The Cabinet Secretary will know very well that I oppose the whole thrust of the Government's energy policy as an exercise in futility, because even if she were to succeed in all her objectives, what we gain in Wales is massively swamped by what's happening in the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the price of this policy is being paid for by the electricity consumers and taxpayers in Wales, and we've just heard of the effects that will be felt in the countryside of these windfarms—these excrescences that are being dotted around all over the hills of Wales. I drove down from Aberdyfi through mid Wales at the weekend and almost everywhere on the skyline you see these eyesores.

In addition to the points, which I totally agree with, that have been raised already by Andrew R.T. Davies and Darren Millar, I would like to ask why it is that the Hendy windfarm has been treated in a different way from that at Rhoscrowther in Pembrokeshire, where the same planning considerations arose. That was only five turbines; Hendy is seven. Rhoscrowther was turned down on the basis of its visual impact and the effect on the landscape. At Llandegley Rocks near the Hendy windfarm, you've got unspoilt landscape, scheduled ancient monuments, internationally important palaeontology of the Llandegley Rocks, it's the source of the River Edw, there's a huge starling roost there—2,000 to 3,000 starlings, a conservation species—which the developers plan to fell, and there are listed buildings very close to the site.

I agree entirely with the point that Darren Millar made that the effect upon the landscape—and let's not forget that one of the principal assets for mid Wales is its tourist potential—is wholly disproportionate to the gain in terms of the Government's energy policy. It's a relatively small project, and looking at this in a global context, it is totally insignificant. And I can't understand, therefore, why the Cabinet Secretary has decided to allow this to go ahead, when it can be of no gain practically to anybody other than the developers themselves, and I don't think that that is a sensible basis upon which Governments should take these decisions.

But I want to address now the wider considerations that the Government's energy policy brings up. Now, it would disappoint the Cabinet Secretary if I didn't mention China in this speech. As she constantly points out to me, this is something that I always raise and she's absolutely right, because I want to make this point again: China has 993 GW of capacity for generating electricity, and they have currently under construction another 259 GW of coal-fired power stations, principally. That's a 25 per cent increase on their current capacity; that is six times the entire generating capacity of the United Kingdom. If we close down the entire United Kingdom economy, of course we would cut our carbon emissions to a very small percentage, but China would, in the course of however long these new power stations take to build—five to 10 years—have made up for that reduction by six times. So, anything that we do in Wales that is responsible for only a minute fraction of 1 per cent of global emissions will be completely irrelevant in the debate on global warming. 

I'd like to read from a BBC article on its website only in September:

'Building work has restarted at hundreds of Chinese coal-fired power stations, according to an analysis of satellite imagery...259 gigawatts of new capacity are under development'.

So, this is something that has achieved considerable publicity, and I think it wholly undermines the whole argument for renewables at vast subsidies that are paid for by ordinary people, and Wales is the poorest part of the United Kingdom. There are 291,000 households in fuel poverty—the Government's own figures—that's 23 per cent of the households in Wales. People can't afford to pay these increases. The Office for Budget Responsibility last spring revealed in its economic and fiscal outlook that environmental levies this year will cost, throughout the United Kingdom, £11.3 billion. That's a rise of £2 billion over the last financial year. It goes on to say that the increase of £2 billion represents a rise in average electricity bills of about 5 per cent, so that's twice the rate of inflation. This is planned to go on and on and on each year for the foreseeable future until in 2030 it's estimated that at least a third of all electricity bills will be accounted for by environmental levies. So, the Government's policy is an exercise in futility, and the people who are really paying the price are those at the bottom of the income scale, whom I would have thought the Labour Party would have had an interest in helping rather than making their lives more difficult.