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IN THIS ISSUE:
- Alarmists Embrace Authoritarianism, Ignore Lessons of History
- Podcast of the Week: Green Energy Is Powered by Human Rights Abuse (Guest: Ronald Stein)
- Europe’s Wind Power Stalls
- Carbon Dioxide Has Less Warming Effect Than Assumed
- Climate Comedy
- Video of the Week: Dan Bongino Destroys Climate Alarmist with Facts, Data from The Heartland Institute
- BONUS Video of the Week: Q&A: The IPCC and its Violations of the Scientific Method in Climate Science
- Recommended Sites
Alarmists Embrace Authoritarianism, Ignore Lessons of History
A rump group of the environmental movement has always been wedded to authoritarianism—primarily the movement’s intellectual leadership. Going back to the beginnings of environmentalism as a movement, Progressive-era politicians such as President Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot (Roosevelt’s friend and choice to be the first head of the newly created U.S. Forest Service) believed democracy and markets were both ill-suited to manage natural resources. Progressives believed natural resources should be controlled, developed, and conserved by elite scientific managers, bureaucrats unbeholden to the wishes of the public.
Later, as detailed by Alston Chase in his powerful book In a Dark Wood, many Nazis were at least in part inspired by an expansive vision of environmental purity.
Although few if any progressives were full-on misanthropes, there have always some of these within the environmental movement, pushing for increasingly extreme actions in defense of the environment and against human use of natural resources. The misanthropic wing of the movement has referred to humans as “a cancer,” “a disease,” and “a parasite,” with some openly hoping for a killer virus to come along and wipe out most of humanity. Eco-philosopher Arne Naess, who coined the term deep ecology, said the ideal human population on Earth is 200 million, and he called for policies and personal actions to achieve that goal as soon as possible. Others have estimated the “optimal” human population as 1.5 to 2 billion people and claimed this justifies population engineering, including both “active” and “passive” means to get there.
Although authoritarians among the climate alarm crowd are not all misanthropes, all misanthropic climate scolds support authoritarian measures to prevent climate change.
Now even the academic literature is increasingly embracing authoritarianism as the world’s allegedly last best hope to avert supposedly apocalyptic climate change. A book released by leading academic publisher Routledge in late 2019 (missed by many because of the pandemic), Liberty and the Ecological Crisis: Freedom on a Finite Planet, says it is urgent for governments to take away people’s freedom:
This book examines the concept of liberty in relation to civilization’s ability to live within ecological limits.
[I]t is our relatively unbounded freedom that has resulted in so much ecological devastation. … The overarching framework for this collection is that liberty and agency need to be rethought…. On a finite planet, our choices will become limited if we hope to survive the climatic transitions set in motion by uncontrolled consumption of resources and energy over the past 150 years.
The American Political Science Review, a publication of Cambridge University Press, recently published an article, “Political Legitimacy, Authoritarianism, and Climate Change,” which begins by asking, “Is authoritarian power ever legitimate?” The author, Ross Mittiga, answers with a resounding “Yes!” Pointing to the restrictions many governments established in response to COVID-19 as the type of emergency justifying authoritarian limits on freedom, the author states, “Climate change poses an even graver threat to public safety. Consequently, I argue, legitimacy may require a similarly authoritarian approach.”
It should be noted that some governments resisted the authoritarian urge. South Dakota in the United States and Sweden in Europe, for example, did not impose authoritarian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their populations’ health fared better than those in many places where governments imposed draconian restrictions on personal freedom, movement, public and even private gatherings, and work, under emergency powers. Based on the ongoing nature of the pandemic and the rise of multiple virus variants, there is limited evidence the authoritarian emergency restrictions imposed by most governments did anything to contain, much less end, the virus.
“The restrictions just weren’t stringent enough or imposed for a long enough time,” I can almost hear some climate alarmists saying.
What we can say with some confidence is that democracy suffered under the COVID response, with Freedom House reporting democracy grew weaker in 80 countries, among them the United States, during the pandemic. Abuse of power by governments and mistrust of government both grew during the pandemic, Freedom House reports.
Mittiga says climate change is a greater threat than COVID and therefore justifies long-term restrictions on life choices even stricter than those imposed over the past two years. How the public will respond to that might best be judged by the visible street protests to ongoing or newly reimposed restrictions in Europe and elsewhere, and the people widely flouting mask mandates, fighting vaccine mandates, and publicly sharing information about adverse vaccine reactions and COVID cases among the fully vaccinated in the United States. This type of pushback presents a problem for Mittiga unless the type of authoritarian solutions he supports are much more like those of North Korea, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, China under Mao, and Russia under Stalin than what the liberal democracies have dared attempt thus far.
This authoritarian turn does not surprise me. I wrote about it in the past, most recently in Climate Change Weekly 411 and Climate Change Weekly 406. In the latter I wrote this:
[T]he energy cuts and lifestyle changes required to hit net zero will mean going back to early-1800s levels of emissions. This will force enormously negative economic growth and giving up modern conveniences (and the freedoms they have created) that people in developed countries have come to take for granted over the past century.
For people in developing countries the news is even worse. They will have to be kept from developing, which will consign even more generations to premature deaths and abject penury due to energy poverty and food privation.
Oh well, climate alarmists whisper (usually in secret), you’ve got to break a few eggs to make an omelet.
Based on the evidence, I believe that no climate crisis is in the offing, that science shows the modest warming of the past century and any reasonably expected warming in the coming century has not caused calamity or even worsening weather extremes and is unlikely to do so. But even if I’m wrong, authoritarianism is the worst possible response to the climate crisis.
Climate alarmists praise China, ignoring the fact that it produces more greenhouse gases than every other industrialized economy on Earth combined and its emissions are growing. Also, as I detailed in a 1997 article titled “Five Eco-Despoiled Nations” in The World & I magazine, the countries with the worst environmental problems in the twentieth century were, with just one exception, communist or socialist dictatorships. (The exception was an impoverished, largely failed state with a history of careening back and forth between deeply disputed democratic elections and coups leading to authoritarian rule.)
Time and again, one finds the environment fares better in liberal democracies with largely market economies than in countries under authoritarian rule. This is not a coincidence.
Climate alarmists ignore this clear fact and display ignorance of history (and no understanding of human nature and how institutions shape behavior) in a second way: people like Mittiga, James Hansen, and others who embrace authoritarianism as a solution to the climate crisis somehow believe they will be the anointed ones wielding power if liberal democracies are displaced by authoritarian governments. I’m sure Robespierre and Trotsky felt the same, but history tells a very different story. See, for a contemporary example, China’s treatment of its environmental protesters and suppression of the environmental movement. Environmentalism doesn’t thrive under authoritarian rule. It is suppressed.
History shows revolutions resulting in dictatorships typically eat their children and those who they overthrew alike, indiscriminately and with equal fervor and self-perceived righteous indignation.
There is no good reason to believe climate alarmists who help bring down liberal democracies around the globe and replace them with authoritarian rule will enjoy a different fate.
On the contrary, statements made by those pushing the hardest for political action to fight climate change indicate they are in fact more interested in imposing socialism or authoritarianism, with them in control, than in protecting the environment or those most vulnerable to climate change. Many of my friends and colleagues refer to these wolves in sheep’s clothing as “watermelons”: green on the outside, Communist red on the inside. They are opportunists who use the specter of climate change to push their socialist political goals by indirect means. Many watermelons are longtime, deeply embedded, experienced political operatives, so there is good reason to believe they—not the academics, intellectuals, or true believers—will seize the reins of power if their revolution comes. The true believers, not the political schemers, would go to the wall along with the former regime.
Authoritarianism is bad, regardless of the cause it purportedly serves. Painting evil green does not make it better.
SOURCES: Grist; American Political Science Review; Freedom House; Climate Change Weekly; Climate Realism
Check Out All Our Presentations in Scotland
Podcast of the Week
In his new book Clean Energy Exploitation, co-authored with Todd Royal, engineer and energy expert Ronald Stein shows that the policies being pushed by relatively wealthy developed countries to end the use of coal, oil, and natural gas to fight climate change are resulting in atrocious environmental and human right abuses on people in developing countries.
Worse still, the so-called green energy technologies being pushed by wealthy elites to replace fossil fuels aren’t all that environmentally friendly and really aren’t good substitutes for the myriad of uses of fossil fuels.Subscribe to the Environment & Climate News podcast on Apple Podcasts, iHeart, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And be sure to leave a positive review!
Europe’s Wind Power Stalls
Europe faces ongoing energy shortages, and Reuters reports it is due to a predictable wind deficit.
Industrial wind power, and to a lesser extent solar, were supposed to be Europe’s solution to climate change, decarbonizing while keeping the lights on. It turns out they do not provide much of either.
Europe’s industrial wind complexes produced just 14 percent of their capacity from July through September 2021, down from the previous-low average of 20 to 26 percent of capacity. The result has been price spikes and power shortages as Europe has been forced to purchase more imported natural gas at inflated prices, largely from Russia, and to reopen shuttered coal-fueled power plants.
“If we had high winds or just reasonable winds over that period, we wouldn’t have seen these price spikes,” Rory McCarthy, a senior analyst at the energy research firm Wood Mackenzie, told Reuters.
Europe has led the push for renewable electric power generation, and Germany has been at its vanguard. Germany’s wind energy production fell by 16 percent over the past year, because of poor wind conditions, even as its government has continued to push wind into an ever-larger share of the nation’s electric power portfolio.
The problem, as analysts have long known but governments have ignored, is that when renewable energy projects are mandated the governments tout “the total capacity, or maximum energy that could be produced from the wind farm on an annual basis,” as the Daily Caller notes. “Both wind and solar projects typically produce a small fraction of that capacity.”
As a result, energy consumers were hit with huge increases in the price of electric power as Russia cut gas exports to Europe while wind production declined.
Although some coal plants restarted, limiting the number of power failures, the price of power from restarted coal plants has also been rising because the operators have to purchase carbon dioxide credits in the European carbon-trading scheme. The increased demand and politically restricted supply have caused the price of these credits to soar, more than doubling since the start of 2021.
It’s an energy Catch-22 of Europe’s own making.
SOURCES: Daily Caller, Reuters
Heartland’s Must-read Climate Sites
Carbon Dioxide Has Less Warming Effect Than Assumed
A recent study published in the peer-reviewed journal Climate, “Solar and Anthropogenic Influences on Climate: A Regression Analysis and Tentative Predictions,” concludes the influence of carbon dioxide on changes in global temperatures from 1860 until today was approximately half that asserted in the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report.
This would imply the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) to a doubling of carbon dioxide is more in line with simple climate models that project a modest rise of approximately 1℃ for a doubling of carbon dioxide. It also suggests two further things. First, the Earth’s climate is not as sensitive to increases of carbon dioxide as the climate models assume. Second, factors independent of increasing carbon dioxide concentrations have played a significant role in the recent rise of temperatures on the Earth over the past century and a half, just as we climate realists have been saying all along.
Physicist Frank Stefani, Ph.D., a researcher at the Helmholtz Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, a Dresden-based research laboratory that is a member of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, examined the geomagnetic index, a measure of the Earth’s magnetic field as observed at Cambridge and Melbourne since 1844. Stefani conducted a regression analysis comparing changes in the index, carbon dioxide levels, and temperatures, concluding the ECS is approximately 1.1 +/- 0.5 °C. This is less than half of the ECS assumed in the climate models the IPCC relies on.
Stefani’s analysis indicates solar influence accounts for 30 to 70 percent of the recent planetary warming, in contrast to the IPCC which has claimed as much as 98 percent of the warming is human-induced. Because of the cyclical nature of solar activity, Stefani forecasts even a further increase in CO2 concentration of 2.5 ppm per year throughout the current century would produce only a 1° C temperature increase by the year 2100:Even for the highest climate sensitivities, and an unabated linear CO2 increase, we predict only a mild additional temperature rise of around 1 K (Kelvin) until the end of the century, while for the lower values an imminent temperature drop in the near future, followed by a rather flat temperature curve, is prognosticated.
The 2°C target established in the 2015 Paris climate agreement “could likely be met even without any drastic decarbonization measures,” concludes Stefani.
SOURCE: Climate
Video of The Week: Dan Bongino Destroys Climate Alarmist with Facts, Data from The Heartland Institute
On his Fox News Channel program “Unfiltered” host Dan Bongino recently had on Democratic Strategist Nomiki Konst. She peddled the typical alarmist line that humans are causing climate change that is making tornadoes and hurricanes more powerful and dangerous. To his credit, Bongino likes to have liberals and leftists on his program to debate hot topics.
Unfortunately, Konst is neither a scientist nor familiar with the data on extreme weather. Bongino is familiar with the data, and cited both The Heartland Institute’s work, and statements by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that climate change is not making tornadoes more frequent or powerful in the United States.
BONUS Video of The Week – Q&A: The IPCC and its Violations of the Scientific Method in Climate Science
Dr. David R. Legates, Ph.D., Tom Sheahen, Ph.D., Howard “Cork” Hayden, Ph.D., and Ken Haapala take questions after their panel on the scientific method, and how the United Nations’ reports repeatedly violate it. Recorded at The Heartland Institute’s 14th International Conference on Climate Change on October 16, 2021 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
Climate Comedy
via Cartoons by Josh
Recommended Sites
H. Sterling Burnett Ph.D. is a Heartland senior fellow on environmental policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
Good post. There was quite a lot of grenzwirtschaft before the rise of the National Socialists in Germany, and that sort of border science that rejected reason and evidence led to political excesses, to put it mildly.
If one accepts “organic” agriculture, accepting the validity of CAGW is an easy step..
Just do not ask any hard questions.
Organic agriculture works the same way as wind and solar, you just have to tailor the users (us) to the availability of the product and the problems go away.
I keep reading there are too many of us anyway.
A friend of mine’s boss, when he worked in Germany used to cut to the chase and simply refer to the green party as the new national socialists.
How quickly history is forgotten.
A ridiculous assertion: no connection between current green policy and ‘National socialism’ (a right wing movement)
Any kind of fanaticism is authoritarian. The rational majority is generally enough to keep it constrained. Where it breaks down is when the rational find a way to profit off the fanaticism. As is happening with CAGW.
The nutters are happily wearing out shoe leather beating up the pavement, the ‘scientist’ have been paid off to keep the scam going for as long as humanly possible, while corporations and investors are raking in the real cash dropped by governments thanks to the unwitting taxpayer. The sucker who is paying for the entire mess.
Wrong, the Greens are and the Nasis were socialist, so not right wing but strong left wing.
Learn history.
No you “learn history”.
And stop revising it to fit your own right-wing ideology.
Can’t have ‘your side’ commit a Holocaust now can we?
Because that is what this is all about denying.
So we’ll turn them into Commies.
Since when was any left-wing party racist?
They wear that fact as a badge of honour – just look at the current cancellation of people for espousing (supposed) racist views by left-wing zealots!!.
So was Hitler “Racist”?
Only the most devastating in terms of lives lost/destroyed in the history of the planet.
If he wasn’t than it didn’t go to plan well for the Jews eh?
National Socialism is not left-wing.
It’s far right wing using nationalism to fire up the masses
(I wonder where there is a modern day parallel?)
Try Googling
Here:
Do find anything that supports your “fake news” narrative that seems to have taken root in the US Republican minds.
https://www.google.com/search?q=were+the+nazis+left+or+right+wing&rlz=1C1CHBF_en-GBGB743GB743&sxsrf=AOaemvJlRQyuKROZmP_jf9q7GqkanJDwRg%3A1641648678361&ei=JpLZYeTEFZGFhbIPzqiq8A0&ved=0ahUKEwjk78byoaL1AhWRQkEAHU6UCt4Q4dUDCA8&uact=5&oq=were+the+nazis+left+or+right+wing&gs_lcp=Cgdnd3Mtd2l6EAMyBAgjECc6BwgjELADECdKBAhBGAFKBAhGGABQkwhY7x5gniRoAXAAeACAAWuIAcYDkgEDNC4xmAEAoAEByAEBwAEB&sclient=gws-wiz
FI:
https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/the-nazi-rise-to-power/the-nazi-rise-to-power/the-role-of-the-conservative-elite/
“The conservative elite were the old ruling class and new business class in Weimar Germany. Throughout the 1920s they became increasingly frustrated with the Weimar Republic’s continuing economic and political instability, their lack of real power and the rise of communism. They believed that a return to authoritarian rule was the only stable future for Germany which would protect their power and money.
The first move towards this desired authoritarian rule was Hindenburg’s increasing use of Article 48 . Between 1925-1931 Article 48 was used a total of 16 times. In 1931 alone this rose to 42 uses, in comparison to only 35 Reichstag laws being passed in the same year. In 1932, Article 48 was used 58 times.
The conservative elite’s second move towards authoritarian rule was helping the Nazi Party to gain power. The conservative elite and the Nazi Party had a common enemy – the political left .
As Hitler controlled the masses support for the political right, the conservative elite believed that they could use Hitler and his popular support to ‘democratically’ take power. Once in power, Hitler could destroy the political left. Destroying the political left would help to remove the majority of political opponents to the ring-wing conservative elite.
Once Hitler had removed the left-wing socialist opposition and destroyed the Weimar Republic, the conservative elite thought they would be able to replace Hitler, and appoint a leader of their choice.
As Hitler’s votes dwindled in the November 1932 elections, the conservative elite knew that if they wanted to use Hitler and the Nazis to destroy the political left, they had to act quickly to get Hitler appointed as chancellor.
Von Papen and Oskar von Hindenburg (President Hindenburg’s son) met secretly and backed Hitler to become chancellor. A group of important industrialists, including Hjalmar Schacht and Gustav Krupp, also wrote outlining their support of Hitler to President Hindenburg.
The support of these figures was vital in Hindenburg’s decision to appoint Hitler as chancellor. Once elected, the conservative elite soon realised that they had miscalculated Hitler and his intentions.
Once elected, the conservative elite soon realised that they had miscalculated Hitler and his intentions.
So in your opinion was Mr Hitler a free market or a state controlled economy guy ?
Is a free market economy Racist ?
National Socialism is not left-wing.
It’s far right wing using nationalism to fire up the masses
(I wonder where there is a modern day parallel?)
You heard about Uyghurs in China ?
Moslems in China ?
“they wanted to use Hitler and the Nazis to destroy the political left”
One of the most absurd things I’ve ever read!
What part of National SOCIALIST Workers Party don’t you understand?
The battle between the Nazis and the Communists was of the same nature as the European wars between the Protestants and the Catholics. They both considered themselves the “true Christians”, and the other as heretics.
The disingenuous framing of the Nazis as the “right” was needed as the Left in the US had strongly backed Hitler, as a true Socialist, right up to the point where he invaded Russia. This of course ruined their propaganda that wars are caused by Capitalism. How then to cover up the problem of two Socialist countries at war with each other? Simple, just call the Nazis “right wing”. Total propaganda with no basis in reality.
I think you answer was for AB ?
Most of the so called “left wing opposition” just ended up joining the SA. I think the phrase “beefsteak Nazi”was coined to describe them.
Anti-semitism is rife in the UK’s Labour party
Racism is rife The Optimum Trust/Population Matters of which David Attenborough is a left-wing patron.
Just because people are left-wing doesn’t mean they can’t be racist.
Just because people are right-wing doesn’t mean they are racist.
Just because people are Black/ Asian/ Hispanic/ LBGTQ/ Christian/ Jewish/Muslim doesn’t mean they can’t be racist/ homophobic/ fundamentalists
Stop revising history to suit your own left-wing ideology
National socialism was not “right wing”, it was a centralized authoritarian system which controlled the production and distribution of goods, like any other form of socialism. The mere claim that allowing owners to continue to manage companies (so long as they did as the Government told them to do), does not mean it was right wing. It simply made more sense to the Nazis than nationalizing the companies outright, and then having them managed by Government appointed “yes men”.
Doesn’t it make more sense to you?
Education has become something of a misnomer in many of the developed countries.
Climate is changing weekly?
Why, yes, Dennis: it is what used to be referred to as your weather forecast for the week ahead. (If I have to put sarc in here….)
Even hourly 😀
Yesterday we had snow, sun and rain within hours
The idea that democracy is the problem isn’t a new one, and isn’t confined to a few mad academics. Take this for instance:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/20/democracy-is-the-planets-biggest-enemy-climate-change/
You note the characteristic craziness in the quote: contrary to the implication of its remarks about China, the Chinese authoritarian regime has in fact rejected the very measures the alarmists want to see implemented. There is every reason to believe this is because they simply don’t buy the alarmist story. They are growing their economy, and if this results in more emissions, fine. The same thing applies to the world’s largest democracy, India.
Now, the piece does go on to argue that
But the line of thought is the same. Its that we want to take some (unspecified) measures, but the voters will not go for them. So we must do something to get around them.
The problem is thought to be that the voters are failing to recognize the obvious need for extreme measures to save the planet. Some remedy must be found. One remedy is to abolish their right to determine policy. This is rejected only because its impractical. Only because its unlikely to yield the desired result, that is, the immediate enactment of some unspecified measures to save the planet.
The other way, in subsequent paragraphs, is to change the makeup of the voting population and engage in mass propaganda at the existing voters, so that the measures can get democratic approval.
The problem the authors don’t seem to understand is that the measures they want are unacceptable to the electorate for the same reason they are unacceptable to the Chinese leadership. They are neither possible, nor, were they possible, would they be effective.
You cannot, take the UK as an example, simultaneously move power generation to wind and solar, vehicles to EV, heating to heat pumps, and gas supply to hydrogen. It is simply not possible, and were it possible, would anyway not contribute an iota to reducing global CO2 emissions, which are said to be the problem.
The hydrogen part is the craziest aspect of all – the idea is that you reduce the requirement for gas by converting everyone to heat pumps, and at the same time you convert the gas pipe network, which will have become redundant, to supplying hydrogen. You also change out all the gas appliances which will have been converted to electricity anyway. And while doing this you frantically search for some hitherto undiscovered source of the hydrogen no-one is going to buy anyway, since they’ve all been moved to using wind generated electricity.
Neither China nor India will reduce emissions. They won’t sacrifice economic growth. And the article is anyway wrong to think the Chinese authoritarian model has any more power to do it than the Indian. The Chinese regime is very conscious that it is sitting on a dormant volcano. The bargain its made is that the people will go along with authoritarian rule, in exchange for economic growth. If they default on their side of the bargain, there will be uncontrollable mass popular unrest. The Chinese regime is no more able to implement emission reduction than the Indian regime. The power may nominally be there, and it may have troops and mass surveillance to enforce any measures they take, but they will never dare to exercise it because as soon as unrest escalates beyond a certain point they will have lost it. The use of those powers on the required scale would be the end of them.
What the authors of pieces like this need to understand is that the problem is not with the form of government. Its with the total irrationality of the policies they want to implement. If they cannot convince the voters to back them, there is a reason. Its that they make no sense.
? ?
Thunberg… was not asking for less democracy. She was asking for a democracy in which she could be heard.”
Anyone who can address the UN Assembly, and the US Congress on Earthday, and appear on virtually all MSM platforms multiple times, is hardly asking for “an opportunity to be heard”. (sic) She was absolutely asking for less democracy. She wants a government that does what she tells it to do. Which is not to be confused with any sort of democracy.
Is it time to take away the freedoms of those pushing authoritarianism before they take away ours?
There is a very interesting piece in this week’s Spectator which argues that the recent adoption of vaccination passports is resulting in UK IDs by the back door. Also that their use in Continental Europe is resulting in a kind of distributed social control.
It is now possible to ban entry to public places like pubs, restaurants, sporting events and concerts to those who are not able to present a document with proof of vaccination.
But vaccination is just a particular case. The infrastructure is now in place to allow banning of individuals from any kind of venue for any reason. It would, for instance, be possible to ban people from taking some kinds of transport. From entering libraries or council offices or supermarkets. From buying gasoline. Any activity you can think of which requires a purchase.
It is very easy to imagine a situation in which the Chinese concept of social credit ratings and privileges associated with them is implemented in the West by the back door. The vaccination passport is a very dangerous example because the condition it certifies is verifiable and the rationale for the restrictions is very reasonable.
But once you have the infrastructure in place its easy to imagine many regimes, particularly regimes in Continental Europe which don’t have the UK tradition of individual freedom, implementing controls for quite different purposes. All of which will have perfectly reasonable justifications at the time.
Imagine, for instance, that a country, in the wake of some latest terrorist atrocity, were to say that all people who have been entered on the intelligence services’ alarm list will be denied access to transport, or some kinds of shopping, or some kinds of religious institutions. Imagine that this country in response to the atrocity by some religious group members starts to record who is a practicing member (service attending member) of each faith.
We should always remember the Dutch experience in WWII. The Dutch had for apparently very good reasons maintained a register of religions. The reason was tolerance and multi-culturalism. It made it possible to automatically fund the religion of your choice, and of course there was no discrimination based on religion because we were determinedly multi cultural. And it was only in the town halls that there were such records.
The invaders were delighted with the convenient tool this gave them. All they had to do was get the records from the town halls and round up their chosen suspects…
Infrastructure once installed will be used for purposes beyond the dreams of the founders. Who would have thought that two of the main driving uses of the Internet would turn out to be pornography and piracy? But its happened. Who knows what the ultimate use of the vaccine passport infrastructure will be? But history offers many discouraging examples.
In the pre-cyber days of WWII records weren’t easily accessible, fortunately, as this episode illustrates.
One cannot preserve Freedom by taking away the Freedom of others. One can only preserve Freedom by convincing a majority that Freedom is a bedrock foundation for civilization. Facism, be it physical or intellectual, must be strongly opposed everywhere and every time.
European wind power set for record Q4 as stormy year-end offsets pre-Christmas lull | S&P Global Platts (spglobal.com)
Including Britain, which is not included in the WindEurope data, European wind averaged around 62 GW over Dec. 1-28, meaning Q4 wind was on course to average around 60 GW, up 10% year on year after monthly records were set in October and November.
(and yes, there was a lull in December pre Xmas: not a problem!)
Well, griff, how do you cope when there is a lull?
Freeze?
Go hungry?
Do tell.
The following is still WIP (Work In Progress), but I’m not sure “not a problem” is an accurate summary of what happened to the GB electricity grid during the “16th to 21st of December 2021” period.
You’re missing the point of the data. What a country needs to run properly is regular predictable supply. The reason there was not a problem was that the standby gas generation kicked in.
So what’s happening is that the green proposal, realistically, is not to use wind as generation. Its to use a combination of wind plus gas or other dispatchable.
So then what you have to explain is, why have the wind? Why not just have the gas?
It doesn’t matter how much overall power is generated from wind at times when its not needed. What matters is how to plan the grid, and no sensible planner would include large amounts of wind in it.
You don’t have to believe wind and solar are the solution, just because you think there is a climate crisis. But this seems to be a reflex, believe in the crisis against the evidence, then automatically believe in wind against all the evidence.
Let me put it more succinctly. You have to have gas anyway. So the only justification for wind is as an addon. Do the sums like that and the wind makes no sense, its not cost effective. It loses money – as an addon, which is all its good for.
In Germany there was a 7% decline in wind power in the first quarter because of lack of winds from Jan-March. The article above talks of wind only supplying 14% of Europe’s energy from July- Sept and an overall fall of wind energy production of 16% over the last year. But wind was up for the last quarter so everything is alright in griffland
You’re being disingenuous, mate. From your link:
Even if we accept your quote at face value, we’re talking about 62GW out of 230GW installed across Europe. What’s that? 27%?
Not exactly going to keep the lights on across Europe, is it?
But where does the money/brain comes from to create and grow these Brown/Green Shirts and H-tler/Climate Jugend ? Who are the Wizards behind the curtain who can print all that is needed to buy/corrupt the system ? Not our puppet ‘leaders’.
And what freedom can they take away when what we have is only Fake freedom. Just think of Direct Taxation that gives those in power the right to know EVERYTHING about you. So how can anyone with a strait face say We The People are Free. We are not and therefore they can impose all those draconian laws upon us.
“primarily the movement’s intellectual leadership” – Sorry, I stopped right there. Intellectual leadership???? What???? Ummm…. overuse of polysyllablic prose and production of papers that weight up to two pounds, overloaded with technicalities designed to confuse the reader (or put him to sleep) are not a sign of intellectual anything. They are meant to put you to sleep when you try to read them.
Yes, it’s all aimed at controlling the uncontrollable. If these bozos who think they are SO superior to everyone else actually undertook a serious review of history they’d realize that dictators’ rulerships were generally quite short.
They should be running scared, but as long as they can hornswoggle grants money out of those who provide it, they will continue to run this scam. It’s ridiculous, but that’s how it is. Until this fad of “the Earth is burning up1!!” ends, and the money flow stops, they’ll keep it up. Oddly enough, they are some of the worst trash-dumpers on the planet. They never, ever pick up after themselves, or put their popsicle wraps and soda cups in the trash barrel standing close by.
They are those who are destroying this planet, not the rest of us.
yes, in a couple of decades there will be broken down bird choppers, and obsolete solar panels, littering the earth. And no one is going to be held responsible for paying to clean it all up.
Dr Stefani’s correlation between CO2 and Geomagnetic effects seems to falter badly after about 1980….so is at high risk of being a spurious correlation.
An interesting YouTube video by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder: “Do Climate Models predict Extreme Weather?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqNHdY90StU
I’m not sure what her point was.
Western nations should try and be more like North Korea! Their population has a really low carbon footprint.