While Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party have brought many improvements to party policy, much remains to be done. In particular, Corbyn has been weak on energy and climate policy. Although Labour’s election manifesto was widely interpreted to include energy nationalisation, in fact it promised no such thing. It pledged to bring the electricity grid into public ownership at some ill-defined later date, but that was the only nationalisation proposed. Instead it pledges to create “publicly owned, locally accountable energy companies and cooperatives”, which a supplementary industrial strategy paper clarifies to mean energy suppliers (the companies from which we purchase gas and electricity, rather than the companies which produce it). Despite stating “Labour understands that many people don’t have time to shop around”, strangely the party’s solution is to introduce a 7th choice to the market.
Continue reading
Posted in Environment
NPF Policy Responses: Environment, Energy and Transport
The National Policy Forum has made the strange decision to group culture with the environment and energy. Meanwhile, transport is placed, not completely without justification, with local government and housing. However, as transport is a major consumer of energy and a transport policy will be essential to fighting climate change, I decided to address it along with energy and the environment, in place of culture.
Continue reading
Share:
What’s in the NPF draft policy statements?
According to the Labour Party Rulebook:
“Party conference shall decide from time to time what specific proposals of legislative, financial or administrative reform shall be included in the Party programme. This shall be based on the rolling programme of work of the National Policy Forum.” (Emphasis added)
The results of that “rolling programme of work” emerge at this time of the year giving members a few weeks to read and discuss them and to get their party branches and CLP to respond. It’s a tight timetable and there is room to doubt the value of the consultation that this purports to be. Continue reading
Share:
A 21st Century Energy Policy, Part 3: The Institutions to Make it Happen
As discussed in Part 2, the transition to a low-carbon economy is a massive task requiring extensive government intervention. In the recent leadership campaign, Jeremy Corbyn promised to “promote the growth of over 200 ‘local energy companies’” and to “support the development of 1,000 community energy co-operatives”. Presumably by “local energy companies” he is referring to council-owned gas and electricity distributors such as Nottingham’s Robin Hood Energy. The “community energy co-operatives” would appear to refer the small generators of renewable electricity which can be found across Britain such as the Brighton Energy Co-operative. Continue reading
Share:
A 21st Century Energy Policy, Part 2: The Technology of the Future
If humanity is to have any hope of avoiding catastrophic climate change, developed countries must take aggressive steps to decarbonise as quickly as possible. This will mean not only replacing existing fossil-fuel power plants, but greatly expanding electricity production to replace gas and petrol. Such a task demands not just an energy policy, but a comprehensive economic plan.
For reasons discussed in Part 1, decarbonisation is not achievable in Britain using only renewable sources. Investments should certainly be made in wind, and (where feasible) hydroelectric, tidal, and geothermal power, but even combined these are unlikely to provide more than half of the current supply. The remainder must be made up by nuclear power. This is broadly in line with what energy analyst David MacKay proposed as “Plan E” in his book Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air. This was the plan which he deemed to be the most economical of those he proposed.
Continue reading
