Author Archives: Tim Newman

Greens too white

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This has all the hallmarks of a shakedown:

The mother of Ella Kissi-Debrah – the nine-year-old girl whose fatal asthma attack may have been linked to illegal levels of pollution – has said there is a lack of representation in climate activism.

People living in parts of London with high proportions of black, mixed or other ethnic groups are disproportionately affected by air pollution compared to those in areas with a high proportion of white people, according to research by the Mayor of London.

In the days of industrialised cities it was true that the poor neighbourhoods were situated downwind of the factories so their air quality was noticeably worse, but today? The pollution in London (and I suspect most modern cities) comes from vehicle exhausts and domestic and commercial boilers (.pdf); what’s the mechanism by which this worsens air quality in boroughs with lots of ethnic minorities?

Yet people from BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) backgrounds are often invisible in climate protest, says Rosamund Kissi-Debrah – who is due to speak at the World Health Organization on Monday.

That’s because it’s predominantly a western, white, middle class female movement which ropes in a lot of hen-pecked husbands and their idiotic Millennial offspring. You might as well complain Chinese are invisible at cricket matches and there are no Indian women at bluegrass jam sessions.

Ms Kissi-Debrah, who lost her daughter in 2013, says black or ethnic minority people care about climate change as much as other groups.

Either this is untrue, or the palefaces erect a phalanx around climate change protests to keep out the swarthy hordes demanding to take part.

Echoing Ms Kissi-Debrah’s comment is Professor Akwugo Emejulu – a sociology lecturer at the University of Warwick specialising in women of colour’s activism in Europe.

A professional race-baiter, in other words.

She says the main reason for what she sees as their lack of representation in activism lies in some of the tactics used by action groups, such as Extinction Rebellion.

That group that popped up out of nowhere a month or so back?

One of the strategies adopted by Extinction Rebellion during their 10-day demonstration in April was to get as many activists as possible arrested.

Prof Emejulu says some black campaigners are put off this approach because they fear violence and hostility from the police.

Because it’s impossible to campaign against climate change without being arrested. It’s either Extinction Rebellion and jail, or nothing.

Samantha Moyo is the coordinator for Extinction Rebellion Together – a section within the group that provides training on diversity.

Meaning the group accepts people from Eton and Harrow.

She says it took a lot of effort to overcome her fear of police when joining protest campaigns.

“I don’t know what it is about being black that makes you feel scared around police,” she said.

Their general incompetence?

“I’ve always got a feeling of, ‘they’re going to get me – out of everyone here, they’re going to come for me’.”

And have they? Or is this just paranoid delusion (or flat out lying) on your part?

Ms Moyo says she only felt safe from police at the latest protests because she was “holding hands with a fellow protester, who was white”.

As the great Chris Rock said, “get a white friend”.

She says police could help to reduce the fear sometimes felt by people of colour if they behaved in a more approachable way.

“Something as simple as a smile. Or maybe something like a declaration from a police department, saying: ‘We admit this has been a problem’, that would be quite healing.

I take it this diversity and policing expert has never seen the MacPherson report.

“Or even allowing or creating spaces for people who are traumatised by police to share their stories.

Have you tried blogger.com?

A lot of people of colour are traumatised.”

Two of them being your parents upon reading this article, I expect.

Kids of Colour – a platform for young ethnic minority people to explore identity and “challenge institutional racism” – says climate protests do not always allow for the realities they face.

To be fair, climate protests are pretty divorced from reality full stop.

School students around the world recently went on strike to demand action on climate change, but some at Kids of Colour question how inclusive the protests were.

Greta Thunberg did look a bit white supremacist-y, didn’t she?

“The school strikes have been fantastic to witness, but it is also a privilege to be able to skip school,” says one representative.

“Many young people of colour feel a pressure to succeed in education because society does not work in their favour.”

If your complaint is that only the spoiled brat offspring of wealthy parents get to flunk school with no consequences, I’m right behind you. But I’m not sure this has a whole lot to do with race.

Economic inequality can be another barrier for people of ethnic and minority backgrounds who are affected by climate change, says Ms Kissi-Debrah.

“Can you imagine giving up 10 days [of work] to sit in central London? It is absolutely not feasible for those in low-paid jobs.

Or any job.

“I’m not saying everyone in Extinction Rebellion is in a privileged situation, but a lot of them were in jobs that make it easier for them to take time off work.”

Such as in academia, NGOs, and the public sector.

The Wretched of the Earth, which describes itself as “a collective of grassroots indigenous, black, brown and diaspora groups”, wrote an open letter to Extinction Rebellion asking the group to rethink its tactics.

Environmentalists often warn that climate change will result in bitter wars over limited resources. What they fail to appreciate is the climate change movement has delivered much the same thing by itself.

While commending Extinction Rebellion’s successes, the letter said ethnic and minority voices were missing from the movement and need to be included early on, in order to effectively challenge systems upholding “racism, sexism and classism”.

To think, this article began with a little girl dying of asthma.

Referencing Miss Thunberg’s “house on fire” analogy, the group said: “Our communities have been on fire for a long time and these flames are fanned by our exclusion and silencing.”

How dare they attack an autistic schoolgirl!

People from BAME backgrounds need to be taken into consideration from the very start, says Prof Emejulu.

Especially when handing out money, power, and privilege.

“It’s not about organising in your own terms and then trying to draw people in. You have to be embedded in the communities with the people that are affected by this.

We can’t be bothered organising ourselves, so we demand you include us in your own activities right from the start.

“It’s also about democracy – if democracy isn’t reflected in your activism then that’s a problem.”

Democracy in this case meaning random, race-hustling outsiders get to tell you what to do.

Ms Moyo says Extinction Rebellion is working on taking action to ensure that people of colour are not being left out.

By including their parents’ housekeepers on the roster?

“I’m excited about what we’re doing,” she says, “because we’ll be raising awareness and providing training around racism, colonialism, systemic trauma and other important issues.”

With a pink yacht on Oxford street.

Greens of Colour is part of the Green Party, aiming to represent BAME members. And Friends of the Earth (FoE) has also acknowledged there is a problem with diversity in climate debates.

How diverse are the donors, I wonder?

In particular, says an FoE spokeswoman, groups need to be better at recruitment and “bringing people in that the sector hasn’t done very much to interest”.

Sane people?

FoE now gives potential supporters a variety of ways to join and tries to make sure they see their experiences reflected in campaigns.

A campaign against polar bear extinction from the perspective of a middle class race-hustler from London would be worth watching, I feel.

The spokeswoman adds: “But we own that we have a long way to go.”

And you always will, because it will never be enough. For my part, I’m delighted by this development: the more these idiotic progressives fight among each other, the better. More please, and faster.

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Baked Al-Akhbar

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Following on from the news of antisemitism in Germany, here’s a story from France:

Halimi, 65-years-old at the time of her death, was subjected to a frenzied beating and then hurled from a third-floor window in the early hours of Apr. 4, 2017, by Traore, a neighbor in the same public housing project in eastern Paris who broke into her apartment.

Terrified neighbors who alerted police after hearing her cries for help reported that Traore had shouted the words, “Allahu Akhbar,” and, “Shaitan” (Arabic for “Satan”), during Halimi’s ordeal.

Police investigations later revealed that Halimi had told relatives that she was scared of Traore, who insulted her visiting daughter as a “dirty Jewess” a few weeks before the murder.

It’s a hate crime, right? No, don’t be silly:

Traore’s lawyers, however, have insisted throughout that their client was too intoxicated from his ingestion of cannabis to be held responsible for his actions. On March 20, a third psychiatric report commissioned by the investigating judge in the Halimi case concurred with this assessment, arguing that Traore’s consumption of cannabis had eliminated his “discernment” (a clinical term for “judgment”).

Get blind drunk and commit a crime? Pokey for you, sunshine. Get high as a kite on cannabis and murder a Jewish woman while screaming “Allahu Akhbar”? Well, he didn’t know what he was doing.

In a statement carried by the Jewish publication Alliance, the BNVCA  —  a Paris-based group that works with victims of antisemitic attacks — said that the investigating magistrate in the Halimi case had concluded that the murderer, Kobili Traore, was heavily intoxicated on marijuana when he committed the killing, and mentally unfit to stand trial.

The term “protected classes” really does mean just that, doesn’t it?

The group added that it was now “very pessimistic about the real possibilities of eradicating antisemitism when the culprits are neither tried nor sentenced.”

It concluded: “We fear that this decision will encourage other so-called mentally ill people to commit other anti-Jewish crimes.”

And it seems Jews’ membership of a protected class is highly dependent on who is attacking them.

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Employees of Conscience

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This doesn’t surprise me:

Amnesty International is to lose most of its senior leadership team after a report said it had a “toxic” workplace.

The human rights organisation’s secretary-general, Kumi Naidoo, ordered an independent review after two employees killed themselves last year.

In the review one staff member described Amnesty as having “a toxic culture of secrecy and mistrust”.

Amnesty said the senior leadership team accepted responsibility and all seven had offered to resign.

Five of the seven senior leaders, based mainly in London and Geneva, are now believed to have left or are in the process of leaving the organisation.

Amnesty International is just one of an inexhaustible list of institutions captured by the hard left and converted to anti-western political campaigning with its original purpose forgotten. And it appears to have become a truism that the more self-righteous a charity is, and the more it embraces progressive ideology, the worse the people running it are.

In May 2018, Gaëtan Mootoo, 65, killed himself in Amnesty’s Paris offices. He left a note talking of stress and overwork.

A subsequent inquiry found he was unhappy over a “justified sense of having been abandoned and neglected”.

Amnesty International was founded to campaign on behalf of political prisoners who had been abandoned and neglected. Now they’re giving their staff a similar experience.

Many staff gave specific examples of experiencing or witnessing bullying by managers.

There were reports of managers belittling staff in meetings and making demeaning and menacing comments, for example: “You should quit. If you stay in this position, your life will be a misery.”

To be fair, this doesn’t sound much different from the management in any other large organisation. These days the only characteristic that is tolerated is unwavering obedience.

There were multiple accounts of discrimination on the basis of race and gender, and in which women, staff of colour, and LGBT employees were allegedly targeted or treated unfairly.

I’d be willing to bet major oil companies are an order of magnitude better on this score. But who gets held up as the conscience of the world while the other has protesters outside their offices looking to shut them down?

The report also pointed to an “us versus them” dynamic between employees and management.

Which is as common a management style as you’ll find anywhere.

Amnesty is not the only human rights organisation to come under fire for its treatment of employees.

A report earlier this year said that bullying and harassment were commonplace at Oxfam, and last year Save the Children was at the centre of serious allegations of workplace sexual harassment.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. One day someone will confirm the rumours I hear about what working in the United Nations is like.

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PC Comics

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A reader sends me this from a comic book convention in London:

It appears Dennis the Menace, Minnie the Minx, or Beryl the Peril wouldn’t even get through the door of this particular comic convention. But it’s good to know the organisers take a robust stand against physical assault and battery, which lesser conventions presumably allow to occur unimpeded. I’m disappointed they appear reluctant to disavow murder and kidnapping, though. Then again, they reserve the right to take action in “any form they deem appropriate” so maybe they didn’t want to limit their options.

And thank heavens someone is on the lookout for bathroom policing in relation to citizenship: no longer will comic book fans have to swipe their passport just to access the clean toilets.  Readers who understand the difference between “inappropriate physical contact” and “unwelcome physical attention” or “gender identity” and “gender presentation” are welcome to leave explanations in the comments.

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Lovers and Other Strangers

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Via Tim Worstall, this article needs a fisking:

David Isaac, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, told the Observer that identity politics had been hugely important in advancing the civil rights of many groups. But he warned of a danger that “individual interests” were narrowing people’s views and diminishing their connection to wider society.

Assigning special protections and privileges to certain minority groups at the expense of the wider population has weakened the social fabric? Who would have thought?

Speaking amid an intensifying row in Birmingham, where a group of predominantly Muslim parents have staged protests outside schools accused of promoting same-sex relationships, he suggested the commission would be prepared to use its legal powers to protect the teaching of LGBT issues in the face of opposition from faith groups.

You might just as easily say the commission could use its legal powers to protect the right to practice one’s religion and peacefully oppose government policy in the face of LGBT activists.

“We are a strategic regulator,” Isaac said. “We can’t support absolutely everybody, but we will take cases where we thinks it moves the law forward to protect human rights.”

Let’s be honest, your only problem here is that one protected class is facing off against another. If it were anything else, you’d be “moving the law forward” to hound the majority population into cowed acquiescence. Human rights really doesn’t have much to do with it.

Recently the commission has become more vigorous in using its legal powers against groups it believes threaten equality.

Equality being where certain, select groups are given special consideration under the law.

“We are about to make a decision whether to investigate antisemitism in the Labour party, and that’s a good example of where, without fear or favour, we are saying in relation to political parties, whether it is Islamophobia in the Tory party or whatever, that if we find unlawful acts we are prepared to use our powers to do something about it,” Isaac said.

If members of political parties hold opinions which contravene our self-serving and deliberately vague laws defining which views may be held, we will use our powers to prosecute them. To protect human rights.

On Friday, Birmingham city council took the decision to close Anderton Park primary school, where parents have been protesting for seven weeks, early for the half term. The MP for Birmingham Yardley, Jess Phillips, has attacked the decision, which she said was down to “bullies and bigots” and contrary to the Equality Act.

Isn’t the right to protest a fundamental human right? Or is there a clause which makes protesting certain viewpoints a crime? I’m confused.

“Everything that is happening at the Anderton school in Birmingham is probably making some headteachers nervous about their commitment to teaching about minority [same- sex] families,” Isaac said.

Headteachers are “probably” nervous? Time to abandon party politics and form a unified, national government until this existential threat is eliminated, don’t you think?

“Part of our job is to remind people that the law is the bottom line.”

And thanks to the vagueness with which it is written and the subjectivity with which it is enforced, the law is whatever we decide it is.

Anderton, a number of other Birmingham schools, and several outside the West Midlands have been targeted by religious groups who say they have concerns about teaching materials shared with pupils, which they claim promote LGBT equality and conflict with the teachings of their faith.

So you have conservative authoritarians arguing with progressive authoritarians over how children are best indoctrinated. Meanwhile, those who think kids should simply be taught reading, writing, and arithmetic at school are unrepentant bigots who must be purged from society.

“As a gay man who’s been very involved in the LGBT movement, I think identity politics have been hugely important historically, and it would be very easy to say identity politics has gone too far,” Isaac said.

Just in case anyone thought the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission ought to be neutral on this issue. Is his deputy an Imam?

But he acknowledged that such politics could be corrosive. “We are living in a world that is more divided, there’s more individualist thinking in relation to what is happening and less empathy, less hope.”

Thanks in large part to that industry you head which goes around slapping labels on people and threatening them with criminal prosecution for wrongthink.

The challenge, he suggested, was to ensure “we don’t end up in the siloed world where everybody is hypersensitive about their own individual interests and less empathetic about how other people are treated.”

Rarely does the head of an organisation come out and state their biggest challenge is the result of their own efforts.

He added: “The key issue is how do we move beyond the ‘I’ to the ‘we’, how do we think of ourselves as citizens in a country or in the world who are not just focused on what works for me and my narrow group. How do we ensure that we think about people who are different to us?”

Ooh, I don’t know. Maybe we could try a version of politics which emphasises what makes us the same – language, culture, shared history, values – rather than what makes everyone different and thus deserving of special treatment.

One solution, he suggested, would be for schools to include citizenship classes in their curriculum, to help them become “citizens of the 21st century”.

Yes, because the one thing missing from the lives of the parents protesting outside the schools is an appreciation of when Britain got its first female MP.

“Teaching kids about not just same-sex relationships but what it is to be a good citizen would be a really important start,” he said.

So Soviet kindergartens only with Lenin in drag.

Finding common ground where all parties accepted that they were subject to the law that protected minority rights would help remove the “binary” nature that engulfed much of the debate swirling around identity politics, Isaac suggested.

It’s those laws protecting minority rights that are the root cause of this problem, you clot.

“People do see it as a zero-sum game,

That’s because it is. Modern rights always come at the expense of someone else.

and my view is that it’s completely possible to teach the tenets of your faith in school, but at the same time say ‘that child over there has two mothers’.

I find it amusing when people who clearly don’t know the first thing about a religion start talking about how its adherents ought to think. Like with the Israel Folau case they think everyone holds the same wishy-washy pick ‘n choose views as your average pencil-necked modern CoE vicar.

We are asking them to respect somebody else’s lifestyle choice or desire to love someone of the same sex.”

The irony here is that in the theocracies of the Middle East, respecting Islam often means endorsing Islam, particularly during Ramadan. What we’re seeing here is less about respect than forced endorsement.

Isaac drew comparisons between the battle to promote equality and human rights and that now being waged to arrest the climate crisis.

In the sense that it’s a privileged, middle-class angst fest driven by a hatred of the plebs and the phenomenal achievements of developed, western societies, he’s quite right.

“Some things are in crisis, particularly in relation to what is happening to disabled people. We’ve made progress in other areas, LGBT being the obvious one, but when I look at gender and race I think we’ve made less progress.”

As the Communists were always just a million more corpses from utopia, progressives think we’re always another few thousand laws from the population thinking as they should. Note that in among all this hand-wringing there wasn’t a single mention of the majority population and what they might want: it’s all about the minorities. Little wonder society is fragmenting.

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Maybe they should hide in the attic?

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A few readers alerted me to this story, but I was going to blog about it anyway:

The German government’s anti-Semitism commissioner has urged Jews to avoid wearing skullcaps in public.

Wear the yellow star, don’t wear a yarmulke. I wish these Germans would make up their minds about how Jews should dress.

Felix Klein warned Jews against donning the kippa in parts of the country following a rise in anti-Semitism.

…

Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin said the recommendation amounted to “an admittance that, again, Jews are not safe on German soil”.

A sharp increase in the number of anti-Semitic offences was recorded by the German government last year.

So what’s driving this rise in antisemitism? Where did it come from?

Mr Klein suggested “the lifting of inhibitions and the uncouthness” of society could be behind the spike in anti-Semitic crimes.

What inhibitions have been lifted in Germany over the past decade that might cause previously mild-mannered folk to go out Jew-bashing? Now the uncouth part I can well believe, but Mr Klein is being awfully coy about where that comes from. As is the BBC:

Jewish groups have warned that a rise in popularity of far-right groups is fostering anti-Semitism and hatred of other minorities throughout Europe.

Since 2017, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been the country’s main opposition party. AfD is openly against immigration but the party denies holding anti-Semitic views.

Oh, it’s the far-right, is it? According to the Jerusalem Post:

According to the interior ministry, right-wing extremists committed 90% of the 1,800 incidents in 2018. The real number of Islamic-animated antisemitic attacks in Germany is not well documented due to authorities characterizing Islamic antisemitism as right-wing antisemitism.

That’s handy: define all antisemitic attacks as being right wing and then blame right wingers for an increase in antisemitic attacks. Back in January 2017 I wrote about this story:

A regional court in Germany has decided that a brutal attempt to set fire to a local synagogue in 2014 was an act meant to express criticism against Israel’s conduct in its ongoing conflict with Hamas.

A German regional court in the city of Wuppertal affirmed a lower court decision last Friday stating that a violent attempt to burn the city’s Bergische Synagogue by three men in 2014 was a justified expression of criticism of Israel’s policies.

Those pesky right wingers, eh? Sorry, I must go. I’m in the kitchen now and I’ve just heard a noise from next door…

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Self-Legalation

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Some years ago I read a story in Private Eye – one of the long, earnest, features they put at the back – concerning a chap who worked in middle management at a major oil company. According to the article he’d spotted some wrongdoing (environmental IIRC), complained to his hierarchy, and been told to forget about it and keep his trap shut. He decided not to and kept making noise, then eventually blew the whistle to outsiders. The oil company tried to buy his silence, then fired him. He sued them, and they tried several times to settle with five-figure sums. But this guy’s aim was to get the oil company in court where they’d be found guilty, heavily fined, and forced to apologise to him, so he kept rejecting their offers. Eventually the oil company decided to come down on him hard and destroy his life with endless lawsuits and delays. Private Eye gave us a teary-eyed account of how the chap had been unemployed for years, had been forced to sell his house, and now his health was failing. Well, what the hell did he expect?

The legal system is not the route on which to launch a moral crusade, and the courts not the place to grandstand. If you’re thinking of launching legal action against your employer, your lawyer should ask you right at the start what you want: to stay in your job unmolested or to leave with a settlement. If your answer is neither and you want to go to trial and force the company to apologise, the lawyer should spend the next several hours talking you out of it. You’ve got to have a pragmatic resolution in mind, which usually means a settlement in which the company accepts no liability or wrongdoing. That’s just the way it goes, and any lawyer will tell you that trials are dicey as hell no matter how solid you think your case is and how right you are. That’s why everyone works overtime to avoid them in such cases. For everyone’s sake it’s better just to collect the cash and move on.

Some people insist on being martyrs, however. Last week I listened to the Joe Rogan podcast with a Canadian chap called Phil Demers. Demers is in something like the seventh or eighth year of grinding litigation with his ex-employer, a marine life park in Canada. Demers was unhappy with the treatment of the marine mammals in the park and sought to expose them, and that led to his being sued and his counter-suing them. Now morally Demers might be right, but he has refused settlement after settlement, determined his case goes to trial so his former employer be denounced in public. He said he is frustrated with his lawyer who doesn’t seem keen on it going to trial (why he’s paying for advice he won’t listen to I don’t know). He also said he’s not interested in money, will accept no figure to settle, and only wants custody of a walrus he used to work with and which he considers his child. I can’t see that going down too well in court. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that, regardless of his bond with the animal and its poor condition in the marine park, he has no legal claim on it. He says he is flat broke and is looking forward to when this whole thing finally goes to trial (there is no date in sight) and he can put the whole thing behind him and move on with his life. I suspect he’s going to be waiting an awful long time, and if and when the trial comes he’ll learn the harshest lesson of his life.

I listened to the podcast aghast, thinking someone needs to knock some sense into this chap. Rogan did query whether he really ought to be doing this to himself, but remained very supportive. I scoured the comments under the podcast looking for a dissenting opinion, but they are almost all along the lines of “Yeah, don’t back down, stick it to the man!” What they didn’t seem to appreciate is that it’s not so much David v Goliath than a man whacking his head against a brick wall in a long, painful suicide attempt. Company executives don’t lie awake at night worrying about some individual suing them, they simply cut a cheque and get a lawyer to take care of it. And if the absolute worst happens and they lose in court down the line, they cut another cheque and use the loss to lower their tax bill that year. For them it’s a simple business transaction, much the same as a paying customs charges. Their only interest is to minimise the bill, and right and wrong don’t come into it. If you’re going to bring legal action against a company without realising this it will never end well for you, even if you think you’ve won. You really do want to listen to that lawyer you’re paying so much for.

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Never burst, buckled, or bent

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The other day I received a PR email from a company based in Aberdeen which:

is aiming to significantly reduce the environmental impact caused by the oil and gas industry, by offering a new sustainable solution with the refurbishment and reuse of decommissioned subsea equipment and component parts.

This immediately struck me as a venture started by people who think sustainability is a product in itself.

Presently, the industry recycles as much of its subsea equipment as possible once it has no further need for them.

Meaning, they take it off the sea floor and sell it for scrap.

Instead of the traditional recycling process, Legasea takes the subsea production equipment from decommissioned fields and reuses as many parts as possible following a rigorous refurbishment process at its base

Here’s where I think the problem is. Despite the enormous cost of subsea equipment creating a massive industry, there’s not actually a lot of it made. Industry efforts to standardise subsea Xmas trees for example ran into the problem that at the height of the boom only about 150 were installed in a year. A couple of years ago it was in single figures. This is not the sort of mass-volume industry which lends itself to standardisation, and the potential savings not enough to persuade oil companies to abandon their own standards in favour of a common industry-wide design. In other words, these pieces of equipment are bespoke and have to be ultra-reliable, hence they’re very expensive. This isn’t the sort of kit which lends itself to using secondhand parts to reduce costs, and even if it were, how many units do these guys think they’ll be selling each year?

This leads to huge cost and lead time savings for clients and results in saving obsolete components, such as many types of subsea electrical connectors and hydraulic couplings making them available for reuse on producing fields.

The long lead times are due to oil companies demanding bespoke units. If they were willing to be flexible on that score they’d have agreed to a standard design and be buying brand new, off-the-shelf kit. But they haven’t, so they will still want bespoke designs and I suspect the long lead times are down to design and approvals rather than an availability of the parts this company is refurbishing. And what percentage savings will they make using refurbished parts instead of new? I can’t see many engineers in an oil company signing off on using refurbished parts for a piece of kit which will sit at the bottom of the sea for twenty years unless the cost savings really are substantial.

A common occurrence in many other industries, this repurposing of subsea parts helps to preserve vital resources for continued use and reduces the environmental impact of the oil and gas companies themselves.

Preserve vital resources? Such as? And it is debatable whether refurbishing these parts with all the material and manpower involved will use fewer resources than just producing them from new.

Co-founded by Lewis Sim (Managing Director) and Ray Milne (Operations Director), the Legasea team has been joined by team members Chris Howley (Service Technician), Graham Petrie (Projects Manager) and Chris Moffat (QHSE Manager).

So you’ve got your overheads sorted, then. How many units will they be refurbishing each month, do you think?

“We offer an alternative route for unwanted and recovered subsea production systems and will take liability and ownership for the equipment; making it safe, clean and disassembling it to its component parts. Reusable parts will then be used to fulfil the demand for urgent remanufacturing and spares when crucial production is at risk during routine preventative maintenance or when an unforeseen failure is encountered subsea.”

Okay, the business model might work if they’re providing urgently-required spare parts, but how many emergencies are they expecting each year? And I’d be interested to know just how much liability they’re willing to take on. One component failure and they could be on the hook for millions within an hour.

Hey, I wish them well and I’m just some bloke on a computer, but if I’m gonna get unsolicited PR emails I feel I’m entitled to look at them critically.

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Holy Wars

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A few weeks ago a mate asked me if I thought the climate change hysteria would begin to die down as skepticism increases and the alarmists’ predictions fail to materialise. The infantile reaction to Greta Thunberg’s nonsense aside, I think environmentalists are already forging ahead with Plan B:

Today, it has become clear that plastic is having a devastating effect not only on wildlife but on ourselves. It is now polluting every corner of our planet. I have seen first-hand, how it is choking our oceans and rivers.

It entangles animals with lethal effect. It causes perforated stomachs and starvation. Mammals, birds, fish and marine invertebrates – over 180 different species in all – have been identified accidentally eating it.

But the impact on humans is less well known. Now a report published jointly by the conservation organisation Fauna & Flora International and others highlights for the first time the effect of plastic waste on the health of the world’s poorest people.

It shows that 400,000 to one million people are dying every year as a result of mismanaged waste. If the upper end of this estimate is correct, then one person is dying every 30 seconds as a consequence of this dreadful pollution.

In the space of about three years plastic in the ocean has gone from something fringe campaigners banged on about to being ubiquitous in media, politics, and business. Barely a day goes by without somebody reminding us how much plastic is in the ocean and how terrible it is (although never actually admitting where it comes from).

As always, the proposed solutions are bans, restrictions, and higher prices imposed by central government following an increase in power, money, and privilege for politicians and environmental campaigners. Nobody considers more practical solutions (such as proper landfill whose CO2 emissions are captured), just as those claiming climate change is an imminent, existential threat refuse to endorse nuclear power. The plastic issue is cloaked in the language of morality whereby plastic is bad because it’s artificial but clearing the rainforest to grow plant-based alternatives is good. Whereas climate change was a political movement which became a quasi-religious one, the war on plastic is a spiritual campaign in which wealthy, middle-class mothers seek to capture politics in order to advance their cause. You’ll notice that of all the plastic items deemed unnecessary by our moral superiors, women’s cosmetic products never make the list. Nor do disposable nappies. If you were to get accurate data on how many men are really on board with environmentalism, organic produce, and bans on junk food compared with those who just wearily go along with whatever their partner deems important, I’d guess the latter outnumber the former ten to one.

So while I don’t think the climate change hysteria will die down, I reckon it my lose prominence to moral crusades such as the war on plastic. Climate change was always political, a route to power for authoritarians who found socialism no longer an option due to the collapse of the Soviet Union. But as western societies scrabbled around for something to fill the vacuum left by the departure of Christianity, it took on a religious bent. Now that seed has been planted we’re seeing cults forming for whom politics is the means to their spiritual ends. They’re already calling for the customary dietary restrictions. I expect what we’ll see is new cults springing up – indeed, identity politics probably already qualifies, perhaps third-wave feminism too – and fight among one another for state recognition, support, and resources. Meanwhile normal people will think they’re in the middle of a Third Great Awakening, dominated by box-wine suburban housewives, corporate power skirts with a repeat prescription for Prozac, children in Ralph Lauren jumpers with double-barreled surnames, and twenty-eight year olds who still live with their parents because they don’t like the idea of being on a cleaning roster.

It’s going to be fun, isn’t it?

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Sex Flags of a Nexus

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I think most people nowadays are familiar with the gay pride rainbow flag, but until a few days ago I was blissfully unaware the entire LGBT[a][b][c]…[z] list each has a flag of its own. I discovered this because a reader emailed me these photos taken at the Whitney Art Museum in New York:

There was a time when folk had to learn the meanings of a set of flags in order to signal to one another. How long before we’re expected to learn a different set in order to signal our virtue?

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