This week’s EU Summit in Brussels has been, so far, a fractious and contentious affair. Ireland has apparently been bamboozled into holding another referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, thus dismissing June’s decisive vote against the Treaty as of no significance. Such high-handedness confirms, as if confirmation is required, the monumentally undemocratic nature of the EU. The Irish people have spoken already – but they said the wrong thing. So they must speak again. Well, at least they have the opportunity to speak, whereas we were denied our vote on the Treaty on some trumped up charge by the man who is currently “saving the world”.
German finance minister Peer Steinbrück attack on Gordon Brown’s fiscal rescue package was extraordinary. Whatever happened to diplomacy? But his assessment of Brown’s squandering of the nation’s finances was spot-on. Britain is being back to one of the sick men of Europe, not that any of Europe’s economies are in A1 condition, and there is not much sympathy in the EU for the man who boasted and boasted and boasted again about the British economy’s superior performance and the end of “boom and bust”. The word “hubris” springs to mind. And as for the suggestion of a major coordinated fiscal stimulus package in the spirit Communautaire camaraderie and fraternal love, the Germans seem reluctant to play ball.
Last but by no means least there are the struggles over the 20/20/20 climate change package, involving the Renewables Directive and toughening up the emissions trading scheme (ETS), to combat “dangerous global warming”. (These targets refer to the proposals to attain a 20% cut in man-made carbon dioxide emissions by 2020 compared with 1990, combined with 20% of fuels to come from renewable sources by 2020.)
Suffice to say Mrs Merkel has already thrown a very sizeable spanner in the EU’s ETS works by demanding free carbon credits for 90-100% of German factories until 2020. She is clearly concerned that the extra costs associated with the climate change package will drive business away from Germany to countries which do not have draconian climate change policies – a development known in the eco-jargon as “carbon leakage”. She was quoted back in September saying that she “could not support the destruction of German jobs through an ill-advised climate policy”. No longer loved by assorted middle class eco-activists and eco-warriors, whose agenda is to undermine modern economies and wreck people’s freedoms, she has been dubbed “Frau Nein” and suffered the indignity of being depicted as a puppet with a bizarre hairstyle which seems to have modelled on the Mayor of London’s.
Mrs Merkel’s comments have been echoed by nine former Iron Curtain countries led by Poland, concerned about recession and lost jobs, and Italy’s Sylvio Berlusconi has generally undermined the EU’s climate change policies by saying “our businesses are in absolutely no position at the moment to absorb the costs of the regulations that have been proposed.” If these positions are maintained, Britain’s hairshirt adherence to draconian carbon reduction policies would mean the country was isolated in its, ultimately futile, attempt to control global man-made carbon emissions – of which Britain accounts for less than 2%.
The decarbonising caravan trundles on in Britain. The Committee on Climate Change recently released a report which ramped up the proposed greenhouse gas reduction targets to 34% by 2020. And they estimated that their proposed policies for hitting these targets would cost Britain at least £15bn a year and add 25% to household electricity costs by 2020. Can they really be serious? Do they understand what is happening to the British economy?
And as I show in a new paper entitled “The EU’s Renewables policy: official cost estimates for Britain” (for Global Vision and the Taxpayers Alliance), even BERR’s estimates of the costs of the Renewables Directive are significant. Moreover, the estimates are likely to be under-estimates. A study by the energy consultancy Pöyry, commissioned by BERR, showed that the annual cost of meeting the Renewable targets could be as high as £200 per household in 2020. And BERR’s own Impact Assessments estimated that the average annual cost per household could be as high as £120, up to 2030. In neither report was their any suggestion that there could be any net cash benefits. The reports were all about extra costs – and sizeable ones at that. These are costs which not only damage industry – but also hit the less well off (including pensioners) disproportionately. The policies are cruelly regressive.
