Ripping us off - by Richard... Sunday, January 10, 2010

Ripping us off - by Richard... Sunday, January 10, 2010

"As noted in this column three weeks ago, the owners of the Corus steel company stand to gain up to $375m (£234m) in European Union carbon credits for closing their plant in Redcar, only to be rewarded on a similar scale by the United Nations' Clean Development Mechanism fund for switching such production to a new 'clean' Indian steel plant."

That is Dominic Lawson in his column in The Sunday Timestoday.

Interestingly, his brief mention of Corus "three weeks" ago puts his first mention of the issue on 20 December, two weeks after I broke the story on this blog and a week after Booker broke it in his column.

This is typical "above the line" behaviour, where the "great man" has to claim ownership of an issue and can't possibly acknowledge his source, unless of course it is a similar "above the line" figure, which allows him to name-drop and show how well-connected he is.

Actually, the issue is far more complicated that either I, Booker and especially Lawson have allowed for, and it is almost certainly the case that the proximate cause of the Redcar steel works closure was the cancellation of major orders for the plant.

At this particular juncture, it is merely fortuitous that Tata Steel stands to make a fortune out the carbon credit swindle. It cannot be said that the plant was closed specifically to take advantage of the money, although it also has to be said that Tata and other Indian steel-makers have been in the lead when it comes to maximising the opportunities created.

Howsoever, while Lawson is patting himself on the back for his cleverness, Booker is getting stuck in with his column, noting that "the true price of the warmists' folly is becoming clear".

This a theme we have been rehearsing on EU Ref, from which Booker draws some material, but he puts it together in a condensed form which makes for a powerful case. There cannot be any doubt that even a fraction of the money wasted on "climate change" spent instead on preparations for this bad weather would have paid dividends.

What I think is still not registering is quite how much of our money, extracted through taxation, this government has spent on its obsession, or much we have been forced to pay to the likes of utility companies and others, as a result of government fiat.

However, other than to say "hundreds of billions", neither we nor anyone else has any real idea. But one just has to take in the idea that Brown wants £100 billion spent on his fatuous array of offshore wind factories to appreciate the scale of the spending.

Thus, despite the subject being "pigeonholed" as a specialist issue, it should be at the heart of the political debate for, while David Cameron hints only at government expenditure cuts in the tens of billions, he like Brown is content to load many more billions on unfortunate householders, all in the name of climate change.

Yet, when the chips are down, for all that we are being ripped-off, we have a government which cannot even clear the streets of snow.

CLIMATE CHANGE – NEW THREAD

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Green grows the opportunity - by Richard... Saturday, January 09, 2010

Lift a stone and it's interesting to see what crawls out from under it. Lift several on same patch and other creatures emerge in the unaccustomed daylight. Are they related? You bet.

Go back in time for the first stone, way back to December 1996 and we see a technical paper written on an obscure subject that would not normally get a second glance – but for the authors. The two lead authors are Ritu Kumar, Nick Robins, both known to reader of this blog.

At the time, Ms Kumar (or Dr Kumar – as she sometimes allows herself to be called) is a research officer at the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO). She works out of the Vienna International Centre in Austria and is evidently well-paid for doing so.

Three years later she is able to quit her job and travel to London to set up house with her husband, who just happens to be Nick Robins, in deepest Merton. They pay £250,000 cash for 27 Albert Grove, which is then registered as the head office of Rajendra Pachauri's outpost of Empire in London, TERI Europe.

Back in 1996, Nick Robins is working for the environmental "charity", the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) based in London, so well endowed that, last year, it took £12,736,870 in income.

Anyhow, the charitable Mr Robins and his bride Ritu have got together to publish this paper which is entitled, "Incentives for Ecoefficiency Lessons from an Evaluation of Policy Alternatives: a Case Study of the Steel Sector in India" – just the thing for those dark December nights.

Of special interest is that the pair (with local authors) are carrying out a study of the suitability of schemes for reducing "pollution" in the steel industry, concluding that the "regulatory model" is less effective when the regulators are corrupt – which is certainly the case in India. On the other hand, they report that the "incentive model" is "feasible even if we assume that regulators are prone to corruption."

It is, of course, a complete coincidence that the case study is conducted with the assistance of the Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO), which is later to benefit so much from the "incentive model" so earnestly recommended by the Kumar Robins duo.

Needless to say, their endeavours do not stop there. In early 1999, they are beating the same drum, with a joint paper about sustainable cities. Nick is still working for the IIED but Ritu has moved to London and is working as a consultant to the Commonwealth Science Council. Shortly, she and "Patchy" are to set of TERI Europe.

The revered Dr Pachauri, some time later, is to take the chair of a founder member group setting up the India Climate Exchange, which will in time exploit the "incentive model" so assiduously promoted by Ritu Kumar, who now works for him in a "voluntary" capacity.

As for Nick Robins, in December 2000 he joined Henderson Global Investors as head of SRI Research. This is a company which seeks to exploit his "charitable" work on the "incentive model" for pollution control. While there, Robins sets up the "Carbon Disclosure Project" which aims to convince corporations of the "desirability" of publishing their "carbon footprint", so disposing them to pay to reduce it.

He, with Ritu and others, on 27 April 2009 their own company called "Investor Watch," which seems to have a similar objective.

Meanwhile, two years earlier, Robins has been recruited by HSBC as head of their Climate Change Centre of Excellence, further strengthening their ability to exploit the "incentive model" for pollution control, advocated now more than ten years ago by the "charitable" Mr Robins and a UN official called Ritu Kumar.

As for the IIED, in seeking "to help shape a future that ends global poverty", as its mission statement so earnestly tells us, it has now acquired as one if its partners an organisation called TERI Europe - of which Ritu Kumar is director – part of a coalition called the "Working Group on Climate Change and Development," producing a number of joint reports, such as this.

No doubt, the association is beneficial to TERI Europe. As the IIED is keen to assure us, it is not a "grant-making institution." Instead, its income (over £12 million in y/e 2009) is "shared with collaborators and partner organisations in joint project activities".

Nothing here, of course, is remotely illegal. These are just kindly, dedicated people toiling in the vineyard to save the poor, earning a modest crust in the process - some might say. Others might note – not always with approval – that "saving the planet" seems to be a hugely profitable enterprise.

Or, as little Nick once put it, "Green grows the opportunity".

PACHAURI THREAD

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Why? - by Richard...

Gas supplies are running critically low, firms are being shut down and there is a very real prospect of electricity cuts, as the electricity generators are hammering the supply to keep up with demand.

So why is it that we are currently supplying to the French 2.2GW of power, produced from our scarce and dwindling gas supplies, via the interconnector?

Just asking.

CLIMATE CHANGE – NEW THREAD

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Weather and climate - by Richard...

Another superbly forensic analysis over on Biased BBC, this one taking on warmist luvvie, David Shukman.

CLIMATE CHANGE – NEW THREAD

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On hold - by Richard...

After labouring long and mightily, we filed the copy for the Pachauri piece in good time yesterday.

Ironically, though, we been defeated by the weather. The great exposé on the global warming scammer has succumbed to, er ... global warming?

Actually, it is more prosaic. The heavy snows have hit the retailers hard, right at what would be the height of the January sales. Thus, there have been massive cancellations of display adverts in the newspapers, which in turn has triggered a crisis in what we used to call Fleet Street.

Thus, tomorrow, The Sunday Telegraph, in common with other Sunday newspapers, is having to scale back production and cut back the size of their papers. Our piece, therefore, has been held over until next week.

That said, we have some stunning revelations to make – we have clearly landed some blows and there are white flags flying in certain quarters, with "Patchy", as he likes to call himself, squealing with indignation about a "vendetta."

However, perforce, I am in purdah for the time being. My lips are sealed and the blog must remain silent for a week on Patchygate, not through any legal intervention – white flags are being run up the mast in that quarter as well – but simply, I have to give the newspaper the first crack of the whip.

What we have uncovered though, is only the start. I suggested some time ago that this is so big, it is of staggering proportions. Dr Pachauri and his sidekick, Mrs Robins, aka Ms Ritu Kumar, are only the tip of an extremely large and unsavoury iceberg.

The warmists had better hope for colder weather, as we are intent on doing some ice melting of our own. Oh! And it's snowing here - again.

PACHAURI THREAD

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Still more global warming - by Richard...

It is global warming here again, and it is getting serious. It is not so much the depth, as the repeated falls. Each layer compacts and freezes which, with fresh global warming on top becomes lethally slippery.

Local authorities, however, are cutting back on gritting and many will run out of salt completely within a week – with very little chance of immediate replenishment.

It says a great deal for us as a country, and our catastrophically incompetent government that they cannot even keep the roads clear. Refuse collection has been suspended and we have not had our bins emptied since before Christmas. Civil society is gradually seizing up.

The warmists are still out in force though, defending their sacred religion and the nation treats them for what they are – a laughing stock. The latest to crack is Giles Coren in The Times. "Climate change doesn't mean we’ll have lots of lovely weather all the time, you numbskulls!" he storms, telling us he is sick of all the global warming jokes.

Gerald Warner, however, is not convinced. The new "deniers", he says, are the warmists. Me, I've had enough of them, and much else besides. The only consolation is that we don't really need to make up any jokes. We've got one for a government. But then, we could always live in Ireland. The incompetence of the ruling elites, it seems, is endemic.

CLIMATE CHANGE – NEW THREAD

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A very, very sick joke - by Richard... Friday, January 08, 2010

That is what The Times is telling us. But it adds: "The nine farms announced will generate enough electricity to power more than half of Britain’s homes, but only when the wind blows."


And just when you need it most, it doesn't. We're peaking at 59GW and wind was supplying a pathetic 3.5 percent of installed capacity, delivering a mere 147MW just after midnight, or 0.3 percent of our total power requirement. Coal, on the other hand, was bashing out 48.3 percent while gas came in second place with 33.2 percent.

Wind? This is a very, very sick joke.

CLIMATE CHANGE – NEW THREAD

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Looks like climate from here - by Richard...

The death toll from Britain’s biggest freeze for decades reached 22 today, reports The Times - and this is before we see what is slated to be the coldest night so far.

That, however, only takes into account the immediate, observable deaths associated with accidents and other incidents. But, as the BBC admits, cold is a silent killer.

Last year's low temperatures saw the highest number of "excess deaths" - the number of those who perished over and above what is normal for the time of year - for nearly a decade.

These amounted to 40,000 in England and Wales and represented a rise of nearly 50 percent over the previous year. In the South East, where people were perhaps least prepared for a cold snap, deaths nearly doubled.

Given that this year we are experiencing much harsher conditions, one can expect a similar toll, representing a major medical emergency. Although estimates vary, the heat wave in France in the summer of 2003 produced about 15,000 deaths. By that measure, cold is a much more potent killer.

To that, we must add the economic cost, currently estimated as around £700 million. That does not include losses arising from the sudden interruption of gas supplies from Norway arising from a breakdown in the pipeline system.

And, for all Monbiot's prattling, this is not "freak" weather – it is part of a pattern that has been with us for three years, the inevitable result of an established cooling cycle, where we have seen each of the last three winters more severe than the rest.

I checked our own blog and we have written over 150 posts on "snow" worldwide, building up a picture of deteriorating conditions. Then, last March we were pointing out that all the signs were there, pointing to an established cooling cycle.

Now, when you get a "freak" event, that is indeed "weather". This is precisely what the French heat wave was. But we are seeing fundamental changes in the weather cycle which reflect a consistent pattern over three years. That is beginning to look more like "climate."

This is, of course, why the likes of Bastardi and Corbyn have been able to predict that we were in for a bad winter, when the Met Office could not. The fact is that the orthodoxy is blinded by Mann-made global warming and cannot see the snow for the tree-rings.

With many local authorities employing more climate change advisors than they have gritter trucks, we are now paying for that folly. Many are paying with their lives, unable to afford the fuel bills that the warmists have been keen to inflate in order to "save the planet" from the hypothetical risk of CO2 – to say nothing of filling their pockets.

But, if The Times is reporting 22 deaths here, immediate victims of the cold, in India, they are reporting a death toll of 195. Fortunately for that multi-millionaire thief Pachauri – tucked up in his luxury mansion at 160 Golf Links – he will be warm and toasty while those he helps keeps in poverty perish from the cold.

CLIMATE CHANGE – NEW THREAD