We have an amazing institution known as the office of the Auditor General. It conducts independent value-for-money audits of government programs and policies. The intent is to ensure that tax dollars are used wisely – and that citizens have access to accurate information. Each year a report is issued that outlines how well the government is performing.

The entire 2011 Auditor General’s report is available online. Two sections of Chapter 3 are of particular interest. Each can be viewed/downloaded separately:

• Electricity Sector – Regulatory Oversight, a 20-page PDF (backup link here)
• Electricity Sector – Renewable Energy Initiatives, a 34-page PDF (backup link here)

The first provides a big-picture overview of how electricity is managed in the province that is home to 40% of Canada’s population. On the third page – which is numbered as p. 69 – we read that:

…electricity prices for the average consumer have increased 65% since the restructuring of the electricity sector in 1999, and prices are expected to rise another 46% in the next five years.

Cantankerous consumers aren’t imagining things, therefore. Over the past decade our electricity bills have, indeed, increased by two-thirds. By 2016 we’ll be paying twice as much for electricity as we did in 1999.

Price increases of this magnitude are especially difficult for low-income families to cope with. They also hit the manufacturing sector hard. If you own a factory that was already struggling to survive, that was already paying tens of thousands per month for electricity, there’s no way you can afford that kind of increase. Dramatic price hikes kill businesses – along with thousands of jobs.

The other big takeaway is found on the same page. While the Ontario Energy Board is supposed to oversee our electricity sector,  it actually has no say over two-thirds of our residential hydro costs:

About 50% of the electricity sold to residential customers comes from suppliers who signed long-term contracts with the government…the price of this power accounts for 65% of the cost of the electricity component on the typical bill. However, the Board has no regulatory oversight role with respect to this portion of the electricity charge. Rather, it regulates only…about one-third of the electricity charges on a typical bill.

If our government had deliberately set out to bamboozle us this would have been a perfect strategy. First, assure the public that an impressive-sounding body is keeping an eye on electricity prices. Then circumvent the process by placing two-thirds of the raw cost beyond that body’s ability to influence.

But the news gets even more distressing in the second section of the Auditor General’s report, the one that examines renewable energy. On page 2 – numbered as p. 88 – we read that the audit team didn’t rely on the Ministry of Energy’s own numbers because there weren’t any. The ministry itself hasn’t conducted “any audit work on renewable energy initiatives” recently.

Gee, I wonder why. Could it be connected to the fact that our government is so obsessed with making itself look green that it doesn’t care what it costs? And I’m not talking just financially. The Auditor General points out that the 2009 Green Energy and Green Economy Act practically declares that the ends justify the means:

Under this legislation, the government created a new process to expedite the development of renewable energy by providing the Minister with the authority to supersede many of the government’s usual planning and regulatory oversight processes.

As a result, the government has been able to further its renewable energy policy agenda without the delays that these processes can sometimes cause.

In other words, if you want to build an oil pipeline you’ll have to jump through all sorts of regulatory hoops. You’ll be required to spend tens of thousands of dollars demonstrating that you aren’t going to harm the environment. Your project will be delayed for years while activists denounce you at public hearings – after which you’ll be obliged to make costly changes to your original plans before you’re granted the appropriate permits.

But if your project has the magic ‘green energy’ label attached to it you’ll be spared all of that hassle. You get to saunter to the front of the line. Your project will be fast-tracked. Environmental impact assessment, what’s that?

Such foolishness, of course, leads to grim real world results. The Auditor General’s report doesn’t mince words. It says the Energy Minister decided to shut down coal-fired electricity plants as quickly as possible – but did no homework first to determine if this made sense from an environmental perspective – never mind an economic one. In its words, “no comprehensive business-case evaluation was done to objectively evaluate the impacts.”

Instead, we got boatloads of wishful thinking. We were told that solar panels and wind turbines would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but we weren’t told that, because the energy they produce is intermittent, gas-powered facilities will remain on standby.

According to the Auditor General, the government “has no data” on the emissions those backup facilities will produce. In other words, it’s entirely possible that we’re going to a great deal of trouble – and spending huge amounts of money – to usher in an new energy era in which the net emissions reduction will actually be minimal.

When the Green Energy and Green Economy Act was passed in May 2009 we were told it would result in a 1% increase in our electricity bills. A year-and-a-half later “the Ministry forecast that a typical residential electricity bill would rise about 7.9% annually over the next five years.”

We were told about the green jobs that would be created, but no one bothered to estimate the ones that would be lost as a result of soaring electricity costs.

Nor did any government official provide advance warning that we’d end up paying hundreds of millions of dollars per year to renewable energy companies to not generate electricity during periods of over-supply.

In other words, green energy is as much a boondoggle here as it is in Germany and the UK. The public is being hosed.

In Ontario’s case, it isn’t just politicians and journalists who are saying so. It’s the Auditor General himself.

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click image to enlarge

It’s the year 2000. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is working on an important document. Called the Technical Summary, this is an overview of the conclusions of Working Group 1 – the most scientifically demanding section of what will become the IPCC’s 2001 assessment report.

Those writing this summary are therefore a select group of people. In an organization allegedly composed of hundreds of the world’s top scientists these 30 individuals have been especially entrusted. It is they who will decide. It is their  judgment that will prevail.

These people will supply the answer to that crucial question: What does the latest scientific research into climate change actually tell us?

Five of them are IPCC officials. John Houghton and Yihui Ding are at the top of the hierarchy, being the co-chairs of Working Group 1.

Narasimhan Sundararaman is the Secretary of the IPCC – a role that includes responsibility for a staff of at least three.

David Griggs is the head of Working Group 1′s Technical Support Unit (TSU). And Paul van der Linden is that TSU’s Project Administrator (see page i of this 94-page PDF for confirmation of these roles).

None of those in attendance would appear to be kids. Most have decades of experience, having been employed by large government bureaucracies in the UK, the US, and Australia.

Given the gravity of the questions under consideration, the importance of the task, and the senior nature of the participants one would expect this group to demonstrate a high degree of professionalism and circumspection.

So where does their important meeting take place? At a university? A government office building? Somewhere where the optics are neutral – the sort of staid, conservative facility that would be consistent with the IPCC’s claim that it is a scientific body conducting a wholly objective and rigorously neutral assessment of the evidence?

Nope. These geniuses conduct their three-day meeting in the New York city offices of a green lobby group. Really.

I’ve written about the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) before:

To get a sense of the wealth and influence of this US-based NGO take a look at its list of staff experts. There are 130 names on that list…They have seven attorneys, eight economists…and a vice-president of corporate sponsorships.

But wait, it gets worse. At that time, Roberta Desmond and Georgia Pease were two EDF employees. Prior to this high-level IPCC meeting, attendees were advised that these two women “can provide you with a formal letter of invitation for visa application purposes.”

Go that? According to official US immigration records, these senior scientists were guests of the Environmental Defense Fund when they were making these all-important IPCC decisions.

The EDF appears to have booked these scientists’ hotel rooms – and subsidized their meals (lunch, dinner and an afternoon snack cost attendees a mere $21 per day in downtown NYC).

How do we know all of this? Because blogger Tom Nelson, who has been methodically working his way through the 5,000 Climategate2 e-mails, has discovered one that spells it all out. Sent in September 2000, the e-mail – cc’d to the two EDF staffers – explains these matters to those who took part in the IPCC meeting a month later (backup link here).

Now tell me, if some nice people offered you meeting space in glorious downtown Manhattan, helped you procure travel documents, fed you – and offered you goodness knows what other charming assistance, entertainment, and company over a three-day period – would you not be somewhat tempted to identify with their worldview?

The EDF isn’t a collection of newborn lambs and fluffy bunny rabbits. These are professional bloody lobbyists. You know – people who get paid to advance a particular agenda.

Lobbyists have no incentive to be fair-minded or even-handed. It is their job to pursue narrow, self-interested goals. A lobby group wealthy enough to afford office space not just in Manhattan, but in 10 other cities – including Washington, Beijing, and San Francisco – is playing in the big leagues. For keeps.

And it apparently occurred to none of these leading intellects at the IPCC that such lobbyists might have an ulterior motive. It occurred to none of them that the outside world couldn’t possibly take their findings seriously were it ever discovered that their deliberations were hosted (influenced / monitored / tainted / overheard?) by lobbyists.

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Read the e-mail here. It is addressed to these individuals:

• Daniel Albritton (USA)
• G Meira Filho (Brazil)
• Michael Oppenheimer (USA)
• John Mitchell (UK)
• Bruce Hewitson (South Africa)
• Thomas Stocker (Switzerland)
• Thomas Karl (USA)
• Joyce Penner (USA)
• V Meleshko (Russia)
• Mack McFarland (USA)
• I Isaksen (Norway)
• B Nyenzi (Tanzania)
• S Pollonais (Trinidad)
• U Cubasch (Germany)
• Kevin Trenberth (USA)
• John Houghton (Co-chair)
• Ding Yihui (Co-chair)
• David Griggs (TSU)
• Paul van der Linden (TSU)
• N Sundararaman (IPCC Secretary, Geneva)
• F Joos (Switzerland)
• H Nassarallah (Kuwait-through N Sundararaman)
• A Ramirez (Venezuela – by fax)
• J Stone (Canada)
• J Zillman (Australia)
• Colin Prentice – represented by Haroon Khesgi (USA)
• Venkatchala Ramaswamy (USA) represented by Jim Heywood (UK)
• Bryant McAvaney (Australia)
• John Church (Australia) or Jonathan Gregory (UK)
• Linda Mearns (USA) or Mike Hulme (UK)
• Berrien Moore (USA)

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According to the company that had sought permission to build it, the project would have created 13,000 American construction jobs plus 7,000 more American manufacturing jobs. A detailed breakdown of the company’s math appears here (backup link here).

It’s therefore rather odd that a Reuters news story about the matter contains the following paragraph:

The pipeline placed the Obama administration in the middle of a dispute between two key parts of its voting block: green groups who oppose the pipeline over concerns about climate change and some unions who back the project because of the jobs they believe it would create. [bold added, backup link here]

Did you catch that? In this news article Reuters suggests that the jobs are merely hypothetical. A figment of some unions’ imagination.

Does anyone really suppose that a 1,700-mile-long pipeline can be constructed without the participation of thousands upon thousands of people? As my husband muttered when he read this story: “The jobs are about as certain as you can get. Someone’s got to build the bleeping thing.”

Notice, also, that while Reuters implies that the unions’ point-of-view is suspect, there’s no similar language regarding green groups.

We aren’t told that green groups believe the pipeline would exacerbate climate change. Nor do the journalists even hint that stopping this particular pipeline merely means the oil will be diverted elsewhere (which rather undermines the ‘we’re fighting climate change’ activist argument).

Instead, the reporters behave as though the green perspective is 100 percent reliable. Whatever comes out of an activist’s mouth is not-to-be-questioned. It gets accepted at face value.

That must be because green activists never, ever exaggerate. They’re never mistaken. They never promulgate doomsday scenarios that fail to pan out.

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Read about Greenpeace’s 1994 false climate predictions here, the Worldwatch Institute’s failed predictions here, and activist Bill McKibben’s bogus 20-year-old predictions here (nevertheless he was quoted in the Reuters article discussed above).

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I began paying close attention to the climate debate after I noticed that activists were trampling on a fundamental human right – that of free speech. Rather than encouraging open and honest dialogue, alarmingly high-profile individuals were trying to shut down the discussion.

You can see and hear former US Vice President (and Nobel Peace Prize winner) Al Gore declaring in this 8-minute video that “the debate is over.” Ditto former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger:

But the debate is never over. Ideas change, our communities evolve. If our forebearers had taken the position that ‘the debate is over’ women still wouldn’t have the vote. Racial minorities would still be required to use separate drinking fountains. School boards would be banned from distributing textbooks to white children if they’d already been used by black children.

Today, January February 18, 2012, is a day of protest. Websites as diverse as Wikipedia and WattsUpWithThat have gone dark to call attention to the fact that two proposed US laws will interfere with free speech on the Internet.

The graphic at the top of this post refers to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) currently before the US House of Representatives. A similar law, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), is also before the US Senate.

These laws are being vociferously supported by lobbyists for old media – exactly the sort of media that has done such an abysmal job of informing the public about the climate debate.

According to the supporters of these bills, draconian laws are necessary to protect the intellectual property of those who make their living recording music, writing books and software, publishing newspapers and magazines, producing films, and so forth.

As someone who has spent the bulk of my working life as a writer and photographer let me say loud and clear: these big media lobbyists do not speak for me. If the choice is between free speech and my ability to earn a living unencumbered by Internet piracy FREE SPEECH WINS. Hands down. Every time.

Business models come and go. Occupations come and go. As Roger Pielke Jr. points out, it now requires only 177 people to accomplish tasks that required 1,000 people in 1950. This trend isn’t new. Blacksmiths were in demand once. They aren’t now. That’s life.

The big media players are attempting to lock in their current position, to freeze this moment in time, to insulate themselves from change. They think it’s okay to interfere with the free speech of ordinary people in order to accomplish this goal. That tells me everything I need to know.

As an editorial in Canada’s National Post argues today (yes, they’re a big media company, but even they recognize the danger), these laws would:

force American website operators to police every single piece of user-generated content on their sites — an impossible job with potentially huge liability costs.

The video embedded above is a good example of the kind of content WordPress would be expected to remove. Technically, it was created by – and is therefore the property of – ABC, a US television network.

From my perspective, the video is a historical document. The ability to embed it in this blog allows me to support my assertions with hard evidence. It helps all of us understand what has been going on. Should Al Gore ever deny that he uttered such words, the ability of members of the general public to link to this video on their Facebook page would be critically important.

As the National Post editorial explains, even if I were to move this blog to a Canadian server (it currently lives on WordPress servers in the US), it wouldn’t matter:

SOPA and PIPA would give the U.S. government the direct authority to block entire domains and blocks of IP addresses. Canadians should be especially concerned about this, since the legislation treats all dot-com, dot-net and dot-org domains — as well as all North American IP addresses — as “domestic Internet protocol addresses” that would be subject to U.S. law. [bold added]

Here’s one last quote:

The bills would employ the same practices used by authoritarian regimes, such as China and Iran, to censor information and quash dissent. Ironically, they would also outlaw the technologies that foreign activists use to evade censorship, including those developed by the U.S. government.

A back-up of the editorial may be seen here. I frequently include back-up links in my posts since content often disappears from the Internet (or gets moved). The ability to back-up newspaper articles we don’t own the rights to is important to bloggers, journalists, researchers, and book authors. But it is exactly the kind of thing these laws could be used to shut down.

I recently spent two weeks in Europe promoting my book. During those two weeks I met numerous individuals in multiple communities. This was only possible because we’d already learned about each other via the amazing invention called the Internet.

It is no exaggeration to say that the vibrant, international climate skeptic community owes its very existence to the Internet.

Free speech is precious. The Internet is precious. We must defend both.

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Donna Laframboise is a former Vice President of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (1998-2001).

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UPDATE, 18 Jan 6 pm:
In the “credit where it’s due department” this is what the Greenpeace International website looks like today:

click for a larger view

When both WattsUpWithThat and Greenpeace can see eye-to-eye on an issue this important, we should all feel heartened.

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Yes, our federal Minister of Natural Resources has publicly acknowledged that once you connect the dots and take a step back so that the big picture comes into focus, the green activist agenda is rather alarming:

Their goal is to stop any major project…No forestry. No mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydroelectric dams.

This sort of political leadership is heady, inspiring stuff. And yet the idea that carbon dioxide emissions are dangerous – because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says so – remains firmly entrenched here in the Great White North. Indeed, it remains accepted wisdom in the province of Alberta, the very epicenter of Canada’s oil and gas industry.

Last October an engineer wrote a letter to that province’s premier. Even a passing glance at the bio of Alison Redford (who is the equivalent to a US state governor) reveals that she’s one smart, accomplished human being.

Throughout her career she has served in senior capacities in our nation’s capital. She has worked overseas with both the European Union and the United Nations. More recently she ran for – and won – the leadership of Alberta’s Progressive Conservative Party, thereby becoming premier of this country’s economic powerhouse.

It is difficult to believe, therefore, that Premier Redford is unaware of the growing list of scandals associated with the IPCC – scandals that call into question the validity of that body’s findings. And yet, when the letter-writing engineer received an answer in November of last year, he was advised:

The provincial government acknowledges the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change… [bold added; see the letter here]

Similarly, when the same engineer left a comment on a government of Alberta website, he received an e-mail reply on November 28th, 2011 that read, in part:

…the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which includes more than 3,000 scientists from around the world, agrees that climate change is caused by a number of factors, including excess carbon dioxide…The Government of Alberta accepts the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and recognizes the need to reduce emissions and take immediate action to deal with the impacts of global warming. [bold added; see a cut-and-paste of the e-mail here]

This is remarkable, n’est pas? As my book-length exposé of that organization points out, the IPCC fails some basic tests. It doesn’t describe its own personnel, its own procedures, or its own reports accurately. It lacks meaningful conflict-of-interest policies. It is studded with personnel affiliated with groups such as Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund.

The government of Alberta may think the IPCC consists of more than 3,000 scientists but the IPCC itself says that only 450 lead authors plus 800 contributing authors wrote its last (2007) assessment report. That adds up to 1,250 people. Some of those people had not yet completed their PhDs – see, for example, Sari Kovats.

While the IPCC says there were an additional 2,500 expert reviewers, its guilty secret is that nothing prevented its authors from entirely ignoring those people’s views.

The fact that IPCC scientists are from around the world sounds good but actually means little, since only about two dozen countries possess the educational infrastructure to produce top-notch personnel. Moreover, it is naive to imagine that scientists who come from undemocratic regimes such as Iran, China, or Sudan are free to adopt positions that conflict with their government’s official line.

And then there’s the biggest misunderstanding of all: The question of whether or not human emissions are responsible for enough climate change to worry about has never been decided by thousands of people. That decision was made by the few dozen individuals who happened to write one particular chapter (out of a total of 44) in the 2007 report.

At no time has the IPCC ever polled all of its participants with respect to this question. At no time have IPCC participants been asked wholesale to sign a statement agreeing with that particular conclusion.

In short, the reality of the IPCC is quite different from the marketing message that governments have swallowed whole and continue to repeat to their citizenry. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, therefore, to deduce that it’s unwise to trust the IPCC’s conclusions. To quote UK Lord Andrew Turnbull in the House of Lords last week:

Over the last two years, there have been three separate reports on the IPCC. They are: the report by the InterAcademy Council, a collective of the world’s leading scientific academies; the report written by Professor Ross McKitrick, a Canadian professor of economics who for a time served as an expert reviewer for the IPCC’s fourth assessment report; and a book, The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert, written by Donna Laframboise, a Canadian journalist. Although they write from three different perspectives, in different styles, the message is the same: there are serious flaws in the competence, operations and governance of the IPCC.

So why do so many elected officials – here in Canada, as well as abroad – remain behind-the-times and out-of-the-loop?

The damning report from the InterAcademy Council was commissioned by the UN itself. It was released in August 2010. More than enough time has passed for the flaws highlighted by that report to have been noticed by the government of Alberta.

Why, then, does Premier Redford still accept the IPCC’s findings?

And what, we are entitled to ask, is the threshold? How many more similar reports will it take? How many additional scandals must surface before the politicians of the world figure out that the IPCC doesn’t deserve their trust?

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Speaking of Germany, I was recently interviewed by Steffen Hentrich of Okowatch via e-mail. When asked how my research into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has affected my view of climate science more generally, I responded as follows:

Numerous, profound conflicts-of-interest are inherent in the IPCC structure. Climate research is not being evaluated by neutral third parties. Rather, the people writing IPCC reports routinely pass judgment on their own research – and on that of their academic rivals. How can that be sound science?

The interview, translated into German, is here. My original answers, in English, appear here. Hentrich has also written a review of the book.

Another review, by Rob Lyons of Spiked, has been translated into German for a Frankfurt-based publication. It was published yesterday.

To be a climate skeptic is to be a member of a minority that is routinely derided and ridiculed. This is especially the case in Germany. I am thrilled, therefore, to be playing a small role in the fledgling debate taking place there.

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click to go to the World Future Council website

Some people have a high opinion of themselves. I mean, what sort of personality type do you have to be to imagine that you, self-anointed you, are the voice of future generations?

What kind of ego trip do people embark on prior to concluding that, among the billions of souls inhabiting this planet, it’s their own special calling to speak on behalf of those who haven’t yet been born?

A long list of individuals with this exalted regard for themselves can be found on the website of the World Future Council. Actually, there are four lists. The first consists of those who are the Councillors and Honorary Councillors of this body. Among these self-aggrandizing mortals we find:

• the Hollywood actress Daryl Hannah
• Tim Flannery, the head of Australia’s government-funded Climate Commission
• Fabio Feldmann, who sits on the boards of Greenpeace International, The Nature Conservancy (Brazil), and Friends of the Earth Brazil
• the president as well as the director general of another activist group called the International Union for Conservation of Nature
• a Vice President of the Club of Rome (which has been issuing bogus doomsday warnings since the 1970s)
• at least four people currently or formerly employed by the United Nations: Maude Barlow, Rae Kwon Chung, Ahmed Djoghlaf, and Hans-Christof von Sponeck

Then there’s the Supervisory Board of the World Future Council. This includes a gynecologist, the directors of two foundations (presumably these are bankrolling the venture), a benefactress, and what no self-respecting group of speakers-for-the-future can do without – a Middle Eastern expert.

List number three is the organization’s Board of Advisors. The bios of those folks are handily collected in this 7-page PDF (backup link here). It turns out that Cyril Ritchie, the chairman of that board, is also “serving his fourth term as Secretary of the Conference of UN NGOs (CONGO).”

I’ve never heard of this body, but evidently it spends its time “actively promoting the involvement of NGOs in the working of the United Nations.” Here are some of the other board members:

• Reto Braun, whose day job involves working with the UN
• Bo Ekman, a former adviser to a former UN Secretary General
• Monika Griefahn, a co-founder of Greenpeace Germany
• Anita Herrdum, who lives in a commune and serves as “chairwoman of a German speaking network of heiresses”
• Beatrix Pfleiderer, a professor of anthropology who spent six years “involved in training with free dolphins on healing communication”

Oh, and let’s not forget Farhad Vladi. This gentleman is equipped to speak for future generations, apparently, because he’s president of three companies that “sell, develop and rent privately owned islands world-wide.” Moreover, he’s “very much involved in art and music” and is “interested in the subject of global warming and renewable energy.”

Finally we come to the last list of names. These people are responsible for the day-to-day activities of the World Future Council. Jakob von Uexkull is “a patron of Friends of the Earth International and a member of the Global Commission to Fund the United Nations.”

Alexandra Wandel used to work for Friends of the Earth before she became a spokesperson for a group of “major European environmental NGOs” that included the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace.

No doubt you’ve heard the term social justice before. Well the World Future Council is pushing future justice. It has a Director of Future Justice, a Campaign Manager for Future Justice, and two policy officers who also have that slogan in their titles.

Quelle surprise, the Director of Future Justice, Maja Göpel, has a history of working for NGOs. A link embedded in her bio takes us to an entire Future Justice page (backup link). Here one finds eyebrow-raising statements such as:

• The world is warming dangerously.  A quarter of our mammals face a high risk of extinction in the near future.
• We need Future Justice because we need to overcome the obscene inequity between people.
• Putting Future Justice into place means tackling head-on our culture, policies and laws…

In the new, improved world these people wish to substitute for our current one:

Fair treatment would be a basic human need, set out in law. Fair shares and fair burdens would be a matter of justice between all humans living, and those yet to be born.

Those who act without concern for the planet, and the human and non-human life upon it, would be pursued and prosecuted.

Notice the legalistic tone. These people imagine that fair burdens and fair shares is simply a matter of passing laws. And if you behave in ways they disapprove of – if you act without concern for the planet – you can look forward to being pursued and prosecuted.

The World Future Council, therefore, doesn’t use the term justice the way most of us do. Rather than simply advocating for certain improvements, these people would have us believe that their particular vision of the future is indistinguishable from justice itself.

In reality, the World Future Council is a collection of NGO brats, self-important rich folks, and UN bureaucrats who think everything would be just so much nicer if they were running the planet.

In my view, their analysis is both infantile and creepy. May future generations be spared their meddling.

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See also The incredible megalomania of the Green Party: now they want to speak on behalf of the ‘unborn’ (backup link here)

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UPDATE: A few hours after this post went live I removed a word and two commas from the last line of the second-last paragraph. It used to read “so much nicer if they, themselves, were running the planet.”

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photo courtesy of JoeOliver.ca

It is a great moment to be a Canadian. Three weeks ago Peter Kent, our environment minister, announced that Canada will withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol. Failure to do so, he explained, would oblige us to purchase $14 billion worth of carbon credits from abroad (backup link here).

As someone who thinks Kyoto was a mirage (even its proponents admit it would accomplish nothing meaningful) I’m thrilled that $14 billion worth of tax dollars will be spent on schools and hospitals instead.

People who think it’s sensible to throw away billions on an imaginary solution to a problem many scientists aren’t even sure exists are welcome to do so out of their own pockets. In the meantime I’d love for someone to explain how this is remotely sustainable.

Yesterday things got even more interesting here in Canada. Our Minister of Natural Resources, Joe Oliver, issued an extraordinary open letter. I have concerns about some parts aspects of the ruling Conservative Party’s agenda but Oliver is manifesting the sort of political leadership I can get excited about. There’s starch in that man’s spine (backup link here).

Before we turn to the contents of his letter, let us remind ourselves that Oliver was elected by ordinary Canadians. In his riding four candidates threw their hat into the ring. Oliver attracted 47% of the vote last May. A Green Party candidate who ran against him earned a mere 3 percent. To put this another way, for every person who voted for the Green Party’s candidate, 15 others voted for Oliver.

That gentleman, therefore, is accountable to the public. His behaviour over the next four years will necessarily be constrained by concern that he might join the unemployment line come next election. Democracy is a system with checks-and-balances.

Activists inhabit an entirely different world. Rather than being accountable to the public, activists think it’s their job to scold and nag the rest of us about our environmentally sinful ways.

No one gave them the authority to do so. Nor did they earn it. They just decided, like bullies in the playground, that they should be the boss of the rest of us.

In an inspiring display of courage and plain speaking, Oliver has stood up to those bullies. His open letter argues that creating jobs is important. This is, after all, a country in which 1.4 million people are actively seeking work but can’t find any.

Trading our natural resources – which happen to include “oil, gas, metals and minerals” – with other nations, he says, “will help ensure the financial security of Canadians and their families.” As an elected member of our Parliament, Oliver is morally obligated to care about Canadian families.

There is, however, a problem. In Oliver’s words:

Unfortunately, there are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade. Their goal is to stop any major project, no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth. No forestry. No mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydroelectric dams.

These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda. They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects. They use funding from foreign special-interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest. They attract jet-setting celebrities with some of the largest personal carbon footprints in the world to lecture Canadians not to develop our natural resources. Finally, if all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach: Sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further. They do this because they know it can work. It works because it helps them to achieve their ultimate objective: delay a project to the point it becomes economically unviable.

Hearings began today regarding a proposed pipeline intended to transport Canadian oil to our west coast so that it may be exported. I’m all for public input, but in this case 4,000 individuals and groups wish to testify. If Oliver is correct and the sole aim of many of these people is to gum up the gears so that nothing ever gets accomplished we need to confront this new reality (backup link here).

Writing in the National Post, Terrence Corcoran points out:

If the hearings could accommodate 10 people a day through 200 sitting days a year, it would take two years just to exhaust the list of intervenors…

Superficially this looks like democracy in action. But if Oliver’s accusations are true, what’s really going on is a sick perversion. A small group of activists – some of whom are receiving lavish funding from left-leaning US foundations – are behaving as though their personal opinions deserve more weight than the economic well-being of the rest of us (see here for further info).

Today Joe Oliver is my hero. We need dozens more like him – to name these problems, to confront them, and to help us find a way forward.

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By any rational standard, the climate science world is surreal. People who behave outrageously still get taken seriously. It’s as though everyone has decided not to notice. It’s as though we’re part of an alternate reality where the normal rules don’t apply.

In a sensible world, scientists who refuse to share the data and computer codes behind iconic climate graphs and important conclusions would be ostracized by the scientific community. Instead, they get showered with awards and accolades (see the bottom of this post for more detail).

In a sane universe, the fact that two-thirds of the chapters in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report were written by scientists known to be affiliated with the World Wildlife Fund lobby group would damage the IPCC’s reputation beyond repair. Instead, we collectively pretend it doesn’t matter.

When I describe the weird world of climate science to people who are strangers to that world I know it sounds fantastical. Yeah, right I imagine them thinking behind their polite smiles. Surely it can’t be that bad. Surely there’s a reasonable explanation.

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World is Michael Lewis’ latest book on the global financial train wreck. Brimming with sharp observations and fabulous turns of phrase, it examines recent financial shenanigans in Iceland, Greece, and Ireland among other places.

I experienced a shock of recognition while reading those case studies. People were doing bizarre things that they – and all of those around them – should have known would lead to tears. Yet almost everyone bought in. Normal rules were jettisoned. Ordinary morality was abandoned. Disbelief was suspended. The few souls who tried to sound the alarm were ignored, ridiculed, demoted, or fired.

In other words, the behaviour I’ve spent the past three years writing about isn’t unique to climate science. The same pattern is horrifyingly evident elsewhere. It’s as though our IQs have all dropped sharply in recent years. It’s as though we have no standards anymore.

Allow me to explain:

Iceland is home to 300,000 people. In five years those people went from being a nation of sensible fishermen to imagining they were the new princes of high finance. Writes Lewis:

[A] hedge fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: you have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that each is worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.

That’s the bare-bones version of what happened. Suddenly Icelandic banks no one had ever heard of were buying century-old British banks, not to mention sports teams and airlines. Although it was all a mass delusion, it carried on for years.

When everyone finally came to their senses the banking sector losses alone amounted to $330,000 for every man, woman, and child in Iceland. And that’s not counting the personal debt associated with mortgages that far exceed the current value of the property to which they are associated – as well as the fact that the Icelandic stock market all but collapsed.

Lewis quotes someone from the International Monetary Fund saying:

It was just a group of young kids. In this egalitarian society, they came in, dressed in black, and started doing business.

Here’s another quote, from a British banker testifying before a House of Commons committee:

They ran their business in a very strange way. Everyone there was incredibly young…And they had no idea what they were doing.

When a Danish bank wrote a report concluding that something was amiss in the Icelandic banking sector the reaction was eerily similar to what we see in climate science. The messenger was accused of having suspect motives and the message was summarily dismissed.

When an economics professor from Chicago gave a speech five months before Iceland’s economy crashed in October 2008 (in which he declared that their banks were already dead and that the economy had no more than nine months) Lewis reports that Icelandic bankers in the audience “sought to prevent newspapers from reporting the speech.”

In other words, a gang of Icelandic kids trashed their nation’s economy. And rather than stopping them, the grownups went along for the ride. The checks-and-balances we would all expect to have been in place, the safeguards we would imagine going hand-in-hand with financial transactions of that magnitude, were entirely absent.

Does this make rational sense? No. Does it sound plausible? Not really. But it happened. And the people of Iceland are going to be living with the consequences for a long, long, long time.

In Greece, the lunacy differs only in the details. The Greek banking sector was apparently solid and sensible, but the 11 million people who reside in that nation are apparently collectively incapable of doing basic math. According to Lewis, two-thirds of Greek doctors (including plastic surgeons) report incomes of less than 12,000 euros a year in order to avoid paying tax – and there’s a widespread belief that all 300 members of the Greek parliament are falsely reporting the value of their homes.

During an election year it’s normal for tax collectors to be sidelined by the government. Nor does anyone seem to worry about being caught for tax evasion (or the bribery of tax collectors) since prosecutions take between seven and 15 years to wind their way through courts that show little sign of taking these matters seriously. As one tax collector explained to Lewis:

If the law was enforced, every doctor in Greece would be in jail. I am completely serious.

Despite the fact that few taxes actually make it into government coffers, government expenditures have ballooned. Lewis reports that the amount of money being paid to government workers has doubled over the past 12 years and that the average government job pays “almost three times the average private-sector job.”

Greece’s national railway is a poster child for that country’s special brand of financial insanity. It takes in only 100 million euros a year in revenue, but pays its employees 400 million (on top of the 300 million it spends on trains, maintenance, and so forth). The next time someone tells you North America should build railways like the ones they have in Europe, this seven-to-one expenses-to-earnings ratio may be worth remembering.

And then there’s the pension problem. In an era in which everyone is living longer, Greek women retire as early as age 50 and Greek men as early as 55 if they work in occupations that are considered “arduous.” Explains Lewis:

more than six hundred Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians, and on and on and on.

Is this a way to run an economy? Does any of this make rational sense? No. But rather than being a bad dream, this is modern-day Greece. Evidently climate science isn’t the only milieu in which dodgy behaviour has become the norm, in which outlandish things are said and done and everyone just shrugs.

Finally, there’s Ireland. The short version is that foolish decisions on the part of Irish bankers fueled a construction boom that far outstripped demand. When the real estate bubble burst the Irish government guaranteed the bad loans, which means Irish taxpayers now have to pay them off.

The debts are so large and the damage to the economy is so extensive that, as Lewis explains, the Irish people are no longer in control of their own destiny. Because no one trusts their judgment anymore, foreigners have been sent in to clean up the mess:

The new bank regulator, an Englishman, came from Bermuda. The Irish government and Irish banks are crawling with American investment bankers and Australian management consultants and faceless Euro-officials, referred to inside the Department of Finances simply as “the Germans.” Walk the streets at night and, through restaurant windows, you see important-looking men in suits, dining alone, studying important-looking papers. In some new and strange way Dublin [is] now an occupied city: Hanoi, circa 1950.

A few years ago an Irish economics professor became alarmed when he realized that students he’d only recently been teaching were now being cast as financial experts on TV – and that they were all assuring the public there was nothing to worry about. When the professor submitted an opinion piece to the Irish Independent sounding the alarm about the precarious state of Ireland’s banks, Lewis reports that the editor “wrote back to say he found the article offensive and wouldn’t publish it.” A second newspaper declined to publish the piece before it finally appeared in the smaller circulation Irish Times.

In other words, Irish journalists chose sides just as journalists have chosen sides in the climate debate. They took the word of the establishment, they believed the bankers. Rather than ensuring that a variety of perspectives were heard on a matter of national importance, journalists denied the public the opportunity to consider alternative points-of-view. In doing so, they infantilized and betrayed the very people they are supposed to serve.

In the space of a few years, therefore, three different economies have crumbled. Millions of people have had prosperity slip through their fingers. To an outsider it’s perfectly clear that years of bad decision-making led inevitably to what has since happened in Iceland, Greece, and Ireland. It’s perfectly clear that, rather than applying the brakes, the educated classes took part in these mass delusions.

All the people one would expect to blow the whistle – elder statesmen, seasoned bureaucrats, regulators, journalists – failed in their duty to protect the society to which they belonged. They stood mute as the ship sailed smack into the iceberg.

It’s difficult to believe that smart people can behave so foolishly – and yet these three national tragedies are proof positive. Which brings me back to the climate industry. According to Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to criticize his organization is tantamount to being a conspiracy theorist. In his words:

Thousands of people are part of what some of these people say is a conspiracy? My God! This is a conspiracy on a scale that’s absolutely astounding! [backup link here, see here also]

According to Pachauri, we should all trust the IPCC’s findings because thousands of people take part in the process that produces them. He would have us believe it isn’t possible for a large group of individuals to delude themselves, to be mistaken about important matters.

But that reasoning is flawed. We now know that entire countries can – and do – fall under a spell. We know that entire societies tell themselves fairy stories that aren’t remotely true. We know that entire populations are capable of exercising monstrously bad judgment.

The mere fact that lots of people took part in the delusion didn’t save Iceland, Greece, or Ireland from their day of reckoning. Nor will it save the IPCC.

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See page 4 of this PDF for Michael Mann’s claim that the computer code which produced the hockey-stick graph – the most important piece of visual information in the 2001 IPCC report – is “a private piece of intellectual property.” Backup link here.

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The term “fraud” does not appear in my book. But ordinary people who smell a rat, who think they’re being manipulated and misled, often end up using words like fraud and scam. These words amount to a moral shorthand; they are a quick way of expressing the idea that a message is suspect.

The IPCC is not a trustworthy organization. I think my book demonstrates that point ten times over. But as I say in today’s interview:

many good, smart, sincere people have worked on IPCC reports over the years. Many of them were simply naïve – oblivious to the fact that they were being used by UN officials like pawns in an international chess game.

I don’t believe, therefore, that the average IPCC participant is defrauding anyone. But I think we should be clear-eyed about the fact that the IPCC was established by UN bureaucrats as a means of helping them achieve the UN’s climate agenda. That agenda has never been submitted to any country’s electorate for their direct approval.

Here’s another tidbit from the interview:

politicians like fighting climate change. It appeals to their egos. It casts them as heroes. It’s more gratifying and glamorous to rail against climate change than to spend one’s time balancing the budget or fixing the school system. Here, for example, is a quote from a recent newspaper article regarding Florida governor Charlie Crist:

Crist’s climate-change crusade got him national attention, with a write-up in Time magazine and an interview on the CBS Early Show. He shared a stage with singer Sheryl Crow and met with Robert Redford. California’s then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called him “another great action hero.”

In a world in which politicians are popularly regarded as scumbags and pathological liars, fighting climate change casts them as admirable. They aren’t going to give that up easily.

Read the whole thing here.

A few weeks back I was interviewed for 40 minutes by the Japan-based Corbett Report. It’s audio only and you can hear it here. Two people have since left comments on that website. The first person is disappointed with me since, even though I’m critical of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), I don’t challenge the idea of human-caused global warming.

The idea that my book is not about climate science, but about the influential UN body that interprets that science on behalf of the world’s governments is sometimes a difficult concept to communicate.

The second commenter writes:

Why hasn’t someone tied Donna Laframboise to a chair, propped her eyelids open, and forced her to read Merchants of Doubt?

Since page four of that particular book claims that:

the IPCC has an exceptionally inclusive and extensive peer review process…

perhaps the authors may wish to consult Chapter 33 of my own work. That’s where I explain that what goes on at the IPCC is nothing like what is normally understood by the term peer-review.

I then list six examples of how the IPCC’s peer-review process, such as it is, has been undercut, circumvented, and short-circuited. IPCC rules sound great in theory. practice. But there are no traffic cops enforcing them, and absolutely no consequences when people violate them.

It is foolish, in the extreme, to imagine that just because an IPCC rule exists on paper it is being followed 100% of the time. But that seems to be the position of those who wrote Merchants of Doubt.

And while I’m on that subject, when did doubt become a bad thing? When did asking questions become a sin? I recall wearing an activist button in my youth that read: Question Authority. Now, apparently, to express doubt about the establishment view of climate change is to be a baddie.

I think we should all remind ourselves that people who don’t tolerate doubt usually belong to cults.

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