In 2021, President Xi Jinping promised that China would “strictly limit the increase in coal consumption over the 14th five-year plan period (2021-2025) and phase down in the 15th five-year plan period (2026-2030)”. Perhaps something got lost in the translation of “strictly limit” or should we just limit ourselves to the appropriate response – hahahahaha. Net Zero is dying around the world, no more so than in China where the appropriate lip service goes hand in hand with the full service manufacturing and sale of dud windmills and solar panels to subsidy-seekers reliant on dwindling bands of deluded politicians.
The graphs above from a recent report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and the Global Energy Monitor shows clearly the sterling attempts China has made to strictly limit coal production. Excellent progress has been achieved in retiring old capacity and replacing it 10-fold with new plant. As this new plant comes on stream, further mirth might arise as China enters its “phase down” period of coal consumption. It need hardly be added that all this coal production introduces a particularly dirty hydrocarbon into the manufacturing process, while cleaner natural gas with, incidentally, half the carbon dioxide emissions remains unfracked across large areas of Europe.
All this hypocrisy is necessary of course as deindustrialising Greens indulge their luxury beliefs and pretend to save the planet by outsourcing to China all the goods that they have lost the will to make for themselves. Neo-Marxism takes over in declining countries as insulated elites are happy to live off the revenues of a bloated state. If the trend continues, increasingly, as in the old Soviet Union, ‘ordinary’ citizens will pretend to work and the state will pretend to pay them. Already in the UK public sector, large numbers of people are ‘working from home’ despite Covid restrictions being lifted years ago. An even more dystopian future might be envisaged as the lessons of history teach that strong tribes invariably take over weak, decadent groupings.
But not every country is indulging its juvenile Greens. In the United States, Net Zero is stone dead. The election of Donald Trump is sweeping away any official concern about the invented climate crisis – the majority is swiftly coming around to the view that the science backing up the scare is mostly produced by garbage in, garbage out computer models, the ‘tipping points’ never tip, the temperature data are often a creative invention of state-employed meteorologists and the claim of ‘settled’ science is a political reaction to the scientific process that would have drawn admiration from a medieval Pope. Trust in mainstream media is falling off a cliff – people are genuinely pissed when they discover that there have been three years of record growth on the Great Barrier Reef at a time when mainstream media kept telling them that if they continued eating meat the coral will all be gone within a decade. When folk want to worry about the Gulf Stream (solid as a rock, unpublicised scientists say) they can watch the science fiction film The Day After Tomorrow rather than read the ubiquitous model predictions of imminent collapse. Recent fires in Los Angeles might be less scary to a general audience if mainstream media didn’t omit the fact that wildfires in North America are running at less than a quarter of the recent historical rate.
In the US, NASA has been told to butt out of climate speculation and go back to launching rockets – a nice change since it has been unable to send astronauts to the Space Station for over a decade. All departments such as defence must concentrate on the tasks specified in their title. The Federal Reserve will have to go back to banking and stop wasting everyone’s time by enforcing climate change regulations on the productive service economy. Days before Trump took over, the Fed withdrew from a busy-body global cartel of central banks and regulators that it is reported were exploring ways to “police climate risk in the financial system”.
Most climate funding appears to have been cut. Distributions of foreign aid are out and it is estimated that at least 10% of funding for all the UN promises has been lost. It is reported that the contribution of US federal scientists to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been halted. NASA’s Chief Scientist Kate Calvin was due to co-chair an upcoming IPCC meeting in China designed to set in motion another climate ‘assessment’ round. Her absence bodes ill for both the meeting and the ability of the IPCC to continues with its ‘Code Red’ doomsday claptrap. Perhaps most significant of all is the recent news that the head of the Environmental Protection Agency has asked the administration to rescind a 2009 ‘endangerment finding’ on the so-called greenhouse gases. “This is the holy grail of the climate agenda,” observes Marc Morano of Climate Depot. “If you want to permanently cripple the United States climate agenda you have to go at the heart of it. This is the heart of it,” he added. He is correct. Terming carbon dioxide as a harmful pollutant opened a pandora’s box that has enabled Government activists to ban and regulate consumer goods to their own heart’s content. Already paper straws, wholly unsuitable for tackling the testing demands of a McDonald’s milkshake, have gone.
No such luck in the UK where the activists on the Climate Change Committee have informed the citizenry that within 15 years they will need to eat less meat and dairy, install noisy, expensive and inefficient heat pumps, pay much higher air fares and remove 80% of their popular internal combustion cars from the road. The Guardian is the mouthpiece for these lunatics and Fiona Harvey spins it as giving up two doner kababs a week. How convenient for Fiona and her comfortable chums in the North London wing of the governing elite. The Labour party gave up on the appalling working class years ago. Saving Planet Earth means clearing the roads of their frightful old bangers, removing most of them from sunny beaches in the Med and getting rid of all that ghastly food that the Holy Who Walk Amongst Us have to smell late at night on their way back from an uplifting play at the National Theatre.
Up the Miners – as the old working class Labour party used to say. Still going strong in China, needless to say.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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This one must be hard for BJ. He must not want to upset the corporate landlord Tory donors. But then again, he has please a certain crowd to force the message you need to stay at home.
They’ve probably sold off all their commercial property to idiots in local government.
And there are lots of idiots on local government!
Just wait until people start to realise that working from home quickly becomes ‘living at work’. A colleague recently said that they feel like their dining room has become a ‘prison’. We can only hope that the mass hysteria will break soon.
I’ve worked for myself for five years since leaving full-time employment. But I really looked forward to getting out of the house. It’s not all good.
The argument about saving the planet is also not black & white. Consider the cost of heating an open plan modern office of 50 people compared to 50 individuals heating their own home. Plus the office still has to be heated and lit for the handful who have returned to the office. This has to be offset against the cost in fewer miles in the car.
Home office and IT suppliers have done well if they need to duplicate their office set-up at home.
I think it varies a lot. For me, working from home has been pretty good, I don’t mind it. It allows me to spread an 8 hour work day over more time, with lots of tiny breaks in between. That works for me, but I realise it doesn’t work for a lot of people.
That does sound beneficial. But with a nasty control freak manager it isn’t possible.
I would have considerable difficulty fitting the thirty foot curved desk, and twelve video screens with keyboards etc plus multple servers in my front room.
Definitely varies. I’m retired, however the young couple next door both have London based jobs.
One of them is able to work flexible hours and delighted to be back in the office three days a week. The other, however, with a more 9 to 5 role, would be happy to take a pay cut to avoid having to endure nearly 15 hours a week on Southern Rail again.
Working from home, is not the same as having to work at home day in, day out. I’ve done the former for a large part of the last 25 years or so. In the last 18 months, I’ve had to do mostly the latter. It sucks and isn’t practical for somebody like me, who is well used to it. I don’t want to imagine what it’s like for a single parent in a small flat.
There are plus and minus points to it.
If working for yourself then sometimes you can choose what you do, and when and how, you do it.
If employed by an organisation, particularly a larger one, then the flexibility probably is much less, and whatever part of your home you use will then seem like “being at work” even if not at that time.
The biggest problem I can see is that many people, previously unused to working from home, will, over time, probably become more remote in their thinking as they are not getting the “atmosphere” of working and (hopefully) co-operating with others, as they do when working physically alongside them.
The temptation to develop “sloping shoulders” will also probably increase, as seems to have happened with GPs and others in the NHS, with the current common “remote” contact practice…
I’m not sure this genie can be put back in the bottle. Not whilst we still have a mentality of mass testing of healthy people and the fear that’s been deeply instilled in people.
We’re still mass testing healthy people?!! What the hell for?
Don’t know – is there any precedent for doing this “just in case testing” for a virus you might have a virus in you? I can pretty much say for certainty that if you went to see your doctor two years ago and asked for a test, they would ask “Have you got any symptoms?”. If the answer was “No, I just fancied getting a test”, you would have been shown the door.
If Covid was clearly more deadly, there might be some smidgen of sense. But it isn’t…
Johnson and Co are working hand in glove with Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab et al putting into effect the plan for near total genocide of the global masses and yet somehow people expect the tireless PM to find time to worry about the profitability of some peripheral service businesses in the city. Come on give him a break, Johnson has much bigger fish to fry.
I’m not sure who actually wants to go back into the office except for those with inadequate facilities at home or the hyper social types. Our office is open but mostly its the twenty somethings plus the sales guys who can’t sit still that have gone in.
I have no particular interest in going in whilst Covid and vaccines remain a topic deemed worthy of discussion (although by now vaccines don’t come up much actually – it’s just assumed that you’ve had it).
It works both ways though…the bedwetters are too scared to go back to the office because certain death. All being continually whipped up by the Trade Union. And then there’s people like me who don’t want to go back to the office because they’ve introduced a whole raft of ludicrous “safety” measures in order to appease the sheeples, that do nothing except make the day absolutely unbearable. I went in to collect something a while ago and all I could utter was “it looks like there’s been Novichok”. They’ve taken away the best bit of the office too so I can’t even hide in the kitchen and make tea anymore
As a contractor I will make sure to include in future contracts a clause that I will not attend any meetings that require either vaccination status checks or masks. If more people did the same, I suspect the issue of “vaccine passports” would solve itself pretty quickly.
An admirable stance – but you might find you don’t get many contracts.
Indeed, even if my company doesn’t wish to make vaccination mandatory for employment (currently it is explicitly stated that both vaxxed and unvaxxed colleagues are welcome into the office. That might change once all the young ones have been double dosed), it won’t take long after we receive the first RfP containing the question “What steps would you take to keep us safe from Covid when we come to your office for meetings?” for it to be mandated “to keep elderly colleagues and client safe” or some such.
Although I expect vaccination passports/requirements will eventually wither on the vine, it could be a year or more from now and for most people that’s a long time without a job.
Depends what field he works in and how in demand the skills are – if it’s something niche they may well accept it.
There’s also the issue of nobody being there. I use our local branch office a lot, but I rarely bother to go to the main office now, which I used to be in several days a week. A lot of the benefit was in talking to people, and there’s hardly anybody there now. Absolutely no point in a 40-mile trek to sit in an empty office when I could sit in the (probably empty) office 10 minutes away! I know a number of colleauges feel similarly.
Latest email from hospital managers today, ask yourself is it possible to work from home and if yes, do so. I, and a couple of others, prefer to work in the office, we are the minority. This sounds like a long term plan with office spaces starting to be reallocated.
Shaftesbury sounds like a great porn nickname.
Whilst I appreciate that the Government messaging has been less than consistent, people need to stop waiting around with their thumb up their a$s for them to tell you what to do.
You are adults. Stop behaving like children and make a decision for yourself!
Anybody with a half functioning brain must consider the odds of another lockdown occurring this winter as being very high indeed. For many people it must now have sunk in that the vaccines aren’t as effective as first advertised. It is very understandable that managers are reluctant to have all staff come in, just to have them forced back into WFH mode a month or two later.
Indeed – a lot of companies are now sitting on the fence waitng to see what happens, and consequently often giving rather vague and contradictory messages to their staff.
If you’re waiting for leadership from Boris on this issue then you’re in for a very long wait. If he was going to grow a pair of balls he’d have done it by now.
What is missing from much analysis that I’ve seen is that there isn’t any point in going in to work to network with your colleagues, if they have decided to work from home that day. You’ll still be doing a zoom call!
What I suspect will happen is that different teams within a workplace will come in to the office on different teams, but that sounds more like a one day a week thing than a two days a week thing.
That takes occupancy up to 20%, add a further 20% for more junior staff who don’t have a good office at home, 10% more senior staff who can’t stand being at home, then 10% for client meetings and similar reasons, and your at 50%.
It seems likely that offshoring will receive a boost too, and greater use of contracting firms. Firms will find a way to vertically de-integrate, by re-parcelling tasks.
Lastly, in the City at least, many of the movers and shakers are 50 years plus. In my industry, our clientele are on average older than that, and invariable work part time. They too must find it quite comfortable working from home, and are more likely to be fearful of Covid.
Businesses wouldn’t be at all confused if they acknowledged that the government are just inept local executors of somebody else’s agenda.
That photo gives new meaning to the expression couch potato.
Isn’t it up to the market to decide whether Work from Home works or not?
Those businesses that make it work will survive and if it is a losing strategy those dragging people three hours in packed vehicles to an office somewhere and trying not to pay them recompense for that time for that will flourish.
Business has changed. The younger generation are perfectly comfortable networking virtually. They’ve been doing it since they were children. It’s all the same to them. It’s the older generation that struggle with the concept that you can’t achieve anything unless you’re breathing the same airspace.
It’s not a matter for government. It’s a matter of negotiation between employers and those they want to work for them.
Slouched on a sofa wearing a mask. Think I may have recently spoken with this muppet via one of the ‘new normal’ call centres. That heffalump is unemployable – FIGHT. BACK. BETTER. – Updated information, resources and useful links: https://www.LCAHub.org/
Are all the MP’s scheduled to be back at work and attending the House? Lead by example and all that…I won’t hold my breath.