test 1 Week 15

Still mucking around with themes and templates - bit of a learning curve for an old bloke.

I've had to remove and/or alter a bit of code - still not totally satisfied - but it's a process.

I've always had "labels" available but never knew or understood what they were - but I've looked that up and it looks like it would have been a good idea to have started using them 11 years ago - just to be able to find things back again.

So, I'll start using them now and "maybe" try to go back on this year's stuff to enter some - just to see if it is worth it.

Monday

Ilona had her birthday on Sunday, so we had the flags out and a small lunch to celebrate.

She told us that she has been with us at the care farm for nine and a half years now! Janny and I looked at each other and wondered "where has that time gone"!?

On a rather sad note, our newest client has had difficulties at home and has been institutionalised for checkups - his wife couldn't manage with him anymore - it seems to have happened so quickly; he was OK with us and seemed to be fitting in rather well. I'm not sure when we'll see him again.

Tjeerd and I finally got rid of the fallen tree...

...and tidied up some other firewood

The wood in "our" forest is still waiting to be picked up - but at least they flattened the walking path again...

"Oh", said the porcupine, "I'm definitely not rich, but I have enough"

"Then you have something that many rich people don't have", said the tree.

€500m per day is the extra cost of the Iran war to the EU’s energy bill.

The bloc has spent an additional €22bn since the start of the US-Israeli airstrikes against Tehran, according to the European Commission. 

Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has already confirmed her conversion to nuclear energy.

Abandoning nuclear was a “strategic mistake”, she said last month. In a speech on Monday (13 April), she said that renewables and nuclear would be at the heart of weaning Europe off its dependency on oil and gas. 

Without their own oil and gas reserves – and with fracking having been ruled out a decade ago because of the environmental damage it causes — the EU-27 are particularly vulnerable to oil price shocks.  

Many of the measures discussed by von der Leyen on Monday are either too small in scale or too slow. EU-wide coordination of member states' gas storage filling and oil releases will help a bit but won’t cushion governments for very long. Subsidising consumer energy bills, as the EU did in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is probably necessary to reduce the chances of a recession.

But, again, how long can finance ministries foot the extra bill? Several African countries, including Tanzania and Kenya, are already bracing their people for 30-percent price hikes at the pump. 

There is a certain irony to von der Leyen’s conversion to nuclear, 15 years after being a minister in the Angela Merkel that basically mothballed Germany’s nuclear reactors. 

The commission is expected to green light France’s plan to build six new reactors at a cost of €70bn, while a handful of other EU states are now unpicking their own legal moratoriums on nuclear energy.

But the new reactors in France, which has the biggest nuclear sector in Europe, won’t be operational for at least a decade. The likes of Italy and Belgium, who are currently re-opening their energy laws, would have to wait longer. 

Perhaps Europe’s greatest energy policy failure in the past 15 years is that it has been too slow, too reactive and too indecisive. In the US, the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations gave fracking the green light. The US is now a major energy exporter again. 

By scrapping nuclear and half-heartedly embracing renewables, the EU left itself at the mercy of Russia and the Middle East. And now, for the second time in four years, it faces a hefty bill. 


Benjamin Fox, trade and geopolitics editor

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