Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Why the Net Zero Policy is Illogical

BY NICK MACLEOD | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | DECEMBER 17, 2022

The U.K. Net Zero Carbon policy (UK NZC) is a Government policy offered as a solution to a problem that involves a range of academic disciplines. As well as being complex, the science of anthropogenic carbon-based global warming is controversial. Although some climate scientists insist that it is ‘settled’, there are many dissenters, as an internet search or a trip to a good bookshop will confirm.

The multi-disciplinary nature of climate science coupled with differing views among experts makes it almost impossible for a layman to follow the arguments, let alone assess the evidence and come to an informed opinion. Despite these apparent difficulties, I’ll argue that it is possible to establish a simple framework that can clarify complex questions – in this case, “How likely is it that UK NZC will be an effective response to global warming? – without requiring specialist knowledge. I also show how the approach can be used to identify, measure and illustrate differences of opinion.

Start from a small number of statements that make up the Net Zero commitment.

  1. The Earth must actually be warming.
  2. The warming must pose a genuine and serious threat to life on Earth.
  3. The warming must be man-made. Specifically, it must be caused by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere arising from human activity.
  4. The U.K.’s NZC policy must bring about a meaningful global reduction of atmospheric carbon. That is, it must either make a significant reduction in its own right, or it must set an example that persuades other countries to reduce their own carbon emissions, to a degree sufficient to stop the warming.

For UK NZC to be effective, statements 1-4 must all be correct. If any one of them is false, the policy will fail, either because it doesn’t lead to sufficient carbon reduction, or because the policy wasn’t necessary in the first place.

The next step is to define a view (with respect to statements 1-4) as a set of probabilities p1, p2, p3, p4, which represent the respective degrees of belief placed in those statements. For example, the view of a particular climate scientist, Expert A, might be expressed as:

(p1, p2, p3, p4)= (0.8, 0.5, 0.2, 0.2), which means that Expert A is:

  • 80% sure that statement 1 – the Earth is warming – is true;
  • 50% sure that the warming is life-threatening (statement 2);
  • 20% sure that statement 3 is correct – warming is the result of human activity;
  • 20% sure that UK NZC will bring about a meaningful global reduction of atmospheric carbon one way or another.

Expert A rates the likelihood of all four statements being correct, i.e., UK NZC being effective, as:

P=p1 × p2 × p3 × p4 = 0.8 × 0.5 × 0.2 × 0.2 = 0.016.

If the view of a second expert, Expert B, with respect to statements 1-4, is:

(q1, q2, q3, q4) = (0.9, 0.5, 0.8, 0.3)

then a comparison with Expert A’s view shows that:

  • Expert B has a stronger overall belief than Expert A that UK NZC will be effective (Q=q1 × q2 × q3 × q4 = 0.9 × 0.5 × 0.8 × 0.2 = 0.108, versus P=0.016;
  • Both A and B agree that the Earth is warming (p1=0.8; q1=0.9);
  • Both of them are equally unsure whether that poses a significant threat to life on Earth (p2=0.5; q2=0.5);
  • They differ on the cause of the warming. Expert A doubts that it is man-made, whereas Expert B believes strongly that it is (p3=0.2; q3=0.8);
  • Both experts are fairly sceptical that UK NZC will lead to a significant reduction in global atmospheric carbon (p4=0.2; q4=0.3).

Neither expert is all that confident that UK NZC will achieve its aims, with Expert A being particularly pessimistic, seeing the likelihood as just 1.6% compared to 10.8% for Expert B. The main reason is that both of them are doubtful that unilateral U.K. action will have much influence on the choices of other countries.

The chart below represents the view of each expert on each requirement, and highlights statement 3, the one area of significant disagreement.

Summary:

  • Defining a view with respect to a set of statements in terms of the respective degrees of confidence associated with each individual statement provides a convenient means of summarising, comparing and illustrating a variety of opinions on the subject to which the statements refer. It also serves as a natural starting point for a cost-benefit analysis of any proposed action.
  • It isn’t necessary to be an expert (in this case on climate science) to make a reasonable assessment of the conditions that must apply if an argument or an assertion (such as “There is no alternative to UK NZC”) is to be persuasive.
  • It isn’t too much to expect someone – expert or otherwise – who advocates a particular course of action to be able to give rough estimates of the likelihood that the conditions essential to the success of that action will be met.
  • Long chains of necessary conditions lead quickly to low probabilities of overall success. The longer the set of plausible conditions that must hold if an assertion is to be true, the less likely the truth of that assertion. With 15 independent requirements, each of which has a 95% probability of success, for example, the probability of overall success is less than 50%. Complex policy issues like those associated with climate change typically have many requirements and much uncertainty.

December 17, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | 2 Comments

If Being Frozen To Death Doesn’t Work, Being Starved To Death Comes Next

By Patrick Clarke | December 14, 2022

First we were placed under virtual house arrest. Now we are being frozen by soaring fuel bills and energy supply shortages in those same homes. Coming next, we are to be starved. All in pursuit of one of the Net Zero cults: Covid or carbon emissions. Too bleak a picture? We have only to look across the North Sea to one of our nearest neighbours, the Netherlands.

Surprisingly for such a small country (it is only about twice the size of Wales), the Netherlands is the second largest food exporter in the world, second only to the United States. It is Europe’s largest meat exporter. Four million cows, 13 million pigs and 104 million chickens are reared annually. It provides vegetables to many of its Western European neighbours.

One would assume this success story would be widely cherished, especially in an era of increasing food insecurity and shortages, with other key sources such as Ukraine under serious threat due to the continuing conflict there.

Remarkably, and many would say sinisterly, the polar opposite is the case. The supposed crime of the Dutch farmers? They have fallen foul of the ‘Zero Carbon’ fixation of the Climate Change Cultists who control so much of the current political and economic agenda.

One of that agenda’s chief targets is agriculture, particularly the use of nitrogen. The Dutch are at the top of the tree for nitrogen use per hectare of cultivated land, at nearly twice the European average.

The European Commission has given strict guidelines to EU member states to reduce their use of nitrogen. To comply with this the Dutch Government introduced laws to enforce a reduction of 50 per cent in nitrogen emissions by 2030. Such draconian targets can only come with draconian enforcement measures.

Dutch farming is being strangled through an assortment of regulations, including new flood prevention regulations, bizarrely given the success of the Dutch in preventing flooding over the centuries despite the fact that large parts of the country are below sea level, having been reclaimed from the sea.

Perhaps worst of all, one of the Government’s new laws bans the children of farmers from inheriting the farm when their parents retire or die. Once a farmer stops farming, their entire family becomes banned from farming in the Netherlands again. A whole way of life plus decades, sometimes even centuries, of experience is being gratuitously thrown away.

Where regulation fails, mandatory purchasing of land by the state is feared to be the next step as farmers have so far shown little interest in selling any of their land. Around 300,000 hectares of farmland is earmarked to be converted into nature conservation areas between now and 2040. More than 1,000 farms face forcible closure.

Nor is it just the Dutch Government that the farmers are battling. A panoply of NGOs are on the case too, using the courts to pursue any part of the government at national or provincial level deemed to be faltering in enforcing these objectives.

Those of us in the UK, long weary of seeing how political charities and activist lawyers run rings round attempts to enforce curbs on immigration, will be familiar with the process.

It’s worth pointing out too that, despite Brexit, Northern Ireland still has to implement these same EU directives as part of the Northern Ireland protocol. Thanks for that one, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. So while today it is Dutch farming under siege from its own government, tomorrow it will be farming in Northern Ireland that is compelled to go through the same pain.

Interestingly, no one has yet stepped forward with a credible plan for how these vital lost sources of food are going to be replaced. The Dutch Government hopes that it will come from artificially created meat from laboratories and is investing in this technology, though how it can be sufficiently scaled up remains to be seen. Given what is already widely known about the harmful effects of eating too many processed foods instead of natural foods, such as the triggering of obesity and potential heart disease, it has to be asked whether this is a desirable course, or indeed what the further health implications for users may be.

Some would say the whole agenda is a straight forward grab by bad actors intent on taking control of the world’s food resources, for whom Net Zero objectives provide a convenient camouflage for their own lust for power, control and yet more wealth than they already have. The usual suspects certainly spring to mind.

Others argue that out-of-control digital technocrats are so conditioned to assuming they can control anything, however complex, that they can’t accept that some things remain beyond human control, such as airborne viruses and the climate.

Each failure to learn that simple lesson is leading to ever more intensive efforts to achieve that control, control that must be achieved at all costs. Either way, vicious cycles of more authoritarianism, human misery arising from absurd and seriously harmful measures, plus more setbacks in failing to reach unobtainable goals lie ahead. Unless we can shake off the grip of these technocrats on our societies and the political institutions in thrall to them, the prospect of starving to death will become our grim reality in an increasingly tyrannical world.

Think that couldn’t happen here? Just look at Sri Lanka, though as with the Dutch farmers, most of the media and nearly every politician would prefer you not to!

December 17, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , , | 4 Comments

Brits struggling to keep warm at home – survey

RT | December 17, 2022

A quarter of British adults are struggling to keep warm in their homes as they cut back on energy use in the face of soaring costs, according to a new survey by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The report, which was published on Thursday, shows that 23% of adults were occasionally, hardly ever, or never able to keep comfortably warm in their living room over the past two weeks.

The ONS data indicated that 63% of adults were using less gas and electricity because of increases in the cost of living, and 96% of those adults were using less heating.

When asked about the measures they were taking to keep warm this winter, 82% of respondents said they were using more clothing or blankets, 46% were only heating rooms they use, 31% were using hot-water bottles or microwave warmers, while 27% were going to bed earlier.

Other measures included cutting back on the use of tumble dryers and washing machines, as well as bathing or showering less.

According to the ONS, many households have already cut back on their energy usage, with 34% of the polled adults saying that reducing heating has negatively affected their health or wellbeing as a result.

The ONS research on the “impact of winter pressures” also found that 16% of adults are worried their food will run out before they have money to buy more, and 19% have cut back on their portion size. The study showed 17% are eating food which is past its use-by date.

The survey of nearly 5,000 British households comes as the nation’s inflation hit 10.7% in November, which is slightly down from the 11.1% in the previous month but still well above the 2% rate targeted by the Bank of England.

December 17, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | 4 Comments

Here’s The Latest Sign Americans Are Going To Eat Bugs And Be Happy

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | December 15, 2022

The latest sign Americans will one day be eating insects is that a top bug producer announced Tuesday major expansion plans in North America.

French insect producer Ÿnsect signed two agreements to expand production facilities in the US and Mexico in 2023. The company “entered an accelerated phase of international development with the signing of a memorandum of understanding with Ardent Mills for an industrial facility in the United States and the signing of a joint development agreement with Corporativo Kosmos in Mexico.”

Ÿnsect’s development plans include 10-15 insect farms worldwide by the end of the decade that can meet the feeding demand of hundreds of millions of people, if not more. The producer of bugs uses highly-automated vertical farms to raise Buffalo and Molitor mealworms to create insect protein.

Many Americans have already been conditioned for the brave new world, one pushed by the World Economic Forum of a so-called ‘sustainable’ future where you’ll eat insects…

… and also own nothing.

Some of the latest conditioning to eat bugs was an article published in Jeff Bezos-owned The Washington Post.

Which brings us to the WEF’s warning earlier this year about an impending food crisis kicked off by the war in Ukraine.

In the medium term, it highlights the need to transform our food system, using more green energy. We should also be encouraging more sustainable diets, which contain fewer grain fed animal products; and regenerative agricultural practices, which improve soil health and the efficiency of nutrient use by the crop. -WEF

So… eat bugs and be happy about owning nothing are the global elites’ blueprint for 2030 society.

December 16, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , | 11 Comments

Biden Wants $8 Billion In Taxpayer Funds To Shut Down Coal Power In South Africa

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | December 16, 2022

With the UN and other interests already interfering in Africa’s energy development, Joe Biden announced at the US-Africa Business Forum a plan for American taxpayers to shell out at least $8 billion to shut down effective coal fired energy plants in South Africa so they can be replaced with far less effective and far less efficient green energy alternatives.

In other words, the goal of climate change cultists is to use $8 billion of America’s money to diminish South African infrastructure.

The green energy scam continues despite the fact that European nations are now admitting they need more oil and coal based energy, not green tech, after the loss of Russian natural gas resources.

The American taxpayer is now carrying the weight of $94 billion in 2022 for so called “clean energy” initiatives in other nations around the world.

December 16, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Video | , , | 3 Comments

Germany’s Gas Reserves “Emptying At Record Speed” As Country Struggles To Keep Warm, Lights On

By P Gosselin | No Tricks Zone | December 16, 2022

Germany’s gas reserves are emptying at record speed: 1% per day as the current wind/solar energy lull means more gas gets burned for electricity, heating.

Pleiteticker.de reports how Germany’s natural gas reserves “are emptying at record speed” because wind and solar power have been on the scarce side over the past few weeks. This means gas turbines have had to jump in to pick up the slack in electricity production – not one the German government had hoped as it wrestles with the heightening energy crisis.

“Germany is converting gas into electricity in record quantities,” pleiteticker.de reports. “Thanks to high pressure system ‘Erika’, the current December is colder than it has been for years. […] In recent days, gas storage facilities have therefore been emptying much faster than before. From December 12 onwards, more than one percent was withdrawn from gas storage facilities in Germany every day.”

“Last week, almost one third of all electricity was generated from natural gas. These are record figures,” writes pleiteticker.de.

If the cold persists through the winter, gas reserves threaten to become extremely tight before spring arrives.

But instead of blaming the energy woes on failed government policies, federal network agency head Klaus Müller criticizes the situation on the consumers, and worries “the gas storage may not last the whole winter.”

“A national gas shortage in winter can be avoided if, firstly, the savings target of at least 20 percent continues to be achieved,” the Federal Network Agency says. Here the government’s solution clearly is that citizens should accept freezing even more when it’s bitterly cold out.

Over 800 million euros paid for unproduced energy in 2021

The problem with wind power is that either too much or too little is produced, due to the weather. As mentioned above. the past weeks have seen little wind power being produced, and so gas turbines had to be fired up to keep the grid supplied.

But when it’s too windy, something needs to be done to keep the grid from being overloaded: wind turbines have to be shut down. That’s costing Germans 807 million euros this year because the excess electricity that could have been fed into the grid by the wind parks legally has to be compensated.

Pleiteticker here writes: “For the amount of electricity that the operators could have fed into the grid, they still receive compensation from the grid operators according to the statutory tariffs. And this sum is higher than ever this year: 807 million euros. Record value. For electricity that never existed.”

And the problem is getting bigger, according to the Federal Ministry of Economics.

“At the time of the worst energy crisis Germany has seen in a long time, when companies and consumers are hammered by energy prices like rarely before, Germany is paying money for energy that also doesn’t get produced,” comments pleiteticker.de.

So far Germany’s response to the energy crisis is plans to build many more turbines, with talks of even tripling its current installed  capacity, which of course would only triple  grid volatility, thus making it far more unstable than it already is and so create an even much bigger mess.

December 16, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Russophobia | | 4 Comments

Looking For The Official Party Line On Energy Storage

By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | December 8, 2022

If you’ve read my energy storage report, or just the summaries of parts of it that have appeared on this blog, you have probably thought: this stuff is kind of obvious. Surely the powers that be must have thought of at least some of these issues, and there must be some kind of official position on the responses out there somewhere.

So I thought to look around for the closest thing I could find to the Official Party Line on how the U.S. is supposedly going to get to Net Zero emissions from the electricity sector by some early date. The most authoritative thing I have found is a big Report out in August 2022 from something called the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, titled “Examining Supply-Side Options to Achieve 100% Clean Electricity by 2035.” An accompanying press release with a date of August 30 has the headline “NREL Study Identifies the Opportunities and Challenges of Achieving the U.S. Transformational Goal of 100% Clean Electricity by 2035.”

What is NREL? The Report identifies it as a private lab “operated by Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract.” In other words, it’s an explicit advocacy group for “renewable” energy that gets infinite oodles of taxpayer money to put out advocacy pieces making it seem like the organization’s preferred schemes will work.

Make no mistake, this Report is a big piece of work. The Report identifies some 5 “lead authors,” 6 “contributing authors,” and 56 editors, contributors, commenters and others. Undoubtedly millions of your taxpayer dollars were spent producing the Report and the underlying models (which compares to the zero dollars and zero cents that the Manhattan Contrarian was paid for his energy storage report). The end product is an excellent illustration of why central planning does not work and can never work.

So now that our President has supposedly committed the country to this “100% clean electricity” thing by 2035, surely these geniuses are going to tell us exactly how that is going to be done and how much it will cost. Good luck finding that in here. From the press release:

The study . . . is an initial exploration of the transition to a 100% clean electricity power system by 2035—and helps to advance understanding of both the opportunities and challenges of achieving the ambitious goal. Overall, NREL finds multiple pathways to 100% clean electricity by 2035 that would produce significant benefits, but the exact technology mix and costs will be determined by research and development (R&D), manufacturing, and infrastructure investment decisions over the next decade.

It’s an “initial exploration.” With the country already supposedly committed to this multi-trillion dollar project on which all of our lives depend, they’re just starting to think about how to do it. “The exact technology mix and costs” — in other words, everything important — “will be determined by research and development” — in other words, remain to be invented. But don’t worry, that will all be done over the next ten years, with plenty of time then remaining to get everything deployed at scale in the three years from then to 2035.

You won’t be surprised that there is a lot of wind and solar generation in this future. How much?

To achieve those levels would require an additional 40–90 gigawatts of solar on the grid per year and 70–150 gigawatts of wind per year by the end of this decade under this modeled scenario. That’s more than four times the current annual deployment levels for each technology.

So there will be an immediate ramp-up of solar and wind deployment to four times current annual levels. No problem! But what if somebody out there objects to having tens of thousands of square miles covered with these things?

If there are challenges with siting and land use to be able to deploy this new generation capacity and associated transmission, nuclear capacity helps make up the difference and more than doubles today’s installed capacity by 2035.

Oh, we’re going to double installed nuclear capacity by 2035. Did anybody tell these people that it takes more than 13 years lead time to build a nuclear plant? At present there are exactly two nuclear plants under construction in the U.S., both at the same site in Georgia. One of them started construction in 2009, and is supposed to enter service next year. That’s 14 years from when the first shovel went in the ground, and there are no other plants anywhere near putting a shovel in the ground.

Well, let’s get to the heart of things, namely the problem of energy storage. From page xii of the Report:

The main uncertainty in reaching 100% clean electricity is the mix of technologies that achieves this target at least cost — particularly considering the need to meet peak demand periods or during periods of low wind and solar output. The analysis demonstrates the potentially important role of several technologies that have not yet been deployed at scale, including seasonal storage and several CCS-related technologies. The mix of these technologies varies significantly across the scenarios evaluated depending on technology cost and performance assumptions.

Aha! This all requires some “seasonal storage” technology that “has not yet been deployed at scale.” (There’s an understatement!). Do they even have an idea of how that might be done?

Seasonal storage is represented in the modeling by clean hydrogen-fueled combustion turbines but could also include a variety of technologies under various stages of development assuming they achieve similar costs and performance. There is significant uncertainty about seasonal storage fuel pathways, which could include synthetic natural gas and ammonia, and the use of alternative conversion technologies such as fuel cells. Other technology pathways are also discussed in the report. Regardless of technology, achieving seasonal storage on the scale envisioned in these results requires substantial development of infrastructure, including fuel storage, transportation and pipeline networks, and additional generation capacity needed to produce clean fuels.

In other words, they have no clue. They’re wildly tossing out ideas of things that have never been tried or demonstrated, let alone costed — and supposedly we’re going to have our whole energy system transitioned to this in 13 years. No surprise that the best idea they have is hydrogen — which, as I describe thoroughly in my report, is a terrible idea. And all that infrastructure they talk about for the hydrogen — none of that currently exists, or is under construction, or is even in a planning stage.

Back to the press release:

A growing body of research has demonstrated that cost-effective high-renewable power systems are possible, but costs increase as systems approach 100% carbon-free electricity, also known as the “last 10% challenge.” The increase in costs is driven largely by the seasonal mismatch between variable renewable energy generation and consumption.

I’ve got news for them: they’re going to hit the wall long before getting to 90% from renewables. Just look at Germany or El Hierro Island to see how that happens. But assume they’re right, and the wall doesn’t come until renewable penetration hits 90%. They fully admit they have no answer at that point. Again from the press release:

Still, getting from a 90% clean grid to full decarbonization could be accelerated by developing large-scale, commercialized deployment solutions for clean hydrogen and other low-carbon fuels, advanced nuclear, price-responsive demand response, carbon capture and storage, direct air capture, and advanced grid controls. These areas are ripe for continued R&D.

Notice how this “demand response” thing gets suddenly slipped in there quietly, without any definition of what it means. Here’s what it means: if the system they create doesn’t work, they reserve the right to turn off your electricity any time they want. Or to jack up the price so high that you can’t afford to use your electricity.

The Report has a big section on cost/benefit analysis, where it is confidently concluded that the benefits far outweigh the costs under any of many scenarios. This is without the storage problem being solved or a solution demonstrated, or costs remotely known.

If you have the time and inclination, you can find the full Report at the link above. I would not really recommend wasting your valuable time on this, but readers who want to add further critiques have the opportunity to do so.

Your taxpayer dollars at work.

December 14, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Stephen Fry and the climate of hypocrisy

By Philip Patrick | TCW Defending Freedom | December 14, 2022

Stephen Fry has announced that he doesn’t understand ‘climate deniers’, implying that such people are selfish and uncaring. He delivered himself of this opinion in a puff piece for his new travel series, A Year on Planet Earth, due to drop on ITVX on December 22.

The series takes Fry to some of the most exotic and beautiful places in the world where he will emote about the flora and fauna. He hopes we will be sufficiently awestruck to help save the world from the ‘climate crisis’ but won’t be lecturing us, he says. This is a relief. But what exactly does he not understand about ‘climate deniers’?

Let’s take a quick look at the views of those crazy denialists. According to William Happer, one of the world’s most distinguished scientists and former adviser to two US presidents, anthropogenic climate change is real – we do have an impact on the climate, but it is small (nothing like a ‘crisis’) and in many ways beneficial (‘global greening’).

Happer and others argue that CO2 (the stuff of life, let us not forget) is a very minor greenhouse gas, and, due to the saturation effect, there is a limit to how much it can affect climate. He uses the analogy of painting a barn door: there are only so many coats you can apply before there is no further impact. In other words, China can build as many coal-fired power stations as it wants, and that may not be good at a surface level, but beyond a certain, not very scary, level, it won’t make any difference to global temperatures.

Added to this, there is the awkward fact that the world isn’t co-operating in the climate crisis narrative. The Arctic and Antarctic have failed to melt away; the Great Barrier Reef, for which an obituary was written in the Guardian, is flourishing, and those pesky polar bears, penguins and whales, just refuse to do the decent thing and disappear. So, to paraphrase Jim Callaghan, ‘Crisis? What crisis?’

Happer’s arguments, shared by many of the world’s most distinguished scientists, should, along with other sceptical viewpoints, certainly be subject to scrutiny. But they certainly shouldn’t be airily dismissed, particularly by someone who by his own admission knows nothing about science: ‘ . . . anything too scientific leaves me having to clutch at a table, feeling a bit weak and hopeless’.

Fry says he can’t understand the people who hold sceptical views on climate views. Can’t, or won’t? The first step to understanding something is wanting to understand it, and if you don’t want to, you never will. This seems to be Fry’s problem, as with many a climate zealot. It is a dangerous mindset, leading you to close your mind to uncomfortable information and denounce unbelievers as heretics.

Fry says in his article that climate deniers ‘now seem to be diminishing in numbers, thankfully’ suggesting these dreadful people are one species he would be glad to see become extinct. And yet this is manifestly untrue. The WCD (World Climate Declaration) is a campaign group of some 1,400 scientists, engineers and experts led by Nobel laureate Ivar Giaever. Hundreds are signing their declaration every day. These, their key points, even a science ‘illiterate’ should be able to understand:

·       Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming

·       Warming is far slower than predicted

·       Climate policy relies on inadequate models

·       CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth

·       Global warming has not increased natural disasters

·       Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities

As for other evidence of scepticism the Swedish government has just scrapped its environment ministry. Huge protests against compulsory farm closures have been happening in Holland. The Sri Lankan government fell after a popular uprising provoked by its climate policies. In the UK, the third highest polling party Reform UK promises a referendum on NetZero (‘Net Stupid’) suggesting considerable scepticism here.

Fry’s most recent project was a three-part spoken word show based on Greek myths: ‘Gods’, ‘Heroes’ and ‘Men’. I suspect he most closely identifies with the first of these. That would explain his Olympian disdain, his effortless superiority, and his seeming imperviousness to accusations of hypocrisy. Like his friend Emma Thompson, Fry apparently sees no contradiction in flying around the world and then claiming to care deeply about climate change. There are, reputedly, 60 locations featured in his new series. Even the title A Year on Planet Earth is revealing, suggesting he has descended from a superterrestrial realm to lead us back on to the path of righteousness.

I’m just about old enough to remember when Fry not only made me laugh but made me think too. Fry was, once, an equal opportunities humorist. If there was a common denominator to his targets it was people who lacked self-awareness, were narrow minded, self-important, and intolerant – like Lord Melchett of Blackadder. If there was a message, it was to engage your intellect and to resist the lure of received ideas.

But that was before this avowed atheist found his religion. Sadly, Fry has gone awry. He is suffering the worst fate that can possibly befall a satirist. He has become an example of the very thing he used to make fun of.

December 14, 2022 Posted by | Film Review, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

And Just Like That… It Was All Gone

Zero Covid is deemed surplus to requirements

Health Advisory & Recovery Team | December 13, 2022

Newsflash from China: the world’s last bastion of Zero Covid has finally given up the pretence. “Covid China cracks”… this is a message that seems to have penetrated even the mainstream media’s coverage.

What is not, however, entirely clear is how brave BBC reporters can travel around the world to capture footage in the Far East, but were blind to peaceful protests closer to home. Those voices of reason who have been ignored for almost three years have found the cognitive dissonance more than a little unnerving. How can it simultaneously be true that lockdown sceptic protests and protestors in UK are bad, selfish and unscientific, while lockdown sceptic protests and protestors in China are brave and pushing back against regime oppression?

Even in their dissonant apostasy, the media cheerleaders still struggle with fundamental misconceptions due to their alignment with the crumbling narrative and blindness to the obvious: “the main challenge is ensuring the inevitable uptick in infections does not lead to mass deaths” claims the BBC. Really? With almost three years of data now to hand, is it now not blindingly obvious that the UK’s Chief Scientific Officer Patrick Vallance was absolutely correct when he stated on 16 March 2020 that “this is a mild disease in most people”?  If these brave reporters want to investigate ‘mass deaths’, how about some hard-hitting investigative reporting on iatrogenesis instead?

This unpalatable (and hard to ignore) charade aside, can we at least hope that this is the end of an era? Can the Zero Covid chapter be closed for good?

Let us hope so. Humanity may – finally – have rid itself of Zero Covid policies, but what of its erstwhile supporters – what new hair-brained schemes are they now supporting? Whether the chaos they were involved in creating was by accident or design is arguably immaterial: how can society protect itself against future periods of collective self-harm?

The precautionary principle “emphasises caution, pausing and review before leaping into new innovations that may prove disastrous”.

Winding back the clock almost three years, it was for this reason that many of us had a principled objection to draconian non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs, i.e. lockdowns) from before they were enacted. While this view is now fashionable, many supported these policies at the time and then did not want to back down from this shibboleth. But why was it ever acceptable to deploy this combination of hand grenades to crack a nut? Why did society go along with a perverse inversion of the anti-precautionary principle: “panic; shout ‘fire’, abandon detailed disaster planning and then implement the precise opposite, botch the implementation, shut down constructive debate and then vilify those that challenge the new orthodoxy”?

It is instructive to observe the flailing attempts by vocal proponents of Zero Covid and its associated policies (school closures, rules of six, masks, vaccine mandates) to post-rationalise and excuse their mistakes.  This is where lessons will be learned (and not, incidentally, from the preposterous attempts by those who piloted the ship onto the rocks to shift blame onto others or to claim that the right decisions were made “based on all the information available at the time”).

We have previously outlined clear evidence of what was common knowledge by mid-March 2020. Chief Scientific Advisor Vallance, quoted above, went on to state: “Epidemics are like a pole vaulter taking flight: the outbreak starts slowly, takes off rapidly, reaches a peak and then comes back down to earth”.  No different to what had happened in previous months on the Diamond Princess, in Wuhan and in Bergamo. This was a known quantity well before the UK launched itself, lemming-like, off the cliffs on 23 March 2020.

From hereon in it was one-way traffic for much of the next two years. Dissent was essentially criminalised, and the full force of far-from-benign authoritarian state machinery was turned against its citizens. Rational discourse was squashed (why would authorities collude with the media to stifle calm voices of reason such as Professor Jay Bhattacharya and instead promote shrill panic-mongers?); the media controlled via carrot (advertising) and stick (OFCOM diktat); dissenters were made an example of. None of this was necessary, and a normally-functioning society and fourth estate could have led us quickly back to balanced rationality, avoiding much of the human cost and unnecessarily-wrought collateral damage of the Coronapanic debacle.

They might prefer us to forget, but we must not. Thankfully, public records exist that will serve as a salutary reminder to future generations of what our own home-grown Zero Covid zealots wanted to perpetrate. For example, in the dark days of February 2021, 47 MPs from Opposition parties tabled an Early Day Motion promoting Net Zero. This Motion – as well as its stated (and implicit) underlying assumptions – has not aged well, the most egregious claim being that harsher draconian measures might avoid “putting huge additional strain on the NHS” – tell that to those on the now-gargantuan waiting lists for essential treatment. Most of the 47 signatories on this Motion are Labour MPs… Labour is currently riding high in the polls. They might well now criticise the UK Government’s handling of the last few years, but it was Labour – and their union paymasters – who were consistently pushing for more and more restrictions. Voters should be careful what they wish for.

So good riddance to Zero Covid, but have we learned any lessons? Unfortunately, there is as yet little evidence to show that society has the strength to resist the siren calls of the next Zero Policy fiasco… for example, could it be that Net Zero is an unholy hysteria rather than a holy grail? We would do well to look a bit more closely before we leap into deindustrialised pauperisation.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and in the interests of protecting all that we hold dear, we can only encourage everyone to keep constructively challenging and critiquing the official narrative.

December 13, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | 4 Comments

The Club of Rome at 50 years old

By Dalwhinnie | December 11, 2022

I used to believe the following tenets of the Club of Rome. I did so for about four years (from the age of 22 to 26) until I woke up from ecodoomism. It is apparent that millions have been sucked into this cult and have never found a way out. Yet. Indeed, eco-doomism is the world’s leading cause of depression, suicide, sexual ambiguity,  non-replacement and cultural anomie. It is immediately the cause of policies designed to immiserate the population (viz. Dutch government putting farms out of business to control world atmospheric nitrogen levels).

Here are the doctrines of the Club of Rome, circa 1972. Look familiar?

“The Limits to Growth” contains six main messages:

  1. Firstly, that the environmental impact of human society had become heavier between 1900 and 1972 due to both an increase in the number of humans and the amount of resources consumed and pollution generated per person per year.
  2. That our planet is physically limited, and that humanity cannot continue to use more physical resources and generate more emissions than nature is capable of supplying in a sustainable manner. In addition, it will not be possible to rely on technology alone to solve the problem as this would only delay reaching the carrying capacity of the planet by a few years.
  3. The authors cautioned that it is possible, and even likely, that the human ecological footprint will overshoot the carrying capacity of the planet, further explaining that this would likely occur due to significant delays in global decision making while growth continued, bringing the human footprint into unsustainable territory.
  4. Once humanity has entered this unsustainable territory, we will have to move back into sustainable territory, either through “managed decline” of activity, or we will be forced to move back through “collapse” caused by the brutal inherent processes of nature or the market.
  5. The fifth message is one of hope. The authors state that: “The challenge of overshoot from decision delay is real, but easily solvable if human society decided to “act”, meaning that forward looking policy could prevent humanity from overshooting the aforementioned planetary limits.
  6. Lastly, the authors advocated for an early start – in 1972 that was 1975 – to achieve a smooth transition to a sustainable world without needing to pass through the overshoot and contraction phases.

The World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwab have followed as night follows day. They key assumptions are that the current population/ resource consumption mix is unsustainable, and the second is that a process of managed decline can smooth the transition to sustainability. I am about to say something at once paradoxical and true:

Humans have more to fear from the managers of population reduction than we do of civilizational collapse.

Because the population reduction is being planned by people who think they are doing good  and the old adage of C. S. Lewis applies, that the robber barons might have their greed satiated, and stop, but the person who tortures for you own good does so with a clean conscience and will not stop. Hence Stalin. Hence Klaus Schwab, and his minions and acolytes.

Collapses are random and bring their own correctives. They are chaotic. If the Roman Empire has to fall, it is better that it occur without central planning, administered by mad tyrants. I realize this is offensive to those who believe that civilizational change can be planned, but it cannot.

The  assumption that needs to be challenged the most is that collapse is somehow inevitable because we have gone beyond limits set by Gaia, that this unsustainability is somehow new, and that we can plan our way out of it.

We went beyond the limits set by Gaia since we domesticated animals, invented agriculture and mined metals. I would not wish to say there are no limits, but I would say that the collective intelligence of mankind has continually found solutions to the problems we have ourselves created. We went into the realm of the “unsustainable” tens of thousands of years ago. We are still in “unsustainablity”. There is no stable state.

The Club of Rome published its manifesto in 1972. It had a tremendous negative effect over time. It resuscitated the idea of a centrally planned economy when the central conceit of Marxism had collapsed: that a planned economy could prevail over the chaotic forces of the market, or of nature.

The close relationship between the idea of sustainability and the tyranny of all-wise central planners needs to be made clear.

The population bomb is diffusing itself anyway…

Regarding solutions that appear without planning, population growth is collapsing through the very process of wealth generation that has come from burning fossil fuels. Women reach a level of prosperity where their kids will survive until adulthood, and – bingo! – they produce at most two children. It is enough to make the most hardened eco-doomist pause and reconsider.

See Bricker and Ibbetson’s Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline, or more brutal yet, try David Goldman’s (known as Spengler) How Civilizations Die.


About the author

Dalwhinnie

Retired, sometime civil servant, sometime consultant, active intellectual, former lawyer, active property manager, and on rare occasions in the past a political activist. He has recovered from the experience.

December 12, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | 1 Comment

World Health Organization’s Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response Treaty

These proposals are a major threat to our sovereignty and democracy

Health Advisory & Recovery Team | December 11, 2022

The WHO has been flexing its muscles for several years but Covid-19 has provided a huge opportunity for mission creep. The latest in its quest for  ever-increasing power is the proposed legally binding Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response Treaty.  Without even waiting for the dust to settle and for countries to undertake their own inquiries into what went well and what mistakes were made, there is a clear intention to force every nation into a straight-jacket of centralised pandemic management with the WHO at its heart. No Anders Tegnell or Ron de Santis to instil a modicum of common sense or proportionality, we would all be hurtling into masks and testing at the first hint or droplet of ‘concern’, and doubtless another rushed mRNA vaccine.

In March 2021, Boris Johnson was centre stage in publishing an article laying out the route to this new international treaty. By December 2021, an intergovernmental negotiating body was established and a Zero Draft report was published in May 2022. It was a number of African nations who called a halt. But undaunted, the WHO this week held another 3-day session and issued the following news release.

 “Member States of the World Health Organization today agreed to develop the first draft of a legally binding agreement designed to protect the world from future pandemics. This “zero draft” of the pandemic accord, rooted in the WHO Constitution, will be discussed by Member States in February 2023.”

‘Zero draft’ is worryingly reminiscent of ‘Zero-Covid’, a policy which has been causing havoc in China. There is also an extraordinary degree of mission creep evident, with a newly established subgroup, the One Health High-Level Expert Panel (OHHLEP), which:

“will also have a role in investigating the impact of human activity on the environment and wildlife habitats, and how this drives disease threats. Critical areas include food production, urbanization and infrastructure development, international travel and trade, activities that lead to biodiversity loss and climate change, and those that put increased pressure on the natural resource base — all of which can lead to the emergence of zoonotic diseases.”

Shiraz Akram, of the Thinking Coalition, drafted an extremely detailed analysis of the proposals and a number of like-minded groups have endorsed his open letter. Thinking Coalition, the Freedom AllianceHARTNot Our FutureTime for Recovery and the Together Declaration have all submitted this letter to members of the House of Lords International Agreements Committee, the House of Lords Constitution Committee and the Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee.

It is vital that our Parliamentarians take a serious interest in this. Both the Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee and the Constitution Committee have previously reported on the numerous problems related to the way in which treaties are ratified in the UK, with the latter stating that “the powers available to Parliament to scrutinise Ministers’ actions are anachronistic and inadequate”.

These committees have only a few weeks to scrutinise the proposals and prevent a lurch into a legally binding agreement at the diktat of the totally unelected WHO.

December 11, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | 1 Comment

Peak Demands For Natural Gas

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | December 11, 2022

Natural gas accounts for 43% of the UK’s primary energy consumption. In comparison, renewable energy only supplies 4%.

Our reliance on gas though is much greater in winter months:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/total-energy-section-1-energy-trends

And if you look at hour-by-hour data, the peaks are greater still, as the National Grid chart below shows:

https://mip-prd-web.azurewebsites.net/

This graph is for yesterday, Dec 10th. Demand for gas ramps up from around 310 mcm at night to 430 mcm in the early evening. One mcm = approximately 11 GWh.

So a rate of 430 mcm/day equates to 4730 GWh, or 197 GWh per hour.

While supply remains relatively constant, these peaks in demand are met by reducing what is known as the linepack – effectively the amount of gas within the gas distribution network. This, of course, is something that the electricity grid cannot do.

In comparison with the daily peaks and troughs of gas, electricity storage is miniscule. Pumped storage capacity is 2.8 GW, with the biggest, Dinorwig, rated at 1.7 GW with storage of 9.1 GWh. Battery storage is much tinier still.

Based on the decline in linepack, we would need about 70 mcm each day to top up at peak demand – that is 770 GWh.

In any event, all of the electricity storage we have will all be needed just to balance peaks in electricity demand.

Yet our policymakers continue down the road of electrification, seemingly oblivious to the realities.

December 11, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | Leave a comment