Moonbat Talks Bollocks Again

I sometimes wonder why I bother reading the drivel that pours from the poisoned pen of George Monbiot. He’s at it again today.

This is a column about how good intentions can run amok. It tells the story of how an honourable, intelligent man set out to avert environmental disaster and ended up accidentally promoting the economics of the slave trade. It shows how human lives can be priced and exchanged for goods and services. The story begins in a village a few miles to the west of London. The government proposes to flatten Sipson in order to build a third runway for Heathrow airport. The public consultation is about to end, but no one doubts that the government has made up its mind.

Its central case is that the economic benefits of building a third runway outweigh the economic costs. The extra capacity, the government says, will deliver a net benefit to the UK economy of £5bn. The climate change the runway will cause costs £4.8bn, but this is dwarfed by the profits to be made.

You have to approach this with the understanding that Moonbat is not just a believer, he is a zealot; a religious fruitcake who makes the mad mullahs pale in comparison.

I have no opinion one way or the other on the issue of another terminal at Heathrow. But, and this is the clincher; given that climate change is something natural that has been happening since this piece of space dust solidified from molten rock, how, exactly can we put a price on the climate change that this terminal will produce? We can’t, it isn’t possible, not least, given that climatologists recognise that the whole thing is highly complex. Attempting to single out one cause – an airport terminal – is pure stupidity worthy of the Guardian and its puerile hacks.

And, George, we have always put a price on human life. We have to if we are to assess the cost benefits of complex transport systems, for example. How else will one make a rational decision about where to invest the capital in building such a project? It sounds cold and calculating and people have a natural abhorrence when confronted with it – as they did when they realised that the cost of life calculations were one of the reasons ATP was not installed throughout the Great Western main line. It is, however, both pragmatic and necessary.

There is plenty of evidence suggesting that the government’s numbers are wrong.

And none whatsoever to suggest that yours are right…

When Sir Nicholas Stern published his study of the economics of climate change, environmentalists – myself included – lined up to applaud him: he had given us the answer we wanted.

A report that has been pretty thoroughly debunked as twaddle. Still, George is a believer and believers don’t need evidence; merely faith.

Stern explains that this “consumption” involves not just the consumption of goods we might buy from the supermarket, but also of “education, health and the environment”. He admits this formula “raises profound difficulties”, especially the “challenge of expressing health (including mortality) and environmental quality in terms of income”. But he uses it anyway, and discovers that the global disaster that would be unleashed by a rise in temperature of between 5° and 6°, and that is likely to involve widespread famine, is “equivalent to a reduction in consumption” of between 5% and 20%.

This is what is known as a hypothesis – a guess in other words. It isn’t fact and the 5^o – 6^o is blatant scaremongering designed to give the enviroloony fascists the excuse they need to reduce us all to a medieval agrarian society. And for government ministers to justify yet another stealth tax.

I can accept that a unit of measurement that allows us to compare the human costs of different spending decisions is a useful tool. What I cannot accept is that it should be scrambled up with the price of eggs and prefixed with a dollar sign. Human life is not a commodity. It cannot be traded against profits or exchanged for convenience. We have no right to decide that others should die to make us richer.

But the assumptions being made are based upon a flawed piece of research that makes a series of assumptions. It is not based on fact. No one, therefore is treating lives as a commodity – this is pure hyperbole. But, then, this is the Groan, so should I expect anything else?