Ed Militard - Time To Change The Narrative

There's no doubting the fact that the announced energy price rise from SSE, and soon to be followed by other providers, is a gift to Ed Militard and the Laborious Party. It means that he can get all worked up about unscruplulous capitalists exploiting the poor consumer and therefore pose as our friend and saviour. It conveniently ignores the part he played in bringing the high costs of energy through (hidden) green taxation - and the fact that he continues to support the same policies as part of a 'fight against climate change'. And lest we be accused of being one-sided here, Militard is doing no different to what that lying piece of shit Chris Huhne did. And brain-dead Ed Davey does the same thing - they all bleat about energy poverty but ignore the part they play in making this happen.

This is nothing new. We saw the same thing with the banking crisis. The popular narrative soon became that it was all the fault of the nasty bankers, conveniently ignoring the part that the politicians played. It meant that Gordon Brown and Barack Obama could both attempt to grab the moral high-ground and yet ignore the part that they had directly played in the fomenting the crisis. How many people really know that Obama pushed hard for policies for 'affordable housing' that ended up giving us the sub-prime crisis?

This isn't to say that the greedy energy companies meme is all wrong - but the problem is way more complex than pinning the blame on greedy executives and their shareholders. The fact is that governments have been dicking with the energy industry in all kinds of ways - green taxes, subsidies in 'renewables', changing the energy supply mix, closing down cheap coal-powered stations, dragging their feet on shale and much more.

So, it's important then that at every conceivable opportunity we remind people of the part that Militard, Davey and the rest have played  - continue to play - in creating the precarious energy supply situation and the high costs that we have to pay. We must not let the politicians do what they do best - create or exacerbate a problem, pin the blame elsewhere and then pose as our saviours.

Quotes like these, from Ed Militard, should be repeated again and again until the message gets through:

November 2009:  It needs a willingness to take the argument to people about the tough choices involved in tackling climate change. This is the starting point: a willingness to engage with people on, for example, the fact that to deal with the problem of climate change, energy bills are likely to rise.

January 2010: Yes, there are upward pressures on energy bills, and that makes life difficult for people, including those in fuel poverty, but it is right that we go down the low-carbon energy route.

The IPCC Has Delivered

The IPCC has delivered something of a crowd pleaser in its latest assessment. There really is something for everybody in this latest report. For the true believers we get the "95% confidence" that humans are the dominant driver of climate change. Forget the models diverging ever more from reality, forget the 15-17 years flat-lined temperature increase despite record CO2 levels, forget the lowered estimates of climate sensitivity to CO2. Just focus on that 95% figure and everything else pales into insignificance. There's little doubt that it's a crowd-pleaser and the true believers will take that number and batter the sceptics with it repeatedly.

For the political classes who pay for the IPCC gravy-train, this is just what they wanted. Here's the justification for the continued green policies and the subsidies for grandiose and futile schemes to reduce CO2 emissions and stop us boiling the oceans. For those in power in the Westsern countries, they've bought themselves permission to carry on as before with failed policies that we citizens are paying dearly for. Obama, Cameron and the rest will quote the IPCC ad infinitum and continue with the refrain that the evidence is incontrovertible and that it's worse than we thought.

And, let's be honest, the IPCC has done a great service to the sceptic cause too. There was a chance that it could have taken a more honourable course and admitted that it's models were wrong, that there was less cause for alarm, that we know less than we pretend to. It could have admitted that the 'science' is far less settled than it has previously claimed. But it hasn't. The IPCC is like a super-tanker set on a course and is unable to nimbly change direction in the face of the obstinate reality in its path. So it continues with statistically incoherent pronouncements and politically acceptable sound bites. For us sceptics this is confirmation that the IPCC is irredemable, and the voices that are being raised against it are growing more vociferous and increasing in number. Witness Judith Curry saying:

We need to put down the IPCC as soon as possible – not to protect the patient who seems to be thriving in its own little cocoon, but for the sake of the rest of us whom it is trying to infect with its disease.

For the moment though, the IPCC have bolstered the confidence of the diminishing band of true believers who are immune to evidence. For them, the 95% number, along with the fake 97% 'consensus' number from Cook and his band of crooks, is all they need to fight off the mounting evidence (much of it in peer-reviewed journals) that climate alarmism is not warranted. In fact it wouldn't suprise me if another 90+ number appeared soon. Having three 9s to quote will feel so much better than just two - as if that's enough to close off reality.

Syria - TFFT

As is usual the defeat of the government in last night's vote on "action" against Syria is widely being replayed as a personal defeat of David Cameron (and to a lesser extent Nick Clegg). It was, of course, but it's more than that. It's one of those rare moments when Parliament has acted as a parliament and has reflected on an issue and how the public feels about it, rather than ignoring us and voting the way they've been told to vote by the whips. It happens all to rarely so we should savour the reminder of what politics could be like if we had more direct control of our politicians. If that had been the case it is unlikely we would have invaded Iraq, or even Afghanistan come to that.

In the meantime, the senseless rush to be seen to be "doing something" for the sake of it can carry on across the water. Heaven forbid that Obama miss an opportunity to claim the moral high ground...

Lab-grown brains and Syria

On the day that scientists reveal that they've grown human brain tissue in the lab, we have our own leaders parading their lack of the stuff. How else do we explain this rush for yet another military intervention? What the hell are these people thinking - indeed, are they thinking?

Reaching for the missiles seems to have become a stock response. The siutation in Syria is appaling, but the complexity of the situation seems too much for our leaders to comprehend. Like all politicians their first response is always to be seen to be doing something. It doesn't matter what that something is, it just needs to be something that means they can't be accused of standing back and doing nothing. And, like it or  not, the simplest way of showing that they're doing something is to drop bombs on people. To make this palatable you need to have a simplistic narrative. You know, something like evil regime versus freedom-loving rebels, good versus bad. Forget the fact that the rebels include jihadists of the worst kind who hate the regime for being soft on religious minorities, women's rights and so on.

Do our leaders think that the these jihadists will show gratitude when the regime falls? Like hell they will. Recent history is littered with jihadists we have supported turning their weapons on us as soon as they get the chance. There are plenty of Syrian rebels who hate the West as much or more than they hate Assad and his clan. Those brain cells grown in the lab? They've got more memory than our brain dead leaders.

We don't know for sure what these chemical weapons were or who fired them. Both sides are capable of such an act, but the Syrian state had more to lose than the rebels in doing such a thing. In any case it seems that it's enough to give us the WMD moment when our sanctimonius leaders can play elder statesmen and bomb another country. And then conveniently look the other way when it helps to lead to the slaughter of Christians and other religious minorities, the institution of Sharia law and the inevitable blood bath as rebel groups fight it out for the spoils.

Lab grown brains? I'd vote for that rather than the brainless morons now in power.

A Reason To Hope Romney Wins

I'm not what you'd call a natural Republican sympathiser, any more than I fancy myself as a Democrat supporter. It's the same with politics here in the UK. I detest all of the main political parties. Looking from this side of the Atlantic I really don't see much to recommend Mitt Romney over Obama. I can see that Obama's a disaster and has further screwed the US economy as he's tried hard to turn the US into the EU. But I don't see much evidence of Romney as being an instinctive small-government free-market kind of guy. He just comes across as another big-spending, big-state Republican in a long line of big-state Republicans like Dubya..

But thanks to a BBC poll that's all changed. According to the BBC, (an organisation who would have given Obama two Nobels not just one), the French score highest in the world in preferring Obama for Romney. So there you have it, at last a positive reason for voting Romney...

Government Spending and Economic Growth

Interesting article at Cato (http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/spending-lies-run-facts) looking at the relationship between state spending (in the US) as a percentage of GDP and annual economic growth and employment. Looking at the data provided you can see which way the relationship goes - more state spending leads to lower growth and lower employment. Just  how big is the relationship?



So, increased state spending is strongly correlated with decreased annual growth, and with decreased employment. And of course employment is even more strongly correlated to economic growth.

Forget stimulus, forget the idea that the state will fix everything through the magic in spending and just look at that little table of numbers....

Thank You WUWT

There's a good piece by Pat Michaels over at the Cato Institute about Obama's headlong retreat from 'climate change' as a major theme of his presidency. Michaels, who has long been on the alarmists hit list as a major 'denier', suggests that a major factor in this is the Watts Up With That website.

How could disagree? WUWT is a big player and outranks the alarmist sites both in visitors and influence. It's a fantastic resource, and we all owe a big vote of thanks to Anthony Watts and his helpers and contributors. If ever you needed an exemplar of what citizen science is all about then WUWT is it.

Barnet Shale Bonanza

Yet another in our compare and contrast series...

This time compare the myth of 'Green Jobs' propagated by the entire political class on both sides of the Atlantic, from Obama to Cameron to the many and varied functionaries of the EU politbureau - along with their allies in the bloated NGO sector, with the reality of job creation and economic activity surrounded shale gas in the United States. Look at the Spanish experience:

The internal report of the Spanish administration admits that the price of electricity has gone up, as well as the debt, due to the extra costs of solar and wind energy. Even the government numbers indicate that each green job created costs more than 2.2 traditional jobs, as was shown in the report of the Juan de Mariana Institute

Now take a look at the report high-lighted by the Global Warming Policy Foundation:

The Barnett Shale natural gas field has generated $65.4 billion in economic activity and created more than 100,200 jobs over the 24-county area since 2001, according to a new study commissioned by the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce.

The full report can be found here: http://www.fortworthchamber.com/BarnettShaleStudy11.pdf

This should be cause for celebration in the UK. Given the scale of recent discoveries of vast shale gas deposits in the UK, we too should be looking forward to a major boost to jobs and economic activity. This really is a no-brainer. You'd have to be totally ideologically blinkered and/or have some personal financial stake in "renewables" not to see this. Not that we would suggest that David Cameron's father-in-law or Chris Huhne's wife would have much of an influence, despite their financial profit from wind farm subsidies and the like.

It's such a no-brainer in fact, that it really begs the question, yet again, of why our leaders believe what they do.

Obama Is Insane

There's a famous quote attributed to Albert Einstein:

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

By this definition Barack Obama is insane. His stimulus packages have failed to deliver. The deficit is up. The economy is largely stalled. Unemployment refuses to budge. So what's his latest and greatest plan? More stimulus.

Why should it be different this time? What magic ingredient is there in this package that isn't in the others?

The deficit will continue to climb. Consumer confidence will continue to stagnate. Unemployment won't shift.

If he wants to boost demand then the measures are simple:

• cut taxes all round
• cut climate-related programs
• quit foreign wars
• stop supporting lame-duck banks and auto manufacturers
• just leave the economy to right itself

Mind you, Obama doesn't have a monopoly on insanity. The entire political class in Europe is infected with the same madness - witness the increasingly desperate closing of eyes and hoping for the best around saving the Euro....