Britain Succumbs To Green Madness !

Just when you think Australia takes the booby prize for global warming madness, along comes Britain. Readers of my blog might be astonished to hear me report on the media release, last month, by Alistair Buchanan, retiring head of energy regulator Ofgem, warning that March will see the closure of five major coal-fired power stations that between them contribute nearly a sixth of the UK's average electricity needs. Over the next few years, Mr Buchanan fears, Britain will be dangerously close to not having enough power in the grid to keep the lights on!

Even the giant Drax power station (photo) in Yorkshire, which is one of the most efficiently run coal-fired power stations in the world...and supplies 7% of all the electricity used is Britain is on the ''hit-list''. As a result of a change in Government policy, triggered by European Union (EU) rules, Drax will embark on a 700 million pound switch away from burning coal for which it was designed, in order to convert it six colossal boilers to burn millions of tons a year of wood chips instead. Most of these chips will comes from trees felled in forests covering a staggering 4,6000 square miles in the U.S.A. Crazy...right?

The theory is that, by gradually switching to wood -- or biomass as it is officially known -- Drax will eventually save millions of tons of CO2 from going every year into the atmosphere, thereby helping to prevent climate change and save the planet. These idiots obviously haven't read the their own MET Office reports saying that there hasn't been any global warming for the last 17 years! It was a Brit, Christopher Booker, that wrote in his 2009 book, ''The Real Global Warming Disaster'' that the writing was on the wall in the government's energy White Paper of 2003, that Britain's lights were going to go out if this policy was pursued. Yet, Tony Blair signed up to this energy policy centred on building thousands of windmills, already fully aware that Britain would be losing many of it's coal-fired power stations due to an EU anti-pollution directive, and that, foolishly, Britain was unlikely to build any new nuclear power stations to replace those that by now would be nearing the end of their life.

Of course, beside not having enough power, Britons are faced with a terrifying new emerging new element in the Government's energy policy. It well knows that electricity from the tens of thousands more wind turbines it hopes to see built in the coming years will cost between two and four times as much as that from conventional power stations. Its solution to this is to rig the market with new taxes and other devices so that this will make electricity from wind farms somehow seem competitive -- not by making wind cheaper but by doubling the cost of electricity from the gas, coal and nuclear power stations that still provide virtually all the electricity England needs to keep its lights on.

The harsh fact is that successive governments in past 10 years have staked their country's future on two utterly suicidal gambles. First, they have fallen for the delusion that they can depend for nearly a third of their future power needs on those useless and unreliable windmills -- which will require a dozen or more new gas-fired power stations just to provide back-up for when the wind is not blowing. Secondly, at the same time, by devices such as the punitive ''carbon tax'' due to come into force on April 1, they plan to double the cost of electricity acquired from grown-up power stations, which can only have the effect in the coming years of  doubling electricity bills, driving millions more households into fuel poverty.

The Way I See It.....the madness of green zealots is running Britain's energy supplies. If the government were not lost in a green bubble of complete make-believe, it would keep open those coal-fired power stations the EU is forcing them to close, stop subsidising grotesquely expensive wind farms, and it would go flat out to exploit Britain's vast reserves of the shale gas that has more than halved US gas prices in four years.

Unfortunately, Britain doesn't have a government that has the balls to tell the Greenies and the EU to get f-cked!  So their lights will go out, the economy will suffer a catastrophe, power bills will double and tens of thousands more people will die of cold in those freezing winters that the politicians were somehow fooled into believing would never come again.