A windfall tax on the energy companies. Taking BP and Shell into public ownership. Putting controls on the price of electricity and persuading us all to turn off the heating as the only way of surviving through the rest of the winter.
If you are getting your news about the gathering energy crisis from the BBC, then you will have been told time and again that there are only three ways to fix the soaring cost of gas and heating.
State control. More state control. And, if that doesn’t work, putting an official at a desk in Whitehall in charge.
But surely it is the Government meddling in the market that has left us in this mess? In reality, the UK needs to have a grown-up, sensible debate about energy policy, and about how we transition to green fuels, at a reasonable cost, and while making sure that our supplies are secured.
And yet it is very hard to do that while the national broadcaster is pumping out a constant stream of propaganda demanding more intervention in the market.
Right now, the BBC is making the energy crisis far, far worse than it needs to be. If you happen to be an expert on price caps, controls, and the nationalization of oil companies, then this is your moment. BBC researchers will be on the phone non-stop.
If you had tuned into the Today program, still the corporation’s flagship current affairs show, on Tuesday morning you would have heard Prof Michael Jacobs advocate for a windfall tax on the energy companies.
Prof Jacobs is no doubt an expert in his field, and yet he is hardly an impartial voice. A former special adviser to Gordon Brown when he was prime minister, and before that at the Fabian Society, he has made his career in Left-leaning think tanks and now academia.
On Newsnight, the night before, you would have heard Jonathan Marshall, from the Left-leaning Resolution Foundation, where he specializes in “net zero”, make much the same case, while the program’s supposedly objective reporter described oil company profits as “dizzying” and energy price rises that were “painful”.
It hardly stops there. On the day that Shell reported bumper profits, and an increased dividend, followed by similar results from BP, the main BBC news bulletins were filled with questions about how they should be made to pay more to ease the pressure on families.
On the news channel, reaction to BP’s figures was from Kate Blagojevic, the head of climate change at Greenpeace: a worthy enough spokesman, but hardly a financial expert.
Meanwhile, Ed Miliband, the original architect of the catastrophic decision to cap energy prices, has been given constant airtime to argue for even more draconian controls on the sector.
Meanwhile, his mini-me, the Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey, who seems to have learned nothing during his three years as secretary of state for climate change, follows up with a slightly less nasal version of the same argument.
It is always easy to accuse the BBC of bias and to ignore its attempts to air different points of view, and those complaints are not always justified. On climate change and the energy crisis, however, its coverage is completely one-sided.
What the BBC conveniently ignores is that it is government policy that has landed us in this mess in the first place.
It rushed into a net-zero target, phasing out coal and nuclear power regardless of the dependability of wind and solar alternatives.
It ran down the North Sea, demonizing the few companies still willing to operate there. It closed down gas storage facilities to save money, complacently assuming it could always buy whatever we needed on the global market.
And it effectively banned fracking, even though we have plentiful reserves in the UK, and the scare stories about it make the anti-vaxxers look sensible.
The US doesn’t have soaring gas prices because the frackers can step into the market. In reality, this is a crisis entirely of the Government’s own making. It takes a Herculean effort to decide the state is the solution – when all the evidence is that it has been the problem.
Meanwhile, the oil company profits may be “dizzying” to BBC reporters, and yet if you take the trouble to spend a whole two minutes looking up last year’s numbers, you will find they are simply balancing out losses from the past couple of years when the oil price was far lower.
There shouldn’t be anything very head-spinning about that. It is how commodity companies work. Good years follow bad ones, as the cycle turns, but the coverage conveniently ignores that.
Even worse, it neglects to mention that the one thing we need right now is more investment in energy, whether oil, gas, or wind.
Will we really achieve that with punitive taxes on the companies that will have to make those investments? It doesn’t seem, to put it mildly, very likely.
The UK’s energy policy is starting to make even our housing policy – which most of us rightly regard as the most distorted, dysfunctional market in the world – look like a model of long-term, rational thinking.
Successive governments have meddled, intervened, and restructured the industry until it started to buckle under the weight of competing objectives and regulations.
We badly need to have a sensible national conversation about how we keep our houses warm, the lights switched on, and the cars and trucks moving.
Perhaps we should slow down the transition to net-zero so that it costs a little less. Perhaps we should be developing more gas in the North Sea so that we can rely on our own resources. Maybe we should be building wind farms as fast as possible.
We need to have that debate, and then work out a way of moving forward, but that is hardly possible while the BBC is pumping out a constant stream of anti-market, anti-business propaganda.
Read more at Daily Telegraph
Exactly, Mathhew Lynn! These government and state media hypocrites cry fake crocodile tears over exploding energy costs, all the while scheming how to drive them even higher! It is a disgusting demonization of the energy that has created the best fed, longest-living, most prosperous human beings that have ever existed. Our most successful energy-based civilization of all time allows 3% of the population to feed the other 97%, BECAUSE OF COAL, OIL, AND GAS (fossil fuels)! (in countries like Canada and the US) And fossil fuels, perhaps even more importantly, recycle dangerously low levels of the basic ingredient of life on earth – CO2. During glacial phases, of our ongoing Pleistocene Ice Age, life essential CO2 levels fall to within 30ppm of the LACK OF CO2 beginning of the death of all things. (All life dies without CO2. Because we are literally made from the stuff.) Following former East German Angela Merkel down her disastrous energy policy rathole which imagined 24/7/365 energy can be replaced by energy that leaves people to die in the dark when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. Promoting unreliable “Dumb Energy” that does nothing but quadruple energy costs and serve as a poster child to the stupidity of television ‘journalists’ and politicians. ‘Journalists’ and politicians who show themselves so ignorant of CO2 that they don’t know they, and every other species on earth, are literally MADE FROM THE STUFF. The same people who loudly proclaim a love of the environment and the science of ecology that describes how it all works. Yet don’t have a clue what the science actually says! Here IS what it says… Life on earth – all life- is composed of little carbon sacks of water called cells. Carbon is uniquely capable of the multiple chemical bonds that allow the long-chain carbon backbone of the molecules that make up life on earth. Every fat, every protein. That is why carbon and oxygen are by far the most abundant elements in ALL life. And green why photosynthesis is the single most important biochemical process in life on earth. Its green pigmented enzyme chlorophyll IS the green in the environment. Photosynthetic single-celled organisms and plants are the only species that are capable of converting sunlight energy to natural chemical energy – sugar. Photosynthetic organisms produce it. Animals have to eat it. And as a byproduct, photosynthesis converts earth’s atmosphere from being devoid of oxygen at life’s birth, to our current near 20% levels. Without it, animals like us could not exist. From green photosynthesis flows ALL OF LIFE’S ENERGY, ALL OF LIFE’S CARBON, AND ALL ATMOSPHERIC OXYGEN. Its formula is very simple. Sunlight plus CO2 plus water produces sugar and oxygen. AND WHEN the fuels that come from life – coal, oil, and gas – are used to make us the best fed, longest-living, most prosperous human beings that have ever existed, THEY ALSO RECYCLE LIFE’S MOST IMPORTANT AND RARE ESSENTIAL INGREDIENT CO2! MAKING FOSSIL FUELS NOT ONLY 85% OF MODERN CIVILIZATION’S ENERGY. BUT RECYCLING DANGEROUSLY LOW LEVELS OF LIFE’S MOST IMPORTANT INGREDIENT CO2. THIS MAKES FOSSIL FUELS OUR ONLY GREEN ENERGY. This IS the ecology of fossil fuel energy. Using them makes the environment greener, richer, stronger, more drought-tolerant, and more abundant. Here’s P.Hd. (ecology) and co-founder of Greenpeace Dr. Patrick Moore on the subject… “Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom”.
BBC and CNN their just about the same the only big difference its the Atlantic Ocean between the New World and the Old world