No, Stephen Hawking, Science Doesn’t Need Any Help from The European Union

Stephen Hawking and 150 other distinguished scientists – all fellows of the Royal Society – have written a letter to the (London) Times saying that if Britain leaves the European Union it would be a “disaster for UK science.”

No it wouldn’t.

Only 3 per cent of science R & D funding in Britain comes from the European Union. And it’s not as though we should be grateful for this sop: not when you consider that Britain puts far more into the EU than it gets back in return. If we were out, we could decide for ourselves how much we want to spend on science – and on which projects – rather than having a bunch of incompetent foreigners decide for us.

When I say “a bunch of incompetent foreigners” I mean just that. Look at the example of the EU’s flagship GPS project in which 28 states have come together in peace and unity and utter pointlessness to spunk Euros 13 billion of taxpayers’ money on a satellite navigation programme that no one actually needs any more because there’s a perfectly good one available already.

Is that the kind of science project we’d tragically miss out on if Britain were to quit the EU? Thirteen years delayed, three times overbudget and the space age equivalent of a chocolate ashtray? If so, I can’t say I’m going to be weeping too many bitter tears for the scientists we would have paid for to do that particular job.

Oh but what about CERN? Imagine! If it hadn’t been for the EU we might never have discovered the Higgs Boson…

Bollocks we wouldn’t have done.

Another of the myths being put about is that leaving the political structures of the EU will affect our participation in the CERN project – the European Organisation for Nuclear Research and home of the Large Hadron Collider. This is simply not true. CERN is an international collaboration of many countries, including many non-EU nations. The UK were founding members of the project back in 1954, and are currently CERN’s third largest contributor. The official status of the EU in respect to CERN is that of an OBSERVER, along with UNESCO, Russia, India, Japan and the USA.

Freedom of movement for scientists then. Think of all the brilliant researchers who’d be denied entry to Britain…

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Unless the Conservatives Come Clean about the Energy Mess They Created, They Will Never Deserve Our Vote

‘Ceci n’est pas un husky.’

Just how stupid does Lynton Crosby think we are?

Very, very, VERY stupid, I’m guessing. And perhaps he’s right. As part of his ongoing campaign to make the Conservatives more electable, he’s inviting us to experience the biggest outbreak of collective amnesia since Odysseus and his crew visited the Land of the Lotus Eaters. He wants us to forget the huskies. And the melting glaciers. And Dave’s announcement from Greenpeace’s HQ, no less that he was going to lead “the greenest government ever”. And to tell ourselves that all these unpopular wind and solar farms, all these rocketing energy prices have nothing whatsoever to do with husky-hugging Dave, leader of the greenest government ever, but with someone else entirely.

Richard North smells a rat here.

I do too. Lots of rats, actually.

Here’s one rat. (Actually, he reminds me more of a neutered poodle). His name is Greg Barker and here he is pretending to feel our pain about all the wind farms blighting our countryside. He’s dressing it up as a mea culpa: Energy Minister admits that some wind farms have been put in “the wrong place.” But it is nothing of the kind. It is part of the Conservatives’ cynical strategy to try to railroad through its offshore wind farms by trying to sell them to a gullible public as a preferable alternative to onshore wind.

And we’re supposed to be grateful for this? Isn’t this a bit like being told by the army besieging your City: “Hey, trapped citizens. Great news! We’ve taken note of your objection that, once you’ve let us through the gates, we’re going to impale every man, woman and child on hot spikes. So instead we’re going to chop your heads off.”

The disastrous Navitus Bay and Atlantic Array offshore projects the ones which will ruin the Dorset coast and utterly devastate the setting of Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel, after all, will require far more taxpayer subsidy (200 per cent, as opposed to 100 per cent) for their useless, intermittent, unreliable, bird-killing, bat-chomping, view-blighting, peace-disturbing, sleep-destroying energy than any onshore wind farms. (Sorry: I can’t bring myself to care about the project off Brighton. It’s God’s punishment for voting Green).

The new deal with the French and the Chinese to build a nuclear power station at Hinckley Point so iniquitous and wrong that even George Monbiot realises it’s a bad idea is another case in point. It’s as terrible as those disastrous PFI hospitals that were inflicted on us in the Blair era: inept government negotiators and greedy corporatists stitching up the market in way that is entirely beyond the consumer’s control. How, in all conscience, can the Coalition express concern about energy prices while simultaneously boasting about their success in striking a deal (for antediluvian technology) which is going to drive them sky high. As Peter Glover says here mini-nukes would have made far more sense.

Or consider the 2008 Climate Change Act, against which only five MPs voted against. The rest including David Cameron were apparently all for introducing the most expensive and pointless legislation in British parliamentary history, guaranteed to cost the taxpayer £18.3 billion a year in needless expenditure (on dubious technologies like carbon capture; and, of course, on wind turbines) till 2050. Yes Ed Miliband may ushered it in as Secretary of State for Energy And Climate Change. But it’s not as if anyone on the Conservative benches save Peter Lilley, Christopher Chope and Andrew Tyrie opposed it.

We have two years until the next General Election and what is already clear as a result of Ed Miliband’s price freeze bribe is that energy prices are going to become a major issue. The only party that has a leg to stand on energy is UKIP, which has consistently noted the flaws in the supposed IPCC consensus and the economic and socio-political dangers of the drive towards unreliable, expensive renewables and the failure to exploit our vast shale gas reserves.

What will be fascinating is to observe how Cameron and co attempt to wriggle out of a mess almost entirely of their own making. There was no need to embrace all that greenery in the way that did. (Whatever Sam Cam may have whispered in Dave’s ear). And God knows, it’s not as though they haven’t had enough opportunities in the last three years to readjust their policies in the light of events. Scarcely a week goes by these days without the Global Warming Policy Foundation presenting such irrefutable evidence from around the world of the disasters being wrought by bad energy policy, and of the decreasing credibility of Man-Made Global Warming Theory. The Conservatives’ ongoing failure in this regard ought to be the single best recruiting sergeant UKIP has.

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autolycus3 says:28th October 2013 at 10:06 am“The choice is no longer between global warming catastrophe and economic growth but between economic catastrophe and climate sense”Professor Fritz Vahrenholt is one of the fathers of Germany’s environmental movement and the director of RWE Innogy, one of Europe’s largest renewable energy companies

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Never mind the squeaky voice, Osborne: what have you got to say about THIS?

Paying to throw workers out of work

What are your government's energy policies, George? Despicable.

What are your government’s energy policies, George? Despicable.

Here’s an open letter to the Chancellor from Clive Francis, a reader of the Autonomous Mind blog. It’s so devastatingly right (* see below) and true I think it could become a bit of an internet hit, so I’m going to reprint it here. Why not send a copy to your local MP and see how evasive his response is? (H/T Old Goat)

Dear Chancellor

What a Nonchalant Way to Spend £400 Billion

The United Kingdom appears to be the only country in the world to have legislated against climate change. The Climate Change Act 2008 was enacted with only five Members of Parliament dissenting (in what Peter Lilley described as “a wave of self-righteous euphoria”) and without any prior attempt at costing. Some time after enactment the Brown government announced that the provisions of this Act would cost some £404 billion over the next 20 years.

Thus, apart from the Finance Acts themselves, the Climate Change Act 2008 is by far the most expensive piece of legislation ever enacted by Parliament – and completely without prior costing.

Are you able to detail the precise scientific facts on which the Government is relying to justify expending the £20 billion per year required by the provisions of the Climate Change Act?

I recently asked my MP to obtain from the Climate Change Ministry a detailed and logical analysis of, and for correction of any errors of fact in, a paper (enclosed) I had written which questioned the part mankind played in our ever-changing climate. The Minister for Climate Change, in replying, did not deny that 95% of the greenhouse effect was caused by water vapour, only 4% by natural carbon dioxide and only a miniscule 0.117% by man-made carbon dioxide.

However, instead of a detailed analysis or repudiation, the Minister responded in general terms and relying for his clinching argument on the phrase:

“The overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree that climate change is a grave environmental threat”.

Apart from his employment of argumentum ad populum, the Minister’s claimed “overwhelming majority” seems to have evaporated markedly last month when a number of irate climate scientists forced the Royal Society into an almost unprecedented and humiliating climb down by having to withdraw its own formal publication “Climate Change – a Summary of the Science”.

The Society’s Chairman, Lord Rees, then issued a statement “There is little confidence in specific projections of future regional climate change”. This is a telling swipe at the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change), which has had to withdraw its dramatic forecasts on the melting of Himalayan glaciers, rising sea levels, flooding of the Netherlands and African crop failures.

The Royal Society’s new guide now admits, “The size of future temperature changes and other aspects of climate change are still subject to uncertainty and some uncertainties are unlikely ever to be significantly reduced.” What an astonishing and complete reversal of The Society’s earlier stance. This sober statement of uncertainty over mankind’s involvement in climate change now differs markedly from the present British Government’s melodramatic posture.

Undeterred by this fundamental alteration to the accepted science of climates, Britain’s Energy Secretary, Chris Huhne, subsequently made his pitch that the UK Government wanted to foster “a third industrial revolution” in low-carbon technology with policies based
on cutting emissions of carbon dioxide and other ‘greenhouse gases.”

So the Royal Society now openly admits it got it completely wrong but why does Chris Huhne have such difficulty in doing the same? His conviction is patent – but where are the facts?

Just what are the proven threats which our Government is trying to avert?

Every single hour the earth receives more energy from the sun than the entire human population uses in one whole year. The amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the planet annually is twice as much as will ever be obtained from all of the Earth’s non-renewable resources of coal, oil, natural gas, and mined uranium combined.

As for our climate, within the last two thousand years outdoor grapes were grown in Cumbria and on occasions the Thames has frozen over. The poles have had ice caps for only 20% of Earth’s geological history. Fluctuating sunspot activity leading to variable solar output, the Earth’s wandering axial tilt and eccentricity of orbit round the sun and were all shown (Kepler, Milancovic) to be the causes of the Earth’s cycles of widely changing climate and of the Earth’s successive and massive glaciations/deglaciations. This, long before industrialisation and carbon were even conceived as possible causes for our climate’s changes – changes far greater than those being presently blamed on carbon.

Whilst no one denies that the world’s industrialisation has increased considerably the output of greenhouse gases, to ascribe the current phase of our ever changing climate to one single variable (carbon dioxide) or, more specifically, to a very small proportion of one variable (i.e. human produced carbon dioxide – 0.117%) is not science, for it requires us to abandon all we know about planet Earth, the sun, our galaxy and the cosmos.

The conclusion of the scientists responsible for the draft of the first report of the IPCC was that:

“None of the studies cited has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to the specific cause of the increase in greenhouse gases.”

This sentence was apparently omitted on political grounds by the IPCC staff from the published edition of the report and caused the resignation of the scientists involved. As Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT said:

“Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally average temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a rollback of the industrial age”.

TATA, the Indian steel conglomerate, is currently closing the Redcar steelworks with the loss of 1700 British jobs. It appears that TATA thus stands to benefit by some £600 million in EU Carbon Credits for stopping Redcar’s “Carbon Emissions”. TATA is currently expanding its steel production elsewhere in the world. Thanks to Chris Huhne the British taxpayer is now paying Europe to throw British workers out of work and, in the end, achieving nothing.

Just where are the solid facts to justify this unproven creed that mankind is altering the climate? The Minister for Climate Change cannot supply them, he relies on argumentum ad populum and is now finding himself running short of populi. In short, the Government is spending a prodigious amount of money trying to act like King Canute in attempting to stem the vast primordial external forces that drive the constant and cyclical changes to our climate. Thus, whilst the Government is asking us to tighten our belts, are you really content for it to wager £20 billion a year on a theory, now formally deemed as uncertain by the Royal Society, that mankind is causing or even capable of causing alteration to the climate?

As Professor Reid Bryson, founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology at the University of Wisconsin, remarked:

“You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.”

Or, the Government can go on spending £20 billion a year and achieve precisely the same effect. However is this the best way to tackle the deficit or fund university education?

Yours sincerely

Clive Francis

* As m’learned friend Booker points out, the £400 billion figure quoted in the letter is a gross underestimate (based on feeble arithmetic published by DECC). The correct figure is nearly twice as much – £768 billion. Not of course that even the higher figure will dent the complacency of any of the MPs to whom you send the letter).

One thought on “Never mind the squeaky voice, Osborne: what have you got to say about THIS?”

Velocity says:3rd December 2010 at 2:39 pmGood letter.Gov’t response? Snake oil from snake oil salesmen.
Westminster is the toilet of the country, a bin for idiot idealists, crooks and rammed to overflowing with cronies.

Same as it ever was…

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Chris Huhne’s favourite yoghurt ingredient | James Delingpole

Huhne: A taste for something better. . .

Huhne: you'll get used to the taste, eventually — Huhne: you’ll get used to the taste, eventually.

Let me explain the analogy, which I first introduced to a nauseated world in a Spectator column penned in bile in the aftermath the Eton Grocer’s spectacular general election non-victory. Here’s the relevant passage:

Quite the most absurd piece of recrimination I’ve heard so far from the Cameroons, though, is the notion that the real people to blame for all this are those 900,000 or so folk who voted UKIP, as well as all those rabid head-banging types like James Delingpole who were so unhelpful in pointing out the flaws in Project Cameron’s splendid policies. If only we’d held our noses and accepted that the Cameroons, for all their flaws, were our last hope of restoring Conservatism to power in Britain, then Dave might be in position right now to effect Real Change.

This is what I call the Dog S**t Yoghurt Fallacy. Suppose your preferred brand of fruit yoghurt manufacturer has been losing sales of late and has decided, after doing a bit of market research, that it may be necessary to alter the formula slightly. What at least some of the punters are clamouring for these days, it seems, is not chunks of fruit in their yoghurt but bits of dog poo instead.

“But that’s revolting!” you tell the manager of your preferred yoghurt brand. “Fruit goes way better in yoghurt than dog poo does.” “Look, you know that and I know that, but trust me we’ve crunched the numbers, done the research and it’s the only way. If we don’t put some dog poo in our yoghurt, then people will say we haven’t moved with the times. We’ll be forever stuck in the boring, fuddy duddy age of strawberry, and raspberry and apricot. But under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the public have acquired a real taste for excrement. If we don’t give it to them – we’ll only need a little bit, I promise – then we’ll probably go out of business.”

“No you won’t!” you reply. “There are loads of us who still like fruit yoghurt. And still loads more who’d buy it if you made it even fruitier. Your analysis is barmy.” “Well I’m sorry sir, but our marketing expert Mister Hilton assures us there’s no other way. Surely, you won’t object to just the inclusion of a tiny hint of merde de chien to save our brand from total ruin?”

Call me weird, call me stubborn. But I prefer my yoghurt to taste of fruit, real fruit and nothing but fruit.

As you see, I was talking mainly about the death of the Conservative party. But the analogy applies just as well to the Coalition’s energy policy, as supervised by the appalling Chris Huhne with the full encouragement of the no less appalling David Cameron.

In this case, the fruit element of the yoghurt would be nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is good. It’s what we need, both for energy security and to fill our looming energy gap. Only a total nutcase could possibly be opposed to nuclear energy, as my colleague Louise Gray has been demonstrating with her ring-round of the asylums:

But Mike Childs, head of climate change at Friends of the Earth, insisted the expansion of nuclear power could not go ahead without some form of public subsidy because of the massive costs of construction.

“It is not obvious to see how nuclear will be affordable without some form of public subsidy because the costs keep rising of building nuclear and getting rid of the waste,” he said.

“The only way nuclear will get built is if they [the Coalition] renege on their promise not to subsidise it.”

What, and the supposed green alternative to nuclear – wind power – doesn’t require massive public subsidy on an even greater scale? Pull the other one, Childs. According to Booker, who unlike some has actually been bothered to do the maths, our economically suicidal attempts to meet the EU renewables target are going to add £880 a year to our energy bills.

Which brings us to the poo element in the yoghurt: renewable energy and decarbonisation. There are many within the Coalition and indeed in the country at large who take what they imagine is a ’sophisticated’ line on Climate Change. As to whether or not it’s a serious threat and to what degree it is or isn’t “man made” they don’t much care. What motivates them is a vague sense that some climate change action is better than no climate change action, that it’s probably quite useful to keep the Caroline Lucas fringe onside, and that there might be some green jobs in it for someone somewhere. In other words: “Let’s just put a few lumps of dog poo in the yoghurt, just in case. No harm done if it turns out to have been unnecessary, eh?”

Er, no actually. In the name of the “precautionary principle” on Climate Change, quite enormous amounts of harm are being done. Richard North gives an example of this in his scathing dismissal of Chris Huhne’s new carbon capture project, which will cost the taxpayer £1 billion to no purpose whatsoever:

Whichever way you look at it, £1 billion is a lot of money. That is £1,000,000,000.00, and it is our money – more money than you and I will ever see, or ever dream of earning. It is a sum of money that would buy 150,000 hip replacement operations. It would pay the energy bills for two million pensioners for a full year, or pay the university fees for 600,000 students. More specifically, and of some personal interest, it would pay for 100,000 life-saving heart operations.

Yet the ****wit pictured is going to take that amount of money from us to play around stripping plant food from coal-fired electricity generation and bury it deep in a hole in the ground.

This man, therefore, will – indirectly – be responsible for many deaths, lost in “opportunity costs”. The money frittered away on this moronic enterprise cannot be spent on life-saving functions. And we do not have the money to spare. If we waste this money, it is not available for anything else. People will die because of this action.

And what about this:

[Huhne] is set to give the go ahead to a new generation of eight nuclear power stations, alongside an expansion of renewable energy and the creation of up to 44,000 wind turbines.

Anyone care to hazard how much environmental damage is going to be done to our countryside by 44,000 – count ‘em – wind turbanes? How many birds – and protected bats (H/T Ian Smith)- are going to be liquidised? How many views spoiled? How many householders impoverished?

Oh and let’s dispense once and for all with the idea that renewables bring any economic benefits. The green experiment has already been attempted in Spain and Germany and has failed dismally. Why? Because renewables only make economic sense if they are subsidised by the taxpayer – which means of course that they make no economic sense at all.

Here’s a report on the Spanish disaster (H/T Global Warming Policy Foundation)

Spain stands as a lesson to other aspiring green-energy nations, including China and the U.S., by showing how difficult it is to build an alternative energy industry even with billions of euros in subsidies, says Ramon de la Sota, a private investor in Spanish photovoltaic panels and a former General Electric Co. executive.

“The government totally overshot with the tariff,” de la Sota says. “Now they have a huge bill to pay — but where’s the technology, where’s the know-how, where’s the value?”

And here is the German energy disaster:

Next year, German households are in for a big price shock: the renewable energies levy, which every household in Germany has to pay as part of their electricity bills, will increase by over 70 per cent to 3.5 cents per kilowatt hour. This was announced by the German network operator on Friday. For an average household this will mean additional costs of around 10 € a month, according to the Federal Environment Ministry.
An end to the price spiral, which is caused by the subsidies for green electricity, is not in sight. Holger Krawinkel, energy expert of the Federation of Consumer Organizations, expects a further rise of the so-called EEG surcharge in the medium term. “It will rise by more than 5 cents in coming years in any case”, Krawinkel predicted in an interview with the news agency DAPD. The reason: The federal government has failed to cut subsidies for solar energy fast and strong enough. Moreover, the impending boom in offshore wind energy is not even included in the green energy levy.

And all because a few plausible charlatans have been able to persuade an awful lot of influential people over the years that plant food is a deadly poison. Thanks Bert Bolin! Thanks Stephen Schneider! Thanks James Hansen! Thanks Al Gore! Rest assured that one day – and let’s hope sooner rather than later – your names will live in infamy for all eternity.

Tag: energy policy

No, Stephen Hawking, Science Doesn’t Need Any Help from The European Union

Unless the Conservatives Come Clean about the Energy Mess They Created, They Will Never Deserve Our Vote

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Never mind the squeaky voice, Osborne: what have you got to say about THIS?

Paying to throw workers out of work

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One thought on “Never mind the squeaky voice, Osborne: what have you got to say about THIS?”

Chris Huhne’s favourite yoghurt ingredient | James Delingpole

Huhne: A taste for something better. . .

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