Energy

Thursday

James Lovelock

Why are we so afraid of nuclear power?

The climate change summit in Glasgow will have one important part of the discussion missing: the role of nuclear power. It seems the government is in no mood for a discussion with the nuclear industry — every one of its applications to exhibit at the COP26 summit has been rejected. That’s a shame, because there are plenty of myths to be addressed. We could discuss the lessons from the plant at Fukushima, seriously harmed by a tsunami in March 2011. Sometime later, two of the reactors overheated, burst and released a small quantity of radioactive material into the environment. At the time of this event, my wife Sandy and I

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: How to feed the world

Doom and gloom Sir: The depressing article by Tom Woodman (‘You must be kidding’, 16 October) confirms my growing fears about the damage being wrought by the promoters of apocalyptic climate change, which has become a dangerous cult with alarming echoes of millenarian doom which has stretched through many previous centuries. While sensible care for the environment is a good thing, the descriptions of a frightening future of the imminent end of the world through drought, flood and fire now imbues every aspect of education and politics. Constantly bombarding young people with the news that the end of the world is nigh has led many of them into completely unnecessary

The Spectator

The government’s net zero strategy doesn’t add up

The commitment to reach ‘net zero’ emissions by 2050 is the most expensive government proposal in modern history. Yet it was rushed through parliament with minimal debate or scrutiny, thanks to a last-minute pledge by Theresa May in 2019, weeks before she left office. She had no credible plan, just a lofty ambition without costings. It has taken the government two-and-a-half years to come up with a proposal — and it is not convincing. The Net Zero Strategy document published this week opens with the Prime Minister’s trademark optimism. ‘We can build back greener, without so much as a hair shirt in sight,’ he writes. ‘In 2050, we will still

Tuesday

Ross Clark

This heat pump scheme is a bung to the rich

Who does the government think will be the 90,000 lucky people who succeed in pocketing £5,000 grants to replace their gas boilers with heat pumps? Just-about-managing homeowners in ‘Red Wall’ seats who strained every sinew to buy a draughty two up, two down – or well-off homeowners with nice period houses, lots of capital and three cars on the drive? Here’s a little clue: even taking into account the £5,000 grant it will still cost upwards of £5,000 to install the heat pump itself, plus another £10,000 for insulation and to install larger radiators – so it is really not an option for the first group. As for the second,

Thursday

James Forsyth

Why Covid means the big state is back

History suggests that when the state expands in a crisis, it doesn’t go back to its pre-crisis level once the emergency is over. After the first world war, the Lloyd George government extended unemployment insurance to most of the workforce, fixed wages for farm workers and introduced rent controls. The second world war led to Attlee’s nationalisations, along with the creation of the NHS and the modern welfare state. In the magazine this week I ask if Covid will lead to a permanently bigger state. There is another danger in all this intervention: can the country afford it? Last year, state spending exceeded 50 per cent of GDP for the first time

Monday

Katy Balls

Why the Treasury shot down Kwasi Kwarteng’s energy crisis response

As Boris Johnson’s holiday in Marbella gets underway, back home his ministers are making headlines for infighting following a hostile briefing from the Treasury. The stark rise in energy prices has led industry leaders to warn that some UK factories are at risk of closure within days unless the government steps in to help with spiralling fuel costs. But there appears to be little unity among ministers as to the right response.  In a Sunday media round, Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng spoke of the steps he was taking to try to ease the pressure on businesses. Kwarteng told Sky News:  The personal rebuke points to simmering tensions between the two sides ‘What

Thursday

Matt Ridley

China is using the climate as a bargaining chip

China’s President Xi Jinping has apparently not yet decided whether to travel to Glasgow next month for the big climate conference known as COP26. That is no doubt partly because he’s heard about the weather in Glasgow in November, and partly because he knows the whole thing will be a waste of his time. After all, the fact that it is the 26th such meeting and none of the previous 25 solved the problem they set out to solve suggests the odds are that the event will be the flop on the Clyde. But another reason he is hesitating was stated pretty explicitly by his Foreign Minister, Wang Yi: ‘Climate

Thursday

Jeremy Paxman

There’s one upside to having Parkinson’s disease

I am just back from my final salmon fishing trip of the year. I have never had a worse season and have hardly cast a line. This autumn’s almost unprecedented sunshine has been terrible for fishing; the river Tweed had been reduced to a dribble, through which even Alex Salmond could easily lead an invasion force from Scotland to England while wearing a three-piece suit. I returned to find a letter from Salmon & Trout Conservation lying on the mat. It is bizarre that the only friends these fish have are those who want to stick a hook in them. The chief executive sounded at his wits’ end as he

Tuesday

Annabel Denham

Why didn’t we listen to the free marketeers?

Economic liberals may feel vindicated by events of the past fortnight. It turns out energy price caps, limits on immigration, over reliance on wind power and IR35 – the taxman’s crackdown on contractors – are all bad ideas, just as they had forewarned. Those same free marketeers may experience a strong temptation to enjoy the schadenfreude. In 2017, some insisted that the only good argument for energy price caps was the Leninist principle of ‘the worse, the better,’ as the move would bring forward the day when the entire policy collapsed. But governments bought into the baseless narrative propagated at the time that energy companies were greedy, price gouging profiteers, and

Friday

Robert Peston

Could the squeeze on living standards bring down Boris?

There is about to be a two-phase onslaught on the living standards of those on low-to-middling incomes. On 1 October the energy price cap, for dual fuel, rises from £1,150 to £1,277. This is a rise of 11 per cent, at a time when furlough is ending and just a few days before the £1,000 a year uplift to Universal Credit is removed (which presumably Boris Johnson will not be swanking about in his big speech to Tory conference). That’s the first hit to living standards. There’ll then be a gradual further erosion of living standards with rising food inflation (of around five per cent, as per what Tesco’s chairman John

Thursday

The Spectator

Which countries have the highest energy bills?

Seeds of change The Chelsea Flower Show opened in autumn for the first time, delayed thanks to the pandemic. The show has been cancelled before due to the world wars — during the second world war the site was used for an anti-aircraft gun emplacement. But it wasn’t always held in Chelsea. It began as the Royal Horticultural Society show in Chiswick, held from 1827 onwards. It moved to Kensington Gardens in 1861 when rival flower shows were attracting visitors away. In 1888 it moved to Temple Gardens, between Fleet Street and the Thames. It was first held in Chelsea — in a single marquee — in 1913. Highly charged

The Spectator

How the Tories have fuelled Britain’s energy crisis

Britain is caught in an energy crisis of the government’s own making. It is true that gas prices have spiked all over the world — but Britain is suffering more than most. Energy suppliers are going out of business, thanks to the government’s price cap. Even fertiliser companies are going bust, with serious knock-on effects for the food industry: the British Meat Processors Association says shortages could hit within a fortnight. The trigger for this crisis has been the sudden surge in demand for gas as the global economy recovers from the Covid lockdowns. Gas prices have doubled in the United States, for example. In Britain, however, prices are five

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Is government preparing to shake the magic money tree again?

Will my bath water still be hot by Christmas? That’s not a question I’d normally feel a need to share with you, but shortly after this morning’s ablutions I read that Bulb Energy — the UK’s sixth-biggest energy supplier with 1.7 million customers, including me — ‘is seeking a bailout to stay afloat amid surging wholesale gas prices’. The spike in the global gas-price graph is extraordinary, up 250 per cent since the start of 2021 and steeper in August. It has many causes beyond our shores, including depletion of stocks last winter, restricted supplies from Russia, hurricane-hit US refineries and increased Asian demand post-Covid. But as this column has

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Gas prices soar, cabinet reshuffled and a green light for travel

Home To prevent a shortage of meat, which relies on carbon dioxide in its packaging, the government gave millions of taxpayers’ money to an American company to reopen a fertiliser works at Stockton, Co. Durham, that produces the gas as a by-product. The plant had been shut down because of a rise in wholesale gas prices caused by calm weather preventing rival wind-energy production, a fire at an interconnector reducing electricity supplies from France, and Russia putting up the price of its gas exports. Gas-supply companies began to go bust because the government price-cap prevented them from charging as much as they paid for gas. There was clamour for money

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The legacy of Stephen Toope

Stephen Toope, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, has begun this academic year by announcing it will be his last in the post. Professor Toope says, no doubt truthfully, that he wants to see more of his Canadian family, dissevered from him by Covid. But I think it reasonable to relate his departure to wider issues. When he arrived in 2017, the ‘Golden Era’ of UK/Chinese relations still, in theory, existed. Cambridge uncritically welcomed Chinese government and business participation. In 2019, speaking in China, Professor Toope hailed the China Development Forum’s ‘Greater Opening Up for Win-Win Cooperation’ and praised President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative. A preface composed in his name

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Is this Boris’s ‘Crisis, what crisis?’ moment?

Will it turn out to be Boris Johnson’s Jim Callaghan moment? Briefing reporters on his plane to the US on Sunday, the current PM tried to play down the energy crisis, saying:  ‘It’s like everybody going back to put the kettle on at the end of a TV programme, you’re seeing huge stresses on the world supply systems.’  The gas price spike would be over just as soon as it occurred, he implied, and was caused by nothing more than the global economy rebounding after many months on the Covid couch. It all had faint overtones of the moment during the Winter of Discontent 42 years ago when the then

Tuesday

Robert Peston

We’ll all pay the price for reckless energy firms’ gambling

You know that mate of yours who is always boasting they pay way less for energy than you because they’re constantly surfing for the best deal on price comparison websites? Well they are still going to have the last laugh, even though the energy company that supplied them is going bust. That is because the energy secretary Kwasi Kwarteng promised today that he would protect consumers and keep the official cap on prices, which means that the amount your mate pays for energy will hardly go up at all. And they’ll probably end up paying what you are paying. But as if to rub salt into your wounds, it is

Monday

Ross Clark

Are low wind speeds to blame for Britain’s energy crisis?

Why has Britain suddenly been plunged into an energy crisis, with day ahead auction prices for electricity rising to over £400 per MWh, ten times what they were this time last year? The spike in global gas prices caused by economic recovery from Covid has been commented on often enough, as has the failure of Britain to maintain sufficient gas storage reserves – we have closed a large gas storage facility as other countries have been building up theirs’. So, too, we have learned of the failure of many smaller energy companies to hedge the prices of their energy, thus putting them at risk of spikes in wholesale prices. Global

Monday

William Nattrass

The battle for Eastern Europe’s energy sector

The fight to power eastern Europe is heating up. As Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky prepares to meet Joe Biden at the White House, competition for Ukraine’s energy market is increasingly being framed as a battle between East and West. And as western investments into renewables vie with fossil fuel imports from Russia, the struggle for the nation’s energy supply is assuming a moral dimension reminiscent of the Cold War. Tens of thousands of panels at Ukraine’s huge Nikopol solar farm harvest the sun’s energy for nobody. In late 2019, the Canadian owners of the farm, TIU Canada, were informed that the nearby Nikopol Ferroalloy Plant, owned by the notorious Ukrainian oligarch Ihor

Thursday

James Kirkup

In defence of net zero: yes, we can afford it

Late in 2013, David Cameron snapped. ‘Get rid of all the green crap,’ the then prime minister told energy ministers. His demand came after a backbench revolt over the surcharges tacked on to household energy bills to support onshore wind power. Not for the last time, his decision was based on a spectacular failure to see one of the big trends of the age: the stunning fall in the costs of renewable energy that was already under way. In the past decade, the cost of generating electricity from onshore wind has fallen by 40 per cent. For offshore turbines, it’s down almost a third. Globally, it’s now generally cheaper to