Study: The "most scientifically literate and best-educated generation in American history" not interested in global warming

Inspite of being bombarded with global warming scare stories, the "most scientifically literate and best-educated generation in American history" shows little interest in climate change: 


A survey in 2009 found members of Generation X were largely disengaged from climate change. Two years later, these American adults became slightly more so, a follow-up survey has revealed.


"We found a small but statistically significant decline between 2009 and 2011 in the level of attention and concern Generation X adults expressed about climate change," said researcher Jon Miller of the University of Michigan in a statement. "In 2009, about 22 percent said they followed the issue of climate change very or moderately closely. In 2011, only 16 percent said they did so."


The survey data comes from the university's Longitudinal Study of American Youth, which includes responses from approximately 4,000 Gen Xers, born between 1961 and 1981. Interestingly, this generation is the "most scientifically literate and best-educated generation in American history," Miller writes in his report, "Climate Change: Generation X Attitudes, Interest, and Understanding."


Read the entire article here


PS


Generation X is to be congratulated for their realistic views on global warming/climate change. Hopefully their realism sets an example to their children. 

The French ban on shale gas exploration to be reversed?

Is France beginning to see the light with regard to shale gas and oil exploration?:

Shale gas, an energy game changer in the U.S., is dividing the French government, raising the possibility the country may lift a ban on its exploration.

“It’s not a banned subject,” Industry Minister Arnaud Montebourg said today in Paris. “We must confront it. For the moment, there is no government position.”

Montebourg, who is charged with reversing job losses and a decline in French industrial production, was speaking at a conference today attended by top executives of some of the country’s biggest companies, including energy explorer Total SA, a shale gas producer in the U.S. whose permit was revoked in France by the previous government.

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France last year became the first country in the world to ban fracking, which uses water, sand and chemicals to open fissures in rocks and release gas and oil. Following passage of the law in parliament, the previous government suspended the rights of energy companies to explore for shale gas around Paris and in southern France. Oil companies including Total (FP), the nation’s largest, and Toreador Resources Corp. had been awarded licenses for exploration.

France and Poland are the two countries in Europe with the biggest potentially recoverable reserves of shale gas and oil. Only in the region around Paris - with a geology similar to the Bakken shale i North Dakota, there may be over 100 billion barrels of oil:

“How can we not want to know if our land has these resources? ” Total’s Pouyanne asked. “Our country may have these resources. If it does, it would indisputably represent industrial renewal. We must have confidence in the ability of our country’s industry to develop these resources and respect strict environmental rules.”

Read the entire article here

PS

One must hope that the French industry minister will be able to persuade François Hollande to join the voices of sanity on this matter. 

The end of the criminal Assad regime is close

The end of the criminal Assad regime in Syria  is close:


"A few weeks ago, we were counting the life span of this regime in months. Now after the last week and today, I think you'd have to say weeks. This is a very fast moving conflict."
Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut

Assad´s main international supporter, Russia´s de facto dictator Vladimir Putin, will no doubt share the same fate in the not too distant future.

The euro crisis failure explained: Eurozone leaders in a state of (mimicked) drunkenness

Der Spiegel on June 29: 
Monti emerged from the late-night negotiations as a clear victor, having broken Chancellor Angela Merkel's resistance just as Italian striker Mario Balotelli cracked the German defense on the pitch in Warsaw earlier in the evening. In 15 hours of negotiations in Brussels, Monti together with Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy secured easier access to the permanent euro-zone bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM).
The session ended at 4:20 a.m. on Friday morning. Ten minutes later, Van Rompuy and European Commission President José Manuel Barroso announced the breakthrough at a press conference. At 5:00 a.m., Monti, the winner of the evening, appeared at the Council building's exit. He gave a press conference on the way to the car -- and announced that he will travel to the European Championship football final in Kiev on Sunday.

Now it is becoming clear why the European Union has failed to solve the euro debt crisis: 

The eurozone political leaders are always in a state of (mimicked) drunkenness when making important decisions about the euro! And regrettably there are no signs that they are going to sober up anytime soon: 

If the leaders of the 17 euro-area countries really want to solve the debt crisis shadowing their currency, they may want to sleep on it.

That’s not likely to happen. Of Europe’s last six summits, three ended no earlier than 4 a.m. The most recent, on June 29, ended at 5 a.m. And finance chiefs’ monthly gatherings routinely extend past midnight.

Those late hours haven’t served European leaders well and may be one reason why their next meeting, to hammer out a bailout for Spain’s banks on July 20, is scheduled to begin at noon. Lack of sleep, the evidence shows, has played a role in faulty decision-making that led to disasters at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill as well as the ill-fated launch of the space shuttle Challenger.

“We’re not well designed to work well into the night,” Chris Idzikowski, a co-founder of the British Sleep Society who has explored the land of nod for more than three decades, said in an interview. “It has to be one of the worst times to do negotiations.”

Remaining awake too long mimics the effects of being legally drunk, according to recent research. Staying up past your natural bedtime can make you more vulnerable to another’s influence and likelier to take risks. It can impair brain function and lead to misjudgments.

European political leaders, then, may want to go to bed at a “normal” time, say between 10 p.m. and midnight, and let sleep do its job, said Idzikowski, who is director of the Edinburgh Sleep Centre in Scotland. “The brain does think about solutions during sleep,” particularly during rapid-eye movement, or REM, sleep, a phase associated with learning, memory and dreaming.

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In people awake for 16 hours, Maas says brain activity is similar to that of someone with a blood-alcohol content of 0.05 percent, which is legally drunk in some jurisdictions. Staying awake for 24 hours is equivalent to having a blood-alcohol content of 0.10 percent -- exceeding the legal-intoxication limit in all countries involved in the talks.

“It takes a tremendous toll,” says Maas, who co-wrote the books Power Sleep and Sleep for Success! Everything You Must Know About Sleep but Are Too Tired to Ask.

Emotions can be one casualty of sleep loss, Maas says.

“Kids, when they’re sleep-deprived, they do indeed get cranky and cry,” he says. “Adults get wired. They get irrational, they get emotional, with symptoms similar to attention-deficit disorder. If you track mood during the day, around 4 to 5 p.m., people get really touchy,” and without a nap, it could be downhill from there.

European finance ministers met for 13 1/2 hours to hammer out a deal on a second Greek bailout, capping it with a press briefing that didn’t end until almost 6 a.m. on Feb. 21

Read the entire article here

Vladimir Putin is worried about the huge gap between rich and poor in his country

Russia´s lifetime president and dictator Vladimir Putin has according to the Moscow Times spoken about the great gap in his country between the super rich and the poor: 

President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that Russia's rich-poor divide is unacceptably wide and promised renewed efforts to decrease the gap in earnings.

"In our country, there remains an inexcusably large discrepancy in incomes," Putin told a meeting of the State Council, an advisory body to the president, Interfax reported.

"Unfortunately, 13 percent [of the population], or roughly 18 million people, still live below the poverty line," Putin said, without specifying the income level used to calculate the metric.

Maybe Putin could begin to close the income gap by selling part of his large watch collection - which includes such tresures as e.g. a Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar, valued at $60,000. and an A. Lange & Söhne Tourbograph, valued at half a million dollars - and donating the money to his less successful compatriots?

Life without the Patek Philippes and the Tourbographs would not make a huge dent in the former second rate KGB spy´s comfortable "investment portfolio". Stanislav Belkovsky, a Russian analyst, has stated that the Russian businessman, politician and current president of Russia, could be worth around $70 billion. Putin is reported to have major shares in three oil and gas companies; Gunvor (oil trader), 75%, Urgutneftegas (oil supplier), 37% and Gazprom: 4.5%.

This afternoon there was one comment to the article in the Moscow Times, which pretty much says the truth about Putin:

Prabesh Karki · Wichita State University

I doubt Putin is serious about closing the wealth gap. The people getting rich in Russia would not be getting rich without his support. He has been ruling the country for 12 years or so, and many of the social and economic problems in Russia only keep getting worse. His most important accomplishment in Russia has been to slide the country back to dictatorship.

An industry in its death throes: Offshore wind turbine market collapses

Opposition against inefficient, bird killing and landscape destroying wind turbines is growing everywhere. The wind turbine industry is in its death throes, as governments cut subsidies. Now it turns out that offshore wind power, the last hope of a dying industry, is collapsing:

Sales of offshore wind turbines collapsed in the first half, a sign the power industry and its financiers are struggling to meet the ambitions of leaders from Angela Merkel in Germany to Britain’s David Cameron.

One unconditional order was made, for 216 megawatts, 75 percent less than in the same period of 2011 and the worst start for a year since at least 2009, according to preliminary data from MAKE Consulting, a Danish wind-energy adviser. Vestas Wind Systems A/S (VWS) of Denmark, the largest manufacturer, won the contract while Germany’s Siemens AG (SIE) was among those shut out.

That’s a setback for Chancellor Merkel and Prime Minister Cameron, who are targeting a 10-fold expansion in offshore wind to limit fossil fuel use and create jobs. Banks have curbed lending to developers as Europe’s financial crisis spread, and utilities held off on new projects because of delays in connecting existing ones to high-voltage transmission grids.

This is what happens to an industry that manufactures products which do not meet real market requirements - and is totally dependent on tax payers´ subsidies:

Shares of Vestas, the world’s biggest wind turbine maker, have fallen 80 percent in the past year through yesterday, underperforming the 57 percent decline in the Bloomberg Industries Wind Turbine Pure-Play Index (BIWINDP) tracking 14 companies in the industry. Siemens, which with Vestas dominates the offshore business, dropped 27 percent over the same period.

Read the entire article here

The shale gas revolution: US carbon emissions back to 1990 levels this year?

For years now representatives of the European Union have been blaming the US - and particularly the "evil" Bush White House - for the failure of to reach a global agreement on reducing CO2 emissions. 


But, like so often, reality differs from the myth: 

“America’s carbon emissions may drop back close to 1990 levels this year. That result would have been thought impossible, even at the end of 2011.

But the shale gas revolution makes a reality many things recently thought impossible.  It was thought impossible to slash carbon US carbon emissions back to 1990 levels by 2012.  It was thought impossible to massively, quickly cut carbon emissions and, at the same time, have lower energy bills.

Shale gas production has slashed carbon emissions and saved consumers more than $100 billion per year.  Truly astonishing!”

MP: And unlike renewable energies like solar that reduce carbon emissions but are uneconomical even with billions of dollars of taxpayer dollars, the shale gas revolution has reduced CO2 emissions significantly without any taxpayer support and wasn’t even part of any intentional energy policy from Washington, or any regulatory directive from the EPA.

Welcome to the shale gas revolution!

Read Mark Perry´s entire blog post here.

Peter C Glover compares this with what is happening in Europe: 

In stark contrast to the U.S., Europe’s use of natural gas fell last year by 2.1 percent as gas-fired plants that needed only half the number of carbon permits, became increasingly uncompetitive. Prices fell sharply by 17 percent to just 8 euros a tonne. Indeed, so expensive has gas become in Europe that the major players like EON and RWE are considering shutting down their gas-fired plants entirely by 2015. Coal – the literal bête noire for all green politicos – is the only viable alternative.

The Eurocracy did not plan it to be this way.

You might think that European capitals would be falling over themselves to develop Europe’s own shale gas resources and share in the ‘green’ benefits of switching from burning coal; not least because another key EU energy policy is to diversify away from European dependence on Russian gas imports. But the EU-imposed goals of CO2 targets for 2020 dictate that member states must bend the knee to the green lobbies that demand a ban on hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), the technique singly responsible for the U.S. gas and oil revolutions. In effect, an EU-sponsored lose-lose situation has developed.

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Eurocrat socialism, with its predilection for imposing regulatory cap-and-trade restrictions that inherently render industry less globally competitive, has contrived to achieve the very opposite of its chief goal: a new, high carbon-emitting, coal boom. American capitalism, on the other hand, has not only seen technological innovation (fracking) promote a cheaper energy revolution and reduce dependence on foreign energy imports it has also raised the very real prospect of energy independence. Just to rub salt in fast-developing European ‘green’ wounds, the U.S. way of ‘doing green’ is making EU energy policies look UP (unfit for purpose).

Read the entire article here.