Monday 27 October 2014

Sceptical of sceptics

Those of you who know my views well (not many, because I'm so coy with my opinions) know that I remain to be convinced that man made climate change is something we can plausibly measure with any accuracy - and the secrecy and fraud among the scientists pushing this agenda leaves the question wide open for scepticism.

But if there's one set of people who get right up my nose at the moment... Other climate change sceptics.

You will never convince me that wind turbines are anything other than subsidy sucking eco-crucifixes and bird mincers, and solar panels serve little purpose apart from being expensive windbreaks for grazing sheep, but the knee-jerk reaction by climate sceptics that dismisses anything sustainable is wholly counter-productive.

Because the word "sustainable" has become synonymous with expensive and stupid CO2 reducing methods, they've taken to ignoring perfectly sensible measures to engineer efficiency into what is a horribly outdated and inefficient energy grid which wastes more fuel than is constructively used.

Just because something saves CO2 does not automatically make it part of an illiberal Malthusian conspiracy to control our consumption. It's a matter of reducing the impact of a system that creates a great many negative externalities and is predicated on thinking dating back to the 1950's.

Small modular reactors and CHP are green. They reduce energy dependency, reduce waste, reduce CO2 and reduce the amount of fuel we use. What's not to like? But because fracking winds up all the right people, climate sceptics have a major hard on for it, when in fact, even when it is tightly regulated, the greenies are quite right. It's pretty inefficient, it's pretty dirty and it's a waste of land which is often irrecoverably scarred by the process.

Admittedly, this bone-headed attitude toward green technology is a result of greenie scaremongering and their dishonest promotion of wholly useless forms of energy generation, but by taking this Luddite approach to every small piece of innovation, sceptics are becoming everything the eco-zealots say they are, thus undermining the very rational position that pissing in a swimming pool does not turn it yellow.

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