From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
The Office for Budget Responsibility has published its latest Economic & Fiscal Outlook, following the Chancellor’s Spring Statement this week. The Outlook contains details on the Government’s tax and spending plans for the next five years.
It offers a stark reminder of how much we are already spending on Net Zero and how much this will increase in coming years.
Starting with Ed Miliband’s Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) itself, RDEL, day-to-day spending, is running at £2 billion a year. On top of that, CDEL or capital spending adds up to £53 billion for the five years to 2029/30:
https://obr.uk/efo/economic-and-fiscal-outlook-march-2026/
A total of £60.7 billion, pretty much all of which could be saved if the Department was shut down, as it should be.
The OBR also include in their figures what are called “Environmental Levies”. These are levies added to energy bills because of government policy. They are all directly or indirectly subsidies for renewable energy. (Note that the Renewable Heat Incentive, which pays subsidies to households to fit renewable heat systems, such as biomass boilers, is funded out of taxation.)
These various subsidy schemes are expected to cost £15.2 billion, rising to £19.8 billion in five years’ time.
Levies are paid via our energy bills, while DESNZ costs are funded through taxation. But one way or another, we will be paying more than £150 billion in the next five years for the obsession with Net Zero.
We can add to these costs the climate change levy, an environmental tax introduced in April 2001. It applies to the non-domestic use of certain forms of energy, including electricity and gas, with the primary aim of encouraging businesses to improve energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This raises £1.8 billion a year currently and impacts the rest of us through higher prices.
Similarly with the Emission Trading Scheme, which raises over £3 billion a year. This penalises electricity producers and heavy industry for using fossil fuels. This tax directly impacts the price we pay for electricity. It has been estimated that the ETS alone is adding 10% to electricity bills, as it increases the cost of gas generation, which in turn tends to set the wholesale price.
Both the CCL and ETS are damaging the competitiveness of UK industry.
These costs are only the tip of the iceberg, as far as Net Zero is concerned. They are only the items that appear on the government’s balance sheet.
They do not include, for instance, the £80 billion OFGEM have said needs to be spent in the next five years on the electricity grid, specifically to make it Net Zero ready. Or the £200 billion which has been estimated to upgrade the electricity distribution network, the low-voltage system which brings power into our towns and homes, and which will be needed to cater for the extra electricity we will need for electric cars and heat pumps.
Nor does it include the costs imposed on households and businesses, forced to pay for unaffordable heat pumps, electric cars and decarbonisation nonsense.
What a brilliant piece. The full costs of the craziness of the UK Net Zero project are not usually visible together in one place because they are scattered through the economy in lots of ad hoc measures. Homewood has done a great public service by summarizing the full picture..
The fundamental problem the UK has is that, as this piece shows, its committed itself to very high energy costs. There is no way around this. Add up all the costs and wind and solar cost far more than conventional. This then feeds somewhat into prices and generally into business costs. The traditional Labour approach to such issues was lower consumer prices and raise business prices. They have now noticed that if you do this, the result is businesses start to go under, lay people off, move production out of the country.
So their solution is now to do a U-turn and raise consumer prices to lower business prices. And then to fund a cap on consumer costs out of general taxation.
It will work after a fashion in its own terms, but the fundamental problem is that Net Zero is imposing these costs on the economy as a whole and all this is just moving them around from one place to another. The only solution to the real problem is to repeal the Climate Change Act, and abolish all the other emission targets, not just the electricity generation ones.
Instead what they have done is close down domestic gas and oil production just ahead of an energy crisis caused by a Middle East war, yet another of them, and also closed down their gas storage, so they are looking at two days gas supply on hand. And the consequence of their energy policy is closing refinery capacity, not just exploration and production of oil and gas, so expect gasoline price rises and shortages.
Craziness. A couple of months ago heating oil was priced at about 65p per liter. Right now its just under 140. The government is now looking at ‘protecting’ heating oil users in the same way they ‘protect’ gas users (about 85% of homes). Its total incompetence, abetted by Miliband’s fanaticism. And its going to end very badly, probably initially in the first week in May at the Council elections, which they have failed in their attempt to postpone.
The UK, as I have said before, is the Canary in the Net Zero coal mine. Its attempting the impossible with lots of contradictory inconsistent measures, and its failing slowly. Its going to carry on failing slowly until it fails fast, which it will one of these days or years.
Watch out then. They believe themselves to be calm, reasonable, pragmatic and polite. But there is something quite different not far under the surface.
To be fair the heating oil price rise is more about Trumps insanity in the middle east than Milibands in the UK…
I am glad I topped up a few weeks ago
The Heating Oil price was an accident waiting to happen. UK refining was allowed to die, to be first replaced with Russian refined heating oil which caused a spike with the Ukrainian War to be replaced by Indian refined heating oil which is now hit by China banning exports of its refined heating oil. Uk refining of heating oil from oil extracted from the North Sea would still have increased in price but not with the peaks caused when its transported half way around the world.
“Trumps insanity”
TDS alert.
“To be fair …” to whom?
I was born 11 presidents ago and at no point has the USA media _not_ complained about Midde East instability and oil supply-demand problems. ‘R’ or ‘D’ seems not to matter much, though DJT has done the best at getting ‘energy independence’. I tried to Google up a chart to verify, but Google sensed danger that it would look bad for its political team and obfuscated.
Michel – it’s a classic example of the tactic known as “re-arranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic”. All for show and unlikely to produce the desired outcome.
But that’s Labour governments for you; Blair’s was like that, too.
Yes, It’s going to be really bad in the UK before this epidemic of low-carbon energy climate related madness breaks down and Miliband resigns. It will certainly cause the end of this deluded Labor government, but not before the economy is trashed by all this self-harm caused by a future climate nonevent. It could be science fiction, but in reality it couldn’t be scripted except as a typical `Freddie’ horror film, with repeated stupidity killing everyone!
Trump could replace Noem, but Starmer can’t replace Miliband?
Noem time away from the office to star in that ad campaign video. That is sufficient cause, IMHO, to transfer to a less critical position. The money spent comes in third place. The verbal claims place second.
Yes, and its very hard to get a handle on this. The first thing to say is that legally he can, the Prime Minister of the day appoints all Ministers and they serve at his pleasure. In the British constitution this is Royal Prerogative, since 1688 exercised by the PM of the day and more or less willingly endorsed by the Queen or King of the day. So why doesn’t Starmer fire him?
Possibility one is that Starmer is a true believer in the climate and energy and UK Net Zero cause. This seems unlikely, he doesn’t seem to believe in anything except staying in office. Possibility two sort of follows on from this, it is that he sees the disaster but does not believe he can fire or replace him and remain in office.
On this account the reasoning would go like this. The Net Zero cause is the darling of the left of the UK Labour Party (along with nutteries about sex & gender, race, immigration, welfare, nationalization, British history, Israel and “Islamophobia” – whatever that is). Miliband is one of two darlings of the left of the party, along with Angela Rayner.
So Starmer probably reasons that Miliband would not go quietly, but would trigger a leadership challenge, which Starmer would lose to one of them. In addition, he most likely reasons, even did he win the contest, the resulting civil war in the Party would probably take the Government standing with the electorate to a new low. It would also be proclaimed by the press and opposition parties as yet another U-turn, of which there have been something like one a month (I haven’t checked recently, it may be more now).
So you can see his problem. The closer the country gets to the summer 2029 General Election, the greater the damage of a contest will be, and then its goodbye to the second term that Starmer is probably still dreaming of. In fact, it could be goodbye to the Labour Party, which could go the way of the old 20c Liberal Party, so small as to be irrelevant.
Now you may argue in reply that Miliband’s policies will lead to medium term national disaster and therefore electoral disaster in 2029 (or whenever Starmer calls an election, if he does so earlier). And this will be on the scale of the old Liberal Party diminishment. Yes, you would be right. But to a politician of his temperament the later possible disaster, even if he is persuaded that its coming, weighs much less than an immediate almost certain one, and one moreover which requires you to make a positive decision for doing it.
So can he? Yes. Should he? Yes. His only real chance is fire Miliband, try and repeal the Climate Change Act, close the Climate Change Committee. if he fails in the Commons, make it a confidence issue, call an election and say he has seen the light and listened to the country, and he will get the country back on track. A manifesto which abandons all the other wokery as well. Would it work? Probably not. It would probably result in a massive shift from Labour to the Greens on the left, and to Reform on the right, but its a better chance than what he is doing now, drifting.
If you want to see true nutters, look at the UK Greens. Headed by a man who said hypnosis could increase breast size. Look up their policies,
Will he act? No. Its classic, a weak vacillating and indecisive manager who is letting things drift into a disaster for the country because he hasn’t the courage to take the only possible remedy and drifting feels less painful than acting. Its the illusion that inaction is not a decision.
The result is probably going to be a wipeout at the local elections on the first Thursday in May, blackouts before 2029, followed by PM Farage in 2029. And something a lot darker than Farage emerging from the swamp after that.
Will Starmer surive the local elections? Hard to say, but probably. The possible leadership challengers have even less guts than him, and will probably bottle it.
Though to be fair to Miliband, he did have the courage (if you can call it that) to stand for the Party leadership at the last minute, against his own brother. So maybe he does have it in him.
Even after impoverishment of their nation and if they actually achieved “net zero” emissions, the “climate” wouldn’t even notice. That’s how batshit stupid this is.
Exactly!
IF the problem were real THEN
The British government is strapped for cash and unable to balance its budget but there appears to be an infinite amount of money for Net Zero. There has never been a government more innumerate than this one.
Speaking of wasting money and near infinite stupidity:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/10/sodium-hydroxide-ocean-global-heating-solution
Only about $19 per human. Cheap!
A billion here, a billion it begins to add up to real money.
One way to end the energy transition is to go bankrupt.
How many nuclear, coal and gas plants could be built with 150 billion pounds UK. It wouldn’t cost a penny more because those funds were already slated to be wasted. It’s like free.
“The UK budget deficit (public sector net borrowing) for the 2025/26 financial year is projected at £138 billion, or 4.5% of GDP”
Or they could just not spend a little?
Spare no expense the nutters-
Scientists pump 65,000 litres of chemicals into the ocean to stop global warming