Net Zero electricity taxes and levies are set to cost British consumers almost £100 billion over the next six years, according to the latest official figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). The ‘environmental levies’ total includes a variety of green rackets from paying suppliers to produce uneconomic energy to persuading consumers to install inferior technologies. As the insane dash towards Net Zero continues in elite political circles, the costs have started to spiral out of control.
Almost all green technologies seem to require huge amounts of public subsidy with no end in sight to constant demands for cash. Recently, offshore wind generators refused to take further Government licences in the North Sea unless the U.K. Government complied with their demands for higher guaranteed prices. In real terms the Government is now prepared to pay over £100 per megawatt hour, a price more than the current estimated cost of gas-powered electricity.
The investigative climate journalist Paul Homewood has been digging into the figures for years, and notes the offshore wind business is already being subsided to the annual tune of £4.8 billion. This despite the fact that we have been promised ‘rapidly falling’ wind power costs that would bring our bills tumbling down. “Now we know that was always a lie,” observes Homewood. Looking at the financial accounts, Homewood concludes that there is “no prospect” that costs will decline in future. On the contrary, he continues, they are likely to continue increasing as supply chain and manufacturing problems mount.
“We are therefore now locked into permanently high electricity prices, with contract prices guaranteed for 15 years,” he notes.
Homewood has produced the table below from the latest figures from the OBR. In total it shows how all the ‘environmental levies’ surrounding the production of electricity are set to provide hard-pressed U.K. consumers with an entirely unnecessary collective bill for £95 billion over the next six years. As Homewood notes, the figures below show the cost added to energy bills by the various assortment of renewable subsidies, capacity market payments and the climate change levy.
Homewood has added in three relevant costs to the OBR table. The feed-in tariffs scheme was recently excluded, but in Homewood’s view it is wrongly left out since it increases energy bills. The Climate Change Levy on productive business is noted elsewhere in the OBR report, but Homewood has “taken the liberty” of adding it to his table. It need hardly be added that this does not involve all the cost of runaway Net Zero fiscal madness. Homewood notes, for instance, that there is no mention of the costs of electricity grid upgrades, system balancing cost and constraint payments – all the direct result of increased renewable generation. And, of course, one can take it out even wider to include the cost of keeping vast amounts of gas capacity idle, waiting to fire up when the wind stops blowing, often for days at a time.
But it might be asked, what is £100 billion when an almost complete dismantling of modern economic society is being planned? A mere down payment on wealth destruction on an unimaginable scale. At a time when the political will to control immigration has withered, massive deindustrialisation is being planned in Europe, with unimaginable effects on the less affluent members of society. On the basis of an unproven hypothesis that human-produced carbon dioxide controls a climate headed for disaster – now deemed ‘settled’ and beyond debate – small, well-funded elite groups in society are planning to remove 85% of the world energy supply within less than 30 years. How far they will get in this madcap, nightmarish scheme before being repelled by gathering rational and democratic forces, only time will tell.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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I think you have illustrated perfectly why people in their droves are turning away from the mainstream media.
It’s largely one-sided fear porn and takes no account of empirically derived fact, feels no obligation to justify itself, all the while accusing those it disagrees with of doing exactly the same thing.
Yep you can bet on that.
Unless, of course, that industry, organisation or company is, in some way, aligned with state ‘truth’ – then there is no cynicism to be found anywhere.
^This.
It would be interesting to test this assertion and see how many MPs do actually receive funding from the gambling industry (not just winning a couple of quid on the horses).
While we’re at it we could also assess how many MPs receive funding from ‘Green’ lobby groups.
I would wager a couple of quid that our MPs are more in the pocket of the greenies.
A tenner says you’re right on that one.
I just noticed the subtitle “Leading Britain’s Conversation”. Bit pretentious, what? Especially in the Era of X. I was thinking it stood for Left-wing Bollocks Cluster.
More than pretentious.
Clearly not a news organisation then.
”Safeguarding”
There is a repulsive, extremely modern word, the epitome of the nanny state. Overbearing and sanctimonious.
It puts everyone into 3 categories. Victim, predator and protector.
If you don’t play along and give into everything the protectors demand, then you are a bad, reckless person and basically on the side of the predators.
Not too far off topic: RIS = reconfigurable intelligent surfaces
Spying on you and you haven’t even got a mobile phone! This shit sees through walls,no kidding!
Got a router? Tick, your on!
Microwave surveillance
Radio 1 Piedophile DJ dies after falling into river!
Oh dear, how sad, never mind!
His love of pies probably contributed his death, weighed him down perhaps.
Fat floats on water.
I am always amazed when I see talk shows on different screens in the gym at how many influencers and opinion types there are. Add the bias suggested here and it would be a surprise if it were not more abused!
Wouldn’t it be refreshing if the gov’t announced the nhs GPs would now be looking at all the adverse events and deaths post covid vaxx? And perhaps offer help.
Maybe asking about the huge level of excess deaths from 2020 onwards when normal pandemic observation would say that there should be less deaths than expected as the weakest have been culled early. This pattern is seen in countries with jab levels of no more than 30% and I presume no ongoing stabby programme. That in the US a report can look at the huge increase in 25-45 deaths – you know, the prime of life – and not go near ischaemic causes is amazing.
In my experience, and I have had a lot of interaction with journalists over the years, there are a slack handful of journalists who are focused on reporting the facts and then discussing that information in a balanced manner, warts n’all. The remainder tend to the lazy and venal, frequently driven by ulterior motives and an all consuming agenda. Anyone who disagrees with their position is an enemy who must be undermined and shut down with urgency.Their ‘facts’ and ‘truths’ trump everything else. Rationality is the prime casualty. Debate is DOA. Journalism contains an awful lot of cess – time we emptied the pit.
From the NICE guidelines:
Consider asking people about gambling (even if they have no obvious risk factors for gambling-related harm) when asking them about smoking, alcohol consumption or use of other substances (for example, as part of a holistic assessment or health check, when registering for a service such as with a GP or in contacts with social services).
The moment it’s accepted that, instead of treating demonstrably existing health problems in ways proven to be clinically effective, the job of a health service is to induce behaviour change to prevent health problems based on empirically unexplained statistical correlations, the number of such behaviours will be keep growing because there’s no amount of behaviours in other people natural busybodies wouldn’t object to and no limit to statistical correlations which can be fabricated intentionally or occur by accident to enable someone to ‘prove’ that his pre-existing theories had been right all the time.
The prominent example for this is Jeremy Clarkson. He was hospitalized because of pneumonia during a holiday in Spain about two years ago. During this stay in hospital, he was (most likely) talked into giving up smoking to improve his health. It improved so much that his life had to be rescued by an emergency ateriosclerosis operation about a year later. A scientist would now conclude that the theory that smoking causes ateriosclerosis has been disproven. A lobbyist who doesn’t give a f***k about how many people end up dying spuriously¹ because of medical misinformation spread for political purpose will start to talk and wave his hands energetically.
¹ An otherwise healthy acquaintance of my mother suddenly dropped dead during a walk about two weaks ago. I can’t help wondering if his life could also have been saved by such an operation had his doctors bothered to look for early symptoms despite he wasn’t a smoker and/or if he had been a celebrity, too.
i was given some good advice over 30 years ago. “If you torture data long enough it will confess to anything”. We have to be very careful with data – it’s just snapshots of reality.