Don't know where that comes from - it could cover a multitude of factors - eg age effects. They are more hesitant:
Black or Black British adults were most likely to report vaccine hesitancy compared with White adults. Around 1 in 5 (21%) Black or Black British adults reported vaccine hesitancy, compared with 4% of White adults (23 June to 18 July 2021).
Vaccine hesitancy refers to those who have either declined a COVID-19 vaccine offer, report being unlikely to accept a vaccine or report being undecided.
And I can cope with the concept of "Black British".
What I find very difficult is knowing how to distinguish between the two - especially in the context of a report about the UK. A Government report at that...
Perhaps we need the expertise of a good lawyer to help distinguish between the two. Or alternatively an expert Conservative interpreter, such as young HY, to explain why his Conservative Government has decided to create these two categories in an official report.
Lots of people determined to keep their heads firmly buried in the sand this morning. Of course it's more comfortable to pretend this isn't happening and switch over to the sports instead, but the recklessness of what we have been doing for the last 30 years, mainly so that very rich people and companies can continue to make a fast buck is the by far the worst crime of my lifetime. Nothing else even comes close.
And those fanatic worshippers of the profit-motive cult continue to spout their bollocks despite all the evidence, it's hard to imagine any evidence that could possibly change their minds at this point. It's the worst religious cult of all - and some of its adherents even pretend to be against religion!
If you read my post properly I accept climate change is happening but action to mitigate it has to be undertaken in a time scale that is realistic and acceptable to the public
Those who want immediate change need to explain exactly what they want, how they are going to achieve it, the cost, and how they are going to get the world to act in unison
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Summer 18 hours of sunshine a day Winter 8 hours of sunshine a day
or do your panels generate power when the sun is below the horizon?
Philip's point (and everyone should know that I rarely agree with him) is that the hours when demand for energy is highest in the UK is when the sun is below the horizon and it's dark.
How many decades have we been 10 years from disaster?
Certainly since the 1970s.
Why are the people who were so wrong then, so right now?
+1
This is puerile. Sources, please, for the 10 years claim being made in the 70s, and each of the years thereafter.
And as a bonus question for extra points: of the 10 hottest years since 1880 the earliest was 2005. Who thinks this fact arises purely from random variation?
Supermarket update: Almost no frozen food at Sainsbury's this morning. Some dry goods looking pretty bare. Got the last two packets of my favourite ginger biscuits for example.
Lidl looking ok.
My Sainsbury’s in Durham had little frozen food on some ranges yesterday, the rest was fine.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
What I frankly do not understand about these climate change targets is why we haven't been doing that, and also solar panels as standard, on all new builds for the last 15 years. That would have made a very considerable difference by now.
If I were feeling cynical I would say because the building trade lobbied hard to make sure it didn't happen and they had the right contacts to whom they were very close to get their way.
If I were feeling realistic, I would say everything in that sentence up to 'and.'
Solar panels are the wrong answer for the UK, they're almost but not quite virtue signalling nonsense in the UK.
In states like California or countries like Australia where electricity demand peaks in the summer sun when air conditioning comes on then solar panels are a complete no brainer.
But in the UK we're a cold, wet, grey island that sees energy demand peak in the winter when we put our heating on - and as we switch from gas to electric heaters that's only going to increase.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Even in winter, my solar panels give enough power to run electric radiators. Just not for the whole house.
Now I will grant you that might work for me, where I'm quite happy just to heat one room and not for the whole day at that, and not for you with a young family across several rooms. But that doesn't make them the wrong solution. Especially not if people are going to do more working from home and be in more often in the hours of daylight.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
Yes absolutely if anyone wants to migrate here then I have no qualms with them doing so. The same rules should be consistently applied on that, I believe that currently if a company is offering a £30k salary plus they can sponsor a visa? I have no issues with that whatsoever, if a company wants to do that then they should do that.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
Lots of people determined to keep their heads firmly buried in the sand this morning. Of course it's more comfortable to pretend this isn't happening and switch over to the sports instead, but the recklessness of what we have been doing for the last 30 years, mainly so that very rich people and companies can continue to make a fast buck is the by far the worst crime of my lifetime. Nothing else even comes close.
And those fanatic worshippers of the profit-motive cult continue to spout their bollocks despite all the evidence, it's hard to imagine any evidence that could possibly change their minds at this point. It's the worst religious cult of all - and some of its adherents even pretend to be against religion!
If you read my post properly I accept climate change is happening but action to mitigate it has to be undertaken in a time scale that is realistic and acceptable to the public
Those who want immediate change need to explain exactly what they want, how they are going to achieve it, the cost, and how they are going to get the world to act in unison
I suspect doing it at a time scale that is acceptable to the public means we will be too late
And being honest I suspect we may already be too late as feedback loops start creating unexpected consequences.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
What I frankly do not understand about these climate change targets is why we haven't been doing that, and also solar panels as standard, on all new builds for the last 15 years. That would have made a very considerable difference by now.
If I were feeling cynical I would say because the building trade lobbied hard to make sure it didn't happen and they had the right contacts to whom they were very close to get their way.
If I were feeling realistic, I would say everything in that sentence up to 'and.'
Solar panels are the wrong answer for the UK, they're almost but not quite virtue signalling nonsense in the UK.
In states like California or countries like Australia where electricity demand peaks in the summer sun when air conditioning comes on then solar panels are a complete no brainer.
But in the UK we're a cold, wet, grey island that sees energy demand peak in the winter when we put our heating on - and as we switch from gas to electric heaters that's only going to increase.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Actually I have had solar panels for 6 years and they are one of the best investments I have made
Indeed this last quarter has produced the highest generation for that period since I installed them, even though it does not appear to be as good a period of weather than last year
They may be a reasonable investment but they're not an answer for zero carbon.
This past quarter is spring/summer when electricity demand dips in the country. It peaks in midwinter. How much was it generating in December or January etc when you had your central heating on? Now imagine your central heating is electricity powered which is meant to be the future, how much is solar helping with that?
Fair comment but for the capital investment, they have shown an annual return of approx 9% which these days is exceptional
I started to listed to the IPCC report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
As I understand it we have to give up all fossil fuel, stop flying, rid our homes of gas central heating, insulate every home in the UK, buy expensive electric cars that have poor ranges and nowhere near enough electricity capacity in the country and feel thoroughly guilty and selfish if we do not immediately agree to this, even though many countries will say of course they agree, then do absolutely nothing
It has to be a gradual process over many years and anything else is frankly totally unrealistic
And by the way watching Messi sobbing about leaving Barcelona was just pathetic.
Barcelona have made him a multi millionaire and if it was so important to him he could have played a couple of years at a nominal 1 euro per year, rather than £650,000 per week PSG are offering him
You have to feel sorry for the lad, only £650k a week, he has been used to £2 million a week for the past 5 years...how can one survive on such a reduction in their wages.
More seriously its bollocks. He has earned over £650m in wages alone from Barcelona over the past 8 years, if he really wanted to stay, he could afford to play for nothing (remember he also earns incredible amounts from sponsorships). The reality is that Barcelona are now a crap team and are so in debt they are going to have to try and offload some of the decent talent ASAP, and Messi wants to win the Champions League again before he retires.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Big cri de 'Wot happens when the wind don't blow?!' energy. Haven't heard one of them for ages mind.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
Yes absolutely if anyone wants to migrate here then I have no qualms with them doing so. The same rules should be consistently applied on that, I believe that currently if a company is offering a £30k salary plus they can sponsor a visa? I have no issues with that whatsoever, if a company wants to do that then they should do that.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
Visas are an unwanted administrative tool to control the labour market aren't they?
How many decades have we been 10 years from disaster?
Certainly since the 1970s.
Why are the people who were so wrong then, so right now?
+1
This is puerile. Sources, please, for the 10 years claim being made in the 70s, and each of the years thereafter.
And as a bonus question for extra points: of the 10 hottest years since 1880 the earliest was 2005. Who thinks this fact arises purely from random variation?
See the prediction of meltdown by....er.....1975 from this eminent Stanford 'expert'
Famine, pollution and ice ages? What we are talking about is AGW, and you come up with a silly no effort blog of downstairs loo reading funnies.
Oh I see the eminent scientists of the past were a bunch of idiots but the ones we have now are so much better because CNN told you so?
No. I am slightly guided by what is visibly happening though. You only attempted part 1 of a 2 part question, so what is your take on "And as a bonus question for extra points: of the 10 hottest years since 1880 the earliest was 2005. Who thinks this fact arises purely from random variation?"
But yes, thank goodness pollution and famine are firmly off the menu of things to worry about. Those wacky scientists!
and how they are going to get the world to act in unison
The whole world is acting, not at the required speed, but the whole world is trying to reduce emissions without wrecking standards of living. We've had some enormous wins - for example the US and China subsidized solar, and it's now way cheaper than most of us would have expected, to the point where in many places it's out-competing fossil fuels on its own terms.
What's slowing us down is that in every single country we're having the exact same argument we're having here, where the exact same fuckheads are complaining that they don't want to do anything unless the other countries do more first.
Doing away with bitcoin and other crypto currencies would be of huge net benefit. It's all powered with dirty Chinese coal and takes up a massive proportion of global power output.
Concerted effort to make it all worthless would a good first step that is probably actionable.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
There's far more heavy cloud in the UK winter than snow.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
What I frankly do not understand about these climate change targets is why we haven't been doing that, and also solar panels as standard, on all new builds for the last 15 years. That would have made a very considerable difference by now.
If I were feeling cynical I would say because the building trade lobbied hard to make sure it didn't happen and they had the right contacts to whom they were very close to get their way.
If I were feeling realistic, I would say everything in that sentence up to 'and.'
Solar panels are the wrong answer for the UK, they're almost but not quite virtue signalling nonsense in the UK.
In states like California or countries like Australia where electricity demand peaks in the summer sun when air conditioning comes on then solar panels are a complete no brainer.
But in the UK we're a cold, wet, grey island that sees energy demand peak in the winter when we put our heating on - and as we switch from gas to electric heaters that's only going to increase.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Even in winter, my solar panels give enough power to run electric radiators. Just not for the whole house.
Now I will grant you that might work for me, where I'm quite happy just to heat one room and not for the whole day at that, and not for you with a young family across several rooms. But that doesn't make them the wrong solution. Especially not if people are going to do more working from home and be in more often in the hours of daylight.
I'm talking on a national basis.
The issue is best summed up by looking at two charts from Gridwatch.
Annual demand - clearly peaks in December to February - and this is before we switch our heating over from gas to electric heating which will send winter demand surging much, much higher.
Annual supply - look at the red line. How useful is that in winter?
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
There's far more heavy cloud in the UK winter than snow.
Are you sure you're in the UK and not the Alps ?
Epic epic point missing.
My panels worked through the winter in Devon at my last house. You can maximise bang for buck very effectively by running white goods machines while the sun is up. And hoovering.
"‘I don’t fancy it just yet,” said Allegra Stratton, the No 10 press secretary turned prime minister’s climate spokesperson, when she was asked about getting an electric car. She preferred her old diesel, thank you.
If this was merely the most memorable in a series of suboptimal comments from the person hired to communicate the urgency of Cop26, the climate summit, you couldn’t fault it as a summary of Boris Johnson’s position on decisive climate action. He doesn’t fancy it just yet."
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
Yes absolutely if anyone wants to migrate here then I have no qualms with them doing so. The same rules should be consistently applied on that, I believe that currently if a company is offering a £30k salary plus they can sponsor a visa? I have no issues with that whatsoever, if a company wants to do that then they should do that.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
Visas are an unwanted administrative tool to control the labour market aren't they?
I guess it depends on whether or not it's your job that's getting its wages depressed.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
What I frankly do not understand about these climate change targets is why we haven't been doing that, and also solar panels as standard, on all new builds for the last 15 years. That would have made a very considerable difference by now.
If I were feeling cynical I would say because the building trade lobbied hard to make sure it didn't happen and they had the right contacts to whom they were very close to get their way.
If I were feeling realistic, I would say everything in that sentence up to 'and.'
Solar panels are the wrong answer for the UK, they're almost but not quite virtue signalling nonsense in the UK.
In states like California or countries like Australia where electricity demand peaks in the summer sun when air conditioning comes on then solar panels are a complete no brainer.
But in the UK we're a cold, wet, grey island that sees energy demand peak in the winter when we put our heating on - and as we switch from gas to electric heaters that's only going to increase.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Actually I have had solar panels for 6 years and they are one of the best investments I have made
Indeed this last quarter has produced the highest generation for that period since I installed them, even though it does not appear to be as good a period of weather than last year
They may be a reasonable investment but they're not an answer for zero carbon.
This past quarter is spring/summer when electricity demand dips in the country. It peaks in midwinter. How much was it generating in December or January etc when you had your central heating on? Now imagine your central heating is electricity powered which is meant to be the future, how much is solar helping with that?
Fair comment but for the capital investment, they have shown an annual return of approx 9% which these days is exceptional
Oh absolutely they can be great for economic reasons.
They're not a solution for the environment though.
So they should only be installed for economic reasons. Not mandated for "environmental" ones if they're economic counterproductive.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
There's far more heavy cloud in the UK winter than snow.
Are you sure you're in the UK and not the Alps ?
Epic epic point missing.
My panels worked through the winter in Devon at my last house. You can maximise bang for buck very effectively by running white goods machines while the sun is up. And hoovering.
Devon is fine but get up to the North East and Scotland when you have far less daylight in the winter then it becomes an issue.
Doing away with bitcoin and other crypto currencies would be of huge net benefit. It's all powered with dirty Chinese coal and takes up a massive proportion of global power output.
Concerted effort to make it all worthless would a good first step that is probably actionable.
Yup. Ideally mining would be taxed at source but that's probably not practical, as it only takes a single country to pick a lower tax rate and it all moves there and everyone else gets undercut.
What would be practical would be to tax holding cryptocurrencies, at a rate proportional to the amount of environmental damage it does. There would be quite a bit of evasion, but it would still be enough to collect a decent amount of tax revenue and clobber the prices of the most damaging ones, while encouraging people to migrate to better designs.
Doing away with bitcoin and other crypto currencies would be of huge net benefit. It's all powered with dirty Chinese coal and takes up a massive proportion of global power output.
Concerted effort to make it all worthless would a good first step that is probably actionable.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
Yes absolutely if anyone wants to migrate here then I have no qualms with them doing so. The same rules should be consistently applied on that, I believe that currently if a company is offering a £30k salary plus they can sponsor a visa? I have no issues with that whatsoever, if a company wants to do that then they should do that.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
Visas are an unwanted administrative tool to control the labour market aren't they?
As far as I'm concerned yes.
They should be removed consistently though, not specifically for one sector alone.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
Yes absolutely if anyone wants to migrate here then I have no qualms with them doing so. The same rules should be consistently applied on that, I believe that currently if a company is offering a £30k salary plus they can sponsor a visa? I have no issues with that whatsoever, if a company wants to do that then they should do that.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
Visas are an unwanted administrative tool to control the labour market aren't they?
I guess it depends on whether or not it's your job that's getting its wages depressed.
Oh absolutely but Philip is a man of principle and it is his political philosophy that is being discussed here.
No surprise to see bitter, Boris hating remain voters plodding along with their grievances, trying to blame it all on Brexit whilst the firms involved say
“ Dairy giant Arla said in June: 'There is a real crunch this Summer because of Covid causing a backlog of new drivers passing their tests, changes to tax rules, some drivers from EU countries returning home, some others on furlough and other factors.”
“ the Road Haulage Association warned in late July that there was a shortage of 100,000 lorry drivers in the UK, which has been hampering deliveries of food from warehouses to supermarkets.
Thousands of prospective drivers are waiting for their HGV tests due to a backlog caused by lockdown, while many existing ones have left the UK after Brexit.
The problem has been exacerbated by Covid, with drivers having to go into self-isolation amid the so-called 'pingdemic'.”
Beats hoping for people to get Covid I guess, though
Who suggested that the shortage of drivers was solely down to Brexit? That is part of it, but so is IR35 and Covid. The issue is that we cannot have a solution because of Brexit. The free market is not allowed to fill the vacancies with available drivers because EU drivers aren't wanted. So we have to wait until sufficient new drivers are recruited and trained to fill both the current hole and those drivers due to retire which will take 18 months at least.
Why will it take 18 months when it takes six weeks to train a driver?
We've been debating this for six months now, not six weeks. Had pay rises been forthcoming six months ago then people could have been trained four times over already.
As the Road Haulage Association say
“ Thousands of prospective drivers are waiting for their HGV tests due to a backlog caused by lockdown”
- and the people blaming Boris for the HGV problem didn’t want lockdown to ever end!!!!
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
Yes absolutely if anyone wants to migrate here then I have no qualms with them doing so. The same rules should be consistently applied on that, I believe that currently if a company is offering a £30k salary plus they can sponsor a visa? I have no issues with that whatsoever, if a company wants to do that then they should do that.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
Visas are an unwanted administrative tool to control the labour market aren't they?
I guess it depends on whether or not it's your job that's getting its wages depressed.
Oh absolutely but Philip is a man of principle and it is his political philosophy that is being discussed here.
My principle is I'm in favour of consistent reasonably free movement globally. I'd like the same rules applied globally and consistently.
I would be happy to see immigration go up not down, but I'd like to see restrictions on land usage eased tied to that so that we can have adequate house building etc to go with the increased population demands.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
There's far more heavy cloud in the UK winter than snow.
Are you sure you're in the UK and not the Alps ?
Epic epic point missing.
My panels worked through the winter in Devon at my last house. You can maximise bang for buck very effectively by running white goods machines while the sun is up. And hoovering.
Devon is fine but get up to the North East and Scotland when you have far less daylight in the winter then it becomes an issue.
Swings and roundabouts. Do all your hoovering in the summer.
No surprise to see bitter, Boris hating remain voters plodding along with their grievances, trying to blame it all on Brexit whilst the firms involved say
“ Dairy giant Arla said in June: 'There is a real crunch this Summer because of Covid causing a backlog of new drivers passing their tests, changes to tax rules, some drivers from EU countries returning home, some others on furlough and other factors.”
“ the Road Haulage Association warned in late July that there was a shortage of 100,000 lorry drivers in the UK, which has been hampering deliveries of food from warehouses to supermarkets.
Thousands of prospective drivers are waiting for their HGV tests due to a backlog caused by lockdown, while many existing ones have left the UK after Brexit.
The problem has been exacerbated by Covid, with drivers having to go into self-isolation amid the so-called 'pingdemic'.”
Beats hoping for people to get Covid I guess, though
Who suggested that the shortage of drivers was solely down to Brexit? That is part of it, but so is IR35 and Covid. The issue is that we cannot have a solution because of Brexit. The free market is not allowed to fill the vacancies with available drivers because EU drivers aren't wanted. So we have to wait until sufficient new drivers are recruited and trained to fill both the current hole and those drivers due to retire which will take 18 months at least.
Why will it take 18 months when it takes six weeks to train a driver?
We've been debating this for six months now, not six weeks. Had pay rises been forthcoming six months ago then people could have been trained four times over already.
As the Road Haulage Association say
“ Thousands of prospective drivers are waiting for their HGV tests due to a backlog caused by lockdown”
- and the people blaming Boris for the HGV problem didn’t want lockdown to ever end!!!!
Seems like the solution would be to strain every sinew to increase the supply of HGV tests being able to be taken then.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
Yes absolutely if anyone wants to migrate here then I have no qualms with them doing so. The same rules should be consistently applied on that, I believe that currently if a company is offering a £30k salary plus they can sponsor a visa? I have no issues with that whatsoever, if a company wants to do that then they should do that.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
Visas are an unwanted administrative tool to control the labour market aren't they?
I guess it depends on whether or not it's your job that's getting its wages depressed.
Oh absolutely but Philip is a man of principle and it is his political philosophy that is being discussed here.
My principle is I'm in favour of consistent reasonably free movement globally. I'd like the same rules applied globally and consistently.
I would be happy to see immigration go up not down, but I'd like to see restrictions on land usage eased tied to that so that we can have adequate house building etc to go with the increased population demands.
We've been through the land thing. You can't have people build anywhere because the taxes to address the negative externalities would be prohibitive.
But glad to see you are against restrictions on free movement. Can't say the same for all your Brexit fellow travellers.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
There's far more heavy cloud in the UK winter than snow.
Are you sure you're in the UK and not the Alps ?
Epic epic point missing.
My panels worked through the winter in Devon at my last house. You can maximise bang for buck very effectively by running white goods machines while the sun is up. And hoovering.
Devon is fine but get up to the North East and Scotland when you have far less daylight in the winter then it becomes an issue.
Swings and roundabouts. Do all your hoovering in the summer.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Or when it’s dark, and it’s quite a bit darker in the winter than the summer.
Phillip does have a point about winter. We need more power during the winter and even working efficiently solar panels don’t deliver and they are great where you got longer days in the south of England but in the north east or Scotland were days are quite a bit shorter they are less so.
Doing away with bitcoin and other crypto currencies would be of huge net benefit. It's all powered with dirty Chinese coal and takes up a massive proportion of global power output.
Concerted effort to make it all worthless would a good first step that is probably actionable.
Yup. Ideally mining would be taxed at source but that's probably not practical, as it only takes a single country to pick a lower tax rate and it all moves there and everyone else gets undercut.
What would be practical would be to tax holding cryptocurrencies, at a rate proportional to the amount of environmental damage it does. There would be quite a bit of evasion, but it would still be enough to collect a decent amount of tax revenue and clobber the prices of the most damaging ones, while encouraging people to migrate to better designs.
The issue is that you or I may understand that, does this issue even make the discussion table for Boris, Biden or Xi? The scientists are too focussed on inputs rather than outputs. We know there are a few highly energy intensive industries. We can focus innovation on these in the very near term to improve efficiency of processes. We should have been doing it 30 years ago but the same scientists were still trying to get people to agree to live in cold, damp caves with ever more hysterical sounding catchphrases.
30 years ago there was a lot of first mover's advantage to be had for any nation which successfully addressed energy inefficiencies in industrial processes. Just as Tesla are getting a huge first mover's advantage for electric cars. Sadly it looks like we're only starting that process today which means we need to wait for 30 years and hope that the current trend can be reversed.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
There's far more heavy cloud in the UK winter than snow.
Are you sure you're in the UK and not the Alps ?
Epic epic point missing.
My panels worked through the winter in Devon at my last house. You can maximise bang for buck very effectively by running white goods machines while the sun is up. And hoovering.
My system generates ~ 4 kwh/day in the winter, 11 in the autumn/spring and 17 in summer.
10 kwh in the winter doesn't sound like a UK based system to me.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
Yes absolutely if anyone wants to migrate here then I have no qualms with them doing so. The same rules should be consistently applied on that, I believe that currently if a company is offering a £30k salary plus they can sponsor a visa? I have no issues with that whatsoever, if a company wants to do that then they should do that.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
Visas are an unwanted administrative tool to control the labour market aren't they?
I guess it depends on whether or not it's your job that's getting its wages depressed.
Oh absolutely but Philip is a man of principle and it is his political philosophy that is being discussed here.
My principle is I'm in favour of consistent reasonably free movement globally. I'd like the same rules applied globally and consistently.
I would be happy to see immigration go up not down, but I'd like to see restrictions on land usage eased tied to that so that we can have adequate house building etc to go with the increased population demands.
We've been through the land thing. You can't have people build anywhere because the taxes to address the negative externalities would be prohibitive.
But glad to see you are against restrictions on free movement. Can't say the same for all your Brexit fellow travellers.
An "Australian style points immigration system" quite literally applied could see immigration double. Australia has about twice as much immigration as the UK does.
What I see no reason to do is to put onerous demands for visas should apply for Australians, Canadians, Indians, Americans, Japanese, Mexicans etc - but that they shouldn't for French, Germans, Portugese, Polish or Romanians.
I grew up in Australia, if any of my classmates wanted to come to the UK they'd need a visa.
If visas are an issue then that issue should be fixed consistently. Do you disagree?
Cynical hat says it will say - "Its even worse than before, we really mean it now, we are all doomed!".
I am fully signed up to net zero, protecting the environment, properly using resources - the whole green thing. But I find the increasingly shrill desperation and scare tactics from the climate scientist lobby, without a balance of proper skeptical science at times counter productive. The recent pandemic has revealed the limits of modelling in complex scenarios.
We need to reach a point where we no longer use fossil fuels and have a fully sustainable existence. We need to stop destroying habitats and making species go extinct. But to say we have to do this because the global temperature (whatever that even is) will rise by a degree or two, against a setting where the planet ranges from -50 to +50 deg C, and even in temperate UK from -19 to +38 deg C is nonsense. I am also surprised that the scientists now seem confident to link extreme weather events to climate change. One of the issues is we now have world wide reporting, so any extreme event gets reported, whereas even 20 years ago that was not the case. This adds to the feeling of doom everywhere, when in reality, for much of the world, extremes have always happened. Homes being flooded is far more because of where they have built their houses, not necessarily due to more rain.
I dont agree on the point about global temperature, but it is the case that as bad as things may be previous estimates feel like they were that things would be even worse.
Based on predictions of 80s videos we had to watch at school in the 90s I'm surprised theres any amazon rainforest left.
I'm not sure how one appropriately lists concern. If you don't set a date theres no urgency but if you then reach that date without widespread catastrophe it undermines future warnings, yet its also probably the case that by the time its obvious it's too late.
It does seem true that more people are more passionately concerned about these issues than just 5 years ago, but given its certain that lots things in any report stated as needing to happen will not happen, by that logic we're already doomed.
I'm happy to disagree - but what do you understand the global temperature to be? I think it is a stupid concept, but that might just be me.
I'm not a scientist and have not explored the issue so couldn't answer with any authority, I just don't see the idea of average global temperatures as inherently nonsense. If there are criticisms of such a thing I'd listen.
My criticism is what is the average temperature of the the earth today? And where? There is a huge spread across the globe. If you take 100 people and measured the average height to be say 5 foot 10, no-one would be that far from that average. Instead if you took insects and elephants and averaged the height it would be meaningless for all of them.
I believe the temp change given is actually the average rise of all the observations around the world. I have issues with that too - most observation sites have changed markedly over the last 150 years, and are subject to urban heat island effects. Climate scientist try to mitigate this (I have seen some talk about this) but I remain unconvinced.
And your alternative for measuring global temperature is what ?
Of course there are uncertainties - but one of the reasons for the increase in alarm is that successive sets of data from an increasing number of sources keeps reducing the room to say 'our calculations were wrong and there's no reason to be worried after all'.
If we wait until the best guess proves a certainty, it will be too late to do anything about it.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
Yes absolutely if anyone wants to migrate here then I have no qualms with them doing so. The same rules should be consistently applied on that, I believe that currently if a company is offering a £30k salary plus they can sponsor a visa? I have no issues with that whatsoever, if a company wants to do that then they should do that.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
Visas are an unwanted administrative tool to control the labour market aren't they?
I guess it depends on whether or not it's your job that's getting its wages depressed.
Oh absolutely but Philip is a man of principle and it is his political philosophy that is being discussed here.
My principle is I'm in favour of consistent reasonably free movement globally. I'd like the same rules applied globally and consistently.
I would be happy to see immigration go up not down, but I'd like to see restrictions on land usage eased tied to that so that we can have adequate house building etc to go with the increased population demands.
We've been through the land thing. You can't have people build anywhere because the taxes to address the negative externalities would be prohibitive.
But glad to see you are against restrictions on free movement. Can't say the same for all your Brexit fellow travellers.
An "Australian style points immigration system" quite literally applied could see immigration double. Australia has about twice as much immigration as the UK does.
What I see no reason to do is to put onerous demands for visas should apply for Australians, Canadians, Indians, Americans, Japanese, Mexicans etc - but that they shouldn't for French, Germans, Portugese, Polish or Romanians.
I grew up in Australia, if any of my classmates wanted to come to the UK they'd need a visa.
If visas are an issue then that issue should be fixed consistently. Do you disagree?
Depends. Preferred immigration treatment for our neighbours was part of a package of measures which we decided overall were beneficial for the country.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
Yes absolutely if anyone wants to migrate here then I have no qualms with them doing so. The same rules should be consistently applied on that, I believe that currently if a company is offering a £30k salary plus they can sponsor a visa? I have no issues with that whatsoever, if a company wants to do that then they should do that.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
Visas are an unwanted administrative tool to control the labour market aren't they?
I guess it depends on whether or not it's your job that's getting its wages depressed.
Oh absolutely but Philip is a man of principle and it is his political philosophy that is being discussed here.
My principle is I'm in favour of consistent reasonably free movement globally. I'd like the same rules applied globally and consistently.
I would be happy to see immigration go up not down, but I'd like to see restrictions on land usage eased tied to that so that we can have adequate house building etc to go with the increased population demands.
We've been through the land thing. You can't have people build anywhere because the taxes to address the negative externalities would be prohibitive.
But glad to see you are against restrictions on free movement. Can't say the same for all your Brexit fellow travellers.
An "Australian style points immigration system" quite literally applied could see immigration double. Australia has about twice as much immigration as the UK does.
What I see no reason to do is to put onerous demands for visas should apply for Australians, Canadians, Indians, Americans, Japanese, Mexicans etc - but that they shouldn't for French, Germans, Portugese, Polish or Romanians.
I grew up in Australia, if any of my classmates wanted to come to the UK they'd need a visa.
If visas are an issue then that issue should be fixed consistently. Do you disagree?
Depends. Preferred immigration treatment for our neighbours was part of a package of measures which we decided overall were beneficial for the country.
Correction - which we decided was not beneficial to the country. There was a referendum, not sure if you remember it.
Doing away with bitcoin and other crypto currencies would be of huge net benefit. It's all powered with dirty Chinese coal and takes up a massive proportion of global power output.
Concerted effort to make it all worthless would a good first step that is probably actionable.
Yup. Ideally mining would be taxed at source but that's probably not practical, as it only takes a single country to pick a lower tax rate and it all moves there and everyone else gets undercut.
What would be practical would be to tax holding cryptocurrencies, at a rate proportional to the amount of environmental damage it does. There would be quite a bit of evasion, but it would still be enough to collect a decent amount of tax revenue and clobber the prices of the most damaging ones, while encouraging people to migrate to better designs.
The issue is that you or I may understand that, does this issue even make the discussion table for Boris, Biden or Xi? The scientists are too focussed on inputs rather than outputs. We know there are a few highly energy intensive industries. We can focus innovation on these in the very near term to improve efficiency of processes. We should have been doing it 30 years ago but the same scientists were still trying to get people to agree to live in cold, damp caves with ever more hysterical sounding catchphrases.
30 years ago there was a lot of first mover's advantage to be had for any nation which successfully addressed energy inefficiencies in industrial processes. Just as Tesla are getting a huge first mover's advantage for electric cars. Sadly it looks like we're only starting that process today which means we need to wait for 30 years and hope that the current trend can be reversed.
IIUC the Xi administration has already basically totally shutdown bitcoin mining in China. (They seem to be waging some kind of war on tech bros, they clobbered ride-sharing services and online after-school study companies as well.)
I don't know what Biden understands but his administration has very knowledgeable people. I think a hodling tax would be popular; It's a quick, environmentally-friendly revenue-raiser, and everybody's cross with cybercoins because of ransomware.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
I don't need to be the world's fucking expert on solar systems to read a fucking chart. Heck anyone not colour blind ought to be able to see this red fucking line. What does it do in fucking winter, and why do we need so much fucking language?
The UK needs heating. We need an environmental solution that works for winter. It is dark and cold and the heating is on in winter.
"‘I don’t fancy it just yet,” said Allegra Stratton, the No 10 press secretary turned prime minister’s climate spokesperson, when she was asked about getting an electric car. She preferred her old diesel, thank you.
If this was merely the most memorable in a series of suboptimal comments from the person hired to communicate the urgency of Cop26, the climate summit, you couldn’t fault it as a summary of Boris Johnson’s position on decisive climate action. He doesn’t fancy it just yet."
The daily press conference, white house-style, would have been a giggle with Allegra running the show.
Cynical hat says it will say - "Its even worse than before, we really mean it now, we are all doomed!".
I am fully signed up to net zero, protecting the environment, properly using resources - the whole green thing. But I find the increasingly shrill desperation and scare tactics from the climate scientist lobby, without a balance of proper skeptical science at times counter productive. The recent pandemic has revealed the limits of modelling in complex scenarios.
We need to reach a point where we no longer use fossil fuels and have a fully sustainable existence. We need to stop destroying habitats and making species go extinct. But to say we have to do this because the global temperature (whatever that even is) will rise by a degree or two, against a setting where the planet ranges from -50 to +50 deg C, and even in temperate UK from -19 to +38 deg C is nonsense. I am also surprised that the scientists now seem confident to link extreme weather events to climate change. One of the issues is we now have world wide reporting, so any extreme event gets reported, whereas even 20 years ago that was not the case. This adds to the feeling of doom everywhere, when in reality, for much of the world, extremes have always happened. Homes being flooded is far more because of where they have built their houses, not necessarily due to more rain.
I dont agree on the point about global temperature, but it is the case that as bad as things may be previous estimates feel like they were that things would be even worse.
Based on predictions of 80s videos we had to watch at school in the 90s I'm surprised theres any amazon rainforest left.
I'm not sure how one appropriately lists concern. If you don't set a date theres no urgency but if you then reach that date without widespread catastrophe it undermines future warnings, yet its also probably the case that by the time its obvious it's too late.
It does seem true that more people are more passionately concerned about these issues than just 5 years ago, but given its certain that lots things in any report stated as needing to happen will not happen, by that logic we're already doomed.
I'm happy to disagree - but what do you understand the global temperature to be? I think it is a stupid concept, but that might just be me.
I'm not a scientist and have not explored the issue so couldn't answer with any authority, I just don't see the idea of average global temperatures as inherently nonsense. If there are criticisms of such a thing I'd listen.
My criticism is what is the average temperature of the the earth today? And where? There is a huge spread across the globe. If you take 100 people and measured the average height to be say 5 foot 10, no-one would be that far from that average. Instead if you took insects and elephants and averaged the height it would be meaningless for all of them.
I believe the temp change given is actually the average rise of all the observations around the world. I have issues with that too - most observation sites have changed markedly over the last 150 years, and are subject to urban heat island effects. Climate scientist try to mitigate this (I have seen some talk about this) but I remain unconvinced.
And your alternative for measuring global temperature is what ?
Of course there are uncertainties - but one of the reasons for the increase in alarm is that successive sets of data from an increasing number of sources keeps reducing the room to say 'our calculations were wrong and there's no reason to be worried after all'.
If we wait until the best guess proves a certainty, it will be too late to do anything about it.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Or when it’s dark, and it’s quite a bit darker in the winter than the summer.
Phillip does have a point about winter. We need more power during the winter and even working efficiently solar panels don’t deliver and they are great where you got longer days in the south of England but in the north east or Scotland were days are quite a bit shorter they are less so.
Which is why we're planning a shit tonne of wind farms. There's also the plan for a massive solar farm in Morocco, with an HVDC cable to somewhere in the south of England.
I always have a mental image of climate change conferences full of the great and the good flying in private jets, exalting everyone that we must do more whilst their personal footprint is absolubtely mahoosive.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
Yes absolutely if anyone wants to migrate here then I have no qualms with them doing so. The same rules should be consistently applied on that, I believe that currently if a company is offering a £30k salary plus they can sponsor a visa? I have no issues with that whatsoever, if a company wants to do that then they should do that.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
Visas are an unwanted administrative tool to control the labour market aren't they?
I guess it depends on whether or not it's your job that's getting its wages depressed.
Oh absolutely but Philip is a man of principle and it is his political philosophy that is being discussed here.
My principle is I'm in favour of consistent reasonably free movement globally. I'd like the same rules applied globally and consistently.
I would be happy to see immigration go up not down, but I'd like to see restrictions on land usage eased tied to that so that we can have adequate house building etc to go with the increased population demands.
We've been through the land thing. You can't have people build anywhere because the taxes to address the negative externalities would be prohibitive.
But glad to see you are against restrictions on free movement. Can't say the same for all your Brexit fellow travellers.
An "Australian style points immigration system" quite literally applied could see immigration double. Australia has about twice as much immigration as the UK does.
What I see no reason to do is to put onerous demands for visas should apply for Australians, Canadians, Indians, Americans, Japanese, Mexicans etc - but that they shouldn't for French, Germans, Portugese, Polish or Romanians.
I grew up in Australia, if any of my classmates wanted to come to the UK they'd need a visa.
If visas are an issue then that issue should be fixed consistently. Do you disagree?
Depends. Preferred immigration treatment for our neighbours was part of a package of measures which we decided overall were beneficial for the country.
Correction: preferred immigration treatment for our neighbours was part of a package of measures which we decided overall were not beneficial for the country.
Considering the UK has more people moving to countries like Australia than European country by a long margin, we should reasonably consider solving visa issues on a global and not regional basis.
Doing away with bitcoin and other crypto currencies would be of huge net benefit. It's all powered with dirty Chinese coal and takes up a massive proportion of global power output.
Concerted effort to make it all worthless would a good first step that is probably actionable.
Yup. Ideally mining would be taxed at source but that's probably not practical, as it only takes a single country to pick a lower tax rate and it all moves there and everyone else gets undercut.
What would be practical would be to tax holding cryptocurrencies, at a rate proportional to the amount of environmental damage it does. There would be quite a bit of evasion, but it would still be enough to collect a decent amount of tax revenue and clobber the prices of the most damaging ones, while encouraging people to migrate to better designs.
The issue is that you or I may understand that, does this issue even make the discussion table for Boris, Biden or Xi? The scientists are too focussed on inputs rather than outputs. We know there are a few highly energy intensive industries. We can focus innovation on these in the very near term to improve efficiency of processes. We should have been doing it 30 years ago but the same scientists were still trying to get people to agree to live in cold, damp caves with ever more hysterical sounding catchphrases.
30 years ago there was a lot of first mover's advantage to be had for any nation which successfully addressed energy inefficiencies in industrial processes. Just as Tesla are getting a huge first mover's advantage for electric cars. Sadly it looks like we're only starting that process today which means we need to wait for 30 years and hope that the current trend can be reversed.
Or they'll just migrate the the Middle East, where solar will be a cent per kW...
Cynical hat says it will say - "Its even worse than before, we really mean it now, we are all doomed!".
I am fully signed up to net zero, protecting the environment, properly using resources - the whole green thing. But I find the increasingly shrill desperation and scare tactics from the climate scientist lobby, without a balance of proper skeptical science at times counter productive. The recent pandemic has revealed the limits of modelling in complex scenarios.
We need to reach a point where we no longer use fossil fuels and have a fully sustainable existence. We need to stop destroying habitats and making species go extinct. But to say we have to do this because the global temperature (whatever that even is) will rise by a degree or two, against a setting where the planet ranges from -50 to +50 deg C, and even in temperate UK from -19 to +38 deg C is nonsense. I am also surprised that the scientists now seem confident to link extreme weather events to climate change. One of the issues is we now have world wide reporting, so any extreme event gets reported, whereas even 20 years ago that was not the case. This adds to the feeling of doom everywhere, when in reality, for much of the world, extremes have always happened. Homes being flooded is far more because of where they have built their houses, not necessarily due to more rain.
I dont agree on the point about global temperature, but it is the case that as bad as things may be previous estimates feel like they were that things would be even worse.
Based on predictions of 80s videos we had to watch at school in the 90s I'm surprised theres any amazon rainforest left.
I'm not sure how one appropriately lists concern. If you don't set a date theres no urgency but if you then reach that date without widespread catastrophe it undermines future warnings, yet its also probably the case that by the time its obvious it's too late.
It does seem true that more people are more passionately concerned about these issues than just 5 years ago, but given its certain that lots things in any report stated as needing to happen will not happen, by that logic we're already doomed.
I'm happy to disagree - but what do you understand the global temperature to be? I think it is a stupid concept, but that might just be me.
I'm not a scientist and have not explored the issue so couldn't answer with any authority, I just don't see the idea of average global temperatures as inherently nonsense. If there are criticisms of such a thing I'd listen.
My criticism is what is the average temperature of the the earth today? And where? There is a huge spread across the globe. If you take 100 people and measured the average height to be say 5 foot 10, no-one would be that far from that average. Instead if you took insects and elephants and averaged the height it would be meaningless for all of them.
I believe the temp change given is actually the average rise of all the observations around the world. I have issues with that too - most observation sites have changed markedly over the last 150 years, and are subject to urban heat island effects. Climate scientist try to mitigate this (I have seen some talk about this) but I remain unconvinced.
It is an average, so it isn't anywhere. That is like saying "you keep talking about the average Englishman, so what's his postcode?"
The heat island effect is understood and corrected for. Many observation sites are and always have been far from any heat island.
And the what difference does a paltry 2 deg C make argument doesn't stand up to a moment's thought either. What happens to frozen water when you raise the temperature from -1 to + 1? Is there a lot of frozen water? Where does it go when it thaws?
I started to listed to the IPCC report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
As I understand it we have to give up all fossil fuel, stop flying, rid our homes of gas central heating, insulate every home in the UK, buy expensive electric cars that have poor ranges and nowhere near enough electricity capacity in the country and feel thoroughly guilty and selfish if we do not immediately agree to this, even though many countries will say of course they agree, then do absolutely nothing
It has to be a gradual process over many years and anything else is frankly totally unrealistic
And by the way watching Messi sobbing about leaving Barcelona was just pathetic.
Barcelona have made him a multi millionaire and if it was so important to him he could have played a couple of years at a nominal 1 euro per year, rather than £650,000 per week PSG are offering him
Agree about Messi.
On climate change, sadly the sacrosanct nature of the comfortable Western lifestyle is not a physical constant. If the situation is that your ship needs to jettison all its cargo or sink, that's the situation. You cannot bargain with the weather to jettison some of the lower value stuff over a period of days, nor point out to it that other ships are not doing as much as you are.
That lazy analogy does not stand up.
We could jettison all our cargo and still sink because the theory of climate change is that the sea conditions are actually determined by the boats collectively. One boat dumping its cargo makes no difference. And the fact is that many boats are taking on cargo. Hundreds of new coal fired power stations are planned in places like Indonesia, Vietnam and of course China.
What we are doing is more like the suicide squad at the end of Life of Brian collectively committing suicide as a gesture of solidarity instead of actually taking saving Brian from being crucified.
We laughed at them. And soon, the rest of the world will be laughing at us.
No, the analogy holds perfecrctly as far as the ineluctability of physical forces is concerned.
On the collective effort point, someone has to move first (and actually it is not as if it's just plucky little GB vs ROW again: other countries are actually coming to COP26, even if just for the look of the thing) and to speak with moral authority backed up by personal example. It's more likely we will be belatedly copied, than laughed at. And anyway, I thought contrarianism was rather your thing?
What people are laughing at, is the idea that after the last 18 months we somehow still can’t do a climate change summit remotely, but instead need a hundred planes involved.
Doing away with bitcoin and other crypto currencies would be of huge net benefit. It's all powered with dirty Chinese coal and takes up a massive proportion of global power output.
Concerted effort to make it all worthless would a good first step that is probably actionable.
Yup. Ideally mining would be taxed at source but that's probably not practical, as it only takes a single country to pick a lower tax rate and it all moves there and everyone else gets undercut.
What would be practical would be to tax holding cryptocurrencies, at a rate proportional to the amount of environmental damage it does. There would be quite a bit of evasion, but it would still be enough to collect a decent amount of tax revenue and clobber the prices of the most damaging ones, while encouraging people to migrate to better designs.
The issue is that you or I may understand that, does this issue even make the discussion table for Boris, Biden or Xi? The scientists are too focussed on inputs rather than outputs. We know there are a few highly energy intensive industries. We can focus innovation on these in the very near term to improve efficiency of processes. We should have been doing it 30 years ago but the same scientists were still trying to get people to agree to live in cold, damp caves with ever more hysterical sounding catchphrases.
30 years ago there was a lot of first mover's advantage to be had for any nation which successfully addressed energy inefficiencies in industrial processes. Just as Tesla are getting a huge first mover's advantage for electric cars. Sadly it looks like we're only starting that process today which means we need to wait for 30 years and hope that the current trend can be reversed.
Or they'll just migrate the the Middle East, where solar will be a cent per kW...
It will be uninhabitable by then anyway so may as well cover it in solar panels.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
Yes absolutely if anyone wants to migrate here then I have no qualms with them doing so. The same rules should be consistently applied on that, I believe that currently if a company is offering a £30k salary plus they can sponsor a visa? I have no issues with that whatsoever, if a company wants to do that then they should do that.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
Visas are an unwanted administrative tool to control the labour market aren't they?
I guess it depends on whether or not it's your job that's getting its wages depressed.
Oh absolutely but Philip is a man of principle and it is his political philosophy that is being discussed here.
My principle is I'm in favour of consistent reasonably free movement globally. I'd like the same rules applied globally and consistently.
I would be happy to see immigration go up not down, but I'd like to see restrictions on land usage eased tied to that so that we can have adequate house building etc to go with the increased population demands.
We've been through the land thing. You can't have people build anywhere because the taxes to address the negative externalities would be prohibitive.
But glad to see you are against restrictions on free movement. Can't say the same for all your Brexit fellow travellers.
An "Australian style points immigration system" quite literally applied could see immigration double. Australia has about twice as much immigration as the UK does.
What I see no reason to do is to put onerous demands for visas should apply for Australians, Canadians, Indians, Americans, Japanese, Mexicans etc - but that they shouldn't for French, Germans, Portugese, Polish or Romanians.
I grew up in Australia, if any of my classmates wanted to come to the UK they'd need a visa.
If visas are an issue then that issue should be fixed consistently. Do you disagree?
Depends. Preferred immigration treatment for our neighbours was part of a package of measures which we decided overall were beneficial for the country.
Correction - which we decided was not beneficial to the country. There was a referendum, not sure if you remember it.
Oh absolutely. We decided it was good for the country and then decided it was not good for the country.
Phil seemed to think there was an inconsistency in it all. He wants a come all ye immigration policy. Which is his right.
Not sure how many fellow Brexiters he will take along with him but that is his view.
The scientists are too focussed on inputs rather than outputs. We know there are a few highly energy intensive industries. We can focus innovation on these in the very near term to improve efficiency of processes. We should have been doing it 30 years ago but the same scientists were still trying to get people to agree to live in cold, damp caves with ever more hysterical sounding catchphrases.
The vast majority of the scientists know that it's not within their expertise to say how to reduce GHG emissions, but they'd like people to take the problem seriously.
Starting now would be better than not, but there are still lots of people who want to leave the problem to their grandchildren to deal with.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
Yes absolutely if anyone wants to migrate here then I have no qualms with them doing so. The same rules should be consistently applied on that, I believe that currently if a company is offering a £30k salary plus they can sponsor a visa? I have no issues with that whatsoever, if a company wants to do that then they should do that.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
Visas are an unwanted administrative tool to control the labour market aren't they?
I guess it depends on whether or not it's your job that's getting its wages depressed.
Oh absolutely but Philip is a man of principle and it is his political philosophy that is being discussed here.
My principle is I'm in favour of consistent reasonably free movement globally. I'd like the same rules applied globally and consistently.
I would be happy to see immigration go up not down, but I'd like to see restrictions on land usage eased tied to that so that we can have adequate house building etc to go with the increased population demands.
We've been through the land thing. You can't have people build anywhere because the taxes to address the negative externalities would be prohibitive.
But glad to see you are against restrictions on free movement. Can't say the same for all your Brexit fellow travellers.
An "Australian style points immigration system" quite literally applied could see immigration double. Australia has about twice as much immigration as the UK does.
What I see no reason to do is to put onerous demands for visas should apply for Australians, Canadians, Indians, Americans, Japanese, Mexicans etc - but that they shouldn't for French, Germans, Portugese, Polish or Romanians.
I grew up in Australia, if any of my classmates wanted to come to the UK they'd need a visa.
If visas are an issue then that issue should be fixed consistently. Do you disagree?
Depends. Preferred immigration treatment for our neighbours was part of a package of measures which we decided overall were beneficial for the country.
Correction: preferred immigration treatment for our neighbours was part of a package of measures which we decided overall were not beneficial for the country.
Considering the UK has more people moving to countries like Australia than European country by a long margin, we should reasonably consider solving visa issues on a global and not regional basis.
As I said to Max, first we decided it was good and then we decided it was bad. Them's the breaks.
I always have a mental image of climate change conferences full of the great and the good flying in private jets, exalting everyone that we must do more whilst their personal footprint is absolubtely mahoosive.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
What I frankly do not understand about these climate change targets is why we haven't been doing that, and also solar panels as standard, on all new builds for the last 15 years. That would have made a very considerable difference by now.
If I were feeling cynical I would say because the building trade lobbied hard to make sure it didn't happen and they had the right contacts to whom they were very close to get their way.
If I were feeling realistic, I would say everything in that sentence up to 'and.'
Solar panels are the wrong answer for the UK, they're almost but not quite virtue signalling nonsense in the UK.
In states like California or countries like Australia where electricity demand peaks in the summer sun when air conditioning comes on then solar panels are a complete no brainer.
But in the UK we're a cold, wet, grey island that sees energy demand peak in the winter when we put our heating on - and as we switch from gas to electric heaters that's only going to increase.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Even in winter, my solar panels give enough power to run electric radiators. Just not for the whole house.
Now I will grant you that might work for me, where I'm quite happy just to heat one room and not for the whole day at that, and not for you with a young family across several rooms. But that doesn't make them the wrong solution. Especially not if people are going to do more working from home and be in more often in the hours of daylight.
I'm talking on a national basis.
The issue is best summed up by looking at two charts from Gridwatch.
Annual demand - clearly peaks in December to February - and this is before we switch our heating over from gas to electric heating which will send winter demand surging much, much higher.
Annual supply - look at the red line. How useful is that in winter?
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
Yes absolutely if anyone wants to migrate here then I have no qualms with them doing so. The same rules should be consistently applied on that, I believe that currently if a company is offering a £30k salary plus they can sponsor a visa? I have no issues with that whatsoever, if a company wants to do that then they should do that.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
Visas are an unwanted administrative tool to control the labour market aren't they?
I guess it depends on whether or not it's your job that's getting its wages depressed.
Oh absolutely but Philip is a man of principle and it is his political philosophy that is being discussed here.
My principle is I'm in favour of consistent reasonably free movement globally. I'd like the same rules applied globally and consistently.
I would be happy to see immigration go up not down, but I'd like to see restrictions on land usage eased tied to that so that we can have adequate house building etc to go with the increased population demands.
We've been through the land thing. You can't have people build anywhere because the taxes to address the negative externalities would be prohibitive.
But glad to see you are against restrictions on free movement. Can't say the same for all your Brexit fellow travellers.
An "Australian style points immigration system" quite literally applied could see immigration double. Australia has about twice as much immigration as the UK does.
What I see no reason to do is to put onerous demands for visas should apply for Australians, Canadians, Indians, Americans, Japanese, Mexicans etc - but that they shouldn't for French, Germans, Portugese, Polish or Romanians.
I grew up in Australia, if any of my classmates wanted to come to the UK they'd need a visa.
If visas are an issue then that issue should be fixed consistently. Do you disagree?
Depends. Preferred immigration treatment for our neighbours was part of a package of measures which we decided overall were beneficial for the country.
Correction - which we decided was not beneficial to the country. There was a referendum, not sure if you remember it.
Oh absolutely. We decided it was good for the country and then decided it was not good for the country.
Phil seemed to think there was an inconsistency in it all. He wants a come all ye immigration policy. Which is his right.
Not sure how many fellow Brexiters he will take along with him but that is his view.
The first “we” is Tony Blair & Gordon Brown & the second the majority of voters at the referendum?
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Or when it’s dark, and it’s quite a bit darker in the winter than the summer.
Phillip does have a point about winter. We need more power during the winter and even working efficiently solar panels don’t deliver and they are great where you got longer days in the south of England but in the north east or Scotland were days are quite a bit shorter they are less so.
Which is why we're planning a shit tonne of wind farms. There's also the plan for a massive solar farm in Morocco, with an HVDC cable to somewhere in the south of England.
I’m aware of what is going on with wind farms, the discussion was the merits of solar PV.
I’m aware of the wind farm stuff. My next door neighbour works for a blade manufacturer up in Blyth. However turbine blades need oil based products to be produced. Oil will still be needed for the foreseeable.
Didn’t know about the solar farm in Morocco. Thanks. That’s interesting. I’ll look it up for more info.
Cynical hat says it will say - "Its even worse than before, we really mean it now, we are all doomed!".
I am fully signed up to net zero, protecting the environment, properly using resources - the whole green thing. But I find the increasingly shrill desperation and scare tactics from the climate scientist lobby, without a balance of proper skeptical science at times counter productive. The recent pandemic has revealed the limits of modelling in complex scenarios.
We need to reach a point where we no longer use fossil fuels and have a fully sustainable existence. We need to stop destroying habitats and making species go extinct. But to say we have to do this because the global temperature (whatever that even is) will rise by a degree or two, against a setting where the planet ranges from -50 to +50 deg C, and even in temperate UK from -19 to +38 deg C is nonsense. I am also surprised that the scientists now seem confident to link extreme weather events to climate change. One of the issues is we now have world wide reporting, so any extreme event gets reported, whereas even 20 years ago that was not the case. This adds to the feeling of doom everywhere, when in reality, for much of the world, extremes have always happened. Homes being flooded is far more because of where they have built their houses, not necessarily due to more rain.
I dont agree on the point about global temperature, but it is the case that as bad as things may be previous estimates feel like they were that things would be even worse.
Based on predictions of 80s videos we had to watch at school in the 90s I'm surprised theres any amazon rainforest left.
I'm not sure how one appropriately lists concern. If you don't set a date theres no urgency but if you then reach that date without widespread catastrophe it undermines future warnings, yet its also probably the case that by the time its obvious it's too late.
It does seem true that more people are more passionately concerned about these issues than just 5 years ago, but given its certain that lots things in any report stated as needing to happen will not happen, by that logic we're already doomed.
I'm happy to disagree - but what do you understand the global temperature to be? I think it is a stupid concept, but that might just be me.
I'm not a scientist and have not explored the issue so couldn't answer with any authority, I just don't see the idea of average global temperatures as inherently nonsense. If there are criticisms of such a thing I'd listen.
My criticism is what is the average temperature of the the earth today? And where? There is a huge spread across the globe. If you take 100 people and measured the average height to be say 5 foot 10, no-one would be that far from that average. Instead if you took insects and elephants and averaged the height it would be meaningless for all of them.
I believe the temp change given is actually the average rise of all the observations around the world. I have issues with that too - most observation sites have changed markedly over the last 150 years, and are subject to urban heat island effects. Climate scientist try to mitigate this (I have seen some talk about this) but I remain unconvinced.
And your alternative for measuring global temperature is what ?
Of course there are uncertainties - but one of the reasons for the increase in alarm is that successive sets of data from an increasing number of sources keeps reducing the room to say 'our calculations were wrong and there's no reason to be worried after all'.
If we wait until the best guess proves a certainty, it will be too late to do anything about it.
I have an email from the Met Office saying that the GISS global temperature measurement methodology is dishonest.
Who is right?
I don't that's a fair characterisation of the Met Office email, and the differences between the two are relatively slight in the context of the issue as a whole.
So while they're important for scientists iterating towards a best estimate, it's not a difference that's important for deciding policy.
Doing away with bitcoin and other crypto currencies would be of huge net benefit. It's all powered with dirty Chinese coal and takes up a massive proportion of global power output.
Concerted effort to make it all worthless would a good first step that is probably actionable.
Yup. Ideally mining would be taxed at source but that's probably not practical, as it only takes a single country to pick a lower tax rate and it all moves there and everyone else gets undercut.
What would be practical would be to tax holding cryptocurrencies, at a rate proportional to the amount of environmental damage it does. There would be quite a bit of evasion, but it would still be enough to collect a decent amount of tax revenue and clobber the prices of the most damaging ones, while encouraging people to migrate to better designs.
The issue is that you or I may understand that, does this issue even make the discussion table for Boris, Biden or Xi? The scientists are too focussed on inputs rather than outputs. We know there are a few highly energy intensive industries. We can focus innovation on these in the very near term to improve efficiency of processes. We should have been doing it 30 years ago but the same scientists were still trying to get people to agree to live in cold, damp caves with ever more hysterical sounding catchphrases.
30 years ago there was a lot of first mover's advantage to be had for any nation which successfully addressed energy inefficiencies in industrial processes. Just as Tesla are getting a huge first mover's advantage for electric cars. Sadly it looks like we're only starting that process today which means we need to wait for 30 years and hope that the current trend can be reversed.
Or they'll just migrate the the Middle East, where solar will be a cent per kW...
I mean, this is the argument the bitcoin enthusiasts make, in theory the cheapest power should *ultimately* be renewable, and also mining can use power that would otherwise be stranded, which is supposed to make renewable generation economical in places where it otherwise wouldn't be because demand wouldn't match up to supply well enough. As far as I can tell it's total bollocks as far as current mining is concerned, but in my HODLing tax suggestion I do base the tax on an estimation of the actual environmental damage; That way, to the extent that the people designing these systems can make them produce better environmental outcomes, they'll be rewarded with a lower tax.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
Yes absolutely if anyone wants to migrate here then I have no qualms with them doing so. The same rules should be consistently applied on that, I believe that currently if a company is offering a £30k salary plus they can sponsor a visa? I have no issues with that whatsoever, if a company wants to do that then they should do that.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
Visas are an unwanted administrative tool to control the labour market aren't they?
I guess it depends on whether or not it's your job that's getting its wages depressed.
Oh absolutely but Philip is a man of principle and it is his political philosophy that is being discussed here.
My principle is I'm in favour of consistent reasonably free movement globally. I'd like the same rules applied globally and consistently.
I would be happy to see immigration go up not down, but I'd like to see restrictions on land usage eased tied to that so that we can have adequate house building etc to go with the increased population demands.
We've been through the land thing. You can't have people build anywhere because the taxes to address the negative externalities would be prohibitive.
But glad to see you are against restrictions on free movement. Can't say the same for all your Brexit fellow travellers.
An "Australian style points immigration system" quite literally applied could see immigration double. Australia has about twice as much immigration as the UK does.
What I see no reason to do is to put onerous demands for visas should apply for Australians, Canadians, Indians, Americans, Japanese, Mexicans etc - but that they shouldn't for French, Germans, Portugese, Polish or Romanians.
I grew up in Australia, if any of my classmates wanted to come to the UK they'd need a visa.
If visas are an issue then that issue should be fixed consistently. Do you disagree?
Depends. Preferred immigration treatment for our neighbours was part of a package of measures which we decided overall were beneficial for the country.
Correction - which we decided was not beneficial to the country. There was a referendum, not sure if you remember it.
Oh absolutely. We decided it was good for the country and then decided it was not good for the country.
Phil seemed to think there was an inconsistency in it all. He wants a come all ye immigration policy. Which is his right.
Not sure how many fellow Brexiters he will take along with him but that is his view.
No one cares if we have an effective open door for doctors or nurses (or bankers). I think the major concern has always been lower skilled and unskilled labour which is predominantly white working class. Closing up shop at the bottom and keeping the door fairly open everywhere else seems like the direction we're heading in. I think if we could have made that work within the EU we wouldn't have voted to leave. Without retreading the same ground for the 209th time there was a level of inflexibility from the EU that they must now regret.
Doing away with bitcoin and other crypto currencies would be of huge net benefit. It's all powered with dirty Chinese coal and takes up a massive proportion of global power output.
Concerted effort to make it all worthless would a good first step that is probably actionable.
More specifically, it's the cryptocurrencies based on blockchains using proof-of-work protocols, such as Bitcoin, that use vast amounts of energy. There is a move towards blockchains based on proof of stake, which doesn't require high energy consumption, but it has been progressing very slowly. Etherium is trying to switch, but they're taking their time about it. Making proof of work illegal, rather than cryptocurrencies in general, would be a more liberal solution.
One thing, going out and getting a covid vaccine is a billion times easier than living a consistently low carbon life. @contrarian "dancing to their tune" argument is just plain odd (Regarding Covid) - it makes more sense for climate stuff.
Doing away with bitcoin and other crypto currencies would be of huge net benefit. It's all powered with dirty Chinese coal and takes up a massive proportion of global power output.
Concerted effort to make it all worthless would a good first step that is probably actionable.
Yup. Ideally mining would be taxed at source but that's probably not practical, as it only takes a single country to pick a lower tax rate and it all moves there and everyone else gets undercut.
What would be practical would be to tax holding cryptocurrencies, at a rate proportional to the amount of environmental damage it does. There would be quite a bit of evasion, but it would still be enough to collect a decent amount of tax revenue and clobber the prices of the most damaging ones, while encouraging people to migrate to better designs.
The issue is that you or I may understand that, does this issue even make the discussion table for Boris, Biden or Xi? The scientists are too focussed on inputs rather than outputs. We know there are a few highly energy intensive industries. We can focus innovation on these in the very near term to improve efficiency of processes. We should have been doing it 30 years ago but the same scientists were still trying to get people to agree to live in cold, damp caves with ever more hysterical sounding catchphrases.
30 years ago there was a lot of first mover's advantage to be had for any nation which successfully addressed energy inefficiencies in industrial processes. Just as Tesla are getting a huge first mover's advantage for electric cars. Sadly it looks like we're only starting that process today which means we need to wait for 30 years and hope that the current trend can be reversed.
Or they'll just migrate the the Middle East, where solar will be a cent per kW...
I mean, this is the argument the bitcoin enthusiasts make, in theory the cheapest power should *ultimately* be renewable, and also mining can use power that would otherwise be stranded, which is supposed to make renewable generation economical in places where it otherwise wouldn't be because demand wouldn't match up to supply well enough. As far as I can tell it's total bollocks as far as current mining is concerned, but in my HODLing tax suggestion I do base the tax on an estimation of the actual environmental damage; That way, to the extent that the people designing these systems can make them produce better environmental outcomes, they'll be rewarded with a lower tax.
I’ve seen Bitcoin zealots claim Bitcoin mining is great for the planet as it will force us to go for renewables quicker.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
Yes absolutely if anyone wants to migrate here then I have no qualms with them doing so. The same rules should be consistently applied on that, I believe that currently if a company is offering a £30k salary plus they can sponsor a visa? I have no issues with that whatsoever, if a company wants to do that then they should do that.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
Visas are an unwanted administrative tool to control the labour market aren't they?
I guess it depends on whether or not it's your job that's getting its wages depressed.
Oh absolutely but Philip is a man of principle and it is his political philosophy that is being discussed here.
My principle is I'm in favour of consistent reasonably free movement globally. I'd like the same rules applied globally and consistently.
I would be happy to see immigration go up not down, but I'd like to see restrictions on land usage eased tied to that so that we can have adequate house building etc to go with the increased population demands.
We've been through the land thing. You can't have people build anywhere because the taxes to address the negative externalities would be prohibitive.
But glad to see you are against restrictions on free movement. Can't say the same for all your Brexit fellow travellers.
An "Australian style points immigration system" quite literally applied could see immigration double. Australia has about twice as much immigration as the UK does.
What I see no reason to do is to put onerous demands for visas should apply for Australians, Canadians, Indians, Americans, Japanese, Mexicans etc - but that they shouldn't for French, Germans, Portugese, Polish or Romanians.
I grew up in Australia, if any of my classmates wanted to come to the UK they'd need a visa.
If visas are an issue then that issue should be fixed consistently. Do you disagree?
Depends. Preferred immigration treatment for our neighbours was part of a package of measures which we decided overall were beneficial for the country.
Correction - which we decided was not beneficial to the country. There was a referendum, not sure if you remember it.
Oh absolutely. We decided it was good for the country and then decided it was not good for the country.
Phil seemed to think there was an inconsistency in it all. He wants a come all ye immigration policy. Which is his right.
Not sure how many fellow Brexiters he will take along with him but that is his view.
The first “we” is Tony Blair & Gordon Brown & the second the majority of voters at the referendum?
I started to listed to the IPCC report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
As I understand it we have to give up all fossil fuel, stop flying, rid our homes of gas central heating, insulate every home in the UK, buy expensive electric cars that have poor ranges and nowhere near enough electricity capacity in the country and feel thoroughly guilty and selfish if we do not immediately agree to this, even though many countries will say of course they agree, then do absolutely nothing
It has to be a gradual process over many years and anything else is frankly totally unrealistic
And by the way watching Messi sobbing about leaving Barcelona was just pathetic.
Barcelona have made him a multi millionaire and if it was so important to him he could have played a couple of years at a nominal 1 euro per year, rather than £650,000 per week PSG are offering him
Agree about Messi.
On climate change, sadly the sacrosanct nature of the comfortable Western lifestyle is not a physical constant. If the situation is that your ship needs to jettison all its cargo or sink, that's the situation. You cannot bargain with the weather to jettison some of the lower value stuff over a period of days, nor point out to it that other ships are not doing as much as you are.
That lazy analogy does not stand up.
We could jettison all our cargo and still sink because the theory of climate change is that the sea conditions are actually determined by the boats collectively. One boat dumping its cargo makes no difference. And the fact is that many boats are taking on cargo. Hundreds of new coal fired power stations are planned in places like Indonesia, Vietnam and of course China.
What we are doing is more like the suicide squad at the end of Life of Brian collectively committing suicide as a gesture of solidarity instead of actually taking saving Brian from being crucified.
We laughed at them. And soon, the rest of the world will be laughing at us.
No, the analogy holds perfecrctly as far as the ineluctability of physical forces is concerned.
On the collective effort point, someone has to move first (and actually it is not as if it's just plucky little GB vs ROW again: other countries are actually coming to COP26, even if just for the look of the thing) and to speak with moral authority backed up by personal example. It's more likely we will be belatedly copied, than laughed at. And anyway, I thought contrarianism was rather your thing?
What people are laughing at, is the idea that after the last 18 months we somehow still can’t do a climate change summit remotely, but instead need a hundred planes involved.
What I've learnt in the last 18 months is that a ghastly videoconference doesn't begin to substitute for actually going to see people. Dunno why but it doesn't. It's a simple ROI calculation: investing in 100 private jets worth of fuel now buys lots of multiples of that investment in future savings arising from the fact this is real and not cyber.
Doing away with bitcoin and other crypto currencies would be of huge net benefit. It's all powered with dirty Chinese coal and takes up a massive proportion of global power output.
Concerted effort to make it all worthless would a good first step that is probably actionable.
Yup. Ideally mining would be taxed at source but that's probably not practical, as it only takes a single country to pick a lower tax rate and it all moves there and everyone else gets undercut.
What would be practical would be to tax holding cryptocurrencies, at a rate proportional to the amount of environmental damage it does. There would be quite a bit of evasion, but it would still be enough to collect a decent amount of tax revenue and clobber the prices of the most damaging ones, while encouraging people to migrate to better designs.
The issue is that you or I may understand that, does this issue even make the discussion table for Boris, Biden or Xi? The scientists are too focussed on inputs rather than outputs. We know there are a few highly energy intensive industries. We can focus innovation on these in the very near term to improve efficiency of processes. We should have been doing it 30 years ago but the same scientists were still trying to get people to agree to live in cold, damp caves with ever more hysterical sounding catchphrases.
30 years ago there was a lot of first mover's advantage to be had for any nation which successfully addressed energy inefficiencies in industrial processes. Just as Tesla are getting a huge first mover's advantage for electric cars. Sadly it looks like we're only starting that process today which means we need to wait for 30 years and hope that the current trend can be reversed.
Or they'll just migrate the the Middle East, where solar will be a cent per kW...
Waves from the Middle East, where the latest phase of a massive solar park is already below 1.7 cents a kWh.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
Yes absolutely if anyone wants to migrate here then I have no qualms with them doing so. The same rules should be consistently applied on that, I believe that currently if a company is offering a £30k salary plus they can sponsor a visa? I have no issues with that whatsoever, if a company wants to do that then they should do that.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
Visas are an unwanted administrative tool to control the labour market aren't they?
I guess it depends on whether or not it's your job that's getting its wages depressed.
Oh absolutely but Philip is a man of principle and it is his political philosophy that is being discussed here.
My principle is I'm in favour of consistent reasonably free movement globally. I'd like the same rules applied globally and consistently.
I would be happy to see immigration go up not down, but I'd like to see restrictions on land usage eased tied to that so that we can have adequate house building etc to go with the increased population demands.
We've been through the land thing. You can't have people build anywhere because the taxes to address the negative externalities would be prohibitive.
But glad to see you are against restrictions on free movement. Can't say the same for all your Brexit fellow travellers.
An "Australian style points immigration system" quite literally applied could see immigration double. Australia has about twice as much immigration as the UK does.
What I see no reason to do is to put onerous demands for visas should apply for Australians, Canadians, Indians, Americans, Japanese, Mexicans etc - but that they shouldn't for French, Germans, Portugese, Polish or Romanians.
I grew up in Australia, if any of my classmates wanted to come to the UK they'd need a visa.
If visas are an issue then that issue should be fixed consistently. Do you disagree?
Depends. Preferred immigration treatment for our neighbours was part of a package of measures which we decided overall were beneficial for the country.
Correction - which we decided was not beneficial to the country. There was a referendum, not sure if you remember it.
Oh absolutely. We decided it was good for the country and then decided it was not good for the country.
Phil seemed to think there was an inconsistency in it all. He wants a come all ye immigration policy. Which is his right.
Not sure how many fellow Brexiters he will take along with him but that is his view.
No one cares if we have an effective open door for doctors or nurses (or bankers). I think the major concern has always been lower skilled and unskilled labour which is predominantly white working class. Closing up shop at the bottom and keeping the door fairly open everywhere else seems like the direction we're heading in. I think if we could have made that work within the EU we wouldn't have voted to leave. Without retreading the same ground for the 209th time there was a level of inflexibility from the EU that they must now regret.
I don't think that's unfair. The studies that you decry about it all do show that the bottom decile (more or less I can't remember) suffered wage deflation which on paper people didn't register, but they did if they were affected.
There are plenty of mitigating responses (the people who suffered most were other immigrants, upskilling usually/should result, etc) but if you are in that bottom group you care and it is real.
I started to listed to the IPCC report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
As I understand it we have to give up all fossil fuel, stop flying, rid our homes of gas central heating, insulate every home in the UK, buy expensive electric cars that have poor ranges and nowhere near enough electricity capacity in the country and feel thoroughly guilty and selfish if we do not immediately agree to this, even though many countries will say of course they agree, then do absolutely nothing
It has to be a gradual process over many years and anything else is frankly totally unrealistic
And by the way watching Messi sobbing about leaving Barcelona was just pathetic.
Barcelona have made him a multi millionaire and if it was so important to him he could have played a couple of years at a nominal 1 euro per year, rather than £650,000 per week PSG are offering him
Agree about Messi.
On climate change, sadly the sacrosanct nature of the comfortable Western lifestyle is not a physical constant. If the situation is that your ship needs to jettison all its cargo or sink, that's the situation. You cannot bargain with the weather to jettison some of the lower value stuff over a period of days, nor point out to it that other ships are not doing as much as you are.
That lazy analogy does not stand up.
We could jettison all our cargo and still sink because the theory of climate change is that the sea conditions are actually determined by the boats collectively. One boat dumping its cargo makes no difference. And the fact is that many boats are taking on cargo. Hundreds of new coal fired power stations are planned in places like Indonesia, Vietnam and of course China.
What we are doing is more like the suicide squad at the end of Life of Brian collectively committing suicide as a gesture of solidarity instead of actually taking saving Brian from being crucified.
We laughed at them. And soon, the rest of the world will be laughing at us.
No, the analogy holds perfecrctly as far as the ineluctability of physical forces is concerned.
On the collective effort point, someone has to move first (and actually it is not as if it's just plucky little GB vs ROW again: other countries are actually coming to COP26, even if just for the look of the thing) and to speak with moral authority backed up by personal example. It's more likely we will be belatedly copied, than laughed at. And anyway, I thought contrarianism was rather your thing?
What people are laughing at, is the idea that after the last 18 months we somehow still can’t do a climate change summit remotely, but instead need a hundred planes involved.
What I've learnt in the last 18 months is that a ghastly videoconference doesn't begin to substitute for actually going to see people. Dunno why but it doesn't. It's a simple ROI calculation: investing in 100 private jets worth of fuel now buys lots of multiples of that investment in future savings arising from the fact this is real and not cyber.
But it’s yet another reinforcement of the idea that *they* want *you* to change *your* behaviour, because IT’S A MASSIVE F***ING EMERGENCY, while *they* appear to have no intention of changing their own behaviour.
If the organisers of the climate change summit can’t get Webex doing what they want it to do, then the rest of us certainly don’t care enough about the environment to stop meeting in person post-pandemic.
Cynical hat says it will say - "Its even worse than before, we really mean it now, we are all doomed!".
I am fully signed up to net zero, protecting the environment, properly using resources - the whole green thing. But I find the increasingly shrill desperation and scare tactics from the climate scientist lobby, without a balance of proper skeptical science at times counter productive. The recent pandemic has revealed the limits of modelling in complex scenarios.
We need to reach a point where we no longer use fossil fuels and have a fully sustainable existence. We need to stop destroying habitats and making species go extinct. But to say we have to do this because the global temperature (whatever that even is) will rise by a degree or two, against a setting where the planet ranges from -50 to +50 deg C, and even in temperate UK from -19 to +38 deg C is nonsense. I am also surprised that the scientists now seem confident to link extreme weather events to climate change. One of the issues is we now have world wide reporting, so any extreme event gets reported, whereas even 20 years ago that was not the case. This adds to the feeling of doom everywhere, when in reality, for much of the world, extremes have always happened. Homes being flooded is far more because of where they have built their houses, not necessarily due to more rain.
I dont agree on the point about global temperature, but it is the case that as bad as things may be previous estimates feel like they were that things would be even worse.
Based on predictions of 80s videos we had to watch at school in the 90s I'm surprised theres any amazon rainforest left.
I'm not sure how one appropriately lists concern. If you don't set a date theres no urgency but if you then reach that date without widespread catastrophe it undermines future warnings, yet its also probably the case that by the time its obvious it's too late.
It does seem true that more people are more passionately concerned about these issues than just 5 years ago, but given its certain that lots things in any report stated as needing to happen will not happen, by that logic we're already doomed.
I'm happy to disagree - but what do you understand the global temperature to be? I think it is a stupid concept, but that might just be me.
I'm not a scientist and have not explored the issue so couldn't answer with any authority, I just don't see the idea of average global temperatures as inherently nonsense. If there are criticisms of such a thing I'd listen.
My criticism is what is the average temperature of the the earth today? And where? There is a huge spread across the globe. If you take 100 people and measured the average height to be say 5 foot 10, no-one would be that far from that average. Instead if you took insects and elephants and averaged the height it would be meaningless for all of them.
I believe the temp change given is actually the average rise of all the observations around the world. I have issues with that too - most observation sites have changed markedly over the last 150 years, and are subject to urban heat island effects. Climate scientist try to mitigate this (I have seen some talk about this) but I remain unconvinced.
And your alternative for measuring global temperature is what ?
Of course there are uncertainties - but one of the reasons for the increase in alarm is that successive sets of data from an increasing number of sources keeps reducing the room to say 'our calculations were wrong and there's no reason to be worried after all'.
If we wait until the best guess proves a certainty, it will be too late to do anything about it.
I have an email from the Met Office saying that the GISS global temperature measurement methodology is dishonest.
Who is right?
I don't that's a fair characterisation of the Met Office email, and the differences between the two are relatively slight in the context of the issue as a whole.
So while they're important for scientists iterating towards a best estimate, it's not a difference that's important for deciding policy.
You haven't seen the email. Unless you worked for them 10 years ago or are Gavin Schmidt.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Just adding to the posts from other people to say that your post is absolutely effing clueless.
1) There are fewer hours of daylight in winter. 2) Winters tend to be more overcast. Whilst panels do not require direct sunlight, the energy delivered is still lower. 3) The sun is lower in the sky in winter, meaning the angle of incidence is lower.
Whilst you are correct that they work better in lower (reasonable) temperatures, this is more than offset by the factors above. At a guess, you'd be lucky to get 20% of average July power in December.
(I daresay someone else will point out I've got this wrong and I'm effing clueless as well...)
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
Yes absolutely if anyone wants to migrate here then I have no qualms with them doing so. The same rules should be consistently applied on that, I believe that currently if a company is offering a £30k salary plus they can sponsor a visa? I have no issues with that whatsoever, if a company wants to do that then they should do that.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
Visas are an unwanted administrative tool to control the labour market aren't they?
I guess it depends on whether or not it's your job that's getting its wages depressed.
Oh absolutely but Philip is a man of principle and it is his political philosophy that is being discussed here.
My principle is I'm in favour of consistent reasonably free movement globally. I'd like the same rules applied globally and consistently.
I would be happy to see immigration go up not down, but I'd like to see restrictions on land usage eased tied to that so that we can have adequate house building etc to go with the increased population demands.
We've been through the land thing. You can't have people build anywhere because the taxes to address the negative externalities would be prohibitive.
But glad to see you are against restrictions on free movement. Can't say the same for all your Brexit fellow travellers.
An "Australian style points immigration system" quite literally applied could see immigration double. Australia has about twice as much immigration as the UK does.
What I see no reason to do is to put onerous demands for visas should apply for Australians, Canadians, Indians, Americans, Japanese, Mexicans etc - but that they shouldn't for French, Germans, Portugese, Polish or Romanians.
I grew up in Australia, if any of my classmates wanted to come to the UK they'd need a visa.
If visas are an issue then that issue should be fixed consistently. Do you disagree?
Depends. Preferred immigration treatment for our neighbours was part of a package of measures which we decided overall were beneficial for the country.
Correction - which we decided was not beneficial to the country. There was a referendum, not sure if you remember it.
Oh absolutely. We decided it was good for the country and then decided it was not good for the country.
Phil seemed to think there was an inconsistency in it all. He wants a come all ye immigration policy. Which is his right.
Not sure how many fellow Brexiters he will take along with him but that is his view.
The first “we” is Tony Blair & Gordon Brown & the second the majority of voters at the referendum?
I started to listed to the IPCC report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
As I understand it we have to give up all fossil fuel, stop flying, rid our homes of gas central heating, insulate every home in the UK, buy expensive electric cars that have poor ranges and nowhere near enough electricity capacity in the country and feel thoroughly guilty and selfish if we do not immediately agree to this, even though many countries will say of course they agree, then do absolutely nothing
It has to be a gradual process over many years and anything else is frankly totally unrealistic
And by the way watching Messi sobbing about leaving Barcelona was just pathetic.
Barcelona have made him a multi millionaire and if it was so important to him he could have played a couple of years at a nominal 1 euro per year, rather than £650,000 per week PSG are offering him
Agree about Messi.
On climate change, sadly the sacrosanct nature of the comfortable Western lifestyle is not a physical constant. If the situation is that your ship needs to jettison all its cargo or sink, that's the situation. You cannot bargain with the weather to jettison some of the lower value stuff over a period of days, nor point out to it that other ships are not doing as much as you are.
That lazy analogy does not stand up.
We could jettison all our cargo and still sink because the theory of climate change is that the sea conditions are actually determined by the boats collectively. One boat dumping its cargo makes no difference. And the fact is that many boats are taking on cargo. Hundreds of new coal fired power stations are planned in places like Indonesia, Vietnam and of course China.
What we are doing is more like the suicide squad at the end of Life of Brian collectively committing suicide as a gesture of solidarity instead of actually taking saving Brian from being crucified.
We laughed at them. And soon, the rest of the world will be laughing at us.
No, the analogy holds perfecrctly as far as the ineluctability of physical forces is concerned.
On the collective effort point, someone has to move first (and actually it is not as if it's just plucky little GB vs ROW again: other countries are actually coming to COP26, even if just for the look of the thing) and to speak with moral authority backed up by personal example. It's more likely we will be belatedly copied, than laughed at. And anyway, I thought contrarianism was rather your thing?
What people are laughing at, is the idea that after the last 18 months we somehow still can’t do a climate change summit remotely, but instead need a hundred planes involved.
What I've learnt in the last 18 months is that a ghastly videoconference doesn't begin to substitute for actually going to see people. Dunno why but it doesn't. It's a simple ROI calculation: investing in 100 private jets worth of fuel now buys lots of multiples of that investment in future savings arising from the fact this is real and not cyber.
But it’s yet another reinforcement of the idea that *they* want *you* to change *your* behaviour, because IT’S A MASSIVE F***ING EMERGENCY, while *they* appear to have no intention of changing their own behaviour.
Praps this time they'll resolve to change their own behaviour. Plus I don't think the us/them divide is quite as entrenched yet as you suppose. I have just booked a return flight bristol-inverness, jetsetting high roller that I am, without anyone telling me it's prohibited.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
Yes absolutely if anyone wants to migrate here then I have no qualms with them doing so. The same rules should be consistently applied on that, I believe that currently if a company is offering a £30k salary plus they can sponsor a visa? I have no issues with that whatsoever, if a company wants to do that then they should do that.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
Visas are an unwanted administrative tool to control the labour market aren't they?
I guess it depends on whether or not it's your job that's getting its wages depressed.
Oh absolutely but Philip is a man of principle and it is his political philosophy that is being discussed here.
My principle is I'm in favour of consistent reasonably free movement globally. I'd like the same rules applied globally and consistently.
I would be happy to see immigration go up not down, but I'd like to see restrictions on land usage eased tied to that so that we can have adequate house building etc to go with the increased population demands.
We've been through the land thing. You can't have people build anywhere because the taxes to address the negative externalities would be prohibitive.
But glad to see you are against restrictions on free movement. Can't say the same for all your Brexit fellow travellers.
An "Australian style points immigration system" quite literally applied could see immigration double. Australia has about twice as much immigration as the UK does.
What I see no reason to do is to put onerous demands for visas should apply for Australians, Canadians, Indians, Americans, Japanese, Mexicans etc - but that they shouldn't for French, Germans, Portugese, Polish or Romanians.
I grew up in Australia, if any of my classmates wanted to come to the UK they'd need a visa.
If visas are an issue then that issue should be fixed consistently. Do you disagree?
Depends. Preferred immigration treatment for our neighbours was part of a package of measures which we decided overall were beneficial for the country.
Correction - which we decided was not beneficial to the country. There was a referendum, not sure if you remember it.
Oh absolutely. We decided it was good for the country and then decided it was not good for the country.
Phil seemed to think there was an inconsistency in it all. He wants a come all ye immigration policy. Which is his right.
Not sure how many fellow Brexiters he will take along with him but that is his view.
The first “we” is Tony Blair & Gordon Brown & the second the majority of voters at the referendum?
Weren't they both elected by the British people?
I don’t know if FOM from the A8 was in a manifesto, it might have been. I voted Labour in 2001, so if it was I voted for it! At the time I probably would have done if it had been in their manifesto, I used to think WWC moaning about mass immigration were stupid racists when I was in my 20s.
But when there was an explicit vote on the matter, “we” said no thanks
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
Yes absolutely if anyone wants to migrate here then I have no qualms with them doing so. The same rules should be consistently applied on that, I believe that currently if a company is offering a £30k salary plus they can sponsor a visa? I have no issues with that whatsoever, if a company wants to do that then they should do that.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
Visas are an unwanted administrative tool to control the labour market aren't they?
I guess it depends on whether or not it's your job that's getting its wages depressed.
Oh absolutely but Philip is a man of principle and it is his political philosophy that is being discussed here.
My principle is I'm in favour of consistent reasonably free movement globally. I'd like the same rules applied globally and consistently.
I would be happy to see immigration go up not down, but I'd like to see restrictions on land usage eased tied to that so that we can have adequate house building etc to go with the increased population demands.
We've been through the land thing. You can't have people build anywhere because the taxes to address the negative externalities would be prohibitive.
But glad to see you are against restrictions on free movement. Can't say the same for all your Brexit fellow travellers.
An "Australian style points immigration system" quite literally applied could see immigration double. Australia has about twice as much immigration as the UK does.
What I see no reason to do is to put onerous demands for visas should apply for Australians, Canadians, Indians, Americans, Japanese, Mexicans etc - but that they shouldn't for French, Germans, Portugese, Polish or Romanians.
I grew up in Australia, if any of my classmates wanted to come to the UK they'd need a visa.
If visas are an issue then that issue should be fixed consistently. Do you disagree?
Depends. Preferred immigration treatment for our neighbours was part of a package of measures which we decided overall were beneficial for the country.
Correction - which we decided was not beneficial to the country. There was a referendum, not sure if you remember it.
Oh absolutely. We decided it was good for the country and then decided it was not good for the country.
Phil seemed to think there was an inconsistency in it all. He wants a come all ye immigration policy. Which is his right.
Not sure how many fellow Brexiters he will take along with him but that is his view.
The first “we” is Tony Blair & Gordon Brown & the second the majority of voters at the referendum?
Weren't they both elected by the British people?
Brown wasn’t
That's as fatuous as those who say the govt wasn't elected by a majority of the British people.
He was made PM under the democratic system in the UK. Hence yes he was elected by the British people because they agreed with that system.
Doing away with bitcoin and other crypto currencies would be of huge net benefit. It's all powered with dirty Chinese coal and takes up a massive proportion of global power output.
Concerted effort to make it all worthless would a good first step that is probably actionable.
Yup. Ideally mining would be taxed at source but that's probably not practical, as it only takes a single country to pick a lower tax rate and it all moves there and everyone else gets undercut.
What would be practical would be to tax holding cryptocurrencies, at a rate proportional to the amount of environmental damage it does. There would be quite a bit of evasion, but it would still be enough to collect a decent amount of tax revenue and clobber the prices of the most damaging ones, while encouraging people to migrate to better designs.
The issue is that you or I may understand that, does this issue even make the discussion table for Boris, Biden or Xi? The scientists are too focussed on inputs rather than outputs. We know there are a few highly energy intensive industries. We can focus innovation on these in the very near term to improve efficiency of processes. We should have been doing it 30 years ago but the same scientists were still trying to get people to agree to live in cold, damp caves with ever more hysterical sounding catchphrases.
30 years ago there was a lot of first mover's advantage to be had for any nation which successfully addressed energy inefficiencies in industrial processes. Just as Tesla are getting a huge first mover's advantage for electric cars. Sadly it looks like we're only starting that process today which means we need to wait for 30 years and hope that the current trend can be reversed.
Or they'll just migrate the the Middle East, where solar will be a cent per kW...
It will be uninhabitable by then anyway so may as well cover it in solar panels.
If it stays arid, and they have enough cheap power, it won't be uninhabitable. If you're reasonably wealthy...
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
Yes absolutely if anyone wants to migrate here then I have no qualms with them doing so. The same rules should be consistently applied on that, I believe that currently if a company is offering a £30k salary plus they can sponsor a visa? I have no issues with that whatsoever, if a company wants to do that then they should do that.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
Visas are an unwanted administrative tool to control the labour market aren't they?
I guess it depends on whether or not it's your job that's getting its wages depressed.
Oh absolutely but Philip is a man of principle and it is his political philosophy that is being discussed here.
My principle is I'm in favour of consistent reasonably free movement globally. I'd like the same rules applied globally and consistently.
I would be happy to see immigration go up not down, but I'd like to see restrictions on land usage eased tied to that so that we can have adequate house building etc to go with the increased population demands.
We've been through the land thing. You can't have people build anywhere because the taxes to address the negative externalities would be prohibitive.
But glad to see you are against restrictions on free movement. Can't say the same for all your Brexit fellow travellers.
An "Australian style points immigration system" quite literally applied could see immigration double. Australia has about twice as much immigration as the UK does.
What I see no reason to do is to put onerous demands for visas should apply for Australians, Canadians, Indians, Americans, Japanese, Mexicans etc - but that they shouldn't for French, Germans, Portugese, Polish or Romanians.
I grew up in Australia, if any of my classmates wanted to come to the UK they'd need a visa.
If visas are an issue then that issue should be fixed consistently. Do you disagree?
Depends. Preferred immigration treatment for our neighbours was part of a package of measures which we decided overall were beneficial for the country.
Correction - which we decided was not beneficial to the country. There was a referendum, not sure if you remember it.
Oh absolutely. We decided it was good for the country and then decided it was not good for the country.
Phil seemed to think there was an inconsistency in it all. He wants a come all ye immigration policy. Which is his right.
Not sure how many fellow Brexiters he will take along with him but that is his view.
The first “we” is Tony Blair & Gordon Brown & the second the majority of voters at the referendum?
Weren't they both elected by the British people?
I don’t know if FOM from the A8 was in a manifesto, it might have been. I voted Labour in 2001, so if it was I voted for it! At the time I probably would have done if it had been in their manifesto, I used to think WWC moaning about mass immigration were stupid racists when I was in my 20s.
But when there was an explicit vote on the matter, “we” said no thanks
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Just adding to the posts from other people to say that your post is absolutely effing clueless.
1) There are fewer hours of daylight in winter. 2) Winters tend to be more overcast. Whilst panels do not require direct sunlight, the energy delivered is still lower. 3) The sun is lower in the sky in winter, meaning the angle of incidence is lower.
Whilst you are correct that they work better in lower (reasonable) temperatures, this is more than offset by the factors above. At a guess, you'd be lucky to get 20% of average July power in December.
(I daresay someone else will point out I've got this wrong and I'm effing clueless as well...)
On the plus side, solar panels are a good complement to wind power, helping to cover the daytime peaks in consumption.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
Yes absolutely if anyone wants to migrate here then I have no qualms with them doing so. The same rules should be consistently applied on that, I believe that currently if a company is offering a £30k salary plus they can sponsor a visa? I have no issues with that whatsoever, if a company wants to do that then they should do that.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
Visas are an unwanted administrative tool to control the labour market aren't they?
I guess it depends on whether or not it's your job that's getting its wages depressed.
Oh absolutely but Philip is a man of principle and it is his political philosophy that is being discussed here.
My principle is I'm in favour of consistent reasonably free movement globally. I'd like the same rules applied globally and consistently.
I would be happy to see immigration go up not down, but I'd like to see restrictions on land usage eased tied to that so that we can have adequate house building etc to go with the increased population demands.
We've been through the land thing. You can't have people build anywhere because the taxes to address the negative externalities would be prohibitive.
But glad to see you are against restrictions on free movement. Can't say the same for all your Brexit fellow travellers.
An "Australian style points immigration system" quite literally applied could see immigration double. Australia has about twice as much immigration as the UK does.
What I see no reason to do is to put onerous demands for visas should apply for Australians, Canadians, Indians, Americans, Japanese, Mexicans etc - but that they shouldn't for French, Germans, Portugese, Polish or Romanians.
I grew up in Australia, if any of my classmates wanted to come to the UK they'd need a visa.
If visas are an issue then that issue should be fixed consistently. Do you disagree?
Depends. Preferred immigration treatment for our neighbours was part of a package of measures which we decided overall were beneficial for the country.
Correction - which we decided was not beneficial to the country. There was a referendum, not sure if you remember it.
Oh absolutely. We decided it was good for the country and then decided it was not good for the country.
Phil seemed to think there was an inconsistency in it all. He wants a come all ye immigration policy. Which is his right.
Not sure how many fellow Brexiters he will take along with him but that is his view.
No one cares if we have an effective open door for doctors or nurses (or bankers). I think the major concern has always been lower skilled and unskilled labour which is predominantly white working class. Closing up shop at the bottom and keeping the door fairly open everywhere else seems like the direction we're heading in. I think if we could have made that work within the EU we wouldn't have voted to leave. Without retreading the same ground for the 209th time there was a level of inflexibility from the EU that they must now regret.
I don't think that's unfair. The studies that you decry about it all do show that the bottom decile (more or less I can't remember) suffered wage deflation which on paper people didn't register, but they did if they were affected.
There are plenty of mitigating responses (the people who suffered most were other immigrants, upskilling usually/should result, etc) but if you are in that bottom group you care and it is real.
Yes, what @MaxPB says, and you agree with, is in my view the entire reason for UKIP doing well in 2013-2016, a referendum taking place, and leave winning.
Without FOM w the A8, none of it would have happened. It’s the only tangible effect of the EU in most peoples lives - the thing was middle class remainers thought FOM was all about graduates spending a year working in Barcelona or a ski season in the alps, so were blinded to the realty
Doing away with bitcoin and other crypto currencies would be of huge net benefit. It's all powered with dirty Chinese coal and takes up a massive proportion of global power output.
Concerted effort to make it all worthless would a good first step that is probably actionable.
Yup. Ideally mining would be taxed at source but that's probably not practical, as it only takes a single country to pick a lower tax rate and it all moves there and everyone else gets undercut.
What would be practical would be to tax holding cryptocurrencies, at a rate proportional to the amount of environmental damage it does. There would be quite a bit of evasion, but it would still be enough to collect a decent amount of tax revenue and clobber the prices of the most damaging ones, while encouraging people to migrate to better designs.
The issue is that you or I may understand that, does this issue even make the discussion table for Boris, Biden or Xi? The scientists are too focussed on inputs rather than outputs. We know there are a few highly energy intensive industries. We can focus innovation on these in the very near term to improve efficiency of processes. We should have been doing it 30 years ago but the same scientists were still trying to get people to agree to live in cold, damp caves with ever more hysterical sounding catchphrases.
30 years ago there was a lot of first mover's advantage to be had for any nation which successfully addressed energy inefficiencies in industrial processes. Just as Tesla are getting a huge first mover's advantage for electric cars. Sadly it looks like we're only starting that process today which means we need to wait for 30 years and hope that the current trend can be reversed.
Or they'll just migrate the the Middle East, where solar will be a cent per kW...
Waves from the Middle East, where the latest phase of a massive solar park is already below 1.7 cents a kWh.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
Yes absolutely if anyone wants to migrate here then I have no qualms with them doing so. The same rules should be consistently applied on that, I believe that currently if a company is offering a £30k salary plus they can sponsor a visa? I have no issues with that whatsoever, if a company wants to do that then they should do that.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
Visas are an unwanted administrative tool to control the labour market aren't they?
I guess it depends on whether or not it's your job that's getting its wages depressed.
Oh absolutely but Philip is a man of principle and it is his political philosophy that is being discussed here.
My principle is I'm in favour of consistent reasonably free movement globally. I'd like the same rules applied globally and consistently.
I would be happy to see immigration go up not down, but I'd like to see restrictions on land usage eased tied to that so that we can have adequate house building etc to go with the increased population demands.
We've been through the land thing. You can't have people build anywhere because the taxes to address the negative externalities would be prohibitive.
But glad to see you are against restrictions on free movement. Can't say the same for all your Brexit fellow travellers.
An "Australian style points immigration system" quite literally applied could see immigration double. Australia has about twice as much immigration as the UK does.
What I see no reason to do is to put onerous demands for visas should apply for Australians, Canadians, Indians, Americans, Japanese, Mexicans etc - but that they shouldn't for French, Germans, Portugese, Polish or Romanians.
I grew up in Australia, if any of my classmates wanted to come to the UK they'd need a visa.
If visas are an issue then that issue should be fixed consistently. Do you disagree?
Depends. Preferred immigration treatment for our neighbours was part of a package of measures which we decided overall were beneficial for the country.
Correction - which we decided was not beneficial to the country. There was a referendum, not sure if you remember it.
Oh absolutely. We decided it was good for the country and then decided it was not good for the country.
Phil seemed to think there was an inconsistency in it all. He wants a come all ye immigration policy. Which is his right.
Not sure how many fellow Brexiters he will take along with him but that is his view.
No one cares if we have an effective open door for doctors or nurses (or bankers). I think the major concern has always been lower skilled and unskilled labour which is predominantly white working class. Closing up shop at the bottom and keeping the door fairly open everywhere else seems like the direction we're heading in. I think if we could have made that work within the EU we wouldn't have voted to leave. Without retreading the same ground for the 209th time there was a level of inflexibility from the EU that they must now regret.
I don't think that's unfair. The studies that you decry about it all do show that the bottom decile (more or less I can't remember) suffered wage deflation which on paper people didn't register, but they did if they were affected.
There are plenty of mitigating responses (the people who suffered most were other immigrants, upskilling usually/should result, etc) but if you are in that bottom group you care and it is real.
I think it was the bottom 25% that saw wage stagnation, the bottom 10% actually saw wages drop but the top 20% saw huge wage growth which completely skews all of the numbers and makes it seem like there's no real issue because overall national pay has increased.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
Yes absolutely if anyone wants to migrate here then I have no qualms with them doing so. The same rules should be consistently applied on that, I believe that currently if a company is offering a £30k salary plus they can sponsor a visa? I have no issues with that whatsoever, if a company wants to do that then they should do that.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
Visas are an unwanted administrative tool to control the labour market aren't they?
I guess it depends on whether or not it's your job that's getting its wages depressed.
Oh absolutely but Philip is a man of principle and it is his political philosophy that is being discussed here.
My principle is I'm in favour of consistent reasonably free movement globally. I'd like the same rules applied globally and consistently.
I would be happy to see immigration go up not down, but I'd like to see restrictions on land usage eased tied to that so that we can have adequate house building etc to go with the increased population demands.
We've been through the land thing. You can't have people build anywhere because the taxes to address the negative externalities would be prohibitive.
But glad to see you are against restrictions on free movement. Can't say the same for all your Brexit fellow travellers.
An "Australian style points immigration system" quite literally applied could see immigration double. Australia has about twice as much immigration as the UK does.
What I see no reason to do is to put onerous demands for visas should apply for Australians, Canadians, Indians, Americans, Japanese, Mexicans etc - but that they shouldn't for French, Germans, Portugese, Polish or Romanians.
I grew up in Australia, if any of my classmates wanted to come to the UK they'd need a visa.
If visas are an issue then that issue should be fixed consistently. Do you disagree?
Depends. Preferred immigration treatment for our neighbours was part of a package of measures which we decided overall were beneficial for the country.
Correction - which we decided was not beneficial to the country. There was a referendum, not sure if you remember it.
Oh absolutely. We decided it was good for the country and then decided it was not good for the country.
Phil seemed to think there was an inconsistency in it all. He wants a come all ye immigration policy. Which is his right.
Not sure how many fellow Brexiters he will take along with him but that is his view.
No one cares if we have an effective open door for doctors or nurses (or bankers). I think the major concern has always been lower skilled and unskilled labour which is predominantly white working class. Closing up shop at the bottom and keeping the door fairly open everywhere else seems like the direction we're heading in. I think if we could have made that work within the EU we wouldn't have voted to leave. Without retreading the same ground for the 209th time there was a level of inflexibility from the EU that they must now regret.
I don't think that's unfair. The studies that you decry about it all do show that the bottom decile (more or less I can't remember) suffered wage deflation which on paper people didn't register, but they did if they were affected.
There are plenty of mitigating responses (the people who suffered most were other immigrants, upskilling usually/should result, etc) but if you are in that bottom group you care and it is real.
I think it was the bottom 25% that saw wage stagnation, the bottom 10% actually saw wages drop but the top 20% saw huge wage growth which completely skews all of the numbers and makes it seem like there's no real issue because overall national pay has increased.
My first ever blog, from 2014
“ So it is that the working class man, who has seen his job security diminish, his pay decrease, & his bills soar in the last ten years, is distracted by the illusion of mass immigration being a boon for the country. While he tries to reconcile this fantastic claim with the deteriorating circumstances of his own life, the smoke and mirrors of an abstract “GDP figure” is deployed to infer the economy would fall apart without this policy.
That is arguable, but what is not is that contained within the GDP figure are some winners, but many more losers, and it’s the lowest paid that lose every time. Mass immigration of cheap labour makes the poor poorer and the rich richer, it is a fact, as the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration confirm. A stealth tax is applied to the wages of the bottom 5% of earners to pay for a tax break for the top 5%. For every 1% of the labour market taken by immigrants, the lowest paid lose 0.6% of their wages. Who would expect it to be any different when the door is opened for millions of people, used to earning a fraction of the going rate in Britain, to compete with the British unskilled for employment by international corporations?”
The rubbish Guardian article about vaccine doses has been updated. It now says it will only take 95m doses to complete our vaccination programme (including boosters) which seems a bit low given that we've already used 87m doses and have more than 7m second doses to give as well as the boosters. But it's a less rubbish figure than 256m.
I'm not sure that the figure for 306m doses due to be delivered stands up to scrutiny either. I think we're at ~100m delivered now, with another Pfizer order of 60m to come. Are they really expecting 140m Oxford/AstraZeneca doses over the next five months? I thought we'd only ordered 100m of them.
Even if you include 60m Novavax doses I don't think it adds up.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I don't see either of those as really being a problem.
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
Recharge times at homes aren't going to decrease because most people don't have a domestic supply that is capable of going over 7200watts.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Just adding to the posts from other people to say that your post is absolutely effing clueless.
1) There are fewer hours of daylight in winter. 2) Winters tend to be more overcast. Whilst panels do not require direct sunlight, the energy delivered is still lower. 3) The sun is lower in the sky in winter, meaning the angle of incidence is lower.
Whilst you are correct that they work better in lower (reasonable) temperatures, this is more than offset by the factors above. At a guess, you'd be lucky to get 20% of average July power in December.
(I daresay someone else will point out I've got this wrong and I'm effing clueless as well...)
PT's contention was that solar in winter is "useless". I was pointing out, that while it is less effective in winter, it's not useless.
I will be quoting from it _a lot_ in weeks and months to come.
Teaser: "The belief that BRexit was the result of something between mass hysteria and mass stupidity allowed a lingering sense of suspicion about less-educated people to boil over into open snobbery...Leave voters were quickly derided as low-information, low-intelligence people..."
Doing away with bitcoin and other crypto currencies would be of huge net benefit. It's all powered with dirty Chinese coal and takes up a massive proportion of global power output.
Concerted effort to make it all worthless would a good first step that is probably actionable.
Yup. Ideally mining would be taxed at source but that's probably not practical, as it only takes a single country to pick a lower tax rate and it all moves there and everyone else gets undercut.
What would be practical would be to tax holding cryptocurrencies, at a rate proportional to the amount of environmental damage it does. There would be quite a bit of evasion, but it would still be enough to collect a decent amount of tax revenue and clobber the prices of the most damaging ones, while encouraging people to migrate to better designs.
The issue is that you or I may understand that, does this issue even make the discussion table for Boris, Biden or Xi? The scientists are too focussed on inputs rather than outputs. We know there are a few highly energy intensive industries. We can focus innovation on these in the very near term to improve efficiency of processes. We should have been doing it 30 years ago but the same scientists were still trying to get people to agree to live in cold, damp caves with ever more hysterical sounding catchphrases.
30 years ago there was a lot of first mover's advantage to be had for any nation which successfully addressed energy inefficiencies in industrial processes. Just as Tesla are getting a huge first mover's advantage for electric cars. Sadly it looks like we're only starting that process today which means we need to wait for 30 years and hope that the current trend can be reversed.
Or they'll just migrate the the Middle East, where solar will be a cent per kW...
Waves from the Middle East, where the latest phase of a massive solar park is already below 1.7 cents a kWh.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Just adding to the posts from other people to say that your post is absolutely effing clueless.
1) There are fewer hours of daylight in winter. 2) Winters tend to be more overcast. Whilst panels do not require direct sunlight, the energy delivered is still lower. 3) The sun is lower in the sky in winter, meaning the angle of incidence is lower.
Whilst you are correct that they work better in lower (reasonable) temperatures, this is more than offset by the factors above. At a guess, you'd be lucky to get 20% of average July power in December.
(I daresay someone else will point out I've got this wrong and I'm effing clueless as well...)
On the plus side, solar panels are a good complement to wind power, helping to cover the daytime peaks in consumption.
Oh, there's certainly a place for solar panels. It's just that we're not in an ideal part of the world for them. In the UK, wind makes much more sense.
I wish there was more openness on the figures, and we could see how much power is generated at any time by individual wind or solar farms. There's a windfarm and solarfarm very near our village, and I've no idea how much they generate.
As an aside, the wind farm's turbines are placed in two rows. The other day I noticed that the blades of each row turn in opposite direction. I assume that increases efficiency if they're in the wind 'shadow' of the other row?
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Obviously you are the world's fucking expert on solar systems but photovoltaic cells work on light not heat and are more efficient in colder temperatures. I usually get about 10kWh from both of my systems in the winter. It only stops being effective when it's covered in snow.
Just adding to the posts from other people to say that your post is absolutely effing clueless.
1) There are fewer hours of daylight in winter. 2) Winters tend to be more overcast. Whilst panels do not require direct sunlight, the energy delivered is still lower. 3) The sun is lower in the sky in winter, meaning the angle of incidence is lower.
Whilst you are correct that they work better in lower (reasonable) temperatures, this is more than offset by the factors above. At a guess, you'd be lucky to get 20% of average July power in December.
(I daresay someone else will point out I've got this wrong and I'm effing clueless as well...)
Yes, but with upcoming solar panels, you'll be looking at efficiencies of well over 30%, so you might see an uplift of 50% on what current systems produce, which will shift the overall (though not the relative) calculation, making them a bit less useless for a given property in the winter.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
Yes absolutely if anyone wants to migrate here then I have no qualms with them doing so. The same rules should be consistently applied on that, I believe that currently if a company is offering a £30k salary plus they can sponsor a visa? I have no issues with that whatsoever, if a company wants to do that then they should do that.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
Visas are an unwanted administrative tool to control the labour market aren't they?
I guess it depends on whether or not it's your job that's getting its wages depressed.
Oh absolutely but Philip is a man of principle and it is his political philosophy that is being discussed here.
My principle is I'm in favour of consistent reasonably free movement globally. I'd like the same rules applied globally and consistently.
I would be happy to see immigration go up not down, but I'd like to see restrictions on land usage eased tied to that so that we can have adequate house building etc to go with the increased population demands.
We've been through the land thing. You can't have people build anywhere because the taxes to address the negative externalities would be prohibitive.
But glad to see you are against restrictions on free movement. Can't say the same for all your Brexit fellow travellers.
An "Australian style points immigration system" quite literally applied could see immigration double. Australia has about twice as much immigration as the UK does.
What I see no reason to do is to put onerous demands for visas should apply for Australians, Canadians, Indians, Americans, Japanese, Mexicans etc - but that they shouldn't for French, Germans, Portugese, Polish or Romanians.
I grew up in Australia, if any of my classmates wanted to come to the UK they'd need a visa.
If visas are an issue then that issue should be fixed consistently. Do you disagree?
Depends. Preferred immigration treatment for our neighbours was part of a package of measures which we decided overall were beneficial for the country.
Correction - which we decided was not beneficial to the country. There was a referendum, not sure if you remember it.
Oh absolutely. We decided it was good for the country and then decided it was not good for the country.
Phil seemed to think there was an inconsistency in it all. He wants a come all ye immigration policy. Which is his right.
Not sure how many fellow Brexiters he will take along with him but that is his view.
No one cares if we have an effective open door for doctors or nurses (or bankers). I think the major concern has always been lower skilled and unskilled labour which is predominantly white working class. Closing up shop at the bottom and keeping the door fairly open everywhere else seems like the direction we're heading in. I think if we could have made that work within the EU we wouldn't have voted to leave. Without retreading the same ground for the 209th time there was a level of inflexibility from the EU that they must now regret.
I don't think that's unfair. The studies that you decry about it all do show that the bottom decile (more or less I can't remember) suffered wage deflation which on paper people didn't register, but they did if they were affected.
There are plenty of mitigating responses (the people who suffered most were other immigrants, upskilling usually/should result, etc) but if you are in that bottom group you care and it is real.
Yes, what @MaxPB says, and you agree with, is in my view the entire reason for UKIP doing well in 2013-2016, a referendum taking place, and leave winning.
Without FOM w the A8, none of it would have happened. It’s the only tangible effect of the EU in most peoples lives - the thing was middle class remainers thought FOM was all about graduates spending a year working in Barcelona or a ski season in the alps, so were blinded to the realty
While it is true that immigration lowered the wages of the lowest decile, that lowest decile came to comprise largely of immigrant workers. Hence the average wage of British workers, who are little represented in the lowest decile, actually rose.
if the low-skilled migrants all left, the wages of the lowest decile would rise, but those jobs would then be filled by Brits who would otherwise have been higher up the pecking order. The net result is that average wage of British people falls.
Mr WWC isn't going to be terribly happy when his son can only get a job as a trucker rather than the managerial job he was hoping for, even if he's earning more than the Romanian trucker he replaced.
Doing away with bitcoin and other crypto currencies would be of huge net benefit. It's all powered with dirty Chinese coal and takes up a massive proportion of global power output.
Concerted effort to make it all worthless would a good first step that is probably actionable.
Yup. Ideally mining would be taxed at source but that's probably not practical, as it only takes a single country to pick a lower tax rate and it all moves there and everyone else gets undercut.
What would be practical would be to tax holding cryptocurrencies, at a rate proportional to the amount of environmental damage it does. There would be quite a bit of evasion, but it would still be enough to collect a decent amount of tax revenue and clobber the prices of the most damaging ones, while encouraging people to migrate to better designs.
The issue is that you or I may understand that, does this issue even make the discussion table for Boris, Biden or Xi? The scientists are too focussed on inputs rather than outputs. We know there are a few highly energy intensive industries. We can focus innovation on these in the very near term to improve efficiency of processes. We should have been doing it 30 years ago but the same scientists were still trying to get people to agree to live in cold, damp caves with ever more hysterical sounding catchphrases.
30 years ago there was a lot of first mover's advantage to be had for any nation which successfully addressed energy inefficiencies in industrial processes. Just as Tesla are getting a huge first mover's advantage for electric cars. Sadly it looks like we're only starting that process today which means we need to wait for 30 years and hope that the current trend can be reversed.
Or they'll just migrate the the Middle East, where solar will be a cent per kW...
Waves from the Middle East, where the latest phase of a massive solar park is already below 1.7 cents a kWh.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
What I frankly do not understand about these climate change targets is why we haven't been doing that, and also solar panels as standard, on all new builds for the last 15 years. That would have made a very considerable difference by now.
If I were feeling cynical I would say because the building trade lobbied hard to make sure it didn't happen and they had the right contacts to whom they were very close to get their way.
If I were feeling realistic, I would say everything in that sentence up to 'and.'
Solar panels are the wrong answer for the UK, they're almost but not quite virtue signalling nonsense in the UK.
In states like California or countries like Australia where electricity demand peaks in the summer sun when air conditioning comes on then solar panels are a complete no brainer.
But in the UK we're a cold, wet, grey island that sees energy demand peak in the winter when we put our heating on - and as we switch from gas to electric heaters that's only going to increase.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Even in winter, my solar panels give enough power to run electric radiators. Just not for the whole house.
Now I will grant you that might work for me, where I'm quite happy just to heat one room and not for the whole day at that, and not for you with a young family across several rooms. But that doesn't make them the wrong solution. Especially not if people are going to do more working from home and be in more often in the hours of daylight.
I'm talking on a national basis.
The issue is best summed up by looking at two charts from Gridwatch.
Annual demand - clearly peaks in December to February - and this is before we switch our heating over from gas to electric heating which will send winter demand surging much, much higher.
Annual supply - look at the red line. How useful is that in winter?
Agree on solar not being suitable for winter heating (typically winter solar is 10% of summer), but we know that. It is however, a good fit for summer cooling via a reversible heat pump.
Disagree on "all houses should have solar panels by law". Set a high standard, enforce it, and let the market find the best solutions for each circumstance. Mandating complex specifics was where Gordon Brown's Code for Sustainable Homes cocked it up very badly.
The timescale to phase out gas boilers in 10-15 years seems reasonable, as this is a fair bit more than the normal lifetime of a gas boiler.
We need to fix the older stock as well as newbuild, because newbuild are a tiny part of emissions from residential. An unrenovated older house will have 2-4x as many emissions as a newbuild - even at today's relatively poor energy standards in newbuild (ie EPC B85 roughly), and newbuild is only about 0.7%-0.8% of new stock per year. Pareto.
Anecdata: I've just had to correct British Gas for estimating my annual electricity usage to be double what it actually is. The main difference is my solar, which generates 5-6 MWh per year. I use 2300 kWh.
Comments
And I can cope with the concept of "Black British".
What I find very difficult is knowing how to distinguish between the two - especially in the context of a report about the UK. A Government report at that...
Perhaps we need the expertise of a good lawyer to help distinguish between the two. Or alternatively an expert Conservative interpreter, such as young HY, to explain why his Conservative Government has decided to create these two categories in an official report.
Those who want immediate change need to explain exactly what they want, how they are going to achieve it, the cost, and how they are going to get the world to act in unison
Winter 8 hours of sunshine a day
or do your panels generate power when the sun is below the horizon?
Philip's point (and everyone should know that I rarely agree with him) is that the hours when demand for energy is highest in the UK is when the sun is below the horizon and it's dark.
Now I will grant you that might work for me, where I'm quite happy just to heat one room and not for the whole day at that, and not for you with a young family across several rooms. But that doesn't make them the wrong solution. Especially not if people are going to do more working from home and be in more often in the hours of daylight.
If a company wants special privileges to hire people at low wages without meeting the salary requirements for a visa then I see no reason why we should do that.
And being honest I suspect we may already be too late as feedback loops start creating unexpected consequences.
More seriously its bollocks. He has earned over £650m in wages alone from Barcelona over the past 8 years, if he really wanted to stay, he could afford to play for nothing (remember he also earns incredible amounts from sponsorships). The reality is that Barcelona are now a crap team and are so in debt they are going to have to try and offload some of the decent talent ASAP, and Messi wants to win the Champions League again before he retires.
Haven't heard one of them for ages mind.
But yes, thank goodness pollution and famine are firmly off the menu of things to worry about. Those wacky scientists!
What's slowing us down is that in every single country we're having the exact same argument we're having here, where the exact same fuckheads are complaining that they don't want to do anything unless the other countries do more first.
Concerted effort to make it all worthless would a good first step that is probably actionable.
Are you sure you're in the UK and not the Alps ?
The issue is best summed up by looking at two charts from Gridwatch.
Annual demand - clearly peaks in December to February - and this is before we switch our heating over from gas to electric heating which will send winter demand surging much, much higher.
Annual supply - look at the red line. How useful is that in winter?
My panels worked through the winter in Devon at my last house. You can maximise bang for buck very effectively by running white goods machines while the sun is up. And hoovering.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/08/allegra-stratton-leads-by-example-in-saving-the-world-she-does-not-fancy-it-yet
"‘I don’t fancy it just yet,” said Allegra Stratton, the No 10 press secretary turned prime minister’s climate spokesperson, when she was asked about getting an electric car. She preferred her old diesel, thank you.
If this was merely the most memorable in a series of suboptimal comments from the person hired to communicate the urgency of Cop26, the climate summit, you couldn’t fault it as a summary of Boris Johnson’s position on decisive climate action. He doesn’t fancy it just yet."
They're not a solution for the environment though.
So they should only be installed for economic reasons. Not mandated for "environmental" ones if they're economic counterproductive.
Devon is fine but get up to the North East and Scotland when you have far less daylight in the winter then it becomes an issue.
What would be practical would be to tax holding cryptocurrencies, at a rate proportional to the amount of environmental damage it does. There would be quite a bit of evasion, but it would still be enough to collect a decent amount of tax revenue and clobber the prices of the most damaging ones, while encouraging people to migrate to better designs.
They should be removed consistently though, not specifically for one sector alone.
“ Thousands of prospective drivers are waiting for their HGV tests due to a backlog caused by lockdown”
- and the people blaming Boris for the HGV problem didn’t want lockdown to ever end!!!!
Let's get DeLorean back plus those beige Rovers while we're on a roll.
I would be happy to see immigration go up not down, but I'd like to see restrictions on land usage eased tied to that so that we can have adequate house building etc to go with the increased population demands.
But glad to see you are against restrictions on free movement. Can't say the same for all your Brexit fellow travellers.
Phillip does have a point about winter. We need more power during the winter and even working efficiently solar panels don’t deliver and they are great where you got longer days in the south of England but in the north east or Scotland were days are quite a bit shorter they are less so.
30 years ago there was a lot of first mover's advantage to be had for any nation which successfully addressed energy inefficiencies in industrial processes. Just as Tesla are getting a huge first mover's advantage for electric cars. Sadly it looks like we're only starting that process today which means we need to wait for 30 years and hope that the current trend can be reversed.
10 kwh in the winter doesn't sound like a UK based system to me.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PmCfcowD0d2gLJZkwllOxA-QWwnpUYNgl2xpGYaOCd8/edit?usp=sharing <-
What I see no reason to do is to put onerous demands for visas should apply for Australians, Canadians, Indians, Americans, Japanese, Mexicans etc - but that they shouldn't for French, Germans, Portugese, Polish or Romanians.
I grew up in Australia, if any of my classmates wanted to come to the UK they'd need a visa.
If visas are an issue then that issue should be fixed consistently. Do you disagree?
Of course there are uncertainties - but one of the reasons for the increase in alarm is that successive sets of data from an increasing number of sources keeps reducing the room to say 'our calculations were wrong and there's no reason to be worried after all'.
If we wait until the best guess proves a certainty, it will be too late to do anything about it.
Here's some detail on how it's done at the moment:
https://granthaminstitute.com/2015/10/16/taking-the-planets-temperature-how-are-global-temperatures-calculated/
I don't know what Biden understands but his administration has very knowledgeable people. I think a hodling tax would be popular; It's a quick, environmentally-friendly revenue-raiser, and everybody's cross with cybercoins because of ransomware.
The UK needs heating. We need an environmental solution that works for winter. It is dark and cold and the heating is on in winter.
Who is right?
Considering the UK has more people moving to countries like Australia than European country by a long margin, we should reasonably consider solving visa issues on a global and not regional basis.
The heat island effect is understood and corrected for. Many observation sites are and always have been far from any heat island.
And the what difference does a paltry 2 deg C make argument doesn't stand up to a moment's thought either. What happens to frozen water when you raise the temperature from -1 to + 1? Is there a lot of frozen water? Where does it go when it thaws?
Phil seemed to think there was an inconsistency in it all. He wants a come all ye immigration policy. Which is his right.
Not sure how many fellow Brexiters he will take along with him but that is his view.
Starting now would be better than not, but there are still lots of people who want to leave the problem to their grandchildren to deal with.
https://twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1424680726205763591?s=21
Electric cars will be at the same range as petrol ones soon enough, and nearly the same refuelling speed, and all the people without drives seem to be quite happy without their own personal petrol pump. Range anxiety will drift away in a few years.
I think much of the grid adaptation has already been done.
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/electric-cars/uk-national-grid-can-handle-ev-surge-experts-say
I’m aware of the wind farm stuff. My next door neighbour works for a blade manufacturer up in Blyth. However turbine blades need oil based products to be produced. Oil will still be needed for the foreseeable.
Didn’t know about the solar farm in Morocco. Thanks. That’s interesting. I’ll look it up for more info.
So while they're important for scientists iterating towards a best estimate, it's not a difference that's important for deciding policy.
Hmm. Maybe someone should compare Remain with Theresa May's 2017 GE campaign.
https://www.mbrsic.ae/en/About/MBRSolarPark
There are plenty of mitigating responses (the people who suffered most were other immigrants, upskilling usually/should result, etc) but if you are in that bottom group you care and it is real.
If the organisers of the climate change summit can’t get Webex doing what they want it to do, then the rest of us certainly don’t care enough about the environment to stop meeting in person post-pandemic.
1) There are fewer hours of daylight in winter.
2) Winters tend to be more overcast. Whilst panels do not require direct sunlight, the energy delivered is still lower.
3) The sun is lower in the sky in winter, meaning the angle of incidence is lower.
Whilst you are correct that they work better in lower (reasonable) temperatures, this is more than offset by the factors above. At a guess, you'd be lucky to get 20% of average July power in December.
(I daresay someone else will point out I've got this wrong and I'm effing clueless as well...)
But when there was an explicit vote on the matter, “we” said no thanks
He was made PM under the democratic system in the UK. Hence yes he was elected by the British people because they agreed with that system.
If you're reasonably wealthy...
Without FOM w the A8, none of it would have happened. It’s the only tangible effect of the EU in most peoples lives - the thing was middle class remainers thought FOM was all about graduates spending a year working in Barcelona or a ski season in the alps, so were blinded to the realty
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/04/08/saudi-arabias-second-pv-tender-draws-world-record-low-bid-of-0104-kwh/
It takes me a few minutes to fill up my car for a 600 mile range. It'll take considerably longer to recharge even the best cars atm, for less range.
https://evcharging.enelx.com/uk/about/news/blog/577-how-long-does-it-take-to-charge-a-tesla
Therefore the best place to charge them is at home.
I'm hopeful we'll get much better battery technology (both in terms of capacity and recharge time), but headlines aside, it'll take years for them to approach fossil fuels.
“ So it is that the working class man, who has seen his job security diminish, his pay decrease, & his bills soar in the last ten years, is distracted by the illusion of mass immigration being a boon for the country. While he tries to reconcile this fantastic claim with the deteriorating circumstances of his own life, the smoke and mirrors of an abstract “GDP figure” is deployed to infer the economy would fall apart without this policy.
That is arguable, but what is not is that contained within the GDP figure are some winners, but many more losers, and it’s the lowest paid that lose every time. Mass immigration of cheap labour makes the poor poorer and the rich richer, it is a fact, as the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration confirm. A stealth tax is applied to the wages of the bottom 5% of earners to pay for a tax break for the top 5%. For every 1% of the labour market taken by immigrants, the lowest paid lose 0.6% of their wages. Who would expect it to be any different when the door is opened for millions of people, used to earning a fraction of the going rate in Britain, to compete with the British unskilled for employment by international corporations?”
http://aboutasfarasdelgados.blogspot.com/2014/08/mass-immigration-stealth-tax-on-working.html
I'm not sure that the figure for 306m doses due to be delivered stands up to scrutiny either. I think we're at ~100m delivered now, with another Pfizer order of 60m to come. Are they really expecting 140m Oxford/AstraZeneca doses over the next five months? I thought we'd only ordered 100m of them.
Even if you include 60m Novavax doses I don't think it adds up.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/aug/09/uk-set-to-hoard-up-to-210m-doses-of-covid-vaccine-research-suggests
Dave Skelton's The New Snobbery.
https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-new-snobbery/david-skelton/9781785906572
I will be quoting from it _a lot_ in weeks and months to come.
Teaser: "The belief that BRexit was the result of something between mass hysteria and mass stupidity allowed a lingering sense of suspicion about less-educated people to boil over into open snobbery...Leave voters were quickly derided as low-information, low-intelligence people..."
Apparently the most difficult issue out here, is finding ways to keep the panels clean from sand without using tonnes of water.
I wish there was more openness on the figures, and we could see how much power is generated at any time by individual wind or solar farms. There's a windfarm and solarfarm very near our village, and I've no idea how much they generate.
As an aside, the wind farm's turbines are placed in two rows. The other day I noticed that the blades of each row turn in opposite direction. I assume that increases efficiency if they're in the wind 'shadow' of the other row?
if the low-skilled migrants all left, the wages of the lowest decile would rise, but those jobs would then be filled by Brits who would otherwise have been higher up the pecking order. The net result is that average wage of British people falls.
Mr WWC isn't going to be terribly happy when his son can only get a job as a trucker rather than the managerial job he was hoping for, even if he's earning more than the Romanian trucker he replaced.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11057771
Disagree on "all houses should have solar panels by law". Set a high standard, enforce it, and let the market find the best solutions for each circumstance. Mandating complex specifics was where Gordon Brown's Code for Sustainable Homes cocked it up very badly.
The timescale to phase out gas boilers in 10-15 years seems reasonable, as this is a fair bit more than the normal lifetime of a gas boiler.
We need to fix the older stock as well as newbuild, because newbuild are a tiny part of emissions from residential. An unrenovated older house will have 2-4x as many emissions as a newbuild - even at today's relatively poor energy standards in newbuild (ie EPC B85 roughly), and newbuild is only about 0.7%-0.8% of new stock per year. Pareto.
Anecdata: I've just had to correct British Gas for estimating my annual electricity usage to be double what it actually is. The main difference is my solar, which generates 5-6 MWh per year. I use 2300 kWh.