The Global Warming Policy Forum is calling on the Government to delay the 5th Carbon Budget and scrap Britain’s unilateral Carbon Floor Price both of which are contributing to the crisis of UK steel and other energy intensive industries.
Along with substantial falls in steel prices, the UK’s uncompetitive electricity prices have been a contributing factor to the closure of steel plants around the country.
Britain’s Carbon Floor Price is a unilateral carbon tax at a floor price of £18 per tCO2. It is more than four times higher than the EU’s current carbon price which is less than £4 (€4.80 on 30 March 2016).
The GWPF has been consistently warning about the rising policy cost of electricity prices which are expected to increase by 47% by 2020 for large industrial energy consumers. The UK’s extra large users of electricity are already paying nearly twice as much for power as the EU average.
![EIUG-11[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/eiug-111.png?resize=648%2C404)
source: Energy Intensive Users Group
GWPF director Dr Benny Peiser said:
“Energy intensive industries – including UK steel – are facing a growing competitiveness crisis. Britain’s unilateral climate policies are racking up electricity prices and are adding to the cost burden.”
“In light of the existential crisis of the steel and other energy-intensive industries, the Government should delay setting new unilateral CO2 targets and scrap the Carbon Price Floor that are hitting UK manufacturers. They also need to bear down on the growing costs of renewable energy subsidies.”
![EIUG-2[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/eiug-21.png?resize=720%2C465)
..It is truly sad to see a once great nation self destruct by trying to fulfill an impossible socialist dream ! R.I.P.
What Red Labour started with their Climate Change Act 2008, Blue Labour are bringing to fruition. In their deluded minds all the ex-steelworkers will find jobs in the ‘renewables’ and ‘green’ industries but I don’t think there is enough taxpayers’ cash to employ them all. I think the job destruction rate is 3.4 real jobs for every ‘green’ job ‘created’.
The pressure will increase on other industries, oil refining, petro-chem, glass, cement, most of which are under foreign ownership so will be able to move production elsewhere in their company locations.
What makes it socialist?
Centralized state control and/or allocation of the means of production (of energy in this case), price fixing, quotas and enforced redistribution of wealth, via tariffs subsidies etc. All socialist crap.
Genuine capitalists and Libertarians have no interest ever expanding state control of industries. Not the energy industry nor anything else.
Only crony capitalists do – i.e. capitalists who get into bed with socialists to create the most perfect living hell. This being approximately the dominant arrangement in the E.U.
The U.K. is currently at a point where over 50% of GDP is government spending.
And that’s just the money spent directly by the state – it does not measure the states control over so-called private industries. Which are increasingly only doing the governments bidding through growing regulatory control.
100% state control would be perfect communism. Although in all attempts to create such a system the public have become reliant on a growing black market, so such a system is entirely theoretical.
We’re nearly there though!!
Crony capitalism is in place in virtually every country in the world. It is the norm, not the exception. In the UK, more subsidies go to fossil fuels than to renewables http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/new-figures-published-by-the-imf-show-the-uk-provides-more-subsidies-for-fossil-fuels-than-renewables/ So other than setting a specific target for RE, I don’t see what is socialist about it.
Chris, that’s just Bob Ward lying again. The environmentalists always like to load the balance sheet in their favour by claiming lots of imagined “external costs” for fossil fuels while ignoring all the benefits which you can see by looking around at pretty much everything you can touch and see.
@ Indefatigablefrog
A communist society is stateless, classless and is governed directly by the people. Never happened, never will.
The US and IMF include depletion allowances as subsidies in there calculations. This is similar to depreciation and is not a subsidy. It is expenseing the cost of productive assets over there useful lives. The “social costs” IMF includes are simply nonsense. The amounts can not be quantified in any scientific sense. They also do not consider the deaths, and lower standards of living that would occur were fossil fuels to be withdrawn.
Chris needs to get out of his mom’s basement more.
That’s because you don’t want to know, because it conflicts with your socialist pubber school education
where you were taught government is the source of all joy.
If you hurry you might be able to call police on your parents about pot before they’re off to work to support you.
>>Chris
>>In the UK, more subsidies go to fossil fuels than to renewables.
While conveniently ignoring the fact that government finances are hugely dependent on tax revenues from fossil fuels and from fossil fuel company profits. While renewables produce no government revenue stream whatsoever. If you balance the two, fossil fuels are huge net contributors to the government purse, while renewables are nothing but a mill-stone around the neck of the chancellor (and the public, who pay their subsidies).
And why do oil companies get ‘subsidies’? Because all companies get various rebates and incentives for R&D and investment, and these are large inovative companies. You cannot give R&D grants, and then say ‘not for oil companies’.
R
“The US and IMF include depletion allowances as subsidies in there calculations. This is similar to depreciation and is not a subsidy. It is expenseing the cost of productive assets over there useful lives.”
Of course it is a subsidy. When an oil company signs a lease for an offshore tract, they pay a royalty on the oil or gas extracted. Why should they get to depreciate the oil they pump, when it is not a capital asset that they purchased?
Bruce, Trent, wow, such witty and original insults. You’re showing your age, Bruce – the mother’s basement insult has been passe for 10 years.
“In the UK, more subsidies go to fossil fuels than to renewables”
Absolute nonsense.
Learn the difference between a subsidy and a tax rebate.
Chris, it is not the oil that is being depleted, but all the overhead that went to get the oil. There is a lot of investment necessary long before extraction is possible.
And again, you exclude the fact that oil producers are paying the royalties in the first place, and taxes on top of their income. Saying that they get more tax deductions than renewables while providing 100 times the energy is sheer nonsense, and calling these deductions “subsidies” is a misnomer. After all, no one would say that the government is subsidizing home ownership . Oil companies put in far, FAR more money to the government coffers than they draw. On the other hand, GE famously paid no taxes for several years in a row due to the subsidies they drew.
So
A: You need to look at net, not gross money received
B: This is a large misnomer calling them subsidies.
C: A raw comparison of numbers ignores that Fossil Fuel companies produce far more energy than “renewable” sources. A proper comparison would be on a $/MWH basis. If this was done, even with the other problems, oil would be orders of magnitude lower than renewables.
This is all such a foregone deal. The bad guys won. The moved into the natural sciences, they screamed and ranted and shouted everyone down, and character assassinated everyone they could identify, and won.
Back to your regularly scheduled programming of left wing alternative energy hacks taking over the natural sciences and finishing off natural sciences education in the west.
I suppose turnabout ≈ fairplay, for inflicting Fabian socialism + Brit bureaucracy on India. Not to mention the horrors of Partition….
Its even sadder to be living here when it is happenning…..
Hey!
Why is Germany not at the top with Sweden.
These have rather a large portion of energy produced by expensive renewables.
Perhaps the plot has nothing to do with how the energy is produced but on policies subsidising large users?
If you are asking about the first graph, it’s because it is for “Extra Large Users” – ie industry
Germany has fixed the pricing for industry so it is the residential pricing that bears the brunt of the renewables subsidies.
“Germany has fixed the pricing for industry”
Exactly.
And yet, Austria attacks the EDF-UK CfD nuclear deal, not Germany, for violation of the free market rules.
The “free” energy market is a big joke.
..The entire E.U. is a joke !
Someone should plot electricity cost per kwh vs atmospheric CO2 and then proclaim cause and effect, and that we have to “do something about it”.
TATA just said that one of the reasons for wanting to sell in GB is the high cost of energy.
Do you seriously think anyone voted for this? At the last election, the parties were so afraid of the ‘Green Blob’ that the one thing they all agreed on was not to fight it…
R.
To power the cokes they need coal, given the fall in steel prices, declining market share, this is another nail, rising electricity costs also contribute. The price for using coal will be the final nail in the steel industry’s coffin.
Here are jobs they are letting walk, while erecting no job creating wind farms.
Meanwhile you see images water vapor from cooling towers in news articles about pollution. Pesky water vapor. Sadly too many think they are seeing pollution.
Ah well, they are now introducing academies in the UK as a means of education where the academies can hire people to be teachers even though they never trained to be teachers. McMasters or McDegree anyone?
There’s a positive to the introduction of academies in that those who haven’t been through our teacher training programme might be free from Marxist indoctrination.
Er ….. . The Academies are in England, not the UK.
“Meanwhile you see images water vapor from cooling towers in news articles about pollution. Pesky water vapor. Sadly too many think they are seeing pollution.”
Yes, taken on a cloudy but bright day so lots of shadows making things look dark-patchy, with a sepia filter on the lens to give that really “dirty” look fr the truly gullible!
Meanwhile, Japan builds more coal burning plants.
..And China….and India…Russia……and etc…………….
These burbling-at-the-moon cretins are going to destroy the UK’s capacity to generate electricity and do not care how much tax payer’s money they spend to achieve that goal. They are going to destroy what remains of our industry. They are going to collapse our economy. They are going to destroy the countryside and much of its wildlife. They are going to force already poor people deeper into the mire with wildly spiralling energy bills. They are going to cause rolling blackouts in winter with consequential death of the elderly and vulnerable. The Institute of Mechanical Engineers repeatedly tell them this but they would rather listen to the sociology grad greens in dreads and moccasins. They are doing this to look like they’re leading the way towards a brighter and cleaner future with jobs and prosperity flowing inevitably forth from renewables projects. They are doing it without a shred of empirical evidence to support any conceivable reason for doing it in the first place. Their insanity is quite beyond belief and I have no idea how they are going to be stopped. I’m sometimes forced to conclude that somehow I slipped between the skeins of spacetime into a parallel Universe where everyone is stark raving insane and the political leaders are all emo teenagers with mass death wish complexes. This site appears to me like a small portal opening onto the real world I used to know and even if I can never physically cross the yawning gulf back into reality I can at least catch occasional glimpses of it through the portal. Thankyou Anthony for the sanity-saving lifeline.
+ 1
Excellent. 100 per cent correct. If only Cameron had the sense to realise it, or if he does, then the courage to take remedial action without thinking of his political popularity.
..Agenda 21 calls for LESS Humans ! Easily achieved by England’s next winter……
lol
That’s what Socialism does, it destroys so that it can rebuild in its image!
That’s totalitarianism.
@cephus0
+ another 1 (at least).
Panem is in the works.
Explains why I hear more and more British accents in Canada. Unfortunately a lot of those voices are union leaders and greens who are wanting to import their Eurocentric vissions …
cephus0 – You describe the problem brilliantly, and I absolutely endorse your thanks to Anthony. But it’s not enough because in the corridors of power the forces of insanity are winning. We have to find effective ways to fight back and we are very rapidly running out of time. In the USA a vote for Ted “They’re cooking the books” Cruz, for all his many faults, will help. UK, Europe, Canada – all have gone. Australia regrettably is dead meat with no sane option in this year’s election. New Zealand has stalled. Anyone who thinks the sceptics are winning simply isn’t looking at the empirical evidence.
My favourite bit of this is the accusation that the Chinese are dumping steel in the UK. They aren’t they are pricing their product competitively as they can afford to do because they haven’t bought in to the scare.
It makes sense to site energy intensive industries in energy cheap areas.
Let us not forget who made energy expensive. Clue: it wasn’t the current government. The current lot seem committed to propping up an uneconomic industry to buy some welsh votes.
..Welsh are allowed to vote ?? LOL
“I have a silly walk, and I’d like to obtain a government grant to try and develop it.”
“I see, and may I see your silly walk?”
A rare piece of documentary footage, here. Proving that in the UK, not much has changed since the 1970’s:
…I really hate British attempts at humor, but I love Monty Python ! Talk about conflicted minds ! LOL
Perhaps it is because the British never do “humor”. Humour on the other hand is done very often and usually well done.
Jut think. We, too in the US can have this sort of disruption. Just implement Obama’s clean energy program, which Hilary has pledged to continue, and we too can destroy our economy. All that is required is to vote for either of the Democratic candidates.
..Honestly, Bernie would be a little worse than Hillary….a very little
Tim Peake the astronaut was given a platform on U.K. news last night where he was asked (by a child) about whether spending money on putting astronauts in space could be justified.
His bafflingly stupid answer was along the lines of “Money spent on space is not spent in space. It’s spent on earth. Where it creates thousands of jobs”.
That brilliant piece of nonsense was broadcast, unchallenged.
The public, seemingly, enjoy allowing themselves to be suckered by meaningless B.S.
Why don’t we get one bunch of astronauts to dig holes on the moon.
And then get another bunch of astronauts to fill them in.
Thereby creating jobs back here on earth, where they are sorely needed.
And creating economic stimulus.
We do these things not because they are useful but because they are dumb…
Yes, this more than any other fallacy gets repeated over and over by politicians and media talking heads. It gets used to justify every policy, however suspect. As a culture, we have replaced cost-benefit analysis with the simpleton justification that some program will create jobs. This nonsense goes unchallenged daily. That we can graduate kids by the billion who do not understand this is the biggest condemnation of our education system.
Hey Dave, Any more of those Global Warming (DiCaprio) Chinooks come through lately? LOL.
DiCaprio is the biggest hypocrite in Hollywood, Prince Charley takes the world title!
Back in the day when NASA actually focused aeronautical and space programs many benefits were realized that most of us would not want to give up today. Here is a short list
http://sac.edu/AcademicProgs/ScienceMathHealth/Planetarium/Pages/Benefits-of-the-NASA-Space-Program.aspx
Thanks for the list. Unfortunately NASA like every other US agency has been destroyed and made useless by the current administration as the current goals are to exaggerate possible global warming or climate change by pushing an agenda in-congruent with the US and human interests. NASA are still searching for human and or contributions from a particular group which are scarce and difficult to identify instead of concentrating on Science, Space and technology. Things are so bad we depend on the Russians to get to the space station at great cost.
This is big news. Unemployed masses will crush the CAGW movement. I say bring it on.
You say that like it’s a good thing. Unemployed masses will crush a lot more than just the CAGW movement. You can indeed kill cockroaches with a sledgehammer, as long as you don’t care what else you break.
Watch the parade of energy-intensive industrial producers emigrating to friendlier climes.
Like the steel industry moving to China? It’s reality already!
I have just been watching a very unusual edition of channel 4 News on UKTV in which the the energy costs at port Talbot have , it was emphasized , played a major role in that steel site’s ability to compete on price for rolled steel with steel from China . The blame was clearly placed on green taxes in an interview with the Labour leader , Corbyn, and that is a very surprising departure from the normal stance of this news channel which is noticeably left wing and “green” on most issues and usually treats Corbyn as a sort of Messiah. (I actually approved of most of Corbyn’s comments on this occasion although he dodged the question of green taxes).
Perhaps it takes a shock of this nature to make people, especially the politicians and opinion makers, question the whole approach to climate change, renewables and taxes , because as a remarkably precise , no waffle, young journalist , a Ms Ebrahimi, pointed out the steel industry at present is worth £10 billion to the GDP and I suppose that if the collapse of Port Talbot takes Scunthorpe down as well that money will have to be borrowed to maintain current overall spend according to the latest Budget ( because we have no surplus) , and I assume the cost will be about about 200 – 300 million pounds / year. Green taxes are killing us.
“Perhaps it takes a shock of this nature to make people, especially the politicians and opinion makers, question the whole approach to climate change, renewables and taxes …”
I keep thinking the same thing and that surely whatever the unfolding daymare du jour happens to be, this time people have to wake up – don’t they? The answer always come back sadly not and progressive political correctness trumps all other considerations – even if that means pushing the West back into the dark ages.
Wouldn’t the planet be better off if electricity were banned altogether?
It’s been the biggest contributor to the runaway consumerism that is destroying the planet.
Live simply so others may simply live.
The morons have taken over.
Its the Revenge of the Environmental Nitwits
The U.K. Government has called upon the most experienced ‘Members of the Cabinet’ to solve the ensuing problem.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/shows/teletubbies
sarc.
Of course ‘maximum compensation’ means maximum expense for the taxpayers.
I am attending the Domestic Use of Energy conference in Cape Town on the nickel of the Cape Peninsula University of Technology and this year it is all about how municipalities and nations incorporate ‘renewables’ into their grid, with an emphasis on PV.
The cost of electricity in a municipal area (which often includes large rural areas) is decided by the municipalities in South Africa. They are power vendors. The towns make a profit and that helps finance the whole show. If they allow, let alone encourage, let alone again subsidise Solar PV, they lose one Watt of sales every time one is generated.
Electricity costs R1.75 per kWh for the first 300 and about R2.23 after that. Poor people get the first 50 free. Both those prices are above what is I pay in Waterloo.
The UK is taxing the release of CO2 or a proxy for it. Why? To what end? What happens to the money? In Waterloo we only subsidise windmills and PV panels to off set our evil….oh, wait! We are 100% nuclear and hydro!
OK scratch that. We are not offsetting anything. RSA, like the UK, has a feed-in tariff, lots of PV and masses of coal. One presentation concluded that the most the grid could stand financially (to minimize cost) was surprisingly small: 4% of the grid output. Above that it was wasting baseload and idle plants and peak management strategies.
It was a surprise to see so much talk about how great things are going in Germany. Talk talk talk. 54% last year, of all installations, were renewables. That is the NAMEPLATE price not the real price. Well, was Google using some of the billions of tons of water p/a to cool it? Will it generate incomes in rural areas, How much, really? No one is talking.
We were told that PV is competitive on an annualiised basis. Only with subsidies which aGWaree hav to fo with thre youngest.
A few years ago we needed to buy a stair lift for my wife who has MS, one of the big plus points for the supplier we used was that they try to source all the materials from the UK. Sadly last year my sister needed one as well so we used the same supplier and the sales rep told us that in the 2-3 years since we bought ours the obtaining of British aluminium and steel had become much harder and costlier.
Soon the only iron and steel that’s British made will be from
James Bull