Wat denn nu (well which is it then)? Which of these two headlines is correct?
“Germany offers help to Syria chemical mission”
or
“Germany supplied Syria with chemicals up until 2011?”
Both are, you say? OK, I get it. I mean, I kinda sorta do.
Germany is ready to give finance and technical support to the international operation to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said on Saturday.
I mean storm. Germany doesn’t even need a wake-up call. But they are always appreciated anyway. The ink was hardly dry on the latest alarming expert IPCC report about “higher seas” (is ink even used anymore?) before German experts here were suddenly quite certain that investments of hundreds of millions of euros will be needed in this country for massive costal protection measures like “super dikes” and other cool stuff like that.
“It is extremely likely” that these investments will just be a meager beginning too, I’m sure. After all, as all Germans know, scary storm tides just keep getting worse and worse here, right?
And WE ALL KNOW that there will be even scarier storm tides crashing in over the German coast in the weeks and months to come because, well, this here IPCC report thingy needs some more handfest (tangible) confirmation. That Germany has always had a Sturmflutsaison (storm tide season) and monster storms throughout recorded history will be of no interest here.
Sound like Fukishima all over again? It should. This is Fukishma all over again. Only different, because the big storm tide hasn’t happened yet.
I think I’m going to go out and get my potable water and canned goods now.
“In der Regel waren die Deiche in den vergangenen Jahren in einem guten bis sehr guten Zustand. Damit das auch künftig so bleibt, werden im Land derzeit einige alte Deiche durch Superdeiche ersetzt.”
No, not that shocking IPCC global warming report (yawn). Alarming is just how much of a fiasco Germany’s Energiewende (energy turnaround) is turning out to be.
Michael Limburg, vice-president of the European Institute for Climate and Energy, told CNN that the government’s energy targets are “completely unfeasible.”
“Of course, it’s possible to erect tens of thousands of windmills but only at an extreme cost and waste of natural space,” he said. “And still it would not be able to deliver electricity when it is needed.”
Limburg told CNN the rapid transition to renewables is economically “insane,” arguing that wind farms will cost at least 13 times more than traditional coal plants.
He added: “Offshore wind is somewhat better in performance, cost and usability but still you have to spend six times as much as what you have to spend for a conventional power plant.”
Germans are already facing some of the highest energy bills in Europe.
According to the Institute for Energy Research, this year German electricity rates will increase by over 10% due to a surcharge for using more renewable energy and a further 30 to 50% price increase is expected in the next ten years.
Blackouts are another problem facing Germany’s energy industry…
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in a report that a hiatus in warming this century, when temperatures have risen more slowly despite growing emissions, was a natural variation that would not last.
Not unless you look at how Berliners vote, that is.
There was no great cross-border migration in the city after 1989. People had security of tenure in their flats, and they stayed put. Berlin had a large concentration of members of the Socialist Unity Party (as the communist party in East Germany was called), as well as the civil servants and Stasi operatives who kept the communist state running, and they have remained in their areas and transferred their loyalty to Die Linke.
PS: Speaking of cross-border migration, whatever happened to Ray? You know, that Dutch dude who ripped off Berlin’s youth services for 30,000 euros while doing his memory loss show for months on end? Well, he just got slammed with all the Härte (severity) of German law and will now have to perform 150 hours of community work AND receive counseling. Yowie. Let me tell you what. The Germans do NOT mess around when it comes to dishing out draconic punishment.
No, not just the one about top German Green party leaders having to resign after seeing their party’s vote drop to 8.4 percent under their leadership (from 10.7 percent in 2009).
There is also the one that climatologists are going to have to face – according to the Spiegel, of all places – about the data showing how global temperatures just aren’t rising the way they had so alarmingly and repeatedly predicted they would.
This is a dilemma. Or another moment of inconvenient truth? I guess the question now is how the Greens and the climatologists are going to get together and manage to kick-start the fear and get it reved up again. Or what other options could they possibly have?
The number of people who believe in such a coming apocalypse, however, has considerably decreased. A survey conducted on behalf of SPIEGEL found a dramatic shift in public opinion — Germans are losing their fear of climate change. While in 2006 a sizeable majority of 62 percent expressed a fear of global warning, that number has now become a minority of just 39 percent.
PS: It must be hard to be cool and smug and still get whooped bad by a dull, frumpy and uncharismatic “Swabian houswife.”
With 4.8 percent, the FDP was well below the 5 percent needed to enter parliament, and 10 percent below their showing in 2009. For the first time since 1949, the liberals will not be represented nationally.
The Greens took 8.4% of the vote, enough to win representation in parliament, the Bundestag, but too little to form its preferred coalition with the Social Democratic Party, which won 25.7%.
“The FDP is tough. They have a deep history. They have representatives all over the country, including in the municipalities. They are deeply anchored in society, in the public – so it’s not yet the end of the FDP.”
Nach der Schlappe bei der Bundestagswahl will der Vorstand der Grünen geschlossen abtreten. Volker Beck zieht sich als Parlamentarischer Geschäftsführer zurück.
Beautiful German weapons sale of the week – or between 2002 and 2006, I mean.*
Because somebody has to admire them.
*It was only just a few harmless tons of chemicals (111 tons worth) that could have been used to make sarin nerve gas but it was absolutely perfectly legal so don’t anybody out there get all hot and bothered about this, OK? Thanks. I know you wouldn’t.
Less than a week before the election, I mean.
Germany’s Green party is under renewed pressure to defend its stance on paedophilia in the 1980s.
In a newspaper article, the historian Franz Walter had accused the Green’s co-leader, Jürgen Trittin, of signing off a 1981 pamphlet calling to abolish the decriminalisation of sexual acts between adults and children “that occur without the use or threat of force”. In response to the revelation, politicians from the Bavarian Christian Social Union have asked Trittin to withdraw his candidacy from the upcoming election.
Trittin is quoted in the article admitting that his party had failed to block a proposal by the activist group Homosexual Campaign Göttingen for such a measure to be included in the pamphlet. He told the paper that this was “also my mistake, which I regret”.
“Die Grünen sollten darüber nachdenken, ob sie mit dieser Besetzung weiter den Wahlkampf in der letzten Woche fortsetzen.”
68 years after Adolf Hitlers’s death, Left party town councillors in the German city of Goslar have decided it is now time for the city to show its colors and some backbone and fearlessly strip the unpopular Nazi leader of his honorary citizenship.
It’s civil courage like this that made Germany what it is today. Or something.
Some 4,000 German towns made Hitler an honorary citizen, and many have since stripped him of the title, some right after the war, while others did it only recently, such as the southern town of Trier in 2010.
Wah? The “energy turnaround” is going to be expensive as hell? Raising taxes? Veggie Day? And the hits keep on coming. I’d ignore the polls these days too if I were a greenie.
The Greens have been consistently bleeding support ever since the spring of 2011. Along the way, they have achieved a few notable successes in state elections, but the trend has been a downward one for over two years. It is as if the German electorate has suddenly decided that the party is no longer needed.
“Der Wahlkampf mit den Rezepten, wie man Kohlrouladen herstellt, ist zu Ende.”
Observing Hermann 