CELEBRITY HYPOCRITES WANT TO KEEP US IN LOCKDOWN

Multimillionaire Celebrities Demand 'End Of Capitalism' From Comfort Of Their Luxury Mansions

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

Multimillionaire celebrities have signed a petition calling for an end to capitalism from the comfort of their luxury mansions.

The petition, called ‘Please, let’s not go back to normal’, says the COVID-19 pandemic is a “tragedy,” but that the “ongoing ecological catastrophe is a meta-crisis.”

“The pursuit of consumerism and an obsession with productivity have led us to deny the value of life itself: that of plants, that of animals, and that of a great number of human beings,” states the letter.

“Pollution, climate change, and the destruction of our remaining natural zones has brought the world to a breaking point.”

The petition urges world leaders to not allow everyone to “go back to normal” after the coronavirus pandemic is over.

Signatories include Madonna, Robert de Niro, Cate Blanchett, Jane Fonda, Marion Cotillard and Monica Bellucci.

This is yet another example of the sheer disdain these celebrities have for ordinary, working aspirational people.

When they talk of ‘ending consumerism’ – they’re not talking about people not watching their movies or buying their music (God forbid), they’re talking about a reduction in everyone else’s living standards while they, the celebrity elite, continue to live like royalty.

While they dance in their giant kitchens and virtue signal about how “we’re all in this together” during the lockdown, people in the real world are losing their businesses and jobs.

They want to create a vertical economy of princes and paupers where no one outside of their bubble is allowed to elevate themselves.

Meanwhile, once the lockdown is over, they’ll continue to travel the world in private jets and buy expensive beachfront property while lecturing you about the necessity of eating bugs to save the planet.

GREEN JOBS WILL PROVE TO BE A FALSE HOPE FOR ECONOMIC RECOVERY

Montford & Hughes: Subsidising Renewables Won't Renew The UK Economy
Andrew Montford and Gordon Hughes, CapX, 4 May 2020

Thanks to pro-renewable policies, electricity prices have doubled since 2002. The idea that ‘green jobs’ justifies a certain energy policy is not serious economics. Making UK energy even more expensive will not create jobs, it will destroy them.

As we start to glimpse a chink of light at the end of the coronavirus tunnel, thoughts are starting to turn to the economic crisis that is now upon us, and a recovery plan that will deliver quickly.

One idea was put forward on this site a few days ago. Sam Hall, the director of the Conservative Environment Network, says that renewables are cheap, and getting cheaper, and that the way to bring about recovery is therefore to keep building windfarms just as fast as we possibly can. He cites in his support a recent report by the trade body for the global renewables industry, IRENA, which claims that there are big economic gains to be had by buying from their members. The benefits, they say, will far outweigh the costs.
 
It is easy enough to dismiss these claims in Mandy Rice-Davies style: they would say that, wouldn’t they? But it is worth looking at the claims in more detail.

We have been pointing out for some years that hard data shows that offshore windfarms in the UK are only achieving small cost reductions and only rather slowly. A recent academic review of the accounts of UK offshore windfarms confirmed this, finding that the costs are still many times those of gas-fired power stations, even without considering the costs of dealing with their intermittent output and getting the electricity to where it is needed.
 
Further work using similar data shows that operating costs for onshore and offshore wind farms are increasing at 3–5% per year in real terms, which means that they will be uneconomic once the generous prices guaranteed under the Contracts for Difference regime expire. Hall is keen on what he calls the “promising” technology of floating offshore turbines, but the harsh reality is that they have much higher capital and operating costs. 
 
He also raises the spectre of peak oil as another reason why our future should be renewables-driven. But the insinuation that we are going to run out of oil in a world that is awash with it does not hold water. Moreover, it is gas that is the chief competitor to renewables, both for electricity generation and for heating. Gas is abundant, cheap and has low carbon emissions. And with gas prices having fallen, the effective subsidy to renewables has become even more pronounced.
 
It’s small wonder then that the government has tried to “socialise” (for which, read “hide”) many of the costs that renewables impose on the grid. To take a very recent example: SSE has just been given permission to build a subsea interconnector from Shetland to the mainland costing over £600 million. This is solely for the benefit of a large wind project in Shetland. Once built, the capital and operating costs of the link will be pooled with all transmission costs and charged to consumers in, say, Oxford and Southampton, who will gain nothing from it. This is pure subsidy to a Scottish project paid by English electricity users.
 
All this means that electricity prices, which have doubled since green policies started to be introduced in 2002, will continue to rise inexorably. This, it is fair to say, is not a recipe for a rapid recovery from the virus. In fact it is a clear plan for long-term decline.
 
The argument that there will be significant benefits from a headlong drive for renewables is equally unconvincing. “Green jobs”, or indeed any argument that policy should be built around job creation is not serious economics. Jobs are a cost of a project, not a benefit.
 
If the Government is foolish enough to continue with the green agenda and to subsidise renewable energy, the effects will be disastrous. They will be penalising everyone who has to compete in world markets against producers who do not have to bear the costs of such misguided policies, so they will destroy jobs rather than create them. And in the process they will be taking money out of the pockets of energy consumers and taxpayers and handing it to overseas manufacturers and investors who free-ride on UK renewables subsidies.
 
Andrew Montford is deputy director of the Global Warming Policy Forum; Gordon Hughes is an energy economist and a former senior adviser at the World Bank.

BORIS MUST CUT THE CLIMATE NOOSE IF WE ARE TO AVOID ECONOMIC NIGHTMARE

Rupert Darwall: Net Zero Mania Threatens To Derail Lockdown Recovery
The Daily Telegraph, 5 May 2020
Boris Johnson has only one chance to ensure rapid and sustained economic recovery from the lockdown - and that is to scrap every obstacle that stands in the way of economic growth, the biggest of all being the net zero climate noose.
When economies emerge from the pandemic, aggressive climate policies should be the priority, according to Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary and Boris Johnson’s deputy. Sounding like a modern day King Canute, he has urged governments to turn the tide on climate change. "There’s no choice between cutting our emissions and growing our economy," Mr. Raab claims. "That’s a myth the UK has helped to shatter over the past decade."
In fact, the last decade saw Britain rack up its worst productivity performance since the Industrial Revolution. Ministers don’t tell us how we cut them by exporting our industrial base – emissions relating to imports from China are 276pc higher compared to 1997.  The Government can forget about re-shoring vulnerable supply chains as it would push up our emissions.
 
France’s Emmanuel Macron, by contrast, is a good deal more honest, having described the choice on climate as profound and brutal. Decarbonising inflicts costs on the poorest in society and it shrinks blue-collar job opportunities, worsening the North South regional divide.
 
Britain legislated its commitment to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to net zero after a mere ninety-minute debate in the House of Commons last June. Unlike the original 2008 Climate Change Act, the Government did not provide an economic impact assessment of net net and its  analysis of the costs, of what it would to do the economy and  an  estimate of the potential climate benefits to Britain.
 
Lack of scientific and economic rigour and objectivity is par for the course development of net zero and  adoption of  the 1.5°C target. In the run up to the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, the president of the Maldives held the world’s first underwater cabinet meeting to dramatise the threat to low-lying islands from rising sea levels and lobby for the 1.5°C limit and incorporated in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Yet there was no satisfactory scientific basis for the sinking island fable. As Charles Darwin explained in the 1830s, coral atolls are formed by gentle subsidence of the seabed and, surprise, surprise, islands such as the Maldives have seen their land area expand.
 
After the politicians had decided on the policy, scientists, in the shape of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),were  invited to provide a special report in 2018 on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.
The IPCC had a problem. Its existing 1.5°C carbon budget – the amount of greenhouse gases that can be emitted to keep global warming from rising  more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels – was all but used up.
 
Obviously there was no point in agreeing a limit only to have it busted almost immediately.  Helped by computer climate models running too hot and over-predicting warming since 2000, an IPCC lead author admitted, the IPCC found a way of more than doubling the 1.5°C budget and keeping the climate show on the road. Although the IPCC only had medium confidence in its revised 1.5°C budget, it claimed high confidence that emissions had to reach net zero by 2050.
 
Perhaps that’s because the IPCC sees net zero as providing, it says, the opportunity for "intentional societal transformation" and makes little secret of its ideological hostility to capitalism and economic growth. Like the government, the IPCC doesn’t put a price tag on net zero, but the few numbers it produces are eye-popping, with costs ranging up to sixty times the hypothetical climate benefits estimated by the Obama administration.
 
Indeed, the IPCC concedes that net zero will hit the world’s poor hard with higher food prices and delay the transition to clean cooking, one of the biggest causes of avoidable deaths in poorer countries. There is no ethical, economic or social justification for such policy overkill and its immense destruction of human welfare.
 
Fortunately net zero isn’t going to happen whatever politicians here might think. The West’s pre-pandemic emissions account for around one quarter of global emissions. Buying into net zero will turn Europe into a continent of zombie economies, but the rest of the world isn’t going to follow.
 
The Prime Minister has only one chance to ensure rapid and sustained economic recovery from the lockdown - and that is to scrap every obstacle that stands in the way of economic growth, the biggest of all being the net zero climate noose. If he fails, he and his government will be toast, his political career be ruined and the Conservatives will be remembered for this policy-made economic disaster. Keeping Boris’s commitment to net zero won’t be pretty.
 
Rupert Darwall is a Senior Fellow of the RealClear Foundation and author of The Climate Noose published by the GWPF

BLACKOUT RISK AS RENEWABLES THREATEN TO DESTABILISE THE NTIONAL GRID

The Times, 2 May 2020
 
Britain could be at risk of blackouts as extremely low energy demand threatens to leave the electricity grid overwhelmed by surplus power.



National Grid asked the regulator yesterday for emergency powers to switch off solar and wind farms to prevent the grid from being swamped on the May 8 bank holiday, when demand is expected to be especially low.

In its urgent request to Ofgem, it warned of “a significant risk of disruption to security of supply” if the “last resort” powers to order plant disconnections were not granted.

National Grid has to keep supply and demand balanced to ensure stable voltage and frequency on the network. When there is an imbalance the network can become unstable, leading to blackouts such as that on August 9 last year when a million homes were cut off.
 
Full story (£)
 
 

RUSSIA TO BE WORLD'S TOP COAL PRODUCER WITHIN A DECADE

Forget Paris: Russia Boosts Coal Production
Russia Today, 2 May 2020

The world’s largest coal-producing country, Russia, plans to increase its output and exports over the next 15 years. Russia’s share of the global coal export market is projected to expand to 25 percent from the current 11 percent.

According to a draft document on state strategy issued by Russia’s Ministry of Energy, production will grow to 448-530 million tons annually until 2024 and up to 485-668 million tons annually until 2035. 

Domestic coal consumption will increase by over 12 percent; it currently stands at around 196 million tons annually. The Asia-Pacific states, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa will continue to be the major markets for Russian coal.


 
Russia is already exporting substantial amounts of coal to China (some 30 million tons per year) yet there remains great potential for a boost in exports in the coming years. The energy ministry expects exports to China to almost double within the next 10 years to 55 million tons, from their current level. 
 
Another Asian market, India, also plans “significantly increasing” coking coal imports from Russia’s Far Eastern ports. Vietnam has already tripled its purchases of Russian coal on the back of the commissioning of several new coal-fired power plants. Meanwhile, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) expects Russia to overtake Indonesia as the leading thermal coal exporter within this decade.
 
Coal mining has been a key industry in Russia for a long time, with the costs of production among the world’s lowest.

 
Full story

SCOTTISH STUDENTS TO BE SUBJECTED TO MANDATORY CLIMATE CHANGE INDOCTRINATION

According to this article the indoctrination is to be given to all future leaders in politics and industry. I wonder what will happen to any dissenters - presumably they will be banished from any position of influence or responsibility. 

E.R. ARE ABOUT TO RAISE THEIR INFAMOUS PROFILE AGAIN

This piece from the Mail on Sunday gives the details of this unpleasant group of anarchists which are attempting to cause more chaos and misery on the British people. Let's hope that this time the law will be vigorously upheld and the public will turn on them.

EU DECLARES OIL AND GAS AS NON FOSSIL FUELS

In the Alice in Wonderland world of EU climate change policy they just make it up as they go along according to this article. I'm sure the green activists will be very angry, but as long as they can show they are meeting targets who cares? Whatever happened to honesty I hear you ask. Well if you read a sceptic blog like this you know there is very little in the politics of climate change. 

ATTEMPTS TO SHUT DOWN ENERGY DEBATE DEFEATED

This article Explains how a group of prominent pro green energy activists tried to shut down debate by getting the new film, Planet of the Humans, banned by YouTube.  

A CALM SCIENTIFIC REPORT ON THE ARCTIC

This article refers to the report. The report is a welcome cool-headed antidote to the sensational portrayal of the Arctic as a melting disaster that’s killing polar bears. The Arctic is characterized as being very different from year to year. Those differences are normal. That is something important in the  science of Arctic weather and is often over-looked by climate alarmists.