From killer diesel fumes to ruinous floods, every green initiative imposed on us by politicians has ended in disaster... and this is the great folly of our age, says CHRISTOPHER BOOKER
What
a parable for our times the great diesel scandal has been, as councils
vie to see which can devise the heaviest taxes on nearly half the cars
in Britain because they are powered by nasty, polluting diesel.
This
week, it was announced many diesel drivers will soon have to pay fully
£24 a day to drive into Central London, while 35 towns across the
country are thinking of following suit. Already some councils charge up
to £90 more for a permit to park a diesel car.
The
roots of this debacle go back to the heyday of Tony Blair’s government,
when his chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, became obsessed with
the need to fight global warming.
Although
he was an expert in ‘surface chemistry’ — roughly speaking, the study
of what happens when, for example, a liquid meets a gas — King had no
qualifications in climate science.
'Every single green scheme
politicians have fallen for has failed to achieve any of the results
claimed for them and costing us more billions every year' says
Christopher Booker
On one
occasion he famously told an environmental audit committee of MPs that
the world was warming so dangerously fast that, by the end of this
century, the only continent on earth left habitable would be Antarctica.
His
light-bulb moment came when he learned that diesel emits less CO2 than
petrol. What a brilliant way it would be to save the planet, he thought,
to manipulate the tax system to encourage motorists to make the switch —
which millions did.
And here we are 15
years later, being told that, as an unexpected side-effect, more than
ten million diesel vehicles on Britain’s roads are chucking out so much
nitrogen oxide and other toxic pollutants they are being linked to
12,000 premature deaths a year.
This is
only the latest in a seemingly endless flow of examples of supposedly
‘green’ government schemes which, one after another, turn out to have
been standing common sense on its head, at a cost which is rocketing up
by billions of pounds a year.
There may
be other competitors for the title of the greatest scandal in Britain
today, but this is so crazy that it is time we all woke up to how
damagingly mad it has become.
Nine years ago, MPs voted almost
unanimously for then Labour minister Ed Miliband’s Climate Change Act,
thus making Britain the only country in the world committed by law to
cut its ‘carbon emissions’ by 80 per cent in just 40 years.
Not
one of those politicians bothered to wonder how in practice such an
absurdly ambitious target could be met: which is why we have since seen
successive governments thrashing about trying to adopt one dotty ‘green’
scheme after another.
Last week, I was
asked in conversation: ‘Why is it that almost all these green schemes
seem to end up as a fiasco?’ To which I replied: ‘You’ve only got one
word wrong there. You can leave out the word “almost”.’
The
truth is that every single green scheme the politicians have fallen for
has proved to be a total fiasco: failing to achieve any of the results
claimed for them and costing us more billions with every year that
passes.
Consider the scandal of Drax in
Yorkshire, until recently the largest, cleanest, most efficient
coal-fired power station in Europe.
Now,
thanks to an annual half-a-billion pounds of public subsidy, Drax has
been switching from burning coal to millions of tons a year of wood
pellets.
'This week, it was announced
many diesel drivers will soon have to pay fully £24 a day to drive into
Central London, while 35 towns across the country are thinking of
following suit. Already some councils charge up to £90 more for a permit
to park a diesel car.'
Absurdly,
these are shipped 3,500 miles to Britain from the U.S., where vast
acreages of virgin forest are being felled, supposedly to be replaced
with new trees that will eventually soak up all the CO2 emitted by
burning them.
Unfortunately, a bright
spark has just pointed out in a report for a respected think-tank that
it could take a replacement tree hundreds of years to grow to maturity —
which would be far too long to have any supposed effect on any climate
change. (It should be noted that the former coalition energy minister
Chris Huhne, having been released from prison for perverting the course
of justice over speeding points, became the European chairman of a firm
called Zilkha Biomass, which makes its money supplying wood pellets from
North America to Europe.)
The bottom
line is that a new report has just confirmed that, far from reducing its
CO2 footprint, Drax is now emitting more than it did when it was only
burning coal.
Meanwhile, why is
Northern Ireland going through its worst political crisis since the end
of the Troubles? Because of the collapse of its power-sharing government
over another green scheme, the Renewable Heat Incentive.
When
businesses discovered that for every £100 they paid for wood chips to
heat their offices, warehouses and factories, UK taxpayers would pay
them £160 in subsidies, not surprisingly they kept their boilers running
round the clock as if there were no tomorrow.
'This is only the latest in a
seemingly endless flow of examples of supposedly ‘green’ government
schemes which, one after another, turn out to have been standing common
sense on its head, at a cost which is rocketing up by billions of pounds
a year.'
When it was discovered
that, by 2020, we will have paid those businesses £1 billion — even to
heat buildings left empty for years — this created such a scandal that
it brought down the government.
That
example made headlines, but the same is happening quietly in the rest of
the country, too, where owners of large houses openly boast that they
are running their boilers flat out, even in summer, to cash in on the
racket which gives them a 60 per cent profit on every £1 they spend on
wood chips.
Some of that wood is now
coming from clearing priceless ancient woodlands, such as a National
Trust estate in Cheshire which the charity plans to turn back into open
heathland.
Another scandal created
under the same scheme is the way canny developers are plonking down
large industrial installations called ‘anaerobic digesters’ in the
middle of the English countryside, to turn huge quantities of crops into
small quantities of methane for the national gas grid.
Official
figures show that, thanks to subsidies costing us more than £200
million a year, 131,000 acres of maize are now being grown to feed the
anaerobic digesters, on land formerly used for food crops.
'Then there was the dream of
‘carbon capture and storage’, for which Gordon Brown’s government
offered £4 billion for companies to come up with a way of removing CO2
from the coal and gas used to make electricity, and then piping it away
for burial in holes under the North Sea'
Separately,
toxic spills of the ammonia that is used in the process have repeatedly
poisoned livestock and fish in nearby fields and rivers.
Then
there was the dream of ‘carbon capture and storage’, for which Gordon
Brown’s government offered £4 billion for companies to come up with a
way of removing CO2 from the coal and gas used to make electricity, and
then piping it away for burial in holes under the North Sea.
Only one Scottish power station took up the offer, spending £1 billion before it discovered that it didn’t work.
But
even though geologists say it can never work, the Government still
talks about it as the only way it can allow coal and gas-fired power
plants — which still supply more than half our electricity — to stay in
business.
Consider, too, the not-so
brilliant idea of bribing motorists to switch to supposedly ‘green’
all-electric cars. So far, this has cost us more than £50 million in
subsidies, for the mere 50,000 cars which have been sold, at £25,000 or
more a time. This is only a fraction of the 26 million cars on Britain’s
roads.
And what gets cynically hidden
by the authorities is that much of the electricity used to charge their
batteries comes, of course, from fossil fuels. Add in emissions from the
manufacturing process and, unsurprisingly, these vehicles give out more
CO2 than they are claimed to save.
'But even though geologists say
it can never work, the Government still talks about it as the only way
it can allow coal and gas-fired power plants — which still supply more
than half our electricity — to stay in business.'
Yet
under the latest ‘carbon budget’, a five-yearly environmental plan
nodded through by MPs to meet our commitments under Miliband’s misguided
Climate Change Act, they still fondly imagine that, within 13 years, 60
per cent of all Britain’s cars will be electric.
The
latest wheeze to catch the attention of gullible politicians has been a
mega-project to spend £40 billion on six giant ‘tidal lagoons’ around
Britain’s coasts, beginning with one in Swansea Bay, to harness the
power of the tide to provide ‘clean, green’ electricity.
This
seemed so irresistible to David Cameron and George Osborne that they
put it in the Tory manifesto at the last election — and the then
chancellor even mentioned it in his Budget speech. Only when the figures
were looked at more carefully did they realise how little electricity
this would produce. Not only that, it would be the most expensive in the
world!
The firm behind the scheme
asked the Government to agree to give it a uniquely high subsidy. The
project will only work, it said, if the power produced could be sold to
the National Grid at a staggering £168 per megawatt hour.
'The latest wheeze to catch the
attention of gullible politicians has been a mega-project to spend £40
billion on six giant ‘tidal lagoons’ around Britain’s coasts, beginning
with one in Swansea Bay, to harness the power of the tide to provide
‘clean, green’ electricity.'
This
was well over three times the wholesale price of unsubsidised
electricity from coal or gas-fired power stations, and would naturally
be paid for by every UK householder through green surcharges on our
electricity bills.
As a result of such
concerns, a report on tidal energy was commissioned from a former energy
minister, Charles Hendry. His objectivity can be guessed at when you
learn that he is chairman of the world’s largest offshore wind farm
project. Unsurprisingly, he was gung-ho for giving tidal lagoons the
go-ahead.
But how can ministers justify
proceeding with another pipe dream which, according to some
conservationists, apart from its ludicrous cost would inflict serious
damage on wading birds, eels and other fish?
This
is because the building of gigantic stone tidal barriers miles long
interferes with the natural ecosystem. Indeed, this disruption to the
natural order is a common problem with schemes which are designed to be
good for ‘the environment’. When, for example, the Somerset Levels
suffered serious flooding in 2014, it emerged that this was not just a
freak of nature.
'To meet
that Climate Change Act target, the Government still dreams of closing
down all our remaining fossil-fuel power stations, instead relying on
‘zero-carbon’ electricity from renewables such as wind, sun and
wood-burning, and a number of new nuclear power stations, which seem
ever less likely to be built after wrangles over funding.'
For
18 years, the local rivers and drainage ditches had not been dredged by
the Environment Agency, with the deliberate intention of keeping more
water flooding out on to the Levels, to provide a habitat for birds and
other wildlife.
One former head of the
agency, who previously ran the Royal Society for the Protection of
Birds, had remarked that she wanted to see ‘a limpet mine’ on every one
of the pumping stations which — separately from the dredging — were used
to pump out the water channels to prevent flooding.
When
the lack of dredging led to the inevitable, and the Levels disastrously
flooded for the second time in three years, it not only did £100
million worth of damage to homes and businesses.
With
bitter irony, it also resulted in the drowning of huge numbers of the
birds, badgers and other creatures the conservationists had wanted to
save.
Flooding aside, however, by far
the greatest environmental damage, at the greatest cost to our household
bills, has been done by the £52 billion so far spent on covering vast
areas of our countryside and the sea around our coasts with wind and
solar farms, which are now adding £5 billion a year to our electricity
bills.
'Our politicians have been
allowed to get away with all this make-believe for so long that few
people noticed some startling figures published a few weeks ago at the
time of the Budget, by the Office of Budget Responsibility.'
Apart
from the way these eyesores have come to dominate parts of our
landscape, studies have shown the shocking damage the windmills do to
birds and bats, including species such as golden eagles, which are
supposed to be protected by law.
Research
by the ornithological society SEO/Birdlife suggested that each turbine
kills between 110 and 330 birds a year, though the RSPB countered this
saying that ‘our own research suggests that a well-located wind farm is
unlikely to be causing birds any harm’.
(Conservationists claim the wind industry has a vested interest in covering up the true extent of bird deaths.)
And
all this is to produce just 14 per cent of our electricity, available
so intermittently that if it wasn’t for those remaining CO2-emitting
coal and gas-fired power stations stepping in when the wind wasn’t
blowing and the sun wasn’t shining, our lights would have already gone
out.
Yet to meet that Climate Change
Act target, the Government still dreams of closing down all our
remaining fossil-fuel power stations, instead relying on ‘zero-carbon’
electricity from renewables such as wind, sun and wood-burning, and a
number of new nuclear power stations, which seem ever less likely to be
built after wrangles over funding.
'It was
exactly a year ago that Theresa May’s joint chief of staff Nick Timothy
described the Climate Change Act as ‘a monstrous act of national
self-harm’. It is high time his boss realised just how chillingly right
he was.'
Our politicians have
been allowed to get away with all this make-believe for so long that few
people noticed some startling figures published a few weeks ago at the
time of the Budget, by the Office of Budget Responsibility.
These
showed that, over the next five years, the annual cost of all the green
taxes and subsidies we shall be paying for is due to rise from £8.97
billion a year to £15.2 billion.
This
will bring the five-year total by 2022 to more than £73 billion, far
higher than the estimated cost of the HS2 rail project, the most
expensive engineering project ever seen in Britain. This equates to £561
a year for every household in the land.
When we consider that colossal sum, most of us may well conclude that our politicians must have gone completely off their heads.
Except
that, alas, our MPs live in such a bubble of unreality that few will
even have looked at those terrifying figures, let alone at what they are
allowing our money to be spent on.
It
was exactly a year ago that Theresa May’s joint chief of staff Nick
Timothy described the Climate Change Act as ‘a monstrous act of national
self-harm’. It is high time his boss realised just how chillingly right
he was.
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