With the Right of the Tory party mutinous, and clear signs that the Conservatives’ support in their rural hinterland is drifting away, the decision by David Cameron to fire environment minister Owen Paterson, a leading figure on the Conservative right who also appeared to “get “ the countryside, earlier this year made little political sense.

Predictably enough, Paterson has taken advantage of the freedom that his firing has brought him, proclaiming a series of inconvenient truths about Britain’s environmental policy and, for that matter, environmental-policy-making.

EUReferendum’s Richard North discusses this here and here at some length, noting Paterson’s opposition to the wind turbines that are so loathed in the countryside:

In the Global Warming Policy Foundation lecture on Wednesday, Mr Paterson said of wind farms that “this paltry supply of onshore wind, nowhere near enough to hit the 2050 targets, has devastated landscapes, blighted views, divided communities, killed eagles” . . .

He went on to say that wind turbines had devastated ‘the very wilderness that the ‘green blob’ claims to love, with new access tracks cut deep into peat, boosted production of carbon-intensive cement, and driven up fuel poverty, while richly rewarding landowners”.

This, Mr Paterson also said, is “the single most regressive policy we have seen in this country since the Sheriff of Nottingham” . . .

North continues:

Readers here do not need to rehearse Mr Paterson’s arguments, but it can never be said too many times that the current energy policy is unattainable – and at a cost of £1.3 trillion, which is roughly the size of the national debt….

We hear quite a bit — and rightly so — about what the current Conservative-led coalition has done to fix the British economy, but the ever-increasing costs of its climate-change policy ought not to be left out of the equation.

Back to North:

Even if Britain and the whole of the EU were to stick to our emissions targets (which we surely won’t), and to hit them (which, actually, we can’t), we would still not come anywhere close to what we are told is needed to save the planet. This is for a very simple reason: the rest of the world won’t do it. Last year, carbon emissions per head in China exceeded those of Britain for the first time, and China has more than 20 times as many heads as we do. The EU is responsible for less than 10 percent of global emissions, so when we set our targets we knew – and said – that we were in no position to stop global warming. The point was to set a lead which others would follow.

They haven’t…

Isn’t it rather extraordinary, [British journalist Charles] Moore concludes, that no mainstream party has dared to point any of this out? Don’t they know there’s an election on? Is it surprising that voters think: “They’re all the same?”

When it comes to orthodoxies of contemporary environmentalism there’s quite a bit to that: There’s a reason that UKIP is winning the support that it is.