Astonishingly ...

For once I agree with Peter Hitchens. This is from his recent article in the Mail Online (again, not one of my usual reads). It's bad form to quote him in full, but I am busy today (see previous post) and he agrees with me about light bulbs and wind farms, so I going to unashamedly block-quote him.

A weird and irrational cult has us in its grip. If the Mormons or the Moonies started taking over the BBC and the Government, which then harangued and persecuted us into wearing funny underwear or getting married in mass ceremonies, we would – I hope – rise in revolt.

But the ‘Man-made Climate Change’ fanatics are applauded and praised, even as they force us to abandon perfectly sensible electric lights, and instead subject ourselves to strange, flickering substitutes, simultaneously worse and more costly than the ones they replace.

There is worse to come. The same people wish to compel us to rely for our power on windmills, million upon million of them, as if we had never discovered more efficient and reliable ways of generating electricity. And they are succeeding. Few areas in Britain are now unthreatened by deranged projects to install intrusive, gigantic wind-farms on prominent sites.

This must be one of the first instances of a civilisation voluntarily and consciously going backwards. We might as well rely for our economic and industrial future on tens of millions of hamsters pattering frantically round treadmills. Hamsters only do this by night. Windmills only make electricity when it is windy. See the problem?

For most of us, the truth has yet to sink in. Our old lightbulbs still function, or we have stockpiled a few. And the nuclear and coal-fired power stations which keep our country going have some years yet to run before they wear out or a Brussels decree shuts them down for ever.

But the time is not far away when we will find the irrational opinions of these maniacs being forced upon us unpleasantly in our daily lives. The lights will be too dim to read by. Then they will go off for long periods of the day or night. Our computers will be down much of the time. The well-off will buy expensive generators and our suburbs will be like Baghdad, with smelly, noisy, petrol-driven motors bursting into life every few hours as the central power shudders and fails.

Even if the prophecies of the man-made global warming cultists were proven, which they aren’t, these measures would be an idiotic response to the problem. Nuclear power, as the French well know, produces no carbon emissions and also ends dependence on Russia for gas and the Middle East for oil. And it works in a dead calm, too.

The lightbulb purge will have a piffling effect on energy consumption, nothing like enough to justify the expense and inconvenience forced upon us. I suspect that it has been designed specifically to advance the cult, to make believers feel good about themselves rather than to do good – the main aim of all false religions.

Why don’t we resist? Partly because, once again, there is now no major political party which speaks for common sense.

I wish his last sentence wasn't true, but I fear it is.