You being a media output or broadcast news bulletin less than a week ago.. the Aussie miner dealing coal to China.. seems somewhat overblown.. if you hear it from the China-side that is..
Reuters lead with the backup..
Millionaire mining magnate Clive Palmer has moved to clarify earlier statements regarding a coal sales agreement between a Chinese company and his commodities group Resourcehouse Ltd, saying that earlier reports were based on his own estimates.
The clarifications come after China Power International Development Ltd (CPID) denied media reports that it had agreed to buy 30 million tonnes of coal annually for the next 20 years from Resourcehouse.
H/T: bizspec
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The good news from Martin Wolf(FT) moderating a recent Davos discussion..
For me, the highlight of the programme was the economic outlook session on Saturday. This is not only because I was moderator. The starting point for the discussion was an obvious one: the policy interventions of late 2008 and 2009 have been a resounding success. The outcome has been a far briefer and shallower recession than most participants imagined a year ago. That is obvious from the successive consensus of forecasts for 2010. For almost every significant economy, the forecast for growth this year is higher than it was a year or even six months ago. The world economy survived the heart attack in the financial system.
It did so as a result of fiscal and monetary stimuli that are unprecedented in peacetime. These actions were essential and successful. It was inevitable, in particular, that the largest increases in fiscal deficits occurred where the private sector’s credit bubble had been greatest: the US, UK and Spain above all. China also mounted a massive stimulus programme, as Zhu Min, deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China, noted in the discussion.
Well said that man!
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There’s a story out of Huffington Post..
About 90 percent of mature lodgepole pines in the Medicine Bow and Routt national forests are expected to die in the next five years, thanks to the beetle infestation, said Mary Peterson of the U.S. Forest Service.
The Forrest Service wants remove them.. except there’s whole heap of them.. and this is rising, too… so what to do..?
Suggestion: Talk to Cobalt, who make biobutanol from wood waste.. maybe they’ll be happy to help.
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On both sides..
A U.S. senator from Alaska who is leading the fight to block federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions is also Congress’ top recipient of campaign contributions from the nation’s electric utilities, according to a new report. U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican who holds a key position on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, received $157,000 from the electric utilities industry last year, the highest among U.S. lawmakers, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. Since 2005, she has received more than $244,000 from the industry.
H/t: YE360
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Is how this report characterizes a US Senator. Now also better known for the company she keeps.. and what that will do for her future in politics.
An excellent illustration also of the kind of special interests American republicanism has become so very capable of, as mentioned in a call (comment #31 @ 4.09pm 17/1/10) to wake up to likely prospects in enzed
What with Big-R designer wars and huge rhetoric-rather-than-science on climate change solutions the Republicans with special interests in support are looking more the advocates of weapons of mass extinction(WME).
How anyone else want want this kind of apellation beats me..
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Says it all for me..
The blogger is Mark Seddon@BT — well done that man!
From now until May, it will be the job of politicians and journalists to create sufficient interest and excitement to cajole Britain’s increasingly reluctant electorate into the polling booths. They will have their job cut out.
The problem for Britain’s professional political class is twofold; the country, alone amongst its competitors is still in recession and all three major parties are to one extent or another wedded to a liberal economic consensus – the consensus that laid the foundations for the current banking crisis. From Thatcher to Blair and now to Brown and Cameron, the essential policies have remained the same. Loosely these can be described as free market based, de-regulatory, biased towards the finance sector and deliberately neglectful of the manufacturing sector. Labour has been kinder to public services, and as long as the bubble was still capable of expanding, allowed for an element of ‘trickle down’. However welcome some of the micro measures to boost training or build schools and hospitals, the gap between the rich and the poor has continued to grow. Britain is now more unequal than at any time since Queen Victoria was on the throne.
So attempting to create any enthusiasm, and especially by a political class now largely reviled as corrupt, would be a tall order in the best of times. But these are the worst of times, and all of the political leaders are agreed that the axe will have to fall on Government spending – the Government having spent much of our wealth bailing out the bankers. In truth cuts are already taking place, but after May comes the heavy stuff – whoever wins. This much the public already knows. It explains why there is so little enthusiasm for any of the parties or their leaders, and why this coming General Election may be less game changing, and more game playing.
In time it may also become known as the ‘phoney election’, because while all of the parties agree that cuts must be made, they are not really telling us where and how deep. And having artificially inflated the economy by pumping billions of taxpayers’ money into bust banks, the politicians are now set on deflating it as quickly – and before a recovery has even started.
Some have suggested that Britain is only a bigger economic version of Iceland. That may be true. But what I fear is that the direct result of slashing public expenditure will be that Britain will be caught in a stagnating deflationary spiral similar to that which has gripped Japan for nearly a decade.
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Chinese manufacturers of photovoltaic solar panels have secured an increasing hold in California, the United States’ largest solar market, doubling their market share in the last year alone, according to a new report. In the last three years, China’s share of the market increased from 2 percent to 46 percent, says Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a research and consulting firm. The share of U.S. manufacturers in the California market dropped from 43 percent to 16 percent during that same period. “The ascendancy of Chinese manufacturers would be noteworthy regardless of market conditions, but is particularly telling in a time when purse-strings are still tight,” the report said. One Chinese company, Yingli Solar, now claims 27 percent of the California solar market. California accounts for about 40 percent of the U.S.’s total solar power business. The lower manufacturing costs of Chinese companies have given them a strong competitive advantage and have contributed to a sharp drop in solar module prices in the past year.
h/t YaleEnvironment360
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Martin LaMonica has the Ernst&Young take on another aspect – electric vehicles..
As I recall one of the frogblog commenters told of rich drivers taking up the E/V.. so an interesting aspect of this is how these fuel savers would willingly spend to acquire convenient charge stations..
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