The forced closure of RWE's Biblis nuclear power plant after the Fukushima accident was unlawful, the German Supreme Administrative Court has ruled. The utility is now likely to sue for considerable damages. Today the state of Hesse was told it acted illegally by enforcing the decisions on the Biblis nuclear power plant sited in the state. Plant owner RWE can now sue for compensation over the loss of the Biblis units as an asset. The company has previously said it suffered losses of over €1 billion ($1.3 billion) in 2011 alone due to the Biblis shutdown. --World Nuclear News, 14 January 2014
In 2011, the goal of German Chancellor Angela Merkel was to utilise the Fukushima shock to turn the pro-nuclear stance of the Christian Democrats into the exact opposite. In that way, the rise of the Green Party should be stopped, which, at that time, shortly before the election in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, were polling at 30 percent of the vote and were about to become stronger than the Social Democratic Party (SPD). The operation ‘Stop the Greens’ was a complete success: robbed of their main policy issue, the Greens soon took a dive in the polls. The follow-up costs for this political success of the Christian Democrats, however, now have to be paid by the taxpayers. --Daniel Wetzel, Die Welt, 14 January 2014
The European Union is on the verge of rolling back much of its climate agenda, even as the United States is moving full speed ahead. “It is becoming obvious that Europe’s unilateral climate policy, the whole green agenda of the last 20 years, has turned into an unmitigated fiasco,” Dr. Benny Peiser, director of the UK-based Global Warming Policy Foundation, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Even EU leaders are beginning to accept reality.” Michael Bastasch, The Daily Caller, 14 January 2014
The old guard of green EU commissioners are trying to salvage their green legacy before they leave office in the autumn. These green bureaucrats will be replaced later this year by a new set of commissioners who almost certainly will be less green and more concerned about Europe’s economic future and competitiveness. The chances of the green lobby to push through any new binding renewables or climate targets are near zero. –Benny Peiser, The Daily Caller, 14 January 2014
A new ComRes/ITV poll has revealed that Britons are still unconvinced over the claim that human action has resulted in climate change, and the notion that the weather is worsening as a result of it. The fact that half of those polled disagree, or ‘don’t know’ about whether climate change is “really happening” will no doubt be a blow to the ‘big green’ lobby, that spends tens of billions of pounds worldwide trying to sell the idea of climate change, and its tax-heavy ‘solutions’. --Trending Central, 13 January 2014
What we now see is the unravelling of years of shoddy science and sloppy journalism. If it wasn’t for independent Murdoch newspapers around the world, the mainstream media would be almost completely captured by the IPCC establishment. --Maurice Newman, The Australian, 15 January 2014
Historians will probably look back at the years 2006-2009 as the time when the climate hysteria reached its peak, when rational debate was at its most restricted and politicians at their most gullible. Those days are over. The climate-change Cassandras are increasingly marginalised here and abroad. --Tom Switzer, The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 January 2014
