Blog posts

I have resumed blogging at Substack.

See you at benpile.substack.com

 

Battle of Ideas 2014

The Institute of Ideas' tenth Battle of Ideas festival is taking place next month at the Barbican Centre in London. If you're not familiar with the event, the Battle is a weekend of many debates and discussions on many different matters, led by speakers from around...

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Stern's Turn

Way, way back in the 2000s, when everyone believed in Hockey Sticks, the UK's Labour government commissioned somebody nobody had ever heard of to write a report on the economics of climate change, so that it could make an argument for domestic and international...

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Monbiot Re-Writes History

Environmentalists don't understand politics. Especially democratic politics. And Environmentalists aren't much good at history either. And it should be noted, that although environmentalists like to claim that their perspectives are grounded in science, they are...

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A Climate Economics Antinomy

Paul Ehrlich once famously remarked, Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. A point noted here often is that although environmentalists claim that their perspective is grounded in science, their desire for...

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How Not to "Crush and Bury" Climate Sceptics

The Guardian has quoted Royal Society President, Paul Nurse's outburst: He urged researchers to forge relationships with politicians, lobbyists, religious figures and leaders of organisations in the hope that they might feel ashamed to misuse scientific evidence. But...

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Does the UK Need Another Climate 'Unit'?

Imagine that you are a journalist -- it's not hard to do -- in need of some information about climate change. Where would you turn to first? You might start with the UK's allegedly independent Committee on Climate Change, they are charged by the Climate Change Act...

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How 'Stupid' Spreads

The last post here noted that there was more than coincidence to environmentalism's ascendency and the decline of the press. The broader point made here is that mediocrity seems to infect many public institutions, who in turn seem to resort to environmentalism. It's...

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Environmentalism & Mediocrity

This blog has long argued that one of the forces driving environmentalism's ascendency is mediocrity, especially in the press. Green-inkers fancy themselves in some kind of war with sceptics or deniers of what they imagine to be the 'reality of climate change'. But in...

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Yet More Solar Lunacy

A popular notion that has driven a lot of thinking on 'green energy' is that the entire world's demand for energy is equivalent to (or can be met by) the amount of sunlight falling on a relatively small area of land. For instance, this image has done the rounds...

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Monbiotism. Again.

It's been nearly a year since this blog last took a look at Monbiot's thinking. He used to be a favourite, epitomising the green movement's excesses in each of his Guardian stories. But as useful as it is to see what goes on in the fantasy world that environmentalists...

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Videos

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Articles

A rebellion that the establishment loves

Why our usually illiberal establishment has been so chilled out about XR’s week of vandalism. Extinction Rebellion (XR) protesters in Cambridge have launched a week-long campaign of obstruction and petty vandalism. It began with the protesters issuing demands to...

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2019: the year of peak green bullsh*t

Greta, Prince Harry and Extinction Rebellion took the eco-cult to new heights of madness. 2019 was the most extraordinary year of green bullshit yet. Despite the planet being a wealthier, healthier and safer place than it was when fears of global warming first...

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Where was the debate about the climate?

Channel 4’s leaders’ debate on climate change was a pointless and pathetic exercise. ‘It is the biggest issue on the planet’, said Krishnan Guru-Murthy as he introduced the Channel 4 News Climate Debate. Cue a montage of floods, storms, fires and a burned Koala...

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Green grandstanding is out of control

The parties’ ever more outlandish climate plans will eviscerate our living standards. Brexit aside, this General Election campaign will be remembered for parties’ promises to spend more than their rivals. From the NHS to ‘free’ broadband for all, a bidding war has...

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Buried beneath Brexit: Boris’s bonkers boiler ban

NEWS emerged this weekend that the Conservative Party Conference will hear the leadership’s proposals to achieve Theresa May’s ‘legacy’ Net Zero 2050 target. According to reports, amongst the first steps on this path will be the outlawing of gas connections to any...

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Emmanuel Macron’s fake news about the rainforest

His Amazon tweet was nonsense. Why didn’t the media call him out on it? ‘Our house is burning. Literally’, tweeted French president Emmanuel Macron last week. ‘The Amazon rainforest – the lungs which produces [sic] 20% of our planet’s oxygen – is on fire’, he added,...

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My beef with Goldsmiths’ burger ban

Universities are turning from centres of free thought into factories of conformism. There has been a lot of climate news this silly season. Amid the stories of Greta in a boat, Greta in a suit and, soon, Greta walking on water, this week we learned that Goldsmiths,...

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