Energy suppliers have urged Ed Miliband to charge households more for running a gas boiler to boost the uptake of eco-friendly heat pumps and electric vehicles (EVs).

In a letter to the Energy Secretary, suppliers including EDF, EOn, Octopus and OVO warned that a typical household paid four times as much per year in levies on electricity usage than on gas usage.

This makes it less financially attractive to switch to electrically-powered heating and transport, they said, even though ministers want households to adopt EVs and heat pumps to help reduce carbon emissions and Britain’s dependence on natural gas.

The suppliers, supported by charities including Citizens Advice and National Energy Action, called on Mr Miliband to urgently review the system and “rebalance” levies so that they were more evenly spread between electricity and gas usage.

In practice, this would mean charges on gas bills would have to go up for millions of households.

Read the full story here.

Matt Oliver is the Telegraph’s Industry Editor, so I am surprised he has fallen for this dishonest nonsense.

Does he not realise that these so-called “levies” are in reality subsidies for renewable electricity, and therefore reflect the actual cost of producing electricity.

Where else then should these costs be loaded onto?

The letter no doubt serves the interests of the companies sending it. Oliver notes the letter cones from “around 30 organisations including suppliers, investors, industry associations, and charities in the Electrify Britain campaign”.

Launched by EDF and Octopus, Electrify Britain’s aims are:

to encourage the use of renewable energy
to promote the adoption of heat pumps
to electrify transport

In short, they are Net Zero zealots, who do not care about the interests of the public.

I doubt if even a large hike in the price of gas will make any real difference to heat pump installations, which remain unaffordable for most. But what it most certainly would do is leave millions in fuel poverty, unable to afford to heat their homes.

A cut in the price of electricity might benefit the well off, with electric cars and power guzzling appliances. But the pensioner trying to keep warm with his gas boiler will be much worse off.

There is also another problem. A cut in the price of electricity would mainly benefit non-domestic users, whereas the offsetting increase in gas prices would disproportionately affect households.

If Electrify Britain really want lower power prices, why don’t they campaign for an end to pernicious carbon tax, which would lower prices straightaway?

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April 2, 2025 at 05:52AM

Daily News 2 Apr 2025

Role of Climate Change in LA Wildfires “Not Statistically Significant”, Says Report Author

By Paul Homewood

You may recall this BBC report in January:

Climate change was a major factor behind the hot, dry weather that gave rise to the devastating LA fires, a scientific study has confirmed.

It made those weather conditions about 35% more likely, according to World Weather Attribution – globally recognised for their studies linking extreme weather to climate change.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd9qy4knd8wo

As I pointed out at the time, the WWA claims were contradicted by that inconvenient thing, actual data!

Now the Daily Sceptic’s Chris Morrison reveals that the authors of the WWA paper that their findings were statistically insignificant, in other words indistinguishable from natural variability. He writes:

“Climate change was a major factor behind the recent Los Angeles wildfires, reported Matt McGrath of the BBC last January. According to a ‘scientific study’ instantly produced by World Weather Attribution (WWA), the prevailing weather conditions were made about 35% more likely due to humans using hydrocarbons. The WWA study, according to the trusting McGrath, is said to confirm this somewhat precise attribution of blame. Possibly the BBC and most of the mainstream that also parroted the WWA line might consider some corrective copy in the light of a devasting critique of the claims from the theoretical physicist, science writer and prominent youtuber Dr Sabine Hossenfelder. In a YouTube video broadcast here that has gone viral on social media, she elicited an astonishing admission from one of the report’s authors that, “as you can see from the numbers, the changes in intensity and likelihood are unsurprisingly not statistically significant”.

Not statistically significant is exactly what Hossenfelder found since she noted that the figures supplied by the WWA were within a 95% statistical probability level. Her broadcast goes into detail about the numbers falling within the 95% level meaning that an alternative explanation is that climate change had no part to play in the LA fires. In fact Hossenfelder was so appalled by the work that she was inclined to be harsh in her conclusions. “It is so bad that I have sincere doubts that even the authors read it”, she says, adding it was so bad that “it is actually quite funny”. Wondering why other scientists don’t complain, she notes: “Whenever there is some crap going around the media, they look away and keep their mouths shut”.

Read the full story here.

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April 2, 2025 at 05:14AM