In advance of the summit, an EU official confirmed the energy talks would be “through the lens of prices rather than climate concerns.”

But EU climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard said on Wednesday it was “a good day for EU climate policy” because leaders welcomed a European Commission green paper on a 2030 framework for climate and energy policies.

The leaders also pledged to return to this issue in March 2014.”

http://euobserver.com/news/120202

The summit marked the first big discussion on energy policy since the agreement of the EU’s energy package in 2009, which aimed at liberalising the sector by “unbundling” production and supply.

Meanwhile, over in Strasbourg, MEPs on Tuesday (21 May) backed a non-legislative report calling for a robust EU policy to promote renewable energy.

The report says the EU should consider a mandatory target for 2030 and create incentives for investment in the sector.

In a statement on Wednesday, Green group energy spokesperson Claude Turmes described the EU’s focus on prices as “deluded and misguided.”

He said that “the EU should be looking to reduce end-user costs and this implies taking more ambitious measures to ensure end-use efficiency, limiting energy wastage, which will bring down energy bills for consumers and industry alike.”

He added: “Shale gas is not the silver bullet for Europe’s energy policy but rather a dangerous Trojan Horse.”

“The European Commission is already in ‘do nothing’ mode on climate change, and it will obviously put off a decision on ambitious targets,” the official said on the European Union’s post-2020 goals.

The change in policy comes as some European companies are moving to shift operations out of the region to avoid increasing costs to meet the emissions-cut goals, and amid a decline in emission trading launched in the region in 2005.

Discussions on countermeasures against global warming have also lost momentum as the European Union focuses on steps to boost the economy ahead of the European Parliament election scheduled for May next year.

Blame the economy, not the collapse of AGW apocalysm?
They sure are a slippery bunch . . .

“Suddenly we are also seeing studies showing that warming won’t be so bad after all, and that CO2 climate sensitivity is much lower than first thought. The policy-making pressure coming from the threat of climate change is disappearing rapidly.”
http://notrickszone.com/2013/05/21/eu-commission-plans-fundamental-course-change-in-energy-policy-focus-away-from-climate-and-more-on-economics/

http://fenbeagleblog.wordpress.com/2013/05/19/the-arrogantauts/

HALLE – FLAMING – LULLIA!!

……mind you it would be good to see what would happen to the ‘windmills’ after a good “Testing” up there.

.

Clouds have a habit of disappearing too, whereas my backed-up exe collection is pretty secure. Funny to think I still have some usable SW tools from the last century! If it ain’t broke . . . .

Back to topic, though…

I think it is interesting to examine what that quote is actually saying. Basically, it suggests that fear be dealt with as a simple matter of will. But — is being blindly reckless any less foolhardy than being blindly fearful? I think not.

Fear can be essential, or it can be detrimental. The specific problem we are concerned with here is the power of irrational fear. It is a problem, because one who holds such a fear will readily accept a similarly irrational solution. This is convenient, in that the very irrationality of his fear guarantees that the efficacy of the solution can be neither verified nor falsified. And in fact, it need not ever have been implemented, in actuality.

To identify this fear as the root problem, though, would be to make a blunder. It is but a symptom; the disease is the tendency for people to fail to grasp the nature of probability.

Perhaps I am afraid I’ll die in a car crash, in a plane crash, or by being struck by lightning. What are the absolute and relative likelihoods of each? To what degree can I mitigate the risk, and at what cost? Does it even occur to me to ask?

If I purchase ten national lottery tickets instead of one, it is perfectly true that I have improved my odds by a factor of ten to one. However, an odds maker knows the sure bet is still that I am not going to win.

Maybe I believe that in giving my power over to another, that in agitating for yet another law, I will reduce my chances of becoming a victim. And that may be true, but to what degree? A thousand times nothing is still nothing, and in the meantime, I have willingly surrendered a portion of my freedom.

Winston wrote: “Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.” I challenge that notion; the question, to me, is more whether the failure to be sufficiently analytical is inherent to man’s being, or if it is something that he gradually overcomes, given enough time.

“I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.”

http://xkcd.com/966/

“We are being transformed into children, ready to obey the orders of an enlightened elite.” Pascal Bruckner

Those bloody illuminati sure do get about.

‘Cause it looks, these days, like there may be quite a few of those types about.

Professor Lewandowsky receives the award for his project entitled ‘The (mis)information revolution: information seeking and knowledge transmission’, which addresses how people navigate the blizzard of information with which we are faced on a daily basis, not all of which is accurate or truthful. http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2013/9330.html

A large percentage of all media: books, television, video games and film that are marketed to children are devised around a paranoid, apocalyptic, millenarian premise: the Earth, humanity, the environment, the galaxy, the Universe itself is in great danger from the forces of evil, the forces of evil being demonized, cartooned version of our adult ourselves, and can only be defeated by children with magical super-hero powers or by returning to a childlike relationship with the reality. My own nieces and nephews can scarcely imagine a story being a story without that basic structure. It wasn’t always like this.

Fear does sell – to the fearful.

W^3

“It would hardly be a waste of time if sometimes even the most advanced students in the cognitive sciences were to pay a visit to their ancestors. It is frequently claimed in American philosophy departments that, in order to be a philosopher, it is not necessary to revisit the history of philosophy. It is like the claim that one can become a painter without having ever seen a single work by Raphael, or a writer without having ever read the classics. Such things are theoretically possible; but the ‘primitive’ artist, condemned to an ignorance of the past, is always recognizable as such and rightly labeled as naïve. It is only when we consider past projects revealed as utopian or as failures that we are apprised of the dangers and possibilities for failure for our allegedly new projects. The study of the deeds of our ancestors is thus more than an antiquarian pastime, it is an immunological precaution.”

Umberto Eco [The Search for the Perfect Language]