In this newsletter:
1) A third of Brits face poverty with energy bills set to hit $5,000
CNN Business, 9 August 2022
2) The rise of King coal as energy crisis hits Europe
India Narrative, 7 August 2022
3) Ex-Cabinet minister Lord Frost says there is no ‘climate emergency’ and Britain should end focus on ‘medieval’ wind power
Daily Mail, 9 August 2022
4) David Frost: Holy Illusions
Policy Exchange, August 2022
5) Melanie Philipps: The energy emergency requires ditching of Net Zero and a rethink of the UK's entire energy strategy
The Times, 9 August 2022
6) Daniel Hannan: The miserable truth is that our leaders don’t want us to have cheap energy
The Sunday Telegraph, 7 August 2022
CNN Business, 9 August 2022
2) The rise of King coal as energy crisis hits Europe
India Narrative, 7 August 2022
3) Ex-Cabinet minister Lord Frost says there is no ‘climate emergency’ and Britain should end focus on ‘medieval’ wind power
Daily Mail, 9 August 2022
4) David Frost: Holy Illusions
Policy Exchange, August 2022
5) Melanie Philipps: The energy emergency requires ditching of Net Zero and a rethink of the UK's entire energy strategy
The Times, 9 August 2022
6) Daniel Hannan: The miserable truth is that our leaders don’t want us to have cheap energy
The Sunday Telegraph, 7 August 2022
7) Germany debates lifting fracking ban as it confronts energy supply crisis
The Globe and Mail, 9 August 2022
The Globe and Mail, 9 August 2022
8) Coral cannot be at record levels – that's not what Sir David Attenborough told me
Chris Morrison, The Daily Sceptic, 6 August 2022
9) Peter Ridd: The reef is strong, so stop the scare campaign
The Australian, 5 August 2022
10) Taylor Dotson: Unsustainable AlarmismChris Morrison, The Daily Sceptic, 6 August 2022
9) Peter Ridd: The reef is strong, so stop the scare campaign
The Australian, 5 August 2022
The New Atlantis, Summer 2022
Full details:
1) A third of Brits face poverty with energy bills set to hit $5,000
CNN Business, 9 August 2022
Martin Lewis compares UK to the Titanic as it approaches iceberg of 'cataclysmic' energy price rises
Nearly one third of households in the United Kingdom will face poverty this winter after paying energy bills that are set to soar again in January, campaigners say.
About 10.5 million households will be in fuel poverty for the first three months of next year, according to estimates from the End Fuel Poverty Coalition (EFPC) published on Tuesday — meaning that their income after paying for energy will fall below the poverty line.
The UK government defines poverty as household income of less than 60% of the UK median, which stood at £31,000 ($37,500) in 2021, according to official statistics.
The predictions are based on new estimates from research firm Cornwall Insight, also published Tuesday, which show that the average household energy bill is expected to hit £3,582 ($4,335) a year from October, and £4,266 ($5,163) from January — equating to about £355 ($430) a month.
January's forecast represents a 116% increase in energy bills from current levels. As fuel prices surge, estimates are having trouble keeping pace. Just last week, Cornwall Insight predicted January's prices would rise by 83% from current levels.
The research firm said it had revised its figures because of a jump in wholesale prices and a change in the way the UK regulator calculates its price cap. But there could be relief on the horizon: Cornwall Insight expects bills to start falling in the second half of 2023.
Fuel bills started rising last year as a global natural gas supply crunch pushed wholesale prices up to record levels. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in late February has only exacerbated the situation.
The average UK household bill has already risen 54% this year, exacerbating a cost-of-living crisis that has forced many Britons to choose between "heating and eating."
In May, the government announced a £15 billion ($18 billion) package of support — including a £400 ($484) payment to 29 million households from October — to ease the burden of energy bills.
But Simon Francis, coordinator for the EFPC, said the latest price estimates meant the current level of government support amounted to a "drop in the ocean."
Craig Lowrey, a principal consultant at Cornwall Insight, said in a Tuesday press release that if "£400 was not enough to make a dent in the impact of [the company's] previous forecast, it most certainly is not enough now."
Liz Truss, the UK's foreign minister and current frontrunner to replace Boris Johnson as prime minister next month, has proposed cutting taxes to help people struggling with their bills, rather than direct help. Her rival, former finance minister Rishi Sunak, has said more support will be needed.
Meanwhile, the CBI — the country's top business organization — has urged Johnson to bring the leadership candidates together to agree on a way to support households and businesses with their energy bills so that measures can be announced as soon as the October price cap is set on August 26. The new prime minister is not expected to be elected until September 5.
2) The rise of King coal as energy crisis hits Europe
India Narrative, 7 August 2022
CNN Business, 9 August 2022
Martin Lewis compares UK to the Titanic as it approaches iceberg of 'cataclysmic' energy price rises
Nearly one third of households in the United Kingdom will face poverty this winter after paying energy bills that are set to soar again in January, campaigners say.
About 10.5 million households will be in fuel poverty for the first three months of next year, according to estimates from the End Fuel Poverty Coalition (EFPC) published on Tuesday — meaning that their income after paying for energy will fall below the poverty line.
The UK government defines poverty as household income of less than 60% of the UK median, which stood at £31,000 ($37,500) in 2021, according to official statistics.
The predictions are based on new estimates from research firm Cornwall Insight, also published Tuesday, which show that the average household energy bill is expected to hit £3,582 ($4,335) a year from October, and £4,266 ($5,163) from January — equating to about £355 ($430) a month.
January's forecast represents a 116% increase in energy bills from current levels. As fuel prices surge, estimates are having trouble keeping pace. Just last week, Cornwall Insight predicted January's prices would rise by 83% from current levels.
The research firm said it had revised its figures because of a jump in wholesale prices and a change in the way the UK regulator calculates its price cap. But there could be relief on the horizon: Cornwall Insight expects bills to start falling in the second half of 2023.
Fuel bills started rising last year as a global natural gas supply crunch pushed wholesale prices up to record levels. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in late February has only exacerbated the situation.
The average UK household bill has already risen 54% this year, exacerbating a cost-of-living crisis that has forced many Britons to choose between "heating and eating."
In May, the government announced a £15 billion ($18 billion) package of support — including a £400 ($484) payment to 29 million households from October — to ease the burden of energy bills.
But Simon Francis, coordinator for the EFPC, said the latest price estimates meant the current level of government support amounted to a "drop in the ocean."
Craig Lowrey, a principal consultant at Cornwall Insight, said in a Tuesday press release that if "£400 was not enough to make a dent in the impact of [the company's] previous forecast, it most certainly is not enough now."
Liz Truss, the UK's foreign minister and current frontrunner to replace Boris Johnson as prime minister next month, has proposed cutting taxes to help people struggling with their bills, rather than direct help. Her rival, former finance minister Rishi Sunak, has said more support will be needed.
Meanwhile, the CBI — the country's top business organization — has urged Johnson to bring the leadership candidates together to agree on a way to support households and businesses with their energy bills so that measures can be announced as soon as the October price cap is set on August 26. The new prime minister is not expected to be elected until September 5.
2) The rise of King coal as energy crisis hits Europe
India Narrative, 7 August 2022
Coal is gold now: The world is now looking at coal for energy supplies
Coal, considered to be the single largest source of global carbon emissions, is back in demand as the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war has crippled energy supplies leading to soaring prices. With an unprecedented rise in global economic uncertainties, several countries including Germany, the European Union’s (EU) largest economy have decided to resort to coal based power generation.
Incidentally, India had come under the scanner last year after the conclusion of the COP 26 (Conference of Paris) )for altering the wording of the final deal to “phase down” instead of “phase out” coal.
In less than a year, the developed countries are now scrambling to resume coal based energy generation.
A report by the Observer Research Foundation noted that energy supply disruptions following the conflict between Ukraine and Russia in early 2022 took LNG prices even higher leaving coal as the only option for dispatchable and affordable power even in the tough markets of Western Europe and North America that have explicit policies to phase out coal.
Germany, one of the worst impacted by the energy crisis, has started to move back to coal by restarting the idle coal plants. The country had earlier shut down most of its coal based power plants as spearheaded the transition towards green energy and the climate change cause. Germany had announced phasing out all coal based electricity generation by 2038. But it is now reversing its stand as it faces one of the worst crises in decades.
Other European countries such as Austria, Poland, the Netherlands and Greece have also started restarting coal plants.
China has the largest number of operational coal power plants. India ranks second. Germany, the largest economy in the EU has 63, according to data collation portal Statista.
Full story
3) Ex-Cabinet minister Lord Frost says there is no ‘climate emergency’ and Britain should end focus on ‘medieval’ wind power
Daily Mail, 9 August 2022
Coal, considered to be the single largest source of global carbon emissions, is back in demand as the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war has crippled energy supplies leading to soaring prices. With an unprecedented rise in global economic uncertainties, several countries including Germany, the European Union’s (EU) largest economy have decided to resort to coal based power generation.
Incidentally, India had come under the scanner last year after the conclusion of the COP 26 (Conference of Paris) )for altering the wording of the final deal to “phase down” instead of “phase out” coal.
In less than a year, the developed countries are now scrambling to resume coal based energy generation.
A report by the Observer Research Foundation noted that energy supply disruptions following the conflict between Ukraine and Russia in early 2022 took LNG prices even higher leaving coal as the only option for dispatchable and affordable power even in the tough markets of Western Europe and North America that have explicit policies to phase out coal.
Germany, one of the worst impacted by the energy crisis, has started to move back to coal by restarting the idle coal plants. The country had earlier shut down most of its coal based power plants as spearheaded the transition towards green energy and the climate change cause. Germany had announced phasing out all coal based electricity generation by 2038. But it is now reversing its stand as it faces one of the worst crises in decades.
Other European countries such as Austria, Poland, the Netherlands and Greece have also started restarting coal plants.
China has the largest number of operational coal power plants. India ranks second. Germany, the largest economy in the EU has 63, according to data collation portal Statista.
Full story
3) Ex-Cabinet minister Lord Frost says there is no ‘climate emergency’ and Britain should end focus on ‘medieval’ wind power
Daily Mail, 9 August 2022
Ex-Cabinet minister Lord Frost has insisted there is no climate 'emergency' and urged the next prime minister to move away from 'medieval technology' such as wind power.
The former Brexit negotiator, who is backing Liz Truss for the Tory leadership, hit out at a 'totally unrealistic approach to climate and energy policy' over the past two decades.
He demanded Britain change tack from 'managing demand' for energy and instead put greater emphasis on fracking and nuclear power, as well as carbon capture and storage (CCS).
Calling for a 'pragmatic' response to climate change - which the Conservative peer said was just 'one of the many' problems facing the UK - Lord Frost blasted an approach that asked the public to 'up-end the whole way our societies work'.
Lord Frost's support for Ms Truss during the Tory leadership contest has prompted speculation he could return to the Cabinet - or become the new PM's chief of staff - should the Foreign Secretary win the contest to replace Boris Johnson.
He was Mr Johnson's chief Brexit negotiator before being given a Cabinet role in March last year. But Lord Frost quit the Government last December with a swipe at the 'direction of travel' of Mr Johnson's administration on Covid restrictions, net-zero ambitions and tax rises.
During the Tory leadership contest, both Ms Truss and her challenger Rishi Sunak have said they would support fracking in Britain if local communities supported it.
This has left open the possibility of a change of direction in UK energy policy under a new PM, with Mr Johnson having used his premiership to call for Britain to become the 'Saudi Arabia of wind power'.
Mr Johnson also banned fracking in England within months of taking office, although he has paved the way for a reconsideration of the moratorium on shale gas extraction amid the current energy crisis.
The outgoing PM also pledged to build a nuclear power plant a year following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which has forced Western countries to end their reliance on oil and gas from Moscow.
In a new essay for the Policy Exchange thinktank, Lord Frost outlined how a new PM could alter the Government's approach as he hit out at the 'insidious effects of 20 years of a totally unrealistic approach to climate and energy policy'.
'The current evidence does not support the assertion that we are in a climate “emergency”,' the Tory peer wrote, as he delivered a fresh swipe at Mr Johnson's climate policies.
'Rather, the effects of climate change are a problem, one of the many we face, and should be tackled in that pragmatic way rather than by asking us to up-end the whole way our societies work.
'Western society, and indeed world civilisation, depends on copious supplies of energy.
'Yet the prevailing mood is one in which individuals are asked to restrict their use of energy and in which unsatisfactory renewables technology is touted as the best solution to our problems.
'Instead of focusing on technological solutions that enable us to master our environment and get more energy in a more carbon-efficient way — nuclear, CCS, fracking, one day fusion – we have focused on managing demand so we can use medieval technology like wind power.'
Lord Frost despaired at how Britons are told by climate activists to 'stop travelling, live local, eat less, stop eating meat, turn our lights out, and generally to stop being a burden'.
'As most of us are generally reluctant to do this as individuals, the state has had to step in, with smart meters, heat pumps, LTZs (limited traffic zones), unsatisfactory electric cars, tailored taxation measures, and “nudges”,' he added.
'We have all gradually got used to this, and indeed internalised it, so that it seems normal to be lectured about the moral aspects of virtually every choice in our everyday lives.'
The peer said this had led to a 'further loss of trust in free market economics' but argued there was 'overwhelming evidence that socialist systems have worse environmental outcomes'.
Full story
4) David Frost: Holy Illusions
Policy Exchange, August 2022
As part of our series on ‘What Do We Want From The Next Prime Minister?’, Policy Exchange features a substantive essay by Lord Frost of Allenton reimagining the famous ‘Stepping Stones’ paper prepared for Margaret Thatcher when she was Leader of the Opposition in the mid-1970s. This paper offers Lord Frost’s diagnosis of Britain’s problems and proposes a series of solutions to address them. Other prominent Conservative thinkers will be responding to the Frost vision in the coming weeks, in the hope of stimulating a broader discussion.
[...]
4. Why are we failing?
Given this set of daunting problems in all our countries, there really ought to be strong political movements in at least some of them to analyse and begin to deal with them. That is not the case. Instead we see the reverse — a refusal to get to grips with the problems or even to acknowledge them.
It is easier to ignore the most pressing economic and societal issues of the day, pretend they don’t exist, or claim they will be solved automatically as normal conditions return. We are, it seems, studiously pretending to be asleep.
The major reason for this is that the deep-seated intellectual environment in which policymakers operate has come to be highly collectivist. I identify four reasons for that — the four “c”s. C for crash — the effects of the 2008 financial crisis. C for climate — the effects of the approach to climate policy. C for covid — the changes wrought by the pandemic. And finally C for complacency — the assumption that the West will always succeed.
All these produce the final C — collectivism. [...]
The second C is the growth of climate collectivism: the insidious effects of twenty years of a totally unrealistic approach to climate and energy policy. The current evidence does not support the assertion that we are in a climate “emergency”. Rather, the effects of climate change are a problem, one of the many we face, and should be tackled in that pragmatic way rather than by asking us to up-end the whole way our societies work.
Western society, and indeed world civilisation, depends on copious supplies of energy. Yet the prevailing mood is one in which individuals are asked to restrict their use of energy and in which unsatisfactory renewables technology is touted as the best solution to our problems.
Instead of focusing on technological solutions that enable us to master our environment and get more energy in a more carbon-efficient way — nuclear, CCS, fracking, one day fusion – we have focused on managing demand so we can use medieval technology like wind power.
One of the consequences is that we have all got used to being hectored by the government and by a huge body of intellectual and NGO opinion to make sacrifices to save the planet. We are told to stop travelling, live local, eat less, stop eating meat, turn our lights out, and generally to stop being a burden. As most of us are generally reluctant to do this as individuals, the state has had to step in, with smart meters, heat pumps, LTZs, unsatisfactory electric cars, tailored taxation measures, and “nudges”. We have all gradually got used to this, and indeed internalised it, so that it seems normal to be lectured about the moral aspects of virtually every choice in our everyday lives.
“Getting on with your life” is not just what you do but has become invested with a ‘green’ moral purpose, a purpose which not everyone endorses but from which dissent, if not impossible, is potentially costly to an individual’s social and economic prospects. The other consequence is a further loss of trust in free market economics.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that socialist systems have worse environmental outcomes, including on CO2 reduction, normal market mechanisms are thought to be inadequate to accomplish climate goals.
Governments pick technological winners. Taxes increase, supposedly on “externalities” but increasingly to encourage particular kinds of behaviour.
We are increasingly told — by the respected economist Dieter Helm for example — that “net zero does require an economic transformation analogous to that from a peacetime to a wartime economy”. Once again, we see the argument that normal means are not enough, and only collectivism will do the job.
Full essay
5) Melanie Philipps: The energy emergency requires ditching of Net Zero and a rethink of the UK's entire energy strategy
The Times, 9 August 2022
The former Brexit negotiator, who is backing Liz Truss for the Tory leadership, hit out at a 'totally unrealistic approach to climate and energy policy' over the past two decades.
He demanded Britain change tack from 'managing demand' for energy and instead put greater emphasis on fracking and nuclear power, as well as carbon capture and storage (CCS).
Calling for a 'pragmatic' response to climate change - which the Conservative peer said was just 'one of the many' problems facing the UK - Lord Frost blasted an approach that asked the public to 'up-end the whole way our societies work'.
Lord Frost's support for Ms Truss during the Tory leadership contest has prompted speculation he could return to the Cabinet - or become the new PM's chief of staff - should the Foreign Secretary win the contest to replace Boris Johnson.
He was Mr Johnson's chief Brexit negotiator before being given a Cabinet role in March last year. But Lord Frost quit the Government last December with a swipe at the 'direction of travel' of Mr Johnson's administration on Covid restrictions, net-zero ambitions and tax rises.
During the Tory leadership contest, both Ms Truss and her challenger Rishi Sunak have said they would support fracking in Britain if local communities supported it.
This has left open the possibility of a change of direction in UK energy policy under a new PM, with Mr Johnson having used his premiership to call for Britain to become the 'Saudi Arabia of wind power'.
Mr Johnson also banned fracking in England within months of taking office, although he has paved the way for a reconsideration of the moratorium on shale gas extraction amid the current energy crisis.
The outgoing PM also pledged to build a nuclear power plant a year following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which has forced Western countries to end their reliance on oil and gas from Moscow.
In a new essay for the Policy Exchange thinktank, Lord Frost outlined how a new PM could alter the Government's approach as he hit out at the 'insidious effects of 20 years of a totally unrealistic approach to climate and energy policy'.
'The current evidence does not support the assertion that we are in a climate “emergency”,' the Tory peer wrote, as he delivered a fresh swipe at Mr Johnson's climate policies.
'Rather, the effects of climate change are a problem, one of the many we face, and should be tackled in that pragmatic way rather than by asking us to up-end the whole way our societies work.
'Western society, and indeed world civilisation, depends on copious supplies of energy.
'Yet the prevailing mood is one in which individuals are asked to restrict their use of energy and in which unsatisfactory renewables technology is touted as the best solution to our problems.
'Instead of focusing on technological solutions that enable us to master our environment and get more energy in a more carbon-efficient way — nuclear, CCS, fracking, one day fusion – we have focused on managing demand so we can use medieval technology like wind power.'
Lord Frost despaired at how Britons are told by climate activists to 'stop travelling, live local, eat less, stop eating meat, turn our lights out, and generally to stop being a burden'.
'As most of us are generally reluctant to do this as individuals, the state has had to step in, with smart meters, heat pumps, LTZs (limited traffic zones), unsatisfactory electric cars, tailored taxation measures, and “nudges”,' he added.
'We have all gradually got used to this, and indeed internalised it, so that it seems normal to be lectured about the moral aspects of virtually every choice in our everyday lives.'
The peer said this had led to a 'further loss of trust in free market economics' but argued there was 'overwhelming evidence that socialist systems have worse environmental outcomes'.
Full story
4) David Frost: Holy Illusions
Policy Exchange, August 2022
As part of our series on ‘What Do We Want From The Next Prime Minister?’, Policy Exchange features a substantive essay by Lord Frost of Allenton reimagining the famous ‘Stepping Stones’ paper prepared for Margaret Thatcher when she was Leader of the Opposition in the mid-1970s. This paper offers Lord Frost’s diagnosis of Britain’s problems and proposes a series of solutions to address them. Other prominent Conservative thinkers will be responding to the Frost vision in the coming weeks, in the hope of stimulating a broader discussion.
[...]
4. Why are we failing?
Given this set of daunting problems in all our countries, there really ought to be strong political movements in at least some of them to analyse and begin to deal with them. That is not the case. Instead we see the reverse — a refusal to get to grips with the problems or even to acknowledge them.
It is easier to ignore the most pressing economic and societal issues of the day, pretend they don’t exist, or claim they will be solved automatically as normal conditions return. We are, it seems, studiously pretending to be asleep.
The major reason for this is that the deep-seated intellectual environment in which policymakers operate has come to be highly collectivist. I identify four reasons for that — the four “c”s. C for crash — the effects of the 2008 financial crisis. C for climate — the effects of the approach to climate policy. C for covid — the changes wrought by the pandemic. And finally C for complacency — the assumption that the West will always succeed.
All these produce the final C — collectivism. [...]
The second C is the growth of climate collectivism: the insidious effects of twenty years of a totally unrealistic approach to climate and energy policy. The current evidence does not support the assertion that we are in a climate “emergency”. Rather, the effects of climate change are a problem, one of the many we face, and should be tackled in that pragmatic way rather than by asking us to up-end the whole way our societies work.
Western society, and indeed world civilisation, depends on copious supplies of energy. Yet the prevailing mood is one in which individuals are asked to restrict their use of energy and in which unsatisfactory renewables technology is touted as the best solution to our problems.
Instead of focusing on technological solutions that enable us to master our environment and get more energy in a more carbon-efficient way — nuclear, CCS, fracking, one day fusion – we have focused on managing demand so we can use medieval technology like wind power.
One of the consequences is that we have all got used to being hectored by the government and by a huge body of intellectual and NGO opinion to make sacrifices to save the planet. We are told to stop travelling, live local, eat less, stop eating meat, turn our lights out, and generally to stop being a burden. As most of us are generally reluctant to do this as individuals, the state has had to step in, with smart meters, heat pumps, LTZs, unsatisfactory electric cars, tailored taxation measures, and “nudges”. We have all gradually got used to this, and indeed internalised it, so that it seems normal to be lectured about the moral aspects of virtually every choice in our everyday lives.
“Getting on with your life” is not just what you do but has become invested with a ‘green’ moral purpose, a purpose which not everyone endorses but from which dissent, if not impossible, is potentially costly to an individual’s social and economic prospects. The other consequence is a further loss of trust in free market economics.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that socialist systems have worse environmental outcomes, including on CO2 reduction, normal market mechanisms are thought to be inadequate to accomplish climate goals.
Governments pick technological winners. Taxes increase, supposedly on “externalities” but increasingly to encourage particular kinds of behaviour.
We are increasingly told — by the respected economist Dieter Helm for example — that “net zero does require an economic transformation analogous to that from a peacetime to a wartime economy”. Once again, we see the argument that normal means are not enough, and only collectivism will do the job.
Full essay
5) Melanie Philipps: The energy emergency requires ditching of Net Zero and a rethink of the UK's entire energy strategy
The Times, 9 August 2022
The target of protest therefore should not be the utility companies but the government. In a democracy, that means throwing the blighters out unless they change course.
A campaign is under way to encourage people to go on strike and refuse to pay their sky-rocketing fuel bills. Many are already paying double what they were a year ago. The typical fuel bill is predicted to rise to more than £3,000 in October and could increase yet further to £4,200 in the new year.
Don’t Pay UK, a campaign formed by anonymous activists, is urging consumers to halt payments of their energy bills from October 1 unless providers reduce them to “affordable levels”. If pledges of non-payment reach one million by that date, protesters will cancel their direct debits.
The idea is that there’s safety in numbers. If enough people stop paying their bills, says the campaign, the utility companies will be overwhelmed and will “be forced to the table to end this crisis”.
There are nevertheless serious risks for consumers in joining such a resistance movement. Charities and other legal and financial experts warn that such people risk being cut off from their power supply. Fuel companies can obtain a court warrant to enter their home to fit a prepayment card meter, with a requirement to pay off arrears or be disconnected. And the protesters may be saddled with a debt record and negative credit score.
There can be no doubt, however, about the terrible hardship that looms with astronomical fuel costs. Poor people are already being forced to choose between heating and eating. Michael Lewis, the chief executive of E.ON, which supplies gas and electricity to almost four million households, says that up to 40 per cent of them could be drawn into fuel poverty this winter by soaring prices.
Of all forms of deprivation, this is arguably the most devastating. If people can’t keep warm in winter or heat their food, the hardship is as savage as it is immediate.
So is a fuel payment strike justifiable? No. It’s the wrong tactic against the wrong target.
It cannot be right for consumers to break their contractual undertaking. If one such obligation is unilaterally broken, why stop there? Council tax rates also cause hardship for many. If people refuse to pay their fuel bills, why not also their council tax bills? Why not go on rent strike, or water bill strike, and so on and on?
Don’t Pay UK says the campaign has a precedent in the poll tax protests more than three decades ago, when up to 18 million people refused to pay the tax. That protest, however, was organised by the revolutionary left and anarchists, keen to produce a street alternative to representative democracy. Notably, the Labour Party leadership insisted that people should respect the law, even if they disagreed with it.
In any event, the poll tax was very different from fuel increases. It was imposed upon everyone by the government. Fuel and power are services provided in a contract between supplier and customer.
The poll tax was perceived as unjust because it would have meant “a duke paying the same as a dustman”. The injustice was fundamental and affected everyone — which was why so many refused to pay the tax.
By contrast, fuel bills create variable levels of hardship since people don’t use the same types or amount of power as each other but choose overall between gas, electricity, wood-burning stoves, solar panels and so on.
The fuel protesters refer to their campaign as “civil disobedience”. But it is not. It involves instead a mass breach of contract with the energy suppliers.
Martin Luther King said civil disobedience involved “an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice”.
Fuel prices are not an unjust law. They are the result of a gross failure of public policy. This was brought to a head by Russia’s weaponisation of gas prices in its war against Ukraine. But that was only made possible because of the British government’s net-zero green agenda. Green levies have racked up energy costs. The government has reduced the supply of fossil fuels. It abandoned fracking for shale gas, Britain’s cheap energy source of which there’s enough for a hundred years. It jacked up instead renewables such as wind power, which cannot sustain reliable fuel supplies.
That abandonment of Britain’s natural energy resilience created a disastrous dependency on foreign energy sources. Furthermore, the power supply this winter may well be unable to meet demand. So while people are cutting back on other essentials to pay their fuel bills, the lights may go out anyway.
Of course, it sticks in the throat that with fuel prices going through the roof oil companies are making record profits. But that’s not the reason for the high prices. It’s political incompetence.
The target of protest therefore should not be the utility companies but the government. In a democracy, that means throwing the blighters out unless they change course.
Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss shouldn’t need mass protests to tell them that the government to which they both belong has created an unprecedented fuel emergency. This needs not just relief for the poorest. It requires a ditching of net zero and a rethink of their entire energy strategy.
A campaign is under way to encourage people to go on strike and refuse to pay their sky-rocketing fuel bills. Many are already paying double what they were a year ago. The typical fuel bill is predicted to rise to more than £3,000 in October and could increase yet further to £4,200 in the new year.
Don’t Pay UK, a campaign formed by anonymous activists, is urging consumers to halt payments of their energy bills from October 1 unless providers reduce them to “affordable levels”. If pledges of non-payment reach one million by that date, protesters will cancel their direct debits.
The idea is that there’s safety in numbers. If enough people stop paying their bills, says the campaign, the utility companies will be overwhelmed and will “be forced to the table to end this crisis”.
There are nevertheless serious risks for consumers in joining such a resistance movement. Charities and other legal and financial experts warn that such people risk being cut off from their power supply. Fuel companies can obtain a court warrant to enter their home to fit a prepayment card meter, with a requirement to pay off arrears or be disconnected. And the protesters may be saddled with a debt record and negative credit score.
There can be no doubt, however, about the terrible hardship that looms with astronomical fuel costs. Poor people are already being forced to choose between heating and eating. Michael Lewis, the chief executive of E.ON, which supplies gas and electricity to almost four million households, says that up to 40 per cent of them could be drawn into fuel poverty this winter by soaring prices.
Of all forms of deprivation, this is arguably the most devastating. If people can’t keep warm in winter or heat their food, the hardship is as savage as it is immediate.
So is a fuel payment strike justifiable? No. It’s the wrong tactic against the wrong target.
It cannot be right for consumers to break their contractual undertaking. If one such obligation is unilaterally broken, why stop there? Council tax rates also cause hardship for many. If people refuse to pay their fuel bills, why not also their council tax bills? Why not go on rent strike, or water bill strike, and so on and on?
Don’t Pay UK says the campaign has a precedent in the poll tax protests more than three decades ago, when up to 18 million people refused to pay the tax. That protest, however, was organised by the revolutionary left and anarchists, keen to produce a street alternative to representative democracy. Notably, the Labour Party leadership insisted that people should respect the law, even if they disagreed with it.
In any event, the poll tax was very different from fuel increases. It was imposed upon everyone by the government. Fuel and power are services provided in a contract between supplier and customer.
The poll tax was perceived as unjust because it would have meant “a duke paying the same as a dustman”. The injustice was fundamental and affected everyone — which was why so many refused to pay the tax.
By contrast, fuel bills create variable levels of hardship since people don’t use the same types or amount of power as each other but choose overall between gas, electricity, wood-burning stoves, solar panels and so on.
The fuel protesters refer to their campaign as “civil disobedience”. But it is not. It involves instead a mass breach of contract with the energy suppliers.
Martin Luther King said civil disobedience involved “an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice”.
Fuel prices are not an unjust law. They are the result of a gross failure of public policy. This was brought to a head by Russia’s weaponisation of gas prices in its war against Ukraine. But that was only made possible because of the British government’s net-zero green agenda. Green levies have racked up energy costs. The government has reduced the supply of fossil fuels. It abandoned fracking for shale gas, Britain’s cheap energy source of which there’s enough for a hundred years. It jacked up instead renewables such as wind power, which cannot sustain reliable fuel supplies.
That abandonment of Britain’s natural energy resilience created a disastrous dependency on foreign energy sources. Furthermore, the power supply this winter may well be unable to meet demand. So while people are cutting back on other essentials to pay their fuel bills, the lights may go out anyway.
Of course, it sticks in the throat that with fuel prices going through the roof oil companies are making record profits. But that’s not the reason for the high prices. It’s political incompetence.
The target of protest therefore should not be the utility companies but the government. In a democracy, that means throwing the blighters out unless they change course.
Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss shouldn’t need mass protests to tell them that the government to which they both belong has created an unprecedented fuel emergency. This needs not just relief for the poorest. It requires a ditching of net zero and a rethink of their entire energy strategy.
6) Daniel Hannan: The miserable truth is that our leaders don’t want us to have cheap energy
The Sunday Telegraph, 7 August 2022
Politicians, in hoc to eco-extremists, have come to believe that consuming fuel is intrinsically sinful
No, the energy crisis is not some unforeseeable consequence of the Ukrainian war. It is the result of years of wishful thinking, preening and short-termism. We sit on 300 years’ supply of coal. We have rich pockets of gas trapped in rocks beneath Central Scotland, Yorkshire, Lancashire and Sussex. We have as good a claim as any country to have invented civil nuclear power. Yet, incredibly, we face blackouts and energy rationing.
The calamity into which we are heading this winter represents a failure of policy under successive governments going back decades. The fact that much of Europe is in the same boat – and that poor Germany is barely in the boat at all, but is clinging by its fingertips to the gunwales – is no consolation.
Like their counterparts in other Western countries, our leaders are now scrambling to make up for past errors. More nuclear power-stations are mooted. The ban on shale gas extraction is reviewed. Sudden attention is paid to potential new sources of clean fuel, from hydrogen to fusion. All good stuff. All too late.
You can’t build a nuclear power plant in less than five years. Even fracking takes around ten months to come online – and that assumes that you have first cleared all the planning hurdles. Hydrogen has vast potential, and what Britain is doing with fusion, not least at the Atomic Energy Authority’s facility in Culham, is mind-blowing. We may well be less than two decades away from solving all our energy problems. But none of that will see us through next winter, when average household fuel bills are set to rise to over £4000.
How did we allow ourselves to become so vulnerable? It was hardly as if disruption in global energy markets was unthinkable. Most of the world’s hydrocarbons are buried under countries with nasty governments. For every Alberta, there are a dozen Irans; for every Norway, a dozen Nigerias. There is even a theory, first advanced by Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, the Venezuelan energy minister who founded OPEC, that the very fact of having oil turns a country into a dysfunctional dictatorship.
We have seen wars, blockades and revolutions across petro-dollar economies. We knew that a break in supply was always a possibility. And it was hardly as if Vladimir Putin was disguising the nature of his regime, for heaven’s sake.
No, we are in this mess because, for most of the twenty-first century, we have ignored economic reality in pursuit of theatrical decarbonisation. Actually, no, that understates our foolishness. Decarbonisation will happen eventually, as alternative energy sources become cheaper than fossil fuels. It is proper for governments to seek to speed that process up. But this goes well beyond emitting less CO2. Our intellectual and cultural leaders – TV producers, novelists, bishops, the lot – see fuel consumption itself as a problem. What they want is not green growth, but less growth.
As Amory Lovins, perhaps the most distinguished writer to have been involved in the move away from fossil fuels, put it in 1970:
“If you ask me, it’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it.”
The idea that cheaper energy is a positive good – that it reduces poverty and gives people more leisure time – has been almost wholly lost. We have convinced ourselves that if it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working. The reason we slip so easily into talk of banning and rationing is not just that the lockdown has left us readier to be bossed about. It is that we have come to regard the use of power as a sinful indulgence.
But raising the price of energy is not something we can do in isolation. When power becomes more expensive, so does everything else. Fuel is not simply one among many commodities; it is the enabler of exchange, the motor of efficiency, the vector of economic growth.
When did you last hear a politician admit as much? When did you hear any public figure extol cheap energy as an agent of poverty alleviation? When did you hear any historian describe how coal and later oil liberated the mass of humanity from back-breaking drudgery and led to the elimination of slavery? For ten thousand years, the primary source of energy was human muscle-power, and emperors on every continent found ways to harness and exploit their fellows. But why bother with slaves when you can use a barrel of sticky black stuff to do the work of a hundred men – and without needing to be fed or housed?
The reason no one says these things (other than Matt Ridley) is, to be blunt, that it is unfashionable. The high-status view is that we are brutalising Gaia, that politicians are in hoc to Big Oil and that we all ought to learn to get by with less – a view that it is especially easy to take if you spent the lockdown being paid to stay in your garden, and have no desire to go back to commuting.
Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and assorted anti-capitalist frondistes are openly and unashamedly anti-growth. For them, low-cost energy has dragged humanity away from the closed, local economies that they want. As Paul Ehrlich, the father of modern greenery, put it in 1975:
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. With cheap, abundant energy, the attempt clearly would be made to pave, develop, industrialise, and exploit every last bit of the planet”.
Tories don’t put it that way, of course, even to themselves. But they are still tugged by the cultural currents of the day. So they find ways to rationalise higher taxes, higher spending and anti-market measures with which they would normally have little truck.
Typically, they do so by playing up the economic opportunities that green technology will supposedly bring. Boris Johnson extols them with such gusto that he seems genuinely to have convinced himself. But it is pure hogwash. If there really were such opportunities, investors would find them without needing the the state to ban some fuel sources and subsidise others.
Green growth is a fallacy for the same reason that, as Frédéric Bastiat showed in 1850, you can’t make a city wealthier by smashing its shop windows. Doing so might immediately generate growth – nominal GDP often rises sharply in the aftermath of a natural disaster – but every penny spent by the shopkeeper on new windows (and by the glazier who now has extra income, and by the people he buys from and so on) is a penny that would have been spent more usefully without the breakages. In the same way, every penny spent on green “investment” is a penny that has been taken out of the productive economy through taxation.
None of this is to argue that governments shouldn’t seek to mitigate climate change. They should. I just wish they would admit that doing so is expensive. Green jobs are a cost, not a benefit. If you banned the use of diggers and had lines of workers with spades instead, you could argue that you had “created” jobs; but you would have made everyone worse off.
Conservatives should approach climate change in neither a masochistic nor a messianic spirit, but calmly, transactionally, hard-headedly. If there is good reason to believe that advances in technology will lead to sharply reduced costs, then let the timetable slip accordingly. If something more urgent comes along then, similarly, make a cool assessment of where your priorities lie. When the coronavirus hit, several fiscal targets were abandoned on grounds that there was a more immediate crisis. The current energy shortfall should prompt a similar reassessment.
Consider this. The transition from relatively dirty coal to relatively clean gas required very little state involvement. The Thatcher government simply withdrew subsidies and allowed the market to do its work. Carbon emissions fell and the air became cleaner.
Since then, though, we have had a much more interventionist approach, with price caps and green levies and subsidies for consumers and grants for producers and bans on new technologies (notably fracking). Result? Prices have risen and supply has fallen – to the point where, like some South American dictatorship, we are about to order our population to get by with less.
Please, ministers, stop trying to help. Stop spending and taxing and printing. Stop fining and subsidising and capping. Stop banning and rationing. Stop setting targets. We have had enough of being helped. We need time to heal.
The Sunday Telegraph, 7 August 2022
Politicians, in hoc to eco-extremists, have come to believe that consuming fuel is intrinsically sinful
No, the energy crisis is not some unforeseeable consequence of the Ukrainian war. It is the result of years of wishful thinking, preening and short-termism. We sit on 300 years’ supply of coal. We have rich pockets of gas trapped in rocks beneath Central Scotland, Yorkshire, Lancashire and Sussex. We have as good a claim as any country to have invented civil nuclear power. Yet, incredibly, we face blackouts and energy rationing.
The calamity into which we are heading this winter represents a failure of policy under successive governments going back decades. The fact that much of Europe is in the same boat – and that poor Germany is barely in the boat at all, but is clinging by its fingertips to the gunwales – is no consolation.
Like their counterparts in other Western countries, our leaders are now scrambling to make up for past errors. More nuclear power-stations are mooted. The ban on shale gas extraction is reviewed. Sudden attention is paid to potential new sources of clean fuel, from hydrogen to fusion. All good stuff. All too late.
You can’t build a nuclear power plant in less than five years. Even fracking takes around ten months to come online – and that assumes that you have first cleared all the planning hurdles. Hydrogen has vast potential, and what Britain is doing with fusion, not least at the Atomic Energy Authority’s facility in Culham, is mind-blowing. We may well be less than two decades away from solving all our energy problems. But none of that will see us through next winter, when average household fuel bills are set to rise to over £4000.
How did we allow ourselves to become so vulnerable? It was hardly as if disruption in global energy markets was unthinkable. Most of the world’s hydrocarbons are buried under countries with nasty governments. For every Alberta, there are a dozen Irans; for every Norway, a dozen Nigerias. There is even a theory, first advanced by Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, the Venezuelan energy minister who founded OPEC, that the very fact of having oil turns a country into a dysfunctional dictatorship.
We have seen wars, blockades and revolutions across petro-dollar economies. We knew that a break in supply was always a possibility. And it was hardly as if Vladimir Putin was disguising the nature of his regime, for heaven’s sake.
No, we are in this mess because, for most of the twenty-first century, we have ignored economic reality in pursuit of theatrical decarbonisation. Actually, no, that understates our foolishness. Decarbonisation will happen eventually, as alternative energy sources become cheaper than fossil fuels. It is proper for governments to seek to speed that process up. But this goes well beyond emitting less CO2. Our intellectual and cultural leaders – TV producers, novelists, bishops, the lot – see fuel consumption itself as a problem. What they want is not green growth, but less growth.
As Amory Lovins, perhaps the most distinguished writer to have been involved in the move away from fossil fuels, put it in 1970:
“If you ask me, it’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it.”
The idea that cheaper energy is a positive good – that it reduces poverty and gives people more leisure time – has been almost wholly lost. We have convinced ourselves that if it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working. The reason we slip so easily into talk of banning and rationing is not just that the lockdown has left us readier to be bossed about. It is that we have come to regard the use of power as a sinful indulgence.
But raising the price of energy is not something we can do in isolation. When power becomes more expensive, so does everything else. Fuel is not simply one among many commodities; it is the enabler of exchange, the motor of efficiency, the vector of economic growth.
When did you last hear a politician admit as much? When did you hear any public figure extol cheap energy as an agent of poverty alleviation? When did you hear any historian describe how coal and later oil liberated the mass of humanity from back-breaking drudgery and led to the elimination of slavery? For ten thousand years, the primary source of energy was human muscle-power, and emperors on every continent found ways to harness and exploit their fellows. But why bother with slaves when you can use a barrel of sticky black stuff to do the work of a hundred men – and without needing to be fed or housed?
The reason no one says these things (other than Matt Ridley) is, to be blunt, that it is unfashionable. The high-status view is that we are brutalising Gaia, that politicians are in hoc to Big Oil and that we all ought to learn to get by with less – a view that it is especially easy to take if you spent the lockdown being paid to stay in your garden, and have no desire to go back to commuting.
Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and assorted anti-capitalist frondistes are openly and unashamedly anti-growth. For them, low-cost energy has dragged humanity away from the closed, local economies that they want. As Paul Ehrlich, the father of modern greenery, put it in 1975:
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. With cheap, abundant energy, the attempt clearly would be made to pave, develop, industrialise, and exploit every last bit of the planet”.
Tories don’t put it that way, of course, even to themselves. But they are still tugged by the cultural currents of the day. So they find ways to rationalise higher taxes, higher spending and anti-market measures with which they would normally have little truck.
Typically, they do so by playing up the economic opportunities that green technology will supposedly bring. Boris Johnson extols them with such gusto that he seems genuinely to have convinced himself. But it is pure hogwash. If there really were such opportunities, investors would find them without needing the the state to ban some fuel sources and subsidise others.
Green growth is a fallacy for the same reason that, as Frédéric Bastiat showed in 1850, you can’t make a city wealthier by smashing its shop windows. Doing so might immediately generate growth – nominal GDP often rises sharply in the aftermath of a natural disaster – but every penny spent by the shopkeeper on new windows (and by the glazier who now has extra income, and by the people he buys from and so on) is a penny that would have been spent more usefully without the breakages. In the same way, every penny spent on green “investment” is a penny that has been taken out of the productive economy through taxation.
None of this is to argue that governments shouldn’t seek to mitigate climate change. They should. I just wish they would admit that doing so is expensive. Green jobs are a cost, not a benefit. If you banned the use of diggers and had lines of workers with spades instead, you could argue that you had “created” jobs; but you would have made everyone worse off.
Conservatives should approach climate change in neither a masochistic nor a messianic spirit, but calmly, transactionally, hard-headedly. If there is good reason to believe that advances in technology will lead to sharply reduced costs, then let the timetable slip accordingly. If something more urgent comes along then, similarly, make a cool assessment of where your priorities lie. When the coronavirus hit, several fiscal targets were abandoned on grounds that there was a more immediate crisis. The current energy shortfall should prompt a similar reassessment.
Consider this. The transition from relatively dirty coal to relatively clean gas required very little state involvement. The Thatcher government simply withdrew subsidies and allowed the market to do its work. Carbon emissions fell and the air became cleaner.
Since then, though, we have had a much more interventionist approach, with price caps and green levies and subsidies for consumers and grants for producers and bans on new technologies (notably fracking). Result? Prices have risen and supply has fallen – to the point where, like some South American dictatorship, we are about to order our population to get by with less.
Please, ministers, stop trying to help. Stop spending and taxing and printing. Stop fining and subsidising and capping. Stop banning and rationing. Stop setting targets. We have had enough of being helped. We need time to heal.
7) Germany debates lifting fracking ban as it confronts energy supply crisis
The Globe and Mail, 9 August 2022
The Globe and Mail, 9 August 2022
Germany’s energy supply crisis has sparked a national political debate about whether the country should lift its ban on fracking to allow development of untapped natural-gas reserves.
As a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine, there is growing concern in Germany that Moscow will completely cut off its gas supplies. Russia has already reduced gas to 20 per cent through its Nord Stream 1 pipeline that runs under the Baltic Sea to Germany.
German energy minister Robert Habeck has been travelling the planet looking for alternative energy supplies, and Chancellor Olaf Scholz will be vising Canada this month to strengthen energy ties.
The fracking debate is splitting along political lines, with left-leaning parties, including the Greens and the ruling Social Democrats, opposed. Parties representing liberals and conservatives say the move is necessary as shortages are expected to hit Germany this winter and over the next few years. They say the country should allow testing and exploration to see if fracking is viable.
“The significant expansion of domestic natural-gas production will make us independent and restore our energy sovereignty,” Michael Kruse, energy policy spokesman of the libertarian Free Democratic Party (FDP) told The Globe and Mail. “It makes more ecological sense to extract this urgently needed gas here on land in safe environments and thus reduce overseas transports,” Mr. Kruse said.
Elsewhere in Europe, fracking is also up for reconsideration. In Britain, there have been calls to lift a moratorium. In the Netherlands, there is a debate over extending fracking production in Europe’s biggest gas field, which is scheduled to end this year.
Germany is also considering extending the lifespan of nuclear plants. The European Parliament recently declared nuclear and natural gas as green energy sources under its climate plan.
Germany has extensive gas reserves, but they are not under development because of the fear of earthquakes and pollution from fracking, which injects high-pressure fluids deep underground to fracture rocks and release shale gas.
Full story
As a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine, there is growing concern in Germany that Moscow will completely cut off its gas supplies. Russia has already reduced gas to 20 per cent through its Nord Stream 1 pipeline that runs under the Baltic Sea to Germany.
German energy minister Robert Habeck has been travelling the planet looking for alternative energy supplies, and Chancellor Olaf Scholz will be vising Canada this month to strengthen energy ties.
The fracking debate is splitting along political lines, with left-leaning parties, including the Greens and the ruling Social Democrats, opposed. Parties representing liberals and conservatives say the move is necessary as shortages are expected to hit Germany this winter and over the next few years. They say the country should allow testing and exploration to see if fracking is viable.
“The significant expansion of domestic natural-gas production will make us independent and restore our energy sovereignty,” Michael Kruse, energy policy spokesman of the libertarian Free Democratic Party (FDP) told The Globe and Mail. “It makes more ecological sense to extract this urgently needed gas here on land in safe environments and thus reduce overseas transports,” Mr. Kruse said.
Elsewhere in Europe, fracking is also up for reconsideration. In Britain, there have been calls to lift a moratorium. In the Netherlands, there is a debate over extending fracking production in Europe’s biggest gas field, which is scheduled to end this year.
Germany is also considering extending the lifespan of nuclear plants. The European Parliament recently declared nuclear and natural gas as green energy sources under its climate plan.
Germany has extensive gas reserves, but they are not under development because of the fear of earthquakes and pollution from fracking, which injects high-pressure fluids deep underground to fracture rocks and release shale gas.
Full story
8) Coral cannot be at record levels – that's not what Sir David Attenborough told me
Chris Morrison, The Daily Sceptic, 6 August 2022
Chris Morrison, The Daily Sceptic, 6 August 2022
You would have to have a heart of stone not to chuckle at the coral contortions endured by many journalists as they wrote through gritted keyboards that the little critters are growing back in record numbers on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR).
The initial reaction seems to have been one of shock. It cannot be true – Sir David Attenborough had assured us that the GBR was in “grave danger” of disappearing within decades because of climate change. Far from disappearing, the coral is now at its highest cover level since reef-wide monitoring began 36 years ago.
The news has yet to feature on the BBC climate page. The Corporation employs numerous environment correspondents, but the only report on its news site had a Sydney, Australia byline and appeared on the general science page. Curiously there was a similar absence of reporting earlier this year, when it was learnt that the South Pole had recently had its coldest six month winter since records began.
For the last three days, the BBC has been leading its climate coverage with a pile of emotional tosh arguing that scientists are not taking seriously enough the possibility of catastrophic climate change outcomes, “including human extinction”. According to the lead author, an international relations specialist, the “closest attempts” to address this have come from popular science books such as The Uninhabitable Earth, “and not from mainstream science research”. This last remark prompted the science writer Jo Nova to comment:
“Essentially they are telling us we need to panic because there are no scientific papers telling us to panic.”
I digress, back to actual science and the coral reefs. Much of the mainstream commentary picked up on the steer from the Australian Institute for Marine Science (AIMS) that growth had come from the faster-growing corals. One might well comment, it would, wouldn’t it. In addition, there have been further outbreaks of bleaching. Again, the science writer Jo Nova notes that bleaching has probably occurred for millions of years, “there were just not many scuba divers to record it”. We ought to be shocked if corals did not have a full toolkit to cope with rapid changes, she said. She added that this latest 2021/22 study from AIMS, “was an absolute blockbuster in terms of busting the myth that corals are on the verge of extinction”.
Reef expert Peter Ridd said the GBR has proven to be a vibrant and healthy ecosystem. This should not be a surprise, he noted, since there are few human pressures on the reef, and it is well protected. “It is also unreasonable to expect that the small temperature rise over the last century (1°C) will have caused much impact, especially as it is well known that most corals grow faster in warmer waters,” he added.
In his view, the AIMS data show the reef is a robust system with rapidly fluctuating coral cover. We must expect coral cover to fall sometime in the future. In a comment, perhaps aimed at Attenborough, he said we should remember, “it is almost certainly natural, and not allow the merchants of doom to depress the children”.
Peter Ridd is a physicist and has researched the GBR since 1984. He was the former head of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Queensland. In 2018 he was fired for pointing out quality assurance deficiencies in reef-science institutions. In a recent note published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation he charged that over the last few years, AIMS “has effectively hidden the good news on coral cover”. Much of the recent doomsday coral copy from journalists would appear to reflect this agenda.
From 2017, AIMS stopped publishing the average coral cover for the GBR, and only issued disaggregated figures for three sectors, northern, central and southern. But figures are available, and Ridd has compiled the above graph for aggregated coral cover over the entire reef. He uses AIMS figures for 1986-2017, and his own from 2017. It shows in a dramatic fashion the spectacular growth since the low point around 2016, when the reef was badly affected by natural depredations arising from a powerful El Niño event. Coral reefs are home to many species and AIMS defines 30-50% cover as a ‘high value’ based on historical surveys. Ridd reports that current cover is almost 34%, with a small margin of error. In his view, only by seeing all the data aggregated for the entire reef can the “exceptional” state of the coral be appreciated. Ridd feels it is “surprising” that AIMS no longer provides an average coral cover for the entire GBR, because it had previously made far reaching claims about the poor state based on reef-wide average data.
In fact he went on to note that when coral cover hit a low point around 10% in 2011 after being devastated by major cyclones, AIMS authors, in a paper widely quoted in the media, said “coral cover in the central and southern regions of the GBR is likely to decline to 5-10% by 2022”.
Ridd concludes that by no longer publishing an average figure for the entire reef, AIMS “has obscured the good news for 2022, and drawn a veil over their inaccurate prediction of a decade ago”.
Polar bears increasing, forests of coral springing up, global warming not happening, even Arctic ice seems to be making a small comeback. Is there no end to all this bad news for green agenda-driven journalists?
9) Peter Ridd: The reef is strong, so stop the scare campaign
The Australian, 5 August 2022
The gross misrepresentation of the state of the reef is not a victimless crime. Schoolchildren around the world have been indoctrinated to believe the reef is almost finished.
The latest data on coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef, produced by the Australian Institute of Marine Science, should be a cause for celebration. Church bells should be ringing and children given a day off school. AIMS says two of the three main regions of the reef are at record-breaking high levels. The other region is at record-equalling levels (once uncertainty margins are taken into account).
AIMS, which has been releasing data on the reef every year since 1985, does not give the aggregate of coral cover for the entire reef; it stopped doing that in 2017. So I have done it for AIMS, and the reef as a whole is at record high levels. This result is proof many science institutions have been misleading the public about the state of the reef. They claimed we had four devastating and unprecedented bleaching events since 2016. So much bleaching, death and destruction supposedly has never happened before and is because of climate change – and now we have record high coral cover.
Imagine if we were now at record low levels instead. The institutions would be screaming for emissions cuts and proclaiming the end of the world. AIMS now meekly says “these gains can be lost quickly with another large-scale disturbance that causes extensive mortality”. Talk about a bunch of killjoys. Or maybe AIMS means like one of the last four bleaching events that clearly had little effect.
The gross misrepresentation of the state of the reef is not a victimless crime. Schoolchildren around the world have been indoctrinated to believe the reef is almost finished. The reputation of the Queensland tourist industry’s premier attraction has been smashed in world media. And there are now many pointless but expensive regulations affecting north Queensland farmers including reductions in the use of fertilisers. All because the reef is supposedly in a dire predicament.
AIMS should be congratulated for its work across many decades. I estimate in these surveys it has towed a diver behind a small boat a distance equivalent to around the world. This work has paid off as it demonstrates that the reef cycles through periods of high and low coral cover. This is natural. It demonstrates that we should be more optimistic about the fate of the reef than we were when pioneering scientists discovered huge plagues of coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish in the 1960s. We knew almost nothing about the reef in those genuinely scary days.
The data also shows that cyclones are the main contributor to temporary coral loss and that bleaching events are comparatively minor. The biggest mortality event was Cyclone Hamish which, in 2009, tracked down the southern and central reefs, and the waves it generated destroyed up to 75 per cent of coral in its path. Hamish was devastating mostly because of its path. And despite what is often stated, cyclones have not got worse in the past century.
Old frail people easily can be killed by diseases such as flu that more robust people will easily survive. This is also true for ecosystems. If the reef were on its last legs because of climate change and pollution, it would not recover as strongly from stresses. The decades of AIMS data have shown the reef is strong, resilient and fabulous. We must never take any risks with its future but neither should any institution use scandalous claims of its supposed imminent demise for political purposes.
It is time for politicians to ask hard questions about the quality-assurance processes in some of our institutions. I have no doubt that any political party that asked for additional quality assurance of reef science, based on the latest data, would be maligned in much of the media. But the average voter would not think this denialism; it is prudence and common sense.
By definition, record high coral cover does not happen every year. It is a golden opportunity to start the necessary political process of making all of our reef science institutions trustworthy again.
Physicist Peter Ridd is an adjunct fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs. He is a member of the GWPF's Academic Advisory Council
The initial reaction seems to have been one of shock. It cannot be true – Sir David Attenborough had assured us that the GBR was in “grave danger” of disappearing within decades because of climate change. Far from disappearing, the coral is now at its highest cover level since reef-wide monitoring began 36 years ago.
The news has yet to feature on the BBC climate page. The Corporation employs numerous environment correspondents, but the only report on its news site had a Sydney, Australia byline and appeared on the general science page. Curiously there was a similar absence of reporting earlier this year, when it was learnt that the South Pole had recently had its coldest six month winter since records began.
For the last three days, the BBC has been leading its climate coverage with a pile of emotional tosh arguing that scientists are not taking seriously enough the possibility of catastrophic climate change outcomes, “including human extinction”. According to the lead author, an international relations specialist, the “closest attempts” to address this have come from popular science books such as The Uninhabitable Earth, “and not from mainstream science research”. This last remark prompted the science writer Jo Nova to comment:
“Essentially they are telling us we need to panic because there are no scientific papers telling us to panic.”
I digress, back to actual science and the coral reefs. Much of the mainstream commentary picked up on the steer from the Australian Institute for Marine Science (AIMS) that growth had come from the faster-growing corals. One might well comment, it would, wouldn’t it. In addition, there have been further outbreaks of bleaching. Again, the science writer Jo Nova notes that bleaching has probably occurred for millions of years, “there were just not many scuba divers to record it”. We ought to be shocked if corals did not have a full toolkit to cope with rapid changes, she said. She added that this latest 2021/22 study from AIMS, “was an absolute blockbuster in terms of busting the myth that corals are on the verge of extinction”.
Reef expert Peter Ridd said the GBR has proven to be a vibrant and healthy ecosystem. This should not be a surprise, he noted, since there are few human pressures on the reef, and it is well protected. “It is also unreasonable to expect that the small temperature rise over the last century (1°C) will have caused much impact, especially as it is well known that most corals grow faster in warmer waters,” he added.
In his view, the AIMS data show the reef is a robust system with rapidly fluctuating coral cover. We must expect coral cover to fall sometime in the future. In a comment, perhaps aimed at Attenborough, he said we should remember, “it is almost certainly natural, and not allow the merchants of doom to depress the children”.
Peter Ridd is a physicist and has researched the GBR since 1984. He was the former head of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Queensland. In 2018 he was fired for pointing out quality assurance deficiencies in reef-science institutions. In a recent note published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation he charged that over the last few years, AIMS “has effectively hidden the good news on coral cover”. Much of the recent doomsday coral copy from journalists would appear to reflect this agenda.
From 2017, AIMS stopped publishing the average coral cover for the GBR, and only issued disaggregated figures for three sectors, northern, central and southern. But figures are available, and Ridd has compiled the above graph for aggregated coral cover over the entire reef. He uses AIMS figures for 1986-2017, and his own from 2017. It shows in a dramatic fashion the spectacular growth since the low point around 2016, when the reef was badly affected by natural depredations arising from a powerful El Niño event. Coral reefs are home to many species and AIMS defines 30-50% cover as a ‘high value’ based on historical surveys. Ridd reports that current cover is almost 34%, with a small margin of error. In his view, only by seeing all the data aggregated for the entire reef can the “exceptional” state of the coral be appreciated. Ridd feels it is “surprising” that AIMS no longer provides an average coral cover for the entire GBR, because it had previously made far reaching claims about the poor state based on reef-wide average data.
In fact he went on to note that when coral cover hit a low point around 10% in 2011 after being devastated by major cyclones, AIMS authors, in a paper widely quoted in the media, said “coral cover in the central and southern regions of the GBR is likely to decline to 5-10% by 2022”.
Ridd concludes that by no longer publishing an average figure for the entire reef, AIMS “has obscured the good news for 2022, and drawn a veil over their inaccurate prediction of a decade ago”.
Polar bears increasing, forests of coral springing up, global warming not happening, even Arctic ice seems to be making a small comeback. Is there no end to all this bad news for green agenda-driven journalists?
9) Peter Ridd: The reef is strong, so stop the scare campaign
The Australian, 5 August 2022
The gross misrepresentation of the state of the reef is not a victimless crime. Schoolchildren around the world have been indoctrinated to believe the reef is almost finished.
The latest data on coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef, produced by the Australian Institute of Marine Science, should be a cause for celebration. Church bells should be ringing and children given a day off school. AIMS says two of the three main regions of the reef are at record-breaking high levels. The other region is at record-equalling levels (once uncertainty margins are taken into account).
AIMS, which has been releasing data on the reef every year since 1985, does not give the aggregate of coral cover for the entire reef; it stopped doing that in 2017. So I have done it for AIMS, and the reef as a whole is at record high levels. This result is proof many science institutions have been misleading the public about the state of the reef. They claimed we had four devastating and unprecedented bleaching events since 2016. So much bleaching, death and destruction supposedly has never happened before and is because of climate change – and now we have record high coral cover.
Imagine if we were now at record low levels instead. The institutions would be screaming for emissions cuts and proclaiming the end of the world. AIMS now meekly says “these gains can be lost quickly with another large-scale disturbance that causes extensive mortality”. Talk about a bunch of killjoys. Or maybe AIMS means like one of the last four bleaching events that clearly had little effect.
The gross misrepresentation of the state of the reef is not a victimless crime. Schoolchildren around the world have been indoctrinated to believe the reef is almost finished. The reputation of the Queensland tourist industry’s premier attraction has been smashed in world media. And there are now many pointless but expensive regulations affecting north Queensland farmers including reductions in the use of fertilisers. All because the reef is supposedly in a dire predicament.
AIMS should be congratulated for its work across many decades. I estimate in these surveys it has towed a diver behind a small boat a distance equivalent to around the world. This work has paid off as it demonstrates that the reef cycles through periods of high and low coral cover. This is natural. It demonstrates that we should be more optimistic about the fate of the reef than we were when pioneering scientists discovered huge plagues of coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish in the 1960s. We knew almost nothing about the reef in those genuinely scary days.
The data also shows that cyclones are the main contributor to temporary coral loss and that bleaching events are comparatively minor. The biggest mortality event was Cyclone Hamish which, in 2009, tracked down the southern and central reefs, and the waves it generated destroyed up to 75 per cent of coral in its path. Hamish was devastating mostly because of its path. And despite what is often stated, cyclones have not got worse in the past century.
Old frail people easily can be killed by diseases such as flu that more robust people will easily survive. This is also true for ecosystems. If the reef were on its last legs because of climate change and pollution, it would not recover as strongly from stresses. The decades of AIMS data have shown the reef is strong, resilient and fabulous. We must never take any risks with its future but neither should any institution use scandalous claims of its supposed imminent demise for political purposes.
It is time for politicians to ask hard questions about the quality-assurance processes in some of our institutions. I have no doubt that any political party that asked for additional quality assurance of reef science, based on the latest data, would be maligned in much of the media. But the average voter would not think this denialism; it is prudence and common sense.
By definition, record high coral cover does not happen every year. It is a golden opportunity to start the necessary political process of making all of our reef science institutions trustworthy again.
Physicist Peter Ridd is an adjunct fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs. He is a member of the GWPF's Academic Advisory Council
10) Taylor Dotson: Unsustainable Alarmism
The New Atlantis, Summer 2022
The crisis mindset is a finite resource — and we’ve exhausted it. From Covid to climate change, we need a new way to manage chronic problems.
Covid has been compared to countless disasters, from wars to hurricanes to terrorist attacks. Sometimes, these comparisons aim to indict officials for failing to act more decisively to protect the public from the pandemic. But they also get aimed at the public itself, expressing frustration that people weren’t horrified enough by the crisis to keep bearing its burdens.
For example, Joe Berkowitz, writing in January to rebuke Bari Weiss for saying she was “done” with the pandemic, compared Covid to 9/11. He labeled her admission that she had come to take restrictions less seriously as “sociopathic.” The daily scale of the catastrophe, for Berkowitz, merited ongoing personal vigilance, even if it meant “present inconvenience and future trauma.”
With a pandemic like Covid, comparisons to 9/11 and the like were only to be expected, and for a while it was appropriate. But the alarmism we have gotten during Covid has actually made pandemic politics worse. When natural disasters, terrorist attacks, or tragic accidents strike, we expect governments to take decisive measures to save lives. Instead, public figures during the pandemic have used catastrophizing rhetoric to divert blame away from their own decisions and onto the obstruction of dissenters. They have used alarmism to imply that it is only Americans’ lack of intelligence and moral resolve that stands in the way of victory.
The cost of alarmist talk is that it demands an emergency response, and this blinds us to the often slow and subtle changes to our infrastructure that could severely reduce risk over the long term. Fortunately, Covid catastrophism is lessening its hold on Americans’ collective imaginations, finally allowing us to focus on developing a more resilient pandemic infrastructure. [...]
Consider alarmism in the climate debate. Presenting climate change in catastrophic terms has allowed activists to discredit anyone who doubts worst-case climate scenarios as “denialists.” While crusading against denialism might seem like a strategy for achieving a consensus about the problem’s seriousness, it often ends up undermining the very conditions that make public deliberation possible. As Matthew Nisbet has argued, the “denialist” label is a way of “controlling who has the authority to speak on the subject.” When expressions of personal alarm become a litmus test for who has a reasonable understanding of the problem, alarmists naturally have sole authority. The effect, as Nisbet writes, is a “culture where protecting one’s own identity, group, and preferred storyline takes priority over constructive consideration of knowledge and evidence.”
The aim of strengthening the alarmist storyline has led many to exaggerate the likelihood of the most cataclysmic scenarios and defend outlandish solutions, like dismantling capitalism to cut emissions. Anti-capitalist narratives may help for expressing how to take climate change more seriously, but they also turn potential allies elsewhere on the political spectrum into implacable enemies. No wonder climate change is no longer a bipartisan concern. We hear a great deal about how corporations have sowed doubt about climate science and helped turn it into a wedge issue, but catastrophism, wedded to extreme solutionism, has also played a part in undermining the prospects for building coalitions.
Covid discourse has been similarly antagonistic. [...]
After Alarmism
Catastrophism has failed us because it has turned our attention away from the broad arsenal of tools available for averting catastrophe. When historians look back at the Covid pandemic, the story they tell must be of a failure to learn and evolve. Governments acted as if they could not think outside of catastrophism, which focused too much attention on what people believed rather than on finding solutions that worked for everyone. Officials stuck to an approach that asked much of the public and little from themselves.
As Leah Libresco Sargeant has written, “the victories of public health infrastructure disappear into the background of everyday life.” By keeping public focus too much on the foreground, on whether everyone is doing their part, alarmism distracts us from developing the public health infrastructure we need.
Two years of Covid alarmism have left the public weary from restrictions and more polarized than ever, making the country even less prepared for the future. The rollback of pandemic measures this year has been more an act of resignation, the acceptance of a stalemate, than a sign of success. No doubt, the restrictions could not have continued forever. But it would have been far better to have scaled them back in light of the strength of our public health infrastructure, not because Americans became tired and disillusioned.
Perhaps future generations will judge us harshly for deciding we were “done” with Covid too soon. People may look back and see a failure of public resolve. But moving on may also be what opens the door to the next stage of pandemic governance, one freed from the moral burden of catastrophism.
Full essay
Covid has been compared to countless disasters, from wars to hurricanes to terrorist attacks. Sometimes, these comparisons aim to indict officials for failing to act more decisively to protect the public from the pandemic. But they also get aimed at the public itself, expressing frustration that people weren’t horrified enough by the crisis to keep bearing its burdens.
For example, Joe Berkowitz, writing in January to rebuke Bari Weiss for saying she was “done” with the pandemic, compared Covid to 9/11. He labeled her admission that she had come to take restrictions less seriously as “sociopathic.” The daily scale of the catastrophe, for Berkowitz, merited ongoing personal vigilance, even if it meant “present inconvenience and future trauma.”
With a pandemic like Covid, comparisons to 9/11 and the like were only to be expected, and for a while it was appropriate. But the alarmism we have gotten during Covid has actually made pandemic politics worse. When natural disasters, terrorist attacks, or tragic accidents strike, we expect governments to take decisive measures to save lives. Instead, public figures during the pandemic have used catastrophizing rhetoric to divert blame away from their own decisions and onto the obstruction of dissenters. They have used alarmism to imply that it is only Americans’ lack of intelligence and moral resolve that stands in the way of victory.
The cost of alarmist talk is that it demands an emergency response, and this blinds us to the often slow and subtle changes to our infrastructure that could severely reduce risk over the long term. Fortunately, Covid catastrophism is lessening its hold on Americans’ collective imaginations, finally allowing us to focus on developing a more resilient pandemic infrastructure. [...]
Consider alarmism in the climate debate. Presenting climate change in catastrophic terms has allowed activists to discredit anyone who doubts worst-case climate scenarios as “denialists.” While crusading against denialism might seem like a strategy for achieving a consensus about the problem’s seriousness, it often ends up undermining the very conditions that make public deliberation possible. As Matthew Nisbet has argued, the “denialist” label is a way of “controlling who has the authority to speak on the subject.” When expressions of personal alarm become a litmus test for who has a reasonable understanding of the problem, alarmists naturally have sole authority. The effect, as Nisbet writes, is a “culture where protecting one’s own identity, group, and preferred storyline takes priority over constructive consideration of knowledge and evidence.”
The aim of strengthening the alarmist storyline has led many to exaggerate the likelihood of the most cataclysmic scenarios and defend outlandish solutions, like dismantling capitalism to cut emissions. Anti-capitalist narratives may help for expressing how to take climate change more seriously, but they also turn potential allies elsewhere on the political spectrum into implacable enemies. No wonder climate change is no longer a bipartisan concern. We hear a great deal about how corporations have sowed doubt about climate science and helped turn it into a wedge issue, but catastrophism, wedded to extreme solutionism, has also played a part in undermining the prospects for building coalitions.
Covid discourse has been similarly antagonistic. [...]
After Alarmism
Catastrophism has failed us because it has turned our attention away from the broad arsenal of tools available for averting catastrophe. When historians look back at the Covid pandemic, the story they tell must be of a failure to learn and evolve. Governments acted as if they could not think outside of catastrophism, which focused too much attention on what people believed rather than on finding solutions that worked for everyone. Officials stuck to an approach that asked much of the public and little from themselves.
As Leah Libresco Sargeant has written, “the victories of public health infrastructure disappear into the background of everyday life.” By keeping public focus too much on the foreground, on whether everyone is doing their part, alarmism distracts us from developing the public health infrastructure we need.
Two years of Covid alarmism have left the public weary from restrictions and more polarized than ever, making the country even less prepared for the future. The rollback of pandemic measures this year has been more an act of resignation, the acceptance of a stalemate, than a sign of success. No doubt, the restrictions could not have continued forever. But it would have been far better to have scaled them back in light of the strength of our public health infrastructure, not because Americans became tired and disillusioned.
Perhaps future generations will judge us harshly for deciding we were “done” with Covid too soon. People may look back and see a failure of public resolve. But moving on may also be what opens the door to the next stage of pandemic governance, one freed from the moral burden of catastrophism.
Full essay
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.
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