Environmentalism is a cult

Why do I say this ? Because its not based on science, statistics, economics or reason. Instead, alarmists have been plucking statistics and hyping up any example of climate change as evidence of impending doom and armegeddon.

Tony Blair was in Australia recently and he had the chutzpah to suggest we put more effort into complying with the Kyoto protocols to reduce our CO2 emissions. Not only would it be devastating to our standard of living if we were to increasingly regulate our economy to reduce emissions, it wouldn't acheive much at all. But the funniest thing is how he can't even follow his own advice:

"Any sign of progress on Mr Blair's fabled low carbon economy? If anything, says Cambridge Econometrix (CE), the country's leading readers of the carbon runes, we may be going backwards. Their latest report says that despite recently announced new measures, the government is likely to miss its 20% carbon-reduction goal by 2010 by 'a large margin'. Even the new forecast of a 14% carbon reduction by 2010 requires prices of tradeable allowances under the Emissions Trading Scheme to rise sufficiently to reduce emissions, particularly from coal-fired power plants. That's very unlikely. In the past fortnight they have completely collapsed." (The Guardian, Society Guardian, 'Eco soundings', May 31)

Another shining example of how wasteful "green" policies are, and how they are nothing more than feelgood environmentalism( via Greenie Watch):

In 1999, the Tompkins County Board of Representatives voted to install solar power on the roof of the country library. (In cold, dark upstate NY.)

It will be paid for with $551,025 of County funds -- an addition to the library capital project -- and $455,514 in grants from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and the U.S. Department of Energy.

And the results ?

So, how much power has their system generated since $1,006,539 was spent to install it? 460,124 kilowatt hours (kWh) since it was installed, in July of 2001. On the open market 460,124 kWh would cost a commercial user (assuming an astronomically high average price of $0.10 per kWh) about $46,000. Only in The City of Evil could spending over a million dollars to generate at most $9,358 worth of electricity per year make sense.

Way to use tax-payers money !