@Surfer17Silver
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Imagine this.View quoted post on X
You “win” WW2.
81 years later, a half Indian, half Jamaican man is a Major General of the British army and has just signed a contract to provide the entire army with halal food.
With a business owner by foreign Muslim men.
For ALL British Army personnel.
Under this Government, energy bills have gone up - and the war in the Middle East could see them climb even higher.View quoted post on X
Yet Ed Miliband still refuses to use our oil and gas reserves in the North Sea.
He says that it wouldn't make a difference, but that's nonsense. Here's why 👇
First, some context on the North Sea. As a country, we’re exceptionally fortunate to have vast oil and gas reserves under the North Sea. If we actually used them, they would be enough to meet half of our needs.
The Jackdaw gas field alone has enough gas to heat 1.6 million homes, and could be up and running in a few months.
But because of this Government’s obsession with Net Zero, they’ve refused to grant any new exploration licenses, meaning that companies aren’t allowed to search for new oil and gas reserves in previously untapped areas. They’re also refusing to let companies extract more oil and gas from the reserves that we already know about.
Instead, they’re spending huge sums of money on intermittent forms of energy, like wind and solar, which don’t work all year round, and which can’t insulate us from shocks like the one that will result from the war in the Middle East.
People like Miliband say that there’s no point using these reserves, because doing so won’t bring down prices. They say that the price of oil and gas is set entirely on the international market, which means that increasing our domestic supply would only have a tiny impact on the overall price.
But this is totally misleading.
First of all, let’s look at gas. It’s true that there are ‘benchmark’ prices for gas internationally. They’re based on the global level of supply and demand.
If the supply goes up but demand stays the same, or falls, the benchmark price will come down. If the supply drops but demand stays the same, or increases, then the benchmark price will go up.
But this is a rough, international rule-of-thumb. It doesn’t mean that all consumers pay the same price everywhere in the world. After all, if that were the case, then why do American consumers pay so much less than British consumers?
To understand how gas is actually priced, you have to look at the two main ways that gas moves around the world.
The first way is through pipelines. These are mostly used for moving gas over relatively short distances. Generally, the buyer and seller will negotiate a price structure, and maintain that agreement over a long time.
But increasingly, the gas market relies on LNG - liquefied natural gas. This is gas which is turned into a liquid, loaded on ships, and transported globally. Ships can be directed to whoever is able to offer the best price.
The further those ships have to travel, the more expensive it becomes to deliver the gas. So, if we’re relying on gas imports from a long way away, we’ll need to spend more money to bring that gas to the UK.
That’s what’s happening at the moment. We currently import about half of the gas that we consume, meaning that we need to bid with other countries for the gas on ships that are travelling around the world.
Michael Cembalest of JP Morgan puts it very well:
“Unlike oil markets, natural gas pricing is more localised…the majority of natural gas is consumed by countries that produce it…European pipeline/LNG prices are spiking…in contrast, US Henry Hub natural gas prices have barely budged…the same is true in Australia and Canada which also produce a lot of gas.”
The vast majority of homes in the UK – 87 percent – use gas for heating. If we produced more gas domestically, then it would be cheaper to buy gas, because it wouldn’t have to travel as far – meaning that heating bills would, in fact, come down.
It would also make us more resistant to shocks. If we lost access to gas from the Middle East, for example, we’d be able to rely on the gas that we produce domestically.
So not only would bills come down, but we’d also avoid sudden increases to bills as a result of falling supply elsewhere in the world.
The oil market operates a little bit differently, but it’s just as important.
97 percent of transport in the UK - cars, lorries, planes - relies on oil products, including petrol and diesel. If fuel prices increase for these companies, it becomes more expensive for them to transport goods that we all need - like food, or clothes. In order to cover their transport costs, companies will need to put up their prices.
So when oil prices go up, it not only makes it more expensive for you to drive your car - it also makes it more expensive to buy everything else.
The oil price is genuinely determined by the level of supply and demand around the world.
However, that doesn’t mean that producing more oil in this country couldn’t bring down prices here in Britain.
The companies which extract oil pay a huge amount of tax - more than £350 billion since the 1970s.
If they’re able to extract more oil in this country, they’ll make more money selling it, which means that they’ll pay more tax.
And the money from that tax can be used to reduce the price that consumers pay for oil.
That’s because, when you pay for oil at the petrol station, 55 percent of the money that you spend actually goes to the Government in tax. In particular, whenever you buy petrol, you pay VAT and Fuel Duty.
The Government want to put up Fuel Duty, which will mean that you pay more for petrol, at a time when the global price of oil is already increasing.
But if we let companies drill for more oil in the North Sea, we could spend the extra tax money that we’d raise on keeping Fuel Duty down. It could save you hundreds of pounds.
And it would also mean that the companies which transport goods like food and clothes would pay less too. They wouldn’t need to put up their prices, so you’d save money on the things that you buy every day.
Miliband’s claims about oil and gas just aren’t true. If we extracted more oil and gas from the North Sea, we could end up with lower household bills, lower petrol prices, and less sudden price increases on everyday essentials. It would make us all better off.
But his obsession with Net Zero ideology means that Miliband would rather leave the oil and gas in the ground. He’s choosing to make us all poorer.
When you give women too much power, they use it to destroy, not improve.View quoted post on X
If you give a woman too much choice, she will want none of the options.
This is true in dating, politics, food, anything really.
Men SHOULD control the world.. Women should be passengers.
