The New Nostradamus of the North

"Herman for President"

2012-02-23T15:44:00.001+01:00

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:

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

2012-02-23T10:57:00.002+01:00

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

2012-02-22T23:55:00.000+01:00

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.
.

"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"

2012-02-22T06:27:00.001+01:00

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

2012-02-20T18:26:00.001+01:00

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

2012-02-20T09:13:00.002+01:00

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

2012-02-19T23:00:00.000+01:00

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.

Warmist Schwarzenegger misinforming Indians about U.S. energy imports

2012-02-18T23:18:00.002+01:00

Former California governor Arnold Schwarzegger gave an interview to India´s NDTV television company during his recent visit to Delhi. The transcript of the interview shows that the warmist ex governor seriously thinks that India is going to achieve energy independence by installing solar panels developed by the former railway engineer R.K. Pachauri! Schwarzenegger also had some interesting things to say about the US dependence on foreign fuel.

This is what Indians should do according to the great energy and security "expert" Schwarzenegger:

We are going to go and create energy independence. We are not going to do this like the developed countries, where everyone has to beg for the grid to work, for electricity to arrive or for some power company to say, alright six weeks maybe we will install some energy in your part. No, I am going to go and develop a solar panel like Dr Pachauri is, where he took out a whole idea where to light a billion lives. That whole programme where he wants to go get people off kerosene lamps and have a solar panel, so they can have a light, they can have a stove and refrigerator etc. That's a whole new way of going that gives you energy independence, which other people don't have. They have to be slaves to the power companies now. And also India has a way of looking at the rest of the world and saying, why is for instance, America is relying 60 percent on fuel to come from outside? That makes the United States very vulnerable. So the national security goes down, as you rely more and more on this outside power.

The Terminator has probably been busy with too many greenie cocktail parties lately, because otherwise it is difficult to understand where he got his information about the "very vulnerable" US "relying 60 percent on fuel to come from outside".

A fact check could have spared Schwarzenegger from misinforming Indian television viewers. (But maybe the truth would have spoiled his environmentalist message?):

U.S. Energy Information Administration:

The United States imported about 49% of the petroleum, which includes crude oil and refined petroleum products, that we consumed during 2010. About half of these imports came from the Western Hemisphere. Our dependence on foreign petroleum has declined since peaking in 2005.

And some more facts:

The U.S. has reversed a two-decade-long decline in energy independence, increasing the proportion of demand met from domestic sources over the last six years to an estimated 81 percent through the first 10 months of 2011, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from the U.S. Department of Energy. That would be the highest level since 1992.
“For 40 years, only politicians and the occasional author in Popular Mechanics magazine talked about achieving energy independence,” said Adam Sieminski, who has been nominated by President Barack Obama to head the U.S. Energy Information Administration. “Now it doesn’t seem such an outlandish idea.”
The transformation, which could see the country become the world’s top energy producer by 2020, has implications for the economy and national security -- boosting household incomes, jobs and government revenue; cutting the trade deficit; enhancing manufacturers’ competitiveness; and allowing greater flexibility in dealing with unrest in the Middle East.

U.S. energy self-sufficiency has been steadily rising since 2005, when it hit a low of 70 percent, the data compiled by Bloomberg show

PS

Schwarzenegger´s description of R.K. Pachauri´s appearance in California some years ago is also interesting:

But I have seen him in California. He is like a rock star over there. People were listening to him like this, leaning forward, kind of inhaling and taking in every word that he said, because he is an extra ordinary human being, that has taken it upon himself, that I am going to lead an environment crusade, and go around the world and make sure we are going in the right direction, that is going to protect us from an international disaster.

It is of course possible that some of Pachauri´s most ecstatic followers in California were "kind of inhaling".

The BBC reruns Jonathan Dimbleby´s uncritical "An African Journey"

2012-02-18T15:03:00.003+01:00

The BBC is currently rerunning Jonathan Dimbleby´s "An African Journey". The three part series shows Dimbleby uncritically praising "not a continent of beggars but of industrious people". Barely a word about dictatorship, corruption or crime in Dimbleby´s fawning presentation.

Just one example:

At a party celebrating the Year of the Tiger, he learns how China's billion dollar deals have rebooted African economies, once dependent on Western aid and investment.

Dimbleby does not interview people like the South African professor and economist James Blignaut, who know that China’s African safari has a flip side:

China´s biggest interest in Africa is in her natural resources and not in her people. Oil from Sudan, Nigeria, Angola and Gabon and minerals from South Africa and Zimbabwe, timber and agriculture products from everywhere, to name but a few. China’s sudden interest in Africa is therefore not only in oil-rich countries, but rather in all forms of raw materials. In return for natural resources, Africa is offering China a lucrative offset market for her cheap manufactured products. These products, such as textiles, are replacing domestic industries.
In essence, Africa is exporting her mineral wealth to act as fuel and much needed materials for the Chinese expansion, while importing manufactured products that outcompete with domestic alternatives, leaving Africa’s trade balance with China in a deficit! This is not altogether a new phenomenon – it has happened over a many decades in Africa’s trade with North America and Europe, the only difference now is that Africa imported technologically advanced products from the West she did not produce herself whereas Chinese products do replace local products and undermine local industries and companies.
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Judging from the past, China is ultimately likely to begin to use its significant economic power for political ends. In other words, using political and economic
ties and contracts, it could pressurise African countries to support China’s political agenda - as it has done and continues to do to isolate Taiwan.
Coming now to the downright ugly side of the Chinese-Africa trade boom is China’s dubious human rights and environmental legacy, a legacy that is likely to blow over to Africa as China’s involvement in Africa increases. China’s close association with Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, for example, is a testimony of China’s seeming indifference to human rights abuses.

Neither does Dimbleby interview somebody like Raymond Hu, writing in Princeton´s American Foreign Policy:

Dissatisfaction with China’s close ties to corrupt African authorities also extends to other countries in an international context. Because China grants aid packages with “no strings attached”, oppressive dictatorial regimes have been able to subvert and survive Western efforts to initiate political reform. While Western nations have attempted to pass a UN arms embargo on the Sudanese government to stop the genocide in Darfur, China has sold $24 million worth of arms and $57 million worth of vehicles and equipment to Sudan. In Zimbabwe, Western sanctions to bring about reform were likewise undermined by China’s support to President Robert Mugabe’s regime in the form of $200 million worth of military vehicles and equipment.

Moral argument aside, the long-term political consequences of current Chinese investment practices in Africa will also be adverse. Already, signs of malcontent indicate that China needs to change its ways if it is to sustain its investment interests in Africa. In 2006, an opposition presidential candidate in Zambia ran his campaign on the idea of “Zambia for Zambians,” a platform in favor of expelling Chinese influence from the country. The disconnect between the official Chinese government rhetoric of “win-win” agreements and local realities will only entrench and perpetuate distrust of the Chinese. It will not take long for the common public to see through the veiled Chinese rhetoric of win-win situations that belies its real quest for natural resources and political control. China’s support of these rogue governments will inevitably harm its reputation on the global stage, reduce its credibility in international affairs, and degrade relations with its neighbors.

PS

Dimbleby´s uncritical approach is very typical for the BBC´s present Africa coverage in general. For some reason the BBC reporters also often treat Africans almost like children. One wonders why?

The shale gas revolution forces Gazprom to reduce prices in Europe

2012-02-18T06:15:00.000+01:00

Russia´s Gazprom has been forced to lower the price it charges for the gas delivered to European Union customers and Turkey:

Deputy chairman of Gazprom Aleksandr Medvedev said "our partners asked us to revise our prices and…what we did is correct the parameters of our formula, which lead to the relative price reduction of 10 percent on the average."
Medvedev said "the new price will ensure Russian gas remains competitive."
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Complaints by some EU countries that Gazprom was charging too high a price have been strengthened recently by the success in the U.S. of shale gas production.

The U.S. canceled plans to import liquefied natural gas from Russia after it became clear domestically produced shale gas could fill U.S. needs.

Russia reoriented that gas intended for the U.S. to markets in Europe but Poland, for example, is going ahead with exploration for shale gas Gaand Ukraine has already produced small amounts in its initial stage of development.

Gazprom continues to cast doubts on the viability of shale gas with Gazprom chief Aleksei Miller saying in his blog on the Gazprom website earlier this month "the so-called shale gas revolution is one and the same thing as American Hollywood."

Read the entire article here

PS

Miller may still continue to belittle the importance of shale gas. But the fact that Gazprom - which was hoping to dominate the European gas market - now has been forced to reduce the price in Europe, speaks volumes about the credibility of its childish denial of reality. And this is only the beginning of the shale gas revolution ...

EU institutions and agencies waste enormous sums of taxpayers´ money

2012-02-17T16:07:00.000+01:00

The huge bureaucracy called the European Union has 31 agencies, which are supposed to provide studies on issues ranging from drug addiction to trademark registration and police co-operation. Like most other EU institutions, these overstaffed and overpaid agencies, located in different member countries, live in a fantasy world of their own, without any connections to the real world of crisis and austerity measures.

Finally though, the European Court of Auditors is putting some pressure on these mostly useless institutions. According to a report sent by the Court to the European Parliament 11 of the 22 surveyed agencies could e.g. not properly account for half of their expences!

The EUobserver has more on the report:

The report - sent on Wednesday (15 February) to the European Parliament and seen by EUobserver - analyses the costs, financial management and "operational efficiency" of 22 out of the EU's 31 autonomous agencies.
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As most of the bodies' budgets are based on EU subsidies, the Court of Auditors looked at their book-keeping practices and found that "increased vigilance is required in respect to the establishment of an agency's budget."

Eleven out of the 22 surveyed could not properly account for half the expenses they filed in 2010, the auditors found.
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Another problem are the large "management boards" of some agencies - normally comprising around 30 representatives of member states, the European Commission, industry stakeholders and observers.
Three agencies mainly dealing with social and labour-related studies employ 84 members each on their respective management boards, as each country sends one government representative and two more representing employers and workers.

The auditor's report comes only a few days after Belgian eurosceptic MEP Derk Jan Eppink wrote a stinging analysis of how two other mini-institutions - the Brussels-based Committee of the Regions (CoR) and the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) waste huge sums of taxpayers´money.

Here is a summary of Mr. Eppink´findings:

Over the last eight years, the budgets of the EESC and CoR will have increased by some 50 percent, reaching €130 million and €86.5 million, respectively. There are around 50 officials at each committee with a minimum salary of €123.890 and six officials at each committee earning over €180,000 - more than the Dutch or UK prime minister.
Over half of the EESC's and the CoR's annual budgets are devoted to their members' expenses, travel costs and staff salaries and pensions.
In 2010, the 344 EESC members produced 181 opinions, which when divided with the annual budget means each opinion came at an average cost of €660,000, while no information is made available regarding how these opinions influenced legislation. If they did so at all.
Average travel expenses per member were €49,000, while a scheme whereby members receive 'lump sums' per meeting attended - without the need to prove they actually incurred the expenses - will still be in use until 2015. Why not now? The EESC remains elusive.
The main mandate of both committees is to "engage participation" from citizens. But there are many indications that neither committee is successful in this.

PS

This is the kind of information that mainstream media should provide to their readers in the various EU member countries. Regrettably the majority of media mainly follow the agenda set by the Brussels spin doctors. Kudos to the EUobserver for highlighting these important reports!

The harsh reality of wind and solar energy

2012-02-17T08:38:00.000+01:00

The harsh reality of green energy does not match its spin. Gary Lamphier, writing in the Edmonton Journal, tells us a story that the greenies want to sweep under the rug:

After all, when it comes to job creation, the green lobby isn't exactly dealing from strength. The renewable energy sector it so avidly promotes is full of investor disaster stories, bankruptcies, plant closures, job losses, red ink, foregone taxpayer loans, and allegations of political meddling.

It ain't a pretty picture, and it's one the enviro activists would rather sweep under a rug, safely out of public view. After all, the gritty truth undercuts their utopian dream of a clean, green energy future, one without fossil fuels.

Consider. Last year, the Wilderhill New Energy Index - a global index of nearly 100 green energy companies - plunged by 40 per cent. And that was no blip. Since the index was formed in January 2006, it has lost a third of its value.

Meanwhile, the Bloomberg Wind Energy Index, which includes 64 global companies, slumped by 22 per cent in 2011.

Denmark's Vestas Wind Systems, the world's largest wind turbine maker, shed two-thirds of its value last year. After turfing its CEO last fall, the company has repeatedly slashed its sales forecasts in the face of stiff competition from China.

Early this month, after Vestas posted a 2011 loss of $220 million US - four times bigger than analyst estimates - the company's chief financial officer quit. The company's stock closed Wednesday at just over $3, down from a 2008 high of nearly $50.

Solyndra, a California-based solar panel maker the U.S. administration enthusiastically supported - with Obama staging photo ops at the plant to affirm his green credentials - went bankrupt last fall, leaving taxpayers on the hook for a cool $535 million.

"Since the failure of the company, Obama's entire $80 billion clean-technology program has begun to look like a political liability for an administration about to enter a bruising re-election campaign," the Washington Post reported in December.

Read the entire article here

PS

The truth is that the wind and solar industries are totally dependent on tax subsidies for its existence. Fortunately the US Congress is beginning to realize that it is not worth wasting more tax payers´ money on these unprofitable and useless technologies. On Thursday it was reported that Congress would not be renewing a tax credit deal for wind energy projects.

"The arrest of Vladimir Putin"

2012-02-15T23:52:00.001+01:00

This video could vey well become reality in Russia in the not too distant future ...

Here is some background information:

"The Arrest of Vladimir Putin: A Report From The Courtroom" has been watched almost 2 million times on YouTube and republished to dozens of Russian blogs and websites.

Viewers have left more than 18,000 comments, including calls that the producer be awarded an Oscar for film editing.

The startlingly realistic clip, in the style of a Russian television news report, purports to show "former" Prime Minister Vladimir Putin being hauled into a Moscow courtroom to face charges including large-scale corruption and participating in a terrorist act with the purpose of intimidating the public and influencing the government.

The charge apparently refers to the 1999 apartment-building bombings that rocked Moscow and other Russian cities in the run-up to Putin taking over the presidency in 2000.

Free trade is not working

2012-02-15T16:01:00.001+01:00

I used to be an eager believer in international free trade. Not anymore. The kind of free trade that has led to huge unemployment, with industrial production moving to cheap labour countries in Asia, has not benefited the great majority of people in the western countries.

More and more people in the U.S. and Europe are beginning to realise what is happening. The American economist Ian Fletcher, who´s book "Free Trade Does Not Work" has received a lot of positive attention recently, here explains what is wrong with the present cult of free trade:

Free trade between e.g. the U.S. and Europe - possibly including countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand - where the economic, political and cultural systems are close to each other, could very well be a good option.

Unelected EU Commission President Barroso´s imperial dreams

2012-02-15T15:24:00.002+01:00

European Commission President José Barroso, who has been on a begging mission to China, has not forgotten to tell his hosts about his dreams of an imperial Europe:

"It is true that in many of our member states there have been student protests and strikes. This is normal in our open societies where people have a right to protest," he said.
He added that the crisis has prompted a new wave of integration, however, such as the fiscal treaty agreed last month by 25 EU countries.
"I want to make this very clear to Chinese public opinion. Because I understand when you see the news you may be putting some questions. Is the European Union really going to progress? I say: 'Yes. No doubt about it' ... Precisely because of the problems in the euro area the conclusion has been to further integrate and to complete the monetary union with a fiscal union and, I believe, in the future toward a political union."

Read the entire article here

What an insult to the struggling people of Greece - and demonstrators in other countries - who are fed up with the humiliating Brussels dictatorship, to talk about the massive demonstrations only as "student protests"! Who the hell does this unelected former maoist think he is, the crowned emperor of Europe? No Mr. Barroso, the only thing you will ever wear on your bald head is the old cheap toupé, not the imperial crown you are dreaming of!

The Beggars in Beijing reality show continues

2012-02-14T14:01:00.002+01:00

There seems to be no end to the Beggars in Beijing reality show. The latest visitors taking their begging bowl to the Chinese capital are the two unelected European Union Presidents, Herman van Rompuy and José Barroso. They are both well versed in the old Chinese tradition of kowtowing, and for former maoist Barroso a visit to Beijing must feel like a nostalgic home coming, but in spite of these credentials they will have to return to their downgraded "empire" without more than empty words from the EU´s "strategic partner":

China is ready to increase its participation in efforts to resolved the eurozone's debt crisis, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao has told European leaders at summit talks in Beijing.
Wen said on Tuesday that China was "full of confidence in its own future" and hoped to see Europe "maintain stability and prosperity" as well.
But Wen stopped short of saying whether China would buy bonds in a bailout fund designed to rescue debt-stricken EU countries.
Al Jazeera's Melissa Chang, reporting from Beijing, said that China had the potential to purchase a large amount of European bonds to help fight off the financial crisis, but had not done so due to doubts over whether its investment would generate sufficient returns.
"We have seen plenty of European delegates and envoys in the past few months come through here asking for assistance. And so far all that we have seen from China is a lot of words, but very little action," she said.
"The Chinese are not entirely confident that they will get their money's worth if they assist the Europeans."

However, the Belgian beggar, made a serious mistake by this thinly veiled threat:

Herman Van Rompuy, the European Union's top official, said the economies of the two sides were "so interdependent that change in the growth rate in one of the two strategic partners has a direct and palpable impact on the other one."

What the haiku poet actually told his hosts is, that "if you do not help us, our financial and economic crisis will soon start seriously hurting your growth, too". Not exactly the kind of language that beggars on a kowtowing mission should use in front of the eastern mandarins.

Read the entire article here

Merkel - "the great eurosceptic"?

2012-02-13T13:54:00.000+01:00

Dr. Richard North, having read this column by Mary Ellen Synon, offers an interesting analysis of what actually could be happening in Germany:

Still burdened by national "war guilt", Merkel cannot break out overtly. She has to be seen as a "good European". She must be seen to be supporting the euro and, more generally, the European Union. But the EU has become a prison. To develop further, Germany must break out its destructive embrace. And this is what we are seeing. It being done by creating the conditions for the destruction the single currency, or a major re-alignment, without Merkel leaving her fingerprints at the scene.

Such a "game plan" presents a contrast with the perceived wisdom. In this scenario, other countries leave of their own volition, or are forced out by the "market" or other extraneous pressures. It eventually leaves an independent Germany (or a Greater Germany grouping) free to follow its preferred domestic policies, without having been seen to be responsible for the break-up of the European construct.

Merkel, therefore, is the great eurosceptic. It will not be Cameron's Britain that will bring down the European Union, but Germany, escaping its shackles and redefining the post-war settlement. That is the game being played. Germany wants "out", and the rest of Europe is trying to keep her in.

A message of hope from the EU Commission to the people of Greece

2012-02-13T09:10:00.000+01:00

"the euro gives the EU’s citizens a tangible symbol of their European identity, of which they can be increasingly proud"

(Source: EU Commission)

The IPCC global warming hoax exposed by German energy expert

2012-02-12T14:26:00.000+01:00

The German energy expert, environmentalist and social democratic politician Fritz Vahrenholt, who holds a doctorate in chemistry, has caused quite a stir in his home country and internationally by his book "Die kalte Sonne" (The cold sun).

In this Der Spiegel interview Vahrenholt argues that the official United Nations (IPCC) forecasts on the severity of climate change are overstated and supported by weak science:

Vahrenholt: In my experience as an energy expert, I learned that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is more of a political than a scientific body. As a rapporteur on renewable energy, I witnessed how thin the factual basis is for predictions that are made at the IPCC. In one case, a Greenpeace activist's absurd claim that 80 percent of the world's energy supply could soon be coming from renewable sources was assumed without scrutiny. This prompted me to examine the IPCC report more carefully.
SPIEGEL: And what was your conclusion?
Vahrenholt: The long version of the IPCC report does mention natural causes of climate change, like the sun and oscillating ocean currents. But they no longer appear in the summary for politicians. They were simply edited out. To this day, many decision-makers don't know that new studies have seriously questioned the dominance of CO2. CO2 alone will never cause a warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. Only with the help of supposed amplification effects, especially water vapor, do the computers arrive at a drastic temperature increase. I say that global warming will remain below two degrees by the end of the century. This is an eminently political message, but it's also good news.
SPIEGEL: You make concrete statements on how much human activity contributes to climatic events and how much of a role natural factors play. Why don't you publish your prognoses in a professional journal?
Vahrenholt: Because I don't engage in my own climate research. Besides, I don't have a supercomputer in my basement. For the most part, my co-author, geologist Sebastian Lüning, and I merely summarize what scientists have published in professional journals -- just as the IPCC does. The book is also a platform for scientists who apply good arguments in diverging from the views of the IPCC. The established climate models have failed across the board because they cannot cogently explain the absence of warming.
SPIEGEL: You claim that the standstill has to do with the sun. What makes you so sure?
Vahrenholt: In terms of the climate, we have seen a cyclical up and down for the last 7,000 years, long before man began emitting CO2 into the atmosphere. There has been a warming phase every 1,000 years, including the Roman, the Medieval and the current warm periods. All of these warm periods consistently coincided with strong solar activity. In addition to this large fluctuation in activity, there is also a 210-year and an 87-year natural cycle of the sun. Ignoring these would be a serious mistake …
SPIEGEL: … but solar researchers are still in disagreement over whether the cycles you mention actually exist. What do you think this means for the future?
Vahrenholt: In the second half of the 20th century, the sun was more active than it had been in more than 2,000 years. This "large solar maximum," as astronomers call it, has contributed at least as much to global warming as the greenhouse gas CO2. But the sun has been getting weaker since 2005, and it will continue to do so in the next few decades. Consequently, we can only expect cooling from the sun for now.,

Most rational people agree with Vahrenholt, but such is the power of the political correctness that even his own party leaders avoid discussing his findings:

The book is a source of discomfort within Vahrenholt's party. No one with the SPD leadership is willing to comment on the theories of their prominent fellow party member, from former Environment Minister and current SPD Chairman Sigmar Gabriel to parliamentary floor leader Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who was given an advance copy of the book.
A lecture Vahrenholt was scheduled to give at the University of Osnabrück in northwestern Germany was recently cancelled.

This will, however, soon change, when more and more scientists, experts and other influential people join Vahrenholt in his condemnation of the IPCC hoax.

UN High-level Panel on Global Sustainability delivers a final report

2012-02-11T06:05:00.001+01:00

In August 2010, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon launched the High-level Panel on Global Sustainability (GSP) "that bring together renowned world figures to formulate a new blueprint for a sustainable future on a planet under increasing stress resulting from human activities".

The Panel, which was co-chaired by Finnish President Tarja Halonen and South African President Jacob Zuma, met a few times - with Zuma not present on most occasions - to hear what the bureaucrats and "experts", who actually wrote the report, had on their mind.

The GSP launched its final report, "Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing" on January 30 in Addis Ababa.

As was to be expected, there has more or less been silence after the launch. Who in the world would be interested in yet another compilation of UN "sustainability speak"?!

Here are a just a few excerpts to show you what was written in the name of these "renowned world figures":

The long-term vision of the High-level Panel on Global Sustainability is to eradicate poverty, reduce inequality and make growth inclusive, and production and consumption more sustainable, while combating climate change and respecting a range of other planetary boundaries. This reaffirms the landmark 1987 report by the World Commission on Environment and Development, "Our Common Future" (United Nations document A/42/427, annex), known to all as the Brundtland report.

But what, then, is to be done if we are to make a real difference for the world’s people and the planet? We must grasp the dimensions of the challenge. We must recognize that the drivers of that challenge include unsustainable lifestyles, production and consumption patterns and the impact of population growth.

The current global development model is unsustainable. We can no longer assume that our collective actions will not trigger tipping points as environmental thresholds are breached, risking irreversible damage to both ecosystems and human communities. At the same time, such thresholds should not be used to impose arbitrary growth ceilings on developing countries seeking to lift their people out of poverty.

It is time for bold global efforts, including launching a major global scientific initiative, to strengthen the interface between science and policy. We must define, through science, what scientists refer to as "planetary boundaries", "environmental thresholds" and "tipping points".

Most goods and services sold today fail to bear the full environmental and social cost of production and consumption. Based on the science, we need to reach consensus, over time, on methodologies to price them properly. Costing environmental externalities could open new opportunities for green growth and green jobs;

International governance for sustainable development must be strengthened by using existing institutions more dynamically and by considering the creation of a global sustainable development council and the adoption of sustainable development goals;

Note the key words and phrases:

unsustainable lifestyles, production and consumption patterns
The current global development model is unsustainable
"planetary boundaries", "environmental thresholds" and "tipping points"
Based on the science, we need to reach consensus, over time, on methodologies to price them (goods and services) properly
the creation of a global sustainable development council

What these "sustainability socialists" want is in reality to have some kind of world (socialist) government to decide our lifestyle, production, consumtion, markets and prices. Fortunately, their dream will never come true, but it will keep hundreds - if not thousands - of highly paid bureaucrats and "experts" busy planning the next major totally useless "sustainability" reports.

Carbon capture: The enormous waste of taxpayers´money continues in the EU

2012-02-10T14:38:00.003+01:00

The enormous waste of taxpayers´money in the name of fighting (non-existent) human caused global warming, continues in the European Union. Now we hear that the failed carbon capture and storage technology (CCS) is going to get another €1.37 billion:

Experimental technology to capture, store and bury carbon emissions in geological formations is in line to receive a payout of as much as €1.37 billion from the EU’s energy infrastructure package, EurActiv has learned.

The funding could prove controversial as carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is an unproven technology that critics say is not commercially viable, climate-friendly or safe.

Supporters on the other hand say CCS will be crucial to reducing the global warming impact of fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas, on which the International Energy Agency says the world will continue to rely for decades. The European Commission has already backed the technology to the tune of €1 billion.

António Correia de Campos, the rapporteur tasked with seeing the energy infrastructure package through the European Parliament, told EurActiv that “around 10%-15%” of the €9.1 billion funding in the legislation would be spent on the technology.

“CCS is by nature under-developed and by definition this leverage will be fundamental for it,” he said.

European CCS projects have been beset by delays, despite receiving billions of euros of EU funding.

Of 12 CCS demonstration plants due to begin operation in 2015, only between four and six are now expected to be up and running by 2020.

Yet there has been little public discussion about the allocation of CCS funding in the package and renewable energy grandees said the funding made no financial or policy sense.

“How can you build an infrastructure for something that has not been implemented yet?” said Arthouros Zervos, president of the European Renewable Energy Council, an industry group. “It would be another white elephant.”

“Even the people building CCS say it won’t be commercially viable until 2030,” he added, “and if you give the money to CCS you subtract it from other electricity infrastructure projects which Europe needs urgently.”

In 2008, the International Energy Agency estimated that, every tonne of CO2 captured through CCS would cost $40-90 (€30-€68), but current carbon prices are closer to $11 (€9).

Two CCS plants in Germany and Britain were recently cancelled, and many remaining projects are at risk, due to regulatory objections, funding shortfalls, public opposition, and questions about their contribution to mitigating climate change.

Even so, the EU’s 2050 Energy Roadmap still estimates that CCS will account for between 19%-32% of Europe’s emission cuts by 2050.

Read the entire article here
PS

The EU climate change madness has already cost European taxpayers billions of euros. However, the current failed EU leaders and the unelected Brussels bureaucrats, united by the fake global warming religion, could not care less. They continue wasting billions while ordinary taxpayers are suffering (also from other failed projects, like the common currency).

But the day of reckoning is getting closer, day by day.

Putin - A "miracle of God"?

2012-02-09T23:02:00.001+01:00

It is sad to see the head of the Russian Orthodox church and other religious leaders praise Russia´s ruler, former second rate KGB agent Vladimir Putin as a "miracle of God":

The head of the Russian Orthodox church on Wednesday called the 12 years of Vladimir Putin's rule a "miracle of God" and criticised his opponents, at a gathering where religious leaders heaped praise on the prime minister.
Putin wants support from spiritual figures for his campaign to win his third term in the Kremlin in a March 4 election. He is facing a growing protest movement and needs to consolidate his core support to avoid a runoff.
Putin has built his campaign on a contrast with the turbulent 1990s, when millions were thrown into poverty after the collapse of the Soviet Union while ethnic conflicts such as the war in Chechnya threatened to tear Russia apart.
Patriarch Kirill, a bearded cleric seen as a modernising figure in the Russian church, the largest in Orthodox Christianity, compared the period preceding Putin's ascent to power to the 1941 Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
"What were the 2000s then? Through a miracle of God, with the active participation of the country's leadership, we managed to exit this horrible, systemic crisis," Kirill told a meeting at the ancient St. Daniel's monastery.
"I should say it openly as a patriarch who must only tell the truth, not paying attention to the political situation or propaganda, you personally played a massive role in correcting this crooked twist of our history," Kirill said.
--
Kirill's speech was echoed by leaders of other faiths.
"You had it right, the fact that they (opposition protests) took place on Saturday suggests that it was not a Jewish business," Russia's chief rabbi, Berel Lazar, told Putin.
"We joked in the synagogue that it would have been better to come for a prayer on that day."
The gathering was also attended by four muftis from predominantly Muslim Russian regions, a Buddhist lama, an Armenian bishop and representatives of Roman Catholics and other Christian churches.
"Muslims know you, Muslims trust you, Muslims are wishing you success," said mufti Ravil Gainutdin. Mufti Ismail Berdiyev from the turbulent North Caucasus added: "You are the only person who has shown the United States its place."

Read the entire article here

One sect, led by a former prisoner who now calls herself "Mother Fotinya" goes even further in her praise of Putin:

"Miracle" in the village of Bol'šaja El'nja, Nižnyj Novgorod, Russia: icon of current Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said to shine and cry myrrh.

A few days ago Mother Fotinya (real name: Svetlana Frolova), the leader of a 'Putinist' Christian sect officially called Chapel of Russia's Resurrection, announced on her web page that a Putin’s icon had begun to мироточить (literally: to seep myrrh), meaning a religious phenomenon where the faithful believes to see myrrh appearing like tears in the eyes of an icon.

Mother Fotinya's all-female sect worships Putin as the reincarnation of Grand Prince Knyaz Vladimir and of apostle Paul.

PS

The Russian Orthodox church of course has a long tradition of co-operation with the Communist regime and the KGB, so maybe one should not be too surprised by the open praising of Putin.

The European "slow-motion train wreck" getting closer to its final destination

2012-02-09T11:36:00.000+01:00

While we witness the "slow-motion train wreck" (Nouriel Roubini´s description of the eurozone) getting closer to its final destination, it is good to know that at least one member of the European Parliament has seen this coming already long ago.

Vestas, the world´s biggest wind-turbine manufacturer, makes huge loss

2012-02-08T22:05:00.002+01:00

Now No. 1 loss maker

Vestas, the world´s biggest wind-turbine manufacturer, today delivered a terrible result for 2011, with an annual loss four times wider than analysts had estimated:

Three members of wind turbine maker's board, including chairman, announce their departure after declaring billion kroner loss

Wind turbine maker Vestas suffered pretax losses of 1.1billion kroner in 2011, far higher than the 450 million kroner loss which was expected.
The numbers were announced on Wednesday and were followed by the news that chairman Bent Erik Carlsen, his deputy chairman, and the company's head of finance will leave after the annual general meeting in March.
The company had already lowered its earnings forecast, but after the loss turned out to be almost triple what was expected, the company has now decided not to publish its expected number of orders for coming years.
“After input from several of the company’s large shareholders, we have decided to reduce the number of parameters that Vestas publishes information about in 2012,” the company said in a press release.
Vestas share prices tumbled almost 15 percent overnight, wiping about two billion kroner off the company’s value.

This comment to the article in the Copenhagen Post pretty well describes what has been happening in Denmark:

According to our current government, this is where the future growth of DK should be--green energy sources.......The government hates other industries and has done everything to ruin them such as high energy costs (greenhouses), NOx fees (cement), over the top animal rights and pesticide legislation (meat and farming), high petrol taxes, environmental zones (transport). The only growth I can see will be an increase in border shopping in Germany and Sweden.

Der Spiegel: "It's Time To End the Greek Rescue Farce"

2012-02-08T08:26:00.002+01:00

Stefan Kaiser, writing in Der Spiegel, has published a realistic account of the efforts to "rescue" Greece:

For the past two years, Greece has wrangled with the euro-zone states and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) over its so-called "rescue." Austerity measures have been agreed to, aid has been paid and private creditors have been forced to accept "voluntary" debt haircuts. Despite all this, Greece is in even worse shape today than it was then. Its economy is shrinking, the debt ratio is rising and the country and its banks have been cut off from capital markets. There isn't even the slightest sign that the situation might improve. Something has gone very wrong with this rescue.

But none of the protagonists seem to have grasped this. They continue to negotiate as if things are business as usual, they let one "final ultimatum" after the other pass and they persistently fail to realize that their discussions have started to verge on the absurd. It would be a lot better to end this farce.

--
For months, Greek government politicians as well as the so-called rescuers in Berlin, Paris and Brussels have all been deceiving themselves. Each supposedly final rescue package is followed by yet another, and austerity pledges aren't being adhered to.
That has a lot to do with domestic political considerations. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy must convey to their voters that they have the situation and, especially the Greeks, under control. Meanwhile, the government in Athens must, out of self-preservation, limit the burdens to its own people as much as possible.
That's why both sides repeatedly agree to promises that everyone knows they will not be able to keep. The current rescue package, for example, officially agreed at the euro summit at the end of October, already has to be improved because it has become too small.

Read the entire article here

Frau Merkel is still, according to fresh polls, very popular in Germany. However, that can change very fast, when people begin to realise what a weak leader she actually is. That realisation will come when the German economy slows down, at least partially as a consequence of her failed "green" energy policy and partially because of the China bubble beginning to burst.

Unelected EU bureaucrat threatening US and China on airline carbon emission tax

2012-02-08T04:57:00.002+01:00

The opposition against the European Union´s unilateral carbon emission scheme for international airlines is hardening. The US seems likely to join China in preventing its airlines to take part:

In December, the US lost an appeal before the EU Court of Justice against the application of the emission permit scheme to non-EU airlines.
In retaliation, the US Senate is considering a bill preventing US airlines from taking part in the EU scheme, which has already been approved by the House of Representatives. President Barack Obama could not stop it unless the EU gave something in return, White said.

China is also retaliating. On Monday its civil aviation authorities ordered its airlines not to pay for the EU permits. US, Chinese, Russian and Indian representatives are set to meet in Moscow on February 21 to mount a united front against the measure.

As we have said before, this is a fight the EU is going to lose. Unelected EU bureacrats, like Jos Delbeke, head of the European Commission's climate change department, are - as they usually are on most matters - seriously out of touch with reality:

But Delbeke stood firm. He noted that so far all foreign airlines have applied for the 85-per-cent quota of EU emission permits that are being handed out for free. Those which will refuse to pay for the remaining 15 per cent will be taken to court, he pledged.

Equally, countries taking retaliatory measures will be taken to the ICAO or even to, as a last resort, the World Trade Organization, Delbeke said.

'If there is retaliation we are going to react ... we are going to be damn serious,' he warned.

Read the entire article here

Putin´s backward turn of the clock

2012-02-08T04:27:00.001+01:00

Russia´s ruler Vladimir Putin tries to woo voters by new populist promises:

Vladimir Putin promised on Tuesday to turn back the clock and restore winter time in Russia if elected president, in a bid to woo millions of voters who have complained about waking up and going to work in darkness.

President Dmitry Medvedev, who will step down in May, scrapped winter time in 2011, arguing that switching the clock back and forth was bad for people's health. Medvedev's critics joked it was the incumbent's boldest move during his presidency.

"I am not going to stick to this decision. This is not some kind of a fetish. We can go back to it (winter time), but let's not do it in a hurry," Putin told a meeting of volunteers who will campaign on his behalf.

Putin is expected to win the March election but is facing growing protests from urban Russians unhappy with his decision to seek a third presidential term. The demonstrations also focused on accusations of fraud in December's parliamentary election, won by Putin's party.

In another populist move Putin also pledged to reduce the number of government cars using flashlights, which give them the right to ignore traffic rules and bypass traffic jams - a major irritant for Russian motorists.

Read the entire article here

However, it is not likely that the growing number of critics will be convinced by Putin´s new promises. They know that the entire Putin era has been one disastrous backward turn of the clock.

The end of a failed presidency: "The Island President" resigns

2012-02-07T13:30:00.001+01:00

"The Island President" - Another total failure

No more underwater cabinet meetings in the Maldives. The darling of the international AGW cultists, Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed, resigned today following weeks of sometimes violent public protests over his controversial order to arrest a senior judge:

It marked a stunning crash for Nasheed, a former human rights campaigner who defeated the nation's longtime ruler in the country's first multiparty election. Nasheed was also an environmental celebrity, traveling the world to persuade government's to combat the climate change that could send sea levels rising and inundate his archipelago nation.

Nasheed fell out of public favor after he ordered the military to arrest Abdulla Mohamed, the chief judge of the Criminal Court.

The arrest came after the judge ordered the release of a government critic, calling his arrest illegal.

Read the entire article here

Maybe Nasheed now will have more time to enjoy his membership in the Legacy club for very affluent Asians?

The end of the failed global warming project gets closer

2012-02-07T12:53:00.000+01:00

The end of another major failed EU (and UN) project is also getting closer:

“THE CO2 LIES … pure fear-mongering … should we blindly trust the experts?”

That’s what Germany’s leading daily Bild (see photo) wrote in its print and online editions today, on the very day that renowned publisher Hoffmann & Campe officially released a skeptic book – one written by a prominent socialist and environmental figure.
This is huge. More than I ever could have possibly imagined. And more is coming in the days ahead! The Bild piece was just the first of a series.

Mark this as the date that Germany’s global warming movement took a massive body blow."

Read the entire blog post here

The end of the failed euro project is getting closer day by day

2012-02-07T12:18:00.003+01:00

The final failure of the political euro project is getting closer day by day. And it is not only the eurozone countries that are being hurt:

A eurozone recession could almost halve Chinese growth this year, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The IMF forecasts China's economy will grow by 8.2% this year - but warns that a recession in the eurozone could cut this to 4.2%.

It said Beijing should get ready to inject billions of dollars into the economy to fend off any downturn.

China's economy grew by 9.2% in 2011, but growth was slowed by Beijing to avoid over-expansion.

Read the entire article here

Austerity programmes are worsening the situation in several EU member countries:

Romania's prime minister quit on Monday after a series of at-times violent nationwide protests against budget cuts and declining living standards, as deepening political turmoil fueled by Europe's prolonged economic crisis spreads across the Continent.

Thousand of Romanians have taken to the wintry streets of Bucharest and other cities in recent weeks to vent their anger at the center-right administration of Emil Boc, who has implemented tough austerity measures in an effort to shore up state finances.

Neighboring Slovakia, also hit by Europe's downturn, was shaken on Friday by the largest protests since the end of communism there in 1989, as people demonstrated against alleged government corruption against a backdrop of cuts to health care, transportation and other state services.

Such upheavals are increasingly calling into question the longer-term political viability of the kind of austerity programs prescribed by the European Union and International Monetary Fund for Europe's struggling and indebted nations.

In Greece, whose debt problems have dragged on the entire euro zone, politicians on Monday struggled to reach agreement on a set of painful steps required for the country to avoid default with a second, large international bailout package.

But the leader of the most powerful - and succesful - eurozone country, Germany, still keeps on repeating her mantra: "There is no crisis of the Euro itself, there is a debt crisis."

Frau Merkel - and her assistant M. Sarkozy and almost all other minor EU leaders - refuse to recognise that there would NOT be a euro/debt crisis of the kind we are now experiencing without the euro. But sooner or later they - or at least their successors - have will have to. And that will be the end of a failed political project.

A f(l)ight the EU will lose

2012-02-06T22:27:00.000+01:00

This Air China plane - rightly - refuses to pay!
(image by Wiki)

The Chinese government has made a very rational and wise decision:

China said on Monday it was forbidding its airlines from joining a European Union carbon emissions scheme to protect the climate. The companies now face fines or may even be barred from landing at EU airports. The dispute comes as the EU is looking to China to help tackle the euro debt crisis.

The Civil Aviation Administration of China said in a statement on its website that the rules "contravene the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and international civil aviation regulations."

Since January 1, all airlines are required to buy certificates for the carbon dioxide they emit through landings and takeoffs in the European Union. Airlines that fail to comply face fines and may even be banned from landing at airports in the EU.
The China Air Transport Association (CATA) estimates that the EU scheme will cost Chinese airlines some $120 million in the first year alone, and that the amount could triple by 2020.
The dispute comes at a sensitive time for the EU, which is wooing China, a major holder of foreign reserves, to invest in bailout funds to help tackle the euro debt crisis. Chinese and EU leaders are due to hold a summit next week.

Read the entire article here

This is a fight that the European Union will lose. However, as there seems to be no limit at all for the stupidity of the EU decisions makers, it may take some time before the Europeans will be forced to withdraw their empty threats.

Putin has blood on his hands

2012-02-06T04:50:00.000+01:00

No wonder that opposition against the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is growing, both in Russia and internationally. The former third rate KGB agent has more blood on his hands than most of his contemporary "colleagues":

No one knows exactly how many people have already died. The UN estimated 5,400 in December, then stopped counting as the fighting intensified. Thousands more have been beaten, tortured and jailed. I heard the horror stories myself, visiting Syria a few weeks into the uprising.That December death toll had doubled since early October, when Russia and China first vetoed a UN resolution threatening sanctions against the regime. On Saturday, these two autocracies – both wary of foreign intervention given their own problems with restless minorities – combined forces again to prevent a watered-down resolution being passed.
In actual fact, opposition was led by Russia.
---
But although the former KGB comrades running the country have good cause to worry about their own protest movement, their support for al-Assad is far more cynical.
Syria is the biggest importer of Russian weapons in the Middle East – so the odds are that bullets aimed at the heads of children and shells setting houses aflame in Homs are Russian-made. It takes an incredible 10 per cent of Russia’s global arm sales.
Just last month, a Russian cargo ship laden with ammunition arrived in the Syrian port of Tartus, while the two nations signed a £420million deal for military aircraft. Russia has refused to bend to diplomatic pressure to stop fuelling the violence and volatility. Little wonder its flag has been burned in cities at the centre of the uprising.
Additionally, as Russian oil revenues dwindle it has spent heavily in Syria, drilling wells and building a gas processing plant – investments valued at £15billion. When I visited Syria, I was told there were also Russian computer experts helping hunt online opposition activists.
Read the entire Daily Mail article here

David Hearst, writing in the Guardian, thinks that Putin has completely misread the situation:

Not for the first time Putin's political antennae are failing him. If he calls the white ribbons Russian protesters were wearing "condoms" and if he continues to believe that the extraordinary domestic protest he is facing has all been staged by the US state department, there is little chance of him seeing the turmoil in Syria differently. Putin's deadly enemy is the isolation in which he lives.

It is time for Obama to reset the reset.

Tens of thousands of Russians march against the Putin regime

2012-02-05T12:36:00.000+01:00

This Al Jazeera report also includes some footage of the much smaller Kremlin-orchestrated pro Putin demonstration

The opposition against the criminal Putin regime in Russia is growing fast now:

Their frozen breath rising in the brutally frigid air, tens of thousands of protesters marched through downtown Moscow on Saturday to keep up the pressure on Prime Minister Vladimir Putin one month before a presidential election that could extend his rule for six more years.

The protesters have few illusions that they can drive Putin from power now, but for the first time in years Russians are challenging his control and demanding that their voices be heard.

Wrapped in furs or dressed for the ski slope, as many as 120,000 people turned out for the third and perhaps largest mass demonstration since Putin's party won a parliamentary election Dec. 4 with the help of what appeared to be widespread fraud.

Read the entire article here

"Earth Hour Beyond the Hour" 2012 - One "inspiring story"

2012-02-05T07:18:00.001+01:00

North and South Korea by night
(wikipedia)

The preparations for the 2012 Earth Hour are in full swing. The Earth Hour website wants people to
"find out what’s happening around the world and hear some inspiring stories from countries and territories that have already taken Earth Hour Beyond the Hour".

However, for some strange reason the organizers have chosen not to include the most succesful "inspiring story" from the country that already for decades has "taken Earth Hour Beyond the Hour":

North Korea's capital faces its worst electricity shortages in years just as a new leadership takes power in the impoverished state and pushes ahead with lavish building projects to celebrate the centenary of its founder's birth.

The Pyongyang-based diplomat, who asked not to be named, said the city of 3 million and home to the leadership elite, has seen daily power supplies almost evaporate as freezing winter temperatures bite.

"Embassies and others with generators are using them most of the time to compensate both for poor quality and cuts, and I can tell you that power problems are a main issue of discussion," said the diplomat, one of a small number of foreigners allowed to live in the country.

"We certainly assess that there is more darkness on the streets and in the residential blocks in the evening than before/during the mourning period (for Kim Jong-il)."

The North is also struggling with chronic food shortages, with United Nations' food agencies estimating nearly 3 million people will need food assistance this year.

Media reports this week said that the North's main ally China sent food shipments after Kim Jong-il's death to stabilize the new leadership under his son.

Read the entire article here

Cameron faces revolt by tory MPs about wind power subsidies

2012-02-04T23:14:00.002+01:00

With the extreme warmist Chris Huhne gone as energy secretary, it appears that more rational forces are gaining ground in UK politics:

A total of 101 Tory MPs have written to the Prime Minister demanding that the £400 million-a-year subsidies paid to the “inefficient” onshore wind turbine industry are “dramatically cut”.

The backbenchers, joined by some MPs from other parties, have also called on Mr Cameron to tighten up planning laws so local people have a better chance of stopping new farms being developed and protecting the countryside.
---
Critics say wind farms are inefficient because the wind cannot be guaranteed to blow at times of greatest energy demand. They are also said to be unsightly, blighting the landscape.
Wind farms are also accused of forcing up energy bills while swallowing disproportionate amounts of taxpayer-funded subsidies.
The Tory MPs, including several of the party’s rising stars as well as former ministers, say it is wrong that hard-pressed consumers must pay for the expansion of onshore wind power.
In the letter sent to No 10 Downing Street last week, which has been seen by The Sunday Telegraph, the MPs say they have become “more and more concerned” about government “support for onshore wind energy production”.
“In these financially straitened times, we think it is unwise to make consumers pay, through taxpayer subsidy, for inefficient and intermittent energy production that typifies onshore wind turbines,” they say.

Read the entire article here
According to a Downing Street spokesman, the Government is proposing "a cut for onshore wind subsidies to take into account the fact that costs are coming down", but the same spokesman still clings to the Cameron government´s stupid green mantra: “We need a low carbon infrastructure and onshore wind is a cost effective and valuable part of the diverse energy mix".

The fact is, as the economist Ruth Lea, recently pointed out in a report, "there is no economic case for wind-power" - neither is there an environmental case. Maybe somebody should send Dr. Lea´s report to Downing Street?

Schwarzenegger telling Indians fairy tales about "booming" green economy in California

2012-02-04T18:09:00.001+01:00

“This is how they greeted me in Delhi", wrote the Terminator on his Twitter account

"The measures taken in California have brought the state in the forefront of green movement in the US. Green economy is booming with 10 times more jobs in green sector and 40 percent more energy efficiency."

However, the Terminator appears to have a rather selective view of the "booming" California economy. Here are some facts which he chose not include in his keynote speech:

In the Bay Area as in much of the country, the green economy is not proving to be the job-creation engine that many politicians envisioned. President Obama once pledged to create five million green jobs over 10 years. Gov. Jerry Brown promised 500,000 clean-technology jobs statewide by the end of the decade. But the results so far suggest such numbers are a pipe dream.
--
Federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed, government records show. Two years after it was awarded $186 million in federal stimulus money to weatherize drafty homes, California has spent only a little over half that sum and has so far created the equivalent of just 538 full-time jobs in the last quarter, according to the State Department of Community Services and Development.
--
Job training programs intended for the clean economy have also failed to generate big numbers. The Economic Development Department in California reports that $59 million in state, federal and private money dedicated to green jobs training and apprenticeship has led to only 719 job placements — the equivalent of an $82,000 subsidy for each one.

PS

Maybe the Terminator was actually thinking about a new kind of "booming" green economy waiting to become reality?:

Last week, more than 200 prisoners at California’s notorious San Quentin State Prison turned out for a “green jobs” fair. The soon-to-be-released felons were greeted by representatives from several nonprofit groups and training programs, all offering advice and information about the ecologically friendly employment opportunities that supposedly await the men beyond the prison's gates.
The inmates of San Quentin also took part in psychobabble discussion groups. An examination of the topics presented included growing your own food will save money; watching plants grow will develop patience; gardening will teach tolerance toward plants and people; and another that literally promised, “smelling the plants changes behavior.”
--
The way utopian-minded non-profits like Planting Justice and Insight Garden Program see the world is, if we’ll just give an ex-con a bag of vegetable seeds upon release, he’ll grow his own food, save money, be more patient and tolerant, his overall behavior will forever be altered, and his criminal ways will be a distant image in the rearview mirror of life.

If only it were so easy.

Forgive me for being cynical, but my antenna is way up. Seems to me, if anything, Planting Justice and the Insight Garden Program may be unknowingly preparing some of these prisoners to become master growers of marijuana and poppy plants.

Read the entire article here

German climatologists: The extreme cold weather in Europe is due to global warming!

2012-02-03T18:59:00.002+01:00

The deep freeze has already claimed over 200 lives in Europe, with the death toll raising to 100 in Ukraine only. Forecasters are warning that the cold weather will tighten its grip at the weekend.

Luckily, German climatologists at the Research Unit Potsdam of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research have found out the reason for the extreme cold: Global warming!

Their study has been published in the scientific journal Tellus A:

Even if the current weather situation may seem to speak against it, the probability of cold winters with much snow in Central Europe rises when the Arctic is covered by less sea ice in summer. Scientists of the Research Unit Potsdam of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association have decrypted a mechanism in which a shrinking summertime sea ice cover changes the air pressure zones in the Arctic atmosphere and impacts our European winter weather. These results of a global climate analysis were recently published in a study in the scientific journal Tellus A.

We can be assured that these innovative German scientists will be able to "decrypt a mechanism" showing that even the coming of a new ice age is due to global warming!

When it is really cold, do not count on gas deliveries from Gazprom!

2012-02-03T09:43:00.000+01:00

When it is really cold - and the need for gas is at its greatest - do not count on deliveries from Russia´s Gazprom!:

RWE AG (RWE.XE) unit Supply & Trading is getting around 30% less gas than usual from Russia, an RWE spokeswoman told Dow Jones Newswires, after national operators in Poland and Austria reported declining delivery volumes from gas giant OAO Gazprom (GAZP.RS) amid severe cold weather.
In Germany, a spokesman for Wingas--the country's second-largest importer of gas and a 50-50 joint venture between German chemicals giant BASF SE's (BAS.XE) Wintershall unit and Gazprom--said earlier Thursday that there were noticeable reductions in Russian deliveries, but that these are hard to quantify. He also said that Gazprom had previously notified customers that there may be reductions in deliveries during the cold weather.

Read the entire article here

Merkel in China: "The euro has strengthened Europe"

2012-02-03T05:11:00.002+01:00

Europe´s de facto ruler, German chancellor Angela Merkel, who is on a kowtowing visit to China, has been extolling the virtues of the common European currency:

"I want to tell you: The euro has strengthened Europe," Ms Merkel said in a speech at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, one of the country's leading academic institutions, which functions as a think-tank for the government. "This is not a crisis of the euro, it is a debt crisis and a crisis of different levels of competitiveness," she said.

At the same time the IMF has warned that the recession in Merkel´s "strengthened Europe" will slow the global economy this year: The 17 nations that share the euro will shrink 0.5 percent this year.

However, we should always remember Merkel´s rule number one: Even if Greece and a couple of other euro countries would go bankrupt, it is NEVER the fault of the eternally excellent, political euro.

Whether Frau Merkel was able to convince her Chinese hosts, remains to be seen.

The new Greenpeace mega yacht on its way to the sunny Caribbean

2012-02-02T21:02:00.001+01:00

After a brief stop in New York the new Greenpeace mega yacht is now on its way to the Caribbean

Just as we expected, the new Greenpeace yacht Rainbow Warrior III is joining all the other mega yachts in Florida and the Caribbean for the winter months. The Greenpeace yacht is now - after a brief stop in New York - on its way to Fort Lauderdale and St. Petersburg. From Florida the global launch tour continues to the blue and sunny waters of the Caribbean, and from there on to Brasil. (The Rainbow Warrior will probably not make it to the Rio Carnival, which opens already on February 17th this year, but there is Carnival all year round in the "world´s party capital"!)

No wonder, that the "activists" on board are excited. Here is the account of one cruise participant:

What a huge privilege to be aboard the ship and for the Atlantic crossing no less!
Gazing out at the hills and islands of Grand Canaria slip into the distance with Penny, the bosun, she explained that it’d take about two weeks to cross the Atlantic (our deadline to get to NY is Jan 29th), spend a few weeks in the US and then head on to Brazil. It was encouraging to hear the timeline and confirm I’ll head to Brazil with the ship!

And now I’m in my bunk, freshly haven taken a hot shower in my own cabin and about to head to bed–the prospect of 9 hours of sleep sounds amazing. I’ve felt a bit lightheaded all day and wondered if it’s exhaustion or seasickness but I’m feeling pretty confident it’s just exhaustion and probably a bit of dehydration from all the traveling. On a similar note, I realized my lunch today was the first proper meal I’ve eaten since last Wednesday night in Madison.
I’m still in amazement that I’m here. Penny pinched me earlier to confirm it was real.

In other blog posts the happy Greenpeace activist relates pleasant encounters on the way to New York:

Dolphins! We watch as eight dolphins jump, glide and dart mere feet in front of the bow, playing in the momentum of our forward motion and the early morning light. After ten minutes about twenty dolphins had rendezvoused at the bow while another dozen jumped in crescent shaped arches to our starboard. A beautiful sunrise, dolphins and sailing on the ocean–a pretty fantastic way to start the day!
---
I was in the perfect place when Lila came out from the bridge pointing to port and exclaiming that there were whales.

Dan slowed the ship and made an announcement over the PA so the rest of the crew could partake in such a treasured and rare occasion. For the next twenty minutes or so we watched the whales occasionally surface and blow air creating huge swaths of glassing rings on the water in their wake. How beautiful and magnificent!

Oh boy, it´s tough to be a Greenpeace activist these days!

BBC uses former Kremlin adviser as main consultant for series on Putin´s Russia

2012-02-02T15:49:00.001+01:00

The BBC offers Vladimir Putin a helping hand

The once great BBC again shows its true colours. The overall narrative in a new documentary series on Russia is slanted towards the country´s corrupted - and according to many observers criminal - dictator Vladimir Putin. No wonder, because the main consultant to the series, former BBC Moscow correspondent Angus Roxburgh, worked for three years from 2006 as an adviser to the Russian government:

Angus Roxburgh is well known to the British public as a former BBC Moscow correspondent. Much more relevant is the fact that Mr Roxburgh was a public relations consultant to the Kremlin for three years between 2006 and 2009. I have no doubt that he is a man of integrity, but it is profoundly shocking that the BBC should even have considered using him, given the nature of his previous employment.
Just imagine the outcry if the BBC were to employ President Ahmadinejad’s former spin consultant when making a film about Iran, or a former Tory central office type when making a film about David Cameron in a British election year.
So why is Roxburgh acceptable? I have been hearing very sad and alarming accounts about the BBC’s coverage of Putin’s Russia for over a decade. Those wanting to learn more can read an article written by the former BBC producer Masha Karp in Standpoint magazine in November 2010, which tells how her programme about the death of Alexander Litvinenko was suppressed by the World Service.
There are other such stories. As The Guardian correspondent Luke Harding records in his recent book, Mafia State, “the BBC Moscow bureau in particular is extremely reluctant to report on stories that might offend the Kremlin”.
The elections on March 4 are of huge importance. If he wins, Vladimir Putin can look forward to a further 12 years in power, making him the longest-serving Russian leader since Stalin. Some good judges believe that this outcome might plunge Russia into a new dark age. How fortunate for Putin that he has a useful idiot in Jonathan Powell and a fearful news organisation like the BBC to make life easy for him.

Read the entire Telegraph article here

The deadly deep freeze in Eastern Europe continues

2012-02-02T08:24:00.002+01:00

The deadly deep freeze in Eastern Europe continues:

RESCUE helicopters have evacuated dozens of people from snow-blocked villages in Serbia and Bosnia as the death toll from a severe cold spell in Eastern Europe climbed to 83.

Temperatures fell to -32C in some areas, parts of the Black Sea froze near the Romanian coastline and rare snow fell on Croatian islands in the Adriatic Sea.
In Bulgaria, 16 towns recorded their lowest temperatures since records began 100 years ago as four more people were reported dead from hypothermia.
In central Serbia, choppers pulled out 12 people, including nine who went to a funeral but then could not get back over icy, snow-choked roads.
Two more people froze to death in the snow and two others are missing, bringing that nation's death toll to five.
''The situation is dramatic, the snow is up to five metres high in some areas, you can only see rooftops,'' said Dr Milorad Dramacanin, who participated in the helicopter evacuations.
Two helicopters were also used to rescue people and supply remote villages in northern Bosnia.
Some villages have had no electricity for days and crews were working around the clock trying to fix power lines.
Ukraine alone reported 43 deaths, mostly homeless people.

The extremely cold weather also continues in Finland, with the coldest day of the year in northern Finland:

Yet another cold record for this winter was set in Kiutaköngäs near Kuusamo, where the temperature plunged to -38.7 degrees Celsius on Wednesday morning.

And this is only the beginning. For the weekend temperatures over - 40 degrees are forecasted in northern Finland!
PS
It cannot take long before we hear the first reports by AGW warmists that this coldspell is all happening because of global warming.

"It’s a complete myth that Putin’s Russia is stable"

2012-02-01T22:42:00.000+01:00

The Robert Amsterdam website is one of the best sources of information about Russia. The interview with German businessman Franz J. Sedelmayer, who knows Russia and Putin better than most Europeans, is another proof of that:

In this exclusive interview, German businessman Franz J. Sedelmayer discusses his decades-long dispute with the Russian government, challenging Russia’s sovereign immunity, and the link between state corruption and the current environment of civil unrest in Russia.

I have picked a couple of excerpts from this must-read article.

Sedelmayer on Putin:

Well there is a nice phrase that describes what happened to Putin: “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
When I worked with Putin, he was known for two things: being honest and being loyal to his boss, who at that time was Mayor Sobchak. Putin would do absolutely anything for Sobchak, including covering up his corruption – and it was incredible, he did a very good job at it. It was this type of display of loyalty that eventually landed him his first top job in Moscow, and I think essentially that was the role he was originally expected to play by Yeltsin and his family.
If Putin would really be reelected as president in March 2012 he will, in order to stay in control for the whole duration of his term, restrict the freedom of the Russian people even more harsh; possibly to rival the situation as it has existed under the communists in the 1970’s. The Russian people are fully aware of that danger!
--
The crisis in Russia is not just limited to Putin the person, but the people who work around him. By nature, a dominant and charismatic personality like Putin is not going to surround himself with very capable people. That actually describes the whole situation in Russia today, whether you are talking about the FSB, the bureaucracy, or the nachalniki that control the cities and regions. These are not exactly the brain surgeons and rocket scientists of Russia – these are people who jumped on the bandwagon of Putin’s party, just like the same type of people who jumped on the bandwagon of the Communist Party for decades.

Sedelmayer on foreign investment in Russia:

Look, the truth is that Russia’s image as a destination for foreign investment is terrible, and I don’t care about all the positive things that any Western government, including the United States, has to say about how great the country is, how it is moving in the right direction, etc. And the American “reset policy” in particular has failed miserably in bringing any progress to Russia that continues to fail to protect people’s property and freedom.
A normal businessperson today would not invest a dime in Russia. The only companies that are able to invest are multinational corporations of the size that they don’t care if they lose their investment. On the one hand, the investment is either relatively small in the terms of the company’s overall portfolio, and on the other, they don’t care if they lose the money because it is not their money but rather that of the shareholders. These guys can go out there and take all the risks, and then worry about handling the disputes among shareholders and auctioneers in the event that they lose the investment, but in no case are they making any investment that would cause the end of company. It seems strange some shareholders have not woken up to that reality, yet! But when you talk about small and mid-sized companies, there is no way they would take the risk to invest in Russia when there is no way to recover debts.

Sedelmayer on stability in Putin´s Russia:

It’s a complete myth that Putin’s Russia is stable. The lack of control over the country is the same as back in the Czar’s days – “the heavens are high and Moscow is far.” It is sheer logistics that do not allow a vertical line of power from the Kremlin to all the cities and the villages in the faraway regions, requiring Moscow to relinquish wide ranging discretion to locals.
What Putin has done essentially is to strike a deal with anybody in the regions that doesn’t step on his feet and or on the feet of the federal government, and then this or that governor or mayor is allowed to fill his own pockets without any oversight from the federal government. But the moment that they mount an opposition to the center, no matter how small it might be, Putin and his people will do anything possible to break it up.

New British study: There is no economic or environmental case for wind power

2012-02-01T07:06:00.003+01:00

Offshore wind parks are indordinately expensive

There is no economic case for wind power. Neither is there a case for cutting CO2
emissions by using wind power. These are the two main conclusions in a new study ("Electricity Costs: The Folly of Wind Power") by the renowned economist Ruth Lea, published by the independent think tank Civitas.

These are the inconvenient facts about wind power that both the British government and other European governments so far have chosen to ignore:

Onshore wind looks relatively competitive on the MM (engineering consultants Mott MacDonald) data. But MM exclude the additional costs associated with wind-power. When allowance is made for these additional costs, the technology ceases to be competitive for both near-term and medium-term projects.
Offshore wind (even before allowing for additional costs) and Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technologies are inordinately expensive.

Nuclear power and gas-fired CCGT are therefore the preferred technologies for generating reliable and affordable electricity. There is no economic case for wind-power.

Wind-power is also an inefficient way of cutting CO2 emissions, once allowance is made for the CO2 emissions involved in the construction of the turbines and the deployment of conventional back-up generation. Nuclear power and gas-fired CCGT, replacing coal-fired plant, are the preferred technologies for reducing CO2 emissions. (Chapter 3)

Wind-power is therefore expensive (chapter 2) and ineffective in cutting CO2 emissions (chapter 3). If it were not for the renewables targets set by the Renewables Directive, wind-power would not even be entertained as a cost-effective way of generating electricity and/or cutting emissions. The renewables targets should be renegotiated with the EU.

Some additional facts about why wind power is not effective in cutting CO2 emissions:

At first glance it could be assumed that wind-power could play a major part in cutting CO2 emissions. Once the turbines are manufactured (an energy-intensive business in itself) and installed then emissions associated with the electricity could be expected to be zero - as indeed for nuclear power.

But, as pointed out in chapter 2, wind-power is unreliable and intermittent and requires conventional back-up plant to provide electricity when the wind is either blowing at very low speeds (or not at all) or with uncontrolled variability (intermittency). Clearly the CO2 emissions associated with using back-up capacity must be regarded as an intrinsic aspect of deploying wind turbines. This is all the more relevant given the relatively high CO2 emissions from conventional plants when they are used in a back-up capacity.

As energy consultant David White has written:
"…(fossil-fuelled) capacity is placed under particular strains when working in this supporting role because it is being used to balance a reasonably predictable but fluctuating demand with a variable and largely unpredictable output from wind turbines.

Consequently, operating fossil capacity in this mode generates more CO2 per kWh generated than if operating normally."

"…it seems reasonable to ask why wind-power is the beneficiary of such extensive support if it not only fails to achieve the CO2 reductions required, but also causes cost increases in back-up, maintenance and transmission, while at the same time discouraging investment in clean, firm generation."6

In a comprehensive quantitative analysis of CO2 emissions and wind-power, Dutch physicist C. le Pair has recently shown that deploying wind turbines on "normal windy days" in the Netherlands actually increased fuel (gas) consumption, rather than saving it, when compared to electricity generation with modern high-efficiency gas turbines.7,8 Ironically and paradoxically the use of wind farms therefore actually increased CO2 emissions, compared with using efficient gas-fired combined cycle gas turbines (CCGTs) at full power.

(image by wikipedia)

Finland and Eastern Europe in a deep freeze - Russia sends nuclear icebreaker to secure shipping

2012-01-31T12:13:00.000+01:00

The world´s largest nuclear icebreaker "50 Years of Victory" is on its way to the Gulf of Finland

A high pressure area over Northwestern Russia keeps Finland and Eastern Europe in a deep freeze:

The Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) predicts severe cold to continue until at least next weekend. Early Monday, a new cold record for this winter was set in Kuhmo, where the mercury plunged to -35.4 degrees Celsius.

Eastern Finland is experiencing the bitterest cold. In the provinces of North Karelia, Koillismaa and Kainuu, temperatures hover around -30 to -35 degrees Celsius.

After a mild start to the winter, frigid air is now pouring into Finland from the east. This Russian blast will keep the country in the deep freeze all week, says FMI meteorologist Antti Jylhä-Ollilla.

Read the entire article here

So far the there is only moderate icing in the Gulf of Finland, but the situation will change if the cold weather continues. In an effort to avoid a repeat of the situation last year, when tens of ships were stuck in the ice, Russian shipping officials ordered the world´s largest nuclear powered icebreaker to assist in the Gulf of Finland. The Russian nuclear giant "50 Years of Victory" left its home port Murmansk last Wednesday, and now on its way to the Baltic Sea.

As we reported in a post last July, the Finnish and Russian goverments have decided to modernise their icebreaker fleets, not trusting the global warming predictions of the AGW alarmists.

(image by wikipedia)

EU leaders continue their dance around the holy euro totem pole

2012-01-31T11:10:00.001+01:00

The European Union leaders continue their dance around the holy euro totem pole, despite the fact that this ritual has lost touch with reality already long ago.

Now the 25 out of 27 EU states have agreed to a more or less meaningless German-inspired fiscal compact for stricter budget discipline. At the same time European politicians are once again discussing a new bailout for Greece, even if everybody understands that the result will be no different than in the past:

Europe's politicians continue to battle reality. Everyone knows that Greece cannot repay its massive pile of debts, now at more than €350 billion ($459 billion). But instead of effectively reducing the financial burden, European politicians intend to approve new loans for the government in Athens and go on fighting debt with new debt. "If the country wants to remain in the euro zone, we should support it," says Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann.

But throwing money to a bankrupt economy is not going to help anyone:

The Greek economy is not productive enough to generate growth. Aside from olive oil, textiles and a few chemicals, there are hardly any Greek products suitable for export. On the contrary, Greece is dependent on food imports to feed its population.
"Greece has been living beyond its means for years," an unpublished study by the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) concludes. "The consumption of goods has exceeded economic output by far."
Especially devastating is the assessment that the DIW experts make about the condition of an industry that is generally seen as a potential engine for growth: tourism. According to the DIW study, the Greek tourism industry concentrates on the summer months, with almost nothing happening throughout the rest of the year. There is almost no tourism in the cities, which translates into low overall capacity utilization and high costs for hotel operators. By contrast, capacity utilization in the hotel sector is much more uniform in other Mediterranean countries.
According to the study, a key cause of the problem is the relatively poor price/performance ratio. In Mediterranean tourism, Greece has to compete with non-euro countries like Croatia, Tunisia, Morocco, Bulgaria and Turkey, which can offer their services at significantly lower prices. The per-hour wage in the hospitality industry was recently measured at €11.39 in Greece, as compared with only €8.49 in Portugal, €4 in Turkey and as little as €1.55 in Bulgaria. The study arrives at grim conclusions, noting that the drastic austerity programs will not only remain ineffective, but will also stigmatize the country as "Europe's problem child" for a long time to come.

Read the entire Der Spiegel article here

As much as one would like to see the euro prosper, Dr Doom´s assessment is looking more and more likely:

"The euro zone is a slow-motion train wreck," said economist Nouriel Roubini, nicknamed Dr Doom after he predicted the U.S. subprime crisis.

Roubini sees Greece leaving the euro within a year, possibly followed by Portugal. He told delegates there is a 50 percent chance of the bloc breaking up completely in the next 3-5 years.

(image by wikipedia)

The Bulgarian ban on fracking may have to be revised

2012-01-31T00:59:00.000+01:00

The Bulgarian parliament recently banned hydraulic fracturing, or shale gas fracking. Now experts in Bulgaria are according to the Southeast European Times saying that the ban may have to be revised, because it would in reality block all drilling associated with the exploration and extraction of oil and gas in the country.

Even the Bulgarian Energy and Economy minister now realises what the ban means to his country:

Bulgarian Energy and Economy Minister Traicho Traikov told bTV that Russia's Gazprom is currently charging Bulgaria more than 382 euros for 1,000 cubic metres of natural gas, while countries that have shale gas are paying 76 euros for 1,000 cubic metres.
"The parliament's decision is depriving us of an argument in the negotiations with the Russians," the minister said.
Bulgaria, which buys 98% of its gas from Gazprom, could be sitting on 300 billion cubic metres to 1 trillion cubic metres of shale gas, Bloomberg news agency said, citing the Bulgarian energy and economy ministry's estimates.

The ban was passed by parliament by a vote of 166-6 on January 18th in wake of mass protests by environmentalists (supported by Russian Gazprom). However, there were at least some sane voices in the parliament:

Ivan Ivanov, a member of the parliament's economy, energy and tourism committee and an MP for the Democrats for Strong Bulgaria party, regretted the ban's adoption, but was content that his party voted against the measure.
"Our position is based on several principles -- mainly that energy is an element of the country's national security," he told SETimes. "The efforts therefore should be aimed at ensuring Bulgaria's energy security and energy independence. The prospecting for, and subsequently the extraction of, shale gas can help achieve both goals simultaneously."

Secondly, Bulgaria would be able to reduce its dependence on Gazprom, which, taking advantage of its monopoly, keeps raising the price of the natural gas it delivers to the country, Ivanov continued.
"Thirdly, the competitiveness of Bulgarian goods will grow, as the price of the main energy resource, which is natural gas, will be much lower," he said.
Bulgaria's unilateral dependence on Gazprom allows Russia to play a certain role in the country's political decision-making process, according to Ivanov.
"Gazprom, which is implementing Prime Minister [Vladimir] Putin's geostrategic plans through its policies, knew that if Poland, Romania and Bulgaria start extracting shale gas, the western route of Russian natural gas deliveries will effectively be cut off," he said

EU climate change commissioner Hedegaard in need of a break

2012-01-29T15:11:00.000+01:00

As we reported only a couple of days ago, the European Commission has published a study stating that there is no need for new legislation to regulate shale gas exploration in the European Union.

Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger:"The legal study confirms that there is no immediate need for changing our EU legislation"

Connie Hedegaard, the European Union´s überwarmist and promoter of (Danish) wind energy, does obviously not keep in touch with Oettinger and the rest of the Commission; she keeps on blabbering that the European Commission is "looking into what kind of regulation could be implemented across the bloc".

"What we're doing is before it gets to be a very big issue we are trying to see about the chemicals, about the fracking, about the consequences. That need s analysis , " she told Reuters .

"We would never mind having international legislation around this, but as that will probably take some time, it's just important for us to check whether our own legislation is adequate , " she added.

Read the entire article here

Time for a long holiday, Mrs. Hedegaard?

Sixteen distinguished scientists: Drastic actions on global warming not needed

2012-01-29T14:31:00.000+01:00

This letter, signed by sixteen distinguished scientists should be read by all politicians who may have to decide about "global warming" measures:

A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about "global warming." Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.
---
The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.
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Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.

A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls. This would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now. Many other policy responses would have a negative return on investment. And it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.

If elected officials feel compelled to "do something" about climate, we recommend supporting the excellent scientists who are increasing our understanding of climate with well-designed instruments on satellites, in the oceans and on land, and in the analysis of observational data. The better we understand climate, the better we can cope with its ever-changing nature, which has complicated human life throughout history. However, much of the huge private and government investment in climate is badly in need of critical review.

Every candidate should support rational measures to protect and improve our environment, but it makes no sense at all to back expensive programs that divert resources from real needs and are based on alarming but untenable claims of "incontrovertible" evidence.

Here are the signatories:

Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting; Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne; Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva.

Read the entire letter in the Wall Street Journal here

Shale gas: Good news for Poland, bad news for Gazprom and the greenies

2012-01-27T20:02:00.002+01:00

Bad news for Gazprom and the greenies - and the French and Bulgarian governments (who have made the incredibly stupid decision to ban shale gas exploration):

There is no need for new legislation to regulate shale gas exploration in the European Union, according to a study published Friday that proposed the bloc adopt a low profile on the controversial issue.
The study, carried out by a consultant and authorized by the European Commission, the EU's executive body, says that existing legislation on exploration and production of fossil fuels, chiefly designed to guarantee safety and to protect the environment, can apply to both conventional and unconventional gas.

"The legal study confirms that there is no immediate need for changing our EU legislation," Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger said in a statement. "We take environmental concerns seriously and will continue to monitor the development of shale gas extraction in the EU."

Good news for Poland:

A study by the European Union's Directorate General for Energy, concluding there is no need for new legislation to regulate shale gas exploration, is a good signal to markets, Polish Treasury Minister Mikolaj Budzanowski said Friday.

(Poland, which intends to get rid of its dependence on Russian gas, may have enough shale gas to meet its needs for 300 years, according to a U.S. Department of Energy estimate published last April.)

President Klaus: The present EU is a straightjacket blocking economic activity

2012-01-26T07:20:00.000+01:00

Czech President Václav Klaus is always worth listening to. In a key-note speech given at the 13th GCC Industrialists’ Conference in Riyadh, Klaus describes what went wrong with the European project, "which started with a rational and undoubtedly positive idea of its founders to liberalize Europe, to open it up, to eliminate barriers existing at the borders of European countries, to form a free trade zone and a customs union, to create a common market and a large interconnected economic space":

The overal liberalization and the removal of barriers were replaced by a different project – by centralization, regulation, and standardization, by harmonization of most of economic activities and economic parameters, by radical shift of competencies from individual member countries to the EU headquarters in Brussels, by the change of the whole concept of integration from intergovernmentalism to supranationalism, by de-nationalization of European member states and by a shift towards European governance. A fundamentally heterogeneous European continent, which flourished in the past because of its diversity and non-uniformity, has been gradually artificially unified and homogenized by a centrally organized governance and legislation. It brought about negative economic effects and led to what is called a democratic deficit (or lack of democratic accountability). I call it postdemocracy.
This very problematic tendency has been accelerating in time with crucial turning points connected with both the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties. At a lower level of integration, the consequences of centralization had not been that dramatic. In the era of a deeper integration, the existing European heterogeneity became more and more in contradiction with the institutional uniformity, which turned into a form of straightjacket and keeps blocking the economic activity.
The most important moment in this process was the establishment of the European Monetary Union and the introduction of common currency in a group of originally 12, now 17 countries that do not form an optimal currency area. The current Eurozone sovereign debt crisis is an inevitable consequence of one currency, one exchange rate, one interest rate for countries with very different economic parameters. The political decision about this arrangement was taken without sufficient attention being paid to the existing economic fundamentals. I have to say that some of us have been criticizing this project for years, as early as in the early 1990s.

Read the entire speech here

PS

The problem is that the failed European system that Klaus describes so well is almost impossible to change, at least to the better. It is therefore likely that the required reforms will take place only after a deep economic and social crisis.

Taiwan´s gift to China: Democracy

2012-01-25T23:43:00.000+01:00

Taiwan´s newly re-elected president Ma Ying-jeou chose his words well, when he presented a gift to the leaders of communist China:

Taiwan's President Ma Ying-jeou said this month's presidential vote was the island's "best gift" to China, hailing the potential for the poll to show the path to democracy on the mainland.
Ma has said hundreds of millions of people in mainland China watched Taiwan's presidential candidates debate live on television last month for the first time through the Internet.

The poll, which saw Ma re-elected, could inspire Chinese democracy supporters, he said in a statement released by the Presidential Office.

"The peaceful election, a sign of democracy taking roots and bear fruits on the soil of a Chinese community, will make them feel that this will also happen on the mainland," the statement said.

"I believe this is the best gift from us to the mainland."

Read the entire article here

It may take some time before China understands the value of Taiwan´s gift, but good things are worth waiting for .....

Obama wants to use the shale gas revolution in his re-election campaign

2012-01-25T07:48:00.000+01:00

When it has become clear that the hundreds of thousands of "green" jobs that he promised, have not - and will not be - created, president Barack Obama now evidently wants to use the enormously succesful shale gas revolution - in which he has played no role - in his campaign to get re-relected.

President Barack Obama pushed drilling for gas in shale rock and support for cleaner energy sources to boost the economy in his final State of the Union address before facing U.S. voters in November.

Hydraulic fracturing, the process of injecting water, sand and chemicals underground to free gas trapped in rock, could create more than 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade, Obama said yesterday. The process, called fracking, is among a list of energy policies Obama said would fuel economic growth.

“We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years, and my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy,” Obama said.

Obama reiterated support for conservation and cleaner sources of power and pledged more oil drilling as part of an ‘all-out, all-of-the-above’’ policy “that’s cleaner, cheaper, and full of new jobs.” He said domestic energy production is at an eight-year high and imports of foreign oil were declining, prompting criticism from Republicans.

California Republican representative Darrell Issa quite rightly commented that the shale gas revolution is not happening as a result of any efforts of Obama´s:

“It’s just a blind accident, if in fact we are producing more oil or natural gas than in previous years, because it’s not because of any of his efforts,” Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican and head of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said after the speech.

Read the entire article here

Great news from the US and Canada: Media not interested in global warming

2012-01-24T08:29:00.000+01:00

A Canadian feature writer is whining about the continiously diminishing interest of US and Canadian media to write about global warming and "climate change":

Even as dust storms rolled over Phoenix, fires ravaged Texas, tornadoes flattened towns like Goderich, Ont., and rivers flooded many regions, mentions of climate change in newspapers and on broadcast media in North America decreased substantially.
According to the Virginia-based news aggregator DailyClimate.org, coverage dropped by 20 per cent from 2010 and by more than 40 per cent from 2009.
Last year at least 7,140 journalists and opinion writers published some 19,000 stories on climate change, as opposed to more than 11,100 reporters who filed 32,400 stories in 2009.
“The decline was seen across almost all benchmarks measured by the news service: 20 per cent fewer reporters covered the issue in 2011 than in 2010, 20 per cent fewer outlets published stories, and the most prolific reporters on the climate change beat published 20 per cent fewer stories,” wrote editor Douglas Fischer, whose organization tracks both U.S. and Canadian media.

Andrew Weaver, with the imposing title "Canada Research Chair in climate modelling and analysis at the University of Victoria" thinks that he has found a way to end the desperation of the warmists:

“I think the next phase will be a bunch of good news stuff, solutions,” he says. “Like, ‘Hey we’ve got this solar power going here,’ or ‘Look at this wind power there.’
“Frankly I wish there was more of that because there is a lot of solutions out there but we’re just not focusing on them.”

Read the entire article here

Yes, we are indeed looking forward to more "solutions" like this, this and this!

Lithuania and Ukraine join Poland in the shale gas revolution

2012-01-23T23:17:00.001+01:00

Fortunately, not all East European countries are - like Bulgaria - prepared to give in to pressure from Russia and the greenies. Ukraine and Lithuania are ready to join Poland in the shale gas revolution in order to end their dependence on Russian gas:.

The Polish oil company Lotos says it will start prospecting for shale gas in neighbouring Lithuania, which wants to break the current monopoly held by Russian giant Gazprom.

Experts say Lithuania may have sufficient reserves of gas trapped in shale -- sedimentary rock containing hydrocarbons -- to cover its needs for between 30 to 50 years.

Read the entire article here

Also a domestic Lithuanian oil producer is going to invest in shale gas:

Minijos Nafta UAB, a Lithuanian oil producer, plans to invest 10 million litas to explore shale gas in the west of the Baltic nation, LETA/ELTA reports, referring to Bloomberg.

The company, which has a license to search for shale gas, plans to drill its first exploration well this year, the Gargzdai-based company said today in a statement on its website.

Read the entire article here

Ukraine´s Energy and Coal Industry Minister Yuriy Boiko says that his country plans to produce 10 -15 million cubic meters of shale gas in five years:

Ukraine will be able to produce 10-15 billion cubic meters of shale gas in five to seven years, Ukrainian Energy and Coal Industry Minister Yuriy Boiko has said live on Inter TV Channel. He said that these figures were based on the relevant experience of other countries.
The minister said that three companies would participate in an auction to obtain licenses for geological exploration and shale gas production at the Oleska and Yuzivska areas. As for the environmental component of shale gas production in Ukraine, the minister assured that he did not expect any threats. "We have studied U.S. experience in this matter and we have not seen any environmental threats," Boiko said.

Read the entire article here

Danish economist: Greece and Portugal will leave the euro zone

2012-01-23T21:06:00.000+01:00

Money, money, money
Always sunny
In the rich man's world
Aha-ahaaa
All the things I could do
If I had a little money
It's a rich man's world

(From the old Abba hit)

Yes, it is all about money. After all the previous rescue packages and bail-outs, Greece and Portugal again need more money. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble today said that he wanted a second bailout program for Greece, and in Lissabon investors, economists and politicians are convinced that Portugal also will need a second bailout, reports the WSJ.

However, the Chief Economist of the Danish Saxo Bank, Steen Jakobsen is probably more realistic in his forecast:

The euro currency does not work for Greece or Portugal and they will eventually leave the euro zone, an economist told CNBC.

They will leave the euro but stay within the European Union because it is very difficult to leave the EU in terms of security policy and foreign policy. You want to be part of it but only linked to it and that is increasingly what a number of countries want to do," Steen Jakobsen, Chief Economist at Saxo Bank said.

Jakobsen said that some countries within the euro zone would rather be one of the 10 that are currently outside of the zone but form part of the broader 27 countries of the EU.

Jakobsen does not think that a return to the drachma would be catastrophical for Greece:

"First of all there is a significant amount of local money from Greece now positioned in the U.S., Germany and elsewhere. If it was devalued this money would be flowing in and buying utilities, railways and telecom companies. If there was devaluation there could be huge advantages for companies," he added.

Read the entire article here

Putin´s aim is to stay in power for the rest of his life - but he will not succeed

2012-01-23T11:24:00.000+01:00

The opinion page editor of the Moscow Times, Michael Bohm has written a must read article about why Russia´s de facto dictator Vladimir Putin aims to stay in power for the rest of his life:

According to The New Times Oct. 31 cover story, "Russia, Inc.: How Putin and Co. Divided Up the Country," Putin and his inner circle control from 10 percent to 15 percent of the country's gross domestic product (from $140 billion to $200 billion) through inside deals. Andrei Illarionov, former economic adviser to then-President Putin from 2000 to 2005, described Putin's "Russia, Inc." as "a corporatist state model." U.S. diplomats put it a little less diplomatically in cables that WikiLeaks published a year ago, describing Russia as "a virtual mafia state" with Putin as the "alpha dog" sitting at the top of this structure.

The best, and perhaps only, guarantee of securing immunity for Putin — and dozens of his friends and colleagues who have become millionaires and billionaires over the past 10 years through their Kremlin-connected businesses — against possible corruption and other criminal charges is to remain in power.

As long as Putin remains in control, Western leaders will continue to do business as usual with him and his administration, and they will ignore or downplay allegations of corruption at the very top. After all, the West has shown many times that it doesn't have a problem having close ties with leaders with shady reputations, such as former Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak or the king of Saudi Arabia, when it is in its best interests.

But imagine if opposition leader Alexei Navalny, for example, ever came to power and Putin becomes just an ordinary citizen. Putin understands that one of the first things Navalny would do after freeing former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky from prison would be to appoint an independent tribunal to investigate allegations of corruption and abuse of power among Putin and his ruling elite.
The Yukos affair alone would probably be enough to put those who conspired to expropriate the country's largest and most-profitable oil company — worth $45 billion in market capitalization before Khodorkovsky was arrested in 2003 — in jail for the rest of their lives. Along with Yukos, the tribunal could investigate corruption charges against Kremlin-connected executives at Gazprom, VTB, Transneft, Russian Technologies, National Media Group, Gunvor, the Rotenberg brothers' enterprises, Bank Rossia, arms trader Rosoboronexport and dozens of other companies that make up Putin's "Russia, Inc."
--
In a worst-case scenario, Putin and his inner circle could try to escape justice by fleeing to a friendly country, such as Belarus — not the best place to spend the rest of their lives, but it sure beats a prison cell in Krasnokamensk or even The Hague. If they take enough money with them, they could set up a luxurious retirement community — an enhanced Belarussian version of Putin's Ozero dacha cooperative — and join former Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who escaped corruption charges by fleeing to Belarus in 2010.
The current criminal trial of Mubarak, who is accused of embezzling as much as $70 billion, shows the danger of giving up power peacefully — even when you are 83, dying from cancer and presumably were given an unwritten guarantee of immunity. The conviction on corruption charges against another elderly, ailing world leader, former French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, also must have given Putin a slight scare.

Kim Jong Il, however, showed that the best way to preserve immunity from criminal prosecution is by staying in power until death. Putin — no less than Kim, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev or Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko — understands that he can never afford to give up power while he is still alive.

This means that we can expect much more than 12 years of Putin in power. At the end of the next two presidential terms, Putin will only be 72, and at that age he will probably still be in his political prime. What's more, Putin, as he reminded us during his New Year's greetings several weeks ago, was born in the year of the dragon — and, according to Chinese astrologers, those born in dragon years tend to enjoy health, wealth and a long life.

Regardless of whether you believe in astrology or not, this is a bad sign for Russia's future.

Read the entire article here

PS

Putin certainly will try to cling on to power as long as possible, but when his house of cards - built on exporting oil and gas - begins to crumble as a result of the American-led global shale gas revolution, his days are numbered. That is the reason for Putin´s recent outbursts against shale gas. Fortunately, he will not be able to stop the revolution.

Fighting real pollution - finally some (partially) good science in Science

2012-01-22T16:29:00.001+01:00

Finally some - partially - good science from sources close to the global warming establishment. A new study published in Science focuses on what could be done to decrease real air pollution:

Buses spew clouds of black exhaust fumes in Mexico City while, in India, wood burnt in rudimentary stoves fills houses with sooty smoke. Methane leaks from gas pipelines in Russia and rice paddies in China, eventually breaking down in sunlight and contributing to the production of smog and ozone. In each of these cases, simple steps to curb air pollution would promote public health.

By 2030, these reduction measures could prevent anywhere from 700,000 to 4.7 million premature deaths from air pollution annually, the study found. And because ozone is toxic to plants, such measures could boost global crop production by 1–4%.

It is only when the scientists behind the study start speaking about the benefits of the above measures in preventing bogus human caused global warming that things begin to go wrong:

We’re in a gridlock over carbon dioxide, and we’re losing time,” says Veerabhadran Ramanathan, an atmospheric scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and a co-author on the Scienceanalysis. “This is one way to buy back some of that time, and the co-benefits are huge.”

What Ramanathan calls "the co-benefits", are quite obviously the only real - but valuable - benefits of fighting "black carbon". However, if there is support among warmists for these kind of measures, it should not be impossible to find common ground with global warming sceptics. At least for this blogger, it does not matter if the warmists - wrongly - think that fighting real pollution will be useful in promoting their beliefs. The main thing is that something is done in order clean the air in some of the worst polluted regions of the world.

But this may be too good to be true. Die-hard warmists, like Kevin Trenberth have already began to put down the new findings:

Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, credits the study with building scientific consensus on the issue, but warns that it should not detract from the main agenda on carbon dioxide. “The fundamental problem with long-term climate change is CO₂, and anything that takes us away from addressing that doesn’t really solve the problem,” he says. “It just puts it off.”

Read the entire article here

Could super smart Godzillas take over after catastrophic global warming?

2012-01-22T08:05:00.000+01:00

A world dominated by super smart Godzillas?

Global warming makes you smarter - at least if you are a lizard. This is what a new study, funded by the National Research Council of Canada, has found out:

His study looked at two different groups of a particular Australian lizard species called the three-striped skink (bassiana duperreyi); one group incubated at a temperature of 16C and the other at 22C.

Amiel and his research group tested the lizards’ intelligence by having them seek shelter when threatened. The lizards were given two options of where to hide: in a bin resembling an overturned flowerpot with a hole large enough for the lizard to enter, or an identical shelter with the hole blocked by a transparent plastic.

The research group observed the lizards from warmer incubation group consistently found the appropriate shelter faster, and made fewer mistakes doing so, suggesting higher temperatures may produce smarter lizards.

If, as the most fanatic warmists predict, catastrophic global warming will result in the end of the human species, it is at least good to know that the ever smarter lizard population will be able to take over ....

(image by wikipedia)

Human rights violations continue in China

2012-01-21T09:08:00.001+01:00

China´s communist government continues its shameful crackdown on human rights in 2012:

The Chinese government recently sentenced three prominent activists to lengthy prison sentences, confirming that human rights standards in the country continue to fall in 2012. This week Li Tie, a longtime human rights defender and writer, was sentenced to ten years after the court denied him his own lawyer, instead insisting he use a government-appointed one.

These three court decisions have fallen under the “subversion of state power” umbrella, enabling the authorities to hand down lengthy sentences.
The UN released a statement denouncing the recent crackdown: “We are very disturbed by this trend of severe suppression of dissent in the country, which appears to be designed to intimidate.” U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke corroborated this sentiment in an interview earlier this week, stating, “The human rights climate has always ebbed and flowed in China, up and down, but we seem to be in a down period and it’s getting worse.”

Yu Jie, who was able to flee China, has described how he was treated by Chinese security officers after publishing a critical book:

When Yu Jie wrote a book in 2010 slamming Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabo as a cynical actor at the head of a heartless Communist party, it was unknown how Beijing's authoritarian government might react.
Yu revealed the answer publicly this week: Chinese security officers dragged him from his home in December 2010 with a black hood on his head and then beat him until he convulsed with seizures.
The plainclothes men pummeled him in the head and face, Yu said in a statement released this week. They also kicked him in the chest, and a state security officer told Yu they could bury him alive and that no one would ever find out.
Chinese security continued to harass him off and on for more than a year after the beating, until earlier this month, when he fled China. He surfaced in Washington on Wednesday, where he gave a news conference and distributed his account.

U.S. ambassador Gary Locke must be congratulated for speaking out against China´s human rights violations. Western governments - including the Obama administration - have been much too passive in their criticism - mainly because they do not want to endanger their perceived economic interests in China. This opportunistic silence is, however, a very shortsighted policy, which in the long run does not benefit western economic or political interests in China.

Hilton hypocrites promoting another climate change scam

2012-01-20T19:09:00.001+01:00

Some of the readers of this blog may remember the post about Hilton Hotels Worldwide "sustainability" hypocrites announcing the "shutting down of business center equipment", "dimming interior lights in lobby and reception areas" and "encouraging guests to switch off their room lights" during the "earth hour" last year.

(Fortunately business executives in need of hotel accomodation were able to use the facilities of other hotels, not participating in this annual greenie stupidity.)

Now the same Hilton hypocrites are again busy promoting another climate change scam.

Hilton Worldwide and Sundance Institute announced today the winners of the newly launched Hilton Worldwide LightStay Sustainability Award program, which includes $25,000 for one feature film and one in-process category winner. The prizes will be presented at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival next week.

In a press release Hilton eulogizes the winning (bogus) documentary:

The Island President (Feature): President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives is confronting a problem greater than any other world leader has ever faced -- the literal survival of his country and everyone in it. As one of the most low-lying countries in the world, a rise of in sea level would submerge the 1200 islands enough to make them uninhabitable. A classic David and Goliath tale, The Island President captures Nasheed's first year in office, culminating in his trip to the Copenhagen Climate Summit where the film provides an unprecedented glimpse of what takes place at such a top-level global assembly. A movie about one man's mission to save his nation, The Island President, is a riveting, uplifting story that is impossible to ignore

The reality is that Hilton´s "sustainability" efforts are just a way to look "progressive", cash in on the supposed "green" trend and at the same time reduce energy costs in their hotels.

And the selection of "The Island President" as the winning documentary is also a carefully thought out decision. As one of the biggest - if not the biggest - foreign hotel and holiday resort businesses in the Maldives - with three major resorts: Conrad Maldives Rangali Island, Hilton Maldives/Iru Fushi Resort & Spa and Waldorf Astoria Maldives - Hilton is of course interested in receiving favourable treatment by the Maldives government.

Awarding the film that glorifies the publicity hungry climate crusadeer president of the tiny island state is, of course, one way of securing Hilton´s future business interests in the area.

One would not be surprised at all if President Mohamed Nasheed, who once organized a publicity stunt with an underwater government meeting, is already one of the regulars at the Conrad Maldives "unique Ithaa Undersea Restaurant, the world’s first all-glass undersea restaurant with spectacular 180° views of coral and marine life".

At least it would fit the real lifestyle of this darling of the "progressive" western media, who recently joined The Legacy Club for the super rich in Asia, which certainly has a lot of interesting activities to offer for its members:

The Legacy club "is, first and foremost, a lifestyle club. And like all lifestyle clubs, members enjoy a range of privileges that include investment opportunities, luxury hotel suite stays and wellness retreats, priority booking for private jets and once-in-a-lifetime experiences"

Energy+ Partnership - Norway´s new international image campaign

2012-01-20T12:46:00.002+01:00

Norway has according to a foreign ministry spokesman pledged to spend $300 million a year "to devise ways to help some of the world's poorest people get better access to energy and to develop a new market-based system to limit emissions from global energy production".

Other countries in the Energy+ Partnership, as the programme to be launched by Norway by June is called, are said to be UK, France, Denmark, Switzerland, Netherlands and South Korea. The countries on the receiving side will be Bhutan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia, Maldives, Morocco, Nepal, Senegal and Tanzania, and later perhaps also India and South Africa.

Reuters adds:
The cash will depend on how well the recipient countries can prove they are increasing public access to energy while cutting greenhouse gas emissions compared to unchecked levels, according to a policy document seen by Point Carbon News.

Read the entire article here

Comment:

One should not be deceived by this PR stunt, designed to make oil rich Norway look like a serious benefactor of poor countries while at the same time pretending to work for "cutting greenhouse gas emisssions".

$300 million a year is a drop in the ocean when one looks at the enormous oil incomes that Norway reaps from its off-shore fossile fuel industry. If Norway´s socialist government really believed in IPCC´s global warming scenarios, it would immediately close down all the oil and gas production facilities that contribute to future catastrophic global warming. But they are of course not prepared to do anything that would seriously endanger their own source of riches. Instead they just want to shine as a "resonsible" model pupil in the worldwide UN school of global warming hypocracy.

MIT warmists recognize the benefits of the shale gas revolution

2012-01-19T14:20:00.002+01:00

Even warmists at the MIT understand the importance of shale gas. These are some of the conclusions in a fresh paper:

Under one scenario, they found that gas prices would rise by about five times their current levels by 2050 without shale gas. Electricity prices would also grow. With shale gas included in the mix, gas prices would only double. The shale input also reduces electricity price growth by 5 percent in 2030 and 10 percent in 2045, compared to a scenario without shale gas.

But the problem for the greenie scientists lies in this:

The paper notes that, without new regulatory restrains, there is little interest in developing technologies such as carbon capture and storage, or CCS, and that "the shale gas reduces interest even further."

"The gas 'revolution' has important implications for the direction and intensity of national efforts to develop and deploy low-emission technologies, like CCS for coal and gas," the MIT paper said.

Under strict limits on greenhouse gases, renewable sources such as wind are needed, but shale gas development delays such sources by up to two decades, the study said. "While taking advantage of this [shale gas] gift in the short term, treating gas as a 'bridge' to a low-carbon future, it is crucial not to allow the greater ease of the near-term task to erode efforts to prepare a landing at the other end of the bridge."

Read the entire article here

However, the assumption that shale gas is some kind of a "bridge to a low-carbon future" is totally wrong . Shale gas is no bridge, but a quality highway to the foreseeable energy future. And CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) for coal and gas is a useless technology not worth wasting government (= taxpayers´) money on.

Shale gas: Bulgarian government caves in to pressure from Gazprom and greenies

2012-01-18T07:19:00.002+01:00

The government of Bulgaria appears to work hard in order for the country to retain its position as the poorest country in the European Union. Otherwise it is difficult to understand why the center-right coalition has decided to cancel a shale gas exploration permit it had granted to Chevron last May. In addition, it is reported that it is preparing a ban on hydraulic fracturing.

Bulgaria´s former masters in Russia - and the greenies, who oppose all reasonable energy projects - must be smiling.

German think tank thinks that the euro crisis is (almost) over

2012-01-17T15:34:00.001+01:00

Hooray, the euro crisis is finally over!

At least if we are to believe the German think tank ZEW:

“It seems the worst of the euro crisis is over,” Michael Schroeder, head of ZEW’s financial markets department today told Bloomberg Businessweek.

Schröder is basing his positive statement on a poll indicating that German business confidence jumped the most on record in January. The rise was according to Schröder driven by "upbeat economic data as well as the European Central Bank's massive injection of cash on the markets last month, which has left banks awash with money".

It´s nice to know that there still are optimists in Europe, but at least I would not put my savings in a bank managed by Herr Schröder.

Only yesterday Bloomberg had this to say:

Germany may be on the brink of recession after its economy shrank “roughly” 0.25 percent in the fourth quarter from the third, the Federal Statistics Office said Jan. 11 in an unofficial estimate. A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of declining gross domestic product.
Economists estimate the euro zone economy will contract 0.2 percent this year, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey. A separate survey shows the U.S.’s gross domestic product may expand 2.3 percent in 2012.

New Australian climate scare: "Climate change could quadruple deaths"

2012-01-17T12:44:00.000+01:00

Welcome to the wonderful world of climate modelling! Models are an ideal tool in the hands of people who feel a need to produce ever new global warming scares. The latest example is an Australian study, "The impact of temperature on years of life lost in Brisbane, Australia", published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

"Climate change could quadruple deaths", is how Cosmos magazine describes the central finding of the new study.

Once the team had produced a statistical model, they used it to predict the effects of increased temperature due to climate change on deaths in the city in the year 2050. If temperatures in Brisbane rise on average by just one degree, Barnett's study suggests that there will actually be fewer temperature-related deaths than there are now. That's because cold deaths are currently the main problem and there will be fewer as the climate becomes warmer.

A 2 ºC increase, however, will markedly raise the number of deaths due to heat and at 4 ºC, "the health consequences become catastrophic" with more than four times the current level of 'years of life lost' due to heat.

The problem with this kind of studies is that that they totally ignore the fact that people tend to adapt to different environmental circumstances. In this case the authors even admit this:

The authors emphasised that their study assumes no change in the way Brisbane deals with climate, and so is probably a worst-case scenario. Things can be done to improve the situation. "It would be a good idea to insulate properly every house in Brisbane,"said Barnett, "starting with houses belonging to people over 65."

Dr. Barnett even concedes that cold weather is right now the worst killer in Brisbane:

"There are more deaths from the cold in Brisbane than Hobart!" said Barnett. "It's because Brisbane houses are very open to allow the air to flow through. When it gets cold, a lot of Brisbane houses tend to be exposed to what's outside." Barnett also suggested that people living in warm climates often don't have the right clothes for cold weather.

Read the entire article here

PS

Australians are welcome to e.g. Scandinavia to learn how to thrive in a cold climate. In the same way there are places where Australians - and the inhabitants of Brisbane in particular - could learn to function in much warmer climates. But for the true global warming cultists, these simple facts of course spoil the party.

Another major problem with these kind of studies is, of course, that they take the unsubstantiated IPCC warming "predictions" for granted.

The latest scare: Global warming turns clownfish to alcoholics

2012-01-17T01:21:00.001+01:00

CO₂-happy clownfish?

The New Scientist brings us the latest global warming scare:

Carbon dioxide in the ocean acts like alcohol on fish, leaving them less able to judge risks and prone to losing their senses. The intoxication adds to the threats that global warming and ocean acidification pose to marine ecosystems.

Luckily, an Australian and a Norwegian scientist have already found a way to cure serious cases of hangover in the clownfish community:

Treating the clownfish bred under CO₂-rich conditions with gabazine, a chemical that blocks the GABA-A receptor, helped them to regain their senses, though: fish treated this way swam towards the predatory smell only 12 per cent of the time.

Read the entire article here

(Ímage by Wiki)

The Economist scoffs at Poland´s opportunity to become self sufficient on energy

2012-01-16T10:41:00.002+01:00

The Economist seems to have a problem with accepting that the American-led shale gas revolution will benefit Poland hugely in the future. The leftist and environmentalist slant in the once great magazine is obvious when one reads the Economist blog:

For the last few years the country has been getting ever dizzier at the prospect of ending its dependence on Russian gas and becoming a "new Norway".

---

The Polish government insists that the system is not to blame for any individual wrongdoing. Still, it is working on a new legal framework for shale-gas exploitation. A new geological and mining law [paywall] came into force on January 1st, applying EU regulations and simplifying procedures for investors.

Environmentalists, however, complain that although the law gives concession-holders potential buyout rights to properties where they might want to set up a drill, it says nothing about "fracking fluid"—the huge quantities of water and chemicals that shale-gas extractors pump into the ground in order to crack shale rocks and get to the gas.

In the next three months the government should present a new law on the taxation of shale gas. The concurrent corruption investigation could have a sobering effect on a country caught up in flighty dreams of riches.

Yes, it is true that seven people have been charged in Poland with offering or receiving bribes in the allocation of concessions to look for the gas in 2011. But does this give the Economist the right to scoff at and belittle Poland´s unique opportunity to finally get rid of its dependence on Russian energy? Certainly not!

However, Gazprom and Greenpeace will applaud.

PS

This is the kind of news that the Economist is not interested in publishing:

By the end of 2012, around 3,500 residents of small towns and villages within the Pomorskie voivodship will be able to use shale gas to heat their homes, reported Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
The change will save them around zł.100 to zł.200 per year on their normal fuel costs.
It is estimated that shale gas will be about 20 percent cheaper for consumers than conventional gas imported from Russia.
Although the production of shale gas on an industrial scale is expected to be launched in Poland not earlier than in 2014, Polish oil and gas giant PGNiG wants to start testing production levels at its Lubocin location in the second half of 2012, writes Dziennik Gazeta

Daniel Hannan: The case for leaving the EU

2012-01-16T09:25:00.000+01:00

Daniel Hannan (MEP, UK) does not need many words for a convincing case:

We have locked ourselves into a declining regional bloc, with whom we run a massive deficit, at the expense of the developing and Commonwealth markets with whom we are still in surplus (I quote the trade figures in the piece). We have disadvantaged our farmers, betrayed our fishermen and burdened our small entrepreneurs. We now propose to wreck our financial services sector. On top of all this, we have ceased to be an independent democracy. Oh, and we pay £19 billion a year for the privilege of having these things done to us.

Mary Robinson: Western "rich lifestyles" to blame for global warming and poverty in Africa

2012-01-15T21:59:00.000+01:00

Former Irish president Mary Robinson has for a long time been a star performer among the do-gooders who jet around the globe in order to give speeches at various "progressive" gatherings.

Last week Robinson, who is also chairing an organisation, modestly called "The Mary Robinson Foundation - Climate Justice" - was in Washington D.C. "to discuss issues of climate change, population and sustainability at a forum hosted by the Aspen Institute".

This was Mrs. Robinson´s message in D.C.:

I had been working in the small organization 'Realizing Rights' and was traveling to different African countries on issues of public health, women, peace and security. I kept hearing, how [people's] lives are so much worse now because of the change in seasons, the dramatic flooding, the long periods of drought.

It was my realization that this was a human rights issue, because these were communities that were not climate resilient. They didn't have insurance and they were already poor, so they had been undermined in their poverty by the impact of global warming, which is the result of the greenhouse gas emissions from the rich lifestyles elsewhere in the world.

Read the entire article here

Robinson peddles the same message - although in her case wrapped in bogus human rights terminology - as all the other highly paid international bureaucrats and scaremongers - from Ban Ki-moon to R. Pachauri: People in the "rich" western countries are to blame for the poverty and everything else - including purported human caused "climate change" - that is bad in the "developing" countries.

And Mrs. Robinson´s solution to the problem is also the same:

"To achieve climate stabilisation will necessitate radical changes in lifestyle and behaviour"
(quote from the Mary Robinson Foundation - Climate Justice page)

Maybe it would be better if Mrs. Robinson would do a little less travelling and start listening to Africans who really know what it takes to lift poor countries out of poverty.

(image by wikipedia)

Russia behind shale gas protests in Bulgaria

2012-01-14T15:03:00.000+01:00

Today Bulgarians have witnessed concrete examples of Gazprom´s - and probably also the Russian intelligence service´s - efforts to prevent the American-led shale gas revolution from reaching Europe:

Approximately 1,000 people have gathered in downtown Sofia to stage a protest against shale gas exploration and production in Bulgaria, Bulgarian National Radio reported.
The protestors urged the parliament to adopt a moratorium and, later, a ban on hydraulic fracturing method, which is used, as they say, in shale gas exploration works and production in Bulgaria.
Similar protests were organized in 11 more cities across Bulgaria.

Alex Alexiev, the chairperson of the executive council of the Centre for Balkan and Black Sea Studies in Sofia gave the background to the Russian efforts already in December:

“The grounds stated in the three draft bills on termination of shale gas studies in Bulgaria coincide with the opinion of Gazprom’s board of directors about the shale gas, published in the end of November,”

In Alexiev’s words, it is hard to avoid the impression that these Bulgarian politicians, deliberately or not, service the interests of the Russian monopolist and work to the detriment of the Bulgarian national interests.
“This is not surprising for the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), since together with their forerunners – the communists, they have always served their Russian masters. As far as Ataka is concerned and the people of Yane Yanev [the Order, Law and Justice (OLJ)] – I do not know what their motives are. I would not be surprised if there are some financial motives, too. The Russians are very generous when it comes to protecting their energy monopoly in Bulgaria,” Alex Alexiev said further.

Read the entire article here

New study: People with better knowledge of science are more likely to be sceptical of global warming

2012-01-14T09:57:00.002+01:00

A new study by the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School has produced a result that its authors want to hide:

People with better knowledge of science and stronger reasoning skills are more likely to be skeptical of climate change than people with lower levels of comprehension.

This is without doubt the most importantant finding in the new study, but because it does not fit into the warmist authors´ agenda, they choose to bury it in a heap of sociological gobbledygook:

The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons: Culture Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate Change

The launch of the Danish EU presidency: "a very, very sad day for Denmark"

2012-01-13T21:35:00.001+01:00

“This is a very, very sad day for Denmark”. Those were the most memorable words by Danish PM Helle Thorning Schmidt when she together with EU Commission president José Barroso yesterday launched the country´s EU presidency in Copenhagen. Not the best possible start for a presidency with green jobs on the top of its priority list.

The sadness was caused by the news that the pride of the Danish industry, the world´s biggest manufacturer of wind turbines, Vestas was to cut 2335 jobs in an effort to cut costs. “This is one of the businesses that we thought will be the new way of doing things,” Thorning Schmidt said.

The Vestas fiasco is another example of what happens when an industry - in this case the wind turbine industry - is totally dependent on government subsidies. But the wind power lobbyists still think they can get away with it:

“When global development is lagging, we have a challenge,” Jan Hylleberg, chief executive officer of the Danish Wind Industry Association, said in an interview yesterday. “Most important for the Danish industry in these times are the political decisions that need to be taken, especially in Europe.”

Read the entire article here

''Political decisions need to be taken, especially in Europe" of course means that there should be even more subsidies for Vestas and other failing wind turbine makers. At the same time wind industry lobbyists are working hard in order get Congress to extend the tax credits that Vestas and the other wind turbines companies rely on.

There is, however, no real reason why Congress would choose to extend the tax credits, particularly considering the fact that the American-led shale gas revolution will provide clean, cheap and plentyful energy for the foreseeable future.

The European Union is another matter. In spite of the deepening financial crisis the failed EU leaders - Helle Thorning Schmidt among them - still keep on repeating the mantra about the European Union as the "world number one" in "clean" energy, regardless of the costs to taxpayers. But the day of reckoning is coming closer also in Europe.

2012: A hard landing in China and a recession in Germany?

2012-01-12T01:15:00.001+01:00

This year may see the Chinese economy crash and Germany sliding into recession. Right now there are not too many bright spots (the American-led shale gas revolution is one) in the global economy:

A looming hard landing in China will bring the financial and economic crisis of the past five years to a climax in 2012, one of the City of London's leading analysts has warned.
Albert Edwards, head of strategy at Société Générale and one of the UK's leading "bears", said the next 12 months would be the "final year of pain and disappointment".
Predicting a sharp slowdown in activity in the world's fastest-growing emerging economy, Edwards said: "There is a likelihood of a China hard landing this year. It is hard to think 2013 and onwards will be any worse than this year if China hard-lands."

Edwards's view was supported by the historian Edward Chancellor, who said China's recent economic performance conformed to the pattern of previous manias and bubbles in history. These included an uncritically assumed growth story, easy money and credit expansion, investment booms and the misallocation of capital, and conspicuous consumption.

Read the entire article here

And China´s hard landing will soon start hurting the German economy. There are already fears about a recession later this year:

The German economy grew strongly last year, despite the European debt crisis. Gross domestic product jumped by 3 percent, while the national deficit sank, the Federal Statistical Office reported on Wednesday. But experts warn that, given the slight contraction in the final quarter of last year, Germany could enter a recession in 2012.

And with Europe´s economic engine running out of steam the last hope for a solution to the eurozone crisis is quickly disappearing ....

Italy remains true to its heritage

2012-01-11T13:11:00.006+01:00

The new Italian government is working tirelessly to avoid an economic collapse. Whether signore Monti will succeed, remains to be seen. However, one cannot blame the Italians for failing to remain true to their heritage:

It was once confined to the sun-baked, sleepy south of Italy but the mafia is now the country's biggest business enterprise, with an annual turnover of €140bn (£116bn), according to an authoritative report.

The country's four mafia groups have broken out of their traditional strongholds in the dusty 'Mezzogiorno' south of Rome and spread their tentacles across the whole country, taking advantage of the economic crisis to snap up ailing businesses and ramp up their loan-shark operations.

They now boast estimated cash reserves of €65bn, collectively making them "Italy's biggest bank", according to a study released on Tuesday by Confesercenti, a prominent employers' association.

The groups make an estimated annual profit of €100bn – about 7pc of Italy's GDP.

Read the entire article here

Frau Merkel and all the other bigwigs in Brussels have repeatedly urged the Italians to adopt the new EU agenda, including a strong commitment to renewable energy. And that is exactly what the country´s biggest enterprise has been doing:

September, Italian police confiscated their largest ever collection of mafia assets when they seized assets worth $1.9 billion from a Sicilian businessman named Vito Nicastri. The haul included 43 wind and solar companies and around 100 properties, including luxury villas in western Sicily. Nicastri, known as "The Lord of the Wind" because he was the island's largest developer of wind farms, had been arrested the year before and accused of ties to Matteo Messina Denaro, a man believed to be the head of the Sicilian mafia.

Unlike the mob's usual criminal activities — trafficking in arms or drugs, investments in real estate, waste management and construction — the renewable-energy sector requires technical prowess. Which is why the mafia seems to have mainly taken on the role of middle man: arranging contracts, buying up land, organizing government permissions, snatching up the construction contracts. The overheated demand caused by subsidies has brought in financial speculation — some 90% of the authorizations to build power plants are subsequently sold — making the market particularly permeable to organized crime.

Read the entire article here

Reaping the benefits of free trade has been another catchword in the new Italian business drive:

The Italian fraud squad recently announced they were investigating allegations that the country's largest olive oil producers have adulterated Italian oil with cheaper imports from Spain, Greece, Morocco and Tunisia.
--
Mueller found that fraud was extensive, particularly adulteration and false labelling. The world's largest former dealer in olive oil, one Domenico Ribatti, plea-bargained his way to 13 months in prison during the 1990s for passing off Turkish hazelnut oil, which he had refined in his own plant, as olive oil. Another prominent importer, Leonardo Marseglia – appropriately based in a town called Monopoli – has variously been accused of selling cheap non-European oils as Italian ones, fudging documents to shirk import tariffs and forming a criminal network to smuggle contraband. Marseglia has denied the charges.
A 2007 EU investigation found that 95% of all known misappropriations of EU agricultural subsidies occurred in Italy, telling us something of the culture in which Italian olive oil fraud was taking place.

Read the entire article here

PS

On 20 January the ruling EU duumvirate Merkozy will arrive in Italy in order to learn more about the exciting new developments taking place in the midst of economic doom and gloom in Europe.
Hopefully they will not fail to express their gratitude to signore Monti´s predecessor, who´s contribution to the Italian heritage project should not be forgotton.

Animal armageddon: "they compete, they parasitize each other and they eat each other"

2012-01-10T09:14:00.004+01:00

Global warming scaremonglers are becoming more and more desperate. The latest scare comes from University of Connecticut warmists who have invented some "really sophisticated" models for predicting the coming of animal armageddon:

“We have really sophisticated meteorological models for predicting climate change,” said University of Connecticut ecologist Mark Urban, who led the study. “But in real life, animals move around, they compete, they parasitize each other and they eat each other. The majority of our predictions don’t include these important interactions.”
The study finds that animals unable to regulate their own temperature are likely move to different climates, possibly increasing the number invasive species. The team discovered that animals are traveling an average of eleven miles per decade towards our planets poles, likely in an effort to escape increasingly warm temperatures. Among the more extreme examples included one butterfly species that has already moved over 130 miles north in just two decades.
Not all species can disperse fast enough to get to these more suitable places before they die off, Mr. Urban said. And if they do make it to these better habitats, they may be outcompeted by the species that are already there – or the ones that got there first, said the study’s authors.

Read the entire story here

How tragic all this is, when we know that animals lived in peaceful harmony with each other before man-made global warming made them cruel cannibals!

Great stuff for a new Hollywood horror blockbuster!

No bright future for "green" jobs in Germany

2012-01-10T01:32:00.000+01:00

The German government´s dream about hundreds of thousands of "green" jobs has been - and will remain - just a dream. Since chancellor Angela Merkel in March announced an about-turn in energy policy by deciding to switch off Germany's eight oldest nuclear reactors and to close by 2022 nine others currently online, job loss announcements have kept on coming.

EON, the biggest power supplier, is planning to cut 11,000 jobs worldwide, and its rival RWE will shed 8,000 jobs. And the German solar energy industry is in dire straits because of foreign (mainly Chinese) competition and a government decision to reduce subsidies.

The government - and renewable energy industry lobbyists - still speak about several hundred thousands of new new jobs to be created in the "green" energy sector, but researchers at the leading independent research institute RWI are questioning these figures:

"Just for show," Manuel Frondel, a researcher at RWI institute, said dismissively, arguing the figures did not take into account jobs lost because of the shift to renewable energy.
"Renewable energies demand a lot of capital but less manpower" than conventional energy sources, he said.
Hundreds of personnel are needed for the operation of a nuclear or coal-powered plant, while very few are required for the running of a wind or solar park.

Frondel in particular points the finger at "blatant (political) mistakes" in the solar energy sector.

While the installation of solar panels in Germany has jumped in recent years, it is down to a subsidy system financed through levying a surcharge on consumers' energy bills, he said.
At the same time, the system has proved particularly beneficial for Asian producers of solar panels which are less costly than those produced in Germany.
"Every job (in Germany) in the solar (sector) costs 250,000 euros ($318,000)" to electricity consumers, meaning they are "doomed" or already lost jobs, Frondel commented.
According to a study last year by Stuttgart University's Institute for Energy Industry and Efficient Energy Use, the end of nuclear energy by 2022 will have a limited negative impact on jobs in the short term.
"But by 2025 job losses of about 185,000 people will be recorded here too," it said.
Additionally some research institutes believe the expected rise in the cost of electricity in Germany will hold back growth and neutralise in the short term any employment benefits reaped from the move to renewable energy.

Read the entire article here

In sight: Energy independence for the European Union

2012-01-09T15:11:00.000+01:00

Russia and Gazprom are fast loosing their grip on the European energy market. The Russians thought they would be able to dictate price and deliveries to a Europe more and more dependent on Gazprom gas. But the American-led shale gas revolution and LNG have - fortunately - destroyed Putin´s dream:

“Russia now faces real competition from L.N.G. and from shale gas, which the Europeans have access to,” Mr. Freedman said, referring to liquefied natural gas. “It should be worried.”
Europe imports a third of its gas from Russia and accounts for 65 percent of Gazprom’s total exports. But the big energy companies that have signed long-term gas contracts with Russia are winning more flexible pricing arrangements.
Some German companies argue that it is now a buyer’s market. This is because increasingly, the price of natural gas is no longer fixed to the cost of a barrel of oil, as it was in the past.
There is competition from liquefied natural gas, which is transported by ship, and shale, an unconventional natural gas extracted from sedimentary rocks that already makes up 14 percent of the U.S. natural gas supply, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The availability of liquefied natural gas and the discovery of shale resources in Europe have rattled Gazprom’s position, especially in Eastern Europe.
Poland, which imports two-thirds of its gas from Russia, plans to reduce its dependence on Moscow by extracting shale and buying liquefied natural gas. Waldemar Pawlak, the deputy prime minister and energy minister, said that having access to alternative supplies gave Warsaw leverage in negotiations. “We can either buy cheaper conventional gas or move quicker on shale gas extraction,” he said.

Read the entire article here

This positive development (from a European point of view) is happening solely as a result of innovations in the energy industry - not by any way through some European Union energy policy. On the contrary, if anything, there is a clear danger that the EU could seriously damage its future energy independence by continuing to cling to the choices preferred by the greenies and Gazprom.

Fidel joins Putin - and the NYT - in the fight against shale gas

2012-01-08T21:07:00.001+01:00

Cuba´s Fidel Castro is joining Russia´s Putin - and the New York Times - in condemning the American-led shale gas revolution:

Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro said on Thursday the world was on an "inexorable march toward the abyss," which he blamed in part on the discovery and exploitation of vast reserves of so-called "shale gas" around the world.

The Energy In Depth blog has some thoughts about the new Cuban-Russian alliance:

For nearly forty years, Cuba and the Soviet Union joined hands across the Atlantic to oppose western civilization. The private sector became the bête noire for both countries, with Cuba and the USSR consistently looking for evidence that would undermine economic freedom (they failed). But with the fall of the Soviet Union, the legitimacy of communism also crumbled under the weight of a superior economic model: the market economy. The ideological link between Russia and communist Cuba was strained, if not completely severed.
But shale development represents a new bond between Cuba and Russia, a source of joint opposition that is, once again, premised on nothing more than flawed logic and a commitment to undermining a superior (and safer) economic system.

Why the New York Times has chosen to join the Casto/Putin team is more difficult to understand. The Reason.com blog offers one explanation:

However, leftish opposition to fracking is not about the problem of industrial accidents; it's about the fact that cheap abundant relatively low-carbon natural gas undercuts their preferred forms of high-cost renewable energy, chiefly wind and solar power.

Amidst the doom and gloom: An economic miracle in the making - but not yet in Europe

2012-01-06T09:02:00.000+01:00

While the mainstream media in the US, and particularly in Europe, continue to focus on the doom and gloom of the financial crisis, there is an economic miracle in the making, which to a great degree goes unreported. In a must-reed article Peter C. Glover explains why, particularly in Europe, the failed "green" energy policies are seriously delaying, or even preventing a positive turnaround:

Amidst the doom and gloom headlines presaging dire prognostications for the Western economies in 2012 there is the very real promise of a global economy re-directing miracle in the making. The impact and promise of shale gas and shale oil is probably the good news story as we step into 2012. Not that you would know it, given the media’s predilection for bad news.

Only two obstacles stand in the way. First, bad energy policies that do not prioritise cheaper fossil fuels – dumping countless millions out of jobs and into fuel poverty. Second, environmentalist campaigners implacably opposed to any hydrocarbon-fuelled energy development. It threatens their Disney-esque utopian blueprint.

But before we glimpse a rare ray of sunshine amidst the stretching economic gloom, we must first demolish a key widely held myth that is fuelling bad energy policy-making: that oil and gas prices will only go on rising, ultimately rendering their cost comparable to expensive and feeble renewable energy generation. As economist and professor of energy policy Dieter Helm’s recent excellent article pointed out, the UK’s current bias towards expensive renewables is a direct result of energy secretary Chris Huhne’s unwavering faith that the price of fossil fuels can only go on rising.

That’s precisely the mistake an incoming Conservative Government made in 1979. Then oil prices peaked at $39 a barrel (the equivalent of $150 today). In the mid-1980s, however, the bottom dropped out of the oil price ‘barrel’ taking over 25 years to recover. As Helm points out, it is the peak oil and gas brigade – today, a useful ally to the green lobbies – who assume depleting resources based on then known reserves. As Helm says: “Nonsense – and some of it dangerous nonsense”.

Helm rightly asserts, “The Earth’s crust is riddled with fossil fuels” adding “there is enough oil and gas (and coal too) to fry the planet several times over.” And his words echo Huber and Mills’ definitive quote on the subject, “Energy supplies – for all practical purposes – are infinite”. The issue is not (and never has been) too much or too little of a given resource. It has always been whether prices are too low or too high to make extraction viable. Today, the shale gas and oil “miracle” – or rather man’s ingenuity in finding new ways to tap previously unrecoverable resources – has yet again blown a gaping hole in the peak-ist argument; as the end of year figures make only too plain.
---
Equally, the new EU Energy Roadmap 2050 shows the EU is tenaciously holding onto its green dream in the vain hope that rising oil and gas prices will eventually make renewables commercially viable. But the shale gale is blowing an even greater hole in that hope.

While new processes allow vast new energy resources to permeate the world’s shales, the ‘biblical’ scale of the potential economic turnaround still has a way to go to permeate the mindset of policy-makers. Even so, the shale-fuelled miracle, able to part the sea of gloomy economic forecasts and reveal a path to a much happier 2012, is very real – despite the plague of bureaucrats.

Read the entire article here

PS

In the United States the shale gas/oil revolution has through its own force aleady changed the country´s economic outlook. This development is taking place, not because of some positive action of the present US administration, but despite of its policies. Ironically, it is quite possible that the energy centered economic turnaround, in which Obama has had no role, will in the end help to get him re-elected.

In Europe the outlook is much gloomier. We have to wait for new elections in order to replace the present failed leaders - and hope that the Poles will not allow the dark forces (Russia/Gazprom and greenies) to prevent their way to prosperity.

Greenpeace´s Naidoo: "We´re not going there and having fun on these ships"

2012-01-05T19:11:00.003+01:00

Greenpeace International boss Kumi Naidoo has again been boasting about how tough and dangerous it is to be an activist on board a Greenpeace ship:

"We're not going there and having fun on these ships," he said. "We're going and putting our lives on the line. For myself, as a person coming from Africa, you cannot believe how far the Arctic was for me . . . It was no joke trying to go and occupy an oil rig in the middle of the Arctic. To be honest I was scared, terrified, the waves are very rough and so on. So we're not doing this for fun."

Well, one can doubt the danger level of Naidoo´s activities in the Arctic. Anyway, the Danish police in Greenland last year did a good job by arresting and deporting Naidoo, so he will not have another chance to break the law over there at least.

Meanwhile, let´s have a reality check regarding Naidoo´s claim that "we are not going there and having fun on these ships".

Here are just a few picks from recent reports by activists who have participated in the continuing "launch tour" of the new Greenpeace luxury yacht Rainbow Warrior III:

Activist Markku reports:

The temperature is now 22 degrees Celsius. Dolphins are jumping happily in the Rainbow Warrior's bow waves. The entire crew is smiling and joking. We are in the middle of the Strait of Gibraltar on the way to Barcelona and the Mediterranean Sea. This situation is rather different from the last 6 day's experiences.
Last night, sailing the Mediterranean, lit up by the full moon, I looked back again up the sails and rigging. I almost get a tear in the eye when admiring this amazing example of sailing engineering. This is an incredible ship, and a real work of art in many ways. It occasionally is good to recall how lucky and privileged I am to get to sail on this ship with all these incredibly wonderful people.

In a few days I will be back in Helsinki, the darkness, and slush.

Yes I agree, sure sailing in Mediterranean waters, "lit up by the full moon" beats the darkness and sluss in Helsinki anytime!

And when the yacht reached the port of Barcelona, another treat was awaiting the activists - a luxurious dinner prepared by the famed Michelin star chef Diego Guerrero.

No wonder that the activist Tracy was more than impressed by the dinner menu:

We sat down with Ramon, musicians from the band Maez, el Pais blogger Mikel López Iturriaga and our Spanish colleagues to the first course called Mini Babybell which has won Diego national awards for pinchos and tapas. It’s a camembert and truffle creation that looked like, obviously, a mini babybell cheese.
Next up Vieira – the scallops.

Then sukiyaki – a miso soup that looked like a cocktail, or a cappuccino?

Then an egg dish dumpling…

And the beautiful Gilthead bream - with orange and chocolate.

Breaking open the egg I discovered a gooey centre of mango surrounded by coconut cream the colour and consistency of a soft boiled egg. The shell was chocolate. Diego later told me the dish is called “This is not an egg”

Earlier on, when the weather was still fine in more northern waters, another activist enthused over the yacht´s arrival in Stockholm:

The Rainbow Warrior's fourth stop on her launch tour brought us to the capital of Sweden. She came in on a beautiful morning, with water as smooth as a mirror reflecting a low-hanging November sun.

PS

There is no information about where the Rainbow Warrior "launch tour" will be heading now, but the Caribbean would probably be a good bet - that´s where most luxury yachts and their owners spend the winter months. Who knows, maybe even the big boss will join them over there - if he is ready to put his "life on the line"? Gourmet dinners are not necessarily good for one´s health ...

Vestas, the world´s biggest wind-turbine maker, plummets

2012-01-04T20:03:00.000+01:00

The rapid decline of the wind-turbine industry continues. Today Vestas, the world´s biggest wind-turbine maker, closed down 19 percent after it became known that the company reduced its revenue and profit outlook for the second time in two months:

Vestas, whose shares have lost 92 percent from a 2008 high, blamed higher costs and delayed wind farms, helping drive down shares in rivals Gamesa Corp. Tecnologica SA of Spain and India’s Suzlon Energy Ltd. Its plan to unveil a restructuring on Jan. 12 without giving a hint of its nature left analysts questioning management’s credibility.

Vestas and U.S. rival General Electric Co. are suffering from slower demand growth and narrowing margins caused by subsidy cuts in Europe and rising competition from Asian turbine makers such as China’s Sinovel Wind Group Co., the world’s second biggest, according to a BTMS Consult ranking.

Read the entire article here

The decline of the wind-turbine makers is another blow to the "progressive" "green jobs" politicians, who do not seem to comprehend that there is no future for an industry that relies almost solely on subsidies for its profitability. However, when the shale gas revolution hits the energy markets with full force, even the last supporters of subsidised wind power will have to face reality ....

Wind turbines kill 440,000 birds each year in the US alone

2012-01-04T09:02:00.000+01:00

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reports that wind turbines kill 440,000 birds each year, including many protected and endangered species. In addition wind turbines kill a huge number of bats, which are important for insect control and plant pollination. And the number of killed animals will increase with every new wind turbine.

But the proponents of wind turbines could not care less. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis comments:

“If coal-fired, nuclear, or natural gas power plants killed federally protected golden eagles, they would be shut down. If you or I killed a federally protected species, we’d be thrown in jail. Yet for some reason, wind farms are given a free pass. This has been going on for more than 20 years now,” Burnett said.
HawkWatch International warns a single proposed wind farm project in Wyoming will cause 700 raptor deaths each year, including 200 golden eagle kills annually. With only 30,000 golden eagles in the entire United States, HawkWatch says wind power projects are rendering populations of the birds unsustainable.
A newly released U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service field report stated nearly 500 bird carcasses were discovered in a mere two-week span at the Laurel Mountain wind farm in West Virginia.
Wildlife groups point out carcasses found at the foot of wind turbines represent merely a fraction of the birds that killed by the machines. Other victims of turbine strikes aren’t killed immediately but die shortly after the birds have flown away to other locations.

Mice, Rats Safe to Thrive
In addition to the avian deaths, wind turbines create a safety zone for rodent breeding because birds of prey cannot patrol wind turbine areas. Communities in the vicinity of wind farms report disturbing spikes in the mouse and rat populations.
“They may figure out a way someday to prevent the wind turbines from killing birds, but the real problem is where you build the farms. In order for wind power to make sense, you have to build the turbines in areas where there is a lot of wind, and this just happens to be in the flight paths of migratory birds, which don’t just flap their wings to get where they’re going, they ride the thermal wind currents,” said Burnett.

Read the entire article here

A message to Gazprom and the greenies from Venezuela

2012-01-04T01:47:00.000+01:00

Here is some news from Venezuela that should add to Gazprom´s and the European and American renewable energy propagandists´ worries:

Shale gas - natural gas extracted from shale rock - may well be several times more abundant than the proven reserves of conventional natural gas on the planet, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Moreover there are large volumes of natural gas in sandstones, and other non-conventional sources.

But the real news from EIA studies is that shale gas is abundant in territories previously regarded as poor in fossil fuels or dependent on imports: China, the United States and Argentina head the list, but large reserves are also found in South Africa, Australia, Poland, France, Chile, Sweden, Paraguay, Pakistan and India.
"The global energy chessboard is changing, and markets will be realigned. Countries that have never had so much available energy will become self-sufficient, and perhaps even exporters," Luis Alberto Terrero, head of the Venezuelan Gas Processors Association (AVPG), told IPS.

As gas supplies grow, "fossil fuels may become cheaper, the growth of alternative energies will slow down, and new alliances, investments and trade networks will be established," Terrero said.

Read the entire article here

What Terrero says is true, no matter how much Putin and the greenies try to wish away the shale gas revolution. The time for wind and solar power may yet come, but there is plenty of time to develop these and other forms of renewables to make them truly useful and profitable, without subsidies.