‘This is very serious’: UK warns of challenging few days as energy crisis deepens
UK Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng warned the next few days will be challenging as the energy crisis deepens, and meat producers struggle with a crunch in carbon dioxide supplies.
“The next few days are going to be quite challenging,” Kwarteng told Sky News. “This is very serious.”
Gas prices are surging, unhedged electricity suppliers are at risk of failing and the usual mechanisms for protecting customers from the chaos aren’t working - meaning some kind of government support will be needed. Meat producers are warning they have just days of carbon dioxide supply left, threatening additional kinks in food supply chains that are already strained by labor shortages.
Adding to pressure on energy prices, a cable that was knocked out last week after a fire at a converter station won’t be coming back online for another month. National Grid said late on Monday that half the capacity of the IFA-1 UK-France line will resume operations on October 23, a month later than previously thought. Full capacity of 2,000 megawatts is not expected until late March next year.
With higher prices continuing to squeeze suppliers, the government needs to ensure there isn’t a cascade of bankruptcies unsettling markets and consumers. The usual mechanism of handing a failed company’s customers to another firm is being tested this year as market prices mean it’s not profitable for larger companies to come to the rescue.
Gas prices on the rise again in ‘extraordinarily tight’ market
Based on current commodity costs and the government-imposed price cap on bills, each additional customer would bring losses of about £300 to £400 ($565-$750), according to RBC Europe Ltd. That’s why companies are seeking government support.
Kwarteng also said he hopes for a solution to the carbon dioxide crisis this week. He doesn’t want to use taxpayer funds to bail them out. As he seeks new suppliers to take on those companies’ customers, and considers government support to ease the process, he said any help would be in the form of loans that have to be paid back. The price cap for consumers will remain in place; companies want it lifted.
Europe is facing a shortage of gas, following a longer and colder winter than usual, and Russia keeping a lid on supplies to the continent. Asia has also attracted more liquefied cargoes of the fuel, keeping the market tight. In the UK, surging energy prices have caused five suppliers to go under in the past few weeks, according to the regulator.
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New Year deadline for businesses to clean up greenwashing act
With next month’s COP26 meeting on the horizon, the competition regulator has warned that it will use 2022 to come down hard on businesses trying to mislead consumers over their environmental credentials.
As part of a wider campaign launched this week ahead of the UN’s Climate Change Conference, and in light of a murky, complex issue that has exploded as consumers become increasingly influenced by the impact their purchasing decisions have on the environment, the Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA) has fired a warning shot at those who inaccurately spin their products and services to appear more sustainable than they really are.
Research carried out in 2020 by the CMA and other global authorities found that 40 per cent of claims made online could be misleading, which includes the things businesses fail to mention about their products and services as well as the claims they do make and which, crucially, must also take “the full life cycle of the product” into account.
Failure to comply with trading requirements in the UK – as enshrined in the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations Act 2008 – could mean businesses find themselves subject to immediate action even before formal review and legal proceedings have begun.
Acting both on and offline, including rifling through in-store marketing and labelling, the regulator is likely to focus on industries where consumers are most concerned about being misled, including fashion and textiles, travel and transport, and “fast-moving consumer goods” such as food and drink, beauty and cleaning products, though it has stated, “any sector where the CMA finds significant concerns could become a priority.”
“Millions of UK households are rightly choosing to switch to green products as they look to reduce their carbon footprint. But it’s only right that this commitment is backed up by transparent claims from businesses,” UK energy minister, Greg Hands, said.
“The competition regulator’s new code will help to ensure this [and give] advice on how best to communicate and understand environmental claims.”
Elsewhere, the government is also reviewing green energy tariffs. Around nine million people are currently on green energy tariffs that claim to be 100 per cent renewable or simply “green”.
However, energy companies are currently able to market tariffs as “green” even if some of the energy they supply to customers comes from fossil fuels, as long as this is offset by purchasing enough certificates called Renewable Energy Guarantees of Origin to cover their customer base.
But few sectors have witnessed the challenges and complexities surrounding eco claims and greenwashing quite like financial services.
“There has been a material market response over the last 18 months across the banking, insurance and asset management sectors, with products and services continually being expanded to meet demand and help clients play their part in tackling the climate crisis,” said Gill Lofts, global sustainable finance leader at EY, speaking ahead of this week’s Zero Emissions Day.
“However, amid much good progress is rising scepticism – and scrutiny – about whether all ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ products do what they say on the tin. Providers of financial products must ensure they practice what they preach, not least because the credibility and growth of their business and the health of our environment depends on it.
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How green is your food? Eco-labels can change the way we eat, study shows
It’s lunchtime at a workplace cafeteria in Birmingham, and employees returning to work after months away during the coronavirus pandemic are noticing something has changed. Next to the sandwiches and hot and cold dishes is a small globe symbol, coloured green, orange or red with a letter in the centre from A to E. “Meet our new eco-labels”, a sign reads.
Researchers at Oxford University have analysed the ingredients in every food item on the menu and given the dishes an environmental impact score, vegetable soup (an A) to the lemon, spring onion, cheese and tuna bagel (an E).
“It probably does help you to start making some choices,” said Natasha King, while eating a plant-based hot meal. She is an employee in the Birmingham headquarters of the UK division of the food services business Compass Group. The company has teamed up with the university for a trial at more than a dozen of its cafeterias across the UK to see if a label can change the way people eat.
Getting people to switch to environmentally sustainable food options through labels is not new: hundreds of food labels exist, from ones that certify organic, to those that promise sustainable fishing. But a new type is gaining steam, one that summarises multiple environmental indicators from greenhouse gas emissions to water use into a single letter indicating the product’s impact.
Some businesses in France began using one this year and the NGO Foundation Earth announced its own trial to begin in UK and EU supermarkets this autumn.
The first challenge for the scientists designing the trial is the image the diners see on the signs. How much information do you include in a label? How do you strike a balance between effective and practical?
During the pandemic, researchers ran studies on an online supermarket where people were given fake money to complete their fake shopping list. The trial gave a sense of what labels were more likely to sway people to buy eco-friendly. They found the most effective way to get people to not buy an item was to use a dark red globe symbol with the word “worse” printed on it. But while effective, it had real world limitations.
“You’re not going to be able to get anyone to use that unless you threaten them with legislation, because they don’t want to say ‘don’t buy this’,” said Brian Cook, the senior researcher leading the project.
And what works for this cafeteria setting, with lots of room for information on walls and beside the food, may not work on food packaging in a supermarket that’s already full of information, much of it government mandated. “The real estate there is highly competitive,” Cook said.
The next challenge in supermarkets is the scale. The sandwiches, soups, and hot dishes laid out in this cafeteria only scratch the surface of the Compass food options. It was the Oxford researcher Michael Clark’s job to go through the hundreds of meals made up of roughly 10 ingredients each, determining the environmental impact. Doing the same for the tens of thousands of products and myriad ingredients in a supermarket would be a Herculean task.
Then the scientists had to create a formula to determine environmental impact – a process full of tough decisions using imperfect data. “There’s neverending ways you can do it and how you weight the different indicators … how you want to nudge people,” Cook said.
This research team decided on four indicators for this trial’s formula: greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, water pollution, and water use (calculated differently based on water scarcity in each region). They weighted each indicator equally in their equation for overall impact.
Other research has looked at land use instead of biodiversity, or using a total of 16 indicators. Whatever the choice, it can change the eco-score that comes out.
“Almonds, you know: great for your health and low in a lot of environment indicators, but then you get to the water, and they are off the charts,” Cook said.
But in most cases, the researchers say the biggest environmental impact will be to get people off meat. “Given that the premise is to get people to shift behaviour, that most correct and scientifically robust approach may actually not be the best approach,” Clark said.
He has considered that a national rollout of labels might need to be based on indicators already prioritised by businesses or mandated by governments, to make the integration as easy as possible for businesses.
In a corner table at the Compass cafeteria, five employees eat together, four of them have chosen a vegetarian meal. They say many of them would usually have opted for meat.
At another table sits Jenny Haines, eating a vegetable stew (rated a C). She does not often think about the environmental impact of the food she eats, but she says it looked appetising, healthy, and was placed right at the front of the hot meals counter.
This was part of an intentional strategy by Compass to find ways to get customers to buy food with a better environmental impact score. Plant-based dishes are placed at the top of menus and at the front of cafe counters, with meat dishes at the back. They do not use the words “vegan” or “plant-based” so people do not feel dictated to, and they gave their dishes a rebrand. “Vegan sweet potato mac n cheese” became “Ultimate New York ‘cheezy’ sweet potato mac”, for example.
At the centre of everything is taste. “Ticking the box isn’t good enough,” said Ryan Holmes, the culinary director of Compass. “We need to put plant-based dishes that can stand next to the meat dishes.”
Some politicians are also interested in this issue. MPs in the UK and Canada have introduced private member’s bills this year aiming to mandate environmental impact labels on food.
Cook gives presentations to business groups and some policymakers in the UK, and says people have a lot of interest in labels. He thinks we will see these labels in some form on products sooner or later.
“It’s definitely part of the toolkit of what you need,” he said. “And in terms of the things that are risky to all stakeholders, this is relatively low risk.”
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Running Out of Green for Energy
Europe’s wind woes are a lesson for the United States about where to put our energy priorities.
Perhaps the Europeans are victims of circumstance as much as anything else, but those living across the pond may be in line to freeze to death (or starve themselves trying to keep the heat on) because there’s a growing shortage of natural gas and the wind’s not blowing. Then again, starvation may be on the table anyway for millions of Britons whose natural gas crisis is now leading to a shortage of fertilizer that also affects the supply of carbon dioxide. Their bad luck has continued as a major electricity interconnect with French suppliers is offline until next March due to a recent fire. Ironically, Great Britain has reasonable supplies of oil in the adjacent parts of the North Sea but is trying to wean itself off fossil fuels.
The same shortages are occurring in other parts of Europe as well. The continent has been hit by a perfect storm of weather that’s too calm to make wind power reliable, local mandates to close coal and/or nuclear plants over the next few years, and a shortage of natural gas that’s been caused by Russian pressure on Germany to finalize approval of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. All these factors have contributed to the present energy crisis, but it’s made worse (and pricier) by a regulatory scheme called the European Trading System, where carbon allowances are bought and sold. The price of European Union Allowances, or EUAs, has surged nearly 50% this year after the chilly winter of 2020-21 and slow economic thaw from the pandemic.
Bear in mind, of course, that Europe is blessed with several more traditional sources of energy, such as the aforementioned North Sea oil and natural gas, deposits of coal, and (in some locations like France) abundant nuclear power — all of which the climate-enlightened nations are turning their back on to harness an unreliable caprice. (Solar power is also present in Europe, but provides less than 1/10 of the continent’s overall electricity, a far smaller share than wind.) Even hydroelectric power is suffering thanks to a dry spell in some regions.
That shortsightedness isn’t lost on some experts. As environmentalist and author Michael Shellenberger tweeted: “When I was in the in UK 2 years ago the country’s leading experts assured me that Britain didn’t need another 2 GW nuclear plant because wind energy was cheap and, in a pinch, they could just import power from France. Now, the wind’s barely blowing & the interconnect has failed.” Oops. But the EUA speculators, which include hedge funds, are living fat and happy.
Fortunately, Shellenberger also points out that there’s pressure in some quarters to maintain and even expand nuclear power, which environmentalists hate despite the fact that it doesn’t contribute to the carbon load.
Because it’s Europe that’s under the gun, all this bad news may not resonate in our day-to-day life here in America quite yet. But it’s worth pointing out that our federal and state policy isn’t unlike Europe’s; we’ve just had the buffer of huge natural gas supplies and a pre-virus booming economy to cushion the blow. Many of our readers (including this writer) live in states that have renewable energy portfolio mandates and a similar cap-and-trade scheme to Europe’s, meaning utility companies are forced to invest in unreliable energy sources and participate in a wealth transfer scheme with states as the beneficiary.
With Joe Biden’s bullheaded resumption of the Paris Agreement, one might think we’re trying to place ourselves in the same boat as Europe — and one would be right. But as The Wall Street Journal cautions: “Europe is showing the folly of trying to purge CO2 from the economy. No matter how heavily subsidized, renewables can’t replace fossil fuels in a modern economy. Households and businesses get stuck with higher energy bills even as CO2 emissions increase. Europe’s problems are a warning to the U.S., if only Democrats would heed it.”
We’re not counting on them doing so, but help may only be an election away.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/82882-running-out-of-green-for-energy-2021-09-22
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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