I concur with JosiasJessop's "why not both" question but nonetheless the suggestions are all sensible and things we are in most cases already doing, just not enough.
What this needs in addition though is how can the UK grasp the huge opportunities to compete in the decarbonised economy, and to do this requires intelligent government investment and regulation, business investment supported by incentives, and a globally minded approach to the issue of climate change that plugs us into the supply chains of the future. Otherwise we end up just importing everything, again.
Renewable energy is one example where we can become a technology and services exporter, but there are big opportunities in wider green tech and energy efficiency, automotive and other transportation, and green finance, all of which should be actively supported and marketed. And yes it also requires us to show commitment to global targets on net zero.
Thankfully only one Daily Mail talking point made it on to this header and that's the old heat pump thing. If our entire net zero strategy were forcing everyone on to heat pumps then there might be a point here, but they are eminently sensible ways of reducing energy usage, combined with insulation and draught exclusion. They are just the norm now in many European countries. I'm fitting an ASHP in our house in France, which comes complete with uninsulated exposed stone walls, and I expect it to work just fine as do my various neighbours' heat pumps.
On heat pumps, the high temp versions now becoming available counter some of the problems around poor insulation (where this is not easily upgraded) and the need to switch to larger heat exchangers (bigger radiators or underfloor setups). Lower efficiency, but - as always - it's a trade-off between less upfront cost/disruption and longer term savings.
I am looking to change my bolier. I dont want to buy a heat pump. My next doot neighbour has one and doesnt sing its praises. But more importantly I hardly ever put the heat on, I put on an extra jumper. So I see no reason to be forced in to spending a large amount of money for something which has no benefit. I'd rather spend the money on something else.
Many heat pumps have been mis-sold, I think. The low temperature ones only really make sense in new or very much upgraded buildings (I've spent time in both with heat pumps and they've been great, but with poor insulation it's going to suck).
If your heat use is very low, you might be better off with a simple electric boiler (solar linked potentially, with a hot tank).
When the cost for heating via electricity such as the above starts to compete with gas, fantastic. But we are a long way off that.
As for solar panels, I'm not sure they will fit on the exterior of my flat.
Additionally the problem with "storage heater" type solutions is they use energy you don't actually require. e.g. you have to put them on overnight, but if you wake up the next day and find it's warm enough you don't need the heating on (or you're not in), you've wasted 7 hours of overnight energy.
The 'warm enough' problem could be easily fixed by a controller reading the weather forecasts.
Aside from the inaccuracy of weather forecasts, how does that work if I expect to be at home on a given day but later decide to go out, leaving a boiling hot house with nobody in it?
Once upon a time, when I was renting, I lived in a place that had no boiler / central heating (it was very rural) and I had these awful storage heaters. If you used them, the place would be roasting in the morning (fantastic, as I left home for work before 8am) and absolutely freezing by the time you got back from work at six or seven.
Heat and hot water is very much an "on demand" thing, even running such devices during off peak tariff times overnight is a) wasteful and b) can't take into account the unpredictability of when exactly you will need the heat or hot water.
In the end I gave up on the storage heater and bought an oil filled radiator that I'd stick on for an hour or two in the evening. It worked out at about 1/5th the cost of the storage heaters.
Weather forecasts are easily accurate enough a day in advance even if predicting your own movements is not.
I've used those brick-based storage heaters plenty of times in rural Scotland. I agree they are pretty hopeless although in theory you can close them up during the day and still get something out of them in the evening.
We just need a better heat sink or cheaper batteries...
Having read the header and some of the comments, I feel I should remind all of you that we should begin preparing for global cooling.
It is, after all, inevitable. Two centuries ago, we got a small reminder of what a single volcano can do: 'The year 1816 is known as the Year Without a Summer because of severe climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1 °F).[1] Summer temperatures in Europe were the coldest of any on record between the years of 1766 and 2000.[2] This resulted in major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
Seventy-four ceturies ago, there was a far worse eruption: 'The Toba eruption (sometimes called the Toba supereruption or the Youngest Toba eruption) was a supervolcano eruption that occurred around 74,000 years ago during the Late Pleistocene[1] at the site of present-day Lake Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia. It is one of the largest known explosive eruptions in the Earth's history. The Toba catastrophe theory holds that this event caused a severe global volcanic winter of six to ten years and contributed to a 1,000-year-long cooling episode, leading to a genetic bottleneck in humans.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
And there have been many other eruptions since then that affected the climate.
(Could most humans survive a Toba event now, given our current technology? No, but we could if we had sufficient warning, say 20 years, and enough energy. So we ought to be looking hard for ways to predict such events. And building more nuclear power plants.)
I concur with JosiasJessop's "why not both" question but nonetheless the suggestions are all sensible and things we are in most cases already doing, just not enough.
What this needs in addition though is how can the UK grasp the huge opportunities to compete in the decarbonised economy, and to do this requires intelligent government investment and regulation, business investment supported by incentives, and a globally minded approach to the issue of climate change that plugs us into the supply chains of the future. Otherwise we end up just importing everything, again.
Renewable energy is one example where we can become a technology and services exporter, but there are big opportunities in wider green tech and energy efficiency, automotive and other transportation, and green finance, all of which should be actively supported and marketed. And yes it also requires us to show commitment to global targets on net zero.
Thankfully only one Daily Mail talking point made it on to this header and that's the old heat pump thing. If our entire net zero strategy were forcing everyone on to heat pumps then there might be a point here, but they are eminently sensible ways of reducing energy usage, combined with insulation and draught exclusion. They are just the norm now in many European countries. I'm fitting an ASHP in our house in France, which comes complete with uninsulated exposed stone walls, and I expect it to work just fine as do my various neighbours' heat pumps.
On heat pumps, the high temp versions now becoming available counter some of the problems around poor insulation (where this is not easily upgraded) and the need to switch to larger heat exchangers (bigger radiators or underfloor setups). Lower efficiency, but - as always - it's a trade-off between less upfront cost/disruption and longer term savings.
I am looking to change my bolier. I dont want to buy a heat pump. My next doot neighbour has one and doesnt sing its praises. But more importantly I hardly ever put the heat on, I put on an extra jumper. So I see no reason to be forced in to spending a large amount of money for something which has no benefit. I'd rather spend the money on something else.
Many heat pumps have been mis-sold, I think. The low temperature ones only really make sense in new or very much upgraded buildings (I've spent time in both with heat pumps and they've been great, but with poor insulation it's going to suck).
If your heat use is very low, you might be better off with a simple electric boiler (solar linked potentially, with a hot tank).
When the cost for heating via electricity such as the above starts to compete with gas, fantastic. But we are a long way off that.
As for solar panels, I'm not sure they will fit on the exterior of my flat.
Additionally the problem with "storage heater" type solutions is they use energy you don't actually require. e.g. you have to put them on overnight, but if you wake up the next day and find it's warm enough you don't need the heating on (or you're not in), you've wasted 7 hours of overnight energy.
The 'warm enough' problem could be easily fixed by a controller reading the weather forecasts.
Aside from the inaccuracy of weather forecasts, how does that work if I expect to be at home on a given day but later decide to go out, leaving a boiling hot house with nobody in it?
Once upon a time, when I was renting, I lived in a place that had no boiler / central heating (it was very rural) and I had these awful storage heaters. If you used them, the place would be roasting in the morning (fantastic, as I left home for work before 8am) and absolutely freezing by the time you got back from work at six or seven.
Heat and hot water is very much an "on demand" thing, even running such devices during off peak tariff times overnight is a) wasteful (as you will always have to prepare more than you need) and b) can't take into account the unpredictability of when exactly you will need the heat or hot water.
In the end I gave up on the storage heater and bought an oil filled radiator that I'd stick on for an hour or two in the evening. It worked out at about 1/5th the cost of the storage heaters.
BIB - this is an old trope and very outdated. Forecasts of temperature for the next few days will be pretty accurate. Where forecasts struggle is with showers, and things like will it snow or not.
Alanbrooke has found a pretty broad consensus on this with his interesting header. Like most I'd want to see the detailed figures but I think most people would sign up for that sort of programme.
Casino's point about branding is relevant - lots of people are actually in agreement with what needs to be done, but put off by slogans like Net Zero wich give too broad a front for tabloids and contrarians to attack. Much the same happened with 15 minute cities, which in essence is an objective which almost nobody would disagree with ("cites should aim for everyone to be able to reach shops and services on foot or cycling within 15 minutes"), but which was cheerfully misinterpreted by our PM.
You'd have to do some number crunching, but most of the stuff in the header (excepting the details of what energy mix we choose) is going to be necessary anyway for net zero.
On sector he doesn't mention is transport (currently responsible for around a quarter of our CO2 emissions). The future of that is where any planning for our future power grid has to start.
And pretending that the infrastructure for EVs (which all the major manufacturers are rapidly transitioning to) can be left to the market, is a recipe for severe damage to the UK economy.
Yes, and thats a cock up heading down the line. Its where Sunak has probably done us all a favour on moving the EV date back 5 years.
That is an admission of failure. Moving the deadline does nothing to address the failure.
May and Bojo setting unachievable dates just to look good for climate conferences is the failure. and in this case failure means alignment with the rest of Europe. The green agenda would advance so much better if politicians stopped making daft claims and treated the public as grown ups.
You won't find any disagreement from me about May and Boris being useless on practical policy versus broad aspiration. But that in itself isn't an argument against net zero.
And you, after all, voted for Brexit, I believe, which has distracted the entire political class from doing much else since the vote.
Of course I did. But thats no excuse for the political class losing the plot. They are paid to run the country not a cage fight.
I don't excuse them, but it is a proximate reason for their having done so.
It's been obvious for a decade that the world was going to transition to EVs. The failure to plan for that so that we benefitted, rather than it costing us to catch up, has been colossal.
Most of Europe and the States arent set up for EVs. Germany and France bet the farm on diesel and it didnt work. The UK could of course be better prepared but I cant see how its noticeably behind any of the other major economies. Japan has only just started thinking about it.
There's a lot more capacity planned in Europe, too.
Japan too is doing a lot more than 'just start thinking about it'.
That's only production, and to be clear the UK doesn't have a car industry of its own, it relies on decisions taken by other people.
So in terms of preparation. Where's the ( green ) electricity coming from ? Who's wiring up the country and installing charge points ? And since this is all about carbon reduction do you actually believe building new EVs and the opening mines for batteries is less polluting ?
There is currently a fair amount of greenwashing in the car industry. Running your old banger in to the ground is still the greenest option of all.
Net Zero has a branding problem amongst certain constituencies. Because it's seen to all be about wearing a hair shirt. And plenty can't help preaching about it along those lines.
If it was pitching in terms of saving you money, environmental cleanliness and enhancing quality of life and safety for you and your family it might get quite a different reaction.
We need to cease thinking about how to get to net zero (hint: we won't get there) and start making plans for what happens when we don't.
That involves a mixture of food and energy security, flood defences and the like, and of course a change to immigration policy when 25% of the world's farmland becomes untenable and mass migration when people from developing countries decide to come somewhere a bit more temperate (and more politically tolerant).
Those are the big questions. Heat pumps are not.
I think we will hit net zero. The question is when. Land transport is in the way. Steel production and concrete production are next up. Aviation is coming along (bio fuel and electric)
You can extrapolate that graph to be "some time after 2100 if we're lucky, sometime never if we don't"
Either way, it will be too late to avoid catastrophic global changes to the environment, that will result in food, energy, infrastructure, and migratory security problems.
Those will be the key issues by 2050. Not how to get to Net Zero, or when. Dealing the fallout from the fact we didn't get there.
We can choose to steal a march on those problems now, or stick our head in the sand and focus on foisting unpopular heat pumps and ULEZ zones on people, which will have precisely zero impact on the real problems we'll be facing by 2050.
Net Zero has a branding problem amongst certain constituencies. Because it's seen to all be about wearing a hair shirt. And plenty can't help preaching about it along those lines.
If it was pitching in terms of saving you money, environmental cleanliness and enhancing quality of life and safety for you and your family it might get quite a different reaction.
We need to cease thinking about how to get to net zero (hint: we won't get there) and start making plans for what happens when we don't.
That involves a mixture of food and energy security, flood defences and the like, and of course a change to immigration policy when 25% of the world's farmland becomes untenable and mass migration when people from developing countries decide to come somewhere a bit more temperate (and more politically tolerant).
Those are the big questions. Heat pumps are not.
I think we will hit net zero. The question is when. Land transport is in the way. Steel production and concrete production are next up. Aviation is coming along (bio fuel and electric)
You can extrapolate that graph to be "some time after 2100 if we're lucky, sometime never if we don't"
Either way, it will be too late to avoid catastrophic global changes to the environment, that will result in food, energy, infrastructure, and migratory security problems.
Those will be the key issues by 2050. Not how to get to Net Zero, or when. Dealing the fallout from the fact we didn't get there.
We can choose to steal a march on those problems now, or stick our head in the sand and focus on foisting unpopular heat pumps and ULEZ zones on people, which will have precisely zero impact on the real problems we'll be facing by 2050.
The idea we'll be at net zero emissions ever is comical in the extreme tbh. Well we could get there, but I'm not sure too many people would sign up for it.
British police are testing women for abortion drugs and requesting data from menstrual tracking apps after unexplained pregnancy losses.
I bet if you asked the random person on the street they would assume that abortion was just legal in this country - and would also say this is not a particularly good use of limited police resources.
Abortion is illegal in the UK after 24 weeks of pregnancy so no that is not outrageous
And part of the supposed virtues of British policing is that they have discretion on what to investigate - I don't think investigating miscarriages or even abortions after 24 weeks is a good use of police time; and the collection of this kind of data is very scary.
Alanbrooke has found a pretty broad consensus on this with his interesting header. Like most I'd want to see the detailed figures but I think most people would sign up for that sort of programme.
Casino's point about branding is relevant - lots of people are actually in agreement with what needs to be done, but put off by slogans like Net Zero wich give too broad a front for tabloids and contrarians to attack. Much the same happened with 15 minute cities, which in essence is an objective which almost nobody would disagree with ("cites should aim for everyone to be able to reach shops and services on foot or cycling within 15 minutes"), but which was cheerfully misinterpreted by our PM.
You'd have to do some number crunching, but most of the stuff in the header (excepting the details of what energy mix we choose) is going to be necessary anyway for net zero.
On sector he doesn't mention is transport (currently responsible for around a quarter of our CO2 emissions). The future of that is where any planning for our future power grid has to start.
And pretending that the infrastructure for EVs (which all the major manufacturers are rapidly transitioning to) can be left to the market, is a recipe for severe damage to the UK economy.
Yes, and thats a cock up heading down the line. Its where Sunak has probably done us all a favour on moving the EV date back 5 years.
That is an admission of failure. Moving the deadline does nothing to address the failure.
May and Bojo setting unachievable dates just to look good for climate conferences is the failure. and in this case failure means alignment with the rest of Europe. The green agenda would advance so much better if politicians stopped making daft claims and treated the public as grown ups.
You won't find any disagreement from me about May and Boris being useless on practical policy versus broad aspiration. But that in itself isn't an argument against net zero.
And you, after all, voted for Brexit, I believe, which has distracted the entire political class from doing much else since the vote.
Of course I did. But thats no excuse for the political class losing the plot. They are paid to run the country not a cage fight.
I don't excuse them, but it is a proximate reason for their having done so.
It's been obvious for a decade that the world was going to transition to EVs. The failure to plan for that so that we benefitted, rather than it costing us to catch up, has been colossal.
Most of Europe and the States arent set up for EVs. Germany and France bet the farm on diesel and it didnt work. The UK could of course be better prepared but I cant see how its noticeably behind any of the other major economies. Japan has only just started thinking about it.
There's a lot more capacity planned in Europe, too.
Japan too is doing a lot more than 'just start thinking about it'.
That's only production, and to be clear the UK doesn't have a car industry of its own, it relies on decisions taken by other people.
So in terms of preparation. Where's the ( green ) electricity coming from ? Who's wiring up the country and installing charge points ? And since this is all about carbon reduction do you actually believe building new EVs and the opening mines for batteries is less polluting ?
There is currently a fair amount of greenwashing in the car industry. Running your old banger in to the ground is still the greenest option of all.
Re EVs, it has long been a bugbear of mine that there is no real, integrated, national plan for the rollout of EV charging. Government should be the facilitator. Nobody seems to have fixed the problem of what people without drives are supposed to do, either.
My suspicion, if I am being completely honest, is that because of the issues with EVs, some of which you identify above, there has been a conscious decision to wait and see - because there is the realistic possibility that a better alternative to the current delivery model of EVs may present itself in the coming years, and render this infrastructure obsolete.
I concur with JosiasJessop's "why not both" question but nonetheless the suggestions are all sensible and things we are in most cases already doing, just not enough.
What this needs in addition though is how can the UK grasp the huge opportunities to compete in the decarbonised economy, and to do this requires intelligent government investment and regulation, business investment supported by incentives, and a globally minded approach to the issue of climate change that plugs us into the supply chains of the future. Otherwise we end up just importing everything, again.
Renewable energy is one example where we can become a technology and services exporter, but there are big opportunities in wider green tech and energy efficiency, automotive and other transportation, and green finance, all of which should be actively supported and marketed. And yes it also requires us to show commitment to global targets on net zero.
Thankfully only one Daily Mail talking point made it on to this header and that's the old heat pump thing. If our entire net zero strategy were forcing everyone on to heat pumps then there might be a point here, but they are eminently sensible ways of reducing energy usage, combined with insulation and draught exclusion. They are just the norm now in many European countries. I'm fitting an ASHP in our house in France, which comes complete with uninsulated exposed stone walls, and I expect it to work just fine as do my various neighbours' heat pumps.
On heat pumps, the high temp versions now becoming available counter some of the problems around poor insulation (where this is not easily upgraded) and the need to switch to larger heat exchangers (bigger radiators or underfloor setups). Lower efficiency, but - as always - it's a trade-off between less upfront cost/disruption and longer term savings.
I am looking to change my bolier. I dont want to buy a heat pump. My next doot neighbour has one and doesnt sing its praises. But more importantly I hardly ever put the heat on, I put on an extra jumper. So I see no reason to be forced in to spending a large amount of money for something which has no benefit. I'd rather spend the money on something else.
Many heat pumps have been mis-sold, I think. The low temperature ones only really make sense in new or very much upgraded buildings (I've spent time in both with heat pumps and they've been great, but with poor insulation it's going to suck).
If your heat use is very low, you might be better off with a simple electric boiler (solar linked potentially, with a hot tank).
When the cost for heating via electricity such as the above starts to compete with gas, fantastic. But we are a long way off that.
As for solar panels, I'm not sure they will fit on the exterior of my flat.
Additionally the problem with "storage heater" type solutions is they use energy you don't actually require. e.g. you have to put them on overnight, but if you wake up the next day and find it's warm enough you don't need the heating on (or you're not in), you've wasted 7 hours of overnight energy.
Good point about the higher cost per KW of electricity compared to gas. It seems this is due to the cost of the gas peaker plant. I wonder if this is tied to politics as much as finances. Also take into account that gas sends some heat out of the chimney whereas electricity is 100% efficient (for heat). also from Tepeo "The stored heat will remain in the core for several days but will slowly be lost."
British police are testing women for abortion drugs and requesting data from menstrual tracking apps after unexplained pregnancy losses.
I bet if you asked the random person on the street they would assume that abortion was just legal in this country - and would also say this is not a particularly good use of limited police resources.
Abortion is illegal in the UK after 24 weeks of pregnancy so no that is not outrageous
And part of the supposed virtues of British policing is that they have discretion on what to investigate - I don't think investigating miscarriages or even abortions after 24 weeks is a good use of police time; and the collection of this kind of data is very scary.
Do you read the stuff you outrage about? From the article :"Lord told Tortoise he was aware of cases of blood tests being taken with the woman’s consent by NHS staff at the request of police, including, he said, “when women knew they were innocent after suffering an unexpected premature delivery”."
Blood taken WITH CONSENT.
What are you scared off? Or are you just another leftie who hates the Thatcherite police, probably because of the miner's strike?
British police are testing women for abortion drugs and requesting data from menstrual tracking apps after unexplained pregnancy losses.
I bet if you asked the random person on the street they would assume that abortion was just legal in this country - and would also say this is not a particularly good use of limited police resources.
British police are testing women for abortion drugs and requesting data from menstrual tracking apps after unexplained pregnancy losses.
I bet if you asked the random person on the street they would assume that abortion was just legal in this country - and would also say this is not a particularly good use of limited police resources.
Abortion is illegal in the UK after 24 weeks of pregnancy so no that is not outrageous
What's the Islamic stance on abortion?
Forbidden. Because of the spec requirements for a serious percentage of the population to undergo spontaneous combustion in the style of the game “Lemmings”, manpower replacement is a serious issue.
I mean, it depends on who you ask, but I think in both Judaism and Islam you can interpret such that there are provisions for how to have an abortion (I'm pretty sure the Old Testament / Torah talks about a potion pregnant people can take to end a pregnancy in a healthy way) and, indeed, mandates to have abortions in instances where there is a view that the life of the mother is at risk. In terms of Muslim countries; it varies - some are no abortion at all, all the way to some allowing it even if the life of the mother isn't at risk. So not too different from the spectrum of access we see across Christian countries.
Net Zero has a branding problem amongst certain constituencies. Because it's seen to all be about wearing a hair shirt. And plenty can't help preaching about it along those lines.
If it was pitching in terms of saving you money, environmental cleanliness and enhancing quality of life and safety for you and your family it might get quite a different reaction.
We need to cease thinking about how to get to net zero (hint: we won't get there) and start making plans for what happens when we don't.
That involves a mixture of food and energy security, flood defences and the like, and of course a change to immigration policy when 25% of the world's farmland becomes untenable and mass migration when people from developing countries decide to come somewhere a bit more temperate (and more politically tolerant).
Those are the big questions. Heat pumps are not.
I think we will hit net zero. The question is when. Land transport is in the way. Steel production and concrete production are next up. Aviation is coming along (bio fuel and electric)
You can extrapolate that graph to be "some time after 2100 if we're lucky, sometime never if we don't"
Either way, it will be too late to avoid catastrophic global changes to the environment, that will result in food, energy, infrastructure, and migratory security problems.
Those will be the key issues by 2050. Not how to get to Net Zero, or when. Dealing the fallout from the fact we didn't get there.
We can choose to steal a march on those problems now, or stick our head in the sand and focus on foisting unpopular heat pumps and ULEZ zones on people, which will have precisely zero impact on the real problems we'll be facing by 2050.
The actual temperatures* aren't going to be too much of an issue (For the UK) - Sure we might have some 42C days but they'll still be few and far between. Flood defences and ensuring future building is futureproofed wrt the effects of say a 3C rise in global temperatures and the additional sea level (& other effects of increased atmospheric energy) is the big one for the UK.
*One measure that could mitigate higher temperatures is increased use of air conditioning - but that ups your carbon emissions so I'd say on balance at this point you probably shouldn't add it in for existing UK builds (Unless it's already as part of existing spec)
Alanbrooke has found a pretty broad consensus on this with his interesting header. Like most I'd want to see the detailed figures but I think most people would sign up for that sort of programme.
Casino's point about branding is relevant - lots of people are actually in agreement with what needs to be done, but put off by slogans like Net Zero wich give too broad a front for tabloids and contrarians to attack. Much the same happened with 15 minute cities, which in essence is an objective which almost nobody would disagree with ("cites should aim for everyone to be able to reach shops and services on foot or cycling within 15 minutes"), but which was cheerfully misinterpreted by our PM.
You'd have to do some number crunching, but most of the stuff in the header (excepting the details of what energy mix we choose) is going to be necessary anyway for net zero.
On sector he doesn't mention is transport (currently responsible for around a quarter of our CO2 emissions). The future of that is where any planning for our future power grid has to start.
And pretending that the infrastructure for EVs (which all the major manufacturers are rapidly transitioning to) can be left to the market, is a recipe for severe damage to the UK economy.
Yes, and thats a cock up heading down the line. Its where Sunak has probably done us all a favour on moving the EV date back 5 years.
That is an admission of failure. Moving the deadline does nothing to address the failure.
May and Bojo setting unachievable dates just to look good for climate conferences is the failure. and in this case failure means alignment with the rest of Europe. The green agenda would advance so much better if politicians stopped making daft claims and treated the public as grown ups.
You won't find any disagreement from me about May and Boris being useless on practical policy versus broad aspiration. But that in itself isn't an argument against net zero.
And you, after all, voted for Brexit, I believe, which has distracted the entire political class from doing much else since the vote.
Of course I did. But thats no excuse for the political class losing the plot. They are paid to run the country not a cage fight.
I don't excuse them, but it is a proximate reason for their having done so.
It's been obvious for a decade that the world was going to transition to EVs. The failure to plan for that so that we benefitted, rather than it costing us to catch up, has been colossal.
Most of Europe and the States arent set up for EVs. Germany and France bet the farm on diesel and it didnt work. The UK could of course be better prepared but I cant see how its noticeably behind any of the other major economies. Japan has only just started thinking about it.
There's a lot more capacity planned in Europe, too.
Japan too is doing a lot more than 'just start thinking about it'.
That's only production, and to be clear the UK doesn't have a car industry of its own, it relies on decisions taken by other people.
So in terms of preparation. Where's the ( green ) electricity coming from ? Who's wiring up the country and installing charge points ? And since this is all about carbon reduction do you actually believe building new EVs and the opening mines for batteries is less polluting ?
There is currently a fair amount of greenwashing in the car industry. Running your old banger in to the ground is still the greenest option of all.
Re EVs, it has long been a bugbear of mine that there is no real, integrated, national plan for the rollout of EV charging. Government should be the facilitator. Nobody seems to have fixed the problem of what people without drives are supposed to do, either.
My suspicion, if I am being completely honest, is that because of the issues with EVs, some of which you identify above, there has been a conscious decision to wait and see - because there is the realistic possibility that a better alternative to the current delivery model of EVs may present itself in the coming years, and render this infrastructure obsolete.
Im totally confused on what is the plan for street parking and charging. I suspect there isnt one nationally. But this impacts millions of people mostly in large towns and cities.
British police are testing women for abortion drugs and requesting data from menstrual tracking apps after unexplained pregnancy losses.
I bet if you asked the random person on the street they would assume that abortion was just legal in this country - and would also say this is not a particularly good use of limited police resources.
Abortion is illegal in the UK after 24 weeks of pregnancy so no that is not outrageous
Isn't it ? All manner of things are illegal, but that doesn't give the police unrestricted powers of search.
But they do have the right to request data if they think a crime has been committed. So this is not unlimited search. My guess is there will be a procedure to go through rather than Plod ringing up and asking for the information.
I would also think - as was hinted at the beginning of the piece - that the reason there has been an uptick in prosecutions is because there has been a very noticeable rise in late term pregnancies ending. Doctors / the Police are (probably rightly) sceptical this is down to natural causes.
If you don't want this to happen, change the law, don't blame the Police - for once - trying to enforce the law. It is one of the things that annoys me most about people like Caroline Noakes and Stella Creasy is that they want to push a policy - effective abortion up to the point of birth - but are being underhand by calling for 'decriminalisation', which effectively means the same thing.
I concur with JosiasJessop's "why not both" question but nonetheless the suggestions are all sensible and things we are in most cases already doing, just not enough.
What this needs in addition though is how can the UK grasp the huge opportunities to compete in the decarbonised economy, and to do this requires intelligent government investment and regulation, business investment supported by incentives, and a globally minded approach to the issue of climate change that plugs us into the supply chains of the future. Otherwise we end up just importing everything, again.
Renewable energy is one example where we can become a technology and services exporter, but there are big opportunities in wider green tech and energy efficiency, automotive and other transportation, and green finance, all of which should be actively supported and marketed. And yes it also requires us to show commitment to global targets on net zero.
Thankfully only one Daily Mail talking point made it on to this header and that's the old heat pump thing. If our entire net zero strategy were forcing everyone on to heat pumps then there might be a point here, but they are eminently sensible ways of reducing energy usage, combined with insulation and draught exclusion. They are just the norm now in many European countries. I'm fitting an ASHP in our house in France, which comes complete with uninsulated exposed stone walls, and I expect it to work just fine as do my various neighbours' heat pumps.
On heat pumps, the high temp versions now becoming available counter some of the problems around poor insulation (where this is not easily upgraded) and the need to switch to larger heat exchangers (bigger radiators or underfloor setups). Lower efficiency, but - as always - it's a trade-off between less upfront cost/disruption and longer term savings.
I am looking to change my bolier. I dont want to buy a heat pump. My next doot neighbour has one and doesnt sing its praises. But more importantly I hardly ever put the heat on, I put on an extra jumper. So I see no reason to be forced in to spending a large amount of money for something which has no benefit. I'd rather spend the money on something else.
Many heat pumps have been mis-sold, I think. The low temperature ones only really make sense in new or very much upgraded buildings (I've spent time in both with heat pumps and they've been great, but with poor insulation it's going to suck).
If your heat use is very low, you might be better off with a simple electric boiler (solar linked potentially, with a hot tank).
When the cost for heating via electricity such as the above starts to compete with gas, fantastic. But we are a long way off that.
As for solar panels, I'm not sure they will fit on the exterior of my flat.
Additionally the problem with "storage heater" type solutions is they use energy you don't actually require. e.g. you have to put them on overnight, but if you wake up the next day and find it's warm enough you don't need the heating on (or you're not in), you've wasted 7 hours of overnight energy.
The 'warm enough' problem could be easily fixed by a controller reading the weather forecasts.
Aside from the inaccuracy of weather forecasts, how does that work if I expect to be at home on a given day but later decide to go out, leaving a boiling hot house with nobody in it?
Once upon a time, when I was renting, I lived in a place that had no boiler / central heating (it was very rural) and I had these awful storage heaters. If you used them, the place would be roasting in the morning (fantastic, as I left home for work before 8am) and absolutely freezing by the time you got back from work at six or seven.
Heat and hot water is very much an "on demand" thing, even running such devices during off peak tariff times overnight is a) wasteful (as you will always have to prepare more than you need) and b) can't take into account the unpredictability of when exactly you will need the heat or hot water.
In the end I gave up on the storage heater and bought an oil filled radiator that I'd stick on for an hour or two in the evening. It worked out at about 1/5th the cost of the storage heaters.
BIB - this is an old trope and very outdated. Forecasts of temperature for the next few days will be pretty accurate. Where forecasts struggle is with showers, and things like will it snow or not.
The forecast I really need is whether or not my downstairs neighbours are in or not on any given day. If they're in and WFH, I get free heat, and barely need my own. If they're out, I have to stick the heating on a bit throughout most of the day.
Banging on a storage heater for 7 hours overnight based on the weather seems rather pointless given that's the main difference in temp levels in my flat most days.
British police are testing women for abortion drugs and requesting data from menstrual tracking apps after unexplained pregnancy losses.
I bet if you asked the random person on the street they would assume that abortion was just legal in this country - and would also say this is not a particularly good use of limited police resources.
Abortion is illegal in the UK after 24 weeks of pregnancy so no that is not outrageous
And part of the supposed virtues of British policing is that they have discretion on what to investigate - I don't think investigating miscarriages or even abortions after 24 weeks is a good use of police time; and the collection of this kind of data is very scary.
Do you read the stuff you outrage about? From the article :"Lord told Tortoise he was aware of cases of blood tests being taken with the woman’s consent by NHS staff at the request of police, including, he said, “when women knew they were innocent after suffering an unexpected premature delivery”."
Blood taken WITH CONSENT.
What are you scared off? Or are you just another leftie who hates the Thatcherite police, probably because of the miner's strike?
That police are asking for blood tests of women who have miscarriages at all is an outrage. I do not think police should investigate this; I do not think pregnant people should be interrogated and investigated at a highly vulnerable point in their lives, having just had a significant physical and emotional trauma.
I also don't think that abortion should be criminalised at all - the vast majority happen in the first trimester as it is, and those that happen in the third are by far and away done so for reasons of viability or risk to the mother. That we have laws on the books that makes any miscarriage after 24 weeks suspect is a problem.
Alanbrooke has found a pretty broad consensus on this with his interesting header. Like most I'd want to see the detailed figures but I think most people would sign up for that sort of programme.
Casino's point about branding is relevant - lots of people are actually in agreement with what needs to be done, but put off by slogans like Net Zero wich give too broad a front for tabloids and contrarians to attack. Much the same happened with 15 minute cities, which in essence is an objective which almost nobody would disagree with ("cites should aim for everyone to be able to reach shops and services on foot or cycling within 15 minutes"), but which was cheerfully misinterpreted by our PM.
You'd have to do some number crunching, but most of the stuff in the header (excepting the details of what energy mix we choose) is going to be necessary anyway for net zero.
On sector he doesn't mention is transport (currently responsible for around a quarter of our CO2 emissions). The future of that is where any planning for our future power grid has to start.
And pretending that the infrastructure for EVs (which all the major manufacturers are rapidly transitioning to) can be left to the market, is a recipe for severe damage to the UK economy.
Yes, and thats a cock up heading down the line. Its where Sunak has probably done us all a favour on moving the EV date back 5 years.
That is an admission of failure. Moving the deadline does nothing to address the failure.
May and Bojo setting unachievable dates just to look good for climate conferences is the failure. and in this case failure means alignment with the rest of Europe. The green agenda would advance so much better if politicians stopped making daft claims and treated the public as grown ups.
You won't find any disagreement from me about May and Boris being useless on practical policy versus broad aspiration. But that in itself isn't an argument against net zero.
And you, after all, voted for Brexit, I believe, which has distracted the entire political class from doing much else since the vote.
Of course I did. But thats no excuse for the political class losing the plot. They are paid to run the country not a cage fight.
I don't excuse them, but it is a proximate reason for their having done so.
It's been obvious for a decade that the world was going to transition to EVs. The failure to plan for that so that we benefitted, rather than it costing us to catch up, has been colossal.
Most of Europe and the States arent set up for EVs. Germany and France bet the farm on diesel and it didnt work. The UK could of course be better prepared but I cant see how its noticeably behind any of the other major economies. Japan has only just started thinking about it.
There's a lot more capacity planned in Europe, too.
Japan too is doing a lot more than 'just start thinking about it'.
That's only production, and to be clear the UK doesn't have a car industry of its own, it relies on decisions taken by other people.
So in terms of preparation. Where's the ( green ) electricity coming from ? Who's wiring up the country and installing charge points ? And since this is all about carbon reduction do you actually believe building new EVs and the opening mines for batteries is less polluting ?
There is currently a fair amount of greenwashing in the car industry. Running your old banger in to the ground is still the greenest option of all.
Re EVs, it has long been a bugbear of mine that there is no real, integrated, national plan for the rollout of EV charging. Government should be the facilitator. Nobody seems to have fixed the problem of what people without drives are supposed to do, either.
My suspicion, if I am being completely honest, is that because of the issues with EVs, some of which you identify above, there has been a conscious decision to wait and see - because there is the realistic possibility that a better alternative to the current delivery model of EVs may present itself in the coming years, and render this infrastructure obsolete.
What alternative to EVs ? There isn't one.
We need a suitable grid with sufficient capacity. The next government needs to get on with it.
That a good list, thanks Mr Brooke. I'd also add the need to ensure as much energy independence as possible is vital.
But... why not do both? D the list above *and* move towards net zero?
Oh. and first. If this thread survives...
I doubt we have the money. But if the investment side is handled correctly some of the projects will meet your goal of doing two things in tandem.
I never understand the "we don't have the money" argument when it comes to the environment. If we don't invest in a green future there will not be a future. Also, money isn't real! So, if a government with control over its own currency (like the UK) decides it wants to shift its economy to go big on green (in a similar manner as "wartime" economies shift) then we could do that. Would it change a lot of things, yes - but not necessarily negatively. It's just that the British political consensus is that government shouldn't be allowed to do things that could possibly make the world a better place. That we're behind even the US on this (who are investing huge amounts into green infrastructure) is telling about the myopic nature of British political foresight.
How do you interpret this chart?
We are already leading the pack on reducing emissions anyway
The UK is the most improved, but not the best. France still has the lowest emissions per capita in the G7.
That a good list, thanks Mr Brooke. I'd also add the need to ensure as much energy independence as possible is vital.
But... why not do both? D the list above *and* move towards net zero?
Oh. and first. If this thread survives...
I doubt we have the money. But if the investment side is handled correctly some of the projects will meet your goal of doing two things in tandem.
I never understand the "we don't have the money" argument when it comes to the environment. If we don't invest in a green future there will not be a future. Also, money isn't real! So, if a government with control over its own currency (like the UK) decides it wants to shift its economy to go big on green (in a similar manner as "wartime" economies shift) then we could do that. Would it change a lot of things, yes - but not necessarily negatively. It's just that the British political consensus is that government shouldn't be allowed to do things that could possibly make the world a better place. That we're behind even the US on this (who are investing huge amounts into green infrastructure) is telling about the myopic nature of British political foresight.
How do you interpret this chart?
We are already leading the pack on reducing emissions anyway
The UK is the most improved, but not the best. France still has the lowest emissions per capita in the G7.
France of course is the country where the vast majority of energy is generated by nuclear power. About 75% atm.
British police are testing women for abortion drugs and requesting data from menstrual tracking apps after unexplained pregnancy losses.
I bet if you asked the random person on the street they would assume that abortion was just legal in this country - and would also say this is not a particularly good use of limited police resources.
Abortion is illegal in the UK after 24 weeks of pregnancy so no that is not outrageous
What's the Islamic stance on abortion?
Islam is a large religion with, like any religion, a diversity of views. So, just like Christianity, where you can go from completely anti-abortion Catholics to pro-choice Protestants. Broadly speaking, Islam is perhaps more accepting of abortion than Christianity. The Shi’as are less keen than the Sunnis, but different Sunni schools vary in their views.
Hamas terrorists beheaded Shani Louk after the gunmen kidnapped the German tattoo artist from the Nova electronic festival and paraded her on the back of a truck, it has emerged.
The IDF and volunteers from the Zaka emergency response team said the bone from the base of a skull, without which a person can't survive, matched with Ms Louk's DNA.
In short we need to prepare the UK for a ~2.5C global rise.
I agree - the problem with that is to do that we have to be honest - a 2.5C world will mean mass migration unlike anything we have seen before, alongside food and water scarcity; and that's even if we rebuild our infrastructure with it in mind. If the policy response of the future is anything like the policy response of the present, that means the UK (and much of the West) is going to let millions of people from the global south die.
That a good list, thanks Mr Brooke. I'd also add the need to ensure as much energy independence as possible is vital.
But... why not do both? D the list above *and* move towards net zero?
Oh. and first. If this thread survives...
I doubt we have the money. But if the investment side is handled correctly some of the projects will meet your goal of doing two things in tandem.
I never understand the "we don't have the money" argument when it comes to the environment. If we don't invest in a green future there will not be a future. Also, money isn't real! So, if a government with control over its own currency (like the UK) decides it wants to shift its economy to go big on green (in a similar manner as "wartime" economies shift) then we could do that. Would it change a lot of things, yes - but not necessarily negatively. It's just that the British political consensus is that government shouldn't be allowed to do things that could possibly make the world a better place. That we're behind even the US on this (who are investing huge amounts into green infrastructure) is telling about the myopic nature of British political foresight.
How do you interpret this chart?
We are already leading the pack on reducing emissions anyway
The UK is the most improved, but not the best. France still has the lowest emissions per capita in the G7.
Does France have new nuclear projects going to Judicial Review ?
Alanbrooke has found a pretty broad consensus on this with his interesting header. Like most I'd want to see the detailed figures but I think most people would sign up for that sort of programme.
Casino's point about branding is relevant - lots of people are actually in agreement with what needs to be done, but put off by slogans like Net Zero wich give too broad a front for tabloids and contrarians to attack. Much the same happened with 15 minute cities, which in essence is an objective which almost nobody would disagree with ("cites should aim for everyone to be able to reach shops and services on foot or cycling within 15 minutes"), but which was cheerfully misinterpreted by our PM.
You'd have to do some number crunching, but most of the stuff in the header (excepting the details of what energy mix we choose) is going to be necessary anyway for net zero.
On sector he doesn't mention is transport (currently responsible for around a quarter of our CO2 emissions). The future of that is where any planning for our future power grid has to start.
And pretending that the infrastructure for EVs (which all the major manufacturers are rapidly transitioning to) can be left to the market, is a recipe for severe damage to the UK economy.
Yes, and thats a cock up heading down the line. Its where Sunak has probably done us all a favour on moving the EV date back 5 years.
That is an admission of failure. Moving the deadline does nothing to address the failure.
May and Bojo setting unachievable dates just to look good for climate conferences is the failure. and in this case failure means alignment with the rest of Europe. The green agenda would advance so much better if politicians stopped making daft claims and treated the public as grown ups.
You won't find any disagreement from me about May and Boris being useless on practical policy versus broad aspiration. But that in itself isn't an argument against net zero.
And you, after all, voted for Brexit, I believe, which has distracted the entire political class from doing much else since the vote.
Of course I did. But thats no excuse for the political class losing the plot. They are paid to run the country not a cage fight.
I don't excuse them, but it is a proximate reason for their having done so.
It's been obvious for a decade that the world was going to transition to EVs. The failure to plan for that so that we benefitted, rather than it costing us to catch up, has been colossal.
Most of Europe and the States arent set up for EVs. Germany and France bet the farm on diesel and it didnt work. The UK could of course be better prepared but I cant see how its noticeably behind any of the other major economies. Japan has only just started thinking about it.
There's a lot more capacity planned in Europe, too.
Japan too is doing a lot more than 'just start thinking about it'.
That's only production, and to be clear the UK doesn't have a car industry of its own, it relies on decisions taken by other people.
So in terms of preparation. Where's the ( green ) electricity coming from ? Who's wiring up the country and installing charge points ? And since this is all about carbon reduction do you actually believe building new EVs and the opening mines for batteries is less polluting ?
There is currently a fair amount of greenwashing in the car industry. Running your old banger in to the ground is still the greenest option of all.
Re EVs, it has long been a bugbear of mine that there is no real, integrated, national plan for the rollout of EV charging. Government should be the facilitator. Nobody seems to have fixed the problem of what people without drives are supposed to do, either.
My suspicion, if I am being completely honest, is that because of the issues with EVs, some of which you identify above, there has been a conscious decision to wait and see - because there is the realistic possibility that a better alternative to the current delivery model of EVs may present itself in the coming years, and render this infrastructure obsolete.
What alternative to EVs ? There isn't one.
We need a suitable grid with sufficient capacity. The next government needs to get on with it.
There isn’t one right now. But then there is still continued talk about hydrogen, for instance.
To be clear, I am not arguing that there shouldn’t be a much better plan for EV rollout. I find it ridiculous that there hasn’t been. I’m just trying to find reasons as to why there hasn’t.
In short we need to prepare the UK for a ~2.5C global rise.
I agree - the problem with that is to do that we have to be honest - a 2.5C world will mean mass migration unlike anything we have seen before, alongside food and water scarcity; and that's even if we rebuild our infrastructure with it in mind. If the policy response of the future is anything like the policy response of the present, that means the UK (and much of the West) is going to let millions of people from the global south die.
Actually that's a fair point though I'd disagree with "letting millions die", when push and shove come people don't really get sent back from here or the EU (See Lampadusa) so the west needs to be prepared for millions of arrivals...
Regarding interconnectors, we need more of them, not less. They are vital for evening out fluctuations in the generation of renewable energy. When the wind blows here, we export; when the wind blows elsewhere, we import; and fossil fuel use is reduced either way. Same for solar.
British police are testing women for abortion drugs and requesting data from menstrual tracking apps after unexplained pregnancy losses.
I bet if you asked the random person on the street they would assume that abortion was just legal in this country - and would also say this is not a particularly good use of limited police resources.
Abortion is illegal in the UK after 24 weeks of pregnancy so no that is not outrageous
That a good list, thanks Mr Brooke. I'd also add the need to ensure as much energy independence as possible is vital.
But... why not do both? D the list above *and* move towards net zero?
Oh. and first. If this thread survives...
I doubt we have the money. But if the investment side is handled correctly some of the projects will meet your goal of doing two things in tandem.
I never understand the "we don't have the money" argument when it comes to the environment. If we don't invest in a green future there will not be a future. Also, money isn't real! So, if a government with control over its own currency (like the UK) decides it wants to shift its economy to go big on green (in a similar manner as "wartime" economies shift) then we could do that. Would it change a lot of things, yes - but not necessarily negatively. It's just that the British political consensus is that government shouldn't be allowed to do things that could possibly make the world a better place. That we're behind even the US on this (who are investing huge amounts into green infrastructure) is telling about the myopic nature of British political foresight.
How do you interpret this chart?
We are already leading the pack on reducing emissions anyway
The UK is the most improved, but not the best. France still has the lowest emissions per capita in the G7.
Yes, so lets give RR our support and place some orders of their miniplants, This is where exportable green jobs can work.. Circa £2bn a plant for 470MW. 30 plants gives us 14GW.
I concur with JosiasJessop's "why not both" question but nonetheless the suggestions are all sensible and things we are in most cases already doing, just not enough.
What this needs in addition though is how can the UK grasp the huge opportunities to compete in the decarbonised economy, and to do this requires intelligent government investment and regulation, business investment supported by incentives, and a globally minded approach to the issue of climate change that plugs us into the supply chains of the future. Otherwise we end up just importing everything, again.
Renewable energy is one example where we can become a technology and services exporter, but there are big opportunities in wider green tech and energy efficiency, automotive and other transportation, and green finance, all of which should be actively supported and marketed. And yes it also requires us to show commitment to global targets on net zero.
Thankfully only one Daily Mail talking point made it on to this header and that's the old heat pump thing. If our entire net zero strategy were forcing everyone on to heat pumps then there might be a point here, but they are eminently sensible ways of reducing energy usage, combined with insulation and draught exclusion. They are just the norm now in many European countries. I'm fitting an ASHP in our house in France, which comes complete with uninsulated exposed stone walls, and I expect it to work just fine as do my various neighbours' heat pumps.
On heat pumps, the high temp versions now becoming available counter some of the problems around poor insulation (where this is not easily upgraded) and the need to switch to larger heat exchangers (bigger radiators or underfloor setups). Lower efficiency, but - as always - it's a trade-off between less upfront cost/disruption and longer term savings.
I am looking to change my bolier. I dont want to buy a heat pump. My next doot neighbour has one and doesnt sing its praises. But more importantly I hardly ever put the heat on, I put on an extra jumper. So I see no reason to be forced in to spending a large amount of money for something which has no benefit. I'd rather spend the money on something else.
Many heat pumps have been mis-sold, I think. The low temperature ones only really make sense in new or very much upgraded buildings (I've spent time in both with heat pumps and they've been great, but with poor insulation it's going to suck).
If your heat use is very low, you might be better off with a simple electric boiler (solar linked potentially, with a hot tank).
When the cost for heating via electricity such as the above starts to compete with gas, fantastic. But we are a long way off that.
As for solar panels, I'm not sure they will fit on the exterior of my flat.
Additionally the problem with "storage heater" type solutions is they use energy you don't actually require. e.g. you have to put them on overnight, but if you wake up the next day and find it's warm enough you don't need the heating on (or you're not in), you've wasted 7 hours of overnight energy.
Good point about the higher cost per KW of electricity compared to gas. It seems this is due to the cost of the gas peaker plant. I wonder if this is tied to politics as much as finances. Also take into account that gas sends some heat out of the chimney whereas electricity is 100% efficient (for heat). also from Tepeo "The stored heat will remain in the core for several days but will slowly be lost."
If the stored heat lasts for days, fantastic. Based on my own experience of storage heaters, I'm sceptical, and suspect they are talking up their book. Even with the best insulation, coffee in a thermos is cold within 12 hours.
But even if they're right, you'll still want to produce more heat than you use, just in case you get caught out, which is why I describe heat and hot water as "on demand" type products. Tepeo-style solutions need to be demonstrably cheaper than "on demand" heat.
Agree that gas is not 100% efficient. More efficient storage would solve a lot of problems, the Tepeo idea is interesting *if* it can store usable heat for multiple days without wasting a significant percentage of it.
Otherwise I suspect it will be like my experience of storage heaters in the past. Sure, I can leave this on for seven hours overnight, but if I'm out for work during the day, it will cost me more than popping an oil filled radiator on for an hour in the evening to heat up the house when I get home.
I passed a new-build estate the other day and noticed just two of the houses had solar panels. I'm guessing they were bought off-plan and the purchasers chose to have them as an optional extra. Which led me to think, why not make them compulsory for all new-builds? It's surely cheaper than retrofitting them later.
And there's been a spate of boiler-thefts from unfinished houses on the same site. If heat pumps are so great why aren't they a legal requirement, instead of threatening the owners of 200-year-old cottages like ours with the expense of fitting them in 10 years time?
If all new housing stock were greened up in the first place there'd be less pressure to ruin old houses by forcing them into the same straightjacket.
They're mandatory in Germany for new builds and major renovations - I was translating the regulations the other day. One can IIRC apply for a special exemption if e.g. the building is in permanent shadow. It's obviously sensible, and although it will increase the cost the new residents will certainly make a profit on the extra cost within 10 years.
Alanbrooke has found a pretty broad consensus on this with his interesting header. Like most I'd want to see the detailed figures but I think most people would sign up for that sort of programme.
Casino's point about branding is relevant - lots of people are actually in agreement with what needs to be done, but put off by slogans like Net Zero wich give too broad a front for tabloids and contrarians to attack. Much the same happened with 15 minute cities, which in essence is an objective which almost nobody would disagree with ("cites should aim for everyone to be able to reach shops and services on foot or cycling within 15 minutes"), but which was cheerfully misinterpreted by our PM.
You'd have to do some number crunching, but most of the stuff in the header (excepting the details of what energy mix we choose) is going to be necessary anyway for net zero.
On sector he doesn't mention is transport (currently responsible for around a quarter of our CO2 emissions). The future of that is where any planning for our future power grid has to start.
And pretending that the infrastructure for EVs (which all the major manufacturers are rapidly transitioning to) can be left to the market, is a recipe for severe damage to the UK economy.
Yes, and thats a cock up heading down the line. Its where Sunak has probably done us all a favour on moving the EV date back 5 years.
That is an admission of failure. Moving the deadline does nothing to address the failure.
May and Bojo setting unachievable dates just to look good for climate conferences is the failure. and in this case failure means alignment with the rest of Europe. The green agenda would advance so much better if politicians stopped making daft claims and treated the public as grown ups.
You won't find any disagreement from me about May and Boris being useless on practical policy versus broad aspiration. But that in itself isn't an argument against net zero.
And you, after all, voted for Brexit, I believe, which has distracted the entire political class from doing much else since the vote.
Of course I did. But thats no excuse for the political class losing the plot. They are paid to run the country not a cage fight.
I don't excuse them, but it is a proximate reason for their having done so.
It's been obvious for a decade that the world was going to transition to EVs. The failure to plan for that so that we benefitted, rather than it costing us to catch up, has been colossal.
Most of Europe and the States arent set up for EVs. Germany and France bet the farm on diesel and it didnt work. The UK could of course be better prepared but I cant see how its noticeably behind any of the other major economies. Japan has only just started thinking about it.
There's a lot more capacity planned in Europe, too.
Japan too is doing a lot more than 'just start thinking about it'.
That's only production, and to be clear the UK doesn't have a car industry of its own, it relies on decisions taken by other people.
So in terms of preparation. Where's the ( green ) electricity coming from ? Who's wiring up the country and installing charge points ? And since this is all about carbon reduction do you actually believe building new EVs and the opening mines for batteries is less polluting ?
There is currently a fair amount of greenwashing in the car industry. Running your old banger in to the ground is still the greenest option of all.
Your article is about what we should be doing to benefit our economy. Indeed in the comments you've been arguing for import substitution. Yet when I talk about our relative failure on EVs, you change the subject.
In short we need to prepare the UK for a ~2.5C global rise.
I agree - the problem with that is to do that we have to be honest - a 2.5C world will mean mass migration unlike anything we have seen before, alongside food and water scarcity; and that's even if we rebuild our infrastructure with it in mind. If the policy response of the future is anything like the policy response of the present, that means the UK (and much of the West) is going to let millions of people from the global south die.
Actually that's a fair point though I'd disagree with "letting millions die", when push and shove come people don't really get sent back from here or the EU (See Lampadusa) so the west needs to be prepared for millions of arrivals...
They have to get here first, and if the current treatment of Mediterranean / Channel crossings is anything to go by, the policy will be make it as deadly as possible before they get here and just claim those deaths aren't our responsibility. We already had temperatures in parts of India this summer hit "wet bulb" levels; if millions of Indians are displaced due to where they currently live just being uninhabitable 3-4 months of the year, they won't just be displaced within India and surrounding countries - many will aim to come here and to the EU; whether that requires people to travel halfway across the world in unsafe conditions because safe routes won't be accessible.
Alanbrooke has found a pretty broad consensus on this with his interesting header. Like most I'd want to see the detailed figures but I think most people would sign up for that sort of programme.
Casino's point about branding is relevant - lots of people are actually in agreement with what needs to be done, but put off by slogans like Net Zero wich give too broad a front for tabloids and contrarians to attack. Much the same happened with 15 minute cities, which in essence is an objective which almost nobody would disagree with ("cites should aim for everyone to be able to reach shops and services on foot or cycling within 15 minutes"), but which was cheerfully misinterpreted by our PM.
You'd have to do some number crunching, but most of the stuff in the header (excepting the details of what energy mix we choose) is going to be necessary anyway for net zero.
On sector he doesn't mention is transport (currently responsible for around a quarter of our CO2 emissions). The future of that is where any planning for our future power grid has to start.
And pretending that the infrastructure for EVs (which all the major manufacturers are rapidly transitioning to) can be left to the market, is a recipe for severe damage to the UK economy.
Yes, and thats a cock up heading down the line. Its where Sunak has probably done us all a favour on moving the EV date back 5 years.
That is an admission of failure. Moving the deadline does nothing to address the failure.
May and Bojo setting unachievable dates just to look good for climate conferences is the failure. and in this case failure means alignment with the rest of Europe. The green agenda would advance so much better if politicians stopped making daft claims and treated the public as grown ups.
You won't find any disagreement from me about May and Boris being useless on practical policy versus broad aspiration. But that in itself isn't an argument against net zero.
And you, after all, voted for Brexit, I believe, which has distracted the entire political class from doing much else since the vote.
Of course I did. But thats no excuse for the political class losing the plot. They are paid to run the country not a cage fight.
I don't excuse them, but it is a proximate reason for their having done so.
It's been obvious for a decade that the world was going to transition to EVs. The failure to plan for that so that we benefitted, rather than it costing us to catch up, has been colossal.
Most of Europe and the States arent set up for EVs. Germany and France bet the farm on diesel and it didnt work. The UK could of course be better prepared but I cant see how its noticeably behind any of the other major economies. Japan has only just started thinking about it.
There's a lot more capacity planned in Europe, too.
Japan too is doing a lot more than 'just start thinking about it'.
That's only production, and to be clear the UK doesn't have a car industry of its own, it relies on decisions taken by other people.
So in terms of preparation. Where's the ( green ) electricity coming from ? Who's wiring up the country and installing charge points ? And since this is all about carbon reduction do you actually believe building new EVs and the opening mines for batteries is less polluting ?
There is currently a fair amount of greenwashing in the car industry. Running your old banger in to the ground is still the greenest option of all.
Re EVs, it has long been a bugbear of mine that there is no real, integrated, national plan for the rollout of EV charging. Government should be the facilitator. Nobody seems to have fixed the problem of what people without drives are supposed to do, either.
My suspicion, if I am being completely honest, is that because of the issues with EVs, some of which you identify above, there has been a conscious decision to wait and see - because there is the realistic possibility that a better alternative to the current delivery model of EVs may present itself in the coming years, and render this infrastructure obsolete.
What alternative to EVs ? There isn't one.
We need a suitable grid with sufficient capacity. The next government needs to get on with it.
There isn’t one right now. But then there is still continued talk about hydrogen, for instance.
To be clear, I am not arguing that there shouldn’t be a much better plan for EV rollout. I find it ridiculous that there hasn’t been. I’m just trying to find reasons as to why there hasn’t.
That is the most puzzling question, why aren't huge numbers of charging stations being built now throughout the Country? I can only think its because the electrical infrastruture is not capable at the moment to power all the required charging points.
That a good list, thanks Mr Brooke. I'd also add the need to ensure as much energy independence as possible is vital.
But... why not do both? D the list above *and* move towards net zero?
Oh. and first. If this thread survives...
I doubt we have the money. But if the investment side is handled correctly some of the projects will meet your goal of doing two things in tandem.
I never understand the "we don't have the money" argument when it comes to the environment. If we don't invest in a green future there will not be a future. Also, money isn't real! So, if a government with control over its own currency (like the UK) decides it wants to shift its economy to go big on green (in a similar manner as "wartime" economies shift) then we could do that. Would it change a lot of things, yes - but not necessarily negatively. It's just that the British political consensus is that government shouldn't be allowed to do things that could possibly make the world a better place. That we're behind even the US on this (who are investing huge amounts into green infrastructure) is telling about the myopic nature of British political foresight.
How do you interpret this chart?
We are already leading the pack on reducing emissions anyway
The UK is the most improved, but not the best. France still has the lowest emissions per capita in the G7.
Yes, so lets give RR our support and place some orders of their miniplants, This is where exportable green jobs can work.. Circa £2bn a plant for 470MW. 30 plants gives us 14GW.
While nukes are obviously to be preferred to fossil fuel plants, I'd have thought they will struggle to compete on price against wind and solar power. They are expensive to build and run, and you've still got the issue of waste disposal.
That a good list, thanks Mr Brooke. I'd also add the need to ensure as much energy independence as possible is vital.
But... why not do both? D the list above *and* move towards net zero?
Oh. and first. If this thread survives...
I doubt we have the money. But if the investment side is handled correctly some of the projects will meet your goal of doing two things in tandem.
I never understand the "we don't have the money" argument when it comes to the environment. If we don't invest in a green future there will not be a future. Also, money isn't real! So, if a government with control over its own currency (like the UK) decides it wants to shift its economy to go big on green (in a similar manner as "wartime" economies shift) then we could do that. Would it change a lot of things, yes - but not necessarily negatively. It's just that the British political consensus is that government shouldn't be allowed to do things that could possibly make the world a better place. That we're behind even the US on this (who are investing huge amounts into green infrastructure) is telling about the myopic nature of British political foresight.
How do you interpret this chart?
We are already leading the pack on reducing emissions anyway
The UK is the most improved, but not the best. France still has the lowest emissions per capita in the G7.
Yes, so lets give RR our support and place some orders of their miniplants, This is where exportable green jobs can work.. Circa £2bn a plant for 470MW. 30 plants gives us 14GW.
While nukes are obviously to be preferred to fossil fuel plants, I'd have thought they will struggle to compete on price against wind and solar power. They are expensive to build and run, and you've still got the issue of waste disposal.
The point is to have a diverse energy base. Nuclear will work when wind and wave dont and when gas is phased out.
That a good list, thanks Mr Brooke. I'd also add the need to ensure as much energy independence as possible is vital.
But... why not do both? D the list above *and* move towards net zero?
Oh. and first. If this thread survives...
I doubt we have the money. But if the investment side is handled correctly some of the projects will meet your goal of doing two things in tandem.
I never understand the "we don't have the money" argument when it comes to the environment. If we don't invest in a green future there will not be a future. Also, money isn't real! So, if a government with control over its own currency (like the UK) decides it wants to shift its economy to go big on green (in a similar manner as "wartime" economies shift) then we could do that. Would it change a lot of things, yes - but not necessarily negatively. It's just that the British political consensus is that government shouldn't be allowed to do things that could possibly make the world a better place. That we're behind even the US on this (who are investing huge amounts into green infrastructure) is telling about the myopic nature of British political foresight.
How do you interpret this chart?
We are already leading the pack on reducing emissions anyway
The UK is the most improved, but not the best. France still has the lowest emissions per capita in the G7.
Yes, so lets give RR our support and place some orders of their miniplants, This is where exportable green jobs can work.. Circa £2bn a plant for 470MW. 30 plants gives us 14GW.
If they can be delivered for that price, it's not terrible. S Korea is currently tendering around $5bn per 1.4GW nuclear plant. Which is why they're getting a lot of new contracts.
In short we need to prepare the UK for a ~2.5C global rise.
I agree - the problem with that is to do that we have to be honest - a 2.5C world will mean mass migration unlike anything we have seen before, alongside food and water scarcity; and that's even if we rebuild our infrastructure with it in mind. If the policy response of the future is anything like the policy response of the present, that means the UK (and much of the West) is going to let millions of people from the global south die.
Actually that's a fair point though I'd disagree with "letting millions die", when push and shove come people don't really get sent back from here or the EU (See Lampadusa) so the west needs to be prepared for millions of arrivals...
They have to get here first, and if the current treatment of Mediterranean / Channel crossings is anything to go by, the policy will be make it as deadly as possible before they get here and just claim those deaths aren't our responsibility. We already had temperatures in parts of India this summer hit "wet bulb" levels; if millions of Indians are displaced due to where they currently live just being uninhabitable 3-4 months of the year, they won't just be displaced within India and surrounding countries - many will aim to come here and to the EU; whether that requires people to travel halfway across the world in unsafe conditions because safe routes won't be accessible.
And in the end, if that happens, European countries will use military force to keep them out
It’s not great. It is horrific: a vast human tragedy in the making. But the cold political facts suggest the west will ultimately defend its prosperity with arms
Alanbrooke has found a pretty broad consensus on this with his interesting header. Like most I'd want to see the detailed figures but I think most people would sign up for that sort of programme.
Casino's point about branding is relevant - lots of people are actually in agreement with what needs to be done, but put off by slogans like Net Zero wich give too broad a front for tabloids and contrarians to attack. Much the same happened with 15 minute cities, which in essence is an objective which almost nobody would disagree with ("cites should aim for everyone to be able to reach shops and services on foot or cycling within 15 minutes"), but which was cheerfully misinterpreted by our PM.
You'd have to do some number crunching, but most of the stuff in the header (excepting the details of what energy mix we choose) is going to be necessary anyway for net zero.
On sector he doesn't mention is transport (currently responsible for around a quarter of our CO2 emissions). The future of that is where any planning for our future power grid has to start.
And pretending that the infrastructure for EVs (which all the major manufacturers are rapidly transitioning to) can be left to the market, is a recipe for severe damage to the UK economy.
Yes, and thats a cock up heading down the line. Its where Sunak has probably done us all a favour on moving the EV date back 5 years.
That is an admission of failure. Moving the deadline does nothing to address the failure.
May and Bojo setting unachievable dates just to look good for climate conferences is the failure. and in this case failure means alignment with the rest of Europe. The green agenda would advance so much better if politicians stopped making daft claims and treated the public as grown ups.
You won't find any disagreement from me about May and Boris being useless on practical policy versus broad aspiration. But that in itself isn't an argument against net zero.
And you, after all, voted for Brexit, I believe, which has distracted the entire political class from doing much else since the vote.
Of course I did. But thats no excuse for the political class losing the plot. They are paid to run the country not a cage fight.
I don't excuse them, but it is a proximate reason for their having done so.
It's been obvious for a decade that the world was going to transition to EVs. The failure to plan for that so that we benefitted, rather than it costing us to catch up, has been colossal.
Most of Europe and the States arent set up for EVs. Germany and France bet the farm on diesel and it didnt work. The UK could of course be better prepared but I cant see how its noticeably behind any of the other major economies. Japan has only just started thinking about it.
There's a lot more capacity planned in Europe, too.
Japan too is doing a lot more than 'just start thinking about it'.
That's only production, and to be clear the UK doesn't have a car industry of its own, it relies on decisions taken by other people.
So in terms of preparation. Where's the ( green ) electricity coming from ? Who's wiring up the country and installing charge points ? And since this is all about carbon reduction do you actually believe building new EVs and the opening mines for batteries is less polluting ?
There is currently a fair amount of greenwashing in the car industry. Running your old banger in to the ground is still the greenest option of all.
Re EVs, it has long been a bugbear of mine that there is no real, integrated, national plan for the rollout of EV charging. Government should be the facilitator. Nobody seems to have fixed the problem of what people without drives are supposed to do, either.
My suspicion, if I am being completely honest, is that because of the issues with EVs, some of which you identify above, there has been a conscious decision to wait and see - because there is the realistic possibility that a better alternative to the current delivery model of EVs may present itself in the coming years, and render this infrastructure obsolete.
What alternative to EVs ? There isn't one.
We need a suitable grid with sufficient capacity. The next government needs to get on with it.
There isn’t one right now. But then there is still continued talk about hydrogen, for instance.
To be clear, I am not arguing that there shouldn’t be a much better plan for EV rollout. I find it ridiculous that there hasn’t been. I’m just trying to find reasons as to why there hasn’t.
That is the most puzzling question, why aren't huge numbers of charging stations being built now throughout the Country? I can only think its because the electrical infrastruture is not capable at the moment to power all the required charging points.
Actually, pretty large numbers of charging stations are being built around the country. According to Zapmap, the number of charge points has risen by 43% in the last year. I regularly charge my Leaf at InstaVolt’s Banbury Super Hub and it's rarely more than half full.
We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on
Alanbrooke has found a pretty broad consensus on this with his interesting header. Like most I'd want to see the detailed figures but I think most people would sign up for that sort of programme.
Casino's point about branding is relevant - lots of people are actually in agreement with what needs to be done, but put off by slogans like Net Zero wich give too broad a front for tabloids and contrarians to attack. Much the same happened with 15 minute cities, which in essence is an objective which almost nobody would disagree with ("cites should aim for everyone to be able to reach shops and services on foot or cycling within 15 minutes"), but which was cheerfully misinterpreted by our PM.
You'd have to do some number crunching, but most of the stuff in the header (excepting the details of what energy mix we choose) is going to be necessary anyway for net zero.
On sector he doesn't mention is transport (currently responsible for around a quarter of our CO2 emissions). The future of that is where any planning for our future power grid has to start.
And pretending that the infrastructure for EVs (which all the major manufacturers are rapidly transitioning to) can be left to the market, is a recipe for severe damage to the UK economy.
Yes, and thats a cock up heading down the line. Its where Sunak has probably done us all a favour on moving the EV date back 5 years.
That is an admission of failure. Moving the deadline does nothing to address the failure.
May and Bojo setting unachievable dates just to look good for climate conferences is the failure. and in this case failure means alignment with the rest of Europe. The green agenda would advance so much better if politicians stopped making daft claims and treated the public as grown ups.
You won't find any disagreement from me about May and Boris being useless on practical policy versus broad aspiration. But that in itself isn't an argument against net zero.
And you, after all, voted for Brexit, I believe, which has distracted the entire political class from doing much else since the vote.
Of course I did. But thats no excuse for the political class losing the plot. They are paid to run the country not a cage fight.
I don't excuse them, but it is a proximate reason for their having done so.
It's been obvious for a decade that the world was going to transition to EVs. The failure to plan for that so that we benefitted, rather than it costing us to catch up, has been colossal.
Most of Europe and the States arent set up for EVs. Germany and France bet the farm on diesel and it didnt work. The UK could of course be better prepared but I cant see how its noticeably behind any of the other major economies. Japan has only just started thinking about it.
There's a lot more capacity planned in Europe, too.
Japan too is doing a lot more than 'just start thinking about it'.
That's only production, and to be clear the UK doesn't have a car industry of its own, it relies on decisions taken by other people.
So in terms of preparation. Where's the ( green ) electricity coming from ? Who's wiring up the country and installing charge points ? And since this is all about carbon reduction do you actually believe building new EVs and the opening mines for batteries is less polluting ?
There is currently a fair amount of greenwashing in the car industry. Running your old banger in to the ground is still the greenest option of all.
Re EVs, it has long been a bugbear of mine that there is no real, integrated, national plan for the rollout of EV charging. Government should be the facilitator. Nobody seems to have fixed the problem of what people without drives are supposed to do, either.
My suspicion, if I am being completely honest, is that because of the issues with EVs, some of which you identify above, there has been a conscious decision to wait and see - because there is the realistic possibility that a better alternative to the current delivery model of EVs may present itself in the coming years, and render this infrastructure obsolete.
Considerable numbers of charging pints are being installed. More needed, but it is incorrect to say that nothing is being done.
As to pollution over the lifetime of a car - the vast majority is created in driving it, not building it.
Alanbrooke has found a pretty broad consensus on this with his interesting header. Like most I'd want to see the detailed figures but I think most people would sign up for that sort of programme.
Casino's point about branding is relevant - lots of people are actually in agreement with what needs to be done, but put off by slogans like Net Zero wich give too broad a front for tabloids and contrarians to attack. Much the same happened with 15 minute cities, which in essence is an objective which almost nobody would disagree with ("cites should aim for everyone to be able to reach shops and services on foot or cycling within 15 minutes"), but which was cheerfully misinterpreted by our PM.
You'd have to do some number crunching, but most of the stuff in the header (excepting the details of what energy mix we choose) is going to be necessary anyway for net zero.
On sector he doesn't mention is transport (currently responsible for around a quarter of our CO2 emissions). The future of that is where any planning for our future power grid has to start.
And pretending that the infrastructure for EVs (which all the major manufacturers are rapidly transitioning to) can be left to the market, is a recipe for severe damage to the UK economy.
Yes, and thats a cock up heading down the line. Its where Sunak has probably done us all a favour on moving the EV date back 5 years.
That is an admission of failure. Moving the deadline does nothing to address the failure.
May and Bojo setting unachievable dates just to look good for climate conferences is the failure. and in this case failure means alignment with the rest of Europe. The green agenda would advance so much better if politicians stopped making daft claims and treated the public as grown ups.
You won't find any disagreement from me about May and Boris being useless on practical policy versus broad aspiration. But that in itself isn't an argument against net zero.
And you, after all, voted for Brexit, I believe, which has distracted the entire political class from doing much else since the vote.
Of course I did. But thats no excuse for the political class losing the plot. They are paid to run the country not a cage fight.
I don't excuse them, but it is a proximate reason for their having done so.
It's been obvious for a decade that the world was going to transition to EVs. The failure to plan for that so that we benefitted, rather than it costing us to catch up, has been colossal.
Most of Europe and the States arent set up for EVs. Germany and France bet the farm on diesel and it didnt work. The UK could of course be better prepared but I cant see how its noticeably behind any of the other major economies. Japan has only just started thinking about it.
There's a lot more capacity planned in Europe, too.
Japan too is doing a lot more than 'just start thinking about it'.
That's only production, and to be clear the UK doesn't have a car industry of its own, it relies on decisions taken by other people.
So in terms of preparation. Where's the ( green ) electricity coming from ? Who's wiring up the country and installing charge points ? And since this is all about carbon reduction do you actually believe building new EVs and the opening mines for batteries is less polluting ?
There is currently a fair amount of greenwashing in the car industry. Running your old banger in to the ground is still the greenest option of all.
Your article is about what we should be doing to benefit our economy. Indeed in the comments you've been arguing for import substitution. Yet when I talk about our relative failure on EVs, you change the subject.
We;re talking about different aspects of EV. On the do we need battery plants issue we are progressing I dont see the huge gap you claim between say us and Germany we are all building battery plants. I would say only China is well ahead of the West and as you are probably aware the EU commission is trying to stop Chinese imports to give Germany and France a chance to catch up.
I was arguing on the wider issue of EV. An EV is no use unless you can charge it and at present I think we have an infrastructure gap, which was why I said Sunak had won us time. And on the same basis I also suspect the green credentials of EVs have been overplayed Im not convinced they will lower carbon output substantially unless we have carbon free power . The production impact of an EV down the whole chain is not clear.
We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on
Technology advancing causes jobs to be lost. That’s always been the way.
It’s white collar middle class people being affected now. Previously it was largely blue collar jobs.
British police are testing women for abortion drugs and requesting data from menstrual tracking apps after unexplained pregnancy losses.
I bet if you asked the random person on the street they would assume that abortion was just legal in this country - and would also say this is not a particularly good use of limited police resources.
I concur with JosiasJessop's "why not both" question but nonetheless the suggestions are all sensible and things we are in most cases already doing, just not enough.
What this needs in addition though is how can the UK grasp the huge opportunities to compete in the decarbonised economy, and to do this requires intelligent government investment and regulation, business investment supported by incentives, and a globally minded approach to the issue of climate change that plugs us into the supply chains of the future. Otherwise we end up just importing everything, again.
Renewable energy is one example where we can become a technology and services exporter, but there are big opportunities in wider green tech and energy efficiency, automotive and other transportation, and green finance, all of which should be actively supported and marketed. And yes it also requires us to show commitment to global targets on net zero.
Thankfully only one Daily Mail talking point made it on to this header and that's the old heat pump thing. If our entire net zero strategy were forcing everyone on to heat pumps then there might be a point here, but they are eminently sensible ways of reducing energy usage, combined with insulation and draught exclusion. They are just the norm now in many European countries. I'm fitting an ASHP in our house in France, which comes complete with uninsulated exposed stone walls, and I expect it to work just fine as do my various neighbours' heat pumps.
On heat pumps, the high temp versions now becoming available counter some of the problems around poor insulation (where this is not easily upgraded) and the need to switch to larger heat exchangers (bigger radiators or underfloor setups). Lower efficiency, but - as always - it's a trade-off between less upfront cost/disruption and longer term savings.
I am looking to change my bolier. I dont want to buy a heat pump. My next doot neighbour has one and doesnt sing its praises. But more importantly I hardly ever put the heat on, I put on an extra jumper. So I see no reason to be forced in to spending a large amount of money for something which has no benefit. I'd rather spend the money on something else.
Many heat pumps have been mis-sold, I think. The low temperature ones only really make sense in new or very much upgraded buildings (I've spent time in both with heat pumps and they've been great, but with poor insulation it's going to suck).
If your heat use is very low, you might be better off with a simple electric boiler (solar linked potentially, with a hot tank).
I currently have a combi boiler about 10 years old. I live in the countryside so there is no gas, its electricity or oil. Electricity hasnt been selling itself of late and oil has been fine price wise is you pick when to buy it. But my main heating approach has been not to switch the heating on in the first place. My fall back position is to light a fire and live in one room but the naggies in government want to cut this off too and force me to heat the entire house.
Er wut?
To start with, every radiator since Victorian times has come with an advanced device. Called a valve.
If actually turning off radiators by hand is too boring, you can fit electronic valves per radiator. You can also setup thermostats per room.
Particulates from burning solid fuels are a legitimate concern.
bollox , nothing to beat an open fire or log burner as second best.
British police are testing women for abortion drugs and requesting data from menstrual tracking apps after unexplained pregnancy losses.
I bet if you asked the random person on the street they would assume that abortion was just legal in this country - and would also say this is not a particularly good use of limited police resources.
I concur with JosiasJessop's "why not both" question but nonetheless the suggestions are all sensible and things we are in most cases already doing, just not enough.
What this needs in addition though is how can the UK grasp the huge opportunities to compete in the decarbonised economy, and to do this requires intelligent government investment and regulation, business investment supported by incentives, and a globally minded approach to the issue of climate change that plugs us into the supply chains of the future. Otherwise we end up just importing everything, again.
Renewable energy is one example where we can become a technology and services exporter, but there are big opportunities in wider green tech and energy efficiency, automotive and other transportation, and green finance, all of which should be actively supported and marketed. And yes it also requires us to show commitment to global targets on net zero.
Thankfully only one Daily Mail talking point made it on to this header and that's the old heat pump thing. If our entire net zero strategy were forcing everyone on to heat pumps then there might be a point here, but they are eminently sensible ways of reducing energy usage, combined with insulation and draught exclusion. They are just the norm now in many European countries. I'm fitting an ASHP in our house in France, which comes complete with uninsulated exposed stone walls, and I expect it to work just fine as do my various neighbours' heat pumps.
On heat pumps, the high temp versions now becoming available counter some of the problems around poor insulation (where this is not easily upgraded) and the need to switch to larger heat exchangers (bigger radiators or underfloor setups). Lower efficiency, but - as always - it's a trade-off between less upfront cost/disruption and longer term savings.
I am looking to change my bolier. I dont want to buy a heat pump. My next doot neighbour has one and doesnt sing its praises. But more importantly I hardly ever put the heat on, I put on an extra jumper. So I see no reason to be forced in to spending a large amount of money for something which has no benefit. I'd rather spend the money on something else.
Many heat pumps have been mis-sold, I think. The low temperature ones only really make sense in new or very much upgraded buildings (I've spent time in both with heat pumps and they've been great, but with poor insulation it's going to suck).
If your heat use is very low, you might be better off with a simple electric boiler (solar linked potentially, with a hot tank).
I currently have a combi boiler about 10 years old. I live in the countryside so there is no gas, its electricity or oil. Electricity hasnt been selling itself of late and oil has been fine price wise is you pick when to buy it. But my main heating approach has been not to switch the heating on in the first place. My fall back position is to light a fire and live in one room but the naggies in government want to cut this off too and force me to heat the entire house.
Er wut?
To start with, every radiator since Victorian times has come with an advanced device. Called a valve.
If actually turning off radiators by hand is too boring, you can fit electronic valves per radiator. You can also setup thermostats per room.
Particulates from burning solid fuels are a legitimate concern.
bollox , nothing to beat an open fire or log burner as second best.
spot on malc, and either wood or turf to make it homely.
We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on
Technology advancing causes jobs to be lost. That’s always been the way.
It’s white collar middle class people being affected now. Previously it was largely blue collar jobs.
It’s going to be very painful for a lot of people who thought they were “safe”
Alanbrooke has found a pretty broad consensus on this with his interesting header. Like most I'd want to see the detailed figures but I think most people would sign up for that sort of programme.
Casino's point about branding is relevant - lots of people are actually in agreement with what needs to be done, but put off by slogans like Net Zero wich give too broad a front for tabloids and contrarians to attack. Much the same happened with 15 minute cities, which in essence is an objective which almost nobody would disagree with ("cites should aim for everyone to be able to reach shops and services on foot or cycling within 15 minutes"), but which was cheerfully misinterpreted by our PM.
You'd have to do some number crunching, but most of the stuff in the header (excepting the details of what energy mix we choose) is going to be necessary anyway for net zero.
On sector he doesn't mention is transport (currently responsible for around a quarter of our CO2 emissions). The future of that is where any planning for our future power grid has to start.
And pretending that the infrastructure for EVs (which all the major manufacturers are rapidly transitioning to) can be left to the market, is a recipe for severe damage to the UK economy.
Yes, and thats a cock up heading down the line. Its where Sunak has probably done us all a favour on moving the EV date back 5 years.
That is an admission of failure. Moving the deadline does nothing to address the failure.
May and Bojo setting unachievable dates just to look good for climate conferences is the failure. and in this case failure means alignment with the rest of Europe. The green agenda would advance so much better if politicians stopped making daft claims and treated the public as grown ups.
You won't find any disagreement from me about May and Boris being useless on practical policy versus broad aspiration. But that in itself isn't an argument against net zero.
And you, after all, voted for Brexit, I believe, which has distracted the entire political class from doing much else since the vote.
Of course I did. But thats no excuse for the political class losing the plot. They are paid to run the country not a cage fight.
I don't excuse them, but it is a proximate reason for their having done so.
It's been obvious for a decade that the world was going to transition to EVs. The failure to plan for that so that we benefitted, rather than it costing us to catch up, has been colossal.
Most of Europe and the States arent set up for EVs. Germany and France bet the farm on diesel and it didnt work. The UK could of course be better prepared but I cant see how its noticeably behind any of the other major economies. Japan has only just started thinking about it.
There's a lot more capacity planned in Europe, too.
Japan too is doing a lot more than 'just start thinking about it'.
That's only production, and to be clear the UK doesn't have a car industry of its own, it relies on decisions taken by other people.
So in terms of preparation. Where's the ( green ) electricity coming from ? Who's wiring up the country and installing charge points ? And since this is all about carbon reduction do you actually believe building new EVs and the opening mines for batteries is less polluting ?
There is currently a fair amount of greenwashing in the car industry. Running your old banger in to the ground is still the greenest option of all.
Your article is about what we should be doing to benefit our economy. Indeed in the comments you've been arguing for import substitution. Yet when I talk about our relative failure on EVs, you change the subject.
We;re talking about different aspects of EV. On the do we need battery plants issue we are progressing I dont see the huge gap you claim between say us and Germany we are all building battery plants. I would say only China is well ahead of the West and as you are probably aware the EU commission is trying to stop Chinese imports to give Germany and France a chance to catch up.
I was arguing on the wider issue of EV. An EV is no use unless you can charge it and at present I think we have an infrastructure gap, which was why I said Sunak had won us time. And on the same basis I also suspect the green credentials of EVs have been overplayed Im not convinced they will lower carbon output substantially unless we have carbon free power . The production impact of an EV down the whole chain is not clear.
The numbers on EVs are actually quite clear.
Because of efficiency (EVs use a lot less energy per mile), there would be less carbon per mile even if you were on a grid with 80% coal vs an ICE. Which isn’t the case even in the US - their coal usage is falling fast.
Google some well-to-wheels studies…
Production of a car is a tiny portion of the life time CO2 emissions associated with the vehicle.
That a good list, thanks Mr Brooke. I'd also add the need to ensure as much energy independence as possible is vital.
But... why not do both? D the list above *and* move towards net zero?
Oh. and first. If this thread survives...
I doubt we have the money. But if the investment side is handled correctly some of the projects will meet your goal of doing two things in tandem.
I never understand the "we don't have the money" argument when it comes to the environment. If we don't invest in a green future there will not be a future. Also, money isn't real! So, if a government with control over its own currency (like the UK) decides it wants to shift its economy to go big on green (in a similar manner as "wartime" economies shift) then we could do that. Would it change a lot of things, yes - but not necessarily negatively. It's just that the British political consensus is that government shouldn't be allowed to do things that could possibly make the world a better place. That we're behind even the US on this (who are investing huge amounts into green infrastructure) is telling about the myopic nature of British political foresight.
How do you interpret this chart?
We are already leading the pack on reducing emissions anyway
The UK is the most improved, but not the best. France still has the lowest emissions per capita in the G7.
Yes, so lets give RR our support and place some orders of their miniplants, This is where exportable green jobs can work.. Circa £2bn a plant for 470MW. 30 plants gives us 14GW.
If they can be delivered for that price, it's not terrible. S Korea is currently tendering around $5bn per 1.4GW nuclear plant. Which is why they're getting a lot of new contracts.
This is where were not getting our industry off the ground. Feeble
We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on
I use ChatGPT and CoPilot every day to assist with coding. Now I am not doing run of mill boilerplate stuff, but it still makes absolutely loads of mistakes even when I ask it to do something like that.
I would say at the moment, it is more like an a combination of decent auto-complete (like you do with text messages) and an advanced search for stack overflow (which all coders have used for donkeys years to get an idealised solution to common problems). Once you get too far from tasks that are easily found there, it starts to break down. And the "self-correct" mode that it can run can be useful, but more often than not it whirls away for 5 minutes and makes the solution worse than when it started.
In summary, will it cause lots of job losses a few years down the line, yes. I wouldn't want to be a random coder starting out their career now. Would I trust it to go from 10 coders to 1-3 coders doing the same job, not yet, not unless you want massively buggy code. So that will be government contractors then...
Time for a new party that represents Muslims adequately. We will not win overall but could easily win parliamentary seats. We are currently in active discussions to get this done. Muslim Labour MPs have let the community down. Change is needed.
"Keir Starmer has lost control of Labour’s message on Gaza Thirteen frontbenchers have defied the party line – but they won’t be punished. By Freddie Hayward"
Alanbrooke has found a pretty broad consensus on this with his interesting header. Like most I'd want to see the detailed figures but I think most people would sign up for that sort of programme.
Casino's point about branding is relevant - lots of people are actually in agreement with what needs to be done, but put off by slogans like Net Zero wich give too broad a front for tabloids and contrarians to attack. Much the same happened with 15 minute cities, which in essence is an objective which almost nobody would disagree with ("cites should aim for everyone to be able to reach shops and services on foot or cycling within 15 minutes"), but which was cheerfully misinterpreted by our PM.
You'd have to do some number crunching, but most of the stuff in the header (excepting the details of what energy mix we choose) is going to be necessary anyway for net zero.
On sector he doesn't mention is transport (currently responsible for around a quarter of our CO2 emissions). The future of that is where any planning for our future power grid has to start.
And pretending that the infrastructure for EVs (which all the major manufacturers are rapidly transitioning to) can be left to the market, is a recipe for severe damage to the UK economy.
Yes, and thats a cock up heading down the line. Its where Sunak has probably done us all a favour on moving the EV date back 5 years.
That is an admission of failure. Moving the deadline does nothing to address the failure.
May and Bojo setting unachievable dates just to look good for climate conferences is the failure. and in this case failure means alignment with the rest of Europe. The green agenda would advance so much better if politicians stopped making daft claims and treated the public as grown ups.
You won't find any disagreement from me about May and Boris being useless on practical policy versus broad aspiration. But that in itself isn't an argument against net zero.
And you, after all, voted for Brexit, I believe, which has distracted the entire political class from doing much else since the vote.
Of course I did. But thats no excuse for the political class losing the plot. They are paid to run the country not a cage fight.
I don't excuse them, but it is a proximate reason for their having done so.
It's been obvious for a decade that the world was going to transition to EVs. The failure to plan for that so that we benefitted, rather than it costing us to catch up, has been colossal.
Most of Europe and the States arent set up for EVs. Germany and France bet the farm on diesel and it didnt work. The UK could of course be better prepared but I cant see how its noticeably behind any of the other major economies. Japan has only just started thinking about it.
There's a lot more capacity planned in Europe, too.
Japan too is doing a lot more than 'just start thinking about it'.
That's only production, and to be clear the UK doesn't have a car industry of its own, it relies on decisions taken by other people.
So in terms of preparation. Where's the ( green ) electricity coming from ? Who's wiring up the country and installing charge points ? And since this is all about carbon reduction do you actually believe building new EVs and the opening mines for batteries is less polluting ?
There is currently a fair amount of greenwashing in the car industry. Running your old banger in to the ground is still the greenest option of all.
Your article is about what we should be doing to benefit our economy. Indeed in the comments you've been arguing for import substitution. Yet when I talk about our relative failure on EVs, you change the subject.
We;re talking about different aspects of EV. On the do we need battery plants issue we are progressing I dont see the huge gap you claim between say us and Germany we are all building battery plants. I would say only China is well ahead of the West and as you are probably aware the EU commission is trying to stop Chinese imports to give Germany and France a chance to catch up.
I was arguing on the wider issue of EV. An EV is no use unless you can charge it and at present I think we have an infrastructure gap, which was why I said Sunak had won us time. And on the same basis I also suspect the green credentials of EVs have been overplayed Im not convinced they will lower carbon output substantially unless we have carbon free power . The production impact of an EV down the whole chain is not clear.
The numbers on EVs are actually quite clear.
Because of efficiency (EVs use a lot less energy per mile), there would be less carbon per mile even if you were on a grid with 80% coal vs an ICE. Which isn’t the case even in the US - their coal usage is falling fast.
Google some well-to-wheels studies…
Production of a car is a tiny portion of the life time CO2 emissions associated with the vehicle.
Alanbrooke has found a pretty broad consensus on this with his interesting header. Like most I'd want to see the detailed figures but I think most people would sign up for that sort of programme.
Casino's point about branding is relevant - lots of people are actually in agreement with what needs to be done, but put off by slogans like Net Zero wich give too broad a front for tabloids and contrarians to attack. Much the same happened with 15 minute cities, which in essence is an objective which almost nobody would disagree with ("cites should aim for everyone to be able to reach shops and services on foot or cycling within 15 minutes"), but which was cheerfully misinterpreted by our PM.
You'd have to do some number crunching, but most of the stuff in the header (excepting the details of what energy mix we choose) is going to be necessary anyway for net zero.
On sector he doesn't mention is transport (currently responsible for around a quarter of our CO2 emissions). The future of that is where any planning for our future power grid has to start.
And pretending that the infrastructure for EVs (which all the major manufacturers are rapidly transitioning to) can be left to the market, is a recipe for severe damage to the UK economy.
Yes, and thats a cock up heading down the line. Its where Sunak has probably done us all a favour on moving the EV date back 5 years.
That is an admission of failure. Moving the deadline does nothing to address the failure.
May and Bojo setting unachievable dates just to look good for climate conferences is the failure. and in this case failure means alignment with the rest of Europe. The green agenda would advance so much better if politicians stopped making daft claims and treated the public as grown ups.
You won't find any disagreement from me about May and Boris being useless on practical policy versus broad aspiration. But that in itself isn't an argument against net zero.
And you, after all, voted for Brexit, I believe, which has distracted the entire political class from doing much else since the vote.
Of course I did. But thats no excuse for the political class losing the plot. They are paid to run the country not a cage fight.
I don't excuse them, but it is a proximate reason for their having done so.
It's been obvious for a decade that the world was going to transition to EVs. The failure to plan for that so that we benefitted, rather than it costing us to catch up, has been colossal.
Most of Europe and the States arent set up for EVs. Germany and France bet the farm on diesel and it didnt work. The UK could of course be better prepared but I cant see how its noticeably behind any of the other major economies. Japan has only just started thinking about it.
There's a lot more capacity planned in Europe, too.
Japan too is doing a lot more than 'just start thinking about it'.
That's only production, and to be clear the UK doesn't have a car industry of its own, it relies on decisions taken by other people.
So in terms of preparation. Where's the ( green ) electricity coming from ? Who's wiring up the country and installing charge points ? And since this is all about carbon reduction do you actually believe building new EVs and the opening mines for batteries is less polluting ?
There is currently a fair amount of greenwashing in the car industry. Running your old banger in to the ground is still the greenest option of all.
Your article is about what we should be doing to benefit our economy. Indeed in the comments you've been arguing for import substitution. Yet when I talk about our relative failure on EVs, you change the subject.
We;re talking about different aspects of EV. On the do we need battery plants issue we are progressing I dont see the huge gap you claim between say us and Germany we are all building battery plants. I would say only China is well ahead of the West and as you are probably aware the EU commission is trying to stop Chinese imports to give Germany and France a chance to catch up.
I was arguing on the wider issue of EV. An EV is no use unless you can charge it and at present I think we have an infrastructure gap, which was why I said Sunak had won us time. And on the same basis I also suspect the green credentials of EVs have been overplayed Im not convinced they will lower carbon output substantially unless we have carbon free power . The production impact of an EV down the whole chain is not clear.
The numbers on EVs are actually quite clear.
Because of efficiency (EVs use a lot less energy per mile), there would be less carbon per mile even if you were on a grid with 80% coal vs an ICE. Which isn’t the case even in the US - their coal usage is falling fast.
Google some well-to-wheels studies…
Production of a car is a tiny portion of the life time CO2 emissions associated with the vehicle.
Ive read reports arguing both ways. Ultimately I think it depends on your driving pattern. If youre driving loads of miles new is probably best assuming youre not fossil fuel powered. But for people like my brother who used to do about 5000 miles a year on a weekly trip to the shop driving the old one is best. Thats why I dont like blanket one size fits all prescriptions.
We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on
I use ChatGPT and CoPilot every day to assist with coding. Now I am not doing run of mill boilerplate stuff, but it still makes absolutely loads of mistakes. I would say at the moment, it is more like an a combination of decent auto-complete (like you do with text messages) and an advanced search for stack overflow (which all coders have used for donkeys years to get an idealised solution to common problems). Once you get too far from tasks that are easily found there, it starts to break down.
In summary, will it cause lots of job losses a few years down the line, yes. I wouldn't want to be a random coder starting out their career now. Would I trust it to go from 10 coders to 1-3 coders doing the same job, not yet, not unless you want massively buggy code.
Indeed. I use ChatGPT and AWS's CodeWhisperer, and they're great tools, but that's all they are - tools. You have to be really careful how you use them though, and you still have to understand what you are doing. I've already been caught out once or twice by suggested code that initially looked perfectly good but turned out to contain some stupid bug that I missed on checking through it.
That a good list, thanks Mr Brooke. I'd also add the need to ensure as much energy independence as possible is vital.
But... why not do both? D the list above *and* move towards net zero?
Oh. and first. If this thread survives...
I doubt we have the money. But if the investment side is handled correctly some of the projects will meet your goal of doing two things in tandem.
I never understand the "we don't have the money" argument when it comes to the environment. If we don't invest in a green future there will not be a future. Also, money isn't real! So, if a government with control over its own currency (like the UK) decides it wants to shift its economy to go big on green (in a similar manner as "wartime" economies shift) then we could do that. Would it change a lot of things, yes - but not necessarily negatively. It's just that the British political consensus is that government shouldn't be allowed to do things that could possibly make the world a better place. That we're behind even the US on this (who are investing huge amounts into green infrastructure) is telling about the myopic nature of British political foresight.
How do you interpret this chart?
We are already leading the pack on reducing emissions anyway
The UK is the most improved, but not the best. France still has the lowest emissions per capita in the G7.
Yes, so lets give RR our support and place some orders of their miniplants, This is where exportable green jobs can work.. Circa £2bn a plant for 470MW. 30 plants gives us 14GW.
If they can be delivered for that price, it's not terrible. S Korea is currently tendering around $5bn per 1.4GW nuclear plant. Which is why they're getting a lot of new contracts.
This is where were not getting our industry off the ground. Feeble
Same old from the party in government for the last decade. Whether Labour will be any better is a matter of conjecture - but at least they claim to believe in industrial strategy.
Alanbrooke has found a pretty broad consensus on this with his interesting header. Like most I'd want to see the detailed figures but I think most people would sign up for that sort of programme.
Casino's point about branding is relevant - lots of people are actually in agreement with what needs to be done, but put off by slogans like Net Zero wich give too broad a front for tabloids and contrarians to attack. Much the same happened with 15 minute cities, which in essence is an objective which almost nobody would disagree with ("cites should aim for everyone to be able to reach shops and services on foot or cycling within 15 minutes"), but which was cheerfully misinterpreted by our PM.
You'd have to do some number crunching, but most of the stuff in the header (excepting the details of what energy mix we choose) is going to be necessary anyway for net zero.
On sector he doesn't mention is transport (currently responsible for around a quarter of our CO2 emissions). The future of that is where any planning for our future power grid has to start.
And pretending that the infrastructure for EVs (which all the major manufacturers are rapidly transitioning to) can be left to the market, is a recipe for severe damage to the UK economy.
Yes, and thats a cock up heading down the line. Its where Sunak has probably done us all a favour on moving the EV date back 5 years.
That is an admission of failure. Moving the deadline does nothing to address the failure.
May and Bojo setting unachievable dates just to look good for climate conferences is the failure. and in this case failure means alignment with the rest of Europe. The green agenda would advance so much better if politicians stopped making daft claims and treated the public as grown ups.
You won't find any disagreement from me about May and Boris being useless on practical policy versus broad aspiration. But that in itself isn't an argument against net zero.
And you, after all, voted for Brexit, I believe, which has distracted the entire political class from doing much else since the vote.
Of course I did. But thats no excuse for the political class losing the plot. They are paid to run the country not a cage fight.
I don't excuse them, but it is a proximate reason for their having done so.
It's been obvious for a decade that the world was going to transition to EVs. The failure to plan for that so that we benefitted, rather than it costing us to catch up, has been colossal.
Most of Europe and the States arent set up for EVs. Germany and France bet the farm on diesel and it didnt work. The UK could of course be better prepared but I cant see how its noticeably behind any of the other major economies. Japan has only just started thinking about it.
There's a lot more capacity planned in Europe, too.
Japan too is doing a lot more than 'just start thinking about it'.
That's only production, and to be clear the UK doesn't have a car industry of its own, it relies on decisions taken by other people.
So in terms of preparation. Where's the ( green ) electricity coming from ? Who's wiring up the country and installing charge points ? And since this is all about carbon reduction do you actually believe building new EVs and the opening mines for batteries is less polluting ?
There is currently a fair amount of greenwashing in the car industry. Running your old banger in to the ground is still the greenest option of all.
Your article is about what we should be doing to benefit our economy. Indeed in the comments you've been arguing for import substitution. Yet when I talk about our relative failure on EVs, you change the subject.
We;re talking about different aspects of EV. On the do we need battery plants issue we are progressing I dont see the huge gap you claim between say us and Germany we are all building battery plants. I would say only China is well ahead of the West and as you are probably aware the EU commission is trying to stop Chinese imports to give Germany and France a chance to catch up.
I was arguing on the wider issue of EV. An EV is no use unless you can charge it and at present I think we have an infrastructure gap, which was why I said Sunak had won us time. And on the same basis I also suspect the green credentials of EVs have been overplayed Im not convinced they will lower carbon output substantially unless we have carbon free power . The production impact of an EV down the whole chain is not clear.
The numbers on EVs are actually quite clear.
Because of efficiency (EVs use a lot less energy per mile), there would be less carbon per mile even if you were on a grid with 80% coal vs an ICE. Which isn’t the case even in the US - their coal usage is falling fast.
Google some well-to-wheels studies…
Production of a car is a tiny portion of the life time CO2 emissions associated with the vehicle.
Ive read reports arguing both ways. Ultimately I think it depends on your driving pattern. If youre driving loads of miles new is probably best assuming youre not fossil fuel powered. But for people like my brother who used to do about 5000 miles a year on a weekly trip to the shop driving the old one is best. Thats why I dont like blanket one size fits all prescriptions.
Which is why ICE is not being banned - just that in the near future, the replacements will be ZEV.
Alanbrooke has found a pretty broad consensus on this with his interesting header. Like most I'd want to see the detailed figures but I think most people would sign up for that sort of programme.
Casino's point about branding is relevant - lots of people are actually in agreement with what needs to be done, but put off by slogans like Net Zero wich give too broad a front for tabloids and contrarians to attack. Much the same happened with 15 minute cities, which in essence is an objective which almost nobody would disagree with ("cites should aim for everyone to be able to reach shops and services on foot or cycling within 15 minutes"), but which was cheerfully misinterpreted by our PM.
You'd have to do some number crunching, but most of the stuff in the header (excepting the details of what energy mix we choose) is going to be necessary anyway for net zero.
On sector he doesn't mention is transport (currently responsible for around a quarter of our CO2 emissions). The future of that is where any planning for our future power grid has to start.
And pretending that the infrastructure for EVs (which all the major manufacturers are rapidly transitioning to) can be left to the market, is a recipe for severe damage to the UK economy.
Yes, and thats a cock up heading down the line. Its where Sunak has probably done us all a favour on moving the EV date back 5 years.
That is an admission of failure. Moving the deadline does nothing to address the failure.
May and Bojo setting unachievable dates just to look good for climate conferences is the failure. and in this case failure means alignment with the rest of Europe. The green agenda would advance so much better if politicians stopped making daft claims and treated the public as grown ups.
You won't find any disagreement from me about May and Boris being useless on practical policy versus broad aspiration. But that in itself isn't an argument against net zero.
And you, after all, voted for Brexit, I believe, which has distracted the entire political class from doing much else since the vote.
Of course I did. But thats no excuse for the political class losing the plot. They are paid to run the country not a cage fight.
I don't excuse them, but it is a proximate reason for their having done so.
It's been obvious for a decade that the world was going to transition to EVs. The failure to plan for that so that we benefitted, rather than it costing us to catch up, has been colossal.
Most of Europe and the States arent set up for EVs. Germany and France bet the farm on diesel and it didnt work. The UK could of course be better prepared but I cant see how its noticeably behind any of the other major economies. Japan has only just started thinking about it.
There's a lot more capacity planned in Europe, too.
Japan too is doing a lot more than 'just start thinking about it'.
That's only production, and to be clear the UK doesn't have a car industry of its own, it relies on decisions taken by other people.
So in terms of preparation. Where's the ( green ) electricity coming from ? Who's wiring up the country and installing charge points ? And since this is all about carbon reduction do you actually believe building new EVs and the opening mines for batteries is less polluting ?
There is currently a fair amount of greenwashing in the car industry. Running your old banger in to the ground is still the greenest option of all.
Your article is about what we should be doing to benefit our economy. Indeed in the comments you've been arguing for import substitution. Yet when I talk about our relative failure on EVs, you change the subject.
We;re talking about different aspects of EV. On the do we need battery plants issue we are progressing I dont see the huge gap you claim between say us and Germany we are all building battery plants. I would say only China is well ahead of the West and as you are probably aware the EU commission is trying to stop Chinese imports to give Germany and France a chance to catch up.
I was arguing on the wider issue of EV. An EV is no use unless you can charge it and at present I think we have an infrastructure gap, which was why I said Sunak had won us time. And on the same basis I also suspect the green credentials of EVs have been overplayed Im not convinced they will lower carbon output substantially unless we have carbon free power . The production impact of an EV down the whole chain is not clear.
The numbers on EVs are actually quite clear.
Because of efficiency (EVs use a lot less energy per mile), there would be less carbon per mile even if you were on a grid with 80% coal vs an ICE. Which isn’t the case even in the US - their coal usage is falling fast.
Google some well-to-wheels studies…
Production of a car is a tiny portion of the life time CO2 emissions associated with the vehicle.
And steadily falling.
Of course but so is the average pollution of cars on the road. Its a moving feast.
British police are testing women for abortion drugs and requesting data from menstrual tracking apps after unexplained pregnancy losses.
I bet if you asked the random person on the street they would assume that abortion was just legal in this country - and would also say this is not a particularly good use of limited police resources.
Abortion is illegal in the UK after 24 weeks of pregnancy so no that is not outrageous
What's the Islamic stance on abortion?
Islam is a large religion with, like any religion, a diversity of views. So, just like Christianity, where you can go from completely anti-abortion Catholics to pro-choice Protestants. Broadly speaking, Islam is perhaps more accepting of abortion than Christianity. The Shi’as are less keen than the Sunnis, but different Sunni schools vary in their views.
Evangelicals tend also to be hard-line anti abortion.
However while also all very interesting the fact remains abortion after 24 weeks is illegal in the UK and the police are obliged to enforce that law
We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on
Technology advancing causes jobs to be lost. That’s always been the way.
It’s white collar middle class people being affected now. Previously it was largely blue collar jobs.
If new jobs are created by technology that is less of a problem, if not it is
Alanbrooke has found a pretty broad consensus on this with his interesting header. Like most I'd want to see the detailed figures but I think most people would sign up for that sort of programme.
Casino's point about branding is relevant - lots of people are actually in agreement with what needs to be done, but put off by slogans like Net Zero wich give too broad a front for tabloids and contrarians to attack. Much the same happened with 15 minute cities, which in essence is an objective which almost nobody would disagree with ("cites should aim for everyone to be able to reach shops and services on foot or cycling within 15 minutes"), but which was cheerfully misinterpreted by our PM.
You'd have to do some number crunching, but most of the stuff in the header (excepting the details of what energy mix we choose) is going to be necessary anyway for net zero.
On sector he doesn't mention is transport (currently responsible for around a quarter of our CO2 emissions). The future of that is where any planning for our future power grid has to start.
And pretending that the infrastructure for EVs (which all the major manufacturers are rapidly transitioning to) can be left to the market, is a recipe for severe damage to the UK economy.
Yes, and thats a cock up heading down the line. Its where Sunak has probably done us all a favour on moving the EV date back 5 years.
That is an admission of failure. Moving the deadline does nothing to address the failure.
May and Bojo setting unachievable dates just to look good for climate conferences is the failure. and in this case failure means alignment with the rest of Europe. The green agenda would advance so much better if politicians stopped making daft claims and treated the public as grown ups.
You won't find any disagreement from me about May and Boris being useless on practical policy versus broad aspiration. But that in itself isn't an argument against net zero.
And you, after all, voted for Brexit, I believe, which has distracted the entire political class from doing much else since the vote.
Of course I did. But thats no excuse for the political class losing the plot. They are paid to run the country not a cage fight.
I don't excuse them, but it is a proximate reason for their having done so.
It's been obvious for a decade that the world was going to transition to EVs. The failure to plan for that so that we benefitted, rather than it costing us to catch up, has been colossal.
Most of Europe and the States arent set up for EVs. Germany and France bet the farm on diesel and it didnt work. The UK could of course be better prepared but I cant see how its noticeably behind any of the other major economies. Japan has only just started thinking about it.
There's a lot more capacity planned in Europe, too.
Japan too is doing a lot more than 'just start thinking about it'.
That's only production, and to be clear the UK doesn't have a car industry of its own, it relies on decisions taken by other people.
So in terms of preparation. Where's the ( green ) electricity coming from ? Who's wiring up the country and installing charge points ? And since this is all about carbon reduction do you actually believe building new EVs and the opening mines for batteries is less polluting ?
There is currently a fair amount of greenwashing in the car industry. Running your old banger in to the ground is still the greenest option of all.
Your article is about what we should be doing to benefit our economy. Indeed in the comments you've been arguing for import substitution. Yet when I talk about our relative failure on EVs, you change the subject.
We;re talking about different aspects of EV. On the do we need battery plants issue we are progressing I dont see the huge gap you claim between say us and Germany we are all building battery plants. I would say only China is well ahead of the West and as you are probably aware the EU commission is trying to stop Chinese imports to give Germany and France a chance to catch up.
I was arguing on the wider issue of EV. An EV is no use unless you can charge it and at present I think we have an infrastructure gap, which was why I said Sunak had won us time. And on the same basis I also suspect the green credentials of EVs have been overplayed Im not convinced they will lower carbon output substantially unless we have carbon free power . The production impact of an EV down the whole chain is not clear.
The numbers on EVs are actually quite clear.
Because of efficiency (EVs use a lot less energy per mile), there would be less carbon per mile even if you were on a grid with 80% coal vs an ICE. Which isn’t the case even in the US - their coal usage is falling fast.
Google some well-to-wheels studies…
Production of a car is a tiny portion of the life time CO2 emissions associated with the vehicle.
Ive read reports arguing both ways. Ultimately I think it depends on your driving pattern. If youre driving loads of miles new is probably best assuming youre not fossil fuel powered. But for people like my brother who used to do about 5000 miles a year on a weekly trip to the shop driving the old one is best. Thats why I dont like blanket one size fits all prescriptions.
Which is why ICE is not being banned - just that in the near future, the replacements will be ZEV.
Though it will take 8-10 tons of carbon to produce them.
That a good list, thanks Mr Brooke. I'd also add the need to ensure as much energy independence as possible is vital.
But... why not do both? D the list above *and* move towards net zero?
Oh. and first. If this thread survives...
I doubt we have the money. But if the investment side is handled correctly some of the projects will meet your goal of doing two things in tandem.
I never understand the "we don't have the money" argument when it comes to the environment. If we don't invest in a green future there will not be a future. Also, money isn't real! So, if a government with control over its own currency (like the UK) decides it wants to shift its economy to go big on green (in a similar manner as "wartime" economies shift) then we could do that. Would it change a lot of things, yes - but not necessarily negatively. It's just that the British political consensus is that government shouldn't be allowed to do things that could possibly make the world a better place. That we're behind even the US on this (who are investing huge amounts into green infrastructure) is telling about the myopic nature of British political foresight.
How do you interpret this chart?
We are already leading the pack on reducing emissions anyway
The UK is the most improved, but not the best. France still has the lowest emissions per capita in the G7.
Yes, so lets give RR our support and place some orders of their miniplants, This is where exportable green jobs can work.. Circa £2bn a plant for 470MW. 30 plants gives us 14GW.
If they can be delivered for that price, it's not terrible. S Korea is currently tendering around $5bn per 1.4GW nuclear plant. Which is why they're getting a lot of new contracts.
This is where were not getting our industry off the ground. Feeble
Same old from the party in government for the last decade. Whether Labour will be any better is a matter of conjecture - but at least they claim to believe in industrial strategy.
LOl it will be run by accountants and spads. Not anyone who has had to get their hands dirty'
British police are testing women for abortion drugs and requesting data from menstrual tracking apps after unexplained pregnancy losses.
I bet if you asked the random person on the street they would assume that abortion was just legal in this country - and would also say this is not a particularly good use of limited police resources.
Abortion is illegal in the UK after 24 weeks of pregnancy so no that is not outrageous
And part of the supposed virtues of British policing is that they have discretion on what to investigate - I don't think investigating miscarriages or even abortions after 24 weeks is a good use of police time; and the collection of this kind of data is very scary.
You can think what you want.
Abortion after 24 weeks is illegal and the police have an obligation to investigate potential breaches of the criminal law. Tough
I concur with JosiasJessop's "why not both" question but nonetheless the suggestions are all sensible and things we are in most cases already doing, just not enough.
What this needs in addition though is how can the UK grasp the huge opportunities to compete in the decarbonised economy, and to do this requires intelligent government investment and regulation, business investment supported by incentives, and a globally minded approach to the issue of climate change that plugs us into the supply chains of the future. Otherwise we end up just importing everything, again.
Renewable energy is one example where we can become a technology and services exporter, but there are big opportunities in wider green tech and energy efficiency, automotive and other transportation, and green finance, all of which should be actively supported and marketed. And yes it also requires us to show commitment to global targets on net zero.
Thankfully only one Daily Mail talking point made it on to this header and that's the old heat pump thing. If our entire net zero strategy were forcing everyone on to heat pumps then there might be a point here, but they are eminently sensible ways of reducing energy usage, combined with insulation and draught exclusion. They are just the norm now in many European countries. I'm fitting an ASHP in our house in France, which comes complete with uninsulated exposed stone walls, and I expect it to work just fine as do my various neighbours' heat pumps.
On heat pumps, the high temp versions now becoming available counter some of the problems around poor insulation (where this is not easily upgraded) and the need to switch to larger heat exchangers (bigger radiators or underfloor setups). Lower efficiency, but - as always - it's a trade-off between less upfront cost/disruption and longer term savings.
I am looking to change my bolier. I dont want to buy a heat pump. My next doot neighbour has one and doesnt sing its praises. But more importantly I hardly ever put the heat on, I put on an extra jumper. So I see no reason to be forced in to spending a large amount of money for something which has no benefit. I'd rather spend the money on something else.
Many heat pumps have been mis-sold, I think. The low temperature ones only really make sense in new or very much upgraded buildings (I've spent time in both with heat pumps and they've been great, but with poor insulation it's going to suck).
If your heat use is very low, you might be better off with a simple electric boiler (solar linked potentially, with a hot tank).
I currently have a combi boiler about 10 years old. I live in the countryside so there is no gas, its electricity or oil. Electricity hasnt been selling itself of late and oil has been fine price wise is you pick when to buy it. But my main heating approach has been not to switch the heating on in the first place. My fall back position is to light a fire and live in one room but the naggies in government want to cut this off too and force me to heat the entire house.
Lol, let's all go back to the 40s shall we?
We also live in a village with no gas. When moved in the house had oil CH but bothe the boiler and the tank needed replacing. We opted for an Air Source Heat Pump and underfloor heating as we were doing a major renovation / remodelling anyway. We also have a woodburner which we use in the winter as we currently have a free supply of logs.
We've been very happy with our ASHP; servicing costs are minimal which is an often overlooked factor.
Next year, dependent on the housing market, we're planning to move and do another project. We'll almost certainly got for ASHP + UFH again, even if we move to somewhere with mains gas.
I concur with JosiasJessop's "why not both" question but nonetheless the suggestions are all sensible and things we are in most cases already doing, just not enough.
What this needs in addition though is how can the UK grasp the huge opportunities to compete in the decarbonised economy, and to do this requires intelligent government investment and regulation, business investment supported by incentives, and a globally minded approach to the issue of climate change that plugs us into the supply chains of the future. Otherwise we end up just importing everything, again.
Renewable energy is one example where we can become a technology and services exporter, but there are big opportunities in wider green tech and energy efficiency, automotive and other transportation, and green finance, all of which should be actively supported and marketed. And yes it also requires us to show commitment to global targets on net zero.
Thankfully only one Daily Mail talking point made it on to this header and that's the old heat pump thing. If our entire net zero strategy were forcing everyone on to heat pumps then there might be a point here, but they are eminently sensible ways of reducing energy usage, combined with insulation and draught exclusion. They are just the norm now in many European countries. I'm fitting an ASHP in our house in France, which comes complete with uninsulated exposed stone walls, and I expect it to work just fine as do my various neighbours' heat pumps.
On heat pumps, the high temp versions now becoming available counter some of the problems around poor insulation (where this is not easily upgraded) and the need to switch to larger heat exchangers (bigger radiators or underfloor setups). Lower efficiency, but - as always - it's a trade-off between less upfront cost/disruption and longer term savings.
I am looking to change my bolier. I dont want to buy a heat pump. My next doot neighbour has one and doesnt sing its praises. But more importantly I hardly ever put the heat on, I put on an extra jumper. So I see no reason to be forced in to spending a large amount of money for something which has no benefit. I'd rather spend the money on something else.
Many heat pumps have been mis-sold, I think. The low temperature ones only really make sense in new or very much upgraded buildings (I've spent time in both with heat pumps and they've been great, but with poor insulation it's going to suck).
If your heat use is very low, you might be better off with a simple electric boiler (solar linked potentially, with a hot tank).
I currently have a combi boiler about 10 years old. I live in the countryside so there is no gas, its electricity or oil. Electricity hasnt been selling itself of late and oil has been fine price wise is you pick when to buy it. But my main heating approach has been not to switch the heating on in the first place. My fall back position is to light a fire and live in one room but the naggies in government want to cut this off too and force me to heat the entire house.
Lol, let's all go back to the 40s shall we?
We also live in a village with no gas. When moved in the house had oil CH but bothe the boiler and the tank needed replacing. We opted for an Air Source Heat Pump and underfloor heating as we were doing a major renovation / remodelling anyway. We also have a woodburner which we use in the winter as we currently have a free supply of logs.
We've been very happy with our ASHP; servicing costs are minimal which is an often overlooked factor.
Next year, dependent on the housing market, we're planning to move and do another project. We'll almost certainly got for ASHP + UFH again, even if we move to somewhere with mains gas.
1960s please.
But if your doing a major refurb thats fine. Im not and dont see any reason to switch to a heat pump since I get no benefit from it.
Alanbrooke has found a pretty broad consensus on this with his interesting header. Like most I'd want to see the detailed figures but I think most people would sign up for that sort of programme.
Casino's point about branding is relevant - lots of people are actually in agreement with what needs to be done, but put off by slogans like Net Zero wich give too broad a front for tabloids and contrarians to attack. Much the same happened with 15 minute cities, which in essence is an objective which almost nobody would disagree with ("cites should aim for everyone to be able to reach shops and services on foot or cycling within 15 minutes"), but which was cheerfully misinterpreted by our PM.
You'd have to do some number crunching, but most of the stuff in the header (excepting the details of what energy mix we choose) is going to be necessary anyway for net zero.
On sector he doesn't mention is transport (currently responsible for around a quarter of our CO2 emissions). The future of that is where any planning for our future power grid has to start.
And pretending that the infrastructure for EVs (which all the major manufacturers are rapidly transitioning to) can be left to the market, is a recipe for severe damage to the UK economy.
Yes, and thats a cock up heading down the line. Its where Sunak has probably done us all a favour on moving the EV date back 5 years.
That is an admission of failure. Moving the deadline does nothing to address the failure.
May and Bojo setting unachievable dates just to look good for climate conferences is the failure. and in this case failure means alignment with the rest of Europe. The green agenda would advance so much better if politicians stopped making daft claims and treated the public as grown ups.
You won't find any disagreement from me about May and Boris being useless on practical policy versus broad aspiration. But that in itself isn't an argument against net zero.
And you, after all, voted for Brexit, I believe, which has distracted the entire political class from doing much else since the vote.
Of course I did. But thats no excuse for the political class losing the plot. They are paid to run the country not a cage fight.
I don't excuse them, but it is a proximate reason for their having done so.
It's been obvious for a decade that the world was going to transition to EVs. The failure to plan for that so that we benefitted, rather than it costing us to catch up, has been colossal.
Most of Europe and the States arent set up for EVs. Germany and France bet the farm on diesel and it didnt work. The UK could of course be better prepared but I cant see how its noticeably behind any of the other major economies. Japan has only just started thinking about it.
There's a lot more capacity planned in Europe, too.
Japan too is doing a lot more than 'just start thinking about it'.
That's only production, and to be clear the UK doesn't have a car industry of its own, it relies on decisions taken by other people.
So in terms of preparation. Where's the ( green ) electricity coming from ? Who's wiring up the country and installing charge points ? And since this is all about carbon reduction do you actually believe building new EVs and the opening mines for batteries is less polluting ?
There is currently a fair amount of greenwashing in the car industry. Running your old banger in to the ground is still the greenest option of all.
Your article is about what we should be doing to benefit our economy. Indeed in the comments you've been arguing for import substitution. Yet when I talk about our relative failure on EVs, you change the subject.
We;re talking about different aspects of EV. On the do we need battery plants issue we are progressing I dont see the huge gap you claim between say us and Germany we are all building battery plants. I would say only China is well ahead of the West and as you are probably aware the EU commission is trying to stop Chinese imports to give Germany and France a chance to catch up.
I was arguing on the wider issue of EV. An EV is no use unless you can charge it and at present I think we have an infrastructure gap, which was why I said Sunak had won us time. And on the same basis I also suspect the green credentials of EVs have been overplayed Im not convinced they will lower carbon output substantially unless we have carbon free power . The production impact of an EV down the whole chain is not clear.
The numbers on EVs are actually quite clear.
Because of efficiency (EVs use a lot less energy per mile), there would be less carbon per mile even if you were on a grid with 80% coal vs an ICE. Which isn’t the case even in the US - their coal usage is falling fast.
Google some well-to-wheels studies…
Production of a car is a tiny portion of the life time CO2 emissions associated with the vehicle.
Ive read reports arguing both ways. Ultimately I think it depends on your driving pattern. If youre driving loads of miles new is probably best assuming youre not fossil fuel powered. But for people like my brother who used to do about 5000 miles a year on a weekly trip to the shop driving the old one is best. Thats why I dont like blanket one size fits all prescriptions.
Which is why ICE is not being banned - just that in the near future, the replacements will be ZEV.
Though it will take 8-10 tons of carbon to produce them.
That’s assuming no decarbonisation of manufacture.
Much of next generation mine machinery is going electric, for example. Quite a lot already is.
And forgets the equivalent emission in building an ICE.
I concur with JosiasJessop's "why not both" question but nonetheless the suggestions are all sensible and things we are in most cases already doing, just not enough.
What this needs in addition though is how can the UK grasp the huge opportunities to compete in the decarbonised economy, and to do this requires intelligent government investment and regulation, business investment supported by incentives, and a globally minded approach to the issue of climate change that plugs us into the supply chains of the future. Otherwise we end up just importing everything, again.
Renewable energy is one example where we can become a technology and services exporter, but there are big opportunities in wider green tech and energy efficiency, automotive and other transportation, and green finance, all of which should be actively supported and marketed. And yes it also requires us to show commitment to global targets on net zero.
Thankfully only one Daily Mail talking point made it on to this header and that's the old heat pump thing. If our entire net zero strategy were forcing everyone on to heat pumps then there might be a point here, but they are eminently sensible ways of reducing energy usage, combined with insulation and draught exclusion. They are just the norm now in many European countries. I'm fitting an ASHP in our house in France, which comes complete with uninsulated exposed stone walls, and I expect it to work just fine as do my various neighbours' heat pumps.
On heat pumps, the high temp versions now becoming available counter some of the problems around poor insulation (where this is not easily upgraded) and the need to switch to larger heat exchangers (bigger radiators or underfloor setups). Lower efficiency, but - as always - it's a trade-off between less upfront cost/disruption and longer term savings.
I am looking to change my bolier. I dont want to buy a heat pump. My next doot neighbour has one and doesnt sing its praises. But more importantly I hardly ever put the heat on, I put on an extra jumper. So I see no reason to be forced in to spending a large amount of money for something which has no benefit. I'd rather spend the money on something else.
Many heat pumps have been mis-sold, I think. The low temperature ones only really make sense in new or very much upgraded buildings (I've spent time in both with heat pumps and they've been great, but with poor insulation it's going to suck).
If your heat use is very low, you might be better off with a simple electric boiler (solar linked potentially, with a hot tank).
I currently have a combi boiler about 10 years old. I live in the countryside so there is no gas, its electricity or oil. Electricity hasnt been selling itself of late and oil has been fine price wise is you pick when to buy it. But my main heating approach has been not to switch the heating on in the first place. My fall back position is to light a fire and live in one room but the naggies in government want to cut this off too and force me to heat the entire house.
Lol, let's all go back to the 40s shall we?
We also live in a village with no gas. When moved in the house had oil CH but bothe the boiler and the tank needed replacing. We opted for an Air Source Heat Pump and underfloor heating as we were doing a major renovation / remodelling anyway. We also have a woodburner which we use in the winter as we currently have a free supply of logs.
We've been very happy with our ASHP; servicing costs are minimal which is an often overlooked factor.
Next year, dependent on the housing market, we're planning to move and do another project. We'll almost certainly got for ASHP + UFH again, even if we move to somewhere with mains gas.
I have stayed with friends who live in enormous, energy inefficient housing that they keep on a constant 28 degrees and swan around t-shirts and pyjama bottoms in the middle of january.
When it gets cold, I put on a jumper, when it gets colder, I put on a coat - often one with a USB heat coil in it. Only then, when it gets too cold, I put the heating on.
Similarly, I have electric blankets and thick duvets for bedtime, rather than heating the whole house that isn't being used.
Maybe that's extreme, but the world could do with more people going back to the 40's attitude of putting on a jumper before cranking the heat up.
Alanbrooke has found a pretty broad consensus on this with his interesting header. Like most I'd want to see the detailed figures but I think most people would sign up for that sort of programme.
Casino's point about branding is relevant - lots of people are actually in agreement with what needs to be done, but put off by slogans like Net Zero wich give too broad a front for tabloids and contrarians to attack. Much the same happened with 15 minute cities, which in essence is an objective which almost nobody would disagree with ("cites should aim for everyone to be able to reach shops and services on foot or cycling within 15 minutes"), but which was cheerfully misinterpreted by our PM.
You'd have to do some number crunching, but most of the stuff in the header (excepting the details of what energy mix we choose) is going to be necessary anyway for net zero.
On sector he doesn't mention is transport (currently responsible for around a quarter of our CO2 emissions). The future of that is where any planning for our future power grid has to start.
And pretending that the infrastructure for EVs (which all the major manufacturers are rapidly transitioning to) can be left to the market, is a recipe for severe damage to the UK economy.
Yes, and thats a cock up heading down the line. Its where Sunak has probably done us all a favour on moving the EV date back 5 years.
That is an admission of failure. Moving the deadline does nothing to address the failure.
May and Bojo setting unachievable dates just to look good for climate conferences is the failure. and in this case failure means alignment with the rest of Europe. The green agenda would advance so much better if politicians stopped making daft claims and treated the public as grown ups.
You won't find any disagreement from me about May and Boris being useless on practical policy versus broad aspiration. But that in itself isn't an argument against net zero.
And you, after all, voted for Brexit, I believe, which has distracted the entire political class from doing much else since the vote.
Of course I did. But thats no excuse for the political class losing the plot. They are paid to run the country not a cage fight.
I don't excuse them, but it is a proximate reason for their having done so.
It's been obvious for a decade that the world was going to transition to EVs. The failure to plan for that so that we benefitted, rather than it costing us to catch up, has been colossal.
Most of Europe and the States arent set up for EVs. Germany and France bet the farm on diesel and it didnt work. The UK could of course be better prepared but I cant see how its noticeably behind any of the other major economies. Japan has only just started thinking about it.
There's a lot more capacity planned in Europe, too.
Japan too is doing a lot more than 'just start thinking about it'.
That's only production, and to be clear the UK doesn't have a car industry of its own, it relies on decisions taken by other people.
So in terms of preparation. Where's the ( green ) electricity coming from ? Who's wiring up the country and installing charge points ? And since this is all about carbon reduction do you actually believe building new EVs and the opening mines for batteries is less polluting ?
There is currently a fair amount of greenwashing in the car industry. Running your old banger in to the ground is still the greenest option of all.
Your article is about what we should be doing to benefit our economy. Indeed in the comments you've been arguing for import substitution. Yet when I talk about our relative failure on EVs, you change the subject.
We;re talking about different aspects of EV. On the do we need battery plants issue we are progressing I dont see the huge gap you claim between say us and Germany we are all building battery plants. I would say only China is well ahead of the West and as you are probably aware the EU commission is trying to stop Chinese imports to give Germany and France a chance to catch up.
I was arguing on the wider issue of EV. An EV is no use unless you can charge it and at present I think we have an infrastructure gap, which was why I said Sunak had won us time. And on the same basis I also suspect the green credentials of EVs have been overplayed Im not convinced they will lower carbon output substantially unless we have carbon free power . The production impact of an EV down the whole chain is not clear.
The numbers on EVs are actually quite clear.
Because of efficiency (EVs use a lot less energy per mile), there would be less carbon per mile even if you were on a grid with 80% coal vs an ICE. Which isn’t the case even in the US - their coal usage is falling fast.
Google some well-to-wheels studies…
Production of a car is a tiny portion of the life time CO2 emissions associated with the vehicle.
Ive read reports arguing both ways. Ultimately I think it depends on your driving pattern. If youre driving loads of miles new is probably best assuming youre not fossil fuel powered. But for people like my brother who used to do about 5000 miles a year on a weekly trip to the shop driving the old one is best. Thats why I dont like blanket one size fits all prescriptions.
Which is why ICE is not being banned - just that in the near future, the replacements will be ZEV.
Though it will take 8-10 tons of carbon to produce them.
That’s assuming no decarbonisation of manufacture.
Much of next generation mine machinery is going electric, for example. Quite a lot already is.
And forgets the equivalent emission in building an ICE.
I have no doubt car production will keep reducing carbon content but so will the cars on the road as the old bangers get scrapped off. As I said it will be a moving feast.
Space, the final frontier. Also the solution to pollution for a little while, We really can dump stuff into the sun for centuries without it getting pissed off. We'll have to move on from that though.
Space, the final frontier. Also the solution to pollution for a little while, We really can dump stuff into the sun for centuries without it getting pissed off. We'll have to move on from that though.
I always wondered why we never tried that with nuclear waste.
I passed a new-build estate the other day and noticed just two of the houses had solar panels. I'm guessing they were bought off-plan and the purchasers chose to have them as an optional extra. Which led me to think, why not make them compulsory for all new-builds? It's surely cheaper than retrofitting them later.
And there's been a spate of boiler-thefts from unfinished houses on the same site. If heat pumps are so great why aren't they a legal requirement, instead of threatening the owners of 200-year-old cottages like ours with the expense of fitting them in 10 years time?
If all new housing stock were greened up in the first place there'd be less pressure to ruin old houses by forcing them into the same straightjacket.
Precisely
Agreed. This fits in with my preference of a mixed set of energy sources, new houses-heat pumps etc, old houses - more efficient gas boilers if necessary. As time goes by the balance will switch to heat pumps as older houses are demolished or rebuilt. I suppose there will always be very old houses. It's like energy production. The more solar and wind etc the better, but we still need biomass/natural gas when necessary, though much less in the future when you factor in storage of gas in tanks and natural reservoirs under the north sea.
Space, the final frontier. Also the solution to pollution for a little while, We really can dump stuff into the sun for centuries without it getting pissed off. We'll have to move on from that though.
I always wondered why we never tried that with nuclear waste.
We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on
I use ChatGPT and CoPilot every day to assist with coding. Now I am not doing run of mill boilerplate stuff, but it still makes absolutely loads of mistakes. I would say at the moment, it is more like an a combination of decent auto-complete (like you do with text messages) and an advanced search for stack overflow (which all coders have used for donkeys years to get an idealised solution to common problems). Once you get too far from tasks that are easily found there, it starts to break down.
In summary, will it cause lots of job losses a few years down the line, yes. I wouldn't want to be a random coder starting out their career now. Would I trust it to go from 10 coders to 1-3 coders doing the same job, not yet, not unless you want massively buggy code.
Indeed. I use ChatGPT and AWS's CodeWhisperer, and they're great tools, but that's all they are - tools. You have to be really careful how you use them though, and you still have to understand what you are doing. I've already been caught out once or twice by suggested code that initially looked perfectly good but turned out to contain some stupid bug that I missed on checking through it.
Lots of these prognoses are predicated on another leap by AI in the next year. GPT5 etc
And if the rumours are right, and GPT5 is to GPT4 what GPT4 was to 3, then they are right to be “alarmist”
We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on
I use ChatGPT and CoPilot every day to assist with coding. Now I am not doing run of mill boilerplate stuff, but it still makes absolutely loads of mistakes. I would say at the moment, it is more like an a combination of decent auto-complete (like you do with text messages) and an advanced search for stack overflow (which all coders have used for donkeys years to get an idealised solution to common problems). Once you get too far from tasks that are easily found there, it starts to break down.
In summary, will it cause lots of job losses a few years down the line, yes. I wouldn't want to be a random coder starting out their career now. Would I trust it to go from 10 coders to 1-3 coders doing the same job, not yet, not unless you want massively buggy code.
Indeed. I use ChatGPT and AWS's CodeWhisperer, and they're great tools, but that's all they are - tools. You have to be really careful how you use them though, and you still have to understand what you are doing. I've already been caught out once or twice by suggested code that initially looked perfectly good but turned out to contain some stupid bug that I missed on checking through it.
Lots of these prognoses are predicated on another leap by AI in the next year. GPT5 etc
And if the rumours are right, and GPT5 is to GPT4 what GPT4 was to 3, then they are right to be “alarmist”
And that’s just OpenAI
GPT3 -> GPT4 for coding wasn't that big of advance. It was evolution, rather than revolution. You could say well now you can show it a picture of some maths and it will code that function, thats new, but again, its very very hit and miss. I have been trying this to speed up implementing academic papers and its really not that great. I find I have to convert image to latex (a kinda of programming language to create scientific texts, which it gets wrong and I could write it myself very quickly) then to say python (which GPT3 could do) and result of this is still so so.
Even if you give it the whole page with all the details of what the various symbols mean, unless its trivial, its not great at it. And if its trivial, a human coder can do it just as fast anyway.
Again, will this get better and better, absolutely.
Space, the final frontier. Also the solution to pollution for a little while, We really can dump stuff into the sun for centuries without it getting pissed off. We'll have to move on from that though.
I always wondered why we never tried that with nuclear waste.
Failure rate of launchers for a start.
Yes but we can make fairly failureproof containers and then relaunch them. I suspect we just haven't looked at it seriously
Space, the final frontier. Also the solution to pollution for a little while, We really can dump stuff into the sun for centuries without it getting pissed off. We'll have to move on from that though.
I always wondered why we never tried that with nuclear waste.
Failure rate of launchers for a start.
Also, celestial mechanics. It would actually need a lot of fuel to drop something into the sun due to conservation of angular momentum. It's easier to fire a payload out of the solar system than into the sun.
We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on
I use ChatGPT and CoPilot every day to assist with coding. Now I am not doing run of mill boilerplate stuff, but it still makes absolutely loads of mistakes. I would say at the moment, it is more like an a combination of decent auto-complete (like you do with text messages) and an advanced search for stack overflow (which all coders have used for donkeys years to get an idealised solution to common problems). Once you get too far from tasks that are easily found there, it starts to break down.
In summary, will it cause lots of job losses a few years down the line, yes. I wouldn't want to be a random coder starting out their career now. Would I trust it to go from 10 coders to 1-3 coders doing the same job, not yet, not unless you want massively buggy code.
Indeed. I use ChatGPT and AWS's CodeWhisperer, and they're great tools, but that's all they are - tools. You have to be really careful how you use them though, and you still have to understand what you are doing. I've already been caught out once or twice by suggested code that initially looked perfectly good but turned out to contain some stupid bug that I missed on checking through it.
Lots of these prognoses are predicated on another leap by AI in the next year. GPT5 etc
And if the rumours are right, and GPT5 is to GPT4 what GPT4 was to 3, then they are right to be “alarmist”
And that’s just OpenAI
GPT3 -> GPT4 for coding wasn't that big of advance. It was evolution, rather than revolution. You could say well now you can show it a picture of some maths and it will code that function, thats new, but again, its very very hit and miss. I have been trying this to speed up implementing academic papers and its really not that great. I find I have to convert image to latex (a kinda of programming language to create scientific texts) then to say python and still so so.
It just takes one of these machines to have the ability to self improve - then KABOOM
“CNBC reporting Apple is going to spend "$1 billion a year" training Ajax for Siri until they catch up. The problem is Ajax won't be ready till next year, and by the end of next year it will have to compete with Claude 3/Alexa, GPT5/Bing.”
And the Chinese will be doing exactly the same. This is the space race and the manhatttan project multiplied by the Industrial Revolution condensed into 5-10 years
“CNBC reporting Apple is going to spend "$1 billion a year" training Ajax for Siri until they catch up. The problem is Ajax won't be ready till next year, and by the end of next year it will have to compete with Claude 3/Alexa, GPT5/Bing.”
And the Chinese will be doing exactly the same. This is the space race and the manhatttan project multiplied by the Industrial Revolution condensed into 5-10 years
Bit of a strange one. If AI pushes lots of people out of jobs then who is going to buy their services ?
I passed a new-build estate the other day and noticed just two of the houses had solar panels. I'm guessing they were bought off-plan and the purchasers chose to have them as an optional extra. Which led me to think, why not make them compulsory for all new-builds? It's surely cheaper than retrofitting them later.
And there's been a spate of boiler-thefts from unfinished houses on the same site. If heat pumps are so great why aren't they a legal requirement, instead of threatening the owners of 200-year-old cottages like ours with the expense of fitting them in 10 years time?
If all new housing stock were greened up in the first place there'd be less pressure to ruin old houses by forcing them into the same straightjacket.
They're mandatory in Germany for new builds and major renovations - I was translating the regulations the other day. One can IIRC apply for a special exemption if e.g. the building is in permanent shadow. It's obviously sensible, and although it will increase the cost the new residents will certainly make a profit on the extra cost within 10 years.
This has been my argument for a long time. The marginal cost increase of a few thousand pounds will be nothing when you are paying £250K or more for a house. And there will be massive economies of scale if every house on a development is having them fitted as standard.
We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on
I use ChatGPT and CoPilot every day to assist with coding. Now I am not doing run of mill boilerplate stuff, but it still makes absolutely loads of mistakes. I would say at the moment, it is more like an a combination of decent auto-complete (like you do with text messages) and an advanced search for stack overflow (which all coders have used for donkeys years to get an idealised solution to common problems). Once you get too far from tasks that are easily found there, it starts to break down.
In summary, will it cause lots of job losses a few years down the line, yes. I wouldn't want to be a random coder starting out their career now. Would I trust it to go from 10 coders to 1-3 coders doing the same job, not yet, not unless you want massively buggy code.
Indeed. I use ChatGPT and AWS's CodeWhisperer, and they're great tools, but that's all they are - tools. You have to be really careful how you use them though, and you still have to understand what you are doing. I've already been caught out once or twice by suggested code that initially looked perfectly good but turned out to contain some stupid bug that I missed on checking through it.
Lots of these prognoses are predicated on another leap by AI in the next year. GPT5 etc
And if the rumours are right, and GPT5 is to GPT4 what GPT4 was to 3, then they are right to be “alarmist”
And that’s just OpenAI
GPT3 -> GPT4 for coding wasn't that big of advance. It was evolution, rather than revolution. You could say well now you can show it a picture of some maths and it will code that function, thats new, but again, its very very hit and miss. I have been trying this to speed up implementing academic papers and its really not that great. I find I have to convert image to latex (a kinda of programming language to create scientific texts) then to say python and still so so.
It just takes one of these machines to have the ability to self improve - then KABOOM
It doesn't even "understand" basic maths yet, let alone know how to improve upon that. I had it the other day arguing black is white over the incorrect details of a tensor, which is trivial maths.
This is the fundamental issue with the idea of LLM being predicted on probabilistic selection of next token.
Time for a new party that represents Muslims adequately. We will not win overall but could easily win parliamentary seats. We are currently in active discussions to get this done. Muslim Labour MPs have let the community down. Change is needed.
We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on
I use ChatGPT and CoPilot every day to assist with coding. Now I am not doing run of mill boilerplate stuff, but it still makes absolutely loads of mistakes. I would say at the moment, it is more like an a combination of decent auto-complete (like you do with text messages) and an advanced search for stack overflow (which all coders have used for donkeys years to get an idealised solution to common problems). Once you get too far from tasks that are easily found there, it starts to break down.
In summary, will it cause lots of job losses a few years down the line, yes. I wouldn't want to be a random coder starting out their career now. Would I trust it to go from 10 coders to 1-3 coders doing the same job, not yet, not unless you want massively buggy code.
Indeed. I use ChatGPT and AWS's CodeWhisperer, and they're great tools, but that's all they are - tools. You have to be really careful how you use them though, and you still have to understand what you are doing. I've already been caught out once or twice by suggested code that initially looked perfectly good but turned out to contain some stupid bug that I missed on checking through it.
Lots of these prognoses are predicated on another leap by AI in the next year. GPT5 etc
And if the rumours are right, and GPT5 is to GPT4 what GPT4 was to 3, then they are right to be “alarmist”
And that’s just OpenAI
GPT3 -> GPT4 for coding wasn't that big of advance. It was evolution, rather than revolution. You could say well now you can show it a picture of some maths and it will code that function, thats new, but again, its very very hit and miss. I have been trying this to speed up implementing academic papers and its really not that great. I find I have to convert image to latex (a kinda of programming language to create scientific texts, which it gets wrong and I could write it myself very quickly) then to say python (which GPT3 could do) and result of this is still so so.
Even if you give it the whole page with all the details of what the various symbols mean, unless its trivial, its not great at it. And if its trivial, a human coder can do it just as fast anyway.
Again, will this get better and better, absolutely.
Tbh I know fuck all about coding, and care less (other than it’s huge secondary impact on our lives, of course)
What I do know and care about is the arts, writing, design, advertising, drawing, thinking, all the interesting stuff the mind does - and if GPT5 is as better at writing (etc) than GPT4 - as GPT4 was better compared to GPT3 - then holy fuck
Space, the final frontier. Also the solution to pollution for a little while, We really can dump stuff into the sun for centuries without it getting pissed off. We'll have to move on from that though.
I always wondered why we never tried that with nuclear waste.
Failure rate of launchers for a start.
Yes but we can make fairly failureproof containers and then relaunch them. I suspect we just haven't looked at it seriously
Er no. Mass of pretty much indestructible casks doesn’t scale well - something the size of a rugby ball to carry a few kilos of plutonium works. See the packaging of RTGs for the Apollo and other programs.
Above that it rapidly ends up with you launching a vast mass with a tiny bit of whatever in the middle.
This was looked at in depth for nuclear reactors for space applications. In the end they have up - the rule was supposed to be only launch a cold reactor (never used, they aren’t very radioactive).
The USSR, being arseholes, launched reactors that had been run. Not to mention their other fuckups with RORSATs.
British police are testing women for abortion drugs and requesting data from menstrual tracking apps after unexplained pregnancy losses.
I bet if you asked the random person on the street they would assume that abortion was just legal in this country - and would also say this is not a particularly good use of limited police resources.
Abortion is illegal in the UK after 24 weeks of pregnancy so no that is not outrageous
And part of the supposed virtues of British policing is that they have discretion on what to investigate - I don't think investigating miscarriages or even abortions after 24 weeks is a good use of police time; and the collection of this kind of data is very scary.
You can think what you want.
Abortion after 24 weeks is illegal and the police have an obligation to investigate potential breaches of the criminal law. Tough
A lot of people seem to think that our law gives zero rights to the unborn and 100% rights to mothers. It doesn't. The unborn have rights that can be superseded in certain circumstances. And, BTW the arguments for this have nothing sensible to do with religion or non-religion; and the argument for where the balance should be struck is similarly hampered by bringing God(s) or their non existence into it. So (see earlier posts) where Islam/evangelicals etc stand or otherwise is not very interesting.
Space, the final frontier. Also the solution to pollution for a little while, We really can dump stuff into the sun for centuries without it getting pissed off. We'll have to move on from that though.
I always wondered why we never tried that with nuclear waste.
Failure rate of launchers for a start.
Yes but we can make fairly failureproof containers and then relaunch them. I suspect we just haven't looked at it seriously
Er no. Mass of pretty much indestructible casks doesn’t scale well - something the size of a rugby ball to carry a few kilos of plutonium works. See the packaging of RTGs for the Apollo and other programs.
Above that it rapidly ends up with you launching a vast mass with a tiny bit of whatever in the middle.
This was looked at in depth for nuclear reactors for space applications. In the end they have up - the rule was supposed to be only launch a cold reactor (never used, they aren’t very radioactive).
The USSR, being arseholes, launched reactors that had been run. Not to mention their other fuckups with RORSATs.
Looks like we/re stuck with it then, back to the drawing board.
We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on
I use ChatGPT and CoPilot every day to assist with coding. Now I am not doing run of mill boilerplate stuff, but it still makes absolutely loads of mistakes. I would say at the moment, it is more like an a combination of decent auto-complete (like you do with text messages) and an advanced search for stack overflow (which all coders have used for donkeys years to get an idealised solution to common problems). Once you get too far from tasks that are easily found there, it starts to break down.
In summary, will it cause lots of job losses a few years down the line, yes. I wouldn't want to be a random coder starting out their career now. Would I trust it to go from 10 coders to 1-3 coders doing the same job, not yet, not unless you want massively buggy code.
Indeed. I use ChatGPT and AWS's CodeWhisperer, and they're great tools, but that's all they are - tools. You have to be really careful how you use them though, and you still have to understand what you are doing. I've already been caught out once or twice by suggested code that initially looked perfectly good but turned out to contain some stupid bug that I missed on checking through it.
Lots of these prognoses are predicated on another leap by AI in the next year. GPT5 etc
And if the rumours are right, and GPT5 is to GPT4 what GPT4 was to 3, then they are right to be “alarmist”
And that’s just OpenAI
GPT3 -> GPT4 for coding wasn't that big of advance. It was evolution, rather than revolution. You could say well now you can show it a picture of some maths and it will code that function, thats new, but again, its very very hit and miss. I have been trying this to speed up implementing academic papers and its really not that great. I find I have to convert image to latex (a kinda of programming language to create scientific texts, which it gets wrong and I could write it myself very quickly) then to say python (which GPT3 could do) and result of this is still so so.
Even if you give it the whole page with all the details of what the various symbols mean, unless its trivial, its not great at it. And if its trivial, a human coder can do it just as fast anyway.
Again, will this get better and better, absolutely.
Tbh I know fuck all about coding, and care less (other than it’s huge secondary impact on our lives, of course)
What I do know and care about is the arts, writing, design, advertising, drawing, thinking, all the interesting stuff the mind does - and if GPT5 is
We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on
I use ChatGPT and CoPilot every day to assist with coding. Now I am not doing run of mill boilerplate stuff, but it still makes absolutely loads of mistakes. I would say at the moment, it is more like an a combination of decent auto-complete (like you do with text messages) and an advanced search for stack overflow (which all coders have used for donkeys years to get an idealised solution to common problems). Once you get too far from tasks that are easily found there, it starts to break down.
In summary, will it cause lots of job losses a few years down the line, yes. I wouldn't want to be a random coder starting out their career now. Would I trust it to go from 10 coders to 1-3 coders doing the same job, not yet, not unless you want massively buggy code.
Indeed. I use ChatGPT and AWS's CodeWhisperer, and they're great tools, but that's all they are - tools. You have to be really careful how you use them though, and you still have to understand what you are doing. I've already been caught out once or twice by suggested code that initially looked perfectly good but turned out to contain some stupid bug that I missed on checking through it.
Lots of these prognoses are predicated on another leap by AI in the next year. GPT5 etc
And if the rumours are right, and GPT5 is to GPT4 what GPT4 was to 3, then they are right to be “alarmist”
And that’s just OpenAI
GPT3 -> GPT4 for coding wasn't that big of advance. It was evolution, rather than revolution. You could say well now you can show it a picture of some maths and it will code that function, thats new, but again, its very very hit and miss. I have been trying this to speed up implementing academic papers and its really not that great. I find I have to convert image to latex (a kinda of programming language to create scientific texts) then to say python and still so so.
It just takes one of these machines to have the ability to self improve - then KABOOM
It doesn't even "understand" basic maths yet, let alone know how to improve upon that. I had it the other day arguing black is white over the incorrect details of a tensor, which is trivial maths.
This is the fundamental issue with the idea of LLM being predicted on probabilistic selection of next token.
Does a calculator “understand” maths? Not in the sense you mean, probably not. Surely not
And yet we absolutely rely on calculators for most basic maths and regard them as infallible, because they are
Understanding is an anthropocentric dead end. We are creating an alien intelligence. It won’t understand anything in the way “we do”. And it won’t matter
We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on
I use ChatGPT and CoPilot every day to assist with coding. Now I am not doing run of mill boilerplate stuff, but it still makes absolutely loads of mistakes. I would say at the moment, it is more like an a combination of decent auto-complete (like you do with text messages) and an advanced search for stack overflow (which all coders have used for donkeys years to get an idealised solution to common problems). Once you get too far from tasks that are easily found there, it starts to break down.
In summary, will it cause lots of job losses a few years down the line, yes. I wouldn't want to be a random coder starting out their career now. Would I trust it to go from 10 coders to 1-3 coders doing the same job, not yet, not unless you want massively buggy code.
Indeed. I use ChatGPT and AWS's CodeWhisperer, and they're great tools, but that's all they are - tools. You have to be really careful how you use them though, and you still have to understand what you are doing. I've already been caught out once or twice by suggested code that initially looked perfectly good but turned out to contain some stupid bug that I missed on checking through it.
Lots of these prognoses are predicated on another leap by AI in the next year. GPT5 etc
And if the rumours are right, and GPT5 is to GPT4 what GPT4 was to 3, then they are right to be “alarmist”
And that’s just OpenAI
GPT3 -> GPT4 for coding wasn't that big of advance. It was evolution, rather than revolution. You could say well now you can show it a picture of some maths and it will code that function, thats new, but again, its very very hit and miss. I have been trying this to speed up implementing academic papers and its really not that great. I find I have to convert image to latex (a kinda of programming language to create scientific texts, which it gets wrong and I could write it myself very quickly) then to say python (which GPT3 could do) and result of this is still so so.
Even if you give it the whole page with all the details of what the various symbols mean, unless its trivial, its not great at it. And if its trivial, a human coder can do it just as fast anyway.
Again, will this get better and better, absolutely.
Tbh I know fuck all about coding, and care less (other than it’s huge secondary impact on our lives, of course)
What I do know and care about is the arts, writing, design, advertising, drawing, thinking, all the interesting stuff the mind does - and if GPT5 is as better at writing (etc) than GPT4 - as GPT4 was better compared to GPT3 - then holy fuck
In short term, I would be very concerned if I did a low level white collar job. It absolutely could do eat into those jobs and soon. For "creative" types, I can see it reducing the numbers required to produce an advertising campaign or come up with concept designs for clients. It doesn't need to understand for that, it just needs to pump out 100s of combinations, which a human can filter, present to client, adjust, refilter....
I think low level coding will be made more efficient, but does that mean lots of jobs go, or just that more gets created e.g. web page coding used to be horrific, cool, cumbersone, painful, now there are still masses of people involved in website industry but have much better tools, so websites can be spin up much faster and cheaper. Probably a combination of the lower end coding being made much more efficient (lots of that is done in places India, China, Eastern Europe) and increased turn around times.
“CNBC reporting Apple is going to spend "$1 billion a year" training Ajax for Siri until they catch up. The problem is Ajax won't be ready till next year, and by the end of next year it will have to compete with Claude 3/Alexa, GPT5/Bing.”
And the Chinese will be doing exactly the same. This is the space race and the manhatttan project multiplied by the Industrial Revolution condensed into 5-10 years
Bit of a strange one. If AI pushes lots of people out of jobs then who is going to buy their services ?
We were discussing the impact of AI on the global south yesterday. I’ve just read a cogent article saying 5m coding jobs in India will disappear immediately - ie in the next two years. Not in a decade. From now on
I use ChatGPT and CoPilot every day to assist with coding. Now I am not doing run of mill boilerplate stuff, but it still makes absolutely loads of mistakes. I would say at the moment, it is more like an a combination of decent auto-complete (like you do with text messages) and an advanced search for stack overflow (which all coders have used for donkeys years to get an idealised solution to common problems). Once you get too far from tasks that are easily found there, it starts to break down.
In summary, will it cause lots of job losses a few years down the line, yes. I wouldn't want to be a random coder starting out their career now. Would I trust it to go from 10 coders to 1-3 coders doing the same job, not yet, not unless you want massively buggy code.
Indeed. I use ChatGPT and AWS's CodeWhisperer, and they're great tools, but that's all they are - tools. You have to be really careful how you use them though, and you still have to understand what you are doing. I've already been caught out once or twice by suggested code that initially looked perfectly good but turned out to contain some stupid bug that I missed on checking through it.
Lots of these prognoses are predicated on another leap by AI in the next year. GPT5 etc
And if the rumours are right, and GPT5 is to GPT4 what GPT4 was to 3, then they are right to be “alarmist”
And that’s just OpenAI
GPT3 -> GPT4 for coding wasn't that big of advance. It was evolution, rather than revolution. You could say well now you can show it a picture of some maths and it will code that function, thats new, but again, its very very hit and miss. I have been trying this to speed up implementing academic papers and its really not that great. I find I have to convert image to latex (a kinda of programming language to create scientific texts) then to say python and still so so.
It just takes one of these machines to have the ability to self improve - then KABOOM
It doesn't even "understand" basic maths yet, let alone know how to improve upon that. I had it the other day arguing black is white over the incorrect details of a tensor, which is trivial maths.
This is the fundamental issue with the idea of LLM being predicted on probabilistic selection of next token.
Arguably it doesn't "understand" anything because it's a goldfish in a bowl with a 5 second memory that happens to be born with an encyclopedia inside its head.
Give it long term memory, and it starts to look shockingly like how human minds work.
An LLM with long term memory accessible the way humans can remember something from 20 years ago at a pinch, starts to look shockingly like us. Give it the ability to improve on its own code and it starts to look very much like us. The human mind is nothing special.
We may be 5-10 years away from this, or some have speculated, Google or OpenAI may be there already but holding back on releasing it for fear of what it will do. But it is coming.
White House Office of Science & Technology Policy @WHOSTP The Biden-Harris Administration is taking the most significant action any government has ever taken on AI. With today's executive order, we are advancing safe, secure, and trustworthy AI. Head to http://AI.gov to learn more.
Space, the final frontier. Also the solution to pollution for a little while, We really can dump stuff into the sun for centuries without it getting pissed off. We'll have to move on from that though.
I always wondered why we never tried that with nuclear waste.
Earth surface to Earth orbit Much as we like to think it's all sorted, a certain percentage of rockets still go bang. Nobody wants to have nuclear debris scattered across their country. So nobody wants to do it.
Earth orbit to Sun An object in order around the Sun has a lot of energy pointing at right-angles to the Sun: it's only the Sun's gravity that stops it speeding off. The greater the change in velocity or direction[1], the more fuel you need. If you want to send it straight into the Sun you need a LOT of fuel. If you want to send it spiralling in, that's cheaper but it takes longer. It may genuinely be easier to send it outwards to Mars/Jupiter, slingshot around it and head back into the Sun.
Comments
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/oil-and-gas/our-insights/charting-the-global-energy-landscape-to-2050-emissions
In short we need to prepare the UK for a ~2.5C global rise.
I've used those brick-based storage heaters plenty of times in rural Scotland. I agree they are pretty hopeless although in theory you can close them up during the day and still get something out of them in the evening.
We just need a better heat sink or cheaper batteries...
It is, after all, inevitable. Two centuries ago, we got a small reminder of what a single volcano can do: 'The year 1816 is known as the Year Without a Summer because of severe climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1 °F).[1] Summer temperatures in Europe were the coldest of any on record between the years of 1766 and 2000.[2] This resulted in major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
Seventy-four ceturies ago, there was a far worse eruption: 'The Toba eruption (sometimes called the Toba supereruption or the Youngest Toba eruption) was a supervolcano eruption that occurred around 74,000 years ago during the Late Pleistocene[1] at the site of present-day Lake Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia. It is one of the largest known explosive eruptions in the Earth's history. The Toba catastrophe theory holds that this event caused a severe global volcanic winter of six to ten years and contributed to a 1,000-year-long cooling episode, leading to a genetic bottleneck in humans.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
And there have been many other eruptions since then that affected the climate.
(Could most humans survive a Toba event now, given our current technology? No, but we could if we had sufficient warning, say 20 years, and enough energy. So we ought to be looking hard for ways to predict such events. And building more nuclear power plants.)
So in terms of preparation. Where's the ( green ) electricity coming from ? Who's wiring up the country and installing charge points ? And since this is all about carbon reduction do you actually believe building new EVs and the opening mines for batteries is less polluting ?
There is currently a fair amount of greenwashing in the car industry. Running your old banger in to the ground is still the greenest option of all.
You can extrapolate that graph to be "some time after 2100 if we're lucky, sometime never if we don't"
Either way, it will be too late to avoid catastrophic global changes to the environment, that will result in food, energy, infrastructure, and migratory security problems.
Those will be the key issues by 2050. Not how to get to Net Zero, or when. Dealing the fallout from the fact we didn't get there.
We can choose to steal a march on those problems now, or stick our head in the sand and focus on foisting unpopular heat pumps and ULEZ zones on people, which will have precisely zero impact on the real problems we'll be facing by 2050.
Sri Lanka 5.3
https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/en/cricket/icc-cricket-world-cup/afghanistan-v-sri-lanka-betting-32743986
My suspicion, if I am being completely honest, is that because of the issues with EVs, some of which you identify above, there has been a conscious decision to wait and see - because there is the realistic possibility that a better alternative to the current delivery model of EVs may present itself in the coming years, and render this infrastructure obsolete.
Also take into account that gas sends some heat out of the chimney whereas electricity is 100% efficient (for heat).
also from Tepeo "The stored heat will remain in the core for several days but will slowly be lost."
Blood taken WITH CONSENT.
What are you scared off? Or are you just another leftie who hates the Thatcherite police, probably because of the miner's strike?
Flood defences and ensuring future building is futureproofed wrt the effects of say a 3C rise in global temperatures and the additional sea level (& other effects of increased atmospheric energy) is the big one for the UK.
*One measure that could mitigate higher temperatures is increased use of air conditioning - but that ups your carbon emissions so I'd say on balance at this point you probably shouldn't add it in for existing UK builds (Unless it's already as part of existing spec)
I would also think - as was hinted at the beginning of the piece - that the reason there has been an uptick in prosecutions is because there has been a very noticeable rise in late term pregnancies ending. Doctors / the Police are (probably rightly) sceptical this is down to natural causes.
If you don't want this to happen, change the law, don't blame the Police - for once - trying to enforce the law. It is one of the things that annoys me most about people like Caroline Noakes and Stella Creasy is that they want to push a policy - effective abortion up to the point of birth - but are being underhand by calling for 'decriminalisation', which effectively means the same thing.
Banging on a storage heater for 7 hours overnight based on the weather seems rather pointless given that's the main difference in temp levels in my flat most days.
I also don't think that abortion should be criminalised at all - the vast majority happen in the first trimester as it is, and those that happen in the third are by far and away done so for reasons of viability or risk to the mother. That we have laws on the books that makes any miscarriage after 24 weeks suspect is a problem.
There isn't one.
We need a suitable grid with sufficient capacity. The next government needs to get on with it.
https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/france/
Good Muslim boys don’t do that kind of thing
https://www.leighday.co.uk/news/news/2023-news/campaigners-win-permission-to-appeal-against-sizewell-c-nuclear-power-station-ruling/
To be clear, I am not arguing that there shouldn’t be a much better plan for EV rollout. I find it ridiculous that there hasn’t been. I’m just trying to find reasons as to why there hasn’t.
But even if they're right, you'll still want to produce more heat than you use, just in case you get caught out, which is why I describe heat and hot water as "on demand" type products. Tepeo-style solutions need to be demonstrably cheaper than "on demand" heat.
Agree that gas is not 100% efficient. More efficient storage would solve a lot of problems, the Tepeo idea is interesting *if* it can store usable heat for multiple days without wasting a significant percentage of it.
Otherwise I suspect it will be like my experience of storage heaters in the past. Sure, I can leave this on for seven hours overnight, but if I'm out for work during the day, it will cost me more than popping an oil filled radiator on for an hour in the evening to heat up the house when I get home.
Says a guy in a video. But where? Riyadh? Tehran? Beirut? Luton?
No, Harvard Square
https://x.com/kassydillon/status/1718946515350122591?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
Yet when I talk about our relative failure on EVs, you change the subject.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/university-wage-premium-fades-average-earnings-drop-3000/
S Korea is currently tendering around $5bn per 1.4GW nuclear plant. Which is why they're getting a lot of new contracts.
It’s not great. It is horrific: a vast human tragedy in the making. But the cold political facts suggest the west will ultimately defend its prosperity with arms
"Safari can't find https://www7.politicalbetting.com"
As to pollution over the lifetime of a car - the vast majority is created in driving it, not building it.
There are plenty of studies on this available.
I was arguing on the wider issue of EV. An EV is no use unless you can charge it and at present I think we have an infrastructure gap, which was why I said Sunak had won us time.
And on the same basis I also suspect the green credentials of EVs have been overplayed Im not convinced they will lower carbon output substantially unless we have carbon free power .
The production impact of an EV down the whole chain is not clear.
It’s white collar middle class people being affected now. Previously it was largely blue collar jobs.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/live/cricket/66858754
Because of efficiency (EVs use a lot less energy per mile), there would be less carbon per mile even if you were on a grid with 80% coal vs an ICE. Which isn’t the case even in the US - their coal usage is falling fast.
Google some well-to-wheels studies…
Production of a car is a tiny portion of the life time CO2 emissions associated with the vehicle.
I would say at the moment, it is more like an a combination of decent auto-complete (like you do with text messages) and an advanced search for stack overflow (which all coders have used for donkeys years to get an idealised solution to common problems). Once you get too far from tasks that are easily found there, it starts to break down. And the "self-correct" mode that it can run can be useful, but more often than not it whirls away for 5 minutes and makes the solution worse than when it started.
In summary, will it cause lots of job losses a few years down the line, yes. I wouldn't want to be a random coder starting out their career now. Would I trust it to go from 10 coders to 1-3 coders doing the same job, not yet, not unless you want massively buggy code. So that will be government contractors then...
Thirteen frontbenchers have defied the party line – but they won’t be punished.
By Freddie Hayward"
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/labour/2023/10/keir-starmer-lost-control-labour-gaza-message
If youre driving loads of miles new is probably best assuming youre not fossil fuel powered. But for people like my brother who used to do about 5000 miles a year on a weekly trip to the shop driving the old one is best. Thats why I dont like blanket one size fits all prescriptions.
Whether Labour will be any better is a matter of conjecture - but at least they claim to believe in industrial strategy.
However while also all very interesting the fact remains abortion after 24 weeks is illegal in the UK and the police are obliged to enforce that law
Abortion after 24 weeks is illegal and the police have an obligation to investigate potential breaches of the criminal law. Tough
We also live in a village with no gas. When moved in the house had oil CH but bothe the boiler and the tank needed replacing. We opted for an Air Source Heat Pump and underfloor heating as we were doing a major renovation / remodelling anyway. We also have a woodburner which we use in the winter as we currently have a free supply of logs.
We've been very happy with our ASHP; servicing costs are minimal which is an often overlooked factor.
Next year, dependent on the housing market, we're planning to move and do another project. We'll almost certainly got for ASHP + UFH again, even if we move to somewhere with mains gas.
But if your doing a major refurb thats fine. Im not and dont see any reason to switch to a heat pump since I get no benefit from it.
Much of next generation mine machinery is going electric, for example. Quite a lot already is.
And forgets the equivalent emission in building an ICE.
When it gets cold, I put on a jumper, when it gets colder, I put on a coat - often one with a USB heat coil in it. Only then, when it gets too cold, I put the heating on.
Similarly, I have electric blankets and thick duvets for bedtime, rather than heating the whole house that isn't being used.
Maybe that's extreme, but the world could do with more people going back to the 40's attitude of putting on a jumper before cranking the heat up.
And if the rumours are right, and GPT5 is to GPT4 what GPT4 was to 3, then they are right to be “alarmist”
And that’s just OpenAI
Even if you give it the whole page with all the details of what the various symbols mean, unless its trivial, its not great at it. And if its trivial, a human coder can do it just as fast anyway.
Again, will this get better and better, absolutely.
“CNBC reporting Apple is going to spend "$1 billion a year" training Ajax for Siri until they catch up. The problem is Ajax won't be ready till next year, and by the end of next year it will have to compete with Claude 3/Alexa, GPT5/Bing.”
https://x.com/andrewcurran_/status/1716511325671817631?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
And the Chinese will be doing exactly the same. This is the space race and the manhatttan project multiplied by the Industrial Revolution condensed into 5-10 years
This is the fundamental issue with the idea of LLM being predicted on probabilistic selection of next token.
Not really.
You should stick to your area of expertise Malc.!
What I do know and care about is the arts, writing, design, advertising, drawing, thinking, all the interesting stuff the mind does - and if GPT5 is as better at writing (etc) than GPT4 - as GPT4 was better compared to GPT3 - then holy fuck
Above that it rapidly ends up with you launching a vast mass with a tiny bit of whatever in the middle.
This was looked at in depth for nuclear reactors for space applications. In the end they have up - the rule was supposed to be only launch a cold reactor (never used, they aren’t very radioactive).
The USSR, being arseholes, launched reactors that had been run. Not to mention their other fuckups with RORSATs.
What I do know and care about is the arts, writing, design, advertising, drawing, thinking, all the interesting stuff the mind does - and if GPT5 is Does a calculator “understand” maths? Not in the sense you mean, probably not. Surely not
And yet we absolutely rely on calculators for most basic maths and regard them as infallible, because they are
Understanding is an anthropocentric dead end. We are creating an alien intelligence. It won’t understand anything in the way “we do”. And it won’t matter
I think low level coding will be made more efficient, but does that mean lots of jobs go, or just that more gets created e.g. web page coding used to be horrific, cool, cumbersone, painful, now there are still masses of people involved in website industry but have much better tools, so websites can be spin up much faster and cheaper. Probably a combination of the lower end coding being made much more efficient (lots of that is done in places India, China, Eastern Europe) and increased turn around times.
Give it long term memory, and it starts to look shockingly like how human minds work.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.10250.pdf
An LLM with long term memory accessible the way humans can remember something from 20 years ago at a pinch, starts to look shockingly like us. Give it the ability to improve on its own code and it starts to look very much like us. The human mind is nothing special.
We may be 5-10 years away from this, or some have speculated, Google or OpenAI may be there already but holding back on releasing it for fear of what it will do. But it is coming.
@WHOSTP
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Much as we like to think it's all sorted, a certain percentage of rockets still go bang. Nobody wants to have nuclear debris scattered across their country. So nobody wants to do it.
Earth orbit to Sun
An object in order around the Sun has a lot of energy pointing at right-angles to the Sun: it's only the Sun's gravity that stops it speeding off. The greater the change in velocity or direction[1], the more fuel you need. If you want to send it straight into the Sun you need a LOT of fuel. If you want to send it spiralling in, that's cheaper but it takes longer. It may genuinely be easier to send it outwards to Mars/Jupiter, slingshot around it and head back into the Sun.
A change in velocity or direction is known as "delta-vee": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v