George Monbiot has released a new video on Double Down News praising that ecological champion…China. After claiming that the West has always criticised it in order to peddle “the old yellow peril myth” and mocking world leaders for talking about the threat from China on a state level, Monbiot touts the country’s green credentials. Everything else is waved away with a “China is doing some bad stuff”…
“It’s massively investing in green infrastructure and green industries and if there’s one thing we should be concerned about it’s that we’re being completely left behind by China’s investments… We are being left behind in the fossil age.”
Monbiot finishes: “China, for all its faults, puts us to shame.” News to anyone who thinks lowering emissions is a good thing…
Last time Guido checked, China, while building some solar farms, added a record 47 Gigawatts of coal power in 2023, which is double the amount from the rest of the world combined. That’s the equivalent of two new coal plants every week, as the country accounted for a whopping 30.9% of carbon emissions in 2021 and is currently rated “highly insufficient” on climateactiontracker.org. Guido didn’t realise George was such a fan of carbon…
Monbiot goes on to say how brilliant it is that the “French government is training every single public servant in ecological principles. 5.6 million people everyone who works for the state in any capacity at all is going to have ecological training.” More powerpoints for bureaucrats, that’ll solve climate change…
Guardianista eco-warrior George Monbiot attacked the Institute of Economic Affairs’ Reem Ibrahim on Politics Live today for what he thinks is a conflict of interest – she could only be arguing for liberty and free markets if she were funded by “dark money” corporations and evil men in suits. Cranks like Monbiot are exactly why think tank donors’ identities ought to be protected…
Guido is surprised to see Monbiot spouting about shrouded interests seeing as his own past isn’t so clean. Guido recalls the eco-crank’s very public dressing down by The Guardian when it emerged he had been promoting charities he was working for in his articles without declaration to his editors. Monbiot agreed to do charity work from 2013-16 worth £25,000 after defaming Lord McAlpine in 2012. He decided part of that would be to publicise the charities in his columns and nominate their personnel for awards. That just happens to be a clear violation of editorial standards…
He was caught out in 2016 after a sleuth got in touch with The Guardian about Monbiot’s covert activities. Glass houses…
Environmental journalist George Monbiot tells Bloomberg…
“Yeah, you like your steak, but I quite like an habitable planet… Agriculture is the worst thing we’ve ever done to the planet. It causes a massive amount of climate breakdown … but it also is the greatest cause of habitat destruction.”
Guardianista eco-warrior George Monbiot will be in a fowl mood today after he was caught out employing underhand statistical wizardry in an attempt to bash Brexit. Monbiot used his Guardian column to heavily hint that chlorinated chicken could be a factor behind poultry-borne infection rates which he claimed “four and five times higher in North America than in Europe“. He wrote:
“[The Adam Smith Institute] says that figures from the World Health Organisation reveal that salmonella and campylobacter infections there are “not out of line” with rates in the European Union. I checked the source: the WHO study the Adam Smith Institute cited. While the incidence of campylobacter is similar, it shows that the burdens of infection per head of population from the two species of salmonella it analyses – Salmonella typhi and Salmonella paratyphi – are, respectively, four times and five times higher in North America than in Europe. I cannot state that this is caused by chlorinated chicken, as the WHO doesn’t provide such detail. But I can state that the Adam Smith Institute’s claim is false.”
The problem with Monbiot’s wizardry it is nonsense. As the ASI comprehensively demonstrates:
“When you compare developed Western Europe, where we use the farm-to-fork approach, to developed North America, where they mostly chlorine wash at the end, the rates of the two types of salmonella seem higher in the US. But what Monbiot doesn’t report are the actual numbers. Salmonella Paratyphi A and Salmonella Typhi infections are so rare in both subregions that the difference Monbiot highlights is trivial in the context of total infections, which the WHO weights according to the disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) lost to them. The figures are 0.1 and 0.4 DALYs per 100,000 in North America versus 0.02 and 0.09 in Western Europe, respectively. But even those average estimates are misleading: the 95% confidence intervals on those numbers all touch zero, and include the rates of the opposite countries. That is: the stats are statistically insignificant from each other. When you drill down to two such specific sub-figures, relying on imperfect sources, you can’t draw a clear result. It’s like rolling two dice three times and arguing the one with the higher number is loaded: you haven’t got enough data to make that conclusion.”
Monbiot tried to hold out on Twitter, rudely dismissing those who politely pointed out he was wrong:
These rather unfortunate tweets have been deleted and he has now belatedly admitted his mistake:
2/2: It is fair to say the rates are similar. I will support a correction in the Guardian. My apologies.
— GeorgeMonbiot (@GeorgeMonbiot) July 27, 2017
You can’t just wing it on chlorine chicken, George…
Gaia has sometimes been critical of George Monbiot. Hats off to him for skinning and taking an axe to a squirrel on Newsnight for dinner. Eating free range Tuftys is one of the sanest things old Moonbat has ever suggested…
Watch Polly Toynbee call a Ferrari a “misogynist motif of the patriarchal social order” and George Monbiot rev up a Land Rover as they ‘audition’ to be the new presenter on Top Gear:
Well at least Guido has a new stock image for Polly stories…
