Catching Up On Links -- October 27, 2015

It looks like President Obama is edging ever closer to a direct confrontation with the Russian tsar. The Washington Post is reporting that the president is weighing options to move  US troops closer to the front lines in Syria, Iraq. 

The president’s most senior national security advisers have recommended measures that would move U.S. troops closer to the front lines in Iraq and Syria, officials said, a sign of mounting White House dissatisfaction with progress against the Islamic State and a renewed Pentagon push to expand military involvement in long-running conflicts overseas.

The debate over the proposed steps, which would for the first time position a limited number of Special Operations forces on the ground in Syria and put U.S. advisers closer to the firefights in Iraq, comes as Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter presses the military to deliver new options for greater military involvement in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. 

The changes would represent a significant escalation of the American role in Iraq and Syria. They still require formal approval from President Obama, who could make a decision as soon as this week and could decide not to alter the current course, said U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions are still ongoing. It’s unclear how many additional troops would be required to implement the changes being considered by the president, but the number for now is likely to be relatively small.

It looks like that JV team is a bit tougher than originally thought. Whatever.

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October 31, 2015: from The Bismarck Tribune, US Marine Sergeant (Ret.) Krause knows why President Obama is sending troops back into Iraq or Syria or wherever:

"They should have let the generals run the war instead of the politicians ... They lost the war and 50,000 men," Krause said.

Sgt Krause was one of the first 200 US Marines to be sent to Vietnam. He knows how that war was lost, also. 

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Faulty Reasoning

Just the other day we talked about Europe burning wood chips, calling the "move" carbon neutral. Business Insider caught the story and has even more to say about this. The headline: Europe's most popular source of 'renewable energy" is worse for the planet than coal.

Burning wood — technically labeled a "renewable" resource since more trees can be replanted and they'll absorb carbon from the air — is the European Union's largest source of "renewable" energy, and will continue to be through the year 2020, according to the European Parliament.

Yet using wood biomass in power plants is heating the atmosphere faster than using coal does, a deeply reported Climate Central investigation found.

In 2013 alone, Europe burned 40 billion pounds of wood pellets for bioenergy, making up 79% of the world's consumption, according to the European Biomass Association.
Companies are converting their power plants from coal to wood across Europe to meet renewable energy goals, Climate Central reported, and the biggest driver is government subsidies.

This is because the European Union classifies wood-generated electricity as "carbon neutral," so companies end up reporting far fewer emissions than their factories are actually generating.