Post-Brexit Britain Wants to Escape Its EU Renewables Targets. About Time Too

Officials in the Treasury and the business department are looking for a way to abandon the national goal of getting 15 percent renewable energy by 2020, which is almost double the current level, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private.

Erasing the target would allow Britain to skirt fines that could reach tens of millions of pounds since it’s on track to narrowly miss the 2020 goal. It would also move the U.K. out of step with other European Union nations that maintain targets as part of their membership in the region’s energy market. The U.K. wishes to preserve its link to the market and smooth cross-border trading of electricity, which has helped lower power prices, the person said.

Let’s translate that into English, shall we?

Under its current status as an EU vassal state, Britain is committed to suicidal, unaffordable “clean” energy targets based on the green religious prejudices and junk-science-driven scaremongering of unelected, unaccountable, borderline-Commie technocrats in Brussels.

These targets were made law by the 2008 Climate Change Act, drafted with the help of a left-wing activist from Friends of the Earth Bryony – now Baroness (!) – Worthington, supervised by the dim eco-zealot and unpopular Labour leader Ed Miliband during his stint as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. This will cost the UK taxpayer, by 2030, around £300 billion – while making no measurable difference to the planet’s climate.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Britain’s New Prime Minister Drives a Stake Through the Heart of the Green Vampire

Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Official: Britain no longer has“the greenest government ever.”

Incoming Prime Minister Theresa May has driven a stake through the heart of her predecessor David Cameron’s fluffy, faux-Conservative project by scrapping the Department of Energy And Climate Change (DECC).

Established in 2008, DECC was a hangover from the Gordon Brown era of woeful misgovernance. Its first Secretary of State was future failed Labour leader candidate Ed Miliband whose only significant political achievement also happened to be one of the most expensive and pointless in British parliamentary history: the drafting of the truly disastrous Climate Change Act.

Under the terms of the Climate Change Act – written by a green activist from Friends of the Earth called Bryony Worthington; endorsed by Cameron’s Conservative opposition and rejected by only five MPs – Britain is legally committed to more stringent “decarbonisation” targets than any other country in the world, at an annual cost of around £19 billion a year.

Miliband’s successors, under the awful Conservative/Lib Dem Coalition government were even worse. For some bizarre reason probably not unconnected with utter fecklessness, green delusion and a fatuous desire to virtue signal, Prime Minister Cameron decided to hand over the keys to DECC to his Lib Dem Coalition partners.

So began probably the worst appointments since some bright spark said: “I know. Let’s make Gaius Verres Governor of Sicily.”

Sure, DECC might have seemed on the face of it a nothing department which could safely be handed over to the losers, perverts and half wits the Liberal Democrat party tends to attract. What appeared to have escaped the Prime Minister’s notice is that any department with the word “Energy” in the title – effectively puts the people who run it in charge of a goodly part of the economy.

First, the job was given to Chris Huhne, an automaton-like, Westminster-educated, millionaire Europhile ex-City boy with at least five houses to his name and a zealous urge to carpet the British countryside with wind farms and solar arrays.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

UK Energy Minister: ‘Britain Must Commit Zero Carbon Suicide’

NOEL CELIS/AFP/Getty

Britain is now committed to zero carbon suicide. That was the promise made in parliament yesterday by the Conservative government’s Energy Minister Andrea Leadsom.

The Government believe we will need to take the step of enshrining the Paris goal of net zero emissions in UK law—the question is not whether, but how we do it.

Does the Energy Minister have a clue what a “zero emissions” economy would look like?

Clearly not or she wouldn’t be talking such virtue-signalling drivel. But to help her along, I suggest she imagines North Korea’s economy only without the abundance and vibrant free market dynamism. Or maybe, better still, a dead whale lying, rotting, on a beach.

A “zero emissions” economy is, almost by definition, an economy in which nothing is produced. That’s because carbon-dioxide is the by-product of pretty much every industrial process. Yes, it is possible to generate energy from “carbon-neutral” technologies such as nuclear and renewables (solar, wind, etc). But the first has been rendered almost prohibitively expensive by impossible safety standards and the latter are so unreliable they need constant back up from fossil fuels.

That’s why in practical terms, no, a zero emissions economy isn’t remotely credible either now or in the foreseeable future. Currently – as Paul Homewood notes – coal, oil and gas account for 84 per cent of Britain’s total energy consumption while wind, solar and hydro provide just 2 per cent.

You’d think someone with the job of Energy Secretary would know this.

Unfortunately, what appears to be going on here is a stitch-up organised by the more lunatic green fringe in parliament, led by failed Labour Prime Ministerial candidate Ed Miliband.

Here’s the clue from Hansard: (the man speaking is Ed Miliband)

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Labour’s Hypocrisy on Immigration Is Breathtaking

EVERY time I pop to the shops, I’m reminded that the Britain of my childhood has gone for ever.

These days I’m as likely to hear Bulgarian, Polish or Romanian as English. And while I have no objections to any of these no doubt decent, hard-working, law-abiding people individually, I cannot help but feel the country I grew up in is no longer my own.The burgeoning popularity of Ukip suggests that I’m not alone. But until recently it wasn’t something you could admit in public without being called “racist”. This was one of the Labour party’s most successful and dangerous achievements in the wake of Enoch Powell’s 1968 Rivers of Blood speech.For four decades, Labour created a climate in which even to question the idea that mass immigration, “multiculturalism” and “diversity” were an unmitigated good was tantamount to being a member of the National Front.Typical of this was Labour’s response during the 2005 general election campaign to a speech by the then Conservative leader Michael Howard in which he said: “It’s not racist to talk about immigration. It’s not racist to criticise the system.

It’s not racist to want to limit the numbers. It’s just plain common sense.” According to Labour spokesman Peter Hain these were “scurrilous, Rightwing, ugly tactics”.

But will Hain, I wonder, condemn the comments by a senior politician earlier this week that “It isn’t racist to be worried about immigration or to call for immigration reform”?

Somehow I’m guessing not. Though the words sound remarkably similar to Howard’s the MP speaking them this time was none other than Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper. As breathtaking hypocrisy goes, this takes some beating.

Not only does it breach Labour leader Ed Miliband’s pledge last week that: “What we will never do is try to out-Ukip Ukip” but it is also an outrageous attempt to duck responsibility for a crisis which is of Labour’s making.

The increase in immigration since the late 1990s was significantly influenced by the government

House of Lords

Between the 1997 arrival of Labour’s Tony Blair as prime minister and the departure in 2010 of Labour’s Gordon Brown, immigration in Britain soared by 45 per cent – from around 327,000 immigrants per annum to 596,000.And those are just the ones officially recorded by the Office For National Statistics.Once you add illegal immigrants that figure may double to more than one million a year.

“The increase in immigration since the late 1990s was significantly influenced by the government’s Managed Migration policies.”

That’s a quote from a 2008 House of Lords economic affairs select committee telling us something that Labour is now very reluctant to admit: that the 2.3 million migrants added to the UK population between 2000 and 2009 didn’t arrive here as a result of some forgivable border control oversight.

They came as a direct consequence of Labour policy. We know this because of a Labour whistleblower called Andrew Neather – a former speechwriter to Tony Blair, as well as Labour home secretaries David Blunkett and Jack Straw – who later became a newspaper columnist.

In one of his articles he revealed that Labour’s wholehearted embrace of mass immigration had a “driving political purpose” – to “make the UK truly multicultural”.

Read the rest at The Express

Climategate: Is the British government conspiring not to prosecute? | James Delingpole

January 31, 2010

Ed Miliband, the weird blobby egg creature with dark hair on top currently doing untold damage as Britain’s Energy and Climate Secretary, has declared war on Climate Sceptics.

According to the Observer:

The danger of climate scepticism was that it would undermine public support for unpopular decisions needed to curb carbon emissions, including the likelihood of higher energy bills for households, and issues such as the visual impact of wind turbines, said Miliband.

If the UK did not invest in renewable, clean energy, it would lose jobs and investment to other countries, have less energy security because of the dependence on oil and gas imports and contribute to damaging temperature rises for future generations. “There are a whole variety of people who are sceptical, but who they are is less important than what they are saying, and what they are saying is profoundly dangerous,” he said. “Everything we know about life is that we should obey the precautionary principle; to take what the sceptics say seriously would be a profound risk.”

Could the New Labour government’s zeal to impose this eco-fascist vision on Britain at any cost have anything to do with the curious case of the Information Commissioner who barked but didn’t bite?

Christopher Booker points up the mystery in his latest column:

There is something very odd indeed about the statement by the Information Commission on its investigation into “Climategate”, the leak of emails from East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. Gordon Smith, the deputy commissioner, confirms that the university’s refusal to answer legitimate inquiries made in 2007 and 2008 was an offence under S.77 of the Information Act. But he goes on to claim that the Commission is powerless to bring charges, thanks to a loophole in the law – “because the legislation requires action within six months of the offence taking place”.

Careful examination of the Act, however, shows that it says nothing whatever about a time limit. The Commission appears to be trying to confuse this with a provision of the Magistrates Act, that charges for an offence cannot be brought more than six months after it has been drawn to the authorities’ attention – not after it was committed. In this case, the Commission only became aware of the offence two months ago when the emails were leaked – showing that the small group of British and American scientists at the top of the IPCC were discussing with each other and with the university ways to break the law, not least by destroying evidence, an offence in itself.

The Commission is thus impaled on a hook of its own devising. By admitting that serious offences were committed, it is now legally obliged to bring charges. And if these were brought under the 1977 Criminal Law Act, alleging that the offences amounted to a conspiracy to defy the law, there is no time limit anyway.

The real mystery therefore is how the Commission came to misread the very Act which brought it into being. Undoubtedly a successful prosecution involving such world-ranking scientists would be extraordinarily embarrassing, not just to the Government but to the entire global warming cause. So what has persuaded the Commission not to do its duty?

I think we should be told. (As Private Eye would be asking were it remotely interested in investigating the AGW scandal which unfortunately, for some bizarre reason known only to its editor, it isn’t).

UPDATE: Climategate.com has been looking into this scandal and is similarly disgusted. It believes there may have been “willful nonfeasance or malfeasance by government officials.”

Government’s £6 million ‘Bedtime Story’ Climate Change Ad: Most Pernicious Waste of Taxpayers’ Money Ever?

The government has spent £6 million on a hard-hitting commercial warning children of the perils of failing to check under their beds and in their cupboards before they go to sleep.

The advert – “Watch Out – Or The Bogeyman Will Get You!” – has been rushed out by Ed Miliband’s Department of Ignorance And Fear Promotion (formerly Dept of Energy and Climate Change) in response to “worrying” statistics showing that 52 per cent of children think the Bogeyman “will never ever crawl from underneath my bed and get me, no not even if I don’t check”, with another 32 per cent saying “Well I suppose I ought to have a quick look, just in case” while another 15 per cent do not know. Just one per cent agree with the government’s statement: “Yes I believe that the Bogeyman exists and that he represents a greater threat to my future than even Al Qaeda, Gordon Brown’s mismanagement of the economy or racist language on Strictly Come Dancing.”

It shows a father reading a bedtime story to a cute little blonde girl, carefully selected because it is thought white middle class households will be most susceptible to this kind of guff. The bedtime story shows pets drowning and nice, middle class neighbourhoods like the little girl lives in being swamped by rising sea levels caused by Anthropogenor – a terrifying, black, fanged beast wearing a giant badge saying “Man Made CO2″, in order to illustrate that white middle class people very much like the girl’s father are largely responsible for this devastation because of their overuse of patio heaters and internet porn sites.

“Daddy, is it twue what some of my fwends at school say that the Bogeyman doesn’t exist so it’s OK not to check under my bed at night?” asks little girl.

At which point, the father snaps the book shut and slaps the little girl hard across the face.

“They LIE bitch!” he says. “The Bogeyman is REAL.”

Since its first broadcast on primetime television on Friday the Government has received numerous complaints from viewers protesting that the advert is brutal, wantonly misleading and, especially in the midst of a recession, the most spectacular waste of taxpayers money.

A spokesman for the Department of Ignorance and Fear Promotion admitted: “Yes we appreciate the evidence for the existence of the Bogeyman is thin and getting thinner by the day. But what you have to understand is that a lot of us here have invested a great deal of life and credibility in promoting the belief that the Bogeyman DOES exist and IS a problem. We simply can’t pull a U-turn like the BBC did last week on “Global Warming”. It would be too damned embarrassing.”

Wind Farms: The Death of Britain

Britain: 2015

“How the hell did we let that happen?” we often ask ourselves when we look at the brutalist monstrosity tower blocks which we allowed to blight our towns in the sixties. In a few decades’ time we’re going to be asking exactly the same question about the 300 foot wind turbines ruining what’s left of Britain’s wilderness.

And a bit like the perpetrators of terrible sixties architecture now, no one’s going to be able to come up with a satisfactory answer because, quite simply, there isn’t one: wind turbines are a bad idea in almost every way imaginable.

They don’t work when there’s no wind.

They don’t work when it’s too windy.

They produce so little power – and so unreliably and erratically – that even if you put one on every hill top in Britain you’d still need to rely on nuclear, coal and gas-generated electricity for your main source of energy.

They chew up flying wildlife and scare horses.

They produce a subsonic hum which drives you mad if you’re downwind of them.

They turn pristine landscape into Teletubby-style horror visions.

They destroy property values.

They steal light.

They’re visible for miles around so that just when you’re thinking you’ve got away from it all you’re reminded of man’s grim presence by the whirling white shapes on the horizon.

They’re environmentally damaging: their massive concrete bases alone requiring enough concrete to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools; then there’s the access roads that have to be built through the unspoilt landscape to put them up in the first place.

They’re twice as expensive as conventionally-produced electricity.

They make you feel a bit queasy, especially the three-bladed ones whose asymmetry is disturbing.

To supply the equivalent output of one nuclear power station you’d need a wind farm the size of Greater Manchester.

When I wrote all this a couple of years ago in How To Be Right, my polemical A to Z of everything wrong with Blair’s and Brown’s Britain, I did think I was erring slightly towards the Dystopian.

The “wind turbines” entry was more of a warning of the awful things that could go wrong if the more extreme eco-nutters got their way and the government completely lost its head. Not even in my darkest moments did I imagine that this nightmare vision would come true.

Why? Well, apart from anything else, because the British landscape is our greatest asset, the thing that makes so proud to have been born here and to live here. In July, I’ll be walking with my family in the near-deserted hills of the Welsh Borders; in late August, I’ll be in Scotland wandering amid the purple heather of the Highlands; in October, the coastal path round Prawle Point and Bolt Head. I love swimming in burns, rock pools, rivers, beneath waterfalls, in the sea off South Dorset. I count it one of my greatest privileges to have been hunting over the stone walls of the Cotswolds and the steep valleys of Exmoor. Few things make me happier or more glad to be alive than the joy that so much of our countryside remains so pristine and stunningly beautiful.

And now, in the name of environmentalism, to serve a cause – CO2 reduction – that will not make the blindest bit of difference to global climate, our Government is destroy this landscape.

Well I suppose they would. They’re Labour and they’ve never really understood the country in the way the Conservatives do.

Or rather, the way the Conservatives did. For, it would seem judging from the comments of Tory environment spokesman Greg Clark that the Conservatives now hate our countryside just as much as Labour does.

To me, it quite beggars belief that a party led by an ex-hunting man representing as beautiful a rural seat as Witney should yet fail to take a stand on this, the gravest environmental threat to Britain in our lifetime. Wind farms are a disaster and an act of lunacy. If the Tories refuse to take a stand against them, they most definitely do not deserve our vote.

Miliband’s Brilliant Plan to Combat Climate Change: ‘We’ll Export Unicorns to China’

Negative jobs, negative energy

Ed Miliband can't sort out his accent, so what does he have against "climate change"?

Ed Miliband can’t even sort out his accent, so what hope does he have against ‘climate change’? (Photo: PA)

My all-time favourite story from the spot-on news satire website The Daily Mash was the one sending up Alistair Darling’s pitiful attempts to rescue the British economy. Among his brilliant schemes was a plan to breed unicorns and sell them to Chinese millionaires.

“The chancellor would invest public money in up to a dozen unicorn farms across the country churning out thousands of magical horses which would then be vacuum packed and shipped to the Far East.”

“Mr Darling believes that at £250,000 a unicorn the government could have paid back its £120bn of borrowing by the time Star Trek becomes reality.”

So it was with a tremendous sense of deja vu that I heard Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband talking on this morning’s Today programme about his radical and costly new measures to tackle “global warming”.

There are, of course, many things to loathe about Ed Miliband: his wonky, slightly sinister face like a giant egg with a hedgehog on top; the way he says “sure” all the time; his Estuarial inability to pronounce his final consonants; the fact that there’s not just him but his ruddy brother too; the annoying missing “l” in his surname; but definitely the worst is the drivel this grinning eco loon is allowed to spout, largely unchallenged, on “climate change.”

This morning he claimed that by 2015 the miseries of his strict new energy policy will be partly offset by the creation of 400,000 “green jobs”. Oh really? These would presumably be green jobs not unlike the ones in President Obama’s much-cited windpowered economic miracle Spain, would they? The ones that actually destroy 2.2 other jobs for every green job that is created?

Yes, this was the truly depressing conclusion of a study published earlier this year by Dr Gabriel Calzada, a Spanish economics professor at Madrid’s Juan Carlos University.

“The study calculated that, since 2000, Spain spent $774,000 to create each “green job”, including subsidies of more than $1.3 million per wind industry job. It found that creating those jobs resulted in the destruction of nearly 113,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs destroyed for every “green job” created. Principally, jobs were lost in the fields of metallurgy, non-metallic mining and food processing, beverage and tobacco.”

Needless to say his BBC interviewer – the normally sound, but clearly not in this case Ed Stourton – did not call Miliband on this empty claim. Nor did Stourton raise any objection when Miliband produced the still-more-outrageous whopper that the English landscape is in greater danger from climate change than it is from windfarms. (Do read the great Christopher Booker on this subject today)

No it isn’t, Ed. Why do you think, all over the British countryside, there are dozens of campaign groups desperately trying to stop these monstrosities being erected on our beautiful landscape? Why do you think Miliband is now changing the planning laws so that local objections can be more easily overruled? Because no one, except a few politicians and eco-nutters and slippery eco-investors actually wants windfarms ruining Britain. Together with bio-fuels they’re arguably the greatest man-made eco-disaster of the last twenty years.

What a relief it would be to think that when New Labour are finally booted out, and Ed Miliband gets his new job as a mannikin in the shop window of Debenhams, that we’ll finally get a regime talking some sense on climate change.

Sadly, this is not to be. Cameron’s Conservatives are every bit as determined to impose ruinous carbon emissions targets on our groaning economy as Brown’s Socialists. Consider Tory energy spokesman Greg Clark’s pathetic response yesterday to Miliband’s “UK Low Carbon Transition Plan”.

Did Clark talk about the nonsense of green jobs? Did he protest about the 30 per cent rise in our energy prices? Did he point out the economic unfeasibility of trying to cut carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050? Did he talk about the imminent threat of brown-outs because of the energy gap caused by successive governments’ failure to duck the issue of nuclear power?

Er, no. He just said – like the joke Irishman giving directions who says “If you want to get there I wouldn’t start from here” – that “households would end up paying because of the Government’s failure to act soon enough.”

Tag: Ed Miliband

Post-Brexit Britain Wants to Escape Its EU Renewables Targets. About Time Too

Britain’s New Prime Minister Drives a Stake Through the Heart of the Green Vampire

UK Energy Minister: ‘Britain Must Commit Zero Carbon Suicide’

Labour’s Hypocrisy on Immigration Is Breathtaking

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Climategate: Is the British government conspiring not to prosecute? | James Delingpole

January 31, 2010

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Government’s £6 million ‘Bedtime Story’ Climate Change Ad: Most Pernicious Waste of Taxpayers’ Money Ever?

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Wind Farms: The Death of Britain

Britain: 2015

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Miliband’s Brilliant Plan to Combat Climate Change: ‘We’ll Export Unicorns to China’

Negative jobs, negative energy

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