Wednesday 22 May 2013

Interests to Declare

With Peter Lilley increasingly vocal in the public energy debate ** (what's the opposite of mealy-mouthed ?), we have the amusing position of heavyweight vested commercial interests ranged against each other - on the Tory benches.

It's long been a source of ad hominem ammunition against Tim Yeo and "Lord Deben" (Gummer the Bummer, © Jasper Carrott) that they stand to gain materially from the pro-renewables policies they promote so assiduously.  Why, we've even pointed them out on these pages.

But of course Peter Lilley is up to his eyeballs in oil interests, some of which are in distant and none-too-salubrious parts; and fairness dictates we draw attention to these 'n all.

Does it matter ?  As far as we can tell they put their interests into the public domain.  We get the picture: they are unashamedly talking their own book.  And if they are the more knowledgeable for their vested involvement, perhaps it adds to the quality of the debate - capitalists at work ...

What do we think ?  I still can't abide Gummer or Yeo.

ND

** but why is his Spectator piece so badly written ?  that's the real offence.    

13 comments:

Bill Quango MP said...

Can't stand either of them also.
Its that they promote without a hint of balance. And that when on Newsnight or wherever, the presenter often fails to point out the vested.

Blue Eyes said...

How does such blatant corruption go on under our noses?

rwendland said...

Lilley's piece is rather selective on the facts though.

He says "UK shales are a mile thick" (surely missing out the word "some"), but fails to say our shales are very much deeper than US shales so harder to extract. Says "The green lobby is in control of DECC", but fails to say the majority of DECC spending (about 80% I recall - could be wrong) is on the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (2013/14 £3.2 billion) to clear up our negative nuclear legacy.

And as I understood it Jonathan Brearley was running the EMR contracts-for-differences show, pro-nuclear rather than pro-wind. While EMR uncertainty has probably delayed gas generation plant builds, that does not seem to make him a hard greenie that Lilley loosely implies.

Doesn't impress as a balanced analysis.

Diogenes Sinope said...

@BE

Comment from the WSJ yesterday. "Politicians are in the business of buying votes" and taking it forward, there is a short hop to being bought themselves.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324787004578494510912071572.html

I've been tracking the implementation of a piece of 2012 legislation. Before it became law, it was hacked to bits by lobbyists for private companies who would lose out.

Once enshrined in law, the same group and hacking the implementation of the law by lobbying government departments and even the MoJ.

Who is to blame? We are as we voted for the system.

Nick Drew said...

Mr W - oh yes, polemic all right, with errors and selective 'facts' aplenty.

I also don't like the way he concedes the assertion that large amounts of putative UK shale production wouldn't lower the price of gas here, they'd simply be sucked across to continental europe, and we'd still be paying 'European' prices

that's physically where much of the gas (in the quantities he envisages) would flow: but in those amounts it would almost certainly become the price-setting marginal EU source

Budgie said...

rwendland said: "Lilley ... fails to say the majority of DECC spending is on the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (2013/14 £3.2 billion) to clear up our negative nuclear legacy".

And you fail to say that the government plans to replace most of the Nuclear with 20,000 windmills which is estimated to cost us, the bill payers, around £30 billion per year.

Nick Drew said...

£30 billion p.a., Budgie ? - a bit of hyperbole there, old chap

(and I think my anti-subsidy credentials are in full working order)

the UK's entire electricity bill - residential + commercial/industrial -last year was approx £31 billion in total

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