Germany

Europe Circumvents U.S. Sanctions On Iran

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By Frances Coppota – Re-Blogged From Forbes

Europe has found a way of circumventing U.S. sanctions on Iran. The governments of France, Germany and the United Kingdom have developed a special purpose vehicle (SPV) to enable European businesses to maintain non-dollar trade with Iran without breaking U.S. sanctions. That SPV, known as INSTEX, is now up and running.

The three governments announced the successful implementation of INSTEX at a meeting of the Joint Commission of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on June 28, 2019. The meeting was chaired on behalf of the EU by the Secretary General of the European External Action Service (EEAS), Helga Schmid, and was attended by representatives of China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Iran.

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Russia Will Be Ruined by the Clean Energy Transition

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By Eric Worrall – Re-Blogged From WUWT

According to Forbes, when renewable energy programmes like Germany’s Energiewende mature, demand for Russian fossil fuel will collapse.

Will Russia Survive The Coming Energy Transition?

Jun 27, 2019, 10:35am
Ariel Cohen Contributor

A new global energy reality is emerging. The era of the hydrocarbon – which propelled mankind through the second stage of the industrial revolution, beyond coal and into outer space – is drawing to a close. The stone age ended not because we ran out of stones. The same with oil and gas.

World Energy Consumption
World Energy Consumption. By Con-struct – BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2017, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

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Most Germans do not compromise on holidays for climate:survey

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From Xinhua – Re-Blogged From WUWT

BERLIN, June 18 (Xinhua) — A large majority of Germans said that the current climate debate has no influence on this year’s holiday plans, a survey conducted by the opinion research institute Civey on behalf of Spiegel Online on Tuesday showed.

More than 70 percent of the 5,000 Germans that were part of the sample group for the representative survey stated that the current climate debate had no impact on their holiday plans for 2019.

11.8 percent of Germans surveyed said that they would refrain from travel by air in view of the climate debate this year. About three percent of the respondents said they had abandoned plans for travelling on a cruise ship.

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Why Germany’s Green Party Is So Strong: A Wake-Up Call

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By Rainer Zitelmann & Tichys Einblick – Re-B;ogged From GWPF

The Greens have long been defining the cultural and political agenda in Germany. The more the other parties have been currying favour with them, the stronger the Green Party has become: voters now choose the original, not the imitators.

“On many issues today, the Greens are setting the direction, then the SPD follows and finally the Christian Democrats follow, lagging behind with a clear delaying effect … The Green Party’s impact goes far beyond their involvement at state government level and their successes documented in elections. More importantly, the Green Party succeeds time and time again in determining the political agenda and assuming opinion leadership in public debate. This can only happen, however, because they have an above-average number of sympathizers in the media and because the ranks of their natural challengers, i.e. the Christian Democrats (CDU), have softened and leading CDU politicians have adopted key positions of the Greens.”

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Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #361

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The Week That Was: By Ken Haapala, President, SEPP

Brought to You by www.SEPP.org, The Science and Environmental Policy Project

Quote of the Week: “It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tost [sic] upon the sea: a pleasure to stand in the window of the castle and to see the battle and the adventures thereof below: but no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of truth ( a hill not to be commanded and where the air is always clear and serene), and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below. – From Of Truth, Francis Bacon [H/t Numberwatch, hopefully returning]

Number of the Week: 5 million tonnes per annum (MTPA) of LNG, which is equal to about 0.7 billion [standard, normal temperature and pressure] cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of natural gas

The Greenhouse Effect –Atmospheric Layers: The atmosphere is divided into distinct layers and the altitude of the layers depends on the latitude, the distance from the equator. One could think of an oval shape with the thickest (elongated) part being above the equator. (Seasonal variation will be ignored in this section.)

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Slowdown Confirmed

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By Mike Savage – Re-Blogged From Gold Eagle

I have had a rough time for the last few weeks coming up with commentary that has anything new to say. It seems that we are bombarded day after day with talk of trade wars, tariffs and counter-tariffs.

Just today, April retail and industrial production numbers came out in China and in the USA. To say the least, the numbers were uninspiring at best.

In the USA retail sales for April contracted 0.2%. Much of the weakness was in auto sales because taking the auto numbers out there was a .1% gain in April. Electronics and building materials also fell. US industrial production, which has been stagnant all year, was not expected to grow in April either. It still surprised on the downside contracting 0.5%. That is the largest monthly drop since May of 2018.

Durable consumer goods dropped 0.8%. What caught my eye, however, was production decreased for business equipment, construction supplies and business supplies. This appears to confirm that 500,000 less people are actually working today than were at the beginning of 2019 even though we have “full employment”. What a joke that is! The only reason production wasn’t hurt worse was an increase in defense and space equipment materials.

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Germany Tests its First ‘Electric Highway’ for Trucks

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By Jon Fingas – Re-Blogged From From Engadget

Germany is joining the ranks of those countries betting on “electric highways” to foster eco-friendly trucking. The country has started real-world tests of an eHighway system on a 3.1-mile stretch of the Autobahn between Frankfurt and Darmstadt, with an electric-diesel hybrid truck merging into everyday traffic while it received power from overhead cables to keep it from using its combustion engine. Earlier tests in the country relied on either slow nighttime tests or the safety of an unused military airfield.

The very first eHighway launched in Sweden in 2016. The concept here is the same — the trucks use pantographs (the pickps on their roofs) to latch on to the overhead cables and draw electricity. Trucks can feed electricity into the grid when they brake, making the system particularly useful if there’s ever a jam.

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