Many would not be surprised that UKIP has scored so low in our manifesto analysis – after all their leader in Wales has recently attacked the science around Climate Change and the party has a long history of flirting with climate denial.
The UKIP manifesto for 2015 fails on a number of points, it concentrates on policies to promote the use of unconventional gas (fracking) and return the UK to the era of reliance on coal. To do this it proposes scrapping a number of key pieces of environmental law that protect the country from acid rain and polluted skies, including the Large Combustion Plant Directive and the Climate Change Act.UKIP also propose withdrawing all subsidies from renewable energy resources without doing the same for subsidies (or tax relief) on fossil fuel sources, clearly tipping the balance in favour of polluting fossil fuels at the expense of preventing climate change and moving to a low carbon economy.
The party makes a number of assertions about the cost of renewable energy which are not wholly supported by the evidence – we see that solar and onshore wind in the UK are approaching grid parity with fossil fuels – especially if the full cost of climate change is accounted for in a levelised cost analysis. It also asserts that wind is unreliable and requires large scale back up, an idea that has been previously debunked.
In short, the UKIP manifesto is entirely flawed in it’s analysis and solutions of the problems the UK energy system faces and we can’t see much to support in it.