Tag: Propaganda

The Great Recycling Swindle

There is no such thing as a free lunch, as Milton Friedman never tired of pointing out. A local authority that pretends otherwise is not practising environmental stewardship.

It is practising virtue signalling at other people’s expense. Let’s take the £720 first.

It is not a recycling saving at all. It is a Love Food Hate Waste talking point about buying less food in the first place, describing what the average family could save by throwing away less edible food. That is a saving from wasting less, not from recycling more.

A cartoon illustration of a recycling industrial complex with various characters discussing waste management and taxes. One character looks worried while holding a council tax bill, and another, a cheerful official, promotes a free food waste caddy. The image features a variety of elements, including food waste, financial elements, and slogans like 'Nothing is free—the bill just moves somewhere else.'

From Tilak`s Substack

By Tilak Doshi

On Thursday I found a parcel waiting at the front door of my Wandsworth flat: a ‘free’ food waste caddy, a starter roll of compostable liners and a note from the council that deserves a place in the annals of municipal self-congratulation. Recycling my food waste, it explained, could save me “as much as £720 every year”. My leftovers would become “a sustainable power source and liquid fertiliser”. And because it is “much cheaper” for the council to recycle scraps than to bin them with the rubbish, the whole exercise “helps keep your Council Tax low”. Each of these claims turns out to be false, an evasion or a subsidy in disguise.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, as Milton Friedman never tired of pointing out. A local authority that pretends otherwise is not practising environmental stewardship. It is practising virtue signalling at other people’s expense. Let’s take the £720 first. It is not a recycling saving at all. It is a Love Food Hate Waste talking point about buying less food in the first place, describing what the average family could save by throwing away less edible food. That is a saving from wasting less, not from recycling more. WRAP, the climate NGO behind the campaign, now puts the annual cost of edible food binned by a family of four at £1,000. But the money is lost by typical household behaviour, not because food waste remains uncollected by the local council.

Separately collected food waste can indeed go to anaerobic digestion, which produces biogas and a digestate fertiliser. But biomethane from digestion is also eligible for the Government’s Green Gas Support Scheme, a tariff subsidy. A “sustainable power source” propped up by a tariff is not a free lunch; it is merely moved from domestic bills to general taxpayers. The household is thus drafted as an unpaid recycler, subject to the good Wandsworth council members that claim to be saving its constituents their own money.

Nor, to be fair to the council’s worthies, is the caddy entirely their idea. Wandsworth’s own website states that all households in the borough must have weekly food waste collections from March 31st 2026, a duty that traces to the Environment Act 2021. This was passed under a Conservative government and is now being delivered under the label of Simpler Recycling. Whitehall wrote the script; Wandsworth Council merely turned up in appropriate costume and supplied the marketing angle.

Social costs and benefits

Had anyone on the Wandsworth Waste Project Team taken the trouble to have a cursory acquaintance of the available analysis, they would have found a remarkably consistent verdict. Thomas Kinnaman of Bucknell University, having reviewed two decades of American recycling experience in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, argued for replacing several state recycling mandates with a moderate landfill tax. A study of a random national sample of municipalities by Robert Bohm, Kinnaman and two co-authors found that both average and marginal costs of recycling exceed those of simple collection and disposal at a landfill. Daniel Benjamin of the Property and Environment Research Center calculated that, even after crediting the resale of recovered materials, curb side programmes in 2009 cost on average $199 a ton against $119 for landfill and concluded that mandatory programmes leave society worse off. It argues that U.S. municipal curb side recycling programmes waste resources and probably do little, if anything, to benefit the environment.

In an article entitled ‘Recycling Is Garbage’ in 1996, New York Times journalist John Tierney concluded that mandatory recycling did not make economic or environmental sense. It legendarily provoked the most hate mail ever delivered to the Times. He returned in 2015 to report that it was still typically more expensive to recycle household waste than to landfill it. He likened the zeal of the faithful to a penance for the sin of affluence.

Food waste, Wandsworth Council’s new enthusiasm, fares worse still. A 2025 study by Jackson Somers of the University of Connecticut, published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, found that a curb side organics collection programme cost per household was nine times the social benefit of the avoided methane. Across the United States, the median expansion would cost $478 per tonne of CO2-equivalent avoided, against an assumed social cost of carbon of $51. It should be noted here that the concept of the social cost of carbon itself is highly disputed, and it could well be negative if the greening benefits of higher atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are fully taken into account.

Wandsworth’s operation is far from frugal: the council has explained that separate vehicles now collect rubbish, recycling, food waste and small electricals, each at its own time. One more fleet, one more caddy, one more cost on the beleaguered taxpayer. None of this is an argument against recycling as such. Recycled aluminium needs about 95% less energy than metal smelted from bauxite, so scrap commands a price, and a price is all a collector needs. Nobody requires a council leaflet to persuade a scrap dealer to fetch a can. Even Defra concedes that for some plastics the value on secondary markets does not outweigh the cost of collection. Free markets sort winners from losers objectively; policy mandates, however dressed up as virtuous signals, are a net cost to the taxpayer.

The Government’s own arithmetic

The council’s claim that food waste recycling keeps Council Tax low collides with Whitehall’s own paperwork. Defra’s final impact assessment in December 2024 for “Simpler Recycling” models the preferred option with English councils bearing £722 million in transition costs and £567 million in higher ongoing costs in present-value terms. The headline saving to councils of £188 million appears only after crediting about £1 billion of additional garden-waste charges on households and £474 million of deposit-return savings. Remove those and the ratepayer is left holding the caddy.

The department’s £5.9 billion “net benefit to society” for the whole package tells a similar tale. It rests on £10.5 billion of “carbon savings”; remove that single line and the package is some £4.5 billion in the red. The Defra claim rests entirely on how carbon is valued. Everything else in the model (collection costs, transition costs, sorting and the rest) nets out negative once the carbon credit is removed. Defra conveniently chose a carbon price that makes the sum positive. The UK values carbon by the marginal abatement cost, meaning the cost of cutting a tonne needed to hit legally binding carbon budgets. The circularity of Defra carbon accounting, driven by Net Zero ideologues, is astounding.

Household time, meanwhile, is treated as a rounding error: familiarisation and inconvenience costs to householders are not accounted for because Defra does not expect them to be significant. The time value of the person rinsing the caddy is evidently free. Tellingly, the same document abandons the plan for free garden-waste collections because the cost was disproportionate to the “carbon benefits”.

And the “free” in “free caddy” rests on the Government’s promise to fund councils’ net additional costs, the so-called new burdens doctrine. The Wandsworth Council leaflet says food waste recycling “helps keep your Council Tax low”. But council tax may well stay low locally only because the Treasury is covering the extra cost, not because recycling is cheap. So the cost of the new service has merely moved from the council’s books to the national taxpayer.

Milton Friedman’s dictum that there is no such thing as a free lunch has apparently not reached Wandsworth; one does not expect a copy of Free To Choose (1980) in the council library. But the deeper problem is the familiar mixture of luxury beliefs and other people’s money. Economists call the satisfaction of doing good a warm glow, and it is a preference, not a resource saving. When a state compels the ‘environmental’ ritual and raises the tax rates, the glow is enjoyed by officials and the chill by ordinary taxpayers.

It is the pattern I described in Ed Miliband’s carbon-capture crusade: policy as moral theatre, financed by somebody else. And it flourishes where the ordinary business of local government is neglected. ‘Woke’ councils seem to have far more time for planning environmental salvation than for potholes, or for easing the fines heaped on hated motorists in Sadiq Khan’s London. As my Daily Sceptic colleague Ben Pile reported last week, recycling centres across the country have been turning away old fridges and freezers, which are now piling up in laybys. Recycling is in trouble where it counts, and officialdom’s answer is another caddy.

The propensity to truck, barter and exchange

What would a rational policy look like? Britain already taxes the tip. The standard rate of landfill tax rose on April 1st to £130.75 a tonne. This tax is not an objective measure of real costs faced by society in getting rid of its rubbish. It is yet another ‘nudge’ by the nanny state to encourage producers to switch to ‘more sustainable alternatives’. ‘Sustainability’ is one of the great weasel words of the modern age, fully in keeping with those who would force taxpayers to ‘save the planet’.

Wandsworth Council should stick to its knitting. Council leaflets should tell residents the truth: that food recycling is a statutory compliance cost, not a saving, and that somebody is paying for it. Let voluntary, price-driven recycling of aluminium, cardboard and scrap metal, like other economic activity, take place by mutually consenting adults freely contracting with each other. Adam Smith argued that the “propensity to truck, barter and exchange” was inherent in human nature and gave rise to the division of labour. Hayek called the belief that a few well-meaning officials can know better than prices what is worth saving the fatal conceit. Wandsworth Council worthies should serve the local public good and let moralising behaviour be the free choice of its constituents.

This article was first published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/09/24/the-great-recycling-swindle/

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.

The Oxford Institute Letting Climate Ideology Bias its Research

The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies (OIES) is one of the world’s most respected institutions in applied energy economics. Its researchers have produced decades of authoritative work on oil and gas markets, LNG pricing and the geopolitics of energy supply. For oil and gas industry analysts, the OIES offers keen insights.

From Tilaks´s Substack

By Tilak Doshi

The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies (OIES) is one of the world’s most respected institutions in applied energy economics. Its researchers have produced decades of authoritative work on oil and gas markets, LNG pricing and the geopolitics of energy supply. For oil and gas industry analysts, the OIES offers keen insights.

Which makes it all the more telling — and dispiriting — that OIES has chosen to hitch its wagon so firmly to the ‘energy transition’ bandwagon. The institute’s recent special edition of the Oxford Energy Forum on the Hormuz Crisis, published in late May 2026 and posted on LinkedIn on Tuesday, illustrates this contradiction. Here is an institute that simultaneously commands respect for its empirical rigour on fossil fuel markets and yet, when it comes to the ‘energy transition’, reliably produces analysis shaped by the prevailing academic and institutional orthodoxy rather than by hard-nosed economic analysis.

This is of course no surprise. Oxford University boasts the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment which is explicitly committed to “the green transition to achieve Net Zero emissions and sustainable development”. The school’s ‘experts’ recently came out with a report that found it a “sheer fantasy” that utilising the remaining North Sea reserves of oil and gas would make UK energy more secure or that it would make valuable contribution to the economy and its households. It also claimed that renewables have become cheaper than natural gas-fired generation.

The contrast with what an independent Oxford mind can do when liberated from institutional groupthink is instructive. Sir Dieter Helm, Professor of Economic Policy at Oxford and one of Britain’s foremost energy economists, has spent years making the unfashionable but essential point that the costs of Net Zero are steep. In a recent podcast discussion and on his own website, Helm has repeatedly argued that “it is important to tell the public the truth, that it’s going to cost you” to decarbonise. An individual of Helm’s stature can afford intellectual honesty. An institution with funding streams, conference participation and reputational stakes in the ‘Net Zero consensus’ is in a far more constrained position.

The Hormuz crisis: what it actually reveals

The US-Israeli attacks on Iran in late February 2026 and the subsequent disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz have generated what OIES itself describes as “one of the most severe energy shocks in modern history”. Daily transit through the strait has largely ground to a halt. Global LNG supply has been cut by around 20%. Gulf crude and liquids production losses have been estimated at close to 12-15 million barrels per day. Asian governments have scrambled to conserve fuel, release strategic reserves and secure alternative supplies from the United States and West Africa.

As an aside, it is now emerging that the lost Gulf oil exports are far smaller than thought, according to traders and shippers speaking to Reuters. Current disruptions could be as small as five to six million barrels per day as logistics adjust and different routes and means of transport alleviate scarcity.

The Hormuz crisis is, above all, a sharp reminder that the world still runs on fossil fuels — and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The Strait of Hormuz is barely 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, yet it carries approximately one-fifth of the world’s oil consumption and a similar share of global LNG trade. When crisis strikes, governments do not reach for intermittent renewable power. They rely on alternative sources of oil and gas and reducing consumption where possible. They release strategic petroleum reserves. They negotiate emergency LNG cargoes. They did not, it bears pointing out, plug in a few extra solar panels or go on a hurried campaign to build wind farms in the expectation that this would bail their economies out.

This is not a peripheral observation. It reflects the current state of global energy security. The OIES Hormuz special report treats the issue rather awkwardly — acknowledging the severity of the shock on one hand, while on the other nudging readers toward the conclusion that the crisis accelerates the case for energy transition.

The persistence of institutional groupthink

The OIES, to its credit, has done serious applied economic work on the mechanics of the Hormuz shock — the effects on refinery runs, crude trade flows, product markets and freight. Bassam Fattouh and his colleagues at the Oil and Middle East Programme have produced genuinely useful analysis. But the institute cannot help itself when it comes to the wider policy framing. The energy transition narrative is embedded in the DNA of how OIES frames its work, from its Energy Transition Research Programme to the recurring suggestion that crises like Hormuz should prompt a faster shift toward renewables.

Here one is reminded of a broader phenomenon in academic institutions. Even after the IPCC quietly abandoned its own extreme RCP8.5 scenario as “implausible”, most academic institutions have failed to reset their Net Zero advocacy. This despite the fact that this doomsday “business-as-usual” emissions pathway has underpinned thousands of alarming climate projections and much of the justification for urgency around the ‘energy transition’. It would seem, to turn the tables here, the “new deniers” are those who persist in ignoring what the IPCC’s own retraction of its most extreme scenario means for the cost-benefit calculus of aggressive decarbonisation policies. Roger Pielke Jr. has documented this with characteristic rigour, noting that “the policy machinery built on RCP8.5 and other implausible scenarios is systemic”. Institutional inertia, in other words, outlives the ‘scientific’ basis that once seemingly justified it.

OIES is not immune to this inertia. An Oxford institution with the OIES’s profile simply cannot afford, in the current academic and funding environment, to adopt a posture that the energy transition narrative is bereft of economic logic. Independent scholars like Prof. Helm can afford heterodox conclusions. Institutions with stakeholder relationships across governments, international agencies, and ESG-sensitive corporate partners cannot — at least not easily.

The developing world has made its choice

Perhaps the most egregious analytical failing in the energy transition orthodoxy that the OIES report implicitly endorses is the claim that developing countries are now embracing intermittent renewables as a route to reducing their exposure to oil and gas geopolitical disruptions — such as the Hormuz closure. This is not borne out by the evidence.

The reality is that we are seeing precisely the opposite response. Many Asian countries most exposed to the Hormuz shock are doubling down on coal as the reliable, dispatchable foundation of their energy systems. Authorities in South Korea have, among other immediate actions such as price caps, lifted restrictions on coal-fired generation. India has directed coal plants to operate at maximum capacity, leveraging domestic reserves to stabilise electricity supply. Bangladesh, Thailand and Vietnam have also increased coal outputs as energy security concerns mount. China appears to have been be somewhat shielded from Middle East conflict-driven price shocks by its significant energy reserves and diversified energy supply. Policymakers in these countries, in the main, realise the need for greater dispatchable generation capacity, more storage of fossil fuels and a diversified supplier portfolio.

Why? Because no country has ever successfully industrialised on the basis of non-dispatchable, intermittent wind and solar power. Not one. The historical record is unambiguous, as Vaclav Smil’s monumental work attests to. Every nation that has achieved sustained economic development has done so on the back of reliable, affordable, continuous energy — coal, oil, gas, hydro, nuclear. Given prohibitively expensive battery storage, wind and solar with their requirement for dispatchable backup power generation cannot fill that role at scale.

The empirical picture is consistent: the global energy system is not transitioning away from fossil fuels on any timescale relevant to current policy debates. Demand for oil, gas, and coal continues to grow in the developing world, even as Western nations (minus Trump’s America) add renewable capacity at enormous cost to their consumers and to grid stability.

The myth of cheap renewables

Central to the energy transition narrative — and one that pervades the policy framing OIES adopts — is the false claim that solar and wind are now cheaper than fossil fuels. This claim deserves to be demolished clearly and firmly, because it rests on a fundamental confusion between marginal costs and system costs. The Levelised Cost of Energy (LCOE) — the misleading metric used to declare renewables the cheapest option — captures only the costs of generating a unit of electricity from a wind farm or solar panel in isolation. It entirely ignores the system costs imposed on the wider grid by intermittent generators. It is indeed time to stop pretending that renewables are cheap.

These system costs are substantial. They include the cost of backup generation (gas peakers, typically) that must be kept on standby for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine; the cost of grid balancing and frequency regulation; the cost of transmission infrastructure to connect remote wind and solar sites to load centres; and the cost of battery or pumped hydro storage. When these system costs are properly accounted for, the ‘cheap renewables’ claim collapses. Prof Helm makes essentially the same point on his website, noting that renewables are “capital-intensive” as they share the economics of utilities — large fixed and sunk costs — not the zero-marginal-cost miracle that their promoters claim.

It would be unfair to single out OIES as uniquely captured by energy transition orthodoxy. The same institutional pressures operate on virtually every major academic energy research centre in the Western world. The European University Institute, the International Energy Agency, Imperial College London’s Energy Futures Lab, UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose — all operate within a funding and reputational environment that makes heterodox conclusions about energy transition punitively costly to publish and defend.

The OIES has done important work on the mechanics of the Hormuz shock. It has tracked the effects on refining runs, crude trade flows and product markets with characteristic professionalism. The institute’s Bassam Fattouh and colleagues at the Gas Programme have produced genuinely useful analysis on what the LNG market disruption means for Europe and Asia. None of this is in question. The issue is the policy framing that surrounds and shapes this otherwise solid empirical work — a framing that consistently tilts toward energy transition conclusions that the institution’s own market analysis does not support.

Reality has not read the transition roadmap

The Hormuz crisis of 2026 has delivered the most powerful empirical rebuke to energy transition orthodoxy in a generation. When the chips are down — when a military conflict significantly reduces global oil and LNG supply — every government on the planet responds with the same toolkit: strategic petroleum reserves, emergency fossil fuel procurement and access to alternative oil and gas suppliers. Not a single country activated its ‘renewable resilience strategy’. Not because the idea of wind and solar power is wrong in principle, but because the physical reality of intermittent, weather-dependent energy makes it unsuitable for crisis management or for long-run development.

Respected institutions like OIES do their best work when they apply rigorous economic analysis to energy markets without fear of where it leads. The Hormuz crisis has given them — and us — a vivid, real-world experiment in what the global economy actually runs on. The honest conclusion from that experiment is not that we need to accelerate the energy transition on the basis of some presumed ‘climate crisis’. It is that the world’s dependence on oil, gas and coal is profound, structural and not going anywhere soon. A world-class research institution ought to be able to say so without the ‘energy transition’ hedge.

This article was first published in the Daily Sceptic [https://dailysceptic.org/2026/06/21/the-oxford-institute-letting-climate-ideology-bias-its-research/]

The Dying Embers of Net Zero Propaganda

Physics hasn’t changed: wind and solar are cheap when the wind blows and sun shines, but the system still needs firm capacity. Technology costs have fallen dramatically, and emissions have been displaced — but the transition’s total system cost is still being socialised through bills and subsidies. Whether the embers are truly “dying” or merely flickering depends on whether governments double down on subsidies or pivot toward abundant, dispatchable, low-carbon supply at lowest total cost to consumers.

Physics hasn’t changed: wind and solar are cheap when the wind blows and sun shines, but the system still needs firm capacity. Technology costs have fallen dramatically, and emissions have been displaced — but the transition’s total system cost is still being socialised through bills and subsidies. Whether the embers are truly “dying” or merely flickering depends on whether governments double down on subsidies or pivot toward abundant, dispatchable, low-carbon supply at lowest total cost to consumers.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

From The Daily Sceptic

By David Turver

A quick glance at the headlines reveals we are in the midst of one of the worst energy crises in history. Both oil and gas prices have spiked because of the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz. UK electricity prices have gone up too.

This has led Ember (the same people who came up with Ed Miliband’s promise to cut energy bills by £300) to claim that renewables have cut gas generation compared to March 2021 and saved us £7 million per day.

Figure 1 – Miliband and Ember Claim the Renewables are Saving Money

Contracts for Difference (CfDs) work by paying generators the market price for the electricity they produce plus a top up to the contract strike price. With market prices rising, we might expect CfD subsidies to fall. But the record shows we paid a record £258 million in CfD subsidies for the month of March in 2026 and a record for the first quarter too. What is going on?

Gas Prices

Figure 2 shows what has happened to gas prices over the past year from Trading Economics.

Figure 2 – UK Gas Prices (p per therm) (from Trading Economics)

For most of 2025, UK gas was trading around 80p per therm. There was a short spike at the end of 2025 then prices settled back around the prior trading range until March 3rd 2026, the first trading day after the start of the war in Iran, when prices immediately spiked to almost 140p/therm. Prices remained above 120p/therm for the rest of March and have started declining on hopes of a peace deal.

However, it is not just gas that drives the wholesale cost of electricity; carbon costs play their part too. Figure 3, ironically using data from Ember, shows what has happened to fuel and carbon costs since 2021.

Figure 3 – Fuel and Carbon Costs (£ per MWh) and Carbon Share (%)

First, we can see that the recent spike in gas prices has had a much smaller impact on fuel costs than the 2022 crisis. Second, fuel and carbon costs were £30.99/MWh and £23.46/MWh, respectively in March 2021 giving a total of £54.45/MWh. This compares to £88.90/MWh and £21.24/MWh, for a total of £110.14/MWh in March 2026, so gas-fired electricity is more expensive now than five years ago. Third, even though fuel costs spiked from £56/MWh in February 2026 to almost £89/MWh in March, carbon costs fell. Carbon costs had risen from less than £20/MWh in January 2025 to ~£32/MWh in January after Prime Minister Starmer’s announcement to align the UK and EU ETS schemes. Carbon costs then fell to ~£21/MWh in March 2026 because in January Chancellor Merz called for the scheme to be reviewed. Falling carbon costs have helped dampen the impact of rising gas prices.

Electricity Supply

To arrive at their conclusions, Ember used the period February 28th to March 28th for 2021. Figure 4 shows the sources of electricity generation for those periods in 2021 and 2026 (data from NESO).

Figure 4 – Electricity Supply by Source (TWh) 28 Feb to 31 Mar

Overall generation is up from 23.7TWh in 2021 to 24.4TWh. However, imports are counted as generation in the NESO data and if imports are excluded actual domestic generation fell from 21.3TWh to 20.4TWh. Gas generation did fall by 3.5TWh from 9.1TWh to 5.6TWh, wind and solar combined generation rose from 6.4TWh to 9.7TWh, offsetting most of the reduction in gas generation. However, the total generation from other sources (coal, biomass, nuclear, hydro and storage) also fell by 0.7TWh as imports rose 1.7TWh.

This looks like there has been a notional “saving” of gas of 7TWh used in electricity generation (assuming 50% efficiency) which at a notional cost of 130p/therm means a gross saving of about £312 million.

CfD Subsidies

We can see the effect of lower carbon prices on the reference prices for offshore wind in Figure 5 (data from the Low Carbon Contract Company (LCCC)).

Figure 5 – CfD Offshore Wind Reference Prices by Month (£ per MWh)

Although reference prices were at an elevated level, around £78/MWh in March, they were in fact slightly lower than the almost £79/MWh recorded in February and much lower than the £89/MWh recorded in January 2026. Reference prices are lower than Ember’s estimate for the cost of gas-fired generation because at times of high renewables output, less efficient gas plants are pushed off the grid.

Lower reference prices have had an impact on the subsidies paid. Record subsidies for the month of March were paid in 2026 reaching over £258 million as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6 – Total CfD Subsidies Month of March by Year (£m)

Offshore wind took the lion’s share of subsidies, with over £200 million paid out. The various forms of biomass took another £53 million, with onshore wind taking £6.5 million. Solar paid back into the system in March 2026, but the £1.3 million repayment is trivial in the grand scheme of things. Even the cheapest CfD offshore windfarm on the grid, Moray East, received a subsidy of £269,000 in March 2026.

Record subsidies of over £796 million for the first quarter were also paid out in 2026, beating the prior record of £595 million recorded in 2020 as shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7 – Total CfD Subsidies Jan-Mar by Year (£m)

Total subsidies for the financial year-ended March 31st 2026 were £2.96 billion, another record. Total CfD subsidies since inception have now reached almost £13 billion.

At first glance, it looks like renewables saved money, because we “saved” £312 million of gas compared to paying out only £258 million in renewables subsidies. We paid about £186 million in subsidies in March 2021, so subsidies have gone up by only £72 million. But this masks the fact that we also paid the market price for the electricity in addition to the subsidies. We paid a weighted average strike price for wind and solar of £153/MWh in March 2026 compared to a weighted average reference price of £77/MWh. This explains the record subsidies. Even if we compare the strike price to Ember’s calculation of the cost of gas-fired electricity in March 2026 of £110/MWh (including carbon costs), renewables were more expensive than gas. Contrary to Ember’s claim, we were paying more for renewables under the CfD scheme than we would have paid had it all been produced by gas. Remember, that is with carbon taxes on gas and before all the additional on-costs of renewables for backup, grid balancing and expansion.

As an aside, the subsidies for renewables subsidised by Renewables Obligation Certificates (ROCs) have also gone up since 2021. ROCs are awarded in addition to the market price, so ROC-subsidised generators are always more expensive than gas. In 2020/21 the buyout value of certificates was £50.07 and in 2025/26 the buyout value had gone up 34% to £67.06. This shows we are paying more subsidies for ROC-funded renewables too.

It is not just more generation that is driving the additional subsidies. Subsidies per MWh generated also rose in March 2026 compared to February 2026 and March 2025 (see Figure 8).

Figure 8 – CfD Subsidy per MWh by Month (£ per MWh)

We paid £81/MWh in subsidies for offshore wind in March 2026 (more than half the strike price) compared to £75/MWh in February 2026 and £64/MWh in March 2025. Onshore wind received £38/MWh in March 2026 and solar paid back £17/MWh.

Incidentally, the offshore wind subsidy in March 2021 was £103/MWh. So, the rate of subsidy has come down as cheaper generators have come online, but we are still paying subsidies, so as a whole, the offshore wind fleet is still much more expensive than gas.

Looking to Future

In the near term, the older offshore windfarms have also seen a big increase in the strike price for this financial year. We will now pay almost £221/MWh for Walney Extension, Burbo Bank and Dudgeon, about £206/MWh for Beatrice and Hornsea 1 and £176/MWh for East Anglia 1. The strike price for Drax biomass plant is £147/MWh in 2025/26, Lynemouth is £154/MWh and Teesside is £183/MWh. So we can expect burning trees to attract more subsidy this year too.

There are some new projects from AR3 and AR4 due to come online in the near future with much lower strike prices which ought to reduce subsidies per MWh. However, the newer contracts from AR6 and AR7 have much higher strike prices for offshore wind. More offshore wind on the grid is likely to drive down reference prices so, they will have the impact of pushing up the absolute levels of subsidy.

The LCCC has released the new strike prices for 2026/27 and we can compare them to the average reference prices for 2025/26 and to March 2026, when gas prices were elevated as shown in Figure 9.

Figure 9 – Comparison Reference Prices and AR6 and AR7 Strike Prices (£ per MWh)

Offshore wind provides the bulk of electricity generation under the CfD scheme. Even with today’s elevated gas prices, the reference prices in March 2026 (£77/MWh) were much lower than the current strike prices of projects awarded contracts in AR6 (£88/MWh) and AR7 (£97/MWh). Onshore wind strike prices are slightly lower and those for solar much lower. But these projects produce trivial amounts of electricity compared to offshore wind, so we can expect subsidies to keep rising and bills to go ever higher.

Labour’s announcement that it will scrap the Carbon Price Support mechanism in April 2028 is a welcome, if tardy, intervention that will reduce wholesale electricity prices and hence reference prices. However, this means that CfD-funded generators will simply collect more of their revenue from subsidies rather than the market.

Conclusions

Even with elevated gas prices, CfD subsidies are soaring and the outlook is that Miliband’s AR6 and AR7 auctions are going to send bills even higher. This has not stopped Ember putting out another shonky report that tortures the data to produce the result they want.

It should be obvious, even to them, if subsidies are being paid to renewables then they are more expensive than gas. With this level of desperation from Ember, we really must be witnessing the dying embers of Net Zero propaganda.

David Turver writes the Eigen Values Substack page, where this article first appeared.

There’s Nothing “Voluntary” About a Smart Meter

Although I am not on board with Rupert Lowe’s new political party (I remain a loyal ‘Sir Nigel’ band member), I increasingly find myself fielding the same criticism levelled at him. Question anything that sits comfortably within the modern consensus and you are quickly placed in the same bracket, as though mild scepticism is a sign of defect rather than a starting point for discussion. That is where we now are. I do not want a smart meter, and I do not currently have one, which seems to be enough to invite suspicion in itself.

Although I am not on board with Rupert Lowe’s new political party (I remain a loyal ‘Sir Nigel’ band member), I increasingly find myself fielding the same criticism levelled at him. Question anything that sits comfortably within the modern consensus and you are quickly placed in the same bracket, as though mild scepticism is a sign of defect rather than a starting point for discussion. That is where we now are. I do not want a smart meter, and I do not currently have one, which seems to be enough to invite suspicion in itself.

My instinct is to question systems that expand quietly while being presented as optional. That instinct was sharpened during COVID-19, when measures introduced with caveats and assurances had a tendency to outgrow both. It is therefore difficult to accept repeated claims at face value when the structure surrounding them suggests a different outcome. The smart meter rollout is a good example of that approach. No law says that you must have one. That line is repeated often and confidently. Think Nadim Zahawi (Reform – why?!) denying the roll-out of vaccine passports only for this to became mandatory in certain settings weeks later. At the point it is parroted it is true, but what is not explained with the same clarity is how the system has been constructed so that, in time, most households will end up with one regardless of their initial preference.

The mechanism is not complicated, though it is rarely set out plainly. Electricity meters are not permanent fixtures. Under the Electricity Act 1989 and the Meters (Certification) Regulations 1998, they must be certified and approved for billing purposes and that certification has a defined lifespan. For many homes built in the early 2000s, that lifespan is around 20 years. Once it expires, the meter is no longer compliant and cannot remain in service. At that point, the supplier is required to replace it. That requirement is no longer discretionary. It sits alongside another obligation, this time within Ofgem’s licence conditions, which requires suppliers to take all reasonable steps to install smart meters when replacing existing equipment. Traditional non-smart meters have largely disappeared from circulation. They are not widely manufactured, they are not offered as replacements, and they do not form part of the current rollout strategy. When a replacement is required, what is fitted in practice is a SMETS2 smart meter.

While the existing meter remains within certification, there is room to decline. Emails can be ignored, appointments can be refused and the matter can be pushed away. That window remains open only for as long as the meter remains compliant. Once the certification expires, the position changes. The old meter cannot stay, and the replacement offered is ‘smart’. There is no alternative presented at that stage. The process does not rely on compulsion in the conventional sense. It works by removing every other option.

The technical framework that follows is not incidental. SMETS2 meters are enrolled onto the Data Communications Company network, a centrally managed system established under the regulatory framework that developed after the Energy Act 2008. Suppliers are required to participate in that system. When a smart meter is installed, it is connected and begins communicating automatically. Consumers are told that they can control how their data are used, which is true up to a point. Billing frequency can be set to monthly rather than daily or half-hourly, marketing can be declined and third-party access can be restricted. Those are real choices, though they relate to how the supplier interacts with the data rather than whether the data exist. The homeowner is simply allowed to decide how much glitter to roll the turd in.

Half-hourly consumption data are recorded regardless of the billing preference selected. Ofgem’s Market-wide Half-Hourly Settlement programme relies on that level of detail to balance supply and demand across the grid and allocate costs within the system. The supplier may only use monthly reads for billing if that is your preference, though the underlying measurement remains far more granular. That distinction is not always made clear. This matters because it shows where control genuinely sits. The customer can influence presentation. The system itself continues to operate at full resolution.

The financial consequences follow naturally from that structure. A system built on granular measurement lends itself to costs that reflect when energy is used. Winter demand is higher, so winter bills rise accordingly. Summer demand is lower and bills fall with it. What had previously been spread across the year becomes concentrated in the months where consumption is greatest. The traditional approach, which relied on a small number of readings and averaged payments over time, allowed households to plan with a degree of certainty. Two readings a year, one in spring and one in autumn, were enough to keep the account aligned while smoothing the extremes. The household paid a steady amount and the variation in usage was absorbed within the system rather than passed directly through.

That arrangement is now being replaced by one that exposes those variations in full. High usage produces high cost at the point it occurs and the financial impact is no longer softened by the structure of the billing system. That may be described as accuracy and in a narrow technical sense it is. It also makes budgeting more difficult, particularly for households that rely on predictability rather than constant adjustment.

It is worth remembering how widely supported this direction of travel has been. The legislative framework begins with the Energy Act 2008, introduced by Gordon Brown’s Labour government. The Conservative and Lib Dem Coalition and later Conservative governments carried it forward, Labour continues it and there has been no meaningful political resistance at any stage. That level of agreement is often presented as strength. To me it screams dodgy. No healthy legislation receives so much untrammelled support.

What exists now is a nationwide infrastructure capable of recording detailed energy usage, transmitting it centrally and feeding it into a regulatory system designed to reshape how electricity is priced and consumed. It is being introduced by stealth via the back door, through certification rules, supplier obligations and the removal of alternatives. The language surrounding it remains careful. The process is described as “voluntary“. The practical outcome is that, once existing meters reach the end of their life, all households will move onto smart metering whether they ever actively chose to or not.

Call it what you like. I call it a con.

And yes, as you’ve probably deduced, my electricity meter’s certification expired a few days ago.

Government Claims Cost of Electricity is Falling. It’s Not

The BBC is being particularly dishonest when it says “prices are still about a third higher than before the war in Ukraine”. The clear intention is to portray the Ukraine war as still keeping gas prices elevated.

From The Daily Sceptic

By Paul Homewood

The new energy price cap is announced. The BBC reports:

Typical household energy bills will fall by 7% in April, regulator Ofgem has announced, following a shake-up in charges by the Government.

Nearly everyone in England, Wales and Scotland will benefit from a cut irrespective of their tariff, although the amounts will vary between households.

For millions of households on variable tariffs governed by the price cap, the drop will be about £10 a month for those using a typical amount of gas and electricity.

However, prices are still about a third higher than before the war in Ukraine, debts have ballooned, and billpayers are being urged to shop around for further savings.

The 7% fall in the price cap is the biggest drop since last summer. While the Government promised a £150 a year reduction in April, the cost of running the energy network is up, leading to a lesser saving of £117 for a household using a typical amount of energy.

The BBC is being particularly dishonest when it says “prices are still about a third higher than before the war in Ukraine”. The clear intention is to portray the Ukraine war as still keeping gas prices elevated. The figures show this to be false.

Firstly, energy prices were extremely low in 2020-21 because the pandemic lockdowns reduced demand.

But if we go back to the first Ofgem price cap, January to March 2019, we see that gas prices have barely risen since in real terms:


Although domestic gas bills have increased from £523 a year to £766 under the new cap for April, nearly all of this explained by general inflation. However, electricity prices have risen 65.4% despite inflation (RPI) only rising by 43.7%.

Clearly gas prices cannot be the reason why electricity prices have far outstripped general inflation.

Electricity prices are high for one reason and one reason only – Net Zero policies. In fact the new cap understates the impact of Net Zero. The new cap takes £130 of renewable subsidies off electricity bills and instead puts the cost onto taxation, or more accurately, Government borrowing to be paid back by future generations.

Without this shuffling costs around onto general taxation, electricity bills would now be £1,005, or 90% higher than in 2019.

First published on Paul’s blog, Not a Lot of People Know That.

Ed Miliband’s Most Brazenly Dishonest Claims Yet

Ed Miliband’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero has just announced the results of the new CfD auction, in what must go down as one of the most blatantly dishonest and arguably fraudulent Government press releases in recent years.

A portrait of a man in a suit with a serious expression, standing in front of multiple wind turbines against a blue sky.

From The Daily Sceptic

By  Paul Homewood

A man wearing a hard hat and a high-visibility vest stands on a boat, smiling with offshore wind turbines visible in the background.

Ed Miliband’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero has just announced the results of the new CfD auction, in what must go down as one of the most blatantly dishonest and arguably fraudulent Government press releases in recent years.

Press release announcing a record 8.4GW of offshore wind secured in Europe's biggest offshore wind auction to enhance Britain's energy independence.
Press release titled 'Record breaking auction for offshore wind secured to take back control of Britain's energy' from GOV.UK, detailing a record 8.4GW of offshore wind secured.

Britain has taken a monumental step towards ending the country’s reliance on volatile fossil fuels and lowering bills for good, by delivering a record-breaking offshore wind result in its latest renewables auction. 

The results deliver the biggest single procurement of offshore wind energy in British and  European history – confounding the global challenges facing the industry – a major vote of confidence in the UK’s new era of energy sovereignty and abundance. 

The Government inherited the fiasco of the previous government’s failed Auction Round 5, in which not a single offshore wind project was secured. The last auction round, AR6, got the industry back on its feet. Now this auction round, known as Contracts for Difference AR7, has secured a record capacity of 8.4 GW of offshore wind which will generate enough clean electricity to power the equivalent of 12 million homes. The ground-breaking result puts Britain firmly on track to achieve its clean power mission by 2030.

These results show offshore wind is cheaper to build and operate than new gas. In new figures published today using the LCOE industry metric, the cost of building and operating a new gas fired power station is £147 per megawatt hour. By contrast, the results for fixed offshore wind in today’s auction were £90.91 per megawatt hour on average – or £65.25 in the commonly used benchmark of 2012 prices – 40% cheaper than the cost of building and operating new gas.

This auction will unlock around £22 billion in private investment, supporting around 7,000 jobs, bringing growth and good jobs to all regions of the country – and particularly to the country’s industrial heartlands. Clean power is also essential to tackle the climate crisis, the greatest long-term threat the country faces. 

Below are the successful schemes:

Table displaying the results of Contracts for Difference Allocation Round 7, including project details such as location, applicant/developer, technology type, size in MW, strike prices, delivery year, and number of phases.
Table showing offshore wind project details, including project names, locations in England and Wales, companies involved, capacities, and project years.

Let’s start with the big lie:

Price for offshore wind agreed at 40% lower than the cost of building and operating a new gas power plant …

These results show offshore wind is cheaper to build and operate than new gas. In new figures published today using the LCOE industry metric, the cost of building and operating a new gas fired power station is £147 per megawatt hour. By contrast, the results for fixed offshore wind in today’s auction were £90.91 per megawatt hour on average – or £65.25 in the commonly used benchmark of 2012 prices – 40% cheaper than the cost of building and operating new gas.

There are the “new figures published today”:

Screenshot of a government report titled 'Electricity generation costs 2025', discussing cost estimates for electricity generation technologies.

The PDF analysis contains this table – I have highlighted the relevant column for Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) technology:

Bar graph displaying Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) estimates for various dispatchable technologies projected for commissioning in 2030. The chart includes categories such as Gas CCGT and CCHT, with different load factors and cost components like pre-development, construction, and carbon.

The data annexes confirm that the cost of new CCGT is estimate as £109 per MWh at 2024 prices – but this includes £41 per MWh for carbon tax, which is not a “cost” at all but a Government imposition. (It relates to the Emissions Trading Scheme, which could be torn up tomorrow, if the political will was there.)

The Government claim that offshore wind is 40% cheaper than gas implies a cost of gas power of about £150 per MWh. That is a fake claim, even if you allow for carbon costs.

The simple reality is that the real cost of new gas power would be £68 per MWh, around a quarter less than these new contracts for offshore wind. Of this, fuel costs account for £45 per MWh.

The second lie concerns the use of “2024 prices”, on which the “90.91 per MWh” price for offshore wind is based.

It has probably occurred to you that we are now in 2026! Since 2024, CPI has risen by 4.5%. As CfD strike prices are index linked, that “£90.91” has already risen to about £95 per MWh.

The wholesale price in Q4 2025 was £74.44 per MWh, according to the Government’s Low Carbon Contracts Company. Offshore wind will therefore be subsidised to the tune of £20 per MWh at these prices.

Line graph depicting historical data of CfD reference prices for offshore wind from 2017 to 2023, showing fluctuations in prices over time.
Line graph showing data trends from Q1 2024 to Q1 2026 with steady fluctuations.

Indeed, the Government admits as much, because the AR7 published results confirm that subsidies could top £1.9 billion a year by the time all the schemes are operational. These subsidies will have to be paid for 20 years, and index linked.

Table displaying estimated monetary budget impact for Pot 3 and Pot 4 from 2028/29 to 2032/33, with values outlined for each year.
Note: The “monetary Budget impact” is the expected subsidy payment i.e., strike price minus market price.

Then we come to the third big lie.

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) is comparing new offshore wind with new CCGT. The true comparison however should be with existing CCGT, as we already have under-utilised CCGTs. It is generation from these that new wind power will replace.

As we have already paid for all of the fixed costs anyway, the only cost of producing additional electricity at CCGTs is the fuel cost, which as we have seen is around £45 per MWh. That means the cost of sourcing power from these new wind farms will be about £50 per MWh dearer than the gas power they are replacing.

We are tight on CCGT capacity and will need to construct new plants if older ones close as expected. But – crucially – we will have to do that anyway, whether we build new wind farms or not as gas will remain our back-up for intermittent renewables for the foreseeable future.

What Miliband wants is to spend tens of billions building offshore wind farms in addition to paying for that new gas capacity. It will not “lower bills for good”, as the presa release blurb states. It will raise bills yet further.

First published on Paul Homewood’s blog, Not a Lot of People Know That.

Science Without Skepticism Is Just Politics in a Lab Coat

That’s a sharp and provocative statement- one that captures a growing concern about the intersection of science and ideology.
Scientific skepticism is the engine of genuine scientific progress. It’s the commitment to questioning claims, demanding reproducible evidence, and remaining open to falsification, no matter how inconvenient or unpopular.

A male scientist in a white lab coat and a female scientist in a blazer stand confidently in a courtroom setting, holding a clipboard labeled 'EVIDENCE,' with a science lab backdrop featuring various equipment.

That’s a sharp and provocative statement- one that captures a growing concern about the intersection of science and ideology.

Scientific skepticism is the engine of genuine scientific progress. It’s the commitment to questioning claims, demanding reproducible evidence, and remaining open to falsification, no matter how inconvenient or unpopular.

As Carl Sagan put it, science is “a way of thinking” rooted in skeptically interrogating ideas while understanding human fallibility. Without that rigorous doubt- organized through peer review, replication, and debate science risks becoming dogmatic.

When skepticism erodes and scientific authority aligns too closely with political agendas, advocacy can masquerade as objectivity. Scientists are experts in their domains, but expertise doesn’t confer moral or policy infallibility.

A person wearing a white lab coat adorned with various colorful pins and badges representing diverse symbols, including peace signs, light bulbs, globes, and national flags.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

From Watts Up With That?

By Charles Rotter

A scientist in a lab coat stands behind a podium labeled 'EVIDENCE,' holding a gavel and a clipboard, in a courtroom-like setting with scientific equipment in the background.

How Conflating Advocacy with Evidence Undermines Science and Self-Government

Screenshot of the article titled 'Scientists as policymakers: Greenlighting restoration and climate action' published in the Earth Stewardship journal, featuring authors Kathleen K. Treseder and Adam J. Cavecche.
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/eas2.70032

The perspective paper “Scientists as Policymakers: Greenlighting Restoration and Climate Action” is presented as a sober reflection on how scientists might better “engage” with public decision-making. What it actually offers is something far more radical and far more dangerous: a blueprint for erasing the institutional boundary between science and political power, while insisting that this collapse somehow strengthens objectivity rather than destroying it.

The authors do not hedge their ambitions. After lamenting that elected officials rarely read peer-reviewed literature, they arrive at what they clearly regard as the logical conclusion:

“If we want ecology to help fight climate change, we need to create a direct line of communication between scientists and policymakers. Better yet, we need scientists who are policymakers themselves.”

That sentence should stop any serious reader cold. It is not an argument for better advisory mechanisms or clearer translation of research. It is an argument for scientists to occupy positions of coercive authority while retaining the cultural prestige of scientific neutrality. History suggests this combination rarely ends well.

From the outset, the paper frames political disagreement as a moral and epistemic failure rather than a legitimate feature of democratic governance. The authors describe policy decisions they oppose as “anti-science,” a term they deploy repeatedly but never define with precision. For example, the catalyst for the lead author’s entry into politics is described this way:

“She was becoming more concerned with each new anti-science action, and one event convinced her to act.”

This framing does enormous rhetorical work. Once policy disagreement is labeled “anti-science,” the debate is effectively over. Opponents are no longer citizens weighing costs, risks, and priorities; they are enemies of knowledge itself. Under those conditions, advocacy is not merely permitted—it becomes morally mandatory.

The authors acknowledge that scientists have traditionally worried about exactly this problem. They note that many researchers have argued that political advocacy risks destroying public trust and scientific credibility:

“They argued that scientists’ roles should be limited to communicating objective facts, leaving policy recommendations to others.”

But this concern is quickly dismissed as outdated squeamishness. Urgency replaces restraint. The possibility that advocacy might corrupt scientific judgment is treated as a secondary issue, outweighed by the need for action.

That logic is repeated throughout the paper. Climate change is described as an “existential threat,” a “code red,” and a crisis demanding immediate intervention. Yet nowhere do the authors grapple seriously with uncertainty ranges, competing risk assessments, or the track record of prior large-scale environmental interventions. Urgency becomes a solvent that dissolves skepticism.

The authors formalize this worldview in what they present as a helpful engagement model: research, outreach, and policymaking. They explain:

“Essentially, research provides critical knowledge; outreach communicates the knowledge to officials and the public; and policymaking uses this knowledge to develop laws, allocate funds, perform casework, etc.”

This model assumes that once “the knowledge” exists, policy decisions follow naturally, almost mechanically. Missing entirely is any serious acknowledgment that policy choices involve value judgments, trade-offs, and opportunity costs that cannot be resolved by data alone. Science can inform decisions; it cannot make them. Pretending otherwise is not evidence- based governance- it is technocracy.

The central case study of the paper illustrates this problem in concrete terms. The authors celebrate the allocation of roughly $100 million in public funds for a restoration project justified in part by climate mitigation goals. The language used to support this decision is revealingly speculative:

“Open spaces could potentially be managed to increase soil carbon storage and offset these sources.”

“Could potentially” is doing heavy lifting here. This is a hypothesis, layered atop several others: assumptions about wildfire frequency, carbon permanence, ecological response, and long-term management success. Yet these uncertainties are never quantified in a way that would allow comparison with alternative uses of the funds.

Instead, possibility is quietly converted into justification.

The paper repeatedly relies on conditional claims—“could,” “might,” “can be accelerated”—while treating the resulting policies as self-evidently necessary. This is not how scientific reasoning is supposed to work. Hypotheses are meant to be stress-tested, not fast-tracked into budget line items.

Even more troubling is the paper’s explicit endorsement of emotional persuasion as a scientific communication strategy. The authors argue that traditional scientific modes of explanation are ineffective with the public and should be replaced with storytelling:

“Scientists are trained to focus on data and information… Yet, telling stories can be more successful with members of the public.”

They elaborate approvingly:

“To ask for climate action, a speaker might tell a story about someone evacuating from a wildfire… the focus would be more on emotions than facts.”

This is not a minor stylistic recommendation. It is a wholesale abandonment of the norms that distinguish science from propaganda. Emotional narratives are powerful precisely because they bypass analytical scrutiny. Encouraging scientists to rely on them while retaining the authority of science is an invitation to manipulate trust rather than earn it.

The authors are clearly aware that trust is central to their project. They emphasize that:

“The public tends to trust scientists more than close family, neighbors, coworkers, religious leaders, and the President of the United States.”

This fact is presented not as a reason for caution, but as a strategic advantage. Trust becomes a resource to be leveraged in pursuit of policy goals. Once scientists openly adopt advocacy, however, that trust becomes fragile. It is far easier to spend credibility than to rebuild it.

Throughout the paper, the authors describe “earth stewardship” as the deliberate reshaping of both ecological and social systems:

“Earth stewardship is the deliberate shaping of biological and social systems to sustain important earth system services.”

This is an extraordinary claim, offered with no apparent awareness of its historical baggage. The deliberate reshaping of social systems by credentialed experts has been attempted many times before. The results are rarely as tidy as the models predicted.

The technocratic impulse is unmistakable. Scientists, we are told, should “provide a vision for a sustainable world,” “incentivize sustainable consumption,” and help place “economic value on earth system services.” The public’s role in this vision is largely passive: to be informed, persuaded, and guided toward preferred behaviors by those who “know better.”

The paper’s final sections make explicit what has been implicit all along. The authors openly identify themselves as political actors with defined ideological commitments:

“She identifies as a progressive Democrat, climate change scientist, academic, researcher, and local decision-maker.”

This transparency is commendable, but it fatally undermines the paper’s claim to be offering a general model for science in society. What is being proposed is not “scientists as policymakers” in the abstract, but scientists who share a specific political worldview using scientific authority to advance it.

That is advocacy, not objectivity.

The danger here is not that scientists lack intelligence or good intentions. It is that complex systems do not yield to centralized design, no matter how well credentialed the designers may be. When scientists become politicians, storytellers, and moral advocates, the incentives that safeguard scientific skepticism begin to erode. Dissent becomes denial. Uncertainty becomes obstruction. Alternative priorities become “anti-science.”

A society that values both knowledge and liberty must resist this convergence of expertise and power. Scientists play a vital role in informing public debate. They do not acquire special moral authority to govern simply by virtue of publishing papers. The moment science becomes indistinguishable from political advocacy, it forfeits the very credibility that made it valuable in the first place.

This paper does not defend science. It repurposes it.

And that should concern anyone who still believes that skepticism is a virtue rather than an obstacle.

Addendum: Earth Stewardship is a new journal, and likely to provide endless fodder for posts.

Earth Stewardship serves as a forum for the cultural exchange of diverse knowledge systems and collective understanding on how we can protect our planet. Earth Stewardship calls for a broad spectrum of scientifically and technologically innovative and groundbreaking contributions including cross-cultural perspectives from leading researchers, policymakers, traditional custodians of land and sea and indigenous communities. Earth Stewardship publishes applied and theoretical articles to promote a broad, intercultural, and participatory foundation for earth stewardship.

A man in a lab coat holds a clipboard labeled 'EVIDENCE' while standing beside a woman in a dress, set against a background of a government chamber and a laboratory.

Junk science and government

Science controversies have become left-right wars fought on the internet. These days everything exists, from run-of-the-mill issues such as (fake) climate change or extreme numbers of unsafe vaccines children need to receive — up to 80 by age 18, including boosters, and COVID vaccines saving lives (hardly, but anyhow), to the Tylenol-autism dustup.

An illustration of a distressed scientist sitting at a desk, resting his head on his hands, surrounded by laboratory equipment and papers, depicting the struggle with scientific controversies.

From American Thinker

By S. Stanley Young and Warren Kindzierski

Science controversies have become left-right wars fought on the internet. These days everything exists, from run-of-the-mill issues such as (fake) climate change or extreme numbers of unsafe vaccines children need to receive — up to 80 by age 18, including boosters, and COVID vaccines saving lives (hardly, but anyhow), to the Tylenol-autism dustup.

Even people with life experience and common sense have problems judging such controversies; and the internet is where sound science competes with junk science.

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) spent the past few years examining the methods of four different fields of science that lead to irreproducible (false) evidence used by governments. Flawed methods are big part of what leads to false evidence and junk science. Guess where most of this junk originates? Government-funded academia.

Academic junk science has been allowed to run amuck for decades and with little or no policing from university administrations. Elite universities, e.g., Harvard, seem to be right in there among the infestation. They would have us think they are important for science innovation. They’re wrong: more often than not — key innovations come from private industries and industrial laboratories rather than from universities.

So where does junk science fit in? It works in favor of government policymakers who mostly spend their career on our dime trying to make their jobs more important. They do this by using junk science to create irresponsible polices and regulations that are costly, meaningless, or even harmful to us.

Government policies should be built on transparent and accountable scientific research. Policies (and regulations) developed from research should clear a high barrier of proof. They should be based on reproducible science. Unsurprisingly, too many government science policies fail here.

All this points to a policy crisis in government. The current situation is win/win for government bureaucrats and universities: agency propaganda is supported and universities get grants. The citizens — us — are the ones paying for the loss of freedom.

The road to fixing this mess has already started at the top — the White House, with a landmark executive order Restoring Gold Standard Science. This order is a return to foundational scientific principles in government — fostering discovery, innovation, and trust in science. To this end, we offer four reforms to help governments.

1. Cut the funding of junk science. Federal government agencies need to change their regulatory and funding practices to fix the irreproducibility crisis in academic science and the irresponsibility crisis in our government.

A graphic illustrating the impact of junk science on government policy and scientific research.

2. Sever the fraudulent relationship between government policymakers and academic junk scientists. Federal and state policymakers need to end the arbitrary procedures of using government-funded scientific research for regulation if it is irreproducible.

3. Fix the process fueling this train wreck. Federal and state policymakers need to change the teaching of undergraduate (and K‒12) science and math to educate properly a new generation of science professionals, policymakers, and informed citizens. They certainly should cover junk science and fossil fuel development, the latter which is linked to our prosperity.

4. Refocus policy institutes to dedicate themselves to sound science policy as a priority. These institutes need to be staffed with people who know the difference between sound and junk science, and the benefits of fossil fuels.

Previous administrations have allowed a cesspit of relationships between government policymakers and academic junk scientists, including radical activists disguised as scientists.

Government experts employed to judge scientific research and academics (whom mostly lean left) are naïve or sly practitioners of political groupthink. They are not our friends.

These reforms will go a long way in reversing the current situation of government bureaucrats and academics jointly using regulation based on junk science to advance corrupt, self-serving policy goals.

S. Stanley Young, PhD, is the CEO of CGStat in Raleigh, North Carolina and is Director of the National Association of Scholars’ Shifting Sands Project. Warren Kindzierski, PhD, is a retired college professor (public health) in St Albert, Alberta.

A smiling scientist with white hair and glasses sits at a workbench with various laboratory equipment, holding a pen and illuminated flasks.
Image: AT via Magic Studio

Ed Miliband: Wind Power is Worse Than We Thought So We Need to Subsidise Even More of It

At first sight the news that the British Government is reducing forecasts for the amount of energy produced by wind turbines is another nail in the coffin of Net Zero. The Telegraph reports that as a result of “updated modelling” the predicted efficiency of wind turbines is being reduced by more than a quarter. The sceptical might observe a political game being played ahead of the latest annual round of subsidy handouts for future renewable projects.

A portrait of a man in front of wind turbines against a blue sky, capturing a thoughtful expression.

From The Daily Sceptic

By Chris Morrison

A man in a bright yellow safety vest stands with his hands clasped in front of wind turbines against a blue sky.

At first sight the news that the British Government is reducing forecasts for the amount of energy produced by wind turbines is another nail in the coffin of Net Zero. The Telegraph reports that as a result of “updated modelling” the predicted efficiency of wind turbines is being reduced by more than a quarter. The sceptical might observe a political game being played ahead of the latest annual round of subsidy handouts for future renewable projects.

Andrew Montford of Net Zero Watch describes it as “unbelievably deceptive”. The game is one of bumping up the enormous subsidies needed to achieve the Government’s clean power capacity ambitions by 2030 while leaving it to fellow zealots in the media to explain away the future eye-watering electricity costs. Expect therefore organised climate fearmongering to be ramped up, and the large Parliamentary majority currently enjoyed for the next four years by the Labour Government to be utilised to ensure there is no turning back from the Net Zero fantasy.

How can such a plan possibly fail when you have trusted messengers still claiming wind is nine times cheaper than gas? All hope is surely not lost when Fiona Harvey of the Guardian can write a recent story headlined: ‘Wind power has cut £104 billion from UK energy costs since 2010, study finds.’ It might not be a complete surprise that this veteran Guardian headbanger is reporting on statistical modelling from UCL, an academic institution that hardly covered itself in mathematical glory during the Covid pandemic.

In the real world, of course, the further dismal downplaying of wind power is a nail in the Net Zero coffin. It means much higher electricity bills for UK consumers, further deindustrialisation and loss of currently well-paid jobs, increasing likelihood of blackouts and runaway public finances. Nine times cheaper than gas was a Green Blob-funded Carbon Brief hilarity, so how we laughed when a group of top British energy executives told a recent Parliamentary committee that future electricity prices in Britain would not fall even if the price of gas fell to zero.

Chris Norbury, CEO of E.ON UK, laid it on the line for often deluded Parliamentarians. “If I look at the non-commodity costs – policy costs, network costs – then certainly some of the modelling that we have suggests that you could get to a position by 2030 where if the wholesale price was zero, bills would still be the same as they are today because of the increase in those non-commodity costs.” Simone Rossi, Director of Economics at Octopus Energy, highlighted a lack of budgetary control over policy-driven expenses, an obvious reference to £15 billion of renewable subsidies and expenses loaded straight onto UK electricity bills every year without legislative oversight.

By 2030, the hated gas turbines will be running down with no immediate prospect of replacement, while nuclear will also be in short supply until the opening of Sizewell C. Do Edward Miliband and his band of weird wonks at the Energy Department care? Probably not – if your ultimate political aim is command-and-control of the heights of the economy, what are a few blackouts when an elite-ordered socialist nirvana is the ultimate prize? Is it not time to stop routinely calling him ‘Mad’ Miliband, a dismissive insult from his enemies he probably enjoys and even promotes, and start treating his sinister plot with the serious attention it deserves?

Needless to say, the news that energy from wind turbines is nothing like as powerful and plentiful as originally though has been known for some time. In March 2023, the Daily Sceptic reported on a paper published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) noting that “wind power fails on every count”. Even at the time it was charged that governments are ignoring “overwhelming evidence” of the inadequacies of wind power “and resorting to bluster rather than reasoned analysis”.

Written by Oxford University mathematician and physicist Professor Wade Allison – who is also a researcher at CERN and Fellow of Keble College – the short paper concentrates on working out the sums behind natural fluctuations in wind speed. At 20 mph, calculated Professor Allison, the power produced by a wind turbine was 600 watts per square metre at full efficiency. If only the wind stayed at 20 mph all day and night, power generation would be a lot easier. Alas it does not: if the wind speed drops by half, the power available drops by a factor of eight. Conversely, and almost worse, notes Allison, if the wind speed doubles, the power delivered goes up eight times, and the turbines have to be turned off for their own protection.

Want to know why the Miliband zealots are going hell for leather to connect as much wind capacity as they can at whatever price is necessary? Consider the graph below, published in the GWPF paper.

Line graph depicting power demand and generation in the EU and UK for 2021, showing peaks in onshore and offshore wind energy generation versus overall demand.

The brown dashed line shows the installed nominated generating capacity in the EU and UK in 2021. This was 236 GW but the highest daily output was only 103 GW, recorded on March 26th. Most other days it was substantially lower.

Professor Allison was doing the sums a couple of years ago and they are the same today since they were based on physics and freely-available information. “Whichever way you look at it, wind power is inadequate. It is intermittent and unreliable; it is exposed and vulnerable; it is weak with a short life-span,” he concludes.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.

The Lancet’s New Push To Ban Meat

Science is not the answer. It cannot be “because Science” that you ought to give up meat. Which Harvard scientists want you to do in the name of “justice”. And, of course, to save the planet. Which is in no danger and does not need saving.

A globe shaped like a heart, made up of various fruits, vegetables, and meats, symbolizing the connection between food and the planet.

From Science Is Not The Answer

By William M Briggs

Bar graph comparing 2020 dietary intake versus reference intake for various food categories, including whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and meats, categorized by regions across the globe.

Science is not the answer. It cannot be “because Science” that you ought to give up meat. Which Harvard scientists want you to do in the name of “justice”. And, of course, to save the planet. Which is in no danger and does not need saving.

Justice is not a concept in science. Science is forever mute on justice. Or fairness. Or equity or Equality. You cannot use Science to justify DIE (diversity, etc.). Though science tells us when Science DIEs, just as when anything DIEs, it dies.

The propaganda: “Landmark study recommends ‘Planetary Health Diet’ for saving lives and the planet“. Experts being narcissists to a man, or especially to a woman, they form the acronym “PHD”, which they are sure will convince you to give up meat. Even though the planet cannot have health.

Realistic, simple dietary swaps can help Americans make a difference in the country’s carbon footprint, a new study found.

Changing how the world eats could reduce premature deaths, save trillions of dollars and slow the impacts of climate change, according to a new landmark report released Thursday by the 2025 EAT-Lancet Commission, a coalition of experts in nutrition, climate, economics, health and agriculture from more than 35 countries.

The peer-reviewed paper is “The EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems” by some large number of authors. Note the “just”, which does not belong in a journal purporting to be about science.

I do not propose here today to go through this paper (or papers), as it is long and dreary. They say, for instance, in their opening sentence, the covid panic was responsible for “exacerbating existing vulnerabilities”. No. Experts were. Experts did the panic to us, starting with creating the bug. Their second sentence is “However, food systems remain squarely centred at the nexus of food security, human health, environmental sustainability, social justice, and the resilience of nations.” Which also has next to nothing to do with science.

At the end of their Introduction they say “Our assessment of justice integrates three dimensions—distributive, representational, and recognitional—within a human rights framing that includes the rights to food, a healthy environment, and decent work.”

All of this is pure politics. And since Lancet is woke, it is woke politics: progressivism and the commitment to DIE.

So today we will stick to philosophy and some very basic science. We can leave the rest for later, if there is interest.

Now it is obvious man is a meat eater. It is just as obvious that are two sexes. These are two of the kinds of truths that used to form the core backbone of science, the subject which studies the way the world works. Yet obviousness carries no weight in The Science, which is the political branch of science. Desires are brought to The Science, and science is asked to justify them. If it cannot, science is ignored.

It does not follow from the true observation that man is a meat eater that from time to time eats other things that man ought to eschew (a bad pun) meat. It only follows that man is a meat eater. Observation tells us man can eat other things beside meat. But this does not make him a non-meat eater. He remains a meat eater.

And that is as far as this science can take us. Except for the deduction that because man is a meat eater, it must have allowed him to live and thrive by this, which we observe by being here and discussing this. Thus any conclusion that says “meat is bad for you”, cannot be true.

Without heavily qualifying what “bad” means, where and when and how, we cannot trust any statement that says eating meat is bad, for us or the “planet”. We deduce eating meat cannot be universally or always bad. Observation has ruled that out and falsified “eating meat is bad” tout court.

We saw earlier that Thomas Malthus’s theory that all species, man included, breed up to the limit of available food. It is not that creatures out-eat their food supply, it is that food provides the energy needed for breeding. Most have this wrong, and think man will cause mass starvation by eating. And so “destroy” the “planet”. Somehow.

In man’s case, Malthus’s theory needs an addendum (I don’t know if the following holds true for other creatures, but I wonder that it might, and know it does in lab rats). It is true man bred vociferously when food began to be produced in vast quantity. But there came a point when there was more food than man could eat, or rather needed to eat to remain alive and healthy and breed. It was then, when man began eating purely for pleasure in addition to eating to live that man stopped breeding in large number.

This picture is a cartoon of the idea:

A handwritten chart illustrating the relationship between food production, breeding enthusiasm, and biological limits, with labels for various concepts.

Most of the food man eats purely for pleasure is not meat. It is plant based and processed heavily. That we can process so much raw food into packaged food is proof enough we have excess food, which was done without “killing” the “planet”.

It can be that a person wanting to eat not because of hunger but for reasons of pleasure wanders to the fridge, pulls out a steak, and fries it up. It is much, much, much more likely he will rip open a package and consume concentrated plant matter, loaded with flavorings and other chemicals to delight the tongue.

Whether that plant matter with flavorings and chemicals are bad or good for you is for us today irrelevant. Even suppose it is good or harmless. Little of what is in that stuff has what is in meat, like protein, which man needs in good quantify lest he look like an NPR listener. Those who eat too much for pleasure end up eating extra food to fill the cravings for the necessary materials found only in meager quantities in concentrated processed plant matter.

And that is before considering whether what’s in those packages is good or bad for health in other ways besides consuming excessive amounts of food. I’m telling you now that the evidence “PHD” scientists used to say plant matter is good, and that meat is bad, is of the standard terrible kind I keep going on and on about (wee P-values galore, etc. etc.) in the Class. If there is interest we can go through some of this. Let me know in the comments.

The “PHD” authors are aware of over-eating, but focus on the maladies which accompany this and not on the lack of breeding which results. Crucially, they do not answer why man produces too much food, much of it existing purely for pleasure. Instead they say “The destabilising effect of unhealthy overconsumption on the Earth’s systems highlights the importance of viewing healthy diets not just as a human right, but also as a shared responsibility.”

There is no “destabilising effect” on “Earth’s systems”. This, like many things in The Science, has causality bacward. It is what some would, as we have seen, falsely call “Malthusian”. Their idea that healthy diets are a “human right” and “shared responsibility” means, as it could only mean, Experts must be put in charge of your plate. Experts cannot bear the idea of people not heeding their credentialed advice.

The reason man makes too much bad food, and does not eat simple diets of meat and the like, and thus does not breed, is because he has surrendered himself to pleasure. Having some HR lady scold you for eating steak is the typical bad doctor approach of treating the symptom and not the disease. Which is wholly spiritual. An area which doctors have less experience than auto mechanics. This must be obvious. Our solution to over-eating is to produce drugs which vanquish fat while continuing to allow the over-eating. This happens because doctors are not priests, and we have turned to doctors for our answers instead of priests.

Thus my unhappy, and surely correct, prediction is that if the “PHD” Experts’ solution is adopted, matters will only grow worse. And the planet will be, as now, in no danger.

There is one more point to amplify. It is rather subtle. Man must eat to live. A stupid and obvious point. But we have learned obviousness is not important to The Science. There is a whispery idea in the minds of many Experts (Western) about man in his environment. Is it that man has no environment. That everywhere and in everything man is an intruder. (Unless non-White, of course. In all environmental propaganda, non-Whites are pictured with their hair gently flowing in the wind as they talk about “My people” and their interaction to “the environment.” Always wind.)

Ants are allowed their hills and beavers their damns, but man is allowed nothing. Or, rather, excused nothing. Even gathering his food, necessary for survival, is seen as tainted, not quite right, worthy of condemnation. Something must be wrong with it. It must be studied! In particular, the idea that man could eat another animal, even though animals eating animals is as natural as the sunrise–“Rise up Peter, kill and eat”–fills him with a peculiar kind of suspicious queasiness, even as he downs a hot dog.

Understand, no scientist “studying” the “problem” of man gathering his food would put it like this. But he believes something very like this just the same.