A final investment for the plants is planned before the next election | Carl Court/Getty Images
LONDON — The U.K. government is mulling plans which would hike household energy bills to help pay for a new nuclear energy plant.
Ministers are considering tweaking the funding deal for Sizewell C, a proposed £20 billion nuclear plant in Suffolk, as they scramble to attract investors.
Under one proposal being looked at in Whitehall, the development would be part funded by electricity suppliers — and those firms “would be expected to pass these costs onto consumers through their electricity bills,” according to a consultation paper on the plans.
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero is set to publish its response to that consultation later this week, according to two industry figures granted anonymity to discuss the process.
Officials insist potential additional charges to consumers would be low. But any move leading to higher bills would be controversial during a cost-of-living crisis driven by two years of rising energy costs.
Three people are set to be charged over a protest at Rishi Sunak’s home (Danny Lawson/PA Wire)
Three people will be charged with criminal damage following a Greenpeace protest at Rishi Sunak’s home in North Yorkshire, prosecutors have said.
Mathieu Soete, 38, Amy Rugg-Easey, 33, and Alexandra Wilson, 32, will each be charged with one count of criminal damage over the protest last August in the prime minister’s Richmond constituency, the Crown Prosecution Service said.
Mr Soete, of Hackney, and Ms Rugg-Easey and Ms Wilson, both from Shiremoor in North Tyneside, are due to appear at York Magistrates’ Court on 21 March, according to the CPS.
A fourth suspect is due to answer bail at a later date.
Activists were pictured last year atop the roof of Mr Sunak’s grade II-listed manor house in Kirby Sigston, near Northallerton, which they draped with oil-black fabric in protest over what they called a new fossil fuel drilling “frenzy”.
The prime minister was on holiday in California at the time of the demonstration.
Environmental activists march during the Global Climate Strike in downtown Chicago, Illinois, on September 15, 2023. (Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty Images)
The city alleges the industry “funded, conceived, planned, and carried out a sustained and widespread campaign of denial and disinformation about the existence of climate change and their products’ contribution to it.”
Chicago on Tuesday joined the growing list of U.S. cities and states suing Big Oil for lying to the public about how burning fossil fuels causes and exacerbates the climate emergency.
The administration of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, a progressive Democrat, filed a lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court against ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, and the industry lobby American Petroleum Institute, which “funded, conceived, planned, and carried out a sustained and widespread campaign of denial and disinformation about the existence of climate change and their products’ contribution to it.”
“The climate change impacts that Chicago has faced and will continue to face—including more frequent and intense storms, flooding, droughts, extreme heat events, and shoreline erosion—are felt throughout every part of the city and disproportionately in low-income communities,” the suit contends.
In a statement, Johnson said that “there is no justice without accountability.”
“From the unprecedented poor air quality that we experienced last summer to the basement floodings that our residents on the West Side experienced, the consequences of this crisis are severe, as are the costs of surviving them,” he added. “That is why we are seeking to hold these defendants accountable.”
🚨BREAKING: Chicago is suing Big Oil companies for climate deception!
“The fossil fuel industry should be able to pay for the damage they’ve caused. We have to see accountability for the climate crisis.”https://t.co/CTrqbzcc0v
“Big Oil has lied to the American people for decades about the catastrophic climate risks of their products, and now Chicago and communities across the country are rightfully insisting they pay for the damage they’ve caused,” Center for Climate Integrity president Richard Wiles said in a statement.
“With Chicago, the nation’s third largest city, joining the fray, there is no doubt that we are witnessing a historic wave of lawsuits that could finally hold Big Oil accountable for the climate crisis they knowingly caused,” he added.
Chicago joins eight U.S. states plus the District of Columbia and numerous municipalities across the country that have sued to hold Big Oil accountable for deceiving the public about its role in the climate emergency.
“To date, eight federal appeals courts and dozens of federal district courts have unanimously ruled against the fossil fuel industry’s arguments to prevent these lawsuits from moving forward in state courts,” noted the Center for Climate Integrity. “In 2023, the U.S. Justice Department added its support for the communities. The U.S. Supreme Court has denied Big Oil petitions to consider the industry’s appeals of those lower court rulings three separate times, most recently in January.”
Angela Tovar, Chicago’s chief sustainability officer, told the Chicago Sun-Times that “the fossil fuel industry should be able to pay for the damage they’ve caused.”
“We have to see accountability for the climate crisis,” she added.
GB News was left embarrassed after the right-wing channel’s own poll showed that an overwhelming majority of respondents want to rejoin the EU, not a result that the channel would’ve been happy with.
Over the weekend, eight years after Britain left the EU, GB News decided to carry out a poll to gauge public opinion on Brexit. They would’ve done well to remember that a number of polls over recent months have shown that a majority favour rejoining the EU, with the demand to reverse Brexit reaching is highest ever level in one poll.
However, GB News decided to put their poll behind a paywall, meaning that only paying readers could participate. Author Edwin Hayward then decided to tweet a link to the poll which bypassed the paywall, allowing others to join in on the voting.
With a wider sample now participating in the poll, the overwhelming majority of votes went to rejoin, with over 90% of voting to rejoin the EU.
“The evidence points to a significant long-run output cost of Brexit,” the economists at Goldman’s wrote.
Yet more evidence has emerged of just how disastrous the decision to leave the EU has been for the UK economy, with economists at Goldman Sachs group saying that real GDP has underperformed by about 5%.
In a research note published earlier this month, Sven Jari Stehn and colleagues said that Brexit had resulted in reduced growth and higher inflation, with ‘reduced international trade, weak business investment and a drop in migrants coming from Britain’s largest trade partner all contributing’, Bloomberg has reported.
It comes as a number of studies have warned of the harmful consequences of Brexit, with the Bank of England saying last year that the decision to leave the EU has cost the average UK household £1,000, due to a lack of investment following the referendum.
