British taxpayers have been forced to subsidise the very Chinese steel companies that are threatening 40,000 UK jobs, critics say. It comes after revelations that the European Investment Bank has given so-called “soft loans” to China of ¬£80million as part of a climate policy intended to lower emissions. The astonishing figures include a loan of ¬£40million to one of the world’s worst “steel dumping” culprits, the Wuhan Iron & Steel Corporation. Furious critics last night pointed out the irony that the loan was concerned with reducing the cost of power generation while one of the complaints of Tata Group is the high cost of energy associated with its steel production operation in South Wales. –Marco Giannangeli, Sunday Express, 10 April 2016
I never cease to be amazed by the capacity of self-harm by European institutions, particularly when they become embroiled in climate policy. We are not allowed to employ non-commercial support to our own industry, yet the EU has been doing exactly that for China. –Peter Lilley MP, Former Trade and Industry Secretary, Sunday Express, 10 April 2016
At the time the Tatas took over Corus, steel prices were on the rise. “It was a fantastic deal for Tata,” said Peter Brannen, metals editor at Platts, a London-based organisation that covers the steel industry. “The year 2007 was when the markets boomed. But then you had the crash [of 2008].” The same year, British lawmakers passed the Climate Change Act which resolved to reduce carbon emissions drastically. A so-called “green tax” was levied on energy intensive industries to fund renewable energy projects. “What started off as a minor inconvenience has become a major problem for the industries,” said Jeremy Nicholson, the director of energy intensive users group. “The government put in place annually escalating targets for electricity and signed the UK for a target by [the year] 2020 that was extraordinarily expensive.” –Omkar Khandekar, Scroll India, 11 April 2016
Greenland sits over an area of abnormally hot mantle material that drives a widespread melting beneath the ice sheet and rapid ice flow over a distance of several hundred kilometres, a new study has found. Greenland’s lithosphere has hot depths which originate in its distant geological past and cause the island’s ice to rapidly flow and melt from below. With this anomaly, researchers from GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) could explain observations from radar and ice core drilling data that indicate a widespread melting beneath the ice sheet and increased sliding at the base of the ice that drives the rapid ice flow over a distance of 750 kilometres from the summit area of the Greenland ice sheet to the North Atlantic Ocean. —Press Trust of India, 9 April 2016
Many readers are aware of a climate bet made with alarmists Rob Honeycutt and Mr. Know-it-all, Dana Nuccitelli. The skeptics bet the current decade would be cooler or the same as last decade ‚Äì using the RSS and UAH satellite data, and not the made up surface stuff from NASA. Robin’s latest calculations show that the current decade is (still) slightly cooler than the last one comprising 2001 ‚Äì 2010. –Pierre Gosselin, No Tricks Zone, 9 April 2016
The Competitive Enterprise Institute has just been subpoenaed, as part of Al Gore’s Climate Witch hunt. This is a move which so blatantly reeks of McCarthyite abuse of power, even some proponents of climate action are horrified at the attack on freedom which this subpoena represents. –Eric Worrall, Watts Up With That, 8 April 2016
