Spain yet again - electricity subsidies

We've seen before that the Spanish economy is rickety under the surface - its local authorities, its mortgages, the increasing separatism of its more prosperous regions.

Now the WSJ has turned its attention to Spain's power prices, as the government plans to raise some household electricity prices by 9.8%. Evidently the Spanish government has been subsidising households' electricity so that small consumers pay less than the utilities charge. The government (that is, taxpayers) make up the difference, enabling utilities to provide power to consumers at a price lower than the cost of production.

This deficit financing has been rising over the past decade, we are told, as successive governments failed to increase power prices fast enough to keep pace with rising oil and gas prices, and now stands at over €15 billion.

The deficit has also widened because of a surge in expensive renewable energy production—in particular wind and solar power—that has gone from almost zero to over 16% of Spain's power generation in 10 years.

Renewables are evidently a particular drain on government finances. Even after the recent cuts to renewable energy subsidies, wind-power generation remains twice as costly as average-electricity generation, and solar power is close to nine times as expensive.

Our ineffable government can't say they weren't warned.

If the Spanish economy is as rickety as it's looking, and starts to crumble, would the country phlegmatically accept Irish sized cuts? If not, Spanish taxpayers may start to ask if continuing renewables subsidies are good value for money.

Piers Corbyn interviewed on Fox News

Piers Corbyn is engagingly interviewed by Fox News here.

The strange death of Lib Dem England

What governing has shown up is that the Lib Dems were a group of political opportunists held together by a few expensive policies designed to appeal to a few interest groups.

Suddenly they have to agree priorities and trade offs. The old saying is right, to govern is to choose. (Of course it's also more than that.)

Now it's dawning on their MPs that the luxury of ineffectual posturing was probably better for their prospects of political survival than the serious grind of governing and choosing.

You can tell from their bleatings to Telegraph journalists how much they hate it already, and how scared they are.

This isn't because the government they're in is a coalition: they would also have had to make choices if they'd formed a single party government.

Some - Clegg, Alexander, Laws, Teather(?) - want to get on with it and even relish it.

Others - step forward windbags Menzies and Kennedy - are desperate always to stay on the sidelines. And Hughes is too in love with himself to make any serious choices at all.

What is it for?

This is the question prompted by what has come an annual event in our village. The newsagent shuts down for a week, which would mean a walk of almost a mile to buy The Telegraph from the village's minimarket - except that last year they didn't seem to stock it. So it needed a short drive to the neighbouring town.

This year, though, ours is seemingly the only local road still iced and treacherous. Christmas visitors had carefree drives to us except for the last few yards, which they travelled with caution and some trepidation. It goes without saying that we will not be gritted or salted, the County's supplies being very low.

(During the summer, Hertfordshire ordered 12,000 tonnes of salt for use across the county. On Monday, there was enough salt for 13 heavy gritting runs with the next delivery expected around 5 January – almost two weeks. We must await the thaw.)

So whereas last year it wasn't much of a decision whether to drive into town for a paper, this year it's one you think about. Somehow the lure of The Sunday Telegraph wasn't sufficient to run the risk of the car proving disobedient on the slippery road.

The absinence didn't turn out to be painful at all. Today we scarcely considered going out for a paper. And it still didn't hurt.

For what does The Telegraph give me? Booker, Ambrose, and Liam Halligan. Occasionally Boris smuggles some meat into his serving, but usually it's slightly flavoured and instantly forgettable.

But most of the content is annoying - news coverage that is shallow, bulked out with girlie chitchat which is beyond shallow, making Boris seem a paragon of Roman gravitas.

So why am I paying so much to be so irritated by so little worth? It's not as if The Telegraph is a serious newspaper any more. It's surprisingly pleasant to stop banging my head against the kitchen table in frustration.

Could it be that newspapers are bad for you? And that the web communities offer better scrutiny of politicians than do the press?

Whoever would have thought it? And we get to set our own agenda.

What we (don't) know about global warming

Paul Murphy posts on WUWT, concluding that

what we know about global warming is pretty much nothing: we’ve no baseline, so don’t know if it’s happening; we’ve no cost/benefit evaluation so don’t know whether it would be net positive or net negative; if it is happening we don’t understand its causation and if it isn’t we don’t understand why not; so really the only thing we’re pretty sure of is that the people jumping up and down screaming that they have the answers are either deluded or charlatans.

That sounds about right. Plenty in the post that quotable, it's all worth reading.

Over on EU Referendum, Richard North quotes a Met Office scientist on the recent snowfalls (notice them?):

This is not a global event; it is very much confined to the UK and Western Europe and if you look over at Greenland, for example, you see that it's exceptionally warm there.

Oops, they're having some snow now in the US too.

She must never be allowed to get away with pleading Greenland.

Did we not read recently that Greenland has a grand total of two temperature measuring points, both in Nuuk, one at the airport, the other also in what's become a built up area? Urban heat island, anyone?

And why only two stations for such a big land mass if the consequences of this global warming are going to be so serious?

Did she just happen to choose Greenland as her example?

GWPF lays into the Met Office

No, the Met Office weren't forecasting a mild winter. So they say.

But now the Global Warming Policy Foundation has called on the Government to set up an independent inquiry into the winter advice it received from the Met Office and the failure to prepare the UK for the third severe winter in a row.

Meanwhile, it has produced a good list of detailed questions to be asked - including:

Although the Met Office stopped sending its 3-month forecasts to the media, it would appear that this service is still available to paying customers, the Government and Local Authorities for winter planning. What was their advice, in September/October, for the start of winter 2010?

P.S. Bishop Hill quotes from the Winter Resilience Review, which reports:

We are advised to assume that the chance of a severe winter in 2010–11 is no greater (or less) than the current general probability of 1 in 20.

The government is likely to seize on this.

Airports: EU wastes no time

Yes, another useful crisis. Reports the Wall Street Journal, the European Commission criticized airport operators in western Europe for being ill-prepared to cope with bad weather.

The commission, the European Union's executive arm, may draft new rules if airport operators can't voluntarily take action to plan better for severe weather, Siim Kallas, the commission's transport-policy chief, said in a statement.

"I am extremely concerned about the level of disruption to travel across Europe caused by severe snow," Mr. Kallas said. "It is unacceptable and should not happen again."

Yes, another useful crisis. And the Commission is so good at democratically preparing rules, isn't it. Who knows, by the time Heathrow next fouls up, the Commission may have taken powers to fine us for not enforcing its rules properly.

Boris outflanks AGW

Who could not laugh, seeing Transport Secretary Philip Hammond standing in the snow, promising that the government would consult "experts" to see if more money should be spent on measures to deal with snow in coming years?

Sadly, in the clip he wasn't asked about snow and AGW. But the government may decide that transport seize ups in future years could cost it an unacceptable number of votes. So it would put in place measures to mitigate against cold - not warming.

Hammond says  of course we can deal with snow more effectively, but it will cost more money and what would we want to spend less on?

(Incidentally, we've had hardly any coverage of how the rest of Europe is coping. Hammond mentioned something about lorries being banned from roads in parts of Northern France. The media seem to be reporting the weather unimaginatively and on the cheap, just sticking a couple of junior reporters out in the snow to tell us that ... hm ... it's snowing.)

Someone should try to collar Mr Huhne about this. If we face colder winters, should we cheer him for making it dearer to heat our homes? Mightn't that cost the government lots of votes too?

No - not as long as the Opposition support this government policy. But does the government really want to rely on the Opposition being consistent?

Enter Boris with a political masterstroke. Piers Corbyn bases his weather forecasts on the sun, and has recently been right more often than the Met Office. Indeed, says Boris, he "seems to get it right about 85 per cent of the time".

Here's the clever bit:

Piers Corbyn believes that the last three winters could be the harbinger of a mini ice age that could be upon us by 2035, and that it could start to be colder than at any time in the last 200 years. He goes on to speculate that a genuine ice age might then settle in, since an ice age is now cyclically overdue.

But Boris can't renounce the faith, or the Tory high church of AGW believers will cast him for ever into outer darkness.

So he elegantly changes the question:

The question is whether anthropogenic global warming is the exclusive or dominant fact that determines our climate, or whether Corbyn is also right to insist on the role of the Sun.

Is it possible, he asks, that everything we do is dwarfed by the moods of the star that gives life to the world?

Boris is not an apostate. But if Philip Hammond has to bring in more anti-snow measures, if the cold forces Chris Huhne to rescue a few people from the fuel poverty that misguided prig has plunged them into, when the false religion of AGW crumbles ... Boris will be waiting.

It's not our government

Yes, the lib dems want to plunge more people into fuel poverty and make life more expensive for all of us. Why?

They say the world is warming. Huh? Even Professor Climategate suppress-others'-views Jones admits that any warming over the past decade hasn't been statistically significant - and that's without scrutinising temperature adjustments, which always seem to be upwards. And that's without wondering why swathes of the globe aren't represented in the official global temperature database at all.

Even if it was warming, why would that be? Carbon dioxide emissions (essential to life on earth) have kept rising but the temperature line has - ahem - flattened. So the theory that any warming is caused by carbon dioxide is - at best - unproven.

Yet all big UK political parties base their policies on it. If you think it's not warming, if you think carbon dioxide may not be causing it, tough.

So the politicians conspire to make us poorer. Even if they were right, would our poverty make any difference to world carbon dioxide? No, because we only produce 2% of this vital gas.

If you want criminals to be imprisoned, if you want us to stop rolling over for the EU, if you don't believe in greenery, if you want proper deterrence for benefit fraudsters, if you think immigrant criminals should be deported and human rights in the UK are for UK citizens ... you can't vote for a government that will agree with you.

Just for a smirky PR toff.

English votes on English students

Now we know. English MPs voted by 311 to 209 for the new student fees arrangements, with 8 abstentions.

Political Betting analyses the numbers and concludes that

England’s MPs are now distributed 296/188/43 plus one Green, Speaker, three Deputy Speakers and a vacancy. The Coalition’s theoretical majority there is 150, while the Tories alone have an outright majority of 64. Some form of EV4EL may tempt Cameron, particularly if the Lib Dems look unreliable. But if even the difficult fees vote could be steered through, does he really need it? And with its potential to reduce their leverage, should the Lib Dems be wary?

David Blackburn writes on the Spectator site that he is "swayed by the argument that the new fees arrangement will affect applications to Scottish universities and therefore it is the business of Scottish MPs. That higher education was devolved in the first place is another, more interesting debating point."

So according to David the Celts can have their cake and eat it - indeed, in the case of the Scots, discriminate against English students by charging them more.

Other nations' MPs should not vote on English arrangements on devolved issues.

Fairness demands an English parliament.

There is no government money

There is no government money. There is taxpayers' money and there is borrowed money.

Obnoxious wastrels such as Charlie Gilmour can riot but tax receipts of £548bn and public expenditures of £697bn means his misplaced sense of entitlement is unaffordable.

There is no fairy gold. The money belongs to the people.

All euro solutions will cost a lot

We all know by now that a single currency area requires a single economic government. It also requires citizens in the more prosperous areas to be reasonably content for subsidies to flow from them to the poorer areas. This requires a sense of single nationhood.

Yet within Spain we see Catalonia voting for more autonomy from Madrid. The Catalans feel they are subsidising the rest of Spain too much. Italy too has a North South divide, with the Northern League wanting separation from the poorer South.

Southern Spain and Southern Italy don't live within their means. Nor do (for instance) Greece or Portugal. Economists propose new "European" bodies which would issue "European" bonds or engage in other financial transactions. But these are castles in the air unless countries such as Germany, France and The Netherlands are ultimately liable for these financial instruments.

This doesn't mean the governments, it means the taxpayers. There is no such thing as government money, only taxpayers' money and borrowed money.

Southern Spain and Southern Italy can't devalue against the northern parts of their countries. Nor can Greece or Portugal devalue against the northern eurozone. So German, French and Dutch taxpayers face the prospect of endless subsidies to the south.

If Spaniards want to cut subsidies to Spaniards, when will northern taxpayers tire of subsidising other countries in the southern eurozone?

But kicking the delinquents out of the eurozone isn't a painless solution. Lenders to the delinquent countries would take huge losses on their loans. Banks in France and Germany have been among the big lenders. So (whisper it) have banks in the UK.

Which, then, would hurt Germany more? Stumbling on with the status quo, paying as little as possible to buy time and protect their banks? Or axeing support to countries in trouble and staunching the direct flows of money from taxpayers, only to see some banks stagger from the blow that debt default by weaker eurozone countries would cause them?

Germany must surely be modelling scenarios such as

- continuing to muddle through and avoiding grasping any nettles
- expelling weak countries from the eurozone
- leaving the eurozone themselves.

At present the French and German governments claim rhetorically that no one should underestimate their determination to support the euro, while rejecting any proffered solutions, because they would cost money and votes.

The next few years will be a good time to be in Opposition.