Cost of living crisis and care home fees

For clients who need to think about putting themselves or their immediate
family into care, it can be a daunting, emotional and stressful time.
A huge part of this stress can be down to working out how to pay for the care itself.
Unfortunately, care homes haven’t been immune to the effects of the cost of
living crisis. The average weekly cost of living in a residential care home is
£760; for a nursing home it’s £9601. These costs vary depending on where
they are in the UK.
But the UK Care Guide’s 2022 survey found average fees have risen by 11%
between February 2022 and February 2023, with some homes increasing
their individual costs by as much as 30%.
This is down to things like raising staffing costs to attract and retain care workers, rising energy costs to keep homes warm and comfortable, and pricier food bills in the supply chain.
The number of people going into care is increasing significantly, too.
According to the 2022 Office of National Statistics report, 375,035 people
went into care between March 2022 to February 2023 – a 3.1% increase on
the year before.
With the need for professional care increasing due to an ageing population2,
spiralling costs at an already financially pressured time will create more worry
for your clients who are looking at care options for themselves or their
loved ones

Funding for care
The care system in the UK can feel complicated.
With thousands of homes to choose from, it can be hard to know where to start and how to pay for it.
For those who aren’t solely self-funding their care, help is available.

Here are some examples:

  • Means-tested local authority funding.
  • Attendance Allowance – not means tested, but eligibility applies.
  • Pension Credit, which can help pay for care support.
    Around £1.7 billion goes unclaimed each year.

It can be difficult navigating this aspect of later life for you or loved ones.
So we can tap into the Legal & General Care Concierge service for when the need arises.
You (or anyone in your immediate family) can call care experts to get more information about finding and funding care. These experts can help
understand all the funding options available such as NHS, local authority,
self-funding and gifting.
Having someone at the end of the phone who knows the system inside-out
can make a stressful time a little smoother.

 

Climate crisis: carbon emissions budget is now tiny, scientists say

Having good chance of limiting global heating to 1.5C is gone, sending ‘dire’ message about the adequacy of climate action

The carbon budget remaining to limit the climate crisis to 1.5C of global heating is now “tiny”, according to an analysis, sending a “dire” message about the adequacy of climate action.

The carbon budget is the maximum amount of carbon emissions that can be released while restricting global temperature rise to the limits of the Paris agreement. The new figure is half the size of the budget estimated in 2020 and would be exhausted in six years at current levels of emissions.

READ: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/30/climate-crisis-carbon-emissions-budget

Prospectors hit the gas in the hunt for ‘white hydrogen’

For more than a decade, the village of Bourakébougou in western Mali has been powered by a clean energy phenomenon that may soon sweep the globe.

The story begins with a cigarette. In 1987, a failed attempt to drill for water released a stream of odourless gas that one unlucky smoker discovered to be highly flammable. The well was quickly plugged and forgotten. But almost 20 years later, drillers on the hunt for fossil fuels confirmed the accidental discovery: hundreds of feet below the arid earth of west Africa lies an abundance of naturally occurring, or “white”, hydrogen.

Today, it is used to generate green electricity for Bourakébougou’s homes and shops. But geologists believe that untapped reservoirs of white hydrogen in the US, Australia and parts of Europe have the potential to provide the world with clean energy on a far greater scale.

READ MORE
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/12/prospectors-hit-the-gas-in-the-hunt-for-white-hydrogen

‘We turn waste into something golden’: the creatives transforming rags to riches

Rich nations’ unwanted clothes often end up in landfills, polluting the global south. But entrepreneurs in Ghana, Pakistan and Chile are turning rubbish into rugs, shoes and toys 

Every second, the equivalent of a lorry full of clothes ends up on a landfill site somewhere around the world. People are buying, and casting off, more clothes than ever. On average, each consumer buys 60% more clothing than 15 years ago and 92m tonnes of textile waste are created annually.

Production and consumption are on the rise, with severe environmental and social implications. Only 12% of the material used for clothing is recycled. A popular way to dispose of clothes is to give them to charity shops.

But many of these donations end up in countries in the global south, where there is big trade in second hand clothing.

READ

Prospectors hit the gas in the hunt for ‘white hydrogen’

The zero-emission fuel may exist in abundant reserves below ground. Now large sums are being invested to look for it

For more than a decade, the village of Bourakébougou in western Mali has been powered by a clean energy phenomenon that may soon sweep the globe.

The story begins with a cigarette. In 1987, a failed attempt to drill for water released a stream of odourless gas that one unlucky smoker discovered to be highly flammable. The well was quickly plugged and forgotten. But almost 20 years later, drillers on the hunt for fossil fuels confirmed the accidental discovery: hundreds of feet below the arid earth of west Africa lies an abundance of naturally occurring, or “white”, hydrogen.

 

Today, it is used to generate green electricity for Bourakébougou’s homes and shops. But geologists believe that untapped reservoirs of white hydrogen in the US, Australia and parts of Europe have the potential to provide the world with clean energy on a far greater scale.

Read more

Arctic spring is getting more erratic

Changing seasons

The timing of spring in the Arctic has become more and more erratic in the past 25 years, leading to growing discrepancies between the behaviour of animals and plants and the conditions they depend on.

Since 1996, Niels Schmidt at Aarhus University in Denmark and his colleagues have been monitoring the ecosystem at Zackenberg, a mountain in north-east Greenland.

When they analysed the first 10 years of data, they found that spring was arriving around two weeks earlier in 2005 compared with 1996.

But now that trend has been replaced by extreme variability from year to year, with animals and flowers emerging at different times. 

New Scientist – read

The rising cost of net zero

The world’s green energy transition, which is essential to achieving net-zero emissions and halting climate change, is under threat, as a financial era of rising interest rates has made some projects, like new offshore wind farms, unaffordable.

Estimates suggest that Europe must now find an additional €163 billion to reach net-zero by 2050, with figures likely to be similar elsewhere in the world. As such, firms are pulling back from new projects.

Last week, Swedish energy firm Vattenfall announced it would stop work on an offshore wind farm in the UK’s North Sea, warning development costs for the Norfolk Boreas scheme had increased by 40 per cent due to rising interest rates and supply chain costs.

Rising interest rates have made the green energy transition more expensive.

READ

Locals in this British seaside town could revolutionise green energy – if the government lets them

Voters want climate action but don’t trust politicians to do it. Could projects like a Whitehaven windfarm be the answer?

  • Rebecca Willis is professor of energy and climate governance at Lancaster University

The seaside town of Whitehaven, in the north-west of England, found itself at the centre of a political storm in May, when the levelling up, housing and communities secretary, Michael Gove, gave his approval for the UK’s first new deep coal mine in more than 40 years just outside the town.

But Whitehaven may soon be known for more than climate-wrecking coal. That is the ambition of Project Collette, a £3bn proposal for a windfarm off the Cumbrian coast to be part-owned by the local community – instigated by the Green Finance Community Hub in collaboration with the engineering firm Arup and community energy specialists Energy4All – and with the potential to power nearby industry.

If Cumbrians could stand on the sandstone cliffs and look out at wind turbines they owned, and that had provided jobs for local people, that might just build the political support and engagement that is so vital to reaching our climate targets?
READ

Carbon capture and storage is ‘no free lunch’, warns climate chief

IPPC chair Hoesung Lee says over-reliance on the technology could mean the world misses 1.5C target

Over-reliance on carbon capture and storage technology could lead the world to surpass climate tipping points, the head of the world’s climate science authority has warned.

Hoesung Lee, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said using technologies that capture carbon dioxide or remove it from the atmosphere was “no free lunch” and that countries should be wary.

 

Lee noted that the IPCC had found it was likely that global temperatures could rise by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, but could then be made to return to below 1.5C by the end of the century. “The jargon for that is the overshoot,” he said. “Carbon dioxide removal methods will be much in demand if that overshoot indeed occurs.”

“But there will be a cost to doing that. There’s no free lunch. And that cost includes that the longer the period of overshoot, there will be additional global warming, and there will be consequences of increased warming.

Read Guardian report

Met Office forecasts 2023 will be hotter than 2022

Next year will be warmer than this one, and one of the hottest on record, the UK Met Office is forecasting.

Dried-up lake bed

Predictions suggest it will be the 10th year in a row the global temperature is at least 1C above average.

The Met Office explained that a cooling effect known as La Niña will likely end after being in place for three years – part of a natural weather cycle.

It also noted the warming impact of human-induced climate change.

Scientific evidence shows that climate change is driving up the global temperature.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64032458

Climate protesters rework Spice Girls song to disrupt Barclays AGM

‘Barclays funds climate chaos’: bank’s AGM disrupted by climate protesters – video

Lyrics of Stop changed to ‘stop right now, no more oil and gas’ because of bank’s fossil fuel funding

Dozens of activists from groups including Fossil Free London and Extinction Rebellion UK began their action less than five minutes into the meeting where its chair, Nigel Higgins, was addressing shareholders at the QEII Centre in Westminster, central London.

A choir was the first to interrupt, with a rendition of the Spice Girls song Stop. Reworking the 90s classic’s lyrics, the group sang: “Stop right now, no more oil and gas, stop burning fossil fuels and end this madness … hey you, burning up the Earth, gotta stop it now baby we have had enough … you dirty, dirty bank.”

Read more and listen to protest

UK solar energy firm offers ‘shared’ scheme that could save £200 a year

Company behind Devon venture hopes it will become a blueprint for projects owned by consumers

A solar power plant
A solar power plant.
A ‘shared’ solar park is an option for households who cannot afford solar panels
or who do not own their home.
  Photograph: Fuyu Liu/Shutterstock

If you would love to have solar panels but don’t own your home or can’t afford the outlay, how about investing in Britain’s first “shared” solar park that is promising cheaper, zero-carbon electricity, direct to your energy bills for the next 40 years?

With two successful community energy schemes already behind it, Ripple Energy is looking for investors for its third: the construction of a 42MW solar park in Derril Water in Devon, not far from the Cornish town of Bude.

Once up and running in the summer of 2024, the project, which is being built by one of the world’s largest independent renewable energy companies, RES, will produce enough electricity to power 14,000 homes across Britain.

The Guardian – READ MORE

Restoring just nine groups of animals could help combat global warming

Protecting or expanding the populations of nine key groups of animals, including wolves and whales, would remove huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere.

Restoring the populations of a few important groups of animals could help capture huge amounts of carbon from the air and thereby play a role in limiting global warming.

Climate change research has emphasised the importance of vast forests and seagrass meadows as the most efficient way of storing carbon. But bison, elephants, whales, sharks and other massive wild animals also store carbon in their bodies while promoting tree and seagrass growth, preventing carbon-releasing wildfires and packing down ice and soil to keep carbon in the ground, says Oswald Schmitz at Yale University.

“There’s been scepticism in the scientific community that animals matter, because if you just do the accounting, they’d say animals don’t make up much of the carbon on the planet, so they can’t be important,” he says. “What we’re doing is connecting the dots, showing that animals – despite their lack of abundance – have an outsized role, because of the multiplier effects that they create.”

To keep the average global temperature from rising more than 1.5°C above its pre-industrial level, scientists estimate that we need to remove 6.5 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere until 2100. Current models that focus on protecting and restoring forest, wetland, coastal and grassland ecosystems would fall short by an estimated 0.5 to 1.5 gigatonnes per year, says Schmitz.

He and his colleagues reviewed data from previous publications about the environmental effects – including dispersing seeds, trampling, carbon cycling, feeding behaviour, hunting behaviour and methane production – of dozens of kinds of wild animals.

NEW SCIENTIST

Read More

Exxon scientists in the 1970s accurately predicted climate change

Analysis of internal climate projections shows Exxon scientists knew the harm of burning fossil fuels, while firm’s executives played down the risk

Exxon scientists accurately predicted the pace and scale of climate change more than 40 years ago, according to a study that its authors say adds weight to claims the oil firm knew about and sought to downplay the risks posed by continued fossil fuel use.

Scientists working for Exxon between 1977 and 2003 accurately forecasted the rate at which global average temperatures would rise as a result of carbon emissions, correctly predicted that human-caused global warming would first be detectable by around 2000 and reasonably estimated how much carbon dioxide would lead to dangerous warming, according to the study.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2354492-exxon-scientists-in-the-1970s-accurately-predicted-climate-change/