A recent post by HotAir editor Beege Welborn, “Labour’s Case of Gas Under Attack,” describes the UK government’s decision to open an offshore natural gas field as a “win-win” for both the government and ratepayers. This is true, suppression of the development of their own energy resources has been a serious problem for the UK at large, which has suffered some of the highest electricity costs in the world.
Welborn writes that it’s “insane” that government officials took this long in the first place to make the decision to open the Jackdaw North Sea gas field, because “Jackdaw won’t take years to provide relief from both high prices and shortages of natural gas on demand during high usage periods,” gas is predicted to start being produced from Jackdaw “possibly within weeks.”
Tory leadership points out that, had the decision been made sooner, gas would have been available during this coming winter, when they are now facing shortages.
Any shortages mean that ratepayers will be suffering from even higher electricity prices, in a nation which ranks in the top ten with the highest electricity costs in the world.
Long gone are the days where residents can easily use their home fireplace if heating bills become too high. London makes it illegal to heat your home with wood burning stoves or fireplaces unless you have a particular kind of appliance, or are not in a smoke-control area (which most of London is).
This is especially egregious and dangerous given the fact that deaths due to cold weather outnumber those due to heat by a large margin. In the UK alone, between 2000 and 2019, 44,000 citizens died from cold weather, according to a study in The Lancet.
How many died of heat? Just 8000. Five times more people died of cold than heat in the UK.
But, as Welborn points out, these realities do not “matter one whit to the hard-core Labour climate cultists, the Greens, or any of the radical environmental whacko groups in the UK who have held sway over energy policy for so long.”
Indeed the complaint from other Labour members and the Green Party leadership is that opening Jackdaw is “climate vandalism.” Alleged human-caused global warming is their only concern, to the exclusion of all other issues.
The UK needs natural gas, however, and they will get it any way that they can, and up until now that was largely by importing it from other countries, which certainly could not be “greener” than using nearby resources anyway.
This way, they save in both emissions related to shipping (if you are worried about that at all) and reduce their reliance on sources of energy from foreign countries. As Welborn said, “win-win,” it should be a no-brainer.
Climate Realism has explained in a multitude of posts how and why renewables like wind and solar simply cannot be the majority energy source for a country, and in practice are more expensive than traditional energy. This is true for the United Kingdom as much as it is any other country that has suffered from rising electricity costs as they adopt more non-dispatchable wind and solar. The only reason they are so heavily installed at all is because of generous subsidies and mandates for installation provided to no other electricity generators.
In the UK, for instance, the Renewables Obligations (RO), Feed-in-Tariffs (FiT), and Contract for Difference subsidy schemes support wind and solar by awarding special certificates and payments for power generation, which end up costing the public almost £12 billion per year. As with every grid that ends up being over reliant on intermittent resources, extra gas plants are required to balance the unstable power generation from wind and solar, which further adds to the cost.
On top of all that, gas-fired electricity production is slapped with a carbon tax. Who pays for that? The ratepayer, ultimately.
Welborn, and by extension, HotAir where the post was published, are right to gloat about this victory, even if the UK has a long way to go to reduce energy costs. The climate of the planet is not going to be impacted at all by the UK using more of their own gas instead of getting it from foreign sources, hopefully Labour is finally waking up (at least a little bit) to energy reality.
