Britain's low-carbon future

All of this notwithstanding the lack of balanced proof that cars do, in fact, significantly contribute to climate change, as compared with other (mostly public) transport, power production, etc. Under these proposals, my 3.0L Renault, which travels no more that 3,000 miles per year, would carry a red tax disc, whereas a 1.2L Ford doing 30,000 miles per year might carry a green disc. Not exactly an ecologically sound premise! All that such "naming and shaming" rubbish would achieve would be to cause resentment amongst those people who believe and act upon everything the Government says, irrespective of the real facts. There already exists a system of charging for transport infrastructure usage - it's called Fuel Tax. Why not drop the fixed and increasingly more complicated VED charging system altogether and simply designate (and publicise) a small proportion of the already excessive fuel tax as a "VED levy". This would provide a realistic and equitable means of charging users according to miles driven, vehicle fuel economy, driving style, etc. This would also release numerous staff at the DVLA to focus upon developing and publicising the benefits of adopting ecologically sound driving strategies, without the current threatening relationship that currently seems to exist.

The British Government today introduced its 'Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation' (RTFO) stipulates that all filling stations must supply at least 2.5% of all fuel sold from biofuels - bioethanol or biodiesel - to increase to 10% by 2012. Very apt on April Fools Day. Ethanol has been around for a century and has not emerged because it's a total failure of efficiency. UC Berkeley geo-engineering professor Tad Patzek did a 3 year study which showed that "burning the biofuel as a gasoline additive actually results in a net energy loss of 65%". It gets worse as he concluded in a later study, "All told, the cumulative energy consumed in corn farming and ethanol production is 6 times greater than what the end product provides your car engine in terms of power. Martin Wolfe at the Financial Times claimed Ethanol was a few subsidised farmers "masquarding as an energy and climate policy". Jerry Siegel UN special envoy of Food Rice claims Ethanol bio-fuel mandates are a "crime against humanity" as they take away prime agricultural land for feeding the population. 450lbs of corn can feed 1 person for a year but provide a paltry 25 gallons of fuel for gas tanks. William Nordhaus thinks Ethanol as an anti-warming policy is what academics refer to as "crazy talk" (ie. really dumb). The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates for corn Ethanol to completely replace gasoline consumption in America they would need to use all US cropland turned over to corn-ethanol production, and then find 20% more land on top to replace oil. E10 fuel which the British Govt is driving us towards (10% Ethanol, 90% gasoline) increases emissions of total hydrocarbons, non-methane organic compounds, and air toxics compared to conventional gasoline. The result is greater concentrations of photochemical smog and toxic compounds. Finally back to Tad Patzek, "One farm for the local village probably makes sense," he says. "But if you have a 100,000 acre plantation exporting biomass on contract to Europe, that's a completely different story. From one square meter of land, you can get roughly one watt of energy. The price you pay is that in Brazil alone you annually damage a jungle the size of Greece." Put another way, the British Govts' ethanol energy promoting needs 6 times more energy than oil which is the dumbest energy policy on the planet.

What Government crone/troll Ms. Kings 'Low Carbon Furture' plan fails/omits/avoids to mention (or calculate) is that it will also lead to low energy and living standards for every man, woman and child in Britain. One should note that the green movement and green politicians are completely contemptuous of the wellbeing and lives of others. One of the craziest arguments for cutting CO2 emissions is that the policy would promote jobs and clean economic growth by investing in alternative energy sources. Anatole Kaletsky, an economics writer for the London Times, is an excellent example of this Keynesian idiocy. This so-called economist argued that that severely restricting CO2 emissions would stimulate economic growth and employment because they would, now this is a good one, “have the effect on the world economy comparable to a large-scale war”. (Digging beneath the gloom, Rupert Murdoch’s Australian 29 November 2000). What lunacy: war and destruction bring prosperity, peace brings stagnation. In case anyone thinks this nonsense is held only by ignorant journalists allow me to point out that in his New York Times 14 September column 2001 the eminent economist Paul Krugman made the same claim about the 9/11 atrocity. Fred Bergsten, who runs the Institute for International Economics in Washington, is another 'economist' who thinks bombing our cities is a great way to raise living standards. According to this genius and former assistant secretary of the US Treasury the tsunami tragedy was a good thing for its victims, at least those that survived it, because: "Like any disaster, you get negative effects through destroying existing properties and people’s health, but you do get a burst of new economic activity to replace them, and, on balance, that generally turns out to be quite positive." Destruction = Prosperity. These guys are genius!! A competent (sane) economist will readily admit that when capital goods are destroyed by war living standards must fall. Basically there are only three sources from which producer goods can come: a) Existing capital goods must be withdrawn from other lines of production, thus lowering output there, or b) savings must increase which also means a further fall in consumption, or c) capital goods must be imported. Economic growth basically means capital accumulation. Capital comes out of savings which in turn comes from forgone consumption. In other words, to save means to give up some present consumption in favour of greater future consumption. If the likes Bergsten, Kaletsky and Krugman are right it would pay a country to thoroughly wreck its factories, offices, transport systems and even housing stock every few years. In his defence of a destructive carbon tax John Humphreys argues that the best way to encourage the growth of "alternative energies" is to "put a price on carbon". The market will respond by discovering "new energy sources". (Exploring a Carbon Tax for Australia, Centre for Independent Studies, 2007). The fallacy here should be obvious: Taxes do not result from a market process, nor do they reflect allocation decisions of resource owners . . . In other words, taxation is a method of intervening, not an alternative to intervention or nonmarket allocation. (O'Driscoll and Rizzo, cited in Efficiency and Externalities in an Open-Ended Universe, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007, p. 13). Moreover, so-called alternative energy sources would savage our living standards. Callous European bureaucrats and politicians have taken the carbon tax to its logical conclusion and are now planning to "reduce the carbon footprints" of human beings by imposing what they call "global warming tariffs". This would be a direct attack on developing nations prosperity. Carbon tax as an outrageous tax on energy consumption that would drastically slash living standards if implemented. The notorious Professor Paul Ehrlich made this clear when he stated: "Giving society cheap, abundant energy... would be the