Some 90 per cent of our gas came from Norway last winter, when the demand was at its peak. And Norway’s gas comes from the North Sea, as did ours in the recent past.
In fact, close to 100 per cent of our gas was produced by British North Sea companies at the turn of the century. Not only was Britain self-sufficient in energy, but we exported about 12 per cent of that production.
Oh the good old days. Now we pay some £20 billion a year for Norway’s North Sea gas, plus some £7 billion for American LNG. And things will get worse before they get much worse.
Our production of oil and gas is falling by 15 per cent a year, while Norway’s is racing in the opposite direction. The country has recently opened a major new gas field, while taking three others off the mothballs.
Energy secretary Ed Miliband has banned new drilling and production licences, whereas his cabinet accomplice, Rachel Reeves, is taxing oil and gas companies at 78 per cent.
Both policies add a whole new dimension to imbecility. For one thing, oil companies are notoriously mobile. When it’s no longer profitable for them to operate in a country, they up sticks and leave for sunnier economic climes.
Rachel’s 78 per cent tax rate will then produce a big fat zero in tax revenue, but such incidentals never stop Marxist ideologues. As far as they are concerned, 78 per cent of nothing is better than, say, 30 per cent of something, provided they can punish the fat cats and drive them out of the country. And if I went against my instincts and tried to look for any logic in Miliband’s policies, I’d fail miserably.
British industry, public services and private households need to burn oil and gas to survive – this is a fact. Another fact is that much of those hydrocarbons have to come from the North Sea for simple logistical reasons. Geography shows that the existing pipeline from there to Yorkshire is shorter than would be a hypothetical one from, say, Texas to Cornwall.
Thus, since much of our energy will come from the North Sea anyway, why not produce it ourselves and save a few bob? Oh well, you see, Ed’s full job title, Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, contains the exhaustive answer to that question.
It also contains an oxymoron: the two parts of his title are mutually exclusive. Energy security means uninterrupted availability of energy sources at an affordable price. Net zero means saving ‘our planet’ from the supposedly harmful effects of the greenhouse gases produced by, well, burning oil and gas.
However, since we have to continue to burn oil and gas to stay afloat, or rather alive, pursuing that policy with Ed’s kind of zeal means uncertain availability of energy and its exorbitant cost. Hence Ed’s title is oxymoronic, not to say moronic.
It makes no difference whatsoever to ‘our planet’ who produces the North Sea hydrocarbons we burn. The net effect on net zero is exactly the same whether the drilling platforms belong to Britain or Norway. Hence banning British companies from exploration and production, while taxing them out of existence, makes no sense at all.
No practical sense, that is. But I’ve always repeated, and will continue to do so till I’m blue in the face, that our Marxist government isn’t motivated by common sense, as evinced by its approach to the economy, morality, law, defence, health, education and of course energy policy.
When they express their concern about any of those, they are lying. This is a classic example of the rule by simulacrum: nothing they say or do can be taken at face value. Everything that even remotely resembles an attempt to make things better is crude disguise.
When contemplating a new policy, this lot don’t ask themselves how its likely outcome will affect the country. The only question that concerns them is whether or not the policy agrees with their ideology and promotes their in-built imperative: gaining more control over the population by punishing its more successful and independent-minded part.
That’s why the fallacy of global warming was such a godsend for them. Some of them may believe the flimsy evidence behind it, but that doesn’t matter one way or the other. Even if they suspected or even knew for sure that the whole thing is a swindle (incidentally perpetrated by some of the same scientists who back in the 1970s were scare-mongering about an impending ice age), that wouldn’t change their behaviour one iota.
Such a glorious opportunity to impoverish the people the better to lord it over them simply couldn’t have been passed up. And, as always, the assault had to be launched from a moral high ground. They aren’t pursuing any nefarious purposes, Marx forbid. Theirs is the noble cause of saving ‘our planet’ from the depredations of rapacious profiteering.
Notice how their poster retard, Greta Thunberg, always linked global warming to capitalist excesses. You are destroying our planet and my future, she frothed at the mouth, to make more money. How dare you!
That evil child was simply enunciating in clear, hysterical tones the strategy appealing to many a grown-up Marxist heart. If plentiful, inexpensive, domestically produced energy could make people wealthier and more independent of the state, it had to be made to stop being plentiful, inexpensive and domestically produced. And if that dastardly objective could be couched in bien pensant waffle, then so much the better.
Unfortunately, even our left-leaning royals try to march in step with the villains who’d get rid of the monarchy in a second if they got the chance. Thus, back in 2009, Prince Charles, as he then was, warned world leaders we had just 100 months before global warming did irreversible damage.
Then, 120 months later, he repeated the warning of the coming fiery doom, this time shortening its ETA to 18 months. And in 2020, Prince Charles couched the same doom-mongering in colloquial terms, saying “we really do have to pull our fingers out now because the theory is we have this decade left” before we all fry. HRH, as he then was, left the idiom incomplete by omitting to mention the place we ought to pull our fingers out of.
His son William agrees wholeheartedly: our royals seem to worry that, unless they mouth vox sinistri platitudes, King Charles III will have to suffer the fate of King Charles I. We have to decide whether such sermons are sinister or merely gauche, but they undeniably issue from the Left.
Apparently, what we pay Norwegians for the energy we could easily produce ourselves amounts to £3,500 a year for every Norwegian. I expect a letter of thanks from a Nordic chap in receipt of my £3,500. What’s the Norwegian for sucker?
P.S. Regrettably, Nigel Farage is being ‘no-platformed’ by the leftist propaganda outlet, the BBC. Also regrettably, he was ‘platformed’ 17 times by the Putin propaganda outlet, RT. I’m appalled by the former and frightened by the latter. Aren’t you?