Monday 25th of November 2024
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COP29 — another incoming copout?.....

Cop29, the next round of UN talks to tackle the climate crisis, will be led by another veteran of the oil and gas industry.

Mukhtar Babayev, Azerbaijan’s ecology and natural resources minister, has been appointed the president-in-waiting for the Cop29 climate talks when they take place in the country in November.

 

Before his entry into politics in the autocratic country in western Asia, once a Soviet republic, Babayev spent 26 years working for the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic (Socar).

Close observers of the Cop process will see parallels with the appointment of Sultan Al Jaber, who moonlighted from his role as the chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company to preside over the summit when it took place in Dubai last year.

Sceptics have already begun to point to Babayev’s appointment as raising questions over the commitment to the global phase-out of fossil fuels in Azerbaijan. The country relied on oil and gas for more than 92.5% of its export revenue last year, according to the US government’s International Trade Administration.

But Babayev does have form in environmental protection, having spent three years as Socar’s vice-president for ecology, in which time he oversaw efforts to remediate Azerbaijan’s contaminated soils. The country is wrestling with a number of severe ecological problems, including, after 160 years of oil production, decades-worth of damage from the petrochemical organisations that operate there.

Born in Baku while Azerbaijan was still part of the USSR, Babayev served in the Soviet military before studying political science at Moscow State University and then foreign economic relations at the Azerbaijan State University of Economics.

He joined Socar in 1994, working in foreign economic relations and marketing until his appointment as the company’s ecology tsar in 2008. According to a US diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks, on his appointment to that role Babayev hosted the first ecology conference in Azerbaijan’s history.

In the environment role, he described remediation as the “shared mission and moral imperative” of all Azerbaijanis, but also said that any fall in oil prices could hamper efforts.

US diplomats reported him as saying in a subsequent meeting that his mission was to “change the mentality” of Azerbaijanis about their responsibilities to the environment, and even joking that his new role made him and Socar’s first vice-president “enemies”.

But he reportedly emphasised his role was to change Socar’s attitude to the environment while nonetheless continuing to develop Azerbaijan’s oil industry.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/05/cop29-will-be-led-by-mukhtar-babayev-azerbaijan-ecology-minister-who-is-oil-industry-veteran

 

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more oil and gas....

Jeremy Hunt has been criticised by the head of the independent Climate Change Committee (CCC) over his assurances that the government can still meet its climate targets while allowing companies to extract more oil and gas from the North Sea.

Piers Forster, the interim chair of the CCC, publicly challenged the chancellor on Sunday, after Hunt used predictions made by the committee to defend his government’s oil and gas licensing bill. MPs will vote on the bill on Monday, with several Conservative MPs likely to team up with Labour in voting against it.

 

Hunt told BBC’s Today programme on Saturday: “The independent panel for climate change that we have for this country are very clear that even when we reach net zero in 2050 we will still get a significant proportion of our energy from fossil fuels, and domestic oil and gas is four times cleaner than imported oil and gas.”

Forster responded to Hunt’s comments on Sunday, tweeting: “Our earlier advice is still current. UK oil and gas consumption needs to fall by over 80% to meet UK targets. This and Cop decision makes further licensing inconsistent with climate goals.” Forster was referencing the Cop28 climate conference decision to transition away from fossil fuels, to which the UK has signed up.

The independent body is not the source of the claim, as suggested by Hunt, that UK gas is four times cleaner than imported gas. This figure comes from the oil and gas industry and has been disputed because it does not account for the emissions caused by burning gas, which account for nearly all of its carbon footprint.

The CCC has previously advised against exploring for new fossil fuels, saying: “An end to UK exploration would send a clear signal to investors and consumers that the UK is committed to the 1.5C global temperature goal.”

The public row between Hunt and Forster comes days after Chris Skidmore, the former Conservative minister, announced he was resigning as an MP over the issue of oil and gas licensing.

Skidmore said in his resignation letter: “I can no longer condone nor continue to support a government that is committed to a course of action that I know is wrong and will cause future harm. To fail to act, rather than merely speak out, is to tolerate a status quo that cannot be sustained.”

Hunt said on Saturday: “It’s very sad to lose a respected colleague like Chris Skidmore … but I do profoundly disagree with the reasons that he gave for resigning.”

However, other Tory MPs have been less diplomatic in their criticism of Skidmore. Damian Green, the former de facto deputy prime minister, said: “I’m pretty appalled by [Skidmore’s decision]. I’m disappointed that Chris has done that. His seat’s abolished, he was standing down anyway. This is a wholly unnecessary byelection.” Liam Fox, the former defence secretary, called the resignation “self-indulgent” and “disloyal”.

But Forster praised Skidmore for his work on green energy, calling his recent review of net zero “impressive, timely and much needed”.

This is not the first time the government has been accused of misrepresenting its independent climate advisory body. Last year, scientists spoke out after energy secretary Claire Coutinho wrongly claimed that the CCC stated that a quarter of the UK’s energy would need to come from fossil fuels by 2050. The CCC confirmed it had never made such a statement.

The prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has also been asked to stop misrepresenting the CCC after wrongly suggesting it had advised the government to implement a meat tax and car-sharing scheme.

The Treasury has been contacted for comment.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/07/hunts-net-zero-target-claims-criticised-by-climate-advisors

 

 

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less solar....

 

How they hate solar.

On Tuesday last week, the Australian Financial Review went large with the story headlined, “How a big new solar farm became a stranded asset”. That evening, energy analyst Tim Buckley debunked the story on social media. This was not a stranded asset at all, Buckley pointed out. “Zero stranding … [financially] a brilliant success”.

For those interested in the nitty-gritty, the discussion thread on LinkedIn is worth the read. The project in question is the DeGrussa solar project in outback WA. It secured funding in 2016 via renewable energy agency ARENA to generate clean energy for the Sandfire copper mine; for the term of that mine.

And it did just that. Now the solar panels can be transported for use elsewhere. We publish Buckley’s post below. He, like many other experts in the energy sector tend to engage in more technical financial debates. The debate is over when it comes to the financial viability and the growth of wind and solar power. It has been for years … but …

https://michaelwest.com.au/afr-slams-solar-project-fail

 

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hottest.....

The year 2023 was the hottest on record and likely the hottest in tens of thousands of years, the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) revealed in its annual Global Climate Highlights report published on Tuesday.

With a global average temperature of 14.98 degrees Celsius according to C3S’ ERA5 data set, 2023 beat the average temperature of the previous record year, 2016, by 0.17 degrees – a “remarkable” margin, the organization’s director, Carlos Buontempo, told Reuters.

While global temperature records only exist dating back to 1850, C3S scientists used alternative sources of data, such as tree rings and air bubbles in glaciers, to reach the conclusion that 2023 was “very likely” the warmest year in 100,000 years, Buontempo said.

https://www.rt.com/news/590353-2023-hottest-year-climate-change/

 

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