Chris Bayliss weighs up UK energy minister Ed Milliband and this politician’s determination to press on with his decarbonisation, Net Zero agenda, facts of reality be damned:

Others may argue that making reasonable concessions to public opinion at critical moments might benefit the green agenda in the long run, by limiting the chances of a backlash. But climate politics lives or dies by its sense of inevitability. There are only so many true believers like Miliband or Al Gore who get near positions of power. The movement is only effective so long as it retains its power over the cynical or weak-willed — the likes of Angela Merkel, David Cameron or Boris Johnson. And that power comes from the green movement’s monopoly on a vision of the future, at least in terms of energy.

With nuclear power largely removed from the discussion, opposition to the green agenda can only talk about fuels associated with the past — gas, oil, sometimes coal. If jaded politicians want to look modern and relevant, they are forced to talk about renewables. They can tell the weary public that they just have to get used to it, and that it’s the future whether they like it or not. It might not make them popular, but it makes them look potent. This is why “backsliding” is considered the most deadly sin by climate campaigners. In order to maintain that impression of inevitability, policy must only ever be seen to move in one direction. “True believers” are under an even greater obligation to hold the line, or face the wrath of the movement.

The green ratchet is bearing a huge load of bad ideas in British energy policy that don’t hold logical water even if you share their assumptions about the severity of climate change. Most obviously these relate to the electricity system and the atrophying of firm generation capacity in a system that relies on gas back-up when intermittent sources do not produce. There is a growing public awareness that critical detail has been excluded by renewables proponents, and this is responsible for the growing cost of electricity, rather than wholesale gas prices.

Reading all this, it is hard not to think of how Milliband, and others who share his views, hold the intellectual equivalent of the sunk cost fallacy.

Meanwhile, at the Daily Sceptic:

The climate science world (‘settled’ division) is in shock following the discovery in ancient ice cores that levels of carbon dioxide remained stable as the world plunged into an ice age around 2.7 million years ago. Levels of CO₂ at around 250 parts per million (ppm) were said to be lower than often assumed with just a 20 ppm movement recorded for the following near three million-year period. In addition, no changes in methane levels were seen in the entire period. Massive decreases in temperature with occasional interglacial rises appear to have occurred without troubling ‘greenhouse’ gas levels, and this revelation has caused near panic in activist circles.

 

I remember the late Brian Micklethwait, of this parish, telling me a while back that sooner or later, the lies and exaggerations of the climate change alarmists would be exposed, and the anger of electorates over what has been allowed to pass would have major consequences. Remember, gentle reader, that much of the deindustrialisation of the West, and all that this implies, has been driven by those who championed the end of fossil fuel production.

Preston Byrne (of defending Americans against Ofcom fame) has been working on a free speech bill for the UK.

See also the thread on X.

The reason this legislative proposal exists, btw, is because Ofcom decided to go after four tiny American companies and I realized the UK didn’t have doctrinal tooling to stop the problem at its source

This Model Bill is, hopefully, a first step towards developing that new law.

The other day the Triggernometry boys sat down with a Professor Robert Pape to discuss the Iran War. Here are his main points along with my commentary:

1. Airstrikes do not change regimes. – Spot on. They don’t change their aims either. Although they may change their capabilities.
2. The 12-Day War of 2025 didn’t work. – That sounds about right. It would appear that Iran still has stocks of the stuff you make nuclear bombs out of.
3. Kharg Island will be difficult to take. – Nonsense.
4. Iran has become an oil “hegemon”. – In other words, by demonstrating it can close the Straits of Hormuz it dominates supply. I doubt it.
5. Suicide bombing has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with desperation. – While I am always open to other ways of looking at things I can’t help but notice that suicide attacks are almost never carried out by Westerners however desperate.
6. The Obama deal, which Pape advised on, is as good as it gets. – He’s losing me.
7. Israel is involved in ethnic cleansing in Gaza. – Now he’s completely lost me. “To Hell or Connaught” it is not.
8. Israel will end up having to allow inspections of its hitherto unacknowledged nuclear facilities. – Maybe, but there won’t be any bombs to inspect because by then the Israelis will have used them.

There was something else that bugged me. It was his general tone: defeatism mixed with smugness.

*Of course, this interview does no such thing. It seems to me that Obama’s guiding principle was the destruction of American liberties and their replacement with a communist tyranny. The Papes of this world just provided suitable intellectual cover.

“The toughest job facing the new head of Ofcom: tackling the blatantly partisan GB News”, writes Polly Toynbee in the Guardian.

She writes,

Labour feels more sure-footed. A stronger sense of its own identity flows from standing up to Donald Trump, his war and his insults. MPs are less often looking over their shoulders at the right and its media.

Here comes one test. Selecting a new chair of the media regulator Ofcom is in its final phase: which of two reported frontrunners is appointed will reveal the government’s frame of mind. Ofcom has been moribund, weak to the point of invisibility. One key area is the regulation of online harms, as the government seeks to toughen up on the safety of children and the sanity of the nation, against a libertarian right that defends aggressive notions of free speech, and permits fact-free dangers, such as vaccine and climate denial. Kemi Badenoch is a free-speecher who argued for the weakening of the Online Safety Act in 2022 by removing the ban on “legal but harmful” material for adults, claiming it was “legislating for hurt feelings”. Keir Starmer is strengthening the law by banning addictive algorithms.

and

Try to imagine the revolt on the right if Labour sanctioned an upstart broadcaster with, say, George Galloway as its main nightly presenter (he’d be as good at it as Nigel Farage), a string of leftists paid large sums by a benefactor founder and a news agenda focused on far-left tropes. Beyond that scenario, it’s hard to devise a leftist channel as aggressively poisonous as GB News, which pours out Farage, Matt Goodwin, Lee Anderson, Darren Grimes, Martin Daubney and Richard Tice, and is frequently accused of breaking rules about accuracy and impartiality.

Toynbee is right to say that George Galloway could find an audience, but wrong to present the scenario of him being employed by a mainstream outlet as unthinkable. Alongside his work for Iran’s Press TV and Russia Today, Galloway hosted shows for talkSPORT and talkRADIO for several years. But we don’t have to imagine “a string of leftists paid large sums by a benefactor founder and a news agenda focused on far-left tropes”, we can see it in Ms Toynbee’s own newspaper, which has been financed by the Scott Trust since 1936. That’s fine by me. I don’t object to “a string of leftists and a news agenda focused on far-left tropes” if it is paid for by a benefactor or by other leftists who like their tropes. I start objecting to a string of leftists and a news agenda focused on far left tropes when I am forced to pay for it via my television licence.

Hundreds of British girls were raped by grooming gangs while Mr Blair was the prime minister. Of course, this was a more diffuse, less murderous phenomenon than October 7. But it is hard to stomach lectures about what must be done in the face of evil from someone whose government did absolutely nothing. Of course, mistreating innocent people should have been unjustifiable in both cases. But Blair should be the last person to hold forth on “removing threats”.

Can we pay him to go away? I’ll set up a GoFundMe.

– Ben Sixsmith

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