The auctioning off of seabed rights to build wind farms is raising some money:

Two windfarm sites within the Irish Sea have reportedly attracted the most frenzied bidding, with energy firms offering to pay as much as £200m for each – a total revenue of £400m a year. Awards for another three areas have yet to be decided. The licences are for 10 years, meaning the auction will raise at least £4bn over a decade.

Which is nice. As with other resource rents the correct home for this revenue is the state. We do need to have government, we do need to have revenue to pay for it. Given that no one created the seabed by taxing the value of it we dissuade no one from producing seabed. That is, as with all other land value taxation, we have no associated deadweight costs and thus this is the most efficient source of that necessary revenue. Henry George was right.

The vast sums involved have prompted calls for the revenues from Britain’s renewable resources to be kept by the public in a “green sovereign wealth fund” that could be used to invest in tackling the climate crisis.

“Rather than being squirrelled away in Treasury coffers, how much better would it be to use this renewable windfall as initial capital for a sovereign wealth fund that could then be invested for future generations, similar to what we’ve seen the likes of Alaska and Norway do in the past with their oil wealth,” said the Green party co-leader, Jonathan Bartley.

Which is where we do have to start to wonder about some people. £400 million a year is not a vast sum, not in governance. It will keep government running for perhaps 5 hours, maybe the NHS for 26 hours. This isn’t the sort of sum that’s going to make a useful start to a wealth fund.

But worse than that is the inability to see that this is the product of investing for future generations already. The entire argument in favour of wind farms is that we are spending now in order to reduce climate change in the future - an investment in, or at least for, those future generations. The very fact that we have this revenue is proof that we’re already doing the investment.

Clarity of logic is a useful aid in determining public policy.