Protesting Farmers Win Big Concessions, But EU Leaders Dig in Their Heels on Net Zero Climate Target
By John-Michael Dumais | The Defender | Febraury 7, 2024
Following the protests in Brussels last week by farmers from across the European Union (EU), the European Commission offered some concessions to the agricultural sector — but said it will not scale back its plan to cut 90% of greenhouse gas emissions by 2040, Reuters reported Tuesday.
The new commission plan drops the requirement to reduce farm-related emissions such as nitrogen, nitrous oxide and methane by one-third and removes the recommendation that EU citizens eat less meat, The Telegraph reported.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Tuesday also offered to drop her proposal requiring farmers to cut pesticide use in half by 2030, saying it had become “a symbol of polarisation,” according to The Guardian.
Other concessions included limiting Ukrainian agricultural imports and delaying rules for setting aside more land to promote soil health and biodiversity.
At the behest of von der Leyen’s center-right European People’s Party, the revised commission plan features language praising the value of the agricultural sector, noting its importance for attaining the EU goal of food sovereignty, wrote Politico.
The compromise comes after weeks of escalating demonstrations by farmers in France, Spain, Germany, Portugal, Italy, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Lithuania and other EU countries against several policies — from fuel subsidies and unfair trade practices to green emissions rules and taxes — that they said threaten their livelihoods.
The farmers argued the climate regulations have singled them out unfairly, imposing a disproportionate burden compared to other industries that also damage the environment, according to the Washington Examiner.
Over the past several weeks, tractors in several European cities blocked major highways and city streets — even an airport — forcing national governments to the negotiating table before the EU Parliament summit in Brussels last week.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition last month agreed not to eliminate a tax rebate on new agricultural vehicles, and to more gradually phase out subsidies on agricultural diesel fuel.
In France, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal’s government in January increased subsidies to livestock farmers, withdrew plans for a fuel tax hike, promised to clearly define lab-grown meat, banned the import of food grown with a neonicotinoid pesticide already prohibited in the country and suspended its pesticide-reduction plan.
Despite concessions, protests continue
Despite the concessions already made — and amid European Commission members releasing statements in support of farmers and their plight — farmers in multiple European countries continue to protest ahead of the June EU elections.
Farmers in Spain this week blocked major roadways in and around major cities in a series of protests, with a farming lobby calling the EU debate a “blame game.”
Italian farmers are massing in Rome to protest cheap imports from outside the EU, with banners featuring slogans such as “No farmer, no food.”
Dozens of Greek farmers’ organizations voted on Tuesday to descend on Athens with their tractors, blocking motorways to gain government concessions. These include speeding up reconstruction after the severe flooding last September in Thessaly, the heart of Greece’s agricultural production.
Even Croatian farmers are considering joining the EU-wide actions, citing green policies and trade agreements.
“We believe that the demands that are discussed at the protests in the EU are something that we agree with, and they are about problems that the entire EU is facing,” said Mladen Jakopović, president of the Croatian Chamber of Agriculture, on Tuesday.
EU leaders are hoping to quell the ongoing farmer protests in the months before the EU Parliament elections in June due to fears the unrest could yield a wave of populist candidates who are less eager to enact the climate measures.
EU’s climate policies remain largely unchanged
The recent accommodations for farmers offered by the European Commission have not changed its overall goal of achieving climate neutrality (net zero) by the year 2050, or its interim goals of a 55% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and a 90% reduction by 2040, according to Politico.
Wopke Hoekstra, the European commissioner for Climate Action, announced the goals Tuesday at the European Parliament meeting in Strasbourg.
European People’s Party spokesperson Peter Liese on Monday said his party’s support for these goals depended on a greater emphasis being placed on “positive opportunities” for farmers and less on “new instruments that rather see the farmers as an enemy of climate policy.”
The commission’s recommendations are not yet laws, which the next commission will consider after this summer’s EU elections. The EU Parliament and EU members will need to agree before such proposals are set in stone.
The climate target recommendations come as the German government, after scrapping its nuclear power reactors, last month announced plans to spend billions on new gas power plants to ensure long-term energy security.
John-Michael Dumais is a news editor for The Defender. He has been a writer and community organizer on a variety of issues, including the death penalty, war, health freedom and all things related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Germany’s energy crisis deepens further due to Biden’s halt of U.S. LNG projects
Germany has dug itself into an energy hole
By P Gosselin | No Tricks Zone | February 4, 2024
Due to the environmental and climate hysteria over the past decades, Germany has steadily moved to shut down its vast fleet of nuclear reactors, coal power plants, and even natural gas supplies (a major supply line from Russia got blown up).
Moreover, Germany is moving to ban fossil fuel heating systems for homes, and mandating electric cars by 2035.
Now in an energy crunch
Since the supply of natural gas from Russia got cut off, it became necessary to find an alternative source quickly – from USA in the form of imported LNG. The German government approved the construction an LNG terminal at the north German coast in record time. This would help secure Germany’s energy supply. Surely the USA could be viewed as a reliable partner.
That was the plan – until President Joe Biden unexpectedly put a stop to further LNG projects. Now, Germany suddenly risks finding itself in energy isolation. It’s panic time in Berlin.
“Devastating energy crisis”
“Germany is facing a devastating energy crisis that seriously threatens its security of supply,” reports Germany’s Blackout News. “Biden’s decision now has far-reaching consequences that could pose serious problems for German energy policy.”
Also see. berliner-zeitung : 26.01.24
The USA is the world’s largest exporter of LNG, but because of climate protection, Biden bowed to pressure from climate radicals and stopped plans to build new export terminals. This development has sent shockwaves through energy-starved Germany.
According to US government officials, four U.S. terminal projects are directly affected by Biden’s decision.
Berlin has backed itself into a corner with its years of misguided green energy policy. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.
Von der Leyen celebrates ‘a great day for Europe’ as farmers trash Brussels
By Rachel Marsden | RT | February 2, 2024
“Agreement! The European Council delivered on our priorities. Supporting Ukraine…. A good day for Europe,” tweeted unelected European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Thursday, as EU farmers “high-fived” her by throwing eggs, lighting fires and dumping manure in Brussels, where a reported 1,300 tractors gathered in protest.
Surely it must have been in anticipation of this “great day for Europe” that Brussels rolled out the barbed wire to keep the bloc’s own struggling farmers at bay while its leaders cut yet another check for Ukraine — after threatening the one anticipated holdout with national economic “blackmail,” as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban qualified it. It’s hard to believe that this meeting actually took place in Brussels. These officials are so disconnected from reality that it may as well have been held on a whole other planet.
Unlike the Ukrainian products making their way onto Western European dinner plates to stick it to Russian President Vladimir Putin (because turtlenecks and short, cold showers apparently failed to do the job), this crisis is certifiably EU-made. No one knows this better than the farmers, who also realize that it makes more sense to blockade the streets of Brussels than the national highways of their home countries, which they’ve been doing with overwhelming public support – from nine out of every ten citizens in the case of France, according to a recent Odoxa poll.
It was the EU with its climate change obsession that imposed a Common Agricultural Policy on farmers across the entire bloc, managed by bureaucrats divorced from the reality on the ground. Pencil pushers use EU Copernicus satellite images to spy and crack down on farmers whose paperwork doesn’t match – even if any discrepancies can be chalked up to uncontrollable but temporary conditions like the weather.
It was also the EU that piled on regulations under the pretext of ensuring the quality of farm products, while at the same time flooding the bloc with grain, poultry, and other imports from Ukraine. Does “Chernobyl chicken” mass-produced by workers who are paid a pittance represent a threat to the physical health of citizens and economic health of farmers? If not, then why can’t Brussels take its jackboot off the necks of its own farmers so they can compete on a level playing field? The EU has also suddenly decided to ease up on some pesticide bans, angering greens. Paris is promoting the idea that ideologically-driven bans need to end, which seems like a tacit admission of their uselessness. So what should we be more worried about now – ideologically-driven authoritarianism under the guise of health consciousness, or an actual health threat?
And what about that Ukrainian grain that EU officials demanded Russia unblock to feed the poor in developing countries? It turns out that Turkey and Russia were right when they raised the alarm about it just being dumped right next door in Europe, and it sounds like Russian President Vladimir Putin was effectively a bigger defender of EU farmers’ interests than Brussels was. But who’s even surprised anymore by Brussels’ misplaced priorities, given the image that has now emerged of another €50 billion ($54 billion) going out the door to Kiev, in support of a country that’s undercutting the EU’s own farmers without even being in the EU itself?
It was also the EU that screwed itself, its entire population, industry, and farmers out of cheap Russian energy, driving inflation that caused consumers to turn to cheaper food products and, in turn, driving industrial distributors to buy more cheaply, favoring Ukrainian imports. French President Emmanuel Macron said that he’d now be merciless with those industrials, as he limbers up to toss them under the tractors instead of taking responsibility for his own inaction or blaming Brussels for a top-down anti-Russia policy that’s doing far more harm than good.
The farmers’ problems are existential. And while some French farming union chiefs have called for the suspension of blockades in light of the most recent series of promised reforms announced by Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, it’s not clear whether the rank and file will actually listen in the long term. These are people who don’t talk much, but when they do, they’re direct and concrete. As one farmer told me, “Our feet may be in the dirt, but the dirt is clean” – in contrast to some politicians who have different narratives depending on their audience. Even with the suspension of the blockades on Friday, union reps admit that if government action and implementation doesn’t follow shortly, then the blowback from the same farmers risks being “catastrophic.”
For many farmers I’ve spoken with, it’s far too little, and way too late. The average French farmer’s income, estimated by government statistics back in 2021 at around €17,700 a year (for people who regularly work 70 hours a week), has since been subjected to even more blows. Yet governments have insisted on milking this particular cow until there’s nothing left. How else to explain the careless decision to raise taxes on farm fuel by 3 cents a liter, every year, and the insistence on maintaining such a policy at a time when the price of energy had skyrocketed as a result of knee-jerk anti-Russian ideological choices imposed by the EU? Until the tractors spilled onto the highways in France, Paris showed no interest in reversing this tax policy, which was implemented to drive the “green transition” away from conventional energy, and against all pragmatic reality. Clearly French officials knew of its devastating impact, as it was one of the very first concessions that Attal tried tossing like a speed bump in front of the advancing tractors on January 26 – and which the farmers rolled right over, demanding more.
Then there’s Queen Ursula briefly breaking from her fawning over the EU farmers’ current nemesis, Ukraine, to propose easing their “administrative burden.” Too bad she didn’t do that before letting Ukraine into the market in the first place. Guess she could always just blame Putin for making her do it. The bureaucracy is so overwhelming at this point that her proposal to the farmers is like offering to save people drowning in the ocean by tossing them a bucket. She could have stopped the paperwork pile-on at any time, but didn’t.
And how exactly could she know this demagoguery was killing European farming? You’d think that the first clue would have been the fact that EU policies ended up strong-arming Dutch farmers to sell their land to the government because their cattle’s nitrogen emissions exceeded climate policy limits.
Macron has now started to lobby the EU to restrict Ukrainian imports. Wow. You’d think these tractors were Decepticon Transformers about to rise up and kick their behinds, the way that all these EU leaders are suddenly springing into action. But the fact that an elected president even has to go cap in hand to plead with unelected Brussels bureaucrats, rather than make sovereign decisions in the best interests of his own country, is pathetic. Like, what if they say no? Then what? Does Macron think that he’s going to single-handedly and permanently derail the new Mercosur free trade deal, ready for signature, and set to flood the EU with even more farm products from Brazil and the rest of South America?
If Macron, or any other EU leader had any courage, they would have vetoed the €50 billion for Ukraine and demanded that it be used in consultation with EU farmers to ease their burden and “unscrew” the bloc. That’s a lot of bought time for the EU to figure out how to deconstruct the mess that it has made of its own house through corruption and special interests – all in hope that one day, people doing honest work can also make a commensurately decent living.
Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist, and host of independently produced talk-shows in French and English.
IMF accused of domestic meddling after telling UK to reach net zero targets by raising taxes
BY THOMAS BROOKE | REMIX NEWS | JANUARY 30, 2024
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been accused of intervening in the U.K.’s domestic politics by warning Chancellor Jeremy Hunt against tax cuts so that net zero targets can be achieved.
In the latest update to its economic forecasts, IMF analysts said that the U.K. Treasury should not be considering cuts to taxation — as hinted at recently by Hunt ahead of March’s budget statement — and should instead raise it in particular areas — all at a time when ordinary Brits continue to struggle with the cost of living.
“Preserving high-quality public services and undertaking critical public investments to boost growth and achieve the net zero targets, will imply higher spending needs over the medium term than are currently reflected in the government’s budget plans,” an IMF spokesperson said.
“Accommodating these needs… will already require generating additional high-quality fiscal savings, including on the tax side.
“The IMF has recommended strengthening carbon and property taxation, eliminating loopholes in wealth and income taxation, and reforming the pensions triple lock.
“It is in this context that staff advises against further tax cuts,” they added.
U.K. conservatives, however, hit back at the global financial institution and accused it of meddling in domestic affairs ahead of a general election expected later this year.
Speaking to Remix News, Conservative MP Dame Andrea Jenkyns said: “It is simple, as Conservatives we should have lox taw and freedom of choice.
“We cannot be telling people how to heat their homes or what cars to drive. Say no to net zero!” added the former government minister.
Former Brexit Party MEP Martin Daubney accused globalist elites of wanting ordinary people to be “poorer, colder, and hungry to fund their eco-vanity projects and keep the taxes rolling in.”
“Supranational super-quango interferes in British domestic affairs in an attempt to keep us saddled with high taxes. Globalism is awful,” added the London-based Bruges Group think tank.
Ahead of the Spring Budget, Chancellor Hunt reiterated his desire to cut taxes but added that “it is too early to know whether further reductions in tax will be affordable.”
“We continue to believe that smart tax reductions can make a big difference in boosting growth,” he added.
Germany’s dream of building a fleet of hydrogen-fired power plants is faltering
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | January 26, 2024
When green fantasies hit the brick wall of cold reality!
By 2035, Germany wants to produce 100% of its power in a climate-neutral way. To back up wind turbines and solar panels, whose production is expected to dominate in the coming years, the government initially envisioned a fleet of hydrogen-fired power plants.
But these plans are now faltering amid a prolonged government budgetary crisis, said Sigfried Russwurm, the president of Germany’s powerful industry association BDI.
In early August 2023, the German government triumphantly announced that the European Commission had essentially greenlit its plan for subsidised backup power plants.
That meant 8.8 GW of dedicated hydrogen power plants, alongside 15 GW of natural gas-powered ones that ought to switch to hydrogen by 2035 at the latest, in total representing about one-third of the German peak power demand of 2023. Climate-friendly power at the press of a button.
Because these plants would likely only produce power in periods of sustained low wind and low sun – known as “kalte Dunkelflaute” – they are unlikely to make a profit without state support.
And critically, the annual €7 billion earmarked for this purpose “evaporated” following a ruling from Germany’s top court, which restricted the government’s use of credit lines approved during the COVID-19 crisis.
With no hydrogen plants available as backup, coal power will likely be needed to fill the gap, the BDI chief warned.
“As long as the prospect of new backup power plants based on hydrogen does not get off the ground […] the solution in Germany will be the continued operation of coal-fired power plants,” Russwurm told the press on Tuesday (16 January).
Given budgetary constraints, the two industry associations are urgning the government to cut corners and ditch plans for hydrogen-fired power plants.
Industry groups are now urging the government to take action. “The Federal Government must now get its act together: We need a power plant strategy with clear framework conditions,” said energy industry association BDEW on 11 January.
“At least 15 gigawatts (GW) of new secure generation capacity will be needed in Germany by 2030,” the association added.
Given budgetary constraints, the two industry associations are urging the government to cut corners and ditch plans for hydrogen-fired power plants.
“To significantly reduce complexity and costs,” BDEW stresses the need to “reevaluate” the role afforded to hydrogen peak and hybrid power plants, due to their expensive components and limited impacts on supply security.
Russwurm is of a similar mind. Outlining the BDI’s priorities for the year, he used metaphors to explain what a hydrogen-fired power plant would look like.
Existing power plants can’t run on “pure” hydrogen because the “burners would simply melt”, he explained. Addressing this would require retrofitting the plants with ceramics, which would make them look like the nose of a spaceship folded inwards – a process that can be done but is costly, the BDI chief said.
“If these turbines are only supposed to run when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, then they will be extremely expensive,” he added.
“I’m not even talking about the cost of hydrogen, which we don’t have, but only the investment costs of these new gas turbines and their new peripherals.”
Ultimately, this means Germany’s plan to entirely phase out coal power by 2030 looks unlikely to materialise. Instead, Germany will have to continue relying on gas-fired power plants to match growing demand for electricity.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/germanys-dream-of-building-a-fleet-of-hydrogen-fired-power-plants-is-faltering/
As the guy from BDI notes, 7 billion euros a year is just the cost of subsidising these hydrogen back up power plants. On top of that comes the cost of actually producing the hydrogen and the question of where the electricity will come from to do it.
Biden halts new LNG exports
The fuel is seen as a vital lifeline for Western Europe, which has cut itself off from cheaper Russian gas imports
RT | January 26, 2024
US President Joe Biden has ordered a pause on liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports from new projects in the country, citing their potential contribution to climate change. Energy costs in Western Europe have skyrocketed since nations such as Germany switched from Russian gas to American LNG, but Biden insists the continent doesn’t currently need additional supplies.
The pause will allow the US Department of Energy (DOE) to update the economic and environmental guidelines it uses when approving new export licenses, and will last for several months.
“During this period, we will take a hard look at the impacts of LNG exports on energy costs, America’s energy security, and our environment,” Biden said in a statement on Friday. The president added that the pause “sees the climate crisis for what it is: the existential threat of our time.”
According to the White House, roughly half of American LNG exports went to Western Europe last year, and the US has exceeded its annual delivery targets to the EU for each of the last two years. “Today’s announcement will not impact our ability to continue supplying LNG to our allies in the near-term,” Biden claimed in his statement.
Europe remains mired in an energy crisis. The continent’s former industrial powerhouse, Germany, is “in a particularly difficult situation” after abandoning Russian gas supplies, Economy Minister Robert Habeck told lawmakers last week. Prior to the imposition of sanctions on Moscow over the Ukraine conflict, Germany received 40% of its gas imports from Russia. Replacing this fuel with LNG from the US, as well as energy from Norway and the Netherlands, has come at a cost, with the German government forced to roll out massive subsidy packages to prevent its largest industrial firms from leaving the country.
German industrial output fell by 2% last year, while the entire economy shrank by 0.3% in the same time period, the country’s Federal Statistical Office reported last week. The office blamed the decline on high inflation, soaring energy prices, and weak foreign demand.
LNG is transported on large tanker ships to regasification plants, where it is heated to return it to a gaseous state. Germany has rushed to bring three such offshore plants online since early 2022, and plans to open three more over the coming months. The US has also built out its LNG export infrastructure to cope with the demand, including the Calcasieu Pass 2 project in Louisiana, which once certified will be the nation’s largest export terminal.
The Calcasieu Pass 2 facility will likely come before the DOE for approval in the coming weeks, where it will be stalled indefinitely by Biden’s pause. With half of the terminal’s output set to go to Germany, a spokesman for the project’s developer, Venture Global, told Reuters last week that the pause would send a “devastating signal to our allies that they can no longer rely on the United States.”
French fury: Farmers sowing seeds of revolution against elites in Paris
By Rachel Marsden | RT | January 25, 2024
The French government is scrambling to get a whole lot of tractors off the nation’s major highways. Good luck with that when 89% of French citizens back the protesting farmers, according to a new Odoxa poll.
France is joining a movement that now encompasses nearly 20% of the EU, with farmers in five of the bloc’s 27 countries convoying and blockading major roads. Farmers from Poland, Romania, Germany, and the Netherlands have now been joined by their counterparts from the country virtually synonymous with revolution. And one particular incident here in France has just shifted the nascent movement into overdrive.
Alexandra Sonac, a 35-year-old cattle and corn farmer from the south of France, and three of her four family members were struck by a car in the dark early morning hours at a farmers’ highway blockade near Toulouse. Sonac and her 12-year-old daughter were killed, while her husband is in intensive care. The incident is still under investigation, but to add insult to injury, the three Armenian occupants of the vehicle that struck the family were reportedly under an expulsion order.
The symbolism here is glaring. A productive farmer resisting government economic oppression was killed by someone who has enjoyed the benefits of government laxity. Just 12% of expulsion orders were carried out by France between 2015 and 2021, one of the lowest rates in Europe, according to recent statistics.
French farmers’ complaints converge with those of their counterparts across the EU. They’re angry with their own governments, but only because these elected officials have insisted on sliding into the fitted straitjacket imposed on them by the unelected technocratic tyrants in Brussels and their top-down, ideologically driven policies. There’s a good reason why French farmers this week have ripped up and burned the same EU flag that President Emmanuel Macron insists on placing alongside the French tricolor in his various appearances.
Farmers all across the bloc have similar demands. They want a fair price for energy while the EU not only has imposed costly climate policies that treat fossil fuels like the plague, but has also decided, “for Ukraine,” to destroy its own supply of cheap Russian gas that drove Europe’s economy. Then, again for Ukraine, they decided to lift import duties on goods and services from Ukraine, allowing the EU to be flooded with truckers who undercut local providers and with equally undercutting farm products that don’t even meet the EU standards with which European farmers are forced to comply at their own expense. Farmers don’t want handouts, but they want governments to lay off the increasingly heavy taxation as their solution to filling state coffers emptied as a result of their constantly misplaced priorities. They also want their national governments to defend their interests against Brussels’ attempts to replace them with cheap foreign imports through endless free trade deals with countries whose farmers don’t operate under the same regulatory diktats, all while Brussels pushes member states (notably the Netherlands) to buy out farms whose cattle waste doesn’t serve its climate change policies.
It’s no surprise that the average person sympathizes, since they’re equally fed up with their incompetent heavy-handed government serving as a white glove for Brussels’ iron fist. They see that their gas and electricity costs are endlessly climbing, and their buying power is circling the drain, all while the French defense minister, for example, talks about how the Ukraine conflict, that has served as a convenient pretext for Europe’s transfer of wealth from the people to the elites, is such a wonderful opportunity for the military industrial complex. And when the French National Assembly approved themselves a €300 ($327) a month increase in their own allowances this week, just to offset the inflation that’s crushing the average citizen, it serves as yet another example of their total tone-deafness.
On the afternoon of January 24, a massive row of tires and manure was set ablaze by angry French farmers right in front of the prefecture of Agen, in southwest France. Some farmers present denounced the move, others voiced their support, but all agreed to being fed up. More tellingly, police and firefighters on the scene dragged their feet in reacting as the smoke extended almost to the height of the adjacent building, considered a symbol of the French state. Apparently, even frontline workers who serve the state’s institutions are getting fed up with the establishment elites. And not just in Europe, but elsewhere in the West.
Canadian Freedom Convoy truckers and their supporters were vindicated in Canadian Federal Court this week when a judge ruled that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government constitutionally violated fundamental rights and freedoms when it evoked the Emergency Act against protesting opponents to the government’s Covid mandates, which they considered a violation of basic rights and freedoms. The fact that the government ordered bank accounts blocked as a deterrent against protesting should have been the first big hint of growing authoritarianism, but apparently it took a federal judge to spell it out.
German farmers and truckers who began convoying across the country earlier this month told me in Berlin that they were inspired by the Freedom Convoy as they railed against the German government’s imposition of more taxes on the diesel that fuels their farm vehicles, already pricy as a result of the government’s misguided energy policies driven by ideological, knee-jerk opposition to fossil fuels and to cheap gas from Russia. In both the Freedom Convoy and farmer cases, grotesque attempts by government officials to portray protesters as some kind of right-wing radicals, to absolve elites from responsibility, have fallen flat among the general population.
Truckers, bakers, students, firefighters, and police are already showing signs of solidarity with the farmers, backed by an overwhelming and quantified silent majority. And these national movements are finding common cause with each other around Europe and the Western world. Attempts to foster division by pitting big farms against small ones or right against left fall flat.
French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, who only started in the job on January 9 and probably still hasn’t found all the washrooms at his new office, trudged down to the rural southern Rhone region last weekend. Attal said that “our farmers are not bandits, polluters, people who torture animals, as we sometimes hear.” Where does he hear that? In Brussels? His seduction skills could use some work. It’s like showing up for a date and saying, “Hey, you’re not as psycho as I heard you were.” What a charmer. Can’t wait to see how this diplomatic savant is going to resolve this whole mess.
A meeting last Monday between Attal and farming reps included a delegate for the Young French Farmers Union. I spoke with several of their counterparts in Berlin at that protest earlier this month — young entrepreneurs, so well-spoken and educated. These young farmers say they work 80-hour weeks and feel there is so much red tape or prohibitions from the EU that it’s paralyzing. And yet France is desperate to encourage young people to adopt farming as a profession at a time when it’s a dying business. Gee, big mystery why that might be, geniuses.
The tragic deaths of Alexandra Sonac and her daughter this week will forever stand as a symbol of struggle against the oppression of the working class by an authoritarian global governance that’s fomenting chaos as it caters to special interests increasingly divorced from those of the average citizen. No amount of tinkering by the offending governments will quell the growing unrest. Only a deep and fundamental rethinking of their relationship with their citizens, whose interests they’re supposed to serve exclusively, would have any hope of resolving this deepening crisis.
Brussels’ diktat on climate change and support for Ukraine is seen as more important than the people who actually feed the country
Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist, and host of independently produced talk-shows in French and English.
German steel production plunges to 15-year low
The home of the largest steel industry in Europe, Germany is facing a continuous crisis over sky-high electricity prices
By John Cody | Remix News | January 24, 2024
Steel production in Germany is cratering, reaching a low point last seen during the 2008 global economic crisis. Steel production dropped to 35.4 million tons in 2022, a decrease of 3.9 percent from 2021.
The hardest hit segment of steelworks was the electrical steel industry, which saw its production sink by almost 9 percent to 9.8 million tons, a figure even lower than the 2009 low. Overall, all segments of the steelworks industry in Germany saw declines.
Since the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war, there has seen a continuous downward trend in the German steel sector, in large part due to soaring electricity prices.
Kerstin Maria Rippel, managing director of the German Steel Federation, cited “weak demand” and “intentionally uncompetitive” electricity prices as being factors behind the crisis.
“The annual balance of steel production in Germany clearly shows that the situation for the steel industry (…) is very serious,” she added.
In what appears to be a shot at the ruling left-liberal government, Rippel says that her association notes an “urgent need for political action” regarding transmission grid fees, which have doubled since the beginning of 2023.
She is calling for state subsidies from the “Climate Transformation Fund” to help the sector finance a turnaround.
“We need a clear political concept on how the path to climate neutrality is to be sustainably financed,” said Rippel.
Soaring energy and material costs have hit German industry particularly hard, and the role of the Christian Democrats (CDU) in pushing for the phasing out of nuclear power — a move also supported by the Greens — has also played a role.
The Alternative for Germany party has pointed to the current left-liberal government, along with the previous CDU-led government, as being behind the long-term decline in Germany’s industrial sectors. However, the situation has grown especially dire under Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
“Only on Monday, the pharmaceutical and chemical giant Bayer announced a ‘significant workforce reduction’ by the end of 2025. The tire manufacturer Continental is terminating the 40-hour contracts of thousands of employees, and the gear factory Friedrichshafen (ZF) apparently wants to cut 12,000 jobs. However, the traffic light government doesn’t care about any of this,” wrote the AfD in a statement.
The AfD says it will reverse the green “energy transition” and repair the Nord Stream pipelines in order to return cheap Russian energy to German industry. The party also promises to reduce the tax burden and bureaucracy to jumpstart the German economy.
Four of Britain’s top institutions have made erroneous estimates of the cost of Net Zero
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | January 24, 2024
Four national institutions have failed to model the 2050 energy system correctly, and all of them in ways that lead to understatement of the costs of Net Zero.
Over the weekend, the Sunday Telegraph reported that the Climate Change Committee has got its energy system modelling wrong. The revelation was made by Sir Christopher Llewellyn Smith, the lead author of the recent Royal Society report on electricity storage, in remarks made at a seminar at Oxford.
According to Sir Christopher, the Climate Change Committee’s estimates of the costs of Net Zero are fundamentally flawed because they have only modelled isolated years. As he pointed out in the seminar, low-wind years can happen back to back, which means that the Climate Change Committee need twice as much storage capacity as they thought. As a result, they have underestimated the costs.
However, the Sunday Telegraph didn’t mention that it’s not just the Climate Change Committee that has made this mistake. In the same seminar, Sir Christopher pointed out that the National Infrastructure Commission has done the same thing, despite being warned of the problem of clusters of low-wind years. So they too will have underestimated the costs.
The National Infrastructure Assessment… is also based on one year…they were told by the Met Office ‘you can get extreme events’…it’s not enough to look at one. They looked at one, so they got the answer wrong. The Met Office are really angry, because they told them ‘don’t do it’, but they did it.
I can also reveal that National Grid ESO, in its Future Energy Scenarios, has done the same thing. I wrote to the NGESO team to ask how they did things, and was told that their models are prepared using weather conditions in 2013, which they describe as an “average year”. They are starting to run tests against low-wind conditions (so-called ‘dunkelflautes’), but back-to-back wind droughts don’t seem to be on their radar yet:
The generation provided from renewables, as well as the demand profile, is typically based on an average weather year (2013).
For FES23, we also conducted an initial piece of analysis looking at abnormal weather conditions (resulting in abnormal supply and demand patterns), the results of which can be found in our FES23 publication under the title Dunkelflaute Period. We took a period of extreme weather, in this case between Jan-Feb 1985, and applied it to our Consumer Transformation scenario in 2050, to look at how the system would respond to a sustained period low renewable output…
We are planning on looking at abnormal supply and exceptional demand in more detail going forward as well as the effects of more extreme weather.
That means that they too will have underestimated the cost of Net Zero.
The Royal Society is to be congratulated for clarifying the problem. However, it turns out that their own modelling is fundamentally flawed too. That’s because, while they model 37 years of different wind speeds, they assume that electricity demand is always the same. Sir Christopher has admitted that this is not correct, in a podcast broadcast last year. As he put it then:
And now I confess something that is a bit of a weakness in our report. We’ve got this model of one year of demand… based in the weather in 2018…We simply repeat that 37 times.
This is clearly wrong, because in 2050 it is imagined that we will all heat our homes with electric heat pumps. Electricity demand will therefore be much higher in cold years than in mild ones, and if we have back to back cold years, we are going to need much more storage.
So, four well funded national institutions have failed to model the 2050 correctly, and all of them in ways that low-balls the cost of Net Zero. That’s a remarkable coincidence, and one that should probably raise alarm bells about the extent of the rot in the British establishment.
Revelation That U.K. Climate Target is Based on One Windy Year’s Data Threatens to Unravel Net Zero Credibility
BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JANUARY 24, 2024
In October the Daily Sceptic reported on a paper written for the Royal Society led by Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith of Oxford University that concluded batteries were not the answer to the huge storage requirements of intermittent ‘green’ electricity power. Despite the prestigious academic fire power on parade, the paper died a death in the popular prints, presumably because of its unwelcome message about the much-touted battery solution. But recent revelations suggest the report could act as a loose thread that helps unravel the collectivist Net Zero agenda in the U.K. The Royal Society analysed decades of local wind speeds and found the electricity system needed the equivalent of at least a third of green energy to be stored as backup. Such a cost would be astronomical. Now it appears that the Government’s Climate Change Committee (CCC) fudged the issue by using just one year of high wind data in persuading Members of Parliament in 2019 to donkey-nod through Theresa May’s insane legislative rush to Net Zero by 2050.
Sir Chris’s report showed that wind could fall away for days at a time during periods of intense cold dominated by high atmospheric pressure. It also found wind speeds varied between years, all of which is in fact known and has been studied widely by other scientists. The Telegraph has reported on remarks made by Sir Chris after the paper was published in which he noted that the CCC has “conceded privately” that reliance on one year’s data was a “mistake”. It appears that the information given to MPs committing to 2050 Net Zero assumed there would be just seven days when wind turbines would produce less than 10% of their potential electricity output. According to Net Zero Watch that compares with 30 such days in 2020, 33 in 2019 and 56 in 2018.
In reporting that the CCC has conceded the “mistake”, the Telegraph noted that Sir Chris said the committee was still saying it doesn’t differ much from Sir Chris’s calculations. “Well that’s not quite true,” observed the Oxford Emeritus Professor. Asked by the newspaper if it disputed the account of Sir Chris, a CCC spokesman said it had “nothing further to add”.
Of course the ‘Noble Lie’ that Net Zero must be foisted on an unwilling population whatever the economic and societal cost will need to be preserved. Nothing to see here, move along please, is likely to guide most mainstream media in covering these latest revelations. The investigative science and Net Zero writer Paul Homewood is less inclined to ignore the serious matter. “It is now clear that Parliament authorised Net Zero without any proper assessment, whether financial or energy, and the whole Net Zero legislation must now be suspended until a full independent assessment is carried out.” He goes further and states that current and past members of the CCC must be held to account, and “excluded from any further influence over the country’s energy policy, or indeed on any issue of public policy”.
In general, nobody wants to talk about the lack of wind and solar backup, so there is a widespread pretence that the problem will somehow be solved in the future. But having dismissed any role for batteries, the Royal Society suggested hydrogen as a solution, an idea, alas, only slightly less dumb than batteries. Highly explosive, low kinetic energy compared with hydrocarbons, expensive to produce, difficult to store and move around – the disadvantages are all too obvious. Francis Menton of the Manhattan Contrarian saw the report as an “enormous improvement” on every other effort on the subject of large scale energy storage systems. But in the end, the authors still have a “quasi-religious commitment” to a fossil-free future, and this means that the report, despite containing much valuable information, “is actually useless for any public policy purpose”.
What is becoming clear is the level of statistical deception that is practised across climate science and the promotion of Net Zero. Surface temperature measurements are frequently adjusted upwards on a retrospective basis despite ignoring growing urban heat corruptions, activists use computer models to run up garbage-in, garbage-out scares on an almost daily basis, and bad weather is deliberately confused with long-term climate to suggest the latter is changing due to human caused carbon dioxide. All lapped up without a critical word between them by members of the mainstream media increasingly funded by elite billionaires.
The donkey-nodding politicians and the poodle media often hide behind the notion that they are just following the ‘science’. There is no such thing as the ‘science’, settled or otherwise, just the ongoing scientific process. The distinguished scientist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman captured the integrity of the process when he wrote: “If you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid – not only what you think is right about it. … Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them.”
Renewable energy is not a low-cost substitute for fossil fuels, notes a forward in Rupert Darwall’s recently published report on Net Zero and Britain’s “disastrous” energy policies. High and rising energy costs have locked Britain into economic decline, a suggestion given weight by last week’s savage destruction of the steel economy of Port Talbot. Renewables are not cheap, nor can they provide the reliability that modern societies expect and on which they depend. His report is said to convincingly demonstrate “how Britain was conned into Net Zero by deceptive and illusory promises of cheap wind power”.
The CCC is a dedicated green activist group that sits at the heart of U.K. Government. It is a pernicious, untrustworthy force in British politics giving cover to policies that will lead to de-industrialisation and massive changes in future lifestyle including restriction on diet, transport and personal freedoms.
Here’s hoping the wind scandal blows the damn thing away.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
The Climate Change Committee Must Pay The Penalty For False Advice
By George Lawson | Not A Lot Of People Know That | January 23, 2024
It seems to me that the falsification of data on the weather, perpetrated by Mr Stark and the Climate Change Committee, has far wider implications than the crime itself. It was due to the Climate Change Committee’s false information to parliament that the Net Zero fiasco was brought into law by the Teresa May government with wide government support before she was forced out of office. Net Zero, as we all know, has been a very expensive failure, and will be seen as the most costly and useless law that has ever been passed by our legislators.
The law has indirectly been responsible for increasing fuel prices to the public and pushed up business costs and prices, making products uncompetitive. It is responsible for increasing the cost of living for everyone across the nation, and has drained many billions of pounds from our overstretched government finances. The effects of these avoidable negative factors on our nation are simply incalculable, but what we do know is that Stark’s blatant lies have been responsible for trashing the country’s economy.
Mr Sunak now has good cause to do two things to affect a recovery of our lost economy. He should immediately close down the wasteful and lying Climate Change Committee, as this is the most expensive lie, by far, than the many lies they have included in their reports over the years, and bring in legislation to overturn the ridiculous economy – sapping Net Zero law. If he does this he will be supported by 99 per cent of the population, it will also increase his reputation massively for when the next election happens.
Finally, Stark, together with the Chairman of the Climate Change Committee, should be brought before a full committee of enquiry to answer for his lies, and if found guilty of intentionally misleading Parliament, he should be sent to prison. Such terrible lies to enhance his reputation at such a cost to the nation, should not go unpunished.
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The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – 10th part of the series “9/11 and the Zionist Question”
Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | August 9, 2016
… In Among The Truthers Kay repeats the core idea of The Volunteer: A Canadian’s Secret Life in the Mossad. As Kay would have it, 9/11 confirms the role of Israel as the West’s primary bulwark against Islamic savagery. In making this case Kay repeats the assertion of Benjamin Netanyahu that 9/11 was good for Israel.
Kay asserts, “Following the attacks supporters of Israel spoke of a silver lining. The war against militant Islam suddenly was a global one. Now the whole world would see and understand the sort of nihilistic hatred that Israelis confront every day.” As Kay sees it, Jews are being enlisted en masse to serve as primary soldiers in a war of civilizations.
He writes, “The Jew was the perfect anti-Islamist, whose zeal and reliability was hard-wired into his political DNA thanks to six decades of Israeli warfare against Islamic terrorists in the Middle East.” … Read full article
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