The Jevons Paradox Explains Why Net Zero is an Exercise in Futility

 Peter Cook and Rowan Atkinson’s ‘End of the World’ sketch from The Secret Policemen’s Ball is a timeless piece of comedy because, like with all great comedy, we instantly recognise the target of the joke. Every generation throws up its own cultists, convinced that they alone can anticipate and possibly avert the ‘end times’.

If the bloke who stood, with sandwich boards proclaiming “the end of the world is nigh” in my childhood town had had access to social media, who knows, he may have become the Greta Thunberg of his day, with millions hanging on his every word.

Greta always puts me in mind of two characters: one fictional, Violet Elizabeth Bott of Just William fame, the spoilt brat from next-door who would yell, “I’ll thcream and thcream till I’m thick!” (translation: I’ll scream and scream until I’m sick); and, Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent, who almost brought down Henry VIII, so popular were her visions and prophecies.

While Greta chucked in school when she was about 12, Barton never went. Despite this, and again, like Greta, Barton met repeatedly with Henry’s senior ministers, though her meetings ended rather less well for her than did Greta’s. It was Thomas Cromwell who, worried that the Barton cult was getting out of hand, had her executed on trumped up charges and a number of her followers hung, drawn and quartered.

Perhaps humans are pre-programmed to adopt apocalyptic cults. After all, the Abrahamic religions all anticipate the end of the world as we know it. Christian breakaway sects, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christadelphians, appear to expect Judgement Day any time soon, but perhaps no sooner than those ‘green’ zealots who set up a trestle table each Saturday in our town square, cover it with baize and pamphlets and, literally, try and frighten the children. Ironically, their pitch is immediately opposite the Jehovah’s Kingdom Hall! Take your pick, they’re all selling the same thing....<<<Read More>>>...

Cap-and-invest: A US programme to ration energy and then tax the rations

 Several US states have implemented or are developing Cap-and-Invest programmes, including California, Washington State and New York State.

Climate change catastrophists will say that these programmes are to save the planet from global warming. But as with all things related to the climate change agenda, it has nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with money and control.

Carbon taxes and cap-and-invest systems have much in common. Both are market-based policies to make “carbon emitters” pay for their “emissions.”

Using climate change jargon: Cap-and-Invest is a tool designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by setting a declining cap on total emissions from covered sources, such as large industrial facilities, fuel distributors and utilities. Each covered entity must hold an allowance for every tonne of emissions it produces, with the total number of allowances equal to the annual emissions cap, which decreases over time to achieve long-term climate goals. This system creates a financial incentive for businesses to reduce emissions, as they can either cut their own pollution or purchase allowances from others, with the price of allowances determined by supply and demand....<<<Read More>>>...

IPCC Likely to Start Blaming Humans For Weather as Friederike Otto Takes Key Role

 Last December the Daily Sceptic published an article reporting that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) could be preparing to start blaming humans for individual bad weather events. Straws-in-the-wind stuff, based on an IPCC press release claiming a century of burning hydrocarbons had resulted in “more frequent and intense extreme weather events”.

To date, the IPCC has failed to detect that humans using hydrocarbons have led to worse bad weather on the simple scientific ground that it is impossible, with current data sources, to remove the overwhelming role of natural variation. Our story was prescient. It’s all change at the IPCC, with the appointment of Attribution Queen Friederike Otto and a troop of fellow attributionists to take charge of writing a new chapter on extreme weather for its forthcoming seventh climate science assessment report. 

With the foxes now in charge of the chicken coop, political order can be restored, with the IPCC science more closely aligned with current Net Zero political requirements. Dr Otto, who runs the Green Blob-funded World Weather Attribution (WWA) operation out of Imperial College, has been appointed the co-leader of the extreme weather chapter. “It will be a lot of work, but it also gives a lot of opportunity to shape the structure and focus of the chapter”, she notes. WWA paymasters who include the Grantham, European Climate and Bezos Earth foundations will no doubt be delighted with this news....<<<Read More>>>...