Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Ed Miliband appeared on Radio 4 Today on Friday morning to talk about the disastrous electricity substation fire that knocked out Heathrow.
Mr Miliband was pressed by presenter Amol Rajan on the lack of resilience in the infrastructure before moving on to other matters. Rajan homed in on high energy bills, but it soon became clear that there is absolutely and unequivocally no other cause of high energy bills apart from volatile fossil fuel markets and there is only one solution. Apparently.
Moreover, although bills are going up, they are in fact inevitably going to do a U-turn shortly as the effects of Government policy and its ‘mission’ kick in:
AR: Let’s turn to your announcement today, £200 million upfront then from GB Energy for solar panels. When will that investment, that £200 million upfront, provide a return, i.e., save more than £200 million for public services?
EM: Well, for the public services it‘ll provide a return straightaway because the great thing about this scheme is because we know schools and hospitals are facing still very high energy bills. Our dependence on fossil fuels causes those high bills. This is, frankly, a no-brainer because solar panels on 200 schools, 200 hospitals, will cut their bills something like an average of £25,000 a school, £45,000 for a hospital and that money will start flowing straightaway. Some of these panels will be in place over the summer so in the next academic year the schools will be seeing those cuts in the bills and because it’s funded by GB Energy the return is a day-one return. And it shows what a publicly-owned energy company, GB Energy, can do for communities up and down this country.
AR: Can I ask you about two specific aspects of Net Zero before we get to some of the wider issues? The first is that your election manifesto promised 650,000 new green jobs as a result of your Green Prosperity Plan across the country by 2030. How’s that going?
EM: [pause] Well, we’re confident we’re going to provide hundreds of thousands of jobs as a result of our drive to Net Zero. The CBI …
AR: How’s it going?
EM: … The CBI produced a really important report a couple of weeks ago which said that the Net Zero economy grew three times faster than the economy as a whole last year, a 10% more employment as a result of that. I think over 100,000 in the last couple of years. A total employment effect. And this is the truth Amal, this is the growth opportunity of the 21st century: turn your back on Net Zero and you turn your back on business investment, good jobs, innovation for the future and Britain leading in the key industrial areas of the future.
AR: But that’s a nice idea, nice ambition, but what’s, what’s the reality? How many jobs has your Green Prosperity Plan created? That’s what I want to know because there was another report, which I’m sure you saw and might have even raised your eyebrow, Mr Miliband, from the Tony Blair institute which came out last month and I know you speak often to that institute, they’ve got close ties to Sir Keir Starmer’s No. 10, and they said that the 650,000 new jobs is a complete fantasy. They say the best-case scenario, and I quote, is 425,000, so about a third less, by 2050. What do you know that they don’t?
EM: Ah, I, I, I’m very confident about our figures and I’m very confident that we will created hundreds of thousands of jobs in a green economy and, look, it’s all about the investments we make. If you take carbon capture and storage for example , £21.7 billion investment over 25 years, it’s going to create 4,000 jobs straightaway, up to 50,000 jobs over the medium term, so look …
AR: But what progress have you made so far?
EM: Let me just make this point. I’ve come back from China recently, you know, they realise that this is the growth opportunity of the 21st century. I’ve come back from India. They also realise this so we can argue about the figures till the cows come home but frankly if you, if you want to create growth in our economy, if you want to create the jobs of the future, this is an absolutely essential part of the answer.
AR: Sure, but it’s not about cows coming home or not coming home or whatever it is what cows do when they don’t come home, it’s …
EM: sniggers
AR: … about your manifesto promise. I just want to know. You made a manifesto promise –650,000 by 2030 – we’re nine months in, how much progress have you made in power to that 650,000 new jobs?
EM: Well, I’m saying that I’m confident about our pledges. I’m confident that we’re going to meet them er, and we are already making progress. I’ve given you [an] example that is carbon capture and storage. As a result of our Clean Power Action Plan, the plan that we have put in place, the clean power by 2030, we’re going to see £40 billion a year of mainly private investment, that’s £200 billion investment, also creating hundreds of thousands of jobs over the course of the next five years, so I’m absolutely confident about our plan for that target.
AR: Another promise made by Sir Keir Starmer was that bills for our beloved listeners would be £300 lower by 2030. How’s that going?
EM: [sucks in breath] We said that bills would be up to £300 lower by 2030. That is part of our Clean Power Plan …
AR: How’s that going?
EM: … it’s true to say that bills have gone up in the first eight months of this Government and I’ll tell you why: because of our dependence on fossil fuels and at the moment we’re in the grip of fossil fuel markets, controlled by petrostates and dictators so we saw the global gas price or the UK gas price, which is controlled by global markets, go up by 15% over the last quarter and that’s feeding through to bills and there is only one answer to this, which is clean home-grown power which we can control, so that every solar panel we put up, every wind turbine we erect, every piece of grid we build and this is controversial for some people, gets us greater energy security and takes us further towards cutting bills. But the truth is the cheapest form of power to build and operate in our country today is renewable power and that’s why we’ve got to drive towards it and that is absolutely what this Government – er – is doing, wasting no time in doing it.
AR: But of course, you make the case for what you’re planning to do to get bills down. It’s just the evidence of your first eight months is things are going in the wrong direction, so you said in the election last year bills will be £300 lower by 2030. Eight, nine months in bills are actually, according to Ofgem, £160 higher so they’ve gone in the wrong direction. If bills have gone up by £160 in your first nine months why should anyone have any confidence that you’re going to now get them down by £460 in the next five years? That’s hot air, you might call it.
EM: You need to interrogate the evidence about why bills have gone up. And the reason why …
AR: But whatever you’re doing’s not working is it?
EM: … well, er, er, absolutely it is, look the truth is you’ve got to interrogate the evidence about why the bills have gone up and they’ve gone up because of our dependence on fossil fuels and that’s why our mission is to stop our dependence on fossil fuels, put in place the clean energy we need so that we can get bills down. So there is only one way to bring bills down for good. At the same time we’re making decisions for example with our warm homes discount next winter to cut bills by another 100, £150 for 2.7 million families so at the same time that we have this long-term plan in place, in the short term we are making decisions that are fair to make sure that we help families who are most vulnerable.
AR: And the people who pay for this transition are your constituents, they’re our listeners, people who often don’t have much money. You’re asking your constituents to pay more in taxes to fund this agenda. You’re doing so while cutting support for some people with disabilities, some people with mental health conditions, some people who might argue that they’re simply too ill to work, so by the way cutting winter fuel payments for lots of people and international aid. Is that the Labour Party that you signed up for, and once led?
EM: I totally disagree with your analysis, Amal, of the meaning and importance of our clean power mission. Our clean power mission is about reducing costs for people because why did we, you know you can have short-term memories in this, why did we see bills rocket after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? Why are bills staying high at the moment?
AR: But they’ve gone up – with Labour in power! [talking over each other]
EM: Because of our dependence on fossil fuels and there is only one answer as I’ve said, which is to drive towards clean home-grown power, so, so the old argument about climate and Net Zero was ‘well, it’ll be more expensive in the short-term but it’s right for the long-term’. The truth is that for a country like Britain where we are subject to global markets on fossil fuels this is actually the way to get bills down.
The interview then ended.
You can hear the whole interview here. Fast forward to about 02:16:00.
Stop Press: Mr Miliband later admitted on LBC that the new solar panels for schools and hospitals will be coming, wait for it, from China among other places:
When asked where the solar panels will come from he conceded that some will come from China, which is responsible for an estimated 80% of total global supply. Quizzed as to why British ones were not being used, Mr Miliband told LBC radio: “Our solar panel industry has not got this kind of share of the market.”
When asked if they will come from China or Russia, he said: “Some of them will be, they’ll be from different countries, but that’s why we’ve got to build our domestic industry.”
Critics say it makes no sense for Britain to attempt to cut emissions in the UK by shipping materials from China, where they are likely to have been manufactured using electricity from coal-fired power plants. The Conservatives’ energy spokesman Andrew Bowie said: “If these solar panels do come from thousands of miles away it shows how ridiculous this whole thing is. Ed Miliband and his eco warriors need to get real.”
It seems creating “hundreds of thousands” of green jobs in Britain will have to wait a bit longer.
Discussion
Comments
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I expect many DS readers will have read Delingpole’s article in the Spectator this week? What it reveals is that the whole corrupt, rotten to the core renewable energy, net zero agenda is nothing more than a giant Ponzi scheme designed to fleece the taxpayer of any wealth he or she thought they possessed. The man behind this scam is the academic Michael Mann whose atmospheric CO2 research in the ’80s gave rise to the hockey stick delussion that the industrial revolution, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, has caused global temperatures to rise dramatically.
If anyone with a scintilla of belief in this nonsense still thinks CO2 is the cause of dramatic climate change after reading this article they should have their head examined as indeed Ed Miliband should.
As Delingpole explains Mann is a rather unpleasant piece of work who likes to litigate against anyone challenging his research. The fact that idiots like Miliband and his ilk are so delusional and incapable of understanding, let alone capable of questioning, the science is truly frightening.
I’m surprised the DS hasn’t posted James’s article and written a piece on it. Maybe Will Jones will at some point?
https://archive.is/VcAfv
Exactly right – anyone willing to litigate against anyone challenging their scientific conclusions, is NOT a scientist. The whole premise of the scientific method is nothing is ever settled, it’s just proven through experimentation, backed by reproducible data / results. No lawyers needed, UNLESS, you’ve done something you shouldn’t have., for a different reason, and don’t want it discovered…
People can be made to “believe” anything. Repeat something enough times and people transform some knowledge they hear to a belief. Once someone believes something they no longer need to think about it and will defend it to the end. Political movements like the climate change scam become cult like demanding faith in their followers even though there is no evidence there is a climate crisis. Miliband is a follower who has been created by 50 years of climate propaganda. He was created, programmed and put in a position of power by the leaders of the climate scam at the WEF, NGOs and UN. Miliband is on a crusade. You will never change his mind through reason and logic. This crusade will not end until the money fueling it dries up.
“I’ve come back from China recently, you know, they realise that this is the growth opportunity of the 21st century. I’ve come back from India”
Could he have communicated across the internet and saved all those CO2 emissions?
Of course our Net Zero policies will create growth – in China and India! Most of us could have told him that and saved him the bother of any communication at all!
Every single extra penny spent (“invested”) by the govenrment is debt.
It shows how incredibly stupid Miliband’s plans are that even the BBC are questioning them.
Fair play to that interviewer though.
No matter what happens it is always the fault of fossil fuels and our dependency on them. These are the same fossil fuels that have given us the prosperity we now have. Better health and longer lifespan, freedom from back breaking labour and from death from preventable diseases. But those fuels are now to be taken away by idiots like Miliband who do the UN’s dirty work for them. They will look you in the eye and lie straight to your face. If wind and sun are so fantastic why then are China and India bringing their 3 billion citizens out of poverty by using coal and gas? Because they are by far the cheapest way to produce electricity and give you it 24 hours a day, every day.
Please someone stop this madman!
When we were young, we used to pass mental asylums and point at them. Then they closed them and the inmates are now running the country. Lord help us!!!
Miliband speaks about investment and jobs and value and returns and all those other good capitalist concepts, and he manages to corrupt the meaning of every single word
It’s as if George Orwell had been to Business School – ‘profit is loss’
If the nasty dictatorial foreign suppliers bother him, why doesn’t he just reopen our own oil fields, dig some of our coal, frack some of our own gas?
Energy is not really his agenda, is it…
The man is a deluded fool. Yes, we can become less dependent on volatile oil and gas prices if we can produce our own fuels. Such as North Sea oil and gas, let alone fracked gas and even oil from our own dependencies aka the Falklands. But he has terminated exploration of the oilfields. Is he working for China,perhaps, or is he just crazy?
I wish AR had challenged EM over his repeated mantra of ‘drive to clean energy power’ when no such thing exists when it is dull, cloudy and windless.
EM clearly doesn’t doesn’t grasp the fact that his ‘clean power mission’ will shift our reliance on fossil fuels ‘controlled by petrostates and dictators’ onto something even more unreliable – the British weather.
It’s borrowed money he is talking about, creating a debt for taxpayer’s to fund. Has he factored that into the cost equation, I very much doubt it.
Net Zero economy grew three times faster than the economy as a whole last year. Of course it did – all funded by taxpayer subsidies. Much like the non jobs in local councils during the last Labour Parliament, these jobs are not necessary and without subsidies would not exist. Is he lumping the high cost of buying backup for wind and solar into the cost of fossil fuels because that’s a fake figure and does not reflect what the cost would be if we relied on coal and gas fired power stations as our main source of energy, provided no market skewing climate tax were placed on them.
Ed Miliband and his brother David are the Marxist progency of their father sent by the Soviets to assist in the destruction of the west. Little did they know that the west had its own fifth columnists working away to dilute their impact. But they could still be judged to be doing a good job.
Wonder if Ed is on the payroll of the CCP, he is from a Marxist family, he is a Marxist, and the only ones earning from Ed’s Religion seem to be the Chinese.
If the price of gas is global, why is it so much cheaper in the USA? Maybe they have a different type of gas? Or could it be some other reason….
If gas prices are the cause of high energy prices and if we have a substantial and growing proportion of so called cheap electricity from renewables, why is the electricity cost per kwh on my bill 4 times the cost of gas per kwh?
We’ll Never Have an Energy Transition
https://www.city-journal.org/article/energy-transition-green-new-deal
“History shows the Green New Deal vision is not inevitable—it’s impossible…
…The Trump administration is shining a welcome light on the inflationary, unproductive, and even socially destructive magnitude of spending in pursuit of the unachievable that has been marbled into legislation and federal programs.
History will likely record the elimination of government largesse in pursuit of an impossible energy transition as a kind of transition itself.”
Miibrain keeps saying “the truth is…” then lies through his teeth.
A common tactic of the Blob is to say that the price of electricity is determined by the price of gas, this usually goes unchallenged by interviewers. It is factually correct, but highly misleading.
It is the wholesale price that is determined by the price of gas, and is currently around 4 pence per kWh.
We pay the retail price, which is currently around 27 pence per kWh.
You could almost say that the price of gas is irrelevant, as a lot of the money we pay goes to renewable subsidies, capacity payments for when the wind dies, building transmissions lines to umpteen wind/solar farms, installation of smart meters, and paying for those who can’t/won’t pay their bills. We must also pay a lot for the ridiculous Micky Mouse competition between the so-called suppliers, who simply send us our bills.
Thank you, the mad rant about fossil fuel producers controlling our electricity prices is the most disturbing aspect of the interview, especially because Milliband actually appears to believe what he is saying. If Rajan had done his homework he could have challenged this and should have done.
“Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”
Richard Feynman, Report of 1987 Challenger Disaster Presidential Commission
“The world of wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries is limited by physics. Those limits are hard, and they are non-negotiable.”
Richard Lyon, The Physics of Net Zero
KOMMISSAR MILIBAND MUST FALL.
All these new Green jobs to produce the same amount – or less – of electricity – that looks a like a massive drop in productivity
The most obvious contradiction is this: If the renewable industry is supposed to represent a move towards a “renewable” source of energy that, for the most part, passively harvests energy from the sun and the wind, then the creation of 650,000 jobs to service the industry makes it far from passive!
Each new job created requires a salary, an additional cost to the industry that will be reflected by either rising energy bills or rising taxes as the government continues leverage through subsidies.
So the more jobs created, the higher our energy bills and/or taxes will be.
But the less jobs created, the less the current jobs lost from the energy sector will be replaced by alternative “green” employment. So the transition to renewables can only represent a lose-lose scenario.
When you put it like that it clearly shows what a load of bollox it all is
Let me just make this point. I’ve come back from China recently, you know, they realise that this is the growth opportunity of the 21st century. I’ve come back from India. They also realise this
China and India recognise a growth opportunity for themselves! They will happily supply us, until the cows come home. Miliband is a complete f***wit, of the highest order.
If Ed gets his way, cows coming home will become a distant memory to tell our grandchildren about.
He went to China on a private jet and bought a load of solar panels with our money, end of story. The rest of his bluster is just him covering his tracks and obfuscating
I would be surprised if they could name one sustainable |(ie long term) green job that is not balanced by the loss of a job in the current economy.
Net zero job creation at work.
I don’t think Miliband has a weak grasp on reality… he has a very strong grasp on his own political ‘reality’. Most politicians prefer to talk about what they wish was true but usually recognise when such talk is too distant from ordinary reality.
Unfortunately his reality is not our more practical reality. Which is why arguing that Net Zero is a cult has some relevance. Net Zeroism as it were.
If the aim of the Net Zero scheme was to reduce energy prices it would be called the Energy Price Reduction Scheme or something. It’s obviously not going to reduce energy prices, but then (a) Miliband will have retired by then, and (b) whoever replaces him will say ‘that was an aspiration, one of the secondary targets of our scheme, but X has since happened and we haven’t been able to deliver…etc’ (this assumes there hasn’t been a violent revolution in the meantime). They will be able to point out that the scheme was never primarily about reducing energy bills.
The scheme is also not primarily about providing ‘green jobs’, or ‘reducing global temperatures’ – if these were the targets, again they would not be met.
Indeed. You clearly know how devious and mendacious politicians are.
You can’t reason with a Marxist Narcissist
https://youtu.be/2be5raB1bMM?si=S2lZ87zpwmoODDP2
Whenever politicians or most journalists use the word “invest” or “investment” you know they don’t know what they are talking about or else they are trying to disguise profligate spending with a word that sounds meritorious (no, really, they do that sort of thing).
Brown started it.
‘borrow / print and spend what we don’t have’ doesn’t sound nearly as positive does it…
For the Labour Party “investment” is always a euphemism for destruction so whenever a Labour politician mentions “investment” the correct response is…oh phook!
Some simplistic maths. Assuming the 200 billion will be spent over the next 5 years that’s 40 billion a year. Let’s say 70 million people in the country, that will cost nearly £600p.a. for every person. So 300 quid off every (shared) tax bill some time in the future isn’t a great investment.
Do you mean ‘300 quid off every (shared) energy bill? Not tax bill…
It’s fundamentally dishonest of Milliband to say that the return for public services such as schools will be immediate. The subsidy of roof solar panels on schools is paid for by taxation. So you could equally say that there is an immediate return to schools by giving them more taxpayer monies. The proper question should be “when will ther be a return on investment to the taxpayer”.
He deliberately ignores the high cost to the taxpayer. If there was a quick return (or a return at all) then there would be no need for subsidies, the schemes would be self funding and people would be installing them at their own cost.
That was the question to ask – when he said renewables are the cheapest form of generation, the follow up question should have been ‘so we can stop all the subsidies then yes?’…
surprised this interview was allowed / allowed to go out – is it so 2TK can move Millibrain on?
surprised this interview was allowed / allowed to go out – is it so 2TK can move Millibrain on?
My thoughts exactly. Despite the omissions from A Rajan this is bordering on a P45 interview, quite hard hitting.
Agreed – everything happens for a reason…
Allowed to go out? Yes the UK is increasingly authoritarian but we don’t yet have the BBC pulling live interviews because they are not unfolding in a way that the government of the day would like.