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.

Fuck me sideways!

I read this, fully expecting snort with derision the whole way through. But apart from the "green" shit that was pretty inevitable, I am actually quite impressed with the commitment to transparency and openness.

I can't imagine what Mark Wadsworth is going to say about their home-ownerism, though.

This is the way to better "green" cars

This guy writes some really good stuff:

Look back at any piece of automotive technology and where the application has appeared first or been most effective. Every single one of them has appeared at the top of the tree in an almost ‘money no object’ car. The S-Class is an exception, but even that is a high end car. In fact, long before the car became a form of mass private transportation it was a play thing of the rich. The money they were willing to pay for the privilege of being able to rip around their estates at a neck-snapping 17mph meant that manufacturers had an incentive to make the technology work better, making the older technology more accessible, obsolete and, therefore, cheaper.

The list of technology that has filtered down from high price applications would basically be a list of everything that appears on modern, affordable, cars: ABS, light-weight alloy wheels (remember how rare those were in the early nineties?), disc brakes, turbochargers, superchargers, independent suspension, etc, etc. Even tyres benefit from this ‘top down’ paradigm.

Engine technology is exactly the same. No matter what the environmental set would like people to believe, we know that an engine that generates 500bhp from 6.2 naturally aspirated litres is a massively efficient donkey. Figure out how to get more power from a given amount of petrol for the people willing to pay £50k for a car and you’re figuring out how to make the petrol engines lower down the range far more frugal. To give an idea of the pace of progress the twin-turbo, 5.5 litre 536bhp V8 in the current CL63 generates just 7g/km more CO2 than the Mark 1 Focus RS, which had a two litre turbocharged four with 200bhp.

The only piece of automotive tech that I can think of that hasn’t taken this tried and tested route to mainstream success and, when you think about it, is the only piece of road car technology that is a bit rubbish is the Hybrid power train.

And I reckon he's fucking spot on. It's absolutely nothing odd for a perfectly normal hatchback to push out horses that would have required a Ferrari 30 or 40 years ago. A relatively common or garden variety Merc pushes out more power than even a final Anniversary Edition Lamborghini Countach!

A Nissan Micra probably has brakes that a Ferrari 250 GTO would have given its metaphorical eye teeth for.

Cutting edge technology like keyless entry or voice controlled gizmos has always appeared first in aspirational cars to and then worked its way down the tree. This is how we're used to making and buying cars. This is a proven process.

The Toyota Pious and Honda Inshite are awful cars precisely because they were the result of an abnormal, government-inspired process, where new tech was bolted directly into the daily shitbox before motor manufacturers had their normal cock-waving competition. And they cost more than they sell for, which is no way to make a living.

So I hope that eco-wibblers the world over will be applauding Porsche for being the first company to take the traditional path with Hybrid technology:

Anyway, this is why I think the 918 Spyder is a far more important car than the coverage it has been getting suggests. Porsche had dealt the first Hybrid-powered blow to the supercar market, and it’s a whopping great big haymaker. Here is a genuinely beautiful car (not some weird quasi-futuristic design abomination that most Hybrid car manufacturers seem inclined to produce) that has 738bhp and will, according to Porsche, out-mpg a Toyota Prius if you drive it sensibly.

How long will Ferrari be able to resist? Lamborghini? Pagani and Koenigsegg? Not long I suspect and, as these guys start producing Hybrid cars whose sole purpose is to smash the faces in of their competitors rather than sell millions, Hybrid powertrains will, after ten years on the market, finally be at the point at which they should have started.

Where will we be in another ten years? I have no idea, but I’d bet my life that as Hybrid supercars start appearing on the market batteries and electric motors will be more mind-blowingly advanced than we could have ever imagined. Perhaps then we’ll get a Hybrid (or even fully electric) car at the sub £30k price point that actually works better than one with an internal combustion engine.

PS I certainly fucking would!

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.

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.

Who'd want to go back to the stone age?

To all these environ-mentalists who want to drag us back to the stone age: how the fuck do you think we're going to have our post-first-coffee-of-the-day morning shit without electricity to make the espresso, then?

Cunts.

"Blair is right"

They are not a series of words I'd ever have thought I'd read, let along write, but:

"The answer to climate change," he says solemnly, "is the development of science and technology. Yes, we will get changes in the way we consume but we will be consuming differently, not necessarily less. People are not going to return to the 19th century. The critical thing is to use the technologies we have and to incentivise the development of new ones. That is the only practical way we will make this thing work."

Well, he's partly right. The market will do the "incentivisation". Government subsidies for wind farms and other eco-wibble are not needed, thanks very much.

I wonder how Timmy will feel about this?

Is this a situation where they both lose? Timmy always says that jobs are a cost, not a benefit, so is the fact that:

for every green energy job created:

2.2 on average will be lost, or about nine jobs lost for every four created, to which we have to add those jobs that non-subsidized investments with the same resources would have created.

In addition actually nine out of ten promised green jobs created were not even permanent. To put it in a different way: every green megawatt created:

destroyed 5.28 jobs on average elsewhere in the economy: 8.99 by photovoltaics, 4.27 by wind energy, 5.05 by mini-hydro.

So does Timmy think this is a good thing or a bad thing?

It think that this bit is incontrovertibly bad, though:

the investment of $36 billion so far created only $10 billion worth in real market prize of energy. Thus renewable mandates have caused already severe damage to the Spanish economy with energy costs increasing nearly 55%. For some companies such as Ferrroatlantico energy cost for its production of iron alloys soared from 37% in 1997 to 43 % in 2005.

Fucking hell.

Even the Indy admits it

Click here.

Click on "Is human activity changing the earth's climate?"

Click on "Case for significant anthropogenic climate change is clear."

See that red box? The one that says "Zero empirical evidence of anthropogenic cause"? If you click on that, they say that there really is no empirical evidence of man causing global warming. But it doesn't matter, we need to do something about it anyway.

Christ, I thought my ex-wife pulled her arguments out of her arse ...

Wot Blaney says

Stick two fingers up at the hectoring cunts:

I invite as many of you around the world as possible to join me in standing up to collectivist bullying by leftists and liberals who are too scared to campaign openly for the socialist paradise they really want and who use "climate change" as the scare story to cajole a gullible and desensitized public into backing their warped worldview.

Join me tonight in turning ALL of your lights ON for an hour. Light up your home as a beacon of liberty standing up to the tyranny of environmental zealots.

Harrabin's Hypocrisy

Watched that sanctimonious cunt on the news last night, telling us all how our evil ways are killing off the coral reefs and the societies that depend on them. What bastards we are.

Of course, this was done, without a trace of irony, from a resort in the Red Sea.

Harrabin, you utter wankstain: I really hope you rowed all the way from London in an organically knitted coracle, because otherwise you are a fucking knave and a dog for using license payer money to tell license payers to live in a way that you want them to but are not prepared to adhere to yourself.

I despise you, your bullying attitude and your shameless hypocrisy and I hope you die painfully from face cancer.

Cunt.

Jonathan Porritt: Cunt du jour

Via Trixy, Old Holborn and Timmy, this:

COUPLES who have more than two children are being “irresponsible” by creating an unbearable burden on the environment, the government’s green adviser has warned.

Jonathon Porritt, who chairs the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, says curbing population growth through contraception and abortion must be at the heart of policies to fight global warming. He says political leaders and green campaigners should stop dodging the issue of environmental harm caused by an expanding population.

A report by the commission, to be published next month, will say that governments must reduce population growth through better family planning.

Timmy attacks the fatuous reasoning with complete dispassion, so I guess he doesn't have kids. Old Holborn rightly points out that Porritt is just another interefering, bullying cunt who needs to be strung up by the testicles.

Both of them (rather surprisingly) miss the point that it matters not what we do in the UK when we cannot oppose a massive influx of EU foreigners anyway, or that the people who have the most kids are actively supported from doing so by the government. If Mr Porritt had backed his hectoring with a call to the government to stop funding feral scrotes from spawning as an excuse to steal more of my money I would have been more positive, something The Lovely One agrees with.

But this is just a call for another fake charity / quango to nanny, bully, hector and interfere with us some more.

So fuck him and the 4x4 he rode in on.

Cunt.

Update: Counting Cats weighs in.

Environ-mentalism strikes in F1

Hah!

The introduction of KERS - Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems - into Formula 1 has not been without mishap. There was a battery fire at Red Bull, and a BMW engineer received a nasty electric shock during a test at the Jerez circuit in Spain.

Now F1 safety supremo Charlie Whiting has announced that track marshals will be issued with gloves that will be “good for 1000 volts” and that cars will be fitted with warning lights so that anyone approaching a stricken F1 racer will be able to see if the KERS has shorted out.

Presumably the subtle odour of frying driver will be another give away.

KERS components will also be clearly colour coded so anyone finding them lying by the side of the track will know what they are about to pick up.

In an interview with F1.com, Whiting goes on to say that a KERS Safety Working Group has been set up, chaired by BMW.

“They‘ve met quite a few time,” he said, “and they’ve come up with a long list of suggestions, parts of which have already become regulations, and some of which will form the basis of a comprehensive document we’ll circulate to all circuits and tracks hosting a grand prix.”

No matter how comprehensive the document, the lingering fear of a massive electric shock is hardly likely to encourage marshals to race to the aid of drivers who have just had a major shunt. After all, just how sure would you be that a 150mph impact hasn't also put the kibosh on the KERS warning lamp?

Of course, none of this worries the lads at Williams F1 as they alone seem to have opted for a flywheel-based system. All they now have to worry about is a kinetic storage device rotating at an unimaginably high rotational velocity ripping loose and flying off into the wide blue yonder like a frisbee from hell.

Never mind chaps, I'm sure Gaia will be grateful for your sacrifices!

More egregious hypocrisy from the Indie

Fuck me gently with a broken bottle:

Silicon Valley, as everyone now calls it, pioneered the developments that gave rise to the computer industry in the 1970s. In the 1980s, it led the biotechnology revolution. In the 1990s it famously drove the dot-com boom. And now it is taking on the biggest transformation of all by staking billions on making the future green.

I go there every year to judge some environmental awards.

I can only guess that he paddles a canoe across the Atlantic every time.

Overweening, self-righteous cock-sniffer that he is.

Is James Hansen fiddling the climate change numbers?

James Hansen is one of the world's most active MMGW alarmists. He personally controls the GISS data set, which is, oddly enough, the one that shows the greatest amount of global warming, often when other sets show no warming or even cooling. Via Bishop Hill, this bit of speculative statistical analysis:

One of the main sources of global warming information, the GISS data set from NASA showed significant management*, particularly a deficiency of zeros and ones.

* Or "fiddling" to you and me.

The Independent: Hypocrites

What a fucking bunch of hypocrites. Every other fucking day, they have some or other calamitous cockwaffle about "climate change" on their front page, yet what is on it right now?

Whether it's a bargain break or a flat-bed luxury flight, don't let the puny pound and faltering economy ruin your plans

Bunch of hypocritical, self-serving, middle-class tossers.

What Dubya got right

The papers are all full of "what Bush got wrong" today. But I disagree violently with this one:

Abandoning the Kyoto Protocol

In 2001, Mr Bush refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty that requires participating countries to lower their greenhouse gas emissions. He cited its effect on the economy, but the auto industry is already on the brink and global climate change is a real problem. Even merely as a sign of intent, his signature would have been helpful.

Utter cock. It's the one thing Bush got absolutely right, the Kyoto Protocol is a load of wibble that will achieve the square root of fuck all, at enormous cost.

Google searches kill the planet

Fuck's sake. What fucking drivel will these greentards come up with next, then?

Assertions by a Harvard University environmentalist and green-website promoter that two Google searches cause carbon emissions equivalent to boiling a kettle appear to be based on questionable numbers. Building on the new research, the Reg can also exclusively reveal that three days of normal human farts cause the same amount of damage to the planet as a Google search. Google, however, say that a use of their search engine is only equivalent to farting once.

Drink tea, use google and fart as much as you like. Just kill a greentard every day to balance out your CO2 emissions.