Former and current FAO officials and academics have criticised the document, seen by Climate Home News, for pro-industry bias, cherry-picking data and even “disinformation” about the environmental impacts of animal farming. 

The FAO told Climate Home that a final version of the report – part of an assessment consisting of various documents – would be launched in 2025 and that conclusions should not be drawn from the draft text at this stage. 

Estimates of livestock’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions vary, ranging from 12%-20% of the global total – mostly in the form of methane from ruminants like cows and sheep, and carbon dioxide (CO2) released when forests are cut down for pasture.  

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Methane, which is emitted in cow burps and manure, is a short-lived greenhouse gas that is 84 times more potent than CO2 over 20 years, making it one of the few available levers to prevent climate tipping points being reached in the near term.   

In a 2024 survey of more than 200 scientists and sustainable agriculture experts, about 78% said livestock numbers should peak globally by 2025 to start bringing down emissions and help keep global warming to internationally agreed limits.   

But the FAO’s draft study offers strong support for growth of the sector, saying livestock’s contributions to food security, nutrition and raw materials for industry make it a “linchpin for human well-being and economic development”.  

It is also described as “critical” for food security, “crucial” for global economies, and “indispensable” for development in sub-Saharan Africa.  

World Bank tiptoes into fiery debate over meat emissions

The report will be submitted to the FAO’s agriculture committee, which has 130 member nations, although the text could change as national representatives thrash out a final version. 

Private-sector lobbyists participating as advisors in national delegations are sometimes also able to influence texts under discussion, according to a July report by the Changing Markets Foundation. 

One FAO insider, who did not want to be named, told Climate Home the draft FAO report had been “biased towards pushing livestock [with] many national interests behind it”.   

The FAO receives around a third of its budget in direct donations from member countries, and the rest in voluntary contributions from the same states and other actors, including businesses and trade associations.   

Tech fixes  

The 491-page draft report, which was overseen by a scientific advisory committee of 23 experts and peer reviewers, does not assess how diets with more plant protein could improve food security.   

One advisory committee member, Professor Frederic Leroy of Vrije Universiteit Brussel, told Climate Home a shift to entirely plant-based diets “would severely compromise the potential for food security worldwide because many of the food nutrients which are already limited in global diets are found in livestock. How much you can move (away from livestock) should be the real investigation.” 

This table from a World Bank report (Recipe for a Livable Planet), published in May 2024, shows that vegan diets are the lowest in emissions (Screenshot/World Bank)

The report’s analysis assumes rising meat production as demand surges among a growing world population with higher incomes. In this context, it proposes “expanding the (livestock) herd size”, increasing production through intensified systems, better use of genetic techniques, and improved land management.   

“Technological innovations” such as feed additives and supplements to suppress methane are another idea backed by the FAO. Those could include experimental methods such as a vaccine announced last week and funded by a $9-million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund that aims to reduce the number and activity of methane-producing microbes in a cow’s stomach.    

Herdsman Musa takes cattle to graze along the Dodowa-Somenya road in Ghana, April 12, 2024. According to environmentalist Kwame Ansah, ‘The unchecked grazing is not only destroying crops but also eroding soil fertility exacerbating land degradation.’ (Photo: Matrix Images/Christian Thompson/via Reuters)

The report’s findings, once approved, will be fed into a three-part roadmap for bringing agricultural emissions in line with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.  

The first instalment, published at the COP28 climate summit, was viewed internally by some FAO experts as a generic placeholder which largely followed an industry-friendly agenda.    

One ex-FAO official, who requested anonymity, told Climate Home the latest draft report on livestock ploughs a similar furrow and would set expectations for part two of the 1.5C roadmap.   

“The reality is that if they do a (nearly) 500-page report and put 23 experts’ names in front of it, it’s to impress you and say: ‘This is what is going to happen. We’re going to defend the sector’,” the former UN official said.  

Making the case for meat 

The expert added that the study’s panel was skewed toward intensified livestock systems and had “cherry picked” evidence to justify recommendations pointing in that direction.  

Several of the report’s advisory committee members have previously advocated for meat-based diets, and 11 of the study’s contributors work for the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), including one of the paper’s committee advisors.

According to the ex-FAO official, ILRI “has been pushing intensified livestock all its life. It’s their identity. It’s what they do.”

The institute co-founded an agribusiness-backed initiative – Pathways to Dairy Net Zero (P2DNZ) – which de-emphasised livestock emissions, framing them as just one of several problems for the industry to tackle.

ILRI did not respond to a request for comment.

IPCC’s input into key UN climate review at risk as countries clash over timeline

Shelby C. McClelland, of New York University’s Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, told Climate Home she was shocked by a repeated claim in the draft FAO report of “a lack of consensus among scientists regarding the contribution of livestock to global greenhouse gas emissions”.  

“This downplays and outright ignores overwhelming scientific evidence from the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], high-profile papers, and other recent studies,” McClelland said. “A statement like this in a supposedly scientific and evidenced-based review by the UN FAO is alarming given their influence on agenda-setting for global climate action.”

Advisory committee member Leroy countered that it was “dangerous” to talk about a scientific consensus when the metrics used to measure methane compared to other greenhouse gases are constantly evolving.  

“This should be part of an open and transparent debate,” he added. “I don’t think we have reached consensus on the way we interpret the effects of livestock agriculture on climate change, the degree of it, how we can measure it and how we can deal with it.” 

Scientists at the FAO first alerted the world to the meat industry’s climate footprint when they attributed 18% of global emissions to livestock farming in the seminal 2006 study, Livestock’s Long Shadow. This analysis found that, far from enhancing food security, “livestock actually detract more from total food supply than they provide.”  

However, the paper sparked a backlash felt by key experts in the agency’s Rome headquarters, as the FAO hierarchy, industry lobbyists and state donors to its biannual $1-billion budget exerted pressure for a change of direction.      

By the time of last December’s COP28, the FAO’s stance had shifted so far that two experts cited in another livestock emissions study called publicly for its retraction. They argued it had distorted their work and underestimated the emissions reduction potential from farming less livestock by a factor of between 6 and 40. 

A deforested and burnt area is seen in an indigenous area used as cattle pasture in Areoes, Mato Grosso state, Brazil, September 4, 2019. (Photo: REUTERS/Lucas Landau)

No ‘carte blanche’ 

Guy Pe’er, a conservation ecologist at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, accused the FAO of turning a blind eye to widespread “hyper-intensive grazing practices” and land use change caused by the world’s growing number of mega-farms.

“We’re currently using more land to feed livestock than humans, and that is causing rapid deforestation in Brazil. Ignoring that is outrageous. When an official organisation is producing disinformation like this, I find it extremely irresponsible,” he said.  

Leroy told Climate Home that different types of livestock farming should not be conflated. “If you have over-grazing and the pollution of water sources, that’s clearly wrong, but other types of animal agriculture are also net-positive [for the environment],” he said.  

If the advisory committee “sees advantages in having livestock agriculture as part of the food system, I think there’s a sound scientific basis to assume that,” he added. “It doesn’t mean that it’s carte blanche or ‘anything goes’ at all.” 

(Reporting by Arthur Neslen; editing by Megan Rowling and Joe Lo)

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The regulation, which tasks the EU’s 27 member states with reviving their land and water habitats and planting billions of trees, was narrowly passed by EU environment ministers.

The controversial law only gained enough backing because Austria’s minister for climate action, Leonore Gewessler, defied her country’s leader and voted in favour of it, a decision which may be challenged legally. 

But, while celebrating the bill’s approval, climate campaigners and scientists warned that its ambition had been diluted and it must be implemented effectively to reverse the destruction of Europe’s natural carbon sinks.

EU warns “delaying tactics” have made plastic treaty deal “very difficult”

The law requires each EU country to rejuvenate 20% of their degraded land and water habitats by 2030 and all of them by 2050, and to plant three billion more trees across the bloc by 2030.

It also requires countries to restore 30% of their drained peatlands by 2030 and 50% by mid-century.

Peatlands that have been drained, largely for farming, forestry and peat extraction, are responsible for 5% of Europe’s total greenhouse gas emissions. 

Climate breakthrough

Belgium’s climate minister Zakia Khatattabi told Climate Home that the law’s passing is “not only a breakthrough for nature but also for the climate”, and would enable the EU to meet its emissions-cutting targets.

Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said that “without it, carbon neutrality in Europe would have been put beyond reach”.

The amount of carbon dioxide sucked in by Europe’s carbon sinks – including forests, peatlands, grassland, soil and oceans –  has been falling since 2010. For forests, the World Resources Institute blames logging for timber and biomass and more wildfires and pests for the decline.

The amount of carbon sucked in is shrinking (black line) when it needs to increase to meet targets for 2030 (orange dot) and 2050 (blue dot)

But the EU’s plan to meet its goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 involves halting this decline and reversing it into a 15% increase on 2021 levels by 2030.

Jette Bredahl Jacobsen, vice-chair of the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change, told Climate Home the new nature law “can contribute substantially to this, as healthy ecosystems can store more carbon and are more resilient against climate change impacts”.

The law is extremely popular with the EU public, with 75% of people polled in six EU countries saying they agree with it and just 6% opposing.

Watered down

But farmer trade associations were fiercely against it, and it became a symbolic battleground between right-wing and populist parties on one side and defenders of the EU Green Deal on the other.

Several of the law’s strongest passages ended up diluted before it reached ministers for approval, including caveats added to an obligation for countries to prevent any “net loss” of urban green space and tree cover this decade.

A new clause was introduced to deter EU states from using funds from the Common Agricultural Policy or Common Fisheries Policy to finance nature restoration – raising questions as to where money to implement the law will come from.

And, most importantly, an obligation to restore peatlands that have been drained for farming – a major source of emissions – was weakened.

A peat bog under restoration in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, pictured in January 2022. (Photo: Imago Images/Rüdiger Wölk via Reuters)

The original regulation would have instructed countries to rewet 30% of peatlands drained for agricultural use by 2030 and 70% by 2050 – the most effective way of restoring them. 

But, as a concession to farmers, the final version of the nature law mandates rewetting just 7.5% of these peatlands by 2030 and 16.7% by 2050, with exceptions possible for actions such as replacing peatlands drained for agriculture with other uses.

Rewetting usually involves blocking drainage ditches. As well as reducing emissions, this helps an area adapt to climate change, protecting it from floods, and improving the water quality, soil and biodiversity.

But the Commission will also count other actions as peatland “restoration”, such as the partial raising of water tables, bans on the use of heavy machinery, tree removal, the reintroduction of peat-forming vegetation or fire prevention measures. 

That’s despite the European Commission’s own rulebook describing these measures as “supplementary to gain better results” and saying that “peatland restoration should always primarily focus on rewetting”.

Lessons from trade tensions targeting “overcapacity” in China’s cleantech industry

Where rewetting does take place, as with all restoration measures in the final version of the regulation, EU states will be obliged to prioritise action in particular areas known as Natura 2000 sites. These cover around 18% of the EU’s territory, and should already have been restored under existing legislation.  

Environmentalists maintain that the legislation still has tremendous potential, pointing to possible actions such as the restoration of seagrass meadows which cover less than 0.1% of the ocean floor but absorb more than 10% of its carbon.    

EU countries will now draft national nature restoration plans over the next two years showing how they intend to meet their targets, for assessment by the Commission.

(Reporting by Arthur Neslen; editing by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling)

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Central and east European (CEE) states are due to lose around a quarter of their EU structural funding and 20% of Emissions Trading System (ETS) revenues next year, as the bloc looks to save money ahead of Brexit.

The two funding streams are vital for a wide variety of climate projects. Most ETS earnings are currently ploughed into national emissions-cutting initiatives.

Equally, climate-related projects received €18bn or 28% of all EU budget funding last year, with energy efficiency the largest single beneficiary, taking just over a third of the total.

The cutbacks would help to plug the roughly €12bn-sized funding hole that Brexit is expected to create – and to fund a similar amount pledged for increases to defence and migration spending.

But it could also lead to the scrapping of clean energy projects intended to meet the EU’s Paris climate accord commitments, according to Jan Kriz, the Czech Republic’s deputy environment minister.

“It might happen of course,” he told Climate Home News. “If there is not a continuous call for proper special structural funds, then there is a danger that we will not fulfil some performance indicators that [allow] priority access for energy efficiency programmes.”

A “continuous call” would allow EU funding streams to remain open for a period of years rather than the few months many are currently available for.

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Pavel Zamyslicky, the Czech Republic’s director of energy and climate policy, said: “The commission’s proposal would mean we have less money to fulfill the 2030 climate targets. It would limit the willingness of member states to contribute more on energy efficiency and renewables.”

The Czech Republic will see its structural funds drop from €23bn to €17bn in the 2020-2027 budget, because of reduced funds and the country’s economic growth.

At present, the Czech Republic receives €2.4bn from structural funds for energy saving projects, and €2bn a year from the ETS – half of which flows directly to the environment ministry.

One project at risk in the next decade is the Green Savings Programme, which renovates energy poor dwellings to reduce heat loss – improving air quality and local economies as it does so.

“We will have to prepare our programmes a little bit differently in this period, to unlock more private money [for them],” Kriz said.

Bulgaria’s regional development minister, Malina Kroumova said her country would also “try to build financial resources and mobilise private funding to achieve our ambitious climate goals”.

But “we need long term predictability to do it,” she added. 

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French president Emmanuel Macron has warned the EU would be “mad” to sign a trade agreement with countries that refused to honour the Paris climate agreement.

Macron was speaking a day after the Irish Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, implored Trump to consider “a new trade deal between the US and the EU”, as a way of lowering trade tensions over steel and aluminium tariffs.

Speaking at a conference in Brussels, Macron said that since Trump had indicated US withdrawal from the Paris deal, a new trade deal would undermine clean energy producers in Europe, and project a message of weakness abroad.

Far from bending to the will of the US, “trade agreements should reverse the burden of proof,” Macron said. “They should be a way of spreading our standards. Anyone who signs an agreement with the EU should be committing to put the Paris Agreement into practice…

“We even go beyond our own rules and ask our own economic agents to do the same. Why should we sign a trade agreement with powers that say they don’t want to implement the Paris Agreement? We would be mad [to do so].”

Macron said that the world’s multilateral rules-based trade policy was “threatened by unilateral temptations”.

“I’m not in favour of showing any softness to those who decide to break those rules,” he said. “We can no longer pursue objectives that work against our own [climate] policies inside our own borders.”

EU: ‘No new trade deals with countries not in Paris Agreement’

Doing so would “discourage” Europe’s clean energy investors who might suffer from unfair competition as a result, he added.

The French leader also made an impassioned plea for a European carbon floor price, and a border tax to prevent cheap, carbon-intensive products entering the EU market which could undermine cleaner local producers.

Macron called for the EU’s budget – currently being negotiated – to increase the fifth of budget spending currently earmarked for climate measures. This is likely to upset some other EU states, such as Poland, which has painted climate action as a drag on economic growth.

“In the [European] Council debate, we have to set an objective that none of the expenditure is hostile to the climate,” he said. “Setting climate spending at 40% of the budget would be ambitious compared to today but I think we can achieve it.”

Macron’s oration brought what would normally have been a staid sustainable finance conference to its feet for a one minute standing ovation, with attendees enthralled at the sight of an EU leader ‘walking the walk’ in the face of Trumpian assault on Paris.

“I think he’s right,” Christiana Figueres, the former UN climate chief told Climate Home News immediately after hearing Macron’s comments linking trade deals to the Paris accord. “What more can I say?”

Last month, CHN reported the French foreign minister, Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, said that if Trump withdrew the US form the Paris agreement, there would be “no trade agreement – the US knows what to expect”.

That position was subsequently backed up by the European Commission and the practice is already implemented in some of the EU’s latest trade deals. Macron’s comments on Thursday were the first time a European head of state has referred to the precondition.

Earlier in the day, the UN’s special climate envoy, Michael Bloomberg, told the conference that under Trump, Washington was “out of synch with the national zeitgeist but it matters less”.

US cities and regions representing emissions roughly equivalent to the UK, France and Germany combined remained committed to the Paris Agreement, he said.

In a bid partly intended to reverse the shortfall in climate funding caused by the US’ reneging on Obama-era spending commitments [link], the Global Covenant of Mayors issued a new funding call in Brussels.

Multilateral banks including the EIB, EBRD and World Bank, appealed to states, pension funds and investment houses for $200m to fund developing cities and $600m for enhanced credit financing.

This sum could then be leveraged up to $6bn, according to Cristiana Fragola, a director of the covenant.

“If pension funds – most of which spend just one-two percent of their funds on climate action – were to allocate even a minor portion of their assets to this call, we could really move the needle substantially,” she told CHN.

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The Tokyo 2020 Olympics organising committee has confirmed that 87% of the plywood panels used to build its new national stadium come from southeast Asian rainforests.

But the timber cannot be traced back to its original source under the committees’s certification protocols, which have been censured by campaigners for a lack of due diligence.

The admission, posted posted online earlier this month followed a request by 44 NGOs in December 2016 for assurances that timber used in Olympic projects would not be “illegal, unsustainable or linked to human rights violations”.

Peg Putt, a spokeswoman for Markets For Change, welcomed the Tokyo 2020 committee’s disclosure, but said that it confirmed her group’s worst fears.

“We are appalled by the substantial volume of tropical wood that has been used thus far and by the glaring lack of due diligence exercised to ensure the sustainability and legality of the wood being used,” she said.

The committee had “failed to provide meaningful assurance that the timber used for Olympics construction was harvested legally and sustainably,” she added. “It exposes the massive extent of irresponsible procurement.”

Plywood being used in Japan’s Olympic construction projects is mostly for formwork or moulds – into which concrete is poured once or twice, before being disposed of. Of itself, environmentalists see this as a wasteful use of tropical wood.

On paper, the Tokyo committee’s sustainable sourcing code requires that the timber it uses is legal, planned, and “considerate” towards ecosystems, indigenous peoples and workers, who should be appropriately protected.

However, it has no obligation for full traceability back to the forest of origin, even when timber is sourced from high risk countries, such as Indonesia and Malaysia.

Hana Heineken, a senior campaigner for Rainforest Action Network, said: “The overwhelming majority of wood used [in the Tokyo stadium] was uncertified plywood extracted from tropical rainforests in Indonesia, an epicentre of biodiversity that is suffering from one of the world’s highest rates of deforestation.”

A further 3% of the panels used came from Malaysian plywood, supplied by companies such as Shin Yang, which has been linked to destructive and potentially illegal logging practices.

In 2017, indigenous leaders from the Malaysian section of Borneo called on the Tokyo committee to stop sourcing timber from the forests of Sarawak because of the industry’s impact on traditional lands and life.

Indonesia and Malaysia were among the top 10 countries suffering dense tree cover loss in 2016, much of it linked to oil palm, pulp and paper industries. 

Around the world, an area of forest the size of New Zealand – 29.7m hectares – disappeared that year, the highest level on record. 

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Despite its imminent Brexit, the UK successfully rewrote a proposal to almost quadruple the potential size of wood burning plants before they had to meet efficiency criteria, according to documents obtained by Unearthed, and shared exclusively with Climate Home News.

The win for Whitehall’s lobby offensive – in alliance with Poland and Spain – was pushed through in a ministerial revision to the renewable energy directive in December.

Shortly before it was approved, a group of high profile climate scientists warned the directive’s biomass articles were “a critical flaw” in the proposal, and would accelerate climate change.

This was because the proposal tolerated the cutting down and burning of whole trees, a process that releases more CO2 into the atmosphere than replanted trees can absorb for decades, if not centuries.

Greenpeace’s chief UK scientist Doug Parr told CHN: “The UK government knows this energy source could backfire and has cooled on providing fresh subsidies, yet they are trying to lobby the EU to make it easier to burn more wood. If ministers really want Britain to be a climate leader, they should back unambiguously clean renewable technologies like solar and wind that really help tackle climate change.”

The directive still needs to be approved by the European Parliament, Commission and Council in a trilogue process that could take up to a year.

Biomass: Could provide 44% of UK energy by 2050 – study

Campaigners say that if it is accepted, the UK proposal would raise the bar at which combined heat and power criteria apply from 20MW to 75MW. This would omit the vast majority of currently operating plants from efficiency obligations.

Parr said the role of genuinely sustainable bioenergy should probably be limited to organic wood waste. This has traditionally been seen as ripe for carbon neutral energy transformation as it would otherwise decompose, releasing its carbon dioxide within a few years.

But even this assumption is wildly optimistic, according to a study published in Environmental Research Letters today, which provides a new model for calculating the net emissions impact of burning wood pellets made only from residues, and not whole trees.

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Because burned pellets emit carbon at a faster speed than decomposing forest material, the paper finds that burning them creates more net emissions – when measured against their “alternative fate” as decomposing twigs and branches.

Mary Booth, the report’s author and director of the Partnership for Policy Integrity, a campaign group opposed to biomass, told CHN that counting biomass smokestack emissions – which tend to be greater than coal per megawatt-hour – was a more representative way of tallying net emissions than current assumptions of carbon neutrality.

“Scenarios that hold down greenhouse gas emissions to avoiding dangerous temperature rise require CO2 emissions to peak in the next ten to twenty years,” she said. “However, this analysis shows that wood-burning power plants burning green chips and wood pellets will inject a lot of extra CO₂ into the atmosphere just in [that] period when it is most urgent to reduce emissions.”

The paper finds that cumulative net emissions from residue pellet-burning will also increase over a 40–50 year period, though less steeply.

EU climate laws: Undermined by Polish and Czech revolt, documents reveal

Wood burning power plants account for the majority of Europe’s renewable energy production and are as eligible for renewable energy subsidies as wind or solar power. Drax, formerly the UK’s largest coal plant, has been converted to burn wood pellets.

The pellets they burn are often made from felled whole trees, but the paper finds that even when “true” wood wastes are assumed, up to 95% of the cumulative pollution represents a net addition to the atmosphere over decades.

“Drax and other power plants burning wood pellets emit as much or more CO₂ per megawatt-hour as when they burn coal, but they get to avoid carbon trading fees for biomass emissions,” Booth said.

A Drax spokesperson said: “The science is not in doubt, where biomass is sourced sustainably using low grade material it delivers significant carbon savings through reduced use of fossil fuels and it helps improve the health and growth of forests, meaning they can absorb more carbon. Drax’s biomass units deliver carbon savings of more than 80% compared to when they used coal – this is independently audited.”

A separate study released by the International Renewable Energy Association and European Commission on Monday found that the EU could cost-effectively double its deployment of biomass by 2030.

“However, its share in the total consumption of renewables would decline from 67% in 2010 to 55% in 2030 as the growing contribution of other renewables outpaces bioenergy,” the report said.

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In a submission to UN Climate Change’s Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI) on 30 January, Business Europe, which represents industry confederations in 28 EU states, called for a conduit to the top table.

This would be “pivotal” to the cycle of reviewing national climate pledges that was established under the Paris Agreement, the document argues.

“We feel that there are many good business ideas to tackle climate change that might not always be reaching negotiators,” the group’s communications director, Peter Sennekamp, told Climate Home News.

“It would be helpful for negotiators to have a direct contact with business representatives in a more formal matter. Therefore, to assure that information reaches them in a timely and consistent manner, we believe that having a recognized focal point is crucial.”

Business Europe’s submission resembles a Ukrainian proposal for bringing energy corporates into UN climate talks that Climate Home revealed in November.

Report: UN makes open call for ideas on fighting climate change

Transparency campaigners oppose giving business interests closer access to the talks, however, seeing them as a barrier to ambition.

Jesse Bragg, a spokesman for Corporate Accountability, described the proposal as “giving the fox a doggy door to the hen house”.

“Groups like Business Europe have long fought to insinuate themselves into climate policymaking in order to undermine it and direct it toward the financial interests of its members,” he said, adding that conflict of interest issues would be “front and centre” at the next interim climate conference in Bonn this May.

“Those responsible for the climate crisis should not be writing the rules for how we address it,” Bragg said.

Business Europe submission to UN climate talks by Megan Darby on Scribd

The US Council for International Business (USCIB) made a similar argument to Business Europe in a submission filed on the same day.

USCIB called for recognition of a “channel for business, focused on the advice, expertise and capabilities that are distinct to business, built on the model of other such consultative bodies, for example the International Organization of Employers (IOE) and the Business and Industry Advisory (BIAC) Committee to the OECD.”

BIAC boasts of providing “access to high level OECD meetings, forums and discussions on leading matters that impact businesses globally” and also “strategic counsel on major policy decisions, peer reviews and key OECD policy instruments”.

USCIB is a US affiliate to both BIAC and the IOE, where it promotes free trade.

Sennekamp denied coordinating with the US group on Business Europe’s latest submission, with the caveat that “we of course speak to many of our counterparts”.

USCIB submission to UN climate talks by Megan Darby on Scribd

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Tomasz Chruszczow, Poland’s top climate negotiator and 2018 UN climate champion, said a push to increase national pledges to stop the world warming more than 1.5C should not be the focus for the world’s climate negotiators when they meet in the Polish city of Katowice in December.

Instead, Chruszczow called for other states to slow down and concentrate on agreeing the rulebook for the Paris Agreement.

Ratification of the accord had moved “at the speed of light” and now, “we need an implementation package to be adopted in Katowice,” he said. “Calls for ambition bring nothing.”

“Instead of being driven by enthusiasm, let’s be driven by responsible common sense which is about poverty eradication, combatting hunger and security of energy supplies,” he said.

COP24: UN climate conference 2018 heads to heartland of Polish coal

Chruszczow was appointed Poland’s “high level climate champion” at the most recent UN talks in Bonn. In this role he will represent the global community and be responsible for an agenda that encourages business and civil society to take greater action on cutting carbon.

Yet he remains sceptical about how fast the world can go. A UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) review of actions needed to limit global warming to 1.5C – due out this year – would “probably not” result in new action from governments, he said. 

Tomasz Chruszczow, centre, is Poland’s top climate negotiator and 2018 UN climate champion (Photo: UN Climate Change)

This is despite most nations agreeing they need to increase their pledges to the Paris Agreement to hold warming below the critical 2C barrier – and ensure that the more challenging 1.5C goal was cleaved to as closely as possible.

Chruszczow suggested this strategy had already been overtaken by events. “If we want the world to stay within safe limits of temperature range, I would risk saying we are already beyond the safe limits,” he told Climate Home News.

Poland has long stood apart from mainstream European ambition to clean up the environment. It remains coal dependent, opposed to onshore wind power, resistant to emissions cuts and obstructive towards wider environmental protections.

But Chruszczow argues that enthusiastic declarations by countries such as Germany – which junked its 2020 climate target to little fanfare last month – are worth little when compared with Poland’s “achievements so far”.

“I wish everyone was as ambitious as we are,” he said, pointing to the emissions drop that followed the shuttering of Poland’s heavy industries after 1989.

Poland: ‘Cannot afford’ share of EU 2030 climate target

Poland’s environment ministry goes further, describing the country as “one of the world leaders in climate action”, for its hosting of three UN climate conferences in a decade. 

When asked if Poland backed the IPCC view of human activity as the key driver of climate change though, the ministry was vague.

In an emailed statement to Climate Home News, a spokesman said: “We have no doubt that we must combat climate change. Its effects cause, among other things, economic losses and also threaten the health and lives of people. It is therefore in the interests of all of us, regardless of the disputes over the causes of this phenomenon, to work towards reducing climate change.”

The comments were originally attributed to the new environment minister, Henryk Kowalczyk, but withdrawn, reattributed, and then withdrawn again. The ministry declined several requests to clarify what position they took on the “dispute”.

Kowalczyk, a low-profile treasury minister allied with the deposed prime minister Beata Szydlo, was appointed last month, replacing long-serving minister Jan Szyszko.

Poland: Coal cash grab attacked by UK, France, Germany

Szyszko, a forester by trade, had dangerously isolated Poland within the EU with a bullish insistence on logging in the ancient Bialowieza forest. Kowalczyk has since rowed back this policy.

“Kowalczyk is doing everything to make a deescalation with Brussels,” said Robert Tomaszewski, a senior energy analyst at the Polityka Insight think tank. “It’s his main job.” 

Polityka Insight now expects a continuation of Szyszko’s environment policy but “with better PR and better relations with Brussels”. 

The environment ministry spokesman said: “We want good cooperation with Brussels in all areas where such cooperation is necessary.”

Surprisingly, the question of whether Kowalczyk will foster that cooperation by chairing the COP24 summit is still open. Szyszko, who was the president of the 5th UN climate conference in 1999, was presumed to be returning to the post this year. If he were replaced, Tomaszewski said, it would be “pretty big chaos”.

Overall, Poland’s environment ministry is seen as having been caught up in a power shift under the new far right Law and Justice Party government.

“Climate policy has been outsourced – or taken over – by the ministry of energy because, from the government’s perspective, it affects coal plants and power plants,” said Aleksander Sniegocki, the climate project manager at Poland’s WiseEuropa think tank. 

“At some point in 2017, energy just became the key ministry for negotiating EU climate regulations.”

With a weak environment minister, a mid-term commitment to coal and gas power, and a government torn between greenish gestures abroad and zero-sum energy patriotism at home, Poland’s hosting of the critical 2018 climate talks may veer off-green, said Tomaszewski.

“They are going to say decarbonisation is happening. We’re planning to use more natural gas, build a Baltic pipeline and import more from Norway,” he predicted. 

“And they will use Katowice as a platform to defend coal and say we are going to make it clean. And they will talk about forests and CO2. And everyone will be happy, the same as at COP19, five years ago in Warsaw.”

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Thousands of ancient sites are at risk of logging because the government will not pay to have them mapped, according to Tiit Kaasik, board member of the country’s Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).

The sites have already been acknowledged under FSC International’s ‘Controlled Wood’ system and, from March 30, companies will be obliged to reflect this in a new national risk assessment scheme, he said.

“If the Estonian state forest management does not follow its obligations, it should not be allowed to have these FSC certificates,” Kaasik told Climate Home news. “I am prepared to file a complaint against the FSC auditor, NEPCon, if pagan traditions are not respected.”

Report: Logging surge threatens a quarter of Estonia’s forest, warn conservationists

Until the 1200s, Estonia was a pagan country. Animist spiritual beliefs still guide large sections of the population, who visit and revere ancient burial and sacrificial places for healing, prayer and communion with nature. Polls suggest that belief in a spirit or life force is three times more popular than in “God”.

“We are pagan,” the former Estonian prime minister, Anders Tarand, told Climate Home News: “We know a lot about managing forests. Nature protection traditions run deep here.”

But commercial demand for timber was overwhelming those customs, he added: “The impact of money streams is so strong that what can we do?”

Coins are left as offerings to the spirits (Pic: Arthur Neslen)

At one ancient burial site in Unipiha, 20 km south of Tartu, scores of coins have been left on a large, bulbous, mossy rock. Thin trees obscure the sacrificial stone on one side of it, but a road and hill littered with felled timber are all too visible on the other.

Walking around the rock, Tiit Kaasik’s sister-in-law, Liis Kaasik, said that she felt the loss most with her children: “I went to a sacred place with my kids and asked them not to pick any flowers or touch anything but at the same time, the whole forest was destroyed. There was this big sadness and grief inside [me], because we Estonians feel the trees crying, and the birds crying when their nests are destroyed.”

Folklore has it that vandals of sacred places suffer terrible fates. But Liis just told her children that the loggers “must have not known about the sites, or they were greedy and only wanted the money, and that nothing is sacred anymore.”

Estonia’s state forest management authority (RMK) says it cannot give the kinds of guarantees being sought by campaigners, partly because of the lack of mapping and partly because Estonian conservation laws only cover small areas around monuments.

“We can guarantee that we won’t harvest [somewhere] if we know that it is a sacred site,” said Aigar Kallas, the RMK’s chairman. “If we don’t know and there’s no historical record, we can’t do anything about it.”

A forest survey between 2008 and 2009 identified 550 sites for the heritage list. “Whether we’ve been able to map out all of them is another question,” Kallas said.

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Estonia’s spiritual traditions reflect the forest’s vibrant wildlife, which is also under pressure. Threatened natural treasures include the greater spotted eagle, the saproxylc beetle and the extraordinary flying squirrel.

Once endemic to Estonia, fewer more than 300 of the mesmerising gliders are thought to remain, confined to a small fragment of the country’s northeast. These are likely to disappear by 2020, according to studies by Jaanus Remm, a conservation biologist at Tartu University.

Estonia’s authorities are taking measures to protect the last populations but the destruction of old growth forests is particularly devastating for female flying squirrels, which have a habitat range of less than 50 hectares. The fragmentation of woodland can limit genetic diversity and increase a population’s vulnerability to disease and predators.

Uudo Timm, the head of the Estonian Environmental Agency’s nature department told Climate Home that while he was optimistic the species would survive beyond 2020, its long-term outlook was poor.

“It is critically endangered now and the protected areas are not a network of protected areas [so much as] an archipelago,” he said. “This population has decreased rapidly. It is clear that the logging and intensive forest management are one reason [for the decline].”

Report: Polish police set to restrict protest and gather personal data at UN climate talks

A report by Estonia’s National Audit Office in 2010 censured the RMK for environmentally destructive practices and highlighted a “conflict of interest” between its twin obligations to log and preserve Estonia’s forests.

“As the RMK is economically dependent on felling and the income generated by sales of timber, then such a conflict of interest is a threat to the sustainable management of state forest and its ecological condition,” the auditors wrote.

Reducing annual logging to sustainable levels “would lead to a significant decrease in the RMK’s turnover,” according to the NAO. Last year, this reached €176m ($215m), with roughly half the profits transferred to state budgets and the other half reinvested in roads and other forest infrastructure projects.

“There is a conflict of interest, obviously,” Kallas admitted. “But since we’ve laid down the principle [that] conservation comes first in the rules we have to follow – and profit maximisation from timber production comes after that – it’s actually not that difficult.”

But nature conservation is sensitive territory in Estonia, a country in which the forest has – in living memory – sheltered partisans and sparked revolutions.

“There is a saying here that the forest is a poor man’s coat,” said Asko Lohmus, a renowned local conservationist. “It has a direct climatic effect – it is a place where you can hide from bad weather – and it has also been a hiding place against enemies.”

“It has an existential value,” he added, “and people feel this psychologically.”

Estonian Forest Aid covered expenses for the author’s visit to Estonia

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That is the warning from conservationists, as the scars of clear-cutting show commercial demand for wood is already changing the landscape.

Estonia’s logging volumes have almost tripled in the past decade. The European Commission expects Estonia’s forests to become a net carbon source by 2030, rather than a sink, as they are today.

Asko Lohmus, a conservation biologist at Tartu University, fears dramatic results. “I think that 25% of our forest is immediately at risk, according to the current legal regulations,” he told Climate Home News.

“Added to that, [another] 20% of the forest area is already clear-cut or a regenerating thicket less than 20 years old, that does not resemble a forest. Plus we have an actual forestry development plan which promotes cutting it down in larger volumes than would regenerate.”

Visiting in December, much of the country’s interior bristles with pine, aspen, spruce and birch, which flourished under decades of Soviet rule. Along the highway from Tallin to Tartu, rows of trees are dimly backlit in grey-green and snowy hues by a winter sun that flatlines on the horizon.

Stare too long though and shards of sunlight will blind you as they suddenly poke through holes in the green curtain. Something is changing in Estonia’s hinterland.

The government is still counting some clear-cut areas as forest (Pic: Arthur Neslen)

A detour through Väätsa forest reveals thousands of tree husks strewn across copses, like victims on a battlefield. Freshly cut logs are stacked by roadsides, some next to fields full of deep ruts and gouge-marks from the use of heavy machinery.

Leo Eensoo (pictured), a small forest owner, says spruce or birch trees sell locally for around €50-60 each, depending on their height.

Many elderly land owners have been persuaded to sell whole forests, Eensoo said, adding that he had recently turned down a financial offer from the state forest management authority to fell trees on his land.

“I said no because I see the forest changing,” he told Climate Home News. “It is shrinking. They are clear-cutting too fast, in too many areas. If we don’t stop now, it might take 80 years to get the forest back.”

Estonia has the EU’s second most intensively farmed forests (after Belgium), with logging making up 91% of forest activity. It is also the OECD’s most carbon-intensive country, depending heavily on shale oil for its electricity.

To meet EU green targets, the Baltic state burns biomass for the vast majority of its renewable energy – 96% in 2012 – and more will be needed by 2030. A billion-euro “biorefinery” is due to open in 2022, churning wood into pulp for applications including power generation. This raises fears among conservation scientists of a catastrophic spike in deforestation under the banner of renewable energy.

Report: UK government details coal power phase-out strategy

On Wednesday 17 January, the European Parliament votes on a proposal to ban the use of whole trees in sustainably certified biomass. Last month, 15 experts – including eight lead authors of UN climate science reports – warned that the EU’s plans would otherwise “increase global warming for decades to centuries, even when wood replaces coal, oil or natural gas”.

The scientists wrote: “By 1850, the use of wood for bioenergy helped drive the near deforestation of western Europe even at a time when Europeans consumed relatively little energy. Although coal helped to save the forests of Europe, the solution is not to go back to burning forest.”

The Estonian government insists that its own forest area will not shrink as a result of the extra logging it has planned. Inventory data in its forest development plan claims that its forest area and reserves have actually grown by 10% in the last eight years.

“Of course people have problems with clear-cutting,” said Marku Lamp, the deputy chancellor of Estonia’s environment ministry. “This is something that we must address more by [explaining] what is behind those forest management practices and why we need them.

The government insists though that 53% of the country is still woodland. “We [also] have a really clear obligation for forest owners to reforest their clear-cut areas,” Lamp added.

Forest diamonds: the collapse of the world’s first indigenous-led carbon credits scheme

But satellite data shows that more than 285,000 hectares (2,850 sq km) of Estonian forest has disappeared since 2001 and Lohmus, recently voted “person of the year” by the Baltics’ largest newspaper, says that only 43% of the country is forest, when clear-cut areas are not counted.

Campaigners say so-called flexibilities in EU carbon accounting rules further obscure the scale of destruction. In the last days of its six-month EU presidency, Estonia inserted an annex to the regulations allowing around one million extra tonnes of CO2 to be removed from its 3.07m tonne forest carbon sink by 2030.

On paper, the measure is a “compensation limit” to prevent nations’ emissions obligations interfering with economic growth. Hanna Aho from the NGO Fern described it as a “loophole” that “undermines the Paris agreement and is simply unforgivable”.

“The forest sector is being allowed to increase its emissions while everyone else is being asked to reduce them,” she said. “Forests are the best and most reliable tool we have to suck carbon from the atmosphere and cool the climate. We should be doing everything to protect them.”

Estonian Forest Aid covered expenses for the author’s visit to Estonia

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His appearance at negotiations to lay down rules for the Paris Agreement, which Trump wants to leave, attracted widespread opprobrium.

But few White House officials understand international climate policy as well as Banks. The free market advocate served as a special advisor on international climate affairs under president George W Bush. After Bush decided not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the precursor to the Paris climate agreement, Banks designed the ‘major economies forum’, a meeting that became a key driver of climate ambition during the Obama presidency.

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In Bonn, he headed a panel with US energy industry executives that was met by a mass walkout. After that talk, he told Climate Home News that he didn’t know what the 2C target – a widely used benchmark for dangerous warming – meant. (He clarifies that here). 

He was keen to present the White House as reasonable and those who dismiss whole industries – such as coal – as ideological and irrational.

Appearing for an impromptu visit to the media centre the next day, he appeared harried – face reddened, surrounded by press packs and activists, trying not to spill his coffee, gamely sparring with interlocutors who saw him as an envoy of evil. In conversation a few minutes later, he was relaxed, responsive and bright.

Banks is no enthusiast for climate action and wouldn’t be drawn on the human contribution to climate change. But, privately, he does not question the science and was part of a group of advisors who tried to convince the president to stay in the Paris deal. That conversation, he told Climate Home News on the sidelines in Bonn, was now over inside the administration and could only be continued by foreign leaders.

AN: Can I just ask one more time about the 2C, I can see you don’t want to answer the question. Maybe the White House doesn’t have policy on this?

GDB: Yeah, so that’s funny you know because this is an issue we talked about in the Bush administration too, right? And I really feel that people, people were I guess interested in my response.

I don’t know what it means. But from a policy perspective and how you chart a pathway forward for technologies, I don’t know what it means. And I’ve never actually participated – maybe I’m not in the right discussions – but I’ve never actually participated in a discussion where someone is using the 2C target to figure out when they need to deploy this or that technology.

It’s always been kind of a lofty target out there. But from an administration perspective, we haven’t discussed it. It was not part of the Paris discussion we had.

The argument would be it’s the level above which the effects of climate change become catastrophic, 97% of the world’s scientists agree with this perspective and it is an imperative because theres no manufacturing or competitiveness on a dead planet.

Of course, of course. But I still don’t know what it means from a policy discussion perspective.

What it means is taking that into account for the energy sector. I mean you said that human activity contributes to climate change. Can you quantify that?

Quantify it?

Yeah how much of climate change do you think is caused by human activity?

I can’t quantify it. I mean, I can’t.

Why not?

First of all, the administration doesn’t have a position on it, right? But if you were to ask me personally, I’d say I can’t give you a percent, but I know the percentages people throw around but I don’t know.

A large part?

Oh quantify it that way?

Yes, a very large part? A majority?

The administration doesn’t have a position on that. [In November, the White House endorsed a report produced by 13 federal agencies, which concluded more than 90% of current climate change had been caused by humans – ed]

A lot of people in the EU – senior people – that I’ve spoken to believed that in the run up to the Rose Garden speech there was an attempt to land the president on various sides of the argument – stay in and try to renegotiate or leave. The very strong perception in Brussels is that you were trying to persuade the president to stay within Paris.

The president heard from a lot of different people. I was really surprised by how many discussions he had on this. He was lobbied by heads of state across the board – the chancellor, the prime minister, former vice president Gore. He had at least one or two conversations with him, at least. 

And he heard from the people who were really concerned about it and it was a campaign promise that he made. And I think that during the campaign it was my understanding and, looking at his speeches and seeing what he said, he spoke from a manufacturing piece [about] the impacts of the agreement, including the Obama NDC [nationally determined contribution]. He met the campaign promise. It was important to keep that promise. And again he was really concerned about the NDC.

There’s a Ukrainian proposal you probably won’t know about. It’s to create an intermediary layer at the Cop [conference of parties] between the nations and the NDCs, and within that, energy corporates would be invited and given direct participation in the talks.

The idea from Ukraine’s side would be to stimulate clean coal technology transfer deals. In so much as it meets the US agenda in terms of manufacturing industry – you know keeping coal jobs, expanding coal jobs, and the ‘clean coal’ industry – does that idea have merit to you?

So, I’ve heard about it. I haven’t seen it… I don’t know enough about it. It sounds interesting. I don’t know how it works, right? I kind of look at the Cop and I think that it’s already dysfunctional in a lot of ways. And I don’t know how adding other stuff to it works.

I do think that the lack of industry participation – and I’m talking about industry that is impacted by the climate agenda in a negative way, not a positive way – I think that the lack of their participation makes it a lot more difficult. But I would argue that the lack of participation by energy and economic ministers makes it more difficult. I don’t think this conversation should be led by the environment ministers.

Who should it be led by?

It should be the energy [ministers] because it’s an energy issue. You can’t separate energy from climate because it’s an energy issue. Mitigation, right? Adaptation yes, but not mitigation.

So in that sense, how could the Cop process be reformed so as to create more favourable conditions for the US to participate?

Well, we’re going to stay in the framework convention.

I was talking about the Paris Agreement.

Ah right, the Paris Agreement. I think that’s a decision made by the president.

Are there any ideas that you are working on while you are here?

No, no, no. We’re not looking at those options anymore. I think it’s, you know, I don’t think it’s a negotiation. I don’t think it’s a conversation. Its not a technical negotiation that I think you would have at the Cop. It’s a heads of state negotiation.

What would be a successful outcome of this Cop for you?

We want to make sure that we do what we can to avoid bifurcation, period, right? Differentiation. It’s a fundamental flaw of the framework convention. You know, because it divides up – it’s the world in actually, I think we ratified it in 1992. Did it come into force in 1992?

I think so, yes.

But you know the conversation started in the late 80s right? So it’s a world view, its like a cold war view of the world when we’re living in a global economy. If you don’t have a graduation mechanism where companies can move backwards and forward, my goodness! Parts of central and eastern Europe should have been developing countries, right? After the collapse of communism. And South Korea? Israel? I mean: come on, you know?

So what about the argument of historic responsibility? What about the argument that America, Britain, Russia industrialised and got the benefits of using coal and fossil fuels and they created the problem – or contributed to the problem – and now the developing world would be punished for that if they were given exactly the same targets before they’d even started to industrialise, some of them.

I think it’s a good question. I would say and by the way I’ve been asked this question around the Paris Agreement – people saying ‘if China does more, will that bring you back in?’ My response to that is that’s not the kind of conversation that we want to have. We’re not asking developing countries to accept reduction targets in exchange for us having a reduction target right?

But when it comes to reporting and transparency and accounting, a country like China should not be treated differently. Now for some poorer countries or the poorest countries, that might be a different situation where they actually need capacity building in order to be able to avoid emissions. But you could also make the argument that it really doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if Mozambique reports its emissions, from a global point of view. Because they don’t really matter. But it matters if China does. So yeah, I think it answers your question.

One last question, some people have raised questions about US climate negotiators here. It’s been suggested that morale is low among some of them. Is that true?

Look I think we’ve got a great team. I think we’ve got the best negotiators in the world. True professionals. A lot of them spent a lot of time on the Paris Agreement. A lot of them have spent years working on climate policy. They’re professionals. You have shifts in policy. That’s very natural with new administrations. But we’ve got the best team in the world, no doubt, no doubt.

They’re yuge

[Both laugh]

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Green MEP Reinhard Bütikofer told Climate Home News the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) had rejected this demand, among others, before walking out of coalition talks last week.

But it was a crux issue which the Greens, who may yet hold the balance of power in Germany, would not compromise over, he added.

“We will not go down below 7GW,” he said on the fringes of a press event in Brussels. “You never call it a red line, but in fact you treat it as such.”

The collapse of coalition talks between the Greens, FDP and Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union has left Germany facing the prospect of another election.

Greens are hopeful of increasing their vote share if another poll is called. While there are many potential combinations of parties that could form the next government, that would again put them in a position to push for climate policies.

The government uncertainty comes at a critical time for the EU’s largest emitter, which is set to miss its 2020 climate target without rapid policy intervention. Coal is a significant part of the picture, accounting for around a quarter of Germany’s primary energy use and 40% of its electricity.

Leaked paper: Germany to miss climate targets ‘disastrously’

The Greens went into the last election promising to shut Germany’s 20 dirtiest coal plants. These amount to 8-10GW of power generation capacity and release around 50 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions a year.

The 7GW compromise would have cut annual CO2 emissions by 40Mt and shut 14 coal plants or the equivalent, according to the office of Annalena Barbock, another German Green negotiator. Extra policies in the transport and buildings sectors would also have been needed to meet the national 2020 target.

Leadership expressed confidence it could have sold that package to its – more radical – membership.

Bütikofer called the 7GW agreement “our most important achievement” in the negotiations. In return, he said the party had given ground on phasing out the “solidarity tax”, created to help East Germany recover after unification.

“When we talked to environmental NGOs, they told us the minimum should be 8-10GW,” he said. “When we asked them about 7GW, they said: ‘It is not enough but it’s far too good to reject the offer. Go for it.’ All of them.”

Report: Protesters storm Trump coal event at UN climate talks

At the last moment though, FDP leader Christian Lindner rejected the package, which would have put the coal phase-out “on a legal basis”.

Instead, the FDP leader used the coal issue “to leverage antagonism” with the CDU in North Rhine Westphalia, which is ruled by a FDP-CDU coalition. Bütikofer said: “The governor there promised to support the Chancellor’s line on energy policy – which was not easy for him to do – and [the FDP] threatened to attack him from the right if he did.”

Coal was not the only issue motivating the FDP to walk out. The rightwing party wanted to end the “solidarity tax” by 2021, to cut taxes more broadly, and to end Germany’s “open door” policy for refugees.

In contrast, climate and energy policy was central to the Greens’ election campaign. The party won 9% of the vote, compared to the FDP’s 11%.

Opponents of a rapid coal phase-out argue it threatens energy security and thousands of jobs. Bütikofer said a 7GW cut would only hit exports, not domestic power consumption.

“Of course there is the issue of the coal miners and that would have been extremely critical and sensitive in North Rhine Westphalia and Brandenberg and Saxony,” he said.

The Greens had worked with trades unions and regional leaders on plans to develop alternative sources of employment, he added.

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In an address to a conference charged with writing the rules of the deal struck in Paris in 2015, Macron promised to replace the $2 million annual donation withdrawn by the US from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The president also called for a border tax to protect EU industry against parties that do not share its climate goals, and promised efforts to haul EU carbon prices up to €30 per tonne.

His speech followed a cautious address by the summit’s co-host, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, which Green MPs involved in coalition talks said cast new doubts on the prospect of a governmental pact.

Macron by contrast was bold. On the IPCC, he said: “We need scientific information which is constantly nourished to ensure clear decision making. The IPCC is one of the major components of this work.”

“However, it is threatened today by the decision of the US not to guarantee funding for it. Therefore, I propose that the EU replaces the USA, and France will meet that challenge.”

While France hoped that other EU countries would also contribute, “I can guarantee that starting in 2018, the IPCC will have all the money it needs and will continue to support our decision-making. It will not miss a single euro,” Macron said.

IPCC: Canada doubles contribution to UN climate science panel

On carbon markets, Macron said that France would be “working hard” to achieve a €30 per tonne carbon fee, “the price that will make it possible to change the behaviour of investors in industrial circles”.

He added: “In particular, we need a border tax to make it possible to protect industry sectors, as there are imports from countries not respecting these goals.”

Merkel, once dubbed the ‘climate chancellor’ – but also a stalwart defender of Germany’s car industry and power utilities – acknowledged that her country had “a long way yet to go” to meet its target of cutting emissions 40% by 2020.

But while it was “important to fulfil obligations we entered into”, she said, “social issues come to fore when we talk about coal. We have to think: is such a scheme economically viable and affordable? Even in a rich country like Germany, there are important conflicts in society that need to be solved and settled in a reliable, calm and collected manner.”

Around 40% of Germany’s energy comes from coal – much of it heavily polluting brown lignite, which is pushing Germany to overshoot its 2020 emissions target by some 120 million tonnes, according to estimates.

The action needed on coal was something “we have to discuss in precise terms in the days to come,” Merkel said, in a nod to the ongoing coalition talks due to end on Friday.

Merkel coalition negotiator: German coal mining could end in the 2030s

Annalena Barbock, an MP in the German Green Party’s negotiating team told Climate Home that Merkel’s speech would not help to unblock coalition talks that were currently “stuck” over the twin issues of climate goals and reduction in coal use.

“I don’t know if this was Merkel playing hardball or not but it was a true disappointment for me as a Green negotiator,” she said. “It was also a true disappointment for me as a climate politician and as a human being. She said at the beginning of her speech that climate change was a challenge to the destiny of humankind. If this is the answer, then we have to be very worried.”

The US coal industry at least might take some heart from Merkel’s apparent reluctance to speed up the German coal phase out, albeit in terms that might not please Germany’s 20,000 coal miners.

Speaking to Climate Home last week, Barry Worthington, director of the US Energy Association, said: “Germany doesn’t like to talk about it, but it is burning US coal for power consumption. Everyone wants to talk about renewables deployment but since World War II, its been buying and burning US coal and it continues to do so.”

Earlier in the conference plenary, the UN secertary-general Antonio Guterres had warned that the window for limiting global warming to 2C would close within five years.

With an estimated $825bn invested globally in fossil fuels and other high-emissions sectors last year, he said: “We must stop placing bets on an unsustainable future that will place savings and societies at risk,” he said. “Markets need to be reoriented away from the counter-productive and the short term.”

“The world should adopt a single rule,” he added. “If big infrastructure projects are not green, they should not be given the green light”

A high carbon price in market covering at least 50% of the world’s economy would be needed to meet the Paris targets, the UN chief said.

“I urge G20 countries to set a strong example,” he concluded.

Climate Home News’ reporting at Cop23 is supported in part by the European Climate Foundation.

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Representatives of the fossil fuel industry said they wanted to be part of the conversation and sat through intense questioning and heckling from media and protesters in the room.

The bitterness that has divided the US since the election of Donald Trump arrived in Bonn, when around a hundred mostly American climate protestors disrupted the event, with song, heckling and protest banners.

“So you claim to be an American, but we see right through your greed,” the protesters sang at a panel including George David Banks, president Trump’s special energy assistant and moderated by vice president Mike Pence’s assistant Francis Brooke. Natural gas, coal and nuclear companies were also represented.

Report: Coal deals ‘very possible’ as US holds industry event at UN climate talks

As they marched out of the room, they were joined by hundreds of other demonstrators that had not been able to get in.

The panel sat quietly through the protest before launching into a defence of the role of various forms of fossil energy in climate mitigation, in front of a half-empty room.

Fossil fuels, including high efficiency coal power generation and carbon capture and storage, “were vital” to achieving the goals of the Paris deal, said Holly Krutka, vice president of coal generation and emissions technologies from Peabody Energy.

Banks said: “This panel is only controversial if we choose to bury our heads in the sand and ignore the realities of a global energy system.” He repeatedly said he was in Bonn to talk openly.

Report: Bloomberg demands seat at UN climate negotiating table for cities and states

When asked later by Climate Home News if the administration held the policy that the 2C warming target from the Paris deal needed to be avoided, he said: “I actually don’t know what that means, the 2C target”.

Banks has been involved with climate policy, of which the 2C target is a fundamental tenet, since the Bush administration.

Trump announced that the US would quit the Paris pact in a Rose Garden Speech last June, although no exit will be possible before November 2020.

When pushed on their position on Trump’s Paris withdrawal, two of the six panelists – the gas and nuclear representatives – said they disagreed, Krutka demurred, Barry Worthington, executive director of the US Energy Association said he agreed. The administration officials both refused to answer, although Banks is widely understood to have pushed for Trump to stay inside the Paris deal.

On the Paris deal, Banks said: “We’re part of the UNFCCC and climate mitigation is an important goal of the US but… I don’t think its any surprise that economic prosperity is a higher priority. When the president looks at the Paris Agreement and climate policy in general, he looks through the lens of what effect does this have on US manufacturing and competitiveness.”

Here we go. #COP23 pic.twitter.com/sIhF5T2rWj

— Lisa Friedman (@LFFriedman) November 13, 2017

Amos Hochstein, senior vice president of marketing at LNG company Tellurian said he had served in the Obama administration: “I’m very proud of that. I disagree with a lot of people on this panel but I’m here anyway and if we really care about clean air and climate change we have to stop siloing ourselves into communities where we only talk to ourselves.”

The reaction from within the conference in Bonn has been muted, with many trying to ignore the event.

“This is a sideshow, the world world is not paying any attention,” said Jay Inslee, governor of Washington, who made a statement to the press before the event began.

Report: For Africans, America’s pledge is about more than pollution

When asked whether coal could be part of the solution to climate change, Frank Bainimarama, the Fijian prime minister and COP23 president, told reporters: “I really don’t want to get into an argument with the United States of America, but we all know what coal does and we all know the effects of coal mining and of coal…

“There is really no need to talk about coal because we all know what coal does with regard to climate change,” he added.

Patrick Gomes, the head of the African, Caribbean and Pacific group of 79 nations said that the US meeting was “a diversion, unfortunately” from the urgent task of climate mitigation and adaptation.

“It has more of a commercial side to it than an ecological or environmental concern,” he told Climate Home News. “It is regrettable [that the US] still wants to bring to the fore commercial incentives and issues that take precedence over humanity.”

US negotiators have kept a low profile at the Bonn summit, raising their heads above the parapet only to support likeminded countries in trying to limit the practical scope and range of the Paris agreement.

“They haven’t caused any trouble,” one climate negotiator said. “The role that they played under the Obama administration is definitely missed and in that sense its troubling not to have them alongside us on many issues.”

Another former government official said that Trigg Talley, the leader of the US delegation would be feeling “terrible, of course” about what he was being asked to do.

“Representing the Trump administration on climate must be the worst thing in the world,” the ex-official said.

The EU, which was holding talks with China and Canada while the event went on, refused to comment on the meeting.

Climate Home News’ reporting at Cop23 is supported in part by the European Climate Foundation.

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Bloomberg, the UN climate body’s special envoy for cities, said non-state actors had already taken the US “half way” to meeting the national carbon-cutting pledge made under former president Barack Obama: a 26-28% cut in emissions from 2005 levels by 2025.

Addressing a packed-to-overflowing pavilion, Bloomberg launched “America’s Pledge”, a process to quantify efforts to tackle climate change by non-state actors.

“This coalition represents more than half of the US economy,” he said. “If this group were a country, we would have the world’s third largest economy. In other words, a group of citizens, states and businesses who remain committed to the Paris agreement represent a bigger economy than any country in the world, outside the US and China.

“We should have a seat at the table and the ability to work with our peers in other nations. That is the aim of our pavilion.”

Report: African campaigners call for US to be kicked out of climate talks

A spokesman for Bloomberg Philanthropies confirmed that “the table” meant international negotiations and the reporting of climate action. Doing so would allow a US interlocutor to be held accountable for US progress in meeting its existing national contribution to the Paris climate deal, despite president Donald Trump’s intention to quit the pact.

Bloomberg’s Dan Firger told Climate Home: “There is a discussion between nation states ongoing about process of ratcheting up commitments under the Paris agreement. America’s Pledge is designed to drive this process, with the inclusion of all stakeholders in alignment with Fiji’s goals for grand coalition.”

The first report from America’s Pledge details the scope and range of actions taken by US cities, local authorities and business groups to cut greenhouse gases over the last decade. It also captures an “outpouring of public support” for continued efforts, in the absence of federal legislation and diplomacy.

The pledge offered a rallying point for Americans in Bonn who are deeply frustrated with President Trump’s repudiation of the Paris agreement and attempts to roll back flagship Obama-era climate legislation such as the clean power plan and fuel efficiency standards.

Following Bloomberg’s speech, Patricia Espinosa, the UN Climate Change executive secretary, welcomed the coalition launch  as a “special moment”, and said she would take it into the formal negotiations.

“While this remains a country-driven process, we do require the participation of all people to meet our climate challenge,” she said. “The climate change agenda and our sustainable development goals agenda cannot be delivered by governments alone.”

Analysis: US governor elections inspire hope during UN climate talks

California governor Jerry Brown also threw his weight behind the initiative. His speech was repeatedly interrupted by clumps of demonstrators.

The protest was called over Californian heavy crude oil production, methane leaks at Aliso County and the state’s cap and trade system.

Over chants of “Still in for what?” and “No sacrifice zones”, Brown attempted to talk to protestors in a near-pastiche of the Dead Kennedys song ‘California Uber Alles’. “I am Governor Jerry Brown,” he shouted. “What’s your name?”

As a large section of the audience started counter-chants of “We want Brown!”, the Californian governor argued that oil and gas presented an “existential threat” but that shutting down their production would disrupt transportation and destroy jobs.

“Unfortunately in politics, we don’t have a magic wand,” he implored. “I can’t say ‘Stop, there’s no more coal, no more oil’. Otherwise all you will get is noise – and this is good noise! But it doesn’t get the job done.”

On grassy parkland behind a conference centre fence, Californian protestors said that they were angered by five refineries that were being allowed to expand under Brown’s cap and trade scheme.

One Brazilian indigenous leader, Chief Ninawa, who represents 13,000 people in Acre, claimed that California’s carbon market was giving credence to companies that were harming his community’s traditional forest use, and dividing indigenous leaders, with payoffs.

“We indigenous people are not polluters,” he said. “We preserve the land. The ones who pollute are these global and national corporations. And these are the multinationals that are paying to offset their emissions.”

Climate Home News’ reporting at Cop23 is supported in part by the European Climate Foundation.

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African diplomats told Climate Home News that talks on technology trades were “very possible” on the fringes of the US event on Monday.

The following day, Ukraine is planning to table an initiative to bring energy corporates closer to the UN climate process, which it claims has US backing.

The proposal would slot energy multinationals into an “intermediate layer” between the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and national governments. It has been encouraged by US officials and coal firms, its authors say, and will be raised by Ukraine’s environment minister Ostap Semerak on Tuesday.

Industry executives and Obama-era climate negotiators say that pushing US coal into the heart of the UN negotiations could offer president Donald Trump political cover to reverse his plans to exit the global climate treaty, should he choose to do so.

The White House and US state department co-organised the side meeting, which is titled: “The Role of Cleaner and More Efficient Fossil Fuels and Nuclear Power in Climate Mitigation”.

‘Don’t wake the bear’: fragile climate talks begin in Bonn

Trump’s climate advisor George David Banks, who lobbied Trump to keep the US in the Paris deal, will address the event. Vice president Mike Pence’s advisor Francis Brooke will chair it. Holly Krutka, vice president of coal generation and emissions technologies for Peabody Energy, the largest private coal company on earth, will also attend.

Barry K Worthington, the director of the US Energy Association and a high profile speaker at the event, was unequivocal when asked if striking fossil fuel trade deals was an objective of the meeting.

“For sure,” he told Climate Home News. “We in the US are very dedicated to increasing our fossil fuel production and exporting to other countries. The flavour du jour is LNG but we’re also exporting crude oil and derivative products and continue to export a sizeable volume of coal.”

Benjamin Sporton, director of the World Coal Association, said there were “a lot of conversations going on” about US lower-emission coal technology transfer deals, which could get a boost from the event. Pakistan, Ghana, Nigeria and Ukraine were likely candidates for such deals, he said.

Ghana has been living with an energy crisis since a drought associated with climate change hit hydro power generation in the country, bringing routine power outages.

Wisdom Ahiataku-Togobo, the Ghanaian energy ministry’s renewable energy director, said talks about coal technology transfer deals with the US at the climate summit were “very possible, because the Volta River Authority [Ghana’s largest energy company] is prospecting for these options”.

“We are looking at clean coal options and if it comes out as more cost-competitive, why not?” he said.

Report: One in seven coal power plant owners are heading for the exit

According to Seyni Nafo, the chair of the Africa group of climate negotiators, some African nations are turning to coal after struggling to access finance for renewable energy.

“If you are presented with a certain technology with a finance package, that’s what you are going to implement,” he said. “That’s the situation in which we find ourselves. If the fossil option is the cheapest one and you have access to do it and its a simple process, that’s what you are going to do.”

Any African country with coal deposits would be tempted by the prospect of electrifying rural areas of their country with relatively less-emitting coal technology, he added.

A former state department official, who is in Bonn, was doubtful that the talks would be used as a vehicle for trade deals. If that had been Trump’s objective, US engagement would have started earlier and US negotiators would have been more visible on the ground, they said.

However, an obscure Ukrainian proposal raised this week during a backroom meeting of negotiators could formalise access to the heart of the UN climate process for companies that want to sell coal technology.

The ‘Committee for Future‘ will “enhance public and private sector participation” in national climate policies, according to a low-on-detail powerpoint presentation made by Taras Bebeshko, an advisor to the Ukrainian energy minister. He told Climate Home News it was envisaged as a way of bringing US energy majors and other non-state actors to the UN table.

Presentation From Ukraine Art 6.8 by Karl Mathiesen on Scribd

Diplomats confirmed the initiative had been raised with the US and received a “positive” response. 

“We are in permanent contact with the US delegation in the negotiating process through the umbrella group,” a Ukrainian source said, referring to a bloc of non-EU developed countries.

Ukraine began importing coal from the US earlier this year after losing control of key mines in a separatist conflict.

American corporates have expressed an interest in the proposal’s “integrated climate partnerships” which would form an “intermediate layer between the global UNFCCC and national [climate plans and] allow direct participation of the corporates,” a Ukrainian source said.

“Within this structure I can clearly see in-depth cooperation with corporations,” the source continued. “If they could bring proper [coal] technology that would allow us to do that, it would be brilliant.”

Climate Home understands US coal giant Peabody, which the US is bringing into the heart of the talks in Bonn, has expressed an interest in the initiative. The company did not answer questions regarding contact with the Ukrainians, saying only that: “We are all about technology to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. That includes high-efficiency, low-emission coal-fuelled generation today and carbon capture over time.”

Most scientific models depend on carbon capture and storage to contain global warming below catastrophic levels, but the technology has struggled to succeed commercially.

While more efficient coal could provide immediate reductions in CO2 emissions in countries that rely on the fuel, the notion that coal can be considered “clean” has been disputed by studies showing that use of the lowest emitting coal plants would rule out meeting the Paris 2C warming limit.

But the US coal industry remains a cornerstone of Trump’s base. In his Rose Garden speech announcing an exit from the global climate pact, the billionaire tycoon enthused: “I happen to love the coal miners.”

Trump also claimed that the Paris Agreement “blocks the development of clean coal in America”, but said he would re-enter the treaty if “terms that are fair to America” could be agreed.

Comment: It is time for the UN climate process to tackle fossil fuel supply

World leaders have made clear the Paris deal is not up for renegotiation. But 24 countries mentioned efficient coal technology in their national contributions to the pact, leaving scope for trade deals.

“There is obviously a need to address the concerns that president Trump expressed,” Sporton said. “An inclusion of lower emission fossil fuel technologies and greater recognition of what they can achieve in terms of the Paris Agreement would no doubt help to keep the US in [Paris].”

The Obama-era climate negotiator said trade deals could provide “political cover” for staying in. “All they [Trump officials] can do is revise down their [national climate targets],”he said. “If they want to put in more about [pledges] and a bunch of announcements about what they’re doing with fossil fuels to make it seem like less of a capitulation, fine.

“But staying in the four walls of the Paris Agreement doesn’t require them to come up with a series of announcements. They would just do it for optical reasons.”

Climate Home News’ reporting at Cop23 is supported in part by the European Climate Foundation.

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The declaration was made by a Syrian delegate at a plenary session of the conference this morning.

Since 2012, Syria has been embroiled in a bloody civil war that has claimed 300,000 lives. Its greenhouse gas emissions in 2011 added up to 88.19m tonnes – or 0.19% of the world total – according to US Aid.

Nicaragua, which gets half of its energy from renewable sources, had also been withholding its signature until stronger measures were in place.

But the small central American state relented last month, leaving just two countries standing opposed to the climate pact. And now there is one.

The US will plough a lonely furrow at the Bonn summit, as it prepares to leave the Paris agreement within three years.

Kelly Love, a White House spokeswoman reportedly commented: “As the president previously stated, the United States is withdrawing unless we can re-enter on terms the are more favourable for our country.”

Safa’ Al Jayoussi, executive director of Jordanian NGO IndyACT, said the Syrian delegation announced they would join during a meeting of the working group on the Paris deal. She said the organisation understood that the Syrian government intended to both sign and ratify the deal in the coming months.

It was important, she said, that all 22 countries from the Arab region would now be part of the deal.

Paula Caballero, the global director of the World Resources Institute: “With Syria on board, now the entire world – save one country – is resolutely committed to advancing climate action. This should make the Trump administration reflect on their ill-advised announcement about withdrawing from the Paris Agreement.”

Climate Home News’ reporting at Cop23 is supported in part by the European Climate Foundation.

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The declaration, which Climate Home News has seen, is in the form of a “non-paper” – a diplomatic demarche – also calls for a tougher emissions performance standard, which would prevent public investment in coal across the EU.

Poland has pushed for a double whammy of revisions to rules governing the emissions trading system’s clean energy fund that would allow it to use it to aid its coal sector.

The governmental ‘non-paper’- also signed by Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Luxembourg – says categorically that fund “should not be used to support any solid fossil fuels-based energy generation”.

The story emerged as annual UN climate talks began in Bonn, Germany on Monday. Poland will the host next year’s crux COP24 climate summit, on which the strength of the Paris Agreement will rest.

Concerns about conflicts between the Polish coal industry and the UN agenda to rapidly cut carbon emissions are widespread at the talks. On the stand advertising the big 2018 talks in Katowice, Poland, advertising material for the coal industry was clearly displayed.

#COP24 in Poland. All about #coal, apparently pic.twitter.com/29TiVEseg9

— Ed King (@edking_I) November 6, 2017

The anti-coal declaration from Poland’s wealthier EU neighbours calls for increases in the ETS fund to be clearly linked with speedier moves to decarbonise.

The governments say resistance by some EU countries to a parliamentary proposal for a 450gCO2/kWh emissions performance standard (EPS) is “problematic”, and concerning.

The EPS benchmark is significantly tougher than the European commission’s proposed 550gCO2/kWh bar, and would effectively embargo public subsidies for the dirty fuel.

News of the leak was hailed by campaigners ahead of an important vote of EU institutions on the issue, due to take place on November 8.

Femke de Jong, a spokeswoman for carbon Market Watch said it would be “outrageous” to use clean energy funds to bail out Poland’s coal plants.

“It would go against the spirit of the Paris Agreement and put lives at risk by further fuelling the air pollution crisis,” she said. “It is critical that policymakers ensure that the EU ETS does not become the union’s largest subsidy scheme for coal.”

‘Don’t wake the bear’: fragile climate talks begin in Bonn

Environmentalists want ETS auction revenues to be used for boosting clean energy, and driving a coal phase out that also supports impacted communities. 

For its part, Poland argues that it supports the EU’s climate objectives but not at the expense of its industry’s competitiveness, or energy supply needs.

Poland wants two things: a doubling of money allocated through the ETS clean energy fund from 310m to 620m carbon allowances; and an increase in the share of free allowances that poorer countries can spend on their power sectors from 620m to 870m allowances

Taking the average €20 a tonne carbon price [behind firewall] projected by financial analysts for the next decade, this would translate into between €18 and €29bn of largesse. Measures such as upgrading highly inefficient coal plants or expanding coal-fired district heating systems could all benefit.

In the past, Poland’s use of concessions in the ETS has drawn accusations by MEPs of “dirty tricks” and “cheating the system”.   

But the deputy secretary general of the environment for Estonia Meelis Munt told Climate Home News he saw no conflict between the Polish proposal and the ‘bottom up’ approach to climate pledges agreed in Paris. In its current role as president of the EU Council, Estonia has been sympathetic to Poland.

He said: “The ultimate goal is to deliver emissions reductions [but] of course there are specific circumstances – when we talk about the EU and the specific needs and conditions in different member states – which have to be taken into account.”

“One size fits all doesn’t work for a larger grouping and we have to accommodate larger needs and concerns beyond climate policy – social and economic policy as well, for example. But the ultimate goal is to deliver the objectives of Paris.”

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Martin Selmayr, a German lawyer and one of commission president Juncker’s closest advisors, sent out the order last Thursday following a meeting with Matthias Wissman, the head of the powerful German auto-manufacturers lobby, the VDA, two EU sources confirmed.

On top of reducing the electric vehicles mandate – due to be proposed on November 8 – to a voluntary scheme, Selmayr, the powerful official dubbed ‘Rasputin’ and ‘monster’ by UK Brexiteers, also demanded that a 2025 target for vehicle emissions reductions be scrapped.

Selmayr denied he had made the intervention. “This is not true. Obviously invented,” he told Climate Home News.

Commission spokeswoman Mina Andreeva would neither confirm nor deny that Selmayr had sent out an instruction to commissioners. But she said that Selmayr had referred Wissman on to the climate commissioner, Miguel Arias Cañete, after receiving a phone call from him last Thursday. The lobbyist and Cañete then spoke the following day, Andreeva said.

The energy commissioner’s press team said: “During the call, Mr Wissman outlined VDA’s position on the upcoming proposal on CO2 standards for cars and vans. The commissioner explained the rationale behind the preparation of the draft proposal and did not comment on the content of any of the proposals that will be part of the package.”

The day before he spoke to Selmayr, Wissman and Gunther Oettinger, the German vice president of the commission, made a joint plea for there to be no electric car quotas in the EU proposal.

The German chancellor Angela Merkel is currently locked in coalition talks with the Greens, who favour strong CO2 regulation for automobiles and the pro-business Free Democrats, who do not.

The resulting stasis has led the auto industry to use its Brussels contacts to tip the balance of power, according to Greg Archer, T&E’s clean vehicles director.

“Having failed to gain support from the German Government the VDA has run to their German friends in the commission to emasculate the commission’s proposal for future car CO2 regulations,” he said. “This is blindingly shortsighted and unnecessary.”

While no announcement on a final decision is expected before November 8, during the Cop23 climate summit, sources say that the issue is being debated by key commissioners today.

One EU official told Climate Home News that despite Selmayr’s intervention, the inclusion of sanctions with the CO2 in cars proposal was strongly backed by several commissioners. “It is not finished,” he said. “We are still discussing it internally.”

In its present form, the draft blueprint would reportedly use carbon offsetting to reward or punish carmakers’ efforts to meet a 15-20% target for zero-emitting vehicles by 2030, with a possible additional target of 10% for plug in electric hybrids.

Report: EU ‘increasingly likely’ to implement electric car quota, despite denials

An overarching 25-30% emissions reductions goal for cars in 2030 – and 30-40% for vans – has also been pencilled in to deliver a big chunk of the bloc’s 40% emissions cut, pledged under the Paris agreement.

“We’re trying to give a signal that the decarbonisation of transport needs zero-emitting vehicles (ZEVs) and we don’t want them all to be Chinese, American or Asian,” an EU source said. “Europe’s industry can manufacture them too.”

“That’s why we need a signal from a benchmarking system beyond CO2 targets that tells industry how many batteries we need, and local authorities how much infrastructure for charging we need,” said the source.

The draft measure was opposed by the influential European Automobile Manufacturers Association (Acea), which pushed for lower goals and less ambitious conditions on any ZEV mandate.

But the industry bigwigs may have been lobbying for a more regressive position than their own members advocate. A VW lobby presentation seen by Climate Home News shows that the firm could accept a ZEV mandate of 22% in 2025, rising to 34.5% in 2030 under certain conditions.

Archer said: “As the VW leak shows carmakers can accept a ZEV mandate and targets more ambitious than the commission is proposing. But some European carmakers are fixated on preserving the market for dirty diesel in Europe for as long as possible, despite collapsing sales, in a desperate attempt to recoup their past unwise investments.”

If the commission’s proposal is lost as a result of the last minute manouevring, attention will switch to the European parliament, where MEPs could reinject some of its original ambition. 

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Concorde, the world’s last commercial supersonic aircraft, generated three times more noise, NOx and CO2 than today’s subsonic planes and contributed five times more to global warming, due to the high altitudes at which it released its emissions.

No carbon dioxide regulations, either international or European, have so far been put in place for the next generation of supersonic aircraft, which the International Civil Aviation Organisation (Icao) expects to begin certifying by as early as 2020.

There are already hundreds of these jets planned. Aerion, a US startup which has already received over $100m in investment to design an A-S2 supersonic business trijet with Airbus, told Climate Home it expected its first planes to come to market in 2025. 

Shipping executive: ‘We have deliberately misled public on climate’

“We anticipate beginning construction in 2020 or 2021,” said Jeff Miller, Aerion’s vice president for communications. “Our production target is 36 aircraft a year and we see a market for about 600 supersonic business jets.” Flexjet has already placed a $2.4bn order for 20 of the planes.

The firm’s jets would be small, heavy and capable of shaving off up to half the long haul flight time for what one analyst called “the 1% of the 1%” of business travellers who can afford it.

The A-S2’s modern turbofan engine will minimise aerodynamic ‘drag’ and make it at least 20% more fuel efficient than its cone-shaped predecessor, according to the firm’s calculations. This would still be significantly more polluting than today’s subsonic aircraft.

“We will meet all the latest standards for CO2 and NOx and any other kind of emissions,” Miller said, adding the engine designs were based on cutting edge “efficient” technology.

Supersonic jets are too heavy to fall within current standards and Daniel Rutherford, the aviation director of the International Council on Clean Transportation, which uncovered the VW diesel scandal, was sceptical about the jets’ ability to meet the existing limits for lighter craft.

“My understanding is that the newest supersonic designs being developed would fail Icao’s subsonic CO2 standard by a wide margin,” he told Climate Home News. “It takes a lot of energy to accelerate and then operate an aircraft at supersonic speeds. On an real-world basis, I’d expect even improved supersonic aircraft to be twice – or even more – carbon intensive than a modern subsonic aircraft. Speed kills.”

The AS-2 will shave off up to half the long haul flight time for what one analyst called “the 1% of the 1%” of business travellers who can afford it (Image: Aerion)

The current lack of standards for supersonic jets is creating “a chicken and egg situation”, according to Tim Johnson, the director of the Aviation Environment Federation (AEF).

“On the one hand, industry argues that you need new data to develop standards because you only have old data from Concorde,” he said. “So you have to develop prototypes. But our fear is that once this has been done, the standards are usually set around the technology, because of the money that has already been invested in it. We are obviously very alarmed about that. We’d like the standards to drive the market and not the other way around.”

To the contrary though, the European Council of EU ministers is pushing for the approaching supersonic fleet to prioritise any standards that emerge from Icao over EU environmental law.

An EU working document dated January 2017 says that where noise and polluting emissions are concerned, all airplanes, engines and parts in the supersonic class “shall comply with the [Icao] environmental protection requirements”.

All the COP23 news: Not just Donald Trump! Climate Home will be taking its largest ever team to November’s UN climate talks in Bonn. Sign up for our daily newsletter from the meeting

No other Icao states or actors have waived their right to set stronger environmental regulations in advance of potential measures at the global aviation forum, according to green think tank T&E and the AEF.

Bill Hemmings, the aviation and shipping director of T&E, said: “Europe’s countries promised that the next generation of supersonic jets would only be allowed to operate in Europe with public acceptance.

“But EU officials could be completely undermining this commitment when taking decisions behind closed doors at Icao and at the EU Council if the proposed powers of Europe’s aircraft certification body… are curtailed,” said Hemmings.

Aerion technicians say operators of its business jets would have to offset their emissions under Icao’s Corsia carbon offsetting scheme if they emitted more than 10,000 metric tones of CO2 a year in international airspace. Miller said Aerion viewed Icao, not regional or national governments, as the appropriate venue for global aviation regulations. 

The firm is far from alone in developing supersonic jets that could fly under the regulatory radar. Spike aerospace, funded by Wall St investors, is planning high speed flight tests next year ahead of a roll out of its S-512 business jets by 2023.

Boom also expects flight tests next year for its 55-seat XB-1 supersonic plane which should be brought into service in 2023, with support from investors in Silicon Valley, London and New York. Virgin’s Richard Branson has promised to buy its first ten supersonic jets and five unnamed airlines have reportedly ordered 76 of the jets.

Concorde, which made its last flight 14 years ago, regularly provoked sharp intakes of breath with sonic booms that broke the sound barrier. Aerion’s A-S2 will only reach speeds above Mach 1 (around 1000mph) over water, and fly at an altitude of 51,000 ft – compared to Concorde’s 60,000 ft. A NASA supersonic X-plane which allegedly makes a ‘soft thump’ rather than a ‘sonic boom’ is due to go into construction at Lockheed Martin next year.

Rolls-Royce also reportedly sees future demand for supersonic jets among what Flight International magazine called “a growing international population of billionaires”.

Funding for such ventures is usually a closely guarded secret, although Boom said it had taken in $41m earlier this year. That is still a drop in the ocean compared to the $4bn Aerion says it will need for development and certification in 2025.

Funded by the oil billionairre Robert Bass, Aerion is collaborating on the A-S2 project with Airbus Defence and Space, which Miller says has made “a substantial contribution” to the engineering of its fusillage, wing structure and fly by wire systems.

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Spanning seven countries and costing $40bn, the southern gas corridor (SGC) is due to begin piping 10 billion cubic metres (bcm) of gas to Europe per year in 2019, according to the European Commission.

The EU aims to eventually receive up to 100bcm of natural gas annually through a pipeline that will snake through Turkey, Greece and Albania before transiting across the Adriatic sea to Italy.

The European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is due to make a loan statement on Wednesday for a $500m investment. The European Investment Bank (EIB) is also mulling a $2bn loan, the largest in the bank’s history. An EIB vote on their loan, also expected on Wednesday, has been postponed.

The banks describe the project as critical for energy security in Europe. Critics say the industry-drafted gas demand forecasts the EU relied on when proposing the corridor have been discredited, its climate impact has not been investigated, and its construction will benefit organised crime and human rights violators.

Report: Turkish gas companies with corrupt past get World Bank loan

Deepening the gloom, Simon Pirani, a senior research fellow and author at Oxford University’s Institute for Energy Studies, told Climate Home News the EU’s dream of a supply expansion beyond 10bcm per year was highly unlikely, with plans still unfinished and private investment yet to materialise.

“I have doubts about any significant quantities of additional gas going along that route, because it’s not clear which gas fields in the Caspian they could come from,” he said.

“There is a field being developed by [Azerbaijan state oil company] SOCAR with Total but that will not produce significant quantities of gas and those companies have already agreed that the gas produced there will go to the domestic Azerbaijan market. There won’t be any left for export. So the amount that Azerbaijan can contribute to [Europe’s gas market] is really quite minor.”

EU hopes for diversified supplies would likely be dashed, he argued, with neighbouring Turkmenistan far more interested on exporting eastwards to China, and little gas availability in Iran’s northwest, from where it could be pumped to Europe.

The 10bcm of gas a year that Azerbaijan has committed to supply would constitute just 2.5% of the 400bcm Europe consumed in 2015, and make little dent in its dependence on Russian supplies, Pirani said.

The pipeline’s cost is equal to the EU’s entire investment in low carbon transformation over the 2014-2020 period.

““I have doubts about any significant quantities of additional gas going along that route,” said Simon Pirani (Photo: Tanap)

The European Commission did not respond to requests for comment. As part of the G7, the EU has committed to ending “inefficient” public subsidies to fossil fuel projects by 2025.

But in Brussels, the project is seen as a vital diversification of energy supplies, freeing the continent from a potential Russian stranglehold.

The bloc’s vice president, Maros Sefcovic has hailed the SGC as an historic “turning point” shifting Europe into mixed and diverse energy markets.

The EU’s decision to include the southern gas corridor on a list of “essential” projects of common interest was taken on the basis of a gas demand forecast by the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Gas (Entsog).

Entsog is a coalition of gas companies and their subsidiaries, which is not listed as a lobby despite sharing a building with the trade association, Gas Infrastructure Europe. Its analyses are not in line with the EU’s climate plans, and it has consistently overestimated gas demand for a decade, according to Friends of the Earth Europe (FoE).

Europe’s actual gas demand in 2015 was 27% lower than projections in 2008, when the pipeline was proposed, and the commission, the International Energy Agency and Entso-E (Entsog’s regulated electricity twin) have all revised their forecasts downwards.

Report: Human rights report quashed in push for Azerbaijan-EU gas pipeline

Think tank E3G expects EU gas demand to flatline – or at best recover slightly – in the short term, and decline thereafter, as the clean economy transformation takes hold. An E3G modelling study found that the SGC was not needed to safeguard against supply disruptions, under any scenario.

That leaves an infrastructural white elephant that could “quickly become a climate bomb”, according to Antoine Simon, a spokesman for FoE. “We know the longer these mega-pipelines are, the higher the risks are for leaks to happen, and it does not get better as these infrastructure age,” he said.

Natural gas may have a global warming potential many times higher than renewables but, as SGC funders, Europe’s development banks have taken their lead from the commission, even though it has carried out no climate impact assessment.

On paper, the EIB and EBRD have committed to considering the climate impacts of their investments. In practice though, the banks are enablers, said the NGO Bankwatch. 

“The project is too big and risky to be financed only from private sources,” said Bankwatch spokeswoman Anna Roggenbuck. “International financial institutions provide loans which also cover political and economic risks.”

Climate Home News approached both banks for interview. The EIB asked for questions in advance, and then turned down the request. The EBRD demanded editorial privileges before publication, which we considered unacceptable.

The institutions’ guarded response follows the announcement of a Bulgarian government inquiry into Kalin Mitrev, the country’s representative on the EBRD board, after the Guardian revealed he received almost $500,000 via the $2.9bn Azerbaijani laundromat scheme. Mitrev says the payments were for legitimate consultancy.

The ERBD loan would be made to the Southern Gas Corridor Closed Joint Stock Company, which is owned by the Azeri government and its state oil company.

The slush fund was also used to pay medical bills worth tens of thousands of dollars to Yaqub Eyyubov, Azerbaijan’s deputy prime minister tasked with developing its oil and gas strategy. Eyyubov’s son also received millions of dollars from the laundromat via a Hungarian bank account, the Guardian reported.

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It is not known what due diligence measures Europe’s banks have taken to investigate Azeri laundromat payments – or to vet, monitor and audit SGC funding disbursements. These have already been beset by charges of corruption, cartelism and mafia infiltration, many substantiated in courts of law.

According to Human Rights Watch, Azerbaijan is a highly repressive regime, where dissidents are routinely arrested, torture is rife, independent media are shut down and human rights monitors cannot operate freely.

Two years ago, the European Parliament called for the EU to suspend all funds to Azerbaijan over its human rights violations, which appear to also breach EIB standards. In March, the central Asian country withdrew from the extractive industries’ global watchdog in response to criticism of its poor record on civil society engagement.

“Given its shaky business case, unresolved human rights issues and legitimate climate concerns, I’m surprised the EBRD wants anything to do with the southern gas corridor,” said Jonathan Gaventa, the director of E3G.

“The southern gas corridor is more than energy diversification and EU energy security for us,” said EU foreign policy high representative Federica Mogherini (Photo: Tanap)

Even the argument that it can diversify the EU’s gas supply away from Russia appears shaky. Russian giant Gazprom has said that it may use the pipeline to transport Russian gas to Europe, under the project’s non-discriminatory auctioning system, and according to reports in the Azeri press may already be planning on this.

Russia’s Lukoil has taken a 10% share in Azerbaijan’s Shah Deniz drilling consortium and the Italian oil firm Eni signed a memo of understanding with Gazprom in March to explore piping Russian gas to Europe through the corridor.

But for the EU, Azerbaijan is more than just a Caspian gas field. The former Soviet republic remains economically and culturally linked to Russia and the southern gas corridor offers the prospect of wedging what then-president Dmitry Medvedev called in 2011, “the closest friendship and trust links” between the two countries.

“The southern gas corridor is more than energy diversification and EU energy security for us,” the EU’s foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, said last year. “It is also about enlarging and deepening political, economic and social ties with a number of partners in a wider region… Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Albania.”

“We need an all-round strategic partnership between us,” Mogherini added, “and I am glad this is Azerbaijan’s vision, too.”

Asked whether the southern gas corridor was in America’s national security interests, a US state department official told Climate Home: “The US sees it as certainly in its interest that the national security interests of partners – and their stability, whether economic or political – be assured.”

“And if there is energy insecurity, we think that undermines security more broadly speaking,” the official added.

What is the Southern Gas Corridor?

BP calls it “arguably the global oil and gas industry’s most significant and ambitious undertaking yet”. It is a three part pipeline that, if completed, will carry gas from the Shah Deniz 2 oil field in Azerbaijan’s Caspian Sea through Georgia, Turkey, Greece, Albania into southern Italy.

Sections:

• South Caucasus Pipeline (SCP) – Azerbaijan, Georgia
• Trans Anatolian Pipeline (Tanap) – Turkey
• Trans Adriatic Pipeline (Tap) – Greece, Albania, Italy

Source: TAP

Ownership: At least 11 different companies are involved in the corporate ownership structures of the various sections. Major players include BP, Azerbaijan’s state oil company SOCAR, Turkish Petroleum, Petronas, Lukoil, Total and Snam.

Public finances: The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, European Investment Bank and Asian Development Bank and are all considering publicly-backed loans for the development in excess of $500m each. The World Bank and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank have already committed $500m and $600m.

The post EU bank to decide huge public loan to Europe’s biggest fossil fuel project appeared first on Climate Home News.

Diplomats from poor nations told Climate Home that it would amount to indefensible “backsliding” and could “open a Pandora’s box”, while Laurence Tubiana, France’s climate change ambassador at COP21, said US backtracking would violate the spirit of the Paris deal.

EU commissioner for climate action and energy Miguel Arias Cañete has previously said that the Trump presidency might “chart its own path” within the treaty.

Last week, while briefing reporters on a meeting with a senior US official at a summit in Montreal, Cañete said: “They are willing to re-engage under the Paris Agreement but they want to check some of the terms under which they agreed to participate previously. We assume that means that the US will revisit at some time the targets put forward by the previous administration.”

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Climate Home understands that the White House has received signals from EU officials – with whom they are in regular contact – that Brussels would accept the US diminishing its pledge, as a mechanism to keep it within the treaty.

But leaders from the poor world said that in his efforts to accommodate the US, Cañete might concede a key principle of the Paris accord – that countries must increase, rather than decrease, ambition.

Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, a high profile climate negotiator from the DR Congo government, said that “if the US is now once again given special circumstances, this would create a bad precedent, where everyone would feel they can be allowed to decrease their ambition.

“I don’t think it’s defensible. People have been saying the US will not be allowed to rewrite the agreement. You can’t say that and do the contrary. If we did, we would open a Pandora’s box, because who would decide to follow suit?”

The Paris accord is a voluntary treaty that allows signatories to set their own pace of decarbonisation, so long as it is consistent with limiting global warming to 2C.

Several clauses make it clear that pledges should be progressively more ambitious, but in negotiations the US won sufficiently ambiguous language to occlude any legal challenge over the issue (Cañete originally argued against this).

Even so, Gebru Jember Endalew, chair of the Least Developed Countries climate negotiating bloc, warned that what might be legally possible would be politically contentious.

“Any backward adjustment of NDCs (nationally determined contributions) would hugely damage and undermine global solidarity,” he said.

NDC revisions were only permitted “with a view to enhancing a country’s level of ambition,” said Endalew. “This is an important part of the Paris Agreement’s mechanism to spiral up climate action.”

Report: Climate advocates in Bonn stumped by Trump dilemma

Tubiana, who is now CEO of the European Climate Foundation, told Climate Home: “While the numbers are not binding, the spirit of the agreement is that if you want to change them, you increase them. You don’t downscale them.”

EU officials insist they are stepping up diplomatic efforts to defend Paris, and note the bloc is the largest contributor to global climate financing, as well as having an ambitious pledge of their own.

“It is for the US to express their final plans,” said Anna-Kaisa Itkonen, a spokeswoman for Cañete. “The EU and its member states remain committed to swiftly and fully implement the Paris Agreement and to continue to lead in the fight against climate change.”

Nozipho Mxakato-Diseko, South Africa’s ambassador to the UN, said the framing of NDCs as voluntary had been a “major concession” by the developing world to draw the US back into climate talks.

“Developing countries know that the EU will never stand up to the US,” she said. “[It] has always been the case.”

“The G77 [negotiating group of developing countries] will continue to fight for the integrity of agreements reached and their implementation,” added Mxakato-Diseko, before taking aim at the European commissioner, who commonly tweets pictures of himself with other climate leaders. “They never took Cañete seriously in any case. He is all drama and no action. That is why we used to say: Climate change is dead serious and not a selfie moment or twitter line.”

Note: The headline of this article was changed. It originally said Cañete had conceded to Trump that he could change the US’ NDC.

The post Anger at EU climate chief’s suggestion US can backtrack on Paris appeared first on Climate Home News.

A changing of the climate guard from Washington to China, Europe and Canada will occur on Saturday, when ministers and representatives of up to 30 major economies convene in Montreal for the first climate talks since the US withdrew from the Paris agreement.

Shadowed by two record-breaking US hurricanes in one week, the meeting will be co-convened by Brussels, Beijing and Ottawa – in what EU sources describe as a “pretty remarkable achievement”, given past differences between China, the developing nations and the West.

“This meeting brings together major economies and key climate actors to advance the implementation of the Paris Agreement and demonstrate continued commitment to global action on climate change,” said Canada’s environment minister Catherine McKenna in a statement to AFP.

The EU and China came close to issuing a powerful joint statement on climate change leadership in June, only for the talks to founder over the EU’s unwillingness to recognise China as a market economy.

An EU source told Climate Home the communique was not dead: “The moment for it has passed – until the next moment arises. That will probably be in the next time we are in summit formation.”

The new coalition will need to find ways to work around their differences if they are to present a united voice on climate change. The Europeans and Chinese remain at loggerheads on issues such as transparency rules for carbon accounting.

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The US has spearheaded action for a decade, particularly through the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate.

The Mef, as it is known in climate circles, was a group of 17 large nations formed by former US president George W Bush. It was used by Barack Obama to corral economies that account for 80% of the worlds emissions into cooperation on climate change.

But no new Mef meetings have been scheduled. (On Tuesday, the Mef website appeared to have been the victim of a cyber attack, a state department spokesperson said they were looking into the issue.)

In light of this, the meeting of ministers in Montreal, under a new triumvirate leadership group representing North America, Europe and Asia represents the dawning of a new era in climate negotiations.

According to delegates in the room, Talley emphasised current progress in lowering US greenhouse gas emissions, which are currently falling by a few percentage points each year, and said the US intended to take part in writing the rulebook for the Paris Agreement while it remained a party to the deal.

How receptive other nations are to the US’ input remains to be seen. But there is an effort to keep the US in the diplomatic loop. In the run up to the Bonn COP23 climate summit, EU and US officials are now said to be in “almost continuous touch”.

The post China, EU and Canada to take lead on climate at Montreal meeting appeared first on Climate Home News.

The level of access to top officials has raised concerns about the influence of the car lobby in Berlin, just as the 24 September federal election is forcing party leaders to confront diesel pollution.

At a meeting with city leaders in the capital on Monday, chancellor Angela Merkel pledged to double a €500m government-industry fund to help local councils rein back soaring emissions that have sparked European court action and over 50 city lawsuits.

Critics see the proposed car software upgrades and urban transport improvements as a palliative to block calls for comprehensive – and expensive – hardware retrofits. This view may be strengthened by news of the auto industry’s extensive access.

Public unease with Germany’s auto industry has grown, as the revelations that VW stacked its software to cheat emissions tests were followed by allegations that it colluded with Daimler and BMW in cartel-like behaviour.

But Germany’s auto industry directly employs around 775,000 workers, and turns over more than €400bn per year, accounting for roughly a fifth of Germany’s exports in the process. This economic gravity means carmakers maintain a mighty pull on politicians across the country.

Exclusive: EU ‘increasingly likely’ to implement electric car quota

Evincing this, several top advisors and government officials have either come from or gone to work for carmakers.

Merkel’s re-election campaign is being spearheaded by Joachim Koschnicke, a former chief lobbyist for the car maker Opel, while Michael Jansen and Thomas Steg – who served as Merkel’s federal office director, and deputy government speaker – now work as senior VW lobbyists.

Eckart von Klaeden, a state minister for Merkel until 2013 became Daimler’s chief lobbyist, while Matthias Wissmann, a transport minister under the former chancellor Gerhard Schroder, is currently president of the German automobile industry association.

Even Sigmar Gabriel, a respected SPD economic minister, sat on the VW supervisory board for four years while he was premier of the state of Lower Saxony, which holds a 20% stake in VW.

His successor, Stephan Weil, sparked controversy last month, when the German newspaper Bild revealed that he showed a draft parliamentary speech about dieselgate to VW management before delivering it.

Since the VW scandal broke in 2015, government officials have held 387 meetings with auto lobbyists about dieselgate and pollution, compared to 113 meetings with trade unions and just 59 with environmental and consumer groups. The data, seen by Climate Home, was released in response to a parliamentary question.

The German government and car industry both declined to comment on the release.

The content of these meetings is unknown and contact between government would be expected to maintain contact with an important industry. But dieselgate and the continuing non-compliance of the car industry lend credence to NGO claims that access equals inaction. Only around 10% of German cars meeting current ‘Euro 6’ NOx emission limits, according to a new study.

Daniel Freund, a spokesman for Transparency International told Climate Home said that state oversight had “collapsed” under the weight of industry pressure. 

“I think we are no longer exaggerating if we say that the German government and regulatory agencies supposed to control and oversee the car industry have been captured,” he said.

Timo Lang, a spokesman for the NGO Lobbycontrol said the data evinced a “striking imbalance that clearly illustrates the close ties between Germany’s government and the automotive industry.”

He added: “Those close ties were a part of the problem leading up to the dieselgate scandal.”

Analysis: Fiat, Renault, VW scams will hasten rise of electric car

Official figures for 2017 show that Merkel’s CDU party received €100,000 from Daimler, €100,002 from Susanne Klatten and Stefan Quandt, the owners of BMW, and €110,000 from the metal and electrical industry association in northern Westphalia, which partly represents the car industry.

The hard right FDP also banked €195,502 from auto lobby groups, and Martin Schulz’s SPD took €100,000 from Daimler.

However these figures may underestimate the car manufacturers’ largesse as they only cover direct donations – rather than sponsorships, which the auto industry increasingly prefers. In Brussels, VW alone spent €3.3m in lobby activities in 2014, according to Lobbyfacts.

Freund said such quids carried an expectation of pro quo’s – perhaps in the form of an open door policy for meetings with officials. “If they didn’t expect that, it would almost be a market failure,” he said.

“The companies are constantly optimising shareholder value and ensuring that they make money for their investors. If they went around giving money to parties for nothing in return, I think someone might question that.”

On Sunday night, dieselgate was again at the centre of the election campaign, with the SPD leader Martin Schulz calling for industry CEO’s to pay the price of the test-rigging scandal in a TV debate with Merkel.

Schulz has tried to make hay with the issue on the campaign trail, assailing Merkel for blocking collective lawsuits against VW and calling for an an EU-wide quota on electric cars.

However, after Merkel responded in mid-August by agreeing that diesel’s days were numbered, Schulz toned down his rhetoric, saying that diesel would be around for “much longer” than people expected.

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The German SPD MEP and former environment committee chair Jo Leinen told Climate Home that Schulz’s “backtracking” had made him look “weak”.

“I think the trade unions got in contact with him to say: ‘hello, not so fast. We will have that transformation but it will take a long time,’” said Leinen. “Diesel is a bit of an ambiguous issue for the SPD. The Green party will always be more radical so we cannot win with the electorate on that front.”

The European commission is currently assessing whether a deal between the German government and carmakers to provide software updates for 5.3 million German motorists addresses the air quality and legal ramifications of dieselgate.

The agreement would reduce NOx emissions by up to 30%, but environmentalists in Germany are holding out for a more comprehensive – and expensive – hardware retrofit option.

Dorothee Saar, a spokeswoman for environmental NGO Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH), which is pursuing 16 legal cases against the German government for breaching air quality limits, said judicial rulings supporting diesel bans in Stuttgart, Munich and Dusseldorf were forcing the government’s hand.

She told Climate Home: “Merkel’s announcement that she’d join a second diesel summit in October and her invitation to city leaders and federal ministers to come to Berlin on Monday shows that she sees an urgent need for action – and that the court decisions are not going in her favour.”

The post Lobbying data reveals carmakers’ influence in Berlin appeared first on Climate Home News.

With France, the Netherlands and Britain planning diesel bans by 2040, commission officials are said to view a new mandate as a natural step. The issue is fraught though, particularly in Germany where the car industry remains a powerful political force and elections are looming.

One source with knowledge of internal EU discussions told Climate Home that cabinet members in the bloc’s climate, industry, energy union and transport directorates had reached a consensus on the need for tough enforceable targets.

“They have made it very clear that it is their intention to go to a zero-emissions mandate and the car industry has been told to stop complaining about it, and start being constructive,” the source said.

A California-style mandate, obliging car-makers to meet a minimum fleet quota for electric vehicles is one option on the table.

“It is looking increasingly likely that they will come forward with a proposal of that sort for 2025 and 2030, probably including plug-in hybrids,” said the source.

There has been confusion about the EU’s intentions since last Monday, when commission spokeswoman Mina Andreeva told journalists that “no quotas for electric cars are being considered”. Nor could they be, she added, as the bloc was committed to technological neutrality.

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Contacted by Climate Home, Andreeva accepted that a binding target for ultra-low emitting vehicles was one of the options put forward for consideration by a commission paper last year. But this was different from a technology-specific quota, she argued.

“You have wording on targets for ultra-low emitting vehicles in the communication, so prima facie it’s out there,” she said. “But the distinction between targets and quotas is important as targets are much softer than quotas, which are legally enforceable.”

Despite this, Germany’s environment ministry reportedly expects a proposal that includes a quota on electric cars, as do commission cabinet members. EU diplomats in Brussels confirmed to Climate Home that they did too.

“It is under consideration,” one diplomat said, on condition of anonymity. “It is part of [the commission’s] brainstorming process.”

Targets for vehicle emissions in the EU have previously been legally enforceable, although that does not necessarily mean they will be under future legislation.

Commissioners are expected to discuss the proposal in a meeting next month, ahead of its release, which is due in November.

Report: German vice chancellor attacks China’s electric car targets

Next month, the European parliament will also vote on a proposal for a 25% minimum fleet quota for electric cars by 2025 and ban on diesel and petrol engines by 2035. MEPs have already backed tougher CO2 benchmarks for 2025 for 2030 and more cheat-proof testing.

If the new measures pass parliament, they will only be a signal of battles to come. The EU parliament can block, tweak or amend regulations in three-way negotiations with EU states, and with the commission. But the commission alone has the power to propose laws.

Moves to restrict pollution from the car industry within the EU commission and parliament have emerged as a hot button issue in next month’s German election. Earlier this week, chancellor Angela Merkel reversed a position that quotas were “not thought-through” under opposition fire, and backed an eventual diesel phase out, without committing to a date.

Merkel has previously warned about the dangers of “demolishing” the diesel industry. But there will have been relief in Germany’s car industry – a major historic contributor to her party – that she also pledged to maintain diesel’s current tax incentives.

The automobile sector is crucial to Germany’s economy and Merkel has not hesitated to use her clout in Brussels to protect its interests, as the industry sees them. 

During negotiations for the last CO2 auto standards in 2013, diplomats accused Merkel of going “rogue” behind the scenes, by threatening car plant closures unless an agreed EU plan was stalled.

Any similar manoeuvres after the Volkswagen ‘dieselgate’ scandal might further damage consumer confidence and the industry’s long term future, according to some green analysts.

Greg Archer, the director of clean vehicles at Transport & Environment, told Climate Home that without zero-emissions sales targets for 2025 and 2030, “European car companies will suffer the same catastrophic collapse Nokia experienced for failing to embrace new technologies”.

Car-makers in Europe say that emissions standards are a regulatory burden that place them at a competitive disadvantage. Critics argue the industry is highly profitable and will need to invest heavily in electric vehicles to remain in business.

Last month, European car manufacturers pleaded with China to weaken its ambitious roadmap for introducing electric vehicles, after an apparently unsuccessful bid by Merkel to slow green growth in the east Asian giant.

“The European car industry’s dream that they’d sell diesel to China and the US is dead [after dieselgate] and the European commission knows it,” said Archer. “They’re worried that they will finish up with an industry locked into old technologies that isn’t going to invest in the new solutions needed to maintain exports around the world.”

The post EU ‘increasingly likely’ to implement electric car quota, despite denials appeared first on Climate Home News.

Under a European Commission review of permits, power generators must clean up health-harming emissions by mid-2021 or face closure.

According to the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), 82% of coal capacity expected to be operating in four years is currently in breach of the standards. Compliance could cost up to €15.4 billion.

Coal bosses are threatening to sue the European Commission over the move, citing “procedural irregularities”.

Green lawfirm Client Earth showed equal determination to make sure the laws are implemented, saying it “will not hesitate” to sue any coal plants that fail to comply.

Report: EU countries have brought in $1bn of coal subsidies since Paris

The legal manoeuvres follow a European committee vote in April, which approved new clean air standards by the narrowest of margins. Germany and Finland joined coal-dependent eastern European states Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania in opposing the new rules, arguing that the proposed limits on nitrous oxide emissions were unreasonably stringent. But they were beaten in a “qualified majority” vote.

Euracoal, a coal trade association claimed that decision was “null and void” because of “procedural irregularities” in the vote, in a letter sent to the Commission on 31 May.

The missive, seen by Climate Home, is accompanied by detailed legal advice from the Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer law firm, and was released under freedom of information rules.

Brian Ricketts, Euracoal’s secretary-general confirmed to Climate Home the lobby group was consulting its members about a lawsuit, describing the EU vote as “a vindictive move against coal” intended to meet international climate goals, rather than reduce air pollution.

He said: “The European Commission has abused process. That’s for sure. They tabled an amendment which no member states had seen, took a vote early in the meeting, and then had a discussion afterwards. The whole thing was rigged to knock out coal and meet the Paris [climate agreement] targets. That is not what the legislation is for.”

Ricketts referred to an email newsletter from the Commission saying the clean energy package “will be crucial for the implementation of the Paris Agreement“.

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While the Commission declined to formally comment on Euracoal’s threat, officials insisted protocols were followed correctly.

“No member states challenged the vote, or said it was void afterwards,” one EU source said. “An appeal period expired without objections, so there is nothing more we can do now.”

The new “best available techniques reference document” (Bref) mandates caps on nitrous oxides (Nox), sulphur dioxides (SO2) and particulate matter (PM) that the EEB says could prevent 20,000 premature deaths per year, mostly from respiratory disease.

Client Earth’s energy lawyer Dominique Doyle said: “Is it really practical to shell out millions to update a plant that may shut down almost as soon as it’s refurbished?” she asked.

“ClientEarth will be watching carefully to see how Europe’s plants comply,” she added. “We will not hesitate to take action if they try to shirk their legal responsibility to protect our health.”

Report: Trump lawyers try ‘extraordinary trick’ to quash youth climate case

The new Brefs reflect a more lively and proactive approach by EU environment commissioner Karmenu Vella, who has pushed through ivory trade restrictions and a court action to protect Poland’s Bialowieza forest in the last few weeks.

But a legal arm wrestle over the emissions benchmark will test the resolve of EU states to police environmental pollution.

Twelve of the EU’s 27 countries already face European court action for breaching air quality limits, and nine have asked for permission to pollute above a cap that should have come into force in 2015.

“This is absolutely an issue,” Ricketts said. “If EU law becomes disregarded and disrespected then there is a problem that will lead to all sorts of uncertainty…

“My feeling is that countries will look for derogations – which are completely legal – but if you start to see them applied to the majority of plants, by definition they will no longer be derogations and the Commission would have to step in.”

All eyes will now be on the position that Germany takes after upcoming elections are out of the way. The country has pledged a 95% cut in emissions by 2050, but still depends on lignite for a quarter of its electricity.

Germany is expected to bring forward a coal phase-out plan in 2018.

Note: This article has been amended. It originally said Doyle had said the Paris Agreement was highly relevant to the future of the coal plants under the new rules.

The post Coal lobby threatens to sue over EU clean air rules appeared first on Climate Home News.

The action plan was intended to be agreed at next week’s Hamburg G20 summit. Climate Home has seen two versions, drafted in March and May of this year. The latter shows the degree to which the German presidency has bent to the will of the Trump White House.

Several elements that have been removed in the May draft are:

• A 2025 deadline for the end of fossil fuel subsidies
• References to the risk of “stranded assets”
• A call for “the alignment of public expenditure and infrastructure planning with the goals of the Paris Agreement”
• A push for carbon pricing
• A commitment to publish mid-century decarbonisation blueprints by next year
• A pledge to develop a “profound” climate plan for multilateral development banks
• Seven references to the UN’s 2018 review of nationally-determined contributions
• 11 references to the 2050 mid-century pathway for net zero emission
• 16 mentions of infrastructure decarbonisation

“The US massively weakened the language in the energy part of the action plan,” one source with knowledge of the negotiations said. “It pushed for references to so-called ‘clean’ fossil fuels and made it less explicit that the energy transition has to be built on energy efficiency and renewables.”

“It also provided cover to some other G20 members – such as the Saudis and Russia – to weaken some climate sections of the document, including the pledge to phase out fossil fuel subsidies.”

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Climate Home understands from several well-placed sources that the May text is the latest version of the plan. Diplomats will try to thrash out some form of compromise on the action plan before next Friday’s summit. But German government sources say that it is currently unclear whether it will even be published.

US officials may find the Germans are now less pliable. Since the document was drafted, the political landscape has shifted, with president Donald Trump announcing his intention to withdraw the US from the Paris deal early this month. 

Trump’s speech was sharply criticised by German chancellor Angela Merkel, whom Trump will face at her home G20 in Hamburg. Climate is expected to be a major source of tension between the two. On Thursday, Merkel said Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris accord had made her “more determined than ever” to make the G20 a success.

“The world’s citizens will look for a strong message from the G20,” said Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation and France’s climate envoy to the Paris climate talks. “The G2O countries and all governments beyond them, should stand firm in their backing of rapid implementation of Paris agreement. We must accelerate action as we are running late, and prepare the long term low carbon strategies that allow us to fulfil the Paris goals.” 

Report: G7 split as leaders issue climate statement without US

The latest version of the draft action plan refers to “clean technologies such as energy efficiency, renewable energy, natural gas and nuclear power, for those countries that opt to use it, and advanced and cleaner fossil fuel technologies”.

These latter could include gasified coal projects such as the cutting-edge but unprofitable $7.5bn Kemper plant in Mississippi, whose operations were suspended yesterday. They could also include carbon capture and storage initiatives, such as the ROAD project in the Netherlands, which Engie and Uniper also pulled out of yesterday.

If the drafts are agreed in this form, the admission from the international community that coal projects can be considered clean would be a major diplomatic victory for Trump, who has championed US miners, to parade back in the US.

The latter document is dated 5 May and includes a footnote making clear that the US was reviewing its climate policies and reserved its position. Sources say that the US failed in its attempt to introduce a ‘ratcheting down mechanism’ on climate funding into the text.

Patricia Espinosa, the executive secretary of the UNFCCC said that she still hoped for the survival of a statement in the action plan that would put climate at the centre of funding deliberations of development banks, such as the World Bank and Africa Development Bank.

“If they were to ensure that all funding decisions had to go through a ‘filter’ that referred to climate risks and the resilience we need to build into societies, that would be great and very helpful,” she told Climate Home.

Espinosa added that she had not spoken to Trump since his election, but hoped for an opportunity to do so soon. “I would certainly ask him to reconsider his decision on the Paris Agreement,” she said.

In other G20 negotiations, a wrangle over references to the Paris deal in the main leaders’ communique is proving no less contentious. Similar discussions at the recent G7 meeting in Italy ended in a split, with the US allowed to stand alone while other leaders expressed their support for the agreement. 

Germany’s environment secretary Jochen Flasbarth told Climate Home: “The implementation of the Paris Agreement remains a central issue of the German G20 Presidency. We want the leaders’ summit to send a clear signal on implementation.”

No meeting of the minds is expected though. “There are no negotiations anymore,” one German government source said. “Negotiations are done.”

“At this stage, we have kind of exhausted our persuasive potential,” added Maros Sefcovic, the EU’s energy commissioner, who had pleaded with the Trump team not to leave Paris. 

When Trump made his Rose Garden address on the Paris deal this month, he said he may be open to “renegotiating” the deal.

“We are 100% convinced that it is not time to renegotiate Paris, but to implement it,” said Sefcovic.

Despite the formal impasse, Climate Home has learned that contact continues between top European officials and White House staffers who fought for the US to remain within the Paris deal. 

Given the lack of detail in Trump’s speech, there is a sense that the president remains open to influence. One informed source described Trump’s speech as “a snapshot of where competing camps were able to land the president on that particular day”.

Full report: Donald Trump says US will leave Paris climate agreement

An EU source said: “The exchanges are happening frequently – a couple of times a month – at director level or above in the European commission, involving senior civil servants.”

Contacts have been plagued by a lack of clear lines of rank and accountability but sources confirmed Gary Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs executive now heading Trump’s National Economic Council and David Banks, a special assistant on international energy and environment, had been in regular contact with the EU.

Banks advised president George W. Bush on climate after the US left the Kyoto Protocol and is credited with keeping the country involved in climate diplomacy through the Major Economies Forum. Along with Cohn and the US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, he has argued for staying at the climate talks table, despite viewing the Paris pact as economically disadvantageous to the US.

Sefcovic confirmed that informal talks were continuing. He also said he had taken meetings with Cohn and Banks in the lead up to Trump’s speech on the Paris deal.

Diplomacy has been complicated by Trump’s decision to leave scores of senior state department positions unfilled, and by idiosyncratic decision-making and communication processes .

“Our biggest difficulty is understanding where the US government is at,” an EU source said. “It’s not so much predicting their next move as understanding the logic of where they’re moving and that’s hard.”

Even so, “there is absolutely a reason to keep talking to the US,” one senior Obama-era staffer told Climate Home. “It would make it easier for the US to re-enter [Paris] and that is in the rest of the world’s interests because without us, China exerts too much influence and you have the potential for a lot of backsliding.”

The post Germany ‘massively weakened’ draft G20 climate plan to appease Trump appeared first on Climate Home News.

Speaking a day after the US left the Paris agreement, Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, a former German SPD MP and chair of the Bundestag’s environment committee, described Trump’s move as a self-inflicted wound that put US industry on the losing side of history.

“He did this stupid act because he believes that coal is good, but it is the game-loser – as you can see from the stock market,” Weizsäcker said. “I suspect he is a loser president and Americans are going to learn it the hard way.”

The EU climate commissioner, Miguel Arias Canete, yesterday rejected the notion – first raised by the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy – of imposing sanctions against carbon-intensive US goods that undercut the Paris pact. Weizsäcker though was warm to the notion.

Report: Trump desire to renegotiate Paris deal ‘incoherent’ and ‘clumsy’

“It would, symbolically, be a lovely idea,” he said. “I don’t know if it is WTO-compatible, and it would be seen by the Trump administration and many Americans as a primitive revenge. It could actually make nationalist feeling in America stronger, not weaker. But I find it a lovely idea.”

The Club of Rome brings together former heads of state, government officials, diplomats, scientists and business leaders to mull issues of climate change and global economy.

The club has spawned its own Bilderberg-style conspiracy meme and is viewed as a “Gaia-worshipping” forum of the global elite by alt-right websites such as Breitbart. 

Weizsäcker is an easy target in that regard – a biology professor, best-selling environmental author and nephew of the former German president, Richard von Weizsäcker. But he is no pushover.

Trump’s withdrawal “is so absurd it creates a pre-revolutionary situation, including in America,” he says. “The Californian hi-tech industries will feel extremely frustrated by a president who honours dinosaurs and punishes innovators.

Full story: Donald Trump’s US leaves Paris climate agreement

“The friendship between Europe and Asia will be enhanced by Trump’s lonely decision too, because both will immediately realise that he is a fool, and then seek different alliances,” he added.

This is the sunny side of the street leading away from Paris. Weizsäcker airily relates the contents of an email he received from a senior UNFCCC official earlier in the week, expressing a wish that Trump leave the climate process as soon as possible to prevent his nominated delegates sabotaging negotiations any further.

But there is real fear of a global backsliding that could unravel the carefully crafted consensus on trying to limit planetary warming to 2C are difficult to dismiss, given the length of time it took for 196 nations to agree the Paris pact.

“There is a bit of a danger that some ‘fossil governments’ will now feel encouraged to leave the Paris agreement,” Weizsäcker concedes, “but technological trends are moving towards decarbonisation, making the selling of coal from Poland or oil from Saudi Arabia, much less profitable. The rewards such fossil governments expect will be minimal and the penalties will be big. So they will be left behind.” 

The post Club of Rome president: climate sanctions on US ‘a lovely idea’ appeared first on Climate Home News.

Under the climate accord, Europe promised to shave 40% off its emissions by 2030, mostly by revising existing climate laws on renewables, energy efficiency and its flagship Emissions Trading System (ETS).

But documents seen by Climate Home show that Visegrad countries are trying to gut, block or water down all of these efforts, in a rearguard manoeuvre that mirrors president Donald Trump’s rollback of climate policy in Washington.

Energy efficiency is supposed to make up around half of Europe’s emissions reductions by 2030, but a Czech proposal could cut energy saving obligations from a headline 1.5% a year figure to just 0.35% in practice.

Below the radar, Poland has also launched a manoeuvre that may block the EU’s winter package in its entirety – particularly a planned limit on power plant emissions – if it is signed up to by a third of EU parliaments, or 10-13 states.

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The EU’s various wings will eventually thrash out a compromise between the commission’s original proposal – which was calibrated to meet the Paris pledge – and the counter-proposals designed to weaken this.

The effect this could have on the EU’s overall emissions has raised concerns among those in Brussels who wish to see the EU maintain its leadership on climate.

“We cannot allow backward-looking east EU states to destroy the EU’s credibility on the Paris agreement,” said Claude Turmes, the European parliament’s lead negotiator on climate governance.

“A successful and ambitious energy transition is one of the few remaining positive stories for Europe. If we allow that to be drained by vested old interests from east Europe, our international credibility – and the last remaining trust of our citizens – will be smashed,” said Turmes.

On Thursday and Friday this week, the EU leadership will meet with Chinese prime minister Li Keqiang. Climate change is a top agenda item at the meeting. A Sino-European coalition on climate action has been mooted as a possible bulwark against the reversal in the US.

The measures proposed by the east EU rebels are highly technical but their potential to diminish carbon savings is clear.

Report: Poland says it ‘cannot afford’ share of EU 2030 climate target

Existing loopholes in the EU’s energy efficiency law already cut the real 1.5% annual energy saving law to around 0.75%. But the Czech proposal, seen by Climate Home and largely accepted by the Maltese EU presidency, would slice off an estimated 0.4% in real savings by trimming the target itself and introducing loopholes.

These include a cut to firms’ energy saving obligations, a stretching of the deadlines by which they must be met, and a double-counting of solar and wind investments towards both renewables and efficiency targets.

Buildings milestones planned for 2030 and 2040 have been edited out of a separate draft energy performance in buildings law after lobbying by Visegrad states.

An article ensuring at least one electric vehicle charging point for every 10 public parking spaces has also disappeared from the commission’s proposed text.

“It is clear that the east European countries are only thinking of cheap energy and nothing else,” one informed source said. “That applies to Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, all of them. The problem is that Germany is not taking a leadership role.”

Documents released by Greenpeace Energydesk on Sunday show the UK government has also been lobbying to weaken the energy efficiency target, despite its intention to leave the EU.

Poland’s far right government has been mired in sniping with the European commission since taking power in 2016. This year, it has already threatened to take the EU to court over its climate laws – and won concessions on its plans for subsidies to keep coal plants running when there is no demand.

Coal is seen as the “foundation” of Poland’s development by the ruling Law and Justice party, despite the thousands of Poles it sends to an early grave each year, and the unparalleled dangers it poses to the climate.

The EU’s preferred method of squeezing big emitters is carbon trading but here too, a Polish proposal taken up by the European parliament’s majority right wing blocks would drain the EU’s proposal of meaning.

A Polish memorandum, which Climate Home has obtained, proposes carrying over a glut of 907m worthless “hot air” carbon credits into the next market phase, depressing prices and reducing incentives to scale back CO2 emissions.

Femke de Jong, a spokeswoman for Carbon Market Watch said that the Polish proposal “would rig the EU’s key climate law with loopholes [and] put the EU’s delivery of the Paris climate goals at risk, at a time when Europe’s climate leadership is most urgently needed.”

But Poland views its gambit as a “reward” for early compliance with past climate obligations, which were largely met by closing down Soviet-era industries.

While Poland’s idea might allow the EU to meet its Paris obligations on paper, it would also open the door to surplus credits covering 550 million tonnes of carbon equivalent (Mtoe), according to a commission analysis obtained by Climate Home.

The same working paper says that a separate “early counting” proposal by Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia and Lithuania would increase the carbon allowance surplus by 690 Mtoe – triple the four countries’ combined 2014 emissions.

Poland also wants a huge increase in forestry offsets that would allow it to continue its coal-first energy model so long as it plants more trees.

De Jong said the ensuing carbon credits shower would allow the EU’s agriculture sector to continue business as usual until 2030, “which means that emissions cuts would need to be nine times steeper afterwards to achieve our climate objectives.”

The post EU climate laws undermined by Polish and Czech revolt, documents reveal appeared first on Climate Home News.

A parliamentary debate about the allegations was immediately scheduled, despite extensive denials by the Rotterdam School of Management (Erasmus University), one of Europe’s largest and best-ranked business schools.

At the heart of the row is a partnership contract (zip file) agreed with Shell in 2012 which allows the company “to potentially influence the design of the RSM curricula and the profile of students who attend the Bsc/Msc/MBA programmes”.

The contract, which Climate Home has seen, says that “ideally, Shell would be able and willing to feature in the Masters courses of the seven Msc programmes”.

The fossil fuels firm has a “substantial interest” in recruiting MSc students and would like to approach student groups with “targeted communications,” the contract says.

To that end, the firm can “identify speakers and guests who will contribute to the students’ understanding of Shell over a possible variety of courses.”

Shell RSM Partnership 1of3 by Karl Mathiesen on Scribd

Vatan Hüzeir, the report’s author and director of the Changerism think tank, blamed cuts to government education budgets and an increased reliance on business school rankings, for an undermining of academic independence.

“In various ways RSM supports business models that depend fundamentally on fossil fuels production and consumption,” he said. “That makes the faculty complicit in facilitating climate change. The far-reaching conflation between science and industry undermines the societal role of universities and their independence.”

A statement put out by the university, which has a triple accreditation and stellar alumni list, said the report was “tendentious, biased and contains factual inaccuracies”.

Marianne Schouten, a spokeswoman for the RSM, told Climate Home the school sees contacts with multinationals, including Shell, as a modus operandi and insists that it does not allow commercial interference with course content or individual student selection decisions.

Schouten said: “We ask advisory board members to think long and hard about curriculum but only on a meta level, not on a content level.”

The contractual permission to exert influence over curricula and student profiles was a “missing nuance,” she accepted. “It is a mistake by us to be honest. We should have phrased it differently.”

“[Neither] Shell nor any other company, directly influences our curriculum for any programmes, be it on the bachelors or the MBA level. But on other hand accreditation bodies require us to work with companies on this meta-level, because they need the students to be employable once they graduate.”

The report though, paints a picture of entanglement that goes far beyond accreditation protocols.

Shell, ExxonMobil, GasTerra and GDF Suez have all paid RSM for advice on how to improve public acceptance of gas drills, in the face of widespread public opposition.

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One RSM professor, Henk Volberda, led a Shell-funded research project in 2008 that advised the government to reduce the tax burden on multinationals, such as Shell. Neither RSM nor Shell disclosed that the project had received more than €300,000 from the fossil fuel giant.

Schouten said that the disclosure had not been made because the research was done for an international consortia. That consortia then requested the bill to be sent only to Shell. “We should have stated that in the report,” she said. “It’s not a secret. It just wasn’t put there.”

The Netherlands’ Association of Universities guidelines say donations should be listed, by “external financiers of scientific activities in particular”.

Volberda later became part of a Dutch government team that advised on improving the condition of corporate headquarters, where he used the research as the basis for more calls for tax cuts, the report says. These were eventually implemented, despite strong criticism by several statutory agencies.

Shell also paid for the launch of an academic journal in 1997 by another RSM professor, Cees Van Riel, which subsequently published an article by the company in its first edition. The funding was not publicised.

That same year, Van Riel co-founded a public relations firm called the Reputation Institute with Charles Fombrun, who went on to work on a rebranding project for Shell, which sold the firm as “the world’s most admired company”.

Schouten denied that Van Riel had any financial involvement with Shell, or that the Reputation Institute had represented them. However, Van Riel’s online profile admits that he has worked with the company and recent Reputation Institute literature cites Shell executives as clients.

The RSM has an unquestionably long relationship with Royal Dutch Shell. In 1966, the firm provided a donation of between €300,000 and €1m to spearhead funding of the university’s graduate school of management – which would become RSM almost 20 years later.

Shell and BP retain positions on the RSM’s advisory board today and participate in formulating its strategy, as well as coordinating RSM activities at annual dinners, the study says.

NOTE: A quote from Schouten was amended. The original rendering was “Shell more than any other company, directly influences our curriculum”. This was misheard.

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Meanwhile, in Britain’s nascent election campaign, Climate Home has learned Labour plans to unveil new rules for landlords to renovate properties to higher efficiency grades, before they can be rented out.

Rarely considered political catnip, energy efficiency was argued over by French candidates’ during TV debates.

As the tightly-fought four-way race heads towards a first round vote this weekend, building renovations have made climate policy relevant to alienated working class voters in France. 

One in three French households are energy poor and, with buildings continuing to account for more than 40% of carbon emissions, renovations have stealthily climbed the political agenda. An existing law that obliges renovations of all buildings in the ‘F’ and ‘G’ energy classes by 2025 has popularised such programmes.

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Left-wing firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon has promised 700,000 building renovations a year for the poorest householders, while his socialist opponent Benoit Hamon has flagged a stunning €100bn renovation plan.

Less striking but better-costed is a €4bn a year renovations programme proposed by the front-runner in opinion polls, Emmanuel Macron, who would also scrap a one-year stay on energy transition tax credits and introduce free efficiency audits.

Even the neo-fascist Marine Le Pen has a manifesto pledge (number 132) to make insulation a “budgetary priority” in public procurement policy. 

Adrian Joyce, the director of Renovate Europe, which is promoting the issue, hailed the new-found prominence that energy renovations were receiving in the election.

“It represents a political breakthrough in that a solid cross-party consensus around the need to accelerate energy renovation has emerged,” he told Climate Home.

In France, a broad alliance of businesses, trade unions, Catholic networks, environmentalists and housing associations were key to turning energy renovations into a consensus issue.

Danyel Dubreuil, a spokesperson for the Renovons (Lets Renovate!) campaign, which has lobbied the candidates on the issue, said: “One of the things that surprised the candidates’ teams was that we were so diverse, and that we produced a cost-benefit analysis.”

“It was a shock for them to see that this was such a big issue – with 7m flats or houses in really bad shape – and that it would not be so expensive to upgrade their energy ranking.”

Warming up cold homes could have universal appeal, said Joyce.

“We spend 90% of our time in buildings so working on them affects everyone positively. The sooner other countries facing elections – like the UK and Germany – witness a similar breakthrough, the better,” he said.

Scotland is currently in the midst of a public consultation about how to upgrade its building stock after declaring energy efficiency to be a national infrastructure priority.

But in the wider UK a remaining Green Deal obligation on landlords to improve the efficiency of energy-leaking buildings later this decade has been so whittled down by the government as to make it unworkable, according to Erica Hope, senior associate at the European Climate Foundation.

Barry Gardiner, UK Labour’s shadow climate spokesman described transport and buildings emissions as “the biggest challenge to meeting our climate budgets”. The challenge is likely to spawn a new election initiative in that country too.   

“We will bring forward clear [building efficiency] standards as part of our manifesto,” Gardiner said. “We are looking to upgrade the obligations on landlords in particular to make sure that properties have to be of a certain energy efficiency level, within a certain timeframe, before they can be rented out.”

“The key thing for the UK is how we go about renovating older housing stock and that is where we need to set regulations in place,” he added.

The policy reflects similar thinking to Labour’s 2015 election manifesto, which proposed a “decency standard” for rented properties.

Britain has some of the worst-insulated housing stock in Europe. Cold homes cost the NHS some €1bn a year in direct treatment, and are rated the second highest risk on Britain’s housing health and safety system.

In just one city – Liverpool – energy poverty was fingered as the culprit in 500 deaths and around 5,000 illnesses in one survey in 2013.

The post Energy efficiency becomes breakthrough issue in French election appeared first on Climate Home News.

If translated into law, such a move could trigger a trade conflict, seven palm oil producing countries have warned.

Indonesia, Malaysia and Colombia are among those to have protested to the European president Antonio Tajani that the motion up for debate contains “trade discriminatory language”.

“The imposition of both tariff and other non-tariff trade barriers, or for an outright EU ban on imports of biodiesel derived from palm oil, could provide advantages to the use of other raw materials, entailing direct discrimination against palm oil,” they say in a letter seen by Climate Home.

Direct discrimination would be a violation of World Trade Organisation rules. Lorena Jaramillo, an officer for the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Geneva, said that a suit was possible.

“If [the ban] becomes a regulation, then they could start a trade dispute if they come to the WTO and present a motion that this is detrimental treatment for the exporting countries,” she said.

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The motion has already been approved in a near-unanimous vote by the European Parliament’s environment committee and is “very likely” to be endorsed by MEPs at a plenary in Strasbourg next Tuesday, according to Kateřina Konečná, the report’s rapporteur.

She told Climate Home: “We believe it is absolute nonsense that a forest in Indonesia should burn in order for us to travel ‘ecologically’. It will never be effective and shouldn’t be an option. The feeling starting to build in parliament is that no-one is happy with deforestation for biofuels.”

As well as banning biofuels sourced from any vegetable oils by 2020, the report calls for a new palm oil regulation, minimum sustainability criteria, customs duty reforms and anti-deforestation articles in all future EU trade agreements.

The palm oil report is not legally binding, but its passage would presage a bid to reform EU laws. “We are already planning to table some amendments to the winter energy package in this regard,” Konečná said.

These would have force of law, if agreed in the three-way negotiations between the European Parliament, Commission and Council which followed.

Report: “Beef caucus” takes over indigenous policies in Brazil

While a separate Commission study on palm oil due this month has been delayed, another EU report on deforestation later this year could also incorporate some of Konečná’s recommendations.

UNCTAD’s Jaramillo expressed concern about the effect of a ban on countries taking tentative conservationist steps. “If you cut market access for countries which are making environmentally-friendly investments and efforts, it would take away their incentive to act in a sustainable manner,” she said.

Illegal forest clearances driven by overseas demand for palm oil, soy, beef, wood and other agricultural products account for 65% of the planet’s tropical deforestation.

The process produces 1.47 gigatonnes of CO2 a year – equivalent to a quarter of the EU’s yearly fossil fuel emissions – and its human cost is no less staggering.

More than 100,000 people are thought to have died in southeast Asia in 2015 due to haze caused by forest fires. Slash-and-burn land clearance is the main culprit, much of it to make way for palm oil plantations.

Under the 2030 agenda on sustainable development, the EU is committed to halting deforestation, restoring degraded forests and promoting sustainable public procurement practices by 2020.

Yet a target to source 10% of Europe’s transport fuels from renewable sources is driving demand. Between 2010 and 2014, use of palm oil for biofuels surged to account for 45% of the commodity’s imports to Europe.

Almost three quarters of the renewable fuel mandate is expected to be met by first generation biofuels: those produced directly from food crops. While the EU has proposed halving its share by 2030, the question remains of what will fill the gap.

Jori Sihvonen, the biofuels officer for Transport and Environment told Climate Home that a range of options would be needed. “You can electrify cars or use hydrogen or advanced biofuels,” he said. “You can also produce diesel out of CO2 captured from the air with electricity and hydrogen.

“With lorries, you can have catenary lines over motorways which work to the same concept as tram lines. When the truck was not on a highway, it could run on a combustion engine fuelled by diesel, advanced biofuels or diesel power-to-liquid.”

The post EU palm oil restrictions risk sparking trade spat appeared first on Climate Home News.

For two years now, China has been piloting a carbon market modelled on the EU’s emissions trading system (ETS), which tries to bridge free market economics with climate action.

But the project is behind schedule and speaking in Brussels last week, Yi Wang, a member of China’s national people’s congress and vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said Beijing would not “take the lead” in linking the two carbon markets.

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“I think we would like to employ a different and effective measurement to promote low carbon development and also reduce our greenhouse gas emissions,” he told Climate Home. “Maybe the market is one method but I would also have another choice: a carbon tax.”

Wang is considered an unofficial spokesman on China’s climate policy, offering an outlet for plausibly deniable government initiatives that are often quoted in media reports. He is also the chief scientist for China’s annual sustainable development report.

Emissions trading in China would be challenged by a cocktail of issues, including large regional differences, regulatory issues, data verification, market models, and management capacity, he argued.

“In China I think we would like to use a different kind of economic instrument,” Wang said. “The carbon market is more like a man-made market, so how to allocate the allowance of admissions equally, or efficiently? I think it is a big challenge for China.”

He added: “If China was to fail, it would be not only a crisis for China but also for the world’s carbon reduction cause.”

Since 2009, Europe has cleaved to its ETS which sets a cap on emissions and then allocates or sells polluting allowances to around 10,000 companies, which can sell, bank, trade or offset their unused credits.

However, carbon prices have struggled to rise above €5 a tonne due to waves of free allocations to heavy industry, intended to forestall their relocation abroad. The result has been a carbon price too low to trigger meaningful change.

Isabel Hilton, the editor of the chinadialogue website told Climate Home: “It is plain to everyone at this point that a tax could be more effective than carbon trading. The ETS just doesn’t seem to save any carbon.”

“Wang’s remarks are interesting,” Hilton said. “It may be that after two years of experimentation, they just look at this dogs breakfast and say ‘Oh god, we’ll never make it work’. When you look at everything that made it not work in the EU, you’ve got it in spades in China.”

Trump’s ban: ‘I want to study in US to save my country from climate change’

Brussels has hung a lot of hopes on a hook up with China’s potentially enormous CO2 market, and a joint conference on the issue is planned for next year, even though significant ministerial players in China are upfront about keeping the carbon tax option open.

EU officials say that they would be “surprised” if China reversed course on its plans for a nationwide ETS.

One source said of Wang’s comments: “It is certainly not what the official government counterparts are saying. We have only been deepening our conversations about carbon market design with them in the past year, and even since [last November’s] Marrakech summit.”

“But I’m sure that there is a continuing line of policy debate, as there is within Europe, as to whether carbon markets are optimal compared to carbon taxes,” the source added. “It is happening in Canada as well.”

China to start work on national carbon market in 2015

The Canadian model currently allows provinces to reduce emissions by a carbon tax or market measures, with British Columbia and Alberta opting for taxes at $30 and $20 a tonne respectively.

Carbon taxes were traditionally seen by left-leaning environmentalists like James Hansen as a more effective, watertight, clear and potentially redistributive measure, being prevented by strong industry opposition.

Any split between the Chinese and Europeans would send tremors through climate negotiations that are reeling from the withdrawal of US leadership. It is hoped that a Sino-EU coalition could fill the void, but such a confederacy would be fragile and shot through with political divisions.

The Chinese démarche would align the country with some members of the Trump administration and prominent Republicans who support a carbon tax instrument.

A recently-launched initiative by three GOP ex-treasury secretaries – James Baker, Henry Poulson and George Schultz – called for a $40 a tonne tax on fossil fuels.

US secretary of state Rex Tillerson, is a long-standing advocate of a carbon tax, as well as being a former CEO of Exxon. His successor, Darren Woods, also came out in favour of a carbon tax two weeks ago.

Critics contend that Exxon’s first public carbon tax manoeuvre in 2009 was accompanied by funding for 30 of the 40 senators who voted to prohibit it in practice, and for 93% of the 156 co-sponsors of a congressional resolution to the same effect.

EU officials said they would “fall out of their chairs in shock” if the Trump administration proposed a carbon tax.

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