In spite of their having campaigned tirelessly over the last few decades for more expensive and less efficient forms of energy production — ‘sustainable energy’ — many of a greenish hue are getting heated up about about UK energy market regulator OFGEM’s latest report. The Left Foot Forward blog reports,

Outrage at 733 per cent rise in energy companies’ profits
There was anger today at the news this morning that energy companies’profits had soared eight-fold from £15 to £125 per customer per year.Friends of the Earth said it was “outrageous” the energy fat cats were raking in the profits while people face “rocketing” bills and “shiver in cold homes”.

As discussed here recently, it’s just a bit rich that FoE are complaining about rising energy prices. Few organisations have done more to make using energy more difficult for poorer people in the UK than FoE.

Rising bills and increasing levels of ‘fuel poverty’ have embarrassed the UK government. And perhaps for the first time, the UK public is finding itself exposed to the realities of climate change policies. In other words, climate change policies just got political. They are now part of people’s daily lives, exactly as the green NGOs wanted. Now everybody has to think before they turn their lights and heating on. Everybody is now forced to think of ways to cut their fuel consumption. And as a consequence, Quangos, NGOs, government departments, and their ministers past and present are trying to distance themselves from those consequences, by pretending to champion the interests of the consumer. “It wasn’t us”, they scream.

The Guardian reported last month that,

The Labour party is to put the UK’s big six energy companies “on notice”, pledging that the next Labour government will break up their “stranglehold” of the market in order to tackle soaring bills.

Labour will pledge to break up the existing market which allows the major energy companies to both generate and sell energy to households, which the party argues fails to minimise prices and prevents new companies entering the market.

Earlier in the year, the same paper quoted Chris Huhne,

As concern grows that the other five major energy companies are preparing to follow Scottish Power and announce big rises within weeks, the energy secretary, Chris Huhne, told the Observer that consumers should not accept the increases “lying down” but “hurt” their supplier by finding cheaper alternatives.

“Consumers don’t have to take price increases lying down,” he said. “If an energy company hits you with a price increase, you can hit them back where it hurts – by shopping around and voting with your feet.”

But come the conference party season, Huhne had a new target.

Price rises were the energy companies’ fault. And then they were the consumer’s fault. But they weren’t the fault of the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, DECC, the coalition government or the previous government/s,  oh no.

Now the quango seemingly charged with being the ‘energy consumer watchdog’ OFGEM, has entered the debate to attempt to give substance to the claims about the energy companies’ dubious selling practices. The press release announcing its intervention said,

After extensive analysis, Ofgem has decided to progress its preferred model for the reform of the retail energy market. It has also published today its latest report on prices which shows that the average dual fuel bill now stands at £1,345 and, following recent price rises, estimated suppliers’ margins have peaked at around £125 per year, but are likely to fall back next year. This report on prices does nothing to alter Ofgem’s findings in March that competition is being stifled by a combination of tariff complexity, poor supplier behaviour and lack of transparency and that radical change is needed. […] In December further decisions on proposals on liquidity to break the stranglehold of the Big Six in the wholesale electricity market

Spurious claims are made about the conduct of energy companies. They’re making excessive profits. They’re misleading consumers. They’re ripping people off. See this interview with Adam Scorer from quango Consumer Focus, for instance.

[- LINK TO VIDEO BROKEN -]

But who is really doing the misleading and ripping off here? A closer look at the OFGEM (another quango) report reveals a far less straightforward picture.

Between 2004 and 2009, it seems that energy companies were not making a profit (if margin is assumed to be profit) at all. There followed two years of profitability, which can barely be described as excessive. In fact, the margin between Aug 2009 and June 2011 looks modest. By June this year, the margin was just £15. The apparently shocking rise of 733% is extraordinary, only when we forget that the margin represented by 100% (£15) is so low. Moreover, the margin reported by OFGEM this quarter is unusually high — an anomaly, in fact. It makes no more sense to talk about the margin rising over just one quarter in this way than it does to talk about climate change by comparing minimum winter temperatures with maximum summer temperatures, as is discussed shortly. It should be treated with some care before it is used as evidence that the energy companies are ripping us off. After all, the idea that they have been ripping us off simply isn’t demonstrated by the curves on the graphs representing their profits. I asked OFGEM for the figures, and how they were derived. They said they couldn’t tell me. It’s ‘commercially sensitive’ data.

OFGEM produce this report quarterly. Take a peek at the headline from the June report, then, and it seems that it’s much harder to portray energy companies as evil b*stards.

We estimate net margin on supplying a typical, standard tariff, dual fuel customer to be approximately £15 per customer for the year from June 2011. This is a significant reduction on the net margin indicator published in March. The main driver of reduced net margins is the increase in wholesale gas and electricity prices. Gas prices, in particular, have had a strong upward shift in the last six months, owing to global events. This means that the price for next Winter‟s gas is around 30% higher than the price for last Winter’s gas. Other factors have also had an effect on suppliers’ margins, and these are explained in the report. The £15 net margin figure is not affected by the recent price increase announced by one of the Big 6 energy supply companies, as this price increase is not effective until August. This will cause the average dual fuel customer bill in our analysis to rise from that date by about £15.

In other words, in June, energy companies would have seen that their profits were going to go negative again. Perhaps this explains the apparently shocking 733% rise in the margin. Faced with the very likely possibility that wholesale prices would rise considerably, the suppliers had to anticipate the market price — which was both high and volatile. Looking at the June report for winter gas prices shows the problem.

Between October 2010 and April 2011, gas prices for winter 2011-12 increased by a third. The apparently huge increase in profits may merely reflect the fact that prices are high, volatile, and the energy companies’ need to anticipate prices.

To make the point more clearly, here are the October to October year increases given by the latest OFGEM report.

(Sharp-eyed readers will observe that there’s an error in the calculation of gross margin for October 2011.)

The first thing to note is that the October ’10 to October ’11 increase is lower than the June ’11 to October ’11 increase, in both absolute terms, and proportionally. It’s a 300% increase, rather than a 733% increase. Still an increase, but hardly as shocking. Second, the increase in the margin represents just over a third of the total increase. The shocking increase in margin was produced by taking a anomalous relative low from a corrective, anomalous high.

Now, let’s assume that the ‘right’ amount of margin for a duel fuel energy company is £50, and then that the current October price was caused by increases in wholesale costs, and the other actual rises.

So in the real world, wholesale prices increased Oct-Oct from £490 to £605 or by 23%. In our imagined scenario, prices rose from £490 to £685, or by 40%. In other words, the energy company would have to anticipate a rise in prices, and the hypothetical energy company estimated a rise of 40%, against the reality of 23%. Is that so unreasonable, given that we have seen prices increase in the order of 33% in just half a year, and that energy companies were barely making a profit at all back in March?

I don’t believe that it is is. And there are many problems with the vilification of energy companies. Why take the June 2011 margin £15 as the starting point to show the increasing profits of energy companies? Why not choose October 2007, when the margin was -£55?

The reasons for this vilification are obvious, and discussed above. Those individuals and organisations need a scape goat. Now let’s consider their solution: breaking the putative monopoly that the ‘big six’ energy providers have on the market. Says OFGEM:

Today’s consultation is the first of four waves of reform:
* In November detailed proposals to reform the energy market to help the businesses sector
* In December further decisions on proposals on liquidity to break the stranglehold of the Big Six in the wholesale electricity market
* In the New Year the findings of an independent report into making energy company accounts more transparent.

Ofgem’s Chief Executive Alistair Buchanan said: “When consumers face energy bills at around £1,345 they must have complete confidence that this price is set by companies competing in a fully competitive market. At the moment that is not the case.

“That is why a radical break with the past is needed. Ofgem’s tariff reforms offer the quickest way to create a market where consumers can have confidence that prices are set by effective competition. Suppliers have told Ofgem they want to restore confidence in the industry and now they have the chance to do so.
“With £200 billion of investment needed to overhaul Britain’s energy industry and the pressure this and rising energy prices puts on bills, consumers rightly demand a major improvement in the way suppliers behave towards them.”

One of OFGEM’s complaints is that the energy tariffs set by companies is too complex. This is undoubtedly true. But it is hard to see that, looking at the margins of the energy companies, simplifying the price structure will yield much of a positive effect for the consumer. These margins are not big. Yet if you listened to the likes of Chris Huhne — who claims that consumers can save themselves £100s by switching tariffs — you would form the impression that energy companies are making £100s per customer. They aren’t. Yet he blames energy suppliers for deliberately confusing customers, and he blames customers for failing to shop around for the best deals. He, the DECC, the ENGOs, and the quangos then blame the monopoly — as though it were a cartel.

But even if these reforms did break the ‘cartel’, how would new players in the market cope with such low margins? For five of the last seven years, the margins seem to have been negative. Who would be foolish to enter such a market? Given the emphasis that the actual cartel — the DECC, quangos, and ENGOs — have put on renewable energy, which rewards new players on the electricity market with such high returns, making conventional energy even more expensive, it is hard to see how the plans to transform the market will yield any benefit to the consumer. Will new players simply be subsidised by the old, just as ‘renewable energy’ is subsidised by conventional energy, and won’t the net effect be to increase prices even further?

The argument from the idiots at Left Foot Forward would seem to suggest that it would be:

Ofgem say the consultation unveiled today is “the first of four waves of reform” – in November, they will unveil detailed proposals to reform the energy market to help the business sector; in December there will be further decisions on proposals on liquidity to break the stranglehold of the Big Six in the wholesale electricity market; and in the New Year they will publish a report into how to make energy company accounts more transparent.

As the BBC’s Damian Kahya writes, the new plans, though still complex, are likely to bring down prices:

In addition to the new simple tariffs, companies will still be allowed to offer an almost infinite range of fixed rate deals, similar to mobile phone contracts. Though complex, those deals may end up cheaper than a standard rate, especially if they are tied to the planned roll out of smart meters.

These complicated deals may also offer greater savings to households that can afford special devices designed to use more electricity when the price is low. It’s exactly that type of complexity which has put many lower income households off switching to cheaper tariffs, a problem Ofgem is trying to solve.

The coming consultation will give the regulator a chance to see if it can be fixed, perhaps by making all tariffs – even smart meter deals – directly comparable on the same terms.

Let’s hope they do.

Let’s hope they don’t get the chance. As a rather more sober BBC article claimed in 2009,

Plans for smart meters for millions of homes have been unveiled with trials suggesting the £8bn scheme may help people save £28 a year.

Hurrah! A saving of a whopping £28! But, the article continues…

Energy suppliers, rather than distribution networks, will be responsible for the roll-out of the meters at a cost of about £340 per household.

So where’s the money going to come from?

From energy bills, of course. The energy suppliers are going to want to recoup that £8 billion capital cost. They’re not making enough money to pay for them. In fact, if they really were making £15 a year back in June, then it would take 23 years to raise that much in profit, or 3 years, at the October margin of £125. It gets worse, though. More recent estimates suggest that the government is being very optimistic…

Margaret Hodge MP, who chairs the Committee of Public Accounts, said the government’s track record on delivering large programmes is patchy at best. “At the moment the estimated cost is £11.3bn, but all our experience suggests that this budget will be blown,” she said.

The government predict savings of up to £18 billion, according to the National Audit OFfice, who seem rightly sceptical. I don’t trust the claim in the slightest.

And if this wasn’t enough, the UK National Grid requires £200 billion investment over the next decade, to make sure that the government’s ill-conceived emphasis on wind energy doesn’t cause chaos.

National Grid will be critical in ensuring Britain’s energy sector is given a £200bn overhaul over the next decade, making sure that new wind farms and nuclear power stations are connected to the grid.

Steve Holliday, chief executive of National Grid, said: “The year has started well with our businesses making good initial progress toward their priorities and delivering solid operational and financial performance.

Yet not a single penny of this vast sum of money will yield a single watt of advantage to the consumer who will end up paying for it. The aim of the UK’s emphasis on renewable energy and emissions-reduction is simply to keep the lights on at best. Keep the lights on, that is, if you are lucky… Steve Holliday, chief executive of National Grid, was also on Radio 4’s Today programme earlier this year.

Evan Davis: “Get a move on”, is your message. Let’s talk about one or two specifics. Wind – as you fly in now over the Thames Estuary, you fly in to Heathrow, you begin to really see quite a lot of wind is being created – a lot of wind turbines are being created – in the Thames Estuary and around the country, aren’t they?

Steve Holliday: They are, and yet that’s still a drop in the ocean, compared to, in our own forecasts, if you look at the energy mix that we believe we are likely to need, to hit a low-carbon generation fleet by 2020 and 2030. Today we’ve got about 5 gigawatts of wind, we’ll have nearly 30 by 2020…

Evan Davis: Does it work?

Steve Holliday:…just imagine…

Evan Davis: Because if the wind doesn’t blow, how does the older grid cope?

Steve Holliday: The grid’s going to be a very different system in 2020, 2030. We keep thinking about: we want it to be there and provide power when we need it. It’s going to be a much smarter system, then. We’re going to have to change our own behaviour and consume it when it’s available, and available cheaply.

We have to consume it when it’s available? So if there’s no wind, we can’t have showers, heat, light… or listen to the moron chief executives of the companies managing the UK’s essential infrastructure on the radio… It’s not some eco-warrior or Guardian eco-loon telling us that the Grid will not be supply power to our homes when we most likely need it; it’s the CEO of the company which operates it. The thinking behind this idea is that continuity of supply will be predicated on the consumer’s ability to pay. Even if the range of tariffs on offer today are baffling, the choice offered by the ‘simplified’ schemes being considered now would be recognised best by Hobson: pay more money, or accept interruptions to your supply. That’s a ‘smart grid’. That’s the ‘future’ of our energy supply. It will cost more. It will deliver less. It will cause real harm to poorer people. And it will be less reliable. And it will be so, because those are today’s political priorities. They are shared by many companies, by politicians and government departments, ENGOs, and the quangos whose legal responsibilities are to protect the interests of the consumer.

The attempt to blame energy retail companies for increasing bills is a grotesque political manoeuvre. It is rank propaganda, designed to capture discontent for the ends of a self-serving consensus. Even if energy retailers made zero profit, it would make almost no difference to the average consumer. Energy prices rise, not because of a cartel of energy companies, but because there is a political consensus in Westminster, in Brussels, and at the UN. The bubble in which these policies are formed it impervious to criticism and to challenge. It’s inhabitants emerge from the bubble, to discover that prices have risen, and that people are angry, and so they blame the retailers.

It’s a bit like imposing tariffs on farmers and restricting the land they may use for agricultural production, and then blaming the shopkeepers for the price of bread rising. ‘We must open more bread shops’, say the government. But now the low margins are split between more people, with greater net overheads. Prices rise. ‘We must control demand’, says the government, and forces the shopkeepers to install ‘smart tills’ that vary the size, quality and price of loaves, depending on customers use of bread. When it becomes apparent that these policies have failed, who will the government turn to next? Will they continue to blame the retailers and consumers, or will they move up the supply chain?

Roger Pielke asks an intriguing question on his blog:

Why is Energy Access Not a MDG?

The UN Millennium Development Goals (pictured above) focus attention on helping improve the lives of poor people around the world. In the words of the UN:
[The eight goals] form a blueprint agreed to by all the world’s countries and all the world’s leading development institutions. They have galvanized unprecedented efforts to meet the needs of the world’s poorest.
Question: Why is energy access not among the goals?

It is a good question. The UN aim to ’empower’ women, for instance, but what good is being empowered, when you have no power? The freest woman in the world would have nothing to enjoy if she has no running water (also not mentioned), electricity, and access to transport. What’s the point of political liberty, if there is no material liberty?

But look also at the fact that these goals are actually rather limited aspirations. They speak of combating HIV/AIDS, malaria ‘and other diseases’, but why not eradication. They only aim to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. The problem with setting ‘goals’ is that, fundamentally, they speak of the impossibility of solving them. After all, these are problems which legitimise supranational organisations such as the UN.

I don’t wish to sound harsh… Many of these aims are laudable. I think the UN probably is good at ‘combating’ disease. I think that it is appropriate to have an international organisation to deliver that kind of good. But what business is it of the UN’s to ‘promote gender equality and empower women’? I believe strongly in the idea; but I think it’s probably up to women to empower themselves. It wasn’t men being nice and generous that led to the extension of the franchise to women in the UK, for instance. So why not have an international project to deliver or fund disease eradication and universal education? But why aim to ‘ensure environmental sustainability’ at the same time? And what if these objectives come into conflict? What if disease, poverty and hunger are ‘environmentally sustainable’ and their cures — never mind the palliatives — aren’t ‘sustainable’? After all, we don’t see many people suffering extreme poverty where they have access to energy.

Last on the list — but I believe to be the fundamental — is the ‘global partnership for development’. It’s a nice piece of fluffy jargon… Who isn’t in favour of global things, especially partnerships. But the problem with partnerships is… other people. If I want to do something, I have to ask you first. Says the UN,

The Millennium Goals represent a global partnership for development. The deal makes clear that it is the primary responsibility of poor countries to work towards achieving the first seven Goals. They must do their part to ensure greater accountability to citizens and efficient use of resources. But for poor countries to achieve the first seven Goals, it is absolutely critical that rich countries deliver on their end of the bargain with more and more effective aid, more sustainable debt relief and fairer trade rules, well in advance of 2015.

So the terms of ‘development’ aren’t set by those who need it. The UN says that the governments of poor countries ‘must do their part to ensure greater accountability to citizens’, but in reality, they’re accountable to the UN, to their creditors, and to NGOs, who presume to act in their interests, as discussed previously on this blog. Don’t take my words for it. Searching the web for discussions and articles by people involved in the development agenda reveals a lot. I got this passage by searching for ‘MDGs’ and Christian Aid, for instance.

The European Commissioner called for an end to capital flight which, in his view, costs poor countries seven times what they receive in aid. In fact everyone agreed that we would never eradicate poverty without addressing capital flight and tax dodging which we estimate costs developing countries $160bn dollars a year.

Gay Mitchell MEP said this money could save the lives of 350,000 children each year and this outflow needs to stop.

This is where I got excited. Having spent most of my waking hours in the past year talking, writing and dreaming of governments taking Christian Aid’s proposals seriously the head of the OECD said this: ‘Country by Country reporting and Automatic Information Exchange are anathema to those wishing to avoid or evade tax and we should pursue them’.

This is a clear signal that Christian Aid’s proposals make sense, but that it is a matter of political will to make them happen.

It is also a clear signal that Christian Aid and our partners have been successful in putting this issue firmly on the agenda of those in power.

The words belong to David McNair Christian Aid’s senior economic justice adviser. It’s curious that someone so concerned about ‘justice’ should be so keen on undemocratic, unaccountable NGOs influencing undemocratic and unaccountable supranational policy-making processes. Christian Aid may well point out that, in a world dominated by powerful interests, the least powerful lack representation, and are unable to assert themselves in the policy-making process. Maybe so. And maybe even ‘capital flight’ is a problem for those people capital certainly seems to flee from.

But surely creating capital is equally an important issue. (And this is why I chose to search Google for ‘Christian Aid, alongside ‘MDGs’). What do Christian Aid have to say about that? A report published by Christian Aid this week, argues that

In recognition of the challenges facing agriculture, donors and governments have in recent years made welcome new political and financial commitments to smallholder farming, especially in Africa. However, as this report outlines, the solutions for Africa advocated by donors, governments and the initiatives of private foundations have tended to centre around the promotion of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, which are costly for farmers and very often resource depleting. This drive for a new ‘Green Revolution’ for Africa has tended to sideline more sustainable, farmer led approaches. For example, recent input-subsidy programmes in Africa have brought significant short-term benefits in certain cases, but they are looking increasingly unsustainable and risk sidelining investment in greener alternatives. And our research identifies concerns that the agro-dealer networks funded by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) are selling ever more quantities
of agro-chemicals to farmers, thus marginalising the space for alternative approaches that are more sustainable.

The emphasis on ‘sustainability’ seems to clash with the objective of development. And yet, as ever, the concept of ‘sustainability’ against which ‘development’ is measured is at best nebulous.

We define sustainable agriculture as a way of producing food that balances the economic, social and environmental aspects of farming. It is an approach that minimises or avoids chemical inputs, uses resource-conserving technologies and materials available on the farm, and draws and builds upon the capacity of farmers and community organisations.

So, one reason Christian Aid seem to think that the use of agricultural chemicals is ‘unsustainable’ is because it involves the use of agricultural chemicals. If pointing out this tautologous absurdity is petty, consider also the fact that using ‘resource-conserving technologies’ paradoxically leaves the producer with fewer resources. That’s the point of using things like fertiliser. Without it, it’s just the soil, the elements, the seed and the farmer. Add the process upstream of the farmer — fertiliser production — and the downstream market, and value-added processing, and you have a system which includes primary producers in a far more complex network of people able to mobilise a greater range of resources. Farmers in the west have iPods, mobile phones, laptop computers, heavy machinery. By precluding the use of pesticides, doesn’t Christian Aid preclude the possibility of life for the poorest people becoming more sophisticated, such that they’re able to assert their own interests in the political process? What’s so good about ‘[balancing] the economic, social and environmental aspects of farming’? The point of using pesticides and fertilisers was never so that these things could be ‘balanced’. They were used to produce positive change. Doesn’t this ‘build upon the capacity of farmers and community organisations’?

Perhaps this sounds unfair. After all, Christian Aid are talking about small scale farming. But their reflection on the Green Revolution in Asia reveals some dodgy use of statistics.

Punjab is the leading ‘breadbasket’ and ’rice bowl’ of India: in the early 2000s it was contributing one-third of rice and over half of the wheat procured by the Food Corporation of India. But in recent years, wheat yields have been falling: from 4.7 tonnes per hectare in 1999 to 2000 to 4.2 tonnes per hectare in 2005 to 2006. And rice yields have grown only very slowly. A recent report on the problem stated that this trend ‘can be directly linked to the ecological consequences of intensive monoculture systems’. The state government has now responded with a programme to support greater crop diversification.

I couldn’t find any data relating to wheat production in Punjab, and the reference to the data linked to by the report is not online. But UNFAOSTAT is fairly useful. It reveals the following facts about wheat production in India.

As we can see, across India as a whole, wheat yield has increased nearly fourfold since 1961. If the region which produces half of that wheat has been falling because of the ‘ecological consequences of intensive monoculture systems’, it would surely be visible. But instead we can see that the area used for wheat production remained relatively static, and production suffered a slight dip in the early 2000s, but recovered through the remaining part of the decade — the opposite picture to the one presented by Christian Aid. It is possible, nonetheless, that the loss in Punjab were absorbed by production increases elsewhere, but the point remains that the increase in yield and production across the country has been sustained, for half a century, thanks substantially to agricultural chemicals.

Now, it is still possible that what Christian Aid are saying is correct, in relation to smallholdings. It may well be the case that the economics of smallholdings are such that chemicals are inappropriate. But then, what’s so good about being a smallholder? That may sound callous, but my point is about Roger Pielke’s question: Why is energy access not among the goals?

If the economics of smallholding preclude the use of industrial chemicals, surely such ‘sustainable’ lifestyles equally preclude the connection to an electricity grid. After all, if the farmer doesn’t produce sufficient surplus to pay for chemicals, how will he be able to afford his electricity bills? How is he going to pay to be connected to water infrastructure? And if there’s not enough capital being produced for these things, what sense does it make to talk about the other development goals? How is anyone trapped in subsistence going to find the time to let their children study; to combat extreme poverty and hunger; argue for equality; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; and combat HIV/AIDS and other diseases… They are too busy meeting the two MDGs taken more seriously than any other: ‘ensuring environmental sustainability’ as their part of the ‘global partnership for development’.

I think we have an answer to Pielke’s excellent question. Energy access is not among the goals set by the supranational political institutions, NGOs, and national governments that dominate the development agenda because it doesn’t fit with their vision of how people should live. Neither does the use of agricultural chemicals. Neither do lifestyles which offer more possibilities than subsistence and… guess what… dependence on the generosity of self-serving supranational political institutions, certain national governments, and NGOs. These entities are in turn dependent on the poverty of others for their own legitimacy. Chemicals and electricity would tear through that relationship of dependency, and that’s the reality of the ‘sustainability’ agenda.

The Guardian has an article about a poll of Europeans [PDF], which, according to them, shows that ‘Europeans fear climate change more than financial turmoil‘.

I have little time for opinion polls. There is only one real test of opinion, and that is an individual leaving his or her home, and putting an ‘X’ in the box on a ballot paper. And I’m suspicious of opinion polls, too. It is easy to make instrumental use of the attempts to gauge public opinion they hire pollsters to carry out. Questions are too easily framed to elicit the desired answer… are you in favour of motherhood and apple pie, or letting dangerous dogs play in childrens’ playgrounds? And then there is the danger that, if the interviewee has not had to go out of his way to register his view (i.e. to the polling station) then all that opinion polls measure is a weak opinion, not a conviction or commitment to an idea, thus making weakly-held opinion appear as support for a given agenda.

Opinions about climate change and policies intended to mitigate it are even more fraught. For what it’s worth — very little — I believe ‘climate change is a very serious problem’. It’s just that I don’t believe that the expression ‘climate change is a very serious problem’ actually means very much. It’s not a problem all by itself. As often pointed out on this blog, the ‘problem’ of climate change depends more on who has to experience it than on the magnitude of the phenomenon.

Anyway, back to the Guardian’s headline. The first thing to point out is that Europeans were not polled about their ‘fear’; they were asked about what they believed were the world’s ‘most serious problems’. Second, ‘financial turmoil’ is not a global problem: many economies are not experiencing it. This Wikipedia article lists each country’s growth over the last year. Most economies are growing at fairly healthy rates. This picture puts those statistics into a global perspective. There is a difference then, between a problem with an international dimension, and a ‘global problem’.

Says the Guardian…

The Eurobarometer poll (pdf) found that the majority of the public in the European Union consider global warming to be one of the world’s most serious problems, with one-fifth saying it is the single most serious problem.

This much seems to be true. If you ask Europeans to name the world’s single biggest problem, one in 5 of them say it’s climate change, and one in 6 and a quarter say its the economic situation. But put another way, four out of five Europeans disagree with the people who say that climate change is the biggest problem in the world. The figure changes dramatically when you ask people to name four more of the biggest problems in the world. But look at the two results…

The figure on the left is what happens when you ask people to name the single biggest problem. The figure on the right shows what happens when you ask them for 3 further answers.

So, out of just eight, the interviewees are in fact to nominate half of the problems listed as ‘the most serious problem[s] facing the world as a whole’.

And look at the problems people are asked to choose from. Concern about ‘the spread of infectious diseases’ and ‘armed conflicts’, rises nearly seven-fold between asking people for one and four of the eight ‘most serious problems. ‘The proliferation of nuclear weapons’ worries six times as many people when you ask people what they believe are the most serious problems, four times. The number of people concerned by ‘the increasing global population’ seems to increase according to the number of times you ask them to nominate one of the ‘most serious problems facing the world’. Why not just ask the same question eight times, and claim that 100% of Europeans think that climate change is ‘one of the most serious problems facing the world’? Eurosceptics amongst us will remember, that this is the MO of the European Union… If you don’t get the answer you were looking for the first time, ask and ask again. If you still don’t get the answer you wanted, insult those you polled, and ignore their answers anyway. I’m talking, of course about the referenda within EU countries, which asked for assent to various treaties, to which the answers were ‘No’, ‘Non’, and ‘Nee’. When did the EU start giving such a hoot about public opinion?

There are further problems. As discussed above, polls such as this don’t really ask interviewees to volunteer their opinion; they ask him or her to chose from the pre-selected list. This may be equivalent to no more than asking them which issues they’ve heard about — a quiz, rather than a poll. Then there’s the fact that opinions, such as they are, really don’t exist in a vacuum. People form ideas about the world by existing within it, and interacting with it. So, for instance, imagine that interviewer offered an argument that may diminish the interviewee’s concern about the issue he or she selected… For instance, had ‘the economic turmoil’ issue been chosen, the interviewer said ‘do you know that only 18 countries are currently experiencing negative growth, would you like to change your selection?’. It’s unrealistic, of course, but the point is that opinions are formed by dialogue. But the biggest problem with the poll is that it forces the presupposition that there are such things as ‘the most serious problems facing the world’ that can be reduced to mere issues devoid of their context. The questions are loaded, therefore, by that familiar maxim, ‘global problems need global solutions’. After all, why else would a supranational political institution, which is most famous for failing to engage the support of its member countries’ populations, be so interested in identifying ‘global problems’? The answer is in the inversion of the maxim: global solutions need global problems.

This is further revealed by Connie Hedegaard, European climate commissioner, quoted by The Guardian,

“This is encouraging news. The survey shows that the citizens of Europe can see that economic challenges are not the only ones we face. A clear majority of Europeans expect their politicians and business leaders to address the serious climate challenge now.”

She said it was “striking” that the public were even more concerned about climate change than in the run-up to the landmark Copenhagen summit on climate change in late 2009.

Another answer might be that the public have simply grown tired of the other ‘global problem’ narratives that once dominated the media, but no longer do. Global pandemics, terrorism and nuclear proliferation, for instance, are more distant memories. In any case, Hedeegard is wrong to suggest that climate change is moving up in the public’s consciousness. Compare this year’s results to the poll conducted in 2008.

It’s more striking that people were less sceptical of climate change policies a year before the Copenhagen summit than either during the run up to it, and since it.

A final quote from the Guardian lets the political ambition cat out of the bag…

The results of the Eurobarometer poll were hailed by the European commission as evidence that the public across member states maintains its support for measures to tackle climate change. The commission is currently engaged in an argument over whether to toughen the EU’s target of cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 20% by 2020, compared with 1990 levels, to a more stretching target of cutting emissions by 30% by the same date. The poll was conducted in June among 27,000 people from aged 15 in 27 countries.

Hedegaard wants to toughen the target but she is opposed by several other commissioners, including the energy commissioner, Günther Oettinger.

Hedegaard said on Friday: “The fact that more than three out of four Europeans see improving energy efficiency as a way to create jobs is a strong signal to Europe’s decision makers. I see this poll very much as an encouragement for us in the commission to continue fighting for ambitious and concrete climate action in Europe.”

So here’s how it works… You take people by surprise. You ask them to chose from a narrow range of issues. And then you ask them again. And Again. And again. You don’t give them the benefit of making a decision in the context of a debate. And you don’t canvass them for their opinion about costs and benefits, either ‘globally’ or in relation to themselves. You don’t tell them that the results will be used to legitimise certain policies. You compare their opinions to a historic low, and say that the answers demonstrate growing support for your policies — the bases of which have never been tested for popular assent at the ballot box.

Pop wisdom has it that ‘a picture paints a thousand words’. Here’s a picture that tries to paint so many words, but says more about its painters than the subjects they intended to portray.

The diagram is from The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society, and aims to depict ‘Key Components of the Climate Change Denial Machine’, and was highlighted by Andrew Revkin on his Dot Earth blog. Says Revkin,

That there are such well-financed and coordinated efforts is not contentious. And this is not the first attempt to map them. But it’s important to keep in mind that not everyone skeptical of worst-case predictions of human-driven climate disruption, or everyone opposed to certain climate policies, is part of this apparatus.

That there are ‘well financed and coordinated efforts’ may or may not be ‘contentious’. But are they significant? The word ‘uncontentious’ in Revkin’s article is a hyperlink to a 1998 NY Times article, alleging ‘Industry opponents of a treaty to fight global warming have drafted an ambitious proposal to spend millions of dollars to convince the public that the environmental accord is based on shaky science’.

Thirteen years later, there is no global climate deal, but also not much evidence that the failure of climate policies on either side of the Atlantic, or internationally had much to do with public opinion. It’s not as if the British or American public were ever really asked about their views before international climate negotiations began, and thus there’s no evidence that public opinion ever led to the failure of climate policies. Certainly in the UK, there was no contest: the three main parties all decided that they would champion the cause. The same is true in most countries, as far as I can see; climate policies are not implemented by virtue of public will. The Australian PM, for instance, is famous for promising that there would be no Carbon Tax.

Once governments such as the UK’s have made their mind up about climate policy, they are then, naturally, able to mobilise many £millions to convince the public about what they are doing…

…which, when you think about it, is kind of like politics in reverse. The government decides on a policy, and then goes about trying to generate ‘public opinion’, through such manipulative interventions as the above video.

So, I’ve often wondered, isn’t this stuff about ‘denial machines’ just a handy little story… A bogeyman… Nobody knows where he really lives. Nobody knows how big he is. Nobody really knows what he’s capable of, or what he’s actually done.

As others have pointed out, the Global Climate Coalition, shown in the diagram near to the ‘echo chamber’, ceased to exist in 2002 — nearly 10 years ago. Similarly, the Information Council for the Environment doesn’t seem to have been active since the late 1990s. The Center for Energy and Economic Development seems to have disappeared, with the best I can established being that it merged with another group a few years ago; it’s website seems to be a holding page for a company selling ‘prime meat’. The Greening Earth Society and the Cooler Heads Coalition haven’t been active since 2005. Not a single one of the organisations shown as ‘front organisations’ by the diagram exists today.

So much for telling us where the bogeyman lives — apart from suggesting that he only lives in the past. But how big is he? This is something discussed years ago on this blog. Back in 2008, I looked at Greenpeace’s claims that Exxonmbil had funded many of the think tanks and organisations involved in climate change ‘denial’. It turned out that all Greenpeace could come up with was the claim that Exxonmobil had fincanced ‘deniers’ to the tune of $2.5 million between 1998 and 2005, $2 million of which went to the Competitive Enterprise Institute — a conservative think tank named by the diagram. In that same era, I pointed out, Greenpeace had burned $2 billion on its own campaigns. Even today, Greenpeace’s Exxon Secrets doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2005. Clearly, the figures it produced were not significant enough — they simply don’t compare to its own coffers.

So the bogeyman doesn’t seem to have a home. He doesn’t seem to be very big. So what is he capable of? Well, of preventing action on climate change policies, apparently. Of ‘distorting’ the public’s perception of climate change, allegedly. All for less than a thousandth of what is available to Environmental NGOs, never mind the collosal resources of the UN, and the US and other national governments, and the multitude of huge corporations — including energy companies — who paint themselves green on the promise of being able to profit from climate change policies and ‘sustainable’ civil infrastructure. Oh, and let’s not forget the contributions from the uber-wealthy, such as George Soros, and smaller fish such as Jeremy Grantham and Al Gore, who, as individuals seem to have spent more on climate change campaigns than Greenpeace can show Exxon spent on ‘denial’.

This picture of the Key Components of the Climate Change Denial Machine is not drawn to scale. But worse than that, it does not put this monster in his environment, nor in perspective against the other beasts inhabiting the landscape of the climate change debate. I don’t beleive that this bogeyman really exists. And I don’t beleive he is powerful. As I’ve argued previously, it’s no good environmental activists posing as academics, pretending that the process of creating climate change policies and bureacracies has failed because of denial… It failed because the agenda was so confused. There is no need for Big Oil to hire expensive PR and lobbying firms or fund ‘conservative think tanks’, because the environmental movement and politicians do all their own negative PR for them. Nobody embarassed Al Gore as much as Al Gore did. Nobody is better able to paraody the environmental movement as well as the environmental movement… Remember this?

There were no ‘deniers’ at the COP15 negotiations in Copenhagen seeking to stall or prevent an agreement to follow the Kyoto Protocol. The parties there — most of them wanting a deal — screwed it up, all by themselves. It wasn’t ‘denier’s at the IPCC who made too much of the Hockey Stick graph, or who inserted the claims about glacier losses and African rain and crop yield. Environmentalists, and environmental policy-makers fail time after time after time, and, it seems, they need to invent an enemy on whom they can lay the blame for their failure. And they need to invent a feckless, ignorant public, who are held in thrall to the ‘denier’ bogeyman shouting into ‘the echo chamber’. The reality is, however, that most of the public simply aren’t interested in green hysteria, let alone ‘denial’.

Revkin points to an attempt to put the diagram into context by the Australian Climate Madness blog [PDF]. Revkin notes, ‘I think some, though by no means all, aspects of the map are not bad. But, as with so much of the climate debate, it is an overdrawn, overblown caricature of reality.’

It’s certainly a more accurate diagram, however. The United Nations, ENGOs, National governments, and corporations are all bigger players than the think-tanks, ‘front-groups’ and foundations that populate the more ‘academic’ diagram. Moreover, the Australian’s effort is far more precise in identifying the bodies it depicts. Those organisations are indubitably the ones constructing climate change policies, well above ‘public opinion’, and in spite of it, whatever has formed it. Perhaps the text boxes on the alternative diagram contain prose which is somewhat more colourful than is necessary, but the headings are accurate. After all, it’s not ‘deniers’ who are proposing and creating laws, powerful international agencies and institutions, and far-reaching policies. If the two diagrams were to converge, and to convey realisticly the relative material impact that those entities have, the academic diagram would be the size of a full stop (a period, to US readers) on the other.

Yet the environmentalists will whinge at any attempt to give a sense of proportion to the debate. Revkin links to a discussion which conludes in part that,

… the major environmental organizations are a $1.7 billion-a-year movement, with revenue streams that rival the most expensive presidential campaigns in history and the combined earnings of the world’s richest sports franchises. In their efforts to pass cap and trade legislation, they spent heavily on general education efforts, engaging policymakers, journalists and the public. They also invested considerable resources in mobilizing their more than 12 million members and in brokering alliances with some of the world’s largest companies, partners intended to augment their efforts at direct lobbying. Through these means and others, environmental groups have closed the gap with their traditional opponents in terms of spending and influence. Indeed, the effort to pass cap and trade legislation may be the best financed political cause in American history.

… But this, says former editor in chief of Scientific American, John Rennie, is ‘false equivalence’.

[Revkin] unnecessarily created a false equivalence between many of the people and organizations on either side of the climate dispute. As such, he’s stumbled into exactly the kind of bad “he said, she said” coverage of the topic that most science journalists and critics such as Jay Rosen have come to recognize as deficient. […]

But what does the comparison actually mean? If it’s only pointing out that opposition exists, that there are people and organizations on the other side of the debate, then it’s so obvious as to be scarcely worth saying. Dunlap and McCright made the point that they were showing the workings of a disinformation propaganda machine, one that misrepresented science with a fixed goal of preventing policies contrary to corporate and rightwing interests. Was Andy implying that those on the climate activism side were an equivalent kind of propaganda machine, even though the case for the reality and gravity of climate change is much better validated by the scientific literature? It seemed unlikely, but he seemed to let his readers think so.

If the diagram weren’t crude enough, the geometry of Rennie’s argument has even fewer dimensions… It’s about ‘sides’. And one ‘side’ has got ‘science’ on its side (‘ner ner ner nerrr nerr’). The former editor of a scientific publication doesn’t notice the politicisation of science. He doesn’t notice himself politicising science, of pitching it against ‘corporate and rightwing interests, in spite of the more sophisticated treatment of the climate debate having identified corporate interests and — heaven forefend — elements of the political right, on the side he seems committed to.

Moreover, the diagram offered by Dunlap et al simply doesn’t show ‘the workings of a disinformation propaganda machine’. Not least for the fact that several of the entities it depicts don’t even exist. And even if they still did exist, the diagram only serves to depict the prejudices of its authors, not a careful analysis of actors within the debate and their influence over it. It is, as it stands, an article intended to distort the perception of the debate, every bit as much as its authors claimed the ‘deniers’ had. No amount of drawings showing hierarchies and dependencies could adequately capture the reality of the debate. There are no straight lines in it. There are far fewer formal relationships between the actors than Dunlap, Rennie and co can admit.

Therefore, I suggest that this image:

… is a better symbol of the excesses of the ‘environmental machine’ and its intransigence than this image…

Because it shows far more explicitly that people project into this debate their own prejudices. Dunlap and co wanted to show how their political opponents had ‘distorted’ the debate. But they lost any sense of proportion in doing so. They forget to look at themeselves to understand why they had failed to influence the debate. They forgot that they themselves were attached to a vast effort to reproduce their ideas in policy, in the political reorganisation of the world, in powerful political institutions. And they were trying to do so, out with a democratic mandate, on the belief that being sufficiently convinced about the science is a legitimising basis for such authority. As sociologists, they should be ashamed of themselves.

I have to admit, I was annoyed at first by Revkin’s article. I read it, and tweeted,

disappointing treatment of a silly article, @Revkin http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/a-map-of-organized-climate-change-denial/ No sense of proportion, why take it seriously?

But then I followed the discussion that has followed it, which accuses Revkin of ‘false balance’, for daring to put arguments about the debate in perspective. And it seemed once again, that it’s the reactions to debate that are the most revealing. Indeed, many seemed shocked that Revkin should dare to put two ‘sides’ together. But what commenters such as Dunlap et al and Rennie cannot explain is why ‘conservative foundations’ and ‘think tanks’, and even corporations shouldn’t have a say in the climate debate. They might answer that they’ve got ‘science’ behind them, and that those they criticise have ‘interests’ and ‘ideology’. But I’m not taking their claims at face value. We can see for ourselves that the debate doesn’t divide on interests. And we can see the politics of such commentators, hidden behind their academic expertise. And it seems obvious that that politics, in spite of its own funding, cannot connect with the public. And it seems transparently the case that that expertise is being used to circumvent debate and democracy.

I didn’t get to study economics at University. I sat in on a few lectures, and was glad that I didn’t. But it would be nice to understand why and how economists arrive at their often counter intuitive conclusions. Science and philosophy often surprise us with what they turn out — things that run counter to what we’d expect from appearances. And it must be so with economics, because The Economist magazine has a story today, which claims that,

Shale gas will not solve Britain’s energy problems

This is very disappointing news indeed. I for one was pleased when Cuadrilla Resources announced estimates of gas reserves amounting to a possible 200 trillion cubic feet. More energy, and cheaper energy was surely an answer to Britain’s energy problems, especially for the 5.5 million households — up to 12 million people — living in fuel poverty. So what’s stopped the flow?

Cuadrilla thinks gas will start flowing by 2014. Alas, the finds will not solve Britain’s energy problems. Mike Stephenson of the British Geological Survey is sceptical that accurate predictions can be made from Cuadrilla’s two drill points. Even if the numbers are right, recovery rates may be only 10-20%. And mining such seams is controversial. Shale traps gas more tightly than other rock. To extract it, the shale is blasted with huge volumes of fresh water at high pressure, a practice known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”. France and two American states have halted fracking because of fears that chemicals used may pollute water sources.

Right, the numbers do seem too good to be true. But even 10-20% of 200 trillion feet is still 20-40 trillion feet. That’s not going to hurt! And even if fears about ‘chemicals’ polluting water sources have some foundation, there seems to be scant evidence for them. The possible cost of a water source becoming contaminated should surely be put into perspective. It’s not as if the UK was a massive desert, landlocked at the middle of a vast continent. And, in contrast to the states, which is far less densely populated than the UK, people rely far less on private wells for their water supply. Furthermore, we know that France objects to shale gas because it’s so heavily invested in nuclear. The problems here are technical, not insurmountable. And have very little, as far as I can see, to do with economics. The Economist, whoever he is, continues…

Generating electricity from natural gas is relatively clean. Other fossil fuels produce more carbon dioxide, so replacing Britain’s coal-fired power stations with gas-fired ones would decrease the country’s carbon emissions. But cheap, plentiful fuel (both indigenous and imported) may lead to an increase in overall energy use, worries Kevin Anderson of Manchester University. Shale gas is also likely to divert investment in Britain from pricier but carbon-free nuclear and renewable-energy sources. “From a climate-change perspective this stuff simply has to stay in the ground,” he says.

The immediate consequence of Cuadrilla’s announcement, though, is to undermine the economic logic of the government’s energy policy. Chris Huhne, the energy secretary, recently told delegates at the Liberal Democrat conference that renewable generation is necessary because fossil fuels will be increasingly expensive; he wants to get the country “off the oil and gas price hook”. Yet even if Cuadrilla’s bounty is smaller than it hopes, the earth is riddled with shale rock; its exploitation may check the upward pressure on prices, weakening the economic case for reducing dependence on hydrocarbons.

Hmm. So, shale gas is cleaner than coal… It is easy to turn into electricity. And if it is abundant as it seems to be, it will create cheaper energy…

So in what sense exactly is it that ‘Shale gas will not solve Britain’s energy problems’? Is there some complex theory of economics I’m not getting here? What has this one-time wannabe-economist got wrong? Is there a graph, expressing a function as some exotic curve, which would explain why cheaper, more abundant stuff isn’t an answer to a shortage of stuff and rising prices? I am well and truly flummoxed.

It is time Mr Huhne admits it will be costly to curb global warming, says Dieter Helm of Oxford University. Shale gas may generate taxes. But the political price of saving the planet has gone up.

Ah, so that’s it. ‘Shale gas will not solve Britain’s energy problems’, because the likes of The Economist, and the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change simply don’t want it to.

We didn’t need an economist to tell us that.

Apologies for this very long post — things which I felt needed to be said kept occurring to me…

Mike Childs is Head of Climate at the Friends of the Earth, and Chair of FoE Europe. He writes in a blog post at the FoE site today that,

One of the reasons I joined Friends of the Earth over 20 years ago was that it was an environmental group with a strong record of joining up social justice, development and environmental issues. This position has been maintained through the years.

I like the ambiguity of the language. ‘Joining up social justice, development and environmental issues’ doesn’t mean a commitment to ‘social justice and development’. Rather, it means subordinating them to ‘environmental issues’. This has been discussed previously on this blog. One-time ‘development’ agencies such as Oxfam, for instance, have abandoned their emphasis on development, to emphasise instead that ‘pastoral society’ is the best way of life for people in the developing world. It’s ‘sustainable’, you see, whereas life in industrialised, democratic, and wealthy economies — where we’ve moved on from such proximity to nature — isn’t. Never mind what people actually want, the influential, well-funded and ethically-unimpeachable NGO ‘joins up’ the notion of ‘social justice’, ‘development’, and ‘environmental issues’, and decides for them what’s in their best interests. Instead of talking about poverty and the need for development, Oxfam now are concerned with ‘climate poverty’ and are opposed to development.

Childs continues…

And that’s why we wanted to answer the question: can the UK shift to a low-carbon society operating within our share of a global carbon budget, in a way that doesn’t unfairly impact on poorer households?

It’s a bit late for that. As the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) admits themselves, the number of people living in ‘fuel poverty’ has more than doubled since 2004. Debate surrounds the extent to which the Climate Change Act has driven the rise in cost of fuel bills, and is thus responsible for the rise in fuel poverty. Bracket this question for the moment, I will return to it. There are two things which are, meanwhile, indubitable.

First, renewable energy is more expensive than conventional energy. This is owed in the main part to the fact that fossil fuels are energy dense, whereas ‘renewable’ sources of energy are more ‘ambient’. Therefore, renewable energy requires more machinery, and/or more human labour to turn that ambient energy into something useful. Notwithstanding that oil is ‘finite’ (and wind is too), wind can never contain as much energy as oil, even if we get better at converting wind into something useful; we can also get better at turning oil into useful energy.

Second, increasing prices puts stuff out of the reach of people with less money. Thus, higher prices — whatever the cause — ’causes’ fuel poverty. A caution here about the expression ‘fuel poverty’. I don’t believe in special terms such as this. There is no need for a term to describe the effect of rising fuel prices. If somebody does not have enough money for food, we don’t say that they are living in ‘food poverty’. If somebody cannot afford adequate housing or clothing, we do not say that they live in ‘house poverty’, or ‘clothing poverty’. So let’s be clear, rising fuel prices increases poverty.

These two truisms established, the Climate Change Act (CCA), then, is undeniably the cause of some increase in poverty. And Mike Childs, as Head of Climate at FoE, which campaigned vigorously for the CCA must take some responsibility for that problem. When the CCA was passed, FoE congratulated its members:

On the evening of Wednesday 26 November, 2008, the UK Big Ask campaign officially ended…

… and the Climate Change Act was passed into law.

World first

The Climate Change Act is the first national law committing to legally binding annual cuts in greenhouse gases.

It should make sure the UK plays its part in keeping global temperatures below danger levels.

And it could put Britain at the forefront of international efforts to tackle climate change.

Energy Act

Another vital new law – The Energy Act – also received Royal Assent.

This new law includes commitments to bring in Feed-in Tariffs – boosts to renewable energy that could see you getting paid for the energy you produce at home.

Both of these fantastic victories are the result of an awesome show of people power.

It’s people like you:

Taking action on our websites
Visiting and speaking to your MP
Signing post cards
that have made this happen.

We now need to keep up the pressure on Government to:

Decarbonise the UK
Ensure emissions reductions are made in the UK – not traded abroad
Set up workable Feed-in Tariffs
Ensuring payments are high enough to make them work
But let’s pause for a second to appreciate our achievements …

Congratulations! We did it.

The FoE’s campaign for a ‘strong climate law’ was called ‘the Big Ask’. It’s inconceivable that FoE were unaware that this ‘Big Ask’ wouldn’t result in bigger energy bills, because it ran concurrent — though much lower profile — campaigns against fuel poverty:

Friends of the Earth and Help the Aged are today (Wednesday 9 April) taking the Government to court, for not doing enough to meet its legal obligation to eradicate fuel poverty. The two charities are campaigning for the Government to develop a far more effective and comprehensive programme of domestic energy efficiency, to simultaneously end suffering from fuel poverty and tackle climate change.

Despite the Government being legally bound [1] to eradicate fuel poverty for vulnerable households by 2010 and for all households by 2016, nearly 3 million households in England are still struggling to adequately heat their homes. The Government currently estimates that by 2010 there may still be 1.3 million vulnerable [2] households in fuel poverty – nearly the same number as at the time of the Government’s Fuel Poverty Strategy in 2001.

The legal action failed. Friends of the Earth had succeeded in drafting and helping a bill through parliament, but had failed to hold the government to its promises to eradicate fuel poverty. We now see nearly double the figures for fuel poverty quoted by FoE in 2008. In November that year, FoE reflected on their failure.

The High Court gave Friends of the Earth and Help the Aged permission to appeal because the case raised difficult and novel legal questions. The organisations have asked the Court of Appeal to reconsider the issues and order that the Government release previously secret fuel poverty documents. Friends of the Earth’s executive director, Andy Atkins, said:

“We believe the Government has acted unlawfully by failing in its legal commitment to end the suffering of fuel poverty. The Government must introduce a massive programme to cut energy waste, slash fuel bills and ensure that people heat their homes and not the planet.”

So FoE knew that the government were failing to meet its promises to abolish fuel poverty; they knew that levels of fuel poverty were rising, and yet they still pressed for legislation — ‘strong climate law’ which they knew would push energy bills up further. And the government knew that energy prices were rising — it was late 2008, after all — and that this would have a material effect on consumers’ bills. And they knew that this would cause an increase in energy poverty — FoE had told them.

The following year, a group of NGOs, including FoE, joined forces.

A new coalition of leading UK environmental and social justice groups, convened by Oxfam and NEF (the new economics foundation) and including Friends of the Earth and the Royal College of Nursing, says the government cannot choose between tackling poverty and climate change; it must begin to tackle these related issues together and it must take action now.

At a time of rising unemployment and economic insecurity, some people argue that we cannot afford the ‘luxury’ of protecting the environment; but the report, Tackling Climate Change, Reducing Poverty shows that tackling climate change actually offers a huge opportunity to boost the economy and tackle UK poverty at the same time.

It’s never been clear to me how NGOs have managed to make the issue of climate change and poverty ‘related’. It’s not as if there was no poverty in the UK before climate change. They are of course related insofar as climate change policies make energy (and therefore everything that requires energy) more expensive. And they are related to the extent that climate — changing or not — is a problem if you don’t have the material means to protect yourself from it. But there is no obvious connection between poverty in the UK, and climate change; you don’t need to talk about the climate in order to understand the phenomenon of poverty. The government’s energy poverty eradication programme was 8 years old by 2008, and neither it nor any of its existing or new climate policies were having any positive effect on the levels of fuel poverty. So in what respect could the issues of poverty and climate change be related? The NGOs claimed that their research showed,

One in five people in the UK still live in poverty, often without enough money to heat their homes or to eat healthily. The new report shows that the poorest people in the UK will be most affected by the effects of climate change. They tend to live in poorer housing, have poorer health, less access to home insurance, and less money to adapt to price rises. Their situation could be worsened by measures to combat climate change such as higher taxation on fossil fuels.

But the report also shows how the need to combat climate change could present a huge opportunity to tackle poverty too. Home insulation cuts fuel bills, keeps homes warm, and reduces CO2 emissions; investment in public transport provides affordable travel for all and cuts air pollution; and the move to a low-carbon economy could be a stimulus for new skilled jobs in home insulation and energy efficiency.

So the first paragraph showed that poor people were damned by climate change (though it does not explain how a warmer climate would harm people who struggled to pay their heating bills), but also by climate change policies. But, the second paragraph argued, fighting climate change and poverty together might create an ‘opportunity’.

But just as it’s not clear how climate change and poverty are ‘related’, it’s not clear how intervention to solve the issues of poverty and climate change together represent ‘opportunity’. Yes, insulating homes creates the possibility of their inhabitants using less fuel, and therefore paying less in total for energy. But that saving is absorbed by the rising cost of energy, thanks to climate change legislation. Any gain made by ‘efficiency’ is lost by the policies designed to disincentivise energy use. On top of this, the cost of insulating so many homes — the labour and materials — needs to be paid for. That’s an opportunity for the person who is contacted to insulate homes, but it’s not an overall opportunity. It doesn’t actually yield anything productive by itself; there is no value added to anything by this ‘efficiency’.

Reading the NGO coalition’s statement, however, I was reminded of something. The words looked familiar. I was sure I had written something about a ‘low carbon economy’, energy efficiency, and new jobs in the renewable sector before…

I had, in April 2009.

Apparently 400,000 new “environmental sector” jobs will be created by 2017, according to Gordon Brown, who reckoned 1.3 million people would by then be working in “green” jobs. According to Mandelson, “The huge industrial revolution that is unfolding in converting our economy to low carbon is going to present huge business and employment opportunities.”

In fact, I had written the article for the Register in March — less than 6 weeks after the NGO coalition had met and published its report. It looks as though FoE were still influencing government thinking, after all. The NGOs were calling for precisely the things the government were now promising in their ‘Green New Deal’. And funnily enough, the ‘Green New Deal’ was also the title of a project conceived in July 2008 by parter in the group of NGOs, the New Economics Foundation (NEF).

The Green New Deal will rekindle a vital sense of purpose, restoring public trust and refocusing the use of capital on public priorities and sustainability. In this way it can also help deliver a wide range of social benefits that can greatly improve quality of life in the future. The Green New Deal includes policies and novel funding mechanisms that will reduce emissions contributing to climate change and allow us to cope better with the coming energy shortages caused by peak oil.

The Labour government were taking policies directly from NGOs and green-left think tanks. They weren’t even giving these policy ‘initiatives’ new names.

And as a Wikipedia article on the ‘Green New Deal’ shows, there are many ‘Green New Deals’, throughout the world, each hoping to use the climate issue to overcome financial woe. Each promising growth, jobs, and a shiny bright happy future. NGOs and think-tanks were instrumental in pushing governments towards these policies.

The following year, the UK Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties formed a coalition government. The previous government’s ‘Green New Deal’ was forgotten altogether, and the coalition, in a stunning act of original thought, promised the UK a ‘Green Deal‘. (Obviously, a New Green New Deal would have been absurd.)

The Energy Bill introduced to Parliament on 8 December 2010 includes provision for the new ‘Green Deal’, which is intended to revolutionise the energy efficiency of British properties.
The Government is establishing a framework to enable private firms to offer consumers energy efficiency improvements to their homes, community spaces and businesses at no upfront cost, and to recoup payments through a charge in instalments on the energy bill.

I’ve discussed the identical nature of, and rhetoric surrounding the Labour Government’s ‘Green New Deal’ and the coalition’s ‘Green Deal’ here recently. Here again is Chris Huhne, announcing the policy.

[youtube jE0lQwNADNE]

Huhne’s bluster is of course as hollow as ‘his’ policy ‘initiative’, which was as hollow as the previous governments policy, which was as hollow as the ‘thinking’ of the NGOs and think-tanks which lobbied for it.

Lots of fanfare. Lots of talk about ‘revolutions’ comparable to the industrial revolution. Promises of jobs. Promises of warm homes. Lots of hope and hype about economic recovery.

The reality is, however, no economy recovery on the horizon, but concerns that things are about to get worse. Nothing resembling an industrial revolution, but, on the contrary, concerns that the UK’s energy policies will send prices up, and industry away from these shores. No sign of any jobs, but, on the contrary, over the period discussed in this blog post, unemployment has risen from 5 to 8% — equivalent to the number of jobs promised by the Green New Deal. Fuel bills have risen faster than any government scheme to insulate homes can stop their occupants falling into ‘fuel poverty’. And there’s very little chance that carbon emissions will be reduced by any meaningful measure, and even less chance that a global deal will follow this vapid posturing.

I promised to return to the question about the extent to which climate change and renewable energy policies have caused bills to rise, and will continue to cause to rise. I must say that, by now, it seems almost pointless: the UK’s climate change act and its grandiose gestures — Green New Deals, green energy revolutions, and so on — are catastrophic failures on their own terms. However, DECC and its defenders have answered criticisms of rising levels of fuel poverty by the policies of the Climate Change Act by claiming that rises in energy bills (the kind you pay for directly, not draft legislation in Parliament) are due to the market, over which they have no control.

This is perhaps true. But admitting that they have no control over the market, they must admit that their plans to mitigate the effects of rising energy prices by offering schemes to insulate homes was inadequate. They appear to have failed to anticipate rising energy costs, and thus put their environmental concerns above the ‘energy poor’. Put another way, the policies intended to prevent carbon emissions and reduce fuel poverty were in contradiction, and one enjoyed greater emphasis than the other — completely contrary to the claim that the two goals are equivalent, as FoE and co had claimed. Put another way again, the idea that ‘the market’ may beset progress in the UK’s climate reduction plan was anathema to the policy-makers and NGOs. Yet the market was able to move in such a way as to put millions of households into fuel poverty.

But, what DECC emphasise is that by 2020, ‘the market’ will have made energy prices so expensive, that the costs caused by climate and energy policies will suddenly become insignificant. Renewable energy will become nearly as cheap as conventional energy. And our insulated homes will require less energy to heat them. As Carbon Brief candidly explained,

DECC base their analysis of future energy bills on the assumption that energy efficiency measures (for example increased home insulation) will reduce household consumption of energy – so while prices go up energy bills may remain steady or even go down. While DECC predict that climate change and energy policies will cause gas prices to go up by 18% and electricity prices by 33% by 2020, they estimate (as of July 2010) that because of reductions in energy use “compared to the counterfactual scenario in which climate change and energy policies do not have an impact on energy bills, on average, domestic energy bills will be 1% higher in 2020.”

So, the government has in fact anticipated higher energy prices. It cannot blame the market for then delivering them, for its failed policies. We can say with some certainty, then, that the emphasis that the government and FoE have put on fuel poverty have been little but token gestures. FoE knew what it was asking for: for policies that would make life difficult for people, and it knew that the government wasn’t capable of, or interested in, solving the problem of fuel poverty in any meaningful way.

Perhaps I sound like I may be being too hard on Childs and FoE here. But consider this passage from his blog post:

We looked at the impact of extending the life of existing nuclear power plants but found this had little impact on emissions as they were simply competing with renewable energy.

There is a crisis now, surely, for the 5.5 million households living in fuel poverty. But meeting the demand for energy — and perhaps lowering the cost — by increasing supply without the need for capital investment is ruled out, because it makes renewable energy investment less attractive. Again, we see FoE’s priorities, which reflect the government’s, in a document in which FoE claim to consider a ‘just transition’ to a low carbon economy.

Last week, Scottish and Southern announced that they were considering pulling their 25% stake in a nuclear energy consortium, to focus instead on renewable energy. An FoE spokesman said,

Scottish and Southern’s decision to abandon nuclear and focus on renewable power is welcome news. But they have a long way to go – 88 per cent of the power they supplied last year came from coal and gas, leaving consumers with soaring fuel bills caused by our fossil fuel dependency. Sufficient investment in renewables and cutting energy waste must be a Government priority, along with measures to help households, businesses and communities to free themselves from the shackles of the Big Six energy firms by developing their own green power.

FoE are opposed to old nuclear, and they are opposed to new nuclear. The cheapest cleanest, greenest, safest, and most proven form of low-carbon energy production is ruled out, because it interferes with windmills.

When Cuadrilla Resources announced that it had found a vast reserve of shale gas, FoE announced that,

Drilling for shale gas raises serious safety concerns and risks polluting water supplies – and it could take vital funding away from the clean energy solutions we know are safe and will work. Our future power needs should come from the wind, sun and waves and using our energy more carefully – this will slash emissions and boost the economy by creating new businesses and jobs. There should be no more fracking in Britain until safety and environmental concerns have been properly addressed.

Shale gas, of course, could do much, much more than ‘renewables’ to boost the economy, create new business and jobs, and slash our emissions — if that is important — by replacing our ageing coal power stations. It would also do much to lower the cost of energy bills. So too would nuclear energy. But as immediate answers to economic problems, fuel poverty and unemployment, and intermediate answers the problem of climate change, they are unacceptable to FoE. But the point of the policies they have pushed for is not simply carbon reductions, but renewable energy… expensive renewable energy.

And the government has responded. It has invited FoE to comment, and to recommend policies. It has welcomed the ‘pressure’ it has put on the policy-making process. It enjoys the PR role that FoE serves, in ‘communicating climate change’, and giving their policies the legitimacy that only an NGO seems able to give them in today’s world.

So finally, we have an answer to the question ‘what proportion of energy price increases are caused by policies’…

All of it. Every single penny rise is the fault of the previous and coalition governments, their policies, and NGOs like FoE. Because rather than emphasising the need for energy, for cheap and abundant energy, and allowing such development to take place, the government has designed policies which emphasise renewables, rather even than low or lower carbon alternatives to coal such as gas and nuclear. They have campaigned in the UK and internationally for policies which are hostile to conventional and nuclear energy. They have promised handsome returns to energy firms who in turn promise to help them deliver on their political targets, while a fifth of all UK households struggle to afford their bills. They have created an atmosphere in which energy firms are disinclined to deliver functioning energy infrastructure, and have emphasised their desire for ‘smart grids’ that will cost tens, if not hundreds of £billions. That is why SSE are considering pulling out of the nuclear energy consortium: they sense the lack of political commitment to the idea of nuclear, and the smart money is following the easy money. And shale gas… The Guardian reported last week,

The UK’s “dash for gas” will be halted by the government because if unchecked it would break legally binding targets for carbon dioxide emissions, Chris Huhne, energy and climate change secretary, said on Monday evening. “We will not consent so much gas plant so as to endanger our carbon dioxide goals,” he told a fringe meeting at the Liberal Democrats party conference in Birmingham.

“We will not consent”, therefore, “so much gas plant so as to endanger…” reducing energy bills, and reducing energy poverty.

All of this will be lost on Mike Childs, head of climate at FoE. He still believes he is committed to ‘justice’.

We came to the conclusion that yes, it is possible for the UK to go low-carbon in a way that’s fair for everyone who lives here. But that it will take a determined effort by government, businesses and individuals to do so. It will undoubtedly require decision-makers to stand up to vested interests such as the big 6 energy companies.

So, heroic changes and a determined effort to address social justice is the order of the day. Not so different from when I joined Friends of the Earth 20 years ago.

There could be a very different discussion about energy. There could be a situation in which there is no problem of energy poverty. Whether you believe energy supply and R&D needs more or less government intervention, a different, more positive discussion could have been dominated by questions about how to get more energy to more people for less cost. That could have been the priority. That could have been the measure of a ‘just’ energy policy. Then, environmental concerns could be heard. But the value of energy is limited to the discussion about ‘keeping the lights’ on, and only then with behavioural change experts ‘nudging’ us to turn them off, anyway.

It is no use discussing the rights and wrongs of climate change and energy policies and their scientific bases when, it seems, we have lost any sense of what we want energy for. The loss of this idea — that energy creates the possibility of real opportunities for longer, more rewarding and more comfortable lives — has allowed the likes of Friends of the Earth to enter the debate with their entirely degraded notion of ‘justice’ — one completely subsumed by their commitment to an absurd ideal of ‘nature’ and life ‘in balance’ with it. This notion of justice turns out to be, much less a liberating idea, but an idea which calls for increased intervention in and control over people’s lives — especially those it claims to want to help — for behaviour change, and for policies which ignore the interests and desires of people. The better argument is about more than merely ‘keeping the lights on’.

Pure poetry:

Ice is the white flag being waved by our planet, under fire from the atmospheric attack being mounted by humanity. From the frosted plains of the Arctic ice pack to the cool blue caverns of the mountain glaciers, the dripping away of frozen water is the most crystal clear of all the Earth’s warning signals.

It’s also sheer BS, and it belongs to Damian Carrington of the Guardian/Observer newspapers. He continues…

Last week saw the annual summer minimum of the Arctic ice cap, which has now shrunk to the lowest level satellites have ever recorded.

Now, is this true? Anthony Watts, who needs no introduction here, has a very useful page linking to sea ice data at his site. Carrington’s claim is true, if we look at the record of ice extent produced by scientists at the University of Bremen:

But it doesn’t seem to be the story produced by International Arctic Research Center/Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (IARC-JAXA):

And it doesn’t seem to be the story produced by The National Snow and Ice Data Centre in the US:

The Danish Meteorological Institute, also, have produced different data:

And so too have the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center:

And if that’s not enough, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration story doesn’t match Carrington’s claims either:

Carrington wanted to give significance to a new record being set. But it seems to have been set only according to one out of six measurements of sea ice extent. He could have checked. He could have looked at Anthony Watt’s site. But if he had, he would be left without a muse, where would his poetry be then?

Carrington, the poet, wants to paint a picture of the world, in which its white parts drain away. He wants to convey a feeling, not unlike the disappointment children experience when they see crisp white snow turn into muddy slush. The real picture of the world’s ice, however, requires grown up eyes.

There may well be a trend towards an ice free world. But there is a great deal of sea ice remaining. The 30-year record, which Carrington believes is waving at us, begging for a ceasefire, hardly depicts this drama.

But it gets worse. (It always does.)

The lower glaciers are doomed. Kilimanjaro may be bare within a decade, with the Pyrenees set to be ice-free by mid-century and three-quarters of the glaciers in the Alps gone by the same date. As you climb higher, and temperatures drop, global warming will take longer to erode the ice into extinction. But at the “third pole”, in the Himalayas, the ice is melting as evidenced by dozens of swelling milky blue lakes that threaten to burst down on to villages when their ice dams melt.

As has been widely discussed in recent years, if the ice on the top of Kilimanjaro does disappear, it will not be the consequence of warming. The glaciers there have been in retreat for longer than can be accounted for by climate change, and the temperatures there are not sufficient to explain the recession as the consequence of melting. And the Himalayas….

The threat posed is far greater than even this terrifying prospect: a quarter of the world’s people rely on Himalayan meltwater, which helps feed the great rivers that plunge down into Asia. The Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Brahmaputra, Ganges and Indus nourish billions and will eventually lose their spring surges.

Even if we take at face value the claim that a quarter of the world’s population rely on Himalayan meltwater — which doesn’t seem plausible to me — why should we imagine that they will always rely on the meltwater in the future, whatever the fate of those glaciers? Even if the glaciers melted — which we now know is a prospect that has been deferred by some three centuries — rain and snow would still fall on the mountains, and make their way to the sea. It should not be beyond the minds and means of a billion or more Asians to find ways of halting the water’s progress, and containing it.

So what is Carrington up to, with all this revision of some of the most absurd global warming alarmism that has materialised over the last few years?

Perhaps it is because ice is at the cold heart of all our deepest global warming fears that climate change sceptics wield their picks so heavily on it. The error by the publicists and cartographers of the Times Atlas, who stated that Greenland’s ice cover had shrunk by 15% since 1999, prompted a renewed sounding of sirens by climate sceptics who saw another example of rampant alarmism by warming fanatics. In fact, it was climate scientists themselves who sounded the alarm, prompting the Atlas publishers to promise a new map would be inserted.

Aha! Carrington senses that the ‘climate change sceptics’ have stolen a march. And rather than letting them steal the show, Carrington rushes to make the claim that it was the scientists who saved the day, after all, spotting the error.

But if it is important to state which side’s champions were instrumental in identifying the truth, it ought then to be important to state who precisely was responsible for propagating the misinformation. As Bishop Hill pointed out, it was the Guardian’s Environmental Editor, John Vidal, who had said,

The world’s biggest physical changes in the past few years are mostly seen nearest the poles where climate change has been most extreme. Greenland appears considerably browner round the edges, having lost around 15%, or 300,000 sq km, of its permanent ice cover. Antarctica is smaller following the break-up of the Larsen B and Wilkins ice shelves.

This was ‘churnalism’. Vidal had merely copied the claim made by the press release announcing the Times Atlas,

For the first time, the new edition of The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, published on 15 September, has had to erase 15% of Greenland’s once permanent ice cover – turning an area the size of the United Kingdom and Ireland ‘green’ and ice free… Cartographers of the atlas have sourced the latest evidence and referred to detailed maps and records to confirm that in the last 12 years, 15% of the permanent ice cover (around 300,000 sq km) of Greenland, the world’s largest island, has melted away.

Rather than quiet reflection on their own errors, Guardian environment staff make noisy statements, hoping to recover their credibility. Does this not speak loudly to the fact that these writers are engaged in a very political debate: they sense that the embarrassment caused by the Times Atlas affair undermines the wholly alarmist argument they have been advancing; they have lost ground to ‘the sceptics’, which must be recovered. Thus, Carrington waxes poetic on what the melting ice portends, before reaching for… grasping for… facts that will give this lyricism some substance. And he grasps for facts that do not bear the weight of the political argument. There doesn’t seem to have been any record set on the Arctic Sea this summer. There is still a great deal of ice left on the world. Kilimanjaro’s glaciers are not victims of climate change. People living beneath glaciers are not so dependent on them. Clinging on to these long-debunked claims is an attempt to keep up appearances: to sustain the view of the debate they have been maintaining for far too long.

It was scientists, not some imagined group of ‘sceptics’, who corrected the Times Atlas. But in the same way, it isn’t ‘the sceptics’ who embarrassed the alarmist fools at the Times Atlas and at the Guardian; they embarrass themselves.

What the Minister for Energy and Climate Change thinks about the public:

Who does he think he is?

The environmental movement and the UK government previous and present have emphasised that price is fundamental to ‘sending signals’, both to the market to encourage investment in the technologies it favours; and to the consumer to coerce him to modify his behaviour. Neither of them have emphasised the possibility of cheaper, more abundant energy, and the good that it would produce: lowering prices, broadening access to transport, and making people’s lives more comfortable.

With public priorities and expectations so diminished, is it any surprise that energy companies have, in accordance with such goals, created a baffling array of tariffs, taking the opportunity to make more money? That is the entire ethic of energy reduction: more for less. That is the inevitable consequence — and completely in the spirit — of doing things like creating tradable commodities out of immaterial objects, such as emissions-trading quotas.

Enough fighting about the rights and wrongs of climate change, we should be answering people like Huhne with positive arguments for more.

That old chestnut… That the ‘climate denial machine’ is ‘well-funded’… is about to suffer another blow to its credibility.

Luboš Motl of the Reference Frame has an entertaining take on the Climate Reality project, which seems to be Al Gore’s latest stunt. Says Motl,

Just look at the dozens of people who had to participate in the creation of these amateurish, would-be interesting movies that have 12,000 or 15,000 views on YouTube, respectively. Imagine how many millions of dollars have been thrown to the trash bin, how many fat screaming female musicians had to be killed during the shooting. Gore’s videos are completely unoriginal, can’t compare with the videos that inspired Gore (like Honda’s Rube Goldberg device: I recently saw some equally good ones, not just the Melvin Machine, but forgot the URLs), and they really make no sense. Why is a Rube Goldberg machine used in a video about the climate? What point could it make (except that alarmists’ arguments are contrived and extremely unlikely)? Those people are just not capable of thinking, capable of doing anything well. They’re just low-quality people.

It’s a good point. There seems to be no end of cash available to promote the catastrophic story, and the individuals behind it, of course. This latest stunt is a 24-hour long web-TV extravaganza. The man himself, says,

“24 Hours of Reality will focus the world’s attention on the full truth, scope, scale and impact of the climate crisis. To remove the doubt. Reveal the deniers. And catalyze urgency around an issue that affects every one of us.”

AL GORE
CHAIRMAN OF THE CLIMATE REALITY PROJECT

It’s an interesting claim. Reality, it seems, is determined by committee, chaired by none other than himself. ‘I’ve got reality on my side’, he seems to be saying, ‘what have you got?’

We ain’t got enough cash for a 24 hour worldwide telethon, that’s for sure, Al.

This is a promo for the event.

And ain’t that the point… There’s the proverbial sh*t that his the fan, to which the promo visually alludes (oh, the subtlety), but there’s the other idiom, ‘throw enough dirt and some of it will stick’.

What possible use could 24 hours of web TV to settling the argument, other than to bore the opposition into submission? There are only two categories of people who will be willing to endure such a dull enterprise: the choir, who need no preaching; and sceptics, who will find it entertaining to see the climate Great and Good attempt to elevate and flatter themselves. Nobody will be watching this from on the fence.

If this 24 hour Gore-Bore-a-thon is an attempt to do anything, it is yet another attempt to win the ‘debate’ without having it. It’s about asserting a claim about ‘reality’, without ever having the claim tested. It’s not simply ‘bias’; it’s naked dogma. All it will do is epitomise the environmental movement’s intransigence; it’s inability to respond to criticism. It may work, of course, for the true believers in one respect. For the committed, it will be a self-affirming ritual… A ceremony for the smug, who will nod, tut, sigh and laugh on cue. But… there is good news…

This failure to permit dialogue must by now be the essential characteristic of the environmental movement, beyond question. I have lost count of the number of on and off-line discussions I have had, in which it became clear that my opponent’s intentions were not to respond to anything I said, but to merely recite the litany at me. In contrast to discussion, in which a point can be explored, conversations with the Faithful do not progress. These encounters are not conversations. There is no person, merely dogma.

If I were to speculate as to what might be going on, it is this. If one starts from the view that ‘the debate is over’ and ‘the science is settled’, and that all that is necessary to win the debate is to tell the consensus story, it is by definition, an appeal to authority: it’s not me who is saying it; it’s not my opinion; it is science‘. Thus the proponent of this view has completely surrendered his own judgement. Lacking any critical function, he has no option but to recycle the litany, as best it fits any turn the discussion takes. He doesn’t have to understand the science, he merely needs to know what to say, and when. It is impossible to have a discussion with such a mind. It is not capable of discussion.

The good news is this, then. As human as this tendency is, so is the tendency to realise that what once seemed like sense is dogma. Since the only people watching the contrived ‘reality’ that Gore and his crew want to promote are likely to be the choir, the only people it will bore are the choir. And the longer they are expected to obediently sit, listen, repeat, and sing on cue, for no reward — for no payoff whatsoever — the more likely they will want to start singing a different tune.

Please, Mr Gore, more 24-hour long ‘reality’ stunts.

I have an article up on Spiked today…

The growth of environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) over the past 50 years has been extraordinary. Starting from humble beginnings and means, organisations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, which are both celebrating their fortieth anniversaries this year, and the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), which opened its first office 50 years ago, now command budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars. But while the organic champagne may be flowing in the green camp, what does the rest of the world have to celebrate about the rise and rise of the Big Green NGO?

Read more…