EU citizens and development aid - Why you should not believe in polls commissioned by the EU Commission

Investment in development aid is largely a waste of money

Louise Fresco
Professor (specialises in the foundations of sustainable development)
University of Amsterdam
 

 

 

 

It is a well known fact that public opinion polls are often commissioned and used by institutions and organizations who want to promote their agenda. The European Commission is one of the institutions which most frequently use this technique of manipulation.

 

The EU Commission press release from November 26 is a case in point:

 

Tackling poverty in developing countries should be one of the main priorities of the European Union, according to 66% of EU citizens. Seven out of ten people (69%) believe that helping these countries is also good for the EU, benefiting its citizens. These are some key results from a Eurobarometer survey to be published today at the European Development Days in Brussels (26-27 November).

Despite the economic crisis, more EU citizens are now willing to pay more for groceries and products that support developing countries (48% of respondents, which represents an increase of 4 percentage points since 2012). 83% of respondents, meanwhile, think that it is important to help people in developing countries and 61% are of the opinion that aid should be increased.

 

Already this text on the cover of the actual Eurobarometer survey should be a warning sign:

 

This survey has been requested by the European Commission, Directorate-General Development and Cooperation – EuropeAid and co-ordinated by Directorate-General for Communication.

 

The survey as such was certainly done in a professional way by TNS Opinion & Social, but the results should be taken with a huge pinch of salt. By formulating the questions in a certain way - and by totally omitting critical questions - you get what the Commission wanted - a useful propaganda tool.

 

When Ipsos-Mori last December asked what UK citizens think about development aid, they got a totally different (and of course much more true) picture:

 

Just one in four people support Britain spending  billions of pounds on ­foreign aid every year.
And more than 60 per cent believe the cash is wasted, according to a poll.
The finding is a major blow to David Cameron, who is committed to protecting international development from budget cuts.
It follows a spate of stories linking Britain's aid spending to corruption or waste.
Spending on development by the Coalition is set to rise to £11.3billion next year.
Only 6 per cent of people in the Ipsos-Mori poll strongly disagreed with the idea that foreign aid is wasted. A further 20 per cent tended to disagree with the statement.
Together the total of 26 per cent is little more than a quarter of the public. But 61 per cent said that development money is being wasted.
Despite the lack of support, Mr Cameron made a passionate defence of his target of spending 0.7 per cent of the UK's income on foreign aid.
The decision will require an increase of 30 per cent in 2013 from £8.65billion this year.
Mr Cameron acknowledged it was 'difficult' to persuade the public that increasing aid was the right thing to do at a time of cutbacks at home.

 

PS

 

For people who still believe in the effectiveness of development aid (outside of the aid agencies), Jonathan Foreman's recent article in The Spectator should be good reading:

 

Our rulers must know that development aid doesn’t work. So why do they throw money at it?

One of the more bizarre mysteries of contemporary British politics is the ironclad, almost fanatical intensity of the government’s commitment to foreign aid spending and the activities of DFID, the Department for International Development.
It is bizarre because the Prime Minister talks about foreign aid as if it’s all about famine relief and saving children’s lives. But he and his Cabinet are intelligent, worldly people and they know that the real world of aid rarely resembles the one celebrated in DFID pamphlets and Oxfam ads. They know that most aid is ‘development aid’ intended not to help in emergencies, but to foster prosperity.
They also know that this development aid is at best useless and at worst counterproductive. A quarter of Britain’s foreign aid goes as ‘budget support’ into the treasuries of some of the world’s least competent, honest or responsible governments. Even more goes to multilateral institutions, like the World Bank or the EU aid body that Clare Short described as ‘an outrage’, ‘a disgrace’ and ‘the worst development agency in the world’.
After 60 years and $3 trillion of development aid, with one big push following another and wave after wave of theories and jargon, there is depressingly little evidence that official development aid has any significant benign effect on third-world poverty. The Tories know this. They’ve read William Easterly and Robert Calderisi, who argue that the cash we dole out has enriched privileged Westerners and kleptocratic third-world rulers more than its intended beneficiaries. Moreover, they’ve seen how South Korea and Taiwan have risen from poverty to prosperity and they know how small a role foreign aid played. So why do they still insist on this enormous, ‘ring-fenced’ aid budget?
Some suggest it’s about being nice (however ineffectually) to our less fortunate neighbours; showing them we’re not racist. But being admirably attuned to matters of race and prejudice, Cameron and his crew must have noticed that the fiercest defenders of aid are invariably white, and the most trenchant critics tend to be African intellectuals like Ghana’s George Ayittey and Uganda’s Andrew Mwenda. Some of them who have been in the field will have seen for themselves how aid activity of both kinds — development and emergency — all too often replicates much that was bad about 19th-century missionary activity and imperialism, and even with the best intentions tends to patronise its beneficiaries and undermine good government.
--
Like so many things in Britain, the new Tory obsession with aid may come down to class and religion.
It is a matter of religion partly because so much aid is faith-based, by which I mean that those who fund it and carry it out have little or no real evidence that it works, but they take a leap of faith that it does. It is also faith-based in the sense that foreign aid has become one of those substitute religions so often adopted by middle-class, educated people who look down on organised religion of all kinds. Like other pseudo-religions, aid has its owns myths, iconography, priesthoods; its state and private elements; its conflicts between fundamentalists and moderates; its guardians of purity, its true believers and cynical hucksters, its genuine saints and its ruthless bureaucrats. And it offers believers an almost spiritual sense of their own goodness — which goes some way towards explaining their extreme reluctance to listen to the evidence against it.

Pope Francis and Global Warming

Pope Francis has so far been silent on global warming/climate change.

The church of global warming has many supporters in the Catholic Church. When Pope Francis was elected in March they all had great expectations. Some of the most fanatic warmists have not abstained from putting words into the Pope's mouth in order to prove that he is a fellow warmist :

On 31 March 2013 Francis used his first Easter homily to make a plea for peace throughout the world, specifically mentioning the Middle-East, Africa, and North and South Korea.^[212] He also spoke out against those who give in to "easy gain" in a world filled with greed, and made a plea for humanity to become a better guardian of creation by protecting the environment

The pope’s homily was striking for its repeated references to environmental protection, highlighting what is likely to be a central theme of his papacy and setting up the 76-year-old pope as a leading activist against climate change.

Source


Let’s hope that Pope Francis follows in his predecessor's footsteps and adopts an aggressive stance on fighting climate change around the world, a growing scourge on the world’s poor that the UN estimates is killing 1,000 children a day and costing the global economy $1.2 trillion a year. That's a toll that will rise to unfathomable levels if we don’t cut our addition to dirty fuels.

Source


In the recently published biography, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots, Paul Vallely notes that the Pope is planning a major encyclical on environmental matters. In a move which will drive conservatives to distraction, Pope Francis has asked Leonardo Boff to send him his writings on eco-theology as part of his preparation. Boff was a major figure in the liberation theology movement and his writings were closely scrutinised by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Indeed his book, Church: Charism and Power was the subject of a notification from the Congregation.

In an interview in 2010 Boff noted:

There are regions in the world that have changed so much that they've become uninhabitable. That is why there are 60 million displaced persons in Africa and Southeast Asia, which are the most affected by climate change and which emit less carbon. If we don't stop it, in the next five to seven years there will be as many as 100 million climate refugees, and that is going to create political problems.

It will not be difficult for the Pope to connect this issue with his own very public concerns on the plight of refugees.

Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez de Maradiaga confirmed during a recent visit to Australia that Pope Francis is indeed planning a document on the environment. The Cardinal is chair of the group of eight cardinals chosen by Francis to advise him, and is a strong proponent of action on climate change. A strong and clear statement from Francis on climate change will be heard all around the world. The Pope has proven himself an able and direct communicator and a document from him will be difficult for our political leaders to ignore.

Source

 

 

Don’t take our word for it. Ask the pope. Or, ask the members of the Social Concerns Team at St. Peter Catholic Church in Huron, where a Nov. 12 program will explore the issue.

The program is “Melting Ice, Mending Creation: A Catholic Approach to Climate Change.”

“The pope, Pope Francis, is behind this,” said Karen Giaco, a member of the Social Concerns Team at the church.    The pope has asked Catholic churches to educate as many people as possible about the effects of everyone’s carbon footprint on the planet, Giaco said.

“The biggest part of this is that the poor and the most vulnerable are going to be affected the hardest,” she said. “Everybody needs to make a change.”

Source

An organisation calling itself the Catholic Coalition on Climate Change, which is running the global warming propaganda website Catholic Climate Covenant, has published quotes on climate change by Pope Francis' predecessor. The Catholic Climate Covenant also has a page with Quotes from Pope Francis on Creation/Environment.

It is worth noting that the words climate change or global warming are nowhere to be found among the quotes. Neither do any of the catholic or other global warming fanatics, who expect to Pope to be one of them, produce any evidence that Pope Francis actually has used the words climate change or global warming in his speeches or writings. (Please correct me, if I am wrong on this).

Pope Francis is clearly worried about environmental questions. But that is not the same thing as being a firm believer in human induced global warming. It is of course possible that the Pope will turn out to join the AGW believers in his forthcoming encyclical on environmental matters. But so far he has not done it, based on what he has said and written.

Robert Bryce: "Wind Turbines Are Climate-Change Scarecrows"

Robert Bryce, writing in the National Review Online, claims that wind turbines are nothing but climate change scarecrows. And he is of course right:

Global energy use has nearly doubled since 1982, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy. As for non-hydro renewable energy, despite decades of hefty subsidies and in some cases, mandates, it now provides about 2 percent of the 250 million barrels of oil-equivalent energy (from all sources) that is being consumed globally every day.
The hard truth is that renewable energy cannot even keep pace with soaring global energy demand, much less replace significant quantities of hydrocarbons. That’s not an opinion. It’s basic math.
Last year, all of the wind turbines on the planet provided about 2.4 million barrels of oil equivalent per day to the global economy. That sounds like a lot until you compare wind’s contribution with that of the world’s fastest-growing source of energy: coal. In 2012, global coal use increased by about 2 million barrels of oil equivalent per day. Thus, just to keep pace with the growth in coal usage, we’d have to nearly replicate the entire global fleet of wind turbines — some 285,000 megawatts of capacity — and we’d have to do so every year. --

Now let’s look at carbon dioxide emissions. In 2012, the American Wind Energy Association claims, wind energy reduced U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 80 million tons. Again, that sounds significant. But consider this: Last year, global emissions of that gas totaled 34.5 billion tons. Thus, the 60,000 megawatts of U.S. wind-generation capacity reduced global carbon dioxide emissions by about two-tenths of 1 percent.
To make the point even clearer, let’s look at the history of carbon dioxide emissions. Since 1982, global carbon dioxide emissions have been increasing by an average of about 500 million tons per year.
If we take the American Wind Energy Association’s claim that 60,000 megawatts of wind-energy capacity can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about 80 million tons per year, then simple math shows that if we wanted to stop the growth in global carbon dioxide emissions by using wind energy alone, we would have to install about 375,000 megawatts of new wind-energy capacity every year. If we assume each turbine has a capacity of two megawatts, that would mean installing 187,500 wind turbines every year, or nearly 500 every day.--

Over the past few years, the U.S. and other countries have been subsidizing the paving of vast areas of the countryside with 500-foot-high bird- and bat-killing whirligigs that are nothing more than climate talismans. Wind turbines are not going to stop changes in the earth’s climate. Instead, they are token gestures — giant steel scarecrows — that are deceiving the public into thinking that we as a society are doing something to avert the possibility of catastrophic climate change.

Weeks of talks ended this morning: Germany to have a social democratic government led by Angela Merkel

Flashback September 25:

Last Sunday's German election was a victory for Angela Merkel's (formally) conservative CDU/CSU. However, Dorothea Siems, writing in the conservative German Daily Die Welt discloses the real result of the election:  The "social democratization" of the German Bundestag.  The fact that the conservative business friendly wing has virtually disappeared from the CDU means, according to Die Welt, that there will be three social democratic parties and a socialist party in the German parliament.

Die Welt is of course on the spot. Angela Merkel is, and has never been, a real conservative. She and finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble will be more than happy to include the second largest social democratic party, the SDP, in the next cabinet, although it will all be preceded by a performance of political theatre in order to give the impression of difficult negotiations. (Of course there is a certain element of competition between the leaders of the two "social democratic" parties)

PS
There are still a number of  real conservatives in the Bavarian sister party CSU, but their influence on the policies pursued by Merkel's "social democrats" will be minimal.

Today German media report that political theatre is (almost) over:

Weeks of talks ended early Wednesday morning with a contract between Angela Merkel's conservatives and the center-left Social Democrats to form Germany's next government. The deal still faces a difficult vote by all SPD members in December.

After five weeks of talks and 17-hour, all night negotiations, the parties seeking to form the next German government reached an agreement early Wednesday, with Angela Merkel poised to begin a third term as chancellor. Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), and center-left Social Democrats (SPD) agreed on the language of a contract stipulating the policies they would pursue over the next four years. The heads of all three parties signed the 185-page agreement Wednesday morning.

PS

Isn't funny that German media still describe Angela Merkel's CDU as "conservative", in spite of the fact the party has not been conservative for decades ...

 

"Distinguished" French professor: French National Front and Dutch Freedom Party "maintain the anti-humanist, cynical, and racist worldview of their predecessors in the 1930's"

The academic world is full of people who think that their fine titles gives them the right to denigrate and belittle us "ordinary" citizens. One such academic is Dominique Moisi, Senior Adviser at the French Institute for International Affairs (IFRI), professor at L'Institut d’études politiques de Paris and currently guest professor at Kings College, London.

The professor does not like the alliance that the French National Front and the Dutch Freedom Party have formed ahead of the European Parliament elections in May 2014. Of course M. Moisi has the right to criticize the alliance, but he should stop slandering the two parties and the vast majority of their supporters:

Likewise, though Europe’s populists use their opposition to “Brussels” as a rallying flag, their ideology retains the atavism that motivated their forebears. Today’s far-right forces may be more anti-Muslim than anti-Semitic – Wilders may even be sincerely pro-Israel – but they maintain the anti-humanist, cynical, and racist worldview of their predecessors in the 1930’s.

The twilight of Germany's solar panel industry: Loss making Solarworld buys Bosch's loss making solar production unit

One by one, German solar panel manufacturers disappear, either by filing for insolvency - like former heavyweights Q-Cells, Solon and Conergy - or by hopelessly trying to get a new lease of life through merging.

Today German engineering and electronics company Bosch confirmed that it has sold its solar panel production to the Bonn based Solarworld after loosing 2.4 billion euros ($3.23 billion).

Congratulations to Boss. However, the 800 employees at the company's solar cell production unit and module facility in Arnstadt in the eastern German state of Thuringia have few reasons to celebrate. The future of their new employer, with production facilities both in Germany and the US (Hillsboro, Oregon) is hanging in the balance.

Solarworld lost 60,2 million euros and its volume of sales dropped 25% during the first nine months of this year. It is highly questionable that the acquisition of another loss making solar panel company will prevent Solarworld from sharing the same fate as so many of the other German solar giants.

The blind leading the blind is usually not a winning formula ...

PS

One should not forget that that all these solar bankruptcies and crisis are a result of Angela Merkel's failed energy transition policy. Without the promise of huge subsidies - which now are not high enough to stave off Chinese and other competitors - these failed companies would not have been founded ...

Putin and the Pope

"The brother shall not acquire anything as their own, neither a house nor a place nor anything at all." (St. Francis of Assisi)

Pope Francis, who chose to be called after St. Francis of Assisi, "the man of poverty", today received Russia's ruler Vladimir Putin, who had flown to Rome with a delegation of 11 ministers and countless delegates.

The Vatican did not offer any comments after the meeting that lasted 35 minutes.

One can only hope that the Pope chose to remind Putin - "who has at his disposal 20 lavish state villas and palaces, four yachts, a fleet of more than 40 aircraft, 15 helicopters, phalanxes of cars, a collection of luxury wristwatches worth about $700,000, and an alleged personal fortune that may amount to billions of dollars" - about his recent visit to Assisi, where he appealed to Christians worldwide to divest themselves of worldliness, which leads to “vanity, arrogance and pride,” because “it is bad for us”.

PS

At least one can be certain that Pope Francis did not call Vladimir Putin's long rule a "miracle of God", as the head of the Russian Orthodox church, Patriarch Kirill, did last year.