"Green" policies are destroying this country

I'm glad you find minesterial incompetence so amusing. Goes a long way to explaining the "quality" of your posts. 👍

I think you hit the nail on the head with that one. Every single scheme they come out with is a moneyspinner to enrich some clique. There's a whole underbelly of consultants and qualified installers who are connected to the greens. If I had put in my solar panels the official grant-supported SEAI way the payback period would be 10+ years instead of the 2.5-4 I am expecting now. Their main business is further squeezing the squeezed middle & they have a vendetta against rural dwellers.

They are being installed by the ESB on foot of a 150 million euro loan from the European Investment Bank. A loan that like all other loans will have to be paid back with interest.

So who will be paying that 150 million + interest back other than the taxpayer. The greens magic money tree ?

Just offer green electricity at a different rate, you sign up voluntarily to pay the extra charge. The extra charge funds building additional green energy.

Only a small minority we are told are against green policies. Surely carbon based energy would perish over time as no customers sign up for the cheaper dirty source.

Minister Ryan only has support in affluent areas. It’s a feel good party, where you can continue to produce more carbon than the national average, but do so knowing you did your bit and voted green!!

Dont forget to grow your salad in your window box, wouldn’t want you to lose touch with reality.

@Pa ElGrande, this is the best (a.k.a scariest) post I've seen on this thread. This link in particular is the most damning indictment of the profligate Green agenda. Tough one for the zealots on here to blame on climate denying loons as it comes from a knight of the realm, honoured for "services to the environment, energy and utilities policy", and author of the UK's 2017 independent Cost of Energy Review. It's similar to some of the Irish Academy of Engineering's publications calling on the government to come clean with the public on the true cost of renewables.

Prof Helm boils it down to one pithy point -- someone has to pay for the intermittency. Pretty much everything in his report applies to Ireland also. You could pick any of a number of money quotes from his executive summary, but this one resonates:

Unfortunately Ireland seems particularly prone to attracting such opportunists -- whether it's Tesco internally referring to Ireland as "Treasure Island", international venture funds sweating their Irish property assets to the max, or "Big Wind" charging us more than twice as much as the UK for onshore wind, we have been getting gouged. As Helm notes, we have not only built up huge legacy costs in the form of strike prices we are tied to for decades ahead, but we are lumbered with the bills for all the associated backup and infrastructure required for when the wind doesn't blow.

His solution is that anyone tendering to provide renewable power would have to also bid an equivalent amount of firm power. I'm not sure I share his optimism that anyone would then tender for renewables at all. But at least he has the courage to say that carbon pricing would be used to materialise the costs to end customers in a very direct way. In other words, if we're going to kill the economy let the public know it through their wallets, instead of governments pretending that there is some sort of cost-free easy transition while merely delaying the true reckoning.

Just a reminder to everybody. You are under no obligation to accept a smart meter, though the power companies or their contractors will try everything in their power to get you to accept one. They cannot do so without the permission of the property holder. Leave it to the early adopters to have their power shut off remotely when Eamon Ryan's winter power cuts start.

I'm a Catholic (though not a good one). Laudato Si was the last encyclical I bothered to read from this pope, before he had become a complete embarrassment. It's technophobic quasi-Marxist twaddle. One of his prime examples of dangerous technology is air conditioning! He seems completely devoid of understanding of finance and economics. Maybe that's why he's currently embroiled in a scandal about the Vatican purchase of London property assets. In L.S. he bemoans "speculation and the pursuit of financial gain", as if green investing (which he has just committed the Vatican to) isn't exactly that. Anyway, he's saved me a few quid as I stopped contributing to Vatican and general Catholic Church funds a few years back, thanks to him.

I have no idea who you are directing that post at as I have not seen any climate change deniers here, and while not having a doctorate in canon law my understanding of the Pope`s infallibility is only on teachings of faith and morality.

I don`t believe there is much of anything in the bible that says we all have to follow the Irish Green Party ideology to get to heaven, and much of that ideology is morally questionable anyway Even for those that may still believe in Catholic Church teaching on infallibility.

Btw his title is not Pope and there was no such infallibility before the First Vatican Council of 1870.

Not true at all ... The Pope's view on climate change is no more than his own flawed opinion. Also, there have been some pretty bad Popes in the past.

If the bogs weren't enough for Eamon Ryan and his euro friends it now wants to rewet perfectly good drained land. What does he propose to do with all the families and farms on this land ? I'm begging to think the Brita were right and get the **** away from the EU.

https://www.independent.ie/business/farming/news/farmer-fury-builds-over-proposed-eu-rewetting-law-42018151.html