25 signatures reached
To: George Osborne
Stop giving funds for renewable clean energy to polluting high energy use companies
Please support continued short-term funding (about to be withdrawn !) for renewable energy technologies (Solar panels, etc) by reversing George Osborne’s autumn statement pledge to protect energy intensive industries (EIIs) to make EIIs exempt from paying levies on energy bills associated with renewable energy generation.
Why is this important?
In making these industries exempt, the funding has to come from elsewhere.
The Conservative government has made it clear that it will not finance renewable energy off its own back, so funding will instead be passed on to regular households.
The Government proposes to withdraw support for short-term funding (the next 4-5 years) of renewable technologies like solar panels and wind turbines as they are concerned it will add £ 7 p.a. to consumers energy bills which is unacceptable.
Households will see their bills increase by £5 a year for the next four years to fund this exemption, at a total cost of £20 added to household bills.
What has also been revealed is that projected savings from “reforming” (closing) the renewable obligation and feed-in tariff (renewable energy support schemes) will save households a total of £17 over the same period.
Clearly, this action does not fit with the Governments intention to save consumers money on their energy bills as this action actually increases consumer energy bills.
Renewable energy industries benefit communities, reduce wholesale future electrical energy costs and reduce pollution, making the environment a better place for current and future generations.
Money used to support these schemes will now be passed as "Levy Control Framework Exemptions" (tax breaks) to high energy busines users - who pollute the planet and cause pollution related illnesses.
The European Commission has aggregated a list of industries it considers intensive users of energy. That list, includes but is not limited to industries such as the mining of hard coal and the manufacture of refined petroleum products.
On the face of it, it looks as if savings made from the feed-in tariff are being handed straight to large energy users to make sure they can survive the kind of difficult business environment the government is creating for domestic solar.
It’s a galling prospect, and one that flies completely against any ‘the polluter pays’ principle put across in environmental law.
“Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children”
Please sign this petition to let George Osborne know we want a clean environment for our children and not to give money used to support clean energy industries away to support polluting fossil fuel companies.
More details on the link below, but please read the quote below the link from Carl Sagan - a famous astronomer who was moved to write about the last image of our planet, taken as a Voyager satelite left our galaxy :
“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot:
