The BBC choose what to report and what not to report, seemingly to help their Labour Party allies

This BBC report on yesterday's OFGEM chief's comments to the Energy and Climate Change Committee is very detailed about one part of Andrew Wright's remarks:

The energy regulator Ofgem has launched a scathing attack on the record and profits of the big gas and electricity suppliers.

Andrew Wright, the acting chief executive of Ofgem, said there was a "deep distrust of anything the energy companies do or say".

But that BBC report manages not report at all something that Sky News do manage to report:

He also warned that Labour's proposed energy price freeze "puts at risk the proper functioning of the industry"
...
Labour, which has pledged to introduce a regulator with greater teeth, came under fire from Mr Wright over its plan for a 20-month freeze to bills if it wins the 2015 general election.

Energy companies had previously warned such an intervention risked crucial investment in the country's energy infrastructure.

Following Ofgem's report on Monday analysing 2012 energy firm profits, industry body Energy UK argued the figures did not take into account the provision for securing energy supplies for the future.

Npower owner RWE confirmed on Tuesday that significant cost pressures had forced it to pull out of the massive £4bn Atlantic Array windfarm project.

So why are the BBC not reporting the full story? Can anyone persuade me that it's not just because they want to help their Labour allies along? 

Stop the Energy Swindle | energyswindle.org

Visit the website below and key in your annual gas and electricity bill.The site will tell you how much of your bill is tax. It will also tell you how much you can expect your combined bill to be by 2020.  I suggest you do this while sitting down as the 2020 figure may come as a shock.  The average combined bill is predicted to be close to £1900. You can thank Ed Miliband for much of the increase.
Website here http://energyswindle.org/

Fracking - the truth?

The way that fracking has been turned into a hated process by the illiberal left made me suspicious, it's almost as though they don't want a new cheap energy source to be found in the West that would reduce our dependence on supporters of Islamist terrorism and a Russian autocracy. So this story interests me...

Hot Air reports this:
'Full disclosure: I’m a friend of filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, producers of the new documentary Fracknation.  I’ve been looking forward to this effort for some time, interviewing Phelim and Ann during the last couple of years as they prepared for and produced the film. Outside of friendship — and Ann and Phelim are a truly lovely and delightful couple — I wanted to get the other side of the fracking dispute represented in the cinematic arena, especially after Gasland and now Promised Land.

And make no mistake — this documentary succeeds in rebutting Josh Fox, the producer/director/writer of the documentary Gasland that touched off much of the anti-fracking activism. Phelim steps through a number of Fox’s claims inside and outside of the documentary, systematically undermining each of them. He includes a clip of his in-person challenge to Fox, which Fox tried to suppress, and another with a state official that cozied up to Fox — whose lawyer hilariously demands the film of the interview immediately afterward. (It’s amazing how little some lawyers know about the First Amendment.)  Instead of speaking with Hollywood actors and the UAE (which provided some funding for Promised Land), Phelim speaks with the farmers in the supposedly-blighted areas of Pennsylvania, New York, and the Delaware Rivery Valley, as well as experts on fracking, water science, and environmental agencies.

The best part, however, comes near the end.  One couple in the area have been particularly effective activists, giving interviews, appearing in Gasland, and protesting about their contaminated water supply.  The EPA even came to Dimock based on their complaints to test the water supply specifically in their wells, which they claimed were contaminated by the fracking that had taken place in the region.  When Phelim asks to interview them for Fracknation and to get the results of the test, they get belligerent enough to call a policeman (who turns out to be one of the most reasonable of all the people in the film) as well as threaten to pull a gun on Phelim. Only through a FOIA request does Phelim find out why — the EPA didn’t find anything wrong with the water, and they were smart enough to tape the meeting in which they told the couple the results.

Fracknation delivers a powerful debunking of the scare campaign against fracking and domestic natural-gas production.  But don’t take my word for it — here’s Variety on the impact of Fracknation:

Those nursing the suspicion that Hollywood politics are awash in knee-jerk liberalism may well have their cynicism validated by “FrackNation,” a counterargument to the outcry over the natural-gas retrieval process known as “fracking” recently explored in Gus Van Sant’s feature “Promised Land.” But the more thoughtful and politics-oriented auds targeted by this well-reasoned film from helmers Phelim McAleer, Ann McElhinney and Magdalena Segieda will find plenty to chew over, including the possibility that perhaps all is not as simple as it seems in the world of nonrenewable energy.

Irish journalist McAleer narrates and serves as host to this briskly paced, low-budget and mischievous pic, presented as a rebuttal to Josh Fox’s Oscar-nominated “Gasland,” a docu that has been instrumental in building political resistance to a process seen by different factions as a godsend and an antidote to Big Oil. Fox is clearly depicted as the villain in “FrackNation,” from a “Gasland” post-screening Q&A where Fox refuses to answer McAleer’s simple questions, to a scene at Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum where Fox literally flees the camera.

McAleer makes a good case against Fox’s movie. From the farmers of the Delaware River Basin, for whom fracking hysteria has meant a loss of crucial income, to experts like James Delingpole, who somehow makes a fairly reasoned case that the anti-fracking people are the tools of Russian President Vladimir Putin (for whom the natural-gas market provides political leverage), most of the voices entertained here make a good deal of sense. But the filmmakers might have done well to address the animosity so many Americans feel toward the energy business in general.

And what did the New York Times think?  You’d probably guess … and you’d be wrong:

Narrated by Mr. McAleer, whose previous documentaries have also argued against environmental concerns, “FrackNation” is no tossed-off, pro-business pamphlet. Methodically researched and assembled (and financed by thousands of small donations from an online campaign), the film picks at Mr. Fox’s assertions and omissions with dogged persistence. Much of what it reveals is provocative, like a confrontation with Mr. Fox about the presence of methane in the water supply decades before fracking began.
What’s clear is that Mr. McAleer knows his way around the Freedom of Information Act and has done his legwork. Besides talking to carefully selected scientists and water experts, he visits pro-fracking residents of Dimock Township, Pa., who are annoyed that their community is being characterized as a toxic wasteland. And he’s not above taking a sentimental detour to Poland to commiserate with a pensioner who can’t pay her energy bills, or reveling in the odd gotcha moment, like accusing a public official of “inappropriate ties” to Mr. Fox.

More than anything, “FrackNation” underscores the sheer complexity of a process that offers a financial lifeline to struggling farmers. Whether it also brings death to their water supply is something we won’t find out by listening to only half of the debate.

Fracknation will air on Tuesday evening on Mark Cuban’s AXs cable television channel at 9 pm ET. It’s a brilliant effort by Phelim and Ann, and it’s appropriate for all ages. The only violence in the film comes, unsurprisingly, from people who don’t want to have Phelim asking inconvenient questions.'

Anyone know how I can watch this in the UK sooner rather than later, after it airs on Tuesday?

Saudis Sweat Bullets As Energy Revolution Changes the Rules | Via Meadia

' As the energy revolution unfolds, the Saudis are likely to have less discretionary money for missionary projects and the United States will be in a stronger position to press its longtime partner on a variety of issues. Interesting times.'
More here - http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/12/29/saudis-sweating-bullets-over-energy-revolution/
Will this reduce or increase Saudi funding for Islamism around the world.

Wednesday catch-up

So many open tabs and so little time...

1) Ken Livingstone on tax avoidance. Oh dear Ken, hoist by your own petard?


2) Daniel Hannan asks 'What makes Question Time audiences so Left-wing?'. A good question.


3) The BBC report that 'Up to 900 tropical bird species could 'go extinct'' - well they 'could' but then again they could not...


4) The Guardian reports that 'Labour minister and MI5 'briefed about phone hacking scandal' - Leveson inquiry hears Met police allegedly sent report to John Reid and security service, but it was not made public'


5) Bishop Hill reports that:

'Biofuels have been attracting a minor surge of media interest recently, after Friends of the Earth published a report claiming that they probably produce more greenhouse gases than they save. Maybe it was this that caused my attention to alight on one of Sharman's papers - the one entitled "Evidence based policy or policy-based evidence gathering? Biofuels, the EU and the 10% target".
Sharman and Holmes 2010 (as the paper is more snappily known) is not publicly available (paywalled here) to the best of my knowledge, but Amelia Sharman was good enough to send me a copy, and I have to say it's pretty amazing stuff.
The paper examines the EU's mandatory 10% target for biofuel use and in particular the way in which scientific advice impinged upon the decision to introduce it. It's a murky tale, which Sharman has uncovered by means of interviewing key players in the policy machinery.
In 2009, when the target was introduced, it was far from clear that biofuels were a feasible approach to greenhouse gas reduction. But the 10% target was introduced nevertheless. As one of the interviewees explained:

The idea is that normally you should not propose legislation until you’ve got the evidence to justify it. But there, you had the prime ministers and heads of state signing up to a target that no-one had done any impact assessment at all . . . they got them to sign up to these targets, 20% renewables and 10% biofuels, and then only later in the year did they do the impact assessment. And basically they said they didn’t need to [properly] impact-assess the 10% because it had already been approved by the heads of state! . . .”

As Sharman and Holmes pithily comment:

The fact that the EC was endorsing a target without having seen a full impact assessment provides the first indication that motivations other than scientific evidence related to environmental sustainability and GHG emissions reductions played a part in the policy
decision to establish the 10% target.'

Good energy news

It was reported widely yesterday that the company Cuadrilla had announced an enormous UK shale gas find. Assuming a 20% recovery rate (which is conservative) then this find is as big as the North Sea Troll super giant oil field. The gas produced would meet around 15 years of total UK energy demands. Put another way it would meet all current LNG imports for 40 years.

Of course the eco-nuts and warmists have been out in force explaining how this source of energy is bad, and of course the BBC have been at the forefront of publicising these opinions and presenting them as facts. For once I will not 'have a go' at the BBC for their clear and obvious bias and for campaigning rather than reporting, I will leave that to Biased-BBC. However I will pick up on one point made by the eco-nuts and reported eagerly by the BBC. The BBC report that:

'could provide 5,600 jobs in the UK, 1,700 of those in Lancashire.'
but also that
'Phil Thornhill, from Campaign Against Climate Change, was one of those protesting outside the meeting.

He said: "Those jobs could and should be in green energy. We need a revolution in the economy to really deal with climate change effectively.

"We need to be moving much quicker than we are to a low carbon economy, that would be a lot of jobs, a lot of development.

"They could create jobs in renewables if they put the investment there." '

Ah green jobs, the eco-nuts holy grail Shall we have a quick look at the reality of green jobs? As HotAir revealed a week or so ago:

'Today’s Washington Post acknowledges what everyone already knows, and what Spain learned the hard way as well — green-jobs subsidies are sinkholes.  When Barack Obama loaded his 2009 Porkulus with nearly $40 billion in subsidies to the green-tech industry, he promised that it would produce an explosion of jobs in a new, green US economy, starting with 65,000 directly created from his largesse.  With half of the money gone, how many jobs has Obama’s investment created?

A $38.6 billion loan guarantee program that the Obama administration promised would create or save 65,000 jobs has created just a few thousand jobs two years after it began, government records show.

The program — designed to jump-start the nation’s clean technology industry by giving energy companies access to low-cost, government-backed loans — has directly created 3,545 new, permanent jobs after giving out almost half the allocated amount, according to Energy Department tallies. …

Obama’s efforts to create green jobs are lagging behind expectations at a time of persistently high unemployment. Many economists say that because alternative-­energy projects are so expensive and slow to ramp up, they are not the most efficient way to stimulate the economy.

That may be the understatement of the year.  Even with Obama’s initial promise of 65,000 jobs created (or “saved,” which makes zero sense in this context), that would still come to $593,846 per job, which is hardly an efficient use of capital.  If a private-sector business had that kind of capital, it could easily create five jobs from that amount with $100,000 in compensation each, with enough left over for a substantial profit margin.
But the actual results in this case are much worse.  With $17.2 billion spent on these programs, the cost per actual job created comes to $4.853 million.  That kind of capital could launch entire new businesses, let alone multiple jobs.  Any company that ate through $4.853 million to create a job would shortly become a former company … kind of like Solyndra, where $535 million disappeared and took 1,000 jobs along with it.'

That's the reality of green jobs and I wish someone would put the point to Chris Huhne, David Cameron, the BBC's eco-journalists or any of the spokespeople for  the various eco pressure groups.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear - It's George Monbiot

George Monbiot in The Guardian thinks he knows what the TUC March 26 rally should be about and he tells us, at length. It's a George Monbiot piece so the fairydust and lack of realism is always evident, here's a few of George Monbiot's suggestions with my comments in italics:

'We need to redress the balance between cuts and tax rises (currently 3:1) as fairly as possible. That means starting with the United Kingdom's most regressive form of taxation: national insurance. This levy is so unfair that it's hard to understand why it hasn't received more attention. On earnings of up to £844 a week, you currently pay 11% national insurance. On earnings beyond that point, you pay 1%. We should raise the national insurance rate for higher earnings from 1% to 15%. This would help to address a wider injustice: the poorest 10% of Britain's households pay proportionately more tax (direct and indirect) than the richest 10%.

National Insurance is not meant to be a tax but a payment into a fund. As the fund's payments are capped shouldn't the payments into that fund? Of course the fund is not really a fund but a giant Ponzi scheme, but I don't think any government wants to own up to that.

...

Of the various means of reclaiming money from the banks, a financial transactions tax – the Robin Hood tax – is the fairest and the most sustainable. It's easy to collect, hard to avoid and highly progressive, as it falls largely upon the richest people in the country. A tax of 0.005% on financial transactions could raise a net £13bn a year; a tax of 0.01%, £25bn.

Sounds sensible but much of the profits of the financial services industry are very slim on a transactional margin basis thus a minuscule sounding 0.005% is actually quite a high percentage of profits. Automated systems create transactions to take advantage of small discrepancies in rates, a tax of 0.005% would be factored into these calculations and these transactions just would not happen. The trouble here is not understanding how modern financial markets work.

...

The tax exemption for private schools must end. This costs us £100m a year – to grant unfair advantages to the children of the rich.

Why? People who send their children to private schools pay for publicly funded education through their taxes and again for their children's education whilst also saving the national education service the cost of educating their children. The tax exemption is a small recognition of the good that such people are doing.


Greg Philo of Glasgow University has proposed an interesting means of mobilising the money that the very rich have stashed away: transferring the entire national debt to them. He has shown that this could be done through a one-off tax averaging 20% on total assets worth more than £1m. It would be graduated, so that the richest people are charged at a higher rate than mere seven-figure millionaires. And it wouldn't have to be paid immediately: the asset-holders could choose to pay only the interest on the debt until they died, whereupon the capital would go to the state. This ensures, as the government has promised, that "the broadest shoulders should carry the greatest burden".

This is the great aim of the left, to tax not income but assets. My assets have been purchased from taxed income. Mrs NotaSheep and I have inherited nothing, Mrs NotaSheep and I have received nothing as a gift from family or friends; why should Mrs NotaSheep and I be taxed a second time on the fruit of our hard work?

...

The following new military hardware programmes should be scrapped: the Trident weapons system; aircraft carriers; Eurofighter jets. The Barrow shipyard, where new nuclear submarines were to be built, should be redeployed to produce offshore renewables: wind, wave and tide turbines. The money saved should be spent on a new public housing programme.

Has George Monbiot read the papers describing how 'new green jobs' destroy more than their equivalent number of old jobs? Does George Monbiot not realise how inefficient and expensive wind power is?

...

To fill looming gaps in provision and reduce unemployment, the government should raise the public workforce by the following levels: 10,000 more social workers; 10,000 more planners; 50,000 more hospital cleaners; 100,000 more educational staff; 350,000 extra care workers for the elderly. As Unison points out, 92% of the cost of employing a public service worker is recouped by the state, because it raises tax revenues while reducing benefit payments.

I'd like to see the proof (if any) behind that 92% figure because as far as I Can see Liam Byrne was right when he said there was no money left.'

So George Monbiot the man who famously declared that 'It is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.' has spoken and it's about as sensible as much else that he has written previously.

The one hundred and eleventh weekly "No shit, Sherlock" award

This week's award goes to Colorado State University for the staggering conclusion, as reported by Red State that:
'University Study Confirms Renewable Energy Isn’t Economically Feasible'

Renewable energy not economically feasible? "No shit, Sherlock"

What does the EU really cost us?

Dizzy Thinks has a summary but the item that caught my eye was this:

'from Chris Huhne's Department of Energy and Climate Change... Directive 2009/28/EC, which is about promoting the use of energy from renewable sources (sounds like legally required advertising doesn't it?) which they do know the cost of, and, helpfully the alleged cash terms benefit.

This little treasure will cost £19.85 billion to transpose into law, yes, £19,850,000,000, and the benefit? Well that's going to be £11 billion, which by my simpleton GCSE maths means it's being implemented at a loss of £8.85 billion. Bargain!'

Look around you, can you see any better uses for £8.85 vbillion? In fact let's be reasonable do you really think that the £11 billion of benefits can be justified?

So David Cameron is 'angry' is he?

I see that David Cameron is 'angry' at the slow pace of negotiations to give EU membership to Turkey. David Cameron is 'angry' is he. Well I am angry too, very angry. But what I'm angry about is the way that this Conservative lead coalition seems to be behaving not much better than the last Labour government. EU police are to be allowed to operate on UK soil, misguided liberal views on prison sentencing are being continued with, there will be no EU referendum, idiotic 'warmist' policies are to be continued with in the area of power generation etc. etc. etc. On Turkey I see that David Cameron is happy to praise Turkey for its former good works whilst its current lurch towards Islamism is ignored. And of course David Cameron gives the BBC and others a perfect sound-bite by describing Gaza as a 'prison camp'.

So David Cameron is angry? He's not alone...

The effectiveness of wind power

The BBC report that:

"Demand for gas in the UK is set to hit a new record on Thursday as people attempt to keep their homes warm through the severely cold weather.

The National Grid estimates usage will reach 455.3 million cubic metres. The current record is 449 million cubic metres, set on 7 January 2003.

The National Grid has issued its second gas balancing alert in three days, asking suppliers to provide more gas.

Some factories have been told their gas supplies will be reduced."

Thankfully in the near future we will have many more wind farms to produce power for us. The various warehouse wind turbines that I pass on most days seem to have been pretty stationary during this cold spell and that is usually the way with very cold weather in this Country it isn't accompanied by wind but calm.

Take a look at Logica's BM Reports site and you will discover that whilst the temperature over the last month has fallen from 12 degrees Celsius to 0 degrees Celsius, the wind forecast has dropped by over 90% over the last three days alone. Meanwhile the same report shows that over the last 24 hours power generation in the UK was as follows: 42.9% Oil, 39.2% Gas, 16.3% Nuclear which makes a total of 98.4%. Don't worry, wind power doesn't even make up all of the remaining 1.6%, in fact it only makes up 0.3%. I wonder if the BBC will mention this problem with wind power when they next evangelise about the wonders of alternative energy sources? I think not.

"There's no danger of power cuts in the next decade."

"There's no danger of power cuts in the next decade."

So apparently said Ed Miliband today on the Andrew Marr show. Would you care for a small wager Ed?

Do as we say not as we do (part xx)

This time its Ed Miliband's waste of space department the Department for Energy and Climate Change who according to The Telegraph have scrapped plans to switch off the air-conditioning and instead open windows after staff complained about the noise. It seems that:

"The trial was abandoned after three days because staff at the department complained about noise from construction works, "the wrong kind of breeze" and the potential security risk."

Do as we say, not as we do; business as usual at the Department for Energy and Climate Change.

For the avoidance of doubt; this country desperately needs an effective energy strategy to encompass efficient generation and waste saving, what it does not need is a climate change strategy.

The EU and the UK

I remember some years ago listening to a piece on BBC radio about how well funded UK pensions were compared to the rest of the EU and how the EU might want to take control of our pension funds to help fund the rest of Europe's. I was reminded of this by reading this piece on A Tangled Web, David Vance reports that:

"The EU seeks to grab control of Britain's vital North Sea oil and gas supplies under emergency plans revealed for the first time in Brussels yesterday.

EU leaders are demanding control of British energy reserves to prevent power blackouts that have left millions of eastern Europeans without heat in Arctic weather due to the Russian gas blockade. Euro-MPs are calling for the creation of a European gas reserve, made up of British and Dutch supplies, which member states can tap into in the event of any future shortage. The transfer of ownership would be enacted under secret powers written into the controversial Lisbon Treaty. It gives Europe the legal power to take over individual states’ supplies to “ensure security of energy supply in the Union”. Ultimate control over Britain’s vast natural gas and oil fields – by far the biggest resource within the EU – will fall to Brussels if the new treaty, which has already been ratified by Britain, is adopted throughout Europe."

David Vance gets it and correctly says:

"Under Labour, and under the auspices of the Lisbon Treaty, this will assuredly happen. We hand over our energy to keep Europe warm, even as we freeze. The sooner we get OUT of the EU tyranny the better."

The trouble is, I see no way out.

More Labour incompetence

Further to my blog yesterday that:

"Vladimir Putin is reported to have given Ukraine until midnight tonight tonight to pay the £1.5 million outstanding gas bill or he will order the shutting down of gas supplies to Ukraine. Bear in mind that 25 per cent of the EU's supplies come from the Ukraine, so bye bye gas means higher prices and probable shortages."

I note that Iain Dale today reports that:

"As a result of 10 years of government inaction, Britain is one of the most vulnerable countries in Europe to turbulence in gas supply. Germany has 99 days of gas storage capacity, France has 122 days, while Britain has just 15 days. As a result, British consumers pay the price because we are more exposed to volatile gas prices than our neighbours."

15 days! Just 15 days supply. Is there a government minister who would care to explain the lack of the UK's preparedness? Somehow I doubt it.

The twenty-sixth weekly "No shit, Sherlock" award

This week the award is more of a "No shit, Sherlocks" award as it goes to the Commons Select Business and Energy Committee for stating that the UK faces a "disastrous energy crunch", that the threat of future blackouts is "real" unless existing coal and nuclear plants are replaced as power stations supplying around a third of the UK's energy needs will close by 2020 and that "The concern that people have about prices will be a picnic compared with significant number of power cuts".

"No shit, Sherlocks"

Maybe the Labour government and the Committee should read my articles on this matter, including here, here, here and here. Or perhaps some reading of Christopher Booker in The Telegraph might enlighten them as to why the blackouts are coming, alternatively the Labour government could not do anything constructive but just release some dodgy statistics to show that the UK has never been so well prepared for power shortages and see if the public will swallow more lies.

Oh those Russians (update)

A visitor to my blog, crushed, commented on my earlier post that

"To be fair though, if anyone can claim the Arctic, it is Russia.

Russia DOES pretty much encircle the Arctic..."

I think the map above shows that Canada, Denmark (via Greenland) and the USA have pretty good claims to part of the Arctic.

Oh those Russians

Putin and his puppet president, Dmitry Medvedev, are at it again. This time they want to unilaterally claim part of the Arctic, stepping up the race for the disputed energy-rich region.

Security of energy supply is going to be ever more important over the coming years and Russia is trying to get to the position where they have the West "over a barrel".

Wind power

Take a read of this article on the sheer stupidity of relying on wind power. Nice link to the ever sensible Burning Our Money.

This Labour government seems incapable of logical thought.