In 2007, the then EDF chief executive said that by Christmas in 2017, turkeys would be cooked using electricity generated from atomic power from Hinkley. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA
EdF’s bosses must be thanking their lucky stars that President Macron decided to take complete control of EdF back in 2022. Otherwise, its latest announcements about further delays and cost increases for its new reactors at Hinkley Point would have sent any remaining investors running for the hills.
The scale of those announcements is staggering:
The price tag for Hinkley Point C has now been reset at £31-34 billion (in 2015 prices), twice the original £18 billion.
In today’s money, that’s around £46 billion – with further delays and cost hikes (rising to at least £50 billion) all but inevitable.
EdF’s shortfall in completing Hinkley Point has risen substantially, and could now be as high as £25 billion on its balance sheet.
EdF has admitted that 2029 is now the earliest Hinkley Point will come online. Fat chance of that!
Which makes Hinkley Point C even more of a bust than EdF’s current worst reactor construction nightmare at Flamanville in France. And significantly worse than its plant at Olkiluoto in Finland, which it just managed to get over the line last year.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, Lee Anderson and Liz Truss at the launch of ‘Popular Conservatism’. Credit: PA Images / Alamy
The launch of Popular Conservatism saw attacks on “net zero zealots” and the Climate Change Committee.
Liz Truss’s new ‘Popular Conservatism’ faction of the Conservative Party launched today with attacks on net zero targets and environmental bodies, using the playbook established by libertarian lobby groups.
The self-styled PopCons included politicians critical of climate policies and science, including Lord Frost, who is a director of the climate science denial Global Warming Policy Foundation, as well as Conservative MP Lee Anderson and Reform party president Nigel Farage.
PopCon director Mark Littlewood is the outgoing managing director of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), an influential free market think tank that has talked up its access to government.
The IEA received funding from oil company BP every year from 1967 to 2018, according to an Unearthed investigation confirmed by the IEA. Both IEA and BP have declined to say if this funding continues, when asked by DeSmog.
A branded leaflet handed out at the event, under the heading “what we stand for”, stated: “End net zero zealotry and promote energy pragmatism to provide both security of supply and low prices”.
The leaflet also named the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the government’s independent advisory body on hitting its climate targets, as one of the institutions which “stand in the way of meaningful reform”.
Littlewood’s speech criticised the UK’s net zero target, complaining about “the Climate Change Committee, pronouncing on our progress to the eye-wateringly [sic] expensive and almost certainly unachievable aim of being carbon net zero”.
Lee Anderson, former deputy chair of the Conservative Party, repeatedly attacked net zero in his speech, which he claimed “never comes up on the doorstep” aside from when it is brought up by “the odd weirdo”.
Anderson said: “if we became net zero tomorrow, this country… it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference to the earth’s atmosphere”, pointing to the higher emissions produced by other countries.
Anderson argued that net zero would cost voters money, calling for an “opt-in, opt-out” approach to what he called “green levies” on energy bills, adding: “Not one politician can put their hand on their hearts and tell you how much it’s [net zero] going to cost.”
The CCC has estimated the cost of net zero at less than one percent of GDP, while the Office for Budget Responsibility has said that “the costs of failing to get climate change under control would be much larger than those of bringing emissions down to net zero”.
Liz Truss used her speech to say: “If we look at the net zero zealots that Lee has just been talking about, the need for cheaper energy is being drowned out by some very active campaigners.” She claimed voters “don’t like the net zero policies which are making energy more expensive”.
The International Monetary Fund found in September 2022 that the energy crisis was hitting UK households harder than any country in western Europe, due to the UK’s reliance on gas for heating homes.
Tufton Street Links
Politicians fronting the PopCon group have a history of working with anti-green think tanks and supporting more fossil fuel extraction.
Truss (who went to the University of Oxford with Littlewood) has extensive ties to the IEA, which is part of the Tufton Street network – a cluster of libertarian pressure groups and think tanks that oppose state-led climate action.
In 2022, Truss’s campaign for Tory leader was run by Ruth Porter, a former communications director at the IEA. Once in 10 Downing Street, Truss hired Porter as her senior special advisor, and has since appointed her to the House of Lords. A number of former Tufton Street figures were appointed to government advisory roles during Truss’s short-lived tenure in Downing Street.
The IEA publicly supported Truss’s ‘mini-budget’, which caused economic chaos by promising large tax cuts without explaining how they would be funded. While in office, Truss lifted the UK’s ban on fracking for shale gas, a policy advocated by the IEA. (The policy was ditched by her successor Rishi Sunak.)
The IEA has consistently opposed UK government climate policies, preferring “market solutions”. In October 2022, IEA executive Andy Mayer said the government should “get rid of” its net zero target, which he called a “very hard left, socialist, central-planning model”.
During her 2022 leadership campaign, Truss received £5,000 from Lord Vinson, one of the few known funders of the Tufton Street-based Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s main climate science denial group.
Rees-Mogg also has a long record of opposing climate policies. Earlier this month he said: “the current headlong rush to net zero risks impoverishing the nation to no global benefit on emissions”.
The UK government’s legally-binding target to cut carbon dioxide emissions to net zero by 2050 is part of international efforts to keep global warming below 1.5C.
As Business and Energy Secretary in 2022, Rees-Mogg supported overturning the UK’s ban on fracking, and said “we have to stop demonising oil and gas” in a meeting with the UAE’s state investment company.
He also receives around £29,000 per month to host a show on right-wing broadcaster GB News. A DeSmog investigation last year found one in three GB News hosts spread climate science denial on air in 2022, while more than half attacked net zero policies. The channel‘s co-owner, Paul Marshall, has £1.8 billion invested in fossil fuels via his investment fund Marshall Wace.
Science Denial
Several figures with ties to climate science denial turned out for the PopCon launch. They included Lord Frost, a trustee of the GWPF who last year said global warming could be “beneficial”, along with Dame Andrea Jenkyns, who sits on the board of the GWPF’s campaign arm, Net Zero Watch.
The IEA and GWPF have both received funding from Neil Record, a Conservative donor who was IEA chairman until July 2023 and remains chair of Net Zero Watch. Record has donated thousands to Tory MP Steve Baker, an IEA ally and former GWPF trustee who has claimed much climate science is “contestable” and “propagandised”.
The PopCon launch was also attended by GB News host Nigel Farage, honorary president of right-wing party Reform UK, which campaigns to “scrap net zero”. Last year the party received £135,000 from donors who spread climate denial or had fossil fuel interests. Reform leader Richard Tice has claimed that “CO2 isn’t poison; it’s plant food”.
Farage posed for a photo at the PopCon event with Lois Perry, director of climate denial group CAR26, who is running for leader of UKIP and last month said she does not believe in human-caused climate change.
Addressing the audience Truss made a series of bizarre attacks on the Left, taking aim at “wokeism” and said the Tories had failed to “take on the left-wing extremists”.
“Wokeism seems to be on the curriculum,” said Truss. “There is confusion about basic biological facts, like what is a woman.
“Look at the net zero zealots, if you listen to the Today programme, I don’t recommend it, you’ll hear demands for more public spending.”
Truss went on to warn that the left were “on the march and actively organising”.
“These people have repurposed themselves, they don’t believe they are socialist or communists anymore. They say they’re environmentalists, they say they’re in favour of helping people across all communities, they are in favour of supporting LGBT people or groups of ethnic minorities.
“So they no longer admit that they are collectivists but that is what their ideology is about.”
She went on to claim that anti-capitalists were being “pandered to” by the Government and that Conservative values were being eroded and said it was “only through Conservative values that we can give the British people what they want”, however fell short on saying what this was exactly.
Former prime minister Liz Truss during the launch of the Popular Conservatism movement at the Emmanuel Centre in central London, in a bid to rally right-wing Tory MPs ahead of a general election this year, February 6, 2024
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Running through a list of enemies almost longer than her catastrophic time in Downing Street, Ms Truss nevertheless claimed that Britain was “full of secret Conservatives — people who agree with us but don’t want to admit it,” while the Tory party had been appeasing “left-wing extremists.”
Painting a picture of a world on the edge of socialism, the former prime minister, best known for crashing the economy in a matter of days, asserted that “the left have been on the march.”
“They have been on the march in our institutions, they have been on the march in our corporate world, they are on the march globally,” she claimed.
Taking on this menace and “changing the system itself” will require “resilience and bravery,” Ms Truss added.
Unfortunately, rather than resilience and bravery, she had to hand only Lee Anderson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, former frontbenchers taking a break from their present gigs on GB News.
Super Typhoon Haiyan is shown off the Southeast Guiuan coast on November 7, 2013. (Image: NOAA)
The experts found five storms that would fit into their hypothetical category—and they have all happened since 2013.
Building on arguments and warnings that climate campaigners and experts have shared for years, a pair of scientists on Monday published a research article exploring the “growing inadequacy” of the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale and possibly adding a Category 6.
Global heating—driven by human activities, particularly the extraction and use of fossil fuels—is leading to stronger, more dangerous storms that are called hurricanes in the North Atlantic and Northeast Pacific, typhoons in the Northwest Pacific, and tropical cyclones in the South Pacific and Indian oceans.
The Saffir-Simpson scale “is the most widely used metric to warn the public of the hazards” of such storms, Michael Wehner of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and James Kossin of the First Street Foundation explained in their new paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“There haven’t been any in the Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico yet but they have conditions conducive to a Category 6, it’s just luck that there hasn’t been one yet.”
“Our motivation is to reconsider how the open-endedness of the Saffir-Simpson scale can lead to underestimation of risk, and, in particular, how this underestimation becomes increasingly problematic in a warming world,” Wehner said in a statement.
The scale is: Category 1 (74-95 mph); Category 2 (96-110 mph); Category 3 (111-129 mph); Category 4 (130-156 mph); and Category 5 (greater than 157 mph). Wehner and Kossin considered creating a Category 6 for storms with sustained winds of at least 192 mph.
The pair found five storms that would fit into their Category 6: Typhoon Haiyan in 2013, Hurricane Patricia in 2015, Typhoon Meranti in 2016, Typhoon Goni in 2020, and Typhoon Surigae in 2021.
“The most intense of these hypothetical Category 6 storms, Patricia, occurred in the Eastern Pacific making landfall in Jalisco, Mexico, as a Category 4 storm,” the paper notes. “The remaining Category 6 storms all occurred in the Western Pacific.”
“Two of them, Haiyan and Goni, made landfall on heavily populated islands of the Philippines. Haiyan was the costliest Philippines storm and the deadliest since the 19th century, long before any significant warning systems,” the paper continues.
The 2013 storm killed at least 6,300 people in the Philippines and left millions more homeless.
“There haven’t been any in the Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico yet but they have conditions conducive to a Category 6, it’s just luck that there hasn’t been one yet,” Wehner told The Guardian. “I hope it won’t happen, but it’s just a roll of the dice. We know that these storms have already gotten more intense, and will continue to do so.”
As the paper details, the pair found that “the Philippines, parts of Southeast Asia, and the Gulf of Mexico are regions where the risk of a Category 6 storm is currently of concern. This risk near the Philippines is increased by approximately 50% at 2°C above preindustrial and doubled at 4°C. Increased risk Category 6 storms in the Gulf of Mexico increases even more, doubling at 2°C above preindustrial and tripling at 4°C.”
Governments worldwide have signed on to the Paris agreement, which aims to keep global temperature rise this century below 2°C, with a more ambitious target of 1.5°C, but scientists stress that policymakers are crushing hopes of meeting either goal.
Wehner said that “even under the relatively low global warming targets of the Paris agreement… the increased chances of Category 6 storms are substantial in these simulations.”
The original argument for not having a Cat 6 was that a Cat 5 pretty much levels everything in its path, but @MichaelEMann points out that with better build codes and housing materials, some things do withstand Cat 5 winds. But 200 mph is exponentially worse.
The scientists considered what the addition of a Category 6 could look like, but they aren’t necessarily advocating for it. Kossin said in a statement that “tropical cyclone risk messaging is a very active topic, and changes in messaging are necessary to better inform the public about inland flooding and storm surge, phenomena that a wind-based scale is only tangentially relevant to.”
“While adding a sixth category to the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale would not solve that issue, it could raise awareness about the perils of the increased risk of major hurricanes due to global warming,” he continued. “Our results are not meant to propose changes to this scale, but rather to raise awareness that the wind-hazard risk from storms presently designated as Category 5 has increased and will continue to increase under climate change.”
The Washington Post on Monday also emphasized the need for improved communication about flooding and storm surge:
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research shows such water-related hazards are hurricanes’ deadliest threats, said Deirdre Byrne, a NOAA oceanographer who studies ocean heat and its role in hurricane intensification. While adding a Category 6 “doesn’t seem inappropriate,” she said, combining the Saffir-Simpson scale with something like an A through E rating for inundation threats might have a greater impact.
“That might save even more lives,” Byrne said.
In a statement, National Hurricane Center Director Michael Brennan seconded those concerns. He said NOAA forecasters have “tried to steer the focus toward the individual hazards,” including storm surge, flooding rains, and dangerous rip currents, rather than overemphasizing the storm category, and, by extension, the wind threats alone.
“It’s not clear that there would be a need for another category even if storms were to get stronger,” he said.
Even if the center has no plans to expand the wind scale, “talking about hypothetical Category 6 storms is a valuable communication strategy for policymakers and the public,” former NOAA hurricane scientist Jeff Masters wrote Monday, “because it is important to understand how much more damaging these new superstorms can be.”
