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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day

· Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · Environment · Slogans & Quotations

Decarbonising our economy is the Greenies’ equivalent of the Soviet collectivisation of agriculture, or the Great Leap Forward. With similar effects.

– Fen Tiger

October 31st, 2021 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)

ACAB

· Environment · Historical views

As the vultures circle above Glasgow for the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference a.k.a. Cop26, here is a flashback to Cop15 which took place in Copenhagen in 2009:

Above all, Obama needed to be able to demonstrate to the Senate that he could deliver China in any global climate regulation framework, so conservative senators could not argue that US carbon cuts would further advantage Chinese industry. With midterm elections looming, Obama and his staff also knew that Copenhagen would be probably their only opportunity to go to climate change talks with a strong mandate. This further strengthened China’s negotiating hand, as did the complete lack of civil society political pressure on either China or India. Campaign groups never blame developing countries for failure; this is an iron rule that is never broken. The Indians, in particular, have become past masters at co-opting the language of equity (“equal rights to the atmosphere”) in the service of planetary suicide – and leftish campaigners and commentators are hoist with their own petard.

– Mark Lynas writing in the Guardian on 22 December 2009: “How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room”

The majestic cycle continues: “Biden heads to crucial climate talks as wary allies wonder if US will deliver”. He won’t. China will wreck the deal. Developing countries will grandstand, led by the Maldives. Doom will be imminent if we do not get a Green New Deal within a timeframe just longer than one electoral cycle. Preparations will begin for Cop27.

October 29th, 2021 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day

· Environment · Slogans & Quotations

“COP26, not as an event but as the beginning of a process, has the potential to provoke revolution. Not certainly and not in the immediate future; but the unfolding future of climate totalitarianism, already fairly clearly delineated in the plans of governments, is the one phenomenon that anyone with an historian’s insight will identify as a conceivable long-term cause of revolution. What shape such a revolution might take, whether purely political or violent, would probably vary according to the culture of any society in which it occurred. If politicians do not heed the warning signs that will eventually proliferate, future historians may compare the assembling of COP26 to the convening of the Estates General in France, in 1789.”

– Gerald Warner

Read the whole thing. If you are from Glasgow, please don’t take offence.

October 27th, 2021 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day

· Environment · Slogans & Quotations

“The alarmism is the goal. The goal is the alarmism.”

– Michael Shellenberger, as interviewed by Jordan Peterson. He is talking about the fearmongering of much of the contemporary Green movement, and what drives it. I really hope that a pushback is coming when the public fully wake up to what’s involved.

October 24th, 2021 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day

· Environment · UK affairs

“For years, the people of this country have been corralled towards a future that they cannot see and cannot understand. But the energy crisis this winter will reveal what politicians and eco-activists have kept hidden – that in a Net Zero future you will be poorer and colder.”

– Dr Benny Peiser, Director, Net Zero Watch.

Net Zero Watch is a new group run by the Global Warming Policy Forum, and it has its own website. I intend to visit it regularly.

October 11th, 2021 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day

· Environment · Slogans & Quotations

By the time some of the environmentalists realised who they had sold their soul to, it was too late. But what, in any case, had the alternative been? The small-is-beautiful crowd, with their patchouli-scented jumpers and their 1970s talk about limits and sovereignty, had been cancelled as eco-fascists long ago, exiled to distant smallholdings and housing co-ops with their well-thumbed copies of Tools for Conviviality and other yellowing tomes by dead white men. Now that an actual eco-fascism was on the horizon — a global merger of state and corporate power in pursuit of progress that would have made Mussolini weep like a proud grandfather — there was nothing to stand in its way.

– Paul Kingsnorth

October 5th, 2021 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)

Steal Labour’s clothes, look like Labour

· Economics, Business & Globalization · Environment · Historical views · Political Economy · Self defence & Security · UK affairs

Britain’s electricity supply is in peril. On Monday (20 Sep) the Financial Times reported,

Peter McGirr wanted to modernise the British consumer energy market when he founded Green three years ago, building a customer base of more than 250,000 households. Now, with the sector in meltdown, he says it is “incredibly unlikely” the Newcastle-based supplier will survive until Christmas without government intervention.

Five smaller suppliers have collapsed in the past six weeks, with four or five more expected to join them in the next 10 days as the industry is battered by unprecedented surges in wholesale electricity and gas prices.

Observers are predicting as few as 10 suppliers will make it through the winter, implying 40 could go bust. Some executives have privately suggested the sector could go back to a big four, five or six companies.

How did this happen to us? I know who to blame for setting the UK on this disastrous course. On Tuesday 24 September 2013, eight years ago tomorrow, the then Leader of the Labour party, Ed Miliband, gave his big speech to the Labour party conference in Brighton. One item was particularly popular:

“If we win the election 2015 the next Labour government will freeze gas and electricity prices until the start of 2017. Your bills will not rise. It will benefit millions of families and millions of businesses. That’s what I mean by a government that fights for you. That’s what I mean when I say Britain can do better than this.”

The response from the Tories was immediate and scathing:

As the Guardian reported,

Energy minister Greg Barker attacks Labour’s plan to cap energy prices

In response to Ed Miliband’s announcement, the energy minister says capping energy prices would have catastrophic consequences for investment in the UK

Figures from the gas industry chipped in:

The lights could go out if Labour introduces its 20-month freeze on energy prices, Ian Peters of British Gas said. “If we have no ability to control what we do in the retail prices” and wholesale prices suddenly go up within a single year “that will threaten energy security,” he said. Asked if that meant the lights would go out, he replied: “I think that is a risk.”

But Mr Miliband’s policy had equally vigorous defenders. On 25 September 2013, the day after Mr Miliband’s speech, Alex Andreou of the New Statesman thundered:

Ed Miliband’s critics think his energy pledge will make the lights go out. They are wrong

The critics were wrong. Ed Miliband is innocent OK! It was not his pledge that a Labour government would limit energy prices that has brought us so near to having the lights go out.

The Conservative manifesto of 2017 included energy price controls, duly introduced by Prime Minister Theresa May on 1st January 2019.

And here we are.

September 23rd, 2021 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)

A press release worth sharing

· Environment · UK affairs

I got this today from the Global Warming Policy Forum, a group that I guess can be best called a global warming sceptics group. It is based in the UK. Here is its press release today. It responds to reports that the UK is dangerously vulnerable to cuts in energy supplies and rocketing prices. Winter this year could be interesting. If the UK has power cuts and serious hits to supplies this year and into next, will the government double down on trying to produce energy from wind and happy thoughts, or realise that a mix of nuclear, some fossil fuels and limited renewables are the way to go? Can any major Western political leader withstand the likely wailing from the establishment media and call bullshit on Net Zero and the anti-carbon cult? Can you imagine any such figure advocating that people read Alex Epstein or Michael Schellenberger, for instance? It is worth noting that the last time the UK had power cuts, during the early 70s, we had a Tory government as led by Edward Heath (who took the UK into the EEC). Then, the coal industry was locked in a brutal industrial dispute with the unions. The three-day week, blackouts and all the rest were big reasons for why Heath was kicked out and eventually replaced by Margaret Thatcher. A basic requirement of a government is to keep the lights on, or at least not stop people from keeping them on. Boris Johnson doesn’t want to be the next Heath, does he?

Here is the GWPF press release:

The GWPF has consistently warned that Britain’s unilateral climate policies under both Labour and Conservative administrations were creating an insecure and expensive energy sector that would ultimately fail due to consumer costs and collapsing security of supply.

These warnings are now fully vindicated. Over-reliance on renewables and interconnectors and a failure to maintain a diverse portfolio of energy supply and electricity generation has resulted in a fragile, weather-dependent British system that is critically vulnerable to pan-European low wind conditions, interconnector failure, and high regional gas prices.

Income support subsidies to renewable energy investors currently total about £10 billion a year, and are still rising, while grid management costs have increased six-fold (to just under £2 billion a year) since the early 2000s when renewables were first introduced in significant quantities.

In spite of this large and growing cost burden, renewables do not protect the consumer effectively against fluctuations in gas prices, since wind and solar are both critically reliant on gas to guarantee security of supply. The UK’s apparent diversity of supply is an illusion. The current energy cost and supply crisis is the result of decades of ill-considered climate policy which has prioritised costly emissions reductions technologies while neglecting the consumer interest, security of supply and macro-economic impact.

The severity of the current crisis merits emergency measures, not only to protect consumers and the economy, but also to avoid the crisis from turning into social disaster as winter approaches.

The GWPF is calling on the Government to:

1. Suspend all green levies on energy bills, funding subsidies temporarily out of taxation, but acting firmly to cancel these subsidies in the near term.

2. Cancel constraint payments, and compel wind and solar generators to pay for their own balancing costs, thus incentivising them to self-dispatch only when economic.

3. Remove all fiscal and other disincentives to oil and gas exploration, including shale gas, to increase domestic production levels.

4. Suspend carbon taxation on coal and gas generation in order to provide consumer relief and ensure security of supply.

5. Re-open recently closed gas storage facilities and support new storage projects.

6. Suspend all further policy initiatives directed towards the Net Zero target, including the Carbon Budgets, the heat pump targets, and the overly ambitious timetable for the ban on petrol and diesel engines, until the UK energy sector has been stabilised.

7. Facilitate the acceleration of building and deploying Small Modular Reactors for both electricity and heat.

September 20th, 2021 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)

Ctrl-F “frack” 0/0

· Economics, Business & Globalization · Environment · Science & Technology · Self defence & Security · UK affairs

The government has published this UK gas supply explainer.

There has recently been widespread media coverage of wholesale gas prices, and the effect this could have on household energy bills. The impact on certain areas of industry, and its ability to continue production, has also attracted attention.

This explainer sets out the background to the issue and the action the government is taking to protect the UK’s energy supply, industry, and consumers.

Natural gas prices have been steadily rising across the globe this year for a number of reasons. This has affected Europe, including the UK, as well as other countries around the world.

Later, the author of the “explainer” reassures us consumers that energy prices may not go up as much as one might expect:

The high wholesale gas prices that are currently visible may not be the actual prices being paid by all consumers.

This is because major energy suppliers purchase much of their wholesale supplies many months in advance, giving protection to them and their customers from short-term price spikes.

The Energy Price Cap is also in place to protect millions of customers from the sudden increases in global gas prices this winter. Despite the rising costs of wholesale energy, the cap still saves 15 million households up to £100 a year.

Isn’t it nice that the government protects consumers by stopping energy firms passing on price rises?

Completely unrelated: Four more small energy firms could go bust next week, the BBC reports.

Some of you may remember that the Bishop Hill blog used to cover climate and energy issues in a moderate and well-informed way. Unless I missed the announcement of a move, that blog does not seem to have been active since 2019. However I recently found that the Bishop is on Twitter, one of the few reasons left to visit that horrible place.

September 18th, 2021 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day

· Environment · Science & Technology · Slogans & Quotations

The deforestation statistics are startling to anybody who listens only to green activists. In 2018 a team from the University of Maryland concluded: ‘We show that – contrary to the prevailing view that forest area has declined globally – tree cover has increased by 2.24 million km². That’s 7 percent more forest globally than in 1982. New forests have been planted and old ones have regenerated naturally, as the footprint of farming shrinks, thanks to better yields.

– Matt Ridley in the print version of The Spectator, article titled Viral misinformation.

August 27th, 2021 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day

· Environment · Slogans & Quotations · UK affairs

These fanatics are fond of pissing our money up the wall on their insane schemes. And I am not going to buy an electric car. These monstrosities are not remotely environmentally friendly. Smug, self-righteous arseholes in developed countries get to feel all self congratulatory about their lack of emissions while in developing countries child labour is used to destroy the local habitat, but who cares about brown people and wildlife if you can virtue-signal in your latest electric motor, eh?

Although I always thought Boris Johnson was something of a lightweight probably unfit for high office, even I have been surprised by just how bloody awful he has been since getting into Downing Street. We might just as well have elected Jeremy Corbyn.

– Longrider

August 14th, 2021 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day

· Environment · Science & Technology · Slogans & Quotations

“Politicians have spent trillions of dollars subsidizing renewable energy with no effect on climate. Nuclear power, which would sharply reduce CO2, is taboo among the greens. Innovation in developing low-cost natural gas, which substitutes for coal, may have done more than any government policy to reduce U.S. emissions. Yet President Biden wants to crush the gas industry with regulation. The IPCC report doesn’t justify putting the U.S. economy into the hands of government. A sensible climate policy will continue to monitor trends, while allowing a free economy to find solutions and build the wealth that will allow for adaptation and amelioration if the worst happens. This lacks the drama of the Apocalypse, but it will better serve the world.”

– Wall Street Journal, responding to the latest IPCC report on global warming (aka climate change).

August 10th, 2021 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
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