Delingpole: To Survive, Britain’s Conservatives Must ‘Get Rid of the Green Crap’ From Breitbart JAMES DELINGPOLE28 May 2019 Besides the Brexit Party, one of the big winners of the European Parliament elections — in Germany, France, Austria, Sweden, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and the UK — were the Greens. There’s a lesson buried in this story — but it’s not what you might think. And it’s…
When I read this — and I have read this passage many times — I thought Judas sounds just like an SJW. He had left after the incident when Jesus defends a woman who pours Nard over him. His argument is “this was a waste. It should have been used for good”. He wanted it to be seen as virtuous. (The fact that he was both the treasurer of the group and a thief is important in part, for SJWs often do…
Preserve us from a National Trust that's so achingly right-on, says James Delingpole
Preserve us from a National Trust that’s so achingly right-on, says James Delingpole
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Whenever I read in the papers about some new trendy scheme introduced to the National Trust by its tiresomely PC management under director general Dame Helen Ghosh (above), I feel a pang of regret at having resigned our family membership a decade ago
Whenever I read in the papers about some new trendy scheme introduced to the National Trust by its tiresomely PC management under director…
Podcast - Radio Free Delingpole Episode 54: Beverly Hills
Written by Breitbart Feed This week on Radio Free Delingpole, James and his guest, The Spectator columnist Douglas Murray go around the horn to discuss how the British blew it on Abu Hamza, the scandal at Beverly Hills Hotel, UKIP’s future, the British elections, Facebook...
My Response To James Delingpole's Sensational Outburst On The Recent WWF Wind vs Gas Report
James Delingpole, the infamous 'interpreter of interpretations' recently posted on his Telegraph blog an article on the latest report by the Cambridge Econometrics think tank for the WWF and Greenpeace, which stated that the UK economy would be £20bn better off if it decided to focus more heavily on offshore wind than gas in the coming decades.
It was a report which garnered widespread praise and support from many in the energy field, and detailed effectively how going down George Osborne's 'dash for gas' path would inevitably lose us money in the long run, something many no doubt already had guessed.
However, Delingpole clearly seems to take an almost unbelievably sensational offense to this piece of science, and proceeds to write one of the most overblown and frankly prejudiced pieces of work I've come to read in a very long time, and on an influential media site such as the Telegraph to boot. This is my rebuttal to just some of his lamentable points made, many of which come straight out of a similarly acerbic blog from the 'Eureferendum' blog which shares his views.
The article instantly starts out by attacking personally and completely irrelevantly the status of the Cambridge Econometrics group and their head, Dr Terry Barker, as follows;
Turning to the source of this wisdom, we find the "think tank" originator named as "Cambridge Econometrics", but to call it a think tank is something of a misnomer. The company actually describes itself as "an independent consultancy", its business being the application of economic modelling and data analysis techniques to the needs of clients in business and government.
As to its "independence", the company is a trading subsidiary of a charity, theCambridge Trust for New Thinking in Economics, which receives income from the company to pursue its registered objects.
What is interesting here is that Cambridge Econometrics seems to be a very profitable company, which, according to theaccounts submitted to the Charity Commission, turns over a cool £2-million-plus each year and giving its effective owner, Dr Terry Barker, a very comfortable living, plus pension. And Dr Barker has a certain amount of baggage. Hiscv says he is:
But it goes on; they then comment on Dr Barkers past careers, which varies in academic, political and scientific rigour and clearly shows him to be someone entirely well-positioned to be carrying out such reports and publishing them like he and his team have. Although, in Delingpole et als view this, if anything, completely nullifies any data or comments he should make, and that his clearly 'violently anti-capitalist, deeply green activist' self is so far biased to the left of things that the report should be scrapped before being opened, as should his reputation.
This is tantamount to questioning the validity of a surgeon and his suggestions pre-op on the basis that they have an academic background in surgery, have sat on multiple different advisory boards and have worked across various hospitals until this point, therefore meaning they are so 'clearly biased towards a surgical response that they can't be trusted'. Forgive the analogue, but I just can't believe Delingpole is even justifying his views in such a way. In that respect, coming from an English Literature background and openly stating he does not read peer-reviewed journals presumably makes James a much more seasoned professional on the subject?
He also attacks the fact that it was commissioned by Greenpeace and the WWF for their own use, to be published as it was, effectively saying that due to their known views on fossil fuels and the green agenda, and the fact that anyone being paid to write for them would be skewed to saying good things about wind farms, they too are just as pointlessly biased and involved in the process as Dr Barker. Would anybody pass Delingpole's validity test with this precedent? It's not uncommon to disregard science done by the Heartland Institute or a fossil fuel lobbyist on the same grounds, but only when their data is refutable, not simply their character or personal life. That's being reasonable.
What strikes me about the whole article is the next part, where he attempts, I emphasise the word attempts, to add some statistics to it all to backup his claims. I thought when I saw the title to this article that I would be presented with a reasoned analysis of the WWF report, pointing out how perhaps one technique they used was ill-advised, or that data was picked erroneously, but how wrong I was. Delingpole proceeds to pluck, seemingly out of the air, two figures for his entire article:
So let us instead apply some incredibly basic, entry-level commonsense. Here's what we know about wind power: Onshore wind power requires 100 per cent subsidy from the government/taxpayer/energy user. Offshore wind requires 200 per cent subsidy. Not a single wind farm anywhere in the world would be economically viable without this state-enforced support. Besides being far less cost-effective than any form of fossil fuel power, the energy produced by wind – being intermittent and unpredictable and invariably unavailable on the coldest and hottest days when it is most needed – is essentially worthless in any free market. And that's before we start considering the hidden costs of wind: the destruction it wreaks on bats and birds; the health risks of low frequency noise; the blight it inflicts on property prices; the near-irreparable damage it inflicts on the natural landscape…
I haven't been able to find these percentages anywhere on the web, and of course there were no references or citations for me to follow from his blog, so it's hard to tell if they are indeed wrong or right. However, given that he omits any mention of fossil fuel or gas subsidies in this article, let me - if we're going to take 100% as the onshore wind subsidy rate, then that does not mean gas, coal etc is at 0%. In actuality, these fuels probably receive subsidies of at least 40-50% if we're talking in Delingpole-statistics, so the sensational context in which he presents those numbers is clearly not as it seems. I only use these figures as a way of putting his claims in context, not as an actual referenced piece of data, but it is useful to understand what that '100%' may actually mean. He tries to cover this up by taking a supposed 'basic, entry-level common sense' approach, but it would be nice to see some actual data to go on before condemning pages and pages of statistics with just two percentages.
He also attempts to list as many negatives for wind energy as he can muster, including the 'health risks' which have repeatedly been debunked as bad science, although noise pollution is an issue but not on a dangerous scale, as well as the 'destruction...on bats and birds', without bearing in mind the fact that wind projects carry out bat studies before construction can go ahead, the involvement of multiple wildlife trusts in the project planning process, and the simple fact that deaths from turbines are a minute fraction of birds killed by cars, cats and windows (just read David MacKay's book and the wind chapter to see this). I imagine even fracking would lead to bird deaths somewhere along the way.
The idea of intermittency being wind's absolute killer is simply wrong, with real-life examples in Germany, Denmark, the US and even here in the UK demonstrating peak generation and massive amounts of energy produced by wind alone, in a way which can be handled effectively to meet demand. As storage technology evolves and grid systems smarten up, we can rapidly reduce this 'intermittency issue' to practically nothing. The idea that 'if the wind ain't blowing, you've wasted your money' is a rapidly ageing one, and Delingpole needs to catch up.
In stark contrast however, he sings the praises of gas:
Relative to wind it is cheap, efficient and clean. In the US, the shale gas revolution has not only brought the US closer to energy independence but it has more than halved the price of gas, bringing down the cost of energy for individual consumers and business alike, with a healthy knock-on effect on prosperity and economic efficiency.
For starters, where are the negatives in this balanced debate? How about some of these: it still emits carbon, there's no escaping that eventuality; it may be cheap initially, but costs rapidly ramp up; multiple gas analysts believe that replicating the US success in shale gas over here in Europe is a pipe-dream, and simply will never come to fruition, regardless of funding and policy; fracking is a highly untested and potentially damaging process, most of all to the environment James so happily berates wind farms for destroying; he says gas brings economic efficiency and prosperity, when the green economy is the only growing section of the UK economy and is doing so at a staggering rate, and worldwide is adding more jobs than any other energy sector. These are just a small selection from a raft of negatives for gas and positives for wind and renewables, and yet Delingpole seems to forgo them.
The article finishes off with a completely off topic and almost random overview of an ITV radio survey on the national debt and whether the public knows what is happening via a simple multi-choice question, and to his glee reports that they don't have a clue, and it is worrying. He links this tenuously back to the original point he was trying to make by suggesting that alongside the media and the Government misleading the public, organisations designed to help us (Greenpeace and the WWF) are in fact pumping out 'junk science and Mickey Mouse economic reports' to further confuse us.
So why should James Delingpole therefore be getting away with this sort of media spinning and sheer lying in the face of the current energy climate and loss of direction in the public? His articles are certainly not providing the correct information; rather, he is using his clever way with words and overly-confident air to do serious and perhaps irreversible damage to the environmental sector, which is only trying to aid society now, and into the future. Considering they use sound and robust science and are backed by multiple past successes, to say their data is 'Mickey Mouse' is astoundingly brash.
It boggles my mind how he thinks he can outright deny the validity of such a potentially important report, without any scientific justification of his own, without any serious rational, balanced argument, and most of all, whilst he screams about how misguiding and full of bull**** the media currently is, when he's sitting at the centre of it.
No doubt he could into play the fact that he took opinions from a blog which outright insulted the academic rigour of one of my lecturers, Dr Rob Gross, and therefore I am emotionally invested, but in all honesty it boils down to the truth that what he said was wrong, and much of what he tries to force on the uneducated public is just nauseatingly hypocritical. Let's not even get started on his coining of the term 'warmist', that's just plain nuts.
