Gluttons for punishment
The Green Party is taking it well.
A senior activist who won an unlawful discrimination claim against the Green Party of England and Wales has been expelled and told he cannot return for at least two years.
In February, a judge found that the Greens had unlawfully discriminated against Dr Shahrar Ali during a row over his gender-critical beliefs. Ali, who is a former deputy leader, was awarded damages of £9,100. The Greens were also ordered to pay him a further £90,000 in costs in September.
He has now been excluded from the party for a fixed term of two years as a result of complaints made about him in 2022.
What were the complaints? What terrible thing did he do or say?
It is understood that some of the complaints against Ali related to a social media post he shared in July 2022, in which he suggested that teaching the concept of transgender identity to two year olds was a “danger to children”.
In a message on X, he quoted a post by the campaign group Stonewall which said that research suggested that “children as young as 2 recognise their trans identity”. Ali added a comment which said: “Off scale of safeguarding risk. Would we teach 2 year olds concept of schizophrenia?”
That…that’s it? But teaching the concept of transgender identity to two year olds is a danger to children. Small children believe what they’re told.
The party has told him that any future readmission would be conditional on him publicly retracting tweets that had been complained about, apologising and undertaking safeguarding training.
What a pack of brain-dead Stalinists. Honestly.
The party is apparently having to fundraise or raise membership fees in order to keep up with the costs associated with these court cases. You’d think they’d want to rethink their strategy.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-66935750
I have to say I find it very bizarre that a political party can be sued for discriminating against beliefs. If the Greens kicked out a Muslim member for saying that women should be kept as slaves, would he have a case?
Aren’t they just repeating the unlawful discrimination, only worse? Seems like they must love paying him money.
I agree with maddog. They just got spanked by the court for discrimination against him on the grounds of his protected beliefs, so they’ve decided to retaliate by expelling him for an expression of his protected beliefs. They really are either astonishingly thick, or their membership department is being run by saboteurs from a rival party.
As for the hypothetical Muslim scenario? Depending on the exact circumstances, the putative member might well have a case. Expressing a belief that women should be kept as slaves, in and of itself, is free speech. Any attempt to translate that belief into action, however, is likely to fall foul of the law; and if the member had signed a form promising not to express such a belief on pain of losing their membership, then they could not sue.
Unlike expressing a belief that enslaving half the human race is a good idea, expressing a perfectly reasonable – and near-universal – belief that brainwashing babies is a safeguarding risk, is unlikely to have been subject to any kind of restrictive clause in the membership application.
The Green Party, in any given country in the West, has more closely resembled a cult of feelings far more than it has a political organisation. In Germany, where our Greens have been part of the actual government for the last few years, the party is not only completely through the looking-glass on social issues which have absolutely nothing to do with preserving the environment (and some of which threaten the very fabric of German social cohesion), it has done far more to harm the environment than any party since the founding of the Federal Republic.
This is not hyperbolic extrapolation from the Greens’ irraitional anti-nuclearism, either, though that is bad enough. It saw them follow through on Angela Merkel’s closure of *every single nuclear plant* in the country, for example. The end of this plan coincided with Russia’s reactivation of its adventure in the Ukraine, to which Germany stopped importing Russian gas in response…gas which Germany had spent the last thirty years, thanks in large part to Merkel and to her predecessor Gerhard Schröder (himself a close personal friend of Vladimir Putin), making Germany’s industry and domestic heating apparatus almost entirely dependent upon.
No, the Greens’ commitment to the environment not only saw them dogmatically follow-through on the death of the German nuclear industry, it saw them recommit to closing German coal mines and to filling them with concrete (along with other more “environmentally friendly” materials for the mines’ “restoration”), which on the face of it sounds reasonable, or at least good-hearted (if one can ignore the folly of rendering such mines permanently inoperable even in theory).
But the realities of German energy production in 2022 up to today meant that we had a choice between activating (and building) more coal-fired power plants or facing regular blackouts and brown-outs in the depth of winter. So the German State, for the first time since the Industrial Revolution (which means for the first time in history), has had to start importing coal to keep the lights on. This coal comes mostly from Columbia, which is…not exactly known for its environmental protections or worker safety laws, nor even for banning child labour.
And now we have German electricity produced on the back of coal dug out of the Andes, some of it by children, and shipped across the ocean so that the Greens can say they delivered on their twin promises of closing nuclear power plants and coal mines. Thanks, in no small part, to the Greens’ ideological intransigence when it meets geopolitical necessity.
But wait, there’s more. Even where Green environmental policy “works”, it has untold costs which will take us generations to sort out.
We have landfills filling up with fibreglass from wind turbines made and shipped out of China, which tend to last only a few years and which themselves cannot reliably produce enough energy to offset the carbon released during their manufacture, transport, installation, and disposal; a great many of these wind turbines are set up in forests, which necessitates removing one or more trees per turbine.
we have solar panels everywhere in a country where the *sunniest* region receives less sunlight in a year than the *least sunny* regions of the continental United States and thus cannot even theoretically produce enough energy to offset the carbon it takes to make, ship, and dispose of them.
In concrete terms, the city famed for the most sunny days in Germany is called Freiburg, a quaint little university town in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg. It receives, according to its own city’s website, “almost 1,800 sunshine-hours per year”, which in addition to giving it a “Mediterrannean flair”, makes it the most ideal place in the country for solar energy.
Seattle, Washington (where I believe our humble host has deigned to erect her domicile) receives, by way of comparison, 2170 sunshine hours per year.
The wisdom of basing a significant proportion of Seattle’s electrical grid on solar energy, much less a country whose *most-sunny location* receives only 80% as much sunshine, is an exercise left to the reader.
In any case, I could never countenance voting for the Greens in this country. I care about the environment far too much to ever do such a foolish thing as that.
@Der Durchwanderer
I was agreeing with you until you went off on your fact-free anti-renewables rant. It’s 2 am here and I’m seriously too tired to address all your (talking) points but I’ll just leave this here:
https://www.aap.com.au/factcheck/wind-turbine-energy-claim-is-all-spin-and-no-power/
Seconded, Francis.
“Sunshine hours per year” is meaningless in solar generation. Just as it is possible for a person to get sunburn on a cloudy day, so is electricity generated by solar panels because it isn’t the light, it’s the radiation.
We’re currently touring the English West Country, during a particularly soggy September; even on the gloomiest days, the two little solar panels on the roof of the campervan, which charge a 12V 200Ah LiFePO4 battery, have been putting out more power than we have been using. I often use the 500W wheelchair lift several times over the course of the day, and then there’s the pump for the diesel cooker/heater, and the lights, and charging for small devices such as phones, laptops, and Nintendo Switch consoles, and running my CPAP overnight. The solar panels stop charging the battery when it’s fully charged, and so are often not actually doing anything useful at all.
Freiburg is a lovely place, and has a great deal more sunshine than my home does (although I should perhaps point out that l live in the second most sunny place in my country) and we get plenty of power generated by solar panels and wind turbines. It is very windy where we live. In conditions which we count as ‘calm’ at home, the government in Canberra used to issue wind warnings!
Ophelia,
Sorry for hijacking this post about British Green social lunacy by diving into German Green environmental lunacy.
Francis,
It is approaching 1am here, and I have a long hike through some pretty nature (or as close as one can get ’round these parts) tomorrow, but I apparently cannot help myself. Rest assured, however, despite the graphic in the site you linked, my reservations about the carbon costs of wind energy in Germany did not come from a Facebook post. They come from studies such as this one, linked by your source as a source of authority that blades last 18 to 25 years but which itself has many more interesting things to say about the challenges and consequences of wind power. For example, it estimates current European blade waste at between 50 and 100 thousand tonnes, and estimates the same by 2050 at upwards of 10 million tonnes. The paper also implicitly estimates blade replacement at a third of all blades (as can be inferred from “In 2050, in the United States, the accumulated waste amount estimated by Cooperman et al. (2021) equals 2.2 Mt. The cumulative waste increases to 3.3 Mt, when considering waste from manufacturing and waste from blade replacement due to failure and repowering.”)
Germany has a current and growing concern over wind turbine waste (already having begun to decommission thousands of whole turbines that have reached the end of their operational spans, and having replaced thousands of tonnes worth of blades which did not last as long as advertised) and we don’t really know what to do with it. The paper above highlights one “recovery” usage, which is to grind up the blades and burn them instead of coal in the manufacture of cement (and perhaps other industrial processes), which…also produces carbon dioxide, and makes the question of whether the enterprise of wind energy in Germany with parts made and shipped from China which then have to be recycled in some way saves more CO2 than burning nuclear fuel along with natural gas would have for the same number of kilowatt-hours generated.
Aside from the CO2 it costs to make wind farms, their placement in Germany often means sacrificing a significant number of trees (as I mentioned in my previous post), which also impacts how much CO2 can be taken in from the atmosphere (at least on the scale of centuries, which for our purposes is long enough to matter). And CO2 is the name of the game, isn’t it?
The answer isn’t as clear-cut as some Australian wind-power activists seem to insist. I do not pretend to know the answer, but I don’t pretend you know it, either.
Reverend Brindley,
I…am not even sure where to begin with the claim that sunshine hours are “meaningless” in solar generation because people can be sunburnt on cloudy days. Sunshine hours are very strongly correlated to the amount of solar radiation a given locale receives; when it is overcast, solar-power arrays produce significantly less power than when the sky is clear and the sun is shining. Here, have a link to US solar power capitalists who (in very sunny language) admit that “…depending on the cloud cover and the quality of the solar panels, efficiency can drop to anywhere from 10 to 25 percent of the energy output seen on a sunny day.” And these people even use your logic of “people get sunburnt when it’s cloudy, so solar panels still work then, too! Please please please buy them from us!”
So, yes, solar panels still “work” when it’s cloudy. They just lose between 75 to 90 percent of their generative capacity on those days, compared to when it is bright and sunny. Which means that Germany, whose *sunniest place* is still less sunny than Seattle (famed the world over for how not-sunny it is) is getting between ten percent and a quarter of the solar power that those same solar panels would be getting in the Sahara or the southwestern United States.
Unlike with wind turbines, where the question of whether the CO2 they save is outweighed by the CO2 and other environmental impacts they cost is not clear, it is clear that solar panels north of the Alps will never pay back the carbon it takes to make, ship, use, and dispose of them. Every single solar panel in Germany causes more CO2 emissions than it can hope to recoup, and they would all be better used elsewhere. But having them here means the Greens can say they’ve helped, when they have done no such thing.
For the record, I wish Europe and North Africa were able to form a stable geostrategic partnership to generate solar power in the desert; this has been tried a couple of times and so far proved unworkable, but who knows what the future holds. I’m also not opposed in principal to wind power, though I think offshore wind is much better and more reliable and less wasteful in every respect than inland wind. I also wish Germany had a sensible nuclear policy and hadn’t simply destroyed its nuclear industry, and I wish Germany hadn’t spent most of my lifetime making itself dependent on Vladimir Putin’s natural gas and convincing itself that the dependency ran the other way around.
But wishes are very rarely the currency we have to work with in life. Instead we have to deal in facts, and the facts of the matter for wind and solar power in Germany are…questionable, at best. Perhaps they are better in Australia.
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And yet nothing in that the report you linked to, interesting as it is, addresses the issue of energy payback time. Turbines last more than a “few” years (reasonably 20 – yes, the ones being decommissioned now are that old). The payback time is typically on the order of a year. That’s very far from not being able to “reliably produce enough energy to offset the carbon released during their manufacture, transport, installation, and disposal”.
Similar thing with photovoltaics. This Fraunhofer report (German enough for you?) estimates an energy payback time of 1.1 years in northern Europe. https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/publications/studies/Photovoltaics-Report.pdf (bottom of page 8). Now, maybe that’s optimistic but PV panels can operate with minimal degradation for something like 20 years (much longer in practice if you’re prepared to tolerate reduced output). That’s actual carbon-free energy for decades.
At this point there’s no justification for not putting solar panels on any available sky-facing surface (and wind turbines in coastal waters where the wind is).
Why not both? New hydropower should be a nonstarter for a host of reasons but I see no reason you shouldn’t be stacking solar, wind, and nuclear altogether. Now if dumb fucks like Elon would quit playing reactionary politics and do something useful like bankrolling orbital solar arrays and space elevators we’d be going somewhere.