Another snuffle in the trough?

Tim Yeo seems to have wangled himself one last desperate chance to prolong his political career - having been thrown out by the leadership of his constituency association he has thrown himself upon the tender mercies of the members instead. It seems that there will be a vote on Yeo's future.

Tim Yeo, à la carte - Josh 248

Tim Yeo has to go.

Cartoons by Josh

Foe Yeo must go

There were no doubt scenes of wild revelry in South Suffolk last night with the news that the local Conservative Association has decided that they do not want Tim Yeo to be their MP any longer.

A statement from the association, issued last night, said: “The executive council of the South Suffolk Conservative Association met on the evening of Friday, November 29 and voted not to re-adopt Tim Yeo for the 2015 general election.

“Mr Yeo is now considering his position and will advise the executive council of his intended course of action.”

Of course he remains an MP and, despite having been recorded telling a lobbyist that he had coached a parliamentary witness, he remains the chairman of the Energy and Climate Change Committee, after constructing some doubt for the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner to give him the benefit of.

And of course, with a past as (ahem) colourful as his, Yeo is probably in prime position to be elevated to the House of Lords. We wait expectantly.

Update on Nov 30, 2013 by Bishop Hill

David Rose notes that Yeo has made something like £400,000 from his green directorships since 2009. Amazing that people would pay so much money to the mere chairman of the Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee.

More Wiz from the Kidz - Josh 247

In a bid to outdo the 10:10 campaign the SkS kidz have launched a Hiroshima app. What a great idea!

H/t Watts up with that. And there is a related video by Bob Tisdale here.

Cartoons by Josh

The boy who never grew up

I'm not sure if that's Tinkerbell or Captain Flint behind our Ed. (D Catchpole under CC; click for link)

It's hard to credit the idea that anyone could imagine that the Labour party is fit to hold office. Their pledge to freeze energy prices, delivered apparently off the top of Ed Miliband's head, has had the remarkable effect of doing enormous damage to the hopes of keeping the lights on even while Labour remains in opposition. That's quite an achievement and one shudders to think what destruction they might reap if they were actually in power.

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From the Top. It's Secret - Josh 246

And this isn't a cartoon about this story which Nigel Lawson never talked about in the Spectator.

Glad that's settled.

Cartoons by Josh

Counting the cost

Updated on Nov 29, 2013 by Bishop Hill

The theme of this morning seems to be shale gas, and what effect it's going to have on prices, and there is still a distinct lack of clarity about which shale plays are being discussed in relation to the European market.

Lord Browne, former head of BP and now the chairman of Cuadrilla was offering up his views on the subject in London last night, saying that shale is not going to reduce prices in the UK. This is a view that we hear a lot, and seems to be based on the Poyry report that was discussed here a few weeks ago. However, as I understand it, this report looked at the effect of exploitation of the Bowland on UK gas price, concluding that because the UK is connected to mainland Europe by a number of gas pipelines the benefits of the gas would be shared with our European friends. Prices would therefore only be expected to fall by 4%. 

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A right royal showdown

The long-awaited meeting between representatives of GWPF and the Royal Society has at last taken place. Nigel Lawson has a brief report on the meeting at the Spectator, revealing little about the content, except for the fact that he is prevented from telling more by a demand for secrecy imposed by the Royal Society fellows themselves.

This is, to say the least, monumentally pathetic of them. Lawson sounds as though he found the experience slightly frustrating:

But what did emerge was that, if anyone needed educating, it was them. Despite the fact that they were headed by Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, the Director of the Grantham Institute, which has pronounced views on climate policy, and a member of the Climate Change Committee, which is concerned with the implementation of the Climate Change Act, they were very reluctant to engage on the crucial issue of climate change policy at all.

I have heard a few other details on the grapevine and I gather that the Royal Society fellows are more inclined to believe computer models than empirical data. So I wonder if some revision on that whole "scientific method" thingy might be in order too.

One extreme to another

Photo: B Mills under CCMadhav Khandekar's report on extreme weather has just been published by GWPF. There is much to entertain BH readers, including this:

The reality of climate change, as we shall discuss below, is that there have been increasing cold weather extremes in recent years, which have been totally ignored by the IPCC and its adherents. Chapter 2 of the IPCC WGI (AR5) entitled: ‘Observations: atmosphere and surface’, makes no mention of cold weather extremes of recent years. There have, however, been news reports of hundreds of deaths due to extreme cold weather in central and eastern Europe, northern India and parts of South America in the last six years.

Red tape as a weapon

Balcombe

Friends of the Earth has written to West Sussex County Council following concerns that fracking firm Cuadrilla may be drilling near Balcombe in breach of its existing planning permission, the environment charity said today (Thursday 5 September 2013).

Barton Moss

An environmental group has written to Salford City Council over concerns the exploratory drilling of a site may be in breach of planning permission. 

Energy company IGas has permission to start drilling to see what type of gas or oil can be found at Barton Moss.

Friends of the Earth said no environmental impact assessment (EIA) had taken place and permission did not allow for shale gas exploration.

Ridley et al on shale

Matt Ridley, Nick Grealy of No Hot Air blog and filmmaker Phelim MacAleer were the latest witnesses to appear before the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee inquiry into shale gas.

To tell the truth it was not particularly exciting and most of the arguments made will be familiar to readers at BH.

There was one rather interesting exchange (from about 16:15) when Phelim MacAleer described the green objectors to fracking as liars. Shortly afterwards he clarified this statement to make it clear that he was referring to the environmentalists rather than local residents in, say, Balcombe. This was followed by an objection from Lord May who, despite MacAleer's statement to the contrary a few moments earlier, accused him of calling local residents liars and suggested that this was a bit rich from someone who was representing companies like Cuadrilla, who had been found by the Advertising Standards Agency to have breached the Advertising Code.

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Once more unto the breach

Here we go again.

It seems that onshore gas company iGas is about to start work on their site at Barton Moss near Manchester. This entails digging an exploratory well to assess gas prospects in a layer of coal and then to go deeper and see what the shale bed looks like. Like Cuadrilla in Balcombe, no fracking is planned at this point.

And like Balcombe, the work seems set to be disrupted by environmentalists, who have already set up site.

Judging by the pictures in the Manchester Evening News the protestors are already lowering the tone of the neighbourhood too.

Still, it will be interesting to see how things go for the protestors. Unlike the Balcombe protests, this time round it's winter and so maintaining a protest camp will be a struggle. I believe we are expecting gale force winds by Friday.

Far unfit to bear the bitter cold

The FT reports that excess winter deaths have risen by 29% over the previous year, a figure that is at once astonishing and entirely predictable.

The Office for National Statistics estimates that there were 31,000 excess winter deaths in England and Wales in 2012/13, a rise of 29 per cent on the previous year.

Last March was the coldest since 1962, with an average temperature of 2.2°C, and the second coldest since 1910.

The majority of the excess deaths (25,000) occurred among those aged 75 or above.

Array awry

The splendid news this morning is that the Atlantic Array, the monster wind farm planned for the Bristol Channel is to be cancelled "because the economics do not stack up".

Much the same could be said of most green initiatives.

Behind the windfarm scenes

Readers may remember Gordon Hughes' report about the lifetimes of real-world industrial wind turbines and the finding that this is much shorter than assumed in government cost projections. The reasons for the short lifetimes centre on wear and tear on the turbine blades and on the gearboxes.

In that vein, you may be interested in this recording from a forum for windfarm operators in which some of these problems are discussed in fairly plain terms. Having listened, you realise that the factors affecting performance are legion, including not only wear and tear, but dirt build-up on the blades, icing. These factors can severely impact upon performance, and because they tend to unbalance the blades they then increase wear and tear on the mechanical parts of the turbine. But icing is even more serious, as the last speaker on the recording notes:

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