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.
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?
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