6 minutes ago
Donate...
Our Manifesto
Our manifesto
Who governs Britain?
EU Documents
The Lisbon Treaty
That "mandate" analysed
EU Constitution - official version
Constitution analysis
Constitution Summit analysis
Building a political Europe
Myths
The seven basic myths
Good for the environment
Co-operating nation states
Europe reunited
The EU is democratic I
The EU is democratic II
Can't be a "superstate"
Keeping the peace in Europe
A free trade area?
Constitution for enlargement?
Qanagate
Blogroll
-
-
20 minutes ago
-
22 minutes ago
-
2 hours ago
-
2 hours ago
-
4 hours ago
-
5 hours ago
-
7 hours ago
-
7 hours ago
-
8 hours ago
-
9 hours ago
-
12 hours ago
-
14 hours ago
-
14 hours ago
-
15 hours ago
-
15 hours ago
-
16 hours ago
-
18 hours ago
-
18 hours ago
-
22 hours ago
-
22 hours ago
-
23 hours ago
-
1 day ago
-
1 day ago
-
1 day ago
-
1 day ago
-
2 days ago
-
2 days ago
-
2 days ago
-
2 days ago
-
2 days ago
-
2 days ago
-
3 days ago
-
3 days ago
-
3 days ago
-
4 days ago
-
5 days ago
-
1 week ago
-
1 week ago
-
1 week ago
-
1 week ago
-
1 week ago
-
1 week ago
-
2 weeks ago
-
2 weeks ago
-
2 weeks ago
-
2 weeks ago
-
2 weeks ago
-
2 weeks ago
-
2 weeks ago
-
3 weeks ago
-
4 weeks ago
-
5 weeks ago
-
5 weeks ago
-
1 month ago
-
1 month ago
-
1 month ago
-
2 months ago
-
2 months ago
-
3 months ago
-
4 months ago
-
4 months ago
-
7 months ago
-
7 months ago
-
9 months ago
-
11 months ago
-
11 months ago
-
1 year ago
-
1 year ago
-
1 year ago
-
1 year ago
-
1 year ago
-
1 year ago
-
1 year ago
-
1 year ago
-
1 year ago
-
1 year ago
-
1 year ago
-
1 year ago
-
-
Climate Change
Blog Archive
-
▼
2011
(1596)
-
▼
June
(139)
- Life copies art
- Another charade
- Corporate clever
- A question
- Voting for oblivion
- Asleep on the job
- Trapped in the bubble
- Why only a "little"?
- They still can't get it right
- Doing the honest thing
- And plan B is?
- Sun shines ... Greeks strike
- Losing the will to live
- Back again
- This is why
- MoD "bloated and dysfunctional"
- Blown it!
- A measure of the divide
- Has to be good
- Scottish practices
- Look in the mirror?
- The EUterus
- Ignoring the elephant
- The penny drops
- Nice and easy does it
- Matured stupidity
- The Austrian defence
- What is and will be
- Softening the line?
- The epitome of ignorance
- Escape from Brussels
- A field for them all
- Green jobs – Boeing jobs?
- Never let it be said
- The decline and fall
- The circus elephant in the room
- Confirming the obvious
- Wilders is innocent
- The perils of the eurozone
- Another one bites the dust
- A message of peace and love
- Klepturition 7
- A very dangerous time
- Default blues
- The Green Revolution – part 1
- The edifice crumbles?
- Of revolutionary times
- Barking cats
- The bleating starts
- Greece will fail
- Bog off
- They really are all the same
- A repentant sinner?
- It would be a mercy
- A threat to our security
- Greenpeace in our time
- Klepturition 6
- A nosedive of morale
- Revolution on hold?
- Shades of 40
- Who would have thought?
- Down in the underpants laundry
- Mind over matter
- Ta ta Tata?
- By your advisors shall ye be known
- You're still going to die
- Adult news values
- The shame
- Revolting Greeks ... again
- Dhimmitude 1940
- Up their own fundaments
- Hitting the switch
- Double domed
- Cutting back
- They don't get it either
- The Boy dun wrong
- The fat lady sings
- Not an ounce of sympathy
- Go hang
- Encore Rafale
- Aren't you proud?
- The prattle of tiny brains
- Delusion bites back
- The story continues
- By special request
- Another day, another promise
- The wheels groan on my wagon
- What did they expect?
- Breaking News
- Not a problem
- The appliance of science (not)
- Point, missed, completely
- The dynamics of power
- Oh woops!
- Stupid, malign idiot
- Whaaaaaaaa?
- Who's mugging whom?
- Where has he been?
- The tyranny of "science"
- Watching them squirm
- "Breeding ground" threat
- Another hijack attempt
- Führernomics
- Listening mode off
- The mighty have fallen
- Foreign aid is "bold and right"
- Micturition in the same pot
- Tax bandit
- 'Elf and Safety
- Do it yourself
- Scheissen!
- Your excellent book
- Perpetuating the delusion
- Unsustainable libraries
- We've been there before
- Do not feed the clogs
- The Macaulay effect
- End game
- A very different country
- Referism: the debate
- What can we learn
- Political blogging
- Silly season comes early
- More thievery
- Revolutionary times
- "Accurate forecasts ... not possible"
- The corporate world
- Five-a-day is up
- Creature comforts
- Bleating-Я-Us
- The plunder continues
- Thinking it through
- Deserves a wider audience
- A Wednesday fourteen
- Thieves at large
- I got it wrong
- Thick MSM
- Asheep at the helm
- The agenda revealed
-
▼
June
(139)
With a speed undiminished by an increasingly laden bandwagon, Booker takes on the energy crisis once again, noting how politicians remain firmly locked in their little green bubble, oblivious to the practical implications of the measures they have set in train.
Sooner or later, he tells us, politicians must emerge with the sense and the courage to question this madness – as many other people are now beginning to do. But, he concludes, there is little sign of their emergence yet.
In fact, there is no sign at all, witness the infantile comments from the embattled Chris Huhne in today's Observer, blithely advising us that we should not accept the increases "lying down" but "hurt" their supplier by finding cheaper alternatives.
"Consumers don't have to take price increases lying down," he says. "If an energy company hits you with a price increase, you can hit them back where it hurts – by shopping around and voting with your feet."
Sadly – infuriatingly – though, we are not allowed to shop around for a new government and vote at all – with our feet or anything else. But it would make little difference if we could. As with the energy suppliers, the politicians are all indulging in common receptacle micturition (CRM).
And here, it is no good looking to the energy suppliers for salvation. As we see from Roger Carr chairman of Centrica, his thinking is constrained by the orthodoxy as he warns that steep energy price increases are inevitable.
Households, he says, should be prepared for further rises in their power bills of the magnitude of Scottish Power's 19 percent increase in gas prices and ten percent hike in electricity tariffs, blaming the pressure on wholesale prices.
"Moving wholesale prices have been very material, well over 20pc, in recent months," he says. "In those circumstances, it is just a commercial fact that those things convert into price increases".
Scottish Power, spreads the blame a little wider, talking about the combination of the wholesale price increases, rising transmission charges from National Grid and the cost of complying with the government's "carbon reduction" legislation introduced to combat climate change.
But what is not being acknowledged is that the reason we are so prone to fluctuations in energy prices – which translate almost immediately into price rises, but rarely price reductions – is a chronic and continuing failure of energy policy.
The desperate need for a coherent policy we noted in September 2008, but it was not to be. Thus while Booker finds the "most terrifying of all" problems is the way politicians are locked into the "green bubble", he is being too kind.
Perhaps the truly most terrifying of all problems is, at one, the long term failure of successive governments, going right back to the last war, to develop a coherent energy strategy, and then of this current administration – and before that the Conservative opposition – to recognise this as the key problem, and start working on urgent remedial action.
For sure, the "green bubble" is blinding our current crop of political dwarfs to the most effective solutions, but there is no indication that, even without their green-tinted spectacles, they would be able to do any better than their predecessors.
Individually and collectively, our political classes have lost the ability to create effective policy and now like pre-teens in a class without their teacher, all we hear is the prattle of tiny brains.
COMMENT THREAD Tweet


