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Bishop Hill Jul 29, 2015 Climate: Parliament Tim Yeo is suing the Sunday Times for libel over its "sting" operation and subsequent articles that alleged that Yeo was offering himself as a parliamentarian for hire.
Story here.
Bishop Hill Jul 27, 2015 Climate: Parliament The Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee has asked for suggestions of what they should do to hold the government to account in the coming session. Now shorn of any obviously sceptic members one assumes that the committee will simply be asking the government why they aren't making more futile and expensive gestures, but I don't suppose there is any harm in our putting some alternative ideas forward, if only so they can be ignored.
The obvious one to me is to look again at current energy policy in the light of the crash in oil prices, but perhaps readers would like to make some other suggestions. I'll compile the best ones into a letter to the committee.
Bishop Hill Jul 21, 2015 Climate: Parliament Amber Rudd is currently explaining DECC's priorities under the new regime. It's pretty snoozeworthy, and the members of the committee are not exactly excelling themselves in asking probing questions, but a few points of interest are coming out:
Bishop Hill Jul 8, 2015 Climate: Parliament Energy: grid Energy: wind So, rather remarkably, George Osborne has decided to knock away some of the props holding up the leaky old edifice that is the renewable energy industry. It seems that subsidy junkies will soon no longer be able to claim exemption from the climate change levy. Gratifyingly, the bigwigs at RenewableUK say that it is "a punitive measure for the clean energy sector" and if ever there was a sector that needed a bit of punishment it is green energy, which would have no existence at all were it not for the money extracted from poor consumers that they have persuaded politicians to hand over.
However, some of our green friends seem relieved that it wasn't worse. In particular the Levy Control Framework, which specifies an ever-rising amount that energy companies can extract from consumers in order to meet the requirements of government policy, is set to remain, although some reckon it could be reviewed later in the year.
The markets seem quite sure that this is going to hit the renewables sector quite hard, with Drax shares collapsing, but what it means for consumer prices is anyone's guess. Until the whole machinery of energy sector intervention is torn down, we will never know.
Bishop Hill Jul 6, 2015 Climate: Parliament The following are the Conservative members of the Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee, together with some quotes that should help readers place them. Should we assume that no further scrutiny of this area of policy is intended?
Antoinette Sandbach:
“Biodiversity loss and climate change are clearly happening, and we need to ensure that policy making in this area is science-based and practically focused, rather than endless legislation going through the Welsh Assembly, which sounds good but achieves less than proper and focused policymaking would.”
Bishop Hill Jul 2, 2015 Climate: Parliament Results are coming through for the election of committee members for the Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee.
As well as the SNP chairman, we now have:
Which means Graham Stringer is no more. No sign of the Conservative members yet.
Bishop Hill Jul 1, 2015 Climate: Parliament Deben Greens Many of the metropolitan chatterati are getting their knickers in a twist this morning over the expansion of London airport capacity. Deep-green Tory MP Zac Goldsmith is threatening to resign his seat in protest over the official Airports Commission decision to go with a third runway at Heathrow.
While the commission has been working away, its chairman Howard Davies has engaged in some interesting correspondence with Lord Deben. I was particularly struck by this letter from Lord D in which he specifies the level of carbon emissions that the aviation industry will be permitted to make:
Bishop Hill Jun 25, 2015 Climate: Parliament
Updated on Jun 25, 2015 by
Bishop Hill
There was a wonderful comedy answer from Lord Bourne to a question from Matt Ridley in the Lords yesterday. Ridley was inquiring about the abatement costs of various renewable energy technologies and was told this:
...based on support provided through the renewables obligation, the estimated abatement cost in 2014 was £65 per tonne of carbon dioxide for onshore wind, £121 for offshore wind and £110 for solar PV.
Bishop Hill Jun 24, 2015 Climate: Parliament Climate: WG3 I've always had my suspicions about the way that energy efficiency is presented as an easy way of reducing carbon emissions. For a start there's the Jevons paradox: the observation that efficiency gains tend to lead consumers towards enhanced performance. In other words, as houses become more efficient we tend to keep them much warmer. Being someone who lives in a cool (or even cold house) and wears jumpers all the time, I find modern houses stiflingly hot, but most people are much happier to wear shorts and t-shirts indoors.
But even leaving this kind of thing aside, whenever I have done the sums on my own house I've always come to the conclusion that investment in energy efficiency is not going to provide a good return. It's therefore interesting to see that my back-of-a-fag-packet calculations seem valid across the board. A new, and by the looks of it carefully controlled study of homes in the USA has found that the much touted gains from energy efficiency measures are actually relatively small and certainly less than the cost of installation
Bishop Hill Jun 18, 2015 Climate: Parliament Energy: wind I thought for a moment I was reading the thoughts of Barry Cryer on windfarms, but it actually turned out to be Barry Gardiner, MP for Brent and fervent adherent to the green cause:
Great explanation by Gordon McDougal on Today Prog about how low cost clean onshore wind's flexibility adds real value to the grid.
I'm thinking that onshore wind's "flexibility" must rank alongside the Pope's Calvinism and the tendency of bears to seek out hygienic toilet facilities as one of the more hilarious propositions to have attracted my attention in recent years.
Bishop Hill Jun 17, 2015 Climate: Parliament Greens There were feisty exchanges in the Lords this afternoon, when questions were asked about the intended action on climate change. At one point the house appears to send Lord Deben off with a flea in his ear for trying to jump the queue on Matt Ridley.
Ridley has a question at 15:12, asking the minister for his preferred estimate of climate sensitivity in the light of all the recent papers that find that it is low. The minister's response is, rather confusingly, that he disagrees.
The later question on neonicotinoids is equally amusing. The fun is again prompted by a Ridley question, this time about whether honey bee numbers have actually increased since neonics were introduced. The response from the government is that neonics are dangerous to animals. Even those surrounding the poor minister appear amused at the poor quality of his flannel.
Bishop Hill Jun 15, 2015 Bureaucrats Climate: IPCC Climate: Parliament DECC Energy: other 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.
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.
Bishop Hill Jun 11, 2015 Climate: Parliament This speech from David TC Davies in the Commons yesterday was quite unusual in that the speaker seemed to have actually studied what the IPCC and other scientists have to say.
Bishop Hill Jun 9, 2015 Climate: Parliament The SNP have, you will recall, been allocated the chairmanship of the Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee and they have now put forward their "candidate" to sit in that role: Western Isles MP Angus MacNeil. His background is interesting: as an engineer he might be expected to have at least a small clue about energy projects, although his support for renewables seems pretty unwavering. That, I suppose, we should put down to pork-barrel politics.
His record on climate is patchy, however, having voted for the Climate Change Act, but having managed to absent himself from several more recent votes that touch on the subject. We will wait and see, if more in hope than expectation.
Bishop Hill Jun 8, 2015 Climate: Parliament GWPF The news that DECC minister Amber Rudd is to meet with Nigel Lawson in the near future is intriguing. After years of DECC bigwigs refusing to meet anyone who wasn't an environmentalist or attached firmly to the taxpayer's teat (or preferably both), one can only wonder what civil servants are making of it all. You can almost picture the horror on the faces of the Whitehall greens.
Rare though it may be, one should not expect too much from such an occasion. Ms Rudd seems quite clear that she is seeking to persuade Lawson of her views rather than trying to learn anything. And as we know from the Slingo correspondence from 2010, the climate bureaucracy sees its role as rebutting anything Lawson says. One therefore assumes that Ms Rudd's staff will be particularly attentive in the hours and days after Lawson leaves the premises.
