Last week, I wrote about how the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change had written a report that seemingly poured cold water over the Labour Government’s Net Zero plans, but which was just an attempt to save Net Zero for the Green Blob – the Blair think tank’s funders. This week, another report, produced by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) for the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), attempts to boost the Net Zero agenda by analysing the green sector’s metrics. Whereas the Blair report was characteristically slippery, this week’s report from the Green Blob is a far more blunt attempt to gaslight the public.
I should first explain what the ECIU is, because it helps to reinforce the main point that I made in the previous article. The Blair report, I pointed out, was produced with the ‘support’ of the European Climate Foundation (ECF), as every report from every think tank and fake academic organisation intervening in climate politics is. The ECIU was founded and is funded by the ECF. It is one of a constellation of think tanks and campaigning organisations that simply would not exist were it not for the ECF’s bottomless bank account. And from the outset in 2014, it produced dodgy reports that did not inform the public debate, but instead belittled the public’s capacity. Its first public offering was analysis of a poll that the ECIU had commissioned, which, the ECIU claimed “shows widespread misconceptions about energy and climate change”, but which in fact clumsily misinterpreted the results of its own poll that asked a stupid question.
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All these once respectable institutions, formerly in the hands of sensible normal rational people have been taken over by self-serving ideologues whose own personal prosperity and success is not just completely detached from the prosperity of the population at large but actually comes at the expense of everyone else.
That of course can’t continue for ever. But boy are they going to cause plenty of damage before it catches up with them.
ECF, ECIU, CBI, GVA…
…Tinkling of acronyms, cymbals and sounding brass, signifying an 18% increase in the price cap in less than a year – the unit price of electricity is the only hard metric that matters here.
The Confederation of British Industry betraying its members – should be forcefully reminding the Department of Energy Insecurity of how the businesses of CBI members are saddled with the highest industrial electricity unit price in the world.
Brought home to me the other day, on hearing how a final-year chemical engineering student at one of the country’s most prestigious universities is scratching around to even get an interview in the once-robust British chemical industry.
State-sponsored energy vandalism – all brought about by decades of pandering to climate fallacy, fantasy and folly. Arch-panderer in chief, Edward Samuel Miliband, fruitcake of Marxist loins.
Lock him up in the Tower and throw away the key.
“The Confederation of British Industry….. should be forcefully reminding the Department of Energy Insecurity of how the businesses of CBI members are saddled with the highest industrial electricity price in the world.”
The fatal weakness in this suggestion is that the CBI has recently been very coy about its membership numbers and the sources of its funding. It would now be a reasonable expectation that the majority of its key members are global multinationals with limited UK manufacturing activities, who simply belong to the CBI to lobby for their own wider interests. In addition, the CBI’s near-collapse in 2023 has no doubt increased its reliance on government contracts to supplement its membership revenues.
Like so many British institutions, (including the Conservative Party), its “cuddly” public image masks its actual policy drivers. “He who pays the Piper….”
Interesting take on the CBI.
You could also add that these groups who pretend to defend their members interests are far too cosy with government and have no intention of rocking the boat and missing out on hob-nobbing with the elite. Look at the NFU for example. Why were they nodding along with all the Net Zero nonsense that is damaging farmers in the UK? They have been dragged into the battle over Labour’s plan to destroy family farms because they couldn’t stand by on this issue.
I spent almost all my working life within the “once-robust British chemical industry”. It remained pretty robust and dynamic until the mid-1990s, at which point the weight of regulation broke the will of so many companies to survive. Simultaneously, the Chinese and Indian governments encouraged their companies to step in and undercut our indigenous producers.
Now, 30 years on, our own chemical infrastructure has been damaged to the point where it’s virtually impossible for a new entrant to get started. In addition to the planning and other legislative barriers, so many key chemical feedstocks are simply no longer available in the UK.
(Jim Radcliffe’s success at Ineos has been to acquire many of the UK’s last remaining production facilities for key industrial chemicals and then screw their captive customers in the knowledge that imports from abroad are neither feasible nor economically viable.)
The rot set in during the 1970’s. If memory serves right, mighty ICI built a plastics plant in Billingham that was never commissioned due to emergence of competition in the Far East.
In 1983, the colourful newly-appointed ICI Chairman, John Harvey-Jones, described the company’s 1982-figures as lousy. Within a decade ICI had been broken up. Corporate descendent AstraZeneca is pretty much all that’s left.
The national dumbing down goes on. Pains me to say it, but seems like difficult degrees in difficult subjects like Chemical Engineering going the way of Textile Chemistry in the 1970’s.
I’d rather attach him with handcuffs to a north sea electricity inter-connector and sink it to the sea floor.
I suggested on X that Ed Miliband should be hoisted up in a cherry picker and fed feet first into a wind turbine. I was suspended for making ‘violent threats’ and only reinstated once I’d retracted the post. Ridiculous. This was a practical, well thought out idea that would have kick started the salvation of the UK.
The owners of the world are the Big International Private Banks. They also own nearly all of the media. It is they who create money out of nothing and lend it to governments who have to tax us to Kingdom Come to pay back the debt. ——-Climate Change Policies, Net Zero, Sustainable Development etc are policies forced onto the UN, WEF and our own so-called Governments, who then impose all of that on their citizens with the seemingly plausible excuse that it is required to save the planet. Ed Miliband is the perfect example of the bought and paid for politician telling lies straight to our faces about the manufactured climate crisis and even as bills continue to rise year on year to pay for all the GREEN CRAP he continues to insist bills will come down. This is like a pack of Lions insisting they will soon stop hunting the Wilde Beast.
Ah, Wildebeest Theory – overdue for lions led by donkeys to turn the tables and make Miliband, the donkeys and the acronyms the wildebeest…
That’s the point though isn’t it – no one is paying back the debt, they are simply paying more and more interest, on more and more debt. It’s why these banking overlords have so much power – they literally own everything one way or another…
Paying down debt, and running a small budget surplus, may be quaint and old fashioned in the eyes of modern politicians, however as far as I can tell it’s the only way for a sovereign nation to actually remain sovereign long term.
Owning everything including the governments they lend to enables them to dictate policies. —–GREEN being the current diktats the governments pander to. The solution is ofcourse for governments to create their own money. But we see what happens to Politicians who try to pull that one ——JFK, Lincoln
The Emperors New Green Clothes are wonderful! Or perhaps just fantastic.
I’m sure the redundant / soon-to-be-redundant workers in the steel industry; Grangemouth; car workers in Luton, Cowley and in-due-course Sunderland; the pottery industry in Stoke on Trent …. and the rest of our traditional manufacturing …. will be delighted to know that their household energy bills will be going up again and nothing is going to derail the Eco Nutters in the Establishment from the Net Zero SCAM.
Unless, of course, we get a Government which pledges to scrap it.
All coming to pass on the watch of the party of “working people.”
The destruction of the UK is coming along tidily.
The “broken window” parable in all its glory
I predicted the cap would rise but I think surprisingly the Standing Charge is going down which I did not expect. Will we get a reduced cap in July of will Ed Siliband make it a clean sweep of rises in his first year? We can be sure that whatever the July figure is there is no chance it will be less than October and so the steady rise of electricity continues.
We need a figure of how much the economy would have grown without all the spurious green taxes and legislation
“ Ed Miliband is not equal to the task of managing the ‘Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’, and needs to be removed from any position of responsibility at all.”
And prosecuted for his gross malfeasance in office.
These uninformed ideologues should be sacked or switch their attention to black tulips.
It’s obvious – Milliband E. is desperate to out-Soros Milliband D.