Google Can’t Be Bothered To Acknowledge Easter, Celebrated By Hundreds Of Millions Worldwide

By P Gosselin on 20. April 2014

On other days, like Earth Day, Halloween, or holidays of other religions, we find Google putting up some kind of motive at their search page to mark the day.

Here’s what Google.de has today for Easter, which is celebrated by over a billion people worldwide:

Google
Nothing, quite obviously.

In fact according to a comment from reader FrankSW below, Google has ignored Easter since 2000.

In the future we ought to keep in mind what Google thinks of practicing Christians.

Forget Google…HAPPY EASTER everybody!

 

Posted in | 6 Responses

More Germans Getting Their Power Cut Off Because They Can’t Afford Paying Sky-High Green Electric Bills

By P Gosselin on 19. April 2014

Just a few days ago, the IPCC WG III report claimed that CO2 emissions could be curbed with little pain involved. Well, go tell it to the more than 300,000 Germans who have had their power shut off in a single year because they no longer can afford skyrocketing electric bills. And these people live in a rich country!

And imagine what expensive power means for poor, developing countries. In such countries it’s nothing short of widespread catastrophe and grinding misery.

The online site of German news television station NTV writes of a threatening energy poverty taking hold in Europe and that”more and more people are unable to pay for the electricity that they consume. More than 300,000 German citizens are going to have their power shut off each year.”

Hat tip: DirkH

NTV cites a report from German nation daily Die Welt, which writes German power companies turned off the power for 321,539 people because of non-payment in 2012, up from 312,500 people in 2011.

The reason for the high prices? NTV writes:

A reason for the increased number of power shutoffs is the rash expansion of renewable energies, which lead to higher energy prices.”

Two years ago NoTricksZone reported on an article also from Die Welt who claimed that 600,000 households were getting their power cut off. The figures on power service cutoffs vary broadly. Whichever figure is correct, the scale of the social disaster is immense no matter how you look at it.

It’s time to make energy affordable and attractive for every socioeconomic level, and not a luxury good for the upper classes.

Also read: max-planck-institute-economist-energiewende-bordering-on-suicide-unimaginably-expensive-folly/

Posted in | 8 Responses

Long Term Tide Gauge Data Show 21st Century Sea Level Rise Will Be Approximately As Much As The 20th Century

By P Gosselin on 18. April 2014

330 Years of Sea Level

By Ed Caryl

Sea level data suffer from the same problem as temperature and other climate measures; there isn’t enough of it. Satellite sea level data only goes back twenty years, even less than the satellite temperature data. Fortunately, because the West was civilized by seafaring nations, we have some tide gauge records back into the 19th century for locations in Europe and a few locations around the world. These go back far enough that the chief source of error becomes not measurement accuracy or care in record keeping, but Post-Glacial Rebound (PGR) or Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA).

As described in Rebound, my last article, PGR for the Nordic countries, and other ports around the Baltic Sea, make sea level measurements in those ports a measure of PGR, not sea level. Fortunately, accurate GPS PGR measurements have been made for nearly all the tide gauges in the world, and these measurements can be used to correct the tide gauge sea level measurements.

Fifteen tide gauge records from around the world were downloaded from PSMSL Explorer, and one record from Amsterdam NAP. These were selected based on quality: (no quality red flags), length (over 100 years preferred), good continuity, low PGR, and low tectonic activity in the area. These were normalized to their average level in the period from 1960 to 1980, then corrected for PGR. The result is Figure 1.

C_1

Figure 1 is the normalized data from 16 quality long record tide gauges.

Figure 2 below is the average of the tide gauge data in Figure 1.

C2

This is the average of 15 Mean Sea Level (MSL) records since 1958, 11 from 1948 to 1958, at least 10 since 1900, at least 7 from 1885, at least 5 since 1864, 4 since 1849, and 2 for most of the period since 1807.

C3

Figure 3 is a chart from climatedata.info. This is presented as a validation of figure 2.

We see an indication here that sea level has been rising since about 1855 to 1860. Before that, sea level was flat or falling. Here is a chart showing trends in thirty-year intervals.

C4

Figure 4 is chart of sea level trends since 1810 using the averaged data from figure 2.

The sea level trend was nearly flat in the whole of the 1800’s, trending up 0.4 mm/year in the first half of the century, then up by 0.9 mm/year in the last half, as the Little Ice Age ended in mid-century. In the whole of the 20th century the trend was up by less than 1.7 mm/year. All together, there has been a sea level rise of about 25 cm in the last 150 years, or about 10 inches. There the trend slowed during the cool 1950 to 1980 period, then increased to 2.25 mm/year in the warming years late in the century. The satellite record begins in the bottom of the cooling years of the Pinatubo volcanic eruption. That is why that record, combined with the artificial GIA/PGA 0.3 mm/year “correction” is listed in U of Colorado satellite data as having a 3.2 ± 0.4 mm/year trend.

C5

Figure 5a, the sea level trend since 1890. Figure 5b, the sea level rise in the last 33 years.

The recent upward tick in 2012 and 2013 due to rebound from the 2011 La Niña is just two years long, and is not nearly as dramatic as several previous short increases and decreases in the record. These are all due to short periods of warming and cooling associated with El Niños, La Niñas, and volcanic events. The 1983 and 1992 El Chichon and Pinatubo volcanic cooling events are particularly obvious in Figure 5b.

We do have one good sea level record from before 1800. The Dutch have been very concerned about sea level for a very long time, as a third of their country is below it.

C6

Figure 6 is a Huddestenen, named for Amsterdam Mayor Hudde, a marble block set in 1684, 2.67 meters above Amsterdam level.

After a severe flood in 1675, the mayor of Amsterdam decided that the only way to make sure dikes were high enough to prevent flooding was to know precisely where the tops of the dikes were relative to the normal high water mark. To that end, during the year 1683 to 1684, September to September, daily records were kept of the tide, and an average high water mark was calculated. Since that time records have been maintained and an almost continuous sea level record exists from 1700 to 1925. This record is called the “Normaal Amsterdams Peil” (NAP) or the Amsterdam Ordinance Datum sea level record. Here is that record, corrected for PGR (or GIA), normalized to and plotted with the average from Figure 2.

C7

Figure 7 is 330 years of measured sea level data.

The sea level rise over the last 200 years, from 1807, is no more than 27 cm, or about 11 inches. In the 125 years before that, there was no rise at all.

So…what will happen in the future? If the cooling predicted by the adherents to the solar climate driver hypothesis comes to pass, then in the next thirty years we will get a hesitation in sea level rise similar to the 1950 to 1980 period. Much of the easily melted ice stored during the Little Ice Age has melted already, so only the large ice reservoirs, Greenland and Antarctica, can contribute to sea level rise. Most of the rise from pumping aquifers and draining land-locked lakes has reached a limit. Thermosteric rise due to ocean heating has reached a limit due to increased evaporation from tropical seas. If all these are taken into account, sea level rise in the remainder of the the 21st century cannot exceed that in the last century, or about 1.7 mm/year, and perhaps less. This indicates a sea level rise by the year 2100 of less than 15 centimeters, or less than six inches.

In areas with glacial rebound, sea level rise will not be noticed at all. In areas with subsidence, the subsidence should be of concern. In the rare areas where neither is happening, normal dike and seawall maintenance and normal replacement of infrastructure will suffice. Coral Islands can grow upwards at 1 cm/year, so will have no problem with a sea level rise 1/6th of that. If the past is any indication of the future, there is little to fear from sea level rise.

 

Posted in | 8 Responses

Bureaucrats To Force Europeans To Drink Cold Coffee To Save The Climate…EU Directive Aims To Limit Coffee Machines!

By P Gosselin on 17. April 2014

Europe’s regulation bureaucrats are going out of control once again.

Citizens, they feel, aren’t grown up enough to responsibly operate their own household applicances. They need to be nannied, the EU bureaucrats believe.

So out they come with the European Ecodesign Directive, which originally was intended to regulate electric appliances like flat screen televisions, dishwashers or lamps. But the power to intrude into people’s lives and tell them how to live was just too irresistible – Brussels bureaucrats wanted more. In 2009 the directive was expanded to include all appliances that “can impact natural resources.” All the intrusion and regulation are justified by the need to “protect our climate”.

Last October I wrote about how the EU was gearing up to restrict household vacuum cleaners. Next in line are coffee machines.

The Austrian daily Der Standard here reports that a new European eco-design directive will switch off coffee machines already after five minutes. The directive will go into effect on January 1, 2015. Commercial coffee makers will be exempted.

Already harsh criticism is mounting. Some German conservative politicians say that the EU “should focus more on really important issues.” Moreover, the German business association UV Nord criticizes the “regulation madness” of the EU.

But the EU commission defends the move, claiming that it does not regulate the coffee machines in general, but rather only their warming function.

Der Standard writes:

The manufacturers can decide whether they wish to allow the consumers to decide if they want to deactivate the automatic switch-off function of the hot-plate function.”

 

Posted in , | 11 Responses

Bastardi: Detroit Sets All-Time Record Snowy Winter! … 5 Of The Snowiest Winters Occurred In Last 11 Years!

By P Gosselin on 16. April 2014

Veteran meteorologist Joe Bastardi tweeted here a chart showing Detroit not only has been struggling with a brutal, cold and snowy winter this year, but has been doing so for the last decade. Soon people won’t know what bare ground in the springtime is!

Bastardi_Detriot winters BlW9pDnCYAAiZmJ

Joe also adds that 6 of the top 15 snowy winters have occurred in the last 15 years.

No wonder the title of the fairy tale has been changed from global warming (a lie) to climate change. For meteorologist Joe Bastardi, it’s clear: “People around Detroit and everywhere (most snowy winters are also colder than normal) dont believe their lies.”

 

Posted in | 7 Responses

German FAZ Commentary On Global Cooperation To Stabilize Climate: “Not Going To Happen”

By P Gosselin on 16. April 2014

The online Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung  (FAZ), Germany’s leading national political daily, has a commentary on the IPCC’s WG III report. It’s also online here.

On the front page AGW believer Joachim Müller-Jung comments:

The solution appears so simple – but collectively it is so difficult to achieve.”

He adds that meanwhile

Climate policy is now changing course. [...] A global cooperation on stabilizing the climate is not going to happen.”

Never mind that Müller-Jung actually believes the IPCC’s already glaringly faulty crystal ball forecasts are going to come true if we don’t act. He sees a number of obstacles ahead in tackling the “climate problem” globally. He writes that coal and natural gas today are “so cheap that the ecological change to renewables will just have to wait” and that in respect to emission reductions “the IPCC has to acknowledge that rigid mandatory targets have little political value and are morally dubious.”

Müller-Jung sees no chance of a collective global agreement on reductions and that the best we can hope for are regional measures that take regional conditions into account. “Many climate activists have a hard time accepting that.”

 

Posted in | 2 Responses

University of Colorado Sea Level Rise Adjustment Appears To Be Unreasonable, Not Justifiable

By P Gosselin on 15. April 2014

Rebound and Sea Level
By Ed Caryl

During the peak of the last ice age, enough ice was collected in the great ice sheets that the global sea level was reduced by more than 120 meters. The ice sheets themselves were, in places, more than two kilometers thick. The great weight of that ice depressed the earth’s crust and mantle by hundreds of meters. In some places, ground that is now a hundred meters above sea level, was pressed down below the sea level that existed before and shortly after the ice melted. Because the earth’s mantle has a high viscosity, and the earth’s crust a high bending strength, these areas are still slowly rising after 12,000 years, and will rise for another 12,000, barring another ice age to press them down again. This “isostatic rebound” or “post-glacial rebound” (PGR) complicates sea levels worldwide because it continually changes the sea bottom and coastline shapes. The University of Colorado sea level measurements add 0.3 mm/year to sea level rise to “adjust” for this. Is this adjustment reasonable?

Locally, this rebound can be measured by precision GPS. Geological studies have also determined the prehistoric amount of rebound that has taken place. I will just mention three areas that have been and will be vastly changed by rebound: the St Lawrence Seaway area in Canada and northern New England in the U. S., an island beach in Nunavit, northern Canada, and Finland in northern Europe.

C_1

Figure 1 is a world map of PGR from the Wikipedia article on that subject, here.

The present day St. Lawrence River Seaway sits at the edge of the present PGR area that marks the boundary of the great Laurentide Ice Sheet of the last ice age. North of the river, the Provence of Quebec is rising. South of the river, southern New England is rising much slower or falling. This is apparent at Lake Ontario, where the tilting has resulted in the northern shore rising faster than the southern shore, and wetlands on the north draining and drying out, while on the southern shore, beaches are drowning and wetlands are being created from formerly dry land. The whole lake is very slowly rolling southward.

At the end of the last ice age, ice had blocked the St. Lawrence valley and formed the glacial Lake Candona, covering what is now the lower three Great Lakes, Ontario, Erie, and Huron. When the ice dam failed, the water level fell 300 feet (100 meters) in a few days. At this point, Lake Ontario may have been connected to the world ocean through the Champlain Sea. The Champlain Sea covered the whole area that is now Lake Champlain and all the St. Lawrence River Valley up to Lake Ontario. Pierre’s boyhood home in Northern Vermont was under seawater, or at the shore during this period. The Champlain Sea lasted from 12,500 years ago up to 9800 years ago, when the rising land finally cut off Lake Champlain from the waters to the north. The land has continued to rise in the Lake Champlain area, and now the lake is 29 to 30 meters above mean sea level.

In the far north of Canada, where the center of the ice sheet was thickest, the land is currently rising at nearly 2 cm a year. In the past, when the last ice had melted, the rate was even higher, and the land will continue to rise into the future until the next ice age returns. The PGR uplift is constant, without fits and starts, in contrast to land in tectonically active areas like California and Japan, and other areas that are near plate boundaries where earth movements will abruptly change sea level.

C_2

Figure 2. At Bathurst Inlet, on the east side of Cockburn Island, Nunavit, northern Canada, is a wedge-shaped beach called Rebound Beach. Source.

Here at Rebound Beach are many fossil beaches, one above the other, preserved because for most of the year the ground is frozen and snow-covered, there is little rain, and very little tidal action. The beaches seen here are like a stereo tape recording (with a stream dividing the tracks) of rising and falling sea levels recorded on a steadily rising, evenly sloped land form. It appears that since the last time the tape was erased, when the ice scrubbed the slope clean over 12,000 years ago, there have been about 20 rises, falls, or hesitations in the sea level, where the rate was different from the steady PGR. A dating of each of these fossil beaches would result in a good record of sea level over the last 12,000 years.

C_3Figure 3 (left) is a map of Finland as of 11,000 years ago. Source. The blue area was water.

Finland 11,000 years ago was mostly sea-bottom with an archipelago of islands. Many place-names in Finland reflect this history with high ground that has island or other maritime feature names. As the land rose, lakes were cut off from the sea, and the Gulf of Bothnia became smaller. The current rate of uplift here approaches 1 cm a year in the northern Gulf. On this map, at the left edge just below center is a narrowing of the Gulf of Bothnia at Kvarken. This narrowing separates Bothnian Bay from the outer Bothnian Sea further south. The water at this point is only about 25 meters deep. Bothnian Bay is already nearly fresh water due to the number and size of the rivers flowing into it. The salt content is now too low to be tasted and there are many freshwater fish species. In about 1500 years uplift will create a further narrowing, reducing the depth to about 10 meters, creating a river flowing south across the Kvarken. At that time Bothnia Bay will be a freshwater lake.

The rising of the bottom of the Bay of Bothnia and the Baltic Sea in general will reduce the volume of the Baltic and force that water into the world ocean, raising the sea level generally. Just to estimate the amount of rise, if the average PGR is 5 mm/year for the Baltic, and the Baltic is roughly 1/1000th of the total ocean area, then the world ocean will rise 0.005 mm/year.

But the Baltic is small compared to Hudson Bay, and Hudson Bay is also rising. The tide gauge at Churchill is rising (sea level falling) at 1.2 cm/year. Hudson Bay is 0.34% of the World Ocean. The PGR here will contribute 0.041 mm/year to general sea level rise. The other waters around the islands of Nunavit in northern Canada will contribute about another 0.004 mm/year, making a total for the Baltic and Canada about 0.05 mm/year.

But the PGR rising is offset by sea bottom sinking. As the earth’s mantle rises, the mantle in the surrounding area must flow down and under to compensate. As can be seen in figure 1, the North Atlantic, the bottom between Newfoundland and Greenland, and the ocean bottom north of Canada, is sinking. These areas are totally under ocean, unlike the rising areas that are mostly land. The sink rate seems to be 3 to 4 mm/year over an area much greater than the rising sea bottoms, which would appear to more than cancel any sea level rise due to PGR. The 0.3 mm/year positive “adjustment” to sea level rise by the UC sea level group does not appear to be justified.

The source for tide gauge PGR data is here.

Much of the material for this article is drawn from Wikipedia here.

The University of Colorado Sea Level website is here.

 

Posted in , | 16 Responses

Rapper’s Climate Science Critical Video Surpasses 100,000 Views…Blasts “Filtered” Message, “Massive Propaganda”

By P Gosselin on 15. April 2014

Not long ago Austrian social critic and rap musician Kilez More produced and posted a climate science skeptic video. I reported on this awhile back, see here and here. The video also has English subtitles to help get the overall message across internationally.

The video, watched mainly by young people, has surpassed the 100,000 views milestone. Congratulations to a musician who is surely reaping lots of scorn for getting young people to question what they are told.

What follows is a short interview with Kilez on the video’s success so far:

How do you feel about the video getting over 100,000 views so far?

I’m glad to see the video climbing over the 100,000 views mark – and it shows, that there is a need for a critical point of view on this topic! It’s still one of the most viewed (and of course most discussed) videos of mine.

Have you gotten a lot of criticism or any threats because of the video?

Indeed the video has brought me a lot of criticism. Some bad articles have been written, some nasty insults have been made, some artists even refused to work with me because of that. Really unbelievable how the massive propaganda works on people’s mind – and especially with this topic the mass media does its best to manipulate the thinking. It’s just too important for too many things – like lots of taxes, many many laws, etc. - to let it go.

But the reactions were not just bad. Also a lot of listeners have been open to the argumentation, starting to dig right through the mass of information. So the video is doing its job! That’s what I want to reach with my music – to get people to start thinking by themselves and searching for information on their own – not through the filtered television-screen in their living rooms.

Do you feel there are attempts being made to marginalize you?

There have been some attempts to marginalize me – and even today. But it’s not only because of the climate-change music video that has been a part of the whole story. A political rapper has his difficulties because the media either first try to black-out my music or insult me and try to marginalize me before they get to the topics. It’s always the same story – try to discredit the speaker to prevent people from listening to the message.

—————

 

Posted in | 6 Responses

Has The Broader Institution Of Science Been Overun By Greedy, Swindling Crackpots?

By P Gosselin on 13. April 2014

Those of us following climate science are all familiar with the hockey stick hoax and NASA’s readjustment of past temperatures that have the effect of making it look like the globe is warming.

Not only climate science seems to have been corrupted by unscrupulous scientists, but so has the food and nutritional sciences in what appears to be in a way that immensely benefits Big Pharma and swindles the consumer. Hat-tip DirkH

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vr-c8GeT34

“You need to get scientists that are not paid by the drug companies to determine what the cholesterol guidelines should be”.

Not long ago I did a report on a study showing that meat-eaters are much healthier than vegetarians – coming from the University of Graz in Austria. I didn’t expect the story to attract so much attention. So far it has been shared over 8000 times and may reach 10,000 shares. The study contradicts everything we’ve been told about what a healthy diet is.

I used to have a lot of respect for the scientific community. But the more I look into things like climate, and now nutrition and medicine, the more I’m realizing that much of it is rotten to the core and has long been overrun by greedy, swindling bastards who crave money and/or power.

My advice: Don’t trust any of today’s “renowned scientists” claiming the science is settled. Chances are they are profiting at the expense of others.

Other worthwhile presentations on the subject of nutrition:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXe2xldWxtY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGOpjPNtjes

 

Posted in , | 19 Responses

Light Blogging Over The Next Few Days…

By P Gosselin on 10. April 2014

Dear Readers,

Blogging and approving comments will be on the light side for the next few days as there are important matters to take care of. I’ll be getting a story in, here or there.

It’a also a good opportunity to to step back a bit and refocus. :)

 

Posted in | 7 Responses

German AfD Protest Party Calls For Complete Abolishment Of Green Energy Feed-In Act, Citing “Cost Burden”

By P Gosselin on 10. April 2014

Britain has the UKIP party; Germany has got the Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) party, translated: Alternative for Germany. Both are equally hated by the establishment. The media do all they can to portray them as dangerous, right-wing, beer-hall populists.

In a nutshell: they are a threat to the cozy establishment.

Last September the AfD party barely missed reaching the 5% hurdle in Germany’s national elections, and thus just missed taking seats in Parliament. Some claim the results were tampered with in order to keep the enfant terrible party out. No matter the result, the party did send a clear message, and it continues to send such messages today.

In it’s latest press release, the AfD announces its position on Germany’s renewable energy feed-in act, calling for its abolishment.

The energy summit last Tuesday at the federal Chancellor’s Office missed its targets. The planned, low-impact slowdown in the expansion of wind and solar was softened considerably using tricks. The rise in the renewable energy feed-in act (EEG) subsidies will continue to gallop on ahead unhindered, so concluded even a proponent of the transition to renewable energies, Holger Krahwinkel, of the consumer associations. Share prices of wind energy plant builder Nordex at times shot up by 7%.

‘The EEG charges is driving the electricity costs dramatically upwards,’ explains Dr. Alexander Gauland, spokesman for the Alternative für Deutschland. ‘Already they are among the highest in Europe. Since the start of the EEG act, the payments made by power grid operators to the owners of renewable energy plants have totaled to be more than 120 billion euros – paid by the consumers. Just in 2013 the figure was 23 billion euros – the tendency is strongly upwards.’

Gauland summarizes: ‘That’s why every ‘correction’ or ‘reform’ amounts only to a senseless doctoring of the symptoms. The cost burden on the German consumer is already very immense and is no longer bearable for more than 600,000 households. At the same time more industrial jobs are moving to cheaper foreign countries. That number is already tens of thousands, and also here the trend is strongly upwards. This is why the AfD is requesting the immediate abolishment of the EEG act. It has made this request an official position in its European election program.“

 

Posted in | 5 Responses

“100 Billion Euros For Nothing! Germany’s CO2 Emissions Haven’t Dropped In 10 Years!”

By P Gosselin on 8. April 2014

That’s the title Die Achse Des Guten here bears at its website.

Few countries have spent as much as Germany on measures to reduce CO2 emissions. Today German website Die Achse Des Guten here links to a blurb appearing in German “intellectual” weekly Die Zeit here which unwittingly tells readers what Germany has gained for its 100-billion-euro investment in green energies so far: nothing!

DIE ZEIT writes:

Actually, the German government wanted to decrease the emissions of CO2 – also through the transition to renewable energy. However our chart shows the opposite is the case.

Greenhouse gas emissions have been increasing for three years in Germany, 1.2 percent for last year.”

The DIE ZEIT chart shows Germany emitted 913 million tonnes in 2009 (due in large part to the global financial crisis) with emissions rising steadily to 951 million tonnes in 2013. The lion’s share of Germany’s post 1990 reduction stems from the shutdown of dilapidated communist East Germany and it’s dinosauric industry.

For the taxpayers who may be angered by the lack of return on investment, 2014 may post a slight emissions drop…but not because of anything the government and the 100 billion euros have done, but because of the warm winter Germany saw this year.

 

Posted in , | 26 Responses

The Start Of Censorship? Climate Depot Gets Called “Unsafe Site” By Microsoft Germany

By P Gosselin on 8. April 2014

UPDATE: Now working!

============================

If you’re like me, you drop by Marc Morano’s Climate Depot daily to get the latest on what is happening within the climate science and politics scene. But today, at least here in Germany, I’ve been getting the following message after being on the site for about 10 seconds:

Climate Depot unsafe

In English:

This website has been reported as unsafe.

www.upsheliner.com

It is recommended that you do not switch over to this website.

Instead you should change to your own start page

This page has been reported to Microsoft as an unsafe site that

possibly publicizes personal or financial information.

More information”

Clicking the “more information” link we get:

For this website, the following threats were reported:

Threat of malware: This site contains links to viruses or other software programs through which personal information that is stored on your computer or which you enter, are made public to unauthorized persons.”

Likely it’s just a temporary technical glitch. I don’t know enough about this to speculate what could trigger this. Are other German readers having problems accessing Climate Depot?

 

Posted in | 8 Responses

Zurich’s Leading Daily Calls EU’s Emission Trading Scheme “A European Debacle…2.2 Billion Surplus Certificates”!

By P Gosselin on 7. April 2014

NZZThe latest Sunday print edition of Switzerland’s flagship Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) has a story blasting Europe’s failure in curbing CO2 emissions through the implementation of its CO2 emissions trading scheme (ETS). See right image.

Hat-tip Hajo Smit

The NZZ story bears the title:

Why the dreck doesn’t cost anything.

With its emissions trading, the EU wanted to be a leader in global climate protection. However it has contributed nothing to lowering greenhouse gases. A European debacle.”

Soviet-scale debacle

The NZZ reports that the emissions trading scheme started out “as a good idea” but never got anywhere. From the NZZ’s portrayal, one easily concludes that the ETS debacle is on a scale of a major Soviet central planning implosion.

The program was supposed to involve 11,000 companies, among them the worst emitters, and to get them to pay real money for each tonne of emitted greenhouse gas. But the trading scheme failed to function as hoped and the price ended up falling to the paltry 5 euros per tonne level that it is at today. Companies have no incentive to invest in energy saving technology when carbon certificates are so cheap.

The NZZ writes:

The targets for reducing greenhouse gases that the EU set to achieve by 2020 will be reached mainly because the economy in many European countries crumbled.”

With certificate prices so low, the EU is a long way from the 40 euros per tonne price level it needs to get power companies to move away from burning coal, says BP chief economist Christof Rühl.

Not only have many citizens in EU countries been burdened by the hardships of economic collapse, which has have led them to reach their emission targets, the subsidies spent on supporting completely ineffective green technologies are costing consumers an arm and a leg as well. The NZZ writes the Germany alone is paying 20 billion euros annually in feed-in charges: “Under the bottom line, this money has done very little for the climate.”

The NZZ blames the failure of the emissions trading scheme on the EU’s “fear of damaging it’s own economy with climate protection“.

In 2008, the global economic crisis led to reduced industrial production in Europe, and thus acted to dampen CO2 certificate prices further. The market was flooded with emission certificates which could be had at dirt-cheap prices and thus having no impact in getting industry off coal.

Experts blame the design of the emissions trading scheme for its downfall, saying that it never had anything to do with climate protection to begin with. What made matters even worse, the NZZ writes, was that as more and more green energy came on line, the demand (and the prices) for CO2 emission certificates dropped further, thus allowing Europe’s industry to easily skirt costly CO2 reduction measures.

The NZZ writes that Germany alone has a surplus of 2.2 billion certificates and experts say it’ll take 15 years to work them off. According to WWF Germany climate expert Regine Gunther:

Thus the flagship of the European climate protection is as good as sunk and the EU as a protector of the climate will be AWOL for the entire time.”

The NZZ writes that before anything changes, Europe has to somehow get over its fear of damaging its economy.

Imagine that. The NZZ and green climate rescuers seem to view economic damage as a sort of irrational fear. For them a rational fear is the world coming to an end in 2099.

 

Posted in , | 7 Responses

Max Planck Institute Economist: Germany’s Energiewende “Bordering On Suicide”…”Unimaginably Expensive Folly”

By P Gosselin on 6. April 2014

Richard Tol tweeted here a link to an article appearing at the Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten (German Business News) about the country’s much ballyhooed Energiewende, in English: transition to renewable energies. The title:

Max Planck economist: ‘Transition To Renewable Energy Borders On Suicide’

Leading economic experts are firing harsh criticism at the energy policy of federal super minister Sigmar Gabriel. Germany as a friendly location for business is not only being weakened, the transition to renewable energy even borders on suicide and is an unimaginably expensive folly.”

Recently Angela Merkel’s grand coalition government just decided they would water down the scale-back in renewable energy subsidies. The Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten quotes Max Planck Institute researcher Axel Börsch-Supan, who has fired harsh words at Federal Economics Minister Sigmar Gabriel:

With their policy, the grand coalition is weakening Germany’s location as a place to do business. This is especially true when it comes to the Energiewende, which is bordering on suicide.”

According to the Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten, other experts are also slamming Germany’s “Energiewende”. For example Ifo Institute director Hans-Werner Sinn calls it an “unimaginably expensive folly“. Marc Tüngler director of a German financial association, calls it “a planned economy without a plan” that makes the Energiewende “unbearably expensive“.

The Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten concludes:

According to experts, the big losers are the consumers, who will have to expect continued increasing electricity prices.

 

Posted in , | 5 Responses

Next »