IEA Has Avowal or Two They Owe You.

The IEA has warned that the climate goals it arbitrarily set are at risk, despite Covid lockdowns.

You may wonder how Climate goals that were never serious, and that no country in the world has shown the least bit of interest in achieving, can actually be "at risk". They never were going to be met, and the rich countries' reaction to Covid, a threat not in the future, but right now, provides the perfect example of the future: one of continued, for-the-camera hand-wringing and exclamations of concern, where no action is taken, but every one acts, as in emotes, performs, enacts, but actually does nothing, or at least nothing differently, at least not anything that'll help, instead they'll be buying an EV instead of an ICE machine, despite the fact that the infrastructure necessary to support a switch from ICE machines to EV's has yet to be built, nor that the cost to do so is always expressed in dollar terms, whereas what it needs to be expressed in is carbon footprint terms. There is, you may argue, a relationship between the two obviating the need to express it in one rather than the other. However, I would counter that that goes both ways. Every time there is a trillion dollar price tag on something, such as the $1.9 trillion Covid bill wending its tortuous path through Congress, there is a carbon cost associated with it, yet, although we now have the ostensibly Green-conscious (more greenback-conscious perhaps?) Dems in charge, we have yet to hear a single congresscritter mention that carbon cost ... one that doesn't only include the USA.

Energy-related emissions were two percent higher in December 2020 than in the same month a year earlier, the IEA documented (note that that's only "energy-related" emissions, but take note .... there are others: meat-production/agricultural emissions (also higher), wildfire emissions (much higher), permafrost melting emissions (also higher, and completely absent from early models of climate change, yet it is precisely these emissions that will continue to grow faster than any of the others, outpacing the growth of all other sources combined).

Which increase, they go on to opine, is driven by  a lack of clean energy policies, yet they are remiss in their report, in that they fail to mention the reason there's "a lack of clean energy policies", is because, outside of fantasy-land, there is no such thing as clean energy. If there were, we wouldn't be here to comment on it, since the sun's waste heat wouldn't be available to us (its heat being a by-product of its energy generation by virtue of transforming matter into energy), or more specifically, available to the plant life on earth that shares the planet with us (and makes habitable for us (no plants, no photosynthesis; no photosynthesis, no oxygen ...  like on Mars, for example. Preferring to believe it's the other way around, we lose sight of the fact that we need plant life; plants, however, although they have a use for us, can survive very well without animals, and especially without the human variety)) generated as the byproduct of the enormous amounts of power it generates at its core by virtue of its fusion of hydrogen atoms into helium, and the host of other atomic fusions it performs by means of its gravitational pressure. Earth's main source of power will never be clean energy: no source of power on earth is generated with clean energy either, it is pseudo-physics to pretend otherwise.

"The rebound in global carbon emissions toward the end of last year is a stark warning that not enough is being done to accelerate clean energy transitions worldwide," IEA executive director Faith Birol said in a statement. I hope Faith has charity, because perhaps, my unFaithful comeback will begin to be seen as reality (which it is): that by accelerating clean energy transitions worldwide, we accelerate climate change, because we are adding a Plus One: the enormous amount of energy inputs required to "accelerate clean energy transitions worldwide" is accelerating Climate Change because they were part of the reason "Energy-related emissions were two percent higher in December 2020". Before a single carbon emission is eliminated from the tailpipe of a single automobile, an entire country's-worth of emissions will have already been exhausted into the atmosphere to bring the fleet that will, in a decade or two's time, eventually, and hopefully, make up for that addition by virtue of their lessened emissions.

When you hear the euphemism, clean energy, you should think of the Subaru ads that claim an automobile, an ICE machine no less, is made with Love. They are both specious and ridiculous statements that no one expected anyone to actually believe ... but instead millions simply swallow the concept whole. And of those millions, there is a rather large subset who is paying dearly for the degree of higher education they worked hard to earn. And yet despite that, despite years of education at prestigious colleges and taxpayer-funded State schools and Community Colleges, educations they will continue to be billed for for decades into their future, they unquestioningly buy into the clean energy Corporate-speak they are fed. What a gargantuan waste of resources. The main result of all that indoctrination is the Corporatized training they received to ask no questions though they tell you all lies. But not to worry; they're all Woke.

It turns out that, somehow, (who could have guessed it?), accelerating clean energy transitions worldwide, worldwide, mind you ... think about that, and remember that burning down rainforests, tearing up the prairies, poisoning the Gulf of Mexico, and ravaging desert ecosystems are all part and parcel of that "clean energy transition", comes with a carbon footprint of its own ... one that is never acknowledged, never mind taken into account when calculating the burden of CO2 the atmosphere is being called on to absorb in order for us to arrive at this zero-emission (Lol) future. All the while, to use the last two generations as a template, increasing the amount of energy each of the billion citizens of the OECD, who already needed an outsize assist of energy inputs to get through every day, while simultaneously bringing electrification and automobilization to billions more Asians who still live in energy poverty, even as all of their urban dwellers choke on the fumes created by their mad rush to modernity. India and China alone would make any attempts to hold the increase in carbon's role to anything close to manageable; EV's or no.

China reflects the global picture: Share of clean energy sources rose, but oil and natural gas (Which China lists as a Green fuel!) usage rose more ... because energy usage rose more than the amount of clean energy generated. This happens time and again in country after country: what they call clean energy generation increases to a new high, and is published to great acclaim and ballyhooed boosterism, leaving unstated that the overall consumption of energy increased more than that of so-called "clean" energy, meaning that, as in China, oil and natural gas usage rises more, which in effect means that renewables act as an accelerant on the rate of combustion of fossil fuels beyond what they would be without them, because energy usage, or rather any overall diminution of energy usage, is never on the table, it's constant growth so baked into the economic pie, that it's curtailment is never even acknowledged as a possibility.

Similarly with coal:

China’s coal share of energy consumption fell in 2020, yet, because China's use of energy increased even more, her overall coal use actually rose.

Coal's share of energy consumption fell, but overall coal usage rose by 0.6 per cent as dozens of new coal power plants came online. 

Global emissions plunged by almost two billion tons in 2020, the largest absolute decline in history, but more than half of that decline was due to lower use of fuel for road transport and aviation.

Both of which are already experiencing a growth spurt: 

On Feb 26, the CO2 reading at Mauna Loa was:

416.33ppm

Today, it is

418.30 ppm  

Feb 26 was last Friday.

Yes, that's right. Basically, in less than a week, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere jumped by close to 2 ppm(!), more than half of the now-yearly increase of ~3.0ppm.

I invite you to listen to the drivel broadcast  this evening by whatever news program you like to watch. I can assure you it will make no mention of this alarming fact.

The climate goals aren't "at risk"; they are, as they have been from the moment they were proposed, nothing but a sop, offering assurances that the world is "doing something" as it proceeds merrily down the path of self-immolation. 

One in six homes across the UK are now at risk of regular flooding – a number the Environment Agency says will double by 2050 – more and more people are thinking up innovative ways to make their properties resilient to submersion. (I'm sure that won't leave any CO2 footprint).

“…the effects of climate change are becoming ever more pronounced. That UK rainfall is set to increase by 59 per cent by 2050. And that, for the time being at least, it is simply not possible to build, engineer or even plant our way out of the predicament.”

In May, the IEA is to publish its first global road map, if t were it reflect reality, it would look like this:

Our path forward is blocked by our own intransigence.

Let me be clear here: as long as the future we envision is one in which every human being has no manner of locomotion other than their own exogenously-fueled personal transportation module, the current path to climate apocalypse will not be averted. It is the total dedication to a future of self-propelled motorized humans that will choke the plants, stymie all our efforts, and lock in the acceleration of the increasing atmospheric load of CO2; a fact that Birol's climate goals completely ignores. As the Covid pandemic has shown us, but that we obstinately refuse to see, even as Texas drops its mask mandate while a pandemic rages out of control, it's the Economy, Stupid. That's all that matters. Not human life, not clean air, clean water, family values, or any other trope they wish to assuage your misgivings with. 

As Texans shivered in the dark freezing to death in their own homes, the power companies they pay every month to ensure their supply of essential fuel is unbroken made a killing (in modern Americanized comic-book-speak, that's a good thing), issuing bills that soared more than 300%. This is disaster Capitalism in your face. Exactly as in the 2008 financial debacle, the system didn't break, it worked the way it was designed to work; and they will make a lot of noise about reforms, and clawbacks, and finding the culprits that perpetrated this calumny, but, as in the case of 2008, nothing will happen, nothing will change, because this is the stupid economic system we have chosen to implement, and Texans, who went to extraordinary lengths, using extralegal means, to perpetuate the myth that the avatar of the Corporatization of the entire nation proceeds unimpaired, by spearheading the campaign to seat in the Oval Office the loser of a national election, ex-President Plump, are the last people you should look to to effectuate the least bit of change to the extractive nature of the current regime of Vampire Capitalism .

In such a corrupt milieu, climate goals are simple: You publish them to great fanfare, then merely move the goalposts another decade or two into the future, even as the past catches up to you and destroys the present. 

It's the economy, stupid.

 And you, no human in fact, matters. Only Capital matters.

The words of the profits are written on the market bull's balls, "If the economy stalls, you'll soon be listening to exploding rounds of ordnance." 

Just ask Lebanon.