Investors May Never Recoup Green Investments

Green Investors Face Bankruptcy As Spain Cuts Subsidies

By Guest Column Dr. Benny Peiser (Bio and Archives) Friday, June 7, 2013
Juan Antonio Cabrero is bracing for the savings he invested in a solar-energy farm in northern Spain to disappear into light. In 2008 Mr. Cabrero put up his €20,000 ($26,200) life savings and took on a €80,000 bank loan to buy part of the solar farm, pledging his home in nearby Tafalla as a guarantee. Now, because of cuts in renewable-energy subsidies the government is said to be planning, the 60-year-old Mr. Cabrero may lose both his savings and his house. The move could drive tens of thousands of struggling solar-energy companies and individual investors like Mr. Cabrero into default.—Ilan Brat and Christopher Bjork, The Wall Street Journal, 6 June 2013
Everyone knows that Britain needs to invest massively in the energy sector over the next 20 years. The National Infrastructure pipeline, put together in the Treasury last year, says that of an anticipated infrastructure spending requirement of £310 billion energy will take £176 billion. But at a conference on Infrastructure organised by think tank Reform and hosted yesterday by the Association of British Insurers the question repeatedly asked was, who is going to pay for all this? Only one speaker, Peter Atherton of Liberum Capital, gave a clear and succinct answer: nobody.—Anthony Hilton, The London Evening Standard, 6 June 2013
Atherton reckons that in a couple of years’ time we will need to be spending at the rate of at least £27 billion a year to have any hope of meeting the targets for 2020 to say nothing of the targets for 2030. At present the spend is around £7 billion a year. Where is that money going to come from? Not from the electricity companies it would appear. Though the utilities are expected by Government to make these investments, Atherton says they have neither the desire nor the money to do so. Even if they did have the desire he says, they would be told by their shareholders to lie down in a darkened room until the feeling passed.—Anthony Hilton, The London Evening Standard, 6 June 2013
There’s no question that Europe is finally awakening to the enormous economic benefits of shale hydrocarbons. Given the nascent impact of the US shale gas and oil industries on both domestic and global markets it is impossible to ignore. But while European leaders openly admit to reappraising their anti-shale development attitude, and the fracking technique that made it possible, two barriers to success remain: an incoherent energy strategy that pre-eminently favours environmental considerations, and national greed that can, as in Poland, threaten to choke national shale industries at birth. —Peter Glover, The Commentator, 3 June 2013
Might it be that it was Ronald Reagan and not Barack Obama who began to slow the rise of the seas? That is one conclusion that could be drawn from a new paper by Canadian physicist Qing-Bin Lu of Ontario’s University of Waterloo. Instead of carbon dioxide emissions, Mr. Lu argues that ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other halocarbons caused global warming. Thanks to the Reagan administration and the 1987 Montreal Protocol, CFCs have been phased out by developed countries. After a lag, Mr. Lu argues that global temperatures peaked around 2002 and predicts they are set to gradually fall over the next five to seven decades.—Rupert Darwall, The Wall Street Journal, 7 June 2013

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/55745