The Dark Knight

I went to see The Dark Knight at the BFI IMAX last night. It is utterly exceptional, so good I'm not sure I've recovered yet.

There is so much superb acting. Christian Bale is brilliant, holding the huge film together as a towering central presence. Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent is charismatic and convincing and makes a difficult transition very convincingly as tragedy overtakes him. Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine make what might have been mundane scenes clever and emotive.

Heath Ledger's performance is utterly incredible. He is portraying absolute chaos. Veering between merely unstable and genuinely terrifying. His character is never made human, remains a force of nature. Despite having no more technology than could be obtained at a hardware store there is no question in your mind that the Joker is utterly capable of destroying Gotham City and Batman. Utterly deserving of the Oscar.

The story dynamic is great. Slowly layering tension upon tension. The battle between chaos and law and order becomes an epic confrontation. Every moment of the film becomes a blow in that battle and has a deeper significance for it. The film addresses deep questions seriously and without talking down to the audience.

I won't say much more as I don't want to spoil it. Watch this film. More than once.

Public service oddities: Accounts Owl edition

I really don't think that council accounts are read by anyone who doesn't have some fixed, and normally quite dull, purpose in mind. Despite that Shropshire County Council have clearly decided they need to make their accounts (PDF) more accessible, more user friendly. How? With an owl and what I think is a weasel discussing them.

Brilliant.

Coal power, clean or not, is now essential

This quote, from Peter Huber, should be printed on a placard and used to beat some sense into people who just will not accept the realities of energy policy:

"If you're 40 or older, you're going to spend the rest of your life powered by carbon or uranium. Take your pick. Forget about "none of the above" or "less of both." For the next several decades at least, alternative energy sources aren't serious choices; they are pork barrels, delusions, demonstration plants and daydreams."

Of course, it isn't quite as simple as that. New technology might deliver something new more quickly and allow us a third option. That's one of those possibilities that you can take small steps to encourage but definitely shouldn't plan on. If some marvellous new renewable, or fusion, quickly becomes able to reliably and affordably provide substantial quantities of power then take that as a bonus. In the meantime, we need to make sure we can keep a secure and reliable supply of energy available.

This excellent article by John Constable, from the Renewable Energy Foundation, sets out how the Government have been enjoying energy daydreams for ten years and have left the future of UK electricity dark, dirty and and costly.

The green movement have encouraged the Government in their delusional belief that growth in renewables could stop Britain becoming dangerously dependent on gas. To see the greens protesting at the building of coal power plants, when they did so much to block cleaner options such as nuclear power, is infuriating. Yes, carbon capture and storage (CCS) might not be installed on an industrial scale for some time but the dichotomy can't be coal power plants and CCS or letting the lights go out half way through the next government's term.

With supplies of gas unstable Britain needs a more diverse mix of fuels. 10 years of delay mean that the only way of doing that is now to build coal power plants.

Cross-posted from CentreRight.Com.

Vote Sinclair's Musings

I need ego puff points. It will make life feel worthwhile if I do well in Total Politics' survey of the most popular blogs. I care almost as much as Wat Tyler.

Vote by naming your top ten blogs in an e-mail to toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com. You need to name ten or your vote won't be counted, and they've all got to be from this massive great list or your vote won't be counted. I reckon those two rules will mean most people will give up and the rest will unintentionally spoil their ballots. Good times!

Public service oddities: I Am Carbon Man! edition

It's been a while since I've written an entry for my little Public Service Oddities series. The series where I share the bizarre little things that public sector organisations choose to share with people reading their corporate documents or looking at their websites. The older entries can be found here, here, here and here.

I have an absolute winner from the East of England Development Agency, the bureaucracy given a pot of money by the Government to help perk up the East of England's economy. These agencies aren't just pointless, particularly in already successful regions like the East of England; they also tend to creep their mission massively. They fund the redevelopment of zoos and open international offices.

Now, predictably, they're getting involved in fighting climate change. EEDA have chosen a rather... unorthodox strategy. This actually has some corporate sponsorship, Anglian Water and E.On are paying their Greengeld, but be under no doubt that it is primarily an EEDA project:

That's right. They're dressing up locals as carbon heros. We're all going to die! Award small community grants and put on fancy dress!

It gets worse. Some of them aren't quite in the shape for a superhero costume:

Wow. I really hope the guy on the right isn't a model.

"I have ridden the mighty moon worm!"

A reader at David Frum's blog sends in a brilliant dissection of Gore's claim that "enough solar energy falls on the surface of the earth every 40 minutes to meet 100 percent of the entire world's energy needs for a full year". The whole, glorious triumph of arithmetic is worth reading but here's the conclusion if you've got no time:

"To summarize, yes, we only need a small fraction of energy theoretically available in "renewable" forms. But we also can only convert a small fraction of that energy into usable forms. And it is far from immediately obvious that the latter fraction is greater (let alone a lot greater) than the former. Before we even start complaining about costs (not that we should not - the laws of economics are just as unrepealable as the laws of physics), we need to realize that there is just no huge untapped (and almost bottomless) pool of readily available renewable energy for us to play with (which apparently exists in Al Gore's imagination).

Of course, there's still another question: where
to get power at night?"

On the subject of green crazy, the A Green New Deal report, via Tim Worstall, looks truly wacky. I'll try and find some time to go through it in detail.

Pierre Manent and Direct Democracy

Pierre Manent is a pretty important figure in France. Wikipedia describes him as "a key figure of the contemporary French political philosophy [whose] work has helped the rediscovery of the French Liberal tradition." As such, this interview is fascinating:

"With the European Union we seem to have reached an ulterior stage of democracy, liberated from its old glittering finery, mutated into pure governance, and not connected to any people, to any territory, to any particular mores. With the May 29, 2005 referendum, we were able to see the fracture between official political action and the real feelings of European citizens, who have the feeling that they are being carried away in a movement that no one can control."

[...]

"True, but the American system, because it is still truly national and representative, is capable of correcting, however brutally, its direction. If Americans vote for President Bush and the Republican Party it is because, rightly or wrongly, they believe those candidates are better able than the Democrats to confront the challenges of the times. Not that the United States enjoys moral and social health in every test it is put to, but their political system reacts to the fluctuations of American opinion and to the vision, accurate or erroneous, that Americans have of what is good for the United States."

[...]

"The problem in Europe, particularly in France, is that our politics, though obviously bad, are not correctible, whatever the orientation of the electorate. Even though opinion is hostile to the indefinite extension of the European Union, even though the citizens of two founding countries voted against the constitutional treaty, everything proceeds as before and it is being suggested that the treaty will slip in through the window."

The whole interview is interesting but these sections, in particular, illustrate that some influential old European conservatives share the concern common among British conservatives; that popular democracy will die by drowning in a supranational and bureaucratic mush.

Cross-posted from CentreRight.Com.

A green surge?

From PoliticalBetting.Com:

"The other striking feature is the massive growth in Green Party support - from 2% to 5% - which must attract questions as to what has prompted this."

Is it possible that Clegg's shift right, combined with an utterly discredited Labour Government, is leaving genuinely left wing voters with little idea where to go? The Green Party might be an answer for some of them.

Al Gore loses his mind

We already knew Al Gore was wrong. That pretty much everything that made his film distinctive and emotionally compelling couldn't be justified by the evidence.

Now, it appears he's lost touch with reality entirely. He has challenged Americans to entirely end the use of fossil fuels to generate electricity within a decade (without an expansion of nuclear power). This is utter insanity. The research of the excellent Renewable Energy Foundation shows pretty conclusively that large scale renewable energy is currently unrealistic. Wind power is far too unreliable and has a nasty tendency to cut out when you need it most. Other technologies just cost too much per KWh to be remotely practical as a large part of our energy mix.

Of course, that's not to say that massive adoption of renewable power won't happen. It is possible, though unlikely within a decade, that new technological developments will achieve something remarkable. Perhaps solar power really will become too cheap to meter. There are steps that can be taken to encourage technological advance in that direction. Jim Manzi, writing in the National Review, proposed prizes that could encourage technological advance at low cost and without too much risk of interest group capture.

However, to start trying to tax people into avoiding fossil fuels now, when there isn't a practical alternative, will just push up the cost of energy. It would cost ordinary families, and particularly the poor and vulnerable elderly, a fortune and do lasting damage to industry. To try and force a switch away from fossil fuels on the timescale and scale Gore is proposing would be insanity.

Cross-posted from CentreRight.Com.

The OECD reveals the inefficiency of biofuel subsidies

A leaked World Bank report has alread alerted us to the fact that biofuels have pushed up food prices by 75 per cent. Now, the direct financial cost of biofuel subsidies is becoming clearer. Yesterday, the OECD released a study on biofuels showing just how expensive and ineffective the subsidies are.

Government support for the industry in the US, Canada and the EU was $11 billion in 2006 and is expected to rise to $25 billion by 2015. All that will achieve is a 0.8 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions from transport fuel by 2015. What's really incredible is the cost per tonne of greenhouse gas emissions saved, between $950 and $1,700. These costs can quite easily be compared with the benefits.

The benefits of saving a tonne of carbon dioxide are referred to as the "social cost" of a tonne of carbon dioxide emissions. For more information on this concept see Box 1.1 in this report (PDF). We last surveyed the major academic and official estimates of the social cost of carbon dioxide emissions for the report The Economic and Political Case Against Higher Fuel Duty (PDF). Nordhaus, who the Economist has called the father of climate change economics, puts the social cost at $7 per tonne. The IPCC and Tol, another respected climate economist, studied dozens of academic estimates of the social cost of carbon dioxide emissions and the averages they reported, at $12 and $6 respectively, were in the same ballpark as Nordhaus's estimate. Finally, the estimate reported in the Stern Review was $85 per tonne. Stern's result is very different to that obtained by Nordhaus, Tol and the IPCC for reasons discussed in Box 1.3 of this report (PDF).

If we compare the cost of subsidising biofuels with what we gain by saving a tonne of carbon dioxide emissions the results are pretty stark:

The costs of subsidising biofuels are between 11.3 and 229.7 times the social cost of just burning fossil fuels and not worrying about carbon dioxide emissions. Biofuel subsidies are a waste of money and should be abandoned.

There may be a day when technological advance delivers efficient biofuels. Just as there may be a day when wind and solar plants can deliver power at a low cost, reliably and in the quantities required to make a big contribution to our energy needs. At the moment, neither biofuels nor renewables are anywhere near efficient enough to replace fossil fuels. Pretending otherwise and throwing huge amounts of subsidy at technologies that just aren't ready for the big time is a ruinously bad idea.

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog.

The case for a voluntary subscription funded BBC

Brilliant article by David Elstein over at Liberal Conspiracy making the case for a voluntary subscription funded BBC. Worth reading the whole thing but here are some good bits:

"There is a social cost to this process, as well as a financial cost. A large proportion of those prosecuted are single parents on low incomes, for whom the licence fee is a considerable burden. To add to this burden the court-imposed fines is effectively to criminalise poverty. Almost no-one now goes to jail for failing to pay the evasion fine, but the victims of the system are often dragged back to court soon after a conviction, having fallen behind again and now finding themselves on the enforcers’ radar.

[...]

As it happens, there is an abundance of evidence that very few people would choose to do without the BBC, at a given price. Moreover, a series of studies has shown that a large proportion of the population would willingly pay more for the BBC than the current level of the licence fee, strongly suggesting that if the BBC introduced a series of channel packages, from, say, just BBC One through to the full array of current channels plus HD options and perhaps a sports channel, take-up of one or other of these choices would be nearly universal, and BBC income would rise, rather than fall, especially as each TV set would need its own smart card, allowing the cost of the cheapest package for a single TV to be as low as £5 per month.

The paradox of the present situation is that people too poor or too unwilling to pay for the BBC are forced to subsidise those who value it well above the level of the licence fee, mostly because that level is a much lower proportion of their net income than it is for the poorest. A tax-based licence fee removes that inequity, but a layered consumer proposition which is entirely voluntary gives the BBC a much stronger connection with its viewers and listeners, real accountability for the first time, and the opportunity to continue developing new services that will appeal to subscribers.

[...]

First, there is a well-established public demand for high quality products: without it, publications like The Economist and the Financial Times could not exist, along with a huge array of other magazines.

Secondly, the research that has been done shows that the present balance of BBC output would deliver enough subscribers to maintain the present quality of service: and as the BBC is non-profit-making and publicly owned, there should be no pressure to dilute in order to maximize revenue."

If this policy were proposed it could do well electorally. TaxPayers' Alliance polling (PPT) suggests that the license fee is considered the second most unfair tax (after council tax) and is particularly disliked by the working class.

The turnaround in Iraq

The sheer scale of the turnaround in Iraq is incredible. Michael Yon has the statistics in a Power Point presentation (PPT) that shows a remarkable decline in incidents and casualties. Predictions about the future in such a dangerous part of the world are always fraught with risk but Yon is a sober reporter so this carries some weight:

"The war continues to abate in Iraq. Violence is still present, but, of course, Iraq was a relatively violent place long before Coalition forces moved in. I would go so far as to say that barring any major and unexpected developments (like an Israeli air strike on Iran and the retaliations that would follow), a fair-minded person could say with reasonable certainty that the war has ended. A new and better nation is growing legs. What's left is messy politics that likely will be punctuated by low-level violence and the occasional spectacular attack. Yet, the will of the Iraqi people has changed, and the Iraqi military has dramatically improved, so those spectacular attacks are diminishing along with the regular violence. Now it's time to rebuild the country, and create a pluralistic, stable and peaceful Iraq. That will be long, hard work. But by my estimation, the Iraq War is over. We won. Which means the Iraqi people won."

Frederick Kagan, who proposed the 'surge' at the American Enteprise Institute; John McCain, who supported the strategy when it was desperately unpopular, and most of all David Petraeus, who led the operation, and the soldiers risking their lives on the ground deserve all the credit in the world.

Politicians don't build nuclear power plants, builders do

Today we learned that:

"Ministers are to build eight new nuclear power stations across England, the Daily Telegraph can disclose."

I'm pretty confident that even if the entire 135-strong payroll vote (PDF) is mobilised that won't quite be enough to get eight nuclear power stations built. Beyond the obvious labour shortages I'm not sure that ministers' careers in the unions, journalism or the law have left them with the expertise to produce a functioning nuclear power plant.

Of course, in reality ministers are only providing planning permission but the underlying attitude, that things get done when ministers command that they be done, is dangerous. An attitude which expects Government to take action and interfere from the top in the day-to-day delivery of services is responsible for so much poor performance in the public services.

Energy policy, over the last decade, has been an utter disaster. John Constable, of the Renewable Energy Foundation, in an article for Power UK, Is the future of UK electricity dark, dirty and costly? (PDF), highlights how bad the situation has become. He suggests another approach, where ministers are far less interventionist:

This disingenuous inteventionism has combined with complacency towards the flaws in the electricity market system (BETTA) and resulted in a decade during which many billions of pounds of assets have been written down, the nuclear industry almost bankrupted, and an imprudent over-commitment to gas generation compounded.

In my view the only way of ensuring rapid remedial action is for government to actually rather than apparently withdraw from the system, so liberating energy market participants to respond commercially to the situation as it now stands. This opinion is not informed by doctrinal libertarian affection for the free market but rather a practical recognition that no government or any single market participant can gather and assimilate sufficient information to design and realise a satisfactory outcome. Only the intellectual action of the market in aggregate, and through competition, has a reasonable chance of producing an optimal result.

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog.

60, 80, -1.6

There was a surreal quality watching Hillary Benn being interviewed on the Politics Show this morning. The host was quizzing him on the Climate Change Bill, and the commitment to cut emissions by 60% from 1990 levels. She was asking why the Government weren't going further, and targetting an 80% reduction. What exactly a 60%, not to mention 80%, cut means in the real world was entirely ignored.

To the right is the pattern of UK carbon dioxide emissions since 1990 so far. Between 1990 and about 1993-94 there are significant cuts. This is almost certainly connected to the recession at the time. Carbon dioxide emissions are so intimately connected to economic growth that recessions often lead to reductions. The collapse of Eastern Europe's manufacturing base probably brought emissions down more than any other global phenomenon of the past few decades. We may see emissions reductions right now, when the data comes through in a couple of years time, connected to the current slowdown. The early nineties reduction was also, more importantly, driven by the shift to gas, something that can only be done once and might need to reversed if gas imports are imperilled. One more reason why ensuring energy security and cutting emissions don't necessarily go together.

We haven't cut emissions since 1995. Since 1997 emissions have actually increased by 1.6%. All this fuss over targets, whether binding or not, is pretty meaningless. The actual policies that have been put in place over the last ten years have increased the price of electricity (Ofgem estimate (PDF) that they make up 8% of the average household energy bill), pushed up the cost of motoring, increased the price of family holidays and otherwise cost taxpayers a fortune. Petrol prices have almost doubled since 1995 and, at the same time, emissions have kept on rising suggesting that the elasticities involved are incredibly low.

Despite all of the innumerable policy initiatives and market incentives to reduce energy use emissions have gone up over the last ten years. Clearly, there is some deeper difficulty to cutting emissions that the greens have not acknowledged. People really do need and/or value the activities that create emissions. Emissions probably will fall if fuel prices stay as high as they are but it'll be slow and steady. There is something deeply decadent in coming up with target after target while ignoring that basic issue.

Not to mention the G8's pride in setting targets without the developing economies. Even if the developed economies were to completely decarbonise then, to make a 50% global cut by 2050 from present levels the developing economies would need to make 46% cuts to their 2050 emissions. If the developed economies can only get a two thirds cut by 2050 (very, very ambitious as the graph above shows) then the developing world would need to cut their 2050 emissions by 74% (all these facts are from a White House Council on Environment Quality presentation). This would mean huge sacrifices in economic growth.

It's hard to escape the conclusion that these targets do not represent anything but meaningless moral preening.

On another note, over on my personal blog I discuss why the idea that an oil-money conspiracy is keeping the green 'truth' from the people is so deeply wrong.

Cross-posted from CentreRight.Com

Why “Big” Oil companies aren't the ones fighting eco-socialism

If there is one message that emerges loud and clear from environmentalist propaganda, whether Al Gore’s rhetoric, green protests or dramatisations like Burn Up, it is a clear idea of the enemy: Rich, slick oil executives who supposedly fund some vast conspiracy to prevent the emerge of a brave, green new world. They form a handy target for a movement that is deeply anti-capitalist. They’re often American, wealthy and clearly have some measure of power; fine bogeymen for the modern age.

There is no vast conspiracy to prevent the public accepting the green agenda. There are millions upon millions of pounds being spent in the UK alone attempting to convince the public that it should be a priority to cut carbon dioxide emissions. The Government’s Act on CO2 programme alone has cost £5.5 million in the last year. Government departments and NGOs run countless other programmes with large staffs and sizeable budgets. By contrast, I’m not sure there is anyone working full-time in the UK to argue the case against radical carbon dioxide emission cuts. A cursory examination of their advertising shows that Exxon Mobil, BP and the other energy majors are not working to combat the idea that we should take aggressive action to curb carbon dioxide emissions. Instead, they’re kowtowing to the greens.

There is, simply, a free-rider problem which means corporations will rarely resist significant political pressure. The benefits from fighting green alarmism are diluted across such a range of firms and interests while the costs, in terms of green opprobrium, are not. Exxon Mobil initially funded sceptical scientists to a certain degree but the amounts were small compared to the budgets the green movement are playing with and that effort is now largely over. Firms respond rationally and don’t defend the broad social benefits of, for example, affordable energy.

Beyond that “Big Oil” isn’t going to be the big loser – in absolute terms – if green policies are put in place. The crucial measure here is reserves. Green policies won’t bring down prices right now so current production isn’t the crucial variable. Reserves are the crucial measure of the potential impact of green policies, were they to be successful in reducing demand for hydrocarbon fuels, on a firm. On that score the Western oil companies are minnows. Measured by reserves, Exxon Mobil is the 14th largest firm, BP 17th largest and Shell 20th. The lion’s share of world reserves are held by nationalised companies, with Saudi Aramco at the top of the list. These are the firms who will really lose out if hydrocarbon demand falls.

Of course, the argument that comes up at this stage is that we have to cut hydrocarbon demand in order to stop Iran, Saudi Arabia and other unpleasant regimes enjoying buoyant revenues that allow them to spend on weapons, promoting radical Islam and other unpleasantness. This is an argument which receives far too little scrutiny. You don’t need to ask too many questions to see that it is full of holes. The argument relies on the idea that people are less dangerous when they’re poor; that poverty actively makes people less likely to engage in terrorism.

While I don’t subscribe to the argument that terrorism is some kind of cry for help from the world’s poor neither do I think that it is dependent on serious wealth. In a world where a state as poor as North Korea can develop nuclear weapons poverty is clearly little bar to an ability to inflict terrible carnage. Our enemies must be resisted and defeated and our potential enemies persuaded. Reducing our use of oil will do little to help and if we impoverish ourselves in the process it will make things more difficult.

Of course, all this assumes that green policies will succeed in significantly reducing hydrocarbon demand. In the meantime, the main effect of green policies, if they hope to have a significant effect, has to be higher energy prices. The real impact here won’t be on energy companies, who can generally pass such costs on, but on a broad range of Britons. Particularly the vulnerable elderly trying to heat their homes; manufacturing industries trying to compete with foreign industries that are less efficient but have lower energy costs; motorists in suburban and rural areas who need their cars to get around.

These aren’t the favoured rhetorical targets of the green movement. They’re rather harder to demonise. However, they, and not the Western oil executives portrayed in countless green caricatures, are the real losers when green policies push up energy prices.

Iranzilla

Absolutely bloody brilliant. Via the Wired blog. The story that inspired it is here.

The Credit Crunch didn't just float over from the States

John Redwood makes the point very well:

"The third is the soundbite “The UK is well placed to ride out this international storm”. The BBC dutifully puts into bulletins that the Credit Crunch was made in the USA, and this is an international problem. They should instead ask some of the following questions:

1. Wasn’t Northern Rock a British collapse, based on the UK mortgage market?
2. Didn’t nationalisation of the Rock remove the most aggressive large mortgage lender from the market, intensifying the mortgage squeeze?
3. Isn’t the boom-bust in UK property prices and housebuilding a UK phenomenon brought about by British monetary policy?
4. Isn’t the UK government in a bad position, having borrowed and spent too much in the good years and now unable to reflate the economy with tax cuts?
5. Didn’t the UK government use off balance sheet vehicles and creative credit devices itself on a large scale, fuelling the credit boom of recent years?
6. Hasn’t UK competitiveness declined significantly in recent years, making UK adjustment more painful?
7. Why did the UK fail to add more to non fossil fuel electricity capacity during the good times, to ease shortages now?
8. Why does the UK impose some of the highest taxes on oil products, and increase them during a period of sharp upward movements in oil prices, exacerbating the squeeze?
9. Why did the government increase North Sea oil taxes, putting companies off from more exploration and enhanced recovery?

If they asked some of these, they might see that repeating uncritically the notion that this is entirely a US or international problem is just not the case. The UK dimension to this crisis reveals serious flaws in the conduct of policy in recent years."

Recession

There is plenty to discuss about the possibility, raised by the British Chambers of Commerce, that we are heading for recession. Regardless of whether we pass the two quarters of negative growth test it is clear we're facing a nasty downturn.

Many of the problems that social conservatives such as Theodore Dalrymple have been drawing attention to for some time are going to become a lot more critical. This, from the best essay written in my lifetime that I've ever read, makes that point:

"Ultimately, the moral cowardice of the intellectual and political elites is responsible for the continuing social disaster that has overtaken Britain, a disaster whose full social and economic consequences have yet to be seen. A sharp economic downturn would expose how far the policies of successive governments, all in the direction of libertinism, have atomized British society, so that all social solidarity within families and communities, so protective in times of hardship, has been destroyed. The elites cannot even acknowledge what has happened, however obvious it is, for to do so would be to admit their past responsibility for it, and that would make them feel bad. Better that millions should live in wretchedness and squalor than that they should feel bad about themselves—another aspect of the frivolity of evil. Moreover, if members of the elite acknowledged the social disaster brought about by their ideological libertinism, they might feel called upon to place restraints upon their own behavior, for you cannot long demand of others what you balk at doing yourself."

Strong families and strong communities are most important in hard times. They provide resilience and hold people together. With good times coming to an end we'll see how we can hope when they are so thoroughly atrophied.

Burn Up

This feels like some kind of horrible joke:

"Burn Up is a nail-biting two-part thriller for BBC Two from the pen of multi-award-winning writer Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty). It's a powerful story of love, commitment and divided loyalty… a thriller in which the stakes couldn't be higher.

[...]

This topical thriller sees oil executives, environmental activists and politicians collide in the battle between economic success and ecological responsibility.

[...]

Neve Campbell plays his colleague Holly, whose covert collaboration with environmentalists puts her in great jeopardy, and Bradley Whitford plays Tom's best friend Mack, a charismatic yet unscrupulous oil industry lobbyist.

Burn Up follows the trio's lives and loves as they hurtle towards a global climate change summit."

Somehow, I think a fair portrayal of the global debate over climate change policy is a bit unlikely. Will the debate over what to do be cast as anything other than a black and white moral issue largely ignoring the human cost of pushing up the price of energy? Will the programme reflect the fact that 'green' campaigners are far better resourced than sceptics? Will anyone opposing climate change alarmism have any motive that isn't purely mercenary?

After Live Earth and the planned Planet Relief no one can seriously argue that, on this issue at least, the BBC's political approach is anything but that of a left-wing pressure group. One funded, at vast expense, by the taxpayer.

Update: Here's the trailer from, I think, Canada (looking less classy than the one the BBC ran before Newsnight):

Apparently, they can't find a network interested in the States. Given how desperately bad it looks that's hardly a surprise. The BBC wouldn't let some minor issue like quality get in the way of their crusade though, would they?

Formatting in Blogger

Blogger is becoming incredibly frustrating. When I add a picture or indent a paragraph it mucks up all the line spacing. Paragraphs don't wrap round pictures properly. This has all been going on for some time. What's going on? Is this fixable or do I just need to put up with it short of getting so frustrated I switch to another platform?