David Craig, on September 14th, 2024weekend blog
I have already bored readers many times by pointing out that Britain’s supposed success in reducing CO2 emissions:
Has resulted in Britain having some of the world’s highest energy prices:
This has led to a collapse in manufacturing as our manufacturing jobs have been outsourced to other countries:
The chart below should show even the most intellectually-challenged UK politician where our British jobs have gone:
This wilful and suicidal de-industrialisation of the UK has severely damaged the UK economy:
I have also written about how our rulers’ green delusions are behind the coming job losses (about 2,800 well-paid skilled jobs) at the Port Talbot steelworks and the 400 job losses from the closure of the Grangemouth oil refinery.
We’re told that the Grangemouth oil refinery is closing because it’s no longer competitive with refineries abroad. So, instead of refining some of our own oil and petrol, we’ll ship it abroad to have it refined and then ship it back to Grangemouth which will be reduced to just being an importing terminal.
I thought it might be worth spending just a couple of minutes investigating why the Grangemouth refinery is so uncompetitive. Part of the problem, I believe, is that being a smallish and older refinery Grangemouth is not as efficient or cost effective as some newer larger foreign refineries. But we can also look at the cost structure of a typical refinery:
You’ll see that most of the cost – around 85% – is due to the crude and other oils bought in to be refined. These are likely to be similar for all refineries. So, to understand why some refineries are more competitive than others, we we need to look at operating costs (the first column on the above table). Here we see that about 46% (40.7% plus 5.3%) of operating costs are energy costs. So, if a foreign refinery has energy costs like refineries in the US that are half the UK’s energy costs or refineries in China or India which have energy costs around a quarter of the energy costs for a UK refinery, there’s no possibility of a UK refinery competing on costs. Moreover, UK energy costs are likely to rise significantly due to Miliband offering energy firms installing new wind turbines and solar farms guaranteed energy prices which are 20% to 30% above current prices. Thus it’s bye bye to 400 jobs at Grangemouth. And it will also be bye bye to many thousands of jobs at other UK-based manufacturing sites.
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said: “This is an act of industrial vandalism, pure and simple.” But it’s her party, the Labour Party, the party which is meant to support workers, which is taking over the useless lying Tories’ Net Zero industrial suicide and accelerating it. Sharon Graham has also been quoted as saying: “This is now the last chance for this Labour government to show whether its (sic) really on the side of workers and communities. The road to net zero cannot be paid for with workers’ jobs.”
Labour’s green policies are “hollowing out working-class communities”, said Gary Smith, the leader of GMB, Britain’s third-biggest union. The Government, he said, must stop “decarbonisation through deindustrialisation”.
When will our unions realise that you can have mad eco-clown Ed Miliband’s Net Zero, with its massively-increased energy prices and deindustrialisation, or you can have workers’ jobs but you cannot have both?
Net Zero and workers’ jobs are mutually exclusive.
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There is nothing boring about repeating the fundamental error of CO2 reduction. Our government has turned a pointless objective into boasting about a world leading achievement. The more the error is pointed out the more likely it will be seen and understood by those who have been deluded by this.
After reading this I cannot avoid thinking that the Labour Party started our manufacturing and economic problems when they gained power after the war. Instead of using the US loans to modernise industry and return it to peacetime manufacturing they used it to nationalise what they could and create an unaffordable welfare state. Germany in contrast modernised industry and when the economy recovered they turned to welfare when they could afford it.
The first problem I noticed was car manufacturing which suffered from poor designs and unreliability and it was the start of Japanese car imports. The industry was nationalised and eventually failed. As far as I can see most of it is now foreign owned which has brought investment but it could go as quickly with high energy and labour costs.
Our energy industry has hardly been a success. We were the first country to have a commercial nuclear power station but the industry has been a disaster. I believe we only sold one Magnox reactor. They were complex designs because of onload refuelling and none were built to cost and time. Now we have given up on them. There is no sign of a prototype for a small reactor as far as I can see. The coal industry was closed down by union demands for higher salaries making our coal too expensive. The cost of energy as you point out makes everything uncompetitive and salaries are also very high because of the cost of living.
The steel industry is also uncompetitive for the same reasons but in addition we no longer have any iron and have to import it. This makes all our steel more expensive than imported steel.
We were a country that had everything for the industrial revolution, but now we are basically our of materials and energy and pay ourselves too much. I doubt that we will ever see fracking because of the public opposition to it.
We have gone full circle from the Labour Party having the wrong industrial policy in 1945 and now they are delivering the final blow to finish off the UK. As Thatcher famously said they only stop spending when the run out of other peoples money. She would never expected that the Tory Party would adopt socialist economic polices but now the true socialists are back in control and determined to destroy the country completely. The worst of it is that they are doing it with the backing of only 20% of the registered electorate and the other 80% can do nothing about it. This is what democracy and universal suffrage was created to do.
While I’m happy to blame labour for this, the so-called Conservative Party have done nothing to stop this net zero Horlicks and in fact did a jolly good job of pushing forward with it. There’s not much industry left for labour to push offshore in the name of CO2 reduction.
They’re so damn thick they can’t see that they are not reducing it – they’re just moving it to somewhere else and actually making it worse because of the CO2 produced when shipping the product back to the UK. Not that our moronic politicians would pay any attention to it but someone should produce a chart showing to which countries the annual CO2 emissions are attributable. China’s emissions are only so high because the rest of the world have dumped their dirty work on them.
It’s all so obvious – why can’t they see that this is zero(sic) sum exercise? Is this what zealotry does to you? Shut down cognitive processes? Rhetorical question – you just need to look at the JSO fanatics! It’s all just the Emperor’s new clothes.