A Conservative Energy Manifesto for Theresa May. She’ll Ignore It, Obviously…

Suppose you were a Conservative leader hoping to win a stonking majority in your general election campaign, which of these two manifesto propositions do you think would win the most votes?

a) Our energy policy will remain in the clutches of a cabal of vested interests – rent-seeking, crony capitalist shysters; green ideologues with junk-science degrees in Gaia Studies from the University of East Anglia; eco-fascist lobby groups and NGOs; compromised scientists with their snouts in the trough; goose-stepping technocrats; really, really, really dim MPs – ensuring that the landscape continues to be blighted by an ever-greater-proliferation of shimmery solar panels and ginormous bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes.

We remain committed to the Climate Change Act which will cost the UK economy over £300 billion by 2030, costing each household £875 per annum; and also to the Levy Control Framework (LCF) which, combined with carbon taxes, cost the UK £9 billion in 2016 alone. Then we’ll pretend it’s the fault of the greedy energy companies by hammering them with a price cap – thus driving their share prices down (bad luck pensions and investors!), reducing competition and innovation, and signalling that we intend to be a meddling, interventionist government which has no truck with free market principles.

b) We want consumers and businesses to have the cheapest most reliable energy which causes the least damage to wildlife and the environment and which best guarantees Britain’s energy security. To this end we will scrap all market-distorting subsidies, declare a moratorium on renewables – as well as white elephant projects such as the Hinkley Point C Radioactive Money Pit and the even more lunatic proposed Swansea Tidal Lagoon project – and go all-out to exploit Britain’s superabundant shale gas reserves.

We will, furthermore, appoint a Secretary of State for Energy capable of explaining in ways even thick people can understand why it’s all OK, the baby polar bears aren’t going to drown, nor is Lancashire going to vanish into a crevice, nor are Britain’s gardens going to turn into deserts – despite all that toss you heard from the BBC’s resident Old Etonian eco-loon David Shukman on the Radio 4 Today programme this morning.

Well personally I’m going with b).

What we’re going to get with Theresa May’s Continuation Cameron Conservatives, unfortunately, is far likely to be closer to a).

This is a terrible shame for a number of reasons. As a lover of the British countryside, I’m most especially upset about the ongoing Scotlandification of Mid-Wales with more and more ugly wind farms. If ever you needed an argument against devolved government, there’s your case made for you. The troglodytes in the Welsh Assembly who allow this kind of destruction to pass are not fit to run a bath let alone a Principality.

But it’s also sad for political reasons. Prime Minister Theresa May has a once-in-several-generations opportunity successfully and unapologetically to demonstrate – without any credible threat from her excuse for an Opposition – that conservative principles of small government, personal responsibility, and free markets are genuinely the best way of creating a fairer, more prosperous and freer society.

And she’s about to blow it.

Still, here – if Theresa May wants it – is an Energy Manifesto prepared for her today by the Global Warming Policy Forum.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Sir. Ed. Davey: Everything That’s Wrong With Britain’s Energy Policy

Sir Ed Davey. Three words that tell you everything you need to know about the worthlessness of Britain’s honours system, the backscratching, sod-the-electorate trashiness of its political class and the still, as-yet-unaddressed lunacy of its energy policy.

In an extremely crowded field, Ed Davey is generally reckoned to have been Britain’s worst ever Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. The only reason he got the job was because his predecessor Chris Huhne was unexpectedly banged up in jail and the desperate David Cameron needed a Liberal Democrat, any Liberal Democrat, to take on the job because of his (Cameron’s) suicidally stupid decision to hand the keys to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) to his bedwetting Coalition partners.

Apart from carpeting Britain’s landscape with ever more bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes, Davey’s principal achievement in office was negotiating the contract with the French company EDF to build the Hinkley Point nuclear power station, described by one industry analyst as “the worst deal I’ve ever seen.”

Indeed. The current going rate for electricity is £33 per megawatt hour.

But the brilliant deal Davey somehow managed to extract from a naturally very reluctant EDF was to persuade them to accept a modest £92.50 per megawatt hour, inflation adjusted. For those, like Davey, unable to do the maths, that is approximately three times the market rate – over a period of 35 years, paid for of course by the taxpayer.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Wind Industry Big Lies no. 1: Fossil Fuels Are More ‘Subsidised’ Than Renewables

Dishonest or Stupid?

Barry “Dork Brain” Gardiner

Is Labour MP Barry Gardiner vilely dishonest or just incredibly stupid? Personally since he appears to be a litigious sort of fellow I’m plumping for the latter. That’s why, I think it’s quite possible that when he was at his public school Haileybury his nickname was “Dork Brain.” (Though I have no more evidence for this than Gardiner does for most of his hysterical views on climate change)

But I leave you to draw your own conclusions after his recent claim, in an interview with Energy Live news, that the Coalition is favouring fossil fuel energy over wind energy through generous subsidies. (H/T Bishop Hill)

Here’s what Gardiner said:

He claimed the third [lie behind government energy policy] is that Government is “neutral” and doesn’t pick favourites in energy: “Last year the OECD announced that in 2010 the UK subsidised fossil fuels by £3.6 billion. In last year’s budget, the Chancellor announced a further £65million to oil and gas in 2011… In contrast the total subsidy paid to onshore wind in 2010 was just £400million.”

As Bishop Hill notes, he made the same claim in August in the New Statesman:

Last year, the OECD estimated that in 2010 the subsidies for coal, gas and petrol in the UK amounted to £3.6bn on top of which the Chancellor, in the 2012 budget, has announced further exploration and production subsidies of £65m to develop the West of Shetland fields.

So it must be true, right? Not only is Gardiner an elected member of parliament but he’s Ed Miliband’s Special Envoy For Climate Change and the Environment, and also Vice President of (the environmental movement’s sinister taxpayer-funded answer to SPECTRE) Globe International. A man with such important and influential public positions wouldn’t be in the business of telling whopping great porkies, now, would he?

Well, whether Gardiner is lying or thick as pig poo he is most certainly mistaken. Let’s examine his claim more closely in order to spare him and those like him the embarrassment of disseminating false information again.

The claim seems to have begun life in this OECD report, characteristically misrepresented by the Guardian’s Ubergruppenklimatischewahnsinnigefuhrer Damian Carrington in a piece titled Wind power still gets lower public subsidies than fossil fuel tax breaks. It claimed:

Gas, oil and coal prices were subsidised by £3.63bn in 2010, according to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development , whereas offshore and onshore wind received £0.7bn in the year from April 2010.

This was at best a tendentious stretching of the truth unworthy of a serious newspaper. (If you believe the Guardian deserves such a title). At worst, it’s pure political activism. In fact, as Bishop Hill notes, the “subsidies” claimed by Carrington and Gardiner weren’t subsidies at all.

The OECD paper does not mention subsidies of £3.6bn. That figure refers to the value of the reduced rate of VAT on energy. This does not meet the definition of a subsidy, which involves a cash payment. And since it applies to all kinds of energy it cannot be a “fossil fuel” subsidy either, so Gardiner’s claim about picking favourites is patently false.

His claim about the further £65m for oil and gas is not a subsidy either, being a reduction in a supertax (the Supplementary Charge) which is paid by oil companies but not by renewables firms. This therefore is not a subsidy and demonstrates that government policy favours renewables over fossil fuels the opposite of what Gardiner has said.

This was also pointed out in June by Telegraph blogs’ own Tim Worstall. In reality, he noted, if you go by Carrington’s definition of a subsidy, it’s the wind industry which is subsidised, not the fossil fuel industry, to the tune of £41 billion.

And, if you want chapter and verse on this issue, go to the excellent Communities Against Turbines Scotland site (where the Resistance is articulate and strong) and look up Stuart Young’s report. Government subsidy for Renewables in 2012, it notes, is £1,780 million pounds. Subsidies paid to the gas, oil and coal industry in the same period: 0 pounds.

To recap then: the UK fossil fuel industry is not “subsidised” in any meaningful sense of the word “subsidy.” Charging less tax on something is not “subsidising” something.

The government does not give fossil fuel companies sweeteners to encourage them to produce more fossil fuel power. That’s because they don’t need any incentives: the fossil fuel power industry is perfectly viable without subsidy.

The government does, however, give massive sweeteners to the renewable industry wind especially. Onshore turbines are given a 100 per cent subsidy from the government (aka the taxpayer). Offshore turbines are given a 200 per cent subsidy. Without these sweeteners not a single wind turbine would be built because the power they produce being intermittent and unreliable is to all intents and purposes worthless in a free market.

Therefore what Carrington claims in that Guardian article is untrue. What Gardiner told Energy Live and the New Statesman is untrue. They really ought to know better and now they do. So if they repeat these claims again it won’t merely be down to an error of extreme stupidity, will it? It will be an abject and cynical lie.

Now we’ve settled that one I wish Gardiner the best of luck in his threatened libel action with the daily-more-magnificent-and-admirable Ben Pile (of Climate Resistance) over some Tweets summarised here by the Bishop:

@BarryGardiner is a liar about the OECD analysis, even if he is right about energy proces rising. […] Shame on you, Barry.

A tweet that ended up with quite an interesting exchange of views:

GARDINER: Your tweet is actionable. Please withdraw it. I correctly state OECD figures for Fossil Fuel Subsidies were £3.6bn in 2010

PILE: you can’t call people liars and complain about being called a liar. Oecd figures are for reduced rate of vat, not subsidiesand you know that oecd figures are reduced rate, not subsidies, hence you are dishonest.

GARDINER: Also I said gov policy was based on a lie. No named person = not actionable You named me = actionable Please retract

PILE: it’s true. You knew that what you said wasn’t true. So you lied. I said so. That ain’t ‘actionable’. If you think it isi’ll withdraw my tweet if you explain that you were wrong about subsidies to energy live newsWhen did it become ‘actionable’ to call an MP a liar, anyway?

GARDINER: So reducing tax to favour the consumption of a particular product does not count as a subsidy in your book? Really?

PILE: no, reducing tax is taking less money, subsidy is giving money. I’m surprised an MP can’t tell the difference. Hmm.and reduced rate doesn’t favour any particular form of energy. Applies to renewables too. Surprised you don’t know this.

Send me your email address, and i’ll give you my postal address so you can get your lawyer to proceed

GARDINER: Gardinerb@parliament.uk

PILE: let me up the stakes by adding ‘coward’ to liar.

PILE: thanks. I’ve got no money or property, I hope you realise. Could cost you.

Yep. Popcorn time.

One thought on “Wind Industry Big Lies no 1: fossil fuels are more ‘subsidised’ than renewables”

Tallbloke says:20th December 2012 at 10:27 pmIs Delingpole vilely dishonest or just incredibly stupid? In actual fact the the subsidies for fossil fuels dwarf those for renewables.http://www.nrdc.org/energy/files/fossilfuel4.pdf

Comments are closed.

If This Is Britain’s Energy Policy, We’re Toast

Daft energy bill

Davey: third runner-up in a Wayne Rooney lookalike contest.

“Global warming” is SO totally over. Even President Obama concedes this now. The problem is that after twenty years or more of infectious drivel from the richly-funded global junk science community (NASA, the Royal Society, the “University” of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, the National Academy of Sciences, etc), the minds of too many politicians have been poisoned, and too much damage has already been done.

Which brings us to Energy Secretary Ed Davey’s draft energy bill. It’s a disaster. It will, if implemented, do untold damage to the British economy and the British landscape. So much is obvious to anyone with half a brain or the merest smattering of knowledge about Britain’s approaching energy gap, about the utter uselessness of “renewables” and about the shale gas story. Yet it seems that few in our political class can see it. And that those who do – Graham Stringer, Peter Lilley – seem not to have enough clout to make any difference.

Everything the tragic Davey – whose only possible use to mankind would be as maybe second or third runner up in a Wayne Rooney lookalike contest – has to say on the subject is either wrong, stupid, fatuous, economically suicidal, a total misrepresentation of the truth – or all five put together.

For example:

Mr Davey, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, said it was impossible to “turn back the tide” of rising energy prices and that consumers should expect rising bills.

As Bishop Hill notes, this is absolute rubbish. In the US, the price of gas has not risen but has collapsed thanks to the wholesale exploitation of shale gas. This is one reason that the US economy is growing and ours isn’t. Cheap energy is good for everyone. (Not, it must be said, that this is any of Obama’s doing. It has happened despite him, rather than because of him. Indeed Obama is just as ideologically committed as his European socialist counterparts are to driving up the cost of energy, as this story at PJ Media reveals – H/T Bohemond).

The two things most scandalous about the draft energy bill are first its ongoing commitment to the disgusting nonsense of renewable energy (meaning more of the landscape will be ravaged, more lives ruined, more revolting rentier scuzzballs enriched by the great wind farm menace). And second, its tacit rejection of the shale gas revolution.

As the No Hot Air blog has noted there are many vested interests which would like to see the UK shale gas industry nipped in the bud: everyone from companies in the business of “carbon capture”, renewables, and other fake green non-enterprises to those in the natural gas sector (who see unconventional shale gas, rightly, as a massive threat to their monopoly). Many of them would seem to have attended the last Downing Street summit on the subject. The company – Cuadrilla – which is actually looking to exploit Britain’s shale gas potential was mysteriously NFI.

The final straw, of course, will be the report on shale gas due to be produced by the Royal Society in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Engineering. Knowing what we know of the Royal Society’s dire politicisation under its three most recent presidents this will be about as trustworthy and scientifically accurate as a report on genetics produced for comrade Stalin by Trofim Lysenko.

Are we really going to allow our economic recovery to be jeopardised by a tiny handful of rent-seeking corporatists, green ideologues and lame-brained, out-of-touch, know-nothing politicians who saw Josh Fox’s Gasland propaganda movie once and found the flaming tap scene really scary?

Apparently we are. We’re toast.

2 thoughts on “If this is Britain’s energy policy, we’re toast”

Nonny says:13th June 2012 at 9:39 pmGod, I love you James Delingpole. I was having a terrible day until my sister sent me a link to your “open letter to the Bishop” re renewables. It cheered me up so I had to come to your site to read some of your rants. They are lovely, absolutely lovely. I didn’t think anyone except Mark Steyn could cheer me up, but you’ve made my day. God bless you and thank you for making an old woman smile.
Contactds says:17th June 2012 at 2:29 pmOne thing I am absolutely certain about is that our educational system has been hijacked by the zealots of the left and the green movement, from an early age our children are being slowly brainwashed into their now much discredited theories right up to and through university, with prescribed text books and lectures that are totally unbalanced and do not allow for rational thought or independence of mind anymore. Where are the the inspirational old teachers who led by discussion and allowed argument, nurtured free independent thinking and gave us our scientists and leaders, no more all we have now is a future of totally second rate politicians and scientists with no independent thought process other than to follow the bigots of global warming, anyone who stands up to them is bombarded with abuse in a desperate attempt for them to hang on to the billions totally wasted over the past 20 years. Most of their pet projects have been disasters and damaged the environment far worse than any so called Human CO2 output.