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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nHouseholds across the country are gripped in a cost-of-living vice, with the price of essentials, from food to travel, soaring. But none more so than energy costs, with the average family fuel bill rising by an incredible 54 per cent to just shy of \u00a32,000 a year. For folks on modest and low incomes, there will be real financial hardship.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018It\u2019s a global energy crunch,\u2019 say our politicians. \u2018There\u2019s not much we can do about it.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, we are reaping the bitter consequences of 25 years of increasingly costly, stupid and self-defeating energy policies promoted in unison by these very same politicians \u2014 <\/em>Tory<\/em><\/a>, Labour and<\/em> Liberal Democrat<\/em><\/a> alike \u2014 who now bleat there\u2019s nothing they can do about it.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Take gas. As the world economy has sprung back from the depths of the pandemic, there is, indeed, a global shortage of gas. Prices have spiked and the extra cost is now showing up painfully in our domestic fuel bills.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The solution has been under our feet for more than a decade. Britain sits on some of the world\u2019s richest reserves of shale gas. The Bowland Field in Lancashire harbours 37.6 trillion cubic metres of the stuff. Even if we were to extract only 10 per cent of it \u2014 through a process called fracking \u2014 we\u2019d have enough gas to be self-sufficient for 50 years.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n There are plenty other places in our land brimming with shale \u2014 all of which could be mined to supply our own needs, with the surplus exported to a gas-hungry world.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n In reality, we haven\u2019t extracted a single cubic metre. Our politicians \u2014 left, right and centre \u2014 simply didn\u2019t have the gumption to go for it.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n They were cowed into submission by the propaganda of the green lobby, which hugely exaggerated the environmental dangers and spread scare stories when exploratory drilling produced the mildest of earth tremors in the Blackpool area.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n They barely registered on the Richter scale and Northern coal-mining areas have experienced worse for more than a century. But they were enough to kill off Britain\u2019s nascent shale industry.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Even that\u2019s not enough for the Green Blob.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Far from exploiting our shale reserves, the Oil and Gas Authority, a state quango which increasingly dances to the green net-zero carbon emissions tune, has ordered Cuadrilla, the drilling company, to seal forever its two shale gas wells by pouring concrete down them.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Not now to frack \u2014 and not ever. It is a policy which beggars belief. The Government should be ashamed of itself \u2014 as should all those Opposition politicians who support it. Far from developing shale gas when we most need it, the unthinking and often uninformed Westminster consensus is to make sure none of it ever sees the light of day.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n As a result, massive investment in the North will not take place and 75,000 well-paid, skilled jobs in places where they are most needed \u2014 such as Lancashire \u2014 will now never be created. Remember that next time you hear a Cabinet minister wittering on about levelling up the North with the South.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, we\u2019re still going to need gas. Even as billions have been poured into renewables, gas is still the biggest generator of electricity \u2014 accounting for on average 40 per cent, and more than 50 per cent when the wind isn\u2019t blowing. But instead of extracting it from our own lands, we\u2019ll have to import it.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Already 50 per cent of the gas we need comes from abroad \u2014 mainly Norway and Qatar, with some from Russia. By the end of the decade, we\u2019ll be importing 70 per cent and by 2050 \u2014 when we\u2019re meant to hit that magical net-zero for carbon emissions \u2014 85 per cent of the gas we need will be imported.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Britain currently runs a balance of payments deficit equivalent to 4 per cent of our GDP and energy already accounts for a big chunk of it. In the decades ahead, imported gas is set to blow an even bigger hole in our trade deficit. A growing deficit makes it harder to run a high-growth economy without making that deficit unsustainable.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The consequences of our absurd energy policies are mind-boggling. Instead of providing well-paid employment for our own people in the North, we\u2019ve decided to line the already-brimming pockets of dictators in Qatar and the Kremlin with billions more dollars.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead of cultivating our own shale industry, which would generate billions of pounds in tax, we\u2019re spending billions to import gas.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The hypocrisy is nauseating. Our politicians dine out with virtue-signalling glee on how they\u2019ve stopped fracking in the UK. But they don\u2019t mention that we had to import shale gas from America this winter to make up for shortfalls in supply from elsewhere. America \u2014 where gas prices are 25 per cent of ours and shale has turned the country into a net energy exporter.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A prospect which beckoned for us \u2014 but on which we preferred to turn our backs, all because our political elite bowed to the power of the green lobby.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n That thud you hear as your energy bills pop through the letterbox and hit the floor is the price you\u2019re paying for their political cowardice.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Our energy failures are not confined to gas. When Tony Blair came to power in 1997 with a landslide majority, giving him the power to do what he wanted, it was quickly apparent we needed to start planning for four new nuclear power stations to replace our ageing nuclear generators.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n But nothing happened. As the Government dithered, the then Chancellor Gordon Brown decided it was a good idea to sell our nuclear generation capabilities \u2014 in the shape of Westinghouse Electric Company \u2014 to Japan\u2019s Toshiba in 2006. Thus did Britain, which once led the world in the peaceful application of atomic power, end up with no nuclear power technology of its own.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Twenty-five years after Blair was told we needed four new nuclear generators, we\u2019re building only one (at Hinkley Point). Actually, the French are building it since we don\u2019t have the know-how to do it ourselves.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n France has shown nuclear is an alternative to gas. It has 56 reactors which generate more than 70 per cent of its electricity. Only 10 per cent comes from gas, which has insulated French households from the current surge in gas prices.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n No surprise, then, that President Macron this week announced six new nuclear power stations as part of a \u20ac50 billion modernisation programme.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Here in dear old Blighty we failed to invest in new nuclear or shale. So our nuclear stations are fast reaching the end of their lifecycle and we grow ever more dependent on gas imports. Stupidity piled upon stupidity.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n UK energy policy used to be driven by the need for security of supply and for affordability. Today we have neither. Both have been sacrificed to the great god of decarbonisation, which has taken precedence over everything else.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead of trying to learn from the litany of energy errors, we just compound mistake with mistake. Smart meters, in theory, should help us to use electricity more efficiently, using power for some tasks when it\u2019s off peak and cheaper.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n But our energy tsars intend to use them to manage shortages of supply, surging prices when demand is strong and even siphoning off electricity from vehicles plugged into chargers. Good luck with that.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The irony of our predicament is that, even if you\u2019re a net-zero zealot, it\u2019s impossible to see it being reached by 2050 unless nuclear power is there to provide carbon-free, base-load power, and relatively clean gas is used as a transition fuel until there is a step-change in battery technology which allows electricity to be stored in huge quantities (to use when the wind isn\u2019t blowing and the sun isn\u2019t shining).<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n But the Green Blob is irrationally averse to any use of fossil fuels even in a transition to net zero and implacably hostile to nuclear.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Most of our politicians, to their lasting shame, are in hock to them \u2014 hook, line and offshore windmill. The rest of us will be paying for their spinelessness big time for the foreseeable future.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n