Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Polly Toynbee, the voice of the Liberal British establishment, thinks just as wind and solar became economic, the British government destroyed the industry by pulling the subsidies. My question – what is her definition of “economic”?
Climate change will affect all of us. So why the lack of urgency?
From Trump to Brexit, we are all fixated on more immediate news stories. We need to look at the bigger picture.
Tomorrow the world shudders as Donald Trump becomes US president. Hopes that wise advisers would mitigate the erratic, half-crazed stream of contradictions pouring from his lips have been dashed as he picks fake news purveyors and climate change-deniers for his close consiglieri.
With climate change doubters moving into the White House, the Guardian is spending 24 hours focusing on the issue – and what we can all do to help save the planet.
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One problem: it’s hard for politicians, commentators and the public to worry about several things at once. The high-octane anxiety over Trump and Brexit absorbs all political energy: fear-fatigue can’t accommodate too much at once. Climate change is background noise, the slow roll of distant thunder. Like anyone not a denier, I am always aware of it and sometimes add “and climate change” to the list of monster crises ahead. Getting it right to the forefront of the brain, ahead of everything else, forcing politicians and public to put planet survival first, second and third in their priorities, that’s the great task.
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The trouble with climate change as a political issue is that it’s too big to grasp, too ever-present. An occasional fixed point of global decision – the dramatic last-minute signing of the Paris climate change deal – briefly flashes up on the political grid, but once over, it falls back as if done and dusted. The planet is heating up fast – but not fast enough for the hungry 24-hour news cycle.
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Outright climate misinformation from people in authority is hugely effective: surely no minister would be so bold-faced? Besides, who doesn’t yearn for the discovery that it was all a mistake, what Trump calls a “hoax” and we are not about to boil, drown and freeze after all? A very little denial lie goes a long way, right round the world. Some, like ExxonMobil are venal, others are mad ideologists of the right who see green politics as a socialist plot or tree-hugging virtue-signalling. If they were serious, the precautionary principle would say, even if warming turns out less bad than feared, the cost of avoiding it is peanuts weighed against the high risk of human annihilation.
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What an opportunity was lost post-crash for a great green Keynesian investment surge in home insulation and new boilers, alongside a massive renewables push for wind, solar, tidal and nuclear power, with better public transport. Instead, no sooner did onshore wind become economic than its subsidies were taken away by Cameron; and just as solar was on the verge of success, George Osborne’s drastic cut in solar subsidy last year wrecked an industry, causing thousands of jobs to be lost.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/19/climate-change-affect-all-urgency-trump-brexit
Toynbee seems to think only special people like herself can worry about the future, can take a long term view – it’s hard for politicians, commentators and the public to worry about several things at once. Perhaps you also need Toynbee’s special viewpoint, to be able to claim with a straight face that yanking a subsidy can wreck an industry which is successful and economic.
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Does anybody know if they still subsidize wood pellets to generate electricity?
I believe that the English power station Drax has shifted from coal to “biomass”, i.e. wood pellets made from purposefully cut down trees in these United States. It is a subsidy for wood pellets and it is insanity. http://tinyurl.com/od9t4rz
yes, they do
drax 2 in the uK
She has an uncanny knack for calling a spade a hippopotamus. Remarkable.
The artificial green blight was deemed not viable and Planned early in its evolution. Poetic.
Polly got into Oxford with very low exam grades and then dropped out so she has some expertise on being promoted beyond the bounds of reality.
From Wiki
‘After attending Badminton School, a girls’ independent school in Bristol, followed by the Holland Park School, a state comprehensive school in London (she had failed the 11-plus examination [for entry to the top level of state schooling]) she passed one A-level. She won a scholarship to read history at St Anne’s College, Oxford, but dropped out of university after eighteen months.
She did say something sensible once which produced this excellent response from ‘ludocrat’ in Guardian comments.
Polly
6.9.08
Guardian comment by ludocrat
Old man:
I have seen
Hours dreadful and things strange; but this sore night
Hath trifled former knowings…
‘Tis unnatural,
Even like the deed that’s done. On Tuesday last,
A falcon, towering in her pride of place,
Was by a mousing owl hawk’d at and kill’d.
And then, ev’n in that unholy rain,
That fell and fell and made winter of lost summer,
Mad Polly was heard to talk some sense …
We are seriously doomed.
Is she Lady Macbeth? Or one of the Three Weird Sisters?
She failed the 11-plus?! WOW! Just WOW!
Yeah, well, look on it as the start of a continuing trend. She’s failed to get anything right.
The obvious, but unspoken, reason “climate deniers” get listened to, which the article tries mightily
to ignore, is the lack of global warming that has lasted almost a quarter of a century. I mean, c’mon alarmists, at least admit the patently obvious. Polly is what an actual “climate denier” looks like.
If she actually knew anything about the future of energy, and molten salt reactors, one version being developed by her own countrymen at Moltex, she would cut out the crap about wind and solar. And electric cars are literally right around the corner as well. She is arguing for crappy low carbon solutions. mostly because she’s one ignorant bigmouth. I mean, blaming Exxon-Mobil, for Christ’s sake!!! Why not the Easter Bunny as well? A really, really, stupid woman.
Everything Polly says or predicts is wrong. You can bet 100% on the opposite. The only thing that makes me cringe, is a picture of her standing next to an old friend of mine, who is now the Vice -Chancellor of the University of Kent.
“The trouble with climate change as a political issue is that it’s too big to grasp, too ever-present.”
You can say that again sister. Masters and mistresses of the double entendre they are.
Toynbee fails to understand that the cuts to subsidies were a direct consequence of the bizarre manner in which subsidy levels are engineered.
A sensible system would aim to maximize the CO2 reduction acheived per £ of subsidy spent.
The UK subsidy system is not designed upon that basis.
Here in the UK, subsidies were designed such that any technology, no matter how expensive or inefficient would provide a financial return (originally intended to be 8% p.a.)
Hence, subsidy rates for inefficient or basically useless technologies are high and subsidy rates for cost-effective and efficient technologies can be non-existent.
What this was intended to achieve in the minds of the morons who designed it, will probably never be fully understood.
But – clearly – what it does achieve is to use public money to guide the market in the direction of making the very worst decisions and wasting as much money as possible on the least possible effective action in cutting CO2.
Eventually, the system failed so badly that it developed into the farce of the N.I. renewable heat scandal, in which people were being paid a subsidy to burn as large a quantity of wood pellets as they could conceivably burn – with scant attention paid to what they were then doing with the heat.
This then created an incentive for individuals to install pellet boilers and run them in empty barns or heating a continual flow of hot water which would be dispense of down a drain.
The public are seemingly unaware that they have been the victim of a comedy of errors.
It is possible that the ordinary mind can simply not comprehend this level of stupidity, and therefore mistakes it all for a work of genius.
I agree, at least in part. Subsidies have often not been directed appropriately and should, as you say aim to maximize the CO2 reduction achieved per £ of subsidy spent. The statement “no sooner did onshore wind become economic than its subsidies were taken away by Cameron;” makes no sense, because you don’t need to subsidise things that are already economic. The N.I renewable heat initiative was a complete disaster of a policy and that should have been obvious at the start.
This is of course entirely separate from the arguments about the science and reality of global warming, about which I disagree with most here.
Yeah, a flat carbon tax introduced incrementally would have incentivized adopting of energy-saving measured and efficient alternative generation – without producing the wasteful perverse incentives witnessed during the last two decades of farce.
Even if we ultimately settle upon a low estimate or equilibrium climate sensitivity, or derate some of the associated concerns – there’s nothing wrong with conserving a valuable shared resource and generating public taxes in the process.
Wasting stuff, was never a good idea.
And congratulations to you – for sticking around here and giving as good as you get.
It’s not a discussion, if everyone blindly agrees.
frog, I agree (:-))
Polly loves to claim the moral high ground. But one should read the acid comments of the sad lady whose husband she misappropriated to figure out what really to think of Polly’s goodiness. It’s Polly is always right and Polly comes first.
Worse kind of champagne socialist. Do as I say, not as I do.
Champions state eduction, whilst sending her kids to private schools.
Champions the poor, whilst living in luxury.
Champions climate change, whilst jetting off to her villa in Tuscany.
Basic economic principle – if you want to stifle innovation in a new technology, subsidize it. When the subsidy is withdrawn the new industry fails.
Interesting to see what happens to the ethanol subsidy in the US.
As far as I can see, Polly Toynbee illustrates a kind of genetic regression to the mean, with grandiosity and disdain for evidence being the dominant and surviving family traits. Lord save us from those brought up on communes started by the rich and famous.
It’s not special to Toynbee; it is common failing of government officials and academics to accept the way free markets actually work: you have to produce genuine value which meets or beats the competition.
Politicians also love to describe every new spending program as “investing in our future”.
It’s just that subsidies have become the new form of government welfare.
“…the erratic, half-crazed stream of contradictions pouring from his lips…”
Er, the entire piece is a half-crazed stream of contradictions from Toynbee’s fevered brain.We are boiling and freezing and drowning (boiling? Does she know temperature that implies?). Economic industries collapse when their subsidies are taken away. We risk annihilation. She talks about a Keynesian surge of investment, yet never called for a Keynesian surplus during good times, but the opposite, more state spending.
Climate change is “background noise” but also “too ever-present”. We have to put “planet survival” first, second and third. What?
Truly, an example of how liberals have gone more than a little bit mad.
I think the good news is that there must be no Klimate Kool-Aid left: Polly Toynbee has clearly drunk all of it.
Subsidies take from one sector of the economy and insert them into another sector and the taxpayer pays the difference.
That’s why Polly’s claim that wind and solar are just becoming economical is only possible by using subsidies. It’s laughable!
I think it all comes down to this: If they’re wrong – and their opposition is neither evil, nor irrational, nor ignorant and possibly right about a few things – then there’s nothing special about them.
And that can’t be.
Because they are oh, so special.
So it is no longer “stronger and more frequent storms”, it is “human annihilation”. Perhaps the annihilation is of the utter bias in the media that the bunk busters bring. Once the media cannot control ‘the message’ the bunk busting bombshells will start doing their work. The only shriek left will be to claim that the solar system will be annihilated is we don’t elect the right party and fund the right technologies. The author is preaching to the choir because the pews are emptying.
Bunk busters. I like it – describes both people and facts.
Dave in Hampshire, England
6500 highly subsidise windmills are producing less than 3% of our power at 16:00 on 20th January 2017!
We have had an anticyclone sitting over the UK most of the week, so little wind, sun is not very powerful and days short, I can’t wait to see the headlines in the Guardian telling us this fact. It was them who distorted the facts when they crowed that 28% of our power on Christmas day was from wind – it was very windy and demand was less than half of a normal working day, and it mild.
Perhaps with smart metering we can have users decide if they wish to opt for Green tariffs, but they will have to accept that they will be cut off when demand exceeds supply from renewals, or they get an option to pay all the cost of any stand-by equipment required to in-fill their supply if they want to retain their power.
Those of us who are not convinced that windmills are the answer, can continue with our gas turbines, coal and hopefully micro-nuclear power stations, and avoid contributing to the money making machines.
The myth of ‘sustainable renewable energy’ founders on the unyielding reefs of economics.
If it’s truly sustainable, it won’t need subsidies… or government protection.
If it needed subsidies to survive, it wasn’t a real industry!
That’s all there is to it.
“The trouble with climate change as a political issue is that it’s too big to grasp, too ever-present” That is not the problem at all. The real problem is the science is so weak and the computer models so questionable. The failure of the models to match the actual data for the last 20 years means the catastrophic predictions of the future are not believable. More and more new information is questioning the man-made contribution to what is really natural climate change.
So the Brits should have best Conditions since 1983 –
She is a social democrat and was a candidate for the Social Democratic Party in the 1983 general election. She now broadly supports the Labour Party.
1983. What happened meanwhile?
Whenever a name like https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/
appears on the e-mail account –
mark that path as spam.