By Paul Homewood
In amongst his Marxist agenda, Jeremy Corbyn has doubled down on the current government’s crazy climate agenda, as the Telegraph report:
A Labour government would carpet Britain with wind turbines as a central part of its green energy policy, Jeremy Corbyn will announce on Wednesday.
In his keynote speech to the Labour Party Conference, Mr Corbyn will promise to double the number of onshore wind farms in the UK and increase offshore wind power sevenfold.
Mr Corbyn will claim the move would create a “green jobs revolution” that would create more than 400,000 skilled jobs.
Setting out his plans to invest in green jobs, Mr Corbyn will say: "There is no bigger threat facing humanity than climate change. We must lead by example."
The Conservatives have introduced an effective ban on the spread of wind farms by bringing in demanding new planning regulations, but Mr Corbyn will say Labour would reverse the policy.
He will say Britain needs a Government "committed to investing in renewables, in jobs and in training" and will promise large-scale public and private investment in wind and solar power, as well as subsidies to make all homes energy efficient.
There is of course no mention of just how much all of this extra wind power will cost consumers.
Since subsidies for onshore wind were ended, new capacity has dried up to virtually nothing. Meanwhile, offshore wind is still heavily subsidised.
Ditto, solar power.
He has also promised to change planning laws to make it easier to build onshore wind farms. This will inevitably mean decisions will no longer be made at local level, but instead by central state diktat. Power to the people!!
But it is his promise of 400,000 new green jobs that really takes the biscuit.
Booker is writing about this on Sunday, but he has reminded me that a certain G Brown made exactly the same promise back in 2008, in his “Green New Deal”.
Here is what Booker wrote at the time:
Then another ministry. BERR, published a second set of figures, One of the claims politicians had increasingly been using to justify all their climate change measures was that these would create huge numbers of ‘green jobs’. Obama in the US had talked about creating ‘five million green jobs’. In Britain Gordon Brown had talked about ‘400,000 new green jobs’. But no one had specified where or how these imaginary jobs might be created, until BERR published an analysis for which it had paid one of the many firms of consultants now springing up to cash in on the ‘low carbon economy’ bonanza.
Under what BERR called ‘the Green New Deal’, the report used a computer model to estimate the likely increased number of jobs in three ‘low carbon and environmental’ sectors of the economy by 2015, just six years away. In renewable energy, the model predicted, the wind industry would create 69,300 new jobs, biomass would create 22,900, the ‘geothermal’ energy sector 39,300 (yet since this virtually non-existent sector was already stated to employ ‘75,000’ people, this alone should immediately have flagged up that the model’s figures were wholly fictitious).
The various planet-saving activities listed under ‘environmental’, covering anything from air pollution to waste management, would, according to the model create 43,000 new jobs, (ever since 1991 the EU had regarded recycling as one of its climate change policies). (*) Under ‘emerging low carbon’, the model estimated that 114,500 new jobs would be created in producing biofuels, 47,500 in ‘green’ building technologies, 13,500 in ‘carbon finance’ and 1,400 in ‘carbon capture and storage’. All this added up to 393,000 additional jobs, according to the computer model. As for the cost of it all, BERR itself estimated that the 25,000 new jobs to be created in waste management alone would cost up to £30 billion, or £1.2 million per job.
In reality, of course, all this was as meaningless as the estimates given by that other computer model of the costs and benefits of the Climate Change Act. Yet it was on such wholly illusory figures that ministers relied to make their case.
So where are all these jobs nearly ten years later?
Earlier this year, Claire Perry claimed that there are more than 430,000 jobs in low carbon businesses and their supply chains, employing people in locations right across the country.
You probably won’t be surprised to learn that this is not quite what it seems!
To get to that number, she has to add in all sorts of jobs, including:
- Waste processing
- Energy efficiency (eg double glazing)
- Low emission vehicles
- Nuclear power
Most of these jobs have been in existence for a long time, and have zip all to do with the government’s “Low Carbon Agenda”.
The chart below comes from DECC’s report in 2015 , “Low-carbon economy: size and performance “:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/low-carbon-economy-size-and-performance
Since then they have not even bothered to update it, which tells its own story. The Office for National Statistics however produce their own data, which suggests little change in overall numbers since 2013.
Table 3 reveals just how few of these jobs are actually new:
Between 2010 and 2013, just 28,000 new jobs were created in “low carbon electricity”, incl supply chains. Of these, 5000 relate to nuclear, which the report explains relates to existing plant.
The other sectors have shown little change, apart from waste processing.
I would not want to decry 28,000 new jobs, but I suspect that many more jobs have been lost because of higher electricity prices, not to mention the running down of coal power stations.
Unfortunately the Tories are so obsessed with their own climate agenda that they are in no position to challenge Labour’s potty plans.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
September 28, 2018 at 12:48PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 