Meanwhile ....

As my colleague immerses himself into the main story of the day (in Britain, anyhow) of the British troops killed by friendly fire, I thought some of our readers might like to have a look at the fact that wind power is becoming something of a problem in different parts of the world.

First a story from the United States about the Long Island Power Authority cancelling plans "to construct a 140 megawatt wind project 3 miles off the south shore of Long Island. The project's estimated costs had ballooned to more than $800 million including transmission lines."

Here are the figures and discussion of them. As Christopher Alleva says

This is a real blow to the Energy Bill passed earlier this month by the House of Representatives. The bill requires 15% of energy generation from "renewables." Renewables under the bill exclude nuclear and hydro. The bill is slated for conference committee in the fall. President Bush has said he will veto the bill because it is completely unserious about resolving the current energy situation.

Things are not looking all that hot (if I may use that expression) for wind farms in Germany either.

Der Spiegel published a piece under the delightful and hightly erudite title "Wuthering Heights" on the dangers involved in the whole idea:

After the industry's recent boom years, wind power providers and experts are now concerned. The facilities may not be as reliable and durable as producers claim. Indeed, with thousands of mishaps, breakdowns and accidents having been reported in recent years, the difficulties seem to be mounting. Gearboxes hiding inside the casings perched on top of the towering masts have short shelf lives, often crapping out before even five years is up. In some cases, fractures form along the rotors, or even in the foundation, after only limited operation. Short circuits or overheated propellers have been known to cause fires. All this despite manufacturers' promises that the turbines would last at least 20 years.

The political situation being somewhat different, there is still pressure to produce more and more wind farms, even offshore ones. But the industry is becoming wary.

COMMENT THREAD

Water, water everywhere

Booker’s column this week was packed with all sorts of goodies. My colleague has covered one of the stories. We also get a discussion of the metric martyrs with credit given where it is due and not to some upstart Tory MEP. Then there is the question of Ofwat, the water companies and our wretched so-called legislators who are clearly ignorant of the basic facts of life.

This has been a rainy winter and spring (apart from April, which will be the month the man-made-climate-change freaks will cite endlessly) yet there are still hose bans in some parts of the country.

Water bills are going up. It is all the fault of those wicked water companies, particularly Thames Water, if you listen to Hizonner the Mayor, who has never quite managed to overcome his distaste for private business. Or it is the fault of Ofwat if you listen to our esteemed MPs. Not hitting those water companies hard enough.

Or one could eschew both of these rather specious explanations and dubious sources and look at the truth as Christopher Booker has done this Sunday. Mending leaks and replacing water pipes costs money. Right? Water companies have the money to do so. Right? Wrong.

The article leads us back to a Starred Question in the House of Lords on the subject of water supply and demand. Most of the discussion is of relatively limited interest until we get to Lord Pearson’s intervention, which goes to the nub of the matter of money.

My Lords, is the Minister aware that by 1997 we had spent some £48 billion on three EU water purification directives? Will he bring us up to date on the money that has since been spent on those directives? Does the noble Lord agree that if we had been wiser and had we spent the money on what really mattered—namely, infrastructure and supply—we would not be in the position that we now face, however much rain we occasionally get and whatever the quality of his rain?

Lord Rooker’s response on behalf of HMG was subdued:

My Lords, I do not think that anyone can criticise. I have not come armed with all the figures on what we have done with the infrastructure in the past 10 years. Billions of pounds have been spent over and above that previously spent. I will find out what has happened to the money that the noble Lord referred to and I will write to him.

He has now written to Lord Pearson of Rannoch and given an answer. Booker quotes it in his article:

Spending to comply with the directives now totals £65 billion. Only £14 billion has been left for infrastructure.

This raises a couple of interesting points. The first one is obvious and Booker makes it crystal clear: our so-called legislators not only do less and less legislating, they know less and less about how it is done. (And I bet they don’t know how sausages are made either.)

An equally important issue is the ease with which certain notions about the environment and what benefits it are accepted. Whenever the subject of the water directives came up in the past – mostly brought up by Lord Pearson of Rannoch – the government would blithely explain that the cost of implementing one of them would be somewhere between £2 billion and £8 billion or some suchlike figure. Not to worry, it will all benefit the environment. Except that the environment in this country would benefit far more from an improved infrastructure.

Similarly, we have never had a cost/benefit analysis in either economic or environmental terms of the great recycling effort. It’s all for the environment or our children’s future. But is it? Time to start asking for that analysis, methinks.

More on the subject over at One London.

COMMENT THREAD

Gosh, some people have useful and interesting jobs

I don't, as it happens, mean that of the Second Sea Lord, in whose naval shoes I would not like to be, or Des Browne. I mean Trevor Thomas,

a member of the fly-tipping crew at the city council, who was called in to investigate the contents of a recycling bag outside Mr Reeves' flat on June 8.

Michael Reeves, that hardened criminal (good to know they have no real crime in Swansea) has lost his appeal against a conviction of ... shock, horror .... putting paper in the bottles and cans recycling bag. Bill Sikes had nothing on this chap, I tell you.

Anyway, he

must now pay an extra £350 costs in addition to the £100 fine and £100 costs imposed by Swansea magistrates last October

and his general opinion is that all this recycling is not worth the paper it is printed on and he will do nothing about it in future. If you believe that recycling is a good thing, that is not the outcome that you want but I have no doubt that the Trevor Thomases of this world will use this terrible example to frighten children with and to demand the legal right to go through people's rubbish bins inside as well as outside their homes to ensure that they recycle and do it the way they are told to do.

But hey, don't some people have useful and interesting jobs. Puts blogging and political research into perspective.

COMMENT THREAD

It can't get anything right…

Courtesy of The Times this morning, we learn that the amount of greenhouse gas pumped into European skies rose by up to 30 million tons last year despite the EU's pledge to lead the world in tackling climate change.

The paper cites EU commission figures which show that the much-heralded emissions trading scheme failed to achieve the cuts in industrial pollution needed to hit Kyoto targets. In 18 of the 27 EU countries, European companies and power generators produced 1.79 billion tons of greenhouse gas last year, largely because too many permits were issued under the scheme.

However, the commission is now planning to impose deep cuts in national allocation plans for 2008-12, with Slovakia cut by 50 percent and Poland by 26 percent. The Polish cut should be fun though. If that ever starts to bite, we should have an interesting little argument between the Polish government and its EU masters. More likely, the Poles – like every other country – will go through the motions and fail to meet the target.

We are so fortunate that these emissions have nothing to do with global warming – otherwise we might be in trouble.

COMMENT THREAD

Oh dear, not again!

The Euroweenies are at it again, ratcheting up the pressure on waste generation.

This comes from MEPs who are expected to vote today in favour of binding targets to reduce the amount of waste produced in the EU, amending the commission's proposed waste framework directive – which does not set any specific targets.

Needless to say, the paranoia over using landfill is being perpetuated, while recycling is very much to the fore. There is also expected to be some controversy about the commission's love affair with incineration.

For those who wish we could inhabit a saner world, however, there is always this over on Little Green Footballs. Well worth watching. Now offline - damn. A humorous exposition, demonstrating that much of the current mania for recycling is based on nothing more than a desire to feel good and has little to do with saving the planet. It actually damages the environment.

COMMENT THREAD

Booker

You could say the column is about Euro-trash today. What continues to amaze is that, after the total shambles of EU environmental policy to date, anyone can possibly think that the EU is "good for the environment".

Then "think" – as in "not" - is the operative word. One does not think about the European Union, the "environment" and especially "global warming". They are all part of an increasingly complex belief system. To stay on board, you just keep taking the mantras.

COMMENT THREAD

Guess who has been nominated for the Peace Prize?

Well, no, not the Lenin Peace Prize of blessed memory but something almost as good. Al Gore has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize "for his wide-reaching efforts to draw the world's attention to the dangers of global warming, a Norwegian lawmaker said Thursday".

Of course, wittering on ignorantly about global warming is not quite what the Peace Prize is supposed to be about, the official citation being that it should go

the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.

Such as Yasser Arafat, for instance, or Kofi (father of Kojo and brother of Kobina) Annan, or Jimmy Carter or numerous other people and organizations that had achieved absolutely nothing though they did so while spouting happily the sort of leftie rubbish one expects from Nobel Peace Prize nominees. (Actually, to be fair, Arafat just whined and threatened Israel and Jews in general.)

Beyond the scandals of commission there have been scandals of omission. Gandhi did not get the Peace Prize, though, I suppose one could argue that his own assassination indicated a certain lack of success in what he preached, as did the communal massacres of 1947 as India and Pakistan became independent.

Those who helped to bring down Communism, Pope John Paul II and President Reagan would not even be mentioned as potential candidates.

And, of course, there is the unfortunate episode of Rigoberta Menchú, who had received the Prize in 1992 and whose autobiography has turned out to be largely bogus. There were suggestions that her Prize should be revoked but nothing much came of it.

So now, it may be Al Gore, whose achievements as a peace maker are non-existent (though there is the invention of the internet that he rather hilariously boasted about).

During eight years as Bill Clinton's vice president, Gore pushed for climate measures, including for the Kyoto Treaty. Since leaving office in 2001 he has campaigned worldwide, including with his Oscar-nominated documentary on climate change called "An Inconvenient Truth."

A conservative Norwegian member of Parliament, Boerge Brende, said that a prerequisite of winning the Nobel Peace Prize is "making a difference" and Al Gore has made a difference. Of course, on that basis, it should be awarded posthumously to the plane-flyers of 9/11 because they have made a great deal of difference to the world.

Al Gore has also made a difference, especially by all those air miles his private plane has eaten up as he criss-crossed the globe to promote his gospel. Anyone would think Kyoto has been a success.

COMMENT THREAD

Wind towers

Like the tower blocks before them, the wind towers are another mass delusion. A letter in The Telegraph tells us why:

Sir – Once again the public are being misled by the wind industry. These windfarms, which are going to cover over 100 square miles of the approaches to the Thames Estuary, will never power one third of London homes.

If as suggested the installed capacity of the 400-plus turbines is 1.3 Gw (1300Mw) then even with a generous load factor of 30 per cent the average output will only be 390Mw. This would in fact be enough to provide 5Kw to 78,000 homes, about enough to power an electric kettle and a toaster. If, as there frequently is, a high pressure system is sitting over south-east England, then there will be zero output from these windfarms. The claims about carbon dioxide savings are equally dishonest. Using widely accepted data the annual, theoretical savings of CO2 for these turbines would be approximately 1.46 Mt and would reduce global levels by a farcical 0.005 per cent.

What your readers really need to know is that these windfarms will receive approximately £160 million per year in subsidies, paid for by them. This windfarm scandal has gone on long enough and needs to be exposed for what is. We are destroying our landscapes and now our seascapes for nothing more than green tokenism, and are being expected to pay for it as well.

Bob Graham, Chairman, Highlands Against Windfarms, Orton, Moray

The tragedy of it all is that, had we not been lumbered with the Green Moron, the Conservatives could have exposed the stupidity for what it is, and gained some real political brownie (instead of greenie) points.

Much of the "green agenda" is a bubble, waiting to burst. Cameron has got on the bandwagon – to mix metaphors – just at a time when the wheels are about to fall off.

COMMENT THREAD

Smoke, baby, smoke!

As a callow youth, I took membership of the Friends of the Earth so seriously that I bought a second-hand van out of my own money, to collect up the newspapers from our locality and take them for recycling. Funny, we had the branch meetings in my flat and, after the hours denouncing cars and all that went with them, it was interesting how many members wanted a lift to the pub – in my car.

But the more messianic doth become the message, the more one is repelled by it. The latest is the EU's emission plan for airlines, which will be a nice little earner for its administrators and cost us all a packet, except of course all those on expenses – like the MEPs who have agreed the plan.

Anyhow, it is good to see that the US is resisting the idea, condemning the whole thing as illegal. "The inclusion of non-EU airlines on a non-consensual basis runs counter to EU member states' legal obligations under the Chicago convention... and their bilateral air transport agreements, including with the US," a government spokesman said.

In my view, the US should go further. In the olden days when men were men, when you could take your girlfriend out for a quid and still have change left for a copy of Flight International, you had smoking inside and outside your airliners. With warbirds, I always remember that you could see a Phantom coming long before the aircraft was visible. As for B52s... who needed radar?

So, junk those prissy Airbuses and the super-clean Boeings. Bring back the 707s and the DC8s. There is nothing like a smoke trail in the sky and the smell of unburnt hydrocarbons to get the pulse racing.

COMMENT THREAD

And your point is?

A hugely expensive ad campaign in the newspapers today attacks Gordon Brown's green credentials. But it also expresses, through a fictional character, the view that David Cameron will "stay refreshingly free from real policies".

Not revealed on the ads, you discover (eventually) from the website that this is a Greenpeace campaign. But what point are they trying to make?

And 'tis the self-same organisation that has been so keen on the REACH directive. But you won't find it being interested in this.

COMMENT THREAD

The Egyptian paradox

What have Reuters, the Guardian, The Times, the New Scientist, Associated Press, Farmers Weekly and others got in common with the minister for the environment?

And what have they all got in common with these traditional Egyptian boats - or "felukka", as they are known?

The answer is here.

COMMENT THREAD

Trampled by the bunny-huggers?

Iain Murray at the Corner deplores the Boy King's pusillanimity on REACH.

He has we are told, pressurised his party's representatives in the European Parliament to vote in favour of the directive, despite the MEPs' concerns about the impact on British business and jobs. Heavily influenced by aggressive lobbying by the World Wildlife Fund, his staff feared that his carefully crafted green credentials might have been undermined by a vote against.

This stance on such a serious economic issue is "exceptionally disappointing", writes Murray: it looks like both HM Treasury and the Department of Trade and Industry will become mere branches of the Environment Ministry in any Cameron government.

But while the Boy is surging ahead in the polls, to suggest that he will benefit electorally from Labour disarray is perhaps premature.

In addition to the Conservative Party, minority parties are also benefitting and disaffected voters appear increasingly ready to look at alternatives such as the UK Independence Party, BNP and the Greens. Support for the minor parties totals 13 percent, higher than at any time in recent history.

It is the march of the minnows that will be the electoral phenomenon of the next election, with many voters entirely immune to the vote blue – go green mantra of the not-the-Conservative Party.

And, perversely, the Boy's enthusiasm for REACH could backfire. While the WWF might be happy with him, the more powerful and numerous animal welfare lobby is not. They are exercised by the requirement to subject chemicals to animal testing and, according to the Sunday Times, tens of millions of rabbits, mice and guinea pigs are facing a painful death as a result of the directive.

In fact, current estimates of the number of animals to be affected range from the 16m predicted by the chemicals industry to 45m over 15 years calculated by Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment – a huge burden of testing which now, effectively, has the Boy’s support.

Pusillanimity may have brought him into line with the Greens but, in addition to disappointing the business community and upsetting the Eurosceptics, he now risks being trampled underfoot by the bunny-huggers. That could be his undoing.

COMMENT THREAD

Compost for brains

When you actually talk to people, ordinary people, and ask them whether they would rate any public service of which they had personal experience as efficient, their answers are almost invariably in the negative.

Yet these same people – or so we are told by the politicians of all parties – would go to the barricades to defend "their" public services and, so sacred are that it is electoral suicide to touch them.

It is these same lame-brain politicians and their groupies (see the comments section) who go all dewy-eyed about municipal recycling schemes and it is thus timely that we get a piece in The Telegraph today telling us about the "composting" rip-off.

Hundreds of thousands of tons of garden waste, we learn, are being driven around the streets unnecessarily every year because councils have an incentive to collect it rather than promote home composting. The growth of "free" green waste collections has caused extra public expenditure, pollution, congestion and probably accidents and been in direct contravention of the government's policy of favouring the minimisation of waste.

Interestingly, that dim little creature masquerading as leader of the Conservative Party was preening during the local election campaign about how Conservative councils had the best record for "recycling". But, as it turns out, the "unintended consequences" of the way that the government promotes recycling means that some of the country's highest-scoring local authorities - such as Tory-held Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, achieve their high figures by gathering green waste that it might have been more environmentally friendly not to collect at all.

The problem, we are told, arises from the government giving statutory incentives to recycle the highest possible tonnages, and garden waste collected for recycling gets subtracted at a rate of 100 percent from the amount of biodegradable waste a local authority is allowed to landfill. On the other hand, any waste that it has managed to save by handing out free home composters, for example, is credited at only 68 percent under the present system – "forcing" councils to go for collection.

The result is a huge growth in "free" (the inverted commas are mine – they aren't bloody well free!) kerbside collections that "has mobilised large quantities of waste, a large proportion of which could otherwise have remained outside municipal collection systems and quietly broken down at the end of people's gardens." Kerbside green waste collections have thus become the fastest growing form of council recycling, growing to 400,000 tons in 2005 from about 20,000 tons in 1997.

All this of course is adding massively to councils' costs, hence the calls yesterday for additional refuse collection charges – the final stage of a bureaucratic system gone mad.

As it happens, our own local council joined in the madness last week, delivering unasked two bijou collection bags (illustrated) to our front door - and then another two to our back - with details of a four-weekly collection cycle which just happens to be different from the four-weekly waste paper collection cycle. It is getting to the stage where we need to keep diary appointments to know what rubbish to put out, and when.

But we are not going to use the bags. We have been composting our garden waste for as long as I can remember and are not about to give the council material that we would prefer to use ourselves, just to help it reach some nominal quota. Nor do we need a "free" composter – why should taxpayers' money go on those?

Anyhow, the real point is that this insane scheme is driven by the EU's landfill directive, not that you would get any hint of this from the Telegraph article. Yet it is about time people woke up to the fact that a previously workable system of waste collection and disposal is being destroyed – at inordinate cost – by mad Brussels bureaucrats.

It is an indictment of the Eurosceptic movement, and especially UKIP, that it has not been able to major on this issue and come up with some saner, workable ideas for promoting recycling. Certainly, though, we cannot look to the Tories. Not only do they not "do" Europe, all we get on this is Peter Ainsworth, the shadow environment spokesman, bleating that "the government urgently needs to address this issue and get people to get rid of their waste in the most sustainable way - and that means in a home composter."

The man has compost for brains.

COMMENT THREAD

Paying through the nose

It was rather helpful of The Times today to inform us that Britain spends £2.6 billion on domestic waste collection and disposal, equivalent to £120 per household per year.

That gross figure provides a useful baseline against which to compare the costs imposed on us by its ill-conceived landfill directive, currently estimated at £5-8 billion a year, on top of an investment of £10 billion to provide the alternative disposal infrastructure.

In other words, courtesy of the EU, the costs of one of our most basic council services is to increase three to four-fold but such is the madness of our age and the paucity of public debate that, instead of railing against this entirely unneccessary burden, no less than Sir Michael Lyons is actively considering whether homeowners should paying a second tax to meet the expense.

Sir Michael is apparently considering this option as part of a range of proposals to reform council tax, telling us it's "a fairness issue". The dreadful man argues, "Why should people who don’t take recycling very seriously or have a lifestyle that generates a lot of waste be able to do that when their neighbours are being very careful not to generate waste and putting their energies into recycling?"

For sure, there is a fairness issue here, but not the one Sir Michael would care to raise: why should we pay four times as much for the collection and disposal of our rubbish just to satisfy an EU directive, especially as so much of the "recycled" material simply ends up in China to pollute their environment?

Bearing in mind that the Tories no longer "do" Europe, at least we had a half-way sensible comment from Caroline Spelman, the shadow secretary for local government, who, once she had got over the obligatory "greenie" bit, said, "the danger with a scheme like this is that it will increase fly-tipping by those who simply don't want to pay the charges."

And ain't that the truth. Many times we have reported that the current measures are leading to an epidemic of fly-tipping and, in some cases, so lucrative has it become that criminals are even moving out of drug dealing into illegal waste disposal because it is more lucrative.

Nor is this only a British phenomenon. Tucked in a report in The Independent last week, entitled "Italy is Europe's worst environmental offender", was the news that:

Among the more pernicious problems are the increasing involvement of Mafia-like gangs of criminals muscling into the disposal of hazardous waste: offering bargain prices to factories in northern Italy with dangerous waste to dispose of, trucking it to the south of the country, faking the documentation and dumping it in landfills or even in national parks.

All this reinforces one of those universal truths, that there is nothing so bad that an EU bureaucrat cannot make it worse. And, courtesy of Sir Michael, it looks as if we are going to have to pay through the nose for the privilege.

COMMENT THREAD

We can all save the climate

What do Manneken Pis and Johann Strauss II have in common? (No, since you ask, Strauss played the violin.) According to the BBC they will both, together with other statues around Europe, be dressed in t-shirts with the following message:

Showing the Earth in the universe, with a thermostat attached to it measuring its rising temperature, it includes the message: "You control climate change. Turn down. Switch off. Recycle. Walk".

Yes, it's another wizard idea from the Commission and its oleaginous president Barroso, who managed to get out of his expensive limo before he went into his expenisvely run office in order to give Europeans the message. (Now, that I think of it, the message may have been given actually inside one of those luxuriously appointed offices.)

The message is that we can all stop climate change. The mere fact that this has never happened before since the earth has existed does not deter our gallant Commissars. It stands to reason that people could not stop the mini-ice age, which started in the fourteenth century or prevent its cyclical end with the gradual warming up from the beginning of the nineteenth. They did not have the ultimate weapon – the European Union with its Commission.

Of course, both those statues are quite small. Will there be t-shirts for the bulldog-like Churchill in Parliament Square or General Napier in Trafalgar Square? In any case, don't know about the Manneken but I can't see Johann Strauss II being too pleased with the whole idea.

Inevitably, there is a website, whose purpose it is to educate people on climate change and what they can do about it. As it happens, education is the last thing the Commission and whoever thought of this latest whizz have in mind. If they did they would publish a great deal more about the scientific debates that are raging all over the world.

They would, for example, refer to a recent article in the Washington Times, which followed the arguments of several highly respected hurricane scientists, who cannot agree whether the severe weather of 2004 and 2005 around the southern coast of the United States is cyclical or the result of temperature change in the Indian Ocean.

Well, scientists may disagree, but Al Gore in his private plane and Commission President Barroso in his limousine know it for a fact: climate change means global warming, caused enirely by people using electric bulbs that are too bright, overfilling their kettles and not switching off the heating when they go out.

Oddly enough, the website does not mention the letter 60 Canadian scientists sent to the Prime Minister, in which they explained that Kyoto and all that went with it was not a sensible way of dealing with environmental problems.

No mention of the highly respected New Zealand scientists who cast doubt on the whole idea that it is human activity that is causing climate change, which does not happen to be any more dramatic than past experience.

No mention of the recent findings that the average temperature of the earth went up by no more than 0.7°C in the last 150 years and has, it appears, stopped rising in the last few years altogether.

Instead of which we get the following tendentious and scaremongering introduction:

The Earth is rapidly getting warmer. This change in the climate threatens serious and even catastrophic disruption to our economies, societies and to our natural environment. The warming is being mainly caused by 'greenhouse gases' that are released by human activities, in particular the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas. In the atmosphere, these gases trap the sun's heat in the same way as a greenhouse.

Even if it were true, switching light bulbs off is not going to make any difference. It is, after all, a truism that the richer a country is economically, the better its environment is and the readier it is to deal with the inevitable climatic disasters.

Compare and contrast the effect Katrina and the other hurricanes had on the United States last year to the effect their weaker brethren had had on the same area at the beginning of the twentieth century. The same hurricanes that cause the odd problem in Florida, reasonably quickly dealt with, devastate a place like Haiti, killing thousands of people and destroying what there is of an economy.

Since climatic changes are unpredictable and cannot be explained by one factor alone, the sensible thing would be to allow economic growth to continue in the West and to encourage it in other countries, so we can all deal with whatever the weather might throw at us. But to acknowledge that would be to deny the whole basis of "thinking" as shown by the Commission, and the scaremongering "environmentalists".

Entertainingly enough, the press release that tells us about this new and, no doubt, extremely expensive project, says this:

"You control climate change" is the title of an awareness raising campaign that European Commission President José Manuel Barroso and Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas will launch today in Brussels The campaign challenges individuals to make small changes to their daily routine in order to achieve significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.

It offers a wealth of practical and easy-to-do tips while aiming to give people a sense of personal responsibility and empowerment and help them contribute to the fight against climate change. Households in the EU are responsible for some 16% of the EU's total greenhouse gas emissions, most of which comes from the production and use of energy. EU Member States will be launching the campaign at national level over the next few days.

Fascinating. The Commission is the organization that has been lambasted repeatedly by the Court of Auditors for, among other things, having a culture of no responsibility. Nobody can be found who will take responsibility for anything.

Slightly more worryingly

The campaign also targets secondary school pupils. The Europa Diary distributed in more than 1.1 million copies at the beginning of each school year will include a section on climate change in September 2006. It will encourage students to sign a pledge to reduce their CO2 emissions, providing them with a form to track their efforts. This material will also be available on the website.

While, for the most part, school children pay little attention to what they are told at school, they are vulnerable to seemingly idealistic views and have no real understanding that these are not based on any real scientific proof.

What is so puzzling about the whole venture is the timing. Why now? Why go into overdrive about climate change, global warming, saving of energy just as scientists who have found it difficult to get a hearing in the past for their non-consensus views, are making ever louder noises debating, even denying the that consensus?

Not only is the Commission getting into a real tizz. Over on Daily Ablution, Scott Burgess has been following the saga of Johann Hari's near libellous comments about Björn Lomborg and the Independent's refusal even to acknowledge the latter's attempts to publish the truth.

Hizonner the Mayor of London is threatening to introduce "statutory carbon emission targets" even though he has no very clear idea of what that is or how such targets can be enforced.

Above all, we have the hysteria exhibited by the stars, moguls, critics and other hangers on at Cannes, most of whom have flown there by private planes and whose yachts guzzle up quite a large proportion of the earth's fuels, going into raptures over that old phony, Al Gore, whose own "humvee days" have long ago turned into decades. Think how much energy we could save if we did not have Al Gore.

As for the scientific debates, they are getting nastier with various media personalities weighing in and accusing the "heretics" of all kinds of sins instead of answering their points.

My own guess is that it is precisely because the so-called consensus is falling apart that its promoters are getting hysterical.

Kyoto is chuntering to its end with no visible effect. The most polluting countries (with Russia's exception) have not even bothered to sign up; those who have signed up have not reduced their emissions and, in some cases, have increased them; the only country whose emissions have gone down is the wicked United States; and new ideas of how to deal with climatic problems, based on developing technology, are gaining ground.

If you add to that the ever louder grumbling in the ranks of international scientists, you can quite understand why the Commission wants to make a last stand for global warming and personal accountability (though not, of course, their own).

COMMENT THREAD

Nuclear fission

Although Tony Blair has put the nuclear option "back on the agenda with a vengeance", his avowed enthusiasm is creating stresses in the European Union, where there is a considerable divergence of opinion on the utility of nuclear power.

This, reports Reuters could well impact on the attempt by EU member states to forge a common energy policy, highlighted by a meeting in Austria of energy and environment ministers this weekend.

For instance, Austria's environment minister, Josef Proell, believes that nuclear power "isn't the future.". He is to stage a debate in the EU parliament in June to discuss "strategic planning" on nuclear energy, when he will try to convince his EU partners to look at other sources such as renewable energy.

On the other hand, Finnish Environment Minister Jan-Erik Enestam, who will be in the chair when his country takes on the rotating presidency of the EU in July, believes that nuclear is a necessary, if temporary, solution. "Climate change will bring new elements to the discussion. It's not that black and white anymore," Enestam says. "If you have to choose among the existing resources and existing technology, you can't exclude nuclear power."

The Finns are already planning to add a fifth nuclear plant to their portfolio. The want to avoid using coal and prefer building its own plants to importing nuclear-generated electricity from Russia. "In Finland you have to choose between two evils: nuclear power or coal, and nuclear power is not as bad as coal," Enestam declares.

To add to the discord, his near-neighbour, Latvian Environment Minister Raimonds Vejonis, has other ideas. More than 60 percent of his population is against nuclear yet it relies on nuclear power plants in next-door Lithuania, from which it imports some of its electricity. The country will suffer after 2009 when Lithuania closes nuclear plants and no decision has yet been made on how to compensate for that loss.

In Germany, however, there is very little debate, as the government plans to phase out nuclear power completely. German environment minister Sigmar Gabriel argued that it is unfair to solve our energy problems and to put the waste to future generations. He also takes the view that, if industrialised nations chose nuclear energy, they will have fewer arguments to prevent countries such as Iran and North Korea from attempting to do the same.

Other major players, like Italy, Spain and Poland, have yet to declare their views but we do know that France is committed to expanding its nuclear capability.

The current technology, of course, still relies on nuclear fission – splitting the atom – but, as the arguments develop, it seems that this will not be the only nuclear fission in the EU. The member states also are – it seems – irreconcilably split.

COMMENT THREAD

Vote blue – go green

I reckon the headline to Rachel Sylvester's piece in the Telegraph today is spot on. "Voting for the BNP is about rage rather than race," it proclaims, a notion which entirely accords with my experience.

Sylvester then spoils it all by writing the piece underneath, positing that the motivation is "fear of change". This, she writes, "remains a powerful force". But then she did not write the headline.

The central theme though, is correct. Generally, people neither know nor care about the details of BNP policies, and certainly have no expectations of the party sweeping to power. Voting for them is simply an opportunity to put two fingers up to the political classes, reciprocating the contempt that they so obviously have for us all.

More to the point, it is a way of telling the Boy King what to do with his own, newly emergent BNP – the Be Nice Party – and where to stuff his "green revolution".

And there could be no better illustration of how firmly the Boy King has imbedded his head up his own backside with a slogan that is almost magnificent in its utter vacuity - "vote blue, go green".

Courtesy of the BBC, we also see how this brainless Tory Toff speaks to the "people" whom he so earnestly wishes to lead.

Prior to helping distribute recycling boxes to residents (i.e. posing for a photo-call holding a plastic box), he told reporters in Brentwood, Essex, that he wanted to see what he called "green growth" - a combination of economic growth and a sustainable environment.

"Some of the green lobby and a lot of the media tend to look at the environment and climate change as, look you've got a binary choice, you can either have economic growth or you can have a sustainable environment, and the truth is we've got to have both. We've got to have green growth," he says.

The trouble is chuck, we've got a "binary choice" when it comes to a vote. And you ain't it.

COMMENT THREAD

A climate of fear

As the Boy King trogs off to look at a melting glacier in Norway, the Wall Street Journal (Opinion Journal) yesterday offered an intriguing piece under the title "Climate of Fear", written by Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT.

His thesis is that global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence, who in turn are bolstering junk science to support alarmist claims about global warming. But, worst of all, writes Lindzen, scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libelled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.

Alarm rather than genuine scientific curiosity, Lindzen concludes, is essential to maintaining funding. And only the most senior scientists today can stand up against this alarmist gale, and defy the iron triangle of climate scientists, advocates and policymakers.

The worrying thing, of course, is that this phenomenon has been prevalent for some considerable time, and now covers a vast range of scientific activity.

I, myself, had personal experience of it when I was researching for my own PhD, carrying out a study of the quality of public-sector investigation of salmonella food poisoning.

My thesis was that, since huge tranches of public policy were based on the findings of public-sector investigators, the effectiveness of the policy depended, to a very great extent, on the accuracy of the conclusions drawn from investigations. It was, therefore, of some interest to measure that accuracy.

I chose as my focus, the enormous number of what were known as "egg-associated" food-poisoning outbreaks, re-investigating sixty of those which had been definitively reported by the authorities as having been "caused" by salmonella-infected eggs.

Using rigorous scientific criteria, I concluded that in only three of the sixty outbreaks was there sufficient evidence to support the assertion that the source had been infected eggs. In a considerable number, there was good evidence to suggest that the source of infection had been something else.

Not least, I seem to have discovered a new type of salmonella, one which – from data supplied in official records – was capable of causing illness before it had been consumed. This arose from five of my re-investigated outbreaks, where illness had occurred in the cohort before the eggs, which were subsequently attributed as the cause of the outbreak, had been consumed. In one case, illness had been detected three days before the eggs had even been delivered to the restaurant which became the focus of infection.

My general finding was that investigators tended in each case to formulate an a priori causal hypothesis, and then directed their investigations to supporting those hypotheses, discarding any information which refuted them. Much public money could be saved, I suggested, if they did not bother carrying out any investigations at all, but simply published their hypotheses as fact, the moment outbreaks were discovered.

However, the specific issue, relating to Lindzen's assertions, is that I had picked up on this theme as part of my general work and then sought to do a structured study within a university environment, as part of a PhD research project. Yet, when I approached a number of universities to take me on, intrigued as they were by my hypothesis, none would touch it. It was far too "risky" and contentious.

Eventually, one courageous department head did take me on (albeit, as long as I found my own funding), and became my supervisor. But it nearly cost him his department where most of the research work was financially supported by the then Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF).

On day, out of the blue, he was summonsed to London to attend what he thought was a review meeting with MAFF, to find himself ushered into a room packed with officials whose only interest was my research. My supervisor was told that it was "incompatible" with the other work being done in the department and either mine would have to go elsewhere, or funding would be withdrawn.

Eventually, a "deal" was stitched up, where it was agreed that I should be "quarantined" within the department and have no access to any MAFF-funded research – and nor would the department publicly support my work. It was a close run thing as, had funding been withdrawn, the department would have had to have closed down.

That experience, as Lindzen is indicating, is now the norm. Academia, far from being the repository of independent research, has been bought and paid-for by the political establishment, prey to lobby groups, its task to reinforce policy decisions and keep out dissident thought.

Behind all that is the EU, which controls much of the science funding in European universities, and has an almost total grip on political research, through its Monnet programme and its "framework" funding system. That is also true of climate science, which is in the grip of what Lindzen calls the "iron triangle of climate scientists, advocates and policymakers", bolstered by an ignorant and indifferent media which is interested only in the cheap, alarmist headline.

The idea of "independent" science, therefore, has become a hollow joke. As Lindzen rightly points out, it has been replaced by a "climate of fear". And it is that which, as he gazes at his melting glacier, the Boy King has bought into.

COMMENT THREAD