Climate Resistance

I’ve got myself into trouble recently, for using words like ‘idiot’ too often. Especially on twitter. Here’s my favourite:

#Moronbiot

Am I reaching the end of my vocabulary?

James Delingpole seems equally frustrated. He’s written about “Why I am so Rude to Warmists”

It was prompted when I very vocally expressed my disgust at one of the standard phrases trotted out by Warmists and other eco-loons in these debates (as, of course, inevitably, they did again on Sunday): the one about “preserving the planet for future generations”.

You can be sure that there is very little thought behind the kinds of trite little pieties Delingpole alludes to. At best, they are nothing more than a form of moral blackmail, by individuals who have no better reason to explain to anyone else why they have a public profile. In Delingpole’s case, he was sharing a car with the person who uttered the hollow piety on the way back from a BBC debate.

As Delingpole explains,

Does anyone imagine that back in 1012 they were all agonising about how the children of the future might cope in 2012, what with all the scarce resources being used up at an alarming rate to make ships and spears and light warning beacons for the next Viking raid? Somehow I don’t think so. Yet this is precisely the kind of unutterable boll***s you hear being advanced almost every day by people like this liberal-leftie media type with whom I had my big row.

It is indeed utter, utter boll***s as James calls it.

So how to counter it? I share Delingpole’s frustration. “The answer is, of course, that there is no counter.”

He has a point. How can one reason with nonsense?

There is clearly a yawning casm — if not between climate alarmists and reality, then certainly between people who believe in the words they are uttering and people who simply don’t. The really interesting thing about the claim to be speaking “for future generations” is that it doesn’t matter how many people think you’re talking bollocks, you can claim the moral high-ground — you’re speaking for people who don’t exist yet, and who aren’t able to tell you that you’re talking complete bollocks, as well as thinking it.

In short, pretending to care for people who don’t exist is a fantastic ruse for people who don’t give a toss about people in the present.

One of my politics lecturers used to call deep differences in society ‘cleavages’. There’s an obvious pun in that, too. But it’s a good word, which describes how tensions emerge between groups of people, ultimately causing some political change or another.

Speaking of which…

I have no idea who Brian Palmer of Slate Magazine is… But he writes…

I just finished reading The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, in which Steven Pinker argues that violence in all forms has diminished over the past few centuries. That’s good for people, of course, but it got me thinking about the environment. How does war affect the planet?

I mentioned Pinker’s book a few posts ago. The pessimists of the world believe that wars are becoming more frequent, and thus we are moving closer to some kind of Armageddon. But in fact, the opposite is true, as Pinker shows. The world is far safer than it ever has been. But talk to people — especially greens, and they don’t think so. They are ever less certain about the world and the future.

So even when they are confronted with the facts, miserablists still have to search for a reason to see bad in the good. Brian Palmer’s question looks to me like such a gesture… ‘Huh, so few babies are dying and there are fewer wars… But so what… What about the trees?’

Yeah, what about the trees?

The human and financial costs of armed conflict are so vast that few people have stopped to consider what war does to rivers, trees, and elephants. In recent years, academics have been much more interested in how environmental degradation contributes to war than in how wars degrade the environment. In addition, no two wars affect the planet in the same way. The environmental devastation from a nuclear war, for example, would be difficult to estimate in advance.

Yes, we should all be really worried about the effects of war on trees.

From this side of the cleavage, I’m wondering what the hell Palmer is on about. If a couple of trees get knocked down in an exchange of nuclear weapons… Well, I really don’t care. Where is Palmer’s moral compass? Who really cares about the environment of a war zone, in which people are being killed?

And it’s not even ‘future generations’ Palmer seems to be moved about,

Armies used to defeat each other by killing huge numbers of enemies in direct battle. Today, military strategists try to undermine the enemy’s war machine with less bloodshed. That usually means occupying huge swaths of land and destroying the industrial infrastructure. In other words, as war becomes safer for humans, it may be increasingly dangerous for the planet.

This is just extraordinary bullshit in so many respects. Is Palmer’s claim that, rather than taking direct aim at people’s heads, soldiers now just blow up factories, and that this is worse? It would seem so…

One need only observe peacetime accidents to see what terror a bomb could unleash if dropped on a modern chemical factory. At the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, in 1984, water infiltrated into a tank holding methyl isocyanate. The mixture caused an explosion that contaminated the surrounding area, killing thousands. Attacks on chemical plants are entirely possible. President Clinton ordered the bombing of a Sudanese factory in 1998 precisely because he thought it was stocked with dangerous chemicals.

Apart from the fact that Palmer seems to be calling for the good old days of war, when men stood opposite men with swords and spears… It looks like he has invented a whole new form of warfare that nobody has ever thought of before: targeting industry and infrastructure to stop the enemy. Gosh… Imagine how much sooner WWII would have ended, had the Allies and Axis powers had thought of such horrific tactics… Oh, hang on a minute…

Who says it’s wrong to call environmentalists morons, idiots, and to say that they talk ‘unutterable bollocks’? Maybe we’re just not rude enough.

James Murray is the editor of BusinessGreen.com . Here are his tweets about the Heartland document leak.

The faux-outrage of the ecological righteous about this is amazing, given that they can’t actually say what the Heartland Documents reveal which isn’t applicable to the strategies of the environmental movement, in spades. And James Murray’s tweets and blog posts epitomise the hypocrisy and double standards.

Take, for instance, this warming from him that companies must be consistent…

what this scandal reveals is that if you are going to commit to developing greener business models, you cannot pick and mix which parts of your business get involved. Failure to enact genuinely company-wide change programmes means you are always at risk of seeing otherwise admirable green initiatives undermined by less progressive activities elsewhere in the business.

[...]

Any business that is publicly committed to a greener future needs to know who it is working with, who it is funding, and how its lobbying activities are managed. Failure to undertake this due diligence and ensure all lobbying activities are in line with the company’s wider green commitments leaves an organisation facing the risk that one day a conscientious individual will reveal their support for anti-environmental campaigns. In one swoop, any hopes of establishing a company as a green leader can be lost for a generation. And that is the kind of surprise no green executive wants to face.

Murray is threatening anyone who might dare deal with the Heartland or any other organisation that publicly questions or challenges climate change policies.

And yet, is Murray’s own house in order?

No.

BusinessGreen.com is owned by Incisive Media, which operate a fair number of specialist magazines, covering a range of industrial sectors. Amongst the portfolio are these, surprisingly un-green publications:

Global Technology Forum (GTF) provides senior engineering professionals and executives in the refining and petrochemical sector with leading technical conferences and training events. GTF has recently expanded its coverage of this important sector with its new website, GTForum.com. With a comprehensive global coverage of the downstream oil sector, GTForum is perfectly positioned to meet the needs of industry professionals all over the world.

Energy Risk Online is the leading digital subscription service dedicated to risk management, trading, regulation and trading technology for the global energy and commodities markets. The content of the publication has been described as required reading by chief financial officers, treasurers, chief risk officers, trading heads and fund managers around the globe. With world developments driving volatility in the global oil, gas and power markets, the need for a reliable source of information on risk management and financing is greater than ever.

Guess what… Behind Business Green is a company which trades with and profits from the fossil fuel industry. Tadaaaaaa! Look! A massive conspiracy!

Of course not. But then, neither is there much to the story that is currently exciting environmentalists and people like James Murray, who doesn’t seem to know whether his role is the editor of a trade journal, the director of a business lobbying organisation, or just a propagandist. It’s confusing of course, in these uncertain times. No wonder he’s so confused about the Heartland documents.

I have an article over at Spiked about the way climate change alarmism seems to hide in the most remote locations.

A study published in Nature last week has found that the effects of climate change on Himalayan glaciers have been overstated. But rather than facing up to their alarmism, those who have been guilty of exaggeration remain as unreflective as ever. Perhaps they are intent on continuing to make political and moral capital out of the possibility of climate catastrophe.

Read on…

Sometimes it’s hard to know if things you encounter in the climate debate are real, or clever works of fiction or satire.

For example, the website Trees Have Rights Too – ecological justice for all sounds to me very much like a joke, parodying the excesses of some eco-warrior. But it is in fact the website of Polly Higgins, the barrister-turned-Gaia’s-advocate, who really does think that non-human things have ‘rights’. The deranged lawyer wants to make a crime of ‘ecocide‘ comparable to genocide, because killing a nest of ants is a bit like the systematic murder of a race of people. Higgins view of people, then, is that they are no better than ants — so why not let them suffer?

Another crazy idea that has resurfaced recently is Jean-François Mouhot’s idea that

Once, men abused slaves. Now we abuse fossil fuels

Pointing out the similarities (and differences) between slavery and the use of fossil fuels can help us engage with climate change in a new way

In an article in the Guardian last week, Mouhot said,

Intriguing similarities between slavery and our current dependence on fossil-fuel-powered machines struck me: both perform roughly the same functions in society (doing the hard and dirty work that no one wants to do), both were considered for a long time to be acceptable by the majority and both came to be increasingly challenged as the harm they caused became more visible.

Back in 2008, I thought it was a joke when I came across the author making the same argument in an article in an edition of History Today. I blogged about it back then, but perhaps too verbosely. More briefly: the use of oil and slaves can only be moral equivalents of course, if we think oil is capable of subjective experience — will, in other words. There’s nothing about using a substance or an object which is ‘like’ using a person against their own will. Yet it takes an academic historian to wonder whether or not there is.

Trying people for ‘ecocide’ and making moral equivalents of slavery and burning oil speak about two, very much related phenomena: total moral disorientation, and the completely diminished view of humanity.

Which brings me to my most recent discovery, and which I still cannot quite believe, and which I am urging caution on, before any comments are made.

This email found its way to me…

Dear Author:

This is the official solicitation for open peer commentaries for the Summer issue of Ethics, Policy, and Environment (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/cepe).

For this next issue, 15.2, we have selected a Target Article by Matthew Liao (NYU), Anders Sandberg (Oxford), and Rebecca Roache (Oxford) titled “Human Engineering and Climate Change.” The abstract follows:

Abstract: Anthropogenic climate change is arguably one of the biggest problems that confront us today. There is ample evidence that climate change is likely to affect adversely many aspects of life for all people around the world, and that existing solutions such as geoengineering might be too risky and behavioural and market solutions might not be sufficient to mitigate climate change. In this paper, we consider a new kind of solution to climate change, what we call human engineering, which involves biomedical modifications of humans so that they can mitigate and/or adapt to climate change. We argue that human engineering is potentially less risky than geoengineering and that could help behavioural and market solutions succeed in mitigating climate change. We also consider some possible ethical concerns regarding human engineering such as its safety, the implications of human engineering for our children and for the society, and we argue that these concerns can be addressed.  Our upshot is that human engineering deserves further consideration in the debate about climate change.

 We are now soliciting approximately 4-6 open commentaries in response to this article.  Potential commentators will be invited to write short 750-1500 word responses which will be published simultaneously with the lead target article.

[...]

Sincerely,

Benjamin Hale and Andrew Light

Co-editors

I have no idea how humans could be modified, so that they can become walking, talking solutions to climate change. And I have no idea how the authors make an argument that ‘ethical concerns’ about modifying people to become climate change solutions can be overcome. I am still not sure that it isn’t a joke.

However, the journal exists.  Ethics, Policy & Environment will cost you £109 for just three issues a year.

While Ethics, Policy & Environment centers on environmental ethics and policy, its substantive coverage is wider. Authors have been concerned with a range of subjects, such as applied environmental ethics, animal welfare, environmental justice, development ethics, sustainability, and cultural values relevant to environmental concerns. The journal also welcomes analyses of practical applications of environmental, energy technology, regional, and urban policies, as well as theoretically robust discussions of common arguments that appear throughout debates on environment and energy policy, either in the scholarly literature or in the broader civic sphere.

The articles authors, Matthew Liao (NYU), Anders Sandberg (Oxford), and Rebecca Roache, all seem to be real researchers at respectable institutions — Oxford and New York Universities.

More surprisingly, the journal doesn’t appear to be some half-baked vanity project either. Roger Pielke Jr. and Max Boykoff are listed as Associate Editors, and the Utilitarian moral philosopher, Peter Singer is on the journal’s editorial board.

Academia is of course an area where ideas should be free. (And again, we should wait until we’ve read the paper before leaping to too many conclusions.) But it is increasingly the case that academia isn’t where ideas are free: it is increasingly the place where unorthodox ideas and opinions are shut down, and where independence, which gave the freedom to speak truth to power has been sold off, to instead speak official truth for power. The demand for ‘evidence-based policy-making’ has forced the colonisation of the academy.

Whimsies such as pondering ‘I wonder if it is right to subject people to biological modifications to suit my political ambitions’ once had little or no application outside the stuffy old ethics corridor in the philosophy faculty. Questions about ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin’ did not concern many outside the quad. But increasingly, the university department has had to prove its value in the real world.

All three researchers, you see, work at the Oxford Martin School (OMS) at the University of Oxford. The slogan on the website of the OMS boasts that they are ‘TACKLING 21ST CENTURY CHALLENGES”. Says their about page:

The Oxford Martin School was founded as the James Martin 21st Century School at the University of Oxford in 2005 through the vision and generosity of Dr James Martin. It is a unique interdisciplinary research initiative tackling global future challenges.

Our mission: to foster innovative thinking, interdisciplinary scholarship and collaborative activity to address the most pressing risks and realise important new opportunities of the 21st century.

There are two main focuses for our work:

Research - supporting forward-looking and interdisciplinary research to address 21st century challenges and opportunities.

Impact - fostering impact-oriented initiatives and facilitating public engagement that will influence policy and effect positive change on a global scale.

Moreover, within the OMS is yet another little school, to which at least one of the authors belong:

The Future of Humanity Institute is a multidisciplinary research institute at the University of Oxford.  It enables a select set of leading intellects to bring careful thinking to bear on big-picture questions about humanity and its prospects.  The Institute belongs to the Faculty of Philosophy and the Oxford Martin School.

So it would seem that the journal article really does intend to offer to the world an ethical argument for the modification of humans, to deal with climate change.

But we will have to see what that is. Perhaps it will make us less sensitive or vulnerable to temperature. Perhaps it will a modification that allows us to run really really fast, so that we no longer need to use cars. Or perhaps it’s a device that makes us more obedient. I look forward to finding out.

Meanwhile, there is more to be said about the institutions that have been set up in Oxford.

The Future of Humanity Institute is the leading research centre looking at big-picture questions for human civilization. The last few centuries have seen tremendous change, and this century might transform the human condition in even more fundamental ways.  Using the tools of mathematics, philosophy, and science, we explore the risks and opportunities that will arise from technological change, weigh ethical dilemmas, and evaluate global priorities.  Our goal is to clarify the choices that will shape humanity’s long-term future.

One of the things I’ve tried to stress on this blog is the difference between positively and negatively defined ideas about humanity and its future. The institutions at Oxford, it seems, have founded themselves on the idea that the ‘big-picture questions for human civilisation’ come from without. Climate change and other risks seem to ‘define’ this generation — it doesn’t get to define itself.

Let’s call the bluff on this idea that the institute is exploring ‘big questions’. The preoccupation with risks is not about finding and answering ‘big questions for human civilisation’. Institutions such as this are simply performances, which act out the narratives that reflect the political establishment’s anxieties. Looking again at the homepage of the Future of Humanity Institute, it is clear that it is preoccupied with ‘global catastrophic risk’, following the link, reveals the claim that,

Global catastrophic risks are risks that seriously threaten human well-being on a global scale. An immensely diverse collection of events could constitute global catastrophes: potential factors range from volcanic eruptions to pandemic infections, nuclear accidents to worldwide tyrannies, out-of-control scientific experiments to climatic changes, and cosmic hazards to economic collapse.

The Future of Humanity Institute is simply cashing in on contemporary scare stories, and the fashion for political ideas to be grounded, not on ideas about progress, liberty, or development, but on catastrophe, disaster, and the impossibility of any form of progress. The purpose of such exercises is to arm increasingly disoriented and disconnected public bodies with legitimacy and purpose. Insofar as the Oxford Martin School, and the Future of Humanity Institute are the coming together of the academy and policy-making worlds, then, they also represent the point at which the establishment sticks its head up its arse.

So Chris Huhne has resigned, pending something or other about perverting the course of justice. Sceptics and other critics of UK/EU energy policy  are understandably happy.

Good riddance, perhaps. It also gives the opportunity for some pause on the UK’s energy policy. But I think some of the celebration is misplaced. Wouldn’t it have been better to have won a victory over the ideas Huhne represented? Instead, it looks more like Huhne simply got himself in a mess, all by himself. Would we have a much different situation if Huhne had not taken the job of Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change? Or perhaps a more interesting question: had the Party of David ‘vote-blue-go-green’ Cameron won a decisive victory at the last election, would we be in a different situation?

Counterfactuals aside, Huhne’s arrogance came to stand for the way environmentalism has been foisted on us without much in the way of democratic debate. He was as contemptuous of critics and the idea that he should answer them as any zealous environmental activist is. Where there were any questions about the policies he was executing, or the ground on which they were formulated, he would not engage with the debate but would assert the same claims, slowly, repeatedly, monotonously, in that tone, with his eyebrows hooked up beyond his grey fringe… ‘This is my sincere face’, he seemed to be saying, ‘trust me’.

Huhne’s spin was astonishing. It’s been covered before on this blog. But briefly, Huhne is claiming that energy bills will go down, because we will be using less energy — a bit like saying a packet of biscuits is less expensive, even though the price has gone up, because you should only eat half of them.  How come it wasn’t that sort of doublethink and complete indifference to people that saw him chased out of politics? It seems that, in today’s stange world, you can spin numbers out of thin air in support of expensive and damaging energy policies, but get someone to take your speeding ticket, and you end up in prison.

I really don’t care about the speeding ticket. And really, I don’t care that he and his department would spin such yarns. What is disappointing is that nobody else in the coalition government or the opposition could or would challenge him. It was a left to bloggers and the think tanks like the GWPF and TPA to challenge Huhne, amid howls of protest from the likes of Bob Ward, the Carbon Brief, and other shrill, greenish foot soldiers. Amazingly, they would complain that the figures used to criticise energy and climate policies didn’t stack up; never mind Huhne’s spin.

That’s because they were fully involved in manufacturing it too, of course. His own party and the major partner in the coalition wanted to sustain the fragile relationship, if they weren’t already committed to being the ‘greenest government ever’, as they had promised. The opposition was completely sympathetic to this aim, though the public didn’t really ever get a chance to say how green it wanted its government to be. NGOs and most think tanks already too involved in the green agenda, and too dependent on state funding to be worried by the Secretary of State’s gaffes.

Huhne, like his predecessor, Ed Miliband rose quickly from relative obscurity, to make leadership bids for their party. Huhne put himself forward after just a year in Westminster, having spent  6 years previously as an MEP. Miliband did not win a seat in Parliament until 2005. Just five years later, he was leader of the Labour Party. What these two characters have in common, apart from having been at the top of the Dept. for Energy and Climate Change, is their sheer lack of charm, their arrogance, and their naked ambition, in spite of it all. This much is obvious, not simply for the fact of their own mealy-mouthed words about climate change policy — they are clearly less committed to environmentalism than their own careers — but also from what we know went on in the background. Here, for instance, is the halfwit eco-baroness,  Bryony Worthington, revealing that the Climate Change Act 2008 was a rush job, designed to maximise Miliband’s profile.

As is clear, figures at the NGOs were happy to work with cynical, and self-serving politicians. And politicians, devoid of their own ideas, were happy to give NGOs influence in return for direction. ‘Showing leadership’ mattered more than considering the consequences of ill-conceived notions of leadership were. Doubts from realists within government were brushed aside, or worse still, sneaked past with trickery. And a bill, dictating four decades of energy, industrial and economic policy was drafted in just 3 months, and after scant scrutiny by Parliament, became an act. Drafted by just one department, it would make the ‘whole government responsible for delivering emissions reductions’, and the cost taken by the public. Miliband got a department with an extended reach, a direction legitimised by civil society (and, in theory, with public approval), and an opportunity to strut his stuff on the world stage. Worthington got a seat in the House of Lords.

But this is about Huhne, who inherited the role from Miliband. Where his predecessor had created a ‘Green New Deal’, itself lifted from the New Economics Foundation, Huhne put his own mark on the idea, by drafting a ‘Green Deal’. It was in fact a more modest proposal: the number of jobs that these policies would create was slashed from nearly half a million, to just a quarter.

This shameless reinvention of what the previous government had proposed was however, still sold as ‘nothing less than an industrial revolution’. Shameless plagiarism, shameless overstatement of the value these policies would produce, and shameless failure of the good — i.e. jobs — to materialise does not bother men like Huhne (and, I suspect they don’t bother the likes of Miliband much, either). Outside the blessed green industrial sector — growing, if at all, only because of the continued subsidies promised to it — people continued to lose their jobs. Energy costs continued to soar. It wasn’t his fault; it was the ‘Big Six’ energy companies, or the stupid, lazy energy consumer for not finding he best deal. The morally bankrupt political hack could not take responsibility for his policies.

The establishment’s vacuity and credulity towards environmentalism, and its cynical regard for the public and democracy allows ambitious but hollow individuals to embarrass it, while stamping their mark on public policy. The ascendency of these mediocre personalities through the party ranks must speak about the dearth of ideas, talent, and vision. And this is echoed in the broader inability to challenge environmentalism. This is what creates men like Huhne (and Miliband). Little will change by his departure. Huhne’s replacement may be more sober, and perhaps less self-serving, but will that be sufficient to stop the absurdities of UK and EU energy and climate policies, the dodgy relationships between governments and NGOS, and the excesses of UNFCC process? It seems unlikely.