Silencing dissent

Is that a brown shirt?A group called Ecojustice has called for an investigation into global warming dissenters, under Canada's Competition Act. Their case, if you can credit it, is that the act forbids anyone from making misleading statements when selling stuff or for promoting their business interests.

Interestingly, the groups targeted are Friends of Science, the International Climate Science Coalition, and the Heartland Institute. Given that none of these are businesses, the investigation promises to be rather short.

Interestingly, one of those involved is Danny Harvey, an academic from the University of Toronto. He gets a mention in the Climategate emails, where he was involved in Hockey Team efforts to dish out retribution after the publication of the Soon and Baliunas paper (Hockey Stick Illusion p. 406). I understand that he is now an editor at Climatic Change too. I imagine you have to take care about what you submit to that journal.

Charities are not what they were

The local press in Northumberland is reporting the appearance in the magistrates' court of the protestors who disrupted the Banks Mining Shotton facility - this was a fairly transparent attempt to have a go at Matt Ridley, in whose back yard the mine is located.

I was interested to see that one of those facing charges is Friends of the Earth campaigner Guy Shrubsole, a familiar name from Twitter.

Perhaps even more remarkable was the appearance of Roger Geffen. That's Roger Geffen MBE, to give him his full title - he was honoured for services to cycling it seems having been the campaigns director of CTC, the cycling charity, for many years.

It's funny to see these officials of registered charities appearing in the dock. Charities are not what they were.

Greens fade to grey

No comment required.

Lean times for the green blob

Some years back I was discussing the state of environmental coverage in the media with someone from the Telegraph. I commented that I thought it was very strange that the Tele had taken Geoffrey Lean on as a correspondent given that his views were pretty much anathema to most of its readers.

"Ah, that's simple" I was told. "He's not there for the benefit of the readers but because green advertisers want him". This made perfect sense at the time.

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BBC still handing free airtime to greens

Readers will be much amused by the BBC's latest antics, launching a whole season of programmes promoting the climate change agenda on the World Service.

I listened to the one from the Philippines. It takes me back a few years to when the BBC was handing over the airwaves to environmental activists without a moment's compunction.

Nothing much has changed by the looks of it.

And funny that it should happen on the watch of Tony Hall, the man whose idea the 28gate seminar was.

Yeoful fail

Tim Yeo's libel action against the Sunday Times has failed. You will recall that this was over the newspaper's sting operation, in which Yeo was caught on camera offering to be a paid advocate for what he thought were a group of green lobbyists.

According to Guido the Sunday Times has said that Yeo's evidence was dismissed by the judge as:

“implausible”, “unreliable”, “not honest”,”dishonest”, “untruthful”, “untrue” and “unworthy of belief”.

Oh dear. :-)

Nurse's last hurrah

In a few days time Paul Nurse will be leaving his position at the helm of the Royal Society. I think it's fair to say that his time as President has not exactly been a success.

Evidence of the rot, and Nurse's determination to leave the society as a campaigning left-wing environmentalist organisation continues to emerge. It seems that he has committed it to a ten-year involvement in Future Earth, "a ten year international research platform providing the interdisciplinary knowledge needed to support the transition towards a sustainable and equitable world". It remains unclear to me how such political objectives are connected to the Society's purported role of "improving natural knowledge". Perhaps they should rename themselves the "Royal Society for Promotion of Equality".

BBC: "To hell with your charter obligations"

This morning the Today programme welcomed Professor Paul Ekins onto the airwaves to discuss what he saw as the problems with government energy policy (audio below). Professor Ekins came over as a highly media-trained green activist, which is perhaps entirely unsurprising because that is what he is - as a former co-chair of the UK green party and the author of tomes such as "A New World Order: Grassroots Movements for Global Change", he has been in the forefront of green politics for 20 years.

It's just that the Today programme didn't want you to know that, and Professor Ekins was presented as just some disinterested academic brought in to provide some rigour to proceedings. Coming so soon after the episode in which the Today programme accidentally forgot to mention Jeremy Leggett's financial interests this is starting to look like policy rather than oversight.

And when you also take into account the decision of presenter Sarah Montague to let Ekins expound at length, with barely a word of challenge, the impression you got was that this was simply the BBC trying once again to fight battles on behalf of the green movement.

The message from the Corporation is, once again, "To hell with your charter obligations, we're on a mission from Gaia".

Ekins Today

Looney green tunes

Just when you thought our environmentalist friends couldn't become any more absurd, they have to go and outdo themselves. The editor of the Ecologist, Westminster and Oxford educated Oliver Tickell, son of the equally silly and equally posh Crispin Tickell (also Westminster and Oxford), has just written a post arguing that the Paris terrorist attacks were intended to disrupt the COP21 climate talks, driving up oil prices and putting petrodollars in the pockets of ISIS. Oh yes, and western oil interests were probably in on it too.

So, assuming - as seems probable at this stage - that the Paris outrage was carried out by or for ISIS, was it in any way motivated by a desire to scupper a strong climate agreement at COP21? And so maintain high demand for oil long into the future, together with a high oil price?

Let's just say that it could have been a factor, one of several, in the choice of target and of their timing. And of course ISIS was not necessarily acting entirely on its own. While not alleging direct collusion between ISIS and other oil producing nations and companies, it's not hard to see a coincidence of interests.

Blimey, he's so bonkers you half expect Paul Nurse to try to squeeze him into the Royal Society alongside Ehrlich.

Some weapons-grade sophistry

Take a look at Mark Lynas's latest piece in the Guardian, in which he tries to absolve the wind fleet of any part in the close call the electricity grid suffered last week. This is pretty remarkable, given that at the time - as readers will no doubt recall - the wind fleet was becalmed and delivering just 3% of its installed capacity. Meanwhile the ageing coal fleet was only delivering 65% of capacity because of breakdowns.

Lynas's position is that this was fine and dandy because the near-total failure of the wind fleet was predicted.

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Schools: not activist enough

Another day, another environmental activist pretending to be a serious researcher. Diego Román of the Southern Methodist University in Dallas has a paper in that well-known organ of cutting edge science, Environmental Education Research. It reports the results of an analysis of middle school science textbooks and their coverage of climate change. His headline finding is that they are terribly bad:

Our findings showed that these text-books framed climate change as uncertain in the scientific community – both about whether it is occurring as well as about its human-causation.

Román's activism is fairly obvious, even from that brief excerpt: he gives the game away by failing to define what he means by "climate change", a trick that is Lesson One of all "how to be a hippie" courses. Of course in reality, few people on would argue with the twin propositions:

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Greenpeace banned

The latest from the subcontinent is that Prime Minister Modi has finally decided that enough is enough and has banned Greenpeace for good:

Under the latest order issued by authorities in Tamil Nadu where Greenpeace is registered, the government said it had found that the organisation had violated the provisions of law by engaging in fraudulent dealings.

Greenpeace denied any wrongdoing and said the closure was a "clumsy tactic" to silence dissent.

It sounds a bit vague to me. I wonder what precisely these fraudulent dealings are? I'm also not really into banning things, although I think it's possible to make a good case where foreign agitators are involved.

On capricious government

The decision by New York regulators to investigate Exxon over climate change is an interesting one. Apparently the aim is "determining whether the company failed to disclose the climate change risks to investors as well as the public".

And you can't really say fairer than that. If companies are obliged to disclose risks - and there is no doubt that they are - then I don't think one can argue that Exxon or any other oil company should be disclosing to investors the possibility, say, that governments might do foolish things in response to hysteria over climate change. These are real risks that affect investors. There are interesting questions over what point any particular political foolishness becomes concrete enough to make it disclosable, however. Governments are driven by perverse incentives, and politicians are capricious at the best of times. Political risk is therefore always a hard thing to gauge.

Moreover, Exxon is a global company, and political risks in any one country are therefore even less likely to affect the overall business. Global political risks are even more nebulous than national ones: the possibility of a global carbon tax, for example, remains remote, with the developing world unwilling to let their populations die young in order to make western greens feel good about themselves.

Of course, the investigation looks more like a fishing trip, trying to get access to Exxon's internal communications on behalf of environmental activists. There is, in the minds of greens at least, a vast oil-funded conspiracy to be exposed. I don't suppose they will find very much.

Quote of the day, shameless edition

Bryony Worthington seems to want to reverse the tide of deindustrialisation her Climate Change Act has brought about.

[T]he Redcar situation... illustrates how important it is that we get our energy and industrial strategy right. There is a risk to dragging our feet and there is an urgency involved in sorting out our policies on how we are going to not just maintain but actively attract industrial players back to the UK to reindustrialise our nation.

I wonder if she goes to sleep at night thinking that all she has achieved in her life is to put thousands of productive people on the scrapheap. I really wonder.

Green vision

This morning I chanced upon some interesting documents that set out the vision for the UK of Friends of the Earth. The docs are FoE's contribution to the 2050 Calculator site set up by DECC's former chief scientist David Mackay a few years ago. The site allows users to set down how they think the UK's energy mix should be achieved in the future.

In the graph below (click for larger), we can see that FoE believe that we are going to reduce demand by 30% or so, which strikes me as optimistic. More interestingly they seem to have recognised that we are going to need standby gas powered generation right through to 2050. However, in their wisdom, they seem to think that three quarters of this gas should be imported rather than produced locally. Their stance on oil is similar. Given their stance on unconventional gas this is probably the only choice, but the conclusion must be that FoE believe that when calculating the trade off between environmental posturing and carbon emissions, it is environmental posturing that should win out.

So much for caring about the planet.

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