The smartest money in global warming stocks may be scurrying to the exit just when the enthusiasm for alternative-energy companies is at an all-time high....
``As an investment play,'' global warming is ``a bubble'' and ``social short-term craze,'' said Ken Fisher, who oversees $35 billion as chairman of Fisher Investments Inc. in Woodside, California.
Anyone looking for corroboration of that assessment may find it in the so-called short selling of U.S. alternative-energy stocks last month, which climbed 45 times faster than the average for Standard & Poor's 500 Index members.
SunPower, the biggest U.S. producer of solar energy, had the largest jump in short sales relative to shares outstanding in the Nasdaq Stock Market. Short sellers sell borrowed stock on the bet price declines will let them to buy back the shares at a lower price and profit from the difference.
------------------------
Note that this isn't even these managers betting their & their clients money that catastrophic warming isn't happening, take that as a given & anyway these guys aren't interested in investments of 100 years. What they are saying is that the global hype about warming is visibly about to burst. Next year all the politicians & BBC who are now riding the warming bandwaggon, saying sceptics are "from Mars" & that Holland & Norfolk are about to go underwater will all be hurrying away & looking for a new scare story to leech off of.
Course what do they know. If they're so smart howcum they aren't rich?
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
"NUCLEAR IS THE EASY ANSWER"
This is a comment online & unpublished letter to the Scotsman:
While nuclear engineering is obviously complicated the basic questions - is it cheaper, has it a better safety record, is it reliable, does it produce less pollution, is it far less visually interfering than wind or smokestack - are all easily answered in the affirmative which makes the decision what the Americans call a no-brainer.
Malcolm Slesser (letter 21st Feb) has asked for an impartial source to assit him. May I go one better & give him the words of an opponent. Nicol Stephen was willing to say, during the BBC "energy debate", that "nuclear is the easy answer" & that he only opposes it because it is so obviously satisfactory that if new nuclear was adopted the electorate would never be willing to shell out for windmill subsidies, If someone so resolutely opposed says this its superiority can hardly be denied.
While nuclear engineering is obviously complicated the basic questions - is it cheaper, has it a better safety record, is it reliable, does it produce less pollution, is it far less visually interfering than wind or smokestack - are all easily answered in the affirmative which makes the decision what the Americans call a no-brainer.
Malcolm Slesser (letter 21st Feb) has asked for an impartial source to assit him. May I go one better & give him the words of an opponent. Nicol Stephen was willing to say, during the BBC "energy debate", that "nuclear is the easy answer" & that he only opposes it because it is so obviously satisfactory that if new nuclear was adopted the electorate would never be willing to shell out for windmill subsidies, If someone so resolutely opposed says this its superiority can hardly be denied.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
ISSUES OVERVIEW
THE ECONOMY - We believe 9% growth is entirely achievable using the methods which have given Ireland 7% growth (cutting corporation tax & business rates & regulations particularly housebuilding regulations) plus a programme of building as many new nuclear power stations as there is demand for producing power at 1.3p per unit, which would obviously be attractive to business (& to all of us who use electricity at home).
Currently 55% of Scotland's economy consists of government spending, from almost all of which examples of waste abound. This is not sustainable in the long term & certainly couldn't be dine by an independent country.
----------------------
LAW & ORDER - There are no easy answers here & any party that says otherwise is feeding you a line. We would be prepared to bite the bullet & build more prisons. We would also consider cutting the age of criminal responsibility. As a general principle the law should ensure that punishment should hurt the perpetrator at least as hard as they hurt the victim, though it must be admitted that there are strong limits on what can be done here under Westminster & EU rules.
In the longer term there is statistical evidence that children without a father present, particularly boys, are considerably more likely to become criminals or generally anti-social. This is not something which can be altered either easily or quickly but we would wish government to incline more towards encouraging family stability & male role models who are not members of gangs.
----------------------
EDUCATION - The 9% Growth Party approves of education vouchers. We would allow schools as much freedom as possible & allow parents to choose. This choice would also extend to schools outside the state system & to new ones created to satisfy this market. In theory Catholic schools are difficult to ideologically justify but in practice they have, in recent years, produced relatively good results. We prefer a system that works to one that is ideologically correct & expect that such schools would become only one of a variety of schools available to people.
-----------------------
The NHS - The 9% Growth Party believe that the NHS' problem has not been money, but political meddling & the establishment of PC rules & targets. We spend 25% more per head than in the south. We would seek to see the separate health areas being free to set their own rules as far as possible with a transparent funding formula for each area & a free market between areas.
Currently decisions on the opening or closing of facilities seem to resolve themselves into an arm wrestling comprtition between local MSPs & MPs, whose duty is correctly, to try to get as much as possible for their own constiturcies but it would be better if such decisions were made by area management, knowing exactly how much money they have.
----------------------
HOUSING - "Affordable housing" has become a political code word meaning houses built by government, often to be turned into tied houses for government employees. This is not our policy.
A century ago houses & cars cost about the same & there is no technological reason why we should not get close to that again. Government planning is not the solution - government planning is the problem, They insist that houses not be built except in very limited approved areas - thus we have land rated for agricultural use on one side of a fence costing £2,000 an acre & on the other side rated for housing at £40,000 a plot (£320,000 an acre). They insist on using pretty much the same materials used in Victorian times, while cars are no longer made of wood. They insist on individual planning approval (& design changes) which prevents the sort of mass production technologicla breakthrough that Henry Ford made for cars.
We will allow builders to build, allow them to use modern materials, grant type & encourage them to invest in mass production off site manufacturing by giving type rather than individual approval & providing bridging loans on completed houses till sale. If the laws of supply & demand work, and they do, we can guarantee fully affordable across the country.
TAXATION - We are committed to cutting business taxes first, since in anything but the very short term an increase in GNP puts more money in people's pockets than tax cuts. Nonetheless we are committed to a freeze on government spending & the severe pruning of the most outstanding examples of government departments which are not providing value for money. For example we think most of the £500 million Scottish Enterprise spend would more successfully attract nrw business in the form of business tax cuts, the Executive has spent £12 million on a debt counseling service which which counedled only 202 people with debts totaling £3 million (both major opposition parties want merely to "reform" this bureaucracy, we would get rid of it) or Scottish National Heritage's hedgehog programme which cost £750,000 to get rid of 690 hedgehogs). We are convinced that after 2 to 3 years of this, depending on how fast the economy takes off, we will be in a position to cut income tax by up to 3p.
We recognise that some of the pruning will be painful & many special interests, who are not bad people, will cause a stramash. Nonetheless it is the duty of government to spend your money carefully & we believe there is very great room for more care in the way Scotland's government has spent our money. The lessons of the Parliament building are not preventing current waste. We think the Scottish electorate are mature enough to know that we cannot spend as much as we would like on everything in government & still have as much as we want for ourselves & we will not ask you to believe promises that we, or anybody else, can.
----------------------
IMMIGRATION - This is a UK matter & in practice cannot be otherwise. Currently Scotland has a relatively slight immigration "problem" due to the success of our current government in keeping up the relative decline in Scotland's economy. We are confident that, when the economy takes off we will not need programmes to attract immigrants. We absolutely disagree with calls from all parties to have special gentler rules for deporting asylum seekers here than in the rest of Britain. In the long term skilled immigrants such as doctors & scientists are people we should be both glad & proud to attract but, with the best will in the world, unskilled immigrants with families & little knowledge of English can add little to our culture or economy.
----------------------
IRAQ - Foreign policy is not part of the remit of this election & while we think it both right & in our long term interest that our foreign policy be based on the rule of international law, which the the invasions of Iraq & Yugoslavia clearly broke, we do not call on you to vote for us for this reason. On the other hand the Iraq war was sold to us by Labour on the basis of a lie (WMDs) & the Tories say they would have supported it even without the purported legal justification. The Yugoslav war was also sold on a lie (genocide by the Serbs) by Labour, Tories & Lib Dems. You may reasonably feel that parties which lie to you are unworthy of your vote & on that basis choose to place your vote elsewhere.
----------------------
TERRORISM - Terrorism must be opposed. On the other hand most of the damage terrorism has done to us has been through our reaction to it. For example the air security rules we apply to ALL passenger flights ensure that it costs £20 per passenger to keep bin Laden from landing in Tiree. This, in tuen, prevents the establishment of a successful air service there & elsewhere in the Highlands & does immense damage to the potential our tourist industry has. We should not allow ourselves to be frightened pointlessly.
-----------------------
EUROPE - Again this is not part of the remit of this election. Nonetheless the EU Enterprise Commissioner recently confirmed speculation that our membership costs us £50 billion annually, mainly in regulatory costs, so we would prefer to leave. Wesminster government have always refued to do an official assessment of the cost to us, while denouncing the opinions of sceptics & would like Holyrood to produce an official estimate for Scorland.
-----------------------
INDEPENDENCE - We do not consider "independence in Europe" to be either true independence or the solution to all our problems it is sold as. On the other hand there are circumstances, such as a refusal to allow us to cut business taxes, when we could support it. The main problem with a referendum is that if we came up with what separatists consider the "wrong" answer they would insist on another chance for us to get it "right" & another & another.
------------------------
GLOBAL WARMING- We agree with the, widely unreported, words of the President of the Czech republic who recently said that "no serious person" believes in catastrophic warming & went on to call Al Gore "insane".
It is a scam to get you to accept more taxes & more regulation of your lives. It is a scam perpetrated by the political establishment leading all the other parties.
This can be proven because it is impossible for anybody who believes in catastrophic warming caused by CO2 to oppose the only practical method of generating sufficient virtually CO2 free power - nuclear. Nonetheless those loudest in calling for you to make sacrificies in the name of alleged warming are the very people most opposed to cheap nuclear electricity. The mere fact that, despite all the predictions, the years since 1999 have all been cooler is also a bit of a giveaway that catastrophic warming isn't happening.
Thus we are absolutely opposed to Luddite measures carried out on the name of stopping global warming.
We aren't going to take it any more. If you aren't too there is only one way to vote.
Currently 55% of Scotland's economy consists of government spending, from almost all of which examples of waste abound. This is not sustainable in the long term & certainly couldn't be dine by an independent country.
----------------------
LAW & ORDER - There are no easy answers here & any party that says otherwise is feeding you a line. We would be prepared to bite the bullet & build more prisons. We would also consider cutting the age of criminal responsibility. As a general principle the law should ensure that punishment should hurt the perpetrator at least as hard as they hurt the victim, though it must be admitted that there are strong limits on what can be done here under Westminster & EU rules.
In the longer term there is statistical evidence that children without a father present, particularly boys, are considerably more likely to become criminals or generally anti-social. This is not something which can be altered either easily or quickly but we would wish government to incline more towards encouraging family stability & male role models who are not members of gangs.
----------------------
EDUCATION - The 9% Growth Party approves of education vouchers. We would allow schools as much freedom as possible & allow parents to choose. This choice would also extend to schools outside the state system & to new ones created to satisfy this market. In theory Catholic schools are difficult to ideologically justify but in practice they have, in recent years, produced relatively good results. We prefer a system that works to one that is ideologically correct & expect that such schools would become only one of a variety of schools available to people.
-----------------------
The NHS - The 9% Growth Party believe that the NHS' problem has not been money, but political meddling & the establishment of PC rules & targets. We spend 25% more per head than in the south. We would seek to see the separate health areas being free to set their own rules as far as possible with a transparent funding formula for each area & a free market between areas.
Currently decisions on the opening or closing of facilities seem to resolve themselves into an arm wrestling comprtition between local MSPs & MPs, whose duty is correctly, to try to get as much as possible for their own constiturcies but it would be better if such decisions were made by area management, knowing exactly how much money they have.
----------------------
HOUSING - "Affordable housing" has become a political code word meaning houses built by government, often to be turned into tied houses for government employees. This is not our policy.
A century ago houses & cars cost about the same & there is no technological reason why we should not get close to that again. Government planning is not the solution - government planning is the problem, They insist that houses not be built except in very limited approved areas - thus we have land rated for agricultural use on one side of a fence costing £2,000 an acre & on the other side rated for housing at £40,000 a plot (£320,000 an acre). They insist on using pretty much the same materials used in Victorian times, while cars are no longer made of wood. They insist on individual planning approval (& design changes) which prevents the sort of mass production technologicla breakthrough that Henry Ford made for cars.
We will allow builders to build, allow them to use modern materials, grant type & encourage them to invest in mass production off site manufacturing by giving type rather than individual approval & providing bridging loans on completed houses till sale. If the laws of supply & demand work, and they do, we can guarantee fully affordable across the country.
TAXATION - We are committed to cutting business taxes first, since in anything but the very short term an increase in GNP puts more money in people's pockets than tax cuts. Nonetheless we are committed to a freeze on government spending & the severe pruning of the most outstanding examples of government departments which are not providing value for money. For example we think most of the £500 million Scottish Enterprise spend would more successfully attract nrw business in the form of business tax cuts, the Executive has spent £12 million on a debt counseling service which which counedled only 202 people with debts totaling £3 million (both major opposition parties want merely to "reform" this bureaucracy, we would get rid of it) or Scottish National Heritage's hedgehog programme which cost £750,000 to get rid of 690 hedgehogs). We are convinced that after 2 to 3 years of this, depending on how fast the economy takes off, we will be in a position to cut income tax by up to 3p.
We recognise that some of the pruning will be painful & many special interests, who are not bad people, will cause a stramash. Nonetheless it is the duty of government to spend your money carefully & we believe there is very great room for more care in the way Scotland's government has spent our money. The lessons of the Parliament building are not preventing current waste. We think the Scottish electorate are mature enough to know that we cannot spend as much as we would like on everything in government & still have as much as we want for ourselves & we will not ask you to believe promises that we, or anybody else, can.
----------------------
IMMIGRATION - This is a UK matter & in practice cannot be otherwise. Currently Scotland has a relatively slight immigration "problem" due to the success of our current government in keeping up the relative decline in Scotland's economy. We are confident that, when the economy takes off we will not need programmes to attract immigrants. We absolutely disagree with calls from all parties to have special gentler rules for deporting asylum seekers here than in the rest of Britain. In the long term skilled immigrants such as doctors & scientists are people we should be both glad & proud to attract but, with the best will in the world, unskilled immigrants with families & little knowledge of English can add little to our culture or economy.
----------------------
IRAQ - Foreign policy is not part of the remit of this election & while we think it both right & in our long term interest that our foreign policy be based on the rule of international law, which the the invasions of Iraq & Yugoslavia clearly broke, we do not call on you to vote for us for this reason. On the other hand the Iraq war was sold to us by Labour on the basis of a lie (WMDs) & the Tories say they would have supported it even without the purported legal justification. The Yugoslav war was also sold on a lie (genocide by the Serbs) by Labour, Tories & Lib Dems. You may reasonably feel that parties which lie to you are unworthy of your vote & on that basis choose to place your vote elsewhere.
----------------------
TERRORISM - Terrorism must be opposed. On the other hand most of the damage terrorism has done to us has been through our reaction to it. For example the air security rules we apply to ALL passenger flights ensure that it costs £20 per passenger to keep bin Laden from landing in Tiree. This, in tuen, prevents the establishment of a successful air service there & elsewhere in the Highlands & does immense damage to the potential our tourist industry has. We should not allow ourselves to be frightened pointlessly.
-----------------------
EUROPE - Again this is not part of the remit of this election. Nonetheless the EU Enterprise Commissioner recently confirmed speculation that our membership costs us £50 billion annually, mainly in regulatory costs, so we would prefer to leave. Wesminster government have always refued to do an official assessment of the cost to us, while denouncing the opinions of sceptics & would like Holyrood to produce an official estimate for Scorland.
-----------------------
INDEPENDENCE - We do not consider "independence in Europe" to be either true independence or the solution to all our problems it is sold as. On the other hand there are circumstances, such as a refusal to allow us to cut business taxes, when we could support it. The main problem with a referendum is that if we came up with what separatists consider the "wrong" answer they would insist on another chance for us to get it "right" & another & another.
------------------------
GLOBAL WARMING- We agree with the, widely unreported, words of the President of the Czech republic who recently said that "no serious person" believes in catastrophic warming & went on to call Al Gore "insane".
It is a scam to get you to accept more taxes & more regulation of your lives. It is a scam perpetrated by the political establishment leading all the other parties.
This can be proven because it is impossible for anybody who believes in catastrophic warming caused by CO2 to oppose the only practical method of generating sufficient virtually CO2 free power - nuclear. Nonetheless those loudest in calling for you to make sacrificies in the name of alleged warming are the very people most opposed to cheap nuclear electricity. The mere fact that, despite all the predictions, the years since 1999 have all been cooler is also a bit of a giveaway that catastrophic warming isn't happening.
Thus we are absolutely opposed to Luddite measures carried out on the name of stopping global warming.
We aren't going to take it any more. If you aren't too there is only one way to vote.
Monday, February 19, 2007
SOME RECENT PRESS RELEASES
19/2/7 NO TO ROAD PRICING BUT MORE DRIVING TAXES SHOULD BE SPENT ON IMPROVING OUR ROAD INFRASTRUCTUE
The 9% Growth Party believe that proposals for road pricing would be expensive & involve the sort of expensive computerisation which the government has repeatedly had failures & mass cost overruns.
We also consider that the civil liberty aspect - that it would give government complete information & ultimately control over where anybody who drives is - has not been properly considered.
We also point out that tax on petrol already provide, at much lower collection expense, a pretty fair analogue of congestion costs in that town driving uses much more petrol per mile than country driving & waiting in queues even moreso.
We have instead called for more money to be spent on improving roads. Currently the Scottish Executive are committed to spending 70% of their transport budget on 'public transport" which is largely code for railways, despite the fact that rail makes up about 2% of traffic. We could also call for money spent on rail to be put towards fully automating selected systems.
The Glasgow/Edinburgh "motorway" should be widened & instead of putting a bullet train between the cities a far simpler automated line running 24/7 with carriages leaving every few minutes should be considered.
We have also supported building a monorail to Glasgow airport for a quoted price of £20 million rather than over £200 million for a rail link.
Spending £610 million on a rail tunnel into Edinburgh airport when all that is needed is a moving walkway from the rail line that passes by is also a waste of money.
Open quotes for a new Forth crossing should be invited from the world's engineericompaniesies. We are convinced that a tunnel would turn out to be the most cost effective option. Norway has built 730 km of tunnels at between £3.5 & £11 kilometre & we have seen no explanation as to why we cannot do so here.
We would like to see the building of tunnels not merely under theForth but also Gourock/Dunnon. to Bute, to Kintyre, to Arran, to Jura, to Islay, to Mull to the Hebrides & if the £1 billion planned for the Forth crossing hasn't run out, to Orkney, Ulster & Man.
Road traffic is the most convenient & flexible sysrem that exists & it is government's duty to spend more of the money they raise from motorists on roads - not merely for the benefit of drivers but as one of the few ways the government can help the entire economy the entire economy.
13/2/07 CZECH PRESIDENT DENOUNCES GLOBAL WARMING SCARE
"Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is not fair to refer to the U.N. panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution: it's a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor
it's an undignified slapstick that people don't wait for the full report in May 2007 but instead respond, in such a serious way, to the summary for policymakers where all the "but's" are scratched, removed, and replaced by oversimplified theses
Other top-level politicians do not express their global warming doubts because a whip of political correctness strangles their voice.
Environmentalism as a metaphysical ideology and as a worldview has absolutely nothing to do with natural sciences or with the climate. Sadly, it has nothing to do with social sciences either. Still, it is becoming fashionable and this fact scares me.
Q: Don't you believe that we're ruining our planet?
A: I will pretend that I haven't heard you. Perhaps only Mr Al Gore may be saying something along these lines: a sane person can't. I don't see any ruining of the planet, I have never seen it, and I don't think that a reasonable and serious person could say such a thing"
Vaclav Klaus, dissident, Czech President
http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/data/2007/02/12/20070212_161315_flash.htm
Perhaps Ross Finnie, who says anybody who doubts the impartiality of Al Gore's film, as we have, is "from Mars" may wish to retract.
The 9% Growth Party wishes to congratulate Mr Klaus, who is clearly able to recognise a politically correct lie, even when it is supported by a monolithic media campaign, when he sees one. One could wish that politicians not brought up under communism had developed similarly sensitive antennae.
Note that this was not picked up by any paper. This is unsurprising when you consider that his remarkable statement has been missing from virtually the entire mainstream media.
6/2/07 BBC ARE WRONG TO SAY WINDMILLS GIVE CHEAP POWER
This morning BBC Radio Scotland did a feature on the proposed new line of pylons across the Highlands to carry windfarm electricity.
During the programme the presenter referred to this as being "cheap & renewable". In fact onshore windmills cost 5.4p a unit, twice the cost of coal power & 4 times what French nuclear costs.
http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:XUGG4sNU4NsJ:www.countryguardian.net/generation_costs_report.pdf+nuclear+cost+royal&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&ie=UTF-8
Neil craig twice rang the programme to ask them to correct this inaccuracy. but they did not do so.
At any time the BBC should show a concern for truthful reporting. particularly on political issues. With a Scottish election coming up the BBC, who have a long history of giving large amounts of airtime to "Green" issues, spokesmen & politicians while denying it to supporters of technological progress should exercise particular caution in reporting truthfeveny & evn, in theory, without political bias.
2/2/7 IT IS WRONG & AGAINST THE LAW TO TELL CHILDREN GORE'S FILM IS IMPARTIAL
Is "An Inconvenient Truth" genuinely a non-political & impartial documentary giving nothing but the truth, the whole truth & nothing but the truth about alleged global warming. I think not. Irrespective of whether warming let alone catastrophic warming is really happening the assurance that we are going to have massive sea level rises etc. is at best highly improbable & purely spinning a questionable partisan line.
This film is being shown to every Scottish schoolchild by order of our political masters.
Ross Finnie says that there is no debate in Scotland over warming & that anybody who says there is is "from Mars". This is pure eco-fascism - when any free debate is allowed to ordinary people it has been repeatedly shown that the sceptical view is predominant & highly defencible on the facts. I would like to remind the Executive & indeed head teachers of their lawful duty:
1966 Education Act section 406 "The local education authority, governing body and head teacher shall forbid .... the promotion of partisan political views in the teaching of any subject in the school." Section 407 requires that "where political issues are brought to the attention of pupils .... they are offered a balanced presentation of opposing views."
To show the Gore propaganda film in isolation would surely be in flagrant breach of the law.
30/10/06 STERN REPORT
The Release by the government of the Stern report, with attendant media hullabaloo is being used as evidence of global warming. It is no such thing it is merely a listing of the worst possible cases in the event that the world temperature were to grow somewhere (anywhere) between 2 & 5 degrees.
In fact the total temperature increase in the last century was 0.6 degrees & still well within known temperature highs during the Medieval & Late Roman Warming Periods. With the mathematics of the Hockeystick Theory, on which the original IPCC report leaned heavily, having been proven invalid, & the temperature being stable since their report promising massive increases, there is no credible evidence to support a higher temperature.
The Stern Report does not mention the supposed costs of an increase of less than 2 degrees though this is obviously vastly more likely. This is because the effects of such a rise would largely be beneficial.
Perhaps not coincidentally the government are, at the same time, trailing proposals for massive tax increase to be sold to us on the basis of the need to fight global warming. With the Lib Dems having already made such proposals & the Conservatives visibly on the verge of the same we are clearly being prepared for massive tax increases in a Scotland where 54% of every pound spent is spent by the government. Whatever pleasures this might give the professional politicians it would increase poverty & have a disastrous long term effect on our economy.
The 9% GROWTH Party is unambiguous in saying that catastrophic Global Warming is a myth & that we do far more harm to ourselves through such fears than warming could ever do. With Kyoto costing £400 million a day worldwide & having, according to its own calculations, cut global temperature by 2 thousandths of a degree we, virtually alone, are offering the voters reasonable policies.
26/10/06 NUCLEAR POWER
Energy analysts Wood MacKenzie have warned that Britain faces the real possibility, though not yet probability of blackouts this winter because we are not replacing our ageing reactors.
There is no question that we will face winter blackouts on a massive scale if we do not replace our current reactors & the portion of our coal power that will fail to meet new emission standards the EU have imposed for 2015. In Scotland this amounts to half our electricity. There is no possibility whatsoever that this can be fully replaced by windmills, tidal, cabin capture. fusion or fairy dust within this timescale.
Whether we have blackouts & deaths this winter or not we will inevitably have them soon if we don't build new nuclear power before Hunterston closes in 2011.
Electricity has to be produced somewhere it doesn't just come out of the sockets by magic.
Every single "environmentally aware" politician & activist knows this. Every single one of them who has opposed nuclear power is quite deliberately guilty of killing 24,000 UK pensioners who die because of fuel poverty every year. Every single one of them will be as guilty of each death occurring during blackouts as Stalin was for the Soviet famine deaths. Such people should be brought to justice.
There is no excuse whatsoever for current high electricity prices which kill people & damage our economy & even less (if less than zero is possible) for the coming blackouts
At the spring 2001 Scottish Lib Dem conference the 9% Growth Party leader, Neil Craig, who was then a Lib Dem said in a speech that a failure to support new nuclear power "would be & would be seen to be grossly irresponsible". In reply Ross Finnie guaranted that the Scottish Executive would not 'allow" blackouts. Mr Craig stands by his statement & asks the Executive to repeat their guarantee.
The 9% Growth Party believe that proposals for road pricing would be expensive & involve the sort of expensive computerisation which the government has repeatedly had failures & mass cost overruns.
We also consider that the civil liberty aspect - that it would give government complete information & ultimately control over where anybody who drives is - has not been properly considered.
We also point out that tax on petrol already provide, at much lower collection expense, a pretty fair analogue of congestion costs in that town driving uses much more petrol per mile than country driving & waiting in queues even moreso.
We have instead called for more money to be spent on improving roads. Currently the Scottish Executive are committed to spending 70% of their transport budget on 'public transport" which is largely code for railways, despite the fact that rail makes up about 2% of traffic. We could also call for money spent on rail to be put towards fully automating selected systems.
The Glasgow/Edinburgh "motorway" should be widened & instead of putting a bullet train between the cities a far simpler automated line running 24/7 with carriages leaving every few minutes should be considered.
We have also supported building a monorail to Glasgow airport for a quoted price of £20 million rather than over £200 million for a rail link.
Spending £610 million on a rail tunnel into Edinburgh airport when all that is needed is a moving walkway from the rail line that passes by is also a waste of money.
Open quotes for a new Forth crossing should be invited from the world's engineericompaniesies. We are convinced that a tunnel would turn out to be the most cost effective option. Norway has built 730 km of tunnels at between £3.5 & £11 kilometre & we have seen no explanation as to why we cannot do so here.
We would like to see the building of tunnels not merely under theForth but also Gourock/Dunnon. to Bute, to Kintyre, to Arran, to Jura, to Islay, to Mull to the Hebrides & if the £1 billion planned for the Forth crossing hasn't run out, to Orkney, Ulster & Man.
Road traffic is the most convenient & flexible sysrem that exists & it is government's duty to spend more of the money they raise from motorists on roads - not merely for the benefit of drivers but as one of the few ways the government can help the entire economy the entire economy.
13/2/07 CZECH PRESIDENT DENOUNCES GLOBAL WARMING SCARE
"Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is not fair to refer to the U.N. panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution: it's a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor
it's an undignified slapstick that people don't wait for the full report in May 2007 but instead respond, in such a serious way, to the summary for policymakers where all the "but's" are scratched, removed, and replaced by oversimplified theses
Other top-level politicians do not express their global warming doubts because a whip of political correctness strangles their voice.
Environmentalism as a metaphysical ideology and as a worldview has absolutely nothing to do with natural sciences or with the climate. Sadly, it has nothing to do with social sciences either. Still, it is becoming fashionable and this fact scares me.
Q: Don't you believe that we're ruining our planet?
A: I will pretend that I haven't heard you. Perhaps only Mr Al Gore may be saying something along these lines: a sane person can't. I don't see any ruining of the planet, I have never seen it, and I don't think that a reasonable and serious person could say such a thing"
Vaclav Klaus, dissident, Czech President
http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/data/2007/02/12/20070212_161315_flash.htm
Perhaps Ross Finnie, who says anybody who doubts the impartiality of Al Gore's film, as we have, is "from Mars" may wish to retract.
The 9% Growth Party wishes to congratulate Mr Klaus, who is clearly able to recognise a politically correct lie, even when it is supported by a monolithic media campaign, when he sees one. One could wish that politicians not brought up under communism had developed similarly sensitive antennae.
Note that this was not picked up by any paper. This is unsurprising when you consider that his remarkable statement has been missing from virtually the entire mainstream media.
6/2/07 BBC ARE WRONG TO SAY WINDMILLS GIVE CHEAP POWER
This morning BBC Radio Scotland did a feature on the proposed new line of pylons across the Highlands to carry windfarm electricity.
During the programme the presenter referred to this as being "cheap & renewable". In fact onshore windmills cost 5.4p a unit, twice the cost of coal power & 4 times what French nuclear costs.
http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:XUGG4sNU4NsJ:www.countryguardian.net/generation_costs_report.pdf+nuclear+cost+royal&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&ie=UTF-8
Neil craig twice rang the programme to ask them to correct this inaccuracy. but they did not do so.
At any time the BBC should show a concern for truthful reporting. particularly on political issues. With a Scottish election coming up the BBC, who have a long history of giving large amounts of airtime to "Green" issues, spokesmen & politicians while denying it to supporters of technological progress should exercise particular caution in reporting truthfeveny & evn, in theory, without political bias.
2/2/7 IT IS WRONG & AGAINST THE LAW TO TELL CHILDREN GORE'S FILM IS IMPARTIAL
Is "An Inconvenient Truth" genuinely a non-political & impartial documentary giving nothing but the truth, the whole truth & nothing but the truth about alleged global warming. I think not. Irrespective of whether warming let alone catastrophic warming is really happening the assurance that we are going to have massive sea level rises etc. is at best highly improbable & purely spinning a questionable partisan line.
This film is being shown to every Scottish schoolchild by order of our political masters.
Ross Finnie says that there is no debate in Scotland over warming & that anybody who says there is is "from Mars". This is pure eco-fascism - when any free debate is allowed to ordinary people it has been repeatedly shown that the sceptical view is predominant & highly defencible on the facts. I would like to remind the Executive & indeed head teachers of their lawful duty:
1966 Education Act section 406 "The local education authority, governing body and head teacher shall forbid .... the promotion of partisan political views in the teaching of any subject in the school." Section 407 requires that "where political issues are brought to the attention of pupils .... they are offered a balanced presentation of opposing views."
To show the Gore propaganda film in isolation would surely be in flagrant breach of the law.
30/10/06 STERN REPORT
The Release by the government of the Stern report, with attendant media hullabaloo is being used as evidence of global warming. It is no such thing it is merely a listing of the worst possible cases in the event that the world temperature were to grow somewhere (anywhere) between 2 & 5 degrees.
In fact the total temperature increase in the last century was 0.6 degrees & still well within known temperature highs during the Medieval & Late Roman Warming Periods. With the mathematics of the Hockeystick Theory, on which the original IPCC report leaned heavily, having been proven invalid, & the temperature being stable since their report promising massive increases, there is no credible evidence to support a higher temperature.
The Stern Report does not mention the supposed costs of an increase of less than 2 degrees though this is obviously vastly more likely. This is because the effects of such a rise would largely be beneficial.
Perhaps not coincidentally the government are, at the same time, trailing proposals for massive tax increase to be sold to us on the basis of the need to fight global warming. With the Lib Dems having already made such proposals & the Conservatives visibly on the verge of the same we are clearly being prepared for massive tax increases in a Scotland where 54% of every pound spent is spent by the government. Whatever pleasures this might give the professional politicians it would increase poverty & have a disastrous long term effect on our economy.
The 9% GROWTH Party is unambiguous in saying that catastrophic Global Warming is a myth & that we do far more harm to ourselves through such fears than warming could ever do. With Kyoto costing £400 million a day worldwide & having, according to its own calculations, cut global temperature by 2 thousandths of a degree we, virtually alone, are offering the voters reasonable policies.
26/10/06 NUCLEAR POWER
Energy analysts Wood MacKenzie have warned that Britain faces the real possibility, though not yet probability of blackouts this winter because we are not replacing our ageing reactors.
There is no question that we will face winter blackouts on a massive scale if we do not replace our current reactors & the portion of our coal power that will fail to meet new emission standards the EU have imposed for 2015. In Scotland this amounts to half our electricity. There is no possibility whatsoever that this can be fully replaced by windmills, tidal, cabin capture. fusion or fairy dust within this timescale.
Whether we have blackouts & deaths this winter or not we will inevitably have them soon if we don't build new nuclear power before Hunterston closes in 2011.
Electricity has to be produced somewhere it doesn't just come out of the sockets by magic.
Every single "environmentally aware" politician & activist knows this. Every single one of them who has opposed nuclear power is quite deliberately guilty of killing 24,000 UK pensioners who die because of fuel poverty every year. Every single one of them will be as guilty of each death occurring during blackouts as Stalin was for the Soviet famine deaths. Such people should be brought to justice.
There is no excuse whatsoever for current high electricity prices which kill people & damage our economy & even less (if less than zero is possible) for the coming blackouts
At the spring 2001 Scottish Lib Dem conference the 9% Growth Party leader, Neil Craig, who was then a Lib Dem said in a speech that a failure to support new nuclear power "would be & would be seen to be grossly irresponsible". In reply Ross Finnie guaranted that the Scottish Executive would not 'allow" blackouts. Mr Craig stands by his statement & asks the Executive to repeat their guarantee.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
ONE OF THOSE WARMING SCEPTICS THE LIB DEMS SAY ARE "FROM MARS"
Haclav Klaus
Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is not fair to refer to the U.N. panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution: it's a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavorObviously our media will mention this barely if at all (but it is going round the net) so they won't have to ask the likes of Ross Finnie who said anybody who doubted the impartiality of Gore's film was "from Mars" if he is really saying that the former world famous dissident & Czech President is really an alien.
it's an undignified slapstick that people don't wait for the full report in May 2007 but instead respond, in such a serious way, to the summary for policymakers where all the "but's" are scratched, removed, and replaced by oversimplified theses
Other top-level politicians do not express their global warming doubts because a whip of political correctness strangles their voice.
Environmentalism as a metaphysical ideology and as a worldview has absolutely nothing to do with natural sciences or with the climate. Sadly, it has nothing to do with social sciences either. Still, it is becoming fashionable and this fact scares me.
Q: Don't you believe that we're ruining our planet?•
A: I will pretend that I haven't heard you. Perhaps only Mr Al Gore may be saying something along these lines: a sane person can't. I don't see any ruining of the planet, I have never seen it, and I don't think that a reasonable and serious person could say such a thing
2 PRESS RELEASES NAILING PROPAGANDA LIES
This morning BBC Radio Scotland did a feature on the proposed new line of pylons across the Highlands to carry windfarm electricity.
During the programme the presenter referred to this as being "cheap & renewable". In fact onshore windmills cost 5.4p a unit, twice the cost of coal power & 4 times what French nuclear costs.
http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:XUGG4sNU4NsJ:www.countryguardian.net/generation_costs_report.pdf+nuclear+cost+royal&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&ie=UTF-8
Neil raig twice rang the programme to ask them to correct this inaccuracy. but they did not do so.
At any time the BBC should show a concern for truthful reporting. particularly on political issues. With a Scottish election coming up the BBC, who have a long history of giving large amounts of airtime to "Green" issues, spokesmen & politicians while denying it to supporters of technological progress should exercise particular caution in reporting truthfully & evn, in theory, without political bias.
The BBC have not responded
-----------------------------
Is "An Inconvenient Truth" genuinely a non-political & impartial documentary giving nothing but the truth, the whole truth & nothing but the truth about alleged global warming. I think not. Irrespective of whether warming let alone catastrophic warming is really happening the assurance that we are going to have massive sea level rises etc. is at best highly improbable & purely spinning a questionable partisan line.
This film is being shown to every Scottish schoolchild by order of our political masters.
Ross Finnie says that there is no debate in Scotland over warming & that anybody who says there is is "from Mars". This is pure eco-fascism - when any free debate is allowed to ordinary people it has been repeatedly shown that the sceptical view is predominant & highly defencible on the facts. I would like to remind the Executive & indeed head teachers of their lawful duty:
1966 Education Act section 406 "The local education authority, governing body and head teacher shall forbid .... the promotion of partisan political views in the teaching of any subject in the school." Section 407 requires that "where political issues are brought to the attention of pupils .... they are offered a balanced presentation of opposing views."
To show the Gore propaganda film in isolation would surely be in flagrant breach of the law.
During the programme the presenter referred to this as being "cheap & renewable". In fact onshore windmills cost 5.4p a unit, twice the cost of coal power & 4 times what French nuclear costs.
http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:XUGG4sNU4NsJ:www.countryguardian.net/generation_costs_report.pdf+nuclear+cost+royal&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&ie=UTF-8
Neil raig twice rang the programme to ask them to correct this inaccuracy. but they did not do so.
At any time the BBC should show a concern for truthful reporting. particularly on political issues. With a Scottish election coming up the BBC, who have a long history of giving large amounts of airtime to "Green" issues, spokesmen & politicians while denying it to supporters of technological progress should exercise particular caution in reporting truthfully & evn, in theory, without political bias.
The BBC have not responded
-----------------------------
Is "An Inconvenient Truth" genuinely a non-political & impartial documentary giving nothing but the truth, the whole truth & nothing but the truth about alleged global warming. I think not. Irrespective of whether warming let alone catastrophic warming is really happening the assurance that we are going to have massive sea level rises etc. is at best highly improbable & purely spinning a questionable partisan line.
This film is being shown to every Scottish schoolchild by order of our political masters.
Ross Finnie says that there is no debate in Scotland over warming & that anybody who says there is is "from Mars". This is pure eco-fascism - when any free debate is allowed to ordinary people it has been repeatedly shown that the sceptical view is predominant & highly defencible on the facts. I would like to remind the Executive & indeed head teachers of their lawful duty:
1966 Education Act section 406 "The local education authority, governing body and head teacher shall forbid .... the promotion of partisan political views in the teaching of any subject in the school." Section 407 requires that "where political issues are brought to the attention of pupils .... they are offered a balanced presentation of opposing views."
To show the Gore propaganda film in isolation would surely be in flagrant breach of the law.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
£12 MILLION OF YOUR MONEY
The Debt Arrangement Scheme (DAS), which helps people rearrange their debts so they can pay them off, was launched in 2004 as a flagship Executive policy to tackle Scots' spiralling debt. Since then, it has ploughed close to £12 million into setting up the service and supporting advisers whose job it is to deliver it.The real problem with this is not just that it was ever done but that our leaders don't want to axe it merely "reform" it & that the Tories & SNP are barely better
Yet in that time, the advisers have helped Scots with a total of only £3.2 million of debt.
Politicians and accountants last night said the scheme was far too bureaucratic.
The Executive admitted the take-up of Debt Payment Plans was "lower than hoped for" but said it would be reformed.
Kenny MacAskill, an SNP MSP for the Lothians, said: "The idea is right but not the implementation ......David McLetchie, the Conservative MSP for Edinburgh Pentlands, said: "The DAS is a good idea, but it's not working in practiceNo it isn't. If it is doing that badly it should be axed immediately not "reformed" & given another chance to blow another £12 million. This is the problem with our government spending having got out of control & politicians being afraid to grasp this nettle.
£12 million could cut business rates by 1%. Does anybody believe there are not 100 other government activities similarly useless which could be axed without harm? There is absolutely no reason why Scotland cannot have a very successful growing economy indeed if we let the people make use of more of the 55% of the economy the government takes & spends.
I don't think this is just socialism since David McLetchie mentioned as someone who didn't want to axe it, is no socialist. Though socialism is an 'ism that fits with state bureaucracy better than most. The problem is that there is very little incentive for anybody of any party to cut spending & a culture in Holyrood of throwing money.
It must be made possible to fire public "servants". Nobody else has a job for life. Beyond that I would like to see a cap on government spending. Any other industry expects to make efficiency savings of about 2% a year & government clearly has room for this. A 2% cut in real terms would be the equivalent of no inflationary increase. The savings should then be devoted to cutting corporation tax, business rates & income tax in that order. This would get the economy moving in a world beating way.
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