Environmental policy: not so much enviro as mental

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Christopher Monckton of Brenchley:

The Environmentalist Committee of the House of Commons, chaired by the ghastly “Tim” Yeo, who has profited to the tune of approaching $1 million from chairmanships of numerous shady windmill subsidy-farming corporations during his undistinguished and soon-to-be-terminated time in office, held a mutually sycophantic hearing last May with Sir David King, the ever-fatuous “climate-change ambassador” to the Children’s Coalition that has made amateur and costly attempts to govern Britain for the past five years.

In that time of supposed “austerity”, the national debt has doubled.

No small fraction of the rapid growth in debt arises from the vast sums the kids have been flinging at heroically stupid measures such as converting Drax, the world’s largest, cleanest and most thermally efficient coal-fired power station, from burning coal to gobbling wood-chips imported from America.

The tiny tots had not understood that the energy density of coal is many times that of timber. Even if Birnam Wood should come to Dunsinane, there are not enough trees in the whole of Europe to keep Drax going.

Then there was the London rent-a-bike scheme that came in at a mere $26,000 per bike, and no one blinked because this was Saving The Planet.

Then there were the recent decisions both by the Scottish Executive and by the UK Government that fracking would not be allowed. For more than a decade, Russia and other vested interests have been pouring money into “green” groups that have protested against fracking on the specious ground that it causes earthquakes, contaminates the water supply and will visit the Ten Plagues of Egypt on anyone who indulges in it.

Yet at the same time – one couldn’t make this up – Scottish and British Ministers have been subsidizing schemes to push CO2 from power stations deep underground through pipes under very high pressure. Er, hello, is there anyone at home?

Then there were the useless windmills. These bat-blatting, bird-blending eyesores now grimly overshadow close to two-thirds of Scotland’s once-beautiful land mass. Tourist numbers in formerly beautiful areas of the countryside now scarred by this pointless industrialization of the landscape are nosediving.

The vast sums once spent by various taxpayer-funded busybody agencies to protect Scotland’s rare raptors and game birds – the hen harrier, the golden eagle, the osprey, the capercailzie, the black grouse, to name but a few – have all gone to waste. The subsidy farms are mincing the birds daily. Soon they will have wiped out all of these noble but fragile constituents in Scotland’s environment, in the name of – er – preserving the environment.

Don’t get me started on the cost. Let me just point out that if in the recent referendum Scotland had separated herself from her nearest and dearest neighbor so as to become a more cringingly abject satrapy of the European tyranny-by-clerk (independence was not on offer), a situation unprecedented in the history of economics would have arisen.

Before long, as the last eagles flutter to their bloody deaths at the foot of these cruel towers of steel, more than 100% of Scotland’s electricity will come from wind on those rare occasions when it is blowing neither too little nor too much.

For geographical reasons the only grid interconnect with another nation is with England. So England will be the monopsony customer for Scotland’s intermittent surplus of electrical power, and can pay as little as she likes for it.

Yet most of the time the turbines are not turning – or, if they are, they are powered by the grid to stop their bearings seizing. At those times, Scotland will have to import most – and eventually all – of her electricity from England, which at these times will become Scotland’s monopoly supplier of power, and can charge as much as she likes for it.

Never before in economic history has any nation been so crass as to place itself at the wrong end of a monopoly and a monopsony simultaneously. This is a world first for economic stupidity.

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