British Solar Industry Faces Devastating 800% Tax Increase

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)http://www.thegwpf.com

Some businesses and schools that generate electricity from rooftop solar panels will have to pay rates for the first time, while others will face a massive tax rise.

Britain’s solar industry is facing devastation and consumers could see energy bills rise after the Chancellor Philip Hammond refused to listen to pleas to cancel a planned tax hike of up to 800 per cent on rooftop solar schemes.

The Solar Trade Association described the Government’s refusal to bend over the increase – due to come into force in April – as “nonsensical” and “absurd”.Bizarrely, state schools with solar panels will be forced to pay, while private schools will remain exempt.

Mr Hammond barely mentioned the energy sector in his speech – apart from a promise to help the oil and gas industry “maximise exploitation” of the remaining reserves in the North Sea.

According to the Government’s own figures, solar power is expected to become the cheapest form of electricity generation sometime in the 2020s.

But the UK solar industry lost 12,000 jobs last year and there has been an 85 per cent reduction in the deployment of rooftop solar schemes.

Full story

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

March 8, 2017 at 04:09AM

Climate not a priority for public

via Climate Scepticismhttps://cliscep.com

A new survey is out today, European Perceptions of Climate Change (EPCC), on public opinion in the UK, France, Germany and Norway. It’s being talked about at an echo chamber conference, see the twitter tag #EPCC17.  It’s also discussed in the Guardian. The authors include some of the ‘usual suspects’, Nick Pidgeon and Adam Corner. The […]

via Climate Scepticism https://cliscep.com

March 8, 2017 at 04:01AM

Understanding the Global Temperature III

via Scottish Sceptichttp://scottishsceptic.co.uk

In the last article I concluded that a reasonable proxy for global temperature could be produced using CET, then sea temperatures (HADSST3) then UAH6. However, that left me wondering why land based temperatures were so appalling. So, I decided to … Continue reading →

via Scottish Sceptic http://ift.tt/1wv5Sjx

March 8, 2017 at 02:59AM

Peter Thiel Sees More ‘Economic Progress’ From Fracking Than Silicon Valley

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)http://www.thegwpf.com

Peter Thiel, a tech billionaire and confidante to President Donald Trump, said something you don’t often hear from Silicon Valley moguls: hydraulic fracturing did more for progress than the tech boom.

“What’s very striking is that on some level I think fracking represents a bigger economic form of progress for our society as a whole than the innovation in Silicon Valley,” Thiel told author and energy expert Daniel Yergin during a 45-minute interview at the CERAWeek conference in Houston.

The U.S. fracking boom added 233,000 jobs to the oil and gas sector from 2009 to 2014 when abundant North American crude and OPEC’s refusal to cut production sent prices plunging. The oil and gas industry shed about 100,000 jobs during the downturn.

Oil and gas production, on the other hand, remained relatively high through 2015, hitting a record 9.7 million barrels per day in April of that year. Production has come down somewhat since, but is expected to increase as crude prices climb. […]

Thiel also took on the global warming establishment, according to Axios. Thiel is often painted as a skeptic of catastrophic man-made global warming, but he’s also funded green energy projects.

“I don’t know whether I am an extreme skeptic on climate change, but I have my doubts about the extreme way that people try to push it through,” Thiel said Wednesday night, “and I would say that I would be much more convinced of climate change, of the need to do something, if I thought there was a more open debate in which both sides were given a full hearing.”

Read more: http://ift.tt/2lYLfwy

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

March 8, 2017 at 02:38AM