James Wimberley

The European Central Bank is failing abjectly in its core mission to protect the common currency through shared prosperity as well as price stability. It no longer deserves its name and logo. So here are my proposals for a new name and logo. The new logo: And new name: The Iron Bank of Frankfurt There […]

Follow-up to my post on the Paris climate agreement. To help you out – and to check for myself whether I hadn’t got the whole thing wrong – I’ve had a go at redrafting the Vice-Chairs’ non-draft in their non-paper, shrinking all options to one. It’s now comprehensible and of reasonable length (11 pages). Link […]

We have a sort of draft of the Paris climate agreement, in the form of a “non-paper” (a charming diplomatic oxymoron invented IIRC in Brussels) of Figueres’ two joint vice chairs, Ahmed Djoghlaf of Algeria and US envoy Daniel Reifsnyder. It’s true that to get a coherent document out of a long discussion, camels and […]

You should not evaluate the Iran nuclear deal without reference to data like these: Price paid by Brazil for utility solar power in the October 2014 auction : R$ 215.12 per megawatt-hour  = $68.38 at current exchange rates; Price paid by Brazil for wind power in the April 2015 auction:  R$177.47 per MWh = $56.41. […]

Ever since 1945, it’s been a cardinal principle of German foreign policy to look harmless. Merkel and Schäuble’s mishandling of the Greek eurozone crisis has changed all that. The genie of fear of German power and self-righteousness is out of the bottle. Comparisons with the Third Reich are as ridiculous as they are offensive. But […]

Like you, I’ve been watching at a safe distance the bitter wrangles and brinkmanship in Europe over Greek debt. It is horribly reminiscent of August 1914. Could the disaster have been avoided? Europe’s financial establishment has been complaining that their Greek negotiators are childishly obstinate. Why don’t they just give in to the astonishingly detailed […]

We have been here before, Keith: a densely connected and hyper-gossipy society where every word can be used against you, those who speak rashly like Sir Tim Hunt come to a rapid social end, and cruel words are used as deliberately as daggers. It was the courts of Renaissance Europe: those of Henry VIII, Cathérine […]

. .. but not yet. Rembrandt, The Actor Willem Ruyter as St. Augustine, 1638 Declaration of the G7 on climate change, 8 June, my italics: Mindful of this [2º C] goal and considering the latest IPCC results, we emphasize that deep cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions are required with a decarbonisation of the global […]

Neither Google nor Bing show a results count when you search images (why not?), but it’s obvious that the number of Christian images of the Resurrection, especially of serious works of art, is enormously less than the number of images of the Cruxifixion. This is to some extent a reflection of the technical difficulty: if […]

Will Rogers said it first: When you find yourself in a hole, quit digging. From an IEA press release on Friday 13 March (sic), my emphasis: Global emissions of carbon dioxide stood at 32.3 billion tonnes in 2014, unchanged from the preceding year. […] In the 40 years in which the IEA has been collecting […]