Dismantling the poppycock

Dave Powell

15 December 2011

Balderdash! Hokum! Piffle!

That's what a new report from the Government's independent advisers, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), says today (I'm paraphrasing a bit).

What about? Bonkers claims that certain bits of the media - egged on by a clutch of rather murkily-funded "thinktanks" - like to foam on about, such as green taxes adding a gazillion quid onto your energy bill.

Get real, say the CCC. Bills have skyrocketed over the last decade. But is this because of the malicious construction of a phalanx of colossally expensive bird-shredding wind turbines? No: it's because of the price of gas.

By 2020, although clean energy investment costs are going to rise by about £100 - er, rather lower than the "thousands" that some of the least grounded hysteria would have us believe - gas prices will probably have an even bigger impact on bills. And actually, if we have a proper stab at energy saving, we can even stop bills going up at all.

The killer facts from the CCC's new report:

1. Bills went up by £455 between 2004 and 2010. Even once inflation is taken into account, that's one heck of a lot. But only a fifth of the rise is down to low-carbon measures - about £75 a year has been added due to policies to invest in clean, secure energy, and helping people save energy in their homes.
2. Of the rest, the lion's share is because the price of gas has gone bananas. £290 has been whacked onto bills because of rising 'wholesale' gas prices.
3. As we ramp up investment in low-carbon kit over the coming decade, another £110 will go onto bills. That's less than the extra £175 that the CCC expects further rises in gas prices to lead to, and indeed is less than the price increases the Big Six have hit us with this year alone.
4. But - and this is the really critical part, so stick with me - if we do enough to cut down on the amount of energy we use (sensible for cash saving reasons as well as environmental ones), our bills should be no higher in 2020 than they are today.

Now, it's true that the CCC say this won't be as easy as the Government seems to think - reading between the lines, they don't seem convinced that DECC's assortment of policies on energy saving are going to deliver. Friends of the Earth agrees - the policies the Government has for insulating homes, for example, are too limp, underfunded, and drenched in Herculean optimism. We reckon a great way to connect the dots here is to use future money the Treasury will net from one of its new low-carbon policies, the Carbon Price Floor, to subsidise insulation and other types of energy saving in people's homes.

What impact will the report have? There's the rub. It's written by independent, extremely authoritative experts and ends up comprehensively debunking "oft-repeated claims about the costs of low-carbon policies". It follows analysis from the energy regulator Ofgem in October that environmental measures make up only 6 per cent of your bill; the Government in November put the figure at 7 per cent (slight difference in accounting).

So can we put this matter to bed? Not on your nelly. With depressing predictability the Daily Mail went off on one, wilfully distorting the report out of all recognition and cherry-picking only the stuff that talks about future increases in green costs. Sigh.

Because of course this isn't really about who's got the most accurate numbers (although I'll give you a clue: it's not the Daily Mail). As Bob Ward from the Grantham Institute at the LSE spells out:

"There has been a concerted effort by some campaign groups to completely mislead the public into believing that green taxes have been the main cause of rises in fuel bills... these groups, including the Global Warming Policy Foundation and the Taxpayers' Alliance, appear driven by an extreme ideological opposition to environmental regulation, and have sought to confuse and misinform the public with blatantly inflated figures."

People who like to maintain climate change is an overblown sinister rumour cooked up by lizards in bunkers in Brussels aren't going to stop peddling overblown nonsenses just because their numbers have been comprehensively exposed as utter poppycock.

As far as I'm concerned, the facts are these. Fossil fuels are making us all poorer, in particular gas. We're hooked on it - it heats our homes and generates up to half of the UK's electricity. And because of decades of stalling and short-termism from the Big Six energy companies (sign our Final Demand petition here), and successive Governments failing to make them invest in better, cleaner energy, we're increasingly at the mercy of rising international demand for gas as our own domestic supplies dwindle.

Investing in the alternative and being smarter about how we use energy isn't just good for the planet - it's going to be good for our wallets in the long run too.