David Craig, on January 17th, 2022Monday/Tuesday blog
What’s really causing rising energy prices?
Today (Monday) the Times newspaper warned:
Millions of families in England will be dragged into fuel poverty overnight when energy bills soar this April, research has found.
The number of households who will find them unaffordable is to treble to 6.3 million when the price cap lifts, according to the Resolution Foundation.
It said this meant more than a quarter of households would suffer “fuel stress”, the definition of fuel poverty in England, which means having to spend at least 10 per cent of family budgets on energy bills.
We’ll be told by our net-zero-obsessed rulers that higher energy bills are out of their control as they are a result of the world’s economic recovery following the devastation of the Chinese Wuhan lab-leaked plague. So, higher energy bills will be spun by our rulers as a positive sign of growing world economies.
But I’d like to offer a slightly different explanation
Subsidising the economically preposterous?
Here’s a table from a recent report from the ludicrously misnamed Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). It lists the various levies which are added on to our power bills:
(left-click on the image and then left-click again to see more clearly)
These levies are intended to subsidise supposedly ‘renewable’ energy because, without these levies, most renewables would make absolutely no economic sense at all.
In 2020/21 we paid £11.2 billion in environmental levies. Assuming there are around 30 million households in the UK, that’s about £373 per household – over a third of the average household energy bill of £1,042 (in 2021). The OBR forecasts that by 2026/27, these environmental levies will reach £14.1 billion – around £470 per household.
I ain’t no mathematical genius. But it does seem to me that the constant rise in environmental levies now at £373 per household and headed towards £470 per household might conceivably be part of the cause of our ever-rising electricity bills.
And here, from my book THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS, is how all these extra environmental levies have been increasing over the years in Germany:
It seems that all Western countries are following the same path to self-inflicted economic ruin by raising energy prices to supposedly ‘go green’.
When I wrote THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS, in a chapter about the West’s economic suicide, I pointed out that energy prices in the West were about 4 to 5 times as high as in countries like Russia, China, India, Vietnam etc:
I guess that with the recent price rises and ever-increasing green levies, households and industry in the West are now paying close to ten times as much for their energy as our friends in China, Russia, India etc. Unfortunately for us, our net-zero-brained politicians and mainstream media eco-idiots don’t seem to understand that this is economic lunacy.
We’re so generous
Not only are we in the UK all forking out about £373 per household to pay for the net-zero ‘renewable’ energy scam, but we’re also showering money on other countries so they can supposedly ‘fight catastrophic climate change’. In the period 2015/16 to 2020/21, we paid over £7 billion in “UK Climate Finance” to corrupt, Third-world kleptocrats to help them battle the effects of man-made climate change. This is in addition to the £12 billion or so a year we shove into Third-world kleptocrats’ offshore bank accounts in ‘foreign aid’.
Moreover, the UK is planning to give another £11.6 billion in “UK Climate Finance” over the period 2021/22 to 2025/26 to Third-world crooks as part of the UK’s contribution under the Paris Climate Agreement. Did your government forget to tell you how generous it was being with your money?
I wonder whether, at the end of this, there will be a single dam or breakwater or flood defence or solar farm or windfarm or anything similar in any Third-world country as a result of our generosity? Or will we find (yet again and again and again) to our utter astonishment that all the tens of billions we have showered on the most corrupt people on the planet have all mysteriously disappeared or been used to build palaces or buy fleets of Mercedes or purchase weapons enabling Third-world despots to oppress their people while they loot their countries?
Trust, once lost, can never fully be restored
And, on a completely different subject, here’s another excoriating evisceration of our lying, self-serving, narcissistic, incompetent rulers from Neil Oliver on GB News:
Category: 
RE: “Trust, once lost, can never fully be restored.”
This reminds me of a short story called “A Country Doctor” written by Franz Kafka.
Quote: “A false ring of the night bell, once answered – it can never be made right.”
In the story, a country doctor makes an emergency visit to a sick patient on a winter night. The doctor faces absurd, surreal predicaments that pull him along and finally doom him.
Circumstances bend over backwards to carry him along to the false alarm, but the way back is sheer hell.
This surreal story has very strong undertones of the malevolent weirdness that is going on right now.
A Country Doctor by Franz Kafka (Audio book)-
It isn’t about trust; it is about trade. Rhodes dominated trade until the Romans came along. Rhodes had a 2% harbour tax, but the Romans had free trade and so Rhodes collapsed. The Roman State also collapsed when it got greedy and ran out of money. The same happened with Venice. When the Doges wanted a bigger share of trade and only offered trading routes to their mates the result was collapse. It all looks similar today. Governments have tried to control trade and economics for centuries without any success and now they think they can change the laws of physics and control the climate and operate grid systems with no energy reserves.
Trade is essential to wealth creation and the advances of human civilisation. We cannot isolate ourselves or control competitive forces. China and Japan isolated themselves from the rest of the world in the past with a disastrous outcome.
The UK rot set in with the nationalised industries with no thought of modernisation and at the same time the creation of an unaffordable welfare state. The unions started to demand wage increases and so eventually we had coal we could not sell abroad, and the price of electricity increased driving up the cost of everything. We could not even produce goods that anybody wanted, even us. We effectively isolated ourselves from exporting but continued to import and became addicted to consumption and debt. That cannot go on forever as we are discovering.
The governments used the nationalised electricity industry to prop up others with electricity consumers paying for it all. It kept the coal miners in work with increasing wages. It ordered the construction of power stations just to fill the order books of the manufacturers and that did not keep them in business. There was a period after privatisation when there was the appearance of competition but now the government has discovered that it can use regulation and has more control over the electricity supply and costs than under nationalisation. At least with nationalisation engineers were still running the business unlike today.
All the governments have done with subsidies is to hand the little wealth we are creating to their mates, just like the Doges, and we suffer the consequences. It has made electricity more expensive making our exports more expensive and reducing our competitiveness, not that we had much. More importantly, they are destroying the grid system. It cannot operate with renewable energy without a storage system that can respond rapidly to changes in renewable generation and demand. The government hasn’t a clue and neither do the managers of National Grid.
Perhaps price increases will result in a huge protest but considering how willing people are to accept the renewable nonsense and lockdowns it may not happen. But there is already severe damage to the grid system and that cannot be restored quickly and at acceptable costs.
China is dominating because it has sensible leaders. Ours are completely useless and we let it happen believing every promise the politicians have made.
On a broad approach to the difficulties that appear to be heaping up on us, the problem is that our politicians have no sense of direction or vision of where they want to take the UK.
All they want is power and they hold onto power by promising all things to everyone. They pander to every piece of nonsense that is the topic of the day with no inclination or requirement to examine if there is any benefit or practical possibility of achieving a desired result. Hence we find ourselves bankrupting the population and making whats left of our industries uncompetetive by pursuing lunatic and costly green policies to appease people with green and pink hair and nose studs, who ignore the facts and insist the planet is in danger of overheating.
Most of these people are unemployed, pay no tax, are on benefits and contribute nothing , but no politician will ever call these people for what they are and tell them to lock themselves in their mum and dad’s spare bedroom.These people are a nuisance to everyone but our judiciary rewards their behaviour by releasing them back into our streets, usually with some patronising sympathetic comment to show how cool and down with the kids the idiot magistrate is.
The public sector is actually made up of the same sort of people who are happy to push paperwork about all day in exchange for a higher salary than they would get working in the private sector, as they look forward to their index linked pensions.
These people are every bit as parasitical as the pink hair people, and while they bask in La La Land, they pretend that their job is necessary, always demanding more, and refure to consider the increasing burden heaped upon the guenuine wealth creators that pay for everything. Health & Safety, equal pay for unequal jobs, idiotic awards for someone taking offence at an offhand remark, and suddenly another 10% of the employed population is captured in the world of non-jobs.
No politician will even begin to consider criticism of this lot.
OAP’s are beyond criticism and regardless of how useless their working life actually was, expect everything to be paid for by someone else.
We have the NHS and the police that need to be drastically reformed but no politician will ever seriously demand this when you can make yourself popular by asking people to clelebrate the NHS by clattering saucepans together on a Thursday night. Cheap tricks for morons of whom there are many.
There is no will to stop the rot and the government will always put off till tomorrow what should be done today.
As an enervated, bloated society, increasingly irrelevant, we will be easy prey for any peoples who wish to fill the vacuum our banal laziness has created. When one considers the fantastic gifts to the world the UK has been responsible for, it is rather sad that we are allowing our nation’s decline because our craven politicians don’t wish to fall out with the pink haired people.