Tim Yeo is NOT a Corrupt Bastard

Do you ever wonder about political corruption, about those who use positions of power to advance their own venal interests?  I imagine it’s an issue that concerns most people, the declining standards of honesty in public life.  It’s always been with us, of course, but there was a time when it took effort to uncover dishonesty and the abuse of office. 

Now the corrupt are able to drape their dealings quite openly in some fashionable theory or other, avoiding all conflict of interest and crisis of conscience.  How convenient when one no longer has to justify one’s financial wheeler-dealing; how convenient when enrichment is aided by theory and by fashion. 

Just think of Timothy Yeo.  For those unfamiliar with the British political constellation, he is one of the stars in the Tory firmament, presently among the luminaries of our tree-hugging Coalition government, out to save the planet, regardless of the cost.  Oh, but no cost to Yeo; just the contrary; it’s rather a nice little earner. Rather conveniently for him, and for his bank balance, he is the Chairman of the Commons Select Committee, a powerful and influential voice.  

Green policies and wind farms are a jolly good thing, he thinks.  Is there any surprise here?  He earns £65,000 ($98,500) as a Member of Parliament, not a lot, you may very well agree, not a lot for a man like Yeo.  Not to worry: this was supplemented last year by those who appreciate the true value of the Yeo factor.  It was supplemented, to be exact, by an extra £136,000 ($206,000), enabling the poor man to live in a manner to which he clearly has become accustomed.  This, I should add, for a minimum of work.  More, really, for his windy presence. 

So who are these Yeo philanthropists, you ask?  Would it surprise you to know that they are all green?  Oh, not green in judgement, just green in interest, keen in ensuring that environmental friendliness remains one of the great political and policy stalwarts of the day.  For as Tim gets rich they get richer - ‘green’ companies like AFC Energy, Eco City Vehicles and TMO Renewables. 

On his paymaster’s behalf – sorry...in the interests of all of us, at least for those who are not green with envy, Yeo has moved an amendment to the present Energy Bill that will add even tighter targets on the amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted by generating power.  A holy green alliance has been formed.  Alongside Yeo and his shadowy backers (where does their money come from?  Who are the investors) there are the usual suspects, the usual variety of nauseating green lobby groups, Socialist and Liberal MPs and others who are likely to ensure that the amendment is adopted.  The irony of making the rich richer and the poor poorer seems to have escaped the Parliamentary Labour Party.  Yeo’s amendment will mean ever higher energy bills, energy beyond the means of many of the elderly, many more of how will die in future of hypothermia.  I urge you, do not grow old in our brave new energy world.  Oh, but the greater cause of Yeo is such a noble end, worth a few casualties along the way

Two years ago I wrote an article on the spread of wind farms (Whistle down the wind, 31, May 2011) in which I made the following points;

Wind farms, who does not hate the sight of wind-farms? I certainly do. You may think they are necessary as a source of clean and renewable power. If you do I urge you to think again, think of the implications of these hideous blots on the landscape for the landscape. As foreign investors rush in to capitalise on British wind - and the wind of British politicians - just remember that it would take require a farm the size of Greater London to generate as much energy as a single coal-fired power station, assuming a never ending windy day. 

Oh, but think of the money to be made; think of the money being made, for example, by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, effectively bribed by developers to stop them complaining about the killing of eagles by wind turbines. Then there are the bats, of course, the damage these things cause to them; but who cares about the bats? You should care about yourself, though, enough to make sure that you live nowhere near these monstrous carbuncles, because the noise generated has caused health problems for those who do. The difficulty here is that, as the contagion spreads, it will be difficult for any of us to escape them. 

And all this for what, all this disruption, all this stupidity for what? We see our land destroyed, we see the economy weakened, jobs lost or exported elsewhere; we see an ever greater burden of taxation for what?   

Well now I know – it’s all for the benefit of Yeo!  Speak out as much as you want; it will make no practical difference.  Professor Gordon Hughes of Edinburgh University has spoken out, saying that even without the amendment the long-term consequences of the Bill will be horrible (his word).  “It’s a recipe for deindustrialisation”, he added.  “Either we get rid of this obsession, or we give our future to the rest of the world.  The question is whether we are serious about our economic future or not.”

Tim Yeo is serious about his own economic future, just as he is serious about keeping wind farms away from his own immediate neighbourhood.  The rest can go hang, which a great many may very well do in future, when the alternative is a slow death by cold. 

Let me amend the ending of my previous article.  As you sit in your blacked-out and freezing home, listening to the sound of the roaring wind farms, comfort yourself by thinking of Yeo’s profits.  Shame on you for thinking this man, with all of his noble intentions, is a greedy, corrupt, pocket-lining bastard.  Same on you for thinking that the Energy Bill is a fraud, verging on treason against this country.  Shame on you for thinking that Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Labour Party are deluded, self-serving and pathetic morons.  Shame on you for thinking that the investors in the ‘green’ energy firms might very well be Chinese.  The future, you see, is Green...backs.  Oh, and the future is for pigs.  

Tilting at Windmills

Matt, the fifth Viscount Ridley, is one of the people that I am thankful for. A businessman, a libertarian and a journalist, he has done so much to expose bogus and fashionable nostrums. Rather like a modern Don Quixote he has tilted at windmills, wind turbines, to be exact, relentlessly exposing what I am convinced is the greatest ‘alternative energy’ scam of the age.

Writing previously about wind farms I made the following points;

Wind farms, who does not hate the sight of wind-farms? I certainly do. You may think they are necessary as a source of clean and renewable power. If you do I urge you to think again, think of the implications of these hideous blots on the landscape for the landscape. As foreign investors rush in to capitalise on British wind - and the wind of British politicians - just remember that it would take require a farm the size of Greater London to generate as much energy as a single coal-fired power station, assuming a never ending windy day.

Oh, but think of the money to be made; think of the money being made, for example, by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, effectively bribed by developers to stop them complaining about the killing of eagles by wind turbines. Then there are the bats, of course, the damage these things cause to them; but who cares about the bats? You should care about yourself, though, enough to make sure that you live nowhere near these monstrous carbuncles, because the noise generated has caused health problems for those who do. The difficulty here is that, as the contagion spreads, it will be difficult for any of us to escape them.

Writing recently in the Spectator, Ridley tabled a fresh indictment. As he says, to the nearest round number the amount of energy that has been generated by wind farms comes to exactly zero. But the cost has been huge; the cost in fuel poverty for the elderly, in regressive subsidies which pass wealth to the wealth, in the destruction of rural communities and landscapes, in the loss of jobs, the felling of forests and the destruction of wildlife. Things have gone that can never be replaced.

But for so long the politicians were blind to all of this. In Bath, one of England’s most beautiful cities, the Liberal Democrat-led council even proposed to erect a 240ft wind turbine on the hills just to the south. The scheme was heavily promoted by a local landowner, the only person who stood to benefit in windfall profits. It was only after mass protests, and a threat by UNESCO to take away the city’s world heritage status, was the proposal reluctantly dropped.

Now, it would seem, central government is beginning to blow less wind. The big multinationals, who are investing heavily in offshore wind, are beginning to worry that the cornucopia is not endless, that subsidies may no longer he as easy to get in future as they were in the past. Vestas, which wants to build a turbine factory in the county of Kent, is seeking assurances from David Cameron, the Prime Minister, that he is still behind wind energy. Thankfully, George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer and master of the purse strings, has made it clear that he at least is dead set against further expansion, all on the grounds of cost.

Quite frankly we have been scandalously misled by an unholy alliance between stupid politicians, the self-regarding green lobby, covetous manufacturers and venal land owners. Even in economically vibrant times the policy made no sense. One would have to cover this fair land from end to end with wind farms to meet even a fraction of our future energy needs. But in these economically straightened times wind appears to be just that – wind. It took austerity to expose this scandal.

Let them eat wind

There are few things, I am happy to admit, that induce in me feelings of weariness and cynicism more quickly than endless lectures about global warming or climate change or responsible energy policy or a hundred variations on the theme from Bore Gore. It’s the new orthodoxy, the new Puritanism that threatens to submerge us all in a mood of guilt. Not I, not ever, no matter how much tiresome ‘science’ is trotted out. I once expressed my feelings in debate, and when I debate I take no prisoners;

Orthodoxy, that’s the key word, don’t you agree? Global warming has become a new religion. It’s part of that pessimism that has accompanied our species almost since the beginning of time, codified in religions like Christianity. There are precious few now who believe in Doomsday, in the Second Coming and the Last Judgement. So, no more ‘the end is nigh: repent!’ Instead we have ‘global warming is happening: repent!'

We have been taken far down the road of repentance in England. There is no debate; it’s now a matter of consensus across the political divide, with green taxes adding an ever growing burden to patterns of consumption, pushing the most vulnerable in our community ever deeper into fuel poverty. The time has come to fight back, against the onward march of taxes and windmills, a ghastly blight on our green and pleasant land.

Let me tell you how to do it. No, let Matthew Sinclair tell you how to do it. He does so in a highly effective fashion in Let Them Eat Carbon: The Price of Failing Climate Change Policies and How Governments and Big Business Profit From Them, an excellent little polemic. The arguments are tailored to an English shape but there are general policy principles that might as easily be applied elsewhere.

Sinclair’s premise is a simple one: ignore all the usual arguments about global warming. Instead focus on the climate change polices that have arisen on the back of all the theoretical gobbledygook. Just ask; do these things work, what difference do they make?

No difference at all, is the short answer.

Actually, that’s not quite right; government initiatives make a difference alright, but for the worse. Green taxes, the renewable energy option built into electricity bills, generates windfall profits for the energy companies and makes pricing altogether more volatile; bio fuels inflate food costs; renewable energy plans involve a huge waste of resources while making supply ever less secure; windmills transfer profits to the owners of land, transfer profits from the productive to the unproductive sector of the economy; and the only green jobs that are created are for bureaucrats and lobbyists. Oh, sorry, that’s not true: there are also the jobs that are created in the Third World, as companies, overburdened with costs and regulations, move elsewhere.

Sinclair concludes that not only will the various green policies adopted fail to reduce carbon emissions but they will also have the effect of creating a prolonged economic depression in the developed world. I suspect that the Chinese have a close interest here.

The title, incidentally, is a reference to Queen Marie Antoinette and her supposed comment about cakes as a substitute for the absence of bread. Here we are, the new peasants, taxed to perdition to support a distant and out-of-touch court, a new Versailles where all sorts of lobbyists, environmentalists and green activists gather to eat up the produce of the nation. As William Norton wrote recently in Prospect, unelected cartels run an irrational system that does not work even on its own terms but out of which they all do very nicely indeed.

Do I hear the sound of tumbrels? Wishful thinking, or I can only wish that our benighted politicians were not quite so stupid.

Whistle down the wind

I’ve always known that the politics espoused by Green parties were fraudulent, that they advance programmes which would require not just deindustrialisation but a major winnowing of the population. They would require, in other words, some form of democide. Oh, not them and their tofu-eating set, just the ‘others’, the outsiders, the unnecessary people. It really is time that we put the whole of the wretched Green movement under closer scrutiny, time we exposed the hypocrisy and the lies.

Matt Ridley has made an excellent start in an article published by the Spectator on 21 May. Under the title of A green dark age, he outlines the damage that is being done to our countryside by the British government’s new carbon emissions target, adopted under pressure from a range of lobbies, including Greenpeace, an organisation which I hold in the deepest contempt.

I’ll come on to the environment issue in a moment but first I want to touch on another point made in the article, namely the burden a policy based on windmills and such panaceas imposes on consumers in a stealth tax, something called the renewable obligation (RO), tucked in to electricity bills.

At the moment RO adds a cool £1.1billion a year to electricity bills. Ridley suggests that by 2020 this could rise to £8billion, a further thirty per cent. The worst thing about this is that as a form of revenue gathering it’s highly regressive, a reverse Robin Hood policy, which robs the poor, even those too poor to pay income tax, for the benefit of the rich.

In what way does it benefit the rich, you ask? Ridley, who is himself rich and a landowner, gives an honest answer. It benefits them in higher wheat and timber prices; in rents for wind farms, and in something called the ‘feed-in tariff’, which pays three times the market rate to those who produce electricity by ‘renewable' means.

In thinking about this I’m reminded of the old Corn Laws, nineteenth century duties on the import of foreign corn which kept the price of food artificially high, to the benefit of an aristocratic and landed interest. Our present energy policy, the invidious RO, gives every sign of being a twenty-first century version of the Corn Laws.

The original acts helped to restrict economic growth by keeping costs artificially high. They acted as a kind of break on the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution, we all know what that meant, do we not; it meant Blake’s Dark Satanic Mills. If that’s your perception then it’s time to think again. The other point Ridley makes, all too often overlooked, is that the industrial revolution helped save the environment. As Britain turned from wood to coal as a source of energy the forests, long depleted, started to recover, as did natural waterways.

Now what, what can we expect for our green and pleasant land? More of our landscape will be despoiled, that’s what; once again our forests are in danger as the price of wood escalates. Over the country councils require developers who construct a building of more than a 1000 square metres to generate 10% of energy ‘renewably’ on site. The solution is wood, or ‘biomass’, to use the awful euphemism. So, in the case of London, we have the absurd situation of diesel lorries delivering timber, to be dried and burned on site, producing ever more carbon dioxide. The situation is so ludicrous that it would defy even the wit of Jonathan Swift. According to one estimate, as Ridley mentions, Britain is producing six million extra tons of carbon each year as a result of this redirection of the wood supply. Landowners, moreover, are harvesting their timber younger than previously in this booming green lunacy.

Wind farms, who does not hate the sight of wind-farms? I certainly do. You may think they are necessary as a source of clean and renewable power. If you do I urge you to think again, think of the implications of these hideous blots on the landscape for the landscape. As foreign investors rush in to capitalise on British wind - and the wind of British politicians - just remember that it would take require a farm the size of Greater London to generate as much energy as a single coal-fired power station, assuming a never ending windy day.

Oh, but think of the money to be made; think of the money being made, for example, by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, effectively bribed by developers to stop them complaining about the killing of eagles by wind turbines. Then there are the bats, of course, the damage these things cause to them; but who cares about the bats? You should care about yourself, though, enough to make sure that you live nowhere near these monstrous carbuncles, because the noise generated has caused health problems for those who do. The difficulty here is that, as the contagion spreads, it will be difficult for any of us to escape them.

And all this for what, all this disruption, all this stupidity for what? We see our land destroyed, we see the economy weakened, jobs lost or exported elsewhere; we see an ever greater burden of taxation for what? Even if these green emission targets are met at considerable cost to us all it will make not a jot of difference, as our carbon footprint is that of an ant beside the elephant of China.

At some point in the future, as we go down in a sea of green, we might perhaps recall William Hague, once Foreign Secretary, whose immortal words are carved on his gravestone – “We showed the Chinese the UK’s international moral leadership on this issue.” Yes, remember that as you sit in your blacked-out and freezing home, listening to the sound of the roaring wind.