EU Carbon Commissioner Blackened in Oz

Aussie sceptics destroy EU carbon commissioner

By James Delingpole, Politics Last updated: March 9th, 2011

Published in The Telegraph

Is this the best five minutes of radio in the history of broadcasting? I think it might be. Have a listen and judge for yourself.

It’s an Australian interview with Jill Duggan, a British woman who you almost certainly won’t have heard of, but who yet holds the economic future of an entire continent in her grasp. As an expert on carbon markets for the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Climate Action, Duggan will help mastermind the EU’s bold – and massively expensive – plans to reduce Europe’s carbon emissions by 20 per cent by 2020. In the process she will of course destroy every last vestige of 550 million people’s economic future: but until now – as is evident from her stumbling and surprise – no one has really called her on it.

That’s what makes it such good radio. Her Aussie interviewers Andrew Bolt (the great sceptical blogger) and radio host Steve Price destroy her feeble arguments so magnificently, comprehensively, and irrefutably that the entire AGW edifice has since collapsed, wind farm ownership has been made a capital offence and Al Gore and Michael Mann have been sent to Guantanamo for crimes against humanity.

Oh all right, the last bit isn’t true (yet) but the first bit is. And thanks to all the Aussies who emailed this morning to draw my attention to it. (H/T Kevin Bennewith; Lucas Joyce; Simon from Sydney Australia; McFanon; Perry Debell).

First, they ask, what the expected cost is of this grand Europe-wide scheme to reduce carbon emissions by 20 per cent by 2020. Duggan says she doesn’t have a figure. So her interviewers put to her the estimate by (non-sceptic) Richard Tol: $250 billion.

Next they ask what she hopes to achieve by spending all this money. What will be the reduction in global temperatures? Duggan again isn’t quite sure but knows that “the models show” that in order to have an even chance of lowering temperatures by 2 per cent CO2 emissions must be reduced by 50 per cent by 2050. Duggan then concedes that this will not be possible if the EU nations act unilaterally since they only contribute 14 per cent of total global carbon emissions.

Her interviewers try again. Does Duggan know what the estimated effect on global temperatures will be if Europe goes it alone in its carbon emissions reduction campaign? Her interviewers tell her 0.05 degrees C by 2100.

“You’re in charge of a massive programme to rejig an economy and you don’t know what it costs and you don’t know what it will achieve,” says Bolt.

Duggan changes tack. She claims that “a million” green jobs have been created in Germany; and that many hundreds of thousands of green jobs are going to be created in Britain. “Really?” wonders Bolt. That would seem to contradict the real world evidence which shows that, far from creating jobs, government “investment” in renewable energy is in fact destroying jobs in the real economy.

(This “economic” argument for renewables, incidentally, is the new Big Lie being promoted by the European Union – inter alia, of course, through its propaganda mouthpiece the BBC)

Finally Duggan makes one last try at digging herself out of the hole. She tries to imply that there’s something eccentric and behind-the-curve about her interviewers’ desire not to emulate the EU’s great decarbonisation programme.

Bolt and Price are unimpressed: “We’re talking about a region which has got unemployment at 10 per cent and growth forecast of 1.6 per cent. I don’t know why what we could learn from Europe actually.”
The part of me that got stitched up like a kipper by the BBC’s Horizon documentary the other day feels almost sorry for Jill Duggan. But here – trolls note – is the key difference between Duggan and me: I’m not proposing to steal $250 billion of your money, spend it on crap, destroy the landscape, raise taxes and deprive your children of an economic future. But the organisation she represents is.