The Economist Bucks Up Pols Scared to Remove Green Subsidies

Last year, The Economist, the repository of elite European economic opinion retreated with honored from the battle over global warming or climate change or climate chaos or whatevs.  

Now, they are helpfully preparing the terrain for European policymakers to cease wasting precious fiscal resources on idiotic green subsidies.  Via WRM.

[O]ffshore wind power is staggeringly expensive. Dieter Helm, an economist at Oxford University, describes it as “among the most expensive ways of marginally reducing carbon emissions known to man”. Under a subsidy system unveiled late in 2013, the government guarantees farms at sea £155 ($250) per megawatt hour for their juice. That is three times the current wholesale price of electricity and about 60% more than is promised to onshore turbines…
Ten-metre waves and salty gales are just two of the hazards that keep offshore costs high. Second-world-war bombs on the seabed are slowing new projects in Germany; in December Scottish Power, an energy firm, scrapped plans for 300 turbines on a site filled with basking sharks.

Translation:  Hey politicians, you are now free to abandon this idiotic subsidy policy and use the money for something else, with full cover knowing that we will help to make this acceptable opinion in elite circles.

Readers of NBfPB know that I have declared the global warming policy movement dead and that part and parcel of that will be Europe's retreat from much of its green agenda-driven policy.  The trick is doing this without giving the smart set the vapors.  This is easily done as the smart set are easily molded.  Thus The Economist is doing the necessary work of leading elites to where they need to go.