Tottering back from the green brink?

Via the GWPF (cos I'm not paying Murdoch for The Times online), we can read that

There was growing speculation last night that the Government is on the verge of cutting multibillion-pound financial incentives to build wind farms. It is believed that the Government could cut so-called ROC incentives for green energy projects as a means of keeping a lid on rising power prices....

Renewable energy leaders say that any cut in the incentive regime would be a disaster for the wind industry, which claims that it would not be able to afford to build commercially viable wind farms.

They're not commercially viable anyway! That's why we pay subsidies! (Nor are they "green", but that's another story.)

Did any politician mention shale? Thought not.

With a report guessing that 2,700 people might die through fuel poverty in a hard winter, and green policies having less and less public support, this would be another step back from what George Osborne has called "Labour's Climate Change Act" - as Richard North points out, the one he voted for.

Oh dear, once again the government comes late to a problem. Andrew Neil has also been rooting around:

Retail prices have risen again and are now above their 2008 peak. Despite lower wholesale prices compared with three years ago our fuel bills are higher than three years ago.

So, contrary to the Energy Secretary's position, higher fossil fuel prices cannot explain our current very high energy bills. And, contrary to the energy companies, they are not merely passing on the extra wholesale costs of energy.

And Huhne's electricity price reforms may not come into effect till 2013 (not that we were holding our breath).

Neil suggests that the energy market is not functioning like a proper competitive market, "otherwise retail prices would not just go up in line with wholesale prices but come down too". Well, that's oligopolies for you. But where's Ofgem, which costs a bundle of money and is proving ... well, useless.

Did any politician mention shale?

As we noted the other day, if the government want to simplify energy bills, the work's already been done for them. Evidently the norm in North America is to have transparent monthly pricing that goes up and down with wholesale markets. Energy firms would become the utilities they should be. Then Ofgem could be slashed or abolished.

Ironically, a major theme of Clegg during PMQs toward the end of the Labour government was ... fuel poverty. He's been noticeably quiet as government contemplates its green policies undermining manufacturing, raising fuel poverty, and making everyone - not just the rich, everyone - poorer. Quite an achievement.

So what has the invisible Huhne been up to? Neil suggests that

Maybe the Huhne green agenda, involving huge subsidies to wind generation, which end up on all our fuel bills, is much larger than we've been told.

So has Osborne been taking Huhne on behind the scenes, and asking Cameron whether he wants the greenest government ever, and more unemployment, and more fuel poverty (and notice that the big carbon capture project has been scrapped)? Especially as the inevitable fragmenting of the eurozone can only make things worse in the short term (but probably more briefly than the pundits suggest).

Heard about shale, by the way?

This really is a miserable little government, with the exception of Gove and IDS, and possibly Pickles. They embrace intellectually bankrupt and politically impossible green policies, their NHS policy is incomprehensible, they want to blow money we haven't got on a high speed railway, their supposedly carefully crafted planning policy looks doomed, they seem in thrall to the EU, and they're taking flak for their claims that they're reining in government overspending when they're doing nothing of the sort.

Could anything else go wrong? Cameron's PMQ performance today was that of a man on the ropes.