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Germany’s decision to eliminate its nuclear plants led it to bring coal-fired power plants out of mothballs to make up the difference. Doing so was a viable option because coal demand in the United States has dropped sharply as American power plants have turned to less expensive gas, driving down the cost of American coal for export to global markets.

As a result, carbon dioxide emissions in Germany went up last year, not down

“Without shale gas, this would be a world where Russia would have very, very strong market power and there would be very strong dependency on gas supply from geopolitically risky regions in the Middle East, Iran and North Africa,” said Laszlo Varro, the director of the Gas, Coal and Power Markets Division of the International Energy Agency.

This narrative ignores one critical fact: Every irresponsible borrower is enabled by an irresponsible lender.

“Following the introduction of the euro,” he said, “a large amount of capital flowed into the countries which are now at the center of the crisis, such as Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Cyprus.” What he didn’t say was how much of that capital flowed from Germany. In the second quarter of 2010, German banks had more assets in Greece than banks from any other country except France. They had more assets in Ireland than banks from any other country except the U.K. And they had more assets in Spain than banks from any other country, period.

Before the euro, when Germans saved, their current account balance rose, and with it, the value of the deutsche mark. After 2002 you could save in euros in Dortmund, and without currency risk your bank would invest in euros abroad

The federal government would give Foxconn tax breaks, subsidized loans and special access through customs and lower tariffs for imported parts if it started assembling Apple products in Brazil, where Foxconn was already producing electronics for Dell, Sony and Hewlett-Packard.

Apple products remain expensive; the latest iPad, for instance, costs about $760 in Brazil, compared with $499 in the United States. But because those devices are made in Brazil and lower tariffs are charged on parts used to assemble them, Foxconn and Apple are pocketing larger shares of the profits, analysts say, offsetting the increased costs of building outside China.

Germany experienced a mild recession in 2003; today’s vulnerable countries are suffering depressions.

today’s vulnerable countries are pursuing adjustment in a period of chronically weak demand.

They have to improve their competitiveness. But the only one in which nominal wages have fallen substantially is Greece. Elsewhere, it is rising productivity that has improved competitiveness. But that is the other side of the coin from the unemployment.

The plan will not work.

The IMF has the option of suspending its disbursements and forcing a default, as it did with Argentina.

Once the markets realise this, they will further raise the interest that they request to roll over the maturing debt or simply refuse to refinance the debt.

ack in 1990, the IPCC relied on just two relatively crude models. Today, the IPCC can take advantage of 45 different models that incorporate a wide range of features of the Earth's climate, from ocean biology to changes in soil. Their accuracy has improved considerably since 1990. But it's unclear if those models can keep improving significantly.

And even in its 2007 assessment report, the IPCC could only explain about 60 percent of the rise in sea-level that had already occurred in the previous half-century. Nowadays, however, climate scientists can account for virtually all of the past sea-level rise,

The emerging risks of ticking time bonds By Martin Wolf

He called upon the EU to pressure Slovakia’s gas transit pipeline operator into sanctioning so-called reverse gas transit flow schemes, allowing Ukraine, which relies heavily on Russian fuel imports, to diversify by importing European market gas.

Still, some say legislators have lost touch with the poor districts they represent. Per capita income is about $463 a year, which nobody here would expect a lawmaker to survive on. Minimum wage is $924 a year, still far too little, in most Kenyans' view, for someone taking care of the nation's business. But the base compensation that legislators earn is about $81,000 a year, tax free, plus a variety of allowances and perks, which can effectively double their take-home pay. That means those public servants earn more than most Kenyan corporate executives and outstrip the salaries of many of their counterparts in the developed world.

Last year Germany, not China, ran the world’s biggest current account surplus. And measured as a share of G.D.P., Germany’s surplus was more than twice as large as China’s.

Instead, however, Germany failed to make any adjustment at all; deficits in Spain, Greece and elsewhere shrank, but Germany’s surplus didn’t.

You can think of Mr. Obama’s argument as falling into two categories (even if he didn’t say so): the reasons that overall economic growth may accelerate, and the reasons that middle- and low-income workers may benefit more from that growth than they have lately.

On the growth side of the ledger, both energy and education have been problems.

And the number of high-school and college graduates is rising. The financial crisis deserves some perverse credit, because it sent people fleeing back to school, much as the Great Depression did

A Multibillion-Dollar Question for Airbus and Its A330

While the A330 continues to generate around 40 percent of Airbus’s civilian aircraft profits, new orders for the plane have slowed significantly in recent years.

But with the wait times to receive new planes now stretching to more than six years, airlines have been slower to reach for their checkbooks.

The Mismeasure of Technology

As Moses Abramovitz aptly noted in 1956, this residual is not much more than “a measure of our ignorance.”

As the scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi would say of such tacit knowledge, we know more than we can tell. CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraph

The problem with TTIP

The TPP is a deep international integration arrangement between the US and 11 other Pacific states, which would cover 40% of world GDP and over 30% of world trade. It seeks to address as series of issues that 21st century commerce, but arguably its most obvious feature is that it excludes China – the world’s largest international trader and before long the world’s largest economy. There are, of course, the ritual genuflections towards ‘open regionalism’ – China can join if only it will agree to the necessary policy requirements – but this is about as much use as saying the Chief Rabbi can dine with you while insisting that the menu contains pork.

By signing TTIP Europe would be tying itself to a static rather than a dynamic part of the world economy and substantially reinforcing the US’s exclusionary policies.

Coal seen as option for European energy security

has governments in Europe beginning to voice support for domestic coal as a way to cut European dependence on Russian natural gas. About a 40 percent of the European Union's natural gas comes from Russia, and a fifth of its oil.

Switch to Natural Gas Won't Reduce Carbon Emissions Much, Study Finds

The third great wave

A third great wave of invention and economic disruption, set off by advances in computing and information and communication technology (ICT) in the late 20th century, promises to deliver a similar mixture of social stress and economic transformation

Powerful, ubiquitous computing was made possible by the development of the integrated circuit in the 1950s

How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

In its announcement, the academy recalled Alfred Nobel’s desire that his prize be awarded for something that benefited humankind, noting that one-fourth of the world’s electrical energy consumption goes to producing light.

Germany and EU row over energy subsidies

The dispute relates to the billions of euros of German public subsidies deployed to promote the energiewende shift to renewables while at the same time shielding heavy industry from the costs

Germany plans to generate up to 60 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2035, as part of a radical shift in energy supply which involves a complete exit from nuclear power. The expansion of clean energy has been encouraged by a generous system of subsidies paid to renewables operators. These have been funded by surcharges that have left Germany with some of the highest household electricity bills in Europe.