We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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“Council borrowed £1bn from taxpayers to bet on British sunshine”, report Gareth Davies and Charles Boutaud of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
Among Thurrock’s rundown council estates and neglected public parks, typical of many towns after a decade of austerity, there is nothing to suggest that over the past three years the local council has borrowed and then invested hundreds of millions of pounds of other councils’ money.
Under the direction of a senior council officer Thurrock borrowed from about 150 local authorities across the UK with little public scrutiny. These loans were not for direct funding of council services, or investing in infrastructure – instead they financed solar farms more than a hundred miles away.
Now, let us not reflexively roll our eyes upon hearing the words “solar farms”. While there has been some reason for the widespread perception that investment in sunbeams has about the same record of success as investment in moonbeams, the technology of solar power genuinely has improved in recent years.
Sean Clark, Thurrock’s director of finance, oversaw the investment of £604m in the solar industry, investments he says were prompted entirely by intermediaries approaching him with money-making opportunities. In an extraordinary interview with The Bureau, Clark wondered whether he had gone too far. At last count Thurrock owed other councils an unprecedented £1bn.
OK, now you can roll your eyes.
John Kent, the former Labour leader of Thurrock council, called on the current administration to come clean. He said: “People absolutely need to be aware that the council has borrowed £1bn – that’s billion with a b.” He claimed that the council had declined to give elected members or the public adequate details of precisely how it invested the money.
As you might have deduced from that, Thurrock Council is currently controlled by the Conservatives.
Come to sunny Thurrock, where the Tories splurge on borrowed money and it is left to Labour to be the voice of prudence! Or come to sunny Britain, which is the same except for the bit about Labour.
“The humanist ethic begins with the belief that humans are an essential part of nature. Humans have the right and the duty to reconstruct nature so that humans and biosphere can both survive and prosper. For humanists, the highest value is harmonious coexistence between humans and nature.”
– Freeman Dyson, the great scientist and futurist who died recently. As quoted in this fine article over at National Review, by Robert Bryce.
Dyson did not buy global warming alarmism, which must have given many in the government-funded science establishment the vapours, (excuse the pun).
The (Glasgow) Herald reports,
Mandatory climate change classes plan for Scottish leaders
MSPs, business leaders and newly enrolled university students may be asked to take mandatory climate change studies if plans currently under consideration are adopted.
The studies would help arm them with facts and knowledge to make urgent changes to society as it emerges from COVID-19 lockdown. The Scottish Government has already committed to enrolling at least 100 senior officials to the Climate Solutions course.
The news comes just days before Tuesday’s one-year anniversary of Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon declaring a climate emergency.
The course was devised by experts at the Perth-based Royal Scottish Geographical Society in partnership with the Institute of Directors, Stirling University’s Business School and the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Carbon Innovation.
Among the main areas the course looks at are issues around transport, energy use, supply chains, social behaviours, mitigation and planning for the future.
Former UN executive secretary on climate change Christiana Figueres who brokered the Paris Agreement, former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney who is now UN special envoy on climate action and finance and ex Irish President Mary Robinson who set up a climate justice foundation, are among heavyweight names lending their support.
The Test Acts, in case you had forgotten,”were a series of English penal laws that served as a religious test for public office and imposed various civil disabilities on Roman Catholics and nonconformists.”
Mr Robinson, said: “What we’re really hoping is we can make it universal.
“The conversations I’ve had are with six universities is about making it mandatory for students as a matriculation course. Stirling and Edinburgh universities are already further down the line on that than others.
“I’m also talking to others about making it as mandatory as we can in all other sectors – including business – because we need everybody to wake up a bit to their responsibilities.
“The Scottish Government are already committed through their programme of government to put through 100 senior staff on it.”
As I mention every time this subject comes up, I am more of a believer in anthropogenic climate change than many here. But the Scottish Government is working on that. If profession of a certain belief becomes a test of office, then soon enough every office holder will profess that belief. But why should anyone believe them? Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?
Overall it’s just that Birkenstock stamping on a human face, forever, again isn’t it?
– Tim Worstall
In the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall points out that electric cars ain’t cheap. So when all cars must be electric, no cars can be cheap.
This is where “trickle down economics” is actually true. New tech is expensive, toys for the rich. It takes a number of manufacturing iterations for it to become cheap enough for the masses. The iPhone started at $700, you can buy better landfill Android now for $30. ABS was only for top end cars, a couple of decades later everyone has it. That’s just how it works.
But we’ve now got government insisting that only electric cars by 2035. Which is rather before those cheap ones are going to be available – an iteration of technology in a car is measured in years, up to a decade. So, the poor get screwed.
And this gets worse. Batteries don’t last forever. And a significant portion of car transport for the poor is provided by the £500 beater. An older car, mechanically reasonable enough, that another few tens of thousands of miles can be got out of. Battery powered cars won’t do that. Because at some point you’re going to have to replace the battery pack, something that will be a substantial portion of the cost of a new car.
The technology basically kills the £500 beater market.
A good point, though I would replace the word “technology” with “regulation”.
At which point, well, aren’t they noticing? Or is this the point? That the proles have to walk while the Comrades can use the whole road as a Zil lane?
“I will not be slienced.” (Greta Thunberg in Bristol)
How would she know? Indeed, how would we know? It savours less of English understatement that of pointed irony to say that noone has tried to silence her. So it seems to me that we and she lack data on this point.
Greta has Asbergers Syndrome. Fans of ‘The Big Bang Theory’ know how many of the jokes depend on the impossibility of silencing the asbergian Sheldon by the gentle methods of social cues and hints, and the ease of doing so when to speak or to act requires that he move outside his idiosyncratic comfort zone. If Greta ever goes to China (obviously required by her proclaimed cause but AFAIK not even hinted at by her handlers or herself) then we may learn how far her ability not to be silenced extends beyond her condition. Meanwhile, we are entitled to reply to her, “How do you know?”
The question could also be put to her about other matters.
“A citizens’ assembly on climate is pointless”, writes Stephen Buranyi in the Guardian, “if the government won’t listen”.
Perhaps a better person than I am would not have split the quotation at precisely that point. But no one who uses the phrase the “real will of the people” has any call to complain about misrepresentation.
This is what Mr Buranyi says a “citizen’s assembly” is:
Its conceit is that it offers direct access to the real will of the people: 110 citizens – chosen to be representative of the British population – attend sessions where they are briefed by experts on the issue; they then come up with a set of policies to solve it.
“Conceit” indeed. Mr Buranyi’s complaint is that the elected government does not obey this body. I would complain if it did. I do not see why the very atypical 0.00016% of the UK population who agreed to participate in this Citizen’s Assembly lark have any better claim to mystically represent “the real will of the people” than 110 customers of your local Wetherspoons who turned up last Thursday for the Curry Club.
Here’s how the Bursar of St John’s College Oxford responded to a student demand that the college “declares a climate emergency and immediately divests from fossil fuels”.
“I am not able to arrange any divestment at short notice. But I can arrange for the gas central heating in college to be switched off with immediate effect. Please let me know if you support this proposal.”
The appropriately named Hot Air got this report out from behind the Times paywall, and tells how the dialogue developed from there. Thank you Ed Driscoll of Instapundit for the link.
The recent massive Australian bushfires have provoked a lot of controversy, with some people claiming that this is largely driven by Man-made global warming, and others pointing to how other factors (not necessarily to the exclusion of such warming) were to blame, including changes to how forests/habitats are managed. For example, I have seen it stated that bans on “controlled burns” and clearances of woodland in the early growing seasons, are a big factor in causing this disaster.
I sense from watching reports in parts of the mainstream media that commentaries on controls on forest clearance, controlled burns and so on have tended to be few and far between. I suspect that the topic isn’t popular in those places pushing the “Man is destroying Mother Earth with C02” narrative, because it gets in the way. But surely it seems to me that such a viewpoint is counterproductive: the general public understands that firebreaks, clearances and selective thinning of woodland, etc, are part of a solution. (A firebreak is like a bulkhead in a ship.) And let’s not forget that some species of plant only germinate after a fire. Fire, in fact, is a part of agriculture. For centuries, farmers have burned certain waste vegetation, which is often good for the soil in releasing certain nutrients. A few years ago in the UK, farmers burned straw after harvest. This practice was banned in the UK in the early 90s largely because a few idiot farmers did not make wide firebreaks around their fields and in some cases, burned when there was a wind. The ash and the smoke upset people and scared a few. But one of the benefits of stubble burning was that it created a clean seed bed for crops, and farmers did not have to spend so much money and fuel cultivating the soil (which is good for the environment) or on herbicides and other chemicals (ditto).
So, controlled burns are and should be a perfectly normal part of intelligent curation of habitats and farmland, when done in a sensible way. The US-based Property and Environment Research Center, or PERC, has a good overview on this topic.
It is surely better to let things burn in a controlled way, rather than allow a whole coastal region of a continent such as Australia go up in a fireball, destroying hundreds of millions of animals and killing people. But such is the grip of this focus on the mono-causal explanation of the fires (blaming it on climate change) that little will be done, I fear. And in a way one of the things I detest most about the age in which we live is how fashionable opinion fastens itself on a simple, but often unattainable goal – eliminating all fossil fuels and hoping this achieves a result in a few thousand years – rather than taking more practical and verifiable steps to handle a situation, such as managing forests more intelligently. There is this toxic mix of virtue-signalling, State regulation bossiness and pettiness, coupled with hostility towards private sector solutions and property rights (such as allowing owners of land to cut trees and thin out brush). The result is catastrophe.
We saw the same sort of toxic brew around the financial crisis of 2008. Remember the old “too big to fail” problem? The problem of limited liability-owned banks not feeling the risk of going bust by imprudent lending? The moral hazard effects of taxpayer bailouts, deposit insurance and central bankers as lenders of last resort? State support for sub-prime lending?
There is a sort of rough analogy between a policy mix that does not allow forests to be thinned and occasionally burned in limited ways, and a banking system where a bank is never allowed to fail for the assets to be reallocated to more sensible uses. (The book Alchemists of Loss is a good summary of what went wrong inside banks and because of public policy.)
But with nature, so with finance. One needs to have “dead wood”, such as unprofitable lines of lending, to go out of business and for the distressed assets to be bought and restructured, much as an overgrown forest needs to be thinned out and for some areas to be cut back from time to time. This is about resilience or what Nicholas Taleb means by the term “anti-fragile”: without allowing things to die and be cut out and for a certain amount of disorder and turbulence, you end up creating something that will eventually go up in a firebomb, whether it be Australian landscapes or modern economies.
“UK green economy has shrunk since 2014”, laments the Guardian.
The number of people employed in the “low carbon and renewable energy economy” declined by more than 11,000 to 235,900 between 2014 and 2018, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Green businesses fared little better, seeing their numbers drop from an estimated 93,500 to 88,500 over the same four-year period.
[…]
Critics of the Conservative government’s record of support for the low carbon and renewables sector blamed the Treasury’s dramatic cut in subsidies to the solar power industry for the sudden loss of employment.
Solar panel installers were among the many businesses connected to the industry that went bust after the Treasury cut subsidy payments by 65% in 2015 before abolishing them altogether last year.
Obligatory “Princess Bride” clip for those benighted souls who haven’t seen it.
“I’ve been with Extinction Rebellion (XR) from the start”, Stuart Basden explains.
And for the sake of transparency: that previous paragraph is all about me ‘pulling rank’ — I’m trying to convince you to listen to what I have to say…
And I’m here to say that XR isn’t about the climate. You see, the climate’s breakdown is a symptom of a toxic system of that has infected the ways we relate to each other as humans and to all life. This was exacerbated when European ‘civilisation’ was spread around the globe through cruelty and violence (especially) over the last 600 years of colonialism, although the roots of the infections go much further back.
As Europeans spread their toxicity around the world, they brought torture, genocide, carnage and suffering to the ends of the earth. Their cultural myths justified the horrors, such as the idea that indigenous people were animals (not humans), and therefore God had given us dominion over them. This was used to justify a multi-continent-wide genocide of tens of millions of people. The coming of the scientific era saw this intensify, as the world around us was increasingly seen as ‘dead’ matter — just sitting there waiting for us to exploit it and use it up. We’re now using it up faster than ever.
Euro-Americans violently imposed and taught dangerous delusions that they used to justify the exploitation and reinforced our dominance, while silencing worldviews that differed or challenged them. The UK’s hand in this was enormous, as can be seen by the size of the former British empire, and the dominance of the English language around the world.
This article is a year old, but someone on the UK Politics subreddit called “WhereHasCentrismGone” posted it with the comment that it made the now rescinded decision by the police to include Extinction Rebellion in a list of extremist ideologies that should be reported to the authorities running the Prevent anti-terrorism programme seem more reasonable. I think it was out of order for the police to put XR on a terrorism watch list – their stunts annoy but are not violent – but we should be grateful to Mr Basden for reminding us that XR should be avoided by anyone who seriously wants to protect either the environment or their own mental health, seeing as the organisation is an anti-scientific cult fuelled by the neurotic self-hatred of privileged dilletantes in rich countries.
Hat tip to Ed Driscoll of Instapundit for at least giving Britain a few hours’ notice of its icy doom.
The news was first reported by Mark Townsend and Paul Harris in the Guardian‘s Sunday sister the Observer on Sun 22 Feb 2004. Since the world did not take the preventative measures the experts warned were necessary it is clear that nothing can save us now:
Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us
· Secret report warns of rioting and nuclear war
· Britain will be ‘Siberian’ in less than 20 years
· Threat to the world is greater than terrorism
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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