Code oranje voor de zware industrie

De vrees voor die verschrikkelijke opwarming van de aarde (die maar niet wil komen) heeft regeringen doen besluiten om in te zetten op hernieuwbare energie ten einde de uitstoot van CO2 te verminderen. Dit leidt niet of nauwelijks tot vermindering van de CO2–uitstoot, vanwege de noodzaak van backup door de conventionele elektriciteitscentrales, die moeten bijspringen als het niet waait en de zon niet schijnt. En deze fluctuaties leiden tot efficiencyverliezen in de rest van het elektriciteitsnet die de ‘winst’ van hernieuwbare energie teniet doen. Het leidt wèl tot hogere elektriciteitstarieven, waardoor energie–intensieve bedrijven, zoals de staal- en aluminiumindustrie, het hoofd niet boven water kunnen houden en sluiten en/of verkassen naar het buitenland, met verlies aan welvaart en massaontslagen als gevolg. Kortom deïndustrialisering.

Maar wordt dat verlies aan werkgelegenheid dan niet gecompenseerd door de schepping van groene banen? Vergeet het maar!

In het Verenigd Koninkrijk en Duitsland werden waarschuwingen van de industrie dat dit zou gebeuren, door groengerande regeringen in de wind geslagen. En zelfs nu het drama zich voor hun ogen bezig is te voltrekken, doen zij niets om het tij te keren.

Er is kennelijk geen grens aan destructief beleid.

In tegenstelling tot Nederland beginnen de media zich in het VK en Duitsland echter fors te roeren. Ik pik er twee artikelen uit van bekende commentatoren: Matt Ridley en Christopher Booker.

Onder de titel, ‘Race To Go Green Is Killing Heavy Industries’, schreef Matt Ridley in ‘The Times’.

If the government really wants to save energy-intensive industries, it must delay setting new emissions targets for the fifth carbon budget, as the climate change act entitles it to do.

Before Redcar and Port Talbot, remember Lynemouth, where Britain’s last large aluminium smelter closed in 2012. In aluminium, as in steel, China is now by far the largest producer, smelting five times as much as any other continent, let alone country.

The chief reason aluminium left (though a small plant survives at Lochaber) was the sky-high electricity prices paid in Britain: electrolysis is how you make aluminium.

For extra-large industrial users, British electricity prices are the highest in Europe, twice the average, and far higher than in Asia and America. Britain has the highest electricity prices because it has the most draconian climate policies.

Despite promises not to do so, the government insists on going faster than other countries in emissions reduction. As Lord Deben, chairman of the Committee on Climate Change, put it recently, apparently without intended irony, the British approach to climate legislation is the envy of most countries in the world. At green conferences maybe. ….

… aluminium and steel are mere harbingers of heavy industry doom because of our costly energy. As the think tank Civitas reported at the time of Lynemouth’s closure, “There are still many other energy-intensive industries left in the UK, such as glass, chemical and ceramic manufacturing. Together these are worth £75 billion and employ 700,000 people and they are just as vulnerable to the future rises in energy costs.”

Lees verder hier.

En onder de titel, ‘We’re following Germany to an energy disaster’, schreef Christopher Booker in de Britse ‘Telegraph’:

A far darker shadow is hanging over Britain than that of the collapse of our steel industry. As she is the sister of a leading figure in the campaign to keep Britain in the EU, we may not be surprised by the warning from Amber Rudd, our Energy and Climate Change Secretary, that “Brexit” would raise our energy bills by £500 million a year. …. But in making that “half a billion a year” claim, Ms Rudd must hope that we don’t recall those recent figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility projecting that within four years – due entirely to her own Government’s policies – we will be paying £13.6 billion a year in climate change levies alone, up a further £7.6 billion from the year just ending.

Even this is only a small part of the disaster Ms Rudd is heading us towards, as she sets about “decarbonising” our economy by closing down all the fossil-fuel power stations which, until recently, were supplying two thirds of all our electricity, in order to rely instead on ever more “renewables” and those new nuclear power stations which simply aren’t getting built.

Just where this policy is leading us, as I predicted five years ago, can be seen by looking at the one country still ahead of us in the rush for the cliff edge. A long article in Handelsblatt, Germany’s leading business journal, paints a devastating picture of the chaos now resulting from its pursuit of a “green” energy policy remarkably similar to our own (except that, post-Fukushima, their 17 nuclear power stations have been closing down even faster than ours).

Already 77 nuclear and fossil-fuel plants have closed. Their largest power companies, RWE and E.On, have run up debts totalling £43 billion. And after £170 billion was poured into “green” subsidies, giving it the largest number of windmills in Europe (26,000) and causing huge problems for its grid when the wind isn’t blowing, Germany’s electricity bills have soared to the point where last year 350,000 customers were cut off because they couldn’t afford to pay.

Thanks to those rocketing energy costs, many of Germany’s top manufacturing firms, such as Siemens and BASF, are moving their production facilities abroad, with the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs. Those jobs are going not least to the US, which has energy costs less than half of Germany’s (the same effect is seen here in Britain, where our “carbon tax”, crippling energy-intensive industries such as steel, is now four times higher than anywhere else in the world). …

Aldus Christopher Booker.

Lees verder hier.

Wie volgt? Tata Steel IJmuiden? En wat wordt eraan gedaan om dat te voorkomen?

Hoe dan ook, klimaat maakt meer kapot dan je lief is.

Voor mijn eerdere bijdragen over klimaat en aanverwante zaken zie hier, hier, hier, hier en hier.