Western climate envoys press Indonesia - world's top exporter of coal - to use renewables instead
 Even proponents of renewable fuels admit that they are not competitive with fossil fuels on a cost-benefit basis. While the high cost of renewables is clear enough, benefits are based on wishful thinking and unexamined assumptions.
Ever since Indonesia, where Hong Kong gets its coal that lights it up at night, has fallen prey to climate bureaucrats offering funds in exchange for commitments to destroy its most successful industry, the country it has been under pressure to do what it does not want to do. That is, rid itself of the source of its coal-fired electricity and end its role as the world's biggest coal exporter.
Climate officials from the US and Europe hope to secure a deal by the time Indonesia hosts G-20 leaders in Bali in November, reports Bloomberg. They want to create a major milestone in the global effort to cut emissions and provide the impetus for the United Nations' COP27 climate summit in Egypt to win universal approval.
Admittedly, it's a hard sell. The war in Ukraine has increased global demand, boosting coal-mining, and making it even more attractive to investors. Meanwhile, the nation's electric company gets its coal at a discount, giving it little incentive to hook up renewable-energy suppliers who are expensive and forever wanting and needing access to more public funds.
Pressured by these woke folk offering cash incentives, the Indonesian government has made a commitment to rein in coal and develop green energy. It even says it welcomes further discussions toward the Just Energy Transition Partnership and has pledged to shut Indonesia's coal fired plants by 2055 and become 100 per cent dependent on renewables five years later. No new coal-fired power plants will be approved and there are plans to finally roll out a carbon tax in July.
Indonesia is one of a handful of natural resource-driven nations that could make a major difference in the bureaucratic battle to curb climate change. It's the world's second-biggest coal producer. One predicts a boom in demand for electricity as Indonesians crawl from the pit of poverty. To sustain this praiseworthy effect, Indonesians have invested heavily in coal, culminating in the building of additional 117 new coal-fired power plants. By 2020, electricity output had grown more than five-fold over nearly two decades.
So what's the problem? Because Indonesia doesn't want to appear to be the bad guy in a world gone woke, it goes along to get along, without believing that global warming is the problem it is said to be. Thus, making a commitment to kill the nation's most prosperous industry by 2050, seems like easy if one gets the money now and is not obliged to complete the mission until those who made the commitments are dead and buried 30 years from now.
If one to is to ask a nation to destroy its greatest financial industrial asset, that nation should be entitled to ask why. From where does this demanding imperative spring?
If one turns to Google and asks the question: What are negative effects of global warming?
Asking the question directly, one first gets much multi-page verbiage explaining what global warming or climate change is, and how it comes to be, but no answer to the question posed.
At least not until at last one alights well down the list when one first the entry from "sustainability-ord-il" where one finds, "the 10 worst effects of global warming", to wit; 1) rising sea levels, 2) shrinking glaciers, 3) heat waves, 4) storms and floods, 5) droughts, 6) disease, 7) economic consequences, 8) conflicts and war, 9) loss of biodiversity and 100 cases destruction of ecosystems.
To destroy one leading industrial sector - as Indonesia has been asked to do - these reasons seem underwhelming to say the least - even if they prove to be true. And given the various level denial, that is a big IF. Given that what we have are western bureaucratic causeniks demanding that third worlders join their children's crusade led by the likes of Greta Thunberg, a clearly hysterical child.
It is clear that this is a bureaucratic cause, because response to it, even when ramped up as a "climate emergency", has generated little response from the public that lists "global warming" or "climate change" as very nearly the least of its concerns in a opinion polls. Even the change in name from "global warming" to "climate change" was deployed to deflect ridicule when then public suffers cold snaps while being harrangued about being overheated. While a heat wave is often ascribed to global warming, a cold snap, through an arcane and incomprehensible exercise in mental gymnastics is ascribed to the same cause. This stretches the credulity of a 2-year-old to the breaking point.
It is no secret that the combination of forces in the media, the universities and the civil service is far more enthusiastic about this cause than anyone else beyond these charmed circles.
If the media were to do it duty, it would henceforth supply balanced information questions if it is to be a useful source of information rather than the propagandists for partisan progressive politics it has become. So next time there is a panel discussion of experts on these matters it should ensure the presence of the likes of Princeton's expert climate skeptic Freeman Dyson or Bjorn Lomborg, author of the "The Skeptical Environmentalist" or Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute or Kiminori Itoh, author of "Lies and Traps in the Global Warming Affair" or Nobel lauriate Ivar Giaever, or Will Happer, Princeton physicist and author of "Heaven and Earth" or Alan Carlin, an economist at the Environment Protection Agency whose report, calling global warming a "hoax" was suppressed by the agency or Patrick Michaels, ecological climatologist from George Mason University. There are lots to choose from. All fully qualified and properly post nominalled.
Here the media will find that the assumptions they have accepted for decades, are often false. So if what has been experienced differs so much from what had been predicted, then what confidence can one placed in predictions made today about tomorrow?
For instance, back in 1970 Harvard biologist George Wald predicted that the way things were going “civilisation will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action was taken against problems facing mankind.”
Also in 1970, Washington University biologist Barry Commoner said: “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation."
Nobel science lauriate Paul Ehrlich said in 1970: “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next 10 years.”
Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University philosophy professor, said: "By 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions. By the year 2000, 30 years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
Such were just the beginnings of the false predictions on the American Enterprise Institute website from the year 1970. These were fears taken seriously by the establishment of the day, though not acted upon in the way they are today.
But given the track record of dire predictions from the best and the brightest, the annointed class of officialdom, Indonesia would be well advised to keep the coal fires burning and not do anything to destroy the nation's most promising prospects, which at the moment appears to be coal. |
