Who says the Almighty has not got a sense of humour? Last Tuesday MPs spent yet another six hours discussing what is potentially the most expensive single piece of legislation ever put through Parliament. The Climate Change Bill, which had its third reading, commits Britain (uniquely in the world) to an 80 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. As MPs droned on about the need to fight global warming, Peter Lilley drew the Speaker's attention to the fact that, outside on the streets of Westminster, snow was falling. It was London's first October snowfall for 70 years, and similarly unseasonal snow was carpeting a wide swathe of Britain. In all that six hours of debate, only two MPs questioned the need for such a Bill, which had swept through its second reading with only five opposed. The sole MP who tried to raise the matter of the cost of the Bill - which could run to trillions of pounds if all its measures were implemented - was Mr Lilley. He was ruled out of order by the Speaker. If the Bill's intent is taken seriously, the cost of cutting our CO2 emissions by 80 per cent would cripple our economy, closing down much of what remains of our industry and rendering most motorised transport impossible. But the cloud cuckoo land that our politicians have floated off into no longer touches scientific or practical reality at any point. What they should have been discussing was the near-certainty that, within a few years, thanks to the imminent shutdown of 40 per cent of our electricity generating capacity, Britain's lights will be going out. The state of many of our power stations is already so parlous that, if this winter continues as cold as it has begun, we can expect major power cuts within months. Yet as we enter the worst recession for decades, our MPs while away their time prattling in sanctimonious unanimity about the need to fight global warming. It is small consolation that Britain is not alone in its plight. One of the few specific policy commitments made by would-be president Obama is that he will support last year's ruling by the Supreme Court that the US Environmental Protection Agency should treat CO2 as a "pollutant" under the Clean Air Act. The gas that no plant can survive without, and hence all higher forms of life depend on, would be regulated as if it were as dangerous as arsenic or sulphuric acid. Senator Obama also supports a US version of the EU's "carbon trading" scheme, costed at hundreds of biliions of dollars. It seems the global warming scare may soon become as crippling to the world's richest economy as anything our own politicians are hell-bent on imposing here. Yet last week, as reported on the admirable Watts Up With That website, nearly 180 places in the US, from Alaska to Alabama, have just recorded their coldest October temperatures or heaviest October snowfalls on record, based on figures from the National Climate Data Center. Declining global temperatures continue to make a mockery of those computer model projections on which the whole global warming scare is based. As I have asked before, has there ever in history been such a collective flight from reality? The BBC keeps the asbestos scare flying Just as bad as the Brand-Ross scandal in revealing the moral corruption of the BBC has been its eagerness in recent years to promote every kind of fashionable "scare". Last week, the BBC was again publicising the latest scare over asbestos, launched by the Health and Safety Executive and supported by all those who stand to benefit by it, from asbestos removal contractors to ambulance-chasing lawyers (and the trade unions which get £250 for every referral to solicitors specialising in compensation claims). The HSE' claims that 4,000 people a year are dying from exposure to asbestos, including a growing number of teachers. No one ever asks the HSE to justify this figure, which is calculated not from clinical evidence but by a complex formula based on no fewer than three arbitrary assumptions - one of which is that white asbestos, by far the commonest type, is just as dangerous as the blue variety, a wholly different mineral. In 1999, when it was still honest about such things, the HSE published a graph showing that blue asbestos is in fact 500 times more dangerous than white, the risk from which, in its most widespread form, encapsulated in cement, the HSE then called "insignificant" or "zero". All that is now forgotten, although the latest science has confirmed it in spades. It was telling that when Radio 4's Today was promoting the HSE's latest fad last week, it should have used Michael Lees, a veteran anti-asbestos campaigner, whose teacher wife died of mesothelioma, to support the claim that ever more teachers are dying from exposure to asbestos in schools. Yet when the HSE had earlier investigated Mr Lees's claims it found that they were "not borne out by the facts". The mortality rate for female teachers was "in line with the average for the whole of the female population". Such honesty has now gone out of the window, to the benefit of the lawyers and those removal contractors whom the HSE, on its website, is glad to call its allies. Accounting for catastrophe I reported here on October 5 the vast, hidden part that new international accounting rules had played in the banking crisis. These "mark to market" rules, introduced last January via the International Accountancy Standards Board, at the behest of the EU, forced banks to report their assets daily, at "fire-sale" values. In a falling market they were dramatically under valued and this, as much as anything, froze interbank lending and forced banks such as Lehman Brothers to close their doors. After a panicky EU had pleaded with the IASB to relax the rules, Brussels rushed through a change on October 15. As a result Deutsche Bank, Germany's largest, could last week revalue its assets upwards by £630 million, saving it from an appeal for government aid. Without those rules, however, much of the disaster which has put so many famous names out of business might never have happened.Climate Change Bill makes chilling reading
By Christopher Booker
Sunday, 2 November 2008
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 02/11/2008
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