Climate change

The failure of the Earth to warm since the start of the century has been a talking point for global warming sceptics for many years, but it is only in the past few months that the mainstream media have started to pay attention too. In recent weeks the Economist, Channel Four News, and even ultra-green writers like the Telegraph’s Geoffrey Lean have sat up and taken notice. And on top of the pause, a series of recent studies of how fast temperature will rise in response to carbon dioxide emissions has produced estimates that are decidedly un-scary. Together with the plateau in global temperatures these estimates have a profound impact

Not that anyone has noticed, but the Kyoto Protocol expired on 31 December, with  carbon emissions up by 58pc over 1990 levels – instead the 5pc cut the signatories envisaged. All that fuss for worse-than-nothing. Kyoto has not been replaced, because a new era of climate change rationalism is slowly taking root. As Nigel Lawson predicted, the hysteria of the last few years is cooling. There’s no point legislating for change that’s not going to happen. No point taxing the poor out of the sky (or off the roads) if it won’t make the blindest bit of difference to the trajectory of global warming. To be sure, countries responsible for

A couple of weeks ago the great global warming bandwagon coughed and spluttered to a halt in Doha, the latest stop on its never-ending world tour. The annual UN climate conference COP18 is no small affair. This is a bandwagon whose riders number in the thousands: motorcades of politicians, buses full of technocrats and policy wonks and jumbo-jets full of hippies travelling half way round the world, (ostensibly) to save the planet from the (allegedly) pressing problem of climate change This is despite the fact that nobody seems able to point to any great problems caused by the modest warming of the globe at the end of the last century

Danny Alexander, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, is to drop his normally conciliatory voice to attack the Tories at the Lib Dem party conference in Brighton. So what? you may well ask. The mild-mannered Alexander is unlikely to strike the fear of God into his listeners, assuming that anyone beyond the conference hall will be listening, or indeed that the conference hall is full: Brighton being lovely at that time of year. Besides, bursts of splenetic outrage at one’s coalition partners have become a feature of conferences, particularly since last year’s unhappy AV referendum. There is, dare I say it, a suggestion that they are choreographed for the TV

The environmental movement hasn’t responded well to the setbacks it has suffered seen since the failure of the Copenhagen climate conference.  The #endfossilfuelsubsidies campaign — trending worldwide on Twitter this morning — is the latest example of their descent. To be clear, fossil fuel subsidies are not a good idea; that is why governments like ours don’t offer them. Fossil fuels are huge cash cows for every western government.  When someone fills up their car with petrol, around sixty per cent of the pump price goes to the Exchequer. When an oil company drills in the North Sea and extracts a barrel the amount that the Treasury gets varies but

Here’s a U-turn that we can all welcome: felling the wind farms. Matt Ridley described, in a Spectator cover story some while ago, how George Osborne has turned against them. Today, the Observer has more details, saying that Osborne is:     As Ridley argued, wind farms are a ‘monument to the folly of mankind’, representing the triumph of ideology over reason. We could not afford them in the boom years, and we certainly can’t now. The subsidies make a small number of rich people even richer, and a huge number of companies are doing very well from the renewable energy racket. But if you apply rational analysis to it — ie,

It did not take long. Last month, Matt Ridley argued in a Spectator cover story that the wind farm agenda is in effect dead, having collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. The only question is when our ministers would realise. In an interview with the Sunday Times (£), climate change minister Greg Barker admits that his department has adopted an ‘unbalanced’ approach to wind farms and will now look at other options. ‘Far from wanting thousands more, actually for most of the wind we need… they are either being built, being developed or in planning. The notion that there’s some new wave of wind [farms] is somewhat exaggerated.’ Indeed, the phrase ‘somewhat exaggerated’

Bjorn Lomborg’s article on why Germany is cutting back on its support for solar power is well worth reading and has clear implication for this country’s debate about energy policy. As Lomborg argues: ‘there is a fundamental problem with subsidizing inefficient green technology: it is affordable only if it is done in tiny, tokenistic amounts. Using the government’s generous subsidies, Germans installed 7.5 gigawatts of photovoltaic (PV) capacity last year, more than double what the government had deemed “acceptable.” It is estimated that this increase alone will lead to a $260 hike in the average consumer’s annual power bill.’ At a time when living standards are being squeezed, these increases