Taxpayer Funded Environmentalism

The TPA has a new report out today on taxpayer funded environmentalism. That's the outrageous arrangement whereby we pay the hippies to campaign for more restrictions on our freedom to live in the 21st century. The TPA's Emma Boon explains it all in the vid.

Key points:

•A total of £10.1 million was given to a range of environmental groups by the UK Government and the European Union in 2009-10.

•The total includes £2.5 million from various UK local councils, departments and quangos.

•It also includes £7.6 million in European Commission grants to environmental NGOs.

•The Foreign and Commonwealth Office made the largest UK payment in 2009-10 of £342,929 to WWF UK.

•Hackney council made the largest payment in 2009-10 from a UK council at £141,246 to Global Action Plan.

Of course, nobody can object to the hippies' right to run their bonkers campaigns (well, nobody except the Major, that is). But we should all object to being forced to pay £10m pa of our friggin' money to fund those campaigns.
 
PS Humble apologies for getting the dates wrong yesterday on Pitt the younger. I reported that the Bank Governor had made highly disparaging Mervyn King style remarks about Pitt in 1780. However, as was pointed out by the inestimable William Norton in comments, Pitt "wasn't elected to the Commons until January 1781, and didn't become Chancellor until July 1782." Quite right Mr N - a correction has been made. It just goes to show you shouldn't believe everything you read in Google. Or in leaked US ambassadors' emails come to that.

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Priests Screw Up - We're Doomed

So they get 15,000 priests, 5,000 scribes, and 45,000 worshippers, cart them all off to the Great Pyramid of the Sun, and then screw up.

No mass sacrifice. No bloodied beating hearts tossed down the steps. Just a bunch of weird attention-seekers thrusting themselves into the global pulpit whenever possible.

I tell you, the Gods ain't gonna like this.

****

What a shambles. If they can't even organise a £130m piss-up in the best brewery in the world, HTFFFF do they expect us to believe they can manage the future of our planet?

But I guess we can afford the odd £130m on a total waste of time. Much worse if they'd actually reached agreement. Because if these climate fascists ever get their way, we will all be A Lot poorer.

Today, the TPA published updated estimates of what so-called Green Taxes already cost us here in the UK. The shocking answer is £26bn pa, or over £1,000 pa per household (see paper for details).

And as things stand, all main political parties intend to increase that burden. They intend to tax and regulate our carbon emitting activites even more heavily - despite the fact that our taxes already far exceed the official estimates of the cost of our emissions. And they want to spend whole other shedloads of our cash on windchimes and elfin generators.

The Aztecs were only able to got rid of their destructive priests when the Spanish slaughtered them all. Let's hope we can get a grip before it comes to that.

PS Anyone who saw Newsnight yesterday will have seen their "Ethical Man" reporter in his kitchen, trying to prove that mankind is the evil destroyer of worlds by means of three empty Evian bottles, a length of plastic piping, and a large lady scientist. Needless to say, it proved nothing. But it did put Tyler in mind of the grisly bits in 10 Rillington Place, where Dickie Attenborough murdered various actresses in his kitchen using a very similar device.

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Flat Earthers And Assholes

OK, it's warmer... but why?

Two, ahem, thoughtful contributions to the climate debate yesterday:

"With only days to go before Copenhagen, we mustn't be distracted by the behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics. We know the science. We know what we must do. We must now act." (Mr G Brown, a public employee with a direct career interest in extending the role of the state)

"What an asshole." (Professor Andrew Watson, a public employee with a direct career interest in extending the role of climate scientists)

Now, many of us would agree with Professor Watson's description applied to Mr B. Except of course, he wasn't describing Mr B: he'd hardly bite the hand that feeds.

No, the Prof - who is something senior at the University of East Anglia's utterly discredited Climategate Research Unit - was describing a fellow Newsnight discussant who had the temerity to challenge his views. Poor Martha hardly knew where to look (you can watch again here - at least for the next 48 hours)*.

As others have pointed out, once they start playing the man not the ball, you know they've lost. Climategate has crystallised the entire issue.

Because it turns out that these blinkered arrogant.... er... assholes have cobbled together hundreds of years of supposed temperature data from Irish pixie rings, crunched the data through a battery of computer models so convoluted they themselves can't remember precisely how they worked, and then presented the results as incontrovertible science. "Science" that has been embraced by big government types worldwide to justify a further massive increase in taxation, regulation, and jobs for the boys.

And as the scales drop from the public's eyes, all these assorted tax-dependents can come up with is that if we won't take their word for it, we must be behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earthers. Like, we should trust them because they have always been as pure as the driven snow... not that we'll have snow much longer.

So what's the truth, and can we handle it?

The story most of us have finally pieced together goes something like this:

The earth's climate has warmed a bit over the last few decades, although the warming seems to have stopped in 1998. There is no robust scientific explanation of why this has happened, which is hardly surprising given the complexity of the global climate system. Moreover, data on long-term climate change is extremely sketchy, although we do know that there has been considerable variation in the UK's climate over the last couple of millennia (from vineyards to ice fairs on the Thames, and back again).

So what should we be doing?

Given the uncertainty over the basic climate data, we're not at all clear we should be doing anything.

But even if we accept that the climate is warming, nobody has yet convinced us it's mainly down to our activities. The official line is that the link has been proved, but the people who say that have never presented the evidence in an open and transparent form that we can examine for ourselves. They simply assert it, present a load of hyped up exaggerated garbage like Gore's lamentable film, and rant hysterically at anyone who dares to question their authority.

But that's simply not good enough. It's not good enough for Brown and Miliband to close down debate by telling me and 60% of the UK population that we're flat-earthers. It's not good enough for them to tell us we have to go on with the green taxes and all the rest just because the world is warming. If the world is warming for natural rather than manmade reasons, making ourselves poorer by stifling our economy is not going to help - on the contrary, it will render us much less able to afford the costs of adaptation.

I want to be convinced. I want to see the actual evidence and be taken through how the models actually work. I want to understand the doubts and uncertainties, and I want to hear from both sides of the debate. And no, I'm not a climate scientist or even a scientist. But I do consider myself to be of at least average intelligence, and I do know a reasonable amount about number crunching and statistical models. And I do want to know.

So why can't the BBC do that for me? And not yet more spin from their in-house propagandists, but a sensible old-style BBC series with half of the progs presented by a sceptical specialist (Mrs T and I nominate Prof Stott).

*PS Yes, we realise Newsnight chose their climate sceptic to face Prof Watson with extreme care, in order to present all sceptics as excitable non-scientists. We are all aware by now that the BBC's editorial position on climate change is that of green propagandists. BOM correspondent NN suffered a seizure while watching a BBC news report on Wednesday about salt traders in Timbuktu. According to the report - a NEWS report note - said traders have apparently had to swap their transport camels for great big climate destroying trucks, because global warming has made the camels too tired and thirsty to do the work (well there is also the small matter of the always biddable truck being able to haul in one week what it takes the moody camels seven to achieve, but the real villain is definitely global warming). After a strong dose of smelling salts, NN emailed - "They sent a sodding reporter and camera crew and translator to sodding Timbuktu for this garbage. By camel? I would be willing to wager that they flew in a nice shiny aeroplane and then carted all their gear on one of the very same evil trucks that cause climate change. At least I hope so. The thought of BBC reporters earning 45 days of per diems while lugging their crap around on 1st century technology is truly alarming. What could have been a really good example of creative destruction and new technologies replacing old for the good of all involved becomes a truly loopy example of green non-thought. And spare a thought for the Tuareg salt-trader. Who wouldn't rather spend 45 days in blistering heat and thirst with a load of wheezing camels than seven days in an air-conditioned truck listening to Timbuktu FM. Of course it was climate change what done it. Aaaaargh. I think I need to leave the country to escape the madness, - by horse." We may join him.

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Cost Of Global Warming Industry

Nice work if you can get it

For some time Tyler has been trying to pin down the cost of the global warming industry. It has several elements:

• Tax funded programmes to research, debate, and propagandise the issue (see pic)
• Regulations that impose additional costs on consumers and businesses
• Tax-subsidised investment in costly emissions infrastructure - eg wind-turbines and carbon capture

A large chunk of this cost is a pure dead loss. For example, the power black-outs we will be suffering in a few years time from not having built new generating capacity, will cut our national output and make all of our lives less comfortable. This is money we might just as well burn in the market square.

But much of the cost is a redistribution from you and me to those employed in the warming industry.

We are directly funding all those thousands of politicos and bureaucrats who will shortly descend on the Copenhagen Climate Summit. And we are also directly funding the legions of climate change scientists employed in places like the Met Office's Hadley Centre. Without taxpayer support most of their jobs would not exist.

But taxpaying consumers are also paying huge subsidies to the private sector part of the warming industry, such as the manufacturers and installers of solar panels and wind turbines. And again, without direct government support most of those jobs would also disappear.

So what's the damage? How big is the global warming industry, and how much does it cost us in subsidies?

Unfortunately, we still haven't pinned down the answer: as so often, hard numbers are difficult to find. But last week in Time magazine, there were a couple of interesting snippets:

"Each year as much as $100 billion is spent by governments and consumers around the world on green subsidies... it's hard to think of any non-military industry that has been so completely and utterly driven by regulation and subsidies from the start...


Both the International Energy Agency and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have asked Germany to end its ludicrous solar subsidies that will total $115.5 billion by 2013."

And elsewhere, we learn that even under climate change denier Bush, the US government pumped up its spending on climate-related items to $7bn pa: spending that has totalled $79bn over the last 20 years.

Now $100bn pa is already a significant burden. But it is nothing compared what the industry is lobbying for.

The stated plan as set out in the famous Stern Report (see this blog) is for such spending to increase to 1% of GDP. Which would mean a fivefold increase.

Where do we sign to opt out?

PS Does anyone know of a good estimate for the overall size of this industry? Any suggestions gratefully received.

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Green But Cold

After a few years you'll get used to it. Probably.

Mrs T returned from Sainsburys waving a 5p fuel token. True, she'd had to top up the shopping to fifty quid to qualify, but no matter: with diesel back to 106p a litre, every little bit helps.

Except of course, half the value of the fuel token has been immediately negated by Labour's latest increase in fuel duty: 2p a litre plus VAT equals 2.3p. Plus a further c2.5p when VAT goes back up to 17.5% at year end. Tax now comprises over 70p a litre.

Ah yes, but as Tyler's eco relations were telling him recently, we have to save the planet. We have no choice, and if you think otherwise you must be an idiot. You should stop moaning about fuel tax and just get rid of your gas guzzler.

Unfortunately, fuel tax is not the only cost being inflicted on us by our climate camping eco-hippies.

Over the weekend we got confirmation that those eco lightbulbs "are not as bright as their traditional counterparts and claims about the amount of light they produce are "exaggerated" (HTP Peter T):

"...under normal household conditions, using a single lamp to light a room, an 11W low-energy CFL produced only 58 per cent of the illumination of an "equivalent" 60W bulb – even after a 10-minute "warm-up".

On a website intended to answer consumers' questions about the switch to energy saving bulbs, the European Commission states: "Currently, exaggerated claims are often made on the packaging about the light output of compact fluorescent lamps."

Brilliant. Because it's the EU themselves who have imposed the sales ban on traditional bulbs, forcing us to use those ugly industrial-style compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) whether we like it or not.

But the most serious cost of the commissariat's green policies is the one we will be facing from the middle of the next decade. That's when the closure of our traditional and reliable power stations (also imposed by the EU) really begins to bite on the availability of electricity. As the Telegraph reports this morning:

"Demand for power from homes and businesses will exceed supply from the national grid within eight years, according to official figures.

The shortage of supplies will hit the equivalent of many as 16 million families for at least one hour during the year, it is forecast. Not since the early 1970s when the three-day week was introduced to preserve coal has Britain faced the prospect of reationing energy use.

The gap between Britain’s energy needs and demand throws fresh doubt on the Government’s assertion that renewable energy can make up for dwindling nuclear and coal capabilities."

The official figures are taken from the government’s Low Carbon Transition Plan, and here's their chart showing the projected energy gap (Expected Energy Unserved):

To put these figures in perspective, the 2025 shortfall of 7000 megawatt hours per year (itself based on highly optimistic assumptions) "is the equivalent to an hour-long power cut for half of Britain". Like the sound of that?

The thing about all these green measures is that they are not costless. The ludicrously spun Stern Report (see previous blogs here and here) tried to convince us the costs would be small, but as we can already see, in reality they will be very large.

We face higher fuel bills, dimmer lights, and f-f-freezing winters.

Enjoy.

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Barbecue Summer Meets The Funnel Of Doubt

How come nobody mentioned the funnel?

Just for fun, let's see if we can work out the relationship between the following four statements:

1. "The coming summer is 'odds on for a barbecue summer', according to long-range forecasts. Summer temperatures across the UK are likely to be warmer than average and rainfall near or below average for the three months of summer." (Met Office press notice 30 April 2009)

2. "You will need a brolly on holiday in the UK in August - the Met Office is issuing a revised forecast for more unsettled weather well into the month. It is a far cry from the "barbecue summer" it predicted back in April. The news will raise questions about the Met Office's ability to make reliable seasonal forecasts." (Roger Harrabin, BBC environment analyst, 29 July 2009)

3. "The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus." ("Safeguarding impartiality in the 21st century", BBC Trust Report 2007, justifying the BBC's overtly partial coverage of global warming; and see here).

4. "What of the... corridor of uncertainty? It must be related in some way to the ‘expanding funnel of doubt’ of which we hear so much in our line of work. Perhaps... ‘corridor of uncertainty’ is a generic term, used to describe a ‘funnel of doubt’ whose expansion/contraction properties are less well defined?" (The Actuary, 1 April 2005)

You see, the thing is, if the £180m pa Met Office's three months weather forecast is no better than than the flip of a coin, HTF can they possibly reckon to forecast our climate 50-100 years ahead? And given the rain lashing down on the barbecue, how can anyone possibly believe they are capable of that?

Admittedly, Tyler is no scientist (although I dare say he knows more about number krunching than the BBC's Environment analyst, who has an English degree). But in all the many forecasting exercises in which Tyler has been involved over the years, there is always this thing called the Funnel of Doubt.

The Funnel starts out nice and narrow - anchored to what we understand as today's reality.

But as you extend your forecast further into the future, the funnel expands rapidly. Known unknowns bombard the forecast from all sides, so that by the time you've got out a couple of years - at most - the funnel is so wide you're pretty well back to coin flipping.

A typical example is this chart showing 20 year projections of US government bond yields, ranging from roughly zero right up to 14%:

And that's without even considering the unknown unknowns, which have a nasty habit of cropping up... well... unknowably. You can't even model them.

The bottom line is that once you crank your forecasts out beyond the hand in front of your face, they are pretty well fiction. To be taken with a huge pinch of salt.

So what of that sodden barbecue?

According to Mr Harrabin:

"Some now ask if the Met Office risks its reputation by attempting to popularise its work this way. Certainly, at the time of the forecast there was pressure on the Met Office from tourism chiefs in the UK to be positive about holidays at home. Did Met Office staff feel an obligation to put on a sunny face?"

Actually, Roger, some of us are now asking a lot more than that.

Some of us are now asking why we taxpayers are stumping up £180m pa for a quango that has become the world's biggest producer of eco-doom fiction?

And yet more of us are asking why we are paying another £3.5bn pa quango to report such fiction as reality?

It's time we were treated like grown-ups. We don't believe any "experts" know what's going to happen to our climate a century from now. Still less do we believe they can justify the massive eco-costs they are now imposing on us.

Where there is doubt, let us see that funnel reported openly and clearly.

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Tribute To Gaia

So let's get this straight. On the very day our buckling economy delivers the biggest ever recorded fall in employment, the government imposes its latest tribute to Gaia.

It will work like this: all over our green and pleasant, and right across our silver seas, we will build 7000 giant religious statues known as "wind turbines". They will be a visible sign to Gaia that we miserable sinners repenteth our sins, and bow down before the one true god.

Yea, and the cost shall be without measure. A tythe of £150bn shall be levied on the rich men at the energy companies. And all the people shall contribute each according to his means whatever the sacrifice. And the pharisees shall treat with the envoys of Russianoligarchicus Caesar so that the people may have light. And darkness shall fall across the land.

As religious tributes go, wind turbines take some beating: they are huge and dominate the landscape; they are expensive; and they have no serious purpose other than worship.

As generators of reliable energy, they are next to useless. We blogged the facts here, but in summary:

• Supply is highly variable - because of wind variability, they operate at a small fraction of theoretical maximum capacity (Denmark's operate at an average 20%)
• You cannot store electricity (well you can to a very small extent, but it's massively expensive) - so you can't smooth out windpower peaks and troughs
• You therefore need back-up generation for virtually the entire peak load - either nuclear, Russian gas, or coal

Of course, if you rely on the BBC and C4 News for your facts, you won't know any of this. Last night's reports identified the main problem with the government's tribute as being that it doesn't go far enough. Gaia is seriously pissed, and we need to speed ourselves into the darkness even faster.

So how is this all going to play out?

Here on BOM, we are great believers in the ultimate wisdom of crowds. As the costs of these massive tributes become more visible, cash-strapped voters will make it perfectly clear they don't want it. Even Millipede Jnr can see "there's a job of political persuasion to be done".

There sure is Ed. The problem for him - and the BBC (see here for the outrageous BBC position) - is that although they keep talking about "the science", they've never actually convinced us of its validity.

More and more of us are coming to understand that this so-called "science" comprises little more than a set of flimsy computer models cranked up to produce 50 year weather forecasts - ie the forecasting error of the Met Office's five-day forecast multiplied by 3,650 (and I have a funny feeling stats theory says it's humongously more than that).

Religions depends on faith. Fair enough.

But when it comes to keeping our homes heated and our economy on the road, I'd prefer to rely on what we actually know. Most of us have no wish to render our futures unto Gaia.

PS Talking of BBC scare-mongering, on Tuesday night Newsnight told us that by next month 50 people a day will be dying from swine flu. They calculated that by multiplying Andy Burnham's "100,000 new cases a day by August" by Imperial College's estimate that 1-in-200 infected people will die. Wha!? we thought - that's a pretty worrying thought on which to head off to bed. So yesterday I took a quick look at the stats. So far, there have been some 90,000 reported cases worldwide, and just over 400 deaths - so about a 0.5% death rate. But of course, that's only among reported cases, and many people apparently don't report - indeed, many don't even realise they've got it. So given a vast range of reporting standards worldwide, how do we know the worldwide stats are any guide to our own death rate? Answer - we don't. So far in the UK (up to 8 July), there have been 9,718 reported cases in the UK; to date there have been 17 deaths - a death rate of 0.17%. Unless I missed it, Newsnight's Susan Watts didn't mention that.

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