Remember this in May when you cast your vote. In order to get past the real threat of blackouts as our generation capacity teeters close to the brink, our government now wants old people to eke out their pensions heating a single room and to merge with the Green party in telling the rest of us to jump up and down to keep warm while forking out to subsidise rich landowners to host corporate sized wind farms. They’ve got to go.
What we really need is affordable energy. This will mean developing our own energy resources. As Chief Scientist sir Mark Walport said when he came to office, we need to balance environmental concerns with energy security and affordability. I find his advice more sensible than that of Natalie Bennett, the Green party leader and that of the present government, led by David Cameron.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
Davey: ‘We can keep the lights on this winter if you turn your lights off’
‘We can keep the lights on this winter if you turn your lights off’
Better still, if you turn your life off 😉
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings.
There appears to be no official advice as to how to warm the bedroom at night to the 18C that they consider necessary to maintain in the living room during the day, nor does there appear to be any attempt to indicate the cost of their contemptuous proposal.
An elderly person must provide his own heat at all times, whereas Civil Servants who draft this and the politicians and greens who thoughtlessly promulgate such ill considered and to many unaffordable guff, spend most of their day in overheated offices and transport, much of which is funded by the taxes paid by others.
Perhaps a better way of reducing CO2 would be for all households and offices to be restricted to the temperature and cost parameters that they suggest and particularly the homes of the Landowners and other subsidised succubi that have brought this misfortune upon the elderly.
Vote UKIP for the only party whose energy policy addresses this obscenity.
In the absence of cheap energy the advice is logical. In fact its more along the lines of ‘prepping’ which is as sensible as it gets. So if you can get past the fact that it is the stupid government that caused this to be an issue, the advice is sound.
I bought a multi-fuel burner in 2011. I mainly burn coal brickettes made of compressed coal dust. The big advantage of this over standard coal is that it doesn’t spit, because there are no gas pockets I suppose. anyway the occasional re-visit to the shop has revealed that they cannot keep up with demand for said burners. In fact the shop has re-designed the display area and ripped out all the electric variants that look like fires and now stocks a wonderful variety of coal/multi-fuel units.
I’m even toying with the idea of putting a 1-2 kw rated unit in one of our smaller family rooms as the lounge is way too big for me and the memsahib on our own [boys off to college now]. Don’t see why every room in the house has to be roasting hot.
It reduced my gas consumption by about 30% over that and subsequent winters. It is rated 6kw [large lounge] but still it gets way too hot for me and I tend to open the lounge door into the hall so the warm air rises to the bedrooms. With lots of cooking going on in the kitchen and the fire in the lounge on the opposite side of the house we do all right. We wear more clothes than usual in winter [obvious isn’t it] no T shirts and shorts. I sweep my own chimney £15-20 for a set of multi-purpose brushes] the cost of the brushes oddly is the same as getting the sweep to come once.
I’d certainly advise older folk who have heating issues to look into the possibility if they have a little money, coal costs me £150 per year. The stove is of the type that we could at a push cook off the top, have used it for making tea when we had an extended power outage a couple of winters ago. I also chop and stack wood for burning during the winter too, it will burn just wood but that tends to burn quick so I use it as an accelerant more than anything else.
I have a flat top woodburner too. Not available to many older people who have moved into blocks of retirement flats or other dwellings where a flue is impractical or not allowed though.
The other scandal here is the govt axed the only green measure worth saving – assistance with insulation.
Quite right Rog, I don’t expect one size to fit all, just an option for some. Living rural, our pensioners don’t live in blocks of flats of any kind, all bungalows, depends on whether they have a proper chimney or not I suppose and whether the the landlord will allow fitting of stoves.
I plan to downsize into a place which has a stove -or the ability to install one- solar panels on the roof but no FITs [won’t have them, don’t need them] solar water heating [had it ten years and free showers between May and September, plus pre-heat water before entering boiler], full insulation and zoned thermostats.
I currently own a very large house but my energy bills are only around £750 total per annum so I must have got something right. Not only that, I’m still 400 units of electricity in credit [my year starts Oct 6] all I do is overestimate the electricity in summer and let it catch up in winter, handy having one of those meters that go backwards……
Didn’t know they’d scrapped the insulation one?
You are in the hands of idiots. Vote UKIP or emigrate.
Wait for the first sub-zero nights and the Cameron government will tell us to wear nightcaps and bed socks, and woolly hats, scarves and mittens during the day! After all, the Major government and Edwina Currie meant well! Pity the lost the following election …
Personally, I shall use up all my savings to keep the house warm, being of bad health. So what if the kids inherit nothing if it runs out. At least they won’t have to use it to pay for ‘care for the elderly’, because I’ll have frozen to death.
Sadly, I can’t install a stove, wood-burning or otherwise, as dealing with the daily grind of removing the ashes and bringing in coals is now beyond me.
Ah well, this just proves yet again that governments are constitutionally incapable of using common sense. But what else is new …
The first thing my wife said was “what do you do when you go to bed in a freezing cold room.
To bloody clever by half these women.
Me_Again says:
October 21, 2014 at 9:58 am
Forbidden in cities where at least 2/3 of the elderly live. It was called the clean air act about 50yrs ago.
roger says:
October 21, 2014 at 9:37 am
The Office and Household Heating law is still on the statute book. You are not allowed to heat any part of your premises above 19°C. It was never enforced or enforceable.
“Forbidden in cities where at least 2/3 of the elderly live. It was called the clean air act about 50yrs ago.”
Smokeless fuel was the answer to that, perfectly legal Stephen.
I only heat one room already. And the t’stat is set at 15C in the daytime when I’m home.
Good for you. I have to say, in the middle of winter I’m either in the kitchen, in the lounge with the stove or in bed with my human warmer for mutual radiative therapy.
Bumper crop of hazelnuts this year but not so good for the walnuts.
It’s the bathroom that needs heating – unless old folk (like me) are now being advised not to bother with personal hygiene (like that idiot Prof Kevin Anderson, Deputy Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research ). See http://www.climatedepot.com/2013/11/19/global-warming-professor-kevin-anderson-cuts-back-on-washing-and-showering-to-fight-climate-change-admits-at-un-climate-summit-that-is-why-i-smell/
The one thing people won’t stand for is collapse of the grid. If it happens this winter there will be a new political landscape within months.
RIP, Lynda Bellingham.
One thing there is no shortage of is red tape. Does it burn efficiently enough to keep the lights on?
You Brits are far to polite and PC, being politically ‘correct’, that they have convinced you to swallow whole.
Why do you people not hate these hard-core environmentalists? You had better, the ones I am speaking of.
I mean they stopped caring about anyone else’s holistic environment long ago if ever, every other person’s well being except their own fantasies up in their heads, their yearning for power over you. That is speaking of all facets, your mental environment, your families home environment, your social environment, the political environment along with the physical environment we live in here on earth. Do they care of any but the last? Not one bit and would rather YOU and your family be gone. It’s down to it, them or us of the normal and caring world.
And for God’s sake and foremost get them out of the governments and these NGOs and ‘charities’. They would not give a single cent to a homeless person on the street… but they will make sure he dies fast and cold and gloat over it between themselves. They are primarily psychopaths without a doubt and group together, look up their traits online if you don’t already know them. You won’t change them.
Get some guts to protect yourselves and families and the good people about you, yes, even physical at a last resort. Don’t let them push anyone into their grave by their snide and covert methods. It is happening right now.
UK energy policy is on the ropes. A knock-out punch could happen any time in the next few years.
http://www.thegwpf.com/britain-on-the-brink-of-man-made-energy-crisis/
Which set of incompetents will be in charge when the whole thing goes under?
Whoever it is probably won’t be in office again for a long time, no matter what excuses they come out with.
Wayne, it is just sad that caring about the environment you live in has been hijacked by a group which even its own founder has now disowned.
Time was ‘environmentalists’ were those trying to get rivers free of pollution, trying to educate livestock farmers in the benefits of non intensive farming, getting sewage treated before being pumped in to rivers or the seas, amongst other useful things.
Everyone now seems to forget the good work that environmentally concerned folks have done because of the activity of a group of people obsessed with their own importance and carbon dioxide. The rest of us seem to have forgotten that to care about your environment is actually common sense and not stupidity.
My father is 94 years old and a 2nd world war veteran. To think he fought so the likes of Camerloon and the Greens could “run” this country beggars belief.
But I tell you this, if he gets cold he will know exactly who to blame- and I still wouldn’t want to mess with him.
I also suspect there are still quite a few like him.
Me_Again, please don’t get me wrong, I too am one of those that has spent an afternoon picking up at a park, painting the meters for free downtown cause it looked trashy and rusty and the city only has to buy some paint. Guess you can call me an environmentalist but just to that degree. Where I live, back in the 60’s, it used to be pretty trashy, people tossing trash out of their car windows, but today everything is now clean (mostly, the rest tiny bit is tolerable) and even the oil and gas around here has completely turned a hundred and eighty degrees, they cleaned up long ago, I haven’t has a problem there for decades now. And I rarely run into anyone that doesn’t really care about our environment but within reason, that is normal folk and that is not who and what I was speaking about above. Those are the ones that demand media and they are really bad news! I’ve met them and spoke with them and they are really sick upstairs, makes me sick downstairs in my gut. Now everyone is seeing what happens when the public lets them grasp some real power over the rest of us.
Wayne, I understand, it’s just that we are all guilty of putting labels on things and sometimes the label is so wrong that you have to drag people back to reality and the way that some people hijack a word.
When they started hijacking the ‘environmentalist’ thing no one really noticed mainly I guess because we were all focussed on what we were already doing. The take over was so insidious that it had happened before anyone realised.
You mentioned PC. Well you hit the nail on the head there. We over here desperately struggle against the idea that a group of vocal activists can decide what is correct and what is not the correct way to think.
Again it’s one of those insidious things. Before you know it, not only is it no longer acceptable to think in a certain way but they want to make it a crime!
Always in history, people have slowly changed the way they think. Activities, sayings, practices have slowly evolved. No longer is it acceptable to knock seven shades of shit out of someone maybe because they are from a different religious group or because they are a different colour or simply disagree with you, no longer is it acceptable to beat your wife and children senseless, however these people are not content to let sense and commonsense prevail they want to force people to think one way.
Then they invite millions of people from different cultures, from different countries and TELL us we have not only to accommodate them, but also that we have to accommodate their cultures and cultural practices. That’s when it really started to go downhill rapidly. So we go back to beating women and treating them as lesser creatures. In order to suppress dissent at this tacit invasion and erosion of our own culture, all discussion about immigration, and about alien cultures was/is suppressed. Anyone who dared say ‘Hey why should we the 97% change our way of doing things to suit the 3%?’ Especially if this change meant winding back the clock 14 centuries and accepting that women are items of property and that you are were no longer allowed to take the piss out of religions -this has been a favourite British pastime for nearly a century, that and laughing at ourselves. But that change wasn’t / isn’t fast enough for these people, not only that but they don’t want you to eventually arrive at your own conclusion, because it may be different to theirs.
Lord Mansfield is attributed as saying ‘that the air of England is too pure for any slave to breathe” thus condemning slavery in this country. Yet today we import a culture which behaves routinely abominably towards women treating them as possessions -and what is that if not slavery- in addition we find slavery flourishing again and not just through the aforementioned religion either. Simple criminal slavery.
So the suppression and subversion go on. The guilt factor plays high with these people, they exhibit mock outrage almost as if trained in special schools to do so, in order to suppress reasonable dissent or questioning.
All about control.
Tally-ho for the nanny state at full gallop.
What ever happened to a government that allowed, no, encouraged self-reliance?
tom0mason, October 22, 2014 at 6:24 am
“Tally-ho for the nanny state at full gallop. What ever happened to a government that allowed, no, encouraged self-reliance?”
Your suffering today is the consequence of a choice that the British people made in 1945 when they elected Clement Atlee over Winston Churchill.