How much does green idiocy cost households?

David Miliband's unconvincing performance in front of Jeremy Paxman this week after his Green lecture did at least leave one agreeing with him that Green is the new Red.

Frank Field recounts how Labour MPs have had to abandon doctrine after doctrine to New Labour in the hope of being elected, but "all the party’s activists believed it remained committed to the poor". What it has come down to is that "the very essence of being a centre-left MP was rudely and brutally questioned by the 10p abolition".

This sounds pretty minimal for a political philosophy. In fact, of course, Labour remains in favour of a huge redistribution of income since that is the only way it could "abolish child poverty" on its own egalitarian definition. Blair and Brown knew that the swing vote they needed would never embrace this policy, which was why Blair pursued it by stealth.

Benn and Miliband both seem to crave some overarching creed they can subscribe to. For both of them it is in their genes. Benn's father is a famously loony left-winger, while pere Miliband was a Marxist academic.

For both of them Green is the new crusade. Miliband nailed the green flag to his political mast in his lecture, and in the past has called for the EU to re-invent itself as a champion of the environment (whatever that means). And Hilary Benn recently said:

The Government is committed to building a low-carbon economy, here and around the world. That means a complete change in the way we live and an economic transformation that will put Britain at the forefront of a technological revolution in the way we use and source our energy.

Maybe he would care to follow Miliband into the Newsnight studio so that Paxman can dissect this statement - perhaps sharing the session with Nigel Lawson, author of the astringently readable "An appeal to reason - a cool look at global warming", or Philip Stott, whose blog is an oasis of accessible sanity.

The Tories also show signs of reverting to traditional behaviour. Whereas Labour craved the enfolding arms of a Big Faith, Conservatives' aim was firstly to get and keep power, and secondly to manage change incrementally. In this sense their leader's lack of principles is an advantage, as we see the environment dropping down his political agenda. This will not be through any conversion to the truth that he misunderstood the science and the policy consequences, but simply because it's not playing well in polling data.

The latest commentator to pick up the environmentalists' incoherence is Bernard Ingham in the Yorkshire Post, brought to a wider audience by Philip Stott. What ails politicians who dance to the green tune, he asks. Have they lost their powers of reason?

I ask because their pre-occupation with combating something that may or may not exist – that is, man-made global warming – is responsible for part of the growing burden of costs with which every household is now saddled.

So, he asks, how much is this costing us? We don't know because government and Opposition don't want to strip out the costs to show us.

Let's forget the so-called climate change levy (CCL), which has as marginal an effect on domestic consumers' bills as it does on CO2 reduction. Instead, the real damage is done by Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROCs) designed to encourage the development of wind, wave, tidal, solar and other "renewable" forms of electricity. These are as idiotically conceived as the CCL, since nuclear and large-scale hydro-electricity, which emit next to no greenhouse gases, are excluded from both.

ROCs latterly have provided a 100 per cent subsidy substantially to wind power – so far the only major renewable source of electricity – and earlier this year, the Business Department forecast they would cost £23bn by 2020, or, nearly £1,000 per household. And for that we would optimistically get only 14 per cent of our electricity – and then only when the wind was blowing.

Unfortunately, that figure was out of date when it was calculated because Tony Blair had signed up to a battily impractical EU requirement to produce 20 per cent of our energy – and not just electricity – by 2020 from renewables.

If we are to offset the massive use of oil and gas for transport and domestic heating with renewables, we shall, as things stand, have to generate up to 45 per cent of our power with wind. So that will treble the eventual cost to £3,000 per household – without providing a reliable power supply.

Ofgem, the energy regulator, says that eight per cent – or £80 – of the current average current gas and electricity bill can be attributed to environmental charges and this is only going to rise with the billions required to link remote and largely useless wind farms to the grid.

This is not to mention more generally the costs of the carbon trading and offsetting rackets, the Treasury's punitive tax revenue from petrol and diesel, Gordon Brown's new "green levy" doubling car tax revenue to £4bn while, on the Treasury's own admission, reducing carbon emissions by less than one per cent, and taxes on rubbish.

"Why", asks Ingham, "do we put up with this "green" extortion to so little purpose? That's the real mystery."

It's no mystery at all. It's because politicians chop the costs up into little pieces to make it hard for anyone to add them all up.

Last year the Taxpayers' Alliance (thank you to them for pointing me at their paper) calculated that

In 2005-06, the total burden of green taxes and charges – Fuel Duty and Vehicle Excise Duty (net of road spending), Climate Change Levy, Landfill Tax and the net cost of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme – was £21.9 billion. (This figure excludes Air Passenger Duty as emissions from international aviation are not included in national CO2 emissions totals.)

That's over £800 for each household in Britain, before you consider the cost of regulations. Some costs, for instance, are concealed in energy bills.

And the burden will have gone up a lot since then.

Something for the weekend, sir

This morning's parcel from Amazon brought Squandered by David Craig and Nigel Lawson's An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming.

Craig in his introductory chapter entertainingly pairs promises by Blair and Brown at the start of their premierships.

Blair --- Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime
Brown - Punish crime and prevent it by dealing with the root causes

Blair --- We will make education our No. 1 priority
Brown - Education is my passion

Blair --- Tackle the unacceptable level of anti-social behaviour
Brown - Take action against anti-social behaviour

Blair --- Everyone is entitled to dignity in retirement
Brown - Respect, dignity and security in old age

Blair --- We will get the unemployed from welfare to work
Brown - Advance to a Britain of full employment

Blair --- Restore trust in politics
Brown - Rebuild trust in our democracy.

All good knockabout stuff. It'll be interesting to see how the following themed chapters develop.

Lawson's foreword starts with a jawdropping disclosure.

While my three previous books had no difficulty whatever in finding a British publisher (indeed they did so before they were even written), this book, despite being promoted by an outstanding literary agent, was rejected by every British publisher to whom it was submitted - and there were a considerable number of them.

As one rejection letter put it: 'My fear, with this cogently argued book, is that it flies so much in the face of the prevailing orthodoxy that it would be very difficult to find a wide market'.

It was published by an American publisher who owns Duckworth.

In a TalkSport interview, Lawson said that someone had paid for a copy to be sent to every MP free of charge, so the publisher has already sold more copies than some so called celebrity autobiographies achieve, and they attract substantial advances.

The first chapter proceeds to undermine the IPCC's reports in layman's language from many angles that will be familiar to readers of Umbrella Blog and the blog of Philip Stott, and concludes

It is, however, prudent to err on the side of caution. For that reason, in the remainder of this book I shall work on the assumption that the majority (IPCC) view described earlier in this chapter is correct, while bearing in mind that, to a very important extent, this issue is in fact anything but 'settled'.

This promises to be an entertainingly bracing read.

Producer capture

For big organisations the fleeting contact with any individual customer can become less important than the continual orders from departments and head office. Internal processes influence reward more than the service given to the customer. And internal processes can be the result of political jockeying among head office departments, which are several layers away from the customers.

This can have a direct effect on customers, as John Humphrys tells in the case of a flight attendant. What's really striking is the bad experiences reported with the NHS. He had taken his small son to the local A&E.

It could scarcely have been a more trivial injury - a splinter in his finger - but it was swollen and turning septic and I had made a bit of a mess of trying to get it out myself.

Neither the nurse I saw first nor the doctor who joined her would do it. Not because they couldn't - it would have taken them a few minutes - but because of the rules which say only A&E units with specially trained paediatric staff can deal with children. That meant having to travel miles into Central London to another hospital.

They told me they did not have "after-care" facilities in case of complications. But it's only a splinter, I said, not a life-threatening injury. It made no difference. Rules are rules.

So off we went and eventually - after seeing two receptionists, two nurses, three doctors of varying seniority and one X-ray technician and receiving a large dose of painkiller (unwanted) and a bottle of antibiotic medicine (unused) - the splinter was removed.

The patient, I am happy to say, survived with no complications whatsoever, but what should have taken a minute or two had taken five hours and heaven knows how much it ended up costing the poor old taxpayer.

And he attacks the self-serving, vacuous slogans with which state bodies patronise us at our expense.

When the state provides a service, the body providing it is usually big, and more interested in serving its central masters than the local people who ultimately pay for it. In this model the local community has hardly any influence over its police, hospitals and schools - and the aim of bureaucrats, both in Whitehall and on the ground, is to keep it that way. So much more comfortable.

That is why direct democracy is so important.

The clunking state (where have I heard that well chosen adjective before?) is incapable of making the services it provides responsive and light on their feet.

Just as the cumbersome structure of taxes and benefits restricts mobility. The Reform think tank claims that underlying child poverty (net of transfers) has risen, and the withdrawal of means-tested benefits means that some gain only 11p for every additional £1 earned.

1,875,000 people face marginal effective tax rates of over 60 per cent in 2008-09 compared to 760,000 people in 1997-98.

Politicians' vanity has a lot to answer for. Frighteningly, they genuinely think they alone can provide proper services and set the 'right' income levels for households.

Next - forgetful of Canute - they'll be imagining that they can change the climate. Oh ... they do.

Governments aren't nimble

Richard North notes the risibly flat-footed response of EU governments to their own policies on emissions reductions now that they are being helped to start understanding the possible impacts of their ignorant grandstanding.

Rhetoric is one thing but – to no one's surprise – economic reality is another.

Some of the main economic landmarks are changing rapidly and interventionist governments' policies will never be able to keep up with this speed of change.

For instance, the Financial Times reports that

Prices of top-quality wheat jumped 25 per cent to a record high on Monday in their largest one-day increase as Kazakhstan, one of the largest grain exporters, said it would impose export tariffs to curb sales.

The move, which follows similar export restrictions in Russia and Argentina, is likely to put further pressure on already tight global wheat supplies, analysts said.

And of course demand from industrialising countries is still shooting up.

In a leader the FT comments that some factors affecting the price of food are temporary. "But the biggest structural change is biofuels."

Over the next few years, therefore, prices should stabilise as supply increases and stocks are rebuilt. In the meantime, those governments that are subsidising biofuels need to cough up and help fund the World Food Programme. The world has enough food to feed everybody – if there is the will to do so.

There is no chance that an interventionist supranational government seemingly making policy based on bad science with the consent of ignorant heads of government will be able to generate intelligent responses to these changes in anything like a timely fashion.

Another fast moving area is data encryption. Common laptop disk encryption products for Microsoft, Apple Mac and Linux operating systems can be easily overcome. Symantec's chief scientist comments that

The first thing to observe is that encryption technology from ten years can almost now be broken with a Casio watch. It's a war out there and hackers realise, that with enough motivation to break technologies, the gains are worth the effort.

ITPro notes that lost laptops are the most frequent cause of data breaches (36%), the use of paper records causes another 24%, while hackers, malicious insiders and malicious code combined lead to just 12% of such incidents.

Putting data in the hands of third-parties doesn't mean it's any safer, as some 38 per cent of data breaches were seen to be caused by external contractors or partners.

The researchers took the opportunity to renew calls for UK or EU data breach notification, but said it was necessary to create one legislation for companies to follow. Each of the 40 US states with notification laws has different legislation which requires separate filings. A multinational corporation faces even more different rules.

They said, "The worst thing that could happen is very harsh, detailed restrictive legislation. Government don't do a good job of legislating technology... we say use best practices." They also stressed the need for safe harbour clauses.

If you've done best practices and are at zero risk of a breach, you shouldn't be penalized... Don't punish a business which has done the right thing.

This is not EU governments' way. How likely are we to see another set of obsolescent prescriptive measures based on bad science?

Detailed government policymaking just can't keep up, especially as it comes with irrational baggage. In the energy field

Luxembourg, Finland, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and other countries have all written to the EU industry commissioner Günter Verheugen, to ask for "swifter decisions" on how the EU plans will affect big energy consumers.

Expect our legislators to continue to think that they know best even though they can't even submit acceptable expenses claims and they think it's fine that Robber Conway is still an MP.

No great expectations

The Taxpayers' Alliance picks up a report from the Financial Times that on public services generally, those who believe things will get worse outnumber those who believe they will get better by 22 percentage points. "That is chiefly due to expectations over the future performance of the National Health Service declining from a net score of minus 14 to minus 19".

However, the Financial Times adds that

A mere 20 per cent are confident that the government will manage immigration well, 23 per cent that they will do the right thing on pensions and 23 per cent that crime will reduce over the next few years.

The public are more optimistic about education and transport.

The Taxpayers' Alliance want politicians to "get themselves out of management".

The problem is that unaccountable management boards would create a democratic deficit. This just leaves the option of actually giving citizens choices of providers on the ground - for instance, giving parents vouchers and letting them choose a school (though this is even harder than it sounds).

But politicians are sure they know better than the electors. You only have to look at Brown and Cameron to realise how deep their conceited conviction of their superiority runs.

They'll be highly reluctant to let go. And so many schools will continue to fail our children, and political interference in the Nationalised Health Service will continue to kill people.

David Cameron is a hypocrite

The question isn't should he have gone to Africa when part of his constituency was under water.

The question is, should he have gone at all? Jetting off to Africa for a couple of days? Come on, how green is that?

He lectures us with his wagging finger about carbon footprints, then jets off on a tawdry publicity stunt. It was a long distance stunt, which made it hypocritical as well as tawdry.

His defence was that if you go there yourself, you get a better idea of what is required. In two days? I think not. Especially if you spend some of the time making a speech to their parliament which presumably could have been delivered by video link.

And what of those Conservative "volunteers" heroically building a school? How misplaced that looks now, when they could have been heroically heaving sandbags in Tewksbury. That's bad luck. But might it not have been better value for Ruandans if the volunteers had donated their airfares to pay for locals to do the work? Then the local economy would have benefited twice over, rather than the airline boosting its profits.

But no, much rather a tawdry political stunt. Unfortunately for him, one which shines a light on the moral emptiness at the heart of David Cameron.

Global warming and BBC bias

Booker is on good form this week. He points out that politicians are causing us extra expense to alleviate global warming, just as questioning of the theory is intensifying.

What happened to the brains of all those panicking politicians who are now heaping on us an Everest of costs without bothering to check whether the simple little equation on which they are based actually corresponds with reality?

They are from the same school of politicians who took most of the EU into the euro - an idea whose time had not come, an arrangement which economists think is now unravelling.

Confront these people with a big, new and preferably simple idea, and they see themselves becoming important figures in history as they usher it along.

Never mind the inconvenient practical detail.

Booker also highlights persistent BBC bias in favour of windfarms.