Back in the real world

As the main section of the Daily Telegraph keeps trying to become a bad version of the Daily Mail, the billion sized scandal of the EU carbon market, picked up by Richard North, is relegated to its business pages, where Rowena Mason tells us that it

has been plagued by fraud, with Europol estimating that carbon trading criminals trying to play the system may have accounted for up to 90pc of all market activity in some European countries during 2009. Fraudulent traders mainly from Britain, France, Spain, Denmark and Holland pocketed an estimated €5bn.

This isn't business news, it should be high politics, and is far more worthy of a review article than a waffly piece about William Hague's enthusiasm for his job.

The carbon market isn't even flawed execution of a good policy. There's no evidence that global warming is shooting up, and evidence for the theory that this global (sic) warming (sic) is caused by carbon dioxide is as hard to spot as a legitimate carbon trade.

Staying in the business news, Jeremy Warner retails what may have been a joke at the time, that

Writing in The Times in 1894, one columnist estimated that such was the growth in horse-drawn carriages that in 50 years every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure.

The theme of his piece, hung on BP's latest energy review, is that "new energy sources are being discovered all the time. The world looks more than able to cope for now", with huge amounts of shale gas, and thorium in the wings.

(Shale gas is even present in Britain. A company drilling near Kirkham wants to make "a leak-free well that is going to last 50 to 100 years".

Cuadrilla Resources said it believed there could be enough gas in Lancashire to supply about 10% of Britain's future needs.

Naturally the BBC's subsequent coverage is focused on greenie wimping rather than the potential benefits. We see a piece from their notoriously impartial environment analyst, but where is the piece about the economic benefits?)

Back to Warner. As he argues, energy intensity lessens as an economy matures - especially if the energy is getting dearer: cost is a great driver to innovation.

An even more important issue than the motivation of William Hague (who?).

When the history comes to be written, this generation of politicians will deserve infamy for their colossal skewing of resources in support of a discredited theory of the causes of "global warming".

It seems "global warming" in Australia causes drought - oops, flooding - oops, maybe that's cyclical. Anything can be put down to "global warming". This is just how religious beliefs are bolstered. Absolutely anything can be explained away, nothing falsifies the core doctrine.

There is no more reality to carbon dioxide induced global warming than there is to the god of the Roman Catholic or any other other church.

But the Roman Catholic church has lasted for a worryingly long time.