“The [UK] Royal Family have secured a lucrative deal that will earn them tens of millions of pounds from the massive expansion of offshore windfarms….A spokesman for Republic, which campaigns for a more accountable Royal Family, said: ‘It is wholly inappropriate that the Palace should have such a direct interest in a subject like windfarms, given Prince Charles’s obsession with renewable energy. It raises the question as to whether he is seeking to increase his own investment portfolio each time he makes a favourable reference to wind power.’.“…..Prince Charles was even allowed to try to convince some Texas lawmakers to see things his way: “A conference was also held at the Texas Capitol in Austin in which a video of Prince Charles personally addressing Texan politicians on the subject of climate change was shown.”…4/3/2012, UK Guardian
10/24/2010, “Queen’s £38m a year windfarm windfall," Martin Delgado for The Mail on Sunday
“How much the [8] European Monarchies cost [as of 2010]"
“Great Britain £68m [US$85.7 million]
– Holland £33.8m
– Norway £23.9m
– Belgium £11.7m
– Denmark £10.5m
– Sweden £10.2m
– Spain £7.4m
– Luxembourg £7.2m
“The Royal Family have secured a lucrative deal that will earn them tens of millions of pounds from the massive expansion of offshore windfarms.
They will net up to £37.5m extra income every year from the drive for green energy because the seabed within Britain’s territorial waters is owned by the Crown Estate.
[Image: Prince Charles at Highgrove, Rex] Under new measures announced by Chancellor George Osborne last week, the Royals will soon get 15% of the profits from the Estate’s £6bn property portfolio, rather than the existing Civil List arrangement.
Experts predict the growth in offshore windfarms could be worth up to £250m a year to the Crown Estate.
There are already 436 turbines in operation around the UK’s 7,700-mile coastline – but within a decade that number is set to reach nearly 7,000.
Prince Charles is a vociferous campaigner for renewable energy sources such as these, but is opposed to turbines being erected on land – particularly near his own homes….But he has expressed enthusiasm for siting them offshore.
The Crown Estate said profits from windfarms in Britain’s territorial waters – which extend almost 14 miles from the coast – could rise to £100m a year, giving the Royals £15m.
But industry experts said this was an under-estimate and that the true figure was likely to be nearer £250m by 2020, with £37.5m for the Royals.
They currently receive about £30m a year from the Civil List and other grants – a figure that will be frozen until 2012 when it will be replaced by the new mechanism, called the Sovereign Support Grant….
If the experts are correct about windfarm returns, the Monarchy’s budget would more than double, to around £68m.
The canny boost to Royal finances was quietly slipped through as part of last week’s Comprehensive Spending Review.
In what one source described last night as a ‘masterstroke’ by the Prince’s closest adviser Sir Michael Peat, 250 years of history was overturned by scrapping the arrangement under which taxpayers’ money has been used to fund the Royals and pay for the upkeep of their palaces.
The Civil List – which has financed the Monarchy since King George III surrendered all revenues from the Crown Estate after running up massive debts – meant the Royal finances were accountable to Parliament, but the Sovereign Support Grant will avoid such scrutiny….
By 2020, 6,400 turbines – each one rising 500ft above the sea – are expected to be in operation around the UK coastline. Household energy bills will have to rise to pay for the £75 billion expansion, which has been described as one of the biggest engineering projects in recent history.
The EU has told Britain it must generate more of its energy needs from renewable sources. But critics say the plan to increase Britain’s dependence on green energy is flawed and could leave homes and business suffering routine power cuts within five years. Sir Martin Holdgate, former chief scientist at the Department for the Environment, said: ‘There is pressure to act on climate change. But when you look at the cost per unit, it is a rather expensive way of providing electricity.’…
Revenue to the Estate from the windfarms rose by 44% last year to a ‘low base’ of £2.6m. But with the third round of contracts handed out in January, companies bidding for the work say a bonanza is on the horizon.
The UK’s first offshore windfarm was commissioned in December 2000 off Blyth Harbour in Northumberland.
In the following year, leases were awarded for the development of 18 sites. North Hoyle off Merseyside was switched on in December 2003, Scroby Sands off Norfolk followed in 2004 and Kentish Flats in the Thames Estuary became operational a year later.
Since then, the pace of expansion has quickened substantially. There are now a total of 436 working turbines at 13 locations from Walney Island in the Irish Sea to Foreness Point off Margate, Kent.
A further 309 are being built at four sites. Planning permission has been granted for 817 more windmills at seven farms. Yet another 519 turbines at five sites are being considered by planning authorities.
Eon, Centrica, EDF, Scottish Power and npower are among the suppliers that have been awarded contracts to develop windfarms. The firms pay the Crown Estate a rental fee to run their cables along the seabed from the turbines to the shore.
The companies also have to pay a percentage of the money they make from generating electricity….
A spokesman for Republic, which campaigns for a more accountable Royal Family, said: ‘It is wholly inappropriate that the Palace should have such a direct interest in a subject like windfarms, given Prince Charles’s obsession with renewable energy. It raises the question as to whether he is seeking to increase his own investment portfolio each time he makes a favourable reference to wind power.’…
A Buckingham Palace spokesman said: ‘Nobody yet knows how the Sovereign Support Grant is going to work. The details have not yet been finalised with the Treasury. It is wild speculation to discuss what might or might not happen in 2020.’ Clarence House declined to comment on behalf of Prince Charles.”
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Added: New income stream frees UK monarchy from oversight by the peasants: “There is concern, too, that reverting to the old system will destroy a process that serves to underline the crucial democratic principle that the monarchy exists only by the consent of the people.”
12/31/2010, “One’s in the money! Why Prince Charles’s secret 20-year campaign could make him the richest king in history,” UK Daily Mail, Geoffrey Levy
“The bombshell was one no one noticed. Four months ago, as George Osborne made his first Budget speech to the Commons unleashing the biggest public spending cuts in living memory, he slipped in a brief – and almost unnoticed – passage about the financing of the Royal Family. The Chancellor said he intended to scrap the Civil List system that has been in place since 1760 – and that to most people has worked pretty well – and replace it with a new one….
From 2013, the Civil List will be scrapped and the monarchy will be financed by what’s been titled the Sovereign Support Grant – comprising a share of the profits made by the Crown Estate, a vast £6.6billion property empire where the profits go to the Treasury….
So just how did this hugely significant development in royal financing come about?
Step forward the Prince of Wales, whose constant stream of handwritten letters to Government ministers urging them to consider various issues are known in Westminster as ‘black spider’ memos.
For Charles, the Chancellor’s announcement was the culmination of a personal campaign he has waged for more than 20 years. Indeed, it was [Charles] the spendthrift heir to the throne – whose 149 staff include three chauffeurs and 25 domestic ‘personal’ staff of butlers, dressers, chefs and valets, and who spent £125,000 on his gardens at Highgrove last year – who first came up with the idea in the late Eighties.
Charles, whose extravagance has even been criticised by the Queen, wasn’t playing things by halves. His original proposal, presented to the Thatcher government (only to see it refused), was that the entire income from the Crown Estates should revert to the sovereign, just as it did before George III was forced to strike a deal with ministers.
The Estate’s income is immense: £211million last year and it is expected to rise to a whopping £450million by 2020. It was already approaching £60million – no small sum – when, as Charles’ official biographer Jonathan Dimbleby put it back in 1994, he ‘floated the notion’ after ‘his back-of-an-envelope calculations (showed) it would more than match the total government expenditure on the monarchy’.
The prince not only wrote letters detailing his big idea, but also initiated talks with the Thatcher government. His view, as explained by one of his circle involved in the discussions, was that ‘it would have been enormously effective in making the household independent and vigorous,…and good for the standing of the monarchy as an autonomous [parasitic] institution’.
Quite so. And it would also have turned the future King Charles into probably the richest monarch in British history. This would have helped a man who has been criticised by his own mother for employing too many servants and taking too much equipment (his personal white leather loo seat, for example) whenever he travels.
To be fair to Charles, he understandably deplores the ‘cap in hand’ element that tends to characterise the negotiations that take place every ten years between palace advisers and Government over what is inevitably described in Left-wing newspapers as the Queen’s ‘pay rise’.
‘Charles…feels it is unseemly for the monarchy to have to go round with a begging bowl. He has always wanted to put an end to that.’
But the questions is, why has George Osborne apparently acceded to Charles’s demand, particularly at a time of national austerity? Did he simply succumb to the Prince’s concerted campaign?
One close friend has said that he would be ‘hugely surprised’ if Osborne had not been in receipt of those urgent ‘black spider’ memos since becoming Shadow Chancellor under David Cameron in 2005.
Osborne is said to have been persuaded by the ‘cap in hand’ argument and, for his part, says the change in the way the royal family is funded is simply to ensure Chancellors who succeed him ‘will not have to return to the issue’.
But there is also a deep suspicion in certain political quarters that Charles is intent on feathering the royal nest. There is concern, too, that reverting to the old system will destroy a process that serves to underline the crucial democratic principle that the monarchy exists only by the consent of the people. [But not enough "concern" to stand up for the people. The US is also effectively a monarchy.]…
As Prince of Wales, Charles receives an independent income from the Duchy of Cornwall – a comforting £17.1million [US$21.5 million] last year, before tax. As king, he would no longer get this, but instead receive the profits from the Duchy of Lancaster — yet another land and property portfolio (172,000 acres of land, estuaries and rivers, huge Stock Exchange and property investments, with the most valuable possession being the Manor of Savoy in London, an area between the Strand and the Embankment) held in trust for the royals.
The duchy provided the Queen with £13.2million last year (which she uses to cover the expenses of her immediate family who carry out royal duties, including her children Andrew, Edward and Anne). Her income from this source has risen by an impressive 125 per cent in the past ten years.
But neither of the two duchies is more than a minnow compared to the vast Crown Estates, with assets ranging from Regent Street in London’s West End shopping area, Ascot racecourse and Windsor Great Park, 265,000 acres of farmland, as well as ownership of our national seabed stretching out 12 nautical miles around Britain.
It was the huge wealth potential from this seabed beneath 7,700 miles of coastline that attracted attention to George Osborne’s proposal for the monarch to receive 15 per cent of the Crown Estate’s profits. Otherwise the new royal finance plans might have gone through unnoticed.
For it’s no secret that the natural resources in our seabed are a goldmine that could hoist the Crown Estate’s income into the stratosphere.
That will certainly be the case if one development which Prince Charles has been pushing for with all his usual eco-enthusiasm — offshore wind farms — gets the go-ahead. Charles, a student and vociferous campaigner for renewable energy, is vehemently opposed to wind turbines being erected on land where, he says, they are a ‘horrendous blot on the landscape’. He refuses to have them on his Duchy of Cornwall estates.
But he supports them being built offshore. And by a happy coincidence, any offshore wind farm will have to pay rent to the Crown Estates. At present there are 436 wind turbines around the UK’s coastline. By 2020, that number is predicted to rise to almost 7,000 and could push the Crown Estate’s present income to something approaching half a billion pounds a year — and rising.
It’s quite a thought that Prince Charles originally wanted ALL of this money — as opposed to just 15 per cent — to pay for the upkeep of the monarchy. For he believes that turning back the clock to the old system — by which it is funded by the Crown Estate and not directly by the Government — would give the monarchy financial independence, as well as freedom from politicians [and peasants].
But critics of his vision fear that, free from constraint by parliamentary control, he would be free to indulge himself by interfering in national issues [they didn’t “fear” it enough to do anything about it] instead of adhering to the crucial tradition of [apparent] strict impartiality so coolly maintained by the Queen [who for many decades has done nothing to scale back the aggressive globalist political activities of her husband Prince Philip and son Charles]. Professor Robert Hazell, Professor of Government at University College London, says: ‘It seems a retrograde step. It would remove Parliament’s role in approving the size of the Civil List.’…
The royals’ income would more than double to around £67.6million in ten years — just at the same time as millions of subjects will have been forced into a decade of belt-tightening. There wouldn’t be too much ‘consent of the people’ in that.
Sensibly, Osborne — pressured by Lib Dems in the Coalition and aware of accusations of unfairness at a time of austerity everywhere else — has insisted on limits and has decided that the sums paid under the new system must be capped.
Conversely, in the highly unlikely circumstance that the Crown Estate’s earnings might fall, there will also be a safety-net minimum payment. How high and how low these figures will be is yet to be decided, although I understand that talks between Government ministers and palace aides are already getting under way.
But it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that a system that has existed for 251 years seems suddenly to have been replaced by something akin to chaos.
One wouldn’t expect the Prince Charles to accept blame for this mess, even though the new payment system is his own personal victory.”…
Added: Climate "action:" The “global climate” industry was created by the US political class and charged to US taxpayers beginning Nov. 16, 1990 with the U.S. Global Change Research Act of 1990. USGCRP permanently enshrined global climate danger funding throughout the Executive branch and at least 13 federal agencies. US taxpayers financed creation of a new global industry. As chart below shows, climate “action” took off in 1990 via billions of US taxpayer dollars each year, largely without taxpayers’ knowledge and to this day ignored by the media and political class.
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“Note and Sources: The data shown here are funding disbursements by the White House U.S. Global Change Research Program and
its predecessor, the National Climate Program, available at NCP 1988,
43; Climate Science Watch 2007; and Leggett, Lattanzio, and Bruner
2013. These data, however, do not represent congressional climate science funding appropriations to other government agencies. As we show later in a more detailed assessment of U.S. government climate science funding,the numbers here, especially those for more recent years, greatly underestimate the actual level of funding.” pdf p. 4Fall 2015, “Causes and Consequences of the Climate Science Boom,“ independent.org, Butos and McQuade
“1. The [US]Government’s Role in Climate Science Funding…[is] embedded in scores of agencies and programs scattered throughout the Executive Branch of the US government. While such agency activities related to climate science have received funding for many years as components of their mission statements, the pursuit of an integrated national agenda to study climate change and implement policy initiatives took a critical step with passage of the Global Change Research Act of 1990. This Act established institutional structures operating out of the White House to develop and oversee the implementation of a National Global Change Research Plan and created the US GlobalChange Research Program (USGCRP) to coordinate the climate change research activities of Executive Departments and agencies.[33] As of 2014, the coordination of climate change-related activities resides largely in the President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, which houses several separate offices, including the offices of Environment and Energy, Polar Sciences, Ocean Sciences, Clean Energy and Materials R&D, Climate Adaptation and Ecosystems, National Climate Assessment, and others. The Office of the President also maintains the National Science and Technology Council, which oversees the Committee on Environment, Natural Resources, and Sustainability and its Subcommittee on Climate Change Research. The Subcommittee is charged with the responsibility of planning and coordinating with the interagency USGCRP. Also, the Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy is housed within the President’s Domestic Policy Council. While Congress authorizes Executive branch budgets, the priorities these departments and agencies follow are set by the White House. As expressed in various agency and Executive Branch strategic plans, these efforts have been recently organized around four components comprising (1) climate change research and education, (2) emissions reduction through “clean” energy technologies and investments, (3) adaptation to climate change, and (4) international climate change leadership.[36]….By any of these measures, the scale of climate science R&D has increased substantially since 2001. Perhaps, though, the largest funding increases have occurred in developing new technologies and tax subsidies. As can be seen from Table 1, federal dollars to develop and implement “clean energy technologies” have increased from $1.7 billion in 2001 to $5.8 billion in 2013, while energy tax subsidies have increased from zero in 2001 and 2002 to $13 billion in 2013, with the largest increases happening since 2010. The impact on scientific research of government funding is not just a matter of the amounts but also of the concentration of research monies that arises from the focus a single source can bring to bear on particular kinds of scientific research. Government is that single source and has Big Player effects because it has access to a deep pool of taxpayer (and, indeed, borrowed and created) funds combined with regulatory and enforcement powers which necessarily place it on a different footing from other players and institutions….Government’s inherent need to act produces a particular set of decisions that fall within a relatively narrow corridor of ends to which it can concentrate substantial resources.
2. By any standards, what we have documented here is a massive funding drive, highlighting the patterns of climate science R and D as funded and directed only by the Executive Branch and the various agencies that fall within its purview.[40] To put its magnitude into some context, the $9.3 billion funding requested for climate science R and D in 2013 is about one-third of the total amount appropriated for all 27 National Institutes of Health in the same year,[41] yet it is more than enough to sustain a science boom. Its directional characteristic, concentrated as it has been on R&D premised on the controversial issue of the actual sensitivity of climate to human-caused emissions, has gone hand in hand with the IPCC’s expressions of increasing confidence in the AGW hypothesis and increasingly shrill claims of impending disaster....
10. The USGCRP operates as a confederacy of the research components of thirteen participating government agencies, each of which independently designates funds in accordance with the objectives of the USGCRP; these monies comprise the program budget of the USGCRP to fund agency cross-cutting climate science R and D.[34] The departments and agencies whose activities comprise the bulk of such funding include independent agencies such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Science Foundation, Environmental Protection Agency, US Agency for International Development, the quasi-official Smithsonian Institute, and Executive Departments that include Agriculture, Commerce (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Institute of Standards and Technology), Energy, Interior (the US Geological Survey and conservation initiatives), State, and Treasury.[35]
11. The past 15 years have seen a sustained program of funding, largely from government or quasi-government entities.[31]The funding efforts are spread across a bewildering array of sources and buried in a labyrinth of programs, agency initiatives, interagency activities, and Presidential Offices, but what they seem to have in common is an adherence to the assumption that human activity is primarily responsible for the warming observed in the latter part of the 20th century. Funding appears to be driving the science rather than the other way around. And the extent of this funding appears not to have been heretofore fully documented. [32]”…
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Comment: We’re told daily that US hasn’t taken “climate action,” when it’s the exact opposite. As shown above US taxpayers financed creation of the entire “climate” industry and largely maintain its existence today. Most know that even if global CO2 terror existed, China is the only country who could cure it. In any case, it’s never been about “climate,” it’s always been about silencing US taxpayers and converting them to global slaves. The entire US political class favors open borders-with one exception: US taxpayers inside the old borders have to pay all the bills.
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Added: “A fifth of official development aid is now diverted to climate policy. Money that used to be spent on strengthening the rule of law, better education for girls, and improved health care, for instance.”…Economist Richard Tol has served on 4 UN IPCC reports:
2/10/2014, “Hot Stuff, Cold Logic,”
“A fifth of official development aid is now diverted to climate policy. Money that used to be spent on strengthening the rule of law, better education for girls, and improved health care, for instance, is now used to plug methane leaks and destroy hydrofluorocarbons. Some donors no longer support the use of coal, by far the cheapest way to generate electricity. Instead, poor people are offered intermittent wind power and biomass energy, which drives up the price of food. But the self-satisfaction environmentalists derive from these programs does not put food on poor peoples’ tables.
In sum, while climate change is a problem that must be tackled, we should not lose our sense of proportion or advocate solutions that would do more harm than good. Unfortunately, common sense is sometimes hard to find in the climate debate. Desmond Tutu recently compared climate change to apartheid.1 Climate experts Michael Mann and Daniel Kammen compared it to the “gathering storm” of Nazism in Europe before World War II.2
That sort of nonsense just gets in the way of a rational discussion about what climate policy we should pursue, and how vigorously we should pursue it.” (end of article)
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1Tutu, “We Fought Apartheid. Now Climate Change Is Our Global Enemy”, Guardian, September 20, 2014.
2Mann and Kammen, “The Gathering Storm”, Huffington Post, September 19, 2014.”
“Richard Tol teaches economics at the University of Sussex and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is a veteran of four assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”
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