Ben Pile Profile picture
Sep 2, 2020 10 tweets 4 min read Read on X
Interesting discussion.

Some unchallenged and unproven claims about the cost of wind power from @SPRKeith.

@KemiBadenoch claims that the 'adults are in the room' on the #netzero agenda.

I don't believe her. As she admits, the targets were set before the means to deliver it.
Moreover, it's not enough to say that the agenda has sensible people in charge of it.

Even if it was true. The government will very likely change in 4 years time.

And it is not as if the government is not capable of deeply expensive, and extremely stupid mistakes.
And it's not true.

Parliament has decided it was not going to test the principles of the green agenda democratically. Yet its consequences, whether intended or not, are far-reaching.

Sorry, @KemiBadenoch, I don't believe you.
It's also obvious that the green blob has been focusing its resources on right-of-centre organisations, publications, etc, including funding old and new think tanks.

It's not a coincidence that @spectator has recently decided to take a positive view of the green agenda.
There are two obvious problems with @KemiBadenoch's optimistic claims.

1. Another example of putting the policy cart before the technology horse is the government's commitment to banning new ICE vehicle sales. EVs exist, for sure. But...
... problems of price and range have still not been solved, and may not be solved by the time of the ambitious target. And the consequences for the second hand market -- on which most people depend for their mobility -- have been completely ignored.
2. But the **far** bigger problem for @KemiBadenoch's claims is that the #NetZero agenda does not stop at the UK government.

The government is committed to a *global* political process, which will dilute countries' freedom to determine domestic policies.
In other words, the government's (and all of Parliament's, to be fair) aggressive climate ambitions are gestures intended to advance a global political agenda that will undermine democratic control of politics.
The green agenda is *fundamentally* anti-democratic.

It is *literally* about dismantling democracy.

And that has been its purpose since the 1960s.

The environment has nothing to do with it.

It's a lie.
Those are just 2 examples of the many hundreds of problems with the green / #netzero agenda.

But the government, Parliament, MPs do not listen to criticism of it.

I hope @KemiBadenoch will.

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More from @clim8resistance

Sep 29
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: Image
Read 16 tweets
Sep 29
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. Image
Image
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. Image
@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.
Read 4 tweets
Sep 27
This month, George Monbiot discovered the green blob.

"The rightwing junktanks behind the Tories’ worst disasters still have the keys to No 10" he whinges.

Indeed, Net Zero is one of the Tories worst disasters. But that's not what he means.

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
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! Image
"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. Image
Read 25 tweets
Aug 24
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.
"But the costs of battery storage are coming down!"

Not if you're buying trillions of quids' worth, they ain't.
"But we're not going to buy them all in one go, Net Zero is 2050."

And if Britain really is "leading the world" in green policy, then everyone else is going to be buying them, too, at the same rate.

Xi says "thanks".
Read 11 tweets
Aug 4
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.

Bonkers. Utterly nuts.
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.
Read 4 tweets
Jul 25
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.
Read 5 tweets

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