> >From Syndey Morning Herald..a very conservitive Australian paper
> http://www.smh.com.au/news/0104/14/national/national9.html
>
> World's greens on the march to put new hue on globalisation
> Greens parties are now a force to be reckoned with, Andrew Clennell
reports.
>
> The secretary-general of the German Greens, Mr Reinhard Bütikofer, is,
like
> Mr Rod, a product of the 1970s radical student movements, and found his
> niche when the West German Greens were formed in 1979.
>
Just to be precise he was a member of the Communist Federation of West Germany (Kommunistischer Bund Westdeutschlands, KBW) the main Maoist organisation. This membership seems to be inopportune today: His official political biography on the Greens's webpage just starts 1983 when he joined the Greens: http://www.gruene.de/vorstand/buetikofer/index.htm
> The German Government has now set itself a tougher target on greenhouse
> gases than it agreed to when signing the Kyoto protocol in 1997.
>
> Its target is that 10 per cent of its farming be by organic methods by
2010,
> and to close the country's 19 nuclear power stations.
>
I do not know whether Reinhard Bütikofer really said this sheer nonsense or whether reporting Andrew Clennell is incapable of grasping a coherent thought. Neither organic farming nor the closure of nuclear power stations has a positive effect on carbon dioxide. The substitution of the nuclear power station will rather have the adversive effect (due to increased production by converntional power stations). The target for organic farming was set due to the BSE crisis.
When it comes to carbon dioxide Germany is very likely not to meet any target at all. The original target was a reduction of 25%, but a recent study revealed there is rather to be an increase: http://de.news.yahoo.com/010409/40/1ieo3.html It looks as if Mr. Bütikofer preferred to remain silent about this achivement of Red-Green environmental policies.
Johannes