Big oil and the ECIU

Our environmentalist friends are fond of pointing to Peter Lilley's involvement with Tethys Petroleum and claiming that it means he can't be trusted on questions of energy and climate change.

How amusing then that Lord Howard, a board member of Richard Black's ECIU, turns out to be the director of an oil company himself and, moreover, an oil company that is the subject of an investigation by the Serious Fraud Office.

A dampish squib

So President Obama has a new climate plan out and his fans in the BBC are getting very excited about it. The main thing seems to be a requirement for states to formulate climate plans, but not for a while. There is an even longer delay before they have to implement them.

Here are my impressions:

• The main objective is to make climate change an wedge issue in the next round of elections.
• The delays will make them more acceptable to the states.
• The plan will make only a tiny fraction of a degree of a difference to global temperatures at the end of the century.
• The US is halfway to the new target already on the back of the shale gas revolution.
• The new rules are put in place by executive order and can therefore be removed just as easily.

I'm not sure this amounts to a particularly large hill of beans.

Wind turbines: worse than we thought

Readers may recall the little ding-dong between Gordon Hughes and David Mackay over the rate of decline in performance of wind turbines as they age. Hughes thought that this happened much faster than Mackay.

Mackay has been looking at the subject again today, analysing how newer windfarms have performed against older ones. His intention was to look at how technological improvements have shown up in the load factors of the turbines, but it's possible that he has inadvertently shown that Hughes was right.

The reason for this is that the rate of improvement in load factor is no greater than would be expected from the fact that the turbines are newer. So you can draw one of two conclusions:

• load factors have not been enhanced by technological improvements
• the rate of performance decline is greater than Mackay had thought.

Either way, wind turbines look just a bit more like a dead end than they did yesterday.

Media balance

Talking of crazy, the new SNP newspaper The National has an article about the proposed coal gasification project mooted for the Firth of Forth.

It features quotes from two green anti-capitalist groups who are opposed to the project, a local councillor who is very much against it and an MSP who hates it with a vengeance.

And they wonder why nobody reads newspapers any more.

The madness of the greens

The ability of green issues to make otherwise kind and decent people lose their grip on reality is always something to behold and there was an extraordinary example in the Guardian at the end of last week.

Take a look.

In a speech in Washington DC Rachel Kyte, the head of climate change at the World Bank, argued that the destitute of the developing world, who currently cook on wood and dung fires, would suffer increased levels of respiratory diseases if they got access to coal-fired grid electricity:

Do I think coal is the solution to poverty? There are more than 1 billion people today who have no access to energy,” Kyte said. Hooking them up to a coal-fired grid would not on its own wreck the planet, she went on. But Kyte added: “If they all had access to coal-fired power tomorrow their respiratory illness rates would go up, etc, etc …

In her defence she does seem to insinuate that this would be a price worth paying, but it's hard not to be left open-jawed at her believing something quite so preposterous.

Are greens now the bad guys?

I was intrigued by this trailer for a forthcoming anime film. From Wiki, we learn that it is set in a future in which humankind has spread across the universe but then gone into decline, and that Earth has subsequently been taken over by an "authoritarian universal government by the name of the Gaia Sanction" which "declares Earth a sacred planet, and thus forbidden for humanity to repopulate".

Anyone would think that the greens were starting to be seen as the bad guys.

Here's the trailer, which looks like a lot of fun even without the message.