There’s a possible solution here:
Let us be frank. If thousands of people were dying needlessly each year in affluent neighbourhoods and suburbs, wouldn’t this be treated as a national emergency, and wouldn’t action have been taken sooner?
Poverty kills: this isn’t hyperbole, but fact. Some 10% of the total deaths, significantly more than 3,000, are directly linked to fuel poverty itself. These are older people – perhaps those who survived war, and who helped build the country – dying of cold because they don’t have the money to pay their energy bills.
One solution would be to stop making energy more expensive by ever greater Green lunacies.
Another would be to deal with climate change in the efficient manner – a carbon tax rather than allowing the idiots to try and plan stuff – as the Stern Review itself advised.
Possibly we might take the regulatory brakes off economic growth so that no one is so poor as to be unable to afford even that more expensive energy.
The small point I want to make here being that it ain’t true that the answer to everything is more tax and redistribution. Sometimes it’s just better government, even less of it. Hard as it may be for Owen Jones to grasp that concept.
He’s also banging on about Insulate All Homes!!!!
To a good approximation, “all homes” are already insulated.
Shurely global warming is going to end winter fuel poverty soon?
Jones advocates mega-government to combat “fuel poverty.” Worstall replies with mega-government to combat “climate change” (though leaving it to the individual to reorder his priorities to reflect my values). We have a state politician whose counter to the mandate that all insurance policies cover abortions for the promiscuous, was a mandate that all insurance policies cover stomach-stapling for his fellow gluttons. The party of “Bariatric Bob” is decimated.
Frack for gas and use coal. Cheap and reliable and no longer necessarily dirty in the case of coal. Cheap and reliable energy is the starting point for eliminating poverty and providing public services. CO2 is plant food and we have precious little at the moment. The world needs more. If you believe a trace gas controls the climate there is, I am afraid, little I can do for you. I hope it will keep you warm in the coming solar minimum. Long-term, if there are no major technological advances in fusion? Factory-produced mini-nuclear units buried underground. Safe, powerful and… Read more »
In short, industry eliminates poverty. (By the way, the welfare state perpetuates poverty.)
I have a machine in my kitchen that produces lethal microwave radiation! Mini nuclear reactors would not have to be buried underground to be safe, though you could hurt yourself or others if you took one apart.
“Poverty kills: this isn’t hyperbole, but fact.” No, that’s a lie. People in poverty don’t die. All those in poverty today will be alive tomorrow (give or take). Anybody in poverty today and under thirty will be alive in forty years time (give or take). As for fuel poverty, lets not forget the 8% that the EU insists we put on fuel costs. There is at least an evens chance that the causation in the correlation between ill-health and poverty is the opposite to the way Jones believes. There is evidence that the choices that lead to ill-health and the… Read more »
The possibility I like is that poor personal choices cause both poverty and poor health, and that is why the latter two correlate.
Looking at the actual data… boring I know. The global warming is evident in night time minimums, they are a tad less minimum and particularly in Winter. Daytime maximums show no increase. This is explained by increased heat energy absorbed during daytime, taking longer to dissipate during night time. Daytime is always being topped up by the Sun no matter how fast it dissipates, so global warming has no effect. Therefore. The ‘disastrous’ Global warming will be during the night, reducing amount of energy required to keep Humans warm (=fewer deaths from hypothermia) also reduce frost damage to crops, other… Read more »
Uhhh… the difference between a carbon tax and a green levy being?