The Great Green Grab

Tom Armstrong has a good, solid FSB piece on what he calls The Great Green Grab.

The Great Green Grab: How £28 Billion of Your Money is Being Spent on a Fairy Tale

A lesson in lunacy: Picture the scene. It is a grey December morning in 2025, and the energy regulator Ofgem has just delivered the nation its latest Christmas present: permission for the electricity and gas companies to spend £28 billion of our money upgrading gas pipes and power pylons over the next five years. The press release is thick, of course, with the usual cant; “future-proofing,” “resilient,” “net zero by 2030”. The accompanying photographs show smiling ministers, wearing wholly unnecessary hard hats, standing in front of turbines the size of Big Ben. The average voter, already paying some of the highest electricity bills in the world, is supposed to cheer.

Do not cheer. What has just been announced is one of the largest acts of state sanctioned larceny in British history, dressed up as salvation. And it rests, from first brick to last, on a fantasy we are invited to accept without question: that the climate ‘emergency’ is so pressing that we must bankrupt ourselves to appease it. Suppose, just for a moment, that the emergency is a mirage – and it certainly is – and compound of hysterical computer models, grant-hungry academics, and politicians in search of a noble purpose and good jobs when they retire or get kicked out. From that vantage point, the £28 billion looks less like an investment and more like the greatest confidence trick ever played on a developed nation.

The whole piece covers familiar ground but is well worth reading. Sooner or later the lunacy has to be nailed as lunacy even if those responsible slink off into another lucrative scam. As they probably will.

One day, perhaps sooner than the modellers think, the public will ask the question that should have been asked years ago: if the climate is truly in peril, why are we the only ones prepared to freeze in the dark to save it? When that day comes, the £28 billion will stand as a monument not to foresight, but to one of the most expensive outbreaks of collective delusion in our island story.

Until then, keep an eye on your direct debits. They are about to go up again. And rebel.