The number of articles harshly criticising the German UBA’s heavy-handed tactics is mounting and there appears to be no let-up in sight.

Today Switzerland’s NZZ published an online commentary written by Markus Hofmann titled State-Certified Climate Science. In it he writes:

What the heck was the German Federal Office Of Environment (UBA) thinking when it decided to publish a 118-page report on the climate debate? The propaganda brochure is called: ‘And indeed the warming continues – What’s behind the climate change debate?’. It is causing a number of journalists to blow their tops with outrage.

[...] Indeed for the UBA it is obviously not about presenting facts simply and clearly. ‘And indeed the warming continues’ pamphlet is a declaration of war on so-called climate skeptics.

The UBA doesn’t stop at defaming the ‘non-climate scientist skeptics’ in general terms. No, it names the persons – putting Fritz Vahrenholt, Sebastian Lüning, Dirk Maxeiner, Michael Miersch, Günter Ederer and the ‘European Institute for Climate and Energy’ (EIKE) on a black list. That is ‘official state defamation,’ heute.de writes.

[...] Specifying what the binding state of the science is, is not the job of a governing authority,’ legal expertThorsten Koch correctly opines in ‘Die Welt’.

Now the debate is off and running: The gentlemen who were criticized by the state are now responding. Vahrenholt is defending himself in an open letter. Maxeiner and Miersch are firing back.

Thus precisely the opposite of what the UBA wanted is now happening: The ‘climate skeptics’ are now in the spotlight. The state’s shot at the skeptics has backfied.”

Yesterday Spiegel published satirical commentary authored by Jan Fleischhauer saying that basically the state has officially declared skeptics as misfits and that everyone should stop listening to them.

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The former DG, who also holds the position of vice president of the World Metrological Organisation (WMO), said climate change was taking place after war on terror rapidly.

He said that due to excessive usage of heavy weapons in war on terror, the climate of South Asian region is changing notably.

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The Obama Administration and European Union are looking for ways to avoid a trade war with China over solar-energy panels. Their brilliant proposed solution? A global cartel enforced by government.

The U.S. Commerce Department set duties on Chinese-made solar cells in October after an investigation ruled that Beijing unfairly subsidizes its panel makers. The European Commission followed this month, proposing tariffs of up to 67.9%. China, in turn, threatened last week to impose duties on American and EU exports of polysilicon, the raw material in solar cells. The EU taxes are due to take effect next month.

Ending the tariffs and subsidies on all sides would be the easiest solution, though never count on Washington and Brussels to choose market sanity over political intervention. The deal taking shape will require Chinese solar firms to sell in America and Europe at above-market prices and in restricted quantities. The hope is that by guaranteeing panel makers across all three continents a profit, the green economy can power onward.

Call it tragicomic that the only way for the U.S. and EU to achieve their green objectives is to embrace China’s model of state-managed capitalism. But the story is also a parable of how the cronyism inherent in the renewable-energy industry can clash with environmental goals.

American and European panel makers, notably the Bonn-based SolarWorld,SWV.XE -0.25% have lobbied heavily for tariffs, but the solar-energy producers and installers rightly complain that this will raise their costs. Higher panel prices will raise consumer prices for solar power, which is still uncompetitive despite huge subsidies.

Beijing wouldn’t be supporting Chinese panel makers at all without the market for solar components that renewable-energy subsidies created in the West. In subsidizing one industry, Western governments generated clamor for trade protections in another. Washington and Brussels need to layer intervention upon intervention to keep their green agendas afloat.

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Ten different licences from four different public agencies, involving two separate public consultations, must be obtained before a single exploratory well can be drilled and hydraulically fractured, according to the IOD report “Getting shale gas working” published on Wednesday.

“We do not question the need for the industry to obtain the necessary environmental permits, conduct the necessary environmental impact assessments and install the necessary seismic monitoring equipment,” IOD concedes, but warns the current process “can seem a little cumbersome”.

“In our view, the planning and permitting regime for shale exploration, as currently constituted, presents a major barrier to the development of shale gas in the United Kingdom.”

Overall, however, the IOD presents an upbeat assessment about the industry’s ability to surmount the obstacles to developing a substantial onshore shale industry in a small, densely populated island with a famously self-contradictory approach to construction and local development.

WAR ON RED TAPE

The IOD is a business lobbying organisation that has expressed strong support for shale gas and often campaigns against what it sees as excessive government regulations, so the report’s conclusions are not entirely surprising.

The most interesting part of the report is the careful assessment of the various suggested barriers to shale development in chapter 5.

The report assesses barriers in five major areas: infrastructure and equipment; skills and the supply chain; finance and tax; regulation; and reputation.

It concludes that gas transportation and gathering pipelines, water supply and the availability of drilling and pressure pumping equipment are unlikely to pose serious obstacles to large-scale exploitation of Britain’s shale formations.

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The reports are inaccurate: Seven Chinese cities are enacting experimental carbon-trading programs in seven areas as of 2014, and Beijing is fast reducing how much carbon is burned per unit of GDP (known as “carbon intensity”). But China hands in Beijing and the US tell me it has made no firm decision on capping absolute emissions. (The rumor began with a May 20 report by the reputable Chinese newspaper 21st Century Business Herald.)

Yet the hubbub underscores an expectation among environmentalists and others that Beijing is moving toward doing more to avoid the most catastrophic climate forecasts. Beijing already has ambitious goals for sharply reducing the amount of carbon it consumes per unit of GDP (known as carbon intensity) by 2015. Against the backdrop of rising local unhappiness with air pollution, China’s leadership has signaled the possibility of an even faster cleanup. Climate activists hope for another iterative jump by China—from a proportional approach to emissions reduction (reducing carbon intensity), to an absolutist strategy (a cap on total emissions). [...]

Many experts wonder how Chinese leaders will enact even the goals they have set. “Achieving these targets eventually would come at considerable economic cost, and so how China will strike a balance between local air pollution, which has become dire in some places, and the cost of controlling these pollutants is still unclear,” said John Reilly, an environmental economist at MIT.

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Tara Singh, whose previous role as public affairs manager at British-Gas owner Centrica involved frequent contact with the Conservative Party, took up her newly-created role at Number 10 this week.

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March, in particular, was 3.3C below average and the coldest since 1962. It was also the coldest Easter on record, with minus 12.5C recorded at Braemar in the Highlands on March 31.

In fact, March was colder than any of the three months of winter. April saw cold snaps and heavy snow mid-month in the South and across the Channel Islands, where the early Jersey Royal potato crop was ruined. More snow came later on in Scotland and Northern Ireland; Braemar once again scored the month’s lowest temperature, with minus 11.2C on April 2.

Energy bills went sky high, nurseries threw out hundreds of thousands of unwanted bedding plants, sheep farmers suffered disastrous losses, wildlife suffered from the lack of food and spring flowers were at least four weeks behind schedule. Just as it seemed that the worst was over, May blew in with more outrageous weather and snow mid-month.

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A few years back, a Texas pioneer named George Mitchell, the son of Greek immigrants, discovered over the course of more than two decades how to combine horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to capture natural gas efficiently from shale formations, which abound in the United States in such unlikely places as Pennsylvania. New technology has also helped extract oil that was inaccessible a short time ago.

The vast majority of this energy bonzana will be consumed at home, but some of it is ripe for export – if the Administration allows it. The Energy Department on Friday [May 17] did give a conditional OK to a U.S. firm to export gas to Japan – the second such approval ever – but 26 other proposals are still awaiting action, and the department said it would make case-by-case reviews “to assess market impacts of each export decision…to ensure American consumers are not harmed by large-scale exports.”

Fear of exports? It would seem Adam Smith settled the export question more than 200 years ago when he showed that everyone gains through trade with low-cost producers. The U.S. government, however, currently has a freeze on natural gas exports to countries without a free-trade agreement, including major markets like Japan, China, India, and much of Europe, and a 37-year-old ban on exporting nearly all crude oil as well. [...]

“I’ve got to make a decision, an executive decision broadly about whether or not we export liquefied natural gas at all,” said President Obama on May 4. Judging from the hand he has been dealt, that should be one of the easiest presidential decisions of all time.

Yes, there are foes, including some environmentalists who detest fossil fuels on principle – even a fuel that produces half the CO2 emissions of coal —  and chemical companies that use gas for both feedstock (raw materials for making plastics and other products) and energy to drive their plants and believe that restricting sales abroad would keep prices low at home. (What if the same argument were applied to polyethylene the U.S. exports?) But, for an administration that set doubling total exports as one of its major goals, the natural gas boom would seem a godsend.

Just a decade ago, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan was warning that a natural gas shortage was wrecking U.S. industry and that LNG import terminals were essential. Now, businesses want to retrofit those terminals for exports, but, so far, the government has approved just two, limited to shipping a total of 3.4 billion cubic feet a day of gas, or less than 5 percent of current U.S. production.

There is no excuse for any more delay in approving all gas export applications – just as there is no excuse for the ban on exporting crude or the long-running drama of approving the Keystone XL pipeline between Canada and Nebraska,now at four years and counting. These steps will not merely boost the U.S. economy but also serve our national security interests by making other nations less dependent on Middle East and Russian petroleum.

Fracking is creating “the biggest change in energy in almost 100 years – a revolution,” says Philip Verleger of the Peterson Institute for InternationalEconomics. Production of shale gas has exploded five-fold in just four years. And that’s just a taste of what could happen if imagination, technology, and capital are unleashed by the man in Washington, who, sitting on a royal flush, can’t seem to play his cards.

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The biggest piece of President Obama’s second-term agenda is his widely expected plan for the Environmental Protection Agency to issue new carbon regulations for power plants, a move that could bring the United States in line with the greenhouse-gas-reduction goals it agreed to in Copenhagen and open the way for an international treaty to control climate change. If the administration unveils such a plan, conservatives will undoubtedly challenge its legality. The legal challenge won’t take place for two years, but the two sides are preparing for war already. The field of battle will be the Federal Appeals Court in Washington, D.C.

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