No Wonder We Are Feeling Vexed Lately

A number of items have caught my attention in these last few days. Things which have strengthened my belief that we are expected to line up quietly, while the economic and political elite, spit on us.

Energy giant, NPower are accused of not paying corporation tax for three years running, despite a 9% price rise and a 34% increase in profits.
The other energy firms have been paying out "fat cat" bonuses totalling £5 million.
Meanwhile, more than 24% of the UK population are officially living in energy poverty.
NPower have used the investment in future energy resources, as the reason for ducking the tax bill. It is standard accounting practise apparently.
I might be swayed if they were investing in our future with philanthropic motives, but they're not. They are investing so that the directors can get bigger bonuses and shareholders can get higher dividends.
Who said that firms who invest in future energy infrastructure, should be able to offset their tax liability?
I bet whoever it was is not sitting in a cold, dark room right now.

Chairman of food giant, Nestle, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, calls for water to be privatised and says that the idea of water as a basic human right, is an extreme view.
Nestle is the worlds largest food company and 27th largest company. It employs 270,000 people directly.
As Chairman of this organisation, Brabeck-Letmathe, could be said to be at the very top of the food chain. According to Darwin, this guy should be some kind of superhuman but all I see is a sociopath, someone who cannot empathise with the people in Brazil, who's water supply is destroyed so that Nestle can sell it to rich westerners, or those children who process cocoa, who are forced to work in conditions that Brabeck-lemathe wouldn't allow his dog to endure.

The actions of NPower executives, Nestle fat cats, and the governments that allow them to operate with impunity, have not gone unnoticed.

There is an answer to all this. Simply stop playing the game. The whole merry go round relies on our cooperation.

Carbon Tax Will Double UK Electricity Bills

This article is from the Telegraph today.

There's a nasty shock in store for the British householder when a new 'carbon' tax comes into force

By Christopher Booker

Fast approaching, if largely unnoticed, is yet another massive shock the Government has in store for us with its weirdly distorted energy policy. It is surprising to see what an abnormally high proportion of the electricity needed to keep our lights on has lately been coming from coal-fired power stations. Last Wednesday evening, for instance, this was over 50 per cent, with only 1.3 per cent coming from wind power. Yet by next March, we learn, five of our largest coal-fired plants, capable of supplying a fifth of our average power needs, are to be shut down, much earlier than expected, under an EU anti-pollution directive.

One reason why these plants are being hammered through their remaining quota of hours allowed by the EU is that a new UK tax comes into force next April, which aims to make fossil-fuel power significantly more expensive. In 2010, George Osborne announced his intention to impose, from April 2013, a “carbon floor price” of £16 on every tonne of CO2 emitted by British industry, rising to £30 a tonne by 2020 and £70 a tonne by 2030.

An explicit purpose of this tax is to make the cost of electricity from fossil fuels so uncompetitive compared with “renewables” that it will, in the Treasury’s words, “drive £30‑£40 billion” of investment into “low carbon” sources such as wind and nuclear. On paper, the effect of Osborne’s new tax on our electricity bills looks devastating.

Using the latest figures from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), our power plants burnt 40 million tonnes of coal in 2011, emitting 116 million tonnes of CO2. They also generated 175,000 gigawatt hours from gas, at just over half a tonne of CO2 per gigawatt. At £16 a tonne, this CO2 would cost £3.5 billion – on top of our total current wholesale electricity cost of some £19 billion. Thus the new impost would represent nearly 20 per cent added to our electricity bills next year, and would almost double them by 2030.

Some of this, however, we already pay through the EU’s Emissions Trading System (ETS), which counts towards our £16 floor price. Osborne’s calculation in 2010 was that, initially, we would have to chip in less than an additional £2 per tonne to make up the £16 price. (The ETS price at that time was predicted to continue rising towards £40.) Since then, however, with falling demand due to the EU’s recession, the price of EU carbon permits has fallen dramatically. To reach the initial £16 level, the Treasury says we will now have to pay nearly another £5, making our electricity significantly more expensive. But since it made that guess the EU price has slipped still further, to well under £6 – leaving a gap of £10 a tonne to be made up by Osborne’s tax, rapidly rising every year thereafter.

Read the rest HERE