A green electricity initiative that promised big returns for energy producers has led to hundreds of acres of countryside disappearing beneath solar panels in the past few months. The Feed-In Tariff scheme, launched in April last year, promised to pay four times the going rate for electricity generated by solar power for 25 years. The scheme promised such good returns that companies from China, Germany and the US rushed to cash in. —Simon de Bruxelles, The Times, 30 August 2011 [Registration required] Those who hate environmentalism have spent years looking for the definitive example of a great green rip-off. Finally it arrives, and nobody notices. The government is about to shift £8.6bn from the poor to the middle classes. It expects a loss on this scheme of £8.2bn, or 95%. Yet the media is silent. The opposition urges only that the scam should be expanded. On 1 April the government introduces its feed-in tariffs. These oblige electricity companies to pay people for the power they produce at home. The money will come from their customers in the form of higher bills. It would make sense, if we didn’t know that the technologies the scheme will reward are comically inefficient.—George Monbiot, The Guardian 1 March 2010

Families should be discouraged from taking holidays abroad if Britain is to meet its climate change targets, a Government commissioned report has said.—David Millward, The Daily Telegraph, 30 August 2011 Yes, most climate scientists believe that anthropogenic global warming is happening, but the rate, the degree, and the effects are all still very much in dispute. The pro-science posture is to recognize the limitations of what we can currently predict, and to remain open to evidence. Shrieking your insistence that the “science is settled” only demonstrates an unscientific and dogmatic orthodoxy.—Mona Charen, National Review Online, 30 August 2011

China’s ambitious new gas development policy, troubles in the nuclear sector, the need to reduce carbon emissions and the discovery of vast new unconventional gas resources are all combining to lead us into a “golden age of natural gas”, says the International Energy Agency (IEA).—European Energy Review, 30 August 2011

No significant political force in the United States is as incompetently organized and led as the greens. Republicans should rejoice; green extremism, hysteria and incompetence seriously undercuts Democratic coherence and credibility. Until the rest of the left knocks some sense into green heads, the environmentalists will continue to serve as one of the Republican Party’s most helpful auxiliaries.—Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest, 26 August 2011

As the public tires of this boogeyman, the prospect of a huge socialistic undertaking to combat climate change begins to fade. One day, perhaps—decades from now, I would guess—people will talk more dispassionately about this topic, and I suspect will look back upon past generations with a bit of laughter.—Anthony Gregory, Eurasia Review, 30 August 2011



The predictions of further warming are necessarily based on models. Now, it happens I did my PhD work on Federally funded modeling, from which I developed the NBSR Law (named after the group for which I worked): All modeling efforts will inevitably converge on the result most likely to lead to further funding.—Charlie Martin, Pajamas Media, 30 August 2011