The fatcat ecocrats exposed: Web of ‘green’ politicians, tycoons and power brokers who help each other benefit from billions raised on your bills
- Four of nine-person Climate Change Committee, official watchdog that dictates green energy policy, are, or were until recently, being paid by firms that benefit from committee decisions
Other industries would stand accused of damning conflicts of interest but when it comes to global warming, anything goes…
The Mail on Sunday today reveals the extraordinary web of political and financial interests creating dozens of eco-millionaires from green levies on household energy bills.
A three-month investigation shows that some of the most outspoken campaigners who demand that consumers pay the colossal price of shifting to renewable energy are also getting rich from their efforts.
Enquiries by this newspaper have revealed:
- Four of the nine-person Climate Change Committee, the official watchdog that dictates green energy policy, are, or were until very recently, being paid by firms that benefit from committee decisions.
- A new breed of lucrative green investment funds, which were set up to expand windfarm energy, are in practice a means of taking green levies paid by hard-pressed consumers and handing them to City investors and financiers.
- £3.8 billion of taxpayers’ money funds the new Green Investment Bank, set up by the Department of Business and Skills. One of its biggest deals involved energy giant SSE selling windfarms to one of the new green funds, Greencoat Wind. The Green Investment Bank’s chairman, Lord Smith of Kelvin, is also chairman of SSE. The bank says it ‘provided expertise’ to enable BIS to take a £50 million stake in Greencoat, which helped fund the SSE sale.
- The same bank’s chief executive, Shaun Kingsbury, is one of the UK’s highest-paid public sector employees. His £325,000 salary is more than twice the Prime Minister’s.
- Firms lobbying for renewables can virtually guarantee access to key Government policy-makers, because they are staffed by former very senior officials – a striking example of Whitehall’s ‘revolving door’.
Among the most astonishing features exposed by our investigation is the way in which vehement advocates for radical policies designed to curb global warming are making huge sums of money from their work. Here are some of the key figures among the new breed of fat-cat Ecocrats…
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I forgot to bold:
Member, International Advisory Board, Abengoa SA (Spain)
which is a large renewable energy company.
Margaret Hardman says:
December 14, 2013 at 8:47 pm
“Enjoy the science, that’s what this site is about. — mod.”
Long since dropped that potato. As for David Rose – in fact checking quarters, his reporting is seen with bemusement. Next week, one assumes, he will run his microscope over the GWPF. Thought not. No, have nothing substantive to say other than how predictable for a science site to reprint this article.
========
Well put, I’ll be looking forward to your next non-substantive comment.
Where there is money, there is corruption.
Big Green trumps Big Oil.
Do We Have Time To Save The Planet From The Greedy Green Capitalists and the Greedy Politicians That Support Them?
Climate Change is Not the Problem. Fuel Poverty Is. Denying poor people access to cheap and reliable energy from fossil fuel is a death sentence for the poor of the world. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/15/james-hansens-policies-are-shafting-the-poor/ As the evidence mounts that that a rise in CO2 has little or nothing to do with global warming it is incumbent on people of good will to hold the greedy capitalists scoundrels accountable for the harm they are doing to the poor and to nature in their pursuit of their ill gained money off the backs of the public. Power to the people not to the greedy green corporate capitalists and the politicians that support them.
http://notrickszone.com/2013/12/15/top-leftist-oskar-lafontaine-comes-out-against-wind-power-landscape-being-robbed-of-its-poetry/
http://notrickszone.com/2013/12/10/analysis-of-entire-inventory-of-historical-data-clearly-points-to-one-conclusion-natural-factors-are-dominant/
Now can we see a story about alarmists to AREN’T on the take?
So Margaret Hardman, care to share with us which part or parts of the Rose article are untrue? I’m afraid snide and vacuous comments that hold as much water as a colander don’t count for much.
Margaret,
I’m still waiting for your reply (as, I’m sure, is UK Sceptic):
What part of the Rose write-up is untrue?
Are you seriously defending these green troughers?
Don’t you realise you’ve been taken for a fool by a group of people who’ve made a lot of money at the expense of the rest of us?
Or maybe you’re riding the Green Gravy Train yourself?
These allegations should be seen in their appropriate context, of which non-Britains may not be aware. The last Labour Government pushed through the Climate Change Act 2008. The current Labour leader, Ed Miliband, was then the Environment Minister. The Act was had cross-party support with 80% of MPs voting for, and around 1% voting against. Since 2010, The consumer cost of electricity and gas has risen by around 30%, but the wholesale price has remained pretty much the same. In September Miliband promised a price freeze if returned to power. The recent implication by the Labour Party is that this is all down to profiteering by the six major energy companies.
Of the six major energy companies, SSE is the only one mentioned in David Rose’s article.
Since 2009 all these six companies have been required by OFGEM to produce annual “consolidated segmental statements” for generation and for four categories of supply. They can be accessed from on OFGEM pdf here. SSE stands as the odd-man-out amongst the six for its generation profit and loss accounts. The revenue per MWh is about two-thirds of the wholesales price, and there are no direct fuel costs, despite operating coal and gas-fired power stations. This is because it has a quite separate (and quite legitimate) wholesale trading arm. It seems a bit odd that a manufacturing company (the product is electricity)should not show its raw material costs in its P&L.
I am currently trying to make sense of these segmental statements. Most telling is that over the 4 years 2009-2012, costs of gas and electricity to the consumer have risen by 25%; the profit margins percentage for supply and generation are about the same (at about 10% of a household bill); and the wholesale price over the last three years (which does not include subsidies) has remained pretty much the same. What has increased is “other costs” by 25% across 6 companies (spread across gas and electric sales) in just 4 years. On lower volumes on sales, this is more significant.
“Children just aren’t going to know what an honest politician is”.
It’s refreshing to see stories about people making money from green energy, especially here in Australia where the fossil fuel industry still receives massive subsidies whilst renewables grow in spurts and bounds despite inconsistent policies across governments. I’m currently looking for ways to disinvest in coal, but it is difficult to know who is fair dinkum and who just wants to take advantage of my idealism (and financial naivety)…. don’t want to seem alarmist bu the science seems to suport cutting our emissions as quickly as possible and history seems to show that innovation creates economic opportunities rather than deiminishing them…
Re: Sasha says:
December 15, 2013 at 6:13 am
“…Gore has been run out of town several times. That’s why he gave up his book signing and publicity tours, and he never appears to his adoring public without six bodyguards.”
Those may not be “bodyguards”. They may be “bag men”. Hauling off the loot is not a one-man job in the “green ‘bidness”.
Michael D Smith says:
December 15, 2013 at 3:44 pm
Now can we see a story about alarmists to AREN’T on the take?
================
here are a whole bunch
want to see them again?
And drug companies make billions on the HIV cocktail.. Hmmm..did they cause the AIDS panic/epidemic?? Perhaps…
Take a state at random: Arkansas’s Changing Climate
Average temperatures are already increasing, along with the frequency of extreme heat, storms, and dry summers.
In the future, with climate change, annual temperatures are projected to rise another 4.5-9.0°F (3-5°C) by the 2080s.
Residents can expect to see more public health risks from storms, flooding and waterborne illnesses, drought, extreme heat waves, and declining air quality.2
Arkansas does not have a statewide plan to prepare for the health impacts of climate change.
The British system of Government is designed to enable Politicians and their friends relatives and corporate rent seekers to write laws to enrich themselves. All these obvious conflicts of interest ( would be described as Corrupt Practices if carried out outside the UK) are conveniently deemed legal if they are openly declared in speeches to the House or before testifying before committees. The Governments Climate and Energy Policy is an Orwellian joke. Everybody except the useful idiot chattering classes understands that whatever the UK does re CO2 emissions will produce zero measurable effect on Temperatures in 2100 The Energy policy is designed to transfer money from the Public at Large to the Politicians and their Landowning friends and relatives and to the corporations who reward the Politicians with Directorships,shares and lucrative consultancies while at the same time reducing the supply of affordable energy to the populace at large, All these goings on are public knowledge available to anyone who cares to investigate and are generally recognized as the ordinary course of business. The Ecoleft Marxists and their propagandists in the BBC and the Guardian are happy to let the Politicians get away with their loot because the Government is a on the way to moving to centrally controlled Stalin – type economy as envisaged in the new Energy bill in which some government flunkey is going to decide in her infinite wisdom on a carbon price which essentially gives her control over the energy mix of the economy as a whole and by extension the price of everything produced in the UK.
The public as a whole mostly doesn’t think about these things at all and those that do adopt the typical British serf like approach to those they think of as their class betters who must obviously know more than they do. CAGW is a wonderful enabler for this massive transfer of wealth and will not be abandoned until perhaps hell freezes over.
Simon Eastman says:
December 16, 2013 at 2:45 am
…. don’t want to seem alarmist bu the science seems to suport cutting our emissions as quickly as possible and history seems to show that innovation creates economic opportunities rather than deiminishing them…
The science is not settled, cutting CO2 emissions will have no effect climate or global temperatures. There is more than enough CO2 in the atmosphere at present to absorb all the absorbable IR emitted from Earth. In fact if CO2 were vhalved to 200ppm theere wold still be more than enough to absorb to extinction all of the IR frequencies in the CO” wavebands.
In the UK any economic opportunities are more than offset by the green levy on energy costs making energy based industries uncompetitive and contributing to very high domestic fuel bills.
Simon Eastman says:
December 16, 2013 at 2:45 am
…. don’t want to seem alarmist bu the science seems to suport cutting our emissions as quickly as possible and history seems to show that innovation creates economic opportunities rather than deiminishing them…
The science is not settled, cutting CO2 emissions will have no effect on climate or global temperatures. There is more than enough CO2 in the atmosphere at present to absorb all the absorbable IR emitted from Earth. In fact if CO2 were vhalved to 200ppm there wold still be more than enough to absorb to extinction all of the IR frequencies in the CO2 wavebands.
In the UK any economic opportunities are more than offset by the green levy on energy costs making energy based industries uncompetitive and contributing to very high domestic fuel bills.
Dr Norman Page: The public as a whole mostly doesn’t think about these things at all and those that do adopt the typical British serf like approach to those they think of as their class betters who must obviously know more than they do.
Sorry Doc but, speaking as a typical British subject, I reckon your forelock tugging serfs “insight” is nothing shy of weapons grade wibble. I suggest you start listening to the “public at large”. You might learn something that surprises you. We’re not all politically ignorant, footie crazed, boozed up knuckle-draggers who can’t comprehend that we are being fleeced by government policies hardly any of us voted for.
I don’t know any serfs or anyone who acts like or wants to be a serf. The only people in Britain who have a problem with class are the progressives and union wallahs and they are the ones who have taken on board the CAGW
cash cowscam wholesale. If the public are in awe of anything it is the scale of the BS and lies our so called betters are frenziedly spreading around in order to try and bury the truth.Not everyone who visits and/or comments on WUWT has scientific training. Many of us are Brits, just ordinary people seeking the truth. And you’ve just insulted us. Well done.
UK Sceptic But y’all did vote for the present policies at the last election . Are there any UKIP members in the Commons ? They seem to be the only ones with any different policies on climate and energy. Don’t you think that most Brits ( not all obviously) simply repeat what the BBC and Guardian and Independent tell them on climate and are inclined to believe any scientist with a Sir or Lord before his name?
Delingpole and Rose are very much in the minority in the MSM.
(BTW I grew up in Liverpool and went to Oxford so I feel free to criticize)
UK Sceptic But y’all did vote for the present policies at the last election
No, we didn’t. You don’t get a hung parliament (coalition) from a popular vote. Politics in the UK is a sordid mess. People are so revolted by, and despairing of, the corruption and incompetence of our politicians they stay away from elections in droves.
Are there any UKIP members in the Commons?
No. And even if there were I don’t believe they’d change anything much because they might talk a good fight but they don’t have anything to back it up other than more rhetoric with a few banana skins thrown in for good measure. I wouldn’t be surprised if they went native the moment they grasped the teaspoon of power (the levers having been exported abroad and placed into the sweaty palms of unelected EU officials some time ago without so much as a by-your-leave or a referendum because the odds are that we would have told the State to shove it).
Don’t you think that most Brits ( not all obviously) simply repeat what the BBC and Guardian and Independent tell them on climate and are inclined to believe any scientist with a Sir or Lord before his name?
Most Brits do not read the Guardian or the Independent. Never have and probably never will. The fact both of those broadsheets have a plummeting circulation and are in financial straits, particularly the Guardian, makes a nonsense of your observation.
As for the BBC they might once have fooled a large percentage of their audience but people have been catching on for some years now. You can blame the evidence of the public’s own eyes not matching up to the claims being made by the BBC about the climate for example. The BBC simply cannot command the number of viewers it once had so it’s influence has waned exponentially.
As for scientists and nobs, I’m afraid the public has been bombarded with so much alarmism, and corruption only spin doctors and the most gullible take theses so called experts seriously anymore, their words no more than tomorrow’s chip paper. “Expert” has become a derogatory term. They are fake charities, agenda hustlers and spivs who constantly contradict each other and themselves as the political script is amended. We are no more in thrall to them than we are to Gordon Brown’s absurd claim to have saved the world from economic Armageddon.
We are sick of the corruption and troughing rife in both the Commons and the Lords. People are not so ready to accept what the “elite” tells us at face value and as information becomes more freely available, information not filtered by a celebrity infatuated, intellectually lazy and biased MSM, it is becoming harder for the elite to pull the wool over people’s eyes.
Delingpole and Rose are very much in the minority in the MSM.
Which is why the dead tree press is floundering and why people turn to the internet for information; to blogs like WUWT. Let’s not forget Christopher Booker of the Daily Telegraph who has been lifting the lid on the claims of the climate alarmists for far longer than Rose and the Mail.
BTW I grew up in Liverpool and went to Oxford so I feel free to criticize.
Oxford, eh? Is this the point where, according to your theory on the hierarchy of the British people, I now meekly accept your intellectual superiority and hang on to your every word?
Dream on, Doc. Dream on. ;0)