Climate-Neutral Already By 2030?… Berliners To Vote On Climate-Neutrality Referendum Today!
By P Gosselin | No Tricks Zone | March 26, 2023
Berliners are going to the polls today in a referendum on whether or not to make the city “climate-neutral” already by 2030 instead of 2045.
That’s quite a lofty goal for a chaotic, financially broken city that couldn’t even build an airport.
Polls showing slight lead for “klimaneutral ja”. And no campaign in Berlin has seen funding to this scale. Acc0rding to media reports, most funding has come from foreign countries, mainly from far left groups in the USA.
According to a report by online Bild, one wealthy New York couple (Albert Wenger und Susan Danziger) even donated half a million euros to fund a campaign to get the people to vote “ja”.
Should Berliners vote to make the German capital CO2 neutral by 2030, it would mean enacting an amendment that would force the city of Berlin to achieve climate neutrality by 2030 instead of 2045. This would affect almost every aspect of Berlin life, from transportation, to heating and widescale major building renovation.
Foreign funding
The amendment is being pushed by the Green Party and radical groups like Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion, who are largely financed by foreign funders like the Climate Emergency Fund, Abigail Disney and Hollywood film director Adam McKay.
If the amendment gets adopted, immense power will be transferred a small group of unelected people, a so-called Climate Protection Council of “experts”, appointed by the Berlin Senate. Climate targets for 2045 would turn into climate legal obligations for 2030.
Huge restrictions, astronomical costs, loss of private property
Critics warn this would mean many more restrictions on freedom, Berliners might even have to say goodbye to their cars completely. Under the amendment, the Berlin airport would be a part of the climate budget. thus posing the risk of reducing the number of flights.”
Moreover property owners would be forced to make largescale, costly renovations and have to install solar panels. No one knows where the money is magically supposed to come from.
Unachievable, pie-in-the-sky
Critics are speaking up, however, calling the radical climate project “factually impossible” and “out of the question”, noting that even the original 2045 target timetable was almost impossible to meet,” Bild reports.
Recent opinion polls show the results of today’s referendum are expected to be very close, slightly tipping in favor of the referendum.
We’ll report the results this evening as they become available.
This means there’s a good chance that the City of Berlin might well end up being an even greater basket-case than California. Somebody needs to lead the way to show the rest of the world what a folly rapid climate neutrality can be.
The Dark Origins of the Davos Great Reset
By F. William Engdahl | Global Research | October 25, 2022
Important to understand is that there is not one single new or original idea in Klaus Schwab’s so-called Great Reset agenda for the world. Nor is his Fourth Industrial Revolution agenda his or his claim to having invented the notion of Stakeholder Capitalism a product of Schwab.
Klaus Schwab is little more than a slick PR agent for a global technocratic agenda, a corporatist unity of corporate power with government, including the UN, an agenda whose origins go back to the beginning of the 1970s, and even earlier. The Davos Great reset is merely an updated blueprint for a global dystopian dictatorship under UN control that has been decades in development. The key actors were David Rockefeller and his protégé, Maurice Strong.
In the beginning of the 1970s, there was arguably no one person more influential in world politics than the late David Rockefeller, then largely known as chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank.
Creating the new paradigm
At the end of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, the international circles directly tied to David Rockefeller launched a dazzling array of elite organizations and think tanks. These included The Club of Rome; the 1001: A Nature Trust, tied to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF); the Stockholm United Nations Earth Day conference; the MIT-authored study, Limits to Growth; and David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission.
Club of Rome
In 1968 David Rockefeller founded a neo-Malthusian think tank, The Club of Rome, along with Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King. Aurelio Peccei, was a senior manager of the Fiat car company, owned by the powerful Italian Agnelli family. Fiat’s Gianni Agnelli was an intimate friend of David Rockefeller and a member of the International Advisory Committee of Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank. Agnelli and David Rockefeller had been close friends since 1957. Agnelli became a founding member of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission in 1973. Alexander King, head of the OECD Science Program was also a consultant to NATO. [i] That was the beginning of what would become the neo-Malthusian “people pollute” movement.
In 1971 the Club of Rome published a deeply-flawed report, Limits to Growth, which predicted an end to civilization as we knew it because of rapid population growth, combined with fixed resources such as oil. The report concluded that without substantial changes in resource consumption, “the most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”
It was based on bogus computer simulations by a group of MIT computer scientists. It stated the bold prediction, “If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.” That was 1971. In 1973 Klaus Schwab in his third annual Davos business leader meeting invited Peccei to Davos to present Limits to Growth to assembled corporate CEOs. [ii]
In 1974, the Club of Rome declared boldly, “The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.” Then: “the world is facing an unprecedented set of interlocking global problems, such as, over-population, food shortages, non-renewable resource [oil-w.e.] depletion, environmental degradation and poor governance.” [iii] They argued that,
‘horizontal’ restructuring of the world system is needed… drastic changes in the norm stratum – that is, in the value system and the goals of man – are necessary in order to solve energy, food, and other crises, i.e., social changes and changes in individual attitudes are needed if the transition to organic growth is to take place. [iv]
In their 1974 report, Mankind at the Turning Point, The Club of Rome further argued:
Increasing interdependence between nations and regions must then translate as a decrease in independence. Nations cannot be interdependent without each of them giving up some of, or at least acknowledging limits to, its own independence. Now is the time to draw up a master plan for organic sustainable growth and world development based on global allocation of all finite resources and a new global economic system. [v]
That was the early formulation of the UN Agenda 21, Agenda2030 and the 2020 Davos Great Reset.
David Rockefeller and Maurice Strong
By far the most influential organizer of Rockefeller’s ‘zero growth’ agenda in the early 1970s was David Rockefeller’s longtime friend, a billionaire oilman named Maurice Strong.
Canadian Maurice Strong was one of the key early propagators of the scientifically flawed theory that man-made CO2 emissions from transportation vehicles, coal plants and agriculture caused a dramatic and accelerating global temperature rise which threatens “the planet”, so-called Global Warming.
As chairman of the 1972 Earth Day UN Stockholm Conference, Strong promoted an agenda of population reduction and lowering of living standards around the world to “save the environment.”
Strong stated his radical ecologist agenda:
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” [vi]
This is what is now taking place under cover of a hyped global pandemic.
Strong was a curious choice to head a major UN initiative to mobilize action on the environment, as his career and his considerable fortune had been built on exploitation of oil, like an unusual number of the new advocates of ‘ecological purity,’ such as David Rockefeller or Robert O. Anderson of Aspen Institute or Shell’s John Loudon.
Strong had met David Rockefeller in 1947 as a young Canadian eighteen and from that point, his career became tied to the network of the Rockefeller family.[vii] Through his new friendship with David Rockefeller, Strong, at age 18, was given a key UN position under UN Treasurer, Noah Monod. The UN’s funds were conveniently enough handled by Rockefeller’s Chase Bank. This was typical of the model of “public-private partnership” to be deployed by Strong—private gain from public government. [viii]
In the 1960s Strong had become president of the huge Montreal energy conglomerate and oil company known as Power Corporation, then owned by the influential Paul Desmarais. Power Corporation was reportedly also used as a political slush fund to finance campaigns of select Canadian politicians such as Pierre Trudeau, father of Davos protégé Justin Trudeau, according to Canadian investigative researcher, Elaine Dewar. [ix]
Earth Summit I and Rio Earth Summit
By 1971 Strong was named Undersecretary of the United Nations in New York and Secretary General of the upcoming Earth Day conference, United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (Earth Summit I) in Stockholm, Sweden. He was also named that year as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation – which financed his launch of the Stockholm Earth Day project.[x] In Stockholm the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) was created with Strong as its head.
By 1989 Strong was named by the UN Secretary General to head the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development or UNCED (“Rio Earth Summit II”). He oversaw the drafting of the UN “Sustainable Environment” goals there, the Agenda 21 for Sustainable Development that forms the basis of Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset, as well as creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the UN. Strong, who was also a board member of Davos WEF, had arranged for Schwab to serve as a key adviser to the Rio Earth Summit.
As Secretary General of the UN Rio Conference, Strong also commissioned a report from the Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution, authored by Alexander King which admitted that the CO2 global warming claim was merely an invented ruse to force change:
“The common enemy of humanity is man.In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome.The real enemy then, is humanity itself.” [xi]
President Clinton’s delegate to Rio, Tim Wirth, admitted the same, stating,
“We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” [xii]
At Rio Strong first introduced the manipulative idea of “sustainable society” defined in relation this arbitrary goal of eliminating CO2 and other so-called Greenhouse Gases. Agenda 21 became Agenda 2030 in Sept 2015 in Rome, with the Pope’s blessing, with 17 “sustainable” goals. It declared among other items,
“Land, because of its unique nature and the crucial role it plays in human settlement, cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership also is a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice… Social justice, urban renewal, and development, the provision of decent dwellings and healthy conditions for the people can only ‘be achieved if land is used in the interests of society as a whole.”
In short private land ownership must become socialized for “society as a whole,” an idea well-known in Soviet Union days, and a key part of the Davos Great Reset.
At Rio in 1992 where he was chairman and General Secretary, Strong declared:
“It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class— involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work place air-conditioning, and suburban housing — are not sustainable.” [xiii] (emphasis added)
By that time Strong was at the very center of the transformation of the UN into the vehicle for imposing a new global technocratic “paradigm” by stealth, using dire warnings of planet extinction and global warming, merging government agencies with corporate power in an unelected control of pretty much everything, under the cover of “sustainability.” In 1997 Strong oversaw creation of the action plan following the Earth Summit, The Global Diversity Assessment, a blueprint for the roll out of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, an inventory of every resource on the planet, how it would be controlled , and how this revolution would be achieved.[xiv]
At this time Strong was co-chairman of Klaus Schwab’s Davos World Economic Forum. In 2015 on Strong’s death, Davos founder Klaus Schwab wrote,
“He was my mentor since the creation of the Forum: a great friend; an indispensable advisor; and, for many years, a member of our Foundation Board.” [xv]
Before he was left UN over an Iraq Food-for-Oil corruption scandal, Strong was member of the Club of Rome, Trustee of the Aspen Institute, Trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation and Rothschild Foundation. Strong was also a director of the Temple of Understanding of the Lucifer Trust (aka Lucis Trust) housed at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City,
“where pagan rituals include escorting sheep and cattle to the alter for blessing. Here, Vice President Al Gore delivered a sermon, as worshippers marched to the altar with bowls of compost and worms…” [xvi]
This is the dark origin of Schwab’s Great Reset agenda where we should eat worms and have no private property in order to “save the planet.” The agenda is dark, dystopian and meant to eliminate billions of us “ordinary humans.”
*
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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Notes
[i] Biographies of 1001 Nature Trust members, Gianni Agnelli, accessed in http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_1001club02.htm
[ii] Klaus Schwab, The World Economic Forum: A Partner in Shaping History–The First 40 Years: 1971 – 2010, 2009, World Economic Forum, p. 15, https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_First40Years_Book_2010.pdf
[iii] Quoted from Club of Rome Report, Mankind at the Turning Point, 1974, cited in http://www.greenagenda.com/turningpoint.html
[iv] Ibid.
[v] The Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point, 1974, quoted in Brent Jessop, Mankind at the Turning Point – Part 2 – Creating A One World Consciousness, accessed in http://www.wiseupjournal.com/?p=154
[vi] Maurice Strong, Opening Speech to UN Rio Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro, 1992, accessed in http://www.infowars.com/maurice-strong-in-1972-isnt-it-our-responsibility-to-collapse-industrial-societies/
[vii] Elaine Dewar, Cloak of Green: The Links between key environmental groups, government and big business, Toronto, James Lorimer & Co., 1995, pp. 259-265.
[viii] Brian Akira, LUCIFER’S UNITED NATIONS, http://www.fourwinds10.com/siterun_data/religion_cults/news.php?q=1249755048
[ix] Elaine Dewar, op cit. p. 269-271.
[x] Ibid., p. 277.
[xi] What is Agenda 21/2030 Who’s behind it ? Introduction, https://sandiadams.net/what-is-agenda-21-introduction-history/
[xii] Larry Bell, Agenda 21: The U.N.’s Earth Summit Has Its Head In The Clouds, Forbes, June 14, 2011, https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2011/06/14/the-u-n-s-earth-summit-has-its-head-in-the-clouds/?sh=5af856a687ca
[xiii] John Izzard, Maurice Strong , Climate Crook, 2 December, 2015, https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2015/12/discovering-maurice-strong/
[xiv] What is Agenda 21/2030 Who’s behind it ? Introduction, https://sandiadams.net/what-is-agenda-21-introduction-history/
[xv] Maurice Strong An Appreciation by Klaus Schwab, 2015, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/11/maurice-strong-an-appreciation
[xvi] Dr. Eric T. Karlstrom, The UN, Maurice Strong, Crestone/Baca, CO, and the “New World Religion”, September 2017, https://naturalclimatechange.org/new-world-religion/part-i/
Sri Lankan president caught fleeing country
Samizdat | July 12, 2022
Airport staff refused to stamp the passport of Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa on Monday, preventing the soon-to-be ex-president from leaving the country for Dubai, AFP reported. Driven from office by mass protests, Rajapaksa is reportedly looking for other means of escape.
Immigration officers refused to enter the VIP suite at Bandaranaike International Airport to stamp Rajapaksa’s passport for exit, AFP’s sources said. Declining to queue with the general public for fear of reprisals, Rajapaksa and his wife spent Monday night at a nearby military base after missing four flights to the United Arab Emirates.
A similar attempt at escape was made by Rajapaksa’s younger brother, Basil, who served as his older sibling’s finance minister until April. According to AFP’s sources, Basil Rajapaksa was prevented from using the airport’s fast-track boarding lane, and left the airport after passengers began protesting.
President Rajapaksa announced on Saturday that he would resign this Wednesday, and is immune from arrest until that point. He is believed to be fleeing to avoid the possibility of being detained once his resignation becomes effective. Officials said that he is considering taking a Sri Lankan Navy vessel to either India or the Maldives.
Rajapaksa’s resignation came after months of protests. Under his leadership, Sri Lanka has been driven to bankruptcy, defaulting on its foreign loan debts in May and introducing fuel rationing earlier this month. The economic turmoil has been blamed on a loss of tourism revenue due to the coronavirus pandemic, and a climate-motivated ban on chemical fertilizers that halved the country’s agricultural output in a matter of months.
Rajapaksa’s government responded to rising costs by printing more money, further accelerating inflation. Concurrently, tax cuts deprived Sri Lanka of vital revenue needed to import food, fuel, and medicine.
As protesters forced their way into Rajapaksa’s presidential palace on Saturday, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe told opposition party leaders that he too would step down after just two months in office. According to Sri Lankan law, Wickremesinghe will automatically take over as president should Rajapaksa resign as planned on Wednesday, until parliament elects a replacement and an interim all-party government takes over until new elections are called.
Energy Affordability: The Issue Everyone Is Ignoring
By Irina Slav | Oilprice.com | April 4, 2022
The U.S.-EU deal for the import of an additional 15 billion cubic meters of liquefied natural gas this year made headlines earlier this month, with both sides praising their own political prowess and quick action. What nobody talked about was how much this LNG would cost.
Meanwhile, another piece of news that grabbed headlines was the House hearing of half a dozen U.S. and international oil executives on allegations of price-gouging and not helping regular Americans “to relieve pain at the pump, instead lining their pockets with one hand while sitting on the other,” according to two legislators.
These two events are indicative of something that no politician in power would want to admit openly but is nevertheless happening: the cost of living in Europe and the United States is rising. And the root cause of this is not the war in Ukraine. It’s high energy costs.
It was the energy minister of the UAE who shone a light on the problem earlier this week. Speaking to CNBC at the World Government Summit in Dubai, Suhail al Mazrouei said that politicians are focusing too much on geopolitics and ignoring the issue of energy affordability, which is affecting both developed and developing economies.
If they continue to ignore this issue, he said, politicians risk seeing large parts of the world plunged into energy poverty, which would, in turn, lead to economic slowdown for much of the world and global stagnation.
Noting that OPEC+ was doing its best to provide a reliable supply of energy to global markets, Al Mazrouei said, “For that to happen, we need resources – financial resources – we need to invest and we need to decouple politics from energy availability and energy affordability.”
By “politics”, the Emirati official likely means energy transition agendas in Europe and the United States. These depend on lower investment in oil and gas production, and the European gas crunch was the first clear sign what the consequences of this approach could be, because, in all fairness, the European cost of living crisis began a lot earlier than the war in the Ukraine.
In November last year, for instance, six in ten Britons said they had seen an increase in their cost of living. This month, this has risen to eight out of ten as energy costs continue higher. From next month the number could rise further after the energy market regulator introduces the new energy price cap by close to $1,000 per household for some 22 million households.
In Germany, inflation is seen accelerating to 6.1 percent this month, from 5.1 percent in February, according to the Ifo Institute. Soaring energy costs are at the root of this inflation trend, with the Ukraine war now adding inflationary pressure on some food staples as both Ukraine and Russia are big producers. According to Ifo, Germans could lose more than $6 billion in purchasing power by the end of this month alone.
In France, the rising cost of living has boosted the election chances of far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, who is betting strongly on messaging that addresses the purchasing power concerns of French citizens who, like their fellow EU-members in Germany and Britons in newly “exited” UK, have been struggling with rising costs of living.
In the United States, the Fed is preparing for an aggressive push into rate hikes to rein in inflation, which has led several economists, among them Mohamed El-Erian, to warn that such an aggressive step could lead to a cost-of-living crisis. Meanwhile, the White House has announced yet another release of oil from the strategic petroleum reserve in an attempt to cool prices at the pump.
Right now, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are happily blaming everything on Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. However, sooner or later, the dust will settle, and people will start asking why even though the war is over, energy is still more expensive than it was before. That would be one tough question to answer unless those who may have to answer it heed the warning made by the UAE’s Al Mazrouei.
US built ‘equivalent of 10 Keystones’ since 2010 – report
RT | November 7, 2015
Critical reaction to President Barack Obama’s blocking of the Keystone XL pipeline from the oil industry amounted to a shrug, perhaps because the US has constructed enough pipeline in the last five years to equal 10 Keystone projects, a new report stated.
Keystone XL’s “deliberation process has gone on so long that the market has evolved and adapted in the meantime,” Mark Smith, director of commodity research at ClipperData, told Market Watch. “The need for it is less urgent now than when it was originally first commissioned.”
During the seven years TransCanada was applying to the US State Department to extend its Keystone pipeline across the US border, other pipelines expanded rapidly within the US, according to a report by the Financial Post. From 2009 to 2013, more than 8,000 miles of piping was built. In 2014, mileage increased over 9 percent to reach 66,649 miles, Association of Oil Pipe Lines (AOPL) data shows.
“While people have been debating Keystone in the US we have actually built the equivalent of 10 Keystones. And no one’s complained or said anything,” AOPL spokesman John Stoody told the Post.
TransCanada had sought to build 875 miles for its Keystone XL. On Monday, it asked the State Department to discontinue its application review process, but that didn’t happen. Secretary of State John Kerry and Vice President Joe Biden stood alongside the president on Friday for his eight-minute prepared remarks agreeing with State Department’s rejection of the application.
“Shipping dirtier crude oil into our country would not increase America’s energy security,” Obama said.
In Canada, the decision was seen as political. Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall viewed this as the Obama administration putting politics “ahead of its relationship with its most important trading partner, Canada.”
President and chief executive of the American Petroleum Institute, Jack Gerard, said, “It’s ironic that the administration would strike a deal to allow Iranian crude onto the global market while refusing to give our closest ally, Canada, access to US refineries” in a media conference call.
The number one source of crude oil for the US is Canada. In August, the amount of Canadian crude oil shipped to the US rose to a record 3.4 million barrels a day. Since 2010, crude oil imports from Canada have risen by a million barrels per day.
The US-based oil industry is growing too. A Houston-based pipeline company, Enterprise Product Partners, projected last week that by 2018 it will have spent a total of $7.8 billion on such projects. Shipping company Magellan Midstream Partners, based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, announced this week that it had increased its budget to purchase capital and equipment to move oil from $200 million to $1.6 billion.
Meanwhile, Enbridge, another Canadian energy transportation corporation, has already doubled the quantity of oil it delivers to the US without an application process, as its routes don’t cross a national border.
A Hell Week For Global Warming Alarmists: Crumbling Consensus, Inconvenient Data And Policy Rejection
By P Gosselin | No Tricks Zone | November 5, 2015
It hasn’t been a good week for the global warming alarmists. Three events have rocked the movement and caused alarmists to go into a state of alarm.
Putin calls global warming “a fraud”
The first event Russian President Vladimir Putin, who used to play along with the issue, has come out and called global warming science “a fraud,” one that is “designed to restrain industrial development.” According to the New York Times, Putin’s skepticism is based on Russian scientists having done “very, very extensive work trying to understand all sides of the climate debate” and that it is “clear that the climate is a complicated system” and that “the evidence presented for the need to ‘fight’ global warming was rather unfounded.”
NASA satellite measurements refute preposterous PIK models
The second event is described at the Swiss online daily Tagesanzeiger which presents a vivid example as to why people like Putin don’t believe the wild climate alarmism: There’s a huge chasm between the scary model projections coming from “leading” climate institutes and the real observations themselves.
The Swiss daily begins by writing that the Germany-based Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) projects that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could “rapidly disintegrate” and cause sea levels to rise 3 meters, all based on “their own model simulations,” which incorporate “feedback effects.” The Tagesanzeiger writes, however, that the PIK was unable to provide “a reason for the loss of stability in West Antarctica.” The Swiss online daily in effect presents a PIK theory that is fraught with assumptions, and is ultra-lean on recorded data.
To illustrate that there is a total lack of consensus with respect to Antarctica, the Tagesanzeiger brings up the latest NASA study by Zwally et al, citing Breitbart : “Antarctica is not shrinking – it is growing,” and writes that the NASA study “completely contradicts” the PIK model projections. The Tagesanzeiger continues:
A satellite survey by NASA tells a different story. It contradicts a number of other studies, which are mostly based on rough estimations and assumptions.”
Poland refuses to ratify Kyoto treaty in Paris
The third set of bad news to come out over the past week is that Poland’s new president, Andrzej Duda, refuses to extend the UN Kyoto Treaty until 2020 and that this “blocks the ratification process” just a month before the UN climate summit in Paris (COP21). Duda is requesting “a more detailed analysis of the climate matter,” writing in a statement:
Binding Poland to an international agreement that will affect Poland’s economy and the therein connected social costs should require a detailed analysis of the legal and economic impacts. These impacts have not been sufficiently explained.”
Greenpeace Poland called Duda’s announcement a “bad sign” which threatens to stall Europe’s movement on emissions limitation.
Asia moves ahead with coal power plant expansion
Also the news tell us that many, especially poorer, developing countries aren’t taking PIK climate science seriously at all. The London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation here writes that “in Asia alone this year power companies are building more than 500 coal-fired plants, with at least a thousand more on planning boards.”
Moscow ready for more sanctions, regardless of Ukraine crisis – Foreign Ministry
RT | September 9, 2015
Russia has no illusion about sanctions being lifted and expects them to be stiffened in future, regardless of developments in Eastern Ukraine. That’s according to a leading Russian diplomat, who says Moscow can live under continuous western pressure.
“We believe that in certain directions, notwithstanding of the developments in Donbass, we should expect toughening of the sanctions pressure,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said at the Russia Arms Expo 2015 in Nizhny Tagil on Wednesday.
According to Ryabkov, the new set of sanctions introduced by Washington last week against Russian companies, including arms exporter Rosoboronexport, “mirrors the policy of complicating operations of the Russian military-industrial complex and all of the mechanism of government.”
Sanctions come in handy as a “true instrument of aggressive foreign policy” aimed at Russia, the diplomat said.
“Russia’s independent and self-sufficient foreign policy, its decisiveness to protect its sovereignty, and the consolidation of the people with the country’s leadership serve as a thorn in the side of our opponents,” Ryabkov said.
“We presume that the sanctions are there for the long haul,” Ryabkov said. “There are no reasons or illusions that sanctions are going to be lifted in the short term, at least not in the Foreign Ministry.”
“When it comes to international financial services, our colleagues from the US and the EU are set to expand their effort to seal off all capabilities. We understand that and we have to learn how to operate in the given situation,” Ryabkov said, insisting that sanctions will fail to gain the desired effect.
“We’re sorry the US has not learned that truth so far.”
Russian Economic Development Minister Aleksey Ulyukaev said Moscow is going to seek a “symmetrical answer” to American sanctions imposed on September 2.
Washington imposed sanctions on a number of Russian, Chinese, Syrian, Turkish, Sudanese and Iranian companies, believed to be involved in activities which, according to Washington, go against its Nonproliferation Act in regard to Iran and Syria.
“These are not sectoral sanctions, they are personalized, therefore we would consider some kind of a symmetrical answer,” Ulyukaev said.
In March 2014, the EU, the US and some other countries imposed individual sanctions against 21 Russian and Ukrainian officials, subjecting them to asset freezes and travel bans. Within a year, the list was extended to 150 people, including Russian Deputy Prime Ministers Dmitry Kozak and Dmitry Rogozin, as well as presidential aide Vladislav Surkov and 37 entities that, according to the EU, are “responsible for actions which undermine or threaten the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine.”
The restrictions have been prolonged until January 31, 2016.
To reciprocate, in August 2014 Moscow introduced a ban on importing meat, dairy, fruit, and vegetable products from countries that have imposed sanctions on Russia over the Ukraine conflict. The countries included EU member states and Norway, US, Canada and Australia.
European Union sanctions against Russia include restrictions on lending to major Russian state-owned banks, as well as defense and oil companies. In addition, Brussels imposed restrictions on the supply of weapons and military equipment to Russia as well as military technology, dual-use technologies, high-tech equipment and technologies for oil production. No sanctions were imposed against Russia’s gas industry.
Eni discovers ‘largest-ever’ gas field in Mediterranean Sea off Egypt
RT | August 30, 2015
Italian energy giant Eni has announced on its website that it has found a “supergiant” gas field at their Zohr Prospect in the deep waters of Egypt in the Mediterranean, claiming it “could become one of the world’s largest natural-gas finds.”
It added that this is “an important day” for the company, as well as for Italy and Egypt, as it could fuel Italy’s economic development and “will be able to ensure satisfying Egypt’s natural gas demand for decades.”
“It’s a very important day for Eni and its people. This historic discovery will be able to transform the energy scenario of Egypt,” Claudio Descalzi, chief executive of Eni, said in a statement.
The field is located about 80 miles (129 kilometers) off the Egyptian coast, 1,450 meters below the surface.
According to Eni’s press-release, the discovered gas field, which covers an area of around 100 square kilometers, could contain about “30 trillion cubic feet of lean gas” (849 billion cubic meters of gas or 5.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent).
Even more oil could be found at the field during the course of further exploration, potentially amounting up to 40 trillion cubic feet (1.1 trillion cubic meters), Claudio Descalzi told Financial Times.
“I think we can discover more,” he said.
In June, Eni struck a $ 2 billion deal with the Egyptian oil ministry allowing it to carry out exploration in Sinai, the Gulf of Suez, the Mediterranean and areas in the Nile Delta.
Claudio Descalzi stressed that “Egypt still has great potential” in the energy field.”
“Important synergies with the existing [Egyptian] infrastructures can be exploited, allowing us a fast production startup,” he added.
The Leviathan gas field near the Israeli coast had been the largest discovered in the Mediterranean Sea before Eni found the “supergiant” field in Zahr. This new find is one of Eni’s biggest, although it is still smaller than a gas field being developed by the company near the coast of Mozambique.
The final investment decision, which is still to be made, could be taken later this year, while drilling could be initiated in 2016, with peak output reaching about 65-80 million cubic meters per day, the Financial Times reports, citing Claudio Descalzi.
“We will fast track this project and production will begin as soon as possible,” he said, as quoted by the Wall Street Journal.
The announcement of the discovery came a day after a Cairo meeting between the Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi and Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi, according to the president’s office.
Eni is Egypt’s main oil and gas producer. It has been operating in the country since 1954 through its IEOC subsidiary, with equity production reaching 200,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day.
Mada Masr:
… Sunday’s announcement also casts doubt on the future of export deals that called for connecting Egypt to pipelines from Cyprus and Israel to supply Egypt’s local demand and to make use of Egypt’s dormant export facilities to reach the global market. …
Obama May Finally Succeed!
By Willis Eschenbach | Watts Up With That? | August 3, 2015
For this post I’ve taken as my departure point a couple of very interesting graphs from over at Not A Lot Of People Know That. I’ll repeat them here:
Interesting, no? But I’m a numbers guy, I wanted to actually analyze the results. Using the data from those posts and adding the US information, I graphed the relationship … Figure 1 shows the result:
Figure 1. Electricity costs as a function of per capita installed renewable capacity. Wind and solar only, excludes hydropower.
That is a most interesting result. Per capita installed renewable capacity by itself explains 84% of the variation in electricity costs. Not a big surprise given the crazy-high costs of renewables, but it is very useful for another calculation.
Today, President Obama said that he wanted 28% of America’s electricity to come from renewable energy by 2030. He has not detailed his plan, so I will assume that like California and other states with renewable targets, and like the EU graph above, hydropower is not included in counting the renewables, and thus the energy will have to come from wind and solar. (Why? In California, they admitted that hydropower was excluded because it would make it too easy to meet the renewable goals … seriously, that was their explanation.)
Currently, we get about 4% of our electricity from wind and solar. He wants to jack it to 28%, meaning we need seven times the installed capacity. Currently we have about 231 kW/capita of installed wind and solar (see Figure 1). So Obama’s plan will require that we have a little less than seven times that, 1537 kW/capita. And assuming that we can extend the relationship we see in Figure 1, this means that the average price of electricity in the US will perforce go up to no less than 43 cents per kilowatt-hour. (This includes the hidden 1.4 cents/kW cost due to the five cents per kilowatt-hour subsidy paid to the solar/wind producers).
Since the current average US price of electricity is about 12 cents per kilowatt-hour … that means the true price of electricity is likely to almost quadruple in the next 15 years.
And given that President Obama famously predicted that under his energy plan electricity prices would necessarily “skyrocket” … it looks like he finally might actually succeed at something.
Since this is being done illegally or at least highly improperly by means of Obama’s Imperial Presidential Fiat, there seems to be little we can do about it except to let your friends and neighbors know that thanks to Obama and the Democratic Party, their electric bill is indeed about to skyrocket …
To President Obama: Let’s just assume for a moment we have a climate crisis
By Paul Driessen | Watts Up With That? | June 2, 2014
As we start hurricane season today, we note the unprecedented 3142 day drought of major hurricane landfalls, shattering a record that goes back to the year 1900.
Despite clear evidence to the contrary, president Obama is now warning us that “storms like Hurricane Sandy will become more frequent as climate change intensifies.” It’s merely the latest in the administration’s seemingly endless stream of headline-grabbing scare stories, designed to justify the job-killing, economy-strangling, family-bashing rules for vehicles, power plants, cement kilns, refineries, factories, farms, shopping malls and countless other facilities that are or soon will be regulated by Environmental Protection Agency fiat. We need to keep one vitally important fact in mind.
Every one of these “looming calamities” is based on assumptions, assertions and computer models that represent the real world about as well as the special-effects T-rexes and raptors do in Jurassic Park. The data on hurricanes says otherwise:
Climate modelers and disaster proponents remind me of the four guys who were marooned on an island, after their plane went down. The engineer began drawing plans for a boat; the lumberjack cut trees to build it; the pilot plotted a course to the nearest known civilization. But the economist just sat there. The exasperated workers asked him why he wasn’t helping.
“I don’t see the problem,” he replied. “Why can’t we just assume we have a boat, get on it and leave?”
In the case of climate change, those making the assumptions demand that we act immediately to avert planetary crises based solely on their computer model predictions. It’s like demanding that governments enact laws to safeguard us from velociraptors, after Jurassic Park scientists found that dinosaur DNA could be extracted from fossilized mosquitoes … and brought the carnivores back to special-effects life.
Climate models help improve our conceptual understandings of climate systems and the forces that drive climate change. However, they are terrible at predicting Earth’s temperature and other components of its climate. They should never be used to set or justify policies, laws and regulations – such as what the Environmental Protection Agency is about to impose on CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants.
Even our best climate scientists still have only a limited grasp of Earth’s highly complex and chaotic climate systems, and the many interrelated solar, cosmic, oceanic, atmospheric, terrestrial and other forces that control climate and weather. Even the best models are only as good as that understanding.
Worse, the models and the science behind them have been horribly politicized. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was ostensibly organized in 1988 to examine possible human influences on Earth’s climate. In reality, Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin and environmental activist groups wanted to use global warming to drive an anti-hydrocarbon, limited-growth agenda. That meant they somehow had to find a human influence on the climate – even if the best they could come up with was “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” [emphasis added]
“Discernible” (ie, detectable) soon metamorphosed into “dominant,” which quickly morphed into the absurd notion that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have now replaced natural forces and become the only factors influencing climate change. They are certainly the only factors that climate activists and alarmists want to talk about, while they attempt to silence debate, criticism and skepticism. They use the models to generate scary “scenarios” that are presented as actual predictions of future calamities.
They predict, project or forecast that heat waves will intensify, droughts and floods will be stronger and more frequent, hurricanes will be more frequent and violent, sea levels will rise four feet by 2100 [versus eight inches since 1880], forest fires will worsen, and countless animal species will disappear. Unlikely.
Natural forces obviously caused the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age and the Pleistocene Ice Ages. (A slab of limestone that I dug up has numerous striations – scratches – left by the last mile-thick glacier that covered what is now my home town in Wisconsin.) After long denying it, the IPCC finally acknowledged that the LIA did occur, and that it was a worldwide agricultural and human disaster.
However, the models and computer algorithms the IPCC and EPA rely on still do not include the proper magnitude of solar cycles and other powerful natural forces that influence climate changes. They assume “positive feedbacks” from GHGs that trap heat, but understate the reflective and thus cooling effects of clouds. They display a global warming bias throughout – bolstered by temperature data contaminated by “urban heat island” effects, due to measuring stations being located too close to human heat sources. They assume Earth’s climate is now controlled almost entirely by rising human CO2/GHG emissions.
It’s no wonder the models, modelers and alarmists totally failed to predict the nearly-18-year absence of global warming – or that the modeled predictions diverge further from actual temperature measurements with every passing year. It’s no wonder modelers cannot tell us which aspects of global warming, global cooling, climate change and “climate disruption” are due to humans, and which are the result of natural forces. It’s hardly surprising that they cannot replicate (“hindcast”) the global temperature record from 1950 to 1995, without “fudging” their data and computer codes– or that they are wrong almost every time.
In 2000, Britain’s Met Office said cold winters would be a thing of the past, and “children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” The 2010 and 2012 winters were the coldest and snowiest in centuries. In 2013, Met Office scholars said the coming winter would be extremely dry; the forecast left towns, families and government agencies totally unprepared for the immense rains and floods that followed.
In 2007, Australia’s climate commissioner predicted Brisbane and other cities would never again have sufficient rain to fill their reservoirs. The forecast ignored previous drought and flood cycles, and was demolished by record rains in 2011, 2013 and 2014. Forecasts of Arctic and Antarctic meltdowns have ignored the long history of warmer and colder cycles, and ice buildups and breakups.
The Bonneville Power Administration said manmade warming will cause Columbia River Basin snowpack to melt faster, future precipitation to fall as rain, reservoirs to be overwhelmed – and yet water levels will be well below normal year round. President Obama insists that global temperatures will soar, wildfires will be more frequent and devastating, floods and droughts will be more frequent and disastrous, rising seas will inundate coastal cities as Arctic and Antarctic ice shelves melt and disintegrate, and 97% of scientists agree. Every claim is based on models or bald-faced assertions unsupported by evidence.
And still the IPCC says it has “very high confidence” (the highest level it assigns) to the supposed agreement between computer model forecasts and actual observations. The greater the divergence from reality, the higher its “confidence” climbs. Meanwhile, climate researchers and modelers from Nebraska, Penn State, Great Britain and other “learned institutions” continue to focus on alleged human influences on Earth’s climate. They know they will likely lose their government, foundation and other funding – and will certainly be harassed and vilified by EPA, environmentalists, politicians, and their ideological and pedagogical peers – if they examine natural forces too closely.
Thus they input erroneous data, simplistic assumptions, personal biases, and political and financial calculations, letting models spew out specious scenarios and phony forecasts: garbage in, garbage out.
The modelers owe it to humanity to get it right – so that we can predict, prepare for, mitigate and adapt to whatever future climate conditions nature (or humans) might throw at us. They cannot possibly do that without first understanding, inputting and modeling natural factors along with human influences.
Above all, these supposed modeling experts and climate scientists need to terminate their biases and their evangelism of political agendas that seek to slash fossil fuel use, “transform” our energy and economic systems, redistribute wealth [upward], reduce our standards of living, and “permit” African and other impoverished nations to enter the modern era only in a “sustainable manner,” as defined by callous elitists.
The climate catastrophe camp’s focus on CO2 is based on the fact that it is a byproduct of detested hydrocarbon use. But this trace gas (a mere 0.04% of Earth’s atmosphere) makes life on our planet possible. More carbon dioxide means crops, forests and grasslands grow faster and better. CO2’s role in climate change is speculative – and contradicted by real-world measurements, observations and history.
Computer models, scenarios and predictions of planetary Armageddon are little more than faulty, corrupt, even fraudulent pseudo-science. They have consistently forecast what has not happened on Planet Earth, and failed to forecast what did happen.
They must no longer be allowed to justify EPA’s job-killing, economy-strangling, family-bashing rules for vehicles, power plants, cement kilns, refineries, factories, farms, shopping malls and countless other facilities that are or soon will be regulated by agency fiat.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death.
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How the CIA hid their MKULTRA mind-control program
By Jon Rappoport | No More Fake News | September 17, 2021
Back in the early 1990s, I spoke with John Marks, author of Search for the Manchurian Candidate. This was the book (1979) that helped expose the existence and range of the infamous CIA MKULTRA program.
Marks related the following facts to me. He had originally filed many Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests for documents connected to the CIA’s mind-control program. He got nothing back.
Finally, as if to play a joke on him, someone at the CIA sent Marks 10 boxes of financial and accounting records. The attitude was, “Here, see what you can do with this.”
I’ve seen some of those records. They’re very boring reading.
But Marks went through them, and lo and behold, he found he could piece together MKULTRA projects, based on the funding data.
Eventually, he assembled enough information to begin naming names. He conducted interviews. The shape of MKULTRA swam into view. And so he wrote his book, Search for the Manchurian Candidate.
He told me that three important books had been written about MKULTRA, and they all stemmed from those 10 boxes of CIA financial records. There was his own book; Operation Mind Control by Walter Bowart; and The Mind Manipulators by Alan Scheflin and Edward Opton. … continue
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