The Panda Principle

Pandas are cute. Big, furry, friendly and, well, just cute. Indeed we know that pandas are cute because 'wuffie' use the panda as their logo - after all these lovely bundles of funny fur are just the sort of wildlife we want to save. For sure that giant international charity doesn't use a really ugly animal or one that might frighten the children. Nope they use the cuddliest of all animals as bait for our support.

And this is The Panda Principle. These are animals that have a seriously restricted diet, really aren't all that keen on sex and only live (wildly) in China where they - people that it - eat everything. None of these factors are great survival traits. But, trust me folks, the panda won't be getting extinct any time soon because the panda is cute. We'd miss pandas, it would be terrible if they died out. Whereas for lots of other animals - rats, leeches, those really ugly giant toads - our response to their extinction would be at best, "oh dear".

The thing with this survival lark is that you have to be either very adaptive, very fast breeding or living in a place where people don't live. Or else you have to be cute. Foxes are cute especially when we get that moonlit glimpse of the vixen with her cubs playing on the back lawn. And this cuteness trumps the fact that those same foxes were yesterday rampaging through a neighbours pen slaughtering her prized rare breed ducks and fancy chickens.

Cuteness wins as a survival trait in a world where humans dominate. Now I appreciate this is probably hubris but such views are essential to the modern idea of conservation and environmentalism. This isn't about nature red in tooth and claw. It's not about how small us humans are next to the awesome power of nature. Nope, it's about us, about how we cause all the problems (like those pandas getting fewer). However, us humans are suckers for cuteness - especially us urban humans far from the reality of living with animals.

And that cuteness means that those big furry animals we ooh and aah over will survive. Perhaps in bounded and controlled environments - they are animals after all. But survive they will - most so we can gawp at them, put pictures of their babies on the Internet and exalt the giving of alms to sustain their survival. Here's to The Panda Principle!

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The purpose of environmental regulation is the suppression of economic growth

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It would appear that our MPs (or at least the ones on the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee) haven't been listening to the deep green rhetoric. As a result they don't seem to appreciate that the whole point of environmental regulation is to reduce economic growth. For, as we know those deep green folk like the WWF believe that you can't separate resource consumption and growth. Ergo growth is bad.

"As development increases beyond a certain level, so does per person Footprint — eventually to the point where small gains in development come at the cost of very large Footprint increases."

You've got that? It comes from WWF's Living Planet Report, a report encapsualted as follows:

...green campaigning group WWF...has stated that economic growth should be abandoned, that citizens of the world's wealthy nations should prepare for poverty and that all the human race's energy should be produced as renewable electricity within 38 years from now.

So the whole point and purpose of those green regulations is to slow - better still, eliminate - economic growth. Right now that's not good politics, so our MPs pretend otherwise. As does the chap from WWF UK:

 "Far from putting British companies out of business, environmental policies may well be the saving of them. Leading businesses are crying out for measures such as mandatory carbon reporting and policy certainty for development of the renewable energy sector," said WWF-UK economic policy officer Luke Wreford."

Now you are confused aren't you! Regulations designed to prevent over-use of resources, to reduce "carbon footprints" and, bluntly, to stop growth are described as the salvation of business. And to justify this we've dreamt up that most oxymoronic of ideas: green growth:

The committee calls for a long-term view based on a proper strategy for green growth, including more investment in renewable sources of energy to reduce UK reliance on imported fossil fuels. 

For investment read "government spending"! Either economic growth is a bad thing (as the Living Planet Report sets out pretty clearly) and regulations or protections are needed to stop it or else it isn't, in which case we need fewer of those controls. In the end environmental regulation will always be anti-growth.

Sadly, our MPs seem not to have worked this out yet.

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How the EU wastes your money... (a further installment)

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In this case it's climate change nonsense combining with food fascism:

Our project will demonstrate the tool to define country-specific sustainable diets across the EU. Recognising the contribution of the food system to GHG emissions, the project will determine the composition of sustainable diets across the EU as an important contribution towards stabilising GHG concentration at a level that prevents global warming above 2 degrees celsius. The project will establish the viability of EU-wide introduction of the Plate by testing and evaluating the tool three pilot EU Member States - Sweden, Spain and France

There's a nice 51,750 Euro budget for this nonsense! Off you go folks and bid! The project is managed by those nice friendly people at the WWF:

WWF has recognised that the current food system has substantial impacts on the environment. As part of the One Planet Food programme we are looking at both production and consumption, and are working on seafood, soy, palm oil, meat and dairy, water and agriculture. We are aware that the current dietary habits of the developed countries are unsustainable and as more and more people start moving towards the developed world’s high livestock product diet the impact on the natural world will be magnified and will accelerate habitat destruction and climate change. This will be compounded by the growing concern around food prices since the 2008 and 2011 price spikes and global food security.

This is utter rubbish of course but that doesn't stop our European overlords and their favoured lobby friends like WWF from squandering our money on research of this kind. But right now, the European economy is crashing and burning, millions are out of work, businesses are folding and social services are under pressure.

There is no case for the research when we're flush with money - right now it's an insult.

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Tokenistic posturing...

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We are all told we should ‘sign up’ for Earth Hour, stop smoking on ‘No Smoking Day’, celebrate ‘International Women’s Day’ amid many other little campaigning days, hours, minutes and probably seconds across the year. This annoys me.

I know, I know. I should be joining with all the other folk this evening and turn off my lights as part of a call to “…stand up, to take responsibility, to get involved and lead the way towards a sustainable future.” But I’m not going to do that as:

1. It’s tokenistic posturing
2. I don’t like WWF

Plus of course Earth Hour will be bad for the planet:

Even if power stations are turned off, the upsurge in turning the lights back on one hour later will require power stations that can fire up quickly like oil and coal. Energy experts said it could therefore result in an increase in carbon emissions "rendering all good intentions useless at a flick of a switch.”

Ooops!