The unbearable detachment of EU beings

This is a guest post by Pat Swords.

One sometimes has to go be persistent and dig out the evidence bit by bit until one has what can be justifiably described as a 'smoking gun'. Look at the attached emails, received from the EU Commission by Joseph Caulfield, one of those now following my 'road somewhat less travelled'. If you look at the first message you might be initially perplexed, but then you might not recognise the person in the Commission it is from. However, while not a household name, the sender does have some major significance: she is the Secretary General of the EU Commission.

Click to read more ...

Your funding bonanza for greens

These details of the European Union's budget agreement are pretty damning. As if anyone needed to be reminded of the EU's depravity.

European heads of state and government have agreed to commit at least 20 percent of the entire European Union budget over the next seven years to climate-related spending. The seven-year budget was agreed at 960 billion euros.

All-night negotiations in Brussels produced agreement among EU leaders on budget proposals for the rest of the decade, from 2014-2020.

Nurse joins the EU referendum battle

Paul Nurse has weighed into the EU referendum fray with an article in the Guardian outlining why he thinks we should stay in.

There's a lot of spurious verbiage to get through, but at the end of the day he seems to be saying that because we get some science funding from the EU we should stay in (he makes a subsidiary point that being in aids collaboration). Having cut through the stream of words in this way, one can see that his argument is extraordinarily thin.

I assume Nurse is clever enough to understand that the concerns of the scientific community are only a minor side issue in the arguments over Europe. In reality, we have the considerable issues of taxation, self-determination, democracy and openness to the world to consider.

Money grubbing by scientists should not weigh too heavily on the views of politicians or of the voters in a referendum.

Principle of proportionality

Pat Swords is well known to reader as the man behind the legal challenge to the Irish Government's renewables policy. Here he writes about the current state of play.

Ultimately the wind and climate change scandal at EU, member state and municipality level is nothing more than a reflection of a weak democracy. If people solely express opinions, then the political process and the administration which fawns to it, will just exist to manipulate various opinions to maximise its agenda. If progress is to be made, we have to move away from public opinion to holding the administration to account on the detail, in particular did it follow the procedural requirements to reach the position it is now in. For instance it may not be quite so important that the Climate Research Unit derived a somewhat unique version of climate change records, but it is hugely important that they acted unlawfully in relation to the transparency of how they derived this. Who watches the watchman? Unfortunately it is left to the concerned citizen, mostly being those who do 'detail' to enforce these standards. Not the Lord Oxburghs of the world. Only in such a manner is the dreadful position we are now in going to be reversed, before more collateral damage occurs.

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The green agenda

Brussels has placed itself on a collision course with Britain's ruling Conservative party by issuing a blunt warning on the dangers of stifling the green agenda.

As David Cameron faced pressure from the Tory right to adopt a more confrontational approach to the EU, Europe's environment chief spoke out against critics of environmental regulations for making "untrue" claims.

Janez Potočnik, the European environment commissioner, told the Guardian that for politicians to suggest that green legislation was a burden was "very unhelpful, because it is untrue".

http://www.euractiv.com/climate-environment/uk-tories-warned-eu-stifling-gre-news-515259

Personally, I'm all for a bit of green agenda stifling.

Climatulike

Ed Davey holds forth again.  Read on....

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If at first you don't succeed....

...try,try,try again.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19868580

Swords at dawn

There is an important FOI story (or, more precisely, an EIR one) at WUWT. It concerns the compliance of the Irish government with the Aarhus Convention, an international agreement to involve the public in formulation of environmental policy, which, at the same time, requires disclosure of environmental information to the public. The convention is the reason we have the Environmental Information Regulations in the UK.

According to anti-windfarm campaigner, Pat Swords:

[T]his is an important decision, because the EU’s renewable energy programme as it currently stands is now proceeding without ‘proper authority’. The public’s right to be informed and to participate in its development and implementation has been by-passed. A process will now be started to ensure that the Committee’s recommendations are addressed; if ultimately they are not, then UNECE has the option of requiring the EU to withdraw from the UN Convention on Human and Environmental Rights.

I wonder what the implications are for the UK?

More thoughts here, where Richard Tol is active in the comments threads.

All change

Further evidence of the decline influence of green extremism in the UK, with two news stories today. The Mail on Sunday reports that a go-ahead appears likely for Cuadrilla to resume shale gas exploration in Lancashire. Work was suspended after some minor earth tremors were reported.

Meanwhile, hot off the presses is the news that the UK will oppose the idea of the EU producing a new renewables target for 2030 - the existing one runs out in 2020. Given the damage that greens - including those in the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties -  have done to the UK economy already, this is probably wise, or at least not quite so extraordinarily foolish as previously.

As if things weren't bad enough

The EU continues its efforts to deindustrialise the entire continent:

Europe's climate chief has beaten off intense lobbying from businesses to secure a key victory in the battle over greenhouse gas targets.

Connie Hedegaard, the EU climate change commissioner, published on Tuesday afternoon her long-awaited report into how the EU can toughen its climate targets in a cost-effective manner, with a proposal that the EU could raise its current targets on emissions cuts from 20% emissions cuts to 25% cuts by 2020.

I think this is going to turn out very badly.

By the way...

...the UK ceased to be an independent country today. In case you hadn't noticed.

(Thought I ought to write a "not-Climategate" post today)

Another email scandal

Daniel Hannan on another another email scandal: Brussels officials are being told to disguise the extent to which they are being lobbied by corporate interests.

The memo is a grisly demonstration of how the Brussels system is designed to allow corporate interests to override the little man.

Free movement and democracy

The must-read article today is Janet Daley in the Telegraph, wondering if the EU chickens aren't coming home to roost.

What the strikers at the Lindsey oil refinery (and their brother supporters in Nottinghamshire and Kent) have discovered is the real meaning of the fine print in those treaties, and the significance of those European court judgments whose interpretation they left to EU obsessives: it is now illegal – illegal – for the government of an EU country to put the needs and concerns of its own population first. It would, for example, be against European law to do what Frank Field has sensibly suggested and reintroduce a system of "work permits" for EU nationals who wished to apply for jobs here.

It's an interesting moral dilemma for liberals when an undemocratic body like the EU has put in place laws that are liberal in nature. Democracy is likely to give us protectionism and economic depression. Of course under a liberal constitution, movement of labour would not be subject to democratic control anyway, but a liberal constitution being about as likely as Gordon Brown winning the next election, the most likely outcome is that democracy will win out.

It's a worrying prospect.

Europravda.eu

European Union invites tenders for the creation of a news aggregator service. It will have full editorial independence apparently, "as long as it respects the journalistic ethic and its public mission."

Fair to say that Eurosceptics should not apply then.

Pests funded by EU

Interesting fact for today: The Pesticide Action Network, who were interviewed by the BBC yesterday, welcoming the EU's decision to ban a range of pesticides, are funded by...the EU.