I’ve just gone and voted for Tim Yeo MP in Bogpaper.com’s Slimeball of the Year competition. I hope you will too. The competition is stiff (Ed Balls, Keith Vaz, Lord Deben – truly, with his silver salver of golden-wrapped balls of suppurating ordure the ambassador is spoiling us) but for me the winner is still a no brainer.

We’ve detailed one or two of the Problems With Tim “Trougher” Yeo here several times this year.

Just Why Is Tory MP Tim Yeo So Passionate About Green Issues?

Tim Yeo: like a cross between Ebola and Chris Huhne? (I was threatened with legal action after that one by the World Ebola Council, which argued I had no business sullying the name of a blameless disease with such dodgy associations)

Tim Yeo MP – even when he’s right he’s wrong.

and

Tory sleaze is worse than ever: Yeo and Deben must go!

Guido had a few good ones this year too. There was the one about Tim Yeo’s China Bonanza. and the one about the highly beneficial deal he struck regarding London Taxi legislation which, even Yeo eventually seemed to recognise, might be seen as pushing his conflicts of interest a bit too far. Then there’s this one (about fracking) and this one, where Guido spells it out once more:

Conflicted Energy and Climate Change select committee chairman Tim Yeo is at it again today:

“Lumbering the economy with a centralised power system largely reliant on gas would be like running an office using a fax machine in the age of the iPad. I think the choice facing Britain is clear. We can embrace the technology of the future, set a target to reduce our present heavy dependence on fossil fuels and upgrade our electricity system, or we can cling to the combustion-based technologies of the past, gamble the future on assumptions about the availability of abundant cheap gas and slow down the process of decarbonising our economy.”

Tim Yeo’s green interests in full:

Chairman of AFC Energy, company developing alkaline fuel cell technology. Wage: £4,340-a-month.
Chairman of TMO Renewables, which develops and supplies technology for second generation biofuels. Wage: £5,832-a-month.
Director of ITI Energy, manufacturer of environmentally friendly ‘clean’ gasification technology.

My main worry about Tim Yeo, though, is that he is not merely routinely unpleasant but actively dangerous. Among the few to have noticed just how dangerous he is is Richard North at Eureferendum, who notes the terrifying, eco-fascistic undertones of a speech Yeo gave recently at Bloomberg’s HQ.

Instead of “lumbering the UK economy with a centralised power system largely reliant on gas”, Yeo wants, “super efficient solar cells, anaerobic digestion, wind power, new nuclear reactors, wave and tidal power and carbon capture and storage”. These, he declares, are the technologies of the future. “Smart meters, new grid technology and increased interconnection across the continent will lead to a new ‘energy internet'”.

What we then see for our money is, “decentralising electricity generation, giving consumers much more control of their use of energy, and empowering people and businesses, both large and small, to produce and sell electricity back to the grid themselves”.

But what Yeo then describes should chill the very marrow of your bones. “The dynamic demand management allowed by these new technological developments”, he tells us, “will help to address the problem posed by increasing proportions of intermittent generation in the system; gradually reducing the amount of gas back up that is needed”.

If you can’t see what the problem is here, let me explain. Up until now we have all lived in a world where we expect to enjoy electricity on demand. When we want a cup of tea, for example, we take it for granted that we can put on the kettle there and then. It would strike us as barmy beyond measure that we might have to wait for two or three hours until such time as the National Grid deemed it fit to provide us with the electricity we desired. Yet this is the principle behind those “smart meters” and “new grid technology” which Yeo is advocating. Yeo and his fellow green ideologues and eco-profiteers are trying to usher in a new world in which it is the State – through the National Grid – which decides when, where and how much electricity you get to use, not you the consumer.

I first cottoned on to this when I was researching Watermelons:

You hear “smart” employed in its new meaning quite often by environmental propagandists and technocrats these days, as for example, in an interview on BBC Radio 4 in March 2011 with Steve Holliday, chief executive of Britain’s electricity connecting network the National Grid.“The grid is going to be a very different system in 2020, 2030. We keep thinking that we want it to be there and provide power when we need it. It is going to be much smarter than that. We are going to change our own behaviour and consume it when it is available and available cheaply.”

Traditionally “smarter” has tended to mean positive things like “more intelligent”, “better designed” , “sharper” or “quicker”. But not in this context. “The time when consumers were free to use electricity whenever they wanted is coming to an end,” Holliday is basically saying. “Now we must prepare ourselves for a new golden age of environmental righteousness, when power is rationed according to the whim of Big Brother.”

It’s no surprise that self-confessed watermelons like Caroline Lucas MP should be four square behind such schemes. But what, you might not unreasonably ask, is a Tory MP doing trying to advance something so inimical to conservative principles as state-controlled energy rationing? This is eco-fascism, pure and simple. It’s not about free markets; it’s not about consumer choice; it’s not about a healthy economy; and it’s most definitely not about rationalism or common sense. Remember, we are about to enter a new era of abundant, relatively cheap, home-grown energy – the shale gas revolution. This revolution will make a mockery of all the assumptions behind so-called “smart growth” – ie that scarce resources need to be preserved, that we need “energy security”, and that the only way we can achieve this is through “rationing” sexily rebranded as something desirable and “smart.”

At the moment “smart growth” is just an unpleasant twinkle in the eyes of a few (very well-placed) green ideologues. But just you watch as, with the help of eco-fascist-dominated government departments like DECC, hard-left lobbyists like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, hairshirt anti-prosperity movements like Transition Towns and their amen corner on the Guardian’s Environment pages, the concept slowly mutates from “What? Energy rationing by the government? We’d never stand for it” to linchpin of government energy policy.

The single best thing the Conservatives could do in 2013 is boot Tim Yeo out of every position of power he holds and watch as he crosses the floor to his natural home: Caroline Lucas’s barmy, misanthropic, anti-capitalist Greens.