RT | January 27, 2024
The United States is planning to deploy nuclear weapons in the UK for the first time in 15 years, the Telegraph reported Friday, citing Pentagon documents.
The report comes amid continuing standoff between Russia and NATO over the conflict in Ukraine, as some Western politicians are calling to prepare for a potential armed clash with Moscow.
The British newspaper cited procurement contracts for a new facility at the Royal Air Force station at Lakenheath in Suffolk that point to Washington’s intention to bring nuclear weapons to the base. RAF Lakenheath is expected to house B61-12 bombs that are three times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, the Telegraph said. The US sent F-35 nuclear-capable fighters to the base last year.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said last year that Moscow would be compelled to enact “compensatory countermeasures” if American nuclear warheads return to Britain. Russia has accused the West of stoking tensions in Europe and maintains that the continuing expansion of NATO eastward is one of the root causes of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
High-ranking European officials, including German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, have spoken about the need to brace for a potential full-blown war with Russia. Last week, Chair of the NATO Military Committee Admiral Rob Bauer urged the bloc to be “readier across the whole spectrum” for direct confrontation.
The head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergey Naryshkin, dismissed the claims that Moscow is planning an offensive against NATO as “information warfare” aimed at justifying the ongoing “hybrid aggression.”
BY DR GARY SIDLEY | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JANUARY 17, 2024
Like those famous Japanese soldiers still fighting World War II on a remote island decades after everyone else had ended hostilities, a minority of healthcare settings in the U.K. enter 2024 with local managers attempting to insist that visitors and patients wear “face coverings” into a fourth consecutive year. For allowing the dogged persistence of this superstitious practice we can thank the U.K. Health Security Agency (UKHSA), despite the fact its own boss, Dame Jenny Harries, made a series of incredible admissions about the value of masking at the recent Covid Inquiry. There was no solid proof masks ever slowed the spread of Covid, Harries explained. The advice to the public to make their own “face coverings” was “ineffective”. Worst of all, by creating a false sense of security, masking may have actually made things worse, she said. Of course, if you’d been paying attention, you’d know Harries was really just coming full circle.
On March 11th 2020, in her previous role as Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England, less than two weeks before the first lockdown Harries was telling the public in a televised interview with then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson that “for the average member of the public” masks “are really not a good idea… people can put themselves at more risk than less… you can actually trap the virus in the mask and start breathing it in”. Harris was far from alone in dismissing the value of mask-wearing, of course, because in the early spring of 2020 the public health experts spoke with one tongue. “In terms of wearing a mask, our advice is clear: that wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all. So we do not advise that,” Professor Chris Whitty, England’s Chief Medical Officer, had told Sky News on March 4th. “We do not recommend masks for general wearing,” echoed England’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Professor Jonathan Van Tam, on April 3rd. On the same day, Professor Jason Leitch, Scotland’s Clinical Director said, “the global evidence is masks in the general population don’t work”.
The experts were so clearly united in their anti-mask stance that, around this time, the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) banned the advertisements of two companies because of spurious claims that their face coverings would protect against coronavirus. The intervention by the ASA won the unequivocal support of NHS Medical Director Professor Stephen Powis who said, “callous firms looking to maximise profits by pushing products that fly in the face of official advice is outright dangerous and has rightly been banned”.
On April 16th, then-Transport Secretary Grant Shapps had told ITV that wearing masks would be “counterproductive… the suggestions people would make their own masks; whether it’s clothing and that sort of thing which doesn’t really provide that much protection. Secondly, the way people take it off can sometimes do the reinfection [sic]. Thirdly, it can provide a false sense of security”. But only 49 days later, on June 4th 2020, Shapps announced that “face coverings – not surgical masks – the kind of face covering you can easily make at home” – would be compulsory on public transport from June 15th, on pain of fines of up to £100. A day later, Government announced that, effective June 15th, staff would be required to wear surgical masks – and visitors and outpatients “face coverings” – in all NHS hospitals, a state of affairs that would persist by law for almost two entire years.
Some may argue that, as there is no longer a legal requirement, there is therefore no problem. But there is no shortage of commentators periodically agitating to make the practice a legal requirement again. And in any case, healthcare settings see us at our most vulnerable. Why should we even be asked to live out an intrusive, dehumanising charade? Especially off the back of two years of state-driven hysteria and an unprecedentedly draconian global restriction regime that achieved the grimmest of logical conclusions when one victim, Stephanie Warriner, was choked to death by hospital guards for the ‘crime’ of wearing a mask too low on her face.
It has long been recognised that masks achieve no appreciable reduction in the transmission of respiratory viruses. We knew this in 2015-16 with regard to surgeons and their patients (here and here). We knew this in 2020 from a gold-standard Cochrane review, an analysis of 14 studies on influenza and a healthcare investigation that concluded that masks “may paradoxically lead to more transmissions”. The amount of robust evidence pointing to the ineffectiveness of face coverings has only increased since this time, culminating in the 2023 Cochrane review. On healthcare settings specifically, a study in April 2023 concluded that mask requirements in a large London hospital made “no discernible difference” to Covid transmission rates. UKHSA guidance acknowledges that the evidence of the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions (including masks) is “weak” and “would be graded as low or very low certainty”. Even when masks were legally required in healthcare settings, no quality standard was ever specified – we were asked to swallow the absurdity that strapping any old bit of rag to our faces was to ‘Follow the Science’. Refer to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and you will find that even surgical masks are not regarded as personal protective equipment (PPE) under the European Directive 89/686/EEC (PPE Regulation 2002 SI 2002 No. 1144). HSE notes that surgical masks “are normally worn during medical procedures to protect not only the patient but also the healthcare worker from the transfer of microorganisms, body fluids and particulate matter generated from any splash and splatter. Whilst they will provide a physical barrier to large projected droplets, they do not provide full respiratory protection against smaller suspended droplets and aerosols”.
Even leaving aside Harries’s now repeated suggestions that masks can cause more harm than good when it comes to Covid, health is of course about much more than attempting to avoid one virus, and masking has never been a benign intervention.
Routine masking, particularly for long periods of time, is increasingly recognised to be associated with a wide range of physical, psychological and social harms (see here for an overview). A recent research study highlighted the potential risks of elevated carbon dioxide levels associated with long-term mask wearing, particularly for children, adolescents and pregnant mothers.
Then there are the human costs of routine masking in healthcare settings: the exclusion of the hard-of-hearing; the re-traumatising of the historically abused; the increased risk of falls in the elderly; the exacerbation of confusion in the already confused; the aggravation of the autistic, anxious and panic-prone; the marginalisation of already stigmatised groups; and the impediment to the goal of soothing the frightened child or suicidal teenager. Faceless interactions impede the development of healing relationships. Humane healthcare, delivered with demonstrable warmth and compassion, will always be more effective than the robotic version emitted by a faceless professional hidden behind a veneer of sterility.
But patients in healthcare settings aren’t the only victims of the mask farce. Respect for institutional science has rightly taken a knock as well, as Peter Horby, Professor of Emerging Infectious Diseases and Global Health at the University of Oxford, conveyed to the Covid Inquiry. During peak Covid, Horby chaired NERVTAG, a high-profile group of scientific experts who routinely provided advice to SAGE. Appearing before the Inquiry on October 18th 2023, he confirmed that “NERVTAG had looked at the issues of face masks in the past… and had taken quite a stringent scientific view that the highest quality evidence is randomised controlled trials… and those data were fairly clear… that the evidence was weak. And we maintained that position on how we saw the evidence, focusing on the data from randomised controlled trials.”
Lady Hallett (the less-than impartial Chair of the inquiry) interrupted, saying, “I’m sorry, I’m not following, Sir Peter. If there’s a possible benefit, what’s the downside?”
“The downside is that you are making a population-wide recommendation based on weak evidence which may weaken trust in your scientific independence and integrity,” Horby replied.
Why would scientists and public health experts risk this very obvious downside? The most obvious explanation is that forcing the public to wear masks was a highly visible way to be seen to be ‘doing something’ that came with at least a couple of attractive bonuses to politicians and bureaucrats. One, the practice had superficial ‘gut feel’ appeal to the layperson – if you didn’t think about it very much, and never looked at the evidence, masking felt like it should work. Two, as with most of the non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) it shifted blame for Covid impacts away from the state and health service and onto individuals. ‘Rule breakers’ among the public – now easily identifiable by sight – made for convenient folk devils and scapegoats.
On June 1st 2022, in a letter co-signed by the same Professor Stephen Powis who had been so withering about “callous firms” promoting face masks to stop the spread of Covid, new guidance from NHS England – referencing “updates from UKHSA” – effectively passed the buck for masking down to local healthcare managers, amid general talk of “transitioning back” to pre-Covid policies.
At the time, the Smile Free campaign wrote:
Two years after the imposition of masking in English hospitals, it is most regrettable that NHS England and the authors of this latest guidance could not simply have signalled a clean break and consigned this unprecedented, poorly evidenced and ultimately failed policy to history. Since they have chosen not to, by far the most likely outcome is that masking in English hospitals will now become a ‘postcode lottery’ based on the whims of local staff.
In an open letter co-signed by over 2,200 doctors, scientists and healthcare professionals in summer 2022, we had called on the NHS Chief Executives in each of the home nations to revise the guidance for doctors, nurses and other health professionals with immediate effect, leaving the individual – whether a professional or service user – to decide whether he or she wanted to wear a mask or not, thereby bringing healthcare into line with other community settings. But with the Government having terrified the public with lurid fear campaigns, advised gravely that masks would “keep everyone safe” and endorsed this claim with the law and eye-watering fines of up to £3,200 for non-compliance, perhaps we should not be surprised that simply pulling the comfort blanket away again was rather too rich for the NHS’s blood.
A reply, dated October 4th 2022, from Dame Ruth May, Chief Nursing Office and national lead for infection control at NHS England, justified current mask advice to hospitals with a computer modelling report linked to Professor Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College that by its own admission was “highly uncertain”. We were startled to find the report was also literally labelled “Should not be used to inform clinical practice” on page one.
Despite masks never having actually gone away in many healthcare settings, the following day, news outlets were reporting the “return of the mask”. Between the Mail and Sun’s accounts, eight different NHS Trusts were reintroducing a range of measures, prominent among which were mask “requirements” for patients and visitors.
In all cases, these measures were apparently being introduced as a result of “Covid’s resurgence” with “surveillance data suggesting Covid is on the rise in England”.
Were those trusts imposing mask “requirements” in areas of above-average Covid prevalence? It appears not; there was no discernible pattern and, in fact, glaring contradictions. For example, Barnsley, with continuing significant restrictions, had a catchment area with the lowest daily new cases per 100,000 people; while Swindon and surrounding areas, served by the Great Western Trust that had reduced its mask restrictions, had the highest rate.
In investigating one trust, ESNEFT, the 10,000 patients reportedly seen every day were still being subjected to “safety theatre” going into a third year of the Covid saga, seemingly driven by a very small and unaccountable infection control team, if not in reality the whims of one man.
Even into autumn 2023, ESNEFT’s website giving advice for visitors to wards and to Accident & Emergency still states that people are required to wear “surgical face masks covering their nose and mouth” where there is a “high-risk of transmission of contagious respiratory infection” or if clinical staff ask them to wear one.
On September 26th 2023 the Smile Free campaign submitted a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to ESNEFT, seeking three pieces of information:
ESNEFT replied a month later, saying that it “does not have access” to any data related to Covid case numbers within its locality. Obviously, this raises the question as to how its staff ever knew whether ‘Covid cases’ were increasing, decreasing or staying flat? It further raises the question as to how they were ever able to make any decisions on mandating, or even recommending, the wearing of face coverings as ‘protection’ against a respiratory virus? It also throws into doubt ESNEFT’s operational competence. ESNEFT also claims that, as it hasn’t operated a “universal mandate” since May 2023, it doesn’t have a risk assessment. ESNEFT never answered the final question, concerning the most recent date at which it conducted a risk assessment. Should we conclude it has never done one?
In response to a similar FOI request around the same time, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, which had reintroduced masking “requirements”, told us it doesn’t “hold the data for regional/community Covid data”, nor “a formal risk assessment” that would justify reintroduction of mask-wearing. In fact, it doesn’t have any “formal risk assessment” used to justify the mandating of masks at all, from any time. Instead it claims it has “a trust-wide expert group which reviews and agrees all actions required depending on the Covid prevalence level which includes the wearing of COVID-19 face masks”. In other words, unilateral decisions are made by a group of staff who don’t feel it necessary to follow the prescribed decision-making processes within their organisation (the NHS) and who don’t record their findings and document them in any formal way. We therefore followed up, asking for the roles of the individuals in this group. At time of writing, the trust had not provided an answer despite being long overdue based on FOI requirements.
In a second open letter in summer 2023, this time co-signed by over 2,500 doctors, scientists and healthcare professionals and 7,500 members of the public, we called on the NHS Chief Executives to immediately issue clear new guidance explicitly discouraging any routine requirement for staff, patients or visitors to cover their faces in healthcare settings.
This time, NHS England’s Dame Ruth May specifically referenced UKHSA guidance as the reason for the ongoing “postcode lottery”, stating “the current UKHSA guidance… sets out that in health and care settings, non-pharmaceutical interventions (such as mask wearing and enhanced ventilation) may be used, depending on local prevalence and risk assessment, with the aim to reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2”. It is interesting that “local prevalence and risk assessment” should be emphasised as the key considerations, since our investigations show hospitals unable to provide any evidence of increased local prevalence, nor risk assessments, to underpin their arbitrary decisions.
On November 2nd 2023, a few weeks before Harries’s appearance at the Covid Inquiry, we wrote an open letter to her at UKHSA asking her to explain the discrepancy between UKHSA’s current guidance, which, while broadly recommending a return to pre-pandemic normality, continues to allow re-imposition of masks where there is a local appetite for it, and its recent literature review, which concluded the evidence for masks reducing viral transmission was, at best, very weak.
We asked Harries to immediately update UKHSA guidance so as to:
At time of writing, we still await a reply – though we note that via her Covid Inquiry testimony Harries has clearly conceded point one above, and identified one extremely significant harm – the false sense of security engendered by masking – from point two.
In everyday life, it only makes sense to initiate a new action if we are reasonably confident it will not result in more harms than benefits. The importance of this notion is amplified manyfold when it is powerful actors – politicians and their public health experts – forcing the change on their citizens. The ‘Precautionary Principle‘ in its original form endorsed this important rule and complemented the Hippocratic oath of our medical doctors to “first do no harm”. Yet throughout the Covid saga we have witnessed a total disregard for this principle with the imposition of a series of non-evidenced restrictions, driven more by politics than science, where the resulting collateral damage – to both the public and to the reputation of medicine and institutional science – has dwarfed any benefits. A prominent example of such absurdity has been the mask requirement in community settings.
Dr. Gary Sidley is a retired NHS Consultant Clinical Psychologist and co-founder of the Smile Free campaign opposed to mask mandates.
The Cradle | January 26, 2024
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, is continuing to send oil and fuel tankers through the Red Sea, despite US and UK bombing of Yemen and attacks by Yemen’s armed forces on Israeli, US, and UK-linked ships passing through the Bab al-Mandeb Strait.
“We’re moving in the Red Sea with our oil and products cargoes,” Mohammed al-Qahtani, head of Aramco’s refining and oil trading and marketing businesses, told Bloomberg on 26 January.
The risks of continuing to use the Red Sea route to Europe amid the violence are “manageable,” he said.
In November, Yemen’s de-facto government, led by the Ansarallah resistance movement, began targeting ships with Israeli links and ships traveling to Israel via the Red Sea and Suez Canal.
Ansarallah took the decision in response to Israel’s bombing and ground campaign against Gaza, which many view as a genocide.
Rather than press Israel to end attacks on Gaza, the US and UK began bombing targets in Yemen, endangering not only Israeli-linked ships but ships from other nations as well.
In response, many of the world’s largest shipping companies began redirecting ships around the Horn of Africa, adding two weeks to the journey from Asia to Europe.
But in January, Aramco increased crude shipments through the Red Sea toward Europe, according to vessel tracking data compiled by Bloomberg.
“That is also giving us huge access and optionality,” Qahtani said. “We are assessing that almost on a daily basis.”
He said that the cost of these shipments has increased, as few shipping companies are willing to travel the route, and insurance costs have risen. “But overall it’s is very manageable.”
Most Saudi crude is exported east to Asia, but the kingdom has been able to continue using the Red Sea route for western shipments due to its continued ties with the Yemeni government.
Saudi Arabia and Ansarallah continue to negotiate a formal end to the war they fought between 2015 and 2022.
As western shipping companies have rerouted their ships, Chinese firms have stepped in to fill the void, as China also enjoys good relations with Ansarallah and does not fear its ships being attacked in the Red Sea.
Chinese firms have been serving ports such as Doraleh in Djibouti, Hodeidah in Yemen, and Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, which all saw major drops in port traffic following the attacks.
Cichen Shen, the China expert at Lloyd’s List Intelligence, told the Financial Times that the “easiest explanation” for the rush of Chinese operators into the region was that they seek to exploit their relative invulnerability to attack to win business.
“You have commercial interest and you see this capacity gap and you see the demand,” Shen said of the lines’ motivation for moving ships to the region. “I think the commercial interest is probably the biggest reason.”
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | January 24, 2024
Four national institutions have failed to model the 2050 energy system correctly, and all of them in ways that lead to understatement of the costs of Net Zero.
Over the weekend, the Sunday Telegraph reported that the Climate Change Committee has got its energy system modelling wrong. The revelation was made by Sir Christopher Llewellyn Smith, the lead author of the recent Royal Society report on electricity storage, in remarks made at a seminar at Oxford.
According to Sir Christopher, the Climate Change Committee’s estimates of the costs of Net Zero are fundamentally flawed because they have only modelled isolated years. As he pointed out in the seminar, low-wind years can happen back to back, which means that the Climate Change Committee need twice as much storage capacity as they thought. As a result, they have underestimated the costs.
However, the Sunday Telegraph didn’t mention that it’s not just the Climate Change Committee that has made this mistake. In the same seminar, Sir Christopher pointed out that the National Infrastructure Commission has done the same thing, despite being warned of the problem of clusters of low-wind years. So they too will have underestimated the costs.
The National Infrastructure Assessment… is also based on one year…they were told by the Met Office ‘you can get extreme events’…it’s not enough to look at one. They looked at one, so they got the answer wrong. The Met Office are really angry, because they told them ‘don’t do it’, but they did it.
I can also reveal that National Grid ESO, in its Future Energy Scenarios, has done the same thing. I wrote to the NGESO team to ask how they did things, and was told that their models are prepared using weather conditions in 2013, which they describe as an “average year”. They are starting to run tests against low-wind conditions (so-called ‘dunkelflautes’), but back-to-back wind droughts don’t seem to be on their radar yet:
The generation provided from renewables, as well as the demand profile, is typically based on an average weather year (2013).
For FES23, we also conducted an initial piece of analysis looking at abnormal weather conditions (resulting in abnormal supply and demand patterns), the results of which can be found in our FES23 publication under the title Dunkelflaute Period. We took a period of extreme weather, in this case between Jan-Feb 1985, and applied it to our Consumer Transformation scenario in 2050, to look at how the system would respond to a sustained period low renewable output…
We are planning on looking at abnormal supply and exceptional demand in more detail going forward as well as the effects of more extreme weather.
That means that they too will have underestimated the cost of Net Zero.
The Royal Society is to be congratulated for clarifying the problem. However, it turns out that their own modelling is fundamentally flawed too. That’s because, while they model 37 years of different wind speeds, they assume that electricity demand is always the same. Sir Christopher has admitted that this is not correct, in a podcast broadcast last year. As he put it then:
And now I confess something that is a bit of a weakness in our report. We’ve got this model of one year of demand… based in the weather in 2018…We simply repeat that 37 times.
This is clearly wrong, because in 2050 it is imagined that we will all heat our homes with electric heat pumps. Electricity demand will therefore be much higher in cold years than in mild ones, and if we have back to back cold years, we are going to need much more storage.
So, four well funded national institutions have failed to model the 2050 correctly, and all of them in ways that low-balls the cost of Net Zero. That’s a remarkable coincidence, and one that should probably raise alarm bells about the extent of the rot in the British establishment.
BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JANUARY 24, 2024
In October the Daily Sceptic reported on a paper written for the Royal Society led by Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith of Oxford University that concluded batteries were not the answer to the huge storage requirements of intermittent ‘green’ electricity power. Despite the prestigious academic fire power on parade, the paper died a death in the popular prints, presumably because of its unwelcome message about the much-touted battery solution. But recent revelations suggest the report could act as a loose thread that helps unravel the collectivist Net Zero agenda in the U.K. The Royal Society analysed decades of local wind speeds and found the electricity system needed the equivalent of at least a third of green energy to be stored as backup. Such a cost would be astronomical. Now it appears that the Government’s Climate Change Committee (CCC) fudged the issue by using just one year of high wind data in persuading Members of Parliament in 2019 to donkey-nod through Theresa May’s insane legislative rush to Net Zero by 2050.
Sir Chris’s report showed that wind could fall away for days at a time during periods of intense cold dominated by high atmospheric pressure. It also found wind speeds varied between years, all of which is in fact known and has been studied widely by other scientists. The Telegraph has reported on remarks made by Sir Chris after the paper was published in which he noted that the CCC has “conceded privately” that reliance on one year’s data was a “mistake”. It appears that the information given to MPs committing to 2050 Net Zero assumed there would be just seven days when wind turbines would produce less than 10% of their potential electricity output. According to Net Zero Watch that compares with 30 such days in 2020, 33 in 2019 and 56 in 2018.
In reporting that the CCC has conceded the “mistake”, the Telegraph noted that Sir Chris said the committee was still saying it doesn’t differ much from Sir Chris’s calculations. “Well that’s not quite true,” observed the Oxford Emeritus Professor. Asked by the newspaper if it disputed the account of Sir Chris, a CCC spokesman said it had “nothing further to add”.
Of course the ‘Noble Lie’ that Net Zero must be foisted on an unwilling population whatever the economic and societal cost will need to be preserved. Nothing to see here, move along please, is likely to guide most mainstream media in covering these latest revelations. The investigative science and Net Zero writer Paul Homewood is less inclined to ignore the serious matter. “It is now clear that Parliament authorised Net Zero without any proper assessment, whether financial or energy, and the whole Net Zero legislation must now be suspended until a full independent assessment is carried out.” He goes further and states that current and past members of the CCC must be held to account, and “excluded from any further influence over the country’s energy policy, or indeed on any issue of public policy”.
In general, nobody wants to talk about the lack of wind and solar backup, so there is a widespread pretence that the problem will somehow be solved in the future. But having dismissed any role for batteries, the Royal Society suggested hydrogen as a solution, an idea, alas, only slightly less dumb than batteries. Highly explosive, low kinetic energy compared with hydrocarbons, expensive to produce, difficult to store and move around – the disadvantages are all too obvious. Francis Menton of the Manhattan Contrarian saw the report as an “enormous improvement” on every other effort on the subject of large scale energy storage systems. But in the end, the authors still have a “quasi-religious commitment” to a fossil-free future, and this means that the report, despite containing much valuable information, “is actually useless for any public policy purpose”.
What is becoming clear is the level of statistical deception that is practised across climate science and the promotion of Net Zero. Surface temperature measurements are frequently adjusted upwards on a retrospective basis despite ignoring growing urban heat corruptions, activists use computer models to run up garbage-in, garbage-out scares on an almost daily basis, and bad weather is deliberately confused with long-term climate to suggest the latter is changing due to human caused carbon dioxide. All lapped up without a critical word between them by members of the mainstream media increasingly funded by elite billionaires.
The donkey-nodding politicians and the poodle media often hide behind the notion that they are just following the ‘science’. There is no such thing as the ‘science’, settled or otherwise, just the ongoing scientific process. The distinguished scientist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman captured the integrity of the process when he wrote: “If you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid – not only what you think is right about it. … Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them.”
Renewable energy is not a low-cost substitute for fossil fuels, notes a forward in Rupert Darwall’s recently published report on Net Zero and Britain’s “disastrous” energy policies. High and rising energy costs have locked Britain into economic decline, a suggestion given weight by last week’s savage destruction of the steel economy of Port Talbot. Renewables are not cheap, nor can they provide the reliability that modern societies expect and on which they depend. His report is said to convincingly demonstrate “how Britain was conned into Net Zero by deceptive and illusory promises of cheap wind power”.
The CCC is a dedicated green activist group that sits at the heart of U.K. Government. It is a pernicious, untrustworthy force in British politics giving cover to policies that will lead to de-industrialisation and massive changes in future lifestyle including restriction on diet, transport and personal freedoms.
Here’s hoping the wind scandal blows the damn thing away.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
By George Lawson | Not A Lot Of People Know That | January 23, 2024
It seems to me that the falsification of data on the weather, perpetrated by Mr Stark and the Climate Change Committee, has far wider implications than the crime itself. It was due to the Climate Change Committee’s false information to parliament that the Net Zero fiasco was brought into law by the Teresa May government with wide government support before she was forced out of office. Net Zero, as we all know, has been a very expensive failure, and will be seen as the most costly and useless law that has ever been passed by our legislators.
The law has indirectly been responsible for increasing fuel prices to the public and pushed up business costs and prices, making products uncompetitive. It is responsible for increasing the cost of living for everyone across the nation, and has drained many billions of pounds from our overstretched government finances. The effects of these avoidable negative factors on our nation are simply incalculable, but what we do know is that Stark’s blatant lies have been responsible for trashing the country’s economy.
Mr Sunak now has good cause to do two things to affect a recovery of our lost economy. He should immediately close down the wasteful and lying Climate Change Committee, as this is the most expensive lie, by far, than the many lies they have included in their reports over the years, and bring in legislation to overturn the ridiculous economy – sapping Net Zero law. If he does this he will be supported by 99 per cent of the population, it will also increase his reputation massively for when the next election happens.
Finally, Stark, together with the Chairman of the Climate Change Committee, should be brought before a full committee of enquiry to answer for his lies, and if found guilty of intentionally misleading Parliament, he should be sent to prison. Such terrible lies to enhance his reputation at such a cost to the nation, should not go unpunished.
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | January 22, 2024
Having set up the big lie about storms, by naming every passing low pressure system and only reporting wind speeds at high altitude and clifftop sites, the Met Office have now doubled down with the lie that storms in the UK are more intense, and it is due to climate change:
Yet the Met Office’s own State of the Climate Report last year was absolutely clear that storms are now less intense than in the 1980s and 90s:
Claire Nasir then compounds her error by talking about rainfall.
Despite the heatwave in June, rainfall for the summer as a whole was above average, as was spring. So where she got this idea of a rainfall deficit is a mystery.
Meanwhile, although autumn was wetter than average, it was a long way from being unusually so. To call it a shift between extremes is the sort of palpable nonsense we are so used now to hearing from the Met Office.
It is time that the Met Office’s climate change work was defunded, and the organisation returned to its proud tradition as a Meteorological Office.
Sputnik – 21.01.2024
The United Kingdom plans to spend $514 million to modernize the Sea Viper anti-aircraft missile system that UK forces previously used to shoot down drones in the Red Sea amid a deteriorating situation in the Middle East region, UK Defense Secretary Grant Shapps said.
On January 10, Shapps said that a UK destroyer operating in the Red Sea alongside US warships managed to repel “the largest attack” staged in the region by Yemen’s Houthi.
The contract was reportedly signed with the UK division of the MBDA missile maker, the report said. The Sea Viper missile system will receive new missiles and software to counter ballistic missile threats.
The Houthis vowed in November 2023 to attack any ships associated with Israel until it halts the invasion of Gaza.
In January, the US and UK began airstrikes on Houthi positions in Yemen to degrade their fighting capabilities. Russia condemned both the Houthi actions in the Red Sea and the Western aggression against Yemen, dubbing the latter “another example of the Anglo-Saxons’ distortion of UN Security Council resolutions and complete disregard for international law”.
Net Zero Watch | January 19, 2024
Net Zero Watch has said that Labour’s green dogmatism will be a disaster for the working classes, bringing industrial closure on an unprecedented scale. The campaign group, which has warned about the existential threat to British steel industry for more than a decade, says that the Port Talbot closure was inevitable, given the determination of all parties to push up the costs of energy.
The policy of taxing fossil fuels made the closure of Port Talbot inevitable, while the drive for renewables is pushing up electricity prices so far that the plan to replace the blast furnace with an electric-powered arc furnace will almost certainly prove to be a dead duck.
Electricity prices have doubled from 2002—2020, even rising during long periods of falling gas prices, as a result of increasing grid system inefficiency caused by renewables.
Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford warns that things may get even worse under a Labour government.
Ed Miliband’s delusions over renewables are going to be a disaster for the UK working classes. He is going to produce deindustrialisation on a scale that is going make the closure of the coalmines under Margaret Thatcher look like a walk in the park.
Mr Montford says that while the finger of blame for Port Talbot should be pointed at the Conservatives, there is an all-party consensus around the policies that produced the disaster:
The Westminster village is so far divorced from the interests of general public that they will shrug off the Port Talbot disaster with barely a look back.
RT | January 20, 2024
Steel producer Tata Steel plans to close blast furnaces at its Port Talbot plant in South Wales and lay off nearly 3,000 workers, according to media reports. The move, which is part of a major restructuring of the company’s UK operations, will reportedly leave the UK as the only G20 economy unable to make steel from scratch.
The planned move, which was first reported by the Financial Times this week, is part of Indian-owned Tata Steel’s four-year transition to a greener form of steelmaking at the company’s UK steel operations, which employ 8,000 people, and involve sites elsewhere in Wales and the Midlands. While the blast furnaces at Port Talbot will be shut down, the company intends to build electric arc furnaces, which make steel from recycled scrap. The government has promised up to £500 million ($634 million) to help with the transition.
Meanwhile, the two other remaining blast furnaces in the UK, both of which belong to the Chinese-owned company British Steel, are also slated for shutdown as the parent entity plans to replace them with two electric arc facilities, which could be operational as early as 2025.
“That would leave the UK as the only G20 country that cannot make steel from raw materials,” The Guardian wrote.
“Steel is the beating heart of manufacturing and of our entire infrastructure and, of course, of our national security,” Stephen Kinnock, a Labour MP for Aberavon, home of the Port Talbot plant, told Sky News. “Do we really want to be a country, given the dangerous and turbulent world in which we live, that isn’t able to produce its own steel?” he said.
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