The red team.

Posted by Pointman on May 6, 2016 · 10 Comments 

If you’ve never heard of the red team concept, it’s a very useful management technique that’s been knocking around in certain organisations for a number of years. In essence, it’s a team of people, internal or external, who aggressively look for faults, flaws and loopholes in whatever an organisation is producing, whether that’s a product, a strategy or even an idea.

Their job is to attack you using whatever means possible as any implacable enemy would. There are no rules, no regulations and nothing is out of bounds. When you get a grudging thumbs up after a good mauling over from a ferocious red team, you know you’ve got something robust.

Let’s do the red team on climate alarmism.

For a moment, assume that the world’s climate is seriously effected by the trace gas Carbon Dioxide, even though it only accounts for 0.04 per cent of the atmosphere. Let’s further assume that the tiny fraction of that tiny fraction attributed to mankind’s activities, such as simply breathing, never mind living in a post-agrarian civilisation, are enough to trigger the fabled tipping point into warmageddon. And let’s even go one further and assume there actually is such a thing as the tipping point.

If it sounds like there are an inordinate number of unverified assumptions stacking up here, it’s because I’m trying to think like a climate scientist.

Anyway, if you concede all those assumptions, you have to accept that unless we reduce the amount of CO2 we produce, the planet is doomed to heat up to a point where life can no longer be sustained on it.

The next part is all assumption free because it deals with political realities.

In the European part of the developed world, even the most formerly infatuated governments are by now deeply disenchanted with the green renewables dream. Record numbers of Germans are having their electricity cut off because they simply can’t afford the huge bills massively inflated by surcharges to cover subsidising renewables. Once fastidiously ordentlich Germans are nipping into forests and stealing caches of logs for heating that in former times could be left stacked and unguarded for months. After the panicked decision closing nuclear generators in the wake of the Fukashima non-disaster, they’ve gone back to building coal generation plants.

I only mention Germany because it was the flag bearer of green energy, and by now it’s well down into the nightmare at the bottom of that particular rabbit hole. It’s the extreme example of what’s happening across Europe. The poor can no longer afford electricity and everyone else equates being encouraged to have a nervous breakdown about the death of the planet as a piss take.

In the Americas, the situation is not as bad if you live outside California. Obama, an ineffectual president frantically casting around for some sort of substantive legacy, decided to use the EPA to kill off whole coal mining communities in places like Kentucky and Virginia using that hideously overreaching bureaucratic arm of government. To a large extent, and despite his efforts, the fracking revolution for oil and gas has softened the unemployment blow, but it’s still bitterly resented by the people of those communities.

The bottom line is, people won’t vote for politicians who’re into green taxes and think it’s okay for other people to lose their jobs, all over an issue those people rank lowest in their list of concerns. Politicians, being at heart mercenary creatures, are listening; the subsidies are being cut, the big fat start-up grants are few and far between nowadays, and the renewables carnival is over.

In short, the developed world, behind a few political fig leaves, has all but abandoned carbon reduction.

The developing world has watched in bemusement an obscenely rich developed world going through a bizarre decade of fashionable navel gazing guilt about somehow destroying the planet with nothing other than thinly concealed contempt. They’d play along with the charade, just as long as there was some possibility of being given a few bucks to salve our stricken conscience.

Mebbe they’d get some money, mebbe they wouldn’t. Whatever was going to happen, they were not going to change strategy. Even if the money had appeared, which it didn’t and never will, they wouldn’t have slowed down their march towards industrialisation by one step, because that was the sure and certain way of raising their populations out of grinding poverty.

Executive summary time, the developing world doesn’t give a damn about carbon reduction.

It’s by now obvious to even the most fervent warmist, that any global binding agreement to reduce carbon emissions is not going to happen. In point of fact, emissions are going to rise inexorably as the developing world gradually industrialises, and they won’t let anyone stop them, as they demonstrated at Copenhagen where they said a flat no to every proposal. They will continue to torpedo any global agreements and they long ago discounted us having enough money to bribe them into not industrialising.

So, the opinion of the red team is there won’t be a reduction in carbon emission, but rather a massive increase, and that means if you’re a warmist, we’re all going to die.

So, from the red team, have a nice green day.

©Pointman

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