What might not be immediately obvious to the British, dependent as they are on road haulage as their primary mode for moving goods around the country, is the effect of the great European freeze on continental waterways, and in particular the Danube.
But, as the AP, via the Washington Post and AFP are reporting, European shippers are losing millions because a lengthy stretch of the Danube - one of Europe's key waterways - is stuck in the longest freeze in recent memory. The Danube flows for 1,785 miles through nine countries, starting in Germany's Black Forest, before passing through Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Ukraine.
The river began to ice over in early February as temperatures plunged to minus 20°Celsius (-4 Fahrenheit). The freeze followed an autumn drought in which water levels had dropped so low that they were interfering with shipping along the international waterway.
By Friday, though, it was ice that had halted shipping on 440 miles of the Danube in Romania. The river forms the border between Romania and Bulgaria and six river crossings were also closed due to the ice. Upstream, the river was also iced over in parts in the Serbian capital of Belgrade.
Costache Constantin, manager of Europolis Shipping & Trading shipping company, said he'd never seen such a drawn-out freeze on the Danube since he began working in the industry in 1981. "This is costing millions of euros", he added. "The transportation of raw materials, coal, minerals, cereals ... are all affected, construction materials too".
An official from the Serbian economy ministry said the commercial repercussions "could be very bad", while infrastructure ministry official Pavle Galico said shipping would not resume for 10 days. Bulgarian authorities, who have banned all navigation on the river, reported 224 vessels stuck in ports, and Ukrainian rescuers in Croatia reached three crew members on a ship trapped in the ice since Friday.
As a result of the conditions generally, we have already seen a statement by Siim Kallas, EU transport commissioner, but it is too soon for the "colleagues" to take on board the most recent effects of the freeze which, so far, is said to have killed 460 people.
It is instructive though that, in 2003, shortly after the heat wave which caused so much grief in France, the EU parliament was right there, on 2 September, tabling a resolution "on the effects of the summer heat wave".
It interpreted the recent extreme weather conditions "as further evidence of the negative effects of climate change" which underlined "that these extreme weather conditions are another sign of the need for ambitious world action to halt climate change". Thus were the MEPs asked to consider that the EU "should continue to play a leading role in this process and reinforce its efforts in the key fields of environment, energy, transport, etc".
Now, as the cold sweeps Europe, we learn that the self-same Europe "stands ready to respond to severe weather conditions across the continent". But, we wonder, whether the EU parliament will be quite so quick to interpret these extreme weather conditions "as further evidence of the negative effects of climate change".
Now they will have to consider the "evidence" of the "Blue Danube", commemorated by Johann Strauss with a waltz of the same name. Rather than strains of music, what is being heard now is the boom of dynamite, which is being used to blow apart ice floes in a desperate attempt to prevent catastrophic flooding when the expected thaw comes.
Somehow, I think the MEPs might be more circumspect this time – although, as we all know, stupidity knows no frontiers and, like Monbiot, they may still try to argue that warmer means colder.
The clinics which fitted faulty PIP implants have a "moral and social duty of care" to provide aftercare to their clients. So says professor Bruce Keogh, medical director of the NHS (pictured), giving evidence to the House of Commons Health Select Committee last week.
He then acknowledges that the government has no powers or mechanisms to enforce that "duty" on private sector providers. Chairman Stephen Dorrell asked whether there was any opportunity for legal redress, and got an extremely equivocal response from Keogh.
Compare and contrast this with the stance taken by professor Laurence Kirwan, Harley Street plastic surgeon and Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons.
Kirwan has taken exception to guidelines Keogh sent to GPs, NHS Medical Directors and plastic surgeons last month. Under the heading "Criteria for replacement of implants at NHS expense" the Department of Health's letter refers to private patients offering to pay for replacements from the NHS because they have been "failed by their providers".
"We have received a number of queries from patients with PIP implants supplied by private providers where the provider has failed in its duty of care", says the letter which was signed by the Chief Medical Officer, professor Sally C Davies.
But, says prof Kirwan, "I will not endorse the statement that the private provider has 'failed in his duty of care' because he has placed a perfectly legal implant approved by MHRA in a completely ethical and legal setting as did the NHS". He adds: "The fault lies with the regulatory agency and they should take full responsibility for removal as well as replacement".
Interestingly, not once throughout the Health Committee proceedings did europhile Stephen Dorrell mention that the CE marking system was part of the fabled Single Market, or in any sense suggest that the regulatory authorities bore any responsibility, even though it was admitted that there had been a "regulatory failure". He steered the committee very firmly to focus on the responsibilities of the clinics which had provided implants.
Back, in Brussels health and consumer policy commissioner John Dalli then had the nerve to call on member states "for immediate action to be taken at national level to ensure full and stringent implementation of the current legislation on medical devices".
However, in a de facto admission that the current system was defective, he said that the priority was "for the Member States and the Commission to act together to tighten controls, provide a better guarantee of the safety of medical devices and to restore patient confidence in the law that protects them".
Dalli has thus outlined his proposals for a joint plan of immediate measures in a letter written to the health ministers of EU member states, asking for their full co-operation in beginning work without delay.
This is on the basis of an earlier report from the commission, asking for "further scientific study" and drawing "first lessons from the recent fraud on breast implants".
Against that background, Keogh on the one hand is determined to contain the impact of this scandal on the resources of the NHS, while Dorrell seems most concerned that the clinics should live up to their "obligations".
Thus do they seek to pass the buck, so who is there to point the finger at the EU and its responsibility for a failed system, and at the French government for its failure earlier to detect the fraud?
And what about these europhiles who are so keen on the Single Market, which includes a single market in medical devices? Where is the "moral and social duty of care" of these people, who so easily seek to dump the responsibility on clincs who relied on the authority of the CE marking?
The attitude of Dorrell seems to me to sum up the europhile tendency – everybody is responsible for their actions, except themselves. They immediately stand aside when there is any chance of blame coming their way. When there is a "regulatory failure", the private providers have a "moral and social duty of care", which requires them to remedy it. If that is not passing the buck, I don't know what is.
… but not for very much longer it would seem. There is definitely a sense that we are moving to the end game. Prime minister Lucas Papademos had offered new austerity measures worth €3.3bn to secure the euro lifeline, but that was not enough to assuage the Gods of Brussels.
Before they deliver unto the creditors of Greece the €130 billion, they want another €325m in "cuts". Papademos has been instructed to get the €3.3bn programme endorsed and come up with a plan for the new cuts – to plug a gap in this year's budget – by Sunday.
George Karatzaferis, a Greek coalition leader, spoke of national humiliation and said he would not accept the new cuts, adding that Greece was labouring "under the German boot". The people are being given a choice between catastrophe or catastrophe.
This is not going to end well.
We saw recently the utility of wind power in the UK (not), when installed capacity of 5.2GW was able to deliver a meagre 51MW (metered), contributing a pathetic 0.1 percent of the electricity generated.
In the UK, it was coal that took the load but, as the freeze continues to grip Europe, spare a thought for Germany. With an installed capacity of 27.2GW in 2010 and the addition of another 2GW (approx), last year, it has recently been forced to restart some of its nuclear reactors, after having imported power in December from neighbouring Austria to stabilise its network.
Thus, we learn from The Times of India, via the AFP agency, after the news had been reported in the German daily Handelsblatt. It was also reported by Russia Today and Press TV, although British media seem to have ignored the story.
However, it now seems that the nuclear element of the story might be wrong. Instead, courtesy of the Vancouver Sun, again via AFP, we get a revised story that the reserve generators are a coal-powered plant in southern Germany and two plants in Austria. A [coal-fired] station in the southern city of Mannheim, is also in use.
That is bad enough but, for the warmists, it gets even worse. Although we reported last Januarythat an additional 11GW of coal-fired capacity was coming on-stream in Germany "this year or next", we now learn from the Union for the Co-ordination of Transmission of Electricity that there will be a net addition of 20-22 GW of fossil fuel-fired capacity by 2013.
Domestic hard coal consumption by EU nations through the first six months of 2011 was 64.9 million metric tons, up from 59.7 over the year-earlier period, and Germany was on track to import up to 48 million metric tons of coal for 2011- a total expected to increase as nuclear power capacity is phased out. Eight of 17 reactors have already been switched off and the nine reactors currently on line are due to be turned off between 2015 and 2022. One assumes that these will go only once the coal capacity is on-line.
Germany is often cited as the lead country in Europe for renewables and if that country is having massively to add to its coal-fired generation – and import electricity - despite having nearly 30GW of wind capacity, any idea that we can do differently with less than a fifth of the wind capacity seems to be fantasy.
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