How to decide green policies

Many people in officialdom seem to love putting ticks in boxes. Apparently once all the boxes are ticked, a task can be put in the ‘mission accomplished’ cupboard and forgotten about. So watching some of the recent political debate in the run-up to our UK election, it occurred to me that there must be groups of people discussing ideas for policies and then having meetings to decide whether they tick the right boxes to be included in a manifesto. I had some amusing time thinking about how a meeting might go for the Green Party. A little preamble first.

I could write about any of the UK parties I guess. Depending on your choice of media nicknames, we have the Nasty Party, the Fruitcake Racist Party, the Pedophile Empathy Party, the Pedophile and Women Molesting Party, the National Suicide Party (though they get their acronym in the wrong order) and a few Invisible Parties. OK, I invented some of those based on recent news stories of assorted facts and allegations and make no assertion of any truth in any of them whatsoever. The Greens are trickier to nickname – ‘The Poverty and Oppression Maximization, Environmental Destruction, Economic Collapse, Anti-science, Anti-fun and General Misery Party’ is a bit of a mouthful. I like having greens around, just so long as they never win control. No matter how stupid a mistake I might ever make, I’ll always know that greens would have made a worse one.

So what would a green policy development meeting might be like? I’ll make the obvious assumption that the policies don’t all come from the Green MP. Like any party, there are local groups of people, presumably mostly green types in the wider sense of the word, who produce ideas to feed up the ladder. Many won’t even belong to any official party, but still think of themselves as green. Some will have an interest mainly in socialism, some more interested in environmentalism, most will be a blend of the two. And to be fair, most of them will be perfectly nice people who want to make the world a better place, just like the rest of us. I’ve met a lot of greens, and we do agree at least on motive even if I think they are wrong on most of their ideas of how to achieve the goals. We all want world peace and justice, a healthy environment and to solve poverty and oppression. The main difference between us is deciding how best to achieve all that.

So I’ll look at green debate generally as a source of the likely discussions, rather than any actual Green Party manifesto, even though that still looks pretty scary. To avoid litigation threats and keep my bank balance intact, I’ll state that this is only a personal imagining of what might go into such green meetings, and you can decide for yourself how much it matches up to the reality. It is possible that the actual Green Party may not actually run this way, and might not support some of the policies I discuss, which are included in this piece based on wider green debate, not the Green Party itself. Legal disclaimers in place, I’ll get on with my imagining:

Perhaps there might be some general discussion over the welcome coffee about how awful it is that some nasty capitalist types make money and there might be economic growth, how terrible it is that scientists keep discovering things and technologists keep developing them, how awful it is that people are allowed to disbelieve in a global warming catastrophe and still be allowed to roam free and how there should be a beautiful world one day where a green elite is in charge, the population has been culled down to a billion or two and everyone left has to do everything they say on pain of imprisonment or death. After coffee, the group migrates to a few nice recycled paper flip-charts to start filling them with brainstormed suggestions. Then they have to tick boxes for each suggestion to filter out the ones not dumb enough to qualify. Then make a nice summary page with the ones that get all the boxes ticked. So what boxes do they need? And I guess I ought to give a few real examples as evidence.

Environmental destruction has to be the first one. Greens must really hate the environment, since the majority of green policies damage it, but they manage to get them implemented via cunning marketing to useful idiots to persuade them that the environment will benefit. The idiots implement them thinking the environment will benefit, but it suffers.  Some quick examples:

Wind turbines are a big favorite of greens, but planted on peat bogs in Scotland, the necessary roads cause the bogs to dry out, emitting vast quantities of CO2 and destroying the peat ecosystem. Scottish wind turbines also kill eagles and other birds.

In the Far East, many bogs have been drained to grow palm oil for biofuels, another green favorite that they’ve managed to squeeze into EU law. Again, vast quantities of CO2, and again ecosystem destruction.

Forests around the world have been cut down to make room for palm oil plantations too, displacing local people, destroying an ecosystem to replace it with one to meet green fuel targets.

Still more forests have been cut down to enable new ones to be planted to cash in on  carbon offset schemes to keep corporate greens happy that they can keep flying to all those green conferences without feeling guilt. More people displaced, more destruction.

Staying with biofuels, a lot of organic waste from agriculture is converted to biofuels instead of ploughing it back into the land. Soil structure therefore deteriorates, damaging ecosystem and damaging future land quality. CO2 savings by making the bio-fuel are offset against locking the carbon up in soil organic matter so there isn’t much benefit even there, but the damage holds.

Solar farms are proliferating in the UK, often occupying prime agricultural land that really ought to be growing food for the many people in the world still suffering from malnutrition. The same solar panels could have been sent to otherwise useless desert areas in a sunny country and used to displace far more fossil fuels and save far more CO2 without reducing food production. Instead, people in many African countries have to use wood stoves favored by greens as sustainable, but which produce airborne particles that greatly reduce health. Black carbon resulting from open wood fires also contributes directly to warming.

Many of the above policy effects don’t just tick the environmental destruction box, but also the next ones poverty and oppression maximization. Increasing poverty resulted directly from increasing food prices as food was grown to be converted into bio-fuel. Bio-fuels as first implemented were a mind-numbingly stupid green policy. Very many of the world’s poorest people have been forcefully pushed out of their lands and into even deeper poverty to make space to grow bio-fuel crops. Many have starved or suffered malnutrition. Entire ecosystems have been destroyed, forests replaced, many animals pushed towards extinction by loss of habitat. More recently, even greens have realized the stupidity and these polices are slowly being fixed.

Other green policies see economic development by poor people as a bad thing because it increases their environmental footprint. The poor are therefore kept poor. Again, their poverty means they can’t use modern efficient technology to cook or keep warm, they have to chop trees to get wood to burn, removing trees damages soil integrity, helps flooding, burning them produces harmful particles and black carbon to increase warming. Furthermore, with too little money to buy proper food, some are forced to hunt or buy bushmeat, endangering animal species and helping to spread viruses between closely genetically-related animals and humans.

So a few more boxes appear. All the above polices achieved pretty much the opposite of what they presumably intended, assuming the people involved didn’t actually want to destroy the world. Maybe a counterproductive box needs to be ticked too.

Counterproductive links well to another of the green’s apparent goals, of economic collapse. They want to stop economic growth. They want to reduce obsolescence.  Obsolescence is the force that drives faster and faster progress towards devices that give us a high quality of life with a far lower environmental impact, with less resource use, lower energy use, and less pollution. If you slow obsolescence down because green dogma says it is a bad thing, all those factors worsen. The economy also suffers. The economy suffers again if energy prices are deliberately made very high by adding assorted green levies such as carbon taxes, or renewable energy subsidies.  Renewable energy subsidies encourage more oppression of people who really don’t want wind turbines nearby, causing them stress and health problems, disrupting breeding cycles of small wild animals in the areas, reducing the value of people’s homes, while making the companies that employ hem less able to compete internationally, so increasing bankruptcy, redundancy and making even more poverty. Meanwhile the rich wind farm owners are given lots of money from poor people who are forced to buy their energy and pay higher taxes for the other half of their subsidy. The poor take all the costs, the rich take all the benefits. That could be another box to tick, since it seems pretty universal in green policy So much for  policies that are meant to be socialist! Green manifesto policies would make some of these problems far worse still. Business would be strongly loaded with extra costs and admin, and the profits they can still manage to make would be confiscated to pay for the ridiculous spending plans. With a few Greens in power, damage will be limited and survivable. If they were to win control, our economy would collapse totally in a rapidly accelerating debt spiral.

Greens hate science and technology, another possible box to tick. I once chatted to one of the Green leaders (I do go to environmental events sometimes if I think I can help steer things in a more logical direction), and was told ‘the last thing we need is more science’. But it is science and technology that makes us able to live in extreme comfort today alongside a healthy environment. 100 years ago, pollution was terrible. Rivers caught fire. People died from breathing in a wide variety of pollutants. Today, we have clean water and clean air. Thanks to increasing CO2 levels – and although CO2 certainly does contribute to warming, though not as much as feared by warmist doom-mongers, it also has many positive effects – there is more global greenery today than decades ago. Plants thrive as CO2 levels increase so they are growing faster and healthier. We can grow more food and forests can recover faster from earlier green destruction.

The greens also apparently have a box that ‘prevents anyone having any fun’. Given their way, we’d be allowed no meat, our homes would all have to be dimly lit and freezing cold, we’d have to walk everywhere or wait for buses in the rain. Those buses would still burn diesel fuel, which kills thousands of people every year via inhalation of tiny particulates. When you get anywhere, you’d have to use ancient technologies that have to be fixed instead of replaced. You’d have to do stuff that doesn’t use much energy or involve eating anything nice, going anywhere nice because that would involve travel and travel is bad, except for greens, who can go to as many international conferences as they want.

So if the greens get their way, if people are dumb enough to fall for promises of infinite milk and honey for all, all paid for by taxing 3 bankers, then the world we’d live in would very quickly have a devastated environment, a devastated economy, a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to a few rich people, enormous oppression, increasing poverty, decreasing health, no fun at all. In short, with all the above boxes checked, the final summary box to get the policy into manifesto must be ‘increases general misery‘.

An interesting list of boxes to tick really. It seems that all truly green policies must:

1. Cause environmental destruction
2. Increase poverty and oppression
3. Be counterproductive
4. Push towards economic collapse
5. Make the poor suffer all the costs while the rich (and Green elite) reap the benefits
6. Impede further science and technology development
7. Prevent anyone having fun
8. Lead to general misery

This can’t be actually how they run their meetings I suppose: unless they get someone from outside with a working brain to tick the boxes, the participants would need to have some basic understanding of the actual likely consequences of their proposals and to be malign, and there is little evidence to suggest any of them do understand, and they are mostly not malign. Greens are mostly actually quite nice people, even the ones in politics, and I do really think they believe in what they are doing. Their hearts are usually in the right place, it’s just that their brains are missing or malfunctioning. All of the boxes get ticked, it’s just unintentionally.

I rest my case.

 

 

 

I’m not a green futurist. I’d rather be right.

Since 1998 I have written and lectured occasionally on environmentalism and often criticise its green, pseudo-religious sub-community. I care about the environment just as greens are supposed to, but I see dogmatic, poorly thought through green policies as a big part of the problem facing the environment. With the greens as its friends, the Earth needs no enemies. Today, I read that solar companies are leaving Spain, where it is usually sunny, to come to the UK, where it usually isn’t, because our previous and existing governments were very keen to demonstrate their green credentials by subsidising solar power. Clarification: they are increasing installation in the UK instead of Spain. This is obviously counter-productive, as are many other policies thought up by the green community. 

So while many other futurists and futurologists advertise themselves as green, I am very proud to be on the other side, that of clear-thinking, full life cycle, system-wide analysis. I am certainly not a ‘green futurist’. I am an engineer and a proper futurist, looking at the future objectively and logically to try to work out what is likely to happen, not caring whether the news is popular or not. I’d rather be right. Of course I want to do my best to help ensure to a sustainable world and where a practice makes good sense I follow it. Greens are meant to do that but they often end up doing the opposite. Many greens think of science and technology as the problem. They want to go back to the dark ages, reduce standard of living, even reduce population. They advocate policies that disadvantage many of the world’s poor and prevent many from being born. I couldn’t ever live with such an ideology. I see advanced technology as the main foundation for living sustainably. As my own contribution to environmentalism and sustainability, as well as inventing quite a few things that can help, I also wrote a book last year on system-wide sustainability, where I contrasted the application of green dogma against the far better approach of positively applying science, engineering and logical systems thinking instead of negatively trying to undo progress. The book is called Total Sustainability.

Nor am I an AGW (human-caused global warming) catastrophist, also in contrast to many other futurists. I am not taken in by the poor quality spun science that suggests imminent AGW-based catastrophe. There is far too much deception in the ‘climate science’ and politics community which then recommends diverting trillions onto ineffective or counter-productive policies that could be spent far better elsewhere. The most important skill a futurist can have is the ability to distinguish between sense and nonsense. 

The climate has always changed, and always will. Humans have some impact, but not so far or likely to be a catastrophic impact. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, a warming contributor, but the CO2-centric climate models that have predicted catastrophe have almost all greatly overestimated warming to date, and none predicted the 17.5 years of no warming that we have now seen, so they are wrong. Much is made of arctic melting, but little is mentioned about the record ice in the antarctic. The theories about why this or that happens seem to change every month. In the UK, seasonal predictions using the same theoretical base have got it wrong almost every time for years. We are meant to listen to a group who tell us a very distorted picture of what is going on, who claim competence and understanding far beyond what they demonstrate. As any real scientist understands, if a theory disagrees with observation, the theory is wrong. We need a new theory. The fact the ‘climate science’ community conspicuously ignores that fact, and spends an enormous effort to make excuses for poor models, or even changing the data, rather than admit that they simply don’t know what is happening puts them in opposition to the most basic principle of good science. While a lot of good science is undoubtedly done, many others disqualify themselves by that principle, and that pollutes the entire field, bringing science itself into disrepute, and damaging the ability of future science and technology to help protect and improve the environment. So I am skeptical when they say the sky is falling. It doesn’t look like it to me.

Other scientists often suggest reasons why the models may be wrong – the full influence of various-term ocean cycles and the full effects on cloud seeding from sunspots via galactic cosmic radiation deflection. These are better correlated through history than the outputs of the models. Many factors that can influence climate such as agricultural practices and socieconomic reactions to trends or subsidies are not included in the models. Much of the warming we have seen can be explained mostly by natural cycles overlaid on the continued warming as we recover from the last mini ice age. Some, but we don’t know how much, can be explained by a wide range of natural effects that are poorly understood and quantified – soil chemistry; forestry emissions; biological, chemical and physical environmental feedbacks and buffers. Some of it, but we don’t know how much, can be explained by changes in human originated CO2, changes in high atmosphere water vapour from aviation and space missions, CFCs, black carbon, and dozens of other human contributory factors, which are still not fully understood or quantified. Now, as we head into a likely prolonged solar minimum, some scientists are suggesting that a lengthy cooling period now looks to be as likely a short to medium term trend as further warming. I don’t pretend to understand all the science, but I don’t believe the AGW catastrophe people do either. I am a skeptic. I don’t deny that CO2 is a problem, nor that we have had warming, nor even that humans may account for some of that warming, but I sure as hell am not convinced we’re all about to cook if we don’t do something really big really fast.

I am quite pleased with my track record on environmentalism and green stuff. In my 2006 report Carbon, I laid out some of my views and I still stand by them. In it I said that increasing CO2 is an important issue but not a reason to panic, mainly because it will eventually take care of itself. We are not faced with imminent AGW catastrophe. The default future migration to other energy sources as they become cheaper will limit CO2 emissions in the long term, so we will be absolutely fine, provided that the proven ongoing damage from green policies can be limited. I analysed a lot of policies advocated by greens and found them likely to be counterproductive. I have sadly been proved right on many of those, but thankfully, some of the engineering solutions I recommended have since gained traction. I was blocked from publishing my 2006 report since it was seen as too controversial at the time. I published it almost unchanged when I went freelance at the end of 2007. I later used much of it in my book.

You can read it here: http://www.futurizon.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/carbonfeb08.pdf

Unlike catastrophic global warming advocates, I haven’t had to change my story every month. I first lectured at the World Futures Society conference on the pseudo-religious nature of green environmentalism way back in 1998 , and I am still saying the same now.

Green usually means wrong and usually means harming the environment by doing something that hasn’t been thought through properly but is based on dogma. I’d rather be someone who helps the environment and helps sustainability by doing proper engineering. I’d rather not have to make excuses in a few years when the historians analyse what was going on today and ask why so many people were taken in by predictions of AGW catastrophe, and why they advocated wasting so much money and impoverishing so many, damaging so many economies and so many lives to make so little impact on a problem that has in any case been exaggerated greatly.

I’m not a green futurist. I’d much rather be right.