{"id":533489,"date":"2026-03-13T10:25:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-13T10:25:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/533489\/"},"modified":"2026-03-13T10:25:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-13T10:25:08","slug":"uk-energy-prices-are-soaring-and-propagandists-want-to-sell-you-a-false-reason-why-george-monbiot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/533489\/","title":{"rendered":"UK energy prices are soaring \u2013 and propagandists want to sell you a false reason why | George Monbiot"},"content":{"rendered":"

These are burning, smoking lies. As oil and gas prices soar, thanks to the US and Israel\u2019s attack on Iran, the UK\u2019s opponents of climate policy become even shriller. Rightwing politicians, Tufton Street junktanks<\/a> and the billionaire press tell us our energy security will be enhanced and our bills will fall if we abandon net zero policies, ditch renewables and reinvest in North Sea gas. These claims are not just a little bit wrong. They are the exact opposite of the truth.<\/p>\n

Two things have indeed happened in recent years. The price of electricity has soared, contributing greatly to the cost of living, and the proportion of the electricity we receive from renewables has simultaneously boomed: from 3% in 2000<\/a> to 47% today<\/a>. So, they claim, one has caused the other: more renewables means higher prices.<\/p>\n

Not a bit of it. By far the cheapest component of our energy supply is the electricity produced by renewables, principally wind and solar. It\u2019s the same story worldwide<\/a>. But the price of electricity does not reflect the mix of sources. It is set at almost all times by its most expensive component. And what might that be? Oh yes, fossil gas. Even before the current war, gas prices were astronomical, and had been rising in leaps and bounds. This, overwhelmingly, is the reason for our high energy bills.<\/p>\n

Why does it happen this way? Because of a system called \u201cmarginal cost pricing\u201d. This means that, while the majority of what comes through the wire is supplied by renewables and nuclear power, electricity is sold on the wholesale market at the price (the \u201cmarginal cost\u201d) of the power source of last resort<\/a>, which fills the last remaining gaps in supply: fossil gas.<\/p>\n

Though the contribution of fossil fuels to our electricity supply in the UK has fallen<\/a> from 73% in 2000 to 27% today,<\/a> gas still sets the price to a greater extent than in almost any comparable country. In the UK, this happens 98% of the time<\/a>, while the EU average is 39%<\/a>. That\u2019s because the backup power sources in much of the EU are not gas but hydroelectricity or nuclear. Better electricity storage would provide us with a cheaper, more secure and less volatile source of last resort. It\u2019s one of the things the government, in the face of media fury, is developing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ironically, in Norway, which supplies 76% of our gas imports<\/a>, gas sets the price only 1% of the time. In fact, the Norwegians scarcely use it<\/a> for electricity production: hydropower provides 89%, wind 9% and fossil gas 0.9%. Norway\u2019s trade in fossil fuels is like the British opium trade in the 19th century: a curse to be dumped on other countries.<\/p>\n

These inconvenient facts caused a magnificent self-own by that gruesome junktank the Institute of Economic Affairs, which demands North Sea drilling and fracking<\/a>. It claimed that, as gas here costs no more than elsewhere<\/a>, \u201cit cannot be gas prices that are driving UK electricity prices so much higher\u201d than in countries such as Norway. Norwegian industrial electricity, it notes, costs less than half of ours. Yup: because it scarcely uses gas. Google first, comment after.<\/p>\n

Such idiocies abound. On X last week, Claire Coutinho claimed<\/a> that our energy resilience depends on \u201cmaximising the North Sea\u201d. She seems to have forgotten that, as energy secretary two years ago, she boasted<\/a> \u201cwe spent over \u00a3100bn protecting the economy and households across the country\u201d from the effects of the gas price spike caused by Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine. Some resilience, that.<\/p>\n

A bulk carrier and a tanker anchored in Muscat, Oman, after Iran vowed to close the strait of Hormuz, 9 March 2026. Photograph: Beno\u00eet Tessier\/Reuters<\/p>\n

We\u2019re told that if we extracted more gas at home, electricity would be cheaper. Hello, basic economics. The price of gas is set on international markets and dominated by conditions affecting the biggest suppliers, such as the US, Iran and Russia. The UK\u2019s remaining reserves are especially difficult and expensive to extract. The industry here depends on a very generous tax regime: most of the time, it receives more money<\/a> than it returns to the exchequer. Even so, it doesn\u2019t offer this gas to UK customers at special rates. The companies sell it, as everyone else does, on the international market, at the international price. Extracting every last cubic metre from the North Sea would not shift the price by one penny.<\/p>\n

And there\u2019s another trifling reason why \u201cmaximising the North Sea\u201d will have no impact. We\u2019ve used almost all<\/a> of it already.<\/p>\n

The money from this extraction could have financed a sovereign wealth fund, like Norway\u2019s, which would have funded social care, railways, sewerage \u2013 any of our long-term costs. Instead, thanks to Margaret Thatcher\u2019s \u201cliberalisation\u201d<\/a> (a fancy word for looting), private companies walked away with the profits. Another victory<\/a> for neoliberalism.<\/p>\n

The same nonsense prevailed last year when the steel industry was on the rocks. The rightwing press insisted<\/a> the problem was net zero climate policies. Had journalists spoken to the industry, they would have heard a different story. Steel is exempt from most environmental levies. Its problem is the one we all face: as UK Steel puts it<\/a>, \u201chigher UK wholesale prices are now responsible for nearly three-quarters of the price disparity between UK, French and German industrial electricity prices\u201d.<\/p>\n

The rest of us do pay green charges, but these account for a far smaller portion of the rise in our bills than the price of gas. The indispensable CarbonBrief estimates that<\/a> \u201c\u2018green levies\u2019 and network charges account for just 6% and 20% of the rise in bills since before the energy crisis, respectively, against 53% due to wholesale prices driven by gas\u201d. These charges enable investment in the transition to a carbon-free grid, resulting in much lower future bills<\/a>. You might have imagined that people who obsess about money and not much else could spot the difference between current and capital spending. Apparently not.<\/p>\n

What explains this epidemic of idiocy? It\u2019s simple. What the owners of newspapers and politicians want is what their entire class demands: a world in which resources are controlled and prices harvested by those who own them. You can do this with fossil fuels, whose reserves are concentrated and under the exclusive control of the companies licensed to exploit them. You cannot do it with renewables, because sunshine and wind are everywhere.<\/p>\n

Renewables are highly competitive and, for this reason, low-profit. Fossil fuels<\/a> are uncompetitive and high profit. Media proprietors, like almost all billionaires and hectomillionaires, gain exceedingly by investing in them. If it is sometimes hard to tell the difference between fossil-fuel lobbyists and the billionaire press, this is because there isn\u2019t one. For the sake of the ultra-rich, we are all being gaslit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"These are burning, smoking lies. As oil and gas prices soar, thanks to the US and Israel\u2019s attack…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":533490,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,48,295,66],"class_list":{"0":"post-533489","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-environment","11":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=533489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533489\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/533490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=533489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=533489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=533489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}