Europeans on this date in history:

1935 – Birth of Theodore Antoniou, a Greek composer and conductor. His works vary from operas and choral works to chamber music, from film and theatre music to solo instrumental works.

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What are your favourite things?
Apart from ET, of course.

New discussion is brewing in the Netherlands to legalize assisted suicide, or euthanasia, for the elderly. Get ready for (American) conservatives proclaiming about the increasing Dutch perfidies and Holocaust parallels.

After all, since April 2002 euthanasia is an acceptable practice in the Netherlands. The crafted law works through “No, unless” principles: euthanasia is still a criminal offence, however, doctors who practice euthanasia are exempt from prosecution but only if they adhere to specific criteria. One of those criteria is that the person involved is incurably ill, suffering and has no further prospects of recovery.

But the Dutch euthanasia law says nothing about assisted suicide for people who prefer to choose their own time of death, and who are not ill. In those conditions, assisted suicide of anyone not explicitly under medical treatment will be considered a criminal offense. A new citizen initiative, coined “Out of Free Will”, was recently launched with the aim to be debated in Parliament. Before the proposal can be placed on the diary of Parliament it will need the support of at least 40.000 supporting signatures.

Every year, energy giant ExxonMobil presents its own "Outlook for Energy", its view of the world's energy future until 2030. Although ExxonMobil's outlook is based on essentially the same historical data as similar "outlook" reports from the International Energy Agency in Paris and the Energy Information Administration (EIA) in Washington, it offers in many ways a different - and fascinating - perspective on the world. It may well be - although this is something no one can say for sure - a more realistic, anticipatory vision than the one offered by the "official" energy institutions.

The realists at ExxonMobil, unsurprisingly, see continued dominance of fossil fuels over the next 25 years - coming mainly from growth in emerging markets as rich countries. There's a lot of interesting data in the full report (6MB PDF!), but I especially like this graph:

Source: European Energy Review
In dotted lines: the price of coal- and gas-fired electricity without any carbon pricing. Note that this is based on unknown fuel price hypotheses, but given how the report writes about the abundance of natural gas, one can expect them not to be too high...
Click for larger version

In other words, wind power is already amongst the cheapest source of electricity, and if any minimal accouting for some externalities is put in place (such as a price for carbon emissions), it becomes the cheapest. Of course, as we know, "cheapest" does not necessarily translate into "most profitable."

And as an aside, they are also sayign that carbon capture will never make any kind of sense.

And it's not me saying it, but ExxonMobil.

front-paged by afew

Europeans on this date in history:

1923 – Birth of Brendan Behan, an Irish poet, short story writer, novelist, and playwright who wrote in both Irish and English.(d. 1964)

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Here we are.

What's the gossip?

In this morning's Salon, ARGeezer flagged a story about The OTHER Reason that the U.S. is Not Regulating Wall Street: In short, the U.S. (along with the European Union and about thirty other countries) has legally bound itself to WTO rules which make legislating certain key financial reforms impossible.

As "George Washington", the author of that article, puts it:

Even if some politicians tried to stand up to Wall Street - or even if we "throw out all of the bums" currently in political roles - the U.S. would still be locked into the WTO's scheme for helping the financial giants to grow ever bigger and to take ever-bigger and ever-riskier gambles.

He also references a Democracy Now interview with Lori Wallach, founder of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, excerpts of which are below the fold.  This interview took place during the during the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh last September.

I don't know how accurate "George Washington"'s and Wallach's descriptions of this issue are, nor how consequential it is to begin with, but after reading through her interview, I was alarmed enough to be very skeptical (if admiring) of Wallach's hopeful words that:

... we need to make such a ruckus about it that basically a huge spotlight is shined on the issue, because there are a lot of very powerful financial service interests.

<...>

So it's not just a matter of what we need domestically, though it's critical. You don't want Granny's pension robbed, your mortgage gone. But on top of that, for the other countries, we've got to fix these WTO rules and stop the Doha round.

front-paged by afew

The future mix of power plants generating electricity is a very politicised issue in Germany. Specific generating modes had their best friends in different parties: the Social Democrats (SPD) for coal, some local branches of the SPD for gas, the conservative CDU/CSU for nuclear (and some local branches of the CDU also for coal), the Greens for wind and photovoltaics and combined generation.

Consequently, government changes had strong influence on energy policy. The SPD-Greens coalition under Chancellor Schröder made nuclear phaseout a law and allowed the expansion of gas-fired plants in unison, while the expansion of renewables and a slow phase-out of coal subsidies were born out of rather intense intra-coalition fights. In the following Grand Coalition (CDU/CSU+SPD), differences mostly served to maintain the status quo, only an SPD environment minister was now free to pursue a coal renaissance (hampered by realities and activists). Finally the black-yellow (CDU/CSU with the neolib FDP) coalition government empowered in last year's federal elections was widely expected to bring back nuclear and undermine renewables.

However, the new government hasn't been any less messier on energy policy than on taxes or Afghanistan. While the pro-nuclear promises were followed up by opening talks on extending power plant lifespans, the government felt forced to make those difficult with demands like companies paying for the clean-up of a nuclear dump and the premature closure of older plants. On the renewables front, plans of the (CDU-led) environment ministry to cut the feed-in rate for photovoltaics led to protests on Thursday, also supported by regional leaders from the CDU (who fear job loss).

Now federal environment minister Norbert Röttgen seems intent to counter-act the image damage with a U-turn. In an interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung, he opined that the CDU should give up on nuclear as the identification is hurting the party, and chart out its replacement with renewables instead: in effect, an accelerated nuclear phaseout. The initiative only created more turmoil, Röttgen was attacked left and right.

Europeans on this date in history:

# 1828 – Jules Verne, a French author who helped pioneer the science-fiction genre, was born. (d. 1905)

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Time for talk

Viking Graffiti, Orkney.

Bumped for your Sunday viewing - In Wales

Europeans on this date in history:

1927 – Juliette Gréco, a French actress and popular chanson singer, was born.

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For your weekend conversation

Europeans on this date in history:

1932 – Birth of François Truffaut, an influential filmmaker and one of the founders of the French New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he remains an icon of the French film industry. He was also a screenwriter, producer, and actor working on over twenty-five films. (d. 1984)

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Thank Crunchie!

Some documents landed on my desk from FERPA - the English translation of which is the European Federation of Retired and Elderly People.  It is a union of older people across Europe:

Some 70 million people are aged over 60 in Europe today, amounting to between 3 and 4 in every 10 voters. Their labour, and their political, social and trade union commitment have helped to build the European Union. They therefore demand the right to play an active part in European policy-making at all levels.

Specifically the documents are from their Women's Committee, looking at the evidence of the feminization of poverty and the impact this has on older women.

When the euro goes up against the dollar, we get [Europe.Is.Doomed™ Alert] because Europe is strangling itself with Hooverian policies, and its economy will suffer from weaker exports and overly conservative monetary policies. It's sign of tensions inherent in the eurozone that will lead to its inevitable collapse.

When the euro goes down against the dollar, we get [Europe.Is.Doomed™ Alert] because it's a clear indicator of defiance against the euro economies, their unsustainable public finances and inability (of some of them at least) to "reform." It's sign of tensions inherent in the eurozone that will lead to its inevitable collapse.

Oh, of course, in both cases Europe is stagnant, declining and irrelevant....

As a way to practice Mandarin, I had the idea to translate interesting essays by prominent Chinese language bloggers who comment on current affairs and contemporary issues.  One such blogger is 薛涌 Xuē Yǒng, whom I discovered a couple of weeks ago listening to an episode of On Point with Tom Ashbrook about "Google vs. China".

Last week Xuē Yǒng wrote 中国要领导"减排世纪" Zhōngguó yào lǐngdǎo "Jiǎnpái Shìjì" ('China Must Lead the "Emissions Reduction Century"'), which he posted on his blog, 反智的书生 Fǎnzhì de Shūshēng (An Anti-Intellectual Scholar), but which I have found reproduced on several other news websites (e.g. 南都周刊 Nándū Zhōukān Southern Metropolis Weekly).

Below is my translation alongside the original Chinese with permission from the author.  I opted in favor of sticking close to the meaning of the original even at the cost of fluency in English, so if some points are not easily understandable, please let me know and I will try to clarify.  (For some reason, some Chinese characters get corrupted when they are displayed here.)

Mandarin, not spam - afew

Europeans on this date in history:

1940 – Birth of H.R. Giger, a Swiss surrealist painter, sculptor, and set designer, who won an Academy Award for Best Achievement for Visual Effects for his design work on the film Alien.

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We went to the zoo, zoo, zoo. How about you?