@ret_ward Do climate sceptics demand observance, obedience?
Do climate sceptics divide people into believers and deniers?
Do climate sceptics hunt down, harass and censor disbelievers?
Do climate sceptics deny their ideas can be debated?
You're a very odd man, Bob Ward.
@ret_ward Do climate change sceptics ask for their critics to be locked up?
Do climate sceptics demand that democratic control of politics be suspended?
Do climate change sceptics warn that if their demands are not met, it will summon up Gaia's revenge, and end civilisation?
@ret_ward Do climate sceptics have billionaire ideological benefactors, who establish vanity project 'research' units at universities, that produce fraudulent claims for public funding?
Do climate sceptics hire sad little bald men to protect their ideologues from criticism in the media?
@ret_ward The answer to all the above, Bob, is no.
Can you say the same about climate change alarmism?
No.
@ret_ward So be very, very careful with that word 'cult', Bob.
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Good show, but far too generous - perhaps to the point of naivety - to the Conservatives.
It is currently fashionable on the right to identify Blair as the cause of all our woes, for his constitutional meddling. There is much truth to this, but it puts far too much credit at the feet of one man.
When the Climate Change Bill was being debated, the Tories' position on emissions-reduction targets was more radical than the then Labour government's.
And it was the Conservatives who went even further than the CCA, increasing it to Net Zero.
Those positions were not the result of being misinformed by civil servants, nor being unaware of criticisms of the agenda, as is claimed. Conservatives and their advisors knew full well what the objections to the CCA and NZ were. We can know this because we know that very senior Tories pointed it out to them -- including the consequences of antidemocratic constitutional meddling.
They chose to ignore those objections, to extend the climate/green agenda. Kemi herself, in office, wanted to repeat -- not repeal -- the climate agenda with the biodiversity agenda.
And now out of office, the Conservative Party is signalling that it has learned nothing by taking is initiatives from the green blob-funded think tanks formed by its former advisers, who got us into this mess.
The problems of the green agenda are not technical. They are ideological and political. And they are deeper than discussions about policy can address.
Here is a discussion on a BBC News show between Nigel Lawson and SoS @ DECC Ed Miliband, shortly after Lawson had set up the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
GWPF produced countless reports explaining the problems of climate/energy policy for MPs.
Lawson was not the only Parliamentarian raising the issue of Miliband's intransigence, ignorance and arrogance, characteristic of the green agenda's advocates.
Peter Lilley, in the Bill's debate, highlighted the problem, now identified as Blairite constitutional meddling:
Ed Miliband here doing the accuse-others-of-what-we-are-doing-ourselves trick.
He's literally talking at an LCEF event. The Labour Climate and Environment Forum is the ECF-funded opposite of the ECF-funded Conservative Environment Network, but with the same grantors.
Here's a list of ECF, and by implication LCEF, grantors.
It's billionaires, top to bottom.
Some tycoon's daughter way paying £20k a month for staff in @Ed_Miliband's office while in opposition.
You're a massive hypocrite, Ed.
@Ed_Miliband I would challenge @Ed_Miliband to produce any receipts whatsoever, to support his claim that there exists a "global network of the right".
He wouldn't be able to. The Guardian hasn't been able to. And even the ECF-funded blob hasn't been able, despite grants available for it.
George is concerned that conversations @ number 10 about "growth" do not include his favoured organisations, such as No Foundation Economics and the Institute for Public Policy Making Stuff Up.
They instead include alumni of Tufton St, Tory-aligned think tanks!
"Who funds you" is the leitmotif of George's analysis of all Westminster politics. He believes that "dark money" explains everything he doesn't like.
By my calcs, and on these stats a battery that could power the UK for a two-week midwinter Dunkelflaute would cost £5.8 trillion, and occupy a site with a footprint of 536 square miles, or a square area 23 miles long on each side.
This chap thinks that offshore wind farms grow like seaweed from the seafloor, and that their roots burrow massive trenches across the sea floor all the way to the coast, where they bud into substations to connect to the Grid. Wind is free, you see.
There's a lot of it about. I get dozens of replies like this a day from people, some claiming academic expertise, who are strongly convinced that they know that wind is free, but have never looked at the very simple arithmetic.
Renewable energy is invariably more:
* capital intensive
* resource intensive
* labour intensive
* land intensive
... than conventional energy production. Yet people still believe it is 'free' or cheaper.
It's an article of faith, not a conclusion of a rational process.
I don't think it is possible to overstate the profound unreality that dominates in SW1.
Even mainstream commentators are discussing the collapse of the established parties, the economic recession that has merely yet to be inaugurated, deindustrialisation, a deep crisis of values across the public realm, an immigration crisis that cannot be stemmed, prices out of control, even blandified high streets are disintegrating, and the risk of war...
Yet here is this plonker who believes that society and the entire economy can be reorganised, and the fact of policy failure can be washed away by glib, elongated gaslighting verbiage.
I went to extremely crappy schools. But I at least learned what the antecedents to the French and Russian revolutions were. Political correctness had already dissolved the English civil wars from the curriculum, but I'm pretty sure there are some lessons in that too. Perhaps Miliband and co went to even worse schools, but cannot think it possible that they are mistaken.
I'm not talking about £300 sparking revolutions here. I am talking about the catastrophic indifference to others epitomised by such idiot zealots that believe elections are mere formalities and a sideshow to coronations, whose agendas are set by higher courts.
I get called a "denier" and "big oil funded" -- neither of which is true. My fundamental question has always been: what kind of world do adherents to green ideology want to create and on what basis do they assume legitimacy for their projects?
For those who are preoccupied by "The Science"...
If you can't interrogate ideology, you don't know what science says. And that is because you don't know what you've told it or asked it.
Too many people believe that science is objectivity rather than the attempt towards objectivity. And too many believe that what science seemingly says is self-evident. But if the putative facts that science produces were self evident, then we would have no need of science.