So... Greta Thurnberg. Apparently the climate emergency is so vast that we must all change the way we live, at a vast cost to economies and people's welfare.
Yet wind turbines cannot be built on the land of indigenous peoples in Norway, for ... reasons.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people,” Thunberg told Reuters on Monday."
Why do only the rights of indigenous people matter? Why should any of us suffer by progressing green energy faster than the economy can sustain?
(Dons flameproof coat)
You feel she's insufficiently fanatical? The consensus view among most people concerned about climate change is that we do need to take substantial action including lifestyle changes, but not that absolutely no other considerations can be made. We can argue about whether indigenous rights are important (I'm not much bothered about them, but Scandinavians do tend to feel differently), but it doesn't invalidate her position to concede the need for some exceptions.
Or Welsh Labour's stupid cancellation of the entire road building program.
I'm not arguing against work to prevent climate change; just that we have to pick a pace that doesn't help send people into food and other types of poverty, and allows us to grow and improve as a country and society.
It's probably better to pick a pace that actually avoids disastrous climate change. You don't win a war by dedicating only enough resources that still allow you to "grow and improve as a country and society"; you dedicate enough resources to win it, even if that means some hardship in the short term.
Good. So when people complain about not being able to afford energy bills, or food (growing and transporting food requires energy), you'll accept that these policies have a detrimental effect? Or will it all be the government's fault?
I am not against trying to combat climate change. It's just that we need to balance that with the needs of the people.
Obviously we need to combat climate change in a way that mitigates hardship as far as possible, but in the end the necessary pace needs to be dictated by the desired result rather than the need to avoid inconvenience. Otherwise our epitaph may be, "Sorry we messed up the world kids, but it turned out there was no way that we could stop it without compromising our standard of living." That's not really a good look.
If the world economy grows at ~3.5% per annum, it doubles in size approximately every twenty years. The unpleasant truth is that if we want to tackle climate change in a meaningful way, we need to pursue degrowth, both of the economy, and of the global population. Not only does that mean an inevitable decline in living standards, it also creates a demographic problem for the future - too many old people and not enough bum wipers, essentially.
But moreover, it's also a thoroughly western-centric attitude that says "hey, we got rich burning dead dinosaurs, now, rest of the world, you've got to accept declining living standards even though you never attained western standards of wealth and prosperity". And most of the developing world simply is not going to accept that.
To be honest, the developed world isn't going to accept declining living standards, either. People in democracies aren't going to vote for policies that make them worse off, no matter how well intended.
That leaves technological advancement as our sole route out of this, whether that be carbon capture, fusion technology, even weather control (I know, I stray into the realms of science fiction here). But in any climate change scenario you need to start from the base case that people will not accept declining living standards without voting out / overthrowing their governments, and accept that developing nations will not accept de-growth foisted on them by western powers.
AI is going to make all of this irrelevant in good and bad ways. You’re worrying about the rural economy on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution
AI as we currently have it, LLMs and ChatGPT, won't make our economy greener - the simple fact is that if the world economy doubles in size every 20 years or so, the amount of resources we consume becomes much bigger. AI isn't gonna stop the developing world wanting cars, fast food and air conditioning. Sure, maybe AGI will come along in the next few years and it will be all powerful and all knowing and it will teach us fusion technology and the like in minutes. But belief in the singularity is a little bit of hand waving and faith in an AI god.
Many of the most important technological advancements of the 20th century - the production line, the automobile, etc, did not reduce our impact on the enivronment. Rather, thay made it orders of magnitude worse. Of course, there are some technologies - nuclear power etc - that reduce our impact on the environment. But to suggest that more technology = less environmental impact as the default state simply isn't true...
It's not a default - but clearly technology, and in particular cheap power from renewables, enables all kinds of possibilities. Energy production is at the root of the climate change problem, and will also determine if and how it is solved.
I don't disagree with your point that massive lifestyle changes will be necessary. I just don't believe that all of them are necessarily going to be negative ones.
Look at the academic literature and you'll see an emerging consensus among the intelligentsia for hair shirts and degrowth. I'm not saying that's right, but I am saying that's where you can see a consensus is emerging.
The idea of rationing petrol, long haul flights, even meat consumption, would have been laughed out of the room even a decade ago. Now, it's an idea that's being taken seriously in academia.
Personally, I think such ideas are borne out of an institutional hatred towards capitalism and an inherent bias against consumption as being bourgeois and decadent. But that doesn't mean these ideas will not be taken very, very seriously by higher ups.
While there are some mitigations, e.g. clean power, circular economy, EVs etc, the fact is the vast majority of the developing world wants a western-style lifestyle and that will necessitate orders of magnitude more consumption in the next 50 years or so.
It's my belief that development of green technologies will not substantially mitigate the massive increase in consumption in developing economies. Then again, nor will wearing hair shirts and reducing our own consumption in the west make a significant impact. This is why, earlier in the thread, I said I think we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The bottom line is that there isn't a hope in hell of selling "you need to be worse off to fight global warmingclimate change the climate emergency" to the public. The key has always been to find measures that are good for the environment but also have benefits to people and sell those benefits.
The idea that future adversity should only be countered by measures that also provide current benefits is completely illogical.
Welcome to human nature.
It's not human nature at all. Most people are prepared to undergo short-term discomfort in exchange for long term benefits for themselves or their children. It's just (?) a matter of selling it properly. Blood, sweat and tears won WW2.
Yeah, because it was easy to sell "we're fighting Hitler, an evil man who wants to kill us".
Climate change is a less immediate but just as real a threat as Hitler was. It's the lack of immediacy that makes selling the need for possibly unpopular measures to counter it difficult, but they are no less necessary.
Here's the thing. Your immense and superior intellect notwithstanding, why do you think it is that the majority (it seems) of people don't share the urgency of your quest to undergo discomfort, or de-grow (yuk)?
People are on the whole well-informed and have all the available facts to hand and have evidently decided that they don't want to do as you say they should.
I mean it is a cheap and hackneyed jibe to point out your fossil fuel usage in posting green comments on an internet chatroom but you could at least set an example by not doing so. Or are you someone (thinking Emma Thompson here) who believes their mission is too important not to engage in the very activities you are counselling against?
I wouldn't say people on the whole are well informed about climate change.
So... Greta Thurnberg. Apparently the climate emergency is so vast that we must all change the way we live, at a vast cost to economies and people's welfare.
Yet wind turbines cannot be built on the land of indigenous peoples in Norway, for ... reasons.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people,” Thunberg told Reuters on Monday."
Why do only the rights of indigenous people matter? Why should any of us suffer by progressing green energy faster than the economy can sustain?
(Dons flameproof coat)
You feel she's insufficiently fanatical? The consensus view among most people concerned about climate change is that we do need to take substantial action including lifestyle changes, but not that absolutely no other considerations can be made. We can argue about whether indigenous rights are important (I'm not much bothered about them, but Scandinavians do tend to feel differently), but it doesn't invalidate her position to concede the need for some exceptions.
Or Welsh Labour's stupid cancellation of the entire road building program.
I'm not arguing against work to prevent climate change; just that we have to pick a pace that doesn't help send people into food and other types of poverty, and allows us to grow and improve as a country and society.
It's probably better to pick a pace that actually avoids disastrous climate change. You don't win a war by dedicating only enough resources that still allow you to "grow and improve as a country and society"; you dedicate enough resources to win it, even if that means some hardship in the short term.
Good. So when people complain about not being able to afford energy bills, or food (growing and transporting food requires energy), you'll accept that these policies have a detrimental effect? Or will it all be the government's fault?
I am not against trying to combat climate change. It's just that we need to balance that with the needs of the people.
Obviously we need to combat climate change in a way that mitigates hardship as far as possible, but in the end the necessary pace needs to be dictated by the desired result rather than the need to avoid inconvenience. Otherwise our epitaph may be, "Sorry we messed up the world kids, but it turned out there was no way that we could stop it without compromising our standard of living." That's not really a good look.
If the world economy grows at ~3.5% per annum, it doubles in size approximately every twenty years. The unpleasant truth is that if we want to tackle climate change in a meaningful way, we need to pursue degrowth, both of the economy, and of the global population. Not only does that mean an inevitable decline in living standards, it also creates a demographic problem for the future - too many old people and not enough bum wipers, essentially.
But moreover, it's also a thoroughly western-centric attitude that says "hey, we got rich burning dead dinosaurs, now, rest of the world, you've got to accept declining living standards even though you never attained western standards of wealth and prosperity". And most of the developing world simply is not going to accept that.
To be honest, the developed world isn't going to accept declining living standards, either. People in democracies aren't going to vote for policies that make them worse off, no matter how well intended.
That leaves technological advancement as our sole route out of this, whether that be carbon capture, fusion technology, even weather control (I know, I stray into the realms of science fiction here). But in any climate change scenario you need to start from the base case that people will not accept declining living standards without voting out / overthrowing their governments, and accept that developing nations will not accept de-growth foisted on them by western powers.
AI is going to make all of this irrelevant in good and bad ways. You’re worrying about the rural economy on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution
AI as we currently have it, LLMs and ChatGPT, won't make our economy greener - the simple fact is that if the world economy doubles in size every 20 years or so, the amount of resources we consume becomes much bigger. AI isn't gonna stop the developing world wanting cars, fast food and air conditioning. Sure, maybe AGI will come along in the next few years and it will be all powerful and all knowing and it will teach us fusion technology and the like in minutes. But belief in the singularity is a little bit of hand waving and faith in an AI god.
Many of the most important technological advancements of the 20th century - the production line, the automobile, etc, did not reduce our impact on the enivronment. Rather, thay made it orders of magnitude worse. Of course, there are some technologies - nuclear power etc - that reduce our impact on the environment. But to suggest that more technology = less environmental impact as the default state simply isn't true...
It's not a default - but clearly technology, and in particular cheap power from renewables, enables all kinds of possibilities. Energy production is at the root of the climate change problem, and will also determine if and how it is solved.
I don't disagree with your point that massive lifestyle changes will be necessary. I just don't believe that all of them are necessarily going to be negative ones.
Look at the academic literature and you'll see an emerging consensus among the intelligentsia for hair shirts and degrowth. I'm not saying that's right, but I am saying that's where you can see a consensus is emerging.
The idea of rationing petrol, long haul flights, even meat consumption, would have been laughed out of the room even a decade ago. Now, it's an idea that's being taken seriously in academia.
Personally, I think such ideas are borne out of an institutional hatred towards capitalism and an inherent bias against consumption as being bourgeois and decadent. But that doesn't mean these ideas will not be taken very, very seriously by higher ups.
While there are some mitigations, e.g. clean power, circular economy, EVs etc, the fact is the vast majority of the developing world wants a western-style lifestyle and that will necessitate orders of magnitude more consumption in the next 50 years or so.
It's my belief that development of green technologies will not substantially mitigate the massive increase in consumption in developing economies. Then again, nor will wearing hair shirts and reducing our own consumption in the west make a significant impact. This is why, earlier in the thread, I said I think we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The bottom line is that there isn't a hope in hell of selling "you need to be worse off to fight global warmingclimate change the climate emergency" to the public. The key has always been to find measures that are good for the environment but also have benefits to people and sell those benefits.
The idea that future adversity should only be countered by measures that also provide current benefits is completely illogical.
Welcome to human nature.
Example - electric cars. Accelerate like a super car. No nasty particulates coming out if the exhaust. Higher reliability possible because of mechanical complexity being reduced.
In a relatively few years, the prices will drop below that of new ICE - batteries are getting cheaper, steadily.
So faster, better, cheaper.
Edit: the Cold Fusion comedy was fun for one reason. The pure terror the thought of infinite, clean energy produced in certain people.
I used to car share with Prof in Mechanical Engineering (older than me - in his late 50's or early 60's). He was hugely skeptical about electric cars - a sentiment echoed by many of his colleagues (including the automotive academics). And yet its happening. There are huge challenges - they are not cheap, yet. Recharging is not as easy as slopping in fuel. You sometimes get issues with no being able to access a charge point. Range is not always as good.
But all of those points have answers. Most journeys are under 20-30 miles. You rarely need the range that your current petrol/diesel vehicle has. More chargers are being installed, all the time. I imagine the first petrol cars had similar issues in the early years of the 20th century.
Sometimes people cannot imagine the change - its too big. The pandemic was a bit like that - few people ever imagined anything on the lines of 'lockdown' - shutting down society. Leon thinks AI is another example (I'm skeptical, but maybe I am just playing the role of my car share here?)
Lastly - I still remember the cold fusion story breaking - we were on holiday in Scotland. It genuinely felt like we could be on the verge of something huge. I think there is something going on somewhere, but its more likely to be some weird physics, rather than the way to power the world with seawater.
The price is solely down to the battery, now. And that is falling. The rest of the car and the power train is simple and already efficient.
If you are on the Tesla chargers - it just works. The other setups are crapulent by comparison.
Not long from now, every other lamppost will be a charger. Literally.
A partially informed observation is that small electric cars for small and medium sized journeys seem a good solution, but big electric cars with big range don't, particularly. You seem to need a much bigger battery to drive that weight of vehicle that range, the weight of which means you need a bigger battery still. This big car may be electric, but it's not particularly environmentally friendly (not least because of the particulates from a big heavy vehicle). I can see a future where, for my family, we only own one car - a small electric - which now the kids are out of car seats we can all fit in comfortably. When we go on a big holiday to Cornwall, we hire a big car for two weeks. Doing this for the four weeks or so a year we need it for will be far cheaper than owning it. Such a future would need car hire arrangements (car clubs?) to be much more flexible than at present though!
Absolutely. I have an electric car with a relatively short range, which is ideal for shortish journeys around the local area. It's charged overnight at home; in the year or so since I bought it, I've only every changed it once from a public charger.
On the occasions when I need to travel further afield, I borrow my other half's diesel, which is much better suited for motorway use. It's getting on a bit now though, and when it expires we probably won't replace it; instead we'll do as you suggest and hire a car for the occasional long-distance trip. Or take the train.
So... Greta Thurnberg. Apparently the climate emergency is so vast that we must all change the way we live, at a vast cost to economies and people's welfare.
Yet wind turbines cannot be built on the land of indigenous peoples in Norway, for ... reasons.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people,” Thunberg told Reuters on Monday."
Why do only the rights of indigenous people matter? Why should any of us suffer by progressing green energy faster than the economy can sustain?
(Dons flameproof coat)
You feel she's insufficiently fanatical? The consensus view among most people concerned about climate change is that we do need to take substantial action including lifestyle changes, but not that absolutely no other considerations can be made. We can argue about whether indigenous rights are important (I'm not much bothered about them, but Scandinavians do tend to feel differently), but it doesn't invalidate her position to concede the need for some exceptions.
Or Welsh Labour's stupid cancellation of the entire road building program.
I'm not arguing against work to prevent climate change; just that we have to pick a pace that doesn't help send people into food and other types of poverty, and allows us to grow and improve as a country and society.
It's probably better to pick a pace that actually avoids disastrous climate change. You don't win a war by dedicating only enough resources that still allow you to "grow and improve as a country and society"; you dedicate enough resources to win it, even if that means some hardship in the short term.
Good. So when people complain about not being able to afford energy bills, or food (growing and transporting food requires energy), you'll accept that these policies have a detrimental effect? Or will it all be the government's fault?
I am not against trying to combat climate change. It's just that we need to balance that with the needs of the people.
Obviously we need to combat climate change in a way that mitigates hardship as far as possible, but in the end the necessary pace needs to be dictated by the desired result rather than the need to avoid inconvenience. Otherwise our epitaph may be, "Sorry we messed up the world kids, but it turned out there was no way that we could stop it without compromising our standard of living." That's not really a good look.
If the world economy grows at ~3.5% per annum, it doubles in size approximately every twenty years. The unpleasant truth is that if we want to tackle climate change in a meaningful way, we need to pursue degrowth, both of the economy, and of the global population. Not only does that mean an inevitable decline in living standards, it also creates a demographic problem for the future - too many old people and not enough bum wipers, essentially.
But moreover, it's also a thoroughly western-centric attitude that says "hey, we got rich burning dead dinosaurs, now, rest of the world, you've got to accept declining living standards even though you never attained western standards of wealth and prosperity". And most of the developing world simply is not going to accept that.
To be honest, the developed world isn't going to accept declining living standards, either. People in democracies aren't going to vote for policies that make them worse off, no matter how well intended.
That leaves technological advancement as our sole route out of this, whether that be carbon capture, fusion technology, even weather control (I know, I stray into the realms of science fiction here). But in any climate change scenario you need to start from the base case that people will not accept declining living standards without voting out / overthrowing their governments, and accept that developing nations will not accept de-growth foisted on them by western powers.
We need to pursue growth via clean technologies. End of story. Any notions of degrowth are ridiculous nonsense, technology is both the cause of and solution to life's problems.
Yep. Improvement in technology is our only way out of this, but it strikes me as extremely unlikely we'll get there in time. And, as you rightly point out, degrowth is completely unpalatable to both western and developing nations. So we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, where there is clearly going to be substantial climate change over the next 50 years or so, which is going to present its own problems in the form of mass migration etc.
There was a recent academic paper published in the UK that suggested the way to fix global warming is rationing. Rationing petrol, limiting long haul flights, even giving people a non-tradeable 'carbon allowance' on a credit-card style carbon card. Do that and there *will* be riots, and I'll be out there with the rioters. It's proper "you will eat ze bugs" stuff. It's utterly dystopian, but this is where the bien pensant intelligentsia is starting to coalesce.
Squint hard enough at the horizon, and you can see where all of this stuff will lead in twenty, thirty years time.
We aren't struck between a rock and a hard place, because degrowth would never do anything anyway.
Driving a low fuel efficiency 5% less doesn't get you to net zero, as you still have 95% of the emissions being released. Flying a bit less doesn't get you there either, as you still have almost all of the emissions there too. Having fewer children won't get you there, since the overwhelming majority who'd be alive in 2050 are already alive today anyway.
This is where "Green" fanatics are completely ungreen and unscientific. They've got the wrong solution to the right problem. Trying to tackle climate change by consuming less is about as successful as trying to tackle obesity by eating one fewer sweet per week.
We need a wholesale transformation to tackle climate change and the only solution to that is science and technology. Not driving less, but driving clean. Not consuming less, but consuming clean. Not flying less, but flying clean. Clean technologies, not fewer people or fewer commodities.
That's pure entitlement. Yes, we'll tackle climate change, but only if I'm not inconvenienced in any way. Otherwise, sorry world.
There are some Greens who are rather upset at the technological solutions to climate change. As one put it to me - "Net zero means unconstrained future growth."
It is perfectly possible to get to Net Zero, without dismantling human society.
We can do 45% of Britain's entire commitment by spreading basalt on fields apparently.
Easy fix then.
Drill a hole through the Earths mantle. Fire a nuclear missile down it. This will cause a massive flood basalt eruption that will cover the entire country in lava.
As a small side effect a chunk of the earths crust may break away and become a new moon.
In local news, there's an interesting double by-election in Littlemore & Rose Hill today, one of the more working class parts of Oxford. Both city and county seats are up for election. Both were held by Labour, though by two different councillors (the county one was beyond hopeless and had, I believe, the worst attendance record on the whole council; I don't know the city one at all; it seems curious that they resigned at the same time).
Littlemore has one of Oxford's much-discussed Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes. There's an Independent standing on a platform of opposition to it, and the Tories have come out against it too (even though they pushed LTNs, and implemented several, while in control of the county council).
The LibDems and Greens aren't making much of an effort - Littlemore isn't fertile territory for either of them. As usual for East Oxford there are TUSC candidates too.
I think it'll come down to Labour vs Independent, and if pushed I'd say Labour will hold it, but it's far from a done deal.
An interesting set of by-elections indeed.
The (less advanced) Cambridge equivalent Low Traffic Neighbourhood Scheme is already developing into a battleground between familiar stereotypes.
The bicycling lefty dons versus the hard-working poor. The intellectual elite versus the struggling, down-to-earth workers.
The mistake watermelon Greens make is thinking "something must be done, this is something, so this must be done". Or that people who disagree with their proposed solutions want to see the world burn. Neither is true.
Tell people not to fly and they'll ignore you. If flights reduce marginally, that won't help the planet.
Tell people to fly on a clean flight and they might. Tax dirty flights so clean flights are cheaper, or outlaw dirty flights so only clean flights happen, and people will take clean flights.
If you're serious about climate change, get serious. Technology is serious, "lifestyle" to beat climate change is like homeopathy to beat cancer.
Currently there is no such thing as a clean flight, nor is there likely to be for some time. But a good start on would be to simply tax aviation fuel at the same level as car fuel. That would help to encourage the development of alternatives.
It's the proper free market solution. If you accept that releasing carbon dioxide into the air isn't good, it ought to be taxed to properly cover the costs of its harms. And by making airplane fuel appropriately expensive, that would spur the adoption of alternatives- whether that's different fuels, modes of transport or destinations.
But doing that will make flying much more expensive. Ouch. And it's possible that there isn't a sufficient technical solution, given how physics and chemistry work. The window of energy density and plane design that gets them off the air isn't huge.
The mistake watermelon Greens make is thinking "something must be done, this is something, so this must be done". Or that people who disagree with their proposed solutions want to see the world burn. Neither is true.
Tell people not to fly and they'll ignore you. If flights reduce marginally, that won't help the planet.
Tell people to fly on a clean flight and they might. Tax dirty flights so clean flights are cheaper, or outlaw dirty flights so only clean flights happen, and people will take clean flights.
If you're serious about climate change, get serious. Technology is serious, "lifestyle" to beat climate change is like homeopathy to beat cancer.
There aren't any clean flights. So outlaw dirty flights=outlaw flights. Maybe a good idea, but a bit extreme.
Then there's balloons. The Chinese have shown us in the last few weeks that they can easily travel on intercontinental routes and be directed fairly accurately (until they "get lost"). Or more specifically dirigeable airships.
The Hindenburg disaster still casts a shadow over our aviation options, rather like Chernobyl does over the European power generation mix.
So... Greta Thurnberg. Apparently the climate emergency is so vast that we must all change the way we live, at a vast cost to economies and people's welfare.
Yet wind turbines cannot be built on the land of indigenous peoples in Norway, for ... reasons.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people,” Thunberg told Reuters on Monday."
Why do only the rights of indigenous people matter? Why should any of us suffer by progressing green energy faster than the economy can sustain?
(Dons flameproof coat)
You feel she's insufficiently fanatical? The consensus view among most people concerned about climate change is that we do need to take substantial action including lifestyle changes, but not that absolutely no other considerations can be made. We can argue about whether indigenous rights are important (I'm not much bothered about them, but Scandinavians do tend to feel differently), but it doesn't invalidate her position to concede the need for some exceptions.
Or Welsh Labour's stupid cancellation of the entire road building program.
I'm not arguing against work to prevent climate change; just that we have to pick a pace that doesn't help send people into food and other types of poverty, and allows us to grow and improve as a country and society.
It's probably better to pick a pace that actually avoids disastrous climate change. You don't win a war by dedicating only enough resources that still allow you to "grow and improve as a country and society"; you dedicate enough resources to win it, even if that means some hardship in the short term.
Good. So when people complain about not being able to afford energy bills, or food (growing and transporting food requires energy), you'll accept that these policies have a detrimental effect? Or will it all be the government's fault?
I am not against trying to combat climate change. It's just that we need to balance that with the needs of the people.
Obviously we need to combat climate change in a way that mitigates hardship as far as possible, but in the end the necessary pace needs to be dictated by the desired result rather than the need to avoid inconvenience. Otherwise our epitaph may be, "Sorry we messed up the world kids, but it turned out there was no way that we could stop it without compromising our standard of living." That's not really a good look.
If the world economy grows at ~3.5% per annum, it doubles in size approximately every twenty years. The unpleasant truth is that if we want to tackle climate change in a meaningful way, we need to pursue degrowth, both of the economy, and of the global population. Not only does that mean an inevitable decline in living standards, it also creates a demographic problem for the future - too many old people and not enough bum wipers, essentially.
But moreover, it's also a thoroughly western-centric attitude that says "hey, we got rich burning dead dinosaurs, now, rest of the world, you've got to accept declining living standards even though you never attained western standards of wealth and prosperity". And most of the developing world simply is not going to accept that.
To be honest, the developed world isn't going to accept declining living standards, either. People in democracies aren't going to vote for policies that make them worse off, no matter how well intended.
That leaves technological advancement as our sole route out of this, whether that be carbon capture, fusion technology, even weather control (I know, I stray into the realms of science fiction here). But in any climate change scenario you need to start from the base case that people will not accept declining living standards without voting out / overthrowing their governments, and accept that developing nations will not accept de-growth foisted on them by western powers.
We need to pursue growth via clean technologies. End of story. Any notions of degrowth are ridiculous nonsense, technology is both the cause of and solution to life's problems.
Yep. Improvement in technology is our only way out of this, but it strikes me as extremely unlikely we'll get there in time. And, as you rightly point out, degrowth is completely unpalatable to both western and developing nations. So we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, where there is clearly going to be substantial climate change over the next 50 years or so, which is going to present its own problems in the form of mass migration etc.
There was a recent academic paper published in the UK that suggested the way to fix global warming is rationing. Rationing petrol, limiting long haul flights, even giving people a non-tradeable 'carbon allowance' on a credit-card style carbon card. Do that and there *will* be riots, and I'll be out there with the rioters. It's proper "you will eat ze bugs" stuff. It's utterly dystopian, but this is where the bien pensant intelligentsia is starting to coalesce.
Squint hard enough at the horizon, and you can see where all of this stuff will lead in twenty, thirty years time.
We aren't struck between a rock and a hard place, because degrowth would never do anything anyway.
Driving a low fuel efficiency 5% less doesn't get you to net zero, as you still have 95% of the emissions being released. Flying a bit less doesn't get you there either, as you still have almost all of the emissions there too. Having fewer children won't get you there, since the overwhelming majority who'd be alive in 2050 are already alive today anyway.
This is where "Green" fanatics are completely ungreen and unscientific. They've got the wrong solution to the right problem. Trying to tackle climate change by consuming less is about as successful as trying to tackle obesity by eating one fewer sweet per week.
We need a wholesale transformation to tackle climate change and the only solution to that is science and technology. Not driving less, but driving clean. Not consuming less, but consuming clean. Not flying less, but flying clean. Clean technologies, not fewer people or fewer commodities.
That's pure entitlement. Yes, we'll tackle climate change, but only if I'm not inconvenienced in any way. Otherwise, sorry world.
There are some Greens who are rather upset at the technological solutions to climate change. As one put it to me - "Net zero means unconstrained future growth."
It is perfectly possible to get to Net Zero, without dismantling human society.
We can do 45% of Britain's entire commitment by spreading basalt on fields apparently.
Easy fix then.
Drill a hole through the Earths mantle. Fire a nuclear missile down it. This will cause a massive flood basalt eruption that will cover the entire country in lava.
As a small side effect a chunk of the earths crust may break away and become a new moon.
The mistake watermelon Greens make is thinking "something must be done, this is something, so this must be done". Or that people who disagree with their proposed solutions want to see the world burn. Neither is true.
Tell people not to fly and they'll ignore you. If flights reduce marginally, that won't help the planet.
Tell people to fly on a clean flight and they might. Tax dirty flights so clean flights are cheaper, or outlaw dirty flights so only clean flights happen, and people will take clean flights.
If you're serious about climate change, get serious. Technology is serious, "lifestyle" to beat climate change is like homeopathy to beat cancer.
Currently there is no such thing as a clean flight, nor is there likely to be for some time. But a good start on would be to simply tax aviation fuel at the same level as car fuel. That would help to encourage the development of alternatives.
It's the proper free market solution. If you accept that releasing carbon dioxide into the air isn't good, it ought to be taxed to properly cover the costs of its harms...
In local news, there's an interesting double by-election in Littlemore & Rose Hill today, one of the more working class parts of Oxford. Both city and county seats are up for election. Both were held by Labour, though by two different councillors (the county one was beyond hopeless and had, I believe, the worst attendance record on the whole council; I don't know the city one at all; it seems curious that they resigned at the same time).
Littlemore has one of Oxford's much-discussed Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes. There's an Independent standing on a platform of opposition to it, and the Tories have come out against it too (even though they pushed LTNs, and implemented several, while in control of the county council).
The LibDems and Greens aren't making much of an effort - Littlemore isn't fertile territory for either of them. As usual for East Oxford there are TUSC candidates too.
I think it'll come down to Labour vs Independent, and if pushed I'd say Labour will hold it, but it's far from a done deal.
An interesting set of by-elections indeed.
The (less advanced) Cambridge equivalent Low Traffic Neighbourhood Scheme is already developing into a battleground between familiar stereotypes.
The bicycling lefty dons versus the hard-working poor. The intellectual elite versus the struggling, down-to-earth workers.
For example, my brother-in-law (staunch Labour) literally cannot contain his rage about it. I have never seen him angrier.
Prediction -- this is the new Brexit.
This is Farage's next Big Issue. It is tailor-made to pit one section of Labour voters against another section.
I recall talking with a councillor in Abingdon about their policies. What was fascinating was the total rejection by the councillor in question of other peoples way of living.
He was retired and rode a bicycle everywhere. No dependents and everything vaguely heavy, delivered.
When I tried to explain that some people live in places/have families that require cars, he kept coming back to "but *I* don't need one".
So... Greta Thurnberg. Apparently the climate emergency is so vast that we must all change the way we live, at a vast cost to economies and people's welfare.
Yet wind turbines cannot be built on the land of indigenous peoples in Norway, for ... reasons.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people,” Thunberg told Reuters on Monday."
Why do only the rights of indigenous people matter? Why should any of us suffer by progressing green energy faster than the economy can sustain?
(Dons flameproof coat)
You feel she's insufficiently fanatical? The consensus view among most people concerned about climate change is that we do need to take substantial action including lifestyle changes, but not that absolutely no other considerations can be made. We can argue about whether indigenous rights are important (I'm not much bothered about them, but Scandinavians do tend to feel differently), but it doesn't invalidate her position to concede the need for some exceptions.
Or Welsh Labour's stupid cancellation of the entire road building program.
I'm not arguing against work to prevent climate change; just that we have to pick a pace that doesn't help send people into food and other types of poverty, and allows us to grow and improve as a country and society.
It's probably better to pick a pace that actually avoids disastrous climate change. You don't win a war by dedicating only enough resources that still allow you to "grow and improve as a country and society"; you dedicate enough resources to win it, even if that means some hardship in the short term.
Good. So when people complain about not being able to afford energy bills, or food (growing and transporting food requires energy), you'll accept that these policies have a detrimental effect? Or will it all be the government's fault?
I am not against trying to combat climate change. It's just that we need to balance that with the needs of the people.
Obviously we need to combat climate change in a way that mitigates hardship as far as possible, but in the end the necessary pace needs to be dictated by the desired result rather than the need to avoid inconvenience. Otherwise our epitaph may be, "Sorry we messed up the world kids, but it turned out there was no way that we could stop it without compromising our standard of living." That's not really a good look.
If the world economy grows at ~3.5% per annum, it doubles in size approximately every twenty years. The unpleasant truth is that if we want to tackle climate change in a meaningful way, we need to pursue degrowth, both of the economy, and of the global population. Not only does that mean an inevitable decline in living standards, it also creates a demographic problem for the future - too many old people and not enough bum wipers, essentially.
But moreover, it's also a thoroughly western-centric attitude that says "hey, we got rich burning dead dinosaurs, now, rest of the world, you've got to accept declining living standards even though you never attained western standards of wealth and prosperity". And most of the developing world simply is not going to accept that.
To be honest, the developed world isn't going to accept declining living standards, either. People in democracies aren't going to vote for policies that make them worse off, no matter how well intended.
That leaves technological advancement as our sole route out of this, whether that be carbon capture, fusion technology, even weather control (I know, I stray into the realms of science fiction here). But in any climate change scenario you need to start from the base case that people will not accept declining living standards without voting out / overthrowing their governments, and accept that developing nations will not accept de-growth foisted on them by western powers.
We need to pursue growth via clean technologies. End of story. Any notions of degrowth are ridiculous nonsense, technology is both the cause of and solution to life's problems.
Yep. Improvement in technology is our only way out of this, but it strikes me as extremely unlikely we'll get there in time. And, as you rightly point out, degrowth is completely unpalatable to both western and developing nations. So we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, where there is clearly going to be substantial climate change over the next 50 years or so, which is going to present its own problems in the form of mass migration etc.
There was a recent academic paper published in the UK that suggested the way to fix global warming is rationing. Rationing petrol, limiting long haul flights, even giving people a non-tradeable 'carbon allowance' on a credit-card style carbon card. Do that and there *will* be riots, and I'll be out there with the rioters. It's proper "you will eat ze bugs" stuff. It's utterly dystopian, but this is where the bien pensant intelligentsia is starting to coalesce.
Squint hard enough at the horizon, and you can see where all of this stuff will lead in twenty, thirty years time.
We aren't struck between a rock and a hard place, because degrowth would never do anything anyway.
Driving a low fuel efficiency 5% less doesn't get you to net zero, as you still have 95% of the emissions being released. Flying a bit less doesn't get you there either, as you still have almost all of the emissions there too. Having fewer children won't get you there, since the overwhelming majority who'd be alive in 2050 are already alive today anyway.
This is where "Green" fanatics are completely ungreen and unscientific. They've got the wrong solution to the right problem. Trying to tackle climate change by consuming less is about as successful as trying to tackle obesity by eating one fewer sweet per week.
We need a wholesale transformation to tackle climate change and the only solution to that is science and technology. Not driving less, but driving clean. Not consuming less, but consuming clean. Not flying less, but flying clean. Clean technologies, not fewer people or fewer commodities.
That's pure entitlement. Yes, we'll tackle climate change, but only if I'm not inconvenienced in any way. Otherwise, sorry world.
There are some Greens who are rather upset at the technological solutions to climate change. As one put it to me - "Net zero means unconstrained future growth."
It is perfectly possible to get to Net Zero, without dismantling human society.
We can do 45% of Britain's entire commitment by spreading basalt on fields apparently.
Easy fix then.
Drill a hole through the Earths mantle. Fire a nuclear missile down it. This will cause a massive flood basalt eruption that will cover the entire country in lava.
As a small side effect a chunk of the earths crust may break away and become a new moon.
Isabel Oakeshott is doing a very impressive job of trashing what is left of her reputation.
Admits to signing an NDA with Mr Hancock, then handed the whole lot over to the Telegraph when it became convenient, whilst furiously demanding that her 'duty to the public' (or something) required her action, and she occupies the moral high ground.
In local news, there's an interesting double by-election in Littlemore & Rose Hill today, one of the more working class parts of Oxford. Both city and county seats are up for election. Both were held by Labour, though by two different councillors (the county one was beyond hopeless and had, I believe, the worst attendance record on the whole council; I don't know the city one at all; it seems curious that they resigned at the same time).
Littlemore has one of Oxford's much-discussed Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes. There's an Independent standing on a platform of opposition to it, and the Tories have come out against it too (even though they pushed LTNs, and implemented several, while in control of the county council).
The LibDems and Greens aren't making much of an effort - Littlemore isn't fertile territory for either of them. As usual for East Oxford there are TUSC candidates too.
I think it'll come down to Labour vs Independent, and if pushed I'd say Labour will hold it, but it's far from a done deal.
An interesting set of by-elections indeed.
The (less advanced) Cambridge equivalent Low Traffic Neighbourhood Scheme is already developing into a battleground between familiar stereotypes.
The bicycling lefty dons versus the hard-working poor. The intellectual elite versus the struggling, down-to-earth workers.
For example, my brother-in-law (staunch Labour) literally cannot contain his rage about it. I have never seen him angrier.
Prediction -- this is the new Brexit.
This is Farage's next Big Issue. It is tailor-made to pit one section of Labour voters against another section.
I don't think it will be. People will still revert to their party of choice at local elections. Gateshead and Newcastle implemented some crackers road schemes around COVID which were widely, and vocally opposed.
A few minor concessions to people whose lives it disrupted.
Come the next local elections they still retained the councils and the councillor base.
A slightly odd turn. Perhaps some of those Catholic Protestants I’ve been hearing about?
I do wonder how much of this went on during the Troubles but got masked by the noise. The paramilitaries needed destabilisation to be able to justify their existence and if the other side aren't pulling their weight then killing a few of your own and blaming the opposition seems an obvious ruse.
So... Greta Thurnberg. Apparently the climate emergency is so vast that we must all change the way we live, at a vast cost to economies and people's welfare.
Yet wind turbines cannot be built on the land of indigenous peoples in Norway, for ... reasons.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people,” Thunberg told Reuters on Monday."
Why do only the rights of indigenous people matter? Why should any of us suffer by progressing green energy faster than the economy can sustain?
(Dons flameproof coat)
You feel she's insufficiently fanatical? The consensus view among most people concerned about climate change is that we do need to take substantial action including lifestyle changes, but not that absolutely no other considerations can be made. We can argue about whether indigenous rights are important (I'm not much bothered about them, but Scandinavians do tend to feel differently), but it doesn't invalidate her position to concede the need for some exceptions.
Or Welsh Labour's stupid cancellation of the entire road building program.
I'm not arguing against work to prevent climate change; just that we have to pick a pace that doesn't help send people into food and other types of poverty, and allows us to grow and improve as a country and society.
It's probably better to pick a pace that actually avoids disastrous climate change. You don't win a war by dedicating only enough resources that still allow you to "grow and improve as a country and society"; you dedicate enough resources to win it, even if that means some hardship in the short term.
Good. So when people complain about not being able to afford energy bills, or food (growing and transporting food requires energy), you'll accept that these policies have a detrimental effect? Or will it all be the government's fault?
I am not against trying to combat climate change. It's just that we need to balance that with the needs of the people.
Obviously we need to combat climate change in a way that mitigates hardship as far as possible, but in the end the necessary pace needs to be dictated by the desired result rather than the need to avoid inconvenience. Otherwise our epitaph may be, "Sorry we messed up the world kids, but it turned out there was no way that we could stop it without compromising our standard of living." That's not really a good look.
If the world economy grows at ~3.5% per annum, it doubles in size approximately every twenty years. The unpleasant truth is that if we want to tackle climate change in a meaningful way, we need to pursue degrowth, both of the economy, and of the global population. Not only does that mean an inevitable decline in living standards, it also creates a demographic problem for the future - too many old people and not enough bum wipers, essentially.
But moreover, it's also a thoroughly western-centric attitude that says "hey, we got rich burning dead dinosaurs, now, rest of the world, you've got to accept declining living standards even though you never attained western standards of wealth and prosperity". And most of the developing world simply is not going to accept that.
To be honest, the developed world isn't going to accept declining living standards, either. People in democracies aren't going to vote for policies that make them worse off, no matter how well intended.
That leaves technological advancement as our sole route out of this, whether that be carbon capture, fusion technology, even weather control (I know, I stray into the realms of science fiction here). But in any climate change scenario you need to start from the base case that people will not accept declining living standards without voting out / overthrowing their governments, and accept that developing nations will not accept de-growth foisted on them by western powers.
AI is going to make all of this irrelevant in good and bad ways. You’re worrying about the rural economy on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution
AI as we currently have it, LLMs and ChatGPT, won't make our economy greener - the simple fact is that if the world economy doubles in size every 20 years or so, the amount of resources we consume becomes much bigger. AI isn't gonna stop the developing world wanting cars, fast food and air conditioning. Sure, maybe AGI will come along in the next few years and it will be all powerful and all knowing and it will teach us fusion technology and the like in minutes. But belief in the singularity is a little bit of hand waving and faith in an AI god.
Many of the most important technological advancements of the 20th century - the production line, the automobile, etc, did not reduce our impact on the enivronment. Rather, thay made it orders of magnitude worse. Of course, there are some technologies - nuclear power etc - that reduce our impact on the environment. But to suggest that more technology = less environmental impact as the default state simply isn't true...
It's not a default - but clearly technology, and in particular cheap power from renewables, enables all kinds of possibilities. Energy production is at the root of the climate change problem, and will also determine if and how it is solved.
I don't disagree with your point that massive lifestyle changes will be necessary. I just don't believe that all of them are necessarily going to be negative ones.
Look at the academic literature and you'll see an emerging consensus among the intelligentsia for hair shirts and degrowth. I'm not saying that's right, but I am saying that's where you can see a consensus is emerging.
The idea of rationing petrol, long haul flights, even meat consumption, would have been laughed out of the room even a decade ago. Now, it's an idea that's being taken seriously in academia.
Personally, I think such ideas are borne out of an institutional hatred towards capitalism and an inherent bias against consumption as being bourgeois and decadent. But that doesn't mean these ideas will not be taken very, very seriously by higher ups.
While there are some mitigations, e.g. clean power, circular economy, EVs etc, the fact is the vast majority of the developing world wants a western-style lifestyle and that will necessitate orders of magnitude more consumption in the next 50 years or so.
It's my belief that development of green technologies will not substantially mitigate the massive increase in consumption in developing economies. Then again, nor will wearing hair shirts and reducing our own consumption in the west make a significant impact. This is why, earlier in the thread, I said I think we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Rationing long-haul flights is hardly "hairshirt" - there are loads of people who have never been on a long-haul flight in their lives - and seems like a very sensible idea in some form.
Manufacturing aviation fuel from zero carbon sources is already in the trial stage.
Sadly Sky are reporting that there is no clear net zero alternative to jet fuel.
Quite like the reference to guilt free flying. I never feel guilty flying. Far from it.
So... Greta Thurnberg. Apparently the climate emergency is so vast that we must all change the way we live, at a vast cost to economies and people's welfare.
Yet wind turbines cannot be built on the land of indigenous peoples in Norway, for ... reasons.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people,” Thunberg told Reuters on Monday."
Why do only the rights of indigenous people matter? Why should any of us suffer by progressing green energy faster than the economy can sustain?
(Dons flameproof coat)
You feel she's insufficiently fanatical? The consensus view among most people concerned about climate change is that we do need to take substantial action including lifestyle changes, but not that absolutely no other considerations can be made. We can argue about whether indigenous rights are important (I'm not much bothered about them, but Scandinavians do tend to feel differently), but it doesn't invalidate her position to concede the need for some exceptions.
Or Welsh Labour's stupid cancellation of the entire road building program.
I'm not arguing against work to prevent climate change; just that we have to pick a pace that doesn't help send people into food and other types of poverty, and allows us to grow and improve as a country and society.
It's probably better to pick a pace that actually avoids disastrous climate change. You don't win a war by dedicating only enough resources that still allow you to "grow and improve as a country and society"; you dedicate enough resources to win it, even if that means some hardship in the short term.
Good. So when people complain about not being able to afford energy bills, or food (growing and transporting food requires energy), you'll accept that these policies have a detrimental effect? Or will it all be the government's fault?
I am not against trying to combat climate change. It's just that we need to balance that with the needs of the people.
Obviously we need to combat climate change in a way that mitigates hardship as far as possible, but in the end the necessary pace needs to be dictated by the desired result rather than the need to avoid inconvenience. Otherwise our epitaph may be, "Sorry we messed up the world kids, but it turned out there was no way that we could stop it without compromising our standard of living." That's not really a good look.
If the world economy grows at ~3.5% per annum, it doubles in size approximately every twenty years. The unpleasant truth is that if we want to tackle climate change in a meaningful way, we need to pursue degrowth, both of the economy, and of the global population. Not only does that mean an inevitable decline in living standards, it also creates a demographic problem for the future - too many old people and not enough bum wipers, essentially.
But moreover, it's also a thoroughly western-centric attitude that says "hey, we got rich burning dead dinosaurs, now, rest of the world, you've got to accept declining living standards even though you never attained western standards of wealth and prosperity". And most of the developing world simply is not going to accept that.
To be honest, the developed world isn't going to accept declining living standards, either. People in democracies aren't going to vote for policies that make them worse off, no matter how well intended.
That leaves technological advancement as our sole route out of this, whether that be carbon capture, fusion technology, even weather control (I know, I stray into the realms of science fiction here). But in any climate change scenario you need to start from the base case that people will not accept declining living standards without voting out / overthrowing their governments, and accept that developing nations will not accept de-growth foisted on them by western powers.
We need to pursue growth via clean technologies. End of story. Any notions of degrowth are ridiculous nonsense, technology is both the cause of and solution to life's problems.
Yep. Improvement in technology is our only way out of this, but it strikes me as extremely unlikely we'll get there in time. And, as you rightly point out, degrowth is completely unpalatable to both western and developing nations. So we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, where there is clearly going to be substantial climate change over the next 50 years or so, which is going to present its own problems in the form of mass migration etc.
There was a recent academic paper published in the UK that suggested the way to fix global warming is rationing. Rationing petrol, limiting long haul flights, even giving people a non-tradeable 'carbon allowance' on a credit-card style carbon card. Do that and there *will* be riots, and I'll be out there with the rioters. It's proper "you will eat ze bugs" stuff. It's utterly dystopian, but this is where the bien pensant intelligentsia is starting to coalesce.
Squint hard enough at the horizon, and you can see where all of this stuff will lead in twenty, thirty years time.
We aren't struck between a rock and a hard place, because degrowth would never do anything anyway.
Driving a low fuel efficiency 5% less doesn't get you to net zero, as you still have 95% of the emissions being released. Flying a bit less doesn't get you there either, as you still have almost all of the emissions there too. Having fewer children won't get you there, since the overwhelming majority who'd be alive in 2050 are already alive today anyway.
This is where "Green" fanatics are completely ungreen and unscientific. They've got the wrong solution to the right problem. Trying to tackle climate change by consuming less is about as successful as trying to tackle obesity by eating one fewer sweet per week.
We need a wholesale transformation to tackle climate change and the only solution to that is science and technology. Not driving less, but driving clean. Not consuming less, but consuming clean. Not flying less, but flying clean. Clean technologies, not fewer people or fewer commodities.
That's pure entitlement. Yes, we'll tackle climate change, but only if I'm not inconvenienced in any way. Otherwise, sorry world.
There are some Greens who are rather upset at the technological solutions to climate change. As one put it to me - "Net zero means unconstrained future growth."
It is perfectly possible to get to Net Zero, without dismantling human society.
We can do 45% of Britain's entire commitment by spreading basalt on fields apparently.
Easy fix then.
Drill a hole through the Earths mantle. Fire a nuclear missile down it. This will cause a massive flood basalt eruption that will cover the entire country in lava.
As a small side effect a chunk of the earths crust may break away and become a new moon.
That would devastate the country - a disaster only partially offset by the improvement to Milton Keynes.
In local news, there's an interesting double by-election in Littlemore & Rose Hill today, one of the more working class parts of Oxford. Both city and county seats are up for election. Both were held by Labour, though by two different councillors (the county one was beyond hopeless and had, I believe, the worst attendance record on the whole council; I don't know the city one at all; it seems curious that they resigned at the same time).
Littlemore has one of Oxford's much-discussed Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes. There's an Independent standing on a platform of opposition to it, and the Tories have come out against it too (even though they pushed LTNs, and implemented several, while in control of the county council).
The LibDems and Greens aren't making much of an effort - Littlemore isn't fertile territory for either of them. As usual for East Oxford there are TUSC candidates too.
I think it'll come down to Labour vs Independent, and if pushed I'd say Labour will hold it, but it's far from a done deal.
An interesting set of by-elections indeed.
The (less advanced) Cambridge equivalent Low Traffic Neighbourhood Scheme is already developing into a battleground between familiar stereotypes.
The bicycling lefty dons versus the hard-working poor. The intellectual elite versus the struggling, down-to-earth workers.
For example, my brother-in-law (staunch Labour) literally cannot contain his rage about it. I have never seen him angrier.
Prediction -- this is the new Brexit.
This is Farage's next Big Issue. It is tailor-made to pit one section of Labour voters against another section.
I don't think it will be. People will still revert to their party of choice at local elections. Gateshead and Newcastle implemented some crackers road schemes around COVID which were widely, and vocally opposed.
A few minor concessions to people whose lives it disrupted.
Come the next local elections they still retained the councils and the councillor base.
Probably because all the parties agreed on the nonsense - that's certainly the case with the absurd bike lanes in my part of the world.
Isabel Oakeshott is doing a very impressive job of trashing what is left of her reputation.
Admits to signing an NDA with Mr Hancock, then handed the whole lot over to the Telegraph when it became convenient, whilst furiously demanding that her 'duty to the public' (or something) required her action, and she occupies the moral high ground.
I am no Tory and even less so a Hancock fan, but I’m finding the PB hot takes that somehow this is all Hancock’s fault and “he only has himself to blame” very hard to swallow.
Hancock is guilty of being rather credulous and somewhat dim - which will come as news to precisely nobody.
In contrast, the odious Oakeshott has broken client confidentiality (both implicit and explicit) and breached - yet again - the golden rule of her trade: never reveal your sources.
She is an utter disgrace to her profession and deserves never to work as a journalist again.
Isabel Oakeshott is doing a very impressive job of trashing what is left of her reputation.
Admits to signing an NDA with Mr Hancock, then handed the whole lot over to the Telegraph when it became convenient, whilst furiously demanding that her 'duty to the public' (or something) required her action, and she occupies the moral high ground.
I never liked Cameron, but her smearing of him over the clearly completely fabricated pig thing showed she was human filth. She admitted she had one deranged source and when challenged on it said it was just a book so can't be expected to have integrity standards. Awful woman.
In local news, there's an interesting double by-election in Littlemore & Rose Hill today, one of the more working class parts of Oxford. Both city and county seats are up for election. Both were held by Labour, though by two different councillors (the county one was beyond hopeless and had, I believe, the worst attendance record on the whole council; I don't know the city one at all; it seems curious that they resigned at the same time).
Littlemore has one of Oxford's much-discussed Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes. There's an Independent standing on a platform of opposition to it, and the Tories have come out against it too (even though they pushed LTNs, and implemented several, while in control of the county council).
The LibDems and Greens aren't making much of an effort - Littlemore isn't fertile territory for either of them. As usual for East Oxford there are TUSC candidates too.
I think it'll come down to Labour vs Independent, and if pushed I'd say Labour will hold it, but it's far from a done deal.
An interesting set of by-elections indeed.
The (less advanced) Cambridge equivalent Low Traffic Neighbourhood Scheme is already developing into a battleground between familiar stereotypes.
The bicycling lefty dons versus the hard-working poor. The intellectual elite versus the struggling, down-to-earth workers.
A slightly odd turn. Perhaps some of those Catholic Protestants I’ve been hearing about?
I do wonder how much of this went on during the Troubles but got masked by the noise. The paramilitaries needed destabilisation to be able to justify their existence and if the other side aren't pulling their weight then killing a few of your own and blaming the opposition seems an obvious ruse.
As a rule, both sides were rubbish at hiding who killed whom. Proving it was a different issue. The speciality was "I was in this bar with 107 close mates, who will all swear..."
As to the reason - probably he was getting too good at digging into their criminal activities.
Isabel Oakeshott is doing a very impressive job of trashing what is left of her reputation.
Admits to signing an NDA with Mr Hancock, then handed the whole lot over to the Telegraph when it became convenient, whilst furiously demanding that her 'duty to the public' (or something) required her action, and she occupies the moral high ground.
I never liked Cameron, but her smearing of him over the clearly completely fabricated pig thing showed she was human filth. She admitted she had one deranged source and when challenged on it said it was just a book so can't be expected to have integrity standards. Awful woman.
She is awful, absolutely. a vile character. How anyone can trust her I don't know.
This doesn't improve her either. Making claims Hancock threatened her and then refusing to share what the supposed threat was.
Isabel Oakeshott is doing a very impressive job of trashing what is left of her reputation.
Admits to signing an NDA with Mr Hancock, then handed the whole lot over to the Telegraph when it became convenient, whilst furiously demanding that her 'duty to the public' (or something) required her action, and she occupies the moral high ground.
I am no Tory and even less so a Hancock fan, but I’m finding the PB hot takes that somehow this is all Hancock’s fault and “he only has himself to blame” very hard to swallow.
Hancock is guilty of being rather credulous and somewhat dim - which will come as news to precisely nobody.
In contrast, the odious Oakeshott has broken client confidentiality (both implicit and explicit) and breached - yet again - the golden rule of her trade: never reveal your sources.
She is an utter disgrace to her profession and deserves never to work as a journalist again.
He was an idiot for trusting Oakeshott, given her record and behaviour.
Isabel Oakeshott is doing a very impressive job of trashing what is left of her reputation.
Admits to signing an NDA with Mr Hancock, then handed the whole lot over to the Telegraph when it became convenient, whilst furiously demanding that her 'duty to the public' (or something) required her action, and she occupies the moral high ground.
I never liked Cameron, but her smearing of him over the clearly completely fabricated pig thing showed she was human filth. She admitted she had one deranged source and when challenged on it said it was just a book so can't be expected to have integrity standards. Awful woman.
How do you know for sure the pig thing was fabricated? Are you trying to spin a picture of David being utterly square in his youth, has never ritually ate swan for example, he never woke up in bed to sight of Boris standing on a table hacking golf balls out a window etc?
In local news, there's an interesting double by-election in Littlemore & Rose Hill today, one of the more working class parts of Oxford. Both city and county seats are up for election. Both were held by Labour, though by two different councillors (the county one was beyond hopeless and had, I believe, the worst attendance record on the whole council; I don't know the city one at all; it seems curious that they resigned at the same time).
Littlemore has one of Oxford's much-discussed Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes. There's an Independent standing on a platform of opposition to it, and the Tories have come out against it too (even though they pushed LTNs, and implemented several, while in control of the county council).
The LibDems and Greens aren't making much of an effort - Littlemore isn't fertile territory for either of them. As usual for East Oxford there are TUSC candidates too.
I think it'll come down to Labour vs Independent, and if pushed I'd say Labour will hold it, but it's far from a done deal.
An interesting set of by-elections indeed.
The (less advanced) Cambridge equivalent Low Traffic Neighbourhood Scheme is already developing into a battleground between familiar stereotypes.
The bicycling lefty dons versus the hard-working poor. The intellectual elite versus the struggling, down-to-earth workers.
For example, my brother-in-law (staunch Labour) literally cannot contain his rage about it. I have never seen him angrier.
Prediction -- this is the new Brexit.
This is Farage's next Big Issue. It is tailor-made to pit one section of Labour voters against another section.
I'm not convinced it's the new Brexit, as it's an issue imo with strictly limited mileage. I think that perhaps the "working class", like "disabled people", are being used as human shields by various quite-Right political types.
We are seeing increasing evidence that what Khan is doing in London is working.
What are the protestors proposing as their tool to meet legally binding emissions targets, which have been delegated down by the Government, should the LEZ and so on be cancelled?
A workplace parking levy might make more sense for Cambridge, and it's notable that quite a lot of places are now cancelling low-emission zones, as they are meeting emissions targets.
Among those who haven't done very much are the mainly Tory Outer London Boroughs who are now moaning their heads off, and LD Boroughs who want a delay. Examples of London Boroughs:
So... Greta Thurnberg. Apparently the climate emergency is so vast that we must all change the way we live, at a vast cost to economies and people's welfare.
Yet wind turbines cannot be built on the land of indigenous peoples in Norway, for ... reasons.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people,” Thunberg told Reuters on Monday."
Why do only the rights of indigenous people matter? Why should any of us suffer by progressing green energy faster than the economy can sustain?
(Dons flameproof coat)
You feel she's insufficiently fanatical? The consensus view among most people concerned about climate change is that we do need to take substantial action including lifestyle changes, but not that absolutely no other considerations can be made. We can argue about whether indigenous rights are important (I'm not much bothered about them, but Scandinavians do tend to feel differently), but it doesn't invalidate her position to concede the need for some exceptions.
Or Welsh Labour's stupid cancellation of the entire road building program.
I'm not arguing against work to prevent climate change; just that we have to pick a pace that doesn't help send people into food and other types of poverty, and allows us to grow and improve as a country and society.
It's probably better to pick a pace that actually avoids disastrous climate change. You don't win a war by dedicating only enough resources that still allow you to "grow and improve as a country and society"; you dedicate enough resources to win it, even if that means some hardship in the short term.
Good. So when people complain about not being able to afford energy bills, or food (growing and transporting food requires energy), you'll accept that these policies have a detrimental effect? Or will it all be the government's fault?
I am not against trying to combat climate change. It's just that we need to balance that with the needs of the people.
Obviously we need to combat climate change in a way that mitigates hardship as far as possible, but in the end the necessary pace needs to be dictated by the desired result rather than the need to avoid inconvenience. Otherwise our epitaph may be, "Sorry we messed up the world kids, but it turned out there was no way that we could stop it without compromising our standard of living." That's not really a good look.
If the world economy grows at ~3.5% per annum, it doubles in size approximately every twenty years. The unpleasant truth is that if we want to tackle climate change in a meaningful way, we need to pursue degrowth, both of the economy, and of the global population. Not only does that mean an inevitable decline in living standards, it also creates a demographic problem for the future - too many old people and not enough bum wipers, essentially.
But moreover, it's also a thoroughly western-centric attitude that says "hey, we got rich burning dead dinosaurs, now, rest of the world, you've got to accept declining living standards even though you never attained western standards of wealth and prosperity". And most of the developing world simply is not going to accept that.
To be honest, the developed world isn't going to accept declining living standards, either. People in democracies aren't going to vote for policies that make them worse off, no matter how well intended.
That leaves technological advancement as our sole route out of this, whether that be carbon capture, fusion technology, even weather control (I know, I stray into the realms of science fiction here). But in any climate change scenario you need to start from the base case that people will not accept declining living standards without voting out / overthrowing their governments, and accept that developing nations will not accept de-growth foisted on them by western powers.
AI is going to make all of this irrelevant in good and bad ways. You’re worrying about the rural economy on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution
AI as we currently have it, LLMs and ChatGPT, won't make our economy greener - the simple fact is that if the world economy doubles in size every 20 years or so, the amount of resources we consume becomes much bigger. AI isn't gonna stop the developing world wanting cars, fast food and air conditioning. Sure, maybe AGI will come along in the next few years and it will be all powerful and all knowing and it will teach us fusion technology and the like in minutes. But belief in the singularity is a little bit of hand waving and faith in an AI god.
Many of the most important technological advancements of the 20th century - the production line, the automobile, etc, did not reduce our impact on the enivronment. Rather, thay made it orders of magnitude worse. Of course, there are some technologies - nuclear power etc - that reduce our impact on the environment. But to suggest that more technology = less environmental impact as the default state simply isn't true...
It's not a default - but clearly technology, and in particular cheap power from renewables, enables all kinds of possibilities. Energy production is at the root of the climate change problem, and will also determine if and how it is solved.
I don't disagree with your point that massive lifestyle changes will be necessary. I just don't believe that all of them are necessarily going to be negative ones.
Look at the academic literature and you'll see an emerging consensus among the intelligentsia for hair shirts and degrowth. I'm not saying that's right, but I am saying that's where you can see a consensus is emerging.
The idea of rationing petrol, long haul flights, even meat consumption, would have been laughed out of the room even a decade ago. Now, it's an idea that's being taken seriously in academia.
Personally, I think such ideas are borne out of an institutional hatred towards capitalism and an inherent bias against consumption as being bourgeois and decadent. But that doesn't mean these ideas will not be taken very, very seriously by higher ups.
While there are some mitigations, e.g. clean power, circular economy, EVs etc, the fact is the vast majority of the developing world wants a western-style lifestyle and that will necessitate orders of magnitude more consumption in the next 50 years or so.
It's my belief that development of green technologies will not substantially mitigate the massive increase in consumption in developing economies. Then again, nor will wearing hair shirts and reducing our own consumption in the west make a significant impact. This is why, earlier in the thread, I said I think we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Rationing long-haul flights is hardly "hairshirt" - there are loads of people who have never been on a long-haul flight in their lives - and seems like a very sensible idea in some form.
Manufacturing aviation fuel from zero carbon sources is already in the trial stage.
Sadly Sky are reporting that there is no clear net zero alternative to jet fuel.
Quite like the reference to guilt free flying. I never feel guilty flying. Far from it.
Isabel Oakeshott is doing a very impressive job of trashing what is left of her reputation.
Admits to signing an NDA with Mr Hancock, then handed the whole lot over to the Telegraph when it became convenient, whilst furiously demanding that her 'duty to the public' (or something) required her action, and she occupies the moral high ground.
I am no Tory and even less so a Hancock fan, but I’m finding the PB hot takes that somehow this is all Hancock’s fault and “he only has himself to blame” very hard to swallow.
Hancock is guilty of being rather credulous and somewhat dim - which will come as news to precisely nobody.
In contrast, the odious Oakeshott has broken client confidentiality (both implicit and explicit) and breached - yet again - the golden rule of her trade: never reveal your sources.
She is an utter disgrace to her profession and deserves never to work as a journalist again.
He was an idiot for trusting Oakeshott, given her record and behaviour.
She is also a disgrace.
Given her reputation as a political operator, what was Hancock hoping to achieve by using her as a ghostwriter?
Isabel Oakeshott is doing a very impressive job of trashing what is left of her reputation.
Admits to signing an NDA with Mr Hancock, then handed the whole lot over to the Telegraph when it became convenient, whilst furiously demanding that her 'duty to the public' (or something) required her action, and she occupies the moral high ground.
I am no Tory and even less so a Hancock fan, but I’m finding the PB hot takes that somehow this is all Hancock’s fault and “he only has himself to blame” very hard to swallow.
Hancock is guilty of being rather credulous and somewhat dim - which will come as news to precisely nobody.
In contrast, the odious Oakeshott has broken client confidentiality (both implicit and explicit) and breached - yet again - the golden rule of her trade: never reveal your sources.
She is an utter disgrace to her profession and deserves never to work as a journalist again.
Well I did, and do, buy into that "hot take" because of her track record. Leopards don't change their spots.
The only worthwhile quote the multi banned old soak, back with a new sock, Ishmael made here was "when someones shows you who they are, believe them" and she has demonstrated who she is ably.
A slightly odd turn. Perhaps some of those Catholic Protestants I’ve been hearing about?
I do wonder how much of this went on during the Troubles but got masked by the noise. The paramilitaries needed destabilisation to be able to justify their existence and if the other side aren't pulling their weight then killing a few of your own and blaming the opposition seems an obvious ruse.
From what I can tell from a distance the paramilitaries on both sides are involved in standard criminality. I guess taking out a cop that does his job efficiently (no idea if this is the case in this instance) and blaming it on the other side is always a possibility.
So... Greta Thurnberg. Apparently the climate emergency is so vast that we must all change the way we live, at a vast cost to economies and people's welfare.
Yet wind turbines cannot be built on the land of indigenous peoples in Norway, for ... reasons.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people,” Thunberg told Reuters on Monday."
Why do only the rights of indigenous people matter? Why should any of us suffer by progressing green energy faster than the economy can sustain?
(Dons flameproof coat)
You feel she's insufficiently fanatical? The consensus view among most people concerned about climate change is that we do need to take substantial action including lifestyle changes, but not that absolutely no other considerations can be made. We can argue about whether indigenous rights are important (I'm not much bothered about them, but Scandinavians do tend to feel differently), but it doesn't invalidate her position to concede the need for some exceptions.
Or Welsh Labour's stupid cancellation of the entire road building program.
I'm not arguing against work to prevent climate change; just that we have to pick a pace that doesn't help send people into food and other types of poverty, and allows us to grow and improve as a country and society.
It's probably better to pick a pace that actually avoids disastrous climate change. You don't win a war by dedicating only enough resources that still allow you to "grow and improve as a country and society"; you dedicate enough resources to win it, even if that means some hardship in the short term.
Good. So when people complain about not being able to afford energy bills, or food (growing and transporting food requires energy), you'll accept that these policies have a detrimental effect? Or will it all be the government's fault?
I am not against trying to combat climate change. It's just that we need to balance that with the needs of the people.
Obviously we need to combat climate change in a way that mitigates hardship as far as possible, but in the end the necessary pace needs to be dictated by the desired result rather than the need to avoid inconvenience. Otherwise our epitaph may be, "Sorry we messed up the world kids, but it turned out there was no way that we could stop it without compromising our standard of living." That's not really a good look.
If the world economy grows at ~3.5% per annum, it doubles in size approximately every twenty years. The unpleasant truth is that if we want to tackle climate change in a meaningful way, we need to pursue degrowth, both of the economy, and of the global population. Not only does that mean an inevitable decline in living standards, it also creates a demographic problem for the future - too many old people and not enough bum wipers, essentially.
But moreover, it's also a thoroughly western-centric attitude that says "hey, we got rich burning dead dinosaurs, now, rest of the world, you've got to accept declining living standards even though you never attained western standards of wealth and prosperity". And most of the developing world simply is not going to accept that.
To be honest, the developed world isn't going to accept declining living standards, either. People in democracies aren't going to vote for policies that make them worse off, no matter how well intended.
That leaves technological advancement as our sole route out of this, whether that be carbon capture, fusion technology, even weather control (I know, I stray into the realms of science fiction here). But in any climate change scenario you need to start from the base case that people will not accept declining living standards without voting out / overthrowing their governments, and accept that developing nations will not accept de-growth foisted on them by western powers.
AI is going to make all of this irrelevant in good and bad ways. You’re worrying about the rural economy on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution
AI as we currently have it, LLMs and ChatGPT, won't make our economy greener - the simple fact is that if the world economy doubles in size every 20 years or so, the amount of resources we consume becomes much bigger. AI isn't gonna stop the developing world wanting cars, fast food and air conditioning. Sure, maybe AGI will come along in the next few years and it will be all powerful and all knowing and it will teach us fusion technology and the like in minutes. But belief in the singularity is a little bit of hand waving and faith in an AI god.
Many of the most important technological advancements of the 20th century - the production line, the automobile, etc, did not reduce our impact on the enivronment. Rather, thay made it orders of magnitude worse. Of course, there are some technologies - nuclear power etc - that reduce our impact on the environment. But to suggest that more technology = less environmental impact as the default state simply isn't true...
It's not a default - but clearly technology, and in particular cheap power from renewables, enables all kinds of possibilities. Energy production is at the root of the climate change problem, and will also determine if and how it is solved.
I don't disagree with your point that massive lifestyle changes will be necessary. I just don't believe that all of them are necessarily going to be negative ones.
Look at the academic literature and you'll see an emerging consensus among the intelligentsia for hair shirts and degrowth. I'm not saying that's right, but I am saying that's where you can see a consensus is emerging.
The idea of rationing petrol, long haul flights, even meat consumption, would have been laughed out of the room even a decade ago. Now, it's an idea that's being taken seriously in academia.
Personally, I think such ideas are borne out of an institutional hatred towards capitalism and an inherent bias against consumption as being bourgeois and decadent. But that doesn't mean these ideas will not be taken very, very seriously by higher ups.
While there are some mitigations, e.g. clean power, circular economy, EVs etc, the fact is the vast majority of the developing world wants a western-style lifestyle and that will necessitate orders of magnitude more consumption in the next 50 years or so.
It's my belief that development of green technologies will not substantially mitigate the massive increase in consumption in developing economies. Then again, nor will wearing hair shirts and reducing our own consumption in the west make a significant impact. This is why, earlier in the thread, I said I think we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Rationing long-haul flights is hardly "hairshirt" - there are loads of people who have never been on a long-haul flight in their lives - and seems like a very sensible idea in some form.
Manufacturing aviation fuel from zero carbon sources is already in the trial stage.
Sadly Sky are reporting that there is no clear net zero alternative to jet fuel.
Quite like the reference to guilt free flying. I never feel guilty flying. Far from it.
I don't think Oakeshott is acting alone. Richard Tice is leader of Reform. Reform is virulently anti-lockdown and generally sceptical about the Covid "truth". Oakeshott is, of course, Tice's other half (I believe). And, of course, she went to the Telegraph because their stance has also become increasingly anti-lockdown (especially in hindsight, of course).
Isabel Oakeshott is doing a very impressive job of trashing what is left of her reputation.
Admits to signing an NDA with Mr Hancock, then handed the whole lot over to the Telegraph when it became convenient, whilst furiously demanding that her 'duty to the public' (or something) required her action, and she occupies the moral high ground.
I never liked Cameron, but her smearing of him over the clearly completely fabricated pig thing showed she was human filth. She admitted she had one deranged source and when challenged on it said it was just a book so can't be expected to have integrity standards. Awful woman.
How do you know for sure the pig thing was fabricated? Are you trying to spin a picture of David being utterly square in his youth, has never ritually ate swan for example, he never woke up in bed to sight of Boris standing on a table hacking golf balls out a window etc?
Never forget John Major tucking his shirt into his underpants.
Isabel Oakeshott is doing a very impressive job of trashing what is left of her reputation.
Admits to signing an NDA with Mr Hancock, then handed the whole lot over to the Telegraph when it became convenient, whilst furiously demanding that her 'duty to the public' (or something) required her action, and she occupies the moral high ground.
I am no Tory and even less so a Hancock fan, but I’m finding the PB hot takes that somehow this is all Hancock’s fault and “he only has himself to blame” very hard to swallow.
Hancock is guilty of being rather credulous and somewhat dim - which will come as news to precisely nobody.
In contrast, the odious Oakeshott has broken client confidentiality (both implicit and explicit) and breached - yet again - the golden rule of her trade: never reveal your sources.
She is an utter disgrace to her profession and deserves never to work as a journalist again.
The mere fact she is a very famous journalist and gets top drawer gigs, doesn’t prove she has made herself to top of her business in your opinion? You sure you know how this trade works? A journalist can only be any good if you like them?
Isabel Oakeshott is doing a very impressive job of trashing what is left of her reputation.
Admits to signing an NDA with Mr Hancock, then handed the whole lot over to the Telegraph when it became convenient, whilst furiously demanding that her 'duty to the public' (or something) required her action, and she occupies the moral high ground.
I never liked Cameron, but her smearing of him over the clearly completely fabricated pig thing showed she was human filth. She admitted she had one deranged source and when challenged on it said it was just a book so can't be expected to have integrity standards. Awful woman.
How do you know for sure the pig thing was fabricated? Are you trying to spin a picture of David being utterly square in his youth, has never ritually ate swan for example, he never woke up in bed to sight of Boris standing on a table hacking golf balls out a window etc?
"Someone, who I can't name, told me it happened, but can't give me a time, place etc. Or any other witnesses, despite it being in front a crowd, allegedly. Oh, and there is a video, but I haven't seen it, but a friend of a friend has."
When you do basic journalism classes, this the structure of a classic bullshit story.
The mistake watermelon Greens make is thinking "something must be done, this is something, so this must be done". Or that people who disagree with their proposed solutions want to see the world burn. Neither is true.
Tell people not to fly and they'll ignore you. If flights reduce marginally, that won't help the planet.
Tell people to fly on a clean flight and they might. Tax dirty flights so clean flights are cheaper, or outlaw dirty flights so only clean flights happen, and people will take clean flights.
If you're serious about climate change, get serious. Technology is serious, "lifestyle" to beat climate change is like homeopathy to beat cancer.
Currently there is no such thing as a clean flight, nor is there likely to be for some time. But a good start on would be to simply tax aviation fuel at the same level as car fuel. That would help to encourage the development of alternatives.
It's the proper free market solution. If you accept that releasing carbon dioxide into the air isn't good, it ought to be taxed to properly cover the costs of its harms...
A tax on breathing would be unpopular.
If it is per breath, then especially with knackered Sunday morning MAMILs.
In local news, there's an interesting double by-election in Littlemore & Rose Hill today, one of the more working class parts of Oxford. Both city and county seats are up for election. Both were held by Labour, though by two different councillors (the county one was beyond hopeless and had, I believe, the worst attendance record on the whole council; I don't know the city one at all; it seems curious that they resigned at the same time).
Littlemore has one of Oxford's much-discussed Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes. There's an Independent standing on a platform of opposition to it, and the Tories have come out against it too (even though they pushed LTNs, and implemented several, while in control of the county council).
The LibDems and Greens aren't making much of an effort - Littlemore isn't fertile territory for either of them. As usual for East Oxford there are TUSC candidates too.
I think it'll come down to Labour vs Independent, and if pushed I'd say Labour will hold it, but it's far from a done deal.
An interesting set of by-elections indeed.
The (less advanced) Cambridge equivalent Low Traffic Neighbourhood Scheme is already developing into a battleground between familiar stereotypes.
The bicycling lefty dons versus the hard-working poor. The intellectual elite versus the struggling, down-to-earth workers.
For example, my brother-in-law (staunch Labour) literally cannot contain his rage about it. I have never seen him angrier.
Prediction -- this is the new Brexit.
This is Farage's next Big Issue. It is tailor-made to pit one section of Labour voters against another section.
I'm not convinced it's the new Brexit, as it's an issue with strictly limited mileage. I think that perhaps the "working class", like "disabled people", are being used as human shields by various quite-Right political types.
What are the protestors proposing as their tool to meet legally binding emissions targets, which have been delegated down by the Government?
A workplace parking levy might make more sense for Cambridge, It's notable that quite a lot of places are now cancelling low-emission zones, as they are meeting emissions targets.
Among those who haven't done very much are the mainly Tory Outer London Boroughs who are now moaning their heads off, and LD Boroughs who want a delay. Examples of London Boroughs:
The one proposed for Newcastle was eagerly proposed by three councils partly for the finance.
I would be interested in some sensible analysis both pro and anti on this matter as most of the debate is either barking mad Eco Loons who think the world will end if people don't stop driving their 4x4's and barking mad right wingers who think this is all a WEF plot to install one world government.
The nearest I have found so far was from Sam Dumitriu.
So... Greta Thurnberg. Apparently the climate emergency is so vast that we must all change the way we live, at a vast cost to economies and people's welfare.
Yet wind turbines cannot be built on the land of indigenous peoples in Norway, for ... reasons.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people,” Thunberg told Reuters on Monday."
Why do only the rights of indigenous people matter? Why should any of us suffer by progressing green energy faster than the economy can sustain?
(Dons flameproof coat)
You feel she's insufficiently fanatical? The consensus view among most people concerned about climate change is that we do need to take substantial action including lifestyle changes, but not that absolutely no other considerations can be made. We can argue about whether indigenous rights are important (I'm not much bothered about them, but Scandinavians do tend to feel differently), but it doesn't invalidate her position to concede the need for some exceptions.
Or Welsh Labour's stupid cancellation of the entire road building program.
I'm not arguing against work to prevent climate change; just that we have to pick a pace that doesn't help send people into food and other types of poverty, and allows us to grow and improve as a country and society.
It's probably better to pick a pace that actually avoids disastrous climate change. You don't win a war by dedicating only enough resources that still allow you to "grow and improve as a country and society"; you dedicate enough resources to win it, even if that means some hardship in the short term.
Good. So when people complain about not being able to afford energy bills, or food (growing and transporting food requires energy), you'll accept that these policies have a detrimental effect? Or will it all be the government's fault?
I am not against trying to combat climate change. It's just that we need to balance that with the needs of the people.
Obviously we need to combat climate change in a way that mitigates hardship as far as possible, but in the end the necessary pace needs to be dictated by the desired result rather than the need to avoid inconvenience. Otherwise our epitaph may be, "Sorry we messed up the world kids, but it turned out there was no way that we could stop it without compromising our standard of living." That's not really a good look.
If the world economy grows at ~3.5% per annum, it doubles in size approximately every twenty years. The unpleasant truth is that if we want to tackle climate change in a meaningful way, we need to pursue degrowth, both of the economy, and of the global population. Not only does that mean an inevitable decline in living standards, it also creates a demographic problem for the future - too many old people and not enough bum wipers, essentially.
But moreover, it's also a thoroughly western-centric attitude that says "hey, we got rich burning dead dinosaurs, now, rest of the world, you've got to accept declining living standards even though you never attained western standards of wealth and prosperity". And most of the developing world simply is not going to accept that.
To be honest, the developed world isn't going to accept declining living standards, either. People in democracies aren't going to vote for policies that make them worse off, no matter how well intended.
That leaves technological advancement as our sole route out of this, whether that be carbon capture, fusion technology, even weather control (I know, I stray into the realms of science fiction here). But in any climate change scenario you need to start from the base case that people will not accept declining living standards without voting out / overthrowing their governments, and accept that developing nations will not accept de-growth foisted on them by western powers.
We need to pursue growth via clean technologies. End of story. Any notions of degrowth are ridiculous nonsense, technology is both the cause of and solution to life's problems.
Yep. Improvement in technology is our only way out of this, but it strikes me as extremely unlikely we'll get there in time. And, as you rightly point out, degrowth is completely unpalatable to both western and developing nations. So we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, where there is clearly going to be substantial climate change over the next 50 years or so, which is going to present its own problems in the form of mass migration etc.
There was a recent academic paper published in the UK that suggested the way to fix global warming is rationing. Rationing petrol, limiting long haul flights, even giving people a non-tradeable 'carbon allowance' on a credit-card style carbon card. Do that and there *will* be riots, and I'll be out there with the rioters. It's proper "you will eat ze bugs" stuff. It's utterly dystopian, but this is where the bien pensant intelligentsia is starting to coalesce.
Squint hard enough at the horizon, and you can see where all of this stuff will lead in twenty, thirty years time.
We aren't struck between a rock and a hard place, because degrowth would never do anything anyway.
Driving a low fuel efficiency 5% less doesn't get you to net zero, as you still have 95% of the emissions being released. Flying a bit less doesn't get you there either, as you still have almost all of the emissions there too. Having fewer children won't get you there, since the overwhelming majority who'd be alive in 2050 are already alive today anyway.
This is where "Green" fanatics are completely ungreen and unscientific. They've got the wrong solution to the right problem. Trying to tackle climate change by consuming less is about as successful as trying to tackle obesity by eating one fewer sweet per week.
We need a wholesale transformation to tackle climate change and the only solution to that is science and technology. Not driving less, but driving clean. Not consuming less, but consuming clean. Not flying less, but flying clean. Clean technologies, not fewer people or fewer commodities.
That's pure entitlement. Yes, we'll tackle climate change, but only if I'm not inconvenienced in any way. Otherwise, sorry world.
There are some Greens who are rather upset at the technological solutions to climate change. As one put it to me - "Net zero means unconstrained future growth."
It is perfectly possible to get to Net Zero, without dismantling human society.
We can do 45% of Britain's entire commitment by spreading basalt on fields apparently.
Easy fix then.
Drill a hole through the Earths mantle. Fire a nuclear missile down it. This will cause a massive flood basalt eruption that will cover the entire country in lava.
As a small side effect a chunk of the earths crust may break away and become a new moon.
Isabel Oakeshott is doing a very impressive job of trashing what is left of her reputation.
Admits to signing an NDA with Mr Hancock, then handed the whole lot over to the Telegraph when it became convenient, whilst furiously demanding that her 'duty to the public' (or something) required her action, and she occupies the moral high ground.
I am no Tory and even less so a Hancock fan, but I’m finding the PB hot takes that somehow this is all Hancock’s fault and “he only has himself to blame” very hard to swallow.
Hancock is guilty of being rather credulous and somewhat dim - which will come as news to precisely nobody.
In contrast, the odious Oakeshott has broken client confidentiality (both implicit and explicit) and breached - yet again - the golden rule of her trade: never reveal your sources.
She is an utter disgrace to her profession and deserves never to work as a journalist again.
He was an idiot for trusting Oakeshott, given her record and behaviour.
She is also a disgrace.
Given her reputation as a political operator, what was Hancock hoping to achieve by using her as a ghostwriter?
So... Greta Thurnberg. Apparently the climate emergency is so vast that we must all change the way we live, at a vast cost to economies and people's welfare.
Yet wind turbines cannot be built on the land of indigenous peoples in Norway, for ... reasons.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people,” Thunberg told Reuters on Monday."
Why do only the rights of indigenous people matter? Why should any of us suffer by progressing green energy faster than the economy can sustain?
(Dons flameproof coat)
You feel she's insufficiently fanatical? The consensus view among most people concerned about climate change is that we do need to take substantial action including lifestyle changes, but not that absolutely no other considerations can be made. We can argue about whether indigenous rights are important (I'm not much bothered about them, but Scandinavians do tend to feel differently), but it doesn't invalidate her position to concede the need for some exceptions.
Or Welsh Labour's stupid cancellation of the entire road building program.
I'm not arguing against work to prevent climate change; just that we have to pick a pace that doesn't help send people into food and other types of poverty, and allows us to grow and improve as a country and society.
It's probably better to pick a pace that actually avoids disastrous climate change. You don't win a war by dedicating only enough resources that still allow you to "grow and improve as a country and society"; you dedicate enough resources to win it, even if that means some hardship in the short term.
Good. So when people complain about not being able to afford energy bills, or food (growing and transporting food requires energy), you'll accept that these policies have a detrimental effect? Or will it all be the government's fault?
I am not against trying to combat climate change. It's just that we need to balance that with the needs of the people.
Obviously we need to combat climate change in a way that mitigates hardship as far as possible, but in the end the necessary pace needs to be dictated by the desired result rather than the need to avoid inconvenience. Otherwise our epitaph may be, "Sorry we messed up the world kids, but it turned out there was no way that we could stop it without compromising our standard of living." That's not really a good look.
If the world economy grows at ~3.5% per annum, it doubles in size approximately every twenty years. The unpleasant truth is that if we want to tackle climate change in a meaningful way, we need to pursue degrowth, both of the economy, and of the global population. Not only does that mean an inevitable decline in living standards, it also creates a demographic problem for the future - too many old people and not enough bum wipers, essentially.
But moreover, it's also a thoroughly western-centric attitude that says "hey, we got rich burning dead dinosaurs, now, rest of the world, you've got to accept declining living standards even though you never attained western standards of wealth and prosperity". And most of the developing world simply is not going to accept that.
To be honest, the developed world isn't going to accept declining living standards, either. People in democracies aren't going to vote for policies that make them worse off, no matter how well intended.
That leaves technological advancement as our sole route out of this, whether that be carbon capture, fusion technology, even weather control (I know, I stray into the realms of science fiction here). But in any climate change scenario you need to start from the base case that people will not accept declining living standards without voting out / overthrowing their governments, and accept that developing nations will not accept de-growth foisted on them by western powers.
We need to pursue growth via clean technologies. End of story. Any notions of degrowth are ridiculous nonsense, technology is both the cause of and solution to life's problems.
Yep. Improvement in technology is our only way out of this, but it strikes me as extremely unlikely we'll get there in time. And, as you rightly point out, degrowth is completely unpalatable to both western and developing nations. So we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, where there is clearly going to be substantial climate change over the next 50 years or so, which is going to present its own problems in the form of mass migration etc.
There was a recent academic paper published in the UK that suggested the way to fix global warming is rationing. Rationing petrol, limiting long haul flights, even giving people a non-tradeable 'carbon allowance' on a credit-card style carbon card. Do that and there *will* be riots, and I'll be out there with the rioters. It's proper "you will eat ze bugs" stuff. It's utterly dystopian, but this is where the bien pensant intelligentsia is starting to coalesce.
Squint hard enough at the horizon, and you can see where all of this stuff will lead in twenty, thirty years time.
We aren't struck between a rock and a hard place, because degrowth would never do anything anyway.
Driving a low fuel efficiency 5% less doesn't get you to net zero, as you still have 95% of the emissions being released. Flying a bit less doesn't get you there either, as you still have almost all of the emissions there too. Having fewer children won't get you there, since the overwhelming majority who'd be alive in 2050 are already alive today anyway.
This is where "Green" fanatics are completely ungreen and unscientific. They've got the wrong solution to the right problem. Trying to tackle climate change by consuming less is about as successful as trying to tackle obesity by eating one fewer sweet per week.
We need a wholesale transformation to tackle climate change and the only solution to that is science and technology. Not driving less, but driving clean. Not consuming less, but consuming clean. Not flying less, but flying clean. Clean technologies, not fewer people or fewer commodities.
That's pure entitlement. Yes, we'll tackle climate change, but only if I'm not inconvenienced in any way. Otherwise, sorry world.
There are some Greens who are rather upset at the technological solutions to climate change. As one put it to me - "Net zero means unconstrained future growth."
It is perfectly possible to get to Net Zero, without dismantling human society.
We can do 45% of Britain's entire commitment by spreading basalt on fields apparently.
Easy fix then.
Drill a hole through the Earths mantle. Fire a nuclear missile down it. This will cause a massive flood basalt eruption that will cover the entire country in lava.
As a small side effect a chunk of the earths crust may break away and become a new moon.
Isabel Oakeshott is doing a very impressive job of trashing what is left of her reputation.
Admits to signing an NDA with Mr Hancock, then handed the whole lot over to the Telegraph when it became convenient, whilst furiously demanding that her 'duty to the public' (or something) required her action, and she occupies the moral high ground.
I am no Tory and even less so a Hancock fan, but I’m finding the PB hot takes that somehow this is all Hancock’s fault and “he only has himself to blame” very hard to swallow.
Hancock is guilty of being rather credulous and somewhat dim - which will come as news to precisely nobody.
In contrast, the odious Oakeshott has broken client confidentiality (both implicit and explicit) and breached - yet again - the golden rule of her trade: never reveal your sources.
She is an utter disgrace to her profession and deserves never to work as a journalist again.
He was an idiot for trusting Oakeshott, given her record and behaviour.
She is also a disgrace.
Quite so, but that is rather like blaming the stupid kid in class for being pushed into the pond after he trusted a bully to show him the tadpoles.
The mistake watermelon Greens make is thinking "something must be done, this is something, so this must be done". Or that people who disagree with their proposed solutions want to see the world burn. Neither is true.
Tell people not to fly and they'll ignore you. If flights reduce marginally, that won't help the planet.
Tell people to fly on a clean flight and they might. Tax dirty flights so clean flights are cheaper, or outlaw dirty flights so only clean flights happen, and people will take clean flights.
If you're serious about climate change, get serious. Technology is serious, "lifestyle" to beat climate change is like homeopathy to beat cancer.
Currently there is no such thing as a clean flight, nor is there likely to be for some time. But a good start on would be to simply tax aviation fuel at the same level as car fuel. That would help to encourage the development of alternatives.
It's the proper free market solution. If you accept that releasing carbon dioxide into the air isn't good, it ought to be taxed to properly cover the costs of its harms...
A tax on breathing would be unpopular.
If it is per breath, then especially with knackered Sunday morning MAMILs.
Every Breath you take Every step you take Every move you make I'll be taxing you
The reception of CPTPP accession becoming a real thing is perhaps the biggest wildcard in British politics at the moment. It could potentially change the narrative on our future trajectory and will also force Starmer to be more explicit about where he stands on Brexit.
But, from a purely technical point of view he's not wrong, is he?
As far as I understand it, yes he is.
As far as I understand it medicines and other goods that are legal in the UK, but not in Europe (eg like when we legalised the vaccine before they did) couldn't previously be traded into NI but now they can.
So no, the EU rules alone don't apply, both sets of laws apply, which is what he proposed himself. If its legal in either EU or UK then its legal in NI, so long as its clearly labelled.
Isabel Oakeshott is doing a very impressive job of trashing what is left of her reputation.
Admits to signing an NDA with Mr Hancock, then handed the whole lot over to the Telegraph when it became convenient, whilst furiously demanding that her 'duty to the public' (or something) required her action, and she occupies the moral high ground.
I never liked Cameron, but her smearing of him over the clearly completely fabricated pig thing showed she was human filth. She admitted she had one deranged source and when challenged on it said it was just a book so can't be expected to have integrity standards. Awful woman.
How do you know for sure the pig thing was fabricated? Are you trying to spin a picture of David being utterly square in his youth, has never ritually ate swan for example, he never woke up in bed to sight of Boris standing on a table hacking golf balls out a window etc?
I wouldn't call it completely fabricated as I don't know for sure (though I would not be surprised). However Hilton admitted at least to her own unprofessionalism, and the weakness of the story which she puffed to get attention.
He really needs to sort out the public sector strikes, at least the ones where the public are sympathetic to the strikers, as well. This will also help his ratings.
Isabel Oakeshott is doing a very impressive job of trashing what is left of her reputation.
Admits to signing an NDA with Mr Hancock, then handed the whole lot over to the Telegraph when it became convenient, whilst furiously demanding that her 'duty to the public' (or something) required her action, and she occupies the moral high ground.
I am no Tory and even less so a Hancock fan, but I’m finding the PB hot takes that somehow this is all Hancock’s fault and “he only has himself to blame” very hard to swallow.
Hancock is guilty of being rather credulous and somewhat dim - which will come as news to precisely nobody.
In contrast, the odious Oakeshott has broken client confidentiality (both implicit and explicit) and breached - yet again - the golden rule of her trade: never reveal your sources.
She is an utter disgrace to her profession and deserves never to work as a journalist again.
He was an idiot for trusting Oakeshott, given her record and behaviour.
She is also a disgrace.
Given her reputation as a political operator, what was Hancock hoping to achieve by using her as a ghostwriter?
He really needs to sort out the public sector strikes, at least the ones where the public are sympathetic to the strikers, as well. This will also help his ratings.
He needs inflation down a few points though before he settles...
Giving 7% when inflation is 6% and falling would be helpful.
So... Greta Thurnberg. Apparently the climate emergency is so vast that we must all change the way we live, at a vast cost to economies and people's welfare.
Yet wind turbines cannot be built on the land of indigenous peoples in Norway, for ... reasons.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people,” Thunberg told Reuters on Monday."
Why do only the rights of indigenous people matter? Why should any of us suffer by progressing green energy faster than the economy can sustain?
(Dons flameproof coat)
You feel she's insufficiently fanatical? The consensus view among most people concerned about climate change is that we do need to take substantial action including lifestyle changes, but not that absolutely no other considerations can be made. We can argue about whether indigenous rights are important (I'm not much bothered about them, but Scandinavians do tend to feel differently), but it doesn't invalidate her position to concede the need for some exceptions.
Or Welsh Labour's stupid cancellation of the entire road building program.
I'm not arguing against work to prevent climate change; just that we have to pick a pace that doesn't help send people into food and other types of poverty, and allows us to grow and improve as a country and society.
It's probably better to pick a pace that actually avoids disastrous climate change. You don't win a war by dedicating only enough resources that still allow you to "grow and improve as a country and society"; you dedicate enough resources to win it, even if that means some hardship in the short term.
Good. So when people complain about not being able to afford energy bills, or food (growing and transporting food requires energy), you'll accept that these policies have a detrimental effect? Or will it all be the government's fault?
I am not against trying to combat climate change. It's just that we need to balance that with the needs of the people.
Obviously we need to combat climate change in a way that mitigates hardship as far as possible, but in the end the necessary pace needs to be dictated by the desired result rather than the need to avoid inconvenience. Otherwise our epitaph may be, "Sorry we messed up the world kids, but it turned out there was no way that we could stop it without compromising our standard of living." That's not really a good look.
If the world economy grows at ~3.5% per annum, it doubles in size approximately every twenty years. The unpleasant truth is that if we want to tackle climate change in a meaningful way, we need to pursue degrowth, both of the economy, and of the global population. Not only does that mean an inevitable decline in living standards, it also creates a demographic problem for the future - too many old people and not enough bum wipers, essentially.
But moreover, it's also a thoroughly western-centric attitude that says "hey, we got rich burning dead dinosaurs, now, rest of the world, you've got to accept declining living standards even though you never attained western standards of wealth and prosperity". And most of the developing world simply is not going to accept that.
To be honest, the developed world isn't going to accept declining living standards, either. People in democracies aren't going to vote for policies that make them worse off, no matter how well intended.
That leaves technological advancement as our sole route out of this, whether that be carbon capture, fusion technology, even weather control (I know, I stray into the realms of science fiction here). But in any climate change scenario you need to start from the base case that people will not accept declining living standards without voting out / overthrowing their governments, and accept that developing nations will not accept de-growth foisted on them by western powers.
AI is going to make all of this irrelevant in good and bad ways. You’re worrying about the rural economy on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution
AI as we currently have it, LLMs and ChatGPT, won't make our economy greener - the simple fact is that if the world economy doubles in size every 20 years or so, the amount of resources we consume becomes much bigger. AI isn't gonna stop the developing world wanting cars, fast food and air conditioning. Sure, maybe AGI will come along in the next few years and it will be all powerful and all knowing and it will teach us fusion technology and the like in minutes. But belief in the singularity is a little bit of hand waving and faith in an AI god.
Many of the most important technological advancements of the 20th century - the production line, the automobile, etc, did not reduce our impact on the enivronment. Rather, thay made it orders of magnitude worse. Of course, there are some technologies - nuclear power etc - that reduce our impact on the environment. But to suggest that more technology = less environmental impact as the default state simply isn't true...
It's not a default - but clearly technology, and in particular cheap power from renewables, enables all kinds of possibilities. Energy production is at the root of the climate change problem, and will also determine if and how it is solved.
I don't disagree with your point that massive lifestyle changes will be necessary. I just don't believe that all of them are necessarily going to be negative ones.
Look at the academic literature and you'll see an emerging consensus among the intelligentsia for hair shirts and degrowth. I'm not saying that's right, but I am saying that's where you can see a consensus is emerging.
The idea of rationing petrol, long haul flights, even meat consumption, would have been laughed out of the room even a decade ago. Now, it's an idea that's being taken seriously in academia.
Personally, I think such ideas are borne out of an institutional hatred towards capitalism and an inherent bias against consumption as being bourgeois and decadent. But that doesn't mean these ideas will not be taken very, very seriously by higher ups.
While there are some mitigations, e.g. clean power, circular economy, EVs etc, the fact is the vast majority of the developing world wants a western-style lifestyle and that will necessitate orders of magnitude more consumption in the next 50 years or so.
It's my belief that development of green technologies will not substantially mitigate the massive increase in consumption in developing economies. Then again, nor will wearing hair shirts and reducing our own consumption in the west make a significant impact. This is why, earlier in the thread, I said I think we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Rationing long-haul flights is hardly "hairshirt" - there are loads of people who have never been on a long-haul flight in their lives - and seems like a very sensible idea in some form.
Manufacturing aviation fuel from zero carbon sources is already in the trial stage.
Sadly Sky are reporting that there is no clear net zero alternative to jet fuel.
Quite like the reference to guilt free flying. I never feel guilty flying. Far from it.
They are indeed a lot slower, but you can make them far more luxurious/spacious at a lower price point (mass lifted rather than space is the key constraint).
In local news, there's an interesting double by-election in Littlemore & Rose Hill today, one of the more working class parts of Oxford. Both city and county seats are up for election. Both were held by Labour, though by two different councillors (the county one was beyond hopeless and had, I believe, the worst attendance record on the whole council; I don't know the city one at all; it seems curious that they resigned at the same time).
Littlemore has one of Oxford's much-discussed Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes. There's an Independent standing on a platform of opposition to it, and the Tories have come out against it too (even though they pushed LTNs, and implemented several, while in control of the county council).
The LibDems and Greens aren't making much of an effort - Littlemore isn't fertile territory for either of them. As usual for East Oxford there are TUSC candidates too.
I think it'll come down to Labour vs Independent, and if pushed I'd say Labour will hold it, but it's far from a done deal.
An interesting set of by-elections indeed.
The (less advanced) Cambridge equivalent Low Traffic Neighbourhood Scheme is already developing into a battleground between familiar stereotypes.
The bicycling lefty dons versus the hard-working poor. The intellectual elite versus the struggling, down-to-earth workers.
For example, my brother-in-law (staunch Labour) literally cannot contain his rage about it. I have never seen him angrier.
Prediction -- this is the new Brexit.
This is Farage's next Big Issue. It is tailor-made to pit one section of Labour voters against another section.
I'm not convinced it's the new Brexit, as it's an issue with strictly limited mileage. I think that perhaps the "working class", like "disabled people", are being used as human shields by various quite-Right political types.
What are the protestors proposing as their tool to meet legally binding emissions targets, which have been delegated down by the Government?
A workplace parking levy might make more sense for Cambridge, It's notable that quite a lot of places are now cancelling low-emission zones, as they are meeting emissions targets.
Among those who haven't done very much are the mainly Tory Outer London Boroughs who are now moaning their heads off, and LD Boroughs who want a delay. Examples of London Boroughs:
The one proposed for Newcastle was eagerly proposed by three councils partly for the finance.
I would be interested in some sensible analysis both pro and anti on this matter as most of the debate is either barking mad Eco Loons who think the world will end if people don't stop driving their 4x4's and barking mad right wingers who think this is all a WEF plot to install one world government.
The nearest I have found so far was from Sam Dumitriu.
Derby, Leeds, Liverpool, Nottingham, Southampton not going ahead so far, according to the RAC.
So... Greta Thurnberg. Apparently the climate emergency is so vast that we must all change the way we live, at a vast cost to economies and people's welfare.
Yet wind turbines cannot be built on the land of indigenous peoples in Norway, for ... reasons.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people,” Thunberg told Reuters on Monday."
Why do only the rights of indigenous people matter? Why should any of us suffer by progressing green energy faster than the economy can sustain?
(Dons flameproof coat)
You feel she's insufficiently fanatical? The consensus view among most people concerned about climate change is that we do need to take substantial action including lifestyle changes, but not that absolutely no other considerations can be made. We can argue about whether indigenous rights are important (I'm not much bothered about them, but Scandinavians do tend to feel differently), but it doesn't invalidate her position to concede the need for some exceptions.
Or Welsh Labour's stupid cancellation of the entire road building program.
I'm not arguing against work to prevent climate change; just that we have to pick a pace that doesn't help send people into food and other types of poverty, and allows us to grow and improve as a country and society.
It's probably better to pick a pace that actually avoids disastrous climate change. You don't win a war by dedicating only enough resources that still allow you to "grow and improve as a country and society"; you dedicate enough resources to win it, even if that means some hardship in the short term.
Good. So when people complain about not being able to afford energy bills, or food (growing and transporting food requires energy), you'll accept that these policies have a detrimental effect? Or will it all be the government's fault?
I am not against trying to combat climate change. It's just that we need to balance that with the needs of the people.
Obviously we need to combat climate change in a way that mitigates hardship as far as possible, but in the end the necessary pace needs to be dictated by the desired result rather than the need to avoid inconvenience. Otherwise our epitaph may be, "Sorry we messed up the world kids, but it turned out there was no way that we could stop it without compromising our standard of living." That's not really a good look.
If the world economy grows at ~3.5% per annum, it doubles in size approximately every twenty years. The unpleasant truth is that if we want to tackle climate change in a meaningful way, we need to pursue degrowth, both of the economy, and of the global population. Not only does that mean an inevitable decline in living standards, it also creates a demographic problem for the future - too many old people and not enough bum wipers, essentially.
But moreover, it's also a thoroughly western-centric attitude that says "hey, we got rich burning dead dinosaurs, now, rest of the world, you've got to accept declining living standards even though you never attained western standards of wealth and prosperity". And most of the developing world simply is not going to accept that.
To be honest, the developed world isn't going to accept declining living standards, either. People in democracies aren't going to vote for policies that make them worse off, no matter how well intended.
That leaves technological advancement as our sole route out of this, whether that be carbon capture, fusion technology, even weather control (I know, I stray into the realms of science fiction here). But in any climate change scenario you need to start from the base case that people will not accept declining living standards without voting out / overthrowing their governments, and accept that developing nations will not accept de-growth foisted on them by western powers.
AI is going to make all of this irrelevant in good and bad ways. You’re worrying about the rural economy on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution
AI as we currently have it, LLMs and ChatGPT, won't make our economy greener - the simple fact is that if the world economy doubles in size every 20 years or so, the amount of resources we consume becomes much bigger. AI isn't gonna stop the developing world wanting cars, fast food and air conditioning. Sure, maybe AGI will come along in the next few years and it will be all powerful and all knowing and it will teach us fusion technology and the like in minutes. But belief in the singularity is a little bit of hand waving and faith in an AI god.
Many of the most important technological advancements of the 20th century - the production line, the automobile, etc, did not reduce our impact on the enivronment. Rather, thay made it orders of magnitude worse. Of course, there are some technologies - nuclear power etc - that reduce our impact on the environment. But to suggest that more technology = less environmental impact as the default state simply isn't true...
It's not a default - but clearly technology, and in particular cheap power from renewables, enables all kinds of possibilities. Energy production is at the root of the climate change problem, and will also determine if and how it is solved.
I don't disagree with your point that massive lifestyle changes will be necessary. I just don't believe that all of them are necessarily going to be negative ones.
Look at the academic literature and you'll see an emerging consensus among the intelligentsia for hair shirts and degrowth. I'm not saying that's right, but I am saying that's where you can see a consensus is emerging.
The idea of rationing petrol, long haul flights, even meat consumption, would have been laughed out of the room even a decade ago. Now, it's an idea that's being taken seriously in academia.
Personally, I think such ideas are borne out of an institutional hatred towards capitalism and an inherent bias against consumption as being bourgeois and decadent. But that doesn't mean these ideas will not be taken very, very seriously by higher ups.
While there are some mitigations, e.g. clean power, circular economy, EVs etc, the fact is the vast majority of the developing world wants a western-style lifestyle and that will necessitate orders of magnitude more consumption in the next 50 years or so.
It's my belief that development of green technologies will not substantially mitigate the massive increase in consumption in developing economies. Then again, nor will wearing hair shirts and reducing our own consumption in the west make a significant impact. This is why, earlier in the thread, I said I think we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The bottom line is that there isn't a hope in hell of selling "you need to be worse off to fight global warmingclimate change the climate emergency" to the public. The key has always been to find measures that are good for the environment but also have benefits to people and sell those benefits.
The idea that future adversity should only be countered by measures that also provide current benefits is completely illogical.
Welcome to human nature.
It's not human nature at all. Most people are prepared to undergo short-term discomfort in exchange for long term benefits for themselves or their children. It's just (?) a matter of selling it properly. Blood, sweat and tears won WW2.
Yeah, because it was easy to sell "we're fighting Hitler, an evil man who wants to kill us".
Climate change is a less immediate but just as real a threat as Hitler was. It's the lack of immediacy that makes selling the need for possibly unpopular measures to counter it difficult, but they are no less necessary.
Here's the thing. Your immense and superior intellect notwithstanding, why do you think it is that the majority (it seems) of people don't share the urgency of your quest to undergo discomfort, or de-grow (yuk)?
People are on the whole well-informed and have all the available facts to hand and have evidently decided that they don't want to do as you say they should.
I mean it is a cheap and hackneyed jibe to point out your fossil fuel usage in posting green comments on an internet chatroom but you could at least set an example by not doing so. Or are you someone (thinking Emma Thompson here) who believes their mission is too important not to engage in the very activities you are counselling against?
I wouldn't say people on the whole are well informed about climate change.
So... Greta Thurnberg. Apparently the climate emergency is so vast that we must all change the way we live, at a vast cost to economies and people's welfare.
Yet wind turbines cannot be built on the land of indigenous peoples in Norway, for ... reasons.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people,” Thunberg told Reuters on Monday."
Why do only the rights of indigenous people matter? Why should any of us suffer by progressing green energy faster than the economy can sustain?
(Dons flameproof coat)
You feel she's insufficiently fanatical? The consensus view among most people concerned about climate change is that we do need to take substantial action including lifestyle changes, but not that absolutely no other considerations can be made. We can argue about whether indigenous rights are important (I'm not much bothered about them, but Scandinavians do tend to feel differently), but it doesn't invalidate her position to concede the need for some exceptions.
Or Welsh Labour's stupid cancellation of the entire road building program.
I'm not arguing against work to prevent climate change; just that we have to pick a pace that doesn't help send people into food and other types of poverty, and allows us to grow and improve as a country and society.
It's probably better to pick a pace that actually avoids disastrous climate change. You don't win a war by dedicating only enough resources that still allow you to "grow and improve as a country and society"; you dedicate enough resources to win it, even if that means some hardship in the short term.
Good. So when people complain about not being able to afford energy bills, or food (growing and transporting food requires energy), you'll accept that these policies have a detrimental effect? Or will it all be the government's fault?
I am not against trying to combat climate change. It's just that we need to balance that with the needs of the people.
Obviously we need to combat climate change in a way that mitigates hardship as far as possible, but in the end the necessary pace needs to be dictated by the desired result rather than the need to avoid inconvenience. Otherwise our epitaph may be, "Sorry we messed up the world kids, but it turned out there was no way that we could stop it without compromising our standard of living." That's not really a good look.
If the world economy grows at ~3.5% per annum, it doubles in size approximately every twenty years. The unpleasant truth is that if we want to tackle climate change in a meaningful way, we need to pursue degrowth, both of the economy, and of the global population. Not only does that mean an inevitable decline in living standards, it also creates a demographic problem for the future - too many old people and not enough bum wipers, essentially.
But moreover, it's also a thoroughly western-centric attitude that says "hey, we got rich burning dead dinosaurs, now, rest of the world, you've got to accept declining living standards even though you never attained western standards of wealth and prosperity". And most of the developing world simply is not going to accept that.
To be honest, the developed world isn't going to accept declining living standards, either. People in democracies aren't going to vote for policies that make them worse off, no matter how well intended.
That leaves technological advancement as our sole route out of this, whether that be carbon capture, fusion technology, even weather control (I know, I stray into the realms of science fiction here). But in any climate change scenario you need to start from the base case that people will not accept declining living standards without voting out / overthrowing their governments, and accept that developing nations will not accept de-growth foisted on them by western powers.
AI is going to make all of this irrelevant in good and bad ways. You’re worrying about the rural economy on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution
AI as we currently have it, LLMs and ChatGPT, won't make our economy greener - the simple fact is that if the world economy doubles in size every 20 years or so, the amount of resources we consume becomes much bigger. AI isn't gonna stop the developing world wanting cars, fast food and air conditioning. Sure, maybe AGI will come along in the next few years and it will be all powerful and all knowing and it will teach us fusion technology and the like in minutes. But belief in the singularity is a little bit of hand waving and faith in an AI god.
Many of the most important technological advancements of the 20th century - the production line, the automobile, etc, did not reduce our impact on the enivronment. Rather, thay made it orders of magnitude worse. Of course, there are some technologies - nuclear power etc - that reduce our impact on the environment. But to suggest that more technology = less environmental impact as the default state simply isn't true...
It's not a default - but clearly technology, and in particular cheap power from renewables, enables all kinds of possibilities. Energy production is at the root of the climate change problem, and will also determine if and how it is solved.
I don't disagree with your point that massive lifestyle changes will be necessary. I just don't believe that all of them are necessarily going to be negative ones.
Look at the academic literature and you'll see an emerging consensus among the intelligentsia for hair shirts and degrowth. I'm not saying that's right, but I am saying that's where you can see a consensus is emerging.
The idea of rationing petrol, long haul flights, even meat consumption, would have been laughed out of the room even a decade ago. Now, it's an idea that's being taken seriously in academia.
Personally, I think such ideas are borne out of an institutional hatred towards capitalism and an inherent bias against consumption as being bourgeois and decadent. But that doesn't mean these ideas will not be taken very, very seriously by higher ups.
While there are some mitigations, e.g. clean power, circular economy, EVs etc, the fact is the vast majority of the developing world wants a western-style lifestyle and that will necessitate orders of magnitude more consumption in the next 50 years or so.
It's my belief that development of green technologies will not substantially mitigate the massive increase in consumption in developing economies. Then again, nor will wearing hair shirts and reducing our own consumption in the west make a significant impact. This is why, earlier in the thread, I said I think we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Rationing long-haul flights is hardly "hairshirt" - there are loads of people who have never been on a long-haul flight in their lives - and seems like a very sensible idea in some form.
Manufacturing aviation fuel from zero carbon sources is already in the trial stage.
Sadly Sky are reporting that there is no clear net zero alternative to jet fuel.
Quite like the reference to guilt free flying. I never feel guilty flying. Far from it.
They are indeed a lot slower, but you can make them far more luxurious/spacious at a lower price point (mass lifted rather than space is the key constraint).
Isabel Oakeshott is doing a very impressive job of trashing what is left of her reputation.
Admits to signing an NDA with Mr Hancock, then handed the whole lot over to the Telegraph when it became convenient, whilst furiously demanding that her 'duty to the public' (or something) required her action, and she occupies the moral high ground.
I never liked Cameron, but her smearing of him over the clearly completely fabricated pig thing showed she was human filth. She admitted she had one deranged source and when challenged on it said it was just a book so can't be expected to have integrity standards. Awful woman.
How do you know for sure the pig thing was fabricated? Are you trying to spin a picture of David being utterly square in his youth, has never ritually ate swan for example, he never woke up in bed to sight of Boris standing on a table hacking golf balls out a window etc?
"Someone, who I can't name, told me it happened, but can't give me a time, place etc. Or any other witnesses, despite it being in front a crowd, allegedly. Oh, and there is a video, but I haven't seen it, but a friend of a friend has."
When you do basic journalism classes, this the structure of a classic bullshit story.
Or. As part of the tradition they all had to do it, hence conspiracy of silence. For now.
You are so naive to think these public school/university clubs/gangs don’t have rituals.
I think a more interesting line of enquiry, when the British ambassador in Washington was destroyed by a leak, is it in the National interest to know if that leak came to UK media from Putin? If true that would be more in National Interest break of journalistic cover than Hancocks what’s app tittle tattle she has released in national interest. In fact it would be treason - taking from work of Putin’s spy’s to harm British diplomacy - and the journalist and intermediary would need to face prosecution.
So... Greta Thurnberg. Apparently the climate emergency is so vast that we must all change the way we live, at a vast cost to economies and people's welfare.
Yet wind turbines cannot be built on the land of indigenous peoples in Norway, for ... reasons.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people,” Thunberg told Reuters on Monday."
Why do only the rights of indigenous people matter? Why should any of us suffer by progressing green energy faster than the economy can sustain?
(Dons flameproof coat)
You feel she's insufficiently fanatical? The consensus view among most people concerned about climate change is that we do need to take substantial action including lifestyle changes, but not that absolutely no other considerations can be made. We can argue about whether indigenous rights are important (I'm not much bothered about them, but Scandinavians do tend to feel differently), but it doesn't invalidate her position to concede the need for some exceptions.
Or Welsh Labour's stupid cancellation of the entire road building program.
I'm not arguing against work to prevent climate change; just that we have to pick a pace that doesn't help send people into food and other types of poverty, and allows us to grow and improve as a country and society.
It's probably better to pick a pace that actually avoids disastrous climate change. You don't win a war by dedicating only enough resources that still allow you to "grow and improve as a country and society"; you dedicate enough resources to win it, even if that means some hardship in the short term.
Good. So when people complain about not being able to afford energy bills, or food (growing and transporting food requires energy), you'll accept that these policies have a detrimental effect? Or will it all be the government's fault?
I am not against trying to combat climate change. It's just that we need to balance that with the needs of the people.
Obviously we need to combat climate change in a way that mitigates hardship as far as possible, but in the end the necessary pace needs to be dictated by the desired result rather than the need to avoid inconvenience. Otherwise our epitaph may be, "Sorry we messed up the world kids, but it turned out there was no way that we could stop it without compromising our standard of living." That's not really a good look.
If the world economy grows at ~3.5% per annum, it doubles in size approximately every twenty years. The unpleasant truth is that if we want to tackle climate change in a meaningful way, we need to pursue degrowth, both of the economy, and of the global population. Not only does that mean an inevitable decline in living standards, it also creates a demographic problem for the future - too many old people and not enough bum wipers, essentially.
But moreover, it's also a thoroughly western-centric attitude that says "hey, we got rich burning dead dinosaurs, now, rest of the world, you've got to accept declining living standards even though you never attained western standards of wealth and prosperity". And most of the developing world simply is not going to accept that.
To be honest, the developed world isn't going to accept declining living standards, either. People in democracies aren't going to vote for policies that make them worse off, no matter how well intended.
That leaves technological advancement as our sole route out of this, whether that be carbon capture, fusion technology, even weather control (I know, I stray into the realms of science fiction here). But in any climate change scenario you need to start from the base case that people will not accept declining living standards without voting out / overthrowing their governments, and accept that developing nations will not accept de-growth foisted on them by western powers.
AI is going to make all of this irrelevant in good and bad ways. You’re worrying about the rural economy on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution
AI as we currently have it, LLMs and ChatGPT, won't make our economy greener - the simple fact is that if the world economy doubles in size every 20 years or so, the amount of resources we consume becomes much bigger. AI isn't gonna stop the developing world wanting cars, fast food and air conditioning. Sure, maybe AGI will come along in the next few years and it will be all powerful and all knowing and it will teach us fusion technology and the like in minutes. But belief in the singularity is a little bit of hand waving and faith in an AI god.
Many of the most important technological advancements of the 20th century - the production line, the automobile, etc, did not reduce our impact on the enivronment. Rather, thay made it orders of magnitude worse. Of course, there are some technologies - nuclear power etc - that reduce our impact on the environment. But to suggest that more technology = less environmental impact as the default state simply isn't true...
It's not a default - but clearly technology, and in particular cheap power from renewables, enables all kinds of possibilities. Energy production is at the root of the climate change problem, and will also determine if and how it is solved.
I don't disagree with your point that massive lifestyle changes will be necessary. I just don't believe that all of them are necessarily going to be negative ones.
Look at the academic literature and you'll see an emerging consensus among the intelligentsia for hair shirts and degrowth. I'm not saying that's right, but I am saying that's where you can see a consensus is emerging.
The idea of rationing petrol, long haul flights, even meat consumption, would have been laughed out of the room even a decade ago. Now, it's an idea that's being taken seriously in academia.
Personally, I think such ideas are borne out of an institutional hatred towards capitalism and an inherent bias against consumption as being bourgeois and decadent. But that doesn't mean these ideas will not be taken very, very seriously by higher ups.
While there are some mitigations, e.g. clean power, circular economy, EVs etc, the fact is the vast majority of the developing world wants a western-style lifestyle and that will necessitate orders of magnitude more consumption in the next 50 years or so.
It's my belief that development of green technologies will not substantially mitigate the massive increase in consumption in developing economies. Then again, nor will wearing hair shirts and reducing our own consumption in the west make a significant impact. This is why, earlier in the thread, I said I think we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Rationing long-haul flights is hardly "hairshirt" - there are loads of people who have never been on a long-haul flight in their lives - and seems like a very sensible idea in some form.
Manufacturing aviation fuel from zero carbon sources is already in the trial stage.
Sadly Sky are reporting that there is no clear net zero alternative to jet fuel.
Quite like the reference to guilt free flying. I never feel guilty flying. Far from it.
They are indeed a lot slower, but you can make them far more luxurious/spacious at a lower price point (mass lifted rather than space is the key constraint).
Who said I was jesting...
Mental Note: Avoid Turbotubbs Airways unles you're very fit...
But, as with the ERG and DUP, there is no describable and lawful deal they can offer in place of it. The lack of challenge to them on this is startling.
In local news, there's an interesting double by-election in Littlemore & Rose Hill today, one of the more working class parts of Oxford. Both city and county seats are up for election. Both were held by Labour, though by two different councillors (the county one was beyond hopeless and had, I believe, the worst attendance record on the whole council; I don't know the city one at all; it seems curious that they resigned at the same time).
Littlemore has one of Oxford's much-discussed Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes. There's an Independent standing on a platform of opposition to it, and the Tories have come out against it too (even though they pushed LTNs, and implemented several, while in control of the county council).
The LibDems and Greens aren't making much of an effort - Littlemore isn't fertile territory for either of them. As usual for East Oxford there are TUSC candidates too.
I think it'll come down to Labour vs Independent, and if pushed I'd say Labour will hold it, but it's far from a done deal.
An interesting set of by-elections indeed.
The (less advanced) Cambridge equivalent Low Traffic Neighbourhood Scheme is already developing into a battleground between familiar stereotypes.
The bicycling lefty dons versus the hard-working poor. The intellectual elite versus the struggling, down-to-earth workers.
For example, my brother-in-law (staunch Labour) literally cannot contain his rage about it. I have never seen him angrier.
Prediction -- this is the new Brexit.
This is Farage's next Big Issue. It is tailor-made to pit one section of Labour voters against another section.
I'm not convinced it's the new Brexit, as it's an issue with strictly limited mileage. I think that perhaps the "working class", like "disabled people", are being used as human shields by various quite-Right political types.
What are the protestors proposing as their tool to meet legally binding emissions targets, which have been delegated down by the Government?
A workplace parking levy might make more sense for Cambridge, It's notable that quite a lot of places are now cancelling low-emission zones, as they are meeting emissions targets.
Among those who haven't done very much are the mainly Tory Outer London Boroughs who are now moaning their heads off, and LD Boroughs who want a delay. Examples of London Boroughs:
The one proposed for Newcastle was eagerly proposed by three councils partly for the finance.
I would be interested in some sensible analysis both pro and anti on this matter as most of the debate is either barking mad Eco Loons who think the world will end if people don't stop driving their 4x4's and barking mad right wingers who think this is all a WEF plot to install one world government.
The nearest I have found so far was from Sam Dumitriu.
Anyone who watches local/community social media accounts can see this is the new Brexit, at least in the way the changes to everyday life without any consent enrages people.
Cycling fanatics on twitter thinking they're winning by closing roads.
Meanwhile the average voter on facebook is furious.
So... Greta Thurnberg. Apparently the climate emergency is so vast that we must all change the way we live, at a vast cost to economies and people's welfare.
Yet wind turbines cannot be built on the land of indigenous peoples in Norway, for ... reasons.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people,” Thunberg told Reuters on Monday."
Why do only the rights of indigenous people matter? Why should any of us suffer by progressing green energy faster than the economy can sustain?
(Dons flameproof coat)
You feel she's insufficiently fanatical? The consensus view among most people concerned about climate change is that we do need to take substantial action including lifestyle changes, but not that absolutely no other considerations can be made. We can argue about whether indigenous rights are important (I'm not much bothered about them, but Scandinavians do tend to feel differently), but it doesn't invalidate her position to concede the need for some exceptions.
Or Welsh Labour's stupid cancellation of the entire road building program.
I'm not arguing against work to prevent climate change; just that we have to pick a pace that doesn't help send people into food and other types of poverty, and allows us to grow and improve as a country and society.
It's probably better to pick a pace that actually avoids disastrous climate change. You don't win a war by dedicating only enough resources that still allow you to "grow and improve as a country and society"; you dedicate enough resources to win it, even if that means some hardship in the short term.
Good. So when people complain about not being able to afford energy bills, or food (growing and transporting food requires energy), you'll accept that these policies have a detrimental effect? Or will it all be the government's fault?
I am not against trying to combat climate change. It's just that we need to balance that with the needs of the people.
Obviously we need to combat climate change in a way that mitigates hardship as far as possible, but in the end the necessary pace needs to be dictated by the desired result rather than the need to avoid inconvenience. Otherwise our epitaph may be, "Sorry we messed up the world kids, but it turned out there was no way that we could stop it without compromising our standard of living." That's not really a good look.
If the world economy grows at ~3.5% per annum, it doubles in size approximately every twenty years. The unpleasant truth is that if we want to tackle climate change in a meaningful way, we need to pursue degrowth, both of the economy, and of the global population. Not only does that mean an inevitable decline in living standards, it also creates a demographic problem for the future - too many old people and not enough bum wipers, essentially.
But moreover, it's also a thoroughly western-centric attitude that says "hey, we got rich burning dead dinosaurs, now, rest of the world, you've got to accept declining living standards even though you never attained western standards of wealth and prosperity". And most of the developing world simply is not going to accept that.
To be honest, the developed world isn't going to accept declining living standards, either. People in democracies aren't going to vote for policies that make them worse off, no matter how well intended.
That leaves technological advancement as our sole route out of this, whether that be carbon capture, fusion technology, even weather control (I know, I stray into the realms of science fiction here). But in any climate change scenario you need to start from the base case that people will not accept declining living standards without voting out / overthrowing their governments, and accept that developing nations will not accept de-growth foisted on them by western powers.
AI is going to make all of this irrelevant in good and bad ways. You’re worrying about the rural economy on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution
AI as we currently have it, LLMs and ChatGPT, won't make our economy greener - the simple fact is that if the world economy doubles in size every 20 years or so, the amount of resources we consume becomes much bigger. AI isn't gonna stop the developing world wanting cars, fast food and air conditioning. Sure, maybe AGI will come along in the next few years and it will be all powerful and all knowing and it will teach us fusion technology and the like in minutes. But belief in the singularity is a little bit of hand waving and faith in an AI god.
Many of the most important technological advancements of the 20th century - the production line, the automobile, etc, did not reduce our impact on the enivronment. Rather, thay made it orders of magnitude worse. Of course, there are some technologies - nuclear power etc - that reduce our impact on the environment. But to suggest that more technology = less environmental impact as the default state simply isn't true...
It's not a default - but clearly technology, and in particular cheap power from renewables, enables all kinds of possibilities. Energy production is at the root of the climate change problem, and will also determine if and how it is solved.
I don't disagree with your point that massive lifestyle changes will be necessary. I just don't believe that all of them are necessarily going to be negative ones.
Look at the academic literature and you'll see an emerging consensus among the intelligentsia for hair shirts and degrowth. I'm not saying that's right, but I am saying that's where you can see a consensus is emerging.
The idea of rationing petrol, long haul flights, even meat consumption, would have been laughed out of the room even a decade ago. Now, it's an idea that's being taken seriously in academia.
Personally, I think such ideas are borne out of an institutional hatred towards capitalism and an inherent bias against consumption as being bourgeois and decadent. But that doesn't mean these ideas will not be taken very, very seriously by higher ups.
While there are some mitigations, e.g. clean power, circular economy, EVs etc, the fact is the vast majority of the developing world wants a western-style lifestyle and that will necessitate orders of magnitude more consumption in the next 50 years or so.
It's my belief that development of green technologies will not substantially mitigate the massive increase in consumption in developing economies. Then again, nor will wearing hair shirts and reducing our own consumption in the west make a significant impact. This is why, earlier in the thread, I said I think we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The bottom line is that there isn't a hope in hell of selling "you need to be worse off to fight global warmingclimate change the climate emergency" to the public. The key has always been to find measures that are good for the environment but also have benefits to people and sell those benefits.
The idea that future adversity should only be countered by measures that also provide current benefits is completely illogical.
Welcome to human nature.
It's not human nature at all. Most people are prepared to undergo short-term discomfort in exchange for long term benefits for themselves or their children. It's just (?) a matter of selling it properly. Blood, sweat and tears won WW2.
Yeah, because it was easy to sell "we're fighting Hitler, an evil man who wants to kill us".
Climate change is a less immediate but just as real a threat as Hitler was. It's the lack of immediacy that makes selling the need for possibly unpopular measures to counter it difficult, but they are no less necessary.
Here's the thing. Your immense and superior intellect notwithstanding, why do you think it is that the majority (it seems) of people don't share the urgency of your quest to undergo discomfort, or de-grow (yuk)?
People are on the whole well-informed and have all the available facts to hand and have evidently decided that they don't want to do as you say they should.
I mean it is a cheap and hackneyed jibe to point out your fossil fuel usage in posting green comments on an internet chatroom but you could at least set an example by not doing so. Or are you someone (thinking Emma Thompson here) who believes their mission is too important not to engage in the very activities you are counselling against?
I wouldn't say people on the whole are well informed about climate change.
Are you an expert on it?
If I said I was, would you believe me?
Interesting exchanges.
I'm not convinced by "de-growth" - far too green medievalist by people who's lifestyle would not be affected.
I am however convinced by decarbonised growth, which is a route we have been going down in Western Europe especially for a very long time now.
I don't think the "I'm going to mutter darkly about details" style works for Boris - he is only comfortable with broad brush statements. We'll get Brexit done. We'll arm Ukraine forever. Labour is the strikers' friend. etc.
But maybe, as someone else said here, he's just putting down a marker, so if it goes wrong he can say "I told you so".
In local news, there's an interesting double by-election in Littlemore & Rose Hill today, one of the more working class parts of Oxford. Both city and county seats are up for election. Both were held by Labour, though by two different councillors (the county one was beyond hopeless and had, I believe, the worst attendance record on the whole council; I don't know the city one at all; it seems curious that they resigned at the same time).
Littlemore has one of Oxford's much-discussed Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes. There's an Independent standing on a platform of opposition to it, and the Tories have come out against it too (even though they pushed LTNs, and implemented several, while in control of the county council).
The LibDems and Greens aren't making much of an effort - Littlemore isn't fertile territory for either of them. As usual for East Oxford there are TUSC candidates too.
I think it'll come down to Labour vs Independent, and if pushed I'd say Labour will hold it, but it's far from a done deal.
An interesting set of by-elections indeed.
The (less advanced) Cambridge equivalent Low Traffic Neighbourhood Scheme is already developing into a battleground between familiar stereotypes.
The bicycling lefty dons versus the hard-working poor. The intellectual elite versus the struggling, down-to-earth workers.
For example, my brother-in-law (staunch Labour) literally cannot contain his rage about it. I have never seen him angrier.
Prediction -- this is the new Brexit.
This is Farage's next Big Issue. It is tailor-made to pit one section of Labour voters against another section.
I'm not convinced it's the new Brexit, as it's an issue with strictly limited mileage. I think that perhaps the "working class", like "disabled people", are being used as human shields by various quite-Right political types.
What are the protestors proposing as their tool to meet legally binding emissions targets, which have been delegated down by the Government?
A workplace parking levy might make more sense for Cambridge, It's notable that quite a lot of places are now cancelling low-emission zones, as they are meeting emissions targets.
Among those who haven't done very much are the mainly Tory Outer London Boroughs who are now moaning their heads off, and LD Boroughs who want a delay. Examples of London Boroughs:
The one proposed for Newcastle was eagerly proposed by three councils partly for the finance.
I would be interested in some sensible analysis both pro and anti on this matter as most of the debate is either barking mad Eco Loons who think the world will end if people don't stop driving their 4x4's and barking mad right wingers who think this is all a WEF plot to install one world government.
The nearest I have found so far was from Sam Dumitriu.
Derby, Leeds, Liverpool, Nottingham, Southampton not going ahead so far, according to the RAC.
Not going ahead before it starts is rather different to cancelling one that is already operational.
Manchester have kicked theirs into the long grass too, sorry its "under review", which is good because their proposal was utterly absurd. The entirety of Greater Manchester was proposed to be in the zone, despite the issues being centred on basically a few roads that could and should have been dealt with separately.
The idea that Central Manchester and Cheadle Hume for instance need the same solutions is utterly preposterous.
Isabel Oakeshott is doing a very impressive job of trashing what is left of her reputation.
Admits to signing an NDA with Mr Hancock, then handed the whole lot over to the Telegraph when it became convenient, whilst furiously demanding that her 'duty to the public' (or something) required her action, and she occupies the moral high ground.
I never liked Cameron, but her smearing of him over the clearly completely fabricated pig thing showed she was human filth. She admitted she had one deranged source and when challenged on it said it was just a book so can't be expected to have integrity standards. Awful woman.
How do you know for sure the pig thing was fabricated? Are you trying to spin a picture of David being utterly square in his youth, has never ritually ate swan for example, he never woke up in bed to sight of Boris standing on a table hacking golf balls out a window etc?
Never forget John Major tucking his shirt into his underpants.
Which he and spin doctors actually denied he came out of aircraft loo to brief journalists with shirt tucked in underpants.
So, people say look it’s been denied, by honest upstanding spin doctors, so it’s not true, 🙄
Isabel Oakeshott is doing a very impressive job of trashing what is left of her reputation.
Admits to signing an NDA with Mr Hancock, then handed the whole lot over to the Telegraph when it became convenient, whilst furiously demanding that her 'duty to the public' (or something) required her action, and she occupies the moral high ground.
I never liked Cameron, but her smearing of him over the clearly completely fabricated pig thing showed she was human filth. She admitted she had one deranged source and when challenged on it said it was just a book so can't be expected to have integrity standards. Awful woman.
How do you know for sure the pig thing was fabricated? Are you trying to spin a picture of David being utterly square in his youth, has never ritually ate swan for example, he never woke up in bed to sight of Boris standing on a table hacking golf balls out a window etc?
"Someone, who I can't name, told me it happened, but can't give me a time, place etc. Or any other witnesses, despite it being in front a crowd, allegedly. Oh, and there is a video, but I haven't seen it, but a friend of a friend has."
When you do basic journalism classes, this the structure of a classic bullshit story.
Or. As part of the tradition they all had to do it, hence conspiracy of silence. For now.
You are so naive to think these public school/university clubs/gangs don’t have rituals.
I think a more interesting line of enquiry, when the British ambassador in Washington was destroyed by a leak, is it in the National interest to know if that leak came to UK media from Putin? If true that would be more in National Interest break of journalistic cover than Hancocks what’s app tittle tattle she has released in national interest. In fact it would be treason - taking from work of Putin’s spy’s to harm British diplomacy - and the journalist and intermediary would need to face prosecution.
OK, I thought you were ridiculous over the new NI deal, but now I know your basic logical reason is just inept. Because some organizations have joining rituals, an outlandish claim that doesn't have evidence or witnesses, and is seen as "possibly deranged" by the person reporting it is credible. And because I point this out I am trying to paint a picture that Cameron is "utterly square" in his youth.
So... Greta Thurnberg. Apparently the climate emergency is so vast that we must all change the way we live, at a vast cost to economies and people's welfare.
Yet wind turbines cannot be built on the land of indigenous peoples in Norway, for ... reasons.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people,” Thunberg told Reuters on Monday."
Why do only the rights of indigenous people matter? Why should any of us suffer by progressing green energy faster than the economy can sustain?
(Dons flameproof coat)
You feel she's insufficiently fanatical? The consensus view among most people concerned about climate change is that we do need to take substantial action including lifestyle changes, but not that absolutely no other considerations can be made. We can argue about whether indigenous rights are important (I'm not much bothered about them, but Scandinavians do tend to feel differently), but it doesn't invalidate her position to concede the need for some exceptions.
Or Welsh Labour's stupid cancellation of the entire road building program.
I'm not arguing against work to prevent climate change; just that we have to pick a pace that doesn't help send people into food and other types of poverty, and allows us to grow and improve as a country and society.
It's probably better to pick a pace that actually avoids disastrous climate change. You don't win a war by dedicating only enough resources that still allow you to "grow and improve as a country and society"; you dedicate enough resources to win it, even if that means some hardship in the short term.
Good. So when people complain about not being able to afford energy bills, or food (growing and transporting food requires energy), you'll accept that these policies have a detrimental effect? Or will it all be the government's fault?
I am not against trying to combat climate change. It's just that we need to balance that with the needs of the people.
Obviously we need to combat climate change in a way that mitigates hardship as far as possible, but in the end the necessary pace needs to be dictated by the desired result rather than the need to avoid inconvenience. Otherwise our epitaph may be, "Sorry we messed up the world kids, but it turned out there was no way that we could stop it without compromising our standard of living." That's not really a good look.
If the world economy grows at ~3.5% per annum, it doubles in size approximately every twenty years. The unpleasant truth is that if we want to tackle climate change in a meaningful way, we need to pursue degrowth, both of the economy, and of the global population. Not only does that mean an inevitable decline in living standards, it also creates a demographic problem for the future - too many old people and not enough bum wipers, essentially.
But moreover, it's also a thoroughly western-centric attitude that says "hey, we got rich burning dead dinosaurs, now, rest of the world, you've got to accept declining living standards even though you never attained western standards of wealth and prosperity". And most of the developing world simply is not going to accept that.
To be honest, the developed world isn't going to accept declining living standards, either. People in democracies aren't going to vote for policies that make them worse off, no matter how well intended.
That leaves technological advancement as our sole route out of this, whether that be carbon capture, fusion technology, even weather control (I know, I stray into the realms of science fiction here). But in any climate change scenario you need to start from the base case that people will not accept declining living standards without voting out / overthrowing their governments, and accept that developing nations will not accept de-growth foisted on them by western powers.
AI is going to make all of this irrelevant in good and bad ways. You’re worrying about the rural economy on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution
AI as we currently have it, LLMs and ChatGPT, won't make our economy greener - the simple fact is that if the world economy doubles in size every 20 years or so, the amount of resources we consume becomes much bigger. AI isn't gonna stop the developing world wanting cars, fast food and air conditioning. Sure, maybe AGI will come along in the next few years and it will be all powerful and all knowing and it will teach us fusion technology and the like in minutes. But belief in the singularity is a little bit of hand waving and faith in an AI god.
Many of the most important technological advancements of the 20th century - the production line, the automobile, etc, did not reduce our impact on the enivronment. Rather, thay made it orders of magnitude worse. Of course, there are some technologies - nuclear power etc - that reduce our impact on the environment. But to suggest that more technology = less environmental impact as the default state simply isn't true...
It's not a default - but clearly technology, and in particular cheap power from renewables, enables all kinds of possibilities. Energy production is at the root of the climate change problem, and will also determine if and how it is solved.
I don't disagree with your point that massive lifestyle changes will be necessary. I just don't believe that all of them are necessarily going to be negative ones.
Look at the academic literature and you'll see an emerging consensus among the intelligentsia for hair shirts and degrowth. I'm not saying that's right, but I am saying that's where you can see a consensus is emerging.
The idea of rationing petrol, long haul flights, even meat consumption, would have been laughed out of the room even a decade ago. Now, it's an idea that's being taken seriously in academia.
Personally, I think such ideas are borne out of an institutional hatred towards capitalism and an inherent bias against consumption as being bourgeois and decadent. But that doesn't mean these ideas will not be taken very, very seriously by higher ups.
While there are some mitigations, e.g. clean power, circular economy, EVs etc, the fact is the vast majority of the developing world wants a western-style lifestyle and that will necessitate orders of magnitude more consumption in the next 50 years or so.
It's my belief that development of green technologies will not substantially mitigate the massive increase in consumption in developing economies. Then again, nor will wearing hair shirts and reducing our own consumption in the west make a significant impact. This is why, earlier in the thread, I said I think we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Rationing long-haul flights is hardly "hairshirt" - there are loads of people who have never been on a long-haul flight in their lives - and seems like a very sensible idea in some form.
Manufacturing aviation fuel from zero carbon sources is already in the trial stage.
Sadly Sky are reporting that there is no clear net zero alternative to jet fuel.
Quite like the reference to guilt free flying. I never feel guilty flying. Far from it.
They are indeed a lot slower, but you can make them far more luxurious/spacious at a lower price point (mass lifted rather than space is the key constraint).
Who said I was jesting...
Mental Note: Avoid Turbotubbs Airways unles you're very fit...
I wouldn't worry; it'll never get off the ground....
I don't think the "I'm going to mutter darkly about details" style works for Boris - he is only comfortable with broad brush statements. We'll get Brexit done. We'll arm Ukraine forever. Labour is the strikers' friend. etc.
But maybe, as someone else said here, he's just putting down a marker, so if it goes wrong he can say "I told you so".
I think that is right.
Keeps the 'prince over the water' beacon burning, shows him as the DUP's friend (in the event of a hung parliament I can imagine them pushing for a change of leader, for example), keeps the issue live.
As ever, Big Dog has seemingly picked the path that suits his own future best...
So... Greta Thurnberg. Apparently the climate emergency is so vast that we must all change the way we live, at a vast cost to economies and people's welfare.
Yet wind turbines cannot be built on the land of indigenous peoples in Norway, for ... reasons.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people,” Thunberg told Reuters on Monday."
Why do only the rights of indigenous people matter? Why should any of us suffer by progressing green energy faster than the economy can sustain?
(Dons flameproof coat)
You feel she's insufficiently fanatical? The consensus view among most people concerned about climate change is that we do need to take substantial action including lifestyle changes, but not that absolutely no other considerations can be made. We can argue about whether indigenous rights are important (I'm not much bothered about them, but Scandinavians do tend to feel differently), but it doesn't invalidate her position to concede the need for some exceptions.
Or Welsh Labour's stupid cancellation of the entire road building program.
I'm not arguing against work to prevent climate change; just that we have to pick a pace that doesn't help send people into food and other types of poverty, and allows us to grow and improve as a country and society.
It's probably better to pick a pace that actually avoids disastrous climate change. You don't win a war by dedicating only enough resources that still allow you to "grow and improve as a country and society"; you dedicate enough resources to win it, even if that means some hardship in the short term.
Good. So when people complain about not being able to afford energy bills, or food (growing and transporting food requires energy), you'll accept that these policies have a detrimental effect? Or will it all be the government's fault?
I am not against trying to combat climate change. It's just that we need to balance that with the needs of the people.
Obviously we need to combat climate change in a way that mitigates hardship as far as possible, but in the end the necessary pace needs to be dictated by the desired result rather than the need to avoid inconvenience. Otherwise our epitaph may be, "Sorry we messed up the world kids, but it turned out there was no way that we could stop it without compromising our standard of living." That's not really a good look.
If the world economy grows at ~3.5% per annum, it doubles in size approximately every twenty years. The unpleasant truth is that if we want to tackle climate change in a meaningful way, we need to pursue degrowth, both of the economy, and of the global population. Not only does that mean an inevitable decline in living standards, it also creates a demographic problem for the future - too many old people and not enough bum wipers, essentially.
But moreover, it's also a thoroughly western-centric attitude that says "hey, we got rich burning dead dinosaurs, now, rest of the world, you've got to accept declining living standards even though you never attained western standards of wealth and prosperity". And most of the developing world simply is not going to accept that.
To be honest, the developed world isn't going to accept declining living standards, either. People in democracies aren't going to vote for policies that make them worse off, no matter how well intended.
That leaves technological advancement as our sole route out of this, whether that be carbon capture, fusion technology, even weather control (I know, I stray into the realms of science fiction here). But in any climate change scenario you need to start from the base case that people will not accept declining living standards without voting out / overthrowing their governments, and accept that developing nations will not accept de-growth foisted on them by western powers.
AI is going to make all of this irrelevant in good and bad ways. You’re worrying about the rural economy on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution
AI as we currently have it, LLMs and ChatGPT, won't make our economy greener - the simple fact is that if the world economy doubles in size every 20 years or so, the amount of resources we consume becomes much bigger. AI isn't gonna stop the developing world wanting cars, fast food and air conditioning. Sure, maybe AGI will come along in the next few years and it will be all powerful and all knowing and it will teach us fusion technology and the like in minutes. But belief in the singularity is a little bit of hand waving and faith in an AI god.
Many of the most important technological advancements of the 20th century - the production line, the automobile, etc, did not reduce our impact on the enivronment. Rather, thay made it orders of magnitude worse. Of course, there are some technologies - nuclear power etc - that reduce our impact on the environment. But to suggest that more technology = less environmental impact as the default state simply isn't true...
It's not a default - but clearly technology, and in particular cheap power from renewables, enables all kinds of possibilities. Energy production is at the root of the climate change problem, and will also determine if and how it is solved.
I don't disagree with your point that massive lifestyle changes will be necessary. I just don't believe that all of them are necessarily going to be negative ones.
Look at the academic literature and you'll see an emerging consensus among the intelligentsia for hair shirts and degrowth. I'm not saying that's right, but I am saying that's where you can see a consensus is emerging.
The idea of rationing petrol, long haul flights, even meat consumption, would have been laughed out of the room even a decade ago. Now, it's an idea that's being taken seriously in academia.
Personally, I think such ideas are borne out of an institutional hatred towards capitalism and an inherent bias against consumption as being bourgeois and decadent. But that doesn't mean these ideas will not be taken very, very seriously by higher ups.
While there are some mitigations, e.g. clean power, circular economy, EVs etc, the fact is the vast majority of the developing world wants a western-style lifestyle and that will necessitate orders of magnitude more consumption in the next 50 years or so.
It's my belief that development of green technologies will not substantially mitigate the massive increase in consumption in developing economies. Then again, nor will wearing hair shirts and reducing our own consumption in the west make a significant impact. This is why, earlier in the thread, I said I think we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The bottom line is that there isn't a hope in hell of selling "you need to be worse off to fight global warmingclimate change the climate emergency" to the public. The key has always been to find measures that are good for the environment but also have benefits to people and sell those benefits.
The idea that future adversity should only be countered by measures that also provide current benefits is completely illogical.
Welcome to human nature.
It's not human nature at all. Most people are prepared to undergo short-term discomfort in exchange for long term benefits for themselves or their children. It's just (?) a matter of selling it properly. Blood, sweat and tears won WW2.
Yeah, because it was easy to sell "we're fighting Hitler, an evil man who wants to kill us".
Climate change is a less immediate but just as real a threat as Hitler was. It's the lack of immediacy that makes selling the need for possibly unpopular measures to counter it difficult, but they are no less necessary.
Here's the thing. Your immense and superior intellect notwithstanding, why do you think it is that the majority (it seems) of people don't share the urgency of your quest to undergo discomfort, or de-grow (yuk)?
People are on the whole well-informed and have all the available facts to hand and have evidently decided that they don't want to do as you say they should.
I mean it is a cheap and hackneyed jibe to point out your fossil fuel usage in posting green comments on an internet chatroom but you could at least set an example by not doing so. Or are you someone (thinking Emma Thompson here) who believes their mission is too important not to engage in the very activities you are counselling against?
I wouldn't say people on the whole are well informed about climate change.
Are you an expert on it?
If I said I was, would you believe me?
I wouldn't automatically disbelieve you, until you said something that indicated you were not. Or if you claimed to be expert on many disparate things.
Isabel Oakeshott is doing a very impressive job of trashing what is left of her reputation.
Admits to signing an NDA with Mr Hancock, then handed the whole lot over to the Telegraph when it became convenient, whilst furiously demanding that her 'duty to the public' (or something) required her action, and she occupies the moral high ground.
I am no Tory and even less so a Hancock fan, but I’m finding the PB hot takes that somehow this is all Hancock’s fault and “he only has himself to blame” very hard to swallow.
Hancock is guilty of being rather credulous and somewhat dim - which will come as news to precisely nobody.
In contrast, the odious Oakeshott has broken client confidentiality (both implicit and explicit) and breached - yet again - the golden rule of her trade: never reveal your sources.
She is an utter disgrace to her profession and deserves never to work as a journalist again.
The mere fact she is a very famous journalist and gets top drawer gigs, doesn’t prove she has made herself to top of her business in your opinion? You sure you know how this trade works? A journalist can only be any good if you like them?
You seem unable to actually understand what others are saying. He didn't say she was unable to make it to the top. He said she was odious and a disgrace. Moral reprobates can often get to the top. See Donald Trump.
I'm starting to wonder whether you actually are Isabel Oakeshott, because I can't think who else would defend her.
In local news, there's an interesting double by-election in Littlemore & Rose Hill today, one of the more working class parts of Oxford. Both city and county seats are up for election. Both were held by Labour, though by two different councillors (the county one was beyond hopeless and had, I believe, the worst attendance record on the whole council; I don't know the city one at all; it seems curious that they resigned at the same time).
Littlemore has one of Oxford's much-discussed Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes. There's an Independent standing on a platform of opposition to it, and the Tories have come out against it too (even though they pushed LTNs, and implemented several, while in control of the county council).
The LibDems and Greens aren't making much of an effort - Littlemore isn't fertile territory for either of them. As usual for East Oxford there are TUSC candidates too.
I think it'll come down to Labour vs Independent, and if pushed I'd say Labour will hold it, but it's far from a done deal.
An interesting set of by-elections indeed.
The (less advanced) Cambridge equivalent Low Traffic Neighbourhood Scheme is already developing into a battleground between familiar stereotypes.
The bicycling lefty dons versus the hard-working poor. The intellectual elite versus the struggling, down-to-earth workers.
For example, my brother-in-law (staunch Labour) literally cannot contain his rage about it. I have never seen him angrier.
Prediction -- this is the new Brexit.
This is Farage's next Big Issue. It is tailor-made to pit one section of Labour voters against another section.
I'm not convinced it's the new Brexit, as it's an issue with strictly limited mileage. I think that perhaps the "working class", like "disabled people", are being used as human shields by various quite-Right political types.
What are the protestors proposing as their tool to meet legally binding emissions targets, which have been delegated down by the Government?
A workplace parking levy might make more sense for Cambridge, It's notable that quite a lot of places are now cancelling low-emission zones, as they are meeting emissions targets.
Among those who haven't done very much are the mainly Tory Outer London Boroughs who are now moaning their heads off, and LD Boroughs who want a delay. Examples of London Boroughs:
The one proposed for Newcastle was eagerly proposed by three councils partly for the finance.
I would be interested in some sensible analysis both pro and anti on this matter as most of the debate is either barking mad Eco Loons who think the world will end if people don't stop driving their 4x4's and barking mad right wingers who think this is all a WEF plot to install one world government.
The nearest I have found so far was from Sam Dumitriu.
Anyone who watches local/community social media accounts can see this is the new Brexit, at least in the way the changes to everyday life without any consent enrages people.
Cycling fanatics on twitter thinking they're winning by closing roads.
Meanwhile the average voter on facebook is furious.
I will take your word for that, and I do not mean that dismissively, as the only one I have seen on local sites is the arguments about the nonsensical change to access to the Tyne Bridge by Gateshead council and the ULEZ in Newcastle. Where I live in Durham we have not had such a scheme.
What I have noticed is that these are initiatives that go across party lines. Andy Street comes up on my Linkedin for some bizarre reason. He posted about one initiative they are looking at in Brum and reducing car ownership is very much a part of it even if the cars are low emission.
The cycling fanatics have a very well organised and well funded lobby that are happy to dismiss anyone who complains about these initiatives as pro pollution/climate change deniers.
I am a member of Cycling UK, I cycle rather alot myself, and am so purely for the liability insurance and they are always demanding local councils make changes to accomodate their demands.
He really needs to sort out the public sector strikes, at least the ones where the public are sympathetic to the strikers, as well. This will also help his ratings.
He needs inflation down a few points though before he settles...
Giving 7% when inflation is 6% and falling would be helpful.
Not an easy circle to square when food inflation is running at what? 17%.
Both the posts on this thread I am responding to seem to be relying on smoke and mirrors to deliver another Conservative Government. Here's a thought, why don't you all try something deserving of a victory, something that actually enhances the average Joe's life? No, ok, I thought not, smoke, mirrors and negativity it is.
In local news, there's an interesting double by-election in Littlemore & Rose Hill today, one of the more working class parts of Oxford. Both city and county seats are up for election. Both were held by Labour, though by two different councillors (the county one was beyond hopeless and had, I believe, the worst attendance record on the whole council; I don't know the city one at all; it seems curious that they resigned at the same time).
Littlemore has one of Oxford's much-discussed Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes. There's an Independent standing on a platform of opposition to it, and the Tories have come out against it too (even though they pushed LTNs, and implemented several, while in control of the county council).
The LibDems and Greens aren't making much of an effort - Littlemore isn't fertile territory for either of them. As usual for East Oxford there are TUSC candidates too.
I think it'll come down to Labour vs Independent, and if pushed I'd say Labour will hold it, but it's far from a done deal.
An interesting set of by-elections indeed.
The (less advanced) Cambridge equivalent Low Traffic Neighbourhood Scheme is already developing into a battleground between familiar stereotypes.
The bicycling lefty dons versus the hard-working poor. The intellectual elite versus the struggling, down-to-earth workers.
For example, my brother-in-law (staunch Labour) literally cannot contain his rage about it. I have never seen him angrier.
Prediction -- this is the new Brexit.
This is Farage's next Big Issue. It is tailor-made to pit one section of Labour voters against another section.
I'm not convinced it's the new Brexit, as it's an issue with strictly limited mileage. I think that perhaps the "working class", like "disabled people", are being used as human shields by various quite-Right political types.
What are the protestors proposing as their tool to meet legally binding emissions targets, which have been delegated down by the Government?
A workplace parking levy might make more sense for Cambridge, It's notable that quite a lot of places are now cancelling low-emission zones, as they are meeting emissions targets.
Among those who haven't done very much are the mainly Tory Outer London Boroughs who are now moaning their heads off, and LD Boroughs who want a delay. Examples of London Boroughs:
The one proposed for Newcastle was eagerly proposed by three councils partly for the finance.
I would be interested in some sensible analysis both pro and anti on this matter as most of the debate is either barking mad Eco Loons who think the world will end if people don't stop driving their 4x4's and barking mad right wingers who think this is all a WEF plot to install one world government.
The nearest I have found so far was from Sam Dumitriu.
Derby, Leeds, Liverpool, Nottingham, Southampton not going ahead so far, according to the RAC.
I don't think the "I'm going to mutter darkly about details" style works for Boris - he is only comfortable with broad brush statements. We'll get Brexit done. We'll arm Ukraine forever. Labour is the strikers' friend. etc.
But maybe, as someone else said here, he's just putting down a marker, so if it goes wrong he can say "I told you so".
I think that is right.
Keeps the 'prince over the water' beacon burning, shows him as the DUP's friend (in the event of a hung parliament I can imagine them pushing for a change of leader, for example), keeps the issue live.
As ever, Big Dog has seemingly picked the path that suits his own future best...
So... Greta Thurnberg. Apparently the climate emergency is so vast that we must all change the way we live, at a vast cost to economies and people's welfare.
Yet wind turbines cannot be built on the land of indigenous peoples in Norway, for ... reasons.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people,” Thunberg told Reuters on Monday."
Why do only the rights of indigenous people matter? Why should any of us suffer by progressing green energy faster than the economy can sustain?
(Dons flameproof coat)
You feel she's insufficiently fanatical? The consensus view among most people concerned about climate change is that we do need to take substantial action including lifestyle changes, but not that absolutely no other considerations can be made. We can argue about whether indigenous rights are important (I'm not much bothered about them, but Scandinavians do tend to feel differently), but it doesn't invalidate her position to concede the need for some exceptions.
Or Welsh Labour's stupid cancellation of the entire road building program.
I'm not arguing against work to prevent climate change; just that we have to pick a pace that doesn't help send people into food and other types of poverty, and allows us to grow and improve as a country and society.
It's probably better to pick a pace that actually avoids disastrous climate change. You don't win a war by dedicating only enough resources that still allow you to "grow and improve as a country and society"; you dedicate enough resources to win it, even if that means some hardship in the short term.
Good. So when people complain about not being able to afford energy bills, or food (growing and transporting food requires energy), you'll accept that these policies have a detrimental effect? Or will it all be the government's fault?
I am not against trying to combat climate change. It's just that we need to balance that with the needs of the people.
Obviously we need to combat climate change in a way that mitigates hardship as far as possible, but in the end the necessary pace needs to be dictated by the desired result rather than the need to avoid inconvenience. Otherwise our epitaph may be, "Sorry we messed up the world kids, but it turned out there was no way that we could stop it without compromising our standard of living." That's not really a good look.
If the world economy grows at ~3.5% per annum, it doubles in size approximately every twenty years. The unpleasant truth is that if we want to tackle climate change in a meaningful way, we need to pursue degrowth, both of the economy, and of the global population. Not only does that mean an inevitable decline in living standards, it also creates a demographic problem for the future - too many old people and not enough bum wipers, essentially.
But moreover, it's also a thoroughly western-centric attitude that says "hey, we got rich burning dead dinosaurs, now, rest of the world, you've got to accept declining living standards even though you never attained western standards of wealth and prosperity". And most of the developing world simply is not going to accept that.
To be honest, the developed world isn't going to accept declining living standards, either. People in democracies aren't going to vote for policies that make them worse off, no matter how well intended.
That leaves technological advancement as our sole route out of this, whether that be carbon capture, fusion technology, even weather control (I know, I stray into the realms of science fiction here). But in any climate change scenario you need to start from the base case that people will not accept declining living standards without voting out / overthrowing their governments, and accept that developing nations will not accept de-growth foisted on them by western powers.
AI is going to make all of this irrelevant in good and bad ways. You’re worrying about the rural economy on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution
AI as we currently have it, LLMs and ChatGPT, won't make our economy greener - the simple fact is that if the world economy doubles in size every 20 years or so, the amount of resources we consume becomes much bigger. AI isn't gonna stop the developing world wanting cars, fast food and air conditioning. Sure, maybe AGI will come along in the next few years and it will be all powerful and all knowing and it will teach us fusion technology and the like in minutes. But belief in the singularity is a little bit of hand waving and faith in an AI god.
Many of the most important technological advancements of the 20th century - the production line, the automobile, etc, did not reduce our impact on the enivronment. Rather, thay made it orders of magnitude worse. Of course, there are some technologies - nuclear power etc - that reduce our impact on the environment. But to suggest that more technology = less environmental impact as the default state simply isn't true...
It's not a default - but clearly technology, and in particular cheap power from renewables, enables all kinds of possibilities. Energy production is at the root of the climate change problem, and will also determine if and how it is solved.
I don't disagree with your point that massive lifestyle changes will be necessary. I just don't believe that all of them are necessarily going to be negative ones.
Look at the academic literature and you'll see an emerging consensus among the intelligentsia for hair shirts and degrowth. I'm not saying that's right, but I am saying that's where you can see a consensus is emerging.
The idea of rationing petrol, long haul flights, even meat consumption, would have been laughed out of the room even a decade ago. Now, it's an idea that's being taken seriously in academia.
Personally, I think such ideas are borne out of an institutional hatred towards capitalism and an inherent bias against consumption as being bourgeois and decadent. But that doesn't mean these ideas will not be taken very, very seriously by higher ups.
While there are some mitigations, e.g. clean power, circular economy, EVs etc, the fact is the vast majority of the developing world wants a western-style lifestyle and that will necessitate orders of magnitude more consumption in the next 50 years or so.
It's my belief that development of green technologies will not substantially mitigate the massive increase in consumption in developing economies. Then again, nor will wearing hair shirts and reducing our own consumption in the west make a significant impact. This is why, earlier in the thread, I said I think we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The bottom line is that there isn't a hope in hell of selling "you need to be worse off to fight global warmingclimate change the climate emergency" to the public. The key has always been to find measures that are good for the environment but also have benefits to people and sell those benefits.
The idea that future adversity should only be countered by measures that also provide current benefits is completely illogical.
Welcome to human nature.
It's not human nature at all. Most people are prepared to undergo short-term discomfort in exchange for long term benefits for themselves or their children. It's just (?) a matter of selling it properly. Blood, sweat and tears won WW2.
Yeah, because it was easy to sell "we're fighting Hitler, an evil man who wants to kill us".
Climate change is a less immediate but just as real a threat as Hitler was. It's the lack of immediacy that makes selling the need for possibly unpopular measures to counter it difficult, but they are no less necessary.
Here's the thing. Your immense and superior intellect notwithstanding, why do you think it is that the majority (it seems) of people don't share the urgency of your quest to undergo discomfort, or de-grow (yuk)?
People are on the whole well-informed and have all the available facts to hand and have evidently decided that they don't want to do as you say they should.
I mean it is a cheap and hackneyed jibe to point out your fossil fuel usage in posting green comments on an internet chatroom but you could at least set an example by not doing so. Or are you someone (thinking Emma Thompson here) who believes their mission is too important not to engage in the very activities you are counselling against?
I wouldn't say people on the whole are well informed about climate change.
Are you an expert on it?
If I said I was, would you believe me?
I wouldn't automatically disbelieve you, until you said something that indicated you were not. Or if you claimed to be expert on many disparate things.
But I was actually asking Kinabalu...
I don't think it's really an issue here who is or isn't an expert on climate change. As a country, we've already decided, for better or worse, that net zero by 2050 is a necessity. What's in dispute is how best to achieve that.
So... Greta Thurnberg. Apparently the climate emergency is so vast that we must all change the way we live, at a vast cost to economies and people's welfare.
Yet wind turbines cannot be built on the land of indigenous peoples in Norway, for ... reasons.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people,” Thunberg told Reuters on Monday."
Why do only the rights of indigenous people matter? Why should any of us suffer by progressing green energy faster than the economy can sustain?
(Dons flameproof coat)
You feel she's insufficiently fanatical? The consensus view among most people concerned about climate change is that we do need to take substantial action including lifestyle changes, but not that absolutely no other considerations can be made. We can argue about whether indigenous rights are important (I'm not much bothered about them, but Scandinavians do tend to feel differently), but it doesn't invalidate her position to concede the need for some exceptions.
Or Welsh Labour's stupid cancellation of the entire road building program.
I'm not arguing against work to prevent climate change; just that we have to pick a pace that doesn't help send people into food and other types of poverty, and allows us to grow and improve as a country and society.
It's probably better to pick a pace that actually avoids disastrous climate change. You don't win a war by dedicating only enough resources that still allow you to "grow and improve as a country and society"; you dedicate enough resources to win it, even if that means some hardship in the short term.
Good. So when people complain about not being able to afford energy bills, or food (growing and transporting food requires energy), you'll accept that these policies have a detrimental effect? Or will it all be the government's fault?
I am not against trying to combat climate change. It's just that we need to balance that with the needs of the people.
Obviously we need to combat climate change in a way that mitigates hardship as far as possible, but in the end the necessary pace needs to be dictated by the desired result rather than the need to avoid inconvenience. Otherwise our epitaph may be, "Sorry we messed up the world kids, but it turned out there was no way that we could stop it without compromising our standard of living." That's not really a good look.
If the world economy grows at ~3.5% per annum, it doubles in size approximately every twenty years. The unpleasant truth is that if we want to tackle climate change in a meaningful way, we need to pursue degrowth, both of the economy, and of the global population. Not only does that mean an inevitable decline in living standards, it also creates a demographic problem for the future - too many old people and not enough bum wipers, essentially.
But moreover, it's also a thoroughly western-centric attitude that says "hey, we got rich burning dead dinosaurs, now, rest of the world, you've got to accept declining living standards even though you never attained western standards of wealth and prosperity". And most of the developing world simply is not going to accept that.
To be honest, the developed world isn't going to accept declining living standards, either. People in democracies aren't going to vote for policies that make them worse off, no matter how well intended.
That leaves technological advancement as our sole route out of this, whether that be carbon capture, fusion technology, even weather control (I know, I stray into the realms of science fiction here). But in any climate change scenario you need to start from the base case that people will not accept declining living standards without voting out / overthrowing their governments, and accept that developing nations will not accept de-growth foisted on them by western powers.
We need to pursue growth via clean technologies. End of story. Any notions of degrowth are ridiculous nonsense, technology is both the cause of and solution to life's problems.
Yep. Improvement in technology is our only way out of this, but it strikes me as extremely unlikely we'll get there in time. And, as you rightly point out, degrowth is completely unpalatable to both western and developing nations. So we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, where there is clearly going to be substantial climate change over the next 50 years or so, which is going to present its own problems in the form of mass migration etc.
There was a recent academic paper published in the UK that suggested the way to fix global warming is rationing. Rationing petrol, limiting long haul flights, even giving people a non-tradeable 'carbon allowance' on a credit-card style carbon card. Do that and there *will* be riots, and I'll be out there with the rioters. It's proper "you will eat ze bugs" stuff. It's utterly dystopian, but this is where the bien pensant intelligentsia is starting to coalesce.
Squint hard enough at the horizon, and you can see where all of this stuff will lead in twenty, thirty years time.
We aren't struck between a rock and a hard place, because degrowth would never do anything anyway.
Driving a low fuel efficiency 5% less doesn't get you to net zero, as you still have 95% of the emissions being released. Flying a bit less doesn't get you there either, as you still have almost all of the emissions there too. Having fewer children won't get you there, since the overwhelming majority who'd be alive in 2050 are already alive today anyway.
This is where "Green" fanatics are completely ungreen and unscientific. They've got the wrong solution to the right problem. Trying to tackle climate change by consuming less is about as successful as trying to tackle obesity by eating one fewer sweet per week.
We need a wholesale transformation to tackle climate change and the only solution to that is science and technology. Not driving less, but driving clean. Not consuming less, but consuming clean. Not flying less, but flying clean. Clean technologies, not fewer people or fewer commodities.
That's pure entitlement. Yes, we'll tackle climate change, but only if I'm not inconvenienced in any way. Otherwise, sorry world.
There are some Greens who are rather upset at the technological solutions to climate change. As one put it to me - "Net zero means unconstrained future growth."
It is perfectly possible to get to Net Zero, without dismantling human society.
We can do 45% of Britain's entire commitment by spreading basalt on fields apparently.
Easy fix then.
Drill a hole through the Earths mantle. Fire a nuclear missile down it. This will cause a massive flood basalt eruption that will cover the entire country in lava.
As a small side effect a chunk of the earths crust may break away and become a new moon.
In local news, there's an interesting double by-election in Littlemore & Rose Hill today, one of the more working class parts of Oxford. Both city and county seats are up for election. Both were held by Labour, though by two different councillors (the county one was beyond hopeless and had, I believe, the worst attendance record on the whole council; I don't know the city one at all; it seems curious that they resigned at the same time).
Littlemore has one of Oxford's much-discussed Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes. There's an Independent standing on a platform of opposition to it, and the Tories have come out against it too (even though they pushed LTNs, and implemented several, while in control of the county council).
The LibDems and Greens aren't making much of an effort - Littlemore isn't fertile territory for either of them. As usual for East Oxford there are TUSC candidates too.
I think it'll come down to Labour vs Independent, and if pushed I'd say Labour will hold it, but it's far from a done deal.
An interesting set of by-elections indeed.
The (less advanced) Cambridge equivalent Low Traffic Neighbourhood Scheme is already developing into a battleground between familiar stereotypes.
The bicycling lefty dons versus the hard-working poor. The intellectual elite versus the struggling, down-to-earth workers.
For example, my brother-in-law (staunch Labour) literally cannot contain his rage about it. I have never seen him angrier.
Prediction -- this is the new Brexit.
This is Farage's next Big Issue. It is tailor-made to pit one section of Labour voters against another section.
I'm not convinced it's the new Brexit, as it's an issue with strictly limited mileage. I think that perhaps the "working class", like "disabled people", are being used as human shields by various quite-Right political types.
What are the protestors proposing as their tool to meet legally binding emissions targets, which have been delegated down by the Government?
A workplace parking levy might make more sense for Cambridge, It's notable that quite a lot of places are now cancelling low-emission zones, as they are meeting emissions targets.
Among those who haven't done very much are the mainly Tory Outer London Boroughs who are now moaning their heads off, and LD Boroughs who want a delay. Examples of London Boroughs:
The one proposed for Newcastle was eagerly proposed by three councils partly for the finance.
I would be interested in some sensible analysis both pro and anti on this matter as most of the debate is either barking mad Eco Loons who think the world will end if people don't stop driving their 4x4's and barking mad right wingers who think this is all a WEF plot to install one world government.
The nearest I have found so far was from Sam Dumitriu.
Anyone who watches local/community social media accounts can see this is the new Brexit, at least in the way the changes to everyday life without any consent enrages people.
Cycling fanatics on twitter thinking they're winning by closing roads.
Meanwhile the average voter on facebook is furious.
I will take your word for that, and I do not mean that dismissively, as the only one I have seen on local sites is the arguments about the nonsensical change to access to the Tyne Bridge by Gateshead council and the ULEZ in Newcastle. Where I live in Durham we have not had such a scheme.
What I have noticed is that these are initiatives that go across party lines. Andy Street comes up on my Linkedin for some bizarre reason. He posted about one initiative they are looking at in Brum and reducing car ownership is very much a part of it even if the cars are low emission.
The cycling fanatics have a very well organised and well funded lobby that are happy to dismiss anyone who complains about these initiatives as pro pollution/climate change deniers.
I am a member of Cycling UK, I cycle rather alot myself, and am so purely for the liability insurance and they are always demanding local councils make changes to accomodate their demands.
As with the EU, it isn't necessarily the ever greater changes themselves, it's the continual lack of consent.
The covid LTN nonsense was a good example - lots were overturned in the following year, but from personal experience its nigh on impossible to overturn them now. Actively encouraging more congestion by closing off some direct routes seems to be the proposed solution to the problem of rush hour traffic. Council workers, rather than councillors, seem to be especially keen on the ideas around here....
In local news, there's an interesting double by-election in Littlemore & Rose Hill today, one of the more working class parts of Oxford. Both city and county seats are up for election. Both were held by Labour, though by two different councillors (the county one was beyond hopeless and had, I believe, the worst attendance record on the whole council; I don't know the city one at all; it seems curious that they resigned at the same time).
Littlemore has one of Oxford's much-discussed Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes. There's an Independent standing on a platform of opposition to it, and the Tories have come out against it too (even though they pushed LTNs, and implemented several, while in control of the county council).
The LibDems and Greens aren't making much of an effort - Littlemore isn't fertile territory for either of them. As usual for East Oxford there are TUSC candidates too.
I think it'll come down to Labour vs Independent, and if pushed I'd say Labour will hold it, but it's far from a done deal.
An interesting set of by-elections indeed.
The (less advanced) Cambridge equivalent Low Traffic Neighbourhood Scheme is already developing into a battleground between familiar stereotypes.
The bicycling lefty dons versus the hard-working poor. The intellectual elite versus the struggling, down-to-earth workers.
For example, my brother-in-law (staunch Labour) literally cannot contain his rage about it. I have never seen him angrier.
Prediction -- this is the new Brexit.
This is Farage's next Big Issue. It is tailor-made to pit one section of Labour voters against another section.
I'm not convinced it's the new Brexit, as it's an issue imo with strictly limited mileage. I think that perhaps the "working class", like "disabled people", are being used as human shields by various quite-Right political types.
We are seeing increasing evidence that what Khan is doing in London is working.
What are the protestors proposing as their tool to meet legally binding emissions targets, which have been delegated down by the Government, should the LEZ and so on be cancelled?
A workplace parking levy might make more sense for Cambridge, and it's notable that quite a lot of places are now cancelling low-emission zones, as they are meeting emissions targets.
Among those who haven't done very much are the mainly Tory Outer London Boroughs who are now moaning their heads off, and LD Boroughs who want a delay. Examples of London Boroughs:
Lol, Mr Lal has been most generous with his favours. One way or another he’s been associated with SCons, Penny Mordaunt, Steve Baker, SLab, Anas Sarwar and Alba. I dare say the SLDs feel a little left out.
That latest false flag op. According to The Daily Beast, multiple independent Russian outlets identified the man in the Telegram video as Denis Kapustin, otherwise known as “White Rex,” a Russian neo-Nazi who just a few months ago admitted to previously cooperating with Russian security services. https://mobile.twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1631285729526444036
The reception of CPTPP accession becoming a real thing is perhaps the biggest wildcard in British politics at the moment. It could potentially change the narrative on our future trajectory and will also force Starmer to be more explicit about where he stands on Brexit.
A sustainable deal with the EU = trusted by other countries to do deals. Boris preferred to be a semi-EU country to have a blame target. It's mature politics but will involve some cost of foregone demagoguery down the road. As for CPTPP it's a good symbol but a fraction of UK merchandise trade, in part because the biggest countries have their own trade deals and shipping times are so long, and no wishing will move GB to the south seas.
So... Greta Thurnberg. Apparently the climate emergency is so vast that we must all change the way we live, at a vast cost to economies and people's welfare.
Yet wind turbines cannot be built on the land of indigenous peoples in Norway, for ... reasons.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people,” Thunberg told Reuters on Monday."
Why do only the rights of indigenous people matter? Why should any of us suffer by progressing green energy faster than the economy can sustain?
(Dons flameproof coat)
You feel she's insufficiently fanatical? The consensus view among most people concerned about climate change is that we do need to take substantial action including lifestyle changes, but not that absolutely no other considerations can be made. We can argue about whether indigenous rights are important (I'm not much bothered about them, but Scandinavians do tend to feel differently), but it doesn't invalidate her position to concede the need for some exceptions.
Or Welsh Labour's stupid cancellation of the entire road building program.
I'm not arguing against work to prevent climate change; just that we have to pick a pace that doesn't help send people into food and other types of poverty, and allows us to grow and improve as a country and society.
It's probably better to pick a pace that actually avoids disastrous climate change. You don't win a war by dedicating only enough resources that still allow you to "grow and improve as a country and society"; you dedicate enough resources to win it, even if that means some hardship in the short term.
Good. So when people complain about not being able to afford energy bills, or food (growing and transporting food requires energy), you'll accept that these policies have a detrimental effect? Or will it all be the government's fault?
I am not against trying to combat climate change. It's just that we need to balance that with the needs of the people.
Obviously we need to combat climate change in a way that mitigates hardship as far as possible, but in the end the necessary pace needs to be dictated by the desired result rather than the need to avoid inconvenience. Otherwise our epitaph may be, "Sorry we messed up the world kids, but it turned out there was no way that we could stop it without compromising our standard of living." That's not really a good look.
If the world economy grows at ~3.5% per annum, it doubles in size approximately every twenty years. The unpleasant truth is that if we want to tackle climate change in a meaningful way, we need to pursue degrowth, both of the economy, and of the global population. Not only does that mean an inevitable decline in living standards, it also creates a demographic problem for the future - too many old people and not enough bum wipers, essentially.
But moreover, it's also a thoroughly western-centric attitude that says "hey, we got rich burning dead dinosaurs, now, rest of the world, you've got to accept declining living standards even though you never attained western standards of wealth and prosperity". And most of the developing world simply is not going to accept that.
To be honest, the developed world isn't going to accept declining living standards, either. People in democracies aren't going to vote for policies that make them worse off, no matter how well intended.
That leaves technological advancement as our sole route out of this, whether that be carbon capture, fusion technology, even weather control (I know, I stray into the realms of science fiction here). But in any climate change scenario you need to start from the base case that people will not accept declining living standards without voting out / overthrowing their governments, and accept that developing nations will not accept de-growth foisted on them by western powers.
AI is going to make all of this irrelevant in good and bad ways. You’re worrying about the rural economy on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution
AI as we currently have it, LLMs and ChatGPT, won't make our economy greener - the simple fact is that if the world economy doubles in size every 20 years or so, the amount of resources we consume becomes much bigger. AI isn't gonna stop the developing world wanting cars, fast food and air conditioning. Sure, maybe AGI will come along in the next few years and it will be all powerful and all knowing and it will teach us fusion technology and the like in minutes. But belief in the singularity is a little bit of hand waving and faith in an AI god.
Many of the most important technological advancements of the 20th century - the production line, the automobile, etc, did not reduce our impact on the enivronment. Rather, thay made it orders of magnitude worse. Of course, there are some technologies - nuclear power etc - that reduce our impact on the environment. But to suggest that more technology = less environmental impact as the default state simply isn't true...
It's not a default - but clearly technology, and in particular cheap power from renewables, enables all kinds of possibilities. Energy production is at the root of the climate change problem, and will also determine if and how it is solved.
I don't disagree with your point that massive lifestyle changes will be necessary. I just don't believe that all of them are necessarily going to be negative ones.
Look at the academic literature and you'll see an emerging consensus among the intelligentsia for hair shirts and degrowth. I'm not saying that's right, but I am saying that's where you can see a consensus is emerging.
The idea of rationing petrol, long haul flights, even meat consumption, would have been laughed out of the room even a decade ago. Now, it's an idea that's being taken seriously in academia.
Personally, I think such ideas are borne out of an institutional hatred towards capitalism and an inherent bias against consumption as being bourgeois and decadent. But that doesn't mean these ideas will not be taken very, very seriously by higher ups.
While there are some mitigations, e.g. clean power, circular economy, EVs etc, the fact is the vast majority of the developing world wants a western-style lifestyle and that will necessitate orders of magnitude more consumption in the next 50 years or so.
It's my belief that development of green technologies will not substantially mitigate the massive increase in consumption in developing economies. Then again, nor will wearing hair shirts and reducing our own consumption in the west make a significant impact. This is why, earlier in the thread, I said I think we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The bottom line is that there isn't a hope in hell of selling "you need to be worse off to fight global warmingclimate change the climate emergency" to the public. The key has always been to find measures that are good for the environment but also have benefits to people and sell those benefits.
The idea that future adversity should only be countered by measures that also provide current benefits is completely illogical.
Welcome to human nature.
It's not human nature at all. Most people are prepared to undergo short-term discomfort in exchange for long term benefits for themselves or their children. It's just (?) a matter of selling it properly. Blood, sweat and tears won WW2.
Yeah, because it was easy to sell "we're fighting Hitler, an evil man who wants to kill us".
Climate change is a less immediate but just as real a threat as Hitler was. It's the lack of immediacy that makes selling the need for possibly unpopular measures to counter it difficult, but they are no less necessary.
Here's the thing. Your immense and superior intellect notwithstanding, why do you think it is that the majority (it seems) of people don't share the urgency of your quest to undergo discomfort, or de-grow (yuk)?
People are on the whole well-informed and have all the available facts to hand and have evidently decided that they don't want to do as you say they should.
I mean it is a cheap and hackneyed jibe to point out your fossil fuel usage in posting green comments on an internet chatroom but you could at least set an example by not doing so. Or are you someone (thinking Emma Thompson here) who believes their mission is too important not to engage in the very activities you are counselling against?
I wouldn't say people on the whole are well informed about climate change.
Are you an expert on it?
If I said I was, would you believe me?
I wouldn't automatically disbelieve you, until you said something that indicated you were not. Or if you claimed to be expert on many disparate things.
But I was actually asking Kinabalu...
I don't think it's really an issue here who is or isn't an expert on climate change. As a country, we've already decided, for better or worse, that net zero by 2050 is a necessity. What's in dispute is how best to achieve that.
This whole 'expert' thing referred to a conversation yesterday...
So... Greta Thurnberg. Apparently the climate emergency is so vast that we must all change the way we live, at a vast cost to economies and people's welfare.
Yet wind turbines cannot be built on the land of indigenous peoples in Norway, for ... reasons.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people,” Thunberg told Reuters on Monday."
Why do only the rights of indigenous people matter? Why should any of us suffer by progressing green energy faster than the economy can sustain?
(Dons flameproof coat)
You feel she's insufficiently fanatical? The consensus view among most people concerned about climate change is that we do need to take substantial action including lifestyle changes, but not that absolutely no other considerations can be made. We can argue about whether indigenous rights are important (I'm not much bothered about them, but Scandinavians do tend to feel differently), but it doesn't invalidate her position to concede the need for some exceptions.
Or Welsh Labour's stupid cancellation of the entire road building program.
I'm not arguing against work to prevent climate change; just that we have to pick a pace that doesn't help send people into food and other types of poverty, and allows us to grow and improve as a country and society.
It's probably better to pick a pace that actually avoids disastrous climate change. You don't win a war by dedicating only enough resources that still allow you to "grow and improve as a country and society"; you dedicate enough resources to win it, even if that means some hardship in the short term.
Good. So when people complain about not being able to afford energy bills, or food (growing and transporting food requires energy), you'll accept that these policies have a detrimental effect? Or will it all be the government's fault?
I am not against trying to combat climate change. It's just that we need to balance that with the needs of the people.
Obviously we need to combat climate change in a way that mitigates hardship as far as possible, but in the end the necessary pace needs to be dictated by the desired result rather than the need to avoid inconvenience. Otherwise our epitaph may be, "Sorry we messed up the world kids, but it turned out there was no way that we could stop it without compromising our standard of living." That's not really a good look.
If the world economy grows at ~3.5% per annum, it doubles in size approximately every twenty years. The unpleasant truth is that if we want to tackle climate change in a meaningful way, we need to pursue degrowth, both of the economy, and of the global population. Not only does that mean an inevitable decline in living standards, it also creates a demographic problem for the future - too many old people and not enough bum wipers, essentially.
But moreover, it's also a thoroughly western-centric attitude that says "hey, we got rich burning dead dinosaurs, now, rest of the world, you've got to accept declining living standards even though you never attained western standards of wealth and prosperity". And most of the developing world simply is not going to accept that.
To be honest, the developed world isn't going to accept declining living standards, either. People in democracies aren't going to vote for policies that make them worse off, no matter how well intended.
That leaves technological advancement as our sole route out of this, whether that be carbon capture, fusion technology, even weather control (I know, I stray into the realms of science fiction here). But in any climate change scenario you need to start from the base case that people will not accept declining living standards without voting out / overthrowing their governments, and accept that developing nations will not accept de-growth foisted on them by western powers.
AI is going to make all of this irrelevant in good and bad ways. You’re worrying about the rural economy on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution
AI as we currently have it, LLMs and ChatGPT, won't make our economy greener - the simple fact is that if the world economy doubles in size every 20 years or so, the amount of resources we consume becomes much bigger. AI isn't gonna stop the developing world wanting cars, fast food and air conditioning. Sure, maybe AGI will come along in the next few years and it will be all powerful and all knowing and it will teach us fusion technology and the like in minutes. But belief in the singularity is a little bit of hand waving and faith in an AI god.
Many of the most important technological advancements of the 20th century - the production line, the automobile, etc, did not reduce our impact on the enivronment. Rather, thay made it orders of magnitude worse. Of course, there are some technologies - nuclear power etc - that reduce our impact on the environment. But to suggest that more technology = less environmental impact as the default state simply isn't true...
It's not a default - but clearly technology, and in particular cheap power from renewables, enables all kinds of possibilities. Energy production is at the root of the climate change problem, and will also determine if and how it is solved.
I don't disagree with your point that massive lifestyle changes will be necessary. I just don't believe that all of them are necessarily going to be negative ones.
Look at the academic literature and you'll see an emerging consensus among the intelligentsia for hair shirts and degrowth. I'm not saying that's right, but I am saying that's where you can see a consensus is emerging.
The idea of rationing petrol, long haul flights, even meat consumption, would have been laughed out of the room even a decade ago. Now, it's an idea that's being taken seriously in academia.
Personally, I think such ideas are borne out of an institutional hatred towards capitalism and an inherent bias against consumption as being bourgeois and decadent. But that doesn't mean these ideas will not be taken very, very seriously by higher ups.
While there are some mitigations, e.g. clean power, circular economy, EVs etc, the fact is the vast majority of the developing world wants a western-style lifestyle and that will necessitate orders of magnitude more consumption in the next 50 years or so.
It's my belief that development of green technologies will not substantially mitigate the massive increase in consumption in developing economies. Then again, nor will wearing hair shirts and reducing our own consumption in the west make a significant impact. This is why, earlier in the thread, I said I think we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The bottom line is that there isn't a hope in hell of selling "you need to be worse off to fight global warmingclimate change the climate emergency" to the public. The key has always been to find measures that are good for the environment but also have benefits to people and sell those benefits.
The idea that future adversity should only be countered by measures that also provide current benefits is completely illogical.
Welcome to human nature.
It's not human nature at all. Most people are prepared to undergo short-term discomfort in exchange for long term benefits for themselves or their children. It's just (?) a matter of selling it properly. Blood, sweat and tears won WW2.
Yeah, because it was easy to sell "we're fighting Hitler, an evil man who wants to kill us".
Climate change is a less immediate but just as real a threat as Hitler was. It's the lack of immediacy that makes selling the need for possibly unpopular measures to counter it difficult, but they are no less necessary.
Here's the thing. Your immense and superior intellect notwithstanding, why do you think it is that the majority (it seems) of people don't share the urgency of your quest to undergo discomfort, or de-grow (yuk)?
People are on the whole well-informed and have all the available facts to hand and have evidently decided that they don't want to do as you say they should.
I mean it is a cheap and hackneyed jibe to point out your fossil fuel usage in posting green comments on an internet chatroom but you could at least set an example by not doing so. Or are you someone (thinking Emma Thompson here) who believes their mission is too important not to engage in the very activities you are counselling against?
I wouldn't say people on the whole are well informed about climate change.
Are you an expert on it?
If I said I was, would you believe me?
I wouldn't automatically disbelieve you, until you said something that indicated you were not. Or if you claimed to be expert on many disparate things.
But I was actually asking Kinabalu...
I don't think it's really an issue here who is or isn't an expert on climate change. As a country, we've already decided, for better or worse, that net zero by 2050 is a necessity. What's in dispute is how best to achieve that.
This whole 'expert' thing referred to a conversation yesterday...
Ah, OK. Perhaps my response should have been addressed to Topping.
So... Greta Thurnberg. Apparently the climate emergency is so vast that we must all change the way we live, at a vast cost to economies and people's welfare.
Yet wind turbines cannot be built on the land of indigenous peoples in Norway, for ... reasons.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people,” Thunberg told Reuters on Monday."
Why do only the rights of indigenous people matter? Why should any of us suffer by progressing green energy faster than the economy can sustain?
(Dons flameproof coat)
You feel she's insufficiently fanatical? The consensus view among most people concerned about climate change is that we do need to take substantial action including lifestyle changes, but not that absolutely no other considerations can be made. We can argue about whether indigenous rights are important (I'm not much bothered about them, but Scandinavians do tend to feel differently), but it doesn't invalidate her position to concede the need for some exceptions.
Except her brand is fanaticism. She's excoriated anyone seeking exceptions to doing everything everywhere all at once. So it does invalidate her position.
It's a classic would X criticise Y if Y used the same argument situation. She and her core supporters absolutely would see any such talk as seeking to get around the need to act.
You and I and most people accept other considerations matter. She has blasted anyone trying to do so. Blah blah blah remember?
And we know that an immediate deflection will be people saying those commenting are weirdly obsessed with her or to stop attacking her, but thats nonsense. She's a global celebrity and a major figure, commenting on her pronouncements is ok.
Live by the fanatics creed, you get cut by it too.
The question is really about balancing side effects. Everything has side effects.
For example, offshore vs onshore wind. Offshore wind is
- politically much easier. Fish don't vote - approaching the same cost (maybe less even) - more efficient (bigger turbines, smoother airflow) - maybe takes a bit longer to get into operation - seabed disturbance
On shore wind
- politically more difficult. A small number of people can't stand the noise (sensitive to certain frequencies). - long lasting disturbance to build the roads to get the turbines built. - maybe a bit quicker to install
So, you evaluate. Simply shouting "Do! everything! now!" doesn't make things happen faster, either.
Aren't the insulating chemicals in offshore wind very polluting as well though?
All form of wind power are catastrophic to flying creatures, not through direct hits but because of the far greater extent of pressure waves created by the blades. They might save the planet - but at the cost of bats and birds.
As someone who isn't a vegan, I'm quite prepared to put human concerns ahead of animal concerns. If the bats and birds get affected, they'll have to adapt.
Unfortunately all our futures are intertwined. Humans, sadly, are a malign influence on everything else on the planet that they share with other species and are gradually trashing it. There will be price to be paid further down the road I expect.
So... Greta Thurnberg. Apparently the climate emergency is so vast that we must all change the way we live, at a vast cost to economies and people's welfare.
Yet wind turbines cannot be built on the land of indigenous peoples in Norway, for ... reasons.
“Indigenous rights, human rights, must go hand-in-hand with climate protection and climate action. That can’t happen at the expense of some people,” Thunberg told Reuters on Monday."
Why do only the rights of indigenous people matter? Why should any of us suffer by progressing green energy faster than the economy can sustain?
(Dons flameproof coat)
You feel she's insufficiently fanatical? The consensus view among most people concerned about climate change is that we do need to take substantial action including lifestyle changes, but not that absolutely no other considerations can be made. We can argue about whether indigenous rights are important (I'm not much bothered about them, but Scandinavians do tend to feel differently), but it doesn't invalidate her position to concede the need for some exceptions.
Or Welsh Labour's stupid cancellation of the entire road building program.
I'm not arguing against work to prevent climate change; just that we have to pick a pace that doesn't help send people into food and other types of poverty, and allows us to grow and improve as a country and society.
It's probably better to pick a pace that actually avoids disastrous climate change. You don't win a war by dedicating only enough resources that still allow you to "grow and improve as a country and society"; you dedicate enough resources to win it, even if that means some hardship in the short term.
Good. So when people complain about not being able to afford energy bills, or food (growing and transporting food requires energy), you'll accept that these policies have a detrimental effect? Or will it all be the government's fault?
I am not against trying to combat climate change. It's just that we need to balance that with the needs of the people.
Obviously we need to combat climate change in a way that mitigates hardship as far as possible, but in the end the necessary pace needs to be dictated by the desired result rather than the need to avoid inconvenience. Otherwise our epitaph may be, "Sorry we messed up the world kids, but it turned out there was no way that we could stop it without compromising our standard of living." That's not really a good look.
If the world economy grows at ~3.5% per annum, it doubles in size approximately every twenty years. The unpleasant truth is that if we want to tackle climate change in a meaningful way, we need to pursue degrowth, both of the economy, and of the global population. Not only does that mean an inevitable decline in living standards, it also creates a demographic problem for the future - too many old people and not enough bum wipers, essentially.
But moreover, it's also a thoroughly western-centric attitude that says "hey, we got rich burning dead dinosaurs, now, rest of the world, you've got to accept declining living standards even though you never attained western standards of wealth and prosperity". And most of the developing world simply is not going to accept that.
To be honest, the developed world isn't going to accept declining living standards, either. People in democracies aren't going to vote for policies that make them worse off, no matter how well intended.
That leaves technological advancement as our sole route out of this, whether that be carbon capture, fusion technology, even weather control (I know, I stray into the realms of science fiction here). But in any climate change scenario you need to start from the base case that people will not accept declining living standards without voting out / overthrowing their governments, and accept that developing nations will not accept de-growth foisted on them by western powers.
AI is going to make all of this irrelevant in good and bad ways. You’re worrying about the rural economy on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution
AI as we currently have it, LLMs and ChatGPT, won't make our economy greener - the simple fact is that if the world economy doubles in size every 20 years or so, the amount of resources we consume becomes much bigger. AI isn't gonna stop the developing world wanting cars, fast food and air conditioning. Sure, maybe AGI will come along in the next few years and it will be all powerful and all knowing and it will teach us fusion technology and the like in minutes. But belief in the singularity is a little bit of hand waving and faith in an AI god.
Many of the most important technological advancements of the 20th century - the production line, the automobile, etc, did not reduce our impact on the enivronment. Rather, thay made it orders of magnitude worse. Of course, there are some technologies - nuclear power etc - that reduce our impact on the environment. But to suggest that more technology = less environmental impact as the default state simply isn't true...
It's not a default - but clearly technology, and in particular cheap power from renewables, enables all kinds of possibilities. Energy production is at the root of the climate change problem, and will also determine if and how it is solved.
I don't disagree with your point that massive lifestyle changes will be necessary. I just don't believe that all of them are necessarily going to be negative ones.
Look at the academic literature and you'll see an emerging consensus among the intelligentsia for hair shirts and degrowth. I'm not saying that's right, but I am saying that's where you can see a consensus is emerging.
The idea of rationing petrol, long haul flights, even meat consumption, would have been laughed out of the room even a decade ago. Now, it's an idea that's being taken seriously in academia.
Personally, I think such ideas are borne out of an institutional hatred towards capitalism and an inherent bias against consumption as being bourgeois and decadent. But that doesn't mean these ideas will not be taken very, very seriously by higher ups.
While there are some mitigations, e.g. clean power, circular economy, EVs etc, the fact is the vast majority of the developing world wants a western-style lifestyle and that will necessitate orders of magnitude more consumption in the next 50 years or so.
It's my belief that development of green technologies will not substantially mitigate the massive increase in consumption in developing economies. Then again, nor will wearing hair shirts and reducing our own consumption in the west make a significant impact. This is why, earlier in the thread, I said I think we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The bottom line is that there isn't a hope in hell of selling "you need to be worse off to fight global warmingclimate change the climate emergency" to the public. The key has always been to find measures that are good for the environment but also have benefits to people and sell those benefits.
The idea that future adversity should only be countered by measures that also provide current benefits is completely illogical.
Welcome to human nature.
It's not human nature at all. Most people are prepared to undergo short-term discomfort in exchange for long term benefits for themselves or their children. It's just (?) a matter of selling it properly. Blood, sweat and tears won WW2.
Yeah, because it was easy to sell "we're fighting Hitler, an evil man who wants to kill us".
Climate change is a less immediate but just as real a threat as Hitler was. It's the lack of immediacy that makes selling the need for possibly unpopular measures to counter it difficult, but they are no less necessary.
Here's the thing. Your immense and superior intellect notwithstanding, why do you think it is that the majority (it seems) of people don't share the urgency of your quest to undergo discomfort, or de-grow (yuk)?
People are on the whole well-informed and have all the available facts to hand and have evidently decided that they don't want to do as you say they should.
I mean it is a cheap and hackneyed jibe to point out your fossil fuel usage in posting green comments on an internet chatroom but you could at least set an example by not doing so. Or are you someone (thinking Emma Thompson here) who believes their mission is too important not to engage in the very activities you are counselling against?
I wouldn't say people on the whole are well informed about climate change.
Are you an expert on it?
If I said I was, would you believe me?
I wouldn't automatically disbelieve you, until you said something that indicated you were not. Or if you claimed to be expert on many disparate things.
But I was actually asking Kinabalu...
I just don't see the point of the question.
You're prepared to use your layman's level of knowledge to judge whether someone possesses the expertise they claim to have. So what difference does it make whether they have that expertise? If they say something unexpected, or contrary to your understanding, you're not going to trust their claimed level of expertise, it will simply become evidence that they aren't an expert.
The reception of CPTPP accession becoming a real thing is perhaps the biggest wildcard in British politics at the moment. It could potentially change the narrative on our future trajectory and will also force Starmer to be more explicit about where he stands on Brexit.
A sustainable deal with the EU = trusted by other countries to do deals. Boris preferred to be a semi-EU country to have a blame target. It's mature politics but will involve some cost of foregone demagoguery down the road. As for CPTPP it's a good symbol but a fraction of UK merchandise trade, in part because the biggest countries have their own trade deals and shipping times are so long, and no wishing will move GB to the south seas.
Half of UK exports are services and this share is growing. Also, services are an area where the UK has a trade surplus, unlike goods, so this plays to out advantage. Two thirds of service exports go outside the EU and are not affected by long shipping times.
Something like two thirds of middle class consumers will be in the Indo-Pacific by 2030, while the EU population is going to start dropping. The CPTPP is also likely to expand over time, and will set the norms for international trade, given it strikes a very good balance between rich and poor countries.
The "consent" to roads policy is Council elections. Just like the "consent" to EU law was national and European elections. Come on. If elections don't count as consent, democracy is impossible.
Isabel Oakeshott is doing a very impressive job of trashing what is left of her reputation.
Admits to signing an NDA with Mr Hancock, then handed the whole lot over to the Telegraph when it became convenient, whilst furiously demanding that her 'duty to the public' (or something) required her action, and she occupies the moral high ground.
I am no Tory and even less so a Hancock fan, but I’m finding the PB hot takes that somehow this is all Hancock’s fault and “he only has himself to blame” very hard to swallow.
Hancock is guilty of being rather credulous and somewhat dim - which will come as news to precisely nobody.
In contrast, the odious Oakeshott has broken client confidentiality (both implicit and explicit) and breached - yet again - the golden rule of her trade: never reveal your sources.
She is an utter disgrace to her profession and deserves never to work as a journalist again.
He was an idiot for trusting Oakeshott, given her record and behaviour.
She is also a disgrace.
Given her reputation as a political operator, what was Hancock hoping to achieve by using her as a ghostwriter?
Someone who would do the hard work of writing up his version of what happened during the pandemic, without worrying unduly about whether or not any of it was true?
Isabel Oakeshott is doing a very impressive job of trashing what is left of her reputation.
Admits to signing an NDA with Mr Hancock, then handed the whole lot over to the Telegraph when it became convenient, whilst furiously demanding that her 'duty to the public' (or something) required her action, and she occupies the moral high ground.
I am no Tory and even less so a Hancock fan, but I’m finding the PB hot takes that somehow this is all Hancock’s fault and “he only has himself to blame” very hard to swallow.
Hancock is guilty of being rather credulous and somewhat dim - which will come as news to precisely nobody.
In contrast, the odious Oakeshott has broken client confidentiality (both implicit and explicit) and breached - yet again - the golden rule of her trade: never reveal your sources.
She is an utter disgrace to her profession and deserves never to work as a journalist again.
He was an idiot for trusting Oakeshott, given her record and behaviour.
She is also a disgrace.
Given her reputation as a political operator, what was Hancock hoping to achieve by using her as a ghostwriter?
Someone who would do the hard work of writing up his version of what happened during the pandemic, without worrying unduly about whether or not any of it was true?
Per The Times this morning, she did it for free too. Fishy.
Isabel Oakeshott is doing a very impressive job of trashing what is left of her reputation.
Admits to signing an NDA with Mr Hancock, then handed the whole lot over to the Telegraph when it became convenient, whilst furiously demanding that her 'duty to the public' (or something) required her action, and she occupies the moral high ground.
I am no Tory and even less so a Hancock fan, but I’m finding the PB hot takes that somehow this is all Hancock’s fault and “he only has himself to blame” very hard to swallow.
Hancock is guilty of being rather credulous and somewhat dim - which will come as news to precisely nobody.
In contrast, the odious Oakeshott has broken client confidentiality (both implicit and explicit) and breached - yet again - the golden rule of her trade: never reveal your sources.
She is an utter disgrace to her profession and deserves never to work as a journalist again.
He was an idiot for trusting Oakeshott, given her record and behaviour.
She is also a disgrace.
Given her reputation as a political operator, what was Hancock hoping to achieve by using her as a ghostwriter?
Someone who would do the hard work of writing up his version of what happened during the pandemic, without worrying unduly about whether or not any of it was true?
And she has, without question, published his version of events...
Isabel Oakeshott is doing a very impressive job of trashing what is left of her reputation.
Admits to signing an NDA with Mr Hancock, then handed the whole lot over to the Telegraph when it became convenient, whilst furiously demanding that her 'duty to the public' (or something) required her action, and she occupies the moral high ground.
I am no Tory and even less so a Hancock fan, but I’m finding the PB hot takes that somehow this is all Hancock’s fault and “he only has himself to blame” very hard to swallow.
Hancock is guilty of being rather credulous and somewhat dim - which will come as news to precisely nobody.
In contrast, the odious Oakeshott has broken client confidentiality (both implicit and explicit) and breached - yet again - the golden rule of her trade: never reveal your sources.
She is an utter disgrace to her profession and deserves never to work as a journalist again.
The mere fact she is a very famous journalist and gets top drawer gigs, doesn’t prove she has made herself to top of her business in your opinion? You sure you know how this trade works? A journalist can only be any good if you like them?
You seem unable to actually understand what others are saying. He didn't say she was unable to make it to the top. He said she was odious and a disgrace. Moral reprobates can often get to the top. See Donald Trump.
I'm starting to wonder whether you actually are Isabel Oakeshott, because I can't think who else would defend her.
There’s no need to result to name calling, Willy.
You need to take a second look, Anabob made clear, as a slithering untrustworthy odious disgrace backstabbing snake means she can’t simultaneously be a top journalist. And whilst you are catching up on things, which you are slow to do, my previous post suggested Izzy could be tried for treason and jailed if her biggest scoop - destroying a top British Diplomat - came to her from Putin.
The "consent" to roads policy is Council elections. Just like the "consent" to EU law was national and European elections. Come on. If elections don't count as consent, democracy is impossible.
Remind me the last time a vote in European elections changed EU policy. If elections don't affect government policy, they are just a facade of democracy.
Isabel Oakeshott is doing a very impressive job of trashing what is left of her reputation.
Admits to signing an NDA with Mr Hancock, then handed the whole lot over to the Telegraph when it became convenient, whilst furiously demanding that her 'duty to the public' (or something) required her action, and she occupies the moral high ground.
I am no Tory and even less so a Hancock fan, but I’m finding the PB hot takes that somehow this is all Hancock’s fault and “he only has himself to blame” very hard to swallow.
Hancock is guilty of being rather credulous and somewhat dim - which will come as news to precisely nobody.
In contrast, the odious Oakeshott has broken client confidentiality (both implicit and explicit) and breached - yet again - the golden rule of her trade: never reveal your sources.
She is an utter disgrace to her profession and deserves never to work as a journalist again.
He was an idiot for trusting Oakeshott, given her record and behaviour.
She is also a disgrace.
Given her reputation as a political operator, what was Hancock hoping to achieve by using her as a ghostwriter?
Someone who would do the hard work of writing up his version of what happened during the pandemic, without worrying unduly about whether or not any of it was true?
Per The Times this morning, she did it for free too. Fishy.
"No payment up front... I just need full access to all your communications... Of course you can trust me..."
Comments
Stroll will be driving in Bahrain.
On the occasions when I need to travel further afield, I borrow my other half's diesel, which is much better suited for motorway use. It's getting on a bit now though, and when it expires we probably won't replace it; instead we'll do as you suggest and hire a car for the occasional long-distance trip. Or take the train.
Drill a hole through the Earths mantle. Fire a nuclear missile down it. This will cause a massive flood basalt eruption that will cover the entire country in lava.
As a small side effect a chunk of the earths crust may break away and become a new moon.
The (less advanced) Cambridge equivalent Low Traffic Neighbourhood Scheme is already developing into a battleground between familiar stereotypes.
The bicycling lefty dons versus the hard-working poor. The intellectual elite versus the struggling, down-to-earth workers.
https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/cambridge-news/live-updates-anti-congestion-charge-26330201
For example, my brother-in-law (staunch Labour) literally cannot contain his rage about it. I have never seen him angrier.
Prediction -- this is the new Brexit.
This is Farage's next Big Issue. It is tailor-made to pit one section of Labour voters against another section.
But doing that will make flying much more expensive. Ouch. And it's possible that there isn't a sufficient technical solution, given how physics and chemistry work. The window of energy density and plane design that gets them off the air isn't huge.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-64815863
And probably attaches as much credence to House's denial as I do.
The Hindenburg disaster still casts a shadow over our aviation options, rather like Chernobyl does over the European power generation mix.
He was retired and rode a bicycle everywhere. No dependents and
everything vaguely heavy, delivered.
When I tried to explain that some people live in places/have families that require cars, he kept coming back to "but *I* don't need one".
Isabel Oakeshott is doing a very impressive job of trashing what is left of her reputation.
Admits to signing an NDA with Mr Hancock, then handed the whole lot over to the Telegraph when it became convenient, whilst furiously demanding that her 'duty to the public' (or something) required her action, and she occupies the moral high ground.
Hmmm.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-64818969
A few minor concessions to people whose lives it disrupted.
Come the next local elections they still retained the councils and the councillor base.
I will find it difficult to vote for the deal
I am no Tory and even less so a Hancock fan, but I’m finding the PB hot takes that somehow this is all Hancock’s fault and “he only has himself to blame” very hard to swallow.
Hancock is guilty of being rather credulous and somewhat dim - which will come as news to precisely nobody.
In contrast, the odious Oakeshott has broken client confidentiality (both implicit and explicit) and breached - yet again - the golden rule of her trade: never reveal your sources.
She is an utter disgrace to her profession and deserves never to work as a journalist again.
As to the reason - probably he was getting too good at digging into their criminal activities.
This doesn't improve her either. Making claims Hancock threatened her and then refusing to share what the supposed threat was.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainment/celebrity/isabel-oakeshott-defends-whatsapp-leak-anyone-who-thinks-i-did-this-for-money-must-be-utterly-insane/ar-AA187TeG
She is also denying claims that have not been made, typical distraction attempt.
"Anyone who thinks I did this for money must be utterly insane"
She is also a disgrace.
We are seeing increasing evidence that what Khan is doing in London is working.
What are the protestors proposing as their tool to meet legally binding emissions targets, which have been delegated down by the Government, should the LEZ and so on be cancelled?
A workplace parking levy might make more sense for Cambridge, and it's notable that quite a lot of places are now cancelling low-emission zones, as they are meeting emissions targets.
Among those who haven't done very much are the mainly Tory Outer London Boroughs who are now moaning their heads off, and LD Boroughs who want a delay. Examples of London Boroughs:
https://mobile.twitter.com/RantyHighwayman/status/1618146962405982209
The only worthwhile quote the multi banned old soak, back with a new sock, Ishmael made here was "when someones shows you who they are, believe them" and she has demonstrated who she is ably.
Sounds great.
When you do basic journalism classes, this the structure of a classic bullshit story.
The one proposed for Newcastle was eagerly proposed by three councils partly for the finance.
I would be interested in some sensible analysis both pro and anti on this matter as most of the debate is either barking mad Eco Loons who think the world will end if people don't stop driving their 4x4's and barking mad right wingers who think this is all a WEF plot to install one world government.
The nearest I have found so far was from Sam Dumitriu.
But, from a purely technical point of view he's not wrong, is he?
https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1631228007841947648?t=LzNdpU_5GXsQeUMhpi2jqw&s=19
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Doctor_Who)
Yes, I know!
The vanity of the project leader with the inevitable consequences.
Every step you take
Every move you make
I'll be taxing you
As far as I understand it medicines and other goods that are legal in the UK, but not in Europe (eg like when we legalised the vaccine before they did) couldn't previously be traded into NI but now they can.
So no, the EU rules alone don't apply, both sets of laws apply, which is what he proposed himself. If its legal in either EU or UK then its legal in NI, so long as its clearly labelled.
Am I mistaken in that?
https://www.theguardian.com/media/mediamonkeyblog/2015/oct/09/isabel-oakeshott-david-cameron-piggatecall-me-dave
Hancock was a fool to trust her.
*well, maybe not all - needs verification in a poll including Truss and Johnson
Giving 7% when inflation is 6% and falling would be helpful.
https://www.aerospacetestinginternational.com/news/electric-hybrid/farnborough-2022-testing-of-500kw-motor-for-electric-airlander-starts.html
They are indeed a lot slower, but you can make them far more luxurious/spacious at a lower price point (mass lifted rather than space is the key constraint).
https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/emissions/clean-air-zones/
You are so naive to think these public school/university clubs/gangs don’t have rituals.
I think a more interesting line of enquiry, when the British ambassador in Washington was destroyed by a leak, is it in the National interest to know if that leak came to UK media from Putin? If true that would be more in National Interest break of journalistic cover than Hancocks what’s app tittle tattle she has released in national interest. In fact it would be treason - taking from work of Putin’s spy’s to harm British diplomacy - and the journalist and intermediary would need to face prosecution.
Cycling fanatics on twitter thinking they're winning by closing roads.
Meanwhile the average voter on facebook is furious.
I'm not convinced by "de-growth" - far too green medievalist by people who's lifestyle would not be affected.
I am however convinced by decarbonised growth, which is a route we have been going down in Western Europe especially for a very long time now.
But maybe, as someone else said here, he's just putting down a marker, so if it goes wrong he can say "I told you so".
Manchester have kicked theirs into the long grass too, sorry its "under review", which is good because their proposal was utterly absurd. The entirety of Greater Manchester was proposed to be in the zone, despite the issues being centred on basically a few roads that could and should have been dealt with separately.
The idea that Central Manchester and Cheadle Hume for instance need the same solutions is utterly preposterous.
So, people say look it’s been denied, by honest upstanding spin doctors, so it’s not true, 🙄
Keeps the 'prince over the water' beacon burning, shows him as the DUP's friend (in the event of a hung parliament I can imagine them pushing for a change of leader, for example), keeps the issue live.
As ever, Big Dog has seemingly picked the path that suits his own future best...
Until now, most legislation banning gender-affirming care targeted minors. This year, a growing number of bills would also limit access for adults.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/02/28/anti-trans-bills-gender-affirming-care-adults/
But I was actually asking Kinabalu...
I'm starting to wonder whether you actually are Isabel Oakeshott, because I can't think who else would defend her.
What I have noticed is that these are initiatives that go across party lines. Andy Street comes up on my Linkedin for some bizarre reason. He posted about one initiative they are looking at in Brum and reducing car ownership is very much a part of it even if the cars are low emission.
The cycling fanatics have a very well organised and well funded lobby that are happy to dismiss anyone who complains about these initiatives as pro pollution/climate change deniers.
I am a member of Cycling UK, I cycle rather alot myself, and am so purely for the liability insurance and they are always demanding local councils make changes to accomodate their demands.
This is the latest one.
https://www.bing.com/search?q=cycling+UK+suing+council&cvid=e181214c0d66448eac1747768d1bfff0&aqs=edge..69i57j0l3j69i11004.5004j0j1&pglt=43&FORM=ANNAB1&PC=U531
Both the posts on this thread I am responding to seem to be relying on smoke and mirrors to deliver another Conservative Government. Here's a thought, why don't you all try something deserving of a victory, something that actually enhances the average Joe's life? No, ok, I thought not, smoke, mirrors and negativity it is.
The DUP despise Boris Johnson.
The man who put a border in the Irish Sea.
The covid LTN nonsense was a good example - lots were overturned in the following year, but from personal experience its nigh on impossible to overturn them now. Actively encouraging more congestion by closing off some direct routes seems to be the proposed solution to the problem of rush hour traffic. Council workers, rather than councillors, seem to be especially keen on the ideas around here....
My point was my brother-in-law was ready to kick my head in over this.
And he votes Labour and works as ancillary staff in Addenbrooke's Hospital.
I think you are underestimating how angry a sizeable fraction of people are about this.
As for me, I broadly agree with it.
I am just worried about the punishment beating I am going to get at the next family reunion. He's a big man.
https://twitter.com/htscotpol/status/1631281573432533000?s=46&t=fJymV-V84rexmlQMLXHHJQ
According to The Daily Beast, multiple independent Russian outlets identified the man in the Telegram video as Denis Kapustin, otherwise known as “White Rex,” a Russian neo-Nazi who just a few months ago admitted to previously cooperating with Russian security services.
https://mobile.twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1631285729526444036
You're prepared to use your layman's level of knowledge to judge whether someone possesses the expertise they claim to have. So what difference does it make whether they have that expertise? If they say something unexpected, or contrary to your understanding, you're not going to trust their claimed level of expertise, it will simply become evidence that they aren't an expert.
So the question is entirely pointless.
Something like two thirds of middle class consumers will be in the Indo-Pacific by 2030, while the EU population is going to start dropping. The CPTPP is also likely to expand over time, and will set the norms for international trade, given it strikes a very good balance between rich and poor countries.
We know the figure for goods is partly due to exporting gas to the continent, but why the big services number?
You need to take a second look, Anabob made clear, as a slithering untrustworthy odious disgrace backstabbing snake means she can’t simultaneously be a top journalist. And whilst you are catching up on things, which you are slow to do, my previous post suggested Izzy could be tried for treason and jailed if her biggest scoop - destroying a top British Diplomat - came to her from Putin.