Hubris Huhne

He lied to his colleagues and constituents; he lied to the police, the papers and the Courts. His former wife is left defending her case on grounds of marital coercion to lie on his behalf when he was caught speeding and she took the blame. His son's texts to him came to light today during the preliminaries to his trial, including one where he told his father "you are the most ghastly man I have ever known." 

And it was only when Chris Huhne, former Energy Secretary, failed to have this evidence excluded from his upcoming trial that, finally, he realised the game was up and changed his plea to guilty, declaring he will shortly resign his seat as an MP - we now face a curious by-election in his Eastleigh constituency where the two Coalition parties are at least the notional main contenders, though time may tell another story.

Huhne has form on changing his story - and not just on speeding fines. Just look at how he changed his tack on nuclear power from when he was in Opposition to Government - it didn't need a court case to alert us to this man's exceedingly dodgy character and the damage he was willing to inflict to further his career.

BEFORE 2010 General Election:

AFTER 2010 General Election, i.e., once he was Energy Secretary:

What a work is he! Hubris Huhne, a man who thought he could get away with anything at all - he just had to be sufficiently brazen. Unique? Certainly not. Among our utterly arrogant political class, his only real crime is that he got caught.

Fracking Awful

In one day, the "greenest Government in history" has dealt two rapid and massive blows to the environmental cause in Britain.

First, it was announced that Government Ministers are set to approve the process of "fracking" (or hydraulic fracturing) for shale gas across the entire UK mainland. This exceedingly environmentally damaging and even dangerous process (it has been linked to causing two recent earthquakes in the Blackpool area) involves pumping water underground to force the gas out. It is dirty, energy-hungry and will leave a poisoned legacy for centuries in the places it occurs - as shown in the American documentary, "Gasland". It also, obviously, does nothing to advance the development of clean-energy alternatives in the UK.

And then came the news that the Con Dem Government's flagship "green deal" policy (the title and some of the concept were stolen from the Green Party manifesto during the last general election, except the scheme as it stands is far more limited than the Green New Deal proposed by the Greens) received a blow. Heeding the calls of the climate change Flat Earthers on the Tory backbenches, as well as some Ministers like Eric Pickles, Prime Minister David Cameron has dropped the element in the scheme which required people building extensions to their homes to have to insulate their properties at the same time. This significantly reduces the effect of any improvements in energy efficiency - Britain could save almost 40% of its energy use if it insulated properties properly, as well as creating tens of thousands of new jobs in the process. But that is now gone.

The green fig leaf covering the naked hypocrisy of the Tories on climate change has finally been blown away. The Tories, we should bear in mind, were the party that to a candidate failed to support Greenpeace at the last election in its call for action on global warming and many surveys at the time showed the Tories to be massively more sceptical about climate change than any other party bar their country cousins in UKIP. Needless to say, the Lib Dems remain as about effective as a chocolate teapot, especially now that their Environment Secretary Chris Huhne has resigned to await trial for alleged perverting of the course of justice relating to a driving offence.

And so as we face massive drought across the south and east of England, with warnings of it continuing for up to 18 months, and with last year the warmest in history in spite of near record breaking cold during the winter of 2010/11, our political masters remain as complacent as ever, modern Neros fiddling while Rome burns. Their eyes fixed on the next share dividend, the Tories grunt that we can't afford green action on climate change. But as our world slowly goes to hell in a handcart, perhaps its the Tories and their allies we can't afford.

Brief Encounter or The Life of Brian?

Sometimes life has strange coincidences.


Returning from London on the train the other evening, I ran by chance into Green Councillor Andrew Cooper (author of the blog Greening Kirklees), who was not long finished at a consultation session between environmental groups and Greg Barker, Tory Energy Minister and deputy to the Lib Dem Energy Secretary Chris Huhne. Professionally, Andrew is an expert in the renewable energy field and he was lamenting the reversal in Government policy over renewable energy feed-in tariffs, a great incentive for consumers to install microgeneration in their homes, especially solar panels, and which pays them for electricity they generate but don’t use (it is instead fed into the national grid, hence the micro-producers’ payment from the electricity companies).

Huhne’s department, in spite of claiming to be part of the greenest government in history, has just decided to slash the subsidies supporting solar power and the tariff (from private companies) by 50% on the spurious grounds that the 30p added to the average annual household fuel bill by the tariff arrangement pushes poorer people into fuel poverty. The Government also for some reason adds the cost of the tariff to the public deficit, in spite of there being no public funding involved and hence utterly no reason for doing so.

We grumbled a bit more about Huhne’s turnaround on nuclear energy as well – from decrying it as dangerous and expensive in his days in opposition to now advocating it as an essential part of Britain’s energy supply and adopting the bizarre view of it as being a source of green energy.

Bidding Cllr Cooper farewell, moments later, on a connecting train, I was hailed by an old acquaintance, now a recently elected Lib Dem MP, who out of residual personal affection shall remain nameless.

He was looking a bit downhearted, apparently having just rebelled, clearly with some difficulty, against one of the Government’s welfare plans. I asked him how he was finding life as an MP and heard him say how awful it all was, how essential the dreadful cuts were to tame the deficit, how Plan A wasn’t working but they had no choice, etc, etc. My suggestion that some good old Liberal Keynesianism might help seemed to go down like a bucket of cold water in a rainstorm, but he tried to appeal to my environmentalism by telling me, “We have done some good green stuff. Chris Huhne has introduced some new green energy initiatives.”

Well prep’d from my discussion with Cllr Cooper, I responded, “Well, hasn’t Chris Huhne just slashed the feed-in tariff...?”

“Yes, yes, he has...but before last week, he had done some good stuff.”

“Well, I don’t like his turnaround on nuclear energy...I remember watching him talk about that in the past and he was really anti but he seems to have changed his tune...”

“Er...yes, but at least there won’t be public funding for it...I mean apart from the tariffs and nuclear...we will eventually do more solar panels...I think...”

“It would be good if money was spent on solar now...its a labour intensive field and if you invested in jobs, the multiplier effect would generate tax and get the deficit down. But I think I read they are cutting back on funding community schemes for renewables...”

“Yes...but....apart from these...I think in time we will do more green things... our Green Investment Bank, when it gets started...it will... well, it’s difficult...”

And then, as our brief encounter threatened to turn into a reverse parody of Life of Brian, it was his stop.

Staring at The Sun

The beleaguered Environment Secretary, fast-driver Chris Huhne revealed the Government's much debated Carbon Budget today, ostentatiously declaring that it will become a legally binding requirement for the Government to achieve a 50% reduction in carbon emissions on their 1990 level by the UK by 2025 to tackle global warming. He has done so in spite of bitter opposition from his fellow Lib Dem, the Business Secretary Vince Cable, as well as from the climate sceptics who inhabit the Tory benches like a horde of neanderthals.

On the face of it, it is a significant achievement and it has been welcomed by some environmental campaigners. But, on closer inspection, the announcement raises more questions than it answers.

1. How will the 50% by 2025 impact on the current plans by the Government to abolish the Climate Change Act on the grounds of it creating too much "red tape" for business and the legally binding target of an 80% reduction by 2050 (which general scientific consensus says is necessary to prevent run-away global warming)?

2. Although the plan includes scope for renewables, recent Government decisions will make it much harder to obtain funding to install community and large scale solar farms. So will the focus move to building new nuclear power stations on the dubious grounds that  nuclear energy is carbon-friendly?

3. The plan allows Britain to trade emissions credits with other countries that have lower carbon emissions - mostly poorer ones. This will at least involve some transfer of money to these countries, but given that their emissions are always among the lowest, will it genuinely achieve any reduction in carbon emissions?

4. Why have we kept that wonderful opt-out card that, if other countries don't do enough, we can stop doing anything? Who on earth came up with that idea?

Of course, in the Tory press and blogosphere the announcement has brought forth a chorus of criticism of how this will damage British manufacturing. And of course the sceptics have been out in force - the Daily Telegraph readers were particularly perplexed by it all:

For the 12 months of last year, I had a subscription to Scientific American. Month after month, there were articles about global warming. In every article, it was taken as read that Global Warming is A FACT. It seemed to me, as I read the articles, that anyone who wanted an article published had to adhere to that basic tenant. 

and this:
The whole climate change debate shoukd be quietly slinking away into oblivion. Don't you get it... We were all conned! The politicos won't admit it as they might be lynched.

and very bizarrely:

None of us KNOWS whether the CO2 science is categorically right or wrong.
But we do know that £13M to reopen the McCann kidnap case is an utter waste of money....

And, assuming he is still in office, it is this sort of pseudo-scientific garbage, propounded by Tory MP after Tory MP, that will probably do for Huhne's attempts to put these proposals into legislation. As was evident in a variety of surveys and stories up to the 2010 General Election, Conservative Party candidates were the least concerned of all parties about global warming by a very wide margin indeed - some described it as a "scam" with ludicrous claims of a vast leftwing conspiracy to use climate change as a means of destroying industry. In addition, the Telegraph itself reported in January last year, a meagre 6% of the top 250 Conservative candidates expressed any desire at all to reduce the UK's carbon footprint in a Conservative Home survey.

All this stands in the face of all the evidence: that the Earth is losing 25 billion tonnes of oxygen each year; that carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have risen by 50% since the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago, and that month after month, year after year, new records are being broken in the extremity of our weather patterns. Last month was the warmest UK April on record and this month is likely to be the warmest May. The USA has just had the largest set of cyclones recorded in decades, while British nature goes to pot - hibernating animals emerge early with the risk of dying again if there is a sudden change, while the strawberry crop has ripened so early that there will be none left for consumption during the Wimbledon tennis competition.

The objectives announced today require a lot of detailed explanation about what they will actually mean and to prove they are more than just a stunt. But as important to its success or failure will be what support will be salvaged from among Tory MPs.

Meantime, the forecast is for another heatwave.

Fat Cats Ate My Sunshine

Yes, you've seen them - the shady characters, gliding up in their electrically powered 4X4's, sharp suits crafted from recycled "Green Worlds" as they size up sites for the latest windmills - the ultimate in Battery Farming - and cashing in greedily on the sickening trade in Solar Futures: who says the Sun will always shine tomorrow? These guys are speculating on a Long Dark Night, I tell you....

This surreal fantasy is actually at the heart of current Government thinking. Just a matter of weeks after effectively abolishing corporation tax on overseas earnings for our poor struggling bankers, the Lib Dem Secretary of State has boldly set his sites on the Government's next target - the far more urgent and dangerous phenomenon of "solar fat cats".

I kid you not - the Government is set to seriously restrict the financial advantages of the "feed-in tariff" for solar energy. Apparently worried about big business cashing in on subsidies to encourage installation of solar energy panels, it has decided to cut back massively in support for non-domestic panels. Perish the thought that any public money might find its way into the hands of profit-seeking energy companies, quite the opposite of the smooth, clean, super-efficient operation of the financially solvent nuclear power industry...

Just as carbon fuel prices soar, edging ever higher with each new crisis in the Arab world, our supposedly greenest Government in history has at a stroke set back hope of a substantial increase in solar energy generation in spite of its increasing efficiency. Support will still be available to small schemes, but as soon as anyone with some serious investment began sniffing around the subsidy pot, the lid was slammed shut.

How bizarre, when the nuclear industry needs tens of billions of taxpayers money just to keep going each year (let alone the massive bill looming for decommissioning the current aging reactor plants). Mr Huhne is by contrast loathe to supply even £40 million p.a. (about 67p per inhabitant of the UK) to foster solar power (mostly recouped from higher charges and not even from the public purse itself).

Of course, it is pretty much a ruse to cut more spending - big business did not show any serious signs of piling into the industry, although there are plans for some interesting medium sized schemes. One scheme, an amusement park company, will likely lose out now and, in these recessionary times, may not proceed with their plans to become carbon-neutral. Jobs are at risk as well and Britain looks set to lose out in the valuable skills development in emergent technologies that the alternative energy industry offers. In the name of short term financial efficiencies, the longer term is being sacrificed.

You have been warned...

Yet at the same time, tens of billions of pounds are set to be handed out in tax cuts to multinational corporations under the new tax reform regulations on Controlled Foreign Companies going through Parliament - a clear case of choices being made rather than necessary cuts in public finance. While no one wants subsidies snatched and gobbled up by a handful of big players, the strategy should be to put money into encouraging an exponential increase in alternative energy rather than tax relief for capitalist pirates. This is a greenwash Government, and this episode shows just how paper thin their commitment to alternative energy is.

As we face the chaos and cost of Peak Oil, there will be a high price to pay for this most ignorant of decisions.



The only song about solar electricity to make the UK charts (at 99!).