The Patriot Post® · Britain's Climate Change: Slashing Wind, Solar Subsidies

Next Monday, many of the world’s nations will meet in Paris to begin discussing ways to hamstring their economies to fight global warming. To sanitize Joe Biden, the summit is a big deal. For the most part, governments want to cut back emissions severely, and the best way to do that is by making energy more expensive so people use less of it. Remember, Barack Obama promised his policies would cause electricity rates to “necessarily skyrocket.” But leftists also primarily target particular sources of electricity — namely coal and any other fossil fuel. Wind and solar are all the rage among ecofascists. So it’s a somewhat humorous coincidence that just before the festivities kick off in Paris, leaders in London are slashing subsidies for wind and solar, favoring instead a push toward natural gas. The Washington Post is apoplectic: “[T]he decision to cut hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of support for renewable energy at home, with a planned 87 percent reduction in subsidies for solar power, threatens to undermine Britain’s international authority, while showing just how difficult it can be for a developed nation to break a centuries-long addiction to fossil fuels.” Or perhaps it could be simple economics. We support an all-of-the-above approach to energy production so long as it’s the free market doing it. If the economics of wind and solar require massive subsidies to even hope to compete with traditional energy sources — and they currently do — then basic economics is going to eventually rule the day.

As a final note, it’s worth mentioning that Britain’s wind farms often do more damage than good. Just saying.