The stupidest international agreement since the Treaty of Versailles expired at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Fifteen years after its launch, the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change died a miserable failure. Few are likely to mourn. According to Kyoto’s authors, it should by now have triggered a five per cent fall in the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.
In fact, they have risen by 58 per cent because the world’s faster-growing economies never ratified Kyoto at all, nor the drastic cuts in the use of fossil fuel it prescribed. China, America, Brazil and India simply ignored it, while Canada, New Zealand and Russia, although initially committed, later cast it aside.
In Britain, however, the Government remains wedded to a post-Kyoto strategy, and along with the rest of the EU has agreed to ‘extend’ the treaty’s provisions. One consequence of this is the new Energy Bill, which by 2020 will triple the subsidies paid by taxpayers and consumers to ‘renewable’ energy suppliers to £7.6?billion a year.
The bungs paid to operate offshore wind turbines – the most expensive form of energy ever devised – will rise 16-fold to an annual £4.2?billion. The hated onshore turbines will also get huge new subsidies, at least doubling their number to about 6,500….
British policy, enshrined in the current Bill, is being driven not by evidence but by irrational dogma, and to question it is to be accused of endangering the planet. Only this explains the ferocity of opposition to fracking.
In reality, a disaster of a different kind looms: years of chronic impoverishment while competitors roar ahead and world CO2 emissions rise unchecked.
Welcome to the British industrial counter-revolution.