In this newsletter:
1) Britain’s Net Zero Lesson for the U.S.
Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 13 August 2022
2) Energy bills to top £5,000 next year in new shock to households
The Daily Telegraph, 11 August 2022
3) Green Britain: Pubs and restaurants warn of winter closures as energy bills soar 300%
The Daily Telegraph, 15 August 2022
4) Green Britain: Schools consider three-day week amid rising energy bills and teacher pay
The Daily Telegraph, 14 August 2022
ABC - Against the voice, 13 August 202
8) Struan Stevenson: Energy crisis might give Liz Truss her Thatcher moment… but she won’t like it
The Sunday Post, 14 August 2022
9) David Frost: Tories can no longer avoid telling hard truths about the route out of this mess
The Daily Telegraph, 12 August 2022
10) Greg McLean: Energy ignorance on display in Canada and Germany
National Post, 28 July 2022
11) Brendan O'Neill: Why eco-alarmists are wrong about almost everything
Spiked, 14 August 2022
3) Green Britain: Pubs and restaurants warn of winter closures as energy bills soar 300%
The Daily Telegraph, 15 August 2022
4) Green Britain: Schools consider three-day week amid rising energy bills and teacher pay
The Daily Telegraph, 14 August 2022
5) Keir Starmer unveils £29bn Labour plan to freeze energy price cap
The Independent, 15 August 2022
The Independent, 15 August 2022
6) Labour's energy price freeze risks higher inflation and Venezuelan poverty, critics warn
Daily Mail, 15 August 2022
7) Interview with Benny Peiser on the impact and implications of the energy crisis on European and international climate politicsDaily Mail, 15 August 2022
ABC - Against the voice, 13 August 202
8) Struan Stevenson: Energy crisis might give Liz Truss her Thatcher moment… but she won’t like it
The Sunday Post, 14 August 2022
9) David Frost: Tories can no longer avoid telling hard truths about the route out of this mess
The Daily Telegraph, 12 August 2022
10) Greg McLean: Energy ignorance on display in Canada and Germany
National Post, 28 July 2022
11) Brendan O'Neill: Why eco-alarmists are wrong about almost everything
Spiked, 14 August 2022
12) And finally: Climate virtuoso Europe destroys Oder river
Spectator Australia, 15 August 2022
Spectator Australia, 15 August 2022
Full details:
1) Britain’s Net Zero Lesson for the U.S.
Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 13 August 2022
Net Zero has turned the Tories into the party that is impoverishing Britain.
There are catastrophes and calamities, and then there’s what’s happening in the United Kingdom’s energy market. Reports this week point to spiraling costs for households and businesses this winter, pushing millions of Britons closer to poverty. It’s a steep price for climate alarmism.
Households are likely to see the average bill for electricity and natural gas climb to £4,400 ($5,370) a year in the first half of 2023, according to a report this week from Cornwall Insight, a consulting firm. This is after the regulatory price cap shot up 54% to about £2,000 in April with another 40%-plus increase due in October and further increases after that.
Britain’s median income after direct taxes is £31,400. Skyrocketing fuel prices could push 10.5 million households, or one-third, into fuel poverty next year, says the End Fuel Poverty Coalition. Fuel poverty is when energy costs drag household disposable income below the government’s official poverty line.
That doesn’t include the energy costs households pay indirectly. Businesses, whose prices aren’t capped, have seen electricity costs rise in the past year between 45% and 122% depending on company size, and gas prices between 131% and 185%. These costs inevitably will be passed on via higher prices, lower wages or lower returns to pension savers.
Politicians are eager to dodge responsibility for this disaster, and Russia offers a convenient excuse. Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion and the resulting energy supply disruptions have pushed up global natural-gas prices. Some 86% of households in England rely on natural gas for hot water and central heating, and gas powers one-third of Britain’s electricity generation, the most of any single source.
But these trends are inseparable from Britain’s homegrown fixation with achieving net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050. That’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s worst mistake, which is making the energy crisis worse.
Start with the direct costs, such as taxes and levies. Various green charges add £153 to the annual household bill, the industry regulator says. But other net-zero costs lurk in household energy bills and budgets. The electric grid operator spent about £3.4 billion over the past year on balancing costs to match supply to demand in real time—a cost that tends to be higher due to the unreliability of wind and solar, and that’s passed to consumers by utilities. Higher commercial energy costs mean higher prices for goods and services.
Another imponderable is how much lower gas prices would be if Britain produced more itself. Conservative Party administrations have flirted for years with proposals for shale-gas fracking in northern England only to lose their nerve. Lately the party has grown hostile to North Sea drilling, as companies see a government promising to diminish the industry under net zero while imposing windfall profits taxes.
Britain’s energy emergency is a growing threat to an economy expected to be among the developed world’s worst performers next year. It’s a political emergency for the Tories, who are in the process of replacing Mr. Johnson. Former Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss both say they support fracking and lower taxes on energy bills, although both still pay lip service to net zero. There’s little evidence environmentally minded voters give the Tories credit for net zero and ample evidence voters of all persuasions blame the party for the energy-price crisis.
So much for those who say conservative parties need to adopt the left’s climate agenda to court younger voters. Net zero has turned the Tories into the party that is impoverishing Britain. As steep a price as the party may one day pay at the polls for this blunder, households already are paying dearly today.
Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 13 August 2022
Net Zero has turned the Tories into the party that is impoverishing Britain.
There are catastrophes and calamities, and then there’s what’s happening in the United Kingdom’s energy market. Reports this week point to spiraling costs for households and businesses this winter, pushing millions of Britons closer to poverty. It’s a steep price for climate alarmism.
Households are likely to see the average bill for electricity and natural gas climb to £4,400 ($5,370) a year in the first half of 2023, according to a report this week from Cornwall Insight, a consulting firm. This is after the regulatory price cap shot up 54% to about £2,000 in April with another 40%-plus increase due in October and further increases after that.
Britain’s median income after direct taxes is £31,400. Skyrocketing fuel prices could push 10.5 million households, or one-third, into fuel poverty next year, says the End Fuel Poverty Coalition. Fuel poverty is when energy costs drag household disposable income below the government’s official poverty line.
That doesn’t include the energy costs households pay indirectly. Businesses, whose prices aren’t capped, have seen electricity costs rise in the past year between 45% and 122% depending on company size, and gas prices between 131% and 185%. These costs inevitably will be passed on via higher prices, lower wages or lower returns to pension savers.
Politicians are eager to dodge responsibility for this disaster, and Russia offers a convenient excuse. Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion and the resulting energy supply disruptions have pushed up global natural-gas prices. Some 86% of households in England rely on natural gas for hot water and central heating, and gas powers one-third of Britain’s electricity generation, the most of any single source.
But these trends are inseparable from Britain’s homegrown fixation with achieving net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050. That’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s worst mistake, which is making the energy crisis worse.
Start with the direct costs, such as taxes and levies. Various green charges add £153 to the annual household bill, the industry regulator says. But other net-zero costs lurk in household energy bills and budgets. The electric grid operator spent about £3.4 billion over the past year on balancing costs to match supply to demand in real time—a cost that tends to be higher due to the unreliability of wind and solar, and that’s passed to consumers by utilities. Higher commercial energy costs mean higher prices for goods and services.
Another imponderable is how much lower gas prices would be if Britain produced more itself. Conservative Party administrations have flirted for years with proposals for shale-gas fracking in northern England only to lose their nerve. Lately the party has grown hostile to North Sea drilling, as companies see a government promising to diminish the industry under net zero while imposing windfall profits taxes.
Britain’s energy emergency is a growing threat to an economy expected to be among the developed world’s worst performers next year. It’s a political emergency for the Tories, who are in the process of replacing Mr. Johnson. Former Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss both say they support fracking and lower taxes on energy bills, although both still pay lip service to net zero. There’s little evidence environmentally minded voters give the Tories credit for net zero and ample evidence voters of all persuasions blame the party for the energy-price crisis.
So much for those who say conservative parties need to adopt the left’s climate agenda to court younger voters. Net zero has turned the Tories into the party that is impoverishing Britain. As steep a price as the party may one day pay at the polls for this blunder, households already are paying dearly today.
2) Energy bills to top £5,000 next year in new shock to households
Household energy bills will soar to more than £5,000 a year next April, according to a grim new forecast.
Ofgem, the energy regulator, may have to set the price cap at £5,038 per year for the average home amid elevated gas prices, energy consultancy Auxilione said.
Experts said the cap could hit £4,467 in January, which is likely to be a more worrying figure for families as they use the most energy in winter. Such a scenario would leave the average household paying £571 for energy in January.
They warned the cap is likely to remain above £4,000 throughout next year.
Ministers are holding crisis talks with utility bosses today to discuss how support for households can be improved.
Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi and business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng will ask bosses for solutions ahead of a spike in bills this winter.
The Government is helping households with bill reductions worth £400 for all households from October, when prices are expected to peak, and up to £1,200 for around eight million of the most vulnerable households. However, Tory party leadership candidates Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak are under pressure to go much further given the scale of the increase.
Auxilione said there was little that could be done to directly bring prices down.
Its analysts wrote: “It seems there is little appreciation for just how impossible that task really is and that energy companies and the government have little control over this in such a globally influenced market."
European natural gas prices hit the highest in a fortnight as the summer heatwave causes disruption to energy production across the continent.
Dutch front-month gas futures for September, used as a benchmark for the continent, climbed more than 3pc to €212 per megawatt hour on Thursday morning.
Auxilione said: “The market’s reaction is based on facing into a series of options that are quickly being exhausted for Europe as it seeks to find alternatives to Russian gas."
3) Green Britain: Pubs and restaurants warn of winter closures as energy bills soar 300%
The Daily Telegraph, 15 August 2022
Pub, restaurant and hotel chiefs have warned the industry could face mass closure this winter without “urgent” support from the Government.
In a joint letter to Boris Johnson, Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi and Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng, seen by The Telegraph, the UK’s leading hospitality groups said the situation was “no less of a threat” than the drought hitting Britain.
UK Hospitality called for “urgent action” to help with bills, saying the Government should not “allow the stasis of party politics to stifle the urgent delivery of action on energy”.
The sector is calling for a cut to VAT or an energy price cap, such as that in place for customers.
It comes as pubs and restaurants prepare to sign new energy deals as old tariffs expire this autumn. Businesses are facing average increases of 300pc under new deals being offered.
The letter, signed by groups representing tens of thousands of hospitality venues across the country, warned the Prime Minister that “not all businesses will be able to survive this onslaught”.
Ministers have been engaging with hospitality bosses for weeks, although government insiders said the Cabinet has agreed not to make any major announcements or fiscal decisions until a new Conservative leader is selected.
However, Mr Kwarteng was moved to take action to support energy-intensive industries, such as producers of glass, ceramics and paper. On Friday, the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy said it was considering subsidising bills for the industry to help save the 60,000 jobs in the industry.
There are no signs of similar support for hospitality.
“On Friday, the Government saw fit to declare a drought, in the face of inarguable evidence that weather conditions had caused a threat to the nation (sic). The energy crisis is no less of a threat and deserves similar attention,” the letter from UK Hospitality, the Night Time Industries Association, the British Beer and Pub Association, the British Institute of Innkeeping, and the Music Venue Trust said.
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy declined to comment.
A recent survey showing one in four hospitality bosses are considering closing due to the steeper bills. The sector provides 10pc of the UK’s jobs and is responsible for 5pc of GDP.
Full story
4) Green Britain: Schools consider three-day week amid rising energy bills and teacher pay
The Daily Telegraph, 14 August 2022
School leaders are considering three or four-day weeks to pay for teacher salary rises and crippling energy costs, The Telegraph has learnt.
Ofgem, the energy regulator, may have to set the price cap at £5,038 per year for the average home amid elevated gas prices, energy consultancy Auxilione said.
Experts said the cap could hit £4,467 in January, which is likely to be a more worrying figure for families as they use the most energy in winter. Such a scenario would leave the average household paying £571 for energy in January.
They warned the cap is likely to remain above £4,000 throughout next year.
Ministers are holding crisis talks with utility bosses today to discuss how support for households can be improved.
Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi and business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng will ask bosses for solutions ahead of a spike in bills this winter.
The Government is helping households with bill reductions worth £400 for all households from October, when prices are expected to peak, and up to £1,200 for around eight million of the most vulnerable households. However, Tory party leadership candidates Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak are under pressure to go much further given the scale of the increase.
Auxilione said there was little that could be done to directly bring prices down.
Its analysts wrote: “It seems there is little appreciation for just how impossible that task really is and that energy companies and the government have little control over this in such a globally influenced market."
European natural gas prices hit the highest in a fortnight as the summer heatwave causes disruption to energy production across the continent.
Dutch front-month gas futures for September, used as a benchmark for the continent, climbed more than 3pc to €212 per megawatt hour on Thursday morning.
Auxilione said: “The market’s reaction is based on facing into a series of options that are quickly being exhausted for Europe as it seeks to find alternatives to Russian gas."
3) Green Britain: Pubs and restaurants warn of winter closures as energy bills soar 300%
The Daily Telegraph, 15 August 2022
Pub, restaurant and hotel chiefs have warned the industry could face mass closure this winter without “urgent” support from the Government.
In a joint letter to Boris Johnson, Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi and Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng, seen by The Telegraph, the UK’s leading hospitality groups said the situation was “no less of a threat” than the drought hitting Britain.
UK Hospitality called for “urgent action” to help with bills, saying the Government should not “allow the stasis of party politics to stifle the urgent delivery of action on energy”.
The sector is calling for a cut to VAT or an energy price cap, such as that in place for customers.
It comes as pubs and restaurants prepare to sign new energy deals as old tariffs expire this autumn. Businesses are facing average increases of 300pc under new deals being offered.
The letter, signed by groups representing tens of thousands of hospitality venues across the country, warned the Prime Minister that “not all businesses will be able to survive this onslaught”.
Ministers have been engaging with hospitality bosses for weeks, although government insiders said the Cabinet has agreed not to make any major announcements or fiscal decisions until a new Conservative leader is selected.
However, Mr Kwarteng was moved to take action to support energy-intensive industries, such as producers of glass, ceramics and paper. On Friday, the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy said it was considering subsidising bills for the industry to help save the 60,000 jobs in the industry.
There are no signs of similar support for hospitality.
“On Friday, the Government saw fit to declare a drought, in the face of inarguable evidence that weather conditions had caused a threat to the nation (sic). The energy crisis is no less of a threat and deserves similar attention,” the letter from UK Hospitality, the Night Time Industries Association, the British Beer and Pub Association, the British Institute of Innkeeping, and the Music Venue Trust said.
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy declined to comment.
A recent survey showing one in four hospitality bosses are considering closing due to the steeper bills. The sector provides 10pc of the UK’s jobs and is responsible for 5pc of GDP.
Full story
4) Green Britain: Schools consider three-day week amid rising energy bills and teacher pay
The Daily Telegraph, 14 August 2022
School leaders are considering three or four-day weeks to pay for teacher salary rises and crippling energy costs, The Telegraph has learnt.
Headteachers, trustees and governors are holding “crisis meetings” during the summer holidays to work out how to keep schools afloat in the autumn term.
Teacher pay rises planned for September will put a squeeze on school budgets at the same time as their energy costs are expected to rise by up to 300 per cent.
Marc Jordan, the chief executive of Creative Education Trust, a multi-academy trust with 17 schools across the East and West Midlands and Norfolk, said he had heard discussions of a “three-day week” to save on costs.
He said that his trust, which educates 13,500 pupils, is considering a recruitment freeze and may have to scrap Covid catch-up programmes for children and planned investments in school buildings.
“Others less fortunate are facing significant deficits and are already planning for teacher redundancies,” he added.
Dr Robin Bevan, the headmaster of Southend High School for Boys in Essex, one of the top grammar schools in the country, said that “if a four-day week is not already being planned, it will certainly be being considered” by some schools. “In the absence of long overdue above-inflation investment in school funding, it'll become a realistic prospect sooner rather than later,” he added.
Full story
7) Interview with Benny Peiser on the impact and implications of the energy crisis on European and international climate politics
ABC - Against the voice, 13 August 202
What does increased geo-political tensions mean for an international agreement on carbon reduction and is the renewable energy transition agenda in sync with global political and economic reality?
Tom Switzer's interview with Benny Peiser: Director, Net Zero Watch
Full interview here (from 25:30min)
8) Struan Stevenson: Energy crisis might give Liz Truss her Thatcher moment… but she won’t like it
The Sunday Post, 14 August 2022
As Liz Truss parades around the UK pretending to be the next Margaret Thatcher, the parallels with the Thatcher era may be closer than she thinks.
Teacher pay rises planned for September will put a squeeze on school budgets at the same time as their energy costs are expected to rise by up to 300 per cent.
Marc Jordan, the chief executive of Creative Education Trust, a multi-academy trust with 17 schools across the East and West Midlands and Norfolk, said he had heard discussions of a “three-day week” to save on costs.
He said that his trust, which educates 13,500 pupils, is considering a recruitment freeze and may have to scrap Covid catch-up programmes for children and planned investments in school buildings.
“Others less fortunate are facing significant deficits and are already planning for teacher redundancies,” he added.
Dr Robin Bevan, the headmaster of Southend High School for Boys in Essex, one of the top grammar schools in the country, said that “if a four-day week is not already being planned, it will certainly be being considered” by some schools. “In the absence of long overdue above-inflation investment in school funding, it'll become a realistic prospect sooner rather than later,” he added.
Full story
5) Keir Starmer unveils £29bn Labour plan to freeze energy price cap
The Independent, 15 August 2022
The Independent, 15 August 2022
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has unveiled his plan to freeze the energy price cap, vowing that his party “wouldn’t let people pay a penny more” on their gas and electricity bills this winter.
Halting price rises in both October and January would save the typical family £1,000 and keep inflation under control during the cost of living crisis, according to Labour.
Sir Keir said his “fully-funded” £29bn plan to keep the cap at current levels throughout the winter would partly be covered by expanding the windfall tax imposed on oil and gas giants.
“Britain’s cost of living crisis is getting worse, leaving people scared about how they’ll get through the winter,” he said. “This is a national emergency. It needs strong leadership and urgent action.”
Closing the “absurd” loopholes in the windfall tax introduced in the spring by the chancellor at the time, Rishi Sunak, and backdating the levy to January, would raise £8bn, Labour said.
The rest of the price freeze would be paid for using the £14bn earmarked by the government for extra support to cover energy bill rises, and £7bn saved in debt interest payments through reduced inflation.
The energy price cap, the maximum amount companies can charge, is currently set at £1,971 a year – but it is expected to climb to almost £3,600 a year in October and over £4,200 in January.
The End Fuel Poverty Coalition – a group of around 60 charities and civil society groups – welcomed Labour’s plan, but insisted that extra financial support would still be needed for those already struggling with increased bills.
Simon Francis, coordinator of the coalition, told The Independent that he hoped Sir Keir’s announcement was “the start of politicians finally waking up to the fuel poverty crisis this winter”. But he added: “We will also need to see additional support for some of the most vulnerable households.”
Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey – who proposed an energy price cap freeze a week ago – mocked the timing of Labour’s policy. “Glad you liked my proposal to cancel the energy price rise. I also have some thoughts on electoral reform that you’re welcome to adopt,” he tweeted.
Research by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think tank, to be published on Monday, bolstered the opposition parties’ case for an energy price cap freeze. It showed that freezing fuel bills would help keep inflation at just over 9 per cent, as well as easing the burden on families.
It comes as the Tory leadership contenders, Mr Sunak and Liz Truss, are facing a call to more than double the level of support to low-income families in order to avert a “catastrophe” over the winter.
A coalition of 70 major charities signed an open letter to Ms Truss and Mr Sunak, warning that families on benefits face a £1,600 shortfall over the coming months in spite of the government’s existing £1,200 support package.
Meanwhile, chancellor Nadhim Zahawi is thought to have asked Treasury officials to draw up plans to cut gas and electricity bills by an extra £400 in January through a new lending scheme for energy providers.
However, the new lending scheme would not be implemented fast enough for October’s rises. And there is no guarantee that either Mr Sunak or Ms Truss would take up this plan on becoming prime minister.
The End Fuel Poverty Coalition said the reported Treasury plan would not “touch the sides” of the huge rises people are facing in October and January.
“The government is tinkering around the edges with plans to offer increases in existing support,” Mr Francis told The Independent. “This is a long way from what is needed – a comprehensive plan to provide emergency funding for households this winter.”
Full story
Halting price rises in both October and January would save the typical family £1,000 and keep inflation under control during the cost of living crisis, according to Labour.
Sir Keir said his “fully-funded” £29bn plan to keep the cap at current levels throughout the winter would partly be covered by expanding the windfall tax imposed on oil and gas giants.
“Britain’s cost of living crisis is getting worse, leaving people scared about how they’ll get through the winter,” he said. “This is a national emergency. It needs strong leadership and urgent action.”
Closing the “absurd” loopholes in the windfall tax introduced in the spring by the chancellor at the time, Rishi Sunak, and backdating the levy to January, would raise £8bn, Labour said.
The rest of the price freeze would be paid for using the £14bn earmarked by the government for extra support to cover energy bill rises, and £7bn saved in debt interest payments through reduced inflation.
The energy price cap, the maximum amount companies can charge, is currently set at £1,971 a year – but it is expected to climb to almost £3,600 a year in October and over £4,200 in January.
The End Fuel Poverty Coalition – a group of around 60 charities and civil society groups – welcomed Labour’s plan, but insisted that extra financial support would still be needed for those already struggling with increased bills.
Simon Francis, coordinator of the coalition, told The Independent that he hoped Sir Keir’s announcement was “the start of politicians finally waking up to the fuel poverty crisis this winter”. But he added: “We will also need to see additional support for some of the most vulnerable households.”
Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey – who proposed an energy price cap freeze a week ago – mocked the timing of Labour’s policy. “Glad you liked my proposal to cancel the energy price rise. I also have some thoughts on electoral reform that you’re welcome to adopt,” he tweeted.
Research by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think tank, to be published on Monday, bolstered the opposition parties’ case for an energy price cap freeze. It showed that freezing fuel bills would help keep inflation at just over 9 per cent, as well as easing the burden on families.
It comes as the Tory leadership contenders, Mr Sunak and Liz Truss, are facing a call to more than double the level of support to low-income families in order to avert a “catastrophe” over the winter.
A coalition of 70 major charities signed an open letter to Ms Truss and Mr Sunak, warning that families on benefits face a £1,600 shortfall over the coming months in spite of the government’s existing £1,200 support package.
Meanwhile, chancellor Nadhim Zahawi is thought to have asked Treasury officials to draw up plans to cut gas and electricity bills by an extra £400 in January through a new lending scheme for energy providers.
However, the new lending scheme would not be implemented fast enough for October’s rises. And there is no guarantee that either Mr Sunak or Ms Truss would take up this plan on becoming prime minister.
The End Fuel Poverty Coalition said the reported Treasury plan would not “touch the sides” of the huge rises people are facing in October and January.
“The government is tinkering around the edges with plans to offer increases in existing support,” Mr Francis told The Independent. “This is a long way from what is needed – a comprehensive plan to provide emergency funding for households this winter.”
Full story
6) Labour's energy price freeze risks higher inflation and Venezuelan poverty, critics warn
Daily Mail, 15 August 2022
Daily Mail, 15 August 2022
Keir Starmer heaped pressure on the would-be Tory PMs today by unveiling a dramatic £29billion plan to freeze energy bills for six months - despite warnings he is pursuing fantasy economics.
The Labour leader hailed his 'robust' proposals as he surfaced after a holiday, insisting Britons cannot be left to take the burden of spiralling prices.
He is calling for the energy price cap to be kept at its current level of £1,971 rather than letting it rise to £3,500 as expected in the autumn, and even higher next year.
Labour said the £29billion policy is fully funded, would save every household around £1,000 and even cut inflation. It would be paid for by widening the scope of the windfall tax on oil and gas producers and backdating it from May to January.
But senior Tories have branded the idea unworkable as energy firms are facing higher wholesale prices and could go bust if they are not allowed to pass on costs.
The respected IFS think-tank also raised concerns that the policy would need to be in place for at least a year, and could end up costing as much as the huge furlough scheme during Covid - around £70billion. It cautioned that the downward effect on inflation would be an 'illusion' because the level would simply surge again when the government stepped back.
In interviews this morning, Sir Keir insisted he was putting forward a 'very strong, robust, costed plan'.
He told BBC Radio 5 Live: 'Millions of people are already struggling with their bills, we all know that across the country and the hikes that are expected for this October….from a price cap of just under about £2,000 to £3,500 and then £4,200 and millions of people, millions of families are saying 'I just can't afford that'.
'We have a choice and this is really the political choice of the day. We either allow oil and gas companies to go on making huge profits which is what's happening at the moment or we do something about it.
'We the Labour Party have said, we'll do something about it. We will stop those price rises and we will extend the windfall tax on the profits that the oil and gas companies didn't expect to make. So we've got a very strong, robust, costed plan here which will stop those rises this autumn.
'It has an additional benefit which is really important, which is because energy prices are a real driver of inflation, this also makes sure that we can reduce inflation from what might even be 13 per cent down to about 9 per cent.'
Sir Keir said one of the main benefits of the scheme was that it brings down inflation, reducing the bill for servicing government debt which is linked to price rises.
'We've got to grip it because at the moment what we've got is two Tory leadership candidates who are fighting each other in a sort of internal battle, where their main argument seem to be about how awful their record in Government has been and a Prime Minister who's a lame duck because he's acknowledged there's a problem with energy bills, but says 'I'm not going to do anything about it'.'
However, IFS director Paul Johnson said that was an 'illusion' because inflation will go up more at the end of the policy.
He said Labour's costing of £30billion for six months was likely to be unrealistic as the policy would need to stay in place for a year to keep bills in check.
'You're looking at the cost of furlough... that is a very expensive scheme. Of course what is does achieve is to protect everyone entirely,' he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
Asked about the IFS reservations, Sir Keir said Mr Johnson was not disputing that the plan would reduce inflation.
'Of course what he's rightly saying is what happens after April matters because you have to maintain measures to reduce inflation,' he said.
'Of course we have to do that in April when we see the circumstances, but what he's not suggesting is that we're wrong when we say that our plan will reduce inflation.'
Sir Keir also fended off criticism from the Left of his own party that he has abandoned the commitment to nationalisation.
He told BBC Breakfast: 'The choice we've made in our plan is that every single penny that is needed for this plan will go directly to reducing the bills of families up and down the country.
'If you go down the nationalisation route, then money has to spent on compensating shareholders and I think in an emergency like this, a national emergency where people are struggling to pay their bills, I think that the right choice is for every single penny to go to reducing those bills.
'Which is why we've gone for this across the board, freeze the prices, raise the money for that through the oil and gas companies who've made more profit than they were expecting and of course the additional benefit of our plan is that it reduces inflation by up to 4 per cent.'
Energy minister Greg Hands told the BBC yesterday: 'We've got to remember energy price rises are set globally, they're driven by Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
'We would have to find a way to compensate people [for] effectively trying to abolish that price rise, and that would inevitably lead to higher taxes.
'So I think we have to be a little bit careful. Labour's seemingly magical solution to just wish it all away – that will have consequences.'
Former minister Sir John Redwood, expected to be one of Liz Truss's economics advisers if she becomes prime minister, said: 'Banning price rises cannot work because companies need to be able to cover their costs.'
He said Labour's plan risked following the model in Venezuela, where price controls on basic foods by the socialist government led to shortages and black markets.
He added: 'If you want to see what happens, go to a pure socialist country. They discovered that if you try to keep the prices down there isn't enough supply.'
Mr Redwood pointed out more than 30 energy firms went bust last year as wholesale prices surged while the price cap limited their ability to increase bills, leaving taxpayers to keep them afloat.
Mr Redwood added on Twitter: 'If Labour thinks government can keep prices down by simply passing a law why don't they propose we do that for food, clothes and many other things as well as for energy?
'Try this and end up with empty shelves. The Venezuela model leads to poverty.'
Full story
The Labour leader hailed his 'robust' proposals as he surfaced after a holiday, insisting Britons cannot be left to take the burden of spiralling prices.
He is calling for the energy price cap to be kept at its current level of £1,971 rather than letting it rise to £3,500 as expected in the autumn, and even higher next year.
Labour said the £29billion policy is fully funded, would save every household around £1,000 and even cut inflation. It would be paid for by widening the scope of the windfall tax on oil and gas producers and backdating it from May to January.
But senior Tories have branded the idea unworkable as energy firms are facing higher wholesale prices and could go bust if they are not allowed to pass on costs.
The respected IFS think-tank also raised concerns that the policy would need to be in place for at least a year, and could end up costing as much as the huge furlough scheme during Covid - around £70billion. It cautioned that the downward effect on inflation would be an 'illusion' because the level would simply surge again when the government stepped back.
In interviews this morning, Sir Keir insisted he was putting forward a 'very strong, robust, costed plan'.
He told BBC Radio 5 Live: 'Millions of people are already struggling with their bills, we all know that across the country and the hikes that are expected for this October….from a price cap of just under about £2,000 to £3,500 and then £4,200 and millions of people, millions of families are saying 'I just can't afford that'.
'We have a choice and this is really the political choice of the day. We either allow oil and gas companies to go on making huge profits which is what's happening at the moment or we do something about it.
'We the Labour Party have said, we'll do something about it. We will stop those price rises and we will extend the windfall tax on the profits that the oil and gas companies didn't expect to make. So we've got a very strong, robust, costed plan here which will stop those rises this autumn.
'It has an additional benefit which is really important, which is because energy prices are a real driver of inflation, this also makes sure that we can reduce inflation from what might even be 13 per cent down to about 9 per cent.'
Sir Keir said one of the main benefits of the scheme was that it brings down inflation, reducing the bill for servicing government debt which is linked to price rises.
'We've got to grip it because at the moment what we've got is two Tory leadership candidates who are fighting each other in a sort of internal battle, where their main argument seem to be about how awful their record in Government has been and a Prime Minister who's a lame duck because he's acknowledged there's a problem with energy bills, but says 'I'm not going to do anything about it'.'
However, IFS director Paul Johnson said that was an 'illusion' because inflation will go up more at the end of the policy.
He said Labour's costing of £30billion for six months was likely to be unrealistic as the policy would need to stay in place for a year to keep bills in check.
'You're looking at the cost of furlough... that is a very expensive scheme. Of course what is does achieve is to protect everyone entirely,' he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
Asked about the IFS reservations, Sir Keir said Mr Johnson was not disputing that the plan would reduce inflation.
'Of course what he's rightly saying is what happens after April matters because you have to maintain measures to reduce inflation,' he said.
'Of course we have to do that in April when we see the circumstances, but what he's not suggesting is that we're wrong when we say that our plan will reduce inflation.'
Sir Keir also fended off criticism from the Left of his own party that he has abandoned the commitment to nationalisation.
He told BBC Breakfast: 'The choice we've made in our plan is that every single penny that is needed for this plan will go directly to reducing the bills of families up and down the country.
'If you go down the nationalisation route, then money has to spent on compensating shareholders and I think in an emergency like this, a national emergency where people are struggling to pay their bills, I think that the right choice is for every single penny to go to reducing those bills.
'Which is why we've gone for this across the board, freeze the prices, raise the money for that through the oil and gas companies who've made more profit than they were expecting and of course the additional benefit of our plan is that it reduces inflation by up to 4 per cent.'
Energy minister Greg Hands told the BBC yesterday: 'We've got to remember energy price rises are set globally, they're driven by Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
'We would have to find a way to compensate people [for] effectively trying to abolish that price rise, and that would inevitably lead to higher taxes.
'So I think we have to be a little bit careful. Labour's seemingly magical solution to just wish it all away – that will have consequences.'
Former minister Sir John Redwood, expected to be one of Liz Truss's economics advisers if she becomes prime minister, said: 'Banning price rises cannot work because companies need to be able to cover their costs.'
He said Labour's plan risked following the model in Venezuela, where price controls on basic foods by the socialist government led to shortages and black markets.
He added: 'If you want to see what happens, go to a pure socialist country. They discovered that if you try to keep the prices down there isn't enough supply.'
Mr Redwood pointed out more than 30 energy firms went bust last year as wholesale prices surged while the price cap limited their ability to increase bills, leaving taxpayers to keep them afloat.
Mr Redwood added on Twitter: 'If Labour thinks government can keep prices down by simply passing a law why don't they propose we do that for food, clothes and many other things as well as for energy?
'Try this and end up with empty shelves. The Venezuela model leads to poverty.'
Full story
7) Interview with Benny Peiser on the impact and implications of the energy crisis on European and international climate politics
ABC - Against the voice, 13 August 202
What does increased geo-political tensions mean for an international agreement on carbon reduction and is the renewable energy transition agenda in sync with global political and economic reality?
Tom Switzer's interview with Benny Peiser: Director, Net Zero Watch
Full interview here (from 25:30min)
8) Struan Stevenson: Energy crisis might give Liz Truss her Thatcher moment… but she won’t like it
The Sunday Post, 14 August 2022
As Liz Truss parades around the UK pretending to be the next Margaret Thatcher, the parallels with the Thatcher era may be closer than she thinks.
If, as seems likely, Truss does become our next prime minister, she would be well advised to study the history of the poll tax riots which ultimately led to Thatcher’s downfall.
With dire warnings that average household energy bills are going to reach £5,000 early next year, the legacy of the poll tax “can’t pay, won’t pay” campaign is looming large.
The poll tax was introduced by the Thatcher government as a way of funding local councils. It was supposed to replace the rating system. Domestic rates were basically a tax on the value of your home and were deeply unpopular with Conservative voters because they targeted properties rather than people.
Thatcher decided to replace the rates with a flat-rate, per capita charge that would be levied on every adult and set by local councils. It was immediately labelled as a way of saving money for the rich and hammering the poor.
Thatcher’s second big mistake was to order the poll tax to be introduced first in Scotland, ironically on April Fool’s Day in 1989, and then in England and Wales a year later. This led to accusations that Scotland was being used as a guinea pig.
Things came to a head in January 1990, when Strathclyde Regional Council, the biggest local authority in Scotland, issued 250,000 summary warrants to Scots who had refused to pay the hated poll tax.
Those who ignored the warrants faced sheriffs’ officers arriving at their homes and seizing furniture and belongings to auction in lieu of the outstanding debt. It caused outrage.
On March 31, 1990, the day before the poll tax was due to be introduced in England and Wales, a massive protest march was held in London. It attracted an astonishing 250,000 people, many of whom had been bussed in from around the country.
The police struggled to control the huge crowd and inevitably, clashes broke out. Mounted riot police charged into the overcrowded Trafalgar Square and the riot escalated. Shop windows were smashed, goods were looted, cars were overturned, fires broke out and there were mass arrests – 113 people were injured.
It was the beginning of the end for the poll tax and for Thatcher.
With new forecasts that the price cap for household energy bills will reach £5,000 by April, the potential for mass non-payment campaigns, like the poll tax protests, have become a manifest reality.
Already a Don’t Pay UK campaign has been set up, calling for a mass payment strike and urging protesters to cancel their direct debits on October 1. The group claims to have the support of over 100,000 people so far.
Thatcher famously said: “The wisdom of hindsight, so useful to historians and indeed to authors of memoirs, is sadly denied to practicing politicians”. Truss should take note.
Struan Stevenson, a former MEP, is a writer and international lecturer on the Middle East
9) David Frost: Tories can no longer avoid telling hard truths about the route out of this mess
The Daily Telegraph, 12 August 2022
Our energy policy has been criminally negligent. We face blackouts, hideous business-crushing costs, and people shivering and dying in the cold. The people responsible for this are as culpable as the “guilty men” whose policies ended up with German tanks at the Channel coast in 1940. They must be swept away from Day One.
A few months back I wandered into the second-hand bookshop of a National Trust property. It confounded the modern reputation of the Trust by having on display a copy of Let our Children Grow Tall, a collection of Margaret Thatcher’s speeches from the late 1970s. They are of remarkable depth and length. Although we can well do without most aspects of the 1970s in our modern politics, it would be good to recover the ability to set out political ideas in a non-trivial way.
I do not suggest that these speeches should be the basis for a modern political programme nearly 50 years later. As Mrs Thatcher herself said: “Every generation must restate its values in the light of present challenges and of past experience.” What they do show, however, is the effort she felt she needed to put into explaining her ideas. In retrospect, it seems obvious that by the late 1970s the post-war consensus had run out of road. It wasn’t so clear at the time. The consensus set the intellectual climate. Deviation from it took you off the policy reservation. Critics were quickly stigmatised as shallow, intellectually not up to the job or even dangerous.
The same is true today. For 20 years or more, political discourse has been dominated by a shared set of ideas: that the state should guide life through both tax and regulation; that economics is best done by technocrats, and politics is best done by judges and lawyers; and that it is the government’s job to take care of everything traditionally considered important in life so that we are insulated from risk and change.
On top of this come the beliefs that the nation state doesn’t matter, that a passport is a flag of convenience not a statement of national identity, and that a country is nothing more than the people who happen to be on its territory at any given moment – whatever their loyalties and however they got there.
I personally find this whole world view – the intellectual world of Gordon Brown, of Davos, the IMF, the European Commission, and virtually everyone who has been in power in Britain in recent years – profoundly depressing. It assumes there is only one way of doing things and that moral autonomy and individual beliefs do not count. Not surprisingly, it reached its apotheosis during the lockdowns.
It can even seemingly survive prolonged contact with reality. Unpoliced borders, a semi-detached Scotland, double-digit inflation, the prospect of energy blackouts, near-zero productivity growth, tax and spend at the highest levels since Clement Attlee – none of this suggests to its proponents that they got anything wrong.
Liz Truss and her team are rightly refusing to be mesmerised by this orthodox wisdom. But the establishment doesn’t like it and moves rapidly to stigmatise heresy.
Suggest that the Bank of England hasn’t got everything right and you will be told, as by one member of the Monetary Policy Committee, Michael Saunders, that “the foundations of the UK monetary policy framework are really important, and best left untouched”. Suggest, as the Attorney General did this week, that judges on the ECHR don’t always get it right, and you will find yourself told by George Peretz QC that you are dealing in “crude civil law vs common law stereotypes that seem to be prevalent in the hard Brexit/anti-ECHR community”.
Criticise the Civil Service, and the former head of the Government Legal Service, Jonathan Jones, will tell you that you are being “crass”, “completely unfair” and “damaging morale and trust”. Suggest that lower taxes help business and you will be told by world-weary economists and commentators that business investment is not affected by business taxation. (Tell that to all the businesses that moved to Ireland in recent years.)
These people will oppose any worthwhile change. It is time to stop listening to them.
That’s because a national emergency is coming. Our energy policy has been criminally negligent. The choice by net zero proponents to rely on renewables and interconnectors, and to run down storage, means we face blackouts, hideous business-crushing costs, and people shivering and dying in the cold. The people responsible for this are as culpable as the “guilty men” whose policies ended up with German tanks at the Channel coast in 1940. They must be swept away from Day One.
We are going to have to take some very unwelcome and expensive decisions to get through the next few months. But it must never happen again. We need to get serious about energy policy. Those who created the old one can’t be involved in the new one.
And this should be a “teachable moment”, to use Barack Obama’s phrase. If she wins, Liz Truss can point to it to illustrate the establishment’s failure and why change is needed.
That will be crucial. She will have no breathing space. She will have to govern straightaway. Like Mrs Thatcher, to bring people with her she will need to devote huge effort to explaining why free-market change is needed. She can’t do that while accepting the presumptions of the ancien régime.
The problem is that lots of people have simply never been exposed to any other ideas. I have had many conversations with people under 40 who clearly have simply never heard free-market arguments. Indeed, they often think they have been living under a free-market regime rather than under a drift to a modern high-tax high-hectoring form of regulatory socialism.
That is our fault. Conservative politicians have simply not set out the arguments in a way that compels attention. Too many are frightened of criticism and instantly back off if questioned.
We need to get back to making a case. The case that countries are stronger where people keep their own money and decide things for themselves. Where they are not dependent on state charity for everything that matters. Where they are expected to develop as individuals and build their communities themselves, not wait for the Government. And where the Government does its job properly – making sure the borders are controlled, the streets policed and the lights stay on.
These things make better countries. People can see that. That’s why the consensus is much more fragile than it looks. Liz, give it a kick and it will come crashing down. Then we can move forward.
10) Greg McLean: Energy ignorance on display in Canada and Germany
National Post, 28 July 2022
While Germany finds itself hostage to Russia, Canada's Liberal government is doubling down on its own ill-considered energy policies
Sixteen months ago, I met with Germany's ambassador to Canada to discuss energy policy - specifically, prophetic warnings about the risk of continued reliance on Russian fuel and the role Canada could play in diversifying Europe's energy supplies. Those issues are even more pronounced today but unfortunately we do not have time - or government policy - on our side.
The meeting was motivated by the German government's interest in Canadian green hydrogen and an indication of a "commitment" to contract for the import of Canadian liquefied natural gas (LNG).
A solidified commercial contract would have been a real impetus for LNG development in Canada, but my take-away was that the "commitment" had more "optionality" than I had understood.
My input to Ambassador Sabine Sparwasser was that approval of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline (bringing more natural gas from Russia) would put her country in a precarious position where a significant portion of their gas would arrive from one, potentially hostile foreign power. I raised the notion of "moral hazard" and the potential outcomes to the economies of Europe if the worst was to unfold.
From a national interest perspective, I pushed on the need to advance the supply of LNG from Canada. If Germany would become a committed buyer of our resource, it would advance development. Of course, while Russian gas from Nord Stream 2 would have been cheaper than LNG from Canada, the price would have been more than made up for by the security and reliability of purchasing from a trusted NATO ally.
This is an illustration of how governments need to consider the long-term outcomes of their short-term narratives.
Germany's policy of "Energiewende" was never viable. Although renewables constitute upward of 50 per cent of Germany's power supply, at other times, it is less than 2.0 per cent. Other sources, such as nuclear and fossil fuels, are needed to ensure reliable baseload power. Energiewende specifically targeted exiting nuclear power production - requiring doubling down on fossil fuels and offshoring their production.
Despite hundreds of billions of euros spent on renewable energy, Germany has become an energyinsecure nation.
When Germany started accepting natural gas from Russia in the '70s, it "committed" to never grow that source to more than 10 per cent of its deliveries. As with "commitment," "never" seems to have multiple meanings. Eighty per cent would be a far cry from 10 per cent. The moral hazard is now obvious.
As a result of the situation Germany has found itself in, the Canadian government has decided to renege on our commitment to impose sanctions on Russia. The return of Russian turbines for the delivery of Russian gas to Germany, and the decision to continue to maintain and repair such turbines, is an about-face that furthers our slide toward irrelevance on the world stage.
Russia will continue to manipulate its flow of natural gas. Our decision to return the turbines emboldens that position. This will lead to the continued flow of European cash to Russia to fund missiles that are destroying Ukraine. Canada is now complicit in this debacle.
At the same time, the Canadian government is doubling down on its own aimless and divisive energy policies, despite the obvious threat to our own energy security. It's a worldwide shame that this charade is being played out at the expense of Ukrainians fighting for their lives and their nation's existence.
Canada's government chose to support a G7 country and NATO ally as it faces energy insecurity of its own design. The fact that we can't deliver needed energy to our allies is our own policy failure. Worse still, the current Canadian government seems oblivious to the consequences: capital flows to a hostile regime; manipulation of resource flow and pricing; Canadian diplomatic irrelevance.
Our friends in Germany may be able to have hot showers this winter, Vladimir Putin willing. But will our friends in Ukraine even have homes? If we are to be seen as a serious country, we need to start making better decisions and stop disregarding the consequences of our energy ignorance.
Greg McLean is the member of Parliament for Calgary Centre and the Conservative Shadow Minister for Natural Resources.
11) Brendan O'Neill: Why eco-alarmists are wrong about almost everything
Spiked, 14 August 2022
The Great Barrier Reef is not dying, and the world is not coming to an end.
So it turns out that reports of the Great Barrier Reef’s death were greatly exaggerated. For years we were told that this glorious coral reef off the coast of Queensland was being slowly strangled by mankind.
The Guardian even published an obituary. It was literally titled ‘The Great Barrier Reef: an obituary’. ‘[The] seeds of the reef’s destruction are well embedded’, it declared. And we all know who was to blame for this ‘destruction’: marauding mankind. It’s always us. Shipping, the transformation of the reef into a tourist hotspot and, of course, Queensland’s evil coal industry have been on a ‘collision course’ with this natural wonder for decades, we were told. ‘Climate change is killing the Great Barrier Reef’ – that was the frank, scary verdict in 2017.
And now? The reef is fine. It’s in better nick than it has been for ages, in fact. The reef’s obituarists focused on the problem of ‘bleaching’. This is where the coral becomes stressed by warmer-than-average waters, responds by expelling the algae that live within it, and then becomes weak and sometimes dies. The coral turns a deathly white, hence the term ‘bleaching’. Huge swathes of the coral in this vast reef system, which stretches for a mind-boggling 1,400 miles, have been bleached in recent decades. And unless ‘climatic conditions are stabilised’, unless mankind reins in his Earth-warming, sea-heating antics, then the rest could be bleached too, we were told.
Only that isn’t what has happened. At all. A new survey of the reef by the Australian Institute of Marine Science reports that coral cover on the reef has recovered spectacularly. In two-thirds of the reef, coral cover is at its highest level since records began, 36 years ago. From newspaper obituaries just a few years ago to good health in 2022 – this reef is the Lazarus of the natural world.
We should remind ourselves just how important reports of the reef’s death were to the climate-change narrative. There were endless fear-stirring headlines about the lethal threat posed by industrious mankind to Earth’s largest coral reef system. Images of the sick white coral were used to boost the eco-sermonising of the elites, to add weight to their narrative about the human impact on the natural world being a wicked and murderous thing. Greenpeace even held an underwater protest in the reef, with a banner saying ‘Coal is killing the reef’. Really? Coal production in Queensland has steadily risen – Queensland produces millions of tonnes of coal every year – and yet the reef’s health has improved. Fake news, Greenpeace?
The ‘somewhat surprising’ news about the reef’s good health – as one newspaper diplomatically describes it – is a very serious blow to the apocalyptic scaremongering of the eco-elites. Of course, as almost every news report has pained itself to point out, the fact that there has been a stunning recovery in coral coverage does not mean there won’t be mass bleaching events in the future. (‘Great Barrier Reef’s record coral cover is good news but climate threat remains’, says the ever-depressive Guardian. Every silver lining has a cloud.) And yet the current recovery of the reef does call into question the catastrophism of the green worldview, the tales of terminal decline that eco-hysterics constantly bombard us with. Humanity, as they never tire of reminding us, is continuing to produce and pollute and generally be a pox on the planet, and yet, at the very same time, the reef’s health has improved.
Maybe we aren’t the mass murderer of nature after all?
The death of the Great Barrier Reef is only the latest eco-apocalypse that has failed to materialise. For decades our hairshirt elites have been forecasting death and doom on a global scale, and none of it has happened. Remember ‘global cooling’, the 1970s idea that Earth was headed for a new Ice Age? Even the CIA predicted ‘detrimental global climate change’, with ‘more snow [and] cold spells’. It was bunkum, of course, as this week’s heatwave attests.
‘The Ice Age that never happened’, as one headline put it a few years ago. Then there was the ‘population bomb’, the feverish belief that so many pesky humans were being born that we wouldn’t be able to feed them all, another 1970s panic. This neo-Malthusian nonsense also fell apart upon contact with reality. There are almost eight billion souls on Earth right now – compared with less than four billion in 1970 – and our revolutionised, fertiliser-rich system of agriculture means we can sustain them all.
My 1980s generation will remember scary school discussions about ‘acid rain’ – another apocalyptic scenario that came and went. ‘Deforestation’ was another oft-told eco-horror story. Mankind is killing the world’s forests, we were told. In truth we’re living in a period of ‘forest gains’. Even forest loss in the tropics is being ‘offset by gains elsewhere’. And how about global greening? Since 1982, 618,000 square kilometres of extra green leaves have been added to the planet each year. That’s the equivalent to three Great Britains a year. Greenery, like the Great Barrier Reef, is doing just fine.
Foretellings of the End of Days are collapsing all the time.
We have ‘five years to save the world’, said the Ecologist – in 2007. We have ‘10 years to save the world’, said the UN – in 1989. We have ‘four years to save the world’, said NASA scientist and climate expert Jim Hansen – in 2009. The end of the world just never comes. And yet instead of reflecting on the holes in their fact-lite apocalypticism, the Poundshop Nostradamuses simply tweak the date of doom. So in 2018 we were told that actually we have 12 years to save the world. Anyone fancy getting together in 2030 to celebrate yet another failed apocalypse? We could do it at the coral-rich Great Barrier Reef.
Eco-alarmists aren’t only wrong about the death of Earth – they’re wrong about life on Earth right now. The message they constantly send is that everything is dire. The big, disgusting ‘human footprint’ on poor Mother Earth is causing heatwaves and storms and death on an unprecedented scale, they say. It is all so overblown. We are actually safer from nature’s violent whims than we have ever been. The number of people dying in natural calamities fell from around 500,000 a year in the 1920s to 14,000 in 2020. That’s a 96 per cent drop. The percentage of human beings living in poverty fell from more than 80 per cent at the start of the 19th century to less than 20 per cent in the 2010s. Deaths from disease and war have also declined dramatically in the modern era. Child labour, too. Life expectancy, meanwhile, has shot up. In Europe, it went from 34 years to 79 years between 1770 and 2019. That is, at the exact time that mankind was having industrial revolutions and allegedly being a plague on the planet, the health and prospects of humanity improved in a way our ancestors could only have dreamed of. It’s almost as if modernity is good for us.
We must never let the anti-industrial rage of the elites blind us to how brilliant our impact on the planet has been. We haven’t destroyed Earth – we have tamed it and civilised it; we have unlocked its secrets; we have transformed this wild and unpredictable ball in space into a planet that can happily host eight billion people, and more besides. Occasionally bleached coral is a very small price to pay for the liberation of humanity from death and drudgery, wouldn’t you say?
Of course things are far from perfect. We’re heading into a serious economic and energy crisis. It will hit the working classes in the West and the people of the South hardest of all. But this crisis is not an indictment of modern human society. On the contrary, it’s an indictment of the elites’ turn against modern human society. Decades of eco-doom-mongering, of fury against fossil fuels, of constant demands for a slowing down of economic growth and for a violent shrinking of the ‘human footprint’, have unquestionably helped to drag us into this worrying new reality of energy crisis and shortages. It isn’t the ‘human impact’ on the planet we should be worried about – it’s the establishment’s hostility to the ‘human impact’ on the planet. Mastery of nature is essential if we are to continue improving human life. It will also help us to look after nature itself, including its greatest wonders like the Great Barrier Reef.
With dire warnings that average household energy bills are going to reach £5,000 early next year, the legacy of the poll tax “can’t pay, won’t pay” campaign is looming large.
The poll tax was introduced by the Thatcher government as a way of funding local councils. It was supposed to replace the rating system. Domestic rates were basically a tax on the value of your home and were deeply unpopular with Conservative voters because they targeted properties rather than people.
Thatcher decided to replace the rates with a flat-rate, per capita charge that would be levied on every adult and set by local councils. It was immediately labelled as a way of saving money for the rich and hammering the poor.
Thatcher’s second big mistake was to order the poll tax to be introduced first in Scotland, ironically on April Fool’s Day in 1989, and then in England and Wales a year later. This led to accusations that Scotland was being used as a guinea pig.
Things came to a head in January 1990, when Strathclyde Regional Council, the biggest local authority in Scotland, issued 250,000 summary warrants to Scots who had refused to pay the hated poll tax.
Those who ignored the warrants faced sheriffs’ officers arriving at their homes and seizing furniture and belongings to auction in lieu of the outstanding debt. It caused outrage.
On March 31, 1990, the day before the poll tax was due to be introduced in England and Wales, a massive protest march was held in London. It attracted an astonishing 250,000 people, many of whom had been bussed in from around the country.
The police struggled to control the huge crowd and inevitably, clashes broke out. Mounted riot police charged into the overcrowded Trafalgar Square and the riot escalated. Shop windows were smashed, goods were looted, cars were overturned, fires broke out and there were mass arrests – 113 people were injured.
It was the beginning of the end for the poll tax and for Thatcher.
With new forecasts that the price cap for household energy bills will reach £5,000 by April, the potential for mass non-payment campaigns, like the poll tax protests, have become a manifest reality.
Already a Don’t Pay UK campaign has been set up, calling for a mass payment strike and urging protesters to cancel their direct debits on October 1. The group claims to have the support of over 100,000 people so far.
Thatcher famously said: “The wisdom of hindsight, so useful to historians and indeed to authors of memoirs, is sadly denied to practicing politicians”. Truss should take note.
Struan Stevenson, a former MEP, is a writer and international lecturer on the Middle East
9) David Frost: Tories can no longer avoid telling hard truths about the route out of this mess
The Daily Telegraph, 12 August 2022
Our energy policy has been criminally negligent. We face blackouts, hideous business-crushing costs, and people shivering and dying in the cold. The people responsible for this are as culpable as the “guilty men” whose policies ended up with German tanks at the Channel coast in 1940. They must be swept away from Day One.
A few months back I wandered into the second-hand bookshop of a National Trust property. It confounded the modern reputation of the Trust by having on display a copy of Let our Children Grow Tall, a collection of Margaret Thatcher’s speeches from the late 1970s. They are of remarkable depth and length. Although we can well do without most aspects of the 1970s in our modern politics, it would be good to recover the ability to set out political ideas in a non-trivial way.
I do not suggest that these speeches should be the basis for a modern political programme nearly 50 years later. As Mrs Thatcher herself said: “Every generation must restate its values in the light of present challenges and of past experience.” What they do show, however, is the effort she felt she needed to put into explaining her ideas. In retrospect, it seems obvious that by the late 1970s the post-war consensus had run out of road. It wasn’t so clear at the time. The consensus set the intellectual climate. Deviation from it took you off the policy reservation. Critics were quickly stigmatised as shallow, intellectually not up to the job or even dangerous.
The same is true today. For 20 years or more, political discourse has been dominated by a shared set of ideas: that the state should guide life through both tax and regulation; that economics is best done by technocrats, and politics is best done by judges and lawyers; and that it is the government’s job to take care of everything traditionally considered important in life so that we are insulated from risk and change.
On top of this come the beliefs that the nation state doesn’t matter, that a passport is a flag of convenience not a statement of national identity, and that a country is nothing more than the people who happen to be on its territory at any given moment – whatever their loyalties and however they got there.
I personally find this whole world view – the intellectual world of Gordon Brown, of Davos, the IMF, the European Commission, and virtually everyone who has been in power in Britain in recent years – profoundly depressing. It assumes there is only one way of doing things and that moral autonomy and individual beliefs do not count. Not surprisingly, it reached its apotheosis during the lockdowns.
It can even seemingly survive prolonged contact with reality. Unpoliced borders, a semi-detached Scotland, double-digit inflation, the prospect of energy blackouts, near-zero productivity growth, tax and spend at the highest levels since Clement Attlee – none of this suggests to its proponents that they got anything wrong.
Liz Truss and her team are rightly refusing to be mesmerised by this orthodox wisdom. But the establishment doesn’t like it and moves rapidly to stigmatise heresy.
Suggest that the Bank of England hasn’t got everything right and you will be told, as by one member of the Monetary Policy Committee, Michael Saunders, that “the foundations of the UK monetary policy framework are really important, and best left untouched”. Suggest, as the Attorney General did this week, that judges on the ECHR don’t always get it right, and you will find yourself told by George Peretz QC that you are dealing in “crude civil law vs common law stereotypes that seem to be prevalent in the hard Brexit/anti-ECHR community”.
Criticise the Civil Service, and the former head of the Government Legal Service, Jonathan Jones, will tell you that you are being “crass”, “completely unfair” and “damaging morale and trust”. Suggest that lower taxes help business and you will be told by world-weary economists and commentators that business investment is not affected by business taxation. (Tell that to all the businesses that moved to Ireland in recent years.)
These people will oppose any worthwhile change. It is time to stop listening to them.
That’s because a national emergency is coming. Our energy policy has been criminally negligent. The choice by net zero proponents to rely on renewables and interconnectors, and to run down storage, means we face blackouts, hideous business-crushing costs, and people shivering and dying in the cold. The people responsible for this are as culpable as the “guilty men” whose policies ended up with German tanks at the Channel coast in 1940. They must be swept away from Day One.
We are going to have to take some very unwelcome and expensive decisions to get through the next few months. But it must never happen again. We need to get serious about energy policy. Those who created the old one can’t be involved in the new one.
And this should be a “teachable moment”, to use Barack Obama’s phrase. If she wins, Liz Truss can point to it to illustrate the establishment’s failure and why change is needed.
That will be crucial. She will have no breathing space. She will have to govern straightaway. Like Mrs Thatcher, to bring people with her she will need to devote huge effort to explaining why free-market change is needed. She can’t do that while accepting the presumptions of the ancien régime.
The problem is that lots of people have simply never been exposed to any other ideas. I have had many conversations with people under 40 who clearly have simply never heard free-market arguments. Indeed, they often think they have been living under a free-market regime rather than under a drift to a modern high-tax high-hectoring form of regulatory socialism.
That is our fault. Conservative politicians have simply not set out the arguments in a way that compels attention. Too many are frightened of criticism and instantly back off if questioned.
We need to get back to making a case. The case that countries are stronger where people keep their own money and decide things for themselves. Where they are not dependent on state charity for everything that matters. Where they are expected to develop as individuals and build their communities themselves, not wait for the Government. And where the Government does its job properly – making sure the borders are controlled, the streets policed and the lights stay on.
These things make better countries. People can see that. That’s why the consensus is much more fragile than it looks. Liz, give it a kick and it will come crashing down. Then we can move forward.
10) Greg McLean: Energy ignorance on display in Canada and Germany
National Post, 28 July 2022
While Germany finds itself hostage to Russia, Canada's Liberal government is doubling down on its own ill-considered energy policies
Sixteen months ago, I met with Germany's ambassador to Canada to discuss energy policy - specifically, prophetic warnings about the risk of continued reliance on Russian fuel and the role Canada could play in diversifying Europe's energy supplies. Those issues are even more pronounced today but unfortunately we do not have time - or government policy - on our side.
The meeting was motivated by the German government's interest in Canadian green hydrogen and an indication of a "commitment" to contract for the import of Canadian liquefied natural gas (LNG).
A solidified commercial contract would have been a real impetus for LNG development in Canada, but my take-away was that the "commitment" had more "optionality" than I had understood.
My input to Ambassador Sabine Sparwasser was that approval of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline (bringing more natural gas from Russia) would put her country in a precarious position where a significant portion of their gas would arrive from one, potentially hostile foreign power. I raised the notion of "moral hazard" and the potential outcomes to the economies of Europe if the worst was to unfold.
From a national interest perspective, I pushed on the need to advance the supply of LNG from Canada. If Germany would become a committed buyer of our resource, it would advance development. Of course, while Russian gas from Nord Stream 2 would have been cheaper than LNG from Canada, the price would have been more than made up for by the security and reliability of purchasing from a trusted NATO ally.
This is an illustration of how governments need to consider the long-term outcomes of their short-term narratives.
Germany's policy of "Energiewende" was never viable. Although renewables constitute upward of 50 per cent of Germany's power supply, at other times, it is less than 2.0 per cent. Other sources, such as nuclear and fossil fuels, are needed to ensure reliable baseload power. Energiewende specifically targeted exiting nuclear power production - requiring doubling down on fossil fuels and offshoring their production.
Despite hundreds of billions of euros spent on renewable energy, Germany has become an energyinsecure nation.
When Germany started accepting natural gas from Russia in the '70s, it "committed" to never grow that source to more than 10 per cent of its deliveries. As with "commitment," "never" seems to have multiple meanings. Eighty per cent would be a far cry from 10 per cent. The moral hazard is now obvious.
As a result of the situation Germany has found itself in, the Canadian government has decided to renege on our commitment to impose sanctions on Russia. The return of Russian turbines for the delivery of Russian gas to Germany, and the decision to continue to maintain and repair such turbines, is an about-face that furthers our slide toward irrelevance on the world stage.
Russia will continue to manipulate its flow of natural gas. Our decision to return the turbines emboldens that position. This will lead to the continued flow of European cash to Russia to fund missiles that are destroying Ukraine. Canada is now complicit in this debacle.
At the same time, the Canadian government is doubling down on its own aimless and divisive energy policies, despite the obvious threat to our own energy security. It's a worldwide shame that this charade is being played out at the expense of Ukrainians fighting for their lives and their nation's existence.
Canada's government chose to support a G7 country and NATO ally as it faces energy insecurity of its own design. The fact that we can't deliver needed energy to our allies is our own policy failure. Worse still, the current Canadian government seems oblivious to the consequences: capital flows to a hostile regime; manipulation of resource flow and pricing; Canadian diplomatic irrelevance.
Our friends in Germany may be able to have hot showers this winter, Vladimir Putin willing. But will our friends in Ukraine even have homes? If we are to be seen as a serious country, we need to start making better decisions and stop disregarding the consequences of our energy ignorance.
Greg McLean is the member of Parliament for Calgary Centre and the Conservative Shadow Minister for Natural Resources.
11) Brendan O'Neill: Why eco-alarmists are wrong about almost everything
Spiked, 14 August 2022
The Great Barrier Reef is not dying, and the world is not coming to an end.
So it turns out that reports of the Great Barrier Reef’s death were greatly exaggerated. For years we were told that this glorious coral reef off the coast of Queensland was being slowly strangled by mankind.
The Guardian even published an obituary. It was literally titled ‘The Great Barrier Reef: an obituary’. ‘[The] seeds of the reef’s destruction are well embedded’, it declared. And we all know who was to blame for this ‘destruction’: marauding mankind. It’s always us. Shipping, the transformation of the reef into a tourist hotspot and, of course, Queensland’s evil coal industry have been on a ‘collision course’ with this natural wonder for decades, we were told. ‘Climate change is killing the Great Barrier Reef’ – that was the frank, scary verdict in 2017.
And now? The reef is fine. It’s in better nick than it has been for ages, in fact. The reef’s obituarists focused on the problem of ‘bleaching’. This is where the coral becomes stressed by warmer-than-average waters, responds by expelling the algae that live within it, and then becomes weak and sometimes dies. The coral turns a deathly white, hence the term ‘bleaching’. Huge swathes of the coral in this vast reef system, which stretches for a mind-boggling 1,400 miles, have been bleached in recent decades. And unless ‘climatic conditions are stabilised’, unless mankind reins in his Earth-warming, sea-heating antics, then the rest could be bleached too, we were told.
Only that isn’t what has happened. At all. A new survey of the reef by the Australian Institute of Marine Science reports that coral cover on the reef has recovered spectacularly. In two-thirds of the reef, coral cover is at its highest level since records began, 36 years ago. From newspaper obituaries just a few years ago to good health in 2022 – this reef is the Lazarus of the natural world.
We should remind ourselves just how important reports of the reef’s death were to the climate-change narrative. There were endless fear-stirring headlines about the lethal threat posed by industrious mankind to Earth’s largest coral reef system. Images of the sick white coral were used to boost the eco-sermonising of the elites, to add weight to their narrative about the human impact on the natural world being a wicked and murderous thing. Greenpeace even held an underwater protest in the reef, with a banner saying ‘Coal is killing the reef’. Really? Coal production in Queensland has steadily risen – Queensland produces millions of tonnes of coal every year – and yet the reef’s health has improved. Fake news, Greenpeace?
The ‘somewhat surprising’ news about the reef’s good health – as one newspaper diplomatically describes it – is a very serious blow to the apocalyptic scaremongering of the eco-elites. Of course, as almost every news report has pained itself to point out, the fact that there has been a stunning recovery in coral coverage does not mean there won’t be mass bleaching events in the future. (‘Great Barrier Reef’s record coral cover is good news but climate threat remains’, says the ever-depressive Guardian. Every silver lining has a cloud.) And yet the current recovery of the reef does call into question the catastrophism of the green worldview, the tales of terminal decline that eco-hysterics constantly bombard us with. Humanity, as they never tire of reminding us, is continuing to produce and pollute and generally be a pox on the planet, and yet, at the very same time, the reef’s health has improved.
Maybe we aren’t the mass murderer of nature after all?
The death of the Great Barrier Reef is only the latest eco-apocalypse that has failed to materialise. For decades our hairshirt elites have been forecasting death and doom on a global scale, and none of it has happened. Remember ‘global cooling’, the 1970s idea that Earth was headed for a new Ice Age? Even the CIA predicted ‘detrimental global climate change’, with ‘more snow [and] cold spells’. It was bunkum, of course, as this week’s heatwave attests.
‘The Ice Age that never happened’, as one headline put it a few years ago. Then there was the ‘population bomb’, the feverish belief that so many pesky humans were being born that we wouldn’t be able to feed them all, another 1970s panic. This neo-Malthusian nonsense also fell apart upon contact with reality. There are almost eight billion souls on Earth right now – compared with less than four billion in 1970 – and our revolutionised, fertiliser-rich system of agriculture means we can sustain them all.
My 1980s generation will remember scary school discussions about ‘acid rain’ – another apocalyptic scenario that came and went. ‘Deforestation’ was another oft-told eco-horror story. Mankind is killing the world’s forests, we were told. In truth we’re living in a period of ‘forest gains’. Even forest loss in the tropics is being ‘offset by gains elsewhere’. And how about global greening? Since 1982, 618,000 square kilometres of extra green leaves have been added to the planet each year. That’s the equivalent to three Great Britains a year. Greenery, like the Great Barrier Reef, is doing just fine.
Foretellings of the End of Days are collapsing all the time.
We have ‘five years to save the world’, said the Ecologist – in 2007. We have ‘10 years to save the world’, said the UN – in 1989. We have ‘four years to save the world’, said NASA scientist and climate expert Jim Hansen – in 2009. The end of the world just never comes. And yet instead of reflecting on the holes in their fact-lite apocalypticism, the Poundshop Nostradamuses simply tweak the date of doom. So in 2018 we were told that actually we have 12 years to save the world. Anyone fancy getting together in 2030 to celebrate yet another failed apocalypse? We could do it at the coral-rich Great Barrier Reef.
Eco-alarmists aren’t only wrong about the death of Earth – they’re wrong about life on Earth right now. The message they constantly send is that everything is dire. The big, disgusting ‘human footprint’ on poor Mother Earth is causing heatwaves and storms and death on an unprecedented scale, they say. It is all so overblown. We are actually safer from nature’s violent whims than we have ever been. The number of people dying in natural calamities fell from around 500,000 a year in the 1920s to 14,000 in 2020. That’s a 96 per cent drop. The percentage of human beings living in poverty fell from more than 80 per cent at the start of the 19th century to less than 20 per cent in the 2010s. Deaths from disease and war have also declined dramatically in the modern era. Child labour, too. Life expectancy, meanwhile, has shot up. In Europe, it went from 34 years to 79 years between 1770 and 2019. That is, at the exact time that mankind was having industrial revolutions and allegedly being a plague on the planet, the health and prospects of humanity improved in a way our ancestors could only have dreamed of. It’s almost as if modernity is good for us.
We must never let the anti-industrial rage of the elites blind us to how brilliant our impact on the planet has been. We haven’t destroyed Earth – we have tamed it and civilised it; we have unlocked its secrets; we have transformed this wild and unpredictable ball in space into a planet that can happily host eight billion people, and more besides. Occasionally bleached coral is a very small price to pay for the liberation of humanity from death and drudgery, wouldn’t you say?
Of course things are far from perfect. We’re heading into a serious economic and energy crisis. It will hit the working classes in the West and the people of the South hardest of all. But this crisis is not an indictment of modern human society. On the contrary, it’s an indictment of the elites’ turn against modern human society. Decades of eco-doom-mongering, of fury against fossil fuels, of constant demands for a slowing down of economic growth and for a violent shrinking of the ‘human footprint’, have unquestionably helped to drag us into this worrying new reality of energy crisis and shortages. It isn’t the ‘human impact’ on the planet we should be worried about – it’s the establishment’s hostility to the ‘human impact’ on the planet. Mastery of nature is essential if we are to continue improving human life. It will also help us to look after nature itself, including its greatest wonders like the Great Barrier Reef.
12) And finally: Climate virtuoso Europe destroys Oder river
Spectator Australia, 15 August 2022
How is it that companies have their carbon emissions monitored continuously, but a major chemical spill can destroy an entire river system and neither the Polish or German governments have a clue how it happened, where it came from, what it is, or who is responsible?
Fifty years ago, environmentally conscious Westerners were worried about the pollution that often accompanies the trappings of civilisation.
Rubbish is a consequence of existence that is common to all lifeforms, whether it be piles of bird shit accumulating beneath swallow nests, the sprawling dumps on the outskirts of cities, or the creation of atmospheric oxygen that accompanied the rise of photosynthetic life that plunged the Earth into a near-fatal ice age.
We used to class the reduction of pollution as the most important way to clean up the planet for all living things. This was a worthwhile goal.
Since the creation of the Climate Change ‘carbon is evil’ narrative perpetrated by those organisations and corporations that profit from the sale of ‘solutions’ or from public money poured into studying the catastrophe, pollution has been largely ignored. It is far easier for governments to raise taxes and claim they are ‘saving the planet’ as their coffers fill rather than getting out and policing waste.
While renewables mining and production creates a continuous source of toxic waste, rarely acknowledged, climate virtuosos in Europe this week have been accused of overseeing an environmental disaster in the Oder river.
The Oder river is a significant waterway that runs through the Czech Republic, Germany, and Poland before flowing into the Szczecin Lagoon and then out into other rivers until it ends up in the Baltic Sea.
Urgent warnings have been issued advising residents to stay away from the water after the river’s banks began to fill with dead fish. Locals have reported that the die-off began in late July, with German environmental officials complaining to Polish authorities that they were not warned about the issue soon enough.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki admitted the government thought the dead fish collecting around riverside Polish communities was a local problem. It is clear that this is no longer the case, with Morawiecki saying that the ‘scale of the disaster is very large, sufficiently large to say that the Oder will need years to recover its natural state’ – possibly longer, given no one is sure about the extent of the damage.
‘Probably enormous quantities of chemical waste was dumped into the river in full knowledge of the risk and consequences.’
A probe has been launched by Germany’s Environment Minister as the situation continues to worsen.
‘I am deeply shocked… I have the feeling that I’m seeing decades of work lying in ruins here. I see our livelihood, the water – that’s our life. It’s just the tip of the iceberg,’ added Michael Tautenhahn, Deputy Chief of Germany’s Lower Oder Valley National Park. He noted that fish were not the only victims of the toxic spill, with mussels, plants, and the animals that feed on them also perishing.
Collection nets have been put up to capture the dead fish and clean them out of the river so that they do not rot and make the situation worse. Volunteers are assisting authorities.
Original fears that high levels of mercury were to blame have been put aside for the moment after tests failed to find the heavy metal. They did, however, discover elevated levels of salinity. It is still unclear what actually killed the fish.
A $310,000 reward has been issued by Poland’s Interior Minister, Mariusz Kamiński, for anyone that comes forward with information that may assist authorities in tracking down the source of the tragedy.
At the moment, the only clue to the disaster is the presumption that a synthetic chemical substance has entered the river in large quantities and shocked the system.
How is it that companies have their carbon emissions monitored continuously, but a major chemical spill can destroy an entire river system and neither the Polish or German governments have a clue how it happened, where it came from, what it is, or who is responsible?
One thing is clear, in the age of climate alarmism, it is pollution – not carbon emissions – that pose the greatest threat to our ecosystems.
Spectator Australia, 15 August 2022
How is it that companies have their carbon emissions monitored continuously, but a major chemical spill can destroy an entire river system and neither the Polish or German governments have a clue how it happened, where it came from, what it is, or who is responsible?
Fifty years ago, environmentally conscious Westerners were worried about the pollution that often accompanies the trappings of civilisation.
Rubbish is a consequence of existence that is common to all lifeforms, whether it be piles of bird shit accumulating beneath swallow nests, the sprawling dumps on the outskirts of cities, or the creation of atmospheric oxygen that accompanied the rise of photosynthetic life that plunged the Earth into a near-fatal ice age.
We used to class the reduction of pollution as the most important way to clean up the planet for all living things. This was a worthwhile goal.
Since the creation of the Climate Change ‘carbon is evil’ narrative perpetrated by those organisations and corporations that profit from the sale of ‘solutions’ or from public money poured into studying the catastrophe, pollution has been largely ignored. It is far easier for governments to raise taxes and claim they are ‘saving the planet’ as their coffers fill rather than getting out and policing waste.
While renewables mining and production creates a continuous source of toxic waste, rarely acknowledged, climate virtuosos in Europe this week have been accused of overseeing an environmental disaster in the Oder river.
The Oder river is a significant waterway that runs through the Czech Republic, Germany, and Poland before flowing into the Szczecin Lagoon and then out into other rivers until it ends up in the Baltic Sea.
Urgent warnings have been issued advising residents to stay away from the water after the river’s banks began to fill with dead fish. Locals have reported that the die-off began in late July, with German environmental officials complaining to Polish authorities that they were not warned about the issue soon enough.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki admitted the government thought the dead fish collecting around riverside Polish communities was a local problem. It is clear that this is no longer the case, with Morawiecki saying that the ‘scale of the disaster is very large, sufficiently large to say that the Oder will need years to recover its natural state’ – possibly longer, given no one is sure about the extent of the damage.
‘Probably enormous quantities of chemical waste was dumped into the river in full knowledge of the risk and consequences.’
A probe has been launched by Germany’s Environment Minister as the situation continues to worsen.
‘I am deeply shocked… I have the feeling that I’m seeing decades of work lying in ruins here. I see our livelihood, the water – that’s our life. It’s just the tip of the iceberg,’ added Michael Tautenhahn, Deputy Chief of Germany’s Lower Oder Valley National Park. He noted that fish were not the only victims of the toxic spill, with mussels, plants, and the animals that feed on them also perishing.
Collection nets have been put up to capture the dead fish and clean them out of the river so that they do not rot and make the situation worse. Volunteers are assisting authorities.
Original fears that high levels of mercury were to blame have been put aside for the moment after tests failed to find the heavy metal. They did, however, discover elevated levels of salinity. It is still unclear what actually killed the fish.
A $310,000 reward has been issued by Poland’s Interior Minister, Mariusz Kamiński, for anyone that comes forward with information that may assist authorities in tracking down the source of the tragedy.
At the moment, the only clue to the disaster is the presumption that a synthetic chemical substance has entered the river in large quantities and shocked the system.
How is it that companies have their carbon emissions monitored continuously, but a major chemical spill can destroy an entire river system and neither the Polish or German governments have a clue how it happened, where it came from, what it is, or who is responsible?
One thing is clear, in the age of climate alarmism, it is pollution – not carbon emissions – that pose the greatest threat to our ecosystems.
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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