Another blog post from Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist.  Climate change boondoggles span countries and continents and defy logic. Faith in climate change "solutions" is hard to dispel using facts with people too enmeshed in cultural "knowledge" and and their own beliefs to listen.

Excerpts:

Spectator Australia diary

Published on Thursday, November 28, 2013, updated Thursday, November 28, 2013

Home thoughts from abroad

After my recent visit to Australia I wrote the diary column in the Australian edition of the Spectator:

Like Britain, Australia’s been confronting the costs of climate policies. The Abbott government has begun to deal with them robustly, whereas in Britain we are still in denial. Our opposition leader Ed Miliband has promised to “freeze” energy bills for two years if he gets into power – a threat that probably caused companies to push them up now -- even though it was he as Energy and Climate Change secretary who did most to load green levies on to consumers. Conservatively it looks like his Climate Act of 2008, with its targets for carbon emission cuts, will cost us £300 billion by 2030 in subsidies to renewable energy, in the cost of connecting wind farms to the grid, in VAT, in costs of insulation and new domestic appliances, and in the effect of all this on prices of goods in the shops. If people are upset about the cost of energy now, they will be furious by the election in 2015. I don’t like to say “I told you so”, but I did, in my maiden speech in the House of Lords in May: “One reason why we in this country are falling behind the growth of the rest of the world is that in recent years we have had a policy of deliberately driving up the price of energy.” David Cameron should take note that Tony Abbott is the first world leader elected by a landslide after expressing open skepticism about the exaggerated claims of imminent and dangerous climate change. Nor can greens argue that the issue was peripheral. The carbon tax was what won Mr Abbott his party’s leadership, and it was front and central in the election campaign. More and more politicians will be finding out that defending green levies on energy bills is more of an electoral liability than doubting dangerous climate change.

One of the more incoherent arguments for green energy policies, repeated unthinkingly by Mr Cameron recently, is that they are an “insurance policy” against future typhoons like the one that devastated the Philippines. Since there has been no increase in either frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones during the period of global warming since 1980 – if anything the reverse – and since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change thinks “the global frequency of occurrence of
tropical cyclones will either decrease or remain essentially unchanged”, this makes no sense. There are going to be typhoons in the Pacific whether it warms or not. What sort of insurance policy is it that costs you a fortune, does nothing to reduce the risk and does not pay out? The way to save lives from typhoons is to equip people with better shelter, communications, transport and rescue services – in short to make them richer. That’s what we have been doing, thanks to fossil fuels, which is why global death rates from storms are down by 55% since the 1970s.