Tim Yeo is NOT a Corrupt Bastard

Do you ever wonder about political corruption, about those who use positions of power to advance their own venal interests?  I imagine it’s an issue that concerns most people, the declining standards of honesty in public life.  It’s always been with us, of course, but there was a time when it took effort to uncover dishonesty and the abuse of office. 

Now the corrupt are able to drape their dealings quite openly in some fashionable theory or other, avoiding all conflict of interest and crisis of conscience.  How convenient when one no longer has to justify one’s financial wheeler-dealing; how convenient when enrichment is aided by theory and by fashion. 

Just think of Timothy Yeo.  For those unfamiliar with the British political constellation, he is one of the stars in the Tory firmament, presently among the luminaries of our tree-hugging Coalition government, out to save the planet, regardless of the cost.  Oh, but no cost to Yeo; just the contrary; it’s rather a nice little earner. Rather conveniently for him, and for his bank balance, he is the Chairman of the Commons Select Committee, a powerful and influential voice.  

Green policies and wind farms are a jolly good thing, he thinks.  Is there any surprise here?  He earns £65,000 ($98,500) as a Member of Parliament, not a lot, you may very well agree, not a lot for a man like Yeo.  Not to worry: this was supplemented last year by those who appreciate the true value of the Yeo factor.  It was supplemented, to be exact, by an extra £136,000 ($206,000), enabling the poor man to live in a manner to which he clearly has become accustomed.  This, I should add, for a minimum of work.  More, really, for his windy presence. 

So who are these Yeo philanthropists, you ask?  Would it surprise you to know that they are all green?  Oh, not green in judgement, just green in interest, keen in ensuring that environmental friendliness remains one of the great political and policy stalwarts of the day.  For as Tim gets rich they get richer - ‘green’ companies like AFC Energy, Eco City Vehicles and TMO Renewables. 

On his paymaster’s behalf – sorry...in the interests of all of us, at least for those who are not green with envy, Yeo has moved an amendment to the present Energy Bill that will add even tighter targets on the amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted by generating power.  A holy green alliance has been formed.  Alongside Yeo and his shadowy backers (where does their money come from?  Who are the investors) there are the usual suspects, the usual variety of nauseating green lobby groups, Socialist and Liberal MPs and others who are likely to ensure that the amendment is adopted.  The irony of making the rich richer and the poor poorer seems to have escaped the Parliamentary Labour Party.  Yeo’s amendment will mean ever higher energy bills, energy beyond the means of many of the elderly, many more of how will die in future of hypothermia.  I urge you, do not grow old in our brave new energy world.  Oh, but the greater cause of Yeo is such a noble end, worth a few casualties along the way

Two years ago I wrote an article on the spread of wind farms (Whistle down the wind, 31, May 2011) in which I made the following points;

Wind farms, who does not hate the sight of wind-farms? I certainly do. You may think they are necessary as a source of clean and renewable power. If you do I urge you to think again, think of the implications of these hideous blots on the landscape for the landscape. As foreign investors rush in to capitalise on British wind - and the wind of British politicians - just remember that it would take require a farm the size of Greater London to generate as much energy as a single coal-fired power station, assuming a never ending windy day. 

Oh, but think of the money to be made; think of the money being made, for example, by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, effectively bribed by developers to stop them complaining about the killing of eagles by wind turbines. Then there are the bats, of course, the damage these things cause to them; but who cares about the bats? You should care about yourself, though, enough to make sure that you live nowhere near these monstrous carbuncles, because the noise generated has caused health problems for those who do. The difficulty here is that, as the contagion spreads, it will be difficult for any of us to escape them. 

And all this for what, all this disruption, all this stupidity for what? We see our land destroyed, we see the economy weakened, jobs lost or exported elsewhere; we see an ever greater burden of taxation for what?   

Well now I know – it’s all for the benefit of Yeo!  Speak out as much as you want; it will make no practical difference.  Professor Gordon Hughes of Edinburgh University has spoken out, saying that even without the amendment the long-term consequences of the Bill will be horrible (his word).  “It’s a recipe for deindustrialisation”, he added.  “Either we get rid of this obsession, or we give our future to the rest of the world.  The question is whether we are serious about our economic future or not.”

Tim Yeo is serious about his own economic future, just as he is serious about keeping wind farms away from his own immediate neighbourhood.  The rest can go hang, which a great many may very well do in future, when the alternative is a slow death by cold. 

Let me amend the ending of my previous article.  As you sit in your blacked-out and freezing home, listening to the sound of the roaring wind farms, comfort yourself by thinking of Yeo’s profits.  Shame on you for thinking this man, with all of his noble intentions, is a greedy, corrupt, pocket-lining bastard.  Same on you for thinking that the Energy Bill is a fraud, verging on treason against this country.  Shame on you for thinking that Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Labour Party are deluded, self-serving and pathetic morons.  Shame on you for thinking that the investors in the ‘green’ energy firms might very well be Chinese.  The future, you see, is Green...backs.  Oh, and the future is for pigs.  

Tilting at Windmills

Matt, the fifth Viscount Ridley, is one of the people that I am thankful for. A businessman, a libertarian and a journalist, he has done so much to expose bogus and fashionable nostrums. Rather like a modern Don Quixote he has tilted at windmills, wind turbines, to be exact, relentlessly exposing what I am convinced is the greatest ‘alternative energy’ scam of the age.

Writing previously about wind farms I made the following points;

Wind farms, who does not hate the sight of wind-farms? I certainly do. You may think they are necessary as a source of clean and renewable power. If you do I urge you to think again, think of the implications of these hideous blots on the landscape for the landscape. As foreign investors rush in to capitalise on British wind - and the wind of British politicians - just remember that it would take require a farm the size of Greater London to generate as much energy as a single coal-fired power station, assuming a never ending windy day.

Oh, but think of the money to be made; think of the money being made, for example, by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, effectively bribed by developers to stop them complaining about the killing of eagles by wind turbines. Then there are the bats, of course, the damage these things cause to them; but who cares about the bats? You should care about yourself, though, enough to make sure that you live nowhere near these monstrous carbuncles, because the noise generated has caused health problems for those who do. The difficulty here is that, as the contagion spreads, it will be difficult for any of us to escape them.

Writing recently in the Spectator, Ridley tabled a fresh indictment. As he says, to the nearest round number the amount of energy that has been generated by wind farms comes to exactly zero. But the cost has been huge; the cost in fuel poverty for the elderly, in regressive subsidies which pass wealth to the wealth, in the destruction of rural communities and landscapes, in the loss of jobs, the felling of forests and the destruction of wildlife. Things have gone that can never be replaced.

But for so long the politicians were blind to all of this. In Bath, one of England’s most beautiful cities, the Liberal Democrat-led council even proposed to erect a 240ft wind turbine on the hills just to the south. The scheme was heavily promoted by a local landowner, the only person who stood to benefit in windfall profits. It was only after mass protests, and a threat by UNESCO to take away the city’s world heritage status, was the proposal reluctantly dropped.

Now, it would seem, central government is beginning to blow less wind. The big multinationals, who are investing heavily in offshore wind, are beginning to worry that the cornucopia is not endless, that subsidies may no longer he as easy to get in future as they were in the past. Vestas, which wants to build a turbine factory in the county of Kent, is seeking assurances from David Cameron, the Prime Minister, that he is still behind wind energy. Thankfully, George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer and master of the purse strings, has made it clear that he at least is dead set against further expansion, all on the grounds of cost.

Quite frankly we have been scandalously misled by an unholy alliance between stupid politicians, the self-regarding green lobby, covetous manufacturers and venal land owners. Even in economically vibrant times the policy made no sense. One would have to cover this fair land from end to end with wind farms to meet even a fraction of our future energy needs. But in these economically straightened times wind appears to be just that – wind. It took austerity to expose this scandal.

Let them eat wind

There are few things, I am happy to admit, that induce in me feelings of weariness and cynicism more quickly than endless lectures about global warming or climate change or responsible energy policy or a hundred variations on the theme from Bore Gore. It’s the new orthodoxy, the new Puritanism that threatens to submerge us all in a mood of guilt. Not I, not ever, no matter how much tiresome ‘science’ is trotted out. I once expressed my feelings in debate, and when I debate I take no prisoners;

Orthodoxy, that’s the key word, don’t you agree? Global warming has become a new religion. It’s part of that pessimism that has accompanied our species almost since the beginning of time, codified in religions like Christianity. There are precious few now who believe in Doomsday, in the Second Coming and the Last Judgement. So, no more ‘the end is nigh: repent!’ Instead we have ‘global warming is happening: repent!'

We have been taken far down the road of repentance in England. There is no debate; it’s now a matter of consensus across the political divide, with green taxes adding an ever growing burden to patterns of consumption, pushing the most vulnerable in our community ever deeper into fuel poverty. The time has come to fight back, against the onward march of taxes and windmills, a ghastly blight on our green and pleasant land.

Let me tell you how to do it. No, let Matthew Sinclair tell you how to do it. He does so in a highly effective fashion in Let Them Eat Carbon: The Price of Failing Climate Change Policies and How Governments and Big Business Profit From Them, an excellent little polemic. The arguments are tailored to an English shape but there are general policy principles that might as easily be applied elsewhere.

Sinclair’s premise is a simple one: ignore all the usual arguments about global warming. Instead focus on the climate change polices that have arisen on the back of all the theoretical gobbledygook. Just ask; do these things work, what difference do they make?

No difference at all, is the short answer.

Actually, that’s not quite right; government initiatives make a difference alright, but for the worse. Green taxes, the renewable energy option built into electricity bills, generates windfall profits for the energy companies and makes pricing altogether more volatile; bio fuels inflate food costs; renewable energy plans involve a huge waste of resources while making supply ever less secure; windmills transfer profits to the owners of land, transfer profits from the productive to the unproductive sector of the economy; and the only green jobs that are created are for bureaucrats and lobbyists. Oh, sorry, that’s not true: there are also the jobs that are created in the Third World, as companies, overburdened with costs and regulations, move elsewhere.

Sinclair concludes that not only will the various green policies adopted fail to reduce carbon emissions but they will also have the effect of creating a prolonged economic depression in the developed world. I suspect that the Chinese have a close interest here.

The title, incidentally, is a reference to Queen Marie Antoinette and her supposed comment about cakes as a substitute for the absence of bread. Here we are, the new peasants, taxed to perdition to support a distant and out-of-touch court, a new Versailles where all sorts of lobbyists, environmentalists and green activists gather to eat up the produce of the nation. As William Norton wrote recently in Prospect, unelected cartels run an irrational system that does not work even on its own terms but out of which they all do very nicely indeed.

Do I hear the sound of tumbrels? Wishful thinking, or I can only wish that our benighted politicians were not quite so stupid.

We Only Have Fourteen Hours to Save the Earth

One simply knows that the global warming theory really is in a state of terminal crisis when even the Guardian, yes, the Guardian starts to raise doubts. The paper ran a series of articles last week, some of them very good, raising a number of pertinent questions.

On Saturday Simon Hoggart, himself an AGW sceptic, highlighted the very thing that concerns me most. It’s simply this: if the science is so convincing why are the warmists becoming increasingly hysterical when faced with rational questions and objections? Why does someone like Ed Miliband, the Secretary for the Environment, need to launch his own campaign of personal invective simply because there are people who take a contrary view to the accepted orthodoxy?

Orthodoxy, that’s the key word, don’t you agree? Global warming has become a new religion, as Hoggart suggested. It’s part of that pessimism that has accompanied our species almost since the beginning of time, codified in religions like Christianity. There are precious few now who believe in Doomsday, in the Second Coming and the Last Judgement. So, no more ‘the end is nigh: repent!’ Instead we have ‘global warming is happening: repent!'

Dismal Gordon Brown, with little Miliband in tow, went to Copenhagen last year along with Super Obama, urging the message of repentance on the world. But they come from a Christian tradition, a tradition of pessimism and guilt. The Chinese do not and therefore had not the least intention of repenting, no matter how many hallelujahs were shouted at them. If we were back in Europe of the late Middle Ages the Chinese delegates would be facing a charge of heresy, with the cleansing fires beyond, a literal warming after the Auto de Fe.

We deniers, and I am most assuredly a denier, not a sceptic, have been placed on the same moral and intellectual level as those who would question the Holocaust. It does not matter; for the more people like Millipede shout and scream, the more bogus ‘science’ is produced, the deeper my conviction becomes. And the deniers, sceptics and doubters are growing by the day, as we know from a recent opinion survey.

The wonderful thing is that it was ordinary people, bloggers by the dozen, the global warming guerrillas, as Matt Ridley describes them in the Spectator, who exposed the greatest intellectual and political fraud of the modern age. The internet has become in this regard a true democracy, a little like the demos of ancient Greece. In pre-internet days the orthodoxy would have been swallowed whole, peddled by the BBC and sycophantic journalists; peddled by ‘scientists’ on fat research grants. Contrary voices would have been lost in the wilderness, confined to obscure journals, only ever read by a tiny minority.

I remember seeing Flash Gordon when I was little in which Dale Arden turns to the hero, saying, “Flash, I love you! But we only have fourteen hours to save the earth” It obviously stuck in the back of my mind, because it immediately leapt out when I heard the warmists say, in their alarmist and hysterical fashion, that there were only fifty days to save the world! Yes, they are ludicrous. I think this is what will kill them in the end – laughter. :-))

The Congress of Mice

The past is a foreign country; they do things better there. Oh, yes they do. Anyone with any sense at all could have predicated that the massive jamboree at Copenhagen would be utterly pointless. There was never going to be any real substance but where was the style, where was the glamour, where was the panache? How utterly insignificant they all seemed, the leaders of our world, what silly little pygmies trying to cut a figure on the stage of history. What a joke the whole thing was, what a total scream, the place packed with polar bears representing one group of global warming fascists or another.

I loved Gerald Warner’s suggestion that Copenhagen was an attempt to recreate the Congress of Vienna with a cast of third-rate extras. The climate itself seemed to be laughing at them, showering England in snow and giving us the coldest December days in years! What a cast there was at the 1815 Congress: the great Prince Metternich for Austria; Castlereagh and Wellington for England, Talleyrand for France. Even Tsar Alexander of Russia, not the most intelligent of autocrats, casts a shadow like a colossus from the past across Obama, Brown and the rest of the vulgar and mediocre Copenhagen crew.

This congress of mice was never about saving the world, no, it was cheap and undignified haggling over money, over who gets what, with a touch of added blackmail, tantrums and phony histrionics. It was quite simply, as Warner says, about blatant greed and naked self-interest, the so-called developing world, which never seems to develop, attempting to extort as much as it can from rest; a modern form of Danegled that will go into the vaults of some dictator or corrupt politician-you chose; there are so many-to buy limos in countries that barely have roads.

Think also about the terminology these clots were using. Think about the precise meaning behind the phrase ‘legally binding agreement.’ Now ask yourself one key question: in what fashion can a sovereign state be ‘legally bound’ to cut carbon emissions or anything else for that matter? In what way would breaches of these ‘legally binding agreements’ be addressed? By sanctions? By war? The questions are rhetorical because I don’t know the answers and I’m reasonably certain the mice would not know the answers either, even if they had considered the questions.

The lie of global warming, the pseudo-science behind it, is without doubt the greatest scandal of our age, through it may take years before the world wakes to this simple truth. Meanwhile the warmists will continue to spread panic and despond as a way of pushing ‘green taxes’ ever higher, as a way of sucking the life out the western economy, of moving resources from the productive to the wasteful. But who is prepared to stand against this; who is prepared to challenge the bogus orthodoxy? None from the congress of mice, of that we can be certain.

The Good Soldier Klaus

Casting my eye across the political class of Europe it occurs to me that they are a pretty pathetic lot for the most part. There is Super Sarkozy, the absurdly vain and silly president of France, prancing around in high heels and surrounding himself with people even smaller than himself…apart from his wife! There is President Rip van Rumpy-Pumpy, so boring he probably sends himself to sleep. There is Seedy Silvio, the laughable Lothario, guided not so much by his brain but an altogether baser part of his anatomy! And then there is Vaclav Klaus.

I really only became aware of Klaus over the resistance he put up, the principled and gallant resistance, to the forward progress of the Lisbon Treaty. The pressure he was under at that time was immense, with Sarko threatening all sorts of dire reprisals against the Czechs. He resisted as long as he could until there was no more point in resistance. I so admire him for this, for his principle and for his decency. I admire him not just because of his stand against Lisbon but because he is the one leader of any stature to take a stand also against the climate change orthodoxy.

To understand President Klaus better one has to look into his background. He began his career in the old communist Czechoslovakia, trained as an economist in the Marxist orthodoxy of the time. Even so, he was quick to perceive that this ideological deadweight was responsible for the economic failures of the east compared with the capitalist west. Latterly influenced by the economic liberalism of the Chicago and Austrian Schools, he accepted that free markets and free societies go hand and hand.

It was his experience of central planning, of the deadening effects of bureaucracy, which stood behind his opposition to Lisbon. Though it seems to have gone largely unnoticed in this country, the speech he gave on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall was among the best to mark the occasion, a celebration, yes, but also a warning. He said that the first ten years after 1989 was an uphill movement towards freedom and democracy. But then things started to go wrong:

…the second post-communist decade has been…downhill. Now, we experience less freedom, more regulation, more manipulation of people in the name of all kinds of politically-correct ambitions, post-democracy instead of democracy, growing disbelief in markets… In the 1950s and the decades after, the leading idea behind integration was liberalisation. It focused on a lack of borders and free movement of people and ideas. This was a very positive concept for Europe, and I believe it should continue. However, integration has turned into unification.

It is this process of centralisation, standardisation and regimentation that is as much a danger now as it ever was in the past, no matter the shift in ideological priorities.

True to his unique perspective, Klaus has also taken a stand, calm and insightful, against the likes of the increasingly hysterical Al Bore-who seems to be frightened to debate with him-and his large tribe of warmists. It is, as Standpoint highlights, no coincidence that Klaus is the only head of state who actually knows something about climate science and a lot about the economics of cap-and-trade. Two years ago he published Blue Planet in Green Shackles in which he argued that the policies advocated by the warmists would be much more ruinous than any negative effects of higher temperatures. But the key argument for me focuses not on the science but the politics. This should be repeated time and time again: the greatest threat to freedom in our century is, as Klaus says, no longer socialism but the “ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism.” Alas, when the world wakes up to this simple truth it may be too late.

Lysenko’s Ghost-the Lies behind Global Warming

During Stalin’s purges in the late 1930s those arrested were almost invariably called ‘wreckers’ or, even more common, ‘saboteurs.’ It now seems to be an insult favoured by those wedded to the climate-change orthodoxy, judging here on the basis of Ed Miliband's recent attacks on Nigel Lawson and David Davis. What was the crime of these loathsome heretics? Why, to suggest that there is an alternative way of looking at this issue and the data supporting the man made climate change hypothesis is not conclusive.

My own view is simple: the climate change argument is based, as we now know, on the deliberate manipulation of data. If you like it’s Lysenko-science, named after Trofim Lysenko, the fraud who dominated Soviet biology for so many years. We know how hysterical the neo-Lysenko movement is; we know from the emails leaked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, a world ‘authority' on the campaign behind the new orthodoxy. Lysenko was fortunate in that anyone who challenged his bogus theories, which were to do so much harm to Russian agriculture, was immediately packed off to the Gulags. Professor Phil Jones, the director of the CRU, is, sadly for him, limited to spreading verbal poison.

Yes, he lets off steam in an impotent and childish fury against the heterodox, sharing his passions with fellow global warming enthusiasts. The death of a scientist who expressed a sceptical view was greeted as ‘cheering news’. One of Jones’ American contacts said the next time he saw Pat Mitchell, another sceptic, he would ‘be tempted to beat the crap out of him.’ And it is by such elevated and refined thought that science makes progress in the modern age. Meanwhile inconvenient information, information that challenges the accepted hypothesis, is quietly set aside.

None of this surprises me really, because science does not operate on the strictly rational model that so many assume, the sort of explanatory framework advanced by the likes of Karl Popper. No, it does not; for scientists are human beings, as driven by emotion and self-interest as the next person. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a useful guide here. There is, if you like, a lethargy to scientific progress; that scientists may very well hold on to existing paradigms simply because they are not yet ready to embrace the alternative; in some cases they may never be ready.

After all, think of all the fat research grants the Lysenko-Jones people attract, all that lovely state support. One gets used to the jet-setting life, off to conferences in luxury hotels around the world, places where deals are done and preconceptions reinforced, where lie breeds on lie and half-truths on self-serving illusions. Who, in those circumstances, is bold enough to face the truth, to become the enemy of the–scientific-people?

Here we are no on the threshold of the Copenhagen conference where the likes of Miliband, who, as Secretary of State for Climate Change, has also made a nice career out of hunting dragons, and a rest of the world’s political community are about to leave a huge carbon footprint while feeding on the poppycock of Jones-Lysenko.

What will it mean? Is this about saving the world? No, its about imposing more and more restrictive practices; its about further advances in the coercive power of the state; its about forcing green ideology down the throats of people who neither need or want it; it’s about preaching and, inevitably, its about more and more bureaucracy. It really does not matter if that academic thug Professor Jones has been rusticated, his message carries on its weary way. To question it is to be a ‘wrecker’, or a believer in a flat earth according to Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister.

Christopher Brooker, journalist, author and heretic, is right: the obsession with man-made climate change, the obsession with a dubious paradigm, is rapidly set to become the greatest scientific scandal of the age. The ghost of Lysenko walks quietly down the corridors of power.