Thursday
Mar102011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Rolls Royce minds
Mar 10, 2011 Bureaucrats Economics Energy A must-hear interview with Jill Duggan, the bureaucrat in charge of Britain's emissions trading scheme. The Australians who are conducting the interview are worried that perhaps an ETS is not such a good idea.
Having heard the interview you will understand why they feel this way - Duggan's performance is truly catastrophic, with our the woman from Whitehall apparently unable to quantify either the costs or the benefits of the scheme she runs. It's hilarious, toe-curling and utterly compelling.
These, ladies and gentlemen, are the Rolls Royce minds that run the UK these days.
Reader Comments (69)
The only sensible information the poor lady gave in her unbearable babling is "you can pick any figure to support your point". She did exactly that and think anybody does the same.
@J4R
"Notice how she's never had a proper job."
Indeed and sadly thats all too often the case for her fellow metro-elite.
What staggers me the most is that we continue to let this carry on. She is but one of thousands of 'carbon professionals' who are milking the EU/UK taxpayer for their own benefit. In Jill Duggan's case don't be surprsied if she continues her climb even further up the greasy pole and gets may be even as far as this lady.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/baroness-ashton-becomes-europes-first-foreign-minister-1823742.html
http://ec.europa.eu/commission_2010-2014/ashton/about/cv/index_en.htm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/6966374/Baroness-Ashton-questioned-by-MEPs-over-new-EU-post.html
As you can see knowledge of the job (as Jill Duggan clear lacks) isn't a pre-requisite when it comes to climbing up the greasy pole of the EU commission.
Whats matters is that you play your part (in Cathy Ashton's case push through the Lisbon Treaty, in Jill Duggan's case set up the UK ETS) engratiate yourself with all the right people and as reward you get a nich cushy well paid job with the EU commission.
I think it would have been interesting for Andrew to ask Jill whether if she could not quantify the costs, she was able to place them anywhere within a range (say <1; 1 to 10; 10 to 100: >200 and so on). I really do not think she has ever given any thought at all to what the costs are, or still less what temperature effect( if any) these measures may produce.
She was however very happy to talk about the creation of jobs and of course she is right that building wind turbines and lots of other "green" activities do create lots of jobs. The only trouble is that as the Verso Economics study Andrew quoted from as well as numerous similar studies in Germany,Spain, Denmark and so on show, the number of jobs destroyed as a result of this wasteful investment is normally 2 to 4 times as large as the numbers created.
As someone pointed out China could well be the exception. It may well have some areas currently without power that might find intermittent power useful. It is also likely to be the world's largest turbine exporter , which will earn it lots of money, and since it controls nearly all the neodymium essential for turbines should make a mint from exporting that too.
what this pantomime adequately illustrates is that we lack in Europe credible news reporting.
Too many taxoverpaidfor public broadcasters decrying the injustices from their plush comfy chairs, and hand in glove with the big institutes and their aparachnik out of a keen self interest.
not enough media reporters who go after fat ignorant toads like jill.
Cannot wait for Fox and co to get larger foothold.
Just to put some meat on what BBD says about coal. Currently 67% of global coal production is burnt in Asia (of which 47% is burnt in China). Coal use in the region is increasing at about 4% per annum, and China plans 400GW of additional coal fired generation by 2020. When asked what the benefits of emissions trading will be she should reply - enormous to China and negative to OECD. It is no good saying we must all do our bit when our bit is utterly insignificant and futile.
new energies for the future will not come by building windmill junk in the seas and cap&trade thefts.
They will come by better using higher education funds and regulation allowing more access and innovation.
In the USSA it now takes 15years of passing regulation hurdles , to be allowed to test anew reactor design.
Any urgency in all that? of course not.
You cannot "motivate" enough voters when you put in policies for people to study exact sciences and engineering. You cannot employ the happily deluded who just graduated in meejah studies in a jet reactor project. They maybe can find the sea to dump windmill junk. But employ them for r&d? nah.
@ phinniethewoo
Cannot wait for Fox and co to get larger foothold.
It won't make much difference IMHO. People like Duggan only go on shows like Bolt's at all because she had thought about it as effectively as she has thought about emissions, i.e. not.
In all her experience of UK media, she has probably only ever experienced fawning ecofascists agreeing with her. It is clear from the interview that she has never even considered "what will it cost and what will it do", because ecofascists simply don't.
So on this occasion she got a nasty shock, but in future she'll simply avoid such interviews altogether. Any news channel that puts key, difficult questions to cooling deniers will find that cooling deniers simply refuse to be interviewed by anyone except Guardian TV, i.e. the BBC.
BBD and Nicholas Hallam: her comments that Europe on its own cannot keep global temperature increases to 2 deg. C and that 1.3 billion Chinese “would probably like the same standard of living that Australians enjoy” are close to an acknowledgement that the developing world is unlikely to reduce emissions and that, for Europe to make a reduction in its, as Spen notes, insignificant 14% share of global emissions, would be a futile gesture.
I’m reminded of this from Beyond the Fringe:
Peter Cook: I want you to lay down your life, Perkins. We need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war. Get up in a crate, Perkins, pop over to Bremen, take a shufti, don't come back. Goodbye, Perkins. God, I wish I was going too.
Jonathan Miller: Goodbye, sir — or is it — au revoir?
Peter Cook: No, Perkins
Robin, the quote from Beyond the Fringe, just lovely.
I have been thinking about a Jill Duggan cartoon today but really how can I compete? Anything I do is only half as funny and at risk of having a mild end, as the MET office would say.
"Rolls Royce mind"? Wouldn't "British Leyland mind" be a bit closer?
(I speak as the proud owner of a '73 Mini...)
Interesting how she tried to drag in China's production of wind turbines to salvage her argument. Andrew Bolt dismissed her impenetrable ignorance in this matter as low-hanging fruit and pressed on.
Rolls Royce mind..? Trabant is more like it....
"Trabant is more like it..."
Steady on - Trabants were basic and simple, but effective. The bodies were particularly durable and really hard to dispose of!
A colleague is shopping around for car insurance just now. Some insurance companies are offering to offset your car's carbon footprint for the year, free. I am assuming that this worthless gesture will cost the insurance company almost nothing but convince gullible idiots that their car is not harming the environment.
@ZT "What is it with UCL? The underpants bomber, Jill Duggan, Gavin Schmidt. Is UCL trying to destroy the world?"
Ask a silly question ;-) ..... I'm sure I am NOT alone in knowing the answer to this question. Jill Duggan is just one of the 'useful idiots' currently telling us that they know best.
I am truly, truly sorry for the future my daughter is going to have to live in as a result of the actions of these fools. Let's hope that Booker gets to report on it come Sunday...
Jill Duggan must have been interviewed elsewhere in Australia as indicated by this great comment on Andrew Bolts blog
"Andrew,
What I found completely staggering, was Jill Duggan’s admission that they stuffed up when they introduced the ETS, because they failed to measure individual emissions before the scheme began.
So when the ETS commenced, companies just vastly overstated their emissions, then claimed credits when they magically “reduced” their consequent emissions!
Smoke and mirrors… "
Why would someone involved in the management of the EU ETS mention this especially when Australia is also relying on company supplied info. to start off their database for their equivalent scheme?
Duggan and her Aussie sponsors are just plain incompetent.
Andrew Bolt, the main interviewer, has the facts at his fingertips because (a) he asks people for them and (b) people send them voluntarily. Heck, even one of my sons is a regular.
As identified by several posters above, its clear that Ms Duggan has never previously been exposed to proper questioning on these airy-fairy proposals which she is promoting - and probably only interviewed by someone like Richard Black on the BBC.
Talking of which - what do you think of this.
Rolling news on all the principle news channels of the dreadful events in Japan - in particular the situation at the Fukushima nuclear power station and the explosion there.
Who do the BBC wheel in to give a view on what might be the situation within the power plant..?
Someone from the Nuclear Inspectorate, perhaps - or a senior engineer from Sizewell or Dungeness..??
Nah - someone from GREENPEACE..!!
Might as well ask a vegetarian what they think of red meat....
They hate nuclear power with a passion - and the guy made it quite clear that he thought the Japanese were not 'telling the truth' - implying that things were much worse than being reported.
Sky and CNN actually got experts in the field - AND asked them sensible questions.
I reckon the Greenpeace guy and the BBC have, between them, probably set the nuclear power programme in the UK back five years - no wonder the guy looked so smug at the end of his interview...
Unfortunately Andrew Bolt is a rare breed in Australia as well. I caught parts of other interviews with Duggan on other stations and there was not a challenging question to be heard. In the Bolt interview, you can hear in her voice her surprise at being confronted by a sceptic. The questions asked by Bolt appear to completely blindside her, as if she had never even considered the issues of costs and benefits before.
I loved the bit where she said "I think you could get lots of different academics coming up with lots of different figures." She seems blissfully unaware of the implications of that statement.