Wonder why Russia has Europe over a barrel? Ask German Environmentalists 

By William Yeatman

It is said that Vladimir Lenin once called Soviet sympathizers in Western countries “useful idiots” for unwittingly advancing the cause of revolutionary Russia. Were the Bolshevik leader alive today, he might apply the same label to German environmentalists, whose influence over their country’s energy policy has been an inadvertent, but essential factor in Moscow’s post-Cold War rise.

Two decades of stringent environmental regulations have made Germany, Europe’s largest economy, increasingly dependent on natural gas from Russia, the world’s largest exporter. Of course, economic leverage translates seamlessly into political power, and Russia’s sway over German foreign policy has been conspicuous as the recent imbroglio in Georgia has continued to play out.

In fact, Germany has the means to power its economy without Russian natural gas, so energy dependence is unnecessary. For starters, it is home to the largest reserves of coal in Europe. But thanks to the European Union’s marquee climate-change mitigation policy—the continent-wide Emission Trading Scheme—the economics of power production have shifted decidedly against coal because its combustion releases the most greenhouse gases of any conventional fuel source.

Given that coal is currently taboo, Germany could meet its energy needs by expanding the use of nuclear energy, which emits no carbon dioxide when used to generate electricity. Yet the environmental movement in Germany opposes nuclear energy because its waste is difficult and dangerous to store. In 2000, environmentalists won passage of the Nuclear Exit Law, which commits German utilities to phasing out nuclear power by 2020.

Rather than coal or nuclear, the environmental movement prefers sustainable sources of power such as wind and solar, and it has convinced the German government to grant generous subsidies to the renewable energy industry. But despite these investments, renewables are still too costly to displace conventional energy sources, which is why wind and solar power account for less than 2 percent of Germany’s primary energy production, according to government figures.

That leaves natural gas, which is cleaner than coal and less expensive than alternative energy. Germany is fortunate to have large deposits of gas—more than 9 trillion cubic feet—most of which is thought to lie beneath the northwestern state of Niedersachsen. Environmental regulations, however, have limited exploration and development in the region.

To meet its demand for energy, Germany turned to Gazprom, a state-owned company that has a legal monopoly on natural gas exports from Russia. Natural gas currently accounts for almost a quarter of all the energy consumed in Germany, including all electricity in homes, gasoline in cars, and coal for industrial boilers. That’s up 40 percent since 1991. And Gazprom now supplies 40 percent of all natural gas consumption in Germany, an increase of 55 percent over the same period.

Currently, almost 40 percent of Germany’s domestic gas consumption comes from Russia. That share is likely to increase with the construction of the Northern Pipeline, a project to be completed in 2010 that would link Russian gas directly to Central European markets.

It’s little wonder, then, that German Chancellor Angela Merkel was the first major world leader to pay a visit to new Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Or that at last spring’s NATO summit in Romania, German diplomats orchestrated the opposition to U.S. President George W. Bush’s plan for expanding the trans-Atlantic military alliance to include Georgia and Ukraine. Before the summit, Russian officials had warned that NATO expansion would cause a “deep crisis,” and provoke a “response” from Russia.

Read the rest of this story at Foreign Policy.

By Bret Stephens

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria phenomenon known as global warming. Much of the science has since been discredited. Now it’s time for political scientists, theologians and psychiatrists to weigh in.

What, discredited? Thousands of scientists insist otherwise, none more noisily than NASA’s Jim Hansen, who first banged the gong with his June 23, 1988, congressional testimony (delivered with all the modesty of “99% confidence”).

But mother nature has opinions of her own. NASA now begrudgingly confirms that the hottest year on record in the continental 48 was not 1998, as previously believed, but 1934, and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate 1954. Data from 3,000 scientific robots in the world’s oceans show there has been slight cooling in the past five years, never mind that “80% to 90% of global warming involves heating up ocean waters,” according to a report by NPR’s Richard Harris.

The Arctic ice cap may be thinning, but the extent of Antarctic sea ice has been expanding for years. At least as of February, last winter was the Northern Hemisphere’s coldest in decades. In May, German climate modelers reported in the journal Nature that global warming is due for a decade-long vacation. But be not not-afraid, added the modelers: The inexorable march to apocalypse resumes in 2020.

This last item is, of course, a forecast, not an empirical observation. But it raises a useful question: If even slight global cooling remains evidence of global warming, what isn’t evidence of global warming? What we have here is a nonfalsifiable hypothesis, logically indistinguishable from claims for the existence of God. This doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist, or that global warming isn’t happening. It does mean it isn’t science.

So let’s stop fussing about the interpretation of ice core samples from the South Pole and temperature readings in the troposphere. The real place where discussions of global warming belong is in the realm of belief, and particularly the motives for belief. I see three mutually compatible explanations.

The first is as a vehicle of ideological convenience. Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore – population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations – and global warming provides a justification.

Read the rest of this piece at the Wall Street Journal.

by Wes Vernon

The late Natalie Grant Wraga once wrote, “Protection of the environment has become the principal tool for attack against the West and all it stands for. Protection of the environment may be used as a pretext to adopt a series of measures designed to undermine the industrial base of developed nations. It may also serve to introduce malaise by lowering their standard of living and implanting communist values.”

And who was this person?

Natalie Grant Wraga (who died in 2002 at age 101) was an internationally-recognized expert on the art of disinformation. In her Washington Post obituary, Herbert Romerstein — veteran intelligence expert in the legislative and executive branches of government — described Grant/Wraga as “one of our leading authorities” on Soviet deceit.

In a 1998 article appearing in Investors Business Daily (IBD), reporter John Berlau wrote that some of the most respected scholars on Soviet Intelligence have credited this woman with teaching them how to penetrate desinformatzia, Moscow’s term for its ongoing operation to deceive foreign governments.

John Dziak — onetime senior intelligence officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) — is quoted by IBD as saying were it not “for someone like Natalie, we would have had more failures, and the Soviets would have had more successes.”

Which leads us where?

In many of her writings, she dropped her last name and wrote under the byline Natalie Grant. That takes us to the spring 1998 issue of The Register. Therein, Grant identified Green Cross International (GCI) as a Non-Government Organization (NGO) founded by Mikhail Gorbachev, the last communist dictator of the Soviet Union. The aim of GCI was worldwide enforcement of a rigid environmental agenda.

Concurrent with the advancement of GCI, there was the birth of yet another NGO called the Earth Council, chaired by Maurice Strong, a key environmentalist mover and shaker at the United Nations. According to Wikipedia, Strong — a Canadian — describes himself as “a socialist in ideology and a capitalist in methodology.” The bio also notes that “some consider Strong a frightening power seeker.” And then this: “He shares the views of the most radical environmentalist street protester, but instead of shouting himself hoarse at a police barricade at a global conference, he’s the secretary general inside, wielding the gavel.”

Meanwhile, about a dozen people participated in the organizing meeting of Gorbachev’s GCI, including then-U.S. Rep. James Scheuer (D-N.Y.). The congressman had publicly stated that regardless of whether the allegation of man-made “global warming” was valid or exaggerated, the U.S. should proceed to take the steps required to fight it because those steps supposedly would benefit the planet. (As explained in last week’s column, the Cap and Trade — “Tax and Rob” — legislation aimed at carrying out the radical enviro agenda at a steep cost to American consumers and taxpayers was dropped like a hot potato in the U.S. Senate June 6, lest the great unwashed arise in anger and deliver an unwelcome verdict at the polls. It will be back in 2009. Connecting these dots is relevant. But I digress.)

The main organizing events

Other GCI meetings were to follow, including what Grant called “The Big Event — the Moscow Conference,” in January 1990. Then-Senator Al Gore was among the speakers. Only two years before, he had conducted hearings on Capitol Hill where the “global warming” theory was showcased.

 As the Moscow conference got underway, the Soviet Union was then on its last legs — down, but not yet out, you might say. Gorbachev, still the Soviet leader, voiced his government’s demand that the nations push for a nuclear test ban, an international environmental monitoring system, a covenant to protect “unique environmental zones” (a mindset that has since led to an international fight over UN efforts to disallow snowmobiles in Yellowstone Park on American soil), support for United Nations environmental programs, and a follow-up conference in June 1992 in Brazil.

Grant writes that while Gorbachev was expressing the “views” and “suggestions” of the Soviet Communist Party, those suggestions did not fall on deaf ears. “Before long, the activities of the movement began to reflect the communist ‘recommendations.’”

Now, why all this background?

On May 28, here in Washington, the featured speaker at the annual dinner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) was The Honorable Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic.

Klaus’s book Blue Planet in Green Shackles had just been released. As the Czech head of state put it at the dinner, the purpose of the book was to outline his firm belief that much of organized environmentalism is “an ideology I consider the most dangerous threat to freedom and prosperity in the current era.”

Read the rest of this article at Renew America.

Democrats were eager to end debate on the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security bill, but couldn’t muster the necessary 60 votes for cloture. The Republican-led filibuster was successful in holding off the legislation, at least for this session.
 
Senator Coleman reportedly missed the procedural vote that would have ended debate and put the bill up for a vote on the Senate floor.
 
Even though the bill has been shelved for this session, supporters of the bill are claiming victory. They say the cloture vote would have been successful if all the bill’s stated supporters had been present to vote.
 
But they weren’t.

Growing constituent opposition to the bill, driven by already high energy prices, and fear of greatly exacerbating current economic woes put tremendous pressure on both Democrat and Republican senators to vote against the cap and trade bill. Senators who missed the cloture vote may well have dodged a deadly political bullet.

Cap and trade supporters hope to bring the legislation forward with more support next year.

Week’s Debate Has Been Contentious

By Steven Mufson and Juliet Eilperin

If this week’s Senate debate on a proposed cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases was supposed to be a dress rehearsal for climate legislation, things are not looking too good for opening night.

The week has been marked by parliamentary maneuvers and bitter accusations over divergent estimates of the bill’s future costs. On Wednesday, a group of GOP senators asked that the clerk of the Senate read the entire 491-page bill aloud, an extremely rare request. That took more than 10 hours.

Although parliamentary maneuvers could still extend the debate into next week, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) faced the prospect of failure in a bid to end debate on amendments to the climate bill this morning. In that event, he was expected to seek withdrawal of the entire measure, to the relief of some Democrats from coal-producing or heavy industrial states.

“We are going to have Democrats voting to end debate on what they call the most important issue facing the planet and Republicans voting to continue debate on it,” said Don Stewart, communications director for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Some Democrats were worried yesterday that the GOP might try to block withdrawal of the legislation to prolong a debate that many Democrats think no longer works to their political benefit. Republicans have pounced on the high price of gasoline and have stressed that the climate legislation, by introducing a price on carbon dioxide emissions, would further raise the price of gas along with that of all other fossil fuels.

James M. Inhofe (Okla.), the top Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a statement, “Now Democrats are on record as supporting legislation that would significantly increase prices at the pump and in our homes.”

Read the rest of this article at the Washington Post.

Rather than bow before this arrogation, let’s take useful steps that aren’t destructive.

By Charles Krauthammer

I’m not a global warming believer. I’m not a global warming denier. I’m a global warming agnostic who believes instinctively that it can’t be very good to pump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere but is equally convinced that those who presume to know exactly where that leads are talking through their hats.

Predictions of catastrophe depend on models. Models depend on assumptions about complex planetary systems — from ocean currents to cloud formation — that no one fully understands. Which is why the models are inherently flawed and forever changing. The doomsday scenarios posit a cascade of events, each with a certain probability. The multiple improbability of their simultaneous occurrence renders all such predictions entirely speculative.

Yet on the basis of this speculation, environmental activists, attended by compliant scientists and opportunistic politicians, are advocating radical economic and social regulation. “The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity,” warns Czech President Vaclav Klaus, “is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism.”

Read the rest of this piece at Star Tribune.