Pete suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Environmental Idiocy of the Day: Jeremy Leggett Edition

Thursday, 25th October 2007

I do love The Guardian sometimes. The way in which their writers manage to get the wrong end of the stick never fails to amuse. Today we have Jeremy Leggett insisting that we've got to have much more subsidy for the renewables industry so that we can compete with Germany. Full of WWII references and all.

But while our German allies are turning out the renewable energy equivalents of Messerschmitts by the factory-load, Britain is again slow to spring into action. Worse, as we learned yesterday, officials responsible for UK mobilisation have told the prime minister it is impossible for us to build modern-day Spitfires in any number.

What he's entirely missed is that we don't actually care who reduces CO2 emissions nor where in the world such reductions come from. If the Germans want to go ahead and reduce them well, carry on Fritz. Please, be our guests. We'll benefit from those reductions just as much as if we'd reduced them ourselves.

In 2006 the cost to the average German household of the tariff was £12 a year. The average UK household paid £7 a year under the renewables obligation, but that delivered significantly less renewable capacity.

Well, OK, less subsidy means less renewable energy. We can see that....but what that means is that the Germans are taxing themselves to benefit us. Hooray! Something to celebrate, not decry, don't you think?

Fell spelt out Germany's success with renewables. In 2000, when he and other parliamentarians pushed through a law to fast-track renewables markets, such sources contributed 6% to the national electricity mix; the target was 12% by 2010. Three years ahead of the target, they are approaching 14% - and have created 200,000 jobs in the process.

And that, I'm afraid, is insane. "Created 200,000 jobs"? The truth is that 200,000 people have been pulled from doing something more useful, curing AIDS perhaps, brewing beer or wiping babies' bottoms, and forced into a lower value activity by the existence of that subsidy.

Usually there's a reason for such idiocy in the advocation of public policy. Sometimes it really is that the proposer is misinformed, possibly even simply dull witted. But this isn't, in my opinion, the case with Leggett. No, you see, he runs a company that installs solar systems. Solar systems that depend upon large subsidies to make them even vaguely attractive to the installer.

If we continue to allow investment to flow uncontested into countries with a renewables vision, UK plc loses out on any prospect of a serious share in the next global business revolution.

Gosh, fancy that, businessman calls for subsidy of his business!