Prime Minister, Kermit was right: it's not easy being green
There is one slight difficulty though, and that is replacing all the things you have banned.
After kayaking to New York (I'm sure he wouldn't have risked the extra carbon output and flown there), the British Prime Minister displayed his usual linguistic flamboyance when attending to the matter of climate change.
Speaking before the UN General Assembly, whose members are undoubtedly composed of individuals with some of the greatest 'carbon footprints' ever recorded, he took aim at Kermit the Frog.
“No!” declared the fluffy-haired eco prince de Pfeffel Johnson: it is easy being green. The frog was wrong.
And surely he's right. It is easy to sign off on various bits of legislation committing the United Kingdom to various climate targets. One can do so before sauntering off to a far-flung part of the world to attend an international conference in which one can merrily chastise the ordinary folk of the United Kingdom for not eating enough locally sourced kale et cetera.
It's even easier just to knock down our old coal-fired power stations. Just a bit of TNT and a few wrecking balls: what could be easier than that?
Heck – pardon my language – it's even easier just to say magical green words such as 'the UK will be carbon-neutral by 2050'. Bringing that date forward a few years is child's play too, and just look how green it makes you sound.
Ban a few things here and there – gas boilers, combustion engines in cars – and we're now on a tour de force of just how easy it all is.
There is one slight difficulty though, and that is replacing all the things you have banned.
We changed our reliable coal for a combination of unreliable renewables and imported gas. Unwilling to tap our own gas reserves (burning LNG from Qatar is fine, but our home-grown stuff isn't – go figure) due to the whinging of the greenies, and scared to build any more nuclear reactors due to watching HBO's Chernobyl a few too many times, we are left with the predictable result: sky-rocketing energy prices.
Admittedly, it is a bit of a wheeze. Forcing up our energy prices so high that companies can no longer afford to maintain production- carbon zero here we come!
The other replacements designed to speed our life down the road of carbon purity are equally dodgy. Kitting out our houses with 'eco-friendly' replacements for gas boilers would be ruinously expensive and would leave us shivering in winter. Not to mention how much energy would be used in replacing them all.
Electric cars are a toddler's idea of being green. It requires the same depth of critical thinking as claiming that the 'NHS is free'. All the chemicals going into that battery (which you'll have to chuck away eventually) are anything but 'green'. And where do you think the electricity is coming from to charge the battery?
It's all so easy if you don't stop to think about it for longer than twenty seconds.
Such imaginative approaches to governing are not limited to greendom alone. Just take our national finances. Look how easy it is! In the past, people had strange notions of monetary prudence: every single example in history of governments resorting to endlessly printing banknotes or adding base metals to their coinage resulted in one thing: inflation, sometimes of the hyper kind.
But no more. It's different this time. We have unlocked the secret of letting the money printers go BRRR and it not having any affect whatsoever. What's that? Inflation? No, the ONS says it's at about 3.0% so that's good enough for me.
This governing malarkey. It's all so easy. Anyone could do it.
As long as you don't mind having a country run on feel good ideas and half-baked proposals, that is.
