Strange….just how important was Miliband’s announcement that he wanted to cap Banks’ market share?

It was the BBC’s top Frontpage story at 02:43 last night……

….But now it has vanished…relegated to a small line on the UK page…whilst ‘Rates of gout in UK ‘soaring’ remains frontpage news.

Could it have anything to do with the Treasury boss’s put down of Miliband?

From the Telegraph:

Mark Carney rejects Ed Miliband’s bank shake-up plan

Also frontpage in the FT (£):

Carney deals blow to Labour bank plan

Miliband must be busily rewriting his scheme for Friday’s big speech…and the BBC can rewrite its own script and give him the headlines again.

The BBC reports:

Ed Miliband to call for banking competition inquiry

A Labour government would tell regulators to investigate whether there is adequate competition between High Street banks, the BBC understands.

Ed Miliband is due to say on Friday that the authorities should look into whether breaking up banks would benefit customers.

The question ‘What should the Treasury do?’ actually refers to bank bonuses and not competition despite the way it looks in the headlines there:

Should the Treasury approve big banker bonuses?

Funny really…Miliband wants to know what the ‘authorities’ think about capping retail bank’s market share….and the Treasury provides the answer…Miliband is a fool basically…and the BBC ignores it…

From the Telegraph:

Mark Carney rejects Ed Miliband’s bank shake-up plan

Labour’s proposals to limit market share were also rejected by Lord Lawson, former Chancellor and member of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, who said: “I think there are probably enough domestic banks for there to be competition.”

‘A blow to Miliband’s plan’…..why would the BBC ignore that?

Also frontpage in the FT (£):

Carney deals blow to Labour bank plan

Where oh where is the BBC report?…the BBC being the biggest news provider in the UK if not the world.

Competition?

The BBC gives us this list of banks implying a miniscule market:

On Friday, Mr Miliband is expected to say that forcing the major High Street banks to sell off branches would promote the growth of new firms able to challenge the dominance of the “big five” – RBS, HSBC, Lloyds, Barclays, and Santander.

“We’ve got to give customers more choice,”

The big five?

What about the Halifax, or the Co-op, or Tescos, or Sainsburys, or Standard Chartered, or Clydesdale? The Post Office has a basic banking service as well….amongst numerous other smaller banks.

As with the energy companies which despite there being a ‘big six’ numerous smaller companies provide an alternative supply…as Miliband knows because he switched to one of them himself, the banks also provide more than enough competition.

Anything else?…from the FT:

The Post Office is one of several “challenger” banks vying to break up the UK’s highly concentrated banking sector by offering a current account, considered the cornerstone of a bank’s relationship with customers.

These providers have stepped up their plans to launch accounts following the introduction of a new switching service, which enables customers to move their current accounts within seven working days.

Tesco declared at the end of last year that it would start providing current accounts in the first half of 2014. The retailer plans to offer rewards to banking customers, using its existing Clubcard points system.

Virgin Money, which took over parts of Northern Rock, also aims to launch current accounts early this year, starting with a basic account aimed at people who do not have a bank account.

Another bit of tilting at windmills to generate headlines by Miliband and his spinners.

And oh yes:

In 2009, the Labour government attempted to create a new “people’s bank” through the Post Office, but the plans were scrapped a year later after they were deemed too expensive.

Shame the BBC regurgitates it all without question once again.

Just listening to 5Live Sport (still on air now) talking to Lord Herman Ouseley, Chair of Kick It Out about Anelka and what is an anti-Semitic salute.

The FA has been taking a long time to come up with a verdict…the BBC presenter, Mark Pougatch probably, said that ‘cultural differences would have to be considered’ when Lord Ouseley said that a lot of information was coming back from France on the background to this.

‘Cultural differences’?  Really?  In which culture is it acceptable to give an anti-Semitic salute…and why should that then be acceptable here if it was a ‘cultural thing’?

As the BBC has already reported this:

The French government’s Sports Minister, Valerie Fourneyron, described the gesture as “anti-semitic”.

…you might think it was cut and dried as to the meaning of the ‘salute’….in France, or anywhere.

The BBC loathed the EDL which campaigned against an ideology that incites homophobia, misogyny, apartheid, death to apostates and anti-Semitism.

But the BBC praises those who chase Neo-Nazis out of town:

The North Dakota town that thwarted a neo-Nazi takeover

[The Neo-Nazi’s ] plans for Leith were exposed in August last year by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based civil rights organisation.

The Southern Poverty Law Center counted 1,007 groups as active hate groups in the United States in 2012….of that…only 3 are Muslim….a religion of peace indeed.

Has the BBC published a map of Muslim ‘hate groups’ in the UK?  Surely there must be some of concern?

Imagine the outcry if non-Muslims in Tower Hamlets were to ‘thwart a fundamentalist Muslim takeover’….too late for that anyway.

Lutfur Rahman can be described as ‘extremist-backed,’ rules Press Complaints Commission (but we will publish his denials)

Since April Lutfur Rahman, the extremist-backed mayor of Tower Hamlets, has been pursuing a PCC campaign against the Telegraph. He has over the last eight months made four complaints, all of which were finally resolved to our satisfaction last week.

It is notable the joyous glee that the BBC hunts down White people who express extremist views….or tries desperately to blame them for something they hope wasn’t done by a Muslim…the Boston bombs for instance…..curious that the BBC avoided tackling politics in Tower Hamlets or indeed the so-called ‘Muslim patrols’ as they hit the headlines everywhere else.

There’s hardly a day goes by without a sneer or a derogatory remark about the Daily Mail from a BBC presenter.

Now that Murdoch has been somewhat neutered the Mail is the next in the firing line for the relentless barrage of criticism that is intended to close it down….either literally or by making life so difficult for the owners that they backdown and give in to what amounts to control by the Left as to what is ‘acceptable’ content.

Scary huh? A Free Press anyone?

The assault has begun already in the New Statesman:

Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail: The man who hates liberal Britain

He’s the most successful and most feared newspaperman of his generation. But after a bad year in which he was forced to defend his methods, how much longer can Dacre survive as editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail?

Politicians no longer fear Murdoch as they once did. They still fear Dacre.

But Murdoch’s decline leaves the Mail under more scrutiny than ever. Is Dacre at last running out of road?

Rumours circulate in the national newspaper industry that members of the Rothermere family, owners of the Daily Mail, are increasingly nervous of the controversy that Dacre stirs up.

Dacre attracts visceral loathing. His enemies see the Mail, to quote the Huffington Post writer and NS columnist Mehdi Hasan (who was duly monstered in the Mail’s pages), as “immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting”.

Curiously the New Statesman doesn’t give us the full facts here:

Nor that Hasan has admitted that…As a Muslim, I struggle with the idea of homosexuality… because of his religion…which by the way is also misogynistic, never mind the calls to kill the unbeliever or gay people…..or apostates as illustrated by the atheist Afghan given asylum here in fear of his life.

The NS continues:

In Dacre’s mind, the country is run, in effect, by affluent metropolitan liberals who dominate Whitehall, the leadership of the main political parties, the universities, the BBC and most public-sector professions. As he once said, “. . . no day is too busy or too short not to find time to tweak the noses of the liberal­ocracy”.

The Mail, in his view, speaks for ordinary people, working hard and struggling with their bills, conventional in their views, ambitious for their children, loyal to their country, proud of owning their home, determined to stand on their own feet. These people, Dacre believes, are not given a fair hearing in the national media and the Mail alone fights for them. It is incomprehensible to him – a gross category error – that critics should be obsessed by the Mail’s power and influence when the BBC, funded by a compulsory poll tax, dominates the news market. It uses this position, he argues, to push a dogmatically liberal agenda, hidden behind supposed neutrality.

[The Mail’s ] trick is to make the world seem more threatening than it is: crime is rising, migrants flooding the country, benefit scroungers swindling the taxpayer, standards of education falling, wind turbines taking over the countryside.

While his views are mostly right-wing, he is not a reliable ally for the Conservative Party, or for anyone else. This aspect of his way of working is little understood. More than most editors, it can be said of him that he is in nobody’s pocket, not even his proprietor’s.

Today, it is resolutely – some would say hysterically – Euro­sceptic and a far higher proportion of its readership is from Scotland and the English north and midlands. [No wonder the cosmopolitan media luvvies hate it]

The New Statesman’s main complaint, or should I say charge, against the Daily Mail is:

To its critics, however, the Mail is as biased as it’s possible to be, and none too fussy about the facts.

[Next week the New Statesman looks at the BBC…and then itself]

The NS gives numerous examples of the Mail being ‘none too fussy about the facts‘, the Mehdi Hasan one above for instance…but like that just how many of the NS’s claims are really true?

This for example…In the past ten years, the Mail has reported that the dean of RAF College Cranwell [Joel Hayward…a Muslim] showed undue favouritism to Muslim students (false)

Indeed the Mail published this story for which they had to pay damages:

‘Ayatollah of the RAF’

The main source for the Mail‘s witch-hunt is a letter headed “The Air Force Ayatollah”, which was sent to the paper by anonymous RAF officers. Apparently students at Cranwell “are in fear” of expressing anti-Muslim sentiments in front of Hayward. Worst of all: “Anyone who fails to follow the line that Islam is a peace-loving religion is hauled into his office for re-education”….The sole “Islamist” connection that the Mail can come up with is the fact that Hayward wrote a paper for the Cordoba Foundation, “described by David Cameron as a front for the Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood”.

But when you look at the man they were reporting on perhaps the RAF should have asked some questions:

“Hayward’s thesis is that the Nazis did not attempt the systematic extermination of Jews during the Second World War. In particular, he finds the evidence that gas chambers were built and used for this purpose unconvincing.”

An Islamic website says this about his thoughts on Libya:

To the dismay of defence chiefs, he has cast doubt on the widely held belief that the Nato actions averted the mass killing of civilians in Benghazi. He also warned against the RAF becoming ‘the air corps of a rebel army’….I worry that the rush to intervene again in a Muslim land without a well-reasoned strategy, even ostensibly to stop a bad man from misbehaving, may yet convince observers that there is more going on behind the scenes than at first there appears.

Dr Hayward has previously expressed remorse after appearing to claim that far fewer Jews were killed by the Nazis than generally thought and that the gas chambers of the Holocaust were British propaganda.

Hayward describes himself as “a moderate and politically liberal revert who chose to embrace the faith of Islam because of its powerful spiritual truths, its emphasis on peace and justice, its racial and ethnic inclusiveness and its charitable spirit towards the poor and needy.”

The usual people that use the term ‘revert’ are fundamentalist Muslims…the term is essentially an insult to all non-Muslims…people who use it mean that all people are born Muslims and if they take up the faith they don’t convert, they revert back to their original state as a Muslim.

Hayward compares Muhammed to Churchill:

On 4 June 1940 Churchill gave a magnificent speech to inspire the British people to continue their struggle against the undoubted evils of Nazism, even though the German armed forces then seemed stronger and better in battle. His speech includes the fabulous warlike lines:

We shall fight on the seas and oceans
We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be
We shall fight on the beaches
We shall fight on the landing grounds
We shall fight in the fields and in the streets
We shall fight in the hills
We shall never surrender.

No-one would dream of calling Churchill warmongering, much less murderous.

Well actually the Left call Churchill a murderous warmonger all the time….the Labour Party and the Daily Mirror leading the charge:

The Conservative leader, Winston Churchill, has wound up his election campaign with a hard-hitting speech in which he vigorously denied accusations of warmongering.

Labour has concentrated its attack on Mr Churchill and the Conseratives saying their return to government would make a third world war more likely.

“Whose finger on the trigger?” has become the slogan for this campaign after the Daily Mirror coined the phrase for a front-page headline.

Trouble is of course Churchill didn’t produce a book that goes onto to call for the death of all Germans or non-Britons etc etc

Jihad Watch has published the Mail’s story...it seems pretty harmless…Hayward has been given the right of reply in it….’Last night Dr Hayward said he did not ‘recognise’ the allegations’……and the Mail is only reporting what it has been told by other RAF officers.

The Mail was forced to withdraw the article and pay damages to Hayward:

Libel damages for RAF professor branded Ayatollah by Associated Newspapers

Remember when the New Statesman had to apologise for its anti-Semitic front cover?:

Dacre and the Daily Mail are now enemy Number One…no doubt we can expect far more of this from the usual suspects.

Free Press anyone?

And to finish…some fine words from Joel Hayward……

Eminent scholar Robert Pape demonstrates that most terrorist attacks by Muslims (and almost all suicide attacks, by whoever) are motivated by perceived grievances that relate to foreign occupation or exploitation. These include Palestinian attacks and most of those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even many bombings in Pakistan relate to the government’s actions in support of the West’s counter-insurgency war in Afghanistan.

It is also clear that western and other nations can increase their own security by leaving Muslim lands to carve out their own futures. Bin Laden may be gone, but some of the claimed grievances that he railed against—albeit through evil action—still fuel tremendous resentment.

Oh…and Murdoch may be part of a pro-Israel conspiracy:

The scandals linked to NoTW raise questions pertaining to truth, objectivity and bias.

[Robert] Fisk believes that at least one international media organisation with excessive influence throughout the western world is steering opinion towards Israel.

 I do not know if Fisk is correct but let’s say, for the sake of argument, that he is.

I am not a conspiracy theorist and rather than attributing this observation to the influence of any malevolent individuals or groups, I tend to attribute the apparent bias and absence of balance mainly to the legacy of Orientalism and a widespread lack of knowledge about Islam.

So Fisk may not be right but……

SamCam’s father nets £350,000 a year from subsidised wind farm

The BBC and their pet scientists frequently lament the fact that so many people are sceptical about global warming and the attendant political policies forced upon them.

Why oh why they ask in despair does no one believe them?

Could it be for instance the inconvenient revelations in the CRU emails?  Could it be the rigged ‘inquiries’ into those emails? Could it be that both scientists and the BBC are not keen to let the public see the data or who is saying what in their secret seminars? Could it be the lack of any real ‘science’ that proves CO2 is the actual driver of climate change?

Could it be as mentioned in the last post that in the quest for a carbon free energy policy it seems that all morality and common sense has gone out of the window as illustrated by Lord Smith’s desire to deny cheap energy to the masses and impose hugely expensive renewable energy upon them instead…

Coal on the global market is so cheap that it threatens government attempts to tackle climate change, the chairman of the Environment Agency has warned.

“The government must ensure it doesn’t continue.”

Or could it be something like this example, Via Bishop Hill, of the arrogant desire to hide yet more inconvenient and very awkward truths about wind turbines….that they are wearing out much faster than claimed…and thereby also losing efficiency as well…and costing us even more?

The Government’s scientific advisor, Prof. Mackay is in full denial mode:

Readers will no doubt recall the study by Gordon Hughes, which suggested that wind farms are wearing out much more quickly than previously thought. This was the subject of a bit of to and fro at BH the other day, when Prof David Mackay, the chief scientist at DECC, appeared in the comments to dispute the findings.

Renewable Energy Foundation published some background, explaining that the two sides had in fact been discussing the issue since the original Hughes paper appeared in 2012. Hughes had apparently met with Mackay and had at that time apparently persuaded him that the model was in fact identifiable. Mackay had then shifted position somewhat, claiming only that the decline in performance was overstated (he suggested 2% per annum compared to Hughes’ 5%). However, by May Mackay had apparently reverted to his earlier position, namely that Hughes’ model was non-identifiable.

The REF’s summary of the story to date ended with this strikingly robust statement:

Professor Mackay has made considerable efforts, first to persuade us to withdraw Professor Hughes’ paper, and now publicly, and on dubious grounds, to discredit work which is obviously original and draws attention to a previously undiscussed phenomenon, the decline in load factor over time, that was not acknowledged, for example, in the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s own levelised cost estimates for wind power. This is extraordinary behaviour for a Chief Scientific Advisor to government. Rather than shooting the messenger, Professor Mackay might more fruitfully be advising government on how best to ensure that consumer gets better value for their subsidy, and that we present a more economically compelling example of the low carbon economy to the developing world. 

 

Ensuring the consumer gets better value for their subsidy?

Pull the other one…never happen…not as long as Cameron’s father-in-law, and his ilk, are raking in the dosh from the windfarms.

Wonder just how many investments the good Tim Yeo, Chair of the DECC, has?

Is the BBC investigating any of this?  Is it heck as like!

As Christopher Booker says:

The BBC,  now has a “narrative” shaping its coverage in only one direction on almost every issue, from global warming and wind farms to the EU and the activities of what they call our “brave” social workers. And the most telling giveaway of anyone who has passed into the grip of a “narrative” is how they instantly fall back on denigration of anyone who questions it, dismissing them as “flat-earthers”, “idiots”, “cranks”, “Right-wingers”, “creationists”, “in the pay of Big Oil”, and so on.

Also, more detail on the wind turbines from Roger Helme:

A paper  by distinguished environmental economist Professor Gordon Hughes of Edinburgh University shows that in the UK, on-shore wind farm relative output (actual output as a percent of rated maximum) declined from an average 24% at the outset to 15% after ten years and 11% after fifteen years.  Danish offshore wind farms declined even more catastrophically, from 39% initially to 15% at age ten.  The output of larger turbines (now favoured by the industry) declined more rapidly than that of smaller turbines.

This decline may be attributable to wear and tear on the mechanical parts and bearings, plus degradation of the aerodynamic surfaces of the blades (I daresay those clots of eagles’ blood and feathers don’t help).  Degradation of the blades can create instability and vibration, in turn leading to mechanical wear, damage and failure.  And offshore, the strong winds and harsh conditions constitute an extraordinarily challenging environment for wind turbines.

These findings have important implications for policy towards wind generation in the UK. First, they suggest that the subsidy regime is extremely generous if investment in new wind farms is profitable despite the decline in performance due to age and over time. Second, meeting the UK Government’s targets for wind generation will require a much higher level of wind capacity – and, thus, capital investment – than current projections imply. Third, the structure of contracts offered to wind generators under the proposed reform of the electricity market should be modified since few wind farms will operate for more than 12–15 years.

The BBC’s Ethical Man laments the ineffectiveness of wind turbines  (cheap energy is only possible at the moment thanks to fossil fuels):

Professor David MacKay, the new chief scientist at the Department for Energy and Climate Change, has done the maths on this. Instead of kW, he calculates power in kWh, and he estimates that if we put wind turbines across the windiest 10% of the country, we would generate only 20 kWh per day per person in Britain.

According to MacKay, it takes 40 kWh to drive the average car 50km.

Add in offshore turbines covering a third of the available shallow water locations (44,000 turbines) and installing deep water turbines in a 9km-wide strip all round the entire British coast and you get an additional 48kWh day per person.

That’s a lot of power, but even on quite conservative estimates the average UK resident uses 125 kWh day.

It leads to a dispiriting conclusion. Wind is, at best, only a very partial solution to the problem of how to generate low-carbon energy.

Some prices to consider:

A Biased BBC reader notes;

“I watched Wild Winter: Surviving Avalanches on BBC4 last night (Tuesday). A fantastic documentary, except for the following. At the 39 minute mark we have cine material showing the snowy Cairngorms in the 1960’s, and then scenes of the next two snowless decades. This is followed by news footage of the last three years of sever snow. The narrator adds a token global warming comment and then goes on to explain how weather is affected by many things. BUT, right in the middle of this a bizarre scene has been crudely inserted where a ‘climate scientist’ tells us he knows what the weather is going to be in 2080, and it’s going to be hot! Cue scene with orange glow. I have watched it again and again, and if you mute this brief segment, the narrator’s voice effortless segues, making perfect sense. I have shown this to a colleague who doesn’t share my bias, and he agrees that this clip appears to have been edited in afterwards in order to remain ‘on message’.  The programme is on iplayer now on BBC4, fast forward to 39 minutes and watch BBC warble gloaming propaganda at its finest.”

Oh Mr Miliband, you DO so impress us. First you take on the “Big 6” energy companies and now you take on the “Big 5” banks. Amusingly, you then send Chris Leslie, shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, onto the Today programme and ..oh dear, it’s a car crash. Did you hear it by chance? Just after 8.08am Mishal Husain was pretty straight with him and he wiggled like a worm, showing just how lightweight Labour is on this topic. So, top marks for her but I did notice that Nick Robinson was doing his usual spot of cheer-leading for Miliband’s nonsensical new big idea.

Middle of the month, my birthday, so a new Open Thread for you and I am off for the day shortly! Enjoy.

China is still massively hooked on coal.

Roger Harrabin has been reporting the ‘excuses’ for China’s use of coal and telling us how wonderful the Chinese are at tackling environmental issues for a long time.

There are always two threads he likes to emphasise….firstly that China must continue to develop economically, it’s only fair, and that the West is responsible for China’s emissions as they buy Chinese products.

Harrabin never questions those ‘orthodoxies’.

Despite being told the Planet is about to burn unless we immediately reduce all carbon emissions China et al can continue to pump out massive quantities of the stuff…so kind of gives the lie to how urgent the environmental issue is….so is it all just ‘political’…a leftwing conspiracy to close down Western industry?

“A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the
United States. De-development means bringing our
economic system into line with the realities of
ecology and the world resource situation.”
– Paul Ehrlich,
Professor of Population Studies

Here is a Harrabin  report from 2011….

It is virtually impossible for the world to keep within the CO2 limits defined as safe for the climate, according to the chief economist of the International Energy Agency think tank.

Dr Fatih Birol told an audience in London that key nations were not prepared to take the steps necessary to cut carbon growth.

Dr Birol said the unsayable – that peaking emissions by 2020 was virtually impossible, and that in those circumstances we could “kiss goodbye” to the 2C target.

“We would need to double decarbonisation efforts, then double them again to keep emissions (of CO2 and equivalent gases) within 450 parts per million,” he said. “The bulk of the effort needs to take place in countries where climate change is not high on the policy agenda. We have to be realistic.”

Dr Birol referred to the debate in Europe as to whether the EU would cut emissions by 20% or 30% by 2020 against 1990 levels. The difference between these two targets, he said, was equivalent to just two weeks of China’s emissions.

He said the West could not blame China because per capita emissions and car ownership there were still comparatively very low and he urged the UK and EU continue with “climate leadership”.

Did you note that sentence?

“The bulk of the effort needs to take place in countries where climate change is not high on the policy agenda. We have to be realistic.”

In other words countries like China must make the most effort to reduce emissions.

Still, can’t blame China.

and one from 2007

China is now building about two power stations every week, the top climate change official at the UK Foreign Office, John Ashton, has said.

He said there was no point blaming China for rising global CO2 emissions.

Rich nations had to set an example of low-carbon development for China to follow, Mr Ashton told the BBC. 

There is  a moral case.  Most of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have been put there by developed countries without the constraint of having to worry about the climate. That means we should bear the leading edge of responsibility.

Rivers of Gold

So the ‘West’ has to pay twice….we’re already pumping massive amounts of money into China’s economy..in infrastructure and manufacturing investment and then by buying the products yet more goes in…and now we’re also supposed to provide compensation for making China rich?

But what does China do with all that money?

‘Provincial governments and state-owned enterprises often see more political and financial advantage in diverting the river of investment money flowing into China towards polluting heavy industries.’

Here from 2009 we see that China thinks its emissions will peak, that’s right peak, between 20 and 30 years from now….

‘a modelling exercise published recently by three respected organisations – the Energy Research Institute (ERI), Qinghua University, and the State Council Development Research Centre – concludes that emissions could peak between 2030 and 2040.’

Harrabin of course can’t lavish enough praise on the Chinese and thinks they are the saviours of the planet……

‘It is almost impossible to tell industrial policy and environment policy apart.’

The blog ‘Not a lot of people know that’ tells a different tale where China is combating pollution in the cities…by moving it out into the countryside:

A Look at China’s Current and Proposed Coal Use

With its rapid economic development in recent years, China has been expanding coal power generation capacity at an astonishing speed for the past decade (see graph below). It is worth noting that this period of rapid expansion followed a period of relatively slow growth in new coal-fired capacity. The action plan marks the first time the Chinese government has introduced a ban on new coal-fired plants.

However most of China’s coal development is moving westwards to less developed regions. The graphs below show that current coal consumption is strong in northern provinces (left), and the geographic distribution of proposed coal power projects (right) indicates a further growth of coal consumption in the northwestern provinces. Most of these regions are not covered by the action plan, and more than 80 percent of the proposed projects in the 2012 pipeline are currently exempt from the ban and special standards.

So China is still building coal fired power stations at the rate of one a week…and emissions will continue to rise until maybe 2040.

Yep……no problem there then if you believe in CO2 powered Global Warming, Climate Change or is it Global Weirding?

And by the by this gives the lie to just how much politicians and the great and the good really care about energy prices…..from last year……

Cheap coal ‘threatens UK pollution targets’

Coal on the global market is so cheap that it threatens government attempts to tackle climate change, the chairman of the Environment Agency has warned.

Lord Smith says the UK’s share of electricity generated by coal is up to 40% – the highest since 1996.

Unless this trend is curbed, he says, the UK will miss its targets on curbing climate change and sulphur pollution.

The price of coal has been driven down by the dash for shale gas in the US.

Lord Smith told the BBC: “There’s lots of talk about a dash for gas but in effect we’re in a dash for coal that’s completely unsustainable.

The government must ensure it doesn’t continue.”

Yes…can’t have cheap energy can we? Instead we must meet some emissions targets driven by scientists who have allowed themselves to be trapped in their own hubris and desire for the massive research grants to continue and by a political set that are also caught in their rhetoric on the subject and in many cases by a desire to use climate change as a vehicle for change socially, industrially and politically.