One point of what may seem like pedantry but is actually quite important. The 1.5C target is 1.5C OVER PRE-INDUSTRIAL LEVELS. Estimates are that we are at 1.2C over such levels. So if the world manages to hit its target (which it won't), and if we're exactly representative of that, we're looking at an increase of only 0.3C. Which, sadly, won't make London into Lyon.
Quite conceivably climate change could make Britain colder and wetter as a result of changes to the Atlantic currents. So London more like Belfast in climate than Lyon.
The prediction was hotter summers and wetter autumns. But like all predictions it could be wrong.
It was the other way round this year.
Summer was warmer than average including the hottest June on record.
Autumn is rapidly becoming a very wet one after a dry start.
Though August was a washout and September unseasonably warm. Increased unpredictability of an already unpredictable climate is not a good thing.
Starmers Green Prosperity Plan does poll well incidentally. Strongly too with the "Loyal Nationalists" of the "Red Wall".
Well maybe, but everybody agrees on doing nice things until the bills come in. When the policies hit the pocket thats when we see if they really support it or not.
There is widespread polling support for green policies.
There are even a lot of Tories who don't want to trash the country and planet.
Well youre letting your views on conservatives blind the reality. Most conservatives support a clean environment, its in the name. You simply highlight that Lefties dont know how to get to common ground. If you spent less time making everything a political campaign and more time on bottom up measures we would all make more progress.
We had common ground on net zero. The right abandoned it.
For me, the point about the UK and net zero is that is a huge opportunity, not a cost or a burden.
I agree that us moving towards it aggressively will not shift the dial on overall heating trends, but it is an area where the UK can lead in terms of showing how to get there and creating systems, strategies and technologies to do it. We can cash in on such leadership in multiple ways - especially if others are delaying. After all, overall there is no alternative to net zero if the world of which we are a part is to have a viable future.
Leaving it to others while moaning about the costs is the typical British response. It has held us back for decades. Let’s try a different approach for a change.
So, I am very interested to see what part 2 brings. I’m not convinced by part 1.
"For me, the point about the UK and net zero is that is a huge opportunity, not a cost or a burden."
It is both a huge opportunity and a cost burden. Which is why the rate of change is so difficult to get right.
One point of what may seem like pedantry but is actually quite important. The 1.5C target is 1.5C OVER PRE-INDUSTRIAL LEVELS. Estimates are that we are at 1.2C over such levels. So if the world manages to hit its target (which it won't), and if we're exactly representative of that, we're looking at an increase of only 0.3C. Which, sadly, won't make London into Lyon.
Quite conceivably climate change could make Britain colder and wetter as a result of changes to the Atlantic currents. So London more like Belfast in climate than Lyon.
The prediction was hotter summers and wetter autumns. But like all predictions it could be wrong.
It was the other way round this year.
Summer was warmer than average including the hottest June on record.
Autumn is rapidly becoming a very wet one after a dry start.
Though August was a washout and September unseasonably warm. Increased unpredictability of an already unpredictable climate is not a good thing.
Starmers Green Prosperity Plan does poll well incidentally. Strongly too with the "Loyal Nationalists" of the "Red Wall".
Well maybe, but everybody agrees on doing nice things until the bills come in. When the policies hit the pocket thats when we see if they really support it or not.
There is widespread polling support for green policies.
There are even a lot of Tories who don't want to trash the country and planet.
Well youre letting your views on conservatives blind the reality. Most conservatives support a clean environment, its in the name. You simply highlight that Lefties dont know how to get to common ground. If you spent less time making everything a political campaign and more time on bottom up measures we would all make more progress.
Hang on, I thought single issue campaigns were damaging society, but now you’re saying environmentalists should have focused on single issue bottom-up measures???
Bottom up measures are multi issues and driven by local need and are pull rather than push.
The sad truth is that so much of our infrastructure in this country is crumbling. Water pipes. Schools. Hospitals. Roads. Public services.
An ocean of cash will have to be invested because the cost of not doing so is higher. The right can complain about the impact on bills but oceans of money have been pocketed by the likes of Thames Water as they leave the infrastructure to crumble. Not that the right care about people anyway.
So we have to spend an ocean of cash to fix this country. Do we spend it on 21st century things or 19th century things? We need power generation - clean tech or coal? And if we need to have all these things does the right really think that importing them is the best approach?
We used to build things for the world. Clean tech is the opportunity to do so again.
One point of what may seem like pedantry but is actually quite important. The 1.5C target is 1.5C OVER PRE-INDUSTRIAL LEVELS. Estimates are that we are at 1.2C over such levels. So if the world manages to hit its target (which it won't), and if we're exactly representative of that, we're looking at an increase of only 0.3C. Which, sadly, won't make London into Lyon.
Quite conceivably climate change could make Britain colder and wetter as a result of changes to the Atlantic currents. So London more like Belfast in climate than Lyon.
The prediction was hotter summers and wetter autumns. But like all predictions it could be wrong.
It was the other way round this year.
Summer was warmer than average including the hottest June on record.
Autumn is rapidly becoming a very wet one after a dry start.
Though August was a washout and September unseasonably warm. Increased unpredictability of an already unpredictable climate is not a good thing.
Starmers Green Prosperity Plan does poll well incidentally. Strongly too with the "Loyal Nationalists" of the "Red Wall".
Well maybe, but everybody agrees on doing nice things until the bills come in. When the policies hit the pocket thats when we see if they really support it or not.
There is widespread polling support for green policies.
There are even a lot of Tories who don't want to trash the country and planet.
Well youre letting your views on conservatives blind the reality. Most conservatives support a clean environment, its in the name. You simply highlight that Lefties dont know how to get to common ground. If you spent less time making everything a political campaign and more time on bottom up measures we would all make more progress.
Well this government is noted for putting shit in our rivers and pollutants in our air.
Many conservatives do care about these things, which is one of many reasons that they are increasingly alienated from the current government.
That's guff. You can criticise them for not cleaning things up fast enough but they did not put them there in. Potentially the biggest natural disaster in the UK is taking place in Lough Neagh the British Isles largest fresh water lake. Thats controlled by Stormont who have been ignoring the problem and killing the lake.
"Israel offered a ceasefire in exchange for Hamas releasing all hostages and handing over the bodies of dead Israelis, but Hamas refused, Al Arabiya reported."
Al-Arabiyah is in effect an arm of the Saudi government and such a story would suit them well. It would give them an excuse to start edging towards Israel again when the current war ends.
A ground invasion is a very risky move which is why Biden has been trying to stop it (unsuccessfully it would seem). So it isn't impossible.
That said, given his track record I can imagine Netanyahu might make such an offer knowing it would be refused and he would then have a pretext to invade over Biden's objections. Bottom line is, if he is to survive he needs a ground offensive and a major win. Even that may not (hopefully, will not) be enough for his career.
Millions of innocents had to die just so Bush & Blair could be seen to be doing something, even if the something had nothing to do with the cause of 9/11….at least in this case you can join the dots between cause and effect, in terms of target. The issue is the hostages, which Hamas will release at two every week, with lots of taking (through intermediaries) in between, to try and keep Israeli in a painful limbo of inaction.
Well, if that was the intention, it's failed.
And I think that's partly because Hamas are actually not keen on peace either.
Though interestingly, the people of Gaza are, or were. 54% support a 2 state solution, and only 10% support the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state. Only 24% would vote for Hamas in a democratic election. This polling finished on October 6th. Polling on the West Bank also supported a 2 state solution, though not quite so strongly.
Polling on Hamas's support is understandably all over the place. Here's a 2021 poll:
"Poll finds dramatic rise in Palestinian support for Hamas ... The poll found that 53% of Palestinians believe Hamas is “most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people,” while only 14% prefer Abbas’ secular Fatah party."
And a problem is this: everyone knows how thoroughly anti-Semitic Hamas is, and what their objective is wrt Jews. You cannot support Hamas and say that you're not anti-Semitic - it's like a German saying they supported the Nazis because they built good roads or had good education policies.
Hamas still exist in Gaza not just because they have power and guns; but because they also have enough support. Sadly, like the Iranian regime.
I think you are also referencing Hamas’s 1988 founding charter, which is antisemitic. However, Hamas have repudiated the document and issued a new charter in 2017, which talks about a Palestine within the 1967 borders, and explicitly says that Hamas does not seek war against all Jewish people but only against Zionism. This reflects comments going back as early as 2008 that were more moderate than the founding charter. That said, others are sceptical of their sincerity.
For me, the point about the UK and net zero is that is a huge opportunity, not a cost or a burden.
I agree that us moving towards it aggressively will not shift the dial on overall heating trends, but it is an area where the UK can lead in terms of showing how to get there and creating systems, strategies and technologies to do it. We can cash in on such leadership in multiple ways - especially if others are delaying. After all, overall there is no alternative to net zero if the world of which we are a part is to have a viable future.
Leaving it to others while moaning about the costs is the typical British response. It has held us back for decades. Let’s try a different approach for a change.
So, I am very interested to see what part 2 brings. I’m not convinced by part 1.
Fair points SO, but we dont lead the world in wind technology or solar so where do you see the technology leadership ?
We don’t. But we *could*. Many of us argue that we invest in these things that we need and the world will buy. Borrow. Invest. Gain a Return on the Investment. Capitalism. Why has the right abandoned capitalism?
The sad truth is that so much of our infrastructure in this country is crumbling. Water pipes. Schools. Hospitals. Roads. Public services.
An ocean of cash will have to be invested because the cost of not doing so is higher. The right can complain about the impact on bills but oceans of money have been pocketed by the likes of Thames Water as they leave the infrastructure to crumble. Not that the right care about people anyway.
So we have to spend an ocean of cash to fix this country. Do we spend it on 21st century things or 19th century things? We need power generation - clean tech or coal? And if we need to have all these things does the right really think that importing them is the best approach?
We used to build things for the world. Clean tech is the opportunity to do so again.
So name your technology. Nuclear perhaps then what ?
Step 1: don't take sufficient action to stop climate change running out of control.
Step 2: realise Britain has failed to become a leader in any new technologies as other countries adapt faster.
Step 3: complain about all these new migrants from places that are now inhospitable, Britain's weather is fine thank you very much.
That's rather unfair. Firstly, Britain (yes, under the coalition *and* Conservatives) have made massive strides towards going green. We have adapted fast - and they get f'all credit for it.
Secondly, we're a small country with a (relatively) small industrial base, especially in low-value, high-volume stuff. The chances are we would always be outplayed in high-volume technology.
Thirdly, *nothing* Britain could do would stop climate change running out of control. Even if we had zero emissions, the emissions from the rest of the world would dwarf that.
Fourthly, people need jobs. I daresay people in public service, especially occupations such as the NHS or education, may feel a certain amount of job security. But going green too fast could really damage the economy. Like many things, it is a balancing game.
Where does this "relatively small industrial base" thing come from?
I know it's a meme that has been repeated ad infinitum in various media (decline of manufacturing etc), yet we are in the top 10 in the world.
AIUI (and I may be wrong), we're very good at low-volume, high-tech items. We're less good at what we used to be good at: low-cost, high-volume stuff. The *value* of what we produce is high; the volume is lower. (*)
Sadly, things like solar cells are the latter (and we want them to be low-cost, high-volume).
(*) I might be wrong, though.
Following on from my own post: IMV we'd be better off not trying to produce things we want to be low-cost and high-volume; other countries are much better at us than that, or we ever could be due to our size and resources (*). Therefore things like mass battery or solar-cell production should be left to others; preferably with us investing in them.
What we can excel at is R&D. We should be investing in things like new battery chemistries, then doing deals with people who can mass-produce them. Or even investing in factories elsewhere. We should play to our strengths.
(*) We could be much better at this, but environmental and NIMBY issues make it next to impossible. Remember the nonsense about Able UK's shipbreaking?
For me, the point about the UK and net zero is that is a huge opportunity, not a cost or a burden.
I agree that us moving towards it aggressively will not shift the dial on overall heating trends, but it is an area where the UK can lead in terms of showing how to get there and creating systems, strategies and technologies to do it. We can cash in on such leadership in multiple ways - especially if others are delaying. After all, overall there is no alternative to net zero if the world of which we are a part is to have a viable future.
Leaving it to others while moaning about the costs is the typical British response. It has held us back for decades. Let’s try a different approach for a change.
So, I am very interested to see what part 2 brings. I’m not convinced by part 1.
Fair points SO, but we dont lead the world in wind technology or solar so where do you see the technology leadership ?
We don’t. But we *could*. Many of us argue that we invest in these things that we need and the world will buy. Borrow. Invest. Gain a Return on the Investment. Capitalism. Why has the right abandoned capitalism?
For the same reason as the left, corporatism is much easier all round.
The net zero policies will self terminate if they punish the poor and benefit the rich, which is how it looks a lot of the time.
Good news is it should actually save people money. See the NIC report last week.
For example, if you electrify your house with solar panels and storage batteries you can cut your electricity bill by anything from 30-70%, ad-infinitum. The issue is being able to shell out the £6-10k up front for all the kit, but even then it repays for itself over 10-12 years, and then makes a profit thereafter.
I know this because I've just ordered. But I can only do so because I have (some) spare capital. HMG should be offering £5k+ discounts on all of this, and to borrow the rest at cost - or make it easy to add to mortgages.
Heat pumps are different. They need to be less shit. They need to pump in 20C+ of heat, with turboboost options for when it's really cold, not just 14-15C and only really working when your house is insulated like an igloo. But, again, once in - no gas bills.
So this will make us wealthier overall, if we get it right.
Human nature, Treasury brain, Anglo Saxon Short Term Capitalism, Boomer "after I've gone"ness...
See British Infrastructure, passim ad nauseum.
There's a lot of prejudice, labelling and confirmation bias in this.
Not sure it's helpful.
Perhaps not.
But I'm pretty sure that it is the case that the UK has a problem of spending too little on infrastructure and too much on day to day consumption. And that's one of the reasons we are collectively in the pickle we are.
Something is causing that, and we need to find a way round that something, whatever it is.
"Israel offered a ceasefire in exchange for Hamas releasing all hostages and handing over the bodies of dead Israelis, but Hamas refused, Al Arabiya reported."
Al-Arabiyah is in effect an arm of the Saudi government and such a story would suit them well. It would give them an excuse to start edging towards Israel again when the current war ends.
A ground invasion is a very risky move which is why Biden has been trying to stop it (unsuccessfully it would seem). So it isn't impossible.
That said, given his track record I can imagine Netanyahu might make such an offer knowing it would be refused and he would then have a pretext to invade over Biden's objections. Bottom line is, if he is to survive he needs a ground offensive and a major win. Even that may not (hopefully, will not) be enough for his career.
Millions of innocents had to die just so Bush & Blair could be seen to be doing something, even if the something had nothing to do with the cause of 9/11….at least in this case you can join the dots between cause and effect, in terms of target. The issue is the hostages, which Hamas will release at two every week, with lots of taking (through intermediaries) in between, to try and keep Israeli in a painful limbo of inaction.
Well, if that was the intention, it's failed.
And I think that's partly because Hamas are actually not keen on peace either.
Though interestingly, the people of Gaza are, or were. 54% support a 2 state solution, and only 10% support the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state. Only 24% would vote for Hamas in a democratic election. This polling finished on October 6th. Polling on the West Bank also supported a 2 state solution, though not quite so strongly.
Polling on Hamas's support is understandably all over the place. Here's a 2021 poll:
"Poll finds dramatic rise in Palestinian support for Hamas ... The poll found that 53% of Palestinians believe Hamas is “most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people,” while only 14% prefer Abbas’ secular Fatah party."
And a problem is this: everyone knows how thoroughly anti-Semitic Hamas is, and what their objective is wrt Jews. You cannot support Hamas and say that you're not anti-Semitic - it's like a German saying they supported the Nazis because they built good roads or had good education policies.
Hamas still exist in Gaza not just because they have power and guns; but because they also have enough support. Sadly, like the Iranian regime.
I think you are also referencing Hamas’s 1988 founding charter, which is antisemitic. However, Hamas have repudiated the document and issued a new charter in 2017, which talks about a Palestine within the 1967 borders, and explicitly says that Hamas does not seek war against all Jewish people but only against Zionism. This reflects comments going back as early as 2008 that were more moderate than the founding charter. That said, others are sceptical of their sincerity.
'Sceptical' is not a strong enough word. Would you trust a Nazi party that repudiated anti-Semitism? Did Hamas go around asking their victims if they were Zionists or not? No, they wanted to kill Jews.
One point of what may seem like pedantry but is actually quite important. The 1.5C target is 1.5C OVER PRE-INDUSTRIAL LEVELS. Estimates are that we are at 1.2C over such levels. So if the world manages to hit its target (which it won't), and if we're exactly representative of that, we're looking at an increase of only 0.3C. Which, sadly, won't make London into Lyon.
Quite conceivably climate change could make Britain colder and wetter as a result of changes to the Atlantic currents. So London more like Belfast in climate than Lyon.
The prediction was hotter summers and wetter autumns. But like all predictions it could be wrong.
It was the other way round this year.
Summer was warmer than average including the hottest June on record.
Autumn is rapidly becoming a very wet one after a dry start.
Though August was a washout and September unseasonably warm. Increased unpredictability of an already unpredictable climate is not a good thing.
Starmers Green Prosperity Plan does poll well incidentally. Strongly too with the "Loyal Nationalists" of the "Red Wall".
Well maybe, but everybody agrees on doing nice things until the bills come in. When the policies hit the pocket thats when we see if they really support it or not.
There is widespread polling support for green policies.
There are even a lot of Tories who don't want to trash the country and planet.
Well youre letting your views on conservatives blind the reality. Most conservatives support a clean environment, its in the name. You simply highlight that Lefties dont know how to get to common ground. If you spent less time making everything a political campaign and more time on bottom up measures we would all make more progress.
Well this government is noted for putting shit in our rivers and pollutants in our air.
Many conservatives do care about these things, which is one of many reasons that they are increasingly alienated from the current government.
That's guff. You can criticise them for not cleaning things up fast enough but they did not put them there in. Potentially the biggest natural disaster in the UK is taking place in Lough Neagh the British Isles largest fresh water lake. Thats controlled by Stormont who have been ignoring the problem and killing the lake.
One point of what may seem like pedantry but is actually quite important. The 1.5C target is 1.5C OVER PRE-INDUSTRIAL LEVELS. Estimates are that we are at 1.2C over such levels. So if the world manages to hit its target (which it won't), and if we're exactly representative of that, we're looking at an increase of only 0.3C. Which, sadly, won't make London into Lyon.
Quite conceivably climate change could make Britain colder and wetter as a result of changes to the Atlantic currents. So London more like Belfast in climate than Lyon.
The prediction was hotter summers and wetter autumns. But like all predictions it could be wrong.
It was the other way round this year.
Well yes but one summer doesnt make a century. Part of the problem is forecasts are just that and are prone to revision. But if the hot summers are the best guess then on what else do we plan ?
“You can’t trust forecasts”… These are the same canards we’ve had for decades from the fossil fuel industry.
The sad truth is that so much of our infrastructure in this country is crumbling. Water pipes. Schools. Hospitals. Roads. Public services.
An ocean of cash will have to be invested because the cost of not doing so is higher. The right can complain about the impact on bills but oceans of money have been pocketed by the likes of Thames Water as they leave the infrastructure to crumble. Not that the right care about people anyway.
So we have to spend an ocean of cash to fix this country. Do we spend it on 21st century things or 19th century things? We need power generation - clean tech or coal? And if we need to have all these things does the right really think that importing them is the best approach?
We used to build things for the world. Clean tech is the opportunity to do so again.
So name your technology. Nuclear perhaps then what ?
Starter for 10: wind. We’re building an awful lot of big wind farms. Why aren’t we developing our own turbines, manufacturing them, and exporting them to other markets?
Off shore wind needs ancillaries- inter connectors, control gear, support ships. Let’s make those.
We’ve given up as an industrial nation. Too hard. Too expensive. Yet we pay more by importing the things we used to export
The net zero policies will self terminate if they punish the poor and benefit the rich, which is how it looks a lot of the time.
Good news is it should actually save people money. See the NIC report last week.
For example, if you electrify your house with solar panels and storage batteries you can cut your electricity bill by anything from 30-70%, ad-infinitum. The issue is being able to shell out the £6-10k up front for all the kit, but even then it repays for itself over 10-12 years, and then makes a profit thereafter.
I know this because I've just ordered. But I can only do so because I have (some) spare capital. HMG should be offering £5k+ discounts on all of this, and to borrow the rest at cost - or make it easy to add to mortgages.
Heat pumps are different. They need to be less shit. They need to pump in 20C+ of heat, with turboboost options for when it's really cold, not just 14-15C and only really working when your house is insulated like an igloo. But, again, once in - no gas bills.
So this will make us wealthier overall, if we get it right.
Human nature, Treasury brain, Anglo Saxon Short Term Capitalism, Boomer "after I've gone"ness...
See British Infrastructure, passim ad nauseum.
There's a lot of prejudice, labelling and confirmation bias in this.
Not sure it's helpful.
Perhaps not.
But I'm pretty sure that it is the case that the UK has a problem of spending too little on infrastructure and too much on day to day consumption. And that's one of the reasons we are collectively in the pickle we are.
Something is causing that, and we need to find a way round that something, whatever it is.
Yes youre right. The arguments that we have no money I disagree with. We have the largest tax take for many years but are spending it on too many of the wrong things.
One point of what may seem like pedantry but is actually quite important. The 1.5C target is 1.5C OVER PRE-INDUSTRIAL LEVELS. Estimates are that we are at 1.2C over such levels. So if the world manages to hit its target (which it won't), and if we're exactly representative of that, we're looking at an increase of only 0.3C. Which, sadly, won't make London into Lyon.
Quite conceivably climate change could make Britain colder and wetter as a result of changes to the Atlantic currents. So London more like Belfast in climate than Lyon.
The prediction was hotter summers and wetter autumns. But like all predictions it could be wrong.
It was the other way round this year.
Summer was warmer than average including the hottest June on record.
Autumn is rapidly becoming a very wet one after a dry start.
Though August was a washout and September unseasonably warm. Increased unpredictability of an already unpredictable climate is not a good thing.
Starmers Green Prosperity Plan does poll well incidentally. Strongly too with the "Loyal Nationalists" of the "Red Wall".
Well maybe, but everybody agrees on doing nice things until the bills come in. When the policies hit the pocket thats when we see if they really support it or not.
There is widespread polling support for green policies.
There are even a lot of Tories who don't want to trash the country and planet.
Well youre letting your views on conservatives blind the reality. Most conservatives support a clean environment, its in the name. You simply highlight that Lefties dont know how to get to common ground. If you spent less time making everything a political campaign and more time on bottom up measures we would all make more progress.
Well this government is noted for putting shit in our rivers and pollutants in our air.
Many conservatives do care about these things, which is one of many reasons that they are increasingly alienated from the current government.
That's guff. You can criticise them for not cleaning things up fast enough but they did not put them there in. Potentially the biggest natural disaster in the UK is taking place in Lough Neagh the British Isles largest fresh water lake. Thats controlled by Stormont who have been ignoring the problem and killing the lake.
The sad truth is that so much of our infrastructure in this country is crumbling. Water pipes. Schools. Hospitals. Roads. Public services.
An ocean of cash will have to be invested because the cost of not doing so is higher. The right can complain about the impact on bills but oceans of money have been pocketed by the likes of Thames Water as they leave the infrastructure to crumble. Not that the right care about people anyway.
So we have to spend an ocean of cash to fix this country. Do we spend it on 21st century things or 19th century things? We need power generation - clean tech or coal? And if we need to have all these things does the right really think that importing them is the best approach?
We used to build things for the world. Clean tech is the opportunity to do so again.
So name your technology. Nuclear perhaps then what ?
A regulatory mechanism that prevents dividends being paid when debt goes above a certain level and another mechanism which forces private owners of infrastructure to invest 10-25% of all revenue (industry dependent) into their infrastructure without any price rises. If that sends them to bankruptcy then the banks and bond holders can eat the losses. Simply, we've allowed our infrastructure to be taken over by financial engineers who have loaded it up with eyewatering levels of debt and paid themselves coincidentally similar levels of dividends over the past two decades whole investing the bare minimum in the actual infrastructure they own.
Step 1: don't take sufficient action to stop climate change running out of control.
Step 2: realise Britain has failed to become a leader in any new technologies as other countries adapt faster.
Step 3: complain about all these new migrants from places that are now inhospitable, Britain's weather is fine thank you very much.
That's rather unfair. Firstly, Britain (yes, under the coalition *and* Conservatives) have made massive strides towards going green. We have adapted fast - and they get f'all credit for it.
Secondly, we're a small country with a (relatively) small industrial base, especially in low-value, high-volume stuff. The chances are we would always be outplayed in high-volume technology.
Thirdly, *nothing* Britain could do would stop climate change running out of control. Even if we had zero emissions, the emissions from the rest of the world would dwarf that.
Fourthly, people need jobs. I daresay people in public service, especially occupations such as the NHS or education, may feel a certain amount of job security. But going green too fast could really damage the economy. Like many things, it is a balancing game.
Where does this "relatively small industrial base" thing come from?
I know it's a meme that has been repeated ad infinitum in various media (decline of manufacturing etc), yet we are in the top 10 in the world.
On the others I agree, @JosiasJessop. On the "Europe leading in greening" at present Johnson, Sunak et al are broadly correct, though they never say that the transformation in electricity supply is far more down to Blair and Brown's governments than their own useless butt-sitting - these things have 10-20 year lead times, and Sunak just made a colossal cockup of his wind power licensing round by being Mr Spreadsheet Dunce.
He does rather Excel at that.
However, I take issue with your crediting it to 'Blair and Brown.' If they hadn't dithered for all their time in office over new nuclear, we might have had no coal stations left by now and much less reliance on gas.
Although the latter was an error by the Coalition as much as Blair and Borwn.
I did like the reason that Clegg gave to Cameron for blocking more nuclear. The stations would only be available by the far off, useless date of… 2024.
If a forest take a hundred years to grow, start now. People have been doing that, literally, for centuries. And guess what?
The sad truth is that so much of our infrastructure in this country is crumbling. Water pipes. Schools. Hospitals. Roads. Public services.
An ocean of cash will have to be invested because the cost of not doing so is higher. The right can complain about the impact on bills but oceans of money have been pocketed by the likes of Thames Water as they leave the infrastructure to crumble. Not that the right care about people anyway.
So we have to spend an ocean of cash to fix this country. Do we spend it on 21st century things or 19th century things? We need power generation - clean tech or coal? And if we need to have all these things does the right really think that importing them is the best approach?
We used to build things for the world. Clean tech is the opportunity to do so again.
So name your technology. Nuclear perhaps then what ?
Starter for 10: wind. We’re building an awful lot of big wind farms. Why aren’t we developing our own turbines, manufacturing them, and exporting them to other markets?
Off shore wind needs ancillaries- inter connectors, control gear, support ships. Let’s make those.
We’ve given up as an industrial nation. Too hard. Too expensive. Yet we pay more by importing the things we used to export
Ive been arguing for years here along with @another_richard that we have been throwing away our manufacturing . However a lot of the technology lead on wind sits with people like Siemens. The make things here but a multinational always suits itself. Unless we have more domestically controlled businesses I cannot see us recovering technologies. The RR mini nuclear plants may be somewhere we can establish a lead but we're screwing that up atm.
One point of what may seem like pedantry but is actually quite important. The 1.5C target is 1.5C OVER PRE-INDUSTRIAL LEVELS. Estimates are that we are at 1.2C over such levels. So if the world manages to hit its target (which it won't), and if we're exactly representative of that, we're looking at an increase of only 0.3C. Which, sadly, won't make London into Lyon.
Quite conceivably climate change could make Britain colder and wetter as a result of changes to the Atlantic currents. So London more like Belfast in climate than Lyon.
The prediction was hotter summers and wetter autumns. But like all predictions it could be wrong.
It was the other way round this year.
Summer was warmer than average including the hottest June on record.
Autumn is rapidly becoming a very wet one after a dry start.
Though August was a washout and September unseasonably warm. Increased unpredictability of an already unpredictable climate is not a good thing.
Starmers Green Prosperity Plan does poll well incidentally. Strongly too with the "Loyal Nationalists" of the "Red Wall".
Well maybe, but everybody agrees on doing nice things until the bills come in. When the policies hit the pocket thats when we see if they really support it or not.
There is widespread polling support for green policies.
There are even a lot of Tories who don't want to trash the country and planet.
Well youre letting your views on conservatives blind the reality. Most conservatives support a clean environment, its in the name. You simply highlight that Lefties dont know how to get to common ground. If you spent less time making everything a political campaign and more time on bottom up measures we would all make more progress.
Well this government is noted for putting shit in our rivers and pollutants in our air.
Many conservatives do care about these things, which is one of many reasons that they are increasingly alienated from the current government.
That's guff. You can criticise them for not cleaning things up fast enough but they did not put them there in. Potentially the biggest natural disaster in the UK is taking place in Lough Neagh the British Isles largest fresh water lake. Thats controlled by Stormont who have been ignoring the problem and killing the lake.
The sad truth is that so much of our infrastructure in this country is crumbling. Water pipes. Schools. Hospitals. Roads. Public services.
An ocean of cash will have to be invested because the cost of not doing so is higher. The right can complain about the impact on bills but oceans of money have been pocketed by the likes of Thames Water as they leave the infrastructure to crumble. Not that the right care about people anyway.
So we have to spend an ocean of cash to fix this country. Do we spend it on 21st century things or 19th century things? We need power generation - clean tech or coal? And if we need to have all these things does the right really think that importing them is the best approach?
We used to build things for the world. Clean tech is the opportunity to do so again.
That's part if it, of course.
The article (particularly without the accompanying "this is what I'd do") is not very good. There's no analysis of what makes up the £1.4tn - a bit over £50bn per annum, which doesn't sound quite so scary. Large parts of our power infrastructure would be completely replaced anyway during that timescale; our entire road fleet; housing (a big part of it) would make our houses better and less costly ti live in.
And the point that the rest of the world is outside our control isn't really a point at all. It's just rhetoric.
Alanbrooke's most disappointing header to date. I hope part two is more substantial.
"Israel offered a ceasefire in exchange for Hamas releasing all hostages and handing over the bodies of dead Israelis, but Hamas refused, Al Arabiya reported."
Al-Arabiyah is in effect an arm of the Saudi government and such a story would suit them well. It would give them an excuse to start edging towards Israel again when the current war ends.
A ground invasion is a very risky move which is why Biden has been trying to stop it (unsuccessfully it would seem). So it isn't impossible.
That said, given his track record I can imagine Netanyahu might make such an offer knowing it would be refused and he would then have a pretext to invade over Biden's objections. Bottom line is, if he is to survive he needs a ground offensive and a major win. Even that may not (hopefully, will not) be enough for his career.
Millions of innocents had to die just so Bush & Blair could be seen to be doing something, even if the something had nothing to do with the cause of 9/11….at least in this case you can join the dots between cause and effect, in terms of target. The issue is the hostages, which Hamas will release at two every week, with lots of taking (through intermediaries) in between, to try and keep Israeli in a painful limbo of inaction.
Well, if that was the intention, it's failed.
And I think that's partly because Hamas are actually not keen on peace either.
Though interestingly, the people of Gaza are, or were. 54% support a 2 state solution, and only 10% support the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state. Only 24% would vote for Hamas in a democratic election. This polling finished on October 6th. Polling on the West Bank also supported a 2 state solution, though not quite so strongly.
Polling on Hamas's support is understandably all over the place. Here's a 2021 poll:
"Poll finds dramatic rise in Palestinian support for Hamas ... The poll found that 53% of Palestinians believe Hamas is “most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people,” while only 14% prefer Abbas’ secular Fatah party."
And a problem is this: everyone knows how thoroughly anti-Semitic Hamas is, and what their objective is wrt Jews. You cannot support Hamas and say that you're not anti-Semitic - it's like a German saying they supported the Nazis because they built good roads or had good education policies.
Hamas still exist in Gaza not just because they have power and guns; but because they also have enough support. Sadly, like the Iranian regime.
I think you are also referencing Hamas’s 1988 founding charter, which is antisemitic. However, Hamas have repudiated the document and issued a new charter in 2017, which talks about a Palestine within the 1967 borders, and explicitly says that Hamas does not seek war against all Jewish people but only against Zionism. This reflects comments going back as early as 2008 that were more moderate than the founding charter. That said, others are sceptical of their sincerity.
'Sceptical' is not a strong enough word. Would you trust a Nazi party that repudiated anti-Semitism? Did Hamas go around asking their victims if they were Zionists or not? No, they wanted to kill Jews.
Their repeated denials since the atrocity that their attacks were on civilians gives some idea of how much their words mean.
The sad truth is that so much of our infrastructure in this country is crumbling. Water pipes. Schools. Hospitals. Roads. Public services.
An ocean of cash will have to be invested because the cost of not doing so is higher. The right can complain about the impact on bills but oceans of money have been pocketed by the likes of Thames Water as they leave the infrastructure to crumble. Not that the right care about people anyway.
So we have to spend an ocean of cash to fix this country. Do we spend it on 21st century things or 19th century things? We need power generation - clean tech or coal? And if we need to have all these things does the right really think that importing them is the best approach?
We used to build things for the world. Clean tech is the opportunity to do so again.
So name your technology. Nuclear perhaps then what ?
Starter for 10: wind. We’re building an awful lot of big wind farms. Why aren’t we developing our own turbines, manufacturing them, and exporting them to other markets?
Off shore wind needs ancillaries- inter connectors, control gear, support ships. Let’s make those.
We’ve given up as an industrial nation. Too hard. Too expensive. Yet we pay more by importing the things we used to export
Ive been arguing for years here along with @another_richard that we have been throwing away our manufacturing . However a lot of the technology lead on wind sits with people like Siemens. The make things here but a multinational always suits itself. Unless we have more domestically controlled businesses I cannot see us recovering technologies. The RR mini nuclear plants may be somewhere we can establish a lead but we're screwing that up atm.
So let’s invest in business then. The Thatcher revolution was to stop investing and to start selling. We sold off the utilities and encouraged British industrial giants like ICI and GEC to split themselves apart and hive off chunks for a quick profit today and don’t worry about tomorrow.
We need to change that. We built up industrial capability before and we can do it again - but we have to invest. And sadly the right seems to see investment as communism - or close to it. Why tie up money investing for the long term when your spiv mates could be making a profit now?
One point of what may seem like pedantry but is actually quite important. The 1.5C target is 1.5C OVER PRE-INDUSTRIAL LEVELS. Estimates are that we are at 1.2C over such levels. So if the world manages to hit its target (which it won't), and if we're exactly representative of that, we're looking at an increase of only 0.3C. Which, sadly, won't make London into Lyon.
Quite conceivably climate change could make Britain colder and wetter as a result of changes to the Atlantic currents. So London more like Belfast in climate than Lyon.
The prediction was hotter summers and wetter autumns. But like all predictions it could be wrong.
It was the other way round this year.
Summer was warmer than average including the hottest June on record.
Autumn is rapidly becoming a very wet one after a dry start.
Though August was a washout and September unseasonably warm. Increased unpredictability of an already unpredictable climate is not a good thing.
Starmers Green Prosperity Plan does poll well incidentally. Strongly too with the "Loyal Nationalists" of the "Red Wall".
Well maybe, but everybody agrees on doing nice things until the bills come in. When the policies hit the pocket thats when we see if they really support it or not.
There is widespread polling support for green policies.
There are even a lot of Tories who don't want to trash the country and planet.
Well youre letting your views on conservatives blind the reality. Most conservatives support a clean environment, its in the name. You simply highlight that Lefties dont know how to get to common ground. If you spent less time making everything a political campaign and more time on bottom up measures we would all make more progress.
Well this government is noted for putting shit in our rivers and pollutants in our air.
Many conservatives do care about these things, which is one of many reasons that they are increasingly alienated from the current government.
That's guff. You can criticise them for not cleaning things up fast enough but they did not put them there in. Potentially the biggest natural disaster in the UK is taking place in Lough Neagh the British Isles largest fresh water lake. Thats controlled by Stormont who have been ignoring the problem and killing the lake.
Step 1: don't take sufficient action to stop climate change running out of control.
Step 2: realise Britain has failed to become a leader in any new technologies as other countries adapt faster.
Step 3: complain about all these new migrants from places that are now inhospitable, Britain's weather is fine thank you very much.
That's rather unfair. Firstly, Britain (yes, under the coalition *and* Conservatives) have made massive strides towards going green. We have adapted fast - and they get f'all credit for it.
Secondly, we're a small country with a (relatively) small industrial base, especially in low-value, high-volume stuff. The chances are we would always be outplayed in high-volume technology.
Thirdly, *nothing* Britain could do would stop climate change running out of control. Even if we had zero emissions, the emissions from the rest of the world would dwarf that.
Fourthly, people need jobs. I daresay people in public service, especially occupations such as the NHS or education, may feel a certain amount of job security. But going green too fast could really damage the economy. Like many things, it is a balancing game.
Where does this "relatively small industrial base" thing come from?
I know it's a meme that has been repeated ad infinitum in various media (decline of manufacturing etc), yet we are in the top 10 in the world.
AIUI (and I may be wrong), we're very good at low-volume, high-tech items. We're less good at what we used to be good at: low-cost, high-volume stuff. The *value* of what we produce is high; the volume is lower. (*)
Sadly, things like solar cells are the latter (and we want them to be low-cost, high-volume).
(*) I might be wrong, though.
Following on from my own post: IMV we'd be better off not trying to produce things we want to be low-cost and high-volume; other countries are much better at us than that, or we ever could be due to our size and resources (*). Therefore things like mass battery or solar-cell production should be left to others; preferably with us investing in them.
What we can excel at is R&D. We should be investing in things like new battery chemistries, then doing deals with people who can mass-produce them. Or even investing in factories elsewhere. We should play to our strengths.
(*) We could be much better at this, but environmental and NIMBY issues make it next to impossible. Remember the nonsense about Able UK's shipbreaking?
Sorry, but that's nonsense. We had a lot of very interesting battery research a decade or so back. Without being involved in manufacturing, it was meaningless. You're effectively saying, for example, that we shouldn't have a car industry.
One point of what may seem like pedantry but is actually quite important. The 1.5C target is 1.5C OVER PRE-INDUSTRIAL LEVELS. Estimates are that we are at 1.2C over such levels. So if the world manages to hit its target (which it won't), and if we're exactly representative of that, we're looking at an increase of only 0.3C. Which, sadly, won't make London into Lyon.
Quite conceivably climate change could make Britain colder and wetter as a result of changes to the Atlantic currents. So London more like Belfast in climate than Lyon.
The prediction was hotter summers and wetter autumns. But like all predictions it could be wrong.
It was the other way round this year.
Summer was warmer than average including the hottest June on record.
Autumn is rapidly becoming a very wet one after a dry start.
Though August was a washout and September unseasonably warm. Increased unpredictability of an already unpredictable climate is not a good thing.
Starmers Green Prosperity Plan does poll well incidentally. Strongly too with the "Loyal Nationalists" of the "Red Wall".
Well maybe, but everybody agrees on doing nice things until the bills come in. When the policies hit the pocket thats when we see if they really support it or not.
There is widespread polling support for green policies.
There are even a lot of Tories who don't want to trash the country and planet.
Well youre letting your views on conservatives blind the reality. Most conservatives support a clean environment, its in the name. You simply highlight that Lefties dont know how to get to common ground. If you spent less time making everything a political campaign and more time on bottom up measures we would all make more progress.
We had common ground on net zero. The right abandoned it.
The net zero policies will self terminate if they punish the poor and benefit the rich, which is how it looks a lot of the time.
Good news is it should actually save people money. See the NIC report last week.
For example, if you electrify your house with solar panels and storage batteries you can cut your electricity bill by anything from 30-70%, ad-infinitum. The issue is being able to shell out the £6-10k up front for all the kit, but even then it repays for itself over 10-12 years, and then makes a profit thereafter.
I know this because I've just ordered. But I can only do so because I have (some) spare capital. HMG should be offering £5k+ discounts on all of this, and to borrow the rest at cost - or make it easy to add to mortgages.
Heat pumps are different. They need to be less shit. They need to pump in 20C+ of heat, with turboboost options for when it's really cold, not just 14-15C and only really working when your house is insulated like an igloo. But, again, once in - no gas bills.
So this will make us wealthier overall, if we get it right.
Human nature, Treasury brain, Anglo Saxon Short Term Capitalism, Boomer "after I've gone"ness...
See British Infrastructure, passim ad nauseum.
There's a lot of prejudice, labelling and confirmation bias in this.
Not sure it's helpful.
Perhaps not.
But I'm pretty sure that it is the case that the UK has a problem of spending too little on infrastructure and too much on day to day consumption. And that's one of the reasons we are collectively in the pickle we are.
Something is causing that, and we need to find a way round that something, whatever it is.
I agree with that, as I think you already knew, but the UK is crap at infrastructure and we're all doomed stuff grates.
Sure, we have problems, but we've made progress- lots of it - and this is one of the top ten best countries in the world to live in.
One point of what may seem like pedantry but is actually quite important. The 1.5C target is 1.5C OVER PRE-INDUSTRIAL LEVELS. Estimates are that we are at 1.2C over such levels. So if the world manages to hit its target (which it won't), and if we're exactly representative of that, we're looking at an increase of only 0.3C. Which, sadly, won't make London into Lyon.
Quite conceivably climate change could make Britain colder and wetter as a result of changes to the Atlantic currents. So London more like Belfast in climate than Lyon.
The prediction was hotter summers and wetter autumns. But like all predictions it could be wrong.
It was the other way round this year.
Summer was warmer than average including the hottest June on record.
Autumn is rapidly becoming a very wet one after a dry start.
Though August was a washout and September unseasonably warm. Increased unpredictability of an already unpredictable climate is not a good thing.
Starmers Green Prosperity Plan does poll well incidentally. Strongly too with the "Loyal Nationalists" of the "Red Wall".
Well maybe, but everybody agrees on doing nice things until the bills come in. When the policies hit the pocket thats when we see if they really support it or not.
There is widespread polling support for green policies.
There are even a lot of Tories who don't want to trash the country and planet.
Well youre letting your views on conservatives blind the reality. Most conservatives support a clean environment, its in the name. You simply highlight that Lefties dont know how to get to common ground. If you spent less time making everything a political campaign and more time on bottom up measures we would all make more progress.
Well this government is noted for putting shit in our rivers and pollutants in our air.
Many conservatives do care about these things, which is one of many reasons that they are increasingly alienated from the current government.
That's guff. You can criticise them for not cleaning things up fast enough but they did not put them there in. Potentially the biggest natural disaster in the UK is taking place in Lough Neagh the British Isles largest fresh water lake. Thats controlled by Stormont who have been ignoring the problem and killing the lake.
Ive just spent 3 years working in the water sector and the problems go back decades. Nobody comes out well.
Yes, it is a pity indeed that the Unionists prevent a Stormont government tackling the many problems of NI.
Not even decent quality trolling Doc Fox Up your game.
Ok. If it isn’t those dinosaur fuckers in the DUP preventing Stormont from operating, who is it?
Stormont was collapsed by Martin McGuiness in 2017. There has been no Stormont government since. Though were still paying the gits,
The Lough Neagh problems go back decades since they are a combination of slurry run off and no investment in sewage.
In typical NI fashion the local politicians will scream how bad things are and then blame the brits,
Just so we’re clear - the reason why Stormont cannot meet in 2023 is because of Martin McGuinness in 2017?
Even blaming the Renewable Heat scandal on him and not Foster is a stretch. But you’ve had multiple elections since then. And McGuinness has been dead for 6 years. I know a corpse is preventing Stormont meeting, but that corpse is the DUP, not McGuinness
One point of what may seem like pedantry but is actually quite important. The 1.5C target is 1.5C OVER PRE-INDUSTRIAL LEVELS. Estimates are that we are at 1.2C over such levels. So if the world manages to hit its target (which it won't), and if we're exactly representative of that, we're looking at an increase of only 0.3C. Which, sadly, won't make London into Lyon.
Quite conceivably climate change could make Britain colder and wetter as a result of changes to the Atlantic currents. So London more like Belfast in climate than Lyon.
The prediction was hotter summers and wetter autumns. But like all predictions it could be wrong.
It was the other way round this year.
Summer was warmer than average including the hottest June on record.
Autumn is rapidly becoming a very wet one after a dry start.
Though August was a washout and September unseasonably warm. Increased unpredictability of an already unpredictable climate is not a good thing.
Starmers Green Prosperity Plan does poll well incidentally. Strongly too with the "Loyal Nationalists" of the "Red Wall".
Well maybe, but everybody agrees on doing nice things until the bills come in. When the policies hit the pocket thats when we see if they really support it or not.
There is widespread polling support for green policies.
There are even a lot of Tories who don't want to trash the country and planet.
Well youre letting your views on conservatives blind the reality. Most conservatives support a clean environment, its in the name. You simply highlight that Lefties dont know how to get to common ground. If you spent less time making everything a political campaign and more time on bottom up measures we would all make more progress.
We had common ground on net zero. The right abandoned it.
Step 1: don't take sufficient action to stop climate change running out of control.
Step 2: realise Britain has failed to become a leader in any new technologies as other countries adapt faster.
Step 3: complain about all these new migrants from places that are now inhospitable, Britain's weather is fine thank you very much.
That's rather unfair. Firstly, Britain (yes, under the coalition *and* Conservatives) have made massive strides towards going green. We have adapted fast - and they get f'all credit for it.
Secondly, we're a small country with a (relatively) small industrial base, especially in low-value, high-volume stuff. The chances are we would always be outplayed in high-volume technology.
Thirdly, *nothing* Britain could do would stop climate change running out of control. Even if we had zero emissions, the emissions from the rest of the world would dwarf that.
Fourthly, people need jobs. I daresay people in public service, especially occupations such as the NHS or education, may feel a certain amount of job security. But going green too fast could really damage the economy. Like many things, it is a balancing game.
Where does this "relatively small industrial base" thing come from?
I know it's a meme that has been repeated ad infinitum in various media (decline of manufacturing etc), yet we are in the top 10 in the world.
AIUI (and I may be wrong), we're very good at low-volume, high-tech items. We're less good at what we used to be good at: low-cost, high-volume stuff. The *value* of what we produce is high; the volume is lower. (*)
Sadly, things like solar cells are the latter (and we want them to be low-cost, high-volume).
(*) I might be wrong, though.
Following on from my own post: IMV we'd be better off not trying to produce things we want to be low-cost and high-volume; other countries are much better at us than that, or we ever could be due to our size and resources (*). Therefore things like mass battery or solar-cell production should be left to others; preferably with us investing in them.
What we can excel at is R&D. We should be investing in things like new battery chemistries, then doing deals with people who can mass-produce them. Or even investing in factories elsewhere. We should play to our strengths.
(*) We could be much better at this, but environmental and NIMBY issues make it next to impossible. Remember the nonsense about Able UK's shipbreaking?
Sorry, but that's nonsense. We had a lot of very interesting battery research a decade or so back. Without being involved in manufacturing, it was meaningless. You're effectively saying, for example, that we shouldn't have a car industry.
We are getting there though:
"The report said the growth in clean energy and technologies was "impressive". In 2020, one in 25 cars sold was electric. Just three years later this number has risen to one in five."
The sad truth is that so much of our infrastructure in this country is crumbling. Water pipes. Schools. Hospitals. Roads. Public services.
An ocean of cash will have to be invested because the cost of not doing so is higher. The right can complain about the impact on bills but oceans of money have been pocketed by the likes of Thames Water as they leave the infrastructure to crumble. Not that the right care about people anyway.
So we have to spend an ocean of cash to fix this country. Do we spend it on 21st century things or 19th century things? We need power generation - clean tech or coal? And if we need to have all these things does the right really think that importing them is the best approach?
We used to build things for the world. Clean tech is the opportunity to do so again.
So name your technology. Nuclear perhaps then what ?
Starter for 10: wind. We’re building an awful lot of big wind farms. Why aren’t we developing our own turbines, manufacturing them, and exporting them to other markets?
Off shore wind needs ancillaries- inter connectors, control gear, support ships. Let’s make those.
We’ve given up as an industrial nation. Too hard. Too expensive. Yet we pay more by importing the things we used to export
Some years ago (I’ve recounted this story before), an acquaintance was tasked with siting a new factory. In addition to the usual Far East locations, he looked at building it in the U.K. - a poor, ex-industrial area.
The response in the U.K.was (collectively) that we don’t really want your factory. Everyone he talked to paid some lip service to the idea, but in actuality produced an endless supply of hurdles to jump.
So guess where the factory ended up?
If you want industry, you need to want new factories.
The sad truth is that so much of our infrastructure in this country is crumbling. Water pipes. Schools. Hospitals. Roads. Public services.
An ocean of cash will have to be invested because the cost of not doing so is higher. The right can complain about the impact on bills but oceans of money have been pocketed by the likes of Thames Water as they leave the infrastructure to crumble. Not that the right care about people anyway.
So we have to spend an ocean of cash to fix this country. Do we spend it on 21st century things or 19th century things? We need power generation - clean tech or coal? And if we need to have all these things does the right really think that importing them is the best approach?
We used to build things for the world. Clean tech is the opportunity to do so again.
So name your technology. Nuclear perhaps then what ?
Starter for 10: wind. We’re building an awful lot of big wind farms. Why aren’t we developing our own turbines, manufacturing them, and exporting them to other markets?
Off shore wind needs ancillaries- inter connectors, control gear, support ships. Let’s make those.
We’ve given up as an industrial nation. Too hard. Too expensive. Yet we pay more by importing the things we used to export
Ive been arguing for years here along with @another_richard that we have been throwing away our manufacturing . However a lot of the technology lead on wind sits with people like Siemens. The make things here but a multinational always suits itself. Unless we have more domestically controlled businesses I cannot see us recovering technologies. The RR mini nuclear plants may be somewhere we can establish a lead but we're screwing that up atm.
So let’s invest in business then. The Thatcher revolution was to stop investing and to start selling. We sold off the utilities and encouraged British industrial giants like ICI and GEC to split themselves apart and hive off chunks for a quick profit today and don’t worry about tomorrow.
We need to change that. We built up industrial capability before and we can do it again - but we have to invest. And sadly the right seems to see investment as communism - or close to it. Why tie up money investing for the long term when your spiv mates could be making a profit now?
You really have to get over Thatcher. Firstly she's dead and scondly she left office in the last century. Blair killed more of our engineering that she did. Here's Gordon telling the City what fine chaps they are.
But imo we can have a manufacturing recovery. It wont be in high volume products but more in niche batch produced ones. We should encourage capital investment in new machinery to revive what we have and encourage new start ups. As a first step we should focus on import substitution rather than export since this is easier to get our industrial base going.
An interesting threader, thanks, and I look forward to Part Two.
"A 1.5 degree rise will give us a temperature more akin to central France. "
Part of the issue with climate change (man-made and natural) is that the effects are hard to discern in advance. We were at the National Space Centre yesterday, and there's a model there that highlights quite how far north the UK is. We should have similar climates to Canada and Norway, but we are warmer, thanks to the Gulf Stream. If that gets shifted, then wave bye-bye to any increases in temperature for us.
There are other advantages to 'going green', aside from the climate. My view is that some of the best - perhaps the best - series of legislation to come out of parliament post-WW2 are he various clean air act. They have improved air quality and saved countless lives. Removing ICE cars from the road will be another big step towards a more liveable environment.
But as is often the case, the question then becomes: how fast? How fast can we make this change? How fast should we make this change?
It has not reached Scotland yet for sure, Global warming my BUTT.
Speaker Mike Johnson is now defending criminally-indicted George Santos, saying if Santos were expelled and held accountable it would narrow Republicans’ majority.
For me, the point about the UK and net zero is that is a huge opportunity, not a cost or a burden.
I agree that us moving towards it aggressively will not shift the dial on overall heating trends, but it is an area where the UK can lead in terms of showing how to get there and creating systems, strategies and technologies to do it. We can cash in on such leadership in multiple ways - especially if others are delaying. After all, overall there is no alternative to net zero if the world of which we are a part is to have a viable future.
Leaving it to others while moaning about the costs is the typical British response. It has held us back for decades. Let’s try a different approach for a change.
So, I am very interested to see what part 2 brings. I’m not convinced by part 1.
Fair points SO, but we dont lead the world in wind technology or solar so where do you see the technology leadership ?
Technology innovation doesn’t have to be foundational, it can be incremental - improve on what’s already there, develop better ways to scale it and roll it out, etc. That’s where big wins often come from. That’s where we have a real chance with Net Zero, IMO.
The East Asians are particularly good at it. There’s no reason why we can’t be. We have millions of homes, offices and public buildings to make more energy efficient and many more to build. We have tens of thousands of charging points to create, we have an energy grid to modernise and so on and so on. If we do it first and do it effectively, we have highly monetisable assets and expertise that others don’t.
That said, we also have world class universities. We can and should be making a lot more use of them. Don’t blow the opportunities they present. No more graphenes.
One point of what may seem like pedantry but is actually quite important. The 1.5C target is 1.5C OVER PRE-INDUSTRIAL LEVELS. Estimates are that we are at 1.2C over such levels. So if the world manages to hit its target (which it won't), and if we're exactly representative of that, we're looking at an increase of only 0.3C. Which, sadly, won't make London into Lyon.
Quite conceivably climate change could make Britain colder and wetter as a result of changes to the Atlantic currents. So London more like Belfast in climate than Lyon.
The prediction was hotter summers and wetter autumns. But like all predictions it could be wrong.
It was the other way round this year.
Summer was warmer than average including the hottest June on record.
Autumn is rapidly becoming a very wet one after a dry start.
Though August was a washout and September unseasonably warm. Increased unpredictability of an already unpredictable climate is not a good thing.
Starmers Green Prosperity Plan does poll well incidentally. Strongly too with the "Loyal Nationalists" of the "Red Wall".
Well maybe, but everybody agrees on doing nice things until the bills come in. When the policies hit the pocket thats when we see if they really support it or not.
There is widespread polling support for green policies.
There are even a lot of Tories who don't want to trash the country and planet.
Well youre letting your views on conservatives blind the reality. Most conservatives support a clean environment, its in the name. You simply highlight that Lefties dont know how to get to common ground. If you spent less time making everything a political campaign and more time on bottom up measures we would all make more progress.
We had common ground on net zero. The right abandoned it.
The net zero policies will self terminate if they punish the poor and benefit the rich, which is how it looks a lot of the time.
Good news is it should actually save people money. See the NIC report last week.
For example, if you electrify your house with solar panels and storage batteries you can cut your electricity bill by anything from 30-70%, ad-infinitum. The issue is being able to shell out the £6-10k up front for all the kit, but even then it repays for itself over 10-12 years, and then makes a profit thereafter.
I know this because I've just ordered. But I can only do so because I have (some) spare capital. HMG should be offering £5k+ discounts on all of this, and to borrow the rest at cost - or make it easy to add to mortgages.
Heat pumps are different. They need to be less shit. They need to pump in 20C+ of heat, with turboboost options for when it's really cold, not just 14-15C and only really working when your house is insulated like an igloo. But, again, once in - no gas bills.
I see no rationale for a discount - home owners are relatively well off and do not need free money. The UK Govt attitude, which I think is correct, has been to offer incentives where the market and actual cost / benefit cannot meet the need, or on condition of fabric improvements as applied to solar FIT and now applies far too minimally to Heat Pump grants. In the case of solar I think the market can do it already - a regulatory intervention to unlock the investment would be better value imo.
Given the rapid rise in house prices most can easily borrow such a small sum on a marginal mortgage increase. Perhaps the Govt could offer funding against 1-3% of equity in the house.
Can you elucidate on that "20C+ of heat"? Heat is in kWh or kJ, not Celsius, and heating a house is about amount of heat gained and lost not temperature differences.
(I won't draw attention to igloos being built out of material that are as poor as insulators as a naked brick wall )
One point of what may seem like pedantry but is actually quite important. The 1.5C target is 1.5C OVER PRE-INDUSTRIAL LEVELS. Estimates are that we are at 1.2C over such levels. So if the world manages to hit its target (which it won't), and if we're exactly representative of that, we're looking at an increase of only 0.3C. Which, sadly, won't make London into Lyon.
Quite conceivably climate change could make Britain colder and wetter as a result of changes to the Atlantic currents. So London more like Belfast in climate than Lyon.
The prediction was hotter summers and wetter autumns. But like all predictions it could be wrong.
It was the other way round this year.
Summer was warmer than average including the hottest June on record.
Autumn is rapidly becoming a very wet one after a dry start.
Though August was a washout and September unseasonably warm. Increased unpredictability of an already unpredictable climate is not a good thing.
Starmers Green Prosperity Plan does poll well incidentally. Strongly too with the "Loyal Nationalists" of the "Red Wall".
Well maybe, but everybody agrees on doing nice things until the bills come in. When the policies hit the pocket thats when we see if they really support it or not.
There is widespread polling support for green policies.
There are even a lot of Tories who don't want to trash the country and planet.
Well youre letting your views on conservatives blind the reality. Most conservatives support a clean environment, its in the name. You simply highlight that Lefties dont know how to get to common ground. If you spent less time making everything a political campaign and more time on bottom up measures we would all make more progress.
We had common ground on net zero. The right abandoned it.
The net zero policies will self terminate if they punish the poor and benefit the rich, which is how it looks a lot of the time.
Good news is it should actually save people money. See the NIC report last week.
For example, if you electrify your house with solar panels and storage batteries you can cut your electricity bill by anything from 30-70%, ad-infinitum. The issue is being able to shell out the £6-10k up front for all the kit, but even then it repays for itself over 10-12 years, and then makes a profit thereafter.
I know this because I've just ordered. But I can only do so because I have (some) spare capital. HMG should be offering £5k+ discounts on all of this, and to borrow the rest at cost - or make it easy to add to mortgages.
Heat pumps are different. They need to be less shit. They need to pump in 20C+ of heat, with turboboost options for when it's really cold, not just 14-15C and only really working when your house is insulated like an igloo. But, again, once in - no gas bills.
So this will make us wealthier overall, if we get it right.
Human nature, Treasury brain, Anglo Saxon Short Term Capitalism, Boomer "after I've gone"ness...
See British Infrastructure, passim ad nauseum.
There's a lot of prejudice, labelling and confirmation bias in this.
Not sure it's helpful.
Perhaps not.
But I'm pretty sure that it is the case that the UK has a problem of spending too little on infrastructure and too much on day to day consumption. And that's one of the reasons we are collectively in the pickle we are.
Something is causing that, and we need to find a way round that something, whatever it is.
I agree with that, as I think you already knew, but the UK is crap at infrastructure and we're all doomed stuff grates.
Sure, we have problems, but we've made progress- lots of it - and this is one of the top ten best countries in the world to live in.
Let's not beat ourselves up too much.
Compared to the 3rd world our infrastructure is great! Compared to neighbouring 1st world countries, not so great.
Regardless of comparisons, what we have is at best under capacity and ageing. So we need to invest an awful lot to have infrastructure which is fit for purpose and allows our economy to compete with our neighbours.
If we’re building all these new houses, why not build them with 21st century technology? If we’re building power generation, why are there calls to go to 20th or 19th century technology?
“China coal plants” is just an excuse for Britain to get left behind on major infrastructure transformation, as usual.
A sad little kingdom of asset sweaters.
I was going to like this post, for the first sentence and Twitter link - which is broadly accurate; there should be a massive in Chinese renewables in the next 10 years - but the rest of the post put me off.
Why do so many on the left take such active pleasure in falsely denigrating and hating their own country?
Maybe because it's not the country or its people we hate, but the grifters and swindlers presently running it..
> China 29% of world emissions, I can’t honestly see them take the remotest interest
If we're going to have posts that don't have any betting content than that's fine and I do appreciate that it takes a lot of effort to write them. But just a little bit of research to check your assumptions might be nice?
Yes. China are installing masses of renewables, and they seem to be aware that they face massive risks from climate change.
The whole argument of we shouldn't do anything until China does argument falls down a bit in the face of China's rollout of zero carbon technologies. The argument is two decades out of date.
Step 1: don't take sufficient action to stop climate change running out of control.
Step 2: realise Britain has failed to become a leader in any new technologies as other countries adapt faster.
Step 3: complain about all these new migrants from places that are now inhospitable, Britain's weather is fine thank you very much.
That's rather unfair. Firstly, Britain (yes, under the coalition *and* Conservatives) have made massive strides towards going green. We have adapted fast - and they get f'all credit for it.
Secondly, we're a small country with a (relatively) small industrial base, especially in low-value, high-volume stuff. The chances are we would always be outplayed in high-volume technology.
Thirdly, *nothing* Britain could do would stop climate change running out of control. Even if we had zero emissions, the emissions from the rest of the world would dwarf that.
Fourthly, people need jobs. I daresay people in public service, especially occupations such as the NHS or education, may feel a certain amount of job security. But going green too fast could really damage the economy. Like many things, it is a balancing game.
Where does this "relatively small industrial base" thing come from?
I know it's a meme that has been repeated ad infinitum in various media (decline of manufacturing etc), yet we are in the top 10 in the world.
AIUI (and I may be wrong), we're very good at low-volume, high-tech items. We're less good at what we used to be good at: low-cost, high-volume stuff. The *value* of what we produce is high; the volume is lower. (*)
Sadly, things like solar cells are the latter (and we want them to be low-cost, high-volume).
(*) I might be wrong, though.
Following on from my own post: IMV we'd be better off not trying to produce things we want to be low-cost and high-volume; other countries are much better at us than that, or we ever could be due to our size and resources (*). Therefore things like mass battery or solar-cell production should be left to others; preferably with us investing in them.
What we can excel at is R&D. We should be investing in things like new battery chemistries, then doing deals with people who can mass-produce them. Or even investing in factories elsewhere. We should play to our strengths.
(*) We could be much better at this, but environmental and NIMBY issues make it next to impossible. Remember the nonsense about Able UK's shipbreaking?
Sorry, but that's nonsense. We had a lot of very interesting battery research a decade or so back. Without being involved in manufacturing, it was meaningless. You're effectively saying, for example, that we shouldn't have a car industry.
We are getting there though:
"The report said the growth in clean energy and technologies was "impressive". In 2020, one in 25 cars sold was electric. Just three years later this number has risen to one in five."
One point of what may seem like pedantry but is actually quite important. The 1.5C target is 1.5C OVER PRE-INDUSTRIAL LEVELS. Estimates are that we are at 1.2C over such levels. So if the world manages to hit its target (which it won't), and if we're exactly representative of that, we're looking at an increase of only 0.3C. Which, sadly, won't make London into Lyon.
Quite conceivably climate change could make Britain colder and wetter as a result of changes to the Atlantic currents. So London more like Belfast in climate than Lyon.
The prediction was hotter summers and wetter autumns. But like all predictions it could be wrong.
It was the other way round this year.
Summer was warmer than average including the hottest June on record.
Autumn is rapidly becoming a very wet one after a dry start.
Though August was a washout and September unseasonably warm. Increased unpredictability of an already unpredictable climate is not a good thing.
Starmers Green Prosperity Plan does poll well incidentally. Strongly too with the "Loyal Nationalists" of the "Red Wall".
Well maybe, but everybody agrees on doing nice things until the bills come in. When the policies hit the pocket thats when we see if they really support it or not.
There is widespread polling support for green policies.
There are even a lot of Tories who don't want to trash the country and planet.
Well youre letting your views on conservatives blind the reality. Most conservatives support a clean environment, its in the name. You simply highlight that Lefties dont know how to get to common ground. If you spent less time making everything a political campaign and more time on bottom up measures we would all make more progress.
We had common ground on net zero. The right abandoned it.
The sad truth is that so much of our infrastructure in this country is crumbling. Water pipes. Schools. Hospitals. Roads. Public services.
An ocean of cash will have to be invested because the cost of not doing so is higher. The right can complain about the impact on bills but oceans of money have been pocketed by the likes of Thames Water as they leave the infrastructure to crumble. Not that the right care about people anyway.
So we have to spend an ocean of cash to fix this country. Do we spend it on 21st century things or 19th century things? We need power generation - clean tech or coal? And if we need to have all these things does the right really think that importing them is the best approach?
We used to build things for the world. Clean tech is the opportunity to do so again.
So name your technology. Nuclear perhaps then what ?
Starter for 10: wind. We’re building an awful lot of big wind farms. Why aren’t we developing our own turbines, manufacturing them, and exporting them to other markets?
Off shore wind needs ancillaries- inter connectors, control gear, support ships. Let’s make those.
We’ve given up as an industrial nation. Too hard. Too expensive. Yet we pay more by importing the things we used to export
Ive been arguing for years here along with @another_richard that we have been throwing away our manufacturing . However a lot of the technology lead on wind sits with people like Siemens. The make things here but a multinational always suits itself. Unless we have more domestically controlled businesses I cannot see us recovering technologies. The RR mini nuclear plants may be somewhere we can establish a lead but we're screwing that up atm.
So let’s invest in business then. The Thatcher revolution was to stop investing and to start selling. We sold off the utilities and encouraged British industrial giants like ICI and GEC to split themselves apart and hive off chunks for a quick profit today and don’t worry about tomorrow.
We need to change that. We built up industrial capability before and we can do it again - but we have to invest. And sadly the right seems to see investment as communism - or close to it. Why tie up money investing for the long term when your spiv mates could be making a profit now?
Which takes us back to the conversation about city bonuses. How do we get money people to take a decades long view when so much of their renumeration depends on short term performance? (Whatever performance even means...)
“China coal plants” is just an excuse for Britain to get left behind on major infrastructure transformation, as usual.
A sad little kingdom of asset sweaters.
I was going to like this post, for the first sentence and Twitter link - which is broadly accurate; there should be a massive in Chinese renewables in the next 10 years - but the rest of the post put me off.
Why do so many on the left take such active pleasure in falsely denigrating and hating their own country?
Maybe because it's not the country or its people we hate, but the grifters and swindlers presently running it..
..and I am not on the left btw.
The government is shit, we all know that, full of arseholes, but for a very large majority of people, this is a very good place to live in. The same is true of most rich world countries.
Compared to any previous generation, our problems are modest ones.
I think it was Hume who said his toothache caused him more anxiety than the Lisbon earthquake, which sums it up.
The sad truth is that so much of our infrastructure in this country is crumbling. Water pipes. Schools. Hospitals. Roads. Public services.
An ocean of cash will have to be invested because the cost of not doing so is higher. The right can complain about the impact on bills but oceans of money have been pocketed by the likes of Thames Water as they leave the infrastructure to crumble. Not that the right care about people anyway.
So we have to spend an ocean of cash to fix this country. Do we spend it on 21st century things or 19th century things? We need power generation - clean tech or coal? And if we need to have all these things does the right really think that importing them is the best approach?
We used to build things for the world. Clean tech is the opportunity to do so again.
So name your technology. Nuclear perhaps then what ?
Starter for 10: wind. We’re building an awful lot of big wind farms. Why aren’t we developing our own turbines, manufacturing them, and exporting them to other markets?
Off shore wind needs ancillaries- inter connectors, control gear, support ships. Let’s make those.
We’ve given up as an industrial nation. Too hard. Too expensive. Yet we pay more by importing the things we used to export
Ive been arguing for years here along with @another_richard that we have been throwing away our manufacturing . However a lot of the technology lead on wind sits with people like Siemens. The make things here but a multinational always suits itself. Unless we have more domestically controlled businesses I cannot see us recovering technologies. The RR mini nuclear plants may be somewhere we can establish a lead but we're screwing that up atm.
So let’s invest in business then. The Thatcher revolution was to stop investing and to start selling. We sold off the utilities and encouraged British industrial giants like ICI and GEC to split themselves apart and hive off chunks for a quick profit today and don’t worry about tomorrow.
We need to change that. We built up industrial capability before and we can do it again - but we have to invest. And sadly the right seems to see investment as communism - or close to it. Why tie up money investing for the long term when your spiv mates could be making a profit now?
You really have to get over Thatcher. Firstly she's dead and scondly she left office in the last century. Blair killed more of our engineering that she did. Here's Gordon telling the City what fine chaps they are.
But imo we can have a manufacturing recovery. It wont be in high volume products but more in niche batch produced ones. We should encourage capital investment in new machinery to revive what we have and encourage new start ups. As a first step we should focus on import substitution rather than export since this is easier to get our industrial base going.
We have done common ground here - though I think you're wrong to rule out high volume manufacturing.
And yes, we do need to get over Thatcher. She made choices which continue to determine where we are now - the destruction of some of our large industries was one of the consequences of those choices. The point isn't to reopen old wounds, but to accept that we ought to have an industrial strategy that's a bit more than laissez faire.
One point of what may seem like pedantry but is actually quite important. The 1.5C target is 1.5C OVER PRE-INDUSTRIAL LEVELS. Estimates are that we are at 1.2C over such levels. So if the world manages to hit its target (which it won't), and if we're exactly representative of that, we're looking at an increase of only 0.3C. Which, sadly, won't make London into Lyon.
Quite conceivably climate change could make Britain colder and wetter as a result of changes to the Atlantic currents. So London more like Belfast in climate than Lyon.
The prediction was hotter summers and wetter autumns. But like all predictions it could be wrong.
It was the other way round this year.
Summer was warmer than average including the hottest June on record.
Autumn is rapidly becoming a very wet one after a dry start.
Though August was a washout and September unseasonably warm. Increased unpredictability of an already unpredictable climate is not a good thing.
Starmers Green Prosperity Plan does poll well incidentally. Strongly too with the "Loyal Nationalists" of the "Red Wall".
Well maybe, but everybody agrees on doing nice things until the bills come in. When the policies hit the pocket thats when we see if they really support it or not.
There is widespread polling support for green policies.
There are even a lot of Tories who don't want to trash the country and planet.
Well youre letting your views on conservatives blind the reality. Most conservatives support a clean environment, its in the name. You simply highlight that Lefties dont know how to get to common ground. If you spent less time making everything a political campaign and more time on bottom up measures we would all make more progress.
Well this government is noted for putting shit in our rivers and pollutants in our air.
Many conservatives do care about these things, which is one of many reasons that they are increasingly alienated from the current government.
That's guff. You can criticise them for not cleaning things up fast enough but they did not put them there in. Potentially the biggest natural disaster in the UK is taking place in Lough Neagh the British Isles largest fresh water lake. Thats controlled by Stormont who have been ignoring the problem and killing the lake.
Ive just spent 3 years working in the water sector and the problems go back decades. Nobody comes out well.
Yes, it is a pity indeed that the Unionists prevent a Stormont government tackling the many problems of NI.
Not even decent quality trolling Doc Fox Up your game.
Ok. If it isn’t those dinosaur fuckers in the DUP preventing Stormont from operating, who is it?
Stormont was collapsed by Martin McGuiness in 2017. There has been no Stormont government since. Though were still paying the gits,
The Lough Neagh problems go back decades since they are a combination of slurry run off and no investment in sewage.
In typical NI fashion the local politicians will scream how bad things are and then blame the brits,
Just so we’re clear - the reason why Stormont cannot meet in 2023 is because of Martin McGuinness in 2017?
Even blaming the Renewable Heat scandal on him and not Foster is a stretch. But you’ve had multiple elections since then. And McGuinness has been dead for 6 years. I know a corpse is preventing Stormont meeting, but that corpse is the DUP, not McGuinness
SF collapsed Stormont and then played silly buggers and wouldn't go back in to government. The DUP when they lost the top spot decided to play the same SF game back on them. Neither one of them gives a shit about the electorate. And its not just water there is a mountain local issues that need sorting but the mexican standoff is the base position.
On the specifics of water the whole NI sector is a mess and this goes back decades - by way of comparison so has the Republic. Lough Neagh's problem has been slurry run off in to rivers. The farming lobby in NI is strong and nobody wants to upset them so its parked. The infrastructure in NI is appalling there has been little to no investment. As an example nobody pays a water bill - its all tucked up in rates. My brother's NI rates bill ( for everything ) is less than my water bill. Again the politicians just dont want to face the fact they have to make people pay more. This has been going on for years even when there was a Stormont. And if they all go back to work, theyll spend their time discussing flags or street names.
It will possibly have blown over by then but there are few issues in British and European politics as visceral as apartheid. And since South Africa this is seen (certainly on the left) as the next great injustice.
I'm sure Starmer will water down his intemperate comments but if he doesn't there will be a backlash. A lot will depend what happens in the next few months. Blair was able to lose his support in a short time with a wrong decision on Iraq and so could Starmer over Palestine
I'm always fascinated by the way the british Left decides it can willy nilly tell other people how to run their countries . Its just imperialism by other means.
But as imperialisms go I'd say campaigning against apartheid beats invading Iraq.
In South Africa, there was an obvious good guy, and an obvious bad guy.
Despite what Roger and the Corbynistas think, Israel doesn't fill the role of obvious bad guy, nor do the Palestinians fill the role of obvious good guy.
Yup. The talk of a “ceasefire” is a good example. In most conflicts when we say “ceasefire” we mean both sides. In this case, people seem to mean unilateral from Israel, and for Israel to just sit there and take continued rocket strikes during it, because it is the baddie and it deserves it.
What makes you say most people want a unilateral ceasefire?
Because I assume no one is silly enough to entertain the thought that Hamas would respect one.
If Hamas won't respect a ceasefire then Israel surely have nothing to lose by calling a ceasefire knowing Hamas will break it anyway. An easy propaganda victory. But Israel doesn't want a ceasefire.
What a perverted logic. Hamas started the fight, and Israel haven't got in their retaliation yet.
So your logic is that Israel should just have a ceasefire giving Hamas an opportunity to strike them with no recourse? How does that make any sense whatsoever?
Israel should have a ceasefire once Hamas have been destroyed.
Umm, you seem to 100% agree with me that Israel doesn't want a ceasefire.
I very strongly object to the insinuation that Israel should want a ceasefire, or there's anything wrong with them not wanting one, while Hamas still exists and holds hostages.
When the hostages are free and Hamas have been eradicated, that would be the time for a ceasefire, would it not?
“China coal plants” is just an excuse for Britain to get left behind on major infrastructure transformation, as usual.
A sad little kingdom of asset sweaters.
I was going to like this post, for the first sentence and Twitter link - which is broadly accurate; there should be a massive in Chinese renewables in the next 10 years - but the rest of the post put me off.
Why do so many on the left take such active pleasure in falsely denigrating and hating their own country?
Maybe because it's not the country or its people we hate, but the grifters and swindlers presently running it..
..and I am not on the left btw.
The government is shit, we all know that, full of arseholes, but for a very large majority of people, this is a very good place to live in. The same is true of most rich world countries.
Compared to any previous generation, our problems are modest ones.
I think it was Hume who said his toothache caused him more anxiety than the Lisbon earthquake, which sums it up.
I agree with that, I'd rather live here thatn Gaza, Israel, the US (parts of). I'm not blind, though, to the grifters taking advantage of our relative prosperity and general openhandedness for their own ends. It does nothing good for our humour and reputation of fairness in the outside world.
“China coal plants” is just an excuse for Britain to get left behind on major infrastructure transformation, as usual.
A sad little kingdom of asset sweaters.
I was going to like this post, for the first sentence and Twitter link - which is broadly accurate; there should be a massive in Chinese renewables in the next 10 years - but the rest of the post put me off.
Why do so many on the left take such active pleasure in falsely denigrating and hating their own country?
Maybe because it's not the country or its people we hate, but the grifters and swindlers presently running it..
..and I am not on the left btw.
The government is shit, we all know that, full of arseholes, but for a very large majority of people, this is a very good place to live in. The same is true of most rich world countries.
Compared to any previous generation, our problems are modest ones.
I think it was Hume who said his toothache caused him more anxiety than the Lisbon earthquake, which sums it up.
That’s really not true any more: it is the Panglossian verdict of the 1990s-00s
AI alone is probably the biggest existential threat mankind has ever faced. Yes it may be utopian, it could also be apocalyptic. Truly. And it is coming - this is not some maybe or could be
Add to that the fractured geopolitical world, climate change, the rise of autocratic China, and our problems are not “modest”, sadly
The sad truth is that so much of our infrastructure in this country is crumbling. Water pipes. Schools. Hospitals. Roads. Public services.
An ocean of cash will have to be invested because the cost of not doing so is higher. The right can complain about the impact on bills but oceans of money have been pocketed by the likes of Thames Water as they leave the infrastructure to crumble. Not that the right care about people anyway.
So we have to spend an ocean of cash to fix this country. Do we spend it on 21st century things or 19th century things? We need power generation - clean tech or coal? And if we need to have all these things does the right really think that importing them is the best approach?
We used to build things for the world. Clean tech is the opportunity to do so again.
So name your technology. Nuclear perhaps then what ?
Starter for 10: wind. We’re building an awful lot of big wind farms. Why aren’t we developing our own turbines, manufacturing them, and exporting them to other markets?
Off shore wind needs ancillaries- inter connectors, control gear, support ships. Let’s make those.
We’ve given up as an industrial nation. Too hard. Too expensive. Yet we pay more by importing the things we used to export
Ive been arguing for years here along with @another_richard that we have been throwing away our manufacturing . However a lot of the technology lead on wind sits with people like Siemens. The make things here but a multinational always suits itself. Unless we have more domestically controlled businesses I cannot see us recovering technologies. The RR mini nuclear plants may be somewhere we can establish a lead but we're screwing that up atm.
So let’s invest in business then. The Thatcher revolution was to stop investing and to start selling. We sold off the utilities and encouraged British industrial giants like ICI and GEC to split themselves apart and hive off chunks for a quick profit today and don’t worry about tomorrow.
We need to change that. We built up industrial capability before and we can do it again - but we have to invest. And sadly the right seems to see investment as communism - or close to it. Why tie up money investing for the long term when your spiv mates could be making a profit now?
You really have to get over Thatcher. Firstly she's dead and scondly she left office in the last century. Blair killed more of our engineering that she did. Here's Gordon telling the City what fine chaps they are.
But imo we can have a manufacturing recovery. It wont be in high volume products but more in niche batch produced ones. We should encourage capital investment in new machinery to revive what we have and encourage new start ups. As a first step we should focus on import substitution rather than export since this is easier to get our industrial base going.
We have done common ground here - though I think you're wrong to rule out high volume manufacturing.
And yes, we do need to get over Thatcher. She made choices which continue to determine where we are now - the destruction of some of our large industries was one of the consequences of those choices. The point isn't to reopen old wounds, but to accept that we ought to have an industrial strategy that's a bit more than laissez faire.
I agree HMG has no plan. We can have a return to volume manufacturing but it wont be from home grown industries since we havent any left. Maybe we could speak nicely to Mr Dyson. However if we want volume work we need to attract so large scale foreign companies to assemble here. The benefits will chiefly be in a localised supply chain. However the balance of payments needs it.
It will possibly have blown over by then but there are few issues in British and European politics as visceral as apartheid. And since South Africa this is seen (certainly on the left) as the next great injustice.
I'm sure Starmer will water down his intemperate comments but if he doesn't there will be a backlash. A lot will depend what happens in the next few months. Blair was able to lose his support in a short time with a wrong decision on Iraq and so could Starmer over Palestine
I'm always fascinated by the way the british Left decides it can willy nilly tell other people how to run their countries . Its just imperialism by other means.
But as imperialisms go I'd say campaigning against apartheid beats invading Iraq.
In South Africa, there was an obvious good guy, and an obvious bad guy.
Despite what Roger and the Corbynistas think, Israel doesn't fill the role of obvious bad guy, nor do the Palestinians fill the role of obvious good guy.
Yup. The talk of a “ceasefire” is a good example. In most conflicts when we say “ceasefire” we mean both sides. In this case, people seem to mean unilateral from Israel, and for Israel to just sit there and take continued rocket strikes during it, because it is the baddie and it deserves it.
What makes you say most people want a unilateral ceasefire?
Because I assume no one is silly enough to entertain the thought that Hamas would respect one.
If Hamas won't respect a ceasefire then Israel surely have nothing to lose by calling a ceasefire knowing Hamas will break it anyway. An easy propaganda victory. But Israel doesn't want a ceasefire.
What a perverted logic. Hamas started the fight, and Israel haven't got in their retaliation yet.
So your logic is that Israel should just have a ceasefire giving Hamas an opportunity to strike them with no recourse? How does that make any sense whatsoever?
Israel should have a ceasefire once Hamas have been destroyed.
Umm, you seem to 100% agree with me that Israel doesn't want a ceasefire.
I very strongly object to the insinuation that Israel should want a ceasefire, or there's anything wrong with them not wanting one, while Hamas still exists and holds hostages.
When the hostages are free and Hamas have been eradicated, that would be the time for a ceasefire, would it not?
Is there a tipping point to your opinion? How many Palestinians would need to be bombed to death?
I am broadly in favour of Net Zero but would like to see it achieved by British investment so we do not find ourselves paying Americans and Europeans for electricity generated by their wind, solar and tidal farms in our country (which is where we are now with many utilities).
Here is then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson:-
Last week I went up in one of our 148 Typhoon fighters, and I flew out over the North sea, over Doggerland. The drowned prairies are now being harvested again with tens of gigawatts of clean green energy. We will have 50 GW of offshore wind by 2050, and thanks to this Government’s activism I am proud to say that offshore wind is now cheaper than onshore wind. I looked down at that ghostly white forest of windmills in the sea, financed with ever growing sums from international investors, and I thought, “This is how we will fix our energy problems; this is how Europe should be ending its dependence on Putin’s gas.” https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2022-07-18/debates/EA7DB1BF-EC36-4C3B-8F73-D47B2523BA53/ConfidenceInHerMajesty’SGovernment
> China 29% of world emissions, I can’t honestly see them take the remotest interest
If we're going to have posts that don't have any betting content than that's fine and I do appreciate that it takes a lot of effort to write them. But just a little bit of research to check your assumptions might be nice?
Yes. China are installing masses of renewables, and they seem to be aware that they face massive risks from climate change.
The whole argument of we shouldn't do anything until China does argument falls down a bit in the face of China's rollout of zero carbon technologies. The argument is two decades out of date.
Thats to misunderstand the argument. Assuming China unwinds there are lots of others to take its place. India is largely coal powered and expanding fast,
I am broadly in favour of Net Zero but would like to see it achieved by British investment so we do not find ourselves paying Americans and Europeans for electricity generated by their wind, solar and tidal farms in our country (which is where we are now with many utilities).
Here is then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson:-
Last week I went up in one of our 148 Typhoon fighters, and I flew out over the North sea, over Doggerland. The drowned prairies are now being harvested again with tens of gigawatts of clean green energy. We will have 50 GW of offshore wind by 2050, and thanks to this Government’s activism I am proud to say that offshore wind is now cheaper than onshore wind. I looked down at that ghostly white forest of windmills in the sea, financed with ever growing sums from international investors, and I thought, “This is how we will fix our energy problems; this is how Europe should be ending its dependence on Putin’s gas.” https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2022-07-18/debates/EA7DB1BF-EC36-4C3B-8F73-D47B2523BA53/ConfidenceInHerMajesty’SGovernment
So bountiful and cheap that the recent round of bidding for offshore attracted no bids and ‘big energy’ are demanding a 70% increase in electricity bills to help fund this bountiful and cheap form of electricity generation.
It will possibly have blown over by then but there are few issues in British and European politics as visceral as apartheid. And since South Africa this is seen (certainly on the left) as the next great injustice.
I'm sure Starmer will water down his intemperate comments but if he doesn't there will be a backlash. A lot will depend what happens in the next few months. Blair was able to lose his support in a short time with a wrong decision on Iraq and so could Starmer over Palestine
I'm always fascinated by the way the british Left decides it can willy nilly tell other people how to run their countries . Its just imperialism by other means.
But as imperialisms go I'd say campaigning against apartheid beats invading Iraq.
In South Africa, there was an obvious good guy, and an obvious bad guy.
Despite what Roger and the Corbynistas think, Israel doesn't fill the role of obvious bad guy, nor do the Palestinians fill the role of obvious good guy.
Yup. The talk of a “ceasefire” is a good example. In most conflicts when we say “ceasefire” we mean both sides. In this case, people seem to mean unilateral from Israel, and for Israel to just sit there and take continued rocket strikes during it, because it is the baddie and it deserves it.
What makes you say most people want a unilateral ceasefire?
Because I assume no one is silly enough to entertain the thought that Hamas would respect one.
If Hamas won't respect a ceasefire then Israel surely have nothing to lose by calling a ceasefire knowing Hamas will break it anyway. An easy propaganda victory. But Israel doesn't want a ceasefire.
What a perverted logic. Hamas started the fight, and Israel haven't got in their retaliation yet.
So your logic is that Israel should just have a ceasefire giving Hamas an opportunity to strike them with no recourse? How does that make any sense whatsoever?
Israel should have a ceasefire once Hamas have been destroyed.
Umm, you seem to 100% agree with me that Israel doesn't want a ceasefire.
I very strongly object to the insinuation that Israel should want a ceasefire, or there's anything wrong with them not wanting one, while Hamas still exists and holds hostages.
When the hostages are free and Hamas have been eradicated, that would be the time for a ceasefire, would it not?
Is there a tipping point to your opinion? How many Palestinians would need to be bombed to death?
It will possibly have blown over by then but there are few issues in British and European politics as visceral as apartheid. And since South Africa this is seen (certainly on the left) as the next great injustice.
I'm sure Starmer will water down his intemperate comments but if he doesn't there will be a backlash. A lot will depend what happens in the next few months. Blair was able to lose his support in a short time with a wrong decision on Iraq and so could Starmer over Palestine
I'm always fascinated by the way the british Left decides it can willy nilly tell other people how to run their countries . Its just imperialism by other means.
But as imperialisms go I'd say campaigning against apartheid beats invading Iraq.
In South Africa, there was an obvious good guy, and an obvious bad guy.
Despite what Roger and the Corbynistas think, Israel doesn't fill the role of obvious bad guy, nor do the Palestinians fill the role of obvious good guy.
Yup. The talk of a “ceasefire” is a good example. In most conflicts when we say “ceasefire” we mean both sides. In this case, people seem to mean unilateral from Israel, and for Israel to just sit there and take continued rocket strikes during it, because it is the baddie and it deserves it.
What makes you say most people want a unilateral ceasefire?
Because I assume no one is silly enough to entertain the thought that Hamas would respect one.
If Hamas won't respect a ceasefire then Israel surely have nothing to lose by calling a ceasefire knowing Hamas will break it anyway. An easy propaganda victory. But Israel doesn't want a ceasefire.
What a perverted logic. Hamas started the fight, and Israel haven't got in their retaliation yet.
So your logic is that Israel should just have a ceasefire giving Hamas an opportunity to strike them with no recourse? How does that make any sense whatsoever?
Israel should have a ceasefire once Hamas have been destroyed.
Umm, you seem to 100% agree with me that Israel doesn't want a ceasefire.
I very strongly object to the insinuation that Israel should want a ceasefire, or there's anything wrong with them not wanting one, while Hamas still exists and holds hostages.
When the hostages are free and Hamas have been eradicated, that would be the time for a ceasefire, would it not?
Is there a tipping point to your opinion? How many Palestinians would need to be bombed to death?
..just asking...
Yes there is a tipping point. Two binary ones of them in fact.
Are the hostages free? Yes, or no?
Have Hamas been eradicated? Yes, or no?
In war you need to proportionately try to reduce the other sides civilian casualties while still seeking to achieve your objectives, and Israel quite rightly are doing that. Once the objectives are complete, with as few civilian casualties as is realistically feasible, the war should end.
If other nations want to offer refuge to civilians to avoid the conflict while it rages, then that would keep civilians alive, if they don't, then more civilians will die but that's not Israel's fault. Israel has to achieve its objectives first and foremost.
Interesting that Saudi state media is suggesting that Israel offered a ceasefire in return for the hostages being released and Hamas rejected it, hence the ground invasion being approved. I don't see what the Saudis would get out of fabricating something that makes Israel looks like the reasonable party so I'm inclined to believe that it is true and the offer was probably made through Saudi intermediaries.
Israel has every right to do whatever it takes to bring back the hostages, and allies will be rock solid in their support until the hostages are released. Hamas are responsible for all of the death and destruction in Gaza by refusing the Israeli offer, but since when have they given any fucks about civilians.
> China 29% of world emissions, I can’t honestly see them take the remotest interest
If we're going to have posts that don't have any betting content than that's fine and I do appreciate that it takes a lot of effort to write them. But just a little bit of research to check your assumptions might be nice?
Yes. China are installing masses of renewables, and they seem to be aware that they face massive risks from climate change.
The whole argument of we shouldn't do anything until China does argument falls down a bit in the face of China's rollout of zero carbon technologies. The argument is two decades out of date.
Thats to misunderstand the argument. Assuming China unwinds there are lots of others to take its place. India is largely coal powered and expanding fast,
So to go back to my earlier question to you left unanswered: what do you propose? Because someone is still burning coal that so should we?
The coal we have left is uneconomical to dig up after binning the mining industry. So if we pull coal power stations out of mothballs we’re burning coal from Brazil.
Or do you prefer gas? We already burned most of the North Sea gas, we don’t want Russian gas, so ship it from Qatar?
Nuclear? We co-invented it but thanks to the Thatcherite industrial settlement we have to pay £vast to foreign governments to build power stations. We do not own, control, or have capability to do fossil fuel power generation, or even nuclear. But we could do renewables. Or, as Tory spies want, just keep paying other people.
Interesting that Saudi state media is suggesting that Israel offered a ceasefire in return for the hostages being released and Hamas rejected it, hence the ground invasion being approved. I don't see what the Saudis would get out of fabricating something that makes Israel looks like the reasonable party so I'm inclined to believe that it is true and the offer was probably made through Saudi intermediaries.
Israel has every right to do whatever it takes to bring back the hostages, and allies will be rock solid in their support until the hostages are released. Hamas are responsible for all of the death and destruction in Gaza by refusing the Israeli offer, but since when have they given any fucks about civilians.
Its a very generous offer by Israel too, since releasing the hostages may be the primary immediate objective, but it is far from the only one. To allow Hamas to survive this with no more than the release of the hostages would be incredibly generous and peaceful of Israel.
Of course Israel cares more about its own civilians, than Hamas cares about its own, so the fact that Israel made such a generous offer - and the fact that Hamas rejected it - is entirely fitting with their behaviour.
The net zero policies will self terminate if they punish the poor and benefit the rich, which is how it looks a lot of the time.
Good news is it should actually save people money. See the NIC report last week.
For example, if you electrify your house with solar panels and storage batteries you can cut your electricity bill by anything from 30-70%, ad-infinitum. The issue is being able to shell out the £6-10k up front for all the kit, but even then it repays for itself over 10-12 years, and then makes a profit thereafter.
I know this because I've just ordered. But I can only do so because I have (some) spare capital. HMG should be offering £5k+ discounts on all of this, and to borrow the rest at cost - or make it easy to add to mortgages.
Heat pumps are different. They need to be less shit. They need to pump in 20C+ of heat, with turboboost options for when it's really cold, not just 14-15C and only really working when your house is insulated like an igloo. But, again, once in - no gas bills.
I see no rationale for a discount - home owners are relatively well off and do not need free money. The UK Govt attitude, which I think is correct, has been to offer incentives where the market and actual cost / benefit cannot meet the need, or on condition of fabric improvements as applied to solar FIT and now applies far too minimally to Heat Pump grants. In the case of solar I think the market can do it already - a regulatory intervention to unlock the investment would be better value imo.
Given the rapid rise in house prices most can easily borrow such a small sum on a marginal mortgage increase. Perhaps the Govt could offer funding against 1-3% of equity in the house.
Can you elucidate on that "20C+ of heat"? Heat is in kWh or kJ, not Celsius, and heating a house is about amount of heat gained and lost not temperature differences.
(I won't draw attention to igloos being built out of material that are as poor as insulators as a naked brick wall )
Solar panels make your house look like shit.
Malcolm - You are just saying that because Scotland gets no sunshine....
“China coal plants” is just an excuse for Britain to get left behind on major infrastructure transformation, as usual.
A sad little kingdom of asset sweaters.
I was going to like this post, for the first sentence and Twitter link - which is broadly accurate; there should be a massive in Chinese renewables in the next 10 years - but the rest of the post put me off.
Why do so many on the left take such active pleasure in falsely denigrating and hating their own country?
Maybe because it's not the country or its people we hate, but the grifters and swindlers presently running it..
..and I am not on the left btw.
Fine, but that's not what I'm hearing: "a sad little kingdom of asset sweaters".
It will possibly have blown over by then but there are few issues in British and European politics as visceral as apartheid. And since South Africa this is seen (certainly on the left) as the next great injustice.
I'm sure Starmer will water down his intemperate comments but if he doesn't there will be a backlash. A lot will depend what happens in the next few months. Blair was able to lose his support in a short time with a wrong decision on Iraq and so could Starmer over Palestine
I'm always fascinated by the way the british Left decides it can willy nilly tell other people how to run their countries . Its just imperialism by other means.
But as imperialisms go I'd say campaigning against apartheid beats invading Iraq.
In South Africa, there was an obvious good guy, and an obvious bad guy.
Despite what Roger and the Corbynistas think, Israel doesn't fill the role of obvious bad guy, nor do the Palestinians fill the role of obvious good guy.
Yup. The talk of a “ceasefire” is a good example. In most conflicts when we say “ceasefire” we mean both sides. In this case, people seem to mean unilateral from Israel, and for Israel to just sit there and take continued rocket strikes during it, because it is the baddie and it deserves it.
What makes you say most people want a unilateral ceasefire?
Because I assume no one is silly enough to entertain the thought that Hamas would respect one.
If Hamas won't respect a ceasefire then Israel surely have nothing to lose by calling a ceasefire knowing Hamas will break it anyway. An easy propaganda victory. But Israel doesn't want a ceasefire.
What a perverted logic. Hamas started the fight, and Israel haven't got in their retaliation yet.
So your logic is that Israel should just have a ceasefire giving Hamas an opportunity to strike them with no recourse? How does that make any sense whatsoever?
Israel should have a ceasefire once Hamas have been destroyed.
Umm, you seem to 100% agree with me that Israel doesn't want a ceasefire.
I very strongly object to the insinuation that Israel should want a ceasefire, or there's anything wrong with them not wanting one, while Hamas still exists and holds hostages.
When the hostages are free and Hamas have been eradicated, that would be the time for a ceasefire, would it not?
Is there a tipping point to your opinion? How many Palestinians would need to be bombed to death?
..just asking...
Yes there is a tipping point. Two binary ones of them in fact.
Are the hostages free? Yes, or no?
Have Hamas been eradicated? Yes, or no?
In war you need to proportionately try to reduce the other sides civilian casualties while still seeking to achieve your objectives, and Israel quite rightly are doing that. Once the objectives are complete, with as few civilian casualties as is realistically feasible, the war should end.
If other nations want to offer refuge to civilians to avoid the conflict while it rages, then that would keep civilians alive, if they don't, then more civilians will die but that's not Israel's fault. Israel has to achieve its objectives first and foremost.
So it's the "other nations" fault if the bombing of civilians result in their death? Surely as Israel occupied Gaza they are responsible for the wellbeing of the residents there?
“China coal plants” is just an excuse for Britain to get left behind on major infrastructure transformation, as usual.
A sad little kingdom of asset sweaters.
I was going to like this post, for the first sentence and Twitter link - which is broadly accurate; there should be a massive in Chinese renewables in the next 10 years - but the rest of the post put me off.
Why do so many on the left take such active pleasure in falsely denigrating and hating their own country?
Maybe because it's not the country or its people we hate, but the grifters and swindlers presently running it..
..and I am not on the left btw.
The government is shit, we all know that, full of arseholes, but for a very large majority of people, this is a very good place to live in. The same is true of most rich world countries.
Compared to any previous generation, our problems are modest ones.
I think it was Hume who said his toothache caused him more anxiety than the Lisbon earthquake, which sums it up.
That’s really not true any more: it is the Panglossian verdict of the 1990s-00s
AI alone is probably the biggest existential threat mankind has ever faced. Yes it may be utopian, it could also be apocalyptic. Truly. And it is coming - this is not some maybe or could be
Add to that the fractured geopolitical world, climate change, the rise of autocratic China, and our problems are not “modest”, sadly
Things are more frightening than in the 1990's. But, before that, we had World War, a series of hideous conflicts after colonial powers withdrew from Africa and Asia, the Cold War, high unemployment, terrorism, bitter industrial conflict, and the threat of nuclear annihilation (my father tells me how frightened he was during the Cuban Missile Crisis), among other delights. And worldwide, both poverty and famine were at much higher levels than now.
The big difference between the 1950-2000 period and now, is that, back then, we could take for granted living standards growing by 2% a year, here, compared to 1% a year now. It doesn't sound like much, but it makes a big difference over the course of 25 years, and it hurts.
> China 29% of world emissions, I can’t honestly see them take the remotest interest
If we're going to have posts that don't have any betting content than that's fine and I do appreciate that it takes a lot of effort to write them. But just a little bit of research to check your assumptions might be nice?
Yes. China are installing masses of renewables, and they seem to be aware that they face massive risks from climate change.
The whole argument of we shouldn't do anything until China does argument falls down a bit in the face of China's rollout of zero carbon technologies. The argument is two decades out of date.
Thats to misunderstand the argument. Assuming China unwinds there are lots of others to take its place. India is largely coal powered and expanding fast,
So to go back to my earlier question to you left unanswered: what do you propose? Because someone is still burning coal that so should we?
The coal we have left is uneconomical to dig up after binning the mining industry. So if we pull coal power stations out of mothballs we’re burning coal from Brazil.
Or do you prefer gas? We already burned most of the North Sea gas, we don’t want Russian gas, so ship it from Qatar?
Nuclear? We co-invented it but thanks to the Thatcherite industrial settlement we have to pay £vast to foreign governments to build power stations. We do not own, control, or have capability to do fossil fuel power generation, or even nuclear. But we could do renewables. Or, as Tory spies want, just keep paying other people.
Ive got some proposals in part 2.
But now I must answer the call of a greater being and take Mrs B to the supermarket.
> China 29% of world emissions, I can’t honestly see them take the remotest interest
If we're going to have posts that don't have any betting content than that's fine and I do appreciate that it takes a lot of effort to write them. But just a little bit of research to check your assumptions might be nice?
Yes. China are installing masses of renewables, and they seem to be aware that they face massive risks from climate change.
The whole argument of we shouldn't do anything until China does argument falls down a bit in the face of China's rollout of zero carbon technologies. The argument is two decades out of date.
Thats to misunderstand the argument. Assuming China unwinds there are lots of others to take its place. India is largely coal powered and expanding fast,
So to go back to my earlier question to you left unanswered: what do you propose? Because someone is still burning coal that so should we?
The coal we have left is uneconomical to dig up after binning the mining industry. So if we pull coal power stations out of mothballs we’re burning coal from Brazil.
Or do you prefer gas? We already burned most of the North Sea gas, we don’t want Russian gas, so ship it from Qatar?
Nuclear? We co-invented it but thanks to the Thatcherite industrial settlement we have to pay £vast to foreign governments to build power stations. We do not own, control, or have capability to do fossil fuel power generation, or even nuclear. But we could do renewables. Or, as Tory spies want, just keep paying other people.
The reason we don’t have a Big Nuclear industry is that we stopped building nukes. And the government policy since the 1960s was not to export nuclear power station design and tech - proliferation combined with the British state obsession with secrecy.
So, with the only jobs in nuclear being building reactors for submarines, strangely, we have that industrial base. Hence the mini-nukes.
The net zero policies will self terminate if they punish the poor and benefit the rich, which is how it looks a lot of the time.
Good news is it should actually save people money. See the NIC report last week.
For example, if you electrify your house with solar panels and storage batteries you can cut your electricity bill by anything from 30-70%, ad-infinitum. The issue is being able to shell out the £6-10k up front for all the kit, but even then it repays for itself over 10-12 years, and then makes a profit thereafter.
I know this because I've just ordered. But I can only do so because I have (some) spare capital. HMG should be offering £5k+ discounts on all of this, and to borrow the rest at cost - or make it easy to add to mortgages.
Heat pumps are different. They need to be less shit. They need to pump in 20C+ of heat, with turboboost options for when it's really cold, not just 14-15C and only really working when your house is insulated like an igloo. But, again, once in - no gas bills.
I see no rationale for a discount - home owners are relatively well off and do not need free money. The UK Govt attitude, which I think is correct, has been to offer incentives where the market and actual cost / benefit cannot meet the need, or on condition of fabric improvements as applied to solar FIT and now applies far too minimally to Heat Pump grants. In the case of solar I think the market can do it already - a regulatory intervention to unlock the investment would be better value imo.
Given the rapid rise in house prices most can easily borrow such a small sum on a marginal mortgage increase. Perhaps the Govt could offer funding against 1-3% of equity in the house.
Can you elucidate on that "20C+ of heat"? Heat is in kWh or kJ, not Celsius, and heating a house is about amount of heat gained and lost not temperature differences.
(I won't draw attention to igloos being built out of material that are as poor as insulators as a naked brick wall )
Solar panels make your house look like shit.
Malcolm - You are just saying that because Scotland gets no sunshine....
[Ducks and runs for cover]
You'd be surprised how much, in some parts - including where Malky lives. And even in the lesser parts it all helps.
The sad truth is that so much of our infrastructure in this country is crumbling. Water pipes. Schools. Hospitals. Roads. Public services.
An ocean of cash will have to be invested because the cost of not doing so is higher. The right can complain about the impact on bills but oceans of money have been pocketed by the likes of Thames Water as they leave the infrastructure to crumble. Not that the right care about people anyway.
So we have to spend an ocean of cash to fix this country. Do we spend it on 21st century things or 19th century things? We need power generation - clean tech or coal? And if we need to have all these things does the right really think that importing them is the best approach?
We used to build things for the world. Clean tech is the opportunity to do so again.
So name your technology. Nuclear perhaps then what ?
Starter for 10: wind. We’re building an awful lot of big wind farms. Why aren’t we developing our own turbines, manufacturing them, and exporting them to other markets?
Off shore wind needs ancillaries- inter connectors, control gear, support ships. Let’s make those.
We’ve given up as an industrial nation. Too hard. Too expensive. Yet we pay more by importing the things we used to export
Ive been arguing for years here along with @another_richard that we have been throwing away our manufacturing . However a lot of the technology lead on wind sits with people like Siemens. The make things here but a multinational always suits itself. Unless we have more domestically controlled businesses I cannot see us recovering technologies. The RR mini nuclear plants may be somewhere we can establish a lead but we're screwing that up atm.
So let’s invest in business then. The Thatcher revolution was to stop investing and to start selling. We sold off the utilities and encouraged British industrial giants like ICI and GEC to split themselves apart and hive off chunks for a quick profit today and don’t worry about tomorrow.
We need to change that. We built up industrial capability before and we can do it again - but we have to invest. And sadly the right seems to see investment as communism - or close to it. Why tie up money investing for the long term when your spiv mates could be making a profit now?
You should be thanking Thatcher.
She was the first major leader to recognise the threat of climate change, and to deliver a UN speech on it. It was partly because of her the 1990 baseline was established, which we've cut against ever since. Because she understood the science.
It's remarkable people keep forgetting this, and that goes for fellow Conservatives too.
"Israel offered a ceasefire in exchange for Hamas releasing all hostages and handing over the bodies of dead Israelis, but Hamas refused, Al Arabiya reported."
Al-Arabiyah is in effect an arm of the Saudi government and such a story would suit them well. It would give them an excuse to start edging towards Israel again when the current war ends.
A ground invasion is a very risky move which is why Biden has been trying to stop it (unsuccessfully it would seem). So it isn't impossible.
That said, given his track record I can imagine Netanyahu might make such an offer knowing it would be refused and he would then have a pretext to invade over Biden's objections. Bottom line is, if he is to survive he needs a ground offensive and a major win. Even that may not (hopefully, will not) be enough for his career.
Millions of innocents had to die just so Bush & Blair could be seen to be doing something, even if the something had nothing to do with the cause of 9/11….at least in this case you can join the dots between cause and effect, in terms of target. The issue is the hostages, which Hamas will release at two every week, with lots of taking (through intermediaries) in between, to try and keep Israeli in a painful limbo of inaction.
Well, if that was the intention, it's failed.
And I think that's partly because Hamas are actually not keen on peace either.
Though interestingly, the people of Gaza are, or were. 54% support a 2 state solution, and only 10% support the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state. Only 24% would vote for Hamas in a democratic election. This polling finished on October 6th. Polling on the West Bank also supported a 2 state solution, though not quite so strongly.
Polling on Hamas's support is understandably all over the place. Here's a 2021 poll:
"Poll finds dramatic rise in Palestinian support for Hamas ... The poll found that 53% of Palestinians believe Hamas is “most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people,” while only 14% prefer Abbas’ secular Fatah party."
And a problem is this: everyone knows how thoroughly anti-Semitic Hamas is, and what their objective is wrt Jews. You cannot support Hamas and say that you're not anti-Semitic - it's like a German saying they supported the Nazis because they built good roads or had good education policies.
Hamas still exist in Gaza not just because they have power and guns; but because they also have enough support. Sadly, like the Iranian regime.
I think you are also referencing Hamas’s 1988 founding charter, which is antisemitic. However, Hamas have repudiated the document and issued a new charter in 2017, which talks about a Palestine within the 1967 borders, and explicitly says that Hamas does not seek war against all Jewish people but only against Zionism. This reflects comments going back as early as 2008 that were more moderate than the founding charter. That said, others are sceptical of their sincerity.
'Sceptical' is not a strong enough word. Would you trust a Nazi party that repudiated anti-Semitism? Did Hamas go around asking their victims if they were Zionists or not? No, they wanted to kill Jews.
Indeed but increasingly, as the death toll mounts, sympathisers of Palestine will be turning round your rhetoric. Did the Israeli air force ask of the thousands it killed, whether they were card-carrying Hamas members?
> China 29% of world emissions, I can’t honestly see them take the remotest interest
If we're going to have posts that don't have any betting content than that's fine and I do appreciate that it takes a lot of effort to write them. But just a little bit of research to check your assumptions might be nice?
Yes. China are installing masses of renewables, and they seem to be aware that they face massive risks from climate change.
The whole argument of we shouldn't do anything until China does argument falls down a bit in the face of China's rollout of zero carbon technologies. The argument is two decades out of date.
Thats to misunderstand the argument. Assuming China unwinds there are lots of others to take its place. India is largely coal powered and expanding fast,
So to go back to my earlier question to you left unanswered: what do you propose? Because someone is still burning coal that so should we?
The coal we have left is uneconomical to dig up after binning the mining industry. So if we pull coal power stations out of mothballs we’re burning coal from Brazil.
Or do you prefer gas? We already burned most of the North Sea gas, we don’t want Russian gas, so ship it from Qatar?
Nuclear? We co-invented it but thanks to the Thatcherite industrial settlement we have to pay £vast to foreign governments to build power stations. We do not own, control, or have capability to do fossil fuel power generation, or even nuclear. But we could do renewables. Or, as Tory spies want, just keep paying other people.
Ive got some proposals in part 2.
But now I must answer the call of a greater being and take Mrs B to the supermarket.
Did she want it, Sir? Did she? Did she want it, Sir?
The sad truth is that so much of our infrastructure in this country is crumbling. Water pipes. Schools. Hospitals. Roads. Public services.
An ocean of cash will have to be invested because the cost of not doing so is higher. The right can complain about the impact on bills but oceans of money have been pocketed by the likes of Thames Water as they leave the infrastructure to crumble. Not that the right care about people anyway.
So we have to spend an ocean of cash to fix this country. Do we spend it on 21st century things or 19th century things? We need power generation - clean tech or coal? And if we need to have all these things does the right really think that importing them is the best approach?
We used to build things for the world. Clean tech is the opportunity to do so again.
So name your technology. Nuclear perhaps then what ?
Starter for 10: wind. We’re building an awful lot of big wind farms. Why aren’t we developing our own turbines, manufacturing them, and exporting them to other markets?
Off shore wind needs ancillaries- inter connectors, control gear, support ships. Let’s make those.
We’ve given up as an industrial nation. Too hard. Too expensive. Yet we pay more by importing the things we used to export
Ive been arguing for years here along with @another_richard that we have been throwing away our manufacturing . However a lot of the technology lead on wind sits with people like Siemens. The make things here but a multinational always suits itself. Unless we have more domestically controlled businesses I cannot see us recovering technologies. The RR mini nuclear plants may be somewhere we can establish a lead but we're screwing that up atm.
So let’s invest in business then. The Thatcher revolution was to stop investing and to start selling. We sold off the utilities and encouraged British industrial giants like ICI and GEC to split themselves apart and hive off chunks for a quick profit today and don’t worry about tomorrow.
We need to change that. We built up industrial capability before and we can do it again - but we have to invest. And sadly the right seems to see investment as communism - or close to it. Why tie up money investing for the long term when your spiv mates could be making a profit now?
You really have to get over Thatcher. Firstly she's dead and scondly she left office in the last century. Blair killed more of our engineering that she did. Here's Gordon telling the City what fine chaps they are.
But imo we can have a manufacturing recovery. It wont be in high volume products but more in niche batch produced ones. We should encourage capital investment in new machinery to revive what we have and encourage new start ups. As a first step we should focus on import substitution rather than export since this is easier to get our industrial base going.
We have done common ground here - though I think you're wrong to rule out high volume manufacturing.
And yes, we do need to get over Thatcher. She made choices which continue to determine where we are now - the destruction of some of our large industries was one of the consequences of those choices. The point isn't to reopen old wounds, but to accept that we ought to have an industrial strategy that's a bit more than laissez faire.
I agree HMG has no plan. We can have a return to volume manufacturing but it wont be from home grown industries since we havent any left. Maybe we could speak nicely to Mr Dyson. However if we want volume work we need to attract so large scale foreign companies to assemble here. The benefits will chiefly be in a localised supply chain. However the balance of payments needs it.
Other countries negotiate technology sharing in return for facilitating market access or significant purchases. We should make a greater effort to do similarly.
“China coal plants” is just an excuse for Britain to get left behind on major infrastructure transformation, as usual.
A sad little kingdom of asset sweaters.
I was going to like this post, for the first sentence and Twitter link - which is broadly accurate; there should be a massive in Chinese renewables in the next 10 years - but the rest of the post put me off.
Why do so many on the left take such active pleasure in falsely denigrating and hating their own country?
Maybe because it's not the country or its people we hate, but the grifters and swindlers presently running it..
..and I am not on the left btw.
Fine, but that's not what I'm hearing: "a sad little kingdom of asset sweaters".
> China 29% of world emissions, I can’t honestly see them take the remotest interest
If we're going to have posts that don't have any betting content than that's fine and I do appreciate that it takes a lot of effort to write them. But just a little bit of research to check your assumptions might be nice?
Yes. China are installing masses of renewables, and they seem to be aware that they face massive risks from climate change.
The whole argument of we shouldn't do anything until China does argument falls down a bit in the face of China's rollout of zero carbon technologies. The argument is two decades out of date.
Thats to misunderstand the argument. Assuming China unwinds there are lots of others to take its place. India is largely coal powered and expanding fast,
So to go back to my earlier question to you left unanswered: what do you propose? Because someone is still burning coal that so should we?
The coal we have left is uneconomical to dig up after binning the mining industry. So if we pull coal power stations out of mothballs we’re burning coal from Brazil.
Or do you prefer gas? We already burned most of the North Sea gas, we don’t want Russian gas, so ship it from Qatar?
Nuclear? We co-invented it but thanks to the Thatcherite industrial settlement we have to pay £vast to foreign governments to build power stations. We do not own, control, or have capability to do fossil fuel power generation, or even nuclear. But we could do renewables. Or, as Tory spies want, just keep paying other people.
That's not true, it was Blair and Brown that wound down British nuclear and starved it of investment. BNFL was sold to Westinghouse in 2000 iirc by Gordon Brown who then proceeded fumble it all and all of the expertise in our nuclear industry either went overseas or retired with no replacements entering from universities.
Also, the UK is a hotbed of gen 4 and gen 5 nuclear reactors as well as fusion. We have the second highest rate of private investment in experimental reactors in the world, what we lack is commercialisation which needs state subsidies and I don't see this government or Labour putting up the £10-20bn requires to get those designs from labs to power generation by 2035. It is feasible but as ever, the UK government will decide that the NHS, pensions and other old people benefits are more important and our reactor IP will be bought up by American companies who will commercialise them with state subsidies and sell the reactors to us at a huge profit.
Regarding that £1.4 trillion - where does that money actually go? Does it disappear down some mythical monetary plug hole or does it actually get spent and therefore recycled round the economy?
The £1.4trillion is a bullshit number that Civitas pulled out of their backside & then had to retract because their numbers were so obviously wrong that even they couldn’t sit there with a straight face & claim that it was an honest effort at calculating the true cost of net-zero.
They had clearly given an intern the job of writing it, been delighted when they came up with such a big number that would give them the headlines they wanted & pushed it out the door to all the newspaper editors asap without bothering to check the numbers. Naturally the right wing press didn’t bother to check the numbers either - the report gave them a headline number they were delighted to print. Who cared if it was bullshit?
This report, amongst other things confused total energy need in MegaWatt-hours with the generating capacity (in MW) of a power station, ending up overestimating the cost of offshore wind power by something like a factor of 10,000. You can’t read it any more because Civitas pulled it altogether - I suspect that once the correct figures had been calculated it didn’t say what they wanted it to anymore. (unless anyone has a link to an updated version?)
For Alan Brooke to quote this number of £1.4trillion in his essay here shows how fundamentally unserious he is. It’s a joke number: a fiction that arose from a right-wing thinktank’s desire to print whatever fitted their prejudices & paymaster’s desires best without the slightest consideration for what was actually true.
Your question of “what do we get for our money” is a fair one of course. The answer is net-zero energy infrastructure: if you pay for a wind farm, you get a stream of energy in return that lasts for the lifetime of the farm (minus maintenance costs). Likewise for solar, tidal etc etc. Insulating homes & offices pays out in lower energy costs over time. A side benefit is that almost all of these energy sources are local - insulating the UK from global risks like a war in the middle east cutting off oil supplies. Plus, although this probably carries little weight with Alan, we get to pull our weight in getting to a worldwide net zero.
> China 29% of world emissions, I can’t honestly see them take the remotest interest
If we're going to have posts that don't have any betting content than that's fine and I do appreciate that it takes a lot of effort to write them. But just a little bit of research to check your assumptions might be nice?
Yes. China are installing masses of renewables, and they seem to be aware that they face massive risks from climate change.
The whole argument of we shouldn't do anything until China does argument falls down a bit in the face of China's rollout of zero carbon technologies. The argument is two decades out of date.
Thats to misunderstand the argument. Assuming China unwinds there are lots of others to take its place. India is largely coal powered and expanding fast,
So to go back to my earlier question to you left unanswered: what do you propose? Because someone is still burning coal that so should we?
The coal we have left is uneconomical to dig up after binning the mining industry. So if we pull coal power stations out of mothballs we’re burning coal from Brazil.
Or do you prefer gas? We already burned most of the North Sea gas, we don’t want Russian gas, so ship it from Qatar?
Nuclear? We co-invented it but thanks to the Thatcherite industrial settlement we have to pay £vast to foreign governments to build power stations. We do not own, control, or have capability to do fossil fuel power generation, or even nuclear. But we could do renewables. Or, as Tory spies want, just keep paying other people.
That's not true, it was Blair and Brown that wound down British nuclear and starved it of investment. BNFL was sold to Westinghouse in 2000 iirc by Gordon Brown who then proceeded fumble it all and all of the expertise in our nuclear industry either went overseas or retired with no replacements entering from universities.
Also, the UK is a hotbed of gen 4 and gen 5 nuclear reactors as well as fusion. We have the second highest rate of private investment in experimental reactors in the world, what we lack is commercialisation which needs state subsidies and I don't see this government or Labour putting up the £10-20bn requires to get those designs from labs to power generation by 2035. It is feasible but as ever, the UK government will decide that the NHS, pensions and other old people benefits are more important and our reactor IP will be bought up by American companies who will commercialise them with state subsidies and sell the reactors to us at a huge profit.
£20 billion spent on tidal would get you 6.4 GW of tidal power in production before 2035.
“China coal plants” is just an excuse for Britain to get left behind on major infrastructure transformation, as usual.
A sad little kingdom of asset sweaters.
I was going to like this post, for the first sentence and Twitter link - which is broadly accurate; there should be a massive in Chinese renewables in the next 10 years - but the rest of the post put me off.
Why do so many on the left take such active pleasure in falsely denigrating and hating their own country?
Maybe because it's not the country or its people we hate, but the grifters and swindlers presently running it..
..and I am not on the left btw.
Fine, but that's not what I'm hearing: "a sad little kingdom of asset sweaters".
The sad truth is that so much of our infrastructure in this country is crumbling. Water pipes. Schools. Hospitals. Roads. Public services.
An ocean of cash will have to be invested because the cost of not doing so is higher. The right can complain about the impact on bills but oceans of money have been pocketed by the likes of Thames Water as they leave the infrastructure to crumble. Not that the right care about people anyway.
So we have to spend an ocean of cash to fix this country. Do we spend it on 21st century things or 19th century things? We need power generation - clean tech or coal? And if we need to have all these things does the right really think that importing them is the best approach?
We used to build things for the world. Clean tech is the opportunity to do so again.
So name your technology. Nuclear perhaps then what ?
Starter for 10: wind. We’re building an awful lot of big wind farms. Why aren’t we developing our own turbines, manufacturing them, and exporting them to other markets?
Off shore wind needs ancillaries- inter connectors, control gear, support ships. Let’s make those.
We’ve given up as an industrial nation. Too hard. Too expensive. Yet we pay more by importing the things we used to export
Ive been arguing for years here along with @another_richard that we have been throwing away our manufacturing . However a lot of the technology lead on wind sits with people like Siemens. The make things here but a multinational always suits itself. Unless we have more domestically controlled businesses I cannot see us recovering technologies. The RR mini nuclear plants may be somewhere we can establish a lead but we're screwing that up atm.
So let’s invest in business then. The Thatcher revolution was to stop investing and to start selling. We sold off the utilities and encouraged British industrial giants like ICI and GEC to split themselves apart and hive off chunks for a quick profit today and don’t worry about tomorrow.
We need to change that. We built up industrial capability before and we can do it again - but we have to invest. And sadly the right seems to see investment as communism - or close to it. Why tie up money investing for the long term when your spiv mates could be making a profit now?
You really have to get over Thatcher. Firstly she's dead and scondly she left office in the last century. Blair killed more of our engineering that she did. Here's Gordon telling the City what fine chaps they are.
But imo we can have a manufacturing recovery. It wont be in high volume products but more in niche batch produced ones. We should encourage capital investment in new machinery to revive what we have and encourage new start ups. As a first step we should focus on import substitution rather than export since this is easier to get our industrial base going.
We have done common ground here - though I think you're wrong to rule out high volume manufacturing.
And yes, we do need to get over Thatcher. She made choices which continue to determine where we are now - the destruction of some of our large industries was one of the consequences of those choices. The point isn't to reopen old wounds, but to accept that we ought to have an industrial strategy that's a bit more than laissez faire.
Thatcher was hugely positive for the environment.
There were precisely two people talking about climate change in the late 80s: her, and the Greens.
Labour, at the time, were still invested in heavy industry. The Liberal Democrats largely localist, and focussed on protecting the green belt, river and local air pollution - and otherwise banging on about the EC/nascent EU.
Thatcher laid the foundations for the 1990 baseline for emissions reduction, the dash for gas in the 1990s (which phased down our coal) and no doubt would have commissioned much more new nuclear, earlier, had she remained in office.
It will possibly have blown over by then but there are few issues in British and European politics as visceral as apartheid. And since South Africa this is seen (certainly on the left) as the next great injustice.
I'm sure Starmer will water down his intemperate comments but if he doesn't there will be a backlash. A lot will depend what happens in the next few months. Blair was able to lose his support in a short time with a wrong decision on Iraq and so could Starmer over Palestine
I'm always fascinated by the way the british Left decides it can willy nilly tell other people how to run their countries . Its just imperialism by other means.
But as imperialisms go I'd say campaigning against apartheid beats invading Iraq.
In South Africa, there was an obvious good guy, and an obvious bad guy.
Despite what Roger and the Corbynistas think, Israel doesn't fill the role of obvious bad guy, nor do the Palestinians fill the role of obvious good guy.
Yup. The talk of a “ceasefire” is a good example. In most conflicts when we say “ceasefire” we mean both sides. In this case, people seem to mean unilateral from Israel, and for Israel to just sit there and take continued rocket strikes during it, because it is the baddie and it deserves it.
What makes you say most people want a unilateral ceasefire?
Because I assume no one is silly enough to entertain the thought that Hamas would respect one.
If Hamas won't respect a ceasefire then Israel surely have nothing to lose by calling a ceasefire knowing Hamas will break it anyway. An easy propaganda victory. But Israel doesn't want a ceasefire.
What a perverted logic. Hamas started the fight, and Israel haven't got in their retaliation yet.
So your logic is that Israel should just have a ceasefire giving Hamas an opportunity to strike them with no recourse? How does that make any sense whatsoever?
Israel should have a ceasefire once Hamas have been destroyed.
Umm, you seem to 100% agree with me that Israel doesn't want a ceasefire.
I very strongly object to the insinuation that Israel should want a ceasefire, or there's anything wrong with them not wanting one, while Hamas still exists and holds hostages.
When the hostages are free and Hamas have been eradicated, that would be the time for a ceasefire, would it not?
They are mutually exclusive though, hostages will be long gone before Hamas are obliterated.
Have we noted that this seat is, in the current climate, defo not an LD target, obviously a 'Labour only challenger' target and a fair bit easier to win than Tamworth.
Also, in the strange but true category, Wellingborough is the site of architect Ninian Comper's greatest masterpiece and is otherwise entirely uninteresting
Is it legitimate to flatten a building housing hundreds of civilians to kill a few Hamas fighters ?
Where do you draw the line ?
The answer is no, hence the ground invasion which will result in far, far fewer civilian deaths in Gaza than aerial bombardment but at a huge cost for Israel both in blood and treasure.
> China 29% of world emissions, I can’t honestly see them take the remotest interest
If we're going to have posts that don't have any betting content than that's fine and I do appreciate that it takes a lot of effort to write them. But just a little bit of research to check your assumptions might be nice?
Yes. China are installing masses of renewables, and they seem to be aware that they face massive risks from climate change.
The whole argument of we shouldn't do anything until China does argument falls down a bit in the face of China's rollout of zero carbon technologies. The argument is two decades out of date.
Thats to misunderstand the argument. Assuming China unwinds there are lots of others to take its place. India is largely coal powered and expanding fast,
So to go back to my earlier question to you left unanswered: what do you propose? Because someone is still burning coal that so should we?
The coal we have left is uneconomical to dig up after binning the mining industry. So if we pull coal power stations out of mothballs we’re burning coal from Brazil.
Or do you prefer gas? We already burned most of the North Sea gas, we don’t want Russian gas, so ship it from Qatar?
Nuclear? We co-invented it but thanks to the Thatcherite industrial settlement we have to pay £vast to foreign governments to build power stations. We do not own, control, or have capability to do fossil fuel power generation, or even nuclear. But we could do renewables. Or, as Tory spies want, just keep paying other people.
That's not true, it was Blair and Brown that wound down British nuclear and starved it of investment. BNFL was sold to Westinghouse in 2000 iirc by Gordon Brown who then proceeded fumble it all and all of the expertise in our nuclear industry either went overseas or retired with no replacements entering from universities.
Also, the UK is a hotbed of gen 4 and gen 5 nuclear reactors as well as fusion. We have the second highest rate of private investment in experimental reactors in the world, what we lack is commercialisation which needs state subsidies and I don't see this government or Labour putting up the £10-20bn requires to get those designs from labs to power generation by 2035. It is feasible but as ever, the UK government will decide that the NHS, pensions and other old people benefits are more important and our reactor IP will be bought up by American companies who will commercialise them with state subsidies and sell the reactors to us at a huge profit.
Yep, exactly what's going to happen.
An enlightened British government would set aside £30-40bn of taxpayers money a year for R&D/infra newshots - and face down the howlers, because only 20-30% might come off that generate massive returns to UK PLC - but that'd require courageous leadership, which we don't have in any party.
Interesting that Saudi state media is suggesting that Israel offered a ceasefire in return for the hostages being released and Hamas rejected it, hence the ground invasion being approved. I don't see what the Saudis would get out of fabricating something that makes Israel looks like the reasonable party so I'm inclined to believe that it is true and the offer was probably made through Saudi intermediaries.
Israel has every right to do whatever it takes to bring back the hostages, and allies will be rock solid in their support until the hostages are released. Hamas are responsible for all of the death and destruction in Gaza by refusing the Israeli offer, but since when have they given any fucks about civilians.
Thatis interesting. A key part of the reasoning behind the Hamas attack (facilitated by Iran) was to kill off the normalisation of relations between Saudi and Israel. Looks like Saudi may be trying to kick back against that. By all accounts the new leaders in Saudi (MBS for instance) are much less invested in the Palestinians than their elders. So may be some hope? The key thing for the Arab leaders is to manage the "street" - they, themselves, have bigger fish to fry than Palestine.
Is it legitimate to flatten a building housing hundreds of civilians to kill a few Hamas fighters ?
Where do you draw the line ?
Well, that's the hard question. Was it legitimate to kill 11,000 civilians in Mosul, and displace hundreds of thousands, to eradicate IS in 2017? On balance, I think most of us would say that it was.
Urban fighting, against people who simply use civilians as shields, is horrendous.
“China coal plants” is just an excuse for Britain to get left behind on major infrastructure transformation, as usual.
A sad little kingdom of asset sweaters.
I was going to like this post, for the first sentence and Twitter link - which is broadly accurate; there should be a massive in Chinese renewables in the next 10 years - but the rest of the post put me off.
Why do so many on the left take such active pleasure in falsely denigrating and hating their own country?
Maybe because it's not the country or its people we hate, but the grifters and swindlers presently running it..
..and I am not on the left btw.
Fine, but that's not what I'm hearing: "a sad little kingdom of asset sweaters".
yes, and who are the asset sweaters?
You lost me when you started insulting my own country.
"Israel offered a ceasefire in exchange for Hamas releasing all hostages and handing over the bodies of dead Israelis, but Hamas refused, Al Arabiya reported."
Al-Arabiyah is in effect an arm of the Saudi government and such a story would suit them well. It would give them an excuse to start edging towards Israel again when the current war ends.
A ground invasion is a very risky move which is why Biden has been trying to stop it (unsuccessfully it would seem). So it isn't impossible.
That said, given his track record I can imagine Netanyahu might make such an offer knowing it would be refused and he would then have a pretext to invade over Biden's objections. Bottom line is, if he is to survive he needs a ground offensive and a major win. Even that may not (hopefully, will not) be enough for his career.
Millions of innocents had to die just so Bush & Blair could be seen to be doing something, even if the something had nothing to do with the cause of 9/11….at least in this case you can join the dots between cause and effect, in terms of target. The issue is the hostages, which Hamas will release at two every week, with lots of taking (through intermediaries) in between, to try and keep Israeli in a painful limbo of inaction.
Well, if that was the intention, it's failed.
And I think that's partly because Hamas are actually not keen on peace either.
Though interestingly, the people of Gaza are, or were. 54% support a 2 state solution, and only 10% support the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state. Only 24% would vote for Hamas in a democratic election. This polling finished on October 6th. Polling on the West Bank also supported a 2 state solution, though not quite so strongly.
Polling on Hamas's support is understandably all over the place. Here's a 2021 poll:
"Poll finds dramatic rise in Palestinian support for Hamas ... The poll found that 53% of Palestinians believe Hamas is “most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people,” while only 14% prefer Abbas’ secular Fatah party."
And a problem is this: everyone knows how thoroughly anti-Semitic Hamas is, and what their objective is wrt Jews. You cannot support Hamas and say that you're not anti-Semitic - it's like a German saying they supported the Nazis because they built good roads or had good education policies.
Hamas still exist in Gaza not just because they have power and guns; but because they also have enough support. Sadly, like the Iranian regime.
I think you are also referencing Hamas’s 1988 founding charter, which is antisemitic. However, Hamas have repudiated the document and issued a new charter in 2017, which talks about a Palestine within the 1967 borders, and explicitly says that Hamas does not seek war against all Jewish people but only against Zionism. This reflects comments going back as early as 2008 that were more moderate than the founding charter. That said, others are sceptical of their sincerity.
'Sceptical' is not a strong enough word. Would you trust a Nazi party that repudiated anti-Semitism? Did Hamas go around asking their victims if they were Zionists or not? No, they wanted to kill Jews.
Indeed but increasingly, as the death toll mounts, sympathisers of Palestine will be turning round your rhetoric. Did the Israeli air force ask of the thousands it killed, whether they were card-carrying Hamas members?
No queue of Arab nations desperate to take in the non Hamas palestinians, they prefer to rub their hands and say bad Israel.
Is it legitimate to flatten a building housing hundreds of civilians to kill a few Hamas fighters ?
Where do you draw the line ?
The answer is no, hence the ground invasion which will result in far, far fewer civilian deaths in Gaza than aerial bombardment but at a huge cost for Israel both in blood and treasure.
If that had been the case then civilian casualties would surely have been much lower .
> China 29% of world emissions, I can’t honestly see them take the remotest interest
If we're going to have posts that don't have any betting content than that's fine and I do appreciate that it takes a lot of effort to write them. But just a little bit of research to check your assumptions might be nice?
Yes. China are installing masses of renewables, and they seem to be aware that they face massive risks from climate change.
The whole argument of we shouldn't do anything until China does argument falls down a bit in the face of China's rollout of zero carbon technologies. The argument is two decades out of date.
Thats to misunderstand the argument. Assuming China unwinds there are lots of others to take its place. India is largely coal powered and expanding fast,
About 50%, with 40% renewables. After they've completed the coal plants already in construction, they're not going to build any more.
"Lots of others" - particularly African nations - are fairly likely to skip coal and gas in the future, and develop via renewables as the cost/benefit continues to improve.
The sad truth is that so much of our infrastructure in this country is crumbling. Water pipes. Schools. Hospitals. Roads. Public services.
An ocean of cash will have to be invested because the cost of not doing so is higher. The right can complain about the impact on bills but oceans of money have been pocketed by the likes of Thames Water as they leave the infrastructure to crumble. Not that the right care about people anyway.
So we have to spend an ocean of cash to fix this country. Do we spend it on 21st century things or 19th century things? We need power generation - clean tech or coal? And if we need to have all these things does the right really think that importing them is the best approach?
We used to build things for the world. Clean tech is the opportunity to do so again.
So name your technology. Nuclear perhaps then what ?
Starter for 10: wind. We’re building an awful lot of big wind farms. Why aren’t we developing our own turbines, manufacturing them, and exporting them to other markets?
Off shore wind needs ancillaries- inter connectors, control gear, support ships. Let’s make those.
We’ve given up as an industrial nation. Too hard. Too expensive. Yet we pay more by importing the things we used to export
Ive been arguing for years here along with @another_richard that we have been throwing away our manufacturing . However a lot of the technology lead on wind sits with people like Siemens. The make things here but a multinational always suits itself. Unless we have more domestically controlled businesses I cannot see us recovering technologies. The RR mini nuclear plants may be somewhere we can establish a lead but we're screwing that up atm.
So let’s invest in business then. The Thatcher revolution was to stop investing and to start selling. We sold off the utilities and encouraged British industrial giants like ICI and GEC to split themselves apart and hive off chunks for a quick profit today and don’t worry about tomorrow.
We need to change that. We built up industrial capability before and we can do it again - but we have to invest. And sadly the right seems to see investment as communism - or close to it. Why tie up money investing for the long term when your spiv mates could be making a profit now?
You should be thanking Thatcher.
She was the first major leader to recognise the threat of climate change, and to deliver a UN speech on it. It was partly because of her the 1990 baseline was established, which we've cut against ever since. Because she understood the science.
It's remarkable people keep forgetting this, and that goes for fellow Conservatives too.
Two unoriginal points linked to that.
First is that Thatcherism really needs the stern moral core of Thatcher to work, otherwise it does descend into spivvery very quickly. The difference between her father and her son.
Second, the Sunak/Truss generation don't have direct experience of Maggie, only of the stories about her. So their Thatcherite cosplay is missing some important bits out, which is why it falls apart.
A shiny sixpence says that Rishi doesn't even know what a Full Maintenance Lease is.
Is it legitimate to flatten a building housing hundreds of civilians to kill a few Hamas fighters ?
Where do you draw the line ?
Well, that's the hard question. Was it legitimate to kill 11,000 civilians in Mosul, and displace hundreds of thousands, to eradicate IS in 2017? On balance, I think most of us would say that it was.
Urban fighting, against people who simply use civilians as shields, is horrendous.
The Hamas attack on Israel was effectively their 9/11. All the horror was there and the casualties (at 50% of that fateful day) far more proportionately impactful on their populace than for the USA.
But, unlike for the US in the aftermath of the attacks on the Twin Towers, Israel had zero grace and very little sympathy.
By contrast, it was pouring out of every orifice for Gaza within 48 hours.
Also, the UK is a hotbed of gen 4 and gen 5 nuclear reactors as well as fusion. We have the second highest rate of private investment in experimental reactors in the world, what we lack is commercialisation which needs state subsidies and I don't see this government or Labour putting up the £10-20bn requires to get those designs from labs to power generation by 2035. It is feasible but as ever, the UK government will decide that the NHS, pensions and other old people benefits are more important and our reactor IP will be bought up by American companies who will commercialise them with state subsidies and sell the reactors to us at a huge profit.
So the private industries can make a great success of it if only the govt would throw a pile of money their way?
Is it legitimate to flatten a building housing hundreds of civilians to kill a few Hamas fighters ?
Where do you draw the line ?
Well, that's the hard question. Was it legitimate to kill 11,000 civilians in Mosul, and displace hundreds of thousands, to eradicate IS in 2017? On balance, I think most of us would say that it was.
Urban fighting, against people who simply use civilians as shields, is horrendous.
It’s a horrible moral dilemma which your example highlights .
“China coal plants” is just an excuse for Britain to get left behind on major infrastructure transformation, as usual.
A sad little kingdom of asset sweaters.
I was going to like this post, for the first sentence and Twitter link - which is broadly accurate; there should be a massive in Chinese renewables in the next 10 years - but the rest of the post put me off.
Why do so many on the left take such active pleasure in falsely denigrating and hating their own country?
Maybe because it's not the country or its people we hate, but the grifters and swindlers presently running it..
..and I am not on the left btw.
The government is shit, we all know that, full of arseholes, but for a very large majority of people, this is a very good place to live in. The same is true of most rich world countries.
Compared to any previous generation, our problems are modest ones.
I think it was Hume who said his toothache caused him more anxiety than the Lisbon earthquake, which sums it up.
That’s really not true any more: it is the Panglossian verdict of the 1990s-00s
AI alone is probably the biggest existential threat mankind has ever faced. Yes it may be utopian, it could also be apocalyptic. Truly. And it is coming - this is not some maybe or could be
Add to that the fractured geopolitical world, climate change, the rise of autocratic China, and our problems are not “modest”, sadly
"The rise of autocratic China" is quite likely to be swiftly followed by "the fall of autocratic China" judging by its disastrous demographic projections. The problem for Xi, if he wishes to be successful in his territorial ambitions, is that the window is closing. The Chinese century aint' gonna happen. The US will steam ahead again.
I suspect Putin's aggression is underlined by a sense that time is fast running out for Russia. It's great power pretensions were looking ever more hollow but it still had a supposedly mighty war machine. Best get on and use it ASAP.
The net zero policies will self terminate if they punish the poor and benefit the rich, which is how it looks a lot of the time.
Good news is it should actually save people money. See the NIC report last week.
For example, if you electrify your house with solar panels and storage batteries you can cut your electricity bill by anything from 30-70%, ad-infinitum. The issue is being able to shell out the £6-10k up front for all the kit, but even then it repays for itself over 10-12 years, and then makes a profit thereafter.
I know this because I've just ordered. But I can only do so because I have (some) spare capital. HMG should be offering £5k+ discounts on all of this, and to borrow the rest at cost - or make it easy to add to mortgages.
Heat pumps are different. They need to be less shit. They need to pump in 20C+ of heat, with turboboost options for when it's really cold, not just 14-15C and only really working when your house is insulated like an igloo. But, again, once in - no gas bills.
I see no rationale for a discount - home owners are relatively well off and do not need free money. The UK Govt attitude, which I think is correct, has been to offer incentives where the market and actual cost / benefit cannot meet the need, or on condition of fabric improvements as applied to solar FIT and now applies far too minimally to Heat Pump grants. In the case of solar I think the market can do it already - a regulatory intervention to unlock the investment would be better value imo.
Given the rapid rise in house prices most can easily borrow such a small sum on a marginal mortgage increase. Perhaps the Govt could offer funding against 1-3% of equity in the house.
Can you elucidate on that "20C+ of heat"? Heat is in kWh or kJ, not Celsius, and heating a house is about amount of heat gained and lost not temperature differences.
(I won't draw attention to igloos being built out of material that are as poor as insulators as a naked brick wall )
Solar panels make your house look like shit.
Malcolm - You are just saying that because Scotland gets no sunshine....
[Ducks and runs for cover]
Bev, I was at the kidding, in the south west here we do get some lovely weather, never too warm. We do get a bit too much rain but it really means it is a green and pleasant land and the ayrshire coastline is beautiful. I miss the snow in the winter thoughas we get little here on coast due to the influence of the gulf stream, which must be warmer than when I was a boy. Though if you go in the water it does not appear so, 2 minutes and you would be blue.
One point of what may seem like pedantry but is actually quite important. The 1.5C target is 1.5C OVER PRE-INDUSTRIAL LEVELS. Estimates are that we are at 1.2C over such levels. So if the world manages to hit its target (which it won't), and if we're exactly representative of that, we're looking at an increase of only 0.3C. Which, sadly, won't make London into Lyon.
Quite conceivably climate change could make Britain colder and wetter as a result of changes to the Atlantic currents. So London more like Belfast in climate than Lyon.
The prediction was hotter summers and wetter autumns. But like all predictions it could be wrong.
It was the other way round this year.
Summer was warmer than average including the hottest June on record.
Autumn is rapidly becoming a very wet one after a dry start.
Though August was a washout and September unseasonably warm. Increased unpredictability of an already unpredictable climate is not a good thing.
Starmers Green Prosperity Plan does poll well incidentally. Strongly too with the "Loyal Nationalists" of the "Red Wall".
Well maybe, but everybody agrees on doing nice things until the bills come in. When the policies hit the pocket thats when we see if they really support it or not.
There is widespread polling support for green policies.
There are even a lot of Tories who don't want to trash the country and planet.
Well youre letting your views on conservatives blind the reality. Most conservatives support a clean environment, its in the name. You simply highlight that Lefties dont know how to get to common ground. If you spent less time making everything a political campaign and more time on bottom up measures we would all make more progress.
We had common ground on net zero. The right abandoned it.
“China coal plants” is just an excuse for Britain to get left behind on major infrastructure transformation, as usual.
A sad little kingdom of asset sweaters.
I was going to like this post, for the first sentence and Twitter link - which is broadly accurate; there should be a massive in Chinese renewables in the next 10 years - but the rest of the post put me off.
Why do so many on the left take such active pleasure in falsely denigrating and hating their own country?
Maybe because it's not the country or its people we hate, but the grifters and swindlers presently running it..
..and I am not on the left btw.
The government is shit, we all know that, full of arseholes, but for a very large majority of people, this is a very good place to live in. The same is true of most rich world countries.
Compared to any previous generation, our problems are modest ones.
I think it was Hume who said his toothache caused him more anxiety than the Lisbon earthquake, which sums it up.
Related to this Hume really did say:
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.
And despite his undeniable greatness each and every single thought of the above is false. Interestingly the 20th century assault on Hume's position has been led by British women philosophers, who seem to be better than most of the men at spotting the flaws.
Comments
It is both a huge opportunity and a cost burden. Which is why the rate of change is so difficult to get right.
An ocean of cash will have to be invested because the cost of not doing so is higher. The right can complain about the impact on bills but oceans of money have been pocketed by the likes of Thames Water as they leave the infrastructure to crumble. Not that the right care about people anyway.
So we have to spend an ocean of cash to fix this country. Do we spend it on 21st century things or 19th century things? We need power generation - clean tech or coal? And if we need to have all these things does the right really think that importing them is the best approach?
We used to build things for the world. Clean tech is the opportunity to do so again.
I think you are also referencing Hamas’s 1988 founding charter, which is antisemitic. However, Hamas have repudiated the document and issued a new charter in 2017, which talks about a Palestine within the 1967 borders, and explicitly says that Hamas does not seek war against all Jewish people but only against Zionism. This reflects comments going back as early as 2008 that were more moderate than the founding charter. That said, others are sceptical of their sincerity.
What we can excel at is R&D. We should be investing in things like new battery chemistries, then doing deals with people who can mass-produce them. Or even investing in factories elsewhere. We should play to our strengths.
(*) We could be much better at this, but environmental and NIMBY issues make it next to impossible. Remember the nonsense about Able UK's shipbreaking?
But I'm pretty sure that it is the case that the UK has a problem of spending too little on infrastructure and too much on day to day consumption. And that's one of the reasons we are collectively in the pickle we are.
Something is causing that, and we need to find a way round that something, whatever it is.
climate predictions != weather forecasts
Off shore wind needs ancillaries- inter connectors, control gear, support ships. Let’s make those.
We’ve given up as an industrial nation. Too hard. Too expensive. Yet we pay more by importing the things we used to export
If a forest take a hundred years to grow, start now. People have been doing that, literally, for centuries. And guess what?
56% Remain
44% Leave
The article (particularly without the accompanying "this is what I'd do") is not very good.
There's no analysis of what makes up the £1.4tn - a bit over £50bn per annum, which doesn't sound quite so scary.
Large parts of our power infrastructure would be completely replaced anyway during that timescale; our entire road fleet; housing (a big part of it) would make our houses better and less costly ti live in.
And the point that the rest of the world is outside our control isn't really a point at all. It's just rhetoric.
Alanbrooke's most disappointing header to date. I hope part two is more substantial.
We need to change that. We built up industrial capability before and we can do it again - but we have to invest. And sadly the right seems to see investment as communism - or close to it. Why tie up money investing for the long term when your spiv mates could be making a profit now?
The Lough Neagh problems go back decades since they are a combination of slurry run off and no investment in sewage.
In typical NI fashion the local politicians will scream how bad things are and then blame the brits,
We had a lot of very interesting battery research a decade or so back. Without being involved in manufacturing, it was meaningless.
You're effectively saying, for example, that we shouldn't have a car industry.
Sure, we have problems, but we've made progress- lots of it - and this is one of the top ten best countries in the world to live in.
Let's not beat ourselves up too much.
Even blaming the Renewable Heat scandal on him and not Foster is a stretch. But you’ve had multiple elections since then. And McGuinness has been dead for 6 years. I know a corpse is preventing Stormont meeting, but that corpse is the DUP, not McGuinness
"The report said the growth in clean energy and technologies was "impressive". In 2020, one in 25 cars sold was electric. Just three years later this number has risen to one in five."
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67198206.amp
The response in the U.K.was (collectively) that we don’t really want your factory. Everyone he talked to paid some lip service to the idea, but in actuality produced an endless supply of hurdles to jump.
So guess where the factory ended up?
If you want industry, you need to want new factories.
Or you can have a theme park.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2006/jun/22/politics.economicpolicy
But imo we can have a manufacturing recovery. It wont be in high volume products but more in niche batch produced ones. We should encourage capital investment in new machinery to revive what we have and encourage new start ups. As a first step we should focus on import substitution rather than export since this is easier to get our industrial base going.
Speaker Mike Johnson is now defending criminally-indicted George Santos, saying if Santos were expelled and held accountable it would narrow Republicans’ majority.
“We have no margin for error,” Johnson said.
https://twitter.com/NoLieWithBTC/status/1718049746970112422
The East Asians are particularly good at it. There’s no reason why we can’t be. We have millions of homes, offices and public buildings to make more energy efficient and many more to build. We have tens of thousands of charging points to create, we have an energy grid to modernise and so on and so on. If we do it first and do it effectively, we have highly monetisable assets and expertise that others don’t.
That said, we also have world class universities. We can and should be making a lot more use of them. Don’t blow the opportunities they present. No more graphenes.
Regardless of comparisons, what we have is at best under capacity and ageing. So we need to invest an awful lot to have infrastructure which is fit for purpose and allows our economy to compete with our neighbours.
If we’re building all these new houses, why not build them with 21st century technology? If we’re building power generation, why are there calls to go to 20th or 19th century technology?
..and I am not on the left btw.
The whole argument of we shouldn't do anything until China does argument falls down a bit in the face of China's rollout of zero carbon technologies. The argument is two decades out of date.
But some experts believe that the mountains could not be the ark's location
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/24553782/has-noahs-ark-been-found-archaelogists-reveal/
Where's the Gazette's archaeology correspondent when he's needed up a Turkish mountain (Ararat)?
Compared to any previous generation, our problems are modest ones.
I think it was Hume who said his toothache caused him more anxiety than the Lisbon earthquake, which sums it up.
And yes, we do need to get over Thatcher. She made choices which continue to determine where we are now - the destruction of some of our large industries was one of the consequences of those choices.
The point isn't to reopen old wounds, but to accept that we ought to have an industrial strategy that's a bit more than laissez faire.
On the specifics of water the whole NI sector is a mess and this goes back decades - by way of comparison so has the Republic. Lough Neagh's problem has been slurry run off in to rivers. The farming lobby in NI is strong and nobody wants to upset them so its parked.
The infrastructure in NI is appalling there has been little to no investment. As an example nobody pays a water bill - its all tucked up in rates. My brother's NI rates bill ( for everything ) is less than my water bill. Again the politicians just dont want to face the fact they have to make people pay more. This has been going on for years even when there was a Stormont. And if they all go back to work, theyll spend their time discussing flags or street names.
https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2023/1026/1413015-epa-report-latest/
When the hostages are free and Hamas have been eradicated, that would be the time for a ceasefire, would it not?
AI alone is probably the biggest existential threat mankind has ever faced. Yes it may be utopian, it could also be apocalyptic. Truly. And it is coming - this is not some maybe or could be
Add to that the fractured geopolitical world, climate change, the rise of autocratic China, and our problems are not “modest”, sadly
..just asking...
Last week I went up in one of our 148 Typhoon fighters, and I flew out over the North sea, over Doggerland. The drowned prairies are now being harvested again with tens of gigawatts of clean green energy. We will have 50 GW of offshore wind by 2050, and thanks to this Government’s activism I am proud to say that offshore wind is now cheaper than onshore wind. I looked down at that ghostly white forest of windmills in the sea, financed with ever growing sums from international investors, and I thought, “This is how we will fix our energy problems; this is how Europe should be ending its dependence on Putin’s gas.”
https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2022-07-18/debates/EA7DB1BF-EC36-4C3B-8F73-D47B2523BA53/ConfidenceInHerMajesty’SGovernment
https://www.ft.com/content/7788e961-1784-4044-8437-2e6c32ead570
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/10/25/electricity-prices-rise-70pc-pay-wind-farms-energy/#:~:text=No new wind farms will be built off Britain's shores,nation's biggest generator has said.
Are the hostages free? Yes, or no?
Have Hamas been eradicated? Yes, or no?
In war you need to proportionately try to reduce the other sides civilian casualties while still seeking to achieve your objectives, and Israel quite rightly are doing that. Once the objectives are complete, with as few civilian casualties as is realistically feasible, the war should end.
If other nations want to offer refuge to civilians to avoid the conflict while it rages, then that would keep civilians alive, if they don't, then more civilians will die but that's not Israel's fault. Israel has to achieve its objectives first and foremost.
Israel has every right to do whatever it takes to bring back the hostages, and allies will be rock solid in their support until the hostages are released. Hamas are responsible for all of the death and destruction in Gaza by refusing the Israeli offer, but since when have they given any fucks about civilians.
The coal we have left is uneconomical to dig up after binning the mining industry. So if we pull coal power stations out of mothballs we’re burning coal from Brazil.
Or do you prefer gas? We already burned most of the North Sea gas, we don’t want Russian gas, so ship it from Qatar?
Nuclear? We co-invented it but thanks to the Thatcherite industrial settlement we have to pay £vast to foreign governments to build power stations. We do not own, control, or have capability to do fossil fuel power generation, or even nuclear. But we could do renewables. Or, as Tory spies want, just keep paying other people.
Of course Israel cares more about its own civilians, than Hamas cares about its own, so the fact that Israel made such a generous offer - and the fact that Hamas rejected it - is entirely fitting with their behaviour.
[Ducks and runs for cover]
The big difference between the 1950-2000 period and now, is that, back then, we could take for granted living standards growing by 2% a year, here, compared to 1% a year now. It doesn't sound like much, but it makes a big difference over the course of 25 years, and it hurts.
But now I must answer the call of a greater being and take Mrs B to the supermarket.
So, with the only jobs in nuclear being building reactors for submarines, strangely, we have that industrial base. Hence the mini-nukes.
She was the first major leader to recognise the threat of climate change, and to deliver a UN speech on it. It was partly because of her the 1990 baseline was established, which we've cut against ever since. Because she understood the science.
It's remarkable people keep forgetting this, and that goes for fellow Conservatives too.
Also, the UK is a hotbed of gen 4 and gen 5 nuclear reactors as well as fusion. We have the second highest rate of private investment in experimental reactors in the world, what we lack is commercialisation which needs state subsidies and I don't see this government or Labour putting up the £10-20bn requires to get those designs from labs to power generation by 2035. It is feasible but as ever, the UK government will decide that the NHS, pensions and other old people benefits are more important and our reactor IP will be bought up by American companies who will commercialise them with state subsidies and sell the reactors to us at a huge profit.
They had clearly given an intern the job of writing it, been delighted when they came up with such a big number that would give them the headlines they wanted & pushed it out the door to all the newspaper editors asap without bothering to check the numbers. Naturally the right wing press didn’t bother to check the numbers either - the report gave them a headline number they were delighted to print. Who cared if it was bullshit?
This report, amongst other things confused total energy need in MegaWatt-hours with the generating capacity (in MW) of a power station, ending up overestimating the cost of offshore wind power by something like a factor of 10,000. You can’t read it any more because Civitas pulled it altogether - I suspect that once the correct figures had been calculated it didn’t say what they wanted it to anymore. (unless anyone has a link to an updated version?)
For Alan Brooke to quote this number of £1.4trillion in his essay here shows how fundamentally unserious he is. It’s a joke number: a fiction that arose from a right-wing thinktank’s desire to print whatever fitted their prejudices & paymaster’s desires best without the slightest consideration for what was actually true.
Your question of “what do we get for our money” is a fair one of course. The answer is net-zero energy infrastructure: if you pay for a wind farm, you get a stream of energy in return that lasts for the lifetime of the farm (minus maintenance costs). Likewise for solar, tidal etc etc. Insulating homes & offices pays out in lower energy costs over time. A side benefit is that almost all of these energy sources are local - insulating the UK from global risks like a war in the middle east cutting off oil supplies. Plus, although this probably carries little weight with Alan, we get to pull our weight in getting to a worldwide net zero.
Where do you draw the line ?
There were precisely two people talking about climate change in the late 80s: her, and the Greens.
Labour, at the time, were still invested in heavy industry. The Liberal Democrats largely localist, and focussed on protecting the green belt, river and local air pollution - and otherwise banging on about the EC/nascent EU.
Thatcher laid the foundations for the 1990 baseline for emissions reduction, the dash for gas in the 1990s (which phased down our coal) and no doubt would have commissioned much more new nuclear, earlier, had she remained in office.
We owe a debt of gratitude to Margaret Thatcher.
Also, in the strange but true category, Wellingborough is the site of architect Ninian Comper's greatest masterpiece and is otherwise entirely uninteresting
An enlightened British government would set aside £30-40bn of taxpayers money a year for R&D/infra newshots - and face down the howlers, because only 20-30% might come off that generate massive returns to UK PLC - but that'd require courageous leadership, which we don't have in any party.
Urban fighting, against people who simply use civilians as shields, is horrendous.
Learn from it.
After they've completed the coal plants already in construction, they're not going to build any more.
"Lots of others" - particularly African nations - are fairly likely to skip coal and gas in the future, and develop via renewables as the cost/benefit continues to improve.
First is that Thatcherism really needs the stern moral core of Thatcher to work, otherwise it does descend into spivvery very quickly. The difference between her father and her son.
Second, the Sunak/Truss generation don't have direct experience of Maggie, only of the stories about her. So their Thatcherite cosplay is missing some important bits out, which is why it falls apart.
A shiny sixpence says that Rishi doesn't even know what a Full Maintenance Lease is.
But, unlike for the US in the aftermath of the attacks on the Twin Towers, Israel had zero grace and very little sympathy.
By contrast, it was pouring out of every orifice for Gaza within 48 hours.
It's a view I suppose....
I suspect Putin's aggression is underlined by a sense that time is fast running out for Russia. It's great power pretensions were looking ever more hollow but it still had a supposedly mighty war machine. Best get on and use it ASAP.
SF = 31%, 144 seats
DUP = 23%, 122 seats
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.
And despite his undeniable greatness each and every single thought of the above is false. Interestingly the 20th century assault on Hume's position has been led by British women philosophers, who seem to be better than most of the men at spotting the flaws.