(/sites/default/files/uploads/2013/10/Fuel-Poverty-Action-Group-007.jpg)The UK is facing its greatest risk of blackouts since 2007⁄08 in the coming winter. The National Grid, responsible for balancing the country’s supply and demand of energy, last week has given this warning because Britain’s reserves of electricity have halved in 12 months.
The UK and the USA are in the same boat here. Both countries have governments that have – or pretend to have – fallen for the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory hook, line, and sinker.
The Obama Administration’s regulations to limit carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, which The New York Times has described as “an aggressive move by Mr. Obama to bypass Congress on climate change with executive actions he promised in his inaugural address this year,” have been denounced as part of the president’s “war on coal.”
White House climate adviser Daniel P. Schrag, director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, admitted in an interview with the paper that this is exactly what it is:
The one thing the president really needs to do now is to begin the process of shutting down the conventional coal plants. Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having a war on coal. On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.
The new rules will be aimed at new gas-fired power plants, but mostly at coal power plants, being the form of energy generation that emits most CO2.
According to a report released earlier this year by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, over 280 coal-fired units are expected to close down partly because of the new, stricter EPA regulations, 5 times more than the number predicted by the EPA itself. One of them is New England’s largest coal-fired power plant.
Some say that the rules will kill the future of coal and raise electricity costs.
In Britain, skyrocketing utility bills and “fuel poverty” are already a reality. “Fuel poverty” is a new condition, one in which energy bill expenditure makes up 10% or more of the household’s net income. One in four British households is suffering from it. Some people have to choose to eat less in order to keep warm.
The exceptionally high gas and electricity bills are due to the fact that householders are obliged to subsidize ineffective “renewables,” like the totally useless wind farms that are now blotting the country’s landscape and seascape against the fierce but crushed opposition of the local residents.
The Renewable Obligations Order system, introduced by Tony Blair’s Labour government in 2002, forces companies supplying electricity to buy a proportion of their electricity from non-fossil sources. Since these are highly ineffective, the energy companies have to pay inflated prices, which they pass on to their unfortunate customers through their electricity bills.
In March 2003 the Blair government published an Energy White Paper. In its Section 4.7 it says explicitly:
We have introduced a Renewables Obligation for England and Wales in April 2002. This will incentivise generators to supply progressively higher levels of renewable energy over time. The cost is met through higher prices to consumers. By 2010, it is estimated that this support and Climate Change Levy (CCL) exemption will be worth around £1 billion a year to the UK renewables industry. [Emphases added.]
It also estimated that meeting the CO2 reduction targets would increase household energy bills by up to 15%.
With the Climate Change Act of 2008 the UK government, by its own description, “passed legislation that introduces the world’s first long-term legally binding framework to tackle the dangers of climate change.”
It was an unprecedented piece of legislation, which The Telegraph journalist Christopher Booker, author of books on the global warming scare, described as:
by far the most expensive law in history, which commits Britain, uniquely in the world, to reducing its CO2 emissions by 80 per cent in 40 years. By the Government’s own estimates, this will cost up to £18 billion a year. Any hope that we could b