Great Britain commits suicide

Well, thanks for the Common Law and stuff.  Been nice knowing you:

[UK] Cabinet ministers have agreed a far-reaching, legally binding "green deal" that will commit the UK to two decades of drastic cuts in carbon emissions. The package will require sweeping changes to domestic life, transport and business and will place Britain at the forefront of the global battle against climate change.

...

It is also hoped that the commitment to renewable energy – the committee says 40% of the UK's power should come from wind, wave and tide sources by 2030 – will stimulate new industries.

...

The committee's report says the new carbon deal will require that heat pumps will have had to be installed in 2.6m homes by 2025. It also says that by the same date 31% of new cars, and 14% of those on the road overall, will be electric. Experts say a total of £16bn of investment will be needed every year to meet the commitment. Some of this money will be raised through increases in electricity prices.

Ignore for a moment the hopeless pie-in-the-sky 40% target for wind and tide power.  Instead, let's put that last price tag in perspective.  £16bn is around $26B.  The population of Her Britannic Majesty's Scepter'd Isle is about 62M, vs. US population of 307M - in other words, there are around five times as many Americans as Brits.

And so an equivalent spend for us to do a boondoggle this stupid would be five times as much, or $130B.  That's the spend per year, every year until 2027 - 16 years.  So the total price tag for this idiocy is the equivalent of us spending $2T.

That's spending that won't be available for productive investment.  Britain is eating its seed corn.  In a generation, they'll have the same standard of living as Mexico.  And who pays for this?  Read the bolded part above [my emphasis].  The poor pays for this.  And notice that the poor will have their gas or oil furnaces replaced with electric heat pumps, so they can pay even more.

All I can say is that environmentalists must hate poor people as much as they hate minorities.

What's simply astonishing is how Europeans are so firmly convinced that they're smarter than we are, and yet their "elite" thinks they can take a quarter trillion bob out of the pockets of the poor (while destroying the poor's hopes for their children) without triggering a revolt.  Good luck with that.  I'm admittedly a biased observer - after all, my ancestors all decided that Europe sucked - but you Eurosnobs have to make it a little harder for us to mock you.  This sort of numbskullery takes away all the challenge.

I'm begging ya, please, to up your game.  I mean, I'll lose my edge in mockery if you keep this up.  Yeah, yeah - somewhere in Texas, a village is missing its idiot.  Seems he sits on Her Majesty's Cabinet now.

Yeah, I'm mocking you.  I just thought that stupid must be in the water over there, so I spelled it out as a public service.  No need to thank me.

(Via)