So outragious that I love it …

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Cheers Comrades

“Green revolution” is “babyish make-believe”.

I love good design and the efficient use of resources, but by the same token I loathe lies and deceptions and when it comes to the hope of a bright new economic future we are being sold a pup by the likes of Al Gore and followers of the his green faith. The reality is simply that the only bright future that exists in the so called “green jobs revolution” will be for the promoters of the schemes and the academics who think up some of the wacky ideas that are floating around about the climate.

Al Gore chairman of a green investment firm, Generation Investment Management

Gore is also chairman of a greeninvestment firm called Generation Investment Management, which is a member of the Copenhagen Climate Council, an international collaboration of businesses and science bodies, and which invests in firms that produce renewable energy and low-carbon technology. So Gore uses one of his multimillion-dollar organisations, the Alliance for Climate Protection, to put pressure on government to promote the low-carbon lifestyle that will furnish one of his other multimillion-dollar organisations, General Investment Management, with booming business.

Gore’s activities provide only a glimpse into the new collusion between greens, businesses and government. So speedily has this network come together that according to one critic of the politics of environmentalism, Bjorn Lomborg, it is not going too far to liken the new green-industrial complex to the military-industrial complex that president Dwight Eisenhower warned of in the 1950s.

Governments across the world are promoting green ideology and economics on the back of the recession. President Barack Obama has spoken of a “green revolution” and spending $US150 billion to create five million “green-collar” jobs. As a result, the race is on among green-leaning businesses to snap up new government contracts and among not-so-green businesses to improve their green-industrial credentials in the hope of reaping government cash.

Yet the international evidence suggests the attempt to create green jobs will hamper economic recovery. Obama cited Spain as a country where green jobs have improved economic matters. In fact, according to a study by a professor of economics at Juan Carlos University in Madrid, for every green job created by the Spanish government in recent years, an average of 2.2 other jobs were destroyed to make way for it. Furthermore, green jobs tend not to be permanent; in Spain, only 1 in 10 green jobs exists for a significant period.

In Britain, green-industrial activists have used their political clout and scientific research, much of it derived from studies that underpin the business-science alliance of the Copenhagen Climate Council, to pressure the government to adopt a green new deal. In response, Gordon Brown announced in April that he would create 400,000 green jobs and a “low-carbon economy”.

Yet his figures don’t add up. The Brown government imagines that by 2015 it will have created 39,600 new jobs in geothermal energy, 74,900 in the development of alternative fuels, 25,300 in solar power and 69,300 in the construction of wind turbines. Yet, as a result of Britain’s debilitating crisis of credit, the renewables industry, in which tens of thousands of new jobs are apparently going to be created, is in a dire state. Five of Britain’s biggest wind-energy projects have been abandoned or put on hold indefinitely and British Petroleum recently cut 620 jobs in its solar-energy division because it wasn’t profitable. As journalist Christopher Booker argues, Brown’s “green revolution” is “babyish make-believe”.

In this country we have outlawed all sorts of Pyramid money making schemes and yet our governments seem hell bent for leather to jump into the green versions of these get rich quick schemes. With the recent news that India is not going to play the game and China doing little more than paying lip service to the Gaiaian liturgy Brother Number One and Penny W(r)ong  still expect the Australian people to believe that our economy will be saved by a “green revolution” the same revolution  that has been revealed as entirely bogus elsewhere, to be incapable of reliably creating even a fraction of its theoretical energy output, and as a consequence can’t make any kind of a profit….
Hmm may be instead of worrying about the Furphy of Co2 emissions our government should look to solving the real problems in our country like the abuse of our indigenous children or how to efficiently respond to  big bush fires…
Cheers Comrades
8)

The house always wins

There are lots of things in life that are just down to chance. It would not be much of a stretch at all to suggest that it is all something of a gamble.

Professor Lord Robert Winston wants long-term animal research on egg-freezing

‘There’s no child aged 30 from egg freezing so how do we know it’s safe?

‘Lord Winston

The chance of conceiving using frozen eggs is only about six per cent, according to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the British Fertility Society.

Yet the number of women putting their fertility ‘on ice’ to pursue a career or find the right partner has more than doubled.

At least 41 clinics now offer egg freezing which involves conventional IVF, egg extraction, freezing and then storage until the patient is ready to become pregnant.

The treatment was developed for cancer patients wanting to preserve their fertility because chemotherapy destroys eggs.

There are also concerns that not enough research has been carried out into the long-term health impacts on children born as a result of a frozen egg.

Lord Winston, emeritus professor of fertility studies at London’s Imperial College, said: ‘Women are paying a very high premium for an expensive insurance policy. And this policy should not be sold at the present time, although it is being sold at clinics in London and other places.

‘The whole thing is a bit of a confidence trick. If a woman goes for egg freezing and produces six to 10 eggs that’s a dangerous quantity.

‘It will be a result of hyper-stimulation, which increases the risk of chromosome defects. Then say all the eggs freeze and half then fertilise (after thawing) then the chance of getting one or two viable embryos is not guaranteed.’

His comments were in response to a call today from experts for egg freezing to be made more widely available.

Scientists at the annual meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology will say it must be an option as more women postpone childbearing.

But Lord Winston said: ‘There’s no child aged 30 from egg freezing so how do we know it’s safe? The concern is the long-term genetic effects. There’s considerable evidence that environmental changes in embryo development may affect humans in later life.

‘In my view it’s irresponsible (for clinics) to egg freeze until long-term animal research has been done.’

The thing is, when it comes to gambling the house always has the biggest edge and attempts to tilt the table, weight the wheel or shave the dice are not going to really improve your odds overall, especially if what you manage to win by cheating is  terribly flawed. Far better to avoid the weighted game and play earlier when the odds  favour the player more…
Cheers Comrades

First of the month and another Airbus A310-300 down

We live in an age when international travel could not be much cheaper or quicker for that matter. By contrast when my family emigrated to Australia we came here by sea and the journey took six and half weeks, now the same journey by air takes less than two days and it real terms it cost only a fraction of the expense of the long sea voyage. But then again in the sixties fewer people travelled the world unless it was to stay somewhere for quite a while…

Airbus A310-300

A BOY may be the only survivor of a Yemeni airliner that plunged into choppy seas on the way from Paris to the Comoros islands off Africa’s east coast. Rescuers yesterday found the child among the bodies of some of the 153 people who had been on board the fated flight.

“A child was found alive. He is now on a rescuers’ boat,” said Ben Imani, a doctor at the main hospital in the islands’ capital, Moroni. A Comoros Red Cross official confirmed the rescue.

“We have all that is needed – drips, equipment – to assist the child immediately.”

[...]

Hopes were fading for the other 141 passengers, including three infants, and 11 crew bound for Moroni via the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, and Marseilles.

The aircraft, with 66 French citizens, as well as Comoros and Arabic states residents on board, belonged to Yemenia Airways, Yemen’s state carrier. It came down between five and 10 kilometres from the coast and was believed to be preparing to land in severe weather. Wind speeds on land were recorded at more than 60km/h.

It is the second Airbus to crash into the sea in big storms in less than a month. On June 1 an Air France Airbus A330-200 plunged into the Atlantic Ocean during a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, killing all 228 on board.

With the Greenies constantly whining about “peak oil” and “greenhouse gases” you have to wonder if the age of mass air travel is close to ending because there is no other method of transport that is so hungry for energy  and so incapable of using “alternative” fuels than air travel. As the cost of energy increases I can foresee a very large increase in the the cost of flying and a subsequent decline in the number of people who travel for pleasure  or any sort of flippant reason.

As for this crash I can’t help wondering if the date is significant, given the previous Airbus  crash was on the first of last  month I really hope that it is a coincidence that this tragedy was on the first day of July because it just seems just a little too neat  and we all know how much certain religious nutters like to celebrate their faith with symbolic acts.

Great news though that one child has survived, that is better than none but hardly enough to inspire confidence for this air travel sceptic.

Cheers Comrades