Demand for Coal is up and prices have doubled
Thermal coal, the stuff burned in power plants to produce electricity is up 106% this year, driven by demand from China. Bloomberg News calls coal “the world’s least liked commodity.” Australia is a huge producer of thermal coal.
World leaders wring their hands about climate change. “Code red for humanity” says the U.N Secretary General. But rising demand for thermal coal points to what is really happening.
Nuclear Power: China is in Germany is out
China is building nuclear reactors and that could stop the world from choking on its coal powered plants. Germany is phasing out its nuclear plants but is still burning a lot of coal, most of it really dirty lignite coal Weird logic. If you’re worried about climate change nuclear power is one way to electrify the world.
Here is a Who’s Who of the Nuclear world from the Website Visual Capitalist:
Here are the top 15 nuclear countries. Like Germany, Sweden vowed to close its nuclear reactors in 1980. In 2010 the Swedish Parliament repealed that order.
Sweden gets 40% of its electricity from nuclear. France is 70% nuclear and sells electricity to Germany when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine.
US closes border from Canada for another month
That’s only for cars. You can still fly to the United States from Canada.
The reason for shutting the border until September 21 seems to be political; 65% of Canadians are double vaxxed compared to 52% for the United States and 24% for Mexico. My guess is that it is an excuse to keep the Mexican border closed without having to look Trump-like.
If the border crossings from Canada were opened while keeping Mexico closed, the AOC wing of the Democratic Party would probably go ballistic. This way it looks more even-handed. In the meantime, small border towns such as Richford, Vermont, are starving for Canadian business.
The Canadian border is open for vaccinated Americans.
Was this a bill for a piece of Pi?
Jeopardy: The answer is always in the form of a question
Q: This man was smiling on Monday and crying on Friday.
A: Who is Mike Richards?
Mike Richards Out as ‘Jeopardy!’ Host Amid Cascade of Scandals
That was the headline in Variety, the Hollywood bible. Richards was executive producer of the quiz show and when Alex Trebek died he was a guest host. A miracle: he was picked to a multi-million dollar job. Fans, including this one, were not happy. They found so much dirt on Richards he quit nine days after he got the job. He has pre-recorded one episode which will play in September. Then he’s off the air, forever.
Read the Variety article here:
Deer in the headlights
Or at least in the coyote’s sights. Look carefully in the top left hand corner: that is a coyote in the backyard of my neighbour in Knowlton, artist Susan Pepler. In the bottom right hand corner, a young deer. Some big dogs from next door soon chased both of them away.
This summer coyotes have moved into this rural village. We can hear their distinctive yipping at night. There is a huge deer population which has exploded in part because the deer have had few, if any, natural predators. Now they do. Another neighbour with a large farm nearby reports he finds evidence of deer kills on his property. Too bad for Bambi, but nature is taking its course.
Essay of the Week
Netflix geography. We haven’t been outside Canada for more than a year and a half but we have travelled the world on Netflix, with some side tours on Amazon. We have been to Turkey in real life, but never knew what marvellous soap operas the Turks produce. All the Nordic countries are covered, with the Russians occupying Norway, a body on a bridge between Sweden and Denmark; a woman as the Danish Prime Minister and a crime-filled crossing on a Spanish Ocean Liner in the 1940s.
Murders from the Shetlands to Cornwall; an Israeli spy; French show biz gossip; endless shootings in Naples (when is the next Gomorra?) and Stanley Tucci’s wonderful gastro-tour of Italy.
Then all of a sudden this week, up pops Luxembourg. Twice. First on the final program of Collateral, when the evil mastermind slips away heading for a flight to Luxembourg. Well he has to park his money somewhere. He can’t go to the Channel Islands. Then we stumbled across something called Capitani. It is about a murder (could be murders, we’re not that far in yet) in a small town in Luxembourg. The cynical big city detective arrives to solve the crime and enlists a couple of local cops to help him, one a bumbling idiot, the other a beautiful young woman who turns out to be smart and tough.
Enough about TV. I reached for my iPhone and googled Luxembourg. I didn’t know that much about it. The Benelux countries from grade school geography. Being an anglophile, I knew the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator despised the Luxembourg politician, Jean-Claude Juncker, who was always preaching about how silly it was to leave. Juncker was president of the European Commission and his antics probably pushed a few British voters to the leave side.
Odd, but Luxembourg is a bit of a winner from Brexit. Goldman Sachs moved some people there from London last December. But I would think that an English speaking American, they are not very good with languages, would much prefer London with its eight-million people, to Luxembourg, a place with 613,000 and that counts the ones in the countryside.
The Duchy of Luxembourg is squeezed between Germany, France and Belgium. It is a tiny country: 2,586 kilometres or 998 square miles. Greater Los Angeles is 12,561 square kilometres or 4,850 square miles. Luxembourg is also rich: the per capita income of Luxembourg is $113,196. The per capita income of Greater Los Angeles is $66,635.
Luxembourg was one of the original six countries of the European Union. It has made out like a bandit. It is one of the four official capitals of the European Union, and the seat of the Court of Justice of the European Union. My God, how the money pours in. It is also an industrial and financial powerhouse. It is always getting in trouble for banking secrecy.
Reuters ran the following earlier this year:
“Luxembourg’s investment fund industry is a financial “black box” that helps people launder illicit money and avoid tax, according to an investigation published on Monday whose findings were rejected by the EU nation.” Well, they would, wouldn’t they.
Back to Netflix. And Wikipedia. I was curious about what language the subtitles were translated from. There are three official languages: Luxembourgish, a German dialect, French and German, the standard variety. I noticed the policeman thank someone and say: “Nō, (pronounced nee) merci.” The mixture of German and French reminded me of the phrase “Bonjour-Hi” in Quebec, which drives the French-speaking nationalists mad.
Much of Luxembourg is covered by the dense Ardennes Forest, part of the plot of the Capitani series. The Ardennes was through to be impenetrable so the French didn’t build the Maginot Line of the Belgian side of it. The German armoured columns plowed straight through the Luxembourg Forest on May 10, 1940, surprised the French and the British and won the Battle of France in 46 days.
Germany occupied Luxembourg in both world wars. Language was a big deal in the last one the Nazis banned French and insisted on pure German only. Nō is spelled the same way in German but it is pronounced Nein not Nee. The Germans conscripted Luxembourg men into the Wehrmacht. Germany annexed Luxembourg in 1942 and it became part of the Third Reich.
Luxembourg is now the richest country in the world on a per capita basis; Switzerland is number two. Judging from the Netflix program, Capitani, there must be some serious inequality. The people in the little town run bakeries, small inns and teach school. Happy, but they don’t strike me as being on $113,196 a year.