Why governments' attempts to pick winners produce more losers than winners.
Two government bodies - Ofgem (the electricity and gas regulator) and the Energy Savings Trust (EST) - are consulting simultaneously on what to do about green electricity tariffs, those electricity-supply deals, like NPower Juice or Scottish & Southern RSPB fund, which allow you to think you are being green. Both Ofgem and EST are interested not in the fundamentals of whether these tariffs really are green, but how best to maintain the fiction that they are. I have sent the following email to both of them in response to their consultations:
Sir/Madam,
Our company is a leading generator of renewable electricity. We commissioned our first plant in 1987, and last year generated over 300 GWh of renewable electricity.
It is not our intention to reply in detail to your consultations on Developing Guidelines for Green Supply and Accreditation of Green Tariffs, because we believe that it is not practical to sell genuinely green electricity to customers in the current UK market, and that all the tariffs being described as green are perpetrating a fraud on their customers. It is meaningless to debate which form of the fraud is more or less green, and how they might better be administrated.
"To complain of lack of leadership is, in the field of political affairs, the characteristic attitude of all harbingers of dictatorship. In their eyes the main deficiency of democratic government is that it is unable to produce great Führers and Duces", Bureaucracy (1945)