Starmer pushes ahead with a state-owned “green energy” investment company which will be devastating to nature
Keir Starmer has announced plans to build enough offshore wind to power 20 million homes over the next five years using taxpayer money to develop parts of the seabed owned by The Crown Estate.
Even though The Crown Estate feigns concern for UK citizens and nature, it will be devastating to both.
The establishment of Great British Energy (“GBE”) is a central part of the government’s green agenda, ultimately aiming to provide “clean” power by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. Although Sir Keir Starmer is yet to announce details of GBE, he has announced a major partnership with The Crown Estate.
GBE will not produce energy. It will not supply energy. It will not add value to the country’s energy resources or infrastructure. It is an investment company. It is merely a vehicle through which the UK government will invest taxpayers’ money in “renewable” energy projects, such as wind farms.
Using all the fluffy language required to sell a defective product, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband is attempting to get the public on board by describing GBE as being owned by the British people. This is disingenuous. What he means is it will be owned by the UK government even though it is funded by the people.
What Miliband is describing is socialism, where the government has ownership and direct control over industries and resources. Any form of socialist regime – which by nature increases government ownership, intervention and control – raises questions about efficiency, accountability and the balance between state control and individual rights and freedoms.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last four and half years, you’ll know that there is a huge difference between the people’s wishes and the Government’s wishes. And there is a huge difference between what is beneficial to the people and what is beneficial to the Government.
As we’ve witnessed Members of Parliament not representing the well-being and concerns of their constituents, so government ownership of a company does not mean the people will have a say or oversight in what a state-owned company’s directors do. The only achievements of a government-owned company that we can be fairly certain of are an increase in bureaucracy, corruption and control over our lives. GBE will ultimately cost the people dearly.
Regardless of the people’s wishes, Starmer and Miliband are pressing forward at taxpayers’ expense. The proposed state-owned GBE will be headquartered in Scotland. And although it is yet to be formally set up, a process that will require legislation, Miliband has already appointed a chairman to run it.
Once it is set up, GBE will be given £8.3bn of public money to invest in green technologies with a target of developing 20-30GW of offshore wind power. This investment aims to help hit the government’s target of decarbonising Britain’s power sector by 2030.
It aims to attract a further £60bn in investment and accelerate the deployment of “clean” energy to create jobs and lower energy bills.
The company’s initial focus will be on offshore wind, but it also plans to invest in other technologies such as carbon capture and tidal power. The company plans to work on activities such as scoping out the seabed and ensuring connections to the onshore grid for new turbines.
In an article for the Guardian, Miliband said: “The crown estate, which has a £16bn portfolio of land and seabed and returns its profits to the government, will bring its long-established expertise having enabled the UK as world leader in offshore wind and the new borrowing powers recently announced by government.”
The government’s deal with The Crown Estate, which will have new powers to borrow money and invest, allows Miliband to sidestep some of the Treasury’s strict public finance rules.
The involvement of The Crown Estate and the royal family is expected to bring credibility and support to the initiative.
Labour is also in discussions with the Scottish government and the devolved management of The Crown Estate in Scotland about support for local projects.
As we have detailed in many articles, there is no climate change crisis and the climate change agenda is spurious. So, what is the Government’s real aim in launching a state-owned energy company? Perhaps a good place to start is with the so-called credibility of King Charles III.
King Charles III’s Credibility
For decades, attempts have been made to use climate change to justify radical policy changes. But “The Great Reset” is the most ambitious and radical plan the world has seen in more than a generation.
Who launched The Great Reset? None other than King Charles III, who at the time was Charles, Prince of Wales.
On 3 June 2020, then Prince Charles launched The Great Reset through his official website. The announcement said: “Today, through HRH’s Sustainable Markets Initiative and the World Economic Forum, The Prince of Wales launched a new global initiative, The Great Reset … The Great Reset, which was launched during a virtual roundtable today, aims to rebuild, redesign, reinvigorate and rebalance our world.”
Who participated in the roundtable? Charles III didn’t elaborate.
Shortly after the launch, The Hill wrote: “Although many details about The Great Reset won’t be rolled out until the World Economic Forum meets in Davos in January 2021, the general principles of the plan are clear: The world needs massive new government programmes and far-reaching policies … Or put another way, we need a form of socialism.”
But it’s not only state control that King Charles wants from The Great Reset. There is a lot of money at stake. Money that he envisions will be provided partly by nations, who take it from the public purse, and from the private sector.
On 1 December 2023, Charles III gave a speech at COP28 during which he revealed that his plan involves bringing together “public-private philanthropic and NGOs so that they all play their part in delivering climate action.”
He said $5 trillion per year was needed to tackle climate change. And because “public finance alone will never be sufficient” the world needs an “international financial system combined with the innovative use of risk reduction tools like first loss risk guarantees.”
An “international financial system” has long been the ambition behind the green agenda. At the City of London’s 2020 Green Horizon Summit, former Bank of England chief Mark Carney said that total net zero transition represents “the greatest commercial opportunity of our time” and “our objective for COP26 is to build the framework so that every financial decision can take climate change into account.”
Why do they want a new financial system?
The year before Carney had said the quiet part out loud. In 2019, at an insurance industry event, he said: “Changes in climate policies, technologies and physical risks in the transition to a net zero world will prompt reassessments of the value of virtually every asset. The financial system will reward companies that adjust and punish those who don’t.”
It’s about money and control.
Considering Charles III’s Great Reset ambitions, it is no surprise that GBE has formed a major partnership with The Crown Estate.
The Crown Estate is a collection of lands and holdings in the United Kingdom belonging to the British Monarch as a corporation sole (solely owned by the reigning Monarch), making it “the Sovereign’s public estate,” which is neither government property nor part of the Monarch’s private estate. According to Wikipedia, the Sovereign, currently King Charles III, has official ownership of the estate, however, is not involved with the management or administration of the estate, and has no personal control of its affairs.
The Royal Household receives a percentage of The Crown Estate’s profit to support the Monarch’s official duties, called the Sovereign Grant. Initially, the Monarch received 15% of the Crown Estate’s profit. This was increased to 25% in 2017-2018. In July 2023, the Sovereign Grant was reduced to 12%.
The Crown Estate “manages” about 55% of the UK’s foreshore (beaches) around England, Wales and Northern Ireland, but not in the Orkney and Shetland islands, and virtually all of the UK’s territorial seabed (from mean low water to the 12-nautical-mile limit). Part of this “management” is leasing and licensing offshore wind farms. Offshore wind developers pay a fee to the Crown for seabed rights. This has proved financially rewarding for the King’s coffers.
In June 2023, it was reported that the bulk of the near-£130 million increase in profits of the King’s property group in 2022 came from the fees paid by the developers who won the rights to build six new offshore wind farms.
On Wednesday, The Crown Estate announced it delivered a record £1.1 billion net revenue profit for the financial year 2023/24. The record results were “driven by decades of investment in offshore wind, combined with a diverse and resilient property and land portfolio.”
There are now 36 wind farms operating across its marine holdings with a combined capacity of 11.8 GW. It should be noted that the UK is the second-biggest market for offshore wind behind China.
The Crown Estate doesn’t limit its charges to fixed-bottom offshore wind farms. It also charges for floating offshore wind farms.
As The Crown Estate announcement noted: “An important moment from the year was the launch of Offshore Wind Leasing Round 5, which is set to generate up to a further 4.5GW by putting innovative floating wind farms in the Celtic Sea,” the announcement stated.
And it is expanding its leases for fixed-bottom wind farms: “The Crown Estate is now planning to deliver seabed space to generate a further 20 – 30GW of renewable offshore wind off the coast of England and Wales by 2030.”
We can conclude that the Crown Estate intends to earn a lot of money from its partnership with Great British Energy, of which King Charles gets, currently, 12% of the profits earned by The Crown Estate leasing the rights to use UK waters.
Read more:
- Meet The Great Reset King – Charles III
- Meet the world’s largest landowners topped by the British royal family
- A Destructive Plan to Transform the Global Financial System Under the Guise of “Climate Change”
- Things are not looking good for UK’s Net Zero Zealots and offshore wind profiteers
- As renewable energy goes into meltdown in Europe, the UK ramps it up
Whales Killed by Offshore Wind
In announcing its record 2023/24 results, The Crown Estate also claimed to be “stewarding the UK’s natural environment.”
“The Crown Estate’s marine, rural and urban assets all have different roles to play in supporting nature recovery at a time when the State of Nature report reveals the UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world,” the announcement said.
“The Whole of Seabed Programme uses data to identify prime areas of opportunity to deliver for biodiversity and ecosystem resilience around the coast and seabed. Ongoing projects with partners include working with the Sea Ranger Service to gather field data on birds and marine mammals in the Celtic Sea, as well as enabling trials to restore seagrass and supporting several oyster restoration projects.”
The Crown Estate’s concern for marine mammals is limited to gathering data. If they had gathered data, then they would know that their offshore wind farm ambitions are destructive to the very nature they claim to be “stewarding.”
Data on the destruction of marine mammals in the gold rush for “clean, green” energy is not difficult to find.
A recent systematic statistical analysis of marine animals off the USA coast indicates that offshore wind development has likely been killing lots of whales since it began around 2016.
Apostolos Gerasoulis, a Rutgers professor emeritus of computer science who co-created the search engine that powers Ask.com, said: “Absolutely, 100 per cent, offshore wind kills whales.”
After Luna, a 41-foot humpback whale that swam up and down the East Coast for the best part of half a century, washed up dead on Long Island, New York, in January 2023, Gerasoulis began researching whale deaths.
That summer he started building a software system to identify any relationship between the dead whales and offshore wind survey vessels, which use loud blasts of sonar to map the seabed for the installation of offshore wind turbines and high-voltage cables. He named the system Luna.
The Luna software system that Gerasoulis built integrates National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (“NOAA”) data on whale, dolphin and porpoise deaths with vessel traffic data from MarineCadastre.gov. He believes it is the first system of its kind.
NOAA declared “unusual mortality events” for humpback whales in 2016, minke whales in 2017 and North Atlantic right whales also in 2017. The death count is now up to 534 for these species.
Wind farm developers started sending out sonar vessels to blast the ocean floor with high-intensity sound waves to map it for offshore wind farms in 2016.
But NOAA still denies any connection.
However, according to Gerasoulis, NOAA’s data reveals that humpback whale deaths in New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island waters went from an average of two per year before 2016 to 10 in the years since. Last year, 21 humpback whales died in the region.
He loaded NOAA data on whale deaths, the zigzag courses of survey ships and even wave action into his computer system. And his system Luna revealed patterns that Gerasoulis believes point to offshore wind survey vessels as the cause of the whale deaths.
“The numbers never lie,” Gerasoulis said. ”There is a cause. We have shown that the cause for the death of the whales is offshore wind. Period.”
Read more: Professor Makes Stunning Discovery: ‘Absolutely, 100 per cent, Offshore Wind Kills Whales’, Climate Change Dispatch, 18 July 2024
“Professor Gerasoulis has confirmed with profound statistical evidence the widespread conjecture that offshore wind sonar surveys have been killing whales. There is now no reasonable doubt that the extensive sonar harassment authorised by NOAA since 2016 has caused the massive increase in whale deaths that NOAA first flagged in 2016-17,” CFact wrote.
Adding, “Given this compelling new evidence, if NOAA still refuses to act, then either the President or Congress should do so. Acoustic harassment is ongoing, and whales may be dying from it. This reckless killing of whales must stop.”
Minke whales are commonly spotted around the UK coastline, as are killer whales and several species of dolphins. Humpback whales, along with beluga whales and sperm whales, are less common but have been recorded in UK waters.
If they are indeed gathering data, how have the Sea Ranger Service, The Crown Estate, Miliband and Starmer missed the deadly effect of offshore wind developments on marine mammals? It has even been reported in the Daily Mail. How have they missed it?
Featured image: Starmer says bills will come down with Great British Energy – as he hails ‘game changer’ Crown Estate partnership, Sky News, 25 July 2024
