In a fantasy world of his own

Two events yesterday, each in their own way, struck chill in the hearts of ordinary mortals – as opposed to the increasingly vapid chattering classes whose detachment from reality seems to grow with each passing day.

The first was more immediate and recognisable - if long expected – the price hike in gas and electricity from another two utilities, following up from British Gas and EDF. Most consumers are now resigned to increases in their energy costs of up to 35 percent, and not a few are seriously asking how they are going to afford to heat their homes.

It is perhaps small wonder that retail outlets are seeing soaring sales of thermal underwear, winter coats and warm knitwear, demonstrating that the public at least have a firmer grip of reality than the chatterati.

The second of the events was the offering by Mr Nick Clegg, leader of the well-named Lib Dims, of an "energy policy" of such fatuity that, had we been able to boast of a media where the combined headcount divided by the sum of their individual IQs gave a number less than one, they would have laughed it out of court.

According to this cretinously stupid man – who, against enormous competition, is obviously bidding for life-time tenure of the post of Westminster village idiot – there is "no evidence" of a "terrible energy gap" with the lights going to go out in the middle of the next decade.

Considering how, clearly, the lights went out in Mr Clegg's dim little brain some time ago, it is a moot point as to how or whether he would notice the difference but, that notwithstanding, his "analysis" of the problem is that our energy mix "is not green enough and we're over-dependent on oil and gas from parts of the world that aren't very reliable."

With thus less than half a watt of residual luminosity, the prescription a la Clegg is to increase greatly production of wave, wind and solar power, buoyed by a staggeringly banal expectation that, with this "magic mix", we could become net exporters of renewable energy by 2050. And how, precisely he plans to increase generating capacity to the 120 GW which we are expected to need by 2020, he does not even begin to say.

Back in the real world, however – the one currently uninhabited by any politician – the situation daily begins to look more and more bleak. This probably explains why so many politicians prefer the comfort zones of their own backsides (or each other's as the case may be).

From the other side of the world comes news via Bloomberg that in Asia liquefied natural gas prices may climb about 80 percent this year "as new projects get delayed and countries from Indonesia to Egypt curb exports."

Apparently, production at plants in Russia, Yemen and Indonesia, with a combined capacity of about 24 million metric tons, will be delayed until next year instead of starting in the second half. Supplies will be limited "just as South Korea increases imports 3.5 percent and Japan boosts purchases after an earthquake shut down its largest nuclear plant."

Thus, while the dismal Clegg is soaring into his fantasy of a bright new 2050 - by which time his nascent Alzheimer's will be fully established – Andy Flowers, a former executive at BP's LNG business is telling us that this winter "can be very tight," adding that, "There's not going to be much supply available."

This is borne out by other reports. For instance, the Indonesian LNG plant at Bontang is lagging behind its contracted volume, with the authorities deciding to divert some production to fertiliser manufacture. So tight is production here that Pertamina, Indonesia's state oil company, is planning to cut supplies to a group in Japan by 75 percent after its contract expires in 2010.

Yet Japan's imports rose 6.2 percent to 34.67 million tons in the first six months, according to data compiled by the Finance Ministry. The country, which imports almost all its gas, bought 66.8 million tons of LNG in 2007.

Furthermore, Japan, already the world's biggest LNG user, is taking an even bigger volume. It grew in July by 7.4 percent to 1.75 million tons from a year earlier. Now, in the shape of the Tokyo Electric Power Company, it wants still more, having increased its consumption by about 18 percent to 19.9 million tons in the year ended 31 March after an earthquake last July shut its Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear plant.

The Korea Gas Corp., which imports about 95 percent of South Korea's needs, is also on the look-out for more LNG and plans to increase its purchases to 26.4 million tons this year, leaving commentators to observe that Japan and South Korea "will pay whatever it takes to get the fuel." They do not have access to pipeline gas and the alternative is oil-based fuel.

This is just one tiny snapshot of a deteriorating global energy supply situation which comes to a head this winter just as the UK will be forced to acquire additional stocks on the spot market, at a price which is likely to make the current inflated prices look like a fond memory.

Yet, imbued with an ego that exceeds his intelligence quotient by many magnitudes, the sorry apology for a human being that is the leader of the Lib-Dims is so far from the land of the living that he has not the first idea of the nature of the crisis screaming down on us like a steam engine on fire. One can, therefore, only indulge in one's own fantasies, usually based on imaginative things to do with the wind farms that Clegg would wish to foist upon us all.

These fantasies may not keep us warm, or even make us feel better, but the prospect of causing that much pain at least affords us some small compensation, the only regret being that it will not be real.

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An institutional breakdown

If we came away with nothing else out of the constitutional Lisbon treaty, it was an appreciation of how much the "colleagues" value their institutions, this being their preoccupation during this – and previous – treaty negotiations.

It is quite remarkable, therefore, that the rabidly Europhile Euractive can apparently view with equanimity what amounts to a complete breakdown of the established institutional order of the European Union, over relations with Russia.

In the natural order of things, EU external relations should be handled by the presidency, currently in the "safe" hands of M. Sarkozy, aided and abetted by the High Representative, Javier Solana, the baton handed on through successive presidencies until the matter is resolved (or not).

What Euractiv is embracing, however, is the growing view that German chancellor Angela Merkel should "step up and take the lead within the EU to resolve tensions over Georgia and reshape the West's relations with Moscow".

In one way, this is a completely logical view. By any account, Sarkozy has spectacularly failed to manage the Georgia crisis and, with clearly a better rapport existing between Merkel and president Medvedev (pictured) – to say nothing of shared geopolitical interests – it makes sense for the chancellor to front negotiations.

The point is, though, that Merkel is an interested party, with a very keen interest, not least, in maintaining the flow of gas, oil and coal from Russia. With Germany closing down its nuclear industry and its coal mines, without the active support of Russia, Germany no longer has an economy.

Yet, the whole ethos of the EU institutional system is that it should be "above politics", managed by disinterested "Platonic guardians" who are looking after the interests of the Union as a whole, without deference to the needs or ambitions of any one or group of member states. Whatever Merkel's merits, no one can accuse her of being disinterested.

On a more practical level, the very last person (or country) we want representing our interest is Germany. Having mismanaged our own energy policy, we too are reliant on Russian gas and are likely to become more so – and have also an unhealthy reliance on Russian coal. Merkel, therefore – in a very real sense – is hardly a "partner" but a serious competitor in the race to secure increasingly scarce and expensive energy resources.

Any idea that Merkel will, in representing the EU in its relations with Russia, will look after our interest lies strictly in the land of the fairies.

In this, history offers a very poor precedent when, in the post Yom Kippur oil crisis, individual member states broke away from the community interest and sought their own salvations. At the time, Jean Monnet and his integrationalist colleagues deplored this exhibition of national self-interest, calling for the rapid development of still more institutional structures to remove this undesirable trait.

Some 35 years later, the institutional structures are still not in place and, rather that pursue them with more vigour – not that they would be of any use – the "colleagues" seem quite content to abandon them altogether in their search for answers.

The significance of this cannot be overstated. Effectively, it represents a loss of faith in the drivers of European integration, with politics reverting to the classic model of Great Powers resolving issues between them, while the lesser powers pick the crumbs from the table after the pie has been shared out.

What is different now, though, is that the UK has absented itself from the game, yet we are still bound by the institutional ethos of the Union when it is clearly no longer functioning. This is the worst of all possible worlds.

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Those Olympic Games

Some of our readers might think that we are failing in our duty to comment on the world by ignoring (well, almost) the big event of the summer - the Olympic Games in Beijing. Well, perish the thought. Not only has my colleague written on the effects the Games have been having on the people of China outside the Olympic village but I have put up a posting on the BrugesGroupBlog about the EU and Olympics.

A couple of things need to be added. One is about China. Many of the factories that are now idle were closed down in the weeks before the Games started in order to cut down on pollution. Whether it worked we shall find out when the sports folk come back home and find their lungs functioning rather less well than before.

Secondly, I should like to pass on an idea suggested by one of our readers: Russia is not doing terribly well in the medals' table. Those of us who recall the old struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States for top position find this new multipolar Olympic table rather weird.

Well, suggested said reader, is that not the real reason for Russia deciding to reconquer its old empire? To restore her position in the Olympic table next time (that would be 2012 in London)? As I recall, the Ukrainians used to do quite well in track events. No wonder Russia is looking to that country now.

A religion without borders

They were banned in the European Union in 2005 and now it is the turn of California to do the deadly deed.

We are referring to lead weights used for balancing car wheels and, according to the LA Times, they are to be phased out in California by end of 2009.

Such is the grip of the greenies that it is going further even than the arch-sponsor of scares, the EPA. Since it is not actually banning them - instead, the agency is sponsoring a "voluntary" initiative to reduce their use – the Oakland-based Center for Environmental Health took a law suit against Chrysler and the three largest makers of lead wheel weights for the US market.

In settlement, the makers agreed to a phase out, after the group had contended that discarded weights threatened drinking water. "Wheel weights have been identified as the largest new route of lead releases into the environment," says Michael Green, executive director of the Center for Environmental Health. "By moving the industry away from leaded wheel weights, we are helping to keep the lead out of our kids' drinking water."

To add to this legend, the paper helpfully tells us that, "lead is a highly toxic metal that can cause brain damage and other nervous-system disorders, especially in young children."

It has been used to make wheel weights for decades because it is cheap and heavy, allowing mechanics to use relatively small weights when balancing tyres – to say nothing of being malleable and soft, making it easy to trim and fit – but such is of no consequence to the greenies.

As in the EU, they will enforce weights made of steel or zinc alloy, which are larger and cost 20-30 percent more. But, since they are cheap enough, no-one is really that concerned and the greenies get their way yet again.

What is terrifying though is the way that what starts in the EU ends up in the USA – and vice versa - from whence the contagion spreads across the globe. It truly is a religion without borders.

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That loathsome media

Readers might have noticed that we are not particularly impressed with the fourth estate – although there are a few journalists worthy of their hire.

However, the very worst of the breed is exemplified by the political correspondent, one such being Jo Coburn who works for the equally repulsive Beeb.

She recently accompanied the prime minister on his trip to Afghanistan and then filed a report on her experiences on the BBC website.

Despite having an opportunity that most of us would welcome – for the chance to get information directly from the "horses' mouths" on the Afghan campaign, which looks to be entering a worrying phase – no such trivial issues detained Mz Coburn or her colleagues for very long.

Having been driven to Kabul and the presidential palace under "incredibly tight" security, a press conference was then arranged for these loathsome creatures.

But, writes la Coburn, "if Gordon Brown had thought he would be asked about the future cooperation between the two countries then he was sorely disappointed." She drools on:

All of us wanted to press him on the future of his leadership. Did he accept his strategy up until now had been wrong? What were his relations like with his foreign secretary, David Miliband, amid tales of political plotting?

There is something particularly despicable about these shrivelled, etiolated creatures that render them beyond contempt. That the likes of Coburn cannot even see that she is wrong to the extent that she quite happily parades her foul trade on the net really says all you need to know about her and her ilk.

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Harvest blues

After the wash-out summer – where hardly a day seems to have passed without rain – harvest-watchers will be unsurprised to learn that wheat futures for December delivery on the Chicago exchange are up to $8.99 a bushel (although still down from the February peak of $13.50).

However, the issue is not quantity, per se, after record global plantings, but quality, the late harvests – delayed by the weather – reducing the amount of milling quality wheat. This is affecting some producers in the United States, but is also getting to be a major problem in the UK and affects even Black Sea producers.

More recently in the UK, Northern Irish farmers have suffered extensive flooding (pictured) in what is slated as the wettest August for a hundred years, although even Devon farmers are complaining as their wheat starts to sprout in the fields. One farmer even lamented that he was depressed than he was during foot-and-mouth.

Throughout the country, farmers are facing a race against time as waterlogged fields prevent them getting the combine harvesters into action and, although the situation is not irretrievable, some are warning that it is getting that way.

Unless we have some prolonged dry spells in the next two weeks, many farmers are in trouble – and so are we, with the price of bread reckoned to soar as much as 30 percent as shortages bite.

But just to show that, sometimes, Mother Nature is the least of our problems, a Bloomberg report tells us that Russia is enjoying its best wheat and barley harvest for 15 years – and is rapidly running out of storage, putting much of the crop at risk and limiting exports.

Apparently, Russia has about 95 million metric tons silo capacity, against a forecast grain harvest of at least 85 million tons – although some estimates put it at 97 million tons.

Of course, that is only part of the picture. By no means all the silos are in the right place. More are needed in the southern and central parts of the country, where most grain is produced and exported.

Building 100,000 tons of silo capacity in Russia costs about $50 million, including costs for rail, road and power connections and, while Russia seems to be able to find the money to finance its mad adventures in Georgia, it has been reluctant to invest in infrastructure.

This does not only extend to bulk storage. The country has only 12,500 specialist rail trucks needed to transport grain, more than a third fewer than are needed. For exports, Russia's total port capacity for exports stands at about 15 million to 18 million tons a year, only just enough to meet demand if there are no problems. The government is forecasting grain exports of about 15 million tons this season.

Russia, therefore, is in a position not so very different from less developed economies like Egypt and Afghanistan, where it needs to develop infrastructure in order to exploit its production potential.

By contrast, the US has about three times more silo capacity than it can produce in a single harvest, and can easily cope with fluctuations in supply and demand. But then, this is a free-enterprise system, whereas, even now, much of the Russian trading system is in State hands.

If we are going to suffer food shortages, therefore, this is going to be as much due to inadequate governance as it will be Mother Nature, although bad weather and bad government is a formidable combination.

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The dark side

Behind the razzmatazz of the Peking Olympics, there is a darker picture, redolent of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, where the country was starved of food, fuel and power simply to keep the Games going.

This was covered by Christopher Booker in his seminal book called the Games War, to which he referred in one of his recent columns, pointing out the uncanny parallels between then and now.

So it is that The Daily Telegraph (business section) is reporting that China's industrial heartland is facing crippling power shortages, with more than a dozen provinces already rationing electricity. The country is suffering from its biggest power crisis since 2004, when a 40-gigawatt shortfall left three quarters of China in the dark.

The proximate cause is a shortage of coal – an issue we rehearsed extensively in February - then noting how Chinese pressure on the global market was driving up prices to record levels. More to the point, the actual cause is a highly regulated internal market which caps the prices of coal and electricity, making it difficult for companies to invest in new capacity – on top of a creaking infrastructure, leaving a shortage of rail transport to deliver coal where it is needed.

Anyhow, so serious has the situation become in China now that, in order to keep the lights burning in Peking, and the television cameras rolling, that other areas are being starved of power.

In the northern province of Shanxi - produces nearly one tenth of China's aluminium and a fifth of its steel - the population of almost 34m people is having to contend with regular blackouts and metal producers are having to curb production. The local administration has forecast a five gigawatt shortage this summer and put its industry on strict rations.

In Shandong province, the government has moved stockpiles of coal to Peking to ensure power supplies in the capital. As a result, the amount of power available to businesses in Shandong has fallen by around a third in August, leading some factories to run assembly lines at night or to shut parts of their plants.

Nor can this be dismissed as a little local difficulty. The Chinese government has responded by imposing a tariff on coal exports which, according to the Indian Financial Express is driving up prices and putting even more pressure on global supplies.

The metal industries are going to be particularly hard hit as China exports nearly half of the world's metallurgical coke. Furthermore, it China has set an export quota of 12.01 million tons this year, and had already exported 8.3 million tons in the first seven months of 2008. Export prices are thus expected to hit $1,000 a ton, up from $700 currently.

As to coal supplies generally, India will be a key factor in the increasing global competition for energy supplies. The Indian coal industry is the fourth largest in terms of coal reserves and third largest in terms of coal production in the world. The country, however, faces huge deficit of coal. Coal requirement electricity generation is expected to grow ten percent this year and demand for both thermal and coking coal may rise to 1.87 billion tonne a year by 2026.

As supplies from China tighten, India can be expected to look elsewhere for its supplies and, as we pointed out earlier, it is bidding against the UK (and Germany) for South African coal, on which we are currently dependent for much of our electricity generation.

Nor can we rely on cheap gas to make up our shortfall. Today's news of a leak in a North Sea pipeline, in the Norwegian gas field, has triggered a 15 percent hike in UK wholesale gas prices, pointing up the fragility in supply, a situation made worse by Russia's adventures in Georgia.

On this, The Times quotes David Hunter, an analyst from McKinnon & Clarke, the energy consultancy. He says, "Gas available to export from Norway to countries including the UK will be cut significantly and, without adequate storage, the UK will be left to negotiate with Russia and the Far East for supplies or risk running low on energy."

That brings us back full circle. With supply difficulties in China, and India sucking in imports, there are going to be no easy options for the UK, which is going to have to pay through the nose to ensure continuity of its own supplies.

For this who are watching and marvelling at the performance of the athletes, therefore, the message is to enjoy it while you can. The reckoning, as always, will come later … we are heading in the same direction as the divers.

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Last year was different

Last year I wrote about the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia under the title "Then again, some things have changed". The Russian military were blustering but it looked like they could do nothing about an actual invasion of any East European country and might, therefore, be too smart to try.

This year, the fortieth anniversary was marked early, thanks to our friends in the Russian military who have decided to take their August holiday in Georgia, an independent democracy on their border. Have things changed back to their normal Russian/Soviet state of affairs?

In some ways yes. Unable to control its neighbours, Russia like a schoolyard bully, prefers to hit out, particularly if that neighbour is smaller and weaker. But is it in a position to sustain a lengthy military occupation and extend it to the other recalcitrant neighbours? That I think is more questionable. Russia is relying on the supineness of the West that will simply acknowledge an updated version of the "Brezhnev doctrine," now called the Putin doctrine. But the underpinning of strength is not there. This is Russia's tragedy far more than anybody else's even if at the moment it is hard to feel sympathetic.

Charge of the Light Brigade

Canadian researcher David Long writes for Embassy – Canada's foreign policy newsletter – this month, on the vexed question of "The EU in Afghanistan". This is particularly topical, given the recent attack on French troops.

The Afghanistan mission, he says, combines military intervention, state building, and democratisation in a narco-state at war with itself - one that has historically been a graveyard of empires. In this troubled environment, the states of the European Union have proceeded in a manner resembling the blunders commemorated at another time in Lord Tennyson's poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade.

He continues:

The European nations' involvement is shaped by their participation in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force operation. Though 25 of 27 European Union nations are engaged in the mission, the reality is that only a few European states have significant numbers of troops in Afghanistan and even fewer (two to be exact, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands) are in the main combat zone in the south, even after the much heralded French deployment into the east of the country. No wonder some laugh that ISAF actually stands for I Saw Americans Fight.

European engagement is circumscribed by caveats and conditions on the location and role of deployments. These are meant to placate restive domestic audiences who fail to see the value of the mission. But the caveats are not simply the result of cowardice or craven caving to populist pacifism. They are the product of strategic and diplomatic calculation. Hesitations over NATO's first combat mission outside Europe highlight the fact that the vision of global NATO has never been a unanimous position of the member states.

Only the member states who share the American vision of NATO as a global security actor have deployed to fight the Taliban-led insurgency in the south. Both the so-called Old and New Europe have doubts about the global agenda.

Old Europe is largely happy to reserve NATO as the guarantor of European security through the provision of territorial defence.

Meanwhile, New Europe, not long liberated from Soviet clutches, still fears Russian interference and prefers NATO's anti-Russian focus be maintained. Given recent developments in Georgia, who can blame them?

All the while, as Afghanistan has increasingly negative connotations among European publics comparing it to the fighting in Iraq, for European leaders a major distraction has been Kosovo, a simmering crisis seen as in the EU's backyard rather than far from home.

European policy is plagued by jurisdictional jealousies: some prefer more EU and less NATO, others the member states rather than an EU mission, and still others the Big Four leading policy. Even the EU's collective intervention is shaped by its internal schisms.

While the Commission allocates billions of euros to a variety of development, humanitarian and other rebuilding projects, its mandate in the provision of non-military aspects of security assistance overlaps with the role of the Council's High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy. The EU's special representative in Afghanistan is supposed to bring cohesion to all this and in effect provide "one-stop shopping" regarding EU policies.

This is a tall order for recently appointed, Ettore Francesco Sequi, an Italian diplomat. The failed EU Constitution and its successor, the Reform Treaty, were supposed to rationalize the EU's foreign policy instruments and decision-making.

Don't hold your breath.

Where bold moves have indeed been taken by the Europeans, such as attempts to bring warring factions together, they have been rebuffed by the Afghan government (and EU diplomats expelled from the country) or have run afoul of contradictory policies preferred by the United States, for instance, over whether to legalize or destroy local poppy cultivation. The steady — a cynic might say glacial — development of the European security and defence policy has been given a fillip with EUPOL as it trains Afghan police as part of its civilian crisis management dimension.

But this project depends on the preservation of a security environment and an uncorrupted culture of governance in which these police and justice officials can go about their business.

But the ultimate conundrum in Afghanistan is the mismatch of the intervention with its goal. The European engagement is a charge of the Lite Brigade because it follows the pattern outlined in Michael Ignatieff's polemic Empire Lite.

Unlike military engagements and imperial conquests of the past, today's interventions are conducted in the long shadow of mass democracy. This means that deployments need to be justified at home, defended before a domestic audience. It also means that the "host" or target state is to be rendered democratic in some way, despite the fact that this is achieved paradoxically through the instrument of alien military force. The EU's involvement maps on to Ignatieff's critique of post-cold war peacekeeping and peace enforcement as imperial ventures in disguise, as was the case in the trusteeship over Kosovo.

Today's interventions are not about conquest as an end in itself, but as a means to another end (democracy) through short-term, low-level military engagement.

As a consequence, what is at stake is not military victory or defeat. To neutralise Afghanistan as a potential future threat to the West is to stabilise it by irreversibly changing it. This is a politico-strategic outcome rather than a military one, achievable only over the course of generations. The EU's Light Brigade intervention can only be minuscule and temporary by comparison.

So where was the strategic calculation regarding the EU's intervention in Afghanistan? And what sort of government bleats to its allies that it needs help in a region that it deliberately chose to engage in?

The marked lack of strategic wisdom is a result of hubris and an interventionist culture that is prevalent across the Western world. In essence, interventionism is the unexamined belief that some action on our part is better than none, even in affairs we don't understand, in regions where we don't have reach and our interests are unclear, and in conflicts that any realistic assessment would indicate are unlikely to be remedied given the resources available for an international military intervention.

This is an interesting perspective. There is a lot I would disagree with, but I really can't improve the last paragraph.

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Charity money goes astray - dog bites man

Let us face it the EU is not the only organization that plays silly-bugger games with other people’s money, channelling it, wittingly or otherwise, to terrorist organizations. I rarely read the Daily Mail (make that almost never) and have to find out about stories in that rag newspaper from various blogs, British or American.

So this story comes with gratitude to the indefatigable Michelle Malkin (how does she do it?). The Daily Mail reports that £20,000 of the money raised by the BBC through its Children in Need appeal went to Leeds Community School in Beeston.

Along with £230,000 from Leeds city council, it was spent on the school and the adjoining Iqra bookshop, which was run by the bombers and became the place they hatched their plans.

Both Children in Need and the council were led to believe they were funding educational work for children.

But, according to Martin Gilbertson, who worked at the bookshop and the community centre, the funds went on propaganda.

"They blamed everything on the Jewish conspiracy, they hated Western culture it was like living with jihad on a daily basis" he said.

The bookshop was run by Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Hanweer of 7/7 bombing fame. They and Khalid Khaliq, jailed this year for terrorism offences, were trustees of the Beeston Iqra charity.

This raises various questions, not least that of why people give money to charities through the BBC or any other media outlet. How can you possibly tell what the money goes on?

Going on from there we have the problem of the Children in Need and Leeds City Council repeating like blessed baa-lambs the mantra of ignorance. They just didn’t know. They gave the money to a registered children’s charity who, they assumed on some basis unknown to the rest of mankind, would spend it wisely. Would it not be a good idea if you are disbursing large amounts of other people’s money to check out what that dosh is being spent on?

Come to think of it, would it not be a good idea to define what is a sensible way for a children’s charity to spend money? After all, why exactly did that school, presumably in receipt of large amounts of taxpayers' money anyway, need extra help from a charity? Why was money given to the bookshop in any event but, especially, why was it given without anybody checking out its stock?

And so on, and so on. One could list questions indefinitely. But the top question will be: what exactly is the purpose of that egregious quango, the Charity Commission?

[Michelle Malkin says that the Children in Need teddy bear is crying out for a clever bit of photoshopping. If anybody is prepared to work on it, I shall post it .]

Meanwhile let us have a look at that aid to various Palestinian groups

Russia is not the only country and the Caucasus is not the only region the EU finds hard to deal with and where, if truth be told, it makes a bad situation even worse. I think it is fair to say that everything the EU has done in the Middle East has helped to deepen the problems there.

Not least, we have the problem of aid to various Palestinian groups. The argument is always the same: we do not approve of terrorism or deliberate attacks on civilian population whether it is Israeli or Palestinian of the wrong kind and we would much rather Hamas, Fatah and whoever else acknowledged Israel's right to exist though if they don’t we understand; and, of course, we would much rather the Palestinians did not waste the money they get in aid on hate-filled school text books or on equipment for terrorists or simply on feathering the leaders' nests; but if we do not give them aid they will produce pictures of hungry children and empty shops and their friends in the NGOs will talk endlessly about humanitarian catastrophes. So, more lucre filched from the taxpayer is sent to completely corrupt and politically impossible Palestinian organizations.

It seems that the Palestinian Authority a.k.a. Al-Fatah is once again struggling to meet the government pay-roll's demands, which, given how many people are on that list, is a serious matter. If they don't get paid they will start using their ammunition and you don’t want that.

Added to which, it would appear, that Arab solidarity does not go very far and the EU had to step in (had to? Who says?) and add another €40 million over and above the €256 million already "disbursed" this year. Handed over to the Palestinian Authority is a better way of describing it than disbursed but let that pass.

The 40 million euro injection of funds comes on top of the 256 million euros in budget support disbursed so far this year by the European Union.

[Prime Minister Salam] Fayyad has struggled in recent months to pay government workers because many Arab donors have not met their financial commitments. "The situation is very, very tight, for sure," a top official from Fayyad's office said this week.

A Palestinian official said the EU money would help Fayyad meet the next government payroll, due in the first week of September. Fayyad has been waiting for months to receive $80 million pledged by Kuwait but it is unclear when the funds will arrive in the Palestinian Authority's coffers, officials say.

It has always been our contention on this blog that if we really do want to put pressure on the Palestinian Authority or the Hamas government in Gaza, we should stop all aid until all conditions, and that includes an open and transparent budget system, were met. Their Arab brethren would not step in. Of course, the Palestinians deprived of their subsidy might decide to put their economy in order instead of wasting money on rockets to fire into Israel and that would be all to the good.

Autres directions

A perspicacious Guardian today notes that the EU is in as much disarray about how to handle the looming recession as it is over how to confront Russia's belligerence in the Caucasus.

Drawing on the experience so many of us have had of baffling French road signs, it suggests that "toutes directions", the often confusing signpost at crossroads in French provincial towns, just about sums up eurozone government responses so far.

Actually, we can do better than that. Attempting to find our way to Strasbourg one day, driving through the by-ways of Alsace completely lost, we came to a T-junction in a small town, unmarked on our map. Witnessed by my increasingly acerbic co-editor, then one of my backseat drivers passengers, we were utterly confounded by a single sign offering the choice between "toutes directions" and "autres directions". That, it seemed to us, was the most appropriate paradigm for the European Union.

Returning to The Guardian, it tells us that France, as holder of the EU presidency, is effectively pushing for a concerted series of activist, counter-cyclical measures to be adopted when finance ministers meet in Nice in the middle of next month - even if it means busting the bloc's three percent budget deficit limit.

In this – predictably - it can count on support from its "Club Med" partners in Italy and Spain but Germany, determined to maintain fiscal discipline and avoid a repeat of the 1970s, is resolutely opposed. And so is the EU commission, while the UK is out on a limb, together with the Irish and the Nordics (several limbs, actually).

Although it retails a sorry tale of confusion, it is a pity though that the paper cannot see the bigger picture. It is not only the "looming recession" and the question of "how to confront Russia's belligerence in the Caucasus" that finds the EU in disarray. The impending clash over the Common Agricultural Policy will point up yet more disarray, while the continued impasse over GM crop approvals, the disagreement over biofuels and the energy policy generally, are all examples of the EU haring off in "toutes directions".

In fact, from the experience of the Common Fisheries Policy – branded by its own commissioner as "immoral" - to the waste policy, immigration and high level initiatives in the Middle East, nothing the EU touches ever works. It leaves behind it a trail of wreckage, disarray and confusion.

Never more has it ever been more urgent that we in the UK should be looking for that sign which says, "autres directions".

COMMENT THREAD

This was not supposed to happen

The well-planned attack by the Taleban on French troops, shortly after midday on Monday, seemingly breaks the trend in a campaign which supposedly has moved into an asymmetric phase. What further marks this out is the ferocity of the attack which had nine soldiers dead within the first minutes of contact ...

Posted on Defence of the Realm

Nope we still can't solve it

It seems incredible but President Sarkozy still seems to think that he has some kind of a role to play in the crisis in the Caucasus. He keeps running around, accepting Russian peace offers and cease-fire deals and then finding that there is not the slightest intention on the Russian side of fulfilling the obligations that they themselves propose. I must say, it is not entirely clear why the Russians keep playing this game unless, as some analysts have been suggesting, there are splits among the various leaders, military and civilian and, above all, between former President, now Prime Minister, Putin and his teddy bear.

Reuters entitles the news item "Russia starts Georgia pullout" but this is a little misleading. Russia is not starting anything of the kind; she is merely promising to do so.

Russian troops will pull back from Georgia's heartland by the end of this week, the Kremlin said on Tuesday, but NATO said it was freezing contacts with Moscow until all Russian forces were out of the country.

This reminds one of the very popular Russian word, which has flummoxed many a Western businessman: сейчас (seychas). Its direct meaning is this minute (or this hour if you wish to be pedantic) but, in actual fact, it conveys a sense of urgency that is just inferior to the Spanish mañana. Yes, yes, yes, we're going, we're going.

So the soft power of the EU has failed and President Sarkozy's readiness to go along with whatever President Medvedev told him has achieved nothing. To be fair, as Joel J. Sparayregen has pointed out on American Thinker, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a Russian expert in her academic days, has faltered at first as well. Unlike President Sarkozy, she has acknowledged it and American demands have become tougher as has NATO's stance, though there is no mention of Georgia becoming a member in the near future. On the other hand, if the near future includes Russian troops on Georgian soil, that might be quite a wise precaution.

The near and mid-term future will, it seems, include missiles positioned in South Ossetia and, possibly, Abkhazia, pointing at Georgia, in order to protect the Russian citizens of those two regions. Since they are now unlikely to be anything but part of Russia, the protections seems excessive.

Almost certainly Russia will institute one of her economic blockades of Georgia. After all, we cannot have the latter being economically successful as that would humiliate Russia.

The latest prediction is that Russian forces will pull back to prearranged positions by August 22, just about the fortieth anniversary of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, but this will not mean simply going back to Russia and South Ossetia but staying in the "buffer zone", that is 14 kilometres beyond the border inside Georgia itself. It would appear that the French negotiators thought this was perfectly reasonable. Then again, did they have an option if nobody was prepared to use stronger methods? G8? Well, no, G7, I think.

CNN entitles its analysis rather whimsically “NATO grapples with angry bear”. In itself, the analysis tells us nothing new. America, Britain, most of the former Soviet colonies and, one assumes, Denmark and Canada are calling for tougher measures; France, Germany and Italy are cowering and chattering about keeping channels open. What that means is anybody’s guess. After all, nobody is suggesting never talking to Russia again.

It is unfortunate that CNN goes along with the analysis that Russia and her self-appointed supporters have managed to feed into the public discourse:

But western ministers, it seems, have only just taken aboard how angry a resurgent Russia, traditionally fearful of encirclement, has been about the U.S. missile defense plan with installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, about the steady eastward march of NATO and the EU, and about the West's ready endorsement of Kosovo's breakaway from Russia's allies in Serbia.

Largely this is tosh. The missile defence plan is no threat to Russia and the former Soviet colonies became members of NATO because they were afraid of the bear. In other words, they are not surprised by the latest developments because they have always expected something like this.

There has never been the slightest indication that Russia cared much about Serbia as the Serbs have vociferously complained about and Kosovo is of little importance to them. The plan to use South Ossetia to threaten and invade Georgia has been maturing for, at least, five years when those Russian passports were first handed out.

Somehow, the myth of the resurgent, angry and humiliated Russia seems to have taken hold. I am in the process of writing a long posting on the subject so shall hold my fire till then but I may add that if Russia is afraid of encirclement then the country she is most fearful of is China.

When it comes to invasion from the east, Monty’s saying of the three rules of war do not apply. Mostly, these have been successful and Russia knows it. A little reported recent development was a border agreement signed between the two countries on July 21, which is returning 174 sq km of territory to China.

The areas to be returned - the Yinlong Island (Tarabarov Island) and half of the Heixiazi Island (Bolshoi Ussuriysky Island) - are territories the former Soviet Union occupied during a 1929 border skirmish.

They are located at the confluence of the Heilongjiang and Wusulijiang rivers that serve as a natural border between the two countries.

Following years of negotiations, the two sides signed an agreement for the return of the areas in October 2004 when Vladimir Putin, then Russian President visited Beijing.

After that, the two neighbors spent three years of negotiations on delineation.

Curiously enough, this was not much reported in Russia, either.

The Eurasian Daily Monitor, which has been following the growing crisis in Georgia long before most of the Western media and politicians realized there was anything to follow (as it happens we have written about it a few times ourselves, here for instance) gives a more detailed analysis of the non-withdrawal and the rings President Medvedev has been running round President Sarkozy.

COMMENT THREAD

The casual lie

In The Times today is an interesting story – for those who are that way inclined – about a plan to install anaerobic digesters in every town.

These, according to Lewis Smith, the Environment Reporter for the paper, "could turn leftover food into electricity and fertiliser could be built around every town and city as part of a scheme being considered by ministers."

Tucked into the story though is that insidious, pernicious lie that pervades so much of modern journalism. "The new generation of anaerobic digesters," writes Smith, "has been developed in a government-sponsored trial designed to find ways of solving the shortage of landfill sites."

He goes on to write: "Pressure on space means that the country is running out of suitable sites for landfill and, with punitive landfill taxes introduced to encourage alternatives, digesters are increasingly being seen as an environmentally friendly solution."

Read my lips: there is no shortage of landfill sites. There is a shortage of landfill capacity, which is a wholly different thing. And that is entirely because of the EU's landfill directive which imposes severe constraints on the use of landfill as a waste disposal option.

We actually dealt with this issue in an earlier piece, where we relied on another blogger who had done the maths, demonstrating unequivocally that landfill sites are actually being generated faster than we could fill them.

As it happens, flying into Manchester last week, after our trip to America, I spotted (as one does) several open quarries, just a few miles from the city centre, which would – in the fullness of time – make ideal landfill, but for the dead hand of the EU. One is pictured, top left.

This is not so say, of course, that Smith personally is lying. Merely, in his ignorance and lack of focus, he perpetuates the lie that has crept into the body politic to explain and obscure the fact that we, as a nation, are no longer allowed to run our own waste policy.

That lack of knowledge also pervades the rest of his story. He writes uncritically of the government being "so confident that anaerobic digesters offer a realistic means of dealing with food waste that earlier this year it offered £10 million in grants to encourage the construction of further demonstrator plants. Plans for at least 60 are under way in Britain."

This we dealt with in a story last January when I set out a dire tale about how private enterprises had embraced anaerobic digesters as an admirable solution to organic waste disposal, only to have the economics of their systems wrecked by the dead hand of the Environment Agency.

The EA insisted on classifying these systems as "scheduled processes" – under an EU directive – and then charging exorbitant "authorisation" and "subsistence" fees which, with the stultifying and time-consuming bureaucracy involved, ensured that few digesters were installed. Those that were quickly became disused simply because, under the burden of regulation, they were too expensive to operate.

So, now that the government has effectively priced the system out of the market, it is offering public money – our money – to encourage the use of a well-tried and working technology that it, itself, has hamstrung.

Had Smith known anything of the subject – and the background to it – he could have written a really interesting and critical piece. As it is, we are condemned to the usual ration of extruded verbal material which has become the only fare available. Thus, as we keep saying, are we served by the fourth estate.

COMMENT THREAD

A question of negligence

On the day one more soldier is reported killed in Afghanistan, another stage was reached in the tortuous path which is hoped will eventually bring the MoD to account for the death of Pte Phillip Hewett in al Amarah, Iraq in July 2005 – now over three years ago. This happened yesterday when Phillip's mother, Sue Smith ...

Posted on Defence of the Realm

Things must be bad

There is nothing so sacred as the holiday period in France, when only a major catastrophe would cause ministers to return to the heat of Paris. And yet … that is precisely what is happening

While Nicolas Sarkozy gads around on the world stage, giving into the Russians, his ministers have been summoned back from their holidays by prime minister Francois Fillon (pictured). They are to attend, according to The Times, an emergency meeting, "in a bid to head off recession after the economy shrunk for the first time in six years."

However, it seems that Fillon has nothing concrete to offer, other than an acknowledgement that his government has abandoned hopes of escaping the global economic crisis. Instead, he is pledging to push ahead with Sarkozy's programme, which includes modernising the economy, reducing state spending and introducing flexibility into a rigid labour market.

Quite why that should warrant an emergency meeting is not quite clear, so there may be another agenda at play. And there is also an EU dimension as Fillon is threatening to call European Union finance ministers together in the search for a "common response" to the slowdown. EU countries should "commence this attempt at coordination," he declares, "which ... hasn't happened yet."

Yet, if Fillon is not quite sure what to do, the depth of the crisis is clear. The French economy shrunk by 0.3 percent in the second quarter and the Bank of France is predicting growth of just 0.1 percent in this quarter. The country is teetering on the edge of recession.

That compares with Fillon's prediction that France would enjoy growth of about two percent this year, although he has not openly admitted that he was wrong, simply that his figures will have to be "adjusted".

Needless to say, the left wing daily Liberation is not being so generous. Mr Sarkozy's dream of kickstarting France, it says, is "turning into a nightmare". That is something, undoubtedly, M. Fillon will be keen to share with the "colleagues".

COMMENT THREAD

Greenie schizophrenia

Almost in the category, "you gotta laugh", the Wall Street Journal today recounts the extraordinary contortions of the greenies, hoist with their own petard.

With the Democrats embracing an "anything-but-carbon avant-garde" – as the paper puts it – they are finding that, when wind and solar power do start to come on line, they face a familiar obstacle: environmentalists and many Democrats.

Specifically, the problem with renewables is that the best sites are out in the sticks and, to connect them up to the grid, new transmission lines are needed. Yet, while the greenies are swooning over the prospect of more wind and solar power in the deserts and plains of America, they are contesting the construction of the power lines needed to bring these installations into production.

Only last week, we are told, Duke Energy and American Electric Power announced a $1 billion joint venture to build a mere 240 miles of transmission line in Indiana necessary to accommodate new wind farms. Yet the utilities do not expect to be able to complete the lines for six long years - until 2014, at the earliest - because of the time necessary to obtain regulatory approval and rights-of-way, plus the obligatory lawsuits.

In California, home of greenie theology, hundreds of treehuggers turned out at the end of July to protest a connection between the solar and geothermal fields of the Imperial Valley to Los Angeles and Orange County. This same greenie class is likewise lobbying state commissioners to kill a 150-mile link between San Diego and solar panels because it would entail a 20-mile jaunt through Anza-Borrego state park.

Even the latter-day greenie, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is losing patience. "It's kind of schizophrenic behavior," he complains. "They say that we want renewable energy, but we don't want you to put it anywhere."

Even in oh-so-green Oregon, the utility companies are having problems. Once people realised that transmission lines would cut through forests, all sorts of obstacles have been raised. Transmissions lines from a wind project on the Nevada-Idaho border are clogged because of possible effects on the greater sage grouse. Similar melodramas are playing out in Arizona, the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Tennessee, West Virginia, northern Maine, upstate New York, and elsewhere.

In other words, says the WSJ the "liberal" (code for illiberal) push for alternatives has the look of a huge bait-and-switch. Washington responds to the climate change panic with multibillion-dollar taxpayer subsidies for supposedly clean tech. But then when those incentives start to have an effect in the real world, the same greenies who favour the subsidies say build the turbines or towers somewhere else. The only energy sources they seem to like are the ones we don't have.

Of course, we are experiencing exactly the same dynamic over here, as the greenies get their knickers in a twist over the conflict between saving the little tweetie birds and indulging in their wet dreams of a carbon-free future.

But then, since the real greenie agenda is to force us back into the Stone Age – as long as we don't light any fires with our flints – this sort of confusion is grist to the mill. There is nothing quite so carbon-free as no power at all – the inevitable consequence of this greenie schizophrenia.

COMMENT THREAD

You don't say!

"Britain has been strangely absent from the Russo-Georgian conflict," proclaims the leader in The Daily Telegraph. "To the extent that we have had anything to contribute, we have contributed it through the Council of Europe and the EU", it continues. "We have, in other words, been represented by Nicolas Sarkozy. And while the French president has admirable qualities, his interests are not identical to Britain's."

Well, blow me down with a feather. What were we writing yesterday? And now The Telegraph has actually noticed that, when it comes to our foreign relations with Russia, we defer to the European Union, relying on Mr Sarkozy, in his role as (temporary) president of the EU.

Waking up from its deep sleep, the paper then intones, "The truth is that a common European foreign policy is already upon us. Britain could no more act unilaterally in Georgia than in the World Trade Organisation."

You don't say! Really! But for the stunning intelligence of the Telegraph leader writers, we would never have noticed. How grateful we should be that they are really on the ball and picked this up, especially when they tells us that, "The EU has a foreign minister, Javier Solana, and an accompanying diplomatic corps, known as the European External Action Service."

Go to any non-EU country, they tell us, and you will find an EU mission alongside national embassies. Then they have the nerve to tell us: "The debate about whether or not there should be a common foreign policy is being conducted decades too late."

Er … And why is that? Why is it that, as the EU's Common Foreign Policy has developed, through Maastricht, through Amsterdam, through Nice and now extended via the constitutional Lisbon treaty, there hasn't been a debate? Could it just be – perhaps – that dismal little comics like The Telegraph have been obsessed with their trivia and tat to the extent that they have taken their eyes off the ball?

Entirely unconscious of the irony, however, the paper pronounces that "Britain" – meaning, of course, successive generations of politicians and dim-witted hacks - has given too little thought to the consequences of this development, and needs to consider urgently how a British foreign policy would differ from the current European one.

But, it says:

…before being able to implement such a policy, we must first recover control, in practice as well as in theory. Britain is the world's fifth-largest economy and fourth military power. We have had a benign impact on mankind: ending slavery, spreading free trade, helping to defeat Nazism and Communism. If we cannot act independently on the world stage, it is hard to see who can.

Well, we cannot act independently and remain within the framework of the European Union treaties. That is what being a member of the European Union is all about. If you want to "recover control" over our foreign policy – and any of the other policies that are within the competence of the EU - we have to leave the EU.

But is the Telegraph actually suggesting that? Don't bother answering. That remains the elephant in the room – positioning the paper in its usual hazy mish-mash of incoherence. When it wakes up, it can see the problems, but is terrified of articulating the solution. But, now that it has woken up, perhaps it might think about growing up.

COMMENT THREAD

Changing the equation

One of the "killer points" against reliance on nuclear energy is the enormous cost of decommissioning power the power stations at the end of their working life. Currently, to deal with first generation of power plants, the cost is estimated at £73 billion.

However, out of the blue, we learn that the nuclear industry has produced a "hidden" resource in the form of a stockpile of plutonium and uranium equivalent to 2.6 billion barrels of oil. If converted to fuel, it could be worth nearly £160 billion and power three nuclear reactors for 60 years.

Furthermore, this stockpile is to become the responsibility of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), which acts on behalf of the State. At the moment it is classified as neither a liability nor an asset but, if it is now classified as an asset, this would make a nice little nest egg for Gordon Brown.

More to the point, by recycling plutonium and uranium into so-called mixed oxide fuel (MOX), these materials can be used in advanced nuclear reactors, of the types currently operated in France, Germany, Japan and Belgium.

Although we have no commercial capacity for using MOX, all three reactor designs being considered for Britain by the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate could burn this fuel. MOX is already made at Sellafield for use overseas, but a £1-2 billion investment in a new fabrication plant would be required to produce commercial quantities for UK use. That cost, however, could be offset against the £2 billion disposal costs that would be incurred if the stockpile was not used.

Happily, the fuel is hated by the greenies - alone a good reason for using it - but, even better, its use as nuclear fuel would further discomfort them by saving 0.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

All of a sudden, therefore, the nuclear power equation has tilted decisively in favour of building new nuclear plants. Far from being a liability, it looks as if the industry has been paying its way and the cost-hurdle of decommissioning should no longer be an issue.

COMMENT THREAD

The ultimate joke

Whatever the outcome of the Russian escapade in Georgia, the one thing on which most commentators seem to agree is that the EU has not come well out of the experience.

Few, however, are as forthright as US columnist, J R Nyquist, writing for Global Analaysis who has decided that Moscow's "blitzkrieg" in Georgia is more than a military campaign.

It is designed, he writes, to empower Russia's diplomatic strategy, which seeks to make the European Union the West's chief representative in future negotiations with Russia. Quite naturally the Kremlin wants to escape the logic of U.S. and NATO policy, which is to contain Russia within her national borders.

The logic of this, according to Nyquist, is that the European Union is an entirely different animal: "toothless, utopian and ready to please." Better to deal with this organisation than a tough nut United States. Today, he continues, the European Union confronts Russia in the same way Neville Chamberlain confronted Hitler in 1938; being outwitted and tricked in the cease fire negotiations, there is no possible outcome other than appeasement.

Pointing at Sarkozy's "triumph", he notes now the Russians insisted that their troops were accepted as peacekeepers in Georgia and the French mediators caved in and allowed this. Thus, the stipulated withdrawal of combatants does not apply to Russian troops.

Under this ceasefire agreement Moscow can claim – in a strictly legal sense – that Russian troops can stay in Georgia indefinitely. President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin are laughing at the French while observing international law. Meanwhile, occupied Georgia is looted and burned; Georgian ships are sunk and the Georgian capital is strangled.

Nor is the purple prose confined to the commentators. My co-editor has already taken a side-swipe at the Common Foreign Policy - when she featured our favourite Polish politician - but, it appears, dear old president Lech Kaczynski was only just warming up.

To the Rzeczpospolita newspaper yesterday he declared that the EU was "too soft on Russia", complaining that it should have been more critical of Russia's military assault on Georgia, with the bloc making clear to Moscow that "imperial times have ended".

As for the Common Foreign Policy, this he said was dictated by France and Germany. "Once again it turned out that, in actuality, decisions of this organisation (the EU) were being taken between Berlin and Paris. (French President Nicolas) Sarkozy agreed the position with Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose voice proved to be decisive," Kaczynski said.

He also complains that the French deal lacked a key element – recognition of Georgia's territorial integrity, adding that he believed the EU reaction "should have been more decisive."

With all that, it was a "joke" to suggest that the 27-nation EU had a common stance. Then speculating on what such a policy would be, he had but one word, "submissiveness".

Perhaps the biggest joke of all, however, is perhaps our own politicians, whose posturing has been noted, even by the Independent. Gordon Brown and David Miliband, we are told, "merely mouthed empty platitudes about the crisis".

What this rabidly europhile newspaper does not say, though, is that there is a "common position" on relations with former Soviet satellites and Russia. Therefore, any dealings must go through the EU presidency – in this case the egregious Sarkozy.

That is indeed the ultimate joke. Great Britain, once the head of an empire on which the sun never set, is reduced to a bit part, while a French president supposedly represents our interests. And all because our political class is so enamoured of the EU.

COMMENT THREAD

Unintended consequences

On this blog we have always maintained that former President, now Prime Minister, Putin and his teddy bear (mishka), President Medvedev tend to be less than adroit when it comes to foreign adventures, whether attempts to bully and blackmail or, as has now happened, actual military invasion (and no, I do not mean South Ossetia, which has been under Russian occupation for something like ten years).

Chancellor Merkel, who led the nay-sayers during the last NATO Summit in Sofia, and thus may be said to have helped to precipitate the crisis in the Caucasus, has now changed her mind. She is reported by AP as saying that Georgia is strongly on track to becoming a member of NATO, which is not entirely logical but there you are.

Her comments, as reported by AP are not precisely accurate. It is not an EU ceasefire we are talking about but a Russian one that they keep offering but never quite keeping to. The EU has not precisely covered itself with glory. Also, the state of the Georgian military is not entirely clear. There are several opinions, some maintaining that the Russians did not have a totally easy ride.

Meanwhile, thanks to Glenn Reynolds on Instapundit, we learn that

Ukraine has agreed to take part in a missile defence system designed by the United States to protect Western countries. The government in Kiev defended its decision for military co-operation with the West, saying Russia cancelled a bilateral treaty with Ukraine earlier this year.

No doubt, this will be interpreted by all the Kremlin-lovers, since they cannot be described as Russia-lovers, as a "humilation" for Russia.

Whatever one calls it, this is not precisely what Mr Putin had intended, one assumes. Some things have changed in the last forty years. Time for Russia's rulers to understand that.

COMMENT THREAD

The scourge of the greenies – US style

Confounding my earlier prediction that Booker would not be able to file his column this week – having been stuck in Newark for a day – The Sunday Telegraph gave him a time extension which enabled him to file late Saturday instead of the customary Friday.

So it is that Booker has been able to make as his theme our recent experiences from our journey into the land of the free where, like me, he was shocked by the extent to which the "greenies" have taken over the energy agenda.

What particularly struck Booker were a series of television commercials for the two presidential candidates, Senators McCain and Obama, each of whom were shown in front of film of the same giant wind farm, to lay claim to virtually identical "green" credentials.

Since, Booker writes, America has already built five times as many wind turbines as Britain, covering thousands of square miles, he checked out how much electricity all those 10,000 turbines actually produce. His answer came to around 4.5 gigawatts - not much more than a single large coal-fired power station.

Actually, these were "back of the envelope" calculations. The installed capacity for US wind farms is just over 18 GW, while the average output is a mere 16.8 percent, giving a system-wide output of around 3 GW. This is less than the coal-fired Robert W Scherer power plant at Juliette, Georgia, which produces 3.52 GW.

In fact, the situation is even worse than that. Because the output of the wind turbines can range from 0-49 percent of installed capacity, the average figure of 16.8 percent is considered too optimistic because it fails adequately to recognise the intermittency of wind generation. To meet peak system demand, a wind capacity value of a mere two percent of installed capacity is being considered, reducing the 18 GW to just over one third of one gigawatt.

That the two presidential candidates should, despite this, endorse wind power, comes as something of a shock. After years when America was vilified for not taking "global warming" seriously, the greenie agenda is now threatening to transform what is still the largest and richest economy in the world.

For instance, both candidates favour a version of the proposed "cap and trade" scheme, McCain coming out in support in May, following Obama into the pit after he released his energy plan last October.

Yet, conservative estimates of the cost of reducing US greenhouse gas emissions by 63 percent of 2005 levels run to more than $600 billion a year, at by 2030 of - representing a cumulative loss to the US economy, within 22 years, of $4.8 trillion - and Obama wants to go for 80 percent.

Although America is still dependent on coal for around half its electricity, with reserves estimated as likely to last 200 years, state after state is proposing to ban new coal-fired power stations. Environmental groups, with powerful political support, are now lobbying equally fiercely against natural gas or any new nuclear power plants.

Most dramatic of all are the implications of a Supreme Court judgement in the case of Massachusetts v EPA which ruled by a single vote that the EPA (effectively) must treat any greenhouse gases as "pollution", to be regulated under America's Clean Air Act.

The EPA is thus mandated to impose drastic new limits on emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases from pretty well any source, not just industry and transport but schools, hospitals, even lawn mowers.

The implications of this development – which have escaped the attention of the British media - are so immense for almost every sector of the US economy that government departments - commerce, agriculture, energy and others - have been queuing up to protest, arguing that the effects of such regulation would be so damaging that it should be regarded as unthinkable.

But politicians of both parties, led by the two men vying for the presidency, are so carried away in the rush to appear "green" that it seems there is no longer any national voice powerful enough to question the sanity of such measures.

All the fashionable talk is of how fossil-fuels must be replaced by massively subsidised sources of "renewable" energy, such as vast arrays of solar panels, even though a recent study (which we pointed out in an earlier piece) showed that a kilowatt hour of solar-generated electricity costs between 25 and 30 cents, compared with 6 cents for power generated from coal and 9 cents for that produced by natural gas.

What is terrifying, writes Booker, is the extent to which America's leading politicians seem oblivious to the economic realities of what they are proposing. The readiness of Messrs McCain and Obama to posture in front of pictures of virtually useless wind turbines symbolises that attitude perfectly.

Here, in the EU we are only too sadly familiar with politicians floating off into cloud cuckoo land over our future energy policy, with the virtual certainty that before many years this may leave us with a colossal shortfall in our electricity supplies.

But "the lights going out all over Europe" is one thing: if they go out in the richest economy in the world - while China cheerfully continues to build one new coal-fired power station a week - we may look back on the US presidential election of 2008 as a time when history really did reach a watershed; the moment when the nations of the West finally signed up to the most bizarre suicide note the world has ever seen.

COMMENT THREAD

Good news and bad news

The most important economic news of recent weeks, Irwin Stelzer tells us in today's edition of The Sunday Times is the recovery of the long-comatose dollar.

But what is good news for the US economy seems to be bad news for the eurozone. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reported earlier this week that the ECB was taking a hammering for making a serious error by raising interest rates a quarter point to 4.25pc last month.

It seems that it has misjudged the seriousness of the downturn in the eurozone economy, which has seen a contraction of 0.2 percent in the second quarter, compared with the first three months of this year, with the economies of Germany, France and Italy probably now in full recession.

In Spain, the picture is darkening so fast in Spain that Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero cancelled holidays and called his cabinet back to Madrid mid-week for the first emergency session of its kind since the Franco dictatorship. The crisis meeting agreed to a €20bn (£16bn) blitz on public works, tax cuts, and a mortgage rescue to halt the downward spiral.

Growth has also turned negative in Ireland, Denmark, Latvia, and Estonia, while grinding to a halt in Sweden and The Netherlands. Iceland contracted by a staggering 3.7 percent.

However, if Ambrose always has a "down" on the eurozone, and is thus considered by some a little biased on the pessimistic side, not so the Wall Street Journal which yesterday took a swipe at the "colleagues".

Throughout the depth of the financial crisis in the US, the Euros have been warbling consistently about "decoupling" – arguing that the mighty European economy is no longer a slave to the American economy, and obeys its own rule. Europe would remain sound while the US would sink into a bottomless pit.

And, says the WSJ, Euro-zone hopes about decoupling from the US economy seem to have come true. But, in tune with the immutable law that dictates that nemesis always follows hubris, this decoupling is not quite as planned. While the eurozone contracted by 0.2, the US posted second-quarter growth of 0.5 percent

Like US fears of a recession, says the paper, the eurozone's economic resilience appears to be, if not mostly "mental," at least somewhat exaggerated. Despite all the talk about a US recession, it concludes, the economy may actually unravel faster across in Europe.

This is certainly what the markets think, for the moment, even the Financial Times reporting that they are becoming increasingly convinced that the US is best-placed to weather the global downturn. But then, if you think about it, for an organisation that gave us the Common Fisheries Policy, it never was a safe bet that the EU would be any better at managing the eurozone economy.

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