Sex and the Guardian

As sure as the sun rises every morning, the Guardian's front page will be a mass of distortions, misdirections and misconceptions. Today's effort is about fossil fuels again, and claims that they are "subsidised" to the tune of $10m a minute. Read a little further, and you discover that when they say "subsidy" they mean something rather different.

The vast sum is largely due to polluters not paying the costs imposed on governments by the burning of coal, oil and gas. These include the harm caused to local populations by air pollution as well as to people across the globe affected by the floods, droughts and storms being driven by climate change.

In similar fashion, you can be fairly sure that when the Guardian says "black" it means what people usually refer to as "white", "yes" probably means "no", and that when a Guardian journalist tells you that he "didn't have sex with that woman" the truth is probably entirely indecent.

A comfortable chat

Lord Stern was on the Today programme this morning, for a chat about his views on saving the planet. The rottweiler John Humphrys suddenly came over all lapdog.

Strictly for the dedicated.

Stern Today prog

The shonky cost of carbon

A new paper has appeared in Nature Climate Change which puts a social cost of global warming at $200 per ton of carbon dioxide. The authors are Frances Moore and Delavane Diaz of Stanford.

The SCC is of course is a figure that greens can manipulate pretty much to their hearts' content - witness Frank Ackerman's hilarious $1000 figure of a few years back. The entertainment comes in working out what particular dodges have been pulled to hike the figure upwards and the new paper explains that it is picking up on an earlier study by Dell et al, which sought to make revised estimates of the damage that climate change would cause by examining the effect of short-term fluctuations in the weather on economic output.

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Silent economics

Updated on Mar 16, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Updated on Mar 16, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute, is up in arms today about an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by the Conservative peer Matt Ridley. Ridley's article, which extolled the virtues of fossil fuels, attracted Schmidt's ire because of one sentence in particular:

The next time that somebody at a rally against fossil fuels lectures you about her concern for the fate of her grandchildren, show her a picture of an African child dying today from inhaling the dense muck of a smoky fire.

Schmidt has variously described this statement as "totally abhorrent" and "asinine".

Conflating climate change concerns w/a disregard for African children dying from smoke inhalation by @mattwridley is totally abhorrent.

— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) March 14, 2015

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Carneyform waffle

Yesterday, the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee took evidence from Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, who has shown himself keen to use his position to promote his environmentalist ideology.

A review of the transcript shows Carney be a consummate politician, able to waffle at any length necessary in order to have to answer a question. I'm therefore going to paraphrase one particular exchange that I think is revealing.

Nigel Lawson: You have said that insurance companies are at risk of having their fossil fuel investments becoming stranded because carbon policies will eliminate demand. But the IEA say that demand for fossil fuels is going to go up. Explain.

Mark Carney: It is important for us to warn the insurance market. There might be a risk.

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Another line for Gordon's political epitaph

Having used his time in office to slap a supertax on the oil industry, Gordon Brown is now demanding massive state intervention to fend off the collapse of the North Sea drilling industry:

He is suggesting a number of measures that he said could help the industry, including;

• A North Sea reserve to maintain and upgrade essential infrastructure and to provide "last-resort" debt finance for companies who want to keep fields open.
• UK government co-investment through public-private partnerships.
• Government loans.
• And advance purchase agreements.

Mr Brown said: "In the most extreme cases, to avoid the field being mothballed in its entirety, the government could go into partnership for a take-over of the field.

"If it is temporarily abandoned, the government should act to ensure that sometime in the future it is possible to come back and exploit the oil.

To be fair, the situation has not been helped by low oil prices, but I think it's fair to say that the political establishment had pretty much done for the North Sea already. That, I suppose, needs to be added to the list of misdemeanours on several political epitaphs, including the particularly lengthy list of Mr Brown's.

Climate rhetoric

The ongoing war of words over Richard Tol's summary of the various estimates of the costs of climate change seems to have come to an end, with the Journal of Economic Perspectives publishing another revision to the paper. The key change is in Fig 1, which previously looked like this:

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Valuing "subsidies"

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the report by the Overseas Development Institute and Oil Change International, which claimed implausibly that the UK was delivering considerable subsidies to the oil industry.

Since then, I have been having a useful exchange of emails with Sam Pickard, one of the report's authors in which I attempted to understand how these figures had been arrived at. Sam pointed me to the section in the report on definitions of subsidies (p.23-27), which turns out to be four pages of masterly obsfuscation in which they never really quite get round to explaining how they define a subsidy.

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Green charades

On Wednesday, the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee is to hold a one-day inquiry into a report published by Lord Stern's New Climate Economy project (NCE) and will take evidence from Stern himself, as well as Jeremy Oppenheim, an economist from McKinsey and Co who is involved in the project.

According to its website, NCE is a joint initiative of the governments of seven countries, including the UK - no doubt this is Mr Davey's work then. A glance at the people involved suggests that it is one of those charades in which a panel of green activists selected from universities around the world  pretends that they have taken an objective look at the subject at hand before faithfully delivering up the required message.

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Green disinformation: worse than we thought

The other day, I mentioned a report by a pair of NGOs on the subject of fossil fuel subsidies, noting that the usual suspects in the mainstream media had failed to mention that in the UK oil companies are subject to a supertax on top of the Corporation Tax to which all companies in the country are subject.

It now seems that the report was even more misleading than we thought.

The report by Oil Change International is a complete distortion of facts. The authors have described as “subsidies” normal deductions of expenses and capital costs from revenues for calculation of taxable income. These are procedures which are followed in all fiscal systems in all countries for all forms of business and investment endeavors. Under normal definitions of “subsidy” the United States has no subsidies for the oil and gas industry which is why Obama has taken no steps to reduce them.

I wonder if Roger Harrabin is going to investigate?

Another disinformation frenzy

Another day, another wave of environmentalist disinformation mindlessly regurgitated by the mainstream media. This time the great green propaganda machine is looking at a report by a pair of NGOs concerning what it calls "subsidies" to oil companies.

The UK Government is providing £750m a year in tax breaks to North Sea oil and gas, despite a pledge five years ago to end fossil fuel subsidies, campaigners said.

A further £414m in public money is going into fossil fuel exploration overseas — from Siberia in Russia to Brazil, India and Nigeria — a report by the Overseas Development Institute and Oil Change International said.

So once again we have the old canard about removal of double taxation being a "subsidy", repeated without question by STV and old BH friends like the Herald's Rob Edwards, the BBC's Roger Harrabin, and of course the Guardian.

Not one of them mentions the double taxation that is charged to oil companies. Not one.

Update on Nov 11, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Remarkably, the Carbon Brief's coverage is less biased in a green direction than the BBC's.

DECC doesn't know the cost of carbon

A clearer admission that that DECC doesn't know its derriere from its demand side balancing reserve is hard to imagine. Junior minister Amber Rudd has ducked a simple request from Graham Stringer MP for the value of the cost of carbon emissions that it uses in formulating policy.

Graham Stringer: To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, what the social cost per tonne of emitted carbon his Department uses to judge the cost benefit of energy policies.

Amber Rudd (The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State) The Department for Energy and Climate Change has indicated that it will not be possible to answer this question within the usual time period. An answer is being prepared and will be provided as soon as it is available.

The cost of carbon emissions is supposed to be the figure by which everything that happens within DECC is judged. That they don't even know it shows clearly that the department is completely rudderless.

But we knew that.

The Old Lady of Eco Street

The Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney first came to the attention of BH readers when, at the time of his appointment, it was noted that his wife Diana was (and is) a fervent supporter of the green movement (and redistribution as well as being against conspicuous consumption).

It's therefore interesting to read today that Mr Carney has told a World Bank seminar that fossil fuels must remain unused:

Mark Carney has re-emphasised his support for the idea that oil companies’ reserves could be stranded assets – still valued by investors, but ultimately going to embody losses.

“The vast majority of reserves are unburnable,” the Bank of England governor said – if the world is to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Thinking of hydrocarbon deposits as stranded assets has gained prominence in recent years, helped by movements like the US student drive to persuade university endowments to disinvest from fossil fuel companies.

Apparently Mr Carney wants companies to report more holistically on their business strategy and "how it relates to stakeholders of all kinds, now and in the future...[so that] all groups can express their view, and influence the allocation of capital and credit today".

Given Mrs Carney's views on equality, and Mr Carney's views on outsiders giving their opinions on allocation of private assets, could the Carney family please allocate some of their (considerable) capital to mine?

Hardtalking with Stern

Nicholas Stern was on the BBC's Hardtalk show, being grilled by Zeinab Badawi about his recent report.

For a BBC journalist, Badawi did not too bad a job of taking potshots at Stern, with ammunition apparently sourced from Richard Tol. I was amused when she called Stern a "climate lobbyist", before correcting herself.

Stern himself was deeply unimpressive, with the mannerisms and delivery of a minor council official rather than a great academic sage and, as Pielke Jr notes on Twitter, constantly resorting to namedropping rather than rational argument.  I was struck also by his allegation that Tol builds his conclusions into his economic models. This struck me as quite a strong thing to say.

Green jobs disappear

Paul Homewood has discovered, via an FOI request, that the government has decided to quietly shelve its green jobs dataset. Paul surmises, surely correctly, that the promised green jobs have not actually materialised.

I have often noted that to the extent that green jobs are created, the related technologies will be expensive. Mr Davey's great economic breakthrough is to burden the country with technologies that are both expensive, disfunctional, and do not actually create much employment at all.

He has broken the mould.