Climate Change.

This is the 'appeal to hypocrisy fallacy' again.
Basically this goes along the lines of :

Speaker A proposes an argument P. Speaker B, instead of refuting the argument P, points out that the actions of person A are inconsistent with P.

So Joe Biden believes climate change is important and that something needs to be done about it, this article says look at all these bad things that Biden is doing contributing to climate change while supposedly engaging in the fight against climate change, the deflection and point is 'so why should anyone care about climate change'.

This version of the appeal to hypocrisy fallacy is, as ever, focused on belittling specific small (in global terms) individual actions and behaviours to discredit the subject, it is not a logical argument because organising action to fix climate change has costs, will always have costs and if those costs are not accepted then nothing, in this case politically, will be done by anyone in order to fight climate change.

The people using this fallacious argument would like to silence everyone who agrees that climate change is real by demanding that they all essentially cease to participate in any way in the modern world i.e. if you believe something should be done about climate change you should stop using electricity, gas, coal, wood, give up your car and realistically your job, never take a flight again, probably never travel in a boat again or a train, I mean realistically they are demanding that you die as no amount of sacrifice would leave them without something to point at something that would let them claim you are hypocritical.

Fighting climate change is about convincing the world that we should act to replace the cheap hydrocarbon energy sources we currently use in favour of renewable energy, it's bigger than that actually because we damage the planet in many other ways through most of our industrial activity.

The real problem is that a very large proportion of businesses want to hang on to the status quo to keep exploiting their easy coal mining, oil and gas drilling and forest clearing industries they see no self interest in building a technology platform for humanity that has a sustainable future all they want is to exploit what they can while they can and when it all falls apart leave it to someone else to fix. We are at the point where it is falling apart but they can't see that yet and by the time they do see it it will be too late to do anything and then they will blame everyone else for not doing something in advance.

Right now renewables cost a bit more than oil and gas but look at the gas price now, that is just the beginning , look at petrol prices, the gas will run out one day not long from now as will the oil, both are dirty and create a dirty unhealthy world for us and our children, there is and intrinsic benefit in taking a green approach to energy in that we clean up the air, the sky the streets and buildings it might cost more just now but in the long run it will create a far better nicer world to live in, when I grew up every building was black from years of soot from coal burning and the chemical reactions with the stone of the gases from all that burning, we did something about that we stopped burning coal in our homes and moved it to the power stations, that fix was just sticking plaster, the people who are against doing anything about climate change just want more sticking plaster they don't want a real solution because they think it will cost them profit in the here and now.

Convincing people to take action will have costs American presidents and others using flights and motorcades is one of those costs, you can criticise the scale of the delegation and security but that is a different argument altogether and it has nothing to do with climate change.

Actually, a couple of examples, one I didn't use a car at all today, thereby not burning a load of petrol, secondly while staying at home I used 5.9 units of electricity less than on the same day last year a trend I have been engaged in for the past 10 months.

I've tracked my daily use since 1st of Jan 2014, Column H is the units used on the same day last year the number is derived as the average use between two readings, I would photograph the meter every couple of weeks and calculate that value.

If you look at column N you will see it is consistently substantially less than column H. light blue cells are actual midnight readings taken dead on midnight by me, yellow cells are the results reported by the meter for the relevant date.

The wide red bar is a the date EON take the remote reading from the smart meter.


Actual reading picture taken a little bit after midnight.


You habitually use the appeal to hypocrisy fallacy, lots of people do, I've likely done it myself it's also known as whataboutism, I raise it as a point because when it is used it is not advancing the argument it is not constructive and I will continue pointing it out where I see it happen because people have come to accept it as a valid form of argument and it isn't it is just a substitute for real discussion.

Now while cleaning up a beach is laudable don't you think that living in a world where people cared enough about it to not create that mess in the first place would be a better one.

The crap on the beach cost energy to make probably cost someone petrol in order to get the crap to the beach in the first place so they could leave the litter, it might even have cost you petrol to go there to clean it up.

Read the rest of my earlier post rather than dismissing it out of hand.

I'm not going over all that again, I've suggested plenty of fixes in the past.

What I will repeat one more time is that I want to live in a world that is modern, a world that continues to have all the wonderful technological benefits that make life fun and interesting, I don't want to live in a world that resembles the middle ages but that is where we are headed.

And I will repeat once again that I don't believe there is the will to avoid the catastrophe that is coming and the reason for that is that the changes needed would impact the lives of all the rich first world citizens, i.e. you and me and all our neighbours and fellow citizens who don't want to pay more for food, heating and light and travel today at the expense of their lives tomorrow.

The really sad thing is that the while the price right now to implement the fix would be quite high it could be done, all we are talking about is building infrastructure for a new world, the Victorians built the sewers for public health that must have been a huge cost and investment but we still benefit today from that investment just as we benefitted from the rail infrastructure and later the power generation infrastructure.

The irony is that the people who want to ignore the climate crisis are the ones that will put us back in that medieval dark age, the people wanting to fix it are the ones with a vision for a viable future.

edit: note COP26 is about discussing how we get there, unfortunately the discussion goes along the lines of 'well if your not going to do it then I'm not going to do it' and it ends up being a discussion about economic competition rather than constructively planning the future.

China actually has an advantage in this instance as their planned command economy takes a long term view and they will use dirty fuels just now to get to a clean future and because of the scale of their economy they will actually succeed however even they can't and won't fix the planet on their own but in doing their bit by moving to that clean future they will gain influence and economic dominance over all of the current first world economies.

My unit price in that spreadsheet clip above Jim is 16.27 pence with 11.55 pence per day standing charge that's with EON.

Your 11 peso is about 16 pence in GBP so on a par with what I pay.

This is my Philippine bill for this month I'm paying 10.36 PHP / Kwh (I've anonymised it as usual)



I'm fairly sure that my friend Philip has had a hand in this new bill design at Meralco, his business over there deals with UX design, that's user experience design and he's had a hand in a lot of recent improvements in banking and billing systems in a lot of companies over there.

That's the first Meralco bill that has ever been easier to read and it's only a little bit easier

Here's an old one from last year.



Meralco have certainly been better in recent years regards brownouts, it does sound like a royal pain the backside where you live just now

At last something that can be discussed, no you are not doing your bit and neither am I, you think you are but you aren't, doing your bit to solve this crisis means much higher costs for you for everything in other words it means much higher taxes, much more expensive electricity in the short term in order to pay for the investment needed and that much higher fuel cost will be reflected in the price of everything else you need to live your life.

The scale of investment needed to actually fix this is staggering and it cannot be fixed by any one country alone, the fix would be an economic reset putting people everywhere back 50 years in terms of standard of living and I am not talking about 1.5 degrees because 1.5 degrees is not a fix it is an acceptance of a substantial degree of damage an actual fix would be removal of carbon from the atmosphere and none of these politicians are going to agree to that.

And the reason they are not going to agree to that is the same reason you get the deflection and finger pointing and the 'appeal to hypocrisy' articles in the Mail and everywhere else in the media, it is the same reason that you have a whole industry promoting climate change denial because nobody wants to pay that price.

And they don't even want to pay the price for fixing 1.5 degrees which would not have as steep an impact on living standards right now, just to be clear once 1.5 degrees is locked in you will start to see, in 10 to 20 years time, localised climate events in various parts of the world where the temperature hits 55 degrees C, at that temperature even in a dry atmosphere people die you could see entire cities die if that kind of heat were sustained, and in a humid atmosphere people will die in droves at much lower temperatures.

So me deliberately living in a colder flat in the middle of winter to save money compared to last year or you picking up litter on a beach is not doing our little bit and the notion that 'every little helps' is actually facetious when you look at the true scale of the problem, as is finger pointing complaining about an 85 car motorcade.

You and everyone else who falls for this 'practice what they preach' rhetoric are simply seeking a way of justifying doing nothing, you are doing exactly what is going to happen at COP26 you are saying 'well if you won't do it then I won't do it'.

COP26 will dress up a lot of great sounding promises that totally fail to actually address the problem, if you want something to be incensed about that would be a far better target.

There are no deals at this point in time better than the energy cap, so you can't get a deal better than the current cap on the standard variable rate of EDF.