More evidence that politics isn't the way to run things

Sure, there needs to be a decision making process. But politics isn’t it:

Rising and falling with the tides of the Humber Estuary, two giant mechanical arms work non-stop to empty the red cargo ships that have sailed across the Atlantic and through the North Sea to Immingham.

Wood chips from the forests of Louisiana and Mississippi are unloaded at 2,300 tons per hour to be whisked by train to Drax power station in Selby, and burned to create electricity for millions of homes.

At a time when the Government wants to plant millions of trees each year to suck carbon out of the atmosphere and is banning the use of wet wood in stoves, burning wood to power homes feels more counter-intuitive than ever.

Yet the use of low-carbon bio-energy –such as crops for vehicle fuel or wood chips for boilers – has been growing in a shift from fossil fuels. The Renewable Energy Association says bio-energy accounts for 7.4pc of the UK’s energy consumption....

Shipping American wood chips to the UK is generally found to have higher emissions than just burning coal in the first place.

The government is set to introduce E10 fuel containing 10% ethanol as a new form of “cleaner” petrol aimed at cutting carbon dioxide emissions.

Once all the emissions from growing the crops are added in bioethanol is generally found to have higher such than just using petrol in the first place.

It is true that the Stern Review claimed climate change to be the largest market failure yet identified. But as ever, we need to remember that just because market processes aren’t perfect there is no reason to believe that political determination will produce a better result.

For, as here, allowing the politicians to be subject to political pressures is entirely capable of leading to a worse outcome than doing nothing at all. Nothing - even an absence of political direction - therefore being a viable solution to more than just the one problem.