JoNova » Taxpayer funded radical plan to make you pay more, use less, stay home. Joy!

UPDATE: See what David Hone from Shell thought. He went and discovered the “”vegan” “low tech” element who talk of annihilating coal.

Tyndall Centre UK has just held The Radical Emission Reduction Conference: 10-11 December 2013. This is their logo:

Things have to go “radical” now, because there are no sensible pragmatic or long term solutions left:

“About the conference
Today, in 2013, we face an unavoidably radical future. We either continue with rising emissions and reap the radical repercussions of severe climate change, or we acknowledge that we have a choice and pursue radical emission reductions: No longer is there a non- radical option. Moreover, low-carbon supply technologies cannot deliver the necessary rate of emission reductions – they need to be complemented with rapid, deep and early reductions in energy consumption – the rationale for this conference.

These people are seriously discussing reductions of energy of 8%, not just by 2020, but every year.

“… More specifically the conference will consider how to deliver reductions in energy consumption of at least 8% per year (~60% across a decade). It will foster an up-beat and can-do mentality.

The Radical Emission Reduction Conference

From the speaker abstracts

Rebecca Willis, Green Alliance says:

“For conservatives, a focus on free markets and personal responsibility sits awkwardly with climate politics, which requires a long-term, collectivist response.”

JoNova replies:

“For collectivists, a focus on opinions and social popularity sits awkwardly with plans to change global climate which requires an understanding of maths and numbers.”

At least no one is pretending cheap solar will save the day. Now the aim is to make coal as expensive as solar (which is much more achievable, sadly).

Charlie Baker, URBED:

“Energy price rises will increase the attraction of radically reducing its use As energy prices continue to rise we will soon reach parity on both PV and Retrofit, PVprices already challenge the conventional assumption about orientation having to be due south and latitude. Energy prices will continue to rise over the coming decades, 7%/A for the last decade.

Expensive energy is a good thing, isn’t it, when you are a university academic on the government gravy train.

Fighting climate change is like fighting World War II, but it’s more complex (seriously, they say that).

Laurence Delina and Dr. Mark Diesendorf, Institute of Environmental Studies, University of New South Wales

Presentation title: ‘Is wartime mobilisation a suitable policy model for rapid national climate

mitigation?

Climate activists assert that rapid mitigation is feasible, invoking the scale and scope of wartime mobilisation strategies. This paper draws upon historical accounts of social, technological and economic restructurings in several countries during World War 2 in order to investigate potential applications of wartime experience to radical, rigorous and rapid climate mitigation strategies. We focus on the energy sector, the biggest single contributor to global climate change, in developed and rapidly developing countries. We find that, while wartime experience suggests some potential strategies for rapid climate mitigation in the areas of finance and labour, it also has severe limitations, resulting from its lack of democratic processes. Furthermore, since restructuring the existing socio-economic system to mitigate climate change is more complex than fighting a war and since the threat of climate change is less obvious to non-scientists, it is unlikely that the public will be unified in support of such executive action…

Who knew that a life and death battle against mass army’s of killers, with a race to develop better radar, encryption codes, and nuclear weapons, was simpler than fighting a trace gas? Anyone get the feeling these academics don’t know a lot of history?

We just have to change our lifestyles (apparently).

You won’t need to visit relatives anymore, get used to staying at home, and enjoying your “local” environment.

Lucky you will be happier staying at home talking to relatives on Skype.

Dr. Angela Druckman, University of Surrey:

Building on previous studies in which we attempted to quantify the carbon required for a ‘decent’ life and the carbon associated with the time used for various activities, we propose a vision for the future. Our vision builds on ‘win-win’ synergies between the way we use our time, activities that make us happy, the structure of society, and infrastructure provision. Taking the perspective of time use, we propose a locally-based society, where time is spent within the home and local community. This chimes with studies which indicate that spending time with friends and family is associated with increased well-being, and that such activities have lower emissions. Local communities, which include facilities for recreation, health,shared workspace-hubs, shopping and education, will build social capital. Families and friends who are geographically dispersed will interact through enhanced digital communications.

(You fool, all those times you paid money for the airfare to visit Grandpa in Hobart you were damaging your global well-being. Lucky there is a bureaucrat to tell you what makes you happy.) Though I note the honesty in qualifying that life as ‘decent’.

And the Chinese will have to learn to like the low energy lifestyle, I’m sure they will take kindly to being told the American Dream is out of their reach.

We use a case study of the UK to make approximate estimates of the carbon reductions achievable, but stress that the vision is highly applicable to rapidly changing emerging economies such as China: there is a window of opportunity for China’s burgeoning middle class to adopt this model rather than follow the ‘American Dream’.

These people are so out of touch with reality they are dangerous. The problem is the system that feeds them. Tax dollars supported this event, and the salaries of the people who spoke there. The Tyndall Centre is almost entirely funded through universities and grants: namely the University of East Anglia, University of Cambridge, Cardiff University, University of Manchester, Newcastle University, University of Oxford, University of Southampton, and the University of Sussex. Some money comes from the Chinese, Fudan University. These people are tax-eaters.

Who is responsible for the decision to send taxpayer funds this way instead of something useful? The tax money passes through a web of hands, so accountability becomes a web too. But ultimately someone is responsible for the process and the outcome.

Does the buck stop with David Cameron?

Let me know what other gems lie hidden in the abstracts….

h/t Paul Matthews

UPDATE

David Hone (Shell Climate Change Advisor) actually went to the conference and found a bunch of ideologues.

this was a room of catastrophists (as in “catastrophic global warming”), with the prevailing view, at least to my ears, that the issue could only be addressed by the complete transformation of the global energy and political systems, with the latter moving to one of state control and regulated consumerism. There would be no room for “ruthless individualism” in such a world. The posters that dotted the lecture theatre lobby area covered topics as diverse as vegan diets to an eventual return to low technology hunter-gatherer societies (but thankfully there was one CCS poster in the middle of all this). Much to my surprise I was not really at an emission reduction conference (despite the label saying I was), but a political ideology conference. Although I have been involved in the climate change issue for over a decade, I had not heard this set of views on the issue voiced so consistently in one place. This was a room where there was a round of applause when one audience member asked how LNG and coal exporters in Australia might be “annihilated” following their (supposed) support for the repeal of the carbon tax in that country.

Here was I just thinking (on the Wind Towers post) that the sensible greens (in that case the ones who didn’t like to see rare birds killed) needed to separate themselves from the political activists who wear green disguises. Here’s a different thread, where the economic activists (Shell) wear green disguises, but need to separate themselves from the greens-who-can’t-count.

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