The FT is reporting that the Government’s planning system reforms are putting thousands of jobs at risk. But for once, this may not be the bad news that it seems. “The planning and infrastructure bill,” explains the paper, “is intended to ‘get Britain building’ and remove obstructive regulation.” One of the obstructions to construction in Britain has been the requirement that proposed development sites are not home to endangered species, and that developers have minimised the potential ecological impact. And this has even affected so-called ‘green’ developments, including wind and solar farms. The green agenda had begun to eat itself, so something had to give. And, having destroyed much of Britain’s industries and businesses, the green agenda has come for the very ecologists who drove it.
In the 1990s, as Shire Tories broke bread with the Greta Thunbergs of the time – the anti-bypass protesters – it was ultimately a rare species of tiny snail that proved to be the most effective obstruction. Since then, as all Westminster parties have, in lockstep, sought to expand environmental bureaucracies to remake Britain in Gaia’s image, there has been ever less political appetite for new roads, factories and homes, despite a growing population. This endless bureaucratisation of nature seemed to reach a peak under the previous government, which agreed, among other things, that 30% of the UK’s land area should be “protected for nature” by 2030 – a target agreed by the 2022 UN biodiversity summit.
To read the rest of this article, you need to donate at least £5/month or £50/year to the Daily Sceptic, then create an account on this website. The easiest way to create an account after you’ve made a donation is to click on the ‘Log In’ button on the main menu bar, click ‘Register’ underneath the sign-in box, then create an account, making sure you enter the same email address as the one you used when making a donation. Once you’re logged in, you can then read all our paywalled content, including this article. Being a donor will also entitle you to comment below the line, discuss articles with our contributors and editors in a members-only Discord forum and access the premium content in the Sceptic, our weekly podcast. A one-off donation of at least £5 will also entitle you to the same benefits for one month. You can donate here.
There are more details about how to create an account, and a number of things you can try if you’re already a donor – and have an account – but cannot access the above perks on our Premium page.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
This is a shock:
‘House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) launched an investigation into misinformation tracking company NewsGuard on Thursday, citing concerns about “protected First Amendment speech” and “censorship campaigns.”
‘Questions now surround the influence of NewsGuard’s business relationships and other influences on its ratings process,” Comer said in a statement announcing the probe on Thursday.
https://www.axios.com/2024/06/14/newsguard-oversight-committee-investigation-free-speech
Or not really:
‘In a study published Tuesday, Media Research Center (MRC) Free Speech America found that NewsGuard, the taxpayer censorship giant self-tasked with rating media outlets on reliability, “overwhelmingly favored left-leaning outlets over right-leaning ones.” This is the third year MRC Free Speech America has exposed NewsGuard for its partisanship, and, according to MRC, NewsGuard has become “even worse” than years prior.
Using AllSides, an organization that classifies media outlets by their “right” to “left” bias, “MRC researchers determined that NewsGuard provided a stellar average ‘credibility’ rating of 91/100 for ‘left’ and ‘lean left’ outlets (e.g., The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, Vox),” wrote MRC researchers. Meanwhile, “right” and “lean right” outlets, such as Fox News, the New York Post, and The Daily Wire, were given “an outrageously abysmal average score of 65/100.”
https://thefederalist.com/2023/12/13/study-finds-taxpayer-funded-newsguard-is-outrageously-biased-against-conservatives/
If they do not change their rating as a result of your response can you sue them? Just like Elon Musk has done with Media Matters?
Wonderful!
Great stuff. Of course, a briefer reply could have referred him to the response in Arkell v Pressdram 1971.
https://www.wearefieldwork.com/journal/arkell-v-pressdram-1971
Thank you for making me burst out laughing. Incredibly therapeutic ☺️
It’s a pity that the Eye is nowadays mostly and establishment mouthpiece¹.
¹ After getting progressively annoyed with the endless focus on the wrongs of Brexit, MD going full-scale COVID pandemaniac in 2020 finally caused me to stop reading it.
you’re so right. It’s now just a left wing establishment house rag. Such a pity.
Yes. Hislop has been a paid up member of the BBC establishment for thirty years. (Have I got news for you).Ingrams Ruston and Booker would not be amused.
Apart from the obvious question of who guards the guards and who rates the raters, it must waste a considerable amount of your time and increase your blood pressure somewhat to regularly have to justify your output in this way.
Teacher wants to mark your work in red, with a ‘see me after class’. Even in this, the world of free speech has shifted noticeably off its axis. In the past, the antique phrase ‘gelding the press’ would have applied.
Please fight your good and just fight. NewsGuard – the censor group, part of the Star Chamber. Free speech for the Totalitarians and Statists, but not for thee. Newsguard should be declared an illegal entity under any Constitution which purports to support ‘free speech’.
Does DS ask to be audited by them and if so, why? Genuine question.
I suppose they have the power to put publications on the Index, and conduct autos-da-fé on their proprietors on behalf of the State Cult. These are consequences of eternal import.
Excellent. Fact check the fact checkers and publish the results for us all to judge.
It’s Mr Gregory’s claims that look suspect given all the reading I’ve done on mRNA jabs and climate change causes from a wide range of sources over a number of years now.
In addition NewsGuard itself is not without criticism, in the context of a world were we can all see now that the censoring of inconvenient facts by the Establishment is a full scale industry. Mr Gregory maybe composed his letter before Mark Zuckerberg’s recent letter apologising for Meta’s censorship, or the arrest of Parval Durov on dubious charges because of Telegram’s stand on free-speech. Tucker Carlson has an excellent interview with Mike Benz on this subject which is very enlightening.
In fact, there is a broad scientific consensus — reflected in findings from organisations including the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — that human activity is the greatest contributor to global warming, primarily through its emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
This makes two government organisations of a government committed to the climate change scare story. And one of these organisation is dedicated to space flight and general space exploration, ie, nothing ‘earthly’ at all. Plus the UN committee responsible for popularizing the notion of anthrophogenic climate change. This kind of broad scientific consensus could aptly be described as Adherents of climate change theory do claim they really believe in it. Even when it’s really none of the kind of business they specialize in.
And then the further wording: Human activity is the greatest contributor to global warming. From greatest contributor follows that there must be other causes for global warming than this human contribution. How much is greatest contributor precisely? Eg, 95% various natural causes individually contributing less than 5% plus 5% human contribution would mean humans were the greatest contributor even despite the total human contribution would be insignificant.
This statement really means very little beyond Climate change propagandists claim to be convinced that humans are doing Really Bad Stuff™ but unfortunately, they don’t know any specifics themselves, ie, it’s an a priori conviction and not one grounded in principally open-ended scientific research.
NASA does aeronautics as well as space exploration, so will have an interest in the state of the earth’s atmosphere.
Their space exploration branch seems limited at the moment by the fact their spaceships leak.
About as much ‘interest in the state of the atmosphere’ as Ryanair.
It’s more grounded in follow the money. Heard them banging on about it on the Radio before. If it’s colder, it is MMCC, and ir it’s warmer it is the same. Apparently the Global average temperature is still going up. But where are they taking the measurements for that claim?
Average temperature isn’t measured. It’s calculated based on the wrong presumption that temperature would be a global and not a local phenomenon, cf the various BBC sensational stories about “It’s hot in the tropcis!” (Oh, really?) recently mentioned in the “BBC Climate Howlers of 2023” text. Heat dissipates into the atmosphere really quickly. You won’t notice the warmth of a fire when standing 500m aways from it. But an average calculated from a measurement adjacent to the fire and one from 500m away would yield a significantly higher temperature than the 500m measurement alone.
Contrived example I’ve already used twice to illustrate why average temperatures are nonsense: Let’s assume there’s a temperature measurment station in the Sahara which yields a temperature of 45⁰C and another in Anartica contributing -50⁰C. This means the average of both is -2½⁰C. But the statement On average, it’s -2½⁰C in Sahara and Antartica is total nonsense as the temperature in either place is nowhere near this value. Adding a lot of other measurement stations dampens the obviousness of the nonsense (so to say) but that’s a sleight of hand.
The organisations mentionned get money, grants, jobs and prestige from saying that humans have a major effect on the climate.
Follow the money.
On the specific case of the objection to the April 2024 article in the DS by Chris Morrison reporting on the then recently published paper “Net Isotopic Signature of Atmospheric CO2 Sources and Sinks: No Change since the Little Ice Age” by Demetris Koutsoyiannis, it’s quite clear that neither the NewsGuard objectors nor the “expert” whose objections they cite actually understand the original paper, or if they do, they have set out to misrepresent it.
Viz:
“Demetris Koutsoyiannis did claim in the March 2024 article you cited that the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels was due to natural warming since the year 1800 leading to a “more productive and expanded” biosphere, and also stated that the effect on human carbon emissions on atmospheric carbon dioxide levels was “non-discernible”.”
The paper actually states:
“Human CO2 emissions have played a minor role in the recent climatic evolution, which is hardly discernible in observational data and unnecessary to invoke in modelling the observed behaviours, including the change in the isotopic signature δ13C in the atmosphere.”
There is a very clear distinction to be made between “non-discernible” and “hardly discernible”, and IMO the objectors reveal their true colours by misrepresenting the original.
Turning to their “expert”:
“What is frustrating and confusing to me is that the author knows that human emissions have increased significantly during the industrial period, enough to explain the rise of CO2,” Sourish Basu, a research scientist at NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory, told Science Feedback in an email. “Early on, the author erroneously concluded that the biosphere must be the main driver behind the atmospheric CO2 budget and fossil fuel emissions must be negligible.”
A couple of evidence-free statements are made there.
On the IPCC’s own figures, human emissions only account for ~4% of total CO2 emissions, and all atmospheric CO2 is recycled through the biosphere with a residence time of approx 4 years, as demonstrated in a more recent paper by the same author.
What the original paper actually demonstrates is that it is not necessary to appeal to human combustion of fossil carbon to explain the recent (>40 years) changes in the carbon isotopic signature, an argument which is used by the warmists to “prove” that burning of fossil fuels is causing climate change.
Moreover, in a previous paper by the same author, he convincingly demonstrates that the rise in atmospheric CO2 is the result of increase in planetary temperature, and not the other way around.
If there’s any confusion it’s because the objector doesn’t actually understand the science.
Lastly, the term “broad scientific consensus” is meaningless: that’s just not how science works.
My take away:
Newsguard is basically a hitman for major pharma companies.
Their “questions”.are actually very detailed, very one sided arguments pharma companies want put forward ending with, “why aren’t you writing this instead?”
John Gregory, the Newsguard health editor who wrote the letter, used to work for this lot Innovate Healthcare who seem to be some kind of multimedia communication and information consultancy serving the “healthcare” industry.
How very restrained of you.
I’d have been very tempted to write back “Eff Off.”
Good afternoon Comrade, it is Sergei Popov from Glavlit here. We have received reports that you have been engaging in non-industry and State approved thinking. Please explain yourselves.
I do not need a ratings agency to tell me which news items/publishers have a high credit rating. I will figure out for myself what is of interest and worth reading.
Cheers Toby
Well done DS, these people, in this case John Gregory, must be named and shamed at every opportunity.
NewsGuard Ministry of Truth (and Lies)
I see House Republicans launched an investigation into Newsguard in July, to which Newsguard has not responded. https://www.axios.com/2024/06/14/newsguard-oversight-committee-investigation-free-speech
If they do not change their rating as a result of your response can you sue them? Just like Elon Musk has done with Media Matters?
Your patience with these paid for idiots is admirable.
People should have the right to disagree with NewsGuard.
It thinks only it has the ‘TRUTH’.
Maybe NewsGuard should be fact-checked.
NewsGuard does not seem to understand the concept of free speech.