Newsbytes from Dr. Benny Peiser at the GWPF:
The British government faces a public backlash against its green energy agenda as consumers are unwilling to spend more on power and gas bills to pay for investment in low-carbon forms of energy, a parliamentary committee warned on Monday. An opinion poll published by utility Centrica last month showed only one quarter of respondents thought the government should stick to its plans for a greener economy if it means higher energy price. —Reuters, 25 July 2011
Industry faces energy price increases of up to 70 per cent as a result of new ‘green taxes’ imposed by the Government. Studies by the Energy Intensive Users Group, which represents industries such as chemicals and steel, show that the extra costs are so high that many companies may be tempted to move to countries that do not have such extreme environmental laws. —Tom McGhie, This is Money, 24 July 2011
There are some wholly implausible assumptions about the pass-through of carbon and renewable subsidy costs. Our suspicion is that DECC has massaged the figures to make the impacts look less severe. —Jeremy Nicholson, Bloomberg, 29 July 2011
If the Prime Minister wants to get involved in climate change policy he should focus on problems closer to home first. Just last week the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) published a report which estimated that prices would rise for large energy intensive users by up to 52 per cent by 2020, with a central estimate of a 31 per cent rise. Unfortunately, this may be about as reliable as their farcical estimates for domestic consumers. —Matthew Sinclair, Conservative Home, 1 August 2011
The UK government has welcomed new developments in “unconventional” gas resources. It is largely a let’s-wait-and-see response, which acknowledges the economic, environmental and security benefits of shale gas. Calls from environmentalist campaigners to freeze exploration in the UK have been given the bum’s rush. ––Andrew Orlowski, The Register, 26 July 2011
Climate change is far less serious than ‘alarmists’ predict, an eminent NASA scientist has said. Dr Roy Spencer, who works on the space agency’s temperature-monitoring satellites, claimed they showed ‘a huge discrepancy’ between the real levels of heating and forecasts by the United Nations and other groups. After looking at the levels of radiation in the atmosphere over the past ten years, he believes the Earth releases a lot more heat into space than previously thought. This means carbon dioxide emissions do not trap as much heat or force temperatures up as much as global warming bodies fear. —Tamara Cohen, Daily Mail, 30 July 2011
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This is what annoys me most about AGW alarmism-based policy.
By taxing CO2 emissions by large point sources in rich countries, you push emissions into smaller sources and into poorer countries with weaker environmental policies. From 1GW modern coal plants into wood stoves and Chinese coal plants.
This may theoretically reduce CO2 emissions, but will unavoidably increase the emissions of every other pollutant and will also move the emissions of those pollutants closer to people – where they do the most harm.
Well I for one am shocked, just shocked I tell you that consumers are no longer willing to drink the global warming bathwater if it means massive price increases on their utility bills.
Just amazing.
This looks like a cherry picking exerise. For example, in the last article cited this following from the artcile was omitted “Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, said: ‘It’s a simplistic theory and we will need to look very closely at these measurements as he is far from proving conclusively that this is the cause.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2020427/Climate-change-far-alarmists-predict-says-NASA-scientist.html#ixzz1TnD1vZ34
There needs to be large scale rebellion to bring the government to its sense.
If everyone refused to pay the green tax/subsidy element of their energy bill, there is little that the energy companies could do given the sheer numbers involved. This would act as a wake up call, letting everyone know precisely what the ordinary citizen thinks.
For, the majority of citizens, energy costs are already a significant proportion of disposable income and I suspect that energy priices will double by 2020. Wages are being squeezed, taxes increased, such that it is not easy to see how the ordinary citizen will be able to afford a doubling in energy costs.
The UK already has about the worst old age mortality rate in (developed) Europe. This is due to poor housing stock, high energy costs and poor pension provisions. A damp climate further exacerbates the problems. I have little doubt that many people (old age pensioners who are already in fuel poverty) will die as a consequence of the increased energy prices, especially if the UK sees a repeat of the recent cold winters that it has experienced these last few years. If the MSM run with those stories, it will pile a lot of political pressure on the government. Hopefully, this will encourage a rethink.,
Fuel Poverty and the “Heat or Eat” dilemma are going to become significant issues for many people if the UK has another cold winter.
Politics, selling you quality false security in exchange for hard earned tithes/taxes since the first superstition.
Forget about all this nonsense. If the world does not get it’s financial house in order, then utility bills, may be the least, of our worries. Dumping trillions into non-return fantasy, is not improving our economic outlook. It takes real wealth, to enable concrete measures, which may mitigate inevitable future disasters, of any kind.
It seems that “social justice” demands that everyone be equally destitute, unable to respond to nature’s finicky ways. I think mankind has been there before (dark ages) and it wasn’t much of a party. GK
The warm is turning.
Fear is changing to anger. That’s what it takes to repel the power-mad greens.
In the UK, the pips are beginning to squeak. I have just been reading an economic report which gives a few recent historical facts.
First, between 2000 and 2010, real private sector wages rose by about 40%.
Now, the increases in the price of selected services:
Domestic gas 131%
Electricity 69%
Motor fuel 41%
The first two have risen in price to a great extent because of hidden government taxes to fund such as windmills – and to increase government revenue. Motor fuel has risen in price, regardless of world prices, because of a government tax ratchet. (Or do I mean racket?)
Over a whole range of goods and services, prices have risen sharply in ten years, except for consumer goods; but those were imports, financed by borrowing which is now, and for a long time to come, stalled.
Yet, the three main British political parties propose to keep on raising the price of energy. I think the asylums are missing a few lunatics.
The fact that there’s more to this than just “saving the world”….
….should be blatantly obvious to everyone but the brain dead
The UK, even Australia, are not big enough to save anything..
Not even the U.S. any more……….
..and China, Russia, India, …..most of the rest of the world doesn’t care
The trouble with British politics is that over so many issues – carbon taxes being one – there is complete agreement among the ‘political elite’. So it doesn’t matter how annoyed consumers are about carbon taxes, they’re going to get them. They can protest all they like – not a British speciality anyway – and it won’t make a blind bit of difference. For once, the only body that might make the politicians see sense is ‘big business’, though that depends whether the lobby that will lose out over the nonsense of carbon taxes has more clout that the arm of big business which plans to make a killing from carbon taxes/permits/trading.
And of course British political elite specialises in not quite telling the truth to the voters, on the assumption that they must be too stupid to comprehend it. In this case, carbon taxes could very well be a mechanism for letting the ‘little people’ have the privilege of paying for the next generation of nuclear power plants, our ‘elite’ not having been quite elite enough to set some money aside for this inevitable necessity. Why not instead tell the little people the taxes are all about saving the planet, polar bears, some other nice story?
I always thought increasing the price of energy was the whole point! How else you gonna force people to go green?
Imagine this — in the 1960’s, we passed laws and regulations making it very expensive to purchase, own and operate cars on public roadways. What would we have today? Flying cars, of course! After all, if it costs just as much or more to operate a motor vehicle as a flying vehicle, who wouldn’t go ahead and purchase a flying car?
All you people who think this won’t work — you’re just impeding progress. You’re probably in cahoots with “Big Auto.” You’re counter-progressive reactionaries, that’s what you are.
Up here in Scotland we’re having a wee bit of a rebellion:
http://tpdrsl.org/index.php/component/jaggyblog/how-to-starve-the-beast
You knew this had to happen sooner or later. Taxpayers in the UK are already suffering as the government tries to back the country away from being buried under crushing debt. People can’t pay higher taxes for debt reduction at the same time as subsidize uneconomic energy. In that sense, the global recession is the “best thing” that could have happened WRT green energy.
The massive increase in taxation of British energy based industry and the British people will have a predictable consequence. Energy based industry (steel, refinery, chemical, and so on) will leave Britain or go bankrupt.
The “green” boondoggle “investment” will result in thousands of wind generators with dozens of back-up gas generating power plants. Each gas generating power plant requires a connection to a large high capacity gas pipeline. The gas pipeline cost must be paid for out of the green boondoggle funds as the gas load will vary from low to high depending on whether the wind is blowing as well as seasonal energy demand changes.
The power generating gas turbines cannot withstand the heat stress cycle of on/off operation, therefore the gas generation turbines will be run in idle with energy loss of 30 to 50%. Alternatives would be massive investment in energy storage such as massive power storage stations with liquid sodium batteries complete with massive power equipment to convert the direct current DC battery power to alternating current. The cost of a liquid sodium battery power storage station is comparable to a power generation station except the energy storage is roughly a factor of 20 less than the power generating station.
In North America there are suggestions for a “smart energy” grid which means thousand mile high voltage power lines run across the country to move surplus wind power energy or to import energy. Besides the billions of dollars investment for the interstate power lines there is roughly a 30% energy loss for the long distant power lines. The “smart energy grid” requires massive subsidies as there is not surplus energy to wheel interstate so the long distant power lines will seldom be used.
Politicians and the general public have no idea how much money will be wasted on the green boondoggle. Hopefully Britain and Australia can lead the way to provide news feedback to protect the US and the other Western countries from wasting trillions of dollars to achieve almost no measurable difference in CO2 emissions which are not a problem anyway.
: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-2018026/Green-targets-force-companies-leave-Britain.html#ixzz1TnQu2M3t
Green targets ‘could force companies to leave Britain’
Industry faces energy price increases of up to 70 per cent as a result of new ‘green taxes’ imposed by the Government.
Energy Secretary Chris Huhne last week boasted that no other country had binding environmental targets as ambitious as Britain.
‘In 15 years, our net emissions will be half what they were in 1990,’ he said.
(My comment: Yes as all of the British energy consuming industry will have left Britain or will have gone bankrupted.)
The Department of Energy last year admitted that environmental policies had already increased average costs for non-domestic users by 20 per cent. This will rise to 28 per cent by 2015 and 43 per cent by 2020. But those figures do not take into account environmental measures that are in the pipeline.
Business pays proportionately more for its electricity because it is subject to tax through the climate change levy.
Jeremy Nicholson, director of the Energy Intensive Users Group, warned that the Government’s estimates for the effect of their policies on domestic fuel bills were highly unrealistic and ‘need to be taken with a bucket full of salt’.
Even if the public finally realizes how toxic the coming energy shortages will be, it will be too late to prevent unnecessarily high prices. The Sierra Club and others have already done their work to prevent cheap coal energy production from being built: http://beyondcoal.org/act-now/ With the enormous lead times required to build anything in the US and Europe, we will suffer high prices and shortages for a long, long time.
The problem is you do not see carbon tax or green tax when you get a bill. The TV and radio media which is where most people get their news (if they bother at all) do not mention the part green taxes play.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14151032
As far as the green elite is concerned the way to end fuel poverty is to go green.
Have you had a look at this lately? Fire Mapper. It shows where the real problems are …
And hear I thought how could anyone deny the efficiency improvements and lower waste products of coal gasification. We have a test plant running in Florida to prove it works. Thanks to Bush for getting it done.
At the end of the day….The WHITE will surpass the Green:
http://youtu.be/ojv9OJ7SoKI
(The driest desert of the world, the Atacama desert, today)
Interesting. From the Reuters piece:
“‘I don’t think there is enough understanding of the charges that are there and which are coming through, and that is why we want much greater clarity on people’s bills,’ Energy Minister Charles Hendry told the committee in a hearing last month.”
So, the Minister for Energy and Climate Change is saying that we should be able to see what we are being charged by the energy companies to prop up renewables. He must surely realise that if that happens, people won’t be too happy about having to pay for it. Are the Tories secretly hoping that “the people” will revolt on the subject of renewables, and that will give them the excuse to move to a more sensible economic position?
In light of a glorious posting from BH (http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/climate-thuggery/29919) where the comments were so caustic I could have had my old MG bodywork stripped ready for painting just by pointing my laptop at it and exposing it to some of them – and at the risk of repeating myself across blogs (apologies BH), the worst I could find was this from TennyNaumer:
I would really like this posting from GWPF to appear there to see what kind of mindless trollerism it would attract. And by their bile, so shall ye know them.
I’m not sure ‘understanding’ the charges is enough. The many and various ‘green’ schemes have been developed and introduced in a vacuum. Although politicians and green groups such as FoE claim UK ‘grass roots’ support for the sustainability fantasy, ‘grass roots’ support has been a self-referential bubble of activists and their political allies. It’s only now that people are beginning to realise just what a fantasy world it is and, more importantly, just what the fantasy will cost them individually. Don’t forget that it isn’t just fuel prices that have shot up, the price of anything using fuel (almost everything) has too.
vboring says:
August 1, 2011 at 8:40 am
“…
By taxing CO2 emissions by large point sources in rich countries, you push emissions into smaller sources and into poorer countries with weaker environmental policies. From 1GW modern coal plants into wood stoves and Chinese coal plants.
This may theoretically reduce CO2 emissions, but will unavoidably increase the emissions of every other pollutant and will also move the emissions of those pollutants closer to people – where they do the most harm.”
Um, not so much. It matters not one bit what western and developed economies do to reduce their “carbon footprint,” whatever we do will be almost immediately replaced by increases in the developing world, e.g. China and India.
These countries will NOT choose to beggar their growing economies, all for the sake of the myth of blue sky. However, they are more than happy to watch the west systematically dismantle their manufacturing sectors, and will be left staning to pick up the pieces. Remaining on this track, we in the west will be forced to scuttle about like rats in ever crowded and dismal cities.
Sorry, not for me.
Green taxes don’t prevent pollution, whether CO2 or otherwise, they INCREASE them.
Green taxes make Western industry uncompetitive, so these industries are shipped out to China instead, where nobody gives a flying-fig about emissions and pollution, and so overall worldwide emissions actually increase. This is the end-result of Green initiatives – an increase in pollution. Clever people, the Greens.
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