Huhne says climate change talks are at their "Munich moment" as £15m renewable heat scheme launched

DECC minister Chris Huhne has compared world leaders who obstruct a global deal to tackle climate change to politicians who tried to appease Adolf Hitler before World War Two, as his department launches a £15 million scheme for domestic renewable heat.

The energy and climate change minister was at Chatham House, endeavouring to inject new urgency into climate change negotiations.

He said that it was vital that governments redouble their efforts to find a successor to the United Nations Kyoto Protocol, which controls greenhouse gas emissions only in developed countries and expires at the end of 2012.

However, he feels that it is now unlikely that a breakthrough will be made at the main annual conference beginning late November in Durban, South Africa, because of “a damaging rhythm" into which "the annual cycle of UNFCCC meetings is in danger of slipping".

"Although the scientific evidence continues to grow, climate change is getting less political attention now than it did two years ago. There is a vacuum, and the forces of low ambition are looking to fill it," he said. "Giving in to the forces of low ambition would be an act of climate appeasement.

Huhne evoked the memory of Winston Churchill and the fight against Nazi Germany. "This is our Munich moment," he said, in a reference to the 1938 Munich Agreement that gave Hitler part of the former Czechoslovakia in a doomed attempt to persuade him to abandon further territorial ambitions. He quoted Churchill - who was both a Liberal and Conservative - who "once said that 'an appeaser is someone that feeds a crocodile, hoping that it will eat him last'."

But climate change affects everyone, and the poor suffer the most. Many developing nations seek to extend the Kyoto principles, but richer countries - Japan, Russia and Canada - want a different sort of agreement.

Poor countries say rich nations have emitted most of the greenhouse gases since the Industrial Revolution and so must give them more help before they can be expected to sign up to making cuts themselves. But Huhne said "We cannot wait for every country to become equal, because that would mean waiting for an eternity. At some point, we must draw a line and say: this starts now. This starts here."

In an attempt to persuade his audience he quoted the Association of British Insurers who said, in 2009, "our assessment of climate change convinces us that the threat is real and is with us now" and he referenced the letter written to the European Union by more than 70 European companies, including Ikea and Coca Cola, asking them to aim for more ambitious carbon cuts.

"This is the last Parliament with a chance to avoid catastrophic climate change," he said. “It will end in 2015. If we have not achieved a global deal by then, we will struggle to peak emissions by 2020. It will be more expensive, more divisive, and more difficult."

He said that the political tactics must include “using soft diplomacy to shift the politics and build coalitions" and "explaining the case for action...on economic and security grounds", and using “targeted financial and practical support to help developing countries build cleaner, more climate resilient economies."

He said temperatures must be kept within 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) of pre-industrial levels to avoid the worst effects of climate change. They have already risen by 0.8 degrees Celsius and even if all emissions were stopped today, they would rise by a further 0.5 of a degree, he said. "Sticking to our 2 degree limit means global emissions must peak by 2020 at the latest," Huhne said. "From 2013, there will be new political leadership in the world's major economies. We hope to have put the global recession behind us. The stars may be more closely aligned in favour of a binding legal deal," he said.

The ‘Renewable Heat Premium Payment’ scheme

The RHPP scheme announced yesterday by DECC makes available £15 million of support for up to 25,000 renewable heat installations in homes, with a review to take place as the £10 million limit is approached.

It will target the four million or so households in Great Britain not heated by mains gas, who have to rely on heating such as oil and electric fires, which tend to be more expensive and emit more carbon emissions.

It is open to householders in England, Scotland and Wales, who will be able to apply for grants of up to £1,250 to install systems such as biomass boilers, air and ground source heat pumps and solar thermal panels from 1 August 2011. It will operate on a first-come-first-served basis, and will close on 31 March 2012.

Part of the purpose of the scheme is to obtain further information on the behaviour of technologies prior to the full commencement of the Renewable Heat Initiative (RHI). Therefore installations will be monitored and any metering equipment will be provided free of charge.

Participants will be required to complete surveys and provide feedback on their experiences.

“Today starts a new era in home heating," announced climate change minister Greg Barker, “because we’re making it more economical for people to go green by providing discounts off the cost of eco heaters. This should be great news for people who are reliant on expensive oil or electric heating as the Premium Payment scheme is really aimed at them. “Getting money off an eco heater will not just cut carbon emissions, it will also help create a market in developing, selling and installing kit like solar thermal panels or heat pumps.”

The Premium Payment scheme is to be administered by the Energy Saving Trust, which has set up an information line, 0800 512 012 and a website.

Dwellings will have to have in place basic energy efficiency measures before householders can apply. The following technologies are eligible:

Ground Source Heat Pumps - £1250 grant (for homes without mains gas heating)
Biomass boilers - £950 grant (for homes without mains gas heating)
Air source heat pumps - £850 grant (for homes without mains gas heating)
Solar thermal hot water panels - £300 grant (available to all households regardless of the type of heating system used).
£3 million of the £15 million will be set aside for registered social landlords to improve their housing stock. DECC will announce details of how to apply for these funds at a later date.

The Renewable Heat Incentive

The Renewable Heat Incentive is split into two tranches. The first, for industry, business and communities will be open for applications on 30 September, subject to State Aids Approval. The tariffs will be paid for 20 years to eligible technologies that have been installed since 15 July 2009 with payments made for each kWh of renewable heat produced.

Households will be able to apply a year later. The government has confirmed that renewable heat installations installed in homes since 15 July 2009 could receive the Renewable Heat Incentive once it comes in, provided they meet the eligibility criteria.

They have also confirmed that this could include those who receive support under the RHPP scheme. The government has not yet published its proposals for how the RHI will work in the domestic sector, including eligibility criteria.

 

bail-out of the euro represents the introduction of socialism on a continental scale - with the British government's cynical endorsement.

How very appropriate that tanks should have been rolling through the streets of Brussels on the day that Europe dismantled another pillar of democracy. The military display, as it happened, was commemorating Belgium National Day, not the triumphal march toward financial union, but the coincidence was one of history’s better jokes. Europe is now galloping toward the final realisation of its great post-war dream: the abolition of independent nation states whose governments are answerable to their own people.
It is important to realise what is at stake here. When you exercise your right to vote for one party or another in national elections, you are, more often than not, doing so on the basis of its fiscal policies: that is, what it proposes to do about tax and spending. There could scarcely be a more important function of the electoral process than this. If the government is not accountable to you for what it does with your money, and how much it will take from you to do those things, then what is left of your power as a citizen? In what sense is your consent to being governed required? If responsibility for these decisions is to be removed from the elected governments of individual countries and transferred to a pan-European entity, then we are setting out on a course with the most terrifying political implications.
There is nothing accidental about this trajectory. The Greek (and Irish, and Portuguese, and Italian, and Spanish) crisis has been useful, as everyone now seems to be admitting, as an accelerant: having to scrape a whole cohort of eurozone countries off the floor has simply made the “need” for financial integration undeniable. The logical conclusion of an economically illiterate project has been reached. No more messing with the will of the people: resentful Germans and rebellious Greeks will be equally overridden in the name of – what? An international welfare state in which wealth is redistributed not just from the hard-working to the non-working classes of one’s own country, but from industrious nations to failing ones. The traditional socialist model of the wealth of the richer being taken by the state to give to the poorer is being applied on a continental scale, with the inevitable result that southern Europe will become a permanent basket case, dependent indefinitely on “support” – cheap loans and periodic bail-outs – from the north. The governments of those dependent countries will simply be ciphers, as powerless as welfare recipients are likely to be in any system.
And what of their voters? They will scarcely be electorates in the true sense at all. Which is why the Greeks were rioting in the streets: not just because they saw their early retirement age and their casual attitude to taxpaying under threat, but because they recognised that their views would now be irrelevant to their fate. Which is pretty much exactly what was intended all along. Deriding public opinion by dismissing it as populist, ignorant and inflammatory is not an incidental feature of the European project: it is essential. The will of the people is not a mere irritant or an obstacle, to be overcome under the pressure of particular circumstances. It is inherently volatile and dangerous: a threat to the benign, enlightened governance which only an apolitical bureaucratic administration can deliver.
The post-war received wisdom was that the terrible international crimes of the first half of the 20th century were directly attributable to the existence of vainglorious nation states and their rabidly xenophobic peoples. Only the abolition of their sovereignty and the disabling of their popular will could rid the world of that terrible blood-and-soil mystical relationship between countries and their own populations. It is not surprising or discreditable that it was Germany itself – the most infamous incarnation of this historical tendency – that was so determined to extinguish the possibility of it ever recurring. The question is: does undermining the fundamental principle of democracy – that the legitimacy of government requires the consent of the people – make that more or less likely to happen?

If we are going to learn from history, we might look at what dreadful things have followed when populations felt outraged and powerless, at what happens when people come to believe that their own political elites are conspiring against them in a way that deprives them of any voice or effective veto. If the democratic levers of protest are unavailable or useless, then non-democratic ones come into fashion. Deny people the ballot box as an effective outlet for their dissatisfaction, and they will take to the streets, either to replace their government by force, or worse, simply to vent their inchoate fury. As often as not, that fury is directed against some hapless victim – a racial minority, a vilified internal “public enemy” or a perceived foreign menace – which becomes a magnet for mob hatred. The glimmerings already visible of extremist politics in Europe (sometimes in countries that have been traditionally liberal and tolerant) are alarming enough: they will be as nothing to what might be on the rise if this arrogant determination to remove the democratic accessibility of national governments is pursued to the end.
That brings us to what appears to have become the official policy of the Conservative leadership, as explained by George Osborne overleaf. Bizarrely, in a reversal of what has been Tory foreign policy for a generation, the party leadership is now urging Europe on toward greater and faster financial union. The superficial (and reasonably plausible) economic case for this volte face is that, at this stage, it is only by accepting full economic integration that the eurozone can survive – and our economic fate being dependent on the survival of the euro as a currency means that it is in our interests to encourage whatever is necessary to kee it viable.
But the political argument for this stance, at which Mr Osborne hints, is that a financially unified Europe would be so clearly unacceptable to Britain that it would provide a perfect pretext for renegotiating our relationship with the EU. So, in effect, we would be prepared to betray the self-determination of the nations of Europe for our own self-serving reasons. This is a cynical form of realpolitik: that we should sell the pass on other people’s democratic rights in spite of whatever dark forces may be unleashed. That is not, as I recall, the traditional British view of our moral role in the world.

 

Disgraced former News International boss Rebekah Brooks intervened to persuade David Cameron to make ex-News of the World editor Andy Coulson his spin doctor,

Disgraced former News International boss Rebekah Brooks intervened to persuade David Cameron to make ex-News of the World editor Andy Coulson his spin doctor, it was claimed last night.

She is understood to have urged Mr Cameron to scrap plans to give the job to a senior BBC journalist. Mr Cameron was told it should go to someone who was ‘acceptable’ to News International.

The disclosure increases pressure on Mr Cameron over his close links to Mrs Brooks and the Murdoch empire.


Rebekah Brooks (left) is understood to have urged David Cameron to make Andy Coulson (right) his spin doctor

It follows the revelation that Mr Coulson stayed at the Prime Minister’s country residence, Chequers, two months after he was forced to quit as Downing Street’s head of communications over the phone-hacking scandal.


Cameron had intended to appoint the BBC's Guto Harri as his media chief

Mr Cameron met News International executives 26 times in 15 months.

Mr Cameron had been on the brink of appointing the BBC’s Guto Harri as his media chief when he was Opposition leader. Mr Harri and his family spent a weekend with the Camerons in 2007 to discuss the job offer.

However, it went to Mr Coulson after Mrs Brooks got involved, according to sources in the Tory party and at News International.

She is said to have told Mr Cameron that the post should go to  Mr Coulson to strengthen links between the Tories and News International. He had resigned a few months earlier as News of the World editor over the phone-hacking storm.

An individual intimately involved in Mr Coulson’s recruitment said: ‘Rebekah indicated the job should go to Andy. Cameron was told it should be someone acceptable to News International.

'The company was also desperate to find something for Andy after he took the rap when the phone hacking first became an issue. The approach was along the lines of, “If you find something for Andy we will return the favour”.’

 

Rebekah Brooks in line for £3.5m pay out as News International slaps gagging orders on chief executives (apart from that inquiry on Tuesday)
Mr Coulson, who was arrested this month over the phone-hacking furore, resigned from the News of the World in January 2007. Weeks later, the paper’s Royal correspondent Clive Goodman was jailed for phone-hacking.


Coulson got the job for Cameron after Brooks got involved

Mr Coulson’s appointment as Mr Cameron’s communications director in July 2007 came after he was close to agreeing to give the post to Welshman Mr Harri, who was then the BBC’s North America business correspondent.

When Mr Coulson moved into Downing Street after last year’s Election, Mr Cameron’s director of strategy Steve Hilton was given confidential information concerning the extent of Mr Coulson’s alleged involvement in phone-hacking. He passed it on to the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn.

Mr Cameron now says the information was not passed on to him.

George Osborne, who was then Shadow Chancellor, also urged Mr Cameron to pick Mr Coulson over Mr Harri. ‘George is fixated with following how Tony Blair did everything but the decisive factor was Rebekah,’ said a Tory aide.

In 2009, the News of the World and The Sun abandoned support for Gordon Brown and switched to Mr Cameron.

Mr Harri went on to be communications director for Mr Cameron’s Tory rival, London Mayor Boris Johnson.

A Tory source said: ‘Lots of people said Andy would do a good job but it is not true that anyone from News International lobbied Mr Cameron to get him the position.’

Lithuanians among Lincolnshire blast dead

Three of the five men killed in an explosion at an industrial unit suspected of being used to produce moonshine alcohol were originally from Lithuania, police have confirmed.

Lincolnshire police said officers were still trying to establish the identity of the other men who died and a sixth victim who was injured in the blast in Boston on Wednesday night. A spokeswoman said: "We can confirm that three of the fatal casualties are believed to be Lithuanian nationals and are aged 24, 26 and 32."

The case has highlighted tensions between the local and eastern European communities in the area.

Meanwhile, a police cordon placed around the unit has been extended to include other parts of Boston's Broadfield Lane Industrial Estate, and further business units are being examined as part of the investigation.

Investigators revealed yesterday that they had discovered evidence which suggested the unit was being used as an illegal distillery when the explosion took place.

Superintendent Keith Owen, of Lincolnshire police, said: "I can confirm we have found chemicals on the premises which tend to indicate either the manufacture or production of alcohol."

Potentially dangerous fake brands of spirits were seized from six "international shops" which primarily serve east Europeans working on the area's labour-intensive fruit and vegetable farms and in packing factories.

 

Outrage at EU moves to 'auction' fish quotas

INDUSTRY leaders and fishing communities are gearing up to campaign against proposed changes to the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) which could throw open Scotland's lucrative fishing grounds to foreign trawler fleets.
Until now foreign fleets, including Spanish trawlers, have been kept out of Scottish waters by access rights, where catches are allocated on the basis of historical landings under the rule of so called "relative stability".

But the disclosure that the country's fishing grounds could be available to Spanish and other foreign trawlers under proposed changes to the CFP, put forward by Maria Damanaki, the European Fisheries Commissioner, has prompted fears that Scottish fishermen could be priced out of the market.

Damanaki has unveiled plans that opponents claim could see Scottish fish quotas for key species such as haddock, cod and langoustines being sold to the highest bidder anywhere in Europe.

Richard Lochhead, Scotland's Fisheries Minister, has warned that the proposed changes represent a "huge threat" to Scotland's fishing fleets. He told Scotland on Sunday: "It's concerning that the commission's proposals could allow our historic fishing rights to be sold off. This could see them end up in the hands of faceless multi-national companies, which would be bad news for Scots fishermen who would be priced out of the market.

"I believe national governments should continue to decide on the quota rights of their fishermen and we should not hand control to Brussels. We simply cannot allow fishermen to sell their quota to other countries, to the detriment of future generations."

Eilidh Whiteford, the SNP's Westminster fisheries spokeswoman, has also voiced her concerns. The MP for Banff and Buchan, home to the white fish ports of Peterhead and Fraserburgh, said: "Selling quota to Europe's highest bidders will erode Scotland's historic rights which in turn could spell doom for our fragile fishing communities."

Damanaki is calling for a system of "transferable fishing concessions" offering a one-size-fits-all system across the EU to cut the capacity of the EU fleet.

The plan calls for an expansion in the international trading of fish quotas - stating "a member state may authorise the transfer of transferable fishing concessions to and from another member state.

 

Europe's bank stress tests as bad as 1979 Irish driving test

Seeing large numbers of his fellow citizens failing their driving tests, Mr Barrett – in a quick bid for votes – declared that anyone who had taken their test twice and not passed would automatically qualify for a licence.
The consequences were predictable. At any one time, about 40pc of the Irish population were allowed to drive on the roads without ever actually having passed a test. Traffic accidents went up and insurance costs followed.
Andrea Enria, the chairman of the European Banking Authority, may not like the comparison, but the limited bank stress test results he unveiled on Friday are born of a similar motivation that led directly to Ireland’s until only very recently dysfunctional driving test system.
Like the Irish government 32 years ago, the EBA and the European Union are under the impression that their power to pass and fail banks will translate directly into making them better at what they do.
The fallacy of this approach is as obvious as the needlessly ruined lives and extortionate insurance premiums that once-blighted Ireland will attest.

 

Senior MP's secret links to Murdoch

The MP who will lead the attack on Rebekah Brooks and Rupert and James Murdoch this week over their roles in the phone-hacking scandal has close links with the media empire, it is revealed today.

John Whittingdale, the Conservative chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport committee, admitted he was an old friend of Mr Murdoch's close aide, Les Hinton, and had been for dinner with Ms Brooks.

The Independent on Sunday has also learnt that Mr Murdoch's daughter Elisabeth, seen as the future saviour of the company, has also met Mr Whittingdale a number of times. Among her 386 "friends" on Facebook, the only MP she lists is Mr Whittingdale. He is also the only MP among 93 Facebook "friends" of Mr Hinton.