A VERY CONVENIENT CRISIS

 I have thought for some time that the steep rise in fuel and energy prices actually provides the government with the ideal conditions for bringing about changes in consumer behaviour that would have been extremely difficult otherwise. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has provided an ideal cover which can be blamed for all the rise when actually quite a lot of it is down to the increasing cost of changing over to intermittent renewables with all the back up and extra grid connections.

Notice how the price increase predictions are getting more and more outrageous. It would not surprise me if the actual rises are a bit lower with people thinking they are not quite as bad as feared, even though they will still be very significant, with the government even getting praise for keeping them down. Such increase will lead to the public being ready to accept the new high-priced renewables as seeming relatively reasonable. 

I will confidently predict that we will never return to the prices of a few years ago. The new normal will be of costly energy, which is just what the government would have liked to impose, but dare not, without a really good reason. Putin has provided it.  

Had the government backed fracking and encouraged more development of the North Sea reserves we would now have self-sufficient sources. We could even have agreed a gas price with the drilling companies in return for a long term commitment to purchase the gas, just as we do for new nuclear powered electricity, or wind farms. Instead we have become obsessed with achieving Net Zero, a policy that will have no measurable benefit at all, only a huge cost.