By Hayden Smith, Metro, 17 June 2010
High levels of scepticism and indifference among Britons continue to dog efforts to get the country to go greener, a Europe-wide study has concluded.
We continue to lag behind other major nations in our attitude to and appetite for tackling climate change. Less than a third of Britons believe the issue is ‘serious and urgent’ and requires ‘radical steps’.
A similar number of people doubt whether climate change is happening at all, according to the study.
This scepticism has contributed to the 2.1 tonnes of CO2 generated per house each year from electricity use – the highest of all ten countries examined by researchers at Imperial College London.
A little more than half of Britons are ‘quite’ or ‘very concerned’ about climate change. In contrast in Spain, which topped the poll, three-quarters said they were at least quite concerned. [Climate Change Minister] Greg Barker said he was encouraged by nine in ten Britons saying they would make changes if given financial support.
‘I think the British are inherently quite sceptical about theoretical politics and science and maybe a little more cautious than some countries in Europe,’ he said.
‘But I am convinced British people want to do something about it.’
Prof Nigel Brandon of ICL said the study, commissioned by EDF Energy for Green Britain Day, said: ‘It all helps to build a more complete picture of how habits follow attitudes when it comes to the environment.’
Britain came sixth in the poll of 5,700 people across Europe.
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Perhaps this demonstrates the lamentable fact that the electorate are better informed and have more sense than the government. I thought the government was supposed to represent the electorate, not brainwash them.
“[Climate Change Minister] Greg Barker said he was encouraged by nine in ten Britons saying they would make changes if given financial support.”
So the one person in ten that is not willing to make changes will be paying for the 9 that are willing, and Greg Barker is encouraged by this? Why?
You know you’re getting really old when the MPs look even younger than the Police!
That single photo of a completely snow-covered UK did more for scepticism than any written arguments
‘Climate Change Minister’ a post created by King Cnut (*) himself.
(*) = not an anagram
No, we`re not big on dogma,our history shows it to be dangerous in the extreme.
Hence only three or four percent church attendance,and an almost instinctive resistance to the strident tones of hempen-clad crustafarian soap-dodgers preaching `the new truth`.
The beautiful irony is that the `activists` and pressure groups are really turning the public off,and long may they continue.Nothing turns people off a `cause` quicker than being berated by a dangerously uninformed teenager with a planet to save.The BBC springs to mind.
What on Earth have these British pols been putting in their KoolAid? All but a handful are barmey in the crumpet.
This Gregory Parker?
Barker also developed strong links to the Russian oil companies, being Head of Communications at the Anglo Siberian Oil Company from 1998-2000 and also worked in Russia for the Sibneft Oil Group, owned by Roman Abramovich.
Barker, in his capacity as Shadow Environment Secretary, accompanied Cameron on his trip to the Arctic Circle in April 2006 for a fact-finding mission on global warming.
Barker was implicated in the 2009 MPs’ expenses scandal for his purchase and sale of London flats
Barker married Celeste Harrison, an heiress to the Charles Wells brewery fortune, in 1992. Following a diary report in The Observer,[6] Barker confirmed he and his wife had separated and on 26 October 2006. British tabloid the Daily Mirror revealed that he had left his wife and children for another man, William Banks-Blaney.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Barker
perhaps whagt the Spaniards are “quite concerned” about is john kerry’s anomaly:
17 June: UK Register: Andrew Orlowski: Sunny Spain suspends solar subsidy scam
18bn Euro flushed down the bano
Dead broke Spain can’t afford to prop up renewables anymore. The Spanish government is cutting the numbers of hours in a day it’s prepared to pay for “clean” energy….
“We feel cheated”, Tomas Diaz of the Spanish Photovoltaic Industry Association told Bloomberg. But it’s undoubtedly taxpayers who have been cheated the most…
Spain paid 11 times more for “green” energy than it did for fossil fuels. The public makes up the difference. The renewables bandwagon is like a hopeless football team that finishes bottom of the league each year – but claims it’s too special ever to be relegated…
Spanish economist Professor Gabriel Calzada, at the University of Madrid estimated that each green job had cost the country $774,000.
Worse, a “green” job costs 2.2 jobs that might otherwise have been created – a figure Calzada derived by dividing the average subsidy per worker by the average productivity per worker…
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/17/spain_sustainability_scam/
The Bilderberg Group is concerned about global cooling?
The 58th Bilderberg Meeting will be held in Sitges, Spain 3 – 6 June 2010. The Conference will deal mainly with Financial Reform, Security, Cyber Technology, Energy, Pakistan, Afghanistan, World Food Problem, Global Cooling, Social Networking, Medical Science, EU-US relations.
http://www.bilderbergmeetings.org/meeting2010.html
The UK coalition adminstration based around social democrat(contintal style)politics is fully signed up to and very keen on enacting crippling and highy damaging ‘green/eco’ policies regardless of public opinion and the state of the science involved.
This government has even acknowledged that UK cuts to carbon dioxide emissions will not lower the earths temperature or even do anything to cut rising CO2 levels.
The sole aim of the cuts in industrial output and jobs is to take on the role of “moral leadership” in the “fight against dangerous climate change”. Yes you read correctly, the sole aim of spending countless billions of pounds and destroying the UK economy and sabotaging the UK energy matrix is so the UK government can bask in the warm glow of leading the world by example, taking a moral leadership in the hope that once the UK destroyed itself the world will be so impressed and awed by this national suicide that the world will follow and drink the kool aid next.
The UK political class seem to be in the grip of some kind of mental illness, existing in a fantasy world and believing they are destined to save the world, a Napoleon/God complex if ever there was one.
Poll question:
* If the government gives you money, will you take it?
Oh, yeah. Threaten Britons with warmer winters and drier springs and tell them that’s a bad thing. Did they take the poll in a bumbershoot factory?
Ahhhh the UK, the formerly GREAT Britain, alarmist central on the AGW issue and yet their populace wont buy it.
Keep ringing those alarm bells, soon the whole lot will be deaf.
From the land that gave us the Ministry of Silly Walks, what do you expect when you have a Minister for Climate Change? You might as well have a Minister for Bears that Sh*t in the Woods.
We continue to lag behind other major nations in our attitude to and appetite for tackling climate change.
They know this is not true. How many countries have actually engaged properly in a meaningful reduction policy? One that has actually achieved a deliberate reduction in CO2? None. A very few have trading schemes that do basically nothing but shuffle the blame, but that’s it. Big talk, no action.
However you will never sell the alarmist line with “Hey, no-one else is doing it, so we should be first!”
hardly the voice of the “left” – Ambinder says capntax is “essential”….repeat “essential”….
16 June: The Atlantic: Marc Ambinder: Carbon Pricing as the Public Option Redux?
If the goal now is to get a bill that begins to wean the nation off of its addiction to oil, a carbon pricing scheme isn’t needed. If the goal is to try to fix the problem of global warming, it is essential…
There clearly aren’t enough Senate votes for cap-and-trade. Even senators who’ve promised not to filibuster a cap-and-trade bill, like Sherrod Brown, are not seen as certain ayes when it comes to the requisite 60 votes to cut off debate. (Privately, the White House believes there are about 52 yes votes at the moment.)
From the perspective of the White House, had Obama explicitly called for carbon pricing in his speech, he might have moved the debate in a way that would hurt the chances of getting any bill at all. They insist that he will put the full weight of his presidency behind cap-and-trade in conference. They insist that cap-and-trade is not analogous to the public option in the health care debate. (The White House came to view the public option less as a lodestone than as a nice piece of shiny quartz that would have been extremely difficult to implement well and wasn’t essential to the edifice itself). Cap-and-trade is essential.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/06/carbon-pricing-as-the-public-option-redux/58257/
Frankly I am skeptical this powder-head even has a normal IQ, much less an education in the area he professes such expertise.
Note the wording: “we continue to lag behind ….” No, the Brits are in front in seeing through the sham! Pity their football team isn’t as advanced.
…”Less than a third of Britons believe the issue is ‘serious and urgent’ and requires ‘radical steps’. A similar number of people doubt whether climate change is happening at all, according to the study.”…
The recent winters in England have left a collective wisdom in the people that will only increase the fraction that are skeptical as those winters continue with more snow. Although weather isn’t climate, the fraction of AGW doubters probably negatively correlates with wintertime temperatures.
If Cameron had said he was sure that Carbon Dioxide was not a poison or pollutant and that Conservative policy was not to waste money on Stupid Green Renewable projects then there would not be the coalition government in the UK that we have at present.
“This scepticism has contributed to the 2.1 tonnes of CO2 generated per house each year from electricity use – the highest of all ten countries examined by researchers at Imperial College London.”
I wonder what else contributed. Perhaps it’s one of the more northerly countries with a maritime climate? Older housing stock with less roof insulation?
No link to the poll questions or list of countries?
With our historical and cultural heritage we have a better idea than most of the limitations of politicians and ‘experts’ of all varieties.
The confluence of a quietening solar surface, rising stratospheric ozone levels, warming stratosphere, equatorward shifting jets. cooling mid latitudes and a cessation of the global upward temperature trend really does suggest something important especially since every component is now going in the opposite direction to what we saw when the sun was more active.
Furthermore it all went into reverse at the same time, in the late 90’s.
Coincidence ? I think not.
Inconvenient for CO2 theories of climate change? Certainly.
Where are the official attempts at an explanation for the utter collapse of their expectations for over 10 years now ?
Secretary of State is loony Huhne from the LibDems.
Greg Barker supports the Secretary of State on:
* Climate change
* International climate change
* Climate Science
* Energy efficiency
* The Green Deal
* Public sector energy efficiency including greening DECC
* Carbon reduction commitment
* Climate Change Agreements
* Fuel poverty
* Social tariffs
* Warm Front
* Promoting interests of energy consumers
* Green Economy, green jobs and skills
* Green Investment Bank
* Green ISAs
* Decentralised energy and small scale renewables (inc cooperative/local ownership and business rates)
* Energy innovation, including marine energy (wave and tidal)
* Heat
* Environment Council
* National Carbon Markets & EU ETS
* CERT and CESP
That list says it all really. No wonder most Brits are sceptical and don’t trust politicians.
There are some very sceptical realists in the UK and I count myself as one, I was lucky, I had a reasonable education and was taught by people who were very able and wanted to teach and most objectively impart knowledge.
I suppose (my generation) we were always going to be realists, it is most amusing however to see and hear of children, that are now becoming acutely tired of the manic inculcation of the BS and government propaganda of CAGW.
The eco-fascists in government, the socialist teachers of hate filled misanthropy and the peddlers of doom, the so called ‘scientific consensus’ – a myth, along with the government funded computer modellers of the Met Office and CRU, despite all their best efforts (and thank the LORD for their incompetency!) are strangulating their own misguided attempts at fomenting mass hysteria and inducing panic over the AGW storm.
It is the motives of the politicians we should concern ourselves with, the case for the government expenditure of vast amounts of money in a vainglorious cause (ie, combating a non existent threat)………….. which will achieve precisely a ZERO effect, is lunacy in any body’s currency.
I salute my fellow Britons cynicism, to doubt is to be scientific in outlook and method.
Funny thing about this survey and one poll done a couple of weeks ago, is that they don’t give out the raw data. I went to the EDF website to get some more info and it just says email them for a copy of the report (so I did!)
What I want to see is with regard to this quote:
… I would like to see which countries were surveyed. Because it may not be “climate scepticism” which leads to Britain’s greater power usage but factors like economic activity and heating demands which vary from European country to country.
I don’t know about you, but I only use (roughly) as much electricity as I need despite my climate scepticism. My skeptical “attitude” doesn’t make me use or waste more electricity. I’m not rich like Al Gore with a power guzzling mansion. I just happen to be addicted to hot showers and cooked meals.
Mooloo says: June 17, 2010 at 9:40 pm,
Mooloo, I notice the same thing in the New Zealand press telling New Zealanders how behind the rest of the world they are going to be if they don’t start action on climate change. It’s two weeks away before New Zealand start the world’s first comprehensive, all sector Emissions Trading Scheme. I’ve even read in mainstream NZ papers (online) that NZ will have their goods rejected by other nations as punishment for not pulling their weight on climate.
Not for nothing did Shakespeare describe us as;
..this sceptic isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,–
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.