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You can’t trust Liz Truss (oil and gas devotee) on energy policy for Britain

a frenzied building of eye-wateringly expensive new nuclear power plants.

the ramping up of nuclear power will add billions to UK consumers’ bills

Liz Truss’s energy plans will be disastrous for our bills and the planet.
Truss will oversee the greatest transfer of wealth in history, from UK
families to oil and gas executives she used to work for.

The celebratory champagne corks must have popped in the headquarters of the oil and gas
corporations on the day Ofgem announced the devastating rise in energy
prices for poverty-stricken British consumers. Especially after they read
Liz Truss’s disastrous “response” in the Daily Mail addressing the
lifting of the home energy price cap.

Truss, the former commercial manager
for the oil giant Shell, proposes a massive ramping up of commercial
projects by the oil corporations, including expansion of North Sea oil and
gas, a resumption of fracking on the UK mainland and a frenzied building of
eye-wateringly expensive new nuclear power plants.

The proposed explosion of oil and gas projects will not knock a single penny from fuel bills, as
the UK’s fossil fuel industry is fully integrated into global markets, and
so production will remain priced at inflated global prices for UK
consumers.

And the ramping up of nuclear power will add billions to UK
consumers’ bills, as nuclear energy is already over twice the cost of wind
and solar and it will take decades before any new plants could reduce
consumer addiction to fossil fuels.

Truss’s statement was silent on
insulation or energy efficiency investments that would actually bring down
bills for consumers, by reducing dependency on fossil fuels. After the
Mail’s 2011 successful “anti-green-crap” campaign – according to Carbon
Brief reportedly at the instigation of the then Lord Lawson’s Global
Warming Policy Foundation – destroyed the home insulation programme that
was then successfully insulating 2.4 million homes a year. If that
programme had been implemented, up to 18 million UK families would have
enjoyed lower bills this winter and the pressure on the UK’s electricity
and gas markets would have been far lower.

Truss has not committed to
lifting her government’s de-facto ban on onshore wind, the cheapest source
of energy in the UK, but has promised a crackdown on solar farms. Blocking onshore wind and solar increases consumer bills and keeps us enslaved to nuclear and oil corporations.

Further thrilling the oil executives, she
ruled out expanding windfall taxes on the huge profits pouring into their
coffers. She also opposes “handouts” for consumers. Nuclear electricity
is now also over twice the price of renewables. The Tory government
recently overrode the planning inspector’s refusal of planning permission
for the proposed new Sizewell C nuclear power plant, over uncertainty on
where the water required to run the plant would come from.

Ministers are proposing that a nuclear levy be added to bills to fund its construction –
before it produces a single kWh of electricity. And they still have nowhere
to safely secure its toxic radioactive waste for the thousands of years
required.

Independent 30th Aug 2022

https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/opinion/liz-truss-energy-bills-oil-gas-climate-b2155598.html

August 31, 2022 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, UK