climate change

Taxes were pushed up too much in the Budget. Global stock markets have been rattled by Donald Trump. And business and consumer confidence has collapsed.

There were plenty of different factors that could explain the unexpected 0.1pc drop in Britain’s GDP reported on Friday. And yet, you hardly need to be Hercule Poirot to figure out who the real culprit is: the climate-obsessed Ed Miliband, our Energy Secretary.

The decline was led by a massive drop in manufacturing production. In reality, the collapse of Britain’s industrial base is turning into a national emergency – and Miliband has to go before he wipes it out completely.

And, well, no, not really. Yes, a bit, but not wholly.

The problem stems from his first time around in office, the 2008 Climate Change Act. We have, as the basics of the law of the land, incorporated entirebollocks. That’s why the 17 years since have been such economic bollocks. It’s not Ed that needs to go it’s the CCA. And, of course the CCC…..

Households living near electricity pylons will be given up to £250 a year off their electricity bills in a bid to reduce opposition to renewable energy projects.

Ed Miliband and Angela Rayner will unveil plans to cut annual energy bills for residents living within half a kilometre of new or upgraded power infrastructure by almost 40 per cent.

This means that the electricity bills of those not living near a pylon will rise.

Because it’s the total costs of the system that have to be met, obviously.

Ah, yes:

The Energy Secretary hopes to pave the way for a mass expansion of Britain’s electricity grid through the countryside by lowering annual average bills by £250 for residents near new pylons.

However, energy experts and campaigners described the move as a “bribe” and warned it would inflate costs for millions of other households who will effectively be required to subsidise the discount.

Heat pumps are so much the cheaper technology that they’re more expensive to run:

Telegraph analysis has found it costs £80 a year more to keep a home warm with a heat pump than a gas boiler in the UK

They’re also more expensive to install. Two types of more expensive, that’s so much better!

Walk past 110 Bishopsgate – a City of London office block commonly known as the Heron Tower that features panoramic glass lifts shooting up its side – and you would not think it could become redundant in five years.

However, net zero rules for buildings such as 110 Bishopgate mean it is a real risk. At Heron Tower, the vast majority of its floors have an energy performance certificate (EPC) rating of C, according to the Government’s register. Similar ratings are logged for swathes of commercial premises in nearby areas of the Square Mile, from towers dotted around Leadenhall Street and Ropemaker Street, to blocks along Fenchurch Street.

Under proposals drawn up in 2021, offices, shops and other commercial properties must have an energy efficiency rating of either A or B from 2030 onwards in order to be lawfully let out. Four years on, the Government has still has not indicated whether it will give those measures the go-ahead or rule them out, leaving commercial landlords in limbo.

The idiots will then say “But look at all the investment!” Because they don’t realise that investment is a cost, not a benefit. The benefit is what we gain from having invested.

But we are ruled by morons….

Reeves claimed last month that net zero “is the industrial opportunity of the 21st century and Britain must lead the way”.

Why?

I grasp the basic underlying. Here’s a technological change, if we’re good at it then we can sell that to others. Cool!

A world where people eat less meat, as the CCC recommends,…..While households will be burdened by heat pumps that cost more than £10,000 and a call to switch to more expensive electric vehicles,….A frequent flier tax,

What are we going to sell people? We don’t make and we won’t make solar cells or windmills. We’ve not got a mass car manufacturer any more, not real volume. What are we going to sell people then? Vegan recipes and tax designs?

So what is it that we’re going to sell the world having perfected it?

Britain’s push towards net zero will temporarily push energy bills higher, Ed Miliband’s officials have admitted in an apparent contradiction of the Energy Secretary’s own claims.

The cost of rolling out wind farms, solar farms and other renewable power schemes will inflate prices in the “short to medium term”, making British businesses less competitive internationally, an obscure page on the Government’s website states.

Adding more more expensive generation to the system makes the system more expensive. Well I never.

Thousands of wind turbines are to be switched off during Storm Éowyn because the power generated by its 100mph gusts would overwhelm the UK’s electricity grid.

The extreme weather will generate an unusably large amount of energy when Éowyn hits wind farms in Scotland and the North Sea on Friday, forcing operators to disconnect their machines.

I think it’s more likely that the mechanics of a bidchopper won’t survive a 100 mph wind pushing it. So, they’re off a feathered.

Now, agreed, what in buggery do I know?

The idle turbines are none the less expected to deliver millions of pounds of profits for wind farm operators, who will be able to claim so-called constraint payments for disconnecting them.

Ahh. Now. If the constraint is that the grid cannae take it then they get paid. If it’s that the mechanics cannae take it then maybe they don’t. So, one cause gets filed as the other….

Nope. I don’t know. But I have a suspicion.

Ah, there we are:

Storm Éowyn is likely to result in some wind farms being switched off for safety reasons, too. This is because turbines are designed to work best within normal wind ranges.

Extreme winds and increased rotation speeds risk damaging turbine blades, bearings and other components.

“When the wind speed averages over 25m/s (approximately 50mph) for more than 10-minutes, the turbines will automatically soft stop, make themselves safe, and wait until the wind speed drops to below 25m/s, where they will automatically restart in a safe manner.

So, who defines when it’s a safety of the turboine – no payment – and safety of the grid – payment – turn off?

Orange groves to replace Britain’s orchards thanks to rising temperatures
Warmer weather is likely to see them take over apple orchards while strawberries, onions, wheat and oats will become harder to grow

You need more than just a degree or two temp difference for oranges……

Anyway. climate change is going to turn off the Atlantic vurrent and so Britain will freeze, right?

Rachel Reeves’s bid to expand Heathrow airport could add £40 to the cost of an airline ticket, according to the Treasury’s own analysis.

The chancellor’s proposal to minimise the carbon emissions of a bigger Heathrow include the use of sustainable aviation fuels, which experts say are expensive and unlikely to reach the scale needed for aviation expansion.

A Treasury cost-benefit analysis seen by the Guardian shows that sustainable fuels could increase the cost of a single economy airline fare by £37.80 by 2040. There are no plans to ensure frequent flyers, or those in first or business class, shoulder more of the cost, with ticket prices expected to go up across the board.

So it’s not, in fact, the expansion of Heathrow that would put up prices. It’s the insistence on flying on chip oil that will. Ho Hum.

1 Duty of the Secretary of State: climate and nature targets
(1) The Secretary of State must achieve the objectives in subsection (2) (“the
objectives”).
(2) The objectives are to ensure that the United Kingdom—
(a) reduces its overall contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions to 5
net zero at a rate consistent with—
(i) limiting the global mean temperature increase to 1.5 degrees
Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels as defined by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and

Lunatic drafting.

It doesn’t say “proportion” or “compared to others” or anything. It just says that we’ve got to reduce our emissions so that 1.5 is hit.

Which, given what China et al are doing means that our emissions have to be minus squideldypop billions.

Twats.

Ed Miliband has warned Donald Trump that the rise of net zero is “unstoppable”, just hours after the President vowed to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement.

Great, so all that effort and subsidy has created sufficient momentum. We can stop now, right? Oh, we can’t? Therefore it’s not unstoppable, is it?

Ethically, the responsibility is undeniable. By continuing to expand production, fossil fuel companies are prioritizing shortterm profits over longterm planetary survival. As academic Naomi Oreskes points out in her book Merchants of Doubt, this is not mere negligence – it is a calculated decision to disregard human and environmental well-being.

The beneficiaries of the production and usage of fossil fuels are consumers. It’s us, wanting toasted food and toasty homes.

Think on it a moment. BP would be pretty pissed if it stopped making money. Or even stopped doing anything. We’d die in our billions if there were no more oil after teatime today.

This is, in fact, one of those occasions when Dr. Heinz Kiosk is correct – we are all guilty. But the standard tactic is to insist – from the left – that it’s all someone else’s fault. Don;t worry, won’t be long before someone starts sayin’ it’s the Joos.

Britain’s gas reserves have dwindled to a “concerning” low with just a week of supply left as freezing temperatures and low winds grip the country this weekend.

The UK’s storage sites are about half full, said British Gas owner Centrica – 26pc lower than this time last year.

It comes amid a battle over the future of Centrica’s Rough undersea storage facility with Centrica seeking subsidies to fund a £2bn expansion plan.

The third of those paragraphs is the important one. We’ve been getting thos story at about this time of the winter for some years now – for no one has given in on the subsidy as yet.

Ho Hum.

Hey, it might even be true, what’s being said. But it’s still a subsidy bid.

Scientists prize neutrality – that doesn’t cut it any more. In 2025, they must fully back the climate movement
Bill McGuire and Roger Hallam

All 9 million scientists on the planet must propagandise, full time, about climate change.

And, you know, no. But extremists, eh?

Ban hybrid cars or make Britain a laughing stock, Starmer urged

WTF do we care what Johnny Foreigner thinks?

And let’s be honest about it. A number of us here live in foreign. So, the local conversations revolve around EV, hybrid and ICE policies in Britain, do they?

Britain needs to press ahead with a ban on the sale of new hybrid cars with no plug from 2030 or risk taking “a catastrophic misstep” on the road to net zero, ministers have been warned.

Cars such as the Toyota Prius, which charge a battery from an internal combustion engine, need to be excluded from the list of vehicles sold in the UK from 2030 or there will be a “profound” fall in confidence in the government’s commitment to electric motoring, according to the representative body Electric Vehicles UK (EVUK).

Abjectly obvious attempt to gain legal privilege, no? Ban our competitors?

But the main advantage of charging from one’s own house is financial. On today’s smart overnight tariff, charging a battery from empty to full costs less than a fiver. In comparison, filling up an average family petrol car costs £75, according to the RAC Foundation. A full tank will go further than a charged battery, but the difference is still huge on a per-mile basis: around £2 to drive 100 miles in the EV, compared to £14 for petrol.

This has always been the promise of electric cars, even for those unconvinced by the environmental factor: while the car’s sticker price may be higher, you will save on running costs in the long-run.

That calculation, however, has completely broken down for those who are unable to plug in at home. While the rise of smart meters and EV-only energy tariffs mean charging at home costs almost nothing, soaring electricity prices have led the price of public charging to hit an all-time high.

Powering up at an ultra-rapid station costs the equivalent of £28 for 100 miles – almost double that of a petrol car – and this has risen significantly in the last two years. Slower chargers, such as those placed in lampposts by councils, are slightly cheaper, but not by enough to make EVs financially viable. Supermarkets and other shops that once offered free charging as a way to get people in the door have stopped doing so.

When electric cars are both more expensive to buy and more expensive to run, owning them makes little sense.

But that’s alreight, obviously. Only the little people don’t have a driveway and such proles shouldn’t be looking for private means of transport anyway. Buses exist, don’t they, for the poor?

As a means of transport, trains have the lightest carbon footprint: taking a train instead of a car for medium-length distances reduces emissions by about 80%, and taking a train instead of a domestic flight cuts them by 86%, according to the climate and data researcher Hannah Ritchie.

That’s per person per km. Using UK rail average load figures – and average electrification too. And not allowing for two or more people to be in the one vehicle.

Travelling in a lightly loaded diesel on a backwoods route will have a higher emissions that a fully loaded car going around the back lanes.

If trains are to compete with low-cost, often subsidised, flights, affordability also has to be addressed. Services need to be far more competitive for families, and not just in price.

But air is largely unsubsidised already and trains are highly subsidised already.

Trains work, well, for crowded urban environments tho’ they’re going to need subsidy there. For a couple to a few hundred miles they work unsubsidised. Often enough, that is. But the idea that they’re less emmittive really just isn’t true. Not when measuring average laod against average load for a car on the shorter routes they’re not. The reason the left love them is because they’re collective, nowt else.

Ford faces £100m bill for failing to sell enough electric cars
The American carmaker is the worst performing of the big brands in electric car sales in Britain, with only 6.8 per cent of its sales electric in the first 11 months of 2024

It is *consumers* who decide which car to buy. Pordicers *can not* compel consumer behaviour. But we’re fining producers for consumer behaviour?

Ignorant, arrogant, fuckwits.

Note this is the mirror image of the fossil fuel companies. They are not responsible for climate change. Because it is us consumers who desire to travel, keep homes toasty and eat hot food.

We do not have to look to the future to know the horrors of climate breakdown. It is here, now. According to a study at Monash University, extreme weather can account for 9.4% of all deaths across the globe between 2000 and 2019.

There is absolutely no way at all I’m going to believe that. Sorry, nope. And the link?

More than 5 million people die each year globally because of excessively hot or cold conditions, a 20-year study has found – and heat-related deaths are on the rise.

The study involving dozens of scientists around the world found that 9.4% of global deaths each year are attributable to heat or cold exposure, equivalent to 74 extra deaths per 100,000 people.

Now that I do believe. -Ish, at least. And Jezza is strictly true by saying “extreme weather” but untrue in that that’s not, at all, the way everyone’s going to read it. They’ll all be going heat, right?

Lying bastard.