Let’s Have A Heater Debate: EU Wants Patio Heaters Banned

FIONA Hall, a Liberal Democrat MEP, says: “Patio heaters are scandalous because they are burning fossil fuels in the open sky, so producing vast quantities of CO2 with very little heat benefit.”

Surely, much depends on how close you are to the heat? And if you place the patio heater indoors, does it still qualify as a patio heater or is it more of a radiator, or a death trap?

The Telegraph says the proposal has been attacked by publicans, who say bars and pubs need the heaters for customers driven outside by smoking bans. Readers learn that the trade has invested £86.5 million in heaters over the past year and “a ban could cost pubs, cafés and restaurants an estimated £250 million a year in lost business”. Not to mention what it would do to the market in new patio heaters.

To give balance to Hall’s argument the paper calls upon Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party. Says he: “Not content with devastating the pub trade with the illiberal and ill-informed smoking ban, these autocratic busybodies now want to make smokers stand in the cold and the rain.

“We are constantly being told that the continental café culture is something to aspire to. But a ban like this will hammer the cafés of Brussels, Stockholm and Copenhagen just as surely as the pubs of Leeds and Sevenoaks.”

Is Farage saying that Leeds and Sevenoaks have much in common with those European capital cities, so creating a united European view of the matter? Or is it just all a slight on Brussels to bracket the seat of European power with a town in Kent? And do the people of Sevenoaks mind?

Let’s have a heater debate…

Anorak

Posted: 31st, January 2008 | In: Global Warming, Politicians Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink