In this newsletter:
1) Tory grandees urge Boris Johnson to lift ‘unconservative’ ban on fracking
The Sunday Telegraph, 13 February 2022
2) A revived British shale gas industry will secure jobs and energy for generations
The Sunday Telegraph, 13 February 2022
3) Net Zero will destroy everything: Last orders for thousands of Britain's pubs as energy crisis strikes
The Daily Telegraph, 14 February 2022
The Daily Telegraph, 14 February 2022
4) Fracking ban must stay because 'UK is not Utah', insists eco-minister
The Daily Telegraph, 14 February 2022
5) Zac Goldsmith’s tall stories
Net Zero Watch, 14 February 2022
6) Energy crunch to squeeze UK industry
City A.M., 14 February 2022
The Daily Telegraph, 14 February 2022
5) Zac Goldsmith’s tall stories
Net Zero Watch, 14 February 2022
6) Energy crunch to squeeze UK industry
City A.M., 14 February 2022
7) American shale gas to rescue Green Europe
Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 14 February 2022
Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 14 February 2022
8) Andrew Montford: How Britain’s fracking industry was regulated into irrelevance
The Spectator, 13 February 2022
9) Seizing land to make way for solar farms could worsen ‘deep and troubling’ farming crisis
The Sunday Telegraph, 13 February 2022
10) Liam Halligan: ‘Net Zero’ may become as divisive as Brexit
The Sunday Telegraph, 13 February 2022
11) The decadent West has emboldened Putin
Editorial, The Sunday Telegraph, 13 February 2022
The Spectator, 13 February 2022
9) Seizing land to make way for solar farms could worsen ‘deep and troubling’ farming crisis
The Sunday Telegraph, 13 February 2022
10) Liam Halligan: ‘Net Zero’ may become as divisive as Brexit
The Sunday Telegraph, 13 February 2022
11) The decadent West has emboldened Putin
Editorial, The Sunday Telegraph, 13 February 2022
Full details:
1) Tory grandees urge Boris Johnson to lift ‘unconservative’ ban on fracking
The Sunday Telegraph, 13 February 2022
Boris Johnson is facing a Tory revolt over the Government’s ban on fracking, with Lord Frost among more than 30 MPs and peers declaring the policy unconservative and stating that shale gas production would allow Britain to avoid future energy crises.
The Sunday Telegraph, 13 February 2022
Boris Johnson is facing a Tory revolt over the Government’s ban on fracking, with Lord Frost among more than 30 MPs and peers declaring the policy unconservative and stating that shale gas production would allow Britain to avoid future energy crises.
In a joint letter to the Prime Minister, the former Cabinet Office minister joined 29 MPs, including John Whittingdale, the former culture secretary, and Bob Blackman, the 1922 committee executive secretary, insisting that it is “time to reverse this moratorium”, which has prohibited the mining of shale gas since 2019.
The intervention comes after it emerged that Cuadrilla, the energy company, had been ordered to seal up two of England’s only viable shale gas wells, despite the energy crisis and ministers’ insistence on the need for Britain to rely less on gas imports from abroad.
Writing in The Telegraph, below, Francis Egan, the company’s chief executive, said: “Using domestic shale gas should be a no-brainer.”
On Saturday night, Lord Frost, Mr Johnson’s former Brexit negotiator, declared that reversing the ban would herald a “British energy renaissance”, telling The Telegraph: “If our economy is to boom after Brexit, British industry needs a competitive and reliable source of energy which we hold in our own hands and brings investment into this country. Shale gas production achieves all this and more.
“If we don’t produce it here, as we have seen, all we do is import gas from elsewhere, and push up overall carbon emissions too. So let’s reverse the moratorium on shale gas and let a British energy renaissance begin.”
A moratorium on fracking has been in place since Nov 2019. Last week, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the new minister for Brexit opportunities, called for the ban to be lifted to boost Britain’s energy independence.
However, the Prime Minister resisted the move, and a government source said: “The Prime Minister himself has made clear it is not something we will be reversing.”
A Whitehall source added that the controversial hydraulic fracturing method was banned because it had caused earthquakes and presented “unpredictable and unmanageable” risks to local communities.
“Even if new scientific evidence emerged and we lifted the moratorium tomorrow, it would take approximately 10 years before sufficient quantities of gas could be produced for the market,” the source added, indicating that such gas would simply be sold for the “market price”.
However, the letter to Mr Johnson, organised by Craig Mackinlay and Steve Baker, the chairman and deputy chairman of the Conservative Net Zero Scrutiny Group, stated that shale gas mining would “allow us to combat the cost of living crisis, level up, create jobs, opportunity and a renewed sense of community in the north, improve our energy security, reduce our reliance on imported gas, stabilise energy prices and achieve net zero without increasing the cost of living for already hard-pressed working families.”
The group, also including Lord Lilley of Offa, the former trade secretary, and Julian Knight, the chairman of the Commons culture committee, said that the Bowland Shale formation of gas under Lancashire, Yorkshire and surrounding counties “offers at least 50 years of cheap and sustainable gas”.
They added: “If levelling up is to mean anything it must be centred around empowering communities, rather than telling them what they can and cannot do... With the lack of public debate about our strategy to reach Net Zero, we have abandoned this fundamentally conservative principle... It’s time to reverse this moratorium.”
A spokesman for the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said: “The development of domestic energy sources, including fracking, must be safe and cause minimal disruption and damage...
“We ended support for fracking on the basis of scientific evidence, showing that it is not currently possible to accurately predict the probability and size of tremors associated with fracking. Shale gas remains unproven as a resource in the UK.”
2) A revived British shale gas industry will secure jobs and energy for generations
The Sunday Telegraph, 13 February 2022
By Francis Egan, the chief executive of Cuadrilla Resources Limited
Using domestic shale gas should be a no-brainer. Instead, a rig will arrive in approximately one month to seal up with cement Britain’s only two horizontal shale gas wells.
This is because the authorities have decreed that now is the right moment for Cuadrilla to “plug and abandon” the only wells which could demonstrate that shale gas can provide affordable, secure, and relatively clean energy.
In the US, where domestic shale gas production flourishes, wholesale gas prices are Roughly six times lower than in the UK. By contrast, UK and EU policymakers are constraining regional gas supply while global demand grows, spending billions annually importing it from all corners of the globe.
Now this might make some sense if we weren’t able to exploit our own gas resources. However, the very same gas that we are importing is sitting right under our feet in the Bowland Shale which stretches across the North of England – 37.6 trillion cubic metres of shale gas sits unused, when only 10 per cent of this could meet UK gas needs for 50 years.
Developing and producing this precious resource would create tens of thousands of well-paid jobs and empower local communities in the North. “Red Wall” councils would raise millions of pounds in local taxes, and tax on domestic gas production could generate revenue for the NHS. Otherwise, we will continue to fund one of the best national health services in the world – only in Norway, from where we import a third of our gas.
Leaving our gas in the ground is also hindering our ability to deliver net zero. Importing gas is estimated to produce double the pre-combustion carbon emissions of homegrown shale gas.
But for some unfathomable reason, the Government’s net zero figures only count “territorial emissions”, meaning that we don’t hold ourselves to account for all the emissions created by the ever-increasing volumes of gas we import. If anyone takes tackling climate change seriously, as I do, a revived British shale gas industry is a more effective and honest way of achieving it.
Reducing foreign dependence on gas
The energy crisis has also shown how vulnerable some of our European allies are to Russian influence because of their gas import dependency. Russia’s LNG capacity has tripled between 2016-19 alone and the former Nato chief has warned that Russia is deliberately undermining attempts by Western countries to develop shale gas capacities, to maintain their influence.
Instead of abandoning our wells in Lancashire because one of them caused a two second vibration at around half the limit applied to construction sites, we should unleash the potential of a sustainable, safe and well-regulated approach to shale gas.
By reversing the shale moratorium and the requirement to plug Lancashire wells, we would be following the science not pressure groups, creating jobs and opportunity across the North, securing our gas supply for decades, reducing energy costs for hard-pressed families, and helping to clean up our planet.
I can’t think of a better opportunity for this country to seize.
The intervention comes after it emerged that Cuadrilla, the energy company, had been ordered to seal up two of England’s only viable shale gas wells, despite the energy crisis and ministers’ insistence on the need for Britain to rely less on gas imports from abroad.
Writing in The Telegraph, below, Francis Egan, the company’s chief executive, said: “Using domestic shale gas should be a no-brainer.”
On Saturday night, Lord Frost, Mr Johnson’s former Brexit negotiator, declared that reversing the ban would herald a “British energy renaissance”, telling The Telegraph: “If our economy is to boom after Brexit, British industry needs a competitive and reliable source of energy which we hold in our own hands and brings investment into this country. Shale gas production achieves all this and more.
“If we don’t produce it here, as we have seen, all we do is import gas from elsewhere, and push up overall carbon emissions too. So let’s reverse the moratorium on shale gas and let a British energy renaissance begin.”
A moratorium on fracking has been in place since Nov 2019. Last week, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the new minister for Brexit opportunities, called for the ban to be lifted to boost Britain’s energy independence.
However, the Prime Minister resisted the move, and a government source said: “The Prime Minister himself has made clear it is not something we will be reversing.”
A Whitehall source added that the controversial hydraulic fracturing method was banned because it had caused earthquakes and presented “unpredictable and unmanageable” risks to local communities.
“Even if new scientific evidence emerged and we lifted the moratorium tomorrow, it would take approximately 10 years before sufficient quantities of gas could be produced for the market,” the source added, indicating that such gas would simply be sold for the “market price”.
However, the letter to Mr Johnson, organised by Craig Mackinlay and Steve Baker, the chairman and deputy chairman of the Conservative Net Zero Scrutiny Group, stated that shale gas mining would “allow us to combat the cost of living crisis, level up, create jobs, opportunity and a renewed sense of community in the north, improve our energy security, reduce our reliance on imported gas, stabilise energy prices and achieve net zero without increasing the cost of living for already hard-pressed working families.”
The group, also including Lord Lilley of Offa, the former trade secretary, and Julian Knight, the chairman of the Commons culture committee, said that the Bowland Shale formation of gas under Lancashire, Yorkshire and surrounding counties “offers at least 50 years of cheap and sustainable gas”.
They added: “If levelling up is to mean anything it must be centred around empowering communities, rather than telling them what they can and cannot do... With the lack of public debate about our strategy to reach Net Zero, we have abandoned this fundamentally conservative principle... It’s time to reverse this moratorium.”
A spokesman for the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said: “The development of domestic energy sources, including fracking, must be safe and cause minimal disruption and damage...
“We ended support for fracking on the basis of scientific evidence, showing that it is not currently possible to accurately predict the probability and size of tremors associated with fracking. Shale gas remains unproven as a resource in the UK.”
2) A revived British shale gas industry will secure jobs and energy for generations
The Sunday Telegraph, 13 February 2022
By Francis Egan, the chief executive of Cuadrilla Resources Limited
Using domestic shale gas should be a no-brainer. Instead, a rig will arrive in approximately one month to seal up with cement Britain’s only two horizontal shale gas wells.
This is because the authorities have decreed that now is the right moment for Cuadrilla to “plug and abandon” the only wells which could demonstrate that shale gas can provide affordable, secure, and relatively clean energy.
In the US, where domestic shale gas production flourishes, wholesale gas prices are Roughly six times lower than in the UK. By contrast, UK and EU policymakers are constraining regional gas supply while global demand grows, spending billions annually importing it from all corners of the globe.
Now this might make some sense if we weren’t able to exploit our own gas resources. However, the very same gas that we are importing is sitting right under our feet in the Bowland Shale which stretches across the North of England – 37.6 trillion cubic metres of shale gas sits unused, when only 10 per cent of this could meet UK gas needs for 50 years.
Developing and producing this precious resource would create tens of thousands of well-paid jobs and empower local communities in the North. “Red Wall” councils would raise millions of pounds in local taxes, and tax on domestic gas production could generate revenue for the NHS. Otherwise, we will continue to fund one of the best national health services in the world – only in Norway, from where we import a third of our gas.
Leaving our gas in the ground is also hindering our ability to deliver net zero. Importing gas is estimated to produce double the pre-combustion carbon emissions of homegrown shale gas.
But for some unfathomable reason, the Government’s net zero figures only count “territorial emissions”, meaning that we don’t hold ourselves to account for all the emissions created by the ever-increasing volumes of gas we import. If anyone takes tackling climate change seriously, as I do, a revived British shale gas industry is a more effective and honest way of achieving it.
Reducing foreign dependence on gas
The energy crisis has also shown how vulnerable some of our European allies are to Russian influence because of their gas import dependency. Russia’s LNG capacity has tripled between 2016-19 alone and the former Nato chief has warned that Russia is deliberately undermining attempts by Western countries to develop shale gas capacities, to maintain their influence.
Instead of abandoning our wells in Lancashire because one of them caused a two second vibration at around half the limit applied to construction sites, we should unleash the potential of a sustainable, safe and well-regulated approach to shale gas.
By reversing the shale moratorium and the requirement to plug Lancashire wells, we would be following the science not pressure groups, creating jobs and opportunity across the North, securing our gas supply for decades, reducing energy costs for hard-pressed families, and helping to clean up our planet.
I can’t think of a better opportunity for this country to seize.
3) Net Zero will destroy everything: Last orders for thousands of Britain's pubs as energy crisis strikes
The Daily Telegraph, 14 February 2022
Soaring bills and rampant inflation are threatening thousands of pubs in the UK
The Daily Telegraph, 14 February 2022
Soaring bills and rampant inflation are threatening thousands of pubs in the UK
The Live and Let Live pub in Northampton has survived a global pandemic, repeated lockdowns and bans on socialising. But a new crisis threatens to be the final straw, forcing it to close its doors for good.
Exorbitant energy prices could mean last orders for thousands of pubs already battling to survive with reduced takings and depleted cash reserves.
A third of publicans have no cash to fall back on, according to a recent survey by the British Institute of Innkeeping, an industry group. Of those who do have cash in the bank, half only have enough to last two months.
Miranda Richardson, landlady of the Live and Let Live, has been told the £1,400 she pays each month for gas and electricity will rise by 50pc thanks to the escalating energy crisis.
“Just to open the doors each week it costs £2,700 and that doesn’t include food and drink,” she said. “That’s just the lease, staff wages and energy bills, which are huge outgoings.
“I can’t make cutbacks like I can at home. You can’t tell customers to put on an extra jumper or turn lights off. The cellar equipment needs to be powered 24/7 to keep the beer cool and stock frozen, they can’t just be turned off.”
England's oldest pub, Ye Old Fighting Cocks in St Albans, has gone into administration after two years of Covid restrictions
Hospitality bookings slumped during the pandemic and surging omicron cases at Christmas deprived pub landlords of much-needed festive takings.
The British Institute of Innkeeping has warned that publicans face “cost increases, crippling debt and fading cash reserves”. It said two thirds of pubs faced inflation of 10pc on business costs and warned “the future of the nations’ pubs hung in the balance” without support from the Government.
Ms Richardson added: “Our beer supplier has told us there will be a price rise in three weeks’ time and it is the same for landlords up and down the country. Soon the only option will be to charge more to customers, and they are already struggling as it is.
“Survival is looking hard without some sort of Government support.”
Yet asking customers to pay more is virtually impossible. Household disposable income is predicted to drop by almost 2pc this year, according to analyst Pantheon Macroeconomics, the biggest fall since 1977.
This month England’s oldest pub, Ye Old Fighting Cocks in St Albans, Hertfordshire, fell into administration after struggling with two years of coronavirus restrictions.
Full story
Exorbitant energy prices could mean last orders for thousands of pubs already battling to survive with reduced takings and depleted cash reserves.
A third of publicans have no cash to fall back on, according to a recent survey by the British Institute of Innkeeping, an industry group. Of those who do have cash in the bank, half only have enough to last two months.
Miranda Richardson, landlady of the Live and Let Live, has been told the £1,400 she pays each month for gas and electricity will rise by 50pc thanks to the escalating energy crisis.
“Just to open the doors each week it costs £2,700 and that doesn’t include food and drink,” she said. “That’s just the lease, staff wages and energy bills, which are huge outgoings.
“I can’t make cutbacks like I can at home. You can’t tell customers to put on an extra jumper or turn lights off. The cellar equipment needs to be powered 24/7 to keep the beer cool and stock frozen, they can’t just be turned off.”
England's oldest pub, Ye Old Fighting Cocks in St Albans, has gone into administration after two years of Covid restrictions
Hospitality bookings slumped during the pandemic and surging omicron cases at Christmas deprived pub landlords of much-needed festive takings.
The British Institute of Innkeeping has warned that publicans face “cost increases, crippling debt and fading cash reserves”. It said two thirds of pubs faced inflation of 10pc on business costs and warned “the future of the nations’ pubs hung in the balance” without support from the Government.
Ms Richardson added: “Our beer supplier has told us there will be a price rise in three weeks’ time and it is the same for landlords up and down the country. Soon the only option will be to charge more to customers, and they are already struggling as it is.
“Survival is looking hard without some sort of Government support.”
Yet asking customers to pay more is virtually impossible. Household disposable income is predicted to drop by almost 2pc this year, according to analyst Pantheon Macroeconomics, the biggest fall since 1977.
This month England’s oldest pub, Ye Old Fighting Cocks in St Albans, Hertfordshire, fell into administration after struggling with two years of coronavirus restrictions.
Full story
4) Fracking ban must stay because 'UK is not Utah', insists eco-minister
The Daily Telegraph, 14 February 2022
A ban on fracking must stay because the UK is not Utah, the environment minister has insisted despite protests from Conservative MPs.
More than 30 of Boris Johnson’s backbenchers have urged him to rethink his current policy after Cuadrilla, the energy company, was ordered to seal up two of England’s only viable shale gas wells despite concerns about the current energy crisis.
But Lord Goldsmith, a minister in Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said ministers would end up paying a high price if the current fracking moratorium - which was introduced in 2019 - was overturned.
“It’s hard to overstate just how unpopular fracking is with the British public,” he wrote on Twitter, citing a Department for Business attitude tracker that showed 18 per cent support.
“People do not want large-scale industrialisation of the British countryside. And given the gas would be produced by private firms and sold at the highest price internationally, there would likely be no measurable impact on UK gas prices anyway.
“We do need gas - it is the cleanest bridge to renewables. But the UK is not Utah. To have any impact at all, the Government would need to rig the market and go to war with furious communities. On every level, the cost would be enormous.”
His comments came as Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative leader, warned on Sunday that Britons would face further “spikes and shortages” unless the UK made more use of its domestic onshore and offshore gas supplies.
'Shutting these things down is a major mistake'
Sir Iain told The Telegraph: “I’m in favour of us rediscovering the need for taking gas out of our own areas and we’ll probably be able to supply parts of Europe to take their dependency off Russia, so it makes sense for us.
“Shutting these things down is a major mistake and the biggest mistake we made is we went from being a net exporter of gas to a net importer of gas because different governments took a decision to phase out our domestic supply and we were wrong.
“Here we are importing gas from Norway because we don’t want to tap into our own gas - it doesn’t make any sense at all. It was a major error of previous governments to cut back. ‘Get on with it’ is the answer, and we need to do that now.”
Craig Mackinlay, the deputy chairman of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group (NTSG) of Conservative backbenchers, suggested the group could play a similar role to the Covid Recovery Group of lockdown sceptics - which was instrumental in 100 of Mr Johnson’s own MPs voting against Plan B restrictions last December.
“We haven’t actually seen any legislation yet that really backs up some of these net zero ambitions beyond the statutory instrument in 2019,” he said.
“There’s lots of legislation in the pipeline in which I would say we can play a part, and where we’re currently standing, that's a negative. I just want some common sense to bring to bear - we all like to be virtuous until it hits our pocket.”
'Never a good idea for the state to pick the winners and losers'
Greg Smith, the Conservative MP for Buckingham, called on the Prime Minister to scrap all green levies, adding that the current approach to meeting net zero targets could backfire at May’s local elections amid spiralling energy costs for households.
“Personally I would much rather see the innovators and the private sector come up with the solutions,” Mr Smith said. “It’s never a good idea for the state to pick the winners and the losers. My fear is we’ll inevitably pick the loser.
“Most elections in living memory have been fought on the basis of the economy, and if people are feeling the pinch, we’ve got to be very wary of that.”
5) Zac Goldsmith’s tall stories
Net Zero Watch, 14 February 2022
Over the last couple of years, there has been much talk of disinformation and misinformation, and much thought lent to the knotty question of who you can trust to relay the facts in unbiased fashion. These are all issues that we have to consider when looking at Zac Goldsmith’s latest utterances.
The noble lord took to Twitter yesterday to try to counter a group of Conservative MPs who are demanding that the UK start exploiting its abundant shale gas resources so as to alleviate the cost-of-living crisis. In the process, he ended up sounding more like something from the murkier corners of the green movement, which of course is what he was before becoming a minister of the crown.
Take, for example, his claim about how many wells we’d need:
"…to replace half the gas we import, we’d likely need around 6,000 new wells"
Hmm. The first thing to notice is that he’s talking “wells” when you really want to understand how many pads would be required. In Pennsylvania, 25 wells per pad is common, and pads with 40 wells are not far away. So even if Goldsmith is right (he isn’t), we might only be talking about 150 pads, occupying 1000 acres. Compare this to the minister’s enthusiasm for taking 150,000 acres out of agricultural production to cover it in solar panels.
When Cuadrilla announced the results of their test fracking, they said they were expecting initial flow rates of up to 200,000 cubic metres per day. Over a year, a 25-well pad would produce 1.8 billion cubic metres (bcm).
Our net imports of gas are under 40 bcm, so to replace half, we’d only need around 11 pads, occupying around 80 acres. Now of course, the initial flow rates decline rapidly, but even if we needed 11 new pads every year, it would still take nearly two millennia to use as much land as Lord Goldsmith wants to industrialise in the first phase of the expansion of solar power. Moreover, that industrialisation will be permanent.
Next consider Lord Goldsmith’s take on the impact of fracking on communities
"…all the associated industrial equipment & endless movements of trucks ferrying toxic chemicals & wastewater to & from sites.”
This is a remarkable thing for a minister in Defra to say, because Defra is reponsible for the Environment Agency, which licenses fracking chemicals. Lord Goldsmith is, in essence saying that staff in his department have been allowing people to poison the land. Fortunately, he is not telling the truth. As Tim Worstall points out in his new NZW paper on UK shale gas, the chemicals licensed are all extraordinarily innocuous. It is simple disinformation to suggest otherwise.
Moreover, as well as not actually carrying “toxic chemicals”, the trucks don’t move endlessly either. Once a well is drilled and fracked it just sits there, absolutely silently, while the gas seeps out. You might need to refrack occasionally, but in essence the industrial operations are time-limited. Unlike those solar panels, which will permanently desecrate this (formerly) green and pleasant land.
Lord Goldsmith is famously wealthy, and enjoys an almost complete disconnect with the concerns of ordinary people. He will lose no sleep worrying if there is enough money in the kitty to pay the energy bill. And being in the Lords, the fact that these issues are of very great concern to voters will not bother him either.
But Conservative MPs will know that the pain being felt is real and will soon be much worse. They will certainly be wondering if it is wise for the Prime Minister to latch onto Lord Goldsmith’s every dubiously sourced claim, as he apparently does.
6) Energy crunch to squeeze UK industry
City A.M., 14 February 2022
UK MANUFACTURING is set to swallow a £20bn-plus bill from soaring energy costs this year, heaping further pressure on Britain’s weakening economic recovery, reveals exclusive research shared with City A.M.
The Daily Telegraph, 14 February 2022
A ban on fracking must stay because the UK is not Utah, the environment minister has insisted despite protests from Conservative MPs.
More than 30 of Boris Johnson’s backbenchers have urged him to rethink his current policy after Cuadrilla, the energy company, was ordered to seal up two of England’s only viable shale gas wells despite concerns about the current energy crisis.
But Lord Goldsmith, a minister in Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said ministers would end up paying a high price if the current fracking moratorium - which was introduced in 2019 - was overturned.
“It’s hard to overstate just how unpopular fracking is with the British public,” he wrote on Twitter, citing a Department for Business attitude tracker that showed 18 per cent support.
“People do not want large-scale industrialisation of the British countryside. And given the gas would be produced by private firms and sold at the highest price internationally, there would likely be no measurable impact on UK gas prices anyway.
“We do need gas - it is the cleanest bridge to renewables. But the UK is not Utah. To have any impact at all, the Government would need to rig the market and go to war with furious communities. On every level, the cost would be enormous.”
His comments came as Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative leader, warned on Sunday that Britons would face further “spikes and shortages” unless the UK made more use of its domestic onshore and offshore gas supplies.
'Shutting these things down is a major mistake'
Sir Iain told The Telegraph: “I’m in favour of us rediscovering the need for taking gas out of our own areas and we’ll probably be able to supply parts of Europe to take their dependency off Russia, so it makes sense for us.
“Shutting these things down is a major mistake and the biggest mistake we made is we went from being a net exporter of gas to a net importer of gas because different governments took a decision to phase out our domestic supply and we were wrong.
“Here we are importing gas from Norway because we don’t want to tap into our own gas - it doesn’t make any sense at all. It was a major error of previous governments to cut back. ‘Get on with it’ is the answer, and we need to do that now.”
Craig Mackinlay, the deputy chairman of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group (NTSG) of Conservative backbenchers, suggested the group could play a similar role to the Covid Recovery Group of lockdown sceptics - which was instrumental in 100 of Mr Johnson’s own MPs voting against Plan B restrictions last December.
“We haven’t actually seen any legislation yet that really backs up some of these net zero ambitions beyond the statutory instrument in 2019,” he said.
“There’s lots of legislation in the pipeline in which I would say we can play a part, and where we’re currently standing, that's a negative. I just want some common sense to bring to bear - we all like to be virtuous until it hits our pocket.”
'Never a good idea for the state to pick the winners and losers'
Greg Smith, the Conservative MP for Buckingham, called on the Prime Minister to scrap all green levies, adding that the current approach to meeting net zero targets could backfire at May’s local elections amid spiralling energy costs for households.
“Personally I would much rather see the innovators and the private sector come up with the solutions,” Mr Smith said. “It’s never a good idea for the state to pick the winners and the losers. My fear is we’ll inevitably pick the loser.
“Most elections in living memory have been fought on the basis of the economy, and if people are feeling the pinch, we’ve got to be very wary of that.”
5) Zac Goldsmith’s tall stories
Net Zero Watch, 14 February 2022
Over the last couple of years, there has been much talk of disinformation and misinformation, and much thought lent to the knotty question of who you can trust to relay the facts in unbiased fashion. These are all issues that we have to consider when looking at Zac Goldsmith’s latest utterances.
The noble lord took to Twitter yesterday to try to counter a group of Conservative MPs who are demanding that the UK start exploiting its abundant shale gas resources so as to alleviate the cost-of-living crisis. In the process, he ended up sounding more like something from the murkier corners of the green movement, which of course is what he was before becoming a minister of the crown.
Take, for example, his claim about how many wells we’d need:
"…to replace half the gas we import, we’d likely need around 6,000 new wells"
Hmm. The first thing to notice is that he’s talking “wells” when you really want to understand how many pads would be required. In Pennsylvania, 25 wells per pad is common, and pads with 40 wells are not far away. So even if Goldsmith is right (he isn’t), we might only be talking about 150 pads, occupying 1000 acres. Compare this to the minister’s enthusiasm for taking 150,000 acres out of agricultural production to cover it in solar panels.
When Cuadrilla announced the results of their test fracking, they said they were expecting initial flow rates of up to 200,000 cubic metres per day. Over a year, a 25-well pad would produce 1.8 billion cubic metres (bcm).
Our net imports of gas are under 40 bcm, so to replace half, we’d only need around 11 pads, occupying around 80 acres. Now of course, the initial flow rates decline rapidly, but even if we needed 11 new pads every year, it would still take nearly two millennia to use as much land as Lord Goldsmith wants to industrialise in the first phase of the expansion of solar power. Moreover, that industrialisation will be permanent.
Next consider Lord Goldsmith’s take on the impact of fracking on communities
"…all the associated industrial equipment & endless movements of trucks ferrying toxic chemicals & wastewater to & from sites.”
This is a remarkable thing for a minister in Defra to say, because Defra is reponsible for the Environment Agency, which licenses fracking chemicals. Lord Goldsmith is, in essence saying that staff in his department have been allowing people to poison the land. Fortunately, he is not telling the truth. As Tim Worstall points out in his new NZW paper on UK shale gas, the chemicals licensed are all extraordinarily innocuous. It is simple disinformation to suggest otherwise.
Moreover, as well as not actually carrying “toxic chemicals”, the trucks don’t move endlessly either. Once a well is drilled and fracked it just sits there, absolutely silently, while the gas seeps out. You might need to refrack occasionally, but in essence the industrial operations are time-limited. Unlike those solar panels, which will permanently desecrate this (formerly) green and pleasant land.
Lord Goldsmith is famously wealthy, and enjoys an almost complete disconnect with the concerns of ordinary people. He will lose no sleep worrying if there is enough money in the kitty to pay the energy bill. And being in the Lords, the fact that these issues are of very great concern to voters will not bother him either.
But Conservative MPs will know that the pain being felt is real and will soon be much worse. They will certainly be wondering if it is wise for the Prime Minister to latch onto Lord Goldsmith’s every dubiously sourced claim, as he apparently does.
6) Energy crunch to squeeze UK industry
City A.M., 14 February 2022
UK MANUFACTURING is set to swallow a £20bn-plus bill from soaring energy costs this year, heaping further pressure on Britain’s weakening economic recovery, reveals exclusive research shared with City A.M.
Surging oil and gas prices will pile an extra £8.7bn on to factories’ energy costs in 2022, crimping their already squeezed margins.
Swelling energy bills will intensify inflationary pressures already threatening to throw the UK’s economic recovery off course.
Goods produced by industrial firms are widely used across the economy, meaning if factories lift prices, other businesses are likely to follow suit, with the bill eventually falling on households.
This wave of price hikes is set to launch soon.
British manufacturers have been largely unexposed to oil and gas price spikes due to them buying energy supplies 12-to-24 months in advance.
However, inventories earmarked for later this year will have been negotiated at the peak of the winter fuel crisis, meaning factories will have to grapple with ultra-high costs to secure energy supplies for the next one-to-two years.
Chris Bowden, founder and chief executive of Squeaky, the firm that calculated the figures, told City A.M. businesses will be whacked by rising energy costs.
“This is going to start biting during this year and next year, and we’ll see more and more comments coming from financial officers and chief executives saying energy prices are going to impact 21-22 and 22-23 results,” he warned.
Both Cornwall Insight and Energy UK, two leading consultancies in the energy sector, have recently warned high gas prices could be baked into the market for years.
Although the industrial sector is able to pass higher costs on to customers due to its output being essential to other businesses, high street retailers and hospitality firms have less room to do so due to the highly competitive nature of their markets.
Energy bills for the UK’s commercial sector will jump nearly £5bn this year, Squeaky said.
These businesses will struggle to lift prices and maintain demand and have been made vulnerable for lost revenues during the pandemic.
Full story
7) American shale gas to rescue Green Europe
Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 14 February 2022
The anti-fossil fuel left is Mr. Putin’s best friend.
Swelling energy bills will intensify inflationary pressures already threatening to throw the UK’s economic recovery off course.
Goods produced by industrial firms are widely used across the economy, meaning if factories lift prices, other businesses are likely to follow suit, with the bill eventually falling on households.
This wave of price hikes is set to launch soon.
British manufacturers have been largely unexposed to oil and gas price spikes due to them buying energy supplies 12-to-24 months in advance.
However, inventories earmarked for later this year will have been negotiated at the peak of the winter fuel crisis, meaning factories will have to grapple with ultra-high costs to secure energy supplies for the next one-to-two years.
Chris Bowden, founder and chief executive of Squeaky, the firm that calculated the figures, told City A.M. businesses will be whacked by rising energy costs.
“This is going to start biting during this year and next year, and we’ll see more and more comments coming from financial officers and chief executives saying energy prices are going to impact 21-22 and 22-23 results,” he warned.
Both Cornwall Insight and Energy UK, two leading consultancies in the energy sector, have recently warned high gas prices could be baked into the market for years.
Although the industrial sector is able to pass higher costs on to customers due to its output being essential to other businesses, high street retailers and hospitality firms have less room to do so due to the highly competitive nature of their markets.
Energy bills for the UK’s commercial sector will jump nearly £5bn this year, Squeaky said.
These businesses will struggle to lift prices and maintain demand and have been made vulnerable for lost revenues during the pandemic.
Full story
7) American shale gas to rescue Green Europe
Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 14 February 2022
The anti-fossil fuel left is Mr. Putin’s best friend.
To understand the strategic benefit of U.S. fossil fuels, consider how liquefied natural gas exports are riding to the rescue of Europe in the Ukraine crisis. Bloomberg reports that on Saturday all seven U.S. LNG export terminals had tankers docked or loading for the first time, with much of the gas headed to Europe.
Demand for U.S. exports helped set a record 13.3 billion cubic feet of gas loading at the LNG export terminals. Demand is so great that regulators have let tankers fill up at the Calcasieu Pass plant in Louisiana, which is still under construction.
Bloomberg adds that of the five dozen or so U.S. LNG tankers on the water, more than two-thirds are headed for Europe. Natural gas prices have soared on the Continent amid winter supply shortages and threats from Russia. U.S. exports offer relief to a worried Europe, blunt the impact of Vladimir Putin’s energy extortion, and expand the market for U.S. shale-gas drillers who are again increasing production after the pandemic crash.
The political left’s assault on U.S. natural gas is one of the most self-destructive acts in history, as Vladimir Putin understands. Russia has financed green opponents of shale-gas drilling in Europe because he knows it makes the Continent more vulnerable to his controlling ambitions.
U.S. LNG will be even more important if Russia invades Ukraine, and Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Germany dies, as President Biden has promised. The U.S. anti-fossil fuel left is Mr. Putin’s best friend.
Demand for U.S. exports helped set a record 13.3 billion cubic feet of gas loading at the LNG export terminals. Demand is so great that regulators have let tankers fill up at the Calcasieu Pass plant in Louisiana, which is still under construction.
Bloomberg adds that of the five dozen or so U.S. LNG tankers on the water, more than two-thirds are headed for Europe. Natural gas prices have soared on the Continent amid winter supply shortages and threats from Russia. U.S. exports offer relief to a worried Europe, blunt the impact of Vladimir Putin’s energy extortion, and expand the market for U.S. shale-gas drillers who are again increasing production after the pandemic crash.
The political left’s assault on U.S. natural gas is one of the most self-destructive acts in history, as Vladimir Putin understands. Russia has financed green opponents of shale-gas drilling in Europe because he knows it makes the Continent more vulnerable to his controlling ambitions.
U.S. LNG will be even more important if Russia invades Ukraine, and Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Germany dies, as President Biden has promised. The U.S. anti-fossil fuel left is Mr. Putin’s best friend.
8) Andrew Montford: How Britain’s fracking industry was regulated into irrelevance
The Spectator, 13 February 2022
This week the fracking company Cuadrilla announced that it was permanently closing its two shale mines in Lancashire, after the Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) declared that shale gas companies must seal up the wells they had drilled and return the land to nature.
It is, on the face of it, a very strange step to take at this time. The wells have not been producing any gas for some years, of course, ever since environmentalists launched their scare campaign against the industry. It was a campaign that was astonishing in its brazenness. Tiny earth tremors recorded near the wells, of a scale that is entirely normal in, say, the mining industry or in geothermal energy developments were rebranded by activists ‘earthquakes’. The chemicals used – all licensed as entirely safe by the Environment Agency – were declared to be dangerous poisons. In one particularly egregious case, householders were given leaflets which claimed that the gas companies were going to use industrial quantities of a known carcinogen called ‘silicon dioxide’. That’s sand, in common parlance.
And just as they have always done, environmental correspondents across the mainstream media relayed it all to a mostly credulous public, with not a note of doubt raised.
The aim of the campaigners and their media allies was to destroy the industry before it took off, or at least to have it regulated into irrelevance. At first, the government held its ground, but with the media in full chorus that didn’t last for very long. After drilling operations caused a pair of microtremors (of a size somewhat smaller than a lorry rumbling past your window) the scaremongering reached a new intensity. Stories were circulated to the media that homes had been damaged. These claims were later shown to be baseless, but by then the government had had enough, and their resistance crumbled. New rules were put in place that made operators stop work if they caused even a tiny earth tremor. The so-called ‘red light’ level was set so low – far below anything detectable – it was said that if you wanted a long weekend, all you had to do was drop a spanner on the drilling pad on Thursday evening.
The government was making it abundantly clear that they had decided they could do without onshore gas (or at least the political flak that came with it) a message that was reinforced by the fact that no other industry that caused earth tremors had to operate under the same strictures.
Soon afterwards, an outright moratorium followed, and the wells have sat idle ever since. Three years on, however, we are in a very different political landscape. Covid was bad enough, but we are now in danger of being overwhelmed by an energy price crisis too. Unusually for the energy and climate arena, everyone is in agreement: the proximal cause of the crisis is the price of gas, which has surged as the world recovers from the pandemic. Heating bills have shot up in response, and because the market price for electricity is set by gas turbines, there has been a knock-on effect on power prices.
If high gas prices are the problem, then reasonable people might conclude that the solution would involve delivering lower prices, which in turn would mean increasing the supply. Of course environmentalists will say that we should instead build more windfarms and install more heat pumps, but these projects would take several decades to deliver, so they are of little help in the near future. And even in the rather longer term, they would still not help, because market prices are set by gas turbines (the marginal generator, in the economic jargon); that’s why they are currently so high.
That means that the only way out of the crisis in the next few years is to drive down the cost of gas. An increase in the domestic supply would help, because it would enable us to replace some of our more expensive imports, and in particular liquefied natural gas.
This being the case, how can we explain the decision to seal the wells up? In fact, it makes sense if you take a look at the OGA’s remit. In this extraordinary document, you will find no mention of any duty to ensure that operators aren’t cutting corners. There is nothing about making sure that they deliver for consumers, nor even anything about national energy security (another issue of pressing urgency, given Mr Putin’s machinations). Instead, the role that government has given it revolves entirely around delivering Net Zero. Put bluntly, the OGA is more about closing the industry down than regulating it.
When the price cap on domestic energy bills is lifted in a few weeks’ time, there is likely to be a great deal of anger. If people learn that the government’s political cowardice has been making things worse, a major political backlash is on the cards.
9) Seizing land to make way for solar farms could worsen ‘deep and troubling’ farming crisis
The Sunday Telegraph, 13 February 2022
Fear that vision to meet net zero target could 'destroy a natural resource in the heart of England’s green and pleasant land'
The Spectator, 13 February 2022
This week the fracking company Cuadrilla announced that it was permanently closing its two shale mines in Lancashire, after the Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) declared that shale gas companies must seal up the wells they had drilled and return the land to nature.
It is, on the face of it, a very strange step to take at this time. The wells have not been producing any gas for some years, of course, ever since environmentalists launched their scare campaign against the industry. It was a campaign that was astonishing in its brazenness. Tiny earth tremors recorded near the wells, of a scale that is entirely normal in, say, the mining industry or in geothermal energy developments were rebranded by activists ‘earthquakes’. The chemicals used – all licensed as entirely safe by the Environment Agency – were declared to be dangerous poisons. In one particularly egregious case, householders were given leaflets which claimed that the gas companies were going to use industrial quantities of a known carcinogen called ‘silicon dioxide’. That’s sand, in common parlance.
And just as they have always done, environmental correspondents across the mainstream media relayed it all to a mostly credulous public, with not a note of doubt raised.
The aim of the campaigners and their media allies was to destroy the industry before it took off, or at least to have it regulated into irrelevance. At first, the government held its ground, but with the media in full chorus that didn’t last for very long. After drilling operations caused a pair of microtremors (of a size somewhat smaller than a lorry rumbling past your window) the scaremongering reached a new intensity. Stories were circulated to the media that homes had been damaged. These claims were later shown to be baseless, but by then the government had had enough, and their resistance crumbled. New rules were put in place that made operators stop work if they caused even a tiny earth tremor. The so-called ‘red light’ level was set so low – far below anything detectable – it was said that if you wanted a long weekend, all you had to do was drop a spanner on the drilling pad on Thursday evening.
The government was making it abundantly clear that they had decided they could do without onshore gas (or at least the political flak that came with it) a message that was reinforced by the fact that no other industry that caused earth tremors had to operate under the same strictures.
Soon afterwards, an outright moratorium followed, and the wells have sat idle ever since. Three years on, however, we are in a very different political landscape. Covid was bad enough, but we are now in danger of being overwhelmed by an energy price crisis too. Unusually for the energy and climate arena, everyone is in agreement: the proximal cause of the crisis is the price of gas, which has surged as the world recovers from the pandemic. Heating bills have shot up in response, and because the market price for electricity is set by gas turbines, there has been a knock-on effect on power prices.
If high gas prices are the problem, then reasonable people might conclude that the solution would involve delivering lower prices, which in turn would mean increasing the supply. Of course environmentalists will say that we should instead build more windfarms and install more heat pumps, but these projects would take several decades to deliver, so they are of little help in the near future. And even in the rather longer term, they would still not help, because market prices are set by gas turbines (the marginal generator, in the economic jargon); that’s why they are currently so high.
That means that the only way out of the crisis in the next few years is to drive down the cost of gas. An increase in the domestic supply would help, because it would enable us to replace some of our more expensive imports, and in particular liquefied natural gas.
This being the case, how can we explain the decision to seal the wells up? In fact, it makes sense if you take a look at the OGA’s remit. In this extraordinary document, you will find no mention of any duty to ensure that operators aren’t cutting corners. There is nothing about making sure that they deliver for consumers, nor even anything about national energy security (another issue of pressing urgency, given Mr Putin’s machinations). Instead, the role that government has given it revolves entirely around delivering Net Zero. Put bluntly, the OGA is more about closing the industry down than regulating it.
When the price cap on domestic energy bills is lifted in a few weeks’ time, there is likely to be a great deal of anger. If people learn that the government’s political cowardice has been making things worse, a major political backlash is on the cards.
9) Seizing land to make way for solar farms could worsen ‘deep and troubling’ farming crisis
The Sunday Telegraph, 13 February 2022
Fear that vision to meet net zero target could 'destroy a natural resource in the heart of England’s green and pleasant land'
Campaigners have warned that Britain faces a worsening agricultural crisis if it presses ahead with turning thousands of acres of land into solar farms to meet net zero carbon targets.
An analysis of data from the solar farm industry has shown that developments currently in the planning or pre-planning stage would total 37 gigawatts (GW) of generating capacity.
Critics said that if the proposals are given the go-ahead, it could take as much as 150,000 acres of agricultural land out of production at a time when Britain has less farmland in use than at any time since 1945.
The country is already losing 99,000 acres of rural land a year to industrial and other uses.
Net Zero Watch, which monitors the implications of what it fears are expensive and poorly considered climate change policies, said the change will increase Britain’s dependency on food imports.
'Protect the national interest'
Dr John Constable, Net Zero Watch’s director of energy, said: “Farmland is already a renewable energy producer, making food from sunlight. Sacrificing that national asset to produce low quality electrical energy from solar photovoltaic panels is foolish in itself and will have deep and troubling long-term implications for British food security.”
Net Zero Watch said planning guidance should be revised to “protect the national interest” by changing the existing presumption of favour of solar development to one against, forcing developers to prove the case for proposals on their own merits.
The warnings come amid a growing row over plans to build one of the country’s biggest solar farms on agricultural land across a swathe of Lincolnshire and Rutland.
Its backers say that, if approved, the 2,175 acre Mallard Pass solar farm would generate in the region of 350 megawatts (MW) of renewable energy, enough to power 92,000 homes.
But local opposition groups say it will dominate the landscape and cause damage to farming and the environment.
Alicia Kearns, the MP for Rutland and Melton, said: “The Mallard Pass solar plant proposal is utterly inappropriate. By building on quality agricultural land, we will destroy a natural resource in the heart of England’s green and pleasant land.”
Keith Busfield, of the Mallard Pass Action Group, said: “As a country we need to ensure our energy policy dovetails with the nation’s approach to food and agriculture, rather than undermine it.”
Mallard Pass is one of nearly a dozen large solar farms currently at the planning stage, including 2,400 acre Cottam Solar Project on the Nottinghamshire/Lincolnshire border, which would produce 600MW, and a 1,400 acre solar farm near Chelmsford, Essex, which would produce 350MW.
Another is the 2,792 acre Sunnica solar farm on the Suffolk and Cambridgeshire border, aimed at producing 500MW.
MPs and residents living in many of the small villages in the area have criticised proposals by Sunnica to use compulsory purchase orders for land it needs.
Mallard Pass Solar Farm’s developer Windel Energy and Canadian Solar said there was an "urgent need to decarbonise our electricity system” by generating “a significant amount of clean, renewable energy”.
The National Farmers’ Union said solar farms should only be built on lower quality agricultural land, avoiding the most productive and versatile soils.
Stuart Roberts, the NFU’s deputy president, said: “As with any land use projects, we need to strike a balance to ensure we can continue to produce quality, sustainable food for the nation while also delivering on our net zero ambition.”
A government spokesman said it did not recognise the figure of 150,000 acres, adding: “Of those solar projects in the planning pipeline, not all are likely to progress, and not all would be sited on greenfield land.
“Ultimately, the more clean, cheap power we generate at home - like solar - the less dependent Britain will be on expensive gas prices set by global markets.”
10) Liam Halligan: ‘Net Zero’ may become as divisive as Brexit
The Sunday Telegraph, 13 February 2022
When April utility bills hit the nation’s collective doormat, we could see not only mass protests, but widespread non-payment
Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer traded barbed comments about household energy bills in the Commons last Wednesday lunchtime. Finally, the political debate is shifting from “he-said, she-said” finger-pointing about Downing Street parties to what truly impacts the lives of millions of voters up and down the country.
The squeeze on living standards is getting tighter. With the consumer prices index showing 5.4pc inflation, a 30-year high, it’s not just low-income households feeling the pinch, but many others too.
When the rubber hits the road in April, and spiking utility bills combine with a rise in National Insurance contributions and even more inflation, this cost-of-living triple-whammy will convulse British politics, just ahead of crucial local elections in early May.
And it is energy prices that will hit hardest – generating serious and widespread discontent. If Boris Johnson is still Prime Minister by then, as I suspect he will be, he may long for the days when he faced questions about cheese-and-wine shindigs in Number 10.
Since last October, the average household fuel bill has been capped at £1,277. Earlier this month, surging wholesale gas prices saw energy regulator Ofgem increase that cap to £1,970 – a rise of no less than 54pc, affecting around 22m households.
In less than two months, then, utility bills will spike by around £700 to almost £2,000 a year. And that’s for the average household. Homes using above average amounts of energy will pay more.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak has unveiled a raft of utility-bill support measures including council tax rebates, fuel bill discounts and an extension of means-tested benefits. The package is overly complex and will help far less than ministers claim. The council tax cut, for instance, only applies to lower-valued properties in bands A to D – very few of them in the South East, where there are still plenty of cash-strapped households.
Other discounts don’t apply until October, by which time wholesale fuel prices could yet be even higher, and involve unsolicited debts with electricity providers that must then be repaid.
When these April utility bills hit the nation’s collective doormat, we could see not only mass protests, but widespread non-payment as well. The political atmosphere will get nasty – not so much a winter of discontent, as a spring rising.
And there’s another dog that has yet to bark when it comes to this energy price crisis. Households are at least partially protected by Ofgem and the Chancellor’s support measures, such as they are. The vast majority of businesses are not.
Stephen Morley is president of the Confederation of British Metalforming, a trade body comprising hundreds of companies, employing tens of thousands of UK workers. These are firms at the heart of our manufacturing sector – and they use a lot of energy.
Late last month, Morley wrote to Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, rightly pointing out that “while there are geopolitical issues at play” when it comes to explaining high energy costs, “the Government is not faultless”.
Wholesale gas prices in the UK are indeed considerably higher than across many other European countries – and way above those in the US. This reflects our lack of gas storage, an aversion to exploiting our own energy resources, not least in the North Sea, and years of drift and complacency from successive governments when it comes to energy strategy.
Our rush towards “net zero”, and related taxes on commercial energy users, also helps explain why, as Morley wrote to Kwarteng, the increase in fuel bills faced by UK businesses is “substantially more than those of our EU competitors, specifically France and Germany”.
Last week, when I spoke to Morley, he told me that his members “are seeing electricity prices go up by 100pc-150pc, with gas prices up three or four-fold”. While very high-intensity energy users, like steelmakers, get some protection against spiralling prices, Morley explained that “most manufacturers don’t – and then we have to pay renewable obligations on top of that”.
This energy crisis, then, is threatening the future of countless firms based largely across the Midlands, Yorkshire, the North West and North East, employing numerous workers in Red Wall constituencies. These are the seats Johnson won from Labour in the December 2019 election, seats he must hold to retain his parliamentary majority.
Charlie Alexander, founder of Bleikers Smokehouse in the Yorkshire Dales, operates at the other end of industrial scale, producing high-quality smoked fish.
“My energy bill is set to at least double from £120,000 to £240,000,” he told me last week. “For a relatively small business that’s a huge increase – plus our packaging and distribution costs are also spiralling upward.”
When the January CPI inflation number is published on Wednesday, it will be considerably higher than the December figure of 5.4pc. That rise will be driven largely by the reality that businesses are facing huge input price inflation, not least energy costs.
Increasingly, firms everywhere are now passing those cost rises on – as consumer goods giant Unilever announced last week – which will drive prices in the shops higher still. US inflation hit 7.5pc in January, we learnt last week – and there is every reason to expect a similar reading on this side of the pond.
Here are three more predictions. With the likes of BP and Shell announcing 2021 profits of over $40bn (£30bn) between them, expect Labour’s idea of a windfall tax on the oil and gas giants to help households pay their fuel bills to get a lot more airtime. Arguments that it will deter investment in North Sea fields, and face legal challenge, will wear increasingly thin as this energy crisis bites.
Secondly, the moratorium on fracking could yet be lifted. “There is every chance, given huge energy price rises, the political climate towards fracking will now shift,” Francis Egan, chief executive of fracking specialist Cuadrilla, told me. “And it should, because gas is part of the answer.”
Finally, it strikes me the issue of energy prices, and particularly the role green subsides are playing in driving household and commercial fuel bills higher, is a bit like Brexit.
Energy costs, ahead of the May local elections, could yet spark the UK’s next populist political movement. Who knows, we could even see a “net zero” referendum one day. Stranger things have happened.
11) The decadent West has emboldened Putin
Editorial, The Sunday Telegraph, 13 February 2022
The Ukraine crisis marks the final failure of the post-Cold War international system, itself a tragically squandered opportunity. Back in the heady days of 1989-1991, the defeat of the USSR, one of the most monstrous empires of all time, was declared the “end of history” and the beginning of a new era of liberal, rational hegemony. Yet as Francis Fukuyama, the author of that maligned phrase, predicted, the vacuum left by the death of communism was soon filled with equally sinister ideologies, not just in poorer nations but also in some of the world’s most powerful states.
The first great realisation that we weren’t all converging on eating Big Macs and peace and love came with 9/11, and the rise of Islamist extremism. This phenomenon was inaccurately viewed as marginal rebellion, something that with sufficient force and political education could be crushed. The great powers, who would decide the future of the world, were assumed to be converging on democratic capitalism.
Now we know this too was arrogant nonsense. The Chinese Communist Party concluded that it could grow rich without giving up power, in fact it could buy off rebellion and rival America’s strategic superiority. The threat that Russia now poses is borne of the opposite problem: it failed to develop a modern economy. As to America and other parts of the West, they have fallen into self-loathing, prey to a toxic woke ideology that exaggerates their failings, downplays their successes and seeks to divide rather than unite.
Russia’s failure to embrace liberal, democratic capitalism, and America’s and Europe’s overly optimistic belief that Moscow’s flawed, corrupt post-communist economic model would deliver the sort of wealth and prosperity that goes hand in hand with real law-governed competitive free markets was an especially grievous error.
Russia’s gross domestic product per capita is about the same as Malaysia’s; its economy is smaller than Italy’s. Dependent upon resource extraction and export, it has poured immense sums into the military and foreign adventures, but failed to diversify – stagnation and corruption have encouraged people to drop out of education or head abroad. The largest country in the world by geography now has a population size not much bigger than France and Germany combined, and lost more than a million people in 2021 alone, indicating serious failure to contain Covid.
The myth Vladimir Putin wants us to believe, and some deluded Westerners have swallowed, is that capitalism ravaged the former USSR and he saved it from the robbers, that what we see in his bullying of Ukraine is a great power restored to its Soviet-era authority. The truth is that this is an authoritarian regime that fears for its own survival – and only calculates that it can get away with this thanks to America’s shockingly weak leadership and Europe’s decadent reliance on Russian energy imports. In other words, we have failed to do democratic capitalism properly, too – failed to build the case for what we supposedly believe in, failed to invest in our alliances and failed to think of the long-term consequences of self-lacerating policy choices.
This is made clear today in an intervention by more than 30 Conservative MPs and peers declaring that the UK Government’s ban on fracking is foolish and dangerous. Here was a chance to increase energy supply and head off the price hikes now hitting consumers – as well as creating well-paid jobs, many in the Red Wall area. The same could be said for nuclear and gas exploration: why did we allow one interpretation of environmentalism to turn our back on home-produced energy and make us reliant instead on an aggressive, hostile power for so much of our gas needs? Whatever the outcome of the current crisis, what is now clear is that Moscow and Beijing are not going to become like us any time soon, that we need to accept the regrettable reality that we are entering another period of global philosophical divergence.
In the short-term, the West must impose the harshest possible sanctions on Russia if it invades Ukraine. We shall see if the Nato alliance system is up to the job of deterrence, though events in Hong Kong, Georgia, Belarus and Crimea indicate that it can do little to save those who are not within its orbit – that a new global, less Western alliance of free nations is needed. Crucially, it must be economically resilient, so that when conflict does occur, we are able to isolate transgressors without destroying ourselves in the process.
An analysis of data from the solar farm industry has shown that developments currently in the planning or pre-planning stage would total 37 gigawatts (GW) of generating capacity.
Critics said that if the proposals are given the go-ahead, it could take as much as 150,000 acres of agricultural land out of production at a time when Britain has less farmland in use than at any time since 1945.
The country is already losing 99,000 acres of rural land a year to industrial and other uses.
Net Zero Watch, which monitors the implications of what it fears are expensive and poorly considered climate change policies, said the change will increase Britain’s dependency on food imports.
'Protect the national interest'
Dr John Constable, Net Zero Watch’s director of energy, said: “Farmland is already a renewable energy producer, making food from sunlight. Sacrificing that national asset to produce low quality electrical energy from solar photovoltaic panels is foolish in itself and will have deep and troubling long-term implications for British food security.”
Net Zero Watch said planning guidance should be revised to “protect the national interest” by changing the existing presumption of favour of solar development to one against, forcing developers to prove the case for proposals on their own merits.
The warnings come amid a growing row over plans to build one of the country’s biggest solar farms on agricultural land across a swathe of Lincolnshire and Rutland.
Its backers say that, if approved, the 2,175 acre Mallard Pass solar farm would generate in the region of 350 megawatts (MW) of renewable energy, enough to power 92,000 homes.
But local opposition groups say it will dominate the landscape and cause damage to farming and the environment.
Alicia Kearns, the MP for Rutland and Melton, said: “The Mallard Pass solar plant proposal is utterly inappropriate. By building on quality agricultural land, we will destroy a natural resource in the heart of England’s green and pleasant land.”
Keith Busfield, of the Mallard Pass Action Group, said: “As a country we need to ensure our energy policy dovetails with the nation’s approach to food and agriculture, rather than undermine it.”
Mallard Pass is one of nearly a dozen large solar farms currently at the planning stage, including 2,400 acre Cottam Solar Project on the Nottinghamshire/Lincolnshire border, which would produce 600MW, and a 1,400 acre solar farm near Chelmsford, Essex, which would produce 350MW.
Another is the 2,792 acre Sunnica solar farm on the Suffolk and Cambridgeshire border, aimed at producing 500MW.
MPs and residents living in many of the small villages in the area have criticised proposals by Sunnica to use compulsory purchase orders for land it needs.
Mallard Pass Solar Farm’s developer Windel Energy and Canadian Solar said there was an "urgent need to decarbonise our electricity system” by generating “a significant amount of clean, renewable energy”.
The National Farmers’ Union said solar farms should only be built on lower quality agricultural land, avoiding the most productive and versatile soils.
Stuart Roberts, the NFU’s deputy president, said: “As with any land use projects, we need to strike a balance to ensure we can continue to produce quality, sustainable food for the nation while also delivering on our net zero ambition.”
A government spokesman said it did not recognise the figure of 150,000 acres, adding: “Of those solar projects in the planning pipeline, not all are likely to progress, and not all would be sited on greenfield land.
“Ultimately, the more clean, cheap power we generate at home - like solar - the less dependent Britain will be on expensive gas prices set by global markets.”
10) Liam Halligan: ‘Net Zero’ may become as divisive as Brexit
The Sunday Telegraph, 13 February 2022
When April utility bills hit the nation’s collective doormat, we could see not only mass protests, but widespread non-payment
Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer traded barbed comments about household energy bills in the Commons last Wednesday lunchtime. Finally, the political debate is shifting from “he-said, she-said” finger-pointing about Downing Street parties to what truly impacts the lives of millions of voters up and down the country.
The squeeze on living standards is getting tighter. With the consumer prices index showing 5.4pc inflation, a 30-year high, it’s not just low-income households feeling the pinch, but many others too.
When the rubber hits the road in April, and spiking utility bills combine with a rise in National Insurance contributions and even more inflation, this cost-of-living triple-whammy will convulse British politics, just ahead of crucial local elections in early May.
And it is energy prices that will hit hardest – generating serious and widespread discontent. If Boris Johnson is still Prime Minister by then, as I suspect he will be, he may long for the days when he faced questions about cheese-and-wine shindigs in Number 10.
Since last October, the average household fuel bill has been capped at £1,277. Earlier this month, surging wholesale gas prices saw energy regulator Ofgem increase that cap to £1,970 – a rise of no less than 54pc, affecting around 22m households.
In less than two months, then, utility bills will spike by around £700 to almost £2,000 a year. And that’s for the average household. Homes using above average amounts of energy will pay more.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak has unveiled a raft of utility-bill support measures including council tax rebates, fuel bill discounts and an extension of means-tested benefits. The package is overly complex and will help far less than ministers claim. The council tax cut, for instance, only applies to lower-valued properties in bands A to D – very few of them in the South East, where there are still plenty of cash-strapped households.
Other discounts don’t apply until October, by which time wholesale fuel prices could yet be even higher, and involve unsolicited debts with electricity providers that must then be repaid.
When these April utility bills hit the nation’s collective doormat, we could see not only mass protests, but widespread non-payment as well. The political atmosphere will get nasty – not so much a winter of discontent, as a spring rising.
And there’s another dog that has yet to bark when it comes to this energy price crisis. Households are at least partially protected by Ofgem and the Chancellor’s support measures, such as they are. The vast majority of businesses are not.
Stephen Morley is president of the Confederation of British Metalforming, a trade body comprising hundreds of companies, employing tens of thousands of UK workers. These are firms at the heart of our manufacturing sector – and they use a lot of energy.
Late last month, Morley wrote to Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, rightly pointing out that “while there are geopolitical issues at play” when it comes to explaining high energy costs, “the Government is not faultless”.
Wholesale gas prices in the UK are indeed considerably higher than across many other European countries – and way above those in the US. This reflects our lack of gas storage, an aversion to exploiting our own energy resources, not least in the North Sea, and years of drift and complacency from successive governments when it comes to energy strategy.
Our rush towards “net zero”, and related taxes on commercial energy users, also helps explain why, as Morley wrote to Kwarteng, the increase in fuel bills faced by UK businesses is “substantially more than those of our EU competitors, specifically France and Germany”.
Last week, when I spoke to Morley, he told me that his members “are seeing electricity prices go up by 100pc-150pc, with gas prices up three or four-fold”. While very high-intensity energy users, like steelmakers, get some protection against spiralling prices, Morley explained that “most manufacturers don’t – and then we have to pay renewable obligations on top of that”.
This energy crisis, then, is threatening the future of countless firms based largely across the Midlands, Yorkshire, the North West and North East, employing numerous workers in Red Wall constituencies. These are the seats Johnson won from Labour in the December 2019 election, seats he must hold to retain his parliamentary majority.
Charlie Alexander, founder of Bleikers Smokehouse in the Yorkshire Dales, operates at the other end of industrial scale, producing high-quality smoked fish.
“My energy bill is set to at least double from £120,000 to £240,000,” he told me last week. “For a relatively small business that’s a huge increase – plus our packaging and distribution costs are also spiralling upward.”
When the January CPI inflation number is published on Wednesday, it will be considerably higher than the December figure of 5.4pc. That rise will be driven largely by the reality that businesses are facing huge input price inflation, not least energy costs.
Increasingly, firms everywhere are now passing those cost rises on – as consumer goods giant Unilever announced last week – which will drive prices in the shops higher still. US inflation hit 7.5pc in January, we learnt last week – and there is every reason to expect a similar reading on this side of the pond.
Here are three more predictions. With the likes of BP and Shell announcing 2021 profits of over $40bn (£30bn) between them, expect Labour’s idea of a windfall tax on the oil and gas giants to help households pay their fuel bills to get a lot more airtime. Arguments that it will deter investment in North Sea fields, and face legal challenge, will wear increasingly thin as this energy crisis bites.
Secondly, the moratorium on fracking could yet be lifted. “There is every chance, given huge energy price rises, the political climate towards fracking will now shift,” Francis Egan, chief executive of fracking specialist Cuadrilla, told me. “And it should, because gas is part of the answer.”
Finally, it strikes me the issue of energy prices, and particularly the role green subsides are playing in driving household and commercial fuel bills higher, is a bit like Brexit.
Energy costs, ahead of the May local elections, could yet spark the UK’s next populist political movement. Who knows, we could even see a “net zero” referendum one day. Stranger things have happened.
11) The decadent West has emboldened Putin
Editorial, The Sunday Telegraph, 13 February 2022
The Ukraine crisis marks the final failure of the post-Cold War international system, itself a tragically squandered opportunity. Back in the heady days of 1989-1991, the defeat of the USSR, one of the most monstrous empires of all time, was declared the “end of history” and the beginning of a new era of liberal, rational hegemony. Yet as Francis Fukuyama, the author of that maligned phrase, predicted, the vacuum left by the death of communism was soon filled with equally sinister ideologies, not just in poorer nations but also in some of the world’s most powerful states.
The first great realisation that we weren’t all converging on eating Big Macs and peace and love came with 9/11, and the rise of Islamist extremism. This phenomenon was inaccurately viewed as marginal rebellion, something that with sufficient force and political education could be crushed. The great powers, who would decide the future of the world, were assumed to be converging on democratic capitalism.
Now we know this too was arrogant nonsense. The Chinese Communist Party concluded that it could grow rich without giving up power, in fact it could buy off rebellion and rival America’s strategic superiority. The threat that Russia now poses is borne of the opposite problem: it failed to develop a modern economy. As to America and other parts of the West, they have fallen into self-loathing, prey to a toxic woke ideology that exaggerates their failings, downplays their successes and seeks to divide rather than unite.
Russia’s failure to embrace liberal, democratic capitalism, and America’s and Europe’s overly optimistic belief that Moscow’s flawed, corrupt post-communist economic model would deliver the sort of wealth and prosperity that goes hand in hand with real law-governed competitive free markets was an especially grievous error.
Russia’s gross domestic product per capita is about the same as Malaysia’s; its economy is smaller than Italy’s. Dependent upon resource extraction and export, it has poured immense sums into the military and foreign adventures, but failed to diversify – stagnation and corruption have encouraged people to drop out of education or head abroad. The largest country in the world by geography now has a population size not much bigger than France and Germany combined, and lost more than a million people in 2021 alone, indicating serious failure to contain Covid.
The myth Vladimir Putin wants us to believe, and some deluded Westerners have swallowed, is that capitalism ravaged the former USSR and he saved it from the robbers, that what we see in his bullying of Ukraine is a great power restored to its Soviet-era authority. The truth is that this is an authoritarian regime that fears for its own survival – and only calculates that it can get away with this thanks to America’s shockingly weak leadership and Europe’s decadent reliance on Russian energy imports. In other words, we have failed to do democratic capitalism properly, too – failed to build the case for what we supposedly believe in, failed to invest in our alliances and failed to think of the long-term consequences of self-lacerating policy choices.
This is made clear today in an intervention by more than 30 Conservative MPs and peers declaring that the UK Government’s ban on fracking is foolish and dangerous. Here was a chance to increase energy supply and head off the price hikes now hitting consumers – as well as creating well-paid jobs, many in the Red Wall area. The same could be said for nuclear and gas exploration: why did we allow one interpretation of environmentalism to turn our back on home-produced energy and make us reliant instead on an aggressive, hostile power for so much of our gas needs? Whatever the outcome of the current crisis, what is now clear is that Moscow and Beijing are not going to become like us any time soon, that we need to accept the regrettable reality that we are entering another period of global philosophical divergence.
In the short-term, the West must impose the harshest possible sanctions on Russia if it invades Ukraine. We shall see if the Nato alliance system is up to the job of deterrence, though events in Hong Kong, Georgia, Belarus and Crimea indicate that it can do little to save those who are not within its orbit – that a new global, less Western alliance of free nations is needed. Crucially, it must be economically resilient, so that when conflict does occur, we are able to isolate transgressors without destroying ourselves in the process.
The London-based Net Zero Watch is a campaign group set up to highlight and discuss the serious implications of expensive and poorly considered climate change policies. The Net Zero Watch newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.netzerowatch.com.
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