Further to yesterday’s SQotD, which was an MP dissing the Climate Change Act, I spotted this propaganda, on the big expensive greenhouse type front door, in Victoria Street near where I live, of the governmental organ that now calls itself the Department for Business Innovation & Skills:
Those wanting to say that my title for this posting is nonsense won’t have to go very far to prove themselves right, in their own eyes. All they need to do is go to the Department for Business Innovation & Skills website, where they will find no prominent mentions of anything about Energising Britain with such things as oil or gas, but plenty of mentions of things like Offshore wind industrial strategy and Multi-million pound investment in offshore wind industry to unlock billions in UK economy. Unlock billions from the UK economy, more like.
I agree, sort of, in other words, with a commenter on that SQotD, who said:
Too late, the scam has been running long enough that there are now too many snouts in the trough.
The above piece of propaganda that I photoed may not be an actual lie, in the trivial sense that 13.5 billion quid may indeed be being invested in Britain this year in oil and gas, despite everything that the Department for Business Innovation & Skills may have done to discourage such investment by instead prattling on about wind farms for the last decade or more. But as an exercise in saying what the Department for Business Innovation & Skills is now concentrating on, it is a lie. The racket continues.
But this is often the way with big government bureaucracies. The truth, and a consequent forthcoming shift of policy emphasis (that later cascades into a truly new and totally different policy), often first impinges in the form of public lies about what they are now doing, even as they persist behind the scenes with the old discredited nonsense.
Never underestimate the reverse-impact of public relations departments, in the form of them telling the other people in the building what they now all ought to be doing. The collapse of the USSR, no less, began as a big old Soviet lie about how the USSR was going to start being efficient and nice and good, by doing something called “Glaznost”. It was wall-to-wall bullshit, but it was wall-to-wall bullshit that helped to change the course of history. The USSR, like “green energy”, “climate change” and so on, was another huge scam that went on for far, far too long, and by the end snouts in the trough was all it was. And the snouts only changed things when the trough was getting seriously near to totally empty. But change things they did. Millions had already died, and millions more had endured lives of utter misery, and in this sense, the change came too late, far too late. But change like that is never not worth doing. There is still a future worth improving, for many millions more.
Suppose you were a green fanatic who had weaselled your way into the Department for Business Innovation & Skills, and got yourself a job giving money stolen from British taxpayers to friends of yours who construct wind farms for a living, and emitting Niagaras of lies about how that was going to “energise Britain”. How would you feel about walking past all this stuff about oil and gas, every time you went into work in the morning?
You might think that all that lovely oil and gas tax revenue would perhaps enable you and your lying friends to keep the wind farm scam going that little bit longer, and if you did feel that, you might well be right. But I don’t think, on the whole, you’d like what you were seeing every morning. Just keeping your little scam going for a few more years until you are safely retired is hardly what you had in mind when you began it. Then, it was a cause, and you and your pals would be all over the history books, in a nice way. Now, history is looking like it might be taking a somewhat different turn.
For starters, there is no mention in this big lump of verbiage, of green, either as a word or in the form of the actual colour green. There is only a rather garish, shamelessly industrial, orange. “BRITAIN” in big letters also has a nasty, nationalistic taste to it. Whatever happened to saving the world?
More fundamentally, “oil and gas” is everything you hate. Oil and gas is vast, clunky metal structures noisily gouging dirty old energy to set fire to out of defenceless Mother Earth like it’s 1925, or if it now isn’t that, you still think it is, as do millions of others who also think: Hurrah! It’s a whole generation of people saying: Bollocks to wind farms, let’s get rich, again. It’s the whole world saying: “Climate catastrophe? Let’s not worry about that when it doesn’t happen, okay?” Despite all the wind farm idiocy that the Department for Business Innovation & Skills is still shovelling out, I think I smell change here, and for the better.
LATER: Green bloodbath in Australia.
SEE ALSO: Alex Singleton, at the ASI blog, says that Parliament’s cushy consensus over climate change is dead.
Let’s hope so. What I look forward to seeing is the abolition of the Climate Change Act and the de-funding of climate change “research”. But, hey, the change has got to start somewhere.
Reckon you’ve called this a mite early. The Green Plague won’t depart until the generation who’ve based their careers on it depart the field. Good ten years left in most of them.
The quote, all political careers end in failure, is rarely true. The careers end in comfortable retirement. it’s the policies end in failure
The Green Party people are having their annual conference – but, to judge from the BBC coverage, even the Greens do not actually believe in Greenism.
They seem to spend their time talking about how wonderful the NHS is (well if you are an undertaker by trade I suppose a case could be made for the NHS – after it gives undertakers a lot of early business) and how evil the leader of UKIP is (for drinking beer and other crimes against humanity).
What all this has got to do with Greenism I do not know.
Government programmes are like Time Lords, try to kill them, and they regenerate, coming back fresh and new, bringing new excitement to their fans.
Unless government money stops flowing in to the Green scams, nothing will change. The Bomber Harris approach is needed: ‘4,000 Lancasters bombing ’round-the-clock’, striking at the heart of the enemy war machine, leaving not one job standing, every Green bureaucrat should expect a P45 to land on their desk at any moment, and to face the economic reality of voluntary exchange, but this government is no more a threat to them than the Swiss Navy was to U-boats.
The nomenklatura might be miffed by rhetoric, but the Gravy Train has yet to face a Typhoon strafing.
What? Did (ie)Newcastle run out of coal?
Besides dandruff shampoo ,and coal tar (some super-genius help me here)can one derive benzene and (just one word)”plastics” from coal?
I’ll betcha’ coal based “ink” would work real good in 3D “printers” of plastic products, without the need for “cities” to subsequently pay for low skilled window/building washers.
Admittedly, I could simply be insane on this.
Government programmes are like Time Lords, try to kill them, and they regenerate, coming back fresh and new, bringing new excitement to their fans.
Brilliant line.
It IS changing. Just think how far it’s already changed. Only a couple of years ago CAGW was the only version of the truth, sceptics were confined to the blogs and Youtube. Now things are being said in parliament and they are getting reported on the news. There will be inertia, for sure- thousands upon thousands of people don’t just walk into work and resign because they don’t like the way the wind blows- but I’m quietly optimistic.
CaptDMO, coal can be used to make plastics. historically in the UK, coal was used to make gas fuel, with vaious simple and complex hydrocarbon products arising, which had a variety of industrial uses, nd coal can be turned into oil. However, the economics of such processes do not lend themselves to such applications and fracking gas may eclipse coal and oil if production costs fall and production rises.
I fail to see where window washers come in.
it’a going to take five more years of no warming (or slight cooling) for it to register with the mainstream public.
The sensible money will move long before that, but the ‘vision’ belief system will take longer to go. (In some it’ll never go – look at Marxists).
Those who’ve made careers out of Chicken Little’ing will never recant. They’ll just step sideways into ‘sustainability’ or ‘acidification’, or re-frame their beliefs to pretend they always had doubts. In the past this would have worked, but the internet now records all their nonsense. And even though they keep trying to MiniTruth their past, there is the Wayback machine and an army of us out here saving the original comments.
They will be called to account.
“I fail to see where window washers come in.”
OK,you asked for it…(rant warning)
In days of old, as some folk (ie.Dickens) described. ALL the cities (US as well)where almost everybody simply BURNED coal, as well as everything “downwind”, got covered with soot, like…windows.
It seems that chimney sweep or window washer were viable options for otherwise healthy unemployed folk, I believe that was also before “On The Dole”.
(Whale oil)Public Lamplighter was an option in larger US cities (for those who could climb a pole), as was street sweeper-bearing in mind that horses were the primary force driving local “commerce” before the internal combustion engine. THOSE were “municipal” jobs however.
Did chimney sweeps ever “unionize”, or otherwise fall under “gub’mint” regulation in UK?
In the US, corporate sky scraper, as well as “municipal” window washers ALL fall under some “facilities management” or such “union”. Many “undocumented” or “guest” workers pay into it. Astonishingly expensive “safety training” required before license/permit is issued.
In (ie)NY City, this had evolved into homeless folk known as “squeegees”, allegedly “cleaning” traffic captured motorists windshields with newspapers and a bottle of river water “cleaner”.
I still have what’s left of the long handled flue brush (pre-plastic natural bristles are long gone) for the now abandoned, yet still quite functional (pre planned obsolescence “economic theory”), coal/wood furnace in my cellar that was the cutting edge technology displacing wood burning fireplaces of the time- 200 or so years ago- when coal became a more economical choice for those who bought their fuel from “others”, and a more ecological choice when remaining forests were dwindling (after scads of forest land was cleared for the Navy’s fleet, and agricultural field
accommodation of “food” and other “needs”(booze/heroin/cocaine) for distant paved “city folk”) SEE: Argentina, Brazil, Afghanistan, Peru, and where ever corn growth is currently “regulated/subsidized” for gasoline adulterant, also at an astonishing “mark up” per oz. at the retailers (pump).
Granted, still cheaper per oz. than say, heavily taxed 80 proof “Russian” vodka, from Pepsi.
Ironically, the times have demanded a new industry evolve for folks who can clean up befouled Windows, only now we call them ‘puter techs.
There’s work available for those who can climb a pole as well, we call them Gentleman’s Club entertainers.
Not “the threat” of a P45 Mr Ed.
That would only make the administrators and activists (much the same thing now) work all the harder – they should just be got rid of now (all of them) by their departments being abolished (the only real way to cut government spending is to get rid of FUNCTIONS of government).
Nor should the actually get “P45s” – when they ask for these documents (having being made redundant) they should be told “good news – you have no need of these documents, as this system no longer applies”.
Paul, my words were
I did say ‘expect‘, not ‘find’, and, as Ming the Merciless said in Flash Gordon when asked by Klytus if he wished to destroy Earth “…Later, I like to play with things a while, before annihilation…”.
I do take your advice, my time frame for ‘later‘ should be a lunchtime, and I am a fast eater. And of course, by ‘green’ bureaucrat, I would take a very inclusive, nay, catholic approach.
I believe that Auberon Waugh proposed, during Mrs Thatcher’s prime, that any Cabinet Minister who proposed and delivered the abolition of his department should get a Dukedom. How nice that would be to ask of today’s Cabinet, and they would all be shocked and appalled at the very mention of the great Mr Waugh.
I think you underestimate one of two contradictory tendencies.
Certainly, the civil service buys into Green Energy by and large and are happy to push money toward the right people. But this is a recent idea and a longer standing idea is suspicion of business in general.
In thirty years from now the narrative will not be one of failure of progressive ideas but one of the hijack of progressive ideas by rapacious businessmen, who greedily stole money and ruined the chance of utopia. Capitalism will get the blame.
Thus the idea that civil servants have “friends in industry” is only contingently true. They will drop them at the first negative Guardian story.
@TDK, I apologise for my query, but who is the ‘They’ in your final sentence, i.e who will drop whom? I cannot resolve the ambiguity definitively.
Nice of you to quote me but an attribution would have been nice too.
Mr Ed – I apologise for my error.
I agree with what you say in your last post.
Yes – a hereditary Dukedom for a Sec of State who manages to abolish their department (without transferring its functions to other departments).
Mr Ed
‘They’ are civil servants, who have friends in the renewables industry.