The scaremonger state shot down

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Two pieces of government propaganda advertising that twist nursery rhymes (and heartstrings) to raise climate change awareness have been banned by the Advertising Standards Agency. The adverts have been struck down for exaggerating the mainstream scientific consensus over the effects of climate change, with the ASA noting that even the environmentalist’s bible, the IPCC report, ‘involved uncertainties’ that weren’t reflected in the adverts. The Department of Energy and Climate Change concedes that they should have been more ‘tentative’ in their language, instead of broadcasting the most extreme potential outcome of climate change as fact, by making claims such as ‘extreme weather events would become more frequent and intense’. This is typical arrogant and bullying government behavior if you can’t get your point across through reasoned argument, warp, exaggerate and distort the facts. While this might be common procedure within Westminster, the ASA has quite rightly found this rather irresponsible. It was also a gross misuse of public money. This isn’t the first time that the government’s enthusiasm for behavior-altering climate change propaganda has crossed the mark. Following nearly 1,000 complaints from viewers, Ofcom has launched an investigation into the now notorious ‘bedtime stories’ video. Under the Communications Act, government advertising can provide ‘public services’ such as whinging about drink driving or obesity. What they can’t do, however, is to broadcast adverts seeking to ‘influence public opinion on a matter of public controversy’. And, despite repeated statements from the government that ‘the science is settled’ on man-made global warming and that anyone who disagrees is a ‘flat-earther’, the public are not so convinced. In a Populus poll last month, only 26% respondents agreed that climate change is happening and is largely man made. Of the remainder, 38% believed that climate change is not yet proven to be largely man-made, 10% believed environmental propaganda unfairly blames climate change on men, while 25% believe that ‘climate change is not happening’. ‘Bedtime Stories’ is out and out propaganda that seeks to both change the public’s behavior, and parades opinion as fact. Hopefully, Ofcom will recognize this. Scaremongering and myth have no place in a government, and every small step they take in this direction leads us closer to the Two Minute Hate.

Cameron should distance himself from Climate Scare

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Many were puzzled recently by the narrowing of the the Tories’ lead in the polls after New Year. This also coincided with President Obama’s decline in the polls. A common link is the meltdown of the climate scare campaign, precipitated by the devastating leak of e-mails from East Anglia University. See this excellent and comprehensive account in the Weekly Standard.

Both David Cameron and Barack Obama have enjoyed miraculous success in the polls over the past two years, and this has been partly due to their populist commitment to “do something” about climate change. Indeed, it seems that the ‘political consensus’ – nowadays much more important than any ‘scientific consensus’, is such that no politician could have survived the last two years without towing a similar line.

Inspiration can however be drawn from The Liberal Party of Australia – whose views seem much more like the proper liberals of yesteryear than the ‘liberals’ we have in the UK or US. They have been through a hefty struggle on the issue of climate change over the last two years. That struggle reached its climax in February this year when Malcolm Turnbull was ousted as leader by a hardcore climate change skeptic, Tony Abbott, because he insisted on helping the Labor Party push contentious Cap-and-Trade legislation through the Senate. Clearly, Turnbull had gone so far toward appeasing the politically correct climate change lobby that he neglected his own party’s base.

As far as Cameron is concerned, he needs to take notice. Now more than ever, it is politically possible for him to distance himself from the typical collectivist position on climate change, which has dragged him away from the base of his party. Seeing as the scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change is no longer as sound as it once seemed, there is clearly an opportunity to take a skeptical position that is both frank and honest, as those in the Australian Liberal Party have shown they can do.

Propaganda by Proxy: How the EU funds green lobby groups

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The EU has been funding powerful green groups in Brussels to the tune of hundreds of thousands of Euros every year – only for these groups to go and lobby the EU for more money and influence.

According to a report published today by International Policy Network, the Directorate-General for the Environment – the European Commission unit that deals with environment affairs - has handed out over €66 million in core funding to green NGOs. The IPN report focuses on the Green 10 – a coalition of NGOs that pushes environmental issues at the EU-level. All the usual suspects are here - Friends of the Earth Europe, WWF-Europe, and other more EU-focused groups like the European Environmental Bureau and Climate Action Network Europe.

Nine out of the Green 10 receive funding from DG Environment. Eight of them depend on it for 33% or more of their funding - and five of them for more than 50%.

Over the years, EU funding to the Green 10 – and to environmental NGOs in general – has increased drastically: from just over €2 million in 1998 to nearly €9 million in 2009. Friends of the Earth Europe saw its funding increase by 325%, while Birdlife Europe’s funding increased by an astounding 900% over the same period.

But all of this funding hasn’t quite been enough for NGOs – they’ve consistently lobbied the EU for more money and influence. The Green 10 made several grabs for the EU’s Cohesion budget, which represents €350 billion, about one-third of the EU’s 2007-2013 budget. The Green 10’s demands were self-serving in the extreme – they wanted an environmental NGO involved in every project committee, the reimbursement of expenses, and training and capacity building. They failed to get their way but they are already lobbying in view of the 2014-2020 budget.

The EU claims that it needs to fund NGOs – and green groups in particular – to balance out the lobbying of big business, trade unions and consumer groups. But they’re only funding the largest green NGOs, and crowding out smaller, more local environmental groups. In fact, these large green groups are far from being representative of either the environmental movement, or of Europe’s citizens in general. In trying to balance the influence of self-interested corporate lobbyists, the EU has managed to line the pockets of self-interested green lobbyists. Meanwhile, the views of the taxpayers who fund this merry-go-round are utterly irrelevant.

Biofuels – an everyday story of lobby groups

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The Department for Transport commissioned E4tech to undertake a study of the overall impact of its biofuel target on forests and other undeveloped land. The study, seen by the Times, shows that millions of acres of forest will be logged or burnt down to create the plantations required to supply biofuel targets. The Adam Smith Institute criticized from the outset the use of edible crops to produce fuel for vehicles instead of food for the malnourished. Now the findings show that the use of palm oil and similar products involves a vast release of carbon when forest and grassland is converted to plantations. The verdict is that biofuels actually pollute more than diesel when their overall impact is assessed.

The obvious question is why was such a perverse policy was implemented? The answer might well be that a toxic combination of environmentalists chanting "renewables" combined with farming lobbies chanting "subsidies," proved irresistible to politicians seeking votes. David Cameron says he is poised to announce clear policies that set out the Conservative position. An immediate candidate would be a rethink of the commitment to biofuels, to stop the damage before it gets any worse.

On the silliness of Geoffrey Lean

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There are useful conversations and discussion we can have about matters environmental: perhaps, for example, it is right that we give up a little bit of material production in order to reduce pollution. As we do already. There are also conversations and discussions where nothing of use can be achieved: for example, when some insist upon grasping firmly the wrong end of the ordure stained stick:

Green technologies also seem to provide plenty of jobs. Exploiting renewables now employs 2.3 million people worldwide, more than the entire oil and gas industries, even though they contribute a small fraction of the amount of energy. They provide several times as much work per dollar invested than fossil fuels, with other green measures like recycling and saving energy proving even more job-intensive.

That is Geoffrey Lean who seems to have become the Telegraph's point man on matters environmental. Something which is not to the credit of that newspaper for while what he's noted is true he notes it with approval rather than the correct approach which is to use the very same facts as a rejection of such schemes.

Jobs, you see, are a cost: yes, I know I've said it before but apparently I need to continue doing so. Having more people labouring away to provide our energy is a bad thing, not a good thing. It stops people from doing other things rather than labouring away to produce our energy.

If by some mischance a Green reads this, a simple and basic example. Imagine an economy of 100 people. 80 of them must labour to provide the food for all 100. This leaves only 20 to do the arts, the crafts, the medical care, lawyering, defence, banking and manufacturing. Over time we get better at that farming thing. We now need only 20 to produce the food for 100, we have perhaps 50 doing manufacturing and 30 doing the services. Times and technologies move on again and we need only 2 to feed us all, 12 to make things we can drop on our feet and 84 can run creches, tend the sick in the NHS, write Grand Theft Auto and appear on the X-Factor.

Roughly speaking that is what has happened in the UK economy over the past couple of hundred years. We have become wealthier by reducing the amount of labour required to produce food and things and services meaning that we can produce more of all of them to share among us out of the labour we have available. We've even, over the same time span, gone from the majority of everyone's time being spent in labour to the minority of it.

A useful shorthand for this process is "we've got richer". We have done so by making all the tasks we face less "job-intensive". Mr. Lean, and he's not alone in this among the deeper green parts of the political spectrum, seems to believe that we'll get richer by increasing job-intensity rather than reducing it.

This is the economic equivalent of declaring that apples fall up to the tree. How can anyone have a useful conversation or discussion with someone promoting such nonsense?

Unite to destroy an airline, and your job prospects

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In the High Court this month, Unite lost their attempt to have British Airway’s change in cabin crew staffing levels declared illegal. Unite argued that the reductions in cabin crew numbers were detrimental to workers’ conditions, in breach of their contracts. However, Sir Christopher Holland held that the negotiations and collective agreements were ‘discursive’ rather than ‘contractual’, so were not ‘apt’ for incorporation. In other words, BA cabin crew did not have a contractual right to the existing staffing levels. Furthermore, BA has the right to make ‘reasonable’ alterations to the conditions of newer staff if they give sufficient notice. BA’s ‘less-than-extreme changes’, in light of their financial situation, ‘cannot be condemned as unreasonable’.

Unsurprisingly, Unite used safety concerns to dramatise their cause. However the levels proposed by BA are well above Federal Aviation Authority recommendations (American guidelines are applicable because the jets being flown are of American design). Furthermore, Unite ‘unwillingly’ agreed in November to work to these standards voluntarily, pending the outcome of February’s litigation. So just how dangerous have the last four months been? Was my safety put at risk when I flew BA in December? Although having an extra trained person on hand will marginally improve safety, Sir Christopher understood that the difference can ‘t justify the cost when the airline is suffering financially.

After the judgment, Len McCluskey, the assistant general secretary at Unite, was adamant that further industrial action was on the table. True to his word, earlier this week, 80.7% of BA cabin crew, on a 78.7% turnout, balloted to strike. This time, there will be no prospect of the High Court declaring it illegal. Of course, being neither a shareholder nor an employee at British Airways, there is hardly any pressure on Mr McCluskey to call off the disastrous action he is forcing on BA – his job and salary at Unite are about as safe as they come.

Unite seem to want to stop BA’s managers from managing the company. Their website “details” proposals they made to heal the financial woes at BA, but the “plans” simply wont save enough money. Moreover, according to Friday’s judgment, a large cause of the breakdown in negotiations has been the infighting within Unite. The cabin crew contingent in Unite’s membership has come from both the TGWU and Amicus, and the divisions that drew the factions apart twenty years ago have engendered ‘mutual rivalry, hostility and mistrust’.

Unite accuses BA of creating a ‘two-tier workforce’, in which new recruits are offered ‘bargain-basement wages’ (known to you and I as ‘10% above market rate’), as well as merit-based, not seniority-based, promotion structures. These are sensible moves being made by management in an effort to manage the company. They are being blocked by a Union that can’t even manage its own affairs.

More on the stupidity of politicians

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And yes, it's stupidity about climate change again. Last week the Government released the subsidies that will be paid on feed in tariffs. The basic idea isn't silly at all. If people are going to use various forms of microgeneration then it does make (some) sense that they should be able to sell this to the grid. Storage technology for electricity is woefully inadequate, after all, so if some is generated it should be used.

It's also not silly that this price be higher than that for more conventionally generated electricity. Not entirely silly, at least: if we are trying to subsidise R&D into these new methods then there might be better ways of doing it and there might not, but the idea of a subsidy through price supports is not entirely insane.

The next step though can fairly be considered to be insane: for we've our old enemy government picking losers again. For they're offering different subsidies for each different form of microgeneration. And they've decided to calculate such subsidies so as to provide a guaranteed return on investment for each different type:

Tariff levels for different technologies:

The tariff levels for the electricity financial incentives (pence), calculated to offer between 5-8% return on initial investment in the technology are:

Aaaargh! No! Our aim is not to subsidise all and every attempt to generate electricity locally. It's to find out which is the best method of generating electricity locally! Thus whatever the subsidy is it should be uniform. So that those who generate at the lowest cost get the highest profit, leading to more installation of this lowest cost method.

For example, if medium scale hydro requires 4.5 p (per whatever unit) of subsidy and solar PV requires 41 p to make a 5-8% return then we absolutely do not want to be doling out 41 p to all those with solar cells. We want people to go build medium scale hydro instead. Perhaps the subsidy should be 4.5 p so that only hydro gets built, or 41p so that those building hydro make huge profits and thus resources flood into the most efficient method of doing this.

But to say to the solar PV folks, yes, we know your technology is wildly useless but here have lots of money anyway, so that resources are ploughed into this wildly useless technology, is simply nonsense.

Is there anything that politicians cannot make worse?

It's amazing how stupid politicians can be, isn't it?

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I think we all know that I'm slightly out of step with many of you: I think climate change is happening and that we ought to do something about it. However, when I watch the politicians stumbling in the dark as they attempt to do something I'm quickly reminded that it's normal for the political process to produce something which is worse than doing nothing.

As Lexington in The Economist notes there's a new suggestion in the US about what to do. Sensibly the idea is to do away with the entirely pork laden and counter-productive measures that have already passed the House and do something more sensible. Instead of cap and subsidise, have cap and dividend. This raises the price of carbon emissions, yes (which is the whole point) but returns the money raised by auctioning them all to consumers in the form of a dividend.

It would be simpler and easier to do this by imposing a carbon tax but that is regarded as a political non-flyer, sadly.

Then we're told about the details. In the trade part of the cap and trade thing (trade being an essential part of a cap and trade system, as the phrase indicates) the legislation would deny most opportunities to trade. More specifically, it would deny speculators from trading the permits (seemingly entirely unaware that speculators both provide liquidity and accept risk): and yet there could still be speculation but it would be pure speculation, without either providing liquidity in the real market nor accepting risk.

Some time ago some of us at the ASI (in our secret underground lair at which we sacrifice socialists and statists to our statues of Adam Himself, Bastiat and Hayek, as you know) were pondering this very point. A properly designed cap and trade system would be the best solution. Then we pondered on the politicians we actually have, rather than those we would like to have, and quickly concluded that a carbon tax would be better, giving less opportunity for said politicans to get it wrong: and in the absence of that perhaps nothing was better than whatever we would get.

Can't say there's been all that much to change that conclusion as yet.

Keep calm and carry on

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My friend John Baden of the Foundation for Research into Economics and the Environment reminds me that twenty years ago, the National Centre for Policy Analysis in Dallas commissioned a report on Environmental Myths and Realities. Nine of the ten myths focused on the consequences of consumer behaviour. The myths (and facts) included: Americans were especially wasteful (they weren't), packaging was bad (it isn't), recycling is always good (not always), biodegradable is best (not always), America's running out of landfill (twenty years on and it still isn't a problem), and we are running out of resources (er... we have more known oil reserves, for example, than we've ever had).

Twenty years ago, of course, most people were worried about the coming ice age and the population explosion. Today, it's warming, and population implosion – we in Europe are producing children at far less than the replacement rate, and on current trends the population of Russia will be down by a quarter come mid-century.

One of the interesting thing about problems is that they change. And for those that remain, people find fixes to them. As Baden will tell you, you don't run out of material resources when property rights are secure and the market is permitted to work – fostering discovery, substitution and conservation. 'Scarcity,' he says, 'has never won a race against creativity when marketable commodities are at issue.' The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stone, enterprising people just found better things to make tools of. No, the real problem is when people, for idealistic reasons, undermine the market system. Then you find out what shortages and ecological disasters are.

More from the New Economics Foundation

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Thorough statistical and scientific evidence leads me to believe that unless we severely restrict social and economic freedoms, Mother Earth could look like this as early as 2030:

UPDATE: It turns out our parody of the nef was unnecessary. They've been kind enough to do it themselves already...