Electric cars and wind turbines have many faults, but whoever knew that they were racist.
One of the small line of duty burdens in writing these articles is having to read the Guardian and listen to the BBC. But where else would one gain this valuable insight into some of the pressing issues of the day? The world’s reliance on hi tech solutions such as electric cars and wind turbines to fix climate and ecological crises is “perpetuating racism”, reports the Guardian. According to the UN racism rapporteur Tendayi Achiume, green solutions “are being implemented at the expense of racially and ethnically marginalised groups”.
Achiume has considerable past form in discovering racism wherever she looks, although of course it might be noted that it is part of her job description. In 2018 she came to Britain, and after a two week tour of the country in the company of the now Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy, declared Britain was a more racist country after Brexit. She went on to criticise Government efforts made at the time to clamp down on illegal migrants, stating it produced a “hostile environment“.
The 2018 visit by Achiume, a law professor in California, went down well in Great Reset Left wing circles, not least because she favours an open borders policy. In recent academic work she argued: “First World Nation states have no right to exclude Third World peoples, and creating a world that reflects this fact requires complete re-imagining of national borders and the institutions of political inclusion.” On publication of Achiume’s full report a year later, Lammy told the Guardian that “decent people” will be ashamed that the British Government is now receiving international condemnation from the UN.
There is woke drivel, and there is pure barking. According to the Guardian, Achiume has outlined in numerous UN reports her contention that the “global development frameworks” required to produce industrial goods such as cars and wind turbines “were fuelling racial injustices, and the need for reparations for slavery and colonialism”. It is not difficult to find practices exploitative of the environment and humans in producing cars and wind turbines – for instance, cobalt for green batteries is frequently mined by children in Africa – but Achiume’s hard line on human economic co-operation seems designed to demonise almost all productive enterprise.
Blaming inanimate objects for racism is not as uncommon as you might think. In November 2021, President Biden’s hapless transport secretary Pete Buttigieg was forced to defend statements that racism was “physically built into highways“. Apparently an underpass was once constructed in New York deliberately low so that tall Hispanics and Blacks could not get to the beach. Senator Ted Cruz joined in the general hilarity by tweeting: “The roads are racist. We must get rid of roads,” adding: “You see, we Hispanics are very, very tall, and we need rich woke Dems to raise the bridges for us. Without Pete’s condescending help, there is no way we can get to the beach.”
All of this nonsense is of course attention-seeking claptrap in a confected culture war. Much of it emanates in American universities, although the U.K. University of Winchester has an Institute for Climate and Social Justice. It is said that sex, gender, race and socio-economic inequality and discrimination cut through many environmental issues confronting the planet. BBC Future recently ran an article titled “Why climate change is inherently racist”.
Few self-identifying climate scientists show this intersectional progress to better effect than frequent BBC guest Mark Maslin. Back in 1999, as a London geography lecturer, he co-wrote an interesting paper in which it was stated that large natural climate changes occurred over a period of “perhaps even a few years”. This of course is a science fact with plenty of evidence to back it up. But under ‘settled’ science ideology, humans control the climate, so this view has rather gone out of fashion of late. By 2014 Maslin was writing an article titled, “Why I’ll talk politics with climate change deniers – but not science”. Forward to 2020, and Maslin is Professor of Earth System Science at University College London and suggesting in another article that the origins of racism and the climate emergency “share common causes”.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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I can only support Jeremy Clarkson’s suggestions ( regarding Harry Windsor’s other half) on what would be a fitting denouement for these loony wastes of space.
It makes my brain hurt trying to understand their positions.
It is clear that climate is stacked against dark skinned people as they absorb more of the sun’s rays their lighter brethren.
For the new kids reading here, FAFFOR is being sarcastic.
If only they absorbed more CO2…
“absorb more of the sun’s rays than their lighter brethren.”
Aye, so they are pinching more of the global warming.
Hmmm.
Not sure about that, so far as some of the honest folk of Bradford (for example) are concerned. How much sunlight are the ladies in Pakistani village dress exposed to? The lucky ones might have a small area at the top of their noses see sunlight occasionally.
Of course, although it had been proven conclusively that vitamin D deficiency was very strongly correlated with the worst Covid outcomes, it was much more important to announce that Covid was racist.
No doubt one reason why such effort was put into rubbishing vitamin D as a prophylactic. The other being to boost “safe and effective” vaccines, of course.
If third world countries were encouraged to use coal and gas to develop then their populations would have no reason to flock to the west. But instead, poor people living on a dollar a day are coerced into NOT using those resources and what that ultimately means is that they cannot come out of abject poverty. Remember that one billion do not even have electricity, which is unthinkable. Just imagine for one moment, getting out of bed in the morning with no electricity. You have no fridge, no kettle, no cooking facility except burning dung, no television. So depriving poor people of fossil fuels, who will mostly have brown skin is most certainly racist, and that is no way playing any kind of race card, it is just a fact. So, the liberal progressives and their endless fight for equality is really exposed by their attitude to the world’s poorest. They would prefer to send them some aid money for turbines and solar panels, but what that is really saying to them is that they will never have much in the way of electricity, or at best just enough to power a small fridge.
Most things that “liberal progressives” do in this area seem pretty racist to me. Implicit is that the people they are supposedly helping have no agency. It often seems more about themselves than it does about the people they purport to be helping. Ditto the race hustlers.
They still get to mine the coal, but then it is shipped East.
Interesting.
I cast my mind back to the construction of the mighty Kariba Dam in Africa.
Paid for by you and me, designed by British Engineers. A huge boost to reliable and affordable energy.
There were some thousands of people who used to live where the reservoir behind the dam is now situated. These people were moved (and I doubt in a kind manner) out of the way.
Some 40 years later I was at a meeting of the British Dams Society, when it was pointed out that those displaced people were still waiting for even a rudimentary supply of electricity. And the ingrates apparently weren’t very happy about it. No doubt this really should have been managed better (if only to spare the blushes of Dam Engineers).
I have no doubt that they must be provided with electricity, if they don’t already have it at last.
But was that “racist”?
When was independence?
One billion poor people in the third world have no electricity. Another 2 billion have barely enough to power your average fridge. The idea that these people should be remotely concerned with a little bit of warming of the planet is absurd, but the progressive left insist that “saving the planet” is more important than bringing 3 billon people out of a life of abject misery. Which wouldn’t be so bad if it were really about the planet. But if we want to make the world a better place, then using fossil fuels is essential. The risk of using coal, oil and gas is far outweighed by their benefits, and since it is always the liberal left who harp on about climate, it is them and their absurd climate policies that we can easily class as “racist” because it is the world’s poorest people (mostly of colour) who the worst affected.
Spot on, Varmint.
As usual.
It’s not just the third world where people of colour are disadvantaged by green policies.
In most developed countries people of colour are on average likely to come from lower socio-economic groups (in my opinion it’s nothing to do with racism but reflects a lack of social mobility in general). Given that poorer people spend a higher percentage of their income on energy than wealthier people and “green” energy, not to mention electric vehicles are more expensive than well established alternatives people of colour will be amongst the hardest hit by net zero, and from this point of view net zero and electric vehicles could indeed be seen as racist. Obviously this isn’t what the guardian meant when it called EVs racist, but it’s something they should investigate.
“hoisted by their own petard” great, net zero, climate change, climate crisis,torchy the battery car,windy Miller,solar plexus greta thunberg, all of it is powered by white privilege! We’re on to something here!, play them at their own game! Indigenous peoples dont build wind turbines! Abolish net zero, its racist! Down with this sort of thing!
“Racism” as a term seems to me to have lost all meaning and when used in these kinds of contexts it’s almost always just a wind-up. It is best ignored.
This is dynamite!
NET ZERO IS RACIST
by whites, for whites, its the ultimate privilege! Yes!!
Your second para reminded me of the risks of long term industrial injury having to work with certain things; the G, and BBC News!
Until the panic broke out, I used to spend a fair bit of time with both of them, but not now.
On a slightly different topic, related to the “carbon zero” brigade, the other day I came across a story on Aljazeera about the development of a steel making technique that does not use coke as a fuel: https://www.jernkontoret.se/en/vision-2050/carbon-dioxide-free-steel-production/ Looks like an early trial at present, but it was interesting, as at present blast furnaces to extract iron from the ore have to use coal. In the report, they emphasised that they intended to use “renewable” electric to split water into Hydrogen/Oxygen so as to use H as the fuel in the process.
Beware Hydrogen Embrittlement.
As usual, lets bung Billions now into technology that might be made to work at some future date. With luck.
Just bet the Ranch on it. Now.
What was that “Precautionary Principle” thingy that GangGreen used to bang on about?
Green policies are racist, first good news I have heard from this A hole organisation. So better get back to coal, oil, and Gas they aren’t racist and guess what they are cheap and we can all get back to real life. Now Mr Racism just needs to declare Transism, identity politics, WOKE, etc racist and the job is done
While much of what Achiume has to say is drivel, there are some grains of truth at the bottom of it. Electric cars, along with smartphones and many other consumer electrics, use lithium-ion batteries, two key ingredients of which are lithium and cobalt.
Lithium-mining interferes with the water table and contaminates the local water supply. The result is, in areas such as the Tibetan plateau, poisoned streams and lots of dead wildlife. In Chile, where the lithium is mined in salt deserts, local farmers have complained of the mining causing droughts.
As for cobalt-mining in, it ought to be universal knowledge by now that it involves what is virtually a form of modern-day child slavery. In 2021, 40,000 of the 255,000 people engaged in cobalt-mining were children, some as young as six. Many will not even earn $2 a day and are required to work with nothing more than their hands. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Dell and Tesla have all knowingly benefitted from this exploitation. This practice is surely abhorrent to anyone who would not be prepared to take their six-year-old out of school and force them to become a chimney sweep.
While Achiume is appallingly disingenuous in trying to apply the meaningless catch-all term ‘racism’ to these injustices, she is at least drawing attention to the shameless double standards of the modern world, and especially those of the progressive left who inhabit so much of big business and the media. At one point in the article, the penny almost drops. She writes: ‘We’re basically again trying to profit our way out of a crisis that is defined by an approach that thinks that profiting out of crisis is sustainable’.
Could it be that much of what we’ve been fed lately about public health, climate and social justice isn’t actually sincere, but is really about profit! Who’d have thought! And then she changes the subject to ‘historic injustices’…
One simply cannot be a vegan animal-rights fanatic, a cheerleader for Black Lives Matter and an electric-car evangelist without also being woefully ignorant or a complete hypocrite. The same is true, incidentally, concerning all other applications of lithium-ion batteries, and it bothers my conscience that I have been unable to resist the intrusion of digital technology into my work and private life.
Actually, for the sake of strict accuracy, I see that Achiume did not actually use the word ‘racism’, but the slightly more meaningful ‘racial inequality’ and ‘racial injustice’. We have Damien Gayle to thank for muddying the waters.
“slightly more meaningful ‘racial inequality’ and ‘racial injustice’”
What do you take those terms to mean?
They have a fairly literal meaning, i.e. inequality between races and injustice perpetrated on racial grounds.
I’m not endorsing their use or the ideological function they serve, I’m just acknowledging that they do have some meaning whereas, in my original post, I incorrectly claimed Achiume used ‘racism’, which is totally meaningless. Maybe I’m being anal, but I have no desire to misrepresent her.
I agree it’s important to be accurate. However IMO those terms are just like “racism” – used by the race hustling industry to advance their cause. What the race grifters mean by those terms is not what the average person in the street means.
“Inequality between races” – literal meaning is that you pick some measure or other (any measure you like) and that measure will not distribute evenly between races? Yes, probably true. Stating the obvious. Not the meaning intended by the grifters though. However we have now been conditioned into thinking that such inequality should not exist (unless it’s in favour of non-white people, in which case it’s just fine) and if it does it’s because of “racism”.
“Injustice perpetrated on racial grounds” – literal meaning some kind of law or restriction based solely on someone’s race? Arguably morally wrong. But again not the meaning intended by the grifters. They intend it to mean any example where their pet racial group (always non-white) is somehow not doing as well as some other racial group (usually white). See “inequality” above.
Funny how the same people who say “race is a social construct” are the same ones who go about race all the time.
Quite. You’ll get no argument from me there.
Isn’t it odd we can model a complex non linear system like the climate with perfect accuracy, yet no one can model equity markets with any accuracy at all even a day ahead. Always amazes me if climate modellers are so smart why don’t they turn their “abilities” to modelling the FTSE, s and p 500 and Nikkei.
Climate is all ‘scenario based’ initially I think eight, but the only one that was promoted was the worst forecast, not the milder ones. Now, even the UN has ditched the most doom laden four and is working from a mid-point. The media are still working from the worst of the worst.
Even scenario modelling is a bunch of bs, the crystal ball is sufficently cloudy such that the value of forecasts is essentially null and void.
You have the bones of it about right.
Almost every shroud waving GangGreen alarmist piece so beloved by the BeebGrauniad is based on RCP8.5. Allegedly “Business as usual”. Actually a daft exaggeration of a Worst Case Scenario, or ‘Borderline Impossible’ as Judy Curry puts it. Coal use 5 times current and so on.
RCP8.5 lives on, alive and well in the imagination of Justin Lowrat and his chums.
Then there are the X-Box prognostications of the effects of fossil fuel use on Global temperatures. I think the IPCC still includes over 100 of this “Garbage Out” forecasts for the next 78 years, including all the most obviously barmy and exaggerated. But they now concentrate on the projections of the slightly less barmy ones to avoid even the Grauniad having to admit how embarrassing the chartsahave become. Only one of these curves comes close to even the upper bound of actual measured temperatures (even when inflated by Typhoon jets taking off and all the rest.)
That curve is produced by the Russians.
Funny that, don’t you think?
Confessions of a Computer Modeler
“Any model, including those predicting climate doom, can be tweaked to yield a desired result. I should know.”
“After three iterations [of remodeling] I finally blurted out, “What number are you looking for?” He didn’t miss a beat: He told me that he needed to show $2 billion of benefits to get the program renewed.
“I finally turned enough knobs to get the answer he wanted, and everyone was happy.
“Was the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] official asking me to lie? I have to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he believed in the value of continuing the program. (Congress ended the grants in 1990.)”
Robert J. Caprara, “Confessions of a Computer Modeler,”
The Wall Street Journal, 9 July 2014
https://www.wsj.com/articles/confessions-of-a-computer-modeler-1404861351
There may be a kernel of something in this, but it’s more like modern feudalism than racism.
Basic common sense tells us that EV’s disproportionately disadvantage the lower social-economic classes who are less likely to have access to private driveways and garages where they could charge an EV at home. Charging an EV at a public charger is, mile-for-mile not far off the cost of petrol or diesel. In addition you don’t need to be a genius to work out that the current nor future electricity grid will be able to support EV charging at current levels of car ownership (15-20m EV’s plugged in at 7kw for 8 hours is a lot of demand!). Therefore once conventional engines are phased out and ULEZ schemes become ubiquitous, it will be the same lower socioeconomic classes that are disproportionately affected as they lose access to private transport.
On the generation side, we have acknowledged for some time now that the renewables represent a huge fiscal wealth transfer from the poor and middle classes to the rich in the form of green subsidies and bloated energy bills. The inequalities between the have’s and the have-nots will only grow as renewables dependency increases.
I think it’s true that using public chargers is about the same price as buying petrol if you assume that the thermal efficiency of modern engines is at least a third (33%). It can be up to about 40% in the one I’ve just shelled out for (a new Toyota one).
The issue about an increasing demand for charging is more complicated. A couple of years ago, the District Network Operator (SSE) renewed a lot of buried in cable in my street, and I can say with reasonable accuracy that it would not cope with every house using EV charging at the same time. The relevant regulations (BS 7671) about doing the sums re demand versus maximum load that can be delivered have been tweaked recently. It’s always been the case that, theoretically, a group of houses could overload the local transformer, cable etc, on the pretext that they won’t all do it at the same time. E.g. they are unlikely to put all their heating on at the same time, at least not for long.
However, EV charging is not like normal domestic loads. If half the street wanted to charge their cars at “night rate” for 7 hours, it wouldn’t cope. The DNO would have to beef up all the buried cable, upgrade the local transformers etc. Or they might try to control demand remotely via smartphones and the like; not popular, you’d have thought.
It’s probably not a problem for the generation firms and up at National Grid level, but I think the more local ones that do distribution, like SSE in central southern England, will be affected by a major shift in demand caused by a rapid change to EVs.
That said, one of the houses in my street did have a Renault Zoe with a home charger on the local supply, but it’s not in use now and no-one else has gone for one yet.
In the standard I referred to, it states: “722.311.201 Load curtailment, including load reduction or disconnection, either automatically or manually, may be taken into account when determining maximum demand of the installation or part thereof”. In other words, it’s a ‘get out’ clause for the DNO to avoid upgrading the whole lot. If you have to use a “smartmeter” to be able to use the supply for EV charging (which is true), it’s possible that a degree of remote control would be used. Not easy given the set up with supply contracts between individual customers and the utility supply firms, which are often independent of the distribution company. E.g. where I live, the DNO does not do supply deals with any of the householders. It’s split into several other firms, so it’s anybodies guess as to how it would be managed in the real world.
You’d have thought that the DNO would need access to your smart meter to control their system – but the contracts are split between several firms on the same cable.
I read a piece from Octopus Energy around the supply to home chargers and they seem to think that either the smart meter or the charging point itself will regulate the supply. However Im still not convinced, it would probably be ok when most people are topping up but with a full charge taking around 8h at 7kw there are going to be times when lots of vehicles are in competition for a limited supply.
Wokeness has literally become a self-parody now.
Wouldn’t I know enough sane Americans, I’d sometimes be tempted to say that it’s high time that someone pulls the plug of Northern American to let it sink gracefully below the waves. OTOH, the Germans stopped paying reparations for the first world war(!) around 2010 and since then, there are clearly loads of people in desparate search for funding who – a real cargo cult of their own – just repeat the same old tired phrases in the hope that mannah^h^h^h^h^honey will suddenly again start falling from the sky.
It always comes down to someone wanting free money.
Where I would agree there is discrimination through electric cars is their imposition on a population where the poor will not be able to afford to buy them in the first place and, living in dense urban environments, will not have the facilities to charge them. But at least the unfortunates will be able to see the rich driving around in their £80K Teslas, and knowing how the other half live.