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Today the Financial Times reports on the poor performance of the Renewables Obligation in encouraging wind farms: "The amount of new wind capacity added in 2007 was less than three-quarters of that built the year before."  This is despite subsidies that make wind farms massively profitable.

Simon Linnett's plan, written for the Social Market Foundation, for a global response to the threat of anthropogenic global warming (PDF) is entirely misconceived. At each stage it chooses the worst possible path forward from its analysis of the threat, to the manner of the response, to the scale at which it is organised.

Much of the power of the Web lies in speed and reach. But those same properties are the source of its greatest failing as well: the tendency to spread faulty assertions instantly and widely. Maybe it’s time for a “slow blog” movement, just as there’s now a slow food movement — and even a slow life movement, as described in The Times this week.

Steel maker ArcelorMittal has reached an agreement on CO2 quotas at its Liege plant and promised to restart its blast furnace on the condition of the granting of a 'polluter's permit', Agence France-Presse reported, citing Belgian government sources.

South Africa's power crisis is having wider repercussions

AT THE big Sandton mall in northern Johannesburg, idle shoppers stroll in darkness. They have been caught in one of the many blackouts that have plagued South Africa for three weeks. Shops are closed, unable to open their tills or process credit cards. Ice-cream shops watch their merchandise dissolve; food stalls are unable to offer coffee or anything hot to eat. In Cape Town a power cut trapped tourists in the cable car that goes up Table Mountain, and in Pretoria angry commuters whose trains stopped running set them on fire. In Johannesburg, which is congested at the best of times, the roads become gridlocked when the traffic lights go out.

Most shocking of all, the country's largest gold, platinum, coal and diamond producers shut down their underground mines on January 25th, after being told that their electricity supply could not be guaranteed. Five days later, having been promised a stable supply, they resumed production. But they will have to limit their power consumption to 90% of the usual level. On January 29th the authorities said power cuts and rationing would continue until July.

The impact is also felt beyond South Africa's borders. Eskom is rationing the electricity it exports to Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Swaziland. The interruption of mining has pushed up the prices of gold and platinum. The crisis is likely to affect global platinum markets, where supply has been tight for a few years, particularly: South Africa produces over 75% of the world's supply. Carmakers, which buy over half of global platinum production for use in catalytic converters, must be praying South Africa will soon emerge from the darkness.

Indonesia is a land in turmoil, home to massive volcanoes, tsunamis, and earthquakes. On Monday, January 14, it experienced a brand new type of disturbance, the world's first food riot caused by another nation pandering to the global warming mob. Indonesians took to the streets, demanding that their government to do something about the price of soybeans, a dietary staple.

All over the world, food prices are on the rise. For most of the late 1990s and up until 2005, the price of beans on the Chicago Board of Trade had remained stable at about $5 a bushel. Since then, they have shot up over 150 percent, to around $13. Corn has doubled, to $5. Wheat prices have tripled.

Simon Linnett, Executive Vice-Chairman of Rothschild, has called for a new international body, the World Environment Agency, to regulate carbon trading.

In a recently published paper, Trading Emissions, for the Social Market Foundation, Mr Linnett argues that the International problem of climate change demands an international solution.

Unless governments cede some of their sovereignty to a new world body, he says, a global carbon trading scheme cannot be enforced and regulated.

Right-wing Czech President Vaclav Klaus slammed the EU's sweeping new measures to fight climate change as a "tragic mistake" in an interview with a German newspaper on Thursday.

"I believe that our government and others will stand up against these bureaucratic ideas," Klaus told the Handelsblatt business daily.

"This package is without doubt a tragic mistake, a misunderstanding of nature and an unnecessary limitation of human activity," the outspoken Eurosceptic leader added.

"For me it is almost a tragedy."

Will global warming increase hurricane activity? Two studies published in the last week arrived at opposite conclusions.

A link between warmer sea surface temperatures and increased North Atlantic hurricane activity “has been quantified for the first time,” according to a study by University College London researchers that was published in Nature (Jan. 30). They claim to have associated a 0.5 degree Celsius increase in sea surface warming with a 40 percent increase in Atlantic hurricane activity during 1996-2005 as compared to the average activity during 1950-2000.