To feed the hunger for 'green' energy, we are bulldozing roads into the planet's beating biological heart. This is all for 'white gold' - balsa wood so light it defies its own volume, yet stiff enough to reinforce the gargantuan blades of wind turbines. As legal plantations in ce with global subsidies, the gap is filled by the illegal stripping of the Amazon. We are, quite literally, clearing the lungs of the earth to build the fans of the future. Since the 1970s, the Amazon has lost roughly 54 million hectares of forest cover, an area the size of France. Access roads are bulldozed deep into these pristine rainforests to steal the wood, leaving permanent scars that disrupt forest succession. This is how environmentalists are 'saving the planet.' Huge profits drive a voracious hunger; a single turbine blade can require thousands of cubic feet of balsa. The scale is immense - newer offshore blades now exceed the wingspan of a Boeing 747. We are cannibalising the biological heartwood of the planet - to produce renewable energy.

Meanwhile in Downing Street... Ed Miliband, the real power behind the throne, casually deciding when (or if) we'll ever open new North Sea wells. Keir? Just the puppet with the 'PM' badge. Labour's energy policy in one image. Who's actually running the country? #StarmerPuppet #MilibandInCharge #NorthSea

Where does Britain get its energy from? 39% from oil 32% from gas 10% from wind and a few odds and sods. This may come as a shock to renewables fans. Be gentle with them. It upsets their world view

Ed Miliband has a cult-like conviction in his own climate ideology. He is incapable of admitting that he is wrong – even with mountains of evidence stacking up against him. As the world gets more dangerous, his anti-North Sea fanaticism is making Britain weaker and poorer. e and more people sound the alarm, Miliband only becomes more convinced by his own righteousness. Today, the Conservatives will force a vote in Parliament calling for the emergency approval of the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields in the North Sea – two fields that could be up and running by the end of the year. Turning our backs on domestic gas that could heat millions of homes would be madness in normal times, but it is sheer lunacy in the midst of a gas supply crisis. In government, I legislated to protect North Sea oil and gas licences and I approved Rosebank, even though I was told it would have put my own personal security at risk from climate extremists. It was controversial at the time, but to say times have changed would be an understatement. From the wind lobbyists at RenewableUK to the chair of Great British Energy - Miliband’s “clean energy” propaganda outfit - the head honchos of the green lobby say we should drill. The great and good of the Labour Left, from the Tony Blair Institute to the unions and Ed Balls, say so, too. The relative geopolitical stability we have had for most of my adult life is not something we can bank on in the years ahead. We need to pass on a country to the next generation that is strong and prosperous. That means making economic decisions based on rationality, not ideology. The North Sea is a blessing for our economy. When gilt markets are charging you a premium because they think we’re borrowing too much and earning too little, it is incumbent on the Exchequer to make the most of all growth opportunities we have. It is a blessing for our energy security, with the gas making up half of our domestic supply. But it is also a blessing for our environment, as the North Sea is much cleaner than importing LNG from abroad. However, for Miliband to admit this would expose the intellectual fraud at the heart of our net zero climate policy. Miliband’s agenda rests on the absurdity that carbon emissions only matter if they happen domestically. It incentivises the replacement of British industry with dirtier imports from abroad. The fact that North Sea gas displaces dirtier LNG doesn’t matter to our climate bean counters because foreign LNG imports aren’t counted in our domestic emissions targets. This is Net Zero irrationality in a nutshell. Fewer jobs in Britain for more carbon in the atmosphere – and yet to the religiously fervent, they will argue that this is Britain’s example of climate success. This is fantasy thinking we cannot afford. We must fast-track Rosebank and Jackdaw and lift the onerous bans and taxes on the North Sea to back Britain’s energy security. Kemi Badenoch knows it and Keir Starmer knows it. Unfortunately, so far, only one of them has had the courage to say so.

How do you respond to an energy crisis? We'll get the Government's answer today. 4 years ago I was being asked the same question when I worked in No10. Back then, Boris Johnson deployed the secret weapon of the British state- endless Cabinet Office committees- to tackle two problems: how to shield billpayers from surging gas costs in the short term, and how to stop taxpayers footing the bill again in a future crisis. Boris would erupt with fury when civil servants explained how a few hundred kittiwakes were stopping us building vital energy infrastructure. His answer was 2022’s British Energy Security Strategy, which I helped write. Its premise was simple: speed up homegrown energy- new nuclear, renewables, and oil and gas- to insulate Britain from global price shocks. On any reasonable measure, it failed. Four years on we have the highest industrial energy costs in the world, the second highest domestic bills in Europe, and our energy system remains reliant on imported gas that spikes in global crises (and increasingly on imported turbines and panels from China). The government is again considering paying everyone's bills. What went wrong? This Government would argue we didn’t go fast enough on renewables. Their policy is to buy lots of renewables very quickly to replace gas. We can and should remove the planning barriers that slow down deployment and increase the cost of all new energy, including renewables. But the catch is that while solar and batteries work in Spain or Texas, the cost of building wind turbines, our main option, has soared. Buying lots of offshore wind in 2021 made sense at £57/MWh. But the latest deals cost nearly double that. In trying to avoid volatility, the Government has bought a record amount of the most expensive wind power in a decade. Wind farms also require more grid than a smaller number of assets like nuclear power plants, both for themselves and for the backup gas they rely on. The cost of building that grid will add £108 per year to bills by 2031 yet we’ll still pay billions to switch wind farms off when it’s too windy for the grid to handle. There are other hidden bill costs: from carbon pricing levied upstream, to subsidies for industry. It’s got so bad that energy bosses have said that even if the wholesale price fell to zero, bills would still go up. Even if we bring down the cost of wind through planning and market reform, a grid dominated by it faces a core challenge: the wind doesn’t always blow. Solving this problem leads you back to burning gas. While more wind in the mix means we burn less gas - handy when prices spike - the trade-off is the cost of building the system twice: once for wind and once for gas backup. And if gas plants run intermittently, their economics get much worse. If we’re going to burn gas anyway should we have ignored renewables and gone hell for leather on gas? Our current crisis suggests otherwise. The North Sea is not what it was, leaving us reliant on imports and exposed to global events. That doesn’t mean current policy makes sense. Banning new exploration licenses in a gas-hungry system that imports half its supply is self-defeating, and the windfall tax is clearly accelerating the North Sea's decline. But that decline is geological not political; it began well before net zero. New licenses and a better fiscal regime can extend its life, not reverse its fortunes. Could fracking have saved us? My view then and now is that the geology, geography, population density and politics of Britain make the economics of US style fracking impossible here. Would a country that struggles with objections to new homes accept thousands of fracking pads across our countryside? Lancashire’s new Reform council certainly doesn't seem to think so. The deeper problem is the 2022 Strategy, in true Johnsonian fashion, set boosterish new targets, but lacked the concrete plan for achieving them. Fortunately this Government now has practical plans it can implement today. First: radical supply side reform to make it easier to build new nuclear. Nuclear cuts the gordian knot; it reduces our reliance on both imported fossil fuels and kit from China, insulating us from price shocks. It carries fewer hidden costs because it is on whatever the weather, and it is zero carbon to boot. The challenge is that our current approach to building nuclear is ruinously expensive - but it doesn’t have to be. Korea builds them six times cheaper; in this country we used to build nuclear power stations for a quarter of current costs. The Fingleton review, which the Government has said they will deliver in full, provides a roadmap for getting costs to that level again - the Government should commit to passing the regulatory changes and legislation needed by the end of the year. Think of it as a vaccine taskforce for nuclear. Second: market reform to cut waste. We can drive down the cost of renewables and add more to the grid, but they should stand on their own two feet. If data centres want to sign a deal to build solar and batteries we shouldn’t stand in their way, but our energy system should be guided by prices not planned from Whitehall. The same applies to grid queues. Finally: cut unnecessary taxes and remove levies to slash bills now. Carbon taxes on electricity have got coal off the grid and now only serve to make all types of power more expensive. They should be removed. Government handouts to industry should not be hidden on bills but moved to general taxation or scrapped. Taken together this would cut the cost of electricity in the short and long term. Good for industry, good for households, while making the shift from the (often) imported oil and gas we use in our boilers and petrol cars more attractive for consumers. The heart of the 2022 strategy: making it easier to build energy infrastructure in Britain, remains correct. The Government now has a blueprint. They should get on with it.

Criminally Negligent. Andrew Neil's Words. Britain's Reality. Andrew Neil does not use language carelessly. Writing in the Daily Mail this morning, he describes Britain as stuck in an energy emergency with an oil and gas policy bordering on the criminally negligent, delivered by dequates at the tiller. He is not reaching for effect. He is delivering a verdict. And the evidence he marshals is unanswerable. The Strait of Hormuz has been closed for the first time in history. Oil is heading toward two hundred dollars a barrel. Britain is facing the worst energy crisis since the Yom Kippur War of 1973. The International Energy Agency has described the supply disruption as the largest in history. And the government overseeing this catastrophe has spent the past year doing everything in its power to ensure Britain would be maximally exposed when it arrived. It closed North Sea oil and gas production. It borrowed against already strained public finances. It built an economic strategy on OBR forecasts that the energy crisis has already rendered obsolete. And it put the man most responsible for Britain's energy vulnerability, Ed Miliband, in charge of the response. The Miliband contradiction has been hiding in plain sight for months. He stood at the despatch box during the energy debate last year and warned that Britain was a price taker not a price maker in international fossil fuel markets, leaving it exposed to their volatility. He was right. He was also the man who ensured that exposure would be as severe as possible by closing down the domestic production that could have cushioned the blow. The North Sea fields that could have been producing. The coal beds that remain untouched. The nuclear capacity that was decommissioned in pursuit of net zero targets that now look like a luxury policy designed for a world that no longer exists. Miliband diagnosed the disease and administered the poison. Rachel Reeves now faces the consequences. The fiscal headroom she has been defending against every request for defence spending, every demand from the Treasury and every warning from military chiefs, is being wiped out not by defence costs alone but by the energy price shock her own government's choices made inevitable. Her foundations, as Neil puts it, are built on quicksand. The borrowing costs are rising at the fastest pace since the Liz Truss mini-budget. Foreign creditors are watching. The bond markets are watching. And the Chancellor is discovering that the numbers she has been citing as proof of fiscal responsibility were always dependent on a stable world that this government's foreign policy paralysis helped to destabilise. Neil makes one observation that connects the economic catastrophe to the political one with surgical precision. A stronger Prime Minister would have fired Miliband. He is right. The man who led the Cabinet revolt against supporting America, who blocked the use of Diego Garcia, who has spent a year dismantling Britain's energy independence and who stood at the despatch box admitting British households would pay the price, is still in his post. Still in the Cabinet. Still in the room. The reason Starmer has not fired him is the same reason he needed a drone on his own runway before he would act, the same reason he consulted his team on minesweepers and the same reason Britain is now a diminished, exposed and strategically paralysed country being described in its own press as a nation of clueless inadequates. He cannot afford to. The coalition that put him in power will not allow it. And so the inadequates remain at the tiller while Britain heads for the rocks. "Miliband diagnosed the disease and administered the poison. [...]. Rachel Reeves now faces the consequences."

EXPLOSIVE 🧨 The Bank of Canada confirms energy costs feed directly into food inflation. So when energy gets more expensive… Food gets more expensive. Claims that policy-driven energy costs have no effect don’t hold up to basic economics. Mark Carney ZERO inflation fromntled TODAY

@ClaireCoutinho Labour's big donor is Dale Vince He owns renewable co. Ecotricity Which own 1/4 of Good Energy Where CEO is Nigel Pocklington Whose brother Jeremy Pocklington is top dog at the Dept for Net-Zero And the Minister is Labour's  Ed Miliband Who dishes out renewable energy cash

As promised, the climate science obliteration has arrived TODAY. The IPCC's central claims have now been torn apart. The oceans are not “warming” let alone “boiling.” That claim is false. The claimed Earth Energy Imbalance is false. It's no different from zero. Full demolition:Cohler et al. (2026) IPCC's Earth Energy Imbalance Assessment is Based on Physically Invalid Argo-Float-Based Estimates of Global Ocean Heat Content doi.org/10.5281/zenodo… Press Release: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo… Easy-to-Read Summary: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo…

If the UK scrapped net zero targets and went all in on North Sea oil and gas exploration, we wouldn’t be talking about energy bills, we’d be talking about sovereign wealth funds. Countries that develop their resources get rich. Norway did it. Saudi Arabia did it. Qatar did it. Instead, Britain sits on vast reserves and imports expensive energy. Drill, baby, drill.