By Paul Homewood
If you thought the BBC’s coverage of climate could not get any worse, read on.
John Humphreys, who is supposed to be one of the BBC’s best interrogators, interviewed the increasingly unstable John Gummer on BBC Today this morning. (About 1 hour 33 min in).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b7d18g
This coincided with the latest report from Gummer’s Committee on Climate Change, which I will be covering in more depth tomorrow. But Gummer was allowed to get away with three absolutely outrageous lies, which, to his eternal shame, were not challenged at all by Humphreys:
Gummer – 1) Even where a community wants to have an onshore wind farm, it can’t have it.
As I have previously pointed out, this is an outright lie, perpetuated by the renewable lobby and repeated by their friends in the media, not least Roger Harrabin.
So, at the risk of repeating myself, the Tory government has not banned onshore wind farms, it has merely withdrawn subsidies to new developments. It has also vested planning permission at a local level.
So, in very simple terms that even Gummer ought to understand, if a company wants to build a wind farm, and the local community wants it, there is nothing at all to stop it going ahead.
Gummer – 2) This is sheer dogma. The fact of the matter is it (onshore wind) is the cheapest form of producing electricity today.
Gummer really contradicts himself here. If onshore wind really was so cheap, new developments would be springing up all over the place.
In reality, developments have dried up since subsidies were withdrawn.
Gummer will doubtlessly be able to pull all sorts of theoretical costings out of his hat. However, the actual subsidies awarded to onshore wind farms prior to the ending of such subsidies trumps any fake claims he might put forward.
In simple terms:
a) Most onshore wind generation to date is subsidised via the Renewable Obligation scheme, which awards it 0.9 ROC/MWh. This is currently worth £42.50/MWh, on top of the value of electricity produced, which is about £45/MWh
b) Since the RO scheme was withdrawn, larger onshore schemes have been subsidised via the CfD process. Schemes awarded contracts recently, most of which have not even started operating yet, get an index linked, guaranteed price of between £87.53 and £91.94/MWh, again approximately double the market price.
https://lowcarboncontracts.uk/cfds
Gummer – 3) China, in many ways, is doing more than any country (in terms of decarbonisation).
One wonders what Gummer has been smoking!
Whilst the rapid growth of Chinese emissions in the early 2000’s has abated because of slower economic growth, there is no indication at all that emissions will actually start to fall.
https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy.html
And as Gummer ought to know, China’s INDC for Paris did not commit them to reduce CO2 emissions at all, merely a meaningless “promise” to reduce CO2 per unit of GDP.
China’s self declared primary objective is to grow its economy, and improve its people’s standard of living. If it is successful, emissions will continue to grow rapidly until at least 2030.
And China have made no secret of the fact that, to provide the energy for this economic growth, it will need to substantially increase its coal-fired capacity.
It is of much concern that Britain’s climate policy is, to a large extent, in the hands of somebody who either does not understand the simplest of facts, or is prepared to lie through his teeth.
Unfortunately we also have the BBC, who are so supine as to allow such blatant lies to be broadcast without a murmur of a challenge.
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June 28, 2018 at 05:40PM
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