The worst damages are caused by elderly coal-fired power stations in Bulgaria, Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom. However, the top-polluting industrial plant is the ArcelorMittal steel processing plant at Grand-Synthe, Dunkirk, northern France, which will be familiar to anyone who ever drives from Brussels to Calais or Boulogne.

The Grand-Synthe plant caused between €421 million and €595 million in environmental and health damages in 2009, according to the EEA.

Here are some more interesting ArcelorMittal figures:

Net income 2010: $2.9 billion

Profits in 2009 of group company Arcelor Mittal Finance and Services Belgium: €1.3 billion

Tax paid in 2009 by Arcelor Mittal Finance and Services Belgium: €496 (not a typo)

Profits in 2010 of group company Arcelor Mittal Finance and Services Belgium: €1.4 billion

Tax paid in 2010 by Arcelor Mittal Finance and Services Belgium: €0

Value of banked carbon credits given to ArcelorMittal for free under the EU emissions trading scheme (ETS): €1 billion (approximately, depending on the market)

Fine for price fixing imposed by European Commission on ArcelorMittal in 2010: €230.4 million

Reduced amount of fine after Commission admitted “the [ArcelorMittal] subsidiaries could not pay this fine and the parent company would not pay it”: €45.7 million

Personal wealth of ArcelorMittal CEO Lakshmi Mittal (from the Sunday Times Rich List): £17.5 billion (€20.5 billion)

The only reasonable conclusion to draw from this, in respect of the environmental and health damage caused by the Grand-Synthe plant in 2009 is: SEND THEM THE BILL! The ETS has failed disastrously to create an incentive for ArcelorMittal to reduce the environmental damage it does; in fact it has only provided them with a scandalous windfall. A bill for the damage done would provide the direct incentive ArcelorMittal needs.

The first was the finding of the Opera project, at Gran Sasso near L’Aquila, that Einstein might have got it wrong. The discovery that tiny particles could apparently travel faster than the speed of light earned headlines worldwide, followed by a faster-than-the-speed-of-light debunking (see for example the Wall Street Journal). In fact the scientists who published the finding urged caution and asked others to test their work. So we shall see.

The second report was published by the European Commission Joint Research Centre’s Institute for Environment and Sustainability in Ispra, northern Italy. The institute’s data shows that world greenhouse gas emissions from manmade sources reached an all-time high of 33 billion tonnes in 2010.

There are several sobering aspects to this data. First, it shows that the Kyoto Protocol has not worked. Annex I countries (those with emission reduction targets) are likely in fact to collectively meet their target but only because of two historical accidents: the collapse of Soviet-bloc heavy industry, and the continuing financial and economic crisis, which led to major industrial production drops. Had these interruptions not happened, developed world emissions would be much higher.

The report also shows that any Kyoto Protocol related achievements have been rendered largely irrelevant by growth in emissions in non-Annex I countries, especially China. Chinese emissions have doubled since 2003, and in absolute terms are now well in excess of even US emissions. Chinese per capita emissions now exceed those of France and Spain (France is a low-carbon country due to nuclear power), and are on the same level as Italy. Alarmingly, the Chinese could be emitting on a per capita basis at the same high level as Americans by 2017 if current trends continue.

The enormous Chinese emissions growth is largely a consequence of installation of fossil fuel based energy generation, mainly from coal. Depending on who’s figures you look at (Chinese official statistics are treated with caution), in one year alone, between 2009-2010, Chinese coal consumption increased by between 5.9 and 10.1 percent. The building of dozens of coal-fired power plants in China locks in emissions for the next few decades and makes it unrealistic that global emissions will peak in 2015, as recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This is especially the case because emissions in developed countries are not dramatically declining to compensate for the developing country increases.

The third – largely ignored – finding from Italy last week came from the Italian Glaciological Committee. It found that Italian glaciers have lost 37 percent of their volume in the last quarter of a century, with a speeding-up of the shrinkage since 2003. Italy’s glaciers could be gone completely by 2050, and the process is now likely to be irreversible, the scientists said.

This is a real-world illustration of the pace of global warming, the consequences of which are unpredictable, but which will involve loss of ice cover, rising sea levels, and chaotic weather patterns. The number of weather-related natural disasters is already increasing sharply, affecting more people (see CRED EM-DAT), and becoming more expensive, as the insurance industry well knows.

Unfortunately policy makers are ill-equipped to address the problem, even though they’ve been told enough times what the problem is. The inertia might be down to denial, the cumbersome structure of decision making, short-term thinking or inability to communicate the risks, but the result is the same: too little action, too late. But perhaps the scientists at Gran Sasso will really prove Einstein wrong, and we can send José Manuel Barroso back in time to sort it all out.

The Olympics will provide a live test for a “Total Airport Security System” (TASS), backed with an £8 million EU grant from research spending. The project promoters give little detail, but say that different scenarios will be tested at Heathrow, involving “integrating and fusing different types of selected real-time sensors and sub-systems for data collection in a variety of modes”.

The TASS consortium includes Britain’s airport operator BAA, which is obviously in need of an EU hand out, having made a £200 million loss last year. But the lead roles are being taken by firms from Israel, not an EU country at last checking. VERINT Systems (Israel) will coordinate, while surveillance know-how will be provided by Elbit Security Systems. Elbit’s supply of Big Brother cameras to the West Bank wall have led to it being dropped as an investment by some pension funds, and the Commission itself considers the separation barrier illegal where it is built on Palestinian land. It is worth noting that intellectual property created in the course of EU research projects (eg new surveillance systems) remains the property of the firms involved, so in theory EU money could pay for development of systems that will ultimately be planted atop an illegal wall and used to keep an eye on the Palestinians!

Considering that the TASS project will result in a high-tech system that can profitably marketed to airports around the world, it is unclear why the Commission needs to dole out this corporate welfare. Defence giant BAE Systems is also taking part, being clearly unable to fund research and development from its £1 billion 2010 profit. BAE is separately involved in 12 similar EU research projects, funded with another £71 million in taxpayers’ cash.

The TASS project website is here: http://www.tass-project.eu/

A version of this article was published in Private Eye magazine.

I’m with Dieter Helm on this. He is an Oxford University professor and advisor to various governments. His point is that if electricity generation could be 100 percent clean, and if the maximum number of products (cars, etc.) could run on electricity rather than fossil fuels, energy efficiency becomes irrelevant, beyond the eternal quest for lower bills.

Coal is the real key to decarbonising Europe’s – and everybody else’s – economy, according to Helm. Power generating capacity based on coal is increasing, swiftly wiping out any emissions reduction from efficiency savings. Interestingly, the amount of energy from coal globally was more or less steady between 1990 and 2002, but then started to climb, mainly because of installation of capacity in China. The amount of electricity from coal globally went up by 27 percent between 2002 and 2009.

There is surely a risk that emphasising energy efficiency, while broadly a good idea, detracts attention from the steady increase in the use of different emissions-intensive fossil fuels. The European Commission’s energy efficiency proposals will have the effect of making energy companies sell less, in principle reducing their revenues, though I’m sure ways around this will be found. But perhaps the power firms prefer this to being made to massively ramp up investment in the short term and phase out coal.

Current commissioners Joaquín Almunia and Neelie Kroes also attended, just as they did in 2010. Kroes was at Bilderberg in 2009 as well. It is interesting to note that one of the topics for discussion this year was ‘social networks: connectivity and security issues’. This will have been of particular interest to Kroes, in her role of Digital Agenda Commissioner. It would also have sparked the interest of attendees Chris Hughes (Facebook co-founder), and Eric Schmidt and Reid Hoffman, respectively the executive chairmen of Google and LinkedIn. But any discussion that might have taken place between the CEOs and Kroes no doubt did not touch on her regulatory role.

Meanwhile, Almunia was able to rub shoulders with the top executives from a number of major companies, including Airbus, Shell, Siemens and so on. Unquestionably, Almunia’s impartiality as competition commissioner was in no way dented by any discussions he may or may not have had with these industry leviathans.

One CEO in attendance was Klaus Kleinfeld of Alcoa. In March, the Commission took the Italian government to the EU Court of Justice because it had not done enough to recover illegal state aid given to Alcoa. Alcoa is currently appealing the Commission’s original decision to charge the Italians with reclaiming the aid.

I’m sure that Almunia and Kleinfeld, should they have met at the conference — possibly in the company of Italian economy and finance minister Giulio Tremonti, who was also there — politely steered away from any discussion of this matter.

What is it though with competition commissioners and Bilderberg? The current and previous two holders of that post — Almunia, Kroes and Monti — were all at St. Moritz.

The plants, to be built at Narva on Estonia’s border with Russia, will be fuelled by oil shale. This is, essentially, porous rock from which hydrocarbons can be squeezed. It presents many environmental problems. It produces more greenhouse gas than coal, and also poses a huge headache in terms of its mining and waste disposal. As this EU report says, “production of a barrel of shale oil can generate up to 1.5 tons of spent shale, which may occupy up to 25% greater volume than the original shale”. Oil shale is in any case a fairly crappy, low-grade fuel. The same report notes that “the heating value of oil shale is limited. In the best cases, it is comparable to that of brown coal or average forest residues, but less than half of that of average bituminous coal”.

Estonia is pretty much the only country where electricity is generated on a big scale by burning oil shale. In fact, Estonia gets most of its electricity from burning this dirty fuel. Instead of weaning itself off oil shale, and diversifying into renewables, the Estonian government wants to give up to €75 million per year, for the next 20 years (so €1.5 billion) to subsidise more burning of oil shale and lock itself into highly polluting electricity generation well beyond 2020.

This seems very shortsighted to say the least, especially from a government that has signed up to EU targets to reduce emissions by 20 percent by 2020 compared to 1990, and to increase the renewables share in the energy mix to 20 percent.

But the Estonians are not the only ones undermining the EU’s climate goals. Should the subsidy be allowed to go ahead, the power plants in Narva will be built by Alstom, the giant French engineering company.

And they will be doing so with French government blessing. France’s State Secretary of Economy, Finance, Industry and Foreign Trade, Pierre Lellouche was in Estonia to oversee the signing by state energy company Eesti Energia and Alstom of the contract to build the oil shale plants. Total contract size for Alstom (which the French state held a major share in until 2006, before selling it to another government favourite, Bouyges): €950 million.

Lellouche said the contract would help guarantee Estonia’s energy security. At least he didn’t have the brass neck of Estonian Minister of Economic Affairs and Communications Juhan Parts, who said “the new energy units will give us [a] cleaner environment and greener future for our children”. Eh?

Fortunately the Commission has stepped in and will investigate the state aid, but on the technical basis that it might create market distortions, rather than the common-sense basis that such aid for polluting industries is stupid and counterproductive. Let’s hope the Commission does forbid the aid.

This article was amended April 7 to take account of a reader’s comment (definition of oil shale).

These include an incident over the Mediterranean Sea in 1956 when an aircraft carrying two nuclear capsules disappeared and was never heard of or seen again; and another incident in 1956 at an unnamed “overseas base” (possibly RAF Lakenheath in the UK) when an aircraft slid off a runway and hit “a storage igloo containing several nuclear weapons”. Then, in 1965, an aircraft loaded with a nuclear weapon fell off an aircraft carrier into the Pacific, sinking unrecoverably into the depths. In 1966, over Spain, a B-52 carring four nuclear weapons was in collision with another plane, resulting in contaminated soil and vegetation, but apparently nothing more serious.

This one, meanwhile, could almost be slapstick comedy if it wasn’t so serious: in 1980 at an air force base in Arkansas, a “repairman dropped a heavy wrench socket, which rolled off a work platform and fell toward the bottom of the silo. The socket bounced and struck the missile, causing a leak from a pressurised fuel tank. The missile complex and surrounding area were evacuated…”. Fuel vapour subsequently exploded but thankfully the nuclear warhead didn’t go off.

The document also describes an incident in northern Greenland in 1968, when a B-52 with four nuclear weapons crashed and burned up. All the nuclear weapons were destroyed in the fire, says the report.

Or maybe not. A BBC investigation in 2008 established that only three of the bombs were accounted for. The fourth is presumably up there in the ice somewhere.

It is also likely that the US 1950-1980 list seriously underplays the number of incidents. It lists 32 accidents, but other reports refer to more, such as this one, which says the US Navy reported 233 “nuclear weapon incidents” between 1965 and 1983.

This provokes a couple of considerations. First, if this is a partial picture of US incidents, it doesn’t even bear thinking about how many times in the Soviet Union nuclear bombs were accidently dropped off ships, lost in the ice, or had wrenches dropped on them. Second, though the US military is hardly forthcoming, European countries are generally less likely to declassify information on nuclear accidents. In the UK for example, a serious accident at a US airbase in 1958 was believed to involve nuclear weapons, but the government always denied this, though of course it could just be that there was no nuclear accident…

So while the European Commission is thinking about stress testing nuclear plants, perhaps it could also put an appeal out to EU governments to disclose the extent of their nuclear arsenals, and to declassify information relating to nuclear weapon accidents and incidents. Of course it won’t happen because anything military is generally beyond the EU’s reach, but it would be nice to know the truth about how contaminated with radiation Europe already is.

PS: interesting Cablegate cable (from 2008) on nuclear power and Japan: http://cablesearch.org/cable/view.php?id=08TOKYO2993

Now just a note for those who will point out that for much of the northern hemisphere December 2010 was extremely cold and snowy: when talking of “global warming” and “climate change”, please remember the clue is in the names. Global warming means the global temperature, on average, is going up. It does not mean that there is uniform warming in all places simultaneously. Climate change means, surprisingly, that the climate is changing. This change can be experienced in many ways: warmer weather in some places, cooler weather in others, more rain and storms and extreme events (as seen in Australia and Russia in 2010). The NOAA also has 2010 as the wettest year on record, in terms of global average precipitation, by the way.

Given the continued global warming trend, it seems surprising that the top EU politicians hardly mention it any more. In particular, the EU2020 strategy seems to be becoming an excuse to put off action on climate change until later. Real action on “low-carbon growth” is now seen as something for 2030 or 2050, rather than now. In recent speeches, Jose Manuel Barroso has barely mentioned climate change. In the EU economic growth priorities for 2011, the notion of sustainable growth does not even feature. In his speech to the first 2011 session of the European Parliament, Barroso briefly welcomed the relative progress in international negotiations on climate change at Cancun (venue for the 16th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, at the end of last year), but then promptly put it in the same bracket as EU agreement on the Eurovignette truck road charging system. Climate change is becoming, it seems, a second division policy area.

And environment commissioner Janez Potocnik is not helping, deciding in the last couple of days to put off until 2013 a review of air pollution legislation that should have happened in 2004. Part of this review would be to set 2020 targets for reductions of some pollutants. Potocnik doesn’t want to put his head above the parapet, it would seem.

But, as climate action commissioner Connie Hedegaard said in a recent debate organised by the Lisbon Council, “we’re in for some very expensive solutions if we just continue business as usual”. She wants the EU to increase its 2020 emissions reduction target from 20 percent to 30 percent compared to 1990 levels, but this idea has been on the table for a year without any real development in the discussion. Hedegaard will push it ahead of the next UN climate summit, in Durban, South Africa, at the end of this year. Its acceptance, or not, will be a major test of the EU’s resolve to try and do something about climate change.

One can speculate that FIFA’s choice of Russia for 2018 was influenced by the lesser likelihood of scrutiny of FIFA’s operations there. In South Africa in 2010, FIFA required a waiver of taxes and changes to the law, creating new crimes to protect its commercial interests. Had an EU location been chosen for 2018, great media pressure would surely have built up over issues such as these. Russia, followed by Qatar in 2022, would seem to be ideal choices for avoidance of the spotlight.

Belgium and Holland put in a joint bid for 2018, but it is hardly surprising that they failed to secure it after Belgian politician Bert Anciaux kicked up a fuss earlier this year about the concessions demanded by FIFA. Anciaux published a series of guarantees that FIFA wanted from the Dutch. These included (and I quote):

“FIFA and/or FIFA Subsidiaries… will be fully exempt from any Taxes in the Netherlands… The full Tax exemption is not limited to the events and is not limited time-wise… The exemption stated in this section shall encompass all revenues, profits, income, expenses, costs, investments and any and all kind of payments, in cash or otherwise” (author’s note: hmmmm, in cash eh?).

However…
“The Government of the Netherlands and all governmental authorities of the local level will procure, at their own costs, the implementation of all necessary safety and security measures required to ensure the safety and security of FIFA / FIFA Subsidiaries and their staff… The Government of the Netherlands will, at its own costs, develop and implement a detailed and comprehensive security concept”.

“Unrestricted import and export of all foreign currencies to and from the Netherlands, as well as the unrestricted exchange and conversion of these currencies into US dollars, Euros or Swiss francs…” (author’s note: isn’t this carte blanche for money laundering?).

“Ambush marketing… that may induce third parties into erroneously believing that those product or services are approved, authorised or endorsed by FIFA… will be prohibited by law.” (note: this is just one of a number of activities related to commercial activity to be “prohibited by law”. These prohibitions “shall be sanctioned by a suitably severe penalty to deter any deliberate breach, subject to a written demand for penalty by FIFA”. Hang on, laws and penalties are determined by Parliaments, no?).

“The Netherlands guarantees to FIFA the availability throughout the Netherlands of a telecommunication infrastructure and all relevant services… [this] shall be given to FIFA at no specific costs and expenses for FIFA.”

There were many more such demands. Some, though not all, were knocked back by the Netherlands. I wonder if the Russians (or the Qataris) reacted in the same way?

Considering the outrageousness of FIFA’s demands, media scrutiny, the economic downturn and pressure on government finances, not to mention EU competition law which is violated by FIFA’s monopoly and commercial practices, it seems unlikely that the EU will ever host a World Cup again. FIFA is a venal organisation and the sooner it is replaced by something else, the better.

Although they are an endangered species nowadays, numbering only 13 out of Britain’s 72 elected euro-representatives, UK Labour Party MEPs will play an important role in the Labour leadership election.

Their votes count equally with those of members of the Westminster parliament. Thus it has been that in the last few weeks, four leadership hopefuls – Ed Balls, Andy Burnham and both Milibands – have pitched up in Brussels to state their cases.

But what of the fifth candidate, Diane Abbott? Well, she was invited. But MEPs were somewhat surprised to receive the emailed reply that Diane would be unable to attend a meeting due to being “very busy with the leadership campaign”. Has anyone told her that she ignores Brussels at her peril!