Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The strongly pro-green French Government have unlocked their strategic fossil fuel reserves, to keep the economy going, in the midst of economically crippling strikes which are preventing oil deliveries and threatening the stability of the national electricity supply.
France Faces Fresh Strikes And Power Shortages As Nuclear Workers Join Protest
AFP – France faced fresh strikes Thursday after nuclear power station workers voted to join gathering protests against labour law reforms that have forced the country to dip into strategic fuel reserves due to refinery blockades.
With football fans due to flood into France in two weeks for the Euro 2016 championships, pressure is piling on the government as queues at petrol stations lengthen by the day.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls warned the CGT union leading the disruption at refineries and fuel depots that it “does not make the law in France”.
The CGT, locked in an increasingly bitter struggle with the government, has called for its action to be extended Thursday to nuclear power stations that supply 75 percent of the country’s electricity.
This is an example of why I think the climate movement will ultimately fail. When all else fails, even French greens embrace fossil fuels, to keep the lights on.
Climate is going to be big during this presidential election season in the US. Trump has thrown down the gauntlet during a speech yesterday at the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference in Bismarck, ND. Clinton we know is already in the Obama camp on climate, but Sanders is even more rabid on climate, and could push her, and the Democratic party even further Left on the issue. Election of Trump could mean the death knell for Climatism. It could go either way though. All those opposed to the Climatist movement need to become united against Clinton, who represents not just a continuance, but a doubling-down of the irrational, econonomically-suicidal, and anti-democratic Climatist policies.
Both Clinton and Sanders are anti-nukes judging on observing them for many years.
Berie seems to think that solar from California can keep houses warm in Vermont in winter. Sanders was on the NRC oversight committee. He did not seem to understand that the NRC did not regulate solar. One way to kill solar is to have the NRC regulated it to the same safety criteria as nuclear plants.
“This is an example of why I think the climate movement will ultimately fail. When all else fails, even French greens embrace fossil fuels, to keep the lights on.”
Until it all runs dry. Some day, Eric, a new idiom like the famous “You can’t get blood out of a stone” will be coined and I think everyone can figure out which word to change.
Cheers
I’m a bit surprised they haven’t blocked the Channel tunnel to/from England yet. I thought that, and blocking the ports, was part of the normal course of events when they have one of their tantrums in France, whatever the reasons for the complaints.
Its getting warmer , there is international football and so the French strike ,
French air traffic controllers are the ‘favourite’ people around the Europe. They are still working, but apparently they spotted a fox wondering around one of two runways at Nice airport, so they promptly divert incoming flights to Marseille, but hey, the Marseille airport operations are disrupted by the strike.
Since rest of my family is flying to the Nice airport this weekend, I told my wife just sing La Marseillaise, her response “s.o.d that I’m English”.
https://youtu.be/SIxOl1EraXA
She’s a cutie. Especially the way she does the “brzzzzzz”.
Sorry about that.
She’s no Vanessa!
Word of warning, don’t let your wife see you watching this.
If you really want to see a mess, just look at the former French colonies in Africa. Most educated Africans and university students agree on that point.
Scanning the complexities of the French Revolution and later the case of the Vichy Regime during German aggression helps explain the current chaos and its spread into EU design and operation. The modern Germans sure put up with a lot of noise just to keep their trade and currency advantage working in all the chaos.
“complexities of the French Revolution”
Complexities?
The French revolution = the statement of the fundamental rights of people and immediately after, a genocide (of the Chouans and Vendéens) (the term “genocide” is an objective description, and is not acknowledged as such by the mainstream history dominated by leftists/pro-revolution historians).
Our national celebration day is the 14th of July, it’s the anniversary of “fête de la Fédération” the 14th of July, 1790, which is on the anniversary of 14th of July, 1989, the day of the murder of the guards of the prison of the Bastille, whose chief surrendered without fighting; the guards were then beheaded and their heads with put on pikes.
Okay messy…..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
Climate Change – the more things change the more they stay the same !
Introducing the new Citroen Dunamispod SL
Base model shown, options limited
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/07/22/article-2017721-0D1DEF0D00000578-845_634x374.jpg
By sheer dumb luck, the French government accidentally did something right and allowed rapid expansion of nuclear power, which now generates close to 80% of France’s electrical demand.
The French government screwed everything else up and now the French people suffer a 10% unemployment rate and an even worse underemployment rate.
Why don’t the French live up to their national anthem and “march, march…let the blood of tyrants water our fields.”…(figuratively speaking of course….).
When will the French finally figure out Socialism is the worst kind of tyranny ever devised by man?
C’est la vie…
““march, march…let the blood of tyrants water our fields.”…(figuratively speaking of course….).”
Wrong!
“Marchons, marchons, qu’un sang impur, abreuve nos sillons.”
March, march…let the impur blood water our fields.
The blood of the serf, the blood of the people, not the blood of tyrants!
Simple– No… Let the impure blood (of tyrants) water our fields…
Earlier in the anthem, it mentions how tyrants are slitting the throats of our sons, so the people must, “March, march, may the impure blood (of tyrants) water our fields…
Impur= impure…
Since it’s the “Chant de guerre pour l’armée du Rhin”, it’s about war against the army of Léopold II. So the impure blood would be the blood of the German soldiers, not of the French aristocrats.
Probably.
Austrian actually.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Marseillaise
Simple– Again… Spilling “impure blood” refers to tyrants…. Not the blood of serfs or the people…
Hint: “No SOB has ever won a war by dying for his country. Wars are won by making the other poor SOB die for his country” ~ George Patton
I am beginning to understand something: “Marchons, marchons, qu’un sang impur, abreuve nos sillons.” doesn’t mean “water our fields,” it means “water our furrows”, so it implies tilt.
This may be why we in France hate Monsanto so much: Monsanto promotes Roundup, RR seeds, notably RR maize and corn, with less mechanical work on the land. “No tilt” may be best environmentally and for the carbon emissions, but we don’t sing “qu’un sang impur, abreuve nos champs planté de graines OGM Roundup-Ready sans labour traités au glyphosate”!
No, you got that very wrong, Socialism is a rather feeble version of Communism impersonating Capitalism, I happen to have experienced all three.
Vukcevic– Unfortunately, I’ve had the displeasure of doing business with Communist and Socialist countries…
Doing business with Capitalist countries is mo’ bedda..
The gentle sound of the mo’ bedda band
Capitalism is superior if “controlled” and by this I refer to the U.S.in the 1890’s with safety and extreme child labor abuses before early 1900’s labor laws came into being. A lot of these abuses were responsible for the eventual rise of excessively powerful unions which somehow escaped many needed controls. There were also abuses with monopolies and in the 1920’s/30’s banking practices which brought Glass Steagall into play (not so much anymore). There is also some overlap as for example Social Security is considered by most to be “socialistic” and also some minor means should be provided for those who can’t take care. The point being that “pure” forms of these ideologies are worse and unfortunately oversight will never come from within but has to be from an imperfect government. A government which tends toward excesses because their rewards are obtained by voter and lobbyist appeasement.
I love it when people who know nothing about history go on and on about it.
The reason children worked had nothing to do with the so called excesses of capitalism.
It was because the technology of the day had not advanced to the point where their parents could earn enough so that children didn’t need to work.
Go back through history and you will find that children had always worked, be it on the family farm or helping around the store. Whatever the parents did, the children helped. It was only the rich who had the money to send their children to school.
It was capitalism that improved the technology that allowed children to no longer work. Government laws had NOTHING to do with it. Check the history books. By the time child labor laws were passed, the only place children still worked were the family farms and family stores. BTW, what were the only places exempted from the child labor laws? Why family farms and family stores. As always the politicians banned something that was no longer happening and took credit for it’s disappearance.
As to labor conditions. The same explanation applies here to. It was technology that made work less back breaking and dangerous. The laws weren’t passed until long after the worst of the problems had already been solved.
Labor unions came about because people wanted something for nothing. That’s always been what unions have been about. It’s not a coincidence that most of the early labor leaders were openly communist.
mods, what happened to my response to BFL?
Monopolies are impossible without the help of a government. Can you name these so called banking practices that resulted in Glass/Steagall, or have you just accepted the claims of the politicians that these changes were needed. Just like you accepted the politicians claims that they were the ones who stopped child labor and improved working conditions?
Government will always tend towards tyranny. That is it’s nature.
Capitalism on the other hand is characterized by the free exchange of goods and ideas.
Mark, So I see that you believe that American industrialists are more “moral” concerning profit than the ones in Asia using similar labor standards of the 1890’s and I’m sure that there are always a few “slants” in studies to turn things that way. I also suppose that labor stats showing almost 100% of new jobs are made up of alien workers (don’t know how many illegals since they aren’t broken out) with a record numbers of much cheaper H-1 visa’s (and cheap home labor) that those “moral” CEO’s just hate to use. Historical observation (including slavery) shows that such morality is in short supply, even today, when it comes to the almighty “profit”, especially if without minimum safe guards. Companies that treat their workers well rarely have trouble with workers wanting union involvement. As to Glass Steagall, there are references, (along with a few not well laid out counter arguments), that the essential demise of that act by
Greenspan resulted in most of the 2008 debacle. Yes the mod in housing lending practices wanted by Dem’s didn’t help but they only added fuel to the fire proving that reducing oversight and calling it deregulation is not always a good thing (also see what happened in the Savings and Loan de-reg debacle under Reagan and ENRON, World Com etc. etc.). You can attempt to argue for a completely unsupervised capitalistic structure depending on corporate morality (are you also for those lobbyists also running DC) if you want, but brutal historical examples don’t agree.
http://useconomy.about.com/od/grossdomesticproduct/p/89_Bank_Crisis.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Job_%282010_film%29
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuyrBRUsu9A (Inside Job the movie)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooksley_Born
Samurai
They never will because they are country of self centered egotist.
Yes, Bob. The French Revolution and the American Revolution took different philosophical paths…
The French Revolution was based on collective mob rule, while the American Revolution was rooted on an individual’s inalienable rights. I.e mob rule vs. the rights of men.
Our Founding Fathers hated democracies and tried their best to prevent that despicable form of tyranny, but, alas, America has slowly devolved into yet another failed tyrannical democratic state.
Shoot the Dead Cow
I found this thread entertaining and it reminded me of something I experienced. A friend and I were hunting in the mountains when we came upon a dead cow. It had been dead for quite some time but was still intact and quite bloated. It was so bloated that it looked like a parade balloon that had been over inflated to the point that it could explode at any moment. It was quite a curiosity. The skin was stretched to the tautness of a snare drum. Since we were hunting, we were both carrying high powered rifles. I turned to my friend and said, ” why don’t you shoot the dead cow and see what happens, what could be the harm?”. He looked at me for a moment, and then looked at the cow, then his gaze turned back to me and he said, “no, you shoot the cow, it was your idea, and I’ll move back while you do it”. I raised my rifle and put the sights on the giant festering belly, and hesitated. I contemplated the mass of pressurized vileness festering in the vessel before me and wondered if I was too close. The uncertainty of what I was about to unleash raced through my mind as I began to press the trigger, but then I stopped just at the threshold of the discharge. I lowered my rifle, put on the safety, and we walked away wondering what the outcome would have been, but not willing to find out.
That is a great story! I see that dead, bloated cow as a metaphor for the Climatist movement. When it goes bust, you don’t want to be anywhere near it.
But you will be near it fiscally and socially. That is the design plan—for no one to have a safe distance. It is fundamentally a shared plan.
Dead cow was bloated by build up of methane gas in the rumen which is normally expelled by belching.
If a hot bullet hit the rumen, gas would have been set on fire, releasing CO2 rather than methane the much more potent GHG. By not firing the bullet you contributed to increase in the global warming, which otherwise may not have been as catastrophic. (/sark)
I see it as a metaphor for the functions of the state in modern Western economies. Hundreds of thousands of government leaches need to be fired but the effect on the economy will be horrendous in the short term. Combined with the demographic nightmare that we are about to see and the debt we have amassed, there is absolutely no way we can avoid an economic apocalypse. The Greens will get their way when we are all living in caves and dressed in animal skins by 2050. The triumph of Socialism-with or without eco-lunacy!
Mr. harmsworth, perhaps you are too pessimistic.
– Debt matters only as long as an effort is made to be repaid; those who lent money could be in as much trouble if they rely on the regular repayments income.
– demographic nightmare solution is something that Mrs. Merkel had in mind when she invited one million middle east refugees. In the UK demographic ‘nightmare’ is of opposite kind, people of certain faith do not have just one or two children as the most Europeans do, it is usually four or five. London schools are far too overcrowded, those kids are going nowhere, and as long as they turn into productive working population there will be no shortage of labour.
France is in similar position, but their labour laws need modernising, Switzerland has the highest immigration per capita. The fact that many European local communities, their culture and at certain degree religion are endangered or often destroyed is regrettable, but it is far too late to do anything about it.
I regularly visit the Mediterranean village of my birth and youth, now it has less than the half population it had 30 or 40 years ago, but not a single ‘immigrant’, not even a local from the other side of the river. After London certainly it is refreshing, but there is acute shortage of younger families. Sadly, the ‘progress’ means that we can’t have it all.
The Germans tolerate the French and the others……all the way to the bank. Only one country really has benefits from the single currency design with no neighbors allowed to devalue their own currency to undercut them. It just requires a lot of vigilance on the debt and fiscal rules side, or limited cheating that is.
ResourceGuy– The purpose of the Euro was to prevent Germany’s strong currency/economy from dominating other Euroean countries’ weak and faltering currencies and economies…
It was a way to plunder Germany and redistribute Germany’s wealth to other impoverished European countries that destroyed their currencies through excessive spending and excessive debt/money priting…
The Swiss were brilliant not to switch the Euro…. The failed Euro will soon collapse. Germany simply can’t afford to pay for all of Europe’s excessive Socialist largess/debt anymore…
“The purpose of the Euro was to prevent Germany’s strong currency/economy from dominating other Euroean countries’ weak and faltering currencies and economies…”
Wait… what?
Everywhere in Europe, the Euro currency WAS called the “Euro-Deutschmark”. Not anymore:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/conflict-grows-between-germany-and-the-ecb-a-1086245.html
We will need more popcorn.
“one of the reasons that France didn’t want a nuclear-powered Iran. Iran also planned to sell surplus nuclear-powered electricity.”
Anti-nukes often confuse nuclear power with nuclear weapons. No countries with nuclear technology to sell are opposed to the peaceful use of nuclear power. However, trade with countries developing nuclear weapons is not allowed. China and Russia however, will sell reactors to anyone with the money.
I think it will be a long time before Iran has to worry about exporting nuclear generated power.
US regulations now allow reactors to be sold to places like China and India but we have to show that will not be used for weapons. This is why I could work in China and on China reactors from the US.
One of the good things about being retired is not working for a French company. The French and the Japanese went on a buying spree of US nuclear companies. One day I worked for a French company but the name on the building was the only thing that changed.
The problem with the French in nuclear is arrogance. There is a difference arrogance and accomplishment. In the US, young engineers seek out older engineers for guidance because of experience. In China, I was the oldest and most experienced. I had to get business license because I was past the retirement age in China and too old to get a work visa. None of the French engineers or management had been around for building older plants. So I was treated with great respect by Chinese engineers and dismissed by the French who were working at a power plant for the first time.
In the US, the nuclear industry and the nuclear regulatory commision have an adversarial relationship. The NRC expects the industry to do quality work and only spot checks compliance.
The French documentation (configuration management) is sloppy. Twenty years ago some US plants had these problems. Arrogance is not learning. It would appear that the French have a problem with convincing repective regulators that it is okay to operate the plants.
So you believe that the relation of IRSN/ASN vs. EDF isn’t “adversarial”?
“Le compte à rebours est lancé” = The countdown is started.
http://www.bfmtv.com/societe/appel-a-la-greve-une-nouvelle-affiche-choc-de-la-cgt-976611.html
Philippe Martinez (CGT) says:
“It is a drawing that could be summarized as: the situation is explosive. That’s what you say every day when you go online. Let’s stop throwing oil on the fire situation is explosive… it is a way to illustrate it.”
During a state of emergency, after the worse terror attacks outside war time, the CGT union draws a bomb with a timer and says “the situation is explosive”.
Great taste.
http://www.rtl.fr/actu/societe-faits-divers/dynamite-detonateur-la-cgt-publie-une-nouvelle-affiche-choc-7783364535
With the help of Google Translate:
Maybe it’s an “over-interpretation” to view a bomb in this context as a “provocation”, after the terror attacks in Paris.
Maybe it’s “unwelcome” and “very insulting” to take a drawing of a bomb on a tract by a Paris metro union as a “parallel” with a terror attack, after the bombing in the metro of Brussels.
Maybe… not.