Instead of a coherent energy policy Mr Osborne offers us juvenile pap
Sometimes, as we read about the Coalition Government’s clumsy attempts to justify their failure to put together a coherent energy policy to carry us through the next decades we smile. Sometimes we despair. Today was one of those days.
In a feeble attempt to bite back at Ed Milliband’s headline grabbing suggestions about price limits on domestic bills, today we read in the Telegraph that
Household energy bills are to be cut using a “tax bonanza” from fracking to strip out green levies, under Conservative plans. … One Cabinet minister said: “Fracking should deliver major tax revenues, so one idea is to rely on that money to fill the gap left by reductions in the environmental levies.”
Osborne fiddles whilst the world warms
So we have just had the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announcing that the likelihood that anthropogenic global warming is causing climate change is approaching the level of certainty, and the following week we have to watch George Osborne and his chums desperately trying to make political capital by doing what? Reducing green subsidies and trying to fill the gap with taxes from increased fossil fuels.
Fiddling whilst the world warms? Quo Vadis indeed!
Meanwhile over at the Guardian we learn that The Liberal Democrats have dismissed a Conservative threat to cut renewable energy subsidies in order to reduce consumer bills as a “total red herring” while energy companies have warned that a political row over green policies will itself lead to higher prices.
Over at the Daily Telegraph, they finally lost patience with George Osborne and his games and published a damning editorial entitled “Getting giddy over shale won’t do much to keep the lights on“, which coruscates all parties over their failure to implement a strategic energy policy and contains the immortal line “At this rate of spending-before-drilling, it risks going down as the great phantom boom of the 21st century.“. When even the Telegraph starts to criticise the Conservative led coalition then the writing is well and truly on the wall.
So, under fire from all sides, the coalition is yet again in total disarray over what you might laughingly call it’s energy “policy”, which appears to be just a tale “Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”
