On Tuesday myself and others from the office went along to Waterstones at the LSE to listen to Lord Lawson of Blaby discuss his recent publication: An Appeal to Reason. It was an event that exposed both of the ugly sides of the debate surrounding climate change, but Lord Lawson remained above this and raised some valid points. Perhaps the most controversial was his argument that environmentalism was the new religion, and I believe that he may have identified a core reason for the appeal of climate change.
Over the past fifty years the number of people practicing religion within Western Europe has declined sharply. This has taken place simultaneously with a cultural shift away from independent/communal self-reliance, to expectations of state absolution which has left in its wake a moral vacuum. Lord Lawson argues that environmentalism has filled this vacuum. Over the past decade people have been more and more kowtowing to the potentially over-exaggerated catastrophic happenings that the climate change apostles have been disseminating. The continual doom sayings of these people have built up the idea that everyone is as culpable as next for the destruction of the planet, and that greatness is only attainable through a slavish and moralistic life dedicated to the cause of stopping climate change.
It is difficult to see much between the European interpretation of religion and environmentalism, save for the private/public disparity. The “New Religion" seeks to raise everyone’s guilt through the invasion of the private sphere, via public policy implementation; those that don’t follow the prescribed messages are seen as heretics. Despite living in the 21st Century, a time of religious liberty, it seems that we are rejecting scientific investigation and results out of hand, if it dare question other's beliefs. The invocation of politics to raise a section of science above all others, based on exaggerated scientific truths that tell of harrowing future terrors, is seemingly irrational in this day and age. Self-comfort can be found in many ways, but making others feel guilty via a comparison of actions is not progressive. It is no wonder Lord Lawson titled his book as he did.
O. Glenn Smith writes in the International Herald Tribune on the potential for getting our much of our energy needs from the Sun:
Science fiction? Actually, no - the technology already exists. A space solar power system would involve building large solar energy collectors in orbit around the Earth. These panels would collect far more energy than land-based units, which are hampered by weather, low angles of the sun in northern climes and, of course, the darkness of night.
Cost and efficiency have been the stumbling blocks to this becoming a possibility and unsurpisingly the breakthroughs have come from the private sector. Space Exploration Technologies and Orbital Sciences have been at the forefront of developing the technology to make this a possibility.
Clearly this is promising, but for the foreseeable future our energy needs will still need to be met through a variety of sources, with coal, gas and nuclear at the forefront. As such, government targets on renewable energies are damaging the market response. For example, the government has set unrealistic and damaging targets on the power we will get from wind turbines. Recently a report by an independent consultancy, funded by the Renewable Energy Foundation, undermined the government’s policy.
With the three main political parties closely aligned on imprudent carbon-reduction obsessed energy policies, we could have a monopoly in such bad policies (£260 per year, per household) in the future. And sadly when the government messes up, it doesn’t go out of business.
I'm pleased to see that The Great Global Warming Swindle is still up on the website of the UK's Channel 4 television station, despite the communication regulator's critical remarks on it.
The programme was done as an antidote to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. It beat up poor Al pretty mercilessly. It was hugely entertaining. Channel 4 prides itself on iconoclastic stuff and likes stirring up debate. But of course the enviro-nazis don't want debate on this issue stirred up, and around 250 folk complained. The regulator, Ofcom, has to investigate even if it only gets one complaint, so the watchdogs went through the programme with a fine-tooth comb. They concluded that it treated some of the climate-change experts unfairly and did not give them a chance to respond.
Well, they didn't need to respond because they'd got their response in at length beforehand, thanks to Big Al. It was Swindle that was the response. But the regulators ruled that the programme, while polemical, had not materially misled people. People watching it knew what they were getting.
Still, I'm sure the fuss will be enough to ensure that all the schools that are happily showing An Inconvenient Truth to their pupils (with all its own polemics, and with its demonstrated errors) do not show this cheerfully vicious rebuttal. There's something terribly one-sided about this debate, don't you think?
Yesterday I rather made fun of Al Gore's latest call for a greener world. Today (alerted by EU Referendum) I can show you the expense of a less adventurous plan. This is the EU's plan that each EU country should reduce their emissions by some amount, in Ireland's case, by 20%. One way of looking at the costs of such a plan is to work out what level a carbon tax would have to be set at to make such a reduction possible:
In a presentation made to the committee, Prof Tol made what he described as a "cheeky" suggestion that the carbon tax needed to meet this stringent target would be equal to a carbon tax of €4,000 per tonne of CO2.
Given that the Stern Review thought that the cost of the emission of such a tonne of CO2 was $85 (and the EU thinks about €40, Tol's own estimate is lower) clearly this level of taxation is ludicrous. It simply isn't sensible to pay 100 times more in tax to discourage an activity than the costs of the activity you're trying to discourage will incur.
Richard Tol isn't, contrary to what some might fear, a crank, or anything like it. He's actually one of the people that helped write the IPCC reports that the whole concern is based upon.
Unfortunately, what we're seeing here is not unusual. The politicians have got the bit between their teeth, they're insisting that something must be done and dangnit, they're going to be the ones who tell everybody else what to do. Unfortunately, in their ignorance, they're now telling everyone to do things which will make us all immeasurably poorer. More unfortunately, for little reason as well.
At the heart of the economic debate over what we should do about climate change is a point that all too few have as yet grasped. We shouldn't spend more on mitigation that such mitigation will save us. To do so is simply to make future generations poorer.
The politicians are insisting that we pay 100 times more to mitigate than the mitigation will save us. Politicians: actively campaigning to make you and your children poorer: isn't that nice of them?
A government-sponsored report on biofuel policy has concluded that the UK’s current biofuels policy could plunge an additional 10.7 million Indian people into poverty, in addition to hundreds of thousands of people throughout Africa. Biofuel policies drive up demand and prices for food staples, and their environmental credentials are far from pristine. Besides distorting the market for food, government-induced demand for biofuels has led to an increase in the destruction of the rainforest, potentially offsetting most of the positive environmental impacts. In response to the report, the government plans to slow its planned expansion into biofuels, at least "until controls are in place to prevent food prices from rising." The plan, it seems, is simply to counteract one government intervention that had unexpectedly bad consequences with another.
Placing controls to artificially keep food prices low will only further distort the market in some of the most crucial commodities for people around the world. Subsidizing farmers in one part of the world will only put others out of business, and price ceilings will only restrict the supply. At the same time, we cannot push for biofuel policies just because they sound nice and clean if the actual impact is starvation and no tangible benefits for real people. Maybe if governments stopped interfering in the market, creating demand that would not otherwise exist for the sake of policies with questionable environmental outcomes, those 10.7 billion people would be a lot better off.
Apparently, the efficiency of power plants in the United States has remained the same for the past 50 years. That's right; in 1957, at a 33% efficiency rate, power plants got just as much energy for every pound of coal as they do today. Why this dearth of technological growth in such an important sector? One author makes a plausible case that it is the extensive regulations and perverse incentives created by government subsidies that have distorted the market, making efficiency unprofitable and competition miniscule.
According to the article, the market "is not stagnant because we've hit any fundamental limit. Indeed, studies by the US Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Agency have identified a whopping 200,000 MW of potential (that's 20% of the peak power demand of the US) for proven technologies that either recover waste energy from industrials and/or cogenerate heat and electricity from a single fuel source."
In other words, we have the technology to drastically increase the efficiency of energy production. In a free market, this efficiency would convert immediately to an increased profit and should therefore be adapted relatively quickly. One major reason that this has not happened is the fact that government regulation makes small start-up companies in the sector unviable – because capital investments are subsidized but energy must be passed on at no mark-up over operating costs. Moreover, mandates to adopt certain kinds of environmental standards have had the perverse effect of shutting out better, more efficient improvements.
Because of its size, importance, and environmental impact, the energy sector is often seen as a sector that requires government intervention. Yet that very government regulation has instead stifled progress to an almost shocking degree. Since the 1950's, we've invented personal computers, the internet, landed men on the moon and sent rovers to Mars. Is it a coincidence that despite all of that progress in unregulated fields, the most heavily regulated sector of the American economy has literally stagnated? I think not.
Meteorologist Fred Singer is always amusing. He has a cheery disposition, and takes particular delight in teasing the likes of Al Gore when their enthusiasm gets the better of their reason. His Non-Government International Panel on Climate Change points out that melting glaciers and suchlike may be evidence of rising temperatures, but they are not evidence that human beings have caused them. And he states simply and confidently that human influence over the climate is insignificant.
The world has been much hotter, and much colder, long before we arrived on the scene. Carbon dioxide has been twenty times the level it is now. The sun – gushing out radiation, gas clouds, and magnetic fields – is a much more important cause of climate change. Carbon 14 and Oxygen 18 isotopes in ancient ice samples allow us to gauge both solar activity and temperature over the millennia; and indeed there is a strong correlation.
Singer has been in London, promoting his new report, Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate. The idea that human beings are causing climate change, he says, has produced damaging distortions in our energy policy – increasing our costs, damaging our economic growth and lowering our living standards. Instead, he says, since our activities have almost no influence on the climate, we should carry on using coal (and nuclear power) to generate electricity, and use our potentially-insecure supplies of natural gas for less strategic purposes such as transportation.
You might not agree with Singer, but it's hard to dislike the good-natured way he is prepared to stand up against the consensus.
Colin Matthews, Chief Executive of the UK airports operator BAA, has launched into the debate on the future of London's airports with a big speech at the Transport Times conference. There has been suggestion that more traffic should be decanted to other London airports; but, says Matthews, if people were unable to make connections at Heathrow (and, I suppose, faced a gruelling trip across London on the capital's ailing public transport system), it would be a major strategic mistake. Charles De Gaulle or Schipol airports would be only to happy to pick up those interlining passengers, and the UK as a whole would suffer.
So he is strongly in favour of a third runway at Heathrow, rather than resurrecting the old idea of building a new hub in the Thames Estuary. (That idea was floated in the 1960s, but dropped for environmental reasons, leaving Stansted to become the third London airport. I cannot imagine that environmental concerns have got any lighter in the intervening period.) And Matthews thinks the suggestion that Heathrow should be made better before it is made bigger is a false choice. Heathrow needs both new runway capacity and better terminal facilities, not just one or the other.
He's probably right on all these points, though critics like Ryanair's Michael O'Leary complain at the cost of BAA's new airport infrastructure projects, and that a lot of travel these days is point-to-point, which can be done using smaller airports that are presently underused. One thing I still think should happen, though, is that BAA's London near-monopoly (Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted) should be broken up. We said that in the early 1980s in an excellent little paper called Airports for Sale. Competition works. It's time we had more of it in the provision of airports, just as we now do in airlines.
This week the Wall Street Journalpublished one of the best stories ever about how inconvenient political correctness and green living can be. Both US parties will try to host "green conventions," with the Democrats going to the extreme.
Some examples:
Union-labour and American made organic cotton caps, shirts, and fanny packs.
Bio-degradable balloons.
A rubbish brigade that will look to see that convention goers put recyclable rubbish in one bin and non-recyclable rubbish in another. After, the brigade will look through each bin to ensure no mistakes were made. "That's the only way to make sure it's pure," Andrea Robinson, a convention organizer says.
Food will be locally grown to minimize emissions from transportation.
Is this what is in store for the nation if the Democrats have their way? So many people accuse the neo-Cons of using fear to get what they want. How is the green madness movement any different?
We need to recognize a few things. Life expectancy is at an all time high. We live better and wealthier lives with much a higher standard of living than ever. We can communicate with people instantly around the world and travel to every corner of the earth.
Technology and modern living carry trade-offs, but we are better off for it. If patronising only domestic goods made by union-labour with organic materials is the model of the future, the third world can kiss an prospect of future prosperity good-bye, and the first world will slip toward economic mediocrity.
Gordon Brown wants oil-rich states to invest in Britain's renewable power projects as a long-term solution to the world fuel price crisis. At the Jeddah eneergy conference in Saudi Arabia this week, the Prime Minster said that it would cost the UK £100bn to meet its 2020 target of having 15% of its power supply from alternative energy sources, and he hoped that some of this investment could come from the Middle East.
I'm not sure this is altogether a good idea. With our gas supplies under threat from Russia and other unsavoury East European regimes, and our oil supplied by countries that are often even more unsavoury and even less democratic, energy security is something to worry about. If Middle East governments are going to be controlling large stakes in the nation's alternative sources, it's out of the frying pan into the fire. I'm surprised that the backbench MPs who are trying to derail the plans to build new UK nuclear power stations don't understand that.
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On Tuesday myself and others from the office went along to Waterstones at the LSE to listen to Lord Lawson of Blaby discuss his recent publication: 
O. Glenn Smith 
I'm pleased to see that 
A government-sponsored report on biofuel policy has 
Meteorologist Fred Singer is always amusing. He has a cheery disposition, and takes particular delight in teasing the likes of Al Gore when their enthusiasm gets the better of their reason. His Non-Government International Panel on Climate Change points out that melting glaciers and suchlike may be evidence of rising temperatures, but they are not evidence that human beings have caused them. And he states simply and confidently that human influence over the climate is insignificant. 
Colin Matthews, Chief Executive of the UK airports operator BAA, has launched into the debate on the future of London's airports with a big speech at the Transport Times conference. There has been suggestion that more traffic should be decanted to other London airports; but, says Matthews, if people were unable to make connections at Heathrow (and, I suppose, faced a gruelling trip across London on the capital's ailing public transport system), it would be a major strategic mistake. Charles De Gaulle or Schipol airports would be only to happy to pick up those interlining passengers, and the UK as a whole would suffer. 
Gordon Brown wants oil-rich states to invest in Britain's renewable power projects as a long-term solution to the world fuel price crisis. At the Jeddah eneergy conference in Saudi Arabia this week, the Prime Minster said that it would cost the UK £100bn to meet its 2020 target of having 15% of its power supply from alternative energy sources, and he hoped that some of this investment could come from the Middle East.