British politics is very boring compared to American politics just now, a fact reflected in the content of recent Samizdata postings. What is there to say about Britain now? They almost all agree, or pretend to agree. They are almost all mistaken. That about covers it. At least in the USA there is occasional debate about something resembling principles.
Perhaps principles are easier to observe from a distance, uncluttered by nearby clutter, rather as skyscrapers loom larger when viewed from a distance. But from where I sit, in Britain, part of the reason for this British political boringness is that Prime Minister Cameron has no apparent objective other than to remain Prime Minister Cameron. What he does at any given moment seems to be entirely the consequence of the various directions in which, and the varying force with which, he is being pulled, pushed, kicked, bribed or threatened. He himself never makes a decision, other than a decision about the combined effect upon him of these various forces.
I seem to recall reading, not long after the coalition government was formed, that Cameron may actually prefer coalition government to regular government. That way, interpreting and constantly rebalancing all those forces is his basic job.
But when those forces change, what Cameron does changes with them, and that can be slightly interesting. One such slightly interesting shift happened in the course of the recent cabinet reshuffle, in the form of the appointment of someone called Owen Paterson to be the government’s Environment Secretary. The interesting thing being that apparently Owen Paterson is not nearly as devoted to wind power as the Windies (so to speak) think that such a person ought to be. In general, Paterson lacks green enthusiasm, as Fraser Nelson explains.
Owen Paterson is far from a household name, but the significance of his appointment as Environment Secretary has not been lost on the green lobby groups. As far as they’re concerned, this is war. They are already denouncing him as a “prominent hater of wind turbines” and overall climate change sceptic.
Sounds like good news to me (rather as the news in this posting was), except actually what “climate change sceptics” are really sceptical about is not climate change but climate catastrophe.
So, why the change of public mood, and consequent slight Cameron shift? Well, part of it is that climate catastrophe scepticism is growing and growing. As I keep insisting, the key to all this is catastrophe. If the climate is just changing a bit, and if sea levels are about to rise a bit, then the obvious answer is for us to adapt, and let the market send us whatever signals it is inclined to. Only if climate catastrophe looms does it make any sense to shut down regular economics and switch the entire world over to emergency tyranny mode, of the sort that the people who set the climate catastrophe scam up in the first place yearn for. But more and more people now believe that there is no more reason now than at any other time in human history to expect climate catastrophe. In short, our side is (as it has been for several years now) winning the climate catastrophe argument (which is the bit of the argument that matters), big time.
The wider public, the sort of public (most of it) that is far more bothered about its fuel bills than by any arguments about longer term climate upheavals, is getting the news of this intellectual transformation not just in the form of an abatement of green propaganda, but also in more elusive ways, involving moral atmospherics.
Fraser Nelson again:
For more than a decade, environmental policy has been cursed with cross-party consensus because no one wanted to be seen to oppose so noble a cause.
It is precisely this air of green nobility that is now changing, as Cameron has surely noticed.
Thanks at first to the whistle blowing sceptics like Steve McIntyre, and then to the bloggers and journos who publicised such findings as McIntyre’s, like Andrew Montford, Christopher Booker and James Delingpole, and now to the big-time daily newspapers who have been joining in more recently with similar stories, “climate science” just doesn’t seem as noble as it used to. Frankly it is being presented as downright corrupt. These “scientists” don’t insist upon the truth of their opinions merely because they just do. They do this because this is how they now make their living. Their constant screeching about the venal motives of their opponents is pure projection, and is more and more being presented to the wider public as just that.
Meanwhile, on the back of the climate science scam, a new variety of green entrepreneur (one of them being David Cameron’s own father-in-law) has arisen. In the days of unchallenged green nobility, the people who thought along these lines both set up or participated in green businesses and sat on public bodies whose mission was to impose the very green schemes and regulations that these green businesses depended on for their profitability. Time was when this seemed okay. But not now. Suddenly, being the director of a wind farm company, and at the same time sitting on some government committee which does all it can to block other and more rational forms of energy doesn’t look quite as noble as once it did.
It’s not that the Windies have given up exerting any forces of their own. The point is that these people are now on the defensive. From the green point of view, the times they are a-changing, and when the times change, people like David Cameron change with them.
“I am but mad north-northwest: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.”
You might be crediting this fuckwit with more brains than is warranted.
There is a phrase, which I think is somewhere in Popper’s works that I have read, at least I associate it with Popper:
iDave is a complete waste of Oxygen, and the rest of our MP’s of whatever party are almost equally clueless. They can’t do sums, hence the financial crisis, and Science may as well come from another planet.
These clowns really believe that Windmills and Solar will be our salvation. The carbon emmissions targets they have set are insane and will result in the total loss of our manufacturing industries.
Britain’s Energy policy is like a game of “pass the parcel” and whoever is left holding it when the lights go out (and they will very shortly) will get crucified.
Paterson may be a slight improvement, but it will be only slight. Too many snouts in the trough of “Renewables” for them to see the light now.
I’ve been reading a lot geology lately. The geologic history of the earth and the understanding of how the earth – and its mountains and canyons and flood plains – got to be the way they are is fascinating to me.
On a geologic time scale, climate change is continuous. Sea levels rise and fall hundreds of meters. Average global temperatures rise and fall. Relative levels of carbon dioxide and oxygen rise and fall.
There are complex long term cycles and processes at work. The movement of continental land masses, especially their connecting and disconnecting from each other over time, change global ocean currents, which change the nature of heat distribution over the planet.
The rise of mountain ranges change the distribution of rainfall over continents through rain shadow effects.
On top of all that, Croll-Milankovitch Cycles – the change in earth’s orbit from more circular to more elliptical, and the change in obliquity of earth’s axis relative to the sun -varies the amount of sunlight that strike the earth over time and appear to operate on approximately 100,000 year cycles.
Only 15,000 years ago the earth was seeing the end of peak glaciation. There were 1-2 kilometer (a mile or more) thick ice sheets over much of the northern hemisphere as far south in North America as New York.
The earth has been getting continuously warmer for at least 12,000 years, when biblical scale flood events were resulting from the melting of glaciers and ice sheets. Google ‘Ice Age Floods’.
Global cooling and heating are written all across the geologic record. They reasons and results are complex, but certainly not new or unusual and long predate mankind’s existence, much less industrialization.
I really wouldn’t say it’s more principled, At the moment the guy who invented obamacare is running against the guy who implemented it federally. the current UK gov are supposed to be making cuts, but in reality they are nonexistent
I live in hope, but with Cameron in the chair aided by the Cleggeron and with the troughing Yeo in charge of the climate change agenda, Owen may have problem turning things around. I do hope that he does but I will look for results fairly quickly or it is a dead duck.
Excellent post. I don’t pretend to know a great deal about climate change but I do know that I have absolutely no confidence in the alarmists who like their public health industry cousins have lied, cheated, undermined and destroyed in order to fuel their personal ambition. And of course get paid.
Wider pubic?
Ivan D
Thanks for the kind words, and for that edit. The old misprints are the best, I always say.
switch the entire world over to emergency tyranny mode
Quotation Gold! I’ll read the rest of the article now.
What Perry said.
Another test of how serious iDave actually is would be to tot up how many Quangos and other such organisations have been shut down since the coalition took power. I am sure that had a lot been closed, we would have heard it boasted about by the Tories, but I am not seeing much sign of this; the last time any significant measure was brought out was in 2010. (See here(Link)). And since then, who knows was fresh growths have come up?
I hope it’s acceptable to use the present discussion as an excuse to ask an ancillary (though O.T.) question that has been bothering me, rather like a missing tooth. To wit, why “iDave”? I assume it’s inspired by “iMac, iPod, iPhone” … but I’ve never known why the “i” in those either, although I had the vague idea that the “i” was supposed originally to suggest Internet capability. Is iDave Internet-capable? :>) –The term strikes me as suggesting one who is a bit plastic, in a pleasant enough but somewhat irrelevant sort of way.
Education on this issue would be much appreciated. Thanks.
The term strikes me as suggesting one who is a bit plastic, in a pleasant enough but somewhat irrelevant sort of way.
I think you have the measure of it there Julie, but you should have said “in a totally plastic and unpleasant sort of way.” Behind the scenes, he is far from pleasant apparently, a nasty little bully in fact.
NickM and I use it over on CCIZ because “call me Dave” as some MSM commentators dub him, has pretended from the moment any of us were first aware of him, that he was a man of the people not a Bullington Boy, and would give interviews telling us what is on his iPod (The Kaiser Chiefs if I remember rightly) and how his kids had broken one and he had to get another etc. The man is as phoney as a nine bob note! Er do you need any help with that reference? 😉
Blair was never a Socialist, and Cameron is not a Conservative, they are an entirely new species.
Perhaps Apple should have called them Me Me MePods.
LOL! Thanks, RAB. I shall now enjoy the term unbothered by holes in the lower mandible.
“Me Me MePods”! *holds nose, utters “eewww!” appreciatively* :>)!
By the way–I’ll SEE your nine-bob note and raise you two three-dollar bills.
I find Blair far more likable
as a person than Cameron…hell, Cameron doesn’t even strike me as a *person*. Regardless, I’m afraid I just may take a missing tooth over either…
I had a molar extracted earlier this year and I have to say, I found the process itself and the resulting gap in my lower jaw entirely more pleasant than either iDave or Blair (or Broon, Clegg, Milliband or any of the rest of them). I’d take a tooth extraction plus a punch in the mouth over most union leaders too, given the choice.
Cameron and Blair might not be socialists in the old “Revolution, Comrades!” sense, but both of them will get us there eventually if we let them.
~R~
“At least in the USA there is occasional debate about something resembling principles.” — The grass is always greener over the septic tank.