Another disinformation frenzy

Another day, another wave of environmentalist disinformation mindlessly regurgitated by the mainstream media. This time the great green propaganda machine is looking at a report by a pair of NGOs concerning what it calls "subsidies" to oil companies.

The UK Government is providing £750m a year in tax breaks to North Sea oil and gas, despite a pledge five years ago to end fossil fuel subsidies, campaigners said.

A further £414m in public money is going into fossil fuel exploration overseas — from Siberia in Russia to Brazil, India and Nigeria — a report by the Overseas Development Institute and Oil Change International said.

So once again we have the old canard about removal of double taxation being a "subsidy", repeated without question by STV and old BH friends like the Herald's Rob Edwards, the BBC's Roger Harrabin, and of course the Guardian.

Not one of them mentions the double taxation that is charged to oil companies. Not one.

Update on Nov 11, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Remarkably, the Carbon Brief's coverage is less biased in a green direction than the BBC's.

Matt Ridley: on cheaper oil

Matt Ridley has an optimistic article in Times today [paywalled] on the benefits of cheaper oil.

His encouraging words are available at his website

Cheer yourselves up.

The Old Lady of Eco Street

The Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney first came to the attention of BH readers when, at the time of his appointment, it was noted that his wife Diana was (and is) a fervent supporter of the green movement (and redistribution as well as being against conspicuous consumption).

It's therefore interesting to read today that Mr Carney has told a World Bank seminar that fossil fuels must remain unused:

Mark Carney has re-emphasised his support for the idea that oil companies’ reserves could be stranded assets – still valued by investors, but ultimately going to embody losses.

“The vast majority of reserves are unburnable,” the Bank of England governor said – if the world is to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Thinking of hydrocarbon deposits as stranded assets has gained prominence in recent years, helped by movements like the US student drive to persuade university endowments to disinvest from fossil fuel companies.

Apparently Mr Carney wants companies to report more holistically on their business strategy and "how it relates to stakeholders of all kinds, now and in the future...[so that] all groups can express their view, and influence the allocation of capital and credit today".

Given Mrs Carney's views on equality, and Mr Carney's views on outsiders giving their opinions on allocation of private assets, could the Carney family please allocate some of their (considerable) capital to mine?

The underpinning of energy policy collapses

UK energy policy has one key predicate, namely that fossil fuels are going to get inexorably more expensive. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, the sine qua non of the whole renewables programme. Renewables, we are told, will save consumers money, and only if we dig much deeper might we discover that in fact we are actually being told that renewables are being forecast to be cheaper than fossil fuels in the future.

For years that forecast has looked ever more implausible, as all around us a revolution in unconventional oil and gas has caused fossil fuel prices to fall. Now, finally, the government has been forced to respond and to reduce its forecast prices.

Burning gas for power is currently far cheaper than electricity from wind farms, which receive billions of pounds in subsidies from consumers.

Yesterday however the Department of Energy and Climate Change released new forecasts slashing its power and gas price forecasts for later this decade by as much as 20 per cent.

But ministers have repeatedly argued that gas prices will keep on rising, eventually making green energy good value for money.

This is a bit of a nightmare for the greens in government, and it is hard to imagine that the government and its advisers are not going to have to reassess the whole renewables programme. No doubt it is not beyond the wit of the bureaucrats in DECC to come up with some plausible explanation of why renewables will get much cheaper in the future, but it will be interesting to see just how much they have to wriggle first.

Geosciences' green strategy

Two tweets by Professor Iain Stewart (of Climate Wars fame) caught my attention over the weekend.

The first concerned the Geological Association conference I mentioned in the previous post:

What are the strategies for getting the UK public to engage with shale gas?

The second concerned an article in the Canadian press:

Click to read more ...

Slip sliding away

I was going to start this morning by writing something about the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, currently taking evidence from people like Lord Deben and David Warrilow, the UK's representative on the IPCC. However, it's a bit of a waste of time, to tell the truth, with the committee so far interested in exchanging platitudes with the witnesses.

Instead, take a look at the latest from Euan Mearns' blog, where he examines oil production in the UK which, despite massive new investment, is in precipitous decline.

Click to read more ...

Cuadrilla's PR fail

As expected, the greens are trying to use physical coercion to prevent Cuadrilla going ahead with their test drilling at Balcombe. Over the weekend Sussex police reported that a number of people had been charged, most of them subsequently charged with one offence or another.

Ezra Lynch, 31, a circus employee; Samantha Duncan, 29, of Beaconsfield Villas, Brighton, and Marcin Swiercz, 35, a handyman from London, have been charged They will appear before Crawley Magistrates on 14 August along with Mark Mansbridge, 51, a voluntary charity worker, of Paddock Road, Lewes; Nancy Walker, 25, of Over Street, Brighton; Richard Millar, 29, of Upper Gloucester Road, Brighton; Frances Crack, 31, a teacher, of Taffs Well, Cardiff, and Justin Preece, of Pontypridd, Mid Glamorgan.

Click to read more ...

The future of UK energy - diesel

This story comes from the BBC:

Two diesel power stations planned in Plymouth will compensate for fluctuations in supplies from green energy, say developers.

Green Frog Power got planning permission last year and Fulcrum Power has made an application for a similar power station.

The Devon-based Regen centre for green energy questioned the use of diesel generators.

Both firms said their power stations supported renewable energy.

I'm speechless. Again.

(H/T Keith)

Fracking in Sussex

The BBC's World This Weekend programme yesterday looked at the prospects for Cuadrilla's plans for frack for shale oil in the leafy south-east of England. This was a pretty balanced piece, with the prospect of the lights going out repeatedly raised as an important factor in the decision-making process. I think it's probably significant that this prospect is no longer considered eccentric or controversial but a real and present danger.

The magazine piece is followed by an interview with the man in charge of this shambles, Ed Davey, whose "answers" to questions are the epitome of vacuity. Towards the end, however, one does sense that the penny may be starting to drop.

The audio is attached below.

World This Weekend on Fracking

Jo Nova on the fossil fuel "subsidies"

Jo Nova has done an indepth analysis of the "fossil fuels are subsidised" argument, knowingly and misleadingly promoted by environmentalists and their political friends around the world.

Groups like Greenpeace and The Australian Conservation Foundation argue that really, Governments are helping fossil fuel companies far more than green ones. But while governments rewrite national economies to help “green” companies, about half of the help for fossil fuels is simply that the government didn’t take as much off them as it could. The net flow of money is still from Big-Fossil-Energy towards Big-Government. It takes a special kind of grand entitlement to call that a subsidy.

A must-read.

When is a subsidy not a subsidy?

Left Foot Forward has an article by a trades unionist bemoaning Shell's decision to pull the plug on its North Sea wind projects.

Firstly, with a 16% surge in three months profits to £4.5bn, why do companies like this need the coalition’s £3 billlion subsidy for oil and gas exploration off the Shetlands?

Secondly, is the company’s finance director right to criticise the ‘vast amount of public subsidies going into renewables’ when the government already subsidises fossil fuels by £3.63bn a year, mostly in the form of VAT breaks?

This is quite extraordinarily silly, even by Left Foot Forward standards. The chancellor is trying to encourage oil companies to open new oil fields as quickly as possible, because then they will make even more profit and pay even more tax. The incentives for exploration off Shetland are more to do with the Chancellor's needs than those of the oil companies.

Moreover, the "£3 billion subsidy" is in fact nothing of the sort. As well as paying corporation tax, oil companies have to pay the Supplementary Charge, an extra whack of taxation charged simply because they are an oil company. The Shetland "field allowance" reduces the profits subject to this extra tax for new fields in that area. So what Left Foot Forward calls a "subsidy" is in fact a partial levelling of the playing field with other parts of the energy sector and indeed with other industry sectors.

I've observed from time to time the remarkable number of occasions on which an argument put forward by a left-wing political activist involves an abuse of the English language. This is yet another of those occasions.

Finally, I should also point out that the £3.63 billion of VAT breaks are of course also available to the renewables sector, because VAT is charged on electricity regardless of source.

From beginning to end, the Left Foot Forward article is a demand for special treatment disguised by misleading language and misleading figures. Why do people think they can get away with this kind of thing?

Matt on discriminatory laws

A few months ago the Obama Justice Department brought charges against Continental and six other oil companies in North Dakota for causing the death of 28 migratory birds, in violation of the Migratory Bird Act. Continental's crime was killing one bird "the size of a sparrow" in its oil pits. The charges carry criminal penalties of up to six months in jail. "It's not even a rare bird. There're jillions of them," he explains. He says that "people in North Dakota are really outraged by these legal actions," which he views as "completely discriminatory" because the feds have rarely if ever prosecuted the Obama administration's beloved wind industry, which kills hundreds of thousands of birds each year.

Read the whole thing