I'm sorry, what??

Sometimes, it's the little things in big stories that make you stop:

Bimlenbra Jha, chief executive of Tata Steel UK, told the Business select committee that the UK had "structural weaknesses" that made the UK steel industry uncompetitive.

Business rates and high energy costs were top of the list.

On energy, he said that if Tata was operating in Germany, its energy bill would be £40m a year lower. The Tata chief defended the company's decision to put the business up for sale saying that the company and its shareholders could not continue to bleed. The business is estimated to be losing £1m a day.

OK, let's break this down. The civil service think man-made climate change is a big thing, therefore the government has instituted massive energy taxes to discourage people from making stuff that needs a lot of energy. Making steel takes a fucktonne of energy. Closing down Port Talbot will be a non-trivial step towards meeting our civil service approved emission reduction targets.

In other words, whether or not you agree with climate change being a thing, and our fault, and something that we can fix, and are fixing in the right way, the fact of the matter is that saying "tata to Tata" is exactly the the kind of outcome you would expect and want from our climate change policies.

However, despite the fact that it's only Morlocks losing their jobs, of course, there are votes to be had here, so now everyone has to panic and pretend to care. It's the usual fiasco of a planned economy.

Hidden away further down, though, was this little nugget:

Mr Javid said steps had already been taken to help on energy costs with £130m paid out since 2013 to compensate high energy users who incur environmental surcharges.

Just think about that: the glorious state has decided that we need saving from ourselves, so let's make energy more expensive. We start to get saved from ourselves, but suddenly we need to compensate businesses who have to pay the environmental surcharge.

What the actual fucking fuck is that all about? Make someone pay a tax and then give them a fucking handout to say sorry? I'm really dying to know which fucking retarded spastic cunt thought this was a remotely sensible fucking idea.

Why "renewable" sources of energy don't work in the real world

The issue here is incredibly simple: predictablity.

The whole point of renewable energy sources is that we want to use them instead of conventional power generation. So the ideal situation is that we want to get the power from a renewable source and while we're getting that, we want to scale down the power we get from conventional energy and when the renewable stops providing, we want to scale the conventional energy back up.

Now, if you look at turbines, the picture is terrible. The wind is incredibly capricious and turbines can only operate at best 30% of the time. But which 30% of the time is completely impossible to tell.

The same applies, to a lesser extent, to solar power. Clouds may or may not have an effect on the capability of the panels, a snow dump could close them off for an unspecified period and if you place them in areas that have good weather and are more reliable, you generally lose a massive amount of power transmitting it to places that it's needed, completely subverting the value of the energy generated.

Even wave power can be significantly affected by the weather and time of the month. Although it will almost always be generating some power, it will almost never be consistent.

So why is this a problem? Well, with current power stations it can take hours or even days to adjust the amount of energy that is being produced.

If the wind is blowing sweetly, waves are nice and even and the sun is shining and we're getting a massive spike of "free" energy, by the time we've slowed down our existing coal and gas and nuclear power supplies, the situation will have changed completely and there will be blackouts all over the country. There would be chaos everywhere, every day.

People are working on this, but even if we were to decomission all our existing power stations and replace them with these which would require more than 200 of these power stations to be built (at a non-trivial cost) plus the cost of decomissioning existing power stations, all of this would probably bankrupt the UK.

And let's assume we beat Denmark's generation of renewable power and get to 30% of power being generated renewably. Given that a reasonable estimate of Britain's energy capacity at the moment is about 100GW, that means that 30GW could be provided renewably at any one time. This means that even using the latest whizz-bang technology, and assuming a completely even distribution of renewable power, there could, at any moment, be a 6-minute period where the entire country shuts down.

In practice, it simply means that we would either have to still massively over-provide electricity capacity, and that areas which have more access to renewable energy would be much more likely to experience an outage.

It doesn't matter how much power wind farms et al generate: if they can't generate the capacity predictably, then even while we're getting that power, we can't reduce the amount of conventional capacity we generate, so we can't reduce our horrid "carbon footprint" no matter how many cunting turbines we ruin the cuntryside with.

Update: This may have potential. (OK, that was pretty shocking. I'm sorry I didn't offer more resistance. Etc.)

A random thought

Someone on twitter said:

2011 Award for most selfless protest : #rallyagainstdebt .. thinking about future generations, not yourself

This got me thinking: one of the biggest selling points about the alarmism around man-made global warming (or whatever shit they're calling it this week) is that it's based on caring for the unborn generations, despite the enormous uncertainties implicit in the MMGW issue.

Yet the same people who call for more "green" money to be spent to protect unborn generations are exactly the same people who mocked the Rally Against Debt which has a much clearer and more demonstrable case for saddling unborn generations with something they don't need.

Why should this be the case?

Why we won't "run out of oil"

One of the things that baffles me the most about people is this constant fear of "peak oil" or running out of oil completely.

There are masses of oil reserves out there. The USA is apparently possessed of oil reserves that dwarf those of the Middle East. The reason they don't drill for them is that they're in a different kind of rock structure that existing drilling technology doesn't make cost-justifiable. But when the price of oil increases enough to make the investment in improving drilling technology viable, you just know they're going to be all over it. And who knows, it may even lead to cheaper oil.

But I'm fairly sure that at some point, we will actually "run out" of oil. There will be oil out there, but it simply will not be cost-effective to get it out. And then the price of oil will go so high that alternatives will demand to be investigated and found. People are working on alternatives, but with the massive amounts of oil available at cost-effective levels, there's no great incentive to make them happen.

It's not a conspiracy by "Big Oil", it's just rational behaviour. Oil is cheap enough and provides us with highly effective energy. Even if someone did find a way to make cold fusion a reality, we'd have to dick around with our infrastructure so much that it would cost us more than just carrying on with oil, at least in the medium term.

Another thing that I keep getting told is that we need to conserve oil to delay that dark and frightening day from arriving.

This is an irrational point of view. Wealth creation and human progress depends on cheap and readily available energy. The availability of cheap energy has led to a massive improvement in the quality of life all round the planet over the last 100 years.

Trying to curtail energy use simply means that progress will slow or stop and we will never get wealthier which means that we will stagnate where we are now, rather that further improving our quality of life.

That's fine for us if we take a short-term view, but it's a huge blow to those people who are behind us on the development curve. It also predicates a poor future for our children.

Increased wealth and prosperity for the generations to come will also allow them to absorb the costs of any changes to the environment or whatever much more easily than we can, in the same way that we can cope with these much more easily than the Romans or the Victorians did.

You cannot predict what the future will bring. There is no point in throttling our progress for something that may never happen. And throttling our progress might also mean that we never find the way around whatever crisis or cataclysm that may genuinely exist in our future.

While I am happy to endorse careful husbandry of resources and efficiency, the idea of crippling our progress in the name of some vague and unspecified fear of what might happen is stupid.

Oh, how I laughed ... again

I see the NHS (which also has a militant "climate change" secretariat) is pleading for 4x4 owners to help them get medicines and staff around.

I wonder if the beardie scruffs will be campaigning against 4x4 owners in 2011 again?

Fucking cunts.

Fuck you and fuck your four-week-old baby, right in the fucking eye

You utter little CUNT:

As you may have heard, last week, 10:10 made a mistake by releasing a short film about cutting carbon which was supposed to be humourous but in the event upset a lot of people. We quickly realised that we had made a serious mistake and took it down from our website within hours.

We also issued a statement apologising but there has subsequently been quite a lot of negative comment, particularly on blogs, and understandable concern from others working hard to build support for action on climate change.

We are also sorry to our corporate sponsors, delivery partners and board members, who have been implicated in this situation despite having no involvement in the film’s production or release

I am very sorry for our mistake and want to reassure you that we will do everything in our power to ensure it does not happen again.

10:10 is a young and creative team but we will learn lessons from this. We are going to investigate what happened, review our processes and procedures, and share the results with our partners. Responsibility for this process is being taken by the 10:10 board of directors.

This media coverage for this film was not the kind of publicity we wanted for the cause of saving the climate, nor for 10:10, and we certainly didn’t mean to do anything to distract from all the efforts of those in other organisations who are working so hard to secure effective action on climate change.

If you have been in touch with us personally about the film, we will be replying to individual emails over the next few days. I’m sorry not to have emailed you about this more quickly - although I have followed developments closely, I’ve been working from home with a four-week-old baby. I thank you for your patience and your support for the 10:10 campaign.

Eugenie Harvey

Director 10:10 UK

hello@1010uk.org

Well, hello, Eugenie.

You fucking little shit-stained cooze. How fucking DARE you fucking imply that it's perfectly fine to kill kids who don't believe in climate change and then have the cock-sucking whore's temerity to fucking schlep your own little bundle of cunt joy into this as a desperate attempt to fucking get the fucking sympathy vote?

You fucking little cock-jockey.

I hope Social Services take your child away for your being unfit to be a human being.

You utter, utter CUNT.

Dear Mr Huhne

Do us all a favour and stick to fucking your current whore of choice and stop fucking us.

You imbecilic utter cuntstain.

Climate Roundup

There are two very important bits of climate news around.

First, for my reader in Oz, please read this and share it about. If you can do something about it, please do. It's absolutely disgusting what is going on here.

Second, an excellent deconstruction of Moonbat's unending hypocrisy.

Less urgent (but still important) is the fact that "global warming" has been replaced with "global climate disruption." This is another shameless attempt to disguise the fact that the temperature record is so addled as to be almost useless and that raw temperature data universally shows a temperature decline.

Yet governments and corporates and greedy sacks of shit like Al Gore and Tim Yeo are coining it from us, so the show must go on.

Cunts.

Global warming leads to increased sea ice?

Hm.

The going rate

Mark Wadsworth shows that a) the Tories are no fucking different, b) Byers was charging the going rate and c) Tim "Green but Dim" Yeo is a weapons-grade cunt.

Climate Cunts

So, the CRU was caught lying about and manipulating numbers that "prove" global warming. The University of East Angular decided to put this chap in charge of the investigation:

Lord Oxburgh is President of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association, and Chairman of Falck Renewables, a wind energy company.

Also:

Oxburgh is also a director of GLOBE, the Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment.

Which he failed to list in his Lords' Register of Interests.

In the House of Lords Register of Lords' Interests, Oxburgh lists under remunerated directorships his chairmanship of Falck Renewables, and chairmanship of Blue NG, a renewable power company. (Oxburgh holds no shares in Falck Renewables, and serves as a non-exec chairman.) He also declares that he is an advisor to Climate Change Capital, to the Low Carbon Initiative, Evo-Electric, Fujitsu, and an environmental advisor to Deutsche Bank.

I'm sure he's entirely objective, aren't you?

Deniers!

What a load of old shite:

a systematic campaign by neo-fascist climate-denying BNP supporters seems to have achieved just what it wanted. To sum up, the BNP campaigned against these ads and the ASA did what the BNP were calling for.

Hurrah! Left Bollock Backward (who I'm really not going to grace with a link for this shit) continues to promote the meme that only lunatics, fascists and Nazis "deny" climate change.

And I must admit that I had been surprised by the ASA breaking ranks over AGW, but as another bunch of loonies (LabourLost, who I'm also not fucking linking to, fuck 'em, they've never linked to me!) quoted in the article shows that they haven't really:

... the ASA actually threw out 9 out of the 10 objections placed by the climate changes deniers. They agreed with DECC that “there was extremely strong evidence for human induced climate change whereas no national or international bodies with climate science expertise disagreed”, that "over 40% of the CO2 was coming from ordinary every day things like keeping houses warm and driving cars" was unlikely to mislead, and that “the story-book images of a dried up UK river bed and a flooded UK town and the mention of "awful heat waves" and "terrible storms and floods" was a narrative about what could happen in the UK in the future, given the scientific projections based on current trends and unlikely to mislead”.

Out of the 10 points made by the climate change deniers, the only one that was upheld related to the precise level of certainty behind predictions of extreme weather events in the UK, and whether the words “ will become“ imply a 90%, 66% or 50% likelihood.

So, no, there never was any cause to celebrate, the ASA is still firmly in the AGW camp and we can forget about these fuckers ever stopping the sucking of green cock. It might be interesting to see where the ASA's pensions are invested ...

I bet the useless fuckers couldn't even get THAT right!

Definitely one to watch.

Whether the weather be hot...

Ah!

The Met Office is to stop publishing seasonal forecasts, after it came in for criticism for failing to predict extreme weather.

Oh!

So ...

Explaining its decision, the Met Office released a statement which said: "By their nature, forecasts become less accurate the further out we look.

Uh ... So who said this then?

If emissions continue to grow at present rates, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is likely to reach twice pre-industrial levels by around 2050. Unless we limit emissions, global temperature could rise as much as 7 °C above pre-industrial temperature by the end of the century and push many of the world’s great ecosystems (such as coral reefs and rainforests) to irreversible decline.

Oh. That would be the same fucking Met Office who can't fucking tell us what the fucking weather is going to do tomorrow?

However, it said its short-term forecasts are "extremely accurate".

Short term? As in: the next five minutes, perhaps?

Cunts.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Gosh, what's next? Kipper ties and flares?

Unions or electricity? Electricity or unions? I wonder what we will decide. How very different the 21st C is going to be.

BBC Bias (Again)

From Counting Cats:

I saw a small bit of a thing on BBC News this morning. OK, this is from memory and I didn’t watch the whole thing because I would have been sedated to prevent me from hurling the cat at the Samsung. And neither Timmy nor the telly deserve that…

I would though chuck an irate ocelot at Harriet Harman’s minge. That is another story though…

It was about “The Rise of Climate Scepticism in Australia”. It described climate sceptics (they’d burn ‘em if that weren’t “polluting”) meetings as being like an “American religious revivalist meetings” (that’s so BBC on so many levels, that’s the sort of thing to get the average Indy reader priapic) and it was just generally horrendous. Despite my inchoate rage I did though clock something which outraged me beyond feline-throwing comprehension.

It opened with a shot of the cracked, dry Australian Desert. You know that thing that Australia has a lot of but also had a lot of when Captain Cook made landfall and even had a lot of during the Dreamtime of the Aboriginals with this soundtrack:



Yup, whilst the BBC now calls us “sceptics” and no longer “deniers” it plays music from a symphony written specifically about the Holocaust.

Where do you think that band is performing? Don’t look much like the Royal Albert Hall to me unless that gaff has really gone downhill very recently.

So the likes of me, PA and Cats wanna disagree with the “consensus” on a scientific issue and we’re ushered to the “naughty-corner” along with that cunt Nick Griffin. Well, some of us, Aunty Beeb actually not only can parse the science but will not fall for cheap tricks like that. Some of us know what an adiabatic lapse rate is and some of us have also been to Auschwitz. Some of us even listen to C20th orchestral music.

Some of us also know what pride comes before.

PS. Fellow bloggers. Take this. I want it known. I want it screamed from the highest parapets.

Cognitive Dissonance ...

Er:

Those who hate environmentalism have spent years looking for the definitive example of a great green rip-off. Finally it arrives, and nobody notices. The government is about to shift £8.6bn from the poor to the middle classes. It expects a loss on this scheme of £8.2bn, or 95%. Yet the media is silent. The opposition urges only that the scam should be expanded.

On 1 April the government introduces its feed-in tariffs. These oblige electricity companies to pay people for the power they produce at home. The money will come from their customers in the form of higher bills. It would make sense, if we didn't know that the technologies the scheme will reward are comically inefficient.

The people who sell solar photovoltaic (PV) panels and micro wind turbines in the UK insist they represent a good investment. The arguments I have had with them have been long and bitter. But the debate has now been brought to an end with the publication of the government's table of tariffs: the rewards people will receive for installing different kinds of generators. The government wants everyone to get the same rate of return. So while the electricity you might generate from large wind turbines and hydro plants will earn you 4.5p per kilowatt hour, mini wind turbines get 34p, and solar panels 41p. In other words, the government acknowledges that micro wind and solar PV in the UK are between seven and nine times less cost-effective than the alternatives.

It expects this scheme to save 7m tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2020. Assuming – generously – that the rate of installation keeps accelerating, this suggests a saving of about 20m tonnes of CO2 by 2030. The estimated price by then is £8.6bn. This means it will cost about £430 to save one tonne of CO2.

Last year the consultancy company McKinsey published a table of cost comparisons. It found that you could save a tonne of CO2 for £3 by investing in geothermal energy, or for £8 by building a nuclear power plant. Insulating commercial buildings costs nothing; in fact it saves £60 for every tonne of CO2 you reduce; replacing incandescent lightbulbs with LEDs saves £80 per tonne. The government predicts that the tradeable value of the carbon saved by its £8.6bn scheme will be £420m. That's some return on investment.

The reason for these astonishing costs is that the government expects most people who use this scheme to install solar panels. Solar PV is a great technology – if you live in southern California. But the further from the equator you travel, the less sense it makes. It's not just that the amount of power PV panels produce at this latitude is risible, they also produce it at the wrong time. In hot countries, where air conditioning guzzles electricity, peak demand coincides with peak solar radiation. In the UK, peak demand takes place between 5pm and 7pm on winter evenings. Do I need to spell out the implications?

So, we have someone attacking the government for the wastefulness and disproportionate cost of feed-in tariffs. But it's not Timmy or Delingpole or Brooker or anyone like that.

Oh no.

It's George Monbiot!

Time to break out a new blog tag.

Pardon?

It's not just our government that talks out of its arse:

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson engaged in doublespeak of the highest degree today as she told reporters that no statistically significant increase in global temperatures since 1995 does not mean that there has not been human induced global warming.

There's been no warming, but that doesn't mean there's been no warming.

“The science regarding climate change is settled, and human activity is responsible for global warming,” Jackson said, adding that the EPA needs more funding to ensure climate change legislation is passed.

Jesus Christ. How much more naked can they be about their agenda? And fucking "progressives" applaud them for this shit?

What utter cunts.

Fucking good riddance, you Dutch cunt

Poor fucking twat:

Yvo de Boer, the UN's top climate change official, says he will resign after nearly four years in the post.

According to AP, people who know Mr de Boer said he was more disheartened by the slow pace of negotiations than he was ready to admit.

"I saw him at the airport after Copenhagen," said Jake Schmidt, a climate expert for the US-based Natural Resources Defense Council, "He was tired, worn out."

Mr Schmidt said that the summit "clearly took a toll on him."

The fucking mendacious thief - it's no fucking match for the toll the fucker is wreaking on us.

Unintended consequences again, again! ... Er, again!

This is the kind of thing that makes me want to kill people who proclaim that "something has to be done!"

As part of their stimulus response to the GFC, the Rudd government initiated a billion dollar program to provide millions of Australian homes with government-subsidized ceiling insulation. The massive influx of easy money has ballooned an industry that pre-stimulus numbered only a few hundred employees to one that now contains over 7000 employees and operators.

Despite being warned over 15 times by various other government agencies and industry groups that this plan would result in untrained workers and dodgy operators, and that poorly installed insulation would pose serious safety risks, the minister responsible went ahead with the plan. Since then numerous houses have burned down due to insulation being installed over light fittings, and 4 deaths have occurred due to untrained workers putting staples through live electric wires. The opposition is calling for the minister's resignation, and there is now a new industry being created in going back through all the affected houses, trying to find the expected 1000 homes that have been turned into potential death traps.

Lo and behold, for the great god of jobs was appeased. And just think of what all those fucking fires have done for Australia's cunting carbon footprint.

Boot-faced fucking arsehole spacktarded mongoloid interfering big-government CUNTS!