This bill puts in place measures to attract the £110 billion investment which is needed to replace current generating capacity and upgrade the grid by 2020, and to cope with a rising demand for electricity.

And if we did it by building gas fired plants it would cost £13 billion. Plus the occasional small earthquake in Blackpool.

Seriously, we’ve got to kill these people.

They’re doing it all entirely the wrong way around.

Stick on a carbon tax and let the market work everything elese out.

Admittedly, no one goes into politics to ever solve any problem other than what can I as a politician fuck up by having power over but that doesn’t mean we should lay down and take this bollocks.

As our weirder greenie friends keep telling us, the legalisation of hemp is indeed the solution. Some decent 10 foot lengths of the stuff.

Jeebus C on a sodding pogo stick how did we end up with this load of idiocy as public policy?

I trust to science and am ready to believe there is some great mathematician, some Fermat’s last theorem, who can write an equation showing where energy policy should turn. I have never met him.

The equation would start with the current market price of coal, gas, oil, nuclear and so-called “renewables”. That would give simple primacy to coal and gas. The equation would then factor in such variables as security of supply, which – being imponderable – can be argued from commercial interest and prejudice. Then it would have to take account of global warming and the virtue of lower carbon emissions. At this point the demons enter.

We must consider CO₂ reduction through substituting gas for coal, carbon capture, nuclear investment, biomass, wind, wave, solar and tidal generation. We must consider the application of fiscal policy to gas and petrol use, to energy efficiency and house insulation. Each has a quantity attached to it and each a fanatical lobby drooling for subsidies. As for achieving a remotely significant degree of global cooling, that requires world diplomacy – which has, as yet, proved wholly elusive.

We actually have all of the tools that we need to deal with this calculation.

The first tool is to agree with the results of the socialist calculation problem of old. It’s simply too complex a calculation to actually be done in anything approaching real time. Too much information is held locally and cannot be gained by the centre doing the calculation.

This does ot mean that the calculation is impossible of course. It just means that it’s not going to be done by planners in an office. We have to turn to that other calculating method, the only one we’ve actually got that can deal with the dispersed nature of information: the market.

However, we also know very well that the market unadorned does not deal with this problem. The effects of climate change are not incorporated into market prices and thus do not influence that behaviour which is guided by market prices. The externalities problem.

Which brings us to our second tool. We know how to deal with externalities: Pigou Taxes. So, we apply a carbon tax to emissions so that the costs of climate change are incorporated into market prices and thus influence those decisions which are guided by market prices.

And our third tool? The Stern Review. This tells us that the social cost of carbon emissions is $80 per tonne. Thus we add $80 a tonne to emissions and, whatever revenue is raised from such we reduce other taxes by the same amount.

We now have the future effects of climate change incorporated into market prices. We can now let the market be our calculating engine as to what we should do about climate change. We can simply ignore the politicians pontificating, shoot the lobbyists and all 65 million of us can go along in our own sweet manner of changing our behaviour as guided by these new prices.

In short, our mathematician is the market: we just have to feed him the right equation.

Wind farms can cause climate change, according to new research, that shows for the first time the new technology is already pushing up temperatures.
…
Satellite data over a large area in Texas, that is now covered by four of the world’s largest wind farms, found that over a decade the local temperature went up by almost 1C as more turbines are built.

Chortle chortle.

Also, it is much smaller than the estimated change caused by other factors such as man made global warming.

Err, no, it ain’t. The wind farms manage 1oC per decade, or in a decade whichever: I believe AGW is held to be responsible for 0.8 0C since the industrial revolution so far?

Anyway, the real issue is of course that we’ll have to revisit the temperature record from any measuring stations that have had wind famrs built around them and then adjust those records for that local and known effect, won’t we?

Imported gas is likely to represent an increasing proportion of the UK’s energy bills, and by 2020 could cost an extra £60bn more than if Britain met the renewable target, according to the study by the Renewable Energy Association (REA).

Renewables cost more than gas.

So how can more gas and less renewables cost more than less gas and more renewables?

Another early test will be whether the Government appoints Lord Deben (the erstwhile John Gummer) – a good political operator, if not always popular with greens – to the vacant chairmanship of the official Committee on Climate Change, also against Treasury opposition.

Gummer, isn’t he the bloke that’s made a fortune out of sucking up the green subsidies?

And Geoffrey Lean thinks it would be a good idea to put him in charge of, umm, the allocation of green subsidies?

Can we say “producer capture” kiddies?

And it saves money, and creates four times as many jobs per pound invested as building a gas power station, the cheapest on offer.

More jobs means higher costs because opportunity costs.

Grr.

And Lean is of course entirely missing the point:

That is where this week’s row comes in. Under the boringly entitled Proposed Changes to Part L (conservation of fuel and power) of the Building Regulations, ministers are consulting on obliging householders who are erecting extensions, converting lofts and garages, installing new boilers or replacing a set percentage of their windows, to spend an extra 10 per cent of the cost on energy-efficiency measures – something they believe will lead to a million more homes installing insulation by 2015.

Crucially, the measures would have to be “proportionate” – such as by draughtpoofing, lagging cylinders, and insulating lofts and walls – and would be eligible for the Green Deal, which means that they should cost householders nothing: indeed, if the repayments of loans were to exceed the expected savings, they could refuse to comply. The original extensions, etc, have to be notified to councils anyway, and it causes less trouble and costs less to do such work when the builders are already in. Oh yes, and conservatories smaller than a generous 30 square metres are exempt.

It all seems a far cry from various claims that a “crippling” tax on “any building project in the home” would “grab from incomes”, make householders apply for special planning permission and force them to “fully insulate” their homes “from top to bottom”, leaving them “tens of thousands of pounds out of pocket”.

That’s not the complaint. The complaint is that in the middle of a cold snap, if a boiler blows up (which they do occasionally for a not very explosive value of blow up) and needs replacing our shivering granny now has to wait for the council to give her permission to send someone round to B&Q for a new one.

It’s not the costs being complained about it’s the stupid bastards with their clipboards that are.

And again not getting the point:

Better still, the Government could, like many of its European counterparts, use money it is getting from carbon taxes. At present the £4 billion it is due to get annually from measures such as setting a new “floor price for carbon” is heading for the Treasury’s maw. Instead – a report by Transform UK, an alliance of green and consumer groups shows – the cash could take 90 per cent of affected homes out of fuel poverty and support up to 200,000 jobs.

The whole idea of carbon taxes is that they are revenue neutral. We move from taxing good nice and lovely things like jobs and profits and instead tax nasty uncuddly things like emissions.

That’s why the money goes to the Treasury. Because three’s absolutely nothing about carbon, emissions, climate change or global warming that says that we need to have a tighter fiscal policy, a rise in the general as opposed to specific tax rate nor even that the wankers in Westminster get to spend more of our money. Only that they get to play Onan with a different portion of it, not more of it.

Err, no, fuck ‘em.

Hang the lot of them.

David Cameron once said that he wanted the coalition to be the “greenest government ever” (“Government to rethink over Heathrow third runway after warning from business leaders“). That is not going to happen by allowing an expansion of the most damaging form of transport of all.

Planes use huge quantities of fuel, and cause more damage to the climate per litre used than other forms of transport. As well as carbon dioxide, aircraft engines emit nitrogen oxide and water vapour. Water vapour leads to contrails and more cirrus clouds, which warm the Earth’s surface.

More air travel also means more traffic congestion around the airport, and more noise for local residents. Lobbyists are arguing that we are running out of airport capacity, but instead of increasing supply, we can reduce demand by taxing aviation fuel. This should curtail the absurdity of people flying to eastern Europe for stag weekends, and leave more capacity for business use.

Richard Mountford

Hildenborough

Kent

Mr. Mountford, you’re a fool.

We have an international treaty that tells us we cannot tax aviation fuel. That’s why we tax passengers instead, the Air Passenger Duty. That APD is already well above the levels of a Pigou Tax as suggested by the Stern Review.

In short, you are ignorant of what you speak of and should thus usefully remain silent.

As well as hundreds of miles of cabling to connect the turbines to the shore, fleets of boats have to be built, including heavy barges for laying the foundations and turbines, and smaller vessels to ferry workers for construction and maintenance – which needs to be carried out regularly for the 25-year lifetime of the turbines.

Divers, port workers, onshore transport companies, road-building, connecting up substations on land – all of these are needed.

Investments of hundreds of millions of pounds in factories to make offshore wind turbines are now under review. But the investment potential is multiplied many times over if the many related industries are taken into account

These are all costs of offshore windpower, not benefits.

If optimistic predictions for the sector are borne out, according to the wind trade association RenewableUK, offshore wind could spark £3bn of investment in the UK supply chain by 2022, supporting more than 45,000 long-term jobs.

Costs!

Fuck me but these people are dim.

That’s £3 billion (I assume per year) that we cannot spend on curing cancer, providing clean water in the third world or research into why unicorns poop rainbows. That’s 45,000 people that cannot be employed building telecoms networks, wiping elderly bottoms or hunting across the Scottish Highlands for that all important Rabbie Burns treat, the haggis.

Seriously, people who don’t understand the concept of opportunity costs just shouldn’t be allowed to go outside unaccompanied.

Total and complete dingbats.

Families need to spend £1,165 a year to adequately heat their homes, but people in the lowest 10 per cent of incomes are spending only £723, leaving homes cold and potentially damaging children’s health.

This “fuel gap” of £450 has more than doubled from £200 in 2004, Barnardo’s said.

It is deliberate public policy to make energy for domestic use more expensive. This is, of course, to beat climate change.

If making energy more expensive had been done through a carbon tax, or a reversal of the special low VAT rate, then there would be public funds which could be used to address the “problem” of fuel poverty in a segment of the population.

The decision to make energy more expensive by subsidising extremely inefficient methods of energy production has of course removed this option. For the extra expense is going into the pockets of those who own windmills instead of the public purse.

Assuming that something does need to be done about climate change we’re actually doing the wrong things about. But then we knew that already.

We have environmental limits to what we can do but we also have social justice limitations to what we must do. The two can conflict.

I’ve no real problem with the basic outline of that argument. I may well disagree with the limits that they insist are there on hte environmental side but leave that aside. Where I really disagree is here:

Bringing everyone above the global absolute poverty line ($1.25 a day) would need just 0.2% of global income.

Who in buggery has that as the limit to their aspirations?

I certainly don’t think that managing to drag the last remnants of humanity up to the living standards of a medieval peasant is the end of the story. I would much rather we drag that last remnant of humanity up to the sort of living standards that we pinkish people enjoy. You know, that $100 a day sort of lifestyle, not the $1.25 one.

Tehre are those who say this cannot be done: at which point I say try reading your own reports matey. The SRES, the economic models upon which the entire IPCC, climate change is going to boil Flipper, model is built upon.

In there you will see that if we continue down this globalised market path, the A1 family, and we largely decarbonise our energy production system (and note, this particular scenario in the family excludes specific measures like carbon taxes and bloody windmills, relying only upon simple technological advance) as A1T supposes, then we both beat climate change and we also have the current poor of this world (OK, their grandchildren, given that we’re talking about 2100) living at the same position high on the hog as USians in 1990.

Now that’s an ambition that beats that $1.25 a day, isn’t it?

And the only limit to getting there, the only environmental limit, is that carbon in the atmosphere thing. Solve that problem and we can do it: we don’t face systematic limits from water availability, metals, energy, fertilisers, land, food or anything else.

The world’s greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new research shows.

The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall.

Oh.

Now, as you all know, I’m generally on board with the idea that climate change is a) happening and b) something we ought to do something about. That something being a minor change in our taxation system, apply a revenue neutral Pigou Tax to emissions and cut taxes on something else.

Whether or not climate change is happening this is probably (OK, weaker than that, I could make the case that it is possibly) economy enhancing anyway. Reducing some of the very bad taxes we have (say on capital or corporates) and replacing them with less bad taxes (said carbon tax) could be beneficial all in and of itself.

A carbon tax is after all a consumption tax and consumption taxes have lower deadweight costs that capital or corporate taxes.

I would want the Nordhaus version though: low now and rising over the years so that we are working with the technological and capital cycles, not attempting to short circuit them.

The one area where I do stray from the narrow path of the media consensus (which isn’t, as we know, quite the same as the scientific consensus) is that I don’t see climate change as being something immediately catastrophic. It’s a decades or centuries long problem and it’s thus one we’ve got decades at least to try to deal with.

As this story about the Himalayas tells us: it was the IPCC wihch hilariously allowed a prediction that all that snow and ice would be gone by 2035 into a report, wasn’t it?

Which leads me to about as sceptoical a position as I am comfortable with. I’m perfetly happy with the basic science of climate change. I’m not entirely certain that the IPCC reflects it properly. And I’m absolutely certain that the economic ideas that are proposed to deal with it, what governments are actually doing, are wrong.

Chris Huhne has become the first Cabinet minister in living memory to be charged with a serious criminal offence after the fall-out from his acrimonious divorce left him facing court, a potential jail sentence and the end of his political career.

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bloke.

So, is the next bloke at DECC going to reverse all of his idiot policies? That’s what we really want to know.

The start is to reverse that “legally binding” reduction in CO2 by 80%. The second is to dismantle the whole foolish subsidy system, the third to impose a serious and correct level carbon tax. At which point the job is done.

A good price for EU carbon allowances on the trading market is required in order to boost investment in the low carbon economy.

No. Just no.

For investment in the low carbon economy is not in fact something we want. Sure, we want the result of a low carbon economy (OK, well, let’s stick within the confines of the current policy argument at least), but we don’t want investment in it. We’d much prefer to get a low carbon economy with absolutely no investment at all. Heck, even get paid to be creating it as with, say, eliminating fossil fuel subsidies.

It could be true that we need to invest in a low carbon economy but if it is that’s a cost to us of getting to our goal, a low carbon economy.

And the low price of carbon credits is not telling us that we’re not going to get a low carbon economy. It’s telling us that it’s going to be heap to get one.

For we’ve already limited emissions through the cap….and of course, Our Lords and Masters could not possibly have made a mistake on the level of said cap. So, having already capped emissions then price of the permits is telling us how expensive it is to meet that cap.

Or, if the price is low, that we don’t need to invest very much because we’re already meeting the cap without much investment.

These twats are getting confused about prices: yes, sure, they’re incentives. But they are also information: here, the information being that we don’t need to invest lots to meet the cap.

Booker’s misunderstandings, like his commentary in general, are not original – in this case they come second-hand from the former Ukip press officer-turned-blogger Tim Worstall, whose complaint on the Adam Smith Institute blog is entitled “Perhaps Decc would like to do their sums again“.

Worstall’s problem is that he “can’t find the price assumptions they make” about the future costs of fossil fuels. He laments: “I’m afraid I can’t find it, just can’t find it at all.” He therefore conspiracy theorises that “the calculation isn’t presented to us” because “we might find that renewables aren’t really an option that anyone would go for.”

Whoops. Worstall’s conspiracy evaporates when one discovers that he has simply not clicked on the correct link on the Decc website.

So, we go through the links that Mark proides us with and we get to here:

Source data

Forecasts of fossil fuel prices:

1. Oil Price cost data
2. Coal Price cost data
3. Gas Price cost data

Explanation of our working assumption:

1. 2050 working assumption oil price 2010-2050
2. 2050 working assumption Coal Price 2010-2050
3. 2050 working assumption Gas Price 2010-2050

You will note that that last is not in fact a link. They do not explain their assumptions about the future price of gas. The thing we’re intrested in, of course, as we want to know what they think of shale gas.

I think I win that one, no|?

But Dr Gordon Edge, Director of policy at the lobby group RenewableUK, said much of the information was gathered from “anti-wind farm cranks”.

He explained that modern gas plants are not required to provide back-up for wind. Instead, wind is “integrated” into the existing system to act as a fuel saver, enabling the UK harness a free electricity source from the weather when it’s available. Some additional investment is required, but Dr Edge said “credible analysis” makes clear it will cost less for consumers than relying on fossil fuels, that are rising in price all the time.

“It is surprising that a think tank such as Civitas has published a report based on the work of anti-wind cranks, repeating the same discredited assertions. The UK’s energy policy over the next ten years will play a critical part in our economic success – offshore wind in particular has the potential to revitalise our manufacturing sector, with the promise of over 70,000 jobs,” he said. “This report, based on outdated and inaccurate information, does nothing to advance the debate.”

That’s how we know it’s expensive, see?

Because you’re “creating ” lots of jobs and jobs are a cost of a project, not a benefit.

However. CH4. Methane.

I know that it’s possible to strip the C out using a catalyst. However, I have a feeling that it comes out as CO or CO2.

Which, if you were trying to generate energy isn’t so bad, if you get CO you can burn that to get CO2 in a nicely exothermic reaction. And you’ve H2 to burn, run through a fuel cell, whatever.

However, if you were trying to get rid of the CO2, not create it, you’d much rather you got C, say as soot.

So, the question is, is there any way of stripping, reformulating, the CH4 into C plus H2s? So that you’ve solid C which can then be disposed of?

The figures – released by RenewableUK, the industry’s trade body – include four deaths and a further 300 injuries to workers.

That’s just in the UK and just in the past 5 years you understand.

And when you calculate it by deaths by amount of energy produced it gets worse.

The death rate for wind is three to four times that of nuclear, that of solar 10 tmes.

Why do the greenies want to kill people?

They have gone virtually unnoticed amid all the bombast, bargaining and breaking news of the past two weeks of top-level climate negotiations. But tucked away in an obscure corner of the giant conference site in the middle of Durban are two South African women, surrounded by a pile of brightly coloured bags, who promise to do more to fight poverty, save lives and combat climate change than all the suited bureaucrats, and their political masters, have done in their deliberations.

Chris Huhne: Britain should lead the world in cutting carbon emissions
Chris Huhne has called for Britain to lead the world in cutting carbon emissions, setting himself on a collision course with George Osborne, the Chancellor.

This is to allow Chris Huhne to walk tall among the environmentalists. To accept, nay demand, their praise and applause after he comes out of jail for perverting the course of justice.

Damn the costs to the rest of us, damn whether a 20% or30% cut in anything at all is needed, damn whether it even happens or not.

By demanding it, regardless of the cost (and for a certain type of greenie, the higher the cost the better), Huhne has guaranteed himself speaking fees and adulation to the end of his days.

Public choice economics, it explains so much about the world.