George Clooney in search of missing millions for Obama in Switzerland

George Clooney and the Obama fundraising team seem to know where the money is:

Actor George Clooney is offering more help to President Barack Obama's re-election campaign by headlining a European fundraiser this summer for Americans living abroad.

An invitation posted on Obama's campaign website says Clooney will be the special guest at an Obama fundraiser in Geneva, Switzerland, on Aug. 27.

Tickets start at $1,000 per person, and dinner for two costs a cool $30,000.

However, it remains to be seen, whether seriously rich Americans who prefer to live in Switzerland will open their check books for Obama:  

Rich Americans renouncing U.S. citizenship rose sevenfold since UBS AG (UBSN) whistle-blower Bradley Birkenfeld triggered a crackdown on tax evasion four years ago.

About 1,780 expatriates gave up their nationality at U.S. embassies last year, up from 235 in 2008, according to Andy Sundberg, secretary of Geneva’s Overseas American Academy, citing figures from the government’s Federal Register. The embassy in Bern, the Swiss capital, redeployed staff to clear a backlog as Americans queued to relinquish their passports.

The U.S., the only nation in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that taxes citizens wherever they reside, is searching for tax cheats in offshore centers, including Switzerland, as the government tries to curb the budget deficit. Shunned by Swiss and German banks and facing tougher asset-disclosure rules under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, more of the estimated 6 million Americans living overseas are weighing the cost of holding a U.S. passport.

Sensational study: Global warming turning Africa´s savannahs into green forests

This barren savannah could soon be a green forest

Great news for Africa: Forget all the tree planting, global warming will turn the continent´s barren savannahs into green forests, according to a new German study, published in the journal Nature: 


New research from researchers based at two German research institutes predicts that large parts of Africa's savannahs may well be forests by the time the year 2100 comes round. 

Writing in the journal Nature, Steven Higgins from the Goethe University Frankfurt and Simon Scheiter from the Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F) in Frankfurt suggest that fertilisation by atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is leading to major increases in tree cover throughout Africa. 

Grasses and trees differ fundamentally in their response to temperature, CO2 supply and fire, and continually struggle for dominance in savannahs. 

Previously, these shifts in dominance have taken place over long periods of time, but the current wave of atmospheric changes has sped up rates of change. Once a critical threshold of CO2 concentration is exceeded, savannahs become less grassy and more forest-like. However, each savannah has its own critical threshold which means that each savannah will make the switch at different times. This helps reduce the risk of a simultaneous and dramatic change emanating from the savannahs.  


PS
The new findings should of course apply to other savannah type areas in the world as well, which makes a warmer future all the more welcome! 

NYC pension funds in the hands of Al Gore - probably not very smart

If I were a present or future New York City pensioner, this piece of news would definitively not cheer me up:  

Embattled city Comptroller John Liu has delivered a $16.56 million contract to the former vice president's environmentally-friendly investment firm, Generation Investment Management, to help manage hundreds of millions of dollars in city pension funds, the New York Post has learned. 

The Comptroller's Office had previously awarded Gore's firm $12.8 million in pension-fund business under Liu's predecessor, Bill Thompson. 

Since 2009, state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli has approved $6 million in contracts to the firm, co-founded and chaired by Gore. Generation now manages nearly a half-billion dollars of state pension-fund investments, records show. 

Bill Gunderson, the owner of Gunderson Capital Management, is - rightly - not impressed by Al Gore´s "green" business or green investments in general: 

I'm sorry if I am as skeptical of Al's financial acumen as I am of his meteorological expertise. But green investments are terrible performers.

More than a year ago I told my clients and readers to 'sell everything under the sun.' I shorted First Solar, America's largest solar manufacturer.

The stock was at $120. Today is at $14.

Line 'em up: The green energy cars, green battery companies, green solar, green wind, green you name it: They are toxic to a portfolio. Unless of course you short them.

Four years ago, the Solar Index -- TAN -- was $307 a share. Today is is $19.

The Wind Index was $31 a share. Today it is $6.

Vestas Wind was $25 in 2009. Today is $1.70.

The list of lousy green stocks is just about the closest thing we have to an infinite renewable resource.

Curious how almost all of investments in green energy that Al would make for public employees require public subsidies and regulatory relief from the same people who are investing in the technology.

These are also the people who issue the numbers on Green Job growth. If you drive a bus, you have a green job. If you push a broom at the bus station, you have a green job. If you type a memo to the bus drive, you have a green job.

Remember that the next time some green broker tells you about the growth in the hundreds of thousands of green jobs in this country.

Months before President Obama made his now infamous visit to Solyndra, I wrote about how Solyndra was 'not a going concern' in several papers throughout the country.

A lot of people in the investment business knew it. If any reporters did, they did not see fit to share it with us. Maybe they were in it for the long term.

But the money still poured in.

That is green investing: If it feels good, do it. If you can brag about it at a dinner party, tell your broker to buy it. If Al Gore likes it, that's all you need to know.

But if your state pension fund actually needs the money, don't.

Read the entire article here

Game over for wind and solar power

Even the most die-hard propagandists of wind and solar energy, like the UN International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena), are now forced to admit that the the American led shale gas revolution is a gamechanger. An interview with Dolf Gielen, the director of Irena's Innovation and Technology Centre in Bonn, is quite revealing: 

• The question today is whether the arrival of cheaper hydrocarbons, in the form of shale gas, could also spell the end of renewable energy as a major player.
• The arrival of vast quantities of previously inaccessible hydrocarbons has driven down the price of natural gas in the US from its 2003 peak of US$20 per million British thermal units to today's $2.
• The solar manufacturing industry that has undergone rounds of bankruptcies and consolidation over the past year seems to have finally bottomed out. "We've reached a situation where most of the solar cell and module manufacturers are making losses," said Mr Gielen. 
• Already, the global economic crisis has pushed nations such as Spain and the Czech Republic to roll back subsidies that made the costs of green power more equal to fossil fuels and motivated homeowners to pitch solar panels on their roofs." (the bolded text is of course sheer propaganda, NNoN)
• "... in the long term, the failure of nations to come to a meaningful climate change agreement to curb greenhouse-gas emissions has sapped confidence in cap-and-trade carbon markets and investor appetite for projects from carbon burial to nuclear to solar."

Still these solar and wind energy propagandists cling to futile hopes about some kind of a miracle - which will not happen - for wind and solar energy after 2030:

Continued low prices pose a threat to the pace of growth for wind and solar energy, at least until 2030, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena), a United Nations agency with headquarters in Bonn, Germany, and Abu Dhabi.

In power generation, renewables account for a little more than 20 per cent of the world capacity, and Mr Gielen forecasts that will rise to 50 per cent with new hydropower, wind and solar plants that are becoming increasingly cost competitive.

It is highly unlikely that renewables - even if they would include hydropower - will rise to the 50% in the foreseeable future, when one considers the abundance of shale and conventional oil and gas available. And even the 20% capacity claim for today is misleading. If one looks at the global energy consumtion figures -  as opposed to capacity - the share of hydro, wind, geothermal, woodpellet, biofuel and biogas declines to just about 8%:

It is crucial, at this point, to differentiate between the installed capacity of renewables and the actual share of renewables satisfying the final energy consumption.

Substracting the use of traditional biomass, the figure for renewables in the modern sense, that is, wind, hydro, solar, geothermal, woodpellet, biofuel and biogas declines to 8.2% of the entire global energy consumption.

And of this 8,2% only a fraction comes from wind, solar and bioenergy. Their share might have grown somewhat during the last couple of years, but this figure from the Danish Risø National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy from 2009 still shows the reality behind all the hype: 

Only 1% of the world’s energy consumption comes from modern renewable energy technologies such as wind, solar and bioenergy. 

Vladimir Putin: "The Man Without a Face"

Putin in a KGB uniform

The Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen - whose excellent Putin biography "The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin"  has recently been published by Riverhead Books - has some interesting things to say in a Harper´s Magazine interview: 

 From 1985 to 1990, Putin was stationed as a KGB officer in Dresden, where you note that he had dealings with West German radicals associated with the Red Army Faction. During this time, the RAF carried out the assassination of Deutsche Bank chairman Alfred Herrhausen, among other terrorist acts. Is there anything tying Putin to the RAF’s trail of assassinations and robberies?

I had a source claim that there was, but I was never able to corroborate what he told me. That is why I refrain from speculating on this in the book.

Who is Marina Salye, and how did she help you resolve the puzzle about the “missing years” in Putin’s biography?

 Marina Salye is Putin’s oldest enemy. In the late 1980s, she emerged from the world of academia to become the most popular politician in Leningrad. She was a leader of the popular, pro-reform People’s Front, and she was elected to city council and became a leader there, too (though, sticking to her radically democratic principles, she chose not to seek the chairmanship). In 1992 she spearheaded a city-council investigation that concluded that Putin, as St. Petersburg’s deputy mayor, had embezzled or helped embezzle as much as $100 million. The council passed a resolution calling on the mayor to dismiss Putin and refer the case to the prosecutor’s office for investigation. Instead, the mayor dismissed the council, and ruled the city by decree for the next year. Salye became a professional organizer and eventually moved to Moscow.

When Putin suddenly rose to national prominence in 1999 and was running for president in 2000, she tried to draw attention to her old investigation, warning in one memorable article that he would become “the president of a corrupt oligarchy.” This uncannily accurate prediction was ignored by the public and by Salye’s old comrades from the pro-democracy movement, as was Salye herself (though she was not ignored by everyone). She was threatened—she refuses to say by whom or how—and she fled the city. Rumor had it she was in Paris, but I eventually found her in a tiny, semi-abandoned village in the woods not far from the Russia–Latvia border. She had been living there for a decade. She talked to me about her investigation (I had the report itself), allowed me to make copies of many important documents relating to corruption in the St. Petersburg city administration, and talked about that period in detail. On February 4 of this year, she emerged from her hideout to be the lead speaker at an anti-Putin protest in St. Petersburg.

After becoming president, Putin spoke of a “dictatorship of the law,” and when Dmitri Medvedev ran for the presidency in 2008, he criticized the cynicism and weakness of Russia’s legal culture and promised reform. This seems to have appealed to a whole generation of young Russians, who thought their nation was charting a new course. One of them was a young auditor named Sergei Magnitsky. What happened to Magnitsky and what does this say about the Putin government’s commitment to law?

I found the “dictatorship of the law” slogan disturbingly oxymoronic from the beginning: the law does not rule by dictatorship; the law serves as an arbiter. It facilitates deliberation and ultimately leads to justice. Or it should. But we got exactly what Putin promised: a corrupt system of law enforcement and the judiciary, which acts in concert with the executive branch to exert terror—just like a dictatorship would. Sergei Magnitsky uncovered a corruption scheme that allowed a group of tax-police officers to use the courts to steal several companies and then fraudulently obtain $230 million in tax returns filed on their behalf. When Magnitsky pushed for an investigation, he was jailed; when he persisted while in jail, he was tortured to death. He died in November 2009, at the age of thirty-six, in prison.

In a review of Gessen´s book in the Australian Quadrant Online, Daryl McCann writes: 

Over the years Putin has repeatedly stolen the assets of prosperous companies and individual billionaires, the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2004 providing as good an example as any: 

And with the assets of the country’s largest private company hijacked in broad daylight, Putin had claimed his place as the godfather of a mafia clan ruling the country. Like all mafia bosses, he barely distinguished between his personal property, the property of his clan, and the property of those beholden to his clan.  

Putin’s compulsion to pilfer apparently knows no bounds, high or low. In 2005, while hosting a delegation of American businessmen in St Petersburg, Putin expressed his admiration for the 124-diamond Super Bowl ring of Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots. With no more ado Putin pocketed the ring and abruptly left the room: “After a flurry of articles in the US press, Kraft announced a few days later that the ring had been a gift—preventing an uncomfortable situation from spiralling out of control.” Putin’s insatiable greed, contends Gessen, is not a case of kleptomania so much as pleonexia, “the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belongs to others”.

PS

What Putin has done to Russia is very sad. Russia deserves something better. Fortunately more and more people have began to realize what kind of a person Vladimir Putin is. 


Obama, Merkel, Cameron and other western leaders of course know the truth about Putin, but they continue to treat him like an ordinary head of state. The ultimate reason for this is fear: Madman Putin is in charge of a huge nuclear arsenal. 

Great news for Panetta: Climate change does not increase risk of armed conflict

"Our mission at the Department is to secure this nation against threats to our homeland and to our people.  In the 21^st Century, the reality is that there are environmental threats which constitute threats to our national security.  For example, the area of climate change has a dramatic impact on national security"
Leon Panetta, Secretary of Defense


"Over the next 20 years and more, certain pressures-population, energy, climate, economic, environmental-could combine with rapid cultural, social, and technological change to produce new sources of deprivation, rage, and instability." 
Robert Gates, former secretary of Defense:

There is great news for Panetta and the other Pentagon warmists.  A new study on Climate Change and Armed Civil Conflict shows that climate change does not increase the risk of conflicts: 

What was learned
In the first stage of their analysis, the two Norwegian researchers did indeed find that "climate-related disasters have a negative impact on growth," but they say that their analysis of disaster data and conflict onset shows that "climate-related natural disasters do not have any direct effect on conflict onset." And they additionally report that they "did not find any evidence that economic shocks caused by climate-related disasters have an effect on conflict onset," noting that their findings "are similar to those in the recent cross-country study by Ciccone (2011)."

What it means
In the concluding words of the authors, "storms and floods adversely affect people and production inputs such as land, infrastructure, and factories, which in turn have a negative impact on the aggregate economy," but they determined that, "interestingly, these negative income shocks do not increase the risk of armed civil conflict as predicted by prominent studies in the field (Collier and Hoeffler, 2004; Fearon and Laitin, 2003; Miguel et al., 2004)."


There is reason to be sceptical about the Norwegian researchers´concept of "climate-related disasters", but that does not invalidate their conclusion that natural disasters do not increase the risk of armed conflicts. 

Study: Poorest countries adapt well to climate change

"One of the biggest injustices of climate change is that the poorest countries are most exposed and vulnerable to the impacts of climate change even though they have done least to raise atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases. Now they must contend with the brutal arithmetic of a tight budget for global emissions as they try to fight poverty, develop and grow, while managing the enormous risks of climate change."
Nicholas Stern, I.G. Patel Professor of Economics and Government and chair of the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics
José Antonio Ocampo, Professor,Columbia University 

“The huge injustice of climate change is that it is those who have done the least to cause the problem - the most vulnerable from the world’s poorest communities - who are hardest hit by it.

“That is why Scotland is committed to supporting climate justice and why we are launching Scotland’s Climate Justice Fund.”
Alex Salmond, First Minister, Scotland

There is great news for Salmond, Stern and all the other warmists who pretend to be worried about the impact of global warming in poor countries. A new study shows that the poorest countries actually adapt better to climate change: 

A new study involving experts in the School of Geography at The University of Nottingham found that the very poor and the relatively wealthy countries are less vulnerable — it was the group in the middle that was most at risk. This unexpected result was found at several different scales and by different members of the research team. They’ve called on policy-makers and NGOs to take their findings into account.


Scottish taxpayers´ money will hopefully now be used for some more urgent purposes.