Despite the truly pitiful sight of a Minister of State being sent out to bat with a miniaturised teaspoon to defend the indefensible decision, and despite the energy industry stooges that have placements inside DECC and are clearly affecting policy, no, the thing that really gets me is the focus on budgets instead of targets.

Here’s a summary from the Government’s own “long term trend” figures for energy consumption in Great Britain :-

Nobody can swear to me that the last few years are not just a glitch caused by economic instabilities, and that the re-localisation of manufacture in future in a recovering economy will not push this demand continually higher according to the trendline.

What are we using to supply this energy ? Here’s a summary :-

Despite the near exponential rise in renewable energy, it’s starting from a small base. The increase in energy consumption is being satisfied by a sharp rise in the supply of Natural Gas – something which the UK is producing increasingly less of these days. And for those who think that shale gas production would help, no, only a few percent of demand could be satisfied. This is an import-led energy supply, and the trend should ring alarm bells, but clearly doesn’t even tickle the ears of the average person in the street.

Electricity demand growth remains healthy, despite problems with unreliable supply from nuclear electricity (refered to as “outages” in the DECC Digest of UK Energy Statistics (DUKES) reports) :-

Now, in the future, with an envisioned massive rise in renewable energy, higher electricity use would be reasonable, as long as other energy consumption reduced. But the growth in electricity consumption charted here is not people driving more electric cars or using electric heating instead of Natural Gas-fired comfort. This is higher consumption, pure and simple, not “energy switching” over to electricity.

As an aside – the sum total of these figures indicates that the nation as a whole is not engaged in significant energy conservation, despite decades of campaigning.

All these trends add up to a very slight loss in dependency on fossil fuels for the UK’s energy :-

This is the critical trend. North Sea oil and Natural Gas production is falling like a large rock, and no amount of technological advancement and re-stimulating the drilling sector is turning this around. This means that without a rapid decrease in fossil fuel dependency, the United Kingdom is going to start haemorrhaging wealth.

Goodbye, First World.

This is why is it essential to ramp up renewable energy deployment by whatever means at our disposal.

Greg Barker MP bleating about keeping to budgets is not helping.

Things are getting so much better with renewable energy engineering and deployment – why do you continue to think it’s useless ?

We admit that, at the start, energy conversion efficiencies were low, wind turbine noise was significant, kit was expensive. Not now. Wind and solar farms have been built, data collected and research published. Design modifications have improved performance.

Modelling has helped integrate renewable energy into the grids. As renewable energy technologies have been deployed at scale, and improvements and adjustments have been made, and electricity grid networks have adapted to respond to the variable nature of the wind and the sunshine, we know, and we can show you, that renewable energy is working.

It’s not really clear what motivates you to dismiss renewable energy. Maybe it’s because you’re instinctively opposed to anything that looks like it comes from an “envionmentalist” perspective.

Maybe because renewable energy is mandated to mitigate against climate change, and you have a persistent view that climate change is a hoax. Why you mistrust the science on global warming when you accept the science on everything else is a continuing mystery to me.

But if that’s where you’re coming from when you scorn developments in renewable energy, you’re making a vital mistake. You see, renewable energy is sustainable energy. Despite any collapse in the globalised economy, or disruption to fossil fuel production, wind turbines will keep spinning, and solar panels will keep glowing.

Climate change has been hard to communicate effectively – it’s a huge volume of research, it frequently appears esoteric, or vague, or written by boffins with their heads in the clouds. Some very intelligent people are still not sure about the finer points of the effects of global warming, and so you’re keeping good company if you reserve judgement on some of the more fringe research.

But attacking renewable energy is your final stand. With evidence from the engineering, it is rapidly becoming clear that renewable energy works. The facts are proving you wrong.

And when people realise you’re wrong about renewable energy, they’ll never believe you again. They won’t listen to you when you express doubts about climate change, because you deny the facts of renewable energy.

Those poor fools who have been duped into thinking they are acting on behalf of the environment to campaign against wind farms ! Wind energy will be part of the backbone of the energy grids of the future.

We don’t want and we can’t afford the concrete bunkers of deadly radioactive kettles and their nasty waste. We don’t want and we can’t afford the slag heaps, dirty air and melting Arctic that comes from burning coal for power. We don’t want and we can’t afford to keep oil and Natural Gas producing countries sweet – or wage war against them to keep the taps open.

Instead we want tall and graceful spinners, their gentle arms waving electricity from the breeze. We want silent and dark photovoltaic cladding on every roof.

Burning things should only be done to cover for intermittency in wind and sunshine. Combustion is very inefficient, yet you support combustion when you oppose renewable energy.

We must fight waste in energy, and the rising cost of energy, and yet you don’t support the energy resources where there is no charge for fuel. Some would say that’s curmudgeonly.

When you oppose renewable energy, what is it you’re fighting for ? The old, inefficient and poisonous behemoths of coal hell ? We who support renewable, sustainable energy, we exchange clunky for sleek, toxic for clean. We provide light and comfort to all, rich and poor.

When you oppose renewable energy, you are being unbelievably gullible – you have swallowed an argument that can ruin our economy, by locking us into dependency on energy imports. You are passing up the chance to break our political obedience to other countries, all because wind turbines clutter up your panoramic view when you’re on holiday.

You can question the net energy gain from wind power, but the evidence shows you to be incorrect.

If you criticise the amount of investment and subsidy going into renewable energy, you clearly haven’t understood the net effect of incentivisation in new technology deployment.

Renewable energy has a positive Net Present Value. Wind turbines and solar panels are genuine assets, unlike the liabilities that are coal-fired power stations and nuclear reactors.

Renewable energy deployment will create meaningful, sustainable employment and is already creating wealth, not only in financial terms, but in social welfare terms too.

Renewable energy will save this country, so why do you knock it ?

Quizzically yours,

Private corporations can in many cases put muscle on the body, a tyre on the bike, and furnish the rooms, but without the basic public provision, private enterprise cannot thrive.

Without taxes being raised – asking everybody for their appropriate contribution – there would be no guaranteed health service, education system, roads, water supplies, power networks.

Federal or central government spending is essential, and often goes without question or inspection – including subsidies, cheap government loans, tax breaks and even rule-bending and regulatory exemption for specific sectors of the economy. This policy lenience also applies to private companies that take on the provision of public utilities.

This explicit, but often glossed-over, support for public services means that private business can rely on this national infrastructure. Small businesses can rely on a power supply and waste disposal services, for example. Large businesses can rely on a functioning postal service and road network.

It is questionable whether for-profit enterprise would be able to survive without the basic taxation-funded provision of public services and utilities.

I can understand why governments feel the need to get public spending off the balance sheet, and outsource public utilities to the private sector.

There is a lingering belief that private enterprise makes public services more efficient; makes manufacturing more reliable; makes construction better quality.

In some cases, this belief in privatisation is justified. Where companies can genuinely compete with each other, there can be efficiencies at scale. However, the success of privatisation is not universal.

Many parts of a developed economy are monolithic – there is no real competition possible. You get electricity through your power socket from a variety of production companies – you cannot choose. The road between your house and your office is always the same road – you don’t choose between different tarmac suppliers. Your local hospital is your local hospital, regardless of who owns and runs it – you have no choice about who that is – and the government contract tendering process is not something open to a public vote.

Added to this lack of competition, in some cases, it is impossible to make a profit by operating a public service by a private concern.

There should be no rock under which private business can hide when it claims to be operating profitable train and bus services – without public subsidies, public transport cannot be run at a profit.

Liability for daily operations may have been outsourced to the British private train companies, but not the full cost of the services. Costs for locally-sourced services cannot be driven down because they cannot be made fully open to global competition.

By contrast, the globalisation of labour has been making manufacturing industry significantly cheaper for decades.

In order for globalised trade to work, finance has to be liberated from its nation-bound shackles, and so along with the globalisation of labour to nations where it’s cheapest, there has been the globalisation of finance, to the tax regimes less punitive.

The globalisation of trade is a two-way bargain between those that want to see the development of primitive economies and those who want to create wealth for their companies and their shareholders.

Globalisation has created a booming China, for example, and filled the pockets of any Western company that imports from China.

However, the tide of globalisation has reached the shore, and the power of the waves is being stilled by solid earth realities. Labour costs in previously under-developed economies are starting to rise significantly, as those economies start to operate internal markets as well as maintain export-led growth.

It could soon be cheaper to have manufacturing labour in the United States of America than China. But when that happens a curious problem will arise. Manufacturing industry has been closed down in the so-called industrialised countries – as companies have taken their factories to the places with the cheapest labour and the most lax tax.

Wealth creation potential in developed countries has been destroyed. And it is for this reason that Western governments feel the urgent need to privatise everything, because their economies are collapsing internally, and public budgets may no longer be able to sustain current government spending.

However, privatisation doesn’t work for everything. It doesn’t work for health, education, water, public transport. The European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is a vehicle to compensate for agricultural sectors than cannot make a profit. I would contend privatisation doesn’t work for the energy supply and distribution sector either – but for a special reason.

Normally, it is possible to run energy stations at a profit. The privatised sector inherited power stations and grid networks that were fully functioning, and the sales of power and Natural Gas were almost pure profit.

However, much energy plant needs to be lifecycled after decades of use – replacements are in order, and this demands heavy public investment, in the form of subsidies, or pricing controls, or tax breaks or some such financial aid, in order to avoid crippling the private companies.

Like the rail network, there is direct public investment in the power grids. This is to support new access for new energy plant. However, I think this doesn’t go far enough. I would argue that much more public tax-and-spend is required in the energy sector.

In future, most electricity generation needs to become low carbon and indigenous. The primary reason for this is the volatility of the globalised economy – it will no longer be possible to assume that imports of coal, Natural Gas and oil for power station combustion can be afforded – especially in economies like the United Kingdom, where much wealth creation has been destroyed by de-industrialisation.

It used to be easy to ignore this – as the North Sea was so productive in oil and Natural Gas that the UK was a net energy exporter. This is no longer the case.

To avoid the risk of national impoverishment, energy independence is dictated, spelled out by a deflating British economy and by the depleting North Sea reserves.

The easiest and fastest way to a power supply that is low carbon is by healthy investment in wind power and solar power. Yet with the turbulence in the global economy, spending on renewable energy has also been rocky.

Now is the time for the UK Government to stop tickling corporate underbellies to get them to invest in British energy, and to start collected tax revenues to spend explicitly on the energy revival.

It can be “matched” funding – the Renewables Obligation, for example, has drawn in massive levels of private investment into wind power. And the feed-in tariff scheme for solar photovoltaics had, until recently, been pulling in high levels of personal individual and private company investment.

This is the kind of public-private financing that works – create a slightly tilted playing field to tip the flow of money towards new energy investment, and watch the river flow.

Without public money ploughed into public infrastructure in non-profitable areas such as public transport and energy, private enterprise will not be able to make a contribution – they would quickly bankrupt themselves.

The result of capping public subsidies for renewable energy is a halt to renewable energy deployment. Those who resist wind farms are in effect destroying the country. Those who cap public subsidies for solar power want to break the nation.

We need socalist financing of new energy technology deployment, for the future wealth of our country.

Hi Jo,

Just picked up on your blog following leads on Tom Heap – I’m writing a piece for my website (www.biggreenbang.co.uk) on the panorama / KPMG saga – just wanted to say what a great blog it is~!! Don’t find so many to-the-point sites in the UK – have picked up on guys like Joe Romm in the States but you seem to have your finger right on the pulse in the UK!

…Should explain that my site has been initiated by a load of IT techie nerds who are already working in telecoms and are about to launch a zero carbon mobile phone company (by a combination of using low carbon technology, buying into renewable power and carbon offsetting) They are committed to putting part of their profits into green projects and are setting up BGB in the hopes that it will be a vehicle for making sustainability issues available to a wider public – they have ambitions to develop it as a community resource too – They obviously hope to get spin-off business for their mobile phone network but I believe their motives are genuinely good and they seem to be giving me a fairly free rein!

look forward to hearing from you

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Date: 10 November 2011
From: jo abbess
To: tim b

Hi Tim,

Good luck with the Panorama research.

Another person to follow on this is Christian Hunt at Carbon Brief :-

http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2011/11/looking-into-panoramas-sources
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2011/11/kpmg-not-sure-if-written-report
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2011/11/another-correction-from-the-mail-group-on-energy-bills

…Keep the green flag flying !

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Date: 11 November 2011
From: tim b
To: jo abbess

Hi Jo,

Thanks for getting back,

I would like to send you a link to the article but for some strange reason its not been published yet – not so much research on Panorama as a general review of Knowns and Unknowns that a report based on figures from and unpublished draught press release throws up!! – It was a Carbon Brief piece that made me take the tack i took.

What I was really interested in was the cut of Tom Heap’s jib – I picked up on your site because I Googled his name – and lo and behold you critiqued the Beeb’s Climategate coverage saying, “some of the mistakes made by the reporter, Tom Heap, were laughable”.

My deeply sceptical mind started to wonder – especially given his Countryfile role, if he’s not one of the “farmer boy climate sceptics” (living in rural XXXXXXXXX with lots of Telegraph reading Hooray Henrys – I meet lots of them!) That is pure speculation on my part but even if it’s just a case of a young ambitious journalist trying to make a name for himself (and aware that good sceptic record will be a great career move for anyone wanting to work for Murdoch, The Mail, The Express… its a long and tragic list!) – he’s hardly generous with information!

…We are still sticking the nuts and bolts of the site together at the moment – my responsibility is writing relevant stories – and my background in environmental issues goes right back to the early days of the Sullom Voe oil terminal in the Shetland Islands (1970′s) I’ve been immersed in this stuff most of my adult life – starting out as a “back to the land idealistic greeny” and ending up a cynical old man – but still believing that this is the most improtant issue we have ever faced!

best wishes

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Date: 11 November 2011
From: jo abbess
To: tim b

Hi Tim,

Don’t grow old and cynical. Instead, grow wise and excited about the prospects for positive change.

It won’t be your generation that fixes climate change with renewable energy, sustainable agriculture and a steady-state economy. It won’t be my generation, either – I’m older than many of the “senior” figures in the UK Government.

We owe it to the next generations to share our hope, knowledge and encouragement; and believe in them.

Scotland will have wind and marine power to replace the oil and gas economic compromise with the English. Wales and Ireland can become energy-independent and shake off Westminster. There will be more sanity, more loft insulation and peace.

I would suggest caution in trusting the BBC for energy news. The BBC people that actually know anything about energy appear to be sidelined by those rolling with the “national interest” programme, supporting UK energy companies and their tainted arguments; not realising that it’s in the interests of the energy business to transition out of carbon. I am looking forward to work by Fair Pensions and other organisations on how companies, and banks, can only survive by investing in renewable energy.

…Stay in touch,

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Date: 15 November 2011
From: tim b
To: jo abbess

Hi Jo,

Fear not – Old and Cynical is a bit of a pose – having reached 60 this year I feel entitled to a degree of curmudgeonlyness – I am indeed excited by the positives, but I’m aware of the extent of change that is needed and the scale of resistance. I suppose the old cynical bit comes from an acute awareness of the political trickery and media manipulation being used by the energy industry in particular – The ST/Panorama thing is a case in point – they’ve sucessfully run a well publicised negative story with a headline figure of £34 billion savings on a report that still (as far as I know today) remains unpublished. The manipulation of media, astroturfing and funding of front organisations in the USA by the likes of Koch and Exxon has led to a political fantasy world over there – with climate denial held as orthodoxy by the right. There’s evidence this ultra neo-con agenda is influential in the current [UK] government.

Liam Fox’s Atlantic Bridge charity had close ties with ALEC – a well funded influence peddling machine that gets its money from similar sources – (check out ALEC Exposed for a bit more insight) – two of its trustees [William] Hague and George Osborne (and especially Osborne) are leaders of the climate denial lobby within the Cabinet (Osborne’s father-in-law – is David Howell – and he’s apparently a prominent Climate Change denier). The gulf between the Government’s promises on carbon targets etc and its actions is growing at a rate – and it doesn’t seem beyond the realms of possibility that a beleaguered David Cameron would offer a withdrawal of support for renewables against a get out of jail card on Europe.

I’m not saying that the Panorama report is deliberate manipulation – but I don’t think it’s a possibility that should be ruled out. The technique of “reporting” on unpublished reports has popped up a few times this year – if memory serves me correctly the [Daily] Mail ran a whole load of spurious headlines on the costs of the new Electricity Reform Bill on pure speculation.

So yes, agreed that we have to be positive and hopeful – but feel we have to keep an eye and a voice on the “rich old white men” who seem to be determined to use no holds barred dirty tricks to stop a move towards a decarbonised world – as for it being future generations that will be the ones who change things – well The [International Energy Agency] IEA are saying we have 5 years to get on top of carbon emissions – not a body exactly renowned for making provocative extravagant claims. One of the things they highlight is that future carbon consumption is locked in by the investments we make today – build a coal power plant and we’re locked into burning coal for the next 40 years etc – I’m sure you are a aware of these issues as I am – so I feel I have to disagree about leaving it to younger generations – we are all in this together and my year old grandson has no voice – I have to speak for him!

Good grief – all this stuff sounds terribly like a conspiracy theory – I’ve fought against believing it but the evidence train is so strong that it has to be taken seriously

best wishes

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Date: 15 November
From: jo abbess
To: tim b

Hi Tim,

As Cameron says, “calm down, dear”. You’re not a conspiracy theorist – you’re just doing some critical thinking.

It is now clear that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will be ineffectual in delivering a workable carbon treaty. The International Energy Agency and the US Energy Information Administration are powerless. The G20 Governments are incompetent. Carbon taxation and carbon trading are dead in the water – because they are based on faulty economics. The Climate Finance Fund for mitigation and adaptation will be as poorly funded as the international aid programmes. Deforestation will continue apace.

Stupid old white men do not have an evil agenda – they seriously believe they are doing the right thing (especially if it ups their share price). However, they do have an agenda – business as usual – and this does need to be critiqued.

There is no prospect of “business as usual” for a number of reasons – Peak Oil being one of them. We could discuss different opinions about the causes of Peak Oil for several weeks, but the data is in. The “business as usual” approach to tackling Peak Oil is a ramshackle plan to drill more, in more places, including the Arctic; to do Coal-to-liquids, Gas-to-liquids projects; to try to coax algae to produce biodiesel, a whole range of ethanol and methanol projects. All of these will fail. Where was the Arctic physically during the Permian ? Paleogeography indicates there’s not much oil in the Arctic. Algae breed messily and slowly. Coal is also peaking. Gas is going to peak in 2030 – 2035.

The problem with these problems is that most people are not paid to see them, or they are paid not to see them, which is why you have the climate change denial lobby, and the renewable energy rubbishing lobby.

My view on these matters is that there is no evil, just incompetence. And this needs to be continually shown to the light with sanity and clarity.

Keep on at it (and do keep in touch – although I rarely enter into lengthy correspondence),

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Date: 15 November 2011
From: jo abbess
To: tim b

Hi Jo

…should emphasise that I don’t believe the evidence points to a conspiracy theory. Rather the opposite – its so strong it’s clearly not a conspiracy theory. A year ago I would have thought the notion that corporate power in the [United] States was systematically funding the stuff it funds ridiculous – now I feel a bit silly not knowing it was going on!

As for “not being evil” – Well I guess that depends how evil is defined – in my demonology spreading deliberate lies in order to knowingly pursue a path that will cause harm to others ranks fairly high on “the things I would define as evil” scale. Pursuing a course that gives a favourable balance sheet but putting the global eco-system at risk definitely justifies the tag! Having said that, I’m not concerned with moral judgements so much as trying to explore ways of getting a broader mass of people to recognise the biggest obstacle to the kind of paradigm shifts we need to make are political rather than technological – it’s as if we are fighting against a Goebbels style propaganda campaign but no one even knows its happening. I suppose part of the point of BGB is to try and introduce these notions to the “wanna be green by means of farmers markets and good recycling” to the harder nosed side of the issues in as gentle way as possible.

cheers

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