"Get(ting) Rid Of The Green Crap" (PM David Cameron) Added 2.5 Billion To UK Energy Costs

[hatrack]

Energy bills in the UK are nearly £2.5bn higher than they would have been if climate policies had not been scrapped over the past decade, Carbon Brief analysis shows. The changes included gutting energy-efficiency subsidies, effectively banning onshore wind in England and scrapping the zero-carbon homes standard. They were introduced after a November 2013 Sun frontpage reported that then-prime minister David Cameron’s answer to rising energy bills was to “get rid of the green crap”, meaning to cut climate policies.

With UK energy bills set to rise by around 50% from current levels in April, the government is once again scrambling to find ways to mitigate the impact on struggling households. Ideas being briefed to the press include further cuts to energy efficiency policies, cutting VAT on energy bills, getting rid of renewable subsidies or government payments to energy suppliers. Carbon Brief’s analysis shows that previous efforts to slash climate policies are now costing the average household around £40 per year, rising to £60 under the price cap expected next winter.

EDIT

The last time energy bills routinely hit UK front pages was in 2013, when high gas prices saw then-opposition Labour leader Ed Miliband pledge to cap energy bills if he won the next election. Later that year, a Sun frontpage reported then-prime minister David Cameron’s “solution to soaring energy price[s]” with the headline: “Get rid of the green crap.”

Cameron’s government, in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, went on to make a series of changes, including cutting spending on energy-efficiency improvements and introducing the “green deal” efficiency scheme, later described by the National Audit Office as a “fail[ure]”. The number of homes getting their lofts or cavity walls insulated each year plummeted almost immediately – by 92% and 74% in 2013, respectively – and has never recovered.

EDIT

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-cutting-the-green-crap-has-added-2-5bn-to-uk-energy-bills

[at140]

1. Need more Battery charging stations!

We don't want this situation!

[hunter]

2. Coal is cheap so long as the environmental impacts are ignored.

Aggressive renewable energy schemes are feasible so long as you ignore the environmental and political costs of natural gas.

Germany has demonstrated the worst of all these possibilities. Their heavy industry runs on cheap coal while residential and small commercial users pay among the highest electric rates in the developed world.

Britain is not Germany but that probably has more to do with political expedience than environmental concerns. The British Left hates coal for environmental reasons, the British Right hates coal miners. The British Left likes wind turbines, the British Right knows wind turbines are useless without natural gas.

Britain quit coal for natural gas. About half this gas is imported. Cameron's in the profitable hybrid natural gas / wind energy camp. He's a money guy who doesn't really care about the environment or the ability of lower income people to pay their utility bills.

[NNadir]

3. While I subscribe to Carbon Brief, and believe that perhaps paying for insulation might have...

...saved homeowners - but not poor people - on their energy bills, the article hands out the usual "gee isn't wind wonderful" daydreams.

In Europe, wind is backed by dangerous fossil fuels, often gas from Norway, Demark and Russia, and some in the UK, but the Russia bit is playing out quite graphically in Europe.

Denmark and Germany have the highest electricity prices in the OECD. That's a fact. Facts matter.

Which part of this graphic is too difficult to understand?

Wind energy requires two systems to do what one can do, and the average lifetime of a wind turbine in that offshore oil and gas drilling hellhole in Denmark is less than 18 years.

That's a fact. Facts matter.

(The lifetime of Danish wind turbines can be calculated from data found here: Master Register of Wind Turbines which can be downloaded in Excel format. The last time I went through this calculation, which was apparently in December of 2018, the lifetime of a wind turbine in Denmark averaged, at that time under 18 years, 17 years and 283 days more precisely, for the 3,232 decommissioned wind turbines recorded at that time.)

Wind energy doesn't save money; and massive investment in it on a trillion dollar scale hasn't done shit to address climate change, nor has it done shit to prevent energy prices from skyrocketing all over Europe. It has placed Europe at the mercy of Putin.

We can keep chanting the same "wind energy is cheap" mantra by focusing on when the wind is blowing and ignoring the enormous environmental and economic costs of wind turbines when the wind isn't blowing, but in doing so I believe we are engaging in the same kind of rhetoric that claims ivermectin cures Covid.