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A call came in from GB News late on Tuesday 18 August, asking whether I would come on their midnight show to discuss an embargoed speech on climate action by the Conservatives, to be given the following day by the Shadow Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho.
As I embarked on some last-minute research, I did not realise I was about to be plunged into another row over dark money think tanks, which our Media Sovereignty Act Campaign seeks to ban.
The speech was an announcement by Coutinho on how the Conservative Party proposed to tear up its own Government’s legislation for a carbon-free target date for 2050.
The press release had a covering statement by the Conservative Leader Kemi Badenoch, which also committed the party to maximising new North Sea oil and gas, despite the field being already 93% depleted.
This follows Badenoch’s extraordinary ruling that no Conservative Party member who supports the party’s previous commitment to a carbon-free 2050 could stand for selection as a party candidate. Yet polling shows a majority of members support climate action.
The International Energy Agency has stated that new oil and gas would mean the world cannot remain under the Paris Climate Agreement’s mandated maximum global temperature rise of 1.5C.
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Coutinho’s speech was based on the new report by the Conservative-aligned think tank Onward called “Firm Foundations” on the costs of removing carbon pollution from the electricity grid.
I quickly searched online for Onward’s donors.
Onward is better than most right-wing think tanks, as it reports donors to the end of the previous year. But it is dark on donors since 1 January.
Last year’s major donor list shocked me more than I expected.
It included the privatised National Grid plc, now owned by Abu Dhabi and US, Norwegian and other investors.
National Grid plc is one of the key stakeholders in the recommendations of the Onward report on cutting electricity costs.
Another major donor that shocked me was Equinor, co-owners of the controversial Rosebank oil field, that Kemi Badenoch’s speech on the Onward report gave full backing to.
Other fossil fuelled donors included billionaire oil giants Shell and BP.
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When I reported the various perceived conflicts of interest on the show, the GB News presenter dismissed the conflict of interest point, stating that what mattered was not who funded the report but what it contained.
I only had time to scan the report summary before the television interview.
But once I had time to read the full report, one of its main theses was that electricity prices could be cut by ending most government policies to cut fossil fuel consumption in the UK.
It calls for ending the UK’s participation in the Emissions Trading Scheme, which puts a price on carbon pollution, the ending of incentives to electrify heating and cars, tearing up the Climate Change Act – the law which commits the UK to cutting its emissions – and the retention of 85% of current fossil gas power production up to 2050.
It admits that this would emit up to 500 million more tonnes of carbon pollution. But the “economic” arguments also alarmed me.
The assertion that ending decarbonisation investment would result in cheaper electricity was founded on two outrageous assumptions: that fossil gas prices would be significantly lower than at present for the next three decades, and that nuclear power costs could be reduced radically.
Neither of which has happened in the real world for decades.
Onward’s Response
We put these points to Onward. In response to the alleged conflict of interest due to National Grid being a donor, it replied: “It is unclear why they would favour report drawing attention to cost of transmission. Networks make returns based on asset base size and arguably incentivised to build more infrastructure.”
It added: “The report accepts the current network market structure as is.”
Yep. Onward accepts the massive costs added to electricity bills that pay for the profits of its donor, the privatised National Grid plc.
Unite, the trade union, has estimated that there is an effective ‘privatisation profit levy’ on every electricity bill of £500.
In response to the analysis that its conclusion that abandoning new renewables would be cheaper was based on presumptions that the cost of both new gas and nuclear are lower for the next 25 years than they have been recently, it accepted that it was reasonable for us to point out the role of gas spikes and the “mixed” track record of recent nuclear projects.
