Farage and Clegg clash on combatting climate change.

Cardew

I watched the 'great debate'(until the football kicked off). I find both men irritating and wouldn't vote for either.

However I thought that Farage's argument on the farce of Europe's 'green' measures was the highlight.

http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2337893/farage-and-clegg-clash-over-climate-change

Nigel Farage yesterday called for wind energy to be "scrapped" as he clashed with Nick Clegg on the topic of climate change in the latest round of their debate on Britain's future in Europe.
Energy was one of several areas that incited heated arguments between the Liberal Democrat and UKIP leaders, with Clegg saying his counterpart was indulging in a "dangerous fantasy" and Farage in turn accusing the Deputy Prime Minister of "wilfully lying" to the British public.

Responding to a question on whether European environmental policies were damaging the competitiveness of British industry, Farage blamed climate "unilateralism" in Brussels for rising energy costs.

"The belief in Brussels that global warming is happening is absolute," he said. "Now whether they're right or not is actually irrelevant because what Europe has done is declare unilateralism: we will unilaterally make sure that every consumer has expensive electricity and we'll make it as difficult as possible for our manufacturing industries to survive.
"40 per cent of the cost for an average factory is its energy prices. There is no way we can combat global CO2 emissions without the Indians and Chinese and the Americans working with us. This act of unilateralism is damaging British industry."
Farage went on to attack UK energy policy, saying the country is "losing our manufacturing base" because of support for "expensive" wind energy.

"We've committed ourselves to something that has made the rich richer, the poor poorer, has not actually helped the environment at all, and British industry - aluminium smelting, steel-making, cement-making - is leaving our shores and going to other parts of the world that don't abide with these rules," he said.

Farage argued the UK should instead exploit its shale gas reserves, claiming that tapping the energy source would help the UK mirror the experience of the US where energy costs have halved in recent years - although experts have warned the UK would not be able to replicate the sharp fall in energy costs seen in the US.

"In the north west of England we are sitting on a shale gas field that is absolutely huge," Farage said. "If we do what the Americans have done we can bring down the price of energy by nearly 50 per cent.

"And I would say let's not look a gift horse in the mouth: scrap wind energy, scrap the subsidies, scrap the money for the rich landowners. Let's get fracking in the short term and let's make sure we can give industry and ordinary people value for money."

Farage's call came on the same day it emerged the Conservatives are considering a 2015 manifesto commitment to curb onshore wind turbines, although opposition from Nick Clegg is likely to prevent the measure forming part of the coalition programme.

Clegg, who was prevented by debate moderator David Dimbleby from responding to Farage's comments on wind energy, had earlier pointed out that the best way to reform European policy was from the inside. He argued that Europe's over-dependence on oil and gas imports from Russia was a driving force behind price rises and warned unless member states could reduce this reliance they risked having energy policy set outside their borders.

Clegg said building interconnectors between neighbouring member states would reduce the cost of energy in the UK by 13 per cent.

"There are too many European countries that are only importing oil and gas from Russia," he said. "That means energy policy is set by other people, it means there's great volatility in prices. That's why I think we actually need to have closer cooperation between European countries.

"This idea we can be completely isolated on one hand and then have Europe over-dependent on Russian oil and gas is somehow a solution to our long term needs - never mind the need to deal with climate change - is a complete and dangerous fantasy."

The above is not an accurate transcript of Farage's points - given the publication you couldn't expect it to be .


His point was that unless China, India and the USA take similar measures - China builds two new coal fired power stations a week - it is pointless for Britain to pay huge subsidies for 'green' energy.

zeupater

Hi

The main issue I picked up on was the 'ad-hominem' and diversionary approach which Clegg used .... it looked like he had a script and struggled a little to modify the question to fit a loosely related rehearsed reply ....

Both were a little sketchy at times, but I really detest the currently in-vogue political term ... "the truth is", when the position has no definite proof either way.

With all of the political pundits running around without a clue what to do or say, I really am starting to wonder what use they actually are when something out of the ordinary happens. What I would like to see is a complete breakdown of the debates, question by question, with close attention paid to the statistics which were being thrown about .... for example, Clegg's assertion that there aren't 29million Bulgarians & Romanians which has been used in both debates can easily be checked on the EU official published citizenship statistics (http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?dataset=migr_pop1ctz&lang=en) the calculation 20020074+7284582 gives the simple answer .... it's was a tad over 27million in 2013, so it's not really a significant difference simply a standard politician's ploy to disrupt proceeding through 'not recognising that figure', which in my view is simply nit-picking ... if they don't agree with a figure or statistic, tell us what their version of the answer is so that we can see how relevant or petty some of these 'major' issues really are in the scale of things ...

I pretty much distrust all career politicians, whatever flavour their ideology .... it's probably more civilised to simply draw lots from a pool of the local population and then vote to choose the one you trust to represent you best ... a little like a developed variant of true Athenian democracy ...

HTH
Z