China's clean tech exports are crushing US filthy fossil fuels

The gap will likely only widen. Works for me.

Recent reports out of think tank Ember on China’s record-breaking $20 billion in August clean technology exports and the underlying data have stimulated discussion online. Electrek focused on the EV exports that are driving much of the growth. Meanwhile, Bloomberg put the numbers together with DOE and EIA data to show how China’s cleantech exports are outpacing US fossil fuels (reposted in Energy Connects). We also published a piece on it a few hours ago: “Renewables Drive A Stake Through The Cold, Dark Heart Of King Coal.”

…Of course, comparing fossil fuel exports to cleantech exports is like comparing apples to oranges. The two categories are significantly different. However, the differences indicate a substantial shift in how the world approaches energy and the global dynamics that drive trade. - CleanTechnica

Head of Cop29 is a fossil fuels guy

As if it wasn't already clear enough that the Cop's are mostly about corporate greenwashing.

The chief executive of Cop29 has been filmed apparently agreeing to facilitate fossil fuel deals at the climate summit.

The recording has amplified calls by campaigners who want the fossil fuel industry and its lobbyists to be banned from future Cop talks.

The campaign group Global Witness posed undercover as a fake oil and gas group asking for deals to be facilitated in exchange for sponsoring the event.

In the calls, Elnur Soltanov, Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister and chief executive of Cop29, agreed to this and spoke of a future that includes fossil fuels “perhaps for ever”. Cop officials also introduced the fake investor to a senior executive at the national oil and gas company Socar to discuss investment opportunities. - The Guardian

Fossil fuels greedheads target climate divestment

Because of course they do. What does the future of humanity matter, when profits are at stake?

Harvard University’s September decision to stop investing in fossil fuel companies, and to let its current investments in the sector expire without renewal, was widely hailed as one of the biggest climate victories in recent history. And for good reason—it was the most significant win yet for the climate divestment movement, a decade-old initiative that’s applied a popular anti-apartheid activist tactic to get colleges, banks, charitable foundations, and religious organizations to stop funding oil and gas firms. Harvard has the largest endowment of any university in the world—totaling $53 billion—meaning a deep pool of money is now out of Big Oil’s reach. This mission was also primarily driven by Harvard’s students; campus group Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard employed moves from meeting directly with administrators to storming the field during the annual football game against Yale. It’s all quite literally paid off.

Yet, as is the case with any successful social initiative, there’s now an institutional backlash. As Kate Aronoff has reported in the New Republic, the American Legislative Exchange Council—a Koch-linked nonprofit that helps state legislators craft right-wing policy—is writing model bills to protect fossil fuel investments, in essence making divestments like Harvard’s illegal. - Mother Jones

Natural gas price spikes are here to stay

The industry's trying to put blame elsewhere is based on some royal BS.

Already, the natural gas industry and its backers have begun casting blame on others for the gas market’s upheaval, suggesting that consumers hold the industry’s proposed villains responsible for the industry’s price issues.

In reality, a wide range of factors — starting with a blast of LNG exports that now consumes roughly 10 percent of the United States’s total gas production — have launched prices higher in the U.S. And shale drillers themselves have proved reluctant to drill more wells even as prices lurch up — a fact that stems far more from drillers’ own wild overspending during the shale rush (and the resulting wave of bankruptcies and cratered stocks) than from anything related to, say, proposed-but-not-implemented climate policies or a small but growing shift to renewable power...

Attempts to pin the blame for natural gas price swings on renewables drew immediate pushback from the International Energy Agency (IEA). “Recent increases in global natural gas prices are the result of multiple factors,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a September 21 statement, “and it is inaccurate and misleading to lay the responsibility at the door of the clean energy transition.”

The reality too is that natural gas has long suffered from wild price swings and volatility that — while tamped down in the recent past by the shale gas glut — just might be re-emerging into a pandemic-pressured world. - DeSmog

Everyone owes mega-gratitude to indigenous resisters

Even though a whole lot of people don't have the sense to realize that. As is the case with so much else.

Indigenous rights and responsibilities, the report explains, “are far more than rhetorical devices — they are tangible structures impacting the viability of fossil fuel expansion.” Through physically disrupting construction and legally challenging projects, Indigenous resistance has directly stopped projects expected to produce 780 million metric tons of greenhouse gases every year and is actively fighting projects that would dump more than 800 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year.

The analysis, which used publicly released data and calculations from nine different environmental and oil regulation groups, found that roughly 1.587 billion metric tons of annual greenhouse gas emissions have been halted. That’s the equivalent pollution of approximately 400 new coal-fired power plants — more than are still operating in the United States and Canada — or roughly 345 million passenger vehicles — more than all vehicles on the road in these countries. - Grist

The IEA is sanguine about solar

This has to piss off Big Filthy Fossil Fuels, whether they'll admit it or not.

Solar output is expected to lead a surge in renewable power supply in the next decade, the International Energy Agency said, with renewables seen accounting for 80% of growth in global electricity generation under current conditions.

In its annual World Energy Outlook on Tuesday, the IEA said in its central scenario - which reflects policy intentions and targets already announced - renewables are expected to overtake coal as the primary means of producing electricity by 2025. - Reuters