The Energy Price Guarantee in its current form will now only run until April, according to newly appointed Chancellor Jeremy Hunt. Setting out new fiscal plans this morning, Hunt reversed much of what was announced in his predecessor Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget on 23 September. While this did not include the total scrapping of the
Government announces plans to sever the link between renewables, nuclear and gas prices in new Energy Prices Bill. The Bill enshrines the support measures announced over the last few months into law, including the Energy Price Guarantee for domestic consumers and Energy Bill Relief Scheme for businesses and non-domestic properties. Additionally, it sets
Ministers are planning to ban solar farms from most of England’s farmland, the Guardian can reveal. The new environment secretary, Ranil Jayawardena, is understood to oppose solar panels being placed on agricultural land, arguing that it impedes his programme of growth and boosting food production. To this end, say government sources, he has asked his
I spent some of August on trains across Europe, gazing out at vast swathes of parched earth, dwindled rivers and failing crops. Climate change was plainly in action across the entire continent. Then I glanced at social media to find the two individuals vying to become Prime Minister competing with each other to say
No single crisis, no matter how existential, will be enough to shut this machine down naturally. We must break it or it will break us It is useful to think of capitalism as a robotic savant, spectacularly gifted at doing one thing and cripplingly blind to everything else. Global capitalism is an incredible machine for
Scientists say there are ample reasons to suspect global heating could lead to catastrophe The risk of global societal collapse or human extinction has been “dangerously underexplored”, climate scientists have warned in an analysis. They call such a catastrophe the “climate endgame”. Though it had a small chance of occurring, given the uncertainties in future
With a dramatic timing worthy of The West Wing, Senator Joe Manchin has delivered an 11th hour deal that comes as a much-needed shot in the arm for the global climate fight. Mr Manchin, a centrist Democrat from coal-heavy West Virginia, announced the pointedly-titled “Inflation Reduction Act” with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Wednesday.
Ofgem has proved “incompetent as the regulatory authority” according to a new report from the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) select committee. The Energy pricing and the future of the Energy Market report finds that suppliers were allowed to enter the market without access to sufficient capital or acceptable business plans, and were run
Her Harvard thesis offers a bleak outlook on the course of civilization but sustainability expert Gaya Herrington tells Louise Boyle that the worst-case scenario is not inevitable. ‘We need to completely re-envision what our role is in the world’ When her study – confirming a 1970s prediction that humanity’s unquenchable desire for economic growth would hit a wall
Only rarely does a book truly change the world. In the nineteenth century, such a book was Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. For the twentieth century, it was The Limits to Growth. Not only did this best-selling 1972 publication help spur the environmental movement, but it showed that the underlying dynamics of the modern industrial world