One way we could reduce the severity of the cuts
Posted by Sammy Wilson, MP for East Antrim, at 15:08, Thu 28 October 2010:
Obviously the big event this week was the announcement of the outcome of the comprehensive spending review by the Chancellor of the Exchequer on Wednesday. However, the night before I was invited along with a select group of journalists, scientists and ambassadors to a lecture by the President of the Czech Republic on the subject of climate change. He has been outspoken in his opposition to the hysteria which has gripped the political establishment on this issue, an obsession which has made normally sensible people behave and speak like fools.
Much of what he said has already been published in his excellent book “Blue Planet in Green Shackles – What is endangered : Climate or freedom?” He gave an excellent exposition of the uncertainty of the science surrounding climate change speculation, the attempts to suppress any dissenting scientific voices by the climate change Gestapo, the enormous costs of the measures to reduce CO2 and the impositions on the freedom of us all as policy makers sought to regulate our lives in pursuit of their carbon reducing goal. He spoke passionately as one who had lived under dictatorial communist rule most of his life, about the new climate totalitarianism.
On close examination the policies which the climate change zealots propose are frightening. Their demands about changing the way we eat would make wartime rationing look generous, their restrictions on air and car travel would take us back to the 1950s in terms of mobility and access to travel for ordinary people (though not of course for the climate experts who need to travel millions of miles to spread their new gospel) their demand that the population of the UK needs to be halved would make China’s one child birth control policy seem mild and one of the climate gurus James Lovelock has even suggested that we may need to suspend democracy to drive through climate changing measures. All of these crazy ideas may seem so far fetched that we disregard them but the cost of climate change policies are already being paid by us all every day.
It is ironic that this week the Chancellor has announced £81bn worth of cuts to public spending across the UK, £4bn from N.I., yet persists with the implementation of now leader of the Labour Party, Red Ed’s Climate Change Act which according to the minister responsible for climate change, will cost a minimum of £18.3bn per year to implement. On top of that there are the costs which the general public pay in terms of higher electricity costs as the government complies with the EU demand for more renewable energy this alone is calculated to add £880 per year to household electricity bills.
Of course it is argued that the switchover will generate “green jobs” which we should welcome in the middle of a recession but the costs of these jobs in terms of subsidies are enormous. A wind farm at Thanet in Kent will generate 21 permanent jobs but will require a subsidy of £1.2bn a cost of £3m per year over the 20 year life of the turbines. Even nuclear power stations are cheaper and of course coal fired stations which could be run on UK produced fuel would only cost a fraction of the wind generated electricity but now that we are on the slippery climate change slope we can’t stop spending money madly.
The cuts which we will have to introduce in N.I. as our share of the national financial burden will be difficult and need to be faced by politicians and the public alike. They will also be immediate, impacting on the quality of life, the job prospects and the economic wellbeing of everyone. I think that most people will rightly question the wisdom of reducing spending on new schools, quicker operations for the ill, a home for the homeless now, whilst throwing money away in the vain hope that in doing so we might reduce the world temperate by a fraction of a degree a hundred years in the future.
Stepping back from the climate change madness which has gripped the political establishment will not solve our financial difficulties entirely but it might reduce the size of the pill which we have to swallow.
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Posted by Sharon Ramsey, 20:13, Thu 28 October 2010: (Is this post abusive?) #
You are right ,the green lobby is all about control and very little to do with climate change, well said Mr Wilson!
Posted by Alister Jackson, 22:01, Thu 28 October 2010: (Is this post abusive?) #
Where do I even start?
Well let's go at this paragraph by paragraph...
The unnamed Czech Republic President is Mr Vaclav Klaus. Dubbed 'The Margaret Thatcher of Central Europe' Mr Klaus is a noted Eurosceptic and right wing open market economist. He is not a climate scientist. His book, "Blue Planet in Green Shackles", however does focus largely on climate science.
In 2007 he was quoted as saying "Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so.".
But this, of course, total is nonsense. Between 97% and 98% of climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC (man-made climate change) outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (http://www.ipcc.ch/index.htm). (Source http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2010/06/22/the-scientific-consensus-on-climate-change-stronger-and-stronger/)
Mr Klaus does not agree with the IPCC's finding's calling them "a group of politicized scientists with one-sided opinions and one-sided assignments". The truth, however, is that scientific consensus of man made climate change is overwhelming and is growing with every passing month.
(For more information have a look at http://climate.nasa.gov/ for yourself. Also there are good, very comprehensive articles here http://www.logicalscience.com/consensus/consensusD1.htm and here http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686)
If we look at the reasons behind Mr Klaus's views, perhaps that would be enlightening? Well lets start with the Czech Republic's reliance on coal – 44% of their total energy usage is from coal – placing the 6th in the world.
(http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=1224)
Understandably, perhaps, Mr Klaus wants to spare the Czech Republic the responsibility of reducing their own CO2...
However if you dig a little deeper you will find close connections between Mr Klaus and the Russian fossil fuel industry. In 2007 Klaus received the 2007 Pushkin Medal from Putin, and refused to comment on Russia's delay of a few days' oil supplies to the Czech Republic in response to the placement of US radar stations there.
Indeed, the state-influenced Russian oil company Lukoil is paying to translate, publish and promote Klaus' book on climate change... If you look at the way the tobacco lobby worked in the 70s and 80s you will start to see the parallels.
As for the demands of the green lobby, of course food can be produced in a manner not harmful to the environment – to suggest otherwise is simply scaremongering. If there are specific 'demands' that worry you, I challenge you to list them.
Next I'll address your concerns about James Lovelock. Here is the interview in question. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/mar/29/james-lovelock-climate-change He is not, as you state, 'suggesting that we may need to suspend democracy to drive through climate changing measures', he is predicting what will happen if climate change is ignored and major climate catastrophe occurs. He is not suggesting this as something that is desirable or should be done. I suggest you read the article in question to get a better understanding if what he is saying.
In your next paragraph you attack subsidies given to green energy projects. The green energy industry is bound to be a major growth area of the future and any projects funded currently will reap rewards in time, as technology and skills are developed. Undoubtedly some technologies will work out better than others, but until we try these out, until Britain invests in the technology, we might never know. I suspect you would have been a critic of money invested in the fledgling computer and electronics industries in the 1970s, but the knowledge and skills learnt there have paid off later as these industries became more mainstream and more profitable. Of course discretion needs to be used to minimise waste and excess, that is without question, and you are otherwise right to question these sums.
I would humbly suggest that if you want the treasury to give more to money NI you might want to put pressure on them to collect their taxes properly.
http://www.private-eye.co.uk/sections.php?section_link=in_the_back
Vodafone's missing tax billions alone are more than the cuts in the entire NI budget over the next four years in total. In comparison to this all the money spent on green issues is a drop in Carrickfergus Harbour. This is what enrages people, not trying to protect the planet's future.
I think both you and Mr Klaus are mistaking a scientific issue for a political left wing/right wing one, and making a pretty big mistake too. If you disagree, then please provide facts, data or evidence of what you claim so that they can be examined. Otherwise it's just an opinion flying in the face of a lot, an awful lot, of hard facts and evidence.
Alister Jackson Bsc, Msc