The Telegraph is very clear: electricity prices are going to to rise £500 a year because of the government’s lunatic “clean” energy obsession. For the BBC it’s a different equation (written in matter-of-fact business need terms and a cue for pictures of useless windfarms):
Government to guarantee electricity prices
Yes, there’s mention of a possible price hike, but it’s well down in the story in the BBC’s version. The main thrust is to justify how necessary this price-rigging mechanism is. And of course, no BBC climate change story would be complete without a smug, patronising comment from Friends of the Earth that we are now on course for saving the planet, but it’s not enough.
Update: The BBC reporting of Huhne the loon’s crazy policies has become more and more obfuscatory as the day has progressed. They note the claims of a £500 increase mentioned in the Telegraph, but give by far the most weight to Huhne’s own preposterous assertion that the figure will be far less, and the headline is now that firms are being given ***new low-carbon incentives***. Me, I think today’s lunatic measures will go down as the longest suicide note in history, as James Delingpole brilliantly outlines. Margaret Thatcher bequeathed us arguably the most competitive power industry in Europe; the nutjob Cleggerons are busy dismantling it. And they have today condemned countless thousands of old people to die miserable, cold deaths. It’s unspeakable.
I don’t know if it’s been changed since you wrote this, but fairly high up in the story is “But consumers are likely to face much higher energy prices. Some estimates suggest the reforms could add hundreds of pounds to bills”.
Agreed though, the headline is hardly drawing people’s attention to their higher bills. Interesting how there is always a quote from Friends of the Earth, but only a vague “consumer groups have voiced concerns”.
I’d say it’s likely that more people are going to die from fuel poverty than will ever die from global warming.
This blog has clearly and well established that the market rate talents don’t ‘do’ difficult choices.
Especially when it requires professional insight and the need to cover many sources objectively.
Depending on how things conform, or don’t, to their simplistic narratives, the BBC either is ‘for’ or ‘against’ things.
And they’ll just wait a while to use the consequences of this to plug into future political event interpretation on cuts or somesuch (ironic in that the most ardent greenho£e numpties are coalition partners), forgetting their earlier complicit enthusiasm.
Or, has been noted by another commenter today, they will manage to ‘create’ causality to suit now, before anything has actually been instigated.
The BBC is a science wasteland, economically illiterate and terminally incapable of objective analysis. It is a bad media joke.
If unique.
Listening to Toady this morning, it was hard for me to believe that ANYONE could listen, and not be convinced as to the depths of agenda-hugging and bias these BBC clowns will stoop to. Huhne on his stupid non-carbon, high-priced wind-driven electricity proposals, that absolute ex-defence minister fool Bob Ainsworth on about drugs, and some ex-police idiot, too – all virtually uninterrupted and allowed to burble their rubbish unopposed, with appropriate words of encouragement and agreement from the beeboids. When the dicussion at the last knockings between the ex-police twat (Thoms?) and Peter Hitchens got wound up – the beeboid saying that they’d had their allocated “6 minutes” (which was more like two minutes), it was all SO clear to me that anyone who didn’t toe the BBC party line was given a hard time. it’s SO bloody obvious – this morning was worse than usual, I thought.
Natsman,
I cannot bear to watch the news or read the papers anymore, its all too much for me!
Its like being a witness to a terrible madness, a cruel joke being played out by inmates of a lunatic asylum. Huhne the mass murderer grinning while hundreds die and more in deaths waiting room, waiting only for the hatchet of unafordable bills and blackouts to come.
We stand by forced to watch as the political classes go insane, grinning and talking jibberish nonsense while the media play the willing stooge by reporting waffle and crap.
Goodnight and good luck 😉
@ Roland Deschain
I’d suggest the BBC story has been changed.
It says Last updated at 10:48 and this article was posted @ 07:42
When I wrote that, it said last updated 00:38. But as we all know, that means nothing. However the article has now completely changed, headed “Energy firms to get new low-carbon incentives” and has removed, at least to my cursory glance, any reference to consumer groups objecting.
Now, Mr Huhne has dismissed reports that consumers’ electricity bills could rise by £500 a year as a result of the measures as “absolutely bonkers”. A £500 bill will “only” rise by £160 a year – 32% by my reckoning. Well, that’s OK then.
I don’t think it’s going too far to suggest that, in terms of the number of deaths he will cause, Mr Huhne is one of the most dangerous politicians we have seen for many a year.
25,000 died last winter from fuel poverty, lets see how many die this year, the harshest winter for decades.
‘My Site (click to edit)
@ Roland Deschain
I’d suggest the BBC story has been changed.’
‘Which is it?’ can now apply pretty much to anything the BBC issues as ‘news’. Not, I’d suggest, optimal for a news outfit.
Between what is, what they think it should be and what they keep adjusting it to get to, their ‘reporting’ of facts and stealth editing to cover tracks is becoming a very bad joke in the MSM journalism infirmament.
How is anyone expected to be informed or educated when they can’t even sort stuff out themselves internally as they get tied in knots trying to spin, avoid PC faux pas, etc?
It also makes nailing their slippery sorry selves pretty darn tricky. Coincidentally.
But one expects they will eventually get it, uniquely, ‘about right’.
http://www.newssniffer.co.uk/articles/373085/diff/0/1
When difficult or contentious stuff arrives they head en masse for “strickly” – that’s a fact.
Words are simply inadequate to describe the poisonous agenda rigging that’s being perpetrated about AGW, “Green” power and CO2 at the moment.
The sooner the plug is pulled the better.
A recent winning entry in a competiton in the IET journal summed it up:
“See amid the winter’s snow
The thermometer is five below
With no power, it’s such a pain –
(Bloody windmill’s stopped again)”
H/T EL of Fife and IET journal
So when the power goes off and the Minister is off in Durban in the sun – what will be his excuse?
Shades of Jim Callaghan maybe? “Crisis, what crisis?”
I used to think better of Huhne, now no longer.
Its not just power – some loon on Farming Today saying farmers should not be allowed to spray cereal crops , as there are alternative ways of farming. Beeboid lets him ramble on, without pointing out that the alternative ways produce a fifth of the quantity of cereal and there are price rises caused by shortages already.
It’s like so many of us have been saying for ages: they want us all to go back to subsistance farming. “Saving the planet” is window dressing.
I’m feeling full of goodwill to all men at the moment so I’ve decided to look on the bright side regarding the obsessional, intolerant and authoritarian greens and their supporters like the BBC.
All of human history has been populated with demented and/or selfish monarchs, regimes or cliques which practiced widespread slaughter and enslaved whole populations in order to enjoy their obedience and deference. In living memory things reached as a bad a point as they ever have in this respect with the likes of Mao, Hilter and Stalin.
Compared to the death and misery inflicted on most humans by these nasty minorities we are living in a golden age. The best they can currently manage is to demand our obedience about energy use and to tax our money off us to line their own pockets and build silly windmills.
Anyone have an idea as to the level of expert objectivity that might be expected on matters of energy policy from James Cameron of Climate Change Capital Investors?
http://www.climatechangecapital.com/news-and-events/ccc-in-the-news/ccc's-james-cameron-joins-the-prime-minister's-business-advisory-group.aspx
I just ask, having heard him, and only him, wheeled out on Radio 2’s drivetime to ‘explain’ how everything Mr. Huhne has come up with is utter genius.
Yes there were a few things muttered about the few downsides, but apparently it’s not so much prices are going to rise as ‘we’ will learn to do with less.
One is presuming that this ‘we’ does not include public-service taxpayer teat-addicted, index-linked civil servants, and guys who take a cut of gazillions shunting about into such schemes?
Oddly, the usually rather sharp BBC bimbette seemed oddly OK with this single source of information.
Me, I just found it… ‘unique’.
Now, I wonder if CCC help with any pension funds?
I’d get in touch to ask, but suspect most of Aunty is trying to patch over the slight derailment to the narrative that is the Jody ‘situation’.
Good piece here from Richard North
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/12/fox-is-shot.html
The “new incentive” is to price fossel fuels out of the market by making them more expensive than so called “green energy”.
“UK carbon tax could reach £40 a tonne by 2020”
http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/1933187/uk-carbon-tax-reach-gbp40-tonne-2020
The honest answer Huhne is trying to fix the market while making everyones life a misery. How many “older people” are you willing to sacrifice in the coming winters,? I’m sure that is worth a Panorama “investigation”. If only
France does not, as far as I can tell, suffer from crippling electricity prices, and they generate most of theirs by nuclear (even selling us their spare). The technology is mature and proven, having been used for decades.
So why don’t we take the same path, instead of fannying around with wind turbines, electric cars and other largely untested and as-yet uneconomic solutions?
Nuclear would seem even more attractive as the era of cheap fuel appears to be over as demand grows rapidly in China, India and other developing countries, while the remaining reserves are more challenging and costly to extract (eg tar sands, extremely deepwater oilfields etc).
Hard to please folk…
IndyWorld The Independent Sudan leader accused of ‘hiding’ $9bn in UK bankhttp://ind.pn/hwih77
This is obviously a post-Cancun generous gesture by an African head of state in appreciation of all the largesse heading t’other way.
I’m sure Aunty will soon be ‘reporting’ that this will be an investment in one of the funds BBC pension pot approves of.