The timing was immaculate. Last week, as blizzards closed roads and schools across northern England and Scotland and large parts of the country were carpeted with snow for the third time this winter, the Government's Committee on Climate Change, chaired by Lord Turner of Ecchinswell, issued its first report on how Britain is to meet the terrifying threat of runaway global warming. In his day job Adair Turner is chairman of the Financial Services Authority, responsible for helping to sort out the chaos in our banking system which the FSA failed to foresee or prevent. A measure of his fitness for his other new role as "Britain's first climate tsar" was the suggestion he made when he was appointed last March that, as a first step towards saving the planet, men should stop wearing ties and suits to the office, and women give up wearing skirts, because this would lessen the need for air-conditioning and encourage them to walk or cycle to work. Now, after eight months hard at work with his committee made up of various "professors of climate change" and other unworldly academics, he has come up with suggestions as to how Britain can lead the world in cutting emissions of CO2 back to just 20 per cent of where they were in 1990. Only one of the committee, all naturally hard-line believers in man-made global warming, appears to have had any experience of the world of industry. Unsurprisingly they have produced a wearisomely familiar list of proposals, none of which have the slightest hope of being achieved. They want us, for instance, to switch from eating beef and lamb to "less carbon-intensive types of meat". Within 11 years they want to see 40 per cent of all the cars on Britain's roads powered by electricity, in the very week when it was reported that sales of all-electric cars have this year halved, from 374 to 156, making a grand total of 1,100. (One of the two companies that make them has just gone bankrupt.) Nor, of course, do they explain where all the electricity to power these vehicles might come from. They seem blissfully oblivious, for instance, to the fact that, within a few years, we shall face a shortfall of 40 per cent in the supply of electricity we need to meet current peak demand, thanks to the forced closure of so many of our existing power stations. They insist that no more coal-fired power plants should be built unless they can be fitted with "carbon capture" (burying the CO2 in holes in the ground), seemingly unaware that, even if this were technically possible, it would double the cost of electricity and make us even more dependent on Russian and other imported coal which already supplies 70 per cent of our needs. So what will provide the juice to fuel those millions of imaginary electric cars, let alone keep our lights on and our computers running? Inevitably they want to see thousands more wind turbines, but nothing better illustrates the cloud-cuckoo land in which these academics live than their graph showing how, by 2020, we shall have enough of them to meet our EU target of deriving a third of the electricity we need from "renewables". These, they claim, will provide 28 gigawatts (GW) of "capacity", representing more than a third of the 80-odd GW of capacity we have today. Yet, as the rest of us know, thanks to the intermittency of the wind those thousands of turbines would only generate on average around 27 per cent of their capacity, some 7.5GW. This represents a mere 13 per cent of current peak demand, leaving us woefully short of our agreed EU target and doing nothing to plug that fast-looming 40 per cent gap in our supplies. In other words, a more vacuously dotty ragbag of proposals would be hard to imagine. Although the latest six-point "Moonbat Plan" to save the planet, from The Guardian's George Monbiot, is a contender. It includes reducing air travel by 95 per cent, barring "key roads" to private cars, and a ban on grouse-shooting because burning the heather on grouse-moors creates "a staggering proportion of UK emissions". Alas, however. the blethering of Lord Turner's committee cannot just be dismissed as a joke. The awful fact is that it was set up by our Government in all seriousness, to advise on how we are to achieve those EU targets to which we are now legally bound by the Climate Change Act, passed virtually unanimously by Parliament. Meanwhile in Poznan 10,000 delegates from 192 countries shiver in near-freezing temperatures as they squabble over the UN's next treaty on global warming. They face impasse over demands by China and India that richer countries should hand over 0.7 per cent of their annual GDP to help "developing" countries to meet their "carbon" targets (for Britain that would represent nearly £10 billion a year). And in Brussels, where 11,000 metal workers demonstrated last Tuesday to protest that the EU's climate change policies would spell doom to Europe's steel industry, the entire package has been thrown into chaos by threatened vetos from Italy and Poland - which still derives 95 per cent of its electricity from "dirty" coal. It is nice to think that all those UN delegates in Poznan are only being kept warm by a fuel which they and the EU would like to ban.Blizzard of mad proposals descends on UK
By Christopher Booker
Sunday, 7 December 2008
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 07/12/2008
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