Offshore wind power projects pave the way to frequent blackouts

EDGAR L. GAERTNER

Thousands of bureaucrats are preparing for another cushy climate confab in Cancun — while U.S. Senators Bignaman, Brownback and Reid are contemplating how to ram renewable energy standards through a lame-duck session of Congress.  If they’re wise, American voters and congressmen will pay extra careful attention to the awful dilemma of German climate and energy policy, as exemplified by recent events and make sure their country doesn’t make the same “green” mistakes Germany did.

Barely two months after the inauguration ceremony for Germany’s first pilot offshore wind farm, “Alpha Ventus” in the North Sea, all six of the newly installed wind turbines were completely idle due to gearbox damage.  Two turbines must be replaced entirely, the other four repaired.

Friends of the project, especially Germany’s environment minister, Norbert Roettgen, talked of “teething problems.”  The problem is far more serious than that, for wind turbines in the high seas are extremely expensive for power consumers, even when they run smoothly.  When they don’t the problem intensifies.  Germany could face blackouts — a new dark age.

The Alpha Ventus failures created intense pressure for Areva Multibrid, a subsidiary of the semi-public French nuclear power company Areva.  Every “standstill day,” with the expensive turbines standing idle and not generating a single kilowatt hour of electricity causes lost revenue.  Environmental economist and meteorologist Thomas Heinzow of the University of Hamburg estimated the operator’s revenue shortfall at almost $6,500 (5,000 euro) per turbine per standstill day.  Giving greater pause to Areva was the certainly not unreasonable fear that the already skittish investors could get cold feet and wander off in search of less risky ventures.

My friend Ernst Georg Beck died this week after a long battle with cancer. Ernst Beck was a biology teacher at the Merian technical grammar school in Freiburg and co-founder of the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) in Jena. He was a teacher of the old school, whom nobody could lead up the garden path. If a statement of politicians did not fit into its solid scientific conception of the world, he examined it by intensive study of international technical literature and, if possible, by own experiments. His website www.biokurs.de is still a treasure trove for everybody, who prepares for examines or finding answers to current scientific questions.

by Edgar L. Gärtner

In early September 2010 the German government has presented its draft of the new energy plan . When reading this concept one feels strongly reminded of a common definition of ‘totalitarianism’ stated in Paul Berman’s ‘Terror and liberalism’ : „Mass mobilisation politics for unreachable goals. “, because this plan allegedly sets the direction into a environmentally-friendly, reliable and affordably energy supply, however  is based on poorly functioning techniques and on calculations that don’t add up.
An important way to reach the goal of a reliable and payable power supply is the extension of the operation periods of the 17 remaining German nuclear power plants on in average 12 years, which was decided after hard struggles. Some trade associations showed up more than satisfactory, because this was what they required. Maybe this was also the goal of Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel. The later known „secret treaty“ between the government and the four German power oligopolies, which is to protect the nuclear power station operators against unprofitable technical retrofits and to ensure the government with additional revenues in case of strong electricity tariff increases also points in that direction. In this case one could forget the rest of to so-called energy plan.

Following the suggestions of her strong emergency committee, WHO General-Director Margaret Chan now officially declares the swine flu epidemic to be over. This official statement was made 15 months after an allegedly new flu virus H1N1 was notified in Mexico and after having alerted a pandemic in June 2009. According to official data, 18,400 humans have fallen victim to the flu since spring 2009 in about 200 countries. That appears  impressing at first sight , but is however  little in comparison to the number of humans, who suffer with the cold season influenza-like infections year-in, year-out. To say nothing about the million-number of victims of a “real” influenza epidemic. The official statistics of the WHO thus confirms  the view that H1N1 is a rather harmless variant of the summer flu.

by Edgar L. Gärtner

We neither need the Maya calendar, nor the prophecies of Nostradamus or Malachias, in order to be able to clearly recognize that the end of our intimate world approaches. Not only around Christmas 2012, but at the end of the current year, the cracks in the walls of the welfare-state organised European house will be so significant that the danger of collapse will be obvious. With this, it also becomes clear that it does not require global warming, earth quakes or other natural catastrophes, to get closer to the apocalypse. The galloping reality loss of our political class is sufficient to completely bring the structure of the world in disorder.

By Edgar L. Gärtner

Sophisticated self-deception

As already mentioned, the end of the Copenhagen climate summit at the end of 2009 demonstrated that the climatic political course of the European Union and particularly Germany lost  its attractiveness in the world enormously.In view of the fact that Europe’s economy has stagnated as the only world region in the 21st Century and is barely able to cope with the challenges of the financial crisis, more and more state heads do not like to follow the climate political out-ride of Germany. The socialist government of Australia has right now suspended the execution of its CO2 reduction plans because of the uncertainty of a Kyoto follow-up, according to Wall Street Journal on 28^thApril 2010. Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel has enough political power experience to be able to recognize, what flowers to an outrider, who nobody follows. Thus she now obviously prepares a careful turn forwards, like Spiegel-online states in its English edition dated from 26 April 2010.

by Edgar L. Gärtner

Just in time before the first business failures caused by several-day-long flight losses, the air traffic in Western and Central Europe slowly got off the ground after the complete flight ban. A good opportunity to take stock and to summarise what one can learn from the political crisis caused by a comparatively small volcanic eruption. I would like to leave the presumption of a possible story behind the story of the Icelandic ash cloud to one side and focus on what generally accessible media communicated. It grabs one’s attention that the problem is not the volcanic eruption, but the inability of the European and national authorities to deal with it reasonably.

by Edgar L. Gärtner

There were no significant steps taken toward a new global waming treaty at the April meeting in the Bonn Maritim Hotel of two ad hoc working groups of the UNFCCC parties. The official purpose of the conference was for the industrialized nations to negotiate additional obligations on the carbon dioxide reductions and their long-term co-operation with poorer countries. Two thousand delegates met in the conference centre’s elegant halls. NGOs demonstrated on a pile of broken glass

Climate Politics Means Chaos on the German Power Market

by Edgar L. Gärtner

“There is at present no other industry in Germany, which is torn up and directionless like the electricity industry. Reason is the dominance of environmental aspects in the energy and especially in the electricity politics.” Thus begins an analysis of the questionable developments on the German electricity market published in the business section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) on 25th March 2010. Mind you, it concerns not experimentally provable environmental and health problems like ruining of landscapes through high voltage routes or through electrical smog, but the so-called climate protection politics, unable to define which climate is to be protected, i.e. pure, nihilistically motivated political arbitrariness. The FAZ article makes understandable that an energy concept from a single source, as demanded by the economy and promised still for the current year by the Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel will not be realised as long as the energy policy is determined by ideological reasons and in the interest of the parasitic wind and solar lobby with focus on carbon-dioxide-free solutions.

Water is low on the United Nation’s priority list 

by Edgar L. Gärtner

“Clean water for a healthy world“ is the theme of today’s 18th annual international World Water day. UN general secretary Ban Ki-Moon did not miss out the opportunity to point out that clean water is a scarce commodity on our watery planet and is becoming scarcer due to climate change. 80% of the infectious diseases in developing countries are caused by contaminated drinking water, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). One and a half million children reportedly die every year through the consumption of contaminated water. If the UN took its (alleged) assignment to focus on the most pressing global problems seriously, drinking water supply would have top priority.

What a pity that my book ‘Eco-Nihilism’, published in 2007 in Germany, has never been translated in English, because you can find there a special sub-chapter on the dangers of ‘Post Normal Science’ (PNS). Recently James Delingpole in the British ‘Spectator’ and in his ‘Telegraph’-Blog  found that the concept of PNS, developed already in 1991 by Marxist Philosophers Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz, was probably the basis of the Global Warming deception that was revealed, last November,through the publication of confidential e-Mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (‘Climategate’).

“Climategate” as an argument for a World Environment Organization

The sudden but not unexpected resignation of the head of the UN Climate Secretariat in Bonn Ivo de Boer is feeding speculation about an imminent collapse of the whole global warming swindle. Only a few days earlier, Phil Jones, a leading member of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former director of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, substantially admitted in the British newspaper “Daily Mail”that the accusations on the basis of leaked confidential e-mails from CRU (“Climategate“) were well founded, i.e. that the decline of the world’s average temperature since ten to fifteen years was hidden by CRU and that the often quoted “hockey stick”-temperature curve is no proof of man made global warming but a fake.

At the same time, eminent political leaders like Maurice Strong, Al Gore, José Manuel Barroso, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Herman van Rompuy (all members of the mysterious ‘Bilderberg‘ Club), took the fiasco of the Copenhagen Climate Conference as opportunity to look for alternative ways in order to meet their aim of total management of the whole planet Earth.

When I was writing these lines I received a piece of news that an US senate committee had to postpone a debate on Global Warming because of an icy snow storm over the US East coast . However, this weather capriole only confirms what more and more people think. They do no longer believe in man-made global warming. “We are witnessing the Berlin Wall moment in the global warming regime. The statist cabal that has ruled the climate debate since the UN IPCC’s inception in 1988 is now tumbling down before our eyes. The so-called ‘gold-standard’ of scientific review turns out to be counterfeit.” This is the conclusion of our friend Marc Morano from the “Climategate”, “Glaciergate”, “Amazongate” and so on scandals that caused the rapid decline of the scientific reputation and credibility of the Nobel prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its chairman Rajendra Pachauri.

The French government under the ever-energized President Nicolas Sarkozy became aware at the beginning of the year that it was threatened to sit on more than 90 million doses of Swine flu vaccine, hastily ordered last year to face an allegedly advancing pandemic. Only five out of currently more than 60 million French people got vaccinated to date against the exaggerated threat of a planetary swine flu pandemic. According to estimates by physicians, at the same time more than 20 million French people got immunized against the new flu variant free of charge, by responding to infection with barely perceptible slight flu symptoms. More than one billion euros seemed to be set in the sand. In the German federal states, the situation is similar but not quite as bad as in France. Since the ordered batches are in part not yet produced, France and Germany managed to cancel at least part of their orders. Especially in France the following questions remain unanswered: Why almost 100 million vaccines were ordered – three times more than what would have been necessay for a reasonable coverage of the population? Why did the government invest simultaneously on a vast storage of the controversial flu drug Tamiflu (one third of total world reserves!)? Why were expensive gas masks purchased, but only available for top officials and managers?

As you know the EU is phasing out traditional incandescent light bulbs in order to “save energy and the climate”. Consumers are obliged to successively replace the simple and cheap incandescent lamps once invented by Thomas Alva Edison by relatively complex and expensive fluorescent lamps with electronic stuff. Perhaps you do not know that EU Commission’s decision was less guided by scientific or ecological concerns than by the lobbying of manufacturers who claimed that “eco-friendly” light bulbs can save up to € 190 per year.  Is this for real?

Par Edgar L. Gärtner

Carbon Fraud is paving the way for a dictatorial world government

While EU representatives are praising the European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) in Copenhagen as panacea, European law enforcement agency Europol is revealing that carbon credit fraud has caused in the past 18 months more than 5 bn euros damage for European taxpayers. In some countries up to 90 percent of the whole trading volume was caused by fraudulent activities. It is easy and perfectly legal for small dealers who have experience in computer and cell phone trading to buy European Unit Allowances (EUA) in one EU member state without VAT and to sell them in another country while taking the usual VAT rate from the buyer. The operation becomes illegal when the trader does not transfer the kept back VAT to the local tax authority. All and above the buyer can resell the certificates abroad and get the VAT reimbursed by the local tax authority.

While in the US Senate the disclosed confidential e-mails and documents on the web, regardless of how it occurred, is expected to pull the plug on “cap and trade” legislation, EU governments continue to walk straight ahead, although the expression “Climategate” is meanwhile even known on Wikipedia . The new German environment minister Norbert Röttgen […]

by Edgar L. Gärtner “Climategate” is perhaps not the end of the global warming myth. But it is quite possible that British star blogger James Delingpole was not premature but right when he started his first blog after the appearance of 1079 rather confidential e-mails and 72 documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research […]

By Edgar L. Gärtner, Frankfurt

After the APEC meeting in Singapore there is nearly nobody left on earth who believes that world leaders will sooner or later find a compromise on massive CO2 reductions. Not everybody regrets this. There are scientists casting serious doubts on the IPCC’s assertion that humankind is facing unprecedented levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. The IPCC’s warning is based on continuous photoaccoustic CO2 measurements on Hawaiian volcano Mauna Loa since 1958. Since then the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has risen one year after another.  Al Gore ‘s famous PowerPoint presentation uses the Mauna Loa curve to demonstrate the need for sharp reductions in human made CO2 emissions throuh emissions trading.

by Edgar L. Gärtner (Frankfurt) Celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 2009 ancient soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, now president of the NGO “Green Cross International”, wrote an editorial for The London Times . In this article Gorbachev is, perhaps involuntarily, confirming the hypothesis that the real aim […]