By Paul Homewood
h/t George Herraghty
More lunacy from the Labour Government:
Scotland’s last remaining oil refinery could be used to turn pine trees into petrol under a £225m taxpayer-funded plan proposed by Ed Miliband.
Under the scheme, timber harvested in Scotland would be taken to the site of the Grangemouth refinery to be “fermented” into bioethanol for blending into fuel, or used to produce chemicals and cosmetics.
Grangemouth is scheduled to be shut down this summer by owners including Sir Jim Ratcliffe, a move expected to trigger the loss of 500 jobs at the plant and an estimated 2,500 more in related industries.
The scale of losses has sparked a political crisis with Sir Keir Starmer and Mr Miliband, the Energy Secretary, last month pledging £200m to find new “low carbon” uses for the site, with the Scottish Government committing a further £25m.
Read the full story here.
Various other schemes have been considered, such as turning waste plastics into packaging material or producing aviation fuel from waste fats (even though Scotland does not use enough frying oil to support such a plant so it would also rely on oil imported from countries such as China.!)
But the universal reaction has been scornful, to put it mildly.
Sharon Graham for instane, the Unite union general secretary, said the study was created “as a fig leaf to justify its act of industrial vandalism of shutting the refinery and axing jobs”.
And as Michelle Thomson, the SNP MSP who represents Grangemouth in the Scottish Parliament, added:
“For my constituents in Grangemouth there cannot be certainty nor optimism. The best they can hope for is jam tomorrow, and certainly not bread and butter today.”
Instead of wasting north of £200 million, here’s a better idea – open up the North Sea for drilling again and drop the ban on petrol cars. Then we might be able to open Grangemouth up again as an oil refinery!