“When people on average earnings start to fall into ‘fuel poverty,’ it is clear that Britain is in the grip of a living standards crisis,” leads the UK’s Daily Express of Oct. 12. “On current trends every British household on a middling income will be defined as living in fuel poverty within four years . . . add in the bills for running a car and the picture becomes bleaker still . . . All the old complacent assumptions about Britain being a securely prosperous country must be jettisoned.”

One-fourth of British households may be forced into “fuel poverty” by 2015 as the British government raises electricity and gas taxes to invest in more high-cost renewable energy—especially high-cost and erratic offshore wind turbines.

“So it is time for Britain to abandon unilateral and unrealistic targets for cutting CO2 emissions, especially where they will only be achieved by investing a fortune in prohibitively expensive ‘renewable’ sources of energy,” concludes the Daily Express.

The costs of British electricity have doubled since 2004, and are expected to rise another 20 percent this year. The German Deutsch bank predicts another 25 percent rise by 2015 as the UK pours billions of public dollars—from both the Treasury and higher consumer billing—into the big steel barges and the tall turbine towers.

“‘Radical policy change’ may be necessary to protect millions of struggling families from the biggest household price shock since the 1970s,” writes Sean Poulter in the Daily Mail of Oct. 12, quoting London financial analysts. Meanwhile, Poulter says, with the worst unemployment figures for 17 years, the Institute for Fiscal Studies found families are about to endure their biggest income drop in over 35 years (a collapse which, incidentally, brought Margaret Thatcher to power).

Put another way, the British cost of electricity is rising about six times as fast as British household incomes, according to David Blair in the Financial Times of Oct. 11. He predicts the steady rise in electricity and gas charges could force the government to reconsider spending L200 billion on new infrastructure by 2020, especially that big expansion of wind power.

“If the rate of increase continues, it would concentrate minds even further and energy costs would rise potentially to the top of the public’s agenda and therefore of the political agenda,” Blair quotes David Hunter, an energy consultant. Mr. Hunter described the costs as “eye-watering.”

Meanwhile, Lord David Young, the former UK Secretary for Trade and Industry, said in the London Times, “No one can doubt that we are going through a period of global warming. A few weeks ago I was at an Inuit settlement on the west coast of Greenland where they have seen five months of sea ice a year reduced to less than a month. . . . Cold weather [persisted in England however] between the 15th and 19th centuries when the Thames would freeze over and frost fairs were held. It was said in Roman times, when we were going through a warm period, that English wine was famous. . . . Our climate is always changing”

Lord Young warns, “in an age of few political beliefs, the cause of climate change [has become] an end in itself. . . . Only recently the Government Chief Scientist, no less, forecast that by the end of the century, Antarctica would be the only habitable continent.”

But he notes that there has been no global warming trend since 1998. “Are we absolutely certain that the main cause of global warming is carbon and has nothing to do with the output of the Sun, or any of the other theories?” he asked. “It would be unfortunate if history recalled that we solved a problem that in the end did not require a solution by tipping [Britain’s economy] into a depression.”

CHURCHVILLE, VA—The United Nations’ new “senior advisor on water”—a Canadian woman named Maude Barlow—says everybody has a right to water.

 

What that means, I guess, is that I have a right to take a bucket down to Whiskey Creek—a mile away—and carry home enough water to drink (after I boiling it to kill any bacteria left in the stream by the local deer and raccoons). If Whiskey Creek should dry up in a drought, I’d have the right to go even further, to the Shenandoah River, for my God-given water, or perhaps even to the Chesapeake Bay.

 

That’s better than the old days, when my village would have had to fight other villages for the right to water holes or local streams, but it’s not much comfort to my wife. She’s gotten used to having clean, safe water come out of the tap in the kitchen and bath.

 

On the other hand, she once lived in Ethiopia, and volunteered in a clinic where poor mothers would walk days with kids who’d been sickened by polluted water. The clinic would cure the kids and send them home—only to have the same women back a few weeks later, their kids made sick again by the same polluted water. And, often the kids don’t survive to make the journey back.

 

God-given or not, the World Commission on Water for the 21^st Century reports that one billion of the world’s poorest people totally lack access to safe drinking water. That’s a dreadful statement about a mostly-affluent world. Some international organizations are laboring to help villagers understand that putting their excrement into the rivers and rice paddies spreads diseases—for which they can’t afford treatment. The newly-enlightened villagers then dig their own latrines, make sure they’re kept covered, and radically reduce their own disease rates. Local education  and local action must be part of God’s work.

 

The World Bank has been working with private water companies, who are in the business of creating reservoirs, laying water pipe and chlorinating the water for safety. Then they charge fees for the service. But Maude Barlow hates anyone who charges people for water. “No one should be denied access because they can’t pay,” she proclaims as her first water principle. That’s a nice sentiment, but it doesn’t buy a pump for the village well or install running water in the school kitchen.

 

Maude’s second principle is that “water is maintained by the public sector, so it’s like a tax, not a fee.” Pardon me, but somebody has to invest money in storing the water, cleaning it up, and delivering it to homes and businesses. That investment could come from the government—if the government is willing and responsible. Or roughly the same capital could be ponied up by a private company if the government is incompetent or unresponsive—and too many are both. Tax or fee, somebody has to put up the capital.

 

I certainly hope that all of the world’s people will soon get access to clean water, but it’s hard to understand how declaring it’s a “right” matters very much to the women and children walking a mile to get water that could kill them.   

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist. He is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net