BRITAIN has given thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ cash to help fracking in China, it has been revealed – to the anger of cross-party MPs. Foreign Office minister Mark Field has admitted since 2016 the department spent £87,000 on projects to improve the “environmental regulation of shale gas development in China”.
PUBLISHED: 07:45, Sun, May 26, 2019 | UPDATED: 07:56, Sun, May 26, 2019
The Tories are spending UK aid to support fracking in China
The move has been condemned by politicians, who expressed astonishment that Britain was boosting the economic superpower’s energy sector.
Fracking, which involves breaking open rock layers to release underground gas, has transformed the global energy market but is a source of fierce controversy in the UK.
James Roberts at TaxPayers’ Alliance said: “When it comes to our aid cash, China is big enough to look after itself.
“And at a time when we are crippling our own energy market with rules and regulations, it beggars belief we’re giving the Chinese a leg-up in the shale sector with our foreign aid.”
A senior Conservative source also voiced concern: “The aid budget tops £14billion a year and ministers have lost all financial discipline and control as to where taxpayers’ cash is going.
“To be giving money to China at a time when they threaten our national security is unacceptable.”
Alex Norris, shadow minister for international development, accused the Government of hypocrisy.
He said: “The Tories are hypocritically spending UK aid to support fracking in China, while also announcing the climate crisis will be a top priority of their international development agenda.
Worse, far far worse, Europe has been subsidizing Chinese steel also under the excuse of the environment!
“The astonishing figures include a loan of £40million to one of the world’s worst “steel dumping” culprits, the Wuhan Iron & Steel Corporation. ”
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/659627/EU-loaning-millions-Chinese-steel-companies-40000-UK-jobs
That’s probably just a bribe…
87,000? is that even a rounding error?
Yes, the Houses of Parliament probably spend more than that on paper napkins. Not the sort of money to spend time making a scandal about.
In the US we spend more than that on hammers.
It should be noted that the hammer actually only costs about $10 but that governmental procurement requirements and certifications add the remaining $300 to the finished price.
…and if you want to argue with a governmental bean counter that many costly requirements do not pertain to a hammer, it only ends up adding more cost.
A good gavel is probably a lot cheaper than Obama’s pen.
(Hmmm…I’m sure that could sound very rude, if said the right way.)
The UK Civil Servants who actually allocate the money have a quota to make. That means that they have to spend all of it. This will help them achieve their quota. Pity we can’t include repair of UK roads in their quota.
Me thinks that someone ought to “check” on how much of that £87,000 …….. found its way back to the Foreign Office personnel (or family or friends).
The highest “bidder” always wins the “prize$”, …….. ya know.
Why not? We’ve given them just about everything else to date.
And what we haven’t given them, the stole.
No wonder political satire has died out in the UK as you simply can’t make up stories that are more unreal than what is really happening. The foreign aid programme is a legacy of the moron David Cameron who actually lists it as one of the two great achievements of his government. The other one is gay marriage……
And since the UK government runs a deficit and therefore an ever increasing debt, the money given away is borrowed.
It is even worse when you consider that the government has made it virtually impossible to commence fracking in the UK with the ridiculous regs they have imposed.
I still dispair at the ignorance that seems to abound here! As I understand it, “fracking” was first undertaken in 1945 in Texas! The UK has been fracking in UK waters, primarily the North Sea, since the 1960s! The only “new” technology is horizontal drilling! Sheesh, just goes to show how the left-wing green propaganda machine swings into full operation onceit smells blood, or at least a lack of confidence in taking on the Green Behemoth & shooting them down!!!
Absolute nonsense. North Sea exploration and oil drilling was never ‘fracking’; in those oilfields, the oil was released by natural pressure. We didn’t need to pump anything other than seawater balance down the lines.
Hydraulic fracturing (horizontal or not), is largely carried out on land into shale rock seams and is a different process again — partly because of the high-pressure toxic chemicals pumped down to shatter the seams.
The issues (literally) start when these chemicals leak through fissures and fractures into underground aquifers and/or the water table/wells then runoff into rivers. We’ve experienced all these problems for years (and others, like leaking collection pools, et al) — they’re embarrassingly well-documented. Much of the non-commercially sensitive records are in the public domain (thus easily researched by anyone with an interest).
Chinwagging and denying that there are serious leakage issues with ‘Fracking’, is patently incorrect. It’s there — and it’s caused some quite appalling, undeniable damage to local property and surrounding environments that have proved nigh-on impossible to clean up.
As an industry, drilling will probably continue regardless. It’s come down to the publics’ perceived urgency for requiring government regulation and oversight as the only remaining method available now to minimise negative impacts of hydraulic drilling rigs and processes.
Sure, it’s a political issue (near the top of lawmakers and policymakers minds), this is really a genuine, pressing environmental area which should have been considered and acted upon — for everyone’s benefit — twenty or thirty years ago.
It would’ve been a heck of a lot cheaper to have dealt with it back then — as it will be less expensive to deal with it now than twenty more years down the line.
We must concede that this regulation has to happen, as the right time for it now has come (whether we like it or not).
I hope this helps.
[??? .mod]
Socialists of the world unite! Pretty soon you guys can pay Cuba to print their Che shirts with inks made of elderberry and rainbows, for the environment of course.
Nice!
+10
They can wear the shirts while standing in line for food ration cards.
I can confirm that UK politicians and civil servants are just as stupid as those in major democracies around the world.
Seconded.
“…Foreign Office minister Mark Field has admitted since 2016 the department spent £87,000 on projects to improve the “environmental regulation of shale gas development in China”….”
Don’t WUWT readers know that ‘improving environmental regulation’ is civil service speak for sabotaging the industry?
We should be sending ALL our ‘environmental regulators’ to China to get rid of unwanted green fifth-columnists in the West, and handicapping our Chinese competitors…..
Good idea DG. Reminds me of a comment made by an Alabama (or maybe Mississippi) Congressman back when the Japanese auto industry was just starting to take over here in the U.S. He suggested that for every Toyota they shipped over here we should ship one of our lawyers over there… Same sort of ‘fix’.
To treat China as deserving of any international aid is astonishing. It is not part pf the 3rd world and not economically challenged.
+1 The second, and may soon become first, economy in the world receiving aid from a country who’s economy is onlly 1/5 of theirs? What’s wrong with this picture?
It’s called buying friends and access to that market for British goods and investment.
Sweetener/bribery/corruption, call it what you will, it’s all the same.
Wow
Do they really have a full accounting of where the Paris Agreement monies are going?
The brown paper bags of cash are kept in a good strong cupboard and all monies are recorded on the notebook in the cupboard.
Many may not realize all of this yet.
China is willing to get money to politicians in other countries in order to get favorable trade deals and business contracts.
This works because the politicians know that you and I have little information of what politicians do, and where money comes from. A politician can be rewarded by a family member getting a good contract, or other means.
There is no requirement for a politician to be completely honest with you. In USA and other countries, lobbyists and campaign contributions are monitored, but other things are not. It is not hard to create channels of money that are not easily detected, and when exposed have a reasonable explanation.
How do politicians do this? Two major aspects of this: one is that they keep you voting by supposedly acting on issues that you supposedly care about, and the other is that once people get into the government, they find out about “gentlemen’s agreements” to allow the other parties to carry on the same way.
Supposed action: They tell you to your face a long list of things they support, and will do for you. When they fail to deliver, they blame it on the other party. Canada just failed at NAFTA renegotiations. Canada was mis-using NAFTA, being a pass-through for Chinese business activity. No one wanted to call this out, since both parties, (R) and (D), were one way or another benefiting from making China happy.
Trump upset all of this. In Canada, they included a bunch of “social justice warrior” demands into a trade agreement – why? So the populace would believe Canada negotiators were serving their interests. But the SJW issues were just to make it so you would be perceived as a “bigot” if you failed to support the renegotiation of the China-favoring NAFTA. So Canadians were generally behind the NAFTA deal, thinking it was not all about China.
Similar in the USA. This was a big story in the Clinton days – you can search for “clinton china money bundling” and read all about it.
The politicians get us outraged with red meat issues, so we are motivated to vote for them, and pay attention to the issues thrown out there like chum in the water. Meantime, they are carrying out all kinds of stuff unknown to you or me.
It was discovered in 2018 that an “aide” of Feinstein, a senator from California – being one of two senators from one of the handful of most populous states is incredibly powerful – Russell Lowe – had communications with China intelligence people. Feinstein played it down – claiming he was a lowly “driver” although his position was noted as office aide. It came out Feinstein had been warned a few years ago about China connections this way.
Some journalists rode the story for a bit, but it only played for a couple of days; we now know there is no Trump-Russia collusion, but that has played on a leading headline news for two years. Why? Because Trump is not part of the gentlemen’s agreement.
The Republicans kept saying they would “end Obamacare.” They filed dozens of bills. A couple got to Obama who, of course, did not sign them. Then, Trump gets elected, and says “send me the bill and I will sign it.”
Not a peep. The “End Obamacare” was all a facade to motivate us voters to take sides – I get all emotional, and go vote for (D), while others get all fired up and vote for (R). All the while our elected officials take Chinese money and laugh at us arguing over Obamacare and abortion rights. Oh – and when (D) is in office, (R) declares the “deficit” is the hugest problem we have, but when (R) in office, we might have an afternoon discussion of the deficit, but that is it.
We get played.
We know USA is in on this. From NAFTA, we know China is pulling strings this way in Canada.
Another example: Former Sen Harry Reid of Nevada was strongly supporting Bureau of Land MAnagement as they faced off against the Bundy family claiming the ability going back maybe 100 years to graze cattle in this one area of Nevada. For those who don’t know, this escalated, and BLM and other federal forces were in a face off with Bundys and supporters, guns pointed at each other. A bunch of Americans took their AR15s and joined the stand-off. Thi being a huge deal, the press was covering it – with long -range cameras showing government snipers in place, etc. Government decided it would be very bad publicity to go to bullets, and the government backed down.
Turns out that Harry Reid’s son, Rory, was helping a Chinese company get set up to build a huge solar farm in this disputed piece of federal property. ENN Mojave Energy LLC was the USA front. You can web search all of this.
Did any (R) senator ever call out Reid? No. Because they are all in on the same gentlemen’s agreement.
So, we (R) and (D) citizens go around about “gun control,” stoked by the politicians, as they know we will ignore the real stuff going on, and knowing our gun rights ain’t going anywhere anytime soon. The supposed conflict between (R) and (D) is manufactured so the parties can do what they want.
Except for Trump, they were telling us, in 1990, NAFTA would be great for us. We dropped from 17 million manufacturing jobs to 8 million as a consequence of NAFTA. We only had modest gains getting maybe another million or two back due to Obama deficit spending trying to stoke the economy. That very modest uptick has been upticking more under Trump, the outsider who is actually doing something, rather than playing out a game.
[The insiders really do not like this. They are figuring out how to get rid of Trump. Now, besides “Russia Collusion,” the latest stunt, I fear, is to work with Iran to manufacture middle-east conflict – even war. We need to be careful how we react to events I am afraid are coming – like we just had those ships with planted bombs, and lo and behold “Iran” gets identified as the Bad Guy; Iran is probably in collusion with US congresspeople to have this play out a certain way, and get Trump the Disrupter out of office. BTW: What was Feinstein doing in Iran this month?! -Will she tell you? Web-search “Feinstein Iran” and read up.]
Now, it look like China is fast friends with UK insiders. I would suspect more of the same.
If UK wants to make China fracking be environmentally acceptable, then UK could pass a law: “we will only buy China oil drilled under certain conditions.” End of story. Further, they could put tariff pressure on China.
But that is not the goal. The goal is to set this thing up as some officially sanctioned way to get money and favor flowing in a way that will make the the average citizen smile and say “how nice that we are making China be so environmentally conscious!”
What is a solution? I suggest that each of us really work to figure out what we expect and want from government, and pressure parties to be clear about agenda. Education, economy, environment, civil rights, infrastructure, etc. Stick to it. From the grass roots up. Rather than allowing the parties to inform you what you should be enraged about today.
Also, we can ask pols: “can you describe political and business connections of you and your family with China?”
THE LAST DEMOCRAT? Sounds like you should come on over to the Right side! Your last sentence could preview the end of Joe/Hunter Biden cash from China, but won’t end Crazy Uncle Joes political adventures. The Watts readers might actually prefer Crazy Uncle Joe as the D candidate as he is against AOC and the Green Wienie Deal.
The “Last Democrat” was JFK……IMHO
RL: With “Dems” straying from the USA to team up with Communists, I do have more in common with Republicans than current “Democrats.” Myself, I can list a clear agenda for a hypothetical democratic party, as it maybe was decades ago, that is clearly American and not Communist, and is distinct from an ideal, hypothetical Republican agenda.
Until the Dem party finally crashes and burns, reflects on where they went off the rails, looks back, and rebuilds the party along those lines, then I do have more in common with a typical (R) platform than the current (D) platform.
Right now, it is taboo to seriously mention 3/4 of this formerly solid Dem agenda in any Dem setting.
The only thing keeping the (D) party viable is how lousy and sold-out the (R) party has been in recent decades. (R) love Chinese Yuan as much as (D) do.
To quote Oliver Cromwell: “Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation. You were deputed here by the people to get grievances redressed, are yourselves become the greatest grievance.”
See https://speakola.com/political/oliver-cromwell-speech-dismissing-rump-parliament-1653 for the full version.
Not only are we the western counties cutting our own throats economically, we are also willing to pay for the knife.