In a dramatic volte-face this weekend The Green Party announced an initiative that might actually make some difference, albeit to individual home-owners rather than the planet at large.
In stark contrast to Minister Ryan’s usual pie-in-the-sky imagining of hordes of merry ‘nouveau-pauvre’ merrily cycling to work through fields of buttercups, or some such similar nonsense that seems to pass for ‘policy’ in the ranks of the sandalistas these days, his recently unveiled €100 million ‘National Insulation Programme for Economic Recovery’ actually involves real people doing real things to real houses for a measurable benefit.
Sounds far too scientific to ever have received the minister’s imprimatur, but there you go.
photo owned by thingermejig (cc)
Report from the paper of record here:
The lowest grant available is €250 for improved attic insulation, which will provide 30 per cent of the cost for a typical suburban house of carrying out this measure. The largest single grant is a €4,000 contribution to work on external wall insulation. This will contribute an estimated 21 per cent of the €19,000 cost for a typical home. Householders are entitled to avail of all the grants that are applicable to their own situation.
and The Green Party website has the following:
http://www.greenparty.ie/en/news/latest_news/govt_announces_new_national_insulation_programme
I do suspect that the estimated payback time on investment will turn out to be rather more estimated than intended but at the very least, this is a step in the right direction and can only be of assistance to homeowners looking to reduce their energy costs.
Also included in the available grants is a sum of €200 towards the cost of a before and after BER assessment.
The ‘before’ assessment can be carried out in advance of the grant application being processed and is intended to help the home-owner to identify the works that they should undertake to improve their home’s energy performance.
Moore Group are happy to assist with all questions you may have regarding the HES scheme and can provide any assessments required along with help with your grant application if required.
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Oh my… pie-in-the-sky imagining, nonsense policies, sandalistas, unscientific… Moore Group not fans of the Green Party then, I take it?
It does strike me that, as good an idea as this National Indsulation programme is, really, wouldn’t that chunk of money be better put towards actually tackling the real problems with CO2 emissions in Ireland? How can the Green Party possibly be taken seriously on climate change when they have failed utterly to address the two biggest problems – transport and industry? Giving me a reduced VRT for driving a Punto doesn’t stop me driving it in the first place, as I have no bloody alternative. And how many factories in Ireland use solar panels, wind turbines or waste-to-energy plants to reduce their carbon footprint? Answer: about 30.
Flippin useless!
I should point out that the post is an editorial – Andy’s opinion, and not necessarily the opinion of Moore Group, other staff, or the owners.
That said, I can’t help being cynical about the approach so far – take for example micropower and selling excess energy to the grid, a fantastic solution to our home energy needs, and obviously attractive to industry – how long has it taken for the trial smart meters to be distributed? – announced by Eamonn Ryan in Nov. 2007 ….
According to a CER spokesman:
Another trial that is well intentioned and a step in the right direction but just doesn’t quite get there….
Moore Group may or may not be fans of the Greens, but I can only speak for myself.
Personally, i think that the election of those idiots will be proven by history to be the worst thing that ever happened to this country.
They blindly follow and regurgitate the latest environmental mantras, without any regard to the veracity of their own claims, and are in the process of fundamentally changing our way of life, without any real scientific basis for those changes.
Allow me to present but one example and much as I hate to do this by quoting Kevin Myers, in this instance I will make an exception:
Full Article here: http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/how-can-opposition-remain-silent-on-a-policy-which-is-clearly-not-in-our-national-interest-1626348.html
Nonsense policies….. now where did I get that notion from.?
Good stuff! My little quip about Moore Group was a shameless attempt to get a reaction… sorry to have tarred and feathered the whole organisation Declan.
Andy, I largely agree with you – for an organisation that claims to be the party with the solutions to Ireland’s environmental wreckage, the Greens do a wonderful job of ignoring, avoiding or (as you rightly suggest) rejecting scientific analysis on environmental issues. All the answers we need – for transport, biodiversity, climate, energy, water quality, waste management – have been tried and tested the world over for more than a decade, and yet Gormley, Ryan & co are perfectly happy to continue with the status quo set by Fianna Fail rather than lead by example. I see no dramatic change in government policies on any environmental issue since they joined Bertie’s cronies. What have they done (or even promised to do) to try to make public transport more accessible and the better choice for commuters? Nothing. What has Sargent done for organic food and farmland ecosystems? Zero. What have they done to address Ireland’s massive shortfall in meeting the 2010 biodiversity target? Nada. When will those smart meters appear, and what about the BER assessors for existing dwellings that were supposed to be ready to go last month? Anybody’s guess. Sure, they inherited these issues with their offices, but they have had 18 months to make a start, and have shown no initiative or effort towards making a difference. And what will suffer as a result of all this envionmental mess? The Irish economy.
The Emporer is in the nip, so to speak… Anyway, rant over.