The BBC’s long-serving Environment Analyst Roger Harrabin is due to retire in June. What must his thoughts be as he contemplates the possible destruction of his cherished Net Zero fantasy, crushed, as seems more than likely, by its first encounter with hard financial reality? A lifetime’s work, all for nothing, as people, inexplicably, turn their back on the prospect of blackouts, being colder and poorer, restricted diets, personal travel rationing, impracticable electric buggies and no foreign holidays. How could they be so selfish?
It was all so carefully prepared from the seminar he helped organise back in 2006 that led green activist cabals from within and outside the BBC to stamp out debate about the science of climate change. From that date on, the science was ‘settled’. To this day, the BBC has ignored scientific work that disputes humans cause all or most climate change. This work involves hundreds of dissenting atmospheric scientists, and many of their findings have been reported in the Daily Sceptic. Rather than repeat ourselves, further details are available in a recent article here.
For the last 20 years, a highly politicised doomsday agenda has been constructed that highlights the work of ‘post normal’ activists determined to show that burning fossil fuel is leading to a ‘climate emergency’. Describing themselves as scientists, Harrabin and his pals have created increasingly implausible doomsday scenarios, full of value judgements, light on evidence and easily debunked. Many of these people work out of re-branded geography and social science university departments and seek to impose a command-and-control Net Zero global system. The IPCC has come to play a central role in promoting this narrative.
Let’s have a more detailed look at how Harrabin helps the agenda along. Last week he published the following article on the BBC News site. Here is the heading: “Climate change: Can the Russian energy crisis help to curb global heating?”
What is this “global heating”? Nothing to do with domestic warmth, of course. Rather, it is a product of the doubling down that the BBC and Guardian undertook a few years ago to rebrand global warming as global heating, since that sounded more threatening. This rhetorical upping of the ante was necessary because the small rise in temperature from the late 1970s started to run out of steam two decades ago. For over seven years the global temperature hasn’t moved, so obviously something drastic had to be done. A similar exercise was undertaken around the same time by upgrading bad weather to ‘extreme’ weather. According to Harrabin:
The Business Department (BEIS), and most experts, tell him [Boris Johnson] existing plans to cut fossil fuels to protect the climate will help shield the U.K. from rocketing global prices for oil and gas.
Classic wishful thinking. Quite how reducing the supply of a commodity already in short supply will “shield” the U.K. from rocketing prices is not immediately clear. Even the imaginative BBC fact-checking department might have difficulty with this one. But it must be true – “most experts” say so.
Insulation is another no-brainer quick hit… A speed limit of 55mph could be set… Trains could reduce their top speed… Boilers running on imported gas would be replaced by electric heat pumps powered by electricity generated by British wind farms… Save energy – bath with a friend.
May the leprechauns dance on your bed, and bring you sweet dreams, as my Irish grandmother used to say. Is it too unkind to suggest that Harrabin is away with the fairies with these suggestions? The recent report from Professor Michael Kelly for the Global Warming Policy Foundation put the cost of this ‘quick hit’ of insulation at around £2 trillion, equivalent to the current GDP of the U.K. Installing heat and air pump systems in houses that haven’t been sealed completely is a waste of time. It has been estimated that the average expenditure per house for new insulation and heat pumps is over £65,000. There are also another 5.5 million non-residential buildings to consider and Professor Kelly reckons that £3 trillion will be required for a full retrofit of all U.K. buildings.
Meanwhile, doing 55mph on the M25 these days is an increasingly rare experience, while Kremlin leaders must be quaking in their boots to hear that the Brits are taking a very serious view of recent events in Ukraine by reintroducing 1970s style communal bathing.
… Economists warned that any fracked gas would be sold on to the global market so it wouldn’t lower U.K. prices much anyway
Ah, the old increase supply and prices stay the same argument. Even if it is true, Harrabin, inexplicably, failed to note that well paid and badly needed British jobs would be created in deprived areas, tax revenues would get a massive boost, dividends would flow into cash-strapped pension funds and Britain would become energy self-sufficient again. Another small advantage is that the war coffers of people who don’t seem to like us will not be filled quite so quickly.
Former head of the gas giant Centrica Iain Conn – previously a shale fan – told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I don’t think it is possible to drill enough wells to be able to make a material difference to the U.K. supplies.”
So says Mr. Conn, a man who earned £13 million for four years work at Centrica. During his period of employment, he put the company’s oil and gas exploration interests up for sale, lost over two million customers and saw the company’s share price fall significantly.
On-shore wind power is cheap… There is no fossil fuel bonanza in the North Sea… The International Energy Agency wants to halt all new fossil fuel operations because enough has been found already to wreck the climate.
Wind power is not cheap since it requires an annual subsidy of £11 billion to bring it to market, rising to £14 billion in 2026. In addition, it needs efficient gas fired turbines to stand idle, ready to be fired up when the wind doesn’t blow. In total, wind and solar provide just 5% of total U.K. energy needs (as opposed to electricity needs, where the proportion is higher). There is plenty of oil and gas left in the North Sea and higher prices and improved technology will help extract it. That is why green activists will do anything to stop production and demonise the exploration companies.
And “wreck the climate” – what is that about? A gently warming climate – warming since long before mass industrialisation – and higher levels of CO2 have led to record levels of global food production and falling incidences of famine. So-called extreme weather events such as hurricanes and flooding are not generally increasing. Wildfires have shown a dramatic fall in North America over the last 100 years and coral is growing furiously across the Great Barrier Reef. Wine is produced commercially in the south of England, as it was during the Roman Warming Period. So no change there.
We wish Mr. Harrabin well in his retirement, as he enjoys the pleasures and standard of living made possible by a BBC pension and fossil fuel. These fuels accounted for about 80% of the energy mix 100 years ago. They still account for that percentage today and it’s likely the figure will be similar in the next century. In the meantime, the BBC should take advantage of Harrabin’s departure to remove the infantile ‘settled’ science ban, stop slavishly promoting the political and financial interests behind Net Zero, and start to report on all the different views surrounding this increasingly controversial agenda.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic‘s Environment Editor.
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We will be sold down the river basically. The very fact that this so-called treaty does not feature on the government’s parliamentary agenda proves this.
Fishy and Kneel are committing treason on a daily basis and know it. They think they are dancing with the big boys but once their usefulness has expired they will be discarded.
For all those MP’s about to lose their jobs – what a fine legacy you treasonous, gutless wonders. I hope your final years are mired in misery.
Anyway, on the plus side Parliament might as well be abolished because we don’t need 650 layabouts doing F A for their £250k per annum. Actually we will need to abolish it just to pay the WHO Tax.
Great Britain – the End.
Great comment———Britain is now a REGION of the International Community. We are now governed by technocrats we never heard of and our UN lackey politicians do not work for us anymore, they work for them.
And Rishi Sunak is Herod
Which Herod do you mean? The older one, who was persuaded by the most evil woman ever to walk the earth to launch the Massacre of the Innocents and kill Zacharias for refusing to tell Herod’s soldiers where his wife had fled with their son John the Baptist the True Christ?
Or the younger Herod, who was also persuaded by that same evil woman seven years later to send a pack of hounds into the wilderness to hunt down Elizabeth and her 7-year-old son John the Baptist and kill them both? And after Elizabeth saved her son at the cost of her own life, that same evil woman sought out the orphan boy in the wilderness, pretended to befriend him, pretended to be his substitute mother, and persuaded him to honour her and her stolen child Jesus the Forerunner, whom she had kidnapped from his mother Elizabeth and twin brother John the Baptist seven years earlier, smuggling him 7 miles away from Ein Karem where he was born, to Bethlehem, so she could claim he was born in the city of David?
Or the same Herod which that same evil woman, colluding with Herodias, Salome and Joanna, wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward, to trick Herod into first imprisoning and then murdering John the Baptist the True Christ, which he did not want to do?
Which Herod do you mean?
Thanks Varmint
Unlike in the US, Parliament can remove the executive and replace it with another one. A big step, but one they could take if they wanted to – if they felt that we had signed up to something contrary to our interests. But they won’t take that, because it suits them not to, just as it suited them to nod through the regulations for lockdown. Contemptible.
At the same time, in the same system, the executive is selected by the majority in parliament, so it would be a case of the people who in charge voting to replace themselves with others.
Our system of democracy is basically a joke. It worked ok while those in power had a minimum sense of decency and acted with restraint. But that’s gone now. And all is left is a joke of a system.
All true.
It’s slightly odd to think of the executive replacing itself, but the opportunity is there if there is enough opposition to a “rogue” executive from MPs acting with decency and restraint.
Off-topic but this just in…They’ve found that Afghan chemical attacker. Not such good news about his victim though;
”Police hunting for chemical attacker Abdul Ezedi have recovered his body from the Thames – as it was revealed his savage assault had left a mother blind in one eye.
The Afghan-born asylum seeker was wanted for attacking his former lover and her two young children in Clapham, south London, where he doused them in alkaline.
The convicted sex offender carried out his horrific onslaught on January 31 before fleeing, having appeared to have also burnt his own face in the assault. He was last seen alive on CCTV later that evening leaning over London’s Chelsea Bridge.
Yesterday, a passing boat reported seeing a body in the water near Tower Pier – four miles from Ezedi’s last known position. Police have since recovered the remains, which they believe to be the 35-year-old’s.
Investigators said the identification was based on ‘distinctive clothing’ he was wearing at the time of the attack and the ‘property found on his body’.
His former girlfriend, a mother-of-two who was doused with a corrosive chemical thought to be oven cleaner in a harrowing attack on her and her young children, is now no longer under sedation in hospital. But friends say she has been left blinded.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13103979/Body-hunt-Clapham-chemical-attacker-Abdul-Ezedi-Met-Police-recover-body-Thames.html
You actually believe that? After the Police was criticised for a huge number of failings, including pulling up 2 dead bodies after a very short search and then stopping the search out of fear of finding more bodies, and after claiming that guy will never be found, all of a sudden they found him. Yeah, that’s just too convenient. I don’t buy it.
This is just more outrageous waste of police time and British Taxpayers’ money, lavished upon the endless Third World chaos caused by the endless Third World Invasion of the West.
If you think Parliament would have done anything about it had they had an opportunity, also think again.
I’ve always expected it to be a done deal , they’ve got Disease X ready along with all the vaccine factories so once the treaty is passed our front doors will be coming in & we Will be having our Jabs
And just in time for the US elections…
Even if they had gone through the motions of voting on it, you know it would be the usual “Tory Rebels threaten to vote against…blah, blah, blah”, then they would all cave in and vote for it, or abstain (all abstentions should be banned).
Parliament has become a total farce.
This is very much like the EU treaties which, we were told, did not reduce the authority of Parliament or the people. There would be no loss of sovereignty, said Heath and a succession of following Prime Ministers.
Yet when the EU Council of Ministers introduced a measuer the people of the UK did not like, assuming they were ever told, it tirned out we had no bilioty to stop it. It also turned out the Treaties made EU Regulations, Directives and even Opinions directly enforcable in this country.
Do not believe a word the lying scoundrels tell us.
Whereas Parliament invented all sorts of ways to prevent a proper Brexit, indeed it stopped ant Brexit at all for years, it seems oddly quiet about this transfer nof authority away from its jurisdiction.
Once again, big focus on the process and the detail of the process. Nothing about the principle so many of the people are petitioning about. Inverted logic.
If I understand correctly these IHR amendments and Pandemic treaty documents should have been placed before Parliament for scrutiny ( not debate necessarily) and this was not done. So at least a procedural problem.
i have come to the conclusion that at least the WHOs plans will be:
Costly
Non-democratic
Run a real risk of people losing individual sovereignty as governments have been proven too weak to go against supranational organisations.
The petition ‘Exit the WHO’ has now got more than 100,000 signatures…another debate in Westminster Hall?
Westminster Hall? More like a cleaners cupboard – if the janitor can find the key.
With thanks to Blue Tara, David Martin really slams the WHO in this video of a presentation he gave in September 2023 – not sure to whom though (EU?): https://forbiddenknowledgetv.net/dr-david-martin-minces-no-words/. Martin starts off as follows:
“I’m done talking about COVID and I’m done talking about SARS-CoV-2. And I’m done for a very simple reason: For 110 years, we the people of the world have been lied to; where a group of a very small number of criminal, industrial conspirators decided to subordinate the entirety of the human population for the purpose of their sinister plans to enrich themselves while impoverishing and killing the rest of humanity and I’m done being polite.
“We’ve long past polite. When the words “acceptable death rate” become part of an industrial norm, we have lost the plot to humanity. And that’s not my words, those were the words of the World Health Organization and of Pfizer and of Moderna, when they were given the authorization to begin the process of killing human beings in the interest of advancing their goals.”
Martin also stated:
“And cunningly, under Article 5 Section 13, which I put on this slide, I want you to understand why I said, at its formation in 1947, when the WHO was funded and founded, it was funded and founded by people intent to commit a crime, because of their own language.
“Section 13 of Article 5 ends with the following statement: “Immunity from personal arrest or detention, blah, blah, blah, immunity from legal process of every kind.” Now, if you didn’t intend to commit a crime, why would would you need to give yourself permanent and absolute immunity from every form of prosecution – and it’s worse: even investigation for prosecution of every kind?”
“Never let a good crisis go to waste”——–The UK Parliament won’t vote on it just as there was no vote on NET ZERO. International agreements and treaties are dictating more and more of our governance. ——-We voted for none of these people and mostly do not even know who they are.
I wonder why Theresa May set such importance on obtaining a Commons vote endorsing her EU withdrawal treaty when she didn’t need one. Was she unaware of her constitutional power as head of the government? The House of Commons suffered from no such ignorance. As we saw at the time, it knew that a Commons majority has no constitutional restraints upon it. It can commandeer the order of business, and usurp the executive. Which is what it did at the time. If adjusted mechanisms for treaty making are needed to fit them for the 21st century, a Commons majority (of 1) can make them at a stroke. In our constitution, a Commons majority is sovereign.
The Politicians can sign up to all they like, I have’nt and I will resist any demands made on my body, my lifestyle and that of my family. There are more of us than them, people just have to wake up and realise that, without our consent they are powerless.
The whole point of the new Treaty is that, when Tedros or his replacement declares a new pandemic and “advises” national governments, including ours, that urgent action must be taken and what that action should be ….. those governments will automatically follow “the advice” of the so-called experts at the WHO. Those so-called experts, who are not allowed to be criticised or contradicted; who do not have to provide any evidence to support their claims or their proposed course of action and who are completely immune from any kind of legal, let alone democratic, accountability.
So yes, in theory our Government remains Sovereign. But in practice, isn’t.
I carried on with life as close as possible to normal during the Covid Tyranny, and that is exactly what I intend doing during any future scamdemics declared by the WHO.
I didn’t have the Covid jab and I won’t be taking any new concoctions either.
Once our sovereignty has been signed away, which can’t be done under Magna Carta, then any edict issued via the WHO and followed by the British government allows for “plausible deniability.”
“Not me guv, it was the WHO wot done it.”
And all on the basis of “legally binding,” although as we have seen “the rule of law” and “legally binding” have been irreparably trashed these last four years and so are worthless.
You might not have a choice soon ! That is the enormity of this upcoming WHO scenario ! Question is ? will societies follow the scaremongering & all manner of possible pressure , mental at first then probable actual physical force ( they have shown us the blueprint ) ! Is this the point where it all kicks off for real & is that what tptb actually want ??
I contacted my MP – whom I have quite a bit of respect (an Andrew Bridgen supporter!) – and was shocked when he replied to say that Parliament will have no chance to discuss and vote on such a major treaty. A done deal, sadly for all of us.
Traitors one & all
The origins of parliament are that the king needed the cooperation of local rulers in order to collect taxes to finance his household and war efforts. A secondary function was to hold court (presided by the king) to pass judgements about property and other disputes according to what was regarded as the law of the land. And this arrangement came into being because medieval kings lacked the military power to rule autocratically throughout the realm. That doesn’t eo ipso make parliament a more legitimate body for governing citizens of the realm than the monarch himself. And neither does MPs have been elected by some random, large subset of the legally present¹ population.
In absence of justification by reference to some divine being, parliamentary government is nothing but enforced obedience by threat of violence, either. It’s exactly as legitimate (or illegitmate) as the king or some local mob grande doing the same.
¹ The weird UK voting laws don’t require legal residence, just legal presence and proper pedigree.