FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
UN: EU violates Aarhus Convention
The Compliance Committee of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), which enforces the Aarhus Convention to which the EU is a party, has issued draft findings and recommendations which criticize the European Commission for failing to abide by the terms of the Convention with regards to the determination of its renewable energy policy (1). Today the plaintiff, Mr. Pat Swords, a chemical engineer critical of the way the EU imposes its “half-baked policy” to Members States, communicated the Committee’s decision to the European Platform against Windfarms (EPAW). Draft recommendations are unlikely to be substantially modified when, after an ultimate input from the parties, they are converted into final ones.
The Compliance Committee found that the EU did not comply with the provisions of the Convention in connection with its programme “20% renewable energy by 2020”, and its implementation throughout the 27 Member States by National Renewable Energy Action Plans (NREAP). In particular, the Committee opines that the EU did not ensure that the public had been provided with the necessary information within a transparent and fair framework, allowing sufficient time for citizens to become informed and to participate effectively in the decision process.
Says Pat Swords: “this is an important decision, because the EU’s renewable energy programme as it currently stands is now proceeding without ‘proper authority’. The public’s right to be informed and to participate in its development and implementation has been by-passed. A process will now be started to ensure that the Committee’s recommendations are addressed; if ultimately they are not, then UNECE has the option of requiring the EU to withdraw from the UN Convention on Human and Environmental Rights.”
The Aarhus Convention requires that public participation occur when all options are still open, not when policies are already set in stone. Furthermore, the authorities have to ensure and document that in the resulting decision, due account is taken of the outcome of public participation. “In the EU,” remarks the engineer, “what we’ve had is a travesty of public participation in a policy having hugely negative impacts on the environment and the economy.”
Mark Duchamp, Executive Director of EPAW, points that Mr. Swords initiated his recourse one and a half years ago, as it was already obvious that the European Commission was imposing an enormously costly and ineffective policy to EU Members States without properly investigating the pros and cons. “It is high time that Brussels be held accountable for the hundreds of billions that have been squandered without a reality check on policy effectiveness” says Mark. “To spend so much money, a positive has to be proven. – It hasn’t.”
Duchamp, who also happens to be an environmentalist and is chairman of the non-conformist NGO World Council for Nature, remarks that never has Europe’s environment been the object of so much destruction in so little time. “Even natural reserves, set up at great cost to the taxpayer, have been allowed to be invaded by industrial wind turbines,” he laments. “I presented objections to a number of eagle-killer wind projects, but the impression I get is that they were not even read. The Aarhus Convention is only being given lip service in Europe. The UNECE findings confirm this.”
Finally, there is another ‘twist to this tale’, says Pat Swords: “as the Convention is part of EU law, there is now a legal ruling that this law has not been complied with. There are long established legal procedures where if a Member State does not comply with EU law, the citizen can seek ‘damages made good’ (2). A can of worms has been opened,” warns Pat.
He continues: “Electricity costs are soaring to implement these dysfunctional policies, which have by-passed proper and legally-required technical, economic and environmental assessments. Not only is the landscape being scarred as thousands of wind farms are being installed, but people in the vicinity are suffering health impacts from low frequency noise, while birdlife and other wildlife is also adversely impacted. It is long overdue that a STOP was put to this type of illegal and dysfunctional policy development and project planning.”
Contacts:
Pat Swords, BE CEng FIChemE CEnv MIEMA
Chemical engineer
+353 1 443 4831 (Ireland) Skype: pat_swords
Mark Duchamp +34 693 643 736 (Spain) Skype: mark.duchamp
Executive Director, EPAW
Chairman, World Council for Nature
References:
(1) – Draft findings of 29 April 2012, communicated on May 4th by the Compliance Committee of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE): http://www.unece.org/env/pp/compliance/Compliancecommittee/54TableEU.html Last items at the bottom of the page (as at this date), namely “draft findings” and “letters to the parties”
Short video explaining the Aarhus Convention: http://www.unece.org/env/pp/vid-presentation.html
(2) – http://ec.europa.eu/eu_law/infringements/infringements_dommages_en.htm
GeoLurking says:
“Simple really, move the entire entity of the United Nations to a luxury liner so that they can legislate and meet in a style befitting their lofty positions. …Then all it would take are a few Harpoon ASCMs to get rid of the problem.”
_______________________________
Dodgy Geezer says:
Do it cheaper.
Get the Italians to provide the Captain….
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You guys just made my day. ROTFLMAO.
One undemocratic institution used against another undemocratic institution. It had to happen. But what fun!
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As referenced by some previous posters, the funniest part about this complaint is that the EU itself will probably cease to exist sometime in the next few months.
Promise the moon in 2020! why not? There isn’t going to be any EU to make good on any of it, so who cares? Just keep the dog and pony show going for a few more days.
So an entity that has always wished to impose unelected rule of “law” (their law) on member nations, is now trying to do that to an entity that has always wished to impose unelected rule of “law” (their law) on its people.
Pass the popcorn and I’ll have a beer with that.
Be verwy verwy afwaid of benevolent institutions and benevolent individuals. Or put another way, if you seek my good, nothing good will come of it. Many politicians seeking high office on both sides of the isle in the US think their destiny is to seek our good. Either through Republican party planks or Democrat party planks. Refuse both. This is the reason for Ron Paul. He does not seek our good. He seeks our freedom as individuals to seek our own good.
Maybe the people of EU nations need to be throwing some tea into the harbor in protest of both these “benevolent” entities. Let us hope that the people of EU nations have not grown weak on the teat of governmental “benevolence” and can instead lay hold of the freedom to make their own individual lives, be they happy or sad, free from the fetters and handcuffs of religious dogma, out-of-control business restriction, and tyranny masqueraded as Gaia worship.
The underlying question to all this is: why are politicians from all major political parties
so enthralled by wind energy? These people are not stupid, so there must be an over-riding
reason. And it’s not because of the polls: public opinion is molded by government propaganda,
which in turn is spread by “mainstream” media (read: politically-correct media, feeding from
the same trough as mainstream political parties). Thus, if they wanted, governments could
turn public opinion against silly energy policies.
The answer lies in the financing of these political parties: Big Wind makes large contributions to their election campaign funds (there are ways to circumvent the caps put on individual contributions), and in return elected officials vote the enormous subsidies required by Big Wind. A book has been published on the first Obama campaign, revealing how the same people who were canvassing for money to finance the campaign, are now holding top positions in the Obama administration’s department in charge of delivering permits, loans and loan guarantees etc. to renewable projects: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/11/13/how-obama-s-alternative-energy-programs-became-green-graft.html
I call this legal corruption (it is legal to make campaign contributions, and legal to vote subsidies, grant loan guarantees, etc.). Democracy has evolved into a system where politicians are bought in broad daylight. Witness what is happening in the US Senate these days: the extension of the Production Tax Credit for windfarms, which expires at year end, has been rejected three times. Yet it is up for vote a fourth time, and already some Republican Senators have indicated they will vote in favor. What does that tell you?
Can Romney forego large campaign contributions from Big Wind? – Only at the risk of being
outspent by Obama in TV ads, and thus losing the elections. European politicians are in the same fix. So it appears we are locked solid into this corrupt system. Any ideas as to how to defeat it? My own recommendation would be that we all make this analysis public, educating people on what’s happened to our democracies. It’s a first and necessary step.
Any feedback: send to save.the.eagles@gmail.com
@ur momisugly saveextremadura says:
May 20, 2012 at 9:40 am
My own recommendation would be that we all make this analysis public, educating people on what’s happened to our democracies. It’s a first and necessary step.
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Given the state of what passes for education these days, I have zero confidence in trying to ‘educate’ the majority of people who seem to have zero interest in becoming educated, and a government education system that appears to be perfectly satisfied with turning out uneducated ‘consumers’. Educated people tend to be difficult to control.
Fraud ! it is all Fraud and Hokum
Put the bleeders on trial for FRAUD
Let a Jury of their peers judge them.
They must justify their actions to the satisfaction
of a duly sworn Jury and if not then that Jury must
find them Guilty of Fraud.
Please can Lord Monckton be the Judge ….. pretty please.
Indeed, it sounds like an impossible task. However, reversing a “consensus” starts with making rebel facts and dissenting opinions public. To date, what we have done is try and prove that CAGW is a fallacy, and that wind and solar energies are both ineffective and very expensive. Well done!
I am merely suggesting now that we should also expose the wicked part played by the financing of political parties, as shown in my posting of May 20, 2012 at 9:40 am
Mark Duchamp
Lots of indications here that the sun has an effect on global climate.
As far as I know I have previously presented here and elsewhere the only currently available plausible description as to how it could work.
wws says:
May 20, 2012 at 8:06 am
“Promise the moon in 2020! why not? There isn’t going to be any EU to make good on any of it, so who cares? ”
About 10 or 12 years ago the EU commission declared their goal was to turn the EU into the most competitive region on the planet within 10 years. This might just come to pass, but not in the way they meant it. (The promise has not been heard for a long time now BTW)
So, have I got this right? As a citizen of the EUSSR I can sue them because they haven’t provided sufficient time for me to be rolled over with this CAGW scam. And if I win they pay damages which are ultimately paid by the taxpayers of the EUSSR – including me.
So. win or lose, I lose and the lawyers get paid either way.
Mmmmm, its worse than we thought!
@ur momisugly saveextremadura says:
May 20, 2012 at 11:56 am
Indeed, it sounds like an impossible task. However, reversing a “consensus” starts with making rebel facts and dissenting opinions public. To date, what we have done is try and prove that CAGW is a fallacy, and that wind and solar energies are both ineffective and very expensive. Well done!
I am merely suggesting now that we should also expose the wicked part played by the financing of political parties, as shown in my posting of May 20, 2012 at 9:40 am
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All well and good, however I doubt more than 5 or 10% of the (global) public has more than a passing acquaintance with the entire subject, let alone any rebel facts and dissenting opinions. Far more pressing issues are occupying hearts and minds. Even in the first world countries the amount of attention paid to anything of consequence is miniscule, and polls show that AGW is at the bottom of the list of attention getters.
Many in the US (likely approaching 50% of adults) can’t tell you who the Vice-President is without consulting their “smart” phone. That doesn’t bode well for relatively obscure information about CAGW, even if you put up it on every billboard ( electronic or otherwise ) in the country. Charts and graphs are as unintelligible as ancient hieroglyphics to most people, and forget statistics and probability statements.
Cutting through the comments, mainly because I haven’t read them all, it seems to me that all these massive bureaucracies are for one thing, and one thing only, and that is power over people like you, and me.
The whole AGW scare edifice is crumbling, but hang on, there’s more to come! Our food, water and even the air that we breathe is under control. The EU, those unelected people who are now controlling us in Europe, and have the longest holidays in the world, are now dictating how we should treat our own children. (Google Christopher Booker).
There seem to be so many of these clubs (Rome) or groups of people (Greenpeace, WWF et al) that seem to be friendly on the outside but sinister inside that it beggars belief that we can condone the situation. The reason could possibly be that there are an awful lot of gullible people around.
At the end of the day it is up to the warmists,aka publically funded climate scientists, to demonstrate that:
1. The earth is warming, and it will do us all serious harm.
2. We are the cause of this warming.
3. We can economically do something about it.
Fail anyone fo these then there is a no cause for alarm.
Fail all three then it is tantamount to fraud.
Yup…I reckon it is a fraud by the egotistical and incompetent, upon the gullible and otherwise trusting public.
I sincerely hope that Pat Swords gets somewhere with this.
Of course, on the face of it, it should be easy-peasy. The actual costs must be known and so are the actual generation figures. Some bureaucrat will also know the cost of running fossil powerstations at less than maximum efficiency (let alone the ones on “spinning reserve”!) and the cost of rebuilding the grid connections. The Government takes good care to hide most of that information and to have tame pundits declaring that the ‘actual cost to consumers’ is only a Groat per Year, or something equally absurd.
But you don’t need to be a genius to work out that projects that are costed in hundreds of Billions of Pounds don’t get paid for by getting a few tens of Millions of consumers to cough up an extra Groat.
Information which is already readilly available is sufficient to demonstrate that BigWind is ludicrously expensive.
But how many senior politicians (or bureaucrats) are there, across Europe, who will admit to this? I doubt if you could round up enough to form a football team.
So, I fear that a successful outcome to Pat’s effort is about as likely as getting Joe Stalin to pay a parking fine.
Incompetent? Judging by the payouts received to date, they are very competent fraudsters indeed!
Is that the logical consequence of following the suggestion, “Go F’ yerself!”?
May I gently suggest “promotion” or something similar? 😉
Friends:
Physical reality prevents the EU from maintaining its existing energy consumption while fulfilling the Aarhus Convention which requires the EU to adopt “20% renewable energy by 2020”. Simply, “20% renewable energy” is a physical impossibility for the EU (or any other developed economy) without closure of most of the EU’s economic activity.
To understand this one needs to recognise the difference between political reality and physical reality.
Please note that this difference is NOT a pedantic point because:
• it is the basis of the AGW-scare,
• it is the justification for the imposition of so-called ‘renewables’, and
• it enables politicians to pretend that reality is whatever they want it to be (e.g. the EU is complying with UNECE when it is not).
Political reality is whatever politicians assert it to be.
Physical reality is the way the universe is.
Politicians choose the political reality which suites their political objectives as and when they desire. And politicians work in (and with) political reality. Indeed, politicians pay pseudoscientists to provide misrepresentations of physical reality (e.g. hockey sticks) which they can use to justify their chosen political reality.
Scientists observe physical reality with the intention of discerning the nearest available approximation to ‘truth’. Hence, although physical reality is whatever it is, scientific understanding of physical reality is changed (n.b. is ONLY changed) by new observations of physical reality and/or new interpretations of the observations.
So, politicians can and do discuss ‘renewable energy’. But ‘renewable energy’ does not exist in physical reality.
All usable energy derives from the “big bang” which initiated the universe. All energy flows capable of conducting work are stages in the process from that event to the heat death of the universe. Energy cannot be ‘renewable’ because a sampled energy flow cannot be raised to its original condition without use of a greater flow of energy (i.e. entropy).
But political reality does include ‘renewable energy’. Simply, ‘renewable energy’ is a source of an energy flow which is used at a rate no greater than the flow of energy into the source.
Therefore, the availability of so-called ‘renewable energy’ is constrained by the rate(s) at which physical reality replenishes the flow of energy into the ‘renewable’ energy source. And physical reality determines those rates which political reality cannot affect.
Hence, physical reality prevents the EU from maintaining its existing energy consumption while fulfilling the Aarhus Convention which requires the EU to adopt “20% renewable energy by 2020”. Simply, “20% renewable energy” is a physical impossibility for the EU (or any other developed economy) without closure of most of the EU’s economic activity. I explain this as follows.
Fuels are stores of energy. They are commodities which can be stored, transported when and where desired, and used as required. Thus, they can be used to provide energy which can be distributed as electricity when and where it is wanted.
Electricity is a form of energy. It is not a commodity. It cannot be stored in significant amounts and must be used at its existing distribution system when generated.
Only three processes provide energy flows which can be sampled by humanity. They are
• the residual energy which was concentrated in ancient – now dead – stars,
• the residual energy from the formation of the solar system, and
• the energy flowing from the sun.
Processes which initiated during the lives of ancient stars have generated radioactive substances notably uranium. Amounts of these substances were part of the material which accreted to form the Earth, and they may be utilised as fuel in nuclear power plants.
Residual energy from the formation of the solar system is observed in the power of the tides and geothermal forces. Indeed, it can be argued that the Earth and Moon system is still forming because these processes still continue.
Energy flowing from the sun consists of radiations and particles. To date, only sunlight and solar heat have been utilised as energy sources by humans.
All the three sources of energy have been suggested for provision of so-called ‘renewable’ energy.
But their supply of energy into their ‘renewable’ sources is very small. Hence, physical reality decrees that ‘renewables’ can only provide a trivial (and insignificant) replacement for fossil fuels.
For example, biomass is solar energy collected by photosynthesis and is ‘renewable’ when the rate of biomass harvest in a year is no more than the amount of biomass growth in that year. But fossil fuels are solar energy collected by photosynthesis over geological ages and available in a compressed, dried form. Similar differences ensure that all suggested forms of ‘renewable’ energy can only provide a trivial (and insignificant) displacement of fossil fuels.
Simply, physical reality decrees that “20% renewable energy” is not possible for the EU (or any other developed economy) without closure of most of the EU’s economic activity.
Richard
Since the EU has failed to meet its renewable energy obligations, the UN has delivered the biggest most powerful punishment in its vast arsenal of punishments. It has given the EU a good glare!
That’ll teach em.
So don’t mess with the UN. Let that be a lesson to all of you.
The whole fiasco of wind energy and the EU would be funny if it was not destroying communities and peoples lives and peace of mind.
Are you disillusioned by rising electricity prices, over dependence on the “green” dream [especially uneconomical and inefficient wind farms] and the destruction of our countryside then please object to the Government at
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/22958
or by GOOGLING “E-PETITION 22958″ and following the link.