"There is no solution to the euro problem"

Spain is clearly the next big problem in the seemingly never ending euro crisis. Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo has admitted that Spain faces a "crisis of huge proportions", with unemployment already at 24% and another downgrade of government debt: 

Unemployment shot up to 24 percent in the first quarter, one of the worst jobless figures in the developed world. Retail sales slumped for the twenty-first consecutive month as a recession cuts into consumer spending.

"The figures are terrible for everyone and terrible for the government ... Spain is in a crisis of huge proportions," Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo said in a radio interview.

Standard and Poor's cited risks of an increase in bad loans at Spanish banks and called on Europe to take action to encourage growth.

Read the entire article here

The problem is that there is no solution to the euro crisis, according to Tim Worstall, writing in Forbes. The huge transfers of money to the Southern European countries that would be needed to "save" the euro, are not forthcoming: 

Leave aside the willingness of the European North to make such transfers to the European South. Ponder instead whether it is actually possible. This depends on how much actually needs to be sent south.

We might take at the low end that, what, four or five percent of GDP that is incorporated in the military and health care. Or we might take at the top end the 20 odd percent of GDP that is collected and spent by the federal part of the US Government. Neither of these numbers is right but a useful assumption would be that the necessary fiscal transfers inside Europe would be somewhere between these two numbers that make the US system work.

The thing is though, in northern Europe the government already takes 40-50% of the entire GDP to pay for those lovely welfare states and free health and child care and so on. It’s extremely dubious that there’s room to collect another 5% of GDP to send south and absolutely impossible to imagine another 20% being so sent.

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As everyone has been saying ever since Robert Mundell wrote on optimal currency areas, to be one requires fiscal transfers. Money raised in tax in rich areas and spent in poor ones. If we use the US as an example of the size of the transfers necessary then we find that the EU simply cannot do this. Not at the required size: for government is already too large to make it possible to collect the necessary taxes.

Thus there is no solution to the euro problem. Or to be more accurate, there is no managed solution: the best that can be hoped for is break up and starting again, however messy and painful that would be while it was actually happening.

The German solar power industry is wiped out

The sun is setting on the German solar power industry:


The global solar industry has entered a brutal phase of consolidation and nowhere are the effects as dramatic as in eastern Germany. Several companies have already declared bankruptcy, leaving towns and cities in the region struggling with job losses and tax revenue shortfalls. The future bodes ill.


The sun, it was said, was going to save Frankfurt an der Oder, a city of 60,000 on the Polish border. After years of post-reunification economic doldrums, whose nadir came with the 2003 failure of a much-ballyhooed microchip factory project, the burgeoning German solar industry took an interest in the down-on-its-luck city.

In 2006, solar-panel manufacturer Conergy moved into the never-used computer chip factory, joining Odersun, already headquartered in the city. In 2007, the United States solar giant First Solar opened a factory as well, followed by a second one last year.

Now, though, the future suddenly looks decidedly dark. Odersun declared bankruptcy in March and Conergy, while pledging to return to profit this year, has seen its share price lose 99.6 percent of its value in the last five years. Many doubt the company will survive. Worst of all, however, was the announcement earlier this month that First Solar was closing both of its factories in Frankfurt an der Oder; 1,200 people will soon be jobless as a result.
"We saw the solar industry as a chance to reindustrialize the region and invested significantly in incentives," Frankfurt an der Oder Mayor Martin Wilke told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "This is a serious setback. It is a very difficult situation."
Frankfurt an der Oder's pain is far from an isolated case. The solar industry, once a beacon of hope for an eastern German economy that struggled for years to revive following reunification in 1990, is undergoing a brutal phase of consolidation. There is a massive surplus of global production capacity and the bad news for eastern Germany keeps getting worse. Last December, the Berlin company Solon, which employed hundreds in the Baltic Sea coast town of Greifswald, filed for bankruptcy. Aleo-Solar, based in Prenzlau north of Berlin, lost over €30 million (about $40 million) last year after turning a profit of €31.8 million in 2010, leading many to fear for their jobs there.

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The growing crisis in the solar industry has not chosen to exclusively victimize eastern Germany. Solarhybrid, Solar Millennium and Scheuten Solar, all based in western Germany, likewise found themselves making their way to bankruptcy court recently. The Sarasin report also stated that Freiburg-based firm Solar-Fabrik faces an uncertain future as well. 
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The problems currently facing the solar industry are not isolated to Germany. According to a report issued last November by the Swiss bank Sarasin, overcapacity in solar module production has made a market shakeout inevitable. "The imbalances between production capacities and demand have become too great," the report stated. In 2011, the global production capacity for solar modules soared to 50 gigawatts, but the industry only managed to sell 21 gigawatts of that photovoltaic potential. Furthermore, the growth of solar companies in low-wage countries such as China has contributed to plummeting solar-panel prices. 


Read the entire article here

The much hyped wind turbine industry is facing similar problems, when governments have began cutting subsidies.

The sad truth about the millions of  "green jobs" political leaders and environmentalists both in Germany and many other countries have promised is; they will never materialize.

Indian agriculture minister: "Global warming has not adversely impacted India´s agriculture production"

Remember all those doomsdays predictions about global warming leading to famine and huge harvest failures in India and other countries?

Well, it did not happen:

Global warming has not adversely impacted India's agriculture production which has been increasing over the last five years, the Rajya Sabha was informed on Friday.

"In the last five years ... wheat, rice, sugarcane and cotton production has not dropped, but increased," agriculture minister Sharad Pawar said during Question Hour. "In fact," he said, "except for Nigeria, no negative impact of global warming has been reported globally so far".

Read the entire article here

But if anybody thinks that Lester Brown and the other scaremongers will admit that they were wrong - again -  it will not happen. These people never accept facts. Instead they will invent new "predictions" about even worse things to come ...

Blind Chinese human rights activist safe in the US embassy

Thank God, there is still one place in China - the US embassy - where an innocent blind human rights activist is safe from the terror of the ruling communist thugocracy!

A blind Chinese rights activist who made a daring escape from extrajudicial detention was on Friday under the protection of the US embassy in Beijing, according to a friend, as concerns were growing about possible retribution against his family and supporters.

After more than six years of jail and house arrest, Chen Guangcheng was said to have fled under cover of darkness, evading eight checkpoints and close to 100 guards who have been watching his home in the Shandong province countryside.

A photograph released on Friday night shows him with a friend and fellow activist, Hu Jia, who said Chen was under US protection. "It is my understanding that Chen is in the safest place in China. That is the US embassy," said Hu.

If confirmed, the incident could overshadow a planned trip to Beijing next week by the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner.
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According to the US-based human rights group China Aid, Chen was "100% safe" in Beijing. But it said the activist He Peirong, one of the people who helped Chen flee, had been arrested at her home in Nanjing on Friday morning.

He, who is said to have been in close contact with the Chen family, had earlier told CNN that Chen's hands were trembling, but his spirits were high. She said he was injured in the escape.

Read the entire article here

PS

Civilized people all over the world should never forget, that communist China´s leaders - no matter how "western" they look in their smart business suits - also are the ones who administer the system of state sponsored slavery - the Laogai - consisting of more than 1,000 slave labour prisons, with more than five million prisoners. Tens of thousands of these slave workers are political or religious prisoners.

Could pollution save the world from catastrophic global warming?

Could pollution save the world from catastrophic global warming?:


Climate scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have discovered that particulate pollution in the late 20th century created a "warming hole" over the eastern United States -- that is, a cold patch where the effects of global warming were temporarily obscured. While greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane warm Earth's surface, tiny particles in the air can have the reverse effect on regional scales.
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What we've shown is that particulate pollution over the eastern United States has delayed the warming that we would expect to see from increasing greenhouse gases," says lead author Eric Leibensperger (Ph.D. '11), who completed the work as a graduate student in applied physics at SEAS.
"For the sake of protecting human health and reducing acid rain, we've now cut the emissions that lead to particulate pollution," he adds, "but these cuts have caused the greenhouse warming in this region to ramp up to match the global trend."
At this point, most of the "catch-up" warming has already occurred.
The findings, published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, present a more complete picture of the processes that affect regional climate change. The work also carries significant implications for the future climate of industrial nations, like China, that have not yet implemented air quality regulations to the same extent as the United States.

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Since the early 20th century, global mean temperatures have risen by approximately 0.8 degrees Celsius from 1906 to 2005, but in the U.S. "warming hole," temperatures decreased by as much as 1 degree Celsius during the period 1930-1990. U.S. particulate pollution peaked in 1980 and has since been reduced by about half. By 2010 the average cooling effect over the East had fallen to just 0.3 degrees Celsius.
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"Something similar could happen in China, which is just beginning to tighten up its pollution standards," says co-author Loretta J. Mickley, a Senior Research Fellow in atmospheric chemistry at SEAS. "China could see significant climate change due to declining levels of particulate pollutants."


Read the entire article here

For the global warming doomsday alarmists the choice should be easy: Humanity could be saved by more pollution!

For the rest of us, this new study is just another sign of the absurdity of the entire global warming madness.

The enviro-fundamentalist Sierra Club wants to stop the American shale gas revolution

The Sierra Club is doing its best in order to prevent Americans from enjoying the benefits of the shale gas revolution - the best thing that has happened to the US economy in decades:

Exporting natural gas from the United States is a "dirty and dangerous" game that puts people at risk, environmental group Sierra Club said.

The Sierra Club said it filed a formal protest to the U.S. Department of Energy challenging a proposal to export natural gas from a facility on Lake Charles in Louisiana.

"Exporting natural gas is dirty and dangerous, and puts American families at risk," Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said in a statement. "The Sierra Club's action today follows a series of filings in an ongoing effort to protect families from the natural gas industry's dirty and dangerous operating practices."

Last week, the Sierra Club filed a 51-page protest with the Energy Department following a decision to authorize liquefied natural gas exports from a terminal in Sabine Pass, La.

Read the entire article here

What many people do not know, is that The Sierra Club and other smilar environmentalist groups in reality represent an ideology for the protection of privilege: 

When stripped of its homilies about the beauties of the nature and virtues of a "sustainable" economy, environmentalism is basically an ideology for the protection of privilege. It works in favor of those who feel satisfied with current levels of consumption and against those who are trying to achieve greater levels of prosperity. As Michael Schellenberger and Ted Nordhaus expressed it in their landmark essay, "The Death of Environmentalism":

Environmentalists… aim to short-circuit democratic values by establishing Nature… as the ultimate authority that human societies must obey. And they insist that humanity's future is a zero-sum proposition -- that there is only so much prosperity, material comfort and modernity to go around. If too many people desire such things, we will all be ruined. We, of course, meaning those of us who have already achieved prosperity, material comfort and modernity.

Environmentalists make a living going around stirring up local opposition to all manner of development -- drilling for oil, harvesting forests, building power plants. The premise is always that this is the "wrong place" for such development and that whatever needs to be done is better taken care of somewhere else. What never gets noticed is that environmentalists are also doing the same thing in the next valley and the one after that and the sum of all this is that nothing gets done. They urge people to "think globally, act locally," but what this means in practice is professing some grand support for a "sustainable" economy built on "renewable" technologies while opposing the same things at the local level.

Read the entire article here

Australians losing interest in global warming - Warmists getting desperate

Australians are clearly losing their interest in global warming: 

ACCORDING TO THE Lowy Institute's annual poll, Australians are losing their conviction on climate change. The last poll, published in June 2011 showed that just 41 per cent of those polled agreed with the statement, "Global warming is a serious and pressing problem. We should begin taking steps now even if this involves significant costs" down from a whopping 68 per cent in 2006.

Meanwhile, support for the statement, "Until we are sure that global warming is really a problem, we should not take any steps that would have economic costs" has risen over the same period from seven per cent to 19 per cent.

This positive development, which is happening despite of the long standing mainstream media global warming  propaganda campaign, is clearly making the the Austrian warmists desperate. An ABC documentary, which also gives a number of sceptics a chance to voice their views, is now criticized on the television channel´s webpage by one of its own reporters:

So a documentary, I can change your mind about climate, which attempts to pit the evidence for climate change against the evidence that everything will be just fine must have seemed like a good idea. It would seem Australians are not clear on the science and a telly special could help present the two sides of the 'debate'.
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Whatever the true cause for the loss of conviction on climate change, the airing of this program on the ABC puts the national broadcaster in an invidious position. Around one fifth of people in the Australian community genuinely believe that we don't need to act on climate change. That's not an insignificant number and these people have a right to a voice.
On the other hand, by airing their non-factual views, it lends legitimacy to them. And it further alienates the majority (is 41% a majority?, NNoN) of Australians who just want to get on and address the problem.
With every report from scientists and economists further emphasising the increasing urgency of acting on climate, and with our political leaders in agreement on the need for action, the time for 'debate' is past. Even though they may be opposed, climate sceptics must accept the inevitability of the world moving on climate change.


In addition, ABC has given the alarmist John Cook a chance to personally attack the "deniers":

How does one deny the consensus of evidence? One straightforward approach is to simply ignore it! Jo Nova ignores satellite observations that directly measure an increased greenhouse effect when she claims the warming effect from carbon dioxide (CO₂) is immeasurable. Richard Lindzen claims negative feedbacks will cancel out CO₂ warming, citing the Earth's past. But it's precisely the Earth's past that provides many independent lines of evidence for reinforcing feedbacks that are an integral part of our climate system.

Marc Morano delivers a breathtaking torrent of misinformation (although I'm not sure he did take a breath) that ignores entire swathes of evidence. He overlooks the fact that Arctic sea ice has dramatically thinned with the total amount of ice hitting record low levels in 2011. He ignores that global warming is still happening, with our planet currently absorbing heat at a rate of two Hiroshima bombs per second. Genuine scepticism requires considering the full body of evidence in order to properly understand what's happening to our climate. What we witness from Nick Minchin's witnesses is not genuine scepticism but rejection of any inconvenient evidence.

Why does this small minority deny the evidence and the overwhelming opinion of experts? The major driving force behind climate denial is conservative ideology and the fear of government regulation. The most concise explanation of this influence is provided by Naomi Oreskes in a scene that sadly didn't make it into the final cut.

It is, of course, no accident that Oreskes did not make it to the final cut. This "Conspiracy Queen" has long ago lost her credibility - if she ever had any: 

Naomi Oreskes is the environmentalist Noam Chomsky. She thinks that anyone who questions environmentalist doctrine is evil. Her crusade is to expose the presumed ulterior motives of the critics. According to Oreskes, if you question the dubious studies concerning secondhand tobacco smoke, you must be in the pay of tobacco companies. If you question global warming, you must be working for a fossil fuel company. If you question the DDT ban, you must part of a right wing conspiracy to weaken faith in government regulators.


Oreskes is the author of one of the silliest article ever to appear in the journal Science. She claimed that she analyzed 928 peer-reviewed papers on global warming and 100% agreed with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concerning global warming. If you go to the website of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) you can find hundreds of peer reviewed papers that disagree with the IPCC in one way or another.
Her latest book, with co-author Erik Conway, is Merchants of Doubt. In this tedious book she treats us to the details of numerous disputes between those who subscribe to normative environmental theology and those who don't. Normative environmental theology is the sort of theology that is preached by the Sierra Club or the Union of Concerned Scientists. Oreskes is a professor and an important administrator at the University of California. Like Chomsky, she cloaks her endless conspiracy theories in the machinery of scholarship. Her 343 page book has 64 pages of notes. A pig with lipstick is still a pig.