Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Mother Jones thinks spillover from the US election is helping the rise of the German AFD, and undermining support for Green Energy. But perhaps the working class has simply grown tired of elitist left wing politicians and institutions ignoring working class priorities.
How the “Trump Effect” Could Undermine Germany’s Clean Energy Revolution
In Germany’s elections, the far right has a familiar anti-immigrant, pro-coal agenda.
AARON WIENERDEC. 29, 2016 6:00 AM
The world’s most advanced energy revolution has hit an obstacle: the Trump effect.
Germany has long been a clean energy pioneer. Despite the fact that the sun hardly shines there, the country was the world leader in installed solar capacity until it was finally overtaken last year by China, a vastly larger and sunnier country. By 2050, Germany aims to get 80 percent of its electricity from renewable sources and to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 95 percent. It currently derives about one-fifth of its power from wind and solar (and one-third from total renewables), compared to just 5 percent in the United States. Even though this dramatic energy transition—known as the Energiewende—has contributed to higher household electricity costs, 90 percent of Germans say they support it.
For years, Germany’s mainstream political parties have supported clean energy, too. But that broad consensus could soon face a significant test, another possible casualty of the resurgence of right-wing, nativist politics across the Western world. Unlike many of its neighbors, Germany hasn’t had a far-right party represented in its parliament since the Second World War. But that’s almost certain to change next year, when national elections could make the Alternative for Germany party (known by its German acronym, AfD) the second- or third-strongest faction in the government, if polling trends continue. The party, which began as a euro-skeptic movement, has built its success on stringent opposition to immigration and admission of refugees—and on inflammatory rhetoric that echoes the campaign of Donald Trump.
The AfD also opposes Germany’s clean energy policies. It’s calling for an end to the law behind the Energiewende and even questions the existence of human-induced climate change, stating on its website, “Scientific research on the long-term development of the climate because of man-made CO2 emissions is fraught with uncertainty.” Now, in an effort to slow the AfD’s rapid rise, the country’s mainstream parties could be poised for a step back in the fight against global warming.
…
Read more: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/12/germany-clean-energy-coal-trump-effect
I’ve got a working class background, plenty of my friends are working class. Over the years I’ve watched as various left wing Labor and Democrat parties became the plaything of the urban elites, champaign socialists. I’ve watched the growing dismay and anger, as left wing elitist politicians supported fashionable green efforts to drive up the price of energy, and flood western countries with cheap immigrant labor, regardless of the pain these efforts inflicted on their increasingly disillusioned working class supporters.
Trump didn’t ignite the anger of the working class, he simply offered a solution to their problems, a new direction. The AFD didn’t ignite the anger of the German working class, they just pointed out the problems, and promised to fix them. The “Trump Effect” is simply the end of working class patience with privileged left wing politicians who have no idea of the pain their ignorant internationalist green posturing has caused to the people they claim to champion.
For Germany, the writing was on the wall long before Trump, as this hilarious video from 2014 demonstrates.
The age old cry of the ruling classes: “Sire, the Peasants are revolting!!!”
They still haven’t learnt. It wasn’t their bad policies or etitist arrogance, it was stolen; fake news; the Ruskies anything to avoid a little self-reflection.
I think the Germans have had enough with THEIR political establishment and are now ready to turf all of them and their corrosive policies.
Robert. “Still they haven’t learned “. Let’s hope they never do. We shouldn’t help them learn because they will get better at faking that they care about the economy and the working persons.
Who said, “The most important thing in the world is sincerity…
If you can fake that, the rest is easy.”?
Excerpt from the ML article:
“The party, which began as a euro-skeptic movement, has built its success on stringent opposition to immigration and admission of refugees—and on inflammatory rhetoric that echoes the campaign of Donald Trump.
The AfD also opposes Germany’s clean energy policies.”
This article employs the old trick of linking two unrelated issues in order to slime your opponent – the same tactic to when warmists tried to link climate skeptics to those who denied that smoking tobacco was harmful to human health.
Many Germans are correctly very concerned about immigration because Merkel has imported Muslim terrorists – the Christmas 2016 truck terror incident in Berlin is just the latest such event. Twelve dead and dozens injured… I know the location well – just in front of the Kaiser Wilhelm church ruins in downtown Berlin. I was first there in July 1989.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/22/berlin-terror-attack-tunisian-suspect-anis-amri-investigated/
Last year Merkel tried to cover-up the mass sexual assaults against about ~1200 German women by Muslim men in Cologne at New Year’s Eve one year ago.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/cologne-new-years-eve-mass-sex-attacks-leaked-document-a7130476.html
It is only a matter of time before there is a reaction to these Muslim terror incidents – probably an over-reaction, caused in part by Merkel’s attempted cover-up.
Green energy is a totally unrelated subject. The reality is that grid-connected green energy is not green and produces little useful energy. The fatal flaw is intermittency and this has been known for many decades. Most green energy is a scam – it feels good but it does not do good. Every true energy expert knows this.
Merkel is an East German who follows the classic tactics of the left – any lie is justified to achieve and hold power.
Regards, Allan
“Sire, the Peasants are revolting!!!”
“Yes, aren’t they.”
Indeed, they stink on ice.
And some here – Remoaners, maybe? – think the Germans have no sense of humour That was smashing. I laughed like a drain.
Auto
I think you’ll find that the German sense of humour is no laughing matter !
Which came first?….the anger?….or the Trump?
The left is going to blame everything from irritable bowels to termites on Trump.
Ask if they need a bigger shovel…………..
The left already has blamed Trump for all sorts of physical maladies, including nausea, depression, sexual dysfunction, panic attacks, and on and on … the links are too numerous to include here.
Surely they can’t blame Trump for the same things that they are already blaming on climate change, can they?
We’ve all been guilt shamed into following this ideological social experiment for decades – it has achieved some positive results but has now run its coarse. When all that’s left is fighting over gender neutral bathrooms, the movement has run out of ideas. The old guard needs to be replaced, policies are too entrenched to make an about face now. Trump was about this change (both Republican & Democrat), even with his imperfections, this plays to his benefit of that not being part of the establishment. Surely they will fight tooth and nail, unfortunately their synapses will take some time to rewire, the left cannot understand it yet. Is Trump the perfect politician, no. Is he an inspiration to the next 30 years of world policy direction, I’d say yes. The next fours years will bare witness.
You left out the Heartbreak of Psoriasis.
Phillip,
They will most likely try. The new rally cry/whine will be “It’s worse than we thought ’cause of Trump.” It’s a never ending worse story.
Of course they can, Philip Bratby – surely you don’t expect logic and consistency from these clowns?
they can’t blame Trump
===============
Oh No! It wasn’t CO2 after all that caused climate change. It was Trump. He was born in 1946, in Jamaica Hospital Medical Center. The same time CO2 started increasing, so clearly he is the cause. And Jamaica isn;t even in the US. So like Obama, Trump clearly wasn’t born in America.
http://www.worldatlas.com/img/areamap/675607cbf50f5433ffcc621f73dfd117.gif
re: ferdberple December 31, 2016 at 11:56 am
Is there a pool on how long it will be until someone takes the bait?
People need to consider the source for this stuff; until recently, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, Variety, Vanity Fair and such were all considered ENTERTAINMENT magazines. While lefty politics are bandied about in between the celebrity gossip and music reviews, they have never risen to the level of serious journalism let alone “news.” Mother Jones in particular was an organ of the hippie, countercultural radical Left.
Hey, it’s a break from “global warming” 🙂
I blame Brexit for everything…..
And Putin of course……
Happy New Year to all
(left right and centre, if you can work out who’s who)
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/imageserver/image/methode%2Ftimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2F2a3f693a-cec8-11e6-90d4-32d09e9feb7c.jpg
I can see Trump and Puttin–I forget who the other guy is.
*Putin.
And so will history.
Barry Soetoro
http://static.snopes.com/politics/graphics/studentid2.jpg
Clever. Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin hugging each other, and Mr. Obama in the middle getting squished. I love it!
I wonder what Putin has on Trump? I suspect it is something nasty.
Trump insults everyone he can possibly think of, except Putin, he fawns over him at every opportunity. He obviously loves him and Putin is currently dangling him on a string. Admittedly he owes Putin a vast debt of gratitude, a favour which Putin may one day wish repaid, and if Trump gets ideas of his own, Putin may show his hand.
So you suspect, but you actually have no proof. Did you see Trump insult the Deplorables – nah, me neither. If wanting to come to an agreement with Putin his fawning then I suggest you read up a tad on diplomacy. Still, you go on thinking like that – opinions with no basis in fact.
The German policy of closing nuclear power stations whilst building coal-fired power stations is the policy of the green madhouse. Energiewende is green policy at its worst, with no thought for the implications on costs and whether it actually does what it says on the tin.
Come now, Philip. it was important to protect the nuclear stations from all the tsunamis in Germany. Trying to garner votes by succumbing to the anti-nuclear crowd had nothing to do with it.
Part at fault was Chernobyl, that scared the Germans! I am German but live in the US since 1985. However the whole thing is insane, France is having many more nuclear power plants than Germany ever had then and the prevailing wind is of course from the west. So they convinced most of the German population that these dangerous plants had to be shut down, although Germany never had the type of nuclear reactor that blew up in Chernobyl.
When I was about to graduate with my diploma in high energy particle physics, there was the German spin-off of the ultra right ‘European Workers Party’, formed by Lyndon LaRouche’s wife that was active in Aachen, Germany and I engaged in a discussion with one of their young activist about fusion power plants. I told them that the instant they are turned on, they produce fast neutrons that would activate material in the immediate vicinity of the reactor. He said that this is all propaganda from the left and that fusion power plants would not produce any radiation! So funny.
Fusion reactors, even if they work, will have a hard time to produce the needed tritium. And not only do they have to produce their own tritium but also produce tritium for other, new fusion power plants to come online. I am not sure if this ‘tritium’ problem has been solved.
For reactors of the tokamak design like ITER there is about as much energy stored in the magnets as in the plasma (beta ~ 1). If an edge mode instability causes the hot plasma to pinch a hole in the superconducting coils, the collapsing magnetic field will have the effect of a sizable detonation and will blow an even larger hole in the vessel and tritium could escape from the breached vessel. We had a discussion about that several years ago with scientists from Albuquerque that work in this field. I read that the new Wendelstein reactor has a much more stable plasma confinement. But the tritium problem still persists.
In the foreseeable future we need to build more nuclear power reactors, and there are technologies available today to make them safe. Instead of wasting money on climate change we need to pour funding into nuclear reactor research to develop new types with passive safety. And we need to grow an army of nuclear scientists and engineers before the old ones that still know how to do it have left us for good. And we need these nuclear power plants to produce the needed tritium for future fusion power plants. Tritium has a half life of only 12.3 years.
Eventually the green pipedream will end, the warming will come to rest or reverse, and people also in Germany will wake up and they hopefully will build new nuclear power reactors with passive safety.
Stephan
Till and Chang who were Argonne labs engineers on the Integral Fast Reactor have written an accessible book on that technology. It appears to tie up the loose ends that dog thermal water moderated reactors; namely cost, intrinsic safety, and elimination by burning of long lived actinide waste.
One can only speculate on the effect of the integral program on carbon emissions , had John Kerry not shut it down under Clinton.
The book is freely downloadable in pdf form from the web (plentifullenergy.pdf).
I found the technical detail and elaboration of (for example) the pros and cons of metalic vs ceramic fuel fascinating. The reactor was tested under ‘station blackout’ conditions and rode it out without a hitch due to inherrent stability.
We have a huge amount of transuranic thermal reactor waste, some fast reactors such as the integral, burn it as fuel. They could achieve over 10% burnup between the cheap, onsite reprocessings.
A youtube video “Fast-neutron reactors: A wiser solution to spent nuclear fuel?” pushes the economic case for transuranic waste disposal by burning in fast neutron reactor vs geological storage.
No need for fusion, or Thorium quite yet. And the Moltex fast salt reactors are just simulations at present.
Meanwhile the Japanese have shut down their Monju reactor.
I’m curious Stephan, how would the the collapse of the magnetic field cause a sizeable detonation? The gas in the chamber of the tokamak gets squished down to make the plasma. When the field collapses, the gas expands refilling the chamber. I thought that was the idea behind nuclear fusion. (not being sarcastic in my questions here )
Going to the moon wasn’t a mining expedition ?
I think you are right on everything else though. Though I didn’t hear of any explosions at PPPL doesn’t mean there weren’t any. You don’t call 911 for those problems, lol.
Other than that, I thought maybe a good place to turn on a nuclear fusion reactor would be in a galaxy far, far, away. The other thought I had with the online operation of LIGO, was that they were looking how to produce a local gravity wave that would bring the plasma to critical. .. I haven’t kept up, but were there neutron releases from the limited fusion reactions so far ?
Previous to the funding being cut, they were close to breakeven. I had assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that fusion reactions were taking place.
Even though in the short term we have enough fossil fuels, with or without climate change, eventually we will need to produce all the energy we are producing now… and then some from a different source.
Heavy water moderated reactors are very efficient tritium producers. Only one thermalized neutron needs to be absorbed by deuterium to form tritium (as compared to 2 neutrons for light water). Canada processes their D20 and stockpiles the tritium in gas cylinders. Lots available. GK
Hi rishrac:
It is the back-EMF of the collapsing magnetic field. This energy has to go somewhere. The current in the interrupted superconducting coils wants to continue to flow, the voltage will rise between the broken wires causing arcing and formation of heat. It will be like an explosion. The stored energy of an inductor is 1/2*I^2 or one has to integrate over the magnetic field density B^2/2mu (this is also the magnetic pressure) to derive at the magnetic energy this way.
I found a source of the energy stored in the coils of the ITER tokamak:
https://www.iter.org/newsline/122/182
It is 4 GJ. 1kg of TNT has 4.6 MJ of energy, so the stored magnetic energy of ITER is about equivalent to 1 ton of TNT! The energy will be released according to the time constant of th coils tau = R*L. I am not sure how that works out but one can assume that a breach will only locally affect the superconducting coils, so for the rest of the coil, R is zero. The energy could be released in a split second. Since beta is about one, the plasma pressure and the magnetic pressure are about the same. So we also have the thermal energy of the low density but very hot plasma to be of similar order of magnitude.
They certainly are aware of the pain they inflict, they just don’t care. Like Merkel now saying islamic terrorism is Germany’s biggest threat but continuing to import that very problem.
They’re just trying to delay their trip up the stairs to the gallows.
An excellent article Eric ! Many thanks (as ever).
As for “green energy” (as they call it) there is of course no such thing.
The entire “language” that the socialist governments use is littered with misleading expressions.
Anyone up for a new list of BETTER expressions ?
I know a few here at WUWT who have pet hate words, so it will be interesting to see some sugestions.
I’ll start the ball rolling: “green-piss”.
Regards and Happy New Year to all,
WL
Wind energy blows not
Yes, reality bites no matter how hard the green fanatics wish to believe.
If wind energy doesn’t blow then surely it must suck ?
“Green” energy = Virtue Signaling energy.
Hunter/gatherer energy or energy from the past. Limbaugh calls it Energy from Weather, which is my favorite.
It is Dark Energy – when the lights go out.
The ghost of electricity (howls in the bones of her face)
“Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place.”
BD
Greenpeace and the Sierra Club are part of the anti-human movement.
“I know a few here at WUWT who have pet hate words, so it will be interesting to see some sugestions.”
The United Nations High Commission for Frightening the Simple-Minded
Can you imagine the outrage if the public knew the fantasy of agw and so called green energy And the lies of 97%, mann s hockey stick, the corruption of ipcc, climategate e mails, ag s
Going after exxon
Politics has always been like this. Right of Centre has tenure of office for a few years, then Left of Centre takes over and vice-versa. Career politicians rarely make good leaders, because they are so out of touch with ordinary peoples concerns and have an I know best attitude. The popular assumption has been that, the Left will dominate the political world for decades allowing Democrat governance in the US and Left wing governance in the UK and Europe. The writing on the wall was actually in May 2010, when the UK Conservatives formed a minority government with the Left of Centre Liberal Democrats. Nobody thought that Cameron would win an overall majority in 2015 and in 2016 we would vote to leave the EU. It took a little longer in the US, but you now have a Republican majority in the Senate and House of Representatives and Donald Trump will be your president in a three weeks.
The destruction of our economies by reliance on expensive, unreliable energy based on a bogus theory and by an unworkable principle of unfettered immigration is on hold, at least for the time being. Germany, ever fearful of the rise in N@zism, has always voted Left or (very) soft Right. France’s Left government faces annihilation and the split in the EU is growing. The time is right to challenge the AGW lie head on because the political will is being redirected to more urgent things such as East-West relations, !S!S etc and the people in the West are thinking more and more about political consequences.
If I could take some literary licence of history repeating itself, the current anger is similar to the rejection by the German people to the Treaty of Versailles. “Germany to accept the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage” during the war. This article, Article 231, later became known as the War Guilt clause. Reparations became excessive/counter productive and while debated, helped lead to the rise of the N@zi’s.
Fast forward to today’s Climate/Social Guilt, accepting of all the loss/damage done to Gaia and societies/religions less well off, it too is getting excessive and counter productive, so much so the people are stating to reject it as well. They are becoming nationalistic again to defend themselves against what is now unjust. While I do not believe we’ll see another Hitler, it seems ironic to me the same policies of guilt, isolation and excessive restitution are leading to the same results they are trying to prevent. A fact that is not lost on Mother Jones, “in an effort to slow the AfD’s rapid rise, the country’s mainstream parties could be poised for a step back in the fight against global warming.” In other words, the fire has been fanned, put less fuel on it.
Cameron’s Tories were left of centre so formed a nice liberal coalition with the further left lib-dems. Cameron then hoped to carry that on and so was shocked and disappointed at winning a small majority. That meant not being able to blame the lib-dems for ignoring promises to deliver on anything remotely to the right of centre as well as having to see through his EU referendum promise. His arrogance did for him but then left us with a still centre left government.
Save with the possible exception of the Thatcher government, there has not been a right of centre government since the war. The Tories are if anything left of centre. What else could be expected of Cameron who proclaimed himself as the heir to Blair.
It would be nice to see a slightly right of centre government that would cut back the size of government, get rid of all the quangos, cut back the size of the public sector, and reinstate welfare as a safety net, not a life style choice. With the money saved, one could return to free education for all through university (at least with respect to proper degrees) as a worthwhile investment in the future.
I remember watching a brilliant interview by Andrew Neil of an MP following an annoucement that about 24,000 army soldiers were to be laid off. Andrew Neil made the point that the Israeli Army spends about the same budget as does the UK on military hardware procurement and does this with a department of about 500 personnel. By contrast, there are about 25,000 personnel in Whitehall charged with military procurement. Andrew Neil asked the MP why not just get rid of 24,000 jobs in Whitehall and keep the armed service personnel the same? Of course, the MP had no good answer, and therein lies the problem with government waste; far too many people doing non jobs, or duplicating jobs which not only adds needlessly to expense but creates decision making problems.
The expenses scandal gave politicians a chance to reconnect with the voters, they did not take it. Brexit provides politicians with another chance to reconnect, but it is doubtful that they will take this chance either. Without a revolution is is difficult to see any meaningful change, and the Brits are too tolerant and apathetic to do anything. Just moan, shrug one’s shoulders and put up with it. Don’t expect to see any significant change any time soon.
Agree with all of that. There is a yawning gap for a party to the right that would suit those like me who can’t stomach Blue Labour and could be home to those labelled as working class but with aspirations to do well for themselves. In other words, just like Margaret Thatcher did. Sadly with Ukip a shambles and looking like trying to replace Labour in the north, this will be a missed opportunity. It would be interesting if we were to have a Brexit election but I suspect there are hoards of Labour and not a few Tories who wouldn’t want that and could block the Act required to make it happen.
…for they stood on the steps of the temple and did prophesy mightily unto the children of Israel, and, behold, those things came not to pass: So let them be stoned as false prophets.
The revolt against the watermelon people started at the ballot box in England.
And Wales, pity about Scotland and Northern Ireland (and Gibraltar but that’s a long story!).
Well, it first drew blood geopolitically speaking, with Brexit, rishrac . . and that’s certainly something worthy of a badge of honor, and a reserved Hoorah ; )
Since when is Trump “far right”? Republicans said he was too far left when the primaries started.
His win was not about left vs right anyway, it was about media indoctrination vs free and critical thought.
Anyone who disagrees with the ruling elite must be branded with a label that appears to make them look bad. Like the 52% in the UK who voted to leave the EU have all been branded ‘racists’
And don’t forget ‘white, uneducated working class’ (!)
‘Uneducated’ meaning not subjected to 4 years of leftist indoctrination by ‘progressive’ (regressive?) professors while accumulating life-sucking debt.
Isn’t that why the communist have re education camps ?
Lawrence
Recently I’ve been reading the history of WW2 by Anthony Beevor. Following the fall of France there was a division of opinion in Britain as to whether to acquiesce and start peace negotiations with Hit1er or to resist and fight on alone. This division of opinion existed both in parliament (Churchill’s leadership rival Halifax championed the surrender camp) and also in the population at large.
Beevor noted that among the British public, those favouring acquiescence to Hit1er included the wealthy elites and aristocracy, white collar managers and women. Conversely it was blue collar workers and men in general who favoured resistance and fighting on alone.
Curiously this division of opinion back in 1940 was almost exactly mirrored by the division of opinion between remaining inside or leaving the EU in 2016.
You can’t leave out “Deplorables”.
You have a point – the need to break everything down into this dichotomy of “right” and “left” takes the place of a lot of critical thing. For example, in terms of “right” and “left”, try and explain why both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump tapped into the same movement and in many cases, appealed to the same people. (no one wants to admit that about the Bernie movement, but it’s true)
“establishment” vs “anti-establishment” is a little bit better model to explain recent events.
Agreed about Sanders, saw it in my circles of friends.
Yes, you have it. This is not left/right politics, this is “kick the bums out”. Both Sanders and Trump were running on the same ethos. The problem for the Democrats was that they ran an establishment candidate. I don’t think the outcome would have been different, but I could be wrong on that, which would have put us on a different track. History turns on subtle things, that’s why it is interesting.
In the US, it is frequently stated that the country, on average, is to the right of the political center. Think about that. How should the political center be determined? Shouldn’t the center be defined by the average? Of course, the terminology was developed by those in the educational system who believe that their left-of-center views are the center, most reasonable position. That’s also why you will never see anyone described far-left, radical left, or alt-left.
In the UK you do not see anyone described as ‘right’ wing, it is always far right. The same description is made of European political parties. Populist parties such as Le Penns are always labelled as far right, not simply right wing.
The descriptions are very unbalanced; as you say one never sees the label of far left being applied, and one always sees the label of far right being applied rather than merely right wing.
Divine wind, devine wind mills, kamikaze mills. Like that.
The talent of the Left has always been to sell an emotionally pleasing idea such as a clean environment to the public while changing the subject behind the scenes. This is an exceptionally difficult tactic to defeat since people tend to think emotionally and are generally too busy with the routine and demands of life to pay attention until it’s late in the day. Then some get mad and rebel, but rebellions in democracies usually are short, dramatic flare-ups that settle back down in a short time. Then the cycle starts another round.
“Divine” comment.
I’ll add that the movement is another popular uprising similar to the one that took out Communism in 1989.
The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989.
Results of the US election were concluded on November 9.
And I am a German and was born on November 10th. And Elvis Presley sang about a cold, gray Chicago November morning. But fun aside, the great teeth gnashing over the US revolt against the global AGW industry is still going on. And China is involved as the world’s largest manufacturer of wind power plants and solar panels. Trump quickly recognized where the wind blew. From the gray, foggy (confused by Elvis Presley years ago with chicago) Beijing. Chinese people see their business model floating, which they had just peed off so beautifully and copied from Western inventions. Oh noe. Perhaps this should be a case for an investigation committee in the trump time. In the meantime, we are paying higher energy prices in Germany every year. The proud second place behind Denmark (it’s a bit lazy in the state of Denmark <), we have intermittently eternal with an enormous intermediate sprint. Only the goals of reducing CO2 emissions and reducing energy consumption have been far behind us. We could say we were running backwards from the starting line.
When the MSM becomes lopsided in its take on any issue, it is just cause for concern by its consumers. It has become very challenging for an individual to examine issues from all the angles, inside and out, which used to be in one objective report, free of buzzwords to spin perspective or stir emotion.
The blatant tunnel vision of the MSM makes me glad I changed my major from Journalism to Biology back in school. I would be very frustrated or completely brainwashed by now, I’m not sure which.
Or in poverty and out of a job if your morals survived intact.
You made the right choice for your soul.
Ironic, but I later chucked the whole degree thing for a job operating power plants, only to end up back at the university I had quit, as a facilities operator/stationary engr., until retirement.
I’m not that groovy at journalism anyway, I thought I wanted to get into TV newscasting until I had a talk with a St. Louis Radio personality my aunt knew and got a dose of the realities of that business.
Back in 1990 I met someone who wrote feature articles for a major newspaper. Her latest article was about a woman who had built a business based on healing pets by the laying on of hands. I asked, “how do you know she has this power?” The journalist looked at me in surprise and said “she told me!”
This was someone who was hardworking and honest, but simply didn’t have the concept that someone claiming a strange power might be untruthful or mistaken. Main-stream media.
I am proudly banned for life from the Mother Jones website..if we could harness the warm and fuzzy I get from that we could mothball all the panels and pinwheels.
heh – I know I got banned from the Ecowatch site, just for asking a few uncomfortable questions.
I just checked – I’m banned from Mother Jones too! And all I did was say something that mildly signaled that I wasn’t part of the Collective.
Trump wasn’t a presidential candidate when Germans began to boil.
Thanks to Pierre Gosselin at notrickszone.com!
http://notrickszone.com/2015/04/18/growing-unrest-german-trade-union-to-protest-co2-plan-that-threatens-100000-jobs-and-affordable-and-reliable-energy/#sthash.75CENv2X.dpbs
Growing Unrest: German Trade Union To Protest CO2 Plan That “Threatens 100,000 Jobs” And “Affordable And Reliable” Energy !
By P Gosselin on 18. April 2015
Germany’s powerful trade unions have long been major constituents of the country’s SPD social democrat party. But new CO2 reduction plans being drawn up by Germany’s Economics Ministry, headed by SPD chief Sigmar Gabriel, has the country’s mining, chemical and energy workers up in arms.
The IG BCE trade union representing a variety German energy employees is calling on its members to demonstrate in Berlin, on 25 April 2015.
The planned protests further puts a German government in an increasingly awkward position as it attempts to appease both the powerful environmental groups, and the country’s influential industrial trade unions.
100,000 jobs at risk, “social blackouts”
Coal power plants supply approximately 45% of the country’s electricity demands. German online daily Die Welt here reports that the Economics Ministry has produced a concept paper calling for capping emissions of older coal plants, and subjecting excessive emissions to hefty fees.
The 125-year old IG BCE union claims the plan threatens 100,000 jobs – in regions where economies are already strained. “Ultimately the social blackout of entire regions threaten,” the IG BCE warn. It also says that scaling back coal power “puts an affordable and reliable power supply at risk“.
The IG BCE announces large demonstrations outside Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office in Berlin on April 25:
The motto: “Enough, we oppose!”
“Unrealistic” figures
Die Welt writes that the IG BCE had investment bank Lazard check over the draft plan. Lazard found that it is based on “unrealistically high power prices” for the year 2020.The prices projected for 2020 by the government will in fact be much lower, and thus means the plan would result in 85 to 95 percent of the power plants being unprofitable. The cap would literally mean the end of Germany’s lignite-fired power plants.
IG BCE commenter Thomas Rohde writes he will surely be attending the demo, and comments:
For too long we have believed politicians that an affordable energy supply and good jobs were worth it. The gods of climate protection have blindly run and sacrificed the guarantors of prosperity and value creation at the altar of CO2 reductions, much to the joy of other EU and industrial countries.”
It is always the way of the criminal and con-artist to cast blame and accuse the messenger of their own crimes.
Gang Green revealed their true nature decades ago, but rational people doubted their own senses and required repeated evidence of the Eco-Loons madness.
Kipling’s poem:The wrath of the Saxon(?) sums up this aspect of human nature, as does the old :A lie is halfway around the world before truth starts to get its boots on.
The emotional ones have had their say, we listened and then asked the questions, they have not answered.
Meanwhile the fools and bandits infesting our governments have rushed to accelerate this wave of mass hysteria.So much for the prime directive of bureaucracy.
So the CAGW hysteria has blessed us in many ways, primarily in allowing the irrational and extremely gullible amongst us to expose themselves.
Perhaps we will learn to chose our “leaders” better.
Or accept the education we have so expensively had thrust upon us.
John. I liked the “wave of mass hysteria ” part, the best of your very good comments. I looked into some mass hysteria articles a few years ago. They were very interesting. Unfortunately it is not a recient phenomenon.
Here in Canada, the progressive parties fought NAFTA tooth and nail because it would cause job loss to Mexico, which it did. Now when Trump criticizes NAFTA, the progressives are suddenly in favour of it???? “Doublethink” is upon us.
BCBill, make sure you fill up your vehicles today and any other unit that takes fuel since the carbon tax takes effect at the strike of midnight thanks to the new Liberal PM…I’m on my way right after I finish plowing all this global warming for the 8th time in 5 days!
In FRANCE AS WELL; All good socialist states. IDIOTS
Crap. I’d go and fill mine, but there’s far too much Global Warming in the driveway to want to get out of the house until I have to.
NAFTA came into force under U.S. President Bill Clinton (Democrat) and Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien (Liberal). It coincides with the time when the Democrat party turned its back on the New Deal and the workers.
During the election, Chretien promised to abrogate NAFTA. Once he was elected with a comfortable majority, he betrayed the voters. link The Liberal party is reputed to run from the left and rule from the right … so no surprise there.
The Canadian New Democratic Party (NDP) seems not to think NAFTA is a problem any more. link That puts the party at odds with its supposed union supporters.
You only get to be a career politician by doing what your masters tell you to. That’s why it took an outsider like Trump to break the globalist ‘elite’ stranglehold on US politics.
Chretien promised to abrogate NAFTA
===============
what about GST? Wasn’t that another Chretien broken promise?
SJWs always lie. Hopefully The Boy King and all his failed promises are going to make the Liberals as unelectable as the Democrats after Obama.
It was the FTA between US and Canada that they fought against and yet when they won the federal election, they passed it into law.
More like the green blight. The double-edged scalpel of environmentalist propaganda corrupts the climate and undermines a proper assessment on its merits.
Flaunting your working class credentials by using the wrong spelling for Champagne?
Only people from the Champaigne region can use the word “Champaigne”. Everyone else is legally required to use Champagne.
I’m closer to Bourbon than Champaigne.
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/large/49044883.jpg
Au contraire. He used the word “champaign,” which is perfectly good English for flat and open country. “Champaign socialists” hail from the Midwest, but head for the coasts, where they can do more damage.
Pop, i live in the french quarter. How come i ain’t never seen that sign? (hic…)
Some things will change quickly. Trump’s acting tough and putting together a cabinet that telegraphs its purposes has itself changed the world, and will cause abrupt about-faces on climate research and concerns, the functions of the UN, World Bank, Nato and other international institutions, changes in education directions away from knowledge-lite propaganda, reining in of the post normal excesses in universities (closure of dozens of wifty poofty faculties), repurposing of national and international scientific organizations, etc. Actors in the climate world will be throwing each other under buses to grab onto a 90% reduction in funding and jobs, etc. Retraining for productive work will be a massive industry in itself. Remember Raegan’s election alone released hostages from Iran and set the foundations of USSR crumbling. The entire Asian including Asia Minor, continent has been schooled to fear and respect strength (part of pearse foreign policy 101 some of you may have seen recently) – they are in for a big change, too.
There is no “Trump effect” a long simmering mistrust of the “post industrial” “new world order” by and for the academic, political, and financial elite is finding expression in an “almost anything but that” political resistance. I don’t know if Trump has the sophistication to understand the tiger he has by the tail but I do hope he will not be captured and bogged down by the “professional” politicians and civil servants. The Obama administration is very busy hanging as many booby traps and IED’s as they can on the way out the door in order to confine the political debate to the choice between impotent “progressive” verses “conservative” memes rather than a US policy revolution. I do not think I can recall a time since the Eisenhower warning about the “military industrial complex” when the white house has been poised to shrug off the “professionals” and set course in a new direction. I hope this is not just a deception and that we will have a Happy New Year!
I will toast to that, sir.
Cheers.
It’s completely insane, and perfectly captures the insanity we are rebelling against.
Dang! At least some of the German people have changed since I lived there in the 1970’s. In a good way. 😀
What a wonderful video to use to cap 2016. I have sent it on to some friends of mine.
When I tire of reading the doom-and-gloom and hearing the heartbreak-of-uncomprehended-vote-failure, I will return and renew my ‘faith’ with this video.
I agree. It’s great.
If only people understood politics.
A Thermodynamic Explanation Of Politics
And a more recent update:
http://classicalvalues.com/2016/12/two-ecologies/
Once again the morons claim only renewable energy is low carbon energy. They claim that German has 20% renewable (which probably doesn’t include energy from their nuclear plants that are still operating or nuclear energy imported from France) and they claim only 5% in the U.S. Hard to know what they are counting over here, since our hydro as I recall is around 10%. Apparently hydro is not considered renewable and apparently neither is geothermal. They have apparently completely redefined renewable energy’s definition. At any rate, the U.S. has 20% nuclear and around 10% hydro and a smattering of geothermal. That is more than 5%.
Aaron Wienerdec should stop by Pierre Gosselin’s site. A quick search for the word “Energiewende” at NoTricksZone returns 18 posts just in the last two years, many of them recaps of articles appearing in German msm publications. Didn’t see any of them blaming President-elect Trump for any of their self-inflicted problems.
Guessing it is inevitable: Donald Trump will be blamed for anything and everything, real or imagined, for the next 20 years.
Do you think they’ll probably blame him for “making America great again” as well. 🙂
SteveT
I think “Green Energy” is undermining German support for Green Energy. Check out renewable performance here
https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm
Looking by month is particularly enlightening
That’s a fantastic link and I shall find it very useful, Thank you!
I notice that the Solar Forecast for every day is 0.
But some days Solar actually delivers some power.
Maybe the only message understood by Gang Green;”Trump Thump”.
German expat here; left in 2000, living in Canada since 2001 (after a brief, strange interlude in Texas).
There are many reasons for the rise of the “horrible, rightwing, populist, untouchable” AfD. The unsustainable energy policy is only one of them. Other major reasons include the completely lunatic handling of the refugee crisis, the endless throwing away of good money after bad to prop up the farce that is Greece, the increasing transfer of wealth and power to uncontrollable entities such as the EU and the ECB, and of course the perfectly justified discontent and anxiety of the working class, whose livelihood is threatened by globalization and automation in much the same way as it is in other Western countries.
If you ditch the “Nazis zOMG” hysteria and look coolly at the political agenda of the AfD, you will find it pretty close to that of the Christian Democrats in former days, when they were more or less Germany’s version of the Tories. That was before Merkel yanked them from their moorings and transformed them into The Green Feminist Labour Party Of Magnificent All-Encompassing Benevolence – the party that stands for everything and everybody, and therefore for nothing and nobody at all. So, in a sense, the AfD simply is beginning to fill the space of a recognizably conservative party that was evacuated by the Christian Democrats under Merkel.
Despite the fact that the sun hardly shines there, the country was the world leader in installed solar capacity
How utterly mad must one be to not see the insanity summed up by that statement?
I hear the Sahara desert is planning to be the world leader in installed hydro-electric power.
It’s not insane if you’re a solar panel manufacturer. Less sun means more panels means more $$$$.
The insanity of that struck me instantly too but these Green folk are never rational.
The shadow looming over the Green Blob is way bigger, and more sinister than Trump. It is truth itself which has reared its ugly head.
Then it Isn’t sinister.
To Greenies it is.
Reflecting on 2016:
“The Common people are ignorant. But they are not THAT stupid…
“Germany has long been a clean energy pioneer …”.
==========================
What is “clean energy”?
Orwell summed it up in his essay Politics and the English Language “… if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought ..” and Frank Furedi has an essay in Spiked, 2016: A War of Words Against the People, on the way the left tries to manipulate thought by controlling language.
Like “carbon pollution” (CO2), “clean energy” is just another of the left’s meaningless value-laden propaganda neologisms.
Christopher
Who washed it to make it clean?
In my “Introduction to Political Systems Theory” course back in the 70’s we were required to read several books, among them Kuhn’s “Structure …” and Hanna Pitkin’s “Wittgenstein and Justice”, which discusses at length the effects of language on thought. One of the reasons I’ve always been fond of learning new languages was the discovery of Wittgenstein. I once spoke German fluently (50 years later I can still embarrass myself in that language), Spanish, Japanese and Czech partially. It’s very hard to escape English though. Too easy to use it. Everyone seems to speak it.
The word for ” I ” in Korean sounds much like the N word in English.
Wow, Bartleby, still in training?
Sent this to PHOENIX.de, founded by longtime DDR.Anschluss politician Helmut Kohl:
Dieser Jungakademiker Thilo Pommerening vom WWF, wie will er in seinem weissen SUV/pickup Hybrid 6 Tonnen Bambuspsitzen an die Zoos in Deutschland liefern für die Pandas.
Weder trägt das edelweisse Gefährt das Gewicht, noch hat’s die Ladefläche.
Was sucht der in Kolumbien das aufgrund angeblicher Dürre grün ist wie hastdunichtgesehen.
Der Kaffeestrauch ist eine Gabe aus Äthiopien, in Kolumbien ist er fremd.
Wenn die Kaffeeröster erfahren dass die Kolumbianer nicht den Stolz haben nur die guten Kaffeebohnen auszulesen werden wir hoffentlich bald keinen kolumbianischen Kaffee mehr kaufen müssen.
Herzig der Arbeitsdress der kolumbianischen Agraringenieuse:
Schwarzes T-Shirt mit tiefem Ausschnitt. Und dazu die weisse Pyjamahose mit lindblauem Fleckwerk.
Na Servus!
Äthiopien kennt ‘wirkliche’ Dürren, der Legende nach hat eine Ziege den Hirten auf den Kaffeestrauch aufmerksam gemacht. Was ja wohl alles sagt.
Warum bringt der WWF-Mann keine Ziegen nach Kolumbien?
usual spelling error,
‘Bambusspitzen’
thanks.
real good cooking is not white flesh from the Galapagos islands ‘white flesh of stinking . Galapagos reptiles’
but Vienneas
http://www.ichkoche.at/wiener-zwiebelrostbraten-rezept-3090
Johann – Thank you for the laugh at one of my “favorite” activist groups. “Warum bringt der WWF-Mann keine Ziegen nach Kolumbien?” Warum nicht?
Ich fürchte meine Deutsh sehr alt ist. In Wahrheit es ist ganz quatsch. Aber Danke sehr!
“but Vienneas”
Doch, mit Leguan? Ja? Ist jetzt gut? 🙂
Enshuldugung Bitte. Ich habe vergessen, das Zitat zu schließen.
Moderator: I forgot to close the quote.
[Odd, Google Translate claims that should be “Entschuldigung Bitte.” 8<) .mod]
Mod: I never suggested I could spell German 🙂
Now I think about it, it should have been “Entschuldigung Sie Bitte.” to be appropriate in Hoch Deutsch. I was raised in Switzerland. It’s my only excuse.
‘Germany hasn’t had a far-right party represented in its parliament since the Second World War.’
Ahhh, yes, the National Socialists were ‘far-right.’ Imagine that, far-right socialists.
Tutto nello Stato.
Ah, I see you have problems with political theory. National Socialism. Think about that word “National” It was socialist indeed, but only for a selected group of Aryan people, not for everyone. I wonder if you spotted the derivative of National Socialism, which is Nazi?
That fascism is ‘far-right’ is an invention of the Left.
Perhaps more people are beginning to realize CO2 has no significant effect on climate.
I honestly don’t think so Dan, I think more people are just getting tired of being preached at by self-righteous SJWs. Really. I don’t think the majority suddenly discovered science. It’s not a great way to win the battle but at least it works. The Greens poisoned their own well with arrogance and conceit. The downside of that is they might recover by changing their approach to public relations and we’d have to do this all over again. I think that’s a real risk. Had they really discovered science that couldn’t happen.
When will they learn.
The real cause of “CAGW” was their own hot air…and their real motive to use it (or anything thing that “sticks against the wall”) to keep their power rising.
In this past election in the US, Trump gave the voters a choice that wasn’t just a return to the same old sh*t but with a different label.
I’ve no doubt what Hillary would have meant.
Time will tell whether Trump is just a “different label” or not.
PS I don’t mean to put all of the outcome of the next 4 years on Trump. Congress needs to cooperate. And many in Congress are too comfortable wallowing in “the same old sh*t”.
“Mother Jones thinks spillover from the US election is helping the rise of the German AFD”
No, what’s helping the rise of the German AFD is the overwhelming number of Muslim immigrants, Merkel has invited into Germany and Europe. Germans are getting fed up with the sexual assaults and other crimes the Muslims are perpetrating on them.
Merkel has invited the enemy into Germany, and although she doesn’t recognize the danger for what it is, the German people do.
It’s hard to believe that otherwise intelligent people can be so completely clueless on some things. They allow their emotions or something to overrule their common sense and blind them to reality.
Obama and Merkel have created a Huge problem for Europe. Obama caused hundreds of thousands of refugees to be created when he turned his back on Iraq and allowed the Islamic Terror Army to rise and wreak havoc in Iraq and Syria, and then Merkel invited all these humdreds of thousands of Muslim refugees into Europe.
Two clueless Leftists like Obama and Merkel in power can cause a lot of damage. Now we have to clean up all this mess.
Don’t know about Merkel, but Obama is not clueless. Obama is a devious weasel, who has craftily used tools of Democrat party to do as much damage to country he hates as he can.
” Obama is a devious weasel, who has craftily used tools of Democrat party to do as much damage to country he hates as he can.”
Dems, he may be doing what he is doing deliberately to cause harm, but I would still consider that to be clueless. Perhaps I should have said delusional. One can be evil and clueless/delusional at the same time, in fact, I think that is a requirement for being evil.
The non-christian migrant issue in the EU goes way back before Obama and Merkel, it was begining to be a problem in the 80’s and not limited to Germany, certainly that is my experience. The main issue I saw was migrants being isolated and not willing to integrate. Unemployment was another issue too.
Get ready:
Warner Brothers in talks to make “Nigel Farage – The Movie”
Nigel Farage: Benedict Cumberbatch
Donald Trump: Clint Eastwood
Hilary Clinton: Meryl Streep
I object to Cumbertwat playing Nigel. We need someone better than that paid up member of the wankerati.
Obviously Warner want someone with a British accent everyone hates.
Tony Blair perhaps then? Or Gary Lineker?
This is pure horror. Meryl Streep as Hillary Clinton. Hillary did not look as good at 18 as Meryl Streep would look at 70. Furthermore, their parents are from Germany and about 15 kilometers from my place of residence. This fictitious role occupation is therefore another no go. By the way, Trumps grandfather was born near my place of residence. For American conditions a catwalk of 60 kilometers ..
Americans don’t walk kilometers.
We drive miles…
and run kilometers.
Don’t miss the video.
When the Deplorables in the heartland stop growing coastal city food, the cities will take note. You cannot tell those who feed you to go to hell.
“You cannot tell those who feed you to go to hell.”
Well, that is what they have been doing for past Eight years…
I was deplorable, before deplorable was cool.
I have consoled several socialist friends about their feelings of despair post-election. I empathize with them, telling them “I know just how you feel. I felt the same way after both of the Obama elections.”
Yes, after getting a very long liberal rant from an acquaintance against Trump after his election, I simply responded, “LOL. That’s exactly how I’ve felt for the past eight years.”
He is a very strong supporter of Israel, which made his support for Obama and Clinton puzzling to me. I’m waiting to see how he feels about Obama now after the UN vote.
“Mother Jones thinks spillover from the US election is … undermining support for Green Energy.”
And downside is?
And then, there’s this:
“Sadly, this is not from The Onion. For satire to work it has to be believable and no one with commonsense would believe that the federal government would intervene to fine people living in Alaska for using wood-burning stoves in the winter.”
http://www.redstate.com/streiff/2016/12/31/epa-moves-fine-alaskans-burning-wood-keep-warm/
“Trump Effect” Undermining Support for German Green Energy
Nice to hear mining activity is increasing already…. and he’s not even in office yet!
Someone should have looked at the polls on support for green energy in Germany…
There’s no way Germany is going back on renewables now.
and did you know it exported even more electricity last year? More than France?
AFD are a nasty party of genuine fascists… anyone who knows any Germans will know that these are a genuine extreme and are going nowhere.
“Griff January 1, 2017 at 2:13 am
and did you know it exported even more electricity last year? More than France?”
Possibly because record numbers of local German consumers were disconnected, the excess had to be consumed elsewhere otherwise wasted.
“..it.exported even more electrical energy last year?”…
Yes, of course! Because the mad “Energiewende” produces electrical energy by random not on demand ! If there is Wind with 16m/s throughout Germany plus sunshine for some hours, windmills and solar panels produce more than 38000MW . But the energy generation of conventional power plants, which is necessary to stabilize the high-voltage grids, is added, so that you have to get rid of the overproduction at all cost and even pay for its acceptance! But with suddenly no wind blowing, we have to import expensive electrical energy from our neighbour countries!
The “Energiewende” ( electrical power supply change) is completely nuts, introduced by incompetent green morons, allegedly to save the planet from CAGW!
The AFD is the CDU of 20 years ago and has been the home of Merkel’s homeless conservatives for three years. Merkel’s CDU is now a wishi washi party with more heart for refugees than for one’s own people. In addition, Merkel has sold itself with the Energiewende to the Greens. #Merkel was in her youth a strict socialist youth in East Berlin. Their “youth group” in the FDJ observed as a “playful” exercise the observation of the literature professor Havemann under GDR householder. Merkel was in her group responsible for leadership and propaganda. Of this, no one wants to know anything about today’s CDU and the mainstream press. Of course, today’s Federal Republic is no longer comparable with the one before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Much is worse and more truths are suppressed. It was also for this reason high time that the largest partner of the Federal Republic, the US finally pursue a different policy than under the hypocritical Obama.
I went thorough Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin and East Germany in July 1989 and witnessed the last days of the Communist Honecker regime.
Here is something I wrote a long time ago on the subject.
Regards, Allan
_______________________
This article is true. I’ve also been to Cuba, and it is a cesspool of poverty and degradation (Trudeau boys, please take note).
What is truly interesting is that there are still apologists for Castro and Cuba here in Canada, even as Fidel himself has recently admitted that Cuba is a failed state.
They are probably the same “useful idiots” who said that Communist East Germany was a good model for Canada to emulate. I seem to recall several former NDP leaders who tried to sell us that line of BS (the names Broadbent and Lewis come to mind).
I travelled to East Germany, going through the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie in 1989, shortly before the Wall fell. East Germany was a cesspool too. While not as materially poor as Castro’s Cuba, it was an even more vicious police state where neighbour spied upon neighbour, and nobody felt safe from the Stasi secret police. Those who tried to escape were shot, and allowed to bleed to death in “no-man’s land” between the many barbed-wire fences that formed “the Wall”.
Epilogue
The last person to be shot and killed while trying to cross the border from East to West Germany was Chris Gueffroy on February 6, 1989. He was 20 years old. Rest in peace, kid.
The Germans dump their excess electricity onto the grid and destabilise the networks in other countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic, who are started to get rather annoyed about it. It would increase costs – from an already high level – in Germany if they were not able to do this. Economic collapse will stop it in the end as you can’t buck the markets if not everyone has an insane energy policy.
You are right! The energy policy of Merkels CDU and the Red/Greens is completely insane, costs german consumers billions and destabilises the networks of our neighbors!
Electricity has to be produced on demand not by random (wind!). Without the possibility of storing electricity economically, those morons are dreaming of a shutdown of ,not only nuclear power plants, but also coal/lignite fuelled ones!
“Griff January 1, 2017 at 2:13 am”
Griff, the Fantasy Land you call your mind is weakening such that it could be reduced back to Primordial Slime even before Trump gets sworn in as Donald J. Hitler. [Seig Heil!]
About 2 years ago Spiegel did a Series on Germany and Spain’s Renewables in which their Top Officials indicated they were suspending any new subsidies for Wind and Solar energy because they were ~”risking bankruptcy” for their Countries and Taxpayers, and these Renewables had proven to be “notoriously unreliable”. Since then the Father of Wind energy in Spain has declared that it has failed, and Nuclear Phobia has forced Germany to have about 30 new Coal-fired Electricity Plants either in operation or planned.
When I found SpiegeI’s Series, I was actually looking for examples of CA’s Ivanpah system for capturing the Sun, which NPR was touting on its Blog as the next Utopian Fantacea. But worldwide, there was apparently only one similar system operating, in Spain, and they weren’t building any more of them. No, a Spanish Corporation had come to America help us out instead!
@Griff: where can those poll figures be found? What *exactly* were people asked about? Which were the polling organisations and how accurate have they been in the past?
https://energytransition.org/2015/01/49-percent-of-germans-doubt-success-of-energiewende/
is misleadingly titled. It quotes extremely high support figures. They are difficult to believe: I don’t think you’d get 95% of voters in my country to agree on the time of day, let alone energy policy. What’s fascinating in that article is that it goes some way towards explaining WHY there might be support: “many of their expectations for returns are unrealistic – 32 percent want payback within three years, with another 30 percent expecting it within five years.” That article notes of another survey that “The survey seems to be tailored to the company’s portfolio.”
They are not even socialists, so how can the be fascists?
Happy New Year, Shankhunt42, …… , er, … , I mean Griff. Glad to see that you and delusion, or compete lack of logic, are hand in hand in 2017. Funny in that the following is an exact quote from Germany with regards to their wonderful (ad)venture into renewables:
“We should regard the country’s experience as a cautionary tale of massively expensive environmental and energy policy that is devoid of economic and environmental benefits.”
Oops! Skankhunt42 is the correct spelling. My apologies to all, with the exception of Griff, that is.
Yes, Griff, You’ve never made the Turing test.
Are you human or a fast responding non-rossia, google goes Canadia answering machine.
I’m German, and the rise of the AfD isn’t Trumps fault and only have little to do with green energy.
The Alternative fuer Deutschland started as Libertarian Party founded by an economy professor called Bernd Lucke. Reason was the catastrophic handling of the Greece’s Debt Crisis by German and European politicians. Lucke and others used the same arguments as left critics and pointed out that a clean bankrupt of Greece and a Grexit from the Eurozone would be better for Creece and it’s debitors than a doomed try to handle the debt with new credits ad infinitum.
The result? All other political parties and many in the media called them far right, xenophobic, anti European. It worked. Many Germans looking for a party what doesn’t want to dissolve Germany in an European Superstate joined and voted for the AfD. Even for the far right the AfD was an alternative to the ultra-right NPD.
Lucke and some others have been sent by voters to the European Parliament, but he and other early members of the AfD left the party after a new Party Leader was elected during the first national congress of the AfD. That changed the party from Libertarian to a thing best described as national social democratic.
The AfD agenda is still written around neoliberal ideas, but you can except that it will be changed to a more social democratic agenda with strong emphasis for a strong national state during the next years.
The green agenda of the Greens and Social Democrats was mainly aimed on photovoltaic and wind power. Many from the upper middleclass put photovoltaic systems on the roof of their homes, and get for 20 years a granted and fixed price for each kWh they produce. The price difference between the fixed price and the market price is add to the consumers price.
The lower middleclass and underclass in Germany lives almost in apartment buildings for rent – they don’t have the chance and the money to build a photovoltaic system on “their” roof, but they have to pay for the photovoltaic systems of the upper middle class.
In 2016 the average price for a kWh was 28,7 cent, and 6,35 cent of those (22%) are used to finance green energy. An average German household needs 3500 kWh per year, that means it pays 222 Euro for “green energy”. For 222 €uros you will get in Germany 222 balls of ice-cream in a cone of wafer.
Strange comparison ? Well, politicians of the Green Party told us that green energy will cost us not more than we spend on one ball of ice-cream each month…
Why the f**k do we have to spend so much money? At noon all photovoltaic systems in Germany reach their peak, and the market price for electricity drops. Coal, gas and nuclear Power plants have to reduce their output during noon. Those plants can’t shut down because during night the photovoltaic systems doesn’t produce any power, leading to a situation there the non-green Power plants still have to maintained for the security of the power grid. Most of those Plants are run by Company’s owned by Cities and States, and those public owners lose a lot of money by keeping the plants running.
So the green energy in Germany means profit for the upper middleclass, and the lower middleclass and the underclass have to pay, while Cites and States lose money with their conventional power plants. That’s neoliberalism at work.
Subsidies are neither “liberal” nor “neo-liberal”. The whole agenda is just a green/red imbecility based on a quasi-religious belief in CAGW, in reality a camouflage for “the great transformation”, conceived by the Club of Rome!
I was also in the former GDR, because Willy Brandt had met with the former GDR leaders in return for the state recognition of the GDR, namely that inhabitants of the immediate border area of the FRG could visit their relatives on the GDR side once a year. Since I was often on vacation with my uncle on my mother’s side in the Rhön on the Bavarian side of the line of demarcation during this time, this uncle once applied for a visit to me. Already the journey through the growth at the border was a gruesome experience, at that time from the GDR side already a several meters high fence with self-shooting were installed. Behind this fence there was a free minefield in the GDR area, and again a border fence with watchtowers like the Roman Limes with grim looking Border soldiers. Everything to prevent the own citizens of the GDR from leaving the country. On the side of the FRG, there were a number of places to see memorials for shot refugees. In the former GDR it was like entering a completely different country. Decayed and neglected villages, roads with sloops one at the other and far and wide no inns. Fortunately the sister of my aunt could cook very well, so that we could at least eat well. A terrible experience for a 14-year-old boy, as I was then one.
AfD’s rise has most to do with Merkel’s policies and far little to do with Trump. Both are political pendelum actions, typical of un-damped proportional feed back dynamics.
The german AfD party is indeed denounced as far right by the leftish mainstream, but is in fact rather national-liberal-conservative. Of course, the party also attracts voters of the far right wing, who have either not voted, or voted for NPD which reached 1,3% in 2013.
With president Trump in the Oval Office, the leftish media establishment fears a more realistic view on left/green agendas like CAGW , EU, Euro,migration politics and the “Great Transformation” even in Germany! All critics of Merkels “great coalition” are N@zis or at least right-wing populists! So you have to restrict freedom of speech and to censor the Internet to save democracy!
Welcome to the late “German Democratic Republic”, new edition by Merkel and Friends! I would like to call it “The 4. Reich”!
Unless that was a clever pun on “sham campaign”, it’s “champagne”.
“Germany has long been a clean energy pioneer. Despite the fact that the sun hardly shines there, the country was the world leader in installed solar capacity”
Should this lead to a conclusion that they’re smart?
“Despite the fact that the sun hardly shines there”
So how do they produce such fine wines?
Germany consists of several climate zones. Just as on the border with Canada probably not a good wine thrives, this thrives also in the north and north-east Germany not. On the other hand, the Upper-Rhine lowland, where I live, is one of the best wine-growing regions in Europe with high sunshine. However, this is only for the summer, the winter is just as gray and cloudy as in the rest of Germany, maybe a bit gray because it is often foggy between Basel and Frankfurt, as well as currently for almost 2 weeks. At the moment, there is a lull in both solar energy and wind energy, it is almost windstill. Exactly at the time of the year when, due to low temperatures, more energy is needed than otherwise. There can not be a better example.
Sunlight is not the only variable in wine growing. Soil chemistry is more important.
Lol, the Soil chemistry remembers me another great case with chemistry in the Moselwein, which on the other hand grows on good slate ground. But he had to be somewhat sweeter because of the lack of sunlight, so he was given glycol. No, I know a bit about winegrowing. Soil chemistry only plays a role when other main factors are present, namely many hours of sunshine and a mild to warm climate. There are enough grape varieties, which do not matter at all, on which soil they grow. Like Müller Thurgau and Riesling and some others. The main thing is: it must be sunny. And, of course, they have appropriate notes, depending on which soil they grow. But this is taste and taste and beauty is in the eye and palate of the beholder.
Why do so many growers grow certain wines in certain areas where soil composition is a factor?
Nowt to do with this!
http://www.euanmearns.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/europeelectricprice.png
This is known to everyone in Germany. This is not going to change so quickly, because the Obama girlfriend Big Merkel has driven the power generation completely to the wall. The Germans will only fully wake up when the employment here subsists and the predicted poverty of old age (very low pensions compared to the previous income) is there. This will affect large sections of the population due to the demographic shift of the population. Perhaps then still need a “Soilent green” for the over 60-year-old population
Sweet Jesus, is there no end to this cacophony of fruitcakes?
http://www.msn.com/en-au/news/world/welcome-to-the-fourth-turning-the-dramatic-1997-doomsday-prophecy-that-is-coming-true/ar-BBxNXm1?
The Fourth Turning? Complete flip out with double twist and full pike more likely looney toon.
Pop Piasa
said, I thought I wanted to get into newscasting until I got a dose of the realities of that business.
No one ever knows enough about persuasion. It’s useful here, and in one’s daily life.
Pop, please expand on the “realities”.
Very much interested.
Peter
Hi Peter, I found out that the TV news business is very tough to break into, particularly in a market as large as St. Louis MO. John Roedell was a veteran newscaster who told me he started out in a radio station in the middle of nowhere and worked for low pay most of his career. I was impatient as a youngster and wanted to make good money right away. Looked like forestry or wildlife management was better then so I switched, only to take a craft job and quit college later. There are many craftsmen at the university where I worked who have their bachelors and one plumber even had a PhD in political science.
I think Anthony can tell you more about the broadcasting business than anybody here. He might describe the challenges of his own career if we ask him nicely.
And that’s Trump’s impact on Chancellor Merkel.
http://m.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-democracy-eroding-amid-populist-rise-a-1122271.html
I would have liked to add something scientifically objective about the German language aka Deutsch. since scientifically objective is necessarily sociopathic that is not appropriate everywhere.
Cheers – Hans
We have a new abbreviation the multi culti belivers won’t share:
NAFRIS
are ‘suggested North African aggressors intimedately touching willing german females seeking for exotic adventures on the city square of Cologne’.
on youtube:
https://youtu.be/T0v0V5nYqSI
Anybody here to subordinate under ‘climate refugees? ‘
Duh!