Tag: Climate Change Act

Will no one ever take on the Green Blob?

Gosh it hurts when your little corner of paradise is destroyed by a few idiots’ ignorance and greed. This is what has just happened to one of Britain’s best-kept secrets, the magically beautiful and remarkably untouristed stretch of the Wye Valley round and about Builth Wells.

Every summer we used to take a holiday let there, jumping into our favourite swim-hole in the Wye, playing Cocky-Olly in the bracken, exploring Llewellyn’s Cave, watching the last of the sun bathe the uplands from the shade of the boules terrain outside the house where we’d enjoy our well-earned fags and evening gin and tonic. But I don’t think I could bear go back there. The sight of what they’re doing to it is just too painful.

Read the rest in the Spectator.

Ten Years of the Climate Change Act – History’s Most Expensive Virtue Signal

LONDON - DECEMBER 08: A climate change protestor walks near Parliament on December 8, 2007 in London. Demonstrators are gathering in more than 50 countries around the world. The worldwide protests coincide with the UN Climate talks in Bali and are calling for urgent action from world leaders to prevent …
Peter Macdiarmid/Getty

Audio version.

It’s the tenth anniversary of the most stupid, pointless and wasteful piece of legislation ever passed in British parliamentary history: the 2008 Climate Change Act.

If you want to loathe and despise the political class even more than you do already, I heartily recommend a read of the damning report that Rupert Darwall has compiled for the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Keep a bottle of whisky and your service revolver handy for when you’re done.

Darwall describes the Climate Change Act (CCA) as “history’s most expensive virtue signal.”

Read the rest on Breitbart.

48,000 Britons Died of Cold This Winter; UK Government Praises Climate Policy Which Helped Kill Them

Cold
OLI SCARFF/AFP/Getty

Britain has just suffered its worst winter death toll in 42 years.
According to the Daily Star:

It is estimated that 20,275 Brits more than average died between December and March.

An additional 2,000 deaths more than average were expected due to cold conditions between March 23 and 31, this winter’s average death rates show.

Campaigners have called the deaths a “national tragedy” as cold weather victims fatalities could be prevented – especially in the elderly.

According to the Office of National Statistics, one in 10 cold weather deaths are among under-65s, one in 10 among 65-75s and eight in 10 among over-75s.

The Department of Health also said cold conditions worsen winter killers including flu, chest diseases, heart attacks, strokes and dementia.

It means this winter is set to total at least 48,000 deaths due to cold weather – which works out at an average of one death every three and a half minutes.

But what’s more shocking still is that the UK government – claiming to be Conservative, last time I looked – is actually boasting about the disastrous policy which helped kill them.

Here is what Energy Minister Claire Perry had to say on the tenth anniversary of the 2008 Climate Change Act – the most ruinous and pointless piece of legislation in recent British parliamentary history – which is largely responsible for making energy so expensive that the poor and vulnerable cannot afford to heat their homes.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

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

renewables
ODD ANDERSEN/AFP/Getty Images

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.

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.

Owen Paterson’s Assault on the Climate Change Act Puts David Cameron on the Horns of an Impossible Dilemma

Just when David Cameron needs it least, one of his former ministers has opened a devastating second front on the Coalition’s tattered administration.

Owen “Minister of Sound” Paterson has urged the repeal of what is arguably the most damaging, wrongheaded and suicidal piece of legislation in recent parliamentary history: the 2008 Climate Change Act.

The Act was the creation of Labour leader Ed Miliband during his stint in the Gordon Brown administration as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. It was devised by a green activist, Bryony Worthington – formerly of the hard-left, anti-capitalist pressure group Friends of the Earth, subsequently ennobled as Baroness Worthington. And it was endorsed by David Cameron, while in opposition, as part of his “Vote Blue, Go Green” strategy which culminated his announcement – delivered at Greenpeace’s London HQ, shortly after the last general election – that he intended to lead the “greenest government ever.”

This was a costly mistake. Just how costly, Christopher Booker explains here:

[The Department of Energy and Climate Change’s] declared aim at an estimated cost of £1.1 trillion, is the almost complete “decarbonisation” of our economy. Astonishingly, this means that, before 2030, the Government plans to eliminate almost all use of the fossil fuels we currently use to generate 70 per cent of our electricity, to cook and heat our homes and workplaces, and to power virtually all our transport. They want all our existing coal- and gas-fired power stations to close.

Out will go petrol-driven vehicles, along with all gas-powered cooking and central heating. These are to be replaced by such a massive switch to electricity for heating and powering our vehicles that it will require a doubling of our electricity needs. Much of this is to come from “renewables”, such as wind turbines; most of the rest from new nuclear power stations – although, after 2030, new gas- and coal-fired power stations will again be allowed, on condition that all the CO? they emit is buried in holes in the ground (what is called “carbon capture and storage”, or CCS).

In order for this crackpot scheme to work, Booker goes on to explain, the UK taxpayer will be compelled to spend £360 billion building 90,000 giant bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes – 85,000 more than we have at the moment. To put it another way, we will have to build 2,500 wind turbines every year for the next 36 years, swamping an area of the British landscape the size of Scotland. Apart from being physically impossible – we would have to be putting up wind turbines eight times faster than we are at the moment – it would be environmentally devastating, not just to the millions of birds and bats killed by the turbines, but also to the swathes of hitherto unspoiled countryside which would be turned into an industrial zone. It would, furthermore, significantly drive up the costs of energy, placing huge burdens on both private and business users, as well as making the UK economy less competitive.

Paterson was perfectly aware of the scale of the problem during his stint as Secretary of State for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). Much of his time there was spent heroically trying to resist the swathes of green legislation being urged on Britain by the European Union, by his rivals at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, and by environmental campaigners from the WWF, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace. His reward from David Cameron? To be booted out of his job at the last cabinet reshuffle because Cameron could no longer bear the flak he was getting from the green lobby and wanted to promote someone more pliable and emollient.

This is a move Cameron will surely come to regret.

Read the rest at Breitbart London

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