Berlin has created the bloc’s biggest renewable energy market by offering a raft of generous subsidies to homeowners and businesses. But costs are rocketing. After a rise in January, green taxes now account for €53 (£45) a megawatt hour of electricity, nearly equal to the £50 price for power in Britain. “Germany has spent more than €150bn in the past 10 years on its green experiment, and what has it led to? Higher emissions,” said Philip Lambert, founder of Lambert Energy Advisory. “They have more than 400 terawatt hours of installed renewable capacity, but its annual output is less than 70TWh, which is why they have had this dash for coal to keep the lights on.” --
The Sunday Times, 22 April 2013
Even as Europe retreats from its ETS scheme, Britain is plunging ever deeper into the green revolution. Just three weeks ago, a new tax called the carbon price floor came into effect. Devised by George Osborne, the chancellor, it ensures that British manufacturers and power plants pay at least £16 for every tonne of carbon dioxide they produce. This will rise to £30 by 2020. Jeremy Nicholson, head of the Energy Intensive Users Group, the trade organisation, claimed Osborne’s scheme will put some of his members “out of business”. --
The Sunday Times, 22 April 2013
The truth is that we are, by imposing on our business high energy costs in the UK, driving business abroad, some of it to China. By subsidising the investment in solar panels and wind turbines, we are creating opportunities for China to export to the UK and we are probably creating green jobs in China. But let us not pretend that we are creating any green jobs for ourselves, or any opportunities to export to China, that would not exist if we simply abandoned all our climate change commitments in this country. -- Peter Lilley,
House of Commons, 18 April 2013
It’s been a bad week for efforts to develop green energy around the world. A new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) says that progress towards carbon-free energy production has basically stalled while Europe has seen a return to coal in the last couple of years. --Matt McGrath,
BBC News, 18 April 2013
So, in every direction, the rest of us must pay to support a policy designed to double our bills and drive millions more households into fuel poverty. And all this supposedly to “save the planet”, when, as Peter Lilley pointed out in a superb speech in Westminster Hall on Thursday, the increase in China’s CO2 emissions alone in 2011 was 200 million tons more than the total emitted by the UK. As Mr Lilley reminded his fellow MPs, locked in their sad little bubble of make-believe, “those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad”. --Christopher Booker,
The Sunday Telegraph, 21 April 2013
Criminologists have observed that the victims of confidence tricksters are often willing—indeed, eager—to believe the story to which they fall victim. The more absurd, fantastic or fabulous the story, the more willing they are to believe it. This Select Committee report – Low Carbon Cooperation with China – and the government’s reply prove that Ministers and Members will willingly believe any delusion as long as it is sufficiently fabulous. It contains all the characteristics necessary for the sort of fairy tale in which one wants to believe: it has a faraway country, mysterious powers that we attribute to ourselves, and pots of gold—green gold—at the end of the rainbow. -- Peter Lilley,
House of Commons, 18 April 2013
Despite these relentless setbacks for the climate campaign, environmentalists are not going gentle into this well-lit night, nor will they abandon their decades-old crusade to kill off hydrocarbon energy. The movement is too well funded, and has established ample footholds in the policy machinery stretching down to the local level in the United States. Having a “climate action policy” is de rigueur for just about every self-respecting city council and county commission in the country. –Steven Hayward,
The Weekly Standard, 29 April 2013
William Waldegrave has, I fear, fallen below his customary standard of meticulous scholarship in his article speculating on what Margaret Thatcher would do today about climate change. There is no need to speculate. She made her views abundantly clear. Towards the end of her time in office she was persuaded that there was a potential threat to which the world should be alerted, but took no policy initiatives of any kind as she well understood that a great deal more needed to be known before that would be justified. By 2002, when her book Statecraft appeared, she had concluded that the science was far more complex and less certain than it had first appeared, and that the motives of the “doomsters” (her term) were, to say the least, highly suspect. --Nigel Lawson,
The Times, 19 April 2013
