Wind power "conspiracy"

An example of the usual Leftist "ad hominem" attack below: If you cannot attack the argument, attack the arguer. The author is Wendy Frew, a frequent "Environment Reporter" for Australia's "Sydney Morning Herald". If I were to argue as Wendy does, I might say that she is obviously a mere journalist who is practiced in how to smear but is lost when it comes to technical knowledge and understanding

Tactics used by anti-wind farm activists in Victoria - including making misleading statements about wind energy - are being copied by some groups in NSW. Research by the Herald has found that a loose association of anti-wind farm groups in Victoria that goes by the name of Landscape Guardians, or Coastal Guardians, relies heavily for its information and tactics on the British anti-wind farm pressure group Country Guardians. That group was set up by Sir Bernard Ingham, press secretary to Margaret Thatcher when she was prime minister. Sir Bernard is now a director of Supporters of Nuclear Energy, and a former consultant to British Nuclear Fuels.

Coastal Guardians Victoria has also worked closely with the now-discredited British botanist David Bellamy {I wonder who it was who "discredited" him? Last I heard he wasn't feeling discredited!], who believes climate change is a myth. He visited Victoria's South Gippsland in 2004 to campaign against wind farms.

The spokesman for Coastal Guardians of Victoria, Tim Le Roy, said he was not worried people would get the wrong idea about his group's connection with Mr Bellamy and Country Guardians and their links to the nuclear industry. "I think the wind industry and its proponents have done the nuclear industry the greatest favour they could have asked for," he said. He believed wind energy would not help cut greenhouse gas emissions generated by energy generation.

Mr Le Roy said he had "a fairly open mind about climate change" and added people in Victoria were right to be angry about wind power because the Bracks Government had caved in to developers and ignored community concerns. "If these windmills were doing any good it would mitigate the concerns."

Mr Le Roy said wind power would not work because it needed back-up power (the national electricity grid is, in fact, already served by back-up power); green groups were split over wind power (all of Australia's major environment groups support wind power); and that wind turbines did not work because they could not store electricity. However, there is no effective way to store large amounts of electricity, regardless of whether it comes from coal or wind, energy experts say.

In NSW, one of the groups using the Landscape Guardians moniker is based in the village of Taralga. Its members are challenging a local wind farm project in the Land and Environment Court. Their president, Paul Miskelly, worked for the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation for 32 years and has given talks on nuclear power.

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TV Ads Seek to Upstage Gore 'Global Warming' Movie

If I were to argue as Wendy Frew (above) does, I would reduce the article below to a simple statement to the effect that Al Gore is a sore loser who cannot let go of the stupid global warming treaty he negotiated but which the U.S. Senate roundly rejected

The latest chapter in the "global warming" debate involves a movie based on the climate change warnings of former Vice President Al Gore and the efforts of a Washington, D.C., think tank to convince Americans that such warnings represent "alarmism." The movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," which opens in select theaters next week and nationwide on June 9, is narrated by the former vice president and is based on the slide show that Gore presented across the country alleging that carbon dioxide emissions are causing widespread damage to the planet. "In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality," Gore told Grist Magazine when asked about the dangers of "global warming." The film's website adds that "humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb."

But ahead of the film's release, the free-market environmental think tank, Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), Thursday rolls out a new television ad campaign criticizing the liberal environmental attack on carbon dioxide emissions. Fuels that produce carbon dioxide "have freed us from a world of back-breaking labor, lighting up our lives, allowing us to create and move the things we need, the people we love," the narrator in one of the ads intones.

The ad, without mentioning Gore or anyone else by name, closes with the narrator declaring that "they call it pollution, we call it life." It is one of two 60-second television spots that CEI produced and plans to air in 14 U.S. cities from Thursday until May 28. "Claims of looming climate disaster due to energy use are unfounded; our ad campaign is a call for balance in discussions of global warming," said Marlo Lewis, senior fellow in environmental policy at CEI, during a Wednesday news conference. "We have to recognize that there really is a debate over whether climate change is a crisis," Sam Kazman, general counsel for CEI, added. "Al Gore is at the forefront of calling for the regulatory equivalent of a war." As a result of Gore's efforts, Kazman complained that "our energy is under attack, our mobility is under attack."

In his interview with Grist Magazine, Gore said Americans are caught in a "category 5 denial" of "global warming, which he said "is an enormous obstacle to any discussion of solutions. "Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem," Gore told the magazine. The website promoting Gore's film claims that "if the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced."

But Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in an April 12 op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal that from his days as a U.S. senator, Gore tried to "bully" scientists who disagreed with him on the threat of climate change. "In 1992, [Gore] ran two congressional hearings during which he tried to bully dissenting scientists, including myself, into changing our views and supporting his climate alarmism," wrote Lindzen. The scientific community, he stated, did not complain "when Mr. Gore, as vice president, tried to enlist Ted Koppel in a witch hunt to discredit anti-alarmist scientists, a request that Mr. Koppel deemed publicly inappropriate. "And they were mum when subsequent articles and books by Ross Gelbspan libelously labeled scientists who differed with Mr. Gore as stooges of the fossil-fuel industry," Lindzen wrote.

The advanced screening of "An Inconvenient Truth" at the Sundance Film Festival was met with rave reviews. The Film Festival's guide calls the documentary a "gripping story" with "a visually mesmerizing presentation" that is "activist cinema at its very best."

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KYOTO LOGIC: JOB LOSSES LOOM AS UK MANUFACTURING COMPANIES PLAN TO RELOCATE ABROAD

Manufacturing firms are operating in an increasingly tough and competitive environment. Over the past year another obstacle to competitiveness has emerged - a considerable rise in the cost of energy. Companies already have to deal with a range of cost pressures, including raw materials (particularly steel and petroleum products), insurance and pension costs. While some of these, such as rising steel and oil prices, are felt internationally, cost increases specific to the UK erode profit margins and competitiveness.

EEF has therefore surveyed its members to discover the extent of the recent price increases in both gas and electricity experienced by manufacturers, and to identify what measures, if any, companies are adopting to reduce the impact of higher utility bills on their business. We conducted a similar survey in 2004, which showed that companies were beginning to feel the effect of rising energy prices. The situation has deteriorated this year, with virtually no company left unaffected by rising prices. Our results are based on responses from 371 members.

Only a few years ago UK firms were paying less for energy than their European counterparts. This situation has been reversed and evidence now confirms that large industrial users in the UK currently face both the highest gas prices and amongst the highest electricity prices in Europe, despite the fact that the UK has a fully liberalised gas market and remains the largest producer of gas in the EU.

Energy accounts for approximately 3% of total input costs in manufacturing, although this can vary widely from sector to sector. In the metals and chemicals subsectors, gas and electricity costs can account for over 10% of total input costs. The rapid rise in energy costs is causing problems for manufacturers in adjusting to the increase in prices. Related to this is the problem of passing on costs for firms that are tied to contracts with customers. For energy-intensive firms this can cause substantial cash flow problems.

These costs, combined with others, have also increased the pressure on profitability, thus hitting the investment plans of some companies. In addition, some firms with foreign parents in energy-intensive sectors take the view that the uncertain cost situation and the squeeze on profitability mean that it is more sensible to load production to sites outside the UK. Though it is unlikely to be the sole factor driving the decision, the steep rise in energy prices may provide the final push for companies to consider investing elsewhere in the world.

EEF has been carrying out extensive research on what factors have been driving the recent price increases. These include:

* higher world oil and gas prices;

* a deteriorating gas supply situation linked with market distortions in Continental Europe; and

* faster pass-through of the impact of the EU emissions trading scheme (ETS) in the liberalised UK energy market.

Source (PDF).






Australia's Prime Minister says nuke power inevitable

Soaring oil prices would push Australia more quickly towards the "inevitable" use of nuclear power, Prime Minister John Howard said today. Mr Howard has also indicated the Government might have to overhaul its 18-month-old energy policy which has a heavy focus on the continuing use of fossil fuels for power generation. The Prime Minister made the comments ahead of talks with the Government of Canada - a country which with Australia holds some of the world's biggest uranium deposits.

Mr Howard said the broad use of nuclear power in Australia was inevitable and the push for its uptake was gathering momentum. "It could be closer than some people would have thought a short while ago," he told Southern Cross Broadcasting from the Canadian capital Ottawa. "I hope that we have an intense debate on the subject over the months ahead. "And the whole atmosphere in Washington, the atmosphere everywhere I go created by the high level of oil prices is transforming the debate on energy and alternative energy sources."

Mr Howard signalled changes to the government energy white paper, released in 2004. "Only 18 months ago we put out an energy white paper," he said. "Now, that white paper was a very comprehensive statement about policy but it was based on certain assumptions regarding the price of oil and those assumptions are certainly very different now. "And you have to ask the question ... as to whether if the assumptions about the price of oil are different, should the assumptions on which the policy is based be changed?"

Asked if the issue could be addressed within a few years, Mr Howard said many countries would increasingly resort to nuclear power. "And obviously as a major holding of uranium reserves that has potential benefits for Australia, not only here but also through our export sales," he said. The timing of Australia's uptake of nuclear would be governed by economic considerations, Mr Howard said. "Clearly the environmental advantages of nuclear power are there for all to see - it's cleaner and greener and therefore some of the people in the past who've opposed it should support it," he said.

Mr Howard held talks with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper about uranium mining and nuclear energy in Ottawa today.

Source






N-boost for Russia too

Russia is to commission at least two reactors a year beginning in 2010 as part of a massive effort to expand its nuclear energy sector. Sergei Kiriyenko, head of the Federal Atomic Energy Agency, said on Wednesday that the program would start with the construction next year of a new nuclear power plant with four reactors near St Petersburg - next to the existing nuclear plant in Sosnovy Bor.

Nuclear power now accounts for about 17 per cent of Russia's electricity generation, and the Kremlin has set a target to raise its share to one-quarter by 2030. Mr Kiriyenko said recently that Russia would have to build a total of 40 new reactors to fulfil the goal.

According to the World Nuclear Association 16 countries, not including Iran, now have proposals to build 107 new civil reactors. The majority are in Asia. Russia's announcement came as the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, faced cabinet-level opposition over his plans for a new generation of nuclear power stations following Treasury predictions of "eye-wateringly large" costs.

Source

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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