EU Referendum

Showing posts with label electricity. Show all posts

ofgem[i-ofgem]
Based on a press release issued by the energy regulator Ofgem, multiple news reports today warn of impending power shortages. In the vanguard is the BBC, which also tells us that the regulator has also warned that a significant number of consumers may not be able to afford the higher energy prices they would have to face.

Details also emerge in agency copy and outlets such as Bloomberg but nowhere does it seem to me that the full context of the press release is properly explained – the nature of which is devastating.

To put it in context, Ofgem - the Office of the Gas and Electricity Markets - tells us that "protecting consumers is our first priority," then listing "other priorities and influences", which include "contributing to the drive to curb climate change and other work aimed at sustainable development."

What this press release actually tells us though is that Ofgem has gone native, ditching it first priority – the very reason for which it was set up - replacing it with climate change. The effect of that will not only ensure that we do run out of electricity but we will also have to pay through the nose for the limited supply that remains available.

This, of course, it not stated overtly, but what we are dealing with is a long-term initiative called Project Discovery. This takes as its starting point UK "carbon targets" - reductions of 80 per cent by 2050 and then notes that there is "an urgent need to plug the generation gap as coal and oil plant comes off the system to meet 2015 European emissions limits."

As an aside here, it misstates the reason for the coal and oil plant coming off the system – this has nothing to do with emission limits, but is entirely due to the EU's Large Combustion Plant Directive, which imposes limits on sulphur dioxide which pre-date the current obsession with global warming.

Anyhow, the essential element of the Ofgem plan is that it takes as a given the government objective of replacing the lost capacity with renewables – mostly with offshore wind power - picking up the 33GW figure that is needed to maintain energy supplies. It then observes that the current financial environment is not conducive to incentivising investors to cough up with the £200 billion needed.

What is entirely missing from the analysis is the simple but inescapable fact that, even with the best will in the world, it is not technically feasible to deliver 33GW of wind power within any foreseeable time frame, irrespective of whether the finance is available.

This we explored way back in June 2008, with two posts, one pointing some of the technical problems and the other citing Paul Golby, chief executive of E.ON UK, who was calling for an "honest debate" on energy provision.

Nothing much has changed since then, other than to bring to light additional technical difficulties – not least undersea cabling problems and growing concerns about the durability and reliability of turbines in highly aggressive offshore environments. In short, what was true then is true now – the offshore plan proposed by the government is not technically feasible.

Having ignored this completely, Ofgem thus focuses on financial incentives which it deems necessary to "unlock" the necessary investment, coming up with a package of measures which it sets out in the diagram illustrated above. First amongst these is imposing a minimum carbon price (level unspecified) to "encourage investment in low carbon technologies."

Bearing in mind that Ofgem is warning about unsustainable price rises, with consumers no longer being able to afford electricity, this is a stunning proposal. Translated, what it is suggesting is a mechanism to increase the costs of conventional power generation to the point where the vastly more expensive renewable energy becomes "competitive" and thereby promotes investment in it.

Totally missing is any indication of who will pay for the increased carbon price, and/or the vastly increased cost of power generation. Somehow, Ofgem seems to believe that this is a no-cost option.

Its next brainchild it calls "Enhanced Obligations and Renewables Tenders", a plan to increase the subsidies (although it does not call them that) to renewable energy providers, and giving them a guaranteed return, "over say a 20 year period," again to "encourage investment in renewable energy". Precisely who pays those subsidies, Ofgem does not say.

Should that be insufficient, Ofgem then argues for "co-ordinating all future investment through a single entity," – essentially re-nationalising power provision, with a state authority (called a "central energy buyer") determining the amount and type of new generation needed and entering into long-term energy contracts for power. Thus, electricity generators will be told what to build, and then the price structure is rigged to cover their (inflated) costs.

To legitimise this, Ofgem chief executive Alistair Buchanan is saying that without what he euphemistically calls "reform" there could be a "degree of crisis" in 2013 or 2014 and warns the situation could then become "quite uncomfortable". Failure to act would risk shortages after 2015 and mean customers would end up footing the bill for costly short-term solutions.

What he is actually saying is that, to stave off short-term problems and price increases, (brought about primarily, although not exclusively, by the EU's Large Combustion Plant Directive – which he does not address), we must adopt a price and control system which will ensure vastly increased prices and fail to deliver the necessary capacity.

In fact, what is already happening is that the generators are investing in increased gas-fuelled capacity, notionally needed as back-up to the wind system but which will actually become our base-load provider. That will precipitate precisely the problems which Ofgem claims to be seeking to avoid, with local gas shortages during peak demand, requiring emergency purchases of gas on the spot market, at highly inflated prices.

The really worrying thing here, then, is that Ofgem is living in a fantasy world, which has not even the slightest acquaintance with reality, bolstered by the idiot Ed Miliband, who says the Government is "confident" of meeting energy supply needs, with a low-carbon transition plan delivering secure supplies until 2020.

And waiting in the wings is David Cameron, whose plans for a "low-carbon transition plan" are indistinguishable from Miliband's fantasy, thereby ensuring that a change of administration – if we get one at the next election – will ensure that our electricity system continues to deteriorate. These fools, between them, will do for us all.

CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD

power_lines[i-power_lines]UK households face an increase in their energy bills of as much as 60 percent over the next decade. This is from the BBC Today programme via The Daily Telegraph retailing news of an energy review by Ofgem.

Yet, because of EU interference and the fact that successive governments have been pratting about with energy policy, and with the future Tory administration (prop. Zac Goldsmith) wetting its panties over subsidy wind farms, this is exactly what we have been saying would happen, again and again. After decades of incompetence, procrastination, downright stupidity and neglect, chickens are coming home to roost.

Thus, Ofgem is calling for "£200bn of investment to secure the country's future supplies", stating that the investment is required to ensure the country can safeguard its energy needs "as well as cutting carbon emissions". As a result, bills will rise between 14 and 60 percent by 2020, not least to cope with "a volatile global gas market and power stations nearing the end of their life."

Alistair Buchanan, Ofgem's chief executive, says that potential problems include gas supplies being disrupted by a Russia-Ukraine row and Asia cornering the liquefied natural gas market. These were "more red lights than green lights towards the end of the decade", Mr Buchanan told the Today programme.

And guess what? Ofgem says that Britain will need to rely on significant levels of gas imports, in particular for gas power plants to replace lost nuclear and coal-fired capacity. Well, you don't say! Gobsmacked, we are! We would never have thought of that!

Put more succinctly – the politicians play, we pay. But then, it was ever thus ... only worse now than it has ever been. With the children in the Tory party besotted with their "renewables" fantasies, energy policy in this country is a train wreck.

COMMENT THREAD

LNG-Tanker[i-LNG-Tanker]Tony Lodge hits the Telegraph letters today under the heading: "Lack of strategic planning for energy policy means Britain is over-reliant on imported gas."

He points out that the prolonged lack of strategic planning on energy has allowed Britain to become overdependent on gas-fired power stations. No other kind of base-load power plant has been approved since 1997. One third of the gas we use, he writes, is now consumed in such power stations, exacerbating the run-down of our indigenous gas reserves from the North Sea, leading to overdependence on imports.

This will increase, as 90 percent of all proposed and ongoing power plant construction is gas fired.

Lodge argues that there is an obvious way out of this looming crisis. The Government must look towards an early derogation from the EU's Large Combustion Plant Directive, which rules that we must close more than 12 gigawatts of older coal and oil plant by 2015. The Government should also support the fitting of new pre-combustion carbon capture and storage technologies, which can capture a large proportion of the pollutants from older plants.

He concludes that it is most unlikely that Britain's new fleet of nuclear power stations will be on line by 2020, so the answer must be to renegotiate the directive and support available but unpublicised technologies.

The point, of course, it that this over-reliance on gas is very dangerous – having enormous price implications, and a significant effect on our balance of payments.

Lodge is also right to cast doubt on the scheduling for new nuclear capacity, so the quick way out – to avoid having to build even more gas capacity – is to seek that derogation from the LCPD. The chances of Mr Cameron doing that, however, is slight.

That leaves "unpublicised technologies". Lodge is a fan of in-situ gasification of coal, which is an attractive proposition. To kick-start that technology, though, will require government support – and that cannot be forthcoming because it would fall foul of EU state aid rules.

Every which way we look, the dead hand of the EU limits our options – the result of which is that we will have to pay until we bleed for our electricity. Yet, as Lodge points out, there is a way out. The problem is that neither this nor the next administration is likely to take it. We are doomed to poverty.

COMMENT THREAD

power-cut-dinner[i-power-cut-dinner]Booker gets to follow-up on the "power cuts" story today in The Daily Mail.

Necessarily written in the breathless style for which that paper is so loved, you have to read well past the headlines and deep into the text to find the core of our piece yesterday. But Booker does tell us that the government hopes to save Britain's electricity supplies from disaster with a scramble to build dozens more gas-fired power stations.

This means, writes Booker, that we shall be looking to gas to provide anything up to 80 percent of our electricity ... at a time when world gas prices are likely to be soaring. He adds that, even if, by this extremely risky gamble, we might manage to close the energy gap now fast approaching us, it could only mean a further massive hike in electricity prices, driving millions more into "fuel poverty".

The price-hike is, of course, the issue. With the torrent of new CCGT plants coming on-stream (DECC estimates that there is 10GW new capacity in the pipeline), there is little real risk of power outages, especially if we see what amounts to rationing by price.

Against current estimates, we are likely to see lower than anticipated demand as high energy industries (such as aluminium production) depart these shores, while hundreds of thousands of people "self-disconnect" from the electricity supply.

This is a little-appreciated development in the electricity supply industry. While compulsory disconnections used to be an unwelcome feature of any downturn, these no longer happens. Instead, delinquent customers are issued with pre-payment meters. Thus, in theory, supply is maintained. Customers then "choose" to disconnect themselves when they cannot afford to top up their meters.

With the advent of "smart" meters – at an estimated cost of £7 billion – that facility will be extended, as suppliers will either be able to ration or cut-off customers entirely, at will, giving a new dimension to controlling supplies. Given an anticipated shortfall, consumption limits can be imposed on selected customers, enabling suppliers to manage peak loads better.

For this reason also, the 70s-style "power cut" is not likely to happen. The political cost of allowing the lights to go out "all over England" is too great and the impact will be thus "managed".

The big problems, as Booker indicates in his piece, is the longer term gas supply problem. While numerous industry sources report lower than expected demand, increased supplies and falling prices, long-term forecasts are pessimistic. A substantial demand-supply gap of more than 500 million tons of LNG is expected to develop by about 2012.

This is more of a financial than a resource problem, as infrastructure and development projects have been cancelled or delayed as a result of the "credit crunch".

The problems are solvable, but they are going to cost, all adding to the long-term price pressure on supplies. Add temporary supply miss-matches and spot prices could soar, just as the UK is increasing its reliance on the fuel. The price-hikes we have seen recently were only a rehearsal. The real crisis is yet to come.

It is instructive, though, to see how readily other media outlets and commentators have bought into yesterday's Telegraph story, although even that paper could not quite make up its mind as to who to blame. While the leader had Labour in the frame, Irwin Stelzer later put the responsibility at the door of all politicians.

Stelzer is closer to the truth, albeit that - despite the excitable scribbling that we have seen of late - it is price and not capacity that is the issue of the future. And that situation is unlikely to ease as long as the Conservatives are slaves to the green agenda – and the EU – and continue to support the fatuous wind-based renewable policy, as well as carbon capture which is holding back coal exploitation.

If the lights go out, therefore, it will be because we can no longer afford to keep them burning.

COMMENT THREAD

power+cuts[i-power+cuts]The front page lead in The Daily Telegraph raises the spectre of massive electricity power cuts, a subject Booker and I have been addressing for some time.

However, the author of the Telegraph piece – none other than Andrew Porter, political editor - plus the copious references to the shadow energy and climate change secretary, gives the game away. This is a "silly season" filler placed by the wonks in the Conservative Party HQ as a means of getting an easy publicity splash for an otherwise invisible shadow cabinet.

Needless to say, in full rah-rah mode, Tory Boy blog gives the issue full-frontal treatment, although the alarmist tone is somewhat deflated by one comment which notes that, apart from the Bridgenorth and Hatfield coal-fired power stations (3GW), there are several planned capacity enhancements at Barking Reach, Immingham, Damhead Creek, Kings Lynn and Sutton Bridge which will make up most of the shortfall.

Those many of us who have followed the energy market closely would tend to agree. Behind the scenes, in an unheralded and generally unnoticed shift in policy, there has been a dash for gas, with the very rapid building of extra capacity.

In theory, these new CCGT stations will provide back-up for the increasing number of windmills that we are supposed to be building. But since the renewable programme is never going to get off the ground, these gas stations will become the core of our primary generation capacity.

This, as we remarked back in June, is likely to be sufficient to ward off any prospect of power cuts, the issue having moved from one of shortage to one of cost. With a heavy reliance on gas, there will be times when supplies are tight and we will have to be buying off the spot market at inflated prices. We may avoid the cuts, therefore, but there will be a very high price to pay.

Using gas to produce electricity is in fact a waste of resource. This product is best suited for supplying domestic heating and cooking and to use it for a purpose for which there are other, better energy sources – such as coal and nuclear – amounts to criminal dereliction.

That is where there battle lines should now lie, with an urgent need to abandon the fatuous attempts at building more and more windmills – a policy which the Tories support – and an emergency drive to build rapidly new nuclear power stations.

However, with the Tories behind the curve, as always, expending their ingenuity in attracting "off-peak" headlines rather than producing off-peak electricity, it is unlikely that we are anywhere closer to developing a rational energy policy. But at least the Tories can congratulate themselves on achieving some cheap publicity, even if we would rather have cheap electricity.

COMMENT THREAD

Wylfa+002[i-Wylfa+002]
In an expected but nevertheless "shock" move, bosses at Anglesey Aluminium Metal (AAM) have confirmed that smelting activities at the Wylfa plant will cease on 30 September.

The impending demise of this plant – a major employer in Anglesea – we reported in January, the closure precipitated by EU state aid rules which prevented the state owned Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), which owns the Wylfa power station, selling electricity to the plant at below market price.

Even though that arrangement – a continuation of the previous contract, a type common in the industry for bulk buyers – was profitable for both parties, by virtue of recent state acquisition of the power plant, this was deemed contrary to EU rules and, thus deprived of a cheap source of electricity the aluminium plant was scheduled for closure.

This brought hasty action by the government, conscious of the devastating effect the closure would have on local employment – the plant then employed around 540 people at the site - with the offer of a four-year £48m loan, styled as a "government rescue package" to keep the plant in operation.

However, the joint owners, Rio Tinto Alcan and Kaiser Aluminium, have decided that even the availability of cheap money – which would, of course, have to be repaid – was not sufficient to return the plant to viability and have therefore decided on its closure.

This leaves Welsh secretary Peter Hain to utter the usual platitudes, saying: "I am bitterly disappointed we could not reach an agreement to secure the long-term future of the smelter ..." but neither he nor the the BBC give any hints as to the real reason for the closure.

The BBC, in fact, cites a man who has been working at the plant for five years. This is Peter Owen, who tells the BBC that there had been no explanation of why the £48m rescue package had been turned down. "I can't understand what happened," he says.

With the benefit of the bigger picture, we could tell Mr Owen what had been going on, but you can be sure that the BBC won't. The hidden enemy must never be revealed.

COMMENT THREAD

"Switch to Ecotricity & help fight climate change with your electricity bill. £20 will also be donated to The Converging World on your behalf." boasts the Ecotricity website.

That's not as great as it sounds. Not that it ever is.

Having rather neglected the wider world over the last few weeks, taking a quick peek away from the tragic drama being played out in Afghanistan, we find Booker writing in The Daily Mail on another constant obsession of ours, wind farms.

Wind farms, he writes, will be a monument to an age when our leaders went collectively off their heads. This is after the CBI warned that the government must abandon its crazy fixation with wind energy as a way of plugging the looming energy gap.

There is nothing new in the piece, nothing Booker and I both have not written a hundred times before, all on the back of warnings that electricity bills are set to rise exponentially to meet the costs of this insanity. There again, nothing new.

John Sauven in The Guardian, however, attacks the CBI, prattling on about how the "renewables sector", against the backdrop of the worldwide economic downturn, "is one of the few success stories," It is "creating millions of new green jobs, increasing countries' energy independence and reducing climate-changing emissions."

It is "scandalous", therefore, that the CBI should come out "attacking the prime minister and the climate change secretary Ed Miliband's commitment to boosting this industry in Britain just days before the launch of a fresh government initiative."

This is what passes for brains these days, and gets you printed in The Guardian - but the terrifying thing is that it is also the economic and political orthodoxy that drives government policy, fully supported by the two main opposition parties.

In the fullness of time, we will indeed come to see these windmills as a monument to a period of collective madness - as we now do the tower blocks that were the answer to the housing crisis - and Booker is right to tilt at the windmills. But, while the collective psyche is gripped by the madness, there is no moving it. It will have to play itself out in its own time, while we pay the bill, as our political masters indulge themselves in their fantasies.

And then we will shoot them.

COMMENT THREAD

polar+bears[i-polar+bears]One of the explanations for the unseemly rush to get the Waxman-Markey Bill through Congress is that the warmists are on the back foot. The global warming tide is shifting against them and, before too long, their creed will be consigned to the dustbin of history as yet another of those mad obsessions that periodically grip the masses.

This is certainly the view of the Wall Street Journal which notes with approval how the Australian Senate is giving Kevin Rudd's version of a climate change law a very hard time. Furthermore, it observes, Australian polls have shown a sharp uptick in public scepticism; the press is back to questioning scientific dogma; blogs are having a field day.

The response of the warmists, however, is nothing if not predictable. Having controlled the agenda for so long, their reaction to the changing tide is to rig the debate, closing down on dissenting voices and suppressing alternative views.

One element of this strategy is recorded by Booker in today's column, where he describes the concerted efforts of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) to prevent one of the world's leading experts on polar bears attending a meeting because his views on global warming do not accord with those of the rest of the group.

The group is meeting in Copenhagen under the aegis of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission, set up – as Booker puts it- "to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming," one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN's major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December.

The excluded expert is Dr Mitchell Taylor who has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. His problem is that, more than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.

To add to his litany of sins, while Dr Taylor agrees that the Arctic has been warming over the last 30 years, he ascribes this not to rising levels of CO2 but to currents bringing warm water into the Arctic from the Pacific and the effect of winds blowing in from the Bering Sea.

Thus Dr Taylor has been told that his views running "counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful". His signing of the Manhattan Declaration – a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents – are "inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG".

This is but one example of how the warmists control the agenda, another being offered by Watts up with that, which catalogues measures taken by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to suppress dissident voices within its own organisation.

None of this could happen, of course, without the active participation of the media and, in his second piece, Booker refers to Lord Hunt, who last week "made one of the most absurd claims that can ever have been uttered by a British minister."

Solemnly reported by the media, Booker writes, he said that by 2020 he hopes to see thousands more wind turbines round Britain's coasts, capable of producing "25 gigawatts (GW)" of electricity, enough to meet "more than a quarter of the UK's electricity needs".

Hunt's ideas are so patently absurd that, had a minister announced that the UK was about to launch a series of manned space shots to the moon to mine green cheese in order to solve the global protein shortage, there would be little to compare between the two.

Booker notes though that perhaps the most disturbing point is that the media dutifully reported Lord Hunt's absurd claims without asking any of the elementary questions that could have revealed that he was talking utter nonsense. One cannot of course expect Opposition MPs to take an intelligent interest in such matters, he writes, but if journalists allow ministers to get away with talking such tosh, the slide into unreality can only continue.

This is a broader point that deserves more attention, touching on an effect we see in defence and elsewhere. The media – as a collective – has its own narratives and as long as an utterance fits with those narratives, it is given an airing. That which goes against the grain is buried.

Currently, the media narrative on climate change is that global warming is real and represents a major threat to the planet and humankind. Similarly, all the woes in the military stem from "under-resourcing" and all problems in Afghanistan will be solved by more "boots on the ground". Thus is the debate rigged, through which means our decline into obscurity, poverty and impotence is managed.

COMMENT THREAD

Green+jobs[i-Green+jobs]Its has been said before, many times, but now we have a US think-tank, the Beacon Hill Institute, saying it: "green jobs are a cost not a benefit."

The researchers have looked at a number of influential studies, including the UNEP report on "Green Jobs: Towards Sustainable Work in a Low-Carbon World," and find that they are "critically flawed".

Says Paul Bachman, director of research at the Beacon Hill Institute, "Contrary to the claims made in these studies, we found that the green job initiatives reviewed in each actually causes greater harm than good to the American economy and will cause growth to slow."

The BHI study itself remarks that, if the green job is a net benefit it has to be because the value the job produces for consumers is greater than the cost of performing the job.

This argument is never made in any of the studies examined. Thus co-author of the BHI study, David G. Tuerck, notes that "these studies are based on arbitrary assumptions and use faulty methodologies to create an unreliable forecast for the future of green jobs."

He adds, "It appears these numbers are based more on wishful thinking than the appropriate economic models, and that must be taken into consideration when the government is trying to turn the economy around based on political studies and the wrong numbers."

Closer to home, Poland's Solidarnosc trade union is warning that some 800,000 jobs across Europe will be wiped out following the adoption of EU climate change legislation last year.

This is from Jaroslaw Grzesik, deputy head of energy at Solidarnosc, who is in fact referring mainly to Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic - although he says Germany, the UK and Scandinavia will also suffer.

The problem here is their reliance on coal for electricity production.
where the requirement to reduce CO2 emissions or buy pollution credits on the European carbon market, will push coal industries to relocate to countries where they are not regulated.

"In Poland, production will move away to Ukraine, a few kilometres away from our borders," Grzesik predicts, deploring the fact that the Polish government and the European had provided "no analysis" of the impact of the EU's climate legislation on industry delocalisation.

He also pours cold water on the notion that job cuts would be offset by the creation of new "green jobs". His estimate is that there will be 800,000 job losses for the whole of the EU, whereas the best estimate for new jobs is 200,000.

"In Europe, without a doubt, it is a problem," said Philippe Herzog, a French economist and founder of Confrontations Europe. "We have not found a balance yet between the definition of European objectives [on climate change] and the implications for jobs."

But then the objective never was balance, or indeed new jobs. The economic illiteracy expressed in the UNEP report surely cannot be real – no one can be that stupid as to believe that wiping out hundreds of thousands of jobs and replacing them with a smaller number is a good thing. Or can they?

COMMENT THREAD

Power+bills[i-Power+bills]Run on the front page of The Daily Express without apparently an online link, is the "shock-horror" story that household energy bills are set to soar to more than £5,000 a year within the next decade, up from an average of £1,243 currently – a figure which has doubled over five years.

The story also finds its way into The Daily Mail and others, where we find that this quadrupling of costs arises "as Britain increasingly relies on outdated infrastructure and green energy policies."

Here we see writ large the failure of the energy policy and the consequences of the obsession with global warming but, unsurprisingly, we see no broadside against the cumulative stupidity that is to bring this massive price-hike about. Instead, we see the anodyne comment that " … we are entering a new era of high-cost energy and households will have to adapt their behaviour accordingly."

Indeed though, we will have to adapt behaviour and, for many people that will mean using less energy. Summing this up is Michelle Mitchell, charity director for Age Concern and Help the Aged. She says, "With more than one in three pensioner households already in fuel poverty, any further price rises could have serious consequences."

What is not conveyed is any sense that this increase is entirely artificial, created to a very great extent by top-loading electricity bills with the EU emission trading scheme, carbon capture, the renewables obligation and all the other crazy imposts, devised in the name of reducing global temperatures.

On top of that is the dash for gas, the industry's answer to the failure of successive governments to get their acts together on nuclear power.

Built in to this hike also is the cost of providing the so-called "smart meters", the real agenda there being to provide the utility companies with a means of rationing electricity without having to suffer the embarrassment of highly visible power outages.

Those unable to pay the inflated bills can also be cut off without having to send an official to do the dirty work, which avoids the even greater embarrassment of having to explain why so many people cannot pay for their electricity.

That this is going to kill people was rehearsed on this blog in January, but a silent epidemic of hypothermia is of no matter to the greenies, who would have us all die to save the planet.

To put the matter in context, our revered and highly respected MPs cost us about £4 per year, for each household. They had – and have – the power to stop this mass stupidity on global warming. But, of course, they have bought into the scare and support the government in its determination to drive up costs.

That, amongst other things, is a measure of the failure of our political system but, in ten years time, it will be too late to slaughter the MPs - to say nothing of those buffoons in Brussels - who made this happen. We should do it now while we still have the opportunity.

COMMENT THREAD

carbon+capture[i-carbon+capture]Ed Miliband, the boy wonder of the climate change industry, laughably named the "energy secretary", is pursuing his madcap scheme for carbon capture and storage, announcing yesterday that the trials of the system would eventually add 2 percent to bills through a levy on electricity suppliers.

In keeping with the fatuous, ill-conceived nature of this scheme, he tells us it is "too early to estimate the total cost of the project" but adds that the government hopes it could create 60,000 jobs and boost the economy by £4bn.

This is a scheme which will add anything up to 40 percent to our energy consumption for the plants so fitted which, when added to the huge capital investment required, adds to our costs of living and to the expenses carried by the economy. Far from being a boost, it is a massive additional drag, not least in funding the 60,000 additional useless mouths which Miliband believes could be employed.

If ever there was a scheme that should be killed at birth, this is it, yet not only are we to be faced with this massive unnecessary bill, we have the ultimate insult to our intelligence with Miliband calling it a boost to our economy.

Needless to say, if we had any intelligent MPs, they would have shot this scheme down in flames but, as we recorded earlier, all we get is bleats of approval from the opposition. That, as Booker pointed out, is the ultimate evidence of a decaying political system.

When our own MPs, far from interceding to save us from this madness, embrace it wholeheartedly, we know that the body that is supposed to represent us is past its sell-by date. On the other hand, why do we allow this stupidity, North junior asks. "Britain is a sick society and its institutions are rotten to the core," he observed. Are our MPs the cause, or the symptom?

COMMENT THREAD

power_plant[i-power_plant]The BBC reports that a former coal-fired power station in south Derbyshire which closed 10 years ago may be brought back to life. RWE npower is proposing to turn Willington, which originally opened in 1959, into a gas-fired power station.

There had been plans to build up to 1,000 homes on the site, but these have been turned down after seven years of arguments and two public inquiries. Now RWE npower is to hold a series of meetings in the area to see whether residents favour the new proposals.

Behind this is an important but scarcely discussed story. In the absence of a coherent energy policy, and the scandalous waste of resources (and our money) on renewables such as wind-generated electricity, power companies are taking matters into their own hands, and going for the "quick fix" of ramping up gas-powered generation.

As we have reported before, there are serious reservations as to whether a supply of gas can be maintained and, even if it can, there will be a very significant price penalty as more and more nations compete for available supplies, exacerbated by the failure of our plans to increase gas storage. A marker of the gathering crisis comes with reports of massive expansions of natural gas applications in the China market, spurring increased demand for LNG cryogenic storage.

Collectively, over term, the failure of our energy policy is set to cost more than the credit crunch, amounting to as much as £300 billion.

Nevertheless, the additional capacity may be enough to stave off the worst effects of the expected generation shortfall – enough to keep the (domestic) lights burning and thus avoiding the political crisis that would surely arise if the nation was subjected to prolonged power cuts. Not least, helping to contain demand will be the huge number of people on pre-payment meters who drop out of the system because they smply cannot afford to pay, thus saving the energy companies the embarrassment of cutting them off for non-payment.

If we had an adult media, these developments would be subject to intense scrutiny and debate, as the economic cost to the nation will be massive – not least in having to fund the useless network of wind turbines as well as having to provide a parallel system of generation for when the wind does not blow. Equally, our politicians should be raising the alarm.

As always though, such vital issues have been "parked" while the political classes indulge in their never-ending soap operas. Too late will we realise just how badly we are being governed.

COMMENT THREAD

Booker+commons[i-Booker+commons]If the European Union is the "Great Deception", the MPs' expenses scam can perhaps be described as the "little deception". But deception it is, according to Booker today, who has been doing some background research into the allowances system.

The crucial thing is, as we have been at pains to point out, is that they are not "expenses" in the ordinary sense of the word. MPs are told they can claim their "allowances" as an automatic right, so long as they go through the charade of handing in largely meaningless invoices.

The story, Booker writes, goes back to 1971 when, with inflation rising, to give them a pay increase might have been politically embarrassing. A new system was therefore devised (under Willie Whitelaw) to give them "additional cost allowances", as an annual sum they could claim as a hidden pay rise.

As can be seen from the Commons Research Briefing, the initial allowance was a mere £187.50. But this rose rapidly, and at an ever-increasing rate, with a jump of £6,000 in 2001, until it now stands at £24,000.

The point, Booker makes, is that the system was founded on deception, and this has only been compounded, as MPs are told they can claim their "allowances" as an automatic right, so long as they go through the charade of handing in largely meaningless invoices. Hence their pathetic bleats, when caught out, that they are only charging "within the rules".

This double deceit is tawdry enough, and this is what has caught them out. But, echoing our own comments, Booker suggests that, "far more weighty is the question of whether our modern MPs earn their salaries, let alone their bogus allowances." This is the case he makes:

It would be easy to point to scores of examples of how MPs no longer justify the money we pay them, because they have so lost touch with the basic realities of the job we elect them to do.

During the 19 years I have been writing this column, I have in effect been reporting on an extraordinary revolution in the nature of our governance. As became apparent in the early Nineties, Parliament has become ever more excluded from its traditional role of making our laws and shaping the way we are governed.

By far the greater part of our legislation no longer has anything to do with Parliament. Much of it is decided in Brussels, most of it is imposed on us by way of statutory instruments, diktats drafted by anonymous officials and signed off by ministers who are no more than puppets. Our MPs, having progressively given away their powers, have become increasingly irrelevant, except to play walk-on parts in the soap opera to which our politics has been reduced.

Infantilised by their lack of a proper grown-up job to do, it is hardly surprising that, with honourable exceptions, the army of ciphers making up our political class speak almost entirely in clichés, bristle with moralistic self-righteousness, have little idea of how we are actually governed and resort to fiddling their expenses.

Having given away their powers and lost their self-respect, they have now lost ours. This is the real message of the squalid spectacle to which we have all been treated in recent days.

Just one of countless examples of how our MPs now fail in their true responsibilities was glaringly on view on 23 April. Our Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, announced to MPs that, to keep Britain’s lights on, he will graciously permit us to have a new generation of coal-fired power stations.

But this is only on the condition that they can in future be fitted with "carbon capture", extracting the CO2 to bury it in holes in the ground. To pave the way for this, Mr Miliband is insisting on four pilot schemes in different parts of the country, each of which, although he didn't admit it, is to cost £1 billion, paid for by all of us through our electricity bills.

So far, there is not a single commercial carbon-capture scheme anywhere in the world. The technological problems in creating one may well be insuperable. Even if they could be made to work, they would, in effect, double the price of electricity and require us to double our already huge imports of coal, mainly from Russia.

In other words, Mr Miliband was announcing to the Commons a completely mad, quixotic proposition. But instead of pointing this out, the handful of MPs present, led by the Tories' energy spokesman, Greg Clark, and John Gummer, fell over themselves to welcome it.

If we had grown-up MPs with the remotest understanding of the real world, they could simply have laughed this totally absurd measure out of court, and saved us all £4 billion – 40 times as much as they cost us each year, including their allowances.

If we had a grown-up media, we would be seeing these points made more widely. Charles Moore, made a start yesterday and Matthew Parris also has some interesting comments.

With The Sunday Times arguing that, "The disclosures over MPs' expenses have turned a general lack of respect for politicians, which some put down to the decline of deference, into open contempt," we are in dangerous times, not least because this paper is focusing entirely on repairing the payment system and allied matters.

The important thing, however, is to focus on the single point – that this current debacle is a symptom of a wider malaise. Fixing just the allowances system will fix nothing. We need to address the deeper causes, some of which Booker has identified.

COMMENT THREAD

Strategy[i-Strategy]So it is done. "What we are trying to do is combine the measures, militarily and civilian," says Gordon Brown in today's statement, something which gets close to joined-up government, even if it is many thousands of miles away.

With Nick Clegg reminding the House that, "Public support for the conflict is under strain", the statement trailed the publication of the document "UK policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan: the way forward", setting out the clearest statement yet of where we stand in this troubled corner of the world.

A mere 32-pages including the covers, the relatively modest length belies its depth. Its main claim to fame is to offer a seam-free approach to a unified policy which encompasses both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Looking for clues as to a change of direction, however, what stands out is the remarkably candid appraisal of the current status. Thus states the document:

The security situation in Afghanistan remains serious, particularly in the south and east. Insurgents are unable to defeat international forces directly, or Afghan forces where they have international support.

But the insurgents' switch to asymmetric attacks (against which international and Afghan forces can only provide the population with a certain degree of protection); their access to havens across the border in Pakistan; and the combination of poverty, lack of good governance, weak rule of law, lack of progress on reconciliation and social and economic development, and perception of widespread corruption, mean that the insurgency has not been delivered a decisive blow.

The local population therefore lacks sufficient confidence actively to back the legitimate government against the insurgency. Without an improvement in security, particularly in the south and east, sustainable progress in Afghanistan will remain difficult; and what progress there has been so far will be put at risk – as will wider regional stability, and our own national security.

But, while what few headlines we have so far seen concentrate on the temporary boost in troop levels – with 700 more to be deployed to provide security during the forthcoming presidential elections - of much more long-term importance is this little nugget buried in the strategy:

We will support the Afghan government by investing in stronger markets that will promote an entrepreneurial business culture. To assist the vast majority of Afghans who live in rural areas, we will increase our support to agriculture and rural development, including transport to market, and support for access to international markets for agricultural exports.

In particular, Helmand province, with its abundant natural resources, has the potential to be a centre of agricultural production and growth for Afghanistan. To help realise this potential, we will invest £68m over the next four years in agriculture, rural enterprise development and infrastructure.

Current projects include: a major road-building programme linking Lashkar Gah to Garmsir, Nad-e-Ali and Gereshk; the refurbishment of the Gereshk hydropower plant (as part of a wider programme to double electricity production in 2009-10); and agri-business infrastructure in Lashkar Gah (funded by the US).

This might by some be considered as coming under the category "too little, too late" but, given that these developments will be almost completely ignored by our kiddies korner media (to say nothing of the increasingly trivial korner of the political blogosphere), it is remarkable that there has been any progress here at all. Crucially, we then see this:

We will also continue to support the Afghan government to deliver basic services, such as health and education, by providing direct support to pay the salaries of teachers and other key workers. In parallel, we will build the government's capacity to collect taxes so that, over the longer term, it can begin to reduce its reliance on international support.

The first sentence is interesting. For too long, there has been money spent on rapid impact projects, building schools for the photo-opportunities they afford, only for them to remain unused or not fully exploited because the communities cannot afford to pay teachers and central government is unable to come up with the cash.

As to the last sentence, this is possibly the most important issue of all. As long as Karzai gains most of his income from international aid, his greatest concern will be keeping his foreign paymasters on-side. The welfare of his people is of secondary concern. Thus, if Afghanistan is to develop, there must be a transition from external dependence, building up a strong tax base so that the central government becomes dependent on its own population.

There is much to be said for the premise "no taxation without representation" but less is heard of the very obvious requirement that, for there to be representative government, there must be taxation. When people are taxed by government, they tend to take an interest in politics. Where there is no tax, there is no nation.

Such issues are, in fact, those which are the focus of policy-makers behind the scenes. They are grown-up issues upon which resolution will depend on whether the visible military adventure is successful. That is where the work lies, and where we must see progress, and it where our attention should be focused. Boring though it is, one crucial metric of success is how many Afghanis fill in a tax return.

That we see a strategy document addressing this is very much a start. That we are seeing recognised the vital role of agricultural development, and the road-building programme is also an improvement. We are further on than we were, and that is something.

That leaves the strategy document to make a statement of the "bleedin' obvious". The challenges facing Afghanistan and Pakistan are substantial and complex, it says. "They require a multi-stranded approach, covering security, building more effective and accountable governance, and promoting development in an often insecure environment."

Pace Nick Clegg and his observation that, "Public support for the conflict is under strain", what is also required is a better understanding by our own public of the issues involved, the priorities and the nature of progress.

On this we cannot expect any guidance from our kiddies korner media, or from our gifted MoD. But, for the grown-ups, the strategy document is directly accessible. The beauty of the internet is that we no longer have to rely on spoon-feeding from the media. We can read things for ourselves and make up our own minds. If we do not, we only have ourselves to blame.

COMMENT THREAD

monkeys[i-monkeys]Purely in order to make some sense of a discordant world, it is necessary to break up the news into bite-sized chunks. Then the information is categorised into different subject headings and finally, whatever happens to be topical is given the lion's share of attention.

Since the budget is currently the hystèrie du jour, that inevitably gets by far the bulk of media coverage, and the full gaze of the commentariat. Tomorrow – or next week – will be different. The dogs bark and the caravan moves on.

Real life, of course, is not like that. The daily grind of living, and making ends meet is not broken up into neat little compartments. It comes all at a rush, the end result being the things you would have liked to have bought but did not, mainly because the figures on the bank statement at the ends of the months have minus signs in front of them.

In that context, while the commentariat are devoting huge amounts of time and energy to their attack on Brown's 50 percent income tax rate for "rich" earners, almost no attention has been given to a raid on our wallets of equal size, which will have a much wider impact on people generally.

The problem here is the false distinction between "tax" – the money that the government takes out of our pockets directly - and government mandated extractions which are collected indirectly and/or are given different names and are collected by other means. That is distinction is artificial is self-evident. Whether it is called a tax or something else, or extracted directly or indirectly, it is still taken out of our pockets. It is still money we, as individuals, cannot spend.

The "raid" we have just experienced is further obscured by the fact that it came in three separate parts, on two consecutive days. The first two came with the budget. One was an increase in the ROC to fund the building of useless and wildly expensive offshore wind turbines.

The other, barely noticed was a rise in the standard rate of landfill tax by £8 per ton on 1 April, and an annual rise of the same amount each year until 2013. As a result, the tax will rise to £48 for each ton of waste sent to landfill from 1 April next year, climbing to £56 in 2011, £64 in 2012 and £72 in 2013.

On top of that, buried in the small print is a decision to reverse a Court of Appeal ruling that allowed certain engineering materials to be exempt from the tax. This also allows the government to reclassify certain inert wastes that currently qualify for a lower tax rate of just £2.50 a ton so that they too will be charged the full rate. That move alone is equal to an additional £160 million a year taken out of the economy, into the chancellor's coffers, with the total receipts in the order of £1.5 billion.

The third part of the "raid" we dealt with yesterday. This adds £4 billion or more to the costs of generating electricity which, like the ROC, will be recovered through our electricity bills.

It says something of these imposts that, while the clatterers are very quick to tell us how much the 50 percent tax rate will cost, the figures on how much the government is extracting through these less direct means is extraordinarily difficult to find. Almost certainly, the combined effect is greater than the 50 percent tax rate. But, in the fullness of time, when the money is drained from our pockets, it will be so dressed up and disguised that the raid will not be noticed for what it is.

Now, the essential point here is that, barring shades of differences on the detail, all three main parties support these extractions. This being the case, our structured impoverishment does not enter the domain of political debate. And, without a political lead, the commentariat – derivative as always – does not discuss it. Thus does the general public remain almost totally unaware of the fact that it is being ripped off.

As the Wall Street Journal points out today, though, global-warming legislation drives up the cost of everything. If we had real, joined-up politics, such an obvious point would be the focus of a heated political debate. But, instead, we have narrow agendas discussed interminably, all neatly compartmentalised with most of the real issues parked in the "do not discuss" box.

Thus, today and for the rest of the week, we discuss the "economy" – or that bit of it which the political claque chooses as its focus. For the rest of the year, we get poorer, without even really knowing why.

COMMENT THREAD

ENERGY2+037s[i-ENERGY2+037s]There is a certain air of unreality in the pronouncements of this dying Labour government, viz the expected announcement from climate change minister Ed Miliband.

Despite the fact that little Eddie is not going to see the inside of a red box past June of next year, he clambered to his feet in the Commons today to declare that there was a "solution to the challenge" that coal presents in causing "dangerous climate change".

That "solution" is, of course, carbon capture and storage – but not just yet. The little chap recognises that the technology "has never been tried on a commercial scale, and never as the complete process from start to finish on a power station", so he is deferring the day of judgement.

Instead, there are to be four demonstration projects – at an unspecified cost, but estimated at £1 billion each – which are to be funded either from a feed-in tariff or by a fixed price for carbon abated. That means one of little Eddie's final gifts to the British people is yet another hike in electricity prices, on top of the hike in ROCs to pay for the offshore wind farms.

With that, the government is planning on the basis that CCS will be technically and economically proven by 2020 whence every coal-fired power station built from now would have to commit to retrofitting the technology on the whole plant - 100 percent - within five years of 2020.

The scale of the costs that we could have to bear is indicated by research cited by Eddie, which suggests that "CCS and other carbon abatement technologies could sustain 50,000 jobs by 2030." That is 50,000 useless mouths, taking fertiliser out of flu gasses for no reason other than the paranoia of a bunch of warmists and some extremely dodgy science.

Needless to say, this was not good enough for Tory spokesman Greg Clark. He wants all new coal-fired power stations to be developed with CCS technology and be required to achieve an overall emissions performance standard of no more than 500 kg of carbon dioxide per MWh "from the outset". Furthermore, he wants the construction to be funded out of receipts from the EU emissions trading scheme, money that Gordon has already spent.

It only then took lib-dimmer Martin Horwood to agree that carbon capture was a jolly good idea, and then John Gummer to congratulate the secretary of state. It was trebles all round, as the chaps happily trotted of to their lunches.

The only real dissent came off-stage from the Guardian's George Monbiot, who thought the whole statement was "cynical and meaningless". Just for once, we do hope he is right – not that we need worry about the final outcome. By 2020, we'll all be freezing, and wondering why previous governments poured £4 billion down the drain.

COMMENT THREAD

Darling22[i-Darling22]With over 3,000 budget-related pieces on Google News and doubtless more to come, it is hard to see how anything by way of useful comment can be added to the torrent. If you started reading now, you might just have caught up by the next budget.

The key points, we are told, are a £7bn squeeze on the rich followed by a brutal freeze on public spending in the next parliament, setting up the government for the general election.

But, while Darling offered a financial budget, he also delivered what is hailed as the world's first "carbon budget", committing the UK to a revised target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 34 percent of 1990 levels by 2020.

This, of course, is hubris personified as the man won't be around a chancellor after the election in 2010, and there will have been a least two more elections by the time a further ten years have elapsed.

By then, also, the likelihood is that the already apparent cooling trend will be well established and the "climate change" scam will be history, buried in winter snows and power and food shortages.

Darling's projections for his carbon budget, therefore, are likely to be about as accurate as his general financial forecasts, but that has not stopped him announcing a £1.4bn package of measures to help create low-carbon economy.

What he is actually doing is creating a low-money economy so it is some small consolation that climate change campaigners are complaining that the package is "inadequate", but then that would be their refrain even if we committed 100 percent of GDP to their obsession.

Adrian Wilkes, chief executive of the Environmental Industries Commission, thinks the package is "timid and inadequate" while Friends of the Earth's director Andy Atkins whines that, "The government has squandered a historic opportunity to kick-start a green industrial revolution and slash UK carbon dioxide emissions."

As to the bones of this fantasy, he has allocated £375m for home energy efficiency, and £525m "support" for offshore wind power. On top of that, Darling is spending £405m of our money to develop low-carbon technologies.

The actual amount to come out of the tax fund is about £510m over the next two years - 9.6 percent of the chancellor's total spending commitments. Much of the rest comes from a temporary increase in the Renewables Obligation Certificates, which we will have to find out of increased electricity bills.

There is also to be available £4bn in new loans from the European Investment Bank, aimed at helping "green" schemes overcome a critical lack of commercial money, with banks reluctant to commit money to these increasingly mad schemes.

The worst is not over though. Today we are to expect an announcement on carbon capture and storage (CCS) plants. These are probably to be funded by money from the EU and an unspecified "new mechanism", likely to end up as a levy on consumer bills. Soon, when you can get it at all, electricity will become a luxury reserved for Sundays and bank holidays.

Unfortunately, according to North Jnr who watched the parliamentary debate after the budget, there is no immediate (or any) relief to hand.

And despite there being an opportunity to ditch at least 9.6 percent of the public spending commitment, without anyone noticing, no such suggestion was forthcoming. We carry on regardless, as madness continues to afflict our benighted land.

COMMENT THREAD

CelticCat[i-CelticCat]Anthony Coughlin of The National Platform that has been fighting the good fight in Ireland since long before Libertas was even a gleam in Declan Ganley's eye has sent me an article about Ireland that appeared in the New York Times. None of them seem all that impressed by the Celtic Tiger and its ability to go on thriving in the new economic situation.

Paul Krugman, who has won the Nobel Prize for Economics (which is not really a Nobel Prize exactly but let that pass) and, therefore, is to be taken with a large dose of salt, thinks that Ireland has got into the mess it is in by opening itself to the great free market and the government is now making matters worse by "is being forced to raise taxes and slash government spending in the face of an economic slump — policies that will further deepen the slump".

He is worried that America might go the same way.

A somewhat different point of view comes from the Mises Institute. Under the delightful title of "The Celtic Kitten", John Engle explains that Ireland's problems stem largely from excessive government intervention. Mind you, I don't know where he gets the idea that it is something new. So far as I can make out the Irish government has always had controlling interest in "public transport, electricity generation and transmission, and broadcasting media (radio and television)".

What of the EU subsidies that under-wrote a good deal of that much admired economic growth? What part did that play?

COMMENT THREAD

Booker+Brown+green[i-Booker+Brown+green]There can be no doubt about it – there is a madness gripping the political classes, which bodes ill for us all.

One of the latest instalments is brought to us by Booker, who brings home the reality of Gordon Brown's "green" budget.

The problem is that he is not on is own, with a similar madness gripping US president Obama, both he and Brown having their countries within 40 years to cutting back "carbon emissions" to a level 80 percent below where it was in 1990 (which would put America back to its CO2 emission level in 1905).

What is really disturbing, writes Booker, is how each of these men has been persuaded link the economic crisis with the green agenda, so that the latter is now being positioned as the answer to our financial woes.

In the UK, this came to us via a budget leak so serious that in former times it would have been a cause for resignation, as Brown revealed that a "major part" of the plan to revive our economy to be announced by Alistair Darling in his budget on 22 April will be the creation of "400,000 green jobs" by switching to a "low carbon economy".

Bizarrely – and there is no more appropriate a word for it - Brown seems particularly excited by the idea that we should all drive electric cars, and inevitably everyone has been piling in to point out what a farce this is.

But last year sales of all-electric cars in Britain fell to just 179. The Indian G-Wiz, much fancied by Mr Brown and Boris Johnson, costs up to £15,795 for a vehicle which can only travel rather slowly for 75 miles before its battery needs several hours of recharging.

What puts this madness in a league of its own, however, is the failure of Brown to ask himself where all this planet-saving electricity is to come from. Yet, as Prof Stanley Fieldman explains in a letter in The Daily Telegraph, it comes of course from the National Grid, 75 percent powered by fossil fuels. Taking account of transmission losses, the CO2 emissions would be nearly twice those of the equivalent amount of diesel.

But this is only a start of the madness. When it comes to the 400,000 "green jobs" Brown is going to create, Ben Pile in the Register demonstrates that this is even more of a pipe dream than those toy cars.

For instance, the Government apparently thinks that, by 2015, 39,600 new jobs will be created in "geothermal energy", 74,900 in making "alternative fuels", 25,300 in making energy from the sun and another 69,300 in erecting wind turbines.

It comes to something that Booker's words to describe this fantasy are "babyish make-believe" – yet this is supposed to be serious policy from grown-up government. It does not even qualify as "infantile".

Thanks to the drying up of credit and the collapsing pound (most of the technology has to be bought from abroad), our "renewables industry" is now in such a crisis that five of Britain's largest wind projects have recently been abandoned or put on hold, while BP is axing 620 jobs from its solar energy division because it is so uneconomic.

Furthermore, the "£100 billion green energy package" announced by Brown last year is set to raise the 14 percent of our electricity bills we already pay for "renewables" to 32 percent. For industry it will be 55 percent.

Then, each of the 25,000 new jobs the government hopes to create in "waste management" will cost us £1.2 million – although this also is fantasy. It is not going to happen.

But if Brown is bad, Obama is worse. He is not only fixated on electric cars, his target from "green jobs" is five million, a job creating scheme on a heroic scale. Here, though Duke University, partly financed by warmist lobby groups, inadvertently pricks the bubble.

The five main sources of all those new jobs will be "LED lighting", "high performance windows", "auxiliary power units for long-haul trucks", "solar power" and "super soil systems, or new technology for treating hog wastes".

Booker argues that the only real way Obama could create his new jobs would be to erect giant treadmills and employ five million Americans to run up and down generating power.

The really terrifying thing is that Brown and Obama look like adults and they sound like adults. But if this is all they have to offer, then – as Booker avers - truly our western civilisation is now slipping over the edge.

COMMENT THREAD