Green Party disintegration / split

astrofool wrote: »

This is the Greens splitting into two left of centre/very left of centre parties, and will probably highlight those who aren't really about the "Green" part. The very left of centre part will probably split in a few years again into a vegetarian/vegan split, and get sillier from there.

I posted something along that vein when McHugh left; that there appeared to be a few people in the Greens who are concerned that the party wasn't far enough to the left and needed to be focusing less on the environment and more on social issues.

You'd have to wonder then why they bothered joining the Greens in the first place? We have innumerable left wing groups more fitting their views that they could have joined instead. Did they think the "Green" label was more electable and that they could piggyback on this to reshape the party more to their liking?

lalababa wrote: »

If there is a pronounced split ,then I would see the jumpers as pathetic.
I'm not familiar with the party's , for want of a better term, 'mission statement, but the greens should be hell bent on the improvement of the environment and rally to that particular call and only that.

I can't say I give the Greens too many high preference votes, but have a bit of sympathy when people come out with this as they can't win either way.

Focus 100% on nothing but the environment and people will say they are unrealistic idealists and they won't vote for the Greens because they don't even have plans for how to run the rest of society.

On the other hand when the Greens start fleshing out their policies to include other non-environmental causes they get accused of focusing on the wrong areas and should stay in their environmental box.

coylemj wrote: »

Meaning that you vote for ecologists and what you get is a bunch of closet communists.

But they aren't even communists they are just woke justice warriors who quit at the first sign of a difficult decision and its becoming more and more evident every day that they didn't really understand the issue in the first place.

Patrick Costello announcing that he will not support the Government on an upcoming bill. As far as I recall, both himself and his wife (Hazel Chu) were against going into government:

https://twitter.com/Costellop/status/1338455968724738054

Exactly. What a stupid thing to walk on. If they can't back a deal agreed with a liberal, centre left Government like Trudeau's, who can they back?

I cannot see what is even remotely controversial about it - then again, as we've seen with some of the Greens' opposition to coronavirus restrictions, the Greens only believe in following the science and the facts when it comes to making the lives of motorists miserable:rolleyes:.

correct horse battery staple wrote: »

The Greens and Science don't belong in same sentence


Current Science and Engineering would allow climate change to be solved in a few decades for example by using existing nuclear fission technology to buy countries around the world a few decades to build up renewable production capacities and better grids and more importantly invent energy storage tech which is currently still expensive (but improving)

We could have been half way along in this transition to a green economy by now

Instead the environmental movement 30 years ago demonised nuclear, with the result being decades of energy needs being met by coal, oil and gas and only now very small steps being taken in the direction i described above because only now some of these green technologies have become somewhat useful.

Green movement like socialists are so driven in their pursuit of their "ideal" vision and **** on anyone who proposes anything remotely pragamatic but is not 100% clean that they forget that politics is also about compromise and realism

Tbf cart horse.

If nuclear was taken as common place then renewables would not have gotten serious investment and we probably wouldn't be where we are now with it.

Additionally we'd have a bucket load of spent nuclear waste to deal with and the higher chances of more Fukushima.

And I'm not totally against nuclear but it's not a Panacea

Oymyakon wrote: »

The problem with CETA appears to be to do with the involvement of the Investor Court System, where governments can be sued for losses incurred as a result of policy making. Now I have no idea how to inform myself fully as to the repercussions of such a trade deal, people on both sides of the argument seem to be so sure that this is a good thing/bad thing.

As a Green member hanging on by a thread I don't want to jump to criticize this trade agreement, but I'm concerned that Eamon Ran has flipped on this issue all of a sudden.

That is certainly the PR that the Green Party is trying to sell to everyone, I agree. However, the truth lies quite far away from what the GP is saying.

CETA doesn't allow for a State to be sued at all, it simply provides for a tribunal to deal with disputes under CETA which will be resolved in line with WTO dispute resolution principles - on other words, effectively nothing changes from a situation where there was no trade deal at all, and in fact a set tribunal is probably preferable.

Additionally, the CJEU Advocate General also opined that an award granted through this ICS would not bind the EU or its institutions or any Member State courts as to its findings on EU law and that the ICS would not preclude the courts of Member States from making a preliminary reference to the CJEU after an award has been made. In other words, the autonomy of EU and Member State law is completely intact under the ICS model.

IMHO this is simply being used by certain GP members as another wedge to be driven into the growing GP divide.

Not a member, but Green voter.

I recognise that a lot of ideological nonsense comes as part of the package when voting for an (ostensibly) environmentally responsible party. However, when I see the likes of McHugh and Bogue I really worry for the core mission of the party. Both seem so immature and unsuited to realities of party politics and the necessary trading of principles for practical achievement. Bogue in particular has struck me as very self-absorbed and grossly naive. I hope those who aligned themselves with the thinking of these characters realise how the mission to improve Ireland's woeful environmental performance will be scuppered if the greens shoot themselves in the foot over culture war issues.

correct horse battery staple wrote: »

Terrible example imho

I would love an electric car and the acceleration they offer, and could charge it for free more or less for half a year of own pv panels

But the prices for a machine with 10x less parts a normal car are still crazy.

In time prices would come down but the planet doesn’t have time and motoring is only one small slice of the overall co2 price

To reinforce what I said earlier the Greens are obsessed with wind and electric cars, but these are only small part of overall answer.

Pissing people off will make them resentful and resentful people vote against their own interests just look at brexit and trump phenomenon

Electric cars aren't even that green either. According to companies like Polestar (Volvo), they can take up to 200,000 km of driving before they deliver a net benefit to the planet over buying a conventional petrol engined car, because in manufacturing process, no less than the equivalent of 10 extra tonnes of CO2 are produced. The equivalent of 24 tonnes of CO2 are produced in making a Volvo XC40, whereas for a Polestar 2 (an electric XC40) the equivalent of 34 tonnes of CO2 are produced in its manufacture. Then there is the extra pollution in scrapping a much heavier car, so it could be even more than 200,000 km really. It obviously depends on how electricity is generated, with 100% renewable it would be quicker than this.

But what's not in dispute is that they weigh a lot more and cost a lot than a conventional car, with nowhere near the level of convenience of a petrol or diesel (despite the delusions of what those on the boards EV and hybrids forum will tell you). Nor can it be disputed that they weigh a lot more, which means more money will need to be spent on roads maintenance (with the negative environmental impact that will bring). For example, a VW Golf weighs around 1400 kg, but a VW ID3 (the new electric VW that's the size of a Golf) weighs 1800 kg - and let's not forget that the ID3 was designed from the outset to be an EV, not just a standard car with some batteries thrown in (as is the case with some of the other popular EVs).

The other big problem is that in order to have decent range (as in at least 500 km), you need lots of batteries, but batteries are very expensive, not to mention bulky. So, the only way to have this and decent space is to go for a very big and very heavy SUV - let's face it €10k more on something like a big Volvo or BMW SUV so you can the electric version instead of the petrol or diesel version is a far lower percentage jump than say €10k on a Fiesta or Yaris (a diesel BMW X5 is about €90k, a petrol Fiesta is about €20k). Hence why a lot of the big launches of EVs next year are for large SUVs. SUVs are popular anyway because of the higher driving position, better space, and most importantly, social status, and the car makers love them because people will pay a stupid amount of extra money for these questionable benefits, but the Greens dislike them because they think they are bad for the planet and are really unnecessary in the urban jungle. For once in their lives on car related matters, they are right on both fronts.

Some people absolutely do need them, and that needs to be respected (so I don't want to see them banned), but the vast, vast majority of owners do not need them at all - so oddly enough, as a car enthusiast I would be totally on board with the Greens' desire to make the SUV less popular become a reality. A conventional saloon or estate car is much cheaper to buy (you wouldn't believe the margins on SUVs compared to standard cars so it's no wonder every manufacturer wants to sell them), almost as practical (if you go for an estate), more economical, quieter, cheaper to run, and as any car enthusiast will tell you, a lot faster and much better handling. I simply cannot understand why the damn things are so popular, and I would love to see the return of cars that are better for our planet and a car enthusiast's heart. So, if they really want to do this, bring it on!

However, as is typical with the Greens', their policies (as evidenced by the forthcoming VRT changes) will achieve exactly the opposite of this.

I will explain why below. Basically, the new changes focus solely and exclusively on notional CO2 emissions at the tailpipe. The system was changed recently to be reflective of the 'real world' but it seems to be just as removed from reality as the old NEDC cycle. It clobbers any sort of purely combustion engined vehicle, pretends that plug-in hybrids are driven every time with the battery at 100% and that there are zero emissions in electricity generation anywhere in Europe.

Thus on the WLTP cycle plug-ins and electrics get extremely good CO2 ratings - particularly plug-ins with say more than 60 km of electric range. But then this means we circle back to the point above - you need lots of batteries to do this, and that means you need lots of space, and thus lots of weight. This means we're straight onto big SUVs or luxury saloon and estate cars - because these vehicles are so big, the packaging compromises are minimal - I mean losing say 5 cm of legroom in a big SUV is nothing compared to losing that in say a Yaris. The added height of an SUV pays dividends for plug-in vehicles in particular - compared to a conventional pure ICE car, a plug-in would often lose 150-200 litres of boot space and 20-25 litres of a fuel tank, and weigh 150-200 kg more. In a saloon or estate car, this would typically mean a boot and fuel tank that are 1/3 smaller and 10-15% weight penalty. Whereas in a big SUV, you're losing just 10-15% of the boot space and fuel tank, and because they weight much more to begin with, 150-200 kg more is maybe 5-10% of a weight penalty. So the compromises are far less in an SUV. But SUVs are far less suitable for the urban environment, and obviously there's far more raw materials involved in making these cars in the first place.

But this is precisely what all the regulations about CO2 tailpipe emissions have achieved. Small hatchbacks and saloons, with pure petrol or diesels are awful planet killers, but heavy luxury saloons and SUVs (which only the wealthy can afford to buy - convenient as a lot of the Greens' voter base is in South County Dublin) are brilliant!

This in a nutshell is the problem with the Greens. They never think things through - particularly when it comes to cars and transport. They and their supporters are driven by an ideological hatred of the private car and all the freedoms and benefits it brings that they can't see the wood from the trees.

Of course, making a complete pig's ear of things and shafting the motorist is something they're well used to. They got it catastrophically wrong the last time they were in Government, telling us to buy diesel cars with their toxic nitrous oxide emissions and particulates even though the dogs on the street knew they were bad for our lungs (and don't blame VW for dieselgate - the EU emissions standards at the time allowed diesels to produce over three times as much NOx as petrols). So they would have known (if they bothered to read the relevant EU rules at the time) that diesels were perfectly legally allowed to be more than three times worse for our lungs than the petrol equivalent, but they decided that was OK because the CO2 is lower :rolleyes:. Ironically, they want them banned now that the manufacturers have cleaned them up.

If they really cared about saving the planet they'd make it cheaper to keep old cars (since the only pollution they create is when they're driven) and they'd tax new cars based on weight and the CO2 impact during the manufacture of the vehicles. They'd also recognise the CO2 from electricity, too.