Sunday
Jul202014
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Unminced words from Owen Paterson
Jul 20, 2014 Greens It was not my job to do the bidding of two organisations that are little more than anti-capitalist agitprop groups most of whose leaders could not tell a snakeshead fritillary from a silver-washed fritillary. I saw my task as improving both the environment and the rural economy; many in the green movement believed in neither.
Link here- but I wonder why the Telegraph editors saw fit to place Paterson's words 9th down the list of "Political" articles, instead of putting it into the section on the environment?
Reader Comments (47)
Perhaps it should be there twice, once in the political section and again in the environment section.
A brilliant article that shows just how undemocratic the UK has become. Time to cut the taxpayer funding streams for these corrupt organisations. I was particularly pleased to see Mr Paterson draw the distinction between the local conservationists and their vile multi-national lying counterparts. Just as 'climate science' does not care that it is ruining the good name of real science, so the big green machine doesn't really care about real conservation.
It is indeed excellent which makes it all the more depressing that Cameron sacked him. Patterson and Grove: the only authentic Tories in the government and both gone. Dismaying is not a strong enough word.
Almost forgot, here is a reminder of just how useless those landscape spoiling windmills are:
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
0.19 GW as of 0849 BST. That is 1.9% of installed capacity. Only an idiot like Davey could consider them a good investment.
I had to look it up. A silver-washed fritillary is a butterfly and a snakeshead fritillary is a flower.
I wish more in the government would stand up to the Green Mafia. It is appalling what these zealots do as they try to impose their pathetic green religion on us.
Lets hope he returns after the next election.
Steve Jones:
The madness of the LibDems (Ed Davey) wind policy is also well covered by Christopher Booker in the Telegraph here
Jul 20, 2014 at 8:56 AM | Registered CommenterPhillip Bratby
Indeed, Davey beggars belief. Paterson's comments about distributing his address are interesting. The UK Terrorism Act 2000 defines terrorism as:
The use or threat of action designed to influence the government or an international governmental organisation or to intimidate the public, or a section of the public; made for the purposes of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause; and it involves or causes:
•serious violence against a person;
•serious damage to a property;
•a threat to a person's life;
•a serious risk to the health and safety of the public; or
•serious interference with or disruption to an electronic system.
Does this behaviour sound familiar?
Jul 20, 2014 at 8:50 AM | Unregistered CommenterSteve Jones
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It would be interesting to compile a data base of the days when wind is producing less than 10%, and less than 5% of installed capacity.
If this was a rare event, that would be one thing. But it is far from a rare event, and this info needs to be brought to public attention, backed up with statistics.
I do not know whether anyone/anybody is compiling the appropriate data.
I supoose a FOI to the National Grid, or to the wind farm operator is unlikely to elicit the required info.
I note with amusement that The Telegraph does its best to hide Paterson's article while giving undue prominence to the vapid pro-Cameron twitterings of that bibulous fool Bruce Anderson. I've not been able to take anything he writes seriously since he predicted John Major would win in 1997. Oh yes.
You could have easily missed it in the BS Telegraph Comments page. Populated with all the BBC luvvie crap along with wack Russia over and over again.
I realised that while for years I voted Tory I clearly voted along with the wrong Tories....stopped that 2 years ago and could only go UKIP.
So with Gove gone everything is back to ratsh*t.
Paterson maybe thinking about deserting the sinking ship and swimming over to UKIP.
The Tories are so obsessed with detoxifying their brand .
Even Without the Lib Dems they still would have done the same pro Europe pro Environmentalist Windmill Building Anti Smoking, Anti Obesity, Anti Drinking ,Anti Car ,Ban Everything soppy pro lefty policies.
No one is going to have street parties and burn effigies or sing ding dong the boring men are dead on Twitter at either John Major,s or David Cameron,s state funerals are they.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9265621/a-misogynistic-reshuffle/
Terry S
Surely you knew that - but does Liz Truss, and does "Dave" care ?
Melissa Kite's brilliant expose of the "reshuffle" would indicate that Cameron has deliberately put women in jobs for which they're least suited and thus be unable to get on top of their briefs this side of the election.
They can then be at the mercy of the NUT, WWF, Fiends of the Earth, and Sam's mates at Greenpeace.
Agouts:
Could there be a clue in that statement as to why they are gone? I wonder…Words that should be etched onto the forehead of every politician (several times, in Camoron’s case – there is certainly room for it!).Nice people, the Greens, aren't they? Just imagine that a right-wing group had done the same to a leading figure in one of the causes approved by the bien pensant class, e.g. gay marriage. You would never hear the end of it on television or in the newspapers but because it is a "nasty" right winger it is quite OK.
Owen Paterson - my hero
Don't confuse Huhne and Davey's windmills with the benign environmental policies of the average Lib Dem. They are just starting to realise their Party was hijacked by Fascists hiding behind Green politics. It was done in the 1980s by the sons and daughters of ex-Blackshirt founders of the Coventry-based Soil Association, set up in 1946. Indoctrination at Oxford of Davey etc. by the likes of Porritt, whose estate borders Highgrove, led to the present debacle and Cameron is happy to allow it, presumably because his family benefits..
The intention is to restrict electricity supply by subsidy farming thereby to enrich elite landowners and the UK and continental Mafias who own the Renewables' Corporations. The other part is Eugenics; to herd the poor into inner cities there to die from poverty. Porritt has called for 30 million to be despatched. Tickell, who using the fake CAGW scam, got Thatcher to support the programme, has reportedly asked for 20 million survivors.
An excellent article by a man I greatly admire for his courage and good sense. Now that he is free from the shackles of Cabinet I hope to see more articles like this. He will be greatly missed in the countryside and at sea.
"It is indeed excellent which makes it all the more depressing that Cameron sacked him." (Agouts)
At least he is now able to speak out like this before the next election. Let's hope there is much more to come.
Owen Paterson's article is a 'must read' piece. He is now in a position where he cannot be silenced: we look forward to hearing more from him.
"The Green Blob sprouts especially vigorously in Brussels" :)
I know two head teachers who both thought Mr Gove was a breath of fresh air for Education. Mr Patterson was the only minister to be any use in DEFRA since it was ruined by the socialists and greens. His article was very revealing about government today.
richard verney:
Under Reason 12 of my paper http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/Reasons.pdf I have a graph showing UK wind electricity supply in Q2 of 2013, when the nameplate capacity was just over 7GW. The graph plainly shows the chaotic variation of the wind supply. Over the first half of 2013 I calculated that the UK wind supply was:
• below 82% capacity (5852MW) all of the time
• below 50% capacity (3568MW) for four-fifths of the time (79%)
• below 29% capacity (2043MW average load factor) for half of the time
• below 10% capacity (714MW) for over an eighth of the time (14%)
It is great to have a passionate and knowledgeable defender of the environment who is now in a position to be hugely effective - it is time to take on the people who only care about their image of each other - with such a narrow selfish view of what the environment is all about. "The Green Mob sprouts especially vigorously in Brussels" - is spot on!
Chris Smith put in a good word for Owen Paterson on the Today programme last month:
https://sites.google.com/site/mytranscriptbox/home/20140626_r4
Alex Cull - crikey ... that's a bit of an about turn by Smiffy from his previous sniping.
If Mr. Cameron wants to be truly subversive he could actually do no better than appoint Owen Paterson to Smiffy's now vacant sinecure as Chairman of The Environment Agency :-) yup, that'd cause some clucking in a lot of hen houses.
Yes, that would be fun.
richard verney/Doug Brodie
Do either of you have a source for nameplate capacity since May 2011?
I have the Gridwatch* data in an MS Access database apart from messing I haven't been able to do a great deal with it. It would be interesting to do a bit to answer the question in detail, if only for myself and the anti-aeolian group in these parts.
*The downloaded data only goes back to May 2011 but that's over 3 years.
SandyS:
Sorry, I don’t have that data. I only recorded it as it was reported on Neta bmreports over the first half of 2013 - a steady 7136MW (with very minor variations). Maybe the proprietor of Gridwatch could help you.
" Judge me by my opponents." What a phrase! I shall use it.
@ richard verney / Doug Brodie / Sandy S
I downloaded the June data from Gridwatch, and entered it into a spreadsheet (Open Office). It shows just how useless wind power can be during settled conditions. I wrote to my local paper with some extracts:
From a total metered capacity of 8403MW (taken from BM Reports) the output varied from a peak of 3117MW down to just 82MW. This represents a percentage of UK demand ranging from 12.69% to 0.22%
Wind supplied less than 10% of UK demand for 98.85% of the time, less than 5% of demand for 84.69% of the time, and less than 1% of demand for 11.46% of the time.
Unfortunately the total connected capacity is quite a bit more than BM Reports / Gridwatch have access to, as the smaller and individual sites aren't monitored. But there is no reason to think the overall performance would be much different, and would probably be even worse, as shorter masts and badly placed house mounted units will be getting less exposure to the wind.
the Green Blob..
...the mutually supportive network of environmental pressure groups, renewable energy companies and some public officials who keep each other well supplied with lavish funds, scare stories and green tape. This tangled triangle of unelected busybodies claims to have the interests of the planet and the countryside at heart, but it is increasingly clear that it is focusing on the wrong issues and doing real harm while profiting handsomely.
Doug Brodie
I found some data on Wiki and at http://www.ewea.org/fileadmin/files/library/publications/statistics/Wind_in_power_annual_statistics_2012.pdf which gives me year end data and there is pretty close agreement between the two.
It was utterly depressing to see this most effective of all ministers in the government dismissed and replaced by someone with no obvious aptitude for the job and who was indeed almost deselected from her own constituency.
One suggestion I have seen is that George Osborne recognised Owen Paterson's abilility and saw him, rightly, as potentially better Prime Ministerial potential than himself and hence pressed for his removal - speculation no doubt but as good an explanation as any.
Let's hope Owen Paterson can yet emerge from the wreckage and offer the leadership the country so badly needs.
Its only the Sunday Telegraph that reflects scepticism, via the excellent Booker, the Saturday column by Geoffrey Lean is like reading something from The Guardian, complete with True Believer preaching that CO2 caused the Somerset floods, and that Cameron simply must attend the next big UN shindig, the future of the planet is at stake, etc.
Dave Ward
With the same caveat that you have about incomplete data because of small suppliers. Also I've noticed a handful of lines of data seem a bit flaky, very low demand and zeroes in nuclear and coal so I've got to check those.
Using the data I have I got the following
Maximum %age of demand supplied by wind 22.4%
Minimum %age of demand supplied by wind 0%
Monthly Average of demand supplied by wind 1.74% to 10.9%
The output compared to installed base is a bit more tricky, as I only have year end data and increases have obviously been throughout the 12 months, doing it the way I have will make wind data a bit low for the installed base at the beginning of the year The numbers I have generated are for the slots from GridWatch with the max, min and average for each month, so there may only be one occurrence of each max and min during each month I haven't gone further yet.
The crude data looks like this
Monthly Minimum %age of wind output v Installed base 0%
Monthly Maximum %age of wind output v Installed base 52.18%
Monthly Average %age of wind output v Installed base 17.13% to 36.37%
My next step is to break the data down into hourly chucks and do a month hour summary, I anticipate a high percentage of wind supply to demand in the early hours.
The Telegraph is ra- ra- cheerleader for Cameron, but everyone can see through this transparency. In the Cameron puff-pieces by their in-house correspondents the readership let it be known in robust terms what they think of it in the comments threads where allowed. The Telegraph does at least to their credit allow some critical columns such as Booker and occasional critical commentary from typically 'Spectator mafia' type people like Charles Moore, but the general tendency is to try and limit it.
This rather childish behaviour is reflected in the placement of Paterson's broadside, which was not printed in the wide circulation Sunday paper edition, and was buried in the politics section of the online subscription only edition, with no comments allowed. Nevertheless, they printed it, and it will be read.
And he steams the greens to a pulp of wilted spinach.
that Anoneumouse mentions at 6.15pm probably cost the country enough to run to repay the national debt. What a shocking waste of our money.
Unfortunately, Dave is like a weather-vane, and Samantha is doing the blowing (as Humph might also have said!)...
Bob Ward probably should defer reading Patersons column. In the current climate, he could get so charged that he gets hit by lightning.
"Paterson was the only minister to be any use in DEFRA since it was ruined by the socialists and greens."
I don't disagree with your sentiment about Owen Paterson, but let's not forget that DEFRA was set up in the first place by the socialists, at the height of the foot and mouth scandal. It was a cynical move, to give the impression of absolving Blair's government from blame, by abolishing MAFF and wiping the slate clean (except, no doubt, with all of the same incompetent personnel still in place).
DECC, too, was a socialist creation, invented out of the ether by Gordon Brown, and run like a Whitehall Bedlam by Huhne and Davey, with the doctrinaire support of their highly politicised civil servants.
In other words, there has never been any sanity emerging from either institution. Paterson himself spoke sense as secretary of state, but probably only over the violent protests of the ideologues infesting the department.
A quote which links this article with the 'BBC and Nigel Lawson' one:
It really is hard to know how to get a grip on this. Why does anybody care what Vivienne Westwood has to say about anything except couture? And would she be so courted and feted if she was in favour of shale gas rather than opposed to it? And what is the basis (scientific or otherwise) on which she has reached the conclusion that shale gas is something she ought to be against?And why is it all right for ignorant (of the specific subject) people like Westwood to be allowed to give their inexpert views and wrong for people who do know what they are talking about (like Lawson) to give theirs?
Serious questions that sooner or later the BBC has to be called to answer.
Jul 21, 2014 at 9:12 AM | Registered CommenterMike Jackson
Mike,
Like many others, I also find this very baffling. One of the reasons I think vacuous celebrities get media attention on issues like global warming is that they push the perceived populist line as that is what gets them the publicity they crave. Another factor is that the populist line is almost always anti something with objections very easy to state in small, simplistic, soundbites. In contrast, the counter argument is usually a more nuanced and considered position which is very difficult to compress down to the short attention span required to engage the zealots. Even if you could do that they would choose to dismiss anything that doesn't reinforce their prejudice anyway.
That is only a theory of course but I have yet to collect any data that contradicts it!
I think what I find more frustrating than anything else is the behaviour of the likes of the RS who are giving fellowships to serial failures like Ehrlich and arrogant creeps like Lewandowsky when what we would expect of them is encouragement to investigate the science that underpins climate and the hypotheses of climate change, if only to reinforce the correctness of those hypotheses.
As it is we are told, on no authority (since the tellers refuse properly to explain either their hypothesis or their method) that this is so because "we" say it is so, so shut up, f*** off, and do what you're told. And what is worse is that those who are doing the telling are, by and large, no more qualified to pontificate on climate than I am.
And in the case of Ms Westwood, I would venture to say less so!
So why then didn't he vote against the criminally irresponsible climate change act? Ah yes I know - gesture politics: Green good, industry bad!
Trouble is that the voters don't give a stuff about climate policy and they would be actively against it if they knew how much it cost them. And what's more; the plebians are correct and the patricians are wrong, just as was the case with BSE, acid rain and a host of other science-free scares.
It's a huge indictment of our system that only the radical UKIP has even considered that UK energy policy might be a slow-motion car crash.
The Green Blob, what a wonderful name from Owen Paterson for Deben, Davey, Globe and all those NGO parasites.
I was aware that Globe, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and WWF all received funding from the EU, but to have it made Public by a Government (ex) Minister, should give the electorate some cause for concern at where our EU contributions go.
“The Green Blob sprouts especially vigorously in Brussels. The European Commission website reveals that a staggering 150 million euros (£119 million) was paid to the top nine green NGOs from 2007-13. European Union officials give generous grants to green groups so that they will lobby it for regulations that then require large budgets to enforce”
I could not find a Conservative MP speaking up in support of Owen Paterson, only Christopher Booker and the NFU.
Then I read the Guardian, where Damian Carrington invited all and sundry to besmirch Paterson’s time as Environment Secretary. His main rant was against Lord Lawson and the GWPF which unearths contrary scientific research and the fact that outside of Europe no one gives a tinkers cuss about CO² and supposed CAGW.
Paterson certainly got up the nose of Friends of the Earth’s energy and climate campaigner Guy Shrubsole and the Independant provided the platform for him and Greenpeace (nearly forgot Bob Ward) to vent their bile. The disclosure that the EU pays to be lobbied by them could get their payments cut-off or reduced.
"..demonstrating genetic modifications to rice to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of children in developing countries,.."
Sigh..
For the love of god..if your pro gm..dont mention or even allude to golden corn.
Golden rice has saved no one..it never happened..it never went on the market..there is not one published paper on it from the Golden Rice foundation..ask them..I did.
Pereten you dont understand that..I dont care.. :)
And, Drapetomania, please explain in a few words why Golden Rice hasn't gone on the market. Was it by any chance due to ridiculous objections from 'green' activists?