Earth Hour is bad for the poor: Bjorn Lomborg

Good eco-intentions are no excuse for extending energy poverty.  

March 24, 2017

At 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, in the U.S. and around the world, around one billion people are expected to switch off their lights for one hour as a political statement against climate change and fossil fuels, and in support of carbon cuts and renewable energy.

This feel-good exercise not only does absolutely nothing for the planet, but it ignores the reality that what the world’s poorest need right now is more light and energy, much of which will be powered by fossil fuels, not darkness.

Started by the WWF in Australia in 2007, Earth Hour has expanded to a global event, with public spaces going dark, and in some places, people gathering with lit candles instead.

According to the organizers, “Earth Hour shows how each of us can be heroes for our planet.”
This grandiose statement overlooks the fact that the political campaign saves, at the most, the equivalent amount of carbon emissions as China halting its CO2 emissions for less than four minutes.
And that is with some incredibly generous assumptions. In fact, a small decline in electricity consumption does not actually translate into less energy being pumped into the grid, and therefore does not reduce emissions. While any significant drop in electricity demand means a temporary reduction in CO2 emissions, this is partly offset by the surge from firing up coal or gas stations to restore electricity supplies afterward.

Those ‘environmentally friendly’ candles that many participants light? They are a fossil fuel — and burn almost 100 times less efficiently than incandescent light bulbs. (That’s why you won’t ever find a modern hospital using them instead of electricity). Using one candle for each switched-off bulb actually cancels out even the theoretical CO2 reduction; using two candles means that you emit more CO2.

Earth Hour is largely celebrated in rich, urban areas. Around the world, there are around 1.3 billion people living in the developing world who will not get a choice whether to participate or not. That’s because they will be living without reliable electricity on Saturday night, just like they do every other night.

Increasingly, the world’s rich nations insist that these people — the world’s poor — should have no new fossil fuel access. Foreign aid is increasingly tied to renewable energy projects such as building solar and wind power capacity, or tiny “off-grid” energy generators. This has a real cost — and it’s the world’s worst-off who pay.

This appears rather hypocritical: The rich world relies heavily on fossil fuels, getting just 10% of its energy from renewables. Contrast that to Africa, which gets 50% of its much lower energy consumption from renewables.

Clearly, renewable energy means something different if you’re living in a remote part of Africa than if you’re a well-meaning environmental campaigner in the U.S. Owing to poverty, almost 3 billion people around the world still cook and heat their homes with wood, twigs and dung. And more than 4 million die prematurely each and every year because of the resulting noxious fumes and indoor air pollution.

When the proponents of Earth Hour celebrate renewable energy, they are envisioning modern wind turbines or solar power stations. But the reality is that wood and dung used by the poor are by far the largest renewable energy source on the planet.
Even in the rich world where most solar and wind power has been built, solar and wind make up just 1% of total energy, according to the International Energy Agency. Instead, wood makes up more than half of all renewable energy in the rich world, with hydropower contributing a third. Wind and solar is just one-tenth of renewable, which itself is one-tenth of all energy.
So why hasn’t solar or wind energy taken over the globe? Despite constantly hearing that it is cheaper or close to being cheaper than fossil fuels, the technology is still not efficient, cheap or reliable enough to compete. That is why we have to hand out more than $115 billion in subsidies to solar and wind this year. With an electricity price that is typically lower than 10 U.S. cents per kWh, we subsidize each kWh from solar at 27 cents.

An analysis by the Center for Global Development found that that by investing $10 billion in renewable energy, we could lift one person out of darkness and poverty for about $500. Using gas electrification would be more than four times cheaper. Insisting on renewables instead of spending that $10 billion on fossil fuels means deliberately leaving more than 60 million people in darkness and poverty.

And surveys of the world’s poor show that what they really want is grid electricity — just like the rich world has. For the foreseeable future, that will be mostly powered by fossil fuels — just like it is in the wealthy countries.

What the planet needs isn’t a futile, brief-lived, feel-good political gesture like Earth Hour, but sustained, greater investment in research and development of green energy. Only when solar and wind power are effective and competitive will the entire world be able to afford to make the switch away from fossil fuels.

Celebrating darkness over light is a fitting metaphor for a global environmental movement that has lost its way, and is not arguing for the smartest prescriptions for the world’s poor, or for the planet.

Bjorn Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Cool It, and The Nobel Laureates’ Guide to the Smartest Targets for the World 2016-2030, and a visiting professor at Copenhagen Business School.

Why the Liberal government lost so badly on March 11

Forget the ‘It’s Time’ argument that both the Liberal and Labor parties are using to explain the crushing defeat for the Liberal government on March 11. It’s simply not true.

As politicians and political commentators have said for a long time, oppositions don’t win government, governments lose government. Of course, opposition parties have to show they have competent people and relevant policies to do a good job of governing should they win, but I’m not aware of a competent, effective, unified government that has lost an election at state or federal level in Australia in recent decades.

The reason why Barnett and the Liberals lost the election is because, in their second term, they were an inept government:
* Roe 8 should have been started 2 or 3 years earlier, not 6 months prior to the election
* the partial sale of Western Power should have been fully explained to electors over a year or more
* Barnett should have jettisoned Troy Buswell rather than wait for the troubled MP to implode
* the public should have been invited to suggest names for Elizabeth Quay
* Joe Francis should have paid his defamation penalty out of his own pocket
* problems at the new children’s hospital should have been resolved prior to the election
* there was a total failure by government to explain where the $40 billion of state debt was being spent and
* Barnett should have stood down about a year ago to give his replacement time to develop a profile and learn the ropes (and to avoid the spectacle of WA business leaders conducting their own polling and realising that a change of Premier was needed).

The preference deal with One Nation didn’t help, of course. Many Liberal supporters were appalled at Pauline Hanson’s racist attitudes and her temporary opposition to vaccinations. Of the 13% of voters who were intending to vote One Nation 3 weeks prior to election day, the preference deal caused almost two thirds of them to desert the party and, rather than return to the Liberal fold, they voted for Labor in protest at both parties involved in the preference deal. The unimaginative and ill-informed Liberal Party lay party executive as exemplified by president Normal Moore should have ‘arranged’ for individual Liberal candidates to negotiate their own preference deals: the outcome was likely to have been largely similar to the formal deal struck between the two parties but it could have been sold as an outcome determined by the grass-roots of the Party, not the executive.

Two other factors are important in explaining Saturday’s disaster. The first is the lack of lay members within the Liberal Party, the people who work at polling booths handing out How To Vote cards and who attend dinners and other fund-raisers to help their local candidate pay for election campaigns. The low lay party membership base also meant that fewer people were involved in policy development and fewer people provided feedback to the Party and MPs on topical or important issues. In turn, party powerbrokers had an easier task of gaining support for themselves and their candidates because they had fewer people needing to be influenced.

As an example, I shared an office in Parliament with Family and Children’s Services Minister Rhonda Parker for 3 years in the late 1990s. Current powerbroker Mathias Cormann was her chief of staff and I have never witnessed a senior party member as rude, as arrogant and as verbally obscene as Cormann. I remain perplexed how a minister as sensitive as Parker could have allowed someone like him to be on her payroll.

The second factor in explaining the March 11 drubbing is that the Premier had a team of very ordinary, lacking in talent and lacklustre MPs to choose from. In 2008 when Barnett was given the poisoned chalice of Liberal Party leadership, no one in the party anticipated an early election, let alone a Liberal win. Because of Alan Carpenter’s early election call, the Liberal Party chose candidates in a rush, with powerbrokers choosing lots of sycophants and party hacks of mediocre abilities. When Barnett then won the election, he had very few people of talent and energy to choose his ministers from. As Gareth Parker said in The West Australian of March 13, “Barnett was too often asked to do so much because those around him contributed so little.”

As further proof of the low or dubious quality of sitting MPs, look at Albert Jacob, a member of his church’s executive which expels people with mental health issues. And Peter Katsambanis who left an inexplicably arrogant and insensitive message on Rob Johnston’s phone at 2.50am on the morning after the election.

Now, I never thought I would say anything good about Troy Buswell but I’ve been advised that he was the only person in cabinet to argue against further capital expenditure, saying that state debt needed to be controlled. That he was overruled by Barnett without his fellow ministers backing the then treasurer says a lot about the Premier’s dominance over and control of cabinet, something that understandably led to accusations of arrogance.

The one positive to come out of the loss of so many Liberal seats on March 11 is that it will give the party an opportunity to find new, quality candidates and preselect them well in advance of the 2021 election. If the party’s powerbrokers are kept in check and a larger lay party membership involves itself more with policy development and candidate selection, the party will be a stronger, more representative political organisation able to show to the people of WA that it is once again capable of governing well for all citizens.

In the meantime, we have the Mark McGowan Labor government for the next four years. Many of his team have serious talents and abilities. They should be capable of governing well provided they stand up to what are likely to be the excessive claims of the union movement. I was elected to Parliament in 1996 at the same time as the new Premier and I consider him to be an honest and capable person. Whether he has the strength to stand up to the unions is unknown, but here’s hoping that McGowan’s first four years as Premier are better than Barnett’s last four years in the top job.

We must defend the legacy of the West

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/jennifer-oriel/we-must-defend-legacy-of-the-west/news-story/cd5ac36e702231217025ff4c8e04a1c5

·         JENNIFER ORIEL

The new movement to save the West from its enemies is so young it doesn’t have a name. Its democratic core has been maligned by the Left in a torrent of PC propaganda. The political Right, too, is wary of the movement that has produced Brexit, Donald Trump and a raft of democratic nationalist parties across the Western world. Republicans have declared they are the true conservatives and excluded Trump from the category. The Liberal Party has distanced itself from new Right leaders such as Senator Pauline Hanson and Senator Cory Bernardi’s new Australian Conservatives. So who are the true conservatives of the 21st century and why does it matter?

The starting point of Western civilisation gives conservatism a 2000-year legacy. Such a legacy enriches the life of the mind and spirit while fortifying the free world order. But it complicates politics when citizens are not educated in the continuous Western tradition. In an age dominated by sound bites, social media and a public keen to learn but time poor, a central conservative challenge is to define clearly the meaning of conservatism and why it matters.

There is an abundance of literature on conservatism, but few clear definitions. Among the works I have read on the meaning of modern conservatism, three stand out for their philosophical breadth and clarity. They are Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilisations, and Roger Scruton’s The West and the Rest. Daniel Mahoney’s The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order is instructive also.

The Conservative Mind sparked the post-war conservative intellectual movement in America. In it, Kirk provides a definition of conservatism that comprises four substantive doctrines. The first conservative doctrine, “an affirmation of the moral nature of society”, rests on the belief that virtue is the essence of true happiness. The matter of virtue is family piety and public honour. Their consequence is a life of dignity and order.

Kirk’s second doctrine of conservatism is the defence of property. He defines it as “property in the form of homes and pensions and corporate rights and private enterprises; strict surveillance of the leviathan business and the leviathan union”.

The third conservative doctrine is the preservation of liberty, traditional private rights and the division of power. The absence of this doctrine facilitates the rise of Rousseau’s “general will”, made manifest in the totalitarian state.

The final doctrine of Kirk’s conservatism is “national humility”. Here, Kirk defines the nation state as vital to the preservation of Western civilisation. Politicians are urged to humble themselves in the light of the Western tradition instead of indulging in cheap egoism by promoting policies that buy them votes, but weaken the West.

English philosopher Roger Scruton identifies the political, pre-political and civil components of Western civilisation that sustain the free world. They are rooted in the uniquely Western idea of citizenship, which is influenced by Christianity. The core components of Western citizenship are: the secular democratic state, secular and universal law, and a single culture cohered by territorial jurisdiction and national loyalty. Like Huntington, Scruton analyses the core foundations and animating principles of Western civilisation in contrast to Islamic civilisation.

Conservatism stands in contrast to both small “l” liberal and socialist ideas of culture, society and state. Its central tenets are: moral virtue as the path to happiness, supporting the natural family, promoting public order and honour, private enterprise, political liberty, the secular state and universal law. The central tenets of conservatism are sustained by a single culture of citizenship that enables the flourishing of Western civilisational values.

Conservatism remains the only mainstream political tendency whose core objective is the defence and flourishing of Western civilisation. In its federal platform, the Liberal Party defines its liberal philosophy as: “A set of democratic values based upon … the rights, freedoms and responsibilities of all people as individuals.” There is no discussion of Western civilisation or Western values. However, it shares with conservatives the principles of limited government, respect for private property, political liberty and the division of power. And conservative prime ministers from Menzies to Howard and Abbott have led the defence of Western civilisation in Australia against its greatest enemies: socialists, communists and Islamists.

It is on the questions of immigration, transnational trade and supranational governance that the primary distinction between conservatives and the new Right is drawn. For example, there is growing tension fuelled by the belief that mass immigration, especially of Muslims, constitutes a demographic revolution that threatens Western values. Mainstream conservatives, including Cory Bernardi, reject the idea of a ban on Muslim immigration. But it is clear that policy resonates with many.

Last year, an Essential Poll showed 49 per cent of Australians thought Muslims should be blocked from the country. Chatham House has published survey results that confirm a wide gap between the political class, the media and the people on the question of Muslim immigration. Among 10,000 people polled across 10 European states, 55 per cent want migration from Muslim countries stopped.

In various polls, people cite the refusal to adopt Western values as a core reason to cease immigration from Muslim states. The defence of Western values is a core conservative position, but only the new Right parties, including Hanson’s One Nation, propose a ban on Muslim immigration.

I have tried to define conservatism by standing on the shoulders of giants and offering some clarity for people tired of hollow words from hollow men. The task of definition is urgent. Unless a well-defined, muscular conservatism emerges, the best of Western civilisation will not survive the 21st century.

Tension between nationalism and liberal democracy is not what is haunting us today.

Friedman's Weekly

March 1, 2017 By George Friedman

Nationalism and Liberal Democracy Tension between nationalism and liberal democracy is not what is haunting us today. Nationalism is rising in the Western world, and many view it as the enemy of liberal democracy. The basis of this view is not unreasonable, as European wars fought from 1914 to 1945 were among the most barbaric in history. Those wars were fought between nations, many of which had rejected the principles of liberal democracy. Some saw the proliferation of nations as causing a rise in tyrannies, destruction of liberal democracies, and a war fought to recover liberal democracy in Europe. The view that Europe’s wars originated in nationalism became common, along with the belief that nationalism gave rise to fascism, and that the preservation of liberal democracy required nationalism’s suppression. From this, the European Union emerged as a moral project, along with the idea that a re-emergence of nationalism would return Europe and Euro-American civilization back to barbarism. Historically, that may be a persuasive argument. But it fails to understand that nationalism – however distorted it might become – is the root of liberal democracy, not only historically, but also morally. The two concepts are intellectually inseparable. West Berliners crowd in front of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 11, 1989 as East German border guards demolish a section of the wall to open a new crossing between East and West Berlin, near Potsdamer Square. GERARD MALIE/AFP/Getty Images Liberal democracy as a political doctrine arose in the 18th century as a challenge to monarchy. At the time, monarchies were based on the idea that kings and emperors had a divine right to rule. Maps of 18th century Europe, and even before, show the outcomes of this approach. The holdings of a monarch or lesser nobility were built by war, money and marriage, and the subjects likely consisted of many nations. Many nations, in turn, were divided between the different monarchies. Therefore, kingdoms and nations did not necessarily coincide, and regimes were not connected to the people, neither in theory nor in practice. Nineteenth and 20th century history involved the struggle of nations to extract themselves from monarchies and empires to take their fragmented parts and make them whole. A European uprising in 1848 was a result of nations seeking the right to be free from empires. For the most part, they failed at this goal but succeeded in another: Nationalism became a moral imperative. Nations emerged from the chaos of World War I after four empires collapsed. To a great extent, this was due to the guidance of Woodrow Wilson at Versailles. Then, in 1991, more nations emerged from the collapse of the Soviet empire. After World War II, as European empires collapsed, nations – and frequently entities pretending to be nations – emerged from the rubble to assert their right to national self-determination. Whatever Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini would have done, advocates of liberal democracy celebrated the global emergence of nations that would govern themselves. A nation is a group of people who share history, culture, language and other attributes. It is the existence of a common identity, a coherent sense of self and nationhood that make self-government possible, because it is that sense of self that permits self-government. A random collection of people without a core set of shared values cannot form a coherent regime, because nothing would hold the regime together or prevent internal chaos. The principle of the right to national self-determination can be universalized, but the practice of national self-determination must be rooted in the nation. Without this commonality, a nation could tear itself apart. We saw this happen in Yugoslavia and when Czechs and Slovaks gracefully divorced. We saw the chaos of the former European empires as nations once divided from each other by imperial borders and forced to live together with strangers were enveloped in constant turmoil. Without people who have self-identity, the right to self-determination cannot exist. Without the democracy that flows from it, liberal democracy cannot exist. Liberal democracy makes two core assertions. First, there is a right to national self-determination. Second, this self-determination must manifest in a type of popular rule, and the people, in ruling themselves, have the right to select and approve the form and substance of government. The important point is that democracy is comprehensible only through the prism of the nation. The centrality of the nation derives from its irrelevance to the old regime. Monarchies did not recognize the right of people to rule themselves, and they didn’t see the concept of a people as important. To challenge despotism, a political instrument that could be wielded as a powerful weapon had to be created. From a political point of view, the only coherent political force to oppose monarchs was the nation. The American Revolution was the rising of a nation crafted as colonies against the English monarch. The French Revolution was the rising of a French nation, as fragmented as it was, against the French monarch. Liberal democracy also has an obvious inherent danger: It celebrates democracy and liberalism, a system of values that defines the individual as the moral core and guarantees him liberty. This is the core tension in liberal democracy. On one hand, liberal democracy demands the right of people to determine their own government. On the other, it demands that people respect liberalism. In other words, liberal democracy wants the people to rule, but it insists that if the people understood the moral universe in which they live, they would always vote a certain way. Contemporary tension in liberal democracy is not with the nation, but rather between democracy and liberalism. If people have a right to self-determination, then they have the right to elect leaders with values they prefer or share. The problem is that some people will object to leaders being selected who violate the principles of liberalism. The battle is between the right of national self-determination on one side, and a faction of people who are appalled at the path the people have chosen on the other side. Nation after nation is being torn apart by those who embrace liberal democracy being usurped by others making democratic choices. The American founders understood this problem and sought to resolve it by limiting democracy in a number of ways. The most important of these limitations was the Constitution, and its purpose was to define how the state works and checks itself, what inviolable rights all citizens have, and what system would make changing the Constitution enormously difficult. The issue with a constitution is always whether the people will respect it and whether tyrants will overturn it. Democracy and liberalism live in dangerous tension with each other. Democracy can destroy liberalism if the majority wills it. And liberalism has a tendency to want to limit democracy if it reaches decisions that are offensive to it. The key to a liberal democracy is a powerful constitution – powerful in the sense that the people, over generations, respect it with an awe approaching worship. The point here is that tension between nationalism and liberal democracy is not what haunts us today. Rather, what haunts us is the tension between liberal principles and democracy. The only thing that can contain that tension is a constitution that brooks no challenge. Without that, everything breaks down. In the end, designing a constitution is the most fundamental decision a self-governing nation must make. Of course, the constitution must be worthy of its authority.