A tale of two I-lands - by Richard... Wednesday, December 08, 2010

A tale of two I-lands - by Richard... Wednesday, December 08, 2010

Ambrose looks at the latest situation and offers this:

Yet the underlying tale of Ireland and Iceland, and the tale of the 1930s, is that a devaluation shock may cause a violent crisis – that looks and feels terrible while it happens – but the slow-burn of policy austerity and debt deflation does more damage in the end.

Did the prime minister of Iceland lose his job, and is Cowen still in power? Just. Does that explain anything?

COMMENT: IRISH THREAD

Print ready

A winter of discontent - by Richard...

Workers at National Grid, we are told, will be voting today on whether to take industrial action in a row over pay. The result is due on 5 January. So far, they have rejected a three-year offer worth 2.5 percent from 1 July this year, and 2.25 percent for each of the following years. The starter sum, they say, is less half the inflation rate of 5.1 percent for 2010.

Says Emily Boase, national officer for Prospect – one of the three unions involved - "Members think that's unfair, since National Grid has seen a 12 percent increase in pre-tax profits and an eight percent increase in dividends. That's thanks to dedication and hard work by staff, who feel affronted to be so undervalued."

The clincher though is the treatment of National Grid's directors. Five of them five feature in the Labour Research Department's league table of the ten highest paid directors in the UK.

That this should be used as an excuse, though, is entirely unreasonable. Just because chief executive Steve Holliday took home a package worth £2.27 million for the year 2010, and the "five" took home between them £7.26 million is neither here nor there. The plebs should know their place.

COMMENT THREAD

Print ready

Different planets - by Richard...

There is a sort of unreality about current politics – and just about everything else, especially what we see in the media which seems to belong to a completely different world.

The reality for millions of people in the UK is the global warming lying thick on the ground – in particular in Scotland. There, hundreds of thousands of people have gone through 24 hours of misery, so much so that Scottish politicians are bickering about the lack of preparedness, while theMet Office is trying to dodge the blame for getting its forecast wrong. That reality is expressed by aGuardian comment:

I'm really angry that they weren't better prepared for the snowfall. The roads hadn't been gritted and I never once saw a snowplough.

I was stuck on a bus from Glasgow to Hamilton. 3hrs queuing at the bus depot, then 9hrs on the bus with a three year old and a baby. We were told there were some delays, but no one thought to mention that it would be so long! Thankfully people on the bus had milk in their groceries and people were coming out there houses with biscuits handing them round cars. My couple hour trip into Glasgow turned into a 28hr trip in total.

People shouldn't have to sleep in their cars, go without food, water, or toilet facilities, because the roads weren't gritted.

The further reality is that the Daily Mail and others are warning that we can expect the global warming to move south by morning, where we are similarly unprepared. A lot of people are going to be trying to carry on with their lives, yet will be struggling to deal with the collapse in the transport infrastructure that happens every time the temperature falls.

Yet none of this registers on the political horizon – still less the prospect of massive energy bills being stacked up, with the UK drawing down record amounts of power, the system increasingly at risk of failure. As far as the politicians go, this makes no one whit of difference to what passes as their thinking as they sit idly by as we are poised to run us out of electricity and money. Their reality is the prattle in the press.

Also failing to register with the impact it deserves are the rumblings coming out of Germany about the euro, and the budget situation in Ireland. There, the Irish government has won the first parliament vote on its 2011 austerity budget, but the drama is far from over. It is going to be until Thursday evening before we see the shape of things to come and, according to some sources, the process is not expected to be wrapped up until early next year.

The distance between "our" reality and what the media and the politicians are trying to tell us are important is now so great that it is getting harder and harder to relate to what they are telling us. This is seriously and disturbingly bizarre.

COMMENT THREAD

Print ready

Some would like to think - by Richard... Tuesday, December 07, 2010

... that this was deliberate, where police officers on their way to an EDL demo "thought they were going to die" after eating contaminated chicken and tuna sandwiches.

But it can't have been that bad. From my recollection, in the first stage of Staph aureus food poisoning you are worried that you are going to die. But, in the next stage of a really bad dose, your real worry is that you're not. Better luck next time.

COMMENT THREAD

Print ready

Dirty deeds - by Richard...

It looks as if we are in for interesting times with the Irish budget. Dirty deeds are afoot - and memories are long.

COMMENT: IRISH THREAD

Print ready

Out of their tiny minds - by Richard...

Adair Turner and his climate change committee are offering recommendations (if one can thus dignify such insanity) on how to cut UK greenhouse gas emissions by 60 percent by 2030.

Not least of their effluvia, they want a substantial proportion of UK car fleet replaced with 11 million electric or hybrid vehicles. At the same time they are suggesting that their 60 percent emissions target is achievable at a cost of less than one percent of GDP.

Taking the cost of the Nissan Leaf – against, say the cost of a new Ford Focus, to replace the entire fleet would cost about £165,000,000,000 over and above the normal retail price of the conventional cars. By my estimation, that additional cost is well over ten percent of GDP.

That, of course, is only the start. For these vehicles to be "emission-free", the electricity they use must come from renewables or nuclear. And the Turner mob have not even begun to work out the price for doing that - but it would be additional to the cost of meeting the current base load. Has anyone done the calculations - the cost of providing electric capacity to charge up 11 million vehicles? Then there is the cost of the charging points.

More dangerous, though, are the committee's plans to rig the market for electricity, which don't even bear thinking about. Amusingly though, nothing of what they propose can be done without EU approval, and new EU legislation would be required, which would probably make it a non-starter.

Overall though, this illustrates once again the complete detachment of the ruling classes from reality. Huhne is planning formally to respond to the report in the Spring - instead of a snort of derision, which would have taken him five seconds. A Bronx Raspberry might have taken slightly longer. The latter, one suggests, should be the response to his endeavours.

COMMENT THREAD

Print ready

Under-estimation - by Richard...

To add to their woes, areas of North Yorkshire underwent prolonged electricity blackouts yesterday evening, possibly reflecting a system under serious stress. National demand is considerably above expectations, reaching a peak of 60GW yesterday evening – with spot prices at £423 per MWh, compared with minimum cost level at less than £40.

What is also significant is the temperature graph (illustrated above). It shows estimates in three bands, with the actual out-turn also shown. The current low temperatures are well below the lowest band predicted – still more evidence that this cold weather has caught the authorities out.

Meanwhile, Scotland is taking another hit. Contacts in Dunfermline gave us precise depth measurements – 33 inches of snow to date (cumulative). Drifts, of course, are very much deeper.

The only compensation is the Ecologist (prop. Zac Goldsmith) squawking about "Big Oil" paying for the climate change exhibition in the Science Museum – something you read on this blog - while The Independent is lamenting the more "neutral" tone.

But if the warmists are now in disarray, it is only because they – like the authorities – are still failing to spot the signs. Even last year we were noting that "global warming" was coloured white and measured in inches. By the end of this current spell, it is going to be measured in feet. We should enjoy their discomfort.

COMMENT THREAD

Print ready

Follow the money - by Richard... Monday, December 06, 2010

"The misuse of CERs is undermining EU's credibility in its fight against climate change ... " saysNew Europe. That, of course, makes several assumptions, the first being that the EU has any credibility. But the more immediate issue is that the misuse of CERs is having any significant effect. It should. After all, this is a major scandal.

But, apart from Booker, neither the media nor the sceptic blogs seem right interested. So another billion-dollar fraud – like REDD – goes unchecked, while the warmists gear up to line their pockets with another scare. As always, follow that money ... there doth the slime reside.

COMMENT THREAD

Print ready

A tidal wave of stupidity - by Richard...

The "hottest year" is a miasma. Yet the spending goes on, the regulation continues unchecked and the brown-soft-squidgy-stuff-for-brains MPs continue to sell us out from the luxury of their over-heated offices. And this happens as UK temperatures are set to plummet again. We are really starting to feel the cold, day-after-day, when even the central heating does not fully cope.

Completely oblivious to the piles of steaming ordure on his own doorstep, Gordon Brown is reinventing himself as the great statesman. The coming decade could witness ''the decline of the West'' if Britain and other Western powers fail to respond to the rise of Asian economies like China, he says. The thing about such pronouncements is – tested against similar profundities made throughout history – is that they are invariably wrong.

No end of brighter and far better informed people look at China and other Asian economies and see nothing but a highly unstable bubble. Yet, such is the power of the myth that the likes of Brown will continue with his own brand of warnings for as long as prattlers are prepared to listen.

The ultimate indictment, I suppose, is that under his very nose, the wealth of the working population declines, while the benefits-and-thieving classes prosper under the protection of the indolent and over-paid police. And, if the average guy in the street still can't see what is coming, the latest tax hike might help concentrate minds. Breath is not being held, however.

One small comfort is that the Met Office is admitting to being slightly wrong on some of its long-term climate projections – although it rushes to tell us that the rest of them, like their forecasts for this winter, are perfectly sound.

Interestingly enough they were concerned about "the shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean's conveyor belt". What they should have been concerned about is the shutdown of their own brains – and noted that the coming issue is the shutdown of society. Above-the-line projections are most often wrong, but you usually find in history voices from the "little people" that have it right.

And they, on this freezing Monday morning, would have it that the tidal wave is coming, but it ain't water. As we see with the foolish Hancock, the greater threat is the tidal wave of stupidity – of which there is an endless supply.

COMMENT THREAD