CHINA SET TO PRODUCE MORE AND MORE POLLUTION-FREE ELECTRICITY -- AND THE GREENIES HATE IT!

Hydro power is the most renewable source of power there is but Greenies hate anything that is actually workable

Within days China will pour the final concrete of the massive Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze River. But completion of one of the great engineering feats of our time will not satisfy the country's energy-hungry developers. They will merely turn their attention to one of the deepest and most dramatic gorges on earth - Tiger Leaping Gorge - 900 miles (1,500km) upstream. China confirmed yesterday that another 80,000 people will be moved this year from areas to be flooded behind the Three Gorges Dam. They are among about 1.3 million being displaced.

Tens of thousands more now fear that their homes will be flooded in the new project. Environmentalists are appalled. But engineers regard a dam across Tiger Leaping Gorge as crucial for the success of the Three Gorges project, which has a small reservoir compared to the enormous flow of the river. Their plan is to add 12 dams upstream from the Three Gorges Dam. The one across Tiger Leaping Gorge would provide the largest reservoir and help most to regulate the river's flow.

Surveys have been going on for 18 months and construction of the proposed 278m-high (912ft) dam could begin as early as 2008. It would dwarf the 180m-high barrier at the Three Gorges. The reservoir would back up for 125 miles. Ma Jun, an environmental consultant from Beijing and author of the influential book China's Water Crisis, recognises the value of the project. "For every drop of water stored, it would add more value for hydropower generation than any other reservoir in China or perhaps the world," he said. But he is no fan of the plan. Although the dam would leave the 30m chasm across which tigers of legend leapt, he wondered how the gorge would look with a concrete wall across it. "The beauty of this place is unique," he said.

The ten-mile gorge is an important tourist attraction and the setting is breathtaking. Mountains soar more than 3,500m above the river to create a deep defile touched by the sun only at midday. It falls within a Unesco World Heritage-listed site that harbours great botanical riches as well as ethnic minorities who have farmed along the steep hillsides for centuries, but are now threatened. Damming the thundering river, called the Jinsha along the upper reaches, could force up to 100,000 people out of their ancestral homes. Most are from the Naxi minority, the last people to use a system of pictographic writing, who farm corn and wheat along the fertile banks. They would have to move north, to a Tibetan area where the altitude and harsh climate mean that the staples are such unfamiliar crops as barley and potatoes.

Liao Qunzhong is a farmer who has lived in Tiger Leaping Gorge all his life and hires out his mule to tourists eager to follow an ancient tea-trading path through the gorge that once supplied Tibet with tea from southern China. "If we have to move north how will we fit in with people from another community? They will not accept us. We will be strangers," he told The Times.

Such worries weigh little with the Huaneng Group, the largest independent power producer in China, which is run by Li Xiaopeng, a son of the former premier, Li Peng. A dam in Tiger Leaping Gorge would block silt being carried down into the reservoir behind the Three Gorges Dam, thus extending the working life of the power station.

Mr Ma is calling for a free and open debate before any decision is taken. "We must make a balanced trade-off," he says. "We want a transparent process. How can we face questions from our children if our decision is not based on a scientific and democratic process?" But officials in southwestern Yunnan province appear to favour the traditional approach, that of top-down government whereby decisions are simply announced by those who believe they know best.

Not everyone is waiting for a decision, however it is made. Some farmers in Tiger Leaping Gorge believe that they will receive 100 yuan a square metre in compensation for their homes and are busy extending their houses. Further upstream, at the First Bend of the Yangtze, farmers have taken the law into their own hands, refusing to allow engineers access to the area to take preliminary measurements and effectively put a stop to preparatory work. Others, certain that the dam will not touch their land, are looking on the bright side. Xiao Yang, a driver, said: "The dam will bring progress for us. And tourists will still come, if not to look at the gorge then to look at the dam just like they visit the Three Gorges Dam."

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ANIMAL RIGHTS THUGS TRY NEW TACTIC

GlaxoSmithKline shareholders were left shaken last night after receiving threatening letters from animal rights activists and doubtful advice from the company on protecting their identities. In a letter that began to land on investors' doormats yesterday, shareholders were given an ultimatum by a group calling itself the Campaign Against Huntingdon Life Sciences to sell their shares within 14 days or have their personal details published on a website. "We are a group set up to hold Huntingdon Life Sciences [HLS] accountable for its acts of animal cruelty," the letter states. "Holding HLS accountable means holding GlaxoSmithKline to its promise not to use HLS ever again. "The only way to hold GlaxoSmithKline to its promise is to target its financial vulnerability."

GSK, Europe's biggest drugs company, is a customer of Huntingdon Life Sciences, the most high-profile target of a militant arm of the animal rights movement. In response to the letter, which has not yet been received by institutional shareholders, the company advised shareholders to instruct their broker to hold their shares in a nominee account to avoid identification, but this advice was called into question. John Roundhill, chairman of Britain's leading registrars' association, said: "Moving to a nominees account won't create a robust defence because this information is still in the public domain." A company is able to force an account nominee to reveal the identities of those it represents by issuing a "212" notice. This information has to be made public.

A spokesman for GSK said yesterday: "We would never use 212 on anybody with less than half a million shares." However, Mr Roundhill said that many nominees operated pooled accounts where the ownership of half a million shares or more was not uncommon.

The lengthy campaign waged against Huntingdon derailed its planned listing in New York after it was forced to delist its shares in London and move its headquarters to the United States.

GSK executives were targeted two months ago. Neighbours of Simon Bicknell, the company secretary, and Sir Ian Prosser, a non-executive director, received letters accusing the two men of being rapists, while one had his house daubed with offensive slogans. More than 100 shareholders contacted Glaxo yesterday after receiving the letters, the company said.

An 80-year-old grandmother in West London who has held Glaxo shares for more than a decade said that she was shocked and angered by the letter. The former scientist, who declined to be named, said: "It's blackmail and I don't like being blackmailed." The hate campaign is being investigated by Netcu, the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit. A spokesman for Netcu advised shareholders to hand the letters to police.

Source






THE IDEA THAT EVERYONE AGREES ON CLIMATE CHANGE IS A FALLACY

As it is bank holiday Monday it seems appropriate to discuss the weather. In an age of, we are led to believe by assorted greens and eco-fundamentalists, unprecedented and potentially cataclysmic global warming, it does seem rather cool. Indeed last winter was one of the coldest for the best part of a decade and spring was a frogspawn-threatening two weeks behind schedule.

I am no climatologist but the alarmism of the scientific establishment, including the Government's chief scientific adviser Sir David King who is on record as saying the only habitable continent will be Antarctica by the end of the century if climate change is not controlled, does strike me as slightly excessive. I am, however, a trained statistician. One of the first things I read about statistics was that it was about measurement and variability. People's height varies, the number of leaves on trees varies, and so does the global average temperature over time. Climate change, therefore, strikes me as quite unexceptional. Indeed I would be amazed if it did not exist, given that solar activity varies.

There have been many fluctuations in the Earth's average temperatures. The last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago. But there was a period from about 5,500 to 2,000BC known as the Holocene Maximum when average temperatures were, apparently, about 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than they are today. Temperatures then cooled, resulting in the Little Archaic Ice Age of around 520-350BC, and then warmed into Roman times. The Dark Ages were, apparently, on the cool side, but the flowering of medieval culture happily coincided with a warm period. The subsequent Little Ice Age occurred from around 1500 to 1860 and included some bitterly cold winters in the 17th Century when the Thames froze. Greenland's icy mountains became decidedly icier and the Norse settlements died out.

Since the middle of the 19th Century average temperatures have picked up. But even over this geologically short period of time there have been discernable swings in temperature. The years 1942 to 1970 were, for example, on the chilly side and included the bitter winter of 1962/63 which was the coldest in England and Wales since 1740. Since the early Seventies, when "runaway glaciation" and a new ice age were foretold, there has been some warming.

All in all, global average surface temperatures picked up by about a modest 0.6C during the 20th Century, which geologist Dr Bob Carter of the James Cook University, Australia, for example, assesses to be within the limits of natural statistical variability. And, interestingly, global average air temperatures, which are regarded as more reliable by climate scientists, have not changed over the past 20 to 30 years. This all strikes me as little reason to take out a timeshare with the Emperor penguins.

But this is not the impression gained when reading about the so-called scientific consensus which claims that global warming is not just a major threat to the planet but is primarily man-made. The culprit is the burning of fossil fuels that results in the release of carbon emissions into the atmosphere. These emissions act as greenhouse gases, blanketing the earth, trapping the Sun's heat and, apparently, frying the Earth. But the burning of fossil fuels also results in sulphate aerosols (tiny particles in the atmosphere) that reflect the Sun's heat back into space and cool the Earth. The combustion of fossil fuels can, therefore, cool as well as warm.

Part of the scientific consensus is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was set up in 1988 under UN auspices. Its influential work claims to show that unrestricted carbon emissions will lead to hugely damaging increases in temperature. And, crucially, its work is the scientific underpinning to the UN's Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which requires signatories to restrict their carbon emissions in order to control global warming.

Suffice to say here that the UK Government is an ardent supporter of Kyoto's procedures, which are part of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affair's policies for "dealing with dangerous climate change", irrespective of cost.

But the IPCC's analysis is deeply flawed, as explained in an excellent report from the House of Lords. The Lords' report also contained a quote from Professor Reiter, of the Institut Pasteur in Paris, which challenged the appropriateness of the notion of scientific consensus. He said "consensus is the stuff of politics, not science". And indeed it is, as there seems to be little scientific agreement that mankind's fossil-fuel burning is the major reason for climate change. On the contrary, analyses of scientific papers on climate change by Dr Benny Peiser, of John Moores University, and Dr Dennis Bray, of the German-based GKSS National Research Centre conclude that the dissenters are in a healthy ... [minority].

The Daily Telegraph, 1 May 2006






In defence of individual ecofreedom

British Government campaigns against running domestic electrical gadgets on standby are unnecessary, and will likely prove unpopular

Last month, UK chancellor Gordon Brown was at the United Nations building in New York City, addressing ambassadors to the UN. Trying to upstage Conservative Party leader David Cameron, Brown made climate change the subject of his speech. His message: consumer goods left on standby worldwide are 'responsible' for just one per cent of global carbon emissions; but providing people with their 'right' to information about this can help them 'meet their responsibilities for environmental change' - indeed, can 'play a powerful role in making self-driven change happen'.

It's a new departure to talk about standby lights at the UN. Let's take a look at the UK figures for energy use and CO2 emissions, to see whether Brown's 'self-driven change' is the right thing to do. From 1970 to 2001, electricity's share of British home energy use rose from 18 to 20 per cent. Absolute home electricity use grew by 49 per cent. Since use of electricity for space heating has shown a general decline, 'lights and appliances' explain much of the increase in share and overall use.

Brown's 2006 Budget announced a drive to persuade retailers to encourage shoppers to buy more energy-efficient gadgets, hoping to save 0.1-0.2 mega-tonnes of carbon (MtC) in 2010 (3). The government enthuses that its Code of Conduct on Digital TV Services has, at virtually no cost, made half the UK's installed TV set-top boxes cut CO2 emissions by 0.4 MtC a year, equivalent to about one per cent of the 36.3 MtC that is linked to electrical equipment in the UK home. Similarly, Friends of the Earth wants legislation to reduce wastage from TVs and other devices that can be put on stand-by. Apparently, that would obviate the need to keep 'around one nuclear power station in the UK'.

From 2008, the EU's Eco-design of Energy Using Products (EUP) framework Directive will set mandatory energy requirements for products placed on the EU market. Until then, Whitehall highlights the labelling of appliances with an Energy Saving Trust 'Energy saving - Recommended' logo. This, it says, along with other regulations, has transformed the market for every type of refrigeration and washing equipment, with appliances given A or A+ ratings gaining market share very rapidly since 2000.

How seriously can we take these claims? The barrage of energy-saving labels that today confronts the consumer, and the injunctions to keep turning everything off, are attempts by the government to micromanage individual behaviour. Yet these efforts are much less effective than improvements in the carbon intensity of electricity supply.

In 2002, lights and appliances took 36.3 MtC of the 147.6 MtC emitted from houses in the UK, or 24.6 per cent of the total. Cooking adds 3.4 per cent to this, giving a total of 28 per cent. But the CO2 emissions for which appliance users are held responsible are made at electric power stations, not in the home. There is no carbon 'footprint' around electrical goods in the home. Rather, it is the carbon intensity of power stations that makes lights and appliances linked to rather large emissions of CO2. The origin of CO2 emissions is to be found in the national system we have for producing and distributing energy; and if the chancellor seriously wants to tackle CO2 emissions, he might be better off focusing there rather than hectoring consumers.....

Apart from the fridge, no single piece of white goods accounts for even a tenth of linked CO2 emissions. Water heaters and lights - now supplemented by one or more TVs, PCs and mobile phone chargers - are no doubt relatively weighty emitters of CO2. Nevertheless, demand-side behaviour with any single light, piece of white goods or electronic gadget that one can switch off easily can make only a tiny impact.

If everyone in the UK switched off their lights, say, day and night and all year round, perhaps a 10 per cent slice would be taken off the 28 per cent of domestic emissions that come from lights, appliances (cookers included), and electronics. Given that domestic emissions themselves account for 27 per cent of the UK total, we are talking about 10 per cent of 28 per cent of 27 per cent, or a CO2 emissions saving of precisely 0.75 per cent of the UK grand total. That, for returning to candles and gaslight.

Only a full-on hair-shirt lifestyle - lived without heat, light, hot water, ironed clothes, TV, PC or mobile phone, with a pantry and a dustpan, not a fridge or a vacuum cleaner - can allow each home a full, three-tonne annual reduction in the CO2 emissions to which it is linked.

The state's intervention into individuals' use of electrical goods in the home is mentally invasive. We can be sure that millions will not consent to keeping an eye on their stand-by lights all the time. Millions, too, would rather that their household's appliance use was not made the subject of campaigns and legislation. The government's policy is equally unlikely to make a difference to supply-side realities. Gordon Brown's science is as ignorant as his politics are authoritarian.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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