Tripe and baloney

For connoisseurs of government tripe on energy and the environment, the last couple of days have been like a banquet. The releases of the UK Low Carbon Transition Plan, the Low Carbon Industrial Plan, the Carbon Reduction Strategy for Transport, the Renewable Energy Strategy, the Renewable Energy Financial Incentives consultation, and the announcement of the new "eco-towns" are such a smorgasbord of cant and delusion that I am struggling to digest them all. In the long-run, they should provide tasty morcels of insanity for weeks to come, but in the meantime, here are a couple of choice cuts that others have spotted, just in case you missed them:

1. The Times noticed that the claims of job-numbers currently in the green-energy industry and to be added by the Government's new measures are just slightly over-stated - including such jobs as slipper-makers, "workers in the North Sea gas industry as well as suppliers of wallpaper and animal bedding".
2. Grant Shapps, shadow minister for housing, noticed (unusually sharply for a Conservative spokesman on green issues) that the minimum standards to which houses in the new eco-towns must be built are -lower- than the standards that will be required of all other developers by the time the first eco-towns are expected to be built (2016).

That'll do for the starters. Now, what shall I have to follow...