The green nexus

Here's an interesting story from the other side of the pond:

Internal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) emails show extensive collaboration between top agency officials and leading environmentalist groups, including overt efforts to coordinate messaging and pressure the fossil fuel industry.

The emails, obtained by the Energy and Environment Legal Institute (EELI) through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, could fuel an ongoing controversy over EPA policies that critics say are biased against traditional sources of energy.

I've little doubt that similar things go on in the UK.

Mackay and King on shale

David Mackay, chief scientist at DECC, and David King, Foreign Secretary's climate change adviser will give evidence to the Lords' Economic Affairs Committee on shale gas this afternoon at 3:30pm. The video will appear below.

King says Met Office has it all wrong

Climate models provide a broad range of projections about changes in storm track and frequency of storms. While there’s currently no evidence to suggest that the UK is increasing in storminess, this is an active area of research under the national climate capability.

The Met Office, a couple of days ago.

"The important thing to get across is the simple notion that storms and severe weather conditions that we might have expected to occur once in 100 years, say, in the past may now be happening more frequently," he told BBC Radio 5 Live.

Sir David King, yesterday

OK, so he didn't say so in as many words, but he clearly thinks that there is evidence of an increase in storminess in the UK. The Met Office is unequivocal that there is none.

Who is right?

Calculated ambiguity

Take a look at the transcript of John Beddington's appearance on the Today programme a couple of days ago. It a masterful performance, replete with insinuation and devoid of explicit statements.

But what we have - what we can expect to see is an increasing frequency of extreme events.

That was neat wasn't it? Are we seeing an increased frequency of extreme events or is this just something that is seen in at the bottom of the climate teapot?

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The bureaucracy's media defenders

The news this morning is that the Environment Agency is going to cut 1500 jobs in a bid to cut costs. In response. the mainstream media are beating their breasts and wailing about impending disaster. But there are flood warnings in force! Storm warnings! It's as if the whole metropolitan media elite are leaping to the defence of the public sector workers.

This news does, however, give me an opportunity to link to Inside the Environment Agency, a blog set up by agency insiders to expose the corruption, inefficiency and graft that goes on inside the agency. It's an amazing read and I thoroughly recommend it.

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Tax-funded recessionmongers

The Tyndall Centre's Radical Emissions Reduction conference has garnered quite a lot of attention in recent days, and I'm pleased to say that slides and audio of the presentations are now available.

When watching these, it's important to remember that these lunatics are paid for out of your taxes. Such a thing is barely comprehensible in times of plenty, but when the public finances are in the appalling state they are, when people everywhere are struggling to pay their bills, when we are in danger of the lights going out, it seems almost criminal for the government to be paying for a bunch of unreconstructed teen revolutionaries to fly from all corners of the globe to talk about how to make things worse.

And I'm not being sarcastic here. These people want permanent recession.

What is David Willetts thinking of when he lets this situation continue? Does he think this is an acceptable use of taxpayers' money? Does he want the Conservative vote to migrate en masse to UKIP?

Top climate official likely to be jailed

You have to laugh - one of the US Environmental Protection Agency's top officials, and the man at the head of its climate change work, spent much of his time at home enjoying himself. He told staff at the agency that he was working for the CIA.

This story was apparently accepted without demur by top brass at the agency:

Beyond Beale’s individual fate, his case raises larger questions about how he was able to get away with his admitted fraud for so long, according to federal and congressional investigators. Two new reports by the EPA inspector general’s office conclude that top officials at the agency “enabled” Beale by failing to verify any of his phony cover stories about CIA work, and failing to check on hundreds of thousands of dollars paid him in undeserved bonuses and travel expenses -- including first-class trips to London where he stayed at five-star hotels and racked up thousands in bills for limos and taxis.

Read the whole thing.

The unscrupulous led by the incompetent. You can see how we have ended up in the fix we are in.

The great eco-cesspit

The big climate and energy story this morning is David Rose's splash on the eco-policy cesspit - the mob of greedy politicians, greedy lobbyists, greedy civil servants and greedy greens who are all enriching themselves at public expense.

Four of nine-person Climate Change Committee, official watchdog that dictates green energy policy, are, or were until recently, being paid by firms that benefit from committee decisions.

A new breed of lucrative green investment funds, which were set up to expand windfarm energy, are in practice a means of taking green levies paid by hard-pressed consumers and handing them to City investors and financiers.

£3.8 billion of taxpayers’ money funds the new Green Investment Bank, set up by the Department of Business and Skills. One of its biggest deals involved energy giant SSE selling windfarms to one of the new green funds, Greencoat Wind. The Green Investment Bank’s chairman, Lord Smith of Kelvin, is also chairman of SSE. The bank says it ‘provided expertise’ to enable BIS to take a £50 million stake in Greencoat, which helped fund the SSE sale.

The same bank’s chief executive, Shaun Kingsbury, is one of the UK’s highest-paid public sector employees. His £325,000 salary is more than twice the Prime Minister’s.

Firms lobbying for renewables can virtually guarantee access to key Government policy-makers, because they are staffed by former very senior officials – a striking example of Whitehall’s ‘revolving door’.

Standards in public life. Don't make me laugh.

Let them eat equality

The Oxford Martin School has appointed a "commission" of environmentalists to gaze at the future and come up with all sorts of plans to deal with it.

Deja vu.

The results were presented in a joint lecture by Martin Rees and Sir John Beddington last week and a video of the event is now available here. In it, we learn that the commissioners are proposing a cornucopia of new international bureaucracies, that some of them have a bit of a soft spot for totalitarian regimes (no short-termism, you see) and that they have decided that Lord Stern was right about low discount rates. This last one is not a surprise given that Lord Stern was in fact one of the commissioners.

Click to read more ...

Green jobs: £1 million each

Stephen Lovegrove is the permanent secretary at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, although when hearing him speak about his work one could sometimes be forgiven for mistaking him for, say, someone from Greenpeace. Take his speech to the Concito conference in Denmark a few weeks ago for example.

For a start, Concito describes itself as a green think tank. One therefore wonders why a politically neutral civil servant is lending his support to environmentalists - who are nothing if not a political movement - in this way. And then read the text of the speech and try to work out whether this is a politically neutral civil servant putting government policy into action or a fully paid up member of the green movement:

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Sounds a bit off

Last week I discussed the work of Mike Stigwood on windfarm noise and the fact that the windfarm lobby had managed to nobble the Institute of Acoustics inquiry into the issue.

Today, a report in the Telegraph not only provides some confirmation of Stigwood's story, but also reveals that the green lobby's attempts to corrupt the policy process went even further than that. It seems that they also gained access to DECC officials and, a cynic might think, managed to get them to alter the official guidance on windfarm noise.

Internal energy department emails released following a freedom of information request show the lobby group met ministry officials, after which it was assured that “the majority of R-UK’s input” was “reflected in the guidance”.

Both the Government and the report’s author said last night that RenewableUK had not influenced the advice, but the emails raise new questions about the Coalition’s openness over its wind farm policy.

 The FOI request on which this story was based is here. 

[Update:the FOI reveals that DECC were using a wind-industry acoustician, from RES].

The nature of scientific advice

Writing in Nature yesterday, David Spiegelhalter and two other eminent scientists tried to explain to ministers how to understand the advice they get from scientists. It ranges from the worthy (No measurement is exact; Bigger is usually better for sample size) to the much racier (Bias is rife; Scientists are human). It's hard to disagree with any of this although I'm not sure that it really portrays the problems with academia as a reliable source of advice for policymakers.

For example, when the authors tell the reader that scientists are human and that peer review is fallible, you get no sense of the failings uncovered by controlled studies of peer review (as described in The Hockey Stick Illusion), which suggest that it is nearly useless for ensuring that the conclusions of a paper are correct (although that obviously doesn't prevent peer review being useful as a way of improving a paper).

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Boudreaux says no

The economist Don Boudreaux writes to the New York Times about the latest scare doing the rounds of the left-wing media.

You report that "Climate change will pose sharp risks to the world’s food supply in coming decades" ("Climate Change Seen Posing Risk to Food Supplies," Nov. 2) - with the premise that this impending calamity requires aggressive government curtailment or modification of industrial capitalist activities.

Color me skeptical. Wherever industrial capitalism has flourished over the past three centuries it has eliminated for the first time in human history the millennia-long curse of recurrent famines. Today, food is in short supply only in societies without market institutions and cut off from global trade. (The people suffering the greatest risk now of fatal shortages of food are true locavores, such as the North Koreans and the Somalis.) Relatedly, some of the worst famines in modern times - most notably, in Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China - have been caused by the hubris of government officials curtailing market forces with command-and-control regulations.

The greatest risk to the world's food supply is not the industrial capitalist activities that environmentalists are keen to curtail. Rather, the greatest risk is the trust that many currently well-fed westerners blithely put in government to rein in the only force in human history that has proven successful at eliminating starvation: market-driven capitalism.

Looking at what government planning has done to the energy market in the UK, you can see his point.

On advice to government

Updated on Oct 15, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Updated on Dec 11, 2013 by Bishop Hill

In the email this morning I find a copy of the presentation Sir Mark Walport will give to the cabinet today, purportedly on the subject of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report. It's a pretty interesting read (see bottom of post for link), although in fact when you get into it there is very little about what the IPCC had to say.

It starts unexceptionably enough, with a slide about surface temperature warming, including not only the IPCC's "Let's hide the pause behind decadal averages" graph, but also the annual averages. 

Click to read more ...

Flannery flung out

New Australian PM Tony Abbott has got straight down to the job of cleaning the Augean stables of public sector sinecures. Top of the list seems to have been Tim Flannery, the head of the Climate Commission.

PROFESSOR Tim Flannery has been sacked by the Abbott Government from his $180,000-a-year part-time Chief Climate Commissioner position, with the agency he runs to be dismantled immediately.

Environment Minister Greg Hunt called Prof Flannery this morning to tell him a letter formally ending his employment was in the mail.

Good things happen when conservatives are in power.