Guest essay by Eric Worrall

h/t James Delingpole / Paul Homewood – All these years we said fossil fuels don’t receive a subsidy, turns out we were wrong.

…Some of the alleged subsidies are beyond parody.

For example, included on the ODI’s list is the £4.6 billion Britain spends “subsidising” public transport by not imposing Value Added Tax on it.

Wait? What? Do these greenie loons seriously think it strengthens their case by pretending that the very form of transport greenie loons are always banging on about as the preferable alternative to hideous evil private cars is somehow deleterious to the nation’s environmental purity?

They surely do. Because that’s how eco loons roll, clearly.

I think my favourite piece of stupid on the subsidies list, though, is the one where it appears to include Capacity Market contracts. These are the large sums of money the taxpayer has to fork out to pay owners of diesel generators and suchlike to provide standby capacity to cover for intermittent renewable supplies.

…

Read more: http://www.breitbart.com/london/2018/06/25/delingpole-fossil-fuel-subsidies-believe-they-exist-bridge-sell-you/

Yep. Substantial fossil fuel subsidies are being payed in Britain, to entice owners of diesel generators to keep their heavily subsidised systems on standby for when useless renewable providers drop the ball.

Australia is about to take this a step further with the National Energy Guarantee, an effort to stabilise Australia’s grid by paying whatever price is demanded by fossil fuel plant owners to maintain production of a set percentage of the grid energy mix from fossil fuels.

The real losers from all this idiocy of course are energy consumers in countries still pretending to commit to the Paris Agreement – what were once relatively free energy markets in Britain and Australia have been replaced with expensive interventionist nightmares which encourage players to game the system for whatever profits can be extracted before the rules change again.