Follow the Money

Why Brexit Would Be Good for the Enviroment

The old adage says, Follow the money.  If you want to make an educated guess about the bed folk are going to end up lying in, think about the motivation of filthy lucre.  Granted, this is a pretty cynical view, but more often than not it gets you close to the animus of the matter.

The big debate of the moment in the UK is Brexit.  Should the UK leave the security of the European Union and bravely cast off for a foreign shore?   We were surprised (at least initially) to hear that Greenpeace and its fellow travellers have come forward to oppose leaving the European Union.  What on earth does Britain's potential exit from Brusselmania have to do with saving the Antarctic penguins?  In order to answer that question, we have to follow the money.

The Institute of  Economic Affairs has done just that.  Christopher Snowden has written a piece entitled: Euro Puppets: The European Commission’s remaking of civil society.   In it he argues that the éminences grises of Europe use money to bind all kinds of social groups to do their bidding.  Mostly they fund groups which reflect their own centralist, statist political ideology.  They fund a veritable panopoly of left wing causes and groups.

Take environmental groups like Greenpeace, for example.  Writes Snowden:

Substantial EU funds are also used to support organisations that share the Commission’s environmentalist agenda. The Green 10 represent the largest of Europe’s environmental lobby groups, but dozens, if not hundreds, of like-minded ecological organisations also receive EU funding. The Commission freely admits that funds are given to environmental groups ‘to support policy development’.


These groups then become provocation agents to push for the remaking of the world in general and Europe in particular according to the lights of European Grey Men.  Here is a summary of how much these "public good" environmental groups rely upon their European paymasters:

Birdlife Europe €332,163 (35 per cent)
CEE Bankwatch Network €836,238 (45 per cent)
Climate Action Network Europe €295,022 (33 per cent)
European Environmental Bureau €894,000 (41 per cent)
European Federation for Transport and Environment €275,516 (16 per cent)
Health and Environment Alliance €362,992 (59 per cent)
Friends of the Earth Europe €1,195,259 (46 per cent)
Naturefriends €365,735 (41 per cent)
WWF European Policy Office €599,954 (13 per cent)

When organisations like Greenpeace rail against the prospect of Brexit on the "grounds" of the huge environmental damage that would result in Britain we are left scratching our heads, until we think about how much money and influence the European centralist environmentalist causes in the UK would lose.  Follow the money to find the cause of outrage.

Yet the record of environmental degradation in the UK as a result of following along with European environmental dictats is pretty damning.  Take, for example, the explosion of wind turbines (to combat global warming, don't you know) which have been pushed oh-so-hard by the EU, and which are now proving, as predicted, to be deadly to bird and bat populations.  This from Oxford University ecologist Clive Hambler  on the devastation they’re wreaking on the world’s bat population, especially worrying because bats don’t reproduce very quickly:

Bats are what is known as K-selected species: they reproduce very slowly, live a long time and are easy to wipe out. Having evolved with few predators — flying at night helps — bats did very well with this strategy until the modern world. This is why they are so heavily protected by so many conventions and regulations: the biggest threats to their survival are made by us.

And the worst threat of all right now is wind turbines. A recent study in Germany by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research showed that bats killed by German turbines may have come from places 1,000 or more miles away. This would suggest that German turbines — which an earlier study claims kill more than 200,000 bats a year — may be depressing populations across the entire northeastern portion of Europe. Some studies in the US have put the death toll as high as 70 bats per installed megawatt per year: with 40,000 MW of turbines currently installed in the US and Canada. This would give an annual death toll of up to three -million. [Cited by James Delingpole]

Way to go.  The money to promote, to advocate, to subsidise, to fund the aerial chompers of avian species comes substantially from the  éminences grises of the European Union.

Two implications stand out: if Brexit were to take place, the European money spigot subsidising and promoting environmentalist causes and flavours-of-the-month would turn off.  Secondly, care and protection of the environment in Britain would increase by leaps and bounds.