UK Labour chained to political correctness, set to lose, and lose, and lose…

Political correctness is the correct way to lose every election. By its very nature, virtue signalling is almost guaranteed to be an electoral disaster. The whole game is to get to the top of the pecking order and mark yourself as being above the unwashed riff raff. A long time ago, if your brain wave was a good idea, the riff raff would adopt it too, which was all fine and good, except then you need another different good idea. And when all that’s left are more absurd signalling displays: Can you control the weather with your plastic shopping bag? Can you set people free by vandalizing statues?

Labor Parties all over the world suffer from the same thing. They stopped listening and caring what the workers think.

h/ t David E

Look at the massive disconnect here:

Poll proves wokery lost Labour ‘red wall’ seats:

Glen Owen, Mail on Sunday

Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is out of touch with public opinion on woke issues, a Mail on Sunday poll has found. The survey revealed that the party was overwhelmingly associated with support for politically correct issues – such as pulling down statues of […]

Making people believe nonsense: The imaginary decline of fossil fuels

Red-pill time

Basic facts, details, accuracy, buried under the weight of propaganda.

Here’s a lost fact: most of the world likes fossil fuels and wants even more of it.

The world is using more fossil fuels than ever.

And this is not exactly a new trend — starting in 1765 or so. Yet despite that, nine out of ten Australians speak as though they have been trained by a renewable energy ad bureau. And in a sense they have.

A few years ago, 88% of Australians would say that fossil fuels are in decline around the world and we must invest in “alternatives”. So nine out of ten people are just wrong. Despite all that connectivity (or possibly because of it) nine out of ten people know something that is not true and has never been true during their entire lives.

Lowy institute polls show how strong the effect of propaganda is. Vale the ABC, undoing science education, and destroying the national debate every day of the week.

89% of Australians think fossil fuels are in decline. Graph. Lowy Poll

On the plus side, the more wrong the reporting, the more the real story […]

Half the population trapped in media fantasy world of doom

All those silicon chips and no real knowledge

The poorest quarter in the UK have more information at their fingertips than King George did, but half the modern population have no idea what’s going on. In big bold terms of history, no other century saw so many lives saved, and deadly foes conquered. But most of the lucky recipients of the biggest bounty in a hundred thousand years aren’t just oblivious to the good news, they think things are getting worse.

Instead of drowning in floods they are drowning in junk headlines.

View this poll as a test of the media. If they told the truth — in perspective — the responses would cluster in a bell curve around the correct answer. Instead, a third of the population don’t know, and half the population know even less.

The GWPF has done a survey in the UK and discovered that less than 10% of the population even realize that the death toll from natural disasters is down at all, let alone by 95%. More than half the population can’t even guess the trend. And if these were “per capita” stats, the trend practically fell off a cliff. Since 1920 the global […]

80% of Republicans think the election was stolen and the media is the enemy

Donald Trump’s message of election fraud has reached millions of people even though Twitter, Facebook, and the media have said it was baseless every ten minutes since election day. Word is spreading so fast that even 12% of Democrats think the election was stolen.

Breitbart:

…Politico conducted its 2020 Voter Priorities Survey and results show that a vast majority of Trump voters believe the election results are not valid and that illegal voting and fraud took place during the election. Twenty-one percent of Trump voters believe the results are valid and 79 percent believe the election was stolen.

This is a crisis for any democratic nation. The way to solve it is with a full and fair investigation which either cleans up the count or puts people in jail. Possibly nothing short of a new election (with paper ballots) will work.

….

Not surprisingly, 83% of Trump voters call the media “the enemy”.

….

The crisis in media trust is due to interviews like this one (below). Here is Ari Melber of MSNBC acting like the enemy…

What is he afraid of — presumably he is worried that the Democrat viewers will find out […]

A fickle faith: Climate change concerns evaporate in US polls

Donald Trump would be delighted if Biden and Harris make climate change a leading issue.

Climate change is the luxury fear people wear on their sleeves when they can afford it. It’s a piece of fashion. Optional and discarded at a moment’s notice.

Amid COVID-19, Americans don’t care about climate change anymore

Will Johnson, Fortune Magazine

In a survey we at the Harris Poll conducted last December, American adults said climate change was the number one issue facing society. Today, it comes in second to last on a list of a dozen options, ahead of only overpopulation. Among Gen X men, in fact, more than third dismiss climate change as unimportant. COVID-19 and the recession have, of course, reordered priorities around the world.

We asked a panel of U.S. adults a series of questions about today’s most crucial issues, environmental policy options, and their own behavior. In all three categories, I was personally surprised and discouraged to discover that our devotion to the world around us is flagging.

The rise in the skepticism of the Gen X men is interesting. In UK polls, the peak age of believers was 30 – 50 years which […]

Congrats! US, Sweden, Australia have more climate “deniers” than anywhere

There are more skeptics in the USA than anywhere, followed by Sweden, Australia, Norway, Netherlands, Canada, Finland, and Germany. And in the same large report, we find that Australian “trust” in the media has fallen yet again from 44% last year to 38% this year.

As well as those listed dismissively as “deniers” (see the graph below) another 10% say climate change is “not very serious”. So about 1 in 5 people, are outspoken skeptics — which doesn’t add up with the “Four out of five news consumers say they consider climate change to be either somewhat, very or extremely serious (79%).” They had to rule out those who aren’t “news consumers” to get the figure up to 79%. It also doesn’t fit with many past surveys that show that half the people in Australia, and the UK and the US are skeptics. (See “Polls“)

They don’t say how many people were neither concerned, nor unconcerned. Where is that data?

Skeptics, country by country. USA, Sweden, Australia lead list of “deniers” | Click to enlarge.

From this report we can see why censorship is the main tool of the climate believers. People exposed to both sides of the story […]

UK – Three quarters of Gen Z doesn’t even know Nuclear is “low carbon”

Do young adults learn anything that matters in school?

They’re protesting in the streets but can’t even answer the most baby-basic questions about energy or their pet molecule “CO2”.

It’s almost like carbon dioxide is totally irrelevant? Teachers don’t care. Kids don’t care. Media don’t care, and when they all grow up the adults won’t care either.

More than 72% of Gen Z ‘don’t know nuclear power is low carbon energy’

Dimitri Macrokefalidis EnergyLive News:

Only 26% of people aged 18-24 understand that nuclear power is a low carbon source of electricity, compared with 76% for renewables such as wind and solar, according to a new poll by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE).

Older people are more likely to say that nuclear power is low carbon. The poll found the level of understanding rising from 47% among 35 to 44-year olds to 61% among 65 to 74-year olds, although it remains well below levels seen for renewables.

Good on the Mech Eng’s for asking. I call “fake” on the protesters that tell us the world is at stake but can’t be bothered learning the basics.

Wait til they find out […]

Guardian prophets six weeks ago: “Climate crisis affects how majority will vote in UK election – poll”

Polls are like climate models. You can get any answer you want, but not the one you need.

An immortal headline from Oct 30:

The Guardian declares: Climate crisis affects how majority will vote in UK election – poll

Survey also finds two-thirds of people agree climate is biggest issue facing humankind

Damian Carrington Environment editor, @dpcarrington

A majority of people in the UK say the climate crisis will influence how they vote in the looming general election, according to an opinion poll, with younger voters feeling particularly strongly about the issue.

And of course the greatest landslide in 30 years wasn’t won by the party aligned with teenage girls who promised better weather.

Six weeks before the UK election and the poll served no purpose other than to fool some politicians and the journalists that write about them. The biggest issue facing mankind either got solved before December 12, or perhaps no one gave a toss, they just said what the pollster wanted them to say.

Or how about the July 2019 poll:

Climate more pressing long-term issue than Brexit, say 71% of Britons

Bigger than Brexit? Jeremy ought to have that election wrapped up….

[…]

Dumb poll, fake headline: Not climate change, 70% of Australians want cheap reliable electricity, 61% biggest worry is “cost of living”.

One survey — so much spin

The Fin Review headline is entirely misleading. “Climate rises as the No. 1 voter concern“. In fact, the same survey shows that two thirds of Australians didn’t even mention “climate change” as one of their top three concerns. The exact same survey shows that when prompted with different topics (rather than just asked what was on the top of their mind) the main concern of a whopping 61% was “cost of living”. Only 34% had said “climate change” in the unprompted question, and that was probably only because climate change is all over the media with bushfires, droughts and duststorms this month. It was the first issue that came into their heads, but not the issue they cared about when asked to choose among the major issues.

The exact same survey also showed that when it comes to Energy Policy fully 70% of Australians wanted cheap reliable energy more than they want “lower emissions”.

Australians prioritise energy affordability (38%), ahead of security and reliability (32%) and reducing emissions (30%).

So the message is unmistakable, yet JWS and all the media missed it. The JWS media release appears to have an agenda. How […]

50% of Americans don’t want to spend *even one more dollar* on renewables

Who wants to pay more for electricity?

All around the world conservative politicians are afraid to campaign against the cost of renewables. So here comes yet another survey showing a huge voter group sits there unrecognized, invisible, waiting for someone to vote for.

The news from the Center for Climate Change Communication, George Mason University:

Who is willing to pay more for renewable energy?

In two recent national surveys of American adults, we asked how much more per month, if anything, people would be willing to pay to get their electricity from 100% renewable sources. Nearly half of Americans (47%) reported that they were willing to pay more, while 50% said $0.

It’s a devastating result. Think about the fantasy they were being asked to put a price on — on offer was the mythical golden goose of “100% renewable energy”. It doesn’t exist (unless you count hydroelectricity). Even so, what was that fantastical creature worth? For half of Americans — nothing.

Instead, the Centre for Climate Communication could have put a more realistic price on “100% renewable purity”, and asked how many Americans were willing to pay that exorbitant sum — it might be 1%. Might be […]

Poll shows Australians are more skeptical of extreme drought, flood and fire voodoo

The message that CO2 causes fires, floods, storms, reef damage and refugees is wearing off

What a problem for the vested interests — it’s their main propaganda message.

It’s witchcraft:

When the witchdoctors ran out of long term trends and supporting evidence they started blaming every storm on CO2. It was a sign of desperation. In more respectable days they would say these were “weather” not climate trends. Storms, floods, droughts and fires are caused by many variables, none of which the climate modelers can predict even ten days in advance. Furthermore, huge 1 in 100 year events need a thousand years of data (at least) before we could pretend to have even a hint of statistical significance that they are not just natural events which have always happened and always will.

About 10% more Australians have woken up

New polling shows that about 1 in ten Australians that used to find this witchcraft convincing are smelling a rat and don’t believe it anymore. Back in 2015 when IPSOS asked the exact same climate change question 62% of Australians thought that climate change was already causing more droughts. Now after a vast drought, it’s only 52%. In 2015, 61% of […]

New poll: 54% of Australians are still skeptics of man-made climate catastrophe

Despite all the spin, the non-stop propaganda, a dreadful drought and the two “record” hot years, most Australians still don’t agree with the IPCC. This is exactly the same as it was in 2015 when the CSIRO last did a serious climate poll.

The IPSOS Climate Change Report

So we sit, a nation of majority skeptics, with no major party to vote for and hardly any TV media, academics or politicians making the case that the IPCC might be wrong and the Paris agreement might be a waste of time. No one is allowed to discuss it and national leaders stay cowed in silence for fear of being called petty names.

There is little to crystallize or focus this sentiment that doubts the experts, yet it exists, even in surveys designed by a team who appear to be doing their best to find and amplify the “believer” vote.

The IPSOS survey suffers from the the usual flaws: loaded questions, ambiguous terms and one sided analysis. Respondents are asked magical pie questions about solving problems as if they only need to wave a fairy wand and it shall be solved. They’re not asked how many dollars they personally want […]

80% of Australian don’t want the government to put renewables ahead of costs, health, housing, jobs etc

With boring regularity, when voters are asked to rank their choices, “clean” energy is not a top priority. Only 7% of Australians want the government to promote renewables ahead of other major issues. It’s the same old, same old for years, yet the media and both parties are locked in a death spiral trying to turn it into an election issue. Real people put living Standards above Virtue Signalling, says Alan Moran.

Essential Report Oct 2018: Rocketing into top place is the cost of living. Stuck in the dull middle is renewables.

Essential poll 2018. What Australian want the government to address. Click to enlarge.

Split voters into left and right, and remarkably they all want the same things. (So we’re all still human, though it says something about the type of questions asked.)

Conservative / liberal voters want to be able to afford stuff, stay alive, have a home:

Liberal voters put renewables at number 10 out of 13.

Essential poll 2018. What Australian want the government to address. Click to enlarge.

Labor voters want to be able to afford stuff too:

Even Labor voters are only putting renewables at number 6.

Essential poll 2018. What […]

New study: Conservatives not fooled by “extreme weather” in media but liberals suffer imaginary droughts

Good news. There is hope for average Americans; not so much for academics.

It’s bad news for the Eco Worriers though who were hoping that constant displays of extreme weather would finally convince conservatives — a flood here, a Cat 6 there, a hottest first Sunday of Lent. It all washes over Conservatives. The weather-porn won’t convince them.

But the most interesting and novel discovery here is buried in the third paragraph from the bottom and barely mentioned. The researchers are only interested in how to “convince conservatives” and not remotely concerned that the media may be misleading a lot of the population by hyping up the weather.

Apparently media propaganda has convinced 40% of the US population that they’ve lived through a drought that didn’t happen and 10% think they’ve lived through a hurricane that wasn’t.

I graphed the differences between perceived events and real ones. Below, red columns show the percentage of people who said they had lived through droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes and floods. Blue columns show the percentage of those same people who were living in counties which NOAA said had actually experienced those events.

A lot of people think they’ve been in a drought or […]

Just like that: 48% of Australians happy to pull out of Paris

The idea of Pulling out of Paris is barely discussed in Australia. Tony Abbott made it a national discussion for five minutes last week, but apparently that’s all it takes, or even less. After 30 years of non-stop agitprop and years of bipartisan rah, rah, solemn “history in the making” cheer, the truth is Australian’s mostly don’t give a toss. All we had to do was ask them.

It’s a loaded question framesd as “if pulling out could result in lower electricity prices”… Purists may protest that this overstates the result. Not so. If we had any kind of rational national discussion it would be obvious to all that the “could” is a wishy washy misleading and loaded term — seeding the possibility that pulling out might not lower prices. If people knew that no nation on Earth with lots of unreliables also has cheap electricity, even more people would want to abandon Paris.

By more than two to one, people want cheaper power, not Paris points:

Almost two thirds, 63 per cent, of voters also claimed that cheaper power should be governments’ priority with only 24 per cent believing reducing emissions should take precedence.

NewsPoll, Australia […]

Old GOP voters are skeptics, so it takes 20 years to recover from education and wise up to the media

From Jo: Bookings close this Sunday.

Hope to see you in Sydney the weekend after next!

I’ll be speaking with Ian Plimer at the ATA Friedman18 conference.

It’s a great line up of speakers on May 25-27, or come for the Gala dinner.

Get a 10% discount with the code Nova18.

On Climate, There’s A Sharp Generational Divide Within GOP

USNews, Alan Neuhauser

A Pew survey exposed a stark gap between younger and older Republican voters on global warming and energy policy.

 

Neuhauser doesn’t mention it but the implications are pretty dire — look how long it takes to recover from school:

Republican millennials – people roughly ages 22 to 37 – are far less likely than older generations to support the use of coal, oil and other fossil fuel sources. By one count, while three-quarters of Republican baby boomers and older generations supported more offshore oil and gas drilling, fewer than half of millennial Republicans felt the same way.

At least most Republicans grow up:

Among [young and old] Democrats, by contrast, there was only a small divide.

If half the population is shifting in the same direction […]

So what? 15,000 scientists sign warning but 30,000 scientists are skeptics*

Skeptical scientists outnumber the unskeptical ones

The “News” today: 15,000 scientists have signed some 25 year old repeat failed climate doom prediction. Headlines are everywhere.

So today is also the perfect day to point out that ten years ago 31,487 American Scientists, including 9,029 with PhD’s signed the Global Warming Petition Project warning that there is no convincing scientific evidence that man-made CO2 will cause catastrophic heating, and that agreements like Kyoto (and Paris) are harmful, and hinder science.

Opinion polls are a measure of sociology rather than science, but since skeptics win them, go forth and spread the word and shine a light on media bias, as well as on the large unheralded mass of skeptical scientists across the world.

The Petition Project was better done, done years ago, done twice, and has twice as many names on it.

Don’t miss the opportunity to pop in on the same journalists that think a list of 15,000 scientists doing a ten second internet form is newsworthy, but 30,000 checked and accredited scientists signing and mailing a paper form is not. Let them bask in their hypocrisy. Turn the screws on their cognitive dissonance. Be polite. Enjoy their struggle.

For the […]

60% of Australians are OK with dumping Paris if they can cut their Electricity Bill

Nearly half of Australians are already paying more than they want to for the Paris Agreement. Sixty percent of Australians wouldn’t mind us dumping it if it meant getting cheaper electricity. That fits with most other surveys for the last four years. It’s a stable slab of the population — despite the ABC and Fairfax running prime-time adverts for renewables constantly pushing the line that renewables are cheap, inevitable, and that only stupid “deniers” would want us out of Paris.

In Australia, no major party represents these voters. Instead, both sides of the establishment are competing on how to meet an agreement that, if the truth were known about the costs, at least 60% of Australians either oppose or couldn’t care less about.

When will the Liberals and Nationals figure this out?

Voters prefer cut in power prices to Paris climate accord

Simon BEnson, Michael McKenna

A Newspoll ­survey, conducted exclusively for The Australian, has revealed that 45 per cent of Australians would now ­support abandoning the non-binding target, which requires Australia to reduce emissions to 26-28 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030, if it meant lower household electricity prices.

This compares to […]

Another meaningless survey shows 4 in 5 Australians want “clean energy” (if someone else pays)

Yet again, it’s another mindless apple-pie-survey produced to fog the debate

Most Australians don’t want to pay anything more for renewable power.

“Four in five (78%) said Yes: the Australian government should introduce a new Clean Energy Target to encourage the construction of new clean energy sources in Australia.” — The Australia Institute

If we ask people if they’d like free/cheap/clean stuff, they say “yes”. If we ask them how much they want to pay for renewables, 62% say “N.o.t.h.i.n.g”. Which is why the Australia Institute didn’t ask them.

They also didn’t ask whether voters would change their vote on this issue, because we already know, time after time, that voters rate climate change last on their list of priorities. You can bet the Australia Institute would have asked that question if they thought the public would give the right answer, instead they surely know that people vote for jobs, to lower the cost of living and to have a strong economy instead of shipping our manufacturing industry to China in a sacrificial quest to change the weather.

So many other, better, surveys show the lie behind this one

Fully 54% of Australians are skeptics of […]

62% of Australians don’t want to pay even $10 a month for renewables

The Money Question trumps

Three quarters of Australians may believe climate change is real (so the ABC keeps telling us) but only 13% of Australians are willing to pay $1 a day or more to save the world. Anyone can tick the box “Don’t pick on me, I believe in *Climate$%@$#Change*”. But if people believed it was a threat they wouldn’t balk at paying $100 a year, which is what 62% of Australians did in the latest Newspoll.

87% of Australians think a dollar a day is too much. But hey, it’s only the planet at stake.

Most Australians don’t want to pay anything more for renewable power.

The survey is still biased. There was no option to pay “less than zero”. How much are you willing to pay to get rid of renewables?

The sad thing is that most Australian’s don’t realize they’re already paying so much more.

For starters, The Australian calculated that the bill for federal renewable subsidies would be $60 billion by 2030. That’s $2500 per Australian. In a house of four, that’s $10k over 20 years or $200 per year. And that’s only the federal subsidies and schemes, it’s not the state schemes, nor […]