Letter: Green claims not supported by cash
Published 4 Nov 2010 12:30
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THIS Government has claimed that it will be the greenest ever. However, what George Osborne announced in the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) showed only cynicism and hypocrisy towards meeting its legal obligation to slash carbon dioxide output by 34% by 2020.
Last November, George Osborne floated the idea of a green investment bank. When the coalition took power, it became a £200bn flagship project to prove he was serious about Britain’s green revolution.
In the CSR, Osborne said the Government would only put a paltry £1bn into the bank. The bank has become an irrelevance before its formation.
A mountain of cash is needed to replace end-of-life fossil-fuel power stations with more expensive alternatives such as wind farms and nuclear stations.
The message seems to be: yes, we want a low-carbon revolution; no, we’re not going to pay for it.
New nuclear power stations have a shaky future. Utilities want nuclear to get the same subsidies as wind power, which has a healthy add-in tariff, which we all pay through our energy bills.
But the government is terrified of being seen to subsidise the nuclear industry. Government predicted that the first nuclear plant would come online in 2017. That has slipped to 2018. Further slippage seems inevitable.
The feed-in tariff subsidies for domestic green energy, which only started this April, are to be cut by 10% to save £14m in 2014 - something environment and sustainability leader Cllr Warren Swain overlooked when promoting RBC’s solar energy exhibition (‘Homeowner’s solar investment’, Reading Chronicle, October 28).
Ken Mann
Reading
This letter appeared in Reading Chronicle 04 Nov 10
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