Blog cottage is being insulated as we speak. Given that it was built sometime shortly before Christopher Columbus decided he’d like to commit mass murder, rape and torture outside European jurisdiction and sailed the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria ever westwards in search of virgin lands and virgin peoples to destroy - this is not a simple process. The walls are thick, which gives a degree of insulation, but the roof used to be thatched. Some time in the cheap-oil, energy-careless years, somebody took off the thatch and slung on some tiles and we are only now finding out what a shoddy job they made of it - and how little insulation they installed.
So it’s all being put right and our fuel bills will be less and, more importantly, for the rest of the life of this house, it will be more efficient. Not as good as it could be, but short of pulling it down and starting again, as good as we can get.
Which makes George Monbiot’s observations on the Australian elections and the role of climate change/climate denial in the political framework all the more cogent.
I still find it hard to believe that sentient adults claim climate change isn’t happening (tell that to Pakistan -it might be marginally more relevant than the imams who say that if you are ungodly, it’s their god’s punishment on you, and if you are pious, it’s a test of faith. Which more or less sums up the schizophrenia of that particular deity.) But the Australian election might, indeed, be about to be won by a man who once trained as a Catholic priest and now says climate change is crap and the world is, in fact, cooling.
Read the whole article for full details, but I found this analysis particularly interesting:
In the Telegraph recently, the Conservative Daniel Hannan tried to explain this association. “When presented with a new discovery, we automatically try to press it into our existing belief-system; if it doesn’t fit, we question the discovery before the belief-system.”(13) He’s right. We all do this, and it is also true that in some respects an antagonism to climate science is consistent with right-wing – and especially neoliberal – politics. The philosophy of the new right is summarised by this chilling statement from Vaclav Klaus. “Human wants are unlimited and should stay so.”(14)
But right-wing denial also leads to perverse outcomes. In a desperate attempt to appease the deniers in his party, Malcolm Turnbull proposed handing £70bn to industry to soften the impacts of acting on climate change(15). Rudd’s trading scheme, by contrast, was more or less self-financing. Tony Abbott intends to lavish subsidies on polluting companies without demanding any corresponding obligations(16). State handouts? Rights without responsibilities? When did these become conservative policies?
Since way back. In the US the Republicans also favour green incentives for industry, without caps or regulation. Worldwide, subsidies for fossil fuels are twelve times greater than subsidies for renewable energy(17). Many of the most generous hand-outs are awarded by right-wing governments (think of the money lavished on the oil industry under George W Bush(18))
It’s that double standard thing again, that goes with the now famous David Davis quote along the lines that ‘if you talk of Small Government, people think you’re Attila the Hun. If you call it Big Society, they think you’re Mother Teresa’ (as if that might be a good thing).
talking of which, Steve Richards has a particularly interesting piece in the Indie today in which he points out the following (my bold)
Yet Clegg’s agile positioning in the aftermath of the election is undermined almost fatally by his apparently enthusiastic support for the wildly risky spending cuts that define the Coalition. The gap between mandate and implementation of revolutionary agenda is vast and dangerous for all those involved, especially so for the leader of a party that has a strongly developed commitment to public services and the investment required to support them. Cameron and George Osborne did not win an overall majority. Clegg certainly did not. Combining the two defeated parties does not mean that there is a consensus for wiping out the deficit in a single term, an act of unnecessary vandalism being pursued by Cameron/Osborne for ideological and expedient reasons, passionate believers in a much smaller state hoping to offer election-winning tax cuts at the next election.
Margaret Thatcher’s political genius was to recognise how much space she enjoyed as a leader when Labour fell apart in the early 1980s. She embarked on her much more limited economic experiment with a substantial overall majority and facing an opposition that was split. She knew when the wider political situation allowed her to act. Cameron and Osborne are not such astute navigators. If they were they would have won an overall majority at the election.
At the moment, they misread media support for sweeping cuts as a green light for them to stride into wide- open spaces that do not exist. Clegg has signed up to an alliance with a Conservative leadership that is, in terms of its hostility towards the state, moving too fast and without the level of support and divided opposition that enabled Thatcher to make her moves. She would have been much more cautious than they are being. Look closely at the political space in which supposedly mighty leaders seek to prevail. Gillard is doomed even if she struggles on in power. Brown was doomed, too, by the summer of 2007. Clegg, Cameron and Osborne have a little more space to determine their destinies but nowhere near as much as they seem to think.
These are the reasons I am no longer a Lib-Dem, much tho’ it pains me not to be so - there was no mandate for these cuts, they are unnecessary and every sane commentator I’ve read says we’re heading for a double dip recession because of them. Once again, if you haven’t read Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, do - it’s the road map for where we’re going…
Edit: Interesting comment below Steve Richards’ article:
Excellent analysis. Current economic policies are being pursued on the back of the biggest pr con trick in political history - but that’s what you’d expect from Cameron. What you might not expect (especially if your are a Liberal) is that your leaders would be so naive as to get sucked into it. The political abyss awaits the Liberals as the harsh winds of Tory economic policy decimate this Country again.
A businessman once told me that the reason he supported Labour was that when they were in power his order book was full, When the Tories were in power it was empty. Now he might say when the Tories and the Liberals are in power….
