Links

Benny Peiser: The EU Green Hell | The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF)

The European Union’s utopian scheme of transforming itself into a green energy powerhouse is faltering as its fantasy plan is colliding with reality. As the EU’s economic and financial crisis deepens and unemployment continues to rise, what used to be an almost all-embracing green consensus is beginning to disintegrate.

The spectre of green stagnation, the loss of competitiveness and economic decline has replaced 20 years of collective wishful thinking. The green folly was founded on two apocalyptic fears: firstly, that global warming was an urgent threat that needed to be prevented at all cost, and secondly, that the world was running out of fossil fuels, which meant that oil and gas would inexorably become ever more expensive. Both conjectures, however, turned out to be bogus.

Oxford University won't take funding from tobacco companies. But Shell's OK | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian

In 1998, the vice-chancellors of the UK's universities decided that they would no longer take money for cancer research from tobacco firms. Over the past few days I have asked the Shell professor of earth sciences at Oxford, the university itself and the umbrella body Universities UK to explain the ethical difference between taking tobacco money for cancer research and taking fossil fuel money for energy research. None of these great heads, despite my repeated attempts to engage them, were prepared even to attempt an answer.

- Bishop Hill blog - Upholders do climate sensitivity. Badly.

Meanwhile, Justin Gillis, the dark green blogger at the New York Times seems to be struggling with the whole mathematics thing:

Melting Ice Opens Fight Over Sea Routes for Arctic Debate - Bloomberg

New passages linking Asia to America and Europe will be as revolutionary as was the 1869 opening of the Suez Canal, which boosted European trade with Asia by connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and shortening the journey for cargo vessels, according to President Olafur R. Grimsson of Iceland, home to the world’s biggest glaciers and a member of the council.
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The Arctic Ocean may become a frigid slush of fresh and saltwater in the summer within three to five years, according to a White House estimate.

UPDATE 1: UN faces uphill battle to reduce global airline emissions - Reuters News - Point Carbon

MONTREAL/WASHINGTON, May 13 (Reuters) - Little progress has been made in a United Nations' effort to craft an agreement to lower greenhouse gas emissions from international air travel, raising doubts that its civil aviation body can deliver a final resolution by a September target date, several government officials said on Monday.