Sarkozy (who has been posturing alongside Merkel) had the old ‘rabbit in the head-lights’ look when Standard & Poor’s stripped France (as well as Austria) of AAA ratings and further downgraded Italy, Portugal, Spain, Cyprus, Malta, the Slovak Republic and Slovenia.  There have been moves internationally to have the number of letters in the alphabet  increased, but as to whether this is political move; finanical commentators don’t believe so, they said they will wait to see what happens and then report on it.

As Ms Gillard settled more comfortably into the 1.5 seat (no doubt enjoying not being on the defensive), and her her brittle laugh echoed around the bank loans manager’s outer office, she said there is always a price to be paid by governments that had put off reforms, spent more money than they had and borrowed like there was no tomorrow (well at least not in their electrol term). She warmed up to the task and continued by suggesting that for too many years, European governments have deferred the nation-building, productivity-enhancing reforms which Australia has made the foundation of our dynamic and resilient economy …

In stark contrast to Europe, Australia had strict fiscal rules that would return it to surplus in – at this stage her voice lowered to a mumble but an aide (the minister from NSW who is clearing his name with respect to misappropiated funds) stated “she said 2012-13″.   Ms Gillard stated she was available – along with world’s second greatest treasurer (Wayne Swan) – to advise them how to (mumble but it sounded like) ‘cook the books’, but it would cost and she would bring along some pay sheets to validate her (and Wayne’s) hourly rate … (but they would bring their own gutting knives and other ‘tools of their trade’). She said European leaders should swiftly undertake structural reforms to boost their economic potential and lift growth.

When no-one asked AMP economist Shane Oliver, he warned swift action to repair European budgets could cut growth further and is alleged to have said ‘fiscal austerity leads to economic deterioration and budget deficits that blow out; effectively worsening the economic outlook’. Poor little rich kid and sometime shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey – walking out of Jenny Craig – lambasted Ms Gillard for the intervention, saying it was “a little rich” for the Prime Minister to lecture Europe; then he muttered ‘did someone mention lamb, mmm BBQ lamb’.

In August, the world’s most succussful borrowing country ever – the USA – had its credit rating cut from AAA to AA (it would have been lower but the agency had an offer they couldn’t refuse; a drone with coordinates of their homes or $1 billion in any currency they wanted – which the USA would print).  Now the Germans are stoic people and their economy is used to pretty much prop up the Euro with a AAA rating. Another unasked question (till now) is why have Portugal’s and Cyprus’s ratings been cut to junk status and not the USA? Oh yeah, the drone.

France is the Euro fund’s second-biggest guarantor and before the downgrade, the head of the French central bank, Christian Noyer, used diplomatic means (he cried like a girl) to have Standard & Poor’s strip Britain of its top rating before France (little realising that England had threatened to send over soccer hoodlums).  Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, offered to shake his hand (no doubt for the ‘Yorkshire hand shake’ – a rapid knock of his forehead on the bridge of the Frog’s nose) and said (in his best Prince Charles accent) ‘the suggestion was unacceptable, do please calm the rhetoric’ and logically pointed out that Britain is not part of the euro zone and should be spared a downgrade.

What gets me is why do they need to keep borrowing money? When the man in the street gets a loan, he just pays it back. …

The British Acoustics Bulletin has just published what is now the 10th independent review of the evidence on wind farms causing annoyance and ill health in people. And for the 10th time it has emphasised that
annoyance has far more to do with social and psychological factors in those complaining than any direct effect from sound or inaudible infrasound emanating from wind turbines.

Two factors repeatedly stand out: a) being able to see wind turbines increases annoyance, particularly in those who dislike or fear them and b) people derive income from hosting turbines, which miraculously appears to be a highly effective antidote to feelings of annoyance and symptoms.  Wind companies don’t publicise what they pay landowners each year to host turbines, as it varies with topographical conditions and the amount of energy that can be generated. So each price is negotiated. Amounts from $7,000 to $18,000 – depending on the landowners topography and accessible windy ridges – can drought-proof the farm by turning generally useless land into a major earner requiring zero labour and investment.

Neighbours with unfavourable topography look on with envy and worry about the relative re-sale value of their land. Some apparently worry themselves sick. Anti-wind farm groups argue that there are many angry turbine hosts who have signed gag clauses preventing them from speaking out. However, blank contract forms from Australian companies have no such clauses and no contract would indemnify any person being harmed from a claim of negligence, so the silence is telling. Other indications of the sociogenic nature of “wind turbine syndrome” are the recency and the anglophone nature of the complaints. There are an estimated 120,000-plus turbines globally, with major construction now occurring in India and China. In France, turbines can be seen in many parts of the country.

A tourist recently asked public health colleagues and neighbours and were given a blank look when asked about negative public opinion or health problems; the same goes for Spain. The surprising thing is complaints about wind farms appears confined largely to parts of Australia, Canada, the US, Britain and New Zealand and these complaints have accelerated in the past five years, despite turbines having been operational in many locations for more than 20 years.

In Australia, the leading opponents are the Waubra Foundation and the Australian Landscape Guardians, which share a post office box with a mining investment company, Lowell Resources. Australian Landscape Guardians has been totally silent on any other intrusion on the landscape, apparently unperturbed by mining, highway construction or suburban encroachment, not to mention the invasive CSG industry.

So why would anyone be against wind farms? Is it the noise … aesthetics … ecology (they have been known for birds strikes, but what of migratory birds that land where water once was that is now as car-park or major road-way. Is it the competition?  The coal industry didn’t complain about nuclear power stations did it?

So, who is it? The fossil fuel industry is pushing the line that more renewable energy undermines their business model, and thus “puts the energy supply grid at risk”. How and why would climate sceptics spend good money opposing wind farms unless they are funded by the ‘business as usual’ coal, gas  and oil industries?

The Salvation Army indicated that it will need to feed 2.2 million Australians at Christmas … all in an environment of massive earnings from royalties for the sale of our diminishing resources by these same tow governments; and the solution according to ‘the Honourable’ Karen Struthers (Minister for Community Services, Housing and Women, in a December 21st 2011 press release) … Two local bunnies MPs Peter Lawlor and Peta Kaye Croft are all for the rights of caravan park dwellers.

As we see more and more people unable to pay their electricity bills or being kicked out of their homes, it begs the question, are we turning into a state of the USA and is this the start of Aussie Trailer Trash, displaced and marginalized people unable to sink roots and no possibility to become part of a community?

Ms Struthers claims caravan park dwellers and residential park home owners and the broader community have a say, but in her press release, you can tell it’s already a done deal, the government has given up not just on these people but the greater community. She visited manufactured home parks on the Gold Coast and encouraged participants to make submissions to the recently released discussion paper on growing the industry’s future, then puts some spin on it (sugars the bullshit) by pretending that ‘it’s important home owners and support agencies join discussion on how the government can ensure sector growth while also protecting the rights of manufactured home owners; that input from industry forums and the discussion paper are vital in determining future government policy when it comes to this type of home ownership and the parks that accommodate them’.

Of course her statement that ‘it will be a growth industry’ further confirms the complete and utter failure by the Labor government/s to make housing affordable; of course politicians, their families and relatives (many now employed in government) will all live in gated areas to separate the riff-raff and growing number of homeless and marginalized trailer-trash and the pensioners (now past their productive life) from their neighbourhoods.

Yet another example of the total failure of urban planning. ‘Let them eat cake …’

WTF ?

How can anyone in their right mind – let alone Ms Gillard – swallow that crap?

Bernanke (head of the USA Federal Reserve and chief architect of the American financial collapse) has also offered guidance to the European Union. What drugs do these imbeciles take?

Listening to either of these two failures in financial management will not help the IMF or the EU. And what exactly will Australia contribute in money we don’t have?  We Australians must look like right Wallies to the world given this ill thought out, rush of blood to the head gibbering.

Does Gillard really believe the pap that she and Wayne Swan peddle to the masses in OZ ? They can change the G 20 Go Broke Summit in gay Paris (Cannes to be specific).  Our least liked Prime Minister (ever) says she plans to ‘garner support for the idea in bilateral meetings with other leaders from the world’s most powerful countries’; shouldn’t that be the most indebted countries ? The implication that Gillard implies she is pushing for support among non-EU members to pressure European leaders to resolve their debt crisis impasse, what a crock.

Gillard met with Brasil’s (first lady) President Dilma Rousseff to ’discuss the importance of providing the IMF with adequate resources to help manage the crisis and restore confidence to the markets’ her spokesman is to have said; Brasil is far more viable than Australia. Gillard can meet with whomever she wants, but they should – and most likely will – be sceptical about anything she says. Opposition treasury spokesman Joe Hockey asked Gillard how much money Australia would provide to help fund a Eurozone bailout; that the British are not prepared to do so, but Joe, the Poms couldn’t help even if they wanted to; their banking system is also in a rotten state.

I can remember being short of money and my children (then aged 10 and under) offering me their pocket money (even future pocket money earnings) and that is exactly what Gillard’s offer is worth, Australia offering to bail-out one of the world’s largest economies – also built on poor financial practices (thats why they are in the pickle they’re in) – we haven’t got the money, but we’ll borrow it – and put our citizens last – so she can look good; how generous Julia.

Despite soaring unemployment and the 19 million Americans currently living in “deep poverty”, federal funds for the Temporary Assistance For Needy Families (TANF) program have entirely dried up for the first time since 1996, leaving states with an average of 15 percent less federal funding for the coming year to help an ever-increasing number of needy families.

TANF, the federal program that replaced welfare under the Clinton Administration, provides a lifeline for families and workers who have exhausted all of their unemployment benefits. According to a new report by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, “more homeless families will go without shelter, fewer low-wage workers will receive help with child care expenses, and fewer families involved with the child welfare system will receive preventive services” now that Congress has passed legislation that will end funding for the TANF Contingency Fund in 2011.

Congress also failed to reauthorize an emergency fund for a subsidized job program on September 30 that would have allowed states to provide emergency help to needy families and place low-income people in subsidized jobs.

In fiscal year 2011, every state except Wyoming will experience up to a 20 percent reduction in recession relief funds. The CBPP reports that many states have already drastically reduced their subsidized job programs after being cut off from federal funding, costing tens of thousands of people their jobs. Some states are also considering substantial cuts to programs for low-income families with children, including child care subsidies for working parents and programs that address substance abuse, caring for a disabled child, and other challenges.

“This is not what Congress intended when it reformed the welfare system in 1996,” said Liz Schott, Senior Fellow at CBPP. “Helping welfare recipients find work in this economy requires more help from the federal government, not less.”

However, Australia has the highest household debt to disposable income ratio in the world; even higher than America; we have big homes, bigger waistlines and the biggest debts; Australia is in the middle of its own credit boom, complete with all the social consequences and financial repercussions.

The chart doesn’t have the most recent data and it appears to show a gentle decline in the household debt-to-disposable income ratio, but since then – due to higher debts and income growth that’s not quite kept up – the ratio has turned up again. It’s around 156% today, largely thanks to the mini-boom in mortgage lending spawned by the diabolical first home owner’s grants. The Fitch Ratings chimed in with a gloomy forecast for Australians overnight; it said that rising interest rates in 2010 would trigger more home loan and commercial mortgage defaults, leading to some “deterioration” in the quality of assets that underpin mortgage-backed bonds.

Does that sound familiar to the Americans …..?

Scientists say the nitrogen kills fish by depleting oxygen levels in water and may also contribute to climate change. As the Earth’s population has increased, farmers have increasingly turned to nitrogen fertilisers to improve crop yields.

Professor Donald Canfield from the University of Southern Denmark is the lead author of a paper outlining the problems in the latest edition of the journal, Science.

He says the use of nitrogen fertilisers has more than doubled the amount of nitrogen on Earth. “We now have the possibility of fertilising large tracts of land which wouldn’t have been possible to fertilise before,” he said. “But the bad thing about it is that the nitrogen that is added to the soils often runs off the soils and then into coastal areas and into lakes where it utrifies them. “[It] causes a lot of productivity of algae, which in turn can cause the oxygen in these environments to go down to very, very [low] levels and cause fish kills and all sorts of things.”

Professor Canfield says other excess nitrogen is being pumped into the atmosphere as the greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide. He says naturally occurring micro-organisms will be able to clean up the excess nitrogen that humans have created, but it will take many decades. He says farmers need to stop the run-off of excessive nutrients.

“It used to be in Denmark that people would fertilise during the fall because that is when they had the fertiliser ready and that is when they could put it on,” he said. “But by doing so, a lot of the fertiliser was lost and ran off into streams and not used by the plants the next spring when they started to grow. “So just timing the fertilisation together with the plant growth season can help a lot.”

In Australia, a report suggests rotating crops with plants like legumes that are able to process the excess nitrogen; it also suggested using selective breeding or genetic engineering to create plants that use nitrogen more efficiently. Professor Peter Grace from Queensland University of Technology’s Institute for Sustainable Resources says the report’s recommendations are good, but some will not suit Australia’s environment and others will not be viable for many years.

In the meantime, he says Australian farmers need more information about the most efficient ways of using nitrogen fertilisers. “Farmers are across this issue because it is profitable. It is what is in their back pocket,” he said.

“But on the other hand, they do need education in terms of when to apply the nitrogen. “There’s also climate variability. There is a whole lot of different environmental interactions that need to be taken into account. “Farmers need information and it’s not as simple as just getting on the web. Farmers need actual information provided by agronomists and extension agents out in the regional areas.”

Professor Grace says state and federal governments have been cutting funding for such services.

In Australia, the master public purse parasite has been Manildra, even coughing money into independent (oxymoron in every sense?) Rob Katter’s election war-chest, but is the writing on the wall, as more State governments look for ways to save money (selling off assets and OKing suspect land developments)?

We follow the USA on many things, so the following article should put a cold chill up the spines of ethanol producers here in OZ.

Jim Sensenbrenner happens to be the top Republican on the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming; he also is happier to pay extra to cruise his pontoon boat (across Pine Lake in southern Wisconsin) at 30¢ more per gallon for fuel free of ethanol; what he calls “a lousy fuel” that corrodes his two-stroke outboard engine. His ethanol aversion is a sign that the darling of alternative fuels is hitting a political wall. ‘people are worried about deficits, debt and special-interest handouts and Ethanol is all three’ says Sensenbrenner.

That sentiment is endangering the $27 billion industry that has grown up since federal support began under President Jimmy Carter amid the 1970s energy crisis. Today the U.S. offers a 45¢ per gallon tax credit to refiners that blend ethanol with gasoline. The government also requires gasoline makers to use a steadily increasing amount of the additive and it imposes an import tariff to deter foreign competition. The tax credit – worth more than $4.7 billion last year – expires on Dec. 31, 2010 as does the protective tariff. If Republicans control the House after the Nov. 2 elections, the renewal of those measures will be in doubt. Ethanol could go the way of biodiesel, an alternative fuel made from soybeans, whose production has ground to a near-halt since biodiesel’s $1-a-gallon incentive expired at the end of last year, according to the National Biodiesel Board.

As in Australia, ethanol makers pushed for and got a 10% add ratio and persuaded the Environmental Protection Agency to allow 15% in motor fuel blends. Growth Energy – an ethanol advocacy group supported by the top U.S. producer, Poet of Sioux Falls, S.D. – says without investment in next-generation ethanol, such as cellulosic ethanol derived from wood and nonedible parts of plants, use will dry up, rural jobs will go away, and corn prices will plunge as biofuel production stagnates, says Wesley Clark, the former NATO commander and Presidential candidate who is Growth Energy’s chairman.

The battle over ethanol’s future pits the industry, corn farmers and the U.S. Agriculture Dept. against a growing cadre of environmental groups, cattle ranchers, and deficit hawks like Sensenbrenner. Environmentalists question ethanol’s overall benefits, and cattle ranchers say it raises the price of feed corn. General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler worry that ethanol will corrode engines in cars not designed to handle the stronger blend. Some 12.8 billion gallons of ethanol will be produced this year by 201 distilleries, according to the Renewable Fuels Assn. U.S. drivers will use about 138 billion gallons of gasoline.

Ethanol’s Corn Belt popularity means many Midwest and rural lawmakers of both parties will back it, says David Yepsen, director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. However, the USA’s poor financial position is changing the equation on federal spending. Farmers and ethanol supporters, including House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), accuse the EPA of foot-dragging on the 15 percent blend limit, which they estimate would create about 136,000 rural jobs. A ruling was delayed last November; the EPA says it will decide after the Energy Dept. finishes tests later this year on whether the fuel has a negative effect on newer vehicles.

Clark’s Growth Energy wants the tax credit extended but can accept ending it if the Administration supports ethanol in other ways, such as bolstering the number of fuel pumps, pipelines, and other infrastructure needed to move ethanol from Midwestern distilleries to consumers. Clark seeks to shift political pressure to opponents such as Sensenbrenner, saying they’re blocking a chance for the U.S. to kick its addiction to foreign oil. “If he had to justify that to his constituents,” Clark says, “he might decide that domestic fuel is pretty good.” The bottom line: The $27 billion ethanol industry’s future is threatened as it loses some of the political support that has sustained it for decades.

It would be easier to believe corn farmers and their transport companies if they used 100% ethanol powered vehicles (as they do in Brasil); however, they don’t and as in Australia, ethanol mixes are not allowed in aviation or marine applications.

BHP – one of the world’s largest producers of thermal coal making almost 10% of its revenue -  have seemingly acknowledged the need for action on climate change, even though the mining industry (the Minerals Council of Australia), was a very vocal opponent of Rudd’s emissions trading scheme.

Although this observation hasn’t received a good reception from politicians, the hung vote and several weeks later a survey indicating if another election were held Labor and the Coalition would lose even more seats just shows how out of touch they are with the people and how beholding they are to the fossil fuel industries. Are both sides of politics  too scared to canvass the end of the coal industry because it would not be welcome by their financial sponsors or because it will highlight to the public how much of what they spend is dependant on what corporations sell off each week.

Both parties back the oxymoron ‘clean coal technology’ and the non-event of carbon capture and storage. Australia’s energy production is particularly carbon intensive and the highest among OECD countries in terms of tonnes of carbon emitted per unit of energy. Coal-fired power stations account for almost half of the country’s emissions and therefore, is a prime example of the need to look beyond just coal.

Minister for Climate Change Greg Combet is charged with developing a policy involving a price on carbon and said ‘my three priority areas are support for renewable energy, greater energy efficiency in industry and households and working towards the introduction of a carbon price; I will be working with other parliamentarians, the business community and the environmental movement to build consensus and to discuss the best way we can achieve a price on carbon’; however, he is reported to have assured the coal industry it had a sound future.

There is a need for revenue generated by any carbon price to be returned to the economy – say – through tax cuts, to offset the cost impact of businesses and individuals.

If Australia did take the lead by implementing a carbon price before a global agreement was struck, Mr Kloppers said ‘it needed to ensure investment did not go offshore to countries without a price on carbon’.

Tony Abbott (who has polarized and alienated many with his hard-man opposition for the sake of opposition) has ruled out allowing Coalition MPs to sit on a cross-party committee to be established by the month’s end to discuss potential responses to climate change.  But is BHP just playing the uranium card ?

BP became the company Beyond Petroleum in 2000, but under new management in 2007 with Tony Hayward, they dropped the green washed label by resuming tar sands operations, winding back wind and solar operations, closing alternative energy headquarters in London and finally, the cream on atop the cake, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

With Peak Coal predicted for Australia in 2040, is BHP more interested in nuclear power for Australia so they can dig more coal to sell elsewhere; is it an announcement to push the South Australian government to OK the Olympic Dam mine expansion; would nuclear reactors reduce our greenhouse emissions ?

Whatever the question and answer, if an honest approach is used, then nuclear power will not be a solution … ever; the simple reason is that an honest approach is one where the embodied energy and GHG emissions emitted in developing the land, building and commission a nuclear power plant and decommissioning the plant and ensuing emissions to do so are added to the emissions of the plant while it is running and being maintained; and then when you have added that in and then considered – rationally – where the nuclear waste is to be stored, that the real cost emerges; and it won’t be a simple Prof Ross Garnaut type solution like dumping tailings at sea either.

Both the ALP and the Coalition have brought policies that most independent analysis suggests will fail to reach the presumed bipartisan target of a 5 per cent reduction in emissions from 2000 levels by 2020.

That, in itself, makes both policy positions untenable. They don’t match the science, they don’t match the expectations of public polling and they don’t match the business need for some sort of certainty to unlock the tens of billions of investment that must be made to bring Australia’s energy network, and its broader economy, into the 21st century.

The most remarkable thing is that the media and the electorate will let them get away with it. The extent to which they do will be answered by the performance of The Greens, the party – according to RBA board member Warwick McKibbin – that has produced “closest to the best policy on climate change”. And the only party that is unable to deliver it.

How the politics of Dumb and Dumber entered the climate debate can be traced back to the fateful day in Canberra when the Liberals rolled Malcolm Turnbull and, much to their own surprise, put Tony Abbott in his place.

Abbott’s climate scepticism didn’t win him any greater support, but his “great big tax” mantra certainly hit a nerve – mostly Labor’s. It fits neatly into a newspaper headline and an audio sound bite: so effectively, that Abbott hasn’t been compelled to produce another original thought on the matter ever since.

The Labor government has been unable to resist the scare campaign, centred as it is around the impact of energy prices in the western suburbs of Sydney. Ever since Rudd pulled the ETS, destroying the last vestiges of his credibility, and was finally dispatched, and Gillard and her advisors dreamed up the Citizens Assembly, the ALP has tried to create a smaller target for the Opposition.

Gillard didn’t even mention climate change in the official election launch, but the Opposition took a shot at it anyway, suggesting it had a secret deal with The Greens to produce an interim carbon tax. So Labor retreated further and promised it would not.

The ALP has promised a suite of policies that sound nice and are steps in the right direction, but don’t mean a lot because they lack ambition. The fuel efficiency measures still leave Australia well behind the rest of the world, the emission caps on new power stations will not affect those already in the planning stages, and the reward for early action for business means nothing unless company boards can see a carbon price.

The Liberals, bizarrely, have chosen a direct action scheme that rewards the two groups that argued loudest against an emissions trading scheme – the farmers and the heavy emitters – by creating a private and exclusive “abatement market” run by bureaucrats and to be paid for by taxpayers. How did this get through?

It reminds some observers of the Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme which was panned by a subsequent audit as being next to useless. Even more bizarrely, the Liberals climate spokesman Greg Hunt compares it to the UN Clean Development Mechanism. That, though, produces a tradable commodity, a Certified Emission Reduction unit. It’s a carbon market! Albeit one that has been rorted horribly because it is run by bureaucrats.

None of this is quite as bizarre as the concept of the citizens assembly. As soon as 14 million Australians go to the polls to elect their leaders, the ALP (presuming its re-elected) will go to the phone book to find 150 souls to consider a strategy to address the greatest moral and business challenge we face.

It turns out that UTS researchers have already done something similar, but much more extensive. A project they conducted, targeting not just 150 Australians, but 7000, and staggered over four in-depth studies, concluded that most voters want the government to adopt an ETS now, and to target bigger reduction targets.

The four studies – conducted at yearly intervals – showed that voters wanted revenues generated by an ETS to be used to ease poverty, assist seniors and invested in research and development, and not to be used to reduce taxes for business.

Professor Jordan Louviere, who headed the research, said it showed that the proposed Citizen’s Assembly was unnecessary – what the community has clearly wanted for years is an ETS.

“It is possible, now, for the government to come up with a workable ETS plan that meets the community’s expectations and makes the trade-offs clear that will come with an effective plan,” he says.

“From the public’s perspective any climate change plan consists of eight key features: When does it start? How will revenue be collected? What will be done with the revenue raised? What happens with the transport sector? Are energy-intensive sectors of the economy given special treatment? Does the plan have a strong R&D component? What reduction in carbon emissions should Australia aim for? Finally, should Australia move now or wait for other countries?

“We asked our survey respondents to choose between plans consisting of different options for these features. In doing so we made it clear to them the nature of trade-offs that would be involved in, say, holding back on the start of an emissions trading scheme or protecting certain industries.

“Overall our results suggest that Australians are committed to a climate change plan that works. They believe that it is happening and clearly recognise that there are substantial costs to adopting a plan.”

Try getting a politician to say that. Maybe on Monday.

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