Englund

 and $20tn-$30tn assets and $7tn debts of the global fossil complex While politicians across Europe have been fighting a culture war over air conditioners and the causes of the deadly heat shock, central banks have been taking matters into their own hands. The Bank of England has slipped through market notice 11, entitled “Changes to collateral eligibility in the Sterling Monetary Framework”. Fossil fuel companies will face bigger haircuts from October onwards. Their debt will be worth less as collateral for borrowing money or securing a trade, depending on how far along they are on the green-to-brown spectrum. Lenders will also have to integrate the financial risks of climate change in their stress testing and models. “The direction of travel is clear. Banks are going to have to set aside more capital when lending to some fossil companies,”. The European Central Bank (ECB) is acting in parallel, using pillar two of the global “Basel regime” to squeeze loans to high polluters and s...

Beijing’s Manhattan Project promises to obliterate the existing global energy order Beijing is replicating the same strategy it used to wipe out global rivals in solar panels, lithium batteries, critical minerals and electric vehicles. China had deployed upwards of $10bn (£7bn) to $13bn since 2023 in a systematic attempt to capture the family of specialist industries that will underpin the rollout of fusion power plants at scale. That figure is more than the rest of the world combined over the same period – probably by a large margin. “Their facilities are so big you can literally see them from space,” said Bob Mumgaard, the chief executive of Commonwealth Fusion, the West’s frontrunner in commercial fusion. Prof Zhang Jie, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said his country was fast developing a form of inertial laser fusion at a vast new facility in Sichuan that was 30 times more efficient than its US rival and promised to deliver baseload power at circa $25 per megawatt hour. Suc...

  Chris Wright, ex-fracker and now US energy secretary, vowing to end the “irrational quasi-religious policies on climate change”.   What about the other 7bn people? They want what we have,” he said. This is a revealing window into the mental world of Trumpism.  Has Wright any idea what the world looks like in 2025? Has he visited China lately? Does he think that most people in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East have no fridges, no lighting, no TVs, no heating and rags for clothes?   He should read ‘The New Joule Order, a report this week by the Carlyle Group, which argues that large parts of the world are about to decarbonise at breakneck speed for reasons that have nothing to do with net zero.  China is the world’s biggest importer of crude and LNG, and it is moving with alacrity to end this state of affairs. Most tankers pass through the Strait of Malacca, easily choked by US warships.  The “Malacca Dilemma” has guided Chinese strategic pl...

  They already undercut coal and gas plants on pure price and a 24/7 basis in areas holding 80pc of mankind, even in the fracking fiefdom of Texas. “We’re seeing a stampede into solar plus batteries. Together they are the killer app of the clean energy age,” said Lord Turner, head of Energy Transitions Commission, which includes China, India and the global South, as well as the West. The price of Chinese solar panels has dropped to nine cents a watt, which is why the ill-run electricity grid in Pakistan is now shrinking at a double-digit annual rate. Every village and every neighbourhood in Lahore or Karachi is erecting off-grid solar panels in a dash for cheap power and energy freedom, lifting solar capacity by 22 gigawatts (GW) in a single year.  The government had nothing to do with it.  The free market speaks Urdu. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Telegraph 31 January 2025 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/31/right-wing-wokeism-green-tech-global-energy-war/ Tillbaka...

Opec tells us that demand will continue to grow for decades – as if technology stands still Not even the most dangerous Middle East crisis this century seems able to propel West Texas crude above $70 (£54) a barrel. Brent has returned to the lower end of its trading range between $70-$80, barely enough to sustain the economic models of the petrostates. Clean technology will make us richer and geopolitically safer and is therefore unstoppable. China is the largest importer of crude and LNG and most of it comes through the Strait of Malacca. At 1.7 miles wide at its narrowest point, the strait is the paramount choke point in world trade.  It leaves China vulnerable to a naval blockade by the US Fifth and Seventh Fleets, operating in concert with Quad navies.  Taking a detour through the Lombok Strait would not make supply much safer. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Telegraph 22 October 2024 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/10/22/china-and-the-global-south-will-not-save-big-oil/...

The Premier’s speech at “summer Davos” always carries a message. Two years ago it was China’s macroeconomic balance. Last year it was global trade. This year it was “China Shock 2.0”.  The #2 of the People’s Republic of China directly addressed the term which, to my knowledge, we owe to Brad Setser, American economist, ex-Obama and Biden-administration official and macro commentator supreme. The shift in China’s trade balance with Europe is truly dramatic. Cedric Gemehl’s data from Gavekal are useful here. The deficit has more or less doubled in the years since Covid. Comparing “China shock 1.0” and “2.0” there are key differences.  China’s exports overwhelmed western manufacturers in low-tech, low-wage sectors The first “China shock” back in the early 2000s was a straight-forward cost-of-production, market-access story. China’s exports overwhelmed western manufacturers in low-tech, low-wage sectors.  China Shock 2.0, by contrast, is above all about Europe and it is above...

A rich world needs less energy than once feared Well-educated people accept the claim that stabilising greenhouse emissions by mid-century will prove to be a near impossible task.  It contaminates economic models and explains why the UK Treasury and other bodies – though not the Energy Institute – cling to exorbitant estimates of what it will cost. Cutting-edge research suggests that we will require just 40pc to 45pc of today’s total energy supply to replace the old system, and to lift the global South, and to satisfy the voracious demand of data centres, all at the same time. So rejoice. “The entire decarbonisation challenge is far smaller than is made out by its critics. Primary energy demand, irrespective of how it’s defined, is simply not a matter of any importance,” said Michael Liebreich, global technology guru and founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance. I hate to mention heat pumps ... Like them or not, they have a performance coefficient near four.  They cut demand fo...

 Slump in power prices are undermining operations of atomic plants that are still the cornerstone of electricity grids in several parts of the continent.slump in power prices are undermining operations of atomic plants that are still the cornerstone of electricity grids in several parts of the continent. Longer term, it’s a warning sign that reactors might get increasingly squeezed out, even as countries such as France and the UK plan to spend huge sums on new plants, having identified the technology as a key element in the fight to limit global warming.  At the United Nations climate meeting in Dubai late last year, they were joined by more than 20 nations including the US, the United Arab Emirates, Japan and South Korea in calling for a tripling of global nuclear generation by the middle of the century. Electricite de France SA, which is just getting its fleet of nuclear plants back on track after years of lengthy outages for repairs and checks, has already had to reduce out...

Whether the world cuts carbon emissions fast enough to secure a 1.5-degree planet depends on the arms race for clean-tech dominance between the US and China. It does not depend significantly on anything done, and even less said, at the Cop28 summit in Dubai,  “A global, irreversible, solar tipping point may have passed where solar energy gradually comes to dominate global electricity markets, without any further climate policies,” concluded a recent paper by the World Bank and Europe’s leading universities. The “technological learning rate” of solar, wind, and now batteries is so relentless that a 24/7 mix is already cheaper than new coal in most of the world, and will become massively cheaper almost everywhere over time. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Telegraph 5 December 2023 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/12/05/cop28-circus-technology-markets-solve-climate-crisis/ China’s carbon emissions have either peaked already or will do this winter, seven years ahead of schedule. They ...

The technologists on the front line solving the problem, and the corporations racing ahead with net zero faster than the political class can keep up, or the environmental old guard seems able to believe. It was a festival of optimism. In one room Rolls-Royce engineers explained how they can already run the world’s existing fleet of passenger jets on 50pc clean fuel, with 100pc clean energy engines being tested successfully, and with the prospect that this fuel will be generated by small modular reactors. In another room, CWP Global explained how it is developing super-sized renewable hubs in Patagonia, or the Sahara, or the Australian outback, able to produce breathtakingly cheap electricity from wind and solar.  Few understand how quickly Big Money has gone from being the careless enabler of fossil pollution and land abuse to becoming instead the arch-enforcer of the green order, pulling forward change Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 16 November 2021 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2...

 As Zhejiang party chief 20 years ago he wrote a weekly newspaper column noted for denouncing ecological degradation, and for warning that China’s “energy-intensive and high-polluting” economic model was unsustainable.  The Himalayas and Tibet - Asia’s "water tower'" - are heating twice as fast as the global mean. A report by the China Meteorological Administration in August said glacier loss has already reached 15pc.  This is likely to accelerate and destabilize the great river systems that have fed China through history Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Telegraph 28 October 2021 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/10/28/cop26-conundrum-does-chinas-eco-warrior-xi-jinping-keep-building/

That is the verdict of the IEA (with the IMF) in its encyclopedic roadmap on global energy on the way to a 1.5 degree world.  Net zero by 2050 is the closest thing we have to catechism.  The report is the bell that tolls for the fossil age . Not even natural gas escapes the cull. Net zero does not leave the world’s poor behind: it saves them. It is the cheapest way to reach 800 million people with no electricity, and a further 2.6 billion people with no clean cooking option.  Rural Africa leap-frogs beyond the old model. It goes straight to micro-grids based on solar power and batteries, getting cheaper by the day. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Telegraph 18 May 2021 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/05/20/ieas-damascene-conversion-net-zero-makes-us-richer-cuts-energy/

It is backed by all former chiefs of the US Federal Reserve and a roster of Nobel economists from Keynesian Left to the free-market Right.  The fee starts at $15 a tonne and ratchets up $10 every year until the task is done. The higher the carbon fee, the bigger the citizen bonus.  The political psychology of carbon abatement is transformed instantly.   Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Telegraph 10 February 2021 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/02/10/conservatives-must-not-surrender-climate-policy-left-market/ Joe Biden’s rapid retreat on climate ambitions Rejecting a higher carbon price means renouncing the most effective tool for cutting emissions Edward Luce FT 30 Septe,ner 2021 https://www.ft.com/content/b5b2f97c-d693-4db9-b884-a905b8c1ac61