Government policy

What planet are they living on? As freezing Britain faces a grave energy crisis, ministers unveil more green gimmicks and eco taxes. What folly

With much of Britain still freezing under a layer of snow, the timing of the action plan set out yesterday by Ed Davey, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, could not have been more immaculate.

He wanted to tell us just how committed his government is to cutting emissions of carbon dioxide from the 'costly, carbon-intense fossil fuels' we use for more than '80 per cent of the heating used in UK homes, businesses and industry'.

And how does he propose to do this? He wants to spend £9 million to 'help local authorities get heat network schemes [designed to pipe heat to homes from a central source] up and running in towns and cities across the country'. 

He wants to hire yet more civil servants to set up a 'Heat Network Unit' to provide 'expert advice'.
And he wants us to pay for '100 green apprenticeships' for 'young people to work in smallscale renewable technologies'.

What planet is this man living on? He has only to step outside his centrally heated Whitehall office to see that the rest of us are having to struggle through the coldest March for 50 years.

Yet, just when we need heat and light for our homes and workplaces more than ever, we are rapidly heading for by far the most serious energy crisis this country has ever faced.

We learned at the weekend that Britain's gas supplies have run so perilously low that we could be depending on just two giant tankers imported from the Middle East to heat our homes at a time when world gas prices are soaring.

Last week, we also lost two more of our major coal-fired power stations, forced to close down by an EU pollution directive - leading the head of our second-largest power company, SSE, to warn our generating capacity is being cut back so far that major blackouts may soon be inevitable.

 

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