Sunday - October 12, 2008

EU instructions on climate change.  The sky is falling and only the stupid don’t believe.

Ed Miliband will follow EU instructions on climate change

By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 12/10/2008

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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.

(HERE COME THE SCARIEST PART)

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”.

For the rest of the article, link below.

http://tinyurl.com/4mescl

Posted by Drew458     on 10/12/2008 at 12:15 PM   
Filed Under: • Climate-Weather • Environment •  
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