The green blob speaks

The green blob has, after a short pause, issued its response to the news that Owen Paterson is about to issue a call for the Climate Change Act to be scrapped. In an article in the Guardian, Adam Vaughan has been around the usual suspects and has got the usual responses.

Bryony Worthington, for example says that Paterson's ideas are "bonkers", a position she reinforces with her normal battery of pseudoscience.

At the current time, when all the evidence is that climate change is getting worse and we need urgent action, I can’t see any desire to repeal this act. It’s the desire of a small group of fanatics who don’t even know what the act does.

She is clearly a "pause denialist" it seems.

You don't expect to get the truth from the Grantham Institute, so it's no surprise to hear what Lord Stern has to say:

Repealing the Climate Change Act now would be a perverse backward step by the UK, with the worst possible timing. It would create additional uncertainty about the direction of government policy, undermining the confidence of investors, and increasing the cost of capital for new energy infrastructure.

You have to concede that the Climate Change Act has brought about considerable investor certainty - they are, almost to a man quite clear that they want nothing to do with the UK energy sector. Replacing that certainty with a little uncertainty is therefore probably a step forward. Who knows, we might even get some dispatchable generation capacity built.

Meanwhile Richard Black, that former paragon of BBC neutrality, has this:

Paterson’s claim that the lights will go out because of current energy strategy is at odds with the regulator Ofgem, which says disruption to supply is not “imminent or likely”.

And what a wonderful bit of selective quoting that is! If you follow the link you find that the linked article continues:

...as long as industry managed the situation carefully.

Among the measures proposed is that the National Grid, which runs power transmission lines, can ask businesses to reduce their electricity use at times of peak demand, something that could cost industry dearly.

So the lights will not go out so long as industry agrees to switch off at enormous cost!

And that, my friends is what the green movement has in store for us.

Comments

[Greg Cavanagh]

Joe Public brings up an interesting question.

I don't have a clue how it is in England. But here in Australia, if a service is disrupted, whoever does the disrupting pays the damages caused by the disruption.

Lets take a Telstra for example, whoever rips up the telstra cable (company or operator) cutting services, gets to pay for the damages claims that come in to Telstra as a result of the service cut. If it was a fibre optic cable and the banks put in a claim for damages, it can quickly get to be a very big value.

Does a similar thing exist in England?

[Flyinthesky]

The CCA is a document with two fuctions, to the rest of the world it's our suicide note. To the rest of the world it also functions as an illustration of an oppotunity.