David Cameron has been hit by a major protest by Conservative MPs over the Government’s backing for wind farms, The Sunday Telegraph can disclose. A total of 101 Tory MPs have written to the Prime Minister demanding that the £400 million-a-year subsidies paid to the “inefficient” onshore wind turbine industry are “dramatically cut”. The demands will be a headache for Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat Energy Secretary, who joined the Cabinet on Friday when Chris Huhne resigned after being charged with perverting the course of justice. The Tory MPs, including several of the party’s rising stars as well as former ministers, say it is wrong that hard-pressed consumers must pay for the expansion of onshore wind power. A Downing Street spokesman said: “The Government has commissioned a review of subsidy levels and we are proposing a cut for onshore wind subsidies to take into account the fact that costs are coming down.” --Patrick Hennessy,
The Sunday Telegraph, 5 February 2012
Every government needs a thick slice of luck, and this week’s has come as Chris Huhne slid off the political road into the ditch. Ed Davey has a golden chance to drive away from an energy policy which might have been designed to make energy expensive and electricity unreliable. While Huhne was tilting at windmills, the energy game has been changed utterly by the emergence of shale gas. The UK’s reserves may not add up to another North Sea (although some believe that they might) but they do give the country the chance to keep the lights on when the existing nuclear stations can’t be patched up any longer and before their replacements are built. All that is needed is a policy which sees gas-fired power as part of the solution, rather than part of the problem. --Neil Collins,
Financial Times, 3 February 2012
Despite his own history of green gimmickry, the Prime Minister must now use the opportunity of Mr Huhne’s departure to listen to the wind-farm rebels for reasons rather deeper than merely heading off a trying back-bench revolt. For the wind-farm policy is as disastrous as it is farcical. Not only are these huge turbines an environmental eyesore, they also produce no energy if the wind is not blowing. But even more ludicrously, if the wind blows too hard, they have to be shut down. In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift mocked scientists by inventing a satirical wheeze for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers. If Swift were alive today, he’d be out of a job, for the Coalition’s green policies are simply beyond satire. Chris Huhne’s enforced departure offers the Prime Minister an opportunity to junk the climate change nonsense that is inflicting such harm on Britain’s fragile economy and relocate his government on Planet Reality. –Melanie Phillips,
Daily Mail, 6 February 2012
Debates that are declared to be 'over' by politicians tend to be just beginning in earnest. A good example is the climate debate. Five years ago, the then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan thought he could announce its final verdict: "A few diehard sceptics continue to deny global warming is taking place and try to sow doubt. They should be seen for what they are: out of step, out of arguments and out of time." Well a lot has happened since then. Or rather it did not happen. It has not warmed since then - the world's temperature has stagnated since well over ten years, 2011 included. Even in Germany a prominent name now dares to speak up: Fritz Vahrenholt, a veteran of the environmental movement, the Labour Party's environment secretary in the state of Hamburg and most recently head of the RWE subsidiary Innogy, which invests in renewable energy. Next week his new book "The Cold Sun - why the climate catastrophe is not happening" will be published. --Michael Miersch & Dirk Maxeiner, Die Welt, 4 February 2012
