Tim Worstall

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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So George has found an argument which he thinks is terribly persuasive. Libertarians, right wing loons generally, face a horrible problem because they believe in property rights. 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 [...]

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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 [...]

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In the Scottish Mail. 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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Migratory animals migrate. Who knew?

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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 [...]

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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, [...]

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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.

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Letter to the Observer here. 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?). [...]

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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 [...]

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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, [...]

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Something to be aware of. 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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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This is really momentous news: 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 [...]

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If there are three things I fear, as a passionate environmentalist who wants to see wild habitats restored all over the world, they are biofuels, renewable electricity and organic farming. Each would demand much, much more land from nature.

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Never let it be said that there’s not an economic concept that our Gaian Economist cannot misunderstand. In a peasant community, each new birth represents a mouth that needs feeding from a limited land resource; in contrast, in an economy where livelihoods are based around the labour-market, each birth represents a potential labourer whose time [...]

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