FW: Meeting to discuss East Coast Main Line public ownership campaign

[Peter Robinson]

FYI

 

 

Please let Matt know if you can send somebody from your organisation. And if you have any thoughts about how to mobilise put them up on the discussion group as well.

 

From: Matt Dykes [mailto:MDy...@tuc.org.uk]
Sent: 24 April 2013 12:30
To: Matt Dykes; Tahera Solim
Subject: Meeting to discuss East Coast Main Line public ownership campaign

 

Friends

 

We would like to invite you all to join us for a meeting to plan a campaign for the public ownership of rail, with a key focus on fighting the privatisation of East Coast.

 

Date:                           Wednesday 8^th May

Time:                           11am – 1pm

Venue:                        Congress House, Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3LS

 

As you know, in March the government announced that it will be putting the East Coast Main Line out to tender in 2014.  East Coast has been run successfully under public ownership, following two previous franchise failures. It has returned over £640m to the government to be reinvested in rail, received among the very lowest subsidy and has out-performed many other Train Operating Companies. Despite this, in a clearly ideological and political move, the government has prioritised East Coast as one of the first franchises to be put out to tender during the life of the current parliament.

 

We want to build a broad coalition of organisations that support our aim of a national integrated railway under public ownership that meets the needs of passengers, our economy and our environment. This meeting will establish an outline campaign plan with the aim of recruiting further partners to the coalition and building action around the UK in support of publicly owned rail, with a key focus on fighting the privatisation of East Coast.

 

If you (or a suitable colleague) can make it to the meeting, please let me know.  If there are others that you think we should invite, please let them know too.

 

Regards, Matt

 

Matt Dykes

Policy Officer

Organisation and Services Department

Trades Union Congress

 

t:    0207 467 1245

m:  07747 025 983

 

www.actionforrail.org

 

 

 

 

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[Philip Pearson]

The independent Committee on Climate Change published a report yesterday on the impact of government green taxes on the competitiveness of our energy intensive industries (EIIs). It suggests that the government’s compensation package is likely to just about cover industries’ additional costs from carbon taxes. I’m not so sure about that. But the report is very well worth looking at. It says we’ve lost so much manufacturing capacity that our imported carbon is greater than home produced emissions.

http://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/carbon-footprint-and-competitiveness/

 

Here’s a TUC commentary on it.

http://touchstoneblog.org.uk/2013/04/bring-industry-back-home

 

 

All the best,

 

Philip

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[Chris Church]

The Energy Bill is still being debated in Parliament. Thanks to much lobbying by groups and individuals across UK it is taking longer than expected.  The core point in the debate is the need for a target for 'decarbonisation' of our electricity supply. If that target is in the Bill, then it helps deliver on the Climate Act targets, it sends a clear message to the electricity industry and it provides a policy basis for investment that could lead to many thousands of new jobs in clean energy.
 
The amendment to the Bill that would set a target, proposed by MPs Tim Yeo and Barry Gardiner has attracted support from MPs form all parties.  Major NGOs including Friends of the Earth, WWF, Greenpeace and the RSPB are united in their support for the amendment. A significant number of Conservative and Lib Dem MPs have already said they will vote against the government to support it.  If we can convince a few more to do so, then we win the vote.
 
So now is the time to lobby your MPs. The next five weeks are critical.  You can do this in many ways.
 
The best is by organising a public meeting. The ‘Energy We Can All Afford’ programme, supported by these NGOs, can supply national speakers to make the case and to invite your MP to support this amendment. We can also offer support in terms of publicity, posters and a grant to cover costs.
 
You can also organise lobby meetings - a small group of people meeting with the MP at an agreed time. We can offer guidance and support on this too. Individuals can also lobby their MPs, in person, by letter and by email.
 
We need to target all Conservative and Lib Dem MPs, but it is also important to remind Labour MPs of the importance of supporting this amendment.
 
Please get your group and your community involved in this work during May. Success now will have positive impacts for many years to come. 
 
If you are interested to act, please contact us now, via in...@energywecanallafford.org or the website www.energywecanallafford.org

[Chris Broome]

I agree need we need to increase our efforts to press particularly Conservative and Lib Dem MPs on the Energy Bill over the next few weeks.

The world is heading for a temperature rise well in excess of 2 degrees because of policies Governments make.  The Bill as it stands will be one policy that keeps us on that path –it is vital that it is changed. 

Tactically, green NGOs have been focusing on the points of “green jobs” and meeting climate targets.  For example, here is a key sentencefrom FoE’s current template campaign letter - “The CCC state that cleaning up our power sector by 2030 is the most cost effective way to meet our legally binding climate change targets.”This line has been very successful, particularly by becoming the focus of mass e-mail actions. The message is positive and shows a way forward for the economy, which is both important and appealing. However, it has weaknesses as well. It does not convey the scale of the crisis we are facing.  Partly because of this, the Government has been able to frame the debate as being only about the cheapest way to meet targets, with no possibility of them being missed altogether. They can then all-too-easily declare that particular measures under consideration cost too much and that emissions savings will obviously be cheaper in some other sector or further into the future. There is public support for this approach because it is easy to visualize the benefits of saving money they are assured there will be no adverse consequences from climate change anyway.

So we should also make the case that if we fail to clean up the power sector, we are most likely to miss our climate change targets and contribute to a situation where we eventually find we can no longer maintain the ordered,  industrialised society we have today. But then there is another rather taboo issue  which we should address. That is that it will be extremely difficult, let alone costly, to increase the amount of electricity we can generate, at the same time as moving away from fossil fuels. This is leading some economists to conclude that meeting emissions targets is simply not viable.

So I grappling with the question of how to get across these issues to an unreceptive audience of largely climate-sceptical  MPs. Whilst very sound and compelling evidence can be put forward to show that both general Government policy and the Energy Bill specifically are inadequate to tackle change, it is difficult to convey this in simple terms.  I have attached a draft letter (updated from an earlier version I e-mailed to this group in January) that seeks to do this as effectively as possible. It is designed to add to the lobbying material that various groups have contributed, in making important but neglected points.  I will also follow this message up with links to other material and Chris Church’s message beIow contains links to some excellent template letters for both first and follow-up responses to MPs.

 I hope that some of you will find this submission helpful in your campaigning. You can send the attached letter or extracts from it to your MP or even just read it for your own knowledge, at this stage. It essentially has two distinct parts – the first is short and includes a link to a presentation by Dr Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre, which covers the Climate Change Act and general climate policy. The larger, second part considers the likely consequences of the draft Energy Bill. I have focused on how it is storing up problems for the future.  The remaining notes below give some extra background to the comments in that second part. I would welcome any feedback, discussion or requests for further information on these issues.

DECC have produced outrageously speculative models of how the electricity sector will look in 2050, as part of the large body of evidence used to inform their policies. Unsurprisingly, they have not attracted much attention. They supposedly demonstrate how we can produce more electricity than at present, almost all from low-carbon or negative –carbon sources. The letter describes the recklessness of relying on these projections, unless and until we develop the means to bring them about. On the one hand, we need to pursue radical energy-saving measures. On the other, we need to develop low-carbon electricity much more rapidly, to both reduce emissions early and discover what is possible. Notice, this argument needs to be handled with care.  Firstly, I am not a simply advocating that emissions should be lower in 2030 so we have more freedom for them to be higher in 2050. The Climate Change Act’s 80% emissions reduction target applies to 2050 so the models have to be in line with that as well as the “Carbon Budget” for that period. The main point is that unless we progress rapidly towards those scenarios early on, we will leave a task that is phenomenally challenging in the 2030s and 2040s. The only reasonable alternatives to meeting the DECC projections for 2050 generation capacity are deeper reductions in emissions in other sectors or reduced energy use.  I believe the latter will ultimately be necessary but it also implies a lower standard of living, according to conventional thinking.   “Low-impact” living is probably going to be our salvation but my arguments do not assume this and unfortunately, this is not a prospect many MPs are willing to contemplate as yet.

Best regards

Chris Broome

[Chris Broome]

A date has now been set for the next Parliamentary stage for the Energy Bill and the long-awaited vote on a decarbonisation target. It is 3 and 4 June - see http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2268587/date-confirmed-for-energy-bill-report-stage-as-row-over-decarb-target-intensifies

 

For those people seeking more evidence to help in lobbying  their MP or who just want to better understand the issues, here are the links I would most recommend.

 

Gas versus renewables

 

I think the best discussion of the gas/low carbon energy debate, including cost comparisons, is still a Carbon Brief blog, dating back to September:

http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2012/09/letter-from-the-committee-on-climate-change-on-gas

The "open letter" link to the CCC's letter to Ed Davey states very clearly why a decarbonisation target  needs to be set next year and not delayed . Figure 5 shows an estimated cost-comparison between a lower-carbon and a higher gas generation mixes. Notice that the gas one is indeed cheaper between 2019 and 2024 but not in the short or long term, for the central price predictions.

 

Shale Gas

 

Carbon Brief have a number of blogs on this. The first one listed here describes the debate well, and especially brings out the broad political support for it (but see last section for arguments against ). The second describes a report by think-tank Chatham House and is less supportive. The third, from the Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre, argues exploiting UK shale gas will be disastrous in a global context.

 

http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2013/04/ecc-committee-report-on-shale-gas

http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2012/08/chatham-house-briefing-on-shale-gas

http://kevinanderson.info/blog/uks-office-of-unconventional-gas-oil-another-nail-in-the-climate-change-coffin/

 

Only the last of these acknowledges (if not by name)  another huge problem with shale gas, which is...

 

The Carbon Bubble

 

The "carbon bubble" is the reason why the majority of the world's fossil fuel reserves need to be left in the ground:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/apr/19/fossil-fuels-and-vested-interests
The report on which this article is base  is here:
Unburnable carbon 2013: Wasted capital and stranded assets
http://www.carbontracker.org/wastedcapital

 

A quote from Ed Davey

The following article mainly describes the chaos all the wrangling with the Treasury is causing within DECC . But note an excellent quote from Ed Davey six paragraphs down. He makes inspiring comments that could be thrown back at any MP opposing a decarbonisation target...

“ Climate change threatens the wellbeing of every person around the world and  can only be addressed through a global response to reduce emissions.

What we still need is the political will to take the action desperately needed. We need a greater sense of urgency. This means taking tough decisions and challenging others.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/top-energy-adviser-walks-out-over-treasury-meddling-8603504.html

 

Nuclear Power

Be ready for DECC and EdF to announce that they have either agreed terms or pulled out of negotiations for EdF to build the first "new nuclear" power station at Hinkley Point. (Note one point that is not made very clear in the link below. A major reason why DECC want the "strike price" to be below £100 is that otherwise, offshore wind starts to become cheaper overall). More furious debate will follow any decision.If the plans fall through, it will be a clear victory for anti-nuclear campaigners, be likely to increase the financial support for renewables but also lead to claims that a decarbonisation target for 2030 is unachievable.

http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2013/02/new-nuclear-its-about-time-(and-money)

 

Fuel Price Fixing

No links for this but if your interest is fuel poverty, a Parliamentary Committee will interview Ed Davey and the head of OFGEM on Tuesday about energy prices, profits and poverty so the subject of price fixing by the big six energy companies is bound to be in the news again next week.

 

An earlier message from Chris Church, with links to a host of material including suggested responses to MPs is copied again below. If anyone would like to discuss any of the material I have put out to this list or correspondence with their MPs, I will also assist if I can.

 

Best of luck with your efforts,

Chris Broome

 

 

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Sent: Friday, 3 May 2013, 13:55
Subject: [Jobs&Climate: 1118] Action on the Energy Bill - your help is needed!