Is Green Energy Making Britons Sick?

That’s the thesis of Eric Worrall at Watts Up With That?

Falling living standards are contributing to a shocking surge in malnutrition, and diseases which were prevalent in the 1800s. My question – how much of this hardship is due to the skyrocketing cost of Britain’s green energy disaster?

Worrall quotes the Independent:

Cases of malnutrition and other “Victorian” diseases are soaring in England, in what campaigners said was a result of cuts to social services and rising food poverty.

NHS statistics show that 7,366 people were admitted to hospital with a primary or secondary diagnosis of malnutrition between August 2014 and July this year, compared with 4,883 cases in the same period from 2010 to 2011 – a rise of more than 50 per cent in just four years.

Cases of other diseases rife in the Victorian era including scurvy, scarlet fever, cholera and whooping cough have also increased since 2010, although cases of TB, measles, typhoid and rickets have fallen.

Chris Mould, chairman of the Trussell Trust, which runs a nationwide network of foodbanks, said they saw “tens of thousands of people who have been going hungry, missing meals and cutting back on the quality of the food they buy”.

Of course, there haven’t been any net “cuts to social services.” The rising cost of energy no doubt has contributed to the impoverishment of lower-income Britons:

Quite apart from devastating job losses which occur when energy intensive industries are forced to close, because they can’t compete with lower energy costs in other countries, Eurostat reports that electricity costs have surged from £0.121 / kWh in 2010, to £0.155 / kWh in 2015 (USD $0.23 / kWh), a rise of 28%.

It is axiomatic, I suppose, that Greens don’t care about anything as mundane as getting enough to eat. Still, I suspect there is a lot more going on here than the needlessly rising cost of energy, at a time when, in the U.S. for example, energy is getting cheaper. It would be interesting to know who, exactly, is turning up with scurvy, scarlet fever and whooping cough, as well as malnutrition. I would guess that recent immigrants play a significant role in this story.

Still, any way you look at it, needlessly driving up the cost of energy, which in turn increases the cost of everything else, is a crime against the poor.

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