Enviro Nut Jobs Shoot Themselves in the Foot.

It's worth saying from the outset that I am neutral on the subject of man-made climate change.  Although I am sceptical, I wouldn't go so far as to call myself a determined "sceptic."  A better term to describe my views would be "agnostic" - the science behind climate change is flawed, and has been shown to have a great deal of corruption around it, but I don't believe that makes it all false.  I am yet to be persuaded either way.

Yet one thing I am absolutely determined on is that, if man-made climate change is real, big government solutions are not the answer.  My main thrust for this belief is that government solutions have rarely achieved anything efficiently or cheaply, especially when one compares it to the private sector.  Therefore if we are really facing a global crisis, a government solution is not going to save us.  The only way for "sustainable and green" technology to be produced is for governments to get out of the way of private sector companies who build new technologies, to lower taxes, and to allow the race for profit to motivate these companies to invest billions into producing these new technologies as quickly as possible in order to satiate consumer demand.  Once these new technologies are discovered, then there will be a race to the bottom by companies trying to make these new developments as cheap as possible for the public - companies get rich by selling products as cheap as possible, not by keeping them artificially expensive (see Henry Ford for a classic example of this.)

Increased government interference will not be as efficient as the private sector, and in addition will in fact hinder the private sector in doing its job.  This has been shown today by a story in "The Guardian" of all places, that reports that so-called "environmental taxes" are threatening green energy research and crippling development.  The case study is the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, which faces an estimated £400,000 bill next year, raising the prospect of job losses and operational cuts.

Sources quoted by the lefty newspaper claim that there should be exemptions for companies and research groups that can be shown to be promoting government policy.  But why should it stop there?  How does one define whether or not they are promoting government policy?  Yes, it is clear that the Culham Centre is promoting green energy, but taxes will be hurting all sorts of research that will contribute, even in a small way, to these goals.  Additionally, these sort of crippling taxes don't just hurt research, they hurt growth as a whole, and the way we are going to get ourselves moving forward to green energy is to allow the whole economy to grow via market forces, which will in turn allow more private investment in all kinds of Research and Development; some that will be explicitly "green based" and others that may only help implicitly.

The only way to move forward with green technology is for government to get out of the way, allow market forces to decide which are the best technologies to invest it, and then allow the profit motive to motivate these powerful corporations in producing the efficient and cheap green energies that people want.  Government will only make bad choices, impose freedom destroying taxes, and ultimately slow down growth and technological advancement.  Scrap enviro-taxes now!