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UK Manufacturers Sound The Alarm Over Rising Energy Costs

Owen Paterson To Call For Suspension Of UK Climate Change Act



Britain will struggle to “keep the lights on” unless the Government changes its green energy policies, the former environment secretary will warn this week. Owen Paterson will say that the Government’s plan to slash carbon emissions and rely more heavily on wind farms and other renewable energy sources is fatally flawed. He will argue that the 2008 Climate Change Act, which ties Britain into stringent targets to reduce the use of fossil fuels, should be suspended until other countries agree to take similar measures. If they refuse, the legislation should be scrapped altogether, he will say. Mr Paterson will deliver the lecture at the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think tank set up by Lord Lawson of Blaby, a climate-change sceptic and former chancellor in Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet. --Christopher Hope, The Sunday Telegraph, 12 October 2013

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It is safe to predict that no speech made by a British politician this week will be more surprising or significant than that to be delivered by Owen Paterson, a senior Conservative, who was sacked from the Cabinet last July for being too good at his job. --Christopher Booker, The Sunday Telegraph, 12 October 2014 The high cost of energy could drive companies out of the UK, according to the EEF, the manufacturers’ organisation. The EEF claims that the projected 50 per cent rise in electricity prices by 2020 would harm British manufacturing. The warning follows research from the EEF which shows that rising energy costs would lead to a quarter of manufacturers considering investment overseas. --Yorkshire Post, 13 October 2014 The very idea that an advanced economy such as ours faces an energy crisis within the next few years should attract the most urgent attention of our political leaders. Yet we appear to be drifting into a situation of great seriousness because they are all wedded to unrealistic decarbonisation targets that none seems willing to revisit. Owen Paterson has begun a debate that cannot be shut down simply because it raises some difficult political questions. If this is not gripped now, then the next government, of whatever stripe, will need to explain to the country why they could have prevented the lights going out, but didn’t. --Editorial, The Sunday Telegraph, 12 October 2014 EU leaders face difficult negotiations to agree a package of climate change targets for 2030 at an end-of-October summit, with coal-reliant Poland leading objections, sources said on Friday. “The European Council will agree on the 2030 climate and energy policy framework for the European Union,” said the draft prepared for the bloc’s 28 member state leaders. But the question of “burden sharing” is central to actually closing a deal, a European source said, with sharp differences between those dependent on fossil fuels, such as Poland, compared with France and Britain which favour nuclear, and Germany which is looking towards renewables. Poland’s new prime minister, Ewa Kopacz, said earlier this month that her coal-reliant country would not rule out vetoing the high carbon cuts. --AFP, 10 October 2014 Forget QE, surely the precipitous oil price decline in the last couple of weeks will finally give the down-trodden European economy the big boost it needs. After three years of prices north of $100 a barrel, surely a big cut in Europe’s energy bill will provide a stimulus effect that Mario Draghi could only dream of? I’m afraid not. Why? Europe is overwhelmed by taxation, subsidy, over-capacity and green incentivisation plans that have conspired to make hydrocarbons a dirty and expensive source of energy. --Steve Sedgwick, City A.M., 7 October 2014


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