The End-a Kenny? - by Richard... Wednesday, February 29, 2012

The End-a Kenny? - by Richard... Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Whether it is good news or bad remains to be seen, but it certainly is interesting to see Taoiseach Enda Kenny (pictured above, left, with Mario Monti in Rome last week) telling the Dáil that his government intends to put the "fiscal compact" treaty to a referendum.

From the Irish Times, we learn that Kenny told the House that the Attorney General's advice was that "on balance", a referendum was required to ratify the treaty.

Kenny says he intends to sign the treaty at the end of the week in Brussels and then, in the coming weeks, his government will finalise the arrangements and the process leading to the referendum. No date has been was given for the poll.

Inevitably, the occasion of the announcement was used to make a propaganda pitch, with Kenny saying to his MP colleagues: "I am very confident that when the importance and merit are communicated to the Irish people that they will endorse it emphatically by voting yes to continuing economic stability and recovery".

Unsurprisingly, he also says that he believes "… it is in Ireland’s national interest that this treaty be approved". A "no" vote it won't actually scupper the treaty. The very nature of an intergovernmental treaty is that it does not require unanimity. In this case, it can go into force after it has been ratified by twelve states.

However, the Failygraph offers the headline: "Irish EU treaty vote threatens chaos". In the circumstances, that is probably an exaggeration – even assuming a negative vote – although the effects on the Irish economy could be severe.

Last December, finance minister Michael Noonan said a vote on the treaty would effectively be a vote on Ireland's membership of the euro. If that is how it is framed, then the "no" lobby could be under considerable pressure to perform.

On the other hand, Reuters says a "no" vote would prevent Dublin from using the European Stability Mechanism and, with about €20 billion borrowing costs to cover in 2014, "most analysts believe it will need more official funding to meet some of its commitments".

As it stands, a recent poll had 40 percent supporting the treaty, 36 percent against and 24 percent undecided. With the last referendum on the Lisbon treaty delivering 67 to 33 percent for "Europe", expectations of a "no" vote cannot be high – especially as the Irish government is very adept at invoking the "fear factor".

If voters believe a "no" vote might make credit harder to get, then there will be even less incentive to rock the boat, and with Ireland's main opposition party Fianna Fail saying it will join the governing Fine Gael and Labour parties in campaigning for a "yes", the vote almost looks a done deal.

Still, it us unwise to underestimate the Irish. Unlikely though it might be, we could still see some shocks, and this time the government says it will not be looking for a second ballot if the vote goes the "wrong" way. But if that happened, it would almost certainly be the End-a Kenny.

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Watermelons - by Richard... Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Chapter Six has the intrepid Dellers at the Heartland Institute's Fourth Annual Conference on Climate Change in Chicago - enjoying the lavish hospitality from Big Oil, or so we are led to believe.

He is amongst principled people, he says, several of whom have become his personal heroes. And the last thing he wants to do is make them feel unwanted. Nevertheless, he goes on to attempt just that. It really doesn't matter how many brilliant papers Roy Spencer produces on cloud cover feedback, he writes:

… or how many times that Nils-Axel Mörner proves that sea levels show absolutely no sign of dangerous increase. This is a debate that no sceptic scientist can possibly win, no matter how much apparently overwhelmingly persuasive evidence they produce. That's because the debate was never about "the science" in the first place. It was, is and always will be about politics.

Latterly, this is the theme that I have been pursuing, alongside Autonomous Mind, and one to which Dellers returns in his current blog. But the text comes from his superb book, Watermelons, which needs to find a space on the bookshelf of everybody who wants to understand how the world works.

The reason it should have such wide appeal is that, while it comes into the category of "global warming", it is in fact an intensely political book. The sub-title tells all, identifying the subject of the book, the threat that is "killing the planet, destroying the economy and stealing your children's future" – the watermellons, a "handful of political activists, green campaigners and voodoo scientists.

As you might imagine, though, Dellers does not pull punches. In his own forthright style, he writes of a green religion, where the core beliefs are "dressed up as a concern for nature and the future of mankind" and rooted in the most bitter misanthropy and direst pessimism. The advocates:

… care little for the human species' myriad achievements, preferring to see our race as a blot on the landscape, a parasite, a disease which threatens the eco-system's otherwise perfect balance and which should at best be reduced by natural means – at worst ruthlessly culled.

In scrutinising the political agenda behind greenery, this is a book that needed to be written, but it is a book that had me cursing the man for writing it so well. As one who reserves such books for bedtime reading, consuming a few pages at a time before drifting off to sleep, he kept me awake for many hours as his riveting narrative made Morpheus an unwelcome guest.

Dellers's deft touch, exhibited throughout the book, takes us through a range of topics, from the nature of scares, a remarkable analysis of the first Climategate scandal, a potted history of the climate change agenda, and the costs of the obsession, to an excellent review of how "the bastards" are getting away with "the biggest and most expensive scientific scandal in history".

If I have a favourite section, though, it is in Chapter Eight, in which Dellers welcomes us to "the New World Order". It takes someone with his writing skills to give the subject just enough gravitas to make his arguments credible, yet confer sufficient lightness to avoid bogging us down in the swamp of conspiracy theory.

He thus romps us through many serious matters, such as the Club of Rome, and its sister organisations, the Club of Budapest and the Club of Madrid, ably writing of "master plans" and the like, without invoking the knee-jerk that has other books flying into the bin.

Keeping it light and humorous is one of Dellers's great skills – and only he could have us contemplating Charlie peeing on the compost heap as an introduction to "sustainable development". Despite this, one is left in no doubt that there are important issues at stake, with the sinister-sounding "Agenda 21" and many other warmist constructs, dragged out, eviscerated and sun dried.

Predictably, after its exposure in The Daily Mail, the book soared to number one in the global warming listings on Amazon, and has remained there ever since, briefly touching double figures in the overall best-seller rankings. As a book suitable for a wide and non-specialist audience, it deserves that ranking, and should become a standard primer on the politics of climate change.

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Crisis fatigue - by Richard...

Constitutional issues relating to the eurozone bailout have again been raised by the German constitutional court in Karlsruhe.

Reuters is reporting that the court has ruled that a nine-member parliamentary panel set up to approve urgent action on the European Financial Stability Facility was "in large part" unconstitutional, demanding that decisions of the type made by the panel should be referred to the 620-strong Bundestag or the 41-member budget committee.

Similar issues were raised in November last year, and while these rulings are going to hamper Merkel's ability to railroad changes through the system, and one can only speculate as to whether this will strengthen the administration's determination to curtail the powers of the constitutional court.

However, this particular event many only be of short-term relevance, as the EFSF is to be replaced by the European Stability Mechanism in July, and the game may then have to start all over again.

No sooner does one gets to grips with one issue, though, another and then yet another crops up, in a never-ending kaleidoscope of activity which defied understanding. Here, the crise du jour seemed earlier to be the downgrading of Greece's credit rating to "selective default", but even that has had less impact than might at first have been expected.

Averting catastrophe is the ECB, which is leaning on the national central banks to provide "emergency liquidity assistance" (ELA), until the €35 billion-worth of support from the EFSF can be mobilised.

Meanwhile, a eurogroup summit scheduled for Friday has been cancelled, apparently at the behest of Germany, which is unwilling to discuss the single agenda item – increasing the funding for the so-called "firewall" of the ESM.

The European Council, set for Thursday and Friday, is nevertheless going to go ahead, and there will doubtless be discussions in les couloirs, triggering much media speculation.

However, it seems to me, with even ZeroHedge somewhat at sea, we are back in a trench warfare situation, where nothing much is expected to happen in the foreseeable future. The time is not yet right for another major crisis – we are suffering from crisis fatigue and need a break.