Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Former Deputy and Interim Director of the Tyndall Centre Professor Kevin Anderson has accused his fellow academics of compromising their scientific integrity to present climate mitigation proposals they think will be politically palatable, instead of saying what they really believe.
Government climate advisers running scared of change, says leading scientist
Rapid transformation needed, Kevin Anderson says, particularly in lifestyles of rich
Matthew Taylor
Fri 26 Jun 2020 22.16 AESTKevin Anderson, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, had a familiar reaction to the latest report from the government’s climate advisers, which was published this week.
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He said: “Many senior academics, senior policymakers, basically the great and good of the climate world have decided that it is unhelpful to rock the status quo boat and therefore choose to work within that political paradigm – they’ll push it as hard as they think it can go, but they repeatedly step back from questioning the paradigm itself.”
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“On mitigation, the academic community and the CCC have collectively failed the political realm and civil society by tailoring our conclusions to fit with what we judge to be politically palatable – all at the expense of scientific integrity.”
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He said the models also ignored the fact that it was the lifestyles of a relatively wealthy few that gave rise to the lion’s share of emissions.
“Globally the wealthiest 10% are responsible for half of all emissions, the wealthiest 20% for 70% of emissions. If regulations forced the top 10% to cut their emissions to the level of the average EU citizen, and the other 90% made no change in their lifestyles, that would still cut total emissions by a third.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/26/leading-scientist-criticises-uk-over-its-climate-record
The abstract of Anderson’s study;
A factor of two: how the mitigation plans of ‘climate progressive’ nations fall far short of Paris-compliant pathways
Kevin Anderson , John F. Broderick & Isak Stoddard Received 19 Jul 2019, Accepted 05 Feb 2020, Published online: 28 May 2020
The Paris Agreement establishes an international covenant to reduce emissions in line with holding the increase in temperature to ‘well below 2°C … and to pursue … 1.5°C.’ Global modelling studies have repeatedly concluded that such commitments can be delivered through technocratic adjustments to contemporary society, principally price mechanisms driving technical change. However, as emissions have continued to rise, so these models have come to increasingly rely on the extensive deployment of highly speculative negative emissions technologies (NETs). Moreover, in determining the mitigation challenges for industrialized nations, scant regard is paid to the language and spirit of equity enshrined in the Paris Agreement. If, instead, the mitigation agenda of ‘developed country Parties’ is determined without reliance on planetary scale NETs and with genuine regard for equity and ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’, the necessary rates of mitigation increase markedly. This is evident even when considering the UK and Sweden, two nations at the forefront of developing ‘progressive’ climate change legislation and with clear emissions pathways and/or quantitative carbon budgets. In both cases, the carbon budgets underpinning mitigation policy are halved, the immediate mitigation rate is increased to over 10% per annum, and the time to deliver a fully decarbonized energy system is brought forward to 2035-40. Such a challenging mitigation agenda implies profound changes to many facets of industrialized economies. This conclusion is not drawn from political ideology, but rather is a direct consequence of the international community’s obligations under the Paris Agreement and the small and rapidly dwindling global carbon budget.
Read more: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14693062.2020.1728209
I love this guy. I think he sees things a little differently to the rest of us, but he certainly doesn’t pull his punches.
For example, from the main body of his study, Kevin’s study appears to suggest developing nations cannot be allowed to industrialise .
As it stands today, the difference in the cement intensity (i.e. kg-cement/person-year) between developed countries with mature infrastructure and those developing nations rapidly constructing such infrastructure, ranges between a factor of two and five (see Appendix B for more detail). Put simply, whilst there are, at scale, substitutes for fossil fuel energy, as yet there are no such substitutes, at scale, for cement. Consequently, and given the key role of cement in facilitating development, penalizing poorer and industrializing nations for rapid infrastructure expansion runs counter to the concept of CBDR&RC.
Nevertheless, whilst ethical considerations are important, the global cement industry cannot be exempt from deep and rapid decarbonization. The inclusion here of the cement sector as a ‘global overhead’ does not exempt nations with high cement use from seeking to reduce process emissions, rather it puts pressure on the global industry to rapidly curtail its emissions. Failure to do so only puts further downwards pressure on global, and hence national, energy-only carbon budgets that are already at the threshold of what is achievable.
Read more: same link as above
The conclusion of Kevin’s study prescribes carbon reduction rate of 10-12% per annum. To put this into context, the Covid lockdowns are estimated to have resulted in a 17% emissions drop – so Kevin is effectively calling for two thirds of a Covid lockdown worth of permanent CO2 reduction every year, for the forseeable future.
Sadly Kevin does not offer any solution to how this colossal societal shift might be engineered, other than a vague reference to the US funded post WW2 Marshall Plan in the conclusion of his study, and a suggestion in his Guardian interview that we could achieve an immediate 30% CO2 emission reduction by heavily restricting the life choices of rich people.
Below is Josh’s take on Keven Anderson’s climate theories, from 2010.
I am always impressed when someone has such faith in his own ideas that he is able to suggest that a large proportion of the World should be arbitrarily deprived of the right to develop their economy with cheap energy and assure themselves of a decent life. The enormity of this suggestion is so great that one can scarcely believe that it has not triggered some sort of doubt in his mind as to the soundness of his beliefs.
Total hubris for someone who has probably never stepped outside the sheltered world of higher education
NO , it’s far worse than that !
It means we stay in lockdown and next year go into lockdown squared. The year after we go into lockdown cubed …. we will be in total collapse of society well before we get that far.
The 10% per year every year is what 10:10 movement was proposing before they destroyed their entire movement with a vid about blowing non conformant school kids. Professor Kevin Anderson is basically trying to relaunch 10:10. Time for a reminder of that video perhaps.
It’s hard to find reliable data but it looks like any household in the USA with at least one minimum wage earner is probably in the top 10% worldwide.
There is an amazing ability of the Climate Wroughters to carry on “business as usual” in zeroing CO2 emissions in 10 yrs, with a herd of elephants in the room. With 15% of global population in the West, which is the only place the zeroing sermon is preached, the 85% are building
several coal-fired plants a week.
Here is a prediction with 100% certainty: We are going to do the “Big CO2 Experiment” doubling CO2 emissions with or without the West’s help. We will know exactly what ECS is to as many decimal places as we like. Green? We will have a “Garden of Eden Earth” with plenty of food and widespread prosperity for a peak population not much larger than now (Bangladesh- once the poorest of nations, has GDP growth today exceeding 8% and fertility rate down to 2.1, Pakistan 6%+, Africa ~3% – World Bank figures)
Kevin Anderson is the ultimate nutty professor.
“Global warming professor Kevin Anderson ‘cuts back on washing and showering’ to fight climate change – Admits at UN climate summit: ‘That is why I smell’ – Defends his call for ‘a planned economic recession’.
https://www.climatedepot.com/2013/11/19/global-warming-professor-kevin-anderson-cuts-back-on-washing-and-showering-to-fight-climate-change-admits-at-un-climate-summit-that-is-why-i-smell/
A propos Kevin Anderson saying that he smelled:
Doctor Johnson of dictionary fame was at the theatre when a person seated next to him complained
” Doctor Johnson, you smell! ”
Doctor Johnson replied, ” No sir, you smell, I stink! ”
As far as Kevin Anderson’s proposals go, I think that improvements in water supply, sewerage systems, child nutrition, education and energy supply would be the first sectors to tackle.
Stephen,
Reducing the world population by a factor of ten would a good plan.
The remaining 1 billion, by about 2050, would have to live a highly efficient lifestyle, so that about 50% of the earth habitable land surface can be set aside/left undisturbed for the REST OF THE FLORA AND FAUNA.
Why do you consider that to be a good thing?
Beyond that, how do you plan on getting rid of the 6 billion people you consider to be superfluous?
You pander to who pays your opinion to generate it as a fact which are government grants and Scholars positions. For Decades now, governments have been paying for this propaganda in many videos and documentaries.
Anderson’s petulant squawking suggests the spoiled child insisting he MUST have another bar of chocolate.
Tell us, Kev, were you to be successful in utterly, completely destroying the UK such that it emitted zero anthropogenic CO2 whatever, how long would it take for his ChiCom chums to take up that little bit of slack?
Methinks it is time for the beaming guys in white coats to bring along the straitjacket….
Methinks it is too late. He should have been taken away many years ago by the men in white coats before his nutty ideas spread to a generation of useful idiots.
Only problem those in white coats are the patients, now running the asylum…
Kevin is unduly worried about cement production.
Following prescriptions from him and his ilk it will be back to mud bricks and wattle and daub within two generations.
Isn’t there large amounts of cement used in wind and solar renewables? Now there’s a way to reduce cement production, stop making renewable infrastructure,!
The thousand ton of cement per large wind turbine is good cement, so the CO2 from it is also good sustainable CO2.
/SARC
Had look at one up close recently. The column had at least 3 layers, with what seemed to be cement, aluminum and a sound damper rather like some kind of rubber compound.
The blades I am not sure but looked like glass-fiber.
And all fully recyclable of course 🙁
China is THE mega producer and consumer of cement, but you want hear a squawk from the Western Green establishment about that: pin drop silence.
Most recent warming was parallel to China’s hyper industrialization, but no research done into that line: that party was too good for global manufacturing MNC stockholders making billions from this crooked state capitalism monopoly racket, like Jack Ma or Jeff Bezos.
Kevin comes from the looney tunes, anti progress, Monbiot faction of politically motivated climate fiction. Stopping third world development is exactly what people like that want to do.
Monbiot
‘The peculiarities of the Abrahamic religions – their astonishing success in colonising the world and their DANGEROUS notion of progress -now inherited by secular society.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/03/22/god-of-the-soil/
Yet oddly the ‘eating the apple of knowledge and getting expelled from nature’ is not only the source but also the solution of eco-ism.
Destroy technology (vomit up the apple) and rejoin nature (the garden of eden).
There’s a reason he’s called Moonbat.
Yeah, nah, wheres that ad hom cop when you need him? Too busy preening himself.
You may wish to brush up on the definition of “ad hom.” You may also wish to examine your practice of psychological projection.
Lately, Loydo has just been phoning it in.
Likely negotiating a new contract
Work to rule and all that Jazz
Wait a sec, is that a progressive calling for a cop?
Regardless – tsk, tsk – best to first pull the beam from one’s own eye before pointing elsewhere:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/06/22/india-confirms-no-increase-in-tropical-cyclones-due-to-climate-change/#comment-3021121
Let not thine hypocrisy become legion.
xoxo 🙂
Professor Kevin Anderson must get good WiFi reception in the rock cave that he lives in, otherwise we would not have seen this article.
Economics for greentards. And therein lies part of his problem. Market pricing is indeed one of the mechanisms that accounts for the success of capitalism. But these people, who have probably never worked in a productive industry that actually makes things, wrongly assume that anything becomes technically possible at the right price.
Thus, for example, Moore’s Law is merely an observation. It is not based on any fundamental technical reasoning and all the real experts know it will cease to hold at some point in the future, if not already. This guy probably also hasn’t given a lot of thought towards how much CO2 will be emitted for the concrete and steel required for all the wind turbines in his ‘energy transition’. Not only are the amounts of emitted CO2 large, but they are produced now, while all the imagined benefits come decades in the future. So this particular solution will actually make his imagined problem much worse for decades to come. He will probably have a real conniption fit if the facts ever sink in.
A decade or so ago, the EPA tried to fine refiners for failing to use a product that didn’t exist.
They had given the industry 5 years to develop a chemical, then fined them for failing to succeed.
It is worth remembering the “professor” is writing in the Guardian. A once proud newspaper that has been taken over by the Woke. A newspaper that has banned any article being published in its pages, that does not agree with man made climate change. To get published in the Guardian you must conform to the Guardian’s house rules without any dissent from their absolute view of the world.
Newspapers with that policy used to exist in the old USSR, we used to laugh at their biased view about everything, particularly any view not in line with the totalitarian rules they promoted.
We now have the very same limit of freedom of expression, once championed by Pravda, here in the so called freedom loving West. The BBC is also keeping up its alignment with their Izvestia mindset. All things must be censored, they proudly boast they have banned anyone from their airwaves who does not promote man made global warming.
With these positions in mind it is worth saying, no one should regard anything written in the Guardian about climate is balanced, or is worth reading.
Rod Evans
I’m sure you will know that the two main newspapers in the USSR were Pravda (‘Truth’) and Izvestia (‘News’).
As Russian people used to point out, there’s no Truth in the News and no News in the Truth.
Pretty much like today’s MSM, in fact.
It reminds one of the old Soviet joke about Pravda (“Truth”), the official newspaper of the Communist Party, and Izvestiya (“News”), the official newspaper of the Soviet government.
“In Truth there is no news, and in News there is no truth.”
And in today’s strange world there is probably more truth in Pravda and on Russia Today than in the Guardian or on the BBC.
Another old joke from the USSR: the country where only the future was certain, but the past was constantly changing. Also applicable to the Guardian, methinks.
If regulations forced the top 10% to cut their emissions to the level of the average EU citizen
They would move somewhere else, and their lifestyle wouldn’t change a bit.
The 90% left behind would discover that their taxes must now double to support the same public services.
The lefties forget that Rich people will just move like they do for tax havens.
I remember a lefty who told me that if they doubled the taxes on the wealthy, the wealthy would just work harder and as a result, we would all be better off.
The higher the taxes, the greater the effort at tax evasion and the greater the income of (tax-deductible) accountants.
If taxes were lower and simpler, most high earners wouldn’t bother trying to evade them.
Additionally, the schemes the rich use to avoid paying taxes are always less efficient economically, resulting in less economic growth.
So they are going to force the top 10% to cut their emissions? What about those in the 50% to 10% brackets? Do they get to keep their emissions the same?
If so, they will all be emitting more than the former top 10% did, which makes more sense.
More than likely what will happen is that the new top 10% will in turn be forced to reduce their emissions to “average”. However, since the former top 10 have reduced their emissions, the new average will be lower than the old average.
This process will continue until nobody has any emissions, which was the goal all along.
1 – Cutting emissions by a third isn’t sufficient.
2 – That would result in the average Canadian freezing in the dark.
3 – It would require depopulating Iceland (pop. 364,000). There are too may of them to make burning blubber feasible (yes, I know about geothermal energy). Maybe they could huddle together around volcanoes.
4 – If the population of Greenland (pop. 56,000) wants to stay there, they have to start living in igloos and burning blubber to keep warm rather than living in houses and using fossil fuel. I’m not sure there’s enough blubber though.
To paraphrase Marie Antoinette: Let them eat mud.
Apropos to the time, all roads lead to the guillotine.
Brilliant
Brilliant was meant for “…let them eat mud”
I kinda like the guillotine comment
As individual people, I can respect each and every academic having an opinion even if their opinions are wrong.
As academics, I don’t want their opinion, I want the ungarnished facts even if the facts disagree with their opinion.
Sadly, facts are rarely ungarnished in climate science.
“tailoring our conclusions to fit with what we judge to be politically palatable”
Doesn’t that pretty much describe the entire global warming industry?
These days it’s customary to put the lunatics in saintly white coats, and there is no shortage of them
If only we could defund them!
Current emission growth is completely from emerging economies, emissions from “the rich” have been stable and declining for the last twenty years.
The moment I see the word transformation used I expect a lot of rubbish to be written. This word – a favorite word of politicians, activists and the media when they do not want to say in clear, explicit language what their objectives are – has become a worthless word. They believe this word gives respectability to their cause when in reality it is disingenuous and deceiving. However, it is only one of many ways climate alarmists manipulate language to fool the naive masses who fail to use logic and careful reasoning when discussing climate.
So as you well know, it’s just ‘Hope and Change’ all the way down to the bottom of the barrel, Baby!
Does the CO2 for 200 foot yacht come from the rich mans CO2 account, or those of the twenty workers and families it supports?
Ahhhhh……. Anderson is full of s#it.
Anderson is an Extinction Rebellion mentor, huge shifts in the weather are settled science apparently.
He is also a mentor to Greta Thunberg:
https://www.tellerreport.com/tech/greta-thunberg–how-big-is-the-influence-of-your-mentor-.S1bXoGcuV.html
Anderson: Greta sometimes sends me manuscripts and asks me to check if everything is correct. Of course, sometimes we both discuss issues as well.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: And?
Anderson: In conversations with her, I often have the impression of having a younger colleague at our institute, but not with a teenager. Greta knows so much about climate change, and she’s constantly learning. Recently she sent me one of her texts about aerosols …
He makes no mention of India, China or nuclear energy. He says it’s all in the math. The only equation he presented was “Paris + IPCC = Equity.” He says that we need to consider nature, but he doesn’t. His message is entirely, anthropocentric, model based, without regard to natural history or science.
He says that perhaps success should not be rewarded.
He ends with Einstein’s definition of insanity, like all Marxists think, the next revolution will make it successful.
(Personally I would never put much technological faith in people that can’t hang banners or a projection screen.)
There’s another interesting feature of that finally successful Marxist revolution. There must never be any conceivably corrective revolution permitted to follow it!
What the hell is carbon neutral? I’m preaching to the choir but what the heck:
Carbon is number 6 on the periodic table. Its natural and also one of the oldest known elements. To quote the online encyclopedia:
“Carbon is the 15th most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, and the fourth most abundant element in the universe by mass after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen. Carbon’s abundance, its unique diversity of organic compounds, and its unusual ability to form polymers at the temperatures commonly encountered on Earth enables this element to serve as a common element of all known life. It is the second most abundant element in the human body by mass (about 18.5%) after oxygen.”
Oh well, I guess I must ‘believe the science’.
He’s talking about carbon dioxide CO2.
Then he should say carbon dioxide, carbon is not carbon dioxide anymore than hydrogen is water!
It is a disingenuous attempt to imply something black and dirty, hence the photoshopped image on the article of water vapour blackened to make it appear dirty.
Perhaps this is why Greta thinks she can see it.
Carbon is black. Does BLM Matter here?
Only half.
What, no subtle thinkers around here today?
Okay, let’s try it this way:
Yeah, but only half, cuz only half life matters when it comes to carbon.
Tough room . . .
🙁
The trouble with ignorant, ill-educated, narrow-minded, lefty academics like him is that their Abroad horizon is limited (with underpaid Guardian hacks, of course) to two weeks in Ibiza. He’s never been to South East Asia, to India, Peru, Djibouti, Manila, Tokyo and got a feel for the real world. Cement? Hah! Taken a look at Kuala Lumpur or Shanghai recently? The idiot. He needs to be shut up in a quiet room with gapminder/tools.org and be made to mine down deeply into Dollar Street for twelve hours.
Narrowly, who pays the bulk of income tax in U.K.?
I wonder if these rich people include Leonardo Di Caprio, Emma Thompson, Harrison Ford, Al Gore, Barack Obama, Princes Charles and Harry and all the other celebrities with the carbon footprint the size of a small town who relentlessly preach to the plebs of the world about reducing their consumption.
Logically, a limit on stupid consumption… would make sense. Does anyone have super rich friends? Logically rather than a carbon tax, we should have start with some upper limits for super consumption.
Homes no more than say 3000 square feet, with a scaling tax. There are people who live in homes the size of a small apartment. Also the number of homes per household. Say a maximum of two homes per household, inforced by a scaling tax.
The other is no foreign ownership of property. What is the benefit for local people? Tourists that visit resorts, sure. People that own property and only come three weeks a year, no.
There are entire neighbourhoods in Vancouver where there are almost no people as the homes are owned by rich Chinese. This does not make sense for Canadians to neighbourhoods of super expensive large homes which most Canadians cannot afford with no one living in them.
Resorts that are used make sense. Jobs for local people. Nice place, safe places for tourists to visit.
We have the same experience here in Australia William in regard to people from overseas, mainly China, buying up residential property and leaving it empty. A friend once related to me that her rental agent told her that a Chinese individual had bought 54 properties in and around her area. This area is north of the city of Sydney and properties there sell for 2 million dollars and more.
Same problem in Australia William. A friend related to me that those same overseas buyers bought up 54 domestic residences north of Sydney worth 2 million and more each! These properties were empty too. How can this be allowed?
No worries!
China’s economy has started to collapse and with it, Chinese ownership of all those expensive foreign properties!
Experts predict that within three years, China will cease to be an economic powerhouse–they may even have great difficulty feeding their own people!
Certainly their military will be pulled back as their army is redirected to food production rather than island building!
It’s funny how all these “professors” on their $200,000 per year always define someone above them in the pay scales as “The Rich.”
You forget. In their minds, they are entitled to their salary, and more.
It’s people who work for a living who must have their incomes cut.
I can’t get as much information as I’d like Mark because some of the sites have been taken down. There are at least 10 Vice Chancellors of Australian Universities who are earning more than 1 million dollars a year and some are earning 1.5 million.
Our Universities are being run like businesses and these ‘CEO’S’ are dependent on the more expensive fees of overseas, and mainly Chinese students to justify their paycheck. Ironically the Wuhan virus is really hurting them now. The trouble is that many of these students are only on paper, they don’t even have to speak English or attend lectures, they elect a representative to translate lectures for them, supposedly. I’m sure they all get their degrees. I’m not even sure that Australian Universities rank well on a global scale, maybe they should get pay cuts to reflect that.
General Managers for country councils can earn $350,000! Bureaucrats earn $800,000 or more. These are all funded by the taxpayers, even our Prime Minister only earns $500,000. Still alot of money but in what way are the other salaries justified? How are they ‘worth’ that pay? Even with businesses closing down, and people losing their jobs due to the Wuhan virus they still get their paycheck! These wages are obscene when compared to the average Australian minimum wage of $23,000.
There has to be a massive amount of corruption in all levels of Australian politics and bureaucracy.
COVID-19 is disrupting education and academics will face an uncertain future in the coming years. In the U.S., there are likely to be far fewer international students, who pay full tuition and in effect subsidize others, while many are questioning the value of debt based degrees. Many students who would head to college in the fall have decided to take some time off.
The US is expected to see fully 50% of their liberal-arts colleges and universities close in the next decade!
Does the rich persons 200 ft yacht come off the rich persons CO2 account or those of the twenty construction team and families that built it?
Ahhh, Anderson lies exposed, very simply. Rich people dont produce more CO2 than average people. Were he not to buy a boat those 20 people would build something else, ferries, concrete roads, what ever it is, they all will find work, and it is human activity that produces CO2, regardless of the customer.
So this is just Marxist, anti rich rhetoric, and as simplistic and childish as ever.
And simplistic childish thinking riddles the eco world, from Occasional Cortex’s GND, to wind turbines. Ill thought out, childish, and destructive.
Anyway, consuption is not proportional to the income. Not even close.
Many academics who say what they really believe would lose their jobs.
https://youtu.be/TFOoay29ybc
This is just more fake news when you consider that all emissions increases since 1980 have been from the developing world, which now makes up 2/3 of global emissions. What is very telling in the CO2 saga is that emissions have risen faster than at any time in history since the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was put in place back in 1992, followed by the Kyoto protocol in 1997 and all driven by the developing world. In fact, the developing word have increased CO2 emissions by more per anum than that generated by the entire developed world since Kyoto, and they continue to increase global emissions at a significant rate, despite modest reductions from the developed world during this period.
This enormous increase in emissions since the climate change framework agreement was established is not a coincidence and it is the intention of the convention to move large scale production away from the developed nations and to the developing countries by imposing emissions reductions targets punishing the developed countries. The climate agreement states that developing and non-developed countries should prioritize economic outcomes ahead of emissions reductions and this is exactly what we see happening and it will continue to happen indefinitely as one would expect.
To add to my comment above, here are the references to the climate treaties, that have had the effect of driving up emissions.
“Under Article 4.7 of the Convention (p 8), ‘the first and overriding priorities of the developing country Parties’ (defined by reference to Annex I) are ‘economic and social development and poverty eradication’ And, under Article 4.4 of the PA (p 3), developing countries are only ‘encouraged to move over time towards economy-wide emission reduction or limitation targets in the light of different national circumstances’. ”
When you consider that RE is not a solution for affordable or reliable energy supply and that nuclear has largely been dropped as an alternative energy source, it is of no surprise that fossil fuels are the first choice for their “overriding priorities”, and will remain so for a considerable time.
Anderson is not a leading climate scientist. He is a former marine engineer turned mathematical modeller. He takes the IPCC conclusions as fact and weaves fantastic doom scenarios around them.
https://tyndall.ac.uk/people/kevin-anderson
In 2005, he was promoting personal carbon credit cards. Everyone would be given a “carbon” allowance and every time they purchased anything they would swipe their card at the checkout and be debited with the “carbon” cost of the product.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237228029_Domestic_Tradable_Quotas_A_policy_instrument_for_reducing_greenhouse_gas_emissions_from_energy_use
Almost without fail, when I read the pronouncements of one of these self-annointed “world savers,” it strikes me that they really aren’t scientists. They’re actually latent, frustrated dictators.
From the incomparable H. L. Mencken:
“Puritanism: The haunting fear, that somewhere, someone is happy.”
The guy’s obviously a control freak, and a typical champagne Socialist.
Just do it, do the thing you want everybody to do.
You can start today, revolutionise YOUR life.
Sell your houses.
Stop travelling.
Eat less. Freezer’s are for Fascists Kev.
You really should have nothing to recycle if you’re serious about this.
Put another jumper on when you’re cold. May as well just keep your coat on actually.
C’mon Kev you can do this, think of the strong message you’ll be sending to your fellow rich b@stards.
….you remember…
“If we were serious about this crisis we could do this in a year – if we were really serious we could do it in a month”
I hate to say this, but Professor Andersen is right on target. Conceptually, the idea of rolling back society to a pre-industrial condition is naive (to put it mildly…); but it has the virtue of actually being able to hit its objective. The readers here are well aware that all the renewable energy schemes will (a) not provide useful electrical services and (b) mostly (if not entirely) shift the carbon output from generating power to making windmills and solar installations. No exaggeration: Trillions down the drain to accomplish bubkis from a CAGW perspective (
liningstuffing pockets of the well-connected aside…). Compared to the Green New Deal and its fellow travelers, his ideas are remarkably coherent.Not that I agree with it for a nanosecond. As others have noted above, this thinking is only (marginally) rational if one wholly buys into the catastrophic consequences of a a degree or two of warming. Condemning all to unending poverty and deprivation only makes sense if one believes the alternative is the lucky few who make it to Hudson Bay licking lichen off of rocks.
So, from a scientific perspective, Professor Anderson’s assumptions (AGW and its consequences) are questionable; but his analysis is refreshingly superior to what we usually see from the global warming community. I urge him to spread his message far and wide. It’ll shift the discussion to the validity of the AGW assumption.
Chaps, I do really recommend looking at gapminder.org’s Dollar Street for an education about the peoples of this planet. There’s depth there- variations in income, place, family habits, aspirations. “We are saving to buy a bicycle”. Photo of a rich South Korean toothbrush holder, a realistic Burundi water closet (actually there isn’t one). Umissable has
“Globally the wealthiest 10% are responsible for half of all emissions, the wealthiest 20% for 70% of emissions. If regulations forced the top 10% to cut their emissions to the level of the average EU citizen, and the other 90% made no change in their lifestyles, that would still cut total emissions by a third”
What do emissions have to do with it? What is the relationship between global warming and emissions?
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/05/18/12479/
When he talks about the top 20%, he’s talking about the population of the entire planet.
That 20% dives well into the middle class of Europe and the America.
Mark,
As 20 of the world population is some 1.4 billion people you have to ask, who does he have in mind as his target exactly?
Remember at least a third of the western world’s population are children/teenagers. With that in mind if you took the whole of the USA and Canada adult population plus the whole of the European adult population it would only come to around 0.5 billion. Where are the other 900,000,000 rich individuals going to be coming from that he wants to target? Further, I would ask, do all adult Americans and Europeans consider themselves, rich?
I suspect not.
Doesn’t matter whether they consider themselves rich or not. Compared to the rest of the world, they are rich.
If the children live in rich households, then they would qualify as rich.
There are a lot of wealthy people in India and China, since both countries abandoned socialism/communism.
“who does he have in mind as his target exactly?”
No one. He’s just blathering meaningless bullsh!t to salve his Chronic Virtue-Signalling Disorder. Give the poor idiot a padded cell.
I first became interested in what subsequently has been named the “climate crisis” a few years ago partly from natural curiosity about the planet’ climate sytems which I had always been too concerned with employment to think about and partly to a concern that things were getting out of control ( fear admittedly first raised in me by the media). At the same time , and contradictorily, I was concerned about the proliferation of eyesore windfarms and the restriction of personal choice about transport and general living styles that were being advocated to counter said climate crisis. That is why I welcomed Bexit and Trump as a brake or a slowing down of these developments and began to haunt websites such as this.
However the Wuhan flu pandemic has destroyed so much so quickly that I realise now that nothing the Greens and the accompanying politicians can do will come anywhere close to what the evil geniuses of Wuhan have achieved .
So in a sense Covid-19 has liberated me . No point in worrying about the failure of Brexit or the defeat of trump by Clinton in Nov because the worst has already taken place. UK is bankrupt with shortly 2m extra unemployed . EU is requiring a massive invention of money from Germany , France and Netherlands and in many countries rioting and murder are out of control. The climate science is still fascinating and continues to hold one’s attention , but the Green initiatives simply consist of blowing up the few remaining buildings in an cityscape already reduced to near rubble , to speak metaphorically.
Pathetic. There is no man made (AGW) climate change. We are staring down the barrel of a Mini Ice Age. It has already begun. Get real Climate Change is natural and cyclical.
We are however stripping the planet of minerals to fuel/supply our lifestyles. This is a completely separate question. Is there an alternative. EG a renewable timber based economy. We still need metals.
I suggest a voluntary uni degree tax from those perpetually concerned weather worriers to help out those struggling to pay for all the free electricity from Gaia-
https://www.msn.com/en-au/money/other/ofgem-proposes-permanent-measures-to-help-vulnerable-energy-customers/ar-BB164ZZf
If it’s not enough it will have to become compulsory based on the individual’s past weather worrying.
Bomb throwing by tenured professors is more an act of personality cult and Teflon status than anything useful to society or science.