Guest essay by Eric Worrall
An aristocratic British member of parliament has decided it is time to lecture the Australian colonies, on what they should be doing about climate change and carbon pricing.
According to MP Richard Benyon;
British Conservatives value climate science and finding market solutions to address the biggest environmental challenge of our era.
Seen from the other side of the world, the stance of Tony Abbott’s government on climate change is incomprehensible.
For a country visibly and increasingly exposed to impacts of climate change, Abbott’s decision to increase climate risks by becoming the first leader in the world to abolish a carbon price mystified many.
Cutting Australia’s renewable energy target was also bewildering, for a country blessed with almost unlimited renewable resources, the more so from a supposedly pro-business government. Meanwhile, the giant new coal mining and coal exporting operations on which Abbott appears to be betting Australia’s financial health look increasingly risky investments, with bank after bank refusing to back them and demand from China, the world’s biggest coal-burning nation, falling.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott made eliminating the carbon tax, to control spiralling energy prices, a prominent centrepiece of his election campaign. Eliminating the carbon tax was the will of the Australian people.
Member of parliament Richard Benyon has an estimated personal wealth of £110 million, so he is in no personal danger of experiencing fuel poverty – in fact Benyon has occasionally attracted criticism, thanks to his skilful application of generous government grants, for rich landlords like himself, who convert their rental tenancy properties to green energy.
It’s lol-tastic. Tony Abbott must think Christmas has come early.
It’ll probably go over about as well as a Guardian campaign in Clark County, Ohio.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3981823.stm
Well ex-colony India is at the receiving end of this CO2 extremism. Note how this British MP is echoing Green protest against the proposed Indian Adani mine in the North but mum on a big Chinese co owned coal mine recently open West of Newcastle. China emits 500% more CO2 than India, which has about the lowest emissions PP on the planet. Thanks to these kind of hypocrites Indias poor are going to get a hard time getting cheap and non-intermittent (coal) electricity.
Britain build its Industrial revolution on coal and oversea’s loot but should not restricts its “Jewel in the Crown” to more development again.
Benyon loves UK shale gas but hates Australian coal.
“Shale gas is a promising new potential energy source which could create thousands of jobs, bring in billions in tax revenue and secure our [UK] energy supply for the future …” (Richard Benyon in letter to constituent).
Link: http://richardbenyon.com/files/Richards_Response_Concerning_Fracking_and_Underground_Access.pdf
“Eliminating the carbon tax was the will of the Australian people.”
I do not recall there being a referendum.
The liberals went to the polls with the clear, up front stance that they would abolish the carbon tax.
They got voted in, so yes, they had the support of the majority Australian people.
10 November 2014
The millionaire Tory MP and the tenants facing homelessness
“We’ve been paying for it for years: throwing billions at millionaire landlords to better enable them to shaft the poor.”
Lyndsey Garratt had never heard of Richard Benyon – until he wound up buying her home and those of her 92 neighbours. Now that the millionaire Tory MP and his business partners threaten to make them all homeless, the 35-year-old mother cannot stop talking about him.
Garratt lives on the fringes of the City of London, on the New Era estate. Built by a charitable trust in the mid-1930s, the redbrick square has provided homes to local working people at affordable rents. There was a time when the term “affordable housing” was not a sick joke, when inner London did house people on moderate incomes. But now the capital has become a global hot spot for property speculators; Hoxton is overrun with overpriced burger joints and media start-up companies, and New Era is one of the last estates to provide working-class Londoners with a home.
At least it was until Benyon’s family firm recently moved in as part of a property consortium and bought up everything. The investors have made no bones about jacking up rents to match the rest of the market. Garratt was previously paying about £640 a month for the two-bed she shares with her daughter; when her contract expires in July 2016 residents expect they will be charged around £2,400 a month. For Garratt, a care co-ordinator at the local NHS trust, that is way more than her entire take-home pay.
Council officers have already told her what that means. As a single mother, she and eight-year-old Daisy will be moved into a homeless shelter, for anything up to four years; then it is temporary accommodation, which could be in Manchester or Birmingham. Since the buyout, Garratt’s rent has already shot up by £160 a month, while the latest NHS reorganization has cut her pay by £300 a month. “I’m getting stretched at both ends,” she says – and is already hacking away at her outgoings, cancelling even little things like trips with Daisy to the local Italian for a plate of spaghetti.
http://i4.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article4605823.ece/alternates/s615/MAIN-heating-Richard-Benyon.jpg
Benyon – who does not have to worry about being homeless
Community: a word that should carry some weight with Benyon. The Tory MP lives in a splendid stately home just outside Reading, Englefield House, complete with deer park and 3,500 acres of woodlands. Within the estate’s walls lies most of Englefield village. How does the old hymn go? The rich man in his castle; the poor man at his gate … But if there is one thing Benyon has proved in parliament, it’s that he does not have much time for the poor. He backed the bedroom tax and readily attacks the “something for nothing” welfare state.
I cannot stand spongers who get something for nothing, either. Except that in my book that category includes Benyon himself, who inherited his giant pad, as well as land stretching from London to Berkshire to Inverness – a whopping slice of Britain that makes up a family fortune worth anywhere between £110m and £200m. It applies to the £2m of public money that Benyon took in EU handouts to keep up his farmland. And it certainly takes in the £625,000 of our money that Benyon’s estate took in tenants’ housing benefit last year from just one council, West Berkshire.
Given the subject of taking something for nothing, Benyon could win Mastermind. Whereas Garratt is counting down the days until she is made homeless and is a complete innocent. She was receiving tax credits of £46 a week – until that got stopped due to “overpayment.” Except that list of subsidies that help Benyon eke out his living doesn’t stop there. Because we are effectively paying him and his fellow investors to put Garratt, her family and fellow residents out on the street (or, as the MP puts it, to “seek alternative accommodation”).
Britain loves its landlords, even while it punishes their tenants. Len Gibbs, who has been a housing market professional for 28 years and heads a housing association in Stoke, has written a paper called Fueling Pauperism, which itemizes how taxpayers throw money at Benyon and other landlords. On that list is how, even amid historic spending cuts, David Cameron found £1 billion for a Build-to-Rent programme, with a further £3.5 billion in guarantees for the rental market.
Then there is the £9 billion a year we hand to private landlords in housing benefit (which Gibbs projects to hit £15 billion by 2019); the £375 billion pumped into the financial system in quantitative easing, which has pushed up property prices and fueled lending to landlords and other members of the asset-rich; and the £5 billion in tax reliefs for landlords’ business expenses, and the plethora of other concessions.
The former housing minister Grant Shapps last year described private landlords as “the unsung heroes of the housing market”. Yet these heroes, as Gibbs points out, jostle first-time buyers off the housing ladder and take money that could build public housing. The £1 billion spent on build-to-rent alone, he estimates, could instead have been used to build 50,000 units of social housing.
You may not like the sound of what could be called Benyonism, but we have been paying for it for years: throwing billions at millionaires to better enable them to shaft the poor. Perhaps it has taken this crisis – a combination of “austerity” and a housing bubble in London – to bring it home to a critical mass of people. “Until this happened I had no clue about politics; it’s opened my eyes to how people like us are treated,” Garratt says. She fits what for me has become a recognizable type in the housing crisis: the mother who never used to think of herself as “political” until an existential threat comes her way and she fights like mad. Then this mild woman gets on to Benyon’s Tory party and its friends in the press: “They make us turn on each other. Bloody asylum seekers are the problem; people on benefits are the scum of the earth. And we’re coming to a point where people like us, working people, finally say, ‘You know what? you’re the problem. We’ve had enough of people like you.’”
3 March 2014
Britain’s richest MP wants to gag press and prevent stories which might embarrass politicians
Richard Benyon called for changes, stating: “we need to make sure that the Act is there for what it is designed to do” rather than “raking up political ammunition”
A Tory MP and landlord making a fortune from housing benefit payments to the poor has called for changes to the Freedom of Information laws used by the Mirror to expose him. Richard Benyon, the richest MP in a Commons packed with millionaires, wants the rules altered to prevent stories which might embarrass politicians being dug up by journalists.
He made nearly £120,000 in housing benefit from just one council last year through his inherited £110m family estate, as the Mirror revealed last week. But Mr Benyon has now called for changes to FOI laws stating “we need to make sure that the Act is there for what it is designed to do” rather than “raking up political ammunition.”
He also complained in a blog post for the right-wing website conservativehome.com that the Mirror newspaper used “a picture of me looking as posh as possible.”
The Mirror’s investigation with the GMB union revealed a string of politicians and political donors raking in housing benefit along with the Crown Estates, which supports the Queen, and Prince Charles’s Duchy of Cornwall.
10 November 2014
Rich enjoy free fuel AND taxpayers’ cash while millions must choose between heating and eating
A Government subsidy scheme for ‘biomass’ boilers is allowing the rich to almost literally burn public money while fuel poverty grips Britain. Britain’s richest MP Richard Benyon may get a boiler for his Berkshire pile.
Wealthy landlords are enjoying free heating and hundreds of thousands of pounds in taxpayers’ cash under a controversial green energy scheme. The owners of “biomass” boilers, which run on woodchip pellets, are coining in generous Government subsidies worth up to five times their installation cost. Meanwhile, 2.33 million households are living in fuel poverty in England alone and research by Age UK last winter showed the cold would kill 24,000.
Toffs looking into getting a boiler include Britain’s richest MP Richard Benyon and Samantha Cameron’s father Sir Reggie Sheffield.
Subsidies for the boilers are guaranteed for the next 20 years. Owners pay to install the boilers and the Government gives them a tariff for the heat produced. Those who have joined the scheme are raving about the savings. Property magnet Jon Gauld, 56, has one for converted flats in Kent and said he saw it as a pension fund. He said: “The installation will pay for itself within five years. After this the payments I’m expecting, around £23,000, a year are profit. I can heat the place for free. The bizarre thing is the more energy you use, the more money it makes you.”
Ann Gerrard, 58, who lives on a £2m estate in Nutley, East Sussex, warms her home, gym, cottage and stables by burning fuel from her woods. She is expecting to receive £12,000 a year for 20 years – as well as saving £6,000 a year by burning wood instead of oil. She said: “It’s permanent hot water and permanent heating in the winter, and it is not costing us anything really.”
David de Boinville installed a boiler to heat his manor house Walkern Hall as well as neighboring flats, coach house, stables and estate office, near Stevenage, Herts. His forecast payments tot up to nearly £23,000 – against installation costs of £95,000. He said: “I’m saving half my heating costs and selling heat to tenants.”
One installer told the press: “We hear of companies installing boilers that are larger than required. They leave the boiler running and their windows open.”
The Government launched the Non-Domestic Renewable Heat Incentive almost three years ago. It is open to businesses and public bodies but loopholes mean anyone warming multiple buildings from one source can apply.
Clare Welton, of Fuel Poverty Action, said: “Huge cash handouts for rich homeowners whilst millions suffer is clearly not the way to solve our energy crisis.”
The Department of Energy and Climate Change expects the Government to pay out £146m under the scheme over the next 12 months. DECC said the high tariffs are needed to “kick-start” the renewable energy market but a “tiering” tariff system is in place to deter people from generating excess heat.
Ofgem, which runs the renewable heat incentive, said there is a phone line to report suspected abuses of the scheme.
Meanwhile Obama buts into UK domestic Politics again
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/07/23/obama-united-kingdom-should-stay-in-the-european-union/
Of course he does, he is here, right now, attempting the destruction of not only the US but the entire Western Civilization… have you not noticed his moves ?? … just ignoring he and his administration’s constant flow of deceptive words (lies)? Easier to destroy and capture just a few huge ones than some thirty if the EU were to break or eighty if the US states also demand and reclaim their original state rights.
Cameron has promised green government but Osborne has promised to balance the books which means big cuts in spending and he really needs growth in the economy which is not being helped by high energy prices. New climate change minister Amber Rudd goes around saying how keen she is on renewables but the new message coming across is that you can have subsidies to start something up but you can’t have subsidies forever because that is not what happens in the real world.
Obama may want us to stay in the EU but I shall vote OUT in the referendum. The EU will then make a better offer and we will have another referendum. The longer we hold out, the sweeter the bribe becomes, it would be madness to give in too soon.
well looking at usa moves in EU and Ukraine especially, the installed murrican politicals and others megacorp takeover,
interference in greece by usa banks getting the poor sods INto eu and then bleeding em out
maybe the TIPP is the closest to moving into EU n doing em over they can work out right now?
however EU might NOT be so happy with that lousy deal..
A few years back wasn’t there a post on Watts Up with That referring to an English wind farm that cost $100,000,000 to save $1,000,000 per year? Basic failure to understand life cycle cost and value. Plus the farm only returned 1/4 of the energy modeled and no one included maintenance costs.
Do Australians dislike receiving unsolicited advice from Brits more than they dislike receiving unsolicited advice from Yanks? Or is it about the same?
Actually this bozo has given me a great idea. Let’s start exporting our great surpluses of sun and wind to European countries where they have so many sunless and windless days. That would create value from renewable energy. Ironically some of the European government decision makers would be stupid enough to pay us for it.
“Global warming did serve a couple of useful purposes. The issue has been a litmus test for our political class. Any politician who has stated a belief in global warming is either a cynical opportunist or an easily deluded fool. In neither case should that politician ever be taken seriously again. No excuses can be accepted.” to quote from David Archibald’s DWILIGHT OF ABUNDANCE
His comments have made the local paper, but I have responded 🙂 though there is a limit on the length of the post:
Newbury MP criticises Australia’s Prime Minister over “mystifying” climate change policies
Richard Benyon slams Tony Abbott’s decision to scrap carbon prices
http://www.newburytoday.co.uk/news/home/15234/Newbury-MP-criticises-Australia-s-Prime.html
Funny how the global warming alarmists keep saying demand for coal is declining blah blah blah. The reality is the reverse. It has been increasing according to the International Energy Agency, and based on the BP Statistical Review of World Energy (June 2015) it is almost certain that coal will be a major source of cheap energy for many decades to come. The alarmists are deluding themselves by their wishful thinking.
The British government is hidebound by the socialist EU and the sooner British people elect to get out of it and repeal ‘the climate change act’ the better.