More fun at the schools ministry

Apropos of the last-but one posting on the new logo for the Department for Children, Schools and Families, some readers may have thought that the picture of a paint-bespattered Ed Balls was a crudely photoshopped fraud. I present below further recent evidence of activities in Mr Balls' department.

 

Ellee on biofuels

Via Peter Risdon, Ellee Seymour's latest venture into the world of climate science is a shocker.

Ellee links approvingly to Conservative MEP Robert Sturdy's letter extolling the (alleged) virtues of biofuels.

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, quite mad and possibly evil too. The lemming-like dash towards biofuels has driven world grain prices inexorably upwards, leading to price inflation and all the suffering that brings. The reaction of governments in many producer countries has been to slap export taxes on grain exports - for example China, Argentina - or imposing export quotas like Vietnam. This has made things even worse. Unrest is becoming widespread -

Clashes over bread in Egypt killed at least two people last week, and similar food riots broke out in Burkina Faso and Cameroon this month.

Farmers in Argentina have pledged to continue a nationwide protest after the government refused to back down on tax rises on agricultural exports.

See also Mexico, Italy (!), etc.

Everybody with the slightest bit of sense is jumping off the biofuels bandwagon post-haste:

The government's chief environmental scientist has called for a halt to their deployment. 

A UN specialist on food availability says that biofuels are a crime against humanity. 

Even the not-very-bright people in the government are starting to backtrack. 

Everyone who gives a damn is against biofuels, so why on earth is Robert Sturdy for them? Can he really not have heard that  they're a disaster. Or could it possibly be because he is a big arable farmer who will derive huge benefits from high grain prices? Tell me it ain't so.

So when I say everyone who gives a damn, what I should have said was "everyone who gives a damn about people other than themselves".

Whose logo is this?

It's your local nursery isn't it?

So whose logo is it really? Well actually, it's the new logo for the Department for Children, Schools and Families.

Is this meant to be reassuring? Have you ever been inside a nursery school? It's a great place to be if you're under the age of five. There's lots of yelling and screaming and chucking of drinks and wiping of bottoms and mewling and puking and running round like nutters. But no decisiveness or cerebration or anything like that.

So doesn't this logo conjure up completely the wrong mental images? 

 

Oh, and the logo cost a cool £5k. Cheap by government standards, but I reckon you could have got it done by Logoworks for a couple of hundred. Still, better twenty times too expensive than the usual hundred or so times.

Any economists out there?

The other day I was flicking idly through the channels on the telly when I chanced upon BBC Parliament, which was showing recorded coverage of Adair Turner's evidence to the Environment Food and Rural Affairs Committee. This is not something any self-respecting citizen should be watching, of course, but  it represented a welcome respite from the children.

During his evidence, Lord Turner said something which appeared to my untutored ear to be a load of old codswallop. He seemed to be saying that the Stern review had stated that reducing carbon emissions by 60 - 80 % would only reduce GDP by 2.5% - ie a one-off hit of 2.5%. On the face of it, this is highly implausible, but it none of the MPs picked him up on it. I made a note to look into it when I got the chance.

I've now located the transcript. While it's uncorrected, what I read there is pretty much as I recall from the television. This is what he said:

I think there is a very compelling case which is set out in Lord Stern's report and other reports that the developed, rich economies, and ultimately the whole world, can run on a fraction of the carbon emissions that they have at the moment. They can reduce it by 60 or 80 per cent from present per capita levels in, for instance, Europe, and the estimates that he produced are that the cost of that might be between minus 0.5 per cent, ie you do a set of things and we are actually better off at the end of the day, through to plus 2.5 per cent, ie we do all these things and the GDP in 2050 and ever thereafter is 2.5 per cent below what it would otherwise be but, as I made the point earlier, that simply means that you have slipped by a year the rate of increase.

[Emphasis mine] Can this possibly be right? Doesn't he mean that the rate of growth in GDP will be 2.5% less than it would have been otherwise?

Here is an excerpt from the conclusions of the Stern Review:

This is a major challenge, but sustained long-term action can achieve it at costs that are low in comparison to the risks of inaction. Central estimates of the annual costs of achieving stabilisation between 500 and 550ppm CO2e are around 1% of global GDP, if we start to take strong action now.

[Again, emphasis added]. This looks pretty damning to me, but I'd prefer a trained economist to confirm that I'm understanding this correctly.

Mind you, Lord Turner is a trained economist too (as he states elsewhere in his evidence). If he has got it wrong, I'm not sure what excuses might be available to him.

Sir David King flounces out

There's a lovely anecdote doing the rounds of climate sceptic blogs about Sir David King, the climate alarmist and former chief scientific adviser to the British government.

It seems that President Putin asked some of his leading scientists to meet Sir David when he went to Moscow as part of the entourage of the foreign secretary. King apparently launched into his standard spiel about how we're all going to fry, but was a bit taken aback when the assembled scientists told him he was talking rubbish. When they had the temerity to list all the scientific evidence which refuted his claims of impending armageddon, our man was left looking a bit of a ninny and turned on his heels and stormed out of the room.

The story is doubly interesting because it's related by someone called RCE Wyndham in a letter in which he tells Robin Butler, the master of University College, Oxford, that the college can expect no donations from him this year because the appointment of King to head Oxford's Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.

The letter can be read here.