Peak Oil

Examining Environmental Claims and Their Costs • January 2007

“Members of Seattle Peak Oil Awareness expect world production of oil and gasoline to peak soon, if it hasn’t already, and hard times to follow. ... ‘You can look at it like a black box,’ said Willson, a foosball-table seller who has taken up gardening. ‘The oil goes in and creates people. When the oil gets cut off, the people go away.’ ”
Andrew Garber, The Seattle Times, “Seattle ‘peak-oilers’ prepare for a world without petroleum,” January 2, 2007

Facts

Predictions of chaos due to resource depletion are not new and they are repeatedly the foundation of environmental calls for new restrictions, new government agencies and new spending on programs to avoid the predicted catastrophe.

Peak oil advocates argue that we are at or rapidly approaching the beginning of a long decline in
oil production, having reached the “peak” of oil resources. Combined with the increase in oil use,
some in the peak oil community are predicting dramatic consequences.

These predictions, however, don’t match the facts. Known world oil reserves are increasing, and
if oil becomes more scarce, and price increases, consumers and businesses will move to other
types of energy.

When Will Oil Run Out?

In The Seattle Times article that catalogues the concerns of peak oilers, the group predicts that catastrophe is in the near future. But such predictions have been made repeatedly. Bjorn Lomborg
quotes E magazine from 2000:

“Here’s the scenario: Sticker shock at the gas pumps, with prices nearly doubling overnight.
Long lines at the few stations that are open. Crude cardboard signs reading “out of gas” blocking incoming traffic at the ones that are closed. Huge sales on “full sized” vehicles. Long waiting lists for econoboxes. Ninteen seventy-three? How about 2007?”

This is not the only example. The best examples are the predictions of environmental icon Paul
Ehrlich, who said in the 1970s that oil would run out in 1992. In 1992, Ehrlich published a new
book, saying that oil will be gone in 2031.

Such predictions have routinely missed the mark. Erhlich was the doomsayer who entered into a famous bet with economist Julian Simon in 1980. Erhlich said growing resource scarcity would
increase the price of five basic metals in ten years. Simon said innovation would cause their
price to fall. Simon won the bet. Ten years later the price of all five metals were below their
1980 level. Tin, for example, fell from $8.72 a pound in 1980 to $3.88 a pound in 1990.

Claim

Seattle Peak Oilers: World To End Soon -- And This Time We Mean It
1 E Magazine quoted in Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press) 2004, p 118.

None of these predictions, however, take into account the growth of technology, both in exploration and efficiency.

According to the Energy Information Administration, proved world crude oil reserves have
risen from 645 billion barrels in 1980, to 1,002 billion barrels in 1990 and to 1,317 billion barrels
today.2 At each point when environmental activists have claimed that the downturn was just
around the corner, world oil reserves defied predictions and continued to increase.

The reason is simple: as oil exploration technology improves, previously unusable or undiscovered resources are found.

Peak oilers, however, say that the “peak,” i.e. the time when reserves begin to decrease, is in the near future. Certainly they are correct that a peak will theoretically occur at some point. Given that reserves are increasing, even in the face of increased demand, the argument that declines are in our near future is no more persuasive today than it was 10, 20 or 30 years ago.

Other environmentalists, in fact, contradict the peak oilers. Groups opposed to drillng in ANWR
do so in part because they fear that increased supply will mean a continued supply of carbon
emissions that impact climate change. Some environmental groups actually argue that the worldwide supply of oil is so great that ANWR would make only a small difference in price.

Even if the peak oilers were right, however, the solution lies not in government programs, but in
the market.

Government Programs or Consumer Choice?

If the supply of oil does decline, the market will adjust. Prices will go up and consumers will
change. In fact, as one source noted, “Americans responded to spiking gas prices during the
second and third quarters of 2006, throttling back on driving as wallets were emptied by pump
prices that soared nearly $0.50 per gallon between March and August.”3 As prices declined, drivers began to drive again.

Those who warn of resource depletion have been proven wrong time and again primarily because they believe consumers and businesses will not change in the face of rising prices. They also underestimate the ability of technology to improve efficiency and change demand patterns.

This is not to say that there is an infinite supply of resources or oil. It is to say that humans have
always adjusted to the abundance and scarcity of what is around them without government attempting to second guess which technologies will emerge.

What the pessimistic view of the peak oilers lacks is an accurate sense of proportion. The oil
resources of the world are indeed finite, but, like sunlight, they are more than enough to serve human needs for a long time to come. This is especially true when technology and innovation are
taken into account. The planet’s oil reserves are ultimately finite, but human creativity is not.

Peak oilers and other environmental activists who warn of resource depletion usually call on the
government to take actions to avert the upcoming crisis. In fact, The Seattle Times goes on to say that peak oilers “start off talking about a resolution they want the Seattle City Council to approve.

It states, in part, that peak oil is likely to hit the city with little warning and ‘intervention
at all levels of government will be required to avert social and economic chaos.’”
When the government spends our money trying to solve non-existent problems, it takes resources away from real problems and increases skepticism about real environmental problems on which we should focus.

Global Cooling

Back in 1991, before Al Gore first shouted that the Earth was in the balance, the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study using data that went back centuries that showed that global temperatures closely tracked solar cycles.

To many, those data were convincing. Now, Canadian scientists are seeking additional funding for more and better "eyes" with which to observe our sun, which has a bigger impact on Earth's climate than all the tailpipes and smokestacks on our planet combined.

And they're worried about global cooling, not warming.

Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada's National Research Council, is among those looking at the sun for evidence of an increase in sunspot activity.

Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.

Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.

This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.

Tapping reports no change in the sun's magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere.

Tapping oversees the operation of a 60-year-old radio telescope that he calls a "stethoscope for the sun." But he and his colleagues need better equipment.

In Canada, where radio-telescopic monitoring of the sun has been conducted since the end of World War II, a new instrument, the next-generation solar flux monitor, could measure the sun's emissions more rapidly and accurately.

As we have noted many times, perhaps the biggest impact on the Earth's climate over time has been the sun.

For instance, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar Research in Germany report the sun has been burning more brightly over the last 60 years, accounting for the 1 degree Celsius increase in Earth's temperature over the last 100 years.

R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada's Carleton University, says that "CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short time scales."

Rather, he says, "I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet."

Patterson, sharing Tapping's concern, says: "Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth."

"Solar activity has overpowered any effect that CO2 has had before, and it most likely will again," Patterson says. "If we were to have even a medium-sized solar minimum, we could be looking at a lot more bad effects than 'global warming' would have had."

In 2005, Russian astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov made some waves — and not a few enemies in the global warming "community" — by predicting that the sun would reach a peak of activity about three years from now, to be accompanied by "dramatic changes" in temperatures.

A Hoover Institution Study a few years back examined historical data and came to a similar conclusion.

"The effects of solar activity and volcanoes are impossible to miss. Temperatures fluctuated exactly as expected, and the pattern was so clear that, statistically, the odds of the correlation existing by chance were one in 100," according to Hoover fellow Bruce Berkowitz.

The study says that "try as we might, we simply could not find any relationship between industrial activity, energy consumption and changes in global temperatures."

The study concludes that if you shut down all the world's power plants and factories, "there would not be much effect on temperatures."

But if the sun shuts down, we've got a problem. It is the sun, not the Earth, that's hanging in the balance.

[91] News from Absurdistan - Learning To Hate Oil

From cooler heads blog:

... [the] argument against oil seems to be based on a syllogism: Islamists produce oil, Islamists are bad, therefore oil is bad. The fact is that 80% of our oil comes from non-islamist sources. Our top sources for petroleum are Canada and Mexico. We even import more oil from Africa than from the Middle East. The rest of the world isn't going to switch away from the most cost-effective source of transportation energy just because we choose something different. So by switching to methanol (which would also require massive amounts of land) we cut off our nose to spite our face. The Islamists will keep getting their funding from other nations, just like they do now, and we'll be less resilient in the face of their attacks because we'll be paying more for a less efficient form of energy (and we'll therefore be less competetive with, eg, China as well). It's ludicrous. If you really want to reduce our imports and lower the world price, campaign for an end to the silly restrictions that keep us from utilizing our vast reserves of oil and gas that are locked away in ANWR, the Rockies and the Outer Continental Shelf. The American consumer is not our enemy.

[5] Money Matters - You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

The Telegraph wonders whether 1929 might look like "a walk in the park":

As central banks continue to splash their cash over the system, so far to little effect, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard argues things are rapidly spiralling out of their control. Twenty billion dollars here, $20bn there, and a lush half-trillion from the European Central Bank at give-away rates for Christmas. Buckets of liquidity are being splashed over the North Atlantic banking system, so far with meagre or fleeting effects.

"Liquidity doesn't do anything in this situation," says Anna Schwartz, the doyenne of US monetarism and life-time student (with Milton Friedman) of the Great Depression."It cannot deal with the underlying fear that lots of firms are going bankrupt. The banks and the hedge funds have not fully acknowledged who is in trouble. That is the critical issue," she adds.Lenders are hoarding the cash, shunning peers as if all were sub-prime lepers. Spreads on three-month Euribor and Libor - the interbank rates used to price contracts and Club Med mortgages - are stuck at 80 basis points even after the latest blitz. The monetary screw has tightened by default.York professor Peter Spencer, chief economist for the ITEM Club, says the global authorities have just weeks to get this right, or trigger disaster.
"The central banks are rapidly losing control. By not cutting interest rates nearly far enough or fast enough, they are allowing the money markets to dictate policy. We are long past worrying about moral hazard," he says."They still have another couple of months before this starts imploding. Things are very unstable and can move incredibly fast. I don't think the central banks are going to make a major policy error, but if they do, this could make 1929 look like a walk in the park," he adds.The Bank of England knows the risk. Markets director Paul Tucker says the crisis has moved beyond the collapse of mortgage securities, and is now eating into the bedrock of banking capital. "We must try to avoid the vicious circle in which tighter liquidity conditions, lower asset values, impaired capital resources, reduced credit supply, and slower aggregate demand feed back on each other," he says.New York's Federal Reserve chief Tim Geithner echoed the words, warning of an "adverse self-reinforcing dynamic", banker-speak for a downward spiral. The Fed has broken decades of practice by inviting all US depositary banks to its lending window, bringing dodgy mortgage securities as collateral.Quietly, insiders are perusing an obscure paper by Fed staffers David Small and Jim Clouse. It explores what can be done under the Federal Reserve Act when all else fails.Section 13 (3) allows the Fed to take emergency action when banks become "unwilling or very reluctant to provide credit". A vote by five governors can - in "exigent circumstances" - authorise the bank to lend money to anybody, and take upon itself the credit risk. This clause has not been evoked since the Slump.Yet still the central banks shrink from seriously grasping the rate-cut nettle. Understandably so. They are caught between the Scylla of the debt crunch and the Charybdis of inflation. It is not yet certain which is the more powerful force.America's headline CPI screamed to 4.3 per cent in November. This may be a rogue figure, the tail effects of an oil, commodity, and food price spike. If so, the Fed missed its chance months ago to prepare the markets for such a case. It is now stymied.This has eerie echoes of Japan in late-1990, when inflation rose to 4 per cent on a mini price-surge across Asia. As the Bank of Japan fretted about an inflation scare, the country's financial system tipped into the abyss.In theory, Japan had ample ammo to fight a bust. Interest rates were 6 per cent in February 1990. In reality, the country was engulfed by the tsunami of debt deflation quicker than the bank dared to cut rates. In the end, rates fell to zero. Still it was not enough.When a credit system implodes, it can feed on itself with lightning speed. Current rates in America (4.25 per cent), Britain (5.5 per cent), and the eurozone (4 per cent) have scope to fall a long way, but this may prove less of a panacea than often assumed. The risk is a Japanese denouement across the Anglo-Saxon world and half Europe.Bernard Connolly, global strategist at Banque AIG, said the Fed and allies had scripted a Greek tragedy by under-pricing credit long ago and seem paralysed as post-bubble chickens now come home to roost. "The central banks are trying to dissociate financial problems from the real economy. They are pushing the world nearer and nearer to the edge of depression. We hope they will eventually be dragged kicking and screaming to do enough, but time is running out," he said.Glance at the more or less healthy stock markets in New York, London, and Frankfurt, and you might never know that this debate is raging. Hopes that Middle Eastern and Asian wealth funds will plug every hole lifts spirits.Glance at the debt markets and you hear a different tale. Not a single junk bond has been issued in Europe since August. Every attempt failed.Europe's corporate bond issuance fell 66pc in the third quarter to $396bn (BIS data). Emerging market bonds plummeted 75pc."The kind of upheaval observed in the international money markets over the past few months has never been witnessed in history," says Thomas Jordan, a Swiss central bank governor."The sub-prime mortgage crisis hit a vital nerve of the international financial system," he says.The market for asset-backed commercial paper - where Europe's lenders from IKB to the German Doctors and Dentists borrowed through Irish-based "conduits" to play US housing debt - has shrunk for 18 weeks in a row. It has shed $404bn or 36pc. As lenders refuse to roll over credit, banks must take these wrecks back on their books. There lies the rub.Professor Spencer says capital ratios have fallen far below the 8 per cent minimum under Basel rules. "If they can't raise capital, they will have to shrink balance sheets," he said.Tim Congdon, a banking historian at the London School of Economics, said the rot had seeped through the foundations of British lending.Average equity capital has fallen to 3.2 per cent (nearer 2.5 per cent sans "goodwill"), compared with 5 per cent seven years ago. "How on earth did the Financial Services Authority let this happen?" he asks.Worse, changes pushed through by Gordon Brown in 1998 have caused the de facto cash and liquid assets ratio to collapse from post-war levels above 30 per cent to near zero. "Brown hadn't got a clue what he was doing," he says.The risk for Britain - as property buckles - is a twin banking and fiscal squeeze. The UK budget deficit is already 3 per cent of GDP at the peak of the economic cycle, shockingly out of line with its peers. America looks frugal by comparison.Maastricht rules may force the Government to raise taxes or slash spending into a recession. This way lies crucifixion. The UK current account deficit was 5.7 per cent of GDP in the second quarter, the highest in half a century. Gordon Brown has disarmed us on every front.

In Europe, the ECB has its own distinct headache. Inflation is 3.1 per cent, the highest since monetary union. This is already enough to set off a political storm in Germany. A Dresdner poll found that 71 per cent of German women want the Deutschmark restored.With Brünhilde fuming about Brot prices, the ECB has to watch its step. Frankfurt cannot easily cut rates to cushion the blow as housing bubbles pop across southern Europe. It must resort to tricks instead. Hence the half trillion gush last week at rates of 70bp below Euribor, a camouflaged move to help Spain.The ECB's little secret is that it must never allow a Northern Rock failure in the eurozone because this would expose the reality that there is no EU treasury and no EU lender of last resort behind the system. Would German taxpayers foot the bill for a Spanish bail-out in the way that Kentish men and maids must foot the bill for Newcastle's Rock? Nobody knows. This is where eurozone solidarity stretches to snapping point. It is why the ECB has showered the system with liquidity from day one of this crisis.Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, UBS, HSBC and others have stepped forward to reveal their losses. At some point, enough of the dirty linen will be on the line to let markets discern the shape of the debacle. We are not there yet.Goldman Sachs caused shock last month when it predicted that total crunch losses would reach $500bn, leading to a $2 trillion contraction in lending as bank multiples kick into reverse. This already seems humdrum."Our counterparties are telling us that losses may reach $700bn," says Rob McAdie, head of credit at Barclays Capital. Where will it end? The big banks face a further $200bn of defaults in commercial property. On it goes.The International Monetary Fund still predicts blistering global growth of 5 per cent next year. If so, markets should roar back to life in January, as though the crunch were but a nightmare. There again, the credit soufflé may be hard to raise a second time.

Ron Paul - Keep on Keeping on

Letter from Dr. Paul

From the campaign:

December 17, 2007

What a day! I am humbled and inspired, grateful and thrilled for this vast outpouring of support.

On just one day, in honor of the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, the new American revolutionaries brought in $6.04 million, another one-day record. The average donation was $102; we had 58,407 individual contributors, of whom an astounding 24,915 were first-time donors. And it was an entirely voluntary, self-organized, decentralized, independent effort on the internet. Must be the "spammers" I keep hearing about!

The establishment is baffled and worried, and well they should be. They keep asking me who runs our internet fundraising and controls our volunteers. To these top-down central planners, a spontaneous order like our movement is science-fiction. But you and I know it's real: as real as the American people's yearning for freedom, peace, and prosperity, as real as all the men and women who have sacrificed for our ideals, in the past and today.

And how neat to see celebrations all across the world, with Tea Parties from France to New Zealand. This is how we can spread the ideals of our country, through voluntary emulation, not bombs and bribes. Of course, there were hundreds in America.

As I dropped in on a cheering, laughing crowd of about 600 near my home in Freeport, Texas, I noted that they call us "angry." Well, we are the happiest, most optimistic "angry" movement ever, and the most diverse. What unites us is a love of liberty, and a determination to fix what is wrong with our country, from the Fed to the IRS, from warfare to welfare. But otherwise we are a big tent.

Said the local newspaper (http://www.thefacts.com/story.lasso?ewcd=36475b4d132fc0a1): "The elderly sat with teens barely old enough to vote. The faces were black, Hispanic, Asian and white. There was no fear in their voices as they spoke boldly with each other about the way the country should be. Held close like a deeply held secret, Paul has brought them out of the disconnect they feel between what they know to be true and where the country has been led."

Thanks also to the 500 or so who braved the blizzard in Boston to go to Faneuil Hall. My son Rand told me what a great time he had with you.

A few mornings ago on LewRockwell.com, I saw a YouTube of a 14-year-old boy that summed up our whole movement for me. This well-spoken young man, who could have passed in knowledge for a college graduate, told how he heard our ideas being denounced. So he decided to Google. He read some of my speeches, and thought, these make sense. Then he studied US foreign policy of recent years, and came to the conclusion that we are right. So he persuaded his father to drop Rudy Giuliani and join our movement.

All over America, all over the world, we are inspiring real change. With the wars and the spying, the spending and the taxing, the inflation and the credit crisis, our ideas have never been more needed. Please help me spread them https://www.ronpaul2008.com/donate in all 50 states. Victory for liberty! That is our goal, and nothing less.

Sincerely,

Ron

[90] News from Absurdistan - The Pope Is Getting It

While Polar bears are looking on, the Pope, ever suspicious of rival creeds, seems to be getting it. From The Daily Mail:

Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.

The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering.

The German-born Pontiff said that while some concerns may be valid it was vital that the international community based its policies on science rather than the dogma of the environmentalist movement.

His remarks will be made in his annual message for World Peace Day on January 1, but they were released as delegates from all over the world convened on the Indonesian holiday island of Bali for UN climate change talks.

The 80-year-old Pope said the world needed to care for the environment but not to the point where the welfare of animals and plants was given a greater priority than that of mankind.

"Humanity today is rightly concerned about the ecological balance of tomorrow," he said in the message entitled "The Human Family, A Community of Peace".

"It is important for assessments in this regard to be carried out prudently, in dialogue with experts and people of wisdom, uninhibited by ideological pressure to draw hasty conclusions, and above all with the aim of reaching agreement on a model of sustainable development capable of ensuring the well-being of all while respecting environmental balances.

"If the protection of the environment involves costs, they should be justly distributed, taking due account of the different levels of development of various countries and the need for solidarity with future generations.

"Prudence does not mean failing to accept responsibilities and postponing decisions; it means being committed to making joint decisions after pondering responsibly the road to be taken."

Efforts to protect the environment should seek "agreement on a model of sustainable development capable of ensuring the well-being of all while respecting environmental balances", the Pope said.

He added that to further the cause of world peace it was sensible for nations to "choose the path of dialogue rather than the path of unilateral decisions" in how to cooperate responsibly on conserving the planet.

The Pope's message is traditionally sent to heads of government and international organisations.

His remarks reveal that while the Pope acknowledges that problems may be associated with unbridled development and climate change, he believes the case against global warming to be over-hyped.

A broad consensus is developing among the world's scientific community over the evils of climate change.

But there is also an intransigent body of scientific opinion which continues to insist that industrial emissions are not to blame for the phenomenon.

Such scientists point out that fluctuations in the earth's temperature are normal and can often be caused by waves of heat generated by the sun. Other critics of environmentalism have compared the movement to a burgeoning industry in its own right.

In the spring, the Vatican hosted a conference on climate change that was welcomed by environmentalists.

But senior cardinals close to the Vatican have since expressed doubts about a movement which has been likened by critics to be just as dogmatic in its assumptions as any religion.

In October, the Australian Cardinal George Pell, the Archbishop of Sydney, caused an outcry when he noted that the atmospheric temperature of Mars had risen by 0.5 degrees celsius.

"The industrial-military complex up on Mars can't be blamed for that," he said in a criticism of Australian scientists who had claimed that carbon emissions would force temperatures on earth to rise by almost five degrees by 2070 unless drastic solutions were enforced.

[89] News from Absurdistan - Mad Gesture Politics

From EU Referendum:

Following our rather elegant "cathedrals of insanity", it is Booker's turn to have a go at what he does not hesitate to call "the maddest single decision ever made by British ministers."

This was announced by John Hutton, Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, the startlingly insane plan to build 7,000 giant offshore wind turbines round Britain's coast by 2020, to meet our EU target on renewable energy.

No matter that Mr Hutton's officials warned him in August it was not conceivable that we could achieve even a much lower target, writes Booker, so keen was Mr Brown that Britain should "lead Europe on climate change" that Mr Hutton was told to ignore his officials.

The interesting thing is that, by and large, the media reported his claims without questioning whether such a megalomaniac project was remotely feasible, the New Statesman in fact lauding the "U-turn" on windfarms as "important".

What is especially interesting is that no one mentioned costs. Hutton spoke of his turbines, equivalent to one every half mile of coastline, as having a capacity of 33 gigawatts (GW), a hefty chunk of the 75GW of power we need at peak demand. But Booker has worked it out.

With the cost of giant offshore turbines, as tall as 850 feet, estimated at £1.6 billion per GW of capacity, this represents a bill of more than £50 billion - equivalent to the colossal sum earmarked last week by central banks to shore up the world banking system.

But of course the point about offshore turbines is that, because wind blows intermittently, they only generate on average at a third or less of capacity. So Mr Hutton's 33GW figure comes down to 11GW. To generate this much power from "carbon-free" nuclear energy would require six or seven nuclear power stations and cost, at something under £20 billion, less than half as much as the turbines.

This, however, is only the start of the madness. Because those turbines would generate on average only a third of the time, back-up would be needed to provide power for the remaining two thirds - say, another 12 nuclear power stations costing an additional £30 billion, putting the real cost of Mr Hutton's fantasy at nearer £80 billion - more than doubling our electricity bills.

Then that are a few other minor problems. Booker asked energy expert Professor Ian Fells whether it would be technically possible to carry out the most ambitious engineering project ever proposed in Britain, one which would require us to raise from the seabed two of these 2,000 ton structures every working day between 2008 and 2020.

So we turn to Denmark for an indication. With the world's largest offshore wind resource, it has never managed to build more than two a week, and marine conditions allow such work for only a third of the year.

But it does not stop even there. The turbines' siting would mean that much of the national grid would have to be restructured, costing further billions. And because wind power is so unpredictable and needs other sources available at a moment's notice, it is generally accepted that any contribution above 10 percent made by wind to a grid dangerously destabilises it.

Two years ago, much of western Europe blacked out after a rush of German windpower into the continental grid forced other power stations to close down. The head of Austria's grid warned that the system was becoming so unbalanced by the "excessive" building of wind turbines that Europe would soon be "confronted with massive connector problems".

Yet Mr Hutton's turbines would require a system capable of withstanding power swings of up to 33GW, when the only outside backup on which our island grid can depend is a 2GW connector to France (which derives 80 per cent of its electricity from nuclear power).

Nothing better illustrates the fatuity of windpower than the fact that Denmark, with the highest concentration of turbines in the world, must export more than 80 per cent of its wind-generated electricity to Norway, to prevent its grid being swamped when the wind is blowing, while remaining heavily reliant the rest of the time on power from Sweden and Germany.

The Danes, who decided in 2002 to build no more turbines, have learnt their lesson. We British have still to learn it. Every time we hear that over-used term "green" we should remember it has another meaning: someone who is naively foolish and dangerously gullible.

So says Booker, but Spiked online has a different "take". What is being agreed in all these announcements is not government action, it says, "but rather yet more planning interrogations."

What Hutton actually did was launch a Strategic Environmental Assessment of the seas surrounding the UK, "paving the way for a possible 'third round' of wind energy development and beyond." This is a "draft" plan for a "potential" major expansion in offshore wind, and will be subject to the outcome of the Strategic Environmental Assessment.

In the housing sector, Spiked adds planning used to mean planning for more houses, but today it means preventing new houses being built. It is the same with energy.

The government now pursues offshore wind in the hope that it can avoid the fate of large onshore wind devices, which are caught in interminable objections by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and other aesthetically minded environmentalists. But New Labour exercises in planning and consultation already promise to kill nuclear energy stone dead, and will likely do the same for offshore wind.

Certainly, whichever way you look at it, Hutton's plan is not achievable – even The Guardian is sceptical – all of which would seem to suggest that we are dealing with a particularly mad form of gesture politics.

The bottom line is that this is designed to allow Gordon Brown can cosy up to his EU "colleagues" and tell them everything is in hand with his renewable energy plans. By the time it comes to deliver, he will be long gone, and David Cameron will be hooking his bike up to a generator to keep the lights on.