Britain has just got the latest climate change taxes passed, this time hitting businesses with phenomenal charges simply for using energy. The reason, to lower the UKs carbon emissions by 80% by 2050.

This makes me wonder how many people affected by this (everyone, it's happening worldwide) know what a low carbon economy means in practice?

1) Low carbon means low industry. That means cutting back on our industrial usage, in this case 80%. That seems self evident to me.

2) Taxing local industries has two immediate results. One is the taxes have to be recouped. Companies must make a profit, so will simply pass on the tax to the end user. Of course every country without such penalties will not include the charge so unless import controls are used (out of fashion currently) people will simply buy from abroad, causing local firms to go out of business. If all companies worldwide could be taxed the same then the costs would be passed on worldwide and first the public would go broke followed by the businesses. You can't get a quart out of a pint pot.

3) The increase in energy charges will have two consequences. If driving becomes too expensive it will eventually become limited to the rich. If home energy becomes more expensive (as it has) people have to spend less on everything else or freeze.

4) If you do reduce CO2 by 80% most power would be generated by nuclear. Like it or hate it, Philip Stott's estimate of 30 year's worth of uranium before that runs out (as it is destroyed in the process) won't get us far beyond 2050. All the coal lying underground will be available but gradually being outlawed.

5) If people prefer to live in pre industrial communities as a few of our local protestors do already, the population is now many times higher than it was a few hundred years ago. Sustaining such numbers by growing their own food and supplying their own fuel from wood and rubbish is hardly going to be viable. And what would they do with all the empty factories and make what they would have made without them?

6) The actual figures for what is termed alternative energy are tens of times the price of conventional at a fraction of the efficiency. The sun rarely shines, the wind rarely blows at just the right speed, and the amount of water required for wave power is restricted to very few sites. There may be alternatives to compare with what we have one day, but not today or for many years.

7) In the short and medium term increased fuel prices will gradually raise transport costs of all types making holidays, private cars and ultimately all transport unviable for all but the richest.

In the Soviet Union there were rich people, the money went to the Communist Party hierarchy. Of course if you remove huge amounts of money at one end it has to go somewhere. The rest of us will be gradually be deprived of more and more home comforts and cash until we will be living at subsistence levels. And even the government's own advisors expect power to be cut off for part of the week as there won't be enough legal fuel to run the power grid. I very much doubt more than a handful of the enthusiasts actually want to live like this, so why are they all pushing governments to make that happen? Do they really not understand the consequences?

My favourite soapbox topic. I wonder if anyone really thinks an industrialised country like the UK can ever reduce their emissions so low? I doubt it. The thing that really upsets me is the deceit involved in all this Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) discussion. As the ClimateGate scandal last November showed the scientists from NASA, the CRU and other research centres have been cooking the books to make their case for AGW. One of the best examples from an email by the tree ring expert was about how his studies show it was at least as hot or even hotter 1,000 years ago. That wee fact never made it into his papers. That and many more lies have made it into the public domain and honest scientists have had funding cuts or had to resign from posts as they were ethically opposed to the lies. I'm sure a lot of this has to do with scientists' egos and trotting around the world as a saviour. As for some politicians and businessmen? I'm sure they are going to make a pretty penny with all the carbon trading credits. Al Gore is projected to be the first "green billionaire" thanks to his partneship in a carbon credit company.

The whole AGW debacle upsets me mainly because of the lies involved and the laziness and bias of the media who don't investigate as they should. Wind power is not going to save the world. Denmark with its forest of windmills uses NONE of it. It's unreliable as a base load so they sell their wind power to Sweden and Germany and receive hydropower from Sweden and some form of power from Germany. Alternative energy can't provide baseload. It's as simple as that. It's a pipedream. Of course we need research into alternative energies. One day it may be possible to power the world with alternative, non-polluting energy. That would be wonderful.

For those who think I'm a heathen polluter let me say that I recycle everything possible. I'm not a huge comsumer of fossil fuels (you try and take my aircon away from me in summer and you'll have a fight though) and I even bring recyclables home from work to put in my recycling bin. Why? Not because I'm saving the world from AGW. It's because I don't like pollution. Let's have less pollution. That is a good thing but nothing to do with AGW.

Global warming may be happening or it may be cooling. It's a cyclical thing that has nothing to do with the human race. That's why the proposterous notion of making us live as people did in the pre Industrial Revolution era is a nonsense.

I can't add a single word to that Tizabelle, you put it perfectly. What saddens me the most is that although all this seems obvious to some, it's clearly gone above and beyond most people's awareness or it wouldn't still be happening. We have an election coming and there is a minor party (at least) who would remove all carbon taxes, so it is possible country by country to get rid of them at each election, should any party be against them.

And the second tragedy is why decent politicians don't begin to rebel as in the end they will all look bad just as Labour now do over Iraq. You can make mistakes as big as you like in politics but can take them back if you realise they may backfire on you, but no one appears to have yet. Unfortunately my comment about following the money does a lot to explain that conundrum as well.

Last December in Australia there was a massive grass roots campaign against the proposed ETS (Emissions Trading Scheme, the same idea as the US's Cap and Trade) and it worked! thousands of people, me included, wrote, rang and emailed politicians on both sides asking them to vote against it. The ruling Labor Party voted on party lines but the opposition Liberal Party nearly imploded, changed their leader and voted against it. It was defeated in the Senate. Things can be done. Unfortunately the Libs have gone soft on the idea and are proposing a watered down version of an ETS. There is a general election due this year so things could get interesting!

All information on political successes is very welcome, as when I called the radio about this the presenter agreed with my view, but said what on earth can we do about it? I said the best I knew was to learn the figures inside out and then tell as many people as possible, and hope one by one they don't rely on me but do their own research and could then be moved to vote against it if they can. I can only hope one country at a time will see the light and stand up to what I can only see as a form of theft. And as I said earlier, as well as stealing our money (besides the dubious reason behind it taxing does not deter energy usage in the main) the actual consequences can only be a return to an agrarian society as if you reduce energy consumption by 80% production will drop at a similar rate. The meerkats would know (local reference there...) but no one seems to look ahead to the future when they support such measures. I doubt many people at all want to lose almost everything they have, computers, travel, television, and central heating. You need a lot of power for all of them and if you reduce the voltage (as some councils do now on street lighting and others) you soon notice the difference, and if the government forecast power rationing then they clearly know a lot more than we do.

This has just appeared in the media
leaked US document

Basically it is an Obama policy document written on March 10th this year, outlining how the UN can take over tax collection for climate change. It also emphasises how important it is to push the message in order to create the structure, ie the climate change scare is simply a vehicle for creating a world tax system above any national government. I was one of the only people I know who instantly distrusted Obama when he made CO2 a pollutant as I know it is not. It's essential for life and can anyone answer the level it changes from that to a pollutant? I doubt it.

Just a reminder what Obama is talking about:

CO2 levels are currently around 360ppm. In 1961 the official world figures were a variable 200-400ppm, not a static amount as many try and tell us. ie it hasn't left the parameters of 50 years ago.

Despite temperature and ice data varying depending on the messenger, CO2 data does not. Of the 0.03% of CO2 in our atmosphere man currently contributes 3% of it. So if we stopped producing any (I'm not sure if that includes breathing, maybe the IPCC can clarify that as well so I can hold my breath every minute for the climate) it would continue at 97% of its current amount. Who can still be fooled as more and more facts creep out is tragic.