10+ Years Of Tory Hatred Of "Green Crap", Ideological Idiocy Have Stranded UK As Energy Crises Build

[hatrack]

As the full horror of the gathering energy crisis takes shape and the party of austerity prepares to borrow £150bn just to pay the bills, government ministers are desperate for you to remember one thing: it is all Vladimir Putin’s fault. Although the terrifying spike in gas prices is driven by the economic war Putin is waging on Europe, the emergency we face this winter is not simply a product of those high prices. It’s also a product of successive Conservative governments wilfully dismissing policies that would have reduced our reliance on gas in the first place.

Take insulating homes and buildings. The past decade has been a period of dismal neglect for one of the most economically obvious policies. Report after report, campaign after campaign, year after year, governments have been reminded of the prudence of investing to make our buildings cheaper and cleaner to heat. Direct grants for those on low incomes, financial support for households and private firms, and properly funded schemes for the public sector could have ended the UK’s reign as the least insulated country in western Europe. Adopting these policies would have cost less than £5bn, and returned money to the Treasury over time through myriad economic benefits, even before gas prices skyrocketed.

EDIT

The government should be given credit for supporting the extraordinary success of offshore wind in recent years. But there was nothing to stop the rapid rollout of onshore wind and solar at the same time. Had this happened, we would have much more cheap, homegrown and clean energy available right now to ride out this storm. Had the Conservatives not “cut the green crap” over the past decade, households would now be saving an average £220 on their annual energy bills. This figure will probably rise further as gas prices do the same. Imagine what a genuine commitment to energy transition could have achieved.

Instead, false solutions won the day. Chief among these was fracking. Despite plummeting levels of public support and repeated warnings from experts that a UK fracking industry would do nothing to lower bills, fracking retained mythical status among Conservative administrations. The dogged pursuit of an industry that went nowhere has wasted precious time and obscured the real solutions at hand. The obsession with getting every last drop out of the North Sea oil and gas industry has replicated a disastrous logic among Conservative ministers. The North Sea fields are in decline for a very simple reason – we’ve extracted, sold and burned most of what was there. Going after what is left will do nothing to lower gas bills because our reserves are a drop in the ocean of global gas prices. Carrying on with fracking regardless, as Liz Truss intends to do, will not lower energy bills – it will merely undermine the UK’s ability to lead on climate action.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/09/tories-decade-fossil-fuel-profits-insulation-fracking-crisis

[c-rational]

1. And this hatred of all things green that both the Tories and reThuglicans hold is IMO due to the

long playing disinformation campaign by the fossil fuel industry against both green and nuclear energy. Well they may have lined their pockets, but my fear is they have sentenced all of us to a very possible dystopian future.

I never understood why the world would not take out an insurance policy against climate change. This imo shows how concentrated power has become in the wrong (minority) hands.