Calls to Completely Eliminate Coronavirus are Nonsensical

by Pat Swords BE CEng FIChemE CEnv MIEMA

“He who can does; he who cannot, teaches.”

George Bernard Shaw (above) may have been harsh on academics, but as a professional working in risk management, I was appalled to read in the Irish Independent “We must completely eliminate coronavirus to return to normal, scientists warn”. To explain, as Voltaire phrased it “In his writings, a wise Italian says that the best is the enemy of good”. 20% of the effort may well get you 80% of the performance (Pareto principle), but perfection is solely an ideal. The plane designed never to crash could not lift into the air. While eliminating the circa 150 annual deaths on our roads, would require us to permit only walking.

Therefore, risk is inherently connected to a degree of reward. As the ISO and our legislation explains, safety is not zero risk, but where the residual risk is reduced to a level society accepts in a given context. The Lisbon Treaty does include the precautionary principle, but the Commission’s guidance on its application is very clear. It requires a strict adherence to risk management and “Measures (…) must not be disproportionate to the desired level of protection and must not aim at zero risk”.

Einstein is portrayed as an older wise man, but he was young and unknown when he published his theory of relativity, challenging the Newtonian physics established for centuries. Some considered him an upstart and a ‘scientific’ book was published ‘One Hundred Authors against Einstein’. Einstein’s alleged reply was one would not need the word of a hundred scientists, just one fact, which no one had produced.

Science is never about consensus, which is politics. Neither should 'so called scientists’ seek to establish the ‘consensus of scientists’ to deliberately push the political process. Society alone decides the acceptability of risk; after all, if our mothers believed in ‘zero risk’, none of us would have been born.

Furthermore, what happens if the evidence emerges to show these ‘scientists’ are wrong. Are they prosecuted for negligence, as professionals involved in the practical application of science, such as doctors and engineers, are? Have they accurately informed, in the wider context of ‘teach’? For example, the data is readily available and the sums not hard, if you are under 65, you are as likely to die from a road accident as from COVID.

Regulation is required to be based on Regulatory Impact Analysis identifying the costs, benefits, uncertainties, etc., conducted in a transparent manner with public participation. Not developed by ‘scientists’, who know what, is best for us.

PSO Levy Reaches Highest Ever Amount to Fund Renewables

Electricity Bills Set to Rise (Once Again)

There is more headache on the way for Irish billpayers as the PSO Levy is set to reach it's highest ever amount at € 480 million, with the vast majority of it going to wind energy. This hike to electricity bills comes at a time when wholesale prices for electricity will be at their lowest since 2017 - when it was also €46 per MWh. So these savings will not be passed on to the consumer.

In fact, Irish consumers are locked into high energy costs for a long time. You may have voted for the Lisbon Treaty, which guaranteed an internal market with a highly competitive social market economy but you won't be getting that. 

The graph below shows how much electricity generating capacity has grown since 2006, at the height of the building boom. We had sufficient capacity then, but now we have twice as much as we need, with demand on or about the same. As wind farms cannot replace a conventional power station, it means that each new wind farm built is additional to our capacity requirements, and all of this excess capacity must be funded by consumers through taxes and levies and hidden costs.  

Electricity Generating Capacity for the Rep of Ireland

Dispatchable Plant is plant that can be switched on when required, e.g. gas, coal as opposed to 

wind energy which is intermittent and dependent on weather conditions

How the EU repeatedly bypassed its Legal Framework and the Rights of its Citizens to implement its Renewable Programme

by Pat Swords

The EU makes repeated claims about the importance of the rule of law, but in reality, it fails to comply with its own legal framework and the rights of its citizens are not considered relevant, when it comes to implementing the New Green Deal. The ideological driven planned economies behind the Iron Curtain, with little regard for either environmental impacts or citizen’s rights, left behind a bitter legacy. In response emerged the United Nations Economic Convention for Europe’s (UNECE) Aarhus Convention on “Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters”, which has been part of EU legal framework since 2005. As the EU Commission has clarified:

“Such agreements take precedence over legal acts adopted under the EC Treaty (secondary Community law). So if there was a conflict between a Directive and a Convention, such as the Aarhus Convention, all Community or Member State administrative or judicial bodies would have to apply the provision of the Convention and derogate from the secondary law provision.”

As part of this Convention on environmental democracy, obligation placed on contracting parties include "fully integrating environmental considerations in governmental decision making and the consequent need for public authorities to be in possession of accurate, comprehensive and up to date environmental information".  That there should, in a transparent and fair framework, be a weighing up of environmental considerations is  no different than a key element of EU jurisprudence, the principle of proportionality, which requires that :

“Measures adopted by EU institutions do not exceed the limits of what is appropriate and necessary in order to attain the objectives legitimately pursued by the legislation in question; when there is a choice between several appropriate measures, recourse must be had to the least onerous, and the disadvantages caused must not be disproportionate to the aims pursued”.

As Recital 15 of Directive 2009/28/EC demonstrates, the EU’s 20% by 2020 renewable target was shared out among the Member States based on the existing percentage of renewables and a ‘fudge factor’ based on GDP. No environmental information existed on what was to be built, where it was to be built, what were the impacts and mitigation measures, etc. Having zero information to quantify the negative impact of carbon emissions, the alleged benefit of the 20% renewable target was related to the expected future price of carbon on the EU emissions trading scheme. A price, which is driven by political decisions related to allocations of carbon credits, with zero relationship to environmental impacts. Hence, what resulted was a circular logic of political target setting in the absence of reasoned decision making, with a complete absence of environmental information to justify the enormous impacts on the European environment and energy markets. 

This glaring democratic deficit was compounded by the supranational dynamics of the EU, where Directives before adoption should first be scrutinised by public participation at the Member State level, such as in Ireland by detailed Regulatory Impact Analysis with public engagement. However, in practice this was by-passed.

After adoption of Directive 2009/28/EC there was only a year for Member States to prepare National Renewable Energy Action Plans (NREAPs) to implement these renewable targets. The Member States essentially left the section on the environmental impacts of these NREAPs blank, as it was an optional requirement in the EU template. Such plans are also subject before adoption to the detailed requirements of the EU’s Directive on Strategic Environmental Assessment (2001/42/EC), in order to establish the justification, alternatives, impacts, mitigation measures and monitoring for unforeseen adverse impacts. This was also bypassed. 

Such legal failures led to a compliance case against the EU at the UNECE (ACCC/C/2010/54) and in 2014 a subsequent declaration of legal non-compliance in International law: Decision V/9g of the Meeting of the Parties on compliance by the European Union with its obligations under the Aarhus Convention. The UNECE recommendations require the EU to:

“…. adopt a proper regulatory framework and/or clear instructions for implementing article 7 of the Convention with respect to the adoption of NREAPs. This would entail that the Party concerned ensure that the arrangements for public participation in its member States are transparent and fair and that within those arrangements the necessary information is provided to the public. In addition, such a regulatory framework and/or clear instructions must ensure that the requirements of article 6, paragraphs 3, 4 and 8, of the Convention are met, including reasonable time frames, allowing sufficient time for informing the public and for the public to prepare and participate effectively, allowing for early public participation when all options are open, and ensuring that due account is taken of the outcome of the public participation. Moreover, the Party concerned must adapt the manner in which it evaluates NREAPs accordingly”. 

As the UNECE documentation records, the EU has since 2014 failed to make any progress to comply with the recommendations above, repeatedly failing to reply to specific questions and advice. Furthermore, at the subsequent 2017 UNECE Meeting of the Parties, it blocked with its 28 votes, a further decision of non-compliance against it. Namely its refusal to provide its citizens with effective access to justice, in order to bring such challenges of non-compliance of EU environmental law directly into the Court of Justice of the European Union. Ongoing UNECE compliance proceedings have further expanded to include Regulation 2018/1999 on the Energy Union and Climate Action and the manner in which the National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs) were adopted. Yet again, the legal requirements of Strategic Environmental Assessment were bypassed and the public had no opportunity to participate in the decision-making, when all options were open and effective public participation could take place. 

If we consider the 2018 World Health Organisation’s Environmental Noise Guidelines for the European Region, while these adopted conditional recommendations for wind turbine noise, they make it very clear: “There are serious issues with noise exposure assessment related to wind turbines”.

“Balance of benefits versus harms and burdens: Further work is required to assess fully the benefits and harms of exposure to environmental noise from wind turbines and to clarify whether the potential benefits associated with reducing exposure to environmental noise for individuals living in the vicinity of wind turbines outweigh the impact on the development of renewable energy policies in the WHO European Region”.

Significant negative impacts are occurring on rural populations from the impacts of high-energy sources of low frequency sound (infrasound). There are legal liabilities, as the required Strategic Environmental Assessments and associated monitoring for unforeseen adverse environmental effects never occurred. 

Brexit (Or Not) : Lessons From Lisbon

 "Oh, no, no I've been through this movie before - Bob Dylan, 1964

Broken words never meant to be spoken,  Broken treaties broken vows, People bending broken rules, Everything is broken - Bob Dylan 1989

Opinion by Owen Martin.

Last Thursday's Brexit vote has re-shaped British politics for good or for bad. It was akin to throwing up all the pieces of a chess game into the air and re-starting the game wherever the pieces happened to land.   From an energy and climate point of view it is too early to say what will happen. Ireland may not have to build the North South Interconnector if the North revokes the EU legislation which prevents them from keeping their power stations open. Who knows, Britain may go into a period of traditional common sense where they dont have to worry about (nor spend billions on) changing the weather anymore. But any myriad number of things could happen between now and the time Article 50 is triggered, and between the time it is triggered and UK effectively withdrawing from the EU (Personally I was hoping to buy cheaper stuff from England but the sterling hasnt dropped as much as the media made out). 

The following diagram is fairly self explanatory and comes from a Norwegian newspaper. 
There are many hurdles that must be crossed before Britain makes an effective withdrawal, if it does at all. 

One possible option is that the political class that are saying now that they accept the result will change their minds in six months time as events sweep the political landscape from under their feet both at British and European level. Who knows where the pieces will land ? But haven't Ireland been here before ?

In 2008, Ireland voted No to the Lisbon Treaty. In 2009, they were asked again. This time they voted Yes to the same but slightly amended referendum. In the intervening years, there was no great political shake-up.  The Prime Minister, unlike in Britain, remained in office until the next general election in 2011. The opposition leader, Enda Kenny, also remained as leader. It wasn't until 2010 that opposition backbenchers revolted but Kenny successfully fought them off and is now Prime Minister (since 2011). Contrast this to what is happening in the days following Britain's cataclysmic vote. Of course, their vote is somewhat more serious although there was a real danger that Ireland would get left behind after their No Vote in 2008. 

Let's see what was said at the time in 2008 after the initial vote :

Prime Minister, Brian Cowen

And again 

And again 

The Minister For Foreign Affairs was at it aswell :

And the Left Wing Opposition :

Britain's Foreign Secretary was also very clear :

Financial turmoil was the result :

The No side were accused of lying :

A second referendum was not possible :

Sound familiar ?

A year later, Ireland were given another chance and this time voted Yes.  Of course, the EU could not continue without Ireland's ratification as other member states threatened legal action. Could it continue without UK membership ? The UK is the second largest intra-EU importer of goods and the second largest net contributor to the EU budget (worth about € 85 bn per year to the EU combined), so possibly not. We are about to find out.

The day after the Brexit referendum the mainstream media were busy telling us that Leave Voters didn't know what they were voting on, that they hadn't understood the issues at all : 

It is far more likely that the 28% of the electorate who hadn't bothered to vote were the ones busy googling the "EU". But Google and the media have planted the seeds of doubt. This is most likely a prelude to the Post - Vote Poll which I have no doubt will confirm their contention that leave voters, in general, were clueless. Here is the Post-vote poll taken after Lisbon Treaty Referendum Part 1 :

40% of the No voters didnt understand, so the referendum had to be run again and the rest is history. 

With the Tory leadership contest not happening for another three months, anything could happen in the meantime.

Aarhus Convention Committee confirm EU in breach of Aarhus Convention

The Aarhus Convention was designed to empower citizens to participate in environmental matters at the political level. It has three main pillars - public participation, access to information, and access to justice. Both the EU and Ireland have signed up in principal to its tenets, but in practice, implementation is sporadic and often arbitrary.

UNECE Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee (ACCC) perform an enforcement role of sorts, but their decisions are not binding. Instead, they try to encourage parties to the convention to comply at Meeting of the Parties.

In a recent complaint accepted by ACCC, the EU itself was found to be non compliant in relation to its plans for large energy infrastructure projects for Ireland (called PCIs) :

After taking into account the information received, the Committee re-confirmed its earlier determination of preliminary admissibility with respect to the allegations concerning article 7 of the Convention. 

Article 7 refers to public participation concerning plans and programmes relating to the environment. There are also allegations of breaches of Article 4, relating to access to information on the environment.

The EU now has till November to respond. Well done to Pat Swords and those involved for getting this far. One of the central tenets of the 2008 Lisbon Treaty was that the EU would :

consolidate and support democracy, the rule of law, human rights and the principles of international law;

 It sure has a lot more work to do..........