Wikipedia - Nazism (Nationalsozialismus, National Socialism; alternatively spelled Naziism)

SOCIALISM BY ANY OTHER NAME...  

by John J. Ray  
Now that more than 65 years have passed since the military defeat of Nazi Germany, one might have thought that the name of its leader would be all but forgotten. This is far from the case, however. Even in the popular press, references to Hitler are incessant and the trickle of TV documentaries on the Germany of his era would seem to be unceasing. Hitler even featured on the cover of a 1995 Time magazine. 
 This finds its counterpart in the academic literature too. Scholarly works on Hitler's deeds continue to emerge many years after his death (e.g. Feuchtwanger, 1995) and in a survey of the history of Western civilization, Lipson (1993) named Hitlerism and the nuclear bomb as the two great evils of the 20th century. Stalin's tyranny lasted longer, Pol Pot killed a higher proportion of his country's population and Hitler was not the first Fascist but the name of Hitler nonetheless hangs over the entire 20th century as something inescapably and inexplicably malign. It seems doubtful that even the whole of the 21st century will erase from the minds of thinking people the still largely unfulfilled need to understand how and why Hitler became so influential and wrought so much evil. 
 The fact that so many young Germans (particular from the formerly Communist East) today still salute his name and perpetuate much of his politics is also an amazement and a deep concern to many and what can only be called the resurgence of Nazism among many young Germans at the close of the 20th century and onwards would seem to generate a continuing and pressing need to understand the Hitler phenomenon. 
 So what was it that made Hitler so influential? What was it that made him (as pre-war histories such as Roberts, 1938, attest) the most popular man in the Germany of his day? Why does he still have many admirers now in the Germany on which he inflicted such disasters? What was (is?) his appeal? And why, of all things, are the young products of an East German Communist upbringing still so susceptible to his message? 

The context of Nazism

"True, it is a fixed idea with the French that the Rhine is their property, but to this arrogant demand the only reply worthy of the German nation is Arndt's: "Give back Alsace and Lorraine". For I am of the opinion, perhaps in contrast to many whose standpoint I share in other respects, that the reconquest of the German-speaking left bank of the Rhine is a matter of national honour, and that the Germanisation of a disloyal Holland and of Belgium is a political necessity for us. Shall we let the German nationality be completely suppressed in these countries, while the Slavs are rising ever more powerfully in the East?"

Have a look at the quote immediately above and say who wrote it. It is a typical Hitler rant, is it not? Give it to 100 people who know Hitler's speeches and 100 would identify it as something said by Adolf. The fierce German nationalism and territorial ambition is unmistakeable. And if there is any doubt, have a look at another quote from the same author:

This is our calling, that we shall become the templars of this Grail, gird the sword round our loins for its sake and stake our lives joyfully in the last, holy war which will be followed by the thousand-year reign of freedom.

That settles it, doesn't it? Who does not know of Hitler's glorification of military sacrifice and his aim to establish a "thousand-year Reich"?
 But neither quote is in fact from Hitler. Both quotes were written by Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx's co-author (See here and here). So let that be an introduction to the idea that Hitler not only called himself a socialist but that he WAS in fact a socialist by the standards of his day. Ideas that are now condemned as Rightist were in Hitler's day perfectly normal ideas among Leftists. And if Friedrich Engels was not a Leftist, I do not know who would be.
 But the most spectacular aspect of Nazism was surely its antisemitism. And that had a grounding in Marx himself. The following passage is from Marx but it could just as well have been from Hitler:

"Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew -- not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew. Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Jewry, would be the self-emancipation of our time.... We recognize in Jewry, therefore, a general present-time-oriented anti-social element, an element which through historical development -- to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed -- has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily dissolve itself. In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Jewry".

Note that Marx wanted to "emancipate" (free) mankind from Jewry ("Judentum" in Marx's original German), just as Hitler did and that the title of Marx's essay in German was "Zur Judenfrage", which -- while not necessarily derogatory in itself -- is nonetheless exactly the same expression ("Jewish question") that Hitler used in his famous phrase "Endloesung der Judenfrage" ("Final solution of the Jewish question"). And when Marx speaks of the end of Jewry by saying that Jewish identity must necessarily "dissolve" itself, the word he uses in German is "aufloesen", which is a close relative of Hitler's word "Endloesung" ("final solution"). So all the most condemned features of Nazism can be traced back to Marx and Engels, right down to the language used. The thinking of Hitler, Marx and Engels differed mainly in emphasis rather than in content. All three were second-rate German intellectuals of their times. Anybody who doubts that practically all Hitler's ideas were also to be found in Marx & Engels should spend a little time reading the quotations from Marx & Engels archived here.
Another point:

"Everything must be different!" or "Alles muss anders sein!" was a slogan of the Nazi Party. It is also the heart's desire of every Leftist since Karl Marx. Nazism was a deeply revolutionary creed, a fact that is always denied by the Left; but it's true. Hitler and his criminal gang hated the rich, the capitalists, the Jews, the Christian Churches, and "the System".

Brown Bolsheviks

It is very easy to miss complexities in the the politics of the past and thus draw wrong conclusions about them. To understand the politics of the past we need to set aside for a time our own way of looking at things and try to see how the people involved at the time saw it all. Doing so is an almost essential step if we wish to understand the similarities and differences between Nazism and Marxism/Leninism. The following excerpt from James P. O'Donnell's THE BUNKER (1978, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, pp. 261-262) is instructive. O'Donnell is quoting Artur Axmann, the Nazi youth leader, recalling a conversation with Goebbels in the Hitler bunker on Tuesday, May 1, 1945, the same day Goebbels and his wife would kill themselves after she killed their children.

"Goebbels stood up to greet me. He soon launched into lively memories of our old street-fighting days in Berlin-Wedding, from nineteen twenty-eight to thirty-three. He recalled how we had clobbered the Berlin Communists and the Socialists into submission, to the tune of the "Horst Wessel" marching song, on their old home ground.
He said one of the great accomplishments of the Hitler regime had been to win the German workers over almost totally to the national cause. We had made patriots of the workers, he said, as the Kaiser had dismally failed to do. This, he kept repeating, had been one of the real triumphs of the movement. We Nazis were a non-Marxist yet revolutionary party, anticapitalist, antibourgeois, antireactionary....

Starch-collared men like Chancellor Heinrich Bruening had called us the "Brown Bolsheviks," and their bourgeois instincts were not wrong.

It seems inconceivable to modern minds that just a few differences between two similar ideologies -- Marxism and Nazism -- could have been sufficient cause for great enmity between those two ideologies. But the differences concerned were important to the people involved at the time. Marxism was class-based and Nazism was nationally based but otherwise they were very similar. That's what people said and thought at the time and that explains what they did and how they did it.

Iconography

And now for something that is very rarely mentioned indeed: Have a guess about where the iconography below comes from:
As you may be able to guess from the Cyrillic writing accompanying it, it was a Soviet Swastika -- used by the Red Army in its early days. It was worn as a shoulder patch by some Soviet troops. The Swastika too was a socialist symbol long before Hitler became influential. Prewar socialists (including some American socialists) used it on the grounds that it has two arms representing two entwined letters "S" (for "Socialist"). So even Hitler's symbolism was Leftist.

{There is an interesting comment on the graphic above by a Russian speaker. He points out that the shoulder patch above was specifically designed for Kalmyk troops. My understanding that the Swastika was more widely used in the Red Army than among the Kalmyk troops alone but I have yet to find a graphic illustrating that. As Stalin would undoubtedly have done his best to erase all references to Soviet swastikas after the Nazi invasion, such a graphic may not be easily found.}

Hitler did however give the symbol his own twist when he said: "Als nationale Sozialisten sehen wir in unserer Flagge unser Programm. Im Rot sehen wir den sozialen Gedanken der Bewegung, im Weiss den nationalistischen, im Hakenkreuz die Mission des Kampfes fuer den Sieg des arischen Menschen und zugleich mit ihm auch den Sieg des Gedankens der schaffenden Arbeit" ("As National socialists we see our programme in our flag. In red we see the social thoughts of the movement, in white the nationalist thoughts, in the hooked-cross the mission of fighting for the victory of Aryan man and at the same time the victory of the concept of creative work").

In German, not only the word "Socialism" (Sozialismus) but also the word "Victory" (Sieg) begins with an "S". So he said that the two letters "S" in the hooked-cross (swastika) also stood for the victory of Aryan man and the victory of the idea that the "worker" was a creative force: Nationalism plus socialism again, in other words. 

{Technical note: Translating Hitler into English often runs up against the fact that he uses lots of German words that have no exact English equivalent (I comment, for instance, on Volk and Reich here). I have translated "schaffen" above as "create" (as does Ralph Manheim in his widely-used translation ofMein Kampf -- p. 452) but it has the larger meaning of providing and accomplishing things in general. So Hitler was clearly using the word to stress the central importance of the working man. In English, "creative" is often used to refer to artistic activities. That is NOT the meaning of "schaffen"}

And by Hitler's time, antisemitism in particular, as well as racism in general, already had a long history on the Left. August Bebel was the founder of Germany's Social Democratic party (mainstream Leftists) and his best-known saying is that antisemitism is der Sozialismus des bloeden Mannes (usually translated as "the socialism of fools") -- which implicitly recognized the antisemitism then prevalent on the Left. And Lenin himself alluded to the same phenomenon in saying that "it is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people" but "the capitalists of all countries." For more on the socialist roots of antisemitism see Tyler Cowen's detailed survey here

The clash of the alarmists

Nuclear vs climate change

Germany’s hysterical decision to shut down all its nuclear power plants exposes the dangers of competitive fear-mongering.

by Frank Furedi 

Germany’s announcement that it will shut all its nuclear reactors by 2022 shows that the values of precaution and risk-aversion, which underpin the culture of fear, continue to dominate public life. However, it also reveals that the politicisation of fear has become a conflictual zone, with various different groups making competing claims about which thing the public should be most scared of in the twenty-first century.

Last autumn, when the German government said it would extend the life of some of its old nuclear reactors, it fell back on fear of climate change to justify maintaining this ‘clean’ form of energy. This argument resonated with many people whose concern over planetary destruction at the hands of climate change outweighs their opposition to nuclear energy. And yet, competitive scaremongers rarely win a permanent or unalterable victory. And when faced with the question, ‘Which calamity scares you the most?’, the prospect of being fried by nuclear radiation in the here and now has a greater capacity to overwhelm the mind than the more unspecific harms that will apparently be inflicted on future generations as a result of global warming.

After the accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant in tsunami-hit Japan, fear appeals based on the alleged threat from nuclear reactors successfully – at least for now – trumped the climate alarmists’ predictions of planetary apocalypse. The German shift shows that even in the midst of a titanic clash of competing calamities, scaremongering can be surprisingly pragmatic.

Historic experience tells us that the success or otherwise of competitive scaremongering has little to with the actual intensity of the alleged threat. Rather its success usually depends on the ability of the scaremonger to resonate with contemporary cultural values. So a couple of weeks ago, when the American evangelist preacher Harold Camping predicted the imminent arrival of Judgment Day, not many people took him seriously. In previous times, however, millennial apprehensions about End Times could unleash major panics. When religious fanatics prophesied that the world would come to an end, followed by the Last Judgment, it really had a major impact on everyday life. The flames of terror impacted on the imagination of hundreds of thousands of people who waited for the coming Apocalypse (1).

A few facts about the Greek crisis

Why the Greatest Depression of All Time Has Begun

by Wayne Allyn Root

I predicted doom if Obama was elected. Sadly the results are far worse than imagined. The economy is in shambles. America is staring at economic disaster -- Armageddon. Even me, the eternal optimist is scared at what the future holds. We are the Titanic, headed straight for the iceberg.

America has always been a land of boom and bust. It’s just part of business cycle. But Obama and his socialist cabal have channeled Hoover and FDR, who turned an ordinary bust into The Great Depression with a toxic strategy of more government, more spending, more debt, more rules and regulations strangling business, higher minimum wages, more power to unions, more entitlements, higher taxes, more printing of money by Fed, and trade tariffs. This is the Obama blueprint squared.

The question this time is, is Obama doing it because he understands nothing about business? Or does he understand exactly what he's doing? Is Obama's goal to overwhelm the system, incite crisis, sow doubt about capitalism, and force the citizens to beg for government to save them, thereby opening the door to Socialism? Is Obama's plan to redistribute the wealth, and at the same time to bankrupt the people with wealth and power, thereby crippling his political opposition?

Does it really matter?

Here's where the story gets downright frightening. This time the results are going to be dramatically worse than 1929. This time we are facing The Greatest Depression ever.

Why? Because The Great Depression had NONE of problems and obligations we are now facing:

In 1929 America was not $100 trillion in debt and unfunded liabilities.

In 1929, most of our states were not bankrupt, insolvent and dependent on the federal government to survive.

In 1929, we had far fewer government employees living off taxpayers. Today 1 out of 5 federal employees earn over $100,000. California lifeguards and Las Vegas firemen earn $200,000. 77,000 federal employees earn more than the Governors of their states. Government employees retire at age 50 with $100,000 pensions for life. The postal service - without competition- loses $8 billion annually. Protected by their unions and the politicians they elect, government employees are bankrupting America. Even FDR said he could not imagine allowing public employees to unionize.

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?