There’s been a lot of noise about Keir Starmer’s decision to scrap Labour’s £28 billion green spending pledge. But there’s a much bigger green Labour pledge that’s being overlooked, says Ross Clark in the Spectator.
In the melee a more rash policy has been overlooked: Labour’s pledge to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030 – which brings the present Government’s target forward by five years. This is one of the five great ‘missions’ laid out in the party’s pre-manifesto pitch, along with the creation of a state-owned company, Great British Energy, to achieve it. Not only will it save carbon emissions, Labour claims (without any evidence or published workings) but it will also save us an enormous amount of money, taking “up to £1,400 off the annual household bill and £53 billion off energy bills for businesses” within six years. This is quite a boast, considering the average household pays £1,928 a year in energy bills.
A large part of Labour’s decarbonisation plans are laid out in a document called ‘Make Britain a Clean Energy Superpower’. Labour says it wants to quadruple offshore wind and double onshore wind by 2030, as well as to triple solar capacity. But this is likely to be impossible, not least because the National Grid won’t be able to get hold of enough subsea cables to plug in the required number of extra offshore wind turbines. There are four suppliers of such cables in the world – all of them have full order books until 2030.
Would Labour’s plan be doable even if it could get the required kit – and would it really save households money? Labour’s case is based on the idea that wind and solar energy are the cheapest forms of energy around. It repeats an often-quoted conceit that, at one point in 2022, “renewable energy was nine times cheaper than gas” and asserts that it remains much cheaper.
But the “nine times” claim was never true. It was made by CarbonBrief, a green energy advocacy website. It arrived at the figure by taking the prices paid for gas power at the very peak of the market in the summer of 2022 – £446 per megawatt-hour – as European countries rushed to fill their gas storage facilities ready for winter, following the loss of Russian gas after the invasion of Ukraine. It then compared them with the long-term, guaranteed ‘strike prices’ offered to operators of wind and solar farms over a 15-year period. In an auction in 2022, wind and solar farms agreed to a strike price of £48 per megawatt-hour.
It was like comparing the cost of a bus journey using a season ticket to that of hailing an Uber in rush hour. If you take the average price of gas power over the past 15 years, it is considerably less than wind or solar power.
Worth reading in full.
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“Only in my hometown of Brighton and Hove…”
Would that it were only possible in Brighton and Hove.
Legal professionals are everywhere manifesting their make-believe virtual worlds through the manipulation of language and expert whataboutery. If a corporation can be a person, why can’t a man be women?
An excellent vehicle by which to destroy a country.
Sorry but this is really a bit silly. The law regards companies as legal persons so that they can be legally liable and be sued. If you wanted to sue a company you would be glad of that.
This makes my blood boil. Who really has the welfare of children at the heart of their thinking? Children’s parents or children’s state service providers? The latter are not only incentivised by woke dogma, but also by their very real need to feel good about themselves. Feel good about themselves by destroying the lives of innocent children. I couldn’t despise these creatures more; they are evil. I’m not sure what I would do if I had young children being indoctrinated like this by this filth. Nothing good.
Labour are communists in disguise. They are showing their true communist, totalitarian colours in Brighton and other places they control. A coming Labour government will have people in gulags: cancellation, firing from jobs and then polizei stasi investigating your thinking will become the norm. We are heading for a very dark place in this country. The socialists are coming for you and your thoughts and freedom. Hopefully it will cause civil unrest and they will be destroyed.
Labour are vile. A clear and present danger to children and the people of this country. How in God’s name are people really favouring this shower of communist dictators??.our people have become mad. They deserve their prison which is coming fast.
The really simple explantion for events like this, especially the transition from Green -> Labour without any change of the Against the people united we stand! political agenda is that there’s money to be had by acting in this way. So-called trans activists are adults seeking to exploit vulnerable, eg, depressive or autistic, children, for their own benefit. And council sold the children to them based on being legally entitled to imprison them in so-called school buildings for most of their time which have thus found new and much more exciting and profitable purpose than teaching them boring stuff like history or maths.
The methods of these people may resemble those of Marxists. But they’re certainly not planning to uplift the working class to decent standards of living by fighting against their exploitative employers.
Forget the gender nonsense and concentrate on the real issues that these children will face .
The majority of these schoolchildren will no longer have their birth father living in their home by the time they are 7years old and there is NO money or organisations out there to help them understand and survive these changes.
There is something particularly evil about this assault on the mental health and emotional integrity of young children. Frankly I can understand it when parents faced with this situation take the law into their own hands.
TLDR
I did read it. But the article could have benefitted from some editorial shortening.
I wonder why nobody is investigating why so many children have these transgender issues, is it environmental toxins?