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They are after all rioting over the increased taxes to pay for all that green power

What does even mean? :-p

Do you require the services of an English teacher. ?

It has always been higher than in the US, thanks to US' massive and cheaply exploitable natural resources and low population. If that is news to you, then let me be the first person to welcome you to this planet. I hope you come in peace!

It has always been ?

https://www.eurotrib.com/story...

Kind of funny how the U.S. was able to reduce the cost of electricity while in Germany it tripled

Nice attempt at lying, does it work with the stupid you usually talk to or do they just nod along ?

It's very hard to know what the IEA really thinks. Their own reports are contradictory and confusing, the head of the IEA has said things that don't seem to reflect the agencies official view. Read this interview with the chief of the IEA, Fatih Birol. In it he says

If Iraqi production does not rise exponentially by 2015, we have a very big problem, even if Saudi Arabia fulfills all its promises. The numbers are very simple, there's no need to be an expert

So what's going on here? One obvious explanation is that the IEA is riven with disagreement, or has internal consensus but feels pressure to not reveal it externally. Given the IEAs history of knife-switching its views without warning and its staff apparently holding quite different ideas to those in its official reports, I am inclined to believe crmarvin42s explanation - it's a deeply confused organization that is under a lot of different pressures, and what comes out is not coherent as a result.

Transporting power is easily done. With modern power electronics, it's even easier than ever before. For example, over sufficiently long distances (continent-wide), DC is much more efficient than AC (look it up if you don't believe me). It used to be a pain to convert big voltages from one to the other; it's now done with off the shelf components.

And if it's such a big deal in the future, long lines could be made supraconductive. It's gonna be expensive, but when energy itself is expensive, it's not really an issue.

Today the problem with all this is the financing. This guy is a banker in the offshore wind business, and has lot to say about it. Wind *is* competitive, today, with all electricity sources but coal. It should be competitive with coal if externalities (i.e. the cost that's paid for by others, such as pollution) were taken into account. The problem is that the almighty and super smart free market is afraid of the 30+ years it takes to amortize a wind turbine. Yet once a wind turbine is set up, there is almost no maintenance, there is obviously no fuel to feed it.

Still, those days the market can barely see beyond the odd quarter or two. And not only are windmills long term investments, they also are big industry. They take quite some time to build, each; you can't really mass produce them yet. Turbine makers can't ramp up production on a whim. In particular, gov't subsidies and regulations in the US change almost year to year, and this has hampered adoption.

Except maybe Finland, and we have an extremely regulated gov't owned monopoly.

Unfortunately, right wingers in power in Brussels want to force the "market" on us, claiming that it would be better .. for whom? It hasn't made price drop in England or Germany, actually the opposite happened. So why should we privatize, again? So that fat bastards hoard even more capital, at the expense of consumers, workers and of the stability of the energy supply?

Visit European Tribune for more on this issue.

BLOGGED BY Joseph Cannon ON 8/22/2006 7:23PM

The Men Who Knew Too Much? NSA Wiretapping Whistleblowers Found Dead in Italy and Greece

Adamo Bove and Costas Tsalikidis: Both uncovered a secret bugging system and both met untimely ends.

Was That Just A Coincidence? And Who Made Your Cell Phone?

Guest blogged by Joseph Cannon

Is someone murdering people who know too much about NSA wiretapping overseas?

Two whistleblowers -- one in Italy, one in Greece -- uncovered a secret bugging system installed in cell phones around the world. Both met with untimely ends. The resultant scandals have received little press in the United States, despite the profound implications for American critics of the Bush administration.

Last month, Italian telecommunications security expert Adamo Bove either leapt or was pushed from a freeway overpass; he left no note and had no history of depression. Last year (March, 2005), Greek telecommunications expert Costas Tsalikidis met with a similarly enigmatic end. Both had uncovered American attempts to eavesdrop on government officials, anti-war activists, and private businessmen.

The Bove case relates to the long-standing controversy over the CIA's kidnapping of cleric Abu Omar, who was flown to Egypt and tortured. The post-Berlusconi government of Italy is attempting to arrest and try all of the CIA personnel involved. Bove used mobile phone records to trace more than two dozen American agents.

Bove had also revealed that his employer, Telecom Italia, had allowed illegal "spyware" -- undetectable wiretaps -- to infest Italy's largest communications system. His testimony helped to uncover the unsettling relationship between SISMI chief Marco Mancini and Telecom Italia head Giuliano Tavaroli. (Mancini, recently arrested by Italian investigators, has also come under some suspicion for his possible role in the strange affair of Major General Nicola Calipari, killed by American troops in Iraq.) In the 1990s, Bove had received wide praise for helping to secure convictions of two bosses in the Camorra, Naples' answer to the Sicilian Mafia.

The case of Costas Tsalikidis -- an engineer for Vodaphone, Greece's top telecommunications firm -- offers a similar picture. Tsalikidis discovered an extraordinarily spohisticated piece of spyware within his company's network. The Prime Minister and other top officials were targeted, along with Greek military officers, anti-war activists, various business figures -- and a cell phone within the American embassy itself. This page gives a full list of the targets, very few of whom could be considered as having even a remote connection to terrorism.

As investigative journalists Paolo Pontoniere and Jeffrey Klein report:

The Vodaphone eavesdropping was transmitted in real time via four antennae located near the U.S. embassy in Athens, according to an 11-month Greek government investigation. Some of these transmissions were sent to a phone in Laurel, Md., near America's National Security Agency.

According to Ta Nea, a Greek newspaper, Vodafone's CEO privately told the Greek government that the bugging culprits were "U.S. agents." Because Greece's prime minister feared domestic protests and a diplomati

It rather sucks that I have to be in a middle of one.

(b) you have no control over.

We do have a certain degree of control. Individually our input is miniscule but in large numbers we can effect significant changes. I now see that your philosophy is not only to selectively ignore the surroundings in favour of internal state of bliss but also to do so out of a form of defeatism: "Why should I worry my pretty mind over things? I cant do anything about anything anyhow. Lets party!". I think you are trying to help but this sort of approach is not suitable for many people. Many of us do not have the luxury of turning off our intelects at will. I think the other part of the problem is that some people care for the fate of society on a personal level, while some do not have that sort of attachment. Were I a Libertarian, I would instead, probably, be busy trying to figure how big a yacht to buy with the proceeds of my latest investment scam involving orphans and widows. Or something of the sort.

(a) price will have no effect on demand,

Most peak oil estimates take the price/supply relationships into account.

(b) oil companies, instead of pretending that oil is more scarce than it really is in order to drive up prices, are actually pretending that oil is more plentiful than it really is to drive down prices

This simplistic idea does not take into account the fact that most of oil reserves are in Saudi Arabian fields whose condition is kept secret (but sordid state of which can be indirectly inferred by compiling leaked data as experts have done) and that discovery of new fields has steadily declined since 1960s. Saudi Arabia and other oil producers are faced with this problem: oil too cheap = little profit, oil too expensive = economic slowdown and possible military action should panic over remaining reserves insue. It is not in the producer's interest to have galloping oil prices, a stable, or slow increase is their desired state. The oil producers are already in the crisis mode as we speak as they are unable to halt the rise in prices.

Add to this the lopsided nature of oil use. Factor in the spare capacity not keeping up with price this time around and you will hopefully start to see the picture.

(c) we won't just shrug and move to a better power source.

I would like to point out to you the fact that there is no viable replacement for fossil fuels available presently. All the technological solutions are at this point pipe dreams, not available even on a fraction of the required scale should oil supplies faulter by even 10-20% from present levels. I dont think you realise that most of the components of most technological products are made of plastic which is made of ... oil. Not to mention that for over 40 years some reckless idiots bamboozled the public into total dependency on cars for everything, including delivery of daily food and 2-hour urban sprawl commutes. I truly do not think you see the scope of the problem and the social impact of restricting the primary source of energy and plastics. We are talking total economic pandemonium here.

And that is on top of record levels of personal and national debt.

Combine this with the autocratic cultural trends of late and things are starting to look decidedly grim.

What are you going to do if there is *no* disaster? Have you done much planning for that contingency? Working towards a better job, saving money for retirement, enjoying new the wonderful things right there in the world around you? It never hurts to be prepared!

I never claimed not to be planning ahead and not proceeding with my life just

It rather sucks that I have to be in a middle of one.

(b) you have no control over.

We do have a certain degree of control. Individually our input is miniscule but in large numbers we can effect significant changes. I now see that your philosophy is not only to selectively ignore the surroundings in favour of internal state of bliss but also to do so out of a form of defeatism: "Why should I worry my pretty mind over things? I cant do anything about anything anyhow. Lets party!". I think you are trying to help but this sort of approach is not suitable for many people. Many of us do not have the luxury of turning off our intelects at will. I think the other part of the problem is that some people care for the fate of society on a personal level, while some do not have that sort of attachment. Were I a Libertarian, I would instead, probably, be busy trying to figure how big a yacht to buy with the proceeds of my latest investment scam involving orphans and widows. Or something of the sort.

(a) price will have no effect on demand,

Most peak oil estimates take the price/supply relationships into account.

(b) oil companies, instead of pretending that oil is more scarce than it really is in order to drive up prices, are actually pretending that oil is more plentiful than it really is to drive down prices

This simplistic idea does not take into account the fact that most of oil reserves are in Saudi Arabian fields whose condition is kept secret (but sordid state of which can be indirectly inferred by compiling leaked data as experts have done) and that discovery of new fields has steadily declined since 1960s. Saudi Arabia and other oil producers are faced with this problem: oil too cheap = little profit, oil too expensive = economic slowdown and possible military action should panic over remaining reserves insue. It is not in the producer's interest to have galloping oil prices, a stable, or slow increase is their desired state. The oil producers are already in the crisis mode as we speak as they are unable to halt the rise in prices.

Add to this the lopsided nature of oil use. Factor in the spare capacity not keeping up with price this time around and you will hopefully start to see the picture.

(c) we won't just shrug and move to a better power source.

I would like to point out to you the fact that there is no viable replacement for fossil fuels available presently. All the technological solutions are at this point pipe dreams, not available even on a fraction of the required scale should oil supplies faulter by even 10-20% from present levels. I dont think you realise that most of the components of most technological products are made of plastic which is made of ... oil. Not to mention that for over 40 years some reckless idiots bamboozled the public into total dependency on cars for everything, including delivery of daily food and 2-hour urban sprawl commutes. I truly do not think you see the scope of the problem and the social impact of restricting the primary source of energy and plastics. We are talking total economic pandemonium here.

And that is on top of record levels of personal and national debt.

Combine this with the autocratic cultural trends of late and things are starting to look decidedly grim.

What are you going to do if there is *no* disaster? Have you done much planning for that contingency? Working towards a better job, saving money for retirement, enjoying new the wonderful things right there in the world around you? It never hurts to be prepared!

I never claimed not to be planning ahead and not proceeding with my life just