A toxic plot?

[jean]

Right now plans are being drawn up that could see dozens of new dirty gas power stations built in the UK. If their plans go ahead, it risks decades of carbon emissions and losing thousands of new green jobs.

Our investigation shows how leading Tories have launched an attack on the Climate Change Act, saying they have the blessing of George Osborne. We also reveal that David Cameron’s campaign manager for the Corby by-election was secretly behind the campaign of a rival candidate who ran against the Conservatives on an anti-clean energy platform.

[marchesarosa]

The Authentic Voice of Green fascism

"It is time for the judiciary to step in and avert climate catastrophe"

"This leaves the judiciary with the task of stepping in and averting catastrophe. In a democracy, issues certainly stop being only political when they give rise to domestic human rights violations and endangerment. Together with the precautionary principle these infringements may serve as legal grounds for the judiciary to take over from politics, protecting citizens from violations by their own government and summoning government to actively protect citizens' fundamental rights. A fast-paced energy revolution is citizens' by right and judicial intervention will help to restore the democratic order, depoliticising the climate issue and making the influence of special interests and short-term gain in the political process less effective."

Note the populism, disdain for demoncracy, appeal to authority, sinister "special interests".

Guess where this was written?

The Guardian of course!

[jean]

No idea.

But here's more on the story in the OP - this time it's from the Daily Mail, so it must be true.

The Conservative campaign manager in the by-election to replace Louise Mensch as MP for Corby has been caught on film admitting he encouraged a rival candidate.

Chris Heaton-Harris today apologised after footage emerged in which he suggested his friend James Delingpole had put his name forward to stand against the Tory party candidate.

Mr Heaton-Harris, MP for Daventry, was filmed saying it was 'part of the plan' to 'cause some hassle' in the Corby by-election by making wind farms a major issue ahead of polling day.

Ms Mensch stood down in the summer, claiming she could not juggle family life and the demands of being an MP.

The Tory party candidate is Christine Emmett, and Mr Heaton-Harris was put in charge of the campaign to get her elected in the vote, which is being held tomorrow.

But he was filmed discussing how he persuaded Mr Delingpole, a newspaper columnist, to also throw his hat into the ring.

Speaking to a Greenpeace activist posing as a wind power opponent last month, Mr Heaton-Harris said: 'There's a bit of strategy behind what's going on. I'm running the Corby by-election for the Tories ... And Delingpole, who is my constituent, and a very good friend... put his head above the parapet but won't put his deposit down... It's just part of the plan.'

[marchesarosa]

Greenpeace clearly think they are the best qualified to rule the planet. They certainly have supporters in high places, and an eye-catching way with propaganda but so did Mussolini and Hitler aka Big Mus and Big Hit (to make the analogy clearer to you green conspiracy theorists) .

Did anyone ever elect Greenpeace to Save the World? Did anyone ever elect IPCC scientists or the UN to rule the world?

I think the world can struggle on without their climate hysteria for a while longer.

[BabelFish]

Nov 16, 2012 17:37:40 GMT marchesarosa said:

Greenpeace clearly think they are the best qualified to rule the planet. They certainly have supporters in high places, and an eye-catching way with propaganda but so did Mussolini and Hitler.

Trans.

I am blissfully unaware of Godwin's law.

[marchesarosa]

Is a by-election in Corby really the very best the board's green tendency can do to advance the cause of the understanding of climatology and energy policy? The information that has come out seems to prove there there is a BIG difference of opinion about renewables, which is exactly as it should be!

Suggest you all have another read of this thread!

ELECTRICITY PRODUCTION and Green Fantasies
thesequal.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=climate&action=display&thread=734

and have a look at this graph
www.geog.ox.ac.uk/~dcurtis/NETA.html

The little green squiggle just above the baseline is wind power!

[jean]

Nov 17, 2012 14:05:00 GMT marchesarosa said:

Is a by-election in Corby really the very best the board's green tendency can do to advance the cause of the understanding of climatology and energy policy?

A Tory candidate's agent secretly encouraging another candidate (the egregious Delingpole, no less!) to stand as well so that the anti-AGW message he wishes to promote can't be pinned on his candidate is a good example of dirty tricks, which are not, it appears, confined to the green tendency.

That's what the OP aims to show.

[marchesarosa]

Of course, you probably think Greens are "clean" when it comes to dirty tricks and "toxic plots"?

Why not just discuss the merits of the climate arguments and the debate over electricity generation instead of getting into the trivialities of party politics? Oh, but I forgot, the trivialities of party politics is your forte, jean. How many times have you stood as Green Party candidate?

And, incidentally, electricity generation from gas produces no more CO2 (if that matters to you) than wind when everything is taken into account including wind intermittency. The higher the proportion of wind in the electricity mix the greater the proportion of back up from conventional thermal power stations required to keep the lights on when the wind drops, as it often does in anticyclonic periods in winter in the UK.

But I wouldn't expect a Green Party candidate to know about basic stuff like that. Far too busy accusing others of "toxic plots".

Is your central heating boiler fired by gas, jean? Is your hot water fired by gas, jean? Let us know when you find another reliable source.

[marchesarosa]

Want to hear about a REALLY toxic plot? Read on!

Seminars held by the BBC at the the prompting of the International Bradcsting Trust, and in particular the one held on 26 Jan 2006 entitled "Climate Change - the Challenge to Broadcasting" were supposedly the basis for the decision of the BBC to abandon its constitutional obligation to strive for "balance" in the reporting of climate matters and to plump for the "science is settled" line and the exclusion of climate sceptics from future broadcast debates and discussions. Recently the BBC spent more than £140,000 on barristers to defend its right to maintain privacy in the face of a FOIA request about the attendees at this fateful 2006 meeting where the BBC management was supposedly receiving definitive information from "top scientists" (in fact, the usual strident NGO and Greenpeace style advocates) to inform their decision.
www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/13/climate28_named_wtf/print.html

However, it seems that the BBC has adopted a totally different approach to controversy and dissent in its treatment of contentious economic matters where it apparently concedes that the economic science is not settled at all. Here is what the BBC said on this matter. I have altered the statement slightly to show just how 'toxic' its double standard is.

Consensus versus range of opinions

A number of comments concerned the question of whether BBC coverage should reflect a consensus view, in areas where there is one, or whether instead it must reflect the range of opinions even if parts of that range are minority views. There was disagreement about this, but most thought the range of opinions was essential for two reasons. One is that macroeconomics climate science itself does not have the same kind of clear consensus now that applied before 2008 – economics climate science is having its own crisis – and it could be difficult to conclude that a certain view was definitive or authoritative. The second reason, for a number of speakers, is that an important part of the job in economics climate science reporting is specifically challenging adominant narrative. One person argued that not only is the consensus often wrong, there is also a tendency for political narratives to shape the way the economy climate science is reported. One participant argued that impartiality depended in part on the confidence and experience of the correspondents, who had to make judgements, while being constantly vigilant against developing fixed habits of thought. A number of contributors spoke of the need to challenge both intellectual and institutional orthodoxies. One participant said it seemed harder for the BBC than for other economic climate science broadcasters and the newspapers to present counter‐intuitive views.
BBC TRUST SEMINAR ON IMPARTIALITY AND ECONOMIC REPORTING 6 NOVEMBER 2012

"Ah, the smell of double standards in the morning. Smells like…. hypocrisy."

Thanks to Tallbloke for this insight!
tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/double-standards-bbc-seminar-on-impartiality-in-economics-reporting-vs-the-climate-twentyeightgate-affair/#more-9717

[jean]

Nov 17, 2012 16:32:57 GMT marchesarosa said:

Of course, you probably think Greens are "clean" when it comes to dirty tricks and "toxic plots"?

I didn't say that.

But since you spend so much time arguing that dirty tricks are innate to Green/Socialist politics, it seemed not unreasonable to suggest you consider some dirty tricks perpetrated by those you agree with.

You have not done this, but instead have tried to introduce other matters onto the thread in the hope of deterring the casuaL reader from considering the matter of the OP.

[marchesarosa]

On the contrary jean, I try to stick to the research findings and don't bother my head with party politics.

The Greens are not a political party, anyway, they are just one trick lobbyists, a gaggle of the worried well of the affluent West, who have proved themselves endlessly susceptible to environmental scaremongering and self-flagellation with more than a dash of hypocritical religiosity thrown in. Trouble is they want to flagellate everyone else, too.

Found a means of fuelling your central heating and water heating less "dirty" (YOUR word) than "natural" gas yet, jean? Funny, I thought we always liked "natural" gas because it burned so CLEAN. Wasn't it "natural" gas that enabled us to get such CLEAN air in the Smoke Control Areas After the first Clean Air Act (1956)?

[marchesarosa]

A handy reference source, jean, if you're wondering how "clean" or "dirty" your source of electricity is at any particular hour of the day.

www.ukenergywatch.org/Electricity/Realtime

Today (Sunday 18th Nov 2012) at 11am an impressive 2.7% of UK electricity was from wind turbines.

That's because the weather conditions have been very still for the last few days (anti-cyclonic, common in the UK in winter) which today also means intermittent sub-zero temperatures and ice in places according to the Met Office.

Good job we've got plenty "dirty" thermal power stations to ramp up the power production when we need it, isn't it?


P.S. Extraordinary, isn't it, that the hysterical greens are calling gas powered electricity generation "dirty" when is emits only about one third of the CO2 per megawatt as coal does?

Just think, if we replaced all coal burning power stations with gas fired ones we could cut CO2 from electricity generation by a factor of 3! Is that worth having or not? Couple that with the fact that we could also have the gas from domestic production via fracking and it looks to me like a win-win situation and not Jean's "toxic plot" at all!

[marchesarosa]

And here's a useful map showing precisely where all those "dirty" electricity generating power stations are (by fuel type) - just in case you were worried that YOUR town or city might be vulnerable to a shortage of "clean" wind when we get rid of all the "dirty" power stations.

www.ukenergywatch.org/Electricity/PowerStations#p=0&c=5

Aren't you ladies glad there is someone around who knows where to get reliable, objective data, that can lighten your darkness?

Compare my offerings on this board and elsewhere to the poisonous little turds of political green propaganda your Green candidate sees fit to present you with. No breaking the habit of a lifetime, is there?

[marchesarosa]

The BBC’s 'dirty little secret’ lands it in a new scandal

The truth of a secret meeting that decided BBC policy on climate change has come out online

Unfolding in the shadow of the greatest crisis in the BBC’s 90-year history has been another scandal, rather less publicised, which again reveals how profoundly the BBC has gone off the rails, morally and professionally. Last week, I reported how the BBC had spent large sums of our money fielding an array of lawyers against a pensioner from Wales to hide what I called, with considerable understatement, “a dirty little secret”. But that secret has now been disclosed to the world, confirming how seriously the BBC has been misrepresenting its policy on one of the most far-reaching issues of our time.

A year ago, I published a detailed report attempting to unravel what has long been a serious puzzle. How was it that, over the past six years, the BBC has been so ready to betray its statutory duty to impartiality by such relentlessly one-sided promotion of the scare over global warming and all it entails, such as the Government’s policy on wind farms? No organisation has done more to obscure the truth about an issue whose political and financial implications for us all are incalculable.

The BBC’s decision to defy its charter obligation to report on this subject impartially followed from a secret day-long seminar held at Television Centre on January 26, 2006. It was attended by all the BBC’s top brass, including George Entwistle, the short-lived director-general, then head of TV current affairs, and several executives who have had to “step aside” because of the Savile affair, such as Helen Boaden, then director of news, and Steve Mitchell, then head of radio news.

In 2007, the BBC Trust published a report claiming that this unprecedented decision to flout its charter was taken after a “high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts” on climate change. Among those who tried to get the BBC to identify these “experts” was Tony Newbery, the blogger who recently faced the might of a highly paid legal team which persuaded an information tribunal to uphold the BBC’s right to keep secret the names of those attending this seminar.

When, last week, those names were finally revealed – thanks to another blogger, Maurizio Morabito (see omnologos.com/why-the-list-of-participants-to-the-bbc-cmep-jan-2006-seminar-is-important/ ) and the Wayback Machine, which stores information deleted from the internet – the result was even more startling than had been suspected. Only three of the “28 specialists” invited to advise the BBC were active scientists, none of them climate experts and all committed global-warming alarmists. Virtually all the rest were professional climate-change lobbyists, ranging from emissaries of Greenpeace and the Stop Climate Chaos campaign to the “CO2 project manager” for BP, one of the world’s largest oil companies.

As shown in my report, “The BBC and Climate Change: A Triple Betrayal” (on the Global Warming Policy Foundation website gwpf.w3digital.com/content/uploads/2012/08/Booker-BBC.pdf ), the consequences of what this roomful of “climate activists” advocated as BBC policy were devastating. The seminar’s co-organisers, Roger Harrabin and Joe Smith, were later able to boast that one of the first fruits of their good work was the BBC’s Climate Chaos season, a stream of unashamedly propagandist documentaries, led off with two fronted by Sir David Attenborough which featured a string of ludicrous scare stories.

This was merely the prelude to hundreds of further examples, up to the present day, of how the BBC has abandoned any pretence at honest or properly researched reporting – all in accord with the party line agreed on at that seminar, the nature of which the BBC was so desperate to keep secret.

As with the Savile scandal, there seems no end to the further embarrassments the BBC cover-up has been bringing to light. Harrabin and Smith ran a small outfit set up to lobby the media on global warming, funded by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, WWF and the University of East Anglia (home of the Climategate emails scandal).

Stranger still, their co-sponsor of the BBC seminar was another lobbying group calling itself the International Broadcasting Trust, which in the past seven years has received £520,000 from the Department for International Development’s foreign-aid budget for “media research” – which includes lobbying the BBC on issues such as climate change. This body in turn is part of a “coalition” known as the Broadcasting Trust, and one of its partners in that is the Media Trust – of which the BBC is a “corporate member”.

So our climate-change obsessed governments have given public money to bodies to lobby the BBC, including one closely associated with a body that the BBC itself belongs to – all to ensure that the BBC promotes government policy.

There is a scandal here that is, in its own way, as disturbing as the one over the Savile affair. But whereas that is being looked into by a series of inquiries, we can be sure that no one will inquire into this second scandal. Remember, after all, how the BBC Trust (now chaired by that committed warmist Lord Patten) aided the cover-up with that lie about “the best scientific experts” in its 2007 report – which was, laughably, supposed to be addressing the BBC’s statutory commitment to impartiality.

Isn’t it odd how often, through all this, one word recurs: “trust”?

Christopher Booker
www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9684775/The-BBCs-dirty-little-secret-lands-it-in-a-new-scandal.html

[marchesarosa]

Matt Ridley on Britain's mad biomass dash

www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article3603011.ece

Burning wood is the worst thing you can do for carbon dioxide emissions!

Never has an undercover video sting delighted its victims more. A Greenpeace investigation has caught some Tory MPs scheming to save the countryside from wind farms and cut ordinary people's energy bills while Lib Dems, Guardian writers and Greenpeace activists defend subsidies for fat-cat capitalists and rich landowners with their snouts in the wind-farm trough. Said Tories will be inundated with fan mail.

Yet, for all the furore wind power generates, the bald truth is that it is an irrelevance. Its contribution to cutting carbon dioxide emissions is at best a statistical asterisk. As Professor Gordon Hughes, of the University of Edinburgh, has shown, if wind ever does make a significant contribution to energy capacity its intermittent nature would require a wasteful "spinning" back-up of gas-fired power stations, so it would still make no difference to emissions or might make them worse.

And wind is not the worst of the renewables. By far the largest source of renewable energy is bio-energy (ie vegetable matter turned into solid, liquid or gaseous fuel), which is expanding fast and doing less than nothing to cut emissions. Even the big three green multinationals - Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and WWF - have come out against biofuels.

Last year, despite a decade of subsidies and the desecration of quite a bit of countryside, 96.8 per cent of our total energy still came from fossil fuels and nuclear. The rest came from bio-energy (2.6 per cent), leaving a derisory 0.6 per cent from wind, hydro, solar, wave, tidal and geothermal put together. It is therefore a little-known fact that 77 per cent of Britain's renewable energy involves burning something. (All these figures for 2011 are from the Department of Energy).

And there is nothing carbon-saving about bio-energy. Take wood, a more carbon-rich fuel even than coal. As the environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel, of Rockefeller University in New York, has shown, when you burn wood more carbon dioxide is emitted than from coal for the same amount of energy.

Yet Britain is dashing to replace coal with wood. Many coal plants are being subsidised to switch to biomass. Drax in North Yorkshire, the country's largest power station, is switching partly from coal to biomass while Eggborough, in the same county, will convert fully to become Britain's leading renewable power plant.

By 2030, according to current plans, the UK will be burning five times the maximum timber harvest that Britain could conceivably produce. So most of it will be - and already is being - imported in the form of pellets, lumber, olive pips and peanut husks. Some will come from tropical rain forests, or will raise prices enough to encourage the felling of more rain forests.(Remember, it is fossil fuels we have to thank for reversing the great deforestation of these islands in the Middle Ages - Britain now has three times as much forest as in the 1800s.)

Although today's dash back to biomass is driven by European carbon-emissions reduction targets, not an ounce of carbon will be saved. Its champions argue that because trees grow in place of those chopped down, wood is almost carbon-neutral, whereas fossil fuels are not. But, as Professor Helmut Haberl, of the University of Klagenfurt in Austria, has pointed out, this makes no sense. Carbon is carbon. Land grows plants whether it is used for biofuel or not. Chopping down a tree to burn its wood oxidises the tree's carbon atoms decades before they would be released by decay. It could take 200 years to break even in carbon terms by planting new trees.

So it is a ludicrous myth that biomass cuts carbon emissions.

Of course, the biomass dash is excellent news for woodland owners (such as me) who are now incentivised to thin and fell woodlands at a faster rate in the hope of making, or more likely losing less, money on the management of woods. It is less good news for the coal industry, in which I also have an indirect interest. But it's the least fun for those of us who pay electricity bills, where the subsidy is artfully concealed.

The Renewable Heat Initiative, encouraging us to heat our homes at public expense with wood rather than gas, is even worse. Wood is much higher in carbon than gas, so if you switch from gas heating to wood you generate more CO2 emissions; not to mention depriving beetles of rotting logs and woodpeckers of beetles. Lorries will soon be delivering 25,000 tonnes of wood chips a year to Heathrow's Terminal 2. Compared with gas, this is madness in economic, ecological and traffic terms.

Growing crops to be turned into biofuel makes even less sense. For a start, the diesel and fertiliser come from fossil fuels, so some of the world's biofuel crops are not carbon neutral when harvested, let alone when burnt. Those that are, such as Brazilian sugar-cane ethanol, rely on cheap labour. But it's worse than that. Biofuels are displacing food crops, which raises prices and in turn encourages forest clearance to grow more crops. A Leicester University study found that such "indirect land use changes" might take 423 years to pay back the up-front carbon debt.

Copying Germany, Britain's farmers are now being enticed by subsidies to install anaerobic digesters. Contrary to popular myth these digest, not manure, but raw crops, mainly maize. Again this makes no sense.
Britain's dash for renewable energy is already costing its hard-pressed economy tens of billions of pounds a year - and rising. Yet it will not make a dent in carbon dioxide emissions, let alone enough to affect climate.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, huge cuts in carbon dioxide emissions are happening. America is now producing less CO2 than it did in the early 1990s, and 30 per cent less per head than it did in in 1973. It has done this while cutting rather than raising energy bills and generating revenues rather than consuming subsidies. The reason? Cheap gas replacing coal, thanks to fracking. If you are worried about carbon dioxide, why not choose a technology that works rather than one that doesn't?

By: Matt Ridley | Tagged: rational-optimist, the-times

www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/britain's-mad-biomass-dash.aspx