Putting a stop to taxpayer funded environmentalism

It’s that time of year again, time for the world to pay attention to climate change policy for a few weeks.  Most of the year, schemes like the EU Emissions Trading System and the Renewables Obligation just wallow in dysfunction and quietly cost us a fortune, adding to our electricity bills in particular.  Manufacturers pay attention, and higher energy costs threaten to drive industrial jobs abroad, and the poor and elderly feel the effects, even if they don’t know why their bills are rising.  But the only people who really have the staff and the organisational clout to pursue this issue all year round are the environmental campaigns.
 
Many of them, like Friends of the Earth, have multi-million pound budgets and dozens of staff.  They have had huge success in advocating very expensive policies here, even if other countries aren’t playing ball at the conferences.
 
To a certain extent, that’s fair enough.