Tim Worstall

The environmental audit committee is calling on the government to introduce measures such as a new carbon tax to push the price of carbon from its level of €15 (£13) a tonne to what the MPs see as a more credible price of €100.

Tim Yeo, chairman of the committee, said: “Emissions trading should be helping us to combat climate change, but at the moment the price of carbon simply isn’t high enough to make it work. The recession has left many big firms with more carbon allowances than they need and carbon prices have collapsed.

“If the government wants to kick-start serious green investment, it must step in to stop the price of carbon flatlining,” the MP added.

Even Bleedin‘ Lord Stern only thoght the price should be $80 a tonne (which for technical reasons is arounf €30-€40 right now).

Don’t these cretins even bother to read the reports sent to them?

The modern day civil society that is.

So what will we get? Bankers talking to bankers and saying stakeholders want what bankers want.

I despair.

The EU / EC should:

a) Allocate seats to stakeholder groups

b) Fund them

c) Make clear they can issue minority reports if need be

d) Provide them with technical support.

There was a time when civil society meant what was done outside government. Now it seems to have morphed into what those with bees in their bonnet can get government to pay for. This is how we end up with Friends of the Earth Europe getting 50% of their funds from the European Union for advising the European Union.

And yes, that is our favourite retired accountant making a pitch for a cushy seat on an unaccountable tax funded quango.

You may have noticed that I’ve got opinions on lots of things. I’ve never quite had the effrontery though to demand that those who aren’t interested in them pay for the privilege of being forced to listen to them.

Others seem less reticent.

This is an entirely reasonable piece on Christianity, Teh Gays, acceptance of and so on.

Your intro to it from the Op/Ed page is entirely stupid.

Every bit of Christian teaching can be summed up in three words: God is love. That is the simple truth that teaches tolerance of same-sex unions.

If you’re incapable of distinguishing between agape and eros then perhaps you might want to find some other part of the newspaper in which to deploy your undoubted talents.

Or perhaps, not five years behind the Times, but 5 years behind Google.

Zeitgeist is a visual record of what people are currently finding interesting on guardian.co.uk at the moment. While other bits of the site are curated by editors (like the front page, or individual sections) or metadata (like blogs, which display in reverse-chronological order), Zeitgeist is dynamic, powered by the attention of users, which is why we’ve put this into the Community section.

Mmmm, hmmm,

Some people have also asked about the name Zeitgeist and wondered why we’re using it. Zeitgeist is a German word which means “spirit of the times” and is commonly used to capture the cultural/intellectual mood and interests or sociocultural direction of a particular nation or group of people at a particular time – in our case, Guardian readers and site users.

Perhaps they don’t know that Google Zeitgeist is what Google Trends used to be called?

On how bureaucracies just keep on operating.

I’ve heard (but cannot prove) that the US Post Office was delivering across the lines until 1863…..

Well, it’s not quite Dover, just the port, but sure, flog it off:

The Port of Dover is being recommended by Government advisers for sale to the French authorities.

It’s not like they’re going to try and pack it up and take it home now, is it? The value of a port lies in, umm, where that port lies.

But much more fun is this:

Chief executive Bob Goldfield said: ‘The time is right for the voluntary privatisation of Dover. We want to invest around £400million on a second terminal and need to invest in the existing terminal, but are unable to because of public sector borrowing constraints. We want to throw off the shackles.’

One of the arguments used about government ownership of things is that only government will invest the right amount in them. You know, business is all too short term, the lust for profits means no one thinks beyond the end of their nose and only government, those wise and omniscient beings who run it, can properly take the long view.

Well, yes, but: that’s not how it works out in practice, is it?

The water companies were constrained in their investment plans by the amount being borrowed and splurged on paying for redundant miners. BT ditto….and here the Port of Dover is constrained by the amount Gordon Brown has pissed away over the years. Even under a Prime Minister who still ran a deficit at the peak of the boom (on the basis that government could and should invest in infrastructure) couldn’t provide the cash to expand a port.

The truth is, you see, that government has a much shorter investment horizon than business: what money there is needs to be spent on winning the next election, not building the infrastructure the country might desire or require.

One of the arguments in favour of privatisation is exactly that government does not think long term.

At the ASI.

Thomas Friedman’s purpose on earth seems to be to get the wrong end of the stick.

Yet another defence review…..and there are those over on the left telling us that the two carriers must be scrapped.

Hmm.

There’s a reason you have two: big ships like that are such complex beasts that you’ve nearly always got one in dock somewhere, being repaired, upgraded, outfitted.

You’d also rather like to make sure that if you’ve got a proper shooting war that one lucky torpedo doesn’t take down the Navy’s entire offensive capability. Heck, the Navy’s entire defensive capability come to that.

The bigger question of course is whether we need any carriers at all. If we do, we need two, if we don’t, well….

Which brings us to this liberal intervention thing. I realise that Iraq and Afghanistan are, err, controversial.

But what about Sierra Leone and Liberia? You can of course take the view that neither were any of our business. But looking back at them as having happened they do seem to have made the world a better place.

And yes, doing either or both of them depended upon our having carriers to do them with.

So, without carriers (of some sort) we’d not be able to do such liberal interventions in the future. Is being able to do that worth 1% of a year’s government spending spread over a number of years?

Anyone who is against the carrier program care to answer that specific question?

Two people were confirmed dead and dozens injured on Sunday when a gas power plant exploded in Middletown, Connecticut, it has been reported.

And also a point to be made about the safety of different forms of generation.

This one accident in a gas fired plant has killed more than the entire US civil nuclear program.

So much for the dangers of nuclear power…..

Here.

The Papists are having a competition for manifesto policies.

Most fun to drop into the comments on each one and discuss the logic, sense or even connection with reality of them.

And I know that not all his clients will be balancing their books – many of them will borrow, for years at a time.

Eh?

Sorry? Any company, individual or organisation that has borrowings has not balanced their books?

Are we absolutely certain that this man worked as an accountant?

At the ASI.

More on the stupidity of politicians.

So says Suzanne Moore.

Oddly, they’re going to do just this you know.

Usually called a “General Election”.

DOCTORS have uncovered the first evidence that fathers of test-tube babies may be passing on their infertility to their sons.

Genetically based problem passed on through genes. That’ll have the evolutionists perplexed, eh?

And writing the editorials too:

There are many excellent reasons to effect the transition to a low-carbon economy: cleaner air, economic independence from oil-exporting states, cheaper energy….

Jebus, if low carbon energy were in fact cheaper then we wouldn’t be having a problem, would we? We could do away with cap and trade, carbon taxes, subsidies and feed in tariffs and just stand back as the market covered the country with windmills and the roof space of the nation with solar cells.

It is precisely because low carbon energy is *more expensive* than fossil fuel that we actually have a problem in the first place.

I would ask “Don’t These People Have Editors?” but sadly the editorials are actually written by them.

Which is why David Cameron and George Osborne’s attempt to revive a better Conservative tradition – liberal conservatism or red Toryism – is such a difficult and perilous project. They have to persuade their comrades that fairness matters; there is such a thing as society; market fundamentalism has screwed up; and there is no option but to use the state cleverly and purposefully to reform the broken structures of British capitalism.

It is a tough challenge because, apart from the odd tract, there is no canon of red Tory ideas from which to borrow. Liberal Conservatives don’t have a John Rawls, Maynard Keynes, Joe Stiglitz, Amartya Sen or Michael Sandel to inform their thinking.

Liberal conservatism has no canon? There are none who might inform the thinking?

Wot? Adam Smith, JS Mill, David Ricardo, Friedrich Hayek, Alfred Marshall,  Schumpeter, Mises, Friedman, aren’t enough to be getting on with?

Coase, Buchanan to give just a couple more Nobel Laureates?

What a miserable dribble of a weak effusion Hutton is.

Look, I’m no defender of Ashcroft but really, The Observer should be better than this:

Ashcroft promised to become a permanent resident of the UK as a condition of his ennoblement in 2000. A year earlier, he had been rejected as a member of the Lords by the political honours scrutiny committee. But successive Conservative leaders have since refused to reveal whether he has fulfilled his promise to take up UK residency.

Pressure on Ashcroft increased last week when the information commissioner accused the Tory leadership of being “evasive and obfuscatory” over his tax status, the Guardian revealed. The Cabinet Office has been ordered to reveal within 29 days the nature of the undertaking that Ashcroft made to become domiciled in the UK when he became a peer in 2000.

Residency and domicile are two different things!

It’s very difficult indeed to see why someone needs to be domiciled in the UK in order to be a peer: Lord Paul, on the Labour benches, is not domiciled.

If Ashcroft promised something then sure, he should be held to that promise. But can we please at least try and be accurate about what it is that he promised so that we can then decide whether he has kept it?

It is impossible to understand why their lordships think that such a consideration should take precedence over diminishing a clear and present danger to national security.

Well, you know, actually, umm, it’s not impossible to understand.

The judges on the Supreme Court understand something which all too many seem to have forgotten. There is a tension between national security and the rights of the citizenry.

Always has been, always will be.

We could improve national security by simply locking up any bugger who looked a bit didgy. Plenty of places do this after all.

We could improve the rights of the accused by having absolutely no methods of locking anyone up at all until we have proved them guilty, judge and jury and all, of something that deserved locking up. That would mean no holding people on remand while they await trial for example.

We do try and chart a course between this Scylla and, umm, the other one.

In this case the government whacked into law a rule that anyone on the UN Security Council’s list should and could have their assets frozen. No one needs to reveal why an individual is on said list. The Supreme Court said, well, you know, if you want to do that then you’ve got to get Parliament to pass it: you can’t just slip such a rule in by fiat.

And no, we’ll not give you three months grace before our vacating of those confiscation orders which are already extant comes into effect.

As long as you understand this tension, between security and liberty, then you’ll understand the Court’s point. Executives the world over are delighted to violate the latter on (sometimes, often) spurious grounds concerning the former. This is part of the near 800 year long balancing of the two that the Common Law has been attempting. The refusal of the grace period might best be viewed as a “naughty, naughty, now don’t try this sort of shite again matey”.

At the ASI.

Even if we do agree there are problems that need to be solved that’s no guarantee that the political process will solve them….given the politicians we have.