Llewellyn King: 'Hunger Winter' may loom amidst energy crisis caused by Putin

Dutch children eating soup during the famine of 1944–1945.

— Photo by Menno Huizinga

WEST WARWICK, R.I. 

Even as Europe has been dealing with its hottest summer on record, it has been fearfully aware that it may face its worst winter since the one at the end of World War II, from 1944 to 1945.

Electricity shortages and prices for fuel that are unpayable for many households are in store for Europe.

Industrial production in Germany, Europe’s economic driver, is threatened and governments from London to Athens are struggling with how they will help with energy bills right now, let alone in the dead of winter.

Electricity production on the European grid was already strained due to the change from coal and gas generation to renewables.

Germany worsened a tight supply by shutting down its nuclear plants, and the new reliance on wind was severely questioned by a wind drought last fall, especially in the North Sea.

After Vladimir’s Putin’s Russia attacked Ukraine with an all-out invasion on Feb. 24, things went from tightness of supply to impending disaster. Russia, through a complex network of pipelines, is the principal supplier of natural gas to Europe and all petroleum products to Germany. Now it has curtailed normal flows. 

Europe is heavily dependent on gas for heating and for making electricity. As things stand, all of Europe is hurting, especially Germany. The country may suffer as dreadful a winter as it did at the end of World War II when there was no coal, the essential fuel at the time.

The unknowns revolve around Russia’s war in Ukraine. These are possible scenarios:

-- Russia wins outright; Europe continues sanctions and is punished with gas interruptions. Result: Europe freezes this winter.

-- There is a political settlement, the rebuilding of Ukraine begins and the gas flows again.

-- Ukraine repulses Russia on the ground; Russia changes regime and abandons the fight. 

-- The conflict worsens, and NATO is drawn in. Europe rations fuel, including kerosene. It is a wartime footing for all of Europe.

-- Germany decides it has had enough and makes a deal with Russia. Ukraine figuratively is thrown under the bus.

While the United States and other gas-producing nations will export all they can to Europe in the form of liquified natural gas, those sources are already heavily committed. The United States, for example, has just seven LNG export terminals. These take years to license and build, and the same goes for the receiving terminals and LNG tankers. Additionally, most of the European receiving terminals are in the West and the severest shortages are in the East.

It is too late to change one certainty about the coming winter: high food prices everywhere, including in the United States, and starvation in developing countries. Ukraine is exporting grain haltingly, but those shipments are too small and too late. Afghanistan and Somalia are already in a food crisis, starting what is set to be a world run on grain provided in humanitarian relief.

The terrible European winter of 1944 to 1945 is known as the “Hunger Winter’’. Prepare to hear that term resurrected.

The world must brace for the coming winter in the Northern Hemisphere with political uncertainty and weak, inward-looking leaders in many countries. In the United States, the midterm elections are set to produce division. In France, President Emmanuel Macron has lost control of the National Assembly. Britain is seeking a new Tory prime minister to replace Boris Johnson. Italy is facing an election that some forecasts say will go to the isolationist fascists.

The democracies are riven with culture wars and other indulgences as a global crisis is in the making in Europe. For much of the rest of the world a new Hunger Winter looms. Many will be cold this winter, others will be hungry. Untold numbers will die.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Lisa Prevost: European study finds wind turbines don't affect lobster harvest

European lobster

Via Energy News Network ( https://energynews.us/) and ecoRI News (ecori.org)

In New England, offshore wind developers and the fishing industry continue to grapple with questions over potential impacts on the region’s valuable fisheries.

A recent European study not only offers good news on that front, it also provides a template for how the two industries can work together.

Research conducted over a six-year period concluded that the 35 turbines that form the Westermost Rough offshore wind facility, about 5 miles off England’s Holderness coast, have had no discernible impact on the area’s highly productive lobster fishing grounds.

The overall catch rate for fishermen and the economic return from those lobsters remained steady from the study’s start in 2013, before the facility’s construction, to its conclusion last year, according to the lead researcher, Mike Roach, a fishery scientist for the Holderness Fishing Industry Group, which represents commercial fishermen in the port town of Bridlington, England.

“It was quite a boring result,” Roach said. “All my lines are flat.”

Ørsted, the Danish energy giant and developer of the offshore wind facility, contracted with Holderness’s research arm to carry out the study, as the group has its own research vessel. The collaborative approach, Roach said, has made the findings all the more credible to local fishermen, who were initially certain that the energy project would destroy the lobster stocks.

“We did the research the same way a fisherman would fish — the same gear types, same bait, deploying in the same way,” Roach said. “We were basically mirroring the commercial fishing method in the area. And that has allowed the fishermen to relate directly to the fieldwork.”

Hywel Roberts, a senior lead strategic specialist for Ørsted and a liaison with the researchers, called the collaboration “a leap of faith on both sides to join together and agree at the outset to live and die by the results.” He noted that the level of research also went well beyond what was required for government permitting.

Ørsted announced the study’s results last month in a press release, even as Roach is still in the process of getting the research approved for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

It’s no wonder the European-based wind developer was eager to share the news more widely, as the fishing industry has proven to be a powerful force in slowing the progress of offshore wind development off the Northeast coast, such as the Vineyard Wind 1 project.

Last year, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced it was pausing the approval process for Vineyard Wind 1, a joint venture between Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Avangrid, to be constructed off Martha’s Vineyard. The agency said it wanted to devote more study to the cumulative environmental effects of the many offshore wind projects lining up for approval.

In June, the agency issued a supplemental environmental impact statement that concluded that the cumulative impacts on fisheries could potentially be “major,” depending on various factors. The federal agency is considering requiring transit lanes between turbines to better accommodate fishing trawlers, a design change Vineyard Wind argues is unnecessary and could threaten the project’s viability.

The developer has proposed separating each turbine by a nautical mile. The transit lanes would require additional spacing.

A final report is expected in December.

The outcome of the Holderness study has “very important” implications for wind projects all over, Roberts said.

“The lobster fishery there is one of the most productive in Europe, and we were tasked with building a wind farm right in the middle of it,” Roberts said. “If it can work in this location, we think it can work in most places around the world.”

Ørsted even brought Roach and one of the Holderness fishermen to Massachusetts last year to spread the word to worried lobstermen about the minimal impact of Westermost Rough.

Roach said he’d like to think his findings “eased some concerns” in New England. However, he said he disagrees with Ørsted that the outcome in the North Sea is applicable to other areas of the world, where habitats and the ecology of the species could be very different.

“There are lessons to be learned and guided by, but I can’t say it’s directly transferable,” he said.

Lisa Prevost is a journalist with Energy News Network, an Institute of Nonprofit News (INN) member that has a content-sharing agreement with ecoRI News.

Llewellyn King: Trump's 'Euro envy' threatens the Western Alliance

There is a strain of conservatism in the United States which suffers from what might be called “Euro envy.”

It is not mainstream, and it was not the conservatism of former presidents Ronald Reagan or either of the Bushes. It has evolved from a hatred of socialist manifestations in European economies.

Sadly, President Trump is the exemplar of this envy -- this need to deride Europe and all things European.

Euro envy has its equally foolish counterpoint across the Atlantic that might be called “disdain for the U.S.”

Neither would be of any consequence if it were not for the delicate international situation with the deteriorated relations between the United States and Europe, compounded by Europe’s own troubles.

Euro envy, at its purest, revolves around the successes of Europe: its public-health systems, its efficient rail system and its support of fine and performing arts. The belief is that Europe’s social approach cannot be better and somehow it must be found to be wanting.  

Some things in Europe do work better, but at a price; a price in taxation and bureaucratic rigidities, which cost the Euro economies in lower growth and higher unemployment.

Anyone who has looked at European health systems knows that they work. Perhaps not perfectly, but well enough and at a lower gross price than their patchier American equivalent. Yet fables persist of people lining up in the streets of London for heart surgery and long waiting lists all over Europe for critical care. These are myths but potent ones.

For public transportation, health care and generous retirement, Europe pays. Recently in Sweden, a colleague who once worked in the White House press corps told me: “We pay half our wages in tax, but we get a lot for it.”

I would add to the downside of European life that it is very hard to fire anyone, that people retire too early and have too many government-guaranteed perks in the workplace like, in some countries, extended maternal leave for both parents.

The obverse, disdain for the U.S., features exaggerated emphasis on gun violence, prison conditions, no universal health care, job insecurity and two-week vacation times.

The European left has always denigrated conditions in America and has unfailingly given short shrift to Republican presidents. They are damned out of the blocks. “Cowboy” is the pejorative thrown at them. This is as unfair and untrue as is the Euro sneering.

Despite these streams of envy, even hatred, the Atlantic Alliance has been a thing of beauty in world history, a bulwark defending the cultures and freedoms that are the Western inheritance -- the inheritance that has made the liberal democracies such a magnet for the world’s less fortunate. Illegal immigration is the compliment that the hapless pay to the happy.

Trump has swallowed whole the Euro disdainers’ views -- they fit well with his nativistic views about the United States.

In one thing, though, and it has riled the right for decades, Trump is right: Europe pays too little for its own defense. This is the cudgel that he will wield at the NATO summit. Europe, for all its quality-of-life smugness, depends on the U.S. defense umbrella.

These things make the next two weeks critical in world affairs, and replete with terrible irony. Europe depends on the United States to defend itself against Russia, which has shown designs on all the European countries that were once Soviet vassal states. But the guarantor of European freedom, Trump, is out to trash the European alliance and cozy up to Russia.

The irony does not stop there. Trump wants more money from Europe when he is about to damage its economies with a trade war.

In the next two weeks, there is not much to envy in the European predicament: Pay up or face Russia alone. Trump will not have your back.

Llewellyn King (llewellynking1@gmail.com) is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He is based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Chris Powell: An immigration policy that might save America

  Pope Francis told Congress last week that the United States should welcome migrants and refugees, as if the country's record in that respect wasn't already infinitely more liberal than that of Vatican City, over which the pope presides.

For while the United States has plenty of immigration law, lately it has had little immigration law enforcement. Most people caught entering the country illegally are given a summons to attend an immigration court proceeding and are waved through.

Of course three-quarters of them never show up in court. Instead in many instances they head for "sanctuary cities" like Hartford and New Haven, where local police are forbidden to assist enforcement of immigration law, and for "sanctuary states" like Connecticut, where illegal immigration is facilitated by the award of driver's licenses, city identification cards, and resident tuition discounts at public colleges.

This is nullification of federal immigration law and the nullifiers include President Obama, Governor Malloy and a majority of Connecticut's state legislators, as well as the people in charge of city government in Hartford and New Haven.

Of course this doesn't make any particular immigrant a bad person, but any country that cannot control its borders and enforce conditions for permanent residency and citizenship will not remain a country for long. Indeed, in New Haven, where the "sanctuary city" movement is an especially ideological one based at Yale University, it is sometimes admitted that the objective is indeed to erase the country's borders. As a practical matter that is treason.

So for the United States the primary question about immigration is whether the country wants to maintain itself as a republic with a distinctly democratic and secular political culture, the more so as immigrants from totalitarian and religiously fanatical cultures, immigrants who have little intention to assimilate into the cultures of their new countries, are extensively penetrating what used to consider itself as the West.

Europe is already fairly mocked as Eurabia, having accepted millions of Arabs who were economic rather than political refugees and who have formed separatist communities seeking to be governed by religious rather than secular law. By the European Union's own statistics, 80 percent of its migrants lately are not as generally imagined, refugees from the civil war in Syria, but economic migrants from throughout Africa and the Middle East. They have run welfare costs up and the wage base down.

In the United States organized labor has pretty much capitulated to uncontrolled immigration, though unlimited immigration here also undermines the wage base and weakens the economy when much of the money earned by immigrants is only sent out of the country to relatives abroad.

Organized labor can take such a position only because it strives to be politically correct and has come to represent mostly government employees, whose jobs and compensation are immune to immigration, rather than private-sector workers, whose jobs and compensation are not immune.

There is probably no compromise between the immigration law nullifiers and the angry and heartless people who want to deport the estimated 11 million illegal aliens in the country, including innocent young people who were brought here by their parents and know no other homeland and whose plight is partly the result of the U.S. government's own negligence with immigration enforcement.

But a political majority might be mustered behind the sort of immigration reform that moderates in Congress have long proposed:

*Strict border control, with no more waving illegals through, but with close tracking and prompt expulsion of visitors who overstay visas.

 *Once strict border control is established to everyone's satisfaction for a year, grant eligibility for permanent residency to those who can demonstrate self-sufficiency, proficiency in English, knowledge of U.S. history, and devotion to a democratic and secular culture, and after five years make them eligible to apply for citizenship.

Such a policy of generous, strict, controlled, careful, and patriotic immigration would safeguard the country and its culture, be generous to its illegal aliens, and advance the country's ideals as the universal nation.

Call it a Lincolnian plan, as it was implied by Lincoln as he campaigned for the U.S. Senate in Illinois in July 1858, just after Independence Day.

We hold this annual celebration to remind ourselves of all the good done in this process of time, of how it was done and who did it, and how we are historically connected with it, and we go from these meetings in better humor with ourselves.

We feel more attached the one to the other, and more firmly bound to the country we inhabit. In every way we are better men in the age, and race, and country in which we live for these celebrations.

But after we have done all this we have not yet reached the whole. There is something else connected with it.

Besides these men descended by blood from our ancestors, we have among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men. They are men who have come from Europe -- German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian -- who have come from Europe themselves or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things.

If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none. They cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us.

But when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration -- and so they are.

An immigration policy that offered citizenship to those who wanted not just to live here but to be fully American might give the country a better class of citizens than the native-born, so many of whom are ignorant about their country and take it for granted.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Europe and Islam

  You can understand  why  so many people in Europe fear the growth in the  Muslim population there. While the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful, within that population are  a few murderous fanatics who reference Islam as an excuse to engage in virtually any kind of barbarity. (See ISIS for what they are capable of.)

And even in the wider Muslim population there tends to be considerably less tolerance  than among native Europeans of other groups' and individuals' views and a disinclination  to integrate with the wider,  democratic and tolerant society that the West is  so proud  of.  Of course, the West's record of tolerance is erratic,  and most  literate people know the totalitarian viciousness that it has been capable of.  Still, it has generally been the freest  and most humane part of of the world for the past few decades, while Islam's golden age  of tolerance was a lot longer ago.

The trouble is that so many Muslims move to the West (Western and Central Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand)  only for economic reasons and/or to escape the brutalities and corruption of the Mideast, South Asia and North Africa,  where Islam is dominant.  Too few move to the West primarily to enjoy its  respect for tolerance and human rights, which too many Muslims don't seem to understand at all.

Islam is a far more encompassing religion  than Christianity has been for a long time.  It's been quite a while since the term ''Christendom'' was used widely.  Among other things,   traditional Islam sees the state and religion as the  same thing.  So there's a totalitarian potential in  parts of Islam that threatens Western society. Europeans know that, and that's a major reason so many oppose further immigration from Muslim nations.

--  Robert Whitcomb