As regulars will know, I'm generally in agreement that climate change is happening and that we might want to do something about it. However, as said regulars will also know, I disagree vehemently with the generaly received wisdom of what we ought to be doing about it. Stick on a carbon tax and let the markets sort it out, forget all of this planning, targetting and picking technological winners.
My deeps and abiding suspicion of what we are told we ought to be doing seems vindicated. For it turns out that WG3 (in the tangled jargon of the IPCC reports, the "what we ought to be doing" bit) has actually been written by Greenpeace.
No, really: "New IPCC error: renewables report conclusion was dictated by Greenpeace" and that's from Mark Lynas, the bloke who wrote a whole book about how we'll all boil when it's 6 degrees hotter.
It's worse than that actually. Greenpeace and the people who make all the windmills and the solar cells and the.....they wrote the report. What was presented as an impartial, based upon the best science, report was in fact a lightly warmed over report from eco-loons and those who sell the purported "solution".
You may recall a month or so back stories telling us that renewables will be able to power our civilisation and so it's all going to be alright? Yes, it's that report. And no, it's not just that the nutters were asked to write it. There's a much larger problem as well.
For what was released a month ago was just the "summary for policymakers". What wasn't released until just this week was the actual report. It's only now that we can see who wrote it. Further, it's only now that we can see the mindgarglingly stupid assumptions that underlie it. For a start their assumption is that in 39 years time, a world more than twice as rich as it is now, with another 30% odd rise in population, is going to be using less energy than we do now.
Another particular joy was: "That study also assumes rapid technological progress in renewables and none in fossil fuels." This is insane. Not just that we'd obviously assume at least some improvement in fossil technologies: perhaps equal to the sort we've had in the past 39 years maybe. But that it doesn't even make sense as a sentence. If we've two competing ways of doing something, two technologies, then we know absolutely that changes in one are going to spark changes in the other. At minimum, rapid advances in renewables will make fossil fuels cheaper as demand for them falls.
My personal opinion is that this whole process has become so corrupted that it's just not viable any more. No, not the basic physics of what happens when you pump more CO2 into the atmosphere, but what we do about it. We need to fire them all and hire some new people. Those who understand basic economics perhaps, technological cycles, the capital cycle, possibly even those who grasp the powers of markets and the innovations that us curious shaved monkeys are capable of.
Why, yes I am free (but expensive), why do you ask?
