Is this “the greenest government ever” which Cameron promised us?

First topic message reminder :

The boom in solar panels in the UK started when the last government announced its “feed-in tariff” scheme in April 2010. This offered money to home owners who generated their own electricity using solar “photovoltaic” panels (also known as solar PV). The feed-in tariff pays a fixed rate for all electricity generated – even if you then use it in your own home. Additional payments are made to those who sell surplus units to the National Grid. The prices offered will be index-linked, and the government has pledged to maintain these tariffs for the next 25 years.

To install your own solar panels will usually cost about £12,000 – depending on the size of the system, access to the roof and location. According to the figures of the Energy Saving Trust, an independent body, it will take about 10 years before you recoup your original outlay. There may also be further maintenance or repair costs to pay. If you move house during this period, you obviously can’t take the panels with you.

The other option is to rent your roof to a solar provider. In that case, start-up costs are minimal. Many companies advertise free installation, while in some cases homeowners will pay a couple of hundred pounds. The downside is that the solar company collects the feed-in tariff. As the figures from the EST make clear, this is the bulk of the money made from the scheme.

What if you move? Many claim that solar panels will add to your home’s value, but this depends on who owns the panels. While a buyer might like the idea of lower utility bills, they might not like the fact that an outside company owns large panels attached to your roof. Conveyancing law remains largely untested around this issue, and clearly there may be legal issues to resolve, such as who is responsible for maintenance and upkeep. There is also the question of who owns the panels when the 25-year tariff ends, and what would happen should the government of the day change the terms of the scheme before then.

The main risk is that the government reneges on its 25-year promise, although this would require legislative change. However, it’s worth noting that it’s already scaled back the feed-in tariffs paid to commercial organisations. As with any new technology, there’s also the risk that far better, more efficient – and possibly cheaper – solar systems may be developed over the next few years, leaving you stuck with the equivalent of an expensive Betamax stapled to your roof.

(Article abridged and adapted from the ‘Your Money’ section of ‘The Daily Telegraph’, 15.10.11)

So, would you put solar panels on your roof?

tlttf wrote:Not at all Ivan, he's simply put an experiment on hold until the country can afford it. What's destructive about trying to save the country and it's resources?

The only thing Green about Cameron is his economic policy. now that is what i would call very green indeed.

For the links, as ever, please visit the original at http://skwalker1964.wordpress.com/2012/12/12/a-micro-example-of-the-govts-macroeconomic-stupidity-or-worse/


I’ve just heard that a small business, which a couple of my friends had set up, has had to cease trading. The company provided and installed high-quality solar panels for households, to allow them to reduce their fuel bills and help the environment by generating electricity that the householder could use directly when needed, and ‘push’ electricity back into the grid when it wasn’t being used in the home. The power generated would qualify for a ‘feed-in’ tariff (FIT) that would reduce the home’s fuel bill, and which would last for 25 years.

This is a small-scale tragedy that also provides a perfect example of the large-scale idiocy, malignancy or both of this government’s macroeconomic ‘austerity’ policies that it claims will turn around or ‘rebalance’ the UK’s economy.

Up to December 2011, the feed-in tariff paid to people who installed the was 43.3 pence per kilowatt (kW), with a 3.2p supplement for any electricity not used but pushed back into the national grid. This meant that the substantial cost of installing solar panels could be paid off in about half the 25-year period of the FIT, and the household could expect substantial reductions in its energy bills from then on – a significant benefit in times when energy costs are only expected to keep rising.

My friends, like many others, started their company to meet the demand that this generated, and the future looked bright.

In December 2011, the government cut the FIT by more than 50%, to 21p, although after legal challenges by the solar industry this was deferred to March 2012. This cut slashed the national demand for solar installations massively at a stroke, from 27,000 to 12,000. Not satisfied with that, in August this year the government cut the FIT again – from 21p down to 16p, a further reduction of 24%.

The result of these cuts? It’s obvious to anyone with a brain, really. Demand was killed, and small businesses like the one my friends started, could no longer find enough work to exist. They’re not generating income for themselves, therefore they’re not paying tax, may need to claim benefits if they can’t find other work immediately – and certainly can’t be thinking about employing anyone else.

All because of actions and decisions taken by the party that likes to style itself as the friend of business, especially of entrepreneurs and small businesses.

Some months ago, I wrote an article about the stupidity of expecting austerity to bring our economy back into recovery, because all it does is suck demand out of the economy – and as someone who works in business, I know that demand is everything, Whatever the other obstacles, it’s simple ‘supply and demand’ – if there is demand for something, companies will overcome the obstacles to supply it, generating profit and jobs.

By contrast, if you kill demand, then no amount of reductions in corporation tax – Osborne’s favourite resort that he claims will boost economic recovery – mean anything at all. They won’t create jobs, they won’t attract investors, they won’t result in more business start-ups – on the contrary, people will lose jobs and become a net cost to the country instead of net contributors. Not because of any fault of theirs (in spite of this government’s proclivity for demonising the unemployed), but because the demand for what those jobs, investments and start-ups would produce or supply is not going to be big enough to make anything but contraction and entrenchment feasible.

Osborne and his ilk love to say that you can’t cut your way out of debt. Well, commonsense and experience, borne out by woeful UK economic performance under this government, show that you can’t cut your way to growth. Taking money out of the pockets of ordinary people – including the unemployed and disabled – who will spend it quickly can only reduce demand, no matter how much you offer tax-breaks to the rich.

If you make the poor poorer and the average poor, ultimately its bad for every business (except maybe the parasites like Wonga) – because economic recovery is all about demand, stupid.

George Osborne is an idiot, but he’s not that big an idiot. So if he knows that the measures he’s taking can only depress the economy and prevent recovery, it can only mean that he has an ulterior motive – to use the continuing ‘crisis’ as an excuse to strip the state to achieve his ideological ends while enriching the Tories’ financial masters in the process.

This what Gideon Osborne was saying six years ago ...

"....GEORGE OSBORNE: Well he (Gordon Brown) was a bit, he wasn't very frank in his mistakes. I mean of course, I don't think there would be anyone in the country, including Tony Blair, who'd say that the Dome was a success. So he highlighted that as the big mistake of the government. It was a mistake.

But there have been plenty others and I thought when he actually came to talking about the Health Service, Gordon Brown has not understood the anger of the public at the closure of the Accident and Emergency wards, the loss of the nursing places and indeed the fury of the junior doctors at the way their future training has been handled."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/politics_show/6651629.stm

Is this “the greenest government ever” which Cameron promised us?

Err.... that's a hard question. Green as in "Clueless" or green as in unproven, or perhaps green as in the result of mixing yellow with blue.

Last November, after being wrong footed by Ed Miliband, Cameron – who once promised us “the greenest government ever” – ordered his aides to “get rid of all the green crap” from energy bills. It seems that our out-of-touch PM may have misread the mood of the nation on that issue, as with so many others.

An opinion poll by YouGov has found that public concern for the environment has reached levels not seen in any national poll since the late 1980s. 23% of people polled stated that ‘the environment’ was currently the number one issue for the country.
 
More details here:-
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/02/climate-change-has-finally-returned-mainstream-issue

Farage has only to promise improved flood-defences, for the entire Home Counties Tory membership to abandon the Cameron plan.

Scandal of Tory green energy scheme 'robbing' the poor to fund free insulation for the rich
 
Extracts from an article by Jeremy Armstrong:-
 
"A Tory ‘green’ energy scheme supposed to help millions in fuel poverty is ‘robbing’ the poor to pay for free insulation for the rich. The well off in big houses are getting work done for nothing because they can guarantee bigger reductions in carbon emissions. But hard up families across Britain are getting no help at all simply because their homes are too small - and so do not provide the same savings.

The £1.3 billion ECO (Energy Company Obligation) provides free insulation paid for by the government. Set up to help 'save the planet', it was introduced to reduce carbon emissions with home improvements paid for by a tariff on all our energy bills. Under Labour, it targeted poor households struggling to pay for electricity and gas. But changes introduced by the Tories have seen payments made to firms doing the insulation work based purely on reduced future carbon emissions. That means rich people in big houses getting work done for free - subsidised by the poorest who are paying the same green levy on their energy bills.

The green tariff used to pay for the ECO scheme adds 8% to energy costs - the equivalent of more than £100 to the average annual household bill."
 
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/scandal-tory-green-energy-scheme-3249263#.UyXV5eBWK2U

Totally logical, the true-blue "old money" Tory voters live in draughty old stone buildings Listed by English Heritage, who prohibit the fitting of modern double-glazing or cavity-wall insulation.

But they look very imposing.

Something to raise the blood pressure on this 'glorious twelfth' of August........   

This cash for grouse scandal shows how Britain has become a plutocrats' paradise

From an article by George Monbiot:-

"A few days after it was revealed that an NHS group is considering charging patients for the crutches, walking sticks and neck braces it issues, we discovered that Cameron has intervened to keep the cost of gun licences frozen at £50: a price that hasn't changed since 2001.

The police are furious: it costs them £196 to conduct the background checks required to ensure shotguns are issued only to the kind of dangerous lunatics who use them for mowing down pheasants, rather than to the common or garden variety. As a result we lose £17m a year. The Country Land and Business Association – the armed wing of the Tory Party – complains that it's simply not fair to pass on the full cost of the licence to the owners of shotguns; unlike, say, the owners of passports or driving licences, who are charged on the basis of full cost recovery.

Then the government announced it would raise the subsidy it provides for grouse moors from £30 per hectare to £56. Yes, you read that right: the British government subsidises grouse moors, which are owned by 1% of the 1% and used by people who are scarcely less rich.

While the poor are being forced out of their homes through government cuts, it is raising the payments – across hundreds of thousands of hectares – that some owners use to burn and cut the land (helping to cause floods downstream), shoot or poison hen harriers and other predators, and scar the hills with roads and shooting butts. While the rest of us can go to the devil, the interests of the very rich are ring fenced."

For the whole article:-
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/28/britain-plutocrats-landed-gentry-shotgun-owners

The Government makes decisions about the countryside, not the Countryside Alliance. Recent attacks on the RSPCA and RSPB have no connection with any of the above correspondence.

Sir David Attenborough urges action on climate change

Sir David Attenborough has criticised government leaders who deny the "overwhelming" evidence on the effects of climate change. The naturalist and broadcaster said humanity was facing a "major, serious problem" and stressed there has never been a collective effort to tackle the issue.

Sir David went on: “Wherever you look there are huge risks. The awful thing is that the people in authority and power deny that when the evidence is overwhelming. They deny it because it's easier to deny it. It's a very major, serious problem facing humanity but at the same time it would be silly to minimise the size of the problem. Never in the history of humanity in the last 10 million years have all human beings got together to face one danger that threatens us.”

http://www.itv.com/news/2015-01-01/sir-david-attenborough-urges-action-on-climate-change/

As long as people vote with their wallet, politicians are not going to risk pledging the vast sums of money and risking untold inconvenience by actually tackling the problem of "£climate-change" head-on.

Of course, climate change is the issue that may render all our political machinations and ideas a bit moot - I imagine a fascist tyranny may be the preferred government 'style' for a world post-apocalypse

boatlady wrote:Of course, climate change is the issue that may render all our political machinations and ideas a bit moot - I imagine a fascist tyranny may be the preferred government 'style' for a world post-apocalypse

From my experience of Moderators from "left inclined " Forums , they all share this vague belief that a Post Apocalyptic world is just round the corner ---- Why ? ---- and that the Government will be tyrannical --- Why ? ------ and this inevitably equates to Fascism .
That's just selective choice to support pre-held assumptions , imo .
If and when the Apocalypse arrives there will be no post anything , apart from small groups acting only for their own survival and needs .

your point being?

On the basis that you specifically asked :-
It is an arbitrary belief , completely lacking factual support .
It looks and sounds strange and as Judge Judy says --- it is therefore almost certainly actually strange .
Exactly as my initial post also said/implied .

The reality of Apocalypse for many people may come with the collapse of the internet due to unacceptable levels of hacking.