Riots May Have Killed Britain's Green Consensus

“Greenwich said the energy retrofit market has turned out to be extremely complicated, with required hammering out of job standards, hiring practices, wages and how best to measure energy benefits.”
“Required” by whom? Answer, required by the real job beneficiaries, the bureaucrats who are afraid that someone, somewhere, will get a job without their permission (without paying the bureaucrat for that permission). Required by the government sponsering and bribing union bosses (more bureaucrats) who want their clients, the rank and file union workers, to continue to support them in office and need to squash any competition to their construction union workers by drownding any such competition in regulations. “Required” so much that it takes 14 bureaucrats a year to retrofit 3 houses.
Plus, they recieved a 14 million grant to retrofit these houses, why are they only offering loans and “incentives” to retrofit these houses? If they recieved “free” government money to retrofit poor peoples houses, why don’t they use all the money to, dare I say it, actually buy the materials and then hire the people to install the stuff for free to those poor people, after all, that is what this money, taken by force from the taxpayers, was earmarked for, right? Or was getting this grant really so that the state bureaucrats could pay for their pension fund? Heck, how much of that 20 million is even left after the bureaucrats have eaten it all?
Suggestion, charge the 14 bureaucrats with missapropriation of government funds, sieze the money back (all their saleries retroactively), buy the materials, and hire a few people to install it. But that won’t happen, because we now see the real reason the state wanted that 20 million, and it had very little to do with weatherization.
And we can see why that trillions of dollers supposedly spent to jumpstart the national economy didn’t.

Gee, if only someone had told the rioters that by burning shops they are producing greenhouse gases and causing climate change; I bet that would have hit them where it hurts.

As a small illustration of how we manage our economy here in the UK,
we are about to cut our police force by some 16,000 officers to save
£2.4bn at a time when we have just witnessed some of the worst riots
in many years.
At the same time we are going to spend around £100bn
building windmills, and are increasing our foreign aid from an already
eye watering £9bn to around £12bn.
Oh, and by the way, we are already spending more than our income,
so we are having to borrow every year to fund the excess.
Makes you proud, doesn’t it?

“The riots have undoubtedly emboldened those Conservative backbenchers who are at best indifferent to environmental issues and at worst openly hostile to green policies.”
I do not think that many Conservatives MP’s are indifferent to environmental issues, since most of them will have rural constituencies or represent the leafier suburbs. It is the metropolitan socialists who have least regard for the environment, using it only as a tool and a convenient source of political power. They are the ones who introduced the heavy subisidies on wndfarms, which have done so much to despoil the countryside and to antagonise the rurally concerned local population.
“However, in the shorter to medium-term, anything that pushes green issues down the political agenda or makes green policies fractionally harder to enact can undermine low carbon investor confidence and, as such, damage the prospects of green businesses.”
No problem with that hitting the prospects for further ‘carbon’ taxes.
“An economy, which through the delivery of enhanced stability, greater sustainability, increased employment and improved living standards, would help make the kind of devastating riots we have seen in recent weeks a thing of the past.”
if the ‘green agenda’ is fulfilled for the UK, the above can be rightly paraphrased as: “An economy, which through the delivery of reduced energy supply stability, restricted growth, reduced employment and falling living standards, would help make the kind of devastating riots we have seen in recent weeks much more likley.”

Verity Jones says:
August 16, 2011 at 12:37 pm

By that I mean that, having begun to instill the values I grew up with, I realise that these now seem at odds with ‘the norm’, which seems to undermine good parenting. I seem to risk being considered a ‘bad parent’ because I encourage ‘dangerous behaviour’.

Heh! I am known in our neighbourhood as the most irresponsible parent of the area. I actually let our children make their own mistakes, but give them enough advice that they know how to make good decisions (most of the time). They are generally very responsible, seemingly in contradiction.
We learn by making mistakes, not by being prevented from making them!

“An economy, which through the delivery of enhanced stability, greater sustainability, increased employment and improved living standards, would help make the kind of devastating riots we have seen in recent weeks a thing of the past.”
Just the things that the green agenda is sucking out of societies. Riots will be the green legacy.

Odd that the British police can use kettling tactics and provocateurs to turn peaceful, legitimate, demonstrations into riots, but can’t stop real riots.
Odd that people are condemned and prosecuted for looting shops (they should be, of course), but banking bosses can cause financial disasters and then loot the public purse to give themselves giant bonuses without being called to account for it.
Tony Blair gets away with war crimes, police get away with murder.
“Not my fault” and “Grab it while you can” run all the way through modern British society. But then, Margaret Thatcher (one of the forces behind the AGW scam) said society didn’t exist.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100100708/the-moral-decay-of-our-society-is-as-bad-at-the-top-as-the-bottom/