Why is a Conservative Prime Minister following the lead of health authoritarian Jacinda Ardern in introducing a progressive smoking ban that will see everyone born after 2009 banned from buying cigarettes, asks Annabel Denham in the Telegraph. Here’s an excerpt.
Had Number 10 given any deep thought to a progressive cigarette and tobacco ban – which will see the age at which people can buy these products rise by one year every year so that, eventually, no one can purchase them – they would perhaps have realised how ill-conceived, illiberal, infantilising and illogical it is.
That the idea has its origins in New Zealand – the country that locked itself down for nearly the longest time and refused to let its citizens come home, and requires Māori theory of creation to be taught in science lessons – should have raised a red flag. Sunak, who recently re-instilled hope that he could be the true heir to Margaret Thatcher and cauterise the wound seared by 2022’s mini-Budget, has now aligned himself with Jacinda Ardern. He may be putting this to a free vote, but history will remember who put this legislation on the cards.
Much as Akshata Murty may have endeared and persuaded delegates in Manchester of her husband’s commitment to Conservative values, there isn’t a shred of Conservatism in this policy. No personal autonomy; the idea that people will make trade-offs – and sometimes choose the unhealthy option, such is the wonder of the human condition. Though more often than not nowadays, when it comes to tobacco, they don’t: the proportion of smokers has fallen significantly in recent decades: from half of adults in the early 1970s to just 14% now.
There was seemingly no consideration of the unintended consequences – the black market that this policy will buttress and the corresponding reduction in tax revenues. And, as usual, the nannying measure is being cloaked in the language of public health and justified on the grounds that it will help protect our socialist, creaking healthcare system.
Here are the facts, for MPs who may soon have to decide whether to wave through this awful policy. Smokers don’t cost the NHS money, they save it. A 2017 study from the Institute of Economic Affairs estimated a net saving of £14.7 billion per annum at the rates of consumption at the time, with the costs smokers incurred significantly outweighed by the sum of tobacco duty paid and the old-age expenditures avoided due to premature mortality.
Worth reading in full.
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I don’t suppose Skidmore will avail himself of this information.
Brilliant as ever. Richard Lindzen’s cajones have their own atmosphere and climate. Long may this guy live!
Prof Lindzen and others say that a lot of the young “climate scientists” are afraid to speak out against the group think lest they lose their funding. Some are true believers, although how many there really are is a question in light of the fact that “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it”.
In principle I agree with him. Single issue tactics are evidently convenient in politics, and measuring carbon dioxide output from certain equipment is relatively easy, and has been used as a roundabout way of encouraging one thing or another, E.g. a few years ago I bought a car that had zero road tax on account of its carbon dioxide measurement under test (it was a Honda Civic in 2013).
It’s just astonishing that eminently qualified people like Richard Lindzen continue to speak truth but continue to be ignored by the governments and mainstream media.
There is another technical route into this issue which destroys the fundamental premise – that manmade C02 emissions are the sole cause for any recent global temperature rises.
As Professor Lindzen points out the mainstream argument builds on the ludicrous premise that trace C02 elements in the atmosphere (measured in parts per million) are the main drivers of overall climate adjustments.
It then goes on to claim that even though the human contribution to annual C02 inputs is a relatively tiny proportion (around 5%, the other 95% fully natural) that for the last several hundred thousand years C02 concentrations have been stable; therefore all the recent observed rises must represent man’s inherently evil C02 hanging around and building up (unlike the very clever natural C02 which magically dissipates in just the right amount to keep itself in perpetual equilibrium).
However here is a series of graphs which reveal that even this fundamental aspect of the Anthropogenic Climate Change pseudo-science is complete nonsense.
First of all increasing annual human C02 emissions over time:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-country?country=~OWID_WRL
Note from 1995 to 2020 the annual output increased at a pretty steady and steep rate from 23.45 billion tonnes per year to 34.81 (a dramatic change of around 50%).
Now look at atmospheric C02 concentrations:
http://www.climate.gov/media/13611
Note the essentially straight line between 1995 and 2020.
Remember that all recent C02 concentration increases are claimed to have been due to humanity’s input, so a straight line would only have been possible if our emissions had stayed constant throughout the 15 year period, ie at the 23.45 billon tonne 1995 level.
The actual steady increase to 34.81 tonnes by 2020 means that (according to the theory itself) atmospheric C02 concentrations should have increased by a greater amount each year and resulted in a marked and immediately obvious acceleration curve of this type (first graph on left):
https://www.teachpe.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/graphs-of-motion620
Again, as opposed to:
http://www.climate.gov/media/13611
It is absolutely unbelievable that schoolboy errors such as this and others have been overlooked in the quest for such an epoch changing poverty and tyranny inducing project.
In fact the most fundamental giveaway that this is a political and financially self-interested project rather than a genuinely scientific or humanitarian one is not directly technical but rather the complete lack of any form of cost-benefit analysis throughout – ie even if harmful manmade Climate Change did exist what would the costs of ameliorative measures such as heat resistant crops and sea walls be in comparison to those of complete deindustrialisation.
This oversight mirrors the complete absence of any rigorous cost-benefit analyses carried out before the introduction of the similarly catastrophic Coronavirus lockdown measures.
Brilliant. Thanks.
Thanks in return for the compliment, very decent of you after I have disagreed with you quite vehemently over other matters!
PS 1995 – 2020 is of course 25 years, not the 15 I claimed! This is an important point because the longer the time scale involved the less likely any expected acceleration curve could be obscured by short-term noise.
There are huge forest fires in the Amazon right now, said to have been started deliberately. Environmentalists are blaming the incumbent Brazilian President, Bolsonaro, who is very unpopular with globalists because he’s “far-right” (i.e., he doesn’t toe their line). The claim is he isn’t doing enough to stop these fires.
I’d bet bet this situation is the same as the Nordstream vandalism – most likely a false-flag committed by those who want world revolution – in this case, the environmentalists.
The fact that this is barely reported in the news is very unusual since the Amazon is hugely important to the world ecosystem.
Combined with America’s obvious attack on Nordstream, this is surely causing enormous environmental damage – committed by those who demand we all radically change our lives in a detrimental way to ourselves because, apparently, our lifestyle (i.e., being alive) is going to bring about the imminent destruction of the planet.
Lindzen’s view that temperature changes are caused by heat flow in the oceans and atmosphere seems remarkably similar to the views of Kinnimoth that were highlighted on daily sceptic a few days ago. I’m not qualified to say if they’re right or wrong, but there are other scientists, e.g. Willie Soon who seem to believe that most temperature change can be explained by changes in solar activity.
Having spent hundreds of hours over the past few years reading about the subject it’s my belief that climate change is a combination of changes in solar activity and ocean currents, but they affect global temperatures on different time scales. Ocean currents such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation affect temperatures on the 20-40 year timescale, whereas changes in solar activity are more likely to be seen on the 50+ year timescale, and on shorter timescales can be cancelled out by ocean cycles.
It seems a shame to me that as far as I’m aware the 2 groups of scientists have never got together to share data and ideas to see if climate change is a combination of ocean and solar cycles. Instead it seems that they continue to believe that it has to be one or the other.