Opposition Grows to EU Holiday Tax

The EU Doesn’t Approve – image by Holidayextras via Flickr

The US has called a meeting of countries opposed to the EU’s carbon tax on airlines.

The countries opposed to the tax also include China, India and Russia. All the countries that matter in the world, in other words.

There are international treaties against taxing flights. Obviously, though, treaties don’t matter to the EU, given that it has been quite willing to depose its own governments when they weren’t “austere” enough.

So the EU unilaterally imposed their carbon tax. Airlines will get bills starting in April next year.

The Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) creates permits for carbon emissions. Airlines that exceed their allowances will have to buy extra permits, as an incentive to airlines to pollute less.

The number of permits is reduced over time, so that the total CO2 output from airlines in European airspace falls.

The EU says that the new scheme will add between £3 and £19 to the cost of a long haul airline ticket.

That’s just the start, of course. In the long run, they intend to add a lot more; their aim is to stop the plebs flying. They intend to do it by pricing them out of flight tickets.

Yes, it’s just the plebs of course. The Eurocrats will go on majestically flying at taxpayers’ expense.

The EU may not succeed with this scheme. China has already passed a law making it illegal for their airlines to buy EU emissions permits. The other countries opposed to it – India, the US, Russia – are powerful.

Even they, though are not objecting to a new flight tax per se. They are objecting to the EU’s imposing it unilaterally.

The next target for the EU-championed climate change scam is your holiday.

Cheer up though. There is a chance that the coming implosion of the Euro may yet destroy the Evil Empire of Europe.

Coalition Disarray on Energy Policy

La Rance Tidal Power Station in France – image by JaHoVil via Flickr

The Energy and Climate Change Select Committee (sic) has produced a report accusing the Treasury of (in the BBC’s words):

making the government’s clean energy revolution unworkable and creating the risk of higher household bills.

Tim Yeo, the Chairman of the Committee, is upset that the government will not now act as guarantor for loans for building green power schemes:

This will result in higher borrowing costs, and make banks less likely to make loans.

Mr Yeo is also championing the wind energy industry:

The chancellor is being urged by backbenchers to make major cuts to the support for onshore wind. That would cause serious damage to the industry.

This is another thing that will have a perverse effect because onshore wind is the cheapest way of meeting our renewables targets.

The Treasury responded that it was increasing the price of fossil-fuelled electricity:

He also pointed out that the Treasury had introduced the controversial carbon price floor to push up the cost of fossil fuel generation, with the aim of making alternative low-carbon energy sources more attractive economically.

So there you have it.

The climate change brigade complaining that the government isn’t providing enough of our taxes to subsidise wind power, and the Treasury defending itself by saying it has made fossil fuel more expensive.

Nobody mentions where those “renewables targets” came from. (They were agreed by Tony Blair.) But they are all agreed on one thing: we should pay more – all of us. They are only debating how much we should pay through our taxes, and how much through our energy bills.

The green power lobby has consistently claimed that green power will be cheaper. They were lying. Green power is more expensive. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t need government help.

Meanwhile, the government still refuses to give any support at all to the Severn Barrage tidal power scheme. That would provide a huge amount of power from a tidal power station built across the Severn Estuary. The government decided not to build it on the spurious grounds that it couldn’t be financed without government support. It would cost, by the way, less than the HS2 High Speed railway.

The government claims it is in favour of nuclear power. But so far no company has made a final decision to build any new nuclear stations. They take several years to build and the energy crunch comes earlier, in 2016, when the EU shuts down Britain’s big coal fired stations because they produce too much carbon dioxide.

E-On and RWE, two big German energy companies, pulled out of their plans for nuclear stations in Britain in March, saying that

nuclear power was simply too long-term an investment in the current economic climate.

The government’s energy policy is all over the place. It is not that they are supporting the wrong things, or doing the wrong things, but simply that they appear to have no clear or consistent policy at all.

Now it is fair to point out that the Energy (and Climate Change) department did have the misfortune to be led by Chris Huhne for a couple of years. He left in February though. He was replaced by Ed Davey, who has made no impact at all as far as I can see.

What an utter shambles it all is.

The tragedy of this is that there is a workable consensus on energy, regardless of the debate about climate change.

Sure, people like me want coal fired power, and the greens want windmills. We can argue about those until the cows come home.

But let’s all get on with the bits we can agree on. We all ought to be able to support the Severn Barrage and new nuclear stations (with the possible exception of the lunatic fringe of the green movement, and they will oppose anything). The government says it wants to invest in infrastructure – well, here are some ready-made infrastructure projects waiting for their financial support.

Mr Davey needs to get off his bottom and promote a clear vision for Britain’s energy policy. Most of it need not be controversial – but if he doesn’t get a move on, we will face an energy shortage within only a few years.

With the Euro in Flames, Our Civil Servants are Still Taking Their Orders from Brussels

Image by quapan via Flickr

The meltdown of the Euro is gathering pace. While Greece stumbles towards a new election that is widely expected to lead to the country’s exit from the Euro, Spain has now been engulfed again as rating agency Moody’s downgrades the credit rating of 16 of its banks.

The question is, once the Euro has disintegrated as it surely will over the next few months, what will be left of the European Union? Not much, I suspect – it is likely to be paralysed by recriminations and squabbling, and in no state to agree and then set a new course towards the looser free trade area that is needed.

Meanwhile, more evidence today of how our civil servants are still taking orders from their counterparts in Brussels rather than from our elected leaders.

Earlier on this week the European Environment Agency (EEA) said that local councils need to take more of a lead in combatting climate change.

“What we are trying to do is to get city managers to anticipate that they will need much quicker event planning, and there are already things that they can anticipate,” said Jacqueline McGlade, EEA executive director.

“This is where political leadership is very important – if you have a vision, and understanding that climate change and adaptation is part-and-parcel of running a city today, it is not something you can renege on,” she told BBC News.

And today – what a surprise – British quango the Committee on Climate Change recommends that local councils should be given a statutory duty to combat climate change.

Local authorities can have a very big impact in areas such as improving energy efficiency in buildings, sustainable travel and waste management.

I suppose continuing to pay the salaries of the people who produce this drivel is what is laughably called “austerity” by our leaders.

From Russia with Love?

Image by wstera2 via Flickr

 

Note: if you are looking for a link to download the new batch of Climategate e-mails, you can download them from here.

For much more on this, see Watts Up With That?.

The “Climategate 2″ release of further hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia are once again embarrassing for Phil Jones, Michael Mann and the other climate scientists involved – whatever their supporters in the media may say.

The latest release, that FOIA2011.zip file, contains 5,000 e-mails in plain text and also a further archive of 220,000 files that is password-protected (with 256-bit AES encryption – in other words, state of the art uncrackable encryption – no less).

The “readme” file released in the package says that those additional e-mails have been encrypted “for various reasons”, and states that the hackers do not intend “publicly” (sic) releasing the passphrase. (It is a passphrase and not a password to make it almost impossible to crack.) So it is not likely we will be able to read those additional 220,000 files unless the hacker relents and releases the passphrase.

I am interested in a few features of all this though.

• This leak (like the previous one) was released on a Russian server, and then removed a few hours later.
• The compression method used was 7Zip. 7Zip was (and is) developed by Igor Pavlov, a Russian computer programmer. As such, it is widely used in Russia – by contrast, in the West, almost everybody uses Winzip compression as a standard.
• The readme file talks about 5,000 e-mails being released and 220,000 being in the encrypted archive. But it writes those numbers as “5.000″ and “220.000″ – with a decimal point rather than a comma separating the groups of figures. That format is not generally used in the UK (or indeed in the USA), but is the normal format in some other countries, including Russia.

All of this leads me to conclude that it is likely that this Climategate leak, as well as the previous one, was orchestrated by somebody in Russia.

Interesting.

I am also interested in the fact that the archive was included in the file but encrypted. The obvious thing to do would have been to publish the 5,000 e-mails, but say that you had 220,000 more. So why did the leaker decide to release that encrypted archive? Without the password, it is of no use to anybody.

Finally, the original filename on the Russian server was not “FOIA2011.zip” but “25FOIA2011.zip”. The “FOIA” I can understand I guess (Freedom Of Information Act). But why the “25″? Does that have any significance?

Not especially useful information, but my two-pennyworth on this.

Climategate

Climategate II is here – another release of e-mails from the University of East Anglia.

Getting Energy Bills Down – Or Up – Or Something

Image by DECCgovuk via Flickr

David Cameron and His Friend Chris Huhne – Confused About Energy Bills

David Cameron has called for action to cut energy bills.

The government needs to work “harder and faster” to bring down energy bills, the prime minister has said ahead of a summit on gas and electricity prices.

Meanwhile, “green taxes” are already adding 5% to our electricity bills, and that is expected to triple over the next few years.

Obviously, when the government itself is deliberately adding to electricity bills, it is a bit rich for the Prime Minister to be saying they need to “work harder and faster” to bring down those bills.

But it is even more stark than that. The purpose of the green taxes is to increase our bills. They are not in place to raise revenue. They are there to encourage people to use less energy by increasing bills.

The government is using green taxes to increase energy bills, to reduce consumption, while at the same time putting pressure on suppliers to reduce bills.

Even on its own terms, the government has two directly contradictory policies on energy. They want cheaper bills – and they want more expensive bills.

What is more, this is not a case of one part of government pursing one policy, while another works in the opposite direction. The Energy Secretary is Chris Huhne. It is he who has been pursuing both these contradictory policies.

Mr Cameron may get nice headlines today for standing up for hard-pressed consumers. But in the long run, as Mr Huhne’s demonstrably ridiculous policies unravel, Mr Cameron may rue the day he became drawn into the whole mess.

Huhne Passing the Buck Again

Chris Huhne – Green is Cheaper in his Wonderful World
Photo by Dept for Energy and Climate Change via flickr – Crown Copyright

Chris Huhne has been passing the buck on energy bills again, this time at the Liberal Democrats’ conference.

He has vowed to “get tough” with the big six energy companies to bring down bills.

In an amazing insight into the Alice in Wonderland world in which he inhabits, he said:

It’s not fair that big energy companies can push their prices up for the vast majority of their consumers, who do not switch, while introducing cut-throat offers for new customers that stop small firms entering the market.

That looks to me like predatory pricing. It must and will stop.

It gets worse. As well as blaming the energy suppliers for the costs of his own green energy schemes, he even tried to claim that greener is cheaper:

He also said it “makes sense” to reduce reliance on expensive oil and gas and promote instead low-carbon energy businesses.

Friends of the Earth energy campaigner Donna Hume chimes in with this:

It’s right that people should be able to switch tariffs and companies more easily, but this won’t ease householders’ pain in the long run, with all six major energy firms putting up prices and the cost of gas rocketing.

Behind closed doors, the energy companies are attempting to lock us into expensive gas power plants for the next two decades instead of investing in the home-grown clean energy that could keep our bills stable and cheaper in the long run.

Just for the record, Donna, oil and especially gas are significantly cheaper than your favoured windmills – and many times cheaper than your solar panels. Like 5 times cheaper. Solar power costs more than 50p per unit.

The green nutcases like Mr Huhne and Ms Hume think that if they repeat often enough that green is cheap, everyone will believe it.

There may be reasons to accept the higher cost of green energy, for environmental reasons. (Regular readers of this blog will know that I don’t accept those reasons, but many do.) But to actually argue that green energy is cheaper is either stupidity or, quite simply, lies.

And Mr Huhne is not stupid. Which can only mean one thing.

He is lying.

The Warming Religion’s Latest Victim

The Editor of a scientific journal, Remote Sensing, Dr Wolfgang Wagner, has resigned after allowing publication of a paper that criticised the man-made global warming theory.

The paper was written by Roy Spencer and William Braswell of the University of Alabama in Huntsville. It suggested that the climate scientists’ computer models exaggerate the extent of global warming, by not correctly taking into account the role of clouds and radiation of heat from the earth into space.

Dr Spencer has a degree in meteorology, according to his blog, and before becoming a Principal Research Scientist at the University,

was a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where he and Dr. John Christy received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites.

So he is not some amateur with no experience in the field.

Here is what the editor of that journal, Dr Wagner, said in his resignation letter:

Peer-reviewed journals are a pillar of modern science. Their aim is to achieve highest scientific standards by carrying out a rigorous peer review that is, as a minimum requirement, supposed to be able to identify fundamental methodological errors or false claims.

Unfortunately, as many climate researchers and engaged observers of the climate change debate pointed out in various internet discussion fora, the paper by Spencer and Braswell…is most likely problematic in both aspects and should therefore not have been published…

The problem is that comparable studies published by other authors have already been refuted…, a fact which was ignored by Spencer and Braswell in their paper and, unfortunately, not picked up by the reviewers.

In other words, the problem I see with the paper… is not that it declared a minority view (which was later unfortunately much exaggerated by the public media) but that it essentially ignored the scientific arguments of its opponents.

This latter point was missed in the review process, explaining why I perceive this paper to be fundamentally flawed and therefore wrongly accepted by the journal.

That doesn’t sound like a failure of the peer review process itself at the journal. It just says that the paper was flawed, and its flaws were not picked up by the reviewers. So why would the editor think that he needed to resign?

Why indeed. Ho hum. Remember those Climategate e-mails?

Here is Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit discussing putting pressure on another journal, Climate Research, to get rid of its editor:

I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor. A CRU person is on the editorial board, but papers get dealt with by the editor assigned by Hans von Storch.

And from the reply from Michael Mann of the University of Virginia:

So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…

And now Dr Wagner has resigned after “many climate researchers and engaged observers of the climate change debate pointed out in various internet discussion fora” that he should not have published this anti-global warming article.

Note, mind, that Remote Sensing has not recanted publication of the article, or dissociated itself from it. But by his resignation, of course, Dr Wagner has damned the article without any need for the Warmists to actually refute the contents of the article properly. That would have been done by publication of a rebuttal in the same journal, or even a further paper in another journal.

Those “many climate researchers and engaged observers of the climate change debate” did not as far as we know submit papers of their own to the journal, refuting Dr Spencer’s claims. Instead, they expressed their opinions on “various internet discussion fora”.

Professor Spencer is sticking by his paper though.

I stand behind the science contained in the paper itself, as well as my comments published on my blog at drroyspencer.com.

Note also the contents of Dr Wagner’s letter. “Rigorous peer review that is, as a minimum requirement, supposed to be able to identify fundamental methodological errors or false claims.” Methodological errors – well yes. But “false claims”? What the hell is a “false claim” in the context of a scientific debate?

Basically, what these charlatans are saying is that any article on climate change must be reviewed by the Warmists first to make sure it aligns with their theories.

And these pseudo-scientists are demanding that we spend £1 trillion a year for 50 years to combat global warming.

Man-made global warming is a religion, not a scientific theory. And like the Catholic one before it, its Inquisition will ensure that heresy is silenced.

The Energy Saving Trust’s Latest Wheeze

Image by RJL20 via Flickr

Solar Thermal Water Heating System

The government’s new subsidy system for installation of solar heating systems comes on line today.

This is completely separate from the FiT scheme, which rewards people who install solar electricity generation systems with a huge subsidy of many times the value of the energy generated.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am highly sceptical about the whole man-made global warming thing. But I will suspend my disbelief for the duration of this post. Let’s imagine that the whole thing is true, and that if we don’t reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, we will destroy the planet.

Now let’s look at this new scheme. There are quite a few figures here, but bear with me.

Says the BBC:

People who opt for greener methods such as biomass boilers and solar panels can apply to the £15m Premium Payment fund set up to support 25,000 installations.

But wait. £15 million divided by 25,000 installations makes just £60 per installation.

The scheme makes the following grants available:

Ground Source Heat Pump – £1,250
Biomass boiler – £950
Air source heat pump – £850
Solar thermal hot water panels – £300

Thus even if every grant application is for the cheapest type of system, the solar thermal hot water, then the real number of grants available will be not 25,000 but 5,000.

Let’s now turn to the details of each installation.

According to the Energy Saving Trust, who will run the new scheme, the average cost of a solar thermal system is £4,800, and it will reduce your gas bill by £50 a year if you heat your water with gas (as most people do).

So even after the £300 subsidy, the cost is £4,500 and the system takes a massive 90 years to pay for itself. Of course, the system will be on the local refuse tip long before then, having worn out. Indeed, it is likely that your house will have been demolished before then, since houses are designed to last just 70 years.

Thus it is extremely unlikely that anyone will be persuaded to install a system by this subsidy. The only people who might go ahead are people who would have gone ahead anyway, aiming to improve their green credentials.

But what about those green credentials? Are these systems even as green as they claim?

The Energy Saving Trust estimates that if you heat your water by electricity, you will save £80 a year and reduce your CO2 by 570 kg.

At 10p per kW-hr, a saving of £80 a year implies you should be saving about 800 kW-hr per year.

The UK produces about 400g of CO2 per kW-hr of electricity generated.

That means 800 kW-hr equates to emissions of 320 kg of carbon dioxide, not 570 kg. So it looks like the carbon emission savings are a bit more than half what they claim.

And what about the carbon emissions involved in manufacturing and installing the system? None of those emissions have been taken into account by the Energy Saving Trust. Neither have they taken into account their own carbon emissions in administering the scheme. Woops. Even a humble packet of crisps has a carbon footprint of 75g, so the footprint of a solar thermal system is likely to be quite significant.

The carbon emissions from manufacture, installation and even the scheme itself will further reduce the benefit.

A quick summary is that all their figures are absolute nonsense, even on their own terms.

They will only help at most a fifth of the number of schemes that they claim, the claimed carbon dioxide savings per installation are highly questionable, and the subsidy probably won’t add to the number of systems being installed.

This scheme is of course supported by the solar thermal system installers, who make a living out of it.

And it creates jobs in the Energy Saving Trust – who also make money out of certifying products as energy efficient – up to £1,000 per product certified.

New Flight Taxes Are There To Stop You Flying

Image via Wikipedia

Green Campaigners Want to Stop All This. They Should be Honest About It.

The Sunday Express has been campaigning to lower flight taxes. They have been working with the Airport Operators’ Association on the campaign, called Hands Off Our Holidays, Mr Taxman!

The Express wants Air Passenger Duty reduced, claiming that in Britain it is eight and a half times the European average.

Yesterday, they also brought the EU Emissions Trading Scheme into the picture. This is being extended to flights next year (in flagrant contravention, by the way, of the international agreement that forbids taxation of aviation fuel).

Here is what the Express said:

Next year will also see the EU emissions trading scheme extended to cover aviation. Analysts have calculated that will add between £5 and £7 to the cost of a fare based on a forward cost of carbon at between £14 and £21 per ton. As the cost of carbon increases, so will air fares.

The EU tax will be added on top of air passenger duty, which is already hundreds of pounds higher than in the rest of Europe, America and Australia.

The Airport Operators Association, which is behind the Hands Off Our Holidays, Mr Taxman! campaign, fears the added charges will eventually mean British families will not be able to afford to go abroad for their holidays.

They seem to have rather missed the point. Air Passenger Duty is just a tax, designed to raise revenue for the Government.

But the new “EU tax” (as they describe it), the Emissions Trading Scheme, is not primarily designed to raise revenue. It is explicitly designed to cut carbon emissions, and the revenue is a by-product. Adding flights to the scheme is specifically designed to make it harder for people to fly.

This is an example of where all that theoretical stuff about “green taxes” and “carbon emissions reductions” starts to affect real people in real ways.

The blunt truth is: adding flights to the Emissions Trading Scheme is specifically aimed at reducing the number of flights people take. Putting it another way, the new EU tax is specifically intended to stop people flying abroad. If it does not achieve that, it will have been a failure. What’s more, the “price of carbon” will go on going up until the number of flights does come down. The scheme is designed to do that. That’s what it does.

Now of course if you believe all the man-made global warming stuff, you might think that cutting people’s foreign holidays was worth it, to cut emissions. But too often the greens have pretended that cutting emissions is pain-free, that somehow “big business” or “the government” or somebody else will cut emissions and we can all blithely sail into a low carbon economy, without our living standards being affected.

Here, then, is an example of the truth behind all that spin. Cutting emissions means cutting our living standards. Cutting emissions means fewer foreign flights, fewer holidays, less car use, colder houses, less production of consumer goods and generally lower living standards.

That in itself does not mean the greens are wrong to campaign for emissions cuts. But they should do so honestly, and admit the real cost of their policies to ordinary people.

If you’re a green fanatic, holidays in the Costa Del Sol are a threat to the world and should be stopped.