Obsession with climate change ‘damaging Britain’
The Government’s highly damaging decarbonisation policy, enshrined in the absurd Climate Change Act, does not have a leg to stand on. It is intended, at massive cost, to be symbolic: To make good David Cameron’s ambition to make his administration “the greenest government ever”.
So says Lord Lawson, respected former Chancellor under Margaret Thatcher, in a scathing attack in the Daily Mail against Prime Minister David Cameron’s energy policy.
Logic applies as well to New Zealand
Lord Lawson says that plastering Britain with wind farms will push up bills to families and businesses without producing any real benefits. The switch to ‘low-carbon’ energy is expected to add £200 to annual energy bills. “This price increase would be economically damaging at the best of times; and these are not the best of times.”
He says it is ‘highly uncertain’ that higher carbon emissions will warm the planet to a dangerous extent and warns it is ‘futile folly’ for Britain to act alone when its emissions are two per cent of the global total.
More and more eminent scientists are finding the courage to point out (the most recent being the distinguished physicist Professor William Happer of Princeton University), that it is far from clear that there is a serious problem — let alone a catastrophic one — of global warming.
A major problem with the British Government’s policy is that even if it were thought to be desirable to cut back drastically on carbon emissions, this can have an effect only if it is done globally.
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On a similar topic, James Delingpole (once, recently, a lone voice in the wilderness), is back firing on all cylinders again.
Vote Blue, Go Green, Ruin Britain
Sometimes it takes a trip abroad properly to ram home just how screwed your country is. And so it proved when, on the deck of a Baltic cruise ship, I first read reports of Scottish Power’s dramatic gas and electricity price rises. Instead of experiencing a wave of fury, as no doubt I would have done at home, what I felt instead was the sort of detached, sardonic amusement an alien might feel on viewing from outer space a once-great civilisation destroying itself over an issue of immeasurable triviality.
That issue, of course, is “Climate Change”. Never before in history, I doubt, has so much money ever been squandered, so much suffering and poverty exacerbated, so much economic damage been inflicted, so many lies promulgated and so much environmental destruction wrought in order to deal with a problem so microscopically miniscule. Really, if Barack Obama were to declare war on Belgium because he’d always found Tintin Au Congo offensively racist, or if David Cameron were to launch a nuclear strike on Mykonos because all those white-painted buildings were “way too gay”, you still wouldn’t be even half way close to equalling the quite breathtaking stupidity, purblind ignorance and suicidal wrongheadedness of the disasters currently being inflicted on the world by our boneheaded political and administrative classes on their holy mission to “combat climate change.”
Read more here..
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100091710/vote-blue-go-green-ruin-britain/
Richard North at EURef is having a bit of a “told you so” moment, noting the media suddenly jumping on this particular bandwagon.
He provides a link to a post of his back in 2006 warning the UK of David Cameron’s obsession with Green issues
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2011/06/wheels-groan-on-my-wagon.html
I am finding it fascinating observing various Brits of the Greenist persuasion now negotiating quite remarkable and difficult U-turns in their public pronouncements.
I suspect we are witnessing a growing rush back to reality as the truth of the global scam becomes apparent and the costs of the mad green official policies begin to bite Joe Public, and to bite very hard.
The latest to make a very public U-turn is Mark Lynas, Marxist green journalist and passionate advocate for various Island communities who claim that global warming is causing their homelands to sink beneath the ‘rising oceans’. He is now worrying about the devastating effects that windmills, which have earned a tragic reputation in the UK as ‘bird mincers’, are having on the fragile populations of large raptors that conservation groups have spent years re-establishing. While very sad, this is a particularly good example of the law of unintended consequences and similar to the Penguin deaths caused by scientists attach tracking devices to them which interfered with the fairly obvious need to swim freely and well.
Not that all of the Greenists are recanting, yet; George Monbiot of the Guardian now reckons wind farms should replace the terrible animals that do so much damage in the UK high country (which, having seen a lot of it, seems not very ‘high’ compared with our high country) – the ‘terrible animals’ of George’s green fantasy – sheep!
Richard North has yet more suggestions on how to get rid of those “bird mincers”
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2011/06/by-special-request.html
The wheels must fall off, the truth must out. It is just so painfully slow for the powers that be to wake from their hypnotic trance, for the scales to fall from their eyes. Oh that Nick Smith might soon be among those that realise the immense and wasteful folly in which they have indulged the western world.
btw Andy – thanks for the Delingpole link – refreshing, well-crafted prose.
They (Governments) will only change their ways when its citzens vote at an election indicating they have had a guts full of being conned.
Interestingly the only reason we signed up to Kyoto was some simple-minded politicians thought they could make money out of it.
It was only discovered later that they had calculated incorrectly and we the citizens would have to pay.
Wake up NZ – the Green brigade and policies relating to Climate Change will destroy our country’s ecconomy.
The Mark Lynas article on wind turbines that Alexander alludes to above is here
http://www.marklynas.org/2011/06/bats-birds-and-blades-wind-turbines-and-biodiversity/
Well worth a read. Finally. environmentalists are realising their folly too.
Booker’s column this week is also on this theme
Industry begins to count the true cost of ‘climate change’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8570158/Industry-begins-to-count-the-true-cost-of-climate-change.html
Aside from the article, I noted this interesting comment:
What the UK does can make no difference. Here are the facts as simply put as possible. According to the USS-DOE, between now and 2030 depending on the economic growth rate, the world will produce between 750 and 820 Billion Tonnes of additional man-made CO2. per year. The UK currently produces 0.52 B-Ts of CO2 per year. If the UK continues to produces at that rate with zero reduction in CO2, in 20 years the UK would produce 10.4 B-Tonnes of CO2 which is about 1.4% of the total CO2 forecast for the worl. Since 1980, atmospheric CO2 has increased at the exact rate of 0.073 ppm for every Billion Tonnes of CO2 that was produced by man. At that run-rate, atmospheric CO2 would increase by something close to 55 ppm by 2030. What this means is ….. if the UK eliminated every gram of CO2 from its economy, the impact on future global atmospheric CO2 would be .014 X 55ppm = 0.77 ppm by 2030. Thus, with the UK doing nothing, future atmospheric CO2 will be about 455 ppm, and with the UK engaging in an enormously expensive program to eliminate entirely the use of all fossil fuel, future atmospheric CO2 would be 454.23 ppm. REALITY SUCKS!Even this modest impact on atmospheric CO2 is not achievable simply because most of the “dirty” industries shuttered in the UK would simply be replaced in China, India, Malaysia, Mexico etc. So what is the point of all of this climate modification spending going on in the UK? Without the full participation of all of the developing nations, anything done in the UK or Europe or the USA will have no meaningful impact on future atmospheric CO2! That is the irrefutable bottom line!
I like these comments because they put the whole thing into a numerical perspective. We can do a similar argument to our ETS of course.
We should be doing this on a regular basis, and shoving in front of politician’s and policy makes noses at every available opportunity.