You see E17? Warmists conflate so many issues together they can’t be argued with. BB’s poor little coughing children meme - what monster wouldn’t want to save them? He doesn’t even grasp that prolonging lives of the elderly (because that’s largely who his report is talking about) means they emit more CO2. Irony.

So at 11:42 you were deriding the report as "bas science"** and two hours later you are quoting from it! And what's more you are flying the idea of a value judgement between the lives of children and the elderly. Since most readers here are not spring chickens, can that bird have wings?

** attention pedants and nit pickers, that is a quote.

I point out two of the phrases in the report that highlight how much of a guesstimate the final value is and I am somehow endorsing its findings? I illustrate my point about CO2 and pollution not being good bedfellows and I’m potentially offending fellow sceptics and wishing them dead? What is most likely to bump pensioners off is the walk to the bus stop on a cold and snowy day and then a cramped ride along with cold and flu afflicted passengers.

Bad science is the current trend for coming to all sorts of conclusions with the flimsiest of proof. That’s fine in a chat down the pub or even on the internet but not for a policy that would remove cars from the reach of the poorest (many of them pensioners) and make life far more expensive for all.

If a government wanted to prolong life and annoy the public greatly, there are far more productive ways than making electric cars compulsory.

Mr Bucket's Lancet article, from its abstract, seems a prime example of drawing the desired conclusions from correlations.

"Children who lived within 500 m of a freeway (motorway) had substantial deficits in 8-year growth of forced expiratory volume in 1 s"

Note that the metric actually recorded is not the air quality in their homes.

The people who live a few hundred metres from US freeways are generally:

- The relatively poor.
- The smoking classes.

A Los Angeles freeway is rather different from a UK inner city which was what Mr Bucket seemed to be talking about previously but I doubt he is bothered by such niceties.

99% of the pollution near US freeways comes from the 18-wheelers, not private cars.

So we have fossil fuels and we have renewable fuels. The fossil ones are easily available and have conveniently high energy density. The renewables are nominally more expensive, have lower energy density and are more problematic to use.

The fossil fuels cost less but have a few hidden costs:

1. many more people die in mining, drilling, transport and use of fossils than do with renewables;
2. fossil fuels come substantially from politically unstable regions and defending their production often means supporting nasty governments, fighting hugely expensive wars, corrupting whole political systems and subjecting local populations to conditions that westerners would not tolerate;
3. when they leak or are spilled, the environmental damage and clean-up costs can be huge;
4. and when they are burned they damage lungs and cause health problems.

But these are hidden costs. We can safely ignore the deaths from 1 because they are foreigners and poor and they don't matter. That supply of fossil fuels corrupts, subjugates or destroys other societies is of equally little importance because they are also foreigners and hence of no value. That we despoil environments is of no concern because they are largely foreign environments and not at all near to our holiday destinations, so they don't matter; anyway the environment is there for us to despoil. And research that shows that pollution affects the health of our children can be denied as arm waving inaccurate estimates. And anyway it is not our children, because we don't live near to busy roads and the deaths can be relabelled as premature deaths of old people who have to die anyway, so they don't count.

So those hidden costs are really non-existent because they mostly affect foreigners and can be discounted. Clearly a British life might be nominally worth a million pounds but as it is impossible to prove* that any particular death was attributable to pollution, we can safely deny that there is any real cost beyond the price per barrel that the market decides is right.

Conclusion, fossil fuels are cheaper than renewables. The question I have is, why would a group of intelligent people buy this? It has nothing to do with CO₂, the preoccupations of this blog.

* and we won't believe pollution is dangerous at all unless we have such proof.

Doesn't matter how YOU count them, HP.

In Murka, a normal rig has 18 wheels.

18-Wheeler stuck

BB,

But renewables effect no saving in fossil fuels and they have a human cost in maintenance, pollution, (e.g. rare earth extraction and refining in China) and putting up food prices (biofuels). Climate change policies in the West drive industry off shore to places where they are less fussy - 1,200 planned coal-fired power stations. In addition we have the emissions and transport costs of geting goods from where they are made to markets.

All in all a lot of effort and expense for a negative result.

I find your arguments specious and strained.

Not suitable for viewing by Mr Bucket...

Mike Jackson, energy has clearly been a key to western standards of living, but energy and fuel are not the same. Electricity is electricity, whatever turns the turbines. Replace the source with solar and wind and storage and the end user is no wiser. All that is in question is the cost, which you maintain to be lower for fossils without being willing to consider the actual costs.

The striking thing about your reply is that despite the obvious external costs associated with our use of fossil fuels, you cannot bring yourself to accept and justify them. Yes, rare-earths have costs too, and that is part of the cost equation for renewables; but it doesn't lower the price of fossils. Yes, there are some stable suppliers of oil, but major sources are in unstable regions that we have spent billions stabilising (or destabilising, think Iran in the 50's) in our interest - and those areas set the world price and availability. Yes environments can recover from spills, but the state of the Niger delta tells another story that we'd all probably rather not hear. And yes the numbers affected by pollution are hard to pin down and are subject to spin, but you'd have to be an idiot (which you clearly are not) to dismiss health effects as without significant cost.

It is very strange that this blog is so determined to lay bear all of the cost of renewables and yet is unable to face the costs inherent in its favourite fuels. Perhaps it is just that the costs are intangible - how can one put a value on a corrupted foreign government, an oppressed people, a destroyed river delta or lives lost. But there are things that have large numbers attached, such as the price of the middle eastern wars (or arguably the Faulklands war, if one considers it was at least in part about oil). And even if you guess that the number of 'productive' lives lost due to pollution is in the low thousands (rather than 29,000), you have to put a very low economic value on those lives to avoid the cost going into the billions annually.

It might be that a calculation of these costs that somehow incorporates the intangibles would reveal that renewables really are hugely more expensive, in which case your arguments against renewables would have more weight. But I don't see any willingness to even consider such an honest calculation.

BTW, I don't support current generation biofuels (food/arable-land based), which are an abomination.

Mike Jackson, I have the same feeling with you (that you do it on purpose) ;-)

I said quite clearly, "solar and wind and storage" (I might have added HVDC inter-connectors). So it really does just come down to cost. Why shouldn't it happen? Put 10KW of solar cells on 4 million roofs and suddenly you've got too much power on a sunny day and there will be the need to store it. So storage will be built. You cannot stop it, however much you would like to. Gas is not going away, but it's business model will have to change to filling in the gaps.

Whatever the costs you are claiming we don't take into account they are less than the benefits which accrue from continuous cheap and reliable energy if only because restricting access to energy will only have the effect of making everyone poorer.

BB "So storage will be built. You cannot stop it" If the government is talking about needing electric cars so that they can be used as temporary storage then you can bet that there's no real storage on the cards. You are threatening us with something that is just a dream and if it wasn't, it wouldn't be much of a threat. You keep trying to suggest we hate renewables, we don't. We hate bad renewables and at the moment that's all that's on offer.

You seem to have the idea that the public are being steered away from green solutions because someone (probably funded by fossil fuels) is keeping them from it. No. People are making their own judgement calls based on what is available. You arrogantly dismissed what I wrote about the disadvantages of an electric car as the words of a petrol head. Grow up. No matter how good your cause, you can't do other people's thinking for them. If you have to resort to threats of forcing society to conform, you're losing. You prove my point that you haven't succeeding in convincing poeple.

Hector, I'm not disputing how the UK authorities count wheels nor what's on your HGV licence.

But the paper BB referred to was an American paper about people living near Los Angeles freeways. Talk to an American about an 18-wheeler or a semi and he'll know immediately what you're talking about. It's part of the American vocabulary.

BB, questions of equality.

1) What level of affluence would you allow a person as a human right? (eg spare rooms, holidays, central heating, power shower)
2) Does that translate into a fixed CO2 level or would people be allowed a certain amount of leeway depending upon circumstance or importance? eg their home is hard to insulate or they have to fly a lot for work.
3) Do you consider the biosphere something that is shared equally by all?
4) If yes, can the rich own more of it (eg buying a forest) to offset a higher amount of CO2?
5) If a person sticks within their CO2 allowance can they spend it on what they like?
6) Who is more evil, a person who doesn’t believe in CAGW and has a low carbon footprint or someone who says they do believe but has a big carbon footprint?
7) If a person justifies international travel because they are trying to warn people of the hazards of global CO2, at what point do the flights become inexcusable?
8) At what point do people need to stop talking about cutting CO2 and actually do it?

TinyCO2, not convincing people? Well I have no expectation of convincing you or Mike Jackson. And just because Shrub finds a model in the paper discussing lung health and therefore feels that the whole issue is settled, 'cos sceptics hate models, does not imply that all other readers are unconvinced. They are pretty silent, whichever side they are on, but they know for certain that breathing traffic fumes every day is at the very least not going to prolong anyone's life.

Maybe you don't hate renewables, but you are happy, it seems, to judge them without considering all of the costs of fossil fuels. It is striking that in this whole discussion not one of you 'neutral' commenters has felt able to admit that there are indeed external costs associated with fossil fuel use. I've given you four major areas and could have mentioned the possibility of supply shocks and sudden price rises (think war with Iran). If you can accept and justify these externalities honestly then you are credibly neutral.

Note: I was just posting this and find you have posted a list of questions. I'm sure you had fun writing them but they are more about your preoccupation with what you see, or like to portray, as the injustices of the AGW movement that with reality. I deliberately have not discussed pricing CO₂ emissions and my argument in favour of quitting fossil fuels is independent of any desire to reduce emissions.

The questions matter because they are fundamental to fairness. You say it’s a human right to breath clean air? What about other things they might put higher on the list? Don’t they get to choose? Or is that too many human rights? Are people only allowed the human rights you want to accord them?

People make choices to, or not to breath pollution all the time. Many of them choose the former because it gives them more money. All those people living in London on benefits will fight tooth and nail not to leave their expensive London council houses and be relocated somewhere cheaper and cleaner. The BBC staff had to be bribed with huge amounts of our cash to move up to Salford and the Mersey, both of which are now much cleaner than London and Thames. Not one of those people will mention the advantages of the fresh air.

Your creed is all about making decisions for eveyone else. Not gonna happen!

And of course you don't want to answer the questions because you know they answers would show you to be a liar or a hypocrite.

Congratualtions BB you're supporting a new way to widen the gap between the rich and the poor. But at least people will enoy their poverty with clean lungs.

The issue of energy security is why coal is an important part of the mix. It comes from different locations to oil and gas. It arrives via different routes and can be easily stored in large quantities (months of energy rather than days). The only good reason for getting rid of coal is CO2. Which you don't now seem to think is important.

You've already been told that the main problem with wind and solar is the unreliability. You countered with storage which is not yet a viable option. End of debate, come back when there is.