We share the usual environmentalist desire for a cleaner, greener, world even as we do insist that it is human flourishing in the round that matters, not just one specific aspect of it. We also obviously differ on how to gain that cleaner, we insisting that capitalism and markets seem to have done an excellent job in cleaning up London’s air since the 1300s just as the one example.

What worries us though is how much of Green economics is so absolutely terrible:

The prime minister announced £160m for ports and infrastructure in Teesside and Humber, Scotland and Wales, needed to build and service these turbines, but if these plans are to benefit communities as well as reducing emissions, the goal must be to keep the jobs and manufacturing contracts in the UK.

We’re not sure if we do want lots more offshore wind let alone the government planning and subsidising such. But let us allow that and examine this specific part of the argument.

Imports are the benefit of trade, we get to consume them. They replace the stuff that we’ve got to sweat blood over making ourselves. In this case the aim is that we get to consume electricity without boiling the oceans. OK, seems acceptable as a goal. But the insistence here is that we’ve got to be doing the work. Instead of using other people who are better at it to do it for us.

Why?

That they are better at it is obvious for if they were worse then we’d not even be thinking about importing the machines. There would therefore be no reason to have to encourage local production or restrict that foreign competition from our shores. The very insistence that something must be done to gain this goal is that insistence that not only are we going to have to do this work but also we’ll be bad at it - and therefore poorer for having done it ourselves.

Why is it that people keep insisting upon pursuing what might well be laudable goals in the worst possible manner?