ULEZ – Another Imperial Con
Ulez Expansion Predicted to Cut Air Pollution by Just 1.5%
By Alex Kriel | Thinking Coalition | August 9, 2023
Listening to the discussion over Ulez expansion feels like an action replay of the way in which many were convinced to overreact to Covid, leading to policy responses which caused significantly more harm than good. The Ulez ‘discussion’ has all of the same elements, with modelled health benefits calculated by Imperial College and Mayor Khan’s justification that he is “saving lives”, implying that opponents are wannabe murderers. Of course, this time around, the public is thankfully much more sceptical.
In this short note, we wanted to set out how those ‘lives saved’ numbers are derived and to demonstrate that at best the numbers are seriously misrepresented and at worst completely wrong. In fact, applying the Government and Imperial’s own logic, there is a very strong case to say that the expansion of Ulez will, on balance, harm Londoner’s health when considering the downstream economic consequences of this policy.
The major flaw in Imperial’s model is the one-dimensional nature of its assumption that air pollution drives health and life expectancy. In the real world health is driven by a number of interacting factors with income being the primary driver. There are many assumptions one could dispute that (perhaps unsurprisingly) work towards inflating the claimed health benefits of reducing air pollution, but we focus only on the flaw of largely ignoring policy consequences.
The Imperial team presents several numbers, including: attributable deaths (3,600 to 4,100), improved life expectancy (five to six months) and life-years saved (6.1 million). We wanted to focus on the claimed benefits of the Mayor’s Transport Strategy in terms of life expectancy and life-years saved.
Before leaving attributable deaths, it is important to note that these are not in any sense deaths that can be avoided, nor are they deaths that are subject to reduction by the Transport Strategy. The figure appears to compare current death rates with death rates if all human emissions had been removed for all prior periods. It is a theoretical construct (similar to an unmitigated pandemic) and only a small fraction of this number would be theoretically impacted by road transport (around 15%). Only the going-forward numbers (life-years saved) relate to the Transport Strategy and there the benefits are relatively low at 0.4%. It is important to note that there has only ever been one death, of a young and chronically unwell girl ever recorded in England (56 million population) where the death certificate mentions air pollution. Tragic as this death clearly is, it again highlights the disconnect between the theoretical attribution number and actual deaths recorded; we suggest ignoring the attributable deaths figure.
Looking at the claimed benefits of implementing the Transport Strategy, it is possible for a layman to understand the main assumptions on which these health benefits are based. In summary, it is assumed that reducing 10 µg m-3 achieves roughly a 6% reduction in all cause mortality. Note however 10 µg m-3 is more than all anthropogenic PM 2.5 emissions as estimated for England as a whole, so any benefits are scaled down from 6%. So a 1 µg m-3 reduction generates roughly a 0.6% improvement in life expectancy (i.e., ten times less).
Looking at life-years saved and extended life expectancy, the key assumptions are poorly explained. For those in a hurry, the detail shows that all of the Transport Strategy initiatives to 2050 combined will deliver a projected 0.4% reduction in life-years lost to air pollution using projections to 2154. There is a claimed five to six month extension in life expectancy, so the life expectancy of a London male of around 80 years would be extended to around 80.4 years.
These gains are stated relative to a baseline and for some inexplicable reason the Imperial team has decided to use 2013 pollution levels to establish the baseline and in the process to ignore the available data for 2019. This serves to inflate the baseline.
The acid test is: are the results of modelling compatible with observed reality? And on that basis the Imperial Ulez modelling falls flat. The model covers the impact of the entire Transport Strategy to 2050 which covers many more steps than Ulez. The Imperial document is somewhat vague about what those steps are – they are cryptically referred to as 2025 LES, 2030 LES and 2050 LES. It is enough to note that the goal of Mayor Khan’s 2018 Transport Strategy is to “aim for 80% of all trips in London to be made on foot, by cycle or using public transport by 2041”. So the first thing to clarify is that the claimed 6.1 million saving of life years relates to a significant number of measures, well beyond Ulez expansion. In effect these combined steps will largely eliminate private car traffic.
The chart below is constructed from the Imperial material and shows that PM 2.5 µg m-3 population weighted (PWAC) pollution falls over a number of steps and Ulez on a standalone basis has a near zero impact. Also, you can also see that a fair chunk of gains have already been banked between 2013 and 2019.
The failure of Ulez to achieve any meaningful reduction in pollution is very clearly shown in a separate document prepared by Jacobs which looks at the impacts of Ulez only. The table below shows the impact of Ulez expansion on PM 2.5 µg m-3 concentration, with an estimated improvement of less than 2%.
There is a slightly better outcome for NOx pollutants which are reduced by 5.4% across Greater London. This feeds in to the health impact assessment which unsurprisingly shows near zero benefit from Ulez for PM 2.5 reductions, for most health-related metrics.
Looking at life expectancy, the report does acknowledge that due to the large population (around 8.9 million) and the extraordinary long time period over which these benefits are expected to crystalise (up to 2154) then there are around 1.5 billion life-years involved (years × population). For any stated benefit to be meaningful, it needs to referenced to the base case value. The 6.1 million life-years saved is then within the context of a total of around 1.5 billion life-years; this saving is around 0.4%. Correspondingly, the impact on life expectancy from all of the pollution schemes (not just Ulez) adds up to around 22 to 27 weeks additional life expectancy. In the context of male life expectancy of 80 years (roughly) this would improve to 80.4 years as a consequence of 30 years’ worth of restrictive climate policies (ignoring any economic consequences).
The core flaw in the calculation is the one-dimensional thinking that underpins this (and all similar calculations) in that all reductions in PM 2.5 concentrations lead to a reduction in the mortality rate. This thinking ignores any link between people’s incomes and health outcomes, which is the primary driver of health. This is the same dishonest cop out that Professor Ferguson made in his infamous Covid paper. This facilitates a myopic focus on ‘safety’ and generates solutions that do far more harm than good.
In setting out the methodology that states that health outcomes will improve with a reduction in air pollution on a more or less linear basis, the Government’s own figures show that real world data prove that this assumption is not correct (or at least over-simplified). Its own data for the regions of the U.K. show that (if anything) this relationship is reversed.
Life expectancy in Scotland is much lower despite having far and away the lowest concentration of anthropogenic PM 2.5 pollutants. Many studies with and between countries show this clearly (e.g. life expectancies by national deprivation deciles, England: 2018 to 2020).
In order to get a handle on how much more significant factors other than PM 2.5 can be, we looked at a recent paper that considers the impact of changes in different factors on life expectancy across 29 European countries (the paper also looks at each factor in isolation using multivariate analysis). The chart below shows the life expectancy impact of a 1% change in the listed factors. There are of course some caveats, but you can immediately see that economic activity dominates the outcomes with a 13-month gain in life expectancy for a 1% gain in GDP versus say a 2.7 month gain for a 1% change in PM 10-2.5. Also note there is no statistically significant relationship between CO2 and life expectancy.
In another section of the same paper the author states: “France and Sweden, some of the countries closest to their potential LE (life expectancies), are also amongst those with the highest NOx level.” The real message, though, is that if you dent people’s income by narrowly pursuing PM 2.5 reduction, you will, on balance, shorten life expectancy and not increase it. The Jacobs’ report confirms that there will be multiple negative impacts on business and economic activity. We guess that on balance Ulez will lower life expectancy when factoring in the impacts on business and family incomes, as well as quality of life considerations.
In the post Covid world, we have understood that politicians of all stripes will shamelessly use emotional manipulation in order to get reasonable people to comply with their unreasonable edicts. That is why understanding how reliable, or otherwise, attributable deaths, life-years saved and life expectancy figures are is so important. You can almost guarantee that these estimates will be manipulated and potentially used to rationalise illogical and damaging policies.With opaque models it is relatively easy to produce results to order.
The political process assumes that the individuals involved are able to understand competing objectives and arrive at a sensible compromise. However, we saw in the case of Covid that many politicians have limited scientific understanding and will tend to pursue unachievable safety, at any cost.
The State seems to be redefining its role with a narrow group of ideologically-driven technocrats setting somewhat arbitrary targets. Achieving those targets requires wholesale changes to people’s lives. Very often economic, mental health and other impacts are barely considered and historically established constitutional boundaries between the State and the citizen are often ignored.
In the case of Ulez expansion, the 59% of respondents to the public consultation who clearly opposed the expansion were simply ignored.
Various sops will no doubt be offered to voters, but is it important that readers realise that there is a direction of travel to these various steps. Finally, remember Albert Camus’s wise warning that, “The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.”
Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was an early critic of the Imperial Covid model. He is a founder of the Thinking Coalition, which comprises a group of citizens who are concerned about Government overreach.
BBC Admits to Smearing Anti-Ulez Protesters as ‘Far Right’
BY IAN PRICE | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 4, 2023
The BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) has responded to complaints about its news coverage of an anti-Ulez protest in London’s Trafalgar Square on Saturday, April 15th, 2023. BBC London News broadcast at the time that:
Local protestors and mainstream politicians were joined by conspiracy theorists and Far Right groups.
I was among many people to complain at the time, disgusted at the BBC’s smear. I was at the protest myself, the first of any kind that I had attended. Since my previous exposure to similar protests – such as those against the lockdowns over the course of the pandemic – was limited to watching clips on Twitter, I was slightly anxious. Were things likely to kick off? Were the police going to ‘kettle’ us all in a side street off the Strand?
I could not have been more wrong. I was overwhelmed by how many families were there, abundant small children clambering up the bases of Landseer’s lions. There were a handful of Tory politicians some of whom spoke from the platform, but there was no other political presence whatsoever.
When I saw the BBC London news coverage, I was therefore appalled. I wasn’t too concerned about the claim that there were a few conspiracy theorists there – quite a few placard-holders were plainly ‘Team James’ – but “Far Right groups” seemed to me something for which there was no evidence at all. This appeared to be an attempt on the BBC’s part to suppress dissent towards the Ulez expansion by smearing opponents. This struck me as a sinister turn from the national broadcaster and so I complained.
On April 21st, the BBC responded to my complaint as follows:
BBC London had deployed a reporter to the protest and she witnessed, and documented, first hand, motifs on tabards and placards with explicit Nazi references, along with other epithets about world order and democracy.
I walked around the protest for about three hours on April 15th and I must have missed the explicit Nazi references, presumably displayed by the “Far Right groups”. I complained again, asking for evidence.
On May 12th the BBC rejected my additional complaint as follows:
We remain satisfied our BBC London reporter gave an honest account of what she witnessed that day.
At this point, I escalated the complaint to the ECU, one of 44 people to do so on the grounds of both accuracy and impartiality. Today the BBC acknowledged the following:
In relation to “Far Right groups”, we recognised that the [conspiracy theory] groups named above might have Far Right (or indeed Far Left) adherents, but did not consider this to be evidence of the presence of “Far Right groups”. The programme-makers directed our attention to the deployment by some demonstrators of Nazi imagery, symbolism and slogans directed against the Mayor of London which we accepted was consistent with tactics used predominantly by certain Far Right groups, but we saw no grounds for concluding that they were used exclusively by such groups. We also noted the presence of an individual who seemed, from social media postings, very likely to have been associated with the presence of a Far Right group at a previous demonstration, but the evidence fell short of establishing that he was an adherent of that group, and we saw no evidence that other representatives of the group were present. While it was clear from our dealings with the programme-makers that the statement about the presence of Far Right groups was made in good faith, we assessed the evidence differently. In our judgement it was suggestive of the presence of Far Right groups but fell short of establishing that such groups had in fact been represented among the demonstrators. This aspect of the complaint has been upheld.
This shows pretty clearly that the idea of “Far Right groups” being present at the protest was a complete fiction. Feelings are running high about Khan and some placards quite possibly likened his administrative style to infamous dictators of the past but for anyone to have spun this as evidence of “Far Right groups” is a stretch to say the least. As for the “individual who seemed, from social media postings, very likely to have been associated with the presence of a Far Right group at a previous demonstration”, the words ‘straws’ and ‘clutching’ spring to mind.
In addition to upholding the complaint about accuracy, the BBC has also partially upheld the complaint on impartiality which derives from the close resemblance of the BBC’s language in its news report to that of Khan himself at a People’s Town Hall in Ealing in March. When asked about people’s misgivings about the Ulez expansion, he said that its opponents were “in coalition with the Far Right” and “joining hands with some of those outside who are part of a Far Right group”.
The BBC has now acknowledged the “impression of bias” and upheld this part of the complaint, while spinning it as something of an accident, something that “might well have been perceived as lending a degree of corroboration to the Mayor’s comments”.
While it is a step in the right direction for the BBC to uphold two aspect of the complaints, there remain unanswered questions about its broader coverage of Ulez and to what extent its coverage is being unduly influenced by Sadiq Khan.
Consider the article in the Daily Express published on 24th June about a senior producer at the BBC that made contact with Reform U.K. London Mayoral candidate Howard Cox to blow the whistle on the BBC’s suppression of coverage critical of the Ulez expansion. (Cox, by the way, was also in attendance at the April demo but had not at that point declared as a Mayoral candidate):
The leak to Reform U.K. Mayoral candidate Howard Cox… reveals that Mr. Khan had applied pressure on the BBC over reporting the issue. It said that journalists wanting to run stories now needed top level clearance over something that is set to be a major electoral issue in the London Mayor election and general election both next year.
The Express article went on to explain email exchanges that the senior BBC producer had received:
The BBC producer was told in an email to news staff from Dan Fineman, Senior News Editor BBC South East: “If any platforms are doing a story on Ulez charges in the South and Southeast we now need to do a mandatory referral to Jason Horton or Robert Thomson (re) outstanding complaint with the Mayor of London which is very live at the moment.”
Jason Horton is the BBC’s Director of Production for BBC Local Services and Robert Thomson is Head of the BBC in London and the East. This suggests a level of collusion between very senior staff at the BBC and Sadiq Khan with a direct influence over editorial approaches to news coverage of anti-Ulez protests.
It was also reported by the whistleblower that a BBC London investigation into Ulez was now been paused because of the Mayor of London’s pressure on the BBC.
In short, Khan appears to be exercising at the very least some form of influence over the BBC’s coverage of anti-Ulez protests. This is not an “impression of bias” – this more closely resembles a real, undiluted bias against anti-Ulez campaigners on the part of the nation’s publicly-funded broadcaster at the behest of the Labour Mayor of London. The BBC has come up with a partial and grudging apology but I suspect that the truth about its willingness to suppress dissent with “Far Right” smears is more extensive than it’s prepared to admit. I hope that doesn’t make me a “conspiracy theorist”.
Bernie Sanders Leads Calls To Prosecute “Illegal Misinformation” On Climate Change
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | August 3, 2023
Before there was the narrative pushed by the mainstream media that the 2016 US presidential election was rigged – there were the Democratic primaries, regarding which the evidence of actual rigging taking place has been much more solid.
The victim was hapless presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders – but now, this once great hope of left-wing citizens seems to be turning increasingly authoritarian, at least in his rhetoric.
He is, essentially, providing a solution to a problem that shouldn’t exist (not in a democracy) – namely, what to do, legally, to stop political opponents?
In this case, it’s about corporate skeptics around the “climate change panic.” And Sanders has the answer – prosecute them, and if found guilty, put them in prison.
Sounds fairly extreme, but here we are.
In a letter co-signed by Senator Sanders, a group of his Democrat colleagues is asking the US Department of Justice (DoJ) to do just such a thing, aimed at what’s termed the fossil fuel industry.
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
And although it seems careful to point the finger and demand retribution from companies that are accused of, basically, organizing campaigns to improve their business (shocking (NOT) – and, that business anyway is far from being illegal) – once a precedent of legally hounding dissenters is set, it can go anywhere.
ExxonMobile, Shell, and other giants are mentioned, perhaps as a way to soften the blow of that reality, but if what the senators are asking is to become reality, next up could be journalists, and then social media users, and just in general, it’s turtles all the way down.
Sanders and his companions would not want any of their actions to be seen that way, naturally. So they assert that, “the fossil fuel industry has had scientific evidence about the dangers of climate change and the role that burning fossil fuels play in increasing global temperatures for more than 50 years.”
The letter continues: “To coordinate their illegal misinformation campaign, the fossil fuel industry funded a multimillion-dollar plan through the American Petroleum Institute that sought to make climate change a ‘non-issue.’”
But the exact same argument could be used (in court) against any “regular Joe” not into the whole climate change – in court, down the line, should such extreme red lines as requested by the letter get established.
Of course, there’s no way to say that will happen – but also, that it won’t.
Kind of the same argument that climate change skeptics are trying to make about the climate change policy push.
The Pandelusion
BY HUGH WILLBOURN | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JULY 24, 2023
I’ve been recording the audio version of my new book, The Bug in our Thinking. In it I quote Carl Sagan from 1996:
We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it? …
Science is more than a body of knowledge, it’s a way of thinking. A way of sceptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask sceptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be sceptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along.
Sagan was on the money. Every day brings news of more absurdities from charlatans in science, education, politics and media. To quote myself, from the same book: “Never have so many been so wrong about so much.”
Why is this happening?
If I could answer that in a couple of paragraphs I would not have had to write a whole book. Here, I will focus on just one element. Underneath all the dangerous and troubling beliefs about gender, climate, race, migration, medicine and vaccination lies a psychological problem. Too many people believe things that are not true. This is the new normal. Let’s call it the Pandelusion.
The Pandelusion – thinking and doing the ‘right thing’ – is the worldview relentlessly promoted by most of the media and driven by bad science and big money.
This doesn’t require a conspiracy by the way. That is just what the profit motive will do when untrammelled by conscience or virtue. For the controlling minority of society it is extremely lucrative to promote the Pandelusion. For the majority, the result is an expensive, destructive, disempowering rip-off.
It would take an encyclopaedia to itemise and refute each of the delusions one at a time. In fact it already has. On websites and Substacks and in books and scholarly journals millions of words have been written refuting every one of the dominant delusions with rational argument and factual evidence – yet the delusions are still in the ascendant. The encyclopaedia of hard evidence and common sense is ignored by most of the mainstream media and censored or ignored by complicit scientists.
It is extremely depressing to see that the majority of the population remain convinced by the Pandelusion. They are accustomed to being guided by orthodoxy. In good times that is not such a bad strategy. In hard times, and very specifically in these hard times, it does no good at all. All around us are hundreds of thousands of people who have been seriously injured by doing what they were told was ‘the right thing’. It takes time, independence, courage, humility, encouragement and good fortune to build the habit of trusting your own judgement even when all the facts are not available.
Now that lockdowns and the uptake of the staggeringly ‘safe and effective’ vaccines have set the precedent, the next bonanza is the climate emergency and orthodox opinion is being boosted, adjusted and streamlined to serve the interests of those who have positioned their investments to profit from it.
Externalities
Do you remember when environmentalists used to talk about ‘externalities’? Externalities, you may recall, are the costs of a service or product which are not paid by the immediate user but by society at large. The costs of driving a car, for example, are not just purchase, fuel and maintenance. The external costs are exhaust emissions and tyre wear particulates, the motorways, the loss of mediaeval town centres to create road systems and car parks, the loss of market share for public transport, the cost of road traffic accidents, and so on and on.
It is helpful and illuminating to consider externalities when assessing the overall impact of a policy. Recently, however, the term has fallen out of favour amongst governments, environmentalists and the mainstream media. Why might that be?
The externalities of Net Zero are mind-bogglingly vast: environmental, economic, social and, for some, existential. Consider just one small element of the path to Net Zero: electric vehicles. The carbon cost of their manufacture means they have to be driven for nearly 10 years before there is a net carbon benefit. Cobalt mining in the Congo is environmentally destructive and exploitative of the local population. Dependency on manufacture in China creates huge political and economic weaknesses. I could go on, but you already know this and much, much more.
The externalities of lockdown were destructive beyond measure: the emotional abuse of elders dying alone, the sabotage of education in schools and universities, the bankruptcies and destruction of thousands upon thousands of small businesses, the depression, the abuse, the suicides and more.
The externalities of Covid vaccination, as we all know, without a shadow of a doubt, are ‘extremely rare’ because the vaccines are so very, very, very, very safe and effective. Nevertheless the vaccines have a remarkable correlation (not causation! Heaven forfend) with a plague of evil coincidence fairies and uncounted cancers, TIAs, myocarditis, heart disease, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and a huge range of other ailments, injuries and disabilities.
The externalities of catering to a tiny number of transgender activists are expensive, disproportionate and insulting and dangerous to women.
The externalities of woke policies in education include rendering academics too frightened to promote independence of thought. Not a great outcome for education.
I can stop listing externalities now – you can think of plenty of them that follow from every Government policy from migration to taxation.
No wonder the mainstream doesn’t talk about externalities any more. They are not to be mentioned.
The orthodoxy has aligned its messages across different platforms by means of helpful, fact-checking, billionaire-backed NGOs. All the bad science, the abstract thinking, the experts, the absurdities from wokery to environmental zealotry, the emotional incontinence and plain stupidity have become one overarching right think’.
It is all a single dictatorial blob of grandiose self-righteousness. The Pandelusion with its Pharisaic acolytes guides 100% of BBC output and at least 90% of media content throughout the Western world.
The power of the Pandelusion is immense.
That is terrifying and horribly depressing.
Some days I feel utterly defeated as I read, yet again, of more moronic orthodoxy.
And yet, and yet, I see a glimmer of hope.
Here is the weakness. Precisely because the Pandelusion has become a single, overarching, dominant orthodoxy, any flaw or weakness in any part of it can affect the whole thing. One tiny little crack anywhere in the whole monstrous edifice has the possibility of advancing, little by little by little, so that it will all, eventually, fall down.
All is not lost. We don’t need to challenge the whole Pandelusion or the big, embarrassing controversies about climate science confirmation bias or the magnificent safe and effective vaccines (Blessings be upon their profits forever, Amen). Now we can just chip away at one small, apparently insignificant, peripheral belief and open up one little crack. Then we can walk away and let the crack spread throughout the whole belief system – all by itself.
Those undiscussed externalities are impinging on more and more people’s everyday lives and they don’t like it. As people reject heat pumps, sabotage Ulez cameras, refuse smart meters, and electric cars, and protest against LTNs and 15-minute cities, they are discovering that those who claim to ‘know better’ know very little at all, and often, it turns out, are misrepresenting the science and even sometimes are lying. And the more they research the more inconvenient facts they unearth. In Germany a rebellion against dominant orthodoxy has gained power in a district council election. In the Netherlands the Farmer-Citizen movement (the BBB) has become the third-largest political force in the country. In Spain, Sweden and Italy there are flickers of sanity.
Let’s talk
So let’s talk about externalities. Not the big ones, just the little ones. Like, “Oh Net Zero! Yay! but… I’m not totally sure about the cost-effectiveness of heat pumps.” Let’s say “Yay, Electric vehicles! … except how quickly, I wonder, will the authorities be able to upgrade the national grid to cope with charging them?”
Let’s talk about how 15-minute cities could be utterly brilliant – except maybe there might lots of traffic jams on the ring roads when you take your kids to karate. Let’s talk about how marvellous furlough was, it’s just a shame about inflation.
Let’s talk about how puzzled we are about the little white lies from our governments, about the police who have stopped policing, and the strange, inexplicable inaccuracy of predictions that haven’t come true.
Let us keep tap, tap, tapping away at the monolithic Pandelusion until we make the smallest little crack. Then in that crack, plant tiny little seeds of doubt – and walk away. The light of day will nourish those seeds and the seedlings will enlarge the crack and reality will finish the job. The hypnotic trance can be broken.
There has already been too much death, destruction and conflict. There will be more. But perhaps if we all keep talking we might be able to save some people and salvage a society worth living in.
The Bug in our Thinking and the Way to Fix It is available in the U.K. here. For the rest of the world, for the ebook – and in a week or two the audiobook – you can find it on your national Amazon store.
Dancing COVID Nurses That Supported Draconian Mandates Switch To Climate Change
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | July 26, 2023
Perhaps one of the most unsettling narrative relationships during the covid pandemic lockdowns was the assertion by various governments, think-tanks and media pundits that the mandates weren’t just good for “stopping the spread,” they were also good for “saving the environment” from what they claim will be inevitable Apocalyptic climate change. While the covid agenda has all but disappeared thanks to millions of people and half the states in the US rejecting the restrictions, climate hysteria is still alive and well.
One of the most obnoxious trends in covid propaganda was the constant TikTok dance videos. Dancing politicians, dancing talk show hosts and dancing nurses all telling us to comply while frolicking around like maniacs. Well, it’s not over, because the dancing covid nurses are back, and now they’re here to tell us that accepting carbon controls is just as important as the mandates.
Beyond the numerous question on how nurses managed to have time to make so many group TikToks if the hospitals were “overrun” with patients dying of covid as the media asserted for the first year of the pandemic, we must also ask: If they lied about the effectiveness of the mandates, why should we listen to them about climate change?
Not one draconian policy enforced by governments made any difference whatsoever in the transmission of the covid virus. The lockdowns were pointless. The masks were pointless. Social distancing was pointless. And the official median Infection Fatality Rate of covid is a mere 0.23%, which means that 99.8% of people were never under any threat from the disease anyway. These facts were well known by medical professionals by early 2021, yet many of them continued to push the mandates.
Invariably, as the summer heats up so does the hype surrounding climate controls which would do little or nothing to shift the existing state of the Earth’s temps. “Record temps” are often touted, but these records are limited to a short time from of around 140 years of official data (since the 1880s). But what about before then? When we look at the real history of the Earth’s climate, the temps today are incredibly mild. Not only that, but the global warming events of the past all occurred without human involvement.
One has to wonder, if this is the case, why are no carbon control proponents or climate scientists talking about it? Is the situation much like covid, where they tell you to “believe the science” except for the science that contradicts their claims? And let’s not forget, these same people have been telling us the Earth is on the verge of burning for a very long time.
People stopped idolizing nurses after the pandemic scare. Dancing for the climate feels more like a desperate act to regain relevancy, rather than legitimate activism.
German Business Fears Best Days Behind It as Economy Crushed by Loss of Russian Energy
By Ilya Tsukanov | Sputnik | July 24, 2023
European industrial behemoth Germany has found itself among the nations hit hardest by the West’s attempt to “punish” Russia for its military operation in Ukraine, with industrial output slumping and the country sinking into a recession earlier this year after losing access to the cheap and reliable supply of Russian hydrocarbons.
German business, administrative, and government leaders have expressed widespread dissatisfaction with the government’s energy and economic policy, and expressed fears that the Central European industrial powerhouse’s economy may have “passed its zenith,” with its best days behind it.
A survey of 484 company board members, managing directors, government ministers, and other senior decision-makers by the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research for German media has found that only 24 percent of the country’s managerial class is satisfied with Economic and Climate Minister Robert Habeck’s job performance, down from 91 percent just a year ago.
Fewer than a quarter of those surveyed expect things to improve over the next six months, with two thirds saying there’s “little chance” the country can restore its lost international competitiveness, and 76 percent saying they don’t believe Habeck or the Ministry of Economic Affairs has the interests of German business in mind to a sufficient degree.
Among the top five problems cited by managers which hamper Germany’s competitiveness are high energy costs (77 percent), a shortage of skilled workers (70 percent), excessive government regulation (68 percent), a backlog in digitization programs (65 percent), and dilapidated infrastructure (61 percent).
58 percent of those polled said Germany appears to have “passed its zenith” economically, with just 22 percent expecting the economy to pick up again.
About three quarters of respondents expressed criticism of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Traffic Light coalition (which includes Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, the Greens – represented by Habeck and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, and the Free Democratic Party). Satisfaction with the coalition government has dropped from 62 percent in 2022 to 21 percent now, with 65 percent of those polled suggesting the coalition’s policies are “weakening the country.”
The Allensbach Institute conducted its survey between June 13 and July 7, with the 484 businessmen and officials polled including 89 board members of large companies, 18 ministers, and 28 heads of firms.
The German economy officially sunk into a recession in May after economic growth shrunk by 0.3 percent in the first three months of 2023.
In the aftermath of the escalation of the Donbass crisis into a full-blown Russia-NATO proxy war in Ukraine in February 2022, Germany has faced all the problems other Western countries have related to the decision to decouple themselves economically from Russia, like high inflation and spiking energy prices. However, as Europe’s main industrial economy, Germany’s crisis has been even more painful for local businesses, which have expressed concerns about the loss of competitiveness to other global behemoths like the US and China due to the energy-intensive nature of their products.
Washington added insult to Germany’s injuries last year after announcing federal subsidies to certain “green” industries, effectively trying to entice European industry to relocate to the United States for tax breaks and cheaper energy.
Russian President Vladimir Putin warned in May 2022 that decoupling the European economy from Russian energy resources would threaten the entire region with widespread deindustrialization and loss of competitiveness.
Last month, German Finance Minister Christian Lindner announced that cuts in the budget had forced Berlin to halt additional contributions to the European Union’s budget.
“Germany is both an important supplier for other European countries and an important buyer. A lasting recession in the German economy will certainly have significant effects on France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, and the Netherlands,” Paris-based economist Jacques Sapir told Sputnik earlier this month.
“If this recession lasts until next spring, the economies of the countries mentioned will also go into depression, which in turn will affect the German economy even more,” Sapir predicted, characterizing Berlin and Europe’s anti-Russian sanctions policy as “a form of suicide.”
The heat is getting to everyone’s head
Heatwave across Europe on the morning of 10 July 2023 via ESA
By Alex Starling | Reaction | July 21, 2023
Nothing beats a good silly-season panic, it seems, but the latest handwringing about Summer heat is surely a step too far. Yes, it’s hot – “Southern Europe on fire” – but is this unusual when the jet stream is aligned as it is now, with hot Saharan air being pulled up from Africa? Judging by recent reporting, you’d be forgiven for thinking the end is nigh. There’s a climate emergency, didn’t you know?
Such scaremongering is of course a free pass, as usually no one really checks up on what actually takes place, but the catastrophic outcome can be milked to its full potential. “Drizzly day in Derby” never did sell any papers.
However, the fourth estate does have an obligation to present its viewers and readers with accurate information. This is where the story gets interesting – this is not just a case of eye-rolling pushback against apocalyptic hyperbole. Ranging from casual sloppy reporting to highly targeted attempts to influence the narrative, there is now a weight of evidence demonstrating the existence of a systemic bias towards catastrophising otherwise run-of-the-mill data.
Consider the following vignettes.
It is currently hot in Southern Europe. Earlier this month the European Space Agency (ESA) issued an attractively-coloured map as part of a press release forecasting air temperatures of 48°C in Sardinia and Sicily that would be “potentially the hottest temperatures ever recorded in Europe”. The quotable quote was suitably amplified by the media, only this time it was picked up by astute observers who pointed out that the ESA had conflated land temperatures with the much cooler air temperatures at the standard 2m measuring height (i.e. while you might be able to fry an egg on tarmac, the same egg suspended 2m on the ground will take much longer to become a culinary delight). The ESA subsequently issued a clarification, with corrections being issued by media organisations such as Der Spiegel which had picked up the original story.
A recent article in this publication also came to my attention. Walter Ellis wrote a piece about urban migration in Zaragoza in Spain. Fascinating though it was, he included some doom-laden forecasts regarding an ongoing summer drought: “It hasn’t rained here for months and the [official forecast] prognosis is for more – that is to say, less – to come… today, as a direct result of climate change, temperatures even in the more northerly regions, including Aragon, are at record highs”. Walter is just relaying official forecasts – hardly a mortal sin and you would hope official forecasts could be relied upon. But a slightly inconvenient truth is that these forecasters managed to get these (very short-term!) predictions completely wrong – the Iberian Peninsula was given an absolute drenching throughout May and June. Oops.
None of this would particularly matter if this idle chatter about the weather was just that; reporting on meteorological curiosities du jour. But quoting Twain: “A lie can travel halfway round the world and back again while the truth is putting on its boots”. And these weather untruths – whether they be honest mistakes, sloppy reporting or cynical ploys – tend to have one thing in common: they are seemingly always yoked to a great article of faith. That is, they are always indicative of a climate ‘emergency’, or at least ‘climate change’ (the old term ‘global warming’ seems to have temporarily gone out of fashion following various postponements of the previously imminent Armageddon).
Walter Ellis’s passing comment mentioned above lays the blame for an (incidentally totally incorrect) forecast of ongoing drought “directly on climate change”, begging the question about this direct causal link given that the prediction did not come to pass. The ESA is able to state that as “climate change takes grip, heatwaves such as this are likely to be more frequent and more severe, with far-reaching consequences”. A Met Office spokesman recently produced this cryptic quote in The Times : “As we get this climate warming, the extremes are becoming more extreme”, in an article worrying about a temporary warm spell in Greenland when the actual data shows that the snow mass was way above average at the height of summer. Even Reaction – if you can believe it – has managed to publish bold conjecture: “As temperatures continue to rise, heatwaves will become more severe. It’s crucial that governments worldwide take swift and decisive action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions immediately… while we can slow down the rate of global warming, the effects of climate change will continue to be experienced in the future”.
These are not cherry picked examples – this climate Lysenkoism is given blanket coverage. The message is ubiquitous (albeit sometimes subliminal) and in starker terms can be summarised as: “hot weather is caused by climate change, and mankind has caused climate change by producing CO2. There is an existential emergency!”
This ‘consensus’ is so consensual that it seemingly needs to be rammed home at every opportunity – almost as if this message (rather than the planet) is fragile, a complex construct that needs protection from awkward questions or detailed analysis. Grand proclamations and joint public statements are made by very serious organisations declaring The Truth that the faithful shall adhere to. Data is continually adjusted such that the graphs have suitable hockey sticks, and academics behind the scenes really know what they are doing. Armies of sycophants can be trusted to hound those who merely report on the weather without anchoring it to a climate scare, and senior sympathisers within the BBC enforce ‘appropriate’ edits and encourage activists to “flag similar cases in the future so they can adapt the content accordingly”.
Or consider Quentin Letts. He was court-martialled to have committed a “serious” breach of BBC rules on impartiality after producing a light-hearted Radio 4 programme entitled “What’s the point of the Met Office?” The recording was so offensive that it was eviscerated from BBC Sounds, lest a member of the public should stumble on such heresy. Not only that, the BBC has claimed that Letts had ignored a pre-production agreement “never to touch on climate change” – Letts categorically denies that this was ever agreed, let alone discussed. And in academia, even if the occasional journal paper with the ‘wrong’ conclusions does slip through the peer-review process, publishers can be relied on to create murky procedural grounds for retraction, especially when newspapers like The Guardian apply a modicum of pressure and editors are made to “think of the implications of publishing”.
That is quite a statement. Scientific curiosity is sidelined by today’s regime, which is tough on thought crime and tough on the causes of thought crime. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command”: do not, under any circumstance, ask questions about recent cold weather events and records – which have seemingly abounded of late. Did you know that the Antarctic has been particularly and persistently cold in recent years? That the snow pack in California has been at extraordinarily high levels, resulting in mind-blowing skiing and white-water rafting conditions? That China and much of Siberia experienced record cold earlier in 2023? And that miserable and cold weather has persisted in Australia for many years now?
These are just anecdotes about the weather – our climate changes, after all. We should keep a weather (!) eye on this, as it was not that long ago that we were warned of an imminent ice age, and the earth’s magnetic field has been waning over the last century. Why don’t the BBC and The Guardian investigate and report on these fascinating phenomena rather than regale us with anecdotes about hot weather, as decreed by ‘Group Sustainability Directors’ who get to post-edit technical output within their organisations?
Perhaps, though, we should be grateful that the green lobby – this veritable hydra of loosely aligned eco-activists, shrieking media and sustainable energy salesmen – are there to protect ‘The Science’ from coming to harm at the hands of the scientific method.
Because surely – surely? – the public at large will eventually notice this pseudoscientific quackery and reject increasingly desperate attempts to apply cancel culture techniques to silence or ridicule heretics. Consider Dr John Clauser, the recipient of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, who recently criticised the climate emergency narrative, calling it “a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people” and that “there is no climate crisis and that increasing CO2 concentrations will benefit the world”. People with such credentials should have their hypotheses examined — not shouted down.
How much more hot air will we have to put up with until a more reasoned debate ensues? It is clear to many that nihilistic climate alarmism is stopping us from investing in reliable energy and pursuing economic growth. If we continue down this Lysenkoist path, we risk deindustrialisation and pauperisation, which would spell an end to the quality of life that we have enjoyed in recent decades – and that our forebears could only dream of.
Greta Thunberg Gives Finger to Opponents of New EU Environmental Legislation
By Robert Kogon | Brownstone Institute | July 22, 2023
Greta Thunberg was photographed at the European Parliament in Strasbourg last Wednesday smiling broadly while flipping a double-bird – apparently to the opponents of heavily contested new EU environmental legislation known as the “Nature Restoration Law”.
According to the German news site Merkur.de, it was a “winner’s gesture” – if not the most sporting one – because at its last week’s session, the parliament approved the legislation, with some amendments, by the notably slim margin of 336-300. A prior motion to reject the proposal outright was defeated by the even slimmer margin of 324-312.
The proposed Nature Restoration Law, one of the main components of the European Commission’s “Green Deal,” would require 20 percent of allegedly degraded EU land and sea to be “restored” by 2030. (See, for instance, the factsheet on the law here.) A modified version of the proposal which was already rejected in the parliament’s Environment Committee would have raised this figure even to 30 percent.
Fearing the impact of such “restoration” on the livelihoods of farmers and fishers, European agricultural and fishery groups have vigorously opposed the proposal, and it was also rejected by both the parliament’s agricultural and fisheries committees.
The largest group in the European Parliament, the “conservative” European People’s Party (EPP), likewise opposed the legislation. Ironically, the largest national delegation within the EPP group is the German Christian Democrats of none other than European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen. Nonetheless, the legislation only managed to escape outright rejection in the full parliament thanks to 15 EPP members breaking ranks and voting with the Greens, the Social Democrats and the Left group. (See roll-call here, p. 52.)
It should be noted that, despite the Schadenfreude evident in Greta Thunberg’s “winner’s gesture,” the Nature Restoration Law has not now been passed.
Rather, the European Parliament’s approval of the legislation means that the text will now be the subject of so-called “trilogue” negotiations involving representatives of the three main EU institutions: the Commission, the Parliament, and the Council (in which EU member states are directly represented). The final text will then be resubmitted to the parliament at some future date.
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From the Archives
British weapons and personnel doing much of the killing in Yemen
Press TV – June 18, 2019
A detailed report published by the Guardian newspaper has shown how Britain is massively contributing to Saudi Arabia’s devastating war on Yemen as it suggests that London is not only supplying the bombs that fall on Yemenis, but it provides the personnel and expertise that keep the war going.
The comprehensive report by Arron Merat published on Tuesday showed that Britain was doing much of the killing in Yemen as the country continues to provide Saudi Arabia with everything it needs to turn its southern impoverished neighbor into a graveyard.
“Every day Yemen is hit by British bombs – dropped by British planes that are flown by British-trained pilots and maintained and prepared inside Saudi Arabia by thousands of British contractors,” said Merat in the report. … continue
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