Calling out the energy giants is now a moral, not political, matter

When in the spring of 1962, some 10 US steel companies decided to breach a negotiated cap and raise their prices by six dollars a tonne, the president, John F Kennedy, decided to publicly call out their bosses, telling them that their “pursuit of power and profit” was a “wholly irresponsible defiance of the public interest”. Eventually, they backed down.

The profit excesses being witnessed today in the UK by many of the current fossil fuel producers, notably Shell and Centrica, look far more obscene against the context of ever-widening poverty as families face the prospect monthly energy bills of up to £50 by January, when excess deaths from malnutrition and cold could reach third world levels.

With our utility regulatory system “broken” and nationalisation ruled out by both major parties, the question of what to do, or who to call out, to avert the coming disaster is no longer a political but a moral question.

Paul Dolan

Northwich

Yesterday, Mary Dejevsky argued for national service as a means of providing young people with useful life skills.

Surely the point of such service, however, is that it provides a workforce to meet immediate, essential needs, not imagined good deeds in the future? We wouldn’t need to look very far to see where such need lies: thousands of vacancies in care homes or crops rotting in the fields.

Instead, imagine a society where every young person, on completion of their formal education, were required to offer one year of service to meet unmet national needs before going on to higher education or into full-time work. Call it a gap year with purpose.

It would solve the angst of not knowing whether you will get the grades to attend a favoured university. In the meantime, you would acquire life skills and experiences that seldom feature in higher education.

Is this likely? Not any time soon. Some 160,000 wealthy Tory party members will ensure that their expensively educated offspring are the ones being looked after by others.

David Smith

Taunton

By far the most disturbing aspect of the leadership fiasco is the total failure by either of the candidates to mention the climate emergency.

In the midst of catastrophic events all round the globe, and even in our own green and pleasant land, there is not even a passing reference to the blindingly obvious impact of climate change.

I’m struggling to understand why this is so, and can only conclude that both Truss and Sunak are ignoring the voting population as a whole because the only voters they have to please are the tiny group (less than 1 per cent of the population) of Tory party members.

If you actually cared about the country you’re hoping to lead, wouldn’t you want to reassure its citizens that you have a plan to at least stick to the promises made at COP26? Our only hope is that a couple of years in the fantasy realm of Trussdom will finally convince people to get rid of this awful government.

Lynda Newbery

Bristol

Rather than seeing vastly inflated fossil fuel prices as a crisis, we should embrace them as a gift. They are exactly what is needed to strengthen the economic case to move away from oil and gas and towards renewable energy and investment in insulation, leading to a greener future. There is also the added bonus of breaking the economic leverage of undemocratic nations in the Middle East, as well as Russia, on the supply of fossil fuels.

What’s not to like? OK – the short-to medium-term pain of economic hardship. But our government and others should intervene to ensure that those in need are looked after by taking back the opportunistic excess profits made by energy companies and shareholders – by limited redistribution of wealth from richer to poorer to tide the latter over. But there’s the rub: it won’t happen without popular support. Self-interest and short-termism will get in the way. Political ideology will trump common sense.

Poor old Gaia.

Tim Sidaway

Abbots Langley

To keep up to speed with all the latest opinions and comment, sign up to our free weekly Voices Dispatches newsletter by clicking here