Plans to increase tax on fuel and energy supplies in the name of tackling climate change are being greeted with increasing scepticism and hostility as the ongoing financial crisis sharpens views on what people are prepared to do to ‘save the planet’ from climate change. Now, the BBC says that the UK government has is to be investigated by the Advertising Standards Agency for spending £6million of tax payer’s money on a TV ‘Carbon Monster’ ad to scare children into telling their parents that we’re all going to die in heatwaves while the world is flooded as a result of man-made climate change.The Times transport correspondent, Ben Webster reports on this with the reverence one can expect from a man-made global warming/climate change believer. Conversely, man-made global warming doubter, James Delingpole of the Mail online, expresses a rather more sceptical view of the merits of the £6million government campaign to scare UK kids into believing that we’re all going to die unless we pay more carbon tax. News of all this has even raised eyebrows down under in The Australian. Frankly, all I will say about all this for now is that you couldn’t make it up.
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November 12th, 2009 at 5:10 am
How is making heating your house more expensive going to stop climate change? Are we going to end up forcing people to choose between eating and heating in a return to a Dickensian era? This policy is clearly a ridiculous lunge at our wallets by a nearly bankrupt Govenrment and has little to do with actually trying to improve the environment.
Making petrol ever more expensive is not really deterring people from driving – not because they can’t afford it but because there is no real viable alternative. It makes people choose between putting petrol in the car or having a night in the pub or switching to cheaper fags. It’s high time we had some common sense policies which reflect reality.
November 12th, 2009 at 6:17 am
Dave’s point about ‘no viable alternative’ resonates very much with me. A small example:
I had planned to ride my motorcycle to London yesterday as I usually do when I have a meeting in town. Because of the increasing difficulty of finding motorcycle parking in London, I thought I’d try the train. A few comments…
1. Charging £6.90 to park (after 1000) at Didcot station hardly encourages people to use the train.
2. Having an complex system where one has to call to pay for a space, enter one’s registration number over the phone, enter a card number and then get told one can’t park anyway is a pain.
3. Nearly £50 to travel the 50 or so miles from Didcot to London is unacceptable.
4. For £50 I’d expect a seat, a train that had been cleaned recently and one that ran vaguely on time. I got none of those things.
So, getting to London – just 50 miles away – turns from the sort of simple, easy and cheap journey one finds in the rest of Europe to an expensive, stressy, irritating experience.
Why is travelling in the UK so expensive and unpleasant? Simply because ‘controls’ on private transport are far more about discouraging car and motorcycle use rather than encouraging the alternatives.
Pricing people out of their cars and off the roads is simply going to damage the economy. That’s real damage, rather than theoretical global warming damage.
Next time, I’m riding.
November 12th, 2009 at 6:20 am
This is a rather better version of the Climate Change bedtime story ad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkPQU3UDBM0