Have legislators gone mad?

From the Institute for Energy Research:

The Drax plant in Yorkshire, England is one of the biggest coal-fired power plants in the world with an almost 1,000 foot-tall flue chimney, 6 boilers, and 12 very large cooling towers. It consumes 36,000 tons of coal each day, providing 7 percent of the country’s electricity. Starting next month, the plant will be converted to burn millions of tons of wood chips a year, costing £700 million ($1.085 billion).

Most of the wood chips will travel 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean, coming from trees downed in the United States. Drax is building 2 plants in the United States that will turn the wood from trees into chips that can be transported by ship to Yorkshire and then hauled to the power station by railway trucks. In order to prevent spontaneous combustion, the wood chips must be stored in domes where the humidity is controlled before they can be pulverized into powder. (Wood is 1,000 times more prone to spontaneous combustion than coal.)

Despite the fact that coal is the least-expensive source of electricity generation in England, the owners of the Drax plant realized that a recently instituted carbon tax on fossil fuels would put them out of business if they continued to burn coal eventually making their electricity become twice as expensive. The political incumbents in Britain decided last year to give any coal-fired power station that switched to ‘biomass’ the almost 100 percent ‘renewable subsidy’ that owners of onshore wind farms get.

The authors ask: have legislators gone mad?

With credit to Sir Bernard Ingham, we might recast that as: cock-up or conspiracy? Are our legislators so utterly inept that they think converting Drax to burn wood chips is a good idea, or are they so corrupt that they knowingly put the corporate interests of the 'green' lobby before the interests of British citizens.

I have a hard time believing that the ministers are quite so incompetent, so I must assume they are corrupt. MPs at large may well be so stupid as to think this policy is sane. Or, more likely, they haven't bothered to consider the question at all.

Whichever way you look at it, it's a damning indictment of our representatives, and the fools who elected them.

EU tyre labelling

Last Wednesday I finally got some winter tyres fitted, just in time for the recent snow.

In choosing the tyres, I did what most people do: I read some reviews, and I satisficed. I decided I was happy enough with the Michelin Alpin A4s available from KwikFit, and I booked my appointment. So far they're serving me well.

At no point in this process did I feel the need for guidance from the EU. But someone in Brussels has declared 'market failure' and sought to address it:

European Regulation No 1222/2009 came into force from 1st November 2012. Apparently my lovely new tyres have an 'E' rating for fuel efficiency and a 'C' rating for wet grip. Sad, I know, but somehow I'm managing to hold it together.

For those who care about fuel efficiency, engine and driving style are likely to be much more important factors. To the extent that tyres matter, it's probably enough to keep them properly inflated. As for wet grip, without knowing what temperature they performed the test at, I have no idea whether the rating is relevant. I could dig into the details, but life is too short. I suspect this expensive new labelling system will be widely ignored by consumers, just like the energy efficiency ratings for houses.

If the ratings do manage to influence customer behaviour, they may well be nudging people in the wrong direction. Even assuming that their tests are well designed, they focus attention on a narrow range of features and conditions, and discourage critical thought.

Incidentally, there are no prizes for guessing where the BBC stands on this: New European tyre labelling could save money and lives.

And a bit of googling turns up some classic astroturfing. The new EU labels are supported by The Campaign for Better Tyres.

The Campaign for Better Tyres is being co-ordinated by Environmental Protection UK (EPUK), a national charity that provides expert policy analysis and advice on air quality, land quality, waste, noise and climate change.

Environmental Protection UK was one of a consortium of NGO’s which lobbied for the introduction of the new EU tyre legislation, which sets stricter standards for tyres on energy efficiency, noise and safety and introduces mandatory tyre labelling.

The campaign has been funded with a grant from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, with additional financial support from the European Federation for Transport & Environment.

And what about EPUK? A group of concerned citizens devoting their own money to an important cause? It seems not:

The UK's oldest environmental NGO has been forced to close after government cuts to local authority budgets drastically reduced its income.

Amazing. A non-governmental organisation entirely reliant on government funding. Sorry to see them go.

Keeping the lights on

The best bit of news from yesterday?

Chancellor George Osborne has approved the building of over 30 new gas-fired power stations to replace the UK's ageing coal, nuclear and gas stations.

The new capacity could produce up to 26 gigawatts (GW) of electricity by 2030, a net increase of 5GW.

The plans will dismay environmentalists who want more emphasis placed on lower-carbon, renewable energy sources.

Unfortunately it seems the government haven't given up on wind power, though they do at least seem to be showing some interest in avoiding blackouts:

In a statement announcing the government's new gas generation strategy, Energy Minister Ed Davey said: "Gas will provide a cleaner source of energy than coal, and will ensure we can keep the lights on as increasing amounts of wind and nuclear come online through the 2020s."

There was also a mention of shale gas:

Mr Osborne also announced a consultation on potential tax incentives for shale gas exploration.

I haven't look into the details yet. Ordinarily I can't condone manipulation through the tax system, but it's possible that the proposed change simply mitigates a previous manipulation against the industry.

What the government really needs to do is get out of the energy business, and stop choosing winners. For now, though, at least the central planners are being slightly less stupid.

Globe still not warming

Lewis Page reports on the latest figures from the UN's World Meteorological Organisation:

The 2012 figure for the year so far stands at 14.45°C. If that were the figure for the full year, it would be cooler than 1998 (14.51°C) and most of the years since then (full listing from the Met Office here).
...
there is now some admission even from the hardest climate hardliners that something may be going on which is not understood. Dr Peter Stott of the Met Office, head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution, had this to say while announcing the 2012-so-far-number:

"We are investigating why the temperature rise at the surface has slowed in recent years, including how ocean heat content changes and the effects of aerosols from atmospheric pollution may have influenced global climate."

Meanwhile, according to some research from Princeton:

At current melt rates, the Greenland ice sheet would take about 13,000 years to melt completely, which would result in a global sea-level rise of more than 21 feet (6.5 meters).

Page provides some context:

Put another way, in that scenario we would be looking at 5cm of sea level rise from Greenland by the year 2130: a paltry amount. Authoritative recent research drawing together all possible causes of sea level rise bears this out, suggesting maximum possible rise in the worst case by 2100 will be 30cm. More probably it will be less, and there will hardly be any difference between the 20th and 21st centuries in sea level terms.
...
Doha delegates take note.

Power shortage risks by 2015

This doesn't feel very 21st century, does it?

Britain risks running out of energy generating capacity in the winter of 2015-16, according to the energy regulator Ofgem.

Its report predicted that the amount of spare capacity could fall from 14% now to only 4% in three years.

But it shouldn't come as a surprise. DK has been warning about it for a long time now, most recently on the 8th of August:

This isn't the 1970s: if the power goes, then so does our entire infrastructure. Banking grinds to a halt, the internet is unreachable (and half of it down anyway), the vast majority of people simply will not be able to work at all.

But even if we do not have to start a series of rolling black-outs, the price of power has been climbing steadily. And power is required for everything these days: as such, as power becomes more expensive then so does everything else.

This government—and its predecessor—have been quite deliberately following a set of policies designed to impoverish everyone in the country. And, throughout all of the other insanities of this time, they have continued to prosecute this war against their own people.

Their aim is simple: to reduce power consumption—whether because of climate change or in order to avoid difficult decisions about building power stations, I do not know (although I have my suspicions).

The government's own report—you know, the one that showed that power would not be more expensive overall—relied on the country using half the electricity that it does now by 2020.

Reducing power consumption may be a laudable aim but it is, frankly, unrealistic in that timescale without a significant down-grading of our current life-style.

I face my ongoing struggle with Hanlon's Razor.

Even if you think CO2 emissions are something worth worrying about, and that reductions here in the UK will somehow make a difference to the global problem, the approach of the British government (first NuLab, now the Coalition) has been sheer lunacy.

The surest way to reduce emissions is to replace coal-fired power stations with nuclear or gas plants. Instead, our politicians have been spunking billions of taxpayers' pounds on ugly, inefficient wind farms which require backup from conventional power sources. Because of the way the backup plants operate, this combined approach is not just staggeringly expensive, but potentially counterproductive:

A study in the Netherlands found that turning back-up gas power stations on and off to cover spells when there is little wind actually produces more carbon than a steady supply of energy from an efficient modern gas station.
...
Wind turbines only produce energy around 30 per cent of the time. When the wind is not blowing - or even blowing too fast as in the recent storms - other sources of electricity have to be used, mostly gas and coal.

However it takes a surge of electricity to power up the fossil fuel stations every time they are needed, meaning more carbon emissions are released.

“You keep having to switch these gas fired power stations on and off, whereas if you just have highly efficient modern gas turbines and let it run all the time, it will use less gas,” said Ruth Lea, an economic adviser to Arbuthnot Banking Group.

More thoughtful environmentalists are recognising the importance of shale gas. Any sane government would be looking in this direction. Ours, incredibly, seems prepared to let the lights go out rather than confront the irrational demands of fanatical greens.

Future generations will be amazed that we entrusted the supply of energy - the 21st century's most vital commodity - to politicians.

1930s photos show Greenland glaciers retreating faster than today

The Register has an interesting article from Lewis Page about photos taken by the seventh Thule Expedition to Greenland led by Dr Knud Rasmussen in 1932:

There's much scientific interest in the Greenland ice sheet, as unlike most of the Arctic ice cap it sits on land: thus if it were to melt, serious sea level rises could occur (though the latest research says that this doesn't appear to be on the cards).

It's difficult to know exactly what's happening to the Greenland ice in total and very different estimates have been produced in recent times. However Professor Box says that many glaciers along the coasts have started retreating in the past decade.

It now appears that the glaciers were retreating even faster eighty years ago: but nobody worried about it, and the ice subsequently came back again. Box theorises that this is likely to be because of sulphur pollution released into the atmosphere by humans, especially by burning coal and fuel oils. This is known to have a cooling effect.

While sulphur emissions in North America and Europe have been reduced in recent decades, due to concerns about acid rain, it's possible that catastrophic warming of the Earth by evil CO2-belching Westerners has been mitigated by evil sulphite-spewing Chinese.  Some scientists speculate that "rapid coal- and diesel-fuelled industrialisation in China is serving to prevent further warming right now".

Alternatively ...

Still other scientists, differing with Prof Box, offer another picture altogether of Arctic temperatures, in which there were peaks both in the 1930s and 1950s and cooling until the 1990s: and in which the warming trend which resulted in the melting seen by Rasmussen's expedition actually started as early as 1840, before the industrial revolution and human-driven carbon emission had even got rolling. In that scenario, variations in the Sun seem to have much more weight than is generally accepted by today's climatologists.

The truth is that we don't understand the mechanisms behind glacial melting, in Greenland or in the Himalayas.  The story isn't nearly as simple as the global warming propagandists would have you believe.

Dino farts warmed the earth

Giant dinosaurs could have warmed the planet with their flatulence, say researchers.

British scientists have calculated the methane output of sauropods, including the species known as Brontosaurus.

By scaling up the digestive wind of cows, they estimate that the population of dinosaurs - as a whole - produced 520 million tonnes of gas annually.

How very inconsiderate.

And how grateful we must be to our state broadcaster for highlighting such important facts.

The Torygraph?

I often have a go at the BBC, but the supposedly right-wing Telegraph shares many of their ridiculous views:

Worrying about the environment is not a concern you’d historically associate with Ferrari, but no one is immune from the global responsibility to decrease carbon emissions, not even niche manufacturers, and the Italian stallion must play its part.

The sad fact is that there aren't any voices of sanity in the British mainstream press. Only the tabloids come close, but they mix the occasional worthwhile comment with so much crap that most educated people dismiss them out of hand.

Delingpole: Why does the BBC so hate Britain?

I've had a double dose of BBC today because I caught the 6 o'clock news in addition to BBC Breakfast.

The relentless drivel about Coalition Cuts, obesity epidemics, and our moral duty to bail out bankrupt governments left me about as enraged as you'd expect, so I was pleased to read this from James Delingpole:

It's long since time that the BBC was forced to recognise its responsibilities as our compulsory, near-monopoly broadcaster. If the only people who funded it were tofu-eating metropolitan anti-capitalist bien-pensants who all believed in renewable energy with the same blind ideological fervour as Chris Huhne then the BBC would be perfectly within its rights to broadcast this Spartist drivel. But they're not. The BBC's job is also to represent – or try to represent – the interests of people who are shocked by rising energy bills, who are desperately worried about Britain's economic future, who might benefit from a job working in or servicing the shale gas industry, who innocently believe (in their sweet but oh-so-naive way) that the British Broadcasting Corporation's true purpose is to broadcast for Britain.

I recommend the whole article.

Sadly, I think the BBC is beyond saving. Even if it were somehow possible to reclaim it from the radical lefties, there would always be the risk that they'd take it over again.

It's a shame, because they do produce some of the best television I've ever seen, Frozen Planet being the latest example. I like to think that the demand for such programmes, and the talented people that produce them, wouldn't suddenly disappear if we moved away from compulsory funding.

A BMW with lasers!

Recently seen at an airport:


It turns out this is the i8 concept car. I've always been a sucker for such things, and even though this one panders to the eco-mentalists, it does look quite stunning.

Under the bonnet:

At the front axle is the electric motor adopted from the BMW i3 Concept and modified for use in the BMW i8 Concept's hybrid power train, while a 164 kW/220 hp turbocharged three-cylinder petrol engine developing up to 300 Nm (221 lb-ft) of torque drives the rear axle. Together, the two drive units take the vehicle to a governed top speed of 250 km/h (155 mph). Like the electric motor, the 1.5-litre three-cylinder petrol engine was developed entirely in-house by the BMW Group and represents the latest state of the art in conventional engine design. Acceleration of 0 to 100 km/h (62 mph) in under five seconds combined with fuel consumption in the European cycle of under three litres per 100 kilometres (approx. 94 mpg imp) are figures currently beyond the capability of any vehicle powered by a combustion engine of comparable performance.

They also claim:

all-electric driving range of approximately 35 kilometres (20 miles). The battery can be fully recharged in two hours at a standard power socket.

But what really got my attention was this:

For the first time BMW introduces as part of the BMW i8 Concept the newly developed Laser Light.
...
The intensity of laser light poses no possible risks to humans, animals or wildlife when used in car lighting. Amongst other things, this is because the light is not emitted directly, but is first converted into a form that is suitable for use in road traffic.

Finally, a car with laaaaasers!

It will be interesting to see what eventually reaches the road.

Osborne takes a small step back from carbon loons

Another good post from James Delingpole:

One and a half cheers for George Osborne. As the UK economy prepares to hurl itself off a cliff, he has decided it should do so with a parachute with lots of holes in it. Which is an improvement on his Plan A, which was to do so with no parachute at all: (H/T Benny Peiser/Global Warming Policy Foundation)

George Osborne has vowed that the UK will not lead the rest of Europe in its efforts to cut carbon emissions, raising the prospect that the country's carbon targets could be watered down if the EU does not agree to more ambitious emission reduction goals.

In a potentially explosive intervention, Osborne insisted the government will only cut emissions in line with its neighbours in order to ensure British businesses are not put at a disadvantage.

Speaking at the Conservative Party conference on Monday, the Chancellor accused environmental regulations of "piling costs on the energy bills of households and companies" and argued that the government should not adopt green targets that damage the business sector.

As Allister Heath rightly notes, the announcement is not nearly as growth- and business-friendly as the Tory spinmeisters might like us to believe:

But the chancellor’s message – that carbon reduction would not take place any faster than in the rest of Europe – suffered from incorrect benchmarking. The UK’s rivals when it comes to the location of manufacturing activity are not in Europe – they are in emerging markets. It might have sounded like a pro-growth statement to the Treasury (which spends more and more time dealing with Brussels) but to UK Plc (which spends its time dealing with the world) it means nothing.

At least, though, it shows encouraging signs that the Coalition is trying to find wriggle room to escape from among the most damaging and expensive pieces of legislation in parliamentary history – the 2010 Climate Change Act which commits Britain to spending a minimum of £18 billion a year till 2050 chasing carbon reduction targets so hopelessly optimistic they could only be achieved by closing down the UK economy.

As I noted this morning on Norman Tebbit's latest post,

lumbering the UK with the world's most ambitious carbon-reduction plans ... will simply mean that the carbon gets produced elsewhere, while Britons miss out on the jobs and profits

The only 'sensible' option for forcibly reducing the carbon footprint of British consumers would be a tax on all goods, regardless of where they're produced.

But even this would be insane, partly because it's fiendishly difficult to calculate the total carbon output involved in the production and transportation of goods, partly because the UK consumption is inconsequential on a global scale, but mostly because CO2 isn't worth worrying about at all.

Global temperatures have been stable for the past decade. Even if they start to rise again, it's far from certain that that CO2 is the primary factor. Even if CO2 is the main driver, it's not clear that the costs of warming will outweigh the benefits. And even if the costs do outweigh the benefits, adaptation is likely to be far cheaper than avoidance.

Transparency and non-corporate vested interests

James Delingpole writes:

Top environmental campaigner George Monbiot has publicly disclosed his laundry list in order to show how transparent he is.

This is a comprehensive list of my sources of income, and any hospitality or gifts I receive (except from family and friends), beginning in September 2011.

I have opened this registry because I believe that journalists should live by the standards they demand of others, among which are accountability and transparency. One of the most important questions in public life, which is asked less often than it should be, is “who pays?”.

All well and good, though we might wonder who his friends are, and how much they have given him.

Monbiot concludes:

I believe that everyone who steps into public life should be obliged to show on whose behalf they are speaking: in other words who is paying them, and how much. I would like to see journalists, like MPs, become subject to a mandatory register of interests. But until that time I hope to encourage other journalists to declare the sources of their income voluntarily – by declaring mine.

A mandatory register for journalists sounds like a very scary idea to me, and we shouldn't be surprised that the likes of Monbiot support it.

But for key decision makers in the public sector, our supposed servants, it does seem appropriate to insist on transparency. Delingpole provides a rather shocking example:

Thanks to FOIA requests from the American Tradition Institute's Chris Horner we are learning more and more about the vast sums of luvverly dosh to be made for those lucky enough to be on the "correct" (ie Establishment) side of the global warming argument. For Jim "coal fired power stations are factories of death" Hansen, AGW has proved a very nice little earner indeed.

The lawsuit claims Hansen privately profited from his public job in violation of federal ethics rules, and NASA allowed him to do it because of his influence in the media and celebrity status among environmental groups, which rewarded him handsomely the last four years.

Gifts, speaking fees, prizes and consulting compensation include:

– A shared $1 million prize from the Dan David Foundation for his "profound contribution to humanity." Hansen's cut ranged from $333,000 to $500,000, Horner said, adding that the precise amount is not known because Hansen's publicly available financial disclosure form only shows the prize was "an amount in excess of $5,000."

– The 2010 Blue Planet prize worth $550,000 from the Asahi Glass Foundation, which recognizes efforts to solve environmental issues.

– The Sophie Prize for his "political activism," worth $100,000. The Sophie Prize is meant to "inspire people working towards a sustainable future."

– Speaking fees totaling $48,164 from a range of mostly environmental organizations.

– A $15,000 participation fee, waived by the W.J. Clinton Foundation for its 2009 Waterkeeper Conference.

– $720,000 in legal advice and media consulting services provided by The George Soros Open Society Institute. Hansen said he did not take "direct" support from Soros but accepted "pro bono legal advice."

Daniel Hannan has also picked up the story:

Oddly ... Monbiot says nothing about the money and influence on the other side. Yes, the oil, tobacco and (above all) pharma lobbies are active in politics – every day I spend as an MEP teaches me quite how active. Even more frenetic, however, are the poverty lobbyists and green NGOs: Oxfam, Friends of the Earth, War on Want, the WWF, Greenpeace and, not least, Christian Aid.

The global corporations and the global NGOs are mirror images of each other. Both distrust the democratic process, preferring to reach understandings with key opinion formers. Both, accordingly, love the EU, immediately intuiting that it was designed to be immune to public opinion. Yet, for some reason, most of those who complain about the anti-democratic tendencies of the multi-nationals have a blind spot when it comes to the eco-lobbies and anti-free-trade campaigns.

Quite.

80-20

A bit of good news, at last:

The government plans to raise the speed limit to 80mph from 70mph in a victory for the transport secretary, Philip Hammond.

Hammond said on Thursday he will launch a consultation later this year with a view to introducing the new limit in 2013.

Or perhaps not ...

Hammond is expected to couple the increase with an expansion of 20mph limits in many urban areas.

Oxford's 20 limits are ludicrous, and widely ignored.

Besides the safety-obsessed killjoys, Hammond can expect resistance from the eco-loons:

Greenpeace's senior transport campaigner Emma Gibson said: "The Saudi oil minister will rub his hands with glee when he learns of Philip Hammond's decision. At a time when North Sea oil production is going down and we are ever more reliant upon unstable regimes and fragile environments to fuel our cars, the transport secretary's decision will raise oil consumption and carbon emissions when we need to cut both."

The policy package represents the end of a drawn-out Whitehall battle with Hammond having to fend off the concerns of the climate change secretary, Chris Huhne, and the health secretary, Andrew Lansley.

Huhne fought against it as the 10mph increase will see cars use more fuel and so increase pollution. Lansley's department raised concerns it will see a rise in road casualties. It comes before a conference in which the Tories announce popular policies to remind activists of their own party's instincts outside the coalition.

Personally, I don't have much faith in the Conservative party's instincts, inside the coalition or out. They might not harbour anyone quite as crazy as Huhne, but Lansley is one of their own.

Britain's shale gas miracle

It was through The Register that I first learned of the potential of shale gas, but recent finds have exceeded expectations, as the GWPF report:

Last week the drilling company Cuadrilla Resources announced that it had discovered an estimated 200 trillion cubic feet of shale gas under a small patch of land in the north-west of England. The find suggests that Britain has considerably more shale gas resources than earlier estimations predicted – possibly by an order of magnitude.

Despite the fact that typically only around 10-30 per cent of gas locked in shale formations is recoverable, the astoundingly large discovery may turn out to be one of the biggest gas finds in the past decade.

And there could be more ...

Britain may be sitting on a huge gold mine of cheap, abundant and comparatively clean energy that could supply the UK's energy needs for a century or more. No wonder then that a growing number of MPs want the North Sea to be at the heart of a new offshore shale gas industry.

The knock-on effects of a shale gas revolution could be just as staggering: cheap energy would make UK manufacturing more competitive, gas and electricity bills would fall significantly and the rising trend in fuel poverty could be reversed. If there ever was a potential silver bullet to tackle Britain's economic and financial problems, shale gas has placed it on the government's table.

What could go wrong?

Vested interests have turned against shale, using flawed and misleading environmental arguments to protect their market share. Chris Huhne in particular is renowned for his uninhibited antagonism towards natural gas. At the Liberal Democrat party conference in Birmingham last week he promised to halt a new "dash for gas" because it would undermine the UK's unilateral climate targets.

Huhne's main concern, however, is not CO2 targets that could be met quite adequately if Britain were to switch from coal-fired to gas-fired power generation. His real apprehension is that if a significant amount of cheap shale gas were to enter the UK market, it would almost certainly deter investment in expensive renewables.

The story has also been covered by DK and James Delingpole, neither of whom mince their words.

Andrew Orlowski's coverage concludes on a pessimistic note:

Environmentalists are the political establishment, and the UK's planning and regulatory regime are designed to make cheap fossil fuel innovation much much more expensive than it need be.

But the good news is that the shale gas will still be there if and when we ever get a sensible government in Westminster.

Noblesse oblige

A classic article from James Delingpole:

It has been brought to my attention that this blog owes Sir Reginald Sheffield, Bt. an apology. In a recent column entitled Green Jobs? Wot Green Jobs? (Pt 242), I carelessly suggested that Sir Reg – beloved dad of the famous environmentalist “Sam Cam”; distinguished father-in-law of the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, no less - is making nearly £1000 a week from the wind turbines on his estates.

The correct figure is, of course, nearly £1000 a day.

In other words, Sir Reginald is making the equivalent of roughly 1000 looted widescreen plasma TV screens every year from the eight 400 foot wind turbines now enhancing the view for miles around on his 3,000 acre Normanby Hall estate, near Scunthorpe.

Delingpole quotes another member of the landed gentry who takes quite a different view:

One such sentimental fool is the Duke of Northumberland, who persists in resisting the wheelbarrows-full of cash being offered by developers to build wind farms on his estates for the following reasons:

“I have come to the personal conclusion that wind farms divide communities, ruin landscapes, affect tourism, make a minimal contribution to our energy needs and a negligible contribution towards reducing CO2 emissions.”

But as Sir Reginald well understands, such antiquated notions as caring for the people who live in and around your estates or preserving the beauty of the landscape for future generations, have no place in the forward looking, post-carbon world being promoted by one’s son-in-law and one’s future king. “Noblesse oblige? Schnoblesse oblige! ” as Sir Reginald is no doubt fond of quipping to the third underbeater on one of his game shoots.

Sounds like a truly shocking exploitation of the poor by the rich. Where are all the Lefty protesters when you need them?

A terrible waste

Back in April, BBC News featured this story:

Oxford gardeners will soon have to pay to have their green waste recycled, with the council blaming government cuts for the decision.

The current scheme where green hessian sacks are emptied by the city council will be replaced by a chargeable service from 3 May.

Residents wishing to recycle will have to opt for a brown wheelie bin or purchase eco refuse sacks.

Councillor John Tanner said: "The new scheme is entirely voluntary."

He added "We hope people will continue to recycle."

Subscribing to the wheelie bin service will cost £35 per year. The eco sacks will be sold in packs of 10 for £25 and 20 for £35.

Mr Tanner, who is a board member for Cleaner, Greener Oxford, said: "The government cuts have forced us to introduce a paid-for garden waste service.

Staggering.

So this previously free service is now going to cost £35/year, but it's "entirely voluntary". Presumably I can burn my garden waste, leave it to rot in a heap, put it in ordinary black bin bags along with the food waste (verboten, of course), or ferry it to the tip myself. Nice.

The whole thing is reminiscent of another BBC story that came out on the 1st of April (sadly not a joke) about Somerset County Council charging people to use the tip.

Just think about all of the pointless activities they could have cut, rather than charging residents extra for a basic service. But their aim isn't to cushion local taxpayers from the impact of central government funding reductions. They have no desire to reconsider which of their functions are truly essential, how many people are required to deliver them, and what these people need to be paid. On the contrary, they want to make the cuts as painful as possible: "government cuts have forced us".

To top it all off, Oxford Council (having given away bins to people on various forms of benefit) now don't have enough of the brown bins to meet demand. We were told a couple of weeks ago that we'd have to wait until September. Can you imagine what would happen to a business that behaved this way?

Let them eat carbon

• Green taxes raised over £40 billion in 2010
• Even after accounting for the cost of road building and greenhouse gas emissions, they were excessive by over £13 billion

The biggest threat to taxpayers right now is expensive new green taxes and subsidies. In the first ever mainstream book on this subject – published Thursday 18 August – TaxPayers’ Alliance Director Matthew Sinclair has exposed how this is the critical new threat to family finances. With rising fuel bills and petrol prices, it will be a defining feature of the political landscape over the coming year.

Sounds very promising.

Lawson on Thatcher's support for the IPCC

From The Australian:

Lord Lawson -- energy secretary from 1981 to 1983 and then chancellor until 1989 -- said that he was not surprised by Mr Cameron's letter to Julia Gillard last week praising her for sending a "strong and clear signal that Australia is determined to make its contribution to address this challenge".

...

Comments in Australia about Baroness Thatcher's position as one of the pioneers of action against climate change were "not an accurate portrayal", he said.

"I was as close to Margaret Thatcher as anybody at the time. The fact is initially she felt this issue needed to be looked into, but she was agnostic as to whether it was a serious problem or not.

"She was instrumental in having the IPCC set up, but it has changed greatly from what she intended as a fact finding organisation to become a lobby group."

Lord Lawson said Baroness Thatcher made her position clear in her memoirs and her later book Statecraft.

"She did have reason for highlighting the possibility of global warming because the biggest threat to the UK energy security at the time was the stranglehold the Marxist National Union of Mine Workers had on the coal industry.

"She felt Britain should not be so dependent on coal. She was in favour of building up nuclear energy to break the dependence on coal and the main opposition to nuclear came from the environment movement. Mrs Thatcher thought she could trap them with the carbon emissions argument."

So that was Thatcher's excuse. What's Cameron's?

Britain's economic suicide

A superb article from The Rational Optimist:

British Gas is putting up the cost of heating and lighting the average home by up to 18 per cent, or about £200 a year. Indignation at its profiteering is understandable. But that can only be a part of the story: the combined profits of the big six energy supply companies amount to less than 1.5 per cent of your energy bill, according to the regulator, Ofgem.

Gas prices have gone up this year mainly because of demand from post-Fukushima Japan and booming China. With energy now a big part of household bills, genuine fuel poverty threatens many Britons next winter.

So what does the Government plan to do? This week it publishes a white paper on electricity market reform that will be predicated upon, indeed proud of, pushing up prices even faster. To meet its self-imposed green targets, the Government’s policy is to tax carbon, fix high prices for renewable electricity and load extra costs on to people’s electricity bills — but without showing them as separate items.

Moreover,

Cheap energy is the elixir of economic growth. It was Newcastle’s cheap coal that gave the industrial revolution its second wind — substituting energy for labour drove up productivity, creating jobs and enriching both producers and consumers. Conversely, a dear-energy policy destroys jobs. Not only does it drive energy-intensive business overseas; according to Charles Hendry, the Energy Minister, the average British medium-sized business will face an annual energy bill £247,000 higher by 2020 thanks to the carbon policy. That’s equivalent to almost ten jobs it must lose, or cannot create.
...
Raising the costs of electricity to subsidise irrelevant wind farms will fail to make the slightest dent in British carbon emissions, let alone global ones. In any case, natural gas is going to do far more than renewables ever could to accelerate the decarbonisation of the world economy, as it replaces high- carbon coal and oil in coming decades.

So the hijacking of energy policy by carbon targets is mad. Far more urgent questions face us than that. How do we replace the one-third of coal-fired stations that will close by 2015? Not by renewables, that’s for sure. How do we replace the capacity of our nuclear power stations, all but one of which will close by 2023? How do we compete with China, where it takes five years, not 15, to build a nuclear power station? How do we compete with America, where companies are now swimming in cheap domestic natural gas, half the price it is over here, thanks to shale gas exploration?

The only thing that the government's carbon taxes will achieve is the continued destruction of British industry. The demand for these products won't go away, it will simply be met by foreign producers rather than domestic ones. Those who care about carbon emissions should not rejoice: instead of British gas and nuclear power, goods will be produced using Chinese coal, then shipped half way around the world.

I can't begin to describe the lunacy of our government's environmental policy, but Matt Ridley does a pretty good job. I thoroughly recommend the whole article.

Sunspot decline and sulphur shrouds

Not so long ago I wrote about global cooling. The story continues to unfold ...

Here's the latest from Lewis Page:

British scientists have produced a new study suggesting that the Sun is coming to the end of a "grand solar maximum" – a long period of intense activity in the Sun – meaning that we in Blighty could be set for a long period of much colder winters, similar to those seen during the "little ice age" of the 17th and 18th centuries.

The new research from boffins led by Professor Mike Lockwood of Reading uni says that "solar activity during the current sunspot minimum has fallen to levels unknown since the start of the 20th century" and that there is a serious chance that the Sun may be headed into another so-called "Maunder Minimum", a long period with almost no sunspots like that which was recorded by astronomers from 1645 to 1715.

What might be the impact for the UK?

According to the new study, chances that the average winter temperature will fall below 2.5°C will be around 1 in 7, assuming that all other factors, including man-made effects and El Niño, remain constant.

Put in context, the average UK winter temperature for the last 20 years has been 5.04°C. The last three winters have averaged 3.50°C, 2.53°C and 3.13°C, with 2009-10 being the 14th coldest in the last 160 years.

Meanwhile, Pages's colleague Andrew Orlowski writes

The refusal of the global temperatures to rise as predicted has caused much angst among academics. "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't," wrote one in 2009. Either the instruments were wrong, or the heat energy had gone missing somewhere.

Now a team of academics, after tweaking a statistical model to include sulphur emissions, suggest that coal power stations may be to blame for a lack of global warming since 1998.

...

Kaufmann et al declare that aerosol cooling is "consistent with" warming from manmade greenhouse gases. Recent studies suggest greenhouse gas emissions may be masking a long-term cooling trend as solar activity declines.

Apparently it's those nasty Chinese ...

"The political consequence of this article seems to be that the simplest solution to global warming is for the Chinese to burn more coal, which they intend to do anyway," writes Curry.

Doubtless they will. First we blame them for warming the planet, but now we blame them for cooling the planet.

Who can say? What's clear to me is that our climate isn't nearly as well understood as our masters in Westminster, and their masters in Brussels, would have you believe.

Their Gaia worship isn't a cost-free exercise; it will cost us dearly.