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.

A strange convergence of interests

 

The Telegraph reports that complaints have been made to the Charities Commission about green NGOs campaigning on Brexit. 

The charities watchdog will on Monday issue new guidance on political neutrality after Friends of the Earth, The Wildlife Trusts and Greenpeace all made public comments backing EU membership.

The charities have all insisted that Britain being a member of the EU is vital to protecting Britain’s wildlife - with one suggesting that those backing Brexit want to make the country “the dirty man of Europe”.

The author of the piece, political correspondent Ben Riley Smith, seems to have missed the fact that Friends of the Earth and the Wildlife Trusts are heavily funded by the EU.

The energy case for Brexit

UKIP makes the case that the EU is wrecking the UK energy supply, making it expensive and unreliable. This a party political piece rather than something designed for the Brexit campaign per se.

There were certainly some commenters on my earlier EU thread who thought that British pols were green-minded enough to trash the energy system in this country without any help from Brussels, which in some ways is the case that UKIP are making here.

Would Brexit allow us to escape the clutches of the green blob?

So it's all very exciting. We're finally going to get a referendum on the EU. 

Now the EU hasn't been a regular topic of this blog since the distant time before I started to specialise in climate and energy matters, but we can at least wonder about what Brexit might mean for the green blob.

It seems reasonable to assume that it would be a bitter blow for those fake charities like Friends of the Earth who campaign to order on behalf of the Brussels bureaucracy - witness the wads of cash that are sent FoE's way, and their sudden interest in air quality at around the time that Brussels issued its new standards.

It's also interesting to wonder whether an independent UK would stick with absurd Brussels recycling targets and renewables targets and directives on flood management and so on. I'm sure readers can suggest further examples. 

I don't think Brexit would be a panacea - EU membership has given us the green blob and there is now a huge vested interest that will fight tooth and nail to keep their rents. 

But at least, with Brexit, we might be in with a chance.

The EU's role in the floods

With a bit of luck, BH readers should by now have worked off the excesses of Christmas and be ready to return to the fray.

With flooding back in the news, I thought it might be useful to point readers to this very interesting piece from a couple of weeks ago, which considers the European Union's role in causing the floods.

[I]n order to comply with the obligations imposed on us by the EU we had to stop dredging and embanking and allow rivers to ‘re-connect with their floodplains’, as the currently fashionable jargon has it.

And to ensure this is done, the obligation to dredge has been shifted from the relevant statutory authority (now the Environment Agency) onto each individual landowner, at the same time making sure there are no funds for dredging. And any sand and gravel that might be removed is now classed as ‘hazardous waste’ and cannot be deposited to raise the river banks, as it used to be, but has to be carted away.

And all paid for by you.

Mackay bashes EU energy policy

David Mackay is in the headlines this morning, having described the EU Green Energy Directive as "scientifically illiterate" in a forthcoming episode of Costing the Earth.  He takes a potshot Ed Miliband for the foolishness of his policy decisions. Excerpts were included in the Today programme this morning, alongside a response from Ed Davey, who comes over very badly in my opinion.

Inevitably a BBC journalist - Tom Feilden - has tried to spin Mackay's comments as an attack on the government. Fortunately Mackay has corrected him - given that the current government was not mentioned at all in the Today programme, Feilden was not even allowing himself a level of plausible deniability, which was a bit daft, even by BBC standards of shamelessness. The offending tweet has now been removed.

dr @davidjcmackay already responded to this tweet @TomFeilden.y did you delete & repost w/o correcting? https://t.co/ZaxTvbwNLo #science #uk

— Gagan Sidhu (@thebrolster) November 17, 2015

The Today programme piece is well worth a listen. It's here.

Mackay Today

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.

The Euro and the climate and the great and the good

Thanks to reader Alan for pointing out Allister Heath's opinion piece in the Telegraph this morning, on the subject of the UK's lucky avoidance of the shackles of the Euro. His recollection of the antics of the great and the good in the efforts to pressure the country into signing up is fascinating:

It is hard today to remember how countercultural keeping the pound felt in the late Nineties and early 2000s: Britain was being pressurised to join the euro by vast swathes of the UK and international establishment, a powerful group that has yet to be held fully to account for such a reckless error of judgment.

Hardly a day would go by without a senior business person or the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) warning that foreign investment would dry up if we didn’t join; and economists were convinced that countries that embraced the euro would benefit from an enormous boom in trade.

Eurosceptics were portrayed as fogeyish, nationalistic simpletons who didn’t understand the direction of history. The Greeks and others listened; we didn’t, thanks to the good sense of the British public and the efforts of a tiny number of anti-euro campaigners and the Tory opposition.

This all sounds terribly familiar, doesn't it?

Doom, doom, doom, another one bites the dust

Another coal fired power station is to close - this time imminently. Eon have apparently announced that time is running out for the Ironbridge Power Station in Shropshire; its allowance under the EU's Large Combustion Plant Directive will be exhausted by the end of the year at the latest. A warm summer or a cold autumn could see the curtains being drawn earlier.

Interesting times.

Notes from a conference, part II

More from Cameron Rose, who is attending a business and climate conference in Brussels.

The Big Fat Carbon Price (see the end of yesterday's post) was the subject for the first discussion, surprise, surprise. Tony Hayward was the man to watch. He is chairman of Glencore, a mining company, and CEO of an Anglo-Turkish company called Genel Energy. He was once BP CEO. Here are the key points I noted:

• 'Fossil fuels provide 82% of world energy but in 30 years the IEA expects it to be a percentage in the early 70s.' (Not much reduction there, then)
• 'The emissions trading scheme (ETS) has been a mess and we are now left with a dysfunctional energy market.' (Not afraid to speak plainly.)
• 'If the objective is to change behaviour it must be at the point of use. We need to eliminate subsidies.'
• 'The abatement of a tonne of CO2 from a coal power stations should be treated the same way as for other, new technologies.'
• 'China and India must complete their industrialisation.'

Click to read more ...

Notes from a conference

This is a guest post by Cameron Rose.

Just thought I'd share my brief diary from the Business and Climate conference at the UNESCO building in Paris on 20th/21st May 2015.  It is in the lead up to COP21 in December and I'm a delegate this week.

Arrived late and missed the opening warm-up from Christine Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC. The businessman in the next seat told me there had been nothing new from her.

Wed 20th PM.  I was in time to catch the second half of the 'Energy' thematic session, where there were six CEO-level panelists plus the Norwegian Minister of European Economic affairs.  I learned the following (perhaps a True/False quiz would be appropriate):

Click to read more ...

Sir Paul's new politicking

With his time at the helm of the Royal Society winding down over the rest of the year, Sir Paul Nurse must have been starting to wonder how he could continue his work as a political agitator once he no longer had access to the Royal Society's pulpit. News today reveals that he may be exploring new niches:

A high level group of scientists is to be recruited to provide independent advice to the European Commission.

The panel will supersede the role of chief scientific advisor that was controversially abolished last year by new EC President Jean-Claude Juncker.

The commission wants also to strengthen its relationship with the national academies across Europe.

Sir Paul is going to be advising Mr Juncker on the recruitment of this group of scientists, so it will be interesting to see (a) if he ends up on the panel himself and (b) if its ranks are filled with the doomsters and millennarians whose company Sir Paul seems to find so congenial.

The EU dispenses with its CSA

The European Union has decided that it is going to abolish the role of chief scientific adviser. The usual suspects are outraged but in reality I can't see why this should be a problem for policymakers. There is no particular reason why the advice of a cell biologist like Anne Glover - the last incumbent of the role at the EU - should be important in the debate over, say, climate change. Many readers of this blog could lay claim to as much or more expertise than the good professor, brilliant individual though she may be in her own field.

Moreover, much of the demand for CSAs in government is driven by a wish to keep pressure on policymakers to fund science and scientists. CSAs end up as public-funded shop stewards, a shameful thing.

If policymakers want advice on particular subjects, let them go to experts in the area concerned.

Deal or no deal?

Accompanied by the obligatory picture of steam coming from the cooling towers of a power station, and another of a fracking site tower looking as though it had been surreptitiously photographed by  a "Frack Off" supporter, the BBC online reports:

 In the early hours of Friday, Mr Van Rompuy, wrote in a tweet: "Deal! At least 40% emissions cut by 2030. World's most ambitious, cost-effective, fair #EU2030 climate energy policy agreed."

The EU also agreed to boost the use of renewable energy to 27% in the total energy mix and increase energy efficiency to at least 27%.

Van Rompuy  is also reported as saying that this decision is “about survival”, and unsurprisingly the environmentalists were less happy about the latest proposals.

For those without high blood pressure, Roger Harrabin’s analysis is on the same page.

TM.

Update 12.11pm

GWPF report that the "agreement "is non-binding. Read all about it.....

Thinking about energy costs

Ahead of the upcoming EU summit [the independent think tank] Open Europe has today published a new analysis of the EU’s energy and environment policies. The study reveals that by 2020, EU-measures in this area will on average add 23% (£350,000) to small and medium sized firms’ energy bills in the UK. Meanwhile, household bills will increase by almost £150 (11%) a year.

Read more here

[Link repaired. TM]