Bishop Hill Rhubarb to save us from global warming
May 28, 2015 Economics Ambrose Evans Pritchard's latest effort in the Telegraph is very long but rather amusing in the way that it repeats every utterance of the greens without question.
An astonishing report - blandly titled "How Large Are Global Energy Subsidies" - alleges that the fossil nexus enjoys hidden support worth 6.5pc of world GDP.
This will amount to $5.7 trillion in 2015, mostly due to environmental costs and damage to health, and mostly stemming from coal. The World Health Organisation - also on cue - has sharply revised up its estimates of early deaths from fine particulates and sulphur dioxide from coal plants.
Right on cue indeed! One wonders whether the possibility that he was merely a conduit for a political PR campaign ever crossed AEP's mind. Then again, as you read all the garbage he has introduced into his article, you have to wonder if it is not a role that he is wholeheartedly embracing. Elon Musk! Four degrees! Rhubarb powered batteries! It's mindblowing.
Reader Comments (66)
Ron C, interesting article. Why would a scientist get a 'hostile reception' for presenting data at a conference?
I like Ambrose. He tells me all sorts of things I didn’t know culled from all sorts of sources I don’t read.
Mind you, I used to like George Monbiot for the same reason.
geoffchambers
If you had gone to public school, you would know the difference between an African and a European swallow too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV0tCphFMr8&list=RDcV0tCphFMr8
Esmif should recall the dfference between a European swallow and a population bomb
http://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2015/05/its-never-too-late-to-reenlist-in-war.html
Russell
You sound like a cool, libreal kind of dude. You will love my website.
Cap and trade may be the biggest transfer of wealth from poor to rich in history.
http://www.scrapthetrade.com/intro
Russell
Naomi Klein is a cool and libreal kind of dude, too. What a great little book The Shock Doctrine - rise of disaster capitalism was. I'm sure you would agree with this.
Naomi Klein: 'Big green groups are more damaging than climate deniers'
Well, I think there is a very a deep denialism in the environmental movement among the Big Green groups. And to be very honest with you, I think it's been more damaging than the right-wing denialism in terms of how much ground we've lost. Because it has steered us in directions that have yielded very poor results. I think if we look at the track record of Kyoto, of the UN Clean Development Mechanism, the European Union's emissions trading scheme – we now have close to a decade that we can measure these schemes against, and it's disastrous. Not only are emissions up, but you have no end of scams to point to, which gives fodder to the right.
The right took on cap-and-trade by saying it's going to bankrupt us, it's handouts to corporations, and, by the way, it's not going to work. And they were right on all counts. Not in the bankrupting part, but they were right that this was a massive corporate giveaway, and they were right that it wasn't going to bring us anywhere near what scientists were saying we needed to do lower emissions
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/sep/10/naomi-klein-green-groups-climate-deniers
I used to be a libreal, New age, Vegan, ultra leftie myself until I saw 'Dances with Wolves'. After 3 hours of Costner I wanted to scalp every darned Injun and every last libreal to the left of J Edgar Hoover.
I know what the greenies are up to: They just want to leave as much fossil fuel in the ground as possible for our children's children to exploit as the pause becomes a plunge...
Fossil subsidies! Dang, certainly they must be ended asap. Where are they hiding?
.....
Ah ...
Actually ... seems in greenspeak, subsidy 'means' : (very much alleged) spillover cost.
Got it now.
NNC1701C
Agh up lad, my beautiful wife of many happy years comes from 'ull on 'umber.
It's bad enough that the Tigers got relegated and that Hull F C and my favourites Hull Kingston Rovers are propping up the league. But when you say that Jonnie 2 Jags came from Hull you go too far. Ok he was a parachuted-in MP for Hull.
In fact he was a ships Barsteward from Manchester and the Hull people were stupid enough to vote for him and his septic policies.
As regards Hull sinking, well that's a different kettle of herrings.
Where we live on the east coast of Angus, the local older generation of fishermen assure me that the sea level is falling!
In actuality what is happening is the recovery from the last ice age burden of ice is causing the land to rise to something like it's previous level.
Live long and prosper
I'm watching Top Gear on Dave and May and Clarkson testing Electric Cars.
Electric Cars ,oh dear so sad.
Rhubarb powered batteries? Did that idea come from a lost chapter of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels?
He has been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.
Gulliver's Travels: part 3 chapter 5
http://www.literaturepage.com/read/gulliverstravels-149.html
"The World Health Organisation - also on cue - has sharply revised up its estimates of early deaths from fine particulates and sulphur dioxide from coal plants."
Predcitable as always. I await the "virtual" body count with bated breath, not! Like tobacco, the numbers will vary wildy, then they will double, triple, quadruple in short succession, with various excuses as to why they didn't get it "right" the first time. Deja vue! If memory serves, the tobacco death toll was stating something along the lines of "that people were dying prematurely, in their 70s & 80s!". Prematutrely in the 70s & 80s? For goodness sake, with a large proportion of the elderly in their 70s & 80s living very poor qualities of life suffering from senility & all the indignity that that brings with it, it should be considered a relief, even if it was true!
A cool liberal dude like Esmif ought to broaden his reading .
http://reason.com/archives/2008/07/23/carbon-based-prohibition
Thank you Russell. Very informative as you implied.