Christopher Booker.

US gets ready to blow its economy away 

By Christopher Booker

17/08/2008

Visiting America last week to talk to audiences across the country about "global warming", I was struck by television commercials for the two presidential candidates. Senators McCain and Obama were each shown in front of film of the same giant wind farm, to lay claim to virtually identical "green" credentials. Since America has already built five times as many wind turbines as Britain, covering thousands of square miles, I checked out how much electricity all those 10,000 turbines actually produce. The answer is around 4.5 gigawatts - not much more than a single large coal-fired power station. After years when America was vilified for not taking "global warming' seriously, it was a shock to find how "environmentalism" is now threatening to transform what is still the largest and richest economy in the world. Both candidates favour a version of the proposed "cap and trade" scheme to slash US greenhouse gas emissions to 63 per cent below 2005 levels, at an estimated cost by 2030 of more than $600 billion a year - representing a cumulative loss to the US economy, within 22 years, of $4.8 trillion. Although America is still dependent on coal for around half its electricity, with reserves estimated as likely to last 200 years, state after state is proposing to ban new coal-fired power stations. Environmental groups, with powerful political support, are now lobbying equally fiercely against natural gas or any new nuclear power plants. Most dramatic of all are the implications of a Supreme Court judgment in the case of Massachussets v the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which ruled by a single vote that the EPA must treat any greenhouse gases as "pollution", to be regulated under America's Clean Air Act. The EPA is thus mandated to impose drastic new limits on emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases from pretty well any source, not just industry and transport but schools, hospitals, even lawn mowers. Read more by Christopher Booker The implications are so immense for almost every sector of the US economy that government departments -commerce, agriculture, energy and others - have been queuing up to protest, arguing that the effects of such regulation would be so damaging that it should be regarded as unthinkable. But politicians of both parties, led by the two men vying for the presidency, are so carried away in the rush to appear "green" that it seems there is no longer any national voice powerful enough to question the sanity of such measures. All the fashionable talk is of how fossil-fuels must be replaced by massively subsidised sources of "renewable" energy, such as vast arrays of solar panels, even though a recent study showed that a kilowatt hour of solar-generated electricity costs between 25 and 30 cents, compared with 6 cents for power generated from coal and 9 cents for that produced by natural gas. What is terrifying is the extent to which America's leading politicians seem oblivious to the economic realities of what they are proposing. The readiness of Messrs McCain and Obama to posture in front of pictures of virtually useless wind turbines symbolises that attitude perfectly. Here, in the EU we are only too sadly familiar with politicians floating off into cloudcuckooland over our future energy policy, with the virtual certainty that before many years this may leave us with a colossal shortfall in our electricity supplies. But "the lights going out all over Europe" is one thing: if they go out in the richest economy in the world - while China cheerfully continues to build one new coal-fired power station a week - we may look back on the US presidential election of 2008 as a time when history really did reach a watershed; the moment when the nations of the West finally signed up to the most bizarre suicide note the world has ever seen. Those in peril from seizure Readers have expressed outrage at my recent story of the three small-boat fishermen around the Thames estuary who were punished by a judge as if they were international criminals. They had caught 19 tons of sole for which they did not have EU quota - even though, under the rules, they should have been allocated a share in 346 tons of quota which remained unused. Judge Neil McKittrick imposed fines and costs on the three men totalling £104,000. In addition, at the instigation of the Marine and Fisheries Agency, he levied confiscation orders on their assets totalling £213,000 under the Proceeds of Crime Act, originally designed to recover the illegal profits of drug dealers. If the men cannot pay within six months, they face two years in prison, even though this is far more than they can raise without selling their homes and their boats - none of them the "proceeds of crime". There have been two follow-ups to this story. One came from a reader pointing out the startling contrast between Judge McKittrick's severity in this case and his seeming leniency in a string of others - as when a paedophile and a sub-postmaster who had stolen £15,000 were given only suspended sentences, while a thug who had seriously injured a 76-year old pensioner was sent to prison for only six months. It also emerges that the case I reported was by no means the first in which the MFA has invoked the Proceeds of Crime Act against fishermen guilty of breaking quota rules. In Liverpool last December, the Crown Court granted confiscation orders against three fishermen and two companies from Kilkeel in Northern Ireland totalling £1,075,056. This appears to mark a new phase in what many fishermen regard as the "war" being waged against them by the UK authorities in their ruthless enforcement of the Common Fisheries Policy in what were once British waters. First the fishermen are given quotas too small for them to earn a living, even though fish may be abundant and the quota allocated to larger vessels unused. Then, when they break the law to survive, they are treated worse than thieves, thugs, paedophiles and drug smugglers. Mean streets of Frisco It's interesting how fast the world's officials learn from each other's ingenuity in finding new ways to persecute us to make a better world. Here in Britain we are now familiar with stories of householders faced with fines of £80 for not closing their rubbish bin lids properly, or for putting a stray envelope in a bin for bottles. But in America I noticed that the Mayor of San Francisco now proposes a similar crackdown on anyone putting garbage in the wrong bin - except that he wants fines up to $1,000 (£500). As one American explained to me, "San Francisco is a very liberal city". We see what they mean.