Energy empires in Collision The Green versus Black Struggle for our Energy Future by David Howell
312pp • 148x210mm
Hardback
ISBN: 978-1-908531-63-6
Price: £19.95
Publication: March 2016
Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-908531-77-3
Price: £12.50
Publication: September 2017
Collapsing oil prices which shake governments and world markets; Middle East oil sheikhs losing control; the clash between rising green power and the world’s oil giants; Paris climate ambitions versus global energy realities; the fiasco of UK (and German) energy policy; the European energy policy confusion; Russian gas ploys; the truth not told about coal expansion, or about nuclear power; China as the decisive factor in world energy.
These are some of the ultra-topical issues which David Howell examines and untangles in Empires in Collision. Interweaving his own experiences as UK Energy Secretary, economist, business consultant and adviser with the great energy upheavals of recent times, Lord Howell shatters some of the myths and misconceptions which stand in the way of a better and more balanced energy future for all.
About the Author Lord Howell of Guildford was first elected as an MP in 1966. He was MargaretThatcher’s first Secretary of State for Energy and later became Secretary of State for Transport. In 2000 he became Chairman of the British Institute of Energy Economics and in 2003 he became Chairman of the Windsor Energy Group. He is the only Minister to have served in Heath, Thatcher and Cameron administrations and his previous books include Out of the Energy Labyrinth.
From the Prologue: Entry into the Department at the Centre of Everything
May 7th 1979. The wind moans through the ill-fitting windows. I am being shown into a large hospital-white room with some long, squashy sofas and chairs that look as though they had seen better times, a repro mahogany table and about twelve chairs and an enormous desk at the end. We are in the palatial but shabby offices along Milbank once occupied by the old ICI, now a major government department.
The Permanent Secretary is waiting politely smiling to receive me. I am taking over the Department at the Centre of Everything. This is the department of oil shocks, the Shah having just fallen, the department of militant miners and Arthur Scargill, itching to have a go at the new Tory Government, the department of colossal investment programmes in mammoth nationalised industries, the department of booming North Sea oil and North Sea licencing of blocks to be explored, with a state oil company owning and trading one of the largest volumes of oil on the planet, the department that has to keep alongside rising OPEC power, whose Sheikh Yamani and Sheikh Khalifa al-Sabah would soon be pressing me, over sandwiches at the Belfry off Belgrave Square (now Mossimans) to make Britain join OPEC – a fruitless quest.
It is the department of nuclear energy, of the vast British Gas empire, under its formidable boss, Sir Denis Rooke, of the Central Electricity Generating Board and all its area electricity companies, and of the National Coal Board, the department of relations with all the international oil companies. It is the department of the Gulf states and of Norway, it is the department which owns fifty-one percent of BP, the department of global energy turmoil, of soaring oil and gas prices and threatened oil shortages, rocking the world’s economies, and of crisis meetings of the International Energy Agency in Paris (you will be chairing that next, Minister).
It is the department promoting the growth of one of the world’s biggest oil and gas industry supply chains, locked in quarrels about subsidies with Brussels, talking daily on the telephone with Jim Schlesinger (the US Energy Secretary) and other energy ministers round the globe, all struggling with leaping oil prices and OPEC threats of cut-offs. It is the department trying to encourage energy conservation, unfamiliar then but now the biggest resource of all, with the energetic help of Bernard Ingham looking after that division (before he goes off to greater things at No. 10). It is the Department under daily bombardment from the Treasury to sell this, cut that, squeeze out more revenues from the other, the goose to be plucked. It is the Department to which the new Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher takes an instant dislike, demanding the Permanent Secretary, Sir Jack Rampton, whom I found very pleasant and helpful, be removed.
It is in short a department of Soviet proportions, supposedly presiding over a huge socialised sector, about a quarter of British industry, employer of millions of people, consumer of billions of pounds and generator of billions more – a world which was all coming to the end of its time. We are poised right on the pivoting moment of the twentieth century as state mega- ownership and centralisation finally choked itself to death and the era of decentralisation, denationalisation, privatisation and the rising market state was about to begin.
Finally it is the department which has to be explained almost daily to an angry and bewildered Parliament, with its Secretary of State described by Hugh Fraser MP as ruling the biggest Ministerial empire of all time. Beyond Parliament there are armies of even angrier motorists and indignant companies, furious consumers. At the end of the first week of Thatcher Government the pump price had gone up by a then deeply painful eight pence a gallon. ‘Not a very good start’ said Mr. Lloyd the Garage that weekend as he filled up the car at my in- laws’ Welsh home – ‘not a very good start at all’. There would be much more to come. Just now, May 1979, this is also a demoralised department, much as Tony Benn had left it a few days before. I have inherited a superb chief private secretary direct from him who of course is suitably tight lipped about what had gone on but discreetly gives me a flavour of joyful madness in the last days of the previous regime. It seems that by the end of the Labour Government Tony Benn had pursued a sort of UDI policy within Whitehall. He simply refused to attend Cabinet meetings and carried on independently with his sprawling empire. In the private office desk draw is a diamond-studded Rolex watch, a gift from a Saudi Minister. By special dispensation it was allowed to be kept in the Department instead of being handed in to the Government store, as all such gifts were supposed to be. This is so that the Minister could be seen politely wearing it when the next Saudi Prince or Minister stepped through the door.
Nothing like this immense departmental empire, with the fate of the whole government and economy on its plate, and almost with its own foreign policy, would ever exist again. It was of course unmanageable, uncontrollable, impossible and fascinating. Decades ahead entirely new energy and energy-connected issues would unfold. Issues like climate change and carbon dioxide emissions, never mentioned then, would come demandingly to the fore. Powerful new green empires would rise to challenge the longstanding global domination of the hydrocarbons – coal, oil an gas. But all that lay far ahead.
Then, as now, there was an abundance of energy but also an abundance of energy problems and a mountain of risks. That was, and remains, the paradox of energy. While the empires struggle there is ample supply of energy for all and every one of us.
In the meantime ‘Welcome to the Department of Energy, Secretary of State, you will need this. It is the key to your private toilet down the corridor.'
Available now in Hardback and launching shortly in Paperback. Buy your copy direct from the publishers and receive 20% discount from the cover price of £19.95 (Hardback) and £12.50 (Paperback), plus p&p.
The energy world is dangerously divided between the fossil fuel producers and the environmentalists. It’s becoming a head-on fight between the world of still plentiful oil, gas and coal we currently live in and the low-carbon future for which more and more governments and peoples are aiming. It is a contest that affects everything – world poverty, the rise and fall of governments, Middle East stability, environmental catastrophe, the largest businesses in the world – and your ability to work, to get the children to school and to heat your home. Neither side can win outright. The answer is co-operation , not conflict. Here, David Howell - Lord Howell of Guildford - outlines how we got to the unsettled present and the challenges, both global and local, that lie immediately ahead. With energy and climate issues increasingly at the heart of world affairs, this book is essential reading.
