The average energy usage is £1,600 per year? Christ - I pay £600 and that was a bad year due to wfh. Shows how important insulation is (my home was built in 2018).
We are under <£900 with someone in the house all day every day (well, until the deal ends/supplier goes under, anyway). That's in a 1925 semi with solid walls (i.e. no cavity, so no cavity insulation). We have insulated the loft to modern spec, have good windows, the boiler is just coming up to three years old and we've got solar panels (so that reduces electricty consumption and also gives us ~£400 year income to offset against the £900).
The average I guess is due to a lot of people being on sub-optimal tariffs with old boilers and very little insulation (my in-laws fall into this category).</p>
In my experience, the big factor is the temperature at which you keep your home.
Insulation is a factor but if you consistently heat your home through the year, then your bill is much higher. This is the case for a lot of older people.
Commission spokesman says Brussels is 'analysing the impact of the AUKUS announcement' on the next round of EU-Australia trade talks, which is scheduled for next month. Comes after France's Europe Minister Clement Beaune said it would be 'unthinkable' for negotiations to go on....
A reminder that last Thursday the EU's high representative Josep Borrell insisted 'we want to foster cooperation with countries such as Australia' and 'trade agreements with Australia will continue down their path'. Seems that French fury has shifted the dial over the weekend.
Wow. I think ordinarily the EU's instinct would be to wait for things to simmer down and then proceed as before. However Boris really has upped the ante - especially in the way his supporters have been clear they see AUUKUS as a tool to render Europe utterly powerless and insignificant in the modern world. This poses an existential threat to the EU itself. The EU nations might decide it's worth using a nuclear option when you've got an opponent like Boris on the loose.
I also wonder about the role model question - e.g. if you've two gay blokes who adopt a girl, where is her female role model? Often the worst damage when family breakup occurs is to the kid who loses a role model of their own gender from regular family life.
What about single parent families, of which there are zillions. Short one role model. Or, arguably, long a harmful role model.
Two loving parents of any sex would seem to me to provide a hugely positive role model about relationships.
I'm sure two parents of any sex do provide a hugely positive role model about relationships but if it's true that male role models for boys make a difference and female role models for girls make a difference then it stands to reason that having two parents of the same sex might make it more challenging to provide a proximate same-gender role model for a child in the same way it does within single parent families.
We like to say that there's absolutely no difference between same-sex couples and heterosexual couples, because we want to be inclusive and don't want to discriminate, but the truth is we just don't know yet.
The former is a fairly recent development (last 15 years) and we may find the difference in datasets in future to be utterly trivial or they might identify some differences.
We don't know yet.
It's worth pointing out that the nuclear family is also an innovation, albeit one with a slightly longer pedigree. It was essentially invented in the middle ages but the Western church as a means to break kinship groups and insert itself into property inheritance. A lot of consequences, good and bad, flowed from that, relating to feudalism, individual rights and rule of law. Society here was earlier organised in much wider family networks and role models of both sexes would have been very accessible even to children whose biological parents were dead or absent.
Well, you can go back tens of thousands of years finding evidence of family groups within tribes, and the corollary for that are the indigenous communities living in comparative isolation today in some forests and on some remote islands.
What I do think is true (and I think we're agreeing with each other here) is that in such tribes and communities extended families were far more common so you've have grandparents, aunties, uncles, cousins and siblings all mucking in to care for each other - particularly given the unpredictability of life and death, it made a lot of sense - and not just the mum, dad and kids by themselves alone.
Who's to say that system was worse? In fact, it might be the answer.
Doesn't take one long in Family Research to find that people tended to marry (breed with) people from their own or the next community (assuming that wasn't over a mountain).
Another uncomfortable truth is the myth of "the one" - it's one we tell ourselves, we all do, because we love our partners deeply but we haven't individually reviewed all 4 billion + suitable candidates to be sure, have we?
As this is a betting site it's probably more likely to be 1:10,000 - which means there are statistically a large number of suitable partners, worldwide - and that's then filtered by cultural entropy, language, compatibility and proximity to feel like they are "the one" within your realistic field of vision for your own life.
Ha - Tim Minchin beat you to it.
Check out his song "If I didn't have you", which, addressing his wife, contains the line "I think you're special but you fall within a bell curve".
Here is a chunk of the lyrics (check out the whole song though):
"But realistically there's lots of fish in the sea, And if I had a different rod I would conceivably land some. Even though I am fiscally consistently pitiable And considerably less Brad Pitt than Brad Pitiful Am I really so poor and ugly that you Think only you could possibly love me?"
Mr. Pioneers, aye, decades of political idiocy from major parties has led to this.
I'm not banking on the imbecile of Number 10 improving it. But we'll see.
Not much chance of that when we have loons newly appointed to the cabinet who were still denying the existence of global warming as recently as 2012! How are people who are already struggling to come to terms with reality supposed to come up with a coherent energy policy?
Welsh Labour’s party conference in November has been cancelled due to high cases of covid and pressure on the NHS. expected at that time of year does that mean other large scale events could be in jeopardy come the winter months?
Seems weird to think that is in jeopardy, the situation doesn't seem to have changed massively over the last two months where cases have been high, there is pressure, but nowhere near the full blown crisis period.
The average energy usage is £1,600 per year? Christ - I pay £600 and that was a bad year due to wfh. Shows how important insulation is (my home was built in 2018).
I think that's a wholesale market price not an average bill.
Average bill is roughly £1200 covering both gas and electricity.
I'm not sure why they bother with a charade, in HK in particular (not that Beijing doesn't have support there, but why that it is so overwhelming now). It doesn't fool anyone, they know it doesn't fool anyone and don't expect it to, so what's the point?
0.5% to 1.29% increase for PayPal fees between the UK and EEA. Sweet. This hits particularly had that vulnerable section of society who spend vast amounts of money buying European car parts on eBay.
0.5% to 1.29% increase for PayPal fees between the UK and EEA. Sweet. This hits particularly had that vulnerable section of society who spend vast amounts of money buying European car parts on eBay.
Polls which only register opposition to tax rise X are of no value when at the end of it they haven't bothered to find out how those answering want to pay instead.
0.5% to 1.29% increase for PayPal fees between the UK and EEA. Sweet. This hits particularly had that vulnerable section of society who spend vast amounts of money buying European car parts on eBay.
The surge in electricity prices have been mainstream headline news here in Spainfor the past 6 weeks. So far the government has reduced IVA [VAT] until the end of the year and said that companies must reduce their profits. The idea that this is a UK specific issue is quite absurd. Spain already had very high electricity prices before the latest problems hit.
The *scale* is UK specific. I know that Spain has high costs comparatively for Spain. A "day ahead" price of €100/MWh. But in the UK it's €177...
Like I said, there are price rises everywhere. Ours are higher than pretty much everyone else due to 30 years of policy shithousery and our reliance on a now unregulated market.
OT and not sure if this has already been mentioned.
Am I wrong in thinking the Telegraph is being particularly misleading with this headline?:
"Jesse Norman quit the Treasury over Boris Johnson’s bid for more diversity"
My immediate interpretation of that headline is that Jesse Norman quit because he objected to the drive for increased diversity. In fact the body of the article makes clear that he quit because he supported the policy and didn't want to be a ''bedblocker' who stood in the way of bringing in new talent.
“I actually believe in what the Prime Minister is trying to do with improving representation and diversity, and I don’t want to be one of those, I don’t want to say 'Yes I’m going to stay in' to be one of those ministers who then has to be forklifted out later on.”
Now of course he might be putting his own spin on it (though I don't think so in this case) but that still doesn't justify the Telegraph headline which implies he was unhappy with the diversity drive.
0.5% to 1.29% increase for PayPal fees between the UK and EEA. Sweet. This hits particularly had that vulnerable section of society who spend vast amounts of money buying European car parts on eBay.
I had a smart meter fitted two weeks ago and the engineer checked my gas combi boiler and said that they were attending many homes where they simply had to condemn the boiler and also some gas fires
It will come as quite a shock to some when they decide to install a smart meter that their boiler will need immediate replacement
Fortunately mine was fine and is serviced annually
And my 4 bed detached is cavity insulated, double glazed, heavy layers of loft insulation, and solar panels but my monthly dd has just risen to £104 from £75
Goodness knows what it would be without the solar panels and feed in tariffs.
Commission spokesman says Brussels is 'analysing the impact of the AUKUS announcement' on the next round of EU-Australia trade talks, which is scheduled for next month. Comes after France's Europe Minister Clement Beaune said it would be 'unthinkable' for negotiations to go on....
A reminder that last Thursday the EU's high representative Josep Borrell insisted 'we want to foster cooperation with countries such as Australia' and 'trade agreements with Australia will continue down their path'. Seems that French fury has shifted the dial over the weekend.
Wow. I think ordinarily the EU's instinct would be to wait for things to simmer down and then proceed as before. However Boris really has upped the ante - especially in the way his supporters have been clear they see AUUKUS as a tool to render Europe utterly powerless and insignificant in the modern world. This poses an existential threat to the EU itself. The EU nations might decide it's worth using a nuclear option when you've got an opponent like Boris on the loose.
I see your obsession grows with the passing of time. Not sure the tweet justifies your hyperbole, but you can live in hope...
Do we have any water systems that could be turned into a significant pumped storage battery in the UK ? Could we create one, or do we need to go Lithium ion for storage here ?
There have been experiments with raising/lowering weights as a form of storage. Could be of use in areas with lots of disused deep mine shafts. My hazy scientific grasp is that a substance denser than water e.g. stone or metal would be more efficient than raising/lowering water.
The surge in electricity prices have been mainstream headline news here in Spainfor the past 6 weeks. So far the government has reduced IVA [VAT] until the end of the year and said that companies must reduce their profits. The idea that this is a UK specific issue is quite absurd. Spain already had very high electricity prices before the latest problems hit.
The *scale* is UK specific. I know that Spain has high costs comparatively for Spain. A "day ahead" price of €100/MWh. But in the UK it's €177...
Like I said, there are price rises everywhere. Ours are higher than pretty much everyone else due to 30 years of policy shithousery and our reliance on a now unregulated market.
...
in Denmark it's €180....
If we are talking about MWh, a lot of our current price rise is due to a 2GW interconnect that is out of order, that shock by itself would have a significant impact on prices as it's 6% of our usual production...
The surge in electricity prices have been mainstream headline news here in Spainfor the past 6 weeks. So far the government has reduced IVA [VAT] until the end of the year and said that companies must reduce their profits. The idea that this is a UK specific issue is quite absurd. Spain already had very high electricity prices before the latest problems hit.
The *scale* is UK specific. I know that Spain has high costs comparatively for Spain. A "day ahead" price of €100/MWh. But in the UK it's €177...
Like I said, there are price rises everywhere. Ours are higher than pretty much everyone else due to 30 years of policy shithousery and our reliance on a now unregulated market.
...
in Denmark it's €180....
Come one man, Rochdale needs a win today. His world view about the EU has been imploding, just give him this one victory. He needs it.
Lol, it's a retelling of the whole thing from the EU/France perspective with multiple quotes from the French side and nothing from either the US, UK or Australians.
France are being asked whether they're happy to be hamstrung by German foreign policy objectives. So far they haven't answered, it's something that will take time for them to answer. The UK out of the EU has said we won't be beholden to Germany wanting to sell BMWs to China. France will need to take that step, either by convincing Germany to come along or, as Barnier has been suggesting, working outside of EU shared sovereignty.
The surge in electricity prices have been mainstream headline news here in Spainfor the past 6 weeks. So far the government has reduced IVA [VAT] until the end of the year and said that companies must reduce their profits. The idea that this is a UK specific issue is quite absurd. Spain already had very high electricity prices before the latest problems hit.
The *scale* is UK specific. I know that Spain has high costs comparatively for Spain. A "day ahead" price of €100/MWh. But in the UK it's €177...
Like I said, there are price rises everywhere. Ours are higher than pretty much everyone else due to 30 years of policy shithousery and our reliance on a now unregulated market.
...
in Denmark it's €180....
If we are talking about MWh, a lot of our current price rise is due to a 2GW interconnect that is out of order, that shock by itself would have a significant impact on prices as it's 6% of our usual production...
Thing is, that interconnector was only really substituting for a nuclear power station we should have built. Importing power, whilst potentially a handy tool to balance things out, shouldn't have really ended up as virtual baseload all winter.
I also wonder about the role model question - e.g. if you've two gay blokes who adopt a girl, where is her female role model? Often the worst damage when family breakup occurs is to the kid who loses a role model of their own gender from regular family life.
What about single parent families, of which there are zillions. Short one role model. Or, arguably, long a harmful role model.
Two loving parents of any sex would seem to me to provide a hugely positive role model about relationships.
I'm sure two parents of any sex do provide a hugely positive role model about relationships but if it's true that male role models for boys make a difference and female role models for girls make a difference then it stands to reason that having two parents of the same sex might make it more challenging to provide a proximate same-gender role model for a child in the same way it does within single parent families.
We like to say that there's absolutely no difference between same-sex couples and heterosexual couples, because we want to be inclusive and don't want to discriminate, but the truth is we just don't know yet.
The former is a fairly recent development (last 15 years) and we may find the difference in datasets in future to be utterly trivial or they might identify some differences.
We don't know yet.
Hence the need for male teachers in primary schools.
Good luck with that. Recruitment of male teachers for young children has an unfortunate image problem, and has done since, well, probably forever. And you can't throw money at the problem because that would be illegal.
Eldest grandson is a primary school teacher. Happily married to a female secondary school teacher.
Yes, indeed. Even when I were a lad and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, we had two male junior school teachers. The rest were women, as were all at infants school (none of your primary school nonsense: when did that happen?). And that will be the experience of most. And still is, which I guess is why you mentioned the issue in the first place.
And at mine, at, I suspect, a bit earlier. Mrs C was, when I met her, a student of nursery and infant teaching, so I've lived with designations for a long time. Nursery schools cater for under 5's. Infant schools deal with years 1 and 2.... 5 & 6 year olds. Primary schools deal with years 3-6 7-11yrs old. Junior schools deal with 5 - 11year olds. In other word. they combine Infant and Primary.
Its been a mixed picture for a long time, I think. The first school I went to in 1974 was an infant school with the separate junior school just over the fence and linkage, more or less automatic progression, from one to the other. The second school I moved to in what we then called third year infants, now year 2, was a primary school.
And the picture of some infant/junior school pairings and some end to end primaries is the same where I currently live. (let's not even go into the one corner of the LEA that has a First/Middle/Upper school system!).
Generally there are mostly Infant/Junior schools but with a few Primaries which handle all the way up to Y6.
I went to my son's U9 away football match yesterday morning at a complex of schools. On the same site they had Nursery, Infant, Junior & Secondary. You could be a child who lived locally and attend education there from the age of 3 to 18!
That seems to be increasingly common with schools provision as part of new housing developments.
I've only ever been associated with establishments divided along the "Pre-school/nursery"/"Primaries"/"Secondaries" as both child and parent.
There are also "6th Form Colleges" (Yr 12/13) which seem to be a very popular way for privately educated children to get back into "state education" before applying to University, round our way.
(Though my other half went to a state-sector 6th Form College in the NW 30+ years ago which was/is rated as one of the best in the country.)
Up in Staffordshire, you have Middle Schools: A Primary or First school at the beginning of the reception year A Junior school at the beginning of Year 3 a Middle school at the beginning of Year 5 a Secondary school at the beginning of Year 7 an Upper school at the beginning of Year 9
Welsh Labour’s party conference in November has been cancelled due to high cases of covid and pressure on the NHS. expected at that time of year does that mean other large scale events could be in jeopardy come the winter months?
No, just Drakeford is a wet blanket, hospitalisations still low due to the vaccinations
Follow the link below, and look at the blue line in Figure 5. And then read this: ... in our more recent data (since mid-April 2021), infections and hospitalisations began to re-converge, potentially reflecting the increased prevalence and severity of Delta compared with Alpha [25], a changing age mix of severe cases, and possible waning of protection [19,26]. https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/90800/2/react1_r13_final_preprint_final.pdf
In short, the increased severity of the Delta variant has essentially cancelled out the benefit from vaccination, as far as the rate of hospitalisation per infection is concerned.
That doesn't mean there is no longer any benefit from vaccination, because vaccination still has a big benefit in lowering the risk of being infected in the first place - and thereby the risk of being hospitalised.
But people really need to stop parroting the old mantra about vaccination reducing the percentage of those infected who go to hospital. It doesn't.
I would be wary about that, given Morrison still leads Albanese as preferred PM.
At the 2019 Australian general election every final poll had Shorten's Labor ahead of Morrison's Coalition on 2PP and they were expected to win, however Morrison led Shorten as preferred PM and it was indeed Morrison who was re elected. On the primary vote the latest Morgan poll also has the LNP coalition on 39.5% to just 35% for Labor even if Labour lead on 2PP
Oh, I agree, the next Oz election is very much open. I merely meant that virtually nobody is changing their vote over submarines in 2040, however excited some people get about the deal.
Might a new government change their mind over buying nukes, though ? (A previous administration favoured an extended range version of the Japanese Soryu - which would have made a great deal of sense, in terms of price, delivery schedule and capability.)
Yes, I wondered about that. My guess is that a new government will not seek to reopen the package, but I don't know if they've clearly opposed it anyway? I know Paul Keating has, not heard about other local reactions. Do others know?
It feels like the sort of issue that the Greens could run on but which wouldn't survive coalition talks.
The Catholic adoption centres believed that adoption by gay couples was against their religious beliefs. When they were given no choice they closed and kids who were previously adopted were less well supported with a huge cost to them.
The compromise I pushed at the time was the requirement that if a Catholic service wasn’t willing to provide adoption services to gay couples themselves they had to have a partnership with someone who would. The Catholics were grumpy but ok with it. The activists on the gay rights side weren’t.
The kids lost out.
(FWIW my personal belief is that a stable two person parental unit is key to children’s success in life. The sex of each member of the parental unit is irrelevant)
Sorry but I have absolutely zero sympathy for centres that wish to break the law being given a "religious" exemption. The law is the law and if these centres wish to put their petty bigotry over "helping the kids" then good riddance to them. Let secular organisations that don't put bigotry over helping the kids in accordance with the law take their place.
Besides, while I may be an atheist I do have a decent understanding of the Bible and while I can't remember Christ attacking gay couples, I can recall a concept of how we are all sinners and then when it comes to the law Matthew 12:17 surely applies?
The law is the law and that should apply to all equally and not have carved out religious exemptions whether it be for Anglicans, Catholics or Sharia.
Positioning it as breaking the law is unreasonable and inflammatory.
They were in compliance with the law. The law changed. So they closed. At no point did they break the law.
Christ cared for children. These were good men and women who wanted to help children. They had a genuine belief - which I disagree with - that children were not helped by putting them in same sex family units.
So now very troubled and scared children don’t get the same quality of assistance (these agencies were among the best in the field).
I hope you feel good about that. But there is a little less joy in the lives of people who are less privileged than you.
At a base level, what do we need from our energy system?
Security of supply (being able to get the coal/gas/fuel/wind/sun we need) to generate the power we need at all times. Security of price (producing and distributing the power for an affordable price) Not kill the environment (not producing nasties such as CO2, NO etc)
I'm curious how many of those who regret there is no Catholic exemption to equalities legislation so that Catholics can't discriminate against homosexuals ... Would also call for an Islamic exemption to equalities legislation so that Muslims could discriminate against women in accordance to Shariah law?
The law is the law and we should have equality before the law.
That is why the solution was requiring a referral system to a local partner agency.
0.5% to 1.29% increase for PayPal fees between the UK and EEA. Sweet. This hits particularly had that vulnerable section of society who spend vast amounts of money buying European car parts on eBay.
I'm curious how many of those who regret there is no Catholic exemption to equalities legislation so that Catholics can't discriminate against homosexuals ... Would also call for an Islamic exemption to equalities legislation so that Muslims could discriminate against women in accordance to Shariah law?
The law is the law and we should have equality before the law.
That is why the solution was requiring a referral system to a local partner agency.
This issue a similar issue has caused quite a bit of staring at the floor - gay marriage for example. Every so often it got proposed that any venue (religious or otherwise) that discriminates should not be allowed to hold weddings at all. Then someone points out the obvious....
I'm curious how many of those who regret there is no Catholic exemption to equalities legislation so that Catholics can't discriminate against homosexuals ... Would also call for an Islamic exemption to equalities legislation so that Muslims could discriminate against women in accordance to Shariah law?
The law is the law and we should have equality before the law.
The issue is that these Catholic adoption agencies had been running successfully for decades. They offered to partner with other agencies who would work with gay couples, rather than turn them away, which seemed a fair compromise.
The consequences, are more abortions and more children growing up in what is euphemistically called ‘care’, including in places like Rotherham.
If there are readily made alternatives available then why should people end up in care?
Why don't they end up at the alternatives that were good enough for gays? Why can't they be good enough for everyone? If Catholic agencies aren't crowding out unbigoted ones then the unbigoted ones should be able to expand to meet the demand.
There were capacity issues - an under supply of people willing to do a difficult and emotionally challenging job often on a volunteer basis. The Catholic charities (I don’t think it was actually the church) weren’t willing to fund others they disagreed with to do the work and neither was the government.
The actual number of gay couples in this situation was tiny.
‘Theory: the effect of Remain campaigning over Brexit has been disastrous for the EU and for France especially - helping to confer a vastly inflated sense of their own righteousness and power, and of the UK's wrongness and impotence.’
I spoke to a German friend in the defence industry today and the topic of Le Strop came up. Despite being a confirmed pro-European and very supportive of the Franco-German alliance, his view was that the French didn't have a leg to stand on.
Apparently the underperformance of the French in the Australian submarine contract was shocking and well known in the industry. They had originally agreed 80% of components were to be Aussie made, then they renegotiated to 60% and it was looking like they were going to have to drop it to 40%. On top of that the French attitude to work was going down very badly with the Australians. Not only did they not appreciate the 35 hour working week, which was strictly obeyed, but the French engineers were also taking all of August off and also regularly turning up to meetings 15 minutes late. According to him, the Aussies pulling out of the contract was known to be only a matter of time.
....Separately, there's another element of this that bears attention. The Taiwanese are currently building their own submarines (The Indigenous Submarine Project or IDS). And they did this, because Donald Trump refused authorisation for submarines or submarine technology to exported there. (A consequence of which is that the IDS is "based on technology from European countries".)
Could we see Biden's America be willing to allow the Taiwanese to directly purchase US submarines? If it did, that would be a major demonstration that the US was willing to stand up to defend Taiwan.
The new Taiwanese submarine* will contain a lot of US systems - sonar, combat systems, torpedoes etc (which were approved by Trump) - and is being built with Japanese help. The first boat is now expected to be launched in just two years' time, unusually ahead of schedule. Assuming that's correct, it's hard to see what alternative they could get from the US, who don't even build diesel/electric boats.
Welsh Labour’s party conference in November has been cancelled due to high cases of covid and pressure on the NHS. expected at that time of year does that mean other large scale events could be in jeopardy come the winter months?
No, just Drakeford is a wet blanket, hospitalisations still low due to the vaccinations
Follow the link below, and look at the blue line in Figure 5. And then read this: ... in our more recent data (since mid-April 2021), infections and hospitalisations began to re-converge, potentially reflecting the increased prevalence and severity of Delta compared with Alpha [25], a changing age mix of severe cases, and possible waning of protection [19,26]. https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/90800/2/react1_r13_final_preprint_final.pdf
In short, the increased severity of the Delta variant has essentially cancelled out the benefit from vaccination, as far as the rate of hospitalisation per infection is concerned.
That doesn't mean there is no longer any benefit from vaccination, because vaccination still has a big benefit in lowering the risk of being infected in the first place - and thereby the risk of being hospitalised.
But people really need to stop parroting the old mantra about vaccination reducing the percentage of those infected who go to hospital. It doesn't.
Do we have any water systems that could be turned into a significant pumped storage battery in the UK ? Could we create one, or do we need to go Lithium ion for storage here ?
There have been experiments with raising/lowering weights as a form of storage. Could be of use in areas with lots of disused deep mine shafts. My hazy scientific grasp is that a substance denser than water e.g. stone or metal would be more efficient than raising/lowering water.
It's a great idea until you start to consider the scale required to be useful. Dinorwic gives you 1.8GW for about 5 hours run flat out from full. To do so it takes around 390 tones of water falling 100m per second. That's 3,900 tons falling 10m a second, or 39,000 tons at 1m/second. If we dig a hole for our 40k ton weight to go down 1km deep, it will equal Dinorwic for 17 minutes. That's before you start looking at the engineering problem posed by dangling 40k tons down a 1km mineshaft on a rope.
Nice idea, but it just doesn't scale big enough sensibly.
I had a smart meter fitted two weeks ago and the engineer checked my gas combi boiler and said that they were attending many homes where they simply had to condemn the boiler and also some gas fires
It will come as quite a shock to some when they decide to install a smart meter that their boiler will need immediate replacement
Fortunately mine was fine and is serviced annually
And my 4 bed detached is cavity insulated, double glazed, heavy layers of loft insulation, and solar panels but my monthly dd has just risen to £104 from £75
Goodness knows what it would be without the solar panels and feed in tariffs.
My fix (started 13/9) has just shifted from the previous £74 to £91 (signed up in late Aug on a 12 month fix. 24 monthers were about £102). The deals started getting rather more expensive more rapidly from about July.
AFAICS part of it is the change to the Price Cap regime in 2019 feeding through, which somewhat tipped the benefit balance from constant switchers to people on card meters and variable tariffs.
Welsh Labour’s party conference in November has been cancelled due to high cases of covid and pressure on the NHS. expected at that time of year does that mean other large scale events could be in jeopardy come the winter months?
No, just Drakeford is a wet blanket, hospitalisations still low due to the vaccinations
Follow the link below, and look at the blue line in Figure 5. And then read this: ... in our more recent data (since mid-April 2021), infections and hospitalisations began to re-converge, potentially reflecting the increased prevalence and severity of Delta compared with Alpha [25], a changing age mix of severe cases, and possible waning of protection [19,26]. https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/90800/2/react1_r13_final_preprint_final.pdf
In short, the increased severity of the Delta variant has essentially cancelled out the benefit from vaccination, as far as the rate of hospitalisation per infection is concerned.
That doesn't mean there is no longer any benefit from vaccination, because vaccination still has a big benefit in lowering the risk of being infected in the first place - and thereby the risk of being hospitalised.
But people really need to stop parroting the old mantra about vaccination reducing the percentage of those infected who go to hospital. It doesn't.
Chris, I'm really interested in this and slightly disagree. I think we are now seeing a lot of younger, unvaccinated people in hospital that we didn't before because we used NPI to a much greater extent. I believe that vaccination does affect your chance of progressing to severe disease, while you clearly don't.
I know you do not like the idea of positive tests being called 'cases'. Is this the heart of the difference in our opinion? Do you regard a case as only someone testing positive AND with symptoms?
Do we have any water systems that could be turned into a significant pumped storage battery in the UK ? Could we create one, or do we need to go Lithium ion for storage here ?
There have been experiments with raising/lowering weights as a form of storage. Could be of use in areas with lots of disused deep mine shafts. My hazy scientific grasp is that a substance denser than water e.g. stone or metal would be more efficient than raising/lowering water.
It's a great idea until you start to consider the scale required to be useful. Dinorwic gives you 1.8GW for about 5 hours run flat out from full. To do so it takes around 390 tones of water falling 100m per second. That's 3,900 tons falling 10m a second, or 39,000 tons at 1m/second. If we dig a hole for our 40k ton weight to go down 1km deep, it will equal Dinorwic for 17 minutes. That's before you start looking at the engineering problem posed by dangling 40k tons down a 1km mineshaft on a rope.
Nice idea, but it just doesn't scale big enough sensibly.
And which is why pumped storage isn't any easy answer - you still need alot of Dinorwic's to deal with intermittency from renewables such as solar and wind.
One interesting idea I came across was using compressed air storage - beating the problem of energy loss on expansion to cooling, by using the cooling to manufacture liquid gases for free..... Making that add up would be an interesting one, though.
I would be wary about that, given Morrison still leads Albanese as preferred PM.
At the 2019 Australian general election every final poll had Shorten's Labor ahead of Morrison's Coalition on 2PP and they were expected to win, however Morrison led Shorten as preferred PM and it was indeed Morrison who was re elected. On the primary vote the latest Morgan poll also has the LNP coalition on 39.5% to just 35% for Labor even if Labour lead on 2PP
Oh, I agree, the next Oz election is very much open. I merely meant that virtually nobody is changing their vote over submarines in 2040, however excited some people get about the deal.
Might a new government change their mind over buying nukes, though ? (A previous administration favoured an extended range version of the Japanese Soryu - which would have made a great deal of sense, in terms of price, delivery schedule and capability.)
Yes, I wondered about that. My guess is that a new government will not seek to reopen the package, but I don't know if they've clearly opposed it anyway? I know Paul Keating has, not heard about other local reactions. Do others know?
It feels like the sort of issue that the Greens could run on but which wouldn't survive coalition talks.
I think unlikely in the short term as the ALP has mostly made positive noises, while criticising the Liberals management of the project so far, and the loss of jobs from cancelling.
In the longer term as costs escalate, with the new subs being rather more expensive, and even fewer parts made in Australia, then cancellation of the whole project is possible.
Australian manufacturing capacity has run down a lot over the last decades, and there is a pork barrel element to it all.
The advantage of SSN over conventional submarines is range and endurance. For coastal protection of Australia regular submarines are fine. Nuclear subs are only needed for out of region activity.
Do we have any water systems that could be turned into a significant pumped storage battery in the UK ? Could we create one, or do we need to go Lithium ion for storage here ?
There have been experiments with raising/lowering weights as a form of storage. Could be of use in areas with lots of disused deep mine shafts. My hazy scientific grasp is that a substance denser than water e.g. stone or metal would be more efficient than raising/lowering water.
It's a great idea until you start to consider the scale required to be useful. Dinorwic gives you 1.8GW for about 5 hours run flat out from full. To do so it takes around 390 tones of water falling 100m per second. That's 3,900 tons falling 10m a second, or 39,000 tons at 1m/second. If we dig a hole for our 40k ton weight to go down 1km deep, it will equal Dinorwic for 17 minutes. That's before you start looking at the engineering problem posed by dangling 40k tons down a 1km mineshaft on a rope.
Nice idea, but it just doesn't scale big enough sensibly.
Can we use the hole to Australia that Mons. Macron is digging for himself to give a fall of 6,000 km?
Lol, it's a retelling of the whole thing from the EU/France perspective with multiple quotes from the French side and nothing from either the US, UK or Australians.
France are being asked whether they're happy to be hamstrung by German foreign policy objectives. So far they haven't answered, it's something that will take time for them to answer. The UK out of the EU has said we won't be beholden to Germany wanting to sell BMWs to China. France will need to take that step, either by convincing Germany to come along or, as Barnier has been suggesting, working outside of EU shared sovereignty.
Hardly 'lol' to get a view from their angle. It's an integral part of the 360. But, ok, tbf, when I saw the version "leaked from Downing St" explaining how Boris Johnson's role in things was akin to Captain Marvel and we were now at the very heart of a great new Anglo alliance that would rock the world to its core, I did succumb to a little chuckle. So touche, I suppose.
I would be wary about that, given Morrison still leads Albanese as preferred PM.
At the 2019 Australian general election every final poll had Shorten's Labor ahead of Morrison's Coalition on 2PP and they were expected to win, however Morrison led Shorten as preferred PM and it was indeed Morrison who was re elected. On the primary vote the latest Morgan poll also has the LNP coalition on 39.5% to just 35% for Labor even if Labour lead on 2PP
Oh, I agree, the next Oz election is very much open. I merely meant that virtually nobody is changing their vote over submarines in 2040, however excited some people get about the deal.
Might a new government change their mind over buying nukes, though ? (A previous administration favoured an extended range version of the Japanese Soryu - which would have made a great deal of sense, in terms of price, delivery schedule and capability.)
Yes, I wondered about that. My guess is that a new government will not seek to reopen the package, but I don't know if they've clearly opposed it anyway? I know Paul Keating has, not heard about other local reactions. Do others know?
It feels like the sort of issue that the Greens could run on but which wouldn't survive coalition talks.
I would be wary about that, given Morrison still leads Albanese as preferred PM.
At the 2019 Australian general election every final poll had Shorten's Labor ahead of Morrison's Coalition on 2PP and they were expected to win, however Morrison led Shorten as preferred PM and it was indeed Morrison who was re elected. On the primary vote the latest Morgan poll also has the LNP coalition on 39.5% to just 35% for Labor even if Labour lead on 2PP
Oh, I agree, the next Oz election is very much open. I merely meant that virtually nobody is changing their vote over submarines in 2040, however excited some people get about the deal.
Might a new government change their mind over buying nukes, though ? (A previous administration favoured an extended range version of the Japanese Soryu - which would have made a great deal of sense, in terms of price, delivery schedule and capability.)
Yes, I wondered about that. My guess is that a new government will not seek to reopen the package, but I don't know if they've clearly opposed it anyway? I know Paul Keating has, not heard about other local reactions. Do others know?
It feels like the sort of issue that the Greens could run on but which wouldn't survive coalition talks.
I think unlikely in the short term as the ALP has mostly made positive noises, while criticising the Liberals management of the project so far, and the loss of jobs from cancelling.
In the longer term as costs escalate, with the new subs being rather more expensive, and even fewer parts made in Australia, then cancellation of the whole project is possible.
Australian manufacturing capacity has run down a lot over the last decades, and there is a pork barrel element to it all.
The advantage of SSN over conventional submarines is range and endurance. For coastal protection of Australia regular submarines are fine. Nuclear subs are only needed for out of region activity.
The Australian Navy has been raising issues about Chinese sub hunters harassing their existing boats while snorkelling.
The size of Australia makes the existing Collins class range a problem. Hence the interest in nukes.
‘Theory: the effect of Remain campaigning over Brexit has been disastrous for the EU and for France especially - helping to confer a vastly inflated sense of their own righteousness and power, and of the UK's wrongness and impotence.’
I spoke to a German friend in the defence industry today and the topic of Le Strop came up. Despite being a confirmed pro-European and very supportive of the Franco-German alliance, his view was that the French didn't have a leg to stand on.
Apparently the underperformance of the French in the Australian submarine contract was shocking and well known in the industry. They had originally agreed 80% of components were to be Aussie made, then they renegotiated to 60% and it was looking like they were going to have to drop it to 40%. On top of that the French attitude to work was going down very badly with the Australians. Not only did they not appreciate the 35 hour working week, which was strictly obeyed, but the French engineers were also taking all of August off and also regularly turning up to meetings 15 minutes late. According to him, the Aussies pulling out of the contract was known to be only a matter of time.
....Separately, there's another element of this that bears attention. The Taiwanese are currently building their own submarines (The Indigenous Submarine Project or IDS). And they did this, because Donald Trump refused authorisation for submarines or submarine technology to exported there. (A consequence of which is that the IDS is "based on technology from European countries".)
Could we see Biden's America be willing to allow the Taiwanese to directly purchase US submarines? If it did, that would be a major demonstration that the US was willing to stand up to defend Taiwan.
The new Taiwanese submarine* will contain a lot of US systems - sonar, combat systems, torpedoes etc (which were approved by Trump) - and is being built with Japanese help. The first boat is now expected to be launched in just two years' time, unusually ahead of schedule. Assuming that's correct, it's hard to see what alternative they could get from the US, who don't even build diesel/electric boats.
*inauspiciously labelled the 'IDS'...
To be fair, IDS sank without trace
That might be good for a submarine…
A quiet man, too, I seem to recall. Another desirable quality.
The Catholic adoption centres believed that adoption by gay couples was against their religious beliefs. When they were given no choice they closed and kids who were previously adopted were less well supported with a huge cost to them.
The compromise I pushed at the time was the requirement that if a Catholic service wasn’t willing to provide adoption services to gay couples themselves they had to have a partnership with someone who would. The Catholics were grumpy but ok with it. The activists on the gay rights side weren’t.
The kids lost out.
(FWIW my personal belief is that a stable two person parental unit is key to children’s success in life. The sex of each member of the parental unit is irrelevant)
While, again FWIW, I agree with you about the stable parental unit with two people involved, I do wonder how the children's wider social group react to it, and consequently to the children, particularly as they get towards and into their teens. It'll probably not matter too much for those who get on reasonably well with their peers, but is it another stick with which to beat the fat girl or the asthmatic boy?
I'm not aware of any work on this, and would be interested to learn of any.
I also wonder about the role model question - e.g. if you've two gay blokes who adopt a girl, where is her female role model? Often the worst damage when family breakup occurs is to the kid who loses a role model of their own gender from regular family life.
The kids and youngish people who I know see gender as more fluid than my generation, so the idea of a female role model would seem a bit quaint to them (I used to think as you do myself). "We're all somewhere on the male-female spectrum, and not always at the same point" is a very common assertion. And of course there are lots of mothers and fathers who are pretty awful at being models of anything.
I now think that having loving parents trumps everything, and their sexual preference and culture is far less important.
I think it's pretty natural and understandable for children to want to know their biological parents. If nothing else, they like to understand their genetic background and heritage - why they are who they are.
I'm also yet to meet a child who's experienced their parents divorcing/splitting up, or who's been adopted, who hasn't at some level been affected by it - this includes within my own extended family and circle of friends.
I think most children (even today) would in an ideal world probably prefer their biological parents to be happy together in a loving and stable relationship, although no-one likes to say so for fear of casting judgement on those who've been less fortunate.
I don't think a gay couple who decide to have a child by one means or another are "less fortunate".
That's your fuddy duddy, old school, Tory, red cord, shire inculcation talking.
I don't think he means that the adopting couple is less fortunate, but that those being placed for adoption is less fortunate than growing up with both your biological parents in a stable relationship.
In an ideal world there would be no adoption, for gays or anyone else, because all kids would be with both their biological parents - by pretty much any metric you like, this gives way better life outcomes than anything else.
Back in the nasty world of reality, we tend to end up discussing the ideal situation, when the reality is almost any living arrangements result in better outcomes than council "care".
Of course there is unfortunately (but unsurprisingly) also a bit of a "pecking order" that goes on within adoption - as I understand, placing a healthy newborn is usually pretty easy, finding someone who can cope with a traumatised 8 year old with learning difficulties is extremely difficult.
I've friends who adopted a 4 year old girl with special needs about 20 years ago - they already had a natural daughter who was going (and has now gone) blind. Having gone through them growing up (quite traumatic at times), about 5 years ago, they adopted 3 siblings (aged about 2-6) with various special needs, from a horrific background. To say I respect them for what they've done doesn't say half how I feel about it.
Good post and yes I was being a bit "Monday morning" with Casino (still nothing wrong with red cords, that said). And yes - we work down from "the ideal" to what we have which is far from ideal.
It was just in that context of things being far from ideal that I don't think it serves a great purpose to relate the current situation to some unattainable goal.
I had a smart meter fitted two weeks ago and the engineer checked my gas combi boiler and said that they were attending many homes where they simply had to condemn the boiler and also some gas fires
It will come as quite a shock to some when they decide to install a smart meter that their boiler will need immediate replacement
Fortunately mine was fine and is serviced annually
And my 4 bed detached is cavity insulated, double glazed, heavy layers of loft insulation, and solar panels but my monthly dd has just risen to £104 from £75
Goodness knows what it would be without the solar panels and feed in tariffs.
My fix (started 13/9) has just shifted from the previous £74 to £91 (signed up in late Aug on a 12 month fix. 24 monthers were about £102). The deals started getting rather more expensive more rapidly from about July.
AFAICS part of it is the change to the Price Cap regime in 2019 feeding through, which somewhat tipped the benefit balance from constant switchers to people on card meters and variable tariffs.
I should have said my fix is for 24 months from 1st September but was at £75 pm so fairly similar
The Catholic adoption centres believed that adoption by gay couples was against their religious beliefs. When they were given no choice they closed and kids who were previously adopted were less well supported with a huge cost to them.
The compromise I pushed at the time was the requirement that if a Catholic service wasn’t willing to provide adoption services to gay couples themselves they had to have a partnership with someone who would. The Catholics were grumpy but ok with it. The activists on the gay rights side weren’t.
The kids lost out.
(FWIW my personal belief is that a stable two person parental unit is key to children’s success in life. The sex of each member of the parental unit is irrelevant)
Sorry but I have absolutely zero sympathy for centres that wish to break the law being given a "religious" exemption. The law is the law and if these centres wish to put their petty bigotry over "helping the kids" then good riddance to them. Let secular organisations that don't put bigotry over helping the kids in accordance with the law take their place.
Besides, while I may be an atheist I do have a decent understanding of the Bible and while I can't remember Christ attacking gay couples, I can recall a concept of how we are all sinners and then when it comes to the law Matthew 12:17 surely applies?
The law is the law and that should apply to all equally and not have carved out religious exemptions whether it be for Anglicans, Catholics or Sharia.
Positioning it as breaking the law is unreasonable and inflammatory.
They were in compliance with the law. The law changed. So they closed. At no point did they break the law.
Christ cared for children. These were good men and women who wanted to help children. They had a genuine belief - which I disagree with - that children were not helped by putting them in same sex family units.
So now very troubled and scared children don’t get the same quality of assistance (these agencies were among the best in the field).
I hope you feel good about that. But there is a little less joy in the lives of people who are less privileged than you.
I would have more time for this position if Catholic adoption agencies didn't regularly put children with single adults. Having two loving, committed parents has to be better than one. It ends up just feeling like the Catholics enforcing their own bigotry against gay people.
And the supreme worry for children runs a bit hollow given how almost all of the Catholic hierarchy ignored child abuse in its own ranks for decades.
Do we have any water systems that could be turned into a significant pumped storage battery in the UK ? Could we create one, or do we need to go Lithium ion for storage here ?
There have been experiments with raising/lowering weights as a form of storage. Could be of use in areas with lots of disused deep mine shafts. My hazy scientific grasp is that a substance denser than water e.g. stone or metal would be more efficient than raising/lowering water.
It's a great idea until you start to consider the scale required to be useful. Dinorwic gives you 1.8GW for about 5 hours run flat out from full. To do so it takes around 390 tones of water falling 100m per second. That's 3,900 tons falling 10m a second, or 39,000 tons at 1m/second. If we dig a hole for our 40k ton weight to go down 1km deep, it will equal Dinorwic for 17 minutes. That's before you start looking at the engineering problem posed by dangling 40k tons down a 1km mineshaft on a rope.
Nice idea, but it just doesn't scale big enough sensibly.
And which is why pumped storage isn't any easy answer - you still need alot of Dinorwic's to deal with intermittency from renewables such as solar and wind.
One interesting idea I came across was using compressed air storage - beating the problem of energy loss on expansion to cooling, by using the cooling to manufacture liquid gases for free..... Making that add up would be an interesting one, though.
I'm curious how many of those who regret there is no Catholic exemption to equalities legislation so that Catholics can't discriminate against homosexuals ... Would also call for an Islamic exemption to equalities legislation so that Muslims could discriminate against women in accordance to Shariah law?
The law is the law and we should have equality before the law.
Catholic churches indeed all Christian churches are also not required to provide gay marriage ceremonies either, nor are Muslim mosques or Jewish synagogues despite gay marriage being the law of the land. Though the Church in Wales has recently voted to have gay blessings in its churches
Until Canon Law changes, or the church is disestablished, it is illegal for a Church of England church to offer gay marriages.
The law of the land is gay marriage is legal, if general synod voted to allow gay marriage the law in England would be swiftly changed to accomodate that. The Methodists have already voted to have gay marriages.
However the problem for the Anglican communion is it is a broad church and while the US Episcopal Church for example has allowed gay marriage, the African Anglican churches certainly would oppose that, indeed gay marriage is not legal in most of Africa.
So at most gay blessings is the limit to what the Church of England will allow in its churches given the Archbishop of Canterbury is spiritual leader of the Anglican communion
As I said, until Canon Law is changed, it is illegal to offer gay marriages in a Church of England church.
It would require primary legislation from parliament, not only a change in Canon Law.
Which would be a formality. Once Canon law is changed, Statute law would change thereafter. The point being that it is up to the CoE to change Canon law which it currently is not minded to do. Once it has done this then the bill amending statute law would go through parliament and receive Royal Assent as a matter of course.
Yes. The real hurdle is elsewhere: other churches have no obligation to perform any particular marriage, they can pick and choose. Non RCs have no right to an RC marriage. Everyone has a basic right to a CoE marriage unless there is a statutory exemption.
But the bigger hurdle is in the nature of the CoE. It includes liberals who don't feel bound by the limits of bible/tradition, and large numbers of (voluble and active) members who think they can't go beyond the bible on gay, or any, issues. They are deluded of course as they routinely ignore the bible/Jesus on war, wealth, remarriage, women speaking in church and all sorts of things. At heart they are not over fond of gays.
I think you are erroneously conflating the CofE and the Anglican Community
If ++Cantab wasn’t head of the Anglican Community I suspect we would be much closer to the Episcopalians in outlook
The Catholic adoption centres believed that adoption by gay couples was against their religious beliefs. When they were given no choice they closed and kids who were previously adopted were less well supported with a huge cost to them.
The compromise I pushed at the time was the requirement that if a Catholic service wasn’t willing to provide adoption services to gay couples themselves they had to have a partnership with someone who would. The Catholics were grumpy but ok with it. The activists on the gay rights side weren’t.
The kids lost out.
(FWIW my personal belief is that a stable two person parental unit is key to children’s success in life. The sex of each member of the parental unit is irrelevant)
Sorry but I have absolutely zero sympathy for centres that wish to break the law being given a "religious" exemption. The law is the law and if these centres wish to put their petty bigotry over "helping the kids" then good riddance to them. Let secular organisations that don't put bigotry over helping the kids in accordance with the law take their place.
Besides, while I may be an atheist I do have a decent understanding of the Bible and while I can't remember Christ attacking gay couples, I can recall a concept of how we are all sinners and then when it comes to the law Matthew 12:17 surely applies?
The law is the law and that should apply to all equally and not have carved out religious exemptions whether it be for Anglicans, Catholics or Sharia.
Positioning it as breaking the law is unreasonable and inflammatory.
They were in compliance with the law. The law changed. So they closed. At no point did they break the law.
Christ cared for children. These were good men and women who wanted to help children. They had a genuine belief - which I disagree with - that children were not helped by putting them in same sex family units.
So now very troubled and scared children don’t get the same quality of assistance (these agencies were among the best in the field).
I hope you feel good about that. But there is a little less joy in the lives of people who are less privileged than you.
Yes I feel very good about that. Good riddance to bigotry and hatred in this sector and in society in general.
You claim that a "referral" should be a suitable solution instead of just not being bigoted in the first place but if a referral is good enough for some it should be good enough for all.
If you don't think a referral for all is good enough, then why should it be for the minority whom this "charity" wished to exclude despite equal rights legislation.
I think being hateful and bigoted to others is a terrible strain on society that causes real harm. I think having equal rights legislation and equality before the law is a very good thing entirely and let any institution that can't keep up with the law fade into history where it belongs.
Apart from the lessons of Northern Rock's "borrow short, lend long" collapse for domestic gas suppliers.
And all other lessons.
What I don’t get is why is the government talk about bailing out the small companies with crappy business models. They took a risk and their equity should be wiped out
Transfer the customers and agree a subsidy between the current rate and the average spot rate over the next 6-9 months. You can’t ask a company to buy into a loss making contract without support
I'm curious how many of those who regret there is no Catholic exemption to equalities legislation so that Catholics can't discriminate against homosexuals ... Would also call for an Islamic exemption to equalities legislation so that Muslims could discriminate against women in accordance to Shariah law?
The law is the law and we should have equality before the law.
Catholic churches indeed all Christian churches are also not required to provide gay marriage ceremonies either, nor are Muslim mosques or Jewish synagogues despite gay marriage being the law of the land. Though the Church in Wales has recently voted to have gay blessings in its churches
Until Canon Law changes, or the church is disestablished, it is illegal for a Church of England church to offer gay marriages.
The law of the land is gay marriage is legal, if general synod voted to allow gay marriage the law in England would be swiftly changed to accomodate that. The Methodists have already voted to have gay marriages.
However the problem for the Anglican communion is it is a broad church and while the US Episcopal Church for example has allowed gay marriage, the African Anglican churches certainly would oppose that, indeed gay marriage is not legal in most of Africa.
So at most gay blessings is the limit to what the Church of England will allow in its churches given the Archbishop of Canterbury is spiritual leader of the Anglican communion
As I said, until Canon Law is changed, it is illegal to offer gay marriages in a Church of England church.
It would require primary legislation from parliament, not only a change in Canon Law.
Which would be a formality. Once Canon law is changed, Statute law would change thereafter. The point being that it is up to the CoE to change Canon law which it currently is not minded to do. Once it has done this then the bill amending statute law would go through parliament and receive Royal Assent as a matter of course.
Yes. The real hurdle is elsewhere: other churches have no obligation to perform any particular marriage, they can pick and choose. Non RCs have no right to an RC marriage. Everyone has a basic right to a CoE marriage unless there is a statutory exemption.
But the bigger hurdle is in the nature of the CoE. It includes liberals who don't feel bound by the limits of bible/tradition, and large numbers of (voluble and active) members who think they can't go beyond the bible on gay, or any, issues. They are deluded of course as they routinely ignore the bible/Jesus on war, wealth, remarriage, women speaking in church and all sorts of things. At heart they are not over fond of gays.
I think you are erroneously conflating the CofE and the Anglican Community
If ++Cantab wasn’t head of the Anglican Community I suspect we would be much closer to the Episcopalians in outlook
Cantuar, Charles. Cambridge doesn't even have a cathedral on the books.
I'm curious how many of those who regret there is no Catholic exemption to equalities legislation so that Catholics can't discriminate against homosexuals ... Would also call for an Islamic exemption to equalities legislation so that Muslims could discriminate against women in accordance to Shariah law?
The law is the law and we should have equality before the law.
The issue is that these Catholic adoption agencies had been running successfully for decades. They offered to partner with other agencies who would work with gay couples, rather than turn them away, which seemed a fair compromise.
The consequences, are more abortions and more children growing up in what is euphemistically called ‘care’, including in places like Rotherham.
If there are readily made alternatives available then why should people end up in care?
Why don't they end up at the alternatives that were good enough for gays? Why can't they be good enough for everyone? If Catholic agencies aren't crowding out unbigoted ones then the unbigoted ones should be able to expand to meet the demand.
There were capacity issues - an under supply of people willing to do a difficult and emotionally challenging job often on a volunteer basis. The Catholic charities (I don’t think it was actually the church) weren’t willing to fund others they disagreed with to do the work and neither was the government.
The actual number of gay couples in this situation was tiny.
So the people willing to do the difficult and challenging job can go to charities that aren't institutionally discriminatory instead.
Do we have any water systems that could be turned into a significant pumped storage battery in the UK ? Could we create one, or do we need to go Lithium ion for storage here ?
There have been experiments with raising/lowering weights as a form of storage. Could be of use in areas with lots of disused deep mine shafts. My hazy scientific grasp is that a substance denser than water e.g. stone or metal would be more efficient than raising/lowering water.
It's a great idea until you start to consider the scale required to be useful. Dinorwic gives you 1.8GW for about 5 hours run flat out from full. To do so it takes around 390 tones of water falling 100m per second. That's 3,900 tons falling 10m a second, or 39,000 tons at 1m/second. If we dig a hole for our 40k ton weight to go down 1km deep, it will equal Dinorwic for 17 minutes. That's before you start looking at the engineering problem posed by dangling 40k tons down a 1km mineshaft on a rope.
Nice idea, but it just doesn't scale big enough sensibly.
And which is why pumped storage isn't any easy answer - you still need alot of Dinorwic's to deal with intermittency from renewables such as solar and wind.
One interesting idea I came across was using compressed air storage - beating the problem of energy loss on expansion to cooling, by using the cooling to manufacture liquid gases for free..... Making that add up would be an interesting one, though.
Dinorwic is enormous and well worth a visit
Yes, it is enormous. But the national Grid is something like 90GW. so you need 2TWh to run the country for 24h.
So you'd need a couple of hundred Dinorwig facilities to run the country for a single 24h period.
I'm curious how many of those who regret there is no Catholic exemption to equalities legislation so that Catholics can't discriminate against homosexuals ... Would also call for an Islamic exemption to equalities legislation so that Muslims could discriminate against women in accordance to Shariah law?
The law is the law and we should have equality before the law.
Catholic churches indeed all Christian churches are also not required to provide gay marriage ceremonies either, nor are Muslim mosques or Jewish synagogues despite gay marriage being the law of the land. Though the Church in Wales has recently voted to have gay blessings in its churches
Until Canon Law changes, or the church is disestablished, it is illegal for a Church of England church to offer gay marriages.
The law of the land is gay marriage is legal, if general synod voted to allow gay marriage the law in England would be swiftly changed to accomodate that. The Methodists have already voted to have gay marriages.
However the problem for the Anglican communion is it is a broad church and while the US Episcopal Church for example has allowed gay marriage, the African Anglican churches certainly would oppose that, indeed gay marriage is not legal in most of Africa.
So at most gay blessings is the limit to what the Church of England will allow in its churches given the Archbishop of Canterbury is spiritual leader of the Anglican communion
As I said, until Canon Law is changed, it is illegal to offer gay marriages in a Church of England church.
It would require primary legislation from parliament, not only a change in Canon Law.
Which would be a formality. Once Canon law is changed, Statute law would change thereafter. The point being that it is up to the CoE to change Canon law which it currently is not minded to do. Once it has done this then the bill amending statute law would go through parliament and receive Royal Assent as a matter of course.
Yes. The real hurdle is elsewhere: other churches have no obligation to perform any particular marriage, they can pick and choose. Non RCs have no right to an RC marriage. Everyone has a basic right to a CoE marriage unless there is a statutory exemption.
But the bigger hurdle is in the nature of the CoE. It includes liberals who don't feel bound by the limits of bible/tradition, and large numbers of (voluble and active) members who think they can't go beyond the bible on gay, or any, issues. They are deluded of course as they routinely ignore the bible/Jesus on war, wealth, remarriage, women speaking in church and all sorts of things. At heart they are not over fond of gays.
I think you are erroneously conflating the CofE and the Anglican Community
If ++Cantab wasn’t head of the Anglican Community I suspect we would be much closer to the Episcopalians in outlook
Yes but he is and he wants to keep the Anglican Communion together rather than see the more socially conservative African branch of the Anglican communion split off. That is especially so as the fastest growth for the Anglican communion is in Africa eg there are now more Anglicans in Nigeria than in England.
So while Episcopalians may be happy to do gay marriages, especially as most of them are in the more liberal bits of the US in and around New England, New York and DC and on the West coast, the Church of England will likely allow gay blessings at most and not full gay marriage in its churches given the head of the Church of England is also head of the Anglican communion
The energy crisis started in the late 80s when the sector was deregulated. We've mentioned the dash for gas - not only did it help burn off our North Sea reserves it also bust the market for coal.
What did that mean? We went from digging coal from profitable pits a short distance from the power station to shutting the pits and importing coal from Venezuela and Brazil. Once you start importing its easy to keep doing it - suddenly imported coal is expensive so both imports and CCS are off the table and coal generation goes.
But its alright as we have all these gas power stations. Except that the gas is increasingly imported. But its alright as we have nuclear. Yeah right, we can't build new ones. But its alright as we have these interconnectors and the energy market is regulated. Until an interconnector burns out and we quit the regulated market.
Whilst there have been errors piled on errors this lot have been in government for 11 years. How will they blame someone else or what they have done - and haven't done - in that time?
Do we have any water systems that could be turned into a significant pumped storage battery in the UK ? Could we create one, or do we need to go Lithium ion for storage here ?
There have been experiments with raising/lowering weights as a form of storage. Could be of use in areas with lots of disused deep mine shafts. My hazy scientific grasp is that a substance denser than water e.g. stone or metal would be more efficient than raising/lowering water.
It's a great idea until you start to consider the scale required to be useful. Dinorwic gives you 1.8GW for about 5 hours run flat out from full. To do so it takes around 390 tones of water falling 100m per second. That's 3,900 tons falling 10m a second, or 39,000 tons at 1m/second. If we dig a hole for our 40k ton weight to go down 1km deep, it will equal Dinorwic for 17 minutes. That's before you start looking at the engineering problem posed by dangling 40k tons down a 1km mineshaft on a rope.
Nice idea, but it just doesn't scale big enough sensibly.
Can we use the hole to Australia that Mons. Macron is digging for himself to give a fall of 6,000 km?
A straight hole to Austrailia would of course allow you to get there in 42 mins just by jumping in*.
(*Assuming you can find a way to keep it evacuated of air and, er, molten magma for the duration.)
"The UK has slashed its strategic gas storage to barely 1.7pc of annual demand by closing the Rough facility off the Yorkshire coast, subcontracting the costly task of storage to Germany and the Netherlands."
Telegraph
Sounds like Business Sec could be in real shit here this winter.
Massive shit. As @Morris_Dancer pointed out this has been brewing for a long time. We've been making strategically stupid decisions in energy since the "dash for gas" days. You can only rely on North Sea Gas as your energy reserve if you haven't let the privatised utilities burn through it already.
For all of the bluster the UK has been increasingly and heavily reliant on exports for decades. Too much focus on prices and competition and profiteering, not enough on where the energy is coming from and what drives the prices.
So here we are. Reliant on imported gas with fuck all storage, reliant on imported electricity with no membership of the regulated European energy market (and nothing to replace it). A unique to Britain massive price spike in electricity threatening business ruin food shortages and blackouts.
We may avoid it. But why the fuck has Johnson let us slide out here to the edge? Global Britain who can't keep the lights on? Watch him spin our power crisis as some kind of environmental statement for COP26.
Headlines that have aged well, part 471
"Sturgeon told ‘find new customer’ for independent Scotland's energy as UK would cut ties"
I also wonder about the role model question - e.g. if you've two gay blokes who adopt a girl, where is her female role model? Often the worst damage when family breakup occurs is to the kid who loses a role model of their own gender from regular family life.
What about single parent families, of which there are zillions. Short one role model. Or, arguably, long a harmful role model.
Two loving parents of any sex would seem to me to provide a hugely positive role model about relationships.
Yes. It's better to have one parent who provides a good role model, than two parents of whom one provides a dreadful role model.
Do we have any water systems that could be turned into a significant pumped storage battery in the UK ? Could we create one, or do we need to go Lithium ion for storage here ?
There have been experiments with raising/lowering weights as a form of storage. Could be of use in areas with lots of disused deep mine shafts. My hazy scientific grasp is that a substance denser than water e.g. stone or metal would be more efficient than raising/lowering water.
It's a great idea until you start to consider the scale required to be useful. Dinorwic gives you 1.8GW for about 5 hours run flat out from full. To do so it takes around 390 tones of water falling 100m per second. That's 3,900 tons falling 10m a second, or 39,000 tons at 1m/second. If we dig a hole for our 40k ton weight to go down 1km deep, it will equal Dinorwic for 17 minutes. That's before you start looking at the engineering problem posed by dangling 40k tons down a 1km mineshaft on a rope.
Nice idea, but it just doesn't scale big enough sensibly.
And which is why pumped storage isn't any easy answer - you still need alot of Dinorwic's to deal with intermittency from renewables such as solar and wind.
One interesting idea I came across was using compressed air storage - beating the problem of energy loss on expansion to cooling, by using the cooling to manufacture liquid gases for free..... Making that add up would be an interesting one, though.
Dinorwic is enormous and well worth a visit
Yes, it is enormous. But the national Grid is something like 90GW. so you need 2TWh to run the country for 24h.
So you'd need a couple of hundred Dinorwig facilities to run the country for a single 24h period.
The energy crisis started in the late 80s when the sector was deregulated. We've mentioned the dash for gas - not only did it help burn off our North Sea reserves it also bust the market for coal.
What did that mean? We went from digging coal from profitable pits a short distance from the power station to shutting the pits and importing coal from Venezuela and Brazil. Once you start importing its easy to keep doing it - suddenly imported coal is expensive so both imports and CCS are off the table and coal generation goes.
But its alright as we have all these gas power stations. Except that the gas is increasingly imported. But its alright as we have nuclear. Yeah right, we can't build new ones. But its alright as we have these interconnectors and the energy market is regulated. Until an interconnector burns out and we quit the regulated market.
Whilst there have been errors piled on errors this lot have been in government for 11 years. How will they blame someone else or what they have done - and haven't done - in that time?
It was all Ed Milliband’s fault😀
There were next to no profitable pits for coal in the UK. Unless you artificially held the price up. Way up above the world average.
Some years ago, a BBC (I think) documentary took a former miner round the world to see energy production in various places. They came to coal mine - I think it might have been Canada - opencast etc. The look on his face when one of though stupendous trucks went past...
It was carrying more coal than a shift at his old pit could dig. One truck.
Do we have any water systems that could be turned into a significant pumped storage battery in the UK ? Could we create one, or do we need to go Lithium ion for storage here ?
There have been experiments with raising/lowering weights as a form of storage. Could be of use in areas with lots of disused deep mine shafts. My hazy scientific grasp is that a substance denser than water e.g. stone or metal would be more efficient than raising/lowering water.
It's a great idea until you start to consider the scale required to be useful. Dinorwic gives you 1.8GW for about 5 hours run flat out from full. To do so it takes around 390 tones of water falling 100m per second. That's 3,900 tons falling 10m a second, or 39,000 tons at 1m/second. If we dig a hole for our 40k ton weight to go down 1km deep, it will equal Dinorwic for 17 minutes. That's before you start looking at the engineering problem posed by dangling 40k tons down a 1km mineshaft on a rope.
Nice idea, but it just doesn't scale big enough sensibly.
And which is why pumped storage isn't any easy answer - you still need alot of Dinorwic's to deal with intermittency from renewables such as solar and wind.
One interesting idea I came across was using compressed air storage - beating the problem of energy loss on expansion to cooling, by using the cooling to manufacture liquid gases for free..... Making that add up would be an interesting one, though.
Dinorwic is enormous and well worth a visit
Not as worth it as it once was.. From wiki
"The power station was also promoted as a tourist attraction, with visitors able to take a minibus trip from "Electric Mountain" - the name of its nearby visitor centre - to see the workings inside the power station; 132,000 people visited the attraction in 2015. However, the centre is now closed with no prospect of reopening."
Also from wiki..
" The project – begun in 1974 and taking ten years to complete at a cost of £425 million – was the largest civil engineering contract ever awarded by the UK government at the time. .... The scheme paid for itself within two years.[citation needed]"
Do we have any water systems that could be turned into a significant pumped storage battery in the UK ? Could we create one, or do we need to go Lithium ion for storage here ?
There have been experiments with raising/lowering weights as a form of storage. Could be of use in areas with lots of disused deep mine shafts. My hazy scientific grasp is that a substance denser than water e.g. stone or metal would be more efficient than raising/lowering water.
It's a great idea until you start to consider the scale required to be useful. Dinorwic gives you 1.8GW for about 5 hours run flat out from full. To do so it takes around 390 tones of water falling 100m per second. That's 3,900 tons falling 10m a second, or 39,000 tons at 1m/second. If we dig a hole for our 40k ton weight to go down 1km deep, it will equal Dinorwic for 17 minutes. That's before you start looking at the engineering problem posed by dangling 40k tons down a 1km mineshaft on a rope.
Nice idea, but it just doesn't scale big enough sensibly.
And which is why pumped storage isn't any easy answer - you still need alot of Dinorwic's to deal with intermittency from renewables such as solar and wind.
One interesting idea I came across was using compressed air storage - beating the problem of energy loss on expansion to cooling, by using the cooling to manufacture liquid gases for free..... Making that add up would be an interesting one, though.
Dinorwic is enormous and well worth a visit
Not as worth it as it once was.. From wiki
"The power station was also promoted as a tourist attraction, with visitors able to take a minibus trip from "Electric Mountain" - the name of its nearby visitor centre - to see the workings inside the power station; 132,000 people visited the attraction in 2015. However, the centre is now closed with no prospect of reopening."
Also from wiki..
" The project – begun in 1974 and taking ten years to complete at a cost of £425 million – was the largest civil engineering contract ever awarded by the UK government at the time. .... The scheme paid for itself within two years.[citation needed]"
The Catholic adoption centres believed that adoption by gay couples was against their religious beliefs. When they were given no choice they closed and kids who were previously adopted were less well supported with a huge cost to them.
The compromise I pushed at the time was the requirement that if a Catholic service wasn’t willing to provide adoption services to gay couples themselves they had to have a partnership with someone who would. The Catholics were grumpy but ok with it. The activists on the gay rights side weren’t.
The kids lost out.
(FWIW my personal belief is that a stable two person parental unit is key to children’s success in life. The sex of each member of the parental unit is irrelevant)
Sorry but I have absolutely zero sympathy for centres that wish to break the law being given a "religious" exemption. The law is the law and if these centres wish to put their petty bigotry over "helping the kids" then good riddance to them. Let secular organisations that don't put bigotry over helping the kids in accordance with the law take their place.
Besides, while I may be an atheist I do have a decent understanding of the Bible and while I can't remember Christ attacking gay couples, I can recall a concept of how we are all sinners and then when it comes to the law Matthew 12:17 surely applies?
The law is the law and that should apply to all equally and not have carved out religious exemptions whether it be for Anglicans, Catholics or Sharia.
Positioning it as breaking the law is unreasonable and inflammatory.
They were in compliance with the law. The law changed. So they closed. At no point did they break the law.
Christ cared for children. These were good men and women who wanted to help children. They had a genuine belief - which I disagree with - that children were not helped by putting them in same sex family units.
So now very troubled and scared children don’t get the same quality of assistance (these agencies were among the best in the field).
I hope you feel good about that. But there is a little less joy in the lives of people who are less privileged than you.
Yes I feel very good about that. Good riddance to bigotry and hatred in this sector and in society in general.
You claim that a "referral" should be a suitable solution instead of just not being bigoted in the first place but if a referral is good enough for some it should be good enough for all.
If you don't think a referral for all is good enough, then why should it be for the minority whom this "charity" wished to exclude despite equal rights legislation.
I think being hateful and bigoted to others is a terrible strain on society that causes real harm. I think having equal rights legislation and equality before the law is a very good thing entirely and let any institution that can't keep up with the law fade into history where it belongs.
The hate filled person would seem to be you, actually. A bigot is somebody who has mindless allegiance to a country. The Church has a reasoned theological case about gay couples - dead wrong, of course, but you treat that as a golden opportunity to see the worst in someone. Like the nimby thing - you are incapable of believing that anyone cares for the English countryside as something uniquely beautiful and irreplaceable: it's an axiom to you that anyone expressing that sentiment is automatically lying. You sound like that genuinely lamented former poster here who held it as an article of faith that every single leave voter was motivated purely by racism and xenophobia. Every last one of them. How do you feel about they particular assumption of bad faith?
Apart from the lessons of Northern Rock's "borrow short, lend long" collapse for domestic gas suppliers.
And all other lessons.
What I don’t get is why is the government talk about bailing out the small companies with crappy business models. They took a risk and their equity should be wiped out
Transfer the customers and agree a subsidy between the current rate and the average spot rate over the next 6-9 months. You can’t ask a company to buy into a loss making contract without support
I don't think "the people" will grasp the nuances of the moral hazard that PT has been pointing out which means that "on your watch" will be dozens of energy companies going bust and energy companies are good, right, some of them even have super green-sounding names.
Do we have any water systems that could be turned into a significant pumped storage battery in the UK ? Could we create one, or do we need to go Lithium ion for storage here ?
There have been experiments with raising/lowering weights as a form of storage. Could be of use in areas with lots of disused deep mine shafts. My hazy scientific grasp is that a substance denser than water e.g. stone or metal would be more efficient than raising/lowering water.
It's a great idea until you start to consider the scale required to be useful. Dinorwic gives you 1.8GW for about 5 hours run flat out from full. To do so it takes around 390 tones of water falling 100m per second. That's 3,900 tons falling 10m a second, or 39,000 tons at 1m/second. If we dig a hole for our 40k ton weight to go down 1km deep, it will equal Dinorwic for 17 minutes. That's before you start looking at the engineering problem posed by dangling 40k tons down a 1km mineshaft on a rope.
Nice idea, but it just doesn't scale big enough sensibly.
And which is why pumped storage isn't any easy answer - you still need alot of Dinorwic's to deal with intermittency from renewables such as solar and wind.
One interesting idea I came across was using compressed air storage - beating the problem of energy loss on expansion to cooling, by using the cooling to manufacture liquid gases for free..... Making that add up would be an interesting one, though.
Dinorwic is enormous and well worth a visit
Not as worth it as it once was.. From wiki
"The power station was also promoted as a tourist attraction, with visitors able to take a minibus trip from "Electric Mountain" - the name of its nearby visitor centre - to see the workings inside the power station; 132,000 people visited the attraction in 2015. However, the centre is now closed with no prospect of reopening."
Also from wiki..
" The project – begun in 1974 and taking ten years to complete at a cost of £425 million – was the largest civil engineering contract ever awarded by the UK government at the time. .... The scheme paid for itself within two years.[citation needed]"
The energy crisis started in the late 80s when the sector was deregulated. We've mentioned the dash for gas - not only did it help burn off our North Sea reserves it also bust the market for coal.
What did that mean? We went from digging coal from profitable pits a short distance from the power station to shutting the pits and importing coal from Venezuela and Brazil. Once you start importing its easy to keep doing it - suddenly imported coal is expensive so both imports and CCS are off the table and coal generation goes.
But its alright as we have all these gas power stations. Except that the gas is increasingly imported. But its alright as we have nuclear. Yeah right, we can't build new ones. But its alright as we have these interconnectors and the energy market is regulated. Until an interconnector burns out and we quit the regulated market.
Whilst there have been errors piled on errors this lot have been in government for 11 years. How will they blame someone else or what they have done - and haven't done - in that time?
There are those who are demanding Cambo is stopped and the Cumbria coal mine planning refused then complain over energy supply crisis
I really fear that we are all, not just here in the UK, but across the globe going to experience the clash between climate change demands (COP26) and the reality that most everyone wants to deal with it but then cannot accept an abrupt and sudden spike in energy prices which underpins all economic activity
The eco warriors on the M25 have infuriated drivers and it would appear 59/25 oppose the demonstrations again indicating that you have to take the public with you and their wallets
The Cumbrian mine is irrelevant now - we needed to not shut the pits and then not shut the power stations.
Yes, viable green energy is a global issue. The explosive price increase in the UK and only the UK is not a global issue. We can't blame the EU or remoaners or stoppy French idiots for this. Quitting the EU regulated energy market left us wide open to this but as usual we thought it was crap as its the EU and didn't need replacing.
Whoops.
I have been listening to the various contributors on Sky this morning and it is fiendishly complex and is not a Brexit issue
Indeed it seems that Ed Miliband's energy price cap enacted by Therese May is a factor in the crisis
Its certainly complex, but are we really going to insist that our departure from the regulated market has nothing to do with the vast increase only in UK prices?
I've not got a detailed understanding about this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but... isn't the main driver of the difference in UK/non-UK prices rises due to an interconnector fire in Kent? That is, we're stuck having to generate more of our own electricity. That could have happened just as easily with us within the EU, right?
It was that which is used to smooth supply plus...a huge flood in demand for energy globally; Russia is being unhelpful and restricting demand as per the AEP article; maintenance on gas platforms in the North Sea; we have had some nuclear outage; and the wind hasn't been blowing in the past few weeks.
According to R4 this morning (08.13).
I drove past several large wind farms on my way to Stirling this morning. They were all still. In late September this is positively weird. When I looked this morning we were generating twice as much electricity from solar than wind. On 20th September.
My suspicion is that this cannot last and the wind will return taking the sting out of this. The fact AEP states that disaster is now inevitable boosts my confidence considerably.
Lol, it's a retelling of the whole thing from the EU/France perspective with multiple quotes from the French side and nothing from either the US, UK or Australians.
France are being asked whether they're happy to be hamstrung by German foreign policy objectives. So far they haven't answered, it's something that will take time for them to answer. The UK out of the EU has said we won't be beholden to Germany wanting to sell BMWs to China. France will need to take that step, either by convincing Germany to come along or, as Barnier has been suggesting, working outside of EU shared sovereignty.
Hardly 'lol' to get a view from their angle. It's an integral part of the 360. But, ok, tbf, when I saw the version "leaked from Downing St" explaining how Boris Johnson's role in things was akin to Captain Marvel and we were now at the very heart of a great new Anglo alliance that would rock the world to its core, I did succumb to a little chuckle. So touche, I suppose.
The point is that the Americans have also said it was the UK side that wanted to turn this into the "Anglo alliance" rather than just a submarine deal. The NYT, usually scathing about Boris, Brexit and the UK, admitted he played a blinder and they aren't exactly going to parrot lines from Downing Street.
If it was just Downing Street saying Boris did it then I'd agree, it would just be Boris bigging up some minor involvement, I have no love for the guy and would like to see him replaced ASAP. The fact that two liberal American newspapers of note (NYT and WaPo) both say the same as what Downing Street are saying and the Australians have confirmed that they initially approached the UK about a submarine deal which the UK helped to convince the US to turn into an anti-China Anglo alliance means that it probably was Boris. What is more convincing is that it speaks to everything Boris likes to do, a big shiny thing he can put his name on. It's the military alliance version of Boris Bikes.
That it has turned into Suez mk.II for France is probably not what was intended. I actually think that none of the three nations set out to burn France as badly as this and eventually France will be invited into an associate membership where they have decision making input over fleet deployments etc... but aren't party to the tech sharing aspects.
The energy crisis started in the late 80s when the sector was deregulated. We've mentioned the dash for gas - not only did it help burn off our North Sea reserves it also bust the market for coal.
What did that mean? We went from digging coal from profitable pits a short distance from the power station to shutting the pits and importing coal from Venezuela and Brazil. Once you start importing its easy to keep doing it - suddenly imported coal is expensive so both imports and CCS are off the table and coal generation goes.
But its alright as we have all these gas power stations. Except that the gas is increasingly imported. But its alright as we have nuclear. Yeah right, we can't build new ones. But its alright as we have these interconnectors and the energy market is regulated. Until an interconnector burns out and we quit the regulated market.
Whilst there have been errors piled on errors this lot have been in government for 11 years. How will they blame someone else or what they have done - and haven't done - in that time?
There are those who are demanding Cambo is stopped and the Cumbria coal mine planning refused then complain over energy supply crisis
I really fear that we are all, not just here in the UK, but across the globe going to experience the clash between climate change demands (COP26) and the reality that most everyone wants to deal with it but then cannot accept an abrupt and sudden spike in energy prices which underpins all economic activity
The eco warriors on the M25 have infuriated drivers and it would appear 59/25 oppose the demonstrations again indicating that you have to take the public with you and their wallets
The Cumbrian mine is irrelevant now - we needed to not shut the pits and then not shut the power stations.
Yes, viable green energy is a global issue. The explosive price increase in the UK and only the UK is not a global issue. We can't blame the EU or remoaners or stoppy French idiots for this. Quitting the EU regulated energy market left us wide open to this but as usual we thought it was crap as its the EU and didn't need replacing.
Whoops.
I have been listening to the various contributors on Sky this morning and it is fiendishly complex and is not a Brexit issue
Indeed it seems that Ed Miliband's energy price cap enacted by Therese May is a factor in the crisis
Its certainly complex, but are we really going to insist that our departure from the regulated market has nothing to do with the vast increase only in UK prices?
I've not got a detailed understanding about this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but... isn't the main driver of the difference in UK/non-UK prices rises due to an interconnector fire in Kent? That is, we're stuck having to generate more of our own electricity. That could have happened just as easily with us within the EU, right?
It was that which is used to smooth supply plus...a huge flood in demand for energy globally; Russia is being unhelpful and restricting demand as per the AEP article; maintenance on gas platforms in the North Sea; we have had some nuclear outage; and the wind hasn't been blowing in the past few weeks.
According to R4 this morning (08.13).
I drove past several large wind farms on my way to Stirling this morning. They were all still. In late September this is positively weird. When I looked this morning we were generating twice as much electricity from solar than wind. On 20th September.
My suspicion is that this cannot last and the wind will return taking the sting out of this. The fact AEP states that disaster is now inevitable boosts my confidence considerably.
I bought a sail boat about 6 weeks ago. I am convinces that the wind drought we have suffered ever since is a direct result of that purchase.
I'm curious how many of those who regret there is no Catholic exemption to equalities legislation so that Catholics can't discriminate against homosexuals ... Would also call for an Islamic exemption to equalities legislation so that Muslims could discriminate against women in accordance to Shariah law?
The law is the law and we should have equality before the law.
The issue is that these Catholic adoption agencies had been running successfully for decades. They offered to partner with other agencies who would work with gay couples, rather than turn them away, which seemed a fair compromise.
The consequences, are more abortions and more children growing up in what is euphemistically called ‘care’, including in places like Rotherham.
If there are readily made alternatives available then why should people end up in care?
Why don't they end up at the alternatives that were good enough for gays? Why can't they be good enough for everyone? If Catholic agencies aren't crowding out unbigoted ones then the unbigoted ones should be able to expand to meet the demand.
The main difference between Catholic adoption agencies, and many domestic adoption placements - mostly run by local social services - is that the Catholic agencies actually cared about, and provided pastoral support to, young pregnant women.
The vast majority of other private adoption agencies operating in the UK, are sourcing children from abroad.
They just didn't care enough about them to do the role with equality before the law?
Hopefully the people who care and have passion will take up jobs in agencies that do want to look after young women while paying full respect to everyone equally before the law.
'Equality before the law' is an extremely slippery concept. Why should it not mean that all adoption agencies have 'equality before the law' to practice what they believe is best for the welfare of children. I would describe your version of 'equality' as 'Everyone being equally told what to think by the state'.
FWIW I don't agree with RC views on same sex adoption, and think that almost any parental arrangement is better than having the state as parent, but some old fashioned classical liberalism might come in handy here.
Equality before the law should mean that the law applies to all equally.
If you mean that equality legislation should be abolished and everyone who wants to should be free to discriminate against gays, women, blacks and anyone else they feel like discriminating against then make the argument for that.
But if you don't want that, then arguing for an exemption on Shariah or Catholic or any other religious grounds is unreasonable in a secular society. Why should religious bigots be able to discriminate but non-religious bigots are in your words "told what to think by the state"?
Religious bigots and atheist bigots should be subject to the same laws. Whether that be allowing them to discriminate against gays, blacks and women ... Or not.
Thanks. We are agreed on the first sentence of your response. The rest of it is an exercise in whataboutery bearing no relation to what I said.
Merely believing in equality before the law does not allow assumptions and presuppositions about how that law should be framed in a liberal society where people have different opinions and practices.
It's not whataboutery since we do have equalities legislation and since this conversation began with Charles bemoaning the fact an exemption wasn't given to the equalities legislation to the Catholic agencies.
Why should Catholic agencies be exempt from the law that applies to secular agencies?
If you wish to argue equalities legislation is a bad thing then that's a position to argue. However if equalities legislation is a good thing then why shouldn't the law apply to all equally?
As it happens my view of liberalism is essentially "do whatever you want, so long as it doesn't harm others". Equalities legislation is about preventing harm to others so I'm ok with that.
My positioned was more nuanced.
I always focus on outcomes - the lack of capacity in the sector meant worse outcomes for the primary beneficiaries of the service.
But same sex couples should have the right to adopt as well. So there was a workaround developed that didn’t worsen outcomes for children. All it needed was a little flexibility on all sides…
The energy crisis started in the late 80s when the sector was deregulated. We've mentioned the dash for gas - not only did it help burn off our North Sea reserves it also bust the market for coal.
What did that mean? We went from digging coal from profitable pits a short distance from the power station to shutting the pits and importing coal from Venezuela and Brazil. Once you start importing its easy to keep doing it - suddenly imported coal is expensive so both imports and CCS are off the table and coal generation goes.
But its alright as we have all these gas power stations. Except that the gas is increasingly imported. But its alright as we have nuclear. Yeah right, we can't build new ones. But its alright as we have these interconnectors and the energy market is regulated. Until an interconnector burns out and we quit the regulated market.
Whilst there have been errors piled on errors this lot have been in government for 11 years. How will they blame someone else or what they have done - and haven't done - in that time?
There are those who are demanding Cambo is stopped and the Cumbria coal mine planning refused then complain over energy supply crisis
I really fear that we are all, not just here in the UK, but across the globe going to experience the clash between climate change demands (COP26) and the reality that most everyone wants to deal with it but then cannot accept an abrupt and sudden spike in energy prices which underpins all economic activity
The eco warriors on the M25 have infuriated drivers and it would appear 59/25 oppose the demonstrations again indicating that you have to take the public with you and their wallets
The Cumbrian mine is irrelevant now - we needed to not shut the pits and then not shut the power stations.
Yes, viable green energy is a global issue. The explosive price increase in the UK and only the UK is not a global issue. We can't blame the EU or remoaners or stoppy French idiots for this. Quitting the EU regulated energy market left us wide open to this but as usual we thought it was crap as its the EU and didn't need replacing.
Whoops.
I have been listening to the various contributors on Sky this morning and it is fiendishly complex and is not a Brexit issue
Indeed it seems that Ed Miliband's energy price cap enacted by Therese May is a factor in the crisis
Its certainly complex, but are we really going to insist that our departure from the regulated market has nothing to do with the vast increase only in UK prices?
I've not got a detailed understanding about this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but... isn't the main driver of the difference in UK/non-UK prices rises due to an interconnector fire in Kent? That is, we're stuck having to generate more of our own electricity. That could have happened just as easily with us within the EU, right?
It was that which is used to smooth supply plus...a huge flood in demand for energy globally; Russia is being unhelpful and restricting demand as per the AEP article; maintenance on gas platforms in the North Sea; we have had some nuclear outage; and the wind hasn't been blowing in the past few weeks.
According to R4 this morning (08.13).
I drove past several large wind farms on my way to Stirling this morning. They were all still. In late September this is positively weird. When I looked this morning we were generating twice as much electricity from solar than wind. On 20th September.
My suspicion is that this cannot last and the wind will return taking the sting out of this. The fact AEP states that disaster is now inevitable boosts my confidence considerably.
Boris thinks the market will sort it out. You are looking to a higher authority
Also, talking of the latter, I think can we please add to the commonly used on PB namely bible references eg Deuteronomy 28:12 the equally authoritative as per my post above eg: R4 08:13.
The Catholic adoption centres believed that adoption by gay couples was against their religious beliefs. When they were given no choice they closed and kids who were previously adopted were less well supported with a huge cost to them.
The compromise I pushed at the time was the requirement that if a Catholic service wasn’t willing to provide adoption services to gay couples themselves they had to have a partnership with someone who would. The Catholics were grumpy but ok with it. The activists on the gay rights side weren’t.
The kids lost out.
(FWIW my personal belief is that a stable two person parental unit is key to children’s success in life. The sex of each member of the parental unit is irrelevant)
Sorry but I have absolutely zero sympathy for centres that wish to break the law being given a "religious" exemption. The law is the law and if these centres wish to put their petty bigotry over "helping the kids" then good riddance to them. Let secular organisations that don't put bigotry over helping the kids in accordance with the law take their place.
Besides, while I may be an atheist I do have a decent understanding of the Bible and while I can't remember Christ attacking gay couples, I can recall a concept of how we are all sinners and then when it comes to the law Matthew 12:17 surely applies?
The law is the law and that should apply to all equally and not have carved out religious exemptions whether it be for Anglicans, Catholics or Sharia.
Positioning it as breaking the law is unreasonable and inflammatory.
They were in compliance with the law. The law changed. So they closed. At no point did they break the law.
Christ cared for children. These were good men and women who wanted to help children. They had a genuine belief - which I disagree with - that children were not helped by putting them in same sex family units.
So now very troubled and scared children don’t get the same quality of assistance (these agencies were among the best in the field).
I hope you feel good about that. But there is a little less joy in the lives of people who are less privileged than you.
Yes I feel very good about that. Good riddance to bigotry and hatred in this sector and in society in general.
You claim that a "referral" should be a suitable solution instead of just not being bigoted in the first place but if a referral is good enough for some it should be good enough for all.
If you don't think a referral for all is good enough, then why should it be for the minority whom this "charity" wished to exclude despite equal rights legislation.
I think being hateful and bigoted to others is a terrible strain on society that causes real harm. I think having equal rights legislation and equality before the law is a very good thing entirely and let any institution that can't keep up with the law fade into history where it belongs.
The hate filled person would seem to be you, actually. A bigot is somebody who has mindless allegiance to a country. The Church has a reasoned theological case about gay couples - dead wrong, of course, but you treat that as a golden opportunity to see the worst in someone. Like the nimby thing - you are incapable of believing that anyone cares for the English countryside as something uniquely beautiful and irreplaceable: it's an axiom to you that anyone expressing that sentiment is automatically lying. You sound like that genuinely lamented former poster here who held it as an article of faith that every single leave voter was motivated purely by racism and xenophobia. Every last one of them. How do you feel about they particular assumption of bad faith?
You're absolutely ridiculous and grasping at straws.
A bigot is not what you said. A bigot is "a person who is obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, especially one who is prejudiced against or antagonistic towards a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group."
Being antagonistic against gay people due to your "theological case against them" absolutely 100% falls under that definition.
That doesn't make all religious people hate filled bigots. Only those that are hate filled bigots are hate filled bigots.
Being so hateful against gay people that you'd sooner shut down than potentially help a gay person. Yes that's 100% hate filled bigotry and good riddance to any "charity" with such a belief system.
No point getting into the NIMBY debate with you again. You have already demonstrated your inconsistencies many times over and I get how upset you are at being called out on your hypocrisy so why re-enter that debate again?
The energy crisis started in the late 80s when the sector was deregulated. We've mentioned the dash for gas - not only did it help burn off our North Sea reserves it also bust the market for coal.
What did that mean? We went from digging coal from profitable pits a short distance from the power station to shutting the pits and importing coal from Venezuela and Brazil. Once you start importing its easy to keep doing it - suddenly imported coal is expensive so both imports and CCS are off the table and coal generation goes.
But its alright as we have all these gas power stations. Except that the gas is increasingly imported. But its alright as we have nuclear. Yeah right, we can't build new ones. But its alright as we have these interconnectors and the energy market is regulated. Until an interconnector burns out and we quit the regulated market.
Whilst there have been errors piled on errors this lot have been in government for 11 years. How will they blame someone else or what they have done - and haven't done - in that time?
There are those who are demanding Cambo is stopped and the Cumbria coal mine planning refused then complain over energy supply crisis
I really fear that we are all, not just here in the UK, but across the globe going to experience the clash between climate change demands (COP26) and the reality that most everyone wants to deal with it but then cannot accept an abrupt and sudden spike in energy prices which underpins all economic activity
The eco warriors on the M25 have infuriated drivers and it would appear 59/25 oppose the demonstrations again indicating that you have to take the public with you and their wallets
The Cumbrian mine is irrelevant now - we needed to not shut the pits and then not shut the power stations.
Yes, viable green energy is a global issue. The explosive price increase in the UK and only the UK is not a global issue. We can't blame the EU or remoaners or stoppy French idiots for this. Quitting the EU regulated energy market left us wide open to this but as usual we thought it was crap as its the EU and didn't need replacing.
Whoops.
I have been listening to the various contributors on Sky this morning and it is fiendishly complex and is not a Brexit issue
Indeed it seems that Ed Miliband's energy price cap enacted by Therese May is a factor in the crisis
Its certainly complex, but are we really going to insist that our departure from the regulated market has nothing to do with the vast increase only in UK prices?
I've not got a detailed understanding about this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but... isn't the main driver of the difference in UK/non-UK prices rises due to an interconnector fire in Kent? That is, we're stuck having to generate more of our own electricity. That could have happened just as easily with us within the EU, right?
It was that which is used to smooth supply plus...a huge flood in demand for energy globally; Russia is being unhelpful and restricting demand as per the AEP article; maintenance on gas platforms in the North Sea; we have had some nuclear outage; and the wind hasn't been blowing in the past few weeks.
According to R4 this morning (08.13).
I drove past several large wind farms on my way to Stirling this morning. They were all still. In late September this is positively weird. When I looked this morning we were generating twice as much electricity from solar than wind. On 20th September.
My suspicion is that this cannot last and the wind will return taking the sting out of this. The fact AEP states that disaster is now inevitable boosts my confidence considerably.
Boris thinks the market will sort it out. You are looking to a higher authority
Also, talking of the latter, I think can we please add to the commonly used on PB namely bible references eg Deuteronomy 28:12 the equally authoritative as per my post above eg: R4 08:13.
How can the market sort it out? There's a price cap. The whole market is broken.
The energy crisis started in the late 80s when the sector was deregulated. We've mentioned the dash for gas - not only did it help burn off our North Sea reserves it also bust the market for coal.
What did that mean? We went from digging coal from profitable pits a short distance from the power station to shutting the pits and importing coal from Venezuela and Brazil. Once you start importing its easy to keep doing it - suddenly imported coal is expensive so both imports and CCS are off the table and coal generation goes.
But its alright as we have all these gas power stations. Except that the gas is increasingly imported. But its alright as we have nuclear. Yeah right, we can't build new ones. But its alright as we have these interconnectors and the energy market is regulated. Until an interconnector burns out and we quit the regulated market.
Whilst there have been errors piled on errors this lot have been in government for 11 years. How will they blame someone else or what they have done - and haven't done - in that time?
There are those who are demanding Cambo is stopped and the Cumbria coal mine planning refused then complain over energy supply crisis
I really fear that we are all, not just here in the UK, but across the globe going to experience the clash between climate change demands (COP26) and the reality that most everyone wants to deal with it but then cannot accept an abrupt and sudden spike in energy prices which underpins all economic activity
The eco warriors on the M25 have infuriated drivers and it would appear 59/25 oppose the demonstrations again indicating that you have to take the public with you and their wallets
The Cumbrian mine is irrelevant now - we needed to not shut the pits and then not shut the power stations.
Yes, viable green energy is a global issue. The explosive price increase in the UK and only the UK is not a global issue. We can't blame the EU or remoaners or stoppy French idiots for this. Quitting the EU regulated energy market left us wide open to this but as usual we thought it was crap as its the EU and didn't need replacing.
Whoops.
I have been listening to the various contributors on Sky this morning and it is fiendishly complex and is not a Brexit issue
Indeed it seems that Ed Miliband's energy price cap enacted by Therese May is a factor in the crisis
Its certainly complex, but are we really going to insist that our departure from the regulated market has nothing to do with the vast increase only in UK prices?
I've not got a detailed understanding about this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but... isn't the main driver of the difference in UK/non-UK prices rises due to an interconnector fire in Kent? That is, we're stuck having to generate more of our own electricity. That could have happened just as easily with us within the EU, right?
It was that which is used to smooth supply plus...a huge flood in demand for energy globally; Russia is being unhelpful and restricting demand as per the AEP article; maintenance on gas platforms in the North Sea; we have had some nuclear outage; and the wind hasn't been blowing in the past few weeks.
According to R4 this morning (08.13).
I drove past several large wind farms on my way to Stirling this morning. They were all still. In late September this is positively weird. When I looked this morning we were generating twice as much electricity from solar than wind. On 20th September.
My suspicion is that this cannot last and the wind will return taking the sting out of this. The fact AEP states that disaster is now inevitable boosts my confidence considerably.
Boris thinks the market will sort it out. You are looking to a higher authority
Also, talking of the latter, I think can we please add to the commonly used on PB namely bible references eg Deuteronomy 28:12 the equally authoritative as per my post above eg: R4 08:13.
How can the market sort it out? There's a price cap. The whole market is broken.
Oh Max. Oh Max, Max, Max, Max.
I know that. You know that. But Boris fervently believes that the listeners of R4, to say nothing of the wider British public, do not.
Such a tactic has not failed him to date and he evidently believes it will work this time round also.
Prince Andrew has another grandchild as Princes Beatrice has given birth to a daughter, though she will be only 11th in the line of succession now behind Charles, William, George, Charlotte, Louis, Harry, Archie, Lilibet and Andrew himself and her mother
The energy crisis started in the late 80s when the sector was deregulated. We've mentioned the dash for gas - not only did it help burn off our North Sea reserves it also bust the market for coal.
What did that mean? We went from digging coal from profitable pits a short distance from the power station to shutting the pits and importing coal from Venezuela and Brazil. Once you start importing its easy to keep doing it - suddenly imported coal is expensive so both imports and CCS are off the table and coal generation goes.
But its alright as we have all these gas power stations. Except that the gas is increasingly imported. But its alright as we have nuclear. Yeah right, we can't build new ones. But its alright as we have these interconnectors and the energy market is regulated. Until an interconnector burns out and we quit the regulated market.
Whilst there have been errors piled on errors this lot have been in government for 11 years. How will they blame someone else or what they have done - and haven't done - in that time?
There are those who are demanding Cambo is stopped and the Cumbria coal mine planning refused then complain over energy supply crisis
I really fear that we are all, not just here in the UK, but across the globe going to experience the clash between climate change demands (COP26) and the reality that most everyone wants to deal with it but then cannot accept an abrupt and sudden spike in energy prices which underpins all economic activity
The eco warriors on the M25 have infuriated drivers and it would appear 59/25 oppose the demonstrations again indicating that you have to take the public with you and their wallets
The Cumbrian mine is irrelevant now - we needed to not shut the pits and then not shut the power stations.
Yes, viable green energy is a global issue. The explosive price increase in the UK and only the UK is not a global issue. We can't blame the EU or remoaners or stoppy French idiots for this. Quitting the EU regulated energy market left us wide open to this but as usual we thought it was crap as its the EU and didn't need replacing.
Whoops.
I have been listening to the various contributors on Sky this morning and it is fiendishly complex and is not a Brexit issue
Indeed it seems that Ed Miliband's energy price cap enacted by Therese May is a factor in the crisis
Its certainly complex, but are we really going to insist that our departure from the regulated market has nothing to do with the vast increase only in UK prices?
I've not got a detailed understanding about this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but... isn't the main driver of the difference in UK/non-UK prices rises due to an interconnector fire in Kent? That is, we're stuck having to generate more of our own electricity. That could have happened just as easily with us within the EU, right?
It was that which is used to smooth supply plus...a huge flood in demand for energy globally; Russia is being unhelpful and restricting demand as per the AEP article; maintenance on gas platforms in the North Sea; we have had some nuclear outage; and the wind hasn't been blowing in the past few weeks.
According to R4 this morning (08.13).
I drove past several large wind farms on my way to Stirling this morning. They were all still. In late September this is positively weird. When I looked this morning we were generating twice as much electricity from solar than wind. On 20th September.
My suspicion is that this cannot last and the wind will return taking the sting out of this. The fact AEP states that disaster is now inevitable boosts my confidence considerably.
I bought a sail boat about 6 weeks ago. I am convinces that the wind drought we have suffered ever since is a direct result of that purchase.
Can you please sell it again? We need about 20gw of wind nowish
The Catholic adoption centres believed that adoption by gay couples was against their religious beliefs. When they were given no choice they closed and kids who were previously adopted were less well supported with a huge cost to them.
The compromise I pushed at the time was the requirement that if a Catholic service wasn’t willing to provide adoption services to gay couples themselves they had to have a partnership with someone who would. The Catholics were grumpy but ok with it. The activists on the gay rights side weren’t.
The kids lost out.
(FWIW my personal belief is that a stable two person parental unit is key to children’s success in life. The sex of each member of the parental unit is irrelevant)
Sorry but I have absolutely zero sympathy for centres that wish to break the law being given a "religious" exemption. The law is the law and if these centres wish to put their petty bigotry over "helping the kids" then good riddance to them. Let secular organisations that don't put bigotry over helping the kids in accordance with the law take their place.
Besides, while I may be an atheist I do have a decent understanding of the Bible and while I can't remember Christ attacking gay couples, I can recall a concept of how we are all sinners and then when it comes to the law Matthew 12:17 surely applies?
The law is the law and that should apply to all equally and not have carved out religious exemptions whether it be for Anglicans, Catholics or Sharia.
Positioning it as breaking the law is unreasonable and inflammatory.
They were in compliance with the law. The law changed. So they closed. At no point did they break the law.
Christ cared for children. These were good men and women who wanted to help children. They had a genuine belief - which I disagree with - that children were not helped by putting them in same sex family units.
So now very troubled and scared children don’t get the same quality of assistance (these agencies were among the best in the field).
I hope you feel good about that. But there is a little less joy in the lives of people who are less privileged than you.
Yes I feel very good about that. Good riddance to bigotry and hatred in this sector and in society in general.
You claim that a "referral" should be a suitable solution instead of just not being bigoted in the first place but if a referral is good enough for some it should be good enough for all.
If you don't think a referral for all is good enough, then why should it be for the minority whom this "charity" wished to exclude despite equal rights legislation.
I think being hateful and bigoted to others is a terrible strain on society that causes real harm. I think having equal rights legislation and equality before the law is a very good thing entirely and let any institution that can't keep up with the law fade into history where it belongs.
The hate filled person would seem to be you, actually. A bigot is somebody who has mindless allegiance to a country. The Church has a reasoned theological case about gay couples - dead wrong, of course, but you treat that as a golden opportunity to see the worst in someone. Like the nimby thing - you are incapable of believing that anyone cares for the English countryside as something uniquely beautiful and irreplaceable: it's an axiom to you that anyone expressing that sentiment is automatically lying. You sound like that genuinely lamented former poster here who held it as an article of faith that every single leave voter was motivated purely by racism and xenophobia. Every last one of them. How do you feel about they particular assumption of bad faith?
You're absolutely ridiculous and grasping at straws.
A bigot is not what you said. A bigot is "a person who is obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, especially one who is prejudiced against or antagonistic towards a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group."
Being antagonistic against gay people due to your "theological case against them" absolutely 100% falls under that definition.
That doesn't make all religious people hate filled bigots. Only those that are hate filled bigots are hate filled bigots.
Being so hateful against gay people that you'd sooner shut down than potentially help a gay person. Yes that's 100% hate filled bigotry and good riddance to any "charity" with such a belief system.
No point getting into the NIMBY debate with you again. You have already demonstrated your inconsistencies many times over and I get how upset you are at being called out on your hypocrisy so why re-enter that debate again?
No. It only looks like hypocrisy to you because of your stone cold certainty that all that motivates me is the value of my house. It looks to me as if the value of my house is entirely irrelevant to me, because I intend to die in it, and the less it is worth, the less people can tax me on it. But I must be lying about that, mustn't I? Because I just must be. Like I said, axiomatic.
The energy crisis started in the late 80s when the sector was deregulated. We've mentioned the dash for gas - not only did it help burn off our North Sea reserves it also bust the market for coal.
What did that mean? We went from digging coal from profitable pits a short distance from the power station to shutting the pits and importing coal from Venezuela and Brazil. Once you start importing its easy to keep doing it - suddenly imported coal is expensive so both imports and CCS are off the table and coal generation goes.
But its alright as we have all these gas power stations. Except that the gas is increasingly imported. But its alright as we have nuclear. Yeah right, we can't build new ones. But its alright as we have these interconnectors and the energy market is regulated. Until an interconnector burns out and we quit the regulated market.
Whilst there have been errors piled on errors this lot have been in government for 11 years. How will they blame someone else or what they have done - and haven't done - in that time?
There are those who are demanding Cambo is stopped and the Cumbria coal mine planning refused then complain over energy supply crisis
I really fear that we are all, not just here in the UK, but across the globe going to experience the clash between climate change demands (COP26) and the reality that most everyone wants to deal with it but then cannot accept an abrupt and sudden spike in energy prices which underpins all economic activity
The eco warriors on the M25 have infuriated drivers and it would appear 59/25 oppose the demonstrations again indicating that you have to take the public with you and their wallets
The Cumbrian mine is irrelevant now - we needed to not shut the pits and then not shut the power stations.
Yes, viable green energy is a global issue. The explosive price increase in the UK and only the UK is not a global issue. We can't blame the EU or remoaners or stoppy French idiots for this. Quitting the EU regulated energy market left us wide open to this but as usual we thought it was crap as its the EU and didn't need replacing.
Whoops.
I have been listening to the various contributors on Sky this morning and it is fiendishly complex and is not a Brexit issue
Indeed it seems that Ed Miliband's energy price cap enacted by Therese May is a factor in the crisis
Its certainly complex, but are we really going to insist that our departure from the regulated market has nothing to do with the vast increase only in UK prices?
I've not got a detailed understanding about this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but... isn't the main driver of the difference in UK/non-UK prices rises due to an interconnector fire in Kent? That is, we're stuck having to generate more of our own electricity. That could have happened just as easily with us within the EU, right?
It was that which is used to smooth supply plus...a huge flood in demand for energy globally; Russia is being unhelpful and restricting demand as per the AEP article; maintenance on gas platforms in the North Sea; we have had some nuclear outage; and the wind hasn't been blowing in the past few weeks.
According to R4 this morning (08.13).
I drove past several large wind farms on my way to Stirling this morning. They were all still. In late September this is positively weird. When I looked this morning we were generating twice as much electricity from solar than wind. On 20th September.
My suspicion is that this cannot last and the wind will return taking the sting out of this. The fact AEP states that disaster is now inevitable boosts my confidence considerably.
Boris thinks the market will sort it out. You are looking to a higher authority
Also, talking of the latter, I think can we please add to the commonly used on PB namely bible references eg Deuteronomy 28:12 the equally authoritative as per my post above eg: R4 08:13.
How can the market sort it out? There's a price cap. The whole market is broken.
The retail market was always rewarding the savvy at the expense of the vulnerable. Is that the kind of society we want?
Do we have any water systems that could be turned into a significant pumped storage battery in the UK ? Could we create one, or do we need to go Lithium ion for storage here ?
There have been experiments with raising/lowering weights as a form of storage. Could be of use in areas with lots of disused deep mine shafts. My hazy scientific grasp is that a substance denser than water e.g. stone or metal would be more efficient than raising/lowering water.
It's a great idea until you start to consider the scale required to be useful. Dinorwic gives you 1.8GW for about 5 hours run flat out from full. To do so it takes around 390 tones of water falling 100m per second. That's 3,900 tons falling 10m a second, or 39,000 tons at 1m/second. If we dig a hole for our 40k ton weight to go down 1km deep, it will equal Dinorwic for 17 minutes. That's before you start looking at the engineering problem posed by dangling 40k tons down a 1km mineshaft on a rope.
Nice idea, but it just doesn't scale big enough sensibly.
And which is why pumped storage isn't any easy answer - you still need alot of Dinorwic's to deal with intermittency from renewables such as solar and wind.
One interesting idea I came across was using compressed air storage - beating the problem of energy loss on expansion to cooling, by using the cooling to manufacture liquid gases for free..... Making that add up would be an interesting one, though.
Dinorwic is enormous and well worth a visit
Not as worth it as it once was.. From wiki
"The power station was also promoted as a tourist attraction, with visitors able to take a minibus trip from "Electric Mountain" - the name of its nearby visitor centre - to see the workings inside the power station; 132,000 people visited the attraction in 2015. However, the centre is now closed with no prospect of reopening."
Also from wiki..
" The project – begun in 1974 and taking ten years to complete at a cost of £425 million – was the largest civil engineering contract ever awarded by the UK government at the time. .... The scheme paid for itself within two years.[citation needed]"
I went through it years ago and I must admit I did not know tours had ended
The reason it paid for itself, was as a reliable backstop to the grid, IIRC
Not as energy storage as such - but having power rapidly available independently of the other generation methods.
Yes, ISTR that Dinorwig can go from 0 to full output in a matter of seconds, but obviously can't keep it up for long. Ideal for those kettle moments during ad breaks in popular programmes, i.e. peak flattening.
As regards renewable intermittency, there is surely still plenty of scope for demand management. We need to get used to paying large consumers to cut their electricity consumption when demand outstrips supply as well as making use of all those car batteries that'll be sitting outside people's homes soon.
I'm curious how many of those who regret there is no Catholic exemption to equalities legislation so that Catholics can't discriminate against homosexuals ... Would also call for an Islamic exemption to equalities legislation so that Muslims could discriminate against women in accordance to Shariah law?
The law is the law and we should have equality before the law.
The issue is that these Catholic adoption agencies had been running successfully for decades. They offered to partner with other agencies who would work with gay couples, rather than turn them away, which seemed a fair compromise.
The consequences, are more abortions and more children growing up in what is euphemistically called ‘care’, including in places like Rotherham.
If there are readily made alternatives available then why should people end up in care?
Why don't they end up at the alternatives that were good enough for gays? Why can't they be good enough for everyone? If Catholic agencies aren't crowding out unbigoted ones then the unbigoted ones should be able to expand to meet the demand.
The main difference between Catholic adoption agencies, and many domestic adoption placements - mostly run by local social services - is that the Catholic agencies actually cared about, and provided pastoral support to, young pregnant women.
The vast majority of other private adoption agencies operating in the UK, are sourcing children from abroad.
They just didn't care enough about them to do the role with equality before the law?
Hopefully the people who care and have passion will take up jobs in agencies that do want to look after young women while paying full respect to everyone equally before the law.
'Equality before the law' is an extremely slippery concept. Why should it not mean that all adoption agencies have 'equality before the law' to practice what they believe is best for the welfare of children. I would describe your version of 'equality' as 'Everyone being equally told what to think by the state'.
FWIW I don't agree with RC views on same sex adoption, and think that almost any parental arrangement is better than having the state as parent, but some old fashioned classical liberalism might come in handy here.
Equality before the law should mean that the law applies to all equally.
If you mean that equality legislation should be abolished and everyone who wants to should be free to discriminate against gays, women, blacks and anyone else they feel like discriminating against then make the argument for that.
But if you don't want that, then arguing for an exemption on Shariah or Catholic or any other religious grounds is unreasonable in a secular society. Why should religious bigots be able to discriminate but non-religious bigots are in your words "told what to think by the state"?
Religious bigots and atheist bigots should be subject to the same laws. Whether that be allowing them to discriminate against gays, blacks and women ... Or not.
Thanks. We are agreed on the first sentence of your response. The rest of it is an exercise in whataboutery bearing no relation to what I said.
Merely believing in equality before the law does not allow assumptions and presuppositions about how that law should be framed in a liberal society where people have different opinions and practices.
It's not whataboutery since we do have equalities legislation and since this conversation began with Charles bemoaning the fact an exemption wasn't given to the equalities legislation to the Catholic agencies.
Why should Catholic agencies be exempt from the law that applies to secular agencies?
If you wish to argue equalities legislation is a bad thing then that's a position to argue. However if equalities legislation is a good thing then why shouldn't the law apply to all equally?
As it happens my view of liberalism is essentially "do whatever you want, so long as it doesn't harm others". Equalities legislation is about preventing harm to others so I'm ok with that.
My positioned was more nuanced.
I always focus on outcomes - the lack of capacity in the sector meant worse outcomes for the primary beneficiaries of the service.
But same sex couples should have the right to adopt as well. So there was a workaround developed that didn’t worsen outcomes for children. All it needed was a little flexibility on all sides…
Being "focused on outcomes" especially when it comes to organised religion is part of the problem.
"Oh this charity does a lot of good, so why does it matter if it's going to break equalities legislation? Give it an exception."
"Oh this Church does a lot of good, so why does it matter if a priest is abusing children. Let's keep the big picture in mind."
"Our religion does a lot of good and saves people's eternal souls, so why does it matter if heathens die to convert them?"
And it's not just organised religion you see it in Oxfam "our charity does a lot of good, so why does it matter if our staff are sexually abusing people in nations we are working in" and many other institutions.
And not just charities but that attitude infects politics too. "the Labour Party does a lot of good, so why does it matter if a few Jews are abused?"
I'm not prepared to give an exception to the law no matter how much "good" a charity supposedly is. If the law has a good reason to be applied it should be applied equally to all, no blind eyes.
The energy crisis started in the late 80s when the sector was deregulated. We've mentioned the dash for gas - not only did it help burn off our North Sea reserves it also bust the market for coal.
What did that mean? We went from digging coal from profitable pits a short distance from the power station to shutting the pits and importing coal from Venezuela and Brazil. Once you start importing its easy to keep doing it - suddenly imported coal is expensive so both imports and CCS are off the table and coal generation goes.
But its alright as we have all these gas power stations. Except that the gas is increasingly imported. But its alright as we have nuclear. Yeah right, we can't build new ones. But its alright as we have these interconnectors and the energy market is regulated. Until an interconnector burns out and we quit the regulated market.
Whilst there have been errors piled on errors this lot have been in government for 11 years. How will they blame someone else or what they have done - and haven't done - in that time?
There are those who are demanding Cambo is stopped and the Cumbria coal mine planning refused then complain over energy supply crisis
I really fear that we are all, not just here in the UK, but across the globe going to experience the clash between climate change demands (COP26) and the reality that most everyone wants to deal with it but then cannot accept an abrupt and sudden spike in energy prices which underpins all economic activity
The eco warriors on the M25 have infuriated drivers and it would appear 59/25 oppose the demonstrations again indicating that you have to take the public with you and their wallets
The Cumbrian mine is irrelevant now - we needed to not shut the pits and then not shut the power stations.
Yes, viable green energy is a global issue. The explosive price increase in the UK and only the UK is not a global issue. We can't blame the EU or remoaners or stoppy French idiots for this. Quitting the EU regulated energy market left us wide open to this but as usual we thought it was crap as its the EU and didn't need replacing.
Whoops.
I have been listening to the various contributors on Sky this morning and it is fiendishly complex and is not a Brexit issue
Indeed it seems that Ed Miliband's energy price cap enacted by Therese May is a factor in the crisis
Its certainly complex, but are we really going to insist that our departure from the regulated market has nothing to do with the vast increase only in UK prices?
I've not got a detailed understanding about this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but... isn't the main driver of the difference in UK/non-UK prices rises due to an interconnector fire in Kent? That is, we're stuck having to generate more of our own electricity. That could have happened just as easily with us within the EU, right?
It was that which is used to smooth supply plus...a huge flood in demand for energy globally; Russia is being unhelpful and restricting demand as per the AEP article; maintenance on gas platforms in the North Sea; we have had some nuclear outage; and the wind hasn't been blowing in the past few weeks.
According to R4 this morning (08.13).
I drove past several large wind farms on my way to Stirling this morning. They were all still. In late September this is positively weird. When I looked this morning we were generating twice as much electricity from solar than wind. On 20th September.
My suspicion is that this cannot last and the wind will return taking the sting out of this. The fact AEP states that disaster is now inevitable boosts my confidence considerably.
Boris thinks the market will sort it out. You are looking to a higher authority
Also, talking of the latter, I think can we please add to the commonly used on PB namely bible references eg Deuteronomy 28:12 the equally authoritative as per my post above eg: R4 08:13.
How can the market sort it out? There's a price cap. The whole market is broken.
The market would be broken even without the cap right now because certain businesses were selling fixed price contracts below the cap and buying energy at spot prices without fixing their costs or having a hedge in place.
Selling fixed and buying variable without a hedge is a broken business model whenever the variable gets too far varied.
The energy crisis started in the late 80s when the sector was deregulated. We've mentioned the dash for gas - not only did it help burn off our North Sea reserves it also bust the market for coal.
What did that mean? We went from digging coal from profitable pits a short distance from the power station to shutting the pits and importing coal from Venezuela and Brazil. Once you start importing its easy to keep doing it - suddenly imported coal is expensive so both imports and CCS are off the table and coal generation goes.
But its alright as we have all these gas power stations. Except that the gas is increasingly imported. But its alright as we have nuclear. Yeah right, we can't build new ones. But its alright as we have these interconnectors and the energy market is regulated. Until an interconnector burns out and we quit the regulated market.
Whilst there have been errors piled on errors this lot have been in government for 11 years. How will they blame someone else or what they have done - and haven't done - in that time?
There are those who are demanding Cambo is stopped and the Cumbria coal mine planning refused then complain over energy supply crisis
I really fear that we are all, not just here in the UK, but across the globe going to experience the clash between climate change demands (COP26) and the reality that most everyone wants to deal with it but then cannot accept an abrupt and sudden spike in energy prices which underpins all economic activity
The eco warriors on the M25 have infuriated drivers and it would appear 59/25 oppose the demonstrations again indicating that you have to take the public with you and their wallets
The Cumbrian mine is irrelevant now - we needed to not shut the pits and then not shut the power stations.
Yes, viable green energy is a global issue. The explosive price increase in the UK and only the UK is not a global issue. We can't blame the EU or remoaners or stoppy French idiots for this. Quitting the EU regulated energy market left us wide open to this but as usual we thought it was crap as its the EU and didn't need replacing.
Whoops.
I have been listening to the various contributors on Sky this morning and it is fiendishly complex and is not a Brexit issue
Indeed it seems that Ed Miliband's energy price cap enacted by Therese May is a factor in the crisis
Its certainly complex, but are we really going to insist that our departure from the regulated market has nothing to do with the vast increase only in UK prices?
I've not got a detailed understanding about this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but... isn't the main driver of the difference in UK/non-UK prices rises due to an interconnector fire in Kent? That is, we're stuck having to generate more of our own electricity. That could have happened just as easily with us within the EU, right?
It was that which is used to smooth supply plus...a huge flood in demand for energy globally; Russia is being unhelpful and restricting demand as per the AEP article; maintenance on gas platforms in the North Sea; we have had some nuclear outage; and the wind hasn't been blowing in the past few weeks.
According to R4 this morning (08.13).
I drove past several large wind farms on my way to Stirling this morning. They were all still. In late September this is positively weird. When I looked this morning we were generating twice as much electricity from solar than wind. On 20th September.
My suspicion is that this cannot last and the wind will return taking the sting out of this. The fact AEP states that disaster is now inevitable boosts my confidence considerably.
The fact AEP is writing about it is the sole reason why I don't actually think this is going to be a long term problem.
The energy crisis started in the late 80s when the sector was deregulated. We've mentioned the dash for gas - not only did it help burn off our North Sea reserves it also bust the market for coal.
What did that mean? We went from digging coal from profitable pits a short distance from the power station to shutting the pits and importing coal from Venezuela and Brazil. Once you start importing its easy to keep doing it - suddenly imported coal is expensive so both imports and CCS are off the table and coal generation goes.
But its alright as we have all these gas power stations. Except that the gas is increasingly imported. But its alright as we have nuclear. Yeah right, we can't build new ones. But its alright as we have these interconnectors and the energy market is regulated. Until an interconnector burns out and we quit the regulated market.
Whilst there have been errors piled on errors this lot have been in government for 11 years. How will they blame someone else or what they have done - and haven't done - in that time?
There are those who are demanding Cambo is stopped and the Cumbria coal mine planning refused then complain over energy supply crisis
I really fear that we are all, not just here in the UK, but across the globe going to experience the clash between climate change demands (COP26) and the reality that most everyone wants to deal with it but then cannot accept an abrupt and sudden spike in energy prices which underpins all economic activity
The eco warriors on the M25 have infuriated drivers and it would appear 59/25 oppose the demonstrations again indicating that you have to take the public with you and their wallets
The Cumbrian mine is irrelevant now - we needed to not shut the pits and then not shut the power stations.
Yes, viable green energy is a global issue. The explosive price increase in the UK and only the UK is not a global issue. We can't blame the EU or remoaners or stoppy French idiots for this. Quitting the EU regulated energy market left us wide open to this but as usual we thought it was crap as its the EU and didn't need replacing.
Whoops.
I have been listening to the various contributors on Sky this morning and it is fiendishly complex and is not a Brexit issue
Indeed it seems that Ed Miliband's energy price cap enacted by Therese May is a factor in the crisis
Its certainly complex, but are we really going to insist that our departure from the regulated market has nothing to do with the vast increase only in UK prices?
I've not got a detailed understanding about this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but... isn't the main driver of the difference in UK/non-UK prices rises due to an interconnector fire in Kent? That is, we're stuck having to generate more of our own electricity. That could have happened just as easily with us within the EU, right?
It was that which is used to smooth supply plus...a huge flood in demand for energy globally; Russia is being unhelpful and restricting demand as per the AEP article; maintenance on gas platforms in the North Sea; we have had some nuclear outage; and the wind hasn't been blowing in the past few weeks.
According to R4 this morning (08.13).
I drove past several large wind farms on my way to Stirling this morning. They were all still. In late September this is positively weird. When I looked this morning we were generating twice as much electricity from solar than wind. On 20th September.
My suspicion is that this cannot last and the wind will return taking the sting out of this. The fact AEP states that disaster is now inevitable boosts my confidence considerably.
The fact AEP is writing about it is the sole reason why I don't actually think this is going to be a long term problem.
Can someone get Peston to write about it just to guarantee it won't be ...
Do we have any water systems that could be turned into a significant pumped storage battery in the UK ? Could we create one, or do we need to go Lithium ion for storage here ?
There have been experiments with raising/lowering weights as a form of storage. Could be of use in areas with lots of disused deep mine shafts. My hazy scientific grasp is that a substance denser than water e.g. stone or metal would be more efficient than raising/lowering water.
It's a great idea until you start to consider the scale required to be useful. Dinorwic gives you 1.8GW for about 5 hours run flat out from full. To do so it takes around 390 tones of water falling 100m per second. That's 3,900 tons falling 10m a second, or 39,000 tons at 1m/second. If we dig a hole for our 40k ton weight to go down 1km deep, it will equal Dinorwic for 17 minutes. That's before you start looking at the engineering problem posed by dangling 40k tons down a 1km mineshaft on a rope.
Nice idea, but it just doesn't scale big enough sensibly.
And which is why pumped storage isn't any easy answer - you still need alot of Dinorwic's to deal with intermittency from renewables such as solar and wind.
One interesting idea I came across was using compressed air storage - beating the problem of energy loss on expansion to cooling, by using the cooling to manufacture liquid gases for free..... Making that add up would be an interesting one, though.
Dinorwic is enormous and well worth a visit
Not as worth it as it once was.. From wiki
"The power station was also promoted as a tourist attraction, with visitors able to take a minibus trip from "Electric Mountain" - the name of its nearby visitor centre - to see the workings inside the power station; 132,000 people visited the attraction in 2015. However, the centre is now closed with no prospect of reopening."
Also from wiki..
" The project – begun in 1974 and taking ten years to complete at a cost of £425 million – was the largest civil engineering contract ever awarded by the UK government at the time. .... The scheme paid for itself within two years.[citation needed]"
I went through it years ago and I must admit I did not know tours had ended
The reason it paid for itself, was as a reliable backstop to the grid, IIRC
Not as energy storage as such - but having power rapidly available independently of the other generation methods.
Yes, ISTR that Dinorwig can go from 0 to full output in a matter of seconds, but obviously can't keep it up for long. Ideal for those kettle moments during ad breaks in popular programmes, i.e. peak flattening.
As regards renewable intermittency, there is surely still plenty of scope for demand management. We need to get used to paying large consumers to cut their electricity consumption when demand outstrips supply as well as making use of all those car batteries that'll be sitting outside people's homes soon.
IIRC loads for restarting other power stations was also a factor - it was expensive and not as reliable to keep extra capacity on standby.
The energy crisis started in the late 80s when the sector was deregulated. We've mentioned the dash for gas - not only did it help burn off our North Sea reserves it also bust the market for coal.
What did that mean? We went from digging coal from profitable pits a short distance from the power station to shutting the pits and importing coal from Venezuela and Brazil. Once you start importing its easy to keep doing it - suddenly imported coal is expensive so both imports and CCS are off the table and coal generation goes.
But its alright as we have all these gas power stations. Except that the gas is increasingly imported. But its alright as we have nuclear. Yeah right, we can't build new ones. But its alright as we have these interconnectors and the energy market is regulated. Until an interconnector burns out and we quit the regulated market.
Whilst there have been errors piled on errors this lot have been in government for 11 years. How will they blame someone else or what they have done - and haven't done - in that time?
There are those who are demanding Cambo is stopped and the Cumbria coal mine planning refused then complain over energy supply crisis
I really fear that we are all, not just here in the UK, but across the globe going to experience the clash between climate change demands (COP26) and the reality that most everyone wants to deal with it but then cannot accept an abrupt and sudden spike in energy prices which underpins all economic activity
The eco warriors on the M25 have infuriated drivers and it would appear 59/25 oppose the demonstrations again indicating that you have to take the public with you and their wallets
The Cumbrian mine is irrelevant now - we needed to not shut the pits and then not shut the power stations.
Yes, viable green energy is a global issue. The explosive price increase in the UK and only the UK is not a global issue. We can't blame the EU or remoaners or stoppy French idiots for this. Quitting the EU regulated energy market left us wide open to this but as usual we thought it was crap as its the EU and didn't need replacing.
Whoops.
I have been listening to the various contributors on Sky this morning and it is fiendishly complex and is not a Brexit issue
Indeed it seems that Ed Miliband's energy price cap enacted by Therese May is a factor in the crisis
Its certainly complex, but are we really going to insist that our departure from the regulated market has nothing to do with the vast increase only in UK prices?
I've not got a detailed understanding about this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but... isn't the main driver of the difference in UK/non-UK prices rises due to an interconnector fire in Kent? That is, we're stuck having to generate more of our own electricity. That could have happened just as easily with us within the EU, right?
It was that which is used to smooth supply plus...a huge flood in demand for energy globally; Russia is being unhelpful and restricting demand as per the AEP article; maintenance on gas platforms in the North Sea; we have had some nuclear outage; and the wind hasn't been blowing in the past few weeks.
According to R4 this morning (08.13).
I drove past several large wind farms on my way to Stirling this morning. They were all still. In late September this is positively weird. When I looked this morning we were generating twice as much electricity from solar than wind. On 20th September.
My suspicion is that this cannot last and the wind will return taking the sting out of this. The fact AEP states that disaster is now inevitable boosts my confidence considerably.
Boris thinks the market will sort it out. You are looking to a higher authority
Also, talking of the latter, I think can we please add to the commonly used on PB namely bible references eg Deuteronomy 28:12 the equally authoritative as per my post above eg: R4 08:13.
How can the market sort it out? There's a price cap. The whole market is broken.
The market would be broken even without the cap right now because certain businesses were selling fixed price contracts below the cap and buying energy at spot prices without fixing their costs or having a hedge in place.
Selling fixed and buying variable without a hedge is a broken business model whenever the variable gets too far varied.
Well part of that was the price cap. Why offer a variable rate contract when you can just fix to the regulated price cap?
It's also completely destroyed any investment incentive within the private sector and the state energy strategy is a complete mess.
The price cap is the ultimate reason we're in the shit here, predictably, it has resulted in years of underinvestment by private corporations in energy generation capacity to protect margins.
Comments
In my experience, the big factor is the temperature at which you keep your home.
Insulation is a factor but if you consistently heat your home through the year, then your bill is much higher. This is the case for a lot of older people.
Check out his song "If I didn't have you", which, addressing his wife, contains the line "I think you're special but you fall within a bell curve".
Here is a chunk of the lyrics (check out the whole song though):
"But realistically there's lots of fish in the sea,
And if I had a different rod I would conceivably land some.
Even though I am fiscally consistently pitiable
And considerably less Brad Pitt than Brad Pitiful
Am I really so poor and ugly that you
Think only you could possibly love me?"
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/annemarie-trevelyan-climate-change-denial-b1921589.html
https://unherd.com/2021/09/whats-behind-macrons-fury/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups[0]=18743&tl_period_type=3&mc_cid=d3747406f1&mc_eid=12cf4fd1d6
Average bill is roughly £1200 covering both gas and electricity.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/brexit-paypal-fees-uk-eu-b1917179.html
Pretty sure Johnson promised they'd go down after Brexit.
European spot prices for electricity seem pretty high to me.. Not quite up to the UK level but also most not much lower.
Am I wrong in thinking the Telegraph is being particularly misleading with this headline?:
"Jesse Norman quit the Treasury over Boris Johnson’s bid for more diversity"
My immediate interpretation of that headline is that Jesse Norman quit because he objected to the drive for increased diversity. In fact the body of the article makes clear that he quit because he supported the policy and didn't want to be a ''bedblocker' who stood in the way of bringing in new talent.
“I actually believe in what the Prime Minister is trying to do with improving representation and diversity, and I don’t want to be one of those, I don’t want to say 'Yes I’m going to stay in' to be one of those ministers who then has to be forklifted out later on.”
Now of course he might be putting his own spin on it (though I don't think so in this case) but that still doesn't justify the Telegraph headline which implies he was unhappy with the diversity drive.
I had a smart meter fitted two weeks ago and the engineer checked my gas combi boiler and said that they were attending many homes where they simply had to condemn the boiler and also some gas fires
It will come as quite a shock to some when they decide to install a smart meter that their boiler will need immediate replacement
Fortunately mine was fine and is serviced annually
And my 4 bed detached is cavity insulated, double glazed, heavy layers of loft insulation, and solar panels but my monthly dd has just risen to £104 from £75
Goodness knows what it would be without the solar panels and feed in tariffs.
https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi/status/1439911997160648707?s=20
Could be of use in areas with lots of disused deep mine shafts.
My hazy scientific grasp is that a substance denser than water e.g. stone or metal would be more efficient than raising/lowering water.
Dan Jarvis will not seek re-election to Mayor to concentrate on his role as an MP
France are being asked whether they're happy to be hamstrung by German foreign policy objectives. So far they haven't answered, it's something that will take time for them to answer. The UK out of the EU has said we won't be beholden to Germany wanting to sell BMWs to China. France will need to take that step, either by convincing Germany to come along or, as Barnier has been suggesting, working outside of EU shared sovereignty.
Nanos Liberals 32.4% Conservatives 31.2% NDP 17.5%
Forum Conservatives 33% Liberals 29.4% NDP 16.2%
Research Conservatives 32% Liberals 32% NDP 19%
Mainstreet Liberals 33.4% Conservatives 30.4% NDP 18.1%
Abacus Conservatives 32% Liberals 31% NDP 19%
EKOS Liberals 32.6% Conservatives 27.3% NDP 18%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2021_Canadian_federal_election
... in our more recent data (since mid-April 2021), infections and hospitalisations began to re-converge, potentially reflecting the increased prevalence and severity of Delta compared with Alpha [25], a changing age mix of severe cases, and possible waning of protection [19,26].
https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/90800/2/react1_r13_final_preprint_final.pdf
In short, the increased severity of the Delta variant has essentially cancelled out the benefit from vaccination, as far as the rate of hospitalisation per infection is concerned.
That doesn't mean there is no longer any benefit from vaccination, because vaccination still has a big benefit in lowering the risk of being infected in the first place - and thereby the risk of being hospitalised.
But people really need to stop parroting the old mantra about vaccination reducing the percentage of those infected who go to hospital. It doesn't.
It feels like the sort of issue that the Greens could run on but which wouldn't survive coalition talks.
They were in compliance with the law. The law changed. So they closed. At no point did they break the law.
Christ cared for children. These were good men and women who wanted to help children. They had a genuine belief - which I disagree with - that children were not helped by putting them in same sex family units.
So now very troubled and scared children don’t get the same quality of assistance (these agencies were among the best in the field).
I hope you feel good about that. But there is a little less joy in the lives of people who are less privileged than you.
At a base level, what do we need from our energy system?
Security of supply (being able to get the coal/gas/fuel/wind/sun we need) to generate the power we need at all times.
Security of price (producing and distributing the power for an affordable price)
Not kill the environment (not producing nasties such as CO2, NO etc)
The actual number of gay couples in this situation was tiny.
That might be good for a submarine…
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/vaccines-highly-effective-against-hospitalisation-from-delta-variant
Dinorwic gives you 1.8GW for about 5 hours run flat out from full.
To do so it takes around 390 tones of water falling 100m per second. That's 3,900 tons falling 10m a second, or 39,000 tons at 1m/second.
If we dig a hole for our 40k ton weight to go down 1km deep, it will equal Dinorwic for 17 minutes.
That's before you start looking at the engineering problem posed by dangling 40k tons down a 1km mineshaft on a rope.
Nice idea, but it just doesn't scale big enough sensibly.
AFAICS part of it is the change to the Price Cap regime in 2019 feeding through, which somewhat tipped the benefit balance from constant switchers to people on card meters and variable tariffs.
I know you do not like the idea of positive tests being called 'cases'. Is this the heart of the difference in our opinion? Do you regard a case as only someone testing positive AND with symptoms?
One interesting idea I came across was using compressed air storage - beating the problem of energy loss on expansion to cooling, by using the cooling to manufacture liquid gases for free..... Making that add up would be an interesting one, though.
In the longer term as costs escalate, with the new subs being rather more expensive, and even fewer parts made in Australia, then cancellation of the whole project is possible.
Australian manufacturing capacity has run down a lot over the last decades, and there is a pork barrel element to it all.
The advantage of SSN over conventional submarines is range and endurance. For coastal protection of Australia regular submarines are fine. Nuclear subs are only needed for out of region activity.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/submarines-a-costly-debacle-but-here-s-why-morrison-has-little-argument-from-labor-20210916-p58s8c.html
The size of Australia makes the existing Collins class range a problem. Hence the interest in nukes.
Another desirable quality.
And a pate loosely resembling a sonar dome.
They might be on to something.
It was just in that context of things being far from ideal that I don't think it serves a great purpose to relate the current situation to some unattainable goal.
And the supreme worry for children runs a bit hollow given how almost all of the Catholic hierarchy ignored child abuse in its own ranks for decades.
If ++Cantab wasn’t head of the Anglican Community I suspect we would be much closer to the Episcopalians in outlook
You claim that a "referral" should be a suitable solution instead of just not being bigoted in the first place but if a referral is good enough for some it should be good enough for all.
If you don't think a referral for all is good enough, then why should it be for the minority whom this "charity" wished to exclude despite equal rights legislation.
I think being hateful and bigoted to others is a terrible strain on society that causes real harm. I think having equal rights legislation and equality before the law is a very good thing entirely and let any institution that can't keep up with the law fade into history where it belongs.
Transfer the customers and agree a subsidy between the current rate and the average spot rate over the next 6-9 months. You can’t ask a company to buy into a loss making contract without support
So you'd need a couple of hundred Dinorwig facilities to run the country for a single 24h period.
Even if you say 6 hours, you need 50.
Big problem to solve.......
So while Episcopalians may be happy to do gay marriages, especially as most of them are in the more liberal bits of the US in and around New England, New York and DC and on the West coast, the Church of England will likely allow gay blessings at most and not full gay marriage in its churches given the head of the Church of England is also head of the Anglican communion
(*Assuming you can find a way to keep it evacuated of air and, er, molten magma for the duration.)
Some years ago, a BBC (I think) documentary took a former miner round the world to see energy production in various places. They came to coal mine - I think it might have been Canada - opencast etc. The look on his face when one of though stupendous trucks went past...
It was carrying more coal than a shift at his old pit could dig. One truck.
"The power station was also promoted as a tourist attraction, with visitors able to take a minibus trip from "Electric Mountain" - the name of its nearby visitor centre - to see the workings inside the power station; 132,000 people visited the attraction in 2015. However, the centre is now closed with no prospect of reopening."
Also from wiki..
" The project – begun in 1974 and taking ten years to complete at a cost of £425 million – was the largest civil engineering contract ever awarded by the UK government at the time. .... The scheme paid for itself within two years.[citation needed]"
Is this true?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
NEW: @resfoundation say four in ten households on Universal Credit face a 13 per cent rise in their energy bills in same month as their benefit is cut by £20 a week. Serious concerns about many being pulled into poverty.
https://twitter.com/PaulBrandITV/status/1439927715625308162?s=20
Is your problem.
Not as energy storage as such - but having power rapidly available independently of the other generation methods.
My suspicion is that this cannot last and the wind will return taking the sting out of this. The fact AEP states that disaster is now inevitable boosts my confidence considerably.
https://twitter.com/paulhutcheon/status/1439854668797157379?s=19
If it was just Downing Street saying Boris did it then I'd agree, it would just be Boris bigging up some minor involvement, I have no love for the guy and would like to see him replaced ASAP. The fact that two liberal American newspapers of note (NYT and WaPo) both say the same as what Downing Street are saying and the Australians have confirmed that they initially approached the UK about a submarine deal which the UK helped to convince the US to turn into an anti-China Anglo alliance means that it probably was Boris. What is more convincing is that it speaks to everything Boris likes to do, a big shiny thing he can put his name on. It's the military alliance version of Boris Bikes.
That it has turned into Suez mk.II for France is probably not what was intended. I actually think that none of the three nations set out to burn France as badly as this and eventually France will be invited into an associate membership where they have decision making input over fleet deployments etc... but aren't party to the tech sharing aspects.
I always focus on outcomes - the lack of capacity in the sector meant worse outcomes for the primary beneficiaries of the service.
But same sex couples should have the right to adopt as well. So there was a workaround developed that didn’t worsen outcomes for children. All it needed was a little flexibility on all sides…
Also, talking of the latter, I think can we please add to the commonly used on PB namely bible references eg Deuteronomy 28:12 the equally authoritative as per my post above eg: R4 08:13.
A bigot is not what you said. A bigot is "a person who is obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, especially one who is prejudiced against or antagonistic towards a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group."
Being antagonistic against gay people due to your "theological case against them" absolutely 100% falls under that definition.
That doesn't make all religious people hate filled bigots. Only those that are hate filled bigots are hate filled bigots.
Being so hateful against gay people that you'd sooner shut down than potentially help a gay person. Yes that's 100% hate filled bigotry and good riddance to any "charity" with such a belief system.
No point getting into the NIMBY debate with you again. You have already demonstrated your inconsistencies many times over and I get how upset you are at being called out on your hypocrisy so why re-enter that debate again?
I know that. You know that. But Boris fervently believes that the listeners of R4, to say nothing of the wider British public, do not.
Such a tactic has not failed him to date and he evidently believes it will work this time round also.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58627115
https://twitter.com/danbloom1/status/1439932970681442311
As regards renewable intermittency, there is surely still plenty of scope for demand management. We need to get used to paying large consumers to cut their electricity consumption when demand outstrips supply as well as making use of all those car batteries that'll be sitting outside people's homes soon.
"Oh this charity does a lot of good, so why does it matter if it's going to break equalities legislation? Give it an exception."
"Oh this Church does a lot of good, so why does it matter if a priest is abusing children. Let's keep the big picture in mind."
"Our religion does a lot of good and saves people's eternal souls, so why does it matter if heathens die to convert them?"
And it's not just organised religion you see it in Oxfam "our charity does a lot of good, so why does it matter if our staff are sexually abusing people in nations we are working in" and many other institutions.
And not just charities but that attitude infects politics too. "the Labour Party does a lot of good, so why does it matter if a few Jews are abused?"
I'm not prepared to give an exception to the law no matter how much "good" a charity supposedly is. If the law has a good reason to be applied it should be applied equally to all, no blind eyes.
Selling fixed and buying variable without a hedge is a broken business model whenever the variable gets too far varied.
It's also completely destroyed any investment incentive within the private sector and the state energy strategy is a complete mess.
The price cap is the ultimate reason we're in the shit here, predictably, it has resulted in years of underinvestment by private corporations in energy generation capacity to protect margins.