Ben Pile: There's nothing democratic about this 'climate assembly'

The first two meetings of Climate Assembly UK, dubbed a ‘citizens’ assembly’ on climate change, have taken place in Birmingham over the course of a couple of weekends in January and February.

The climate assembly has brought together 110 randomly selected members of the public to discuss a range of climate issues and policies with a range of experts, including David Attenborough. The task of the assembly, which will meet over two more weekends this spring, is to decide on a set of recommendations for how the government can best meet its pledge to achieve Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Fabius Maximus: An autopsy of the climate policy debate’s corpse

Science has become a footnote in the mad rush to embrace so-called green energy policies, or so it seems. But is the climate likely to notice anything?
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The climate policy debate has died. Its autopsy shows who killed it, says Larry Kummer @ Fabius Maximus.

Summary: The climate policy debate ran for 30 years but produced little action (it ranks #17 of the public’s top 18 concerns). Now it has died. The autopsy reveals not just who killed it but also disturbing insights about America.

This is post #404 in a series about climate change that I began 12 years ago.

European EV charging network IONITY hikes price by 500%

Image Credit: freepik.com

Electrek reports:

IONITY, a European EV charging network owned by BMW, Daimler, Ford, Hyundai, Kia, and VW Group (with Audi and Porsche) has announced that prices will be going up over 500% starting January 31 as they transition to a pay-per-kWh system.

Previously, IONITY charged a flat, fixed rate of €8 for a DCFC charging session. This was a good deal if you showed up with an empty battery and filled most of the way. If you arrived with, say, 10% battery remaining, and added 60 kWh during your charging session, then you’d get away with paying about €0.13 per kWh. For context, in France, electricity costs about €0.19 per kWh at home, and €0.24 per kWh at Tesla Superchargers. In Germany, you pay €0.30 per kWh at home, and €0.33 at Tesla Superchargers in Germany.

Boris goes full speed ahead for Britain's economic suicide

Apologies to Josh

Today, the UK government will commit to destroying the nation’s economy. It published this suicide note on its website.

The Prime Minister will today, Tuesday 4 February, launch the next UN climate conference COP26, joined by Sir David Attenborough and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte at an event in central London.

At the event, he will set out the UK’s position as a world leader in the response to climate change, having made a legal commitment to achieve net zero emissions, and call all nations to strive towards this goal.

Goldman Sachs operative Carney slithers from BoE to UN climate con job.

Bank of England governor Mark Carney, who previously served as Canada’s top central banker, will be taking on a new role as the United Nations’ special envoy on climate action and climate finance.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres made the announcement while speaking to reporters in Madrid on Sunday, adding the move will take effect next year.

Quotes from COP25: It's a nothing-burger

Here are key quotes from leaders, experts and activists on the UN Climate Change Conference (COP25) outcome.

Antonio Guterres, UN secretary general

“I am disappointed with the results of COP25. The international community lost an important opportunity to show increased ambition on mitigation, adaptation and finance to tackle the climate crisis.”

Tallbloke talking about climate and energy on PlusNews live TV

Yesterday I got the opportunity to have a relaxed climate conversation with Stephen Place, who presents the ‘Talking Yorkshire’ programme on PlusNews TV, a community based channel going out on 15 live platforms worldwide, youtube and on facebook. Make a pot of coffee and check it out.

The U.N. is running out of money to pay it’s 40,000 bureaucrats with.

Facing a massive hole in its budget, the United Nations is implementing “emergency measures” to avoid missing payroll and other obligations before the end of the year. Unsurprisingly, UN bosses are demanding that taxpayers in America and other nations hand over more money now or face global catastrophe. Even UN officials and apologists, though, have blasted the “bloated” organization for squandering massive amounts of money on everything from luxurious air travel and fancy hotels to globalist propaganda promoting its own agenda. Trump reacted to the whining by calling on the UN to go look for money elsewhere.

How much public consultation on carbon targets, Boris? Net Zero

New Prime Minister Boris Johnson hasn’t had to wait long for critics of his approach to energy and climate to open fire.

In his first session as PM in the House of Commons, Boris Johnson made two notable statements yesterday, writes Ben Pile @ The Conservative Woman.

First, he declared that the Conservative Party is the party of democracy, and that as such it will defend the result of the referendum.

Second, he reaffirmed his commitment to the Net Zero 2050 target – the policy that Theresa May had stolen from his leadership campaign to secure her own ‘legacy’. Only one of those statements can be correct.

Many believe that the Net Zero 2050 (NZ2050) target lacks a democratic mandate.

The Cult of Greta Thunberg

Image Credit: Anon twitter account

Partial reblog as Brendan O’Neill at Spiked Online gets stuck into the enviro-mentalists.

It actually makes sense that Ms Thunberg – a wildly celebrated 16-year-old Swede who founded the climate-strike movement for schoolkids – should sound cultish. Because climate-change alarmism is becoming ever stranger, borderline religious, obsessed with doomsday prophecies. Consider Extinction Rebellion, the latest manifestation of the upper-middle classes’ contempt for industrialisation and progress. It is at times indistinguishable from old fundamentalist movements that warned mankind of the coming End of Days. I followed Extinction Rebellion from Parliament Square to Marble Arch yesterday and what I witnessed was a public display of millenarian fear and bourgeois depression. People did dances of death and waved placards warning of the heat-death of the planet. It felt deeply unnerving.

Alan Carlin: When will the Trump Administration finally confront the CIC?

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide

The absurdity of a ruling that vital trace gas carbon dioxide is a ‘pollutant’ has been allowed to stand for far too long. What would nature say? (see graphic)

I have advocated independent review of climate science by the Trump Administration over the last few years, most recently here, writes Alan Carlin.

The best way to do this is a formal reevaluation and rejection of the Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding (EF) issued by the Obama US Environmental Protection Agency in 2009. This might lead to real action–rejection of the EF.

Bill Gates Slams Unreliable Wind & Solar: ‘Let’s Quit Jerking Around With Renewables & Batteries’

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Quite right, but not what climate-obsessed politicians and the ‘Greenblob’ crowd want to hear.

STOP THESE THINGS

Bill says it’s time to stop jerking around with wind & solar.

When the world’s richest entrepreneur says wind and solar will never work, it’s probably time to listen.

Bill Gates made a fortune applying common sense to the untapped market of home computing. The meme has it that IBM’s CEO believed there was only a market for five computers in the entire world. Gates thought otherwise. Building a better system than any of his rivals and shrewdly working the marketplace, resulted in hundreds of millions hooked on PCs, Windows and Office. This is a man that knows a thing or two about systems and a lot about what it takes to satisfy the market.

For almost a century, electricity generation and distribution were treated as a tightly integrated system: it was designed and built as one, and is meant to operate as designed. However, the chaotic delivery of wind…

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The UN’s Global Green Law is going nowhere for now

It may have taken a knock, but it’s by no means the last we’ll hear of it, as CFACT explains.

The first major meeting of the UN’s (take a breath) “Ad hoc Open-ended Working Group towards a Global Pact for the Environment” or simply OEWG, convened on Monday, 14 January 2019 at the United Nations Environment Program offices in Nairobi, Kenya.

During the week-long session, delegates considered the report of the United Nations Secretary-General (UNSG), titled “Gaps in international environmental law and environment-related instruments: towards a global pact for the environment.”

This is the newly hatched grand green dream, for a binding set of new global laws that both encompasses and surpasses all of the existing multinational environmental treaties and agreements (MEAs). I am not making this up.

Extinction Rebellion and Anti-Frackers in Westminster Bridge Footshooting incident

The extreme end of the environmentalist movement decided on a novel approach to getting the public on their side this weekend; by blocking five bridges in central London, causing a huge traffic jam. Predictably, the result was a lot of unnecessary carbon dioxide and particulate emissions from stationary vehicles.

We can only recommend the organisers read this article by Stephen Moore
published in April 2016 on the Real Clear Politics website.

The U.S. Department of Energy published data last week with some amazing revelations — so amazing that most Americans will find them hard to believe. As a nation, the United States reduced its carbon emissions by 2 percent from last year. Over the past 14 years, our carbon emissions are down more than 10 percent. On a per-unit-of-GDP basis, U.S. carbon emissions are down by closer to 20 percent.

Even more stunning: We’ve reduced our carbon emissions more than virtually any other nation in the world, including most of Europe.

Alan Carlin: Why climate change is not an exception that justifies government intervention in free markets

Credit: planetsave.com

Accuracy in long-term climate prediction is hard to come by, from solar cycle activity onwards. Claims of imminent doom are bluffs, as is the idea of spending to ‘solve the climate’.

Climate change is nothing more nor less than a faddish scam, writes Alan Carlin. Unfortunately, this is not unusual in environmental issues.

One major problem is that there is no inexpensive way to “solve” it as climate alarmists claim. In fact, it could easily consume the entire national income of any nation that really tried to eliminate it.

Tony Thomas: Christiana Figueres, the Green Fairy

Ever-polite Stan Grant tried his very best to keep Christiana Figueres drifting off in a cloud of sob-sister vapours to Warmist Land, where only the transfer of vast wealth from the West to Third World kleptocrats can foil global warming. Yes, Stan gave it his best shot, but he never had a chance

Lord Tennyson with his “tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean” has been an inspiration to Christiana Figueres (left). She was secretary-general of the top-level UN climate body UNFCCC (2010-16)  and spruiked doom on Stan Grant’s Matter of Fact show on ABC-TV on October 9.

BBC climate change ‘facts’ are fiction

Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy

‘Move along please, nothing to see here, science is settled’. Is that the BBC’s climate reporting policy? Does controversy have to be swept under the carpet, for fear of upsetting the ‘greenblob’? What happened to their charter duty of impartiality?

H/T The GWPF

In order to avoid giving ‘false balance’ to the climate alarmists at the BBC, I thought it would be a good idea to fact-check their new internal guidance on climate change, writes Harry Wilkinson.

This is their totalitarian memorandum aimed at stamping out free scientific discourse, on the basis that certain facts are established beyond dispute.

The problem is that these ones aren’t, and the BBC is guilty of repeatedly failing to describe accurately the nuances of climate science and the degree to which certain claims are disputed.

Big Green Inc.: Inside the $4 billion U.S. foundations funding Green activists

Green blob [credit: storybird.com]

It seems some people in the US with money to burn are queuing up to try and buy the weather they think they want, with fossil fuels their primary target. The concept of natural variation of the climate has either totally escaped them, or they must think it belongs in the past only.
H/T The GWPF

Major foundations handed nearly $4 billion to global warming activists, anti-fossil fuel campaigners and other environmentalists over the past eight years, according to a database debuted Monday, writes Michael Bastasch.

The website Big Green, Inc. tracked $3.7 billion in commitments from major grant-making foundations to environmental causes from 2008 to 2016.

Tony Thomas: Suffer your children

Of all the green/Left groups badgering schoolkids about human-caused global warming, the most determined is the Australian Academy of Science. It pushes its government-funded campaign to Year 9 students via the ‘Big Systems’ unit in its ‘Science by Doing’ course. About 16,000 Australian science teachers – two out of three – have signed on. The science teachers work in 80 per cent of secondary schools. About 160,000 users are registered, including 50,000 newcomers last year.

‘Big Systems’ is a revision of the Academy’s 2013 course. Here’s from the original (tinyurl.com/nwxj76e):

Lesson outcomes: At the end of this activity students will… appreciate the need to lobby at all levels of government to ignite and lead change – even if it is unpopular with the voters.

Ask [15-16 year old] students if they have ever taken action or advocated for a cause. Do they know of anyone who has? Key vocabulary: advocacy, campaign, champion, environmentalist.

If you were concerned about Earth’s sustainability, who would you vote for?

Ever wonder where the 275 billion taxpayers money went that got poured down the EU carbon trading system hole?

Talkshop readers may remember a damning report by UBS about the billions of public money lost in the ETS carbon trading system. It calculated that if the money had been invested in modernising the European power generation fleet, CO2 could have been cut by 40% (and generate a huge number of high quality jobs). EU emissions rose 1.8% last year.

Despite all the recent turmoil over the UK steel industry and meetings in Brussels today, the reality is that the European Union has actually been subsidising the Chinese steel industry for years, in payments hidden amongst its efforts to combat Climate Change.

Using complex methods of carbon credits and carbon offsets, the EU devised rules on climate change ended up paying Chinese steel manufacturers billions to upgrade their steel mills and other energy intensive industry.

According to the analysis company, European Insights, almost €1.5 billion was paid to over 90 steel plants in China with the purpose of modernising them to consume less energy, and making the plants more efficient. Taken with the downturn in Chinese trade and the need for them to reduce world market prices to sell their product, the output of these mills has flooded onto the European market making steel products artificially cheap and endangering thousands of jobs in the UK. One plant alone, Anshan Iron and Steel, received a payment of €150 million to help pay for the installation of up to date equipment and replace the old inefficient Communist era machinery.