I wrote to my MP, David Wright (aka Red Dave), about the increasing cost of living which is almost entirely down to his government’s climate change scam.  I sent a free of charge, environmentally friendly email to him and he replied, extolling the virtues of “green” Liebour and telling me about how we all have to do our bit to protect the environment.  But he didn’t reply by email – no, he typed up a reply, printed it on two pieces of dead tree (not even double sided printing), put it inside another piece of dead tree and posted it from London to my house.  His constituency office is 3 or 4 miles up the road from where I live.

Here is the email I sent to him originally:

Dear David,

I see the price of petrol and diesel has gone up yet again.  The price of diesel is going up every other day at the moment.

It’s getting close to the point where I can’t afford to drive any more which is unfortunate.  Because I have problems with my knees I can’t walk everywhere.  I can get to work on the bus but it’ll cost me £3.20 return from [where I live] to the Town Centre daily.  That’s a journey of about 3 miles.  From the Town Centre I then have the option of catching another bus for around the same amount that will eventually get me to St Georges from where I can walk to work or walking to [a different office] and catching a minibus that my employer provides.

I’d need to do some sums to figure out whether the bus is cheaper than the car but one thing is for sure – my journey to work will increase from five minutes to around an hour and a half.  That means three hours a day less with my family and when I work a late shift every other week that means not seeing my 3 year old as she would be in bed by the time I got home from work.

Then there’s the problem of me being on 24 hour call-out.  Every other week I am on call 24 hours a day but buses don’t run 24 hours a day.  I’d have to give that up and lose about £5,000 a year in salary.

And, of course, there is the knock-on effect of high fuel prices that affects everyone, driver or not – increased cost of food and other goods.  My wife tells me that some items of shopping are increasing on a weekly basis.  This is due to both the increasing cost of transport and the food shortages caused by farmers turning fields over to biofuels in the name of the global warming scam that you and your colleagues are propagating.

When will this stop David?  When will you and your government do something to help out those of us who don’t have a £61,000 MP’s salary to cushion the blow?  When will your government realise that what the economy needs – and what we all need – is for the tax on fuel to be decreased, not increased?  It’s all well and good your prime minister (salary £187,000) telling us that he won’t drop tax on fuel so we can afford to live because we need secure and cheap oil supplies for the future but that’s not happening (largely thanks to your government’s foreign policy, but that’s another matter).  We aren’t going to get cheap and secure oil supplies other than those that are present in the North Sea, control of which your government is passing over to the EU.  A tax cut is the only way fuel prices will be decreased.

So what do you suggest I do David?  The way things are going, very soon I won’t be able to afford to work.  What are you doing to bring down the cost of fuel, the cost of food and the general cost of living?  What are you going to do to make sure that people like me can afford to travel to work and buy food for our families?

Stuart Parr

He eventually replied, basically avoiding answering any of my questions, with the following piece of newspeak:

Dear Stuart

Thank you for your e-mail of the 22 May relating to fuel costs and the general living expenditure of families.

I was somewhat puzzled by your reference to the “global warming scam” that I am supposedly propagating.  I have read literature claiming that global warming is not taking place and I do not find it convincing.  Tackling climate change is the most serious and pressing global environmental challenge the world faces. 

The Stern report showed that failing to reduce carbon emissions leads to dangerous climate change risking our future economic prosperity.  Unless we tackle it, we will face higher food costs, more floods, humanitarian crises and climate refugees.

Efforts are needed to cut emissions across the economy including transport where cars, vans and lorries alone account for nearly a quarter of the UK’s CO2 emissions.  Cars provide huge benefits to people and businesses through greater mobility and freedom.  We need to retain these benefits, while cutting the CO2 emissions, which means encouraging more fuel-efficient cars.

Over the last decade the government has introduced a range of measures to encourage cleaner cars.  This has contributed to the proportion of least polluting cars on our roads rising by more than a third, while that of the most polluting cars has fallen by a quarter since 2001. 

I am very conscious of how current high nominal petrol prices are affecting people.  That is why we postponed this April’s fuel duty increase to help people and this policy will be kept under review.  High fuel costs are the result of international oil prices increasing to record highs.  Fuel duty by contrast is down in real terms since 1999.  The government is working to encourage oil producing states to lift production.

The best way to ensure long term price stability is to have economy wide stability.  I believe that is what Labour has delivered.  The government responded to calls to alleviate the problems caused by the abolition of the 10p tax rate.  If people want a reduction in tax on fuel then they have to decide whether to further increase public debt or reduce public expenditure.

The medium to long term solution is to promote alternative fuel cars, subsidise public transport and move our wider economy away from oil and gas based energy consumption through more renewables and nuclear power.

Yours sincerely

David Wright

So much bullshit, so little time and energy to fisk him.  I did manage to summon the motivation to type out a reponse (which I sent by environmentally friendly, free email):

Dear David,

Thank you for your letter.  The irony of you replying to my environmentally-friendly, almost zero-carbon email by typing a reply, printing it on a piece of dead tree and then posting it to me 3 or 4 miles down the road hasn’t been lost.  Still, it gave me a laugh.

I wonder if you could let me know what evidence you’ve seen that convinces you that climate change is caused by human activity.  Whenever I look for the kind of incontrovertible evidence that would , if I were an MP, convince me to destroy the global economy and condemn the bulk of my constituents (mainly the section of society that voted for me) to poverty, I keep finding things like:

The lead author of the IPPC report on climate change telling the worlds media that the Wilkins Ice Shelf in the Antarctic is “hanging on by a thread” when it actually collapsed 10 years ago.  I can’t trust the findings of a report whose lead author is a proven liar and propagandist.

German scientists have confirmed that there will be global cooling again this year and for the next decade.  They claim that the increase in temperature predicted in the IPPC report will happen after the decade of cooling.

31,000 scientists (including 9,000 PhD’s) have so far signed the Oregon Petition and 500 climatologists, scientists and engineers have signed the Manhattan Declaration, all criticising the IPPC report on climate change, Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” and the actions of world governments in the name of climate change.  Only 2,500 scientists endorsed the IPPC report on climate change, 400 of which say their names were added without their knowledge or consent and one scientist had to threaten legal action to have his name removed after leaving the project because it was unscientific and politically motivated.

The Centre for Ecology and Hydrology says that the floods last year had nothing to do with climate change but the Environment Agency (which is, of course, part of the British government department, DEFRA) said, in response to their report, that although they couldn’t attribute the floods to climate change, we can expect more floods because of climate change.  Such blatant propaganda does nothing for the global warming lobby.

The peak in Atlantic sea temperatures during the second world war that have formed an integral part of the model that the propagandists have used for their predictions have recently been confirmed as incorrect data.  The temperature didn’t actually increase, it was just measured differently by the Americans during the war and normal temperatures were recorded after the war when the British took back over measuring the temperature.  The propgandists haven’t changed their model to take this into account, they’ve just put their fingers in their ears and shouted “la la la la la”.

I remember being told that we were heading for a new ice age when I was younger but the same data that convinced scientists then that we were heading for global cooling then now convinces scientists that we’re heading for global warming.  They were just as convinced on global cooling and they were wrong.

The permafrost in Greenland and the Arctic ice caps haven’t shrunk to the extent that they did during the Medieval Warm Period (natural climate change) or 2,000 years ago when the Vikings settled there.  The Vikings grew grapes for wine production in Greenland and Newfoundland in what is now permafrost and surface ice.

Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, was judged to be propaganda by a High Court judge who ruled that it could only be shown in schools if the teacher explained that the film was not objective and was full of inaccuracies.  Most of the inaccuracies were exposed by British government scientists.

Perhaps you’ve got some different evidence that we mere mortals don’t have access to?  If you do, could you please let me have a copy?

If I could just address one more point you make – increasing oil production.  This is a nonsense because the UK is almost entirely self-sufficient in oil requirements.  It is only about 2 and a half years ago that oil use in the UK exceeded our own oil production.  Increasing the amount of oil produced in the Middle East will have little impact on the price of fuel because most of the oil we consume comes from the North Sea and off the coast of East Anglia.  The only reason why our own oil is so expensive is because of the obscene rate of duty that your prime minister has imposed on it.  A country that is almost self-sufficient in oil shouldn’t be paying the same amount for petrol and diesel as a country that doesn’t produce any oil of its own.  A reduction of tax on fuel would provide a massive boost to the economy and may even head off the recession that your government is engineering putting more money back into the economy.  But, of course, citizens having their own money and not relying on state handouts isn’t the socialist way, is it?

If you could also let me know what you intend to do to bring down fuel costs, increase global fuel production to combat the loss of crops to biofuel production and bring down food costs, I would be most grateful because right now your government’s policies are compounding (or causing) the situation, not making it better.

Stuart

David Wright is a party man through and through.  What does he care if half of his constituents are struggling to pay their bills?  At £61k, his salary is about four times the average wage of his constituents and we pay his travel expenses.

Technorati Tags: David Wright, Cliamte change, Propaganda