Part of a really excellent article by David Rose ...
How MPs in the pay of subsidised eco-firms set insane new carbon targets that send your bills sky-rocketing … and drag us to a new Dark Age
Like all MPs, Tim Yeo is paid £65,000 a year. But he never has to make do with just that. Last year alone, three ‘green’ companies paid the Conservative MP for South Suffolk £135,970.
For this, he usually did just a few hours’ work a month. Yet he may be the firms’ most valuable asset, as Mr Yeo is chairman of the Commons Select Committee on Energy and Climate Change, and so plays a key role in shaping the green economy in which his sometime employers – AFC Energy, Eco City Vehicles and TMO Renewables – operate.
And he may be about to perform his most valuable service yet.
Mr Yeo has moved an extraordinary amendment to the Energy Bill that would set a crippling and binding target for the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by generating power in 2030. It would transform the electricity industry and bring huge benefits to the business sector, which has so generously rewarded Mr Yeo.
For the rest of us, however, the effects will be very different. It will cause already high energy bills to soar further and could lead to more power cuts. The effect on business is likely to be even more dramatic.
Yet despite the considerable drawbacks, the amendment is likely to be passed into law. Following intense campaigning by an alliance of dozens of green pressure groups and renewable-energy firms, the move has won the support of Labour, many backbench Liberal Democrats and some Tories, which may be enough to push it through Parliament.
‘Even without the amendment, the long-term consequences of the Bill will be horrible,’ said Professor Gordon Hughes of Edinburgh University, one of Britain’s leading experts on energy economics. He issued a strong warning the ‘surreal’ amendment could spell the end of British industry. ‘It’s a recipe for deindustrialisation,’ he said.
In case you think that's an overstatement, let us remind you of a couple of quotes from prominent global warmers ...
"Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsiblity to bring that about?" - Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme
"Global Sustainability requires the deliberate quest of poverty, reduced resource consumption and set levels of mortality control" - Professor Maurice King
”We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of acres of presently settled land" - David Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!
THE MYTHS ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE
MYTH The world is continually getting warmer.
TRUTH Official Met Office data shows no statistically significant global temperature rise since January 1997. The fact was confirmed last week by Raj Pachauri, chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Many scientists say this means forecasts of how much warmer the world will be by 2100 must be revised downwards. Pachauri disagreed: for him to be convinced, the ‘pause’ would have to last 30 years.
MYTH Global warming is already causing extreme weather.
TRUTH If anything, weather has become less, not more extreme in the past 50 years. Professor Roger Pielke Jr of Colorado University – no climate sceptic – last week said that the past seven years had been the longest period ever recorded without a Category 3 or stronger hurricane hitting America, and that drought has decreased since the mid-20th Century. The IPCC admits there is no evidence that global warming has caused more storms in the tropics.
MYTH If we don’t take swift, drastic action to cut CO2 emissions, the world will soon become uninhabitable
TRUTH The ‘pause’ in rising temperatures, along with new research into the decline in the sun’s output and other natural factors, is leading many scientists to lower estimates of how fast carbon dioxide warms the world. Until now, the IPCC has suggested that doubling CO2 causes a worrying increase of 3.5C, but many experts say it is about 1.7C. The computer models still say the world will be at least 2C warmer by the end of the century, but they failed to predict the pause.
MYTH We’ve got to do our bit, even if it hurts. If we cut emissions, the rest of the world will follow.
TRUTH The fiasco of the 2009 UN climate conference in Copenhagen proved that China, India, Brazil and other fast-growing nations are simply not prepared to make any binding commitments to reduce their emissions. However, by cutting our own ever more deeply, all we do is increase the already rocketing price of our energy and so drive jobs abroad – while making almost no difference to world CO2 levels.
MYTH The faster we cut carbon in our power generation, the more prosperous we will be.
TRUTH We face declining energy capacity, while the Government targets on 2030 emissions would mean few firms will be willing to invest in the one proven type of power source – gas – that can fill the gap relatively cheaply. Instead of ‘green growth’, we face years of impoverished stagnation, while industry flees Britain and our sky-high energy prices.
MYTH The Arctic is going to be ice-free in summer in a few years.
TRUTH Although last summer saw a return to the relatively low levels of ice seen in 2007, the growth of Arctic winter ice this year is the fastest on record. Canadian archaeologists have been finding evidence the ice cover shrank to half its current extent during a warm period 7,000 years ago – but never vanished entirely.
You really should read the whole article - it's one of the best things the Daily Mail has carried for years. All right, we know that's not saying much and you have to set it against tons and tons of total crap, but truly it is excellent ...
Meanwhile in Australia the loonies are oozing their way out of the woodwork. Professor Emeritus of Medicine David Shearman and philosopher and ecologist Joseph Wayne Smith have openly attacked the liberal democratic system, which they think should be replaced by an authoritarian "elite warrior leadership" to combat global warming.
This is what the two "warriors" have to say in the foreword of their book 'The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy': “We have known about these impending problems for several decades. Each year the certainty of the science has increased, yet we have failed to act appropriately to the threat. We have analyzed the reasons for this indolence. This understanding will lead you to ask yourself if Western civilization can survive in its present state of prosperity, health, and well-being, or will it soon suffer the fate of all previous civilizations—to become a mere page in history?
We will demand from you the reader, far more than your comprehension of the consequences of climate change and the workings of democracy. You will need to examine the limits of your introspection and the motivation bestowed upon you by biology and culture. The questions to be asked are difficult. You have a commitment to your children, but are you committed to the well-being of future generations and those you may never see, such as your great-grandchildren? If so are you prepared to change your lifestyle now? Are you prepared to see society and its governance change if this is a necessary solution?
Chapters 6 and 7 demonstrate that the inherent failures of democracy that have lead to the environmental crisis also operate in many other spheres of society. They are inherent to the operation of democracy. Furthermore, we come to share Plato’s conclusion that democracy is inherently contradictory and leads naturally to authoritarianism.
In chapters 8 and 9 we argue that authoritarianism is the natural state of humanity, and it may be better to choose our elites rather than have them imposed. Indeed Plato, on seeing the sequelae of democracy’s birth, observed that it is better that the just and wise should rule unwillingly, rather than those who actually want power should have it. We analyze authoritarian structures and their operation ranging from the medical intensive care unit and the Roman Catholic Church to corporatism with the conclusion that the crisis is best countered by developing authoritarian government using some of the fabric of these existing structures. The education and values of the new “elite warrior leadership” who will battle for the future of the earth is described.
Well, that sounds like a riveting read, all right. Luckily not everyone in Australia is as mad as a bunyip.
An Australian professor says "This whole thing about climate change being responsible for an increase in extreme weather, or natural disasters, is just a fiction really".
The fiction is being promulgated by, among others, the Guardian newspaper. Some of the world's leading green journalists on climate at the Guardian's "Environment blog" are ridiculing people who think that recent climate events in Australia are not a sign of global warming: they say “Australia had its biggest and longest heatwave on record in January creating perfect conditions for hundreds of bushfires. For seven days straight, the average maximum temperature across the country topped 39C. Then there were the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, which killed more than 170 people. The 2011 Queensland floods caused $5bn of damage after an area the size of France and Germany was declared a disaster zone.
Of course these extreme events, like others being shared around the world of late, had absolutely nothing whatsoever, not even in the slightest, how very dare you even contemplate it, to do with man-made climate change. But like my grandpa used to say, he who laughs last, laughs longest.”
However, Professor John McAneney, the director of Risk Frontiers, an independent research group funded mostly by the insurance industry, says that based on a database of natural hazard events in Australia, including some dating back to 1803, "there has been no increase in the frequency of natural hazard events since 1950".
But what of the spiralling insurance claims in the wake of hailstorms, floods, cyclones (think Yasi at $1.4 billion) and bushfires ($4 billion for Victoria's Black Saturday firestorms)?
"What we can see very clearly is that when this dataset … is corrected for the increases in numbers of buildings at risk and their value, no long term trend remains," Professor McAneney said. “It is indisputable that the rising toll of natural disasters is due to more people and assets at risk.
The GOS says: What is a bunyip, anyway?
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