Green/Climate

2024-01-31

The penny is dropping, so to speak.

We can fight the climate (and lose!) or fight Mr Putin (and lose). Or of course we can pretend to fight both, but everybody would see through that...  wouldn't they?

War requires energy and in quantity, but "green" doesn't deliver.

And it isn't merely about steel, although that comes into it depending upon whether Mr Putin would allow us time to prepare. 

But why would he? He wouldn't. He strikes me as being very rational, particularly about defending Russia and the Russian Federation. So unless we believe that he is only bluffing about defence (which flies in the face of his track record so far) we would be well advised to negotiate a proper defence understanding with him - you stay out of our back yard (which doesn't include the Ukraine) and we will (for a change) stay out of yours. And allow "mutual" inspection...

We

2024-01-31

As the label on Waitrose-reduced items says, this is "too good to waste".

A veritable compendium of modern madness gets the Nick Hubble treatment today.

"The whole net zero pitch is looking so implausible that I increasingly expect it to simply fade away altogether"

and to be honest, I am with him. "Transition" will simply transition imperceptibly into a new meaning - we will be for ever transitioning, burning fossil fuels in the interminable and ultimately hopeless quest for "green", simply because the green mirage will, like all mirages, simply fade further away before ultimately disappearing before we get there

No Such Thing as Green Steel?

2024-01-26

There are so many issues to dissent about these days that it's ridiculous to expect that every dissenting voice is going to agree on all of them.

So to those conspiracy theorists out there who call out other dissenters because they disagree on a specific issue (however important that issue), I suggest that we all bring a level of truth (and awakening) to the specific audience that is most attuned to our own viewpoints, and the audience which is not prepared to listen to our dissent to their particular belief will be catered for by others.

The enemy of progress is indeed the quest for perfection (especially our own idea of perfection!).

So I'm happy to tip the nod to Lawrence Fox for this video, even if we may not agree on all the issues that face us. We do agree on probably the majority, and the rest will come in God's good time as everybody

2024-01-24

London is attracting attention from the Canadians, who have noted a new way for UK citizens to keep warm this winter.

Our governments' serial inability to manifest anything without prodigious and ever-rising expenditure always (unless Big Pharma stand to make the biggest "killing" of all time) delivered after ever more delays and cost extensions, doesn't imply that that which they manifest will actually work. 

Indeed, the green revolution could have been designed not to work, and is now being shown all across Europe not to work as coal plants are being fired up across the continent (a humiliation the UK only avoided by demolishing most of them ahead of time) in a rearguard action to avoid widespread deaths from freezing.

Still, we in the UK are preserved by the Gulf Stream, which usually ensures that temperatures don't fall very much below freezing - unlike Canada where 30 degrees below is the winter norm.

2024-01-23

In response to the farmers' protests and the success of the AfD, the German government has mobilised their own response - counter-protests!

As an an example of double-think it surely takes the biscuit, amounting as it does to "let's take to the streets to defend our democracy against the opposition party that has too much support and will wreck our democracy".

"Failure to support ruinous government policies is thus by definition contrary to democracy and ought to be illegal"

So only the governing party is to be considered democratic? The rest are all wreckers and populist upstarts? If nothing else it should enable savings on the costs of running elections...

Just to make sure the press are also playing their part:

...

2024-01-22

I doubt that any visitor to this site is willing to sit through all the speeches at WEF Davos, boring as they deliberately are, so here, courtesy of the ever-reliable Sky News Australia, is a brief rundown of the highlights.

Enjoy!

(15 minutes)

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2024-01-19

I guess this is a topic in which a large number of motorists will have an interest - if not today, then tomorrow!

With "Low Emission" zones proliferating like the proverbial rabbits, there cannot be many who will never run foul of some restriction or other - even when well signed, it can be well-nigh impossible to scan all the street furniture, identify all the signs, then read and understand them, whilst simultaneously taking care to avoid rear-ending the vehicle in front.

So Martin, having been picked out for driving his (not commercial) van in an area where only private cars are permitted free passage, has decided to contest the claimed infraction on the basis that his van is a private conveyance in all significant respects and is therefore permitted free passage.

Of course, as he digs deeper he uncovers more issues... which seem as if they may have parallels with the Council Tax situation. Quelle surprise!

Ever Wondered How Much CO2 is Released by War?

2024-01-15

In compliance with our policy of encouraging our readers to do their own thinking, we turn our attention today to Tartaria, a region encompassed today by modern-day Russia.

Who were the Tartarians, did they migrate all around the world, constructing magnificent buildings that worked in ways unimaginable to us today? What happened to them?

I don't know the answers, but we do know that much of Tsarist Russia was destroyed by the Bolsheviks, with considerable loss of life.

Much within this video seems plausible to me, but I have no firm opinion. Certainly it may be thought far-fetched, but after the last few years I have learned not to discount on that criterion alone...

Make of it what you will.

(44 minutes)

  

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2024-01-10

From the Ministerial Foreword by the Rt Hon Steve Barclay:

"I have learnt that farming is fundamental to the UK’s rural economy, the environment and of course our food security"

"... I am setting out the biggest upgrade to farming schemes since the UK has had the freedom to design our own schemes"

We voted "Leave" in 2016.

The original Agricultural Transition Plan was published in 2020.

By comparison, Covid struck in January-ish 2020, the Coronavirus Act 2020 (348 pages) had received the Royal Assent by July 2020. 

"... we need to see universal adoption of farming regulatory standards and at least 70% of farmers

2024-01-08

The UK 100 aims to co-opt local councils into the WEF's Climate Agenda, and has much success in so doing - even councils that didn't officially sign up do seem to be besotted with the green agenda.

However, not all of these councils have been scrupulously open about this involvement, and I doubt that any of them actually campaigned for election on how this membership would drive them to change the lives of their constituents. 

UK Column discuss these goings on with Ben Pile, with particular reference to the effective bypass of our democratic system. 

(68 minutes) 

2024-01-01

And it may be best if you make sure you aren't driving it when it dies...

Zerohedge reports on a winter driving experience that the author probably wished he hadn't had, but it highlights the quite simple primary reasons why EVs as currently powered by battery simply aren't a very workable idea, unless you just want to use it as a local runabout. Even then, can you afford a new battery when the original battery dies?

There was much talk originally of swapping batteries in and out at service stations, which would solve some of these problems at a stroke and seems to be being adopted in China's EV market (although I don't remember just now where I read that). But western manufacturers never adopted that solution, which seems somewhat perverse, although the problems of swapping multiple physical battery sizes at service stations would quickly become impracticable should more than one size be involved.

Maybe EVs are a solution in search of a problem? It

2023-12-28

I doubt that I am the only person to have noticed the steadily falling numbers of a variety of common garden birds over recent years. Time was when driving across country in summer months we would need to scrape the dead flies off our windscreens - there were even special cleaning products available that claimed to assist in this task. 

No longer - the insect population is severely reduced these days, but nobody seems to take any note.

No doubt there is linkage here with the falling avian population - fewer insects means less food for birds. Not that they don't eat seeds and berries as well, but every little helps as they say, and many blooms (of insects and flowers) are seasonal. A seasonal gap in the food supply isn't something that any life form can benefit from.

I'm not saying that I understand all of these intricacies, but it is clear that something amiss is ongoing, and it could be the birds and insects are the canaries in the coal mine, a warning

2023-12-20

The House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts reports on the smart meter roll-out (October 20th).

"The Government’s original target was to effectively complete the rollout by 2019. However, it has adjusted its deadlines three times and reduced its target installation levels for smart meters from “all homes and small businesses” in 2019, to its current target of 74.5% of homes and nearly 69% of small businesses to have smart meters by the end of 2025"

"At the end of March 2023, more than a decade after the rollout started, only 57% of all electricity and gas meters were smart"

"The extent of smart meter installation varies across Great Britain, from 5% in the Isles of Scilly to 69% in Chesterfield as at March 2023"

"... the responsibility for consumer engagement rests primarily with Smart Energy GB (a not-for-profit organisation funded by

2023-12-17

Get your new gas boiler installed before 31st December, or it may cost you!

Why? Well, government meddling of course. 

Gas is "BAD" so must be phased out - but the government doesn't want to look bad to the voters (you could have fooled me) so instead of demanding a tax on gas boilers, it's going to tax fine the manufacturers for not installing enough heat pumps. 

Since the manufacturers must still make a profit...

The Daily Sceptic reports.

2023-12-14

Dr Benny Peiser reflects on the realities underlying the COP28 pronouncements.

As the good Dr remarks:

"... for the first time that I can remember, this COP has given the rubber stamp to fossil fuels"

I guess what it comes down to is - what's in a word? As Humpty Dumpty remarked:

"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less"

Pragmatism, or revolt (by any other name) because too many populations simply cannot survive without effective and reliable power supply?

(26 minutes)

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2023-12-06

With COP28 rattling along in the UAE, there are three stories to entertain you today.

As with all things "Climate", none of them reflect anything new, it's the same culprits playing the interminably same old same old that we always hear from these gatherings, that we have come to accept as inevitable, that being relatively sane people we have come to ignore and filter out of our attention-space as deluded and irrelevant to real life.

Unfortunately for that response, the fact that we don't take any interest in climate catastrophisers doesn't mean that they don't take any interest in us.

Unsurprisingly their messages prompt much the same sort of "heard-it-all-before" rebuttals from those "climate-deniers" that can still be bothered to keep up, although this year the COP28 President, no less, did chuck in an attention-grabbing assertion that there is no science behind their relentless push to reduce the use of fossil fuels before our world

2023-12-04

The Fulford report this Monday is amazing - "behind the scenes" information dropped on multiple fronts that make you laugh and cry, or make you exclaim "I didn't know that!".

Is it all the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth? I've no idea, but it's good entertainment, and you won't find any of it on the Beeb.

"The world is undergoing the biggest changes in centuries if not millennia"

"We will have to wait and see if all this comes to pass but, in my decades of reporting, I have never heard so many aggressive statements from so many different and senior sources"

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