Doug Brodie’s Letter To MP’s

By Paul Homewood 

 

  

Doug Brodie has just sent his latest missive to assorted Tory politicians:

 

 

To: Mr Drew Hendry, MP

      All Tory MPs

      Lord Lawson

      Lord Bourne

      Ms Ruth Donaldson, MSP

      Mr Murdo Fraser, MSP

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

 

Why the Climate Change Act should be Repealed, Edition 2

 

This email is to refer you to my updated paper Why the Climate Change Act should be Repealed. I have made minor changes to the text and hyperlinks to bring it up to date and make it easier to understand. For example, I have made clear that the minor global warming of the last year which is being absurdly hyped by some as “proof of climate change” is due to natural El Niño weather conditions and therefore not to man-made CO2 global warming. I have also added details on the very high overall cost of wind power to rebut the recent simplistic media reports claiming that wind power is now the cheapest source of electricity.

You owe it to your constituents to read at least the opening and closing pages of my carefully referenced paper, preferably all of it.

I sent my Edition 1 paper to Energy and Climate Change Secretary Amber Rudd in her official capacity. The response from the DECC was only a few short paragraphs. It included the classic propaganda mantra “climate change is one of the most serious threats facing our world” and various other equally unjustified climate change assertions, with no attempt to respond directly to the facts and arguments in my paper.

I also sent my paper to Mr Miguel Arias Cañete, the unelected EU Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy but have had no reply, not even an acknowledgement. This demonstrates how remote and inaccessible the EU is to the ordinary UK voter. It prompted me to expand my own views on the EU’s stance on climate change in the Conclusions section of my paper.

This entirely typical display by climate officialdom of unscientific denial of reality and unwillingness to engage with critics vindicates my approach of sending my paper to all Tory MPs. The only hope of averting the impending disaster of electricity blackouts and economic decline is that politicians as a body, Tories in particular now that they are no longer constrained by the excessively green LibDems, can be persuaded that the reckless, futile measures being undertaken by the government to “tackle” so‑called man-made climate change are "politically impossible, economically ruinous and morally bogus".

Obviously I am aware that you individually are not obliged to engage with a non-constituent but if any of you or your researchers want to send me a reply and even try to rebut the facts and arguments in my paper, I would be happy to respond.

To finish, the following are a few recent adverse “climate change” items of news:

* A crisis has engulfed the UK steel industry, hastened by the "cripplingly high energy costs" resulting from our Climate Change Act policies.

* A scandal has engulfed Volkswagen over cheating on NOx diesel emissions, a casualty of the Kyoto-inspired push to favour diesel over petrol to save minimal, irrelevant CO2 emissions, even although the toxic diesel pollution effect was known about from the outset.

* On windless 4th November, the National Grid was forced for the first time to use new "last resort" measures to keep the lights on after multiple coal power plants broke down and wind power supplied less than 1% of demand. Fortunately the weather was mild, so peak demand was low. This incident highlights the complacency expressed by Lord Bourne, Secretary for Energy and Climate Change and others in the recent House of Lords debate on the electricity blackouts being threatened by our "slow motion train crash" energy policies.

* In the run-up to the Paris climate summit, blogger Paul Homewood has been analysing the INDCs submitted by individual countries. He notes that one of the key aims of the Climate Change Act is to: ”Demonstrate strong UK leadership internationally, signalling that we are committed to taking our share of responsibility for reducing global emissions in the context of developing negotiations on a post-2012 global agreement at Copenhagen in 2009”. His INDC analyses show clearly that there is no prospect of emissions being reduced before 2030. As such the “aim” has failed, rather destroying the purpose of the Act.

* In any case it’s not looking good for global agreement in Paris with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin saying that "climate change is fraud".

Yours faithfully,

Douglas S Brodie, BSc

 

 

Doug’s full paper is here,  but I have reprinted the Introduction and Conclusions below:

 

 

 

Why the Climate Change Act should be Repealed, by D S Brodie

 

1. Introduction

Politicians, UN bureaucrats, environmentalists, academics, the establishment media and greedy big business have worked together for years to spin an alarmist narrative on the allegedly dangerous effects of alleged man-made global warming and how we must take drastic action to tackle this threat and thereby “save the planet”. They have repeated the politically correct mantras of this narrative for so long that they have apparently come to believe that their own made-up propaganda is actually true, e.g. “the science is settled”; “man-made climate change is one of the most serious threats the world faces”; “97% of scientists believe in made-made global warming”; “man-made climate change is causing more frequent extreme weather events” – all debunked within this paper.

 
Our politicians are squandering hundreds of billions of pounds trying to tackle a non-problem, hoist on their own petard of having brainwashed the electorate and themselves about “climate change” for so long. Without proper scientific or engineering due diligence they have rushed to adopt technically ineffectual and economically destructive energy policies which can only achieve marginal, irrelevant decarbonisation. Their target of 80% decarbonisation by 2050 is impossible given current technology without shutting down whole swathes of the economy and reverting to a very restrictive sort of society. All they are actually achieving is to drag our country down into a low efficiency, high cost, fuel poverty rife, blackout-prone, anti-science, anti-growth, de-industrialised, jobs sparse future, all for minimal climate or sustainability benefit.

 

7. Conclusions

 

Establishment thinking on climate change prompted Professor Richard Tol to say:
“Politically correct climate change orthodoxy has completely destroyed our ability to think rationally about the environment”. As Nigel Lawson says “Global warming orthodoxy is not merely irrational. It is wicked”. Politicians urgently need to shake themselves out of their groupthink climate daydream. They are the real “climate deniers”, ignoring all the evidence and common sense arguments against their man-made global warming/climate change scare story. They have constructed a massive man-made climate change folly built on foundations of sand.

 
The 2008 UK Climate Change Act legally commits the UK to decarbonise its economy by 80% by 2050. That it was passed into law by then Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband with the assistance of a Friends of the Earth campaigner (now Lady Worthington) and that no other country in the world (apart from Scotland) has set such a draconian legally binding target should be enough to set major alarm bells ringing. No proper cost-benefit analysis has been carried out and the plans as to how it might be achieved are airy-fairy. The Climate Change Act elevates the "precautionary principle" to an absurd level when we could just adapt to whatever happens (warming or cooling) as and when necessary.

 

According to the government’s own figures, the Climate Change Act will cost the UK an incredible £18 billion per year. Leftist politicians seem strangely untroubled by this vast expenditure in these times of austerity. It may work out to even more, as figures from the EU and the IEA researched by ex-environment minister Owen Paterson suggest that for Britain to reach its 2050 targets would cost £1.3 trillion, a sum which could instead pay off most of the national debt. On top of this the EU has, unbelievably, committed at least 20% of the entire EU budget to climate-related spending. All this because of make-believe, unvalidated, disproved, invalidated computer climate models.

 

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) and the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) have set about the task of supposedly bringing the Earth’s climate under control with missionary zeal. Unfortunately most of their pronouncements have a biassed “climate change” propaganda slant and objectively-minded sceptics are disinclined to believe a word of what they say. The top CCC bureaucrat recently gave a radio interview which was so "off the wall" as to cast real doubt on his fitness for office.

 
The CCC recently issued an advisory paper on options for the UK’s so-called fifth carbon budget (2028-2032), characterised by one expert as "green crap trumps common sense". It follows along the lines of the DECC energy projections described in Section 5 of this paper and shown to be unrealistic pie in the sky. In a series of recent posts, “best blog” analyst Paul Homewood describes the CCC’s plans as “wishful thinking”, “pure gibberish”, “utterly dishonest” and leading to an “astronomic bill” of £17 billion per year by 2030.

 

All the spin, obfuscation and deception surrounding “climate change” is explained by the fact that the climate change movement was highjacked at its inception as a vehicle to promote sustainability, as described in the previously referenced book by Dr Tim Ball. Today it seems to be a mixture of left-wing authoritarianism and muddled global society changing agendas: for Agenda 21; for global wealth redistribution and trying to "change the entire global economy" through unelected UN politicians and bureaucrats with dreams of world governance pushing for binding global agreements; against alleged environmental damage caused by greedy Western capitalists and consumers to the alleged detriment of the world’s poorest; against alleged "climate injustice", to save the world’s poor from the imagined ravages of non-existent man-made global warming; all on the pretext of supposedly “tackling climate change”. To add to the parody, as man-made global warming is simply a political fabrication, in practice all that results from futile, pretend efforts to “tackle climate change” is that the world’s poorest suffer the most. Where is the self-righteous moral superiority in such a political stance? Resource depletion is a looming problem, but it needs to be faced in a rational, honest manner.

 

Our politicians ostensibly set great store by the UN’s December Paris climate summit, despite the fact that every other such summit has ended in failure with this one shaping up to be no different. Hopefully they are just playing a political game, knowing that their professed hope for a legally binding agreement has no chance of coming about. It is sad that despite all the evidence that man-made CO2 is not a problem, politicians keep going to such climate talks proposing actions which will achieve nothing but economic harm.

 

It seems unlikely that between now and December the government will have an “Emperor’s New Clothes” realisation of the obvious truth that the climate change movement is not wearing a suit of fine clothes but is actually stark naked (which Ukip realised long ago). However it must seize the opportunity to change policy when, as expected, the Paris summit ends in failure or in a meaningless fudge. That will be the time to repeal the flawed Climate Change Act, or at the very least to drop its unilateral, unattainable targets. This would surely be welcomed by the overwhelming majority of Tory MPs said to be sceptical of man-made climate change. A more palatable political option might be to suspend the Climate Change Act rather than repealing it, until such time as potentially dangerous man-made global warming actually starts to shows itself.

 
Obviously the government needs to avoid making rash commitments at the Paris summit, such as committing to our unattainable but still revocable Climate Change Act targets. The climate ideological EU and USA’s President Obama (whose blog and actions show him to be very badly informed or shamelessly partisan) are fanatical cheerleaders for the climate change scare, with no qualms about sacrificing their industries to their cause. We should resist committing to the EU’s proposed 40% emission cuts from 1990 levels by 2030 and especially the G7 summit’s proposed 40%-70% emissions cuts from 2010 levels by 2050 which could be even more unattainable than the Climate Change Act 80% target from the 1990 baseline. We should side with the pragmatists, admittedly few and far between in a world where most politicians have lost all sense of reality on this issue.

 
In fact David Cameron should insist on the repatriation of our energy policies in his EU renegotiations on new UK terms of membership. He should challenge the flawed, statist belief that authoritarian, supranational regulation is essential “to tackle climate change”.

 
The EU must know that, as outlined in this paper, (i) the science shows that man-made CO2 poses only a far future, relatively minor, perhaps even net beneficial, currently not even discernible* climate risk, (ii) our intermittent renewables technology is incapable of achieving meaningful national emissions reductions and (iii) the determination of the now-dominant developing countries to continue using fossil fuels means that the EU’s damaging climate policies are certain to prove globally ineffectual and pointless.

 
* disregarding the knee-jerk, easily disproved, scaremongering claims by climate propagandists that practically every severe weather event that happens is due to “climate change”, the alarmists’ obfuscating new name for “man-made global warming”.

 
This suggests that the main reason for the EU’s zealous promotion of the climate change scare is not because of the science, not “virtue signalling” and certainly not due to any rational analysis of the facts, but raw power politics. To the EU, “climate change” is just another device for exerting enforced “solidarity” and “ever closer union” control over its member states, no matter that it is based on an imagined threat (shades of George Orwell’s “1984”) and no matter how severe and pointless the economic damage caused. The retribution that will fall on politicians when the broader public realise how they have been deceived on this issue will be severe unless they start to backtrack soon. The EU’s
absurdly profligate, "green-energy basket case" climate policies and the hefty fines it could impose on us for failure to meet its ill-considered energy directives is by itself a good reason for voting no to continued membership of the EU.

 
If the government is serious about sustainability it ought to be encouraging research into innovative, energy-rich fuels of the future rather than leading a regressive charge backwards to using energy-sparse fuels of the past like wind and wood.

 
Finally, the government needs to stop listening to subversive environmental groups like Greenpeace, WWF and Friends of the Earth with their undemocratic hidden agendas. Who do they claim to represent? Their support for a zero or negative growth economy with no fossil fuels and no nuclear power is totally unrealistic and misguided. It would take us back to the poverty and squalor of the Middle Ages when all the evidence shows that a growing, wealthy economy provides better support for the environment.

 

This paper has described how the policies of the Climate Change Act are wrecking our energy infrastructure, precipitating electricity blackouts, worsening fuel poverty and making our businesses uncompetitive, all for marginal, irrelevant decarbonisation. This damage could be stopped at a stroke by repealing the Climate Change Act. With no more renewables subsidies or carbon taxes on “demon” fossil fuels, the deployment of unviably incompatible renewables would be stopped dead and could start to be reversed, allowing essential new fossil fuel and nuclear power stations to be commissioned at affordable prices. The economy would be unshackled from the albatross of the Climate Change Act lunacies. The DECC and the Committee on Climate Change could be disbanded and proper engineers put in charge of energy policy instead of naïve green activists and politicians. Funding of the subversive UN IPCC could be stopped. Rationality would be restored.