreign Challenges, With China No. 1

Rick Gladstone — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 00:43:35 +0000

President Trump will be handing Joseph R. Biden Jr. a difficult cleanup act in America’s relations with many countries. But it may not take much for Mr. Biden to improve the mood.

Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times

U.S. relations with China are the worst since the countries normalized ties four decades ago. America’s allies in Europe are alienated. The most important nuclear anti-proliferation treaty is about to expire with Russia. Iran is amassing enriched nuclear fuel again, and North Korea is brandishing its atomic arsenal.

Not to mention global warming, refugee crises, and looming famines in some of the poorest places on earth, all amplified by the pandemic.

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is inheriting a landscape of challenges and ill-will toward the United States in countries hostile to President Trump’s “America First” mantra, his unpredictability, embrace of autocratic leaders, and resistance to international cooperation. Mr. Biden also could face difficulties in dealing with governments that had hoped for Mr. Trump’s re-election — particularly Israel and Saudi Arabia, which share the president’s deep antipathy toward Iran.

But Mr. Biden’s past as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as vice president in the Obama administration have given him a familiarity with international affairs that could work to his advantage, foreign policy experts who know him say.

“President Trump has lowered the bar so much that it wouldn’t take much for Biden to change the perception dramatically,” said Robert Malley, chief executive of the International Crisis Group and a former adviser in the Obama White House. “Saying a few of the things Trump hasn’t said — to rewind the tape on multilateralism, climate change, human rights — will sound very loud and significant.”

Here are the most pressing foreign policy areas the Biden administration will face:

Credit…Ng Han Guan/Associated Press

The challenge of U.S.-China relations

Nothing is more urgent, in the eyes of many experts than reversing the downward trajectory of relations with China, the economic superpower and geopolitical rival that Mr. Trump has engaged in what many are calling a new Cold War. Disputes over trade, the South China Sea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and technology have metastasized during Mr. Trump’s term, his critics say, worsened by the president’s racist declarations that China infected the world with the coronavirus and should be held accountable.

“China is kind of the radioactive core of America’s foreign policy issues,” said Orville Schell, director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations.

Mr. Biden has not necessarily helped himself with his own negative depiction of China and its authoritarian leader, President Xi Jinping, during the 2020 campaign. The two were once seen as having developed a friendly relationship during the Obama years. But Mr. Biden, perhaps acting partly to counter Mr. Trump’s accusations that he would be lenient toward China, has recently called Mr. Xi a “thug.”

Credit…Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

The Middle East: Shifts on Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iran?

Mr. Biden has vowed to reverse what he called the “dangerous failure” of Mr. Trump’s Iran policy, which repudiated the 2015 nuclear agreement and replaced it with tightening sanctions that have caused deep economic damage in Iran and left the United States largely isolated on this issue.

Mr. Biden has offered to rejoin the agreement, which constricts Iran’s nuclear capabilities if Tehran adheres to its provisions and commits to further negotiations. He also has pledged to immediately nullify Mr. Trump’s travel ban affecting Iran and several other Muslim-majority countries.

Whether Iran’s hierarchy will accept Mr. Biden’s approach is unclear. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has said the United States is untrustworthy regardless who is in the White House. At the same time, “Iran is desperate for a deal,” said Cliff Kupchan, chairman of the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy.

Still, Mr. Kupchan said, Mr. Biden will face enormous difficulties in any negotiations with Iran aimed at strengthening restrictions on its nuclear activities — weaknesses Mr. Trump had cited to justify renouncing the nuclear agreement.

“The substance will be tough — we’ve seen this movie and it’s not easy,” Mr. Kupchan said. “I think Biden’s challenge is that it will not end up blowing up in his face.”

Mr. Biden’s Iran policy could alienate Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who leveraged Mr. Trump’s confrontational approach to help strengthen Israel’s relations with Gulf Arab countries, punctuated by normalization of diplomatic ties with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. How Mr. Biden manages relations with Saudi Arabia, which considers Iran an enemy, will also be a challenge.

“There’s a very hard square to circle here,” Mr. Kupchan said.

Mr. Trump’s extremely favorable treatment of Israel in the protracted conflict with the Palestinians also could prove nettlesome as Mr. Biden navigates a different path in the Middle East. He has criticized Israeli settlement construction in occupied lands the Palestinians want for a future state. And he is likely to restore contacts with the Palestinian leadership.

“Benjamin Netanyahu can expect an uncomfortable period of adjustment,” an Israeli columnist, Yossi Verter, wrote Friday in the Haaretz newspaper.

At the same time, Mr. Biden also has a history of cordial relations with Mr. Netanyahu. Mr. Biden has said he would not reverse Mr. Trump’s transfer of the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv — a relocation that deeply angered the Palestinians.

Repairing relations with Europe and navigating Brexit

While Mr. Trump often disparaged the European Union and strongly encouraged Britain’s exit from the bloc, Mr. Biden has expressed the opposite position. Like former President Barack Obama, he supported close American relations with bloc leaders and opposed Brexit.

Mr. Biden’s ascendance could prove especially awkward for Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, who had embraced Mr. Trump and had been counting on achieving a trade deal with the United States before his country’s divorce from the bloc takes full effect. Mr. Biden may be in no hurry to complete such an agreement.

While many Europeans will be happy to see Mr. Trump go, the damage they say he has done to America’s reliability will not be easily erased.

“We had differences, but there was never a basic mistrust about having common views of the world,” Gro Harlem Brundtland, the former prime minister of Norway, told The New York Times last month. Over the past four years, she said, European leaders had learned they could “no longer take for granted that they can trust the U.S., even on basic things.”

Credit…Korean Central News Agency

Confronting North Korea’s nuclear threat

Mr. Trump has described his friendship and three meetings with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, as a success that averted war with the nuclear-armed hermetic country. But critics say Mr. Trump’s approach not only failed to persuade Mr. Kim to relinquish his arsenal of nuclear weapons and missiles, it bought Mr. Kim time to strengthen them. Last month the North unveiled what appeared to be its largest-ever intercontinental ballistic missile.

“On Trump’s watch, the North’s nuclear weapons program has grown apace, its missile capabilities have expanded, and Pyongyang can now target the United States with an ICBM,” said Evans J.R. Revere, a former State Department official and expert on North Korea. “That is the legacy that Trump will soon pass on to Biden, and it will be an enormous burden.”

Mr. Biden, who has been described by North Korea’s official news agency as a rabid dog that “must be beaten to death with a stick,” has criticized Mr. Trump’s approach as appeasement of a dictator. Mr. Biden has said he would press for denuclearization and “stand with South Korea,” but has not specified how he would deal with North Korean belligerence.

Credit…Pool photo by Mikhail Klimentyev

A likely tougher approach to Russia and Putin

Mr. Biden has long asserted that he would take a much harder line with Russia than Mr. Trump, who questioned NATO’s usefulness, doubted intelligence warnings on Russia’s interference in U.S. elections, admired President Vladimir V. Putin, and said that improving American relations with the Kremlin would benefit all. Mr. Biden, who as vice president pushed for sanctions against Russia over its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014 — the biggest illegal land seizure in Europe since World War II — might seek to extend those sanctions and take other punitive steps.

While tensions with Russia would likely rise, arms control is one area where Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin share a desire for progress. Mr. Biden is set to be sworn in just a few weeks before the scheduled expiration of the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. He has said he wants to negotiate an extension of the treaty without preconditions.

Credit…Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

A return to the Paris Agreement and international commitments

Mr. Biden has said one of his first acts as president will be to rejoin the Paris Climate accord to limit global warming, which the United States officially left under Mr. Trump on Wednesday. Mr. Biden also has said he would restore U.S. membership in the World Health Organization, which Mr. Trump repudiated in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, describing the W.H.O. as a lackey of China.

More broadly, Mr. Biden is expected to reverse many of the isolationist and anti-immigrant steps taken during the Trump administration, which are widely seen by Mr. Trump’s critics as shameful stains on American standing in the world. Mr. Biden has said he would disband Mr. Trump’s immigration restrictions, stop construction of his border wall with Mexico, expand resources for immigrants and provide a path to citizenship for people living in the United States illegally.

Nonetheless, many of Mr. Trump’s policies had considerable support in the United States, and it remains to be seen how quickly or effectively Mr. Biden can change them. The convulsions that roiled American democracy and the divisive election have also sown doubts about Mr. Biden’s ability to deliver on his pledges.

“There is relief at a return to some kind of normalcy, but at the same time, history cannot be erased,” said Jean-Marie Guehenno, a French diplomat who is a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Foreign Policy Program and a former under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations at the United Nations. “The kind of soft power that the United States has enjoyed in the past has largely evaporated.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/07/world/americas/Biden-foreign-policy.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

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Global Warming: Fake news from the start

Tom Harris and Timothy Ball — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 19:30:33 +0000

Senator Tim Wirth, scientist James Hansen, and others manufactured the climate “crisis.”

President Donald Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change because it is a bad deal for America.

He could have made the decision simply because the science is false. However, most of the American and global public have been brainwashed into believing the science is correct (and supported by the faux 97% consensus), so they would not have believed that explanation.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and indeed the leaders of many western democracies, support the Agreement and are completely unaware of the gross deficiencies in the science. If they understood those deficiencies, they wouldn’t be forcing a carbon dioxide (CO₂) tax on their citizens.

Trudeau and other leaders show how little they know, and how little they assume the public knows, by calling it a “carbon tax” on “carbon emissions.” But CO₂ is a gas, the trace atmospheric gas that makes life on Earth possible. Carbon is a solid, and carbon-based fuels are solid (coal), liquid (oil) or gaseous (natural gas).

By constantly railing about “carbon emissions,” Trudeau, Obama and others encourage people to think of carbon dioxide as something “dirty,” like soot, which really is carbon. Calling CO₂ by its proper name would help the public remember that it is actually an invisible, odorless gas essential to plant photosynthesis.

Canadian Environment Minister Catherine McKenna is arguably the most misinformed of the lot, saying in a recent interview that “polluters should pay.” She too either does not know that CO₂ is not a pollutant, or she is deliberately misleading people.

Like many of her political peers, McKenna dismisses credentialed Ph.D. scientists who disagree with her approach, labeling them “deniers.” She does not seem to understand that questioning scientific hypotheses, even scientific theories, is what all scientists should do if true science is to advance.

That is why the Royal Society’s official motto is “Nullius in Verba,” Latin for “Take nobody’s word for it.” Ironically, the Society rarely practices this approach when it comes to climate change.

Mistakes such as those made by McKenna are not surprising, considering that from the outset the entire claim of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) was built on falsehoods and spread with fake news.

The plot to deceive the world about human-caused global warming gathered momentum right after the World Meteorological Organization and United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) created the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988.

After spending five days at the U.N. with Maurice Strong, the first executive director of UNEP, Hamilton Spectator investigative reporter Elaine Dewar concluded that the overarching objective of the IPCC was political, not scientific. “Strong was using the U.N. as a platform to sell a global environment crisis and the global governance agenda,” she wrote.

The political agenda required “credibility” to accomplish the deception. It also required some fake news for momentum. Ideally, this would involve testimony from a scientist before a legislative committee.

U.S. Senator Timothy Wirth (D-CO) was fully committed to the political agenda and the deception. As he explained in a 1993 comment, “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing.…”

In 1988 Wirth was in a position to jump-start the climate alarm. He worked with colleagues on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to organize and orchestrate a June 23, 1988 hearing where the lead witness would be Dr. James Hansen, then the head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Wirth explained in a 2007 interview with PBS Frontline:

“We knew there was this scientist at NASA, who had really identified the human impact before anybody else had done so and was very certain about it. So, we called him up and asked him if he would testify.”

Hansen did not disappoint. The New York Times reported on June 23, 1988: “Today Dr. James E. Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration told a Congressional committee that it was 99 percent certain that the warming trend was not a natural variation, but was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere.”

Specifically, Hansen told the committee, “Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming…. It is already happening now.”

Hansen also testified: “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now…. We have already reached the point where the greenhouse effect is important.”

Wirth, who presided at the hearing, was pre-disposed to believe Hansen and told the committee. “As I read it, the scientific evidence is compelling: the global climate is changing as the earth’s atmosphere gets warmer,” Wirth said. “Now the Congress must begin to consider how we are going to slow or halt that warming trend, and how we are going to cope with the changes that may already be inevitable.”

More than any other event, that single hearing before the Energy and Natural Resources Committee publicly initiated the climate scare, the biggest deception in history. It created an unholy alliance between a bureaucrat and a politician, which was bolstered by the U.N. and the popular press – leading to the hoax being accepted in governments, industry boardrooms, schools and churches all across the world.

Dr. John S. Theon, Hansen’s former supervisor at NASA, wrote to the Senate Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. “Hansen was never muzzled, even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress.”

Hansen never abandoned his single-minded, unsubstantiated claim that CO₂ from human activities caused dangerous global warming. He defied Hatch Act limits on bureaucratic political actions, and in 2011 even got arrested at a White House protest against the Keystone XL pipeline. It was at least his third such arrest to that point.

Like Trudeau and other leaders duped by the climate scare, Senator Wirth either had not read or did not understand the science. In fact, an increasing number of climate scientists (including Dr. Ball) now conclude that there is no empirical evidence of human-caused global warming. There are only computer model speculations that humans are causing it, and every forecast made using these models since 1990 has been wrong – with actual temperatures getting further from predictions with every passing year.

President Trump must now end America’s participation in the fake science and fake news of manmade global warming. To do this, he must withdraw the U.S. from further involvement with all U.N. global warming programs, especially the IPCC, as well as the agency that now directs it – the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. He should also launch a “Red Team” exercise that lets non-alarmist scientists examine climate cataclysm claims and the purported evidence for them.

Only then will the U.S. have a chance to fully develop its hydrocarbon resources to achieve the president’s goal of global energy dominance and long-term prosperity for America and the world

Source: https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/global-warming-fake-news-from-the-start

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Pope on climate crisis: Time is running out, decisive action needed

Vatican News — Fri, 14 Jun 2019 06:23:57 +0000

Pope meets with oil CEOs attending Vatican Dialogue Summit (Vatican Media)

Pope Francis on Friday meets with participants attending a summit entitled, “The Vatican Dialogues: The Energy Transition and Care for our Common Home”. In comments to the group, he warns that today’s ecological crisis, especially climate change, “threatens the very future of the human family” and asks oil CEOs for a “radical energy transition”.

Addressing those attending the summit, which included multinational oil companies, the Pope spoke on an issue very close to his heart: The Care for our Common Home.

Pope Francis told those gathered that this second year of Dialogue in the Vatican was taking place at a “critical moment.”

Today’s ecological crisis, especially climate change, he said, “threatens the very future of the human family”.

The Pontiff noted that a significant development in this past year was the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which warns that effects on climate will be catastrophic if the threshold of 1.5ºC outlined in the Paris Agreement goal is crossed. “The Report warns, moreover, that only one decade or so remains in order to achieve this confinement of global warming.”

Action needed

Faced with a climate emergency, the Pope underlined, “we must take action accordingly, in order to avoid perpetuating a brutal act of injustice towards the poor and future generations.”

In effect, he went on to say, “it is the poor who suffer the worst impacts of the climate crisis.”

What was required, stressed Pope Francis, was courage in responding to “the increasingly desperate cries of the earth and it’s poor”.

Points of discussion

During his address, the Pope focused on the three points that were being discussed during the meeting, which are, a just transition; carbon pricing; and transparency in reporting climate risk.

Pope Francis remarked that a just transition to cleaner energy, which is called for in the Preamble to the Paris Agreement, can if managed well, generate new jobs, reduce inequality and improve the quality of life for those affected by climate change.

On the issue of carbon pricing, the Pope said, this was “essential if humanity is to use the resources of creation wisely.”

Speaking on the third point, transparency in reporting climate risk, Pope Francis commented that, “open, transparent, science-based and standardized reporting is in the common interests of all.”

Time is running out

In conclusion, the Pope warned that “time is running out!”

Deliberations, he emphasized, “must go beyond mere exploration of what can be done, and concentrate on what needs to be done.”

In our meeting last year, Pope Francis said, “I expressed the concern that ‘civilization requires energy, but energy use must not destroy civilization’. Today a radical energy transition is needed to save our common home.”

He continued by saying that, “the climate crisis requires ‘our decisive action, here and now’ and the Church is fully committed to playing her part.”

However, the Pope did strike a note of optimism, “there is still hope and there remains time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change”, he said, “provided there is prompt and resolute action…”

The summit was organized by the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.

Source: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2019-06/pope-declares-climate-emergency.html

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Europe on the Move: Commission completes its agenda for safe, clean and connected mobility

European Commission Press Release — Thu, 17 May 2018 22:27:46 +0000

The Juncker Commission is undertaking the third and final set of actions to modernise Europe’s transport system.

In his State of the Union address of September 2017, President Juncker set out a goal for the EU and its industries to become a world leader in innovation, digitisation and decarbonisation. Building on the previous ‘Europe on the Move‘ of May and November 2017, the Juncker Commission is today putting forward a third and final set of measures to make this a reality in the mobility sector. The objective is to allow all Europeans to benefit from safer traffic, less polluting vehicles and more advanced technological solutions, while supporting the competitiveness of the EU industry. To this end, today’s initiatives include an integrated policy for the future of road safety with measures for vehicles and infrastructure safety; the first ever CO2 standards for heavy-duty vehicles; a strategic Action Plan for the development and manufacturing of batteries in Europe and a forward-looking strategy on connected and automated mobility. With this third ‘Europe on the Move’, the Commission is completing its ambitious agenda for the modernisation of mobility.

Vice-President responsible for Energy Union, Maroš Šefčovič said: “Mobility is crossing a new technological frontier. With this final set of proposals under the Energy Union, we help our industry stay ahead of the curve. By producing key technological solutions at scale, including sustainable batteries, and deploying key infrastructure, we will also get closer to a triple zero: emissions, congestion and accidents.”

Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy, Miguel Arias Cañete said: “All sectors must contribute to meet our climate commitments under the Paris Agreement. That’s why, for the first time ever, we are proposing EU standards to increase fuel efficiency and reduce emissions from new heavy-duty vehicles. These standards represent an opportunity for European industry to consolidate its current leadership position on innovative technologies.”

Commissioner for Transport, Violeta Bulc said: “Over the past year, this Commission has put forward initiatives addressing the challenges of today and paving the way for the mobility of tomorrow. Today’s measures constitute a final and important push so that Europeans can benefit from safe, clean and smart transport. I am inviting the Member States and the Parliament to live up to our level of ambition.”

Commissioner for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs, Elżbieta Bieńkowska said: “90% of road accidents are due to human error. The new mandatory safety features we propose today will reduce the number of accidents and pave the way for a driverless future of connected and automated driving.”

With today’s initiatives, the Commission aims to ensure a smooth transition towards a mobility system which is safe, clean and connected & automated. Through these measures, the Commission is also shaping an environment allowing EU companies to manufacture the best, cleanest and most competitive products.

Safe Mobility

While road fatalities have more than halved since 2001, 25,300 people still lost their lives on EU roads in 2017 and another 135,000 were seriously injured. The Commission is therefore taking measures with strong EU added-value to contribute to safe roads and to a Europe that protects. The Commission is proposing that new models of vehicles are equipped with advanced safety features, such as advanced emergency braking and lane-keeping assist system for cars or pedestrian and cyclists’ detection systems for trucks (see full list here). In addition, the Commission is helping Member States to systematically identify dangerous road sections and to better target investment. These two measures could save up to 10,500 lives and avoid close to 60,000 serious injuries over 2020-2030, thereby contributing to the EU’s long-term goal of moving close to zero fatalities and serious injuries by 2050 (“Vision Zero”).

Clean Mobility

The Commission is completing its agenda for a low-emission mobility system by putting forward the first ever CO2 emissions standards for heavy-duty vehicles. In 2025, average CO2 emissions from new trucks will have to be 15% lower than in 2019. For 2030, an indicative reduction target of at least 30% compared to 2019 is proposed. These targets are consistent with the EU’s commitments under the Paris Agreement and will allow transport companies – mostly SMEs – to make significant savings thanks to lower fuel consumption (€25,000 over five years). To allow for further CO2 reductions, the Commission is making it easier to design more aerodynamic trucks and is improving labelling for tyres. In addition, the Commission is putting forward a comprehensive action plan for batteries that will help create a competitive and sustainable battery “ecosystem” in Europe.

Connected & Automated Mobility

Cars and other vehicles are increasingly equipped with driver assistance systems, and fully autonomous vehicles are just around the corner. Today, the Commission is proposing a strategy aiming to make Europe a world leader for fully automated and connected mobility systems. The strategy looks at a new level of cooperation between road users, which could potentially bring enormous benefits for the mobility system as a whole. Transport will be safer, cleaner, cheaper and more accessible to the elderly and to people with reduced mobility. In addition, the Commission is proposing to establish a fully digital environment for information exchange in freight transport. This will cut red tape and facilitate digital information flows for logistic operations.

Background

This third Mobility Package delivers on the new industrial policy strategy of September 2017 and completes the process initiated with the 2016 Low Emission Mobility Strategy and the previous Europe on the Move packages from May and November 2017. All these initiatives form a single set of consistent policies addressing the many interlinked facets of our mobility system. Today’s package consists of:

A Communication outlining a new road safety policy framework for 2020-2030. It is accompanied by two legislative initiatives on vehicle and pedestrian safety, and on infrastructure safety management;
A dedicated communication on Connected and Automated Mobility to make Europe a world leader for autonomous and safe mobility systems;
Legislative initiatives on CO2 standards for trucks, on their aerodynamic, on tyre labelling and on a common methodology for fuels price comparison. These are accompanied by a Strategic Action Plan for Batteries. Those measures reaffirm the EU’s objective of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from transport and meeting the Paris Agreement commitments.
Two legislative initiatives establishing a digital environment for information exchange in transport.
A legislative initiative to streamline permitting procedures for projects on the core trans-European transport network (TEN-T).

The full list of initiatives is available here. They are supported by a call for proposals under the Connecting Europe Facility with €450 million available to support projects in the Member States contributing to road safety, digitisation and multimodality. The call will be open until 24 October 2018.

Source: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-3708_en.htm

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