But Andy Atkins, executive director of Friends of the Earth, said the UK should take responsibility for emissions.
"The committee should put pressure on the Government to abandon climate-wrecking plans to expand UK airports and not to build coal-fired power stations without carbon capture and storage from the outset," he said.
"Investing in green energy and cutting energy waste can create tens of thousands of new jobs, reduce our dependency on the yo-yoing cost of fossil fuels and put Britain at the forefront of a green industrial revolution."
Look Andy, creating jobs is a cost of such schemes, not a benefit.
The very fact that thousands of jobs are created is proof that your plans make us poorer.
“The very fact that thousands of jobs are created is proof that your plans make us poorer.”
This is idiotarianism on a grand scale. Having an army does not make Britain poorer per se; it depends on what the alternative is.
But we know the alternative to paying thousands of people to build windmills – it’s keeping their salaries in our wallets.
Even if we agree that AGW is a real threat, switching off the UK’s fossil fuel generators will reduce growth in greenhouse gases by less than 2% difference to it, so it wouldn’t even make things better, just make them very, very slightly less worse.
I’d rather keep my money and when the time comes, spend it on a boat.
green jobs vs cash lost to import oil
both are costs… but which will cost less??
Why does Lord Turner said that the costs (of not fixing the greenhouse effect) will be catastrophic? They won’t. 2.5% of our GDP (Nordhaus 08) by 2100 is tiny. Or to paraphrase Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling – bearing in mind that the world’s income grows by around 3% per year this will be ‘a cost that will be imperceptible’.
The Economist has been at the same game in it’s 2009 annual saying that if deal in Copenhagen fails we will just give up on saving the planet!
“This is idiotarianism on a grand scale. Having an army does not make Britain poorer per se; it depends on what the alternative is.
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Having a defence capability is a benefit, paying for it is a cost. Put it this way, if we could have an army of terminators, we would have the benefit, without the cost. It is not being claimed that the cost (of jobs) is never worth it, just that the benefits fall on one side of the equation, and jobs on the other. Why do some people find this simple concept so hard to grasp.