I make no claims to be an economist, but even I can recognise a daft argument when I see one. The Indy leads with an article about the collapse of green energy firms due to a government “U-turn”.
Two of the UK’s leading clean energy companies have gone into administration on the same day, blaming the Government’s U-turn on energy policy.
Nearly 1,000 staff were laid off in Leicester yesterday as home insulation and solar panel provider, Mark Group, fell into administration.
Within hours Climate Energy, which describes itself as “the UK’s largest provider of energy efficiency solutions” had also closed down, announcing the news on their website.
Mark Group blamed the closure on the goverment’s recent turnaround on energy policy including the removal of subsidies to renewables.
If your business model relies on government subsidies to work, well, it’s just too bad if the government changes its policy. And, frankly, why should my money be used to prop up such concerns?
But, no, the real peach is in the comments here from Foghorn:
Presumably British consumers will now buy Chinese imports and the British workers will go on the dole and the country loses the tax income.
Er… My money is paying their wages in the form of subsidies. So them losing their jobs means that I am no longer paying their wages (I might be paying JSA, but that’s another matter). I am not losing tax income because I was paying it in the form of wages in the first place. It’s a variation of the broken window fallacy. Worryingly, people really do think that taxpayer-funded jobs provide income for the taxpayer…
Presumably they can be convinced that perpetual motion really does work.
Agreed. Those who live by the sword (subsidies) will also die by the sword (subsidies being scrapped).
A basic business management rule is never to put all your eggs in one basket. If your business relies so heavily on a single source of revenue — in this case, government subsidy — that its loss will kill the business itself, you’re doing management wrong.
That was a lesson I learned the hard way around five years ago. Nowadays, I have around five clients spread over two industries, rather than rely on just the one.
Ha Ha
I live near Hull and here the local media are cock-a-hoop over the new Siemens wind turbine factory that is being built here. Looking at all the stationary windmills that have been standing idle for almost a week because of a complete lack of wind, I’m wondering how long it will be before this particular bubble bursts. Obviously the factory is only being built here because of Government subsidies. It has now dawned on all sane people that man made climate change is nonsense, the problem is that so much money has been sunk into solving the problem that no one can now admit that there isn’t a problem and never was.
“man made climate change is nonsense”… not necessarily.
Climate Change *is* demonstrably happening. What we *don’t* know to any useful degree of accuracy is (a) how much influence our own activities are having on it, and (b) what, if anything, we should do about it.
Another issue is that if we’re pumping more energy into the climate in some form or other, there’s no reason to assume the climate will express that excess energy in the form of heat. There’s a lot of energy in a tornado or hurricane, for example. (Suddenly, all those giant concrete windmills don’t look like such a brilliant idea.)
Finally, there are humans living in northern Canada, the Antarctic, Siberia, and the Gobi and Sahara deserts. As a species, we clearly don’t have to worry about a new ice age or a couple of degrees increase in average temperatures we’ve survived both. Many coastal *cities* might need higher river banks, better flood protection, etc., but that’s just engineering. We’re good at that too.
Personally, I think it’s all a conspiracy invented by the Americans to avoid having to rebuild vast swathes of New Orleans.
I should also like to add that point (a) above is only worth pursuing if evidence *does* suggest that our influence on the climate is substantial. Even then, it matters only to lawyers with a peculiar axe to grind: what matters to the rest of us is point (b). And the answer to that is, most likely, “nothing”.