But the government’s claims about clean energy tend to go further. The promise, as conveyed by the £300 pledge, is that we can also save money on the way to 2030. Really? The gas price is back at its 10-year average in real terms, while renewables have lost the financing whoosh they enjoyed from ultra-low interest rates. It becomes harder to see how a £200bn five-year transition from dirty but reliable fossil fuels to a cleaner but more complex intermittent system can be costless for consumers.
‘Mazin’ how they manage to think through these things, innit? Such startling conclusions….
£300 pledge? Was that painted on the side of a bus?
In the Guardian no less! That article’s verging on blasphemy.
The Graun’s main purpose is to align the clerisy’s thinking. It is now bing prepared for the Grand Rowback from Net Zero, and in time will be primed to claim that bankrupting the nation was never the intention; obviously sensible, adult people had to behave as sensible adults, nothing to see here, we’re still in charge, etc. etc.
Then the memory hole.
The crucial words “up to”, which to his credit Mr Pratley has included, in stark contrast to the general media position, would most certainly not have been on the Clapham omnibus.
Milliband’s bullsh1t is about as truthful as Obama’s famously dishonest promise to reduce medical insurance costs by $2,500.
First order effect – A fuckwit politician signalling their virtue to the world as a parting gift after being a totally useless PM (fish face May).
Second order effect – Fuck the UK consumers with the costs from the CCA leading to world’s highest energy prices.
I continue to be amazed by people who think carbon dioxide is a pollutant except it’s the education system which has divorced approved opinion flrom provable fact. If they were any good at numbers they’d be screaming for more plant food and enjoying (unrelated) good weather.
When will the Groan wake up to the fact that so-called clean energy causes far more pollution than fossil fuels?
Fossil fuels are not “dirty” and unreliables are not “clean”. Other than that…
Right again, Esteban. ‘Clean’ and ‘dirty’ are just commie focus group tested words, and don’t mean ‘clean’ or ‘dirty’ at all. They are just commie word symbols meaning “good” and “bad.”
But but but, wind and solar are “free”!
Well so are oil and gas. There’s no underworld boss we have to pay for the juice.
The costs are in the extraction. And costs to get diffuse energy are higher than costs to extract concentrated energy.
In the Spectator yesterday there was a graph showing the cumulative costs of net zero. 800 billion by 2050. That’s a lot of zeros.
It becomes harder to see how a £200bn five-year transition from dirty but reliable fossil fuels to a cleaner but more complex intermittent system can be costless for consumers.
If only there was some way of knowing when people are telling you untrue things, so they can rob you and leave you dead in a ditch. Wouldn’t that be a handy skill?
For the government, there is an extra incentive to protect itself against the risk of a 2022-style rise in the price of gas after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
They’re “protecting” us from gas price increases by killing the British oil and gas industry.
CfDs are the price-guarantee mechanism, funded by bill payers, that encourages developers to build. Projects get the “strike” price for their electricity regardless of the wholesale price. Last year’s CfDs for fixed offshore wind, viewed as “the bedrock” of a cleaned-up system, were priced at £76-£82 in 2024 money, which at the top end is the same as the average wholesale price of electricity over the past year.
We’re going to cancel them, and leave the energy thieves holding tens of thousands of worthless windmills. They’ll be shrieking like banshees.
Very important that the energy companies be allowed to fail, there’s no fucking way we should tolerate the continued existence of this subsidy or further burden taxpayers and householders. Let the big energy companies go bust and someone will pick up the valuable parts of their business at auction. When we cancel Net Zero, *somebody’s* getting financially raped – let’s make sure it’s the rapists this time.
philip @ 11.52, I believe one estimate of the cost of net zero was £1.4 trillion by 2050.
Thats, £1,400,000,000,000, three more noughts than £800,000,000.
It’s only £50,000 per household though, so peanuts really………
Steve, Nigel has the right idea. You can’t just cancel all of these subsidies and whatnot because they’re entangled in webs of laws and contracts and you’ll get way too much Blob pushback. You can windfall tax the recipients though, to make all of these activities loss-making, then sit back and watch the exodus and subsequent collapse. You use the tax take to subsidise fracking, CCGT and mini-nuke. Pigou would be proud.
Ooooh, I’ll look forward to Dale’s shrieks.
Norman – I’m a big picture guy, Nige can sort out the details because I trust him.
But it’s true that we live under a Parliamentary dictatorship and Parliament can make any laws it wants, and as long as it controls men with truncheons and guns to enforce its laws, Parliament can do anything.
Here’s a fun example of what I mean, from the old Scottish Parliament but it’s compatible with the doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty:
Act abolishing the surname of Ruthven
Forasmuch as the surname of Ruthven has been so naturally bent these many years bygone to attempt most high and horrible treasons against his majesty and his most noble progenitors that his majesty is thereby brought in vehement suspicion of their whole race and of his natural clemency, being careful that the infamy justly inflicted to the guilty shall not disgrace such of his subjects as are innocent of the said treasons, for extinguishing of the memory of the treasonable committers of the crimes foresaid and removing of the blot that with the surname might follow such of his highness’s lieges as have not been participant of the said crimes, his majesty, with advice and consent of the estates of this present parliament, statutes and ordains that the surname of Ruthven shall now and in all time coming be extinguished and abolished for ever, and that such of his highness’s subjects bearing the said surname in time past as are free and innocent of the said crimes of treason attempted against his majesty and his predecessors in manner foresaid shall be held and astricted to renounce the said surname of Ruthven, and never to use the same in any time coming, and to take to themselves, their bairns and posterity any other honest and undisgraced surname between now and Whitsunday [31 May] next, whereby they, their bairns and posterity shall be called in all time coming, and to use the same in all contracts, bonds, pacts, infeftments, writs, securities, proclamations of banns, subscribing of letters, speeches, conferences and other occasions whatsoever under the pain of banishment during the king’s pleasure to be executed against them and every one of them with all [rigour]†
I want an Act Abolishing Milibands. NB – not the name Miliband.
It’s the old “capitalists are bad” trick, and Mr Steve fell for it.
“When we cancel Net Zero, *somebody’s* getting financially raped – let’s make sure it’s the rapists this time.”
Energy companies did what government asked them to do, so energy companies are “rapists.”
They are not your problem. Your problem is the government. Be nice to energy companies: they keep you alive. Government isn’t doing much FOR you these days.
I’ve plenty of time for oil and gas companies, Gamecock, not so much Dale Vince and the other ‘renewable energy’ grifters. Hangin’s too good for ’em.
In the Spectator yesterday there was a graph showing the cumulative costs of net zero. 800 billion by 2050. That’s a lot of zeros.
Why, that’s almost 7 HS2s!
@Esteban
Other than “fossil fuels” being concentrated, relatively easily transportable and available 24/7/365 with a century of established infrastructure behind them.
Unusables being (well in practice unusable) diffuse, intermittent, incredibly land and resource hungry, generally far away from where they are needed , economic lunacy (paying to turn them off!) and will be a recycling/disposal nightmare for decades after the penny finally drops
Gamecock – does the boot taste nicer when it’s owned by a corporation? Do you enjoy tonguing the parade gloss shine? Mmmmm at least it’s not government.
Energy companies did what government asked them to do, so energy companies are “rapists.”
The Nuremberg defence didn’t even work in Nuremberg. Yes, energy companies are raping the British public. They saw subsidies on offer and greedily mobbed them while pretending Net Zero might work out, somehow.
Net Zero won’t work out, it was never going to work out, and the only decisions to be made are who’s going to lose their pensions over it. I’m saying the people who benefited from the subsidies, who hoped to get rich by robbing us, need to pay.
Be nice to energy companies: they keep you alive.
Personally, I’d have their CEOs hanged. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But I’m also open to defenestration, burning and death by ostrich.
Difficult Steve to separate the company from the shareholders.
Normally the shareholders should take some of the pain, but if you invested in Shell/BP for the hydrocarbons you got the Net Zero crap as well because that was the virtue signalling the C suite wanted at the time.
Should a pensioner who invested in hydrocarbon businesses take a haircut to make amends for the execs?
AS – Difficult Steve to separate the company from the shareholders.
Yes, but do you understand the scale of the problem?
We have hundreds of billions of pounds of malinvestment in Net Zero.
That means somebody’s going to lose out, bigly, when we cancel Net Zero. Big enough to bring down the current owners of our energy sector. The entire country is covered in useless fucking windmills, not to mention the £££££££ being spaffed on useless fucking windmills offshore, remember. There’s no pain-free escape.
Either the British public is fucked in the arse forever, which was the plan by Miliband and his fellow hand-rubbers, or we are going to have to bankrupt some big corps and currently high net worth individuals who thought they’d be raping the British public forever.
There’s no escaping this, it’s inevitable. Net Zero is a massive conspiracy against the public, and unwinding this scandal is going to hurt many people. Because we don’t have trillions of pounds, free, to make everyone whole.
Should a pensioner who invested in hydrocarbon businesses take a haircut to make amends for the execs?
They better, we’re done sacrificing our children for greedy old bastards. Nobody under the age of 50 is going to be able to retire anyway, so my sympathy is non-existent.
AS, the pensioner could sell hishydrocarbon stocks and buy something else instead. Should have done, i fact, when they turned away from hydrocarbons towards renewable unicorns: they were never going to make profits, only claim subsidies. I suppose we ought to be piling into mobility scooter manufacturers.
Should have done, i fact, when they turned away from hydrocarbons towards renewable unicorns:
Yarp, and NB *somebody’s* taking a haircut. It would be better if not, but too much money has been wasted for this to be gently unpicked.
If not the people who expected to financially benefit from Net Zero, then who?
We have no magic wand to undo the malinvestments. If the pension beneficiaries don’t accept their own losses in companies they (or their representative) willingly put money into, it means – AGAIN – that we’re robbing our grandchildren to benefit people who already won the demographic lottery by being born and able to claim before the British welfare Ponzi scheme inevitably went tits.
Our grandchildren can’t afford this. We should let the energy companies go bankrupt instead. They won’t cease to exist, their valuable assets will simply be bought by someone else, while the worthless fucking windmills are written off and left to rust as monuments to the foolishness and fecklessness of our idiot fucking politicians.
A lot of people, including me, will likely lose out on the pension due to stock market revaluation, but it’ll be worth it because our country will survive. At the end of the day, we just can’t afford the ridiculously high cost of energy the British government expects us to pay, when we get prices down it’ll create infinitely more benefits for society than the short term pain of crystallised losses. But no mistake, there will be pain and loss, it’s inescapable now, after the Tories wasted 14 years of our lives in a cocktease that never went anywhere.
“He’s the universal soldier,
and he really is to blame”
Well, Steve, your letting government off will be your demise.
@ Steve / Norman
Let me suggest another candidate for who the costs should fall onto (and this is Gamecock’s point) – the electorate.
Who voted in the utter fuckwits who enacted the CCA and then didn’t get rid of it when it was obviously a massive mistake. That would be the politicians who were elected by voters.
The excuse that people couldn’t be bothered or that the CCA was a small part of a manifesto or whatever holds the same amount of water as blaming the pensioner shareholder of big energy.
Gamecock – Adam Smith said that people of the same trade rarely gather, even for recreation, without their conversations turning into a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
He’s right, that’s exactly what we do.
I think this halfwitted libertarian idea that private business = good and government = bad was already stale when Ron Paul ran for your president. In reality there’s a broad spectrum of arseholes across every field of human endeavour.
AS – Let me suggest another candidate for who the costs should fall onto (and this is Gamecock’s point) – the electorate.
That would be a massive policy failure.
Rort the electorate, and we’re fucking over people who weren’t even born when Lord Stern kicked off this con game in the UK. And people who aren’t even born today, but will be expected to service the feckless UK government’s trillions of debt.
If we contrive this sort of financial escape for people who wanted to get rich forcing you to pay for their useless fucking windmills, the moral hazard is obvs. It would be Bank Bailouts v2.0. Net Zero is obviously going to be cancelled, because it’s unworkable and unaffordable, so there’s an unlubed freight train of pain heading for *somebody’s* bottom – make that somebody the electorate as a whole and we will have – yet again – privatised the (ill-gotten) profits and socialised the losses.
That’s for the birds. If we’re ever hoping to be a serious country again, we need to let losers lose and winners win.
The excuse that people couldn’t be bothered or that the CCA was a small part of a manifesto or whatever holds the same amount of water as blaming the pensioner shareholder of big energy.
The other excuse – and a good one – is that we live in a fake democracy run by cunts. The British public voted for less “green crap” in every election for 14 years, didn’t make the slightest difference… because we’re a fake democracy, run by cunts.
I think we should make the cunts pay, for a change. Tax what we want to see less of.
Well there you go: lock up the CEOs, and the government will never do anything stupid again.
Gamecock – Le sigh
Still thinking it’s libertarian bowtie fun time, when it’s time for the Scourge of God.
Agent Smith,
“Should a pensioner who invested in hydrocarbon businesses take a haircut to make amends for the execs?”
Who else? You’re a stockholder and think the CEO is being a fuckwit, you either try and vote him out or sell up and put your money elsewhere. If you couldn’t be bothered checking out the fuckwit level of the CEO, you deserve what you get.
Of course, if you’re a pensioner who understands little about investing and pensions (most of them, and you can hardly blame them) and have therefore gone for a straightforward retail pension or investment you’re at the mercy of the fund manager, who is at the mercy of ESG policies, unless you’ve specifically sought out a fund that ignores them, and I doubt there are many.
So you’re going to take the haircut anyway.
And that’s why you have to kill the poison at source. Windfall tax the subsidy beneficiaries but announce it beforehand, as Nigel is doing. As a windfall tax can avoid legal challenge, and therefore actually be implemented and work, it’s going to be the fund manager’s fiduciary duty to move your investments out of renewables before the tax hits. Problem solved.
Also don’t forget the influence of the pressure Nigel is applying. Reform are looking like serious contenders and this generates uncertainty. If you want to get into renewables you only have four years max to recoup before Nigel crushes your returns. Building new stuff under these circumstances is pretty unattractive.