Green investors

Greenies are being offered the opportunity to put their money where their not inconsiderable mouths are:

Ethical bank Triodos is offering people the chance to become shareholders in Triodos Renewables, a public limited company which came into being 13 years ago as the Wind Fund. This is its fourth share issue - the last was in 2005.

Triodos Renewables invests mainly in small and medium-sized wind farms, hydroelectric schemes and emerging renewable energy technology companies in the UK. It owns and operates two wind farms, Caton Moor in Lancashire and Haverigg II in Cumbria, and two single turbines, Gulliver in Lowestoft, Suffolk, (recently out of action for a few months following lightning strikes) and Sigurd in the Orkney Islands. It also owns the Beochlich hydroelectric project in Argyll, Scotland, and it has a stake in Marine Current Turbines, a tidal energy company whose first commercial turbine will begin operating off the coast of Northern Ireland later this year, and is a partner in Connective Energy, which is developing ways to capture and re-use waste heat from industry.

I'm all for people investing in things in which they believe. The problem is that this is not really an investment in green energy so much as an investment in the chance to win a share of some government subsidies.   

(Via The Graun) 

It was the biofuels wot done it

There's a rather important article over at EU Referendum this morning. Richard North highlights a recent FAO report, which shows that changing diet in China and India has not affected their share of the global grain harvest. This puts the kaibosh on the argument that demand for meat production has sucked in huge quantities of grain. The change has in fact largely come from the USA, where production has been shifted massively over to biofuels.

Read the whole thing. 

Political dynasties

Is it just me, or are Labour starting to make a habit of forming political dynasties?

GWYNETH Dunwoody's daughter, Tamsin, has been chosen by the Labour Party as its candidate to be Crewe and Nantwich's next MP.

She will now fight the May 22 by-election to try and take the seat her mother held for the last 34 years.

An intensive two-day selection process ended with Tamsin Dunwoody being chosen by the local Labour group at Pebble Brook School tonight.

About 60 applications were made for the candidacy and they were then narrowed down to a manageable shortlist of five with Tamsin Dunwoody emerging as a comfortable winner.

More detail comes from Adam Boulton's blog:

Both Gwyneth's grandmothers were suffragettes. Her father, Morgan Phillips, was Labour Party general secretary (in the days before people turned the job down, Gordon). And her mother was a Government minister in the House of Lords.

So the Dunwoody dynasty looks as though it's as old as the Labour movement itself, and is set to continue for at least another generation. 

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I'd be inclined to believe that this was all a coincidence if it wasn't for the equal longevity of the Benn dynasty - Wedgie's granddaughter could be set to follow his son Hilary into parliament, having been chosen to stand at PPC in Worthing at the tender age of seventeen. If successful, she would be the fifth generation of her family to sit at Westminster.

I'm sure Tamsin Dunwoody and Emily Benn are outstanding individuals who would shine in any assembly that would have them, but are we really to believe that the five generations of Benns and four of Dunwoodys all got (or will get) to Parliament on merit? Statistically speaking, I would have thought that the possibility of this happening by chance was fleetingly small.

Update:

Iain Dale notices that the citizens of Crewe are not amused. 

Why did Labour lose?

So, Labour lost big time and the Tories won. But as Glenn Reynolds says, it's hard to see how much actual change the Tories will bring about. If the party won't let you know what their policies are then how can you?

Meanwhile, Labour are wondering what went wrong and the Tories are wondering what they got right. The feeling in the pub last night was that this was a vote against Labour far more than it was a vote for the Tories, so the Labour post-mortem is rather more interesting. Sunder Katwala, who, if memory serves me correctly runs the Fabian Society, sets out all the things that he thinks are going to win voters back in an article on LabourHome.

"Then make a fairer Britain the defining mission: take risks for the cause of child poverty; make clear what climate change demands of us all; go for electoral reform and a written constitution. If not now, when?"

This is, not to put to fine a point on it, bizarre. Other-worldly. Does he really think that people voted Tory because he though that Labour had done badly on child poverty? That they want to pay more carbon taxes? That they are, in fact, aching for electoral reform, and were raging all the way to the ballot box to express their fervent love of written constitutions?

Some people in the Labour party think so.   

Global warming to stop

As the global warming fraternity seeks to explain away the lack of any actual observable warming, they've come up with a whole new explanation - that the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation will wipe out any warming for the next few decades. Even the most observant followers of the climate debate will have failed to notice anyone mentioning that the AMO might have been boosting temperatures in recent decades. And neither will they have seen any inkling of this fall in temperatures being predicted by the IPCC.

Which brings us on to this quote from the climatologist Roger Pielke Snr (via CCNet):

If global cooling over the next few decades is consistent with model predictions, then so too is pretty much anything and everything under the sun. This means that from a practical standpoint climate models are of no practical use beyond providing some intellectual authority in the promotional battle over global climate policy.

Looks like all the IPCC projections may just be bunk.