Analysis of UK wind farms shows that the 15 biggest owners will between them receive almost £850 million in subsidies that are added on to household electricity bills. It comes after the disclosure last week that 101 Tory backbench MPs had written a letter to David Cameron demanding he slash the subsidies. The Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) expects the total consumer subsidy paid out by 2030 to amount to a staggering £130 billion. --Robert Mendick, and Edward Malnick, The Sunday Telegraph, 12 February 2012
The National Trust is now "deeply sceptical" of wind power, its chairman said as he launched an outspoken attack on the "public menace" of turbines destroying the countryside. For years the conservation charity has been a supporter of renewable energy, including wind, to reduce carbon emissions and help fight global warming. But in an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Sir Simon Jenkins warned that wind was the "least efficient" form of green power, and risked blighting the British landscape. --Louise Gray, The Daily Telegraph, 13 February 2012
It's been a while since Washington politicians and bureaucrats were extolling the alleged benefits of rising energy prices and championing policy that would drive them up quicker, all in the name of green jobs and climate virtue. Perhaps slow growth and stubborn unemployment, like the gallows, tend to concentrate the mind. President Barack Obama would never admit today, as he did four years ago, that electricity rates would "necessarily skyrocket" under his cap-and-trade plan. In fact, he'd probably prefer to hear nary a word about cap-and-trade during the next nine months. And Energy Secretary Steven Chu will surely not be heard repeating today what he said back in his heady days as an academic, namely that "somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe." Obama and Chu have it exactly backwards: It's lower energy prices that drive economic renaissance. Vincent Carroll, The Denver Post, 12 February 2012
When Lord Robert May — a distinguished British population biologist — told a journalist: “I am the president of the Royal Society, and I am telling you the debate on climate change is over,” he was risking the reputation of the venerable institution he headed. Presidents of national science academies are not meant to engage in ex cathedra statements, but to promote objective research. However, according to a devastating report this week from the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the Royal Society — former home to Newton and Darwin — has adopted a stance of intolerant infallibility over climate science and, even less appropriately, over policy. Unfortunately, perverting science to promote draconian and poverty-inducing global controls is hardly a laughing matter. –-Peter Foster, Financial Post, 10 February 2012
2011 is the 11th year out of the last 12 when the Met Office global temperature forecast has been too warm. Whatever the reason for this ongoing 'warm bias,' the Met Office forecast for the first half of this decade, published in early 2010, that half the years between 2010 and 2015 would be hotter than the hottest year on record is already looking in doubt. --Paul Hudson, BBC Weather, 10 February 2012
Julian Simon found that humanity progressed not only by solving immediate problems within the existing institutional framework but also by creatively improving the framework over time. . . . In the short run, members of society adopt localized technical and contractual fixes. In the medium range, they may explore government regulatory policies. In the longer term, they expand the scope and scale of the liberal institutions. These institutions of economic freedom—private property, binding contracts, and the rule of law—improve incentive structures that foster both economic well-being and environmental stewardship.” --Fred Smith, MasterResource, 12 February 2012
