From the Met Office's mistakes to Gordon Brown's (pictured left) wind farms, the cost of 'green' policies is growing. Impeccable was the timing of that announcement that directors of the Met Office were last year given pay rises of up to 33 per cent, putting its £200,000-a-year chief executive into a higher pay bracket than the Prime Minister. As Britain shivered through Arctic cold and its heaviest snowfalls for decades, our global-warming-obsessed Government machine was caught out in all directions. For a start, we saw Met Office spokesmen trying to explain why it had got its seasonal forecasts hopelessly wrong for three cold winters and three cool summers in a row. The current cold snap, we were told with the aid of the BBC – itself facing an inquiry into its relentless obsession … No attempt was made to explain why the same freezing weather is affecting much of the northern hemisphere (with 1,200 places in the US alone last week reporting record snow and low temperatures). And this is the body on which, through its Hadley Centre for Climate Change and the discredited Climatic Research Unit, the world's politicians rely for weather forecasting 100 years ahead. Then, as councils across Britain ran out of salt for frozen roads, we had the Transport Minister, Lord Adonis, admitting that we entered this cold spell with only six days' supply of grit. No mention of the fact that the Highways Agency and councils had been advised that there was no need for them to stockpile any more – let alone that many councils now have more "climate change officials" than gritters. – UK Telegraph
Dominant Social Theme: A difficult conundrum.
Free-Market Analysis: We've spent plenty of time on global warming and of course we considered it a power elite promotion from the start (many years ago). But we have been gratified to see how thoroughly the meme has collapsed, even though like all dominant social themes the official efforts have not ceased. This is one of the hallmarks of an elite promotion, as we have pointed out, that even when debunked government recognition and solutions continue apace.
But what has brought us back to global warming today is that it is increasingly a good example of how government doesn't work and how the free-market is distorted by government as a matter of course. It is difficult for people often to understand that even when the issue is not nearly so egregious as global warming. True, government involvement in the market distorts the market's price information and leads to inefficiencies, opportunity costs and terrible queues and shortages. But sometimes this is hard to perceive, even though ultimately socialism doesn't work. Unfortunately, mixed economies can go on for a considerable period of time and yet, when the tipping point is reached, they can collapse rather quickly. (See Venezuela.)
But in the case of global warming, we have a clear cut example of how the government can distort the marketplace emphatically and with great vigor. In Britain, the socialist government of Gordon Brown is moving ahead on many fronts to recognize global warming and its impact on society even as the evidence mounts that the earth is heading toward a serious cooling decade. Here's some more from the article:
With the leasing out of sites for nine giant offshore wind farms, there was Gordon Brown's equally timely relaunch of his "£100 billion green revolution", designed, in compliance with EU targets, to meet a third of Britain's electricity needs. This coincided with windless days when Ofgem was showing that our 2,300 existing turbines were providing barely 1/200th of our power. In fact, 80 per cent of the electricity we used last week came either from coal-fired power stations, six of which are before long to be closed under an EU anti-pollution directive, or from gas, of which we only have less than two weeks' stored supply and 80 per cent of which we will soon have to import on a fast-rising world market.
In every way, Mr. Brown's boast was fantasy. There is no way we could hope to install two giant £4 million offshore turbines every day between now and 2020, let alone that they could meet more than a fraction of our electricity needs. But the cost of whatever does get built will be paid by all of us through our already soaring electricity bills – which a new study last week predicted will quadruple during this decade to an average of £5,000 a year. This would drive well over half the households in Britain into "fuel poverty", defined as those forced to spend more than 10 per cent of their income on energy.
Finally, following Mr. Brown's earlier boast that his "green revolution" will create "400,000 green jobs", there was the revelation that more than 90 per cent of the £2 billion cost of Britain's largest offshore wind farm project to date, the Thames Array, will go to companies abroad, because Britain has virtually no manufacturing capacity. At last, in all directions, we are beginning to see the terrifying cost of that obsession with "global warming" and "green energy" which for nearly 20 years has had all our main political parties in its grip. For years governments, including the EU, have been shovelling millions of pounds into the coffers of "green" lobby groups, such as Friends of the Earth and the WWF, allowing them in return virtually to dictate our energy policy. Not for nothing is a former head of WWF-UK now chairman of the Met Office.
The bills for such follies are coming in thick and fast. Last winter's abnormal cold pushed Britain's death rate up to 40,000 above the average, more than the 35,000 deaths across Europe that warmists love to attribute to the heatwave of 2003. Heaven knows what this winter will bring. And remember that the cost of the Climate Change Act alone has been estimated by our Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband at £18 billion every year until 2050 – a law that only three MPs in this Rotten Parliament dared oppose. Truly have they all gone off their heads.
We can see emphatically from the above how wrong-headed the British government is being about climate change and how much money it is wasting. This article is even clearly written enough to show that the government is causing mayhem and death with its policies. And lest Americans think they have escaped the worst of it, we would point out that the Obama administration is dead set on remaking the ruined car manufacturer GM as a "green" car company. In fact, the Obama administration's policies differ little from Gordon Brown's – only America is a bigger country than Britain and the libertarian and conservative push back to green policies has been emphatic.
The green phenomenon should convince one the existence of power elite promotions even if one generally doubts the organizations of such massive efforts. In fact, water vapor is a far stronger "carbon sink" than carbon itself. Carbon was chosen as the greenhouse gas of choice because it is associated with ENGINE emissions. While it might be nice to regulate water (that will surely come) the point of the greenhouse gas promotion was to regulate anything that ran on fuel. Very profitable if you can get away with it.
But have those behind this promotion gotten away with it? We don't think so. The promotion can limp along for a while longer and probably more laws will be passed. But the buy-in is not what it was, in our humble opinion. As we have pointed out many times a promotion is a promotion because people believe in whatever fraudulent, fear-based nonsense is being pushed. And, yes, it is pushed, through think tanks, white papers, universities, NGOs, the United Nations and then, gradually, as it trickles down, through the mass media, public schools, church groups, etc. But if people cease to believe in the promotion then it is for all attempts and purposes defunct.
Information is key. The promotional chain has been built over the past 100 years especially in Britain and America at great expense. The only pleasure we partake in analyzing it, is that it is all tumbling down about the ears of those who constructed it. The Internet is doing a most effective job of demolition.
Truth is powerful. Ideas will win out against laws and guns – no matter how many of them there are. One of the biggest promotions of course is the false sense of helplessness and fear that the power elite has worked hard to instill in people through various "Illuminati"-type promotions – prominent awarding of prison complex contracts to Halliburton, etc. Resistance is futile, etc. We think even good old George Orwell may have been involved in this sort of nonsense. But It will not stand. It is collapsing along with all the rest.
The green meme is a various obvious example of how government distorts industry and economic outlooks. In Britain, billions of pounds are being spent on green industries and useless wind farms. In America, billions if not trillions will be spent trying to create a variety of green industries and in propping up car companies like GM with auto technology that few desire and fewer will probably purchase unless forced to by law. And yes, for a while, an industry can be built by force, a market (cap and trade) can be created by regulatory bluff. But ultimately, the market is not fooled and ruin advances. This happened most recently with the fiat dollar itself after nearly a half century or monetary puffing-up. And this leads us to our normal concluding prognostication that not only will green industries eventually collapse but also that money will at some point reclaim its private dominance within the arch of a private gold and silver standard.
