An auction with a price cap is not an auction

This story is quite baffling, from Yahoo News/Reuters:

LONDON (Reuters) - BP, Shell and utility Iberdrola were among the winners of seabed rights to develop Scottish offshore wind projects, in an auction which raised nearly £700 million ($958 million) for public spending... Crown Estate Scotland, which manages the Scottish seabed, said on Monday that proceeds from the first such leasing deal in around a decade will go to the devolved Scottish government.

This is land value tax in action - the sea bed and the wind were created by nobody and thus belong to everybody and nobody, so the government is perfectly entitled to claim dibs and auction it off on behalf of 'everybody'. Good stuff so far, but...

Last year, seabed options around the coast of England, Wales and Northern Ireland were awarded at much higher prices at a leasing round held by the Crown Estate. However, Crown Estate Scotland capped the lease payments at £100,000 pounds per km2. As a result the payment for leases per GW were 94% lower than the average in the English auction, said analysts at Bernstein.

The English/Welsh auction last year raised £9 bn, but that article doesn't say how many GW or km2 were involved so I will accept the "94% lower" figure.

So it wasn't really an auction at all, it was a freebie for those who were awarded the rights. I hope that Scottish citizens kick up a stink about this and that heads roll, starting with Wee Krankie.

Land Value Tax in action

From the BBC:

Leader Sir Ed Davey put forward his "sovereign green wealth fund" proposal at his party's spring conference. He said the government raised £9bn last month from auctions to build wind farms on the coasts of England and Wales.

Ignore the stuff about "sovereign green wealth fund"; what triggers a tax and what the government does with the proceeds are two entirely separate topics. If it's a good idea to tax the extraction and use of fossil fuels [and it is], then it's a good idea, however the proceeds are spent. If it's worth spending money on 'green' stuff, then it's worth spending, however the taxes are raised.

£9 billion is a lot of money but it's Land Value Tax. The operators subtract likely costs from likely income for the duration of the licence and pay most of the unearned surplus (the value of the location, which is really the value of the 'free' wind energy for which they pay a few pence per kWh, which is no different for paying for coal for an old-fashioned power station) in the auction.

If only they applied the same logic to onshore wind farms, instead of subsidising them, which are ultimately subsidies to large landowners (so negative LVT).
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That's exactly the same as the £22.5 billion which Gordon Brown raised from the 3G auctions. Radio frequencies are 'land' in economic terms. Nobody created them and the government protects people's right to use certain frequencies to the exclusion of others. The users pay in accordingly.

From the previous link...

Sky's Ian King says the infamous 3G auction of 2000 that raked in more than £20bn killed investment in our mobile infrastructure.

This is complete nonsense. The bidders might well have overbid (underestimated costs or overestimated income) but once paid, it's a sunk cost and has no bearing on future investment.

Worst case, a bidder goes bankrupt and the liquidator sells their 3G licence at a lower price to a competitor, who has then paid the 'correct' lower amount and is not deterred from making the necessary investment. Mobile phone coverage in most parts of the UK is excellent and the consumer prices are very competitive IMHO, so clearly nothing bad happened. And the same applies to wind farms.
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From The Blackpool Gazette:

The Crown Estate, which manages the Queen’s property and land [not strictly true, but many seem to believe it is], said it had auctioned off eight gigawatts of potential new offshore wind capacity to help the UK meet its demand for renewable electricity.

The deals are set to bag the Crown Estate around £879 million every year for the next decade, with a share going to Buckingham Palace. The Sovereign Grant, which funds the Queen and the monarchy’s official duties, is set at the beginning of each financial year and is currently equal to 25 per cent of the Crown Estate’s profits – allocated two years in arrears.

It's a shame about the £2.2 billion of taxpayers' money being fittered away like this, but hey.

UKIP, landowners and windmills: You can't beat a nice paper trail

Well done, Autonomous Mind.

I do not know how he got hold of some of these documents, but this is the sort of bureaucratic digging I have to do at work.

Comments here disabled, join the convo at his.

Sometimes NIMBYs are right

but for the wrong reasons

Comedian Griff Rhys Jones said building a £25m solar farm near his Suffolk home would be a "folly" that would ruin the landscape.

Hive Energy wants to build a 43,000-panel farm at Tattingstone, near Ipswich.

Mr Rhys Jones said he feared a "gigantic change of use to farmland".

Hive said it would help provide the UK's energy needs and the solar panels would eventually be concealed by hedgerows and trees.

The £25m proposals would cover 95 acres (38 hectares) at Valley Farm near Alton Reservoir.

The company said it would generate 16MW of electricity - enough to supply 6,000 homes.

Cue much wailing about "loss of valuable farmland" etc by the usual suspects, which, of course, is complete b*llocks, the land being still there under the panels. Cue also cries of "NIMBY" from the other side of the fence. Well, possibly, but the real reason why this sort of thing should be stopped is that it is yet more rent-seeking, the profits to Hive Energy coming solely from money extorted from everyone else via higher energy bills.

What Griff Rhys Jones and Jeremy Clarkson, who also waded in against the solar farm, should be pointing out is not that 95 acres of Suffolk farmland is going to disappear under glass, but that a good chunk of the £25M to pay for it is coming out of our pockets. Meanwhile, in the winter, when the sun doesn't shine much, not even in Suffolk, we still need electricity, if not more so.

Blame Diversion auf der Autobahn

From The Independent

Motorway service stations could soon be shamed into lowering their petrol prices after criticism that they are fleecing drivers by charging 10p a litre more than other garages.
The inflated cost of motorway petrol is among the most common complaints of Britain’s drivers(1). At the moment, most motorists only discover they are having to pay over the odds once they have pulled off the motorway(2). Now the Government may force service stations to advertise their prices well before drivers reach the site.
...
One proposal is to include details of prices on road signs giving the distance to the nearest service stations, which happens in France. Signs on the hard shoulder could also display the prices at the next few motorway stops, enabling motorists to compare prices. The Government’s aim is to drive down by prices by forcing petrol retailers to be more competitive.(3)
...
Last night the RAC welcomed Mr Cameron’s proposal. Pete Williams, a spokesman, said: “Motorway drivers have long been the victims of some pretty indefensible(3) pricing at the pumps with many service stations charging on average 10p extra per litre above the ‘high-street’ or supermarket forecourt price(4).

1. Who? Who's complaining. I'm not. I know they charge more. It's a premium location, like having a cafe on St Marks Square or the Champs-Elysee. I go elsewhere. If I'm desperate, I stick a couple of gallons in - a couple of extra quid for the odd time I do that is the least of my concerns.

2. It doesn't take many times pulling off the motorway to discover that service stations charge more for everything.

3. The differential is even greater in France than here, in my experience.

4. But you're not at the supermarket. The petrol stations close to J15 and J16 of the M4 are two of the most expensive in Swindon.

What also isn't mentioned is there's a quid pro quo of service stations. If you like, a form of taxation, that the high street and supermarket stations don't have to pay, and that is that the parking and toilet facilities are for everyone. You can pull up, have a pee, open up your sarnies and flask of tea and eat your lunch and drive on. Your local BP garage may have a different outlook on this. In a roundabout way, that's the government extracting some rent for a premium location.

Of course, this is all part of the desperate blame-diversion by government, that the reason people are suffering are a few greedy companies, when in reality, most of us are getting stiffed far more paying for useless windmills than what we pay for service stations.

Peak wind

From The Register:

Both these assertions, however, have been called into doubt - and the first one, that there's plenty of wind power to meet all human demands, is particularly shaky as it ignores the thorny issue of cost. McElroy, Jacobson and their allies tend to make wild assumptions - for instance that it would be feasible to distribute massive wind turbines across most or even all of the planet's surface.

Professor Keith has some scathing criticism for these ideas. To start with, he says that most large-scale wind potential calculations thus far have simply ignored the problem that the possible massive wind farms of the future are going to result in much less powerful winds for long distances behind them. He and Professor Adams write:

"Estimates of global wind resource that ignore the impact of wind turbines on slowing the winds may substantially overestimate the total resource. In particular, the results from three studies that estimated wind power capacities of 56, 72 and 148 TW respectively appear to be substantial overestimates given the comparison between model results and the assumptions these studies made about power production densities...

To cite a specific example, Archer and Jacobson assumed a power production density of 4.3 W m-2... production densities are not likely to substantially exceed 1 W m-2 implying that Archer and Jacobson may overestimate capacity by roughly a factor of four."

I'd always wondered about that, by how much does a wind turbine slow down the wind.

Fun Online Polls: Subsidies for windmills and solar panels & your favourite Armstrong

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll on an excellent turnout of 190 votes (thanks to everybody who took part) were as follows:

How much extra are you prepared to pay on your electricity bill to subsidise windmills and solar panels?

Nothing - 91%
£10 a year - 4%
£100 a year - 3%
£1,000 a year - 2%

I don't think that requires much further comment, does it?
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Not much else is going on at the moment, so let's find out who your favourite Armstrong is: the moon landing faker-cum-intrepid space pioneer; the cancer-surviving mono-bollocked drugs cheat ex-fiancé of planet-saver Sheryl Crow; the half of the comedy duo Armstrong and Miller who features in the Direct Line adverts and doesn't look like Rob Brydon; or the gravelly-voiced trumpet player?

Or indeed one of the dozens of other similarly named people listed on this Wiki page.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Wind powered Indian bicycle marketing.

Compiled by Bob E.

Exhibit One:

Ed Miliband’s controversial scheme to encourage homeowners to install solar panels and wind turbines is set to cost families an extra £1billion in higher bills, figures reveal... Tory MP Dominic Raab said the scheme was another example of Labour profligacy. He added: "Ed Miliband’s flagship green subsidies have proved a ludicrously expensive way of backing inefficient technology."

Exhibit Two, from Private Eye 1331 published 11th January 2013 - Page 9 - Keeping The Lights On

Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, slipped out an announcement just before Christmas unveiling a plan to fund uneconomic windfarms by forcing the Government Procurement Service to buy electricity from them at above market rates.

The PE piece continues for a further 4 paragraphs, one of which mentions the GPS being instructed by Ministers to sign up to 15 year contracts and that the policy means "[the GPS] will now be forced to underwrite projects so uneconomic they cannot attract finance even with the lavish level of subsidy already available" but sadly none of them contain a quote from Dominic Raab moaning about Coalition profligacy or ludicrously expensive ways of backing inefficient technology.

Exhibit Three:

Under a scheme agreed by Labour leader Ed Miliband during the last Labour government, but implemented by Coalition ministers, the contracts guarantee that the power firms will be paid even if they fail to deliver energy to households.

Labour MP Margaret Hodge, who chairs the PAC, described the contracts as a “licence for the private sector to print money at the expense of hard-pressed consumers”.

To summarise that for the benefit of Margaret "Memory Loss' Hodge, it was her government which issued the licence to print money and the "private sector" has now started using it.

Fun Online Polls: Subsidies and this Thursday's elections

On a very high turnout, thank you to everybody who cast a vote, the result in last week's Fun Online Poll was as follows:

Do you regard subsidies for wind power development as a good deal?

No - 96%
Yes - 3%
Other, please specify - 0%

So stick that in your pipe and smoke it, you subsidy junkies!

NB, Nick Drew questioned the reliability of the findings of a similar survey here.
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This week's Fun Online Poll will run until Thursday evening, for obvious reasons.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: Titanic & subsidies for renewables

Well done to the 91% of respondents who chose any direction other than North West and thus avoided steering the Titanic into the iceberg. I trust that none of you cheated by breaking open the cupboard which had the binoculars in it?
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The BBC reported this morning that "More Britons than not regard subsidies for wind power development as a good deal, an opinion poll suggests".

Ho hum. Let's see what real people think.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

A likely story...

From the BBC:

More Britons than not regard subsidies for wind power development as a good deal, an opinion poll suggests.

Commissioned by trade body RenewableUK, the Ipsos-Mori poll found that 43% see the UK subsidy as good value for money against 18% who do not. Another survey has also found a big majority in favour of renewable energy.

Remind me to run a Fun Online Poll on this to see what real people think, I suspect that RenewableUK might be just a little bit biased and might have asked leading questions or pre-selected its audience.

Lazy Energy Secretary to blame for high energy bills, say domestic customers

From The Daily Mail:

Millions of hard-up householders have risked insulting Chris Huhne by saying that he is to blame for high energy bills.

Families said that the Energy Secretary 'does not allow energy companies to bother' to hunt for the cheapest sources of fuel, but would rather spend more time making them look for hugely overpriced windmills and wrecking what's left of the UK's heavy industry with a Carbon Tax.

They also said the Energy Secretary could save up to £3,000 in legal fees if he didn't get involved in speeding incidents and could use the spare money to go on a short weekend mini-break with the woman he dumped his wife for.

Domestic energy users said: "He frankly spends less time shopping around for an energy source that's on average more than £500 a year cheaper than what we are being forced to buy than he does shopping around for a £250 toaster from the John Lewis list. Or for something like £250 billion's worth of windmills and other green tomfoolery. If he got that in perspective and said, 'OK, we are going to save a huge amount of money shopping around' [we] could save very substantial amounts of money,' they said in an interview with the Times.

Households said Mr Huhne spends 85 per cent of his time dreaming up new ways of making gas and electricity eye-wateringly expensive, and challenged him not to 'just sit back and take all the bungs from the windmill and power lobbies and succumb to the myth that all sources of energy cost the same'. Their comments came after energy firm EDF announced a 15.4 per cent jump in gas tariffs as it became the last of the major suppliers to put up prices...

Don't blame me, I voted UKIP

From the Evening Standard:

Cameron ready to approve euro bail-outs without a referendum: David Cameron clashed with Tory Eurosceptic MPs today as he offered to approve a new scheme to bail out the single currency without holding a referendum. At the start of an EU summit in Brussels, the Prime Minister signalled his support for a permanent new emergency rescue mechanism for economies in trouble.

But British diplomats were rebuffed when they tried to obtain a cast-iron guarantee that under the proposals the UK would never again have to pump taxpayers' money into the rescue of countries in the euro. More trouble brewed as Mr Cameron and other EU leaders planned to push through the bail-out plan as an amendment to the EU's contentious Lisbon Treaty without a referendum.

The BBC spins it thusly:

The eurozone stability mechanism will require a change to the EU's Lisbon Treaty - but the wording has now been agreed, diplomats say. As the UK uses the pound it will not have to contribute to the fund, UK Prime Minister David Cameron has said.
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Also from the Evening Standard:

New power plants could put bills up: Energy bills could rise by hundreds of pounds under plans for the construction of a new generation of power plants unveiled by the Government... Energy Secretary Chris Huhne said private-sector investment of £110 billion in new power stations and grid upgrades is needed over the next decade* to replace ageing plants, to hit the UK's climate change targets and to ensure that the lights do not go out...

Additional financial support for the construction of reserve plants to provide a "safety cushion" as Britain increasingly relies on electricity from intermittent sources such as wind; and a cap on CO2 emissions of 450-600 grammes per kilowatt/hour generated, which should ensure that all future coal-powered plants use carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.

Which the BBC spins thusly:

Price comparison website uSwitch has estimated that bills will rise by £500 a year if the measures are introduced. But Mr Huhne told the BBC that the average electricity bill of £500 a year would rise by £160 a year over the next 20 years, and if the new measures were not put in place, bills would rise by £190 a year.

In fact, the Treasury has calculated that the average annual household electricity bill will be between £4 and £28 higher in 2016, but should be between £20 and £48 lower by 2030.

Right, they can forecast electricity prices twenty years ahead, can they? Best of luck with that.

* These forecasts are also usually wildly understated, see also Olympics 2012, but let's take £110 billion over ten years at face value, that's £11 billion a year, two-thirds of which will be paid by households, unless we somehow imagine that private investors will pay for this out the goodness of their own hearts, that's about £300 per household per year.
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From The Sun:

Banned driver Aso Mohammed Ibrahim, 33, left Amy Houston, 12, to die under the wheels of his Rover car and fled the scene following the accident.

But the Iraqi Kurd was today told he can stay in Britain after judges said deporting the dad of two would breach HIS human rights following a seven-year legal battle.

More Mafia/wind farm related tomfoolery

From the FT:

 

Italian anti-mafia police have made their largest seizure of assets as part of an investigation into windfarm contracts in Sicily. Officers confiscated property and accounts valued at €1.5bn belonging to a businessman suspected of having links with the mafia...

 

The article continues in this vein for several paragraphs, and at no stage is it made clear whether any actual crimes have been committed and if so which. The only clues are:

 

Some projects were sold through intermediaries to foreign renewable energy companies attracted to Italy by generous subsidy schemes.

 

Easily fixed. Scrap the subsidies. And:

 

The renewable energy sector is under scrutiny across much of southern Italy. Some windfarms, built with official subsidies, have never functioned.

 

Again, scrap the subsidies, and whoever built them will have little choice but to cut his losses and finally get them hooked up. However little electricity they generate, it's got to be more than nothing (unless the cost of hooking them up is greater than the potential revenue). And:

 

A separate probe in Sardinia has involved political allies of Silvio Berlusconi, prime minister. They have denied bribing officials to win tenders.

 

And:

 

Mr Berlusconi's government is proud of its record of cracking down on the mafia, seizing more than €10bn in assets and arresting more than 5,800 suspects since taking office in May 2008.

 

So maybe this all just boils down to a bit of political tit-for-tat and showboating?

Bashing ASH = missing the point

Dick Puddlecote and Velvet Glove often do posts criticising the taxpayer-funded anti-smoking propaganda spewed out by ASH, but it strikes me that they are going after the wrong target.

I'd completely agree with them that what's behind it all is lobbying by providers of 'righteous' nicotine (patches, gum etc) in order to take market share from the providers of 'unrighteous' nicotine (tobacco), and that this has precious little to do with 'public health' and a lot to do with corporatism.

As a general rule, when it comes to creating false markets, encouraging government subsidies and then creating barriers to entry, the European Union is behind it - for example white asbestos removal, using windmills to generate electricity etc. I don't think that the EU has any coherent approach to any of this, apart from jumping on any bandwagon heading vaguely in the direction of 'righteousness', and if the tobacco companies upped their game and offered even bigger backhanders than Big Pharma, the pendulum may well swing in the other direction

Simply Googling the phrase European Union smoking ban produces 319,000 hits, the second one on the list being this:

EU countries urged to pass tougher anti-smoking laws.

The commission is calling for an EU-wide ban on smoking in public places by 2012. Currently all EU countries have regulations of some kind designed to protect people from second-hand smoke and its harmful effects. But the rules vary widely from country to country.

The UK and Ireland have the strictest laws - a complete ban on smoking in indoor workplaces and public places, including public restaurants and bars. Bulgaria is due to follow suit in 2010*. Greece, Italy, Malta, Sweden, Latvia, Finland, Slovenia, France and Holland have introduced smoke-free legislation that still allows special enclosed smoking rooms.

The EU is now proposing that uniform laws be drafted for all 27 countries to regulate smoking more strictly in public areas and workplaces.

Second-hand, or passive, smoke has been linked to heart disease and lung cancer. Back in 2002, some 19 000 non-smokers are thought to have died in the EU due to second-hand smoke at home or at work. Tobacco is the leading avoidable cause of death in the EU, claiming some 650 000 lives a year. One in three Europeans - about 170 million - uses tobacco.

As part of a new anti-smoking campaign, the EU is inviting people to upload videos showing how they kicked the habit. Hundreds have responded and their work can be seen on the campaign website.

Just sayin', is all.

* Update 1: Spartan in the comments informs us that the Bulgarian parliament are not playing ball for the time being. Don't worry, the EU will get its own way sooner or later.

Update 2: Dave A reminds me that the World Health Organisation (part of the United Nations) is behind this as well. Given the WHO's talent for whipping up hysteria and ordering governments to spend billions on ineffective treatments, e.g. swine flu, this all fits the pattern.

Intellectual coherence, lack thereof.

From an interview with our new Minister For Eco-Fascism in today's Times:

“I’m not ideologically opposed to nuclear,” Mr Huhne insisted. “My scepticism is based on whether or not they can make it work without public subsidy. One of the things the coalition agreed with some passion in the current circumstances of fiscal restraint was that there will be no public subsidy for nuclear power.”

Even support in the event of a disaster was out of the question, he said. “That would count as a subsidy absolutely. There will be no public bailouts . . . I have explained my position to the industry and said public subsidies include contingent liabilities... It is a challenge for them, as no one has yet built a nuclear power station without public subsidy for some time... The key thing about it is that if the operators think they can make it work then they take that commercial risk... My view is that historically nuclear is prone to going over budget and as a result there has not been private commercial finance for nuclear for a long time.”

Jolly good, I couldn't agree more. I am also rabidly opposed to subsidies for anything whatsoever (above and beyond simple redistribution to fellow citizens). Similarly, we all need electricity, and we have to pay for it through our electricity bills, so all things being equal, we want electricity to be generated as cheaply as possible but without subsidies or artificially imposed costs, which for the electricity companies means getting planning permission for the power stations and overhead cables.

So if things like nuclear power stations or windmills can be self-financing, they can go ahead, else not. Ah... sorry, did I say 'windmills'?

“We ought to be able to put together a policy that is non-carbon and independent from foreign sources.” But he admitted that it is “inevitable” that Britain is going to become “more reliant” on imported energy over the next few years. In the election the Lib Dems called for 15,000 more large wind turbines. Mr Huhne thinks wind farms are “beautiful” and says: "We can do a lot more although we have to be sensitive to local communities.”

When he says 'we can do a lot more', does he mean 'the government can subsidise them a lot more'? For incredibly heavily subsidised they are: in terms of £ per kW, they are even more heavily subsidised than nuclear.

"A renewable energy lobby seeks power in Brussels"

Via Global Post, here's a nice little insight into how things works at the EU:

... the hard-headed lobbyists representing the renewable energy industry in Europe these days has come a long way from that image of tree-hugging dreamers.

“The European renewable energy industry has an annual turnover of about 45 billion euros and employs 450,000 people,” said Christine Lins, general secretary of the European Renewable Energy Council. EREC is an umbrella group for a series of associations representing what were once called “alternative energies.” Although the associations sometimes work with environmental campaigners like Greenpeace, their membership includes industrial giants such as Electricite de France, Shell and Siemens.

Renewable energy these days is a big business that could be about to get a whole lot bigger if world leaders agree on a package to cut global warming at the U.N. climate change conference starting Dec. 7 in Copenhagen.

EREC has an annual budget of 850,000 euros ($1.3 million) and directly employs 10 people at its Brussels headquarters, which it shares with affiliate organisations such as the European Biomass Association and the European Ocean Energy Association. In total about 100 people work at the Renewable Energy House. It is part of a vast lobbying community — some estimates put the total number of lobbyists at 15,000 — that has grown up in Brussels around the institutions of the European Union which are headquartered in the Belgian capital.

EREC seeks to influence European legislation to create "positive frameworks" for renewable energy and promote European technologies in the renewable sector. It hailed the EU's target to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20 to 30 percent by 2020 as a major success. The umbrella group provides information and consultancy for political decision makers from local to international level as well as seeking to reach out to the international media and other opinion makers. EREC also works as a forum for exchanges of information and promotes research on the development of renewable technology.

“We have some of our members that are the utilities, that not only run wind farms and concentrated solar thermic plants but also nuclear or coal power plants,” Lins said, "We also see that more and more hydrocarbon companies are interested in biofuels because clearly they understand that their markets are limited and that they need to diversify in order to ensure the future of their companies.”

With the 27-nation European Union committed to producing a fifth of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, Lins said the sector could be generating 150 billion euros ($225 billion) in revenues and 2 million jobs across the EU a decade from now. That could be just the beginning.

“It is absolutely feasible that we go far beyond the 20 percent,” she said, "There are no limits. Now, there is a discussion going on about the new energy policy of the European Union until 2050, and there we clearly see that renewables can contribute up to 100 percent.”

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From The Times:

Sir, The plan for wind farm rent rises by the Crown Estate (report, Oct 26) is an example of the monopolist landowner being able to rack up rents with impunity*.

It illustrates that every landowner, or, in the case of homeowners, the bankers taking their mortgage interest, are being given a gift through added land value by the community process of planning permission. What is being given by the landlord or bank to the community for the benefit received?

Lloyd George's 1909 People's Budget attempted to tax the increased land values that these higher wind farm rents imply. We now need a 2009 People's Budget to capture this value for the public purse while reducing other taxes. It surely is disproportionate and unfair to tax the personal creative activity of work via income tax, while allowing windfall gains to landowners and mortgage lenders, achieved solely by planning gain.

Charles Bazlinton, Alresford, Hants.

* As an aside, as Crown Estates are a branch of the state, they should of course charge full market rent, i.e. as much as they can get away with. Whether we call that "tax" or "rent" is immaterial, and making Crown Estates (or any other branch of the state) pay Land Value Tax is a self-cancelling transaction, although it would be useful for costing purposes.

Carbon emission reduction tomfoolery

The whole topic is too depressing for words, but the following 'bloggers seem to have summoned the energy and summed it all up nonetheless:

Legendary Leg-Iron
The Fat Bigot
Nick Drew
Julia M

I don't have much more to add right now.

Follow the money: all roads lead to ...

There is a fine bit of painstaking backwards digging, from fakecharity Ecotricity all the way to the EU, here.

Via EU Referendum.