Warmie Psychic: EU To Go Eeeeu Over Poland

Wooo Wooo Warmie, the Global Warming psychic, has conjured up the mystical (non GHG-emitting) spirits and proclaimed this prediction: Hauty EU members from Western Europe are going to snub their Eastern Europe counterparts in Poland ... and soon.

Mystical spirits? Methinks not! Wooo Wooo's just been reading the dancing electrons again:

Coal is king in Poland, the European Union's top producer, and Warsaw is poised for a fight to keep burning as much as possible in power stations, feeding its economy despite the pollution.

Sitting on an estimated 140 years' worth of coal reserves, Poland is on tenterhooks ahead of Brussels' announcement Wednesday of final proposals for how the EU's 27 member countries will have to shoulder the burden of slashing 20 percent of the bloc's greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.

"We hope the European Commission is taking into account the fact electricity production in Poland remains and, unfortunately, will remain based on coal burning, which is a polluting technology. That's a Polish specific, and there's no getting away from it," environment ministry spokeswoman Elzbieta Strucka told AFP.

Fat chance they will. EU is notorious for discounting its poorer members desire to grow their economies and better their standards of living. Call me cynical, but I think it just might be due to their desire to import cheap manufactured goods and cheap workers from Eastern Europe.

Wooo Wooo tells me that what's really funny about this whole situation is that Poland is way ahead of the effete Western Europeans when it comes to meeting Kyoto protocol targets:

Poland was able to more than meet its Kyoto Protocol obligations to curb emissions of carbon dioxide -- one of the main gases held responsible for global climate change -- largely thanks to the closure of a swathe of polluting, communist-era industrial behemoths during market economy reforms after 1989.

The country's emissions are now 32 percent lower than in 1988 -- surpassing the required six-percent cut -- despite a tripling of the number of vehicles on the road amid growing wealth since the fall of communism.

Yeah, sez the EU. So what?

But the EU's executive body, the European Commission, wants Warsaw to do even more.

In March 2007, the Commission gave Polish heavy industry a carbon dioxide emission quota of 208.5 million tonnes for 2008-2012, almost 27 percent lower than Warsaw had requested.

Meanwhile, check out this Google search on EU imports from China. All their imports -- including those from China's massively polluting steel industry -- are surging to new records.

So you slap the Poles and support the Chinese, is that the trick, EU bureaucrats? Seems to me that not much at all fair sprouts from Brussels.

Sunday Scan

Bad Karma For Islam

On October 8, Muslims in Pakistan followed in the footsteps of their Taliban brothers gang members, dynamiting the face of this wonderful 23 foot tall bas relief Buddha carved into a mountainside at Jenanabad in the Swat Valley. You can see the before and after here.

The history of the Swat Valley is one of marvelous cultural cross-pollination; a history now crushed by Islamic totalitarianism and intolerance. Tufts University history prof Gary Leupp explains (Counterpunch via HNN):

Conquered by Alexander the Greek and his Macedonians in the 320s BCE, this region became part of the Mauryan Empire. Emperor Ashoka in the mid-third century BCE promoted the spread of Buddhism here, and in the second century BCE the local Greek King Menander may have been a convert. (The Questions of Menander---supposedly a conversation between the king and a Buddhist monk---is unique among ancient Buddhist texts in its dialogue form, characteristic of Greek philosophical texts, and may have actually been composed originally in Greek.) Later the Kushan Empire centering on the Gandhara region encouraged the emergence of an Indo-Greek Buddhist style of sculpture.

The Swat Valley was at the cutting edge of one of the most extraordinary syntheses in art history: Buddhist content and classical realistic western sculpture. The Buddha, earlier represented symbolically (as a footprint), came to be depicted as a Greek deity or king, standing or seated in meditation.

The act was carried out by followers of cleric Maulana Fazlullah, who heads the "Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law," which is aligned with the Taliban. Leupp says the news was not reported widely in the West because it would have shown the spread of Taliban influence outside Afghanistan.

I doubt that was what motivated it, as our press is only too happy to show any failure in the War on Terror, and Taliban influence in the Swat Valley is already well understood. Leupp's piece is remarkably poor for a historian, blaming this on Bush, because his invasion drove the Taliban out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan.

Historians should understand the porosity of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, the longstanding social and religious cross-border ties, and the fact that the Russians created a much larger exodus in the 1980s, which further cemented cross-border melding. And Leupp should ask himself if the Taliban demolition of the great Buddhas of Bamiyan wouldn't have been followed by the destruction of the Jenanabad Buddhas much more quickly if the Taliban hadn't had their hands full trying to stay alive.

The Young and the Newsless

The writer's strike may effect the presidential election?! On its face it seems that the writers of sit coms and reality shows (you have to wonder why reality shows need writers ...) would have no impact at all on who should be the leader of the most powerful nation in this corner of the galaxy, but Adam Kelly, writing in The Phoenix, has a different viewpoint:

It’s easy to be flip about the deep implications of the Writers Guild of America strike, which is now stretching into its fourth week. After all, what’s the harm in missing a few episodes of Two and a Half Men?

But this take is too facile. In today’s media landscape, more and more serious-news coverage — particularly political news — is coming from written (read: fake) TV-news programs, with The Daily Show and The Colbert Report as exhibits A1 and A2. We’re also in the midst of a wide-open presidential campaign. And with those shows out of commission, stories that could change the course of the race haven’t been getting the attention they otherwise would.

Kelly quotes a couple surveys that back him up:

In 2004, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reported that about as many young viewers were getting their presidential-campaign news from comedy programs including The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live (21 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds who were polled) as from the nightly newscasts of NBC, ABC, and CBS (23 percent of the same group). The same study found that a whopping 61 percent of that same demographic got their campaign information from comedy and/or late-night talk shows, either regularly or occasionally.

In 2006, meanwhile, an Indiana University study of coverage of the ’04 race found that The Daily Show contained just as much substantive information as its network-news counterparts. Is it really surprising, then, that Democrat John Edwards announced his 2004 presidential candidacy on The Daily Show? Or that Republican John McCain did the same on Letterman’s show earlier this year, with fellow Republican Fred Thompson following suit on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno?

Can you imagine what these outlets would have done with the recent stories on Rudy's Byzantine billings for his Hamptons get-aways? And can you imagine a combined Stewart, Colbert, Maher, Leno and Letterman joke-a-thon not having an impact on Rudy's numbers?

It is only fitting that in this era of fakey candidates, fake news can have a real influence.

Japanese Work Ethic?

Apparently the reputation of the Japanese as notorious over-workers still has merit:

TOKYO (Reuters) - A Toyota Motor Corp employee died of overwork after logging more than 106 hours of overtime in a month, a judge ruled Friday, reversing a ministry's earlier decision not to pay compensation to his widow.

The Toyota Labor Standards Inspection office, a local branch of Japan's labor ministry, refused to pay the widow the usual compensation for a spouse's work-related death, saying the man had only logged 45 hours of overtime in the month before he died, Japanese media reported.

But the court ruled that the employee had worked far more than that .... The employee, who was working at a Toyota factory in central Japan, died of irregular heartbeat in February 2002 after passing out in the factory around 4 a.m.

Perhaps this can best be viewed as seppuku (hari kari) with a timeclock.

High-Priced Liberalism

San Francisco is facing a whopper of a $229 million budget deficit and there's only one target for the blame. And it's not the housing slump.

Much of the projected $229 million budget deficit that now preoccupies San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom was created with his blessing - and with his full knowledge that the city didn't have the dough to cover it.

Newsom and his aides, however, didn't let the cat out of the bag until after his re-election last month. (SF Chron)

Newsome supported a $28 million public transit program and a four-year, 24% pay hike for police, fire and nurse city employees, all the while knowing the usual padding -- a $100 million budget carry-over -- was non-existent.

Asked how Newsome felt about this economic Balaklava, an aide said hizonner "doesn't even have one tiny morsel of regret."

Liberalism is never having to say you're sorry.

Far, Far From Kyoto

Orange Punch, the OCRegister's opinion blog, passes along this tidbit:

“Strikingly, three Chinese power companies, South Africa’s giant Eskom, and India’s NTPC all generate more CO2 emissions than any single U.S. firm—underscoring the shared challenge posed by global climate change,” according to U.S. News and World Report. “The largest, Huaneng Power International of China, has emissions 68 percent higher than American Electric Power’s.”

What do you want to bet that the U.S. will remain the principle target of global warming alarmists?

Good bet.

Dr. Doom

We conclude this week's Sunday Scan on a note of terror, calling your attention to an LA Times op/ed by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, authors of The Nuclear Jihad.

How nice that this piece ran in the liberal LAT, where blinders to the threat of global jihad abound. Frantz and Collins lay out in frightening detail the story of Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the man who sold Pakistan's nuclear technology to Libya and Iran, and Iran's subsequent efforts to mask its true nuclear ambitions from international scrutiny.

Do read the piece, even though it doesn't include anything new to people who have tracked this issue in the blogosphere. What's illuminating about the piece is that what we know -- Iran's lies and cover-ups, the true extent of their nuclear program -- is now becoming more broadly covered in MSM outlets read by Libs.

Will they take note or just hide under their "blame everything on Bush" denials?

Aussie Vote Heard In Kyoto, Bali

The apparent defeat of Australian Liberal (i.e., Conservative) prime minister John Howard (fittingly on the right in this photo) by Labor's Kevin Rudd has its Iraq implications, but may be more significant in global warming politics.

Howard is, of course, a Bush ally on both. Rudd, looking reality in the eye like our serious Dem Prez candidates are, has not made any rash promises about pulling out of Iraq; rather, he talks only of pulling out some troops. Nancy and Harry, are you paying attention?

On global warming, though, Rudd has promised to sign the Kyoto Protocol, even though the protocol would bring massive reductions in international productivity with virtually no signficant atmospheric changes. Still, with Australia presumably joining the lemmings, Bush will find himself even more isolated when world leaders gather in Bali to discuss how to replace Kyoto when it expires in 2012.

Howard has overseen eleven and a half years of an unprecedented 17-year boom in the Australian economy. Much of the economy's strength can be attributed to Howard's undoing of Labor's big-government restrictions on the economy in favor of a free market approach. The results have been stunning -- so successful that the biggest economic worrys Australia faces is how to manage the boom.

Rudd has promised to follow in Howard's laissez faire footsteps -- but how can you do that while imposing mandatory limits on your economy, as Kyoto requires? Show me an economy without greenhouse gases and I'll show you a failing economy.

Before Rudd tanks the Australian economy in the name of Climate Change Fundamentalism, he might want to question the dogma of the faith a bit, as Malcolm Duncan did recently in Australia's Web Diary. Reading through the UN's IPCC report, Duncan wrote:

Let’s look at how reasonable this science is. Despite all the rhetoric, as all good science does, this document is hedged with qualifications.

First there is the assertion (p 2):

Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values determined from ice cores (my emphasis)

Yet the explanation given includes this:

The annual carbon dioxide concentration growth-rate was larger during the last 10 years (1995-2005 average: 1.9 ppm per year) than it has been since the beginning of continuous atmospheric measurements (1960-2005 average 1.4 ppm per year) although there is year-to-year variability in growth rates

That’s right: they’ve only been doing serious continuous measurements since 1960.

A footnote says:

Climate Change in IPCC usage refers to any change in climate over time, whether due to natural variability or as a result of human activity.

Hmmm, so we’re not necessarily talking about human activity as a factor. In the rest of the report, that just gets glossed over and of course it is ignored by every Climate Change nutter activist and journalist who says anything about the issue. (hat-tip: Greenie Watch)

Duncan's piece goes on through quite a few more wiggle-words and conflicting statements, to the point one must wonder why Australians would willingly buy into the global warming hysteria and put their economic well-being at risk.

In Rudd's election, we have the set up of a perfect global warming experiment. We won't be measuring greenhouse gases; we'll be tracking an economy that was healthy as it enters the world of mandatory controls required to comply with Kyoto. Will it stay healthy? Will it fail?

Hint: Most Kyoto signatories have simply ignored the protocol's requirements, so my guess is the Australian experiment may well prove inconclusive.