Like James Delingpole, I’m finding it hard to keep up with Climategate, the latest posting by this Climategating journo-blogger, after another tumultuous weekend of Climategatery, being a piece he put up on Saturday about the Beano. Read EU Referendum, read the Bishop, Climate Audit, WUWT, and the rest of them. In particular, the sheer quantity of good stuff that EU Referendum puts up every day amazes me.
In one of his more recent postings, EU Referendum’s Richard North says this:
… there is a long way to go before the institutional inertia supporting the global warming industry can be overturned, and the lack of political engagement by the Conservatives is a major handicap. Until and unless this issue goes political, there is little to sustain it in the long run. Without that political traction, skeptics will find it hard to keep up the momentum, feeding fresh stories to the media. The campaign could falter.
I don’t believe the campaign will falter for a moment, any more than that old habit we used to have of complaining about the uselessness of Communism ever stopped, just because the newspapers had been ignoring that fact for a week or two. But, I get the point. Yes, the “campaign”, in the sense of daily old and new media Warmist catastrophes and surrenders and humiliations and measured retreats that turn into routs, might soon slacken off bit. And a few words of doubt about Warmism from David Cameron would indeed keep the media pot boiling that little bit longer. But how to contrive this? Cameron’s plan for the next general election is to present himself as Mister In-Between, neither Left nor Right, but Nice and Good and Wise, and thereby to make a nonsense of all Leftist protestations to the effect that he is a nasty Rightist. The more the Right complains about him, the more it suits Cameron’s plan. His plan may be unprincipled hogwash, but that’s another whole argument. Meanwhile, that is his plan.
It thus follows that the way to get an anti-Warmist response out of the Cameron is not for the Conservative Party’s entire activist base to bombard him with anti-Warmist complaints. Cameron believes he has all his faithful votes in the bag. He frets now only about the unfaithful ones. He will merely use his refusal to notice complaints from his own angry supporters to burnish his image as Mr Not-Right. No, the trick is somehow to get the Left to say anti-Warmist things. If that happens, Cameron will be echoing it within the hour.
And the good news is, the Left is starting to do this. The newspapers of the Right are now all over Global Warming, printing their usual newspaper mixture of important truths, sloppy lies, stupid irrelevancies, and generally echoing the anti-Warmist blogosphere of about a month ago or more. But, quite often, they are even acknowledging that bloggers got there first. And now they are catching up. The Guardian is starting seriously to shift. Even the BBC is starting to ask some of the questions that matter.
The reason this is happening is that when the regular non-Left newspapers publish stories about Warmism and about the dishonesties of the Warmists, people read them. Public opinion is inexorably shifting on this. Why wouldn’t it? Had it been uncontested, Warmism would have spread – still might spread – ruin all over the planet, and at a time when ruin of other kinds has just been spread all over the planet on the basis of other excuses. What’s not to hate? The arguments are extremely complicated, but the basic message now being learned from them is cruelly simple. It’s bollocks. This is a meme that can spread from one head to another head in under a second. The opinions polls can only go on going one way on this. By and by, the Left that hasn’t noticed this already will notice. Even if their only complaint is that Warmism isn’t working any more, and is instead hated, well, that’s a good reason for them to hate it too. Perhaps Warmism’s ultimate crime in their eyes will be that it is now making them look like fools.
And guess what they will then say? My guess is, they will say (see above) that Warmism is a capitalist plot. As opposed to global warming, I mean. This is how the Left always ends up accepting that something that their enemies have denounced for years as bad actually is bad. They say, it’s bad because capitalism did it. That they actually started it themselves, well, they forget that bit. But, in a way, they’re correct about this. Leftist causes do have a habit of degenerating into capitalist rackets. Certainly Warmism has become a capitalist racket, big time.
“Capitalism”, in an argumentative context such as this, is a word that blurs the distinction between (a) good and just and freedom-enhancing rules that result in, among many other splendid things, capitalists doing very well, and (b) capitalists who have done very well buying up the government and bending it to their will. We here unswervingly support (a), while remaining suspicious of (b), for all that, as we constantly also point out, (b) is at least better than (c) utter ruin, caused by people who hate both (a) and (b). For most Lefties, the dubiousness of (b) is iused as an excuse to destroy (a), which is stupid, but there you go. If that’s what it will take to make them enjoy performing the intellectual about-turn that I am suggesting for them, away from their idiotic and hitherto wholly uncritical fixation with Warmism, well, so be it. It would also help if by then the Left had found some plausible but quite different excuses for ruining up the world in their preferred manner. Again, different argument.
If anybody else in the world is doing more than Richard North to offer the Left the sort facts it needs to change its tune in the manner I describe, then I have not noticed such a person, although the Left won’t thank him for this. It will suddenly pluck such facts out of thin air, as if nobody had ever thought of them before, and denounce Right wingers for none of them having realised any of this. They will. Just you wait.
Which is when Cameron may finally have something to say about the imperfections of Warmist scientists.
It goes like this: specialist skeptic blogs, unspecialist but skeptic blogs, the Conservative Party’s usual supporters, public, non-lefty old media, more public, lefty old media, more public, and finally, last of all, David Cameron. This undignified process is presumably what David Cameron thinks of as leadership. It may end up being branded by the rest of us something seriously other than leadership, but, like I say, different argument. My point is, given Richard North’s question, that has been my answer.
The real litmus test is reflected in the carbon markets of late. They’ve dipped, and the price seems to have flattened out, because for the first time since the inception of that nonsense…there is uncertainty as to whether the liberal political handlers are up to the task of forced participation (i.e. US Cap and Trade etc).
My personal opinion is that this could be a tipping point if one pushed hard enough.
Cheers,
The Worm
If England has to wait for St Call-me-Dave to slay the dragon of False Climate Science …. Well, that’s just not a very good plan.
In a sense, I feel sorry for poor over-promoted Davie. Barack Obama’s intelligence married to Hillary Clinton’s charisma. Remember how the Brit media used to lavish praise on Gordon Brown while emptying their chamber pots on Tony Blair — then fast forward to today. That’s the future that awaits poor little out-of-his-depth spineless Davie.
But to the issue at hand. Surely the political approach is to start at the ground floor. Can party activists (in any or all parties) make a proper skepticism about the abuse of science by Warm-mongers into an issue in candidate selection? If a significant minority of MPs can enter the next Parliament (Davie’s Parliament!) on record as being unconvinced about the need for stealth taxes on carbon, poor old Davie will have his hands tied.
For a practical lesson in how to deal with the contortion of climate change politics watch Australia’s PM to be, Tony Abbott…
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/environment/news/article.cfm?c_id=39&objectid=10625009&pnum=0
The left will probably claim that it realised that the claims of the AGW warmists were overblown, just as parts of the left claimed that they realised that the Soviet Union was doomed long before Ronald Reagan/Thatcher others denounced it. That claim will be hocus, although there are a few lefties – such as those folk at Spiked – who have been beating up on the AGW/anti-technology folks for years. There is a strain of leftist who regards the Greens as a form of reactionary Tory. Actually, that makes sense if you think about it.
As for the capitalist angle, Brian, there are financiers, investment funds and entrepreneurs who are trying to make a living by being Green: such as those folk angling for contracts under a cap-and-trade carbon market, for instance, or folks making those modern windmills that are becoming an ugly eyesore across many an open landscape and coastal estuary. There is a lot of money now in all this, just as there is now a lot of money being made by IT firms connected to things such as the Database State.
Welll…
The Spiked crowd are lefties by any reasonable definition, and have never been warmists that I’ve noticed.
Not that I’m a regular reader of their stuff, but I tend to wander by once a year or so.
Besides them, I’ve come across quite a few sceptical lefties; interestingly either “old labour” union types or the more old fashioned socialists; the middle class nulab sorts seem much more likely to be thoroughgoing warms.
You would think so, wouldn’t you Alice? Unfortunately, us Brits are so politically lazy that we’ve allowed the candidate selection process to become centralised to the point of absurdity and candidates are either parachuted in to a constituency or must be part of an approved list. This list, of course, consists of ‘minority’ candidates. Yes, Dave is once again fighting the last war.
There are other factors militating against any show of independence from a new Tory MP. The Prime Minister has so much patronage in the form of government jobs that any MP who speaks out is cutting him/herself off from a large pension, salary and expenses increase, as well as losing all the cachet that being a government minister provides, even if it is only Minister for paperclips. Then there’s the fact that the carbon scam is being lobbied for by those same nasty capitalists that Brian mentions in his post, and, to top it off, there’s Europe, the great corrupting influence on British politics which, as Richard North is amply documenting, is up to it’s neck in the whole stinking mess.
No, unfortunately we’re left with the elder statesmen of the Tory party, the likes of my Lords Tebbit, Monckton and Lawson, who have little left to lose, to point out the nakedness of the Emperor. These brave old soldiers are doing a good job, but for the moment they’re being ignored.
No, the only way to get them to notice us is to vote for ‘none of the above’ and take the consequences, but given the aformentioned political decadence of the British electorate I don’t hold out much hope on that score either.
Following on Kevin B’s comment, and as a non-Brit, I don’t understand why are you even concerned with Cameron, Brian. Does he even have any relevancy left?
Another bubble waiting to burst?
CARBON TAX IS THEFT, PLAIN AND SIMPLE,
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=181254384531&v=wall
Brian – Glenn Beck has tried this approach.
Pointing out that the various “anti globel warming” policies all seem to be designed to benefit General Electric.
General Electric would seem to be a nice target to put up for the left to denounce.
It is involved in everything (from banking, to manufacturing, to television broadcasting) it is in bed with governments around the world (“other corporations have customers, General Electric is the partner of governments – we are creating the world of the future” as the head of European operations put it) and it is very political.
Basically it acts as if the “Resident Evil” films were documentaries and that it thought the “Umbrella Corporation” had a good business plan.
It should not be that difficult to get the left to believe that “globel warming” is a plot to increase the power of General Electric.
It might even be the case that it is.
Although I make no judgement on that.
I was driving around on saturday afternoon with Radio 4 on.
Then this came on. It is the sort of thing that the BBC can still pump out with a straight face.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00qll1r/Profile_Rajendra_Pachauri/
What a puke inducing piece of puff, eh?
AGW was ever about money. Everything in world politics is about money, mostly taxpayers money because scamming compliant governments is easier than trying to profit from real business. And the self styled “progressive left, the Blair’s Browns and Obamas are the most authoritarian, supranational capital friendly political faction of all.
There has always been a residual part of the left that hasn’t bought the environmentalist message. Climate Resistance appears to be linked closely to the idiosyncratic Spiked group. Their message is leftist in that it rejects climate determinism (the view that we are powerless to master changes in climate) in favour of development goals that give people the wealth to tackle environmental changes.
So too Durbin, the maker of the Channel 4 anti-global warming film is a leftist
They quite correctly point out that Margaret Thatcher was a prime mover in the AGW bandwagon, appointing Houghton. Some on the left see this as part of Tory anti-miner policy.
Another point of interest, is that the Green Party grew out of the Environmental Party which itself grew out of an organisation called “People” (?) which was composed (mainly) of disaffected Conservatives.
I’m not too convinced by this. It’s easy to draw a history which points a certain way if you highlight certain facts and ignore others. In contrast, I’m reminded that when Marx and Engels were alive their brand of Communism defeated the Pastoral Socialists, who opposed the dehumanising effects of industrialisation and sought a return to an imagined rural idyl of people living in harmony with nature. This was about the 1840s but can still be seen in William Morris’ brand of Socialism. Incidentally, Jonathan Pearce’s comment about reactionary Tories being Greens is very close to historical fact. According to Watson’s review of Socialist literature, there was a definite strain of Toryism within Pastoral Socialism.
The modern movement is a gift to the left. We have ex-Enron guys selling carbon credits in league with most of big business. Every business that showed itself to be environmentally aware in the past few years is providing another irrefutable fact to show that Action on Climate Change is just a Capitalist plot.
“Some on the left see this as part of Tory anti-miner policy.
Another point of interest, is that the Green Party grew out of the Environmental Party which itself grew out of an organisation called “People” (?) which was composed (mainly) of disaffected Conservatives.
I’m not too convinced by this…”
Neither am I. A quick review of the political history of Mr Maurice Strong ““Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsiblity to bring that about?” ( Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme) shows him in a financial arrangement with many key players.
Blame it on the Tories ? You can if you like, buts it’s an inconvenient truth, that is ignored by the MSM, that many trillions of carbon credit dollars are going to go in one way only…
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-skeptics-cant-relax-yet-%e2%80%94-real-fraud-is-measured-in-dollar-signs-not-degrees/?singlepage=true
FYI:
In short, the capitalist society (in this case, a major natural gas producer) was, more or less, pressured into playing nice with the Greenies… until recently (today) when it seems a majority of the world doesn’t buy the AGW premise. Capitalism always plays to demographics, and in this case the risk of portraying poor judgement in supporting a sinking ship (Cap and Trade) far outways a plunging number of “protect the poley bears” types.
Cheers,
The Worm
The point at contention is not my personal views but the ease with which the left can claim an underlying malign capitalist influence on mitigation efforts.
The main focus for socialists before 1970 was industry. In Britain they sought and achieved the goal of nationalising the commanding heights of the British economy. Planners loved industry and wanted to rebuild Britain with a Le Corbusier vision. It’s only after Callaghan that mainstream Socialism changed its focus.
The modern green movement grew up alongside a pre-existing conservation movement, but it was influenced more by world events like Earth Day, Silent Spring, Limits to Growth, ban DDT etc. It was regarded as ridiculous by the left in the 1960s. It was only after the failure of socialism (particularly the fall of the Berlin Wall) that leftists turned on mass into Greens.
That’s not to say that if Green roots are not leftist they must have been Tory – this isn’t a binary decision.
Maurice Strong started in oil and gas and advises several major corporations. The man was involved in the oil for food scandal.
His desire for industrialism to collapse may put him in the green left camp today but that’s not true from a historical perspective. Recall that classic Marxism loves industrialisation. That only ended when the failure of Russian style communism became self evident and Mao supplied an alternative Agrarian vision.
Maurice strong will be a gift to leftists in 50 years time.
RAB – yes.
Let us assume one actually believed in the man made globel warming stuff – one should then DETEST this man.
His corruption (and general degenerate behaviour) has put “The Planet” at risk – at least if one believes in globel warming case.
Instead the BBC praise him.
This is the same BBC whose first comment about Sarah Palin (after this lady was picked as a candidate for Vice President) was that she was “close to the oil industry” – this of someone who was famous for being TOUGH on the oil industry.
I make no judgement as to whether being tough on the oil industry is good or bad (as a libertarian I am not over the Moon about squeezing tax money out of any industry), however please note that what the BBC said was not an intellectual error – any more than saying nice things about this corrupt U.N. person is an intellectual error.
It was not that they did not know something (and so failed to broadcast it) – they made something up. And they do so all the time. They lie – they say things they know not to be true, BECAUSE they not true.
I keep saying “they are bad people” – but I say this because they are bad.
No doubt they were not born evil – perhaps it took many years of brainwashing (via the “education system” and so on) to turn them into the creatures they are today.
But this does not help matters.
When a bad man is trying to rip your throat out it is pointless to engage in long intellectual examination about what made him bad – one has to concentrate on defeating the attacker.
The BBC and the rest of the msm must be defeated – as a matter of self defence.