Coronavirus recovery plan ‘must tackle climate change’-BBC

By Paul Homewood

This is something we are going to hear a lot more of in coming months, the idea that any economic recovery plan should be centred around the Green New Deal agenda:

Tackling climate change must be woven into the solution to the Covid-19 economic crisis, the UK will tell governments next week.

Environment ministers from 30 countries are meeting in a two-day online conference in a bid to make progress on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

The gathering is called the "Petersberg Climate Dialogue".

It will focus on how to organise a "green" economic recovery after the acute phase of the pandemic is over.

The other aim is to forge international agreement on ambitious carbon cuts despite the postponement of the key conference COP26 – previously scheduled for Glasgow in November (now without a date).

Alok Sharma, the UK Climate Secretary and president of COP26, said: "I am committed to increasing global climate ambition so that we deliver on the Paris Agreement (to stabilise temperature rise well below 2C).

"The world must work together, as it has to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, to support a green and resilient recovery, which leaves no one behind.

"At the Petersberg Climate Dialogue, we will come together to discuss how we can turn ambition into real action."….

The EU is already set on delivering a green stimulus. The Commission’s Green Deal chief, Frans Timmermans, said every euro spent on economic recovery measures after the COVID-19 crisis would be linked to the green and digital transitions.

"The European Green Deal is a growth strategy and a winning strategy," he tweeted.

"It’s not a luxury we drop when we hit another crisis. It is essential for Europe’s future.

Meanwhile, China appears set on its current carbon-intensive development path, and President Trump says the US will rescue struggling fossil fuel firms.

Even in Europe there’s a degree of push-back against the idea of a green stimulus .

Markus Pieper, an MEP from the centre-right German CDU party, told the magazine FOCUS that the EU’s sweeping plan for investment in clean technologies would no longer be possible.

He said: "The Green Deal was a gigantic challenge for an economy in top shape. After the corona bloodletting, it is simply not financially viable."

But the UK climate economist Lord Stern told BBC News: "The immediate priority is the current Covid crisis – but then we have to build for the future.

"Timmermans is right and Trump is wrong. We should only be bailing out firms that are going to contribute to tackling climate change.

"They don’t have be be ostensibly clean tech firms at the moment – but they do have to be committed to cutting their emissions in line with international targets."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-52418624

It is based on a classic piece of misconception. If we can afford to spend hundreds of billions now bailing out the economy, why can’t we do the same every year in future to save the planet?

The answer should really be obvious. The reality is that we cannot even really afford the current package, never mind one every year.

In the best case scenario, there will be a V shaped recovery, with the economy quickly returning to previous levels of activity once the coronavirus has been sorted.

It is much more likely though that recovery will be much slower, particularly if solutions take longer to arrive. The risk is that many companies will go under, jobs will be lost, and companies which survive will be loaded down with debt and unable to finance new investment and expansion.

Meanwhile stagnant incomes will depress consumer spending.

Under this scenario, could a Green New Deal help to engineer economic growth?

Well, let’s look at some of the proposals made by its proponents, for instance more renewable energy such as offshore wind farms.

These may create some extra jobs, but to what end? They do not add any economic value, as they simply duplicate something we already have, ie power generation. Worse still, they do so in an inefficient way.

We can say the same thing about spending billions on insulating houses and installing low carbon heating systems, another favourite of Green New Deal proponents. Both this and renewable energy investment do no more than create make-work jobs, that have less immediate financial benefit to the economy than the jobs cost to support. You might just as well pay people to go around painting everybody’s houses green.

The inconvenient reality is that somebody has to pay the bill for these new jobs, whether through taxation or higher energy bills.

Then, of course, there is the obsession with electric cars. Emission reduction mandates and threats to ban conventional cars are already causing much damage to the European car industry, with German manufacturers in particular cutting back jobs as a result. Doubling down on the green agenda will weaken the industry further still.

Similarly other industries, already hammered by high energy prices, will be badly hit by plans to impose carbon storage, reduce emissions, raise carbon taxes and push up energy prices even further.

At the end of the day, COVID-19 is a global problem, along with the economic crisis it has brought with it. Europe cannot hide away and insulate itself behind its own green agenda.

If it does, its economies will pay the price.