So what does this mean? Billions more dollars poured into the uber carbon gravy train? Twenty whole percent?
Current climate spending is estimated at 5-7%. So this might be a big increase. Has the EU gone over the waterfall, or is it more a PR exercise where money that would have been spent on other things is rebadged as a “climate” expenditure.*
The power of a single department may get diffused and spread among lots of departments. WWF are not happy and nor is the European Environmental Bureau. It can’t be all bad. ( 🙂 )
BRUSSELS, Belgium, February 8, 2013 (ENS) – 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.
All-night negotiations in Brussels produced agreement among EU leaders on budget proposals for the rest of the decade, from 2014-2020.
“Climate action objectives will represent at least 20% of EU spending in the period 2014-2020 and therefore be reflected in the appropriate instruments to ensure that they contribute to strengthen energy security, building a low-carbon, resource efficient and climate resilient economy that will enhance Europe’s competitiveness and create more and greener jobs,” the final agreement states.
Environment News ServiceThe seven-year budget was agreed at 960 billion euros ($1.28 trillion). By comparison, the budget for the years 2007-2013 was 975.777 billion euros.
“Rather than being parked in a corner of the EU budget, climate action will now be integrated into all main spending areas – cohesion, innovation, infrastructure, agriculture,” Hedegaard said.
Council President Herman Van Rompuy said in a news conference today that, while the budget must be leaner to reflect today’s financial realities, “the focus is clearly on triggering new investments and on developing transport, energy and ICT networks, including 30 billion euros for “connecting Europe.”
WWF doesn’t like it
International aid received a disproportionately large cut while investment in connecting Europe’s energy infrastructure, a move that would allow better pooling of renewable resources, was cut from €12bn to €5bn.
“This is not a good deal for the climate. There are some interesting elements but the complete failure on Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) is such that it will be bad for the environment and climate in general,” said Sebastien Godinot, an economist with WWF’s European Policy Office.
“We’re very much opposed to the council adopting this proposal. It would be a major missed opportunity,” he told RTCC.
European Environmental Bureau calls it a disgrace
But Europe’s largest coalition of grassroots environmental organizations, the European Environmental Bureau, which represents more than 140 NGOs, condemned the outcome as “a disgrace.”
EEB Secretary General Jeremy Wates said, “This is the worst of both worlds: a smaller budget that is explicitly dedicated to keep pumping money into Europe’s most wasteful and harmful policies and projects, in particular the CAP.”
” The Commission intends to increase the proportion of climate related expenditure to at least 20%, with contributions from different policy fields subject to impact assessment evidence. This approach will maximise synergies between environmental policies and other areas and also help to avoid a proliferation of programmes as well as to minimise administrative burden”.
Can we be surprised that the “negotiations” (perhaps a better term is “conditions of surrender”) took place late at night?
Bureaucrats burning the midnight oil? Can’t be good.
What a waste of resources and what an inflation of an already bloated bureaucracy.
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You sound surprised. Like you were expecting negotiation from Brussels?
Me either.
Cheers,
Speedy.
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I will have to read the detail of the budget papers before coming to a formal conclusion, but I am heartened to read that the WWF European Office and the European Environmental Bureau are unhappy.
It may be that the EU have had a Yes Prime Minister moment and have been advised by an equivalent of Sir Humphrey to actually reduce expenditure in the wasteful ‘Climate change’ areas, but to hide it by relabelling some other normal ongoing expenditure as ‘Climate Expenditure’.
For instance from now on, everything they build with a roof on it will be considered part of the Climate expenditure budget. A drain alongside a road, is ‘climate expenditure’, all environmental administration now comes under ‘climate expenditure’ as does manufacturing and technology. In fact now that I think about it, why did they stop at 20%, that should be a doddle?
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Jaymez,
I agree. Most established European bureaucrats enjoy conditions of employment that virtually give them tenure until retirement age. They can only be sacked for committing a criminal offense, or if the position they occupy becomes disestablished (hence the modern lack of “Gas Lamp Inspectors”).
Bureaucracies have therefore developed the fine art of reorganisation, where various government departments are “merged”, and given a new name. In this process many jobs are disestablished, and the occupants must reapply for a new job, which has a different name, but just happens to do the same tasks as the old job. In that process, any dead-wood can be eliminated, and replaced by younger, brighter, keener, and cheaper people.
The same thing can be applied to budgets. By combining the climate change budgets of multiple departments into one “super budget”, the funding is removed from all of the individual departments.
This, in turn will act as a trigger for a bureaucratic reorganisation as I have just explained. As a result, The “super budget” will then end up being reallocated across a number of departments.
There are two interesting things in this, for me.
Firstly, it is very unusual for the above process to be made public, especially when it exposes the value of the “super budget”. Somebody (probably a politician) has shown a lack of judgement, and allowed it to get into the public arena.
Secondly, the proportion of the total budget. This is the first time that I have seen any mention of the total proportion of expenditure, tagged for “climate matters”, across all departments in the EU.
The changes in budget allocation resulting from the inevitable departmental reorganisations may require a proportional increase, or they may represent a proportional decrease. I don’t have any previous numbers to compare it with. But the fact that the NGO’s (who may have been able to calculate the previous total) are complaining, would indicate that it is an overall decrease.
Allocation of funds to Climate Change Mitigation will never go away, but the proportion of the budget will get smaller over time, to the point where it is meaningless.
I expect that at lease one Euro remains permanently allocated to Gas Lamp Inspection, somewhere in the hidden depths of the Commissions’ budgeting system.
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“In that process, any dead-wood can be eliminated, and replaced by younger, brighter, keener, and cheaper people”
What fantasy land are your living in? Does the Tooth Fairy also still put money under your pillow?
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Sean,
I have lived and worked in several “fantasy lands”: Westminster, Washington and Wellington. But not Canberra. (Canberra doesn’t start with a “W” :-)).
Restructuring is relatively common in the bureaucracies in those countries and, I am told, in Brussels. At such times the “light-weight intellects float to the surface, where they can be skimmed off”. Not my words, but the words of a Department Deputy Secretary in Westminster, for whom I was working at the time.
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I agree with you as well. See comment #17 just posted.
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If you live in the EU, you will have come to realise that you are ruled by unaccountable bureaucrats (Brussels based eurocrats) overseen by failed politicians, the commissioners, or commissars.
It is the most horrendous gravy train, but wonderful for the Eurocrats, who are as hopelessly incompetent as they are expensive.
Evidence is beginning to emerge that national political leaders are becoming increasingly aware of the monster they have created. Wiser heads are beginning to understand the crass stupidity of committing an entire continent to reliance on very unreliable and expensive renewable energy resources.
Unfortunately, being seen to be green is still perceived as being politically expedients, as opposed to being just plain goofy. However, the tide is turning and the smarter politicians are starting to distance from the green madness of reliance on renewable energy.
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Britain’s Prome Minister Cameron needs to appear tough on the EU to stave off calls for a Referendum, which he has managed to defer for another 5 years, and to quell rebellion in his own Tory back benches.
Appearing to control EU spending (in whatever terms), both strengthens his hand at home and most of the rest of the EU members play along, as the very real threat of Britain leaving looms.
France’s new Socialist President Hollande OTOH, could care less if Britain leaves and nothing is going to rein in his spending ambitions in the meantime.
As for Climate, it’s now just a way of talking about stuff. Everything is put in terms of it’s climate saving advantages, to give it air of good cause morality, even cutting public transport journeys.
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Jo,
You have a typo.
Surely it should be “Britain’s Prole Minister”; especially in relation to his autonomy vis-a-vis the EU.
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I think you mean Britain’s Prime Criminal
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No he meant “Prom minister” the guy version of a Prom Queen.
I dont look at British news, its too painful. But I did notice Camerons face has “filled out” since last I saw it.
That referendum carrot is a total con-trick to stem the haemorrhage of Conservative voters to other parties. I cant believe it would ever be allowed.
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I agree with jay this is a case of watch the other hand. The 20% is to placate the masses while they really just plan on reclassifying the expense as climate related regardless of the actually expense itself.
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Jo, you should have a look at this agitprop article about Australia’s Carbon Tax coming from Canada…
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/australia-taxed-carbon-and-the-sky-didnt-fall/article8354440/
Looks like this “journalist” takes his desire for the reality… What’s your take?
Thank you
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Jeffery Simpson, the author, is a left wing idiot, as are the editors of The Globe. That’s why their subscriptions are declining.
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The comments at the article sicken me. Sometimes I am ashamed of how some fellow Canadians “think”.
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Since it isn’t do-able it won’t happen.
If by some god awful miracle they do manage to divert 20% of the European budget into counteracting something that doesn’t exist there will be the most almighty recession.
Bring on that minimum, sadly a few years away, perhaps even long enough for Europe’s bewildered brainwashed political imbeciles to destroy a decent economy.
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>> Is the EU population asleep at the wheel…
No. But then the EU population has no say in it. The unelected EU Commissars (sorry, “Commissioners”) make the law. The EU Parliament merely votes whether to accept these laws or not. EU MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) get huge salaries and even larger allowances and expenses of all sorts. They’re elected by the Party List system, so no-one votes for them directly – all we get to vote for at elections is a party. It’s no wonder that EU MPs seldom if ever vote against the Commission, since to do so would usually mean that their parties would de-select them and they would lose their magnificently-paid jobs as MEPs.
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John Campbell
Is that Party, as they are in Australia, a registered corporation?
Is the EU a registered corporation?
Would registering to vote and voting for a Party be deemed as your consent to the EU and its Parties rules?
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Yes, to both questions
The EU has become a monstrous T-Rex
In Ireland recently with in-laws. Brussels issues dictates and if the local Parliaments from the targeted populace makes disagreeable noises, Brussels simply withholds various Euro grants until they comply
Brussels bureaucrats are unelected and so cannot be removed. In essence, member countries have been de-facto stripped of their sovereignty. I admit I though I’d never see that happen to Ireland (who took centuries to push the Brits out) but it has, and the populace has no recourse
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If the EU is a corporation then voters are electing a company president and board members. The companies rules are called laws but really are only company policy enforced not by a public police service but by a corporated police force? Their rule can only be maintained through the use of fear and Force.
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The motives and even the policies of a mob like the EU are opaque. There could be something legitimate in this for defending members against Russian abuses of their power exports (literally their power power), gas mainly. I feel odd sying anything in their defence. But it just gets tiring trying to find ways of expressing the magnitude of my detestation of that gang of scoundrels. Machievelli had nothing on that lot and even a broken clock tells the time twice a day (except in Europe where its once in 24 hours, so they even managed to balls that up).
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Great read over at Quadrant
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2013/02/weird-weather-shenanigans-part-i
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Too bad the EU Commissars did not look at this study first ( if it had have been available before they made their “decisions” ).
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/2/9/global-warming-overestimated-by-factor-of-two.html#comments
How long will it take the Team to cough and splutter a nonsense response to it ?
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[…] is verified by two quotes courtesy of Joanne Nova verifies my opinions of earlier. First from […]
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Speaking from a position in Oz where we have a carbon (sic) tax, it has NOT stopped global warming.
Anywhere!
Take it from us “living the experience” in Oz. A carbon tax DOES NOT work.
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I don’t trust anything that comes out of Brussels. It is a matter of policy for the eu that it only ever acquires power, never surrenders it. It’s called l’acquis communautaire. If the eurocrats are extending their interference into energy matters, even beyond the car-crash they have already created, they are looking for new ways to grab hold of the bits of national government power that they don’t yet control. Famously, the eu’s budget hasn’t been signed off by any auditor since some time in the nineties, either.
Jo asks if “the European population is asleep at the wheel”. The fact is that the eurocracy is not affected by public opinion. No British party with representation at Westminster is prepared to espouse withdrawal, or even a significant change to the status quo – and Britain is the member country with by far the most vocal opposition to the moronic eu project. In Spain, Greece, Portugal, Italy and Ireland, the eu has been a conspicuous disaster, in the shape of the euro, with its ugly coins and mafia-friendly banknotes (you really can get one million euros in a briefcase, apparently, although I haven’t had the opportunity to try it for myself), but the local politicians all humbly genuflect to Brussels, all the same. In some European countries, where political parties are state funded, meaning licensed by the state, any party intending to campaign against the euro-trainwreck would either be wound up by law, or forbidden to exist in the first place. This sort of thing has already happened in Belgium (which, by an amazing coincidence, is where Brussels is, of course).
I have only once, as far as I know, met a eurocrat and that was on a tour of a Latin American country. She was rather sweet, as long as we stayed off politics. I am right-wing, in a democratic, libertarian way, while she was all for central control, from Brussels, immune from democratic accountability. We agreed to skip discussing politics for the duration of the trip. Another member of the tour-party, though, innocently asked her what the tax arrangements were for members of the Brussels nomenklatura (not that he used that word). She was extremely evasive, simply saying that she paid tax. I knew that the real answer was that the tax rates for the eurocrats are way below those in the member countries, even as the eurocrats award themselves payrises that would be unaffordable in their home states, even in a good year. As I say, I think she was genuinely a nice person, but there are thousands of eurocrats, I suspect, who really are not very nice at all. They’re not much good at anything else, but they are very efficient at acquiring power and at hanging on to it.
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I can’t resist asking, of what use is her being a genuinely nice person when she is so obviously not doing nice things for the people she is supposed to serve?
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She wasn’t representing anyone, as such – that’s the point about the eurocrats. I was just saying that she was essentially a pleasant individual, in the process of being corrupted by a monstrous machine.
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Owen,
I got it that she wasn’t representing anyone. But it was clear that she should be serving the people of the EU, hence I said, “…serve.” 🙂
I don’t know the EU like you do and certainly never will. But it’s quite clear that it wasn’t formed with the general interest of the man on the street in mind but for the benefit of the money interests. As I remember, that’s the reason given for doing it in the first place — a more powerful competitive position in the world for European business.
When I first heard it proposed I said they’d regret it. I only needed to remember how things have gone with ever more centralization of power at state and federal level here in the U.S. to realize what would happen. And when I read that someone in Brussels was setting standards for the size and shape of bananas I knew I was watching a great tragedy unfold.
Is there no power that individual EU members could bring to bear on Brussels? Or maybe they don’t want to?
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Just think of what else could be done with that much money. You could provide clean drinking water for the entire world; eliminate malaria; land a woman on mars and bring her back; dig a tunnel under the straights of Gibraltar; design and build a new generation of thorium reactors to replace the more dangerous uranium ones; pay the university fees of all university students in the EU and save them from a lifetime of debt; build a city on the bottom of the ocean; provide the entire world with free internet …
… I could go on but you get the picture. What a waste; what a failure of imagination; to spend this much on subsidising windmills.
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True, if the AGW believers really believed what they preach then they would be screaming for expenditure on infrastructure to ease AGW. That is, more levees to protect from flooding, higher seawalls, more dams, relocation of housing, more research for drought/flood resistant crops, more research on tropical diseases and ways to cool people.
Most of all there would be more research given to some already fantastic discoveries being made in physics to produce and transmit energy in ways the AGW believers seem to be oblivious about. Some of the discoveries will make old technology as windmills comparable to building the pyramids.
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I’m not sure I really want to know. Awake or asleep, does it make any difference?
I do think it’s comical that 140 different NGOs think they’re the government of the EU. There’s where much of the trouble comes from right there. If you know so damned well what to do all the time then throw your hat in the ring and run for office and we’ll see what the voters think about you. Otherwise you’re just part of the problem.
You want things done your way? Then step up and take the risk of failure that goes with being in control.
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I don’t think you understand the problem in the eu. There are twenty-seven member nations, from big ones like Germany and the UK (yeah, Aussies, we don’t look big, but there are still enough of us to re-populate your continent twice over, with about ten million to spare), to tiny ones, like Malta and Latvia, not to mention Luxemburg, which was a member of Benelux, which started the whole thing.
There is no democratic mandate which controls the eu, because, for obvious (obvious to me, anyway) reasons, no truly democratic party has any sway across political boundaries; nor will it ever have. Any pan-European party would be a product of the eurocracy, its candidates filled with euro-favourites. It would be like the bolsheviks in the ussr.
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Owen,
Maybe I’m mistaken but is there not a European Parliament or its equivalent in which member states have a voice?
By the way, I’m American, not Australian…but same difference when it comes to understanding the EU — we’re outside looking in.
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Yes, there is a “European Parliament”.
No, we don’t have a voice.
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In budgeting one should always look at the figures, not the words. I have done so, and concluded it is just hype. There is no new money. What there will be more of is tedious environmental justifications for those who want to get grants – just as academics wanting research grants have done for years.
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Yes Manic, if so much money has gone into Climate, where did it come from? Which programmes got cut?
Jo
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There is very little that gets cut, just “re-branded”.
There is no separate category for climate. There is no separate category for the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Neither are their separate categories for energy policies or industrial subsidies or infrastructure projects.
There is a simple table on annex 1 on page 46 of the “Conclusions”. Of the EUR 960bn budget for 2014-2020 is split into six categories. I summarize as
If there was a genuine need to save the planet from CAGW, those least qualified to enact such policies are the political classes. Politicians must convince (sell to) their constituents to need to accept reduced living standards from reduced energy usage. They must do so over generations, for no apparent gain. It is far easier, politically, to re-brand expenditure and tax revenue, and enact legislative targets for future Governments to impose than to impose the pain now. But imposing pain now would be required if the alarmists were correct.
The sub-group least qualified to enact these policies are the politicians at the EU. They are 28 states, all with their own priorities.
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I get the impression that the EU is a headless octopus.
Able to force compliance by its member states, but incapable of acting as a single organism. Iron and Clay is a good description of it.
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You known what you call a large coalition of grassroots… Sod.
If it’s a Bureau lead by a Secretary General, it’s not grassroots, it’s astroturf.
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I struggle to understand what differentiates WWWTF from Greenpeace these days.
I still fondly remember handing them some of my meagre pocket-money for a nice black and white print of a panda-bear. The same year, I played King-of-the-Ants in a school production of Rumpelstiltskin.
What happened to them? How did they become a political party?
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I mean if they have a King they are clearly not going to need political parties.
What happened to them? I see ants everywhere. They are still about.
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Do you mean King Abdullah or the Duke of Edinburgh?
I am assuming the ants you refer to are members of WWF?
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…you surely dont mean Charlie Boy?
I so respect his mum for hanging on as long as possible in the hope of denying the interfering old coot his chance to do more harm to this country than he has already. H would be the first Muslim king and he is already the first Muslim to regard Laurence Van Der Post as The Prophet.
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My take on this as well as many of the International Shackles apon the people of Australia and the World,First posted on Just Grounds about the topic of the UN’s Agenda 21 legislation into Slavery for all the peoples of the World.
This linked Article exposes what I have said for a while and while the Editorial see’s only Negatives,We on the other hand along with Many Scottish will see the real gains they can Achieve.
Similar to what happened in Iceland when the people sacked the Government and then with a People’s Congress came up with a New Constitution and a New Government and at the same time cut the ties that bind a country into Slavery,Something those in Scotland would be well aware of,Far more so than here in the Antipodes.
This is our Solution neat and simple compared to all the other options,I have no doubt there are more than a Few Governments across the world looking at the same thing.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2276795/Go-Scotland-forced-…
http://peoplescongress.org/2012/10/article-icelands-advisory-consti…
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