Film on UBB

Silly Earth Day Predictions

From here.

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions".

Earth Day was founded in 1970 by a US Senator called Gaylord Nelson to raise awareness of environmental issues. In the first one, 20 million Americans participated making it the single largest national demonstration in US history. (Hat tip: Roddy Campbell).

Here are some of the disasters that environmentalists were predicting in that year. (Thanks: Washington Policy Center)

• “…civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind,” biologist George Wald, Harvard University, April 19, 1970.

• By 1995, “…somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” Sen. Gaylord Nelson, quoting Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, Look magazine, April 1970.

• Because of increased dust, cloud cover and water vapor “…the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born,” Newsweek magazine, January 26, 1970.

• The world will be “…eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age,” Kenneth Watt, speaking at Swarthmore University, April 19, 1970.

• “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” biologist Barry Commoner, University of Washington, writing in the journal Environment, April 1970.

• “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from the intolerable deteriorations and possible extinction,” The New York Times editorial, April 20, 1970.

• “By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half…” Life magazine, January 1970.

• “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich, interview in Mademoiselle magazine, April 1970.

• “…air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone,” Paul Ehrlich, interview in Mademoiselle magazine, April 1970.

• Ehrlich also predicted that in 1973, 200,000 Americans would die from air pollution, and that by 1980 the life expectancy of Americans would be 42 years.

• “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” Earth Day organizer Denis Hayes, The Living Wilderness, Spring 1970.

• “By the year 2000…the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America and Australia, will be in famine,” Peter Gunter, North Texas State University, The Living Wilderness, Spring 1970.

Luckily none of this happened. So it must mean that Earth Day worked. Hurrah for Earth Day, saviour of the planet!

Take away the banks' licence to print money

This article no longer appears on the Ottawa Citizen website.

Monday, July 05, 2010
Take away the banks' licence to print money

Take away the banks' licence to print money
By Paul Hellyer, Citizen Special July 5, 2010


I am one Torontonian who was bitterly disappointed by Canada's attempt to lead the world through the G20 group of leaders. Apart from putting our city through a kind of hell for three days, the "victory," if there was one, was not for the people of the world. It was a confirmation of the supremacy of Wall Street and of the fact that Mammon rules the world.

What was missing at the G20 was any meaningful discussion of why the banking industry was able to get the world into such a mess and how to keep it from reoccurring. Especially when, as U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs recently told a London audience, "Wall Street has had the most profitable year in its history. It made profits of $55 billion," thanks to bailouts and low interest rates. "Bankers are brazenly smirking as they pocket large amounts of our money," he said. And the most the G20 could agree on was to give them a green light to keep on doing it.

The world monetary and banking system that left tens of millions unemployed in Canada, the U.S., Europe and elsewhere, and eroded the retirement wealth of a whole generation, is a disaster and must be fixed for the benefit of all. You would think G20 leaders would get the message after 25 recessions and depressions since 1890. Apparently not; we are doomed to struggle with more of the same.

The real source of the problem is a privately owned money-manufacturing monopoly that creates virtually all the new money as debt, of which there is so much that the real economy is about to drown in it. But there is a quick and simple fix with a Canadian precedent to support it.

Most people believe the bankers' myth that the money they lend to you today is money that someone else deposited yesterday. The odds of that being true are infinitesimal. They have to create the "money" they lend to you.

This is the way it works. Suppose you decide to borrow $35,000 to buy a new car. You visit your banker, who will ask for collateral; then you will be asked to sign a note for the principal amount with an agreed rate of interest. Once the note is signed, your banker will tap the bank's computer and, presto, a $35,000 credit will appear in your account. The important point is that only seconds earlier that "money" did not exist. It was created out of thin air -- so to speak.

The problem with bank-created money (BCM) is that it is all created as debt on which interest has to be paid. But no one creates any money with which to pay the interest, so collectively we have to borrow more and go deeper and deeper in debt. The system is like a balloon being pumped full of debt. The balloon keeps getting larger until the debt load is too big, and then it's like a balloon with a pin stuck in it. A recession or depression wipes out a lot of debt so the whole process can start over again.

In 1938, there were no job openings in Canada -- none. Then war broke out in 1939. Soon everyone was working. Some people joined the armed forces, others built factories or made munitions. So, you might ask, where did they get the money necessary to do all this? The Bank of Canada just printed it.

The system worked this way. The Bank of Canada (BoC) printed money to buy government of Canada bonds. The government paid the BoC interest on the bonds, but the bank paid it back as dividends. So the net cost to taxpayers was close to zero.

The cash that the government got from the sale of its bonds was spent into circulation and wound up in the private banks, where it became what the economists called high-powered money. That became the monetary base (cash reserves) for private banks to expand their lending capacity and make loans for building factories, etc.

In effect, the money-creation function was shared between the government of Canada, through the Bank of Canada, and the private banks. This was the system that got us out of the Great Depression, helped finance the Second World War, helped finance post-war infrastructure and assisted in laying the foundation for our

social security network. It was the system that gave us the best 25 years of the 20th century!

It continued, in effect, until 1974 when the BoC, in concert with other central banks, adopted the ideas of Milton Friedman and his colleagues at the University of Chicago. This led to the current so-called capital adequacy system that is basically uncontrollable because all of the yardsticks are subjective. It has got to go.

The first requirement is to re-instate the cash reserve system as an objective regulator of the rate of money creation without the wild fluctuations in interest rates that have had such horrific consequences in the real world.

Next, bank leverage has to be reduced from 20-to-one to a level that the banks themselves would consider prudent if they were making a loan to industry. A ratio of three-to-one appears to be most appropriate. That leaves them with more than enough money-creation power to meet their legitimate objectives while denying the reckless latitude to finance leveraged buyouts, hedge funds, the purchase of stocks on margin, and the casino-like activities that have become addictive.

Third, and profoundly significant, the proportion of government-created money (GCM) should increase to 34 per cent of the total, while the banks are reduced to 66 per cent from about 95 per cent. If the GCM is created as debt-free money, it will be possible to reverse debt-to-GDP ratios in every country. Of course, the 33-per-cent cash reserve should be phased in over a period of years to give the banks time to adjust to the new reality. Still, benefits of the transition would be immediate.

Canadian banks had considerably more than $2 trillion in assets at the end of last year. Requiring them to increase the cash in their vaults by three per cent would allow the federal government to print enough money to eliminate its budgetary deficit for last year. One or two additional percentage points would provide cash to allow the federal government to assist the hard-pressed provinces and still have enough cash to provide additional stimulus to help create jobs for people affected by the banking crisis.

Whenever government-created money is suggested, the knee-jerk reaction of orthodox economists is that it would be inflationary. That is not correct. It is the quantity of money put into circulation that influences prices, not who prints it. GCM would be entirely neutral if BCM was reduced accordingly.

The infusion of substantial sums of debt-free money would end the tsunami of debt that has put the world financial system in peril and paralysed governments from taking the essential steps to solve the problems of the real world, as opposed to the demands of the money-changers.

Was it too much to ask of the leaders of the G20 that they put the interests of their electors and of future generations ahead of the interests of an elite few?

Former defence minister Paul Hellyer is the author of a new book titled Light at the End of the Tunnel: A Survival Plan for the Human Species.

Wind Power Scam

Image via WikipediaFrom the Mail.


Scarcely a day goes by without more evidence to show why the Government's obsession with wind turbines, now at the centre of our national energy policy, is one of the greatest political blunders of our time.

Under a target agreed with the EU, Britain is committed within ten years — at astronomic expense — to generating nearly a third of its electricity from renewable sources, mainly through building thousands more wind turbines.

But the penny is finally dropping for almost everyone — except our politicians — that to rely on windmills to keep our lights on is a colossal and very dangerous act of self-deception.
Green and unpleasant land: The wind farm at Ingbirchworth, West Yorkshire, one of the landscapes blighted by turbines

Green and unpleasant land: The wind farm at Ingbirchworth, West Yorkshire, one of the landscapes blighted by turbines

Take, for example, the 350ft monstrosity familiar to millions of motorists who drive past as it sluggishly revolves above the M4 outside Reading.

This wind turbine performed so poorly (working at only 15 per cent of its capacity) that the £130,000 government subsidy given to its owners was more than the £100,000 worth of electricity it produced last year.

Meanwhile, official figures have confirmed that during those freezing, windless weeks around Christmas, when electricity demand was at record levels, the contribution made by Britain’s 3,500 turbines was minuscule.

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To keep our homes warm we were having to import vast amounts of power from nuclear reactors in France.

Wind turbines are so expensive that Holland recently became the first country in Europe to abandon its EU renewable energy target, announcing that it is to slash its annual subsidy by billions of euros.

So unpopular are wind turbines that our own Government has just offered 'bribes' to local communities, in the form of lower council tax and electricity bills.
Taking over: Europe's biggest onshore wind farm is Whitelee, on the outskirts of Glasgow

Taking over: Europe's biggest onshore wind farm is Whitelee, on the outskirts of Glasgow

In Scotland, the 800 residents of the beautiful island of Tiree are desperately trying to resist Alex Salmond's plans to railroad through what will be the largest offshore windfarm in the world, covering 139 square miles off their coast, which they say will destroy their community by driving away the tourists who provide much of their living.

So riddled with environmental hypocrisy is the lobbying for wind energy that a recent newspaper report exposed the immense human and ecological catastrophe being inflicted on northern China by the extraction of the rare earth minerals needed to make the giant magnets that every turbine in the West uses to generate its power.

Here in a nutshell are some of the reasons why people are beginning to wake up to the horrific downside of the wind business. And since I began writing about wind turbines nine years ago, I have come to see how the case for them rests on three great lies.

The megawatts supplied by our 3,500 turbines is derisory: no more than the output of a single, medium-sized conventional power station

The first is the pretence that turbines are anything other than ludicrously inefficient.

The most glaring dishonesty peddled by the wind industry — and echoed by gullible politicians — is vastly to exaggerate the output of turbines by deliberately talking about them only in terms of their 'capacity', as if this was what they actually produce. Rather, it is the total amount of power they have the capability of producing.

The point about wind, of course, is that it is constantly varying in speed, so that the output of turbines averages out at barely a quarter of their capacity.

This means that the 1,000 megawatts all those 3,500 turbines sited around the country feed on average into the grid is derisory: no more than the output of a single, medium-sized conventional power station.

Furthermore, as they increase in number (the Government wants to see 10,000 more in the next few years) it will, quite farcically, become necessary to build a dozen or more gas-fired power stations, running all the time and emitting CO2, simply to provide instant back-up for when the wind drops.
This means that the 1,000 megawatts all those 3,500 turbines sited around the country feed on average into the grid is derisory: no more than the output of a single, medium-sized conventional power station.

Not green: Greenpeace activists raise an inflatable model of a wind turbine, but they do not save a lot of CO2

The second great lie about wind power is the pretence that it is not a preposterously expensive way to produce electricity. No one would dream of building wind turbines unless they were guaranteed a huge government subsidy.

This comes in the form of the Renewables Obligation Certificate subsidy scheme, paid for through household bills, whereby owners of wind turbines earn an additional £49 for every 'megawatt hour' they produce, and twice that sum for offshore turbines.

This is why so many people are now realising that the wind bonanza — almost entirely dominated in Britain by French, German, Spanish and other foreign-owned firms — is one of the greatest scams of our age.
The third great lie is that this industry is somehow making a vital contribution to 'saving the planet' by cutting our emissions of CO2 - it is not

What other industry gets a public subsidy equivalent to 100 or even 200 per cent of the value of what it produces?

We may not be aware of just how much we are pouring into the pockets of the wind developers, because our bills hide this from us — but as ever more turbines are built, this could soon be adding hundreds of pounds a year to our bills.

When a Swedish firm recently opened what is now the world's largest offshore windfarm off the coast of Kent, at a cost of £800million, we were told that its 'capacity' was 300 megawatts, enough to provide 'green' power for tens of thousands of homes.

What we were not told was that its actual output will average only a mere 80 megawatts, a tenth of that supplied by a gas-fired power station — for which we will all be paying a subsidy of £60million a year, or £1.5billion over the 25-year lifespan of the turbines.

The third great lie of the wind propagandists is that this industry is somehow making a vital contribution to 'saving the planet' by cutting our emissions of CO2.
Too many windmills: Holland is slashing its renewables subsidies

Too many windmills: Holland is slashing its renewables subsidies

Even if you believe that curbing our use of fossil fuels could change the Earth's climate, the CO2 reduction achieved by wind turbines is so insignificant that one large windfarm saves considerably less in a year than is given off over the same period by a single jumbo jet flying daily between Britain and America.

Then, of course, the construction of the turbines generates enormous CO2 emissions as a result of the mining and smelting of the metals used, the carbon-intensive cement needed for their huge concrete foundations, the building of miles of road often needed to move them to the site, and the releasing of immense quantities of CO2 locked up in the peat bogs where many turbines are built.

When you consider, too, those gas-fired power stations wastefully running 24 hours a day just to provide back-up for the intermittency of the wind, any savings will vanish altogether.

Yet it is on the strength of these three massive self-deceptions that our Government has embarked on one of the most reckless gambles in our political history: the idea that we can look to the vagaries of the wind to provide nearly a third of the electricity we need to keep our economy running, well over 90 per cent of which is still currently supplied by coal, gas and nuclear power.

It is true that this target of raising the contribution made by wind by more than ten times in the next nine years was set by the EU.

But it is no good blaming Brussels for such an absurdly ambitious target, because no one was keener to adopt it than our own politicians, led first by Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband and now by David Cameron and the Energy Secretary Chris Huhne.

To meet this target, our Government wants to see us spend £100billion on building 10,000 more turbines, plus another £40billion on connecting them all up to the grid.

This country will soon be facing a colossal energy gap, and dependent on politically unreliable countries such as Russia and Algeria for gas supplies

According to the electricity industry, we will then need to spend another £100billion on those conventional power stations to provide back-up — all of which adds up to £240billion by 2020, or just over £1,000 a year for every household in the land.

And for this our politicians are quite happy to see our countryside and the seas around our coasts smothered in vast arrays of giant industrial machines, all to produce an amount of electricity that could be provided by conventional power stations at a tenth of the cost.

This flight from reality is truly one of the greatest follies.

But what turns it from a crazed fantasy to a potential catastrophe is that Britain will soon face a huge shortfall in its electricity supplies, when we see the shutdown of conventional power stations, which currently meet nearly 40 per cent of our electricity needs.

All but two of our ageing nuclear power stations are nearing the end of their useful life, with little chance of them being replaced for many years.

Six of our large coal-fired stations will be forced to close under an EU anti-pollution directive, and our Government is doing its best to ensure that we build no more.

There is no way we can hope to make up more than a fraction of the resulting energy gap solely with wind turbines, for the simple and obvious reason that wind is such an intermittent and unreliable energy source.

Meanwhile, this country will soon be facing a colossal energy gap, while relying on politically unreliable countries such as Russia and Algeria for gas supplies.

What we are seeing, in short, is the price we are beginning to pay for the past two decades, during which our energy policy has become hopelessly skewed by the siren calls of the environmentalists, first in persuading our politicians to switch from coal and not to build any more nuclear power stations, and then to fall for the quixotic dream that we could gamble our country’s future on the 'free' and 'clean' power of wind and sun.

All over the EU, other politicians are waking up to the dead-end to which this madness has been leading us.

The Danes, who have built more wind turbines per head than anyone, have realised the idiocy of a policy that has given them the highest electricity prices in Europe, while they have to import much of their power from abroad.

In Spain, their rush for wind and solar power has proved a national disaster. In Germany, having built more turbines than any other country in the world, they are now building new coal-fired stations like crazy.

In Holland, meanwhile, they have now given two fingers to the EU by slashing all their renewables subsidies.

Only in Britain is our political class still so imprisoned in its infatuation with wind that it is prepared to court this dangerously misguided pipedream.

Related articles

• Why the £250bn wind power industry could be the greatest scam of our age - and here are the three 'lies' that prove it (windconcernsontario.wordpress.com)
• Transport Secretary Philip Hammond reveals his ignorance of wind power (telegraph.co.uk)
• What is a wind turbine? (greenanswers.com)

Kiva is a SCAM

I've been saying this for ages. I know this article doesn't specifically mention Kiva, and I'll dig up some more proof. People with good intentions, stop being so naive.

India proposes regulating microfinanciers

(AFP) – 1 day ago

MUMBAI — An Indian central bank panel has put forward proposals for nationwide regulation of the microfinance sector after the industry was buffeted by accusations of lending abuses.

The panel urged that interest rates on microloans be capped at 24 percent a year and that loans to the poor total no more than 25,000 rupees ($550) per borrower.

The panel's report was commissioned after the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, a hub of microcredit activity, took steps last October to crack down on microfinance firms' operations in a bid to stop alleged exploitation.

The panel said in its report on the bank's website Thursday that there was a need to halt such abuses as multiple lending to borrowers by competing microfinance companies, and coercive recovery methods.

The seven-billion-dollar microfinance sector has until recently been hailed as a saviour of India's poor for providing loans averaging 250 dollars to millions of borrowers -- often small entrepreneurs -- unable to get credit from mainstream banks.

But the microfinanciers' surging profits, charges of arm-twisting debt collectors and interest rates of over 30 percent have led to mounting controversy with some critics accusing the sector of greed.

Since the backlash debt collection rates in Andhra Pradesh, which accounts for a third of microlending activity, have plummeted and commercial banks have cut back sharply on lending to microcredit institutions.

Shares of India's biggest lender to the poor, SKS Microfinance, jumped sharply Thursday after the central bank panel proposed the regulations.

SKS, India's only listed microfinance firm, climbed as much as 13 percent to 750 rupees before easing back on profit-taking to close up nearly four percent at 694.25 rupees.

The proposals "give clarity to the industry's requirements. The recommendations have been long the demand of the industry," industry spokesman Alok Prasad told the Press Trust of India news agency.