Grope De Cologne

@greenheroaf Does the name Nordhaus mean anything to you? The only Nobel winner so far on the economics of climate change.

Calling climate change a hoax does not alter the scientific evidence. I support climate action because rising emissions are increasing extreme weather, biodiversity loss and risks for vulnerable communities.

@KiMcGuinness You say "The leave sold it on ‘Take Back Control’." Ask yourself this, what is the EU's primary fiscal purpose? ENG is now alone in Europe afaik in not subsidising capital owners to produce food. And you think that's a bad thing, 'cos that schit should be centralised to Brussels?

It’s nearly 10 years since the Brexit referendum. The leave sold it on ‘Take Back Control’. That’s not what we got. This is what taking back control really looks like: Re-industrialise Buying British for more jobs in Britain An end to trickle down economics More devolution

@worstall @Phoenix4419 Got to admit that Lisa Edelstein is well attractive, but she was Gregory House's boss. House's mostly male assistants had attractive girlfriends but Lisa Edelstein #1 imv of course

@Phoenix4419 Dunno, I could go with House. His assistants are always pretty comely, no?

"Top" "Best" and "lawyers who win in an adversarial system" are all relative concepts. Therefore, by definition, it's impossible for all to have access.

The cost of mitigating emissions through the Contracts for Difference scheme has reached as high as £2000/t in the last couple of years. This means the costs of the scheme exceed the benefits - global warming avoided - by a factor of as much as 40 (!). 🧵👇

@DanNeidle @ToryFibs @BBCPolitics Time will tell. He was certainly indifferent to whether CTAX was due. And perhaps wilfully took the attitude that it's the council's job to bill me, rather than my citizen responsibility to inform the Valuation Office to inform the council to bill me. I blame that 1925 Act myself

@ToryFibs @BBCPolitics I don't see why that's relevant. I say I don't believe it's wilful because there's no evidence at all that it was wilful.

Green Party leader Zack Polanski cleared over houseboat tax row bbc.in/4fSFcZ1

@KiMcGuinness Fair play to you. You may not have read Fournier/Johansson on the positive effects of public infrastructure (a new crossing point over the Tyne opposite the Metro station perhaps), but you are not dull. Bohemian glamour might survive.

Our new travel website is now LIVE! We've been waiting too long but we've now got one place where you can plan all your North East journeys from. I want this to make it easier for passengers right across the region to get about with as little hassle as possible. You can find it here: travelnortheast.uk

@KeillerDon @ClimatePNowak Would you know of any trends that the IPCC *had* found good evidence for, there must be a couple for the alarmist anti-markets faction to cling on to as their headline examples of how things are provably getting worse.

@ClimatePNowak No they are not. Here’s a summary of extremes that the IPCC had found no trends for.

High agricultural output does not remove climate risk. To me, climate resilience still matters because extreme heat, drought and floods are putting real pressure on harvests, transport and food prices.

@tonywestonuk What area or activity do you think is currently underfunded? Once you've figured it out then the PMs can fund it directly rather than parsing it through the worst government of our time with losses to bureaucracy, unions and incentive failure.

There’s something that we hear time and time again through TV and the media, but it simply isn’t true. The story goes like this: billionaires are sitting on so much money that the government is helpless. It has no choice but to let roads crumble, libraries close, and youth clubs disappear. The finger is pointed at billionaires: That’s where the money is. The government can’t do anything without it. But that isn’t true. Billionaires have far too much wealth and far too much power. They absolutely should be taxed far more than they are now. Bring on a wealth tax. But here’s the important bit: governments choose not to fix roads, fund libraries, or keep youth clubs open. That is a political choice. A government that issues its own fiat currency has the ability to buy anything for sale in its own unit of account: the pound. When it says, “We don’t have the money,” that is not the same as saying, “We don’t have the resources.” It is a choice about priorities. And they choose not to. Worse, they tell us they are helpless. They say there is no money. They suggest the billionaire “wealth creators” have it all, and that without taking more from them, nothing can be done. But look at Patriotic Millionaires. Many millionaires are openly asking to be taxed more. The government still does not want to do it. Why? Because if more money came in, if the deficit fell or the debt went down, the government would lose one of its favourite excuses: We don’t have the money. A wealth tax is needed. But a wealth tax would also expose the deeper lie. It would make it harder for politicians to hide behind the idea that they are powerless to do good things. So the public gets hit with the old one-two: - First, millionaires and billionaires hoard vast amounts of wealth. - Second, the government uses that as cover to cut services it simply does not want to support. We need to fix both problems. We need a wealth tax. But we also need to tell people the government is part of the sham. Because once the public is conditioned to believe that even an elected government cannot do the things people want, democracy itself starts to wither. Why vote at all if every party is supposedly trapped by the same financial constraints? Why vote Green, Reform, or anyone promising change, if we are told they will all eventually run into the same answer: Sorry, there’s no money? That belief is not accidental. It is politically useful. If people believe governments are powerless, they stop expecting anything from them. They stop demanding better. Eventually, many stop voting altogether. And that is exactly what the people benefiting from the current system want. The reason your library is closing is not that the country has “run out of money.” It is closing because someone chose not to fund it. And the reason they keep saying there is no alternative is because they do not want you to believe your vote could create one.

@Tw_timerAlder @latimeralder Trade-offs matey. The highest CO2 taxation recommendations indicate around 3% of national income is clawed back as a CO2 tax. Adaptation of 1% of national income to build dykes and sea defences is clearly value if that is the only adaptation needed.

Fun Fact! Brainwashed crank @latimeralder says there is no need to be concerned about accelerating sea level rise as we can all be like the Netherlands 🇳🇱 So he’s advocating for spending 1% of our GDP per year on ruining our beautiful coastlines with dykes and sand banks 🤦🏻‍♂️

@meadwaj @VerdantThinking You spelt the name of the PM wrong. Serious counterpoint though: free markets and easy licensing can replace most of that lost fertiliser supply. Did you know for example it's illegal in the UK to pilot a lower emission Haber process to make ammonia based fertiliser.

I've written for @VerdantThinking what I think is the glaring omission in Andy Burnham's plans for the cost of living crisis: nothing on food and food prices. Link to blog below...

@Imran_HussainMP Sanitation is a public good. The benefits are non-rivalrous and non-excludable. Water itself is not a public good. You can metre it to households for example, and you can cut someone off, even a whole town off in a recent case.

Rejecting a bailout deal for Thames Water is a welcome step forward. But the Government should have nationalised Thames Water, and the rest of our privatised water supply, a long time ago. Water is a public good. Leaving it in private hands has clearly failed customers, workers and the environment. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

@Tw_timerAlder @greenheroaf Restraining emissions in the most efficient way is not your bag really. Nordhaus winning an economics Nobel for showing how best to do it and you're ignorant. This is a hate campaign for you son.

@greenheroaf Yes but Latimer Alder is a brainwashed crank and habitual liar. You don’t expect him to understand science do you? He is one of the most ignorant people on the planet. Ignore him.

Higher crop yields are not proof that climate change has no impact. They show how much adaptation, innovation and resilience have been required to protect agriculture and long term food security.

@SimonTuckwell1 @KiMcGuinness "How long is the payback over"? Articles indicate around 7 years, i.e. 100k savings per year for a 700k outlay. I googled a couple of private schools (Dragon and MGS) that have installed rooftop solar and they claim 3-7 years. Which shows how cheap solar has gotten. In daylight.

@KiMcGuinness how long is the payback over. I.e. how many years will pass before the savings outflank the outlay. Also need to consider the energy impact on production, taking that into account.

How do you save North East schools £100,000 per year for books, school supplies and the best days out? Simple - put solar panels on their roof. So that’s what we did for 23 schools in Sunderland and Northumberland. Lower energy bills, more money for kit, kids loving their contribution to the environment and the panels were fitted by north east workers too! Green energy 🤝 green jobs 🤝opportunity

@KiMcGuinness There's a massive error in your arithmetic - 85 tonnes CO2 is the consumption of about 20 people, call it 10 homes. Back to class Mayor Kim.

@iealondon @cjsnowdon Google search tells me Kate Bush was promoting demo tapes at 15, that Picasso was exhibiting at 11, Mozart was a child genius. I await the analysis of the great @JackWatson2008 as to whether an unintended consequence of a socials ban is a world without child prodigies.

Responding to the Government's ban on social media for under-16s, @cjsnowdon, Head of Lifestyle Economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs, said: "We must stop judging new legislation by the good intentions of its advocates rather than its likely consequences. We know from Australia that most teenagers will get around the ban and that those who are not able to do so will suffer from social isolation. "There are legitimate concerns about screen addiction among both children and adults, but parents are already able to restrict what their children see online and limit the number of hours they can use a smartphone. These guardrails are removed when kids log in via VPNs or sign up to platforms as adults. "What the Government is trying to do is reminiscent of attempts to ban the printing press. It is similarly impractical, illiberal and ultimately undesirable."

@mwt2008 That's a policy failure. As is the idea that people should be protected from carbon prices being put into the cost of gas because gas is very useful. Instead the policy position is to make gas more expensive in other ways and tackle climate change less efficiently.

The Stern Review described climate change as “the greatest market failure the world has seen”. Its preferred solution was carbon pricing, but a carbon price that fully reflected climate, health and environmental costs would make fossil gas significantly more expensive while many households still depend on it. That’s why governments use a mixture of carbon pricing, regulation and targeted support for cleaner technologies during the transition. My heat pump grant exists because the market currently fails to price the full costs of fossil gas.

This is exactly why rapid decarbonisation matters. Human-caused warming is now estimated at 1.37°C and increasing at around 0.27°C per decade. The longer we delay, the more climate impacts, air pollution costs, and adaptation costs accumulate. The cheapest tonne of CO₂ is the one we never emit.

@RobMcLondon @DanNeidle Indeed - a single data point for 55-64 would be around 27% - the second highest point on the yellow curve. It would still leave a dip for 45-54, but one outlier data point is more likely to be well an outlier.

@DanNeidle The x-axis is odd in that its mostly 10 year groups except 55-59 and 60-64, so the large high earners point in 2014-15 45-54 group suddenly get split into two groups in 2024-25, showing suddenly that those born early 1960s doing well, those born later '60s not...

This is really weird and hard to explain. My first thought is that it's a data error of some kind. Any other theories?

@cjsnowdon If it's about unhappiness leading to suicide we should ban SM for men in their 50s. But our amazing government bans something only for those at lowest risk

This is Starmer’s Turkey Twizzlers moment.

@mwt2008 Have you heard of the Stern review and read the review's scathing opinion of tackling climate change with subsidies?

Yes, it was. My EV, solar PV and home battery didn’t receive any subsidy, though. Reducing gas demand helps lower wholesale gas prices for everyone still using gas. The less gas we burn, the less exposed we are to volatile international gas markets. The same argument applies to insulation. The cheapest unit of gas is the one you never need to buy.