Yesterday we read how EU and German bureaucrats want to force homeowners make costly home renovations, for the sole sake of saving some energy. This of course would seriously drive up rental rates for tenants, hitting the poor especially hard.
And if it isn’t difficult enough for the poor to pay for their housing, take a look at the cost for mobility. We learn today that this is already unaffordable for many – thanks to the high price of fuel from government policy.
The leftist German daily TAZ reports here on a survey by research institute Forsa published last Thursday. Over 3000 citizens were surveyed and results show that one quarter are reducing their use of public transportation or their automobiles because of costs.
According the TAZ:
24 percent of the 3212 persons surveyed from all German states are refraining from planned or necessary trips with automobile, bus, rail or planes because of cost reasons.”
These 24% of course are those with limited financial and income means. The middle class and rich will worry much less about the costs of travel as they are able to pay the prices. The energy policy is impacting mainly the poor – making their struggle to make ends meet even worse with each passing day.
There is now spiralling energy inflation in Germany. The TAZ adds:
‘Compared to cost of living increases of about 11 percent between 2005 and 2011, the prices for air and rail trave,l as well as fuel prices, have exploded,’ said Allianz-pro-Schiene Director Dirk Flege. Last year a German Railway train ticket cost 22 percent more than it did 6 years ago.
In the same time period, air travel costs rose 34 percent. Fuel prices for cars went up 28%. The reason for the price increases are rising energy costs.”
Already many of the poor are unable to afford electricity and now will neither have anywhere to go nor the means to travel. In response, the government is considering social programs to alleviate their plight. But these programs are ineffective and amount to pick-pocketing 5 euros from one pocket, and putting one euro in the other, and claiming to be good Samaritans for it.
The greens and environmentalists are of course pleased about 24% of the population cutting back, and they view it as progress for the climate. But they are demanding more – 95% if possible (5%, green officials, would be exempt and continue to fly to places like Bali, Cancun, Durban, etc.).
The plague is here. It’s killing the poor and negatively effecting the rest of the populations. It’s called environmentalism. It ends in ‘ism’ like communism, stalinism, nazism, and all the ideologies that, like a plague killed millions…………
One litre of petrol in the UK £1.40 about 1.67 euros
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17490088
“”The way things are going the planned duty rise will see average petrol prices hit the £1.50-a-litre mark – forcing more and more people who need their cars off the road.”
That’s 1.79 euros
Conversion using
http://www.ukforex.co.uk/currency-converter
Black is the new Green. (Note: German politics is, like cheap fantasy literature, color-coded: red stands in for the Social Democrats, yellow for the Free Democrats, black for the Christian Democrats, green for The Cause.) Remember this?
http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_image.cfm?image_id=3435
“At their Magdeburg party convention in March 1998, Alliance 90/The Greens adopted an election platform that included plans to raise gasoline prices to 5 Deutschmarks a liter over a ten-year period (“eco-tax”) and to impose a speed limit of 100 kilometers (62 miles) per hour on the Autobahn. On top of these unpopular plans, Green Party Bundestag representative Hannelore Saibold stated in an interview published on March 22, 1998, that Germans should be content with one vacation flight every five years. As a result, public support for the Greens declined, and the party left itself open to attacks by the CDU/CSU and the FDP in the election campaign.”
I often say that “There’s something in the water!” to explain or give a reason for the stupidity that seems so omnipresent in the old “West”. After all there usually IS a reason for everything in this day and age, right? Now I’m beginning to think there actually may be something in the water. How can Germany, Europe, N.America, et al, be so stupid? How are the Greens doing it? Why is everyone else letting them? This is insane!
There are centuries of German “back to nature” romanticism, permeating all German ideologies with the notable exception of original Marxism.
http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html
Germans also suffer from resource scarcity, as most meaningful resources have been mined and depleted over the last 1,000 years. There was, for instance, already sophisticated mining for Gold and Silver in the Hartz mountains 1,000 years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harz#Middle_Ages
So most Germans are extremely Malthusian without ever having heard of Malthus.
We also usually lose our World Wars the moment we run out of fuel…
Dang it, it’s Harz mountains, not hartz… Hartz was the guy who invented that reform of unemployment money known as Hartz IV…
In Romania, they called it ‘Black February’ as cost went up twenty percent, plus it being the coldest month in a long time. For my wife in a one bedroom flat, the cost was over 220 dollars and her monthly wage is about 500 dollars [with 30 years in the teaching system; a couple years ago, teachers wages were cut 40 percent over the course of a year or so to meet IMF cuts requirements].
People are saying that the government is trying to kill off the old people so they don’t have to pay them pensions.
Sorry, I’ve got no sympathy, for the Germans or the British.
These people have the vote, and they voted for the loony left greenies, like turkeys voting for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Now that they are in the roasting pan they are complaining,
If they don’t know what to with their votes, they need to be stuffed.
Well, actually they DIDN’T vote for the jolly green men, at least most of them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_federal_election,_2009
Party votes % of votes
Christian Democratic Union 13,852,743 32.0
Christian Social Union of Bavaria 3,190,950 7.4
Social Democratic Party 12,077,437 27.9
Free Democratic Party 4,075,115 9.4
The Left 4,790,007 11.1
Alliance ’90/The Greens 3,974,803 9.2
– it’s just that every single party has internalized the New Gospel and is trying to be more Green than the rest. Given that there is also an election threshold of 5% for any party to be elegible for Parliament (so that any vote for a “radical free market party” or something like that is squandered), you have no option to vote an anti-eco party into office. Not yet.
That’s why I said German and British, in the UK the conservatives have pledged to be the ‘Greenest government ever’. So all our major parties are stuffed with puppets that swallowed the New Gospel according to the Saints of the IPCC.
Unless we vote these jokers out we must grin and bear it!
You have to understand that most Green party members are teachers, who are well-payed public servants in Germany. Most party members of the two biggest parties, SPD and CDU, are also public servants (but less teachers among them).
The reason for this is that public servants are free to switch to a full time political mandate and are guaranteed their job back when they come back from a political career, so it’s no risk for them. Also, political participation is encouraged; membership in any democratic party accelerates the career of a public servant.
As the public servants are better paid than most private sector employees, they are the ones who suffer the least from degressive taxation – so they always favor consumption taxes. (‘Degressive’ insofar as when you express a tax as percentage of disposable income)
At least in the past (~1 year ago?) these energy-renovations were meant to be carried by the home owner alone, WITHOUT the ability to increase the rent to cover the cost for renovation.
Is this off-the table? I don’t read about it anymore, but I also do not read otherwise.
One example: Court decision: Energetic renovation justifies rent increase.
http://www.sykosch.de/index.php?id=04000000&newsid=1324
You find many more by googling for
“mieterhöhung energetische sanierung”
Every gasoline car can be converted to LPG.
Costs: 75 euro cents per liter
Cost of a conversion depending on the car and the LPG tank used but quicly recovered when you save full euro per liter.
I drive a gasoline Polo with added LPG tank.
What’s my cost, at the moment about 72 EUR for 600 km for gasoline;
or about 45 EUR when using LPG. LPG has a lower energy content.
So that’s 62.5% of the fuel cost.
Installation of LPG costs 2500 EUR. At 1.70 EUR/l gasoline, you save
0.6375 EUR on the liter of gasoline. So you make a profit after 3921 liter of gasoline equivalent; or in my example, I need about 42 l for 600 km, it takes 56000 km to break even. I have used it in this configuration for 100,000 km so I’m making money.
But sales for LPG cars are down, down, down… most people don’t expect to drive that much.