GWPF welcomes delay to UK energy white paper
By Paul Homewood
GWPF welcomes the delay to the UK energy white paper:
London, 12 November: The Global Warming Policy Forum has welcomed reports that the government is to delay its energy white paper.
Ministers are said to feel that costly projects envisaged before the Covid crisis may no longer be affordable.
The government announcement coincides with the publication of a new estimate of the cost of decarbonising the UK’s housing stock. According to GWPF’s Andrew Montford:
Decarbonising the housing stock alone will cost nearly £1 trillion pounds, with another £1 trillion to be paid in higher energy bills by 2050. That’s around £50,000 per household. If the government is genuinely considering to slow the plans to decarbonise the economy then homeowners will have dodged a bullet.”
And GWPF director Benny Peiser is calling on Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to publish a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis for the government’s Net Zero plans:
In recent weeks, new research has shown that the cost of offshore windfarms is much higher than previously thought. The bill for electrification of the UK is therefore going to rise steeply. In light of the deepening Covid crisis, the Treasury should prioritise a comprehensive Net Zero cost-benefit analysis.”
The GWPF cost sheet ‘Cost of Decarbonising Housing’ can be downloaded here (pdf)
https://www.thegwpf.com/gwpf-welcomes-delay-to-energy-white-paper/
It remains to be seen what the real reason for the delay is, but we can but hope!
I would thoroughly recommend, by the wya, reading the two page GWPF cost sheet mentioned, which lays out the sort of numbers I have been talking about for a long time.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Asking for an analysis of costs and benefits is a very good angle for sceptics. The request is eminently sensible and can hardly be refused – it can be ignored for a time, but not forever. The results, if honest, are likely to be a mortal blow to the Net Zero insanity project. And if there is a temptation to put a nice gloss on the figures, the powers that be will easily be caught out.
The costs are astronomical, while the benefits are small, if measurable, and shared among all countries, whether on the Net Zero train or minding their own business.
Our government doesn’t do detailed cost benefit analyses. If they did, HS2, wouldn’t have got the go ahead and we wouldn’t all still be wearing Covid lockdown handcuffs, never mind plunging down the net zero plug hole. The delay is probably more to do with presentational issues than policy. Trying to turn the entire populous into kamikazes is a tad more difficult a sell than they probably imagined.
I understand all UK legislation must be accompanied by a cost benefit analysis. Trouble is almost no MP’s bother to read themit because virtue signaling is more important than reality.
The Climate Change Act 2008 cost benefit analysis showed net negative benefit. Peter Lilley MP said he thinks only 3 MP’s actually consulted it.
Of course in the vote, I think only 5 voted against the Act. One of them was Peter Lilley (Conservative, science graduate) and another I believe was Graham Stringer (Labour, science graduate). All the MP’s with no qualifications or only PPE’s voted Yes like the bunch of Lemmings and Sheeple they are.
Led by donkeys. Which is why we are in/heading for the disaster they have all been culpable in creating.
There is a simple and easy way to decarbonise. National leaders should visit a decarbonised country like the Sudan or Cambodia. See how they live and simply copy that lifestyle in your home country.
It’s not rocket science.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/10/22/carbon-footprints/
Good comment chaam.
From a UK perspective there are negative benefits. If the UKs climate warms by up to 4 degrees it will become more productive, prosperous and have a lower death rate. Increases in agriculture, tourism, lower heating and energy use, etc etc. There are only benefits from a warming climate for the UK. Not that CO2 has anything to do with it anyway!
Not sure about that. In Sudan life expectancy is 65. We’d get through a lot of deaths to catch up. The crude death rate is not a good measure, given the very different population pyramids.
https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/country-health-profile/sudan
A nightmare assessment for climate scientists. Thank you for this information.
Delay will be until after new US president confirmed, then instructions taken from ‘uncle Joe’s ‘ energy team’. Nothing good I’m sorry to say.
And when did ‘facts’ like ‘cost/benefits’ have anything to do with saving the planet ( or making the powerful elite even richer and more powerful).
Kathryn Porter mentioned in a reply to a comment I made at her Watt-logic blog that supposedly National Grid are going to provide some costings for their net zero scenarios in the next month or so: I guess she has an inside track. I bet they will ignore things like insulating homes, and make a lot of assumptions about lower costs.
It was entirely clear that the NG approach to their scenarios was to assume away problems: peaky heating demand would be covered by insulation regardless of cost, or by “demand side response” a.k.a freezing the house out. V2G will provide masses of battery storage even when people are driving home in peak rush hour. Never mind what it costs to make hydrogen at floating offshore wind farms by first desalinating seawater and then having hundreds of kilometers of subsea hydrogen pipelines. It’s truly delusional stuff.
If they desalinate seawater before attempting electrolysis to generate hydrogen they will either have to run the electrodes at a high over- voltage or add some other electrolyte because deionised water is a non conductor.
Sadly the sane comments here don’t seem to affect the insane approach of successive governments on energy policy for the UK. It has been down hill even before the outrageous Climate Change Act.
The evidence for Democrat fraud against Dementia Joe seems to be building if you look at Jo Nova’s site. How could they get their electoral system into such a state that a presidential election can be rigged? It certainly strengthens the case for in person paper voting only as we have seen postal vote fraud in Labour areas here since it was made so easy to get a postal vote.
Here in Thailand we have a simple system that works like a clock. Voters sell their vote to the highest bidder and these votes are on the ledger. Accounting 101. Whereas in America they don’t know who won AFTER the vote, we know who won BEFORE the vote.
The NET-zero arithmetic is not that hard. Two trillion £2 divided by 500 billion tons of CO2 (the 65 ppm Hansen McKibben amount to get to 350 ppm) is only 0.40£ per ton captured and stored. Nobody can be expected to do that for that trivial amount. In other words the decarbonization cost estimates are absurdly low…even if it was possible to store that huge amount of CO2 under pressure.
But the Guardian is saying that getting to net zero is much cheaper than was thought even last year. Unfortunately they don’t show any figures. They are to follow for some reason, but they say the key to this cheap answer is to start right now to get maximum benefit. So we are to move quickly now to take advantage of our cheap way to net zero but we still don’t know how they arrived at the figures nor what they are. They are good lads so i think we might go along with this.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/12/reaching-uk-net-zero-target-cheaper-than-we-thought-says-climate-adviser
If things are really getting cheaper, that is surely a reason to wait for them to get even cheaper rather than spending the money now. It’s the effect that negative inflation tends to have, right?
I wouldn’t ascribe any great motive to the delay. Simple incompetence is so often the reason, especially when government is involved.
This analysis has omitted the essential elements of the eco house which are necessary if heat pumps are to be used throughout the winter. Insulation has to include the ground floor and the whole suspended deck has to be taken up in order to insert insulation. Much heat is lost through ventilation and can easily exceed the loss through conduction. Chimneys are a cause of much air movement and these will have to be sealed off and insulated. The treble glazed windows will be draught stripped and the ventilation for the house will have to be replaced using heat transfer exchangers. Water loss also loses energy and waste water tanks are needed to save the heat. The biggest problem for existing housing is the party wall, which assumes no heat loss and no insulation necessary. If thy neighbours are absent or the house is vacant, then the heat loss will be far more than through the other elements. And of course there is little opportunity to exploit large south facing windows for solar gain or heat storage in pools.
It would be so much cheaper to do what the French do now and heat the house using storage and direct resistance heaters wired to nuclear power stations.
I had a large conservatory built back in 2004. Its been great and is a good source of heat even in the late Autumn and early Spring. Even on days when cloud cover is thin we still get heat. When the guy from the Council came to sign the project off he said that, due to regulation changing while we were constructing the conservatory, we would not get permission for it again. When I asked why not he said “too much glass.” “too much heat loss” Apparently they don’t take any account of any heat gain, only heat loss. Such is the stupidity and lack of common sense displayed in our planning system. Apparently, although we had to have outside quality doors connecting the conservatory with the rest of the house, the regulators don’t believe that, on really cold evenings or days, we don’t have the sense to cut off the conservatory and retreat to the main body of the house rather than sit there shivering.
If the same thinking is applied to all this crap we are in for some very dubious regulation.
Steve,
I have no idea what the French pay for their electricity but to make resistance heating viable it would need U.K prices to be a third of what they are, as a rough guess. It is not going to happen.
You have to remember Braindead Boris doesn’t listen to anybody and spends money like water. He will only listen to Greenpeace and the green activist he lives with. He won’t care about the costs of Net Zero and what people will have to bare, not forgetting he has found not only a magic money tree but a magic money forest, as long as he can show off (virtual signal) to the world at large that he can achieve Net Zero and reduce the world’s co2 output by 1%, and trashing our Country’s economy along with it. He is a very dangerous individual with absolutely no regard for the money he spends. Just look at what he has spent with Covid.
Boris Johnson, in my estimation, has never had a conviction in his life. He swopped sides in the Brexit debate and had a reputation at uni for arguing for either side in debate. He has no strong beliefs and it seems he is totally under the influence of his wife who is interfering with staff selection at number 10. How this clown has got to lead a party with strong traditions is beyond me.
Unfortunately, apart from a handful of Tory MPs, most of Parliament are as bad, or in Labour’s case much worse.
Before slanging off about the Conservatives please read or view Yes Prime Minister .
If it is now convenient to drop any ‘climate’ initiatives it will be for the pratical reason that these initiatives are no longer useful in rallying support for the Cabinet. IMHO
If you don’t like Yes Prime Minister read Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels where the same techniques were used in the 19th Century on the Irish Question and so on. The 19th century Parliament was a lot worse than today’s, and governments were full of place seekers.