I hesitate to criticise Dean, because I thought he made some excellent points (I particularly liked the well-thought-out arguments about “political correctness”), but I do wonder if maybe he’s broken the first law of arguing with people on the internet: don’t feed the trolls.

Would be interested in what others think.

It’s important that we keep challenging that the glossy message of “reform” and “efficiency savings” is a mask over funding cuts directly hurting people. If you’re serious about efficiency, you invest in improvement programs. Cutting funding just causes less of what’s currently happening – there’s no resource or room during times of cutback to focus on effective and innovative delivery of services.

http://www.kenanmalik.com/lectures/beyond_the_sacred.html

Firstly (cos I’m a chemist) conflating nicotine with Neonicotinoids is a little bit tabloid. But only a little bit, so I’ll let it lie

There is, to me, a slightly bizarre argument at play that says the problem with this insecticide is not that it is killing insects and bugs, but is killing some of the ones we like. We don’t care about the nasty bugs only the happy friendly ones like smiley bees. A bit like saying that antibiotics are bad because they kill good bacteria and not just bad bacteria.

If you use an insecticide then you kill things, that’s the point. Of course there is an environmental argument for how much impact interventions have, but if you decide some bugs are worth keeping and some bugs you are happy to let die, then I think you also have to accept that it may not be exactly as you want. finding that point of acceptable impact is where the debate should be.

The research into Neonicotinoids is not clear but there is isn’t really much evidence to show it’s a huge problem, when it is used correctly (which is becoming more the major issue). However, I’m still wary of them and when I kept my bees on a rapeseed farm, the farmer would let me know when he was spraying, I’d close up the bees for a few days, in the hope of reducing any risk. The plight of the bees seems to be an excuse for every crank to hang their preferred doomsday reason on their decline -pesticides, mobile phones, power lines yadda yadda yadda , although pesticides (as mentioned in the piece) are a more likely part of a the multivariate issue – varroa mites appear to be the biggest issue tho.

There is often a argument put forward about big nasty chemical company lobbying the gov to make sure they don’t get banned. There’s probably some truth in it, but it’s also worth mentioning that one of the Eastern EU countries (Slovenia?) banned Neonicotinoids after heavy lobbying by Monsanto as they had a GM product they wanted to flog. Muddy waters indeed.

To suggest that people might want to buy organic as a result is I think an odd suggestion, but that’s maybe just me.

Anyway, maybe I’m being over harsh, I thought Matt spoke fairly even-handedly, although I can’t understand why he’s ok with one bug being vaporised but is getting animated about preserving a different one!

T

The church flyers quest is in Riften by the way if your wife wants to seek it out and then not do it!

Its true that the method being fallacious doesn’t in itself make the conclusion wrong; but they were not talking about safety – they were talking about cost.

In any case only four people have ever been killed by wind turbines, then even if this is a higher per GWh rate than nuclear, its still a very small number. The numbers are similarly small for nuclear – and both wind and nuclear are safer than coal (largely because of mining rather than generation). With such a small number of lethal accidents, safety shouldn’t be the deciding factor.

You are right to point the holes in this report, but it’s important to remember that just because a report or investigation is badly done and may well be biased, does not, in itself mean that the reverse conclusion is true.

I found it very uncomfortable listening to climate skeptics rant ‘but wind turbines don’t work’ but the more I look into it, the more true that seems.

For example four people have been killed by wind turbines to date, which makes wind power far more deadly per gigawatt hour than say, nuclear, but no one wants to talk about “we will never overcome the wind power safety issue’

This is of course due, more to the fact that nuclear is a vastly more energy dense source than wind, but isn’t that the whole point?