UK Madness: Climate Change Act stays

21 March, 2012 by

Huhne Mark II

When Chris Huhne resigned over an alleged driving incident, I had high hopes that Mr Windmill’s climate madness would be rapidly wound back, and the UK may be spared. Pity the poor Brits, then, as it is the Climate Change Act that has been spared, surviving a “green tape” cull to wreck the UK’s economy still further.

Ed Davey, replacement for Huhne, has demonstrated himself to be as clueless as Huhne, totally seduced by the alarmism and spin of the warmists, and happy to see the UK disappear into the ether in its desperate and pointless attempts to control the climate:

Britain’s laws on climate change that push up energy bills for millions of households have been spared, despite George Osborne’s plea for a reduction in expensive green regulations.

Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat Energy Secretary, said he would not scrap or water down the Climate Change Act, after a year-long review into reducing bureaucracy surrounding environmental laws.

The Act underpins all of the Government’s policies on reducing carbon dioxide emissions, from support for wind farms to higher road taxes for more polluting cars.

It costs up to £18 billion per year, the equivalent of £650 for every household, according to a government analysis.

Last year, all Whitehall departments were asked to look at scrapping laws in the Cabinet Office’s Red Tape Challenge, taking suggestions by the public into account.

The Chancellor has said he is “worried about the combined impact of the green policies adopted not just in Britain, but also by the European Union”.

He claims “endless social and environmental goals” mean “businesses will fail, jobs will be lost, and our country will be poorer”.

Mr Davey said yesterday that the Climate Change Act is an “example of essential legislation” and all its supporting regulations must remain unchanged.

His only concession is a consultation on reducing red tape for companies forced to pay for every ton of carbon dioxide they emit.

The move disappointed campaigners against the Act, who have so far collected 1,000 signatures calling for it to be repealed.

Yesterday, Roger Helmer MEP called for the act to be scrapped as it is a “catastrophically disproportionate response to an entirely speculative problem”. (source)

Exactly like the carbon tax to be introduced here in a few months. Australia and the UK can go to the dogs together, then…

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BREAKING: UK climate change minister resigns

3 February, 2012 by

Just like the Belgrano... (image from Guido)

Yesss! Chris Huhne, UK Energy and Climate Change minister (or Mr Windmill 2011, as he should be named) has resigned after being advised he will face charges relating to a speeding violation – but there’s more to it than that.

It’s alleged he arranged for his ex-wife to take penalty points on his behalf, which I guess you would call “perverting the course of justice”, perhaps?

Huhne will not be missed for a nanosecond, by this blog or the poor suffering population of the UK – his dangerous brand of environmental extremism has done more to damage the UK’s economy and future energy security than anyone else in living memory.

Here is a selection of previous posts on Huhne, just for old time’s sake:

Guido Fawkes has more here.

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UK: Climate madness and climate sanity

27 November, 2011 by

Huhne-atic

The UK is further along the road to climate madness than Australia, but where the UK now stands provides a possible vision for the future in Australia, if the Labor/Green policies are allowed to continue unhindered. Both the UK and Australia have the same characters in this vulgar melodrama, just a different cast.

In the UK, the long-suffering public has to deal with that eco-lunatic Chris Huhne, Mr Windmill, who is systematically strangling the UK’s fossil fuel energy production capacity, without having seriously considered what can replace it. In Australia we have Bob Brown, a blinkered environmental extremist, completely disconnected from the real world.

Today we have two articles from the UK Telegraph which demonstrate the ever widening gap between the rarified atmosphere of government and the harsh reality outside. Firstly, we have Huhne on the forthcoming Durban conference, sincerely believing that it will achieve something significant:

If we have learnt anything from the financial crisis, it is that clear rules implemented properly can prevent the toxic build-up of risk. A recent survey of large global firms found that 83 per cent of business leaders think a multilateral agreement is needed to tackle climate change. Businesses want certainty; only the politics lags behind.

A commitment to a new agreement will provide that certainty – and Kyoto provides the basis of the rules we need to manage a destabilising climate. Durban must not be the end of Kyoto, but a chance to build on what it began.

We recognise that it will take time to negotiate this.

So we also want immediate action. Current voluntary pledges to reduce emissions are not yet enough; in Durban, we should agree that we must close the gap, building momentum towards a major review of ambition.

We must build the system we use to measure and verify emissions cuts. We must do more on long-term financial support for developing countries and agree how the new Green Fund will operate. And we must continue to reduce emissions from deforestation.

Above all, we must show leadership. Next year I will continue to press for a more ambitious EU emissions target: a 30 per cent reduction by 2020. That will help us raise our sights globally.

Milton Friedman once said: “Our basic function is to keep good ideas alive until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” That is a good description of the task that awaits in Durban. (source)

To quote The Thick of It, Huhne is “disconnected to the point of autism”. When the rest of the world is backing away (apart from Australia, of course), the UK is heading for even deeper emissions cuts! And his quoting of Friedman shows that this entire facade is pure politics. Skating over the fact that this isn’t keeping a good idea alive, but a bad idea struggling for breath and surviving only thanks to a ventilator, Huhne is on a political crusade which will not be sidetracked by trivial matters like another GFC. Pity the poor Brits.

A third article in the Telegraph here, explains how Huhne will give such long-term financial support to developing countries: GBP 1 billion of British taxpayers’ money will be sent to Africa to help them “tackle climate change.” Given the parlous state of the UK economy, you’d have to conclude that their priorities are a little out of kilter… Check out the comments on that one.

At least they have an antidote in Christopher Booker, one of the few commentators who fully understand the desperate situation the UK is heading towards. His near-weekly dose of climate sanity is always essential reading, but particularly so today:

To grasp the almost suicidal state of unreality our Government has been driven into by the obsession with global warming, it is necessary to put together the two sides to an overall picture – each vividly highlighted by events of recent days.

On one hand there is the utterly lamentable state of the science which underpins it all, illuminated yet again by “Climategate 2.0”, the latest release of emails between the leading scientists who for years have been at the heart of the warming scare (which I return to below). On the other hand, we see the damage done by the political consequences of this scare, which will directly impinge, in various ways, on all our lives.

It is hard to know where to begin, after a week which opened with The Sunday Telegraph’s exclusive on a blast of realism from Prince Philip over the folly of our Government’s infatuation with useless windmills. Then came an excoriatory report from the House of Lords on how we have so run down our nuclear expertise that it is doubtful whether we can hope to run a new generation of nuclear power stations. Next, there was a report from a leading Swiss bank finding that the EU’s “emissions trading scheme” has wasted $287 billion (£186billion) over six years – paid by all of us, to achieve nothing in terms of reducing “carbon emissions”. There was also a front page story in another newspaper, warning that (as readers of this column have long been aware) within nine years we could all be paying nearly £300 a year to subsidise solar panels and those same useless windmills.

…

All this madness ultimately rests on a blind faith in the threat of man-made global warming, which no one has done more to promote than the scientists whose private emails were again last week leaked onto the internet.

It is still not generally appreciated that the significance of these Climategate emails is that their authors, such as Michael Mann, are no ordinary scientists: they are a little group of fanatical insiders who have, for years, done more than anyone else to drive the warming scare, through their influence at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And what is most striking about the picture that emerges from these emails is just how questionable the work of these men appears.

We see how they torture the evidence to support their theory – even to the point where some of them seem to lose faith in the story they are trying to tell. And we also see how rattled they were as soon as their work was challenged by expert outsiders such as Steve McIntyre, the mathematician who exposed the methods used to create Mann’s “hockey stick” temperature graph, which the IPCC had made Exhibit A for their theory.

Again and again we see them trying to defend the indefensible, giving vent to wild personal abuse of the enemies of what they call their “cause”, and stopping at nothing to keep their critics’ evidence out of IPCC reports and scientific journals, and prevent dissenting views from getting media atention.

This is no longer science worthy of the name. As I wrote when the first Climategate emails appeared in 2009, the global warming scare is far and away the greatest scientific scandal of our generation. When we then contemplate the insanity of the measures the politicians have imposed on us in consequence, we know we are looking at a collective flight from reality which has no precedent in the history of the world. (source)

Australia is actually better placed than the UK to retreat from the madness. At least we have a political party that opposes pointless carbon taxes and emissions trading schemes. All the major parties in the UK support the kind of nonsense Huhne is proposing, although there are signs of retreat there as well.

The big question, however, is this: Will sanity prevail before it’s too late?

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The pointlessness of wind power

3 July, 2011 by

Monument to green stupidity

Once again, the futility of wind energy has been brought into sharp focus in an article by Christopher Booker in the UK Telegraph. The lights will be going out in Britain if the present government, and in particular Chris Huhne, continues with its suicidal plan to wreck the country’s energy generation capacity:

Centrica and other energy companies last week told [the Department of Energy and Climate Change] that, if Britain is to spend £100 billion on building thousands of wind turbines, it will require the building of 17 new gas-fired power stations simply to provide back-up for all those times when the wind drops and the windmills produce even less power than usual.

We will thus be landed in the ludicrous position of having to spend an additional £10 billion on those 17 dedicated power stations, which will be kept running on “spinning reserve”, 24 hours a day, just to make up for the fundamental problem of wind turbines. This is that their power continually fluctuates anywhere between full capacity to zero (where it often stood last winter, when national electricity demand was at a peak). So unless back-up power is instantly available to match any shortfall, the lights will go out.

Two things make this even more absurd. One, as the energy companies pointed out to DECC, is that it will be amazingly costly and wildly uneconomical, since the dedicated power plants will often have to run at a low rate of efficiency, burning gas but not producing electricity. This will add billions more to our fuel bills for no practical purpose. The other absurdity, as recent detailed studies have confirmed, is that gas-fired power stations running on “spinning reserve” chuck out much more CO2 than when they are running at full efficiency – thus negating any savings in CO2 emissions supposedly achieved by the windmills themselves.

How supposedly intelligent people can be taken in by this nonsense is beyond belief, unless of course, rational thinking has flown out of the window, and all that remains is devotion to a green religion.

Read it here.

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UK: Huhne "the Hoon" on the ropes

17 May, 2011 by

Double demerits?

Looks like the UK’s dangerous and downright unhinged Energy and Climate Secretary’s days are quite possibly numbered, as he “does an Einfeld” by allegedly getting his estranged wife to take the rap for a speeding offence:

Chris Huhne’s career was hanging by a thread last night after his estranged wife agreed to testify that he asked her to take speeding points for him.

A close friend said Vicky Pryce would swear in court that she was busy all day in central London when the offence was committed 40 miles away in Essex.

As political support ebbed away from the Energy Secretary at Westminster, Essex Police appointed a senior detective to look into the allegations that Mr Huhne broke the law.

Sources said that if Miss Pryce co-operates and provides corroborating evidence, it is almost certain to lead to a full criminal inquiry. This could mean Mr Huhne facing charges of attempting to pervert the course of justice. [maximum penalty: life imprisonment – Ed]

A friend of Miss Pryce told the Mail: ‘She was working in London during the day and evening of the date the offence took place in Essex. And she’s quite prepared to stand up in court and say so if necessary.’ (source)

Maybe there is a glimmer of hope that the UK climate madness could be reversed if Hoon Huhne was a guest of Her Majesty for a while. A few years, say.

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Madness: UK commits climate suicide

16 May, 2011 by

Looney (image thanks to Guido Fawkes)

Chris Huhne will be remembered as The Man that Screwed Britain. In twenty years’ time, when wind farms are standing idle, with conventional power stations all past their sell-by date, and Britain is a third world country, the long-suffering population, sitting in the cold and the dark, will look back at the climate madness inflicted on the country by Huhne and cry “Bring back hanging.”

And there isn’t a hint of caution, just ploughing on, full steam ahead into the abyss, with legally mandated emissions cuts of 60% by 2030 and 80% by 2050 on 1990 levels (1990 levels!!!), whilst at the same time, China and India just continue with business as usual (virtually), offsetting many times over anything that Britain does:

Chris Huhne will announce a long-term programme that will put Britain at the forefront of the battle against climate change.

Cabinet ministers have agreed a far-reaching, legally binding “green deal” that will commit the UK to two decades of drastic cuts in carbon emissions. The package will require sweeping changes to domestic life, transport and business [translation: reducing the UK to a third world nation – Ed] and will place Britain at the forefront of the global battle against climate change.

The deal was hammered out after tense arguments between ministers who had disagreed over whether the ambitious plans to switch to more green energy were affordable. The row had pitted the energy secretary,Chris Huhne, who strongly backed the plans, against the chancellor, George Osborne, and the business secretary, Vince Cable, who were concerned about the cost and potential impact on the economy. [But we don’t want to worry about minor details like that. We’re SAVING THE PLANET!!!! – Ed]

However, after the intervention of David Cameron, Huhne is now expected to tell parliament that agreement has been struck to back the plans in full up to 2027. He will tell MPs that the government will accept the recommendations of the independent committee on climate change for a new carbon budget. The deal puts the UK ahead of any other state in terms of the legal commitments it is making in the battle to curb greenhouse gases. (breathlessly reported by The Guardian, of course – source)

It has been said before but I’ll say it again: goodnight Britain. It’s been nice knowing you, but I’m very glad I emigrated to Australia. Because you guys are well and truly screwed.

(h/t PC)

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UK: Wind farm hell

12 October, 2010 by

Replace “wind” with “solar” and you have the carbon-priced future in Australia, except Australia doesn’t have a nuclear power backup for when it all goes horribly wrong. A truly enlightening, and shocking, video entitled “Europe’s Ill Wind” lifts the lid on the European wind farm fiasco. Thanks to the almost incomprehensible idiocy of politicians like Chris Huhne and Ed Miliband, the UK is heading towards deep Green oblivion. Last person to leave, please turn out the lights … no wait, they’ll be out already.

[hana-flv-player video=”http://blip.tv/file/get/Europesillwind-EIWfinal720993.flv”
width=”480″
height=”300″
description=””
player=”4″
autoload=”true” autoplay=”false”
loop=”false” autorewind=”true”
/]

Also, pay a visit to the web site: Europe’s Ill Wind, and leave a comment to show your support.

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UK Climate madness: build more wind farms!

11 September, 2010 by

Freaking useless, and expensive

The UK is way ahead of Australia in the climate madness stakes, having already enacted crippling legislation that will hamstring its energy policy by requiring 15% of its energy to be generated from “green” [i.e. useless] sources by 2020, and committing itself to a massive 80% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050. But unfortunately, not everyone wants ugly wind farms in their back yards, and the planning system is grinding to a halt:

The planning system must allow more wind farms or Britain will fail to meet key climate change targets, Government advisers have warned.

The UK is committed to generating 15 per cent of energy from green sources like wind and solar by 2020.

But at the moment only 3 per cent of energy comes from renewables. [Only 12% to go in less than a decade – good luck with that!]

Lord Adair Turner, Chairman of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), said the UK is likely to miss the target unless there is massive investment in wind, wave and solar.

In a strongly-worded letter to Chris Huhne, the Energy and Climate Change Minister, he called for the Government to “ramp up” efforts to build turbines both on land and at sea.

He said the average wind farm is stuck for more than three years in the planning system. In the last year planning approval rates fell from 68 per cent to 53 per cent.

Despite concerns about wind farms in beauty spots, he said planning permission needs to be given faster so that three times as many turbines can be installed every year. (source)

I guess common-sense will eventually prevail at some point, when the utter lunacy of all this is too obvious to ignore, but how supposedly intelligent people can be so freaking dumb is quite frankly staggering.

Until that happens, however, it’s a case of “Adios”, Great Britain.

(h/t EU Referendum)

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UK climate madness: Huhne wants more wind farms

29 July, 2010 by

Expensive, inefficient, ugly. Like Huhne.

Here in Aus, we haven’t yet got to this level of lunacy, but we’re well on the way. So as we watch the lights slowly fizzle out in the country formerly known as Great Britain, but which should now be known as piss-weak Britain [and I should add it is the country of my birth, so I don’t say that lightly], it is a salutary lesson to the rest of us.

The Conservative/Liberal coalition has only been in power for five minutes, but has already demonstrated that it is as nauseatingly deep green as the outgoing Labourites, if not worse. Christopher Booker is incredulous:

The penny is fast dropping that by far the most disastrous appointment made by David Cameron to his Coalition Cabinet was that of the ultra-green, Lib Dem millionaire Chris Huhne as our Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.

Yesterday, after Mr Huhne issued his first annual statement on Britain’s energy future, it was clear that we should all be very, very concerned about the future of Britain.

As was only too predictable, the overall theme of Mr Huhne’s message was that ‘climate change is the greatest global challenge we face’.

We must do everything we can and more to cut down very drastically on our ‘carbon emissions’, as we are now legally committed to do by the Climate Change Act – at a cost of £18 billion a year.

But in the real world, the £100 billion-plus energy question that confronts us all in Britain today is how we are going to fill that massive, fast-looming gap in our electricity supplies when the antiquated power stations which currently supply us with two-fifths of the power needed to keep our economy running are forced to close.

The headline answer given by Mr Huhne is that we must build thousands more giant wind turbines.

As a 24-carat green ideologue, he is viscerally opposed to replacing the ageing nuclear and coal-fired plants which currently provide us with more than half our electricity.

Like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown before him, he dreams we can somehow fill that gap by erecting 6,000 wind turbines in the seas around Britain’s shores, and thousands more across many of the most beautiful parts of our countryside.

What is truly terrifying about Mr Huhne as our energy minister is that he seems so astonishingly ignorant about even the most basic principles of how electricity is produced.

He boasts about how the 3,000 wind turbines we have already built have the ‘capacity’ to generate 4.5 gigawatts of electricity.

Capacity is the crucial word here. As he could see from figures on his own department’s website, thanks to the fact that the wind blows only intermittently, the amount of power these windmills actually produce is barely a quarter of that.

In other words, the amount of electricity generated by all those turbines put together, at a cost of billions of pounds, is no more than that provided by a single medium-size conventional power station – equivalent to a mere two per cent of the electricity we need.

The lights will be going out in the UK pretty soon.

READ IT ALL.

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