There was a brief flicker of interest over the appointment as the Foreign Office's "Europe minister" of a supposed Europhile, David Lidington, instead of the supposed Tory Eurosceptic Mark Francois. But the real question is, why should the Foreign Office have a Europe minister at all? So much of our government is now run by "Europe" that pretty well all our ministers are "Europe ministers". The FO certainly has little to do with "foreign affairs" these days. For years, one of the two main roles of the Foreign Office has been to ensure that other Government departments are faithfully complying with EU legislation (the other, through our embassies and high commissions, is to propagandise for Britain's obsession with climate change). So much of our foreign policy now has to be agreed with our EU colleagues that, apart from Tony Blair's ill-fated adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, Britain no longer has any independent policy worthy of the name. Thus the only role of a Europe minister is to bring our pretend national government in London closer to our real government in Brussels – the one that's now presiding over the meltdown of its proudest achievement, the single currency. Chris Huhne will ensure the coalition is soon out of power The most obvious Achilles heel of this weird new Government is the issue on which the two parties making it up are most firmly united. On Friday morning, a beaming David Cameron stood alongside his new Energy and Climate Change Secretary, the Lib Dem Chris Huhne, to proclaim their dedication to halting what Mr Huhne called "the greatest challenge facing mankind": global warming. Both parties are pledged to cut Britain's CO2 emissions by more than four fifths in the next 40 years. Both are committed to building thousands more wind turbines. And neither ever mentions the crisis fast bearing down on us when we lose 14 of the nuclear and coal-fired power stations which supply 40 per cent of the electricity that currently keeps all our economy running, In response to a babyish interview on the Radio 4's Today programme, Mr Huhne wanted to put across two messages. One was that, as a longtime opponent of what he has described as the "failed technology" of nuclear power, he is not prepared to give any financial help to electricity companies wishing to replace our ageing nuclear power stations. (This we knew already since, although he didn't say so, any subsidy would be against EU rules.) The other was that "the most scandalous legacy of the past 13 years" is that we haven't been going all out for wind power, tidal power and wave power. This he now intends to remedy as the centrepiece of his policy. What is truly terrifying about putting Mr Huhne in charge of Britain's energy policy is that, like the rest of his Government colleagues, he clearly hasn't the slightest practical understanding of what is involved. Obviously, he has no idea of just how useless windmills are in providing any more than a derisory fraction of the electricity we need to keep our lights on and our computers running. The 3,000 already built provide on average no more electricity than a single medium-sized conventional power station, and the more we build, the more we will have to build CO2-emitting power stations, costing billions of pounds, simply to provide back-up for when the wind is not blowing. Although the EU's new Industrial Emissions Directive has extended the time we are allowed to keep six of our ageing coal-fired power plants running, Mr Huhne will allow no new ones to be built unless they are fitted with "carbon capture and storage" – which, despite a Government-estimated cost of £14 billion, is never going to work. There is no aspect of this Government's energy policy which is not based on wishful thinking and complete technical illiteracy. It talks of spending up to £30 billion on a Severn Barrage to supply "five gigawatts" of electricity, when in reality it would only intermittently produce on average 1.9 gigawatts, less than the output of a single coal-fired power station. For the same money, eight new nuclear plants could produce seven times as much power, reliably and round the clock. Mr Huhne's only hope of keeping Britain's lights on – as he builds his thousands of hugely subsidised wind turbines – is that the largely foreign-owned electricity companies he appears to despise might build two dozen gas-fired power stations, putting us largely at the mercy of a highly unpredictable world gas market. This is precisely the danger that all the experts have been warning us against for so long. There are only two possible outcomes of all those "green" delusions which Mr Huhne and Mr Cameron seem to share. First, our energy bills will soar to astronomic levels, pushing millions more households into "fuel poverty". Second, we can look forward to a time when power cuts are as common as they are in South Africa, which is now going for nuclear as hard as it can. Britain is still the only country in the world already committed by law to cutting its CO2 emissions by more than 80 per cent over the next 40 years - although we emit less than 2 per cent of the world's total. In the name of fighting an imaginary problem, we are soon going to have an imaginary economy – and Mr Huhne's name will join all the others on its tombstone.All our ministers are
'Europe ministers'
now
The Foreign Office has little to do these days but
make sure we comply with
EU legislation, says Christopher Booker
The new energy secretary has no practical solutions for our looming energy crisis, says Christopher Booker
Sunday, 16 May 2010
Posts
