Climate change madness....

Perhaps we should coin a new expression - climate change stupidity - for the craziness of the proposals out there...this is from the UK....

They want us, for instance, to switch from eating beef and lamb to "less carbon-intensive types of meat". Within 11 years they want to see 40 per cent of all the cars on Britain's roads powered by electricity, in the very week when it was reported that sales of all-electric cars have this year halved, from 374 to 156, making a grand total of 1,100. (One of the two companies that make them has just gone bankrupt.) Nor, of course, do they explain where all the electricity to power these vehicles might come from.

They seem blissfully oblivious, for instance, to the fact that, within a few years, we shall face a shortfall of 40 per cent in the supply of electricity we need to meet current peak demand, thanks to the forced closure of so many of our existing power stations. They insist that no more coal-fired power plants should be built unless they can be fitted with "carbon capture" (burying the CO2 in holes in the ground), seemingly unaware that, even if this were technically possible, it would double the cost of electricity and make us even more dependent on Russian and other imported coal which already supplies 70 per cent of our needs.

So what will provide the juice to fuel those millions of imaginary electric cars, let alone keep our lights on and our computers running? Inevitably they want to see thousands more wind turbines, but nothing better illustrates the cloud-cuckoo land in which these academics live than their graph showing how, by 2020, we shall have enough of them to meet our EU target of deriving a third of the electricity we need from "renewables".

These, they claim, will provide 28 gigawatts (GW) of "capacity", representing more than a third of the 80-odd GW of capacity we have today. Yet, as the rest of us know, thanks to the intermittency of the wind those thousands of turbines would only generate on average around 27 per cent of their capacity, some 7.5GW. This represents a mere 13 per cent of current peak demand, leaving us woefully short of our agreed EU target and doing nothing to plug that fast-looming 40 per cent gap in our supplies.

In other words, a more vacuously dotty ragbag of proposals would be hard to imagine. Although the latest six-point "Moonbat Plan" to save the planet, from The Guardian's George Monbiot, is a contender. It includes reducing air travel by 95 per cent, barring "key roads" to private cars, and a ban on grouse-shooting because burning the heather on grouse-moors creates "a staggering proportion of UK emissions".