Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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Venezuela: Electricity rationing because of . . . global warming

The country with (allegedly) highest oil reserves is starting to ration electricity.
Venezuela to Begin Nationwide Power Rationing
Persistent heat wave causes a surge in demand for air conditioning

Shaky power supply is one of many problems facing Venezuela as the resource-rich South American country reels from an economic crisis and a cash crunch partly due to lower oil prices. Frequent blackouts in the interior of the country have stoked accusations of mismanagement and insufficient power grid investment by the government, which nationalized the electricity sector under the late leftist leader, Hugo Chávez.

But authorities in Venezuela, which relies on hydroelectric turbines for two-thirds of its power supply, say climate change is to blame.

“This is, of course, linked to global warming and the excessive industrialization of capitalism, which never stops, nor has ever stopped, for the effects that it can have on the climate, on society and on Mother Earth,” Mr. Arreaza said.

The blackouts have been going on for a couple of years, but the rationing is new.

Talking from both sides of the mouth, they ask that you get a generator, to use up more Venezuelan gasoline that the government insanely subsidizes to a consumer price of $0.002 a gallon, because, capitalism causes global warming or something,

Vice President Arreaza also made a bizarre call for the use of “autogenerated” electricity to reduce demand on the government’s plants. “Both the public sector as well as large [private] consumers should opt for autogeneration,” he said in the statement announcing the new plan. “That is to say, that they use their own equipment and plants to generate electricity, especially in peak hours, and not use the National System.”

Venezuela is probably netting less than US$20/barrel on its heavy, low-quality oil. It needs oil at $151 a barrel to balance its budget.

Another Venezuelan export, cacao, can’t generate revenues because the government cancelled export permits.

Again, Communism doesn’t work.

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Kerry Gives $17 Million to Vietnam to Fight Global Warming

John Kerry Gives $16 Million to Vietnam to Fight Global Warming (h/t Frontpage); The AP reported

Kerry pledged $17 million to a program that will help the region’s rice producers, shrimp and crab farmers and fisherman [sic] adapt to potential changes caused by higher sea levels that bring salt water into the delicate ecosystem.

Don’t know about the “higher sea levels”, but some of the water was frozen on its way down:

Some of the rice producers, shrimp and crab farmers and fishermen may need to get themselves some goretex with the $17 million, as Heavy Snowfall Causes Damage In Vietnam’s Lao Cai Province

According to the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development of Sa Pa, more than 100 hectares of chayote and another 100 hectares of flowers were buried under snow.

School kids got a snow day off from school, perhaps for the only time in their lives.

In other global warming news to warm your heart, Climate change expert’s fraud was ‘crime of massive proportion,’ say feds (h/t Babalu)

The EPA’s highest-paid employee and a leading expert on climate change deserves to go to prison for at least 30 months for lying to his bosses and saying he was a CIA spy working in Pakistan so he could avoid doing his real job, say federal prosecutors.

He even got his shrink to say the scam was “fueled by his insecurities.”

Tellya what: John Kerry gives me $17 million, and my (financial) insecurities will not only vanish, I’ll even put some of that money towards clearing the waters rising outdoors in the form of snow.

IMG_0433

Winter hasn’t even started.

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If they’re really sinking, why open a new airport?

Climate change castaways consider move to Australia

Threat ... much of the Maldives could be lost to climate change. Threat … much of the Maldives could be lost to climate change.

THE President of what could be the first country in the world lost to climate change has urged Australia to prepare for a mass wave of climate refugees seeking a new place to live.

The Maldivian President, Mohamed Nasheed, said his government was considering Australia as a possible new home if the tiny archipelago disappears beneath rising seas.

”It is increasingly becoming difficult to sustain the islands, in the natural manner that these islands have been,” he told the Herald in an interview in Male, the Maldives capital.

If you read on, the article seems to confuse beach erosion with rising sea levels. Beach erosion takes place whether the sea levels rise or not; it’s caused by the effect of tides and ocean currents on sands.

But back to the Maldives:

Tim Blair points out that Nasheed

Then … attended a ceremony to mark the construction of a new airport.

New airport?

When the country’s supposedly going to be swallowed by the waves at any moment?

Back to Tim Blair,

President Nasheed has more urgent problems than a few little waves:

An epidemic of cheap heroin has swept through the archipelago, but taken root in Male in particular. The UN has estimated 40 per cent of the country’s youth use hard drugs.

You mean, cheap heroin that arrives via airplanes?

Nasheed, a Muslim as the Maldives constitution obliges all Maldivians to be, also faces a rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism. Wahhabist Islamic scholars, most schooled in madrassas in Pakistan, are radicalising Islam in the Maldives.

Female circumcision is practised, and is reportedly on the increase, across the archipelago. There are calls for the return of amputation for crimes and for the banning of music and dancing. Women are flogged for having extra-marital sex.

Much more imminent problems than rising sea levels, indeed. The castaways have a long wait.

And, besides, weren’t the seas supposed to cease rising?

(links fixed)

UPDATE:
Linked by Hot Air. Thanks!

Nils-Axel Mörner, a sea-level expert from Sweden, sent President Nasheed a letter some time ago telling him that the sea levelsweren’t actually rising.

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Enough with the compact flourescents

Jim has the lunacy,

Here’s the problem,

The mercury in one bulb, for example, is enough to contaminate up to 6,000 gallons of water beyond safe drinking levels.

Consisting of glass tubes twisted into a spiral, they require more hand labor and so are made largely in China, where labor costs are lower and environmental regulations are not so strict. The Times of London recently reported that “large numbers of Chinese workers have been poisoned by mercury, which forms part of the compact fluorescent light bulbs.”

I hope Michelle Bachmann’s proposed legislation goes through.

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