Green propaganda on the taxpayer

NB I am not the Devil.

We all know that the Government spends a huge amount of taxpayers' money on propaganda - they are, after all, the biggest advertiser in the British economy nowadays.

But the latest detail to come out about their green propaganda really takes the biscuit. The projects featured in the above video are just a few of the absurd ways in which our masters in DEFRA and DECC squandered £8.6m through the "Climate Challenge Fund" between 2006 and 2008.

Some of my particular favourites include:

• £16,245 to the University of East Anglia to publicise and promote the research and findings of the Climatic Research Unit. (As it turned out, it would fall to others such as DK to actually publicise what the CRU was up to...)
• £77,698 to a company called Forkbeard Fantasy to produce a video describing humans as "carbon weevils", whose only purpose it reproduce and pollute.
• £295,000 for an online game called LogiCity, which is a kind of Sim City in which your task is to tackle climate change.
• £396,026 for an "experiential climate dome" from Carbon Neutral North East which looks remarkably like the world's most expensive tent.
• £39,810 for a supposedly educational video called Rite2No, in which a group of Mancunian school children are transported to 2020. There they find a nightmare future where thanks to climate change everyone is forced to take swimming lessons to survive rising sea levels, swarms of insects invade British classrooms and - best of all - everyone needs to wear sun glasses. Yes, you read that right - climate change will make...erm...the sun brighter.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, the Fund was deemed a failure by the Government's own evaluation report - which we can publish today for the first time. Amongst other failings they identified, the schemes preached to the converted, were quite often inaccurate and were exploited by some organisations as a way to get the taxpayer to subsidise their other work.

If you'd like to see the full list of projects that the taxpayer funded, the full report is here. Also, please circulate the above TPA video via your own blogs, by email, twitter and any other way you can imagine.