Sunday, 21 February 2010


The Sunday Times reports on the latest YouGov poll which has the Tory lead slump to just six percent. The not-the-tory-party makes 39 percent, down one point on January, Labour gets 33 percent, up two and the Lib-Dims drop one point to 17 percent.

We are told that the six-point gap is the narrowest since December 2008, the results suggest a hung parliament with the Cameron's party set to take 290 seats, 10 seats more than Labour.

Even worse news awaits the Boy over in The Sunday Telegraph though. There, a tracker poll byPolitics Home has his personal lead over Gordon Brown halved in six months.

The centrepiece of the Cameron experiment has always been that call-me-Dave has been more popular than his own party, dragging it up in the polls.

When voters were asked in September whether they thought he was doing a good or a bad job, Mr Cameron scored a positive performance rating of 36 (calculated by subtracting the percentage of people who thought he was doing a bad job from the percentage who thought he was doing a good job).

However, that rating fell by several points each week until it was 12 by the second week of February. By contrast, Brown's performance rating, was minus 55 in September last year and climbed steadily by several points a week until it was minus 33 by mid February.

If the trend continued, says The Telegraph, Cameron and Brown could be neck and neck by the time of the election on 6 May, each with performance ratings of just below zero. NeitherAutonomous mind nor Your Freedom and Ours would be surprised.

But what is especially significant is that Cameron's fall from grace began in the first week of November, which coincided with him ditching his EU referendum pledge. He can't say he wasn't warned – he was in no uncertain terms, but the Boy thought he knew better.

He didn't.

COMMENT THREAD

The weekly column is posted. At least he recognises a good story when he sees one - or two. Ironically, one of the contextualised Google ads on the page takes you here, to a site flogging carbon credits. My guess is that they won't pick up much business from Booker readers.

However, the site might come as a bit of a surprise to Jeremy Warner, assistant editor for The Daily Telegraph. He has just learnt about CDMs from this brilliant article. You can see why that paper is so far behind the curve – the system has only been in place since 1998, the year after Kyoto.

Meanwhile, Booker's second piece deals with a kerfuffle in The Independent. This has Sir John Houghton, former head of the UK Met Office – and erstwhile trustee of TERI-Europe – complaining of the use of a quote attributed to him, the apocryphal "Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen."

Houghton denies ever having said this – or anything like it, claiming that the exact quote was: "There are those who will say 'unless we announce disasters, no one will listen', but I'm not one of them."

Oddly, although the quote was attributed to his book, published in 1994, with it first appearing on the internet in 2006, it has taken until now for Houghton to complain – and that is after Booker used the truncated version in his book, The Real Global Warning Disaster.

The trouble is that, if Houghton did not utter the truncated version, it is so close to the sort of thing that he might of said that it conveys credibility. And, despite his denials, he did indeed say something very similar.

Thanks to that admirable expert on "risk", Professor John Adams, and Professor Philip Stott, who for years was almost the only voice critical of climate hysteria in the British press, we see this in an interview Houghton gave to The Sunday Telegraph in its "Me and My God" slot on 10 September 1995.

As a fervent evangelical Christian, Sir John claimed that global warming might well be one of those disasters sent by God to warn man to mend his ways ("God tries to coax and woo but he also uses disasters"). He went on: "If we are to have a good environmental policy in the future, we will have to have a disaster".

"Maybe," notes Booker, "these are not quite the words that have been so widely misquoted." They are close enough. Houghton might claim he opposes the idea of generating scare stories to publicise climate change, but the truth will out.

CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD

"Happiness in life is based on expectations," writes Rajendra K Pachauri on his own blog. And if your expectations include ownership of a nine-hole golf course, then Dr Pachauri must be a very happy man indeed.

The ownership is reported today by the Indian newspaper the Mail Today which tells us that R K Pachauri's "not-for-profit" TERI - imbued with a mission to "work towards global sustainable development, creating innovative solutions for a better tomorrow" – is the proud owner of a water-guzzling nine hole golf course in Gual Pahari on the outskirts of Gurgaon a satellite town to the southwest of New Delhi.

This much is not new. It was described in glowing terms by the Business Standard in February 2007, when we were told of a "beautiful golf course" that precedes the entrance of a "completely different world from the precincts of Gurgaon".

It is part of the "amazingly landscaped 36-hectare TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute) campus at Gual Pahari." And nestled inside this campus is an unassuming building called The Retreat, a training and recreation centre for TERI staff and executives.

Furthermore, TERI has made no secret of the facility, noting in its Annual report 2006/7 that the golf course had been created "with the intention of promoting golf amongst TERI personnel residing in Delhi and Gurgaon." It was then that the six-hole golf course was being upgraded into a nine-hole green. A 200-yard driving range was "an added attraction" and there was a nine-hole putting course adjacent to the Retreat building.

But, it appears, TERI is harbouring a guilty "secret". The five-acre golf course is part of the 69 acres of institutional land it acquired from Haryana Urban Development Authority (HUDA) in 1985 (below - Google Earth), for the exclusive use of TERI staff. Commercial exploitation is prohibited.


Yet the paper has found that the golf course has been opened up to selected members of the public who are being charged Rs 25,000 (£350) for membership.

According to Gurgaon's district town planner Vijender Singh Rana, commercial activity through sports on institutional land is illegal. "HUDA gave this land to TERI for institutional or public and semi-public purpose."

Rana said. "Though they have asked for change of land use (CLU) regularly from HUDA, permission cannot be given for any sporting activity. If TERI is selling golf course memberships, it is wrong." Rana said the conditions for use of institutional land were clear. "If TERI uses it for its own purpose, there is no problem. But it cannot use it commercially and sell golf memberships," he said.

Needless to say, a TERI spokesperson denied it was making commercial use of the course, something rather contradicted by this piece written in May 2008, to say nothing of this site which refers to green fees. Then there is another, seemingly bizarre, contradiction which has the state government imposing a tax on golf players, a piece in which the TERI golf course is mentioned.

However, this is confirmed by a Mail Today reporter who anonymously contacted course officials and was offered memberships for £350. Furthermore, Mohinder Singh, an official at the course, told the paper that there was a one year waiting time. "Your form will come for review after a year," he said.

Equally contentious is the water usage to keep the golf course green. As chair of the IPCC, Pachauri is voluble in demanding of governments around the world that they cut down on carbon emissions and save water, among other things, to sustain the environment. He is equally voluble about potential water shortages in his home country, arising from melting glaciers and all that.


TERI claims that water conservation measures on the campus include "an efficient central rainwater harvesting system in accordance with water conservation guidelines such as drip water irrigation, early morning and late evening half circle sprinkling to minimise water evaporation and loss."

But with the golf course and environs requiring up to 300,000 gallons a day during the summer to keep the lush greenery in condition (pictured above), questions are being asked about the sustainability of the facility, which would have difficulty in meeting the volume required solely from harvested water.

This is especially an issue in Delhi, where water shortage is a major a problem, and more so in Gurgaon. As recently as March 2008, local difficulties were causing scarcity of drinking water in the city.

Then reported earlier this month, serious concern has been expressed about the huge gap between supply and demand and the rapidly falling water table, depleted by an estimated 35,000 bore wells, only 9,780 of which are registered.

With many local residents increasingly struggling to cope with a failing water supply, many eyebrows are being raised at the luxuriant scenery which Dr Pachauri's merry men enjoy as they stroll round the greens in between saving the planet and relieving the misery of the poor.

And for those who are not too keen on golf, there is the world class "TERI Oval" cricket green for gentle recreation. Failing that, there is always the badminton green.

But this is not what most people had in mind when they describe Dr Pachauri and his institute as "green".