Britain’s prospects under Boris Johnson are obviously much, much better than they would have been under Jeremy Corbyn. But there’s one area especially, I fear, where this Conservative administration is going to come seriously unstuck.
It’s climate change and energy policy, obviously.
On its current trajectory, Britain’s destabilised grid system is heading for more and more blackouts like the ones that caused chaos last August, stopping trains and seriously inconveniencing over one million people.
Ofgem — the industry regulator — has now fined the three electricity companies responsible a total of £10.5 million.
But this needs to be seen for what it is — a cover-up designed to distract from the serious, long term problems facing Britain’s electricity system as a direct result of the government’s embrace of renewable energy.
The more intermittent, unreliable renewables that are connected to the grid, the more unstable it will grow.
If you don’t like the sound of that ‘we’, fine, I’ll take ’em on my own. But I suspect that quite a few of you feel as angry about this thing as I do. The Green Blob — aka the Climate Industrial Complex — is one of the most insidiously dangerous and oppressive forces in the world today and it’s time we hit back hard.
Green ideology is evil. It’s killing our jobs, it’s brainwashing our kids (and stealing their future), it’s despoiling our landscapes, it’s murdering our wildlife, it’s corrupting honest science, it’s enriching the most disgusting, cynical people in crony capitalism, it’s driving up the cost of living, it’s holding back our economies, it’s hamstringing business, it’s burning our homes…
How dare these nauseating green zealots try to lecture us on how to save the planet when they’re the ones doing so much of the harm!
Latest case in point are the bush fires ravaging Australia. Every month, every week, every day practically, there’s a story somewhere in the world that captures the wanton idiocy of the green movement.
As I demonstrate pretty comprehensively here, the Australian bush fires have nothing to do with climate change. The reason they are so widespread and intense, rather, is the result of misguided green policy. (So you can see why the greenies might be wanting to distract from this by pointing the blame elsewhere).
But you’d be amazed – or rather you probably wouldn’t, actually – how many supposedly intelligent people have chosen to buy into and promulgate the lie.
In the days before Doctor Who got woke and went broke, there was a famous storyline in which the Doctor faced gigantic maggots spewing deadly radioactive green slime. Just like George Monbiot, the maggots lived in Wales.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson would almost certainly have watched this terrifying serial (starring Jon Pertwee) — Doctor Who and the Green Death — as a child.
But little can young Bozza have realised that when he grew up he would have to face this horror for real. Not giant maggots, exactly, but something no less creepy and wriggly and relentless — the pullulating creatures of the Climate Industrial Complex, hungry for world domination.
Congratulations to BBC Environment Correspondent Matt McGrath who has just won a €100K prize from the BBVA Foundation for ‘his extraordinary capacity to communicate complex environmental issues and science’…
…Or, as Ben Pile more cynically suggests, as a reward for lazily and uncritically regurgitating press releases favourable to the interests of the Green Blob.
The difference between journalism and propaganda, is that journalists don't get their quotes off-the-shelf from people who will given them the answer they are expecting.
Here, for instance, a controversial method for attributing events to causes gets no scrutiny. pic.twitter.com/PAwWovs0Bk
I can understand Pile’s cynicism. The idea that any environment correspondent in the employ of the BBC should deserve any kind of award for their journalism is laughable. It has been many years since the BBC showed any interest in covering climate change and the environment fairly or accurately.
Besides the Brexit Party, one of the big winners of the European Parliament elections — in Germany, France, Austria, Sweden, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and the UK — were the Greens.
There’s a lesson buried in this story — but it’s not what you might think. And it’s definitely, definitely the opposite of the conclusion being drawn by the Conservative Party.
In the Conservative mindset, green issues are one of those politically neutral, morally and socially positive causes you can embrace without betraying your principles or alienating your base.
This delusion is widespread, as we can see from the number of Tory leadership candidates who have decided to campaign on a green-friendly platform. Rory Stewart, Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Matt Hancock, even the hard-headed and supposedly right-wing Dominic Raab have all, with varying degrees of canting enthusiasm, mentioned environment and climate change among their urgent priorities.
Gosh it hurts when your little corner of paradise is destroyed by a few idiots’ ignorance and greed. This is what has just happened to one of Britain’s best-kept secrets, the magically beautiful and remarkably untouristed stretch of the Wye Valley round and about Builth Wells.
Every summer we used to take a holiday let there, jumping into our favourite swim-hole in the Wye, playing Cocky-Olly in the bracken, exploring Llewellyn’s Cave, watching the last of the sun bathe the uplands from the shade of the boules terrain outside the house where we’d enjoy our well-earned fags and evening gin and tonic. But I don’t think I could bear go back there. The sight of what they’re doing to it is just too painful.
Would you pay an Irish environmental lawyer £232,000 a year to lobby to the government to raise your taxes and to make it harder to do business if he told you it was for the “public good”?
Well if you’re a UK taxpayer you already do.
His name is James Thornton and he heads a charity called Client Earth, which the UK government currently funds to the tune of nearly £1 million a year via the Department for International Development.
The problem is, as Paul Homewood notes, Client Earth is the Green Blob with bells on.
Essentially, it’s an outfit of environmental lawyers who use the courts system to obstruct industrial progress in the name of saving the planet.
One of their areas of speciality is, you guessed it, ‘climate change.’
Ofgem — the UK government regulator responsible for energy — has been caught covering up two major scandals in the ‘low carbon’ energy industry.
The cost of these scandals — involving smart meters and the renewable heat incentive (RHI) — may run into the tens of billions of pounds.
But rather than protect the consumer, which is supposedly its job, Ofgem has taken the side of the vested interests profiting from these industries. It has done this by using draconian gagging orders to silence two whistleblowers who had wanted to expose the scandals.
Ironically, the story was broken in The Guardian — a newspaper which has long been committed to supporting the corruption- and incompetence-riddled green industry that the whistleblowers were hoping to expose.
Climate change has been a difficult subject for the BBC, and we get coverage of it wrong too often. The climate science community is clear that humans have changed the climate, but specifically how is more difficult to evidence. For instance, there is very high confidence that there will be more extreme events – floods, droughts, heatwaves etc. – but attributing an individual event, such as the UK’s winter floods in 2013/2014, to climate change is much less certain.
We must also be careful to distinguish between the statements. For example: “Climate change makes this kind of event both more frequent and more severe,” and “Climate change caused this event”. The former uses previous scientific evidence to say ‘it is likely’ the event is the result of climate change, whereas the latter may be making an assertion without the proof to back it up.
What’s the BBC’s position?
Man-made climate change exists: If the science proves it we should report it. The BBC accepts that the best science on the issue is the IPCC’s position, set out above.
Giuseppe Ciccia/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
U.S. foundations are now spending over $1 billion a year to advance the global warming agenda – an amount several orders of magnitude bigger than the sums spent promoting climate change skepticism.
The eyewatering sum is revealed in an investigation, conducted by Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, into some of secret forces and nefarious methods pushing the climate change agenda in the U.S. and beyond.
What the report clearly demonstrates is that – regardless of President Trump’s attempts to introduce an element of scientific rigor and economic practicality to America’s climate and energy policies – a powerful, richly funded and determined Green Blob is working to undermine the Administration’s efforts at every turn.
Among the familiar names involved in the scheme are former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, disgraced former Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, three left-leaning state governors – Andrew Cuomo (New York), Jay Inslee (Washington) and Jerry Brown (California), plus, of course the inevitable Al Gore. The institutions involved include fake-neutral, pretend-scientific green activist group the Union of Concerned Scientists, Harvard Law School and the Rockefeller Family Fund.
One of the more dubious schemes exposed in the study – the result of numerous FOI requests from highly reluctant institutions – was a plan to encourage the offices of sympathetic Attorneys General to push through climate change legislation by secretly providing them with off-the-books staffing funded by green-aligned non-profits.
The report argues that these arrangements were at best dubious and possibly illegal.
