Climate craziness continues....

Christopher Booker continues to lead the field in reporting on the silliness of the global warming crowd...

Ed Miliband, our new Energy and Climate Change Secretary, has committed Britain, at this moment of financial meltdown, to an 80 per cent reduction of “carbon emissions” by 2050 – which must go down as the most fatuous utterance ever made by a British Cabinet minister (immediately supported by the Tory shadow spokesman).

The only way this goal could be achieved would be to shut down almost the whole of our economy.

A slightly firmer grasp on reality prevails in those countries, led by Poland and Italy, which were last week in Brussels urging the EU to moderate its plans to reduce carbon emissions, on the grounds that this was not the moment to be piling onto Europe’s economies costs amounting to trillions of euros.

But Gordon Brown, alongside the Commission President, José Manuel Barroso, was at the forefront of those insisting that the EU must stick to its guns.

Brussels’s only concession came from the Environment Commissioner, Stavros Dimas, who said he would increase from 35 per cent to just over 50 per cent the amount of “carbon credits” which European industry would be allowed to buy from the developing world under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

In other words, for the right to continue emitting CO2 in Europe, firms would be permitted to pay hundreds of billions of euros to China, India and elsewhere.

The net result would be to impose astronomic costs on those firms, such as electricity suppliers, which cannot move their operations outside Europe (costs to be passed on to their customers) with little or no effect on emissions.

Just how crazy this system is already becoming was illustrated by a programme broadcast by the BBC World Service last June (and reported here) which highlighted several examples of the CDM in action.

A small Indian chemical firm, for instance, already receives up to $60 million a year for eliminating emissions of CFC greenhouse gases from its process.

A company spokesman admitted that it would have eliminated the CFCs anyway.

The $500 million it is due to receive over the next 10 years is just a free gift, to achieve nothing.

So this insanity gathers way on every side, creating fortunes for the “carbon traders” who broker the deals, all in the name of preventing global temperatures rising.

Yet for several years now, while greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, temperatures have ceased to rise, and even fallen, making a nonsense of all those computer models that predicted that one must rise with the other.