Surprise !!

We're in Era of "Peak Renewables, " To Be Followed by An Age of Fossil Fuels That Has Just Begun

"Everything You've Heard About  Fossil Fuels May Be Wrong"

BY MICHAEL LIND 

Are we living at the beginning of the Age of Fossil Fuels, not its final decades? The very thought goes against everything that politicians and the educated public have been taught to believe in the past generation. According to the conventional wisdom, the U.S. and other industrial nations must undertake a rapid and expensive transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy for three reasons: The imminent depletion of fossil fuels, national security and the danger of global warming.

What if the conventional wisdom about the energy future of America and the world has been completely wrong?

As everyone who follows news about energy knows by now, in the last decade the technique of hydraulic fracturing or "fracking," long used in the oil industry, has evolved to permit energy companies to access reserves of previously-unrecoverable “shale gas” or unconventional natural gas. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, these advances mean there is at least six times as much recoverable natural gas today as there was a decade ago.

Natural gas, which emits less carbon dioxide than coal, can be used in both electricity generation and as a fuel for automobiles.

The implications for energy security are startling. Natural gas may be only the beginning. Fracking also permits the extraction of previously-unrecoverable “tight oil,” thereby postponing the day when the world runs out of petroleum. There is enough coal to produce energy for centuries. And governments, universities and corporations in the U.S., Canada, Japan and other countries are studying ways to obtain energy from gas hydrates, which mix methane with ice in high-density formations under the seafloor. The potential energy in gas hydrates may equal that of all other fossils, including other forms of natural gas, combined.

If gas hydrates as well as shale gas, tight oil, oil sands and other unconventional sources can be tapped at reasonable cost, then the global energy picture looks radically different than it did only a few years ago. Suddenly it appears that there may be enough accessible hydrocarbons to power industrial civilization for centuries, if not millennia, to come.

So much for the specter of depletion, as a reason to adopt renewable energy technologies like solar power and wind power. Whatever may be the case with Peak Oil in particular, the date of Peak Fossil Fuels has been pushed indefinitely into the future. What about national security as a reason to switch to renewable energy?

"... because he marches straight to his objective over Congress, over lobbies, over stubborn bureaucracies."

FDR and the Collectivist Wave

by Ralph Raico

"The grotesque double standard in judging Communist and Nazi atrocities originated with the administration of Franklin Roosevelt."

In granting official diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union in November 1933 Franklin Roosevelt was "unintentionally," of course, returning to the traditions of American foreign policy.

From the early days of the Republic, throughout the 19th century and into the 20th — in the days, that is, of the doctrine of neutrality and nonintervention — the US government did not concern itself with the morality, or, often, rank immorality, of foreign states. That a regime was in effective control of a country was sufficient grounds for acknowledging it to be, in fact, the government of that country.

Woodrow Wilson broke with this tradition in 1913, when he refused to recognize the Mexican government of Victoriano Huerta, and again a few years later, in the case of Costa Rica. Now "moral standards," as understood in Washington, DC — the new, self-anointed Vatican of international morality — would determine which foreign governments the United States deigned to have dealings with and which not.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, Wilson applied his self-concocted criterion, and refused recognition. Henry L. Stimson, Hoover's secretary of state, applied the same doctrine when the Japanese occupied Manchuria, in northern China, and established a subservient regime in what they called Manchukuo. It was a method of signaling disapproval of Japanese expansionism, though there was no doubt that the Japanese soon came into effective control of the area, which had been more or less under the sway of competing warlords before.

In later years, Roosevelt would adopt the Stimson doctrine of nonrecognition and even make Stimson his secretary of war. But in 1933 all moral criteria were thrown overboard. The United States, the last holdout among the major powers, gave in, and Roosevelt began negotiations to welcome the model killer state of the century into the community of nations.

Recognizing Soviet Russia

To the Soviet negotiator, Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, FDR presented his two chief concerns. One had to do with the activities of the Comintern. This worldwide organization is often ignored or slighted in accounts of the interwar years, but the fact is that the history of the period from 1918 to the Second World War cannot be understood without a knowledge of its purpose and methods.

With his seizure of power in Russia, Lenin turned immediately to his real goal, world revolution. He invited members of all the old socialist parties to join a new grouping, the Communist International, or Comintern. Many did, and new parties were formed — the Communist Party of France (CPF), the Communist Party of China (CPC), the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), and so on, all under the control of the mother party in Moscow (CPSU).

The openly proclaimed aim of the Comintern was the overthrow of all "capitalist" governments and the establishment of a universal state under Red auspices. Hypocrisy was not one of Lenin's many vices: the founding documents of the Comintern explicitly declared that the member parties and movements were to use whatever means — legal or illegal, peaceful or violent — that might be appropriate to their situations at any given time.

The End of Empires

The Ash Heap of History

by Peter C. Earle

For over half of a millennium, the lands encompassing present-day Ethiopia and portions of both Sudan and Somalia have been a source of deep and abiding mystery. It is a land steeped in religious and mystical significance, said by some to be the final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant and the home of one of the biblical magi.[1] In addition, many archeologists and explorers have independently uncovered evidence that a complex civilization — the kingdom of the Aksumites (or Auxumites) — once thrived there, but disappeared suddenly.

Much about them remains obscure to this day. Investigative efforts have been undertaken throughout the last century, a recent one culminating in the publication of Dr. Stuart Munro-Hay's comprehensive Aksum: An African Civilization of Late Antiquity in 1991. In the foreword of the book, he affirms that a good number of contemporary archeologists knew nothing of the Aksumites, and even many African history books don't have a chapter on them, dedicating at most a few pages to the subject.[2]

As is so often the case with disremembered segments of human history, it is to mankind's collective detriment that the story of the Aksumite kingdom remains largely unknown. Applying aspects of the Austrian School framework to the facts that Munro-Hay and others have disinterred admits a resounding study of the perils that even brief incursions into statism may carry.

The Aksumite civilization began coalescing approximately 400 years before the birth of Christ, with the aggregation of a number of tribes and clans in present-day Ethiopia. It can first be considered a single society by approximately 100 CE, as a number of other social groups, in particular large portions of the declining Kush and Meroë empires, were absorbed into it.[3]

The principle asset of the Aksumite civilization was its location straddling the Red Sea, the great aortic byway of global commerce in its time. It also sat at the hub of trade routes bringing numerous raw commodities, finished goods, and luxury items through northern and central Africa. In the middle of the 1st century, the first references to Aksum appear in a shipping tome called The Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, noting an expansive list of goods being sold and purchased in the port city of Adulis.[4]

For nearly half a millennium, the Aksumites facilitated trade in goods from all corners of the then-known world — Africa, the Mediterranean, Sri Lanka, the Middle East and Asia — ranging from the mundane (animal skins, iron, salt), to the precious (gold, silver, obsidian, and emeralds), to the exotic (ivory, leather, spices, wild animals). Success in trading brought a high standard of living for the Aksumites; they developed innovations in ceramics and engineering, the latter demonstrated by massive obelisks that festoon the ruins. The high quality of the Aksumite diet also hints at their affluence; remnants of glassware and foodstuff containers that once held wine, beer, and olive oil have been found in the ruins of many habitations.[5]

As early as 77 CE, in fact, Roman author and magistrate Pliny the Younger referred to the kingdom of Aksum as having a "window on the world" in light of their heavy involvement in global trade.[6] The Persian prophet Mani opined in 250 CE that the most important empires in history to date were the Persian, the Roman, the Sileos (China), and that of the Aksumites.[7]

But in contrast to these other empires, Aksumite prosperity did not rise by device of conquest, territorial strangleholds, or luck; neither did they offer shipping and trading services in the hope that sea and land trading would simply arrive. Their prosperity was built upon two informal but core tenets: noninterventionism and the maintenance of a broadly accepted, market-dictated currency standard. These codes, even beyond their enviable geographic location, proved critical in the ascendancy of the Aksumites, quickly bringing them to prominence as a preferred trading center.

"Et tu, Brute?"

The Euro Living Dangerously

by P. Krugman

A very important column from Martin Wolf. 

One way to summarize his argument is to say that slow-motion bank runs are already in progress in the European periphery, and that these countries’ banking systems are being sustained only by a process in which, say, Ireland’s central bank borrows from the Bundesbank and then lends the funds on to Irish private banks to replace the fleeing deposits. 

Here are claims among central banks as of the end of last year:

Financial TimesClaims among European central banks

You can see why we’re now at the panic stage. The Bundesbank is already very upset about its large claims on troubled debtors, which are backed by sovereign debt as collateral. Yet if financing stops in the wake of a debt restructuring, the result will be to collapse the debtor nations’ banking systems, a process Martin believes would lead to their ejection from the euro. (He makes me look like an optimist!)

So the ECB keeps saying that restructuring is unthinkable. Yet austerity programs are not working; the prospect of a return to normal financing is receding rather than approaching.

If you ask me, the water level has now dropped so far that the fuel rods are exposed. We really are in meltdown territory.

Who Would Have Thought

Cheap Gas Will Overtake Expensive Renewables

A glut of cheap gas will see the fuel overtake renewable sources in the global race to build new energy generation, says a senior energy industry executive.

"More gas [power plants] than wind and solar will be built [in the 10 to 20 years]," said Steve Bolze, chief executive of General Electric's power and water division, which makes gas-fired turbines. "Gas is a good alternative to being 100% renewable."

However, he was unable to say whether a massive increase in gas-fired power generation would be consistent with the world meeting its climate change target of halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 compared with 1990 levels, which scientists say is the only way to avoid dangerous levels of global warming.

He said: "We need not only to be able to work through these targets, but also to deliver the power that is required in the world. Our role is to supply the industry – and we are seeing more demand for gas."

The International Energy Agency has predicted that if the anticipated "dash for gas" goes ahead, the world will be far adrift of its greenhouse gas emissions targets. Laszlo Varro, head of gas, coal and power markets at the IEA, said: "We have said repeatedly that on our current trajectory we will miss these targets."

GE is putting its engineering and marketing muscle strongly behind gas – the company has just launched a new gas-fired turbine that is being billed as complementary to renewable energy. The new turbine is more efficient, and its key selling point is that it can be sparked up or powered down much more quickly than previous models. The company says this means it is a good way of providing back-up for intermittent renewable generation from wind turbines – which the company also manufactures to a lesser degree.

"When the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine, gas is an efficient way of meeting demand," said Bolze.

Gas companies have been stepping up their lobbying efforts in recent months, in an attempt to persuade policymakers around the world that an abundance of unconventional gas – fuel that was previously too expensive to exploit or inaccessible because it is bound up in dense rocks – means the fossil fuel is the best way to meet rising demand for power and cut greenhouse gas emissions.

This argument is rapidly gaining traction in the US in particular, where a rush to exploit shale gas reserves is spurring the construction of gas-fired power plants. "The US will be a gas island, because there is so much local supply, and it may be cheaper than gas traded in the rest of the world," said Varro.

Gas is being positioned as a low-carbon fuel – burned in a power station, it produces about half of the carbon associated with coal. However, this is not the whole story; a recent study showed that the most common form of unconventional gas, shale gas, which is released by fracturing dense rock formations, produces as much carbon as coal because of problems with its production.

As Bolze's remarks illustrate, this new "dash for gas" is likely to be at the expense of renewables. A report from the European Gas Advocacy Forum suggested that Europe could meet its carbon-cutting targets hundreds of billions of euros more cheaply by pursuing gas than by relying on renewables.

GE contends that gas can be complementary to renewables. "To have more renewable energy on the grid, you need to have more flexibility, other forms of power," Bolze said.

However, building a massive new fleet of gas-fired power stations around the world would effectively lock in fossil fuel generation for decades, because each new plant has an operating life of at least 25 years.

The UK's committee on climate change has warned that all British energy generation must be decarbonised by 2030, and the same is likely to be true of other developed countries if they are to comply with scientific advice on emissions. This would mean that gas-fired power stations built in the next decade would have to be taken out of commission before the end of their lives or fitted with carbon capture and storage technology (CCS).

Full story

"A dumping ground for bad loans"

The European Central Bank 

Der Spiegel reveals the sad truth: 

The European Central Bank has become a dumping ground for bad loans: While Europe is preoccupied with a possible restructuring of Greece's debt, huge risks lurk elsewhere -- in the balance sheet of the European Central Bank. The guardian of the single currency has taken on billions of euros worth of risky securities as collateral for loans to shore up the banks of struggling nations.Since the beginning of the financial crisis, banks in countries like Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Greece have unloaded risks amounting to several hundred billion euros with central banks. The central banks have distributed large sums to their countries' financial institutions to prevent them from collapsing. They have accepted securities as collateral, many of which are -- to put it mildly -- not particularly valuable.These risks are now on the ECB's books because the central banks of the euro countries are not autonomous but, rather, part of the ECB system. When banks in Ireland go bankrupt and their securities aren't worth enough, the euro countries must collectively account for the loss. Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, provides 27 percent of the ECB's capital, which means that it would have to pay for more than a quarter of all losses. For 2010 and the two ensuing years, the Bundesbank has already decided to establish reserves for a total of €4.9 billion ($7 billion) to cover possible risks. The failure of a country like Greece, which would almost inevitably lead to the bankruptcy of a few Greek banks, would increase the bill dramatically, because the ECB is believed to have purchased Greek government bonds for €47 billion. Besides, by the end of April, the ECB had spent about €90 billion on refinancing Greek banks.Former Bundesbank President Axel Weber criticized the ECB's program of purchasing government bonds issued by ailing euro member states. In the event of a bankruptcy or even a deferred payment, the ECB would be directly affected.But even greater risks lurk in the accounts of commercial banks. The ECB accepted so-called asset-backed securities (ABS) as collateral. At the beginning of the year, these securities amounted to €480 billion. It was precisely such asset-backed securities that once triggered the real estate crisis in the United States. Now they are weighing on the mood and the balance sheet at the ECB.No expert can say how the ECB can jettison these securities without dealing a fatal blow to the European banking system. The ECB is in a no-win situation now that it has become an enormous bad bank or, in other words, a dumping ground for bad loans, including ones from Ireland. 

Read the entire article here

PS
Without the euro and the European Central Bank, we would not have this kind of a mess, which may lead to a serious weakening of the whole European economy. The common currency was built by a number of European politicians, who intentionally chose to turn a blind a to basic economic realities. They are not anymore around to pay for their huge mistake. As always, the taxpayers will end up paying.

An Inconvenient Truth

Rise of sea levels is 'the greatest lie ever told'

The uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story

by Christopher Booker

If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.

Although the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. We all know the graphic showing central London in similar plight. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, as Prince Charles likes to tell us and the Archbishop of Canterbury was again parroting last week, they are due to vanish.

But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.

Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm". And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by
Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.

The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on "going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world".

When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown.

Similarly in Tuvalu, where local leaders have been calling for the inhabitants to be evacuated for 20 years, the sea has if anything dropped in recent decades. The only evidence the scaremongers can cite is based on the fact that extracting groundwater for pineapple growing has allowed seawater to seep in to replace it. Meanwhile, Venice has been sinking rather than the Adriatic rising, says Dr Mörner.

Too Much Food Causes Problems

Bumper Harvest In India 

A new study published in the Science magazine says that global warming has contributed to a drop in the yield of crops in Russia, China and India:

Crop yields hit by global warming

Global warming is hurting world food production, says new study. A drop in the yield of some crops around the world was not caused by changes in rainfall but was because higher temperatures can cause dehydration, prevent pollination and lead to slowed photosynthesis, the new study says. Wheat and corn yields were down in Russia, China and India, due in part to rising temperatures, according to the study published in the journal Science. The new research adds to other studies which have tried to distinguish between climate change and natural variations in weather and other factors.

Read entire story here

And here is the latest news just in from India:

India faces problem of plentiful food

There is a bumper wheat and rice crop. In Andhra Pradesh, India's rice bowl, production is up 30%. Millers are offering only Rs 8 for a kilo of paddy though the MSP is Rs 10.30. Angry farmers last week threw paddy into the Krishna river. The state government has borrowed Rs 550 crore from RBI for procurement. The FCI can do little. After buying 50 million tonne wheat and rice this season, added to 44 million tonnes left from last year, it is exhausted.
The oilseed crop is 20% larger. Import of palm oil from Malaysia and Indonesia is down for the sixth straight month till April, a three-year low. Sugar output is up 28%. Even exports can't prod the bulls into action.
Production of pulses rose by a fifth to cross 17 million tonne. The Planning Commission pegs this year's demand at 19 million tonne. As the gap narrows, premiums are evaporating.
Cotton prices hit a 140-year high in March on the back of the world market and then crashed by Rs 20,000 per candy within two months. Textile mills can't absorb the record harvest. In crop after crop, output is higher. In West Bengal, farmers have put 60% of their potato in cold storage, hoping prices will improve. And a 15% jump in onion harvest has pushed wholesale prices in Maharashtra back to Rs 5 per kilo. In January, we paid Rs 70.

PS

Surely Dr. Wolfram Schlenker and the other members of New York´s Columbia University´s research team must be pleased to learn, that global warming evidently has stopped, at least in India - or alternatively it has contributed to a record harvest

Unasked questions

Mladic, war crimes and the West 

The response to the arrest of the former Bosnian Serb commander shows how some pine for the good v evil parable of their Balkan crusade.

by Mick Hume 

There has been much pious talk about how the arrest of the former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic on war-crimes charges will bring closure to many victims of the war in the former Yugoslavia. But ‘closure’ is the last thing the Western authorities want in relation to the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s. They want to keep the wounds open, keep the horror alive, in order to remind us all of a time when the West could pose as a force for Good against the Evil of the Serbs in the civil wars that wracked the former Yugoslav republics.

Indeed, the more zealous campaigners for Western intervention must look at Mladic today with a sense of nostalgia, for that faraway golden age when they were widely seen as being on the side of the angels – before the disaster of Iraq, the drawn-out debacle of Afghanistan, and the derisory war on Libya. An age when the Western authorities could set themselves up to sit in judgement on the world in the war-crimes tribunal at The Hague – a far cry from today, when the US government cannot even assassinate the world’s most infamous terrorist without being accused of committing a war crime itself.

Whether or not Mladic gets a procedurally ‘fair trial’ before the International Tribunal at The Hague is irrelevant. Judgement has already been passed, as the world’s media declares him ‘the Butcher of Bosnia’, guilty of the most heinous crimes against humanity seen in Europe since the Second World War, most notably the Srebrenica massacre. spiked has no interest here in siding with Mladic, or with any participants in the Balkan conflicts. But, as throughout those wars, there is a need to question the political myths and the moral crusading that have been used to justify Western intervention and cloud the issues at stake.

In that spirit, there are a few questions that are unlikely to be properly addressed during the drawn-out legal circus of Mladic’s forthcoming trial.

Why did Srebrenica happen? For most commentators this is a simple issue: the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces under Mladic’s command was a demonstration of evil incarnate, the ‘worst act of genocide in Europe since Auschwitz’. What more need be said or asked about such a heinous crime against humanity?

An elite that cannot envisage the future except in terms of decline and disaster.

Beware Malthusians in reasonable clothing

The green critics of population control are just as misanthropic as their prophylactic-promoting opponents.

by Tim Black 

The ambient jazzy, folky music - possibly nicked from a nearby Starbucks - had been turned to mute. The lights were dimmed. And the effect was near instant. The postgraduate-dominated audience under-populating the Bloomsbury Theatre in London was finally settling down in glum anticipation of ‘My vision for the future’, the first public event of ‘Population Footprints’ – a ‘UCL and Leverhulme Trust conference on human population growth and global carrying capacity’.

Quite what the audience was expecting, I’m not sure. Doom-laden prophesying? Possibly. Encomia to family planning? Probably. Frighteningly self-righteous blather about there being too many people and too few resources? Almost definitely. This last, after all, is the great unmentionable that the green and the not-so-good can’t stop mentioning, a neo-Malthusian idea that has seized the withered imaginations of every repressed misanthrope from Forum for the Future founder Jonathon Porritt to the patron saint of wildlife programmes, Sir David Attenborough. As Attenborough himself said in a recent piece for the New Statesman: ‘The fundamental truth that Malthus proclaimed remains the truth: there cannot be more people on this earth than can be fed.’

So, given this current cultural climate, in which it’s almost conventional to view the propagation of the species as an act of self-destruction, what the audience was probably not expecting was the opening gambit of Fred Pearce, environment consultant for the New Scientist, author of Peoplequake, and, most important of all, someone who doesn’t think population growth is much of a problem. ‘We are defusing the population bomb’, he declared. There was no booing. But there was no applause either.

Not that Pearce would mind, of course. He seems to be enjoying making a name for himself as the debunker of overpopulation hype. A few weeks ago, for instance, he took on no less a source of procreation anxiety than the United Nations Population Division (UNPD). The problem for Pearce was that in 2009, the UNPD had estimated that the global population, currently just under seven billion, would reach nine billion by 2050 before levelling off. At the beginning of May, however, it revised its predictions. Now global population was not only going to reach nine billion by 2050, but it was going to keep on rising until it reaches over 10 billion by 2100.

Pearce was not convinced that there was much evidence to support such a revision. In fact, as hepoints out in Nature magazine, current world population and current global fertility rates are actually lower than the UN predicted they would be at this stage two years ago. So why, contrary to actual population trends, does the UN now envisage a further rise in future fertility rates? None of this makes sense, argues Pearce: women are now having half as many babies as their grandmothers and world fertility has fallen from 4.9 children per woman in the early 1960s to its current level of around 2.45. The only way the UN can come up with such groundless population projections is by assuming that many developed countries currently with fertility rates well below the replacement level of 2.1 will suddenly start, contrary to all expectations, to produce more and more children. As Pearce observes, this assumption has simply been imposed on to the modelling system. Hence the revision ‘looks more like a political construct than a scientific analysis’.

All of which sounds like a rational voice amid the cacophony of overpopulation doom-mongering. This is surely a good thing, right? What could be better than an award-winning science journalist and author calling out the prophets of overcrowding?

The problem is that while Pearce is correct regarding the population-hyping models used by the UNPD, he has not come to destroy the Malthusian core of green-tinged thinking; he has come, whether he knows it or not, to save Malthusianism, not damn it. Save it, that is, from its overexcited champions who see the threat of ‘catastrophic’ population growth as a stick with which to beat people the world over into prophylactic-using submission.

A reminder that there was a time when climate scientists actually did science

1979 Prediction: Warming Trend Until The Year 2000, Then Cooling

Medieval predictions

Italian Scientists On Trial For Manslaughter After Failing To Predict Earthquake

by W. Briggs

Seven Italian geologists have been hauled before an Italian judge—whether in chains or no, we are not informed—and charged with the heinous crime of manslaughter. Specifically, these men are being held culpable for the deaths of 309 people following an earthquake.

On 6 April 1990, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake shook L’Aquila, Italy. A not unusual event. According to the United States Geological Survey, earthquakes in Italy are as common as Italian soccer players crying foul. At this writing, the last was one month ago, a magnitude 3.3 in Central Italy.

Not only Italian geologists, but geologists everywhere are notoriously bad at predicting just where and when the next earthquake will be. True, these scientists are equipped with elaborate computer models which show how one chunk of earth slides under another and how this slip-sliding causes the earth above to shake and rattle.

Problem is, these models, even though they can be and are used to make predictions, are useless for that task. Geologists at least have the benefit of tracking their faulty predictions, information which can be used to improve their models.

In any case, the L’Aquila quake was not predicted. Which is to say, it was not predicted by the Italian version of the USGS. A man named Giampaolo Giuliani did predict a quake, but he said it would be centered at Sulmona, Italy and that it would take place days before the L’Aquila quake.

The Great Leap Backwards

The Green Fourth Reich

by Dave Blount

Germany produced many of the key figures in the development of socialism, including Otto von Bismarck, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Adolf Hitler, so it should come as no surprise that some Germans are falling head over jackboots for its most alarming incarnation yet, ecototalitarianism:

When it comes to environmental and climate policy, Germany's Scientific Advisory Council on Global Environmental Change (WBGU) is an influential advisory committee for the German Chancellor Angela Merkel. …

In April 2011, the WBGU presented a report entitled "World in Transition - Social Contract for a Great Transformation". The main theses of the WBGU are as follows: The current economic model ("fossil industrial metabolism") is normatively untenable.

"The transformation to a climate friendly economy… is morally as necessary as the abolition of slavery and the outlawing of child labor." The reorganization of the world economy has to happen quickly; nuclear energy and coal have to be given up at the same time and very soon. …

All nations would have to relinquish their national interests and find a new form of collective responsibility for the sake of the climate: "The world citizenry agree to innovation policy that is tied to the normative postulate of sustainability and in return surrender spontaneous and [persistent] desires. Guarantor of this virtual agreement is a formative state […]."

This strong state provides, therefore, for the "social problematization" of unsustainable lifestyles. It overcomes "stakeholders" and "veto players" who "impede the transition to a sustainable society." In Germany, climate protection should therefore become a fundamental goal of the state for which the legal actions of the legislative, executive and judicial branches will be aligned.

Note that all of this rests on the liberal belief that CO2 has a deleterious effect on the climate — an unproven theory that has been crumbling in the face of a cooling climate.

Why should people around the world voluntarily give up their demands for material welfare and security? Consequently, the WBGU admits frankly, that the decarbonization of the society can only be achieved by the limitation of democracy - both nationally and internationally.

Decarbonization means deindustrialization — i.e., poverty directly imposed by the government.

Internationally, the WBGU calls for a "World Security Council" for sustainability. The members of the proposed "future chamber" for Germany would explicitly not be chosen democratically and would limit the powers of Parliament.

This time German oligarchical collectivists won't have to count on the Wehrmacht to impose their dystopian schemes. The United Nations will be much more effective. Democrats can be expected to collude with them eagerly.

For an idea of what happens when authoritarians try to bring about economic transformations on this scale through coercion, refer to Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, which killed 45 million Chinese in four years and subjected the survivors to a generation of abject misery — and remember that unlike environazis, Mao wasn't destroying living standards deliberately.

Bankers, lobbying CEOs, and saber-rattling policy wonks

Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy

"Even large business interests can come and go, but the political apparatus itself, the most inherently corrupting of all institutions given its unavoidably coercive and monopolistic nature, will continue to inflict misery and loot the disadvantaged on behalf of the powerful."

by Anthony Gregory

The idea that corporate interests, banking elites, and politicians conspire to set US policy is at once obvious and beyond the pale. Everyone knows that the military-industrial complex is fat and corrupt, that presidents bestow money and privilege on their donors and favored businesses, that a revolving door connects Wall Street and the White House, and that economic motivations lurk behind America's wars. But to make too fine a point of this is typically dismissed as unserious conspiracy theorizing, unworthy of mainstream consideration.

We have seen this paradox at work in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse. The left-liberals blame Wall Street and Big Finance for betraying the masses out of predatory greed and for being rewarded for their irresponsibility by Washington's bailouts. At the same time, the Left appears reluctant to oppose these bailouts outright, seeing the spending as a necessary evil to return the global economy to stability, however inequitably. What's more, left-liberals fail to call out President Obama and Democratic leaders for their undeniable hand in all this. They blame Goldman Sachs but see their president, who got more campaign money from the firm than from almost any other source, as a helpless victim of circumstance, rather than an energetic conspirator in corporate malfeasance on top of being the enthusiastic heir and expansionist of George W. Bush's aggressive foreign policy.

The tea-party Right is also hesitant to examine the corporate state too closely. These conservatives detect an elitism in Obama's governance but are loath to earnestly challenge the economic status quo, for it would lead to uncomfortable questions about the warfare state, defense contractors, US wars, the whole history of the Republican Party, and all the typical right-wing assumptions about the inherent fairness of America's supposedly "free-enterprise" system. By refusing to admit that economic fundamentals were unsound through the entirety of the Bush years — by failing to acknowledge the imperial reality of US wars and their debilitating effect on the average household budget — the Right is forgoing its chance to delve beyond the surface in its criticism of Obama's reign.

One word: “Srebrenica.”

The Making of a Monster

by Janine di Giovanni

 

For years, during the grim and seemingly endless Balkan wars of the 1990s, Ratko Mladic appeared a mysterious, almost mythic figure, a stout and red-faced general in combat fatigues, who was rarely seen by anyone but his most trusted men. To many Serbs, he was a hero, a defender of national pride and values. To the families of his victims, he was a coldblooded killer who led his soldiers not into battle, but into a state of carnage during the disintegration of Yugoslavia. While all sides—Muslim, Croats, and Serbs—were guilty of heinous crimes, it was Mladic’s men who crossed into infamy, slaughtering nearly 8,000 Muslim boys and men during the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre.

During the years I spent reporting these Balkan wars, my notebooks grew thick with accounts of the terror Serbian snipers inflicted on the residents of Sarajevo, the city they held in a malevolent siege for years. I heard lengthy, heartbreaking accounts of the destruction of Srebrenica, Gorazde, Foca, and Mostar.

But I met Mladic only once.

It was the winter of 1993, a particularly desperate time for the Bosnian civilians, whose villages were left behind as smoldering pyres by marauding Serbian soldiers. Somehow, by a muddy road, through pelting, icy rain, I had made it to Lukavica, the Serb military stronghold where Mladic and his men had made a stop. Dressed in full military regalia, the general was seated in his jeep, appearing smaller than I had expected. I asked him for an interview. Looking at me with a glacial stare, he seemed to regard me not as human but as some strange species. “Tell the reporter to move away from my car before I run her down,” he barked to one of his lackeys. I never saw him again.

It would take almost two decades after that before he was finally caught. His wife, Bosiljka, had claimed he was dead; there was speculation that he had had plastic surgery to avoid capture. But last week, after too many close calls, too much leaked information, too many escapes, Serb intelligence agents found the 69-year-old general at last. His face, though aged, was the same—that of Europe’s most notorious fugitive from justice. Serbia’s president during the war, Slobodan Milosevic, who preceded Mladic to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague after he was arrested in 2001, was known as the Butcher of the Balkans (his trial ended without a verdict when he died in prison in 2006). But it was the bloodthirsty Mladic, soon headed to The Hague himself to stand trial, who oversaw the charnel house.

The capture of Mladic ends what Boris Tadic, the current Serb president, described (with a monumental euphemism) as a “difficult period of our history.” His arrest, he said, will remove “a stain from the face of the members of our nation wherever they live.” Perhaps it will also, in some small way, ease the anguish of the families of the victims who, in the words of the prosecutor for the ICTY, suffered “unimaginable horrors.”