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SWITCHING LIGHTBULBS WON'T SAVE THE WORLD

Climate change - a worrying business

Wednesday March 21,2007

By Ann Widdecombe

Comment Speech Bubble Have your say(6)

CLIMATE change is a genuinely worrying business and I would not wish to belittle the issue of global warming but, as usual, all that’s happening is largely peripheral and is providing yet another raft of petty officials with yet another excuse to be petty.

Let us first get the issues in perspective.

China relies on carbon for 70 per cent of its energy and its industrialisation is growing fast. So is India’s. Those two countries plus the United States account for half of all the carbon pollution in the world.

So anybody imagining that it makes a jot of difference if Mrs Bloggs replaces her lightbulbs with low energy ones might just as well throw a sugar cube in Loch Ness and claim a serious contribution has been made to sweetening the water.

Take a look at any big city at night. Office buildings are lit up like gin palaces, advertising hoardings are illuminated so as to be seen from miles away and street lights burn every few yards. Yet we are all invited to feel guilty for leaving a washing machine on standby.

As usual, it is the ordinary citizen who will be persecuted – and almost certainly eventually prosecuted – while the big energy wasters carry on wasting. One electrical chain store has decided to abandon the sale of ordinary lightbulbs.

So tight is the grip of environmental panic that Britain cannot see the wood for the trees

Presumably it imagines the poor can just change their fittings overnight? Dash it, the low energy affairs cannot even work with dimmers! Doubtless some boffin will find a way for them to do so in due course but, meanwhile, it is sensible to let people go on buying the bulbs which already work.

Recycling is important but when councils put chips into wheelie bins to spy on the rubbish, it is a sign not of green consciousness but of bullying bureaucracy and, in this country, bureaucracy just loves to bully. Any excuse to pry, pontificate and fine is grist to the mill of the environment fascists. We have the most intrusive state since Oliver Cromwell and it is time we gave it the boot and rejoiced once more in freedom.

Nuclear energy is cleaner and more sustainable but those who supposedly want a purer atmosphere find that too politically unpalatable to even have a full and informative national debate. Instead, they fill the countryside with ugly windmills which produce a fraction of what is needed and have no virtue other than being in fashion. It might be funny if it were not so serious.

So tight is the grip of environmental panic that Britain cannot see the wood for the trees – but the shape of the wood is international and will not be changed by stamping on a few twigs. The ordinary citizen is becoming the twig while China, India and the US carry on regardless.

Before anybody accuses me of being cavalier about these matters, let me say that I recycle and do not leave machinery on standby. I do both, however, for reasons of thrift, not because I believe that my puny efforts will save the planet.

I acknowledge that the sum of such efforts might make a difference but even that will be pathetic if the big polluters do not change their ways or even concede the urgent necessity of doing so. We are about to have Government inspectors snooping round our homes when we sell them. They know how much we put in our waste bins.

Hidden cameras are being installed to trap citizens who put out their rubbish on the wrong day and who are now being branded enviro-criminals as if we haven’t enough problems trapping the real criminals.

Politicians presume to have a view on our electric fittings and propose to tax our holidays. They are wrecking acres of green fields (ironic, is it not?) with wind farms.

Yet it is all for nothing if President Bush, President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh do not get their act together.

SWITCHING LIGHTBULBS WON'T SAVE THE WORLD

25.03.07, 8:15pm

mind you switching lightbulbs will hardly make any difference to this Global warming CON;The only thing i think it would be they will save all who have them ,will probably save everyone money; great idea at least someone has their head screwed on the right way around whooray for commonsense, at last who thought that up make him or her pm.. that will would give gordon brown a fit?? great then cause he is not leader of men the leaders of men are fighting a war under equipt lightbulb that saves the working people of this country a load of cash;WHY NOT OR IS THIS ONE OF BROWNS GIMMIC'S TO TAX YOU ON SAVINGS ON LIGHTBULB HA HA

• Posted by: alanG • Report Comment

SWITCHING LIGHTBULBS WON'T SAVE THE WORLD

22.03.07, 1:51pm

Anne you are talking sense as usual, like you I recycle, turn appliances off as often as I can. The energy gestapo needs to understand that to get anywhere with this long term problem they need to motivate industry and the individual citizen to think of the economics when buying equipment or using energy, this is the only way that efficient use of energy will ever come about.
When governments dictate the use of energy efficient bulbs etc they are not looking at the whole picture, filament bulbs do give off heat it is true but they have totally ignored the fact that homes in the UK need that heat so in fact it is not wasted energy. When looking at energy efficiency one should look at the whole picture ie the needs of the home in the individuals case and on an idustrial scale the company that is the most efficient will survive while the less efficient will soon go out of business.

• Posted by: JimCardiff01 • Report Comment

SWITCHING LIGHTBULBS WON'T SAVE THE WORLD

22.03.07, 1:51pm

• Posted by: JimCardiff01 • Report Comment

SWITCHING LIGHTBULBS WON'T SAVE THE WORLD

22.03.07, 10:00am

Always read your articles Anne and find them an absolute ray of hope in a manic -lemming like- dash to the edge of the precipice.
You are obviously in touch with the genuine Mr and Mrs Britain and it is to be hoped that someone in your party is also listening and has the courage to put you in a position in the party where you can do some good to this ailing country of ours, (assumming of course you wish to hold such a position).
I do feel the global warming has got a little out of hand locally (Gr Britain) and that the current political parties are using the issue as a vote catcher. Carry on with your common sense writings and hope that you eventually swing them back on to the path of sensibility and fairness.

• Posted by: J1E2D3D4 • Report Comment

SWITCHING LIGHTBULBS WON'T SAVE THE WORLD

21.03.07, 10:49pm

Ann -if there were more like yourself in David Camerons NU Tory party I would remain a faIthful tory voter. However I fear you are a lone voice of rational thinking. Therefore I am looking towards the UKIP to hopefully bring back some sort of democracy to this sad country.The only light bulb I am likely to value ,is the one that needs to be switched on in the heads of an electorate who has tolerated the integrity our parliament to be compromised in recent years.

• Posted by: Jay_R • Report Comment

SWITCHING LIGHTBULBS WON'T SAVE THE WORLD

21.03.07, 6:45pm

Well said Ann - now all you have to do is convince D Cameron that he is on a loser backing the lie of global warming and all the other hyped up green issues - add a smattering of anti-immigration action, curb council mis-management , mis-appropriation of the public purse and the waste of public money and you are back in government.
As it is he's a bluer shade of Blair but only just.
Come to think of it why don't you stand for leader of the 'tories - you'd get my vote

• Posted by: Spike • Report Comment