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| Britain |
| Cameron's first stupid mistake |
| 2010-05-09 |
| Not content with having destroyed British conservatism, David Cameron has decided he might as well go the whole hog and finish off the British economy as well. He announced it yesterday as one of his key priorities if and when he forms his Coalition of the Suicidal with Nick Clegg. He said he would make “the creation of a low carbon economy a priority.' Presumably – demonstrating that same sophistication that secured his party such a spectacular popular mandate in the General Election – Cameron imagined he was being frightfully clever. ‘Here's a sop I can easily afford to give the Lib Dems, without betraying any of my party's core principles' kind of thing. No Dave. I hate to tell you this but committing Britain to a low-carbon economy is not like committing yourself to keeping all phone boxes painted red or promising Britain will never join a currency it was never going to join in a million years anyway. A low carbon economy is virtually the same thing as NO economy. It means: 1. Committing your country – at the enormous expense of at least £18 billion a year – to combating an entirely imaginary problem called CO2, which is plant food, and which makes no serious contribution to Anthropogenic Global Warming. 2. Losing 2.2 real jobs for every “Green job' you subsidise with taxpayers' money. 3. Crippling industry with higher fuel costs and greater tax and regulation at the very moment in the economic cycle when what it needs is cheap, reliable energy, a slashing of red tape and lower taxation. 4. Squandering still more money on “alternative energy' sources, all of which are enormously expensive, none of which work. If Cameron tries to push this sort of legislation through, our only hope is that he will be torn apart by the Furies within his party, many of whom are as AGW-skeptical as they are Euro-skeptical. I agree entirely with Harry Mount: if I were a proper Conservative who'd squandered five years of my life paying lip service to the Cameroons' liberal pieties in the belief that this would get me into government I should be perfectly livid right now and itching for revenge. Cameron has failed his party and failed his country. He deserves all the lack of the support we can possibly give him. |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #4 In the US, electric generation is 40% of energy use. It's probably pretty close in Britain too. So going 100% nuke/hydro still leaves 60% burning fossil fuels. Unlikely to qualify for the political class's low carbon fantasy economy. And that doesn't even count all the oil/gas/coal used to make plastics. |
| Posted by: ed 2010-05-09 22:48 |
| #3 What Bulldog said. Yes nukes. |
| Posted by: lex 2010-05-09 22:20 |
| #2 Low carbon: it's called a subsistence economy. How long before the Brits are featured on National Geographic specials? |
| Posted by: ed 2010-05-09 22:16 |
| #1 Simple solution: go nuclear. Big style. France style. Flip the bird to the Greenpeace et al. and do us all a favour. We can't rely on fossil fuels forever, so we might as well do the sensible thing, if we're going to go low carbon, and embrace the cleanest option around. . |
| Posted by: Bulldog 2010-05-09 16:28 |