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Discussion > Drs against Diesel : A subsidy mafia Front

Green-warrior are for some bizarre reason vehemently campaigning against a small new coking coal coal mine in Cumbria.

On Feb 4th they ran with Boris Johnson risks “humiliation” at a climate summit the UK is hosting this year unless he blocks plans to open a new coal mine in Cumbria.

The article quotes Hanen
and ends by quoting Lord Deben
So seems prepared from the same PR material that BBC' Harra used in his big campaigning articles

Commenters replied
Are China or India 'humiliated' for opening a new coal-fired power station EVERY WEEK?

China has opened a coal mine a week for years. Are they humiliated?
This is one mine mainly for coke for EU steel industry and will be the cleanest ever built. Think UK will survive the “humiliation” it’s own news media bestow upon it. Focus on all the good UK is doing.

The opposition to this plan is typical of the attitudes of our green lobby. Every, and any, of our current industries shall be sacrified the sacred cow of the carbonless society- no arguments accepted.

Top Comment
The blast furnace is thermodynamically efficient and is, at present, the only means of producing primary iron/steel on a large scale. Blast furnaces need coke. The new mine in Cumbria will not change, one iota, the demand for steel. Therefore the new mine will not change, one iota, the global demand for coke. Therefore the new mine in Cumbria will not change, one iota, the environmentally harmful by products of coke production. It will, however, produce some hundreds of jobs in Cumbria.

Opposition to the mine perfectly illustrates the illogicality, hypocrisy & lunacy of much of the ‘climate change’ agenda

James Hansen is one of the most hysterical, his projections of climate doom were so wildly exaggerated that even NASA GISS had to disown them.

"He wrote that the mine would “increase global emissions and have an appreciable impact on the UK’s legally binding carbon budgets”.
How will moving production from US to UK increase global emission???

Feb 5, 2021 at 10:23 PM | Registered Commenterstewgreen

Ah on the same day they ran
First new colliery for 30 years may be a necessary evil
The UK’s first new coal mine for 30 years is due to produce coking coal to make steel, not thermal coal for power...
Ben Webster, Environment Editor

As ever the commenters are much more Red Pilled than the journos
"at last an intelligent analysis rather than the automatic outrage from the climate lobby.
We’ve got to protect our manufacturing base, and we should be up-front and proud in doing so

Feb 5, 2021 at 10:28 PM | Registered Commenterstewgreen

My Jan 30th newspaper has an article : "jenrick plan for coal mine under fire"

which is dated Monday Feb 1st online
and retitled : Cumbria coal mine decision under attack

The photo shows 2 school kids
with a placard "Hunger strike against the new coal mine"

Quotes Lord Deben, the committee’s chairman and a former Conservative cabinet minister, wrote that the mine would “increase global emissions and have an appreciable impact on the UK’s legally binding carbon budgets”.

John Sauven, Greenpeace UK’s executive director, said: “Of all the things the host of a major climate summit should not do, opening a new coal mine is pretty high up on the list.

“.. the global embarrassment the project will cause the government as a host of the Glasgow summit. "

Feb 5, 2021 at 10:37 PM | Registered Commenterstewgreen

Also Feb 4th
New carbon taxes: meat, cheese and gas heating prices to rise


Comments
it is futile and very expensive both for consumers and the UK as a whole to try to win the race to be the first carbon-neutral country.
we should aim to finish somewhere in the middle and pace ourselves accordingly.
The winner of this race will end up impoverishing their citizens and their economy as whole whilst those lagging behind will secretly be laughing whilst pretending that they wish they'd been the winners.
We didn't vote for the Green Party but for some reason Boris seems overly keen on some of Caroline's ideas

There we have it, our political class have now written the biggest economic suicide note by carbon taxing industry and the poor
. Only the London elite who live in an isolated bubble can afford such a tax that will make food and heating far more expensive for us all.

Feb 5, 2021 at 10:54 PM | Registered Commenterstewgreen

Editorial
The Times view on carbon taxes: Costing the Earth
New taxes to combat carbon emissions may seem politically perilous but they make economic sense
and can help achieve the net-zero target by 2050

This implies higher consumer prices and bills for carbon-intensive goods and services, which is not an obviously vote-winning strategy.
Despite this, it is the right approach and it may be possible to compensate households for these higher costs.

Comments
And how much has the temperature gone down in the last 10 years according to the IPCC?
We’ll just end up exporting our jobs to China whilst they carry on polluting.

Why is The Times promoting such a nightmare? The first political party to finally come to their senses, and reject this economy destroying nonsense, will win the election by a landslide.
This will make the Poll Tax look like a walk in the park,

Feb 5, 2021 at 10:58 PM | Registered Commenterstewgreen

That last sentence

Meanwhile ... I'm wrestling with the idea that "pubs can open" - but they "can't sell alcohol"

Feb 6, 2021 at 10:12 AM | Registered Commentertomo

ITV local
most important is tucked away at the end
Since the air is now clean the Clean Air Zones in Sheffield & Leeds have been delayed.

Bradford taxi drivers protest against plans to charge a clean air tax
..in the video the driver doesn't wear a seatbelt
https://www.itv.com/news/calendar/2021-03-12/bradford-taxi-drivers-protest-against-plans-to-charge-a-clean-air-tax

A protest by taxi drivers has taken place in Bradford against plans to charge a clean air tax on their vehicles.

They say the introduction of a clean air zone across the city will unfairly impact taxi drivers already hard hit by the pandemic.
Bradford Council says air pollution is killing 200 people across the city every year and change is needed
has higher than average asthma

... The 200 claim is fake ..it comes from weird modelling not actual death certificates.

Mar 12, 2021 at 6:37 PM | Registered Commenterstewgreen

Times review of Mark Carney’s autobiography
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/values-building-a-better-world-for-all-by-mark-carney-review-fwmrvrxd3
says he sees himself as a future Green PM of Canada
Ends “If he want to be PM he will need to learn to speak like a human”

He is awed by Greta Thunberg,
who reminds him “how average most [leaders] appear, how disappointing the encounters often feel.
But sometimes they are exceptional: like the grand sheikh of al-Azhar mosque, Bono, Emmanuel Macron.”

he wants to let rip on Brexit, but he limits himself
to the jibe that “Brexit dominated government resources while the NHS remained underfunded”
.....
(claims he has been successful in engineering markets )
Get the incentives right and their power can be harnessed for good.
Carney demonstrated this with climate change, where he has been a driving force behind market pricing of environmental risk.
His success, and he deserves much credit, has been tangible. Investors are betting against polluters.
The most valuable US energy company is not ExxonMobil but NextEra, a clean-energy firm.
... is that Enron II ?

He complains that “governments systematically undervalued resilience in the run-up to the Covid crisis”
but, by his own admission to parliament
, he left the Bank with almost nothing in the policy tank before handing over a week before lockdown.
.....
has already been accused of “greenwashing” for using an outdated definition of “net zero” to burnish his employer’s credentials.
....
Yet confronted with the raw fact that a quarter of the carbon emissions that need to be removed
are “not abatable
under currently available, large-scale commercial technologies,”
he invokes “the optimistic venture capitalist”. His faith that the market will solve the problem is plain.

Mar 26, 2021 at 10:05 PM | Registered Commenterstewgreen

he & Davos people think can easily tweak the market a bit
and will magically organise into utopia

Mar 26, 2021 at 10:16 PM | Registered Commenterstewgreen

Well as far as recent prime ministers of Canada are concerned - at least Carney does look stoned off his bonce most of the time.

- that isn't an endorsement

Mar 27, 2021 at 10:02 AM | Registered Commentertomo

Valuing CO2 and creating a market for it seems to me to be the work of the most useful of idiots.

Apr 1, 2021 at 8:58 AM | Unregistered Commenternot banned yet

Apr 17 @LeighDay_Law tweeted
Nearly 400,000 motorists join fight to sue over ‘mis-selling’ of diesel cars
- Leigh Day are fighting for cleaner air and the rights of thousands of consumers over their vehicles’ emissions
http://Leighday.co.uk/vehicleclaims

That converted into a Times article
Nearly 400,000 motorists have signed up with law firms in the hope of winning compensation for being “mis-sold” diesel cars.

In what is rapidly becoming the biggest compensation movement since the PPI scandal, lawyers are advertising on TV and online to persuade owners of almost every historic diesel car to register their interest in making a claim after the emissions scandal
.. could match the scale of the PPI scandal, which cost banks £38 billion..

Then good on the Times as it's gets critical saying PPI lawyers caused massive nuisance calls .

To my mind most buyers lost nothing
They bought a car it worked ..and they didn't care about emissions

The Times has a box featuring an example of a super green customer who feels ripped off
a retired guy 73, owns a home with a ground source heat pump and solar panels so when he learnt that his car was much more polluting than stated, it was “shocking”.

“We felt guilty so we decided to change the car and buy an electric one instead.
We had to sell at much less than we thought the market value would be so we approached Leigh Day because we did not think it was right that we should suffer a loss

That's an extreme example
and I'd laugh if the court talks about the emissions from EVs
and exposes how bad his are.

Apr 21, 2021 at 9:39 PM | Registered Commenterstewgreen

Another story about private jets
said the leasing corp Victor had been enthusiastic about offering voluntaryeco-surcharges
but only 8.5% of customers pay, not the 20% they'd hoped to get.

Apr 21, 2021 at 9:52 PM | Registered Commenterstewgreen

April 22nd : Times Climate Quiz
For #EarthDay there's a 16-page pull-out in @thetimes today on the climate crisis. I
t's part of the paper's preparations for COP26 in Glasgow in November.
How much do you really know about the climate crisis?
Take our quiz to challenge your perceptions and compare your results with fellow Times readers #EarthDay

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/how-much-do-you-really-know-about-the-climate-crisis-8jn7d03hd

Apr 30, 2021 at 11:14 AM | Registered Commenterstewgreen

By coincidence FT also has a Climate Quiz
Is this Futerra the Green PR agency at work ?

Apr 30, 2021 at 11:15 AM | Registered Commenterstewgreen

Do Futerra have a government contract?

Apr 30, 2021 at 12:03 PM | Registered Commentertomo

They'll be married into the government

Apr 30, 2021 at 12:09 PM | Registered Commenterstewgreen

Times : Moe than 90 per cent of climate scientists agree that climate change is real and that human activities are the main cause.

Yet despite *overwhelming* scientific evidence
it is often hard for people to directly relate cause and effect
: how much impact can a 1C rise really have?
How can rising sea levels affect someone living miles from the coast?

Q1 Forests are crucial allies in the fight against global warming.
What proportion of the world’s annual CO₂ emissions are absorbed by woodland and jungles?

5% 10% 25% 50%
(Forests are a lot but have they included ocean life ?)

Q2 How have CO₂ emissions in the UK changed over the past 30 years?
chart goes from -50% to +20%

Q3 Fumes from passenger cars account for 15 per cent of all *** greenhouse gas emissions in the UK
. How much more or less are they emitting, compared with 1990?

(*** there is a big word missing there MANMADE, they are also not including water vapour)

Q4 Without the greenhouse effect, what would the average temperature on Earth be?
(Answer the avg temp idea is a bit of PR BS, even then there seems to be a lot of data tempering "cooling the past etc,

What counts is your local weather, local winds and on the whole that's pretty much the same the desert is still the desert
farm land is growing more food than ever etc.)

Q5 The five warmest years in modern history have all been recorded in the past:
scale runs from 5 to 50 years
(It doesn't tell you what modern history is
I'd question if old guesstimates were reliable ..as they didn't have enough measuring stations )

Q6 What impact have natural causes, such as volcanic activity and changes to the Earth’s orbit
, had on the temperature rise we have seen since 1900?
(Some super big volcanoes might cool a few months but even out over 1 or 2 years
I don't know their warming effects through direct heat, CO2 methane and other gases)

Q7 The 2015 Paris agreement is an international treaty aimed at fighting the climate crisis.
Its goal is to keep global warming below 2°C compared with pre-industrial levels.
How many of the 195 countries in the world have signed it?
(almost all cos poor countries get a lot of money , pure PR question)

Q8 In the past 40 years how much has the average area covered by sea ice in the Arctic decreased by?
(depends time of year etc, it can vary a lot from year to year , eg less but deeper etc.
I notice they don't mention Antarctic ... duh !)

Q9 After it broke away from Antarctica in 2017, A68a became the largest iceberg in the “open ocean”.
How big was it compared with London?
A third of it - Half of it - Twice as big - More than three times as big
(country size AFAIK ..not that unusual either)

Q10 Since 2000, four major heatwaves have occurred in the UK – in 2003, 2006, 2013 and 2018. How many deaths are linked to them?
Less than 1,000- 2,000 to 3,000 - 3,000 to 4,000 - More than 5,000
(Trick question cos you are adding up 4 years but 5,000 over summers is quite a small number
and cold Winter would be magnitudes more)

Apr 30, 2021 at 12:57 PM | Registered Commenterstewgreen

"Take our quiz to challenge your perceptions"...

translates to

"Take our quiz to reinforce your misconceptions"...

May 1, 2021 at 3:10 PM | Unregistered Commenternot banned yet

+1

May 3, 2021 at 8:54 PM | Registered Commenterstewgreen

itvLaurenHall item
60 beekeepers in Lincolnshire will start participating in air pollution study

Surely, it's just an extension of the Coventry Uni , Midlands study announced 2 months ago
https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/about-us/research-news/2021/thriving-hives/

May 7, 2021 at 6:34 PM | Registered Commenterstewgreen

So, air quality has never been better:

19 April 2021

Urban background and roadside nitrogen dioxide (NO2) pollution has shown long-term improvement. In 2020, the lowest average annual mean concentrations since the start of the time series for both roadside and urban background monitoring sites were recorded.

...

Urban background and roadside particulate pollution (PM10) has shown long-term improvement and in 2020, annual average PM10 concentrations at both roadside and urban background sites were the lowest in the time series (despite a period of relative stability between 2015 and 2019). A substantial network for fine particulate matter (PM2.5) has been operational since 2009 which shows a similar trend.

...

Urban background ozone pollution has an overall long-term increasing trend. In 2020, the daily maximum 8-hour mean concentration of ozone at urban background sites was the highest in the time series. Rural background ozone pollution has shown no clear long-term trend.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/air-quality-statistics/summary

And yet an anonymous useful idiot states without any checks:

"BBKA are delighted to be able to fund this interesting project. This is an area on which little research has been carried out to date and given the increase in pollution in our environment, this pilot study might give us valuable insight as to the extent of the problem."

Spokesperson from BBKA

One for the Times quiz.

May 10, 2021 at 10:32 PM | Unregistered Commenternot banned yet

Sorry - date typo:

National Statistics
Air quality statistics in the UK, 1987 to 2020 - Summary
Updated 29 April 2021

May 10, 2021 at 10:38 PM | Unregistered Commenternot banned yet

ITV local news ... any #PRasNews?
Yes, "It's International Clean Air Day"
presented by the weatherman Jon Mitchell.

He used expert Alistair Lewis of York Uni.
says cities are the problem. Made grand claims about man-made pollution
..so forgetting about pollen etc
(asthma attacks correlate with grass pollen
.. although manmade pollution doesn't help)
He made the claim pollution causes 28K to 36K deaths per year
( ..FakeNews ... he'd be pushed to show us 1 death certificate nevermind 36K)

Next unamed expert made asthnma claims
Ah it's Prof Jonathan Grigg (he founded a campaign group DoctorsAgainstDiesel which helped the Times promote electric cars, but fell a bit flat)

The ITV Jon highlights the new AQI Air Quality Index graph, that they'll be using on future shows.
He made no mention of today's pollution levels ... Why's that ?
cos today air pollution is zero .. it's been raining all day so it's all been washed out.

He finally mentioned natural stuff like Sahara dust quickly at the end.

https://www.itv.com/news/2021-06-17/air-quality-forecasting-pollution

Jun 18, 2021 at 6:36 PM | Registered Commenterstewgreen

Also on "Clean Air Day", this rather indirect statement from the Gov. that air quality has never been better:

//
...

Environment Secretary George Eustice said:

“Ella’s death was a tragedy and I would like to pay tribute to her family and friends who have campaigned so tirelessly on this issue, and continue to do so.

“Today’s response is part of a much wider cross-Government effort to drive forward tangible and long-lasting changes to improve the air we breathe, as well as doing more to inform the public about the risks.

“Air pollution levels have reduced significantly since 2010, with emissions of fine particulate matter falling by 11%, while emissions of nitrogen oxides are at their lowest level since records began. We know that there is more to do which is why we are setting new legally-binding targets on particulate matter pollution and building on our Clean Air Strategy to accelerate action to clean up our air.”


https://deframedia.blog.gov.uk/2021/06/18/government-response-to-the-ella-adoo-kissi-debrah-coroners-report/
//

Jun 24, 2021 at 4:39 PM | Unregistered Commenternot banned yet