de-civilisation

Us and Them

/ Neil Lock / 2 Comments

By Neil Lock

This is the final essay of six in in a re-appraisal and re-working of my philosophical system. I am calling the new version of this system “Honest Common Sense 2.0.”

Today, it’s time (at last!) to offer some thoughts on how we might seek to move from where we are today towards a better world. Some of these ideas, I’ll warn in advance, may seem radical to many people. To some, even scary.

I’m going to try to make this essay as stand-alone as I can; so that even those who haven’t read the preceding five parts should be able to appreciate my points of view. To that end, I’ll begin with some brief summaries culled from the earlier essays.

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A Dark Green Background

/ Neil Lock / 10 Comments

A Dark Green Background

By Neil Lock

UPDATE: Since first publishing this article, I have examined a further relevant document from the UK government: the 2019 “Report to the Committee on Climate Change of the Advisory Group on Costs and Benefits of Net Zero.” This has shed some interesting new light on the matter, so I have updated the essay to give some more details on the costs versus benefits angle.

This essay follows on from my review of the UK government’s recent “Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution,” which you can find at [[1]]. Today, I’ll trace the history of the global warming agenda, and in particular the bad things governments – particularly in the UK – and their cohorts have done to us in promoting, supporting and implementing it.

There’s a long, sordid back-story to the deep green agenda. It goes back fully 50 years. Everything in this back-story is available on the Internet to those who are willing to look, and able to sort the wheat of evidence from the chaff of lies and politics. A lot of it, indeed, is in government documents! That’s how I learned all this myself.

There are somewhat similar back-stories on other aspects of the green agenda. Notably, on air pollution. But today, I’ll confine myself to global warming, also known as climate change.

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Green industrial revolution, or Great Leap Backward?

/ Neil Lock / 7 Comments

Green industrial revolution, or Great Leap Backward?

By Neil Lock

Prologue: The decay of politics

For several decades now, there has been a continual decline in the quality of the political atmosphere, in the UK and elsewhere. In the UK, I think this probably dates back to the 1970s and Old Labour; but the Tories and New Labour have both actively helped it along. Government has lost respect for the people it is supposed to serve. It treats us, at best, as if we were naughty children. It takes no account of what we actually are: thinking, feeling human beings, who need freedom and justice in order to live our lives to the full. In consequence, many people have begun to lose confidence in politics and government, no matter which party is in power. And among such people there is a, slowly but inexorably, mounting sense of exasperation with the political establishment and those in it. The Brexit referendum vote in 2016, and the meteoric rise of the Brexit Party in the first half of 2019, were signs of this.

Meanwhile, the political class and their cohorts (such as bureaucrats, academe, media, big-company bosses) have steadily become more and more authoritarian, arrogant, dishonest, deceitful, untrustworthy, grasping, irresponsible, evasive of accountability, hypocritical, hysterical, and lacking in concern for us “little people.” It is as if they have formed themselves into a giant, psychopathic, criminal gang; and we are their chosen victims.

You can see this in their erection of millions of cameras to spy on us. In their tracking of our Internet and phone usage. In their obvious desire to use any “crisis” they can drum up, such as the COVID epidemic, to take away or restrict our liberties. But nowhere is it more clearly reflected than by their conduct on environmental issues, such as the matter often called “climate change” or, alternatively, “global warming,” “climate crisis” or “climate emergency.” And, in particular, by the UK government’s Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution [[1]], published in November 2020. Continue reading →

My response to the government consultation on “De-carbonizing Transport”

/ Neil Lock / 12 Comments

Last Friday, I sent in a just-in-time response to the UK government’s “consultation” on how to “de-carbonize transport.” Or, more simply put, to ban our cars – as quickly as they possibly can.

My response is a 56-page PDF. There’s a lot of detail in there, and some quite strong ideas. So I thought the best way would be simply to put it up on the Internet, and link to it. WordPress, though, had other ideas. It wouldn’t let me link to it, without actually embedding it. So, here it is:

Click to access respcon-200731.pdf

 

On Externalities, Integrated Assessment Models, and UK climate policies

/ Neil Lock / Leave a comment

On Externalities, Integrated Assessment Models, and UK climate policies

By Neil Lock

This is a follow-up to my recent essay, “On Cambridge University, post-modernism, climate change, Oppenheimer’s Razor, and the Re-Enlightenment.” As I said there about the economic impacts of global warming: “I’d expect that some probing by independent experts into the economic calculations, and the assumptions on which they are built, might bear fruit.” But where are these calculations, and who are the unbiased experts who have quality controlled them? I couldn’t find any such calculations, or the names of any such experts. Perhaps, I thought, I’d better take a look at this myself.

So, I set out to learn as much as I could about the economic calculations which – so we’re supposed to believe – justify the extreme measures proposed, all the way up to total de-carbonization of the UK economy, to avoid alleged catastrophic damage from global warming. This essay is the result of that exercise. If it reads like a cross between a layman’s guide to the economics of global warming and a political rant, that’s because it’s both!

Summary

Here are the main points of what I found out:

  1. In 2009, the UK government ceased to value carbon dioxide emissions according to their social cost [1], in favour of using numbers based on political commitments they had previously made. In effect, they abandoned doing cost versus benefit assessments on policies that are expected to increase or decrease CO2 emissions.
  2. Recent empirical estimates of equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), when run through assessment models like those used by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), suggest a considerably lower social cost of CO2 emissions than earlier estimates, such as the UK government’s Stern Review.
  3. When the beneficial side-effects of CO2 emissions, such as increased plant growth, are taken into account, it’s possible that the social cost of these emissions may even become negative. That is, CO2 emissions become a nett benefit not a nett cost.
  4. Calculations based on a 2017 paper by Dayaratna, McKitrick and Kreutzer suggest a social cost for all UK CO2 emissions as at 2020 of 0.05% of GDP (optimistic) or 0.31% of GDP (pessimistic). Using the social cost numbers for 2050 from the same paper, the figures are 0.08% and 0.52% respectively. All these numbers are substantially lower than the 1-2% of GDP put forward as the cost of “net zero” policies.
  5. There is a need for urgent action to prevent the imposition of costly, draconian and lifestyle-destroying policies on people in the UK in the name of a problem, which is far less serious (if it is a problem at all) than is claimed by the promoters of those policies.

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The Classics and the Culture War: A Response to Sean Gabb

/ Sean Gabb / 6 Comments

Dear Sean,

I usually read your emailed newsletters because, for the most part, I find your observations thought-provoking.

I’m writing to tell you that you continue to fail to convince me of the benefits of studying classics, particularly the learning of Latin – my own experience of which (I concede) is entirely vicarious. Both my two sons were fortunate in winning music scholarships to Eton College, where Latin still looms large on the timetable. Both sons dropped the subject at the earliest opportunity, which they considered nowhere near early enough. Similarly, time spent enduring Latin lessons as choristers at St Paul’s Cathedral was time ill-used – the boys were hard-pressed enough as it was, what with singing in the cathedral for three hours a day, six days a week – and with three instrumental skills to practise. Now in their mid-twenties, neither of them know any more Latin than I do (i.e. semper fidelis, per adua per astra, quid pro quo, illegitimi non carborundum, i.e., e.g. and etcetera). Continue reading →

On Cambridge University, post-modernism, climate change, Oppenheimer’s Razor, and the Re-Enlightenment

/ Neil Lock / 4 Comments

On Cambridge University, post-modernism, climate change, Oppenheimer’s Razor, and the Re-Enlightenment

By Neil Lock

In the early 1970s, I studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge. I enjoyed it at the time, but was left with a feeling that something wasn’t quite right. Although I scraped a First, and was offered a place on Part III of the Tripos, I decided to go out into the real world instead. Never did I make a better life decision.

Over the intervening decades, I have come more and more to question the value of universities. I would have expected the remit of a university to be (1) to seek, (2) to develop, and (3) to pass on, ideas and practices to improve the human condition, both today and in the future. There should be no dishonesties in their processes, no imposed orthodoxies, and no restrictions on the freedom to seek, or to tell, the truth. Yet, universities – not just at Cambridge, but world-wide – seem to have become bastions of political correctness. Anyone in the faculty, who doesn’t toe the party line and parrot the narrative of the moment, will find difficulties in funding or in getting papers published, or may even be in danger of dismissal. Peter Ridd in Australia and Susan Crockford in Canada are topical examples.
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