Lord Lawson, one of the most respected Tory figures of recent decades, accuses the Prime Minister of risking Britain’s economy to make a ‘symbolic’ point.
In a devastating verdict he writes: ‘The Government’s highly damaging decarbonisation policy, enshrined in the absurd Climate Change Act, does not have a leg to stand on. It is intended, at massive cost, to be symbolic: To make good David Cameron’s ambition to make his administration “the greenest government ever”.
‘My dictionary defines green as “unripe, immature, undeveloped”.’
His comments came after former Civil Service chief Lord Turnbull accused ministers and officials of pandering to global warming ‘alarmists’ and piling huge, unnecessary costs on ordinary families.
Lord Lawson, Chancellor under Margaret Thatcher, goes further today, saying that plastering Britain with wind farms will push up bills to families and businesses without producing any real benefits. The switch to ‘low-carbon’ energy is expected to add £200 to annual energy bills.
He writes: ‘This price increase would be economically damaging at the best of times; and these are not the best of times.’
And he warns the harm to business could be greater still, adding: ‘The economy is already recovering from the recession.
‘However, there is indeed a threat to that recovery and the bitter irony is that this is of the Government’s own making.
‘It is its so-called climate change policy of ‘decarbonising’ the British economy.’
He says it is ‘highly uncertain’ that higher carbon emissions will warm the planet to a dangerous extent and warns it is ‘futile folly’ for Britain to act alone when its emissions are two per cent of the global total.
In his article, Lord Lawson also stresses the importance of the shale gas revolution:
The new development, however — and it is the biggest technological breakthrough to have occurred in the energy sector since the advances that enabled oil and gas to be extracted from the North Sea — concerns the extraction of gas from shale.
Shale is a rock formation which occurs throughout the world and has always been known to contain vast reserves of oil and gas, but extracting it was uneconomic.
So far as shale gas is concerned, that technological problem has been cracked; as a result, the world is now awash with commercially extractable gas — and no longer over-dependent on the Middle East or Russia for its energy supply.
Read the entire article here
PS
On can only hope that David Cameron, and also other political leaders in Europe, are listening to this voice of reason. It is time to stop the climate change madness both in the UK and in the European Union in general, before it further damages Europe´s economic development.
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