Update: the photo above shows a wind turbine’s parts
blocking a road in Wales.
Two hundred years ago, Britain discovered how to make energy
cheaper and cheaper, which caused a rush to mechanisation, which
raised living standards all around the world by making it easier to
fulfil people’s needs and wants through the amplification of work
by cheap and reliable energy turning ingenious machinery. We call
it the industrial revolution.
Today Britain officially announced that it would single-handedly
reverse this revolution by deliberately trying to make energy more
expensive. It intends to do this by adopting sources of power that
are irregular, unreliable, capital-intensive, unsightly,
bird-killing, bat-killing, steel-rich, concrete-hungry,
neodymium-demanding, dependent on Chinese imports and thirteenth
century in concept. It intends to ask the poorest in society to pay
hefty subsidies through their electricity bills to the richest. And
it intends to do all this unilaterally so that we export jobs to
other countries. It is mad.
Here is James Delingpole:
In other words, what Chris Huhne
and David Cameron are asking British business to accept is a
swingeing impost which fines companies at £27 a tonne for an
(almost inescapable) by-product for which our global competitors
are charged nothing at all. I don’t think any of us have
much objection to Chris Huhne’s insatiable urge to be the first
lemming over the cliff. What is of concern is the fact that
currently he has been granted the power to drag us all over with
him.
Every week, every day almost, I post in
these pages about the economic and ecological disaster which awaits
Britain if it goes ahead with Huhne’s and Cameron’s insane
proposals to “decarbonise” the British economy at a cost
conservatively estimated at £18 billion a year. What depresses me
almost as much as the sheer bloody uselessness of the Coalition is
the bloody uselessness of my colleagues in the Fourth Estate (even
the notionally “conservative” or free market ones) in opposing its
wilder idiocies.