By Paul Homewood

This really is a grossly dishonest, scurrillous and factually inaccurate piece:

 

 

Households across Britain are being punished with a ‘stealth tax’ on their energy bills amounting to billions of pounds to pay for the bailout of dozens of electricity and gas supply companies.

Campaigners have condemned the increases to the levy, which has soared over the past 12 months – and now costs bill-payers around £273 each.

The inflation-busting figure does not include the £6.5 billion cost to the taxpayer of bailing out controversial start-up company Bulb, which had 1.7 million customers when it suddenly collapsed.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11588825/The-rapidly-rising-stealth-tax-fuel-bills-used-bailout-failed-electricity-gas-firms.html

The money is not being spent “to bail out energy firms”; this would mean that the money has gone to those failed companies in order to keep them going.

The system of Supplier of Last Resort has been operating since 2008. It was set up to protect energy customers in the event of their supplier going bust, where there would have been a danger of being left without electricity and gas, losing credit balances on their accounts etc. Under the mechanism, OFGEM appoint a new supplier to take over.

The new supplier is quite rightly allowed to claim back any additional costs from a fund  paid for by an industry levy on Distribution Use of System Charges. All energy suppliers pay this levy, and currently the charge is built into the Energy Price Cap.

Originally the claims on the levy were tiny, but in the last year or two have rocketed. Energy suppliers have often lost money recently as energy market prices have outstripped the Energy Price Cap. Furthermore, whereas suppliers may have fixed the prices they pay in advance for their existing customer base, they would need to pay current prices for any new dollop of customers handed over by OFGEM.

In short, the money, even the Bulb “bailout” has gone to protect customers of these failed companies.

The Mail ignores the two underlying policy errors made, which have largely contributed to this crisis:

1) The Energy Price Cap –  many smaller companies have gone under in the last two years because the Cap was set far too low. Or, more to the point, the Cap was fixed for six month periods during which market prices rose rapidly.

It has been the media above all who pushed for the Cap in the first place.

2) Smaller energy companies were not only allowed to proliferate without any real checks on their financial stability, they were actually encouraged to. Politicians and media have regularly attacked the big energy companies for ripping customers off (partly to divert attention away from the green subsidies which have forced up electricity prices). They have encouraged customers instead to move to smaller companies, more often than not boasting fake green credentials.

There is an issue of how these costs are passed on to customers. Currently it is done through Standing Charges, so each customer pays the same; this obviously can be regressive. However, OFGEM took a hard look at this a few months ago. They argued that to add the cost on to the price of energy would penalise those vulnerable people who use more energy:

“Following a review of one part of electricity standing charges covering the cost of supplier failures, we looked long and hard at whether moving the costs from standing charges to usage was the right thing to do, but the numbers just didn’t stack up.

“Our analysis shows it would disproportionately negatively affect some of the most vulnerable consumers who use high amounts of energy and are least able to reduce their use, such as those with disabilities and the elderly, while resulting in minimal savings for those it would benefit – around just £1 a month.”

https://www.energylivenews.com/2022/08/19/ofgem-for-supplier-failure-costs-the-numbers-didnt-stack-up/

 

Whichever way is chosen, customers still end up paying. But for the Mail to claim that “pensioners pay the most” is an outright lie.

Meanwhile, if they want to report on real bailouts, maybe the Mail should mention the German government, which has already injected billions into Uniper, to stop them going broke. And many more bailouts will follow.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/germany-to-bail-out-energy-suppliers-ahead-of-winter-without-russian-gas-11657032009

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

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January 1, 2023 at 10:28AM

Brian Giesbrecht writes at Epoch Times Canada’s National Hysteria in the 21st Century.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Mass hysteria is the spontaneous manifestation of a particular behaviour by many people. There are numerous historical examples: Middle Age nuns at a convent in France spontaneously began to meow like cats; at another convent, nuns began biting one another. In 13th-century Germany, spontaneous dancing broke out and entire city populations danced until exhausted. But perhaps the best-known mass hysteria was the Salem Witch Trials, where people, seized by visions, accused others of bewitching them. Many were executed.

But hysteria episodes are not only historical. They have occurred in modern times as well. Remember the daycare panic of the 1980s, when daycare workers were accused of horrible crimes against children, including satanic abuse. Many falsely accused spent years in jail. Lives were ruined. The strangest thing about that mass hysteria is that it spanned continents. It started in California, but then moved through Canada, Europe, and even New Zealand, before it burned itself out.

Obviously, those caught up in mass hysteria do not realize at the time that they are not seeing things clearly.

Could it be that some of us are even now victims of self-induced mass hysterias?

For example, what are we to make of the insistence that a man who chooses to live as a woman actually becomes a woman? To most of the world this claim is nonsensical. It is neither scientific nor factual. A woman has XX chromosomes, while a man has XY. Case closed. But to others, a man actually becomes a woman simply by stating that s/he is one. In the future, will this strange thinking be considered a mass hysteria?

Or what about the odd response that most Western nations took to the COVID-19 pandemic?

For reasons that remain unclear, most Western countries decided to copy communist China’s lockdown strategy, which was a radical approach that had hitherto been rejected by all Western scientists and emergency planners. The misery we see playing out in China, as they finally abandon it, is absolute proof of its absurdity. Yet even today, many still insist that we were right to lock down. And some say that we should do it again! Is this an example of a mass hysteria?

And are the most extreme of today’s anti-fossil fuel exponents caught up in some version of a mass hysteria? I’m not referring to people with legitimate concerns about global warming and the need to find cost-effective, non-polluting energy. I mean those who insist that everyone must give up all fossil fuels by a date they invent. Will history judge this to be a hysteria?

But perhaps the strangest ongoing episode of mass hysteria might be playing out in Canada. That is the claim that 215 indigenous children were secretly killed at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School and then covertly buried at night, with the forced help of children “as young as six.”

If true, this would easily be the biggest crime in Canadian history. The very idea that the nuns and priests running the school would be responsible for the deaths of 215 children, and then force other children to bury their comrades, never made sense. For one thing, there was not one single historical record of any indigenous parent in Kamloops—or anywhere else—reporting that their child had disappeared after attending Kamloops IRS. But more to the point, there was never any factual reason to believe that the nuns and priests who operated the school were the ghouls that the accusation demanded.

But then the strange accusations multiplied. Other indigenous leaders chimed in, with claims that there were “thousands, tens of thousands” of such intentionally killed and secretly buried residential school students all over the country. The prime minister ordered flags to be flown at half mast for months, hundreds of millions of dollars were committed to search for these phantom children, and a cabinet minister, Marc Miller, called anyone who even dared to question these bizarre claims a “ghoul.”

The country went into a panic. A new national holiday honouring these “missing children”
(who were never missing) was declared.

But there was never any credible evidence to support any of these claims. The only information that could even be loosely termed “scientific” was an embargoed report by a junior archaeologist that she had detected 215 “soil disturbances” that might be graves. It now appears that it is much more likely that those soil disturbances are clay pipes from a 1924 septic field.

We do know that the bizarre stories of priests killing and secretly burying indigenous children have gained more prominence since the 1990s, when a defrocked minister began spreading conspiracy theories. But how is it that ordinary, sensible Canadians seemed willing to accept these same preposterous, and deeply anti-Catholic, stories?

Will future historians see this strange episode as some kind of mass hysteria?

via Science Matters

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January 1, 2023 at 09:16AM

There is more Arctic sea ice now than there was fifteen years ago when Al Gore won the Nobel Prize and predicted all the ice would be gone in seven years. So climate alarmists have turned their attention south to … Continue reading →

via Real Climate Science

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January 1, 2023 at 08:54AM

via Watts Up With That?

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January 1, 2023 at 08:31AM