Madness on a huge scale....

Christopher Booker in the the Daily Telegraph reports on the latest climate change bill in the UK parliament...

The Climate Change Bill, which had its third reading, commits Britain (uniquely in the world) to an 80 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.

As MPs droned on about the need to fight global warming, Peter Lilley drew the Speaker's attention to the fact that, outside on the streets of Westminster, snow was falling. It was London's first October snowfall for 70 years, and similarly unseasonal snow was carpeting a wide swathe of Britain.

In all that six hours of debate, only two MPs questioned the need for such a Bill, which had swept through its second reading with only five opposed.

The sole MP who tried to raise the matter of the cost of the Bill - which could run to trillions of pounds if all its measures were implemented - was Mr Lilley. He was ruled out of order by the Speaker.

If the Bill's intent is taken seriously, the cost of cutting our CO2 emissions by 80 per cent would cripple our economy, closing down much of what remains of our industry and rendering most motorised transport impossible.

But the cloud cuckoo land that our politicians have floated off into no longer touches scientific or practical reality at any point.

What they should have been discussing was the near-certainty that, within a few years, thanks to the imminent shutdown of 40 per cent of our electricity generating capacity, Britain's lights will be going out.

The state of many of our power stations is already so parlous that, if this winter continues as cold as it has begun, we can expect major power cuts within months.

Yet as we enter the worst recession for decades, our MPs while away their time prattling in sanctimonious unanimity about the need to fight global warming.

It is small consolation that Britain is not alone in its plight. One of the few specific policy commitments made by would-be president Obama is that he will support last year's ruling by the Supreme Court that the US Environmental Protection Agency should treat CO2 as a "pollutant" under the Clean Air Act.

The gas that no plant can survive without, and hence all higher forms of life depend on, would be regulated as if it were as dangerous as arsenic or sulphuric acid.

Senator Obama also supports a US version of the EU's "carbon trading" scheme, costed at hundreds of biliions of dollars. It seems the global warming scare may soon become as crippling to the world's richest economy as anything our own politicians are hell-bent on imposing here.

Yet last week, as reported on the admirable Watts Up With That website, nearly 180 places in the US, from Alaska to Alabama, have just recorded their coldest October temperatures or heaviest October snowfalls on record, based on figures from the National Climate Data Center.

Declining global temperatures continue to make a mockery of those computer model projections on which the whole global warming scare is based.

As I have asked before, has there ever in history been such a collective flight from reality?