Lead In Your Pencil.

The theory that the fall in crime over the last generation has been due to the phasing out of lead additives in petrol has received another airing recently.

The last time I mentioned the idea on this blog it was to ridicule the idea, but over the last few years it seems to have stood up fairly well- to the point where it is perhaps the biggest underlying global cause of long term fluctuations in crime trends. (When I'm admitting I was partly wrong I tend to waffle).

However there is a danger of neglecting cultural and policy impacts on crime levels in affecting crime levels even if they aren't the only factors. For example there has been a major difference in the homicide rate of the northern and souther United States going back to before the country was actually formed- and long predating the use of lead in petrol. Even today the much vaunted fall in crime experienced by New York cannot really be explained by lead alone, because the rate in New York fell in relative terms compared to other cities (to the point where the much small city of Chicago has more murders in total than New York). So there still is a significant role for effective policing and sentencing in cutting crime.

If the theory continues to hold water then it is a significant victory for environmentalists- at least the saner ones- because it seems that pollution caused side effects far more severe than could have been predicted based upon the best evidence available at the time. The precautionary principle has in this case at least been vindicated.

Can You Get Geo-Thermal Powered Range Rovers?

The Telegraph reports that:

Novellist Winterson in 'screaming rant' with neighbour

Best-selling author Jeanette Winterson has been embroiled in a confrontation with a neighbour after accusing him of damaging her Range Rover, it is claimed.

This is obviously a bizarre mistake. Jeanette Winterson would hardly own a gas guzzling Range Rover given her passion for saving the environment, as she has explained on BBC Radio 4's Any Questions:

WINTERSON
 
I think everything that we're talking about tonight keys into much larger questions about what these so-called values are that we want to uphold, how exactly we want to live, what sort of people we think we are. We said we want a good health service but do we want to pay for it? We want to reduce our environmental footprint but we don't want to have bin collections every fortnight, we want them every week, so that we can go on making as much rubbish as we've always made, and piling it up outside the front gate. If anybody suddenly says make less rubbish we say but that's interfering with my civil liberties, I must make as much rubbish as I like because I live in the rich West. So some where there are a lot of contradictions which need to be straightened out and we do need - we need less packaging, we need less rubbish, we need to be a lot more conscious about what we're doing to the planet, to the environment. But in order to do that it can't just be about us putting stuff out in the bins at night it has to be about supermarkets and packaging which is a huge issue [CLAPPING]. I've been a member of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth for the last 25 years and we used to do those symbolic protests where you unpack everything at the checkout and just chuck it all back at them and you have at least two bin bags worth full before you've even eaten anything. That is a big problem and I think we should all start addressing that and be going in there and saying we don't want all this crap and then we could have fortnightly collections but it's up to us to change things and no you can't keep putting your rubbish out every week you know, we're all in here going to have to change our ways. [CLAPPING]
....
WINTERSON
 
This is a very tricky question and James Lovelock, a scientist whom I have a huge amount of respect as you know, is a proponent of nuclear energy and really thinks it's the only way forward. And it is someone we have to take seriously. I am trying to wade through the mass of evidence information on this to make up my own mind because it's tricky. However unlike James I do find wind farms rather beautiful. And I would rather see as much power as we can get coming from renewables rather than go down the nuclear route. But again it's back to what - how much are we prepared to give up, will you use less power, less electricity? I've just put in a geothermal system underground for my electricity which is fantastic but it costs £12,000 and Gordon Brown took seventeen and a half per cent VAT off me in order to put it in. That doesn't help the householder to help the planet. But there's a lot that we can do ourselves but we are going to have to rein in, pull back a little bit. We can't just say this is a problem for politicians, it's bigger than us, it's not bigger than us, it's about us in our homes tonight, so switch the light off. [CLAPPING]

Jeanette is a passionate environmentalist who spends £12000 on geothermal energy systems (more than you peasants spend) and has been a member of both Greenpeace & Friends of the Earth (not just one or other) for over a quarter of a century yet the Telegraph expects us to believe that she has a carbon spewing Chelsea Tractor. They should apologise.

Subsidised Industry Supports Subsidies Shocka!

The head of external affairs at the Renewable Energy Association and the Solar Trade Association thinks the government should subsidise solar panels!!

Who could have foreseen such a  development?

Japan's Nuclear Crisis In Perspective

Tim Worstall has a must read post here.

You can only compare the safety of nuclear power to the alternatives, and if an earthquake strikes I'd rather live next to a nuclear power station than a dam.

Update: Okay, I am beginning to doubt Worstallian wisdom on this topic.

Village Green Preservation Society

George Monbiot is joining the Village Green Preservation Society or at least he is writing about the importance of green spaces:

One fascinating paper shows that crime rates are also strongly affected by vegetation.

It works the other way too, look at Detroit, crime is so bad that the city is being reclaimed by the wilderness. That's not what Monbiot means of course, he is arguing that village greens and city parks are an exceptionally valuable resource.

He is right of course but the destruction of common lands isn't due to the rapaciousness of developers but because of restrictive planning laws that make it near impossible to build on the green belt and therefore leave builders with no alternative but to develop sites within existing settlements.

If we could build a little bit on what is now low value farmland we could paradoxically give far more people access to greenery.

Unreciprocated Love

Peter Hitchens writes about anti-British sentiment in the USA something I've written about before albeit more tongue in cheek than Hitchens' column, he even quotes the same buffoonish Chicago mayor of the 1920s that I mentioned- Bill Thompson.

Of course the fact that we both have to cite a figure from the 1920s to bolster the case for US anglophobia does suggest that current examples are thin on the ground despite President Obama's posturing over the oil spill.

Whilst the political posturing of US politicians such as President Obama over the BP oil leak is undignified the fact remains that they are attacking BP because BP is in the wrong not because it is British.

However whilst the President probably has nothing against us it, his rather undiplomatic blundering does illustrate another point- he isn't much interested in the world outside the United States. For all the talk of how his background meant that he would be exceptionally astute in dealing with the outside world, his outlook is intensely insular. There is nothing in the way he sees the world that consists of anything beyond the standard positions of the company he has mixed in for his adult life. To the extent he has any interest in the outside world it extends only to the impact it has on US domestic politics.

Quote Of The Day

From the current edition of Viz:

'General Public Spoiling Planet For Stars'- Says Sting

Quote Of The Day

A professor at some hippy university in the USA and former soccer international has a proposal about how to deal with the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, Tim Worstall isn't impressed:

So, we've got a gusher of an underwater oil well. And we're going to say that no one with any contact with the oil companies can work on attempting to cap said gusher.

That is, everyone who might have even teh slightest idea of how to cap it won't be let near it.

No, got to hand it to you, this is pure friggin' genius.

Tell you what, let's get Peter Crouch on to it shall we? See if there's some parrot, moon, over thing that can be put together?

I feel sorry for the politicians in all this, there is nothing they can helpfully add to the solution so they are left like Obama issueing press releases informing the people that they are still very cross indeed about this, which simply underlines their impotence on the matter.

Tree Kills Tree Hugger

This is like the British version of Timothy Treadwell, a man murdered by the life forms he swore to protect.

AGW Sceptics & Carbon Trading.

The Copenhagen summit doesn't appear to have achieved much. Not a surprise.

Malcolm Turnbull, the leader of Australia's Liberal Party was recently deposed due to his support for a carbon emissions trading programme. He writes about this in the Times. He is highly critical of the sceptics and deniers (I don't like the word in this context given its connotations but I am assuming a denier here means someone who is convinced that global warming is not happening whereas a sceptic is simply someone unconvinced that it is happening). He is surely right about an emissions trading scheme being the rational response because it restricts the output of CO2 and the creation of a market encourages CO2 emissions to be reallocated in the most efficient manner.

Scepticism about climate change is fine, I would define myself as reasonably sceptical in that I don't accept the claims that "the debate is over" and the idea that AGW is as solidly proven as the spherical shape of Earth or evolution. The behaviour of individual advocates of AGW has not inspired confidence, as is pointed out here the scandalous aspect of the leaked University of East Anglia emails wasn't that they tried to evade a Freedom of Information Act request, but that an FOI request was necessary in the first place. The denunciations of anyone who questions AGW also serve to undermine the cause, when even someone as committed to rationalism as James Randi can be attacked in really quite distasteful terms- "Could it be that the fact he is currently suffering through chemotherapy for intestinal cancer explain the lapse?"*- for simply arguing that we should keep an open mind.

However the fact remains that it is the view of the overwhelming majority of people who have studied this have concluded that CO2 emissions lead to an increase in global temperatures, so at the very least it is quite probable that AGW is real. Therefore even if one thinks that instead of being an incontrovertable fact that CO2 emissions are contributing to environmental damage, that it is actually something that is only 90%, 75% or 40% likely, it still makes sense to calculate the expected cost of CO2 emissions and set a price that will reflect that.

In fact anyone who doesn't believe with 100% certainty that global warming is not man made should support some kind of price for emitting greenhouse gases, shouldn't they?

* via

Blame Canada

I missed this George Monbiot column last week, however it was in the "Spotlight" section of google news yesterday. Moonbat writes:

Canada's image lies in tatters. It is now to climate what Japan is to whaling

I don't think he has thought his analogy through though, Japan is rather good at whaling indeed they are the best at catching whales in the whole wide world. So in effect George Monbiot is actually saying that Canada is better for the climate than any other nation on Earth.

Tree Huggers Cause Tree Massacre.

Investigators are trying to determine who drove six-inch nails into hundreds of red pine trees near Backus. They think the vandals might have thought they were saving the trees from logging; about 100 of the 600 trees were slated to be cut down and sold this month. But now the entire forest will be cut down because of safety concerns, the authorities said. Mike Diekmann of the Cass County Sheriff’s Office said that if a saw hit one of the nails, “it would explode like a gun going off” and could cause serious injury

Unintended consequences are a bugger aren't they?

Those Climate Emails

Are all the environmental campaigners who are denouncing the leaking of the CRU emails as theft against direct action now?

It is reasonable for the proponents of climate change to point out that unethical practices don't invalidate the theory itself. Some of the world's greatest scientists have been gits of the highest order yet their work remains valuable, the feud between Isaac Newton and Gottifried Liebnitz doesn't show either man in a positive light even though they were both incredible polymaths. The Piltdown man hoax does not disprove evolution

AGW advocates George Monbiot in the Guardian and Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post have both robustly defended the theory of manmade warming without soft peddling the serious issues raised by the emails, Robinson writes:

From my reading, the most damning e-mails are those in which scientists seem to be trying to squelch dissent from climate change orthodoxy -- threatening to withhold papers from journals if they publish the work of naysayers, vowing to keep skeptical research out of the official U.N.-sponsored report on climate change.

Which is exactly right. Unfortunately most of the AGW advocates have twisted themselves in knots to defend, contextualise and explain away the behaviour of the CRU scientists.

War: The Answer To All Life's Problems.

War is doing a better job of species conservation than the WWF, the wildlife charity that is not the Wrestling organisation (although they probably don't do that much conservation either):

Indian Kashmir's wildlife population has seen a dramatic increase after two decades of fighting scared off poachers and hunters from the region, a wildlife official said on Tuesday.

Similarly 50 million people died in World War 2 but it did wonders for replenishing the North Sea cod stocks, so it's an ill wind that blows no good.

An Idea Whose Time Has Come.

If only we copied the Maldives' idea of holding cabinet meetings underwater.

Although without all the scuba gear.

Self Appointed Experts.

To misquote Tom Wolfe, we are always being told that the dark night of extremism is descending on the American right yet it always seems to land on the left.

The departure of Obama's truthy former "Green Jobs" advisor Van Jones was inevitable and right. As I've said before I believe that the science supports the proposition that global warming is to a large extent man made which probably puts me in a minority in my part of the political spectrum. A lot of the public is scpetical of AGW so it doesn't help that environmentalists are perfectly happy to have gibbering lunatics as their spokesmen (I call this "Michael Meacher Syndrome").

Anyway how did Van Jones come to be appointed as Obama's expert on creating "Green Jobs"? He didn't spend years familiarising himself with economic theory, he didn't run a business, he didn't study to make himself an expert on energy policy and he didn't learn engineering so that he could create energy solutions. In fact as far as I can tell he is a dilettante who bounced around as an activist for whatever far left cause was flavour of the month, before he designated himself as an expert on the environment and job creation, he was a "Civil rights activist" (race hustler), "human rights activist" (anti-police demagogue) and an advocate of "social justice" (not to be confused with normal justice).

In other words there was nothing in his background to support his claim to expertise in the Green economy, in fact in so far as he insisted that there wouldn't be any trade offs to shifting the economy in such a different direction he is almost the exact opposite of a economic expert. Yet on the basis of these non existent credentials he was recruited by the President of the USA. It is like appointing Gillian McKeith as Surgeon General. That is the scandal.

Civilisation For Or Against?

The Guardian hosts a discussion on whether the collapse of civilisation would be a good thing or not.

In fairness George Monbiot argues against the idea on the basis that the deaths of billions would be a bad thing but the fact that it is debateable whether civilisation is a good thing or not is rather striking.

There Will Be Whitewash At The Whitehouse.

This idea doesn't seem too bad to me:

The Nobel prize-winning physicist appointed by President Obama as US Energy Secretary wants to change the colour of roofs, roads and pavements so they reflect more of the Sun’s light and heat to combat global warming, he said today.

Professor Steven Chu, speaking at the opening of the St James’s Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium, for which The Times is media partner, said this simple and “completely benign” approach to “geo-engineering” could have a vast impact at low cost.

It seems like such an obvious idea that I imagine that anyone who wasn't a Nobel winning physicist would feel a little bit embarrassed proposing it.

If it would actually works as effectively and at as little cost as Chu claims then I'm a little surprised that the idea hasn't featured more prominently in ideas for reducing global warming.Environmentalists appear to prefer solutions that are costly and would entail radical changes to how we live.

Green Taxes- So What?

I don't really get the purpose of the Taxpayers Alliance and their new 'Green Tax' calculator. If one accepts that taxes have to be raised in some manner then surely taxing something which creates negative externalities is a good thing. Obviously I'd prefer it if government spending were much lower but I don't really see why Green taxes are any worse than income tax, National Insurance, Stamp Duty or VAT.

They have been used in part to raise taxes by stealth- so the government doesn't have to raise income tax- but the problem there is surely ever rising taxes not the form they take.

Update: Just to clarify, when I say "I don't really get the purpose of the Taxpayers Alliance and their new 'Green Tax' calculator" I didn't intend to say that I didn't get the purpose of the TPA, I was just referring to the Green Tax Calculator.

Population Alarmism.

David Attenborough is climbing aboard the population alarmist bandwagon:

Sir David Attenborough has warned British couples to limit the number of children they have to help quell the 'frightening' growth in the world's population.

The veteran broadcaster said the planet is under 'mounting pressure' from an 'explosion in human numbers'.

Britain's fertility rate is between 1.6 and 1.9 depending on how it is measured, in other words it is below two and once the demographic momentum of previous years plays out the population will fall. So there is no need for Britain to do anything about our population.

There are some countries where the population is growing too fast but they are not in the West. Almost invariably population alarmism goes hand in hand with an admiration for totalitarian government:

Sir David, 82, said families in the UK need to control their number of offspring - a policy already adopted by China where parents are allowed just one child.

If my younger brother was Richard Attenborough then I might also support a one child policy but how successful is China's policy? Well there are 5 countries or territories with a majority Chinese population- China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Macau and Taiwan. Only one adopts a one child policy- China- and guess which one has by far the highest birth rate? China.

With the exception of a few Middle Eastern countries where women aren't allowed to do much else beyond breed, the factors that correlates most strongly with low birth rates are increasing prosperity and a reduction in infant mortality not a totalitarian government.