As Lord Marland put it this week: “It is already going to cost the consumer £7 billion for £400 million of net present value.”

This makes the consumer £ 6.6 billion poorer of course.

We really do want to remember only to do those things which have an NPV over and above the cost of doing hem.

For one thing, the model used by the MIT scientists didn’t make precise “predictions”, but projected what was likely to happen if certain trends continued, allowing for “adjustable assumptions” of resource use. Their real finding was not that collapse was likely to occur by a particular year, but that population and the global economy would contract rapidly after peaking. The only circumstances under which some kind of stabilisation, rather than collapse, was achieved, was constraining population and the scale of the economy.

Models and reality are not the same thing. But – strikingly given the relatively crude computer modelling available at the time – the MIT projections have proved remarkably accurate. Today they can be checked against decades of actual data. Population, industrial output, pollution and food consumption all track the lines in the model.

Quite true you ignorant tosspot. Except, of course, for one thing that hasn’t come true: we’ve not run out of resources, have we? For resources are not some fixed endowment with which we start. Resources are things that we create, manufacture, by inventing new technologies which do so.

I have yet to see any figures to illustrate how growth in rich countries can, in perpetuity, be compatible with environmental limits,

I have explained it to you several times. Are you thick or just not listening?

One thing is sure: advocates of growth need to be able to show not only that environmental impact can be cancelled out by efficiency and resource substitution, but that deep, absolute reductions in resource use can be achieved simultaneously, and that such gains can be made year, after year, after year, ad infinitum.

No, we don’t. We need to be able to show that economic growth is compatible with whatever resource constraints that you specify.

There are many problematic issues to do with growth that can’t be covered here. Clinging to growth, however, suffocates the imagination needed to devise more convivial ways to share a finite planet. At the very least, and with so much evidence to the contrary, the burden of proof now lies heavily on those who reject the original message of the Limits report, for them to demonstrate how, and under what circumstances, we could possibly enjoy “growth forever” in a finite world.

And here it is once again you miserable cretin.

So, let us imagine that steady state economy of Herman Daly. We abstract no new resources, at least no resources unsustainably, from nature. We recycle everything and use only renewable energy etc. We’re stuck with just what we’ve already dug out of the ground, we’re not going to mine any new mountains etc.

Excellent, now, in this scenario can we have economic growth? Sure we can, for as long as technology allows us to make more with the same resources or use fewer resources to make the same things.

For example, gold plating on computer boards used to be 200 nm. Now it’s more like 2 nm. So, out of that available stock of gold (and recall, something like 99.9% of all gold ever mined is still available for use, we’re missing pretty much only grave goods and the stuff that weathers off onion domes) we can now make 200 times as many computer boards as we could only 30 years ago.

Or, if you prefer, we can make the same nuber of computer boards and we can still make more gold teeth for rap artists.

We have had economic growth, either way, because we now have either more computer boards or the same number plus gold teeth.

And this is without even thinking about the definition of economic growth, a rise in GDP. GDP is an increase in the value of goods and services as valued at market prices. Perhaps resource constraints do, or at some point will, mean that more goods cannot be produced. But why would that limit the value we can add through advancing technology?

And what’s so intensely annoying about your and your bloviations Mr. Simms is that this is all explained in your Ur text, the works of Herman Daly as above. He says that a steady state economy must move from the consumption of more resources to a stable consumption, to a resource limited mode of production. But he also points out that we can still increase value add and we can thus still have economic growth. He calls the latter qualitative growth, the former quantitative growth.

Shrug, he’s just using different names for absolutely standard economic thinking. Even in a resource constrained world economic growth will continue at the rate of technological advancement.

And you’re just to dim to understand what your own fucking Bible is telling you.

Be Gone, sod off, trouble us no more!

according to the coalition of community groups, which adds that many places are missing out on the chance to produce their own low-carbon and low-cost energy, supported by government subsidies.

Umm, if everyone else in the country has to chip in to pay for this energy then it’s not “their own” is it. And if it requires subsidies then it’s not cheap is it?

And we hang them from their own windmill towers? Probably not, as they’re not “their own” are they?

Last year, a former executive director, Charles Secrett, accurately accused it and other green groups of being “out of touch, ineffective and bureaucratic”, adding: “Interminable meetings, not action, are the order of most days.”

Happens even to Friends of the Earth.

Worstall’s Law: In the end, any and every organisation will be run by those who can stay awake in committee.

Population growth is, of course, partly responsible, but so is growing affluence, which, especially in India and China, is increasing the demand for meat. It takes 8lb of grain in feed, for example, to produce 1lb of beef.

This is one of those minor Americanisms that really irritates me.

It is true that if you grow a cow on a feed lot then you get that 8:1 ratio.

However, if you grow a cow on pasture then you get a ratio more like 0:1.

And there’s an awful lot of pasture out there that cannot be ploughed up to grow grain but is just great at growing grass for cows to eat.

And while this isn’t entirely true it is generally so: lots of American cows are on feed lots, few European ones. So why do we keep quoting this American number when it’s simply not true for us here?

The problem being that pollution affects property so therefore libertarians should be very much against pollution because of property rights but they’re not. In fact, they go all denialist over pollution precisely because they can’t bear to be confronted with the conflict between pollution and property rights.

Well, yes. Perhaps. Good enough for a bit of GCSE reasoning I suppose.

It does however betray a certain lack of knowledge about libertarianism, right wing loons generally and even such trivial matters as economics.

For, you see, exactly this argument, this point, has been made before. That there is indeed a conflict between property rights and pollution and so whadda we gonna do about it?

A point made in The Problem of Social Cost published in 1960. The answer being, to keep it short, that where transactions costs are low then private property rights will solve pollution problems and where they are high then regulation is needed.

So it isn’t that this conundrum is a new one for libertarians and right wing loons generally. It’s one that has been raised, assessed and answered: answered sufficiently that the man who raised, considered and answered the point was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1991.

Jeez, if you’re going to wibble about pollution and property rights you really ought to be aware of the seminal work on the point, no? And it’s not as if the UK has so many Economics Laureates that you could overlook Ronald Coase, is it?

The figures – released by RenewableUK, the industry’s trade body – include four deaths and a further 300 injuries to workers.

That’s just in the UK and just in the past 5 years you understand.

And when you calculate it by deaths by amount of energy produced it gets worse.

The death rate for wind is three to four times that of nuclear, that of solar 10 tmes.

Why do the greenies want to kill people?

Not, as far as I know, online.

‘Some recycling is an extraordinarily
good idea – but not when it’s the
latest new state religion,’ says the
economist Tom Worstall, a Fellow of
the Adam Smith Institute and the
author of Chasing Rainbows: Economic
Myths, Environmental Facts.
‘The concept of zero waste is insane.
They are not asking questions, not
analysing costs and in some cases, in
pursuit of their ambition, they are
doing more harm to the environment.
Rather than being a panacea,
recycling may be running us into
problems, because some recycling is a
very bad idea.
‘Take green glass, for example, which
most of our wines comes in. It’s
ground up for hard-core beneath
road surfaces. The Westminster
Government’s own research concedes
that recycling it causes more carbon
emission than dumping it.
‘Another example is food. Waste is
collected and put through a ‘digester’
that produces methane gas. If you
dump it, bacteria does the same job.
Now, I am not certain which system is
better – and that is my point. In our
haste to recycle everything, no one is
asking questions.
‘We might also consider the cost of
our time to satisfy the demands of
councils to separate waste into our
five, six or seven bins. It is estimated
that it takes 45 minutes. If we were
paid only a minimum wage, the sum
would be greater than the annual cost
of waste disposal.
‘We are moving not at the pace of
practicality but religious zeal. All
those bins! Seven or eight journeys to
pick them up! Sending waste by road
over hundreds of miles!’

….

Mr Worstall adds: ‘I really think it’s time to
step back and distinguish between what is
good and what is not in recycling… for the
truth of the matter is that we are not doing
this at all properly.’

It’s a bit late for me to correct them about my not being an economist……and it’s the result of a 30 minute conversation being turned into notes rather than quite direct qoutations….

Nonetheless, in recent years a few economists have advanced a contrary view. Tim Jackson in the UK, Herman Daly in the US, and Serge Latouche in France have argued that growth is not always good for the environment or for the real health of communities, and that GDP growth is impossible to sustain over the long run anyway because we live on a planet with limited natural resources.

What they say (at least, Daly does and I’m not sure how much the other two have misunderstood him) is that resource limits are a limit upon economic grwoth but not the limit.

Leave aside for a moment whether they’re correct that we are currently anywhere near actual resource limits (I don’t think so at all, other than overloading the atmosphere with CO2 but….) and concentrate on the logic for a moment.

Yes, it’s true, we cannot use more copper atoms than there are copper atoms on the planet. Iron, iron etc. Cannot use more human labour than there are people and hours.

Leave aside all of the economist’s stuff about substitutability etc as well.

OK, they’re right, there’s environmental limits to the volume of goods and or services (energy and time being the limits there perhaps) that we can produce. Thus there is an environmental limit to the physical size of the economy we can build.

Lovely: but GDP is not the physical size of anything. It is “the value of goods and services produced”. Within our environmental constraints we can change the value of what is produced. One obvious method is by adding more value to those environmentally restricted physical inputs.

The process of discovering those new methods of adding value is also known as inventing new technologies.

Which is what Daly actually says is the steady state economy. It’s not one in which GDP stays constant. It’s one in which the abstraction of resources from the environment stays constant and GDP rises as when and if we can invent technologies which add more value to them.

Which is where all of these no growth Jeremiahs go howlingly wrong (and Daly himself is known to ignore his own studies in his rhetoric). Resource availability is a constraint upon GDP growth but not the, not an absolute and not the defining one. Even with constant, shrinking or artificially limited resource use we can still have GDP growth.

Protestations that government is encouraging electric cars and needs more time to comply are rubbish. It’s not as if air pollution is hard to control or even expensive. Most comes from mass car use, so a national network of low emissions zones could be set up within months. Fewer vehicles could be allowed into city centres. Government could spend on better cycling and pedestrian infrastructure.

Spending on pedestrian and cycling infrastructure is an expense, yes.

As is “fewer vehicles in city centres”. It could be an expense worth bearing, it might even be on net profitable. But it is still an expense, not something to just be blithely waved away.

Europe, says the EEA, could be paying €537bn (£460bn) a year in human health terms for air pollution by 2020, and government estimates it costs Britain £20bn a year already.

OK, let’s just imagine, £20 billion is the cost to use of cars in city centres. I mean it isn’t, that’s the total cost of air pollution but let’s just imagine that it is.

OK, so, how much is it worth to use to be able to have cars in city centres? More or less than £20 billion?

No, I don’t know either but that is the sum we have to do before we can tell whether reducing air pollution is cheap or expensive, isn’t it?

The Chancellor’s claim that planning costs are among the highest in the world is groundless; when asked for its evidence, the Treasury had to admit it had “no recorded information”.

Damn, this isn’t even economics, it’s straight arithmetic!

What is the price of a house in England? £200k or there abouts for a dwelling (ie, house, flat, average of them all).

What is the rebuild cost of a house (flat, house, average of them all etc)? Given that a nice house costs £120k to build, say, £100k? Fair enough?

What is the price of land? £10k a hectare or thereabouts. How many houses/dwellings can you put on a hectare? The government says 14 minimum. So, we can see that the cost of land is under £1k per dwelling.

I’m not going too fast for anyone am I? Good, now, out with the calculator.

£200k minus £100k mionus £1 k gives: £99k.

Excellent, we now have the cost of the planning system to each household in the country: £99k.

Excellent, off you go now and see if you can find a place with a higher cost, eh?

Hundreds of solar companies were likely to go bust by Christmas, it was claimed, after Greg Barker, the minister for climate change, said “feed-in tariff” subsidies were too generous and would be halved.

We can but hope, eh?

Such should be the fate of subsidy junkies.

All the usual tosh from all the usual suspects.

Just about the entire economics department from SOAS. Prem Sikka (yes, they are counting an accountant as an economist), R. Murphy (ditto), the bird who writes Gaian Economics, various nef-ites, Gregor Gall (professor of industrial relations I think, not an economist?).

Essentially, a list of those who have or do write for The Guardian plus those who would like to.

Increase benefits and pay for it through an FTT (even the EU has said that an FTT will shrink the economy).

Green Quantitative Easing. Print money to spend on windmills in effect. They’re incapable of understanding the difference between quantitative easing (printing money to bring down long term interest rates) and printing money to spend.

Oh, and the Government should direct investment through a national investment bank. As if it’s not been tried before and doesn’t work?

Under current plans, the level of the feed-in tariff is likely to more than halve, from 43p per kWh to 20p. The solar industry says it can broadly live with that level, but some companies warned that schemes to provide disadvantaged communities and households with low-cost power and heating would be the most likely to be scrapped under the changes.

So we’re going to halve the amount of money pissed away on stupid schemes. Excellent.

And the schemes that won’t be built are the ones which are the least efficient in the first place. Doubleplusgood.

while massively increasing the priority and resources for family planning and women’s empowerment programmes in developing countries, enabling the 215 million women with an unmet need for contraception to control their own fertility.

All the woe is doom merchants about population, they’re all always going on about contraception.

As I’ve said all too often before, contraception isn’t the point. Sure, if people don’t have it and would like it, give it to them. It’s a cheap way of making their lives better so why the hell not?

But look at the damn numbers would you? Even those claiming that contraception is the solution are saying that there’s only 215 million people who want to use it and don’t have it. That’s among 7 billion people. It just isn’t the deciding factor.

What is the deciding factor is desiring to use contraception, desiring to limit fertility, not the means by which one does so.

There are, give or take, 3.5 billion women on the planet (yes, not all fertile at the same time) and we’ve been really rather successful at getting them to desire to limit their fertility. Because that’s just what getting rich does, offers both the likelihood of survival for the children one does have plus other more exciting things to do than pumping out a never ending stream of babies.

Get rich and the population problem goes away: as it has done (except for immigration) in every country that has got rich.

The United Nations will warn this week that the world’s population could more than double to 15 billion by the end of this century, putting a catastrophic strain on the planet’s resources unless urgent action is taken to curb growth rates, the Observer can reveal.

That figure is likely to shock many experts as it is far higher than many current estimates. A previous UN estimate had expected the world to have more than 10 billion people by 2100; currently, there are nearly 7 billion.

The new figure is contained in a landmark study by the United Nations Population Fund (Unfpa) that will be released this week. The report –The State of World Population 2011 – is being compiled to mark the expected moment this month when somewhere on Earth a person will be born who will take the current world population over the 7 billion mark, and will be released simultaneously in cities across the globe.

The thing to remember about UN population predictions is that they have, at least in the past they have, offered three variants. Low, medium and high.

Actual outturns have been around or below the low figure, that low figure continually being revised down with each passing set of predictions. But it’s always possible, of course, for people to take a new report of the figures, latch onto the high prediction and thus cry havoc.

As is being done here.

The important questions are a) well, how likely is each variant and b) what actions can we take to influence which path is actually followed?

As I’ve said many a time before, it’s not actually contraception which changes population size. It’s helpful, yes, certainly I see no reason at all why those who want to use it shouldn’t be supplied with it. Not as a matter of human rights or anything, but it’s a remarkably cheap way of making others peoples’ lives, as they are lived, better, and as good little liberals we should be all in favour of that.

No, the key to it all is the desire to limit family size, the wish to use contraception if it is available that makes the difference. Providing condoms to someone who wishes to become pregnant isn’t all that useful, providing a situation in which a woman wishes to limit her family size is.

Fortunately, we know what does that too: rising wealth. It’s happened everywhere wealth has gone above a certain level (around and about $5,000 to $6,000 GDP per capita I think?) so the great game if it really is population that you’re worried about is how to get wealth for everyone up above that level. Economic growth in short.

Even more remarkably, we’ve actually been pretty good at this in the past 30 odd years. No, it isn’t all just China and or India. We’re seeing good and strong economic growth in Africa as well. Something to do with that so despised Washington Consensus actually: you know, that list of stupid things that governments shouldn’t do?

Some problems don’t have solutions: some do. This population one is one where we do know the solution and we’ve already implemented the solution. Get economic growth going, pour the petrol of neoliberalism and globalisation on the fire and watch as birth rates fall.

Job done.

A third of all shoppers say that they are cooking with leftover food and scraps more than they were at the start of the year, according to a survey into shopping habits by the IGD, the food and grocery industry body.

Won’t WRAP and all the environmentalists be pleased? You know, the people who have been whining that we throw away far too much of the food that we buy?

Or maybe it doesn’t work like that. It’s good if you waste less food because you are pure of heart but not good if you waste less food because you’re skint?

You know, intentions matter more than the environment?

Clyde Loakes, a councillor at Waltham Forest, said the verdict was disappointing.

He said rubbish would continue to be dumped on street corners if businesses did not ensure that their waste was transferred to a licensed contractor.

He said: “Last year we handed out 1,650 fixed penalty notices and carried out almost 100 successful prosecutions for waste offences and this one judgment, while unhelpful, will not deter us from pursuing this type of irresponsible behaviour.”

Now what did this fool do? He and his bureaucratic mates spent £15,000 on prosecuting a company. Said company had given a man a few cardboard boxes, one of which was later found flytipped.

Thus they prosecuted the company for not making sure that their waste went to an approved waste disposal operative.

More importantly, they were striving mightily to make sure that no one could ever reuse material: which is quite insane when you think of it. Material must be “disposed of” not, reused by another person.

Take it to the extreme: you may not sell your used car, it must go for disposal by an approved and licensed disposer of cars.

Cretins, but then that’s bureaucracy for you, people being stupid in offices.

Cuadrilla Resources believes there are 200 trillion cubic feet of “shale” gas in the Bowland basin, which could result in a Lancashire gas boom creating 5,600 jobs at peak production.

Yeah, yeah, unconfirmed, they might be causing earthquakes with their drilling, Chris Huhne has seen Gasland and thinks everyones’ taps will blow up.

However, the killer fact is this:

Executive director Dennis Carlton said initial results show a basin five to 10 times thicker than America’s Marcellus shale.

That is, in technical terms, what is known as a fuck of a lot of gas.

One very back of the envelope calculation states that this one field, only Lancashire, could supply the entire UK’s gas demand for 30 years. Yes, at peak winter demand.