Today I want to draw your attention to an article on the BBC website, by its environment correspondent, Richard Black. I could have chosen any of hundreds of similar articles by Black and his colleagues over the last few years: characterised by lazy repetition of press releases from interest groups, in the promotion of solar and wind power; against a backdrop (in this case, implicit) of unquestioning acceptance of the anthropogenic global warming meme.
This time, Black has been fed by the Church of England (wouldn't you know) and the National Trust. They're whinging about the proposed cut in the renewables feed-in tariff (currently struck down on a technicality by the courts) from 43p to 21p per kilowatt-hour. By comparison, operators of coal, gas and nuclear power stations sell their electricity for 2-3 p/kWh (see Figure 1, here), while a domestic user can buy electricity at around 13p/kWh and an industrial user at around 8p/kWh (see Tables 5.4.2 and 5.4.3 here). So, if the government gets its way, if you stick a solar panel on your roof, you'll still be paid 7-10 times the rates of the commercial generators (on whom we actually depend), rather than the 15-20 times currently. A prime example of why the presumption should always be against subsidising anything. Give someone a free gift and they'll bellyache if the next one is a little less generous.
Who pays? Every domestic consumer to the tune of 10% of their bill by 2020 and businesses to the tune of 0.47p/kWh right now. So everything anyone (rich and poor alike) needs to buy costs more and everyone (rich and poor alike) will pay more for their electricity bills; all to the benefit of people who can afford the capital investment required to install solar cells and especially to the manufacturers thereof. This at a time when one in five households are said to live in a state of "fuel poverty" and in 2009/10 there was an excess winter death rate of nine pensioners per hour. And this at a time, of course, when the country is flat broke.
Does Black question who pays—with their money or their life? Does he put the subsidies in any kind of economic context? Does he question why we bother, when the mean global temperature has essentially flatlined for a decade or more? Of course not. His ex-colleague Alex Kirby gave the game away in one of the Climategate 2.0 leaked emails, to Professor Jones of the University of East Anglia (my bold):
Yes, glad you stopped this — I was sent it too, and decided to spike it without more ado as pure stream-of-consciousness rubbish. I can well understand your unhappiness at our running the other piece. But we are constantly being savaged by the loonies for not giving them any coverage at all, especially as you say with the COP in the offing, and being the objective impartial (ho ho) BBC that we are, there is an expectation in some quarters that we will every now and then let them say something. I hope though that the weight of our coverage makes it clear that we think they are talking through their hats
Which makes me think of another subsidy, of £3.4 billion raised by a poll tax, that the British public might be told what to think.
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