Etiquette Nonsense, MPs Expenses, Emissions
Shaking Hands
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Sign for the 'Salutation Inn', unknown artist
Photo Credit: Heritage Doncaster [CC BY]
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Schools are
letting down young people by not teaching them the basics of interviews,
including how to shake hands, according to Nilesh Dosa, a youth mentor at the
accountancy firm Ernst and Young. “We’re churning out academically able
students who just aren’t equipped for work,” he has said.
The etiquette consultant Jo Bryant agrees. “You can have all the qualifications in the world, but if you go in with a poor body language, poor eye contact and a poor handshake you won’t get the job.”
(The Guardian, 2019)
MPs and Expenses
The Environment and CO2 Emissions
The etiquette consultant Jo Bryant agrees. “You can have all the qualifications in the world, but if you go in with a poor body language, poor eye contact and a poor handshake you won’t get the job.”
(The Guardian, 2019)
Does it need an
‘etiquette consultant’ to state the obvious?
MPs and Expenses
Nearly 400 MPs including nine cabinet
ministers and Jeremy Corbyn, have been blocked from using their parliamentary
credit cards for breaking expenses rules in just over three years.
…Sir Alistair Graham, former chair of
the committee on standards in public life, said: “It shows there is either
something fundamentally wrong with the system, or we’ve got a bunch of highly
incompetent, slovenly MPs who can’t keep the rules.”
(The i, 2019)
Perhaps it’s
both.
The Environment and CO2 Emissions
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The Commencement of the Deluge, William Westall (1781-1850)
Photo Credit:Tate [CC BY-NC-ND]
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…Apparently
a decisive contribution to this [Saving the Planet] can be achieved if the UK
becomes “net carbon zero” by 2050.
…Unfortunately, the whole business is an exercise in vanity and hubris. The UK generates barely 1% of annual global CO2 emissions. So, if we were, by magic, to become “carbon zero” by lunchtime tomorrow, it would mean – based on accepted links between manmade emissions and climate – an average global temperature (in 2040) about 0.005 degrees lower than if we had carried on with “business as usual”. Someone would need to tell the planet, as neither Gaia, nor indeed any of her inhabitants, would notice the difference.
…Ed Miliband, who as energy secretary promulgated the Climate Change Act…told MPs: “I cannot emphasise enough…the authority that our ability to act gives us.” That is, if we unilaterally hurtled to carbon zero, China and India will be so impressed that they would rapidly follow suit. Unfortunately, the former Labour leader was unable to furnish MPs with any evidence for this theory.
…The late government chief scientific adviser, Professor Sir David McKay told The Guardian in an interview conducted 11 days before his death in 2016: “Because [my] time is getting thinner and thinner I should call a spade a spade…There is this appalling delusion that people have that we can take this thing [renewables] and we can just scale it up and if there is a slight issue of it not adding up, then we can just do energy efficiency. Humanity really does need to pay attention to arithmetic and the laws of physics.”
As Professor McKay pointed out in his book Sustainable Energy – without the Hot Air, there is no practicable zero-carbon future without full-on investment in nuclear power, which provides emission-free electricity uninterruptedly (unlike wind and solar power). Yet nuclear wasn’t mentioned by MPs in the debate last week.
(Dominic Lawson, The Sunday Times, 2019)
…Unfortunately, the whole business is an exercise in vanity and hubris. The UK generates barely 1% of annual global CO2 emissions. So, if we were, by magic, to become “carbon zero” by lunchtime tomorrow, it would mean – based on accepted links between manmade emissions and climate – an average global temperature (in 2040) about 0.005 degrees lower than if we had carried on with “business as usual”. Someone would need to tell the planet, as neither Gaia, nor indeed any of her inhabitants, would notice the difference.
…Ed Miliband, who as energy secretary promulgated the Climate Change Act…told MPs: “I cannot emphasise enough…the authority that our ability to act gives us.” That is, if we unilaterally hurtled to carbon zero, China and India will be so impressed that they would rapidly follow suit. Unfortunately, the former Labour leader was unable to furnish MPs with any evidence for this theory.
…The late government chief scientific adviser, Professor Sir David McKay told The Guardian in an interview conducted 11 days before his death in 2016: “Because [my] time is getting thinner and thinner I should call a spade a spade…There is this appalling delusion that people have that we can take this thing [renewables] and we can just scale it up and if there is a slight issue of it not adding up, then we can just do energy efficiency. Humanity really does need to pay attention to arithmetic and the laws of physics.”
As Professor McKay pointed out in his book Sustainable Energy – without the Hot Air, there is no practicable zero-carbon future without full-on investment in nuclear power, which provides emission-free electricity uninterruptedly (unlike wind and solar power). Yet nuclear wasn’t mentioned by MPs in the debate last week.
(Dominic Lawson, The Sunday Times, 2019)
If there is no
agreement, particularly from China, India and Indonesia, it’s not going to
work. Didn’t the Paris Agreement commit countries to some form of reduction?
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