Keir Starmer and his Minister for Green Zealotry (Ed Miliband) made a flying visit to Baku, Azerbaijan, this week where yet another shindig on global warming was being staged. A staggering 470 British officials went along for the ride, suggesting Whitehall really is full of folks with too much time on their hands.
The Prime Minister went in person and mob-handed to impress on everybody how Britain ‘leads the world on climate change’, a typically pathetic and untrue conceit to which British politicians are all too prone to these days. Nobody else agrees or even cares.
To underline his credentials, he even unveiled a new target: Britain will aim to reduce its CO2 emissions by 81 per cent on 1990 levels by 2035. There seems to be no limit to the cost and pain this government is prepared to inflict on ordinary households to allow ministers to grandstand on the world stage.
Starmer would have us believe this is ‘climate leadership’ in action. The only problem is that the rest of the world is already going in the opposite direction to him. The Pied Piper of net zero is bereft of followers, no matter how loudly he blows his pipe.
For a start, almost nobody else who matters bothered to make it to Baku to follow his lead. Not President Biden. Not President Xi of China or Prime Minister Modi of India, whose coal-fired electricity generating stations continue to churn out record CO2 emissions.
Not President Macron of France or Germany’s Chancellor Scholz, who had more pressing matters to attend to on the home front. Even the President of the European Union Commission, Ursula von der Leyen – who’s usually up for a jolly at the drop of a hat – couldn’t be bothered to turn up.
France in fact stopped its environment minister from attending after the host attacked it for ‘colonial crimes’ in the Pacific. Argentina’s President Milei, something of a climate sceptic, ordered his 80-strong delegation home so they allegedly did not have to be involved in agreements with which he did not agree.
No wonder even the Global Green Blob is beginning to wonder aloud if the whole COP process has run its course.
Keir Starmer was the major leader present at COP29, where he stated that Britain will aim to reduce its CO2 emissions by 81 per cent on 1990 levels by 2035
Starmer is the only major leader who still takes these green jamborees seriously, even though it’s clear they’ve descended into a farce. Known as ‘Conference of the Parties’, COP Baku was like the last in the United Arab Emirates – held in a fossil fuel state which has no intention of cutting its oil and gas output.
Fossil fuels account for 90 per cent of Azerbaijan’s exports. Its dictator welcomed delegates by describing its oil and gas reserves as a ‘gift from God’. The local deputy energy minister was caught helping to facilitate oil and gas deals, which was also a feature of the UAE’s COP28. A farce indeed.
En route to Baku, Starmer made three claims: One, securing £1 billion investment in offshore wind is a major step forward in our mission to make the UK a clean energy superpower; Two, it will fire up our industrial heartlands and break down barriers to growth across the country; And three, we will lead the world in industries of the future.
All are untrue. Note he didn’t make a fourth claim – that his dash for renewables would reduce household energy bills by £300 a year before the end of the decade.
It was a pledge made during the election campaign which no longer passes ministers’ lips because it is not going to happen. The Institute of Fiscal Studies calculates household bills will soon rise by another £120 a year in green levies to subsidise the expansion of renewable capacity. Labour politicians must have known at the time that the promised cut was mission impossible.
The extra £1 billion for offshore wind Starmer is so proud of is a mere drop in the North Sea compared to what is required to meet Labour’s target of decarbonising the electricity system by 2030. Tens of billions more will be required in wind turbines and solar panels – and tens of billions more on top of that to build pylons and cables for a national grid which will need to be reconfigured to carry renewables, which are intermittent and unreliable.
The consumer – households and business – will bear the cost. The UK already has some of the highest electricity prices in the developed world to finance subsidies for renewable energy. They are about to get higher. This week the Beatrice Offshore Wind Farm in the Moray Firth became the fourth UK wind farm to collect more than £1 billion in subsidies. It will rake in about £2 billion in the course of its 15-year lifespan.
The Office for Budget Responsibility calculates that subsidies for renewables will add £12 billion to fuel bills for this year alone – and that’s before we include future renewable subsidies and the £100 billion needed to upgrade the national grid for decarbonisation. No wonder industry is either closing down or fleeing to America, where energy prices are a fraction of Britain’s.
The Democratic thumping in America is a warning of what happens when a governing elite loses touch with the people – a warning that Starmer will ignore as long as he remains in thrall to Miliband, and which might well mark his ultimate downfall, Andrew Neil writes
COP29, in Baku, was like the last in the United Arab Emirates – held in a fossil fuel state which has no intention of cutting its oil and gas output, Andrew Neil comments
We are witnessing another great bout of British deindustrialisation in which, inexplicably, a Labour government is a willing partner. Households, which unlike business cannot flee, will need to get used to tightening their belts for yet higher fuel bills.
The claim that renewables will usher in an era of cheaper electricity prices is one of the great lies of the Green Blob. The other is that renewables will create a plethora of well-paid jobs.
Politicians on the Left and Right have often made this claim, none more so than the hapless Miliband who, a decade ago, promised a million new green jobs by 2030. It is fantasy economics. What Starmer thinks will be the industries of the future – such as carbon capture and storage – are untried and could just as easily be the turkeys of the future.
We now have the latest official data for 2022, which claims there are 600,000 jobs in green industries. But more than half that total includes all manner of jobs – waste collection, double glazing, forestry, water supply, nature protection – which have been around long before climate change and renewables moved up the agenda.
Jobs created by efforts to decarbonise our energy supply and the dash to renewables have risen from under 58,000 in 2014 to around 98,000 in 2022 – an increase more than wiped out by the loss of jobs in industries that could not compete because of our high energy prices.
The Green Blob, of course, has done alright for itself. In 2022 there were 78,000 jobs associated with green charities, lobbies, consultancies and government agencies. Nice work if you can get it, but hardly a career route for unemployed steel, chemical or oil refinery workers. And even if they were tallied, you’re still nowhere near Miliband’s million.
The obsession with net zero is now in retreat almost everywhere bar Britain. It won’t just be America under President Trump that will opt instead to expand its fossil fuel output. Liberal-Left Canada and social democratic Norway are planning to do the same. Only Britain is refusing to grant new oil and gas licences.
Germany, which once led the march to renewables, is pulling back sharply even under its current shaky centre-left coalition. A new centre-right government will take power in Berlin next year even more hostile to net zero. France, secure with its massive fleet of nuclear power stations, was never that keen in the first place. Only Britain has a madness-gripped government which almost seems intent on impoverishing us to reach net zero at any cost.
Starmer said this week that he had no interest in telling people how to live their lives. That was yet another untruth. There is no way he can meet the tougher decarbonisation targets he outlined in Baku without forcing us to switch to electric vehicles, swap our gas boilers for heat pumps and eat less meat. So much for the light footprint he promised he would impose on our lives.
Telling us what to drive, how to heat our homes and what we should eat will make the Government more intrusive than ever, which is probably why it appeals to so much of the Labour Party.
But the Democratic thumping in America last week is a warning of what happens when a governing elite loses touch with the people – a warning that Starmer will ignore as long as he remains in thrall to Miliband, and which might well mark his ultimate downfall.
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