When I reported it here in June 2006, I described it as "a horrible little episode", a case which illustrated not only the mindless arrogance of contemporary officialdom but the dismal consequences of the "great asbestos scare", the deliberate official muddling together of different minerals, some deadly, some harmless, just because they are loosely described under the same generic name "asbestos". In a Welsh courtroom last week, thanks to a judge's robust common sense, that nasty little story came to a resounding conclusion. Graham and Sara Blackmore ran a small skip hire company in Cardiff. Several times they had turned down offers to buy their business, valued at £500,000. Then one day a builder delivered to their yard a pile of rubble from the demolition of houses owned by Vale of Glamorgan council. The Environment Agency received a tip off that the rubble included "asbestos". The agency commissioned a report from a firm called National Britannia (which receives £850,000 a year from the Health and Safety Executive for running its "asbestos helpline") which confirmed that the site was "contaminated", without determining the nature or quantity of any asbestos present.Eleanor Smart, an agency official, issued a prohibition notice shutting down the business, threatened Mr and Mrs Blackmore with criminal prosecution and invited five asbestos removal firms to the site to draw up a protocol for its "decontamination". This included 26 conditions which might have been appropriate if the entire yard had been covered three feet deep in genuinely deadly loose blue asbestos fibres. Every inch of the premises, including the offices, would have to be thoroughly cleaned. The water would have to be taken away as "hazardous waste". Every step of the operation would have to be monitored, photographed and recorded. Mr and Mrs Blackmore were quoted £180,000 for the work, far more than they could afford. They knew they would have to close the business. But at this point they were advised to call in John Bridle of Asbestos Watchdog, the whistleblower on asbestos scams of every kind, well known to readers of this column. Mr Bridle discovered that the only asbestos among the rubble, apart from two tiny insulation boards too small to be covered by the law, was in two tons of cement roof slates. The 10 per cent of white asbestos these contained was quite harmless because the fibres locked in the cement cannot escape in respirable form. Furthermore this represented only 0.025 per cent of the rubble, and the law only applies when that figure reaches 0.1 per cent. Mr Bridle therefore advised that the asbestos could be safely and legally disposed of by burying it on site, at a cost of £200. The agency's officials refused to go back on their misreading of the law. When Mr and Mrs Blackmore were forced to sell the site at a knock-down price of £30,000, it was cleared without observing all the costly protocols they had been told were mandatory. Despite the intervention of their local Labour MP, Julie Morgan, the agency kept adding new criminal charges against them and eventually last Monday, after three years and several aborted court hearings (because the agency had failed to present its case correctly), these were heard by Judge David Morris. The agency's case was torn to shreds. Why had the agency ridden roughshod over the law by not determining how much asbestos was present? Why had the Vale of Glamorgan council not obeyed the law by informing Mr Blackmore that it was dumping asbestos on his site? The judge even threw out the one technical char ge to which Mr Blackmore had pleaded guilty, on the ground that he could not have committed an offence under his waste licence because the council had failed in its duty. Having lost on all counts, the agency was ordered to pay £15,000 costs. For Mr and Mrs Blackmore it was the end of a nightmare which had left their life in ruins, costing them their livelihood, their business and Mr Blackmore his health. (Having recovered, he now earns a modest living as a taxi driver.) As for the agency, its officials can walk away from three years of heartless incompetence, leaving the rest of us to foot the bill for a case which should never have been brought. EU stands firm on carbon fantasies while Arctic ice grows Ed Miliband, our new Energy and Climate Change Secretary, has committed Britain, at this moment of financial meltdown, to an 80 per cent reduction of “carbon emissions” by 2050 – which must go down as the most fatuous utterance ever made by a British Cabinet minister (immediately supported by the Tory shadow spokesman). The only way this goal could be achieved would be to shut down almost the whole of our economy. A slightly firmer grasp on reality prevails in those countries, led by Poland and Italy, which were last week in Brussels urging the EU to moderate its plans to reduce carbon emissions, on the grounds that this was not the moment to be piling onto Europe’s economies costs amounting to trillions of euros. But Gordon Brown, alongside the Commission President, José Manuel Barroso, was at the forefront of those insisting that the EU must stick to its guns. Brussels’s only concession came from the Environment Commissioner, Stavros Dimas, who said he would increase from 35 per cent to just over 50 per cent the amount of “carbon credits” which European industry would be allowed to buy from the developing world under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). In other words, for the right to continue emitting CO2 in Europe, firms would be permitted to pay hundreds of billions of euros to China, India and elsewhere. The net result would be to impose astronomic costs on those firms, such as electricity suppliers, which cannot move their operations outside Europe (costs to be passed on to their customers) with little or no effect on emissions. Just how crazy this system is already becoming was illustrated by a programme broadcast by the BBC World Service last June (and reported here) which highlighted several examples of the CDM in action. A small Indian chemical firm, for instance, already receives up to $60 million a year for eliminating emissions of CFC greenhouse gases from its process. A company spokesman admitted that it would have eliminated the CFCs anyway. The $500 million it is due to receive over the next 10 years is just a free gift, to achieve nothing. So this insanity gathers way on every side, creating fortunes for the “carbon traders” who broker the deals, all in the name of preventing global temperatures rising. Yet for several years now, while greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, temperatures have ceased to rise, and even fallen, making a nonsense of all those computer models that predicted that one must rise with the other. Arctic ice, which this year we were told might melt altogether, now covers an area 28.7 per cent greater than it did at this time last year (see the Watts Up With That website). Has there ever been such a flight from reality in the history of the world? For all the acres of newsprint devoted to the return to the Cabinet of Peter Mandelson, by far the most important and potentially damaging move in Gordon Brown's recent Government reorganisation could well be his setting up of a wholly new ministry, laughably called the Department of Energy and Climate Change. Under a new Secretary of State, Ed Miliband, the new department merges two groups of officials who, over the past year, have been ever more obviously at war with each other; and on the outcome of that battle hangs nothing less than whether, within a few years, Britain can still continue to operate as an economically viable nation. On the one hand have been the civil servants charged with running Britain's energy policy at the former DTI, now known as BERR (Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform). As became increasingly evident from speeches by John Hutton, our former business secretary now moved to Defence, his officials had become acutely aware that Britain is fast approaching an unprecedented energy crisis. Within seven years, or even much sooner, we stand to lose nearly 40 per cent of the generating capacity which meets our current peak electricity needs. All but one of the 10 nuclear power stations which provide a fifth of our electricity are due to close and, as we were warned last week, they are all now so decrepit that much of that capacity may not be available even this winter. Also due to close, under the EU's Large Combustion Plants directive, are nine more large power stations, six coal-fired, which will soon be running out of the remaining quota of hours Brussels has allowed them. This was why, as "realists", the BERR officials recognised that our only hope of keeping our lights on and Britain's economy functioning was to make it a top national priority to build, as fast as possible, at least a dozen new nuclear and coal-fired power stations, such as that planned at Kingsnorth. As Mr Hutton told the recent Labour Party conference, "no coal, plus no nuclear, equals no lights, no power, no future". On the other hand, totally opposed to them at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) down the road, have been the climate change fanatics, obsessed with global warming, for whom the highest national priority, as expressed in their recent Climate Change Act, is for Britain to lead the world by cutting its carbon emissions by 60 per cent in the next 40 years.The most influential of these officials, as Defra's chief scientific adviser, has been Dr Robert Watson, until 2002 chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a man so passionately committed to fighting climate change that he was once hailed by Al Gore as "the hero of the planet". On every point the BERR "realists" and Defra's "fanatics" have been at odds. Where Defra was vociferously behind the EU's requirement that by 2020 we must generate nearly 40 per cent of our electricity from "renewables", building thousands more giant windmills, to BERR's energy experts, as was clear from an internal briefing document leaked last year, this was in practical terms wholly unachievable. Where Defra and Dr Watson were wholly opposed to any new coal-fired power stations unless all the CO2 they emittted could be piped off and buried in holes in the ground, BERR recognised that this was equally pie-in-the-sky. Not only would "carbon capture" double the cost of coal-fired electricity and require us to double our imports of coal, the technology to make it possible hasn't even been properly developed yet. As it became increasingly obvious that the policies of the two departments were wholly incompatible, Gordon Brown finally accepted that the best way to resolve the impasse was simply to bring them both together, merging them into a new ministry where their differences could be thrashed out internally. But what as a nation we urgently need to know is which side of the argument is likely to prevail - and on the evidence so far it seems the outcome is likely to be pretty one-sided. For a start the minister in charge, Ed Miliband, comes very much from the climate change side of the argument, and as a committed Europhile seems highly unlikely to follow his predecessor John Hutton's line that, where EU policies conflict with Britain's national interest, it should be Britain's needs which come first. With all his authority as a former chairman of the IPCC, it seems the most influential figure in the new ministry will be Dr Watson, who may be reluctantly prepared to give way on nuclear power, but is likely to maintain his hard line against new coal-fired stations unless they are fitted with a carbon-capture technology which doesn't yet exist. When I rang the new department last week, the spokesman - from Defra's climate change camp - didn't even seem aware of the growing alarm over the fact that we shall shortly lose a huge chunk of our generating capacity. As telling as anything, perhaps, has been the unanimous chorus of approval for the ministerial merger from the more fanatical end of the climate change lobby, from Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to the Royal Society and the BBC. With Gore's "hero of the planet" now helping to decide our energy policy, it seems the vegetarians have been put in charge of the abattoir. Those BERR "realists" wanting to keep our lights on may now be fighting a losing battle. And anyone hoping they might at least get support from a change of government may note the first Tory response, from David Cameron's shadow cabinet colleague Ed Vaizey, who acclaimed the setting up of the new ministry as "a masterstoke, the one good idea Brown had had in 18 months". As global temperatures continue to fall, stand by for lots more windmills and no lights. The crash of stable doors being closed When the history of 2008's Great Crash is written, a key role will be given to the new international "mark to market" accounting rules, enforced in Britain under EU directives and a thicket of EU regulations. By forcing firms drastically to undervalue their assets, these have frozen the interbank lending and borrowing which were the markets' lifeblood. As Martin Sullivan, former CEO of the collapsed insurance giant AIG, told the US Congress last week, "mark to market accounting played a central role in the company's deterioration". In Luxembourg on Tuesday, at an emergency meeting behind closed doors, the EU's 27 finance ministers endorsed a complex, 45-page Capital Requirements Directive, to amend the rules that have created such mayhem. Although designed as a "direct response to the financial turmoil", it seems the drafting of this document began last year, and it is unlikely to become law before next April. So they have long known that something like the present disaster was on the way - and now the horses are bolted, they are laboriously closing the stable door. And, unsurprisingly, they are trying to keep it all as quiet as possible. (For further details seeeureferendum.blogspot.com).White asbestos proved fatal for their livelihood
By Christopher Booker
By Christopher Booker 
Sunday, 19 October 2008
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 19/10/2008
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 12/10/2008
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