In this newsletter:
1) EU energy crisis ‘perfect storm’ as prices explode
Daily Express, 20 December 2021
2) Families face paying £1,000 MORE for energy bills as price cap ‘nearly doubles’
The Sun, 21 December 2021
Daily Express, 20 December 2021
2) Families face paying £1,000 MORE for energy bills as price cap ‘nearly doubles’
The Sun, 21 December 2021
3) Energy bills could soar to £2,000-a-year as the energy price cap is doubled
Daily Mail, 21 December 2021
Daily Mail, 21 December 2021
4) Net Zero Europeans face a $395 billion hike in energy bills next year
Bloomberg, 20 December 2021
5) Ben Marlow: Gutless North Sea oil rules will destroy Britain’s energy independence
The Daily Telegraph, 20 December 2021
6) Europe hits China’s wind industry with anti-dumping duties
Bloomberg, 20 December 2021
7) Ofcom complaint about collaboration between Sky and Government-owned company to promote ‘Net Zero’
Daily Sceptic, 21 December 2021
8) Peter Ridd: Too much coral is not enough – but it’s not good either
The Australian, 3 December 2021
The Australian, 3 December 2021
9) Christine Rosen: The Real Misinformation Problem
Commentary Magazine, January 2022
Commentary Magazine, January 2022
10) And finally: 'We need a global Ministry of Truth...'
The Times, 21 December 2021
Full details:
1) EU energy crisis ‘perfect storm’ as prices explode
Daily Express, 20 December 2021
EUROPE'S energy crisis has hit new levels driven by a perfect storm of surging demand and falling output from renewables.
Daily Express, 20 December 2021
EUROPE'S energy crisis has hit new levels driven by a perfect storm of surging demand and falling output from renewables.
Across the continent prices per megawatt hour (MWh) now exceed €300 (£256) in most countries. With the exception of Poland and Scandinavia all countries in Europe have broken the €300 MWh barrier with France and and Switzerland nearly at €400 (£341.60).
Head of Analytics at research firm Enappsys Andre Bosschaart said he'd "never seen this kind of volatility and high prices" adding that predictions for tomorrow's prices suggested France and Germany would break past €400 (£341.60) MWh.
Head of Oil and Gas Research at Investec Nathan Piper described the prices as "phenomenally high", adding that gas prices were now 10 times higher than the US in Europe.
Speaking to Express.co.uk Mr Piper explained higher gas prices were, in turn, driving up electricity prices due to gas being increasingly used to generate electricity.
This year has seen power output from the wind fall in Europe meaning gas has been increasingly relied upon.
Meanwhile, Asia has seen a fall in output from hydroelectricity increasing demand for gas and further straining prices.
While demand for electricity typically increases in winter Mr Bosschaart explained wind power production would usually be higher than in the summer, with this year proving an exception.
He described the current mix of low wind power and surging demand as "a perfect storm."
Full story
2) Families face paying £1,000 MORE for energy bills as price cap ‘nearly doubles’
The Sun, 21 December 2021
CASH-strapped families face paying £1,000 a year MORE for their energy bills by next October according to experts.
Head of Analytics at research firm Enappsys Andre Bosschaart said he'd "never seen this kind of volatility and high prices" adding that predictions for tomorrow's prices suggested France and Germany would break past €400 (£341.60) MWh.
Head of Oil and Gas Research at Investec Nathan Piper described the prices as "phenomenally high", adding that gas prices were now 10 times higher than the US in Europe.
Speaking to Express.co.uk Mr Piper explained higher gas prices were, in turn, driving up electricity prices due to gas being increasingly used to generate electricity.
This year has seen power output from the wind fall in Europe meaning gas has been increasingly relied upon.
Meanwhile, Asia has seen a fall in output from hydroelectricity increasing demand for gas and further straining prices.
While demand for electricity typically increases in winter Mr Bosschaart explained wind power production would usually be higher than in the summer, with this year proving an exception.
He described the current mix of low wind power and surging demand as "a perfect storm."
Full story
2) Families face paying £1,000 MORE for energy bills as price cap ‘nearly doubles’
The Sun, 21 December 2021
CASH-strapped families face paying £1,000 a year MORE for their energy bills by next October according to experts.
The dire prediction comes because the energy price cap - which currently stands at £1,277 per year per household - will likely be raised twice next year to keep up with record market prices and the cost of supplier failures.
By next April, the default tariff price cap could be hiked to £1,865 according to consultancy Cornwall Insight - nearly 50 per cent more and higher than its previous estimates.
Next October, households could be paying a whopping £2,240 per annum for their electricity and gas, the consultancy calculates.
That is nearly £1,000 more than at present, adding to the growing cost of living crisis afflicting British families.
Around four million UK households are already in the grip of fuel poverty according to charity National Energy Action, unable to afford to heat their homes to the temperature needed to keep warm and healthy.
Citizens Advice says many struggling families are facing a choice between “heating or eating”.
The cost of living is climbing, with inflation running at more than five per cent as prices rise on a range of goods from used cars to footwear.
Full story
By next April, the default tariff price cap could be hiked to £1,865 according to consultancy Cornwall Insight - nearly 50 per cent more and higher than its previous estimates.
Next October, households could be paying a whopping £2,240 per annum for their electricity and gas, the consultancy calculates.
That is nearly £1,000 more than at present, adding to the growing cost of living crisis afflicting British families.
Around four million UK households are already in the grip of fuel poverty according to charity National Energy Action, unable to afford to heat their homes to the temperature needed to keep warm and healthy.
Citizens Advice says many struggling families are facing a choice between “heating or eating”.
The cost of living is climbing, with inflation running at more than five per cent as prices rise on a range of goods from used cars to footwear.
Full story
3) Energy bills could soar to £2,000-a-year as the energy price cap is doubled
Daily Mail, 21 December 2021
Households could face a 56% rice in their energy bills from April, experts warn
Daily Mail, 21 December 2021
Households could face a 56% rice in their energy bills from April, experts warn
Gas and electricity bills for millions of Britons could soar to a record £2,000-a-year from next year as the energy price cap is set to be doubled in the coming months, households have been warned.
Households could face a 56 per cent rise in their energy bills from April after unprecedented wholesale costs force Ofgem to lift the price cap.
Investment bank Investec has said that Britain's energy price cap will have to be lifted to £1,995-a-year per household from April when the regulator next alters the limit, reported the Financial Times.
The current cap is set at £1,277-a-year per household since October, meaning Britons could have to may more than £700 extra annually unless the government or Ofgem provide 'mitigating actions'.
The energy market was plunged into chaos after wholesale gas prices soared by 500 per cent in less than 12 months as a result of raised energy demand and low gas exports from Russia and low supply from France.
Twenty-five providers have collapsed since the end of the summer, affecting more than four million households.
The biggest company to go bust so far is Bulb, whose 1.7 million households made it one of the top energy suppliers in the country.
Martin Young, an analyst at Investec, told The Times: 'With wholesale commodity prices remaining elevated, we suggest that the tariff cap could jump by 56 per cent reaching £2,000 [a year] for the summer 2022 period.'
Mr Young suggested that higher wholesale energy costs would account for £560 of the rise, while £72 would reflect the cost of supplier failures.
'[It will come as] a shock to many, with implications for discretionary spend, inflation and fuel poverty,' Mr Young told the newspaper.
He also told the FT that 'an increase of this magnitude is likely to have political implications'.
The warning comes just days after experts warned that families could face energy bill increases every three months under plans to overhaul the price cap.
Full story
Households could face a 56 per cent rise in their energy bills from April after unprecedented wholesale costs force Ofgem to lift the price cap.
Investment bank Investec has said that Britain's energy price cap will have to be lifted to £1,995-a-year per household from April when the regulator next alters the limit, reported the Financial Times.
The current cap is set at £1,277-a-year per household since October, meaning Britons could have to may more than £700 extra annually unless the government or Ofgem provide 'mitigating actions'.
The energy market was plunged into chaos after wholesale gas prices soared by 500 per cent in less than 12 months as a result of raised energy demand and low gas exports from Russia and low supply from France.
Twenty-five providers have collapsed since the end of the summer, affecting more than four million households.
The biggest company to go bust so far is Bulb, whose 1.7 million households made it one of the top energy suppliers in the country.
Martin Young, an analyst at Investec, told The Times: 'With wholesale commodity prices remaining elevated, we suggest that the tariff cap could jump by 56 per cent reaching £2,000 [a year] for the summer 2022 period.'
Mr Young suggested that higher wholesale energy costs would account for £560 of the rise, while £72 would reflect the cost of supplier failures.
'[It will come as] a shock to many, with implications for discretionary spend, inflation and fuel poverty,' Mr Young told the newspaper.
He also told the FT that 'an increase of this magnitude is likely to have political implications'.
The warning comes just days after experts warned that families could face energy bill increases every three months under plans to overhaul the price cap.
Full story
4) Net Zero Europeans face a $395 billion hike in energy bills next year
Bloomberg, 20 December 2021
Europeans will pay an additional 350 billion euros ($395 billion) in energy bills next year as global demand for fuel and power threatens to keep prices elevated, according to Greece’s energy minister.
Kostas Skrekas said a new mechanism to help shield the most vulnerable citizens and middle-sized businesses from price increases should be created at the European Union level. It came as officials from Hungary and Spain voiced concern about recent volatility in carbon-emission markets at a meeting of environment ministers in Brussels.
“In the face of this extraordinary situation, we cannot remain uninvolved,” Skrekas said. Greece had estimated earlier this year that Europeans would face an increase of 100 billion euros this winter alone.
Europe’s energy crunch is straining national budgets and has become one of the EU’s biggest political challenges, fueling inflation just as governments contend with the spread of the omicron virus variant. Member states have come forward with a number of proposals, from a redesign of how the electricity market works to caps on the bloc’s carbon trading market.
For its part, the European Commission has emphasized the need to shift to cheaper renewables. In October it put forward a toolbox of measures national governments could use to help support citizens struggling with the higher energy costs.
A global supply squeeze for natural gas, combined with low inventories, military tension on the Russia-Ukraine border and bottlenecks for renewable energy, have contributed to soaring prices for everything from electricity to coal. European gas futures have surged some 600% this year, while German year-ahead power and the French equivalent both rose to record highs Monday.
5) Ben Marlow: Gutless North Sea oil rules will destroy Britain’s energy independence
The Daily Telegraph, 20 December 2021
The government's gutless plan to wind down the North Sea gas and oil industry is another nail in the coffin of what remains of Britain’s energy security.
Say what you like about this government but they have become world leaders in saying one thing and doing another: lockdown by stealth, covert cheese and wine parties while the rest of us stay at home or are prevented from seeing loved ones, and now the latest thing: a gutless plan to wind down the North Sea oil industry and another nail in the coffin of what remains of Britain’s energy security.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, energy minister Greg Hands is attempting to dress the whole thing up as a climate-friendly scheme to help the sector with some nonsense about how it is evidence that the government remains pro-oil and gas. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
The clue is in the name: a new “climate change compatibility checkpoint” that all new applications to explore for fossil fuels in the North Sea will be subjected to before approval is, or isn’t, granted. How precisely this will “open the door” to a flurry of new fields being developed, as Hands protests, is anyone’s guess.
If the government doesn’t want further development in the North Sea then it should have the courage to say so, instead of introducing yet more hurdles that will either discourage investment, or worse, simply prevent it because they are impossible to clear.
But the very notion that net-zero-obsessed ministers are about to pave the way for a new era of exploration in the region is in itself laughable. Recent evidence alone would tell you that is emphatically not the case.
First the regulator rejected Shell’s plans to develop the Jackdaw field east of Aberdeen, which is estimated to hold gas resources equivalent to between 120m and 250m barrels, on the basis of environmental grounds yet to be made public.
Then Shell was also forced to pull out of plans to extract oil from the Cambo field off the coast of Shetland after fierce opposition from green campaigners, and even the threat of legal action from Greenpeace against the government if exploration went ahead.
Hands says he is “aware” that “homegrown oil and gas is more climate-friendly than imports” as if that alone is proof of the government’s support for North Sea producers but this is little more than an attempt to spin away the reality.
Shell’s difficulties tell us everything there is to know about the direction of travel and there’s nothing positive about it for the people employed there, for the Scottish economy, or indeed the UK’s energy security.
There are two give away lines in the white paper proposal: future licences will be granted “only on the basis that they are compatible with the UK’s climate change objectives”, which means any found to “undermine the UK’s climate goals or ability to reach net zero” will be blocked.
As the Department for Business itself acknowledges, this means that “an additional layer of scrutiny” will be applied to future licences, alongside an “environmental assessment” carried out by the Offshore Petroleum Regulator for Environment and Decommission, and a “net zero impact assessment” undertaken by the Oil and Gas Authority as part of the consent process for new drilling.
How that is proof that the government is “supporting the industry in the transition to a lower carbon future, while also working to achieve the UK’s net zero commitment” is anyone’s guess.
On the contrary, the likelihood is that any steps to wind down the North Sea by stealth will rob Britain of its energy independence. Furthermore, by making us even more reliant on imports from unsavoury foreign regimes like Russia and Saudi Arabia, it will do nothing to help us reach net zero.
In short, yet another spectacular own goal from Westminster as it barrels blindly ahead with a green agenda with scant regard for the economic and social consequences.
6) Europe hits China’s wind industry with anti-dumping duties
Bloomberg, 20 December 2021
Europe slapped import tariffs of up to 19.2% on Chinese steel wind turbine towers as governments seek to protect industries producing clean power equipment needed for the energy transition.
The European Commission found that Chinese firms had dumped about 300 million euros ($337 million) a year worth of towers at below-market prices, hurting European producers, it said in a Dec. 16 statement.
Governments around the world are seeking to support domestic clean energy supply chains after Chinese firms have come to dominate solar panel production and are looking to expand in wind. The anti-dumping duties will secure over 3,600 jobs in the 1 billion euro industry in the EU, the commission said.
“These measures serve to protect and defend EU producers and workers from trade distortive practices that harm EU manufacturing,” the commission said.
China’s top tower maker Titan Wind Energy Suzhou Co. fell 6% in Shenzhen Monday after saying late Friday it now faced 14.4% anti-dumping duties in Europe. Dajin Heavy Industry Co. will be charged 7.2%, while other Chinese companies that did not cooperate in the European Commission’s investigation face 19.2% levies.
Sales to Europe made up 6% of Titan’s revenue in the first nine months of the year, and the company will expand exports to non-EU countries while accelerating construction of its manufacturing base in Germany to reduce the tariff impact, the company said in the statement.
“Demand in the domestic market has been high in recent years, so the importance of overseas markets is even lower,” said Leo Wang, a BloombergNEF wind analyst based in Beijing.
China’s largest wind turbine maker, Xinjiang Goldwind Science & Technology Co., fell as much as 10% in Hong Kong and its peer Ming Yang Smart Energy Group Ltd. dropped 4.6% in Shanghai.
7) Ofcom complaint about collaboration between Sky and Government-owned company to promote ‘Net Zero’
Daily Sceptic, 21 December 2021
Laura Dodsworth and I have filed a complaint with Ofcom about a report issued by the Behavioural Insights Team and Sky urging broadcasters to use sophisticated psychological techniques derived from behavioural science to persuade people to support the Government’s ‘Net Zero’ agenda.
Sky proudly boasted in the report that it was already using these subliminal techniques, which we think is a breach of Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code – in particular, the prohibition on using “techniques which exploit the possibility of conveying a message to viewers or listeners, or of otherwise influencing their minds without their being aware, or fully aware, of what has occurred”. Here is the gist of our complaint, taken from our letter to Melanie Dawes, the Chief Executive of Ofcom:
"We are writing to alert you to a broadcast license complaint we have made about Sky U.K. Our complaint concerns a partnership between Sky and Behavioural Insights U.K., Known as the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), a limited company that was partly owned by the Government at the time the report was published. We believe this partnership – and, in particular, Sky’s adoption of BIT’s recommendations about how to help the Conservative Government successfully implement one of its most political contentious policy, namely, Net Zero – contravenes the Broadcasting Code.
The partnership we’re referring to resulted in the publication of “The Power of TV: Nudging Viewers to Decarbonise their Lifestyles” and the launch of Sky’s ‘Sky Zero’ campaign, which recommended that broadcasters make use of “behavioural science principles”, including subliminal messaging (“nudging” in the parlance of BIT, which is colloquially known as the Nudge Unit), to encourage viewers to endorse and comply with Conservative Government policy. Alarmingly, the report recommends broadcasters utilise sophisticated psychological techniques to change the behaviour of children “because of the important influence they have on the attitude and behaviours of their parents”.
The letter is worth reading in full.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, energy minister Greg Hands is attempting to dress the whole thing up as a climate-friendly scheme to help the sector with some nonsense about how it is evidence that the government remains pro-oil and gas. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
The clue is in the name: a new “climate change compatibility checkpoint” that all new applications to explore for fossil fuels in the North Sea will be subjected to before approval is, or isn’t, granted. How precisely this will “open the door” to a flurry of new fields being developed, as Hands protests, is anyone’s guess.
If the government doesn’t want further development in the North Sea then it should have the courage to say so, instead of introducing yet more hurdles that will either discourage investment, or worse, simply prevent it because they are impossible to clear.
But the very notion that net-zero-obsessed ministers are about to pave the way for a new era of exploration in the region is in itself laughable. Recent evidence alone would tell you that is emphatically not the case.
First the regulator rejected Shell’s plans to develop the Jackdaw field east of Aberdeen, which is estimated to hold gas resources equivalent to between 120m and 250m barrels, on the basis of environmental grounds yet to be made public.
Then Shell was also forced to pull out of plans to extract oil from the Cambo field off the coast of Shetland after fierce opposition from green campaigners, and even the threat of legal action from Greenpeace against the government if exploration went ahead.
Hands says he is “aware” that “homegrown oil and gas is more climate-friendly than imports” as if that alone is proof of the government’s support for North Sea producers but this is little more than an attempt to spin away the reality.
Shell’s difficulties tell us everything there is to know about the direction of travel and there’s nothing positive about it for the people employed there, for the Scottish economy, or indeed the UK’s energy security.
There are two give away lines in the white paper proposal: future licences will be granted “only on the basis that they are compatible with the UK’s climate change objectives”, which means any found to “undermine the UK’s climate goals or ability to reach net zero” will be blocked.
As the Department for Business itself acknowledges, this means that “an additional layer of scrutiny” will be applied to future licences, alongside an “environmental assessment” carried out by the Offshore Petroleum Regulator for Environment and Decommission, and a “net zero impact assessment” undertaken by the Oil and Gas Authority as part of the consent process for new drilling.
How that is proof that the government is “supporting the industry in the transition to a lower carbon future, while also working to achieve the UK’s net zero commitment” is anyone’s guess.
On the contrary, the likelihood is that any steps to wind down the North Sea by stealth will rob Britain of its energy independence. Furthermore, by making us even more reliant on imports from unsavoury foreign regimes like Russia and Saudi Arabia, it will do nothing to help us reach net zero.
In short, yet another spectacular own goal from Westminster as it barrels blindly ahead with a green agenda with scant regard for the economic and social consequences.
6) Europe hits China’s wind industry with anti-dumping duties
Bloomberg, 20 December 2021
Europe slapped import tariffs of up to 19.2% on Chinese steel wind turbine towers as governments seek to protect industries producing clean power equipment needed for the energy transition.
The European Commission found that Chinese firms had dumped about 300 million euros ($337 million) a year worth of towers at below-market prices, hurting European producers, it said in a Dec. 16 statement.
Governments around the world are seeking to support domestic clean energy supply chains after Chinese firms have come to dominate solar panel production and are looking to expand in wind. The anti-dumping duties will secure over 3,600 jobs in the 1 billion euro industry in the EU, the commission said.
“These measures serve to protect and defend EU producers and workers from trade distortive practices that harm EU manufacturing,” the commission said.
China’s top tower maker Titan Wind Energy Suzhou Co. fell 6% in Shenzhen Monday after saying late Friday it now faced 14.4% anti-dumping duties in Europe. Dajin Heavy Industry Co. will be charged 7.2%, while other Chinese companies that did not cooperate in the European Commission’s investigation face 19.2% levies.
Sales to Europe made up 6% of Titan’s revenue in the first nine months of the year, and the company will expand exports to non-EU countries while accelerating construction of its manufacturing base in Germany to reduce the tariff impact, the company said in the statement.
“Demand in the domestic market has been high in recent years, so the importance of overseas markets is even lower,” said Leo Wang, a BloombergNEF wind analyst based in Beijing.
China’s largest wind turbine maker, Xinjiang Goldwind Science & Technology Co., fell as much as 10% in Hong Kong and its peer Ming Yang Smart Energy Group Ltd. dropped 4.6% in Shanghai.
7) Ofcom complaint about collaboration between Sky and Government-owned company to promote ‘Net Zero’
Daily Sceptic, 21 December 2021
Laura Dodsworth and I have filed a complaint with Ofcom about a report issued by the Behavioural Insights Team and Sky urging broadcasters to use sophisticated psychological techniques derived from behavioural science to persuade people to support the Government’s ‘Net Zero’ agenda.
Sky proudly boasted in the report that it was already using these subliminal techniques, which we think is a breach of Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code – in particular, the prohibition on using “techniques which exploit the possibility of conveying a message to viewers or listeners, or of otherwise influencing their minds without their being aware, or fully aware, of what has occurred”. Here is the gist of our complaint, taken from our letter to Melanie Dawes, the Chief Executive of Ofcom:
"We are writing to alert you to a broadcast license complaint we have made about Sky U.K. Our complaint concerns a partnership between Sky and Behavioural Insights U.K., Known as the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), a limited company that was partly owned by the Government at the time the report was published. We believe this partnership – and, in particular, Sky’s adoption of BIT’s recommendations about how to help the Conservative Government successfully implement one of its most political contentious policy, namely, Net Zero – contravenes the Broadcasting Code.
The partnership we’re referring to resulted in the publication of “The Power of TV: Nudging Viewers to Decarbonise their Lifestyles” and the launch of Sky’s ‘Sky Zero’ campaign, which recommended that broadcasters make use of “behavioural science principles”, including subliminal messaging (“nudging” in the parlance of BIT, which is colloquially known as the Nudge Unit), to encourage viewers to endorse and comply with Conservative Government policy. Alarmingly, the report recommends broadcasters utilise sophisticated psychological techniques to change the behaviour of children “because of the important influence they have on the attitude and behaviours of their parents”.
The letter is worth reading in full.
8) Peter Ridd: Too much coral is not enough – but it’s not good either
The Australian, 3 December 2021
The Australian Institute of Marine Science recently released its annual survey of coral on the Great Barrier Reef. It shows spectacularly good results. For all three major regions of the reef, once data uncertainties are considered, there has never been more coral since records began in the mid-1980s.
This despite three supposedly catastrophic and unprecedented hot water bleaching events in the past five years.
This great news about the reef poses only a minor problem for those science and management institutions that have convinced the world that the reef is on its last legs. They use three strategies: first, ignore the data and hope nobody points out the great news; second, discredit the good news with “fact checks”; and finally, contrive a spurious but apparently plausible reason that the good news is actually bad news.
Ignoring the good news was on display last month in the latest reef-doom story when the ABC, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian all quoted an eminent reef scientist who stated that only 2 per cent of the reef had not bleached in the past few decades.
The implication was that bleaching was unprecedented and had destroyed almost the entire reef. The fabulous coral statistics this year were not mentioned by any of those articles.
Bleaching, cyclones and starfish plagues, which all occasionally kill parts of the reef, are akin to bushfires on land. They are completely natural and reset the ecosystem, which rapidly recovers, and are a necessary and important feature of many Australian ecosystems. I could guess that roughly 2 per cent of western Queensland was not affected by a bushfire in the past half century. That would be a good thing, certainly not worthy of concern. Neither should it be for the reef.
To counter the latest good news about the reef, as reported in The Australian, the fact-check gods of Facebook also swung into action. They deemed that the coral has actually declined in the past decade. So what does the AIMS data, which was cited in the fact check, actually show about the change in coral since 2011?
For the northern region, the amount of coral this year is excellent and about the same today as in 2011; for the central region, it has roughly doubled; and for the southern region it has almost tripled. There is a significant uncertainty in the data because of the difficulty of measuring such a vast system, and the measurements are partly subjective in nature, but there is absolutely no doubt that the fact-checkers are extraordinarily wrong.
They appear to be incapable of reading simple graphs.
The final strategy is to turn good news into bad. AIMS and other reef science institutions such as James Cook University Coral Reef Centre dismiss the obviously fabulous coral statistics by arguing that it is only the fast-growing corals that have regrown.
But they ignore that it is the fast-growing corals, the delicate staghorn and plate corals, that were killed in the first place by cyclones, bleaching and starfish plagues. So of course it is the fast-growing corals that have recovered.
In 2012, when the reef hit record lows of coral after a couple of very destructive cyclones, these institutions did not say: “Don’t worry, it is only the fast-growing corals – they will be back.” Instead, AIMS published a paper stating that, without intervention, the reef would likely crash much further by 2022. This is yet another failed prediction of the imminent death of the reef in the past 50 years.
Back in the early ’70s, scientists were claiming that plagues of crown-of-thorns starfish, a native Australian species, not an introduced pest, would totally destroy the reef. The plagues came and went, and we now know from geological evidence that the plagues have occurred across millennia.
The amount of coral on the reef fluctuates dramatically with time. The one thing that remains the same are the dire predictions of the loss of the reef. The other thing that remains the same is the reality that the reef is one of the most pristine, best protected, and brilliant ecosystems on Earth.
Early next year Environment Minister Sussan Ley must prepare an updated report on why UNESCO should not declare the Great Barrier Reef as endangered. She will be up against activist scientists, environmental groups and public servants. And in the background the false gods of big tech turn a huge increase in the amount of coral into a decline. Institutions such as AIMS and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority that downplay the excellent condition of the reef will be a further problem.
After 50 years of doomsaying about the reef, and its stubborn refusal to die, how much longer will we have to wait before a government will audit the science institutions that have been scaring our children?
Peter Ridd is author of Reef Heresy (Connor Court) and is a member of the GWPF's Academic Advisory Council.
The Australian, 3 December 2021
The Australian Institute of Marine Science recently released its annual survey of coral on the Great Barrier Reef. It shows spectacularly good results. For all three major regions of the reef, once data uncertainties are considered, there has never been more coral since records began in the mid-1980s.
This despite three supposedly catastrophic and unprecedented hot water bleaching events in the past five years.
This great news about the reef poses only a minor problem for those science and management institutions that have convinced the world that the reef is on its last legs. They use three strategies: first, ignore the data and hope nobody points out the great news; second, discredit the good news with “fact checks”; and finally, contrive a spurious but apparently plausible reason that the good news is actually bad news.
Ignoring the good news was on display last month in the latest reef-doom story when the ABC, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian all quoted an eminent reef scientist who stated that only 2 per cent of the reef had not bleached in the past few decades.
The implication was that bleaching was unprecedented and had destroyed almost the entire reef. The fabulous coral statistics this year were not mentioned by any of those articles.
Bleaching, cyclones and starfish plagues, which all occasionally kill parts of the reef, are akin to bushfires on land. They are completely natural and reset the ecosystem, which rapidly recovers, and are a necessary and important feature of many Australian ecosystems. I could guess that roughly 2 per cent of western Queensland was not affected by a bushfire in the past half century. That would be a good thing, certainly not worthy of concern. Neither should it be for the reef.
To counter the latest good news about the reef, as reported in The Australian, the fact-check gods of Facebook also swung into action. They deemed that the coral has actually declined in the past decade. So what does the AIMS data, which was cited in the fact check, actually show about the change in coral since 2011?
For the northern region, the amount of coral this year is excellent and about the same today as in 2011; for the central region, it has roughly doubled; and for the southern region it has almost tripled. There is a significant uncertainty in the data because of the difficulty of measuring such a vast system, and the measurements are partly subjective in nature, but there is absolutely no doubt that the fact-checkers are extraordinarily wrong.
They appear to be incapable of reading simple graphs.
The final strategy is to turn good news into bad. AIMS and other reef science institutions such as James Cook University Coral Reef Centre dismiss the obviously fabulous coral statistics by arguing that it is only the fast-growing corals that have regrown.
But they ignore that it is the fast-growing corals, the delicate staghorn and plate corals, that were killed in the first place by cyclones, bleaching and starfish plagues. So of course it is the fast-growing corals that have recovered.
In 2012, when the reef hit record lows of coral after a couple of very destructive cyclones, these institutions did not say: “Don’t worry, it is only the fast-growing corals – they will be back.” Instead, AIMS published a paper stating that, without intervention, the reef would likely crash much further by 2022. This is yet another failed prediction of the imminent death of the reef in the past 50 years.
Back in the early ’70s, scientists were claiming that plagues of crown-of-thorns starfish, a native Australian species, not an introduced pest, would totally destroy the reef. The plagues came and went, and we now know from geological evidence that the plagues have occurred across millennia.
The amount of coral on the reef fluctuates dramatically with time. The one thing that remains the same are the dire predictions of the loss of the reef. The other thing that remains the same is the reality that the reef is one of the most pristine, best protected, and brilliant ecosystems on Earth.
Early next year Environment Minister Sussan Ley must prepare an updated report on why UNESCO should not declare the Great Barrier Reef as endangered. She will be up against activist scientists, environmental groups and public servants. And in the background the false gods of big tech turn a huge increase in the amount of coral into a decline. Institutions such as AIMS and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority that downplay the excellent condition of the reef will be a further problem.
After 50 years of doomsaying about the reef, and its stubborn refusal to die, how much longer will we have to wait before a government will audit the science institutions that have been scaring our children?
Peter Ridd is author of Reef Heresy (Connor Court) and is a member of the GWPF's Academic Advisory Council.
9) Christine Rosen: The Real Misinformation Problem
Commentary Magazine, January 2022
There is a new scourge befouling the media landscape, one that our self-appointed mandarins have declared themselves eager to combat: misinformation.
The Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder recently released a report that blamed misinformation for a range of social problems: “Information disorder is a crisis that exacerbates all other crises… . Information disorder makes any health crisis more deadly. It slows down our response time on climate change. It undermines democracy. It creates a culture in which racist, ethnic, and gender attacks are seen as solutions, not problems. Today, mis- and disinformation have become a force multiplier for exacerbating our worst problems as a society. Hundreds of millions of people pay the price, every single day, for a world disordered by lies.”
With $65 million in backing from investors such as George Soros and Reid Hoffman, the newly organized Project for Good Information also vows to fight fake news wherever it roams. As Recode reported, the group’s marketing materials claim, “Traditional media is failing.
Disinformation is flourishing. It’s time for a new kind of media.” The project is run by Democratic operative Tara Hoffman, whose company ACRONYM created the app that spectacularly bungled the Iowa Democratic caucus vote in 2020.
And as Ben Smith reported in the New York Times, the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University has been hosting a series of meetings with major media executives to “help newsroom leaders fight misinformation and media manipulation.” Even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has apologized for his platform’s role in spreading misinformation.
The origin of this new wave of portentous declarations and hand-wringing can be found in the Trump years. In an insightful piece in Harper’s, Joseph Bernstein labels this effort Big Disinfo. It’s “a new field of knowledge production that emerged during the Trump years at the juncture of media, academia, and policy research,” he writes. “A kind of EPA for content, it seeks to expose the spread of various sorts of ‘toxicity’ on social-media platforms, the downstream effects of this spread, and the platforms’ clumsy, dishonest, and half-hearted attempts to halt it.” As Bernstein argues, “As an environmental cleanup project, it presumes a harm model of content consumption. Just as, say, smoking causes cancer, consuming bad information must cause changes in belief or behavior that are bad, by some standard.”
Big Disinfo has gained in popularity in mainstream media outlets in part because it claims to solve the problem of bad information while placing blame for it on anyone other than mainstream media. In fact, those diagnosing our illness and prescribing the cure are themselves purveyors of the “infodemic” they claim is upon us.
The Aspen Institute’s Commission, for example, includes several people who have actively engaged in misinformation efforts. As the Washington Free Beacon reported, one of the Commission’s advisers, Yoel Roth, was the Twitter executive who blocked his site’s users from sharing the New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop just before the 2020 election. Adviser Renee DiResta is something of a misinformation wunderkind as well: She was an adviser to American Engagement Technologies, which, the Beacon reports, is a “tech company that created fake online personas to stifle the Republican vote in the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama.”
The commission’s co-chair, Katie Couric, is also familiar with manipulating facts to yield favorable outcomes. She admitted in her recently published memoir that she had removed and edited statements made by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg about athletes protesting the playing of the National Anthem. Ginsburg’s criticism of the practice might have angered her fellow liberals, Couric feared. Commissioner Rashad Robinson, head of the activist group Color of Change, also helped spread misinformation by promoting the hate-crime hoax of actor Jussie Smollett even after it was clear Smollett (currently on trial for criminal charges related to the staging of the attack) was lying. And then there is commission member Prince Harry, an expat British ex-royal with few qualifications but a lifetime of evidence of his own questionable judgment (such as dressing up as a Nazi and, more recently, whinging to Oprah about the family that funds his lavish lifestyle). Earlier this year, Harry declared the First Amendment “bonkers.”
The Aspen Commission’s report says that there is no such thing as an “arbiter of truth,” and yet our media gatekeepers have claimed that mantle for themselves—with decidedly mixed results—for some time.
Consider the fact that Russiagate, a years-long effort to prove that Donald Trump was being blackmailed and controlled, proved untrue yet was given constant media attention, while the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents, which proved true, was actively suppressed with the explicit purpose of protecting Joe Biden’s chances of becoming president. We live in a surreal information moment when the lie was given ample airtime and featured prominently in print, while the truth was smothered and labeled disinformation.
And yet our self-appointed misinformation warriors have proven unwilling to engage in self-reflection. Harvard’s Shorenstein Center used the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop computer as the basis for one of its case studies during its recent misinformation sessions. The lesson that the Center’s leaders drew, however, was not the one anyone who values the truth should follow. According to the Times, the Shorenstein Center claimed that the Hunter Biden story offered “an instructive case study on the power of social media and news organizations to mitigate media manipulation campaigns.”
In other words, the suppression of information deemed by “experts” to be misinformation was precisely the kind of Good Information objective we should be pursuing. The research director of the center, Joan Donovan, told the Times that the Hunter Biden case study was “designed to cause conversation—it’s not supposed to leave you resolved as a reader.”
But what is there to resolve about the fact that the Fourth Estate eagerly embraced the role of Chief Information Censor on behalf of a Democratic candidate for president?
Misinformation and disinformation are nothing new. Propaganda, political dirty tricks, and deliberate lies have been with us a while—and have often been a point of pride for their practitioners. It was not that long ago that Ben Rhodes, then a top aide to President Obama, boasted about creating an “echo chamber” in the media to spread falsehoods about the details of Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.
It is true that misinformation has taken on greater significance thanks to the scale and speed of the social-media platforms that spread it. But the new sanctimony about misinformation should be leavened with some healthy skepticism about the movement’s major actors. As Bernstein noted, in some sense “the disinformation project is simply an unofficial partnership between Big Tech, corporate media, elite universities, and cash-rich foundations.” The crusade against misinformation is an approximate mirror image of Donald Trump’s war against “fake news.”
Control of information is control of one of the most valuable commodities in the developed world: people’s attention. And people want their confirmation biases affirmed. But scholars and commissioners studying misinformation also suffer from confirmation bias. Contra the proposals made by panels and commissions on misinformation, the most radical thing we could do right now isn’t to give more power to elites or the federal government to control information. Their record of late—Russiagate, Hunter Biden, the Covington kids, the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis, Border Patrol officers with whips, the Kyle Rittenhouse trial—has not been stellar.
It would be far better for the health of the “information ecosystem” that these supposed experts are always invoking if reporters focused on shoring up what were once unassailable tenets of journalism—balance, iron-clad sourcing, and critical independence from and skepticism about the powerful. Instead, they are power’s handmaidens.
Commentary Magazine, January 2022
There is a new scourge befouling the media landscape, one that our self-appointed mandarins have declared themselves eager to combat: misinformation.
The Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder recently released a report that blamed misinformation for a range of social problems: “Information disorder is a crisis that exacerbates all other crises… . Information disorder makes any health crisis more deadly. It slows down our response time on climate change. It undermines democracy. It creates a culture in which racist, ethnic, and gender attacks are seen as solutions, not problems. Today, mis- and disinformation have become a force multiplier for exacerbating our worst problems as a society. Hundreds of millions of people pay the price, every single day, for a world disordered by lies.”
With $65 million in backing from investors such as George Soros and Reid Hoffman, the newly organized Project for Good Information also vows to fight fake news wherever it roams. As Recode reported, the group’s marketing materials claim, “Traditional media is failing.
Disinformation is flourishing. It’s time for a new kind of media.” The project is run by Democratic operative Tara Hoffman, whose company ACRONYM created the app that spectacularly bungled the Iowa Democratic caucus vote in 2020.
And as Ben Smith reported in the New York Times, the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University has been hosting a series of meetings with major media executives to “help newsroom leaders fight misinformation and media manipulation.” Even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has apologized for his platform’s role in spreading misinformation.
The origin of this new wave of portentous declarations and hand-wringing can be found in the Trump years. In an insightful piece in Harper’s, Joseph Bernstein labels this effort Big Disinfo. It’s “a new field of knowledge production that emerged during the Trump years at the juncture of media, academia, and policy research,” he writes. “A kind of EPA for content, it seeks to expose the spread of various sorts of ‘toxicity’ on social-media platforms, the downstream effects of this spread, and the platforms’ clumsy, dishonest, and half-hearted attempts to halt it.” As Bernstein argues, “As an environmental cleanup project, it presumes a harm model of content consumption. Just as, say, smoking causes cancer, consuming bad information must cause changes in belief or behavior that are bad, by some standard.”
Big Disinfo has gained in popularity in mainstream media outlets in part because it claims to solve the problem of bad information while placing blame for it on anyone other than mainstream media. In fact, those diagnosing our illness and prescribing the cure are themselves purveyors of the “infodemic” they claim is upon us.
The Aspen Institute’s Commission, for example, includes several people who have actively engaged in misinformation efforts. As the Washington Free Beacon reported, one of the Commission’s advisers, Yoel Roth, was the Twitter executive who blocked his site’s users from sharing the New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop just before the 2020 election. Adviser Renee DiResta is something of a misinformation wunderkind as well: She was an adviser to American Engagement Technologies, which, the Beacon reports, is a “tech company that created fake online personas to stifle the Republican vote in the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama.”
The commission’s co-chair, Katie Couric, is also familiar with manipulating facts to yield favorable outcomes. She admitted in her recently published memoir that she had removed and edited statements made by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg about athletes protesting the playing of the National Anthem. Ginsburg’s criticism of the practice might have angered her fellow liberals, Couric feared. Commissioner Rashad Robinson, head of the activist group Color of Change, also helped spread misinformation by promoting the hate-crime hoax of actor Jussie Smollett even after it was clear Smollett (currently on trial for criminal charges related to the staging of the attack) was lying. And then there is commission member Prince Harry, an expat British ex-royal with few qualifications but a lifetime of evidence of his own questionable judgment (such as dressing up as a Nazi and, more recently, whinging to Oprah about the family that funds his lavish lifestyle). Earlier this year, Harry declared the First Amendment “bonkers.”
The Aspen Commission’s report says that there is no such thing as an “arbiter of truth,” and yet our media gatekeepers have claimed that mantle for themselves—with decidedly mixed results—for some time.
Consider the fact that Russiagate, a years-long effort to prove that Donald Trump was being blackmailed and controlled, proved untrue yet was given constant media attention, while the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents, which proved true, was actively suppressed with the explicit purpose of protecting Joe Biden’s chances of becoming president. We live in a surreal information moment when the lie was given ample airtime and featured prominently in print, while the truth was smothered and labeled disinformation.
And yet our self-appointed misinformation warriors have proven unwilling to engage in self-reflection. Harvard’s Shorenstein Center used the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop computer as the basis for one of its case studies during its recent misinformation sessions. The lesson that the Center’s leaders drew, however, was not the one anyone who values the truth should follow. According to the Times, the Shorenstein Center claimed that the Hunter Biden story offered “an instructive case study on the power of social media and news organizations to mitigate media manipulation campaigns.”
In other words, the suppression of information deemed by “experts” to be misinformation was precisely the kind of Good Information objective we should be pursuing. The research director of the center, Joan Donovan, told the Times that the Hunter Biden case study was “designed to cause conversation—it’s not supposed to leave you resolved as a reader.”
But what is there to resolve about the fact that the Fourth Estate eagerly embraced the role of Chief Information Censor on behalf of a Democratic candidate for president?
Misinformation and disinformation are nothing new. Propaganda, political dirty tricks, and deliberate lies have been with us a while—and have often been a point of pride for their practitioners. It was not that long ago that Ben Rhodes, then a top aide to President Obama, boasted about creating an “echo chamber” in the media to spread falsehoods about the details of Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.
It is true that misinformation has taken on greater significance thanks to the scale and speed of the social-media platforms that spread it. But the new sanctimony about misinformation should be leavened with some healthy skepticism about the movement’s major actors. As Bernstein noted, in some sense “the disinformation project is simply an unofficial partnership between Big Tech, corporate media, elite universities, and cash-rich foundations.” The crusade against misinformation is an approximate mirror image of Donald Trump’s war against “fake news.”
Control of information is control of one of the most valuable commodities in the developed world: people’s attention. And people want their confirmation biases affirmed. But scholars and commissioners studying misinformation also suffer from confirmation bias. Contra the proposals made by panels and commissions on misinformation, the most radical thing we could do right now isn’t to give more power to elites or the federal government to control information. Their record of late—Russiagate, Hunter Biden, the Covington kids, the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis, Border Patrol officers with whips, the Kyle Rittenhouse trial—has not been stellar.
It would be far better for the health of the “information ecosystem” that these supposed experts are always invoking if reporters focused on shoring up what were once unassailable tenets of journalism—balance, iron-clad sourcing, and critical independence from and skepticism about the powerful. Instead, they are power’s handmaidens.
10) And finally: 'We need a global Ministry of Truth ...'
The Times, 21 December 2021
Sheldon Himelfarb and Philip Howard
We need an Intergovernmental Panel for the Information Environment (IPIE), and we need it now.
With the rapid spread of the new Omicron variant comes the spread of another deadly social disease: misinformation. Conspiracy theories and inaccurate news abound, again threatening to exacerbate the death toll and undermine management of the pandemic.
Yet Covid is only one of the planetary threats that misinformation compounds. Misinformation itself is an existential threat because it impedes action on virtually every global problem. It has stymied efforts to address climate change and caused mob violence in India and Myanmar. It has produced election violence in the US and attacks on minorities around the world. It has led young people to think that many vaccines threaten their fertility.
Which has led us to this conclusion: we need an Intergovernmental Panel for the Information Environment (IPIE), and we need it now. This was the recommendation of a group of experts at the Nobel Prize Foundation Summit this year, who suggested it be modelled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
We have researched the relationship between communication technologies and social wellbeing for 25 years and know that truth is the first victim in conflicts. What is different today, and unprecedented in human history, is the volume and the velocity with which anyone can spread misinformation globally.
We have considered the full range of proposed solutions to the crisis, from antitrust action against social media companies, to redesigning the architecture of the internet itself, but none are as comprehensive and actionable as one based on the IPCC.
The IPCC was set up to determine the state of knowledge on climate change and provide regular scientific assessments on its implications. Like climate change, misinformation is a global problem which demands a co-ordinated global response. The IPIE would gather scientific evidence on misinformation, establish standards for a healthy information environment, evaluate potential policy responses and create the multilateral framework needed for a global approach.
The UK government already leads on technology issues in the G20 and other international forums. With the UK’s backing, an IPIE could begin to address this crisis. Helping governments and the platforms to co-ordinate on misinformation is the only way forward. We must take this vital step to save our information environment.
Yet Covid is only one of the planetary threats that misinformation compounds. Misinformation itself is an existential threat because it impedes action on virtually every global problem. It has stymied efforts to address climate change and caused mob violence in India and Myanmar. It has produced election violence in the US and attacks on minorities around the world. It has led young people to think that many vaccines threaten their fertility.
Which has led us to this conclusion: we need an Intergovernmental Panel for the Information Environment (IPIE), and we need it now. This was the recommendation of a group of experts at the Nobel Prize Foundation Summit this year, who suggested it be modelled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
We have researched the relationship between communication technologies and social wellbeing for 25 years and know that truth is the first victim in conflicts. What is different today, and unprecedented in human history, is the volume and the velocity with which anyone can spread misinformation globally.
We have considered the full range of proposed solutions to the crisis, from antitrust action against social media companies, to redesigning the architecture of the internet itself, but none are as comprehensive and actionable as one based on the IPCC.
The IPCC was set up to determine the state of knowledge on climate change and provide regular scientific assessments on its implications. Like climate change, misinformation is a global problem which demands a co-ordinated global response. The IPIE would gather scientific evidence on misinformation, establish standards for a healthy information environment, evaluate potential policy responses and create the multilateral framework needed for a global approach.
The UK government already leads on technology issues in the G20 and other international forums. With the UK’s backing, an IPIE could begin to address this crisis. Helping governments and the platforms to co-ordinate on misinformation is the only way forward. We must take this vital step to save our information environment.
The London-based Net Zero Watch is a campaign group set up to highlight and discuss the serious implications of expensive and poorly considered climate change policies. The Net Zero Watch newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.netzerowatch.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment