Miliband’s promises of cheap and easy energy don’t add up
Every week Keir Starmer jets off somewhere new to do more harm to the national interest. First, he surrendered British sovereign territory in the Chagos Islands to an ally of China. Then he was bullied into discussing billions of pounds for slavery reparations at talks in Samoa.
Next, he signed Britain up to even more costly climate targets in Azerbaijan, and this week he was in Brazil, cosying up to the biggest beneficiary of his climate plans – China. Perhaps he should consider staying at home.
The Prime Minister claims his new target to reduce carbon emissions by 81 per cent by 2035 will make us a global leader. The truth is, we have been one for many years and other major countries have not followed our lead.
We were the first major economy to halve our emissions since 1990. In that time, the US has barely cut emissions at all, while China’s have tripled.
Keir told us his new emission reduction targets are necessary to win the global race for jobs, yet the biggest manufacturer of clean energy technology in the world is China, which is still 60 per cent powered by coal, and, according to recent data, is now one of the largest polluters of all time.
Whether it’s batteries, cables, or solar panels, the biggest beneficiary of Labour’s headlong rush to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030 will not be Britain, but China, who dominate clean technology supply chains.
Without time to grow, British businesses will be frozen out in favour of cheap, coal-powered Chinese mass-manufacturing. Labour will be driving billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money into the hands of the world’s largest polluter, all in the name of tackling climate change.
This will be turbocharged by a hidden policy bomb implicit in Ed Miliband’s flagship project to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030. Tucked away in the National Energy System Operator’s recent report on the costs of “Clean Power 2030”, a report that the Energy Secretary has unequivocally endorsed, is an assumption that Britain’s carbon price – a tax levied on industry players who use natural gas, for example – would be an eye-watering £147/tCO2 in 2030.
This is double the Government’s own forecasts and would be the most punitive carbon tax of any country in the world. It would have a devastating effect on British industry, yet there has been no impact assessment produced of how many jobs it would cost.
The Prime Minister and the Energy Secretary are relying on this assumption to tell the British public that their energy plans will be cheaper than the status quo. This is simply not an honest position.
There are trade-offs to be made between higher climate targets, people’s jobs and energy bills. The thousands of workers in Port Talbot, Scunthorpe and Grangemouth already know this. So too do the 200,000 workers who depend on the North Sea.
A carbon price that sends industry fleeing to cheaper, more polluting countries won’t mean we need any less steel or petroleum products, we would just end up shipping in dirtier imports from countries like China.
That would mean fewer jobs here at home but more carbon in the atmosphere. This would be carbon accounting gone mad.
Britain will always play a role in protecting the environment. However, we only account for 1 per cent of global emissions.
Giving away our jobs, forcing painful changes on the British people and sending energy bills through the roof would leave us as a warning, not an example, to the rest of the world.
If instead we focused on exporting exciting British technologies – like in nuclear – to the rest of the world we would have a greater impact on global emissions, lower bills and more jobs in Britain.
The Prime Minister needs to ground himself in the facts and ditch the dangerous ideology of his Energy Secretary before it’s too late