Tim Worstall

Tonight, Hilary Benn, the environment secretary, said the ban would have both financial and environmental benefits. It would cut greenhouse gas emissions from landfill sites and from manufacturing new products such as cans and bottles from virgin materials.
It would also save councils money on the landfill tax charged for every tonne [...]

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According to a study, when people feel they have been morally virtuous by saving the planet through their purchases of organic baby food, for example, it leads to the “licensing [of] selfish and morally questionable behaviour”, otherwise known as “moral balancing” or “compensatory ethics”.
Do Green Products Make Us Better People is [...]

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Here.
Energy systems face the same problem…..which isn’t good news for renewables.

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So, a new paper out showing that the subsea permafrost in the Arctic is melting. This will/could lead to large emissions of methane and thus to increased climate change and thus to we’re all gonna die.
A brief outline of the paper is here.
Now, me, I’m perfectly willing to accept that hypothesis. Not that I’ve the [...]

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Beneath the corrugated iron roof of an open-ended old pig shed – amid swooping swallows – workers were painstakingly hand-separating paper, plastics, glass, aluminium, food scraps, vegetable matter and other material that can be used again, leaving only the remnants to go into the island’s rudimentary waste disposal system. Every week, [...]

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Jeremy Leggett tries to recover from the shotgun blasts fired at Solar PV subsidies served up by George Monbiot.
Doesn’t so all that well to be honest.
Second, Monbiot says the government’s scheme targets money where economies of scale are “impossible” – an incorrect assumption because solar electricity costs will inevitably fall to the point, within [...]

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George Monbiot is sensible.
The people who sell solar photovoltaic (PV) panels and micro wind turbines in the UK insist they represent a good investment. The arguments I have had with them have been long and bitter. But the debate has now been brought to an end with the publication of the government’s [...]

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A robot capable of automatically sorting rubbish into six categories of recycled waste using laser detectors has been developed by scientists in Japan.
Excellent. Stick a few of those in the municipal dump and we can return to throwing our rubbish away in single sacks.
As I’ve shouted about several times before, the time spent sorting waste [...]

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So there’s to be an announcement of a new off the grid super duper energy generation thingie called the Bloom Box today.
The Guardian’s environment correspondent seems to be a little at sea about what it actually is.
A new but still unseen technology that its creator claims can be an off-grid source of cheap, clean [...]

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UN warns world could be swamped by electronic waste
The world faces being swamped with a tidal wave of electronic waste as sales of household gadgets boom over the next decade, according to a UN report.
Quite a simple reason.
Electronic waste is valuable. There’s, quite literally, gold in them thar swamps. Plus all sorts of lovely stuff [...]

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The greens claim to understand the dynamics of complex ecosystems better than the rest of humanity; the simplistic assumptions and unrealistic strategies with which they’ve approached the complex ecosystem of international politics don’t provide the dispassionate observer with much evidence in support of this claim.
I would add that their incredibly naive [...]

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The fact that it is more expensive:
Fortnightly bin collections are to be extended across the country to save money.
We already have the taxes in place to cover the externalities of waste disposal: landfill tax for example.
So, if recycling did indeed save resources as a whole, given that we’ve already internalised the externalities, it would be [...]

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So, the Japanese are finding that the cherry tree blossom ain’t like it used to be:
The Japanese have for centuries celebrated the arrival of spring by sitting beneath cherry trees as their delicate blossoms open each year, but due to global warming and the impact of rising temperatures in cities caused by vehicle emissions, air [...]

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A sensible environmentalist.
Now Ofgem says that a range of government interventions, even renationalisation, are needed if new investment is to be secured. I think everyone accepts that the market needs reform to incentivise investment but what we need is a better designed market, not state direction. That is a recipe for [...]

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Becoming a vegetarian can do more harm to the environment than continuing to eat red meat, according to a study of the impacts of meat substitutes such as tofu.
The findings undermine claims by vegetarians that giving up meat automatically results in lower emissions and that less land is needed to produce food.
The [...]

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Leggett again, thought I’d have a look at the actual report.
Taskforce member companies
Arup, Foster and Partners, Scottish and Southern Energy, Solarcentury, Stagecoach Group, Virgin Group.
Hmm, two architects, one generator, a solar panel installer, a bus company and the Bearded One.
This is where we go for our expertise on global oil supply and demand?
Ho hum….

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Well, yes, umm….
Stephen and Sarah Nunn are believed to be the first people to sell olives grown in Britain……The couple’s glass-covered grove has yielded 200 kilos of olives, which are worth a total of about £4,000 and are being sold for £3.50 pounds per 100g, four [...]

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Quite simply, we cannot have economic growth because it’ll cause climate change. Thus we must stop economic growth.
In slightly more detail, economic growth necessarily means that we’ll go over 2 oC of warming and thus Flipper will boil as the oceans evanesce into the atmosphere.
Thus we should stop economic growth.
I refute it thusly:
The IPCC tells [...]

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Yet there are no experimental controls (study areas in which one or both methods are not being tried), so there is no means of telling which of the two measures is working, or whether changes in the incidence of the disease have anything to do with the experiment. There’s a scientific term for a study [...]

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Lordy this man has some interesting ideas.
Similarly, Britain’s ability to feed itself has been in long-term decline, and food prices are reportedly rising in the cold spell. It was only two years ago that droughts in Australia caused a crisis in world grain supplies; in April 2008 food crises affected at least 37 countries and [...]

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