In collaboration with Doosan Enerbility and Daewoo E&C, KHNP is competing with EDF, a French government-owned electric utility company, to win the 30 trillion won ($22 billion) project...
Can anyone explain ?
The Koreans just finished building one out here in the sandpit. 4x1345MW, $24.4bn, 13 years from breaking ground to reactor #4 being commissioned.
They’re good at this stuff, and the UK should have bought their tech rather than - again - trying to re-invent the wheel.
Yes, the article references their completed projects - but this is even more striking, given that it's a European contract (with possibly stricter planning terms ? ) at today's prices.
We have seriously lost our way in terms of getting stuff built, whether it's housing, railways or nuclear power stations.
Starmers six pledges are horribly bland and minor. Probably the right call though for election purposes, just have to have fingers crossed they understand the job much better than this:
Sticking to tough spending rules in order to deliver economic stability
Cutting NHS waiting lists by providing 40,000 more appointments each week - funded by tackling tax avoidance and non-dom loopholes
Launching a border security command to stop the gangs arranging small boat crossings
Setting up Great British Energy, a publicly owned clean power energy company
Providing more neighbourhood police officers to reduce antisocial behaviour and introduced new penalties for offenders
Recruiting 6,500 teachers, paid for through ending tax breaks for private schools.
I can't see how the UK can set up a border security comment to stop gangs arranging small boat crossings, when that organisation will be happening in France?
Also, why do we have to put 'Great' in 'Great British Energy'? In ye olden days, we did not have 'Great British Railways', 'Great British Telecom' or 'Great British Gas'.
It's naff.
Surely it’s just acknowledging how much better things are now? Great British Water next..
Did you notice the careful exclusion of NI? Sure, BR has nothing in NI, but that doesn't apply for everything.
I know and you know that it's not technically correct, but I know and you know that Britain and Great Britain is often used as a synonym for UK, because "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland broadband (or whatever)" is a bit of a mouthful.
One of the things I've liked most about Britain over the years is that mostly people don't work about these curious inconsistencies. They're fun quirks. Don't be ruining that for me now.
Is that like them using England to mean UK, Britain or Great Britain
This was an interesting piece on the linkage between re-wilding and climate change. I don't know abut the figures they claim, but the reasoning seems plausible.
Is that really what the picture looks like? A massive disembodied head floating in a sea of red? Can artists not just paint a normal picture anymore?
See Sky's Portrait and Landscape Artist of the Year programmes. Yes, you can paint a perfectly well executed piece of art, but no, you will not beat someone who produces something 'challenging', such as painting the King in red on a red background, so that it looks ridiculous. Usually helps that the judges are the kind of idiots who thought Tracy Emin's unmade bed was great art. They usually contort themselves to find ways that rubbish art has a hidden message (but not hidden from the learned judges, who are enlightended).
My favourite was an artist who left large sections of the canvass blank (they only have 4 hours) and this was turned into a great idea of leaving things for the viewer to interpret (or some other guff). Reality - the artist hadn't painted fast enough...
Someone on here a while ago talked about contemporary classical music having lost its way and, while I was listening to RTÉ Lyric (home to all the classical music you've already listened to) it occurred to me that there was plenty of good contemporary classical music - it's all been written for film soundtracks. I reasoned the difference was that there was still a purpose for film soundtrack music, and so the music has to achieve an objective, and that subjected it to a discipline that meant that some of it would be good. And that doesn't apply to what passes for contemporary classical music. Hardly anyone listens to it, so it doesn't matter if it's shite.
The same is probably true for painted portraits. They no longer have a purpose - the previous purpose of portraits now being filled by photography - and so it doesn't matter if they're shite. So they end up being shite.
Starmers six pledges are horribly bland and minor. Probably the right call though for election purposes, just have to have fingers crossed they understand the job much better than this:
Sticking to tough spending rules in order to deliver economic stability
Cutting NHS waiting lists by providing 40,000 more appointments each week - funded by tackling tax avoidance and non-dom loopholes
Launching a border security command to stop the gangs arranging small boat crossings
Setting up Great British Energy, a publicly owned clean power energy company
Providing more neighbourhood police officers to reduce antisocial behaviour and introduced new penalties for offenders
Recruiting 6,500 teachers, paid for through ending tax breaks for private schools.
Nothing on housing. Which was the only interesting policy they had.
That'd mean admitting the SNP got it right, and actually adopting SNP policies, which is a huge no-no in Labour circles up here in Scotland.
But tbf they have to save some goodies for later, anyway.
I suspect it’s more about not giving something for Tories to wave in NIMBY faces on the doorstep.
If anyone waves in Nimby faces it is the LDs
I don’t dispute the Lib Dems have a bad track record of that kind of nonsense locally and it’s my biggest issue with the party, but they are not in a straight fight with Labour in any constituencies except possibly Hallam.
Tories won’t hesitate to use local housebuilding as a stick to beat Labour if given the chance.
Is that really what the picture looks like? A massive disembodied head floating in a sea of red? Can artists not just paint a normal picture anymore?
I guess the problem is that a lot of artists can't draw, and at the other end, hyperrealism is just a labour-intensive way of reproducing a photograph. Anyway, this is what Yeo does, paint heads on backgrounds. The alternative would be to draw in the King's suit (as in his famous Blair portrait with the red poppy) so it's swings and roundabouts. What I'm not a fan of is the fake-looking anatomical style of Lucien Freud.
It was shit, all red with Charlie's big baw face and a hand sticking out.
Starmers six pledges are horribly bland and minor. Probably the right call though for election purposes, just have to have fingers crossed they understand the job much better than this:
Sticking to tough spending rules in order to deliver economic stability
Cutting NHS waiting lists by providing 40,000 more appointments each week - funded by tackling tax avoidance and non-dom loopholes
Launching a border security command to stop the gangs arranging small boat crossings
Setting up Great British Energy, a publicly owned clean power energy company
Providing more neighbourhood police officers to reduce antisocial behaviour and introduced new penalties for offenders
Recruiting 6,500 teachers, paid for through ending tax breaks for private schools.
Nothing on housing. Which was the only interesting policy they had.
Tbf they have an election to win, and lots of ways of losing it. Pat McFadden, who is a very safe pair of hands, was struggling this morning even to flesh out the meaning and delivery of these bland proposals in a way that wouldn't lead to the next set of challenges. All interesting policies cost money. The next government starts with minus £2.1 trillion in the sock under the bed.
On another topic, for the BBC news website the top story in all the world this morning is some plumber putting misleading material on social media. This is deranged.
I probably sound like a broken record on here but this is exactly the issue with BBC News now. Farcical priorities, editorialising, celebrity-obsessed, cross-promoting.
It saddens me how it has gone downhill so rapidly.
It's a 'BBC investigation', you see, so must get top billing.
Slightly embarrassing, also, given the previous fawning BBC reports on the guy.
The international edition BBC News front page is thankfully a lot better. Their headlines at the moment:
1. Robert Fico assassination attempt 2. Meeting between Putin and Xi 3. Israel/Hamas war 4. US economy focus 5. Floods in Afghanistan.
Is that really what the picture looks like? A massive disembodied head floating in a sea of red? Can artists not just paint a normal picture anymore?
I guess the problem is that a lot of artists can't draw, and at the other end, hyperrealism is just a labour-intensive way of reproducing a photograph. Anyway, this is what Yeo does, paint heads on backgrounds. The alternative would be to draw in the King's suit (as in his famous Blair portrait with the red poppy) so it's swings and roundabouts. What I'm not a fan of is the fake-looking anatomical style of Lucien Freud.
It was shit, all red with Charlie's big baw face and a hand sticking out.
Well we've now got the piccy of Ange and Rachel eagerly clutching their Baby's First Steps pledge cards so the day can proceed with everything right in the world. Yay for the new Ed Stone! Now we have this to choose alongside Rishi's enticing 'yeah but we know HOW we utterly broke it so that's something, right?' And Eds blue cardboard box busting yellow hammer of policy free irrelevance. Exciting times for the UK.
Is that really what the picture looks like? A massive disembodied head floating in a sea of red? Can artists not just paint a normal picture anymore?
I guess the problem is that a lot of artists can't draw, and at the other end, hyperrealism is just a labour-intensive way of reproducing a photograph. Anyway, this is what Yeo does, paint heads on backgrounds. The alternative would be to draw in the King's suit (as in his famous Blair portrait with the red poppy) so it's swings and roundabouts. What I'm not a fan of is the fake-looking anatomical style of Lucien Freud.
It was shit, all red with Charlie's big baw face and a hand sticking out.
Be fair, he was on fire. The artist had to work quick to capture the moment.
Is that really what the picture looks like? A massive disembodied head floating in a sea of red? Can artists not just paint a normal picture anymore?
I guess the problem is that a lot of artists can't draw, and at the other end, hyperrealism is just a labour-intensive way of reproducing a photograph. Anyway, this is what Yeo does, paint heads on backgrounds. The alternative would be to draw in the King's suit (as in his famous Blair portrait with the red poppy) so it's swings and roundabouts. What I'm not a fan of is the fake-looking anatomical style of Lucien Freud.
It was shit, all red with Charlie's big baw face and a hand sticking out.
Give Malc the art column in the guardian please.
As long as it doesn’t affect his editorship of Pseud’s Corner.
In collaboration with Doosan Enerbility and Daewoo E&C, KHNP is competing with EDF, a French government-owned electric utility company, to win the 30 trillion won ($22 billion) project...
Can anyone explain ?
The Koreans just finished building one out here in the sandpit. 4x1345MW, $24.4bn, 13 years from breaking ground to reactor #4 being commissioned.
They’re good at this stuff, and the UK should have bought their tech rather than - again - trying to re-invent the wheel.
Yes, the article references their completed projects - but this is even more striking, given that it's a European contract (with possibly stricter planning terms ? ) at today's prices.
We have seriously lost our way in terms of getting stuff built, whether it's housing, railways or nuclear power stations.
Does Korea have the potential for judicial review in their law to the extent that we do on large infrastructure ?
This was an interesting piece on the linkage between re-wilding and climate change. I don't know abut the figures they claim, but the reasoning seems plausible.
"Bison influence grassland and forest ecosystems by grazing grasslands evenly, recycling nutrients to fertilise the soil and all of its life, dispersing seeds to enrich the ecosystem, and compacting the soil to prevent stored carbon from being released. These creatures evolved for millions of years with grassland and forest ecosystems, and their removal, especially where grasslands have been ploughed up, has led to the release of vast amounts of carbon..." So reverting the land to grazing by sheep would presumably have the claimed effect but without the rewilding fairydust sugar sprinkles?
Also bison are bovids and therefore methane farters
Jonathan Jones in the Guardian has a brilliantly negative 1* review.
I cannot stand Jonathan Jones. A real-life Toast Of London caricature, only worse.
Whereas someone like Meades I often disagree with, but am entertained by, Jones is a windbag who never grew out being the biggest smartarse in the lower sixth.
I find Jones quite entertaining and I think he has valid and well considered views on art, to the extent that I am qualified to judge, but I imagine he might be a bit of an arse IRL.
Starmers six pledges are horribly bland and minor. Probably the right call though for election purposes, just have to have fingers crossed they understand the job much better than this:
Sticking to tough spending rules in order to deliver economic stability
Cutting NHS waiting lists by providing 40,000 more appointments each week - funded by tackling tax avoidance and non-dom loopholes
Launching a border security command to stop the gangs arranging small boat crossings
Setting up Great British Energy, a publicly owned clean power energy company
Providing more neighbourhood police officers to reduce antisocial behaviour and introduced new penalties for offenders
Recruiting 6,500 teachers, paid for through ending tax breaks for private schools.
Nothing on housing. Which was the only interesting policy they had.
Tbf they have an election to win, and lots of ways of losing it. Pat McFadden, who is a very safe pair of hands, was struggling this morning even to flesh out the meaning and delivery of these bland proposals in a way that wouldn't lead to the next set of challenges. All interesting policies cost money. The next government starts with minus £2.1 trillion in the sock under the bed.
On another topic, for the BBC news website the top story in all the world this morning is some plumber putting misleading material on social media. This is deranged.
I probably sound like a broken record on here but this is exactly the issue with BBC News now. Farcical priorities, editorialising, celebrity-obsessed, cross-promoting.
It saddens me how it has gone downhill so rapidly.
It's a 'BBC investigation', you see, so must get top billing.
Slightly embarrassing, also, given the previous fawning BBC reports on the guy.
Not that much of an investigation, when they're just repeating what other people have been pointing out for years. Only they got labelled as trolls for their trouble...
Are there actually any new revelations in what the BBC are saying?
In collaboration with Doosan Enerbility and Daewoo E&C, KHNP is competing with EDF, a French government-owned electric utility company, to win the 30 trillion won ($22 billion) project...
Can anyone explain ?
The Koreans just finished building one out here in the sandpit. 4x1345MW, $24.4bn, 13 years from breaking ground to reactor #4 being commissioned.
They’re good at this stuff, and the UK should have bought their tech rather than - again - trying to re-invent the wheel.
Yes, the article references their completed projects - but this is even more striking, given that it's a European contract (with possibly stricter planning terms ? ) at today's prices.
We have seriously lost our way in terms of getting stuff built, whether it's housing, railways or nuclear power stations.
Oh absolutely. One can understand why the planning stages can be more difficult in somewhere like the UK, it’s a small island and there aren’t many vast empty spaces where you can plonk down a nuclear power plant or a railway line without annoying people, but the process for major projects really needs to be streamlined considerably.
I suspect that the answer is to give Parliament the authority over local planning committees and judicial reviews, for projects of national importance, but also to increase compensation to those affected, eg paying 150% of the value of property to be compulsorily purchased. Yes it can be seen as undemocratic by objectors, but if you’re going to run your national infrastructure projects to the agenda of activist groups looking for greater crested newts then nothing’s ever going to get built.
For how long now have we been talking about HS2, Heathrow’s new runway, Stonehenge Tunnel, Brynglas tunnels, Hinkley C, and so many more major projects? All of these should have been completed at least a decade ago, if not two, and the inertia will be causing economic damage and foregone growth.
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
Biden wants them out of the way now, rather than in October as they usually do, and they both want to avoid RFK Jr and a libertarian getting on the stage with them.
Yes it’s silly to do it in June, the party conventions haven’t even happened yet!
Yes. Early debates are in both candidates interests.
For Trump it gives him a chance to shift the narrative away from his court cases.
For Biden it creates a chance to contrast his greater mental ability with Trump's deterioration, to challenge the narrative that age is more of an issue for Biden than it is for Trump. Plus, it spreads out the campaign commitments over a longer period of time because age is an issue for Biden.
Is that really what the picture looks like? A massive disembodied head floating in a sea of red? Can artists not just paint a normal picture anymore?
See Sky's Portrait and Landscape Artist of the Year programmes. Yes, you can paint a perfectly well executed piece of art, but no, you will not beat someone who produces something 'challenging', such as painting the King in red on a red background, so that it looks ridiculous. Usually helps that the judges are the kind of idiots who thought Tracy Emin's unmade bed was great art. They usually contort themselves to find ways that rubbish art has a hidden message (but not hidden from the learned judges, who are enlightended).
My favourite was an artist who left large sections of the canvass blank (they only have 4 hours) and this was turned into a great idea of leaving things for the viewer to interpret (or some other guff). Reality - the artist hadn't painted fast enough...
Not much of a fan of the new portrait (it's about as challenging as AI 'art'), but it's a fckload better than the last outing which would embarass a 5th former.
TBF the latter job wasn't given so much space in the Royal diary. So some excuse there.
'The artist had just two weeks to complete the project, and while His Majesty did not sit for the portrait, Alastair was able to study him at work at a Buckingham Palace reception on 17 February held in support of global biodiversity, working from his photographs and sketches of the occasion.'
Is that really what the picture looks like? A massive disembodied head floating in a sea of red? Can artists not just paint a normal picture anymore?
See Sky's Portrait and Landscape Artist of the Year programmes. Yes, you can paint a perfectly well executed piece of art, but no, you will not beat someone who produces something 'challenging', such as painting the King in red on a red background, so that it looks ridiculous. Usually helps that the judges are the kind of idiots who thought Tracy Emin's unmade bed was great art. They usually contort themselves to find ways that rubbish art has a hidden message (but not hidden from the learned judges, who are enlightended).
My favourite was an artist who left large sections of the canvass blank (they only have 4 hours) and this was turned into a great idea of leaving things for the viewer to interpret (or some other guff). Reality - the artist hadn't painted fast enough...
Not much of a fan of the new portrait (it's about as challenging as AI 'art'), but it's a fckload better than the last outing which would embarass a 5th former.
Yes. Early debates are in both candidates interests.
For Trump it gives him a chance to shift the narrative away from his court cases.
For Biden it creates a chance to contrast his greater mental ability with Trump's deterioration, to challenge the narrative that age is more of an issue for Biden than it is for Trump. Plus, it spreads out the campaign commitments over a longer period of time because age is an issue for Biden.
Might be the only debate we get if it goes badly for one of them.
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
I think it's actually a genius move by the government to boost real reduced carbon heating solutions.
Public info campaigns: "Buy a heat pump or we'll pump hydrogen into your homes", combined with some Hindenburg imagery
Interesting thread on new challenges facing Macron:
Just as @EmmanuelMacron hoped to turn French eyes and ears towards his economic achievements and away from a constant right-wing drumbeat on violence and insecurity, two events – one of them 10,000 miles away – have driven all positive news from the headlines. 1/
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
...and a much higher hydrogen leakage value. Which then explodes.
Reasons for not using hydrogen are:
Hydrogen is just greenwashed coal: it takes more energy to produce than it releases.
It leaks like a bastard.
It is worse than all the other alternatives.
So it's expensive to make, impossible to store, dangerous to transport and pointless. It has a large red flashing sign over it saying "THIS IS A MASSIVE ERROR". It is Blackadder levels of wrong. It's not just wrong it's stupidly wrong. I could do a Baldrick impersonation whilst saying "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong..." but I think my view is clear at this point.
Is that really what the picture looks like? A massive disembodied head floating in a sea of red? Can artists not just paint a normal picture anymore?
I guess the problem is that a lot of artists can't draw, and at the other end, hyperrealism is just a labour-intensive way of reproducing a photograph. Anyway, this is what Yeo does, paint heads on backgrounds. The alternative would be to draw in the King's suit (as in his famous Blair portrait with the red poppy) so it's swings and roundabouts. What I'm not a fan of is the fake-looking anatomical style of Lucien Freud.
It was shit, all red with Charlie's big baw face and a hand sticking out.
Be fair, he was on fire. The artist had to work quick to capture the moment.
The artist could have been more subversive by painting in a box of matches and making the background recognisably Windsor Castle
In collaboration with Doosan Enerbility and Daewoo E&C, KHNP is competing with EDF, a French government-owned electric utility company, to win the 30 trillion won ($22 billion) project...
Can anyone explain ?
The Koreans just finished building one out here in the sandpit. 4x1345MW, $24.4bn, 13 years from breaking ground to reactor #4 being commissioned.
They’re good at this stuff, and the UK should have bought their tech rather than - again - trying to re-invent the wheel.
Yes, the article references their completed projects - but this is even more striking, given that it's a European contract (with possibly stricter planning terms ? ) at today's prices.
We have seriously lost our way in terms of getting stuff built, whether it's housing, railways or nuclear power stations.
Oh absolutely. One can understand why the planning stages can be more difficult in somewhere like the UK, it’s a small island and there aren’t many vast empty spaces where you can plonk down a nuclear power plant or a railway line without annoying people, but the process for major projects really needs to be streamlined considerably.
I suspect that the answer is to give Parliament the authority over local planning committees and judicial reviews, for projects of national importance, but also to increase compensation to those affected, eg paying 150% of the value of property to be compulsorily purchased. Yes it can be seen as undemocratic by objectors, but if you’re going to run your national infrastructure projects to the agenda of activist groups looking for greater crested newts then nothing’s ever going to get built.
For how long now have we been talking about HS2, Heathrow’s new runway, Stonehenge Tunnel, Brynglas tunnels, Hinkley C, and so many more major projects? All of these should have been completed at least a decade ago, if not two, and the inertia will be causing economic damage and foregone growth.
Wasn't something like that done in the early 90s, in the wake of the Sizewell B inquiry taking an unacceptably-long 3 years? Certainly things seemed to work okay in the late 90s and 2000s - Jubile Line Extension, HS1, Olympics, etc.
Starmers six pledges are horribly bland and minor. Probably the right call though for election purposes, just have to have fingers crossed they understand the job much better than this:
Sticking to tough spending rules in order to deliver economic stability
Cutting NHS waiting lists by providing 40,000 more appointments each week - funded by tackling tax avoidance and non-dom loopholes
Launching a border security command to stop the gangs arranging small boat crossings
Setting up Great British Energy, a publicly owned clean power energy company
Providing more neighbourhood police officers to reduce antisocial behaviour and introduced new penalties for offenders
Recruiting 6,500 teachers, paid for through ending tax breaks for private schools.
Nothing on housing. Which was the only interesting policy they had.
That'd mean admitting the SNP got it right, and actually adopting SNP policies, which is a huge no-no in Labour circles up here in Scotland.
But tbf they have to save some goodies for later, anyway.
I suspect it’s more about not giving something for Tories to wave in NIMBY faces on the doorstep.
If anyone waves in Nimby faces it is the LDs
Come off it, young HY!!! You Tories fought the last election or two or three under the slogan Take Back Control... And now you you sneer at people who want some measure of control over what happens in their own locality.
And there was a time when you Tories spent almost all your time talking about "localism"... Of course, it suited you do do so back then.
Now all the Conservative Party stands for is trampling all over the people of this country, ripping us off on an industrial scale and making sure that the fat cats get even fatter.
O/T but interesting piece on how it's possible to build cycle paths cheaply if one knows how to use the planning system and has lots of free labour (especially for @MattW ):
Obvious issues about it really only working out in the sticks rather than the urban jungle, but Shepton M is not that small a place.
And the emphasis of the article is on cycling (despite the notice in onw photo!).
Interesting. There is an awful lot of difficulty with landowners, including Network Rail who sit on land that would be perfect for cycle lanes (and indeed trams), even when there is plenty of funding available.
There is also a tension with the provision of off-road cycle networks in lieu of ones alongside roads. Women, in particular, do not like cycling along them in the dark, and the one factor that has a discernible effect on cycling rates is hours of daylight (often wrongly ascribed to the weather). Thus, adding good lighting is essential but massively increases costs and maintenance.
"including Network Rail who sit on land that would be perfect for cycle lanes"
Do you have examples? I can understand BRB (Residuals) / HA Historical Railways Estate having such land, but what are the NR examples?
Tracks alongside exiting railway lines are frequently used for access by workers, and probably would not be either safe or accessible to the public.
My personal example is a closed freight line in Edinburgh. It's been in the council's plan for cycling for at least 6 years but apparently Network Rail are yet to provide a price for the purchase (and they have form for these kind of delays elsewhere, I'm told).
If it takes that long to provide a quote for a disused stretch of land for a cycle lane in the middle of the capital, you start to understand why nuclear energy takes such a long time!
Which line? It might be wanted for reinstatement as a rail link?
Powderhall.
Thanks. The remnant branch line from the main line at Piershill to the [edit] closed cooncil rubbish compaction depot where the greyhound stadium used to be. Not obviously in demand, esp as they have the south side railway as a diversion route thro' central Edin.
Interesting thread on new challenges facing Macron:
Just as @EmmanuelMacron hoped to turn French eyes and ears towards his economic achievements and away from a constant right-wing drumbeat on violence and insecurity, two events – one of them 10,000 miles away – have driven all positive news from the headlines. 1/
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
I think it's actually a genius move by the government to boost real reduced carbon heating solutions.
Public info campaigns: "Buy a heat pump or we'll pump hydrogen into your homes", combined with some Hindenburg imagery
As we live in the sticks (actually just on the edge of a Wiltshire town with population 18000, but hey its Wiltshire) our heating is via oil. As my parents are the same it seems totally natural. We are currently having a large extension built. The original plan had been to build over the existing kitchen, but the footings were not good enough. The new section is vastly better insulated and built than our 1970's core house. Proper two rows of blocks with a decent gap filled with celotex insulation AND an air gap. I suspect if the whole house was the same we would easily cope with an air source heat pump without modifying the pipes and radiators, but I am not convinced that the 1970's section would cope. It has no insulation and upstairs is a single row of blocks, with wood cladding. I think this is one of the issues with air source - many properties may need a lot of work done.
I have heard of combination oil/air source boilers to try to help in rural areas, but to be honest I'd rather just have the oil boiler.
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
...and a much higher hydrogen leakage value. Which then explodes.
Reasons for not using hydrogen are:
Hydrogen is just greenwashed coal: it takes more energy to produce than it releases.
It leaks like a bastard.
It is worse than all the other alternatives.
So it's expensive to make, impossible to store, dangerous to transport and pointless. It has a large red flashing sign over it saying "THIS IS A MASSIVE ERROR". It is Blackadder levels of wrong. It's not just wrong it's stupidly wrong. I could do a Baldrick impersonation whilst saying "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong..." but I think my view is clear at this point.
You need it to get to a certain concentration for it to explode, though, surely? And with it being so leaky that's going to be hard to achieve - no-one encloses their boiler that well.
But I don't disagree that domestic hydrogen's a dead end given the continuing development of heat pumps - as you say, there's still no economic source for the volume needed.
It'd be better to just set a date now for switching off gas altogether rather than stringing it out with the promise of a hydrogen transition that will probably never happen.
"Under CNN network rules, a candidate must be on enough state ballots to win an Electoral College majority and score 15 percent in at least four major national polls."
Will RFK Jnr qualify ?
I quite like this CNN rule and when the equivalent UK General Election debates come up I think something similar should be introduced. Whilst some may disagree, I didn't want to see Nicola Sturgeon and Leanne Woods on a main UK GE debate when it was not possible their party could win a majority (I know, I know, they could've formed a coalition). I'd have applied something like:
[AND: Must - Stand in at least 326 seats;] [AND: Have 1 MP at dissolution OR: Have polled 10% at the previous General Election]
At the moment, that would mean Labour, Conservatives meet all three, LD, Greens and Reform meet 1 and 2 (And therefore appear).
Workers Party reckon they will stand in well over that number of seats so will be on George will make mincemeat of the other leaders could be very bad for Labour. They will definitely want to exclude him so will probably need to exclude Reform and Green unless they tweek the rules.
They will want to find a rule that allows them to exclude the Workers Party but include the Reform Party.
Unlikely they will be able to achieve that tbh, Workers have an elected MP, Reform have a defector, they'll both stand in a majority of seats and neither existed at the last GE (or BXP got 2% if we include that). So any stitch up to get Tice on screen and deny Galloway would probably backfire and add votes to the Workers tally. It will be probably a head to head and a mass participation including LDs, Green, SNP or PC (one in each country), Reform and Workers (and in Scotland Alba if they stand in most seats)
A rule about polling, which is what the US broadcasters use, would work. Reform UK poll well. The Workers Party is nowhere in polling. Ditto Alba: they poll better than the Workers Party, but still tiny numbers.
I am also doubtful about the Workers Party's boasts about how many candidates they will stand. Galloway is too toxic. He's not successfully pulled together a broader coalition of various individuals and bodies. Where does the money come from to pay all those deposits, that are going to be lost?
Is that really what the picture looks like? A massive disembodied head floating in a sea of red? Can artists not just paint a normal picture anymore?
See Sky's Portrait and Landscape Artist of the Year programmes. Yes, you can paint a perfectly well executed piece of art, but no, you will not beat someone who produces something 'challenging', such as painting the King in red on a red background, so that it looks ridiculous. Usually helps that the judges are the kind of idiots who thought Tracy Emin's unmade bed was great art. They usually contort themselves to find ways that rubbish art has a hidden message (but not hidden from the learned judges, who are enlightended).
My favourite was an artist who left large sections of the canvass blank (they only have 4 hours) and this was turned into a great idea of leaving things for the viewer to interpret (or some other guff). Reality - the artist hadn't painted fast enough...
Someone on here a while ago talked about contemporary classical music having lost its way and, while I was listening to RTÉ Lyric (home to all the classical music you've already listened to) it occurred to me that there was plenty of good contemporary classical music - it's all been written for film soundtracks..
Not entirely - though it's certainly true that composers need to make a living, so they go where the money is.
If you listen to R3, you do come across some pretty good contemporary classical alongside the unlistenable stuff.
But the good stuff will last - look at the older generation, for example Arvo Pärt, or Steve Reich.
"Under CNN network rules, a candidate must be on enough state ballots to win an Electoral College majority and score 15 percent in at least four major national polls."
Will RFK Jnr qualify ?
I quite like this CNN rule and when the equivalent UK General Election debates come up I think something similar should be introduced. Whilst some may disagree, I didn't want to see Nicola Sturgeon and Leanne Woods on a main UK GE debate when it was not possible their party could win a majority (I know, I know, they could've formed a coalition). I'd have applied something like:
[AND: Must - Stand in at least 326 seats;] [AND: Have 1 MP at dissolution OR: Have polled 10% at the previous General Election]
At the moment, that would mean Labour, Conservatives meet all three, LD, Greens and Reform meet 1 and 2 (And therefore appear).
We have a parliamentary general election and we won't be having a Presidential election like the US. So prior seats won not current polls rating is key.
You therefore couldn't exclude Swinney as leader of the third largest party at Westminster from any debate beyond a straight Sunak v Starmer head to head even if I am no SNP fan
Why does a Parliamentary vs Presidential system make polling less relevant? You can poll for Parliamentary elections. We do poll for Parliamentary elections.
Is that really what the picture looks like? A massive disembodied head floating in a sea of red? Can artists not just paint a normal picture anymore?
See Sky's Portrait and Landscape Artist of the Year programmes. Yes, you can paint a perfectly well executed piece of art, but no, you will not beat someone who produces something 'challenging', such as painting the King in red on a red background, so that it looks ridiculous. Usually helps that the judges are the kind of idiots who thought Tracy Emin's unmade bed was great art. They usually contort themselves to find ways that rubbish art has a hidden message (but not hidden from the learned judges, who are enlightended).
My favourite was an artist who left large sections of the canvass blank (they only have 4 hours) and this was turned into a great idea of leaving things for the viewer to interpret (or some other guff). Reality - the artist hadn't painted fast enough...
Someone on here a while ago talked about contemporary classical music having lost its way and, while I was listening to RTÉ Lyric (home to all the classical music you've already listened to) it occurred to me that there was plenty of good contemporary classical music - it's all been written for film soundtracks. I reasoned the difference was that there was still a purpose for film soundtrack music, and so the music has to achieve an objective, and that subjected it to a discipline that meant that some of it would be good. And that doesn't apply to what passes for contemporary classical music. Hardly anyone listens to it, so it doesn't matter if it's shite.
The same is probably true for painted portraits. They no longer have a purpose - the previous purpose of portraits now being filled by photography - and so it doesn't matter if they're shite. So they end up being shite.
This was an interesting piece on the linkage between re-wilding and climate change. I don't know abut the figures they claim, but the reasoning seems plausible.
"Bison influence grassland and forest ecosystems by grazing grasslands evenly, recycling nutrients to fertilise the soil and all of its life, dispersing seeds to enrich the ecosystem, and compacting the soil to prevent stored carbon from being released. These creatures evolved for millions of years with grassland and forest ecosystems, and their removal, especially where grasslands have been ploughed up, has led to the release of vast amounts of carbon..." So reverting the land to grazing by sheep would presumably have the claimed effect but without the rewilding fairydust sugar sprinkles?
Also bison are bovids and therefore methane farters
Starmers six pledges are horribly bland and minor. Probably the right call though for election purposes, just have to have fingers crossed they understand the job much better than this:
Sticking to tough spending rules in order to deliver economic stability
Cutting NHS waiting lists by providing 40,000 more appointments each week - funded by tackling tax avoidance and non-dom loopholes
Launching a border security command to stop the gangs arranging small boat crossings
Setting up Great British Energy, a publicly owned clean power energy company
Providing more neighbourhood police officers to reduce antisocial behaviour and introduced new penalties for offenders
Recruiting 6,500 teachers, paid for through ending tax breaks for private schools.
Nothing on housing. Which was the only interesting policy they had.
That'd mean admitting the SNP got it right, and actually adopting SNP policies, which is a huge no-no in Labour circles up here in Scotland.
But tbf they have to save some goodies for later, anyway.
I suspect it’s more about not giving something for Tories to wave in NIMBY faces on the doorstep.
If anyone waves in Nimby faces it is the LDs
Come off it, young HY!!! You Tories fought the last election or two or three under the slogan Take Back Control... And now you you sneer at people who want some measure of control over what happens in their own locality.
And there was a time when you Tories spent almost all your time talking about "localism"... Of course, it suited you do do so back then.
Now all the Conservative Party stands for is trampling all over the people of this country, ripping us off on an industrial scale and making sure that the fat cats get even fatter.
You might at least try being consistent.
They've been consistently taking the piss for at least a decade ?
"Under CNN network rules, a candidate must be on enough state ballots to win an Electoral College majority and score 15 percent in at least four major national polls."
Will RFK Jnr qualify ?
I quite like this CNN rule and when the equivalent UK General Election debates come up I think something similar should be introduced. Whilst some may disagree, I didn't want to see Nicola Sturgeon and Leanne Woods on a main UK GE debate when it was not possible their party could win a majority (I know, I know, they could've formed a coalition). I'd have applied something like:
[AND: Must - Stand in at least 326 seats;] [AND: Have 1 MP at dissolution OR: Have polled 10% at the previous General Election]
At the moment, that would mean Labour, Conservatives meet all three, LD, Greens and Reform meet 1 and 2 (And therefore appear).
We have a parliamentary general election and we won't be having a Presidential election like the US. So prior seats won not current polls rating is key.
You therefore couldn't exclude Swinney as leader of the third largest party at Westminster from any debate beyond a straight Sunak v Starmer head to head even if I am no SNP fan
Why does a Parliamentary vs Presidential system make polling less relevant? You can poll for Parliamentary elections. We do poll for Parliamentary elections.
I think he's worried that the Tories won't get to take part in the debate, the way their polling is going.
I've just done a YouGov poll including questions on the London mayoral and assembly vote... you know, the vote we've already had! So, the questions asked how I had voted. Is this YouGov trying to work out what happened with their polling?
This was an interesting piece on the linkage between re-wilding and climate change. I don't know abut the figures they claim, but the reasoning seems plausible.
"Bison influence grassland and forest ecosystems by grazing grasslands evenly, recycling nutrients to fertilise the soil and all of its life, dispersing seeds to enrich the ecosystem, and compacting the soil to prevent stored carbon from being released. These creatures evolved for millions of years with grassland and forest ecosystems, and their removal, especially where grasslands have been ploughed up, has led to the release of vast amounts of carbon..." So reverting the land to grazing by sheep would presumably have the claimed effect but without the rewilding fairydust sugar sprinkles?
Also bison are bovids and therefore methane farters
This was an interesting piece on the linkage between re-wilding and climate change. I don't know abut the figures they claim, but the reasoning seems plausible.
"Bison influence grassland and forest ecosystems by grazing grasslands evenly, recycling nutrients to fertilise the soil and all of its life, dispersing seeds to enrich the ecosystem, and compacting the soil to prevent stored carbon from being released. These creatures evolved for millions of years with grassland and forest ecosystems, and their removal, especially where grasslands have been ploughed up, has led to the release of vast amounts of carbon..." So reverting the land to grazing by sheep would presumably have the claimed effect but without the rewilding fairydust sugar sprinkles?
Also bison are bovids and therefore methane farters
This was an interesting piece on the linkage between re-wilding and climate change. I don't know abut the figures they claim, but the reasoning seems plausible.
"Bison influence grassland and forest ecosystems by grazing grasslands evenly, recycling nutrients to fertilise the soil and all of its life, dispersing seeds to enrich the ecosystem, and compacting the soil to prevent stored carbon from being released. These creatures evolved for millions of years with grassland and forest ecosystems, and their removal, especially where grasslands have been ploughed up, has led to the release of vast amounts of carbon..." So reverting the land to grazing by sheep would presumably have the claimed effect but without the rewilding fairydust sugar sprinkles?
Also bison are bovids and therefore methane farters
In collaboration with Doosan Enerbility and Daewoo E&C, KHNP is competing with EDF, a French government-owned electric utility company, to win the 30 trillion won ($22 billion) project...
Can anyone explain ?
The Koreans just finished building one out here in the sandpit. 4x1345MW, $24.4bn, 13 years from breaking ground to reactor #4 being commissioned.
They’re good at this stuff, and the UK should have bought their tech rather than - again - trying to re-invent the wheel.
Yes, the article references their completed projects - but this is even more striking, given that it's a European contract (with possibly stricter planning terms ? ) at today's prices.
We have seriously lost our way in terms of getting stuff built, whether it's housing, railways or nuclear power stations.
Oh absolutely. One can understand why the planning stages can be more difficult in somewhere like the UK, it’s a small island and there aren’t many vast empty spaces where you can plonk down a nuclear power plant or a railway line without annoying people, but the process for major projects really needs to be streamlined considerably.
I suspect that the answer is to give Parliament the authority over local planning committees and judicial reviews, for projects of national importance, but also to increase compensation to those affected, eg paying 150% of the value of property to be compulsorily purchased. Yes it can be seen as undemocratic by objectors, but if you’re going to run your national infrastructure projects to the agenda of activist groups looking for greater crested newts then nothing’s ever going to get built.
For how long now have we been talking about HS2, Heathrow’s new runway, Stonehenge Tunnel, Brynglas tunnels, Hinkley C, and so many more major projects? All of these should have been completed at least a decade ago, if not two, and the inertia will be causing economic damage and foregone growth.
Apparently, Hinkley C is not just a copy of the french design - because it has to be adapted to British nuclear regulations:
"He said that 70% of equipment had now been delivered for unit 1, and "many risks are behind us, like the unique British instrument and control system which has been designed and manufactured, with testing under way". He added: "We had to substantially adapt the EPR design to satisfy British regulations, requiring 7000 changes, adding 35% more steel and 25% more concrete. This adaptation and approval process is the same for other developers bringing new designs into Britain."
"Under CNN network rules, a candidate must be on enough state ballots to win an Electoral College majority and score 15 percent in at least four major national polls."
Will RFK Jnr qualify ?
I quite like this CNN rule and when the equivalent UK General Election debates come up I think something similar should be introduced. Whilst some may disagree, I didn't want to see Nicola Sturgeon and Leanne Woods on a main UK GE debate when it was not possible their party could win a majority (I know, I know, they could've formed a coalition). I'd have applied something like:
[AND: Must - Stand in at least 326 seats;] [AND: Have 1 MP at dissolution OR: Have polled 10% at the previous General Election]
At the moment, that would mean Labour, Conservatives meet all three, LD, Greens and Reform meet 1 and 2 (And therefore appear).
Workers Party reckon they will stand in well over that number of seats so will be on George will make mincemeat of the other leaders could be very bad for Labour. They will definitely want to exclude him so will probably need to exclude Reform and Green unless they tweek the rules.
They will want to find a rule that allows them to exclude the Workers Party but include the Reform Party.
Unlikely they will be able to achieve that tbh, Workers have an elected MP, Reform have a defector, they'll both stand in a majority of seats and neither existed at the last GE (or BXP got 2% if we include that). So any stitch up to get Tice on screen and deny Galloway would probably backfire and add votes to the Workers tally. It will be probably a head to head and a mass participation including LDs, Green, SNP or PC (one in each country), Reform and Workers (and in Scotland Alba if they stand in most seats)
A rule about polling, which is what the US broadcasters use, would work. Reform UK poll well. The Workers Party is nowhere in polling. Ditto Alba: they poll better than the Workers Party, but still tiny numbers.
I am also doubtful about the Workers Party's boasts about how many candidates they will stand. Galloway is too toxic. He's not successfully pulled together a broader coalition of various individuals and bodies. Where does the money come from to pay all those deposits, that are going to be lost?
Workers are crowdfunding to try and raise £100k towards deposits AFAIK. They have about 160 candidates announced thus far. I expect them to stand in over 500 seats. I mean I know Galloway is highly controversial but their performances in the locals where they did stand far exceeded Reform where they did (about 2.5 x as many votes per candidate) and they won more councillors. In the PCCs Reform got 14 and 15% of course, the one Workers PCC candidate got 8%. If they stand in over half seats and with an elected MP I dont see any justification on shutting them out and including Reform. Its too much 'dont like Galloway so shut him up'. Democracy shouldn't work like that. If they fail to stand in half the seats then fair enough.
I've just done a YouGov poll including questions on the London mayoral and assembly vote... you know, the vote we've already had! So, the questions asked how I had voted. Is this YouGov trying to work out what happened with their polling?
I think YouGov do this after every election as a way to calibrate their panel, and they'll also be able to see who changes their answer on past vote over time.
I've just done a YouGov poll including questions on the London mayoral and assembly vote... you know, the vote we've already had! So, the questions asked how I had voted. Is this YouGov trying to work out what happened with their polling?
They said they would be looking at London as they were well out.
In collaboration with Doosan Enerbility and Daewoo E&C, KHNP is competing with EDF, a French government-owned electric utility company, to win the 30 trillion won ($22 billion) project...
Can anyone explain ?
The Koreans just finished building one out here in the sandpit. 4x1345MW, $24.4bn, 13 years from breaking ground to reactor #4 being commissioned.
They’re good at this stuff, and the UK should have bought their tech rather than - again - trying to re-invent the wheel.
Yes, the article references their completed projects - but this is even more striking, given that it's a European contract (with possibly stricter planning terms ? ) at today's prices.
We have seriously lost our way in terms of getting stuff built, whether it's housing, railways or nuclear power stations.
Oh absolutely. One can understand why the planning stages can be more difficult in somewhere like the UK, it’s a small island and there aren’t many vast empty spaces where you can plonk down a nuclear power plant or a railway line without annoying people, but the process for major projects really needs to be streamlined considerably.
I suspect that the answer is to give Parliament the authority over local planning committees and judicial reviews, for projects of national importance, but also to increase compensation to those affected, eg paying 150% of the value of property to be compulsorily purchased. Yes it can be seen as undemocratic by objectors, but if you’re going to run your national infrastructure projects to the agenda of activist groups looking for greater crested newts then nothing’s ever going to get built.
For how long now have we been talking about HS2, Heathrow’s new runway, Stonehenge Tunnel, Brynglas tunnels, Hinkley C, and so many more major projects? All of these should have been completed at least a decade ago, if not two, and the inertia will be causing economic damage and foregone growth.
Wasn't something like that done in the early 90s, in the wake of the Sizewell B inquiry taking an unacceptably-long 3 years? Certainly things seemed to work okay in the late 90s and 2000s - Jubile Line Extension, HS1, Olympics, etc.
What's changed since then?
The advantage of the Olympics, and related projects, was that there was an absolute deadline that was never going to change, and everyone knew this several years out. There was also a lot of legislation which IIRC replaced much of the usual planning process.
It’s also easy to go back and think things were better because they eventually happened. What we now know as the Elizabeth Line was 15 years from approval to opening. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail The new Wembley stadium was also years late and nearly bankrupted the contractor.
This was an interesting piece on the linkage between re-wilding and climate change. I don't know abut the figures they claim, but the reasoning seems plausible.
"Bison influence grassland and forest ecosystems by grazing grasslands evenly, recycling nutrients to fertilise the soil and all of its life, dispersing seeds to enrich the ecosystem, and compacting the soil to prevent stored carbon from being released. These creatures evolved for millions of years with grassland and forest ecosystems, and their removal, especially where grasslands have been ploughed up, has led to the release of vast amounts of carbon..." So reverting the land to grazing by sheep would presumably have the claimed effect but without the rewilding fairydust sugar sprinkles?
Also bison are bovids and therefore methane farters
Would rhinos be better? They fart less. Or kangaroos? My vote is for kangaroos.
On the subject of Kangaroos, well adjacent, I stumbled across a three part doc on iPlayer last night called “The Australian Wars” about the fighting between British colonists and Aborigines/Aboriginals/Original Owners (just so nobody gets miffed about the terminology they use all words themselves in the documentary).
I knew some bad stuff was done but it’s frankly grim what the colonists did, along with “Native Police” in certain areas. Brutally, almost Nazi in the retaliation, nasty and the numbers, even if you reduce the figures in the doc for an element of bias from those in the programme who state them are terrible. It was a massive eye opener and I almost became woke watching it.
Was v weird though watching the interviewees who represented various tribes who all looked as if they were your average white man or woman on Worcester high St. Interesting how some people cling to a small part of their heritage hundreds of years since an ancestor was that heritage - same with people like Joe Biden thinking they are Irish - and it’s their “identity”.
Anyway, well worth a watch to have three hours of being disgusted at being British, remembering that the people who did its ancestors are today’s Aussies so feeling better about being British again and remembering that about three colonists were also killed so it’s sort of justifiable.
In collaboration with Doosan Enerbility and Daewoo E&C, KHNP is competing with EDF, a French government-owned electric utility company, to win the 30 trillion won ($22 billion) project...
Can anyone explain ?
The Koreans just finished building one out here in the sandpit. 4x1345MW, $24.4bn, 13 years from breaking ground to reactor #4 being commissioned.
They’re good at this stuff, and the UK should have bought their tech rather than - again - trying to re-invent the wheel.
Yes, the article references their completed projects - but this is even more striking, given that it's a European contract (with possibly stricter planning terms ? ) at today's prices.
We have seriously lost our way in terms of getting stuff built, whether it's housing, railways or nuclear power stations.
Oh absolutely. One can understand why the planning stages can be more difficult in somewhere like the UK, it’s a small island and there aren’t many vast empty spaces where you can plonk down a nuclear power plant or a railway line without annoying people, but the process for major projects really needs to be streamlined considerably.
I suspect that the answer is to give Parliament the authority over local planning committees and judicial reviews, for projects of national importance, but also to increase compensation to those affected, eg paying 150% of the value of property to be compulsorily purchased. Yes it can be seen as undemocratic by objectors, but if you’re going to run your national infrastructure projects to the agenda of activist groups looking for greater crested newts then nothing’s ever going to get built.
For how long now have we been talking about HS2, Heathrow’s new runway, Stonehenge Tunnel, Brynglas tunnels, Hinkley C, and so many more major projects? All of these should have been completed at least a decade ago, if not two, and the inertia will be causing economic damage and foregone growth.
Apparently, Hinkley C is not just a copy of the french design - because it has to be adapted to British nuclear regulations:
"He said that 70% of equipment had now been delivered for unit 1, and "many risks are behind us, like the unique British instrument and control system which has been designed and manufactured, with testing under way". He added: "We had to substantially adapt the EPR design to satisfy British regulations, requiring 7000 changes, adding 35% more steel and 25% more concrete. This adaptation and approval process is the same for other developers bringing new designs into Britain."
Ah, so another huge dose of the usual British regulatory gold plating.
I’m going to take a wild guess that the French, the Koreans, the Emiratis and many more countries also don’t want a nuclear accident, but for some reason a British reactor needs 35% more steel and 25% more concrete than a French reactor.
One might understand if there were specific environmental reasons, such as earthquake or tsunami risk, but there aren’t and it’s just adding cost for the sake of it.
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
...and a much higher hydrogen leakage value. Which then explodes.
Reasons for not using hydrogen are:
Hydrogen is just greenwashed coal: it takes more energy to produce than it releases.
It leaks like a bastard.
It is worse than all the other alternatives.
So it's expensive to make, impossible to store, dangerous to transport and pointless. It has a large red flashing sign over it saying "THIS IS A MASSIVE ERROR". It is Blackadder levels of wrong. It's not just wrong it's stupidly wrong. I could do a Baldrick impersonation whilst saying "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong..." but I think my view is clear at this point.
You need it to get to a certain concentration for it to explode, though, surely? And with it being so leaky that's going to be hard to achieve - no-one encloses their boiler that well.
But I don't disagree that domestic hydrogen's a dead end given the continuing development of heat pumps - as you say, there's still no economic source for the volume needed.
It'd be better to just set a date now for switching off gas altogether rather than stringing it out with the promise of a hydrogen transition that will probably never happen.
I would like to see the writeup for "the environment is so leaky that leaking hydrogen is no biggy". As in legally-responsible-for-the-result writeup and signature.
In collaboration with Doosan Enerbility and Daewoo E&C, KHNP is competing with EDF, a French government-owned electric utility company, to win the 30 trillion won ($22 billion) project...
Can anyone explain ?
The Koreans just finished building one out here in the sandpit. 4x1345MW, $24.4bn, 13 years from breaking ground to reactor #4 being commissioned.
They’re good at this stuff, and the UK should have bought their tech rather than - again - trying to re-invent the wheel.
Yes, the article references their completed projects - but this is even more striking, given that it's a European contract (with possibly stricter planning terms ? ) at today's prices.
We have seriously lost our way in terms of getting stuff built, whether it's housing, railways or nuclear power stations.
Oh absolutely. One can understand why the planning stages can be more difficult in somewhere like the UK, it’s a small island and there aren’t many vast empty spaces where you can plonk down a nuclear power plant or a railway line without annoying people, but the process for major projects really needs to be streamlined considerably.
I suspect that the answer is to give Parliament the authority over local planning committees and judicial reviews, for projects of national importance, but also to increase compensation to those affected, eg paying 150% of the value of property to be compulsorily purchased. Yes it can be seen as undemocratic by objectors, but if you’re going to run your national infrastructure projects to the agenda of activist groups looking for greater crested newts then nothing’s ever going to get built.
For how long now have we been talking about HS2, Heathrow’s new runway, Stonehenge Tunnel, Brynglas tunnels, Hinkley C, and so many more major projects? All of these should have been completed at least a decade ago, if not two, and the inertia will be causing economic damage and foregone growth.
Apparently, Hinkley C is not just a copy of the french design - because it has to be adapted to British nuclear regulations:
"He said that 70% of equipment had now been delivered for unit 1, and "many risks are behind us, like the unique British instrument and control system which has been designed and manufactured, with testing under way". He added: "We had to substantially adapt the EPR design to satisfy British regulations, requiring 7000 changes, adding 35% more steel and 25% more concrete. This adaptation and approval process is the same for other developers bringing new designs into Britain."
Ah, so another huge dose of the usual British regulatory gold plating.
I’m going to take a wild guess that the French, the Koreans, the Emiratis and many more countries also don’t want a nuclear accident, but for some reason a British reactor needs 35% more steel and 25% more concrete than a French reactor.
One might understand if there were specific environmental reasons, such as earthquake or tsunami risk, but there aren’t and it’s just adding cost for the sake of it.
No, the British reactor may actually have less.
The amount of paperwork of the most pointless type will be 400% more.
Prof. Groeteschele: Who would survive? That's an interesting question. I would predict... convicts and file clerks. Prof. Groeteschele: The worst convicts - those deep down in solitary confinement - and the most ordinary file clerks, probably for large insurance companies, because they would be in fire-proof rooms, protected by tons of the best insulator in the world: paper. And imagine what will happen. The small group of vicious criminals will fight the army of file clerks for the remaining means of life. The convicts will know violence, but the file clerks will know... organization. Who do you think wll win? [Groeteschele pauses, and then laughs] Prof. Groeteschele: It's all hypotheses of course, but fun to play around with.
This was an interesting piece on the linkage between re-wilding and climate change. I don't know abut the figures they claim, but the reasoning seems plausible.
"Bison influence grassland and forest ecosystems by grazing grasslands evenly, recycling nutrients to fertilise the soil and all of its life, dispersing seeds to enrich the ecosystem, and compacting the soil to prevent stored carbon from being released. These creatures evolved for millions of years with grassland and forest ecosystems, and their removal, especially where grasslands have been ploughed up, has led to the release of vast amounts of carbon..." So reverting the land to grazing by sheep would presumably have the claimed effect but without the rewilding fairydust sugar sprinkles?
Also bison are bovids and therefore methane farters
Would rhinos be better? They fart less. Or kangaroos? My vote is for kangaroos.
On the subject of Kangaroos, well adjacent, I stumbled across a three part doc on iPlayer last night called “The Australian Wars” about the fighting between British colonists and Aborigines/Aboriginals/Original Owners (just so nobody gets miffed about the terminology they use all words themselves in the documentary).
I knew some bad stuff was done but it’s frankly grim what the colonists did, along with “Native Police” in certain areas. Brutally, almost Nazi in the retaliation, nasty and the numbers, even if you reduce the figures in the doc for an element of bias from those in the programme who state them are terrible. It was a massive eye opener and I almost became woke watching it.
Was v weird though watching the interviewees who represented various tribes who all looked as if they were your average white man or woman on Worcester high St. Interesting how some people cling to a small part of their heritage hundreds of years since an ancestor was that heritage - same with people like Joe Biden thinking they are Irish - and it’s their “identity”.
Anyway, well worth a watch to have three hours of being disgusted at being British, remembering that the people who did its ancestors are today’s Aussies so feeling better about being British again and remembering that about three colonists were also killed so it’s sort of justifiable.
Three colonists killed? Must have been some extra sharp Kiwi fruit.
In collaboration with Doosan Enerbility and Daewoo E&C, KHNP is competing with EDF, a French government-owned electric utility company, to win the 30 trillion won ($22 billion) project...
Can anyone explain ?
The Koreans just finished building one out here in the sandpit. 4x1345MW, $24.4bn, 13 years from breaking ground to reactor #4 being commissioned.
They’re good at this stuff, and the UK should have bought their tech rather than - again - trying to re-invent the wheel.
Yes, the article references their completed projects - but this is even more striking, given that it's a European contract (with possibly stricter planning terms ? ) at today's prices.
We have seriously lost our way in terms of getting stuff built, whether it's housing, railways or nuclear power stations.
Oh absolutely. One can understand why the planning stages can be more difficult in somewhere like the UK, it’s a small island and there aren’t many vast empty spaces where you can plonk down a nuclear power plant or a railway line without annoying people, but the process for major projects really needs to be streamlined considerably.
I suspect that the answer is to give Parliament the authority over local planning committees and judicial reviews, for projects of national importance, but also to increase compensation to those affected, eg paying 150% of the value of property to be compulsorily purchased. Yes it can be seen as undemocratic by objectors, but if you’re going to run your national infrastructure projects to the agenda of activist groups looking for greater crested newts then nothing’s ever going to get built.
For how long now have we been talking about HS2, Heathrow’s new runway, Stonehenge Tunnel, Brynglas tunnels, Hinkley C, and so many more major projects? All of these should have been completed at least a decade ago, if not two, and the inertia will be causing economic damage and foregone growth.
Wasn't something like that done in the early 90s, in the wake of the Sizewell B inquiry taking an unacceptably-long 3 years? Certainly things seemed to work okay in the late 90s and 2000s - Jubile Line Extension, HS1, Olympics, etc.
What's changed since then?
The advantage of the Olympics, and related projects, was that there was an absolute deadline that was never going to change, and everyone knew this several years out. There was also a lot of legislation which IIRC replaced much of the usual planning process.
It’s also easy to go back and think things were better because they eventually happened. What we now know as the Elizabeth Line was 15 years from approval to opening. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail The new Wembley stadium was also years late and nearly bankrupted the contractor.
That's true - and the Millennium Dome was hardly a success at the time, either...
Is it simply that we're paying too little for the "admin" stuff - dragging out the inquiries, planning process, etc., in order to save a few quid, and setting the project up to fail by doing so?
Certainly, something has gone badly wrong with the abandonment of HS2, and not even starting Crossrail 2. It's beginning to look like Hinkley Point C will be the closest thing to a success that we'll have for a generation or more.
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
...and a much higher hydrogen leakage value. Which then explodes.
Reasons for not using hydrogen are:
Hydrogen is just greenwashed coal: it takes more energy to produce than it releases.
It leaks like a bastard.
It is worse than all the other alternatives.
So it's expensive to make, impossible to store, dangerous to transport and pointless. It has a large red flashing sign over it saying "THIS IS A MASSIVE ERROR". It is Blackadder levels of wrong. It's not just wrong it's stupidly wrong. I could do a Baldrick impersonation whilst saying "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong..." but I think my view is clear at this point.
You need it to get to a certain concentration for it to explode, though, surely? And with it being so leaky that's going to be hard to achieve - no-one encloses their boiler that well.
But I don't disagree that domestic hydrogen's a dead end given the continuing development of heat pumps - as you say, there's still no economic source for the volume needed.
It'd be better to just set a date now for switching off gas altogether rather than stringing it out with the promise of a hydrogen transition that will probably never happen.
I would like to see the writeup for "the environment is so leaky that leaking hydrogen is no biggy". As in legally-responsible-for-the-result writeup and signature.
There seem to be a lot of folk on PB who are quite happy to have their entire central heating ripped out, and sit in a chilly home every winter, rather than just get a new boiler to burn hydrogen in place of natural gas. Air source heat pumps are shite.
Fair enough. I'd rather the gas network switched to hydrogen.
"Under CNN network rules, a candidate must be on enough state ballots to win an Electoral College majority and score 15 percent in at least four major national polls."
Will RFK Jnr qualify ?
I quite like this CNN rule and when the equivalent UK General Election debates come up I think something similar should be introduced. Whilst some may disagree, I didn't want to see Nicola Sturgeon and Leanne Woods on a main UK GE debate when it was not possible their party could win a majority (I know, I know, they could've formed a coalition). I'd have applied something like:
[AND: Must - Stand in at least 326 seats;] [AND: Have 1 MP at dissolution OR: Have polled 10% at the previous General Election]
At the moment, that would mean Labour, Conservatives meet all three, LD, Greens and Reform meet 1 and 2 (And therefore appear).
Workers Party reckon they will stand in well over that number of seats so will be on George will make mincemeat of the other leaders could be very bad for Labour. They will definitely want to exclude him so will probably need to exclude Reform and Green unless they tweek the rules.
They will want to find a rule that allows them to exclude the Workers Party but include the Reform Party.
Unlikely they will be able to achieve that tbh, Workers have an elected MP, Reform have a defector, they'll both stand in a majority of seats and neither existed at the last GE (or BXP got 2% if we include that). So any stitch up to get Tice on screen and deny Galloway would probably backfire and add votes to the Workers tally. It will be probably a head to head and a mass participation including LDs, Green, SNP or PC (one in each country), Reform and Workers (and in Scotland Alba if they stand in most seats)
A rule about polling, which is what the US broadcasters use, would work. Reform UK poll well. The Workers Party is nowhere in polling. Ditto Alba: they poll better than the Workers Party, but still tiny numbers.
I am also doubtful about the Workers Party's boasts about how many candidates they will stand. Galloway is too toxic. He's not successfully pulled together a broader coalition of various individuals and bodies. Where does the money come from to pay all those deposits, that are going to be lost?
Workers are crowdfunding to try and raise £100k towards deposits AFAIK. They have about 160 candidates announced thus far. I expect them to stand in over 500 seats. I mean I know Galloway is highly controversial but their performances in the locals where they did stand far exceeded Reform where they did (about 2.5 x as many votes per candidate) and they won more councillors. In the PCCs Reform got 14 and 15% of course, the one Workers PCC candidate got 8%. If they stand in over half seats and with an elected MP I dont see any justification on shutting them out and including Reform. Its too much 'dont like Galloway so shut him up'. Democracy shouldn't work like that. If they fail to stand in half the seats then fair enough.
Yes, of course we shouldn't design rules just to exclude or include certain parties. I support giving a wide range of parties coverage in a general election campaign, and UK broadcasting rules are good at doing that. I am also, however, sympathetic to the logic that a debate should only be between a manageable number of people, with a focus on those who could become PM.
I like the US broadcasters' approach of requiring a polling minimum. I note that the Workers Party polling average is approximately 0%. They stood very selectively in areas with large Muslim populations. That they did relatively well in those areas does not prove they have a snowball's chance in most of the country. I suspect Reform UK will get about the same number of MPs as the Workers Party in the general election, but they do poll across the country much, much better.
(I also note that the Workers Party has 1 MP and 5 councillors, whereas Reform UK has 1 MP (by defection), 9 councillors and 1 London AM, plus they are in an alliance with the TUV, who bring another 10 councillors and 1 Stormont AM.)
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
...and a much higher hydrogen leakage value. Which then explodes.
Reasons for not using hydrogen are:
Hydrogen is just greenwashed coal: it takes more energy to produce than it releases.
It leaks like a bastard.
It is worse than all the other alternatives.
So it's expensive to make, impossible to store, dangerous to transport and pointless. It has a large red flashing sign over it saying "THIS IS A MASSIVE ERROR". It is Blackadder levels of wrong. It's not just wrong it's stupidly wrong. I could do a Baldrick impersonation whilst saying "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong..." but I think my view is clear at this point.
You need it to get to a certain concentration for it to explode, though, surely? And with it being so leaky that's going to be hard to achieve - no-one encloses their boiler that well.
But I don't disagree that domestic hydrogen's a dead end given the continuing development of heat pumps - as you say, there's still no economic source for the volume needed.
It'd be better to just set a date now for switching off gas altogether rather than stringing it out with the promise of a hydrogen transition that will probably never happen.
I would like to see the writeup for "the environment is so leaky that leaking hydrogen is no biggy". As in legally-responsible-for-the-result writeup and signature.
There seem to be a lot of folk on PB who are quite happy to have their entire central heating ripped out, and sit in a chilly home every winter, rather than just get a new boiler to burn hydrogen in place of natural gas. Air source heat pumps are shite.
Fair enough. I'd rather the gas network switched to hydrogen.
Air source heat pumps are not shit. What was (and is) shit is installing them badly.
I've installed air source *heating* (A/C that reverses) in the room I am typing this in. Plus solar panels to power it. Just works.
Hydrogen isn't an answer to anything - it would be cheaper to go to electric boilers at that point. Given the known (and future expected) falls in electricity prices, electric boilers will be cheaper than gas before the planned ending of gas.
Anyone who wants to ignore the safety rules on handling hydrogen is an idiot.
This was an interesting piece on the linkage between re-wilding and climate change. I don't know abut the figures they claim, but the reasoning seems plausible.
"Bison influence grassland and forest ecosystems by grazing grasslands evenly, recycling nutrients to fertilise the soil and all of its life, dispersing seeds to enrich the ecosystem, and compacting the soil to prevent stored carbon from being released. These creatures evolved for millions of years with grassland and forest ecosystems, and their removal, especially where grasslands have been ploughed up, has led to the release of vast amounts of carbon..." So reverting the land to grazing by sheep would presumably have the claimed effect but without the rewilding fairydust sugar sprinkles?
Also bison are bovids and therefore methane farters
Would rhinos be better? They fart less. Or kangaroos? My vote is for kangaroos.
On the subject of Kangaroos, well adjacent, I stumbled across a three part doc on iPlayer last night called “The Australian Wars” about the fighting between British colonists and Aborigines/Aboriginals/Original Owners (just so nobody gets miffed about the terminology they use all words themselves in the documentary).
I knew some bad stuff was done but it’s frankly grim what the colonists did, along with “Native Police” in certain areas. Brutally, almost Nazi in the retaliation, nasty and the numbers, even if you reduce the figures in the doc for an element of bias from those in the programme who state them are terrible. It was a massive eye opener and I almost became woke watching it.
Was v weird though watching the interviewees who represented various tribes who all looked as if they were your average white man or woman on Worcester high St. Interesting how some people cling to a small part of their heritage hundreds of years since an ancestor was that heritage - same with people like Joe Biden thinking they are Irish - and it’s their “identity”.
Anyway, well worth a watch to have three hours of being disgusted at being British, remembering that the people who did its ancestors are today’s Aussies so feeling better about being British again and remembering that about three colonists were also killed so it’s sort of justifiable.
It's a great series, although I've not finished it yet. It's depressing viewing!
For some of the tribes, the reason that their only ancestors look white is because the genocide of the tribe was so compete that those are the only people left with any connection.
This was an interesting piece on the linkage between re-wilding and climate change. I don't know abut the figures they claim, but the reasoning seems plausible.
"Bison influence grassland and forest ecosystems by grazing grasslands evenly, recycling nutrients to fertilise the soil and all of its life, dispersing seeds to enrich the ecosystem, and compacting the soil to prevent stored carbon from being released. These creatures evolved for millions of years with grassland and forest ecosystems, and their removal, especially where grasslands have been ploughed up, has led to the release of vast amounts of carbon..." So reverting the land to grazing by sheep would presumably have the claimed effect but without the rewilding fairydust sugar sprinkles?
Also bison are bovids and therefore methane farters
Would rhinos be better? They fart less. Or kangaroos? My vote is for kangaroos.
On the subject of Kangaroos, well adjacent, I stumbled across a three part doc on iPlayer last night called “The Australian Wars” about the fighting between British colonists and Aborigines/Aboriginals/Original Owners (just so nobody gets miffed about the terminology they use all words themselves in the documentary).
I knew some bad stuff was done but it’s frankly grim what the colonists did, along with “Native Police” in certain areas. Brutally, almost Nazi in the retaliation, nasty and the numbers, even if you reduce the figures in the doc for an element of bias from those in the programme who state them are terrible. It was a massive eye opener and I almost became woke watching it.
Was v weird though watching the interviewees who represented various tribes who all looked as if they were your average white man or woman on Worcester high St. Interesting how some people cling to a small part of their heritage hundreds of years since an ancestor was that heritage - same with people like Joe Biden thinking they are Irish - and it’s their “identity”.
Anyway, well worth a watch to have three hours of being disgusted at being British, remembering that the people who did its ancestors are today’s Aussies so feeling better about being British again and remembering that about three colonists were also killed so it’s sort of justifiable.
The book "Dark Emu" could be an interesting follow-up. It looks at evidence for pre-colonial agriculture in Australia. The claimed lack of agriculture by aboriginals was one of the legal justifications for colonists to take the land - if it wasn't being farmed then nobody owned it.
I love the smell of performative cruelty in the morning. It smells of victory.
Any sane compassionate authority would simply say 'of course you can stay and if you with to be British you can'. How much tax has this chap contributed over the years? How much of an impact on friends and families lives?
This was an interesting piece on the linkage between re-wilding and climate change. I don't know abut the figures they claim, but the reasoning seems plausible.
"Bison influence grassland and forest ecosystems by grazing grasslands evenly, recycling nutrients to fertilise the soil and all of its life, dispersing seeds to enrich the ecosystem, and compacting the soil to prevent stored carbon from being released. These creatures evolved for millions of years with grassland and forest ecosystems, and their removal, especially where grasslands have been ploughed up, has led to the release of vast amounts of carbon..." So reverting the land to grazing by sheep would presumably have the claimed effect but without the rewilding fairydust sugar sprinkles?
Also bison are bovids and therefore methane farters
Would rhinos be better? They fart less. Or kangaroos? My vote is for kangaroos.
On the subject of Kangaroos, well adjacent, I stumbled across a three part doc on iPlayer last night called “The Australian Wars” about the fighting between British colonists and Aborigines/Aboriginals/Original Owners (just so nobody gets miffed about the terminology they use all words themselves in the documentary).
I knew some bad stuff was done but it’s frankly grim what the colonists did, along with “Native Police” in certain areas. Brutally, almost Nazi in the retaliation, nasty and the numbers, even if you reduce the figures in the doc for an element of bias from those in the programme who state them are terrible. It was a massive eye opener and I almost became woke watching it.
Was v weird though watching the interviewees who represented various tribes who all looked as if they were your average white man or woman on Worcester high St. Interesting how some people cling to a small part of their heritage hundreds of years since an ancestor was that heritage - same with people like Joe Biden thinking they are Irish - and it’s their “identity”.
Anyway, well worth a watch to have three hours of being disgusted at being British, remembering that the people who did its ancestors are today’s Aussies so feeling better about being British again and remembering that about three colonists were also killed so it’s sort of justifiable.
The book "Dark Emu" could be an interesting follow-up. It looks at evidence for pre-colonial agriculture in Australia. The claimed lack of agriculture by aboriginals was one of the legal justifications for colonists to take the land - if it wasn't being farmed then nobody owned it.
That argument that they're not making proper, efficient use of the land was, of course, also used in North America and by Zionists in the early 20th century in Palestine.
In collaboration with Doosan Enerbility and Daewoo E&C, KHNP is competing with EDF, a French government-owned electric utility company, to win the 30 trillion won ($22 billion) project...
Can anyone explain ?
The Koreans just finished building one out here in the sandpit. 4x1345MW, $24.4bn, 13 years from breaking ground to reactor #4 being commissioned.
They’re good at this stuff, and the UK should have bought their tech rather than - again - trying to re-invent the wheel.
Yes, the article references their completed projects - but this is even more striking, given that it's a European contract (with possibly stricter planning terms ? ) at today's prices.
We have seriously lost our way in terms of getting stuff built, whether it's housing, railways or nuclear power stations.
Oh absolutely. One can understand why the planning stages can be more difficult in somewhere like the UK, it’s a small island and there aren’t many vast empty spaces where you can plonk down a nuclear power plant or a railway line without annoying people, but the process for major projects really needs to be streamlined considerably.
I suspect that the answer is to give Parliament the authority over local planning committees and judicial reviews, for projects of national importance, but also to increase compensation to those affected, eg paying 150% of the value of property to be compulsorily purchased. Yes it can be seen as undemocratic by objectors, but if you’re going to run your national infrastructure projects to the agenda of activist groups looking for greater crested newts then nothing’s ever going to get built.
For how long now have we been talking about HS2, Heathrow’s new runway, Stonehenge Tunnel, Brynglas tunnels, Hinkley C, and so many more major projects? All of these should have been completed at least a decade ago, if not two, and the inertia will be causing economic damage and foregone growth.
Apparently, Hinkley C is not just a copy of the french design - because it has to be adapted to British nuclear regulations:
"He said that 70% of equipment had now been delivered for unit 1, and "many risks are behind us, like the unique British instrument and control system which has been designed and manufactured, with testing under way". He added: "We had to substantially adapt the EPR design to satisfy British regulations, requiring 7000 changes, adding 35% more steel and 25% more concrete. This adaptation and approval process is the same for other developers bringing new designs into Britain."
Ah, so another huge dose of the usual British regulatory gold plating.
I’m going to take a wild guess that the French, the Koreans, the Emiratis and many more countries also don’t want a nuclear accident, but for some reason a British reactor needs 35% more steel and 25% more concrete than a French reactor.
One might understand if there were specific environmental reasons, such as earthquake or tsunami risk, but there aren’t and it’s just adding cost for the sake of it.
Even with extra safety margin built in, there's no good reason a UK reactor should cost more than double what everyone else is paying.
Interesting thread on new challenges facing Macron:
Just as @EmmanuelMacron hoped to turn French eyes and ears towards his economic achievements and away from a constant right-wing drumbeat on violence and insecurity, two events – one of them 10,000 miles away – have driven all positive news from the headlines. 1/
1) the locals are a bunch of fascists resisting giving voting rights to immigrants
Or
2) the locals are defending their post colonial situation
Answers please…
Bloody hell was recently in F Polynesia (Marquesas and Tahiti) and thinking how Rousseau and idyllic it all is (well not Tahiti which is full of US honeymooners)
But there were rumblings about metropolitan French and possibly other EU ers) pricing out locals
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
...and a much higher hydrogen leakage value. Which then explodes.
Reasons for not using hydrogen are:
Hydrogen is just greenwashed coal: it takes more energy to produce than it releases.
It leaks like a bastard.
It is worse than all the other alternatives.
So it's expensive to make, impossible to store, dangerous to transport and pointless. It has a large red flashing sign over it saying "THIS IS A MASSIVE ERROR". It is Blackadder levels of wrong. It's not just wrong it's stupidly wrong. I could do a Baldrick impersonation whilst saying "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong..." but I think my view is clear at this point.
You need it to get to a certain concentration for it to explode, though, surely? And with it being so leaky that's going to be hard to achieve - no-one encloses their boiler that well.
But I don't disagree that domestic hydrogen's a dead end given the continuing development of heat pumps - as you say, there's still no economic source for the volume needed.
It'd be better to just set a date now for switching off gas altogether rather than stringing it out with the promise of a hydrogen transition that will probably never happen.
I would like to see the writeup for "the environment is so leaky that leaking hydrogen is no biggy". As in legally-responsible-for-the-result writeup and signature.
There seem to be a lot of folk on PB who are quite happy to have their entire central heating ripped out, and sit in a chilly home every winter, rather than just get a new boiler to burn hydrogen in place of natural gas. Air source heat pumps are shite.
Fair enough. I'd rather the gas network switched to hydrogen.
Air source heat pumps are not shit. What was (and is) shit is installing them badly.
I've installed air source *heating* (A/C that reverses) in the room I am typing this in. Plus solar panels to power it. Just works.
Hydrogen isn't an answer to anything - it would be cheaper to go to electric boilers at that point. Given the known (and future expected) falls in electricity prices, electric boilers will be cheaper than gas before the planned ending of gas.
Anyone who wants to ignore the safety rules on handling hydrogen is an idiot.
Also, high temperature ASHPs, though less efficient, are more amenable to less older properties. "They are shit" is just ignorance.
I love the smell of performative cruelty in the morning. It smells of victory.
Any sane compassionate authority would simply say 'of course you can stay and if you with to be British you can'. How much tax has this chap contributed over the years? How much of an impact on friends and families lives?
Can we deport the Home Office?
The Home Office enforcers have always been this stupid, picking on difficult edge cases at the expense of raiding the restaurant or factory or farm where dozens of obvious illegals are working, often in very poor conditions and for less than the minimum wage.
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
I think it's actually a genius move by the government to boost real reduced carbon heating solutions.
Public info campaigns: "Buy a heat pump or we'll pump hydrogen into your homes", combined with some Hindenburg imagery
As we live in the sticks (actually just on the edge of a Wiltshire town with population 18000, but hey its Wiltshire) our heating is via oil. As my parents are the same it seems totally natural. We are currently having a large extension built. The original plan had been to build over the existing kitchen, but the footings were not good enough. The new section is vastly better insulated and built than our 1970's core house. Proper two rows of blocks with a decent gap filled with celotex insulation AND an air gap. I suspect if the whole house was the same we would easily cope with an air source heat pump without modifying the pipes and radiators, but I am not convinced that the 1970's section would cope. It has no insulation and upstairs is a single row of blocks, with wood cladding. I think this is one of the issues with air source - many properties may need a lot of work done.
I have heard of combination oil/air source boilers to try to help in rural areas, but to be honest I'd rather just have the oil boiler.
I suspect the new high temp heat pumps might be the solution there. I haven't seen figures, but presumably the efficiency drops compared to low temp heat pumps, but versus oil they could still be competitive (if oil is still really expensive for home heating?)
I've known people, not on mains gas, but not too far from us (we are on gas), who have replaced worn out oil boilers with straight electric boilers and linked solar and reckon it's working out not too much different, not that I've seen the actual figures.
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
...and a much higher hydrogen leakage value. Which then explodes.
Reasons for not using hydrogen are:
Hydrogen is just greenwashed coal: it takes more energy to produce than it releases.
It leaks like a bastard.
It is worse than all the other alternatives.
So it's expensive to make, impossible to store, dangerous to transport and pointless. It has a large red flashing sign over it saying "THIS IS A MASSIVE ERROR". It is Blackadder levels of wrong. It's not just wrong it's stupidly wrong. I could do a Baldrick impersonation whilst saying "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong..." but I think my view is clear at this point.
You need it to get to a certain concentration for it to explode, though, surely? And with it being so leaky that's going to be hard to achieve - no-one encloses their boiler that well.
But I don't disagree that domestic hydrogen's a dead end given the continuing development of heat pumps - as you say, there's still no economic source for the volume needed.
It'd be better to just set a date now for switching off gas altogether rather than stringing it out with the promise of a hydrogen transition that will probably never happen.
I would like to see the writeup for "the environment is so leaky that leaking hydrogen is no biggy". As in legally-responsible-for-the-result writeup and signature.
I mean, we used town gas for however long that lasted, and that was 50% hydrogen...
Yes, sure, there'll be some unsuitable materials used in the 80s before anyone began to think of hydrogen compatibility, and we would need a plan to replace those. But that's mainly an issue in the distribution network rather than in the home, and that can be solved by re-lining the pipes where necessary.
And since more than 95% of the deaths from gas come from CO poisoning, a pure hydrogen network would likely work out as being safer than natural gas.
But I don't see it winning out against electricity, and think the real danger is that certain sectors of industry will try to keep us throwing money at it in an effort to keep the possibility of domestic hydrogen alive. We ought to make a decision rather than dithering.
(I do agree that a 'a few more explosions but far fewer poisonings!' is hardly a great safety case. But that's an argument against all domestic gas, not just against hydrogen)
I love the smell of performative cruelty in the morning. It smells of victory.
Any sane compassionate authority would simply say 'of course you can stay and if you with to be British you can'. How much tax has this chap contributed over the years? How much of an impact on friends and families lives?
Can we deport the Home Office?
The Home Office enforcers have always been this stupid, picking on difficult edge cases at the expense of raiding the restaurant or factory or farm where dozens of obvious illegals are working, often in very poor conditions and for less than the minimum wage.
This is the hostile environment in action. He is an illegal immigrant by all the definitions. He overstayed his visa.
I don't know why you're complaining about the rules that you wanted being enforced. Maybe you should have thought about that when you were busy accusing lefties of being weak on immigration for opposing these sorts of rules?
I love the smell of performative cruelty in the morning. It smells of victory.
Any sane compassionate authority would simply say 'of course you can stay and if you with to be British you can'. How much tax has this chap contributed over the years? How much of an impact on friends and families lives?
Can we deport the Home Office?
The Home Office enforcers have always been this stupid, picking on difficult edge cases at the expense of raiding the restaurant or factory or farm where dozens of obvious illegals are working, often in very poor conditions and for less than the minimum wage.
If you enforced minimum wage laws and laws on employing people without legal status in the UK, the entire garment trade in Leicester would be fucked.
This was basically admitted during COVID, when the conditions in those factories was exposed.
The bit I never mention about my plan to wipe out the black economy - by being really nice to the victims of it - is the crisis that would result. I'm talking about an overnight hit to GDP, hundreds of thousands of jobs evaporating and a number of business models ceasing to work.
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
...and a much higher hydrogen leakage value. Which then explodes.
Reasons for not using hydrogen are:
Hydrogen is just greenwashed coal: it takes more energy to produce than it releases.
It leaks like a bastard.
It is worse than all the other alternatives.
So it's expensive to make, impossible to store, dangerous to transport and pointless. It has a large red flashing sign over it saying "THIS IS A MASSIVE ERROR". It is Blackadder levels of wrong. It's not just wrong it's stupidly wrong. I could do a Baldrick impersonation whilst saying "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong..." but I think my view is clear at this point.
You need it to get to a certain concentration for it to explode, though, surely? And with it being so leaky that's going to be hard to achieve - no-one encloses their boiler that well.
But I don't disagree that domestic hydrogen's a dead end given the continuing development of heat pumps - as you say, there's still no economic source for the volume needed.
It'd be better to just set a date now for switching off gas altogether rather than stringing it out with the promise of a hydrogen transition that will probably never happen.
I would like to see the writeup for "the environment is so leaky that leaking hydrogen is no biggy". As in legally-responsible-for-the-result writeup and signature.
I mean, we used town gas for however long that lasted, and that was 50% hydrogen...
Yes, sure, there'll be some unsuitable materials used in the 80s before anyone began to think of hydrogen compatibility, and we would need a plan to replace those. But that's mainly an issue in the distribution network rather than in the home, and that can be solved by re-lining the pipes where necessary.
And since more than 95% of the deaths from gas come from CO poisoning, a pure hydrogen network would likely work out as being safer than natural gas.
But I don't see it winning out against electricity, and think the real danger is that certain sectors of industry will try to keep us throwing money at it in an effort to keep the possibility of domestic hydrogen alive. We ought to make a decision rather than dithering.
(I do agree that a 'a few more explosions but far fewer poisonings!' is hardly a great safety case. But that's an argument against all domestic gas, not just against hydrogen)
Hydrogen embrittlement was largely discovered through town gas - pipes you could collapse by rapping on them with your knuckle.
You can't reline domestic pipes - between embrittlement and leaks, you'd have to redo all the pipework between the street and boiler. Even the solder used to join metal has to be the right kind. Hydrogen can leak *through* solid materials.
Gas explosions have dropped massively since the town gas days - the question is whether this was partly due to no hydrogen in the mix. It probably was.
O/T but interesting piece on how it's possible to build cycle paths cheaply if one knows how to use the planning system and has lots of free labour (especially for @MattW ):
Obvious issues about it really only working out in the sticks rather than the urban jungle, but Shepton M is not that small a place.
And the emphasis of the article is on cycling (despite the notice in onw photo!).
Thank-you. Laura Laker is fantastic - she's quite like Carlton Reid - decades of experience and knowledge, understanding how things work, and an excellent writer / presenter.
It's interesting that the main barriers she identifies, in addition to various "Schrodinger" type fears (Schrodinger's ASBO Motorcyclist is the one I get most), were around organisational recalcitrance in local authorities, and the planning system.
She wrote a companion piece last week in the Guardian about cycling the Strawberry Line. I did it back in 2015 going to a dance weekend at a hotel in the Levels in winter over frosted roads. I would like her to be more specific in mentioning anti-mobility barriers; it's ironic that the nice level, well-surfaced paths advertised as accessible are exactly the ones that get barriered off.
I heard a fascinating presentation this week by a Green Councillor from Darlington about organisational inertia in his local authorities, and how Council officers are overwhelmingly small c timid-conservative driven by fear of the unknown when it comes to new, or different, ideas. A god example is conraflow cycling on one-way streets, which is fine but causes Corporal Jones to have a panic attack.
Plus how traditional democratic structures which are existing-but-unused (eg petitions, questions to scrutiny committee) can be leveraged by activists for these type of opportunities. I'll post in when it hits Youtube.
I love the smell of performative cruelty in the morning. It smells of victory.
Any sane compassionate authority would simply say 'of course you can stay and if you with to be British you can'. How much tax has this chap contributed over the years? How much of an impact on friends and families lives?
Can we deport the Home Office?
The Home Office enforcers have always been this stupid, picking on difficult edge cases at the expense of raiding the restaurant or factory or farm where dozens of obvious illegals are working, often in very poor conditions and for less than the minimum wage.
This is the hostile environment in action. He is an illegal immigrant by all the definitions. He overstayed his visa.
I don't know why you're complaining about the rules that you wanted being enforced. Maybe you should have thought about that when you were busy accusing lefties of being weak on immigration for opposing these sorts of rules?
It is interesting the BBC picks the sympathetic cases. When was the last time a BBC investigation profiled the criminals that have no legal right to be in the UK?
Blame Boris Johnson. His administration set it up.
Mmm, who could have foreseen that an enormous troupe of barristers, travelling around the country for a couple of years would have turned out to be expensive?
They do seem to make a point of doing things in the most archaic way possible - there's an astonishing reliance on shuffling physical paper, and there's all that hanging around while other people put materials up on the screen for them, etc.
But even if they'd found some more tech-literate people, how much would that actually have saved?
And beyond that, it's hard to see where any other savings could have been achieved whilst still fulfilling the brief given to them by the govt.
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
...and a much higher hydrogen leakage value. Which then explodes.
Reasons for not using hydrogen are:
Hydrogen is just greenwashed coal: it takes more energy to produce than it releases.
It leaks like a bastard.
It is worse than all the other alternatives.
So it's expensive to make, impossible to store, dangerous to transport and pointless. It has a large red flashing sign over it saying "THIS IS A MASSIVE ERROR". It is Blackadder levels of wrong. It's not just wrong it's stupidly wrong. I could do a Baldrick impersonation whilst saying "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong..." but I think my view is clear at this point.
You need it to get to a certain concentration for it to explode, though, surely? And with it being so leaky that's going to be hard to achieve - no-one encloses their boiler that well.
But I don't disagree that domestic hydrogen's a dead end given the continuing development of heat pumps - as you say, there's still no economic source for the volume needed.
It'd be better to just set a date now for switching off gas altogether rather than stringing it out with the promise of a hydrogen transition that will probably never happen.
I would like to see the writeup for "the environment is so leaky that leaking hydrogen is no biggy". As in legally-responsible-for-the-result writeup and signature.
I mean, we used town gas for however long that lasted, and that was 50% hydrogen...
Yes, sure, there'll be some unsuitable materials used in the 80s before anyone began to think of hydrogen compatibility, and we would need a plan to replace those. But that's mainly an issue in the distribution network rather than in the home, and that can be solved by re-lining the pipes where necessary.
And since more than 95% of the deaths from gas come from CO poisoning, a pure hydrogen network would likely work out as being safer than natural gas.
But I don't see it winning out against electricity, and think the real danger is that certain sectors of industry will try to keep us throwing money at it in an effort to keep the possibility of domestic hydrogen alive. We ought to make a decision rather than dithering.
(I do agree that a 'a few more explosions but far fewer poisonings!' is hardly a great safety case. But that's an argument against all domestic gas, not just against hydrogen)
Hydrogen embrittlement was largely discovered through town gas - pipes you could collapse by rapping on them with your knuckle.
You can't reline domestic pipes - between embrittlement and leaks, you'd have to redo all the pipework between the street and boiler. Even the solder used to join metal has to be the right kind. Hydrogen can leak *through* solid materials.
Gas explosions have dropped massively since the town gas days - the question is whether this was partly due to no hydrogen in the mix. It probably was.
From a good thread on the Rotterdam hydrogen summit:
Mobility and heating definitely have a muted presence, with a lot more focus on ammonia, eSAF, P2X, and large scale industrial facilities.
Hydrogen will definitely have its place in a renewable economy - but the cost timeline on the production of green hydrogen, and the likely massive cost of upgrading national gas networks (and domestic pipework), make planning to use it to replace gas in domestic heating completely nuts.
As an industrial feedstock, from electrolysis using zero marginal cost renewables which go beyond what's needed to charge whatever battery storage demand is out there from hour to hour, bulk generation of green hydrogen will at some point make quite a lot of sense economically.
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
It's a mix of hydrogen and 'normal' gas. Apparently a certain percentage of H2 in the system will be fine...
I love the smell of performative cruelty in the morning. It smells of victory.
Any sane compassionate authority would simply say 'of course you can stay and if you with to be British you can'. How much tax has this chap contributed over the years? How much of an impact on friends and families lives?
Can we deport the Home Office?
The Home Office enforcers have always been this stupid, picking on difficult edge cases at the expense of raiding the restaurant or factory or farm where dozens of obvious illegals are working, often in very poor conditions and for less than the minimum wage.
This is the hostile environment in action. He is an illegal immigrant by all the definitions. He overstayed his visa.
I don't know why you're complaining about the rules that you wanted being enforced. Maybe you should have thought about that when you were busy accusing lefties of being weak on immigration for opposing these sorts of rules?
It is interesting the BBC picks the sympathetic cases. When was the last time a BBC investigation profiled the criminals that have no legal right to be in the UK?
Man bites dog is a story. Dog bites man isn't. A criminal with no legal right to be in the UK being deported is what's meant to happen, but it doesn't constitute news.
I love the smell of performative cruelty in the morning. It smells of victory.
Any sane compassionate authority would simply say 'of course you can stay and if you with to be British you can'. How much tax has this chap contributed over the years? How much of an impact on friends and families lives?
Can we deport the Home Office?
The Home Office enforcers have always been this stupid, picking on difficult edge cases at the expense of raiding the restaurant or factory or farm where dozens of obvious illegals are working, often in very poor conditions and for less than the minimum wage.
This is the hostile environment in action. He is an illegal immigrant by all the definitions. He overstayed his visa.
I don't know why you're complaining about the rules that you wanted being enforced. Maybe you should have thought about that when you were busy accusing lefties of being weak on immigration for opposing these sorts of rules?
It is interesting the BBC picks the sympathetic cases. When was the last time a BBC investigation profiled the criminals that have no legal right to be in the UK?
Oh, back in the Hadean Eon, I think. Last week, or something.
I love the smell of performative cruelty in the morning. It smells of victory.
Any sane compassionate authority would simply say 'of course you can stay and if you with to be British you can'. How much tax has this chap contributed over the years? How much of an impact on friends and families lives?
Can we deport the Home Office?
The Home Office enforcers have always been this stupid, picking on difficult edge cases at the expense of raiding the restaurant or factory or farm where dozens of obvious illegals are working, often in very poor conditions and for less than the minimum wage.
This is the hostile environment in action. He is an illegal immigrant by all the definitions. He overstayed his visa.
I don't know why you're complaining about the rules that you wanted being enforced. Maybe you should have thought about that when you were busy accusing lefties of being weak on immigration for opposing these sorts of rules?
It is interesting the BBC picks the sympathetic cases. When was the last time a BBC investigation profiled the criminals that have no legal right to be in the UK?
That guy has no legal right to be in the UK - and by overstaying his visa is, surely, a criminal. So they're profiling exactly the sort of person you say they should.
If you find him sympathetic, perhaps that should make you question your other assumptions on the topic?
These kind of stories polarise opinion. Some would expect a lot of this kind of thing goes on. Some would say its rare, and we get selection bias (we are aware of these cases BECAUSE they get caught). Id be interested to see how this opinion split between left and right and Labour vs Tory.
Blame Boris Johnson. His administration set it up.
Mmm, who could have foreseen that an enormous troupe of barristers, travelling around the country for a couple of years would have turned out to be expensive?
They do seem to make a point of doing things in the most archaic way possible - there's an astonishing reliance on shuffling physical paper, and all that hanging around while other people put materials up on the screen for them, etc.
But even if they'd found some more tech-literate people, how much would that actually have saved?
And beyond that, it's hard to see where any other savings could have been achieved whilst still fulfilling the brief given to them by the govt.
Hardly surprising, given the precedent (or lack of) at Westminster. Voting like sheep being herded into pens for dipping with insecticide, not enough seats for MPs, ...
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
...and a much higher hydrogen leakage value. Which then explodes.
Reasons for not using hydrogen are:
Hydrogen is just greenwashed coal: it takes more energy to produce than it releases.
It leaks like a bastard.
It is worse than all the other alternatives.
So it's expensive to make, impossible to store, dangerous to transport and pointless. It has a large red flashing sign over it saying "THIS IS A MASSIVE ERROR". It is Blackadder levels of wrong. It's not just wrong it's stupidly wrong. I could do a Baldrick impersonation whilst saying "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong..." but I think my view is clear at this point.
You need it to get to a certain concentration for it to explode, though, surely? And with it being so leaky that's going to be hard to achieve - no-one encloses their boiler that well.
But I don't disagree that domestic hydrogen's a dead end given the continuing development of heat pumps - as you say, there's still no economic source for the volume needed.
It'd be better to just set a date now for switching off gas altogether rather than stringing it out with the promise of a hydrogen transition that will probably never happen.
I would like to see the writeup for "the environment is so leaky that leaking hydrogen is no biggy". As in legally-responsible-for-the-result writeup and signature.
I mean, we used town gas for however long that lasted, and that was 50% hydrogen...
Yes, sure, there'll be some unsuitable materials used in the 80s before anyone began to think of hydrogen compatibility, and we would need a plan to replace those. But that's mainly an issue in the distribution network rather than in the home, and that can be solved by re-lining the pipes where necessary.
And since more than 95% of the deaths from gas come from CO poisoning, a pure hydrogen network would likely work out as being safer than natural gas.
But I don't see it winning out against electricity, and think the real danger is that certain sectors of industry will try to keep us throwing money at it in an effort to keep the possibility of domestic hydrogen alive. We ought to make a decision rather than dithering.
(I do agree that a 'a few more explosions but far fewer poisonings!' is hardly a great safety case. But that's an argument against all domestic gas, not just against hydrogen)
Hydrogen embrittlement was largely discovered through town gas - pipes you could collapse by rapping on them with your knuckle.
You can't reline domestic pipes - between embrittlement and leaks, you'd have to redo all the pipework between the street and boiler. Even the solder used to join metal has to be the right kind. Hydrogen can leak *through* solid materials.
Gas explosions have dropped massively since the town gas days - the question is whether this was partly due to no hydrogen in the mix. It probably was.
From a good thread on the Rotterdam hydrogen summit:
Mobility and heating definitely have a muted presence, with a lot more focus on ammonia, eSAF, P2X, and large scale industrial facilities.
Hydrogen will definitely have its place in a renewable economy - but the cost timeline on the production of green hydrogen, and the likely massive cost of upgrading national gas networks (and domestic pipework), make planning to use it to replace gas in domestic heating completely nuts.
As an industrial feedstock, from electrolysis using zero marginal cost renewables which go beyond what's needed to charge whatever battery storage demand is out there from hour to hour, bulk generation of green hydrogen will at some point make quite a lot of sense economically.
Creating hydrogen for steal production, actually makes some sense.
The cycle of electricity -> hydrogen -> compress/cool -> store -> uncompress -> electricity is so inefficient that hydrogen power storage is unlikely to make sense. Nearly every other method is cheaper and better. Remember you have significant loses per day - several percent.
Comments
We have seriously lost our way in terms of getting stuff built, whether it's housing, railways or nuclear power stations.
I don't know abut the figures they claim, but the reasoning seems plausible.
Herd of 170 bison could help store CO2 equivalent of almost 2m cars, researchers say
Free-roaming animals reintroduced in Romania’s Țarcu mountains are stimulating plant growth and securing carbon stored in the soil while grazing
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/15/bison-romania-tarcu-2m-cars-carbon-dioxide-emissions-aoe
The same is probably true for painted portraits. They no longer have a purpose - the previous purpose of portraits now being filled by photography - and so it doesn't matter if they're shite. So they end up being shite.
Tories won’t hesitate to use local housebuilding as a stick to beat Labour if given the chance.
1. Robert Fico assassination attempt
2. Meeting between Putin and Xi
3. Israel/Hamas war
4. US economy focus
5. Floods in Afghanistan.
No mention of any plumbers on the front page!
Now we have this to choose alongside Rishi's enticing 'yeah but we know HOW we utterly broke it so that's something, right?' And Eds blue cardboard box busting yellow hammer of policy free irrelevance. Exciting times for the UK.
"Bison influence grassland and forest ecosystems by grazing grasslands evenly, recycling nutrients to fertilise the soil and all of its life, dispersing seeds to enrich the ecosystem, and compacting the soil to prevent stored carbon from being released. These creatures evolved for millions of years with grassland and forest ecosystems, and their removal, especially where grasslands have been ploughed up, has led to the release of vast amounts of carbon..." So reverting the land to grazing by sheep would presumably have the claimed effect but without the rewilding fairydust sugar sprinkles?
Also bison are bovids and therefore methane farters
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8357158/
But farming bad, rewilding good.
Hydrogen piping is stupid
The government is stupid
The next government is stupid
- E.J. Viewcode, aged 17½
You can't properly read 'first steps' behind the speakers.
Are there actually any new revelations in what the BBC are saying?
I suspect that the answer is to give Parliament the authority over local planning committees and judicial reviews, for projects of national importance, but also to increase compensation to those affected, eg paying 150% of the value of property to be compulsorily purchased. Yes it can be seen as undemocratic by objectors, but if you’re going to run your national infrastructure projects to the agenda of activist groups looking for greater crested newts then nothing’s ever going to get built.
For how long now have we been talking about HS2, Heathrow’s new runway, Stonehenge Tunnel, Brynglas tunnels, Hinkley C, and so many more major projects? All of these should have been completed at least a decade ago, if not two, and the inertia will be causing economic damage and foregone growth.
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
Yes it’s silly to do it in June, the party conventions haven’t even happened yet!
For Trump it gives him a chance to shift the narrative away from his court cases.
For Biden it creates a chance to contrast his greater mental ability with Trump's deterioration, to challenge the narrative that age is more of an issue for Biden than it is for Trump. Plus, it spreads out the campaign commitments over a longer period of time because age is an issue for Biden.
'The artist had just two weeks to complete the project, and while His Majesty did not sit for the portrait, Alastair was able to study him at work at a Buckingham Palace reception on 17 February held in support of global biodiversity, working from his photographs and sketches of the occasion.'
Public info campaigns: "Buy a heat pump or we'll pump hydrogen into your homes", combined with some Hindenburg imagery
Just as @EmmanuelMacron hoped to turn French eyes and ears towards his economic achievements and away from a constant right-wing drumbeat on violence and insecurity, two events – one of them 10,000 miles away – have driven all positive news from the headlines. 1/
https://x.com/Mij_Europe/status/1791035668778426872
Reasons for not using hydrogen are:
- Hydrogen is just greenwashed coal: it takes more energy to produce than it releases.
- It leaks like a bastard.
- It is worse than all the other alternatives.
So it's expensive to make, impossible to store, dangerous to transport and pointless. It has a large red flashing sign over it saying "THIS IS A MASSIVE ERROR". It is Blackadder levels of wrong. It's not just wrong it's stupidly wrong. I could do a Baldrick impersonation whilst saying "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong..." but I think my view is clear at this point.What's changed since then?
And there was a time when you Tories spent almost all your time talking about "localism"... Of course, it suited you do do so back then.
Now all the Conservative Party stands for is trampling all over the people of this country, ripping us off on an industrial scale and making sure that the fat cats get even fatter.
You might at least try being consistent.
1) the locals are a bunch of fascists resisting giving voting rights to immigrants
Or
2) the locals are defending their post colonial situation
Answers please…
I have heard of combination oil/air source boilers to try to help in rural areas, but to be honest I'd rather just have the oil boiler.
But I don't disagree that domestic hydrogen's a dead end given the continuing development of heat pumps - as you say, there's still no economic source for the volume needed.
It'd be better to just set a date now for switching off gas altogether rather than stringing it out with the promise of a hydrogen transition that will probably never happen.
I am also doubtful about the Workers Party's boasts about how many candidates they will stand. Galloway is too toxic. He's not successfully pulled together a broader coalition of various individuals and bodies. Where does the money come from to pay all those deposits, that are going to be lost?
If you listen to R3, you do come across some
pretty good contemporary classical alongside the unlistenable stuff.
But the good stuff will last - look at the older generation, for example Arvo Pärt, or Steve Reich.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVPsa4---Y4
"He said that 70% of equipment had now been delivered for unit 1, and "many risks are behind us, like the unique British instrument and control system which has been designed and manufactured, with testing under way". He added: "We had to substantially adapt the EPR design to satisfy British regulations, requiring 7000 changes, adding 35% more steel and 25% more concrete. This adaptation and approval process is the same for other developers bringing new designs into Britain."
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/EDF-announces-Hinkley-Point-C-delay-and-big-rise-i
If they fail to stand in half the seats then fair enough.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-69016539.amp
I love the smell of performative cruelty in the morning. It smells of victory.
It’s also easy to go back and think things were better because they eventually happened. What we now know as the Elizabeth Line was 15 years from approval to opening. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail
The new Wembley stadium was also years late and nearly bankrupted the contractor.
I knew some bad stuff was done but it’s frankly grim what the colonists did, along with “Native Police” in certain areas. Brutally, almost Nazi in the retaliation, nasty and the numbers, even if you reduce the figures in the doc for an element of bias from those in the programme who state them are terrible. It was a massive eye opener and I almost became woke watching it.
Was v weird though watching the interviewees who represented various tribes who all looked as if they were your average white man or woman on Worcester high St. Interesting how some people cling to a small part of their heritage hundreds of years since an ancestor was that heritage - same with people like Joe Biden thinking they are Irish - and it’s their “identity”.
Anyway, well worth a watch to have three hours of being disgusted at being British, remembering that the people who did its ancestors are today’s Aussies so feeling better about being British again and remembering that about three colonists were also killed so it’s sort of justifiable.
I’m going to take a wild guess that the French, the Koreans, the Emiratis and many more countries also don’t want a nuclear accident, but for some reason a British reactor needs 35% more steel and 25% more concrete than a French reactor.
One might understand if there were specific environmental reasons, such as earthquake or tsunami risk, but there aren’t and it’s just adding cost for the sake of it.
The amount of paperwork of the most pointless type will be 400% more.
Prof. Groeteschele: Who would survive? That's an interesting question. I would predict... convicts and file clerks.
Prof. Groeteschele: The worst convicts - those deep down in solitary confinement - and the most ordinary file clerks, probably for large insurance companies, because they would be in fire-proof rooms, protected by tons of the best insulator in the world: paper. And imagine what will happen. The small group of vicious criminals will fight the army of file clerks for the remaining means of life. The convicts will know violence, but the file clerks will know... organization. Who do you think wll win?
[Groeteschele pauses, and then laughs]
Prof. Groeteschele: It's all hypotheses of course, but fun to play around with.
Is it simply that we're paying too little for the "admin" stuff - dragging out the inquiries, planning process, etc., in order to save a few quid, and setting the project up to fail by doing so?
Certainly, something has gone badly wrong with the abandonment of HS2, and not even starting Crossrail 2. It's beginning to look like Hinkley Point C will be the closest thing to a success that we'll have for a generation or more.
Fair enough. I'd rather the gas network switched to hydrogen.
Yes, of course we shouldn't design rules just to exclude or include certain parties. I support giving a wide range of parties coverage in a general election campaign, and UK broadcasting rules are good at doing that. I am also, however, sympathetic to the logic that a debate should only be between a manageable number of people, with a focus on those who could become PM.
I like the US broadcasters' approach of requiring a polling minimum. I note that the Workers Party polling average is approximately 0%. They stood very selectively in areas with large Muslim populations. That they did relatively well in those areas does not prove they have a snowball's chance in most of the country. I suspect Reform UK will get about the same number of MPs as the Workers Party in the general election, but they do poll across the country much, much better.
(I also note that the Workers Party has 1 MP and 5 councillors, whereas Reform UK has 1 MP (by defection), 9 councillors and 1 London AM, plus they are in an alliance with the TUV, who bring another 10 councillors and 1 Stormont AM.)
I've installed air source *heating* (A/C that reverses) in the room I am typing this in. Plus solar panels to power it. Just works.
Hydrogen isn't an answer to anything - it would be cheaper to go to electric boilers at that point. Given the known (and future expected) falls in electricity prices, electric boilers will be cheaper than gas before the planned ending of gas.
Anyone who wants to ignore the safety rules on handling hydrogen is an idiot.
@nickwallis
Who or what is Lesley Sewell crying FOR?
#PostOfficeInquiry
10:38 AM · May 16, 2024"
https://twitter.com/nickwallis/status/1791040512268398775
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cE0FxhrdMI
For some of the tribes, the reason that their only ancestors look white is because the genocide of the tribe was so compete that those are the only people left with any connection.
Can we deport the Home Office?
Kier In Ending, aRe.
Easy to remember.
But there were rumblings about metropolitan French and possibly other EU ers) pricing out locals
"They are shit" is just ignorance.
I've known people, not on mains gas, but not too far from us (we are on gas), who have replaced worn out oil boilers with straight electric boilers and linked solar and reckon it's working out not too much different, not that I've seen the actual figures.
Yes, sure, there'll be some unsuitable materials used in the 80s before anyone began to think of hydrogen compatibility, and we would need a plan to replace those. But that's mainly an issue in the distribution network rather than in the home, and that can be solved by re-lining the pipes where necessary.
And since more than 95% of the deaths from gas come from CO poisoning, a pure hydrogen network would likely work out as being safer than natural gas.
But I don't see it winning out against electricity, and think the real danger is that certain sectors of industry will try to keep us throwing money at it in an effort to keep the possibility of domestic hydrogen alive. We ought to make a decision rather than dithering.
(I do agree that a 'a few more explosions but far fewer poisonings!' is hardly a great safety case. But that's an argument against all domestic gas, not just against hydrogen)
Knight Expects Imminent Rule
I don't know why you're complaining about the rules that you wanted being enforced. Maybe you should have thought about that when you were busy accusing lefties of being weak on immigration for opposing these sorts of rules?
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-inquiry-costs-taxpayers-300k-day-wjgwgfr3d
This was basically admitted during COVID, when the conditions in those factories was exposed.
The bit I never mention about my plan to wipe out the black economy - by being really nice to the victims of it - is the crisis that would result. I'm talking about an overnight hit to GDP, hundreds of thousands of jobs evaporating and a number of business models ceasing to work.
You can't reline domestic pipes - between embrittlement and leaks, you'd have to redo all the pipework between the street and boiler. Even the solder used to join metal has to be the right kind. Hydrogen can leak *through* solid materials.
Gas explosions have dropped massively since the town gas days - the question is whether this was partly due to no hydrogen in the mix. It probably was.
It's interesting that the main barriers she identifies, in addition to various "Schrodinger" type fears (Schrodinger's ASBO Motorcyclist is the one I get most), were around organisational recalcitrance in local authorities, and the planning system.
She wrote a companion piece last week in the Guardian about cycling the Strawberry Line. I did it back in 2015 going to a dance weekend at a hotel in the Levels in winter over frosted roads. I would like her to be more specific in mentioning anti-mobility barriers; it's ironic that the nice level, well-surfaced paths advertised as accessible are exactly the ones that get barriered off.
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/article/2024/may/09/somerset-england-growing-cycle-network-strawberry-line
One current project down there is that Cheddar Gorge may be closed to motor traffic one weekend per month:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-68723687
I heard a fascinating presentation this week by a Green Councillor from Darlington about organisational inertia in his local authorities, and how Council officers are overwhelmingly small c timid-conservative driven by fear of the unknown when it comes to new, or different, ideas. A god example is conraflow cycling on one-way streets, which is fine but causes Corporal Jones to have a panic attack.
Plus how traditional democratic structures which are existing-but-unused (eg petitions, questions to scrutiny committee) can be leveraged by activists for these type of opportunities. I'll post in when it hits Youtube.
Keir Enables Irritating Revolution?
Like the post office inquiry you are seeing very highly paid lawyers in action doing work that is bettering humanity.
They do seem to make a point of doing things in the most archaic way possible - there's an astonishing reliance on shuffling physical paper, and there's all that hanging around while other people put materials up on the screen for them, etc.
But even if they'd found some more tech-literate people, how much would that actually have saved?
And beyond that, it's hard to see where any other savings could have been achieved whilst still fulfilling the brief given to them by the govt.
Mobility and heating definitely have a muted presence, with a lot more focus on ammonia, eSAF, P2X, and large scale industrial facilities.
Still a lot of large "hub" type concepts floating, but increasingly project focused and hands start shaking out.
https://twitter.com/NiyerClimate/status/1790345901531189725
Hydrogen will definitely have its place in a renewable economy - but the cost timeline on the production of green hydrogen, and the likely massive cost of upgrading national gas networks (and domestic pipework), make planning to use it to replace gas in domestic heating completely nuts.
As an industrial feedstock, from electrolysis using zero marginal cost renewables which go beyond what's needed to charge whatever battery storage demand is out there from hour to hour, bulk generation of green hydrogen will at some point make quite a lot of sense economically.
Yep - that'll happen !
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3g92zkd7n4o
If you find him sympathetic, perhaps that should make you question your other assumptions on the topic?
https://msn.com/en-in/news/other/benefits-cheat-filmed-running-jailed-for-two-years/ar-BB1mryW1?ocid=BingNewsSerp
These kind of stories polarise opinion. Some would expect a lot of this kind of thing goes on. Some would say its rare, and we get selection bias (we are aware of these cases BECAUSE they get caught). Id be interested to see how this opinion split between left and right and Labour vs Tory.
The cycle of electricity -> hydrogen -> compress/cool -> store -> uncompress -> electricity is so inefficient that hydrogen power storage is unlikely to make sense. Nearly every other method is cheaper and better. Remember you have significant loses per day - several percent.