Britannia Radio

- - - - Win all the arguments and all the idiot politicians (save 10 
in the Lords and 5 in the Commons) ignore the facts and vote for the 
new religion regardless.

This weekend is due to be cold - they say .  It would be good if some 
people would go to government offices on Monday and check the 
thermometers inside (perhaps take one there for the purpose) .  I’ll 
bet the government will keep itself warm!

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THE REGISTER 20.11.08
Lords debate Climate Bill, carbon racket

'We don't know what we're talking about'
    By Andrew Orlowski •

The government's climate minister in the House of Lords dropped a 
clanger on Monday evening, when he claimed that the polar ice caps 
were melting at a record rate.

"It is indisputable that polar ice caps are melting - we can see that 
with our own eyes,"  [What a far-sighted man - about couple of 
thousand miles -cs] Lord Hunt, Minister of State of the Department of 
Energy, told the house. Hunt described himself as a climate 
"agnostic" - but he was swiftly corrected by Lord Lawson of Blaby, 
the former Chancellor.

"My Lords, that is not true of the past year; The noble Lord’s 
predecessors were seriously misinformed by his officials, and I 
suspect that he will be too," Lawson replied. Twisting the knife he 
continued: "That is a real problem for him, and I feel for him.
"The fact is that in the Antarctic, where most of the ice is, the ice 
is thickening and has been for some time. In the Arctic this year 
there has been a greater extension of ice than ever before."

The Lords were debating the Climate Change Bill once again - which 
the Commons voted through on an unusually snowy October evening 
recently. That Bill was passed by our elected representatives by 463 
votes to 3. Would the unelected upper chamber - which has a 
reputation for rejecting and amendming hasty legislation - show 
greater scrutiny?

You can guess the answer to that one. The Amendments were passed by 
around 190 to 10. But the Lordships' debate was at least broader and 
deeper than the six hours of greener-than-thou pledges relayed in the 
Commons last month. A significant speech by Nigel Lawson, now Lord 
Lawson, made the difference. Lawson described it as the first and 
last speech he would make on the Bill - but more of that in a moment.

The debate gave the Government and its supporters the chance to say 
something they hadn't in the Commons. That hand on heart, that they 
don't know what they're talking about. Quite literally. Take this 
exchange between The Earl of Onslow and Lord Hunt. Onslow asked:

"The world’s climate has got colder over the past 10 years, just, 
while world emissions have risen by quite a lot. Can the Minister 
explain that?"

"My Lords, I am not a scientist," the Minister replied, "and it is 
not my role to debate the intricacies of scientific arguments".
"The committees and the expert groups that have looked into these 
matters and which have informed the government’s decision: it is on 
their conclusions that the 80 per cent target is now based."

That's a very odd reply, since Hunt didn't need to offer a scientific 
argument, he'd been confronted with two assertions of fact. Either 
they were true or they were false. Hunt's answer avoiding expressing 
his own judgement either way. Instead, the Minister of State 
preferred to pass - indicating that a) facts are irrelevant and b) 
saying he had total confidence in someone else's judgement. In fact 
Hunt deferred several times in answers to the "committees and expert 
groups" to make his political judgements on his behalf.

When politicians defer to the "science" - that means that judgements 
are being made by their appointed committees and quangos. And the 
committees, it turns out, are highly political - they've got an axe 
to grind. They're doing politics on our behalf. This is a kind of 
evisceration of democratic politics: if these quangos are so wise 
that we aren't permitted to question the political judgements they 
produce - we may as well appoint wise quangos to do all of our 
politics for us.

And Guy Fawkes really could have saved himself the trouble of buying 
all that gunpowder: we've arrived at No Parliament by other means.

So to Lawson.

After Mrs Thatcher's former Chancellor had written a book on policy 
responses to climate change, he discovered that no British publisher 
would take it. A US publisher brought it to market, and it's since 
become a hit, translated into two languages.

Lawson's main point was that this was a futile gesture. It didn't 
require the UK to cut it's own emissions by one gram. But the 
consequences of this gesture were costly. He began by explaining why 
he hadn't spoken before in the House:
"I felt that it was unbecoming for an unbeliever to take part in a 
religious service, which is what all this is really about.
"The Bill will go down in history, and future generations will see it 
as the most absurd Bill that this House and Parliament as a whole as 
ever had to examine, and it has now become more absurd with the 
increase from 60 per cent to 80 per cent."

A futile unilateral gesture?
Lawson invited the Lordships to "pretend the planet is warming" - and 
ignore the figures from the Met Office and Hadley Centre. (Lawson 
said he didn't see the evidence supported the claim that the planet 
was cooling, but it certainly hadn't done a lot of warming since the 
1998 El Nino). "The majority of climate scientists do not think that 
if there were a warming, it would be a disaster." So what then?

The point of the bill was symbolic - and only "makes sense" if other 
countries were to follow suit and make similarly symbolic gestures, 
he argued.

(The UK only contributes 2 per cent of man-made CO2 emissions 
worldwide, while worldwide human emissions are only 2 per cent of the 
planet's CO2 output. And the planet's CO2 is about one tenth of 
greenhouse gas. So the rhetoric is about "setting an example".)

The problem, said Lawson, was that Europe had planned to isolate the 
US, a plan that had "backfired horribly". This left the EU making 
symbolic pledges of its own - no one expects China, the world's 
biggest CO2 emitter, or India to follow. Except that the Europeans 
are now backing off. The catchy 20 per cent by 2020 reduction has 
been abandoned. Germans need their coal, the new members like Poland 
need theirs - and are playing industrialisation catch-up - and the 
whole thing is falling apart.

"Nothing will happen. It can only be agreed unanimously and will be 
looked at again in December this year, after the Poznan meeting, 
which I hope the Minister will grace with his presence. It will be an 
educational event for him."

Lawson highlighted a recent conference called "Cashing in on Carbon" 
in which an investment group featuring Lord Stern was prominently 
featured.
"So the people who gave you the glories and the joys of mortgage-
backed securities are now offering the great business opportunity of 
carbon-backed securities."

Meanwhile the emissions trading system was a "scam": China made a lot 
of money selling these worthless indulgences. So much money, it had 
to tax them. Climate change had also proved to be a vote-loser for 
the Canadian Liberal opposition - its "green shift" cost it the 
election - and in New Zealand, said Lawson. He also warned the Tory 
party not to find itself "high and dry" with symbolic climate gestures.

It was almost a lone voice, as the House of Lords nodded through the 
Amendments.

Back in the Commons, the bill was hailed by climate change minister 
Joan Ruddock as a "triumph for the UK".