The race for the most disastrously stupid energy policy - UK overtakes Germany

This video pretty well shows where David Cameron is heading with his windmill policy  ....

There seems to be a competition going on between governments in Europe about who has the most outrageously expensive and stupid "green" energy policy. Just when everybody was thinking  Angela Merkel´s  German team was in the lead, it was overtaken by the UK team, led by its incomparable captain David "Muppet" Cameron.  

The Daily Mail´s Richard Littlejohn explains the secrets of the Cameron "success" story:

Following the revelation that we’re all paying a secret stealth tax to subsidise so-called renewable energy sources, it seems like a good time to check out exactly what we are getting for our money.At midday yesterday, wind power was contributing just 2.2 per cent of all the electricity in the National Grid. You might think that’s a pretty poor return on the billions of pounds spent already on Britain’s standing army of windmills.

But it’s actually a significant improvement on the last time I checked the wholesale electricity industry’s official website. At the turn of the year, the figure was 1.6 per cent. During the cold snap the turbines had to be heated to stop them freezing and were actually consuming more electricity than they generated.Even on a good day, they rarely work above a quarter of their theoretical capacity. And in high winds they have to be turned off altogether to prevent damage. Britain’s 3,426 wind turbines produce no more electricity than a single, medium-sized gas-fired power station.
Any sane individual would conclude that wind generation is hopelessly inefficient and horribly expensive and stop throwing good money after bad.
But when did sanity ever have anything to do with government policy?

Ministers are planning to install another 12,500 of these worse-than-useless windmills, some of them up to three times the size of existing monstrosities.
We are paying for all this through hidden charges which now make up a fifth of all gas and electricity bills. The average household has to fork out an extra £200 a year.
That’s because the Government forces energy companies to buy from renewable sources, which are far more expensive than conventional power stations. The cost is then passed on to the consumer.
Ministers know there would be an outcry if they raised taxes to pay for windmills, so they hide the subsidies in our gas and electricity bills and hope the energy companies get the blame.
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Earlier this year the National Grid was forced to pay £900,000 compensation to the owners of six wind farms which were forced to close down one especially gusty night — because they were producing too much electricity and there was no capacity to store it.So they’re either producing little or no electricity, or else have to be switched off because they’re producing too much. Either way, we pay.

Read the entire article here

And here is James Delingpole´s take on the Cameron team´s achievements:

 "Never before in history, I doubt, has so much money ever been squandered, so much suffering and poverty exacerbated, so much economic damage been inflicted, so many lies promulgated and so much environmental destruction wrought in order to deal with a problem so microscopically miniscule. Really, if Barack Obama were to declare war on Belgium because he’d always found Tintin Au Congo offensively racist, or if David Cameron were to launch a nuclear strike on Mykonos because all those white-painted buildings were “way too gay”, you still wouldn’t be even half way close to equalling the quite breathtaking stupidity, purblind ignorance and suicidal wrongheadedness of the disasters currently being inflicted on the world by our boneheaded political and administrative classes on their holy mission to “combat climate change.”
Read the entire article here

Shale gas - the best thing that has happened to Eastern Europe for a long time

The Russians and the European enviro-fundamentalists are doing their best in order to stop the US-led shale gas revolution in Eastern  Europe, but they are not going to succeed. Shale gas offers a unique chance for Europe to get rid of the dependence on Gazprom deliveries.

The same technology that brought the lowest natural gas prices to U.S. consumers since 2002 is being unleashed in Eastern Europe, threatening to reduce Russia’s grip on the region’s energy supplies.
Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM), Chevron Corp. (CVX) and Talisman Energy Inc. (TLM) are among companies leading the drive to unlock gas trapped in shale rocks from Poland to Bulgaria that may be enough to meet regional demand for almost 80 years, according to the Energy Information Administration. Poland, the hub of the wildcatting, has completed seven wells out of 124 planned, and the results are being assessed now.
A successful drilling campaign would redraw the energy map across Europe, a continent now reliant on Russia for about a quarter of its natural gas. The efforts to find more gas are taking on greater urgency as Germany plans to phase out nuclear energy and limits tighten on emissions of carbon dioxide blamed for global warming.

Read the entire article here

The Toronto Sun columnist John Robson sees the reality behind the European Union:

The idea that "Europe" is a nation that should be a state has appealed to people from Dante and Emmanuel Kant to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Leon Trotskii and Charles de Gaulle. Doubters included Germany's "Iron Chancellor" Otto von Bismarck, who wrote in the late 19th century: "Whoever speaks of Europe is wrong. It is a geographical expression."
But after 1945, those horrified by two world wars found a practical approach to the dream: integrate the industrial economies of Europe so thoroughly that modern warfare among them became literally impossible.
Hence the European Coal and Steel Community (1952), European Economic Community (1958) and Euratom (operational in 1960), which merged into the European Community in 1965, one of whose constitutional contortions in 1993 renamed it the EU.
It worked in the limited sense that no third catastrophic war was fought against Germany on French soil. But it never led to a real, instinctive sense of European identity or the genuine political institutions that might have grown from such a sense.
Even the EU's vaunted labour mobility is an illusion. Only about 2% of EU citizens work in other European countries. It has no real foreign policy or army - when "Europe" acts in the world, as in Libya, it goes through NATO with the U.S. military in the lead. And it has a nightmarishly complicated pseudo-government with a legislature (the European Parliament) that cannot constrain its various executives: the European Commission, European Council and semi-legislative Council of the European Union, not one of whose members are elected in European elections.
Undaunted, the EU went on to create a common currency. But to get the responsible budgetary and fiscal policy necessary to maintain the Euro's value, it had no better resort than extracting from its members promises they did not keep and could not be punished for breaking.

Read the entire column here

An important American speech on Taiwan

Ros-Lehtinen: “Taiwan remains a great beacon of democracy in East Asia"

It is reassuring to note that the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee again has a chairman, who understands the importance of  democratic Taiwan. Republican chairman/chairperson Ileana Ros-Lehtinen last Saturday gave a wide ranging speech on Taiwan in Los Angeles. The US based Formosa Foundation executive director Terri Giles said Ros-Lehtinen´s speech was "the most pro-Taiwan speech of any major Washington politician in a decade".

The Taipei Times reports:

US Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairman of the House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, has warned China not to interfere in Taiwan’s presidential election and promised to support Taiwan’s democracy in every way she can.
In a wide ranging speech -delivered in Los Angeles on Saturday, Ros-Lehtinen called on US President Barack Obama to sell F-16C/D aircraft to Taipei and to work to improve relations with Taiwan.
“Taiwan remains a great beacon of democracy in East Asia and an important strategic ally in a key region of the world,” she said.
Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican, was addressing a crowd of mostly Taiwanese-Americans at an event organized by the Los Angeles based Formosa Foundation.
She has organized a hearing before the full Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday to investigate the state of US-Taiwan relations and the future of Taiwan’s democracy.
“This is the first such hearing on Taiwan in seven years, but under my chairmanship, it won’t be the last,” she said.
“One of the reasons we will be holding this hearing is that I am deeply concerned for Taiwan’s future, as it tries to cope with a rising China,” she said.
“I am also increasingly troubled about recent trends in US-Taiwan relations, trends which suggest, as one academic writes; ‘a marked decline in US support for the island’s freedom of action.’ Let me make one thing clear: I support the Taiwanese people and their democracy,” Ros-Lehtinen said.

“Early next year, Taiwan goes to the polls to vote for both a president and a legislature. It’s an important election and should be free from outside interference or coercion,” she said. “Beijing needs to stay out of this election. China must not repeat the bullying of the 1996 election, when it sought to intimidate by launching missiles on Taiwan’s election eve.”
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“Tragically, Taiwan appears to have become an afterthought in the Obama administration’s larger aims of engagement with Asia and the Pacific,” Ros-Lehtinen said.

The European Union´s External Action Service in action

Mr. Stelios Christopoulos, Minister Counsellor and Chargé d’Affaires a.i.

The European Union´s External Action Service, the vast worldwide diplomatic network, led by the British Labour Baroness Cathrine Ashton is growing fast these days:

The service, with 7,000 staff, was a product of the Lisbon Treaty, intended to massively strengthen the EU's international role. The EEAS controls a total budget of around €7 bn (£6.2 bn) including massive aid, peacekeeping and development budgets. It has aroused bitter opposition among British critics. Geoffrey Van Orden, a Conservative MEP, said: "The EEAS has huge appetite and ambition, and now it's turning into a hydra-headed monstrosity."
Lady Ashton, 55, a Labour peer appointed by Gordon Brown, is the world's highest paid female politician on a salary of £270,000. A former treasurer of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament who has never been elected to any public position, she had no foreign policy experience when she was appointed to her post promising to speak for 27 EU foreign ministers

Read the entire article here

In order to find out what the army of EU diplomats actually are doing, it is rewarding to visit some of the EU "embassies´" websites. This time we wanted to see, what the Delegation of the European Union to Trinidad and Tobago recently has been busy with.

One of the main annual spring activities of the EU Delegations around the world seems to be organising the Europe Day - the EU´s own "national holiday" . This is the day when the local EU "ambassador" usually throws a big party and gives a speech paying homage to Robert Schuman and later "fathers" of the "ever closer integration" as well as extolling the marvellous things the EU is doing today. The acting head of the EU´s base in Port of Spain,  Stelios Christopoulos, Minister Counsellor and Chargé d’Affaires a.i. is no exception. Here is an excerpt from his speech on May 9, 2011:

HONOURABLE CHIEF JUSTICE and Mrs IVOR ARCHIE,
MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS, THE HONOURABLE Dr. SURUJ.  RAMBACHAN,
MINISTER OF TRADE AND INDUSTRY, THE HONOURABLE STEPHEN CADIZ and Mrs CADIZ,
MINISTER OF PLANNING, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL RESTRUCTURING AND GENDER AFFAIRS, THE HONOURABLE MARY KING and Mr KING,
MINISTER OF FOOD PRODUCTION, THE HONOURABLE VASANT BARATH and Mrs  BARATH,
MINISTER OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, THE HONOURABLE RUDRAWATEE RAMGOOLAM,
MINISTER OF HOUSING AND ENVIRONMENT, THE HONOURABLE ROODAL MOONILAL,
MINISTER OF EDUCATION, THE HONOURABLE DR TIM GOPEESINGH,
YOUR EXCELLENCIES THE AMBASSADORS AND REPRESENTATIVES OF THE EU MEMBER STATES,
OTHER HEADS OF DIPLOMATIC MISSIONS AND MEMBERS OF THE DIPLOMATIC COPRPS,
PERMANENT SECRETARIES,
MEMBERS OF THE MEDIA,
DEAR COLLEAGUES AND DISTINGUISHED GUESTS,
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Throughout the year and in view of the recent financial difficulties of the EU, some of our long time friends and partners have expressed their concerns about the ability of the EU to honour its commitments. But in the EU, we know from past experience that the road to growth and recovery requires more exposure to trade and more assistance to our developing partners, not less. Indeed, the EU remains the biggest donor of development assistance in the world providing more than 60% of the total.
Does Trinidad and Tobago have real access to the EU funds as promised? In March this year we were very pleased to hand over on behalf of the European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, a check of about TTD 217 M to the Government of Trinidad and Tobago.  This came as a reward of several months of hard work and successful collaboration between the Government of Trinidad and Tobago and the EU.
This is our small contribution to the efforts of the Government of Trinidad and Tobago to bridge the gap between wealth and development.
The EU looks forward to the continued and successful collaboration with the Government.
At this point, allow me to raise my glass to the honour of our host country and the people of Trinidad and Tobago!

Read the entire speech here

PS

Well, here we have a Greek happily "rewarding" the Trinidad and Tobago government with "our small contribution" of € 23,5 million (courtesy of EU taxpayers) for its "several months of hard work and succesful collaboration" with the EU. The announcement comes at the end of the short speech, a great deal of which consists of reading the names of all local dignitaries present. One wonders, whether the thought crossed the mind of Mr. Christopoulos, that his soon to be bankrupt native country might have had better use for the money? Probably not. These overpaid eurocrats live in their own cosy little world (tax free, of course), well shielded from the realities of the outside world.

On the Delegation´s "welcome page" Mr. Christopoulos mentions that the "small but competent and committed staff" is assisting "the Government of Trinidad and Tobago in its efforts to further progress in two key areas: the diversification of the national economy and the promotion of good and effective governance in a number of fields". 

It is impossible to find out, how small Mr. Christopoulos´ staff actually is, since the page labeled "Internal organisation" is empty. As to teaching the local government to make economic progress and "good and effective governance", it might perhaps be better for the EU to use Mr. Christopoulos´ expert knowledge back in his home country.

More info about other great things the EU is doing in the Caribbean here

"The deindustrialisation of Germany"

Many leading industrialists are strongly criticising the German government´s nuclear energy phaseout. One of the loudest critics is the head of energy giant RWE, Jürgen Grossmann. Grossman has publicly complained about an "eco-dictatorship" before writing a letter to chancellor Angela Merkel, blasting details of her plans:

On Friday, he took the battle a step further, warning in an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung that Merkel's phase out plan could result in large companies turning their backs on the country as a result of climbing energy prices. "The de-industrialization (of Germany) won't come all at once. It will be a gradual process," Grossmann said. "Soon we will have to do without entire industrial sectors: companies like BASF and Thyssen-Krupp won't be here anymore."

There has even been growing criticism from within her own party. Indeed, many within her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) now want her to call a party convention to focus solely on the issue of atomic energy.


"It would be good were the party to discuss such a fundamental change as the nuclear question at a special party convention," Peter Hauk, CDU floor leader in Baden-Württemberg state parliament, told SPIEGEL. "Such a discussion would be good for the party." Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, head of the CDU in the state of Saarland, agrees. "Given the effort to find broad societal consensus on the issue," she told SPIEGEL, "a discussion within the party would certainly seem appropriate."
Merkel made no indication on Thursday that she was intending to acquiesce to such demands. "The dramatic events in Japan were a turning point for the world and a turning point for me personally," she said. "I have revised my views."


Read the entire article here

PS

It appears almost certain that this, or the next German government, will have to revise Merkel´s unwise decision to shut down the country´s nuclear plants by 2022. A Germany without many of its leading industrial companies will not be able to cope economically. And, as this blog and others have pointed out, it is also extremely dangerous to become dependent on Russian energy deliveries.

Former chancellor Lord Lawson denounces David Cameron´s "green agenda"

Former Tory chanchellor Nigel Lawson has written a scathing assessment of David Cameron´s so-called "green agenda". In an article in the Daily Mail, Lord Lawson says that the government´s obsession with climate change is seriously damaging Britain´s recovery from recession. 

 

The Daily Mail summarises Lord Lawson´s article:

Lord Lawson, one of the most respected Tory figures of recent decades, accuses the Prime Minister of risking Britain’s economy to make a ‘symbolic’ point.

In a devastating verdict he writes: ‘The Government’s highly damaging decarbonisation policy, enshrined in the absurd Climate Change Act, does not have a leg to stand on. It is intended, at massive cost, to be symbolic: To make good David Cameron’s ambition to make his administration “the greenest government ever”.

‘My dictionary defines green as “unripe, immature, undeveloped”.’

His comments came after former Civil Service chief Lord Turnbull accused ministers and officials of pandering to global warming ‘alarmists’ and piling huge, unnecessary costs on ordinary families.

Lord Lawson, Chancellor under Margaret Thatcher, goes further today, saying that plastering Britain with wind farms will push up bills to families and businesses without producing any real benefits. The switch to ‘low-carbon’ energy is expected to add £200 to annual energy bills.

He writes: ‘This price increase would be economically damaging at the best of times; and these are not the best of times.’

And he warns the harm to business could be greater still, adding: ‘The economy is already recovering from the recession.

‘However, there is indeed a threat to that recovery and the bitter irony is that this is of the Government’s own making.

‘It is its so-called climate change policy of ‘decarbonising’ the British economy.’

He says it is ‘highly uncertain’ that higher carbon emissions will warm the planet to a dangerous extent and warns it is ‘futile folly’ for Britain to act alone when its emissions are two per cent of the global total.

In his article, Lord Lawson also stresses the importance of the shale gas revolution:

The new development, however — and it is the biggest technological breakthrough to have occurred in the energy sector since the advances that enabled oil and gas to be extracted from the North Sea — concerns the extraction of gas from shale.

Shale is a rock formation which occurs throughout the world and has always been known to contain vast reserves of oil and gas, but extracting it was uneconomic.

So far as shale gas is concerned, that technological problem has been cracked; as a result, the world is now awash with commercially extractable gas — and no longer over-dependent on the Middle East or Russia for its energy supply.

Read the entire article here

PS

On can only hope that David Cameron, and also other political leaders in Europe, are listening to this voice of reason.  It is time to stop the climate change madness both in the UK and in the European Union in general, before it further damages Europe´s economic development.