Seems like it's been chilly bananas since November.

I don't know about you all, but we've had a winter here in Pcola, sunny Florida. Everything from consecutive days of lows hovering around 14° to a classic blizzard. 

For us, that turned into epic proportion territory, with almost a foot of snow in some sections of the county - we had eight inches in our two miles from the Gulf as the crow flies yard - and seventy-some odd miles of interstate closed for two almost days.

We are forecast for another frost Friday morning with only a little over a week left in March.

The British Isles have also had a winter, with big-time snows and some absolutely ferocious storms rolling in off the North Atlantic.

Where our local city-owned gas utility just hums along and keeps that warm air pumping out of my registers when I want it to, the British weather has caused issues for energy generation all winter long and, consequently, threatened their liquid natural gas storage reserves.

In January, at the height of the freezing cold and assault of the storms, Britain had this warning to contend with.

Centrica Plc says that the UK’s gas reserves are at “concerningly low” levels as freezing temperatures grip the country, boosting demand for heating.

...As of Thursday, UK storage sites are 26% lower — or around half full —  than at the same point last year, leaving the country less than a week of gas demand to fall back on, Centrica said in a statement on Friday.

...“Energy storage is what keeps the lights on and homes warm when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, so investing in our storage capacity makes perfect economic sense,” Centrica’s Chief Executive Officer Chris O’Shea said in a statement. “We need to think of storage as a very valuable insurance policy. Like any insurance policy, it may not always be needed, but having more capacity helps protect against worst-case scenarios.”

ENERGY STORAGE IS WHAT KEEPS THE LIGHTS ON

What they are 'storing' are liquified natural gas (LNG) imports, which are then used to fire hugely expensive backup power plants when those very same unreliable renewables the government has bet the UK's energy security on don't deliver.

They often don't, especially when they are really needed.

The very same month that teeth were starting to chatter from both the cold and nerves that the UK might well run out of fuel to keep the lights on if the immoderate weather conditions continued - so much for betting on 'no snow ever again' - there was an announcement out of an area just north of Nottingham. It certainly should have warmed those concerns away had there been anyone but climate cultists at the government throttle.

Salvation and energy independence was at hand, or could be.

A giant gas field has been discovered under Lincolnshire that could fuel the UK’s entire needs for a decade, reducing dependence on imports and generating tens of thousands of jobs, an energy company has claimed.

Egdon Resources, the business behind the discovery, is to formally announce its findings at an energy industry conference later this month.

Its preliminary work suggests that the field, centred on the market town of Gainsborough, is so large that it could benefit the whole UK economy, boosting growth through more jobs, increased tax revenue and cheaper energy.

The possibilities this discovery opened up were two-fold. That the source was British, as would be the jobs, and all the benefits that followed from exploiting the find. Also, developing and delivering locally drilled nat gas was far more efficient than importing the LNG was now. Hardened NetZero advocates were sure to hail the cleaner alternative.

...Deloitte estimated that exploiting the Gainsborough Trough field could add up to $140bn (£112bn) to GDP, yield $34bn in direct taxation and create tens of thousands of jobs. It said that CO2 emissions would be 218m tonnes lower than if Britain uses imported gas instead.

But Net Zero is an indulgent fantasy for over-educated, well-heeled fanatics and a suicide cult for everyone subjected to their unicorn fart fever dreams' results.

In order to be developed, the Gainsborough Trough field would have to be fracked. Fracking has been under a moratorium in the UK since 2019 even as the national energy situation becomes more dire and LNG imports from volatile African and Arab states more crucial.

...There has been a moratorium on fracking in England since 2019 due largely to environmental concerns. While the sector had its advocates, some experts maintain that fracking for shale gas in the UK was never going to be viable.

But in a combative statement, Cuadrilla argued the UK’s gas supply was dwindling. National Gas data shows the UK gas stockpiles are down by around 36 per cent on last year’s level.

“The UK is heavily reliant on natural gas to keep the lights on, to heat our homes and to provide cost effective energy to British industry. That dependence will continue for the next several decades,” Francis Egan, chief executive of Cuadrilla, said.

“Yet nearly two thirds of all the gas we use comes from abroad, including liquefied natural gas from countries like Algeria, Qatar, Egypt and Angola.

The Starmer government's Minister for Energy and Climate Change, a bug-eyed, crusading Net Zero cultist named Ed Miliband, doesn't really give a rip what's underneath Lincolnshire or where the dirtier imported LNG now used comes from.

Rebuffing any appeals that his department looks into reconsidering the fracking pause in the interest of national energy security (and cheaper electricity overall), the Energy and Climate Ministry fully intends for all fossil fuels to be gone as quickly as they can swing it. The UK, these starry-eyed believers say, will 'sprint' to their destruction.

....A spokesman for the Energy Department said: “We intend to ban fracking for good and make Britain a clean energy superpower to protect current and future generations. The biggest risk to our energy security is staying dependent on fossil fuel markets and only by sprinting to clean power by 2030 can the UK take back control of its energy and protect both family and national finances from price spikes.”

So far, their plan is doing pretty well. Britain is on its way to a German-style deindustrialization, thanks solely to Net Zero and the climate cult's suicidal intransigence.

Britain faces years of industrial decline as net zero sends factory energy prices rocketing, economists have warned.

EY Item Club said Britain’s manufacturing sector was on track for three years of falling employment in the face of energy costs that are four times as high as those in the US, and 50pc more than those paid by factories in France and Germany.

Factory output is also expected to shrink by 0.6pc this year, the influential forecaster predicted.

Peter Arnold, the UK chief economist at EY, said the sky-high energy costs were the result of running down fossil fuels without a reliable replacement.

He said: “UK businesses currently pay the highest electricity prices in the developed world. This has been driven by high and volatile global energy prices, particularly for gas, which has left the UK exposed given its reliance on gas for electricity and heating and, combined with declining oil and gas production, has not been helpful for prices.

“The UK has invested heavily in renewables like wind and solar but these are intermittent, as opposed to say nuclear power, and this can also increase pricing volatility.”

It's just awful bad luck that the Tories, having been such miserable stewards and the ones who began this insanity, by the time they woke up to smell the flaming turbine oil, it was too late to reverse course. The British electorate threw them out in disgust, yes. Only what voters installed is a far more radical, far more determined, downright authoritarian group of Green grifters in Labour.

The Energy and Climate Change Minister has already confirmed banning new oil and gas wells in the North Sea, somehow imagining it's part of the area's 'transition' to a 'clean energy future.' 

The ministry of unicorn farts and fever dreams believes it will be able to avoid 'mass job losses' even as it bans the jobs.

The thinking is always magical with these lunatics.

The UK government has unveiled proposals that could ease the tax burden on the offshore oil and gas sector but confirmed that it would also ban new drilling licences as part of a pledge to “unleash the North Sea’s clean energy future”.

...Alongside the tax plans, the government announced an eight-week consultation on how to manage the North Sea’s transition from oil and gas to cleaner forms of energy, without triggering mass job losses.

And, to put paid to any notion that fracking might one day resume, meaning Britain's own nat gas would flow, with electricity and heat affordable and reliable again?

Minister Miliband is doing what any supervillain would do had he the power to crush hopes and dreams - he's concreting over the remaining two shale gas wells in Britain.

UK’s last fracking wells to be filled with cement despite dwindling gas stocks

The UK’s last fracking wells are set to be closed and filled with cement despite warnings that Britain’s gas stockpiles are dwindling.

Entombing them so they can't ever be resurrected.

On Monday, concrete will be poured into Britain’s last two shale gas wells in Lancashire. Cuadrilla Resources, which owns the license at the Preston New Road site, is being forced to destroy the wells by the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), which has ordered that the wells be ‘plugged with cement and decommissioned’ by 30 June.

This is not for safety or environmental reasons. Cuadrilla has offered to keep the wells secure at its own expense. It is to ensure that the wells can never be used to extract natural gas at any point in the future. In other words, the NSTA requirement is an act of economic vandalism, reflecting the extreme anti-fracking position of Ed Miliband, the Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary.

The petty monster.

...Miliband’s hostility to fracking isn’t only endangering his career. It’s endangering Britain.

And yet, there he stays, dispensing more death for Britain's energy independence.