Vote Reform to save trees. Yes, you read that right. For we alone will stop the madness of burning trees at Drax – the controversial power station in North Yorkshire, which is Britain’s largest single emitter of carbon dioxide, and burns not just wood, but clear-cuts virgin forests.
At the start of a Reform government, we will revoke the long-term contracts Drax has hoodwinked politicians into agreeing, through which it receives billions of pounds in ‘green’ subsidies from you, the billpayers.
Drax’s 375ft cooling towers are a monument to Net Zero hypocrisy. Its furnaces would have never have started burning wood were it not for the folly of energy ministers past and present.
It barely seems credible that this previously coal-fired power station was paid to convert to burning wood, which belches out even more CO2.
Drax consumes one tree every second. Since 2012, 300 million have been incinerated in this tree crematorium, which is six times more than there are in the New Forest.
Only, none of them come from these shores. They are imported, mostly from North America, making the 6,000-mile journey on diesel freighters for good measure.
And these are not just any trees. Last year the firm was fined £25 million by the regulator Ofgem for misreporting where its wood pellets came from – primary forests in British Columbia, Canada.
Deputy leader of Reform UK Richard Tice says his party will put an end to the Drax scandal, something the other parties have singularly failed to do
Drax’s 375ft cooling towers are a monument to Net Zero hypocrisy. Its furnaces would have never have started burning wood were it not for the folly of energy ministers past and present, writes Richard Tice
In the name of climate change, it is ruining these never-harvested forests, which over millennia have become vast stores of carbon, flattening the homes of an extraordinary richness of plants and animals.
In short, Drax is costing the earth and costing you a fortune. And who came up with this madness? Step forward Ed Miliband who in 2009 announced the then Labour government would ‘ramp up’ the burning of ‘sustainable’ wood at Drax.
Let me lecture Mr Miliband on sustainability: If anything on this earth is not sustainable, it is the industrial destruction of primary forests. That the Government has given Drax £8 billion in subsidies since 2012 makes this carbon catastrophe also a political scandal – one that is 12 times more expensive than the Post Office one.
Mr Miliband is the author of this disaster, but others share the blame.
Back in 2010, he was replaced as climate secretary by two Lib Dems in the coalition government.
First was Chris Huhne. His political career ended in ignominy when he went to prison, but that didn’t stop him walking into a job at a wood pellet company – one with which he had held an official meeting when in power. Nothing to smell there then, apart from burning wood.
Mr Huhne was replaced by one Ed Davey. And things got no better under the Tories. On their watch, Drax CEO Will Gardiner personally trousered £5 million in just one year – emptying your pockets for polluting the skies.
Now we are back with Mr Miliband, the destroyer of forests and jobs. Because the electricity that comes from wood transported halfway round the world costs twice the price of gas. British industry is dying because our electricity prices are the highest in the developed world.
The Government claims that it will get a better deal. Better for Drax, not you.
For Mr Miliband has promised Drax bosses that he will not just extend their ‘welfare payments’ for another four years but also increase the price you have to pay by 11 per cent. So you will be forced to pay higher priced ‘renewable’ subsidies to a company that, in 2023, was responsible for almost 3 per cent of Britain’s entire CO2 emissions.
Not that the power station’s annual 12 million tonnes of carbon ever appear on our Net Zero ledger. Why? Because Mr Miliband pretends that replacement trees immediately reabsorb all the CO2 from the atmosphere, when science says that takes the best part of a century.
So despite burning wood being more polluting, Mr Miliband makes Drax’s emissions magically disappear. Net Zero made easy.
Still worse could come, because Drax executives are trying to persuade him to give them even more billions to capture the power station’s emissions.
It’s an additional process that would make the firm’s electricity absurdly inefficient – Drax would consume twice as much energy than it would supply to the grid.
Oil and gas are far more efficient and therefore cost much less. For instance, our wind farms require huge amounts of cement and steel. These vast machines are made in China at enormous cost to the environment and your pocket. They also require hundreds of miles of unsightly pylons.
If the wind does not blow, gas-powered stations have to be fired up at great cost. And if there’s too much wind, more than the infrastructure around the remoter farms off the coast of Scotland can handle or store, their owners are paid millions to switch their turbines off.
This lose-lose farce is killing our economy. Efficient decarbonisation must be led by technology, not hare-brained central planners in our energy department.
In government, I will stop this economic suicide by high energy prices. Reform UK is preparing to repair the damage. In redesigning the grid we will get the balance right between decarbonisation, affordability and engineering common sense.
We have already told the subsidy vultures that the reckless 20-year wind farm contracts that Mr Miliband is trying to saddle us with will be null and void.
Today, I am telling Drax that they will get the same treatment. The deal they have done with Mr Miliband will be over. The subsidies will stop. Immediately.
The same will happen if the Energy Secretary tries to rush through a multi-decade carbon capture scheme. He can sign contracts – but they will not bind the hands of the next Parliament. He will not wreck the British economy for a generation.
I am making two further announcements. First, we will set a date for the last tree to be burnt in a British power station. To that end, I am inviting firms to write to me with a timetable to replace this unacceptable fuel. Since burning wood is the most inefficient of fuels, every alternative will produce lower emissions and costs.
Second, if Drax threatens to turn out the lights, then, in a blink of an eye, it would be put under new ownership. Without compensation.
If Drax shareholders want to salvage their position, they can start today by getting rid of the executives whose serial dishonesty has placed the company in the crosshairs of so many regulators.
Those regulators are investigating matters so serious that Drax has become a career graveyard for its executives. Its shareholders need to understand the eye-watering sums Drax’s CEO has paid lawyers in an attempt to wriggle free from accountability like a greased piglet.
Reform will put an end to the Drax scandal, something the other parties have singularly failed to do.
The Tories, Lib Dems and Labour are hopelessly compromised by the firm. The Greens – led by ‘G-Cup Zack’ Polanski, the hypnotherapist who charged women to ‘enlarge their breasts’ – are not a serious party.
It is because of charlatans like him that billpayers were saddled with this environmental and economic nightmare, which only Reform has the will to fix.
