I should like visitors to this blog to know that I read each and every comment that is posted. Also, if folk choose to email me separately I also read each and every email that I receive, as well as all of the tweets that I receive. I hope you will appreciate, however, that I can’t reply to every communication that I see; at the last count there were over 200,000 visitors to this site from 146 countries around the world, and there are over 430 followers, with that number growing all the time. I’m delighted that you read the posts on this blog and participate in the debate. We really do live in extraordinary times.
I do not ‘censor’ any comments, apart from those which I consider to be gratuitously offensive and make no contribution to the debate. In the time that I’ve been operating this blog I have censored just one comment.
Moraymint Chatter 
Found your blog through the most convoluted route, basically, global warming skeptical to energy economics to yourself. Very insightful and well written, you should get yourself a column on our local blat ( P+J) which could do with some quality journalism. I’m a conservative Scot Nat incidentally, there’s not many of us!
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Thank you moraymint. I have just discovered you following the link on the DT comments section of Allison Pearson’s article today.
I am half Scottish, half English 😬, a foot in both camps so to speak.
You write so eloquently and have voiced my views exactly.
I have subscribed to your newsletter in the hopes of maintaining my sanity.
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Welcome to Moray, Hilary. Great to have you here …
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Hilary, can you confirm that you provided your email address in the ‘Follow this blog …’ box on the right of the screen? At the moment, I can’t see any evidence for this?
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Me too!! However, I hang onto the belief that good will conquer evil. The world has just gone a bit arse about face!!
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Just wondering if you have given up the struggle for a quiet life or the ptb have gotcha. Thanks for your efforts over the years but as keynes said in the end we are all dead (perchance to dream). Best wishes dustyirv.
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Still here gordon and still as intellectually active as ever in terms of observing and reflecting on the unfolding madness all about us! Just been extraordinarily busy on the work fronts: I have several irons in the fire in terms of earning a living and they all got busy at once. Still here, though, and no intention of going down the quiet life route (yet). All the best!
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Immigration is certainly a problem when a country allows in people with minimal eduction (if any at all) – without the language skills of the host country – and without skills that will allow the immigrant to find employment. This is a recipe for disaster – anyone (other than of course govt bureaucrats) could see this.
I read an article recently about a successful immigration programme – that of Canada where they have for years had a points system – for instance if the country needed engineers then if you wanted to immigrate and had an engineering degree with English/French language skills, you were almost guaranteed entry.
The article pointed out that the 25% of the wealthiest Canadians were immigrants – and another 25% of the wealthiest were the children of immigrants.
Unfortunately from what I can see Europe has allowed pretty much anyone in. And people without skills end up living in ghettos where they fester and act as a drain on society.
And of course when a community (e.g Algerians in France) aggregates and does not assimilate they become a target and they become reviled – so they cluster ever more closely and the problem becomes intractable – racism takes hold – nobody will give them a job – and eventually the situation turns violent.
As for the murder of a Brit soldier, top Australian investigative journalist presents another perspective on why this happened http://hongkong.asiaxpat.com/features/home-truths.html
But then this as they say, another story altogether
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Outstanding analysis – I couldn’t agree more with all of this.
However one thing you may want to address in a future column – many people are of the opinion that what is needed to ‘save the world’ is cheap, clean energy.
Let’s think that through though – imagine we had a very cheap, clean, unlimited source of energy – what would be the consequences?
Well – we had cheap energy for over a hundred years and look at the impact of that http://www.natsoc.org.au/content-images/bio-5.gif
Now let’s assume we had cheap + unlimited + clean energy – what would be the consequences?
I suggest there would be a population explosion because we could desalinate oceans and grow more crops (what we’d do with all that salt is another matter of course). In addition to a spike in global population we’d also see much more affluence.
Of course this massive, affluent population would demand more ‘stuff’. And stuff requires raw materials – copper, wood, nickel, iron, rare earths etc etc etc…
So imagine a population of say 15 billion – let’s say 5 billion of them are ‘living large’
Cheap, clean, unlimited energy is not the answer. It would in fact accelerate the demise of the world as we know it.
More people mean more demand for not only food but all resources –
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Paul, perhaps you’ve heard the phrase “the rich get richer and the poor get children”? I’ve worked in the most dirt poor part of West Africa (Chad) and the one thing they don’t lack is children! And they might be as sparsely populated as Scandinavia but the locals have managed to kill just about every bit of Bush meat in a country the size of Western Europe. Incidentally it was the opinion of the savants I worked alongside that Chad could feed the whole of Africa if they had proper capital intensive agriculture. Anyhoo. It’s not energy that allows population growth, otherwise we’d be overrun by Norwegians
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