Free Republic

Large multinationals, many of them based in the United States, are masters at avoiding taxes on profits made abroad. Apple, for example, paid just $100 million in taxes in 2010 on overseas profits of $13 billion. But Germany would like to put a stop to the practice, and is finding some influential support. … The operations corporations launch to optimize their tax bill go by various names, including "Double Irish" and "Dutch Sandwich," but the principle is always the same. In a confusing network of parent companies and subsidiaries, foreign branches and holding companies, sales, earnings and costs are shifted...

Does Britain belong in the European Union? There are plenty both in the United Kingdom and on the Continent who have their doubts. Now, with the debate over the EU’s next budget raging, a European Commissioner has challenged London to decide. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel is also losing her patience over the squabble. … On Friday, European Commissioner for Financial Programming and Budget Janusz Lewandowski, Poland’s representative in the EU’s executive, said it was time for Britain to make a fundamental decision regarding its future in the European Union. “Of course there are limits,” he said in an interview...

Representatives of Europe’s biofuels industry have threatened to sue the European Commission if it proceeds with plans to limit crop-based biofuels because of their indirect effect on greenhouse gas emissions. “If no one is going to invest in us anymore, I think we should sue the European Commission for killing an industry,” Rob Vierhout, the secretary-general of ePure, Europe’s bioethanol association said at a roundtable in EurActiv’s offices. EurActiv understands that the EU has rowed back on plans to make biofuels suppliers account for greenhouse gas emissions in its proposals to deal with the Indirect Land Use Change (ILUC) issue,...

The European Commission announced yesterday (2 October) that it intends to introduce an emissions monitoring system in early 2013, in a bid to curb the environmental footprint left by the shipping industry. The Commission said in a statement it would outline “a simple, robust and globally feasible approach towards setting a system for monitoring, reporting and verification of emissions based on fuel consumption”. This was “the necessary starting point” for further action on greenhouse gas emissions, it said, flagging market-based mechanisms. These could include a maritime emissions trading scheme (ETS) or bunker fuel levies. …

France and Germany still need the backing of a number of member states to put in place a European Union financial transaction tax (FTT), despite claims from French President François Hollande that the tax is "now effective", EurActiv.fr reports. For over a year now, Paris and Berlin have been battling to persuade their European partners to put in place a FTT. … A working group, launched by Germany and France in March 2012, continues to discuss the proposal. Poland and Austria say they will take part in the project. To form a robust cooperation agreement, a minimum of nine countries...

URGENT - WEATHER MESSAGE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE MEDFORD OR 210 PM PDT WED AUG 22 2012 ...WIDESPREAD FREEZING TEMPERATURES POSSIBLE FRIDAY MORNING... .COOL HIGH PRESSURE WILL MOVE OVER THE AREA THURSDAY NIGHT AND FRIDAY MORNING. CLEAR SKIES AND LIGHT WINDS WILL LEAD TO ADDITIONAL COOLING WITH FREEZING TEMPERATURES POSSIBLE OVER MUCH OF NORTHERN KLAMATH AND LAKE COUNTIES FRIDAY MORNING. ORZ029>031-231100- /O.NEW.KMFR.FZ.A.0011.120824T1000Z-120824T1500Z/ KLAMATH BASIN- NORTHERN AND EASTERN KLAMATH COUNTY AND WESTERN LAKE COUNTY- CENTRAL AND EASTERN LAKE COUNTY- INCLUDING THE CITIES OF...BEATTY...CHEMULT...CRESCENT... GILCHRIST...SPRAGUE RIVER 210 PM PDT WED AUG 22 2012 ...FREEZE WATCH IN EFFECT FOR FRIDAY MORNING... THE NATIONAL WEATHER...

A European crackdown on pollution from ships will require billions worth of investment by shipping firms on filter technology and by refineries on upgrades to produce cleaner fuels—burdens the industries say they can ill afford. The shipping industry is already struggling due to poor global demand and overcapacity, which have pushed freight rates to unprofitable levels for many operators. European refineries are under pressure from high crude costs, cheap refined product imports and weak demand. To comply with new European Union laws, shipping companies now face extra costs of €2.6 billion ($3.2 billion) to €11 billion ($13.7 billion) to switch...

So eager are the shills at the George Soros-funded far-left website Think Progress to find evidence of global warming that on Thursday they falsely blamed melting street lights in Stillwater, Oklahoma, on the heat. As originally reported by TP's Stephen Lacey:… Even as residents swelter in the relentless heat, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe continued his tirade about man-made global warming during a Senate hearing yesterday, saying the science had “collapsed.” It appears the only thing collapsing are the street lights.Way down at the bottom is this:UPDATE: After we published this piece, we saw reports from people on the ground in...

The German engineering giant Siemens is researching the idea of using overhead electricity lines to power truck traffic. But the state-supported project makes no sense. It would cost billions to implement—and only lead to higher fuel consumption and more pollution. … Germany's Ministry for the Environment (BMU) saw enough green potential in this hybrid truck to channel over €2 million ($2.5 million) in federal funding to the project. Siemens used the funds to help set up its first test track at an obsolete military airport north of Berlin. … In any case, electrifying Germany's roads is not going to bring...

Fears about climate change are overblown and shifting weather patterns and rising sea levels should be considered an engineering problem, said the head of the world's largest oil refiner, ExxonMobil. "The fear factor that people want to throw out there to say 'we just have to stop this,' I do not accept," Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil's chief executive, said in a speech on Wednesday (June 27). Tackling global poverty should have a higher international priority than reducing carbon emissions, because it would give billions of the world’s energy poor access to oil and gas supplies, in his view. "They'd love to...

The earth is running out of natural resources like land, water and minerals so quickly that if nothing is done, some predictions say that by 2030 humankind will need the equivalent of two planets to sustain our current lifestyle. Those chilling figures come from a famous World Wildlife Fund ‘Living Planet’ report in 2008, but what exactly can we do to reduce our environmental impact—which has got worse since then—and how should we go about doing it? People “desperately” need a means of putting the environmental impact of their products into context, according to Martin Barrow, a senior consultant at...

Rattled in Europe by the REACH regulation and carbon dioxide emission curbs, international chemical companies are at the Rio Earth Summit determined to push for a global approach to environmental policy—but with a light regulatory touch. … The reasoning is simple and well-known. Rather than complying with a myriad of environmental laws in different countries, companies prefer dealing with a single set of globally-harmonized rules. … In Europe, the REACH regulation, adopted in 2006, has started a mammoth process of registering about 100,000 substances that are currently used in a wide range of consumer products, with the aim of gradually...

China will take swift countermeasures that could include impounding European aircraft if the European Union punishes Chinese airlines for non-compliance with a scheme to curb carbon emissions, the China Air Transport Association said on Tuesday. Chinese airlines, which have been told by Beijing not to comply with the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme, refused to meet a March 31 deadline for submitting carbon emissions data. EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard has said carriers have until mid-June to submit their data before enforcement action is taken. "Chinese airlines are unanimous on this. We won't provide the data," Wei Zhenzhong, secretary general of...

While the leaders of member countries were meeting in Brussels at an extraordinary summit on growth, the European Parliament approved the tax on financial transactions, known as Tobin tax, by 487 votes (152 against, with 46 abstentions). “The joint resolution of Parliament—whose opinion on the subject is only advisory—approves a proposal from the European Commission presented in September 2011,” reports La Tribune, mentioning that it will not come into force before the end of 2014. …Nine countries, including Germany and France, are defending bringing in the tax, but others, like Britain, are opposed because they fear it will provoke financial...

The European Commission today (15 May) gave defiant Chinese and Indian airlines one month to report their carbon emissions after they failed to meet their deadline, expanding a transcontinental feud over the EU’s Emissions Trading System. Ten air carriers from the two countries failed to report their 2011 emissions to the EU by the end of March and could face punitive actions if they do not file their reports by mid-June, said Climate Action Commissioner Connie Hedegaard. The eight Chinese and two Indian carriers that fly to and from EU airports could face sanctions from members states if they do...

Analysts say that any one-off EU clearing of the massive glut of carbon permits now clogging the Emissions Trading System (ETS) is likely to lead to a ‘central bank' or other policy tool to manage future imbalances. But the European Commission is cautious about entrenching such a mechanism in the ETS, which is the bloc's chief weapon to fight climate change. Figures released today (2 May) show that 254 million carbon offsets worth around €2.6 billion were used in 2011, an 85% increase on 2010, despite statistics showing that the EU emissions continue to fall, due to recession. Companies are...

James Lovelock, the maverick scientist who became a guru to the environmental movement with his “Gaia” theory of the Earth as a single organism, has admitted to being “alarmist” about climate change and says other environmental commentators, such as Al Gore, were too. Lovelock, 92, is writing a new book in which he will say climate change is still happening, but not as quickly as he once feared. He previously painted some of the direst visions of the effects of climate change. In 2006, in an article in the U.K.’s Independent newspaper, he wrote that “before this century is over...

The EU's climate commissioner played down the impact of the controversial carbon tax being imposed by the bloc on airlines, saying Friday it would cost less than a cup of coffee per passenger. With the tax, sharply criticized by China and the United States, "a flight from Beijing to Frankfurt for example will cost around an extra two euros per passenger," Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard told the French daily Les Echos. "In other words, an amount less than that of a cup of coffee at the airport," she added. With the dispute intensifying over the tax, Hedegaard said it was...