Press Release 06/10/14
UK Business Minister Finally Admits Carbon Taxes Are Damaging British Businesses
London, 6 October: The Global Warming Policy Forum has welcomed Vince Cable’s belated admission that the government’s climate policy is damaging British businesses.
Business secretary Vince Cable yesterday warned that Britain’s unilateral carbon tax is hampering UK businesses who are losing competitiveness to their counterparts abroad.
Of course it is not just the Carbon Floor Price that is driving up the cost of energy, but so are the ever rising subsidies for green energy which will amount to £8 billion p.a. by 2020.
Mr Cable is right to highlight the growing risk to British businesses that “are struggling against international competition because of the cost of energy.”
“At a time when most major economies are turning to cheap and abundant fossil fuels, Britain alone seems prepared to risk its economic competitiveness by adopting policies that are making energy ever more expensive,” said Dr Benny Peiser, the GWPF’s director.
“Given the manifest reluctance of major economies to follow Britain’s unilateral policy, the government should now suspend the fourth carbon budget and all post-2020 climate targets,” he added.
There are a couple of posts above which assume that UKIP is a right wing party. Let me, as a UKIP county councillor, disagree. In general we tackle (or, more likely, try to get those in power to tackle) the problem in front of us. This makes us a mixture — housing needs ‘left wing’ solutions, education needs some of the right wing fiddling to be abandoned, armed services need major help (the lack of long-range strike assets when the Tornados are retired is so obvious I’m surprised even cast iron Dave hasn’t noticed), English votes for English matters in Parliament…. etc. The big one is energy — nothing is so important. Tax the windmills and solar farms, frack and drill, put research into thorium reactors (Candu reactors can, I believe, run on thorium), stop the tx on carbon dioxide emissions and save the money being wasted on sequestration.
The analysis that we will split the Right is therefore faulty. For example, how will the good people of Haverhill vote? Well, this has generally been a Labour town, but the last election for a borough councillor gave UKIP a winning vote of 64%. Polls suggest we get 83 Labour voters for every 100 Cons. Libdems are an odd bunch, probably destined to move to the Greens and keep on swallowing every climate change lie they can strain at.
As an ex-serviceman I’ve generally been a Con voter, but I looked at the empty suit they put up as a leader and realised that the world had changed. Vote for Labour? Let me tell you about Labour. In a full council meeting they voted against releasing brownfield land owned by the council in order to build social housing, taking the pressure off the poorest and weakest members of our society. Party of the working man? They wouldn’t recognise a working man if he licked their Foster and Son bespoke shoes.
I could go on. And on. It’s about this stage that the rest of the UKIP councillors sidle away and I begin to rant. Let me spare you that.
JF
Julian Flood:
Good luck with your mixed platform, but this requires the voter to adopt a new viewpoint, seemingly.
The GWPF is a lobby organisation promoting the fossil fuel industry and opposing renewables – because of the economic competition.
So the news that “GWPF Calls On Government To Suspend Fourth Carbon Budget” is hardly surprising.
You would not expect them to say anything else.
UKIP have a lot in common with the GWPF – the bias towards fossil fuels, the bias against renewables (even when proven to work) and the lack of scientific credibility.
James Abbott
The GWPF is not “a lobby organisation promoting the fossil fuel industry” but it does oppose so-called renewables such as windfarms because their only function is to be subsidy farms.
I oppose both UKIP and your Green Party which each has as much “scientific credibility” as the other; i.e. none. However, political parties require policies and not “scientific credibility”. UKIP has a sensible Energy Policy and your Green Party has an insane Energy Policy.
Richard
Richard
Please explain then, if I am so wrong, why the GWPF has published articles (many hundreds of them over recent years) which almost without exception:
(a) promote the use of fossil fuels
(b) oppose renewables
(c) oppose nuclear
I am intrigued that you think Green policies on energy are “insane”.
So it is apparently “insane” to:
Reduce fossil fuel use (finite, will run out)
Increase the use of renewables (by definition will not run out)
Become far more energy efficient (keeps costs down, reduces fuel poverty and reduces the need for new capacity)
That’s an interesting definition of sanity you have.
James Abbott
October 6, 2014 at 2:50 pm
Because your demand for “renewables” is killing people right now.
24,000 in the UK last winter alone.
Add a 2-4% reduction or impact on the economy because of your deliberately politicized demand for increased energy prices, and you are killing more due to stress and unneeded worries and poor conditions.
But YOU demand the world kill people and harm innocents, on the assumption that maybe, perhaps, some unknown time in the future there might be a reason to change energy policies because some people somewhere somehow in the far future might be impacted. Might have to move. Maybe.
So, your conclusion? We must kill tens of thousands of people now, every year for the next 86 years, just so you feel better.
James Abbott
I answer each of your points addressed to me in turn.
I answer:
I am not aware that GWPF opposes nuclear power but everybody with any sense desires continued use of reliable, efficient and cheap fossil fuels and opposes adoption of intermittent, inefficient and expensive so-called renewables.
You continue
Of course they are insane. They intend to reduce use of reliable, efficient and cheap fossil fuels while increasing use of intermittent, inefficient and expensive so-called renewables which would condemn many UK people to death from fuel poverty and would make impossible much of British industry. That is more insane than Jack The Ripper who killed much fewer people than the energy policies of the Green Party would.
And you demonstrate the insane reasons for those insane policies by writing
Fossil fuels will not “run out” for centuries if ever, and if they were going to “run out” then there would be no purpose in a policy to enforce their disuse.
Renewables will “run out” every time the wind blows at the wrong speed during the night.
The ‘renewable’ subsidy farms are – of course – extremely efficient at ripping-off the public, but it is a physical impossibility for them to provide an efficient energy supply. Indeed, they increase costs and so fuel poverty while requiring additional generating capacity to perform their back-up.
The Green Party energy policy is insane because it is intended to deliberately increase costs and to kill people for no purpose and for no benefit. By comparison, you members of the Green Party make Jack The Ripper seem like a nice guy.
Richard
James,
your “big oil shill” type smear against GWPF is pointless. No better than Peter Gleick’s foolish forgery against Heartland in the US.
You don’t understand why it is pointless because you are a collectivist. You don’t understand that there is no fossil fuel funded “core” to the sceptic movement. Those organisations are getting their information from us, individual sceptics. You and your fellow travellers have been using centrally planned “astroturfing” for years; now you are faced with a genuine “grass roots movement” and you are going to lose.
As I pointed out previously, Big Wind will be the first to fall. The collapse of this sorry pyramid selling scheme is well under way in Australia. In the news today, the Union movement, whose “investments” were used to “salt the mine”, has had to admit to massive losses. The private investors are fleeing. The UK will be next.
Big Wind was never “renewable”, it was a subsidy farming pyramid scheme. And the thing with pyramid schemes is no next layer and they collapse. No bleating about finite fossil fuels or energy security can save them. They need CO2 to be the demon, as it is the only thing that could vaguely justify the insane cost and environmental destruction of the bird blenders.
As a collectivist, guess what you will be doing next? The anti shale gas propaganda is failing. Where is Big Wind going to put its millions of propaganda dollars? It’s back to “ocean acidification” propaganda, because that keeps CO2 the demon. Will environmentalists accept the “free lunch” from Big Wind? I hear they are serving Fetid Lucre Salad, lightly drizzled with the blood of endangered species. Delicious!
Nature and history determine. Not man
RACookPE1978
I have no idea what you are ranting about.
A key Green policy is to end fuel poverty by properly insulting homes.
High energy prices are largely due to the market.
The UK had one of the worst excess winter death rates in Europe long before renewables started to be developed at commercial scale because of grossly inadequate building standards over many decades.
James Abbott
People freeze in insulated houses that lack heating.
Richard
Richard, I am sure, got it right – ‘insulated’, not ‘insulted’.
Hey – I do typos, two.
But, yes, poor, or elderly, and especially poor AND elderly folk in the UK – worst in the North: Scotland, and the NE and NW, but throughout the UK, which is 99.9% N of Fifty Degrees North, and the Northern-most of all the Great Lakes is forty miles south of the Southern-most part of the British Isles – have died, are dying, and – it appears, James, with Green policies – will continue to die, if they have to make a choice between eating and heating, because they simply cannot afford both.
Auto
James Abbott says:
A key Green policy is to end fuel poverty by properly insulting homes.
Abbott has inadvertently explained how the eco-crowd thinks. Windmills are an insult to homes.
[BTW, Robert Cook is exactly right. ‘Green’ policies kill. That’s a fact.]
Well its difficult to have a sensible debate with people who think fossil fuels are never going to run out (Doh !) and who also seriously think that policies to help people keep their homes warmer are “killing” them – and who throw Jack the Ripper in there as well !
I could write any old **** to match that in reply but back in the real world, I would rather save the energy !
In order to save energy, you must have some energy in the first place.
On a dark midwinter’s anticyclonic night, the Green Energy system will have NO energy. And therefore all the insulation in the world will keep nobody warm save no energy. And people and industry will suffer.
Perhaps you like making people suffer. Some people do.
Ralph
You have in your shale in GB a huge bounty of natural gas, the cleanest of fuels, according to a recent report. Just think James Abbot, there is energy enough to heat all the homes in GB for several hundred years, and quite cheaply. All will benefit. Does not that make you glad? Or do you gnash your teeth at the idea?..
Seems that Abbot is gnashing his teeth in silence.
Nobody says never. Insulating a home while removing the heat source is …..to borrow from another poster….burning the village to save it.
James,
we all want a cleaner more efficient energy future, but if you want a sensible debate you need to acknowledge that this cannot be built on a foundation of lies.
Quite simply CO2 cannot cause global warming. Sure, some folk, both sceptic and warmist, are trying to engineer a “soft landing” for the hoax. But this is never going to work. The news that there is actually no NET radiative GHE on this ocean planet will eventually get out. AGW was just not physically possible.
There is no future for Big Wind or large scale PV solar subsidy farmers. They cannot survive the building public rage. Playing “issue fade and replace” with “fossil fuel depletion” will just add to that rage. You fellow travellers must admit fault and apologise for their crazy assault on science, freedom and democracy before we can move on.
Shale gas, combined cycle base load turbines and open cycle peaking turbines give plenty of time for economic renewable technologies to be developed. But they must be work, both economically and environmentally. The subsidy farming game must end.
PS. James, what will you do when you are asked by Big Wind to keep their pyramid scheme going with “ocean acidification” propaganda? The right thing, or the wrong thing?
James Abbott
You addressed a host of points to me and I answered each of them. Failing an ability to refute any of my answers you have responded saying in total
You could “match that in reply”? Really? Then why don’t you support your Political Party’s insane energy policies instead of providing the sour grapes saying you would “rather save the energy”?
And of my two points you choose to answer you misrepresent one one and fail to answer the other.
I wrote
That says two things; viz.
(a) alternatives to fossil fuels may be obtained in the centuries before they “run out”,
and
(b) if fossil fuels were about to “run out” then it would be pointless to enforce their disuse which will happen anyway.
You have admitted that the insane Green Party energy policy ignores those realities and pretends that “fossil fuels are … going to run out”. Harmful action taken in response to an imaginary reality is delusional insanity.
I wrote of the Green Party energy policies
your reply to that says in total
Thankyou for providing a quote that can be used to show how a Green Party spokesman agrees that Green Party energy policies are more insane than Jack The Ripper.
Richard
The Mad Monk writes:- “I could write any old **** “.
You do, old boy!!!
The BBC which is rightly called the “Biased Broadcasting Company” on environmental issues virtually brainwashed the politicians into believing that the thousands of ordinary scientists and engineers who highlighted the issues were “deniers”.
The political classes did not need brainwashing. Most of them are actually descended from the old aristocratic classes and have retained the attitudes of the Victorian era. Even in the 20th Century the aristocracy would visit “trade” but never stay in their houses. Churchill famously said engineers should be on tap, not on top, before proceeding to ignore their advice and destroy the basis of British electronics after the war.
Most of the opposition to climate scientists came from engineers who said the Fourier analysis did not show the facile pattern predicted by the scientists who were using methods dated even in the very early nineteenth century for their predictions of normality hence the class snobbery that allowed the engineers advice to be ignored.
People really have no clue what’s going on…
http://www.drjudywood.com/articles/erin
http://www.checktheevidence.co.uk/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=316&Itemid=50
I’d laugh my head off it wasn’t so serious.
James Abbott says:
UKIP have a lot in common with the GWPF…
Thanks for making it clear that this is politics to you. For the rest of us, this is a science discussion.
Next, your complete non sequitur says:
Well its difficult to have a sensible debate with people who think fossil fuels are never going to run out…
The point, which you studiously ignored as you tried to re-frame the debate, is that the policies you prefer would cause massive deaths among the poorest of the world. You don’t seem to care.
Your “green” policies would kill people. That is a fact.
Conversely, the burning of fossil fuels has added beneficial CO2 to the biosphere, which in turn has reised agricultural productivity by anywhere from 11% on the low side, to as much as 26% since 1990. That, in turn, has caused the price of food to decline due to the iron law of supply and demand.
But your preference is to reduce fossil fuel use, which in turn would decrease the concentration of harmless, beneficial CO2, which would then result in a lower food supply. That would kill people. Starvation is an excruciating way to die, and that is what “green” policies would bring about.
Not that you care.