Tuesday, September 28, 2021

Platts Commodity Tracker: "4 Charts To Watch This Week"

 From S&P Global Platts, September 27:

Prices of steel raw materials diverge as uncertainties hit the market amid the financial issues faced by Evergrande, China's second-largest property developer. Climate action also continues to be a strong theme across different sectors and continents ahead of COP26. 

...2. China ratchets up climate commitment ahead of pre-COP26 summit in Milan...

China energy mix

What's happening? In a pre-recorded address to the UN's General Assembly Sept. 21, China's President Xi Jinping said China would cease financing of new coal-fired power plants abroad, and step up support for other countries to develop green and low-carbon energy. He said China would also strive to ensure its own carbon emissions peak "before 2030," rather than by 2030, as previously stated. What looked like relatively modest steps could in fact be significant for the countries concerned. As of early 2021 China was supporting some 27 GW of coal-fired generation development mainly in South Asia and Southeast Asia—close to the size of Poland's entire coal fleet.

What's next? Italy is hosting this year's pre-COP summit in Milan Sept. 30—a key preparatory gathering of energy and climate ministers from up to 50 countries to frame discussions at the main event in Glasgow in November. It is not known yet whether China will attend COP26 in Glasgow, but its engagement on coal has given the UN talks a late boost. The next stage is for China, the world's biggest emitter of CO2, to detail how it intends to get to net-zero by 2060. The projected cost is eye-watering. China would need Yuan 136 trillion ($21.1 trillion) of investments—around $500 billion a year on average—to reach carbon neutrality by 2060, according to Zhang Shaogang, vice chairman of China Council for the Promotion of International Trade. To get on trajectory to meet the UN's Paris Agreement on global warming, it needs to cut nearly 70% of its coal consumption by 2050....

....MUCH MORE

China's nice words mean nothing. Even verifiable reductions mean nothing if they are running a scam along the lines of their refrigerant b.s. Build a plant, get paid for the total estimated lifetime production of the greenhouse gas if you tear it down, build a plant, get paid to tear it down. They took billions off of the German hausfraus.

From December 27, 2020's "Why Is China Placing Huge (Global) Bets On Coal?":

....For some reason I can't get HFC-23 out of my head. It's a refrigerant chemical that China used to rake in billions from the Kyoto treaty signatories (read German hausfraus).

HFC-23 is 12,000 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2.

They would build plants to make the stuff  (as a byproduct of HFC-22) and then offer to shut them down for Kyoto cash. Based on the estimated lifetime production of the plants. Best guess is they netted $6 billion after construction costs.

After a while (years) the carbon credit people caught on and then we saw China's reaction:

"China Threatens Massive Venting of Super Greenhouse Gases in Attempt to Extort Billions as UNFCCC Meeting Approaches"

We're no  HFC-23 Johnny-come-latelys. From September 2007: 

China's Kyoto Scam = $Billions

Been calling them out for a long, long time.