Continuation of the New Statesman Whitehouse/Lynas blogs: Number 2

4,522 Responses to “Continuation of the New Statesman Whitehouse/Lynas blogs: Number 2”

1. tempterrain says:

   17/08/2011 at 2:00 pm

   I don’t think Britain is socialist in the 21st century. If it ever was, it would have been in the period after the war when the many of the big industries in the Uk were nationalised, and there was free education at university level. I would say Mrs Thatcher put an end to that period of British history.

   Although the Brits like to deny it they are all terribly class conscious. What accent you have. What school you went to. Who you parents were etc They all go silly over Royalty.

   Social Mobility is very low in the UK
   http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8639671.stm

   They like to think they lead the world at this and that but its really just wishful thinking. Mind you, having said that, they have suddenly produced a very decent cricket team out of nowhere, so there is hope for them yet if they just get their act together!
2. peter geany says:

   17/08/2011 at 8:28 pm

   PeterM The reason for the riots are many and varied, and I don’t want to debate them simply because I don’t have the time to do the subject justice. But it was most definitely not due to anything those opportunists have had cut.

   As to the Cuts, the only part of the UK that has seen cuts are the private sector. And this is simply because we in the private sector don’t get any government money. Richard North made the point today about our ridiculous expenditure on off shore wind turbines, and to put the operating subsidy into context related it back to proposed cuts in our health care budget. Get rid of these stupid monstrosity’s and our health budget is safe.

   More over we know they don’t work and so we will still have to build standby Gas plants to inefficiently run at low power setting ready to take up the load. And the Power companies are asking for a subsidy to build these plants. And as we know most power from wind is produced at night when we can not use it so the actual useful output will be less than 10% of installed capacity.The bottom feeders and pond life we have in power at present are setting new standards for stupidity. This will undoubtedly manifest itself during the next euro election.
3. peter geany says:

   18/08/2011 at 2:06 pm

   This author puts it all far more succinctly than I ever could

   http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/274492/new-britannia-mark-steyn?page=1
4. tempterrain says:

   19/08/2011 at 6:52 am

   Peter G,

   What proportion of Government spending would be classed as “green” in the UK, in your opinion?
5. Brute says:

   19/08/2011 at 10:51 pm

   NYTimes: ‘Green’ jobs flopped…

   http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/us/19bcgreen.html?_r=2
6. peter geany says:

   20/08/2011 at 1:22 pm

   PeterM That is a good question for which I don’t have an authoritative answer. Too much I would say, but I think that a direct answer to your question would come up with an answer of “not very much”.

   What I would say is that the emphasis of our spending has shifted, where we now spend vasts amounts that yield very little. Wind power is one area and bio-fuels another. Not only do we subsidise construction, but we subsidise production. In the past this would have meant the consumer not paying the total cost of production directly. Today it means we pay an excess for production as we are investing in extraordinarily inefficient production methods rather than the most cost effective.

   It will all come to a grinding halt soon. It can not have escaped your notice that the markets have been almost universally unimpressed with the political leadership in Europe and the US. Our own leadership in the UK rather than taking the lead and suggesting the only option they now have left in Europe, namely that Germany and its northern Friends (excluding France) leave the euro, so that the rest of Europe can devalue and grow their economies, have suggested that the euro zone accelerates fiscal union. This raises many questions over democratic legitimacy.

   It will be recalled that both France and the Dutch rejected this idea when it was written into the EU Constitution and it was dropped. The Constitution was re-written as a series of amendments to existing treaties and in this way was just adopted by all the EU governments without the need for a referendum. However the Irish did hold one and rejected it. Huge pressure and and much bribery was used to convince the Irish in a rerun to vote yes. The UK was refused a referendum as the answer would have been NO.

   Now to relate this back to your question, rather than continuing to improve our collective standard of living, the liberal left governments of Europe have perversely only managed to divert money from the middle and working class to the growing unworking class and to their moneyed Friends. And perversely the more they try to control the markets, the greater the uncertainty and volatility in the markets and the more money is lost by the working and middle classes. Their green schemes have been a classic case in point, with rich land owners able to make money for doing nothing productive or useful with otherwise wilderness land.

   The idea of trying to produce useful amounts of electricity from solar energy in the UK is another area that hits the working class hardest whilst enriching landowners and property owners. Much regulation revolving around industry, manufacturing and waste collection and disposal is motivated by the green movement. Companies employ people to monitor their “carbon footprint” and craft pages of bull sh1t convincing the public that they are green and take reducing carbon emissions. All this activity is just waste and contributes nothing other than to increase costs and this in turn causes the government to spend and borrow more.

   Now I’m off on holiday and hopefully some sun, because there has been very little here this year.

   [TonyN says: Have a good holiday, and this may cheer you on your way
   http://www.thegwpf.org/best-of-blogs/3664-walter-russell-mead-feeding-the-masses-on-unicorn-ribs.html Other countries have to take note of the US experience]
7. Alex Cull says:

   21/08/2011 at 3:02 pm

   Re offshore wind in the UK, the writing has been on the wall for some time, even among some supporters of renewable/low-carbon energy, that it is too expensive and being implemented too quickly. Here’s an extraordinary argument that took place on Channel 4 News in September 2010, when the Thanet wind farm was opened off the Kent coast (transcript here.) Dr John Constable of the Renewable Energy Foundation said that “the levels of wind contemplated by Government seem, to many of us, reckless, economically and technically”.

   In May this year, Lord Adair Turner of the CCC warned that “offshore wind at the moment is more expensive than either onshore or nuclear”, and that “it’s the scale of the increase in offshore over the next ten years, in particular, which is just driving in particular the increases in electricity prices”; his advice was to reduce offshore wind targets by 15% – 20% (transcript here.)

   And last week, Professor Dieter Helm talked to the BBC’s David Shukman (video here and transcript here), as reported in today’s Telegraph by Christopher Booker. Here is what Dieter Helm said:

   Well, if you look at the costs of offshore wind, and indeed if you look practically at what is involved in building an offshore wind farm, it’s inherently complicated, it’s in a difficult environment, and it’s unsurprising that it is really, almost staggeringly, expensive. I mean, if you want a kind of, sort of ballpark order-of-magnitude of cost, here, offshore wind is one of the very few things that makes nuclear power look cheap – and it certainly isn’t cheap, nuclear power. And the only thing that makes offshore wind look a cheap way of reducing emissions is the kind of stuff being stuck on people’s roofs – solar panels and so on. So what we’re doing is choosing, effectively, the most expensive way of reducing emissions first. And we’re doing it by an enormous commitment to this one technology. And the sorts of sums involved are of the order of a £100 billion, to be spent by 2020. That’s just for the wind farms. Then you’ve got to put the transmission in place, all the systems, all the backup. That’s probably another £30, £40 billion on top, at least. So we want £150 billion to build these wind farms in less than ten years. You can work that out as billions per annum. And then, ultimately, you have to ask yourself: and who’s going to pay? And you might like people to pay. You might like customers to pay, you might like industry to pay. But they actually have to be able to do it. And given the extent of fuel poverty, and given the state of our economy, I doubt it can, in fact, be afforded.
8. manacker says:

   22/08/2011 at 6:10 am

   PeterM

   “Social mobility” (as you put it) is arguably lower in the UK than it is in Switzerland and lower in Switzerland than it is in the USA.

   Now, interestingly, I would say that (of the three) “socialism” is most developed in the UK and least in the USA.

   A. Is there a trend here?

   B. Or is this coincidental?

   C. Or are the two not related at all?

   What do you think, Peter?

   Max
9. tempterrain says:

   22/08/2011 at 1:44 pm

   Max,

   I’m not sure that ‘what I think’ is of such importance. Lets look at the facts and gather some figures from different countries.
   I’ve found this graph which suggests that the UK is only marginally better than the USA in terms of social mobility. Switzerland isn’t included unfortunately.
   http://angryfutureexpat.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/social-mobility.jpg
10. manacker says:

    22/08/2011 at 10:42 pm

    PeterM

    This updated study shows UK has lowest “social mobility”.
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/10/oecd-uk-worst-social-mobility

    Max
11. tempterrain says:

    23/08/2011 at 8:27 am

    Max,

    Yes, this looks pretty much the same as my graph. So, maybe the “old dart” and the USA, should learn from countries like Australia, Denmark and Finland? Certainly in Australia there has always been the tradition of “the fair go”. That means that everyone , no matter what their social background, should have the same life chances as everyone else. There should be no heredity privilege, as there seems to be in the UK and USA. I support that concept 100%.

    However, we do need to ask, if the USA and the UK do want a society based on social mobility? Maybe they don’t? They are always snakes as well as ladders in the ‘game of life’.
12. James P says:

    23/08/2011 at 10:03 am

    “snakes as well as ladders”

    Indeed. Politicians always seem to forget that ‘social mobility’ can be in either direction!
13. James P says:

    23/08/2011 at 10:12 am

    Alex

    If onshore wind farms are of debatable value (even with subsidies) then offshore wind must be totally bonkers. As an engineer with some North Sea oil experience, I shall be very interested to see, a) how they are constructed and b) how long they survive. Once a few seize up or get damaged by winter storms (when it will be too rough to repair them) I can see the whole idea being quietly dropped.
14. Alex Cull says:

    24/08/2011 at 9:13 pm

    James P, re the harshness of the North Sea environment, here’s an interesting article on the website of GL, a German maritime engineering company, that stresses the fact that these are still early days for offshore wind farms, which require an extremely strong protective coating for turbines against corrosion:

    Proper corrosion protection not only means long-term cost-savings but is also a safety-critical issue. “But safe operation of offshore wind farms – also in regard to corrosion protection – is not yet guaranteed for the expected 20-25 year lifetime,” said Christoph Kraft, engineer with E.ON Climate & Renewables. Even when repairs on the anticorrosion system already have been done, their strengths and weaknesses will not become apparent until the offshore wind turbine has again been in operation for some time.
15. manacker says:

    01/09/2011 at 12:02 am

    NEWS FROM CERN SHOWS CLOUD COSMIC RAY LINK TO CLIMATE
    http://www.thegwpf.org/the-observatory/3702-cern-finds-qsignificantq-cosmic-ray-cloud-effect.html

    “The science is settled”, said Gore
    “So let’s tax and do research no more”
    But to Gore’s consternation
    There’s a new explanation
    Which nobody thought of before.
16. Brute says:

    01/09/2011 at 11:42 am

    Solar company touted by Obama closing — despite $535 million from feds…

    1,100 ‘green jobs’ gone…

    http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Solyndra-Shutting-Down-128802718.html
17. manacker says:

    01/09/2011 at 11:18 pm

    Brute

    Do a quick calculation to cheer yourself up.

    You know about how much income tax revenue the USA had in 2010.

    You know how much direct income tax you paid in 2010.

    You probably don’t know how much indirect tax you paid, but double your direct tax bill for a rough estimate.

    So you can figure out how much of the $535 million came out of your pocket.

    It really wasn’t all that much, and it was for a “just cause”, wasn’t it?

    Max
18. Brute says:

    02/09/2011 at 2:21 am

    Hey Max,

    The trouble is that this isn’t the only shakedown of the US citizen……there are hundreds of thousands of these theft schemes. As I write this, my share of the debt is $131,000………..add Mrs. Brute and that’s $262,000 that we “owe” per this household.

    http://www.usdebtclock.org/

    Call me crazy, but I take money (my property) being stolen personally.

    Obama’s plan is to loot and pillage………to strip every nickel of wealth from productive Americans and hand it over to his selected cronies to buy votes and fund his Marxist Utopia.

    That’s what’s happening in America at this moment under this regime.

    Read Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky…………this is Obama’s playbook.
19. Brute says:

    02/09/2011 at 2:45 am

    New Science Confirms: Earth’s Temperature Determined Not by Taxes and Regulations but by Sun

    Science is never truly settled, but when it comes to global warming, it’s getting close:

    The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.

    The research, published with little fanfare this week in the prestigious journal Nature, comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere.

    In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.

    The left-wing establishment has been doing its best to keep a lid on this breakthrough, but in the end, truth will out. Already liberals are becoming desperate enough to start playing the absurdly irrelevant race card to silence skeptics. As with their race-baiting attack on the Tea Party, this is a sure indication that they feel the wall against their backs.
20. manacker says:

    04/09/2011 at 8:38 am

    Brute

    Your 4293 sounds very gloomy for the USA.

    The bit of news we get here on the US debt ceiling / economic crisis (probably copied from the NYT in the left-leaning press here) is that the crisis can be blamed on the right-extremist Tea Party for blocking administration plans to invest in infrastructure projects. Sounds fishy to me.

    Max
21. Brute says:

    05/09/2011 at 4:54 am

    The bit of news we get here on the US debt ceiling / economic crisis (probably copied from the NYT in the left-leaning press here) is that the crisis can be blamed on the right-extremist Tea Party for blocking administration plans to invest in infrastructure projects.

    Hey Max,

    Is that the same New York Times that was pushing the carbon credits?
22. Brute says:

    06/09/2011 at 11:03 am

    Der Spiegel: Global Warming Now Causes Sea Level Drop! ‘AGW, leads to strange weather shifts, which is now cause of unexpected & ‘biggest sea level drop ever recorded’ in satellite era

    http://notrickszone.com/2011/08/31/der-spiegel-global-warming-now-causes-sea-level-drop-through-weather-shifts/
23. Brute says:

    15/09/2011 at 1:35 am

    This is shaping up to be a deep, deep scandal. Seems that the Obama Administration has been funneling taxpayer money to this solar panel manufacturer in exchange for political contributions.
    The company has since gone bankrupt.

    BURNED: WH pressed on $500M loan to solar company now under investigation…

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-pushed-500-million-loan-to-solar-company-now-under-investigation/2011/09/13/gIQAr3WbQK_print.html
24. Brute says:

    16/09/2011 at 1:54 am

    Great news: Green-jobs subsidies created 1 job for every $4.85 million spent

    http://hotair.com/archives/2011/09/15/great-news-green-jobs-subsidies-created-1-job-for-every-5-44-million-spent/
25. manacker says:

    16/09/2011 at 10:16 pm

    Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Resigns Over Global Warming
    https://mail.google.com/mail/?hl=en&shva=1#inbox/1326b7872815d717

    Dr. Ivar Giaever, a former professor with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the 1973 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, abruptly announced his resignation Tuesday, Sept. 13, from the premier physics society in disgust over its officially stated policy that “globalwarming is occurring.”
    The official position of the American Physical Society (APS) supports the theory that man’s actions have inexorably led to the warming of the planet, through increased emissions of carbon dioxide.
    Giaever does not agree — and put it bluntly and succinctly in the subject line of his email, reprinted at Climate Depot, a website devoted to debunking the theory of man-made climate change.
    “I resign from APS,” Giaever wrote.
    Giaever was cooled to the statement on warming theory by a line claiming that “the evidence is inconvertible.”
    “In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?” he wrote in an email to Kate Kirby, executive officer of the physics society.
    “The claim … is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period,” his email message said.
    A spokesman for the APS confirmed to FoxNews.com that the Nobel Laureate had declined to pay his annual dues in the society and had resigned. He also noted that the society had no plans to revise its statement.
    The use of the word “incontrovertible” had already caused debate within the group, so much so that an addendum was added to the statement discussing its use in April, 2010.
    “The word ‘incontrovertible’ … is rarely used in science because by its very nature, science questions prevailing ideas. The observational data indicate a global surface warming of 0.74 °C (+/- 0.18 °C) since the late 19th century.”
    Giaever earned his Nobel for his experimental discoveries regarding tunneling phenomena in superconductors. He has since become a vocal dissenter from the alleged “consensus” regarding man-made climate fears, Climate Depot reported, noting that he was one of more than 100 co-signer of a 2009 letter to President Obama critical of his position on climate change.
    Public perception of climate change has steadily fallen since late 2009. A Rasmussen Reports public opinion poll from August noted that 57 percent of adults believe there is significant disagreement within the scientific community on global warming, up five points from late 2009.
    The same study showed that 69 percent of those polled believe it’s at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data in order to support their own theories and beliefs. Just just 6 percent felt confident enough to report that such falsification was “not at all likely.”