You’ve got to hand it to this lot: when it comes to brazen, carbon-intensive balls, they’ve got ‘em!
First out of the blocks was the heavily-whipped decision in Parliament on Wednesday to allow fracking under (but not, as yet, in) National Parks and other protected areas.
So that’s all right then: the frenzied aesthetic concerns of a small number of people living in and visiting National Parks have ensured that no wind turbine can be built if they’re easily visible from within the Park. But any such aesthetic concerns at the prospect of bloody great fracking rigs hard up against the boundaries of our National Parks are clearly of little interest to this Government.
24 hours later, DECC announced its final determination on Feed-In Tariffs for solar energy. What could have been a complete and unmitigated disaster (as in an 87% cut in the existing Tariff) is now just a mitigated disaster (as in a 64% cut).
The only bit of good news here is that DECC Secretary of State Amber Rudd has proved that she really doesn’t have tin ears, and can indeed open them to submissions raising blindingly obvious points about her blindingly stupid ideas. And the reason for putting it quite so trenchantly is that even a 64% cut (plus a lot of other restrictive measures on bigger solar schemes, both ground-mounted and rooftop, and community energy schemes) will still have a massively damaging impact on the UK’s solar industry.
DECC itself has estimated the consequential job losses from these changes at between 9,700 and 18,700.
All of which are completely unnecessary. With even the vaguest enthusiasm for building a thriving green economy here in the UK, we’d be talking today not about job losses but about huge numbers of new jobs. Which is exactly what governments the world over are now busy scoping out given the Paris Agreement.
But not our Government. Oh no!