The Price Britain Will Pay For the Iran War
The New Statesman has a piece by Dieter Helm about the price Britain is going to pay for Trump’s Iran war, specifically thanks to years of an energy policy that has left the nation woefully unprepared for shocks. The OECD and IMF say Britain will be the hardest hit of nations that import Gulf oil and gas. Worse, this has all been done in the name of Net Zero but has done nothing whatsoever to offset the emissions because all Britain has done is outsource carbon-based production:
Britain already had an energy crisis: it had the highest industrial energy prices of any of the G7 countries and among the highest domestic prices. British industry and British households were already in serious trouble, with large industry closures and an alarming growth of bad debt.
How could this be, since the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero tells us that renewables are nine times cheaper than gas? The answer is that the renewables are intermittent, whereas the existing and new industries demand firm power 24/7.
To meet a peak demand of around 45GW in Britain, we once had around 60GW of total capacity as insurance against shocks and outages so that the lights would stay on. The national electricity grid met the requirements to connect the big power stations. Now we need around 120GW to meet a slightly smaller peak demand, and because the wind is decentralised and of low energy density and in small units, we need to roughly double the size of the grid for the same 45GW peak demand. On top of this, we need lots more batteries and storage, and 10GW of interconnectors and 35GW of gas running to meet periods of low wind and sun… yet still 35GW of gas is what it will take if we meet the 2030 target for Net Zero power.
The Iran war has made a bad situation even worse. Britain relies on gas for 35% of its total energy supply, about the same for oil. The rest is nuclear (a small and currently declining share) and renewables. Britain has almost no coal to fall back on (unlike Italy, Germany and Poland and, of course, China, which burns more than 50% of the world’s total coal). Britain is deliberately reducing existing North Sea gas production (through a windfall tax) and banning new gas licences (preferring Norwegian North Sea gas to British North Sea gas). At the margin, Britain is even forced to buy US LNG (liquefied natural gas), which is fracked gas that is then liquefied and hence much more environmentally damaging than local North Sea gas.
On top of all that, there has been a chronic reduction in gas storage and oil. Moving to wind and solar hasn’t brought, and can’t bring, ‘security’:
We are not going to “just stop gas” any time soon. That means deciding whether we want Norwegian North Sea gas or British North Sea gas, and pipeline gas rather than US LNG at international prices.
Then there are industrial prices:
If industry closes down in Britain, as it has been doing, it makes no contribution to the energy system costs, and these system costs do not fall. As Grangemouth, refineries in Scotland and Hull, the steel industry, the fertiliser industry and the car industry contract and close, more burden falls on domestic customers. Time instead to set the prices to industry at levels that to keep it in Britain [sic].
What about the mirage of the march to Net Zero?
Britain boasts fast and deep cuts in territorial emissions. It is illusory. Deindustrialisation has offshored emissions, disguising the carbon consumption we are all responsible for. As Britain closes its energy-intensive industries in the face of its very high energy costs, emissions are outsourced as we carry on buying the products with imported carbon. Britain’s energy policy is not leading us to no longer cause climate change.
It is time to… recognise that we are not on our way to becoming a clean-energy superpower. Other countries do not, as Boris Johnson once claimed, look to Britain to find out how to do it. They look to us with our high prices as a case study on how not to do energy policy.
Given that the piece is in a Left-leaning magazine, it’s worth reading in full.
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When the government achieves its aim of total economic collapse, what then?
I don’t think they’re bright enough to have thought that far ahead.
I want to see them hanging from lampposts.
I believe that is the aim of all Western governments, including the US. I once believed Trump was the counter to a global cabal that wants to destroy the economy and society in order to bring in a new world order. Based on the direction of travel since becoming POTUS I now believe he’s a clever deception.
The things Trump is doing does not support your idea. He is withdrawing from all the global stuff, like the IPCC, WHO, NATO etc etc.
Yes, we can’t get everything we want from a President but if he loses the Mid Term elections because of his failure to honour his “No more foreign wars” pledge then impeachment attempts will most likely follow with the MAGA movement dead in the water. Democrats will most likely win the next election and they will assuredly suck up the globalist agenda that Trump rolled back.
Whether we like it or not Trump is now being seen as an Israel first POTUS not an America first POTUS.
Blame it on Trump, Putin, Brexit, Iran War, the Tories, Climate change, the Far Right.
More islam.
Back to the Stone Age folks. The age NOBODY voted for.
They are just slavishly following The Communist Coudenhove-Kalergi Plan for Miscegenation to erase national borders and ethnicity, and the Communist Cloward-Piven Strategy of flooding the West with Third World Scroungers in order to OVERWHELM THE INFRASTRUCTURE and collapse the system, so the Communists can “Build Back Better” in their own image.
See the Fabian Society logo of Fabians smashing the world with Sledgehammers…
They think GLOBAL, not LOCAL—–The fact that industry does will not exist in the UK is irrelevant because the whole idea of reducing CO2 is not because it helps “fight climate change”. It has little to do with that. Climate Change is simply the excuse given to the public. The real reason for the climate policies is compliance with the UN and the Sustainable Development Agenda that states that we in the wealthy west consume to much and must make do with LESS —-of EVERYTHING. —–CO2 =WEALTH, not CLIMATE, and as a UN Lead Author revealed some years ago “One has to free oneself from the illusion that climate policies are environmental policies anymore. We redistribute the worlds wealth by climate policy”
We are being played by the eco socilaists and their global warming SCAM.
It’s weird to think that this country produces almost nothing, cannot keep itself warm or feed itself. People who work largely do useless make-work to satisfy endless red tape and regulation. Then there is the vast amount of people who do nothing at all. Economic collapse is going to be very very ugly.
It’s the means by which they think they’ll get us back in, and keep us in, the EU.
Net Zero. A policy so stupid that even the New Statesman has finally started to notice.
“… specifically thanks to years of an energy policy that has left the nation woefully unprepared for shocks. “ Then clearly nothing to do with the Iran War is it? A few weeks ago it was the Russia/Ukraine War. Are we to imagine without the Iran War we would be awash with oil? We get only 2% of LNG from Qatar and less than 4% of our oil comes via the Hormuz Strait. Top crude oil supplier to the UK is the USA from where we get 35% of our diesel. The UK gets 45% of its gas piped ashore from the North Sea and the rest is LNG mostly from the USA. War or no war, LNG is much more expensive because liquefaction is expensive, transporting it is expensive, storing it and regasification is expensive. The less of our North Sea gas, the more LNG, the more expensive our gas will be. Oil: Brent light, sweet crude is also piped ashore and is best for producing petrol, diesel and aviation spirit. However in order to do that we need refineries. In the 1970s there were 19, by 1998 this was down to 12, and now there are only 4. We… Read more »
Lefties are fundamentally stupid. They seem to believe that a complex society made up of individuals, all of whom have different psychological, economic and emotional needs will all conform to their 19th century ideological view of the world. Despite the fact that their model has failed catastrophically for the past 150 years they still persist. They are truly insane.
They insist their silly communism will always work the next time, and that they have learned some lessons. —–But as we know “Keeping doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result” is the ultimate in stupidity.
Trouble is they form a majority of the population!
There’s the remains of a generation of oil field trash based in the U.K. with 30+ yrs experiences, at the moment we’re kicking our heels abandoning old wells or drilling useless carbon capture projects.
Many of us are thinking of retirement. After us there’s precious little experience left.
Will there be one last hurrah?
Even the supposedly right wing MSM are saying things to cover Reeves/Starmer and especially Milibrain’s arses. This morning a journalist actually said that Trump’s war stopped interest rates from coming down last time which has caused mortgage rates to go up but the interest decision was due to decision of our government and base rates staying the same means mortgages staying the same.
You are not making much sense. The Bank of England controls our base interest rate not the government. Mortgage rates are driven by 10 year gilt rates more than the base rate and those gilt rates are driven up by government borrowing which of course has shot up under Labour. The rates under Thieves are worse than the Truss blip that the dumb office temp keeps bringing up.
The ‘Energy Secretary’ is showing how utterly ignorant he truly is. You cannot have ‘nine times cheaper’, you can have ‘nine times more expensive’ though. ‘One ninth of the expense’ is correct.
One times cheaper would be impressive: Free.
But of course windmills and sun temples are more expensive NOT cheaper.
The author writes, “The OECD and IMF say Britain will be the hardest hit of nations that import Gulf oil and gas.”
That is entirely FALSE. Over half of Britain’s imported oil and gas comes from THE UNITED STATES and the other half from NORWAY.
Most of the oil and gas transported through the Strait of Hormuz goes to THE ORIENT.
Some say the whole Iran War was started to deflect attention from Israel invading and seizing large swathes of territory from Lebanon and elsewhere. However, none of this has anything to do with the West, and it’s not our problem to sort out.
So let me get this straight: we get 10-15% of our electricity from French nuclear power because we didn’t build any more nuclear plants of our own.
We buy most our gas from Norway from North Sea fields immediately adjacent to our own waters but we don’t exploit the very same fields ourselves.
We buy some of the remainder of our gas from U.S. fracking suppliers but we refuse to frack our own underground gas reserves.
And we can’t even help to re-open the Straits of Hormuz because we spent so much tax revenue chasing net zero that we can’t afford to pay for any army or navy.
And we voted for the people responsible for ‘organising’ this pathetic, completely lunatic, sh*tshow…
Democracy: the least worst system of government.
We aren’t a Democracy. We have an elected Dictatorship …. in this instance, elected by 20% of the electorate – with a huge majority but no mandate.
Is our North Sea gas field contiguous with the Norwegian field? If so, we are paying Norway to extract our gas, and as theirs empties it will suck ours dry, which is a problem with the shared Iran/Qatar field.
This country has hundreds of years’ worth of coal. Unlike Germany, Italy, Poland etc we can’t use it because the morons in the Uni-Party blew up our coal-fired power stations.
On a slightly positive note. It will be the end of the Uni-parties forever. It happened to the Liberals in the 1920’s. The public won’t forget EVER.
Why aren’t Unions organising strikes to protest at this stuff?