RICHARD TICE: How Reform will end the Great Green Fraud that is Drax – which burns one tree EVERY SECOND and gets billions of your cash

Vote Reform to save the trees. Yes, you read it right. Because only we will stop the tree-burning spree at Drax, the controversial power station in North Yorkshire that is Britain’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide and burns not only wood but also virgin forests.

We will cancel the long-term contracts that Drax persuaded politicians to agree to at the start of the reform government, thus receiving billions of pounds of ‘green’ subsidies from you ratepayers.

Drax’s 375ft cooling towers are a monument to Net Zero hypocrisy. If it weren’t for the stupidity of energy ministers past and present, furnaces would never have started burning wood.

It seems implausible that money was paid to convert this previously coal-fired power plant to wood burning, which emits even more CO2.

Drax consumes one tree every second. Since 2012, 300 million people have been cremated in this tree crematorium; this number is six times that of the New Forest.

But none of them come from these shores. They are imported mostly from North America and travel 6,000 miles on diesel freighters.

And these aren’t just any trees. Last year the firm was fined £25 million by regulator Ofgem for misreporting where its wood pellets came from (primary forests in British Columbia, Canada).

Drax’s 375ft cooling towers are a monument to Net Zero hypocrisy. Furnaces would never have started burning wood if it weren’t for the stupidity of energy ministers past and present, writes Richard Tice

In the name of climate change, it is destroying these never-harvested forests, which have turned into huge carbon stores for thousands of years, and destroying the homes of an extraordinary wealth of plants and animals.

In short, Drax costs the world and you a fortune. So who came up with this madness? Step forward Ed Miliband, who announced in 2009 that the then Labor government would ‘increase’ ‘sustainable’ wood burning at Drax.

Let me lecture Mr Miliband on sustainability: if there is anything in this world that is unsustainable, it is the industrial destruction of primary forests. The government’s £8 billion subsidy to Drax since 2012 makes this carbon disaster also a political scandal; that’s 12 times more expensive than at the Post Office.

Mr Miliband is responsible for this disaster, but others share the blame.

In 2010, two Liberal Democrats in the coalition government were appointed as climate ministers.

The first was Chris Huhne. His political career ended in disgrace when he went to prison, but that didn’t stop him from taking a job at a wood pellet company, where he held an official meeting while in power. So there is no smell there except burning wood.

Mr. Huhne was replaced by Ed Davey. And things didn’t get any better under the Conservatives. Under their watch, Drax CEO Will Gardiner personally spent £5 million in one year alone, emptying your pockets for polluting the skies.

We are now with Mr Miliband, who is destroying forests and jobs. Because the electricity obtained from wood transported halfway around the world costs twice the price of gas. British industry is dying because our electricity prices are the highest in the developed world.

The government claims a better deal will be reached. Better for Drax, not for you.

Because Mr Miliband has promised Drax bosses that he will not only extend ‘benefit payments’ for another four years but also increase the price you have to pay by 11 per cent. So by 2023 you will have to pay higher priced ‘renewable’ subsidies to a company responsible for almost 3 per cent of all Britain’s CO2 emissions.

The power plant’s 12 million tonnes of carbon per year does not appear at all in our Net Zero ledger. From where? Because Mr Miliband claims replacement trees instantly suck back all the CO2 from the atmosphere, even though science says it took the best part of a century.

Despite the fact that burning wood is more polluting, Mr Miliband magically eliminates Drax’s emissions. Net Zero is easy now.

Worse may yet come, as Drax executives are trying to persuade him to give them even more billions to capture the power plant’s emissions.

This is an additional process that will make the firm’s electricity ridiculously inefficient; Drax will consume twice as much energy as it supplies to the grid.

Oil and gas are much more efficient and therefore cost much less. For example, our wind farms require large amounts of cement and steel. These huge machines are produced in China and cause great harm to the environment and your pocket. They also require hundreds of kilometers of ugly poles.

If the wind does not blow, gas-fired stations have to be burned at great expense. And if remote farms off the coast of Scotland have more wind than the surrounding infrastructure can handle or store, their owners are paid millions to switch off their turbines.

This lose-lose farce is killing our economy. Effective decarbonization must be driven by technology, not by the bird-brained central planners in our energy department.

As the government, I will stop this economic suicide due to high energy prices. Reform UK is preparing to repair the damage. As we redesign the grid, we will strike the right balance between decarbonisation, affordability and engineering common sense.

We have already told the subsidy vultures that the reckless 20-year wind farm contracts that Mr Miliband is trying to impose on us will be null and void.

Today I say Drax will get the same treatment. The agreement they made with Mr Miliband will come to an end. Subsidies will be stopped. Immediately.

The same thing will happen if the Minister of Energy tries to rush through a decades-old carbon capture plan. It can sign agreements, but they do not tie the hands of the next Parliament. It won’t destroy the British economy for a generation.

I’m making two more announcements. First, we will determine the date of the last tree to be burned at a power station in England. To this end, I invite companies to write to me with a timeline for replacement of this unacceptable fuel. Since burning wood is the most inefficient fuel, any alternative will produce lower emissions and costs.

Second, if Drax threatens to turn the lights out, he’ll be under new ownership in the blink of an eye. Without compensation.

If Drax shareholders want to salvage their position, they can start today by getting rid of executives whose serial frauds have put the company in the crosshairs of many regulators.

These regulators are investigating matters so seriously that Drax has become a career graveyard for its executives. Shareholders need to understand the eye-popping sums Drax’s CEO pays to lawyers to escape liability like a greased piglet.

Reform will put an end to the Drax scandal, something other parties have failed to achieve on their own.

The Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Labor are hopelessly compromised by the firm. Led by hypnotherapist ‘G-Cup Zack’ Polanski, who accuses women of ‘enlarging their breasts’, the Greens are not a serious party.

Because of charlatans like him, bill payers have been saddled with the burden of this environmental and economic nightmare that only Reform has the will to fix.