A write-to-your-MP campaign has been launched today by cheap energy enthusiasts at Net Zero Watch. The wonks are mounting an effort against Auction Round 7 in the UK’s Contracts for Difference scheme. Low carbon energy providers are bidding for government contracts with guaranteed multi-year strike prices – a massive subsidy system for Miliband’s 95% clean power policy. The strike prices are raising the cost of energy…
The campaigners have made a tool to write to MPs as part of the new effort. AR7 is due to publish strike prices imminently….
Ed Miliband has over the course of a year emitted more carbon dioxide from flights than an average Brit does in 35 years. Hot air merchant…
According to Environmental Information Regulations set out in 2004 ministerial plane travel needs to have its carbon footprint tracked by civil servants. Miliband’s total tab is a whopper…
Guido’s FoI Unit has uncovered that over 15 trips from August 2024 to June 2025 – including domestic flights – Miliband emitted 31.03 tonnes CO2 equivalent. 49,952 miles covered…
Miliband’s most gaseous single trip was in March from London Heathrow to Doha to Beijing Daxing: 7,079 miles and 6.53 tonnes CO₂e. Considering 2024’s total UK international aviation emissions were around 36 million tonnes, produced by roughly 40 million passengers, that works out to about 0.9 tonnes CO₂ per UK resident per year for flights. Multiply that by 34.5 and you get Miliband’s figure so far…
Read the full list, gathered by DESNZ officials, below:
Defence Secretary John Healey has written to the developers of Whitestone Solar Farm to oppose the development of the 750 MW project in his constituency on the grounds of ‘proportionality, safety, and fairness’. Presumably he’ll be writing to his Cabinet colleague Ed Miliband soon too, because the proposal is a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP), and it will ultimately cross Red Ed’s desk for sign-off. Just last week, the government approved the UK’s largest solar farm in Lincolnshire…
Healey has told his constituents today, however, that all this “must be done right, with proper community engagement and without sacrificing our local environment“:
“I summarise my concerns below. If you go ahead with a formal application for this development, I plan to make a detailed submission to the Planning Inspectorate. My objections will not be made alone; many other local voices. organisations, and statutory consultees will be doing the same. I have long supported the need for Britain to expand renewable energy generation. It is cheap, home-grown, job-creating and essential for cutting our dependence on fossil fuels. And foreign state suppliers. When people elected us to government last year, we made a commitment to Clean Power by 2030 But, in my view, every project must still meet three tests. It must be proportionate, it must be safe. and it must be fair. Whitestone fails all three.”
Approving virtually all these NSIPs is central to Miliband’s agenda, not that you’d know that from Healey’s letter. It should make for a few awkward conversations at the Cabinet table. What happened to backing the builders, not the blockers?
In a latest blow to Red Ed’s net zero crusade, Britain’s biggest power generator has warned that falling wind speeds are driving up energy bills – and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. RWE, which supplies around 15% of the UK’s electricity and increasingly relies on wind power said:
“Wholesale electricity prices in our European core markets also rose. Contributing factors were an increase in the price of fuels and emission allowances as well as unfavourable wind conditions.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasts that global winds will continue to slow in the decades ahead. Though when there’s too much wind, bill-payers have to pay farms to turn turbines off. Brits are set cough up £1.26 billion in “constraint payments” this year…
At the same time, Miliband is planning to pay developers up to £116 per megawatt hour for the power they generate from wind farms, adding an estimated £24 a year to the average domestic power bill. Red Ed’s big energy plan just more hot air…
Great British Energy – Nuclear (not to be confused with the inexplicably separate quango Great British Energy) is searching for a new chairman. ‘GBE-N’, as it is known in the ever growing domain of government bodies poking around in the energy industry, is in charge of delivering small modular reactors (SMRs) in the UK, among other things. That programme has been ongoing since at least 2015…
Now Red Ed is looking for a new head for the organisation – and a live job advert shows a cool salary of more than £203,268 per annum for just three days a week. Meltdown for taxpayers…
The government is banking on deploying SMRs in the 2030s. The new chair will oversee that target with a “more agile, programmatic and faster delivery approach than has been achieved previously”. That won’t be hard, because currently zero SMRs have been delivered. It’s such a civil service priority it’s a three day a week role…
The UK DOGE FoI Unit has discovered that DESNZ is spending on online advertising – including influencer marketing – at a high rate. Someone has to promote those dodgy heat pumps…
In the last 12 months the energy department has spent a total of £168,576.98 on social media promotions, and a total of £1,194,402.78 on online advertising. They say this “may be inclusive of influencer activities procured via media buying”…
The department is ludicrously blocking the exact amount spent on influencer marketing because they claim the info would “harm the DESNZ’ business reputation and weaken the DESNZ’ position in a competitive environment.” Miliband’s team don’t want the public to know how much taxpayer cash is going on fashion models to pose with heat pumps in castles…
The taxpayer may have a view on where their cash should go instead. UK DOGE recommends costs are cut here…
Speaking at his speech on how to achieve “progressive capitalism” Wes Streeting fired a dig and Andy Burnham:
“Bond markets are not bond villains and fiscal rules matter.”