Audiences up and down the country have been watching the People’s Emergency Briefing, the film launched 10 months ago to great fanfare. The emergency, if you did not guess, is the so-called ‘climate crisis’.
In Part I we looked at the climate-related parts of the film. If those were little more than unashamed propaganda, the other briefings, which covered Food Security, Economics, Energy and Health, were amateur hour.
Energy transition
The section on energy, for instance, was presented by Tessa Khan, Executive Director at Uplift, an advocacy organisation set up to “create a rapid and fair transition away from oil and gas production in the UK”. Uplift is funded by the usual Green Blob, notably the notorious European Climate Foundation.
Tessa is not an energy or economics expert. She has no qualifications or experience whatsoever in the subject. She is an environmental lawyer.
Her pitch was to blame high energy prices on the cost of gas and other fossil fuels. She points out that “the UN Fuel Poverty Coalition states there are now more than 12 million households across the UK who are struggling to pay their energy bills” and claims that the evidence is clear that an energy system powered by renewables will be more affordable.
She is wrong. Our energy, or more precisely electricity, bills are some of the highest in the world not because of fossil fuels but because of the high cost of renewables.
