Poland continues to oppose the European Union´s stupid zero carbon plan

Poland is to be congratulated for standing against the European Union´s unrealistic, and downright stupid zero carbon plan, which - if adopted - will guarantee a permanent recession in this crisis ridden club of climate change alarmists. But what a pity that other club members, who basically agree with much of what the Poles are saying, are too scared to dare to challenge the politically correct empty greentalk still dominating the EU debate:

With European delegates preparing to push a low-carbon agenda at the Rio Earth Summit this week, coal-reliant Poland has prevented EU governments  from speaking with a single voice in the bloc's debate on a low-carbon energy future.

At a meeting in Luxembourg on Friday (15 June), EU energy ministers debated an energy 2050 road map published by the bloc's executive in December, which sets out the route towards almost zero carbon power generation by the middle of the century.

Poland has repeatedly objected to any language in EU texts pointing towards deeper carbon cuts to guide decision-making for the years following 2020, when the EU is set to meet a binding target of a 20% emissions cut from 1990 levels.

Ministers from 26 EU member countries backed a resolution calling on the European Commission to propose a new policy framework for low-carbon energy up to 2030, but Poland was the only country to oppose the move.

"Poland cannot accept regulations concerning reduction targets after 2020 without reaching a global agreement on climate issues, and technologies reducing emissions at industrial scale are not implemented," a statement from the country's economy ministry said.

The country's reservations concerned the EU's decarbonisation objective, as well as a call for "robust and adequate" carbon pricing, which in its opinion could be seen as an encouragement to artificial support of CO2 emission prices.

Carbon prices on the EU's Emissions Trading System have fallen to record lows below €7 per tonne in recent months, while analysts say prices of €20 to €50 are necessary to spur investment in low-carbon energy.

A spokesman for the Danish EU presidency said Poland's opposition to the resolution would not prevent the bloc from pressing ahead with its low-carbon plans.

"The resolution was supported by 26 EU countries, and that is a clear signal to the Commission that it can start working on legislative proposals for 2030," the spokesman said.

Read the entire article here

China is a country run by thieves

This photo is from the headquarters of one Chinese state owned company.  A tour of the  crazy  palace is available here.

The authoritarian communist party apparatchiks now in charge of China are received like emperors when visiting western countries. From Obama to Merkel and the Danish Queen, everybody is competing in the art of kowtowing. 

Nobody wants to admit - although they know, or at least should know - that the these "emperors" are no more than a bunch of thieves. 

China is a kleptocracy - a country run by thieves - of a scale never seen before in human history. That is the view of Australian blogger John Hempton, who´s analysis of the Chinese economy is devastating, but very much to the point: 


The Chinese banks are the finest deposit franchises in human history. They can borrow huge amounts at ex-ante negative real returns.

And those deposits are mostly lent to State Owned enterprises.

The SOEs are the center of the Chinese kleptocracy. If you manage your way up the Communist Party of China and you play your politics really well may wind up senior in some State Owned Enterprise. This is your opportunity to loot on a scale unprecedented in human history.

Us Westerners see the skimming arrangements. If you want to sell kit (say high-end railway control equipment) to the Chinese SOE you don't sell it to them. You sell it to an intermediate company who on-sell it in China. From the Western perspective you pay a few percent for access. From the Chinese perspective – this is just a gentle form of looting.

Hempton´s analysis is confirmed by this New York Times report: 

Publicly controlled enterprises have become increasingly lucrative, generating wealth and privileges for hundreds of thousands of Communist Party members and their families. And in a clear sign of its position, the government has moved to limit public debate on economic policy, shutting out voices for change. While political reform has always been a taboo topic in China, in economics, from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, almost anything went, with powerful voices backing strong measures that challenged the status quo. But now, despite the rise of social media, fewer prominent voices within China are able to make the case for a systemic overhaul that would prepare the nation for long-term prosperity on sturdier foundations.

Unelected eurocrat Barroso lectures world leaders

Jose Manuel Barroso, the unelected Brussels bureaucrat and former maoist, is more and more convincing in his role as the new emperor without clothes. Today he was lecturing real world leaders: 

Earlier today, Jose Manuel Barroso said he was tired of being lectured by G20 leaders and urged the international community to be patient as the region tackles its debt crisis.

"We are not coming here to receive lessons in terms of democracy or in terms of how to handle the economy," he told reporters.

"By the way, this crisis was not originated in Europe.e

"This crisis originated in North America and much of our financial sector was contaminated by, how can I put it, unorthodox practices, from some sectors of the financial market."

And to make his point even clearer, the "emperor" added: 

 “The European Union has a model and we are very proud of it.…We are certainly not coming here to receive lessons from nobody.”

One wonders how long the democratically elected world leaders are willing to allow the two European Union clowns, Barroso and van Rompuy, to attend G20 and other similar meetings. Or are the two already considered to be the so established as official court jesters that their presence cannot obe avoided?


PS
Barroso´s PR department has now put the "emperor´s lecture on YouTube. But it is worth noting that the possibility to comment on or rate the video has been disabled. So much for the openness Barroso is bragging about! 

(image wikipedia)

Shale oil is the next big thing

The major impact of the US led shale gas revolution on the global energy markets is already a widely known fact, but another as important development - the shale oil revolution - is just around the corner:

 We have discussed some of the shale oil prospects and their recent successes, but the story of US shale oil does not end there. There is, for example, the Green River Formation (mainly in Colorado and Utah). According to estimates from the USGS, this contains about 3 trillion (3,000 billion) barrels of oil, about half of which may be recoverable, depending on the available technology and economic conditions. Note that the US consumes about 7 billion barrels of oil per year.

If the United States is able to commercially exploit part of these resources and combine this with successfully exploiting conventional oil resources in new offshore prospects, it is quite possible for the country to substantially reduce its oil import dependency and perhaps even achieve self-sufficiency by 2035. According to rfigures from consultancy PFC Energy, oil companies are investing an estimated $25 billion this year to drill 5,000 new oil wells in tight rock fields in the US. Energy consultancy IHS CERA foresees that, based on production plans from industry, unconventional oil production could rise from about half a million barrels per day now to 3 million barrels per day in 2020. Daniel Yergin, chairman of IHS CERA, has said: "This is like adding another Venezuela or Kuwait by 2020, except these tight oil fields are in the United States."

--

To conclude, the potential of both conventional and unconventional oil production in the US is quite significant and one could expect that by 2035, if backed by sound policies, US oil import dependency would be substantially reduced. This means that crude oil meant for the US will look for other markets. If countries like China and India could also increase their oil production, substantial supplies would become available for the rest of the world.

Read the entire article here

One thing is certain: The prospects for the US economy are excellent in the decades to come, providing that American politicians make the right decisions and allow all the good things to happen. The same possibilities are open to China, India and many other countries. 

Professor Fritz Vahrenholt - A voice of sanity in the climate debate

Professor Fritz Vahrenholt, one of the fathers of Germany's environmental movement and the director of RWE Innogy, one of Europe's largest renewable energy companies, last week delivered the 3rd Global Warming Policy Foundation Annual Lecture at the Royal Society in London. Vahrenholt, whose book "Die kalte Sonne: Warum die Klimakatastrophe nicht stattfindet" (The Cold Sun: Why the climate catastrophe is not happening), written together with Sebastian Lüning, has become a best seller in Germany, is a powerful and convincing critic of the alarmist global warming establishment: 

For many years, I was an active supporter of the IPCC and its CO2 theory. Recent experience with the UN's climate panel, however, forced me to reassess my position. In February 2010, I was invited as a reviewer for the IPCC report on renewable energy. I realised that the drafting of the report was done in anything but a scientific manner. The report was littered with errors and a member of Greenpeace edited the final version. These developments shocked me. I thought, if such things can happen in this report, then they might happen in other IPCC reports too.

--

In the last 10 years the solar magnetic field dropped to one of its lowest levels in the last 150 years, indicating lower intensity in the decades ahead. This may have contributed to the halt in global warming and is likely to continue for a while, until it may resume gradually around 2030/2040. Based on the past natural climate pattern, we should expect that by 2100 temperatures will not have risen more than 1°C, significantly less than proposed by the IPCC.

Climate catastrophe would have been called off and the fear of a dangerously overheated planet would go down in history as a classic science error. Rather than being largely settled, there are more and more open climate questions which need to be addressed in an impartial and open-minded way.

Firstly, we need comprehensive research on the underestimated role of natural climate drivers. Secondly, the likely warming pause over the coming decades gives us time to convert our energy supply in a planned and sustainable way, without the massive poverty currently planned.

In the UK and Germany, for example, power-station closures and huge expenditure for backup of volatile wind or solar energy or harmful ethanol production will raise energy prices massively and even threaten power cuts: the economic cost will be crippling, all driven by fear.

Read the entire article here

The question is; When will the political leaders, who have allowed themselfs to be hijacked by the enviro-fundamentalist scaremongers, begin to listen to climate realists like professor Vahrenholt? Politicians should realize that the longer they toe the alarmist line, the more they will contribute to a damaging development, with a growing number of people impoverished and many real environmental problems left unsolved. 

Kiribati gets so much EU climate aid that it can´t handle it

The European Union is, in an addition to the seemingly never ending euro crisis, facing other type of problems, also entirely of its own making.


During the last few years, the European Union´s climate change "allies" - a number of small Pacific island states - have received tens, if not hundreds of millions of "climate change aid" in exchange for toeing the EU line on global warming alarmism. And more aid is in the pipeline, as a matter of fact so much that the often authoritarian and corrupt rulers of the mini states do not seem to have the capacity to open enough bank accounts for receiving the millions:

Kiribati is pleading with the European Union to make climate change funding easier for small island states to access.

An extra 23-million US dollars to help Pacific nations cope with climate change was part of a new European Union development partnership unveiled last week.

A senior official at Kiribati’s ministry of finance, Teriba Tabe, says for small island states, it is difficult to actually get the funding.

“We have limited capacity, we don’t have much time to go through these procedures, and guidelines to follow, so hopefully we’ll get there, but our plea to the European Union members if they can always make the rules more flexible and suitable for us."

Read the entire article here


Knowing the dismal corruption records of Kiribati and several of the other Pacific island states, it comes as no surprise that there are demands for more "flexible" and "suitable" payment procedures. One way of dealing with this "problem" to the satisfaction of the Kiribati and other Pacific island governments could be for the EU to pay the climate "aid" millions directly to e.g. safe private Swiss bank accounts. 


PS
This is what Freedom House says about government corruption in Kiribati:

Official corruption and abuse are serious problems, and the government has not shown a commitment to addressing them. The number of businesses owned by mainland Chinese has rapidly increased in recent years, raising concerns over possible corruption in granting immigration status to Chinese investors and other legal wrongdoing in overseeing foreign investments. Kiribati was ranked 91 out of 178 countries surveyed in Transparency International’s 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index.

Hypocrite Prince Charles warns governments about climate change

Prince Charles is obviously intent on destroying everything that his mother has done for the British monarhcy during her 60 years of service. Now this unelected royal hypocrite thinks that he is entitled to criticize democratic governments for lack of actions with regard to bogus human caused climate change:

In a video message for world leaders attending the Rio earth summit the Prince criticised the lack of urgency by governments in addressing growing global issues.

He said the failure of the global community to act against warming “despite countless such meetings” was made against the background of “increasingly dire warnings”.

“Like a sleepwalker, we seem unable to wake up to the fact that so many of the catastrophic consequences of carrying on with “business-as-usual” are bearing down on us faster than we think, already dragging many millions more people into poverty and dangerously weakening global food, water and energy security for the future,” he said.

In the video filmed at Clarence House he appealed to policy makers to act in a concerted effort “before it is finally too late”.

The entire news article and video here

Can anyone imagine the Queen making a statement like that? One wonders, are there no sane people among his staff, who dare to tell the Prince to shut up, before it is finally too late?