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
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Nobody burns books for heating … unless you use a lot of gasoline, or plan to stay awake overnight to feed the fire page by page, otherwise the book won’t burn much. Thick books burn even harder …
Watch for park benches and wooden fences: when those go, then somebody is in trouble paying for heating.
Welcome to the reality of “green”. Our politicians are living a complete fantasy.
Our current “ministry of climate change” moron was busily talking the talk on TV earlier as 6 ins of snow falls outside my window and temperatures haven’t got much above zero for weeks.
It is a surreal experience listening to “global warming blah blah” coming from some moronic minister in a warm office and the next news item switches to the chaos and -20C expected in parts of Scotland.
Green objections to energy and X-Box expectations of Mediterranean climate mean we will be living through power cuts at this time of year from around 2015.
Can’t wait for an election and the chance to consign these clowns to history. Gordon “flat earth” Brown and his fellow travellers leaving office as pensioners burn books to stay alive.
Says it all really.
Well, burning books raises the CO2-concentration.
So it may lead to Global Warming. 😉
I have an open fire which is a real boon in the depths of winter. And very attractive too. I’ve just paid £76 for a 250kg of economy coal.
I’m still flummoxed by the option to buy low carbon coal [at a higher price]? I assume to get x amount of heat you have to combine the same amount of hydrocarbons with oxygen [producing CO2] so how does that work?
cheers David
“Temperatures this week are forecast to plummet as low as -13ºC in the Scottish Highlands”
Weather forecast on BBC News just forecast as low as -20ºC for the Scottish Highlands before the end of this week.
So prepare for a heatwave ;>)
In the UK, I believe we only have six weeks worth of reserve gas supply. I wonder it is since I have not seen a full gasometer in my travels around the country in the last six months. Indeed, they have mostly been completely empty! Luckily, we have a wood burner.
It’s continually depressing to me that however much honest science and sensible opinion I read at sites like this our politicians are now so blinkered and brainwashed by AGW and the opportunities for control and tax that they have become seemingly incapapble of admitting it’s a scam. I honestly think that no amount of good science will ever make them admit they have been wrong.
I therefore think the recent news that Ofcom have suddenly admitted to costing ‘error’ and that the treasury are rethinking the impact costs may be the best news we have had in some time.
It suggests to me that the facade is cracking. Some hard rethinking is taking place where the politicians can’t ignore it. And most importantly the ‘we can’t afford it at the moment argument’ is the one situation that allows politicians to both save face and hold back from further action.
One can hope!
Wait – what’s this?
The BBC’s Richard Black ambivalent about the influence of “global warming” on the current weather in Old Blighty AND highlighting the importance of another climate process instead? Who wants to bet that in five years the editorial line will be “well, we were always sceptics actually”? I think I need to have a lie down….
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/2010/01/arctic_conditions_arctic_cause.html
Correction to comment (08:35:53) – I wonder WHERE it is….. re reserve gas supply!
Time for a Libertarian Republic of Great Britain with a Victorian pride for industrial progress.
And all this time I thought books were a carbon sequestration mechanism. Clearly the UK needs to put an emergency carbon tax (or price floor) on the carbon content of books.
Hello from a little place near Montreal, Canada
“What confuses me is the snowfalls in th e US and Canada are more considerable, yet you don’t get the same paralysis.”
In Canada we are ready for it. Building code, snow removal by the cities, private snow removing services, personnal snow blower, lots and lots of shovels and winter tires.
“Funny story, but anyone with a fireplace in which they can burn books would get a lot more benefit from blocking it up and using something like an oil-filled electric radiator.”
Slow combustion wood fireplace are the norm here. And since the hail storm a lot more people keep a wood reserve, just in case. I was one month without electricity at my place. But with the slow combustionr fireplace I still spent that month in a t-shirt and jeans in my house.
For those outside the UK, don’t laugh to loudly. This insanity will be coming to your country before long.
Pete (07:22:46) :
There’s a good 6″ of white global warming soot in my back garden in West Yorkshire.
Confirmed. Yorkshire is just about shut now as temps head down freezing the roads up nicely. Expect the UK to be shut by tomorrow afternoon.
Off to enjoy a good book now.
Roy, that’s not true (and I’m a heating consultant). The radiated heat from a roaring fire actually produces more heat than a room-sized heater, despite the fact that a lot of the heat is going up the chimney. I know this thread is only light-hearted but books don’t actually burn very well – even paper in the form of a newsletter doesn’t burn very well. You just can’t beat a split log, although modern laminated flooring cut into sections burns really well. Compressed paper bricks are next to useless.
Bags of coal… yes, we did try using pipelines once, but the lumps kept getting stuck.
The MetOffice predicted a warmer than average winter and now local councils are running out of grit for the roads and the National Grid are warning that gas reserves will run out, because demand is so much higher than expected. D’oh, I can’t tell you how proud I am to be British.
But don’t worry… in order to ensure that this winter is ultimately a warmer than average winter the Met Office has requested that all British subjects go outside at 2100hrs tonight and breathe OUT as hard as possible. The sudden surge in CO2 should cause a tipping point as the CO2 absorbs the energy being radiated from the burning encyclopaedia Britannicas (if only Wikipedia was on paper !) In addition, it is anticipated that the water vapour we breathe out at this time will combine to form huge clouds that blanket the nation overnight and keep all the heat in.
Knowing that around half the UK population is pretty gullible (higher percentages exist in some professions, such as politics and news media), I’d better declare this a hoax. I would hate to be responsible for someone dying from hypothermia just after 9 o’clock tonight.
P Wilson (07:23:16) :
“…What confuses me is the snowfalls in th e US and Canada are more considerable, yet you don’t get the same paralysis. I guess it’s because we haven’t had a cold winter like this for a long time (apart from last year)
The northern areas have snow removal equipment. There are enough storms so the towns have the equipment or contractors available.
Out here in the boonies (mid North Carolina) we fire up the tractors and plow the roads ourselves. Our local roads were cleared before the state got to the main highways. I keep a set of chains for my Pick-up truck so I can get to town and work no matter what. Also there is a rock quarry with sand and gravel down the street less than 10 kilometers. Rock quarries and land scape businesses with sand piles are all over the place here in the USA so that helps too.
After the last big hurricane we were all out with the chain saws and tractors and had the roads cleared before the road crews got to us. One big old oak was almost as tall as my pickup. We could not budge it with the dual wheel pick-up and had to use a couple of VERY big tractors as well.
However you are more likely to see the paralysis in the cities especially if ice storms hit. Also Americans are a mobile bunch so most of us have had to deal with snow. I moved south from NH/MASS/NY area but I made sure I have all weather tires and chains… just in case.
Jeff Alberts (07:39:49) :
> People actually buy bags of coal??? … How 19th century!
Why? Here in New England people with pellet stoves can buy bags of wood pellets or corn.
http://btpellet.com/price_list has wood pellets (bagged) at approximately USD$275/short ton. I think corn is somewhat higher but burns hotter. I don’t have one, otherwise I’d likely say a lot more.
Roy (07:33:35) :
Funny story, but anyone with a fireplace in which they can burn books would get a lot more benefit from blocking it up and using something like an oil-filled electric radiator.
Unless there’s no electricity to power the radiator:
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/149760/Gas-supplies-running-out-as-Britain-faces-big-freeze
Nice….
@Jeff Alberts
Why shouldn’t people buy coal? Coal is a highly compact and easily transportable source of energy. I assume you’re in the USA. Do you notice that people buy firewood here? How 10th century!
Mike.
Pensioners grateful to Al Gore for keeping them warm in the current deep freeze.
“Our Choice, A Plan To Solve The Climate Crisis”,
free and available in large quatities at your local junk store.
Don Keiller (07:07:02) :
“More from Benny Peiser’s newsletter.
WHAT HAPPENED TO SPAIN’S GREEN JOBS”
Jobs are not the issue in of themselves. People don’t want jobs – they want to consume. They need jobs in order to consume. But it’s no use distributing unproductive “green” jobs at the expense of productive non-green jobs. Anybody employed in an unproductive industry can only be paid a low wage.
A while ago, a western observer in China was watching a dam construction project and noticed that there were thousands of workers toiling with picks and shovels. Surprised at the inefficiency, he explained that if you gave the project bulldozers they could do the job with a tiny fraction of the work force. The Chinese official retorted “of course, but think of the contribution we’re making on unemployment.”
And therein lies the rub. Too many people mistake jobs for wealth creation. You can put everyone to work in similar unproductive jobs, but you will do so only at the cost of destroying wealth.
3×2 (08:44:12) :
Off to enjoy a good book now.
——————–
Reading it or burning it ??
Aren’t library books “renewable” ?
Re: Ric Werme (08:41:23) : carbon sequestration via books.
I once read an article in the “Journal of Irreproducible Results” ( a fine journal, which like far too many, does not require archived raw data) which postulated that wealthy suburbs of New England were subsiding due to an accumulation of Natioal Geographics. In our house, it was Scientific Americans, but nonetheless, it was a valid and thought provoking insight. Since they are now available on CD, releasing of all those superfluous magazines into the environment could cause climatic and tectonic disasters. The threat is a significant, worse than we thought, and I think we need a big conference in a nice place to discuss it.
Maybe OT but Lola looks to be a pensioner.
So the comics are the start of MSM making fun of Gore!
http://comics.com/lola/