Ed Miliband is hammering the final
nail in Britain’s coffin – then boasting
about it.
The country that birthed the industrial revolution now
has the world’s highest electricity prices and only the
ghost of an industrial sector
Annabel DenhamColumnist and Deputy Comment Editor
Les jeux sont faits, Ed Miliband. The chips are down, the game is up. We knew Labour was no closer to solving the energy trilemma than scientists are to explaining dark matter. That, for now, we cannot have net-zero emissions, security of supply and affordability. We knew that using public money to import gas to manufacture CO2 was less a display of moral leadership on climate change than it was brazen hypocrisy.
Perhaps most importantly, we knew that the pursuit of net-zero policies, regardless of cost, would impact our lives in ways the gentleman in Whitehall could not possibly foresee. It already is, as anyone who has driven into a clean air zone can attest. Yet the ruling class insisted on living in some alternate reality where there were no trade-offs; just cheap, abundant, secure renewables.
So we should thank Bill Esterson, Labour chair of the Commons Energy Security and Net Zero Committee, for letting the cat out of the bag. “We will all have to change our lives” if we are to decarbonise the grid by 2030, he has just admitted. Keir Starmer is offering no such candour; at Cop29, the climate jamboree many world leaders had the good sense to snub, the Prime Minister not only set us another target (an 81 per cent reduction in emissions by 2035), but peddled the line that he “won’t be telling people how to behave”.
This will surely only be true in the most literal sense. Impose congestion charges in British cities, and people might be forced to travel by other means, or not at all. Foist mandates on car manufacturers to sell a certain number of EVs on penalty of hefty fines, and they may be forced to cut sales of petrol vehicles, pushing prices up and consumers out. Introduce green levies on energy bills – they now make up 16 per cent of electricity bills – and households will have to cut spending elsewhere. Did the Government “tell” us to change our behaviour? No, it just left us with no alternative.
And we are only in the foothills of the transition. Yes, the UK last year became the first country to halve its emissions since 1990 – a milestone about which the eco-zealots remained surprisingly quiet. But this was achieved by accelerating existing trends, such as abandoning much domestic production, and we could rely on renewables because fossil fuels were there to provide baseload power. The next half will be far more painful – though the climate cult will likely dismiss such concerns, insisting that clean energy sources are “cheap” and jobs will be provided aplenty.
Clearly, when wind turbines are running the marginal cost of energy produced is close to zero, whilst energy produced by gas has a positive marginal cost because we have to purchase the fuel. But gas-fired power stations are easy to build and link to the grid. Wind turbines, on the other hand, are costly to install and maintain, especially offshore. They don’t have a long life, are in places far from population centres, and are expensive to link to the grid. They also need backup when the wind doesn’t blow, or if it blows too hard. But these issues are hidden by government subsidy and delusional eco-hype.
Yet the Tories are hardly in a position to challenge it – assuming they want to. The timetable they set for the transition to clean energy was excessively ambitious. They did nothing about the 2008 Climate Change Act, failed to dismantle the supposedly independent Climate Change Committee, and enshrined the Net Zero by 2050 target in law. As a result, the country that birthed the industrial revolution and created the oil refineries and steelworks that transformed people’s lives, now has the world’s highest electricity prices – and only the ghost of an industrial sector.
Some 199 years ago, the first steam locomotive carried passengers in the North East. Why did this breakthrough happen on our small island? For the same reason we pioneered large factories, mass electrification and gas for cooking: because we had cheap coal. No country in the world has ever prospered without affordable and abundant energy. That Labour fails to accept this is as alarming as its belief you can grow an economy by lavishing money on the public sector. It is making us poorer by the day, telling us we’re imagining it – and then giving an exasperated sigh when we complain.
“The clean energy transition is unstoppable,” said the fanatical Miliband yesterday, as Vauxhall announced the closure of its Luton factory. “Unstoppable because clean energy is the route to energy security. Unstoppable because it is the economic opportunity of our time.” A noble lie is still a lie. DT.
