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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@ur momisugly John Galt (11:11:34) :
John, I guess you forgot to insert the sarcon/sarcoff tags on that comment:
…Better to freeze to death! ….
But, if not: you first, please!
Anyway, my wife, me and my kids really like to read books, so there about
2500-3000 books and paperbacks available, even if my heart would truely bleed. (Didn’t count lot’s of manuals, printouts and approx seven years of weeklies about computers and science)… just in case if the refilled heating oil
– should be enough for 15 to 18 month, is not enough.
But before burning them I would use them as an additional insulation for the
windows, stacking them up in the window frame.
Productivity bonus for having reduced global warming!
Look at the snow outside!
He must have been working overtime.
The traditional ending of this probably apocryphal story is as follows:
“Businessman” is the most common hero of this story, sometimes also “engineer” or “economist”. I’ve even seen this attributed to late Milton Friedman.
Looking at all these “green jobs”, it doesn’t sound much like joke anymore.
Barry Foster: I daresay a fire gives off lots of heat while it is roaring away, but as soon as you run out of books or go to bed it just squirts heat out of your house and into the sky. I am of course prepared to be shown scientific proof that fireplaces burning logs or books are a net benefit, but I am skeptical until then.
PS: I have a very pleasant log fire right now. It smells great, it looks great, and it is even a kind of company. I wouldn’t want to seal the house up so I can incubate in my own warm stale fug. But I can’t believe a fire is efficient.
“…Thin spreading fingers seek
to embrace the sill-warm bundles
that huddle on the doorsteps
of a white London Town. …”
Something’s On the Move – Jethro Tull
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/uknews/6936859/Britain-paralysed-by-snow-and-freezing-weather-causing-travel-chaos-and-schools-to-close.html?image=29
some pictures of “global warming” the river tyne froze, the fountains in trafalgar square froze
Katabasis: “The BBC’s Richard Black ambivalent about the influence of “global warming…””
I don’t see any ambivalence in Black’s comments. His explanation for the current cold snap in the northern hemisphere is that it is weather spilling down from the Arctic as a result of a negative Arctic oscillation.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/2010/01/arctic_conditions_arctic_cause.html
This seems to be a reasonable explanation, and intuitively supports the notion that the mid-northern hemisphere is suffering from “Arctic conditions”. Interestingly, my morning newspaper quotes a Beijing meteorologist who opines that the current NH weather is linked to unusual atmospheric patterns caused by global warming.
The article doesn’t elaborate on the “unusual atmospheric patterns”, but it’s also reasonable to suppose that increasing energy levels within the atmospheric system would lead to greater instability and more extremes of weather.
On the book-burning story, while this smacks of “pensioners reduced to eating dog-food”, the outcome of book-burning might not be wholly negative. In fact, if pensioners were to warm their toes against the curling pages of, say, The Da Vinci Code, there could well be a positive benefit to humankind.
These IPCC volumes should keep the cold away. All UK pensioners should be issued with a copy.
http://web2.nies.go.jp/gaiyo/kokusai/images2009/kokusai-2e.jpg
[image]http://web2.nies.go.jp/gaiyo/kokusai/images2009/kokusai-2e.jpg[/image]
In 3 years, we’re going to send Obama (along with a supply of ‘region 1’ DVDs) over to bed down with his “good friend”, Gordon Brown.
Predicador – China’s cities are full of newish freeways. They see a certain amount of use but nothing like you’d expect on a Western freeway in similar locations.
After three or five years many of them are crumbling. The rebar money no doubt paid for many Party bosses’ daughters’ weddings.
And so now you’ll find twenty or thirty guys out there pounding on the broken pavement with picks, if they’re lucky chopping up pavement with jackhammers, troweling out concrete with big pole floats, then moving on to the next bad spot.
So yeah, been there seen that.
I knew there was a reason I shouldn’t have bought a Sony ebook reader. Convenient for lugging copies of papers around, but not sure the lithium battery would be good for the fireplace. Here in sunny Reading, UK I’ve had about 8cm of global warming falling in the last 5hrs. Think the uni’s climate brigade have now been banned from my local pub 🙂
Ralph (07:30:35) : You already have the technology, just call those british NGO´s specialists in promoting civil unrest in third world countries.
tallbloke (09:23:43) :The depth of the little ice age in fact. 1640-44
I´ve been saying that cycles repeat, so the screw it is already turning….beware ye fools, your time is over, the doom you forecasted for us was yours. Time for nature to process its rotten crops and turn them into soil…
IF CHURCHILL WERE ALIVE TODAY
He might say, “Never have so many given so much for so D@ur momisugly#% little!”
@ur momisugly Roy (11:44:51) :
Have you ever examined a Rumford Fireplace? They utilize principles that the science at the time hadn’t caught up to yet, such as radiant energy (infrared) for heating instead of heating the air, and a laminar air flow from the room. They have great performance, are EPA tested, and very efficient. And this from a masonry open fireplace with a simple chimney design with no damper.
Jefferson had them put in at Monticello. Makes them worth a look. Check out the Technical Details page of links, start clicking. You might just be impressed.
to all of you brits out there re: Jeff Alberts (07:39:49) :
I just think Jeff may not be terribly well-travelled. I have used and seen plenty of domestic coal fires in my travels. However, here in the US, there are constantly warnings about using coal to fire our fire places. They say it can and does lead to carbon monoxide poisoning. I never looked into whether this is true or not (if our fireplaces or design is different somehow) or if this is something that just keeps the personal-coal industry down for whatever reason.
OAP’s slip-sliding down to the local charity shop then warming themseves with a smouldering tome?
Sounds like a leg-pull to me….but then I am in climate denial.
That is why Ben Franklin invented the “Franklin stove”
Much more efficient than a conventional fireplace
http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/frankstove.htm
Larrry
Mark Bowlin (07:08:01) :
“I suspect it’s a cold cold winter in East Anglia.”
Good one 🙂
I hope they freeze their knickers off…
In the 1970’s the Mayor of Denver lost his job due to poor snow clearing in the preceding winter.
Michael Bilandic in Chicago in that era lost his Mayor’s job to Jayne Byrne.
P Wilson (07:23:16) :
kadaka (10:36:58) :
No. Snowfalls in the US and Canada are met with massive snowplow efforts for which all of our northern states (Canada being even further north) are well prepared.
You see the same problems the UK is having in southern US, however, as they are not prepared for snow. Flurries in Jacksonville, FL, for example, result in bridge closings everywhere. TV crews sat along side an Atlanta highway one year watching all the wipeouts from so-called “black ice” that had formed during a freeze.
Of course, no region is not without its idiots that don’t understand why speed limits don’t apply during snow storms or conditions that otherwise result in icy conditions. Drive down any Colorado road in the winter and count the number of cars in the ditches for proof.
Mark
JEM (13:11:08) :
Said
“Predicador – China’s cities are full of newish freeways. They see a certain amount of use but nothing like you’d expect on a Western freeway in similar locations.
After three or five years many of them are crumbling. The rebar money no doubt paid for many Party bosses’ daughters’ weddings.
And so now you’ll find twenty or thirty guys out there pounding on the broken pavement with picks, if they’re lucky chopping up pavement with jackhammers, troweling out concrete with big pole floats, then moving on to the next bad spot. ”
========================
If they last 3 to 5 years before needing repair we should get the guys who built them over here to the UK for those few short sections of road we see built each year.
Our new roads, if you can find one, barely last 3 to 5 months before they are being repaired. The repair methods sound similar too.
@RAYQ MCMULLEN some posts back.
Glad to know you have a fire.
For various reasons (mainly the lack of choice of suitable natural gas burning cooking ovens) since last summer we now have an all electric kitchen. So if the electicity supply fails we are without heat (the controls for the gas boiler will not work) and the ability to prepare warm food and hot drinks. Not that such a facility would last for long since pipeline gas supplies would be regulated and controlled at some point by equipment requiring grid electricity … but we might have a little time available before things turned bad.
Electricity reliance just means we have a single point of failure for all life support in cold weather.
I’m thinking I should maybe invest in some sort of bbq with a bottled gas supply just in case.
I suggest foreign aid. We send them all those 2,000 page bills with the 500 page amendments introduced at 3 AM. Nobody reads them, and they contain some heat content. Further since they are made from dead trees, they are carbon neutral. Prince Bat Ears the serial adulterer of the House of Hanover should appreciate that.
outside temp: -2C
room temp: 23C
all thanks to some pallets of wood and bankfiles from the past years.
Rajendra Pachauri chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) writes in the Guardian that, “The same group of climate deniers who have been active across the Atlantic have now joined hands to attack me personally, alleging business interests on my part which are supposedly benefiting me as well as the Indian Tata group of companies.” “As the science in the IPCC Fourth Assessment report clearly demonstrates, there is no leeway for delay or denial any longer.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/jan/04/climate-change-delay-denial
Yes Rajendra, no leeway for denial any longer, it is time for reckoning, you should prepare yourself for your next starring role with the ICC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court
Rajendra Pachauri, there are people freezing to death tonight and you are partially to blame…