But what's more interesting is why the last-remaining object of the Blair-era consensus is still intact.
While Blair and then Brown, and then Cameron were trying to build their projects on the Westminster consensus, to make climate change the dominant issue, the loudest voice from the public was the demand for the referendum.
The Conservatives -- each member of which has a price -- were easily bought by the green blob.
They were going to continue the project that Blair, Brown, Mandelson, the Milibands and Hilary Benn, among others, had started.
But there remains no public appetite for it.
Any *sensible* Tory analyst would look at what consensus politics, divorced from the public, brings. It would realise that is has a narrow opportunity to turn Labour's disarray into permanent advantage and divorce itself from the blob...
Or to mirror Labour's mistakes.
It doesn't need the blob. It is far ahead in the polls. And it looks like Labour are on the floor, unable to mobilise its traditional constituency.
It could scrap Net Zero, and perhaps even the Climate Change Act tomorrow.
But it would *rather* do the blob's bidding.
The Tories are determined to follow Labour into the abyss.
So be it.
It is easier to watch people set fire to themselves than it is trying to convince them not to play with matches.
As long as the fire doesn't spread.
But we should try.
How to tell them that people don't want cosy Westminster consensuses? We don't want wet think tanks drafting wet policy ideas. We don't share their green ideology. We want them to fight it out, left, right and centre! That's why we put our 'x' in their box.
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To the extent that it is not mere nonsense, this is green mysticism: "the climate crisis is driving the foundations of economic shocks".
People internalise this irrational green ideology. We should take it seriously.
Inflation and interest rates have nothing to do with 'climate'.
There is no climate change signal in cocoa production stats. Thee of the last four years saw record production. The last year's production was still higher than any year prior to seven years ago.
Prices of commodities often fluctuate, for myriad reasons. Greens always blame a single outlier on 'crisis' to support their ignorant ideological view.
Labour will further exclude the public from political decision-making by outsourcing policy to unelected panels of people, who will be tortured into submitting to the will of the fake experts that will bore them close to death, before providing them with rigged questions, and then writing up their deliberations to suit the conveners, not what the 'citizens assembly' actually determined...
Read my analysis of the climate 'citizens assembly'.
This is a somewhat shallow and hollow attempt to circumvent the major problem haunting global climate politics for four decades.
It was the 'free-rider' problem: why should we commit to self-harming policies when others won't?
Those other countries were 'developing' when the first global policies were being considered. Now they are well and truly developed, and their progress is accelerating, while much of the seemingly 'developed' world is stagnating, thanks in large part to rising energy costs, owed in turn directly and indirectly to the green policies she is arguing for.
Ritchie tries to counter what she claims is a 'weak argument' with a series of arguments that are even weaker.
1. Rich countries – that have emitted the most – have a moral responsibility
Why? The data provided by her own project show very clearly that there are no adverse signals in fundamental metrics of human welfare that can be attributed to climate change.
Moreover, the same data show that affordable, abundant and reliable energy are key to that progress.
So there is no injury. And thus there is no moral obligation.
This work is an add-on to our @ClimateDebateUK/@Togetherdec report on air pollution politics.
We show how green billionaires and their fake civil society organisations are corrupting UK democracy at all levels of government -- international, national, regional and local.
My 'debate' with Donnachadh McCarthy on @petercardwell's @TalkTV show this morning.
Starts at 1h.46m.44s into this Youtube clip.
A discussion thread follows...
Unfortunately debate with green zealots is not possible, because of what I call the 'Femi effect'. As with debates about Brexit with Remainer activists, you end facing a machine-gunned litany of unconnected factoids, precluding any focus on facts, let alone coherent argument.
That means you have to try to limit what you respond to -- McCarthy wanted to talk about everything from ice cores to annual global temperatures and his solar panels, not the rights and wrongs of UK climate and energy policy. And much of what he said was simply untrue.