Bishop Hill Lord Marland shames Parliament
Oct 21, 2010 Climate: Parliament Yesterday Nigel Lawson asked a question of Lord Marland, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Energy & Climate Change. This is the full exchange:
Lord Lawson of Blaby: My Lords, is the Minister aware that the chairman of the Government’s own Green Investment Bank commission has authoritatively stated that the cost of meeting our current carbon reduction commitments in this country is somewhere between £800 billion and £1 trillion? Does he not agree that, with the best will in the world, this mind-boggling cost cannot be justified except in the context of a binding global carbon reduction agreement? Therefore, in the absence of such an agreement being secured at Cancun, does he not agree that it is only commonsense to suspend the Climate Change Act until such time as a binding global agreement is secured?
Lord Marland: My Lords, when I bumped into my noble friend in the Corridor and he said that he was catching the train to York I was rather relieved. Sadly, he will be catching a slightly later train than I was hoping for. I have now forgotten entirely what his question was.
Utterly, utterly shameful.
Reader Comments (72)
Shameful indeed. Has Lord Marland been taking lessons from Bob Ward?!
It seems people forget who pay their wages...
It seems to be like stealing, the more you steal the less the sentence...
The more the amount from taxpayers the less the democratic respect that is accorded...
The Independent and the Guardian seem to want have both ways... today's headlines after the spending review:
Independent: Spending Review: A colder, crueller country – for no gain
Guardian: Osborne's spending review axe falls on the poor
Yet they are both happy that much of the "Green" stuff survived, including carbon capture, which is like p*****g few billion into the ground, and will only make a few engineering firms extremely wealthy. Government projects this (like many in the MOD) are always a disaster, be over-budget, late and probably canned before the results are conclusive.
Jiminy. It is a well known fact (backed up by real-world evidence, not computer models) that governments are expert at picking losing technology. Hence Concorde, wind turbines, solar panels, CCS etc etc
Phillip you are so right, yet accountability never seems to have any effect. I worked with people who had been very senior on the Concorde project. Project Largesse on a grand scale, perhaps one of grandest. I am surprised they did not gold plate the controls (due to some requirement clause about pilots with skin complaints.)
I worked in IT Consutlancy. You look at the Government IT projects at the beginning and you think that will be a f***-**. It is just so obvious from the requirements and the departments involved, yet the projects get started. Sure enough millions spent and project canned.
When you know your budget it amazing how your projections match it. Every firm knows that all you do is promise anything and everything to get the project. Once they get the project they know they can run rings around the government and those assigned to watch over it. And if it runs over budget those firms have enough of legal paper trail to CYA.
My next door neighbour is a supplier Project Manager on a MOD Radar system. His only job is to CYA. 10 years and two nice Volvos outside the house.
And Carbon Capture, as it is a ground breaking project, they cannot exactly be held to account if the results are not what was envisaged.
There will be have been some serious lobbying by large engineering firms in the last few months. What's a few million when the result is a project to print money at the taxpayers expense?
Big Oil? Hmmm...
Come on Phillip you can’t put Concorde in the same class as windmills
Martyn, they are both vanity projects...
Did Lord Lawson not then remind the noble Lord Marland what his question had been and then ask it again?
Sounds like the old story of the lord who dreamt he was addressing the house, then woke up to find that he was.
Martyn:
Come on Phillip you can’t put Concorde in the same class as windmills
The verdict is not in. Concorde cost the taxpayers xbillions and was a big white elephant. Windmills have so far cost the electricity consumer ybillions, with zbillions still to come (where z is a huge number) and are big white elephants. I am sure that, even taking inflation into account, x<<(y+z).
Concorde was an aviation icon in advance of its time competing with nothing other than jealous rivalry hence the reluctance to allow landings and airspace. Architecture maybe rife with vanity projects but we will have to agree to disagree about Concorde. Although I do agree with Phillip that Governments are expert at picking losing technology just Concorde isn’t/wasn't one of them.
Concorde was a disaster from the start. The UK had a viable civil aircraft industry - but all our eggs were put in the Concorde basket, when there was no clear market requirement as compared with what Boeing were doing in promoting mass cheap air transport. We could have got into bed with Boeing, instead we got into an unbreakable treaty with the French and their inefficient aircraft industry.
I was involved within Whitehall in 1972, saw the figures - they were a total joke. People were forecasting total sales of 150 copies. Ridiculous. In the event - no airline bought any. They were effectively given away to British Airways and Air France - one-tenth of the original forecast total. Massive loss of public funds. Britain effectively out of the civil aviation industry.
I remember commenting - "The figures would not look so bad if we wrote off all the money already spent - ran the "spreadsheet" just including future expected spending, and those crazy sales forecasts." "But we have already excluded the prior costs". Truly crazy - and I saw many other examples over the years of how stupid Whitehall and Ministers can be.
I think it was the economist David Henderson who said that it is very difficult to oppose massive Government projects - they are like steamrollers, not much speed but enormous momentum. Stand in the way and you get flattened. So it wil take some fairly brave civil servants to finally block the whole carbon tax madness and all the wasteful expenditure on stuff like windmills.
martyn
There were only a handful of possible routes for supersonic flight - cross-ocean. Concorde was NOT blocked from landing at Kennnedy, it could also go to Bermuda, there was no evident market at that time across the Pacific, very little chance of viability on the route to Cape Town. The fares on any route flown were bound to be extremely high - for just a small minority of customers.
THAT is why none were sold. And that was obvious to an amateur like me from the start. We bet the farm on the ridiculous Concorde in a battle against Boeing's Jumbo. Utterly pointless, national-vanity project. Made worse by being screwed by the French.
Sorry Martyn, I used to work for BAe.
It is often forgotten that Britain had a world leading Aeronautics industry, the equal of America, France and the USSR. We had world leading products over a range of market segments. One aircraft had a guaranteed order for over 300 from the US. The company went bust when the Government could have saved it, but Concorde was king.
Concorde sucked dry that whole industry into an engineering dead-end. Creating a knowledge base that no one wanted.
A beautiful piece of over engineering that proved its reliability at the cutting edge of technology. Yet the market has spoken, 40 years and no similar project has gotten off the ground. People with money rent/own private jets and they make the same time savings as they could with Concorde.
Thanks guys for the support, but we seem to have gone off thread.
But as John Wright has asked, was the question finally answered? Lord Lawson asked a most important question, the answer to which affects our future survival (unless we want to become a peasant society).
Jiminy Cricket
You have it exactly right.
In the early 70’s I recall there were orders for nearly 100 Concorde then the oil crisis arrived with the stock market crash which put an end to those. Concorde has been a victim of circumstances throughout its life.
Lortd Lawson won't let go. He will have been offended by the first answer - which looks to me like a deliberate evasion. Their Lordships don't like rudeness.
Later in the transcript (and slightly out of sequence)
Of course, his reasoning is doubtful, but I think he did answer the question...
On Concorde: Don't forget that this beautiful plane was in reality 1960s technology. The engines were from that era too. Inside the cabin the seats were quite narrow with only 4 seats across the plane. There were 2 on each side of a narrow aisle. It was quite noisy inside when in flight. Yes it was beautiful to see and to have had the experience of flying in, but when the economics of building and operating it were taken into account, it was a loss making plane for everybody.
With all the billions spent on it at the time, only 9 went into operation. 5 with my old employer BOAC/Britsh Airways and 4 with Air France. There were also 2 prototypes made as far as I remember.
The consoles in front of the pilots and engineering officer were old fashioned dials of the era.
It first operated London/Bahrain/Singapore. It didn't have the range to do London Singapore in one hop.
A White Elephant?
Yes, of course it was.
But in the minds of most people, the most beautiful White Elephant ever to fly.
Peter Walsh
Shameful... but it is just business as usual... like describing the 6.2 percent increase in government expediture by 2014-15 as cuts in government expediture.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/10/for-avoidance-of-doubt.html
Martyn
I was in the Board of Trade. The Government were funding Concorde. Our senior administrators and economists were crawling all over the figures -as were the Treasury.
There were NO clear orders in the early 1970s, the only names being touted around in 1972 (other than BA and Air France were one copy for the Shah of Persia and one copy for Braniff as a personal toy. The major US airlines diodn't give a hoot about Concorde.
Any talk of "100 orders" let alone 150 was mere marketing puff. And this was 1972 - before the oil crisis of 1973.
(Memo to self - I must go to the Public Records Office and try to track down some of the 1972 papers, including any stuff I wrote at the time and got slapped down for. I felt like the little boy in The Emperor Has No Clothes.)
Off subject. Regardless of the essential swinging cuts the chancellor still managed to state that climate change is the most serious problem facing us. Then I'm sure I heard him pledge £1bn for research into carbon catpture and storage. I pray my rather poor hearing was playing me up.
Phillip, it is not so off topic, because it sheds some light on Government expenditure on these vanity projects.
Despite all the money spent and years of design/research to that point, the first Concorde prototype could not actually be landed safely because they could not see out of the cockpit! Fine, we will just redesign the whole front end and have a moving nose section. Any idea how much that would have cost extra ?
When the Government pay the bills in this way on vanity projects, engineering becomes divorced from the actual original design goals.
The political investment means the project cannot fail.
Shameful, indeed. I have picked up on it with a post here: http://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2010/10/contempt-for-parliament-effect-or.html
' Lord Marland disgraces the House of Lords with his blatant contempt for a fellow peer. But it is a sign not merely of yobbishness on his part, but of the absurdity and indefensibility of the Climate Change Act. It is out of the question that it can be complied with, and this particular exchange merely serves, as did the climategate revelations, to reveal the low calibre of some of those who create, or collaborate with, alarm about CO2 in the atmosphere. This vacuity at government level is unsettling but not surprising - there being so little substance to the case for such alarm. An alarm that is now part of the curriculum in our schools. '
Steve Crook: I do not see an answer to the three questions Lord Lawson asked.
The answers to the questions should have been "yes", "yes" and"yes".
Lord Marland has a background in insurance, so is probably cashing in on climate change.
All,
The answer reluctantly proferred is disgraceful as it is, but I wonder if there isn't something even nastier here.
I don't know the specifics of the procedures of the Lords, but I'm fairly certain that each questioner is very very very limited in the NUMBER of questions he asks. Is it possible that, by offering this nonsense about trains to York, Lord Marsland has prevented Lord Lawson from asking a much more searching follow up question that takes apart the answer he expected to be given?
Having now read the Hansard extract, yes, that is exactly what he is doing.
Lord Lawson did not get to ask his question again.
I have long been a supporter of the lords on the basis that they stand between us and the tyranny of the majority as enacted in the Commons. This is enough to cause me to reconsider.
Given also, how clear he is in his other answers, the phrase "i have now forgotten what his question was" looks to me like a lie. That can/should/ought to be dealt with by the authorities in the Lords.
Lord Marland is your typical millionaire Tory - a capitalist who exploits the sweatshops in communist China to makes pots of money for himself and his cronies.
This guy knows nothing about science but finds himself elevated to being a minister in the Dept. of Energy and Climate Change.
There are people in China working for a pittence to keep this man in ermine.
E-mail just sent to DECC....
Having just read Hansard for yesterday, may take this opportunity to remind the minister of Lord Lawsons unanswered question.
Lord Lawson of Blaby: My Lords, is the Minister aware that the chairman of the Government’s own Green Investment Bank commission has authoritatively stated that the cost of meeting our current carbon reduction commitments in this country is somewhere between £800 billion and £1 trillion? Does he not agree that, with the best will in the world, this mind-boggling cost cannot be justified except in the context of a binding global carbon reduction agreement? Therefore, in the absence of such an agreement being secured at Cancun, does he not agree that it is only commonsense to suspend the Climate Change Act until such time as a binding global agreement is secured?
Perhaps the minister would now like to answer that specific question for me?
Regards
Anoneumouse
Outrageous! How could Lawson take it further?
How would one campaign to "suspend the Climate Change Act until such time as a binding global agreement is secured" ? Seems to me if the public were aware of the costs, given the uncertainty in the science, and the current 'austerity' meme, it'd sure put the pressure on.
Lord Marland only demonstrates historical illiteracy and a commitment to wasting the resources of the people of the United Kingdom perhaps only matched by the generals of WWI.
So Marland only answers the questions he wants to. Look at this further disgraceful behaviour:
Lord Deben: Does my noble friend accept that the cost of not acting now is much bigger than the cost that the head of the Green Investment Bank has suggested? Will he therefore make sure that we do not stop or slow our actions against climate change?
Lord Marland: I thank my noble friend. I am glad that he has not taken a train anywhere and that he has stayed to allow me to answer his question. I am grateful for that question from my own Benches;
So, Marland wishes that that those who want to ask sensible questions were not in the chamber, but those who sow questions so that he can propagandize are there. Look also at his disgraceful 'evidence' for climate change:
Lord Marland: I thank my noble friend. I am glad that he has not taken a train anywhere and that he has stayed to allow me to answer his question. I am grateful for that question from my own Benches; I am not really used to it, as a matter of fact. There is no doubt that the climate is changing: we have seen the worst ever flooding in Pakistan in its history; there have been record-breaking temperatures in Moscow; and 17 countries in the northern hemisphere alone have recorded their highest ever temperatures. It is a substantial problem. This Government are committed to being the greenest Government ever and to supporting all endeavours on climate change.
The greenest government ever. The new 'green' tax that was supposed to be redistributive has just been declared to be another stealth tax, going straight into the coffers of the Treasury, who, in their defence, say that the government 'has to get its money from somewhere'. So, as we knew all along, this 'green tax' was an excuse to suck more taxation from the British people.
Unregistered CommenterThe Pedant-General "Given also, how clear he is in his other answers, the phrase "i have now forgotten what his question was" looks to me like a lie. That can/should/ought to be dealt with by the authorities in the Lords."
It is certainly a lie, but Marland knows well enough that one cannot accuse another member in the chamber of lying. Lawson should have been fuming - I would have been. I hope he takes the matter further. Simply answering the questions you want to answer and ignoring the difficult factual ones is an abysmal way of running the country.
Phillip Bratby,
Didn't the Russians also build flyable SST's and didn't Boeing also at least get to mock-ups? The foolishness of this undertaking may not have been so obvious at the time.
"Didn't the Russians also build flyable SST's"
No.
[checks wikipedia] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordski
actually yes, but...
:-)
There is no point in us talking about this here.
The Lords has a system whereby we can write to them directly to ask qustions and remind them of their duties - www.theyworkforyou.com/peer/lord marland.
Lords have a duty to reply on this and if he tries to fob us off with a weak replies we can publish his replies here.
No serious climate scientist in the real world actually thinks that either the Moscow heatwave or the Pakistan floods are evidence of anything (other than a weak jetstream) and surely he must have a better reason than this for spending a trillion pounds of our money.
At the very least this will show him that we are watching him and are unimpressed.
Pedant-General: Russian SST.
I think you would agree that it would have been very difficult for the Russians to crash an SST at the Paris Airshow had they not built at least one.
In answer to "j ferguson"... Yes, the TU144 ("Concordski") went into limited service in the USSR but it was a very different kettle of fish from Conconrde... It may be apocryphal but I believe that it was so incredibly noisy that the passengers had to wear ear-defenders.
I think that NASA still have a TU144 that they use for high-altitude research.
I have been reliably informed that even amongst climate scientists, there is a special breed called attributionists, the very top of the pecking order of which sits Kevin Trenberth, who happens to be pre-possessed with the knowledge that the Russian heat wave was anthropogenic in origin.
A lot of things can happen with a long lead time between concept and the first commercial flight in 1976. It isn’t surprising the original interest in Concorde from the early 60’s through to early 70’s did not convert to firm orders not only with the 1973 oil crisis:-
But all the main stock indexes of the future G7 bottomed out between September and December 1974, having lost at least 34% of their value in nominal terms 43% in real terms. In all cases, the recovery was a slow process. Although West Germany's market was the fastest to recover, returning to the original nominal level within eighteen months, it did not return to the same real level until June 1985. The United Kingdom didn't return to the same market level until May 1987 (only a few months before the Black Monday crash), whilst the United States didn't see the same level in real terms until August 1993: over twenty years after the 1973-74 crash began.
Oops tea break over. I must go and mothball a couple of aircraft carriers that haven’t been built yet.
I disagree with one of Lord Lawson's assumptions, when he asked "Does he not agree that, with the best will in the world, this mind-boggling cost cannot be justified except in the context of a binding global carbon reduction agreement? "
I contend that even with a global agreement, the cost can not be justified. At http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N45/yost.html , the figure of 2% of GDP for mitigation by 2100 (per the Stern report) is contrasted with a 1.8% estimated effect of un-mitigated global warming. It is also true that mitigation costs begin immediately, while any effects are not going to be apparent for some time; including this fact, along with the usual discounting of future vs. current, tips the balance further towards a policy of deliberate non-action in the present, adapting as and if required in the future. P.S. to contrast the choices properly, one must also add (mitigated) effects into the cost of the mitigation option.
That the effects are so uncertain -- our ability to project 100 years is fine with astronomy, but in climate, not so much -- is viewed by some as a chance that the effects may well be (much) larger than predicted; but to date what I see is that the predicted warming has exceeded the reality, so my own view is that the effects will likely be less [than, say, the IPCC projects given no policy change].
pogo,
"Kettle of Fish" = passenger aircraft is quite good. Better than "steerage."
Lost in this was the idea that the foolishness of a massive project is not always sufficiently obvious at the time the commitments are made to prevent the waste. Even though some people will recognise the folly on sight.
@HaroldW: disagree with one of Lord Lawson's assumptions.
It was likely a ploy on Lawson's part to avoid giving Mayland too obvious a tangent to go off on. I'm pretty sure Lawson would agree with everything you said.
In any event, the ploy seems to have been at least a limited success; Mayland's infantile response demonstrates beyond all doubt that he was cornered.
Time to "move on", methinks.
Bishop Hill
Admin
In case noone has mentioned it, the link to Lord Lawson's question does not work.
However the following link did just work for me:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201011/ldhansrd/text/101020-0001.htm#10102041000306
Stephen Prower
Stevenage
Thursday 21 October 2010
@J ferguson
"Pedant-General: Russian SST.
I think you would agree that it would have been very difficult for the Russians to crash an SST at the Paris Airshow had they not built at least one".
that wasn't the question. It was "did they build a FLYABLE one?".
:-)
Present Government thinking is set out in the National Security Strategy published earlier this week. See para 1.30 where it says:
"Tackling climate change is increasingly an issue which is bringing countries together. Failure to reach agreement at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen was a strategic setback. Nevertheless we will strive for an effective response, including a global deal. Over 70 countries (accounting for some 80% of global emissions) have set out their global emissions reductions commitments."
So there will be no let up by a government headed by Cameron to back pedal on the Climate Change Act. On the contrary it is full speed ahead, and green tax and green spend because he believes there is no tomorrow unless he does so. That is the present reality. This position is shared by the Leader of the Opposition, E Miliband, who piloted the Climate Change Act through the HoC.
I happen to think this is bonkers. But that is the present political reality in the UK.
Re the Russian SST, it was widely believed that somebody working with access to the Technical Drawings of Concorde quietly made a blueprint copy took them home and sold them to the Soviets.
It was always widely stated that if you have the same design parameters the same design will come out. However, in those days the Technical Drawing dept. would have had hundred's of draughtsmen and quite a few facsimile machines. With design/production engineers, attractive secretaries, walking in and out. I think it is fairly certain the USSR got a nice set. And let us say that helped them with design decisions. I think it even flew before Concorde.
However it too was a vanity project, and the SST was quickly relegated to flying long distance cargo flights because basically it was a rushed piece of c***.
Thanks dread0.
I wondered about whether that phrasing represented Lawson's actual belief, or if he was just trying to focus on the one particular objection, as you say. But the danger is that the opposition becomes contingent; and if China & India say that they will introduce decarbonisation, then this sort of statement will be seen as a (grudging perhaps) concurrence. If the UK position presented to the international negotiations is "we'll jump off the bridge if everyone else says they'll do it too" -- it's going to be difficult to back down if that comes to pass.
As compared to a flat-out opposition to such measures, as being less cost-effective than just waiting and adapting. Which approach has the very significant advantage of not relying on projections of dubious reliability.
@The Pedant-General
Yes, the Tu144 was flyable, Soviet aerospace engineers had produced many, highly capable, military supersonic aircraft.
It was, however, a rushed job. espionage occured in Aerospatial's factory, largely to confirm that Concord was a real project.
Now, Konkordski certainly wasn't practical, not even in a real "profit doesn't matter" environment, could it's flying life be prolongued.
The crash at Paris is still a subject of controversy, did the engines stall before it pitched nose down, or when it pitched? Was the French Mirage the really the initiator of the crash?
If you watch slo-mo of the crash, the airframe starts to break up when pull-up was initiated.
On reflection anyone who decides (as I already have) to write to Marland under "they work for you", it might be worth copying it to Lawson so that he also knows what is in Marland's postbag.
Thanks Shub, I had actually previously thought Trenberth was one of the more credible of the "hockey stick" team - much more balanced and potentially open-minded than either Mann or Jones.