EU plans ‘post-industrial revolution’ – binding energy targets

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The European Commission has urged its members to sign up to an unprecedented common energy policy, unveiling a plan to diversify the bloc’s energy sources.

Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso said it was time for a “post-industrial revolution” which would see Europe slash greenhouse gases by 20% by 2020.

EU vulnerability as an oil importer was thrown into sharp relief this week when Russia’s row with Belarus hit supplies.

There are three central pillars to the proposed integrated EU energy policy.

  • A true internal energy market
  • Accelerating the shift to low-carbon energy
  • Energy efficiency through the 20% target by 2020

In addition to the 20% of all EU energy that should come from renewable power by 2020, 10% of vehicle fuel should come from biofuels, said EU energy chief Andris Piebalgs.

The EU wants to make these targets to be binding for the first time, he said.

via BBC News

Bush ‘surge’ crafted by aide who wanted to nuke North Korea in 1995

The Democrats expressed alarm over an academic article he wrote in 1995 that called for dispatching more troops to South Korea, redeploying American tactical nuclear weapons to the country, and bombing North Korea if Pyongyang refused to abandon its nuclear program. Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, described Mr. Crouch’s North Korea proposals as “reckless.”

via RawStory

Schwarzenegger seeks health care for all in California

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 8 — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday proposed extending health care coverage to all of California’s 36 million residents as part of a sweeping package of changes to the state’s huge, troubled health care system.

via NYTimes

The Economist has a great article on the topic, “The Federalist Prescription: Extended healthcare to the uncovered, one state at a time” that looks at the new CA proposal, as well as similar policies in MA and other states.

U.S. Targets Iran’s Oil Industry


LONDON — As the United States wages a very public battle against Iran’s quest for nuclear power, Washington quietly is gaining ground on another energy front: the oilfields that are the Islamic republic’s lifeblood.

Iran’s oil industry has raked in record amounts of cash during three years of high oil prices. But a new U.S. campaign to dry up financing for oil and natural gas development poses a threat to the republic’s ability to continue exporting oil over the next two decades, many analysts say.

The campaign comes at a moment of unique vulnerability for Iran’s oil industry, which also faces challenges from rising domestic energy consumption, international isolation, a populist spending spree by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and trouble closing contracts with foreign oil companies – a recipe for potential disaster in a nation with one of the world’s largest reservoirs of oil.

“If the government does not control the consumption of oil products in Iran, … and at the same time, if the projects for increasing the capacity of the oil and protection of the oil wells will not happen, within 10 years there will not be any oil for export,” Muhammad Hadi Nejad-Hoseinian, Iran’s deputy oil minister for international affairs, said in a telephone interview.

via RawStory

Iran threatens to stop oil flow via Hormuz strait

A senior Iranian officer warned that if the West continues to threaten Iran’s economy over its nuclear program, Teheran will discontinue the flow of oil via the Strait of Hormuz, Israel Radio reported Monday.

According to the officer, 40% of the world’s oil is transferred through the strait, and the world is dependent on Iran for a source of energy and a stable economy.  

via The Jerusalem Post

The spoils of war: How the West will make a killing on Iraqi oil riches

The Cover story from Sunday’s Independent (UK):

Iraq’s massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.

The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.

The huge potential prizes for Western firms will give ammunition to critics who say the Iraq war was fought for oil. They point to statements such as one from Vice-President Dick Cheney, who said in 1999, while he was still chief executive of the oil services company Halliburton, that the world would need an additional 50 million barrels of oil a day by 2010. “So where is the oil going to come from?… The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies,” he said

Read the rest of the article

Belarus Blocks Transit of Russian Oil

The latest in the energy dispute between Russia and its former Soviet republics:

“The suspension of oil deliveries comes just days after Belarus and Russia reached a last-ditch agreement on gas prices that avoided a New Year’s cutoff of natural gas for Belarusian consumers that threatened a repeat of last year’s energy dispute between Moscow and Kiev.

Belarus grudgingly accepted a doubling of the price it pays for imports of Russian natural gas, on which it depends for industry and home heating.

But the two countries are now locked in a dispute over oil duties, with Russia determined to stop Belarus from re-exporting petroleum products made from processing Russian oil bought cheaply.”

via AP News

See the earlier politricks.mnp posts (and this) for background info on the conflict.

UPDATE (1/9/07): RUSSIA SHUTS OFF OIL PIPELINE TO PARTS OF EASTERN EUROPE

UPDATE 2 (1/10/07): BELARUS DITCHES TRANSIT TAX PLACED ON RUSSIAN OIL 

Israel denies planning attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities

Israel vehemently denied Sunday a report by a British newspaper which claimed that it plans to attack Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities using nuclear weapons.  According to the report quoting Israeli military sources, two Israel Air Force squadrons are training to blow up an enrichment plant at Natanz, around 220 kilometres south-east of Tehran, using “bunker buster” nuclear bombs. Two other sites would also be hit with conventional weapons.

via RawStory/dpa German Press Agency

New US Legislation Proposes 60 Billion Gallon Renewable Fuel Standard

On the first day of the new Congress, Senators Tom Harkin (D-IA), Richard G. Lugar (R-IN), Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-DE), Byron L. Dorgan (D-ND) and Barack Obama (D-IL) introduced legislation that proposes a new federal renewable fuels standard (RFS) of 60 billion gallons of ethanol and biodiesel by 2030.

The current RFS specifies 7.5 billion gallons of renewable fuel by 2012. Based on forecasts of fuel consumption of approximately 198 billion gallons of gasoline equivalent in 2030, the 60 billion RFS would work out to approximately 30% of the fuel required.

Article via Green Car Congress

Bush replaces top general in Middle East who opposed troop surge

In what appears to be a military shakeup surrounding Iraq, President Bush has replaced both the top US general in the Middle East and the top general in Iraq, ABC NEWS is reporting on air.

Admiral William J. Fallon will replace Gen. John Abizaid, US commander in the Middle East, who announced his retirement in December and was expected to leave the post in March. Abizaid was a critic of Bush’s efforts to add more troops to Iraq, but the circumstances of his early departure are unclear.

via Raw Story

U.S. Bars Lab From Testing Electronic Voting Machines

A laboratory that has tested most of the nation’s electronic voting systems has been temporarily barred from approving new machines after federal officials found that it was not following its quality-control procedures and could not document that it was conducting all the required tests.

Experts on voting systems say the Ciber problems underscore longstanding worries about lax inspections in the secretive world of voting-machine testing. The action by the federal Election Assistance Commission seems certain to fan growing concerns about the reliability and security of the devices.

via the NYTimes

Report blasts ExxonMobil for misleading public on climate change, funding psuedo-science

The Union of Concerned Scientists released a report today arguing that oil giant ExxonMobil has funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science.

“ExxonMobil has manufactured uncertainty about the human causes of global warming just as tobacco companies denied their product caused lung cancer,” said Alden Meyer, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Director of Strategy & Policy. “A modest but effective investment has allowed the oil giant to fuel doubt about global warming to delay government action just as Big Tobacco did for over 40 years.”

The report said that a task force that Exxon Mobil helped create on global climate science in 1998 included someone who had led a nonprofit organization called the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, “which had been covertly created by the tobacco company Philip Morris in 1993 to manufacture uncertainty about the health hazards posed by secondhand smoke.”

This report comes on the heels of an unprecedented step by the Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific academy, which in September 2006 wrote the oil giant to demand that the company withdraw its support for dozens of groups that have “misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence”. The scientists also strongly criticised the company’s public statements on global warming, which they described as “inaccurate and misleading.” (see article)

Exxon Mobil raked in $10.5 billion in net earnings in the third quarter of 2006– a near record in American corporate profits that was second only to the $10.7 billion it recorded for the fourth quarter of 2005.

See the Union of Concerned Scientists Press Release
Read the whole report:
Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil uses Big Tobacco Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science” (pdf)

Foreign Spying on US Defense Technology Seen Rising

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Foreign countries, especially nations in the Asia-Pacific region, have intensified their efforts to steal sensitive U.S. defense technology, according to a Pentagon report circulated on Wednesday…

In one case, a female spy seduced an American translator to learn his computer password. His unclassified network was later found to be infected by viruses planted by a foreign intelligence service.

The total number of suspicious foreign contacts climbed to 971 during fiscal year 2005, the report said. The number of countries trying to obtain U.S. technology also rose, to 106 from 90 a year earlier.
Article (Reuters) via Yahoo!News