Japan and China

Japan and China are slowly getting warmed up for a war (an increased chance of war is one of my predicted results of global warming).

This story describes how Japan has started building a military radar station near the disputed islands (the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands) in the South China Sea.

Last year China declared an "air defence zone" requiring foreign planes to notify Beijing of flights over a huge swath of the East China Sea near the disputed islands. This February China started enforcing new regulations requiring foreign vessels to ask China's permission to fish within much of the South China Sea, an area encompassing island groups also claimed by Vietnam, the Philippines and others.

This week China siezed a Japanese ship because of a pre-war debt, as described here.

The islands themselves are of almost no value, but their possession is the key to controlling vast swathes of oil, gas and fishing areas, and such resources are in short supply and becoming critical in our over-populated, over-exploited globally warming world. It doesn't matter who is right and who is wrong, nor who starts shooting first. War is never good, is a huge source of pollution, and the more crowded our world is, the more people will suffer. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

Renewable Energy in Europe

This story describes recent reversals in the drive towards renewable energy in Spain and the rest of Europe.

Spain gets a very large proportion (49.1%) of its energy from wind and other renewable sources, due largely to easier planning permission, government grants and tax breaks.

Now, however, due to financial pressures, this favourable tax and regulatory climate has changed. Other European countries (apart from Germany and Britain) have similarly scaled back their subsidies and investment in renewables. All this in the news just 10 days since the UN called for "a trebling of the planet's use of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power". Did these governments forget that our planet is in crisis?