Lunacy is costly - the cost: £50 billion every single year - let's sell vegetables to each other

Source: James Delingpole

Never mind the Climategate whitewash – what about our new £50 billion annual climate bill?

July 7th, 2010

So the Sir Muir Russell inquiry into Climategate was, pretty much, a whitewash. But then we’d already guessed that. The danger with all these official cover-ups – reported with salivating glee by the Warmists’ drooling useful idiots in the Mainstream Media – is that they distract from the main point.

And the main point, at least as far as British taxpayers are concerned is this: under the terms of the 2008 Climate Change Act we are the only country in the world legally committed to making swinging reductions in CO2, the harmless trace gas which helps plants grow and which we really need more of not less in order to soften the blow of the imminent global cooling.

How much is this lunacy going to cost us? The figure which used to be quoted was £18 billion per annum. Apparently this has now more than doubled.

The new figure our glorious Coalition intends to squander – every single year for the next 40 years – is £50 billion, all in order to deal with a problem that doesn’t actually exist.

We learned this horror in questions posed in the Lords earlier this week by Lord Lawson of Blaby in response to something called the Green Investment Bank Commission on “Unlocking investment to deliver Britain’s low carbon future” – aka the Wigley Report.

Lord Lawson of Blaby: I am grateful to the Leader of the House. Is my noble friend aware that only a couple of days ago, Mr Bob Wigley, the chairman of the previous Government’s Green Investment Bank Commission, stated that meeting the requirements of the absurd Climate Change Act will cost the United Kingdom £50 billion a year, every year, for the next 40 years. How-above all in this age of austerity-can this possibly be justified?

I don’t know which is more terrifying – Lawson’s shock revelation or the nauseating mix of delusional arrogance and complacency in the response from the coalition’s parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Department of Energy and Climate Change Lord Marland.

Lord Marland: I am very grateful to noble Lords for fighting over a question for me; it is quite rare in this job. However, I must correct my noble friend; the Green Investment Bank was an initiative set up by our own party and one must not rule out the phenomenal business opportunities that it offers for this country. We must have 2 million heat pumps by 2020. We must have bioenergy, which will create 100,000 jobs at a value of £116 million. Wind alone should create 130,000 jobs at a value of £36 billion. At a time when the country needs investment, these are heartening numbers.

Why is that Lord Marland’s boast reminds me so much of my favourite Daily Mash story – the one about ex-chancellor Alastair Darling’s ingenious scheme to pay off the national debt by selling unicorns to the Chinese?