Bishop Hill Baling out? Probably not
Oct 12, 2013 Climate: Parliament ;)
After years of trying to load us with green taxes and beating their chests about saving the planet from global warming, politicians are rushing to tell us how worried they are about the cost of living (readers will probably want to be quite rude about this volte face, but let's try to maintain a little dignity, shall we?)
Today, The Mail is reporting that David Cameron has responded to Miliband's call for a government mandated price freeze by ordering a review into the cost of living, including green taxes.
The Coalition was riven by bitter infighting over green taxes last night after David Cameron ordered a review to stem the rise in energy bills.
Green taxes have been blamed for pushing energy prices to record levels, but the Prime Minister’s intervention met fierce opposition from the Lib Dems.
They insist the Government’s green energy targets are sacred.
Business Secretary Vince Cable said it would be ‘short-sighted and foolish’ to try to cut energy bills in the short term by tearing up the Government’s environmental policies.
I think it's fair to say that this is a case of tickling the tummies of swing voters rather than Cameron baling out from the green movement. The coalition agreement seems fairly clear that ever increasing energy costs are to be an inescapable part of life in the UK, at least until the next election.
No doubt the Liberal Democrats will go into the next election promising more of the same; the otherworldliness of the party never ceases to amaze, but their attachment to greenery will remain in place regardless. However, it will be interesting to see how the big two parties position themselves in 2015. Labour, free of the shackles of government, are able to set out their stall now, and their idea of a government-mandated price freeze may gain traction among the intellectually challenged. However, there are two years for the absurdities of the policy to be brought into the limelight, so the policy's lifetime will probably be short.
And what of the Conservatives? Will they jettison greenery, arguing that it was all those wicked LibDems that made them wreck the country? My guess is not. Greenery is part of brand Cameron, and the loss of face he would suffer if he u-turned would be immensely damaging, possibly terminally so. But if they stay on the path they are on, their core vote will split, with everyone worried about the cost of living heading for UKIP. The party therefore seems to have a choice between possible annihilation and certain annihilation. They will try to wriggle their way out of it of course, by coming up with some last minute eye-catching initiatives, and hope that the electorate will fall for it. To be frank the electorate may well do that.
It's hard to see a way for this to end well.
Bishop Hill
We should remember, in particular, Cameron's arguing last week of the necessity of green subsidies.
Reader Comments (81)
with Nick Clegg as my elected representative and having exchanged many fruitless emails with him I can tell you that as long as he is leader of the LibDems their policy will be to put as many people into fuel poverty as possible whilst exporting jobs and emissions to the developing world. It is not possible to maintain the dignity that your Grace requires and to comment objectively on the mores of these people.
I'm not quite as pessimistic as El Obispo, but it depends on us. The Conservatives are in a tricky position, and will need every vote they can get for re-election, particularly if they want to govern without the 'assistance' of the Lib Dems. There may never have been a better time to get what we want from them, we just have to make sure they know it. Time to start sending polite emails to our MPs making sure they understand we understand where they stand :-)
We've been accepting increasing taxation on society's pariahs as something normal for so long that eventually we have all become pariahs.
They glibly say they want consumers to shop around for the cheapest Energy
They wont let the Energy companies do it.
Great article on Spiked about the failure to expand Kings North coal power station.
A 2010 winter magnitude event this winter will be enough to bring the issue front and centre, there will be no wiggle room to justify a higher than normal winter weather related death toll. The energy companies have already set the ball in motion with their price hike, when criticised they will simply state how much of the cost of energy is for green taxes.
It is clear that none of the main political parties will abandon the Green taxes as they have long since accepted the climate pseudoscience. As well as some have positioned themselves financially
Ed Miliband started the ball rolling with the Climate Change Act. He knew and stated it would lead to higher energy prices. Also - "Ed Miliband, the climate change minister, has angered rurual campaigners by saying opposition to windfarms is as socially unacceptable as failing to stop at a zebra crossing"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/5045289/Ed-Miliband-says-opposing-windfarms-is-socially-unacceptable.html
Ed Davey does not understand anything about the science but is a complete believer. He was the LibDems antinuclear guru before the last election. So he must take a lot of the blame for the lack of progress in building new nuclear power stations and the slow development of shale gas.
Lord Deben a long time believer and someone who appears to be financially involved with companies in renewables, will advise the government that we must stick to the emission cuts - because the climate "scientists" say so. Presumably it will hurt the pockets of too many MPs and ex MPs if the Green taxes were cut.
We need a people's revolution or mass demonstration against this green poll tax. Fuel poverty is rising and well rise steeply over the next decade. How long before people revolt?
First things first.
The EU elections will be the chance for the electorate to punish Westminster by voting UKIP, with little or no political repercussions on their heads.
The effect on the Westminster MPs will be salutary and serve to concentrate not a few minds in the run up to 2015.
The possibility of a UKIP block in Parliament after the 2015 election would throw putative coalition permutations into a turmoil that would be relished by the MSM and feared by marginal seat MPs of all persuasions.
2014 is the key.
It's a long game and the facts will out.
Heavy snow on the Jura here so another long hard winter looks likely and apparently they have early snow in Munich.
One thing's for sure, anyone who flogged a ski resort in the last few years due to global warming fears must feel like a right idiot, and a poorer one at that.
My Lord I have posted the following at Watts and I think if you have not already listened to the pod cast I am sure you and your readers would very much enjoy. I don't think it is off topic as it is now still very topical.
Clive James in 2009 did a radio piece on Herman Khan, whereby he discussed Herman Khan’s predictive powers. As a flavour to the following link Herman Khan always made predictions well into the future, for example everyone would fly helicopters and have free fall sex in twenty five years time. Clive James gave a period of twenty five years as one Hermie.
The broadcast then deals with the relationship between the media , scientists and politicians. This is just post Climategate
Scroll down the link to Hermie Khan and enjoy the truth and wit of Mr James’s humour.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/povcj
As I understand it, wind is not subsidised as such, but consumers are obliged to buy it at a fixed high price. There can be no doubt that this puts upwards pressure on energy prices. But worse than that, traditional generators are being forced to cycle up and down their plant to accommodate wind, this costs money, and they are being forced out of the market, which also costs them money and so their only response is to raise prices. In other words, wind is expensive to produce and it is also expensive to integrate on the grid.
...They will try to wriggle their way out of it of course, by coming up with some last minute eye-catching initiatives, and hope that the electorate will fall for it. To be frank the electorate may well do that....
Going by past experience, what we will probably get is a "Cast-Iron Promise" that energy prices will fall under the Conservatives. Which will be meaningless, and won't happen anyway.
Incidentally, I've been trying to estimate the actual impact of wind variability on fossil fuel load-following generators. Of course, it's unbelievably complicated, and totally dependent on what equipment is running at the time, but as far as I can see, putting low amounts of variability into a typical thermal electric generator drops efficiency by around 2%. This rises, of course, depending on how much you actually vary, right up to 100%.
Because most of our energy is fossil-fuel, losing a small percentage through inefficiencies can lose whole gigawatts of power. Losing about 15% would totally wipe out a typical maximum wind contribution. Losing about 8% would wipe out an average wind contribution. These are, of course, back-of-envelope estimates by me, so could be be way out....
Tony Lodge: "We must change our energy policy now to head off power cuts and price rises"
http://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2013/10/tony-lodge-to-head-off-power-cuts-and-price-rises-we-must-change-our-energy-policy-now.html
It's full of commonsense suggestions as to what the Conservatives should do, so Camoron will ignore it.
P.S.
One big problem for energy traders is that wind turbines produce about 25% of output at a wind speed of 15mph, rising to 70% of output at 25mph. That's around 50% variation in output for quite a small wind-speed change, and I suspect that the Met Office can't forecast this sort of thing precisely, so the fossil-fuel generators regularly have to soak up a mis-match of 1-2Gw each day....
Defra have announced a loan scheme to facilitate the construction of small-scale on-farm anaerobic digesters. As far as I know it is in the nature of loans to need paying back - when the cockies discover that this can be done more easily by digesting food oils and maize silage rather than cow slurry to sell electricity into the grid we can expect them to cut out the cows and we can go look for the milk butter and cheese somewhere else. There is no mention of ROCS or FITS in the press coverage - anyone know more?
The LibDems are currently packing the parachutes.
Possibly in common with many others on here and in general, I am getting weary of the whole shebang. The science of the issue is utterly irrelevant, it is all about politics – a game that has been reduced to who can tell the most convincing lies, then renege upon any promises made in their emission.
The sooner we, the electorate, wake up to the stench emanating from Wastemonster and the corridors of
Whitehall, the sooner we can be rid of the parasites that our sapping us of our lives; if you don’t want to vote UKIP, vote for any other party but the main three.Dang! Stupid typos… (serves me right for trying to be too clever by half). This is what I meant to say:
Possibly in common with many others on here and in general, I am getting weary of the whole shebang. The science of the issue is utterly irrelevant, it is all about politics – a game that has been reduced to who can tell the most convincing lies, then renege upon any promises made in their emission.
The sooner we, the electorate, wake up to the stench emanating from Wastemonster and the corridors of
SWhitehall, the sooner we can be rid of the parasites that our sapping us of our lives; if you don’t want to vote UKIP, vote for any other party but the main three.I read the article at The Mail. Vince Cable is a lunatic. He said that everything is fine, and the policies are sound, because "in the long term the cost of renewables will fall." He sounds like Marie Antoinette reincarnated.
Cameron is finding out, just as the thankfully deceased Labor government here did, what happens when you shackle your party's fortunes to green fringe elements. They are incapable of compromise, even if it means political suicide (the Greens lost a third of their vote here in the last election).
I imagine that there a lot of nervous Tory backbenchers in marginal seats who are well aware of the damage this is doing to their core vote.
Incidentally, Bish, I think your headline should read "Bailing". Sorry. It's a pet spelling peeve of mine.
I have had a couple of energy spikes in the last month, a pumps surge protector cut in leaving me with no water for 10 minutes until it decided it was safe, two 240volt to 12 volt convertors destroyed. One of the surges definately coincided with a gust of wind.
There are two new turbines up the line from me, presumably with all the safety features to stop them causing a spike, but if they didn't do it what did, it was windy not thundery.
The Tories have precisely NO chance of a clear majority, so on the morning after the general election night before the nation will awake to a certain 'green' future via a Labour government led by the clown to drove through the most ruinously expensive Act in parliaments history.
Factor in the EU strangling shale at birth via red tape, Milibands daft pledge to decarbonise the entire energy sector by 2030 and a headlong rush into further EUropean integration and we have an energy recipe for absolute disaster.
btw, people talk of riots in the street and a public uprising; it never happens from sensible middle England, only the Left engage in such activism. Tough times for our nation lie ahead.
A very fair assessment of the present situation. However, one variable is missing, violent protest on the street. Those of us who remember the certainty Thatcher displayed over the Poll Tax ( sorry Community Charge) and the way it was physically destroyed by protests in London and elsewhere. Thatcher paid with her job in the end, so will all three hapless modern leaders over the price of power.
The great politically induced calamity would not be the lights going out but prices being raised so high that poor citizens and otherwise productive companies end by being frozen out.
We could be looking at a few contenders for the Prat Overboard Award.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2013/10/12/climate-prat-of-the-year-award-2013/
Pointman
@ filbert cobb 11:52 AM
There is a permitted farm-based AD plant near me and applications in for two more. The first one will use chicken litter and grass/maize silage, the other two will use cattle slurry and grass/maize silage. Several square miles of land will be used to grow the grass and maize. Cattle numbers will be reduced because there will be less feed for them. In total there will be not much more than 1MWe of capacity, from several square miles of food crops. The electricity will be fed into the local network, but 60% of the energy produced is heat which will be lost. So Government policy is to discourage food production and encourage production of a small amount of electricity and lots of waste heat. You wouldn't think that anybody would be mad enough to make this up. But they do.
I can't see any way Cameron could bail on renewables, even if the evidence became toxic and unavoidable.
It would be political suicide. So he, and his advisors will run the country into the ground, and old people into their graves, to save his reputation – which will be destroyed anyway in ten years time when the facts about CAGW finally come out.
If he was a man, he would stand up and say, "We got it wrong. What can we do to fix the damage we and Labour have done?"
The Liberals are, however, simply insane.
David Cameron wants voters to think that he might do something about green taxes, just as he wants voters to think that he might do something about our membership of the EU. After all, Cameron's background is in PR. He is more interested in controlling perceptions than with actually solving problems.
Like everything else, AGW is a banking scam. Politicians aren't confused or wrong, they are lying.
I am a Nigerian Prince.
Carbon Capitalists Warming to Climate Market Using Derivatives
As a young London banker in the early 1990s, Blythe Masters of JPMorgan Chase was part of JPMorgan’s team developing ideas for transferring risk to third parties. She went on to manage credit risk for JPMorgan’s investment bank.
Among the credit derivatives that grew from the bank’s early efforts was the credit-default swap. A CDS is a contract that functions like insurance by protecting debt holders against default. In 2008, after U.S. home prices plunged, the cost of protection against subprime-mortgage bond defaults jumped. Insurer American International Group Inc., which had sold billions in CDSs, was forced into government ownership, roiling markets and helping trigger the worst global recession since the 1930s.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601086&sid=aXRBOxU5KT5M
Making political predictions is offering a certain hostage to fortune. All the same, I can't see any of the three main parties resiling from their Green cult advocacy without significant changes at the top - and not just the leaders but all their henchmen too.
The only people with the time, excess testosterone and idiocy to riot in the streets are the young and they aren't going to get agitated by energy cuts, so I think we can forget about that as a possibility (and I nearly added 'sadly')
The only hope I can see is immense public pressure applied through the media and an enormous protest vote with the motivations made plain enough that even our elected morons realise why people voted the way they did.
Personally, that means a vote for UKIP even if they are 'loonies'. After all, compared with whom? The Lib Dems? Red Ed? Dim Dave?
Somehow we have to hose-out the stables and start again. With new horses, too.
Apparently Ed Dopey is on BBC Question Time in 30 minutes. I can't bear to listen.
Some of us in Australia were hoping that the UK government would do some useful acts to set precedents that we could follow. Unfortunately, you seem to have a surfeit of pollies who are wedded to that other cause, either mentally or financially.
Do you now appoint Lords because they made a lot of money or because peerage will allow them to make a lot of money?
Do you allow people to forget the dangers of pillow talk? And of making policies that satisfy the missus?
Do you hide from the dangers from allowing carpetbaggers to function with impunity?
Do you forget the danger of conflict of interest which seems to have been lost to the current crop of pollies?
Wow! Things are getting bad.
I'll keep you informed if we here manage to do anything that could be helpful.
The political issue is that the Lib Dems have decided to sabotage the UK economy with high energy prices so they can stay in power after the next election.
The way to counter them is to take the green taxes off power bills and identify the Lib Dems as responsible for higher general taxation then to accelerate the programme to allow households to bypass the Mafia-controlled electricity grid by installing CHP fuel cells.
Not only are these 55% thermodynamically efficient so on a par with CCGTs, there is no grid power loss, the heat is kept in buildings and they can be used as efficient fast standby also making solar cells more manageable.
The alternative being pushed by Crazy Davey is STOR which increases fossil fuel use by 80%, CO2 by 150% compared with CCGTs.
The CO2 saving of 10 GW home generation is enormous and will make the Tories the greenest ever government, along with fraccing.
We are in a vicious fight as we wrest back control of the economy from the crooks behind the windmills who want to ration power to maximise profits, also the eugenicists like those who control DECC whose aim is to surreptitiously kill millions.
It's interesting to see how this is being framed by the BBC. Here's an item from Radio 4 News at 6 pm yesterday (h/t to stewgreen in Unthreaded):
It's quite cleverly written, building up to the takeaway message which is: fossil fuels and nuclear = increasingly unaffordable, but renewables = negligible cost and (by implication) our only hope!
Decarbonisation targets are decreed from above, via EU directives and the UN's Agenda 21. That's why none of the main parties can come clean about it, as it reveals their impotence. They will twist and distort in their Kabuki theatre politics but the facts remain the same.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/6227479/EU-carbon-policy-could-leave-UK-in-the-dark.html
Vote UKIP.
Of course there's a necessity for green subsidies.
CallMeDave's father in law has probably earmarked his near £1000/day rake in from the wind farm on his land for years to come!
I wonder how many wind turbines Sir Reggie can see from his main residence?
johanna
If you want a battle of the pedants, my Chambers has no fewer than six headings for 'bail' including exiting from an aircraft which, it says and I agree, is usually spelt 'bale' which itself has three headings one of which says "see bail (5)" which is the reference above..
So, are we "baling out" as the Bishop implies with his photo or "bailing out" the sinking boat?
Good pun, either way.
Phillip Bratby
Lodge speaks sense. What Cameron doesn't seem to realise is that the 2015 election is in the bag if he simply appoints a few more like Paterson to key posts and says bluntly, "we were sold a pup by the likes of Goldsmith and Porritt; things are obviously not as bad as all the greenie scaremongers would like us to believe; we got it wrong and I'm sorry.
Fracking starts tomorrow and if Clegg and his sidekicks don't like it, tough s**t".
But I would suggest he engage a good divorce lawyer first! And that, gentlemen, is half the problem I suspect!!
"It's hard to see a way for this to end well."
May I suggest a way. If by early 2015 there is strong evidence of the earth cooling, rather than just a standstill, that even the IPCC can't obfuscate. Of course it would be bad news for the planet, but it might be worth it so see 650 MPs in abject terror of the imminent reckoning.
Steve Crook wrote:
quote
There may never have been a better time to get what we want from them, we just have to make sure they know it. Time to start sending polite emails to our MPs making sure they understand we understand where they stand :-)
unquote
I'm afraid you won't get much traction there. Yesterday, we (Tony Brown and me, UKIP county councillors for Haverhill) met our local MP. I had a go about energy and he made 'there's nothing we can do, it's the LIB Dems' noises: my suggestion that he stop the coalitiion and go it alone was slid away from. He, like all politicians, understands one thing only and that's a threat to his job.
You know how to threaten LibLabDem politicians with loss of employment? The day before our meeting, UKIP had won a town council seat with a greatly increased majority. That was on his mind, you can bet money on it.
Vote often.
JF
I don't understand it.
We, on this and related blogsites, are crystal clear about the lunacy of the government's (and the Opposition's) current policies on energy - so are the politicians REALLY that stupid..? Or have they got their fingers so far into the 'green' tills that they can't get their arms out..?
I think the answer may be yes on both counts - but I'm also reminded of the Great Lightbulb Fiasco. The government of the time (Labour, but it doesn't really matter) decided that incandescent light bulbs were Bad. 'Low Energy' ones were Good. So - knee-jerk, knee-jerk - ban all incandescent lightbulbs. Result - we have a mercury-in-groundwater crisis about to unfold because of course people don't, in general, 'recycle' their (dim) low energy lamps - they bung 'em in the wheelie bin and they finish up in landfill, get broken and the mercury leaks out.
Far better (and engineers were pleading at the time) would have been to allow LEDs to develop further and get cheaper (sadly they still haven't) before getting rid of incandescent lamps.
Incidentally - the biggest hoarder of incandescent lamps is - you've guessed it - the public works division of the government..! Well - can't have whirly fluorescents in those lovely sparkly chandeliers, can we..?
As an aside - I've just fixed my gas and electricity until November 2014, at what SEEM to be relatively reasonable prices (Scottish Power) - can only advise a visit to Uswitch and/or the other similar websites...
Mike Jackson, I defer to your local knowledge. This must be one of those relatively rare occasions when English and Australian spelling diverge. Here, "bale" only refers to bundling up hay and such.
We pedants need to stick together in an uncaring world. :)
Polticians will say whatever they have to say to get elected. If energy costs have become an explosive issue by the time of the next election, then there will be a volte-face and the poacher will turn gamekeeper or be faced with electoral defeat.
johanna
You will appreciate this Christmas Card from a few years ago.
(I assume that Aussies are familiar with the carol 'Good King Wenceslas'.) This is the only place I could find it. You'll need to click 'Continue to the Media'.
let's chalk up the differences in our electricity bills and draw it from the BBC's penshun fund? For them saving Gaiia is primordial anyway. also note that parasiting won't be possible when Gaiia is boiling so their contribution, with OUR money, will be most welcome.
samesame for our MP's travel expenses. What travel expenses why travel expenses,Nooo travel expenses: is it not better for Gaia to fucking use email , phone and Skype?? wot aboot saving some Co2, and top up for our rising electricity bills. Cheers.
We know that Labour and LibDem MPs are virtually 100 percent in the warmist camp. We also know that only five brave Tory MPs voted against the Climate Change Act, and one of those is no longer in the Commons. No doubt a few more Tories have joined the sceptics: but I doubt if there are any where near enough to repeal the act, or even redirect green taxes. Can the Chancellor transfer the green taxes into the general taxation pot, without a vote?
The LibLabCon will not see my vote next GE.
I probably would vote UKIP without any great enthusiasm, because they have policies that are nearest to my prejudices.
BUT what I would like on the ballot paper is a box to tick for - NON OF THE ABOVE THANK YOU.
@Johanna - I understand that in Oz there is a legal requirement to vote, although I gather one can spoil ones paper. You have to attend the voting station. I was idly wondering what effect that has, and in particular what effect it would have on the UK outcome of the next GE ???
No offence intended to anyone
politics 101
They are intelligent, they know what they're doing If you don't understand, it's you that's dumb, not them.
After leaving the Washington Post (a CIA front organisation) in 1977 and working with CIA stooge Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein wrote
THE CIA and the media by Carl Bernstein.
http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
Energy companies, 'encouraged' by the government, are giving subsidies on energy bills to deserving cases. You can get a credit of £135 pa if you can show your are poor enough. All very well, but this is actually a secret method of out-sourcing both tax and welfare. And having them appear nowhere in public expenditure or tax figures. Just on your energy bill, where it accounts for some 5%.
@ Tefor Jones
Given that the scum who violently protested against the perfectly fair Community Charge because it meant an end to little old ladies subsidising their lives are the same crowd who demand action on climate change and are indifferent to increased winter deaths among little old ladies and increased poverty as a result of the policies they advocate, I doubt that violent protests are likely.
"Energy companies, 'encouraged' by the government, are giving subsidies on energy bills to deserving cases."
Rhoda.
That sounds bizarre. Where did you read that ?
thanks
It is bale or bail, either spelling is fine. I won't add my thoughts on Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg, or David Cameron. I am maintaining my dignity, as instructed by the bish...mind you that c*** Gummer really takes the f****** biscuit doesn't he? I bet even Monckton would agree.
Sorry Andrew, what little dignity I ever had went west a long time ago.:)