Clean, Green And Catastrophic

How Is Britain Going Green? By Shutting Down Industry

In the wake of government action around the world, industrial plants are closing, so-called green operations are failing, prices are soaring, subsidies are rampant, jobs are being lost, competitiveness eroded and energy consumers, especially the poor, are threatened by regressive carbon taxes. What’s green and clean is turning catastrophic. Scanning news stories and the work of the Global Warming Policy Forum in London, there are signs of green economic turmoil everywhere. --Terence Corcoran, Financial Post, 2 April 2016

Solar-energy company SunEdison Inc. plans to file for bankruptcy protection in coming weeks, a dramatic about-face for a company whose market value stood at nearly $10 billion in July. SunEdison, whose stock has plunged in recent months, would rank among the largest financial collapses in recent years. Its market capitalization is now about $150 million, and it had long-term debt of about $7.9 billion as of Sept. 30, according to a regulatory filing. --Matt Jarzemsky and Liz Hoffman, The Wall Street Journal, 2 April 2016

Take a bow, you fashionable eco-warriors and your craven enablers in the political establishment. Give yourselves a hearty pat on the back, because you have achieved something quite remarkable – the complete destruction of a once great British industry and the loss of tens of thousands of jobs. Because let’s get one thing absolutely clear – the decline of the steel industry is no unhappy accident, but happened as a result of deliberate policy dreamt up by eco-loons and adopted by successive governments. Bill Carmichael, Yorkshire Post, 1 April 2016

One should not give the impression that the Government can do nothing to help [the UK steel industry] – although it may now be too late. George Osborne said this week, “We are cutting taxes on energy”, but this is true only modestly, and only in relation to the colossal prices that his very own green policies imposed earlier. Carbon prices and renewable subsidies add between 65-80 per cent to the price steelmakers would otherwise be paying for their electricity, according to the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Our electricity prices are the most expensive in Europe; our steel industry is a heavy user. Sanjeev Gupta, whose company, Liberty House, is buying Tata’s steel sites in Scotland, says, “Scrap the carbon tax for energy-intensive industries. It kills industry, and industry will just continue to export production where they don’t have the tax.” If you tax energy punitively, as we do, you are deliberately targeting – as the very word “energy” suggests – the force that makes economies grow. --Charles Moore, The Daily Telegraph, 2 April 2016

A fortnight ago, the UK energy minister, Andrea Leadsom, declared grandly that Britain, alone in the world, would commit to a target of reducing net carbon emissions to zero. ‘The question is not whether but how we do it,’ she told Parliament. It is now becoming painfully clear how this target will be reached: not by eliminating our carbon emissions but by exporting them, along with thousands of jobs and much of our manufacturing industry. -- Editorial, The Spectator, 30 March 2016

The EU's unilateral climate policy is absurd: first consumers are forced to pay ever increasing subsidies for costly wind and solar energy; secondly they are asked to subsidise nuclear energy too; then, thirdly, they are forced to pay increasingly uneconomic coal and gas plants to back up power needed by intermittent wind and solar energy; fourthly, consumers are additionally hit by multi-billion subsidies that become necessary to upgrade the national grids; fifthly, the cost of power is made even more expensive by adding a unilateral Emissions Trading Scheme. Finally, because Europe has created such a foolish scheme that is crippling its heavy industries, consumers are forced to pay even more billions in subsidising almost the entire manufacturing sector. Europe’s climate policy failure demonstrates beyond doubt that its unilateralism has been a complete fiasco. The lessons of this self-defeating debacle are clear: don’t make the same mistake. Policymakers would be well advised to heed this warning. –Benny Peiser, Testimony to the Committee on Environment and Public Works of the United States Senate, 2 December 2014

With his bravura introduction of the Tesla Motors Model 3 on Thursday, company founder Elon Musk cemented his reputation as the business world's most outstanding showman since Steve Jobs. Friday's action followed a mind-bending 60% run-up dating back to Feb. 10, when Tesla posted a disappointing loss but Musk somehow charmed investors into accepting his promise of profits to come soon and his optimism about the coming unveiling of the Model 3. They should all take a deep breath. First of all, the Model 3 doesn't exist yet, neither in a final production version or actually in production. Nor will it be reaching the road any time soon. Tesla's financial health is questionable. The biggest single question about the Model 3 is whether its manufacturer will last long enough to get the car to market? --Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 1 April 2016

Brought to you by Benny Peiser's Global Warming Policy Forum