When Parody Meets Dystopia
By Irina Slav, April 24, 2023
On a (possibly) bright winter day in Davos this January, a group of insurers brought together by the UN to fight climate change issued a document setting out emission-cutting target-setting requirements for the industry.
The document, proudly if not very originally named the NIZA Target-Setting Protocol, gave insurers strict deadlines for adopting “science-based, intermediate targets for their respective insurance and reinsurance underwriting portfolios in line with a net-zero transition pathway consistent with a maximum temperature rise of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100.”
In early April, Munich Re, a signatory to the NZIA, which stands for Net-Zero Insurance Alliance, left the organisation, citing antitrust risks. The risks referred to stemmed from a Republican backlash against all the target-setting in the United States that also saw Vanguard quit NZIA’s sister organisation, NZAM, where the AM stands for Asset Managers.
Shortly after Munich Re, and by shortly I mean a few days later, Zurich Insurance Group also upped and left, saying it wanted "to focus our resources to support our customers with their transition".
To make sure nobody could accuse it of being flippant on its emission commitments, the insurer also said that "Zurich’s sustainability ambitions pre-date its membership in the NZIA. Withdrawing from the NZIA will not change the Group’s commitment to sustainability."
Then, last week, Hannover Re joined the quitters’s club, saying only that the exit was the outcome of “careful consideration” and, of course, assured everyone interested that "Regardless of this, Hannover Re remains committed to its sustainability strategy, the associated goals and its support for the Paris Agreement, and aims to achieve full climate neutrality by 2050 at the latest."
Heaven forbid someone thought that any of these insurance giants would suddenly stop caring about the transition.
Meanwhile, the NZIA Target-Setting Protocol got enriched with a 1.5-page “Important note”, in which the organisation pledged it will not tell its members exactly what measures to take in order to achieve their emission-cutting targets and how to go about carrying these measures out.
Tellingly, the note also said, “For the avoidance of doubt, NZIA members are under no obligation to continue their relationship with NZIA and, while this document may propose general measures and best practices on how to set and pursue individual targets, NZIA members shall, at all times, each remain free to determine and implement their respective decarbonisation strategies independently and unilaterally.”
Translation: Please don’t leave, we promise we won’t tell you what to do and we absolutely promise to not break any antitrust laws. We’re only here for the good conversation. Forget about those deadlines, let’s be friends again.
And the NZIA exodus is not even the funniest recent development in the world of climate change, anxiety, and target-setting.
A day after Hannover Re left NZIA, Canada’s Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development slammed Trudeau’s government for failing to track how its emission-reduction policies were performing, warning that the country risked falling short of its emission-cutting targets.
Clearly showing a flair for the dramatic (almost) on par with the UN’s Antonio Guterres, Commissioner Jerry DeMarco said "When I look at all of the...reports that have flagged these grave concerns over the years, it's clear that we have been repeatedly ringing the alarm bells. Now, these bells are almost deafening."
Said bells are apparently ringing — at a deafening volume, no less — because Canada’s government literally does not know if the policies it has adopted as a means of cutting emissions are, in fact, working. It is doing something but nobody knows how good this something is.
If you think this is funny wait till see the comments of Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault: "We won't stop fighting climate change while we figure it out reporting methodologies," Guilbeault said, as quoted by Reuters. "The bottom line is that Canada is bending the emission curve downward."
Ah, curves and their bending — it takes me back to those days when we were flattening another curve. Good times. Good times. Major drop in emissions. Remember?
So, in the past three weeks, we’ve have three insurers pull back from an organisation set up to oblige — I mean advise with no strings attached — its willing members to set themselves emission-reduction targets and track the emissions they are already generating, and a government revealed to have no idea whether its own emission-cutting efforts are working.
Activists know, however. They know neither insurers or governments are doing enough to bend that curve downward, so they’re pushing selflessly against the inertia. In a letter from late March, a group of climate activists dubbed Insure our [sic] Future sent a letter to insurance majors including Munich Re and Zurich Insurance Group to urge them to stop insuring fossil fuel projects.
So, what else is new, you might ask, and the answer is that in addition to letters, insurers are facing shareholder resolutions demanding target-setting, reducing, committing, etc. per the standard climate change chant.
One of the signatories of the letter, Peter Bosshard from something called The Sunrise Project, told Reuters that the organisation had set its sights on U.S. insurers and that "We are considering doing the same with Japanese insurers for next year. And also with the European insurers if they don't get more serious.”
Insurers, beware. Activists are coming after you. Stop underwriting those oil and gas projects or else. Oddly enough, the NZIA protocol itself appears to contain a grain of sense and acknowledges certain realities in passing:
“The NZIA may need to tolerate a “buffer” behind the scientific pathways in future iterations of the Protocol to reconcile members’ ambition to reach net zero with the need to continue to provide insurance capacity to activities essential to the global economy and society,” the document says at the beginning.
I may be wrong but to me, this sounds like “We’ll continue providing coverage for oil and gas because without them the economy stops. We’re sorry but there it is and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
You may find this roundabout admission of the facts of life entertaining but it is a lot more than some others have been demonstrating recently. By some others I mean the federal government of Germany, which, unlike insurers, appears to have zero intention of acknowledging facts of life.
No, I’m not going to talk about the nuclear power plants and the immediate increase in both coal power generation and electricity prices, hilarious as the latter was. What I’d like to touch upon today is another massively popular decision by the good people in Berlin: the ban on oil and gas heating systems.
Earlier this month the government that features literature and philosophy major Robert Habeck as economy minister approved a bill stating that from next year Germans will have to heat themselves with “heat pumps that run on renewable electricity, district heating, electric heating or solar thermal systems.”
There are exemptions, and the exemptions are for Germans over the age of 80 and “living in hardship”. If this is not an admission that fossil fuel energy is cheaper I really don’t know what is.
Indeed, the switch will cost Germans about 9 billion euro annually but it’s all right, because the government will provide support and, according to Habeck, "The financing is secured.” Strangely, he declined to say how much this support will cost the state but maybe he just didn’t know. Why bother with figures when you can talk about heat pumps.
Besides, it’s all going to get cheaper with time. Per Reuters: “The costs would fall to 5 billion from 2029 as Berlin expects renewable energy expansion and a ramp up of heating pumps production to make the switch cheaper.” Because we all know there is no shortage of raw materials for wind and solar installations.
So, we’ve got insurers admitting — in a thickly veiled way — that fossil fuels continue to be essential for civilisation as we know it and the German government admitting — likely by oversight— that oil and gas and cheaper than wind and solar. Does it get any better than this?
Why yes, it does. The EPA is planning to slam gas-fired power platn operators with requirements to capture their carbon emissions and environmentalists are happy. You’d never guess why, though.
"These standards could level the playing field between new gas plants and new renewable energy," a regional chapter head in the Sierra Club told Reuters, which went on to note that “Most new gas plants currently do not pay for emitting carbon, so the rules could make it harder for them to compete with solar and wind power.”
Did this man just admit wind and solar are more expensive than gas-fired power plants, so the latter need to be made more expensive to level the playing field? Yes. Yes, he did. Funny old world.
But it gets even better than this. And a lot scarier. If parody dominated this text so far, now it’s time for some hardcore dystopia.
“Nuclear power plants are a hindrance to the energy transition. They are not able to run in stop-and-go mode and cannot really compensate for power fluctuations that arise when using solar and wind energy. With Germany looking to expand solar and wind power very rapidly over the next few years, now is a good time to shut down nuclear reactors to make way for renewable energy.”
The above are the words of someone called Volker Quaschning, a professor of Renewable Energy Systems at the HTW university in Berlin. The comments, obviously, came after the shutdown of the three last nuclear power plants. And I’m afraid they might be a harbinger of bad things. Thanks to Tammy Nemeth for sharing the CNBC report featuring that harbinging.
The reason these comments should sound an alarm is that this person is effectively telling us that black is white and vice versa. He is literally turning reality on its head for the purposes of pushing the transition to wind and solar.
“Nuclear cannot run in stop-and-go mode” — and that’s one of its two biggest advantages over pretty much every other energy source, the other being zero emissions during operation. Implying that round-the-clock generation is somehow a negative is not just utterly arrogant, it is, as I said, dangerous. It could set an example for others and probably will.
“[Nuclear] cannot really compensate for power fluctuations that arise when using solar and wind energy”. This is a seriously odd statement, to put it mildly. The dispatchable nature of fossil fuels and nuclear ensures precisely this: that they can compensate for the power fluctuations that arise when using solar and wind energy. Because they are not dependent on the weather unlike wind and solar.
The above statement also somehow manages to suggest that these power fluctuations are a positive thing. Unless, of course, my dark side has taken over me and sees messages that do not exist. I maintain it hasn’t: calling intermittency “power fluctuations” is definitely an attempt to put a positive spin on the biggest drawback of both wind and solar.
This is where we are: while industries heavily involved in the energy transition narrative are quietly acknowledging not all is rosy, the transition crusaders press on with even less regard for facts and physics than before. And they like to use the word “science” a lot, which is how you can spot them.
The bad news is that in such an environment, things will get a lot worse before they start to get better.
The good news: Germany has officially turned itself into a transition guinea pig. So far, the data is not encouraging but we are certainly learning a lot about not just energy but indoctrination and self-preservation, too.
Germany, the climate guinea pig, will soon stumble, will it die or will German people will wake up one day from this unscientific nightmare they imposed on themselves and on everyone else... 🤔
In the meantime I am looking to invest in a property outside of the "climate hysteric" countries for my old day 😁. I don't want to freeze 🥶 to death for the sake of some climate zealots 🤡