John Anthony Barney
Name: John Anthony Barney
Country: United Kingdom
What is your background?
I graduated in polymer science and spent the first part of my professional life in the rubber industry: research at Dunlop (Birmingham) and latex concentrate manufacture in Kuala Lumpur. I built a demo factory for The Rubber Research Institute, Malaysia and designed rubber testing labs for the Indonesians (Jakarta) and for the Nigerians (Benin City).
After that I installed, commissioned and managed North Yemen’s first truck tyre retreading factory in Ta’iz. I then founded Devon Rubber in partnership with Bandvulc in Ivybridge (UK) and managed Intellectual Property Rights for Environmental Monitors in Totnes (UK), researching and producing groundwater sondes. I am joint patent holder for splitting a single water stream into very high and very low pH streams (many citations) for trace ammonia detection. I also have a patent for cryptosporidium detection in public water supplies, amongst others.
I joined Mensa and left the increasingly fractious world of employers and employees, and traded commodity futures contracts on my own account, learning about precious metals generally and gold in particular. This has led to what for me, is the inescapable conclusion: that an equitable society is based upon sound money, freely chosen by peoples’ experiences over several millennia. For me, an ‘equitable society’ comprises both high productive employment and a narrow wealth gap. For me ‘high productive employment’ is where the profit making private sector in a free market employs around 80 percent of the working population. Profits are prime, since they are the only thing that governments can tax for essential public services.
Since when and why are you interested in climate change?
I first became interested in climate during the 1970s when there were widespread warnings of the prospect of a mini ice age. I later joined Greenpeace as a Frontline Member.
How did your views on climate change evolve?
I became suspicious about Global Cooling, when all the talk was about Global Warming in the 1980s.
Is climate change a big issue in your country and how do you notice this?
By the turn of the century, in the UK, somehow the narrative evolved into Climate Change. But the climate is always changing! At that point I realised that the climate agenda is politics, not science. Politicians, who produce nothing for a profit (especially in a free market), need to create credible fearful issues and then inflate them, to justify their existence. Even their Central Bankers target inflation at 2% (really?) when the evidence of free markets is that goods and services become cheaper and better over time.
How would climate policy ideally look like in your view?
Climate changes by the day, the year, the centuries, the millennia. Like all natural phenomena, with countless interacting variables and consequential unknowable positive and negative feedback loops, climate is chaotic, on which there is much scientific literature. We humans have evolved successfully by adapting to chaos. The most resourceful thrive (Darwin). So Climate Ministers and Climate Policies are entirely redundant. An utter waste by politicians of resources they don’t have, on things we don’t need.
What is your motivation to sign the Clintel World Climate Declaration?
As a scientist, to help put the record straight.
What question did we forget?
What do you think drives climate? For me the answer is clear. We call our patch of the universe The Solar System, for good reason.
Secondly: Why do think you Climate Change has become an issue? The issue has created a carbon-fear paradigm, keeping unproductive state operators ‘employed’ and providing state (i.e. taxpayer funded) opportunities for the development and deployment of pseudo-scientific so-called ‘green’ technologies, while diverting peoples’ attention from nuclear power, etc. Mostly, all these pathways create inflation.
The good news is that Western ‘democratic’ economies are nearing collapse, so most western people will be in survival mode. Climate Change will no longer be an issue. (Nor all the other artificial political issues). When reality finally returns, and goods and services are marked-to-market not marked-to-model, the next generation can re-learn and move on. A decade or so?