Sun continues to set on feed-in tariffs as plans for cuts are laid out

17 February 2012

http://www.sustainablegov.co.uk/central-government/energy-and-climate-change/the-sun-continues-to-set-on-feed-in-tariffs-as-future-plans-for-reductions-are-laid-out
Solar feed-in tariffs have been the environmental hot topic these past few months, but on February 9 the final terms were set in stone.


The new system that governs feed-in tariffs was apparently necessary because of the reduction in cost in installation but also due to the surprisingly large amount of people that were getting solar panelling. In reality the Government created an easily utilised system that would give a huge number of people jobs in the middle of a job crisis. So it’s not so surprising that so many people took up the job and quickly made the process more efficient to maximise profit, while also selling it very effectively, if not always honestly.


Ed Davey, the new Energy and Climate Change Secretary, claimed that the reforms were necessary due to “the uncontrolled surge of solar photovoltaic (PV) installations in the latter part of last year, driven by rapidly falling costs, placed a huge strain on the FITs budget”.


It’s been a long painful journey for the mass amounts of PV workers created by the heavily subsidised industry, but finally they have a realistic view of what their future might be.
The immediate changes to take place are:

• Tariff rates of 21p/kWh are to take effect from April 1 2012 for the standard domestic panels (≤4kWh) under 25. All applications for solar panelling after March 3 will be placed into this FIT bracket but will receive the original FIT rate up until April 1.
• Properties that apply for the feed in tariff after the April 1 will also need to meet a D standard on the Energy Performance Certificate ratings. Apparently 50 per cent of people fit into this area more than the original estimation, those below a D grade will have to either raise their status or apply for a lower tariff based on their rating.
• Multi installation rules will also come at the beginning of April. Anyone with more than 25 panels including private citizens and organisations will be given only 80 per cent of whatever the current FIT rate is.

Proposals to make sure that the system is sustainable in the future (consultation2A) primarily due to continually reducing installation costs along with the possibility of increased demand are as follows.

• Tariffs for the ≤4kW panels will lower to a range of around 13.6p to 16.5p per kWh after July 2012, these will then decrees gradually over time based on estimated cost reductions and an annual review.
• Solar PV will receive a 5 per cent reduction in October of 2012 and then a further 10 per cent reduction every 6 months. If the installation ratio goes to 125 per cent of predicted installations they will also activate a contingency mechanism that will bring forward some reductions on tariffs. This could lead to two changes a month to the tariff rate in worst case scenarios.
• If you where to buy you solar panelling on the first of April it would supposedly decrees from 21p to then 12.9 in October and then down to 7.7p by April 2015.

There’s no denying that feed-in tariffs have become considerably less attractive to the consumer. While they were originally a very simple idea, their popularity, combined with both the solar industry and the average citizen recognising a good deal when they see one, has essentially put the fear of God into the Government as they watch their idea drain huge amounts of money with very little political gain.


Ministers seem painfully aware that given the inefficiency of solar panels especially in the English climate, they will have a hard time claiming kudos for the programme despite the cost. This is only made harder by the Government defending the lowering of the tariff by pointing out the ineffectiveness of solar panels, even saying that it was not appropriate for them to spend so much of the energy budget on something that accounts for just 1 per cent of the energy supplied in the UK. How he could have estimated that figure given the amazing take off of solar panels and the continued progress that would have been made is not forthcoming.


It’s clear that the Government have backtracked on this subject, first it’s worth paying out large amounts for solar panelling then when its popular they have to cut the amount returned in half. ‘Rent-a-roof’ operators will lose huge amounts of business after being lured into an industry that was made so attractive they could not resist. Now they have invested in training and the tools required, there is a big chance many will need to sell out or go bankrupt.


How ministers can justify cutting the tariffs in half due to lowering costs of installation which have only gone down by 8 per cent is beyond most mathematicians. However, making a financial mistake that could have seen taxpayers shelling out billions for a scheme they thought would be ignored is not surprising and should probably be accepted as another bout of short-sightedness from the Government.

here's hoping!

;-)

yet: let's not get complacent, there's still a recession, a global one, so I for one _don't_ think this tide has turned

http://www.sustainablegov.co.uk/education/faith-schools-could-be-at-risk-as-secularism-is-back-on-the-agenda

Faith schools could be at risk as secularism is back on the agenda

21 February 2012

It might seem as if religion is losing some of its relevance in modern society, but a wave of recent developments has thrown the spotlight firmly back on faith in the UK.


While on a high-profile visit to the Vatican, Baroness Warsi of the Conservative Party spoke of the “threat from a rising tide of militant secularisation” reminiscent of “totalitarian regimes” sweeping across the country. Her words might appear strange out of context, but after recent events it was little surprise to see politicians from both sides weighing in with their take on secularisation – a debate that many may have assumed had already been won.

The words emanating from the Papal residence followed an extraordinary development in the small Devon town of Bideford, which made headlines after a battle between councillors spilled into the courts. Former councillor Clive Bone, a staunch atheist, enlisted the help of the National Secular Society in order to prohibit the practice of saying prayers before council meetings, and in doing so opened the floodgates for religion to take centre stage in national discourse.

The judgment, which is set to be appealed by the council, was made as the debate surrounding the place of religion in the public sphere boiled over, with many taking the opportunity to scrutinise society for the last vestiges of faith.

Significant progress means the UK can now rightly call itself a modern secular democracy, but the jagged separation of Church and State has not removed every remnant of faith from public life. Heated debate often takes two opposing sides, one of which sees the persistence of religion in public life – and particularly the status afforded to Christianity – as increasingly anachronistic, whilst the other seeks to protect deep-seated traditions that are part of our shared history and culture.
Meanwhile, faith groups and politicians managed to join forces in the midst of the fracas in a bid to protect Religious Education in schools and promote its value to young people. While likely to remain a compulsory subject for the foreseeable future, MPs took up the cause after RE was slated to be overlooked as the new English Baccalaureate is drawn up.

Interested parties may soon find their attention turned from the classroom to the wider education system. Faith schools, which make up a significant proportion of primary and secondary education facilities in the UK, are one of the most obvious traces of a past in which religion informed many aspects of daily life, and are seen by critics as an outdated anomaly in today’s world.

Often boasting outstanding records and reputations, they can make an attractive proposition for any parent unwilling or unable to afford the fees that private schools demand, often leading to charges of oversubscription and parents willing to falsify a conviction in order to acquire a place for their offspring.

It is their segregated nature, however, that draws many detractors, with taxpayers left with no choice but to foot the bill for schools at which their children may be denied entry on the grounds of faith. Discriminating on the grounds of religion may seem a particularly antiquated notion in a modern secular society, especially as there is often little to distinguish the curriculum at a faith school with any other, but such schools have been part and parcel of the education system for a long time, and are now deeply entrenched in society.

We are perhaps reaching a tipping point at which secularisation campaigners will focus intently on the last remaining faith-based practices. Faith schools, despite their highly regarded work to instil knowledge and morals, could soon find themselves next in line for persecution.

This may focus on NZ, but applies, one way or another, to the globe...

"It's a bit like paying all the bills with a credit card and pretending all is well with the home budget. Healthy rivers, lakes and soils are our natural capital. But we are running them down in a mad rush, ignoring the fact that we have long since exceeded the limits.

Our ecological capital credit card is maxed out and it's long past time for action."

http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/comment/6306177/Face-the-facts-we-aren-t-so-green

Face the facts - we aren't so green

The enthusiastic response of Kiwis and many Government agencies to the Rena shipwreck disaster was heartening.

A foreign-owned vessel messing up our environment and wildlife provoked a deep sense of injustice and motivated many to get involved in the clean-up.

But sadly, this remarkable response really just serves to highlight our denial of the real environmental disaster that we are increasingly desperately avoiding.

If only New Zealand's real "worst ever" environmental disaster was so well publicised, officially acknowledged and stimulated such urgent action. And if only our real disaster was so easily fixed and even better that everyone could be involved its remediation.

Unfortunately, unlike the Rena disaster, the true environmental and biodiversity catastrophe is so pervasive it cannot be cleaned up by teams of volunteers; rather its cure will involve a total rethink of what we accept as being "good for the economy".

At present, any economic gain is considered a great thing, regardless of the losses inflicted on the environment or society; neither of which are counted or even mentioned. To have a future, we must grow up as a nation and begin to take into account the losses inflicted on our natural capital.

Most Kiwis perceive our country as clean and green, and this perception is shared by the rest of the world, although doubts are creeping in.

Clean and green is what defines us; it is fundamental to differentiating New Zealand from geographically closer competitors in world markets.

So, the perception and the reality of environmental health and sustainability are essential to a secure economic future and we trash it at our peril.

Unfortunately, a "hands-off" approach by successive governments in the past few decades means we have slipped a long way towards the bottom of the heap.

This news will come as a bombshell to most Kiwis; but a recent peer-reviewed international study using seven well-accepted measures of environmental performance revealed that per capita we are 18th worst of 189 countries in the world. The frightening reality is that we only rank one notch higher than China, at 17th worst per capita.

Not surprisingly, for overall impact China placed much lower given its population, they ranked third worst behind Brazil and the United States. When it comes to this overall impact New Zealand ranked 47th worst in the world.

We smugly scorn other countries for trading in endangered species. Whether it's rhino and elephant tusks in Africa or the condemnation of Japanese whaling, we vehemently condemn this destruction of indigenous biodiversity.

In a delightful irony here in 100 per cent-pure-New Zealand we harvest, export and sell locally at least five endangered freshwater fish species.

Four of the five species in your whitebait fritter are listed as endangered, but you can buy them at any supermarket. Our amazing, endemic longfin eel is commercially harvested and exported but is one of our threatened species.

Sadly our Fisheries Ministry is "managing" them to extinction by allowing them to be harvested under the much-lauded "quota management system" that even it admits is failing longfin eels.

This freshwater fish calamity is but one example of scores of examples revealing how we got be so low on world environmental rankings so quickly. The recent unprecedented and totally unregulated boom in dairy farming has had enormous impacts on our rivers and lakes and their biodiversity.

The extreme number of cows we now have per hectare, made possible by imported fertilisers and palm kernel, is now more than twice the carrying capacity of our land and rivers.

Just one clue of how far we have gone is the fact that two thirds of our 50 freshwater fish species are listed as threatened. The impacts to our waterways their decline portends are only just beginning to be seen.

A recent Environment Court decision confirmed a limit of one cow for every 2ha to protect Lake Taupo – this is about a third of the stocking rate for the rest of the country.

Now it's official – we have the world's highest proportion of threatened species, and 161 countries are cleaner and greener than us. This environmental devastation driving us down to the bottom of world rankings is the result of a failure of successive governments to measure or even realise the true economic value of a healthy environment.

It's a bit like paying all the bills with a credit card and pretending all is well with the home budget. Healthy rivers, lakes and soils are our natural capital. But we are running them down in a mad rush, ignoring the fact that we have long since exceeded the limits.

Our ecological capital credit card is maxed out and it's long past time for action. However, the bizarre response from Government is to take money from conservation and continually weaken the Resource Management Act, driving us even further down.

Many New Zealanders are now painfully aware of the true implications of the weakening of regulation. Owners of leaky homes, residents of liquefaction zones or those hit by landslides are the latest victims of our supposed leaders putting short-term economic gains before sustainability.

These urban examples are well-known and publicised but the same lack of regulation has led to environmental degradation in the rest of the country. The losses are less well-known but are proof of the lobbying power of industry, the profit takers who are long gone when disaster strikes.

Mike Joy is a senior lecturer in ecology and environmental science at Massey University.

Faking It: How the Media Manipulates the World into War

http://www.corbettreport.com/faking-it-how-the-media-manipulates-the-world-into-war/

Faking It: How the Media Manipulates the World into War

Posted by Corbett

Podcast: http://youtu.be/ofrf2ZEEQtE

by James Corbett
grtv.ca
2 January, 2012

As the drums of war begin to beat once again in Iran, Syria, the South China Sea, and other potential hotspots and flashpoints around the globe, concerned citizens are asking how a world so sick of bloodshed and a population so tired of conflict could be led to this spot once again.

To understand this seeming paradox, we must first understand the centuries-long history of how media has been used to whip the nation into wartime frenzy, dehumanize the supposed enemies, and even to manipulate the public into believing in causes for war that, decades later, were admitted to be completely fictitious.

The term “yellow journalism” was coined to describe the type of sensationalistic, scandal-driven, and often erroneous style of reporting popularized by newspapers like William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. In one of the most egregious examples of this phenomenon, Hearst’s papers widely trumpeted the sinking of the Maine as the work of the Spanish. Whipped into an anti-Spanish frenzy by a daily torrent of stories depicting Spanish forces’ alleged torture and rape of Cubans, and pushed over the edge by the Maine incident, the public welcomed the beginning of the US-Spanish war. Although it is now widely believed that the explosion on the Maine was due to a fire in one of its coal bunkers, the initial lurid reports of Spanish involvement stuck and the nation was led into war.

In many ways, the phrase infamously attributed to Hearst in reply to his illustrator “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” apocryphal as the story may be, nevertheless perfectly encodes the method by which the public would be led to war time and again through the decades.

The US was drawn into World War I by the sinking of the Lusitania, a British ocean liner carrying American passengers that was torpedoed by German U-boats off the coast of Ireland, killing over 1,000 of its passengers. What the public was not informed about at the time, of course, was that just one week before the incident, then-First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill had written to the President of the Board of Trade that it was “most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hopes especially of embroiling the United States with Germany.” Nor did reports of the attack announce that the ship was carrying rifle ammunition and other military supplies. Instead, reports once again emphasized that the attack was an out-of-the-blue strike by a maniacal enemy, and the public was led into the war.

The US involvement in World War II was likewise the result of deliberate disinformation. Although the Honolulu Advertiser had even predicted the attack on Pearl Harbor days in advance, the Japanese Naval codes had already been deciphered by that time, and that even Henry Stimson, the US Secretary of War, had noted in his diary the week before that he had discussed in a meeting with Roosevelt “how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves,” the public were still led to believe that the Pearl Harbor attack had been completely unforeseen. Just last month, a newly-declassified memo emerged showing that FDR had been warned of an impending Japanese attack on Hawaii just three days before the events at Pearl Harbor, yet the history books still portray Pearl Harbor as an example of a surprise attack.

In August 1964, the public was told that the North Vietnamese had attacked a US Destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin on two separate occasions. The attacks were portrayed as a clear example of “communist aggression” and a resolution was soon passed in Congress authorizing President Johnson to begin deploying US forces in Vietnam. In 2005, an internal NSA study was released concluding that the second attack in fact never took place. In effect, 60000 American servicemen and as many as three million Vietnamese, let alone as many as 500,000 Cambodians and Laotians, lost their lives because of an incident that did not occur anywhere but in the imagination of the Johnson administration and the pages of the American media.

In 1991, the world was introduced to the emotional story of Nayirah, a Kuwaiti girl who testified about the atrocities committed by Iraqi forces in Kuwait.

What the world was never told was that the incident had in fact been the work of a public relations firm, Hill and Knowltown, and the girl had actually been the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador. Once again, the public was whipped into a frenzy of hatred for the Hussein regime, not for the documented atrocities that it had actually committed on segments of its own population with weapons supplied to them by the United States itself, but on the basis of an imaginary story told to the public via their televisions, orchestrated by a pr firm.

In the lead-up to the war on Iraq, the American media infamously took the lead in framing the debate about the Iraqi government’s weapons of mass destruction NOT as a question of whether or not they even existed, but as a question of where they had been hidden and what should be done to disarm them. The New York Times led the way with Judith Miller‘s now infamous reporting on the Iraqi WMD story, now known to have been based on false information from untrustworthy sources, but the rest of the media fell into line with the NBC Nightly News asking “what precise threat Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction pose to America”, and Time debating whether Hussein was “making a good-faith effort to disarm Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.” Reports about chemical weapons stashes were reported on before they were confirmed, although headlines boldly asserted their existence as indisputable fact. We now know that in fact the stockpiles did not exist, and the administration premeditatedly lied the country into yet another war, but the most intense opposition the Bush administration ever received over this documented war crime was some polite correction on the Sunday political talk show circuit.

Remarkably, the public at large has seemingly learned nothing from all of these documented historical manipulations. If anything, the media has become even bolder in its attempts to manipulate the public’s perceptions, perhaps emboldened by the fact that so few in the audience seem willing to question the picture that is being painted for them on the evening news.

Later that year, CNN aired footage of a bombed out Tskhinvali in South Ossetia, falsely labeling it as footage of Gori, which they said had been attacked by the Russians.

In 2009, the BBC showed a cropped image of a rally in Iran which they claimed was a crowd of protesters who assembled to show their opposition to the Iranian government. An uncropped version of the same photograph displayed on the LA Times’ website, however, revealed that the photo in fact came from a rally in support of Ahmedinejad.

In August of 2011, the BBC ran footage of what they claimed was a celebration in Tripoli’s Green Square. When sharp-eyed viewers noticed that the flags in the footage were in fact Indian flags, the BBC was forced to admit that they had “accidentally” broadcast footage from India instead of Tripoli.

Also that month, CNN reported on a story from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claiming that eight infants in incubators had died in a hospital in Hama when Syrian authorities cut off power in the area. Some news sites even carried pictures of the infants. The images were later admitted to have been taken in Egypt and no evidence has ever emerged to back up the accusations.

As breathtaking as all of these lies, manipulations and so-called “mistakes” are, they in and of themselves don’t represent the only functions of the media for the war machine. Now, the US government is taking the lead in becoming more and more directly involved with the shaping of the media message on war propaganda, and the general public is becoming even more ensnared in a false picture of the world through the Pentagon’s own lens.

In 2005, the Bush White House admitted to producing videos that were designed to look like news reports from legitimate independent journalists, and then feeding those reports to media outlets as prepackaged material ready to air on the evening news. When the Government Accountability Office ruled that these fake news reports in fact constituted illegal covert propaganda, the White House simply issued a memo declaring the practice to be legal.

In April 2008, the New York Times revealed a secret US Department of Defense program that was launched in 2002 and involved using retired military officers to implant Pentagon talking points in the media. The officers were presented as “independent analysts” on talk shows and news programs, although they had been specially briefed beforehand by the Pentagon. In December of 2011, the DoD’s own Inspector General released a report concluding that the program was in perfect compliance with government policies and regulations.

Earlier this year, it was revealed the the US government had contracted with HBGary Federal to develop software that create fake social media accounts in order to steer public opinion and promote propaganda on popular websites. The federal contract for the software sourced back to the MacDill Air Force Base in Florida.

As the vehicle through which information from the outside world is captured, sorted, edited and transmitted into our homes, the mass media has the huge responsibility of shaping and informing our understanding of events to which we don’t have first-hand access. This is an awesome responsibility in even the most ideal conditions, with diligent reporters guided by trustworthy editors doing their level best to report the most important news in the most straightforward way.

But in a media landscape where a handful of companies own virtually all of the print, radio and television media in each nation, the only recourse the public has is to turn away from the mainstream media altogether. And that is precisely what is happening.

As study after study and report after report has shown, the death of the old media has accelerated in recent years, with more and more people abandoning newspapers and now even television as their main source of news. Instead, the public is increasingly turning toward online sources for their news and information, something that is necessarily worrying for the war machine itself, a system that can only truly flourish when the propaganda arm is held under monopolistic control.

But as citizens turn away from the New York Times and toward independent websites, many run and maintained by citizen journalists and amateur editors, the system that has consolidated its control over the minds of the public for generations seems to finally be showing signs that it may not be invincible.

Surely this is not to say that online media is impervious to the defects that have made the traditional media so unreliable. Quite the contrary. But the difference is that online, there is still for the time being relative freedom of choice at the individual level. While internet freedom exists, individual readers and viewers don’t have to take the word of any website or pundit or commentator on any issue. They can check the source documentation themselves, except, perhaps not coincidentally, on the websites of the traditional media bastions, which tend not to link source material and documentation in their articles.

Hence the SOPA Act, Protect IP, the US government’s attempts to seize websites at the domain name level, and all of the other concerted attacks we have seen on internet freedoms in recent years.

Because ultimately, an informed and engaged public is far less likely to go along with wars waged for power and profit. And as the public becomes better informed about the very issues that the media has tried to lie to them about for so long, they realize that the answer to all of the mainstream media’s war cheerleading and blatant manipulation is perhaps simpler than we ever suspected: All we have to do is turn them off.