Tonight former Environment Secretary Owen Paterson gave the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s annual lecture. Here’s how he said we should go about ‘Keeping the Lights On’:
I would like to thank Lord Lawson and the Global Warming Policy Foundation for inviting me to deliver the annual lecture – an important event in the calendar.
As a member of the Cabinet for four years I supported Coalition energy policy. However I have become increasingly aware from my own constituency and from widespread travel around the UK of intense public dissatisfaction with heavily subsidized renewable technologies in particular onshore wind.
I have used the last three months since leaving the Cabinet to learn more about the consequences of this policy. And what I have unearthed is alarming.
Our current policy will cost £1,300bn up to 2050. It fails to meet the very emissions targets it is designed to meet. And it fails to provide the UK’s energy requirements.
I will argue that current energy policy is a slave to flawed climate action.
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