When is the rest of the Western world going to catch up with
Donald Trump and point out that the green emperor is wearing no clothes?
I ask as a concerned UK
taxpayer absolutely sick to death of the vast sums of money that continue to
be funnelled into the pockets of crooks, liars, spivs, chancers,
con-artists and fantasists in the name of solving the non-existent problem of
“climate change.”
Let me give
you some examples of what I mean.
Wales’s £18
million tidal energy flop
If there’s
one thing everyone who thinks of themselves as reasonable and well-informed
knows, tidal power is the thing. How do they know this? Well, because they’re
aware that wind and solar power have their flaws but their hearts tell them
that renewable energy must be a good thing because it’s clean and it’s free so
therefore they’ve decided to pin their hopes on the technology whose crapness
hasn’t been tested yet – and that means tidal.
Also they’ll have read
thinly-disguised press releases like this article First full-scale tidal generator in
Wales unveiled: Deltastream array to power 10,000 homes using ebb and flow of
the ocean and gone: “Well they wouldn’t print stuff like that unless it
were true, would they?”
But now, surprise surprise,
this tidal project – subsidised to the tune of £8 million by the European
Union, with another £500,000 from the Welsh government – is lying
in ruins on the Pembrokeshire sea bed because the company that ran
it – Tidal Energy Ltd – has gone into administration. It failed after just
three months of operation.
This is a
problem all too familiar with so many projects in the renewable energy sector:
see also Solyndra and Abengoa, for example. Because the unreliable, expensive
power they produce is not commercially viable, they fold as soon as the
government subsidies dry up. But we’re not supposed to mind about public money
being squandered in this way because, hey, it’s green and the intentions were
good.
Northern Ireland’s £1 billion
Renewable Heat Incentive disaster
In 2012, in order to boost
renewable energy usage the Northern
Irish government hit on the brilliant scheme of subsidising
businesses to the tune of a £160 rebate for every £100 they spent on fuels,
such as wood pellets, burnt in biomass boilers. Naturally, every business with
any sense piled in to grab a piece of this free money.
As the Times(£) reports, this
had unintended consequences:
Flaws in the scheme were
exposed by a whistleblower who said businesses were buying biomass boilers
solely to collect the subsidy. The whistleblower alleged that one farmer
expected to make £1 million over 20 years for using a biomass boiler to heat an
empty shed, while heating a number of empty factories would net their owner
£1.5 million.
Northern Ireland’s
auditor-general, Kieran Donnelly, says the RHI had “serious systemic weaknesses
from the start” because it did not have the built-in spending controls imposed
on a similar scheme in Great Britain. He added that the scheme was vulnerable
to abuse and possible fraud.
Now taxpayers face a bill of
over £1 billion, £490 million payable by Northern Ireland, the rest by
taxpayers in England, Scotland and Wales.
The great £216 million
anaerobic digester scam
Anaerobic digesters are machines that turn crops into fuel, by converting agricultural waste into methane which is fed into the national gas grid. This is a very expensive way of producing energy – and just the sort of thing Jonathan Swift was satirising three centuries ago when his Academy of Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels devised schemes to extract sunbeams from cucumbers.
Anaerobic digesters are machines that turn crops into fuel, by converting agricultural waste into methane which is fed into the national gas grid. This is a very expensive way of producing energy – and just the sort of thing Jonathan Swift was satirising three centuries ago when his Academy of Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels devised schemes to extract sunbeams from cucumbers.
But in the anaerobic digester
case, a gullible British government – the useless Cameron/Clegg Coalition to be
specific – actually decided that sunbeams from cucumbers was such a good
idea that they’d massively subsidise it through the Renewable Heat Incentive.
Naturally, like cockroaches to a rotting carcass, the usual rent-seekers –
among them wind turbine developer Dale “Dog On A Rope” Vince have piled in to
take advantage of all that free money.
But as David Rose has
reported, the Anaerobic Digester business is yet another dodgy eco scam. First
there’s not enough agricultural waste to fuel these machines, so instead crops
– such as eco-unfriendly maize – are being grown specifically to provide fuel
them. A government report has described this as “not a cost-effective means of
biomethane production.” No, indeed. Methane gas produced in this way costs
three-and-half times as much as that from fossil fuel sources.
On top of this, these AD
industrial plants can be highly polluting – both in the form of increased
traffic (just one project by Dale Vince’s Ecotricity will involve 12,792
extra “vehicle movements” per year in a hitherto tranquil rural area) and in
the form of leaks, like the one that contaminated 70 acres of this farmer’s land. Oh,
and it can also cause explosions like the one that blew up a containment tank
at Harper Adams agricultural college two years ago.
Wind turbine sickness
Seven families from Banteer, N.
Cork in Ireland are set to win a multi-million Euro landmark court
ruling in an out-of-court settlement in a long-running case
against a German wind turbine manufacturer. They sued because of the damage
done to their health by the infrasound and low frequency noise produced by the
wind turbines sited near their homes.
This scandal has been simmering
for years. I have been reporting since 2012 on the
damage to human and animal health caused by wind turbines. But the renewables
industry – worth an annual $300 billion –
has many powerful vested interests and has persistently sought to cover its
tracks with threatening legal letters, gagging clauses, and lavishly funded
propaganda by industry trade bodies.
What’s significant about this
Irish case is that it now sets a global precedent for further legal action
around the world. If I were an investor, I seriously wouldn’t want to be
exposed to the wind industry right now: it could face class actions as heavy as
the one against Big Tobacco. Although I have no control over the investment
strategy of my hedge fund CoolFutures, one of the things I hope it will
be doing is shorting wind turbine shares.
I once got into trouble with
Australia’s incredibly politically correct press complaints commission for
quoting a sheep farmer who described wind farm developers being as bad as
paedophiles. I would hereby like to apologise to paedophiles for any offence
that may have been caused by this disgusting analogy.
The ruination of mid-Wales
I urge you to sign this petition. All right – so
it’s the normally ghastly 38 degrees but this is a cause worth supporting: the
preservation of some of the matchlessly beautiful rural Welsh landscape which
is threatened with destruction by a massive wind turbine development being
foisted on it by the eco-loons in Wales’s Mickey Mouse pretend parliament the
Welsh Assembly.
The area
involved is at least 600 square miles of the Radnor Hills from the Brecon
Beacons all the way to the Shropshire Border. This is planning on a massive
scale.
The
previous round of wind generations proposals was widely debated and resulted in
the so called TAN 8 allocations in areas deemed to be of minimum environmental
impact. These new proposals are for an area fifteen times larger, with no
Environmental Impact Assessment.
What is
being proposed is the expansion of the alternative energy target for our area
from 50 megawatts to 600 megawatts. This is an eye-watering hike. The
deployment of wind-power on this scale in to the national grid will necessitate
the construction of huge windmills (the size of the London Eye) and the
installation of ranks of pylons to take their output in to the grid system.
This Grid
presently goes from Gloucester to Shrewsbury and then in to Newtown, and from
Gloucester to Cardiff. Pylons would have to march up our valleys into all our
hills in the designated areas. Access Roads spurring off trunk systems would
have to be built up to each windmill, and the depth of concrete footings under
each mill (more than 50 feet) would have long term effects on water tables. So
the visual effect of the windmills themselves are the least of our worries!
I could, of
course, provide many, many further examples of the waste, corruption and
environmental damage caused by politicians in cahoots with Big Green. But I
think these are more than enough to be going on with.
In the
decade or so that I have been covering the Great Green Climate Scam I have
often been ridiculed and marginalised by colleagues in the mainstream media as
a tin-hat conspiracy theorist. Speaking out against the excesses of the
environmental movement has damaged my career, it has damaged my health, it has
caused massive upset to my family and it has taken me down an alley where the
story has begun to seem so boring and repetitive that every day feels like
groundhog day.
But I don’t
have the slightest regret about any of this because – like all the dedicated
souls, journalists, bloggers, scientists and think tankers who have suffered
similarly in this cause – I have done my small bit in a war worth fighting.
Pretty soon, now, we are all going to be totally vindicated when Donald Trump
assumes office and starts the chain of events which will make it almost
impossible for the green boondoggle to continue.
Here is
what strikes me as bizarre: we are now at the point where the evidence against
the man-made global warming scare has reached critical mass – yet hardly
any of our institutions appears to have caught up with the fact.
In the
mainstream media, for example, there remain still only a handful of
publications prepared to express scepticism about the global warming scare. Our
schools and universities are almost completely ideologically warmist.
So too are
many institutions – corporations, law firms, trade bodies. So too are the vast
majority of churches, of all denominations. So too is almost all local
government. So too are significant number of politicians, not just left-wing
and green ones, but ones who profess to be conservatives and really ought to
know better.
To all
these people, I have some questions:
In the
light of the examples I have given above – and remember these are just the tip
of the iceberg – how comfortable do you feel with your ongoing support for
green policy?
Does the
warm, gooey feeling you get from championing green causes still offset the
damage you now know – demonstrably and incontovertibly – is being done in
the name of saving the planet from global warming?
Do you
think it’s right, fair or just that inefficient, expensive industries with no
environmental benefit should continue to be favoured by government fiat,
to the benefit of rent-seeking troughers and to the detriment of ordinary
taxpayers, the working poor most especially?
When are
you going to apologise to those of us who have been pointing this stuff out for
years?
What actual
value have professional subsidy-troughers like Dale Vince ever
actually created in order to justify their multi-million pound fortunes?
And – one
for Theresa May, here: you’re supposed to be a Conservative, a fount of
commonsense and a champion of the poor, advised by a man, Nick Timothy, who
supposedly totally gets what an enormous scam environmentalism is. So when,
exactly, are we going to see some hard evidence of this in the form of actual
policy?