The staggering cost of crazed quangocrats

The Climate Change Act will present us all with a bill of mind-boggling proportions, says Christopher Booker.

By Christopher BookerPublished: 6:58PM GMT 14 Nov 2009
It is almost exactly a year since Parliament all but unanimously approved by far the most expensive piece of legislation ever put before it. The Climate Change Act, according to our Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, is due to cost us all £404bn, or £18bn every year until 2050, to reduce our carbon emissions by well over 80 per cent. Just what this will mean in practice we have lately been hearing from that galaxy of quangocrats who have clustered round the new Act like wasps round a honeypot.
Lord (Adair) Turner, chairman of the Government's Climate Change Committee (also chairman of the Financial Services Authority), tells us that we will all have to spend between £10,000 and £15,000 on making "a whole house approach to carbon efficiency". He also proposes that a "carbon tax" of £3,300 should be imposed on every new car, an idea coming from the Green Fiscal Commission, chaired by the former green activist Robert Napier, who is also chairman of the Met Office, one of the leading promoters of the global warming scare.

Then there is Lord (Chris) Smith, former culture secretary, now chairman of the Advertising Standards Authority and of the Environment Agency, who looks forward to wind turbines "all over the countryside" and wants us all to be issued with our own "personal carbon allowances". We would each, in effect, have a CO2 ration book, to be used every time we pay for petrol, an electricity bill or an airline ticket. When we exceed our allowance we shall then have to buy carbon credits from those who don't drive cars or fly off on holiday to the sun.
Mr Miliband also tells us that we shall have to spend £9.5 billion through our electricity bills to pay for the CO2 from coal-fired power stations to be piped away and buried in holes in the ground (even though the technology to do this hasn't yet been properly developed). Not to mention the further £100bn we shall all have to pay, according to Gordon Brown, for his dream of building 7,000 new wind turbines.
Even if these could all be built (which in practical terms is out of the question), these machines would still only generate little more electricity on average than the single giant coal-fired power station at Drax. But then we shall never again be allowed to build one of those because Mr Miliband will not allow it unless it is fitted with the technology that doesn't yet exist.
All in all, it would be much easier to admit that the belief in manmade global warming arose just through a very unfortunate scientific blunder, and to redeploy all these crazed quangocrats in jobs where they can do us no more harm.
Christopher Booker's The Real Global Warming Disaster (Continuum £16.99) is available from Telegraph Books for £14.99 plus £1.25 p & p. To order, call 0844 871 1516 or go to books.telegraph.co.uk