Defending CO2: Astro-Climatology, Climategate And Common Sense
By Matthew Ehret | Principia Scientific | August 12, 2021
According to such modern climate experts as Bill Gates, Greta Thunberg, Michael Bloomberg, Mark Carney, Al Gore, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Prince Charles and Klaus Schwab, carbon dioxide must be stopped at all cost. Images of submerged cities, drowning polar bears and burning deserts taking over civilization flash before our eyes repeatedly in schools, mainstream media and films.
The Paris Climate Accords demand that all nations reduce their emissions to pre-industrial levels and the upcoming COP27 Summit in the UK will certainly demand that these reductions be made legally binding and enforceable by new global governance mechanisms.
But is CO2 really the existential threat it is being made out to be?
I would like to take a few moments to entertain the hypothesis that we may be drinking some poisonous Kool-Aid in a modern-day Jonestown cult and we are just minutes away from a hearty “bottoms up”.
While some of the questions and facts you are about to read are considered heretical in certain quarters, I think that history has shown that it is only by permitting the mind to question sacred cows at the risk of being denounced as “heretical” that any creative progress can made. With this thought in mind, I will venture the risk and only ask that you accompany me for this thought experiment with an open mind.
A Preface On Climategate
Back in November 17, 2009, a major scandal erupted when the 61 Mb of emails internally circulated among the directors and researchers at East Anglia University’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) were made public. To this day, it has not been verified if the scandal occurred via an internal leak or a hack, but what was verified throughout the hundreds of emails between director Phil Jones and the teams of climatologists staffing the CRU, was that vast scales of fraud were occurring. Jones himself was caught red handed[1] demanding that data sets be ignored and massaged in order to justify the climate models that had all been used to sell the idea that CO2 was driving startling rates of warming.
East Anglia’s CRU is the world’s foremost center of data set centralization and climate model generation which feed directly into the UN’s Independent Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and which in turn feeds into every major NGO, school, corporation and government. The other central control point of data selection and model generation (for both climate change and covid-19 data sets) is an Oxford-based operation called “Our World In Data”, funded in large measure by the UK government and Bill Gates[2].
Climategate couldn’t have come at a worse time, as the COP15 Climate Summit was scheduled for December 2009 where the world’s first legally binding carbon reduction treaties were expected to finalize an end to sovereign nation states. The terrible publicity of climategate essentially caused the event to become a big goose egg, as Chinese and Indian delegates refused to play along, and ensured that all teeth were removed from any binding carbon caps[1].
In December 2009, former chief economic advisor to Putin, Dr. Andrei Illarionov stated that Russia had sent data to East Anglia’s CRU from 476 meteorological stations covering over 20% of the globe’s surface hosting a wide range of data from as far back as 1865 to 2005.
Dr. Illarionov explained[2] that he was dismayed to see that Phil Jones and the CRU entirely ignored the data from all but 121 stations, and from those stations they did use, they artificially cherry-picked data that gave off the false result that temperatures between 1860-1965 were 0.67 degrees colder than they truly were while temperatures from 1965-2005 were made artificially high.
After being suspended for a few months, a UK review panel absolved Jones from his transgressions and re-installed him into his old position of carbon data gatekeeper at the CRU.
Development Greens The Earth
Many people were taken aback by the findings published by a team of scientists analyzing the results of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. NASA’s website[3] described the findings (published on February 11, 2019[4]) in the following way: “The research team found that global green leaf area has increased by 5 percent since the early 2000s, an area equivalent to all of the Amazon rainforests. At least 25 percent of that gain came in China.”
Up until this study’s publication, scientists were not certain what role human economic activity played in this anomalous greening of the earth.
The NASA study demonstrated that this dramatic rate of greening between 2000-2017 was being driven largely by China and India’s combined efforts at eradicating poverty which involves both reforestation, desert greening efforts (see China’s Move South Water North megaproject[1]), agricultural innovation and also, general industrial growth policies. The later policies represent genuine efforts by Asian nations to wipe out poverty by investments into large scale infrastructure… a practice once used in the west before the days of “post-industrialism” induced a collective insanity of consumerism in the early 1970s.
A perplexed reader might now be heard to ask: but how can industrial growth have anything to do with greening of the planet?
One simple answer is: carbon dioxide.
CO2: An Innocent Victim Framed For Genocide
As children, we are taught that CO2 is an integral part of our ecosystem and that plants love it.
The processes of photosynthesis which evolved over long spans of time with the advent of the chlorophyll molecule eons ago requires constant infusions of carbon dioxide that are broken down along with H2O, releasing oxygen back into the biosphere. Over time, free oxygen slowly formed the earth’s ozone layer and fueled the rise of ever higher life forms that relied on this “plant waste” for life.
Today, large amounts of carbon dioxide is regularly generated by biotic and abiotic activity from living animals, decaying biomass as well as volcanos which constantly emit CO2 and other greenhouse gases. A surprisingly small portion of that naturally occurring CO2 is caused by human economic activity.
Taking the entire composition of so-called ‘greenhouse gases’ together, water vapour makes up 95 percent of the bulk, carbon dioxide makes up 3.6 percent, nitrous oxide (0.9 percent), methane (0.3 percent), and aerosols about 0.07 percent.
Of the sum total of the 3.6 percent carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, approximately 0.9 percent is caused by human activity. To restate this statistic: Human CO2 makes up less than 1 percent of the 3.6 percent of the total ‘greenhouse gases’.
During the mid-20th century, a belief began to emerge among some fringe climate scientists that the 400 parts per million (PPM) average carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the “natural and ideal amount”, such that any upset of this mathematical average would supposedly result in destruction of biodiversity.
These same mathematicians also presumed that the biosphere could be defined as closed systems such that rules of entropy were the natural organizing principles- ignoring the obvious fact that ecosystems are OPEN, connected to oceans of active cosmic radiations from other stars, galaxies, supernova and more while being mediated by nested arrays of electromagnetic fields.
As film maker Adam Curtis demonstrated in his All Watched Over By Machines of Love and Grace (2011)[1], this belief slowly moved from the fringe into mainstream thinking despite the fact that it is simply wrong.
Beyond the facts already presented above, another persuasive piece of evidence can be found in carbon dioxide generators which are commonly purchased by anyone managing a greenhouse[2]. These widely-used generators increase CO2 to amounts as high as 1,500 PPM. What is the effect of such increases? Healthier, happier, greener plants and vegetables.
Temperature And CO2: Who Leads In This Dance?
Amidst the frantic alarms sounding daily over the impending climate emergency threatening the world, we often forget to ask if anyone ever actually proved the claim that CO2 drives the climate?
To begin to answer this question, let’s start with a graph showcasing the rise of human industrial CO2 from 1751-2015 broken down into various regions of the earth. What we can see is consistent increase from the mid 19th century until 1950, when a vast spike of emission rate increases can be viewed. This increase obviously accompanies world population growth and the correlated agro-industrial output.
Next, let us look at the global mean temperature changes from 1880-present.
Here several anomalies strike the thinking mind.
For starters, absolutely no warming accompanies the period of intensive industrial growth of 1940-1977. In fact during this period, many climate scientists were ringing the alarm over an impending ice age![1]
Another anomaly: Since carbon dioxide emissions have increased continuously over the past 20 years, one would expect to see a correlated spike in warming trends. However, this expected correlation is entirely absent between the year 1998 and 2012 when warming tappers off to a near standstill sometimes called “the global warming pause” of 1998-2012[2].
This has been an embarrassment for all modellers whose scare-mongering predictions have fallen to pieces to the point that they can only pretend this pause doesn’t exist. Again, the question must be asked: why would this anomaly appear if CO2 drove temperature?
Let’s take one more anomaly from our temperature records before digging into the hard proof that CO2 does not cause temperature changes: The medieval warming period [see graph].
While certain proven fraudsters like Michael Mann[1] have attempted to erase this warming period from existence with things like the famous “hockey stick” model crafted with the help of East Anglia’s Phil Jones, the fact remains that from 1000-1350 A.D. global mean temperatures were significantly warmer than anything we are currently living through. The Vikings in Greenland had no coal plants or SUVs, and yet mean temperatures were still warmer than today by a long shot. Why?
Perhaps taking a wider look at the CO2:climate correlation might give us a better idea of what is actually happening.
Below we can see a chart taking 600,000 years of data into account. It is certainly the case that CO2 and temperature have a connection on these scales… but correlation is not causation, and as the author of How to Lie with Statistics[1] famously stated “a well-wrapped statistic is better than Hitler’s Big Lie; it misleads, yet it cannot be pinned on you.”
When a 70,000 year sampling is inspected, we find the sleight of hand fully exposed by observing the peaks and troughs of temperature and CO2. If the later were truly the driving force as the Great Resetters of our day proclaim, then CO2 peaks and troughs would happen before temperature, but the evidence shows us the exact opposite. Let’s look at one more example of an 800 year CO2/temperature lag about 130,000 years ago…
Going back even further into the climate records, it has been revealed that during many of the past ice ages, carbon dioxide had risen up to 800% higher than our current levels, despite the fact that human activity played zero role[1].
A Brief Look At Space Weather
Technically, I could end right now and feel like any honest jury would conclude that CO2 has been falsely framed for murder. But I would like to introduce one more dramatic piece of evidence that gets us back on the path of a true science of climate change and ecosystems management: Astroclimatology.
The fact that the earth is but one of a multitude of spherical bodies in space speedily revolving around an incredibly active sun within the outskirts of a galaxy within a broader cluster of galaxies is often ignored by many computer modelling statisticians for a very simple reason. Anyone who has been conditioned to look at the universe through a filter of linear computer models is obsessed with control, and is incredibly uncomfortable with the unknown.
The amount of actual factors shaping the weather, ice ages, and volcanism are so complex, vast and mostly undiscovered that computer modellers would prefer to simply pretend they don’t exist… or if they do acknowledge such celestial phenomena to have any function in climate change, it is often dismissed as “negligible”.
Despite this culture of laziness and dishonesty, the question is worth asking: WHY does evidence of climate change occur across so many other planets and moons of our solar system? Ice caps on Mars melt periodically[2] and have been melting at faster rates in recent years. Why is this happening? Could the sun’s coronal mass ejections, solar wind, or electromagnetic field be affecting climate change within the solar system as one unifying process?
Often Venus with its atmosphere of 96.5 percent CO2 is used as a warning for people on the earth what sort of terrible oven we will create by producing more CO2. It is hot after all with temperatures averaging 467 degrees Celsius (872 degrees Fahrenheit). However, if CO2 were truly to blame for the heating, then why is Mars so cold with temperatures averaging minus 125 degrees Celsius (-195 degrees Fahrenheit) despite the fact that it’s atmosphere is 95 percent CO2?
Similarly, what role does cosmic radiation play in driving climate change? Based on the recent discoveries of Heinrich Svensmark and his team in Denmark, strong correlations were found linking cloud formation, climate and cosmic radiation flux over time.
Cosmic radiation flux into the earth is a continuous process mediated by the earth’s magnetic field as well as the oscillating magnetic field of the sun which shapes the entire solar system as we revolve around the galactic center of the Milky Way every 225-250 million years. Svensmark’s discovery was outlined beautifully in the 2011 documentary The Cloud Mystery.[1]
A Return To A True Science Of Climate
The point to re-emphasize is that the weather is, and always has been, a complex process shaped by galactic forces that have driven a miraculous system of life on the earth over hundreds of millions of years.
During this time amounting to approximately two revolutions around the galactic center, living matter has transformed from relatively boring (high entropy) single celled organisms, through a continuous process of increased complexity, and increased power of self-direction (low entropy). Up until now, there is no actual evidence that this process is a closed system and as such, that any fixed state of no change/heat death is controlling its behavior.
While some might deny this claim, citing the redshifts of galaxies as proof that the universe is in fact dying (or inversely had a starting point “in time” 13.6 billion years ago before there was nothing), I refer you to the work of Halton Arp[1].
This process has been characterized by non-linear discontinuities of living matter emerging where only nonliving matter previously existed, followed later by conscious life having appeared where only non-conscious life had been found and most recently self-conscious life endowed with creative reason appearing onto the scene. While this process has been punctuated by sometimes violent mass-extinction cycles, the overall direction of life has not been shaped by randomness, chance or chaos, but rather improvement, perfectibility and harmony.
When humanity appeared onto the scene, a new phenomenon began expressing itself in a form which the great Russian academician Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945) described as the Noosphere (as opposed to the lithosphere and biosphere). Vernadsky understood this new geological force to be driven by human creative reason, and devoted his life to teaching the world that the law of humanity must accord with the law of nature stating:
“The noösphere is a new geological phenomenon on our planet. In it, for the first time, man becomes a large-scale geological force. He can, and must, rebuild the province of his life by his work and thought, rebuild it radically in comparison with the past. Wider and wider creative possibilities open before him. It may be that the generation of our grandchildren will approach their blossoming”.[1]
In Vernadsky’s mind, neither the noosphere, nor the biosphere obeyed a law of mathematical equilibrium or statis, but was rather governed by an asymmetrical harmony and progress from lower to higher states of organization. It was only by coming to understand the principles of nature that mankind became morally and intellectually fit to improve upon nature by turning deserts green, harnessing the power of the atom or applying scientific progress to health and agriculture.
Some of his most important insights were published in his Scientific Thought as a Planetary Phenomena (1938), Evolution of Species and Living Matter (1928) Some Words About the Noosphere (1943), and The Transition of the Biosphere to the Noosphere (1938).[2]
Despite the lasting contributions made by Vernadsky to human knowledge, here we sit, 76 years after the end of WW2 tolerating an unscientific policy of mass decarbonization which threatens to radically undermine civilization for countless generations.
Is this change being forced upon humanity? Unlike the forces of fascism and imperialism of the past, today’s terrible self-implosion of civilization is occurring via the consent of those intended to perish under a Great Reset via the collective guilt for the crime of simply being human. It has become the norm for the majority of today’s children to think of themselves as belonging not to a beautiful species made in the image of a Creator, but rather to a parasitic race guilty for the crime of sinning against nature.
So let’s take this opportunity to re-introduce truth back into climate science, and let the social engineers drooling over a Great Reset scream and whine as nations choose a new open system paradigm of life and anti-entropy rather than a closed system world of decay and heat death.
This positive new paradigm of cooperation, scientific and technological progress, and cultural optimism is getting stronger by the day led by Russia, China and other nations joining the international New Silk Road. Most importantly, let’s finally absolve CO2 of its accused sins, and celebrate this wonderful little molecule as our friend and ally.
About ther author: Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , a BRI Expert on Tactical talk, and Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow. He is author of the‘Untold History of Canada’ book series, and Clash of the Two Americas. In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation .
Let’s divide the European Union
By Dr Jiří Weigl | The Reference Frame | July 22, 2021
Last week’s publication of the European Commission’s plan for a green “great leap” in the holy struggle to save the climate has definitively confirmed that the gulf of opinion, ideas, and interests between the EU’s West and its post-communist East has reached an insurmountable dimension.
The EU West, which controls Brussels and all European structures, has completely succumbed to the phantasmagorical progressivist ideology and is not willing to discuss it at all, but on the contrary wants to impose it by force on everyone, regardless of their views. We are in danger of something strongly reminiscent of the [fatal 1620 Battle of] White Mountain and the subsequent 1627-1628 Verneuerte Landesordnung [Restored Land Order, a new constitutional document] which was octroied [by Ferdinand II i.e. circumventing the legislative assembly of the estates], i.e. intolerant foreign domination, ideological monopoly enforced from the position of strength, persecution of those who disagree, de-nationalisation, and disenfranchisement.
This is not an exaggeration. Progressivist anti-humanist pseudo-salvation of the planet cannot do without such actions and suppression of dissent by force.
Hypothetically, the following possible responses are offered:
Submission and relying on somehow surviving again. That may no longer work in today’s world.
Fight within the EU. An unrealistic scenario, because there is no chance of convincing Brussels and the West of the need to change the current policy.
To respect the balance of power and agree with the other dissatisfied parties to divide the whole, whose direction is not to our liking, while preserving the maximum of the positive from the common past.
To come forward individually, which in the current constellation is not a realistic project for which we have the strength.
We have to respect that our Western European partners, disgusted by their current excess of wealth, see a meaningful future only in poverty, sacrifice, and renunciation for the sake of the planet. Let us respect that they want to renounce consumerism, flying, and personal transport, meat-eating, child-bearing, and other pleasures of life. Let us accept that polyamory and marriage for all will take the place of family for them. Let us give our Western friends the pleasures of doing good deeds in opening their borders and caring for all who head to them from the world for an easier life. Let us allow them to live in a multicultural, Islamized society with free choice of gender and total equality for every conceivable minority, protected by the surveillance of inquisitorial political correctness. Let us allow them to have their own experience of the restriction of civil rights and liberties and the only ideology allowed.
However, let us firmly demand that they respect that we – Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Slovaks, and other Central and Eastern Europeans – do not want to live in such a society, that we did not enter the EU with such goals and they were not outlined to us at the time. We have our own experiences of totalitarianism and social utopias and we do not want to repeat them. We want to live in our own way and not under someone else’s dictates.
Let us try to avoid the imminent conflict and destruction of European cooperation rationally – let us divide today’s EU with respect for one another and preserve the maximum of the good that unites us. Only in this way will we be able to overcome today’s tensions that threaten to destroy the entire current shaky European construct. We Czechs and Slovaks may have something important to say about this. By taking a similar step, we avoided the serious threats after the fall of communism.
As we know, it was not beneficial for anyone to stay on the Titanic after the collision with the iceberg. The European Commission itself put such an iceberg in the EU’s path. Let us try to get off a ship that we cannot stop at any cost if we care about the future of our children. The planet will survive.
A Little Arithmetic: The Costs Of A Solar-Powered Grid Without Fossil Fuel Back-up
By Francis Menton – Manhattan Contrarian – July 29, 2021
Yesterday’s post made the point that states or countries seeking to march toward 100% “renewable” electricity don’t seem to be able to get past about the 50% mark, no matter how many wind turbines and solar panels they build. The reason is that, in practical operation, due to what is called “intermittency,” no output is available from the solar and wind sources at many times of high demand; therefore, during those times, other sources must supply the juice. This practical problem is presented most starkly in California, where the “renewable” strategy is based almost entirely on solar panels, with only a very small wind component. Daily graphs published by the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) show a clear and obvious pattern, where the solar generation drops right to zero every evening just as the peak demand period kicks in from about 6 to 9 PM.
Commenter Sean thinks he has the answer: “Given the predictable daily power generation cycle of solar in sunny places like California and the predictable daily demand which peaks in the evening perhaps solar generators should be required to have electricity storage equivalent to the daily generation of their PV system.”
I thought it might be instructive to play out Sean’s idea to see just how much solar generation capacity and storage it would take to make a system out of just those two elements that would be sufficient to fulfill California’s current electricity requirements. Note: this is an exercise in arithmetic. It is not complicated arithmetic. There is nothing here that goes beyond what you learned in elementary school. On the other hand, few seem to be willing to undertake the effort to do these calculations, or to recognize the consequences.
We start with the current usage that must be supplied. Currently, the usage ranges between a low of around 30 GW and a high of around 40 GW over the course of a day. For purposes of this exercise, let’s assume an average usage of 35 GW. Multiply by 24, and we find as a rough estimate that the system must supply 840 GWH of electricity per day.
How much capacity of solar panels will we need to provide the 840 GWH? We’ll start with the very sunniest day of the year, June 21. California currently has about 14 GW of solar capacity. Go to those CAISO charts, and we find that on June 21, 2021, which apparently was a very sunny day, those 14 GW of solar panels produced at the rate of about 12 GW maximum from about 8 AM to 6 PM, about half that rate from 7-8 AM and 6-7 PM, and basically nothing the rest of the time. Optimistically, they produced about 140 GWH for the day (10 hrs x 12 GW plus 2 hrs x 6 GW plus a little more for the dawn and dusk hours). That means that to produce your 840 GWH of electricity on a sunny June 21, you will need 6 times the capacity of solar panels that you currently have, or 84 GW. When 7 PM comes, you’ll need enough energy in storage to get you through to the next morning at around 8 AM, when generation will again exceed usage. This is about 13-14 hrs at an average of 35 GW, or around 475 GWH of storage.
That’s June 21, your best day of the year. Now let’s look at a bad day. For the past year, a good example would be December 24, 2020, which besides being one of the shortest days of the year, must also have been rather cloudy. Production from the existing 14 GW of solar capacity averaged only about 3 GW, and only from 9 AM to 3 PM. That’s 18 GWH in that window (3 GW x 6 hrs). Then there was another about 1 GWH produced from 8 to 9 AM, and another 1 GWH from 3 to 4 PM. About 20 GWH for the whole day. You need 840 GWH. If 14 GW of solar panels only produced 20 GWH for the day, you would have needed 588 GW of panels to produce your 840 GWH. (14/20 x 840) That 588 GW of solar panels is some 42 times your existing 14 GW of solar panels. And when those 588 GW of capacity stop producing anything at all around 4 PM, you are also going to need at least 16 hours worth of average usage in storage to get yourself to 8 AM the next morning. That would be around 560 GWH of storage.
So you can easily see that Sean’s idea of providing storage “equivalent to the daily generation of the PV system” doesn’t really get to the heart of the problem. Your main problem is that you will need capacity of close to 15 times peak usage (nearly 600 GW capacity to supply peak usage of around 40 GW) in order to deal with your lowest-production days of the year.
Cost? If you assume (charitably) that the “levelized cost” of energy from the solar panels is the same as the “levelized cost” of energy from a natural gas plant, then this system with 15 times the capacity is going to cost 15 times as much. Plus the cost of storage. In this scenario, that is relatively modest. At current prices of around $200/KWH the 560 GWH of storage will run around $112 billion, or around half of the annual budget of the state government of California.
But you may say, no one would build the system this way, with gigantic over-capacity in place just to cover the handful of days in the year with the very lowest solar output. Instead, why not build much less solar capacity, and save up power from the summer to cover the winter. Since the average output of the solar facilities in California is about 20% of capacity averaged over the year, then you ought to be able to generate enough power for the year with capacity of about 5 times peak usage, rather than the 15 times in the scenario above. You just will need to save up power all the way from the summer to the winter. Oh, and you will need a huge multiple more storage than for the one-day-at-a-time scenario. If 180 days per year have less production than usage, and the average shortfall of production on each of those days is 300 GWH, then you will need 54,000 GWH worth of batteries (180 x 300). At $200 per GWH, that will run you around $10+ trillion. This would be about triple the annual GDP of the state of California.
But don’t worry, batteries to store power for six months and more and release it without loss on the exchange don’t exist. Maybe someone will invent them in time for California to meet its 2030 renewable electricity targets.
Any reader can feel free to check my math.
I just can’t believe that anybody talks about this as something remotely connected to reality.
Russia rejects Dutch court ruling to hand $5 BILLION of taxpayers’ cash to ex-oligarchs over collapse of Yukos
RT | July 29, 2021
Officials in Moscow have vowed to vigorously appeal a judicial ruling in an international arbitration court that would bind Russia to hand over billions of dollars to the former shareholders of the collapsed Yukos energy giant.
The office of the country’s Prosecutor General said on Thursday that it does not acknowledge the validity of the decision, by the International Arbitration Court in The Hague. Authorities said that Russia would “appeal the decision without fail,” questioning both the basis of the judges’ jurisdiction and the claims themselves.
Earlier that day, representatives of the shareholders who lost cash when the former oil and gas conglomerate collapsed claimed victory in legal proceedings that handed them a total of $5 billion in compensation. A separate claim, for a total of $57 billion, is currently being heard by the Supreme Court of the Netherlands.
The ex-shareholders say that the Russian government “expropriated” the assets of Yukos when the firm was bankrupted by a multi-billion dollar tax bill. The private company had been formed after a controversial auction of state assets following the fall of the Soviet Union, and quickly became one of the world’s most valuable companies despite investors picking it up for a fraction of its worth.
The founder of the energy empire, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, later served time in prison on fraud charges, which he claims were a response to his political activity. However, the London-based businessman asserts he has no direct interests in the lawsuit, and the case has been brought by other financiers including influential businessman Leonid Nevzlin.
Russia has insisted that the judgements are “politically motivated,” and in December the country’s Justice Minister, Konstantin Chuychenko, told journalists that the case was part of a “legal war that has been declared on Russia.” He added that “Russia must adequately defend itself and, sometimes, even attack back.”
Moscow denies the charges and says that foreign courts have not considered that national laws around fraud and other wrongdoing might have been broken. However, in December, the Constitutional Court, one of Russia’s highest judicial authorities, ruled that Russia could refuse to pay any settlement imposed by Dutch judges. The basis for the arbitration is the terms of the Energy Charter Treaty, which Moscow signed but never ratified.
In their adjudication, the judges found that while the country’s government of the day began the process of signing up to the pact in 1994, they did not have the authority to make national laws inferior to international agreements, or to “challenge the competence” of Russian courts. Therefore, the jurists conclude, adhering to the Dutch court’s demands would be “unconstitutional.”
There have, however, been a number of attempts to confiscate Russian state assets in case the country refuses to honor any eventual settlement. To date, though, these have ultimately been rapidly overturned by courts. The case is expected to be settled by the Netherlands’ highest court later this year.
India May Join China In Bid To Lower Oil Prices
By Tsvetana Paraskova | Oilprice.com | July 27, 2021
The world’s third-largest crude oil importer, India, could join China in tapping into its strategic petroleum reserve in a bid to sell lower-priced crude to its refiners amid rallying international oil prices.
India is reportedly considering selling half of its SPR to attract private participation in expanding its strategic storage capacity, government sources told Reuters last week.
The sale of crude from reserves could also be a move from one of the importers most sensitive to price hikes to reduce the price of crude for its refiners, Reuters columnist Clyde Russell says. India’s SPR currently holds around 36.5 million barrels of crude oil.
India has been the most vocal critic of the OPEC+ production reduction pact this year, saying that it does not support “artificial cuts to keep the price going up.” On several occasions, India’s top officials have criticized OPEC+ for keeping the market tight and prices high and have expressed concern that the higher crude and fuel prices in India would slow down the economic and oil demand recovery.
India’s move to commercialize half of its SPR is primarily aimed at raising financing for additional SPR storage, but it could also ensure cheaper oil from storage to Indian refiners, according to Reuters’ Russell.
Last week, reports emerged that the world’s top oil importer, China, is looking to tap its crude reserves.
China has started to release more than 20 million barrels of crude oil from its strategic reserve in a move seen as seeking to curb the recent oil price rally, Energy Intelligence reported last week, quoting trading sources. The reported release from the strategic petroleum reserve is also aimed at putting inflation under control.
Various market and trade sources told Energy Intelligence that China was about to release the equivalent of between 22 million barrels and over 29 million barrels, or between 3 million and 4 million tons.
Why the EU’s Carbon Border Tax will Fail to Stop Carbon Leakage
By Eric Worrall | Watts Up With That? | July 20, 2021
The EU is once again attempting to impose a carbon tax on all imports, to stop “carbon leakage”, the loss of manufacturing or other businesses relocating to lower cost countries. But a few simple economic calculations demonstrate why the EU’s plan will not stop the ongoing haemorrhage of business activity.
Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism: Questions and Answers
Why is the Commission proposing a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism?
The EU is at the forefront of international efforts to fight climate change. The European Green Deal sets out a clear path towards realising the EU’s ambitious target of a 55% reduction in carbon emissions compared to 1990 levels by 2030, and to become a climate-neutral continent by 2050.
The July 2021 package in support of the EU’s climate targets is an integral part of our strategy to achieve this, and will further seal the EU’s reputation as a global climate leader. As part of these efforts, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is a climate measure that should prevent the risk of carbon leakage and support the EU’s increased ambition on climate mitigation, while ensuring WTO compatibility.
Climate change is a global problem that needs global solutions. As we raise our own climate ambition and less stringent environmental and climate policies prevail in non-EU countries, there is a strong risk of so-called ‘carbon leakage’ – i.e. companies based in the EU could move carbon-intensive production abroad to take advantage of lax standards, or EU products could be replaced by more carbon-intensive imports. Such carbon leakage can shift emissions outside of Europe and therefore seriously undermine EU and global climate efforts. The CBAM will equalise the price of carbon between domestic products and imports and ensure that the EU’s climate objectives are not undermined by production relocating to countries with less ambitious policies.
…
Read more: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_21_3661
Why does this tax put an EU producer at a disadvantage?
EU Border Tax – No Sale
Simple – selling to another EU entity is price competitive, so far, but selling outside the EU is impossibly expensive, because you are competing with other sellers who don’t pay EU carbon taxes. An exporter outside the EU has an advantage over a manufacturer inside the EU, even if they have to pay a carbon border adjustment.
What about if the EU tries to level the playing field for EU based exporters, and applies a tax credit to exports? This opens the door to massive global carbon carousel fraud.
EU Carbon Tax Carousel Fraud
Either the EU destroys their own exporters, in an attempt to protect their domestic industry, or they have a big firefight on their hands, trying to contain carbon carousel fraud, which will only get worse any time they try to ratchet up their carbon price.
What about the effect of carbon pricing on businesses inside the EU carbon tax zone?
Classic supply and demand graph, showing the impact on quantity of a tax driven rise in price per unit.
In this case quantity is assumed to be a proxy for economic activity.
Ever visited a shopping centre, and wondered why all the interesting shops are slowly replaced by clothes shops or other high turnover businesses? The reason is all those interesting shops are not profitable enough to pay the rent, and over time they are replaced by simpler, less interesting businesses – safe, boring, profitable, but still a contraction in the diversity of life choices available to consumers.
Pretty much the same thing would happen to domestic high carbon businesses afflicted by EU carbon pricing.
The EU at least in principle likely hopes that revenue from the carbon tax will drop to zero, as people discover low carbon or zero carbon alternatives to the high carbon goods they currently use such as alumina, or simply learn to live without.
But this is a huge gamble. The only reason for carbon leakage in the first place is because the carbon intensive goods targeted by the EU are difficult to replace with low carbon alternatives, and difficult to live without.
If a carbon intensive good is irreplaceable, continued dependency on that high carbon good will be an ongoing anchor dragging on the European economy.
Of course you could make an argument that the benefits the people of the EU receive from reduced CO2 emissions outweigh the costs, that one day our descendants will thank us for giving them the opportunity to experience cold weather. But this does not help consumers and businesses today.
In conclusion, the EU carbon border adjustment will do nothing to prevent carbon leakage. The EU does not control enough of the global economy to make it more than an inconvenience for multinationals. The only people the EU border carbon adjustment will hurt are people living in the EU, who will see their choices and opportunities contract.
Cuba and Color Revolution: A Cautionary Tale of the Next Phase of Forever-War
By Joaquin Flores | Strategic Culture Foundation | July 14, 2021
If one believes that the protests in Cuba can be explained within the rubric of 20th century economic systems, and then believes they can go on to extract some great truths about socialism vs. capitalism, then they are misinformed. No, this is about technocracy, color revolution, and forever-war.
The events in Cuba were caused by the staged economic collapse directed by the IMF under the advisement of the World Economic Forum, under the pretext of supply-line stoppages and economic closures to combat Covid-19. The socio-economic strife that such an imposed crisis is known to provoke, is then weaponised to destabilize ‘regimes’ so as to further the hegemonic agenda of the (admittedly divided) oligarchy ruling the global west. We saw this before in 2008 with the crash and crisis, and how this was weaponised to create a destabilization process known as the Arab Spring.
The planners involved are long-term planners, having transcended the quarter-driven constraints of the old market system. The new technocracy emerging is simply able to use Friedmanesque manipulations to keep the system afloat until the law of value is entirely transcended through automation. That was the crypto-Marxian understanding of economics promoted by Maynard Keynes.
Just as Cuba positioned itself away from socialism and towards further integration into global markets, the IMF moved openly to wind down the global market system and move towards a new type of totalitarian order which some critics have likened to communism.
Cubans are protesting against the mask-mandates and the lockdowns which have harmed people’s way of life. They are protesting the way that the government has effectively privileged those with dollar accounts who can buy from state-sanctioned dollar stores. Hence, those without families abroad sending dollars are negatively affected the most. This strikes against the whole narrative of Cuba and its gusano diaspora. Cuba produces its own vaccine, one that is not an experimental mRNA vaccine. The US would like very much to force a concession onto Cuba that it accept the mRNA vaccine. Perhaps the Cuban population of 11 million is just too high.
The fake news talking points that Cubans are protesting a lack of vaccines is a lie. We knew that trans-Atlantic talking points were a part of the Color scheme last year in Belarus when we were told that protestors rose up to oppose Lukashenko’s lackadaisical approach to the plandemic. Lukashenko in turn revealed that he refused an IMF offer of $980 million to play the lockdown deathmatch.
This is a Color Revolution
Anyone like Tom Fowdy for RT who writes that it is premature to say that the clear signs of a Color Revolution aren’t there, probably only says so because they don’t really know what those signs are.
They probably approach that question in terms of on-location forensics: identifying that a particular protest leader is actually an employee of the state department or Soros NGO in some fashion.
Yet for those who understand what the signs are, the signs of a Color Revolution are certainly there. But to understand this requires a long and broad view of the interplay between staged economic crises and the predictable turmoil they create in certain countries.
Because turmoil and protests are all but predictable even to OXFAM, once the FAO food index price surpasses about 210 (by 2012 ratios). Then, it becomes a question of which countries global lending institutions deem worthy of borrowing to subsidize against the newly inflated food price, or which countries the food production companies view in a lenient fashion.
As OXFAM wrote in 2012: “While concerns about high food prices are foremost about the spread of hunger and poverty, high food prices are also strongly correlated with political instability and have historically been a catalyst for mass protest in countries where legitimacy is already faltering. Research performed by the New England Institute for Science and Society has identified “a global food price threshold for unrest;”
Since 2007, food riots have broken out in more than 60 countries and have occurred with heightened frequency during periods of record-breaking food prices such as in 2008, when food riots erupted from Europe to the South Pacific. The FAO food price index crossed the 210 threshold, for the first time, in February 2008.”
Do we need to mention again that global economic crises are staged? Surely, there are structural problems broadly speaking, in the entire Neo-Keynesean system built in some large part from the ideas of Milton Friedman. So it should be clarified that while the timing of these economic crises are planned, they are also bound to happen. But when precisely they happen, and the point of them, would probably shock and confuse, then demoralize anyone who had a naïve understanding of global politics. You see, the point of planned economic crises is the upwards redistribution of wealth. Every firm except a handful of ‘zaibatsu’ style state-picked winners must absorb their own losses. This is corporatism 101.
Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
Each market crisis is structurally predetermined as these bubbles which define them, grow to a certain point. But it is a decision that is made to ‘pop the bubble’ at a particularly more fortuitous time as opposed to some other time – granted that it would need to be popped sooner or later. So these are both features of the structure, but also planned.
Understanding Color Revolutions requires an understanding of this phenomenon. In 2008, the massive bail-outs to banks using currency debasement, led to a geopolitical strategy on the part of the US deep state to buy up and corner the markets on perishable goods, especially those markets and firms which directed their energies towards Turkey, the Arab world, and Iran. This led to strife across the Maghreb region, Egypt, Syria, an increase of problems in occupied Iraq, and a boon to the Green movement in Iran.
The Crisis in Cuba
Further destabilization in Cuba will be a huge part in a coming global destabilization, and so it must be opposed. This is the case, even contemplating the reasonable grievances of the actual protesters, which in turn are not the same as the Sorosian demands placed in the mouths of anonymous protestors by the globalist media.
An inflation crisis has hit Cuba because of the staged political response to Covid, meant precisely to cause inflationary crises globally. The tourism industry has taken the biggest hit. Food and similar perishables are unaffordable for many without access to dollar accounts. There are state-picked favourites in the private sector (as is the case everywhere) as well as Communist Party bureaucrats who seem unaffected by the very same conditions that the protesters accuse them of bringing about. This much seems reasonable: in looking at who to blame for a problem, look to those who are making out.
The themes affecting Cuba are isolation and sovereignty, versus integration and dependence. Ever since the collapse of the USSR, which Cuba relied on for massive subsidies, Cuba has had both up and down periods as it struggles to balance between these two questions. Cuba is an island nation with just 11 million people, and so there can be no real sovereignty without the heavy price of isolation, nor can there be any integration into the globalist system without becoming a dependent state.
It’s a very tough predicament, because the Ideological State Apparatus of Cuba is its own variant of Marxism-Leninism, and this means that no matter how actually integrated and dependent Cuba is or is becoming, it must use the pages of Granma to pencil polemics declaring that Cuba is more sovereign and stable than ever before. Conversely, each undeniable period of crisis must be blamed on the very same socio-economic systems of global governance which Cuba relies upon in part for its own legitimacy.
The July 13th Edition of Granma, Official Organ of the CC of the CP of Cuba
The problem then is when people really believe this state propaganda, or when people are forced to openly proclaim a public truth they know personally to be a lie. Because instead of the public understanding that Cuba has lost much of its sovereignty in its process of dollarizing so much of its economy, (and that the machinations of foreign actors, the IMF, the planned and staged collapse of the global speculative economy that Cuba is integrated in, is a large part of Cuba’s present woes) blame is laid by the public directly at the feet of a nominally sovereign state’s ruling government.
Quite the predicament. Because the government cannot really tell the truth, it must take the blame. Or do as it has done (and done so with no shame for provoking incredulity), and claim that the entire protest is a foreign provocation.
The Cuban government and its sinecure functionaries must always declare that any grassroots grievances expressed en masse are always at its core the work of foreign ‘imperialist’ intelligence operations bent on a destabilization strategy.
Yet such accusations of foreign plots are more likely to be true than not.
Another problem, and this is something where the Cuban government needs to make a fix, is the issue of dollar accounts.
Those with dollar accounts are tremendously less affected by the perishable goods inflation crisis in Cuba. But those deposits are only possible by having loved ones who have left Cuba for the US. So those who have ‘betrayed’ the revolution are the ones able to help those in Cuba. Those in Cuba living better off are not those who have been loyal to the socialism project of Cuba excepting a small layer of bureaucrats and professional snitches, but instead are the relatives of those gusanos in Florida and the rest of the US who have moved on to greener pastures.
What sort of message does that send? This greatly weakens the legitimacy of the government, because those common-folk who defend the Cuban system are left feeling like fools. When this layer joins a protest movement, the government’s days are numbered.
Cuba – Between a Rock and a Hard-Spot
Color Revolution schemes cannot work unless there are real-existing grievances shared among large segments of the population.
And yet going further, those real-existing grievances today, (while they compound longer standing ones which the Cuban government must account for), are directly caused by the IMF’s decision to bring global capitalism to a grinding halt for some period of time.
It is very difficult for a nominally sovereign government to tell a Thatcherite story of ‘TINA’ – there is no alternative. Cuba lacks alternatives except going either the path of the Khmer Rouge, or the path of laissez-faire. It has chosen some middle-path.
This really touches on a very big problem Cuba faces: its civilizational decision to place its legitimacy at the hands of international organizations related to global governance. Cuba strives to show its own citizens, and perhaps secondarily the US, that the rest of the world and especially the UN’s alphabet soup of agencies and organizations, recognize any number of successes that Cuba promotes having accomplished. To wit, at least within the rubric of those accounting systems, Cuba makes a decent case.
So a problem arises when this very same system of global governance, under the pretext of fighting Covid-19, instructs various countries to commit ritual seppuku at the altar of world health in order to preserve this status and these relationships to global trade and global governance.
And how? The western hemisphere is controlled almost entirely by the IMF and global banking systems. Cuba exists in some netherworld of ‘helpful harm’, if not through the US due to sanctions, then through the same banks in their Trans-Atlantic incarnations by way of Europe.
Since we understand that the WHO is effectively controlled by allies of the World Economic Forum like Bill Gates, which in turn is the think-tank of the IMF; and since the IMF includes in its bylaws and requirements that countries in a time of a declared global pandemic by the WHO must take the proscribed measures to combat this, then we understand what we have seen as a global phenomenon.
It’s been only a handful of leaders, several in Africa, in Haiti, and Belarus, that have openly bucked these provisions. And of these, all have been since eliminated except for Lukashenko in Belarus who no doubt enjoys some security provisions from the Russian Federation.
The Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC) explains that in 2019, “The top exports of Cuba are Rolled Tobacco ($287M), Raw Sugar ($211M), Nickel Mattes ($134M), Hard Liquor ($97.3M), and Zinc Ore ($78.4M), exporting mostly to China ($461M), Spain ($127M), Netherlands ($65.5M), Germany ($64.7M), and Cyprus ($48.9M).
The top imports of Cuba are Poultry Meat ($286M), Wheat ($181M), Soybean Meal ($167M), Corn ($146M), and Concentrated Milk ($136M), importing mostly from Spain ($1.01B), China ($790M), Italy ($327M), Canada ($285M), and Russia ($285M).”
Hence Cuba was placed in a pincer move. It lost massively from the global plandemic and the restriction of supply lines, the tightened access to imports, the loss of tourism. The compliance of other countries to the IMF’s mandated economic implosion reduced demand for Cuba’s exports and damaged tourism as well.
But in order to maintain its own relationship with the IMF and also following the global narrative of the Socialist International (2nd International), (an EU driven social-democratic association of governments and political parties), it went along with the ‘solidarity’ driven component of woke politics seen in the ‘do-your-part’ masking and lockdowns.
But those harmed by the lockdowns were ordinary Cubans, not government officials or those with dollar accounts. And so the reaction we see today is a predictable one.
Conclusion
There can be no doubt: Cuba’s present crisis is not the direct result of its own economic mismanagement, but rather the staged demolition of finance, global trade, and supply lines using the Covid pandemic as a pretext. However, a number of social and political decisions by Cuban leaders have no doubt compounded the impact of the crisis and emboldened protesters.
What citizens in first world countries have seen as a ‘stock market rebound’ predicated by ‘too-big-too-fail’ type bailouts (socialism for the rich), are only possible so long as those moneys are held on the books but not really spent – hence the lockdowns. At least not spent in such a way as would this liquidity naturally circulate in the economy. For such velocity of moneys based on such extreme debasement of the currency, would lead to the largest inflationary crisis in the history of man on earth.
In raw-materials producing countries like Cuba, that has meant a tripled hardship. The aim of the centers of finance capital has been to do something like the Arab Spring, only more so.
At the same time, the Cuban government’s defensive and accusatory posture is poor optics and bad politics. It needs to better engage the protestors and validate some part of their grievances. Pointing the finger at Uncle Sam is tone deaf and only serves to satisfy a single demographic in Cuba.
Today, we are seeing only the start of a fresh wave of global destabilization efforts, never-ending wars. But now governments have prepared the civilian populations for these wars under the pretext of never-ending lockdowns due to a mystery illness. The right to protest, strikes, and the basic social contact needed to organize these can be revoked by instantaneous mandate as some new variant of Covid will always invariably be discovered. This is the biggest threat humanity faces since the Second World War, but in addition to destabilization campaigns, is the backdrop of a class-war gambit of the oligarchy against everyday people. Cuba needs to be understood in this light, and while it needs a better approach to managing the Covid narrative and hearing its people, foreign meddling in its affairs needs to be opposed.
Fit for 55 — EU Green Deal and the Industrial Collapse of Europe
By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 12.07.2021
One of the rare honest statements by Bill Gates was his remark in early 2021 that if you think covid measures are bad, wait until the measures for global warming. The European Union is in the process of imposing, top-down, the most draconian measures to date, that will effectively destroy modern industry across the face of the 27 states of the European Union. Under cute names such as “Fit for 55” and European Green Deal, measures are being finalized in Brussels by unelected technocrats that will cause the worst industrial unemployment and economic collapse since the crisis of the 1930s. Industries such as automobile or transport, power generation and steel are on the chopping block, all for an unproven hypothesis called manmade global warming.
While most EU citizens have been distracted by endless restrictions over a flu-like pandemic called covid19, the technocrats at the EU Commission in Brussels have been preparing a program of planned dis-integration of the EU industrial economy. The convenient aspect of an unelected supranational group far away in Brussels or Strasbourg is that they are not accountable to any real voters. They even have a name for it: Democratic Deficit. If the measures about to be finalized by the EU Commission under German President Ursula von der Leyen and Vice President for Global Warming Dutch technocrat Frans Timmermans, are enacted, here is a hint of what will happen.
“Fit for 55”
On July 14, the EU Commission presents its “Fit for 55” green agenda. While the title sounds more like an ad for a middle-ager health studio, it will be the most draconian and destructive de-industrialization program ever imposed outside of war.
Fit for 55 will be the central framework of new laws and rules from Brussels to reduce CO2 emissions dramatically, using schemes such as carbon taxes, emission caps and cap and trade schemes.
In April 2021 the EU Commission announced a new EU climate target: Emissions to be reduced by 55 percent by 2030 compared to 1990, up from the 40 percent as previously agreed. Hence the cute name “Fit for 55.” But the industry and workforce of the EU states will be anything but fit if the plan is advanced. Simply said, it is technocratic fascism being imposed without public debate on some 455 million EU citizens.
This Fit for 55 is the first time in the world that a group of countries, the EU, officially imposes an agenda to force an absurd “Zero” CO2 by 2050 and 55% less CO2 by 2030. EU Green Deal czar, Commissioner Frans Timmermans said in May, “We will strengthen the EU Emissions Trading System, update the Energy Taxation Directive, and propose new CO2 standards for cars, new energy efficiency standards for buildings, new targets for renewables, and new ways of supporting clean fuels and infrastructure for clean transport.” In reality it will destroy the transport industry, steel, cement as well as coal and gas fuel electric generation.
Here are major parts of the sinister Fit For 55.
Cars and Trucks
A major target of the EU Green Deal will be measures that will force internal combustion engine vehicles– gasoline or diesel cars and trucks—to adhere to such punitive CO2 emission limits that they will be forced off the roads by 2030 if not sooner. The plan will change the current target of a 37.5% reduction in vehicle CO2 emissions by 2030 to a rumored zero emissions by 2035.
On July 7 a coalition of trade unions, transport industry companies and suppliers including the European Trade Union Confederation and the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, wrote an urgent appeal to EU Green Czar Frans Timmermans. They stated, “… we want to see industrial transformation and innovation in Europe, rather than de-industrialisation and social disruption.” The letter pointed out that the EU has no plans for a so-called “Just Transition” for the EU auto industry including no new skills training for displaced workers: “Currently, there is no such framework for the 16 million workers in our mobility eco-system, and notably Europe’s automotive sector which is a powerhouse of industrial employment.”
This is no minor issue as the transition from internal combustion engine cars and trucks to E-autos will mean a huge unprecedented disruption to the present auto supplier chains. The letter points out that EU-wide, the auto sector has 8.5% of all European manufacturing jobs and in 2019 produced nearly 10% of GDP in Germany alone, along with 40% of the country’s research and development spending. The EU today makes up more than 50% of the world’s exports of auto products. They point out that the transition to zero CO2 vehicles will mean a loss of at least 2.4 million skilled, high-wage jobs across the EU. Entire regions will become depressed. The letter points out that Brussels has yet to even map the consequences for the auto sector of the Green Deal.
In April German EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen indicated Fit for 55 could extend a draconian carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS) from beyond power plants or industry to cover road transport and buildings in a “polluter pays” add on. The tie to the ETS will automatically force financial penalties on drivers or home owners beyond the present carbon taxes despite a very limited impact of some 3% on emissions. This, on top of tighter auto emission standards, will deal a killer blow to consumers and industry. When the French government imposed such a carbon tax in 2018 it triggered the Yellow Vests national protests and forced Paris to withdraw it.
Steel
The drastic EU plan contains new provisions that will mean drastic change for the energy-intensive EU steel and cement industries. Steel is the second biggest industry in the world after oil and gas. Currently the EU is the second largest producer of steel in the world after China. Its output is over 177 million tons of steel a year, or 11% of global output. But the Timmermans plan will introduce new measures that ostensibly penalize steel imports from “dirty” producers, but that in fact will make EU steel less competitive globally. Leaks of the EU plan indicate that they plan to eliminate current free ETS pollution permits for energy-intensive industries such as steel or cement. That will deal a devastating blow to both essential industries. They call it the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. As the Center for European Policy Network points out, EU steel exporters will “not receive any compensation for the discontinuation of the free allocation. As a result, they suffer considerable competitive disadvantages compared to their competitors from third countries.“
Coal Carbon Taxes
The EU’s new 55% climate target for 2030 implies a near-complete coal phase-out by 2030 in the whole EU. This will hit Germany, far the largest EU coal power user. The German government, already with the world’s most expensive electric power owing to the Merkel Energiewende transition to unreliable solar and wind that will see the last nuclear power plant closed in 2022, has just recently dropped its plan to phase out coal by 2038. It will phase out far earlier, but for obvious political reasons in an election year, has not revealed its new “zero coal” date.
The absurdity of believing the EU, especially Germany, will be able to achieve zero coal by 2030, replacing not even with natural gas, but rather unreliable solar and wind, is already clear. On January 1, 2021 as part of the Government mandate on coal power reduction, 11 coal-fired power plants with a total capacity of 4.7 GW were shut down. That phase out lasted eight days as several of the coal power plants had to be reconnected to the grid to avoid blackouts due to a prolonged low-wind period. The shut coal plants were ordered to operate on reserve status at the cost of the consumers. The Berlin government commission that drafted the coal phase-out plan included no power industry representatives nor any power grid experts.
With the new element of the destructive EU Commission Fit for 55 plan, the heart of European industry, Germany, is pre-programmed not only for severe industrial unemployment in steel, cement and auto sectors. It is also pre-programmed for power blackouts such as that that devastated Texas in early 2021 when wind mills froze. In 2022 in Germany, as noted, the last nuclear plant along with other coal power will be closed, removing 3% of the power. An added 6,000 wind turbines also will exit due to age, for a total cut of 7%. Yet planned addition of new wind and solar doesn’t come close to replace that, so that by 2022 Germany could have a shortfall of between 10% and 15% in capacity on the generation side.
WEF Great Reset and EU Green Deal
The hard thing for ordinary sane citizens to grasp with this EU Fit for 55 and the Davos Great Reset or the related UN Agenda 2030 globally, is that it is all a deliberate technocratic plan for dis-integration of the economy, using the fraudulent excuse of an unproven global warming danger that claims– based on dodgy computer models that ignore influence of our sun on Earth climate cycles– that we will see catastrophe by 2030 if the world does not slash harmless and life-essential CO2 emissions.
The ever-active Davos World Economic Forum as part of its Great Reset is also playing a significant role in shaping the EU Commission’s Europe Green Deal. In January 2020, the World Economic Forum at its Annual Meeting in Davos brought together leaders from industry and business with Executive Vice-President Frans Timmermans to explore how to catalyze the European Green Deal. The July 14 unveiling by Brussels is the result. The WEF supports the CEO Action Group for the European Green Deal to get major corporations behind the Brussels dystopian plan.
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University.
Alternative for Germany Party Leader Wants Exit From EU, More Cooperation With Moscow
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 12.07.2021
The popularity of the nationalist Alternative for Germany (Alternative fur Deutschland – AfD) party shot up dramatically from a state of virtual obscurity in the mid-2010s as Germans struggled to deal with the migrant crisis of 2015-2016, with the party winning 94 seats and becoming the third largest party in the Bundestag in the 2017 elections.
Germany has no choice but to leave the European Union and to create a “new European space” in which Russia will also have a place, AfD parliamentary group co-chair Tino Chrupalla has said.
“Germany should exit today’s European Union, which simply cannot be reformed, and establish a new European economic and interest group,” Chrupalla said in an interview with Welt published on Sunday.
The politician lamented that Germany’s post-World War 2 national identity and culture had been heavily influenced by the “psychological warfare of the Allies, especially the Americans,” which he compared to the Nazis. As an example of such malign influence, the politician cited Washington’s strategy of trying to torpedo the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project between Germany and Russia, suggesting that the US was pursuing “strategic interests” via a “deliberate strategy of disinformation and the manipulation of public opinion” in Germany.
Chrupalla went into greater detail on his party’s vision of a new association of European nations to replace the EU in an op-ed in the Junge Freiheit newspaper, rejecting the concept of an EU “superstate” in favour of a ‘Europe of fatherlands’. The EU, he suggested, had failed utterly in tackling several major emergencies, including the euro crisis, and the migrant and coronavirus crises.
The politician also clarified that instead of the concept of a UK-style ‘Gexit’, AfD’s policy was to support ‘Neustart’, or ‘Reset’ – a “common reset for Europe” which includes an invitation for all AfD’s European sister parties “to join us.”
On the prospect of improved ties with Moscow, Chrupalla emphasized in his op-ed that “a good relationship with Russia is not negotiable,” and that Russia is “an integral part” of Europe economically, politically and culturally.
The politician accused EU elites of “sticking to old Cold War thought patterns” about Russia, and noted that while “communism in Eastern Europe has long been defeated, European opinion leaders were importing new Western ideologies from the US ‘New Left’,” such as identity politics and its promotion of positive discrimination, resulting in social unrest which he stressed “must be overcome.”
“With Russia, a large European state and an important trade partner has been excluded from the European Union. Furthermore, at the insistence of our US partners, we are constantly imposing new trade sanctions on the Russians for new reasons,” Chrupalla wrote.
According to the politician, these restrictions ultimately come back and hit the German economy and medium-sized businesses, causing them to lose out as Russia replaces its imports from Germany with new trade ties with Asia. “Trade between Germany and Russia fell by 25 percent between 2013 and 2019, and in Saxony by 70 percent. It cannot go on like this!” Chrupalla argued.
Ultimately, the politician suggested that both countries would benefit if sanctions are lifted and new ones are ruled out. “Russia is also an integral part of Europe culturally and politically, and Germany always does well when it has good relations with Russia,” Chrupalla stressed.
Chrupalla’s views on foreign policy aren’t representative of the AfD as a whole, with party co-chair Jorg Meuthen recently suggesting that a German exit from the EU is a “poorly thought out idea.” The party is also traditionally in favour of close ties to the US and Israel, and of keeping Germany a member of NATO. Since its emergence as a major political force in the Bundestag following the 2017 elections, the party has experienced an intense internal debate regarding these and other policies.
Germans will go to the polls on 26 September for general elections to the Bundestag and multiple state parliaments. Longtime German Chancellor Angela Merkel is set to retire after the elections. A recent INSA/YouGov poll indicated that Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union alliance enjoys a plurality of 28 percent support at the moment, with the Social Democratic Party and the Greens second with 17 percent support each. 12 percent of respondents said they plan to support the Free Democratic Party, 11 percent said they would vote for the AfD, and 8 percent said they plan to give their vote to the democratic socialist Die Linke. Like the AfD, Die Linke supports an improvement in Germany’s relations with Russia. The party also has a firm policy of opposition to NATO and proposes to replace the alliance with a new collective security system for Europe with Russia as a member. Despite their ideological differences, AfD and Die Linke occasionally cooperate on certain issues.
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UN declares war on ‘dangerous’ conspiracy theories
‘World is not secretly run by elites’
Free West Media | August 5, 2022
UNESCO says it is seriously concerned about the increase in “disinformation” and “conspiracy theories”. And they plan to put an end to it through a network of informants.
“Conspiracy theories can be dangerous,” the UN agency warned. “Often they ignore scientific evidence and polarize society with dire consequences. This has to stop.”
Unesco’s director-general warned that “conspiracy theories” could cause damage to people as well as to their health. “They reinforce misconceptions about the pandemic, reinforcing stereotypes that can fuel violence and violent, extremist ideologies,” said Audrey Azoulay.
The UN agency has launched a campaign to help people identify, debunk and report “conspiracy theories” to prevent them from spreading further.
This campaign is being carried out in collaboration with the European Commission, Twitter and the World Jewish Congress. The UN has created a toolkit to “debunk” such theories and smear anyone who dares to claim that governments are not fair and transparent.
The UN also warned that George Soros, the Rothschilds and Israel should not be linked to “alleged conspiracies”.
World events “are not secretly manipulated behind the scenes by powerful players with malicious intent,” the UN agency maintained.
And if anyone therefore comes across someone who believes that the world elite is plotting to consolidate power or direct events, then that person needs to take action. According to the UN agency, when meeting a “conspiracy theorist”, under no circumstances should one enter into a discussion. … continue
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