Crippled Jesus Christ on a friggin\’ unicycle.
It is true that a tonne of carbon dioxide pollution saved in Bangalore is the same as a tonne saved in Birmingham – but by paying others to make carbon reductions for us, Labour are selling Britain short by subsidising abroad the efficiencies and savings we need to make at home.
There are many thousands of new and well-paid jobs that could be created in the UK with a major national push on energy efficiency, microgeneration and renewable energy technologies.
Creating jobs is a cost of such schemes, not a benefit! And this is a Tory swallowing this idocy for the Lord\’s sake!
No one pretends that squeezing more efficiency out of our economy will be easy, but at a time of economic stress for Britain Gordon Brown should be looking for ways to create more jobs in the UK, not lobbying to use tax payers\’ money to create green tech jobs overseas.
Gaaah! Efficiency means getting the most out of the limited resources that we have. Thus efficiency concerning labour means getting as much as we can out of using the least labour we can. Thus what we\’d really like is a method of having a green economy with no labour employed at all in it!
Now look Barker (for it is that Gregory who has perpetrated this nonsense), we expect this sort of nonsense from the likes of Caroline Lucas but you\’ve been to the London Business School, you know better than this.
Get with the programme will you, you know, connect with reality? Creating jobs is a cost!
Boo to subsidies! Boo to aid payments to the Third World!
The fact that the entire rationale for this is based on lies just makes it worse.
Yes–it is at least mostly lies. My reservation about the “all” is that few of the left proponents have the requisite expertise to separate fact from fiction in these matters, so, merely as a matter of chance, some truth content is almost certain to creep into their overall presentation.
But Tim has an extremely valid point. Just as in the old formula “buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest, so should as many of whatever are the absolutely necessary requisite of carbon-reducing jobs as possible be created in those places where the wages are at their pitiful lowest. That is the rational formula–the one that doesn’t waste.
“we expect this sort of nonsense from the likes of Caroline Lucas . . .”
Actually, before I read which Conservative was spouting this nonsense, I assumed it was this Labour supporter sitting pro tem on the opposition benches.
Could the government not just employ a load of people to dig holes and dump the CO2 in them. You’d need a hole about 8m deep and 8m wide for one tonne of CO2, aye?
If Boris Johnson got his way over the proposal for moving London Airport to a new Island in the Thames Estuary off Sheerness, that would create a lot of space for ‘carbon landfill’.
If the jobs go to your supporters then this is definitely a ‘benefit’ to a politician.
But wouldn’t building an industry focused on
energy efficiency, microgeneration and renewable energy technologies have the potential to create expertise in these areas that could lead to the UK to exporting products, services and know-how and therefore generate wealth?