Menzies House

American Conversations Part I

Hopefully the punditry is wrong and descent into a Romanesque end isn't the final curtain call, writes Tim Humphries

It began with an interview I did with Libertarian radio host of the popular LRM.FM program Liberty Conspiracy with Gardner Goldsmith. The touchstones of North and South Korea plunged our cordial conversation into Trade, International Relations, Currency and the Economic drivers of same both at home and abroad.

The interlocking histories of Australian, American and Chinese involvement on the world stage also figured prominently. However what grabbed my attention was the idea that America was sliding from the world stage and that her pre-eminence was being usurped by China.

BREAKING: Kim Jong Un Reveals War Plans

Team America jokes seem to be the immediate comedic response to this news. However if it is serious, what should our response be? 

READ MORE: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2300964/North-Korea-war-room-photos-Kim-Jong-Un-plotting-attack-America.html

 

Australia leads the way - to poverty

In 2009-2010 Australia gave $41.1 million in foreign aid to China. In 2011 the Gillard government said they would remove China and India from the foreign aid program. But, you know what Gillard does. 2012-2013 we will give China $18.1 million.

Why are we padding the pocket of the largest commodity consumer on earth? China is the largest manufacturer of solar and wind products in the world. But, they don't use them in China. They don't give a tinker's cuss about Co2, they never did and they never will. But Australia charges down the road to poverty. GC.Ed.

One thing is clear: China's solar and wind power industries have grown at warp speed. Since 2008, production capacity of both photovoltaic (PV) modules used to assemble solar panels and wind turbines has doubled annually. China now dominates the world in manufacturing of PV modules and wind power equipment, producing far more than the domestic market can absorb. For instance, in 2010 China produced 8 gigawatts (GW) of PV modules, but only about 5% were used domestically; 95% would have to be exported. 

Read more:http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/03/chinas-booming-solar-and-wind-se.html

Around 6.6 billion tonnes of hard coal were used worldwide last year and 1 billion tonnes of brown coal. Since 2000, global coal consumption has grown faster than any other fuel. The five largest coal users - China, USA, India, Russia and Japan - account for 76% of total global coal use.

Read more:http://www.worldcoal.org/coal/uses-of-coal/

European Union probes China on solar panels

BEIJING (AFP) - China said Thursday it "deeply regrets" a European Union decision to probe claims solar panel products were being sold by Chinese firms below cost and warned of problems potential penalties may cause.

EU ProSun, a group of more than 20 European solar panel makers, in July called on the European Commission to impose tariffs to punish its Chinese rivals who it suspects "dumped" goods and received subsidies from Beijing.

The European Union said Thursday it has decided to start an anti-dumping investigation after evidence provided by EU ProSun showed the Chinese products have had "substantial adverse effects on the financial situation of the Union industry".

Read more

Fact vs Fiction: China & Clean Energy

Senator Christine Milne, Deputy Leader Of The Australian Greens:

Australia is in danger of being left behind as China moves to position itself as a key player in carbon markets whilst investing heavily in renewable energy, clean technology and electrification of the vehicle fleet

The Economist this week - China's Polution Visible From Space:

World Health Organisation guidelines suggest that PM2.5 levels above ten micrograms per cubic metre are unsafe. The boffins have found (as the map shows) that almost every Chinese province has levels above that. Indeed, much of the country’s population endures air so foul that it registers above 30 on the PM2.5 scale, with Shandong and Henan provinces topping 50. Because these readings reflect the average pollution that a typical resident in a province is likely to endure during a given year, they underplay the sharp spikes in pollution that are seen on particularly dirty days, when spot readings go much higher. That is why Beijingers should take little comfort from the fact that the capital’s pollution measures only 35.  

Tim Andrews

h/t Instapundit

Give Me More Cash: Obama seeks $1.2 Trillion Debt limit rise

President Obama, in a one-sentence letter to House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner, the top Republican in Congress, said "further borrowing is required to meet existing commitments."

The proposed increase would push the US debt ceiling to $16.394 trillion.

 Meanwhile…

Even before the euro crisis, people were worried about Europe’s pension bomb.

State-funded pension obligations in 19 of the European Union nations were about five times higher than their combined gross debt, according to a study commissioned by the European Central Bank. The countries in the report compiled by the Research Center for Generational Contracts at Freiburg University in 2009 had almost 30 trillion euros ($39.3 trillion) of projected obligations to their existing populations.

Germany accounted for 7.6 trillion euros and France 6.7 trillion euros of the liabilities, authors Christoph Mueller, Bernd Raffelhueschen and Olaf Weddige said in the report.

And according to JP Morgan...

Australia is "vulnerable" to recession in 2012 as the global economy deals with the potential ramifications of the worsening European sovereign debt crisis.

JPMorgan chief economist Stephen Walters said the Australian economy was not as well placed now compared to the start of the downturn, given the nation's fiscal position.

There is no way Wayne Swan will get the budget back into surplus by 2012-2013.

Greg Sheridan Demolishes Malcolm Turnbull

Greg Sheridan, the highly-respected Foreign Affairs Editor of The Australian, eviscerates Malcolm Turnbull for being devoid of values, well outside the Australian Mainstream (and certainly to the left of Labor, let alone the Coalition), and "overestimated intellectually", in a hard-hitting piece in the Weekend Australian. Some extracts:

MALCOLM Turnbull has delivered two important speeches on China that help explain why he was such a disastrous Liberal leader and why he should never be considered for the leadership again.

The two speeches were to the London School of Economics in October and to Asialink this week. They contradict Liberal Party policy, they contradict Liberal leader Tony Abbott and Liberal foreign affairs spokeswoman Julie Bishop, and they show Turnbull as well to the left not only of his party but of the Gillard government, and indeed of Kevin Rudd. They suggest Turnbull's values and world view are in many respects outside the mainstream of his party, and on some key matters outside the mainstream of Australian life.

Yet in other ways the speeches are not left-wing. Rather they are devoid of political values at all. It is worth noting that in two long speeches about China neither the words, nor the concept, of human rights received any mention.

...

But I think Turnbull is overestimated intellectually. His is the kind of intelligence which can be relied upon to have read the most fashionable books of any moment, but you wonder about his ability to take the longer view, his sense - or lack of it in this case - of any strategic culture.

...

This nonsense from Turnbull does not constitute serious strategic thinking. But politically it suggests a lot of Turnbull-centred turbulence may well lie ahead for the Liberal Party.

Read the whole thing. 

 

 

China to Waste $1.9 Trillion: Wind Power Set for Full-Blown Growth

Even the Chinese have been sucked in to tackling imaginary CAGW.

 

 

Wind power is set to meet 17 percent of China's electricity demand by 2050, according to goals set by the Energy Research Institute under the National Development & Reform Commission and the International Energy Agency. The country’s installed wind power capacity will reach 200 million, 400 million and 1 billion kilowatts, respectively, by 2020, 2030, and 2050, according to the roadmap report jointly released by the two agencies on Wednesday.

China will invest a total of 12 trillion yuan ($1.9 trillion - $47.5 billion per year) in the next 40 years to achieve this goal.

I honestly thought the Chinese were smarter than this – I figured they'd hit the mother lode by exporting wind turbines to suckers like us.

Given the average Wind Turbine pumps out (when there is wind) around 1,500 kilowatts my back of the envelope calculations tell me that China by 2050 will need to manufacture and install over 666,665 Wind Turbines.