UK Energy Battle Escalates

Ministers are preparing to scrap all subsidies for onshore wind farms by 2020 in a major victory for campaigners against the controversial energy source. David Cameron and George Osborne are to come down firmly on the side of those who object to payments currently worth £400 million a year to companies who produce onshore wind, The Sunday Telegraph has learned. Despite opposition from the Liberal Democrats, who strongly support more renewable energy, the subsidy regime for onshore wind and solar panels is now firmly expected to be phased out by the end of the decade. A senior Conservative source said: “This is now very much the direction of travel.” --Patrick Hennessy and Robert Mendick, The Sunday Telegraph, 17 June 2012

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The news will delight local groups fighting new turbine developments and more than 100 Tory MPs who wrote in protest to David Cameron earlier this year. Chris Heaton-Harris, the Tory MP who organised the letter to the Prime Minister on wind farms, said: “I struggle to see how anyone can argue for a policy that gives huge sums of money to big landowners and the big six energy companies, whilst at the same time it thwarts growth and forces tens of thousands into fuel poverty. This policy is not green, progressive or sensible. The Chancellor should take an axe to these subsidies as soon as possible.” --Patrick Hennessy and Robert Mendick, The Sunday Telegraph, 17 June 2012 Ed Davey, energy secretary, has warned Conservative colleagues not to play “fast and loose” with investors in onshore wind farms, as a cabinet row looms over subsidy levels. Downing Street is putting pressure on the Liberal Democrat minister to scale back subsidies, amid calls from more than 100 Tory MPs to reduce support for wind farms, which they say produce expensive power and ruin the countryside. --Jim Pickard, George Parker and Pilita Clark, Financial Times, 18 June 2012[Registration Required]

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The major federal tax and grant subsidies for windpower and other qualifying renewables are scheduled to expire at year-end. And claims of robust economics, competitiveness, and growth have given way to fear of a freer, less preferential market in 2013 and beyond. Wind’s artificial boom/upcoming bust is the risky business of political capitalism. --Robert Bradley Jr. , Master Resource, 17 June 2012 Older Britons are more sceptical about climate change than their peers in other countries, according to the first international survey of its kind. Many older people in Britain are struggling with the double-dip recession and pensioners have been hit by the government’s ‘granny tax’, which freezes age-related tax allowances. Dr Benny Peiser, director of The Global Warming Policy Foundation, said the findings suggest scepticism about climate change is growing among Britain’s baby boomers, the generation who were 'most exposed in their upbringing to the environmental movement. Most people still think economic growth is in some way in opposition to environmental protection, which is complete nonsense,' he said. 'I think people are now coming round to the more rational and less emotional view that a lot of environmental issues can be better solved if we have a better economy and better technology. It would appear from these findings that the British public is more rational about this than people in many other countries.'--Daily Mail, 16 June 2012 No one outside the Government and the green movement takes the IPCC very seriously any more, because the real world has stubbornly refused to act in accordance with all the climate scientists’ scary predictions. --James Delingpole, Mail on Sunday, 17 June 2012 The Harper government is giving a wide range of new powers to cabinet ministers to decide the scope of environmental assessments, as it proceeds with an omnibus budget bill that overhauls the way Ottawa will review major resource projects. --Shawn McCarthey, The Globe and Mail,10 June 2012

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