How to Starve Africa: Ask the European Green Party

Posted by Josh

I read this today on Risk-monger.com

There is a commonly shared neo-colonialist expression: The Europeans have the watches; the Africans have the time. Today, the European Green Party, with the support of countless environmentalist NGOs, proposed an initiative in the European Parliament to make Africa wait for at least another generation to be able to lift itself out of poverty.

It's a shocking read and ends:

A sad day for Africa

Today, in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, MEPs voted “overwhelmingly” by 577 MEPs, with only 24 against and 69 abstentions to accept the Green Party’s Heubuch Report and demand that the European Union stop funding the G8’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. It is with great hope that the world ignores this unfortunate act, considering it as a narrow-minded gesture towards appeasing a backward looking European green constituency.

In 2015, after 30 years of residence in the Brussels area, I became a Belgian citizen. Today, for the first time since officially becoming a European, I was ashamed of what ill-guided people in the European Parliament had done in the name of Europe. This act of selfish science denialism (with the potential for massive negative consequences) is no way for reasonable Europeans to act.

We need to let Africa have the chance to develop, not on our terms or demands, but on theirs. It is time to give Africans the watch and let them manage their affairs on their time, not ours.

Shame on Maria Heubuch and her band of eco-religious missionary zealots.

Shame on our MEPs too.  Read the whole thing here.

The liberal society and its publicly funded enemies

In my absence, readers will no doubt have been aware of the attempt by several noble peers of the realm to silence dissenting voices on climate change. Headed by Lord Krebs, they wrote to a letter to the Times with the normal mealy-mouthed line of "we are in favour of free speech but you shouldn't publish people who disagree with us".

Today, the Times publishes another letter from Lord Krebs:

Sir, Matt Ridley (”Climate change lobby wants to kill free speech”, Opinion, Apr 25) misses the point of the personal letter to the Editor of The Times that we signed with 11 other peers. The letter was not an attack on free speech and we clearly stated that a free press is essential for a healthy democracy.

Our point is that misleading stories on the science of climate change undermine the credibility of The Times. We expressed particular concern that the views of the Global Warming Policy Foundation appear to be unduly influential. That it was an adviser to GWPF who criticised us in your pages adds to our concern. 

The letter was discussed with several people, including the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, but it was from the 13 peers and not from anyone else. 

The admission of the involvement of the ECIU in the letter really does stink. Krebs is the chairman of the Adaptation Subcommittee of the Commmittee on Climate Change, and is therefore a paid government adviser. Lord Krebs and his gang of environmentalist chums are therefore doing their anti-liberal-society dirty work on the public payroll.

It seems to me that his position is entirely untenable. Amber Rudd should sack him.

Bob's funding feedback

The government's plans to stop grant recipients from using the taxpayer's largesse to lobby government has got the usual suspects all worked up: Bob Ward is his normal dismal form in the Guardian (Unknown funding blah! Check! Ideological blah! Check! Free-market blah! Check!).

Of course this is a prime example of a public-funded lobbyist lobbying using public funds to ensure that public funding of lobbyists continues.

It can't go on.

Settled science bites

Sceptics have often pointed out that if the science of global warming is "settled" then it's clearly not necessary to spend a fortune researching it. The government down under now seems to have taken this message on, announcing that jobs in the ocean/atmosphere divisions at CSIRO are to be slashed. Their reasoning could have come straight from the pages of this blog:

The cuts were flagged in November, just a week before the Paris climate summit began, with key divisions told to prepare lists of job cuts or to find new ways to raise revenue.

"Climate will be all gone, basically," one senior scientist said before the announcement.

 

In the email sent out to staff on Thursday morning, CSIRO's chief executive Larry Marshall indicated that, since climate change had been established, further work in the area would be a reduced priority. 

It was Lord May who said to Roger Harrabin "I'm the President of the Royal Society and I'm telling you that the science is settled". I wonder if he is reconsidering the wisdom of those remarks.

Suppressing the good news

Just before Christmas, Steve Milloy reported on his successful bid to get the email correspondence relating to an op-ed in the New York Times, ostensibly by Richard Spinrad of NOAA and Ian Boyd, the chief scientist at Defra. this was on the subject of ocean acidification and carried a fairly scary paragraph about what scientists were said to be observing:

Ocean acidification is weakening coral structures in the Caribbean and in cold-water coral reefs found in the deep waters off Scotland and Norway. In the past three decades, the number of living corals covering the Great Barrier Reef has been cut in half, reducing critical habitat for fish and the resilience of the entire reef system. Dramatic change is also apparent in the Arctic, where the frigid waters can hold so much carbon dioxide that nearby shelled creatures can dissolve in the corrosive conditions, affecting food sources for indigenous people, fish, birds and marine mammals. Clear pictures of the magnitude of changes in such remote ocean regions are sparse. To better understand these and other hotspots, more regions must be studied

Click to read more ...

DECC consistently misled public over electricity costs

An interesting tweet from former DECC chief scientist David Mackay yesterday:

.@paulyb2008 I agree, LCOE is an unhelpful metric. We need to think about whole-system cost.

— David MacKay FRS (@davidjcmackay) November 17, 2015

As readers here know, I have been quite strongly against the use of levelised costs (LCOE), referring to it as "the great levelised costs lie". It's therefore gratifying to see Mackay publicly agreeing with me.

Click to read more ...

Walport tour dates

Following on from his climate change tour in 2014, Mark Walport is hitting the road again, this time to talk about energy policy. All over the country nubile young environmentalists are going weak at the knees.

Over the next 6 months, Sir Mark Walport will tour the UK to talk about how we supply and use energy today, and the options we have for the future...

Sir Mark said:

The UK faces a series of choices about energy. We all require energy to live and our dependence on it is total. But how we supply energy and how we use it in the future needs to change. We need power that is secure, affordable and more than ever we need it to be sustainable.

When world leaders meet at the UN Conference on Climate Change in Paris this December, energy will be at the heart of the debate.

Details here.

A letter to the Foreign Secretary

Reader Alex Henney sends a copy of a letter that he has recently sent to Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond. It concerns our representative in Paris, Sir David King.

Dear Mr. Hammond,

Professor King and the Paris Conference of Parties

I write to object on several grounds to Professor King being UK climate representative at Paris.

The attached paper “The scientific flaws of the Committee on Climate Change and the expensive consequences” shows there is no need for significant concern about climate change.

Professor King knows very little about climate science and has a track record of naïve alarmism, if not semi hysteria:-

• In March 2004 he warned MPs that the Antarctic had already lost 40% of its ice and that the melting of the polar ice caps could cause a shift in the Gulf Stream which would lower temperatures in Britain and Europe by as much as 10°C.  In fact the sea ice in Antarctica is at record extent since satellite assessment started in 1979.  The IPCC does not rate the shift of the Gulf Stream as a likely risk

Click to read more ...

Just what is DFiD spending money on?

On a whim, I downloaded the monthly expenditure details from the Department for International Development for August 2015, the most recent figures available.

Of interest are payments to:

• ClientEarth £246,171 Aid programme
• Climate Policy Initiative £32,500 Project delivery
• WWF £371,860 Aid programme, Asia, Caribbean and Overseas Territories
• World Resources Institute £867,847 Aid programme grants,Policy division
• Solar Aid £239,875
• Environmental Investigation Agency £69,416 Aid programme grants, policy division

I don't know about you but you could get the impression that a great deal of what DFiD reports as overseas aid spending is actually bungs to environmentalists.

Update on Oct 29, 2015 by Bishop Hill

WWF seem to have been getting as much as £3-4m per year in the past. The figure above suggests that this has not changed much. Given what we know about WWF removing people from their homes to make way for wildlife (1, 2), you have to say that this is a pretty odd definition of "development".

The unmentionables

The BBC's decision to part company with the Met Office has provoked a great deal of comment over the weekend (and a cartoon or two as well). Returning to my desk this morning I expected that the story would have run out of legs, but it has just been given a new lease of life via the Today programme.

I've attached the audio file below. Justin Webb was discussing possible reasons for the the BBC's decision and he mentioned that some people had suggested that this might have something to do with the Met Office's stance on climate change. Given that the BBC is now arguably rather more alarmist than the Met Office, however, this seems somewhat counterintuitive.

To be fair it was just a throwaway comment, the aural equivalent of clickbait, and at least one bottom feeder has swallowed it whole.

Click to read more ...

Is there a backstory to the EPA pollution incident?

Further to the story that the EPA was responsible for a major pollution incident in Colarado a few days ago, Ivo Vegter posted a scan of a letter that was published in the local newspaper a few days before EPA started work. It's a bit hard to read, but well worth it if you can decipher sufficiently.

Environmental regulators trashing the environment

My concern over a massive discharge of polluted water into a river in Colorado is lightened at least slightly by the discovery that the culprit was the Environmental Protection Agency.

The city of Durango and La Plata County, Colorado, have declared a state of emergency after a federal cleanup crew accidentally released mine waste into the water.

An estimated 1 million gallons of waste water spilled out of an abandoned mine area in the southern part of the state last week, turning the Animas River orange and prompting the Environmental Protection Agency to tell locals to avoid it.

A deserving case, I would say.

EU sockpuppets

A few days ago, Universities UK set up its own campaign to support Britain's continuing membership of the European Union - another example of the abuse of state funding for political ends.

Daniel Hannan has responded with this rather amusing video about those, like UUK and our old muckers at Friends of the Earth, who are being so vocal about the necessity of keeping in with Brussels.

Gray lady

The BBC for once has published a story that could credibly be seen as justifying its taxpayer funding - a fascinating profile of the head of ethics at the Cabinet Office, Sue Gray. The misdeeds of civil servants is something of a theme at BH, but I was particularly interested in this story because as far as I can tell it was Ms Gray who cleared Lord Deben's appointment as head of the Committee on Climate Change despite knowing that he had a conflict of interest.

The story paints a picture of an over-powerful Whitehall official, who seems to operate with an almost total disregard for the law, particularly on FOI. This would not be the first time we have come across public sector officials behaving like this - recall for example the breaches of the law by UEA. Nor is it the first time we have noted the almost complete lack of any consequences suffered by the perpetrators.

Update on Jul 13, 2015 by Bishop Hill

There is a related story here.

Birthday honours?

The Queen's birthday honours list was out a couple of days ago and as I always I have scanned it looking for familiar names. There are no climatologists this year, but two names in particular stood out.

David Warrilow is the UK's long-term representative on the IPCC and has come to the attention of BH from time to time, although as I have noted in the past he is someone who operates very much in the shadows. BH readers did some research on him in the comments here, including Doug Keenan's recollection of a meeting between the two of them. Warrilow gets himself an OBE.

The other was Anne Glover, the former chief scientist at the EU, whose gradual descent into climate alarmism I have followed with interest. She becomes Dame Anne.

The only other one that struck me as being of interest was someone called David Surplus, the director of a renewable energy group in Northern Ireland, who is awarded an OBE. What a strange world, I thought, where it is considered honourable to achieve success through vigorous sucking at the taxpayer's teat.

Update on Jun 15, 2015 by Bishop Hill

In the comments, it is pointed out that David Kennedy, Lord Deben's former sidekick at the Committee on Climate Change, is also honoured.