Race To Go Green Is Killing Britain’s Heavy Industries

Britain’s unilateral climate policies are a green version of what the writer James Bartholomew calls virtue signalling. They make people in suits feel good at conferences, while people in boiler suits at factories lose their jobs. If the government really wants to save energy-intensive industries, it must delay setting new emissions targets for the fifth carbon budget, as the climate change act entitles it to do. --Matt Ridley, The Times, 4 April 2016

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Prime Minister David Cameron promised voters last year that his Conservatives would be the true working-people’s party in Britain. Try telling that to the Welsh steel workers at Port Talbot whom Mr. Cameron’s green-energy policies are about to push out of their jobs. --Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 1 April 2016 The government has been urged to scrap “unilateral climate policies”. The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) has asked the Tory administration to delay the 5th Carbon Budget and get rid of the Carbon Floor Price (CFP). That’s because they are contributing to the crisis of the nation’s steel sector and other energy intensive industries. --Jacqueline Echevarria, Energy Live News, 31 March 2016 The failure of Tata Steel’s fragile UK operations is a salient, early symptom of more general and growing problems in the British economy. Other indicators include falling electricity consumption across all sectors, now at levels not seen since the 1990s and weak, near stagnant performance and falling rates of employment in larger scale manufacturing. The steadily accumulating effects of policy-induced energy cost increases are a significant part of this unfolding story, and, unlike many of the other causes involved, are actually under government control, so can be corrected. But just as the climate policies are slow but sure in the damage they cause, reforms will only bring benefits over the medium term, and so need to be made immediately to avoid serious problems in the next decade. Foresight and patience are both required. --John Constable, Global Warming Policy Forum, 2 April 2016

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A far darker shadow is hanging over Britain than that of the collapse of our steel industry. As she is the sister of a leading figure in the campaign to keep Britain in the EU, we may not be surprised by the warning from Amber Rudd, our Energy and Climate Change Secretary, that “Brexit” would raise our energy bills by £500 million a year. But in making that “half a billion a year” claim, Ms Rudd must hope that we don’t recall those recent figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility projecting that within four years – due entirely to her own Government’s policies – we will be paying £13.6 billion a year in climate change levies alone, up a further £7.6 billion from the year just ending. --Christopher Booker, The Sunday Telegraph, 3 April 2016 Port Talbot’s prospects look grim. David Cameron has been caught flat-footed. But UK steel has long been in terminal decline. The PM’s problem is that he personally signed the industry’s death warrant by imposing a punitive carbon tax, which makes the energy to produce our steel twice as costly as Germany’s. It began as a barking mad idea from Ed Miliband when he was Labour’s Shadow Energy and Climate Change Secretary. But it was embraced by Mr Cameron in his green period to make the “nasty” Tories look cuddlier — just like his equally daft vow to splurge £12BILLION a year in aid to dodgy foreign tyrants. Both have now blown up in his face. The ring-fenced overseas aid budget — soon to hit an eye-watering £16billion — stands revealed as a cash cow for international corruption. --Trevor Kavanagh, The Sun, 4 April 2016 In Britain, Tata’s plants have been slowly poisoned by a lethal cocktail of sky-high electricity prices and gold-plated UK carbon regulations, which are gradually killing heavy industry. British electricity costs stand at 9.5p per kilowatt hour, compared with 5.1p in the rest of the European Union, according to the Office for National Statistics. In the United States and China, they are even lower, at about 4.3p. It is not only British steel plants that have thrown in the towel. In recent years, aluminium smelters, glassmakers, brickmakers and oil refiners have all blamed high energy costs for the closure of their UK facilities. --Robin Pagnamenta, The Times, 4 April 2016 The Tory leader gave uncritical support to Ed Miliband’s 2008 Climate Change Act. The only way this could be achieved — as Cameron must have realised — was to ‘punish’ industrial companies for relying on cheap fossil fuels and to make them pay for the subsidies which underpinned wind and solar power. So British manufacturing industry ended up paying twice as much per kilowatt/hour of electricity as its continental rivals, about four times as much as its U.S. competitors — and who knows how much more than in China, which has imposed no such constraints on its manufacturing industries. --Dominic Lawson, Daily Mail, 4 April 2016

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