Axe the tax

The head of Scottish Power has called for the Climate Change Act to be axed. The alternatives are terrifying:

Britain's unilateral carbon tax should be scrapped before it causes blackouts, pushes up household bills and makes the UK uncompetitive, ScottishPower argues.

Keith Anderson, chief corporate officer, warns that the “carbon price floor” (CPF), which taxes companies for burning fossil fuels, will make Britain’s remaining coal plants “largely uneconomic by around the middle of the decade”.

I don't suppose this will have any impact on Ed Davey or David Cameron, so I think we should probably assume the worst (although I reiterate my view that spiralling prices and industry shutdowns are more likely than consumer blackouts). What seems increasingly clear is that the crisis will be upon us soon. It is therefore not only the younger culprits - the noble and learned Baroness Worthington for example - who will live to see the results of their ideology, but the older ones like Lord Deben too.

MacKay's dilemma

Christopher Booker's piece on windfarm policy this morning visits old ground for BH readers, namely Gordon Hughes' report on the deterioration of wind turbine performance over time. There is, however, an important bit of information towards the end of the article:

I gather that Prof Hughes showed his research to David MacKay, the chief scientific adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, who could not dispute his findings. So DECC is fully aware of this devastating flaw in its projections, but presses on with its insane policy regardless.

Click to read more ...

Let them eat equality

The Oxford Martin School has appointed a "commission" of environmentalists to gaze at the future and come up with all sorts of plans to deal with it.

Deja vu.

The results were presented in a joint lecture by Martin Rees and Sir John Beddington last week and a video of the event is now available here. In it, we learn that the commissioners are proposing a cornucopia of new international bureaucracies, that some of them have a bit of a soft spot for totalitarian regimes (no short-termism, you see) and that they have decided that Lord Stern was right about low discount rates. This last one is not a surprise given that Lord Stern was in fact one of the commissioners.

Click to read more ...

The Frackers

Gregory Zuckerman, a business journalist at the Wall Street Journal has told the story of the shale gas revolution in his new book The Frackers. It's an easy read, with a light, journalistic style similar to books like Robert X Cringely's Accidental Empires or Stephen Levy's Hackers. You get a series of pen portraits of the motley selection of men who battled against adversity and ridicule and made the shale gas revolution a reality. We hear about their lives and loves and the fortunes they made, or in some cases, they didn't make.

The book cleverly shows how the different ingredients needed in order to make shale gas flow in economic quantities were gradually brought together. So we start by learning that hydraulic fracturing was tried as an alternative to gel-based fracking (not as a brave new commercial venture but in a desperate attempt to save money) and was found to be much more effective. Others were trying horizontal drilling on shale and exploiting the new-found ability to precisely steer the drill bit. Other factors needed to be added before the recipe was just right.

In the end though it's a bit too light for me. As a business journalist with a mission to entertain the lay reader, Zuckerman seems to shy away from the technical details. I wanted more science, more technical details, something more to get my teeth into. But if you are not technically inclined, or you just want something to read by the pool, you will enjoy it.

Buy here.

Ecocide echo - Josh 251

On the noisiness of wind turbines...

Click to read more ...

Men of no meaning

James Delingpole is on vigorous form, in a groove that this blog also treads from time to time, namely the misuse of the English language to score political points. His particular complaint is the "let's all pretend that fossil fuels are subsidised" meme that many of the more ludicrous members of the green fraternity find so attractive at the moment:

This fossil-fuels-more-subsidised-than-renewables meme has been spread, inter alia, by the Guardian's ludicrous Damian Carrington; by Labour MP Barry "Dork Brain" Gardiner (Vice President of the sinister GLOBE international); by green pressure groups; by the Overseas Development Institute; and by the IMF which, impressively, has put global energy subsidies at $1.9 trillion – the majority of these, apparently, for fossil fuels…

This is undoubtedly an abuse of the English language and one so egregrious that even the noble and learned Baroness Worthington has found herself unable to support it.

As I've said before, if you don't use words with their common meaning then nobody can trust a word you say. So when peers and MPs who make these claims about fossil fuel 'subsidies' tell you they have 'no conflicts of interest', that they only make 'honest expense claims' or that they 'didn't have sex with that woman', you should probably assume the worst.

Windfarm noise: state of play

Via Angela Kelly comes this message from acoustician Mike Stigwood, who sets out the state of play on excess AM noise from windfarms. It looks like surrender from the developers.

Recent research presented at three planning inquiries that were conducted in September, October and November (Starbold, Bryn Lleweln and Shipdham - decisions awaited)  have hopefully exposed the misconceived arguments made by the industry's acousticians, which have successfully avoided controls over wind farm noise impact for many years.

After more than 4 years of smoke screens, obfuscation and erroneous objections raising unrealistic concerns and placing barriers in the way of necessary controls over the wind farm noise called "Excess Amplitude Modulation", industry acousticians have finally admitted a planning condition is "necessary" and "reasonable".  Excess AM is now shown to be neither rare nor only causing minor effects as claimed over the last few years, arguments that have successfully blocked planning controls leaving many communities exposed to serious noise impact.  Research by ourselves and the Japanese have exposed this as a common and serious problem.

Click to read more ...

Skary kidz extreme weather - Josh 250

You can read about Dana's latest Twitterings on Twitter here, and here at WUWT and also at Keith Kloor's here. Quite a fun and, as Roger Pielke Jr says, educational read.

Cartoons by Josh

The unfeeling in pursuit of the unthinking

Simon Jenkins has written an admirable blast at windfarms in the pages - believe it or not - of the Guardian.

I have spent two years traipsing Britain in search of the finest views. It is hard to convey the devastating impact of the turbines to those who have not seen them, especially a political elite that never leaves the south-east except for abroad. Fields of these structures are now rising almost everywhere. They are sited irrespective of the wind, since subsidy is paid irrespective of supply, even if there is none. It makes EU agricultural policy a paragon of sanity.

I don't think Jenkins is right when he says that politicians have been driven mad by the myth of free wind power. That's lazy thinking. Politicians are making logical decisions to get themselves reelected. It was the rational pursuit of the green vote that was behind the appearance of sanity. We have to ask ourselves why so many people were persuaded that wind power was a sensible way to go.

More on the secret dissertation

Readers may remember the strange case of the LSE research project that had apparently investigated global warming sceptics in ethically questionable circumstances. Back in July I reported that in response to a request for the related MSc dissertation under the Data Protection Act LSE had contradicted my original source, and said that I was not in fact one of the subjects of the research. They subsequently refused to release details of the project under FOI either.

My appeal to the Information Commissioner has now been concluded, with the ICO upholding the LSE's decision.

Click to read more ...

Same old New Scientist

Same old New Scientist. Their editorial today is desperately poor stuff, at best demonstrating a comical lack of understanding of the lukewarmer case and at worst deliberately mispresenting it.

[Sceptics] have been emboldened by scientists' acknowledgment that temperatures on the planet's surface have risen less sharply than expected in recent years. The scientists say that's down to natural variability; the doubters say it is a sign that climate change amounts to little more than ignorable, or even beneficial, "lukewarming".

...

But it is misguided to focus only on the temperature of the thin layer of air that we live in. That is just one of many important indicators. In particular, the oceans are warming too: recent research suggests that in the last 60 years the Pacific's depths have warmed 15 times as fast as at any time in the previous 10,000 years.

Leave aside the fact that for years, upholders of the global warming consensus and their supporters in New Scientist focused relentlessly on surface temperatures. Leave aside the fact that people like Pielke Sr who called for a focus on ocean heat content were damned as heretics or the paid mouthpieces of oil companies. Consider instead the fact that the basis of the lukewarmer case is not based on the hiatus in surface temperature rises, it is that climate sensitivity is low. And climate sensitivity calculations take ocean heat content changes into account.

One wonders if the author took the trouble to actually find out what the lukewarmer argument is before criticising it.

Green jobs: £1 million each

Stephen Lovegrove is the permanent secretary at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, although when hearing him speak about his work one could sometimes be forgiven for mistaking him for, say, someone from Greenpeace. Take his speech to the Concito conference in Denmark a few weeks ago for example.

For a start, Concito describes itself as a green think tank. One therefore wonders why a politically neutral civil servant is lending his support to environmentalists - who are nothing if not a political movement - in this way. And then read the text of the speech and try to work out whether this is a politically neutral civil servant putting government policy into action or a fully paid up member of the green movement:

Click to read more ...

Fade to grey

This is interesting: the Daily Telegraph has created a new post of Energy and Climate Change Editor and has decided to fill it with the current energy and utilities correspondent Emily Gosden.

Interestingly, Ms Gosden appears to have no discernable eco-credentials.

Does this mean that that the green advertisers no longer hold sway at the Telegraph?

Out of tune & out of time - Josh 249

Ed Davey's performance yesterday at the Energy and Climate Change Committee, posted here, was a mix of horror and farce. DECC seem to live in a make believe world where increases in costs cost less and policies which increase carbon emissions will somehow magically decrease them, one day, somehow, somewhere.

What a pantomime. 

Cartoons by Josh

Unpresidential address

Image: Somerset House: a meeting of the Royal Society. Via albionprints.com (click for link)Each year, the president of the Royal Society gives an address to the fellows at their annual meeting and Paul Nurse's speech last year is now available online. It's mostly fairly unremarkable stuff - extolling the virtues of the society itself; making the oft-repeated but scarcely credible claim that the society is independent of government; criticising those who reach different conclusions to Nurse's preferred scientific cliques. Most of this is in the first five minutes of the talk, and much of the rest is about the internal machinations of the society, which is probably important but frankly too dull for words. However, there's an interesting bit at the end.

Click to read more ...