Over here The Englishman is depressed at the latest little effluvia from Jonathan Porritt and the Sustainable Development Commission’s report.

I could read the rest of this ridiculous report but I can’t be arsed – it wouldn’t improve the “quality of my life” to listen to more of this bollocks.

I have to admit I don’t agree. Having read much of the report this weekend I think it’s highly important that we take note of, and detail, even fisk, the absurd assumptions underlying the report. After all, this is actually part of the Prime Minister’s Office, and presumably feeds directly into the way things will be governed in the future.
A full description would be book length, and while this blog is aimed at my writing longer essays on these very interfaces between economics and environmentalism, which might then be collected into book form, time does not permit of a full such report.

Three things that damn the report in my eyes. Sufficiently that I can reject everything else they say.

1) In discussing energy supplies, global warming, fossil fuels and the interaction between them, not one single reference is made to nuclear power.
Correct. The one form of non carbon emitting power generation that we have which is even remotely competetive does not feature in the report at all. Not even to dismiss it. It just ain’t there.
2) In discussing income inequality they do not make clear whether they are using pre tax and benefit figures or post tax and benefit figures. Quite clearly, if one person is on a million a year and another is on £ 10,000, there is a large income inequality. But it is a different one from that which you get when the guy on a million has just paid £ 350,000 in income tax, and the guy on £ 10,000 gets income support, rent allowances and all the rest.
Looking up the figure they do use ” equivalent disposable income”, this is a pre tax number after adjusting for the size of the household.
The true absurdity is that governments, in anything close to a free society, cannot influence what the pre tax incomes of the highly paid are. They can only tax and redistribute. So what you would expect an egalitarian, a redistributionist, ( and the Commission is indeed very worried about income inequality ) to emphasise is that pre Govt action here is the inequality, and post Govt action here is the lesser inequality. See, Govt works !
That they do not make clear whether they are using pre or post tax and benefit numbers is par for the political course. That they don’t even understand why they want to emphasise the differences simply shows that they are numbskulls.
3) They publish the report from the consultant they hired to do the grunt work. Of course, intelligent and highly paid quangocrats could not possibly be asked to sit down and do a little googling to find out for themselves. Of course. I could have done the same work and next time around for the Commission perhaps they’d like to give me a call ? As I actually have a real job, one in which I am the world expert, my rate is a very reasonable £ 250 an hour. I reckon 8 hours on google to get the numbers and two days for a typist at £ 25 an hour to make it look pretty with all those charts and the like.
And I promise not to use emoticons to illustrate my points.
Yes, really. A report going to the Prime Minister’s Office uses emoticons. Whether this is an illustration of the idiocy the writer expects of his readers, or of the idiocy of the writer himself is immaterial. The use itself is enough to reject the whole thing as just another one of those ” Your tax money at work ” moments.