Quote of the day - the climate apocalypse

From geographer Joel Kotkin:

The Catholic Church discovered millennia ago that the prospect of apocalypse provides a brilliant tool of propaganda. To people in the Middle Ages, observed historian Barbara Tuchman, “apocalypse was in the air,” the spawn of human sin. In much the same way the environmental movement links human material aspirations with impending disaster, citing manmade climate change as the singular explanation for everything from starvation, wars and crop failures to hurricanes, floods or any other unusual weather.

For all that I'm not a climate change denier (just rightly sceptical of the screeching, frantic policy prescriptions from those most loud about the issue) Kotkin's observation seems to be bang on the money. I've commented already that modern climate change environmentalism has more in common with millinarian religious cults than with more usual political movements. It is dominated by simple, scary words - 'emergency', 'extinction', 'crisis', 'catastrophe' - rather than by the considered assessment we saw a few years ago from the IPCC and through work like the Stern Review, we now have a shout of "do something" linked to setting targets and undermining the market systems that provide the best route for response to the challenges.

The worst outcomes of all this are either the imposition of arbitrary emissions targets that result in global depression or the triumph of denialism leading to us stopping the gradual transition away from an extractive economy. So long as we indulge the Greta Thurnberg doom agenda this polarisation becomes more and more likely and we will become more attached to a set of essentially arbitrary policies rather than as has been the case up to now, a more considered and gradual process away from those things most contributing to climate change - deforestation, burning fossil fuels - and a focus on things that are less important but focus directly on consumer behaviour (eating meat, using plastics).

We should also begin to talk about the good news - levels of deforestation have declined (despite the best efforts of environmentalist-driven demands for bio-fuels) and the use of the most polluting hydrocarbons (coal, crude oil) in energy is declining while use of renewables rises. There isn't a climate apocalypse but the manner in which politicians and public officials are being led to endorse the nonsense of a "climate emergency" reminds us just how difficult it is to counter those absolutely wedded to an apocalyptic doom cult.

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How many posh yachts will we need? Environmentalism is now just a millinarian doom cult.

Raedwald observes:

With a ten day passage time to New York, the new J-class yachts that will need to be built to carry the current 3m passengers a year who currently fly from LHR to JFK will give business to Europe's shipyards for years ahead. Suggestions that this is all just money-grabbing virtue signalling by Saint Greta's parents were strongly denied.

I'm not any sort of climate change denier just a tad sceptical about some of the scarier claims. And when the Jeanne d'Arc of environmental extremists sets sail on a billionaire's yacht because she won't fly, I realise that we're being played here.

As I pointed out the other day the extremists need to be run out of town on rail. They are at best misguided and at worst - that other great saint of environmental extremism springs to mind here - deeply unpleasant misanthropes. They pretend that crashing the west's economy will somehow help the billion folk still in absolute poverty. Present an endless string of petty gimmicks like banning straws and cultish fads like veganism all aimed to make us guilty about 21st century life and culture. What we have isn't science but a millinarian doom cult little different to those people who climb hills on an appointed day to await the second coming.

John Locke warned us about 'enthusiasm', what he called an 'eruption' of the 'ungrounded fancies of a man's own brain'. Environmentalists are feeding us a faith based on creating a fear of ever more imminent planetary doom - "14 months" is the latest of these doom cultists warnings. They invoke the future in the most polemic of terms intended to stir up those ungrounded fancies - "think of the children"

The deadline for protecting our children from a ruined climate is close at hand

And so it goes - worst case is piled on worst case and environmentalists point to their desired apocalyptic horse riders - extinction, famine, carbon, death - and cry to the heavens. It has become the politics of chicken-licken as those captured by the cult's message of doom cry, scream and wail at those they claim are "doing nothing about the climate emergency". Politicians - left, right and centre - all line up behind the cultists, a tear in their eye, fine words in their mouths, and call for action, for bans, for taxes, for factories to be closed, oil wells capped and mines shut. "We must listen to the young people", they cry (while counting the votes and power they'll get as a result of indulging the doom cult).

Right now the world is largely doing exactly the right thing - moving slowly away from a resource-extractive economy - and there is no need to accelerate this or change the sorts of strategies agreed two decades ago. A marginal change in climate (the most likely scenario) means that current generations are accepting a similarly marginal reduction in the betterment of their lives as a precaution against that climate change becoming less marginal and more problematic. It isn't an emergency, we are not doomed, we don't need to stop flying, become vegan or eschew the convenience of plastic. And we definitely don't need to allow the environmentalist doom cult to dictate our policy responses to environmental challenges.

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Not everyone likes greens - lessons about popular politics from Australia

Not everyone likes greens

Every place is different. We're told this - don't take what's happened in Australia or Texas or Greece as a guide to what might happen in England or Tuscany or Austria. But maybe there is something happening? Here's Tyler Cowen:

Sometimes political revolutions occur right before our eyes without us quite realizing it. I think that’s what’s been happening over the last few weeks around the world, and the message is clear: The populist “New Right” isn’t going away anytime soon, and the rise of the “New Left” is exaggerated.

Cowen frames this in the context of the Australian election where "an evangelical Christian who has expressed support for President Donald Trump" won despite every prediction saying the Australian Labor Party with its achingly 'new left' agenda (identity politics, climate change, immigration) were going to win at a canter. Cowen then touches on the Brexit Party and the emerging contests in the early stages of next years presidential elections pointing out a similar pattern. The intellectual agenda may be left wing but politics is not - and politics is what people vote about.

We could equally have seen reference to Salvini's Lega, to the Gilets Jaune in France or to a host of other manifestations of this populist 'new right' - this week's European Parliament elections could see a host (Cowen says up to 35%) of MEPs from these anti-establishment parties. Everywhere we look, we see people sticking two-fingers up at the established parties of the centre left and centre right.

Looking at Australia we begin to see where the problem is for "urban cosmopolitans" - here's urbanist Ross Elliot writing in New Geography:

The denizens of trendy inner city secondhand bookshops may have been filled with confidence, but not of suburban and regional voters. Struggling with flat real wage growth and having borne the brunt of a changing employment landscape, rising electricity bills and falling confidence in their future, this was not the time to tell them it was their duty to sacrifice even more to ‘save the planet’ by paying ever higher electricity bills, or buying an electric car they can’t afford. Especially when that message comes from smug sounding public servants or wealthy, entitled inner city residents who have been the beneficiaries of economic change, as well as overseas investors, rather than its victims.

The climate change warriors organised a convoy to protest against a new coal mine at Adani in central Queensland and got a frosty welcome when they arrived with locals organising a counter protest and stores, petrol stations and restaurants refusing to serve the protestors. This was rural Australia but the same sentiments will be heard is thousands of other places - everywhere but the places inhabited by what Elliot calls "the inner urban elites of government, the bureaucracy, media and industry" - the great and the good.

Telling people who don't think they've enough money that they need to make sacrifices to 'save the planet' is lousy politics yet this is precisely the tone we hear from those who share every one of Greta Thunberg's inane utterings as if they were on golden tablets received from god. Hardly a day passes without another initiative designed to 'save the planet' or 'fight climate change' that mostly acts to add a little more mild irritation into the lives of people who are already mildly irritated. Maybe we do need to ban plastic straws but can we stop pretending it's any sort of vote winning political strategy.

Right now the mainstream of political opinion is more concerned about whether there'll be minimum wage labour from Romania to serve them in Pret, how terrible it is that a very well-paid and wealthy female news presenter is paid slightly less than her male colleague or if they'll have to fill a form in to drive a car in France. These opinion-makers are the sorts who can afford to pay a tax on flying, have the time (or staff) to fuss over recycling and are very keen to ban things that they don't use but disapprove of. And these people really do look down on the proles - here, quoted by Ross Elliot, is Elizabeth Farelly from the Sydney Morning Herald:

“The suburbs are about boredom, and obviously some people like being bored and plain and predictable, I'm happy for them … even if their suburbs are destroying the world.”

For a long while people hadn't noticed that the great and good didn't like them very much - why would they when their paths seldom crossed. But, with Brexit, with the climate change agenda targeting the less well off, with an identity politics that disdains the working class, people have now noticed. And when it comes to voting those people are going to kick the inner urban elite's snobbery right in the ballot box.

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Care about the planet? Well stop saying local is better then.

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One of the most common myths of the modern trendy progressive world is that which say 'local' is always better - for the economy, for the planet and for society. If only we 'transitioned' our places into being locally-focused, resilient communities filled with independent shops, urban gardens and local food networks say the advocates - with comments like this ever so common:

The same goes for agriculture, textiles, and many other sectors where returning to local, human-scaled enterprise will lead to less worker exploitation and environmental damage while producing better, healthier products. Nonindustrial practices may be more labor-intensive, but they’re also better for us all. For those of us used to white-collar jobs, the idea of growing vegetables or making clothes may seem like a big step backward toward more menial labor. But consider for a moment the sorts of activities the wealthiest Americans or most satisfied retirees engage in enthusiastically: brewing craft beers, knitting, and gardening. If there’s really not enough work to go around and there are so many extra people to employ, we can always farm in shifts.

This quote is from a book called Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus and was quoted - as an example of progressive ignorance - by Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek. What bothers me most isn't the stuff about the local multiplier that are used to justify resilience - we know that's pretty much nonsense - or even the truth that this sort of local protectionism only makes us poorer. No, what bothers me is that the idiot progressives promoting transition towns and putting up these 'back to the land' arguments are completely wrong about its environmental impact.

It simply isn't true that this return to pre-industrial production has less environmental impact than modern intensive agriculture or mass-production of the clothes and tools we need. We know that extensive agriculture uses more inputs than intensive agriculture, which is a pretty wasteful start, but we also know that this sort of farming is more polluting and has a bigger impact on wildlife and the local environment. Yet the 'Greens' and their progressive fellow travellers persist with their myth-making and in denying that the same benefits come from agricultural intensification as come from any other improvement in our efficiency in using resources - it makes us richer, it puts less strain on the planet and it allows time for those pleasant pastimes like home brew beer and allotment gardening.

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Making a 'sustainable' park - thoughts from a visit to Rome

"Towards a sustainable park" proclaims the blurb on the posters that have been carefully pinned to the solid but, one hopes, temporary fencing. Or rather it says that in Italian complete with diagrams, pictures and the mindless impenetrability of bureaucratic language.

So what is this 'sustainable park' you may very well ask? After all that word 'sustainable' is one of those weasel words so confounded by being discussed and contested that the sense and purpose of the original word is lost in a fog of verbal concern wrapped around with calls for poorly specified action.

As we arrived in the park, it was clear that is was - as your mum would say - in a rather sorry state. It wasn't just the temporary fences or the lack of grass where the grass should be but rather the impression that nothing much had happened for a very long time. Yet the park had sustained - it's probably among the world's oldest parks (the very definition of 'sustainable' one might suggest) so it's not its continued existence that is the bother for those bureaucrats but something else.

Indeed, despite its slight sad state the park was well used combining the dog-walking and children playing functions of parks with a newer purpose of providing a place for African immigrants to lounge around - taking a break from the tough job of trying to flog cheap stuff to tourists (the plaintive cry of 'selfie selfie' being the newest street call from those trying to get folk to buy a selfie stick). And there's a basketball court (or rather whatever the Italians call a 'multi-use games area') where a bunch of young men were playing volleyball as well as what might once have been a properly laid out five-a-side pitch.

Along the sides of the slightly potholed paths are trees. Big trees - mostly stone pines, that icon of Italian treedom - and smaller trees. A multitude of trees. And it's these trees that are the problem with that sustainability. We have - as well as the conflict with regular every day uses of the park - an additional complication for this is Rome and the park is the Colle Oppio, one of the original seven hills of ancient Rome. Meaning, of course, that underneath every inch of the park lies irreplaceable ancient heritage. Those lovely trees - and most of them are lovely - have root systems that are gradually destroying that precious remainder of the lost city. The structures that remain - old bath houses, thermal springs, mosaics, monuments and homes - are unstable, quite literally crumbling away resulting in the project to do something.

And the something is - at its core - trying to get to a balance between the park as a place of play, the park as a green place in an urban environment and the park as a preservation of the past. You get a sense that each tiny piece of completed betterment has only come as a result of careful bartering between the heritage champions, the greens and the local folk who want somewhere to sit or a place for their children to play.

When people ask about political decision-making, we tend to think about new laws or grand strategy. We seldom consider that the toughest political places are these very contested places where many good things are wanted but their priority is contested - ancient ruins worth saving, trees that help the city breathe, playgrounds for toddlers to swing and gardens for us to walk. We can have all of these things but only if we accept some limitation and it falls on the political process - in its broadest meaning - to decide on those constraints, to broker agreements between trees and ruins, and to referee the disputes and disagreements. While all the time knowing that there's an imperative to get the job done, to make that sustainable park.

Right now the Colle Oppio is a mess. At some point it won't be. The challenge will be - and I hope this is the case although my Italian is far too limited to understand everything the signs say - to balance those competing needs, to make a place for tourists (Colle Oppio is 400 yards from the Colosseum), residents, workers and the inevitable flotsam of a city park.

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Reducing landfill is a good thing to do - not some sort of EU green conspiracy

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There's a common line from those who dislike either or both of climate change policies and the EU that the encouragement of recycling and strategies to reduce the use of landfill are just another of those idiotic greeny-greeny nonsenses. We've read this from Christopher Booker, on the EU Referendum blog and now from James Delingpole in the Daily Mail:

Every year Britain produces about 70 million cubic metres of municipal waste, while it has more than 819 million cubic metres available for landfill — a figure that increases by 114 million cubic metres a year as more quarries and gravel pits are dug.

By far the most attractive and safe option would be to have these gaping holes filled with rubbish and covered over or reclaimed, so the landscape looks almost as it did before.

This would have knock-on benefits for the aggregates industry, which could offset its costs — as it did in the old days — with waste disposal.

It would release local councils from layer upon layer of regulatory bureaucracy. No longer would we have to waste time pointlessly sifting our rubbish. And it would, of course, bring an almost immediate end to fly-tipping.

This, after all, was the system that worked perfectly well for us before our politicians and the EU stuck their oars in. If only we had the will and the courage of our convictions, it could work just as well for us now.

My instant reaction (one that most Cullingworth residents would share) is 'there speaks a man who doesn't have two landfill sites in his village' but to explain the problem let's describe landfill and consider what we mean by 'municipal waste'.

Modern landfill can be described as finding a big enough hole in the ground, putting a very big plastic bag (a sophisticated, highly-engineered plastic bag to be sure but still a plastic bag) into the hole rather like you do with the bin in your kitchen, filling it up with rubbish until you can't get any more in and then covering it over. And then we wait thirty to fifty years with out fingers crossed hoping that big plastic bag doesn't split.

Then there's the stuff we put in the landfill. 'Domestic' waste they call it and it's all that stuff you put in your general waste bin. So there's fairly benign stuff like food scraps, paper and plastic. And a cocktail of nasty unpleasant chemicals - the bits of bleach you don't rinse out from the bottle, the heavy metals in the spent AA batteries, the residual contents of aerosols, shampoos and a bewildering variety of pharmaceuticals. Domestic waste is truly filthy stuff - poisonous, corrosive and polluting. As it rots is produces a very dangerous leachate - the big plastic bag is all that stops this leachate from polluting water supplies and contaminating land. Do you really think the best way to deal with this waste is to but it in a big plastic bag on the hill above Cullingworth?

Now Delingpole is right to criticise the EU's waste licensing regimes, to question how the ramping up of landfill charges contributes to illegal dumping and to condemn the nonsensical manner in which recyclers are prevented from exporting recovered goods or materials. But this doesn't change the fact that landfill isn't the best way to deal with hazardous waste. Nearly all of that 70 million cubic metres of trash local councils collect is pretty dangerous stuff. Simply dumping it into holes in the ground without pre-treatment or the reduction of pollution risk is a recipe for blighting communities. And the best way to reduce those risks is to promote recycling.

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More nonsense about urban farming...

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Urban farming, some believe, is the solution to all our problems. Rather than shifting food from distant locations to the urban communities where we live, we farm the corners, roundabouts and gardens and cultivate diused land so as to feed ourselves. It's all terribly jolly and green, typified by the Incredible Edible programme in Todmorden. I love it, the randomness, the cheeky nature of swooping on a little patch of urban green and seeding it with herbs is great.

However, when people start taking this stuff seriously they start talking nonsense. Here's a report from some professors at Sheffield University:

THE COUNTRY may only have 100 harvests left because of intensive over farming unless drastic action is taken, according to university scientists

They say the problem has depleted the soil of the nutrients needed to grow crops and suggest converting parts of the UK’s towns and cities into new farmyards.

Scientists from Sheffield University warn that a lack of bio-diversity is causing a dramatic fall in the country ‘s wildlife populations.

A study by Dr Jill Edmondson has also found that soils under Britain’s allotments are significantly healthier than soils that have been intensively farmed.

Now I'm going to take the scientists' information at face value - it really isn't surprising that the soil in allotments, lovingly and intensively managed by the hobby horticulturalist, is better than the soil on the typical commercial farm. But that really doesn't make it either sensible of viable to replace the production from farmland with production from gardens or allotments. More significantly, yields from commercial farming as vastly higher than yields from hobby farming. Despite stagnant yields in some crops, there's not much evidence to suggest that the dire predictions from the Sheffield University team will come to pass.

However there's another important point to be made here which is about land use and land values. We know that urban and rural land values are massively different. According to Savills the average value for farmland in Great Britain is £9,750 per acre whereas residential development land can be values at £900,000 per acre of higher. Quite obviously there is no way in which the value of the land for other uses (housing, parkland, highway, commercial or industrial) can be substituted for agricultural use and for the farmer to be able to recover his outlay from the profits generated by growing stuff.

As one comment on urban agriculture put it:

What today’s enthusiastic locavores ultimately fail to understand is that their “innovative” ideas are not only up against the Monsantos of this world, but also in a direct collision course with regional advantages for certain types of food production, economies of scale of various kinds in all lines of work and the fact that pretty much anything they can achieve in urban environments can be replicated at lower costs in the countryside. These basic realities defeated sophisticated local food production systems in the past and will do so again in the foreseeable future.

While no one argues against the notion that our modern food production system can be improved, and entrepreneurs are always searching how to do so, the desire to make urban agricultural a viable commercial reality distracts from more serious issues such as international trade barriers and counterproductive domestic agricultural subsidies. The sooner well-intentioned activists understand these realities, the better. 

The right response is to work on either protecting biodiversity and soil quality in intensive agriculture or at opening up more land (not just in the UK, America and Europe but in Africa and Asia) to productive agricultural uses. Suggesting that Sheffield's twee Love Square - or any similar sort of project - is any kind of solution to food supply challenges is arrant nonsense. But it's so much more fun to play at farmer in our spare time and to prattle on about urban food production.

Hardly a day passes without some further argument support intensification and densification within urban communities. It's as if that science fiction image of cities captured in biodomes, self-sufficient and shiny but surrounded by wilderness, has become the real ambition of the green movement. What they miss is that the image was always a convenient plot structure rather than a painting of a real future, a way for the writer to explore the logical conclusions - good and bad - of urban living.

The sad part of this green myth-making is the seriousness with which some folk treat it - they seem unconnected to economic reality as they pretend their sweet world of sustainable towns peopled by walking, cycling allotment owners is anything but a greenwashed version of subsistance agriculture - the very form of poverty that we escaped from by moving to cities and creating the modern capitalist society.

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Our environment policies make people poorer...

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Well you knew that didn't you? You knew that the deal between big energy distributors, government and the environment movement is about driving up prices for the energy consumer? You knew that so-called 'regulatory oversight' coupled with obsessing about subsidised renewables results in more jobs for green activists, bigger government departments and higher profits for the distributors? And you knew that, for all Ed Miliband's populist nonsense about price fixing, the left is entirely wedded to making energy more expensive so as to 'combat climate change'?

All this is part of an international effort to drive up energy prices so as to make renewable systems (but not nuclear energy, of course) economic as an alternative to using the earth's abundant supplies of fossil fuels. And, like so much else in our environmental and international development policy, the consequence of this is to ensure that millions of poor Africans, Indians and Arabs remain just that - poor. And, here at home, to exacerbate levels of fuel poverty.

Yet when the status quo on energy is challenged - as Owen Patterson has done - the response of our Liberal Democrat energy minister is to sound like a cracked record justifying keeping people poor because of the risks from climate change:

“The overwhelming majority of scientists agree that climate change exists while most leading British businesses and City investment funds agree with the Coalition that taking out an ‘insurance policy’ now will protect the UK against astronomical future costs caused by a changing climate.

“The majority of European countries are ready to implement proposals that would see [them] adopt targets similar to our Climate Change Act in a deal the Prime Minister should seal later this month.

“With the USA, China and India also now taking the climate change threat seriously, the global marketplace for green technology is increasingly strong.” 

Note the language of opportunity here - opportunity for the already rich to exploit, in effect, the diversion of money from the poor to their projects (and pockets). There is no doubt that the Climate Change Act represents one of the most regressive imposts on the UK ever enacted - a massive transfer from the least well off to the better off. All those feed-in tariffs for solar panels, those subsidies for wind farms and those bungs by councils at 'microgeneration' - these things don't benefit the least well-off in society, they are a cost to them in higher energy prices.

And take a look internationally at what Ed Davey calls an 'insurance policy' - a scheme to protect the rich world from the consequences of climate change while watching the poor parts of the world head off to hell in assorted and rickety hand carts. Not because of the floods, famines and pestilence of global warming but because we've prevented them replacing burning wood and dung with cheap fossil fuel electricity generation from coal and gas.

The truth about the environmental movement and 'green' policies is that they want to save the planet. But they want to save the planet for rich people living in a Brighton semi, a Shipley terrace or a docklands apartment not for poor people in Mogadishu, Mumbai or, for that matter, Bethnal Green. The environmental movement is filled with the comfortably off who worry about recycling, whether their brown rice is organic and the organising of walking buses to get Joshua and Emily to school. These aren't people who have to make a choice about whether to turn on the heating or have a hot meal, they aren't living in a shack with no sanitation cooking on a dung fire that's giving them lung disease and they aren't people living in a village that has one electric point that's live only a few hours a week.

I'm not a climate change 'denier' but I still think our policies are misplaced - worse that that we are imposing huge costs on the least well off to deliver that planetary salvation. This means there will be more of those poor people, more people in fuel poverty, more ill-health and more people dying for lack of food or heating. I don't agree with Owen Patterson that the concern is energy security (although this is important), I think our concern should be reducing poverty. And if we want to do that faster, we need to provide cheap energy to everyone and especially to the poorest in the world. Our environmental policies are doing the opposite, our environmental policies are making people poorer.

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Quote of the day - green politics and the privileges of the wealthy

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It's from Joel Kotkin and speaks of California. But it could apply in the UK - indeed in any European nation:

But now, having embraced a stringent environmentalism, the gentry seek to impose their “green” agenda on the hoi polloi. If this hypocrisy isn’t disturbing enough, consider the increasingly top-down nature of environmentalist politics. In the past, conservationists focused on how to protect people from harm and preserve nature, in part, so people might enjoy it. Many of today’s progressives not only are determined to protect their privileges, but seek to limit the opportunities for pretty much everyone else.

And the same goes for policies in health, in education and in criminal justice - the interests of the left wing gentry ar eprotected and the working classes get stuffed.

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Quote of the day - Owen Paterson on the green lobby...

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OK so the term 'green blob' does rather summon up images of Quatermass but Paterson is absolutely spot on in his condemnation of the so-called 'green' lobby:

I soon realised that the greens and their industrial and bureaucratic allies are used to getting things their own way. I received more death threats in a few months at Defra than I ever did as secretary of state for Northern Ireland. My home address was circulated worldwide with an incitement to trash it; I was burnt in effigy by Greenpeace as I was recovering from an operation to save my eyesight. But I did not set out to be popular with lobbyists and I never forgot that they were not the people I was elected to serve.

Indeed, I am proud that my departure was greeted with such gloating by spokespeople for the Green Party and Friends of the Earth.

It was not my job to do the bidding of two organisations that are little more than anti-capitalist agitprop groups most of whose leaders could not tell a snakeshead fritillary from a silver-washed fritillary. I saw my task as improving both the environment and the rural economy; many in the green movement believed in neither. 

These things cannot be said too often. The 'green' movement is driven less by the interests of our local environments that by self-interest, the search for power and influence, and above all by an unwavering belief that improving the conditions for ordinary men and women comes at a cost to the environment.  It doesn't. Just as no-one is poor become another is rich, the environment is not doomed by the desire of people like me to see poor people everywhere enjoying the fruits of capitalism's bounty.

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Ban fridges!

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The 'green movement' (if the odd agglomeration of leftie twits and self-righteous know-alls merits the term 'movement') has developed a love for exploiting middle-class angst and guilt. You see, dear reader, our wicked consumerist ways are to blame for all the planet's woes and the western middle-class mum is at the pinnacle of this pyramid of badness, the queen of carbon emissions.

Of course, as large terrestrial mammals in North America discovered 30,000 years ago, man is a pretty rapacious predator and his passion for consumption led to their extinction before he'd cottoned on to the advantages of taming and breeding those meat animals.

However, those early North American pioneers weren't as bad as today's western middle-class mum. Oh no.  For today we have fridges, huge great fridges:

Middle-class families should stop buying large fridges in order to save energy and tackle climate change, a government-commissioned report has suggested.

Families could save up to £36 a year on their electricity bills by replacing large fridge-freezers or televisions with smaller appliances, according to a study published by the Department for Energy and Climate Change.

The report found that the average family fridge had grown in volume by two fifths since 1985, amid a fashion for large American-style appliances, while the average television had grown by more than seven inches since 2004. It warned that the trend undermined attempts to cut carbon emissions. 

Feeling guilty as you opened your double door fridge this morning? Well you should be because you're damaging the planet with such a huge monstrosity in your kitchen. Polar bears are sliding into the ocean right now because you want more space to store your organic, shade grown vegetables, fairtrade chardonnay and locally-sourced free range guinea fowl.

Such selfishness is highlighted by the author of the report in question:

Nicola Terry, a co-author of the study, said: “Why do we need a bigger TV, and why do we need a bigger fridge? I don’t understand the case, but when people go to the shop they think, that’s bigger it must be better.” 

See middle-class people everywhere - your abject obsession with keeping up is destroying the planet!

The truth is, of course, that I want a bigger TV because I want a bigger picture. And I want a bigger fridge - a plumbed-in fridge - so I can store more stuff safely. But when patronising researchers arrive trying to guilt-trip us into getting a tiny little fridge and a hanky-sized TV, the screws of social pressure are turned. I can already hear the voice of some righteous hipster; "oh, Jocasta and I live out out green  principles and haven't bought one of those American fridges - so I'm afraid the fairtrade sav blanc is a bit warm."

Trust me here folks. The size of your fridge won't make a jot of difference to the planet's temperature. So buy the one that suits your needs. Better still, be a consumer and buy the one you want. The massive walk in one with chilled water on tap and enough space to store all the food and drink for the planet-destroying barbecue you're holding on Sunday.

Go for it! Stick it to those green fussbuckets!

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"De-growth" or how Greens think drinking less take-out coffee is an economic policy

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The Greens and their associated useful idiots are a pretty strange bunch. But nothing is stranger than when these good, kind and utterly barmy people start talking about work:

“Why do we work? What do we do with the money we earn?” asks Anna Coote, head of social policy at the New Economics Foundation. “Can we begin to think differently about how much we need—to get out of the fast lane and live life at a more sustainable pace, to do things that are better for the planet, better for ourselves?”

Now I'm not sure how many hours Ms Coote puts in or precisely how much she gets paid to spout this sort of stuff. But I'll guess that her take home pay is a damn sight more that the average pay for the average British worker.

And here lies the problem. I once had a conversation with a hairdresser about his business. He wasn't moaning just making the matter-of-fact observation that, with the shop open long hours, the time spent managing stock and staff plus the time at home in the evening book-keeping, paying bills and planning, his hourly income was below the minimum wage.

If Ms Coote and her sort - comfortably off, employed people - had their way, the cost of basic things like having your hair cut or the windows cleaned would soar. Even worst people would have us believe that somehow we can get out of the fast lane - presumably while they carry on with big salaries and pleasant jobs, the rest of us can lump it on less money.

Such people - when they aren't weeping crocodile tears about 'the poor' - believe that every job is like theirs. The sort who subscribe to Sierra Magazine where they suggest:

"...you move to a smaller house or an apartment, downsize to one or no car, or simply have fewer lattes to-go, a smaller paycheck could reduce consumption overall...” 

Isn't that lovely! We're going to save the planet by having fewer take-out coffees! These people really do live in a bizarre otherland. OK it's not quite living in teepees and growing organic vegetables. In fact it's probably worse because it implies some sort of moral urbanism exists in the green mind - presumably because the core constituency for modern greenery is decidedly urban and hipsterish. It's more about planting herbs in gutters than a return to the land.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not against down time - all work and no play does make for a dull life. But the idea that there is some sort of Malthusian imperative requiring "de-growth" is ridiculous. If people only want to work 20 hours a week that's fine by me and I hope they enjoy the free time but don't try to pretend that your different lifestyle is somehow not consumption, somehow superior to those folk who like a take-out latte and a shiny new car.

What Ms Coote and her friends fail to appreciate is that by stopping all their consumption they end all those businesses, all those jobs that serve such sinful indulgence. All the baristas, the car salesmen, the brewers and cake makers - gone. And with less money circulating that means lower tax revenues - less money to sweep the streets, teach children and care for Ms Coote's elderly relatives.

If these ideas come to pass we'll be less healthy, less happy and live shorter lives. But we'll have saved the planet!

As I said these people are utterly barmy.

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Diana Carney - another eco-authoritarian arrives to lecture us

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The eco-folk love a bit of middle-class judgementalism:

While she admits she is tempted by low prices she argues people should be “paying more” and “consuming less” as current clothes production is causing a “trail of devastation” in the communities where cheap cotton is grown. 

Got that folks - you should be buying organic stuff certified by the woo-merchants at the Soil Association. And, into the bargain, destroying the jobs of a whole load of poor people in places like Bangladesh, Vietnam and Egypt.

I do so wish that millionaire pseudo-celebrities like Mrs Carney would stop offering this false solution to the rest of us - the solution that things should cost more money. By all means indulge in some sort of cod, frugality, revel in your right-on greeniness and force the rest of your family to live with your warped ideas - but can you refrain from thrusting this nonsense at the rest of us. And especially stop implying that your so-called morals - this green nonsense - are better than those of others who chose to shop at Primark.

And Mrs Carney should also bear in mind that she has a choice - loads of money makes that possible. For many people out there, cheap clothes are the only choice.



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Now the Liberal Democrats want to ban cars...

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I guess this is something to do with saving the planet. But quite frankly they can shut up and go away:

Nick Clegg’s party has unveiled proposals to only allow ultra-low carbon vehicles on UK roads by 2040.

The controversial measures would mean millions of petrol and diesel cars being forbidden.

Only electric vehicles and ultra-efficient hybrid cars would be allowed on UK roads under the Lib Dem plans. 

What is it about these so-called 'liberals' that makes them want to ban things, stop things and generally restrain and curtail the liberty of ordinary Brits?

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Very rich hobby farmer wants poor people to pay more for food

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We've known for a while that our future king is, how do we put this? Ah, yes - rather too much of a hippie for his own (and our) good. All the talking to plants, alternative medicine, organic farming and old-fashioned architecture is rather sweet. But when he talks about food and the food industry he displays the arrogance of being, not merely a hippie, but a very wealthy hippie.

Charles said the drive to make food cheaper for consumers and to earn companies bigger profits was sucking real value out of the food production system – value that was critical to its sustainability.

Now Charles might not be living in a recession but the rest of us are and telling us that food should be more expensive is really quite objectionable. Especially when it's wrapped up in all those trendy, middle-class green movement words like "resilience" and "sustainability". Worse still, our king-to-be has discovered nannying fussbucketry and the blaming of obesity on the food industry rather than on people choosing to eat too much.

What is most striking (and this is very typical of this sort of wealthy man greenery - Transition Towns being a fine example) is that Charles is chiefly interested in the producer - those farmers - rather than the consumer.

"It has also led to a very destructive effect on farming. We are losing farmers fast. Young people do not want to go into such an unrewarding profession.

"In the UK, I have been warning of this for some time and recently set up apprenticeship schemes to try to alleviate the problem, but the fact remains that at the moment the average age of British farmers is 58, and rising."

The cause of that decline isn't that we've stopped consuming farming product (especially if you take Charles' obesity point as true). The decline is because - despite the subsidies and price fixing - many of our farms are uneconomic. And whilst it's tough on the romantic notion of farming (the sort Charles plays at with his tailored tweeds and hand-crafted shepherd's stick) most of us would rather have the cheap food.

And the farming won't go away - it will intensify. Which means fewer input costs to produce the same amount of fine food. If we wibble on about soil and local systems, we are completely missing the point and worse, we'll be making food more expensive and poor people poorer.

So next time you hear this wealthy - very wealthy - hobby farmer calling for higher food prices, just remember who benefits. It isn't you and me - we're going to pay more for our food and drink. Instead it's Charles and his castle-dwelling German farmer friends who'll suck up the higher prices and syphon off the new subsidies. And maybe a few ageing, overworked hill farmers might stay on a year or two longer than they should.

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Killing off old people to deal with climate change - the real green agenda

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The long campaign by the greens and their fellow travellers to raise the cost of heating our homes has resulted in record numbers of old people dying unnecessarily in cold houses.

“We have seen the death rate in the past month alone quadruple since December last year and if the cold weather continues we could be looking at horrendous figures

“At the rate we are going, and if this extreme cold continues we could be looking at 30,000 or more.

“Many elderly health conditions are worsened by cold weather and there is a definite risk of the highest national winter mortality figures since 2008-09.”

Despite this our government is trapped in a hideous and pointless programme of closing down efficient means of energy production and replacing them with more expensive methods. Apparently this will save the planet. I guess the Greens - eugenicists to a man - are only too happy to see a few human casualties in their fanatical pursuit of reducing "carbon".

Don't be fooled by the chaff thrown around by these fanatics - the stuff about evil gas companies or wicked electricity producers from France. These people want higher fuel prices because it's the only way they can get the subsidies for wind, tide, solar and all the other twee green generation methods.

The greens have hobbled nuclear by pretending it's dangerous when it isn't, they've pushed the coal mining business to the brink of closure and they want to prevent the safe, low-cost gas that would come from frakking. And they've shoved up the price of fuel by subsidising inefficient generation.

The result of this is that old people can't afford to heat their homes. And too many of them die because of this policy. Those 30,000 deaths - the greens did that.

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Pirates!

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Cuddly green pirates but still pirates:

“You don’t need a peg leg or an eye patch. When you ram ships; hurl containers of acid; drag metal-reinforced ropes in the water to damage propellers and rudders; launch smoke bombs and flares with hooks; and point high-powered lasers at other ships, you are, without a doubt, a pirate, no matter how high-minded you believe your purpose to be.”

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Green means poor and greener means poorer

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The Centre for Cities reports on how economic misery is saving the planet - at least in terms of reducing those pesky carbon emissions:

Between 2005 and 2010, total CO2 emissions in the UK fell 10 percent, with the most dramatic shifts coming since the recession began in 2008. Industrial emissions, which account for 44 percent of all UK CO2 emissions, fell 15 percent since 2005.

And to illustrate this, the writers cite Middlesborough - where of course they closed down steel plants and chemical works. With the result that:

However, the vast majority of the reduction in CO2 emissions came from industrial decline. Anecdotally, the closure of major manufacturing plants like Corus Steel in 2010 and Croda Chemicals would have had a large impact on the emissions of the city. Overall, employment in manufacturing fell in Middlesbrough by roughly 20 percent since the onset of the recession.

Saving the planet comes at the expense of human misery. The losers aren't the better off but those on the margins, poorer people. The whole point and purpose of green economics is to make us poorer - and that means more of that human misery. Just as Oxfam wants poor Africans to stay as poor Africans, the green movement believes economic growth is wrong - and this means poor people staying poor, or worse getting poorer.

These greens should be driven from the land.

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More on the crass stupidity of Transition Towns - the case of Totnes

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Some folk from Totnes aren't too happy at the way in which a few well organised green extremists have captured the Town Council and imposed their ridiculous Transition Town Totnes (TTT) idea on the place:

While no one in the Totnes has voted for TTT to dictate town policy, it has enormous influence over town planning policy and the future economic direction of the town. No one in the town voted for TTT to run policy, and it is quite wrong that Totnes Town Council took the unilateral decision to become give us the label of a Transition Town. In fact, if TTT continues to implement its damaging policies it will succeed in turning Totnes centre in a ghost town and make all our lives far more difficult. We want choice, not just TTT's choices.

Indeed the town featured in all the trendy nationals over a campaign against Costa coffee opening and revealed how the green extremists distorted the truth to make their case:

...only 12 per cent of local residents supported its battle against the coffee chain. Its argument that Totnes was a chain free town was a lie. It's claim there are 41 coffee outlets in Totnes included pubs, cafes and restaurants that would have been barely affected even if the arrival of Costa Coffee resulted in fewer coffee sales. Totnes has one dedicated coffee and that, the Curator, open after TTT began its campaign.

These good people have launched a petition - I would urge them to put up for the Town Council and to involve their District and County Councillors (if they've not been taken in by the green extremists). More power to their elbow and success to their petition!

Worse still this green fanatics want to impose a load of huge industrial wind turbines on the place!

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Transition Towns - or how to be less resilient and exclude the poor

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Maybe I've been asleep - I don't usually miss left-wing, green wibble - but 'transition towns' were a new one on me. Apparently there's a whole movement of them:

Transition Initiatives, community by community, are actively and cooperatively creating happier, fairer and stronger communities, places that work for the people living in them and are far better suited to dealing with the shocks that'll accompany our economic and energy challenges and a climate in chaos.

The point about these 'transition initiatives' is that they involve the capture of a local agenda - and policy-setting within a specific community - by a small group of committed, green extremists. The point and purpose of these groups is to ensure that all the focus within the particular community is on "resilience". We are told the problem is - without evidence or the proffering of choice - with things such as 'runaway' climate change, peak oil and that:

Industrial society has lost the resilience to be able to cope with energy shocks.

The chosen methods for these activists are to stress those parts of the local agenda that are open to criticism on 'environmental' grounds - it might be anything from local concerns about proposals for a coffee shop or a supermarket to campaigns against housing development or new transport infrastructure.

These campaigns give the green extremists the crack into which to ram their anti-development, anti-industrial wedge. At the heart of this extremism is the seemingly benign idea of 'resiliance' - making communities more resistant to shocks such as "fluctuations in energy prices" and "anticipated changes in climate". And this resilience is all about excluding the regional, national and international - thus the lower prices and distribution resilience of the large supermarket is denied in favour of local growing initiatives, jolly little town currencies and campaigns to defend independent shops. All of which, of course, make it more difficult and more expensive for the less well off.

And cutting yourself off from wider distribution systems does not make you more resilient. You only need to look at the aftermath of the recent Hurricane Sandy to see that national retailers were far more able to respond to the crisis than were local independents. Why? Because their national distribution networks, dispersed warehouses and truck fleets allowed them to quickly redirect stocks to places affected by the hurricane.

The truth is that the last and best protection - that resilience - comes from well-managed private business rather than from government. The Transition Towns idea deliberately sets out to exlcude these systems claiming they damage the environment or actually threaten local resilience. Worse still Transition Towns seek to create local systems that are more expensive to manage, less robust and excluding of the poor - they are not just twee little groups 'doing good' but organisations actively damaging communities.

Most depressingly these Transition Towns do not seem that way. Clever and articulate people promote them, the same naive churchy types as were suckered by 'fair trade' get involved and none of these people realise that the losers in all this are the poor. The one's who'd rather like a nice supermarket or a Costa coffee. The one's who would benefit most from connection to the international network of trade. The one's who'd like their sons and daughters to have a fighting chance of affording to carry on living in the smart little market town. The people who benefit from that "industrial society" our Transition Town advocates disdain.

Transition Towns really are less resilient and exclude the poor.

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