Workers at one charity shop in Swansea, in south Wales, described how the most vulnerable shoppers were seeking out thick books such as encyclopaedias for a few pence because they were cheaper than coal.
A lot of them buy up large hardback volumes so they can stick them in the fire to last all night.’
A 500g book can sell for as little as 5p, while a 20kg bag of coal costs £5.
Since January 2008, gas bills have risen 40 per cent and electricity prices 20 per cent, although people over 60 are entitled to a winter fuel allowance of between £125 and £400.
Daily Mail, 3 January 2010 Tom McGhie
Household gas and electricity bills are expected to rocket fourfold to nearly £5,000 a year by the end of the decade to meet Government-imposed green targets. And the price heavy industry will have to pay by 2020 is so high that energy-dependent firms could be wiped out, causing thousands of job losses, said an industry spokesman.
A massive rethink on the cost of ‘green energy’ is taking place in Whitehall among senior regulators and industry, leading some to question whether the public will be prepared to pay increasingly high bills for the UK to become greener than most countries.
Officials at regulator Ofgem now privately admit that a report they issued only last year severely underestimates the cost of cutting carbon emissions by building a new energy infrastructure for the UK.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/article-1240201/Watchdog-rethinks-consumer-cost-green-energy.html
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I hope they won’t run out of books:
From Times Online January 5, 2010
Met Office warns of 40cm of snow within hours in South East
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6976571.ece
Re: Dave Ward’s link:
“An average gas and electricity customer pays £38 a year towards subsidies for green projects, according to Ofgem”
Perhaps some of the British can capitalize on this insanity by selling T shirts, with the caption: ” 38 Pounds a Year and all i got was a lousy lightbulb”.
People actually buy bags of coal??? Next you’ll be telling me Jack the Ripper is still on the loose! How 19th century!
joe (07:22:09) :
Call me crazy but I do believe this is deliberate. Looks like the Brits are leading the road back to serfdom.
Piers Corbyn thinks higher food prices caused by biofuels is intentional.
He’s right a lot.
I paid attention when he said that.
We had a new boiler fitted in August so our first quarterly bill for gas and electricity came in December. We were very pleased that it showed a 25% decrease compared with more or less the same period in 2008. And that with no price increase during the year from our supplier.
However our “delight” has been short lived with the recent cold “snap” as the BBC calls it increasing our gas consumption by almost 100% to maintain the same temperature. We’ve had to turn it down and put on even more layers. I’m typing this wearing thermals, a fleece top and a blanket round my shoulders.
So our next bill will be at least 50% higher than the last quarter and we are on a limited income. Hate to think what it might have been with the old inefficient boiler. Probably at least double.
How on earth our government in the UK thinks we are going to be able to afford a 400% increase in fuel charges to fund their outrageous plans I really don’t know. Gordon Brown has announced plans to spend £100bn on more windmills even though the link to this table below shows that the current wind turbines only produced 0.4% of the country’s power output, the bulk supplied by the gas and coal powered stations (that we are having to close down from NEXT year on the orders of the EU)
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/01/monument-to-folly.html
Pascvaks (07:22:27) :
Burning books? Books cheaper than coal? Hello! What planet am I on?
I think they’re talking about used, donated books at places like Goodwill.
Pretty crafty of the pensioners I think.
Don’t send us food parcels please. Send oil! Send coal! Send LPG!
Our world-leading (according to them) government has put off building more nuclear power stations for so long that the lights will start going off in a couple of years.
Brown may have saved the world, but he’s run the UK into the ground.
Ah well, as a third-world country, at least we’ll get loads of carbon credits from the UN. Do they come with any paperwork? Paper will burn!
What do the environmentalists whose heart are filled with care and concern have to say about this?
Wait, I know, ‘the burnt ink in the smoke is harming the environment’.
Burning cars in Paris on New Years? Now burning books in London? I have a feeling the MSM have missed another headline story (or are trying to keep it hidden to let the White House and Congress pass a resolution or something). Life IS a beach, and I think there’s a hurricane coming.
I’ve been listening to a BBC radio programme about the history of the Royal Society. Compared to the state and status of science in the UK over 300 years ago, you would be forgiven for thinking that we are in now back in the dark ages. Science has been thrown in the bin at the expense of green and politically correct advocacy. It’s enough to make a grown man weep.
Anthony,
OT but I thought you might enjoy this one:
Met Office chief receives 25% pay rise.
He now gets more than the British prime minister.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/6931584/Met-Office-chief-receives-25-pc-pay-rise.html
Here in Michigan, Governor Granholm (economic advisor to Obama) has passed an initiative that requires 10% of electricity in the State to originate from renewable sources.
The Detroit Free Press explained yesterday that a power company was letting contracts to solar farms to buy electricity at an average rate of fifty cents per kilowatt hour for twelve years. The going rate is 11 cents.
So 10% of our electricity will cost 400-500% more, on average the overall cost will go up 30-40 percent over the cost in nearby States.
It is not for nothing that Michigan is listed dead last in business climate.
When building an economy, it is wise to consult Michigan then do the opposite.
Green is the New Blue….
One third of the consumption of bituminous coal in England is residential heat.
In India and China 75% of homes use fire to burn papaer, corn stalks, coal or dung for cooking and heat.
Of course playing games with energy hurts the poor.
The unemployment rate in Spain and the youth and minorities in America is due to defective thinking in economics.
Our glorious leader it quick to grandstand over the execution of a British citizen in China but says nothing about the 36,700 old people that his government effectively executed last winter because they had to decide whether to spend their meagre income on food or heating.
How many more will die this winter as his idiot gOVERnment pushes ahead with expensive green energy projects which will make their decisions even more difficult just so he can project himself as the world saviour of global warming?
Jeff, you seemed surprised that we still buy bags of coal. Why? Every winter, in the long evenings, we quite often light the fire in the sitting room (having turned off the central heating for the room). And we burn coal in our fireplace (sometimes with a coupla small logs on top). I top up the fire with coal from our nice shiny brass coal scuttle. There’s nothing like a bright coal fire, flickering flames, dancing reflections, and oodles of radiated heat, to make a room really cosy. And yes, I buy the coal in bags. What else? It’s difficult to carry when loose.
Well Jeff, some of us buy coal to fill a bunker. It’s a great thing to either use when you don’t want to switch the central heating on or to augment its effects.
As is normal in these cold spells, there’s very little wind to power those bloody bird-choppers!
Local councils are running out of salt & grit to treat roads and pavements with, thanks to the Met Office’s ever-so-reliable forecast of a mild winter.
The thing that gets me is how fragile our energy sector is. For example, the US once had a thriving industry that built luxury yachts. Then the Dems came along and figured they could get a lot of revenue by taxing these as luxury items. Well, it didn’t take long for rich people to do some comparative shopping and start buying their luxury yachts from overseas. So all those artisans and supplier that had been building luxury yachts in the US went out of business. Then the Dems realized they’d made a huge mistake and rescinded the tax. But you know what happened? The yacht makers had families and themselves to feed, so they had found other jobs doing something else by that time. And with the prospects of yet another “Tax the Rich” on their yachts should they go back to building them, they just said “Nuts”, and so an industry was lost.
The same thing happens with mining–an industry I’m fairly familiar with, having worked as a mining engineer in the western US for 15 years. There, it takes a bunch of disciplines and a huge amount of money to get a mine up and going–including financial gurus, geologists, mining engineers, equipment operators, etc. etc. You destroy an industry and it may never return. Ever! Why? It becomes easier to buy from overseas suppliers, just like luxury yachts.
But the Dems have never been strong on production or business–no, they’re generally a bunch of lawyers who have never produced a workable, useful widget in their lives. They’re so far from the reality most of us face that they’re the butt of many nasty jokes and rightly so. It is pretty sad they impose their unworkable pardigm on the rest of the world.
The UK could use some additional wood lots. As could California, particularly the Bay Area. Especially on Winter “Spare the Air” days!
Maybe their pain will help to instill some sanity… here’s another story… gas shortage
http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/149760
From Britain
Wind, in all its glory, managed to deliver a risible 0.4 percent – which is hardly even a rounding error and amounts to an insignificant contribution to the national electricity supply. Producing a mere 163 MW at around midnight last night, against an installed capacity of just over 4 GW, that represents a load factor of four percent.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/01/monument-to-folly.html
‘A spokesman for the National Grid said the alert had been effective in prompting electricity companies to import more gas or switch to coal-fired power stations. ‘
Presumably the lack of wind means all those expensive windfarms are not working. Tut. Tut. More bloody carbon dioxide but hopefully that might warm things up a bit.
Enjoy it. Winter snowfall will become a very rare and exciting event.
Thanks, Anthony and Benny, for continuing to remind us of reality and its conflict with fake climate predictions from a corrupt alliance of scientists with politicians.
PAIN is the greatest teacher. Only ACCEPTANCE of reality will relieve the pain.
May “Climate-gate” produce enough pain for corrupt scientists and politicians to finally accept this basic spiritual principle of science:
“Truth is victorious, never untruth.”
(Mundaka Upanishad 3.1.6; Qur’an 17.85)
Again, I thank you for helping the scientific community face reality.
A list of scientific “Observations That I had To Accept” since 1960 was posted on the “Naked Science Forum” earlier this year:
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=9197
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
http://www.omatumr.com
Mark Bowlin (07:08:01) :
“I suspect it’s a cold cold winter in East Anglia.”
BBC lunchtime news & weather (from the good ol guys n’ gals from the Met Office), snow & sleet blizzards will make their way eastwards in the southern half of the country & head up towards East Anglia. Rather appropriate I thought.
Yes I recommend book burning, although IPCC SPMs burn jolly well, I think they contain vast amounts of phlogiston! Then again so do cow pats!
Cold & miserable in the south-west. Snowed quite heavily at lunchtime with low cloud over the hills, at least the dog enjoyed his walk over the fields chasing snow flakes all the way!
I know Piers Corbyn would take issue with me over cause, but I seem to recall Prof Mike Lockwood of Southampton University & Rutherford Appleton Lab said a while back of the quiet sun in early autumn, that if there was going to be any cooling effect as a result we would have seen it by now! Well err………..take a look outside your window Mike, you’ll be surprised what you might see! Not many takers on giving an explanation of why we’re experiencing such cold conditions in the northern hemisphere it seems to me. We know the jet stream has shifted south, there is a huge high pressure over Greenland (F*%k-its-freezing-land), but no “why”, & that’s it, nada, zilch! I am waiting for the wacko who then suggests that this is global warming big time causing the cool temps that were predicted back in thne 70’s hailing in the next ice-age!
Dodgy Geezer has it bang on the nose me thinks!