Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Friday, 22 November 2013

The European Union Times


Posted: 21 Nov 2013 12:27 PM PST

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is currently considering whether to require all new cars to include communication technology that constantly broadcasts a vehicle’s location, speed, and perhaps even the number of passengers inside.
This new technology, dubbed “vehicle-to-vehicle” (V2V) communications, would be used to alert drivers to possible hazards and improve the safety of cars, but there is also concern that the data transmitted could be used to violate an individual’s privacy.
The NHTSA sees V2V technology as the first of a series of steps that would eventually culminate in effective self-driving cars, which would operate through the cooperation of an individual vehicle’s internal electronics and an external communications and database system. The agency expects to decide whether to move forward with the rule-making process before the end of the year.
“We expect to issue decisions on light duty vehicles this year, followed by a decision on heavy-duty vehicles in 2014,” said NHTSA administrator David Strickland to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, according to CNSNews.
By sharing and receiving various kinds of data from other cars, a vehicle would be able to deliver early warning signals to the driver, who’d then take the necessary precautions to avoid a dangerous situation. However, the ability to send and store data like location and speed has raised the possibility that an individual’s movements could be tracked by the government.
For its part, the Obama administration said this is not an option it’s considering.
“NHTSA has no plans to modify the current V2V system design in a way that would enable the government or private entities to track individual motor vehicles,” a NHTSA spokesman said to CNSNews.
Despite these claims, however, a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) acknowledged that the Department of Transportation does want any new V2V system to detect what it called “bad actors” while also safeguarding the privacy of Americans.
In response to questions from CNSNews, the GAO’s David Wise said the current draft of the V2V system prevents the association of a vehicle’s communications data with a driver’s identity. He added that the draft contains “multiple technical, physical, and organizational controls to minimize privacy risks—including the risk of vehicle tracking by individuals and government or commercial entities.”
Wise acknowledged there is a desire by the government to track “bad actors,” but defined the term as vehicles whose parts are malfunctioning or have been hacked rather than individuals.
Still, the GAO report found that the widespread use of V2V technology faces an uphill battle with the public, with one expert saying that it will probably not be accepted “without rules prohibiting the use of vehicles’ speed and location data to issue tickets or track drivers’ movements.”
Earlier this year, civil liberties advocates raised questions about another piece of technology that’s included in nearly every car these days: event data recorders (EDRs) that can store data from the last 5-10 seconds before a crash, including the speed of a car on impact, whether or not an individual was wearing a seatbelt, and more.
Data from EDRs has already been accessed and used by law enforcement authorities in court to contradict testimony.
In July 2013, Khaliah Barnes of the Electronic Privacy Information Center said the proliferation of EDRs raised questions about what, exactly, is being recorded and who has access to the data.
“There’s not so much privacy concerns as actual threats to privacy,” Barnes said to CBS News. “These machines collect lots of data, and right now there are no federal laws that safeguard this information. And so what happens is there is an increasing market for this information. Law enforcement wants to see this information. Insurance companies, as well as private citizens involved in litigation.”
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Posted: 21 Nov 2013 12:18 PM PST
German Chancellor Angela Merkel uses her mobile phone before a 2011 meeting at a European Union summit in Brussels.
German politicians have agreed on measures to keep their internal communications safe in light of the recent reports about spying by the US National Security Agency (NSA) on top German officials.
On Thursday, the interior ministry of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and their Social Democratic Party (SPD) counterparts, currently in coalition negotiations over forming Germany’s next government, agreed on “urgent” guidelines for ministers’ and top ranking officials’ mobile phones, The Local reported.
The guidelines require the new government politicians to make calls only on encrypted phones, meaning mobiles which are not protected will become the exception.
The guidelines also ban the use iPhones for official correspondence, so Apple products will start disappearing from the German parliament.
The Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) has said that discussing official correspondence should only be conducted on phones approved by BSI.
In October, Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower, leaked top secret US government spying programs under which the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are eavesdropping on millions of American and European phone records and the Internet data from major Internet companies such as Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Apple, and Microsoft.
The NSA scandal took even broader dimensions when Snowden revealed information about its espionage activities targeting friendly countries and their leaders, which included bugging German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone for a decade.
Documents leaked by Snowden showed Britain has also been operating a covert listening post within a stone’s throw of Germany’s parliament, and Merkel’s offices in the Chancellery, using hi-tech equipment housed on the embassy roof.
The revelations prompted Brazil and Germany to draft a UN General Assembly resolution aimed at restraining the NSA’s surveillance programs against other nations.
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Posted: 21 Nov 2013 12:12 PM PST

The theory that men first assess women based on their figure has been repeatedly confirmed. However, it turns out that women look at each other the same way. A group of psychologists from the University of Nebraska (Lincoln, USA) led by Sarah Gervais concluded that women assess the appearance of other women from the point of view of men.
Scientists have long been interested in the so-called phenomenon of “objectifying gaze.” They assume that both men and women when first looking at each other perform some sort of mental “analysis” that captures the degree of sexual attractiveness of a new acquaintance and determines whether the person is suitable for them as a potential partner.
36 men and 29 women were involved in the study. They were divided into two groups, each group had members of both sexes. They were showed pictures of ten different women. The pictures were manipulated to obtain three images of varying degrees of attractiveness.
The first team was asked to evaluate the appearance of these women, while the second group was asked to assess their personal qualities (or share their assumptions about them). The researchers used special eyetracking technology Eyelink II to map the trajectory of the subjects’ gaze. The device is a helmet with two sensors detecting the movement of the pupils.
It was found that men dwelled more on the most sexualized parts of a woman’s body than on their face. This, however, was not surprising. Surprise awaited the researchers when the same experiment was conducted with women who were shown pictures of other women.
It turned out that the female subjects also focused primarily on the particular shape of other women. One key difference between male and female perceptions is that men dwelled more on “curvy” figures, while women spent equal amount of time looking at all shapes.
Only the degree of visual appeal was assessed. Women with hourglass figures were perceived more positively than women with straighter figures by male participants, the researchers found. As for personal traits, men gave higher assessment to “curvy” women, while women participants did not always give high assessment to women with a good figure.
Psychologists believe that women tend to subconsciously compare themselves to other women, and the assessment of appearance allows them to see or not to see each other as potential rivals and competitors. Recently another psychologist conducted a study that showed that women more often than men use indirect methods of aggression in order to stifle competition. This is mostly apparent at a young age.
For example, men tend to compete in order to gain women’s attention. In order to get the woman they want, they can use direct aggression, for example, physical violence against other men. In addition, many of them mistakenly believe that women like aggressive macho (according to numerous studies, this is not the case).
Women use other tools for competition, for example, sarcasm and gossip. They often try to “destroy” their opponents by verbally humiliating them. For example, in a survey conducted by researchers most women said that if another woman were to offend them, they would try to boycott her in the circle of mutual friends.
It was also found that women are less favorable towards well-dressed women than to those who are not elegantly dressed. A survey of Canadian teenage girls showed that attractive girls are 35 percent more likely to turn into an object of aggression by their peers than the less attractive ones. Unattractive women are not perceived as competitors, while attractive women are perceived as a potential threat in the race for men. If a man sees a beautiful woman as a potential partner, women see her as a competitor, experts say. This is why both men and women equally carefully look at women’s appearance.
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Posted: 21 Nov 2013 11:49 AM PST
Argentine Defense Minister Agustin Rossi
Argentinean Defense Minister Agustin Rossi has called for a joint plan among South American countries to cope with the US spying activities.
Rossi made the remarks during a meeting with his Brazilian counterpart Celso Amorim in Brasilia on Thursday.
“I believe that UNASUR (the Union of South American Nations) must have a joint defense strategy,” the Argentinean minister said, adding, “The issue of cyber-defense undoubtedly deserves to be addressed.”
During the talks with Amorim, Rossi further urged higher level of cooperation between the two countries.
“In this case, we are looking at a point of convergence between Argentina and Brazil,” he said.
The Brazilian minister, for his part, assured Rossi that his country would collaborate with Argentina over the issue, saying, if the UNASUR does not shoulder the task, “We can work bilaterally.”
In September, the two ministers had a meeting in Buenos Aires where the two sides signed a military cooperation agreement under which Brazil is committed to providing cyber defense training to Argentinean officers from 2014.
The agreement was made in the wake of revelations by Brazil’s O Globo newspaper.
The newspaper reported on July 7 that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had collected data on billions of telephone and email conversations in the country as well as President Dilma Rousseff’s personal communications.
Reports have shown that Argentina was has been also targeted by the NSA.
Concerns over Washington’s espionage rose after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked classified data about Washington’s massive surveillance programs.
The former CIA employee leaked two top secret US government spying programs under which the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are eavesdropping on millions of American and European phone records and the Internet data from major Internet companies such as Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Apple, and Microsoft.
The NSA scandal took even broader dimensions when Snowden revealed information about its espionage activities targeting friendly countries.
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Posted: 21 Nov 2013 11:38 AM PST

The United States is silently watering down the text of an anti-spying UN resolution introduced by Germany and Brazil in order to ensure any extra-territorial violation of online privacy remains legal, according to a document obtained by The Cable.
According to a government document obtained by the publication, the US has circulated a confidential communique entitled “Right to Privacy in the Digital Age – U.S. Redlines.”
In it, Washington highlights the US objectives in negotiations currently underway at the United Nations and calls for changing the Brazilian and German text so “that references to privacy rights are referring explicitly to States’ obligations under ICCPR and remove suggestion that such obligations apply extraterritorially.”
Washington is also calling for its allies to support amendments that would weaken a UN draft resolution by Brazil and Germany aimed at constraining internet surveillance by the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies.
The United States claims that it wants to limit the focus to illegal surveillance.
“Recall that the USG’s [U.S. government's] collection activities that have been disclosed are lawful collections done in a manner protective of privacy rights,” the document states. “So a paragraph expressing concern about illegal surveillance is one with which we would agree.”
Diplomatic sources have also told The Cable that Washington is worried that extraterritorial human rights could hinder the US effort to pursue international terrorists.
There is no extraterritorial obligation on states “to comply with human rights,” one diplomatic source told The Cable. “The obligation is on states to uphold the human rights of citizens within their territory and areas of their jurisdictions.”
Germany and Brazil submitted a draft resolution to the UN General Assembly earlier in November.
The text calls for an end to excessive electronic surveillance, data collection, and other snooping techniques, in response to recent revelations of US mass surveillance programs.
The text of the resolution asks the world community to declare that it is “deeply concerned at human rights violations and abuses that may result from the conduct of any surveillance of communications, including extraterritorial surveillance of communications.”
The circulated draft, that is being discussed in the UN’s third Committee, urges member states “to take measures to put an end to violations of these rights and to create the conditions to prevent such violations, including by ensuring that relevant national legislation complies with their obligations under international human rights law.”
The Brazilian and German proposal seeks to apply the right to privacy to online communications under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
It acknowledges that while public safety may “justify the gathering and protection of certain sensitive information,” nations “must ensure full compliance” with international human rights laws. The resolution is expected to be adopted next week at the UN.
In public, the US claims to affirm privacy rights. “The United States takes very seriously our international legal obligations, including those under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,” Kurtis Cooper, a spokesman for the US mission to the UN, said in an email to the Cable. “We have been actively and constructively negotiating to ensure that the resolution promotes human rights and is consistent with those obligations.”
Yet behind the scenes, The Cable alleges US diplomatic efforts are aimed at killing “extraterritorial surveillance” provision of the Brazilian and German draft. The publication claims that American negotiators have been pressing their case behind the scenes through their allies.
According to one diplomat, “the United States has been very much in the backseat,” leaving it to its allies, Australia, Britain, and Canada, The Cable writes.
“They want to be able to say ‘we haven’t broken the law, we’re not breaking the law, and we won’t break the law,’” Dinah PoKempner, the general counsel for Human Rights Watch told the publication. She says the US wants to maintain its ability “to scoop up anything it wants through the massive surveillance of foreigners because we have no legal obligations.”
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Posted: 20 Nov 2013 02:30 PM PST
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (R) speaks with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during their meeting in Moscow’s Kremlin, on November 20, 2013. Netanyahu arrived today in Moscow.
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has suggested Iran’s nuclear issue should be resolved with the same approach as Russia offered for Syria, saying it will be peaceful for Tehran just like it was for the war-torn Arab state.
“This will be a peaceful, diplomatic solution of Iran’s nuclear issue just the way it [solution] has been achieved in Syria regarding its chemical weapons,” the Israeli Prime Minister said at a press-conference with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.
For his part, President Putin said he was hopeful of a positive outcome from the talks in Geneva, stressing that both Russia and Israel were optimistic that a “mutually acceptable resolution” could be found.
Netanyahu has compared Iran’s nuclear issue to Syria’s possession of chemical weapons saying that it was a matter “very similar” to what the “states [P5+1 group] involved in Geneva talks” are now negotiating.
Netanyahu stressed that Israel is interested in a peaceful and diplomatic solution for Iran, just like with Syria, where the disarmament process going on.
“I think that we can draw serious conclusions from the resolution that the powers have reached on Syria’s non-conventional weapons. In the case of Syria, Russia and other powers quite justifiably insisted on full the disarmament of Syria,” he said.
Netanyahu said that the International community would not agree to allow Syria to reduce its chemical weapons ability but allowing it to keep its capacity to amass more stockpiles in the future.
The Israeli PM said “the international community must definitely watch closely the implementation of the UN Security Council resolution by Iran, namely, to cease uranium enrichment, to dismantle the centrifuges, to withdraw the enriched material from Iran and dismantle the reactor in Arak”.
Since 2006, the UN Security Council has imposed a series of sanctions targeting entities, people involved in Iran’s nuclear program. Besides that, separate US and EU sanctions have targeted Iran’s energy and banking sectors
If reached, the deal could see Iran’s nuclear program put on hold for six months, in exchange for Western nations lifting sanctions.
Under the deal, the US said it would unfreeze no more than $10 billion of Iran’s money.
Netanyahu has reiterated that Iran’s nuclear activity and “attempts to develop a nuclear weapon” remain the main threat for “Israelis existence” and “peace and security” in the whole world.
The Israeli Prime Minister is in Moscow to try to persuade Russia to impose tougher terms in a nuclear deal with Iran that the Jewish state strongly opposes.
Netanyahu has met President Vladimir Putin behind closed-doors to voice his concerns about the deal being discussed at Iran nuclear talks in Geneva, where senior diplomats from Britain, China, France, Russia, the US and Germany (known together as P5+1 group) are back at the negotiating table.
Israel considers Iran’s stockpile of nuclear material a mortal threat and wants its enriched uranium to be removed and capabilities dismantled.
Russia is hopeful the sides will hammer out a deal during talks in Geneva this week. It is also seeking to freeze or curb Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for some relief from international sanctions.
The previous round of talks in Geneva two weeks ago failed to produce an agreement. Some blamed the failure on France, while others, particularly the US, pointed at Tehran, saying that it “couldn’t take” it as the P5+1 “presented our proposal to the Iranians”.
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Posted: 20 Nov 2013 02:21 PM PST

The United States is gravely concerned about China’s new long-range nuclear bombers that can target previously unreachable US military bases in the Pacific, according to a new report.
The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission warns in its annual report that China is “rapidly expanding and diversifying” its ability to strike US bases, ships and aircraft throughout the Pacific, even places like Guam that were previously out of reach, The Foreign Policy magazine reported on Wednesday.
The House Armed Services Committee is set to discuss China’s Hongzha-6K bomber at a hearing on Wednesday when members of the commission will testify about their report.
The US military has made Guam a key strategic military hub in the western Pacific as part of Washington’s new “pivot” strategy of realigning American forces toward Asia.
The report warned that China has become increasingly aggressive in the way it handles issues with US allies such as the Philippines and Japan.
“Although sovereignty disputes in the East and South China Seas are not new, China’s growing diplomatic, economic, and military clout is improving China’s ability to assert its interests,” according to the report.
“It is increasingly clear that China does not intend to resolve the disputes through multilateral negotiations or the application of international laws and adjudicative processes but instead will use its growing power in support of coercive tactics that pressure its neighbors to concede to China’s claims,” it added.
China’s new drone, which resembles the MQ-9 Reaper, can be armed with Hellfire missiles, bombs and other weapons.
The commission also warned about the growth of the Chinese navy.
“By 2020, barring a US naval renaissance, it is possible that China will become the world’s leading military shipbuilder in terms of the numbers of submarines, surface combatants and other naval surface vessels produced per year,” said the report, citing Chinese military experts Andrew Erickson and Gabe Collins.
This is while the United States has planned to conduct more joint military exercises in western Pacific and encircle China with a chain of small air bases and military ports.
China is considering the Pentagon’s focus on the “pivot” to the Asia-Pacific as a strategy to counter China’s increasing global influence.
Beijing says American militarism in the region could endanger peace, urging Washington to abstain from flexing its muscles.
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Posted: 20 Nov 2013 02:03 PM PST

With government intervention now becoming the only viable solution being touted for everything from individual health care and the economy to our personal safety and how we educate our children, it would only make sense that officials in Washington also figure out a way to use their power of confiscation and redistribution to equalize the income playing field.
It’s no secret that 48 million Americans require nutritional assistance just to put food on the table, or that over 100 million of us are living in or at the very edge of poverty, or that nearly one in three of us is currently without any meaningful labor.
This is a major problem, and if we stay on our current trajectory those numbers are going to continue to rise. The American people are broke, and so are the businesses that employ them, which means that we’ll continue to shed jobs, decrease wages and further impoverish an already dwindling middle class.
Enter the idea of a Universal Basic Income, to be distributed by the Federal government on a monthly basis to every adult in America.
You read that right.
It’s a proposal being floated by members of the establishment media at The Atlantic, the New York Times, and Business Insider, and based on their research, would put a decisive end to poverty and income inequality in America.
According to the “experts,” this is how it would work:
A simple idea for eliminating poverty is garnering greater attention in recent weeks: automatically have the government give every adult a basic income.
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It’s exactly how it sounds. The government would mail every American over the age of 21 a check each month. That’s it. Everyone is free to do what they like with it.
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Giving each working-age American a basic income equal to the poverty linewould cost $2.14 trillion. For some comparison, U.S. GDP was almost $16 trillion in 2012 and the defense budget was $700 billion.
But a minimum income would also allow us to eliminate every government benefit as well. Get rid of SNAP, TANF, housing vouchers, the Earned Income tax credit and many others.
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The clear [benefit] is that no American would live below the poverty line. The U.S. has been waging the War on Poverty for a generation now and still nearly 50 million Americans are below the line. This would end that war with a decisive victory.
First, the assumption being made here is that when you send every person in America a paycheck, they will then use that money to purchase food and the basic essentials they need for survival. They wouldn’t spend that money on new smart phones, or vacations, or home upgrades, or any of that stuff that drove our consumer-based society into a mountain of debt to begin with. Once the government starts doling out the checks, everyone is going to be responsible with their newly found wealth and use it on the things they really need.
Second, injecting $2.1 trillion dollars of cash into the U.S. economy on a yearly basis is only going to be positive for the consumer, right? Are we to assume that when more money is chasing the same amount of goods that the price of those goods will remain the same? That there will be no direct inflationary impact as consumers race to spend their monthly stipend on goods they couldn’t have bought before? Prices are already rising at a rate of nearly 10% a year. What do you think will happen when two trillion new dollars are introduced into the economy on an annual basis?
Third, and probably the most important aspect of all this is how, exactly, are we going to fund this?
To spread the wealth around we have one of two choices.
We can either increase taxes on working Americans to offset the payments going to those who make less than them, or we can borrow it from our creditors by raising our debt ceiling an additional $2.1 trillion on a yearly basis (on top of the existing increase requirements).
Raising taxes isn’t going to work simply because those who generate an income in this country just had their financial futures destroyed by the Patient Affordable Care Act, which promises to triple their monthly mandated health payments. They’ve got nothin’ left after mortgage, car payment, food, utilities and forced health insurance at the barrel of a gun.
Printing money, we suppose will work. For a short while, at least, until our foreign creditors realize there is absolutely no way our country can pay back the trillions of dollars we’re adding to our balance on a yearly basis.
Thus, in the end, we either go broke through taxation, rendering all of us to living on the edge of poverty or below it, or, the Federal Reserve will be forced to make up the difference by printing trillions upon trillions of dollars that will have the effect of rising prices for goods that people will no longer be able to afford, like food, electricity, and other essentials.
Both options lead to essentially the same result.
Margaret Thatcher once warned that socialism only works until you run out of other peoples’ money
We’re just about out.
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Posted: 20 Nov 2013 01:21 PM PST
Blackout Britain – it’s only just the beginning.
BASF, the world’s largest chemical company, has been headquartered in Germany since before the country formally existed.
Founded in 1865 by the industrial pioneer Friedrich Engelhorn, it still occupies the vast site on the banks of the Rhine at Ludwigshafen where its first dye and soda factories were built. A third of its staff are employed in Rhineland Palatinate. It is a global company, yet as German as Goethe and gummi bears.
A few days ago Kurt Bock, the firm’s chief executive, warned that its Ludwigshafen plant may soon be forced to close, with BASF’s German jobs relocated elsewhere. The reason, he said, was Germany’s soaring energy costs and the crippling green levies being used to pay for ‘renewables’ such as wind farms. With German energy prices already twice as high as in the United States and likely to rise much further, the time had come to reconsider ‘the competitiveness of the location’.
BASF’s British rivals should take no comfort from this. For years Britain has, like Germany, chosen green energy over cheap energy – and piled regulation after regulation, levy after levy, on the providers of fossil fuels. In Germany the effect is now becoming apparent: the sacrifice of industry on the altar of environmentalism. It may sound like economic suicide, but it is precisely the policy which David Cameron’s government is pursuing.
Energy now stands at the very centre of British politics, a subject enlivened by Ed Miliband’s pledge to freeze household energy bills. His policy is wildly popular, seeing as gas and electricity prices have roughly trebled in the past ten years. More than five million households are now in fuel poverty. As winter advances, the choice between heating or eating isn’t some abstract slogan, but a daily dilemma. Each winter in Britain, some 25,000 elderly people die from the cold.
But the debate has been bizarre. Politicians from all benches of the Commons like to lambast the Big Six energy companies, without mentioning their own culpability. Mr. Miliband talks about forcing energy bosses to take pay cuts. Meanwhile David Cameron and Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat Climate Change Secretary, suggest the answer is to fiddle around with schemes such as the ‘eco’ levy which subsidises home insulation, and move them from fuel bills to general taxation, so cutting bills by 7 per cent. Nothing either side is discussing will make more than a temporary cosmetic difference.
While they bicker about trimming a few tens of pounds here or there, Parliament has been dealing with the closing stages of the Energy Bill. This, working in concert with its predecessor, the 2008 Climate Change Act, will inflict the biggest fuel bill increases of all. The 2008 measure enforces a legally binding carbon emission target for 2020. But because it’s much harder to cut emissions from transport and heating than electricity generation, this will mean trebling the proportion of power produced by renewables from its current 11 per cent over just six years.
The cost of this swift and radical transformation dwarfs marginal items such as the eco levy. According to the ‘levy control framework’ established by the Energy Bill, it means more than tripling renewable subsidies to £7.6 billion by the end of this decade. The total renewable subsidy which UK consumers will have paid via higher energy bills for the ten years to 2020 will be an almighty £46 billion.
Even this eye-watering figure is a massive underestimate. This week, the National Audit Office said bills were likely to rise above inflation for at least 17 years, with the cost of government commitments likely to be at least £700 per household. According to the energy experts Professor Gordon Hughes of Edinburgh University and Peter Atherton of Liberum Capital, the Energy Bill figure does not factor in the enormous cost of connecting wind turbines to the National Grid, nor the complicated switching mechanisms needed to deal with the fact that no turbine will actually produce power for more than a third of the time. They say the true green bill by 2020 could be more than £100 billion, with households paying around £400 more per household for electricity alone.
For voters, this will mean years of further cost-of-living misery. But for business, it may well lead to German-style bankruptcy. About two thirds of this legally mandated ‘dash for wind’ will be paid for by companies. Some will find it intolerable, and join previous casualties of Britain’s green revolution such as aluminum smelting. Those that remain will have little choice but to pass their bills on to customers – so many other things will become more expensive, too.
This year, unique among nations, Britain introduced a tax on emitting carbon dioxide, the ‘carbon price floor’. This means power generators must pay £16 for every ton of carbon dioxide they emit. The Climate Change Committee, set up by the 2008 Act, has determined this should quadruple by 2030 – for the 2020 emissions target is only the start. The Climate Change Act already imposes still more ambitious targets for 2027 under what is termed the ‘fourth carbon budget’, which will see electricity generation almost entirely ‘decarbonised’. According to Atherton, the cost of effecting what will amount to a revolution in the crucial industry on which all others depend will be about £300 billion – a figure very close to the NAO’s. Here too the pain in store for British business is unique. No one anywhere else has enacted binding targets beyond 2020.
This is where Germany’s present agony becomes instructive. The infrastructure of the most costly power ever invented, offshore wind, is well-advanced there, though in Britain it remains in its infancy. The result, as Der Spiegel reported recently, is that green subsidies have already ‘reached levels comparable only to the eurozone bailouts’. This year, German consumers will pay a total of €20 billion for power from wind, solar panels and biomass – of which a staggering €17 billion is subsidy.
Stalking
Earlier this year, BASF decided to build a new ammonia plant in the US because the American shale gas boom, which caused electricity costs to plummet and hence an industrial rebirth in the rustbelt states. Last Tuesday week Hariolf Kottmann, who runs BASF’s Swiss competitor Clariant, said he no longer had any reason ‘to invest a penny’ in Germany: ‘We had two or three projects planned. Now we prefer to invest in the United States.’ He said the renewable levy the firm was paying for its factory in Frankfurt-Hochst had almost doubled since 2011 – making energy twice as expensive as in China and America. And yes, he mentioned those two countries in the same breath.
As German companies know, things could be about to get worse. Germany has so far exempted manufacturing companies from most of their renewable subsidies. The European Commission has launched an investigation, and may now declare that this amounts to an unlawful state subsidy. If the exemption is removed, BASF says it would expect to pay an extra €400 million a year just for Ludwigshafen – a total which will, of course, only rise. A further 300 German manufacturing companies get the exemptions. What’s the point of eurozone bailouts if German industry, which survived the great recession so well, collapses?
Britain’s Energy Intensive Users’ Group, representing businesses on which 800,000 jobs depend, has pushed the government for similar exemptions. Some have been offered, though a government report last year admitted that British business will soon face the highest green costs of any of 11 major industrial countries surveyed – 50 per cent more than in Germany and nearly twice those of France. ‘The industries with the heaviest reliance on electricity are also those most sensitive to foreign competition,’ says the group’s director, Jeremy Nicholson. ‘Thousands of jobs will be lost.’
It isn’t easy to disentangle the impacts of energy and climate policies. Official documents are written in a jargon that is virtually impenetrable. Worse is the sheer Panglossian dishonesty of the policies’ exponents. Ed Davey’s Department of Energy and Climate Change says that energy bills will be 11 per cent lower by the end of the decade, and the minister invites our applause. But the small print reveals a distinction between ‘prices’ and ‘bills’. The price of electricity, he admits, is set to rise by at least a third because of his green policies. So why the cut in bills? Better insulation and boilers, apparently – and, one might add, lower demand, caused by rocketing prices and thicker woolly jumpers.
It isn’t hard to conceive an exit from this strategy: repeal the Climate Change Act, abolish its targets, and stop the Energy Bill coming into force. We could get on with fracking and so release our colossal reserves of clean natural gas. Professor Hughes says that to retool the electricity industry to rely on modern ‘combined cycle’ gas plants would cost about £15 billion, with no subsidies necessary. This would be following the American example, where carbon emissions have fallen to a 20-year low because they are so much lower in gas than in coal. We could then invest some of the billions currently spent on wind on research into non-fossil energy sources such as nuclear fusion – much closer to viability than most people realise.
But the intellectual shutdown in British politics means that such ideas cannot be publicly articulated. Some cabinet members – notably George Osborne and the Environment Secretary Owen Paterson, a keen supporter of fracking – have a sense of the looming crisis. But while the coalition remains in office, they are powerless: green energy is the closest thing the Liberal Democrats have to a religion. Nor is Ed Miliband likely to tear up the Climate Change Act he authored – and anyway, it’s politically useful to him to cast energy companies as national villains.
In the unlikely event that the Conservatives win an outright majority, it’s far from clear that the party is capable of thinking clearly about how to avoid this catastrophe. Even Osborne ended up signing the most expensive deal in energy history. Astonishingly, the Chancellor has guaranteed to pay EDF almost double the market price for power from the nuclear plant that is to be built in Somerset, for 40 years. Why would he do that? Because the Tories have not allowed themselves to think rationally about energy for at least eight years. Even if they want to avert disaster, they don’t know where to start.
Britain is sleepwalking towards the same economic calamity for which Germany is now bracing itself. Even ministers who can see the coming disaster lack the power (or knowledge) to change course. They will be all too aware of the absurd truth: for all the crocodile tears about rising energy costs, all three parties have agreed upon a range of policies specifically designed to cause prices to soar – with the inevitable consequences for families and businesses. The current squabbles about energy bills are just a prelude: a far bigger, deeper and more dangerous crisis awaits.
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Posted: 20 Nov 2013 01:11 PM PST

The US National Security Agency has subverted an international agreement in order to save and examine the phone, internet, and other communication records of UK citizens not suspected of any wrongdoing, according to a new report.
The Guardian report is based on a 2007 NSA memo revealing that the shadowy agency specifically sought to “unmask” the personal data that British residents wanted to keep private. Where American and British lawmakers have repeatedly claimed that the far-reaching clandestine programs first revealed in June were designed to combat terrorism, Wednesday’s leak makes those claims problematic and point to a loose interpretation of what data can be collected to that end.
It indicates that the NSA was previously forced to remove the cell phone numbers, fax numbers, emails, and IP addresses caught in its clandestine efforts. Those restrictions loosened in 2007 after an agreement between the US and UK no longer required the agency to “minimize” its data records.
The records are also being made available to US intelligence and military agencies other than the NSA.
The documents were published in a collaborative effort by the Guardian and Channel 4 News in Britain. It is the latest report assembled from classified documents released to the press by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who has fled the US and is now living under temporary asylum in Russia. His disclosures have sparked international anger, with US allies condemning the surveillance.
Personal information belonging to UK residents were “incidentally collected” by the dragnet, indicating the individuals in question were not thought to have committed any crime, much less terrorism, nor were they the actual targets of the surveillance.
NSA leaders have admitted that intelligence analysts will collect information within “three hops” from the surveillance target, meaning they investigate the communications of a friend of a friend of a friend from that person. If starting its focus on one Facebook user this strategy, according to research conducted by the Guardian, could yield information for more than five million people.
The memo in question shows the NSA has been using the data collected from the UK for so-called “pattern of life” or “contact-chaining” inquiries, which are connected to the “three hops” examinations.
The link between the Americans and the British intelligence agencies constitutes the main partnership of the “Five Eyes” data-sharing alliance. Also involved are Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; however it seems to have always been an understanding that the nations will not collect information on the public of any other.
The NSA document describes the Five Eyes agreement as one that “has evolved to include a common understanding that both governments will not target each other’s citizens/persons.”
Yet a separate NSA memo from 2005 outlines a proposed classified procedure that would give the agency access to another Five Eye nation, even when that partner has explicitly denied the US access.
This document, as viewed by the Guardian, plainly states to intelligence analysts that the targeted Five Eye nation must not be able to identify an American surveillance effort or the procedure that would allow it. A stipulation in the document notes that government “reserved the right” to monitor other Five Eyes’ citizens “when it is in the best interests of each nation.”
“Therefore,” it continues, “under certain circumstances, it may be advisable and allowable to target second party persons and secondary party communications systems unilaterally, when it is in the best interests of the US and necessary for US national security.”
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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 09:42