Climate change nonsense

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An awful lot of nonsense about climate change is spouted, as we know. I think the thing that bugs me the most though is that people don't seem to be understanding the very reports they rely upon for their logic and calls to action. You know, things like various greenies insisting that we should revert to local and regional economies....when the very IPCC report they rely upon for predictions of climate change states that this would make things worse, not better.

Today's example comes from the private sector:

Airline passengers should pay a global tax on carbon and accept an increase in the cost of flying for the sake of the environment, the chief executive of British Airways has told The Times.

The airline is the first in the world to propose that all airline passengers should pay an additional sum which would be likely to rise steadily over time.

BA is proposing that the tax should raise at least $5 billion (£3 billion) a year to be used to combat tropical deforestation and help developing companies to adapt to climate change.

That there should be a price for carbon emissions, as there should be for other externalities, I have no problem with, indeed welcome. And as the Stern Review pointed out, we can do this either by Pigou taxation or by cap and trade. We'll leave aside the bit where that report points out that it doesn't matter what you spend the taxes on, it's simply the addition into market prices of those costs that does the work.

But what I would like Bill Walsh (for it is he suggesting this) to understand is that the very same report/review which provides logical support for this position also gives us what that price should be. And as a result of that suggestion, Gordon Brown has doubled Air Passenger Duty. As far as Stern is concerned, as far as both the price and logic of the argument are concerned, the external costs of aviation are already included in the market prices people pay to fly from or to the UK.

It's already been done, no more taxes are needed. It would be fine to call for a different system, but not to call for an additional one.

The antidote to the tube strikes

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Click here for the censored version of the London Underground song. Ah, catharsis.

Socialists highlight "offensive" candidates

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An article published recently on Euractiv reports the Party of European Socialists' publication of a list of 12 "conservative, liberal and right wing" candidates who are "at risk of being elected" to the European Parliament.

To quote: "The list contains candidates who, it is claimed, variously deny that the holocaust ever happened, dispute the existence of climate change or hold 'other offensive or absurd' views."

Now, leaving aside the fact that mature adults should be free to vote for whoever they choose in a democratic election, it is undeniable that the vast majority of people would indeed find holocaust denial offensive. But what I find far more disturbing is this easy conflation of holocaust denial with questioning of the received wisdom on the drivers of climate change. It has become the norm now for sceptics to be labelled as climate change deniers, in an attempt to place them outside the pale.

However, on this as so many other issues, it is ironic that the only directly elected institution in the EU is so far out of step with the views of those who it purports to represent. This is one of the reasons why many voters are Eurosceptics. The benefits of a single market, free movement of citizens and an unprecedented era of cooperation between countries who were regularly at war with each other are very real but often taken for granted. More visible, unfortunately, are things such as the CAP, the unaccountable and Byzantine Brussels bureaucracy and the continued progress of a highly precautionary environmentalist agenda which does little for European citizens while stifling innovation and growth.

Martin Livermore is the Director of The Scientific Alliance

An early vote?

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ASI Fellow Tim Worstall on whether organic food is sustainable.

A small thought about climate change

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We've just had a crowd of Nobel Laureates telling us all how urgent is the need to do something about climate change. And we've also just had a group of not scientists telling us that hundreds of thousands are already dying from the effects. That latter used some, umm, creative methods to reach that conclusion, for I was previously entirely unaware that earthquakes were indeed caused by climate change.

However, this leads to me to ponder a little on what Lord Stern told us. That was that we could sort this all out for the remarkably low price of 1-2% of GDP, spent year by year over the next few decades. Given the size of the UK economy this means some £14 billion to £28 billion a year. And we're also told that this amount should be used to correct the price system, so that matters currently external to the markets become internal to the pricing system. This so called Pigou taxation.

This makes sense, I have to say, as the amount of damage, by Lord Stern's figures again, done by Britain's emissions are again in this sort of range: £14 billion to £28 billion.

Now whether I actually swallow all of these numbers is a different matter, but let's take them at the logic of their proponents. We know  the problem, we know how to solve it, we know how much the problem costs and we know how much the solution costs. Excellent.

But, but....well, how much are we already paying in such green taxes? That depends a little on exactly how you want to calculate what is a green tax but adding up landfill tax, air passenger duty, the petrol tax rises from the fuel duty escalator and so on we get to a figure of....£14 billion to £28 billion again. Which means that, by the logic of the Stern Review, we've actually already solved climate change.

No, not even I think that to be actually correct, as Lord Stern himself doesn't. For he keeps telling us that we must do much more, much more quickly, in order to solve the problem, as those Nobel Laureates were also telling us last week.

Which, sadly, leaves us with one inescapable conclusion. We're not going to crack this at that low cost of 1-2% of GDP per year over the decades. It's going to be much much more expensive than that: which means we really need to reopen the calculations of whether we want to stop climate change or would prefer to adapt to it.

Tube strikes

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I have written before about the failure of the Mayor of London to face up to the RMT Union. Now we are seeing the repercussions of that initial weakness with news that the RMT have voted to strike over pay, working conditions and some 3,000 jobs feared to be at risk.

Workers will begin a 48-hour strike at 1859 BST on 9 June. The response from TfL has been swift and non-conciliatory:

The RMT leadership has failed to engage in any meaningful talks on pay, instead submitting a wildly unrealistic claim - demanding a 5% pay rise for fewer hours in the middle of a recession. On jobs, the RMT leadership knows full well we are seeking to end the duplication of back office jobs and that no front line staff will be affected. Our offer guarantees real wage increases for the next five years. Very few Londoners have that level of certainty for the future.

The battle lines are drawn. If the RMT does not back down, nor should the Mayor. One thing is for sure: Londoners would be near-unanimous in their support for confrontation.

In truth, the fight will not be won until the London Underground is privatized. This is certainly easier said than done; it is the case for most industries that once they have been touched by the inefficiencies of government, putting them back on the straight and narrow is a long and often painful road. Nevertheless it is the only way out of the mess we are in and it should not stop Boris doing the right thing. Let it not forgotten that before his makeover, he was a disciple of Thatcherism. If he could just follow his intellectual instincts as opposed to his political ones, there is no reason why he could not be the person to revolutionize London’s ailing underground system.

Professor Ian Plimer: Global warming

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Professor Plimer discusses why he thinks that the new Climate Change Religion is a "load of hot air".

Smart meters or smart consumers?

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The government, in its wisdom, has now announced plans to install "smart meters" in all homes across the UK by 2020. These would allow consumers to see what their actual gas and electricity consumption is at any time, and also do away with meter readers, as readings can be collected wirelessly by the supplier. There would also - in principle at least - be no need for call centres to deal with complaints or revised readings.

The cost is estimated as £7bn, or roughly £15 per household for each year from 2010 to 2020. Energy companies claim that £10 of that would be funded by their own cost savings, while the remainder would be more than offset by savings made by more aware consumers. Maybe, but experience suggests that costs are probably underestimated and savings overestimated. For example, it seems inconceivable that all 26 million electricity and 22 million gas meters would work perfectly all the time, so call centres would still be needed to some extent. And what will be done about the people who have prepayment meters?

Experience also suggests that smart meters will polarise people into those who become obsessed with turning off all possible devices (but many of whom are probably already obsessed by energy saving) and those who simply ignore them. The impetus for the move comes, not surprisingly, from the government plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The claim is that energy use would be reduced by 2%. The likelihood is that such savings will not materialise and, by the time all the meters have been fitted, carbon dioxide will no longer be seen as the driver of climate change. The energy companies (and smart meter manufacturers) will gain, but meter readers and call centre employees will lose.

Martin Livermore is the Director of The Scientific Alliance

Neodymium: The truth

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The political and international divide over green energy politics is growing. Not only are the prospects of over ambitious plans such as Koyoto II getting gloomier in the ongoing financial crisis, it is becoming increasingly clear that the green renewable energy issues could create problems of the same magnitude as our present oil-dependency. As the Atlantic reports in its May issue, the exploding demand for hybrid cars and windmills is likely to create a bottle neck in the supply of a commodity with the exotic name of neodymium.

Neodymium is a crucial material for build lightweight permanent magnets “that make the Prius motors zoom" and are needed for the generators of wind mills as well. In fact, the present production of neodymium would have to be doubled in order to make just a few million electric cars. The main pit for neodymium in the US, California’s Mountain Pass, has recently been closed after a series of leaks released hundreds of thousands of gallons of radioactive waste into the environment. The dirty little secret of green cars and windmills is that the neodymium has to be yielded from rare-earth ore, which are regularly contaminated with radioactive thorium.

So much for the green ideologues and main stream media hypocrites who don’t accept nuclear energy with zero CO2 emission as clean energy.

Peter Huber's prudent policies

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Peter Huber has brilliantly put together all the arguments of a prudent carbon policy.

First of all we have to acknowledge the fact that we are unable to control the global mobilization of carbon-based energy because 80% of fossil oil worth $ 40 trillion is under the control of 'nasty' people. Secondly, the anti-nuclear bias of the greens after Chernobyl has increased the pollution of our planet because the coal industry was the main beneficiary. Thirdly, developing countries are sitting on trillions of cheap coal that they will use regardless of the West’s obsession with de-carbonizing the planet. Fourthly, 1.2 billion people of the industrialized West don’t even control the demand for carbon anymore, the 5 billion poor people that are meanwhile emitting 80% of greenhouse gases have taken over and their per-capita emissions are rising much faster than ours can possibly fall using de-carbonizing technology. As a result and fifth it is plainly absurd that the planet can be saved with just 1 or 2 % of the world economy.

On wind power, Huber accurately states:

Windmills are now 50-story skyscrapers. Yet one windmill generates a piddling 2 to 3 megawatts. A jumbo jet needs 100 megawatts to get off the ground; Google is building 100-megawatt server farms (in Lithuania with 78 % nuclear electricity production, FH). Meeting New York City’s total energy demand would require 13,000 of those skyscrapers spinning at top speed, which would require scattering about 50,000 of them across the state, to make sure that you always hit enough windy spots.

The worst thing we should do is sharply increase the cost for coal-based electricity. For using this to power our passenger cars would actually lower carbon emissions because these big power plants are much more efficient in burning carbon than individual gasoline engines. And finally Huber makes a very good case for sequestration of carbon on the inescapable assumption that in our 21st century economies carbon emissions will keep growing. But focusing on better land use and reforestation worldwide over the next 50 years will do.