UK warmists whining as government is reducing wind energy subsidies

On July 4 the UK TaxPayers' Alliance launched its "Stop the Energy Swindle" campaign:

"Families and businesses are struggling with their electricity and gas bills. Politicians should be cutting energy taxes to ease that burden. Instead they are adding to them on an enormous scale to pay for fat subsidies that support expensive energy sources like wind turbines and solar panels. People who are already finding it hard to pay their bills will not be able to cope with the big increases in prices needed to meet draconian targets for the energy sector. We cannot allow more families to suffer needlessly and more jobs to be driven overseas thanks to high prices here in Britain. It is time to stop the energy swindle."

Now it appears that the UK government is finally listening - and the "independent" warmist Committee on  Climate Change is whining:

The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) has written to Ed Davey, the Energy Secretary, to warn that "required investment is at risk under current proposals".

Proposed reductions in subsidy levels for offshore wind farms this decade are too severe for the cost reductions that the industry can achieve, it warns.

Ministers also appear to have dramatically scaled back their ambitions for how much offshore wind is wanted in the long-term, undermining confidence in the sector.

This creates a vicious circle whereby developers are reluctant to make the investments that would be needed to reduce costs, the CCC warns.

David Kennedy, chief executive of the CCC, said: "I have spoken to every major investor and they are all concerned."

What the CCC considers a "vicious cycle" is in reality a much awaited virtuous cycle, which hopefully will be strengthened in the near future.

 

Putin and Assad playing games with weakest US president since Carter

Dictators Putin and Assad are playing games with the weakest US president since Carter:

If Syrian President Bashar al-Assad gives up his chemical weapons, a military strike would "absolutely" be on pause, President Obama said today.

"I consider this a modestly positive development," Obama told ABC News' Diane Sawyer in an interview at the White House when asked whether Syria's apparent willingness to relinquish control of its chemical weapons would prevent a U.S. strike.

"Let's see if we can come up with language that avoids a strike but accomplishes our key goals to make sure that these chemical weapons are not used," the president said.

Obama's comments come after the Russian foreign minister suggested today that Syria could avoid a U.S. attack by turning over its chemical weapons stockpiles over to international control and destroying them, a proposal the Syrian government "welcomed."

Obama said that Secretary of State John Kerry would pursue the proposal with Russia, an ally of Syria.

 

It is so sad to see the leader of the Free World in free fall. Barack Obama has lost whatever credibility he might have had.

The global warming establishment in a state of shock: The Planet is cooling!

The UN led global warming establishment is terrified. A secret memo to the IPCC reveals that the planet is getting cooler, not warmer:

The extraordinary “reverse” of global warming has led to a 60 per cent rise in ice-covered ocean. Just six years ago, some scientists were predicting that all of this ice would have melted away by 2013.

 

The big chill has persuaded some experts that temperatures will keep falling for decades and throws fresh doubts on claims that global warming will devastate the planet.

Details of the latest twist in the debate emerged in a secret memo to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

It says that a chillier-than-usual summer has left a thick ice layer stretching from the Canadian islands to the northern coast of Russia. The ice prevented dozens of yachts and a cruiser getting through America’s North-West Passage.

The memo surfaced days before the Arctic freeze is about to begin and six years after warnings that global warming would melt the ice by this winter. An ice-free Arctic was boldly predicted in a 2007 BBC report, which quoted ­Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

He said his grim but conservative estimate was provided by the most realistic computer models. Cambridge University expert Professor Peter Wadhams added: “This is not a cycle, not just a fluctuation. In the end, it will all just melt away quite suddenly.”--

The UN memo’s authors say they are “95 per cent confident” that global warming has been caused by greenhouse gases, which have risen by 90 per cent in the past six years.

But US climate expert Professor Judith Curry said carbon dioxide is less influential and ocean temperatures are more important, leading to a period of cooling.

She said the world might be approaching a period similar to that from 1965 to 1975, when temperatures fell over a longer period – leading some scientists to predict a new ice age.

Professor Anastasios Tsonis, of the University of Wisconsin, said: “We are already in a cooling trend, which I think will continue for the next 15 years at least. There is no doubt the warming of the 1980s and 1990s has stopped.

 

The doomsday prophets will without doubt try to continue their scaremongering, but with their credibility badly diminished, we will soon witness a major u-turn by the mainstream politicians, who have allowed themselves to be misled by the global warming lobby.

 

 

Failed former European leaders try to hide their failures by advocating a federal European state

A group of (mostly) retired European politicians - and a few academics - have signed an article in which they pretend that a federal European state is the answer to all present European problems:

When the heads of the EU’s three major institutions -- the European Commission, the European Council, and the European Parliament -- collected the Nobel Peace Prize together in Oslo last December, they spotlighted the vague mandate and lack of institutional clarity that are at the core of the organization’s current problems. Unless these institutions can garner legitimacy among European citizens and transform the EU into a real federal union, with common fiscal and economic policies to complement its single currency, Europe will be worried by its future as much as its past and continue to find its social model battered by the gales of an ever more competitive global economy.

The first step forward has to be developing an economic growth strategy, to escape the union’s current debt trap and to create breathing space for the tough reforms that can make Europe as a whole competitive again. As former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has said, “Structural reforms can only work in conjunction with a growth trajectory.” Then, to sustain reform, the union needs a clear path to legitimacy for a strong but limited European government, one that resembles today’s Swiss federation. This will entail creating an executive body that is directly accountable to Europe’s citizens (emerging from the current commission), strengthening the parliament as a lower legislative house, and turning the council (a committee of the leaders of the member states) into an upper legislative house. Along the way, France will have to yield more sovereignty than its historic comfort zone has so far allowed, and Germany will have to realize that its own self-interest calls for it to bear the burden of resolving the current account imbalances within the Eurozone.--

 

Any move toward such a political union would obviously raise myriad thorny issues. The new institutions and their rules would ideally be established from the bottom up through a constituent assembly, rather than by a treaty change -- but how could a truly ground-up process ever get traction? The large parties that would win the most seats in the European Parliament would need to hash out a compromise or a common agenda robust enough to make governing possible -- but what if they did not? And what is most fundamental, could a political union ever really cohere if not preceded by continent-wide nation building aimed at forging a forward-looking common identity? What is crucial now, however, is recognition that the current system is not working and that closer, rather than looser, integration is the more sensible and attractive option. 

In 1789, Alexander Hamilton, then the U.S. secretary of the treasury, proposed a strong federal system of government that would assume the states’ debts from the American Revolution while guaranteeing a steady future revenue stream, further integrating fiscal policy while preserving a large swath of local sovereignty on nonfederal issues. This was the first step in making the United States a continental and, ultimately, global power. So, too, in Europe, debt resolution can be the midwife of a political union that could make Europe a powerful pillar in the geopolitical order of the twenty-first century. The only way to answer Europe’s current challenge in the face of the many uncertainties is for Europe’s leaders, and its public, to at last commit to this transformation instead of remaining paralyzed with hesitancy.

 

Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Juan Luis Cebrián, Jacques Delors, Mohamed El-Erian, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Felipe González, Otmar Issing, Jakob Kellenberger, Alain Minc, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Jean Pisani-Ferry, Romano Prodi, Nouriel Roubini, Gerhard Schroeder, Michael Spence, Joseph Stiglitz, Peter Sutherland, Matti Vanhanen, Guy Verhofstadt, Franz Vranitzky, and Axel Weber.

 

 

Blair, Schröder, Delores, Prodi and all the others know that a federal European state is a totally unrealistic scenario - an overwhelming majority of Europeans reject it. The real purpose of the article is, of course, to make ordinary Europeans forget that these are the people who through their failed policies to a considerable degree are to blame for the continuing European crisis.

PS
I find it surprising that professor Niall Ferguson has signed the article. It was not long ago, when he, very aptly, wrote this about the economic integration of Europe:

Ultimately, it was a conspiracy by the European elite against their electorates. 

 

 

 

 

Swedish Foreign Minister: Putin's Russia engaged in "brutal pressure" against Eastern European countries

Most European leaders understand that Vladimir Putin is the dictator of the kleptocracy called Russia. But as long as there are "leaders", like EU "president" Herman Van Rompuy, who in their official speeches still describe Putin's mafia state in this way, there is not much hope for a more truthful approach:

 

Russia and Europe belong to the European family and want the same things, Van Rompuy underscored. “We want our citizens to be prosperous and safe; and we want peace and security between countries in Europe and in the world.” --

“I believe our societies will grow closer to one another, and that our economic systems, our political institutions will do so too – each of us following our own path,” said Van Rompuy.

Fortunately there are also political leaders, like Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, who have a deeper understanding of  the Putin regime:

Sweden's Foreign Minister Carl Bildt warned of Russia pressuring Eastern European countries like Armenia, Georgia and Moldova to cut negotiations with the European Union, urging the EU to develop a strategy to resist Moscow.

 "What we have seen during the past few weeks is brutal Russian pressure against the partnership countries of a sort that we haven't seen in Europe for a very long time," Bildt told reporters during a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Lithuania's capital Vilnius on Saturday.

He was referring to the post-soviet states Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia, in which the EU supports democratic reforms under the so-called program "Eastern Partnership".

"I see they have been threatening Moldova with a cut-off in gas supplies as well as a cut-off in wine exports," Bildt said. "This is economic warfare."

He claims that Russia takes advantage of the international focus being on Syria, quietly pressuring the post-soviet states.

Last week, Russia warned Moldova that its pro-Europe stance could lead to a more costly energy relationship to its biggest gas supplier, Russia. Dimitry Rogozin, the Russian deputy prime minister, said on a visit to Moldova: "Energy supplies are important in the run-up to winter. I hope you won't freeze."

Moldova's leaders declared that they won't change their course towards more trade with the European Union.

In November, the EU will hold a summit in Vilnius, discussing new free trade agreements with the former soviet countries.

Of course Putin and his servile underlings have never liked truthsayers like Bildt, but if things go well from a European perspective, there will be more "Bildts", and fewer "Van Rompuys" in the future ....

Great news from Australia: The new Prime Minister Tony Abbott set to axe the carbon tax

Great news from Australia:
Australia's opposition has crushed the governing Labor party in a general election that has returned the Liberal-National coalition to power for the first time in six years.

Tony Abbott, Australia's new Prime Minister, now has a excellent opportunity to lead the country for many years, because the losing Labor Party has de facto ruled itself out, if one is to believe Bill Shorten, who is the likely new party leader after Kevin Rudd:

Bill Shorten, the favourite to lead the Labor Party in opposition, said the party needed to recognise the electorate had told it to get its house in order.
But he said Labor should not give up on its principles, including the need to have a price on carbon.
“I don't believe anyone in Labor is going to walk away from the issue of putting a price on carbon pollution,” he told Network Ten, flagging a fight with the incoming Abbott government as it tries to axe the carbon tax.
“Because a failure to act on pollution is in fact just making the problem harder for our kids, and that's not the Labor way.”

Read the entire article here

The sooner Abbott manages to axe the tax, the better for Australia. A Labor party which still insists on "putting a price on carbon" must be prepared for a prolonged stay in opposition.

What Obama told - or should have told - Putin in St. Petersburg

Finally, a great summary of the G20 "summit" that took place in dictator Vladimir Putin's home town St. Petersburg:

Hopes for a positive G20 summit crumbled today as President Obama blurted to Russia’s Vladimir Putin at a joint press appearance, “Everyone here thinks you’re a jackass.”
The press corps appeared stunned by the uncharacteristic outburst from Mr. Obama, who then unleashed a ten-minute tirade at the stone-faced Russian President.
“Look, I’m not just talking about Snowden and Syria,” Mr. Obama said. “What about Pussy Riot? What about your anti-gay laws? Total jackass moves, my friend.”

As Mr. Putin narrowed his eyes in frosty silence, Mr. Obama seemed to warm to his topic.
“If you think I’m the only one who feels this way, you’re kidding yourself,” Mr. Obama said, jabbing his finger in the direction of the Russian President’s face. “Ask Angela Merkel. Ask David Cameron. Ask the Turkish guy. Every last one of them thinks you’re a dick.”
Shortly after Mr. Obama’s volcanic performance, Mr. Putin released a terse official statement, reading, “I should be afraid of this skinny man? I wrestle bears.”
After one day of meetings, the G20 nations voted unanimously on a resolution that said maybe everyone should just go home.

Who knows, maybe Barack Obama will use this kind of language the next time he meets the leader of the world's number one kleptocracy? It would add some real substance to these empty "summits".