'The UK doesn't need Russian gas, doesn't need Texan LNG, it doesn't need to import anything.'
Amid a growing energy crisis, political leaders across Europe want to divert attention away from their own role in its exacerbation and instead make citizens focus on one thing only: Russia. However, it is far more complex than that.on the energy crisis, Yanis Varoufakis laid out the workings of the European energy market that exists today, one which has long been designed to favour the oligarchy above the people.
"The reason is Thatcher—because Thatcher privatised the electricity system in the UK and introduced the idea that privatisation is a good thing for the people—not for the oligarchs, but for the people, the idea being that the market knows better how to reduce costs than the state—state bureaucracies, state owned and run electricity grids and power stations are stuck at high costs.
"Privatisation in the United Kingdom is crucial because the model of the United Kingdom was then extended to the rest of the European Union." "And these companies compete with one another in the wholesale market. So they compete to provide the system, with a wholesale price. That's one part. "Now, when you simulate a market—because it's not a real market, it's a pretend market—you need to have certain government imposed rules simply because you don't have a real market, you have a government simulating a market.
"Proof of this is that, since privatisation, the difference between the cost of producing an average kilowatt hour and the retail price has trebled, so don't believe anyone who tells you that the problem has nothing to do with the system and that the problem is that the cost of production is going up.
"It is mad. And you don't need to subsidise electricity prices. All you need to do is to eliminate these super profits by those idiots. Actually they're not idiots, they're very smart. We are idiots. "And I was bit worried. I thought, oh my God, do I have to come out now and thank the government for doing the right thing? They introduced a maximum cap for electricity produced by hydro—low, solar—a little bit higher, [and] the same with wind power. And then for lignite and for natural gas, they had a formula which effectively gave the average cost of producing through lignite or through natural gas, plus a small percentage. It was perfect.
"Now, the human mind cannot wrap itself around that. If you have a maximum price that is imposed by government on every different power station, why do you need the auction? Isn't that the obvious question to ask? This is what they do. "So it is as if I have a company that is producing electricity and I have a company that is a retail company. So what the government does is let the pseudo-auction determine the price at 700, then they force me to return to the state from my left pocket, which is my pocket as a producer, 588 euros to the government, and the government puts it in my right pocket.
"And in the meantime, nobody can understand what's going. People think 'okay, they are imposing a price cap, they are subsidising the public, so the government is doing something'. No, the government's doing nothing. The government are agents of the oligarchy. They are crooks and they are thieves.
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