Another major US study: No evidence of groundwater contamination from fracking

Another major U.S. study shows no evidence of groundwater contamination from hydraulic fracturing:

Hydraulic fracturing of shale formations to extract natural gas has no direct connection to reports of groundwater contamination, based on evidence reviewed in a study released Thursday by the Energy Institute at The University of Texas at Austin.

The University of Texas study, "Separating Facts from Fiction in Shale Gas Development", which can be downloaded here, should be read by all those - including quite a few European politicians -who have been misinformed by people behind the anti-shale gas propaganda "documentary" Gasland and other fake environmentalists.

Eleven internationally famous vocalists

On a Friday evening, maybe it is OK to relax with a little night music, performed by eleven soloists of international - but maybe not vocal - fame. Enjoy!

EU´s überwarmist Hedegaard blames global warming for the eurozone crisis

In an interview the EU`s überwarmist, former Danish journalist Connie Hedegaard, has repeated the old leftist slogan about western "overconsumtion" and the need to change "the current damaging model of economic growth", "forever". (By the way, Hedegaard is - or is supposed to be - a conservative back home in Denmark!).

What makes the interview interesting, however, is the way Hedegaard, at least indirectly, blames global warming/climate change for the eurozone crisis. The media are full of "studies" and reports about global warming causing countless catastrophic events all over the world, but this is probably the first time a leading European politician/unelected eurocrat blames global warming for the Eurozone mess!

This is what Hedegaard had to say:

The world must use a landmark environmental summit this year to change forever the current damaging model of economic growth, Europe's climate chief has warned, or face future crises as severe as the one currently enveloping the eurozone.
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"This has a lot of relevance to the euro crisis," said Hedegaard. "We're trying to make it clear that the climate change crisis is an economic crisis, a social and a job crisis – it should be seen as a whole. If we do not tackle these, we will be in crisis mode for many, many years."

Read the entire article here

PS

With regard to Greece, the EU is in a strange way actually heeding Mrs. Hedegaard´s advice, by forcing the poor Greek people to cut their "overconsumtion". Impoverished and jobless Greeks are thus model citizens of Connie Hedegaard´s Brave New Europe. However, it is less than certain that the Greeks themselves are enjoying themselves in this role.

"Herman for President"

The Belgian haiku poet Herman Van Rompuy is set get another 2 1/2 years term as unelected "President" of the European Union. According to an anonymous EU official Van Rompuy will be re-appointed at the meeting of EU leaders next week, reports the AP news agency.

As the EU president is not popularly elected, Haiku Herman - as the president is nicknamed - has only campaigned very moderately for the extension of his term. Just to be certain about his re-election he is, however, rumoured to have re-distributed his original campaign video from 2009 to the EU heads of state and government:

PS

Here is one of Van Rompuy´s most famous haiku poems:

Birds in concert.

One sings above all others.

I don't know its name.


Maybe the poet is less than honest here. Certainly he must know the name of the German chancellor! 

The Russian Orthodox Church openly supports Putin´s megalomaniac rearmament programme

Russia´s ruler Vladimir Putin has announced a huge military build-up:

"Within the next decade, the armed forces will receive more than 400 modern ground- and sea-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, eight ballistic missile submarines, about 20 general purpose attack submarines, over 50 surface ships and some 100 military-purpose spacecraft," Putin wrote in a new article for the Rossiiskaya Gazeta government daily.

He said the number will also include "over 600 modern aircraft, including fifth-generation fighters, more than a thousand helicopters, 28 regimental sets of S-400 (SA-21 Growler) surface-to-air missile systems, 38 division sets of Vityaz air defense systems, 10 brigade sets of Iskander-M (SS-26 Stone) tactical missile systems, more than 2,300 modern tanks, some 2,000 self-propelled artillery systems and guns, as well as more than 17,000 military vehicles".


At the same poverty in Russia grows faster than expected:

The number of impoverished people in Russia has increased by 2.3 million and made up 22.9 million in one year, the Russian Federal Statistics Agency said. Many experts believe that official statistics does not reflect the real state of affairs and is very often undervalued. Therefore, it means that the number of the poor in the country grows much faster.


One would think that the Russian Orthodox Church is worried about the fast growing poverty in the country. That does not seem to be the case, however. Instead the church, upholding its traditonal policy of co-operation with the KGB and the Soviet establishment, is openly supporting Vladimir Putin´s megalomaniac rearmament programme, and it even promises to participate in a planned programme of military training in schools!

Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, the head of the church's department for relations with society, who has openly welcomed the prospect of Putin returning to the Kremlin, had this to say about the new rearmament programme:


The Russian Orthodox Church says it fully supports Vladimir Putin’s initiatives on military reform and also rejects the allegations that the church is an intrinsically pacifist organization.

The cleric also highly valued the part of the article where Putin suggested more attention be paid to military and patriotic training in schools and, being a Church representative, expressed the readiness to take part in this process.

Chaplin also pointed out that in his article Putin gave the correct assessment of the current international situation and the challenges that Russia is facing.
“One cannot but agree with words that the instability zones are currently appearing in the world,the zones of artificially heated and controlled chaos and one can observe targeted attempts to create such zones near Russia’s borders and the borders of our allies,” Chaplin noted.

Greenies tweeting on a rooftop in London

The BBC reports about the latest Greenpeace stunt in London today:

Up to eight activists from environmental protest group Greenpeace climbed on to the roof of the National Gallery in London.

The campaigners said they were protesting against oil firm Shell's plans to drill for oil in the Arctic.

They unfurled a 40m (131ft) long banner from the roof bearing the picture of an oil rig and reading 'It's No Oil Painting'.

Scotland Yard said the protesters came down from the building at 20:15 GMT.

No arrests were made.

Greenpeace itself describes what took place on its website:

So our climbers have made sure that guests at the National Gallery are met with an unexpected picture when they arrive; a short while ago, they evaded security and are preparing to unfurl a huge banner with the words “It’s no oil painting”.  Our climber Hannah is tweeting from the rooftop using the hashtag #SaveTheArctic.
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"No arrests were made". One sort of wonders what would have happened if some ordinary people would have done the same thing and started tweeting from the rooftop of the National Gallery?

"The Not-So-Wast Conspiracy"

The Wall Street Journal puts the (at least partly fake) Heartland Institute documents stolen by Dr. Peter Gleick in perspective:

Given the coverage the story has generated, you'd think some vast conspiracy had been uncovered. Heartland is, according to the Associated Press, "one of the loudest voices denying human-caused global warming, hosting the largest international scientific conference of skeptics on climate change." The Vancouver Sun reports that it is "heavily funded by right-wing industrialist Charles Koch," while the Virginian-Pilot dubs it "the ideological center of the denial movement."

So how flush is Heartland? The documents show the group is expecting revenues of $7.7 million this year, mostly from private donations and grants. Mr. Koch's "heavy" funding came to $25,000 in 2011, though the Heartland "Fundraising Plan" has it hoping for an increase in 2012. To put those numbers in not-for-profit perspective, last year the Natural Resources Defense Council reported $95.4 million in operating revenues, while the World Wildlife Fund took in $238.5 million.

Press coverage has focused in particular on Heartland's plans to produce and distribute "educational material suitable for K-12 students on global warming that isn't alarmist or overtly political." Heartland is budgeting $200,000 this year for the effort, which in the past has "had only limited success," per one of the documents. Little wonder if teachers aren't returning Heartland's calls: Last year the World Wildlife Fund spent $68.5 million on "public education" alone.

As for "the largest international scientific conference of skeptics," Heartland will, according to the documents, spend all of $388,000 this year on the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. That's against the $6.5 million that the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change costs Western taxpayers annually, and the $2.6 billion the White House wants to spend next year on research into "the global changes that have resulted primarily from global over-dependence on fossil fuels."

In the pages of Rolling Stone last summer, Al Gore warned of the "Polluters and Ideologues [sic] . . . . spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year on misleading advertisements in the mass media." He had the wrong spenders.

Read the entire article here

PS

The fraud and theft committed by Dr. Gleick will almost certainly lead to a sharp increase of private donations to the Heartland Institute. This would of course be very welcome, as the institute does an excellent job when one considers its very modest financial resources.

New Polish report: Shale gas mining is safe

Shale gas mining, or "fracking", is a safe technology. That is the main conclusion of a soon to be published report by the Polish Geological Institute:

Shale gas mining will not damage the water supply or increase carbon emissions, finds an as yet unpublished report by the Polish Geological Institute.

The Dziennik Gazeta Prawna daily says it has seen the report prepared for the Ministry of Environment which concludes that apart from the noise from drilling, 'fracking' shale gas in Poland will not have negative environmental consequences.

Experts studied the environmental impact of the so-called fracking process performed in 2011 on one of the boreholes in the village Łebień in Pomerania, northern Poland.

From 2014, Warsaw wants to tap an estimated 5.3 trillion cubic meters of shale gas reserves. According to the US Energy Information Administration, Poland is sitting on more than 300 years of its domestic energy needs.

Read the entire article here

PS

It is good to know that greenie scaremongers, assisted by Russia´s Gazprom, have not succeeded in their anti shale gas propaganda. A recent poll shows that 73% of the Poles back shale gas mining. The new report by the Polish Geological Institute will probably convince an even greater number of Poles about the need to support this new source of their country´s future wealth.

Global warming: Smart tomatoes strike back

Is this the future?

Smart tomatoes seem ready to take over the planet when global warming has wiped out humanity.

While almost all other species are said to suffer or even be destroyed by the coming green armageddon, Indian scientists have now found out that tomatoes will outsmart global warming:

India: Tomatoes outsmart global warming

Researchers from Kakatiya and Osmania Universities have successfully developed tomato varieties that are able to cope with increasing temperatures and withstand the onslaught of various pests.

They have produced a variety of "smart" tomatoes that can survive in drought conditions and in soils affected by salinity.

PS

Who knows, maybe catastrophic global warming in reality is the result of a devilish scheme created by smart killer tomatoes?

The solar energy dream comes to an end in Germany

Germany has, thanks to its innovative companies and its industrious work force, so far been able to avoid the economic and financial crisis that has been - and still is - the curse of so many other western countries. And it is all the more remarkable that this has happened despite of the Merkel government´s less than helpful policies, such as e.g. the huge subsidies to totally useless solar energy.

However, as the German economic engine is beginning to show signs of slowing down, even the German government has began to realise that this waste of taxpayers´ money cannot continue for long anymore.

Bjørn Lomborg explains why dark clouds eclipse the sunny German dream:

Germany once prided itself on being the "photovoltaic world champion", doling out generous subsidies - totalling more than US$130 billion (Dh447.51bn), according to research from Germany's Ruhr University - to citizens to invest in solar energy. But now the German government is vowing to cut the subsidies sooner than planned, and to phase out support over the next five years. What went wrong?
There is a fundamental problem with subsidising inefficient green technology: it is affordable only if it is done in tiny, token amounts. Using the government's generous subsidies, Germans installed 7.5 gigawatts of photovoltaic (PV) capacity last year, more than double what the government had deemed "acceptable".
It is estimated that this increase alone will lead to a $260 increase in the average consumer's annual power bill.
According to Der Spiegel, even members of the chancellor Angela Merkel's staff are now describing the policy as a massive money pit. Philipp Rösler, Germany's minister of economics and technology, has called the spiralling solar subsidies a "threat to the economy".
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Solar power is at least four times more costly than energy produced from fossil fuels. It also has the distinct disadvantage of not working at night, when much electricity is consumed.In the words of the German Association of Physicists, "solar energy cannot replace any additional power plants". On short, overcast winter days, Germany's 1.1 million solar-power systems can generate no electricity at all. The country is then forced to import considerable amounts of electricity from nuclear power plants in France and the Czech Republic. When the sun failed to shine last winter, one emergency back-up plan powered up an Austrian oil-fired plant to fill the supply gap.

Indeed, despite the massive investment, solar power accounts for only about 0.3 per cent of Germany's total energy. This is one of the key reasons that Germans now pay the second-highest price for electricity in the developed world (exceeded only by Denmark, which aims to be the "world wind energy champion"). Germans pay three times more than Americans.

Moreover, this sizeable investment does remarkably little to counter global warming. Even with unrealistically generous assumptions, the unimpressive net effect is that solar power reduces Germany's CO2 emissions by about eight million tonnes - or about 1 per cent - for the next 20 years. When the effects are calculated in a standard climate model, the result is a reduction in average temperature of 0.00005°C (one twenty-thousandths of a degree Celsius, or one ten-thousandths of a degree Fahrenheit). To put it another way: by the end of the century, Germany's $130bn solar panel subsidies will have postponed temperature increases by 23 hours.

Using solar, Germany is paying about $1,000 per tonne of CO2 reduced. The current CO2 price in Europe is $8. Germany could have cut 131 times as much CO2 for the same price. Instead, the
Germans are wasting more than 99 cents of every euro that they put into solar panels.

It gets worse: because Germany is part of the EU Emissions Trading System, the actual effect of extra solar panels in Germany leads to no CO2 reductions, because total emissions are already capped. Instead, the Germans simply allow other parts of the EU to emit more CO2. Germany's solar panels have only made it cheaper for Portugal or Greece to use coal.
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Germans have paid about $130bn for a climate-change policy that has no effect on global warming. They have subsidised Chinese jobs and other European countries' reliance on dirty energy sources. And they have needlessly burdened their economy. As even many German officials would probably attest, governments elsewhere cannot afford to repeat the same mistake.

Read the entire article here

PS

What Lomborg says, also applies to the heavily subsidised wind power industry.