Subsidising planetary destruction or: Another reason to leave the EU

If you are serious about tackling climate change, the best approach, and the one I've advocated for years - decades - is to reward people for tackling climate change. Not to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and certainly not to subsidise the production or use of biofuels. So, of course, subsidising biofuels, which means cutting down rainforests, is what the European Union, with its corrupt, psychotic subsidy regime, is paying people to do:

Half of all the palm oil imported by Europe is turned into biodiesel and blended into conventional fuel to power cars and trucks. This misguided attempt to "green" fuels is actually tripling carbon emissions, not reducing them. What's more, the practice is subsidised by the European Union. In other words, taxpayers are paying to destroy rainforests and accelerate climate change. The real palm oil problem: it’s not just in your food, 'New Scientist', 2 May

The loopholes in the way international carbon accounts are calculated mean that emissions from biomass are never counted. The New Scientist article quotes Tim Searchinger of Princeton University: 'You could cut down the Amazon, ship the trees to Europe to replace coal and that would count as a 100 per cent greenhouse gas reduction.'

There are plenty of suggestions in the UK media about how some of the people who voted for Brexit might have regrets. I don't.