“The Today programme interviewed Phil Bentley from British Gas and Chris Huhne the energy and climate change minister this morning. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/b006qj9z/console
Prices are rising and the Today programme wants to know why. The government also wants to know why.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15308005
‘David Cameron calls for action to cut energy bills. The government needs to work “harder and faster” to bring down energy bills, the prime minister has said ahead of a summit on gas and electricity prices.’
Throughout the interview the ‘inconvenient fact’ of ‘why’ is skirted around with euphemisms and wilful blindness.The prices are rising so dramatically because of government green policies….that is to pay for all the massive subsidies to build wind farms and to handsomely reward wealthy farmers and landowners to allow these unwanted intrusions in the landscape onto their land.
Naughtie uses every phrase he can dream up to avoid using ‘carbon tax’ or ‘green tax’….he tells us that price rises are to pay for energy from ‘different sources’ or that they are to ‘secure energy supplies’ or ‘government policy in all its forms’ will increase prices but eventually he raises the subject but only tentatively and only once and fails to chase Huhne as he sidestepped it…’a commitment to a reduction in emissions means prices will go up will it not?’.
Huhne dodges the question and claims prices are rising to secure supplies and er…to protect us from price rises…..how does that work? ….presumably build a windfarm and charge us the earth up front in subsidies to these energy companies and then keep charging us that rate but don’t increase prices unless ‘unusual circumstances’ dictate a rise.
Isn’t that just like the shop that raises prices just before a ‘sale’ and the sale price is actually the same price on the sticker before the ‘sale’? Why is the BBC so reluctant to mention green taxes?
Does it not want the public to know just how much of their money is being ploughed into this unproven theory and lining the pockets of already wealthy people, especially in times of economic crisis.
Does it think people might object and start looking even more closely at the realities of climate?
Huhne was on Radio 2 in the last few minutes, promoting the same rubbish, and totally avoiding the main points. Phone-in questioners were limited to micro-view with questions about the top-up cards etc.
Heard it, was sickened by it, not in the least surprised by their determination NOT to mention the primary root cause of the gigantic leaps in the cost of energy.
The CAGW fraud is directly behind the energy prices we are now forced to pay, it has got very little to do with the world market in fossil fuels. Lying cheating bastards who got together before hand to make sure the CAGW fraud was not mentioned. Secure energy supplies? Not with windmills that do not generate electricity, not with nuclear power plants that are not yet built, not yet being built and probably never will be built.
The sheer soviet mentality of hushing up the latest grotesque blunder and blaming it on energy companies, the green CAGW fraud alone has destroyed the economy, destroyed countless jobs, made many scumbags rich, hurt ordinary families and most evil of all will condemn tens of thousands of the poorest elderly OAPs to a horrible death this winter. A bunch of criminals?
Mr Millionaire Huhne and his rich chums can afford to turn up the heating, they will not suffer, their elderly relatives will not die this winter. The most important scandal in modern history, the wasting of hundreds of billions of pounds on a complete shabby green fraud, the wealth of a nation vanishes into the pockets of the rich.
I wonder where all those green jobs are, many promises, so few kept. More windmills and less real power stations and power cuts on the way. Heath gave us power cuts and now Heath Mk2 seems determined to replicate his forebears efforts. Can you imagine the evil intent of the BBC toady filth to hush up the real cost of the CAGW fraud?
One thing I didn’t realise before was a point made in passing by Malcolm Grimston of the Chatham House think-tank, just before Naughtie interviewed Caroline Flint, that there’s also going to be a massive cost to update the national grid to cope with renewables, because they behave so very differently. That wasn’t the only unorthodox-for-the-BBC comment Mr Grimston made. He went on to say that the energy companies should make a profit and talked of the cost of wind turbines and the intermittent nature of wind power.
He did also make some very-orthodox-for-the-BBC points as well, but the cynic in me notes that his interview is not available to ‘Listen Again’ on the ‘Today’ website – unlike Caroline Flint’s and the one Alan describes. Why isn’t it available for easy access, BBC? It can be heard on i-player, about 1h 9m in, here.
I’m very loathe to say anything complimentary about James Naughtie (the worst of the ‘Today’ presenters for bias in my opinion, to answer a question cj posed a while back), but his obvious exasperation at the refusal of gap-toothed beauty Caroline Flint to answer his question about why Ed Miliband did nothing about the evil Big Six when he was Energy Secretary, despite now mounting his high horse on the subject, was something in his favour.
I hoped he was going to pursue it but, as Umbongo pointed out on another thread, James Naughtie unfathomably fails to pursue a lot of telling points – and he gave up here too, allowing her to get away with the sort of opportunistic cant that gives politicians such a bad name.
The eminent Melanie Phillips has an excellent blog on the subject
UK Cabinet power struggle over Huhne’s unhealthy emissions
Well said, Alan. When environmentals demand higher energy taxes to force people to reduce consumption, the BBC loves it. Now they’ve magically forgotten about things like advocating taxing fuel or that they’re always keen to give air time to environmentals calling for carbon taxes. Before Huhne was part of the nasty Conservative-led Coalition, the BBC gave him a free platform to call for rising energy prices in order to force people to reduce consumption.
How stupid do they think you are?
I caught something of this story on bBC News 24.
I was suprised like everybody else how the folly of following ineffective green issues is one of the major rerasons why energy prices are rising.
How nobody mention that actually world wide gas prices have fallen , how Russia and Iran have been behind the past rises in gas prices. (Which is why gas prices are still pegged to Oil) But due to America no longer importing gas (Now an exporter) their little plan to corner the gas market has failed.
But what suprised me was how the bBC allowed the chairman of British Gas to state that not only are gas proces rising , but unless new gas fields are found, they will continue rising (Maybe he gets his news off the bBC as he doesn’t know about the huge gas finds in: Blackpool,Poland,Bangerldesh,Brazil,Israel,Eygpt,Peru,India,
Turkmenistan,Mozambique.
But what really took the biscuit was how during this story the bBC aired banners stating how Labour Leader Ed Milliband blamed the present government for the mess of high energy bills.
Really bBC???
BBC greenies and luddites seem slow to condemn the terrible man-made catastrophic earthquake in frakking Blackpool.
James Delingpole:
“How many died in the great Blackpool earthquake of ’11?”
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100111487/how-many-died-in-the-great-blackpool-earthquake-of-11/
Newsnight is on the case tonight.
Why does one suspect in all the talking from all the gathered ‘experts’, there will be certain ‘off topic’ aspects that won’t make the cut.
The show is no more than a propaganda piece, with £1m+ figureheads who have had irony & hyocrisy bypasses.
Slightly off topic but related. I came across a car magazine which carried an article on the US decision to compel all car manufacturers to average 75 MPG across the whole range of their models. By 2015 or so I think,
The only way to do this is by forcing electric cars down our throats.
Huge profits for some people I suppose and big price increases. The ordinary person will be priced out of the market but the Huhnes of this world will not be affected .
The energy policies are nothing other than an attack on the living standards of the majority to benefit the usual suspects. The corporate state at it’s worst.
This was on Top Gear a while back, Aston Martin are getting round it by basically re-badging Toyota and flogging them as Aston’s!!
‘the Huhnes of this world will not be affected’
The Huhne of this parish apparently dodged Newsnight last night.
Not that they would have bowled any tricky questions. Maybe the wrong guest slipped in and Mr. Huhne panicked that the £1m plusser may not be able to run interference?
An Aston Hiroshima, eh? Figures, but hopefully the cost does not get dumped on the tax payer, like the light bulb scam or wind subsidies.
Goverment and business totally complicit.
With the BBC handling PR and story suppression.
“The sheer soviet mentality of hushing up the latest grotesque blunder and blaming it on energy companies …”
But the energy companies are in on the scam big time.
There was a spokesman on SKYNews being grilled about increasing prices and profits for the companies – Reply?
“Yes because we have to find ways of reducing demand for the product”.
We’re charging th earth to save the Earth (and making a friggin packet from the public)
Good point, but it is the political class driving the fraud and it is the political class that bought off the energy companies by allowing them to charge more for less product. Left to its own devices the energy sector would be supplying cheap reliable fossil fuel energy. The natural result of political influence in industry has always been a complete disaster, I like to call it the ‘BL reality 😀 ‘
You are correct that the energy companies are complicit but that is the pathetic reality of a socialist style interference in capitalist markets where buying off the likes of shell in order to have their full cooperation in the CAGW fraud was essential.
The green watermellon scum are trying their best to drive the population into poverty, but why? Their ugly creed needs the medium of poverty in which to grow and thrive. It is poverty within the lower orders where support for the red virus like poverty grows like Japanese knot weed.
It is essential for the red/green filth to provoke the kind of poverty where their rancid ideology thrives and if it does not exist they have to help it on its way. Like sunlight kills bacteria, a vital capitlist economy kills support for the dark and ugly Marxist/green/red disease. Its why they are so desperate to stop fracking, its why the regime is so fearful of fracking, its why both will kill off the project if they can. And BTW the big energy companies that have spent so much time building expensive LNG import terminals are not at all happy at having a cheap source of gas available to drive down the cost of their product still further. Fracking promises to smash the flimsy excuses of the energy/regime cartel to smithereens. Those big import terminals, those expensive facilties, the contracts and the profits and the taxes derived thereof, all gone in a flash.
And with that goes the broawn envelopes to the political vermin, the lavish sinecures handed to retiring political vermin by the energy sharks, gone will be the cosy and corrupt mutual back scratching that as done so much to pervert our energy sector and enrich the political establishment filth. Imagine how the FO officials/political scum/civil service panjandrums feel about having their sources of income wither away. The industrial scale corruption in the UK government establishment is barely known as yet, the stooge MSM has made sure of that, when the facts are known there will be a revolution.
While BBC-NUJ lambasts Fox on lobbying, BBC-NUJ turns a blind eye to its OWN lobbying.
Take the example of SHALE GAS finds in Lancashire; the immediate reaction of HARRABIN and co is to go the Blackpool area and produce a biased, anti-fracking piece of propaganda, and give the misleading impression that there is only significant opposition to the development in the area, which there isn’t. It is ‘Green’ lobbying.
Philip Johnston ‘Telegraph’ has this today:
“Why are we kept in the dark over the energy lifeline that is shale gas?The widespread antipathy towards an energy resource that could satisfy British fuel demands for decades is mystifying.”
[Extract]:
“But there seems to be a conspiracy to keep this from the public. The greens are determined to kill off shale gas because it is not a renewable source. The big energy companies don’t want to know and the Government has so far been lukewarm about the prospect.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/8831710/Why-are-we-kept-in-the-dark-over-the-energy-lifeline-that-is-shale-gas.html
Why is the BBC so reluctant to mention green taxes?
But it is not just taxes. By law (passed by the previous government but conspicuously not repealed by this one) energy companies are required to source a certain proportion of the electricity they sell from “renewable” sources and to pay a premium rate for it. This premium can be very large.
Every time Huhne complains about high power bills, remember, he could do a lot to cut them very quickly by ending this renweables obligation, but has chosen not to. It might be nice if highly paid interviewers were to challenge him on that, but it won’t happen.