Japan will push for an easier target for reducing greenhouse gases in the next international pact on global warming than in the previous one, a top bureaucrat said Monday. The Kyoto global warming pact requires nations to cut emissions below 1990 levels, but critics say that is too difficult because emissions in many countries have risen dramatically since then. Instead, Japan will push to set the base year for 2005 in an agreement that is meant to take effect when Kyoto expires in 2012, said Takao Kitabata, vice-minister of Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. Kitabata argued 1990 levels are too easy to meet for industrial nations of the European Union, which has absorbed Eastern European countries whose emissions dropped in the 1990s. The EU backs continuing with 1990 as the base year. “Comparisons with 1990 levels are extremely unfair, and that is the Japanese government’s stance,” Kitabata told …

Every age has its dominant caste. This is the age of the zealot. Twenty years ago they were dismissed as cranks and fanatics, but now they are licensed to interfere in the every day lives of ordinary people to an unprecedented degree. When Bernard Levin first identified the new phenomenon of the SIFs (Single Issue Fanatics) many of us thought it was a bit of a joke or at most an annoyance. Now the joke is on us. In that short time they have progressed from being an ignorable nuisance to what is effectively a branch of government. They initiate legislation and prescribe taxation. They form a large and amorphous collection of groups of overlapping membership, united and defined by the objects of their hatred (industry, tobacco, alcohol, adiposity, carbon, meat, salt, chemicals in general, radio waves, field sports etc.) Their success in such a short time has been

The Greens’ resistance to geo-engineering sits very uncomfortably with its message that the planet is screwed and we’re all going to die. It suggests that Environmentalism has less to do with saving the planet than it does with reining in human aspirations. It suggests that they don’t actually believe their own press releases, and that they know the situation is not as dire as they would like the rest of us to think it is. And that Environmentalists are cutting off their noses to spite their faces - “we’ll save the planet our way or not at all.” It suggests that Environmentalists regard science and engineering as the cause of problems, and not the solution.

Es hat zwar etwas gedauert, aber jetzt scheint selbst bei den grünen Sandkastenstrategen in Wiesbaden der Groschen gefallen zu sein: Auf das Eigentor folgen erste Anzeichen der hier seit Wochen vorhergesagten Kehrtwende: Der hessische Grünen-Chef Tarek Al-Wazir schließt eine sogenannte Jamaika-Koalition von CDU, FDP und Grünen offenbar nicht mehr kategorisch aus. Zwar distanzierte er sich in der Zeitung “Die Welt” erneut von der hessischen CDU und bezeichnete diese als “rechts außen”. Eine Zusammenarbeit nannte er jetzt jedoch nur noch die “unwahrscheinlichste von allen Optionen”.

Achgut, 7 März: Die strategische Niederlage der hessischen Grünen ist denn auch der entscheidende Grund warum eine Jamaika-Koalition immer wahrscheinlicher wird. An einer großen Koalition können die Grünen kein Interesse haben. Und bei Neuwahlen stünden sie mit an Sicherheit grenzender Wahrscheinlichkeit vor erheblichen Stimmenverlusten und minimaler Chancen auf eine Regierungsbeteiligung. Schon aus diesem Eigeninteresse heraus dürfte den hessischen Grünen jetzt nicht viel …

The weather forecast for this holiday weekend is wildly unsettled. We had better get used to it. According to the climate change scientist James Lovelock, this is the beginning of the end of a peaceful phase in evolution.

By 2040, the world population of more than six billion will have been culled by floods, drought and famine. The people of Southern Europe, as well as South-East Asia, will be fighting their way into countries such as Canada, Australia and Britain. We will, he says, have to set up encampments in this country, like those established for the hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced by the conflict in East Africa. Lovelock believes the subsequent ethnic tensions could lead to civil war.

Crackpot or visionary, the fact is that more and more people are paying attention to Lovelock, and that he, himself, supports the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate …

Brasilianer und Katholik zu sein, das war seit Jahrzehnten eins. Doch inzwischen haben evangelikale Sekten zwischen Amazonas und Rio Grande einen enormen Zulauf. Der Einfluss der evangelikalen Sekten hat in Brasilien enorm zugenommen. Im größten katholischen Land der Welt predigen katholische Priester immer öfter vor leeren Kirchenbänken und beklagen Nachwuchsmangel. Gleichzeitig drängen sich die Gläubigen in den Tempeln der Evangelikalen mehrmals am Tag.

Die Zahl ihrer Anhänger in Brasilien geben sie selbst mit 33 Millionen an –das wäre fast jeder fünfte Einwohner. Nach einer neutraleren Studie gibt es 24 Millionen evangelikale Christen in Brasilien und damit mehr als im Herkunftsland dieser Glaubensrichtung, den USA. Auch im restlichen Lateinamerika, in Afrika, ebenso wie in Asien fallen die Botschaften der evangelikalen Freikirchen auf fruchtbaren Boden. Doch nirgendwo sind ihre Macht und ihr Einfluss so groß wie in Brasilien: Dort sind sie salonfähig geworden –in der Gesellschaft, in der Wirtschaft, in …

These days, people really are taking coals to Newcastle. That flow is part of a vast reorganization of the global coal trade that is making the United States a major exporter for the first time in years — and helping to drive up domestic prices of the one fossil fuel the nation has in abundance. Rising worldwide demand is turning American coal into another hot global commodity, with domestic buyers having to compete with buyers from countries like Germany and Japan.

Great Britain, the country that used its vast coal stocks to pioneer industrial development in the 18th century, has become a major coal importer in recent years, its own industry moribund. With Newcastle-upon-Tyne once being the center of a rich English coal region, the phrase “hauling coals to Newcastle” was a cliché describing an absurd economic proposition.

Nowadays, however, coal arrives regularly at the Port …

You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist in the 1990s to figure that speculative investment in dot-coms with no revenues would be disastrous. The same goes for lenders giving mortgages to borrowers with no job, no income and no assets. So after surviving the tech bubble and while trying to extricate the economy from the housing bubble, why are we bent on heading into the global warming bubble?

Sacrificing many trillions of dollars of GDP for a trivial, 45-year-delayed and merely hypothetical reduction in average global temperature must be considered as exponentially more asinine than the dot-bombs of the late-1990s and the NINJA subprime loans that we now look upon scornfully. So who in their right mind would push for this?

I met many of them up-close-and-personal last week at a major Wall Street Journal conference at which I was an …