Llewellyn King: 'Hunger Winter' may loom amidst energy crisis caused by Putin

Dutch children eating soup during the famine of 1944–1945.

— Photo by Menno Huizinga

WEST WARWICK, R.I. 

Even as Europe has been dealing with its hottest summer on record, it has been fearfully aware that it may face its worst winter since the one at the end of World War II, from 1944 to 1945.

Electricity shortages and prices for fuel that are unpayable for many households are in store for Europe.

Industrial production in Germany, Europe’s economic driver, is threatened and governments from London to Athens are struggling with how they will help with energy bills right now, let alone in the dead of winter.

Electricity production on the European grid was already strained due to the change from coal and gas generation to renewables.

Germany worsened a tight supply by shutting down its nuclear plants, and the new reliance on wind was severely questioned by a wind drought last fall, especially in the North Sea.

After Vladimir’s Putin’s Russia attacked Ukraine with an all-out invasion on Feb. 24, things went from tightness of supply to impending disaster. Russia, through a complex network of pipelines, is the principal supplier of natural gas to Europe and all petroleum products to Germany. Now it has curtailed normal flows. 

Europe is heavily dependent on gas for heating and for making electricity. As things stand, all of Europe is hurting, especially Germany. The country may suffer as dreadful a winter as it did at the end of World War II when there was no coal, the essential fuel at the time.

The unknowns revolve around Russia’s war in Ukraine. These are possible scenarios:

-- Russia wins outright; Europe continues sanctions and is punished with gas interruptions. Result: Europe freezes this winter.

-- There is a political settlement, the rebuilding of Ukraine begins and the gas flows again.

-- Ukraine repulses Russia on the ground; Russia changes regime and abandons the fight. 

-- The conflict worsens, and NATO is drawn in. Europe rations fuel, including kerosene. It is a wartime footing for all of Europe.

-- Germany decides it has had enough and makes a deal with Russia. Ukraine figuratively is thrown under the bus.

While the United States and other gas-producing nations will export all they can to Europe in the form of liquified natural gas, those sources are already heavily committed. The United States, for example, has just seven LNG export terminals. These take years to license and build, and the same goes for the receiving terminals and LNG tankers. Additionally, most of the European receiving terminals are in the West and the severest shortages are in the East.

It is too late to change one certainty about the coming winter: high food prices everywhere, including in the United States, and starvation in developing countries. Ukraine is exporting grain haltingly, but those shipments are too small and too late. Afghanistan and Somalia are already in a food crisis, starting what is set to be a world run on grain provided in humanitarian relief.

The terrible European winter of 1944 to 1945 is known as the “Hunger Winter’’. Prepare to hear that term resurrected.

The world must brace for the coming winter in the Northern Hemisphere with political uncertainty and weak, inward-looking leaders in many countries. In the United States, the midterm elections are set to produce division. In France, President Emmanuel Macron has lost control of the National Assembly. Britain is seeking a new Tory prime minister to replace Boris Johnson. Italy is facing an election that some forecasts say will go to the isolationist fascists.

The democracies are riven with culture wars and other indulgences as a global crisis is in the making in Europe. For much of the rest of the world a new Hunger Winter looms. Many will be cold this winter, others will be hungry. Untold numbers will die.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Lisa Prevost: European study finds wind turbines don't affect lobster harvest

European lobster

Via Energy News Network ( https://energynews.us/) and ecoRI News (ecori.org)

In New England, offshore wind developers and the fishing industry continue to grapple with questions over potential impacts on the region’s valuable fisheries.

A recent European study not only offers good news on that front, it also provides a template for how the two industries can work together.

Research conducted over a six-year period concluded that the 35 turbines that form the Westermost Rough offshore wind facility, about 5 miles off England’s Holderness coast, have had no discernible impact on the area’s highly productive lobster fishing grounds.

The overall catch rate for fishermen and the economic return from those lobsters remained steady from the study’s start in 2013, before the facility’s construction, to its conclusion last year, according to the lead researcher, Mike Roach, a fishery scientist for the Holderness Fishing Industry Group, which represents commercial fishermen in the port town of Bridlington, England.

“It was quite a boring result,” Roach said. “All my lines are flat.”

Ørsted, the Danish energy giant and developer of the offshore wind facility, contracted with Holderness’s research arm to carry out the study, as the group has its own research vessel. The collaborative approach, Roach said, has made the findings all the more credible to local fishermen, who were initially certain that the energy project would destroy the lobster stocks.

“We did the research the same way a fisherman would fish — the same gear types, same bait, deploying in the same way,” Roach said. “We were basically mirroring the commercial fishing method in the area. And that has allowed the fishermen to relate directly to the fieldwork.”

Hywel Roberts, a senior lead strategic specialist for Ørsted and a liaison with the researchers, called the collaboration “a leap of faith on both sides to join together and agree at the outset to live and die by the results.” He noted that the level of research also went well beyond what was required for government permitting.

Ørsted announced the study’s results last month in a press release, even as Roach is still in the process of getting the research approved for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

It’s no wonder the European-based wind developer was eager to share the news more widely, as the fishing industry has proven to be a powerful force in slowing the progress of offshore wind development off the Northeast coast, such as the Vineyard Wind 1 project.

Last year, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced it was pausing the approval process for Vineyard Wind 1, a joint venture between Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Avangrid, to be constructed off Martha’s Vineyard. The agency said it wanted to devote more study to the cumulative environmental effects of the many offshore wind projects lining up for approval.

In June, the agency issued a supplemental environmental impact statement that concluded that the cumulative impacts on fisheries could potentially be “major,” depending on various factors. The federal agency is considering requiring transit lanes between turbines to better accommodate fishing trawlers, a design change Vineyard Wind argues is unnecessary and could threaten the project’s viability.

The developer has proposed separating each turbine by a nautical mile. The transit lanes would require additional spacing.

A final report is expected in December.

The outcome of the Holderness study has “very important” implications for wind projects all over, Roberts said.

“The lobster fishery there is one of the most productive in Europe, and we were tasked with building a wind farm right in the middle of it,” Roberts said. “If it can work in this location, we think it can work in most places around the world.”

Ørsted even brought Roach and one of the Holderness fishermen to Massachusetts last year to spread the word to worried lobstermen about the minimal impact of Westermost Rough.

Roach said he’d like to think his findings “eased some concerns” in New England. However, he said he disagrees with Ørsted that the outcome in the North Sea is applicable to other areas of the world, where habitats and the ecology of the species could be very different.

“There are lessons to be learned and guided by, but I can’t say it’s directly transferable,” he said.

Lisa Prevost is a journalist with Energy News Network, an Institute of Nonprofit News (INN) member that has a content-sharing agreement with ecoRI News.

Llewellyn King: Trump's 'Euro envy' threatens the Western Alliance

There is a strain of conservatism in the United States which suffers from what might be called “Euro envy.”

It is not mainstream, and it was not the conservatism of former presidents Ronald Reagan or either of the Bushes. It has evolved from a hatred of socialist manifestations in European economies.

Sadly, President Trump is the exemplar of this envy -- this need to deride Europe and all things European.

Euro envy has its equally foolish counterpoint across the Atlantic that might be called “disdain for the U.S.”

Neither would be of any consequence if it were not for the delicate international situation with the deteriorated relations between the United States and Europe, compounded by Europe’s own troubles.

Euro envy, at its purest, revolves around the successes of Europe: its public-health systems, its efficient rail system and its support of fine and performing arts. The belief is that Europe’s social approach cannot be better and somehow it must be found to be wanting.  

Some things in Europe do work better, but at a price; a price in taxation and bureaucratic rigidities, which cost the Euro economies in lower growth and higher unemployment.

Anyone who has looked at European health systems knows that they work. Perhaps not perfectly, but well enough and at a lower gross price than their patchier American equivalent. Yet fables persist of people lining up in the streets of London for heart surgery and long waiting lists all over Europe for critical care. These are myths but potent ones.

For public transportation, health care and generous retirement, Europe pays. Recently in Sweden, a colleague who once worked in the White House press corps told me: “We pay half our wages in tax, but we get a lot for it.”

I would add to the downside of European life that it is very hard to fire anyone, that people retire too early and have too many government-guaranteed perks in the workplace like, in some countries, extended maternal leave for both parents.

The obverse, disdain for the U.S., features exaggerated emphasis on gun violence, prison conditions, no universal health care, job insecurity and two-week vacation times.

The European left has always denigrated conditions in America and has unfailingly given short shrift to Republican presidents. They are damned out of the blocks. “Cowboy” is the pejorative thrown at them. This is as unfair and untrue as is the Euro sneering.

Despite these streams of envy, even hatred, the Atlantic Alliance has been a thing of beauty in world history, a bulwark defending the cultures and freedoms that are the Western inheritance -- the inheritance that has made the liberal democracies such a magnet for the world’s less fortunate. Illegal immigration is the compliment that the hapless pay to the happy.

Trump has swallowed whole the Euro disdainers’ views -- they fit well with his nativistic views about the United States.

In one thing, though, and it has riled the right for decades, Trump is right: Europe pays too little for its own defense. This is the cudgel that he will wield at the NATO summit. Europe, for all its quality-of-life smugness, depends on the U.S. defense umbrella.

These things make the next two weeks critical in world affairs, and replete with terrible irony. Europe depends on the United States to defend itself against Russia, which has shown designs on all the European countries that were once Soviet vassal states. But the guarantor of European freedom, Trump, is out to trash the European alliance and cozy up to Russia.

The irony does not stop there. Trump wants more money from Europe when he is about to damage its economies with a trade war.

In the next two weeks, there is not much to envy in the European predicament: Pay up or face Russia alone. Trump will not have your back.

Llewellyn King (llewellynking1@gmail.com) is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He is based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Europe and Islam

  You can understand  why  so many people in Europe fear the growth in the  Muslim population there. While the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful, within that population are  a few murderous fanatics who reference Islam as an excuse to engage in virtually any kind of barbarity. (See ISIS for what they are capable of.)

And even in the wider Muslim population there tends to be considerably less tolerance  than among native Europeans of other groups' and individuals' views and a disinclination  to integrate with the wider,  democratic and tolerant society that the West is  so proud  of.  Of course, the West's record of tolerance is erratic,  and most  literate people know the totalitarian viciousness that it has been capable of.  Still, it has generally been the freest  and most humane part of of the world for the past few decades, while Islam's golden age  of tolerance was a lot longer ago.

The trouble is that so many Muslims move to the West (Western and Central Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand)  only for economic reasons and/or to escape the brutalities and corruption of the Mideast, South Asia and North Africa,  where Islam is dominant.  Too few move to the West primarily to enjoy its  respect for tolerance and human rights, which too many Muslims don't seem to understand at all.

Islam is a far more encompassing religion  than Christianity has been for a long time.  It's been quite a while since the term ''Christendom'' was used widely.  Among other things,   traditional Islam sees the state and religion as the  same thing.  So there's a totalitarian potential in  parts of Islam that threatens Western society. Europeans know that, and that's a major reason so many oppose further immigration from Muslim nations.

--  Robert Whitcomb