Energy

What Happened To GB Energy?

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“In a world where vows are worthless.Where making a pledge means nothing. Where promises are made to be broken, it would be nice to see words come back into power.” – Chuck Palahniuk

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One of Common Weal’s most important policy successes has been how we’ve pushed the debate in Scotland and beyond on the issue of publicly owned energy. Energy is absolutely vital to our entire economy regardless of which side of the left-right spectrum you believe that economy should serve (as Prof Steve Keen puts it: “Capital without energy is a sculpture; Labour without energy is a corpse.”) and in the UK we, unlike many other states, have decided to sell off our energy sector to the point that more of our energy is owned by the public sectors of other nations than is owned by our own, never mind the vast swathes owned by private multinationals that are the size of countries.

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Shedding Light on Rural Heat

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“One afternoon, when I was four years old, my father came home, and he found me in the living room in front of a roaring fire, which made him very angry. Because we didn’t have a fireplace.” – Victor Borge

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If the Scottish Government knew they were going to abandon its climate targets (see Robin’s column for more on that) then they could have probably saved themselves a lot of strife last week over their botched policies and communications around rural heating. If they had listened to us almost five years ago when we submitted a comprehensive policy paper and two extensive policy briefings to them on decarbonising heat in off-grid and rural areas, they might have avoided both weeks of bad headlines now.

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Time For Some Tech Optimism

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

 “I’m an optimist because I know what technology can accomplish and I know what people can accomplish.” – Bill Gates

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Despite my scientific training and engineering background (or perhaps because of them) when talking about the climate emergency, I’ve generally been wary about going down the route of tech-optimism, of believing that there’s a technological solution to the problem just around the corner. There are three broad reasons for this. The first is that risk that the tech fails and leaves us in a worse place than we currently are. Continuing to emit carbon until the day that a tech-priest grants us the blessing of effective carbon capture only works if the blessing actually arrives. If it doesn’t, then we’re left with a larger problem and even less time to fix it. And a strategy like “Net Zero” that fixes part of the problem (like EV cars fixing carbon emissions) but doesn’t address the rest of the problem (overall air quality) isn’t even a solution.

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The Welsh Way Forward – Part 2

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The conversion of an industry to public ownership is only the first step towards Socialism. It is an all-important step, for without it the conditions of further progress are not established. One important consequence is a shift of power that resolves the conflict between public and private claims. The danger of the State machine being manipulated by private vested interests is thus reduced. – Aneurin Bevan

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Wales risks creeping ahead of Scotland in progressive policy again, if the Welsh Government adopts proposals put forward by the Institute for Welsh Affairs to radically increase the amount of community owned energy in Wales.

Their new paper, Sharing Power, Spreading Wealth, is a comprehensive map of the state of public energy in Wales and identifies just about every angle that we’ve been campaigning for in Scotland (including mention of the role of Ynni Cymru – the new public energy company set up by the Welsh Government based on our Powering Our Ambitions model of a National Energy Company).

The paper, like much of our energy campaigning, identifies profit extraction from energy resources as a major driver of the current cost of living crisis as well as a major barrier against the development of renewable energy around communities (it’s a bit of a hard sell to see your landscape covered in wind and solar generators knowing that your own energy bills keep going up and none of the profits stay similarly within eyeshot) but also identifies that Wales along, with even more limited devolved funding than Scotland has, is unlikely to be able to nationalise the entire sector.

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Carbon Capture Is The Last Thing We Should Do

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Note to the wise: whenever someone insists that he wants to buy something from you, but tells you there’s no real value in it yet, two things are happening: he’s lying, and you’re being taken.” – Michael A. Stackpole

(This blog post previously appeared in The National.)

Scotland is in the midst of a grand selloff of our land – again. Folk in the sector are openly saying that instead of valuing land based on grouse and deer, Scottish uplands are now being valued based on its ability to be harvested for carbon capture credits. Andy Wightman recently announced that the US-owned, London-based hedge fund Gresham House is now the third largest private landowner in Scotland based on this market.

But this isn’t a column about land reform but instead about the push for carbon capture and sequestration itself which is increasingly being relied upon by politicians to greenwash their pro-fossil fuel policies.

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Getting Energy Right

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

Lucretius Corvo: What will happen when [the power gauges] reach the maximum?
Corellus: As my tutors on Mars would say, Captain, the Omnissiah acts mysteriously. The ways of the Motive Force may be understood, from positive to negative and on through the circuit. That which guides it may not.
Lucretius Corvo: You do not know.
Corellus: No. That is what they generally meant when they said that.
Dialogue between Lucretius Corvo and Techmarine Correlus of the Ultramarines. – Guy Haley, Pharos

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The other week, I had the pleasure of delivering the keynote speech to the Just Transition Partnership’s Reclaiming Our Energy conference where I gave a (not completely impartial, but at least honest) appraisal of the Scottish Government’s draft energy statement. As of the time of writing, the recording of the full conference isn’t yet online (I’ll link to it here when it is) however I included the audio of my presentation in this week’s Policy Podcast.

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Oil Be Back

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Oil creates the illusion of a completely changed life, life without work, life for free. Oil is a resource that anaesthetises thought, blurs vision, corrupts.” – Ryszard Kapuściński

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Who won the energy crisis? The obvious answer is “not us”. The bank accounts of the oil barons are absolutely glowing right now with all of the major corporations publishing their 2022 profit figures this week. Many of them are showing record levels of profit while folk are freezing in their houses despite this being one of the mildest winters in UK history. Shell announced profits of $40 billion, BP made $28 billion, Norwegian state-owned Equinor made $79 billion and Exxon – who infamously predicted with “shocking accuracy” the climate change impact of their operations almost 50 years ago but covered up the data and kept on going – made $56 billion.

A large chunk of these profits will go towards share buybacks – where the company reduces the amount of shares in the company out there in the wild and therefore increases the value and the voting power of remaining holders – but much of it will go out in dividends. You paid more than you ever have to keep your house colder than it’s ever been but all that did was make someone else richer.

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How To Heat Scotland’s Homes

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 2 Comments

“Leaky pipes lead to puddles of despair.” – Anthony T. Hincks

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In December 2019, our oil boiler exploded. This was rather inconvenient as it was the week before Christmas, we had only moved into the house a couple of months prior and my parents-in-law were over visiting to see the new place for the first time. It was also bitterly cold and our only sources of heat were a hot water bottle, two hyperactive kittens and an old electric heater the previous owner had left forgotten in the shed – plugging it in was effective but sent the meter spinning so quickly that I’m pretty sure I could have rigged up a dynamo and used it to keep the water bottle warm. It was doubly annoying in that one of the first things we did when we moved in was to get the boiler serviced and that turned up no obvious problems.

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Burning Money

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 2 Comments

“When you want to know how things really work, study them when they’re coming apart.” – William Gibson

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Britain is heading into one of the worst winters of a generation. The rising cost of living combined with multiple crises from energy, food supplies and general government incompetence mean that we’re facing price rises, empty shelves and potentially the highest rents and mortgage burdens ever seen in this country (headline interest rates /might/ not quite reach the peaks of the early 90s but house prices are so much higher now than then and wages haven’t increased by nearly as much so a greater proportion of our wage will end up being devoured by our bank and/or landlord). Folk trying to buy a house over the winter, who are trying to renew a mortgage reaching the end of its fixed rate or who are renting from a landlord trying to do one of the above are particularly vulnerable to price shocks that could equal or exceed the energy crisis.

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But It’s Reserved!

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 2 Comments

“When you have no real power, go public — really public. The public is where the real power is.” – Elizabeth Warren

The nature of Scotland’s devolved settlement is that the country is simultaneously less powerful than many would like but more powerful than many would give it credit. The reserved powers list in Schedule 5 of the Scotland Act are quite clear and the Scottish Government can and has been taken to court when it has attempted to overreach its powers. However the areas of devolved powers are broad and cross-cutting enough that it is often possible to effect change in defiance of Westminster simply by looking for the cracks and loopholes within those reserved and devolved powers.

We have also seen the pandemic reveal that some powers (such as the power to close or restrict borders) which were previously assumed to be reserved have, in fact, been substantially devolved. Until the pandemic struck it would have been considered unthinkable that the Scottish Government could effectively order the closure of the Anglo-Scottish border – and yet, for a time, it was (that the closure wasn’t particularly well policed and enforced is another matter entirely).

Scotland pushed against reserved Westminster policy many times – mostly significantly by using powers over planning permission to effectively block nuclear power and onshore fracking in Scotland. A larger challenge looms in the form of offshore oil and gas, but I believe that the Scottish Government could go further that it current does in terms of opposing oil extraction around Scotland despite the powers to do so being largely reserved.

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(Source: Unsplash)

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