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January’s big freeze prompts Orbán cabinet into urgent action for the people – updated
The government is taking over additional heating costs resulting from the extreme cold in January, Balázs Hidvéghi, a state secretary at the Prime Minister’s Office, said in a public radio programme broadcast on Sunday.
With January temperatures reaching 15-year lows, Hidvéghi noted that the government had pledged to take over the cost of turning up the heat for 3.3 million Hungarian households. He also said that it was important to consider how energy companies could contribute, pointing to the precedent of sectoral windfall profit taxes.
He added that the government “would not exclude” the possibility of asking utilities companies to take their share of the burden and contribute to making Hungarian families’ lives easier.
Hidvéghi said that the government support for January heating bills applied to households that heat with gas, electricity or district heating. He added that firewood for people in need who heat with wood-buring furnaces was available “practically without limit” as long as the cold weather lasted.
Hungarians pay the lowest utilities bills in the region, with an average household footing a bill of 250,000 forints (EUR 653) a year, compared to bills equivalent to 650,000 forints a year in Slovakia, 600,000 forints in Romania, 900,000 forints in Poland and 1 million in Czechia, he said.
Many decades ago then Tennessee senator Al Gore began to write about what was then termed, ‘Global Warming.’
He was wise to re-term it to ‘Climate Change’, because not only has there been a solar cooling trend, the new term makes anything that does not look exactly like last year seem suspicious.
Once a devotee of Global Warming theories, I began to get suspicious when, questioning people 40, 50, and 60 years older than myself, I noticed a trend when they discussed the weather they had experienced in their childhood.
Their conclusions?
In Winter it is cold.
In Summer it is hot.
Spring and Fall are the most pleasant.
Some Winters are colder than others, just as some Summers are hotter than others.
Change is constant – but within a certain limit.