THE CARBON WAR

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The Winning of The Carbon War
management to drop the Hinkley nuclear reactor project. They are saying it is
so uneconomic that it puts the company’s survival at risk.
The British government flounders on, notwithstanding.
The policy implications of their increasingly monstrous assault on low-carbon
technologies become clearer all the time. In the first week of November,
unexpected power plant outages required the National Grid to call on industrial
users to reduce their power demand, for the first time ever. “UK’s high-wire
act on power supplies laid bare”, the headline in the Financial Times reads.
More than ten percent of the 45 megawatts of electricity needed during
the power crunch came from plants that will no longer be available next year.
What are Rudd’s civil servants doing about this rapidly worsening
high-wire act? Worrying about whether they will be joining the jobless solar
thousands next year, in many cases. DECC, a small Whitehall department, is
to lose 1 in 8 jobs as the government’s drive for austerity in everything except
fossil fuels and nuclear rolls on. Amber Rudd justifies this like a character from
the novel Alice in Wonderland. “Subsidy should be temporary, not part of a
permanent business model,” she says.
Most of Britain’s major cities seem to have given up on central government.
The leaders of more than 50 Labour-run councils make pledges to eradicate
carbon emissions in their areas, and to run on green energy by 2050.