Study: An estimated 135 million premature deaths linked to fine particulate matter pollution between 1980 and 2020

Excuse me while I laugh! See both a popular summary and the originating journal article at the links below:

https://phys.org/news/2024-06-million-premature-deaths-linked-fine.html

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412024001739

The study was published in a rubbishy "pay to publish" journal. You get charged over $3,000 to get your article published there. I had over 200 academic journal articles published without once paying for it.

And the study is appropriately silly. What they were looking at was the correlation beteween pollution and disease. But, I quote:

"It is noted that only regions with correlation coefficients larger than 0.15 or smaller than – 0.15 and the corresponding p-values < 0.05 were selected in this study"

In other words they deleted from their study all cases that diagreed with their hypothesis. You couldn't make it up.

And don't suppose that I need to add that it was yet another "geography" study, looking at correlations between areas, not correlations between people -- with NO control for demographic confounders as far as I can see

It would have had no hope of getting into a "real" academic journal. The journal claims to be refereed but the referees must have just nodded it through on the basis of its congenial conclusions, if they read it at all. Serious referees would at a minimum have insisted on demographic comtrols. Some articles of this type do have such controls. It can be done.

**************************************************

EU climate knaves and follies

The results of the European Parliamentary election this week have been a de facto referendum on Germany, and Europe’s, energy policies.

The Social Democratic party (SPD) of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz suffered an ignominious defeat winning less than 14 per cent of the vote, down from almost 16 per cent, its worst result in a national poll since 1949. Humiliatingly, it only came third in the overall tally behind the main opposition party, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) which won almost 24 per cent of the vote, up more than one percentage point, and behind the much demonised Alternative for Germany (AfD) which increased its vote by almost 5 per cent compared with the last election. As SPD leader Lars Klingbeil put it, ‘There is no way to sugarcoat it. I think it is crystal clear that things have to change.’

But if the European parliamentary elections were devastating for Germany’s SPD, roughly the equivalent of the Australian Labor party, they were even worse for its ‘traffic light’ coalition partner, the Greens, which was incontestably the biggest loser, falling almost 9 percentage points to less than 12 per cent. This will no doubt come as a shock to Mr Bowen but it’s hardly surprising when you look at the appalling policies that the Greens tried to implement. Their Building Energy Act sought to mandate that all new heating systems use at least 65 per cent renewable energy which amounted to it effectively forcing people to install heat pumps that would have inflicted punishingly high costs on owners of older buildings. The law is deeply unpopular as is the plan to ban CO2-emitting cars.

One of the most damning aspects of the Green nightmare in Germany is that having campaigned to lower the voting age to 16, their vote crashed to only 10 per cent with those aged 16 to 24 years old, and their partner, the SPD, got a paltry 9 per cent. Instead, 17 per cent of these youths voted for the conservative Christian Democrats/Christian Social Union and another 17 per cent voted for the Alternative for Germany.

As the most populous country in the EU, the results in Germany had a big impact on the overall outcome in the European Parliament but in any event the same trend could be seen in France, Italy and Belgium.

In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally got more than 31 per cent of the vote, the first French party to do so since 1984. Macron’s Renaissance party got just over 15 per cent of the vote down from 22 per cent in 2019. The French Greens – the Ecologists – got a tad over 5 per cent, a steep fall from over 13 per cent in 2019 and more than 16 per cent in 2009.

Overall in the European Parliament it looks like the Greens will be pushed from fourth place into sixth place with only 53 seats out of 720. The only green shoot, so to speak, was Denmark where the Greens gained one seat and in the Netherlands where a Green-Left party is the largest Dutch party in the EU parliament with eight seats but where Geert Wilders Freedom Party went from one seat to six and the Farmer-Citizen party also got two seats.

What explains this collapse in the vote for Green parties and for climate-loving left-liberals is that Europe is suffering what it calls a greenlash to its Green New Deal. For months, farmers have been protesting EU climate policies that are driving them out of business. Yet the least palatable proposals of the EU’s delusional 2030 goal of cutting greenhouse gases by 55 per cent from 1990 levels look highly unlikely to be implemented. A carbon market for heating and transport fuels that is meant to be launched in 2027 would further exacerbate the cost-of-living crisis, and all new cars are meant to be emissions-free by 2035. But even that is not enough for the climate commissars who earlier this year called for a more ambitious goal for 2040 of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 90 per cent relative to emission levels in 1990. That would require almost doubling the level of investment from the 863 billion euros per annum spent in the decade to 2020 to 1.5 trillion euros per annum. Good luck with raising the capital to splurge on such profoundly unproductive investments.

You know that climate policies have lost their appeal when even the most ardent of activists, such as Greta Thunberg, was wrapping herself in a keffiyeh last Friday to protest the war in Gaza in Berlin rather than ‘climate injustice’ per se. Bizarrely, the protesters managed to conflate Israel’s war against Hamas with a ‘Kick Big Polluters Out’ rally that called for oil and gas companies to be held accountable for enabling genocide in Gaza, systemic violence, and fuelling the climate crisis. In a strange way that they didn’t intend their protest almost made sense. After all, who is a bigger exporter of gas than Qatar, which bankrolls Hamas, the terrorists that are calling for a Jewish genocide? As William Blake wrote in his Proverbs of Hell, ‘If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise’, although perhaps more apposite when considering the EU’s climate policies is Blake’s proverb that ‘Folly is the cloke of knavery’. What does Mr Bowen make of all this? Very little it seems. Under Labor, Australia is set to follow in Europe’s foolish footsteps while the knaves laugh all the way to the bank.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/06/eu-climate-knaves-and-follies/

************************************

Canadian skulduggery

The latest embarrassment for Canada’s Liberal administration is that they were caught deliberately suppressing information about their carbon tax.

And also caught in massive ethics violations in grant-making to insiders by Sustainable Development Technology Canada. Or was it the same pattern government-wide with regard to McKinsey?

No, we remember: it’s that they were caught suppressing information about subversion within the hallowed walls of our Parliament and when the news broke they refused even to apologize let alone mend their ways.

So much for “openness by default”. But we’re going after the carbon tax scandal here because it’s a classic illustration of how zealotry so often looks like deceit when it’s actually a terrible form of sincerity.

It is a curious feature of public affairs, and not just in Canada, that the people who aspire to govern spend very little time studying government.

It’s partly because whereas to gain entry to and promotion in almost any normal trade like, say, plumber or graphic designer, you show competence at plumbing or graphic design, whereas to flourish in government you have to be good at politics, quite a different business.

But it’s also because so many people hold the naïve view that good intentions translate smoothly into good results especially in the public sector, so they worry obsessively about motives (their own pure ones and their adversaries’ wretched ones) and neglect methods.

This habit leads them to assume that whatever they want to happen, really want, will happen and have the results they seek. They do not study the law of unintended consequences, and the related massive issue of the importance of incentives.

And particularly they do not ponder the importance of incentives in the public as in the private sector, and the enormous risk that those inside will learn to “game” the system in ways that range from job security to bonuses to hiding awkward information to steering contracts to outfits known to hire retired bureaucrats and politicians on generous terms.

As a result, when dreams do not transition seamlessly into reality, they assume they are being foiled by malevolent foes, that the apparent failure is just misinformation and everything’s secretly fine, or both. And then they become dismissive of criticism and frivolous in responses.

We mention this problem here particularly because the administration’s response to the mess in Sustainable Development Canada, which included the abrupt resignation of both CEO and chair under clouds last November, was to… fold it into another equally risk-prone entity.

A press release from something called the Council of Canadian Innovators, inexplicably not available on this innovative “internet” thing, said:

“Today in Ottawa, Canada’s Auditor General published a report into Sustainable Development Technology Canada, identifying significant governance lapses and procedural failures when dispersing government funds.

Following its release, Innovation, Science and Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne immediately announced that SDTC will no longer exist as an arm’s length entity and will be folded into the National Research Council going forward.”

So pretty much shoot, shovel and shut up. And thus the other key point is that they aren’t hiding this information because they know it proves them wrong.

They’re hiding it because they’re so sure they’re right that even their own research, when it says otherwise, is misleading and must be suppressed lest it cause confusion.

Humans are stubborn creatures, and rarely more so than when defending a cause. And we’re all for tenacity. But at a certain point firmness turns into idiocy.

And the suppression of carbon-tax information was so far past that point, and so brazen, that even the normally fairly cautious Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) could stand it no longer. As the National Post reported:

“The federal government has a secret economic analysis of the impact of the carbon tax that confirms the parliamentary budget officer’s prior findings, and the budget watchdog said he believes that his office has been under a gag order to not talk about it.”

Strong words. But also a paraphrase so perhaps the press are dressing it up? Not at all. As the Post added, PBO Yves Giroux testified bluntly before the House of Commons finance committee that he and his staff had seen an in-house assessment but “we’ve been told explicitly not to disclose it and reference it.” And when:

“Conservative MP Marty Morantz asked Giroux if the government ‘put a gag’ on the PBO to not talk about their economic analysis. ‘That is my understanding,’ said Giroux.”

It’s no small matter, because the carbon tax and its true impact have been a matter of vigorous, even brutal partisan quarreling. The position of the administration is that the “price on pollution” actually gives most people more money than it takes from them; the Prime Minister has flatly accused the leader of the Official Opposition of wanting to take money from people by abolishing a tax.

Indeed, in response to this latest scandal, instead of expressing contrition and pledging to get back to that promised openness, Justin Trudeau robotically insisted that “We will continue to put money in people’s pockets and fight climate change,” although the only possible rational defence of a price on carbon is that it imposes behavioural changes on people by increasing the cost of actions you want to discourage.

If it actually gives back more than it takes, people won’t buy less gas or natural gas; they might even buy more. (For those who understand economics, unlike our Prime Minister, a crucial point is that these fuels are highly price-inelastic because there are very limited available substitutes.)

Since everything in Canadian governments appears to be broken, the PBO was obliged to concede that the analysis by his office also included the impact of industrial as well as consumer carbon pricing. And as Giroux told the committee, the stuff the government wants to keep hidden proves them wrong:

“[It] confirms the report that we have published essentially, so that’s why I’m comfortable with what we have already published with the understanding that it provides the impact of the carbon tax and the OBPS.”

(OBPS, for those wishing to get down into the weeds, stands for Output-Based Pricing System aka the industrial carbon tax).

So the state broadcaster CBC naturally ran a piece defending the administration using the “Conservatives pounce” angle:

“In the middle of some haggling over his report on Monday at the House of Commons finance committee, Giroux said the government has its own analysis of the impact of carbon pricing but he doesn’t have permission to release the report himself. That led the Conservatives to allege that the government is hiding a ‘secret carbon tax report’ and that the PBO is under some kind of ‘gag’ order.”

That Giroux himself said as much somehow didn’t make it into their copy. What did, however, was an insistence that unless you factor in the hideous cost of climate change you can’t really measure just how great the tax really is:

“‘The PBO compares costs relative to a world in which Canada simply ignores its emissions – and faces no consequences,’ experts with the Canadian Climate Institute wrote last year.”

No prize for guessing who funds these independent “experts”. It’s the same people who fund the CBC and created the tax in question.

https://principia-scientific.com/you-dont-need-to-see-that-information/

***********************************************

Australia's Greens are Nazis in sheep’s clothing

FRANCIS GALBALLY

In my opinion there appears to be alarming similarities between Adam Bandt’s Greens and Hitler’s National Socialist Workers’ Party of the 1920s and 1930s. Both leaders are ideologues and demagogues. They are anti-Semitic in their rhetoric and this encourages in many a belief that the Jews are the cause of things wrong with society.

Bandt encourages the chant “from the river to the sea”. What does that mean other than the annihilation of the Jewish state and its people? But not just that, he seems through his rhetoric to want more. He encourages and attends pro-Palestinian demonstrations that are anti-Semitic and aimed at intimidating Australia’s Jews as they at least try to go about their ordinary lives whether as university students, workers or business people. Bandt supports gatherings that seem to me frighteningly similar to those pre-Nuremberg rallies in Munich in the 1920s. His rhetoric and actions appear to encourage the anti-Semitic demonstrations at parliament and on our city streets. This was Hitler at his most effective, and Bandt seems to have borrowed his playbook.

Bandt’s rant a few days ago has all the hallmarks of a Nazi rally. He accuses the major parties of “slandering this movement”. He calls on the Israeli ambassador to be expelled. He calls on sanctions against Israeli. He says “enough of the hand-wringing tweets, enough of the words that always come with conditions attached … they are being ignored by an extreme war cabinet that is hellbent on continuing this invasion”. And, like 1930s Munich, police had to move in to quell the violent protesters and use pepper spray (in Munich it was batons).

Bandt doesn’t mention how the Gaza war started, and appears to have no empathy for the abducted Israelis and the rape and killing of women and children. Bandt is a frightening demagogue; he distorts the truth, which suits a political agenda.

Bandt’s support of activists locking politicians out of their electoral offices bears the hallmarks of a potential dictator slowly cutting away at democracy.

Like Hitler, Bandt uses propaganda, discontent and fearmongering to gain support. He finds support among anti-Semites and uses climate action and anti-capitalist rhetoric to feed his supporters. Bandt would massively raise taxes and drive business from Australia. His rhetoric on tax and anti-business plays to his supporter base, much as Hitler did. And, like Hitler, he gets support from some individuals and businesses.

I do not criticise those who truly support the original Greens’ stand: protection of the environment and action to mitigate climate change.

But the Greens are now a party controlled by a rabblerouser who could destroy our way of life.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/these-duplicitous-modern-greens-are-wolves-in-sheeps-clothing/news-story/85782a0b1725d97060fc3d1b98db275f

***************************************

My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

*****************************************