Swiss voters Sunday overwhelmingly rejected an initiative that would have scrapped the Alpine country’s value-added-tax system and replaced it with a carbon tax. Roughly 92% of voters opposed the initiative while 8% supported the measure. The initiative would have encouraged Swiss households to use renewable energy sources, including solar and wind, which would have been exempt from taxes. The initiative, which was introduced by the Green Liberal Party of Switzerland, was designed to help lower carbon emissions and reduce global warming. --Neil Maclucas, The Wall Street Journal, 8 March 2015
A proposal replacing the main consumer tax with a new levy on non-renewable energy has suffered a blistering defeat in Sunday’s nationwide ballot. The proposal by the Liberal Green Party won only 8% of the vote, according to final official results. Sunday’s result was the second worst in modern Swiss history. --Swiss Info, 8 March 2015
Coal was the leading source of power generation in India last year and this is expected to almost double by 2025. India’s clean coal capacity is forecast to grow by approximately 103 GW in the next decade as the country seeks to meet its surging electricity demand, according to new research. GlobalData’s senior power analyst Sowmyavadhana Srinivasan said India’s electricity demand was being driven by its increasing population and industrialization, improved standard of living, and strong economic growth. According to GlobalData, coal was the leading source of power generation in India last year, with 160 GW, accounting for 59 per cent of installed capacity, and this is expected to almost double by 2025. --Kelvin Ross, Power Engineering International, 4 March 2015
Next January will see the 10th anniversary of one of the most curious episodes in the history of the BBC. At a “secret seminar”, many of its most senior executives met with a roomful of invited outsiders to agree on a new policy that was in flagrant breach of its Charter. They agreed that, when it came to climate change, the BBC’s coverage should now be quite deliberately one-sided, in direct contravention of its statutory obligation that “controversial subjects” must be “treated with due accuracy and impartiality”. Anything that contradicted the party line, from climate science to wind farms, could be ignored. --Christopher Booker, The Sunday Telegraph, 8 March 2015
Disappointingly the BBC programme Climate Change by Numbers championed style over content. Its treatment of the so-called pause in global annual average surface temperature was misleading. The start date given for the “pause” was incorrect as was the assertion that not all surface temperature datasets show it. It was said that when adjustment was made there was a slight warming trend. What was not said was that this trend is statistically insignificant, surely an important point in a documentary about statistics and climate change. The “pause” was dismissed as a statistical fluke and then, briefly, suggested it might not exist. So Climate Change By The Numbers was a disappointment and a wasted opportunity and certainly not the start of a new narrative in the debate about climate change. But, in the interests of impartiality, why not allow three sceptics a similar platform to present their view of climate data? -- David Whitehouse, Global Warming Policy Forum, 4 March 2015
Research in recent years has encouraged those of us who question the popular alarm over allegedly man-made global warming. Actually, the move from “global warming” to “climate change” indicated the silliness of this issue. The climate has been changing since the Earth was formed. This normal course is now taken to be evidence of doom. Billions of dollars have been poured into studies supporting climate alarm, and trillions of dollars have been involved in overthrowing the energy economy. So it is unsurprising that great efforts have been made to ramp up hysteria, even as the case for climate alarm is disintegrating. --Richard Lindzen, The Wall Street Journal, 5 March 2015
So once again it is the campaigns of environmental activists that are causing problems for mankind. And, counterintuitively, the result of the greens' efforts is to increase the pressure to convert wild land into farmland. There is a pattern here isn't there? The greens' campaigns against modern agriculture are leading to wild places being ploughed up for farmland. Their campaigns for "renewable" energy are leading to wild places disappearing under carpets of wind turbines and farmland being covered in solar panels. This represents an all out assault on the wildernesses that so many people cherish and leads to one clear conclusion. If we want to keep our wild places we have to ditch the environmentalists. --Andrew Montford, Bishop Hill, 9 March 2015
