Quotulatiousness

August 24, 2012

The new Malthusian miserabilism

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Food, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:18

Brendan O’Neill on the once-again popular theories of Reverend Thomas Malthus:

Malthusianism is back in vogue. Not only in theatres in Sloane Square, but across the opinion-forming spectrum. Last year, the human population hit seven billion, giving rise to a boom in handwringing commentary. BBC reporters tell us that ‘uncontrolled population growth threatens to undermine efforts to save the planet’. The Guardian’s environment reporters are forever warning of the dangers of our ‘rapidly growing global population’. Then there’s much-loved celebs like David Attenborough, who recently signed up to the population-panic group the Optimum Population Trust (OPT) and frequently declares: ‘I’ve never seen a problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve with fewer people.’

The New Malthusians are getting cockier. At the UN Rio+20 Earth summit earlier this year, 105 respectable institutions, including Britain’s increasingly Malthusian Royal Society, urged the international powers-that-be to look beyond the ‘ethical sensitivities’ around the population issue and ‘confront rising global population’. All those wailing babies mean we are now ‘living beyond the planet’s means’, they declared. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is pumping millions of dollars into the distribution of birth-control tools in the developing world. Well-off westerners can now even offset their carbon emissions by helping to prevent the birth of babies in less fortunate places. A website called Pop Offsets, launched by the OPT, allows you to work out how much carbon you emit in your daily life and then tells you how many births you must help to prevent in order to offset that carbon. You make a financial contribution to a reproductive charity; that charity encourages a woman somewhere not to have more kids; and, hey presto, your personal emissions are cancelled out by your contribution to the non-creation of resource-demanding babies. The Guardian’s report on this initiative was illustrated with a photo of babies, 12 of them, just lying there like the problematic drains on nature.

Malthusianism is so ingrained in the outlook of greens and other trendies that people can fantasise about loads of human beings dying off without anyone batting an eyelid. Population panic-merchants often claim that the ‘carrying capacity’ of the planet is two billion human beings, so at least five billion less than at present. In a discussion on Radio 3’s super-respectable Nightwaves a couple of years ago, the psychologist and writer Sue Blackmore declared: ‘For the planet’s sake, I hope we have bird flu or some other thing that will reduce the population, because otherwise we’re doomed.’ There were no complaints to the BBC: the idea that humans are a problem in need of a solution is widespread in respectable ­circles.

August 13, 2012

The problems of conducting science-by-press-release

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

At sp!ked, Ben Pile explains why the first casualties in the climate change debate are usually the facts:

In plain sight of the fact that the melting was neither unexpected nor unprecedented, environmental journalists the world over picked up the story and ran with it. In the Guardian, Suzanne Goldenberg, wrote: ‘The Greenland ice sheet melted at a faster rate this month than at any other time in recorded history, with virtually the entire ice sheet showing signs of thaw.’

As I have noted elsewhere, Guardian journalists have a fetish for stories about melting ice. In September last year, following an unusually low measurement of Arctic sea-ice extent, Damian Carrington wrote: ‘Ice is the white flag being waved by our planet, under fire from the atmospheric attack being mounted by humanity.’ But the low measurement of sea ice that Carrington pointed to disagreed with at least five other continuous measurements of the Arctic, and was thus unreliable. This kind of over-reaction to scientific developments are facile attempts to turn science into stories of political intrigue. When images of the Arctic taken by US spy satellites were declassified in 2009, the headline of an article by Goldenberg and Carrington proclaimed that ‘the secret evidence of global warming Bush tried to hide’ had been ‘revealed’.

The rash of excited articles about the dying cryosphere caused some surprising corrective responses from voices within climate research. Malte Humpert from the Arctic Institute Centre wrote a stinging response to the headline histrionics. ‘The Greenland ice sheet, which is up to 3000+ metres thick, is not “melting away”, did not “melt in four days”, it is not “melting fast”, and Greenland did not “lose 97 per cent of its surface ice layer”.’ Humpert continued: ‘Most articles also exaggerated the importance of the melt event on global sea levels by explaining how sea levels would rise by up to 7.2 metres if the ice sheet were to melt.’

Similarly, Mark Brandon, a sea-ice scientist at the Open University, reproduced an interesting series of tweets and links to articles that showed the development of the current panic about ice, beginning with (alleged) comedian Marcus Brigstocke’s misconception of the story. To Brigstocke, an ‘unprecedented’ melt was the proverbial canary in the coal mine — a harbinger of doom. But as Brandon and his colleagues pointed out, it was a bit soon to be calling time on the human race. This was just weather.

August 2, 2012

The real reason behind the war on the humble plastic bag

Filed under: Environment, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:54

Tom Bailey explains that the reasons we’ve been given for the renewed attacks on plastic bags are not the real reason for the ongoing struggle:

Individually, a plastic bag weighs about eight grams. In total, we use about 10 billion of them a year, adding up to around 80,000 tonnes of plastic bags. A large number, perhaps, but not when compared with total municipal waste. The total amount of household waste produced each year is 29.6million tonnes. This means that plastic bags make up a mere 0.27 per cent of what we all throw away every year. This percentage would become even smaller if we were to include commercial and industrial waste in our calculations.

The total amount of oil used to produce plastic bags is also exaggerated, considering that most plastic bags are made using naphtha, a part of crude oil that isn’t used for much else and would probably be burnt away otherwise.

So what’s going on here? Why the panic about a simple little bag? The assault on plastic bags is really an assault on consumerism. There is a prevailing view among the green and mighty that consumerism is bad. It is portrayed as being a modern-day vice, devoid of meaning, something which atomises society, corrupting us through crude materialism and distracting us from more important issues.

Plastic bags are an outward reflection of the ease with which people can buy goods and take them home. People now have the disposable income to enter a shop unexpectedly and buy a load of stuff, and plastic bags mean they can rest assured they they will have the means to carry their purchases. How often do people returning home from work decide, on a whim, to make a quick stop at Tesco Express to buy a few items of food? How frequently, perhaps on a journey past Oxford Street, are we drawn into a sale by a piece of attractive clobber? Such nonchalant consumption would be made more difficult, perhaps more expensive, without shops’ provision of handy, free plastic bags.

I guess I must be a puppet of “Big Plastic”, as I’ve posted about this issue a few times already.

July 20, 2012

Reason.tv: How the Government Makes You Fat: Gary Taubes on Obesity, Carbs, and Bad Science

Filed under: Food, Health, Science, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

“The government can come along and, with all the best intentions, cause enormous problems” says Gary Taubes, a science writer and author most recently of Why We Get Fat And What To Do About It.

Reason.tv’s Zach Weissmueller talked with Taubes about his controversial work in the world of nutrition and epidemiology, including Taubes’ hypothesis that carbohydrates, not dietary fat, overeating, or lack of physcial activity, are the primary factor causing obesity. Other topics include the inability of governments and large informational institutions such as the American Heart Association to adapt to new information, the mess of bad legislation and bad science that Taubes believes led to America’s obesity problem, and why many libertarians seem to love the Paleo Diet.

Taubes’ work has unsurprisingly invited criticism from scientists, government officials and journalists, even in the pages of Reason Magazine, where he went back and forth with Reason contributor Michael Fumento.

July 16, 2012

If this forecast is accurate, we’ll all be nostalgic for global warming

Filed under: Britain, Environment — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:05

In his Telegraph column on the current weather in Britain (and what it may or may not do to the Olympic schedule), Boris Johnson shares a long range weather forecast that is chilling — literally:

I have just been on the blower to my old chum, Piers Corbyn, the world’s foremost meteorological soothsayer, and he sounds like Jeremiah with an ingrown toenail. This is the same Corbyn, with a first-class degree in physics, who decisively beat the Met Office in 2010 and accurately forecast the cold and snowy winter — and I am afraid he has been bearish about this summer from sometime in February or March.

According to Piers and his team at Weather Action, we all underestimate the role of the sun. This is set to be just about the wettest July on record, he says, and that is mainly because of things taking place in the nuclear fireball millions of miles away from earth. “Sometime too bright the eye of heaven shines,” says the Poet, and often is his gold complexion dimmed. This is one of the dim moments. The old boy is suffering from some kind of solar acne, called “coronal holes”, and on July 12 he apparently emitted a colossal flare — a cosmic spurt of X-rays and other charged particles; and, by a process that we (or at least I) do not fully understand — perhaps because rain droplets form more easily when there are charged particles around — this distemper in the celestial orb is helping to cause the current inundations.

For the sake of completeness, and so that no one can later accuse me of concealing the bad news (what did he know about the weather, and when did he know it?), I should say that Piers has a general thesis that the current phase of grim weather — cold, snowy winters and wet summers — is just the prelude to something yet more bracing. We are heading, he says, for a mini Ice Age. These wet Julys and frosty Januaries are part of the opening drum roll of a cold period that will set in over the next decades.

Some say it will be upon us by 2045, some say by 2030. Looking at the pattern of the last few years, Piers Corbyn now thinks it could be sooner than that. He does not say that sabretooth tigers will roam the streets of Newcastle. He does not say that the Thames will freeze at London Bridge and that we will have fairs on the ice — unlikely, given how fast the river flows these days. But he does believe that it will get nippier, and that we will see the kind of cold period last experienced in the late 17th century and early 18th century.

July 15, 2012

Individual data points are less important than trends

Filed under: Environment, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:06

Remember the summer of 2001? It was a media feeding frenzy on the highly appropriate topic of sharks: shark attacks in US coastal waters were the third-most reported news item. But the media was calling attention to a “trend” of increasing shark attacks that didn’t actually exist. 2001 was actually a lower than average year for shark attacks. Warren Mayer explains the similarities between 2001’s “Summer of the Shark” and 2012’s heat wave:

This summer we have been absolutely bombarded with stories about the summer heat wave in the United States. The constant drumbeat of this coverage is being jumped on by many as evidence of catastrophic man-made global warming.

[. . .]

Trend, you say? Doesn’t a 100-year high temperature in and of itself imply warming? Certainly not. I believe this will prove to be an exaggeration, but for a moment let’s assume that this heat wave has created the hottest June in 100 years for half the Continental US. That seems pretty extreme, right? But the Continental US is about 2.5% of the world’s land mass. Just by math, in a stochastic system with a stable mean, a land area of this size somewhere should have a 100-year high month about five times a year! One data point about one small patch of the Earth having a hot month tells us nothing about trends.

[. . .]

What the Summer of the Shark needed, and what this summer’s US heatwave needs, is a little context. Specifically, if we are going to talk about supposed “trends”, then we should look at the data series in question over time. So let’s do so.

July 13, 2012

A more accurate title would have been The Locavore Delusion

Filed under: Environment, Food, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

Rob Lyons reviews the new book by Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu:

The fundamental question underpinning both those earlier papers and The Locavore’s Dilemma is this: if local food is so great, why did a globalised food system develop at all? The answer, as Desrochers and Shimizu argue, is that the creation of a worldwide trade in food reduced prices, increased variety and improved security of supply. If there is a problem with this world market in food, they argue, it is that it is not open or far-reaching enough.

The online eco-magazine Grist ran an interview with Desrochers earlier this month. In a follow-up piece, readers came up with responses to the interview. One of these responses provides such a neat summary of the arguments in favour of local food that it is worth repeating in full.

‘I am a local-food advocate for many reasons: Taste: An heirloom tomato picked that morning runs circles around a hybridised tomato picked two weeks ago in Florida and gassed so it turns red en route; Quality: the better the soil and the farmer, the better the food; Nutrition: food sheds nutrients after it is picked. The longer it takes to get to market, the less nutritional value it has, comparatively; Transparency: I like knowing how my food is grown and harvested. I visit my meat producer; try that at a CAFO [concentrated animal feeding operation]; Environmental: A minimisation of the use of chemicals that wash into waterways, creating algae blooms, choking out life, or killing beneficial insects, including honey bees; Sane stewardship: I like to support farmers who create more naturally fertile soil, which is better able to resist pests, floods, and droughts; Pleasure: I buy local food at my farmers’ market because it’s more pleasant to do so than going into an air-conditioned grocery store. I see neighbours, chat with farmers, taste before I buy. Economic: I want my food dollars to support my local economy; Humanity: Animals and humans are treated better on the small farms I know than they are on the large ones; I value green open spaces: Supporting local farms with my money encourages those farmers to maintain those green open spaces rather than selling off to developers.’

As Desrochers and Shimizu explain, these ideas are either not necessarily true, are matters of personal taste or, more often, are completely wrong. Instead, the authors argue, ‘the available evidence convincingly demonstrates that long-distance trade and modern technologies have resulted in much greater food availability, lower prices, improved health and reduced environmental damage than if they had never materialised. Indeed, more trade and ever-improving technologies remain to this day the only proven ways to lift large numbers of people out of rural poverty and malnutrition.’

Let’s take those arguments for local food, one by one, using (though not exclusively) the arguments in The Locavore’s Dilemma.

July 10, 2012

BMI: Badly Misleading Indicator

Filed under: Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:04

Lewis Page explains why being too thin is a bad idea health-wise:

Yet another study has shown that the so-called “obesity” epidemic sweeping the wealthy nations of the world has been massively over-hyped, as new results show that is is far more dangerous to be assessed as “underweight” than it is to be assessed even as “severely obese” — let alone merely “obese” or “overweight”.

“There is currently a widespread belief that any degree of overweight or obesity increases the risk of death, however our findings suggest this may not be the case,” says health prof Anthony Jerant, lead author of the study. “In the six-year timeframe of our evaluation, we found that only severe obesity was associated with an increased risk of death.”

Most statistics in this field are still based on the now widely discredited Body Mass Index (BMI) system, under which people are assessed as “underweight”, “normal”, “overweight”, “obese” or “severely obese”. BMI, devised in the early 19th century by an obscure Belgian sociologist without medical qualifications, copes poorly with increases in height as it assumes the human body will scale up in mass in proportion to the square of height — which doesn’t allow for the fact that bodies are three dimensional — and further fails to allow for the greater cross-sectional area needed in supporting structures to carry increasing weights.

July 3, 2012

Bad news (for panicmongers, anyway)

Filed under: Economics, Environment — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:32

In the Guardian, George Monbiot (known to his detractors as “The Great Moonbat”) admits the terrible truth. He was wrong, again:

The facts have changed, now we must change too. For the past 10 years an unlikely coalition of geologists, oil drillers, bankers, military strategists and environmentalists has been warning that peak oil — the decline of global supplies — is just around the corner. We had some strong reasons for doing so: production had slowed, the price had risen sharply, depletion was widespread and appeared to be escalating. The first of the great resource crunches seemed about to strike.

Among environmentalists it was never clear, even to ourselves, whether or not we wanted it to happen. It had the potential both to shock the world into economic transformation, averting future catastrophes, and to generate catastrophes of its own, including a shift into even more damaging technologies, such as biofuels and petrol made from coal. Even so, peak oil was a powerful lever. Governments, businesses and voters who seemed impervious to the moral case for cutting the use of fossil fuels might, we hoped, respond to the economic case.

[. . .]

Peak oil hasn’t happened, and it’s unlikely to happen for a very long time.

A report by the oil executive Leonardo Maugeri, published by Harvard University, provides compelling evidence that a new oil boom has begun. The constraints on oil supply over the past 10 years appear to have had more to do with money than geology. The low prices before 2003 had discouraged investors from developing difficult fields. The high prices of the past few years have changed that.

June 27, 2012

California primed to make bad decision for “good” reasons

Filed under: Environment, Food, Government, Health, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:05

California’s already bad economic situation could be made even worse by mandating that genetically modified foods be labelled to call attention to themselves:

The American Medical Association resolved this week that “there is no scientific justification for special labeling of bioengineered foods.”

The association has long-held that nothing about the process of recombinant DNA makes genetically engineered (GE) crop plants inherently more dangerous to the environment or to human health than the traditional crop plants that have been deliberately but slowly bred for human purposes for millennia. It is a view shared by the National Academy of Sciences, the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N., the European Commission, and countless other national science academies and non-governmental organizations.

And yet Californians will consider on their November ballots a law that mandates cigarette-like labeling of food derived from GE plants. Proponents claim to promote opportunities for consumers to make informed choices about the foods they eat. But to build support for the measure, they have played on consumer fears about a promising technology that is nevertheless prone to “Frankenfoods” demagoguery. If successful, they may well imperil the ability of Californians, and consumers around the world, to choose a technology that scientists contend could end hunger and malnutrition, lift hundreds of millions from poverty, and reduce the environmental impact of feeding an evermore populous world.

June 19, 2012

British “researchers” call for starvation diets to meet carbon targets

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:04

There’s only so much “mad” you can tolerate in the ranks of your “scientists”, and these guys are more than a bit over-the-top:

A famous mad professor who has previously called for Britons to starve their children into dwarfism so as to ease strains on the planetary ecosystem has reiterated his arguments, this time insisting that the amount of surplus flab carried by the human race will soon be equivalent to having another half-a-billion people on Earth.

Regular readers will be familiar with Professor Ian Roberts of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine already: he and his colleague Dr Phil Edwards wrote a paper in 2009 in which they suggested that it would be a good idea for Britons and Americans to model their diet and physique on that of the “lean” Vietnamese, as this would assist in such things as meeting British government carbon pledges. Lightweight Vietnamese people, according to the two scientists, not only need less food but use less energy to move themselves around.

Unfortunately, as we pointed out at the time, this would not merely have been a matter of Britons shedding some flab. In order to match the Vietnamese on weight, Brits would also have to lose four inches or so of height. Extrapolating from Roberts’ and Edwards’ figures, in fact, the people of the UK would need to shrink to a Hobbit-like stature barely over three feet to meet the more ambitious governmental carbon goals.

Oh, and in case you still think BMI has any scientific validity, here’s your disillusionment of the day:

Unfortunately the entire edifice of their argument is based on the long-discredited Body Mass Index (BMI), a frankly bizarre method of assessing how fat people are which was developed by an obscure Belgian social scientist without any medical qualifications in the early 19th century. The BMI assumes that healthy human mass goes up in proportion to the square of height, a patently absurd suggestion given that human bodies are three-dimensional rather than flat 2D shapes. All other things being equal a human’s weight should go up related to the cube of height — and indeed they aren’t equal. Any engineer will point out that cross-sectional area in support structures (feet, leg bones etc) needs to go up in direct proportion to weight carried, adding still more heft than a cube law would as height goes up. This is why elephants are not simply scaled-up dogs, and dogs are not simply scaled-up insects — they have proportionally thicker legs and other supporting structures and come out much heavier.

As one would expect, then, it has been confirmed by several recent studies among the taller populations of the modern-day developed nations that a BMI assessment of “overweight” should really be assessed as normal or healthy, while the previous “normal” range ought in fact to be dubbed “underweight”, as it has negative health consequences similar to being “obese”.

By suggesting that the human race — including the taller peoples — needs to shift into the outmoded BMI “normal” range, Roberts and his fellow public-health experts are advocating a course which would cause more health problems: scarcely what they are paid to do.

June 17, 2012

Imaginary “planetary boundaries”

Filed under: Environment, Food, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:08

Matt Ridley on the shift in emphasis for the Rio+20 conference:

The Riocrats now have a new tack, which will dominate next week’s discussion: planetary boundaries. An influential paper in 2009 written by Johan Rockstrom of Stockholm University and 28 colleagues argued that there are nine thresholds, crossing any of which will trigger collapse of the Earth’s life support systems: land-use change, loss of biodiversity, nitrogen and phosphorus levels, water use, ocean acidification, climate change, ozone depletion, aerosol loading and chemical pollution.

The trouble with this approach, according to a new report by Linus Blomqvist, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute in San Francisco, is that, for six of these measures, “there are no global tipping points beyond which these ecological processes will begin to function in fundamentally different ways. Hence the setting of boundaries for these mechanisms is an arbitrary exercise.”

A good example is land-use change. The Rockstrom paper suggested that if human beings convert 15% of the land surface of the Earth to cropland, the world will pass a tipping point, because as marginal land gets exhausted, a small increment in food demand would produce an accelerating increase in cultivation. Currently we cultivate about 11.7% of the land. Yet there is no evidence that anything special happens at 15%. In the words of Steve Bass of the International Institute for Environment and Development in London, “If anything, the opposite has probably been more true: Converting land for farming and for industry has clearly delivered a great deal of well-being.”

[. . .]

The “boundaries” approach needs to incorporate the possibility that, thanks to technology, fossil fuels and minerals, people are already living more lightly on the land than we did in the past.

June 15, 2012

The horrific environmental scourge of the plastic bag

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:40

Terence Corcoran on Toronto City Council’s most recent brainfart — banning plastic bags — and the actual environmental impact of same:

Meantime, most Canadians, through the media, would be relying on green activists and demagogic politicians who have been promoting plastic bags as a local and national environmental scourge for more than a decade. There’s not enough space here to review the mindset of politicians, including the inhabitants of Toronto city council, who last week voted 27-17 to ban plastic bags by 2013. Most of the bylaw’s backers would be getting their information from professionals, including Dr. Rick Smith, head of Environmental Defense.

[. . .]

Canadians who answer polls should know that Mr. Smith holds a PhD in green bull. He said Canadians know at a “gut level” that plastic bags are a “not terribly complicated environmental issue.” Well, here are three complications:

Litter The last city of Toronto audit of litter across the city, in 2006, found six plastic bags out of 4,341 items. That’s 0.14% by item. By weight, the percentage would be less.

Waste The 450 million plastic bags Mr. Smith mentions is a 2008 number. The city says the current number of bags is now estimated at about 215 million (the science of calculating this is something else). But even the 450 million-bag total, at about six grams per bag, works out to 2,600 tonnes. As a percentage of the city’s estimated 800,000 tonnes of waste, plastic bags would account for 0.3%. If all plastic bags were eliminated — an impossibility given their necessity as garbage-bin liners and other uses — Toronto’s waste stream would be essentially unchanged. Not a penny will be saved, and costs would likely go up under complications brought on by the ban.

Environment Numerous comprehensive studies by people who are as green or greener than Mr. Smith suggest plastic bags are better than the alternatives — whether paper or cloth. Plastic is less polluting and toxic than paper and cotton, according to a 2011 U.K. Environment Agency report. As for global warming, a cloth bag would have to be reused 327 times, and a paper bag nine times, to match the low warming impact of a high-density polyethylene bag that’s reused as a garbage-bin liner.

June 7, 2012

Yet another scare “study” about teens and video gaming

Filed under: Gaming, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:00

Martin Robbins in the Guardian on another “study” linking teenagers who play video games to negative results:

Not that the ‘research’ cited says anything about violent video games to begin with. BAAM conducted a survey of 204 parents of children aged nine to eighteen, asking about their use of computer games: anything from Tetris to GTA IV via SimCity. This produced the following results:

    “Forty-six per cent said their sons or daughters had become ‘less co-operative’ since they started playing video games. Forty-four per cent said they were more ‘rude or intolerant towards others’, 40 per cent said they were more impatient, 36 per cent reported an increase in ‘aggressive behaviour’, 29 per cent cited more mood swings and 26 per cent said their offspring had become more reclusive.”

26% of parents thought their teen offspring had become more reclusive in the years since they started playing video games. No doubt pedantic nay-sayers will whine on about the other SEVENTY-BLOODY-FOUR PER CENT of kids who either didn’t become more reclusive or became less reclusive, or ask how ‘reclusive’ is even defined or measured in the first place; but if that incredible correlation doesn’t persuade you, well then by golly-gosh I don’t know what will.

Even the most ‘persuasive’ of those figures stands at just 46%. That, astonishingly, is the proportion of parents who think their teenaged children are becoming less cooperative with time. This is put down to video games, rather than something silly, like… oh I don’t know, maybe the fact that they’re teenagers?! 46% is a shocking figure only in the sense that I’m shocked it’s only 46%. Perhaps video games actually make kids more cooperative? We have no way of knowing, because there doesn’t seem to have been any effort made to survey kids who don’t play video games as a control group.

High-ranking conspiracy or blundering incompetence?

Tim Worstall explores the range of possibilities:

Viewing the ghastly mess that politics makes of anything, it can be difficult to decide between cock-up and conspiracy theories. Are politicians simply too dim to perceive the effects of what they do, or are they are plotting to make the world a worse place?

Which brings us to where I believe the real climate change conspiracy is: in what we’re told we must do about it all. I’ve pointed out that if we assume that the basic science is correct (and I certainly don’t have either the hubris or technical knowledge to check it) then the answer is a simple carbon tax. The British Government employed Nick Stern to run through what was the correct economic response, assuming the IPCC was correct, and that was his answer. So the question has to be why hasn’t that same government enacted that very solution? Which is, as I say, where I think the conspiracy comes in.

For instead of this simple and workable solution we end up with the most ghastly amount of wibble and dribble.

Consider the subsidies to renewables. Our system gives higher subsidies to the more expensive technologies: clearly ludicrous. We have some limited amount of money, whatever that limit is, and we thus want to get as much renewable power as we can from that limited money. But we give five times more money per unit of power to the most expensive technology, solar, than we do to the cheapest, hydro. What have the politicians been smoking to deliberately spend our money in the most inefficient manner possible?

Or we could look at the argument for subsidy to solar itself: we’re told that it will be economic, comparable to coal-generated power, within only a couple of years. Thus we must have subsidy now – which is insane. If something is about to be profitable without subsidies then we don’t want anyone installing it yet; install it in a couple of years when it is profitable without subsidies. Why waste good money when we can just wait?

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