Seems to me that this will place Britain at the forefront of economic disadvantage.
You know, back in the day we had a similar problem like this where politicians ignored the people, and I think we rather pushed back against that sometime around 1776. Perhaps after a few years, we’ll see a repeat of that, but this time in Britain, rather than a colony.
I think some of the goals are impossible to achieve given Britain’s current direction and results, such as the folly of the wind power program.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/06/whoa-windfarms-in-uk-operate-well-below-advertised-efficiency/
In the Guardian article, I cringed over this, even though I have an electric car of my own.
The committee’s report says the new carbon deal will require that heat pumps will have had to be installed in 2.6m homes by 2025. It also says that by the same date 31% of new cars, and 14% of those on the road overall, will be electric. Experts say a total of £16bn of investment will be needed every year to meet the commitment. Some of this money will be raised through increases in electricity prices.
God help you all, at least until you throw the bums out. Full story here
h/t to WUWT readers PhilW, M White, Steve C, and Harry Trent
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Retired Engineer says:
May 15, 2011 at 1:56 pm
“You get what you vote for…..”
Unfortunately RE, all three ‘major’ parties subscribe to the same orthodoxy.
I’m a member of UKIP, the only sensible party out there – acorn-small at the moment but I’m hoping for bigger things. It will probably take this self-imposed disaster to wake up the electorate.
My form Master’s favorite comment to our class of twelve year olds, form 3 are
Illiterate, inarticulate, dumb,and solid ivory from the neck upwards!
A very appropriate comment for most Government Ministers.
I was a life-long Conservative voter, but no longer. I now vote UKIP, which reflects my views both on Europe and climate change/energy policy.
I’m not sure if any new announcements will make a great deal of difference. The damage was already done by the lunatic Climate Change Bill (passed, ironically, when there was snow on the ground in London, the first time in October for many years).
Several commenters mentioned that all the major parties are equally deluded. That may not be true. Many senior Conservatives are sceptical, including Margaret Thatcher. before last year’s elections, when the Conservatives were well ahead in the polls, I hoped that a Conservative government might start to return, however slowly, to sanity. Unfortunately the Conservatives failed to secure a working majority in Parliament, resulting in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, who are the most deluded of the three major parties.
We therefore ended up with a Lib Dem, Chris Huhne, in charge of energy and climate change policy. Now that’s what I call a real man-made climate change disaster!
However, it seems that Huhne’s past may be catching up with him. He may even end up in jail.
I was once proud to be British. But no longer. Truly, the lunatics have taken over the lunatic asylum.
Chris
Huhne will be in prison soon for lying to the police a few years ago.
For Australians reading this blog:
Here’s a copy of an e mail I received today
A group set up with Allen Jones as patron and some very eminent advisors including Warwick Hughes
And another media personality Andrew Bolt
I heartily endorse the site; it’s time to get the message that people like Warwick have been researching for so long before the public and into the media
so I hope you can donate and encourage this effort
and here’s the e mail
It’s time: an opportunity to support true scientists presenting real-world climate science to inform the public.
http://www.galileomovement.com.au
7:10am Tuesday morning, May 17th, and Wednesday, May 18th tune into radio 2GB, Sydney: http://www.2gb.com
16 May, 2011
Hi,
We’re delighted to be able to introduce you to the web site of the newly-formed Galileo Movement (www.galileomovement.com.au). The principal aim of this Movement is to first win the battle against the currently threatened tax on carbon dioxide and then to win the war against any drive for ever putting a price on it.
From recent public polls it is obvious that the majority of Australians are opposed to this tax and we believe you are probably part of that majority.
Our efforts are non-political as there are politicians in all parties who need to be convinced of the futility of taxing a beneficial trace gas in the atmosphere. So many people still think that carbon dioxide is a harmful pollutant; we need your help to educate these people that this is not so! We have strong connections to excellent scientific and other advisers worldwide. We’re ready.
How can you help? Well, on the web site there is a printable flyer which you can print and distribute into letter boxes, at bus stops, shopping centres and railway stations; it is at http://www.galileomovement.com.au/threat_freedom.php#O and click on “flyer”.
More importantly, we intend to run a major, national, professionally-managed campaign to gain access to significant members of the mass media (print journalists, radio and TV personalities) who need to understand that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been spreading truly false information. This campaign will be costly, so we are appealing to you and all like-minded people to make a contribution towards this effort. You will note from our web site that virtually all our efforts are voluntary; there are some minor costs in maintaining formal financial records and in producing and maintaining the web site. Once we have won the war, any remaining funds are destined to go to the Royal Flying Doctor Service.
Please distribute this email widely to make people aware of http://www.galileomovement.com.au as this may be our last opportunity to unite to defeat this negative, economic and socially life-changing legislation. It is time to act: “The triumph of evil requires only for good men (and women) to do nothing”.
Thank you,
John Smeed, Director
Case Smit, Director
Malcolm Roberts, Project Manager
P.S. Our apologies if you receive more than one copy of this email.
P.P.S. Please let us have your suggestions for enhancing our web site.
P.P.P.S. Listen to Australia’s most influential radio personality Alan Jones of Radio 2GB (www.2gb.com), and Patron of the Galileo Movement, who will be interviewing distinguished American meteorologist Professor Lindzen at 7:10am Tuesday (May 17th) and at 7:10am on Wednesday, The Galileo Movement’s voluntary Project Manager, Malcolm Roberts
Malcolm Roberts
BE (Hons), MBA (Chicago)
Fellow AICD, MAIM, MAusIMM, MAME (USA), MIMM (UK), Fellow ASQ (USA, Aust)
http://www.conscious.com.au
My personal declaration of interests is at:
http://www.conscious.com.au/__documents/additional%20material/Personal%20declaration%20of%20interests.pdf
(manually go to http://www.conscious.com.au and look for ‘Summaries’ and then click on ‘Aims, background and declaration of interests …’)
180 Haven Road
Pullenvale QLD 4069
Phone:
Home 07 3374 3374
Mobile 04 1964 2379
E-mail: catalyst@eis.net.au
Please note: Apart from suburb and state, my contact details are not for publication nor broadcasting and are provided only for your own personal use to respond.
For care to be effective, care needs to be informed
IMHO, for fear of offending their green lobbyists and the corrupt so-called UK science establishment which includes many powerful individuals and organisations, the political parties in the UK have not dared announce that they will be getting twelve new nuclear electricity-generating plants operational as soon as they can to replace the old coal-fired plants which now carry almost all of the generating load and will be phased out in the near future as the reach the end of their economic life. The windpower industry will collapse under the weight of it’s own subsidies, inherent engineering problems and the public’s response to the visual and aural vandalism of their much-loved countryside, the solar industry will see the disappearance of ‘solar farms’ as they are dismantled and the components sold off become an economically viable, rational and unsubsidised individual units installed on privately owned homes as a supplementary source of energy to boost domestic water heating. Once a number of the coming nuclear power stations are on line to the power grid, sanity will, I hope, return and the discredited Green Socialists will melt away as the madness and non-viability of their chosen path for the population is fully revealed.
UK is turning into such a Catalogue of Fail, you don’t know where to start.
There’s such a fantastic irony even in the photo used (turbines vs a wheatfield), as the UK’s largest bio-ethanol factory is (temporarily) closing due to the high price of its feedstock (yes, it uses wheat).
http://www.fwi.co.uk/Articles/2011/05/13/126776/Rising-grain-prices-force-Ensus-plant-to-close.htm
Then, quick calculations coupled with a modicum of knowledge will (should) tell anyone what problems this policy is leading us into.
Especially- the UK grid trundles along at about 40GW and can peak at about 60GW, as it did this winter (wholesale electricity prices actually reached 20 times retail prices) To replace the UK’s 30 million cars with EVs will create a demand of 60GW (assuming they spend 12 hours driving and 12 hrs per day re-charging). If they all try to tap into ‘cheap/off peak’ electricity through the night, demand will hit 120GW from (say) midnight till 6AM
That is 3 times the rated capacity of the present grid.
Heatpumps…
A well insulated UK house will use 100kWh per day in the winter. If that came from a heat pump with an efficiency of 4 (that is ‘pushing it’), demand will be a constant 1kW per house and multiplied by 30 million houses equal to another 30GW demand on the grid.
Basically, they are asking for a UK National Grid that is rated at between 120 and 180GW, up from its present capacity of between 40GW (normal running) and 60GW (absolute peak)
Where is it all coming from and what happens if/when the thing falls down. (Literally, there are wooden poles carrying power across my land that are at least 50 years old, how long do these things last for?)
There will be no light, no heat and no transport. (There will be no heat because a precondition on installing a heat pump is the removal from houses of conventional heating sources)
And these numpties keep on paying themselves more and more…
http://www.publicfinance.co.uk/news/2011/05/public-sector-pay-rises-still-beating-private-sector/
What planet are they on?
I am seriously considering a public suicide in parliament square to show my dissapointment at this latest nonsense.
I am not an engineer or chemist, so can anyone out there advise me which method of suicide has the highest carbon footprint? may as well go out with some style….
It appears that the person Mr Huhne asked to take his speeding fine instead of him was his ex-wife. The Telegraph seem to have a transcript of a telephone conversation where he says that there is no reason for the story to come out unless she makes it do so.
There is now a police investigation because a Labour MP has made a complaint to the police. The problem is that the former Mrs Huhne has now gone all quiet about it all, maybe she is worried that she will end up being prosecuted as she said she was the driver involved in speeding, when it was not true.
I sincerely hope that Huhne is found guilty of this offence and goes to prison, loses his seat in parliament and we never hear from him again. He is a thoroughly bad and nasty piece of work.
Re. all comments above noting that “the poor will pay”, more news from the same “august journal” today: Pay gap widening to Victorian levels. Yay! Forward to the Middle Ages!
That gurgling sound you hear is Britain’s future going down the drain.
This insanity will guarantee a collapse of the ‘conservative’ vote’ and puts into perspective the vehement anti AV, (Alternative Vote) referendum just held by the government. A collapse of the conservative vote will enable parties such as UKIP; the Unite Kingdom Independent Party to finally have a say in the running of the country and hopefully enable the UK to leave what is called by many , the EUSSR. with its undemocratic penchant for making new and repressive law and for spending our money. In Brussels they have a library filled with books promoting the EU. Apparently the average cost per loan is in the region of £450 per book!
The UK already pays £9 billion a year for membership for which there is little or no benefit.
There is certainly increasing anger and a movement against the absurd and now pretty well busted campaign for AGW or even the catastrophic effects of increasing Co2. Unfortunately, politicians are not really interested in what the people they represent think or want. It is all to do with ambition and money. You would be surprised how many UK politicians have a vested interest, or control of the proliferating ‘climate change’ companies; most of which have the main aim of making money.
>>> Pay gap accellerating to Victorian levels.
Yes, but I predicted and wrote about this back in 2000. Any sentinent being would have understood that if you import 2 million poverty-stricken workers into a country, that the pay of manual workers would plummet. And this will never affect the rich, because we are not importing economists, politicians, managing directors or BBC correspondents, but competitors for builders, drivers and cleaners who will undercut the pay-rate of any manual job. But why did this happen, when the results were obvious?
Same goes for AGW. The results of putting up the energy and production costs of all UK products, is the decimation of any (remaining) manufacturing jobs in the UK. So why would any sentinent being want to do this? Do they hate the British worker so much, that they wish to exterminate them? China wants to be more competative and increase employment in manufacturing, while the UK wants to destroy the economy. You have to wonder what the rationale of these people is. Are they mad, or bad?
.
E.on (A German power company with a large UK customer base) are offering to fit PV solar panels to customers houses for a one-off payment of £99. How is this largesse paid for?
“You’ll need to sign a lease agreement to keep the solar panels on the roof for 25 years and 3 months and for our partners to receive the Government subsidy payments to cover the cost of the installation.” – From the E.on website.
So this is green jobs? Take our taxes and send them to a German company.
Robin
Dean Morrison says:
May 15, 2011 at 1:53 pm
“This is very good news indeed, as it will drive investment in the technologies of the future, rather than those of the Victorian era, such as the internal combustion engine and coal and steam driven electricity generation. It’s the countries that lag behind that will have to import these new technologies from us, and they are the ones that will be economically disadvantaged.”
/////////////////////////////////////
If ever there was a technology of the Victorian era, it is windmills. Whoops, my mistake, this technology is pre-Victorian era and was abandoned because of its inefficiencies.
It is almost inevitable that the UK will not be at the forefront of new technologies and will be purchasing these from abroad, most probably China thereby helping China’s economy expand.
You can stop praying now. They’re already back-tracking. They know it’s impossible on current technology never mind impractical in economic terms. So if other European countries ‘backslide’ on their emissions targets, which they will of course, then it’s OK for the UK to backslide too. You have to laugh. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-13409404
How can they be so stupid?!
Don’t they know what they are doing?!
This is madness and it will destroy britain!!!!
etc etc…
vs
It’s all part of Agenda 21 as per their own documents.
I mean, c’mon people ….. WAKE UP!
Phil-M at 12.36 said:
Brits. We have an opportunity to make our views known! (etc. etc).
Thanks Phil. This is the contribution I have placed on that website (http://www.redtapechallenge.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/environment)
Facts are hard things, I know, but you should only, as a Government, base your strategies and actions on known facts. Here are some:
1. The earth has not warmed for 15 years
2. Many distinguished climatologists believe that we are in for an extended cooling period
3. The IPCC has said, in an official document, that the purpose of its climate change agenda is not to prepare the world for a warmer climate but to facilitate the distribution of wealth.
4. Huge, natural changes occur in the earth’s climate over hundreds of thousands of years.There is no hard evidence that the increase in the trace gas CO2 will lead to an increase in temperature – indeed, currently, it seems to be having the opposite effect. We cannot change these long-term climatic variations, only mitigate their effect on the biosphere.
5. Every climate change skeptic I have spoken to or read about believes also that we should seek to reduce manmade emissions, especially particulates, but that this reduction should be undertaken as part of good housekeeping NOT as part of a swingeing exercise based on an unsubtantiated Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming scenario.
Please throw out this socialist agenda and appoint an environmental minister who actually understands the science and who will at last give the other side a proper hearing….
Fellow Wattsupwiththatters, whether you think it makes a difference or not, you will only be able to change things by taking action. So take it.
Usually well-informed MSM journos are now saying that the new deal is a payoff to keep the Tory party’s coalition partner the Lib-Dems ‘sweet’, as the Lib Dems lost 10% of their support in the recent local council elections due to too close an adherence, in the view of many of their supporters, to Tory policy. The Torys are keen on sneaking the acceptance of nuclear power stations in quietly, after ‘Buff’ Huhne is reassured that these plants will withstand an earthquake of 8.9. Earth scientists inform us that the likelihood of an earthquake of this magnitude in the UK is nil, but the reassurance process will delay the introduction another year, by which time this current deal will have been allowed to slide into oblivion.
An emerging problem on another front for Mr Huhne, the climate minister and arch-warmist, is his alleged dishonesty for seemingly pressuring his wife to accept his speeding-ticket ‘points’ to ensure he would not be stripped of his driving licence before fleeing the matrimonal nest for another woman.
As the truth begins to emerge, Huhne is not only a scientific illiterate, it seems he is also a serial liar and a bully.
Danny Lee says:
May 16, 2011 at 4:32 am
“I am seriously considering a public suicide in parliament square to show my disappointment at this latest nonsense….”
Don’t do it Danny – the announcement’s just a joke!
It is a joke isn’t it…..must be joke…..got to be a joke….surely!
It is tragic to see the valor displayed during the Battle of Britain going for naught. What the Nazis failed at, the Greens are set to accomplish.
Here’s an idea.
Our betters (this is the UK, remember) demand that we suck up “sweeping changes to […our…] domestic life”.
We say, “Sure thing, as long as we can first take your passports and then flay you alive when the lights go out. And that shameless snake-oil salesman Timothy Yeo is first. Deal ?”
Think it’ll run ?
Canny.
“The targets will be reviewed if European nations backslide on their own climate commitments.”
There’s the get-out clause. I think we can safely assume that a lot of backsliding will take place.
(Forgot to mention for those unfamiliar with Yeo that he is the UK’s very own feeble version of Al Gore).
And in the independent
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/campaigners-welcome-emission-pledge-2284487.html
“Greenpeace said a “strong intervention” by Prime Minister David Cameron had resolved a fraught battle within the Cabinet over the merits of the far-reaching deal to cut emissions by 50% on 1990 levels by 2025.”
50% on 1990 levels by 2025 LOL. The last time they put some “climate change” legislation through parliament three MPs voted against it.
Future historians may record our civilization is the first to make a conscious decision to fall into the rubbish heap.