A wave of recent rightwing commentary has attempted to blame the gas crisis variously on Greta Thunberg, “the state”, “green regulations”, “net zero fanaticism” and “climate alarmism”.
David Frost, the Nigel Farage, Allison Pearson, Tim Newark, Iain Martin, Leo McKinstry and Steve Baker have all made similar claims, in outlets from the Daily Telegraph to the Daily Express and the Times, joined by editorials in the Wall Street Journal and the Daily Mail.
Their most common target is the “green levies” that the Conservative leadership frontrunner, Liz Truss, has promised to “suspend” if she becomes prime minister. From the frequency with which the levies are targeted, one might imagine they are playing at least some small part in rising bills.
In reality, the opposite is true. Since last summer, levies have fallen to about £150 a year. This is 8% of average bills – not 25% – as recent corrections in the Daily Mail and Daily Express admitted.
To imagine that falling green levies are the problem, when soaring gas prices will soon have added £2,200 to household bills, is truly to enter the upside down.
My latest Carbon Brief analysis shows an elevenfold increase in wholesale gas prices is behind 96% of the unprecedented surge in energy costs that are due to hit households this winter.
This brings us to the second argument from those who attempt to blame the energy crisis on climate policy, namely that gas is expensive because of the government’s legally binding target of net zero emissions by 2050.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph on 9 August, for example, Farage blamed “the self-inflicted wounds of net zero fanaticism underpinning the [energy] crisis”.
Farage, a self-confessed “admire[r]” of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, does not mention the fact that Russia’s state-run energy group Gazprom has cut gas deliveries to the EU by three-quarters.
Moreover, Russia, formerly the bloc’s largest gas supplier, began throttling deliveries to the continent in autumn 2021, months before Putin ordered his invasion of Ukraine.
Welcome back to the upside down, where according to McKinstry in the Daily Express on 11 August, it is merely “fashionable to put the blame” for the energy crisis on the world’s second-largest gas producer cutting production and dramatically choking off exports to the EU.
The reality is that gas prices are soaring thanks to market fundamentals, from surging post-Covid demand to supply outages, cold winters, weak nuclear output and the invasion of Ukraine.
On top of that, Europe’s worst drought for 500 years is hobbling hydropower, restricting deliveries of coal and further squeezing French nuclear, all as a rash of heatwaves spike electricity demand.
For the Daily Telegraph columnist Pearson on 9 August, however, the problem was rather that “a conscious decision was taken to rapidly reduce the supply of fossil fuels” in the UK.
Similarly, a Newark article for the Daily Express on 3 August originally claimed US energy production had been “severely reduced” by President Joe Biden’s “numerous green regulations”. Given US gas output is at record highs, the newspaper was forced into a double correction.
Putting aside the fact that UK gas production has been steady for the past decade, its longer-term decline is simply because “reserves are running out”, the National Audit Office says.
This has contributed to a wider fall in European gas output, as reserves have been used up and the giant Groningen field in the Netherlands has started to close after years of earthquakes.
Add in the UK’s decade of shale gas failure and Poland, where a parade of oil firms gave up on fracking owing to “obstinate geology”, having spent hundreds of millions of dollars.
Pearson’s column makes a third argument, claiming renewables are “unreliable” and that consequently – as she added on Twitter – they leave us “dependent on foreign providers”.
Yet renewables have generated enough electricity in 2022 to avoid the need for five times as much gas as the UK imported from Russia last year. Pearson is not only upside down but back to front: the more renewables the UK builds, the less “dependent on foreign providers” it will become.
Lord Frost wrote in the Daily Telegraph on 11 August: “The choice by net zero proponents to rely on renewables and interconnectors, and to run down storage, means we face blackouts, hideous business-crushing costs, and people shivering and dying in the cold.”
(For the record, the decision to close Rough, formerly the UK’s largest gas storage site, was “nothing to do with net zero”, according to a government adviser at the time.)
Again, the overwhelming causes of “business-crushing costs and people shivering” are Russia and a long list of other market fundamentals making gas cost nine times more than renewables.
The argument that net zero is the problem, when reaching it could save 0.5% of GDP, is more than a little upside down. And, yet, like the supernatural villain in Stranger Things, it keeps reappearing.
