NYC Democrats whine about Con Ed hikes caused by their own dumb policies
Better sit down before you open your next Con Ed bill: Rates are set to soar, starting next month — and double over the next two years.
If you’re a progressive, you can’t complain. What did you think would happen, based on your anti-fossil-fuel, big-spending, anti-business agenda?
On Thursday, the state’s Public Service Commission OK’d hikes of 9.1% for electricity and 8.4% for gas, starting in August, along with additional jumps though 2025. At that point, typical bills will have doubled, from about $70 a month to $140 — or an extra $840 a year.
A whining letter from the City Council demanded that Gov. Kathy Hochul use her executive powers to stop the pain.
The letter called out an “already dire affordability crisis” and included specious worries about poor New Yorkers.
That “affordability crisis,” notably, is also of the left’s own making, thanks to its anti-housing, inflation-fueling polices.
Why is Con Ed hiking rates?
True, execs at the company did enjoy a pay bump in 2022, with CEO Timothy Cawley getting a 4% hike in base compensation.
But the central driver is idiotic green policies, both at the state and federal level — clamping down on fossil-fuel use, forcing infrastructure improvements to handle the shift, taxing utilities to the hilt, etc.
That fuels costs that get passed on to consumers.
This week, Team Biden struck yet another blow in its war against domestic energy production, jacking up costs for drillers on federal land: Royalty rates will rise from 12.5% to almost 17%; minimum per-acre lease bids will quintuple.
The administration estimates this will cost producers some $1.8 billion over the next eight years — with the possibility of yet more cost hikes to come.
A perfect prescription to discourage future exploration and make extraction more costly.
And the same progs whinging about Con Ed rate hikes applaud this nonsense.
Just as they applauded the state’s insane Climate Leadership and Action Plan.
That brainchild of Albany Dems, signed into law by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2019, aims to make New York’s power generation 100% emissions-free by 2040.
The costly upgrades demanded by that plan, in preparation for our (still nonexistent) transition to green energy, are a big contributor to Con Ed’s rising costs.
And this followed Cuomo’s painful ban on fracking (a source of much cleaner fuel for power) and came as he moved to shutter a major source of emissions-free power, the Indian Point nuclear plant.
On top of all that, 21% of the average consumer’s electric bill goes to cover Con Ed’s New York state property taxes.
The fallout from this, as anyone capable of basic arithmetic could have foreseen, is higher power costs for consumers across the board.
And those costs hit low-income families, who can least afford it, hard.
That’s never part of the affluent greenies’ calculus, of course. No doubt they figure they can always somehow squeeze the rich to subsidize the higher costs. (Until that money runs out, too, anyway.)
The truth is, progressive fantasies about high-tech windmills and solar panels won’t keep costs down; they’ll keep boosting them — unless, of course, they trigger blackouts. Then no one will have to pay a dime, while they sit in the dark, with no AC.
https://nypost.com/2023/07/21/democrats-whine-about-con-ed-hikes-caused-by-their-own-dumb-policies/
***********************************************Biden Climate Plan Gives 'Dark Money' Foreign Group Approval Over US Military Contracts
Buried deep in the weeds of a proposed federal rule is a piece of bureaucratic jargon that is stirring fears that an outside group with troubling connections could be making decisions that impact America’s defense contractors.
The rule, with the federal ID number of FAR-2021-15, is still in the drafting process, with a report taking the hundreds of comments received into consideration due on July 26.
The rule’s purpose is to “require major Federal suppliers to publicly disclose greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related financial risk and to set science-based reduction targets,” according to a federal procurement website.
The draft version of the rule says that large defense contractors must develop “science-based targets” for reducing greenhouse gases and that “these targets must be validated by SBTi.”
The draft rule then notes that “SBTi is a partnership between CDP, the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), the World Resources Institute (WRI), and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF, also known as the World Wildlife Fund).”
A less glowing report in the Washington Free Beacon claimed that the London-based group “is funded by the Democratic Party’s main dark money network.”
The site alleged that one group managing SBTi is the “We Mean Business Coalition,” which it called “a front group for a $900 million left-leaning dark money organization called the New Venture Fund.”
The Free Beacon said the New Venture Fund is on the hot seat over its political activities during the 2020 election year.
Aside from potential twists and turns of the organization’s money trail, having it in the middle of a federal procurement system irks many.
SBTi would be “operating in a quasi-regulatory stance,” said former SBTI board member Bill Baue, a sustainability expert who is no longer affiliated with the group.
“And yet it doesn’t have the kind of checks and balances or transparency for such an organization … certainly there’s reason to be concerned,” he said, touching on areas such as financial conflicts, ethics issues or proper governance.
BP America filed a comment against the rule saying, “We believe that by appointing a third-party arbiter of companies’ eligibility to be major contractors, the proposed regulation could be damaging and counter-productive, both for the proposal’s underlying decarbonization goals, which bp supports, and for the effectiveness and competitiveness of federal major procurements.”
“By effectively appointing a third-party arbiter to determine which companies are eligible to be major contractors, without the requisite degree of federal government involvement in or oversight,” the statement continued, “we believe that the proposal is at variance with recommendations of the Administrative Conference of the United States, presenting risks to the integrity and legal durability of the proposal.”
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce poked holes in the plan by noting that another outside group — CDP — would be reviewing company data and plans and being paid in the process.
“Major contractors would have to submit this disclosure by filling out the questionnaire of a private entity — CDP — and by paying CDP thousands of dollars in fees,” its statement said.
“The Proposed Rule would further require major contractors to develop ‘science-based targets’ for reducing GHG emissions in accordance with specific and stringent requirements developed and maintained by a private entity, the Science Based Targets initiative (‘SBTi’) (which is not subject to the legal and political constraints that apply to federal administrative agencies) and to have those targets ‘validated’ by the same entity. All in all, these additional requirements would tack millions of dollars onto each ‘major’ contractor’s total annual compliance spending,” it wrote.
Travis Fisher, a senior energy research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said the concept is a loser, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
“I think Americans will be upset when they realize the Biden administration is trying to put a bunch of unelected bureaucrats and a climate activist group — headquartered in London — in charge of long-term planning for our national defense contractors,” he said.
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Giant windfarm off Norfolk coast halted due to spiralling costs
The government’s green energy ambitions have been dealt a blow after plans for a giant offshore windfarm off the Norfolk coast ground to a halt due to spiralling supply chain costs and rising interest rates.
The Swedish energy giant Vattenfall said it would stop work on the multibillion-pound Norfolk Boreas windfarm, designed to power the equivalent of 1.5m British homes, because it was no longer profitable.
The state-owned company said costs had climbed by 40% due to a rise in global gas prices which have fed through to the cost of manufacturing, putting “significant pressure on all new offshore wind projects”.
“It simply doesn’t make sense to continue this project,” said Anna Borg, Vattenfall’s chief executive. “Higher inflation and capital costs are affecting the entire energy sector, but the geopolitical situation has made offshore wind and its supply chain particularly vulnerable.”
Vattenfall won a government contract to build the Norfolk Boreas project last year after bidding a record low price of £37.35 per megawatt hour (MWh) for the electricity generated.
Borg said it was “so obvious to everyone that the situation has changed dramatically since last year”, meaning the price would now need to be “significantly higher” to make financial sense.
According to its latest results, the decision to stop work has cost the company 5.5bn Swedish krona (£415m) but Borg said the move was “prudent” given the impact of costs on the project’s future profitability.
“The market framework is simply not reflecting the market situation,” Borg said. “Something needs to happen. It’s important to understand that our suppliers are being squeezed. They have problems in their supply chain so it’s not so easy to mitigate these situations.”
Borg said Vattenfall has called on the UK government to adapt the financial framework which controls the price and was in “constructive discussions” with officials.
Industry experts have said that without an overhaul of the government’s financing approach to take into account the steep climb in costs, the UK risks missing its target to increase its offshore wind capacity fivefold to 50GW by 2030.
Jess Ralston, the head of energy at the thinktank the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, said the government had set the starting price for the next contract auction before the global rise in market prices, meaning it was now too low.
“There are some concerns that this could be too low for projects that have suffered supply chain price inflation, excluding them from entering the auction,” she said. “The sensible strategy would be to seek to involve in auctions as much capacity as possible.”
Under the government’s scheme developers can compete in the auction for a contract which gives a guaranteed price for the electricity generated. If wholesale market prices are below this level the project receives a “top up” payment through a levy on energy bills. But if market prices are above the “strike price” the project must pay back the difference to consumers, leading to lower bills.
Setting the auction’s starting price at a higher point would still result in contract prices well below the current market rate, according to Ralston, meaning windfarms will continue to pay money back to households for the foreseeable future.
Dan McGrail, the chief executive of RenewableUK, said ministers would have to take into account global inflationary pressures “which have significantly changed the economic landscape”.
“We need a stronger industrial strategy for the sector, which the chancellor should support with new measures in the autumn statement as a matter of urgency,” he said.
“The government needs to step up with a robust response to enable industrial growth throughout Britain.”
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Making war on motorists in Britain
Since Boris Johnson quit as an MP last month, Labour has been confident about winning the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election. Yet not so confident that Danny Beales, the party’s candidate, felt he could get through the campaign without lambasting Sadiq Khan’s plans to expand London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) to cover the capital. ‘It’s not the right time to extend Ulez to outer London,’ he told a hustings a fortnight ago. ‘It’s just not.’
From the end of next month, anyone driving a non-compliant vehicle – which in practice means most diesel cars sold before 2015 and petrol cars sold before 2005 – is liable to pay a daily charge of £12.50. If they fail to do this, and are caught on a network of number-plate recognition cameras, they are liable to pay a fine of £180. Taking fees and fines together, Ulez raised £224 million last year – a figure which will almost certainly rocket upon expansion to the whole of London.
The London mayor may be refusing to back down on his signature policy, but many others in the Labour party have realised that Ulez is a political disaster for the working people whose support it needs to win next year’s general election.
People such as Tracy Buckle, one of many thousands of small-business owners who rely on road vehicles, but whose lives are about to be made a misery because of the Ulez expansion. She runs a family gardening business, Everlush Lawn Care, in Beckenham. ‘We have two vans, one of which is only five years old, but when I put the registration number into the computer it shows up as non-compliant,’ she says. ‘It would cost us £600 a month to pay the Ulez charges, so we are thinking of downsizing the business. The van cost us £20,000, and we can’t afford to replace it. My daughter-in-law is a teacher who drives six miles to work in Orpington. She can’t afford to replace her car, and the only alternative is to take three buses.’
The phrase ‘war on motorists’ has often been overused, not least by drivers who feel aggrieved after being caught speeding. But hostilities have reached a level at which it is hard for ordinary drivers not to wonder whether there is a systematic campaign to ease them out of their vehicles – or else to milk them for revenue.
It is not just London and Ulez: low emission zones, low traffic neighbourhoods and parking, bus lane and box junction fines are proliferating across the country. Birmingham has had a low emission zone since 2021, Bristol since November. Glasgow began enforcing its zone last month. Cambridge is planning a £5 a day congestion fee, while Oxford and Canterbury will soon limit motorists from driving between one area of their city and another.
Ostensibly, Ulez, like all these schemes, is about air quality. Khan’s office claims, as justification for the extension, that central London has seen since 2019 a reduction of 46 per cent in nitrogen oxides and a 41 per cent reduction in PM 2.5 pollution (particulates which are less than 2.5 micrometres in diameter). You don’t have to sniff too hard, however, to smell a rat. The mayor’s study arrived at these figures by comparing actual roadside measurements with what it guesses pollution levels would have been had there been no Ulez for cars. Yet the graph showing the predicted path of emissions in 2020 and 2021 without Ulez looks remarkably flat – in spite of a collapse in traffic due to the pandemic. According to the mayor’s modelling, emissions would have fallen by 10 per cent in 2020, the year of two lockdowns. Department for Transport data shows that traffic in central London decreased by much more than this in 2020 – by 22 per cent in Westminster, for example, and 19 per cent in Camden. Pollution might also have been expected to fall thanks to a suspension of construction work.
A more independent source is an Imperial College study which looked at pollution in central London for 12 weeks before and 12 weeks after the original Ulez was introduced in 2019. It found that overall nitrogen oxide levels fell by just 3 per cent and there was no significant reduction in PM 2.5 pollution. In some sites, pollution actually worsened. One of the authors concluded: ‘Our research suggests that a Ulez on its own is not an effective strategy to improve air quality.’
In fact, air pollution has been on a long downward trend for more than 50 years, beginning long before Ulez. Nationwide, emissions of nitrogen oxides have fallen by 77 per cent and PM 2.5s by 85 per cent since 1970 – a result of less coal-burning, cleaner vehicles and many other factors. Cars have become steadily cleaner over that period, though not to the extent that would justify charging a new car nothing.
This is what has offended so many people about Ulez: its highly regressive nature. While the owners of old cars are hammered, the £12.50 daily charge does not fall on the owners of supercars who turn up every summer to speed around the streets of Kensington. Nor does it fall on the owners of electric cars, even though the vast bulk of particulate pollution emitted by vehicles comes from brakes and tyres, not engines.
Khan claims to have the public on his side for expanding Ulez, and there are certainly a large number of young non-motorists in London who are not directly exposed to the charges. But it all rather depends on how you ask the question. A YouGov poll commissioned by the mayor asked people whether or not they supported Ulez expansion, beginning with the statement that it was being enlarged ‘to tackle air pollution’. It found that 51 per cent were in favour of the scheme being implemented and 27 per cent were against. However, the Conservative party commissioned its own YouGov poll, this time prefacing the question with the statement that it was being introduced to raise extra revenue. The situation was reversed, with 34 per cent saying it should be expanded and 51 per cent saying it shouldn’t.
There is a growing backlash against Ulez expansion. The Tories’ new mayoral candidate, Susan Hall, has pledged that, if elected, she will ensure ‘Sadiq Khan’s disastrous Ulez expansion will stop on day one. No ifs, no buts’. Several Conservative-controlled councils have also launched a judicial review of the scheme. But it would be a mistake to see the war on motorists as a partisan affair. Councils of all colours have set their sights on drivers to raise revenue, as their grants from central government have been whittled away. In London in 2021, 7.5 million penalty tickets (for parking, infringements of bus lanes, box junctions and others) were handed out, a rise of 41 per cent in a single year. Across the country, councils are raising £800,000 a day in parking fines.
Until May’s local elections, the Conservatives were proposing to introduce a traffic scheme in Canterbury which would split the city into zones, with large fines for residents who drove from one zone to another. Council leader Ben Fitter-Harding, who had championed the scheme, lost his seat as a result.
The concept of low traffic neighbourhoods, where access to side roads is blocked off and through traffic kept to main roads, is nothing new, and until recently such schemes attracted little controversy. What is different is the scale of the schemes, isolating whole neighbourhoods, and the use of ubiquitous penalty charge notices.
What’s also new is the disturbing tendency for objectors to these anti-motorist schemes to be dismissed as followers of right-wing conspiracies – or as being in association with the vandals who have been creeping out at night to destroy cameras being installed for Ulez.
In Oxford, plans for a low traffic neighbourhood would mean that motorists who needed to travel a short distance to, say, a super-market would be forced to undertake a long diversion via the bypass. When, understandably, the plan inspired a protest march, local drivers were bewildered to find their objections treated as a far-right conspiracy – ‘How 15-minute cities turned into an international conspiracy theory’, asserted a CNN headline about the march. True, this being Oxford, the demonstration did attract some high-profile outsiders, and opponents have exaggerated by calling the scheme a ‘climate lockdown’. But surely residents are entitled to complain about something that will have a huge impact on their livelihoods without being treated as if they are somehow in cahoots with conspiracy theorists.
In any case, those who assert that Ulez, low traffic neighbourhoods and congestion charges are about something larger than mere traffic management have a point. The government’s target to achieve net zero by 2050 is only going to intensify the war on motorists. It is already becoming clear that, short of a miracle breakthrough in battery technology, net zero is not compatible with motoring for the masses. The idea that electric cars would be on a cost parity with petrol and diesel ones by 2024 – promoted by Bloomberg among others just two years ago – has proven a forlorn hope. Not only are electric cars much more expensive to buy, they also cost more to run at current petrol prices. They will become even more costly once the government – inevitably – seeks to make up for the £28 billion a year in fuel duty that it stands to lose as petrol and diesel cars are forced off the road. Moreover, electric vehicles aren’t really carbon-neutral or anything like it. Once the industry is forced to decarbonise the steel, plastics and battery materials which go into the cars, purchase costs will be going upwards too.
Volkswagen is already complaining about a ‘general reluctance to buy electric cars’ and, beyond Tesla, shares in manufacturers have slumped over the past year. Shares in Polestar and China’s Xpeng are down by more than half. As reality has set in, it has become clear there is a limited market for these cars.
While the banning of petrol and diesel cars tends to steal headlines, it is less understood that part of the plan for net zero involves the outright reduction in use of road transport. In its Sixth Carbon Budget, the government’s Climate Change Committee writes: ‘Effective demand-side policy is also essential – we identify significant opportunities, and advantages, to reducing travel demand, but this will not happen without firm policies.’ In its net-zero strategy for 2021, the government sets an ambition for half of all journeys in towns and cities to be walked or cycled by 2030. Given that in 2021, 57 per cent of such journeys in England were by car, 32 per cent walking, 2 per cent by bicycle, 4 per cent by bus and 3 per cent by train, this envisages quite a change.
Making life awkward for motorists may come to be seen as a form of preparatory work for what lies ahead – weaning the greater part of the population off their cars altogether. But motorists are not going to go quietly.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/highway-robbery
***************************************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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
