Only George Orwell could have invented - and named - the British Government's Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) that came into operation yesterday. It is the latest in a long line of measures intended to ease the conscience of the rich while keeping the poor miserable, in this case spectacularly so. ...The British Government has been persuaded by the wind turbine manufacturers to commit a third of its annual renewables subsidy to this uniquely inefficient energy source, advertising over hill and dale the cabinet's horror of making a decision on nuclear power. ...If all these fancy subsidies and market manipulations were withdrawn tomorrow and government action confined to energy-saving regulation, I am convinced the world would be a cheaper and a safer place, and the poor would not be threatened with starvation. Just now, for reasons not all of which are "green", commodity prices are soaring. Leave them. Send food parcels to the starving, but let demand evoke supply and stop curbing trade. The marketplace is never perfect, but in this matter it could not be worse than government action. Playing these games has so far made a few people very rich at the cost of the taxpayer. Now the cost is in famine and starvation. This is no longer a game.

What's telling is that the European interest hasn't wavered even though U.S. federal subsidies for clean energy are slated to expire this year and have yet to be extended. Historically, the federal tax-credits have been make-or-break for the industry. Now, though, it appears other factors weigh more heavily. EDP is so anxious to expand in the U.S. that it ordered more wind turbines from India's Suzlon this week, even though those Suzlon machines have had technical glitches. The big drivers? State incentives for renewable energy, like those in Texas; a slow but inexorable shift in the U.S. toward cleaner energy; and the high-quality wind resources in the U.S., which dwarf those of Europe (and other parts of the world.)

While wind energy is being wildly supported by many in the U.S., there have always been drawbacks to the performance and costs of these machines. The U.S. has had a heavily subsidized romance with them for nearly 40 years and too few of the state and federal policy makers have taken a close look at what the tens of billions in subsidies have actually done for the taxpayers. These wind energy programs have made many companies such as Florida Power and Light very wealthy because of the heavy subsidies, tax credits, and accelerated depreciation allowance. Additional benefits come from local taxing authorities. This source of energy remains very unreliable and limited, having produced only about 1% of the nation's energy for decades.

Another area where the French have emphatically got it right is in power generation. After the oil shocks of 1973, France, with no significant oil or gas reserves of its own, embarked on a massive expansion of nuclear power, completely ignoring the doom-mongerers such as Greenpeace. The result has been an unqualified success story. Today, France has 59 nuclear power plants producing 78 per cent of its electricity needs. Electricity is so cheap and abundant that much of it is exported to the UK and Germany, earning the French economy about three billion euros a year. ...And because nuclear emits no carbon or pollutants, France is also one of the "greenest" countries in the industrialised world.

Any approach to determining economic policy for climate change should take into account the possibility that the current understanding of the atmosphere may not be translatable into reliable forecasts with a precision that allows the design of an economic response. Further, any economic forecasts that are used to construct models of future carbon use and carbon dioxide emissions will be unable to deal with technical innovations. Their success cannot be predicted. This impacts on policy in two ways, first the obvious uncertainty in estimating economic development but more immediately the desire of governments to stimulate technical solutions. The need to be seen to be taking action frequently descends to picking winners and creating classes of rent seekers. ...As an example the present subsidies for wind farms are a response to demands for action from Green groups and green politicians. The result is a new rent seeking group. There is little cost benefit analysis to guide policy development. Rather policy is set to subsidise non-competitive technologies that may produce unquantified benefits. A simple comparison with the more conventional alternative of natural gas shows the use of gas to be more cost effective and useful as gas turbine generators produce electricity on demand. General encouragement of innovation should be the limit of government policy. It is hard enough in business to develop innovations and well beyond the reach of general government.

If you thought the 2008 presidential race was shattering all records for windy rhetoric, it's nothing compared to the political eco-rhetoric being spun to US taxpayers -- to get them to cough up billions of dollars to fuel a renewable wind power industry boom sensible investors won't touch with a turbine's rotor blade. ...Wind power sounds a great European success story -- one to be echoed in the US, it seems, as 2008 is set to see wind power developments shatter records for the fourth consecutive year. However, a closer look at the European "success" story reveals that all is not quite as it seems. Wind seems to be blowing in the mind of the politically correct and those on the recent environmentalist bandwagon but the cost is going to be huge, no companies will plunge into it without massive government subsidies and, if actually built, power reliability will take a nosedive. ...The bottom line is that the renewables debate, and investment in it, is as much about ideology and political belief as it is about economics and environmental issues. When the real cost of turbine power as a major player toward our future power needs is assessed, the answer just ain't "blowing in the wind".

The greens favour high oil prices because consumers use less of the stuff when it costs more, and because high prices for oil make other forms of energy more competitive. Nuclear power, solar energy, wind power or any of the other substitutes for fossil fuels can become more economically viable only if oil prices stay about where they are - and politicians stump up some generous subsidies, sceptics would add. Meanwhile, the hunt for the proverbial free lunch is on. The most efficient way to cut the use of fossil fuels is to make them more expensive by taxing them, or the emissions they create. But politicians are as unenthusiastic about transparency in the cost of cleaning up the environment as they are about increasing the transparency of the funding of political parties. So most proposals to cut carbon emissions are built around a single proposition: hide their cost from voters. ...Even the emerging favourite in the United States and Europe, a cap on emissions followed by a trading of permits, is a hide-the-cost device: costs of compliance will be passed on as higher prices. So the blame will go to car makers, supermarkets, electricity utilities, and oil companies, the applause to politicians. All so politicians can avoid the transparent device of a tax on carbon or carbon emissions.

With all the supposed truths out there about global warming, here's one that doesn't get reported very often. Europe isn't the climate-change champion that its leaders, and their American apologists, would have you believe.........European policy makers have plenty of motivation to goad Washington into going along with their approach before too many people realize it isn't working. At a summit in March, EU national leaders dramatically raised the stakes by pledging a 20% cut in CO2 emissions by 2020. That's a real laugher considering their scant chances of meeting their Kyoto commitment of 8% by 2012. Their move is best seen as a bluff intended to pressure the U.S. into the game. Here in Europe, the grand gesture is always the most appealing play.

Dick Keane recently raised the very important question as to what happens when the wind drops and wind turbines are no longer able to make a contribution to the national grid (Letters, August 6). He suggested other, more suitable, ways to use wind power, which do not require a constant output of electricity. It was disappointing, therefore, to read in Emmet Egan's letter, on behalf of the Irish Wind Energy Association, that the Irish solution to the problem is to pass the buck to Eirgrid, because it has the spare capacity to cope when the wind drops. Is the Irish wind industry not making any attempt at all to look at other alternatives for using the output from their wind farms? It was consoling to read in your business pages that Eirgrid has the power to meet winter peak demand, even if the wind drops as we are in the middle of cooking the Christmas dinner.

But gradually the realization dawned that wind power is not all it had been cracked up to be by Al Gore-style environmentalists, its most obvious drawback of course being that wind is so unreliable. This creates three separate but related problems. First, turbines produce only a fraction of their "installed capacity", so the amount of power they actually provide is derisory. ...Second, so unpredictable are the instances when the wind blows at sufficient strength that conventional power stations must be kept permanently running, ...The third problem, thanks to this unpredictability, is that the more a country comes to rely on wind energy, the more it risks destabilizing its grid through sudden surges or drops in the energy from its turbines.

Airtricity states that all its output goes onto the national grid (Letters, July 30) but fails to mention that this power is about as useful to the grid as a spare groom is to a wedding. Unlike water from your tap, electricity cannot be stored and must be generated exactly to meet demand minute by minute. Unfortunately, the wind does not blow on command. Its volativity, unreliability and unpredictability make it a nightmare in balancing supply and demand on any power grid. In fact, at many times of peak demand, when wind energy could be useful, it is typically not available......However, the overwhelming drawback of wind energy is the need to have conventional power plants on permanent stand-by, fully manned and belching out CO2, ready to kick in when the wind stops.

These figures are impressive but quite meaningless. The reality is that because output is so critically dependent on wind speed the overall output is only about 25pc of capacity and, on average, two thirds of this is wasted because it is generated when the power is not needed. With the wind at their back Airtricity will be lucky to power 10pc of the number of homes stated. This level of return simply does justify the environmental degradation caused by wind farms or the huge investment of resources involved.

Renewable energy policy is now at a critical conjuncture; compliance to the directive is the responsibility of individual governments, but this can only be achieved by the EU setting uniform, realistic and non-quantifiable objectives. Forcing countries to achieve targets may lead to investment in inefficient projects and eventual state involvement and protection of these projects.

Most shocking of all is new evidence that the need to switch on and off base load fossil fuel power plants, to provide back up for unreliable wind turbines, actually gives off more carbon emissions than keeping them running continuously, thus negating any carbon savings from wind. Alas, only when our governments have allowed thousands more turbines to disfigure Britain’s countryside, not least by their grotesque bending of the planning rules, will the futility of the ‘great Wind Scam’ finally be recognised.

On energy specifics, Europe's paper commitment to Kyoto greenhouse gas limits pushes so-called renewables like wind, solar, and bio-fuels. These are all unsuitable for large scale energy production despite heavy subsidies, and even then rarely economically viable. And since the construction of wind-power generators consumes more energy than they produce over time, they become tools of energy storage that leave a massive, disruptive "footprint" on the landscape.