As I understand it nobody other than Vox will work with PP. Than again, everyone will work with PSOE.
So a choice of a minority coalition with the hard right, or a minority coalition with the separatists and terrorists. Or another roll of the dice and hope people vote differently.
They need to try a grand coalition. Push out the lunatics, promote mainstream politics and hope they flush away the Vox and Basque idiots.
Grand coalitions tend to promote the extremes, though - if people dislike the government (and every government runs into trouble), then the extremes become the only alternative. I know minority governments with confidence and supply support are not the Spanish tradition, but perhaps thast's the way to go?
Satisfying to see Vox crash and burn, though. One can get lots of media coverage and initial support by culture war stuff, but in the end people don't want it as the main raison d'etre of government.
My father-in-law did. Supposedly Vox were "for Spain", as opposed to PSOE who were in bed with "terrorists, separatists and demented lesbians".
I somehow suspect it isn't a £1.3m home in Hampshire. Not if you can afford a RR and helicopter and it appears to have a large plot, lake and covered swimming pool.
On the ULEZ thing, it really isn't a difficult sell.
"It's your car. It's everyone's air. Do what you want with your car, but don't push particulates and NoX into our air because it will kill."
Push that message at breathers of air rather than drivers of cars. It's a smoking in public places argument.
If Labour can't be bothered selling that, why should they expect to be successful.
Such arguments can, and indeed have, created majority support for ULEZ.
Electoral support works differently however, and this is what is being consistently missed. For supporters it is not in their top 10 issues. For those forking out a few £k extra, especially those hurt hard by cost of living, it might be their very top issue.
If Labour want to change the electoral math on ULEZ they need to support those drivers and make it less regressive.
Yes, that's right, and true of many issues - one can get majority support for all sorts of things that aren't salient for most people, and still get defeated by the people who really care.
A similar trap is majoring on something that most people like but don't much care about. Abolishing IHT probably comes in that category - people like the abolition of any almost any tax, but do they think it should be the top priority? Not really.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
It's a fair point, but when one is faced with orbital photos of Australia on fire in 2020 and Mediterranean islands on fire in 2023, one does start wondering if this hug-a-penguin green crap might actually have a bit of a point.
If the UK cut its carbon footprint to zero it would stop precisely nothing,
That's why I always throw my litter in the street, what difference does it make when 99.9% of litter is dropped by other people?
LOL
thats why we burn all that lignite in our coal fired power stations and have 7 of Europes top ten polluters on our land
Weve picked up our litter it would be nice if you Germans could do the same given you produce twice as much carbon as we do.
Deutschland - Spitzenverschmutzer
The German record is terrible. Obviously that is entirely my fault and I will never disagree with you again. Sorry.
Germany's record is terrible.
You lecture the rest of us while chugging out lignite emissions and buying Putins oil and gas. Your green agenda is going backwards because of public resistance to - heat pumps will go tits up here too - and you have closed down all your nuclear .
There are many places one could take a note of the green agenda, but Germany isnt really one of them.
Germany doesn't buy any Russian gas any more, does it? In fact, if you want to be really picky and look at the Enerdata stats, we've bought more Russian gas* than the Germans in 2023.
* Albeit we probably didn't know it was Russian, because we bought if from a UAE broker
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
It's a fair point, but when one is faced with orbital photos of Australia on fire in 2020 and Mediterranean islands on fire in 2023, one does start wondering if this hug-a-penguin green crap might actually have a bit of a point.
If the UK cut its carbon footprint to zero it would stop precisely nothing,
That's why I always throw my litter in the street, what difference does it make when 99.9% of litter is dropped by other people?
LOL
thats why we burn all that lignite in our coal fired power stations and have 7 of Europes top ten polluters on our land
Weve picked up our litter it would be nice if you Germans could do the same given you produce twice as much carbon as we do.
Deutschland - Spitzenverschmutzer
The German record is terrible. Obviously that is entirely my fault and I will never disagree with you again. Sorry.
Germany's record is terrible.
You lecture the rest of us while chugging out lignite emissions and buying Putins oil and gas. Your green agenda is going backwards because of public resistance to - heat pumps will go tits up here too - and you have closed down all your nuclear .
There are many places one could take a note of the green agenda, but Germany isnt really one of them.
Germany doesn't buy any Russian gas any more, does it? In fact, if you want to be really picky and look at the Enerdata stats, we've bought more Russian gas* than the Germans in 2023.
* Albeit we probably didn't know it was Russian, because we bought if from a UAE broker
You must be fairly desperate today Robert, Germany opened the floodgates on Russian gas many years ago and based its industry on it. It took a war to show the folly of it. Now the industry is looking exposed with even the head of the BDI saying things are looking gloomy.
They didnt base their energy on sustainable "green" under Merkel
I'm just pointing out that your criticism is a year out of date.
After all, you wrote "You lecture the rest of us while chugging out lignite emissions and buying Putins oil and gas".
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
Tosh. First, you're a complete numpty if you think you can forecast populations for the end if this century. Second, they're going to discover relatively soon that they can grow their economies faster without fossil fuels. The point of wealthier countries leading that process is to accelerate the technology development.
You're a conservative Luddite.
Im not forecasting population Im using those provided by a variety of institutions including the United Nations who do this for a living. I suggestt you will find a lot of surprises as indeed I did when you start to go through them.
As for Luddite no. I dont have your big white Bwana approach to other nations, They will do what suits them and what makes them richer. We should do the same.
I somehow suspect it isn't a £1.3m home in Hampshire. Not if you can afford a RR and helicopter and it appears to have a large plot, lake and covered swimming pool.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
This is why I am defeatist on climate change. There are too many with no intention of changing their lifestyles, at least not until we have trashed the planet.
Splutter
Mr Fox we agree for once, James lovelock ( the Gaia man ) said the same thing some time ago. I cannot see Modi or Xi stopping their counties getting richer and thats before Africa moves in to gear.
For the UK I think we need to look at what this means for us and address the issues will which keep UK being a highly liveable country and improve our citizens standard of living.
It's hard to see how the UK will remain a highly liveable country when most of its major cities and half its agricultural land have vanished under the waves.
I somehow suspect it isn't a £1.3m home in Hampshire. Not if you can afford a RR and helicopter and it appears to have a large plot, lake and covered swimming pool.
Obviously this racism as everybody loves a flash solicitor.
High-flying London lawyers and sleepy countryside villages are not always the happiest of combinations, especially when the criminal law specialist really wants to take to the air.
Mayus Karia bills himself as a “ferocious litigator” but the residents of Durley, in Hampshire, will doubtless have a litany of other names for the solicitor-advocate, who has triggered a row over plans to make frequent helicopter landings at his six-bedroom £1.3 million home.
Neighbours in the village, which has a population of about 1,000, have objected to having their “peace ended” by the “flash” lawyer.
The dispute started when Karia, who qualified as a solicitor in 2005 and is said on his law firm’s website to have an “unrivalled . . . sixth sense in litigation”, won permission to construct a helipad in his back garden.
Officials at Winchester city council originally granted him only two personal use round trips a month between the hours of 8am and 6pm. However, local authority planning application documents show that last month Karia applied for unrestricted use to allow multiple landings and take-offs.
In the application, an agent for Karia said the lawyer needed “a loosening of the restriction to allow flexibility of irregular visits by some clients . . .”
Karia, a father of three, who charges between £1,000 and £1,200 an hour for legal advice, is said by neighbours to drive an SUV Rolls-Royce, while his firm, London Litigation Partnership Solicitors, describes him as “a ferocious and meticulous litigator”. His firm’s website goes on to liken his legal skills to “the genius of Field Marshal Montgomery in the battlefield”.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
This is why I am defeatist on climate change. There are too many with no intention of changing their lifestyles, at least not until we have trashed the planet.
I think you only need to look at the reactions to eg Just Stop Oil - or indeed the M25 at 6pm on any day - to see where the British public is wrt such action to change their lifestyles.
We don't want to.
Someone who doesn't want to change at all has access to all the information that someone who is a passionate Just Stop Oiler. So it can't be information asymmetry. It must be intention.
Oh but then you say that there are a lot of people who don't, how shall we put this, understand the complexities of climate change but then you are left with the elite telling the plebs what to do. Again. And that never usually ends well.
Nonsense.
The public will go along with policies which dont hurt much,
The problem with the current batch of policies is they are all stick and no carrot. When green policies are just misery piled upon misery or greenwashed taxation eventually you are going to be told to eff off.
One caveat to that- timeframes.
Current energy policies everywhere are going to create an awful lot of stick for people a generation or two down the line. (I think we've got past the point where we can plausibly water down that "will".)
So the question is how much misery we are going to pile on them and how much we are going to take ourselves.
Not a cheerful thought, and a hard one to sell on the doorstep. But it doesn't stop it being a necessary one, not helped by those who continue to insist that everything is fine.
Good morning
I have commented before on this but if anyone wants an example of pure zealotry then the SNP/ Green proposal that from 2025 they are to change the energy efficiency criteria so that it is impossible for any home with a gas boiler to meet category C which will be mandated for all home sales
Apparently the cost would be around 33 billion with only 1.8 billion coming from the Scottish government
You do wonder just how anyone could even think of such a stupid proposal, not least because there is not the capacity to fit all the homes with heat pumps or electricity boilers, and whoever thought an attack of this nature on homeowners in a cost of living crisis was good politics is out of touch with reality and has resonance with the ill fated poll tax
Yesterday someone posted a Scottish sub samples with labour 38% SNP 21% conservatives 17% and the question is when will crossover come between the conservatives and the SNP if this is enacted
It will be interesting to see if Starmer rejects this madness and if so how he counters it
We need to address climate change sensibly, and at a cost that the public will accept and anyway, as has been said, with Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and others refusing to take the action demanded by the G20 it is they that need to change
You've posted this quite a few times - I'm sure they have said it, but as a policy its a non-starter. A lot of homes up here would be very difficult to get to Category C. My own house was rated as Category F with the potential to improve to Category D. No government is going to make it illegal to sell granite homes when significant parts of the housing stock are granite.
So its vapourware - stop quoting it. If you want to hit the SNP on zealotry and energy (and why wouldn't you - its fun), lets go after their nonsense about blocking new oil licences. Yes we're moving away from oil. But we still need the stuff. So how does it make more sense to ship oil from the middle east rather than extracting our own?
Why would I stop reporting something which was reported in the Herald two days ago, together with the Scotsman and Times
It is an active proposal and just indicates how extreme some in the Scottish Government are on climate change
However, I do agree the policy the SNP/Greens and UK Labour to block new oil licences is a nonsense
Obviously this racism as everybody loves a flash solicitor.
High-flying London lawyers and sleepy countryside villages are not always the happiest of combinations, especially when the criminal law specialist really wants to take to the air.
Mayus Karia bills himself as a “ferocious litigator” but the residents of Durley, in Hampshire, will doubtless have a litany of other names for the solicitor-advocate, who has triggered a row over plans to make frequent helicopter landings at his six-bedroom £1.3 million home.
Neighbours in the village, which has a population of about 1,000, have objected to having their “peace ended” by the “flash” lawyer.
The dispute started when Karia, who qualified as a solicitor in 2005 and is said on his law firm’s website to have an “unrivalled . . . sixth sense in litigation”, won permission to construct a helipad in his back garden.
Officials at Winchester city council originally granted him only two personal use round trips a month between the hours of 8am and 6pm. However, local authority planning application documents show that last month Karia applied for unrestricted use to allow multiple landings and take-offs.
In the application, an agent for Karia said the lawyer needed “a loosening of the restriction to allow flexibility of irregular visits by some clients . . .”
Karia, a father of three, who charges between £1,000 and £1,200 an hour for legal advice, is said by neighbours to drive an SUV Rolls-Royce, while his firm, London Litigation Partnership Solicitors, describes him as “a ferocious and meticulous litigator”. His firm’s website goes on to liken his legal skills to “the genius of Field Marshal Montgomery in the battlefield”.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
Its not so much the sea ice but the risk that the ice shelf on Antartica is now able to slide off on a massive scale. If that happens Canary Warf becomes Canary ponds.
The rise in sea level will probably become the UK's biggest headache in the future. There is evidence that the sea level during the last interglacial period - the last time temperatures were comparable to now - was around 6 to 9 metres higher than today. It takes a while* for all that water to warm and the ice to melt, so it won't be our problem. It'll be a nasty legacy for our children and grandchildren though.
* Having said that, there have been occasions in the past when tipping points have passed and the Earth's climate has changed very rapidly, as Richard Tyndall has pointed out. It's very difficult to know what these points might be and when they will be passed, but the warming of the Earth is unlikely to remain a smooth process.
I agree about the sudden tipping points and of course that is possible. But your contention that the last time temperatures were this warm was in the last interglacial is simply wrong. In both historical and pre-historical times we have seen temperatures significantly warmer than now. This does not inform what might happen going forward as such but making such obviously refutable errors doesn't help the debate.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
This is why I am defeatist on climate change. There are too many with no intention of changing their lifestyles, at least not until we have trashed the planet.
I think you only need to look at the reactions to eg Just Stop Oil - or indeed the M25 at 6pm on any day - to see where the British public is wrt such action to change their lifestyles.
We don't want to.
Someone who doesn't want to change at all has access to all the information that someone who is a passionate Just Stop Oiler. So it can't be information asymmetry. It must be intention.
Oh but then you say that there are a lot of people who don't, how shall we put this, understand the complexities of climate change but then you are left with the elite telling the plebs what to do. Again. And that never usually ends well.
Nonsense.
The public will go along with policies which dont hurt much,
The problem with the current batch of policies is they are all stick and no carrot. When green policies are just misery piled upon misery or greenwashed taxation eventually you are going to be told to eff off.
What is truly pitiful about this position is that it falsely implies there is zero cost on the other side of the equation. Which works when persuading the uninformed and frankly unintelligent that they should vote against their own interests.
But this isn't GBeebies or the Daily Mail, and we know better.
Exactly. The British public knows better and doesn't want to pay that cost.
As someone who used to live literally on the inner ring road in that London (top of Grays Inn Road) I know exactly what that cost is. Air you can taste. A generation with asthma and worse. Decades of "misery piled on misery" making engines more efficient and less pollutey were followed by ULEZ. And when I go back there now the air is quite clearly cleaner than it used to be. More needs to be done and is being done.
Absolutely. It's called progress. As we get richer (using fossil fuels to do so) we then look at ways of improving our lifestyles. Totally normal. Electric cars might be a rich man's sport atm but it will develop and before too long they will become standard. Just like we don't live in woad huts and burn peat indoors any more.
Nothing to do with climate catastrophising.
I was born, and spent my early childhood, a little over a mile from a coal-fired power station (actually two, an A and a B plant). If the wind was in the wrong direction, mum had to take the washing in as it would soon be covered in little black specks. Those stations closed over twenty years ago; at their peak they produced over 1,400 tonnes of ash a day; most, but not all, was captured.
I think there are at least two aspects in play here.
Firstly, local effects. The various Clean Air acts have probably been the biggest boon for health of any UK regulation ever, and have made local air quality massively better..
I'm old enough to remember my father complaining about the mandatory introduction of 'smokeless' Coke in place of coal for domestic fires.
Though I can't quite remember the then phrase for 'woke madness'.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
This is why I am defeatist on climate change. There are too many with no intention of changing their lifestyles, at least not until we have trashed the planet.
I think you only need to look at the reactions to eg Just Stop Oil - or indeed the M25 at 6pm on any day - to see where the British public is wrt such action to change their lifestyles.
We don't want to.
Someone who doesn't want to change at all has access to all the information that someone who is a passionate Just Stop Oiler. So it can't be information asymmetry. It must be intention.
Oh but then you say that there are a lot of people who don't, how shall we put this, understand the complexities of climate change but then you are left with the elite telling the plebs what to do. Again. And that never usually ends well.
Nonsense.
The public will go along with policies which dont hurt much,
The problem with the current batch of policies is they are all stick and no carrot. When green policies are just misery piled upon misery or greenwashed taxation eventually you are going to be told to eff off.
What is truly pitiful about this position is that it falsely implies there is zero cost on the other side of the equation. Which works when persuading the uninformed and frankly unintelligent that they should vote against their own interests.
But this isn't GBeebies or the Daily Mail, and we know better.
Exactly. The British public knows better and doesn't want to pay that cost.
As someone who used to live literally on the inner ring road in that London (top of Grays Inn Road) I know exactly what that cost is. Air you can taste. A generation with asthma and worse. Decades of "misery piled on misery" making engines more efficient and less pollutey were followed by ULEZ. And when I go back there now the air is quite clearly cleaner than it used to be. More needs to be done and is being done.
Absolutely. It's called progress. As we get richer (using fossil fuels to do so) we then look at ways of improving our lifestyles. Totally normal. Electric cars might be a rich man's sport atm but it will develop and before too long they will become standard. Just like we don't live in woad huts and burn peat indoors any more.
Nothing to do with climate catastrophising.
I was born, and spent my early childhood, a little over a mile from a coal-fired power station (actually two, an A and a B plant). If the wind was in the wrong direction, mum had to take the washing in as it would soon be covered in little black specks. Those stations closed over twenty years ago; at their peak they produced over 1,400 tonnes of ash a day; most, but not all, was captured.
I think there are at least two aspects in play here.
Firstly, local effects. The various Clean Air acts have probably been the biggest boon for health of any UK regulation ever, and have made local air quality massively better..
I'm old enough to remember my father complaining about the mandatory introduction of 'smokeless' Coke in place of coal for domestic fires.
Though I can't quite remember the then phrase for 'woke madness'.
Smokeless coke is much more popular now. People seem to prefer snorting it anyway.
As I understand it nobody other than Vox will work with PP. Than again, everyone will work with PSOE.
So a choice of a minority coalition with the hard right, or a minority coalition with the separatists and terrorists. Or another roll of the dice and hope people vote differently.
They need to try a grand coalition. Push out the lunatics, promote mainstream politics and hope they flush away the Vox and Basque idiots.
Grand coalitions tend to promote the extremes, though - if people dislike the government (and every government runs into trouble), then the extremes become the only alternative. I know minority governments with confidence and supply support are not the Spanish tradition, but perhaps thast's the way to go?
Satisfying to see Vox crash and burn, though. One can get lots of media coverage and initial support by culture war stuff, but in the end people don't want it as the main raison d'etre of government.
My father-in-law did. Supposedly Vox were "for Spain", as opposed to PSOE who were in bed with "terrorists, separatists and demented lesbians".
And he was a Podemos supporter!!!!
Getting into bed with terrorists, separatists and demented lesbians is certainly a niche sexual activity. Initially novel but soon very wearing I imagine.
Obviously this racism as everybody loves a flash solicitor.
High-flying London lawyers and sleepy countryside villages are not always the happiest of combinations, especially when the criminal law specialist really wants to take to the air.
Mayus Karia bills himself as a “ferocious litigator” but the residents of Durley, in Hampshire, will doubtless have a litany of other names for the solicitor-advocate, who has triggered a row over plans to make frequent helicopter landings at his six-bedroom £1.3 million home.
Neighbours in the village, which has a population of about 1,000, have objected to having their “peace ended” by the “flash” lawyer.
The dispute started when Karia, who qualified as a solicitor in 2005 and is said on his law firm’s website to have an “unrivalled . . . sixth sense in litigation”, won permission to construct a helipad in his back garden.
Officials at Winchester city council originally granted him only two personal use round trips a month between the hours of 8am and 6pm. However, local authority planning application documents show that last month Karia applied for unrestricted use to allow multiple landings and take-offs.
In the application, an agent for Karia said the lawyer needed “a loosening of the restriction to allow flexibility of irregular visits by some clients . . .”
Karia, a father of three, who charges between £1,000 and £1,200 an hour for legal advice, is said by neighbours to drive an SUV Rolls-Royce, while his firm, London Litigation Partnership Solicitors, describes him as “a ferocious and meticulous litigator”. His firm’s website goes on to liken his legal skills to “the genius of Field Marshal Montgomery in the battlefield”.
I wonder what were Mr Karia's Caen or Market Garden?
FM Monty still survived and ended up, well, Viscount Monty of Alamein. Lawyers survive their clients' disasters (no idea if Mr Karia has ever lost anything, mind, so the comparison may be completely otiose).
As I understand it nobody other than Vox will work with PP. Than again, everyone will work with PSOE.
So a choice of a minority coalition with the hard right, or a minority coalition with the separatists and terrorists. Or another roll of the dice and hope people vote differently.
They need to try a grand coalition. Push out the lunatics, promote mainstream politics and hope they flush away the Vox and Basque idiots.
Grand coalitions tend to promote the extremes, though - if people dislike the government (and every government runs into trouble), then the extremes become the only alternative. I know minority governments with confidence and supply support are not the Spanish tradition, but perhaps thast's the way to go?
Satisfying to see Vox crash and burn, though. One can get lots of media coverage and initial support by culture war stuff, but in the end people don't want it as the main raison d'etre of government.
The best result for Vox and indeed Sumar would be a grand coalition between the PP and PSOE where they are the main opposition.
Meloni in Italy too came to power after her Brothers of Italy party became the main opposition after a grand coalition government in Italy of centre right and centre left.
In Germany the AfD is surging having been in opposition to the grand coalition of CDU and SPD Merkel led governments and now also in opposition to the Scholz led SPD, Green and FDP coalition government. Linke also slightly up
I somehow suspect it isn't a £1.3m home in Hampshire. Not if you can afford a RR and helicopter and it appears to have a large plot, lake and covered swimming pool.
£1.3M for a small swimming pool, & helipad sounds tight but doable.
Did you see the swimming pool building? Or plot size.
The article is paywalled, so nothing beyond what's been posted here. £1.3M is definitely out of ex-council range there.
I never claimed it was in council house range and you can see the plot even with the paywall. I don't have access to the article either just clicked on the link. I think I made a reasonable assumption that £1.3m is tosh unless it is next to the sewage plant.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
This is why I am defeatist on climate change. There are too many with no intention of changing their lifestyles, at least not until we have trashed the planet.
I think you only need to look at the reactions to eg Just Stop Oil - or indeed the M25 at 6pm on any day - to see where the British public is wrt such action to change their lifestyles.
We don't want to.
Someone who doesn't want to change at all has access to all the information that someone who is a passionate Just Stop Oiler. So it can't be information asymmetry. It must be intention.
Oh but then you say that there are a lot of people who don't, how shall we put this, understand the complexities of climate change but then you are left with the elite telling the plebs what to do. Again. And that never usually ends well.
Nonsense.
The public will go along with policies which dont hurt much,
The problem with the current batch of policies is they are all stick and no carrot. When green policies are just misery piled upon misery or greenwashed taxation eventually you are going to be told to eff off.
One caveat to that- timeframes.
Current energy policies everywhere are going to create an awful lot of stick for people a generation or two down the line. (I think we've got past the point where we can plausibly water down that "will".)
So the question is how much misery we are going to pile on them and how much we are going to take ourselves.
Not a cheerful thought, and a hard one to sell on the doorstep. But it doesn't stop it being a necessary one, not helped by those who continue to insist that everything is fine.
Good morning
I have commented before on this but if anyone wants an example of pure zealotry then the SNP/ Green proposal that from 2025 they are to change the energy efficiency criteria so that it is impossible for any home with a gas boiler to meet category C which will be mandated for all home sales
Apparently the cost would be around 33 billion with only 1.8 billion coming from the Scottish government
You do wonder just how anyone could even think of such a stupid proposal, not least because there is not the capacity to fit all the homes with heat pumps or electricity boilers, and whoever thought an attack of this nature on homeowners in a cost of living crisis was good politics is out of touch with reality and has resonance with the ill fated poll tax
Yesterday someone posted a Scottish sub samples with labour 38% SNP 21% conservatives 17% and the question is when will crossover come between the conservatives and the SNP if this is enacted
It will be interesting to see if Starmer rejects this madness and if so how he counters it
We need to address climate change sensibly, and at a cost that the public will accept and anyway, as has been said, with Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and others refusing to take the action demanded by the G20 it is they that need to change
You've posted this quite a few times - I'm sure they have said it, but as a policy its a non-starter. A lot of homes up here would be very difficult to get to Category C. My own house was rated as Category F with the potential to improve to Category D. No government is going to make it illegal to sell granite homes when significant parts of the housing stock are granite.
So its vapourware - stop quoting it. If you want to hit the SNP on zealotry and energy (and why wouldn't you - its fun), lets go after their nonsense about blocking new oil licences. Yes we're moving away from oil. But we still need the stuff. So how does it make more sense to ship oil from the middle east rather than extracting our own?
Why would I stop reporting something which was reported in the Herald two days ago, together with the Scotsman and Times
It is an active proposal and just indicates how extreme some in the Scottish Government are on climate change
However, I do agree the policy the SNP/Greens and UK Labour to block new oil licences is a nonsense
When did the SNP have the power devolved to them to issue oil licences?
As I understand it nobody other than Vox will work with PP. Than again, everyone will work with PSOE.
So a choice of a minority coalition with the hard right, or a minority coalition with the separatists and terrorists. Or another roll of the dice and hope people vote differently.
They need to try a grand coalition. Push out the lunatics, promote mainstream politics and hope they flush away the Vox and Basque idiots.
Grand coalitions tend to promote the extremes, though - if people dislike the government (and every government runs into trouble), then the extremes become the only alternative. I know minority governments with confidence and supply support are not the Spanish tradition, but perhaps thast's the way to go?
Satisfying to see Vox crash and burn, though. One can get lots of media coverage and initial support by culture war stuff, but in the end people don't want it as the main raison d'etre of government.
My father-in-law did. Supposedly Vox were "for Spain", as opposed to PSOE who were in bed with "terrorists, separatists and demented lesbians".
And he was a Podemos supporter!!!!
Getting into bed with terrorists, separatists and demented lesbians is certainly a niche sexual activity. Initially novel but soon very wearing I imagine.
Not necessarily a quadruple. Certainly if you were to believe certain PBers the three often occur in one person.
I somehow suspect it isn't a £1.3m home in Hampshire. Not if you can afford a RR and helicopter and it appears to have a large plot, lake and covered swimming pool.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
This is why I am defeatist on climate change. There are too many with no intention of changing their lifestyles, at least not until we have trashed the planet.
I think you only need to look at the reactions to eg Just Stop Oil - or indeed the M25 at 6pm on any day - to see where the British public is wrt such action to change their lifestyles.
We don't want to.
Someone who doesn't want to change at all has access to all the information that someone who is a passionate Just Stop Oiler. So it can't be information asymmetry. It must be intention.
Oh but then you say that there are a lot of people who don't, how shall we put this, understand the complexities of climate change but then you are left with the elite telling the plebs what to do. Again. And that never usually ends well.
Nonsense.
The public will go along with policies which dont hurt much,
The problem with the current batch of policies is they are all stick and no carrot. When green policies are just misery piled upon misery or greenwashed taxation eventually you are going to be told to eff off.
One caveat to that- timeframes.
Current energy policies everywhere are going to create an awful lot of stick for people a generation or two down the line. (I think we've got past the point where we can plausibly water down that "will".)
So the question is how much misery we are going to pile on them and how much we are going to take ourselves.
Not a cheerful thought, and a hard one to sell on the doorstep. But it doesn't stop it being a necessary one, not helped by those who continue to insist that everything is fine.
Good morning
I have commented before on this but if anyone wants an example of pure zealotry then the SNP/ Green proposal that from 2025 they are to change the energy efficiency criteria so that it is impossible for any home with a gas boiler to meet category C which will be mandated for all home sales
Apparently the cost would be around 33 billion with only 1.8 billion coming from the Scottish government
You do wonder just how anyone could even think of such a stupid proposal, not least because there is not the capacity to fit all the homes with heat pumps or electricity boilers, and whoever thought an attack of this nature on homeowners in a cost of living crisis was good politics is out of touch with reality and has resonance with the ill fated poll tax
Yesterday someone posted a Scottish sub samples with labour 38% SNP 21% conservatives 17% and the question is when will crossover come between the conservatives and the SNP if this is enacted
It will be interesting to see if Starmer rejects this madness and if so how he counters it
We need to address climate change sensibly, and at a cost that the public will accept and anyway, as has been said, with Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and others refusing to take the action demanded by the G20 it is they that need to change
You've posted this quite a few times - I'm sure they have said it, but as a policy its a non-starter. A lot of homes up here would be very difficult to get to Category C. My own house was rated as Category F with the potential to improve to Category D. No government is going to make it illegal to sell granite homes when significant parts of the housing stock are granite.
So its vapourware - stop quoting it. If you want to hit the SNP on zealotry and energy (and why wouldn't you - its fun), lets go after their nonsense about blocking new oil licences. Yes we're moving away from oil. But we still need the stuff. So how does it make more sense to ship oil from the middle east rather than extracting our own?
Why would I stop reporting something which was reported in the Herald two days ago, together with the Scotsman and Times
It is an active proposal and just indicates how extreme some in the Scottish Government are on climate change
However, I do agree the policy the SNP/Greens and UK Labour to block new oil licences is a nonsense
When did the SNP have the power devolved to them to issue oil licences?
BigG read it three times before breakfast, in the Scotsman, Herald and Times (all well known for their balance on Scotland) so it must be true.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
This is why I am defeatist on climate change. There are too many with no intention of changing their lifestyles, at least not until we have trashed the planet.
I think you only need to look at the reactions to eg Just Stop Oil - or indeed the M25 at 6pm on any day - to see where the British public is wrt such action to change their lifestyles.
We don't want to.
Someone who doesn't want to change at all has access to all the information that someone who is a passionate Just Stop Oiler. So it can't be information asymmetry. It must be intention.
Oh but then you say that there are a lot of people who don't, how shall we put this, understand the complexities of climate change but then you are left with the elite telling the plebs what to do. Again. And that never usually ends well.
Nonsense.
The public will go along with policies which dont hurt much,
The problem with the current batch of policies is they are all stick and no carrot. When green policies are just misery piled upon misery or greenwashed taxation eventually you are going to be told to eff off.
One caveat to that- timeframes.
Current energy policies everywhere are going to create an awful lot of stick for people a generation or two down the line. (I think we've got past the point where we can plausibly water down that "will".)
So the question is how much misery we are going to pile on them and how much we are going to take ourselves.
Not a cheerful thought, and a hard one to sell on the doorstep. But it doesn't stop it being a necessary one, not helped by those who continue to insist that everything is fine.
Good morning
I have commented before on this but if anyone wants an example of pure zealotry then the SNP/ Green proposal that from 2025 they are to change the energy efficiency criteria so that it is impossible for any home with a gas boiler to meet category C which will be mandated for all home sales
Apparently the cost would be around 33 billion with only 1.8 billion coming from the Scottish government
You do wonder just how anyone could even think of such a stupid proposal, not least because there is not the capacity to fit all the homes with heat pumps or electricity boilers, and whoever thought an attack of this nature on homeowners in a cost of living crisis was good politics is out of touch with reality and has resonance with the ill fated poll tax
Yesterday someone posted a Scottish sub samples with labour 38% SNP 21% conservatives 17% and the question is when will crossover come between the conservatives and the SNP if this is enacted
It will be interesting to see if Starmer rejects this madness and if so how he counters it
We need to address climate change sensibly, and at a cost that the public will accept and anyway, as has been said, with Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and others refusing to take the action demanded by the G20 it is they that need to change
You've posted this quite a few times - I'm sure they have said it, but as a policy its a non-starter. A lot of homes up here would be very difficult to get to Category C. My own house was rated as Category F with the potential to improve to Category D. No government is going to make it illegal to sell granite homes when significant parts of the housing stock are granite.
So its vapourware - stop quoting it. If you want to hit the SNP on zealotry and energy (and why wouldn't you - its fun), lets go after their nonsense about blocking new oil licences. Yes we're moving away from oil. But we still need the stuff. So how does it make more sense to ship oil from the middle east rather than extracting our own?
Why would I stop reporting something which was reported in the Herald two days ago, together with the Scotsman and Times
It is an active proposal and just indicates how extreme some in the Scottish Government are on climate change
However, I do agree the policy the SNP/Greens and UK Labour to block new oil licences is a nonsense
Why? Because it isn't true! Plenty of actual real true things to attack them for. Why cling onto something that isn't?
The actual policy proposal is here:
"we will introduce regulations requiring that all residential properties in Scotland achieve an Energy Performance Certificate rating of at least equivalent to EPC C by 2033, where technically and legally feasible and cost-effective."
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
50 degrees Celsius in China this month. Of course ironically global warming impacts the UK temperature wise less than most of the world, hence while extreme heat in southern Europe, much of Asia and southern and western US and forest fires in Australia we still have a relatively soggy July after a slightly warmer June.
The UK already has less fossil fuels usage now than the global average but we can survive climate change better than most nations, although the most low lying areas will face more floods
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
Its not so much the sea ice but the risk that the ice shelf on Antartica is now able to slide off on a massive scale. If that happens Canary Warf becomes Canary ponds.
The rise in sea level will probably become the UK's biggest headache in the future. There is evidence that the sea level during the last interglacial period - the last time temperatures were comparable to now - was around 6 to 9 metres higher than today. It takes a while* for all that water to warm and the ice to melt, so it won't be our problem. It'll be a nasty legacy for our children and grandchildren though.
* Having said that, there have been occasions in the past when tipping points have passed and the Earth's climate has changed very rapidly, as Richard Tyndall has pointed out. It's very difficult to know what these points might be and when they will be passed, but the warming of the Earth is unlikely to remain a smooth process.
I agree about the sudden tipping points and of course that is possible. But your contention that the last time temperatures were this warm was in the last interglacial is simply wrong. In both historical and pre-historical times we have seen temperatures significantly warmer than now. This does not inform what might happen going forward as such but making such obviously refutable errors doesn't help the debate.
Obviously this racism as everybody loves a flash solicitor.
High-flying London lawyers and sleepy countryside villages are not always the happiest of combinations, especially when the criminal law specialist really wants to take to the air.
Mayus Karia bills himself as a “ferocious litigator” but the residents of Durley, in Hampshire, will doubtless have a litany of other names for the solicitor-advocate, who has triggered a row over plans to make frequent helicopter landings at his six-bedroom £1.3 million home.
Neighbours in the village, which has a population of about 1,000, have objected to having their “peace ended” by the “flash” lawyer.
The dispute started when Karia, who qualified as a solicitor in 2005 and is said on his law firm’s website to have an “unrivalled . . . sixth sense in litigation”, won permission to construct a helipad in his back garden.
Officials at Winchester city council originally granted him only two personal use round trips a month between the hours of 8am and 6pm. However, local authority planning application documents show that last month Karia applied for unrestricted use to allow multiple landings and take-offs.
In the application, an agent for Karia said the lawyer needed “a loosening of the restriction to allow flexibility of irregular visits by some clients . . .”
Karia, a father of three, who charges between £1,000 and £1,200 an hour for legal advice, is said by neighbours to drive an SUV Rolls-Royce, while his firm, London Litigation Partnership Solicitors, describes him as “a ferocious and meticulous litigator”. His firm’s website goes on to liken his legal skills to “the genius of Field Marshal Montgomery in the battlefield”.
I wonder what were Mr Karia's Caen or Market Garden?
FM Monty still survived and ended up, well, Viscount Monty of Alamein. Lawyers survive their clients' disasters (no idea if Mr Karia has ever lost anything, mind, so the comparison may be completely otiose).
Traditionally even our worst generals end up well rewarded if they're ultimately on the winning side, John French, Lord Cardigan and Frederick Duke of York all spring to mind.
In light of the earlier quarrel about the Laffer curve, how about they get a big pay rise if we have a much bigger tax rise on anyone who holds the post of chief executive of a FTSE 100 company?
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
This is why I am defeatist on climate change. There are too many with no intention of changing their lifestyles, at least not until we have trashed the planet.
I think you only need to look at the reactions to eg Just Stop Oil - or indeed the M25 at 6pm on any day - to see where the British public is wrt such action to change their lifestyles.
We don't want to.
Someone who doesn't want to change at all has access to all the information that someone who is a passionate Just Stop Oiler. So it can't be information asymmetry. It must be intention.
Oh but then you say that there are a lot of people who don't, how shall we put this, understand the complexities of climate change but then you are left with the elite telling the plebs what to do. Again. And that never usually ends well.
Nonsense.
The public will go along with policies which dont hurt much,
The problem with the current batch of policies is they are all stick and no carrot. When green policies are just misery piled upon misery or greenwashed taxation eventually you are going to be told to eff off.
What is truly pitiful about this position is that it falsely implies there is zero cost on the other side of the equation. Which works when persuading the uninformed and frankly unintelligent that they should vote against their own interests.
But this isn't GBeebies or the Daily Mail, and we know better.
Exactly. The British public knows better and doesn't want to pay that cost.
As someone who used to live literally on the inner ring road in that London (top of Grays Inn Road) I know exactly what that cost is. Air you can taste. A generation with asthma and worse. Decades of "misery piled on misery" making engines more efficient and less pollutey were followed by ULEZ. And when I go back there now the air is quite clearly cleaner than it used to be. More needs to be done and is being done.
Absolutely. It's called progress. As we get richer (using fossil fuels to do so) we then look at ways of improving our lifestyles. Totally normal. Electric cars might be a rich man's sport atm but it will develop and before too long they will become standard. Just like we don't live in woad huts and burn peat indoors any more.
Nothing to do with climate catastrophising.
I was born, and spent my early childhood, a little over a mile from a coal-fired power station (actually two, an A and a B plant). If the wind was in the wrong direction, mum had to take the washing in as it would soon be covered in little black specks. Those stations closed over twenty years ago; at their peak they produced over 1,400 tonnes of ash a day; most, but not all, was captured.
I think there are at least two aspects in play here.
Firstly, local effects. The various Clean Air acts have probably been the biggest boon for health of any UK regulation ever, and have made local air quality massively better..
I'm old enough to remember my father complaining about the mandatory introduction of 'smokeless' Coke in place of coal for domestic fires.
Though I can't quite remember the then phrase for 'woke madness'.
I rsemember the conversion of our cooker from town gas to North Sea gas. Don't recall any moaning.* It did mean that the local gasworks closed down instead of carrying on causing pollution and prsoducing lots of nasties. Got tarmacked over and made into a trading estate. Though I wouldn't like to dig into the ground there (another reason to be sceptical of brownbelt claims - sometimes, something is just too nasty to remediate at reasonable cvost unless there is huge political pressure and lots of public money).
Edit: I think Granny and Mum took a little time to get used to the slightly differtent properties of the oven, but that was about it.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
50 degrees Celsius in China this month. Of course ironically global warming impacts the UK temperature wise less than most of the world, hence while extreme heat in southern Europe, much of Asia and southern and western US and forest fires in Australia we still have a relatively soggy July after a slightly warmer June.
The UK already has less fossil fuels usage now than the global average but we can survive climate change better than most nations, although the most low lying areas will face more floods
It's 53 weeks since we hit 41 celsius. Only 2 prime ministers ago.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
Its not so much the sea ice but the risk that the ice shelf on Antartica is now able to slide off on a massive scale. If that happens Canary Warf becomes Canary ponds.
The rise in sea level will probably become the UK's biggest headache in the future. There is evidence that the sea level during the last interglacial period - the last time temperatures were comparable to now - was around 6 to 9 metres higher than today. It takes a while* for all that water to warm and the ice to melt, so it won't be our problem. It'll be a nasty legacy for our children and grandchildren though.
* Having said that, there have been occasions in the past when tipping points have passed and the Earth's climate has changed very rapidly, as Richard Tyndall has pointed out. It's very difficult to know what these points might be and when they will be passed, but the warming of the Earth is unlikely to remain a smooth process.
I agree about the sudden tipping points and of course that is possible. But your contention that the last time temperatures were this warm was in the last interglacial is simply wrong. In both historical and pre-historical times we have seen temperatures significantly warmer than now. This does not inform what might happen going forward as such but making such obviously refutable errors doesn't help the debate.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
It's a fair point, but when one is faced with orbital photos of Australia on fire in 2020 and Mediterranean islands on fire in 2023, one does start wondering if this hug-a-penguin green crap might actually have a bit of a point.
If the UK cut its carbon footprint to zero it would stop precisely nothing,
That's why I always throw my litter in the street, what difference does it make when 99.9% of litter is dropped by other people?
LOL
thats why we burn all that lignite in our coal fired power stations and have 7 of Europes top ten polluters on our land
Weve picked up our litter it would be nice if you Germans could do the same given you produce twice as much carbon as we do.
Deutschland - Spitzenverschmutzer
The German record is terrible. Obviously that is entirely my fault and I will never disagree with you again. Sorry.
Germany's record is terrible.
You lecture the rest of us while chugging out lignite emissions and buying Putins oil and gas. Your green agenda is going backwards because of public resistance to - heat pumps will go tits up here too - and you have closed down all your nuclear .
There are many places one could take a note of the green agenda, but Germany isnt really one of them.
Germany doesn't buy any Russian gas any more, does it? In fact, if you want to be really picky and look at the Enerdata stats, we've bought more Russian gas* than the Germans in 2023.
* Albeit we probably didn't know it was Russian, because we bought if from a UAE broker
You must be fairly desperate today Robert, Germany opened the floodgates on Russian gas many years ago and based its industry on it. It took a war to show the folly of it. Now the industry is looking exposed with even the head of the BDI saying things are looking gloomy.
They didnt base their energy on sustainable "green" under Merkel
I'm just pointing out that your criticism is a year out of date.
After all, you wrote "You lecture the rest of us while chugging out lignite emissions and buying Putins oil and gas".
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
Tosh. First, you're a complete numpty if you think you can forecast populations for the end if this century. Second, they're going to discover relatively soon that they can grow their economies faster without fossil fuels. The point of wealthier countries leading that process is to accelerate the technology development.
You're a conservative Luddite.
Im not forecasting population Im using those provided by a variety of institutions including the United Nations who do this for a living. I suggestt you will find a lot of surprises as indeed I did when you start to go through them.
As for Luddite no. I dont have your big white Bwana approach to other nations, They will do what suits them and what makes them richer. We should do the same.
Abusive, and demonstrably wrong.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth ... the 2012 report predicted that the population of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, would rise to 914 million by 2100; the 2022 report lowers that to 546 million, a reduction of 368 million...
I somehow suspect it isn't a £1.3m home in Hampshire. Not if you can afford a RR and helicopter and it appears to have a large plot, lake and covered swimming pool.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
This is why I am defeatist on climate change. There are too many with no intention of changing their lifestyles, at least not until we have trashed the planet.
I think you only need to look at the reactions to eg Just Stop Oil - or indeed the M25 at 6pm on any day - to see where the British public is wrt such action to change their lifestyles.
We don't want to.
Someone who doesn't want to change at all has access to all the information that someone who is a passionate Just Stop Oiler. So it can't be information asymmetry. It must be intention.
Oh but then you say that there are a lot of people who don't, how shall we put this, understand the complexities of climate change but then you are left with the elite telling the plebs what to do. Again. And that never usually ends well.
Nonsense.
The public will go along with policies which dont hurt much,
The problem with the current batch of policies is they are all stick and no carrot. When green policies are just misery piled upon misery or greenwashed taxation eventually you are going to be told to eff off.
What is truly pitiful about this position is that it falsely implies there is zero cost on the other side of the equation. Which works when persuading the uninformed and frankly unintelligent that they should vote against their own interests.
But this isn't GBeebies or the Daily Mail, and we know better.
Exactly. The British public knows better and doesn't want to pay that cost.
As someone who used to live literally on the inner ring road in that London (top of Grays Inn Road) I know exactly what that cost is. Air you can taste. A generation with asthma and worse. Decades of "misery piled on misery" making engines more efficient and less pollutey were followed by ULEZ. And when I go back there now the air is quite clearly cleaner than it used to be. More needs to be done and is being done.
Absolutely. It's called progress. As we get richer (using fossil fuels to do so) we then look at ways of improving our lifestyles. Totally normal. Electric cars might be a rich man's sport atm but it will develop and before too long they will become standard. Just like we don't live in woad huts and burn peat indoors any more.
Nothing to do with climate catastrophising.
I was born, and spent my early childhood, a little over a mile from a coal-fired power station (actually two, an A and a B plant). If the wind was in the wrong direction, mum had to take the washing in as it would soon be covered in little black specks. Those stations closed over twenty years ago; at their peak they produced over 1,400 tonnes of ash a day; most, but not all, was captured.
I think there are at least two aspects in play here.
Firstly, local effects. The various Clean Air acts have probably been the biggest boon for health of any UK regulation ever, and have made local air quality massively better. They plucked the low-hanging fruit. The latest sets of regulations (e.g. on NOx) are just building on these. If you think differently, just remember the 1950s London smogs.
Secondly, regional and global effects. These are much less noticeable, but just as vital.
The thing is, tackling the former also helps the latter. Would anyone want to go back to every town having dozens of tall chimneys belching our smoke? Back to the Black Country being truly black?
We have made tremendous progress on local air quality, and reasonable progress in the UK on regional air quality. There is less to do on the former, but much more needs to be done on the latter.
Let's go fly a kite Up to the highest height! Let's go fly a kite and send it soaring Up through the atmosphere Up where the air is clear
I somehow suspect it isn't a £1.3m home in Hampshire. Not if you can afford a RR and helicopter and it appears to have a large plot, lake and covered swimming pool.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
This is why I am defeatist on climate change. There are too many with no intention of changing their lifestyles, at least not until we have trashed the planet.
I think you only need to look at the reactions to eg Just Stop Oil - or indeed the M25 at 6pm on any day - to see where the British public is wrt such action to change their lifestyles.
We don't want to.
Someone who doesn't want to change at all has access to all the information that someone who is a passionate Just Stop Oiler. So it can't be information asymmetry. It must be intention.
Oh but then you say that there are a lot of people who don't, how shall we put this, understand the complexities of climate change but then you are left with the elite telling the plebs what to do. Again. And that never usually ends well.
Nonsense.
The public will go along with policies which dont hurt much,
The problem with the current batch of policies is they are all stick and no carrot. When green policies are just misery piled upon misery or greenwashed taxation eventually you are going to be told to eff off.
What is truly pitiful about this position is that it falsely implies there is zero cost on the other side of the equation. Which works when persuading the uninformed and frankly unintelligent that they should vote against their own interests.
But this isn't GBeebies or the Daily Mail, and we know better.
Exactly. The British public knows better and doesn't want to pay that cost.
As someone who used to live literally on the inner ring road in that London (top of Grays Inn Road) I know exactly what that cost is. Air you can taste. A generation with asthma and worse. Decades of "misery piled on misery" making engines more efficient and less pollutey were followed by ULEZ. And when I go back there now the air is quite clearly cleaner than it used to be. More needs to be done and is being done.
Absolutely. It's called progress. As we get richer (using fossil fuels to do so) we then look at ways of improving our lifestyles. Totally normal. Electric cars might be a rich man's sport atm but it will develop and before too long they will become standard. Just like we don't live in woad huts and burn peat indoors any more.
Nothing to do with climate catastrophising.
I was born, and spent my early childhood, a little over a mile from a coal-fired power station (actually two, an A and a B plant). If the wind was in the wrong direction, mum had to take the washing in as it would soon be covered in little black specks. Those stations closed over twenty years ago; at their peak they produced over 1,400 tonnes of ash a day; most, but not all, was captured.
I think there are at least two aspects in play here.
Firstly, local effects. The various Clean Air acts have probably been the biggest boon for health of any UK regulation ever, and have made local air quality massively better. They plucked the low-hanging fruit. The latest sets of regulations (e.g. on NOx) are just building on these. If you think differently, just remember the 1950s London smogs.
Secondly, regional and global effects. These are much less noticeable, but just as vital.
The thing is, tackling the former also helps the latter. Would anyone want to go back to every town having dozens of tall chimneys belching our smoke? Back to the Black Country being truly black?
We have made tremendous progress on local air quality, and reasonable progress in the UK on regional air quality. There is less to do on the former, but much more needs to be done on the latter.
Let's go fly a kite Up to the highest height! Let's go fly a kite and send it soaring Up through the atmosphere Up where the air is clear
That was in the days before aircraft (other than nannies with umbrellas).
As I understand it nobody other than Vox will work with PP. Than again, everyone will work with PSOE.
So a choice of a minority coalition with the hard right, or a minority coalition with the separatists and terrorists. Or another roll of the dice and hope people vote differently.
They need to try a grand coalition. Push out the lunatics, promote mainstream politics and hope they flush away the Vox and Basque idiots.
Grand coalitions tend to promote the extremes, though - if people dislike the government (and every government runs into trouble), then the extremes become the only alternative. I know minority governments with confidence and supply support are not the Spanish tradition, but perhaps thast's the way to go?
Satisfying to see Vox crash and burn, though. One can get lots of media coverage and initial support by culture war stuff, but in the end people don't want it as the main raison d'etre of government.
My father-in-law did. Supposedly Vox were "for Spain", as opposed to PSOE who were in bed with "terrorists, separatists and demented lesbians".
And he was a Podemos supporter!!!!
Getting into bed with terrorists, separatists and demented lesbians is certainly a niche sexual activity. Initially novel but soon very wearing I imagine.
You can probably find something on the well-known porn site Xvideos which for some unaccountable reason is now trending on Twitter since Elon had the brilliant idea of renaming it X.
I somehow suspect it isn't a £1.3m home in Hampshire. Not if you can afford a RR and helicopter and it appears to have a large plot, lake and covered swimming pool.
As I understand it nobody other than Vox will work with PP. Than again, everyone will work with PSOE.
So a choice of a minority coalition with the hard right, or a minority coalition with the separatists and terrorists. Or another roll of the dice and hope people vote differently.
They need to try a grand coalition. Push out the lunatics, promote mainstream politics and hope they flush away the Vox and Basque idiots.
Grand coalitions tend to promote the extremes, though - if people dislike the government (and every government runs into trouble), then the extremes become the only alternative. I know minority governments with confidence and supply support are not the Spanish tradition, but perhaps thast's the way to go?
Satisfying to see Vox crash and burn, though. One can get lots of media coverage and initial support by culture war stuff, but in the end people don't want it as the main raison d'etre of government.
My father-in-law did. Supposedly Vox were "for Spain", as opposed to PSOE who were in bed with "terrorists, separatists and demented lesbians".
And he was a Podemos supporter!!!!
Getting into bed with terrorists, separatists and demented lesbians is certainly a niche sexual activity. Initially novel but soon very wearing I imagine.
You can probably find something on the well-known porn site Xvideos which for some unaccountable reason is now trending on Twitter since Elon had the brilliant idea of renaming it X.
Appropriate given how he's fucking about with Twitter.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
This is why I am defeatist on climate change. There are too many with no intention of changing their lifestyles, at least not until we have trashed the planet.
I think you only need to look at the reactions to eg Just Stop Oil - or indeed the M25 at 6pm on any day - to see where the British public is wrt such action to change their lifestyles.
We don't want to.
Someone who doesn't want to change at all has access to all the information that someone who is a passionate Just Stop Oiler. So it can't be information asymmetry. It must be intention.
Oh but then you say that there are a lot of people who don't, how shall we put this, understand the complexities of climate change but then you are left with the elite telling the plebs what to do. Again. And that never usually ends well.
Nonsense.
The public will go along with policies which dont hurt much,
The problem with the current batch of policies is they are all stick and no carrot. When green policies are just misery piled upon misery or greenwashed taxation eventually you are going to be told to eff off.
What is truly pitiful about this position is that it falsely implies there is zero cost on the other side of the equation. Which works when persuading the uninformed and frankly unintelligent that they should vote against their own interests.
But this isn't GBeebies or the Daily Mail, and we know better.
Exactly. The British public knows better and doesn't want to pay that cost.
As someone who used to live literally on the inner ring road in that London (top of Grays Inn Road) I know exactly what that cost is. Air you can taste. A generation with asthma and worse. Decades of "misery piled on misery" making engines more efficient and less pollutey were followed by ULEZ. And when I go back there now the air is quite clearly cleaner than it used to be. More needs to be done and is being done.
Absolutely. It's called progress. As we get richer (using fossil fuels to do so) we then look at ways of improving our lifestyles. Totally normal. Electric cars might be a rich man's sport atm but it will develop and before too long they will become standard. Just like we don't live in woad huts and burn peat indoors any more.
Nothing to do with climate catastrophising.
I was born, and spent my early childhood, a little over a mile from a coal-fired power station (actually two, an A and a B plant). If the wind was in the wrong direction, mum had to take the washing in as it would soon be covered in little black specks. Those stations closed over twenty years ago; at their peak they produced over 1,400 tonnes of ash a day; most, but not all, was captured.
I think there are at least two aspects in play here.
Firstly, local effects. The various Clean Air acts have probably been the biggest boon for health of any UK regulation ever, and have made local air quality massively better. They plucked the low-hanging fruit. The latest sets of regulations (e.g. on NOx) are just building on these. If you think differently, just remember the 1950s London smogs.
Secondly, regional and global effects. These are much less noticeable, but just as vital.
The thing is, tackling the former also helps the latter. Would anyone want to go back to every town having dozens of tall chimneys belching our smoke? Back to the Black Country being truly black?
We have made tremendous progress on local air quality, and reasonable progress in the UK on regional air quality. There is less to do on the former, but much more needs to be done on the latter.
Let's go fly a kite Up to the highest height! Let's go fly a kite and send it soaring Up through the atmosphere Up where the air is clear
That was in the days before aircraft (other than nannies with umbrellas).
PB pedantry: Mary Poppins is set in Edwardian times - so a number of aero*planes* extant then. But no doubt at all when it comes to air*craft* as that includes aero*stats* such as hot-air and hydrogen balloons and dirigibles.
I somehow suspect it isn't a £1.3m home in Hampshire. Not if you can afford a RR and helicopter and it appears to have a large plot, lake and covered swimming pool.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
This is why I am defeatist on climate change. There are too many with no intention of changing their lifestyles, at least not until we have trashed the planet.
I think you only need to look at the reactions to eg Just Stop Oil - or indeed the M25 at 6pm on any day - to see where the British public is wrt such action to change their lifestyles.
We don't want to.
Someone who doesn't want to change at all has access to all the information that someone who is a passionate Just Stop Oiler. So it can't be information asymmetry. It must be intention.
Oh but then you say that there are a lot of people who don't, how shall we put this, understand the complexities of climate change but then you are left with the elite telling the plebs what to do. Again. And that never usually ends well.
Nonsense.
The public will go along with policies which dont hurt much,
The problem with the current batch of policies is they are all stick and no carrot. When green policies are just misery piled upon misery or greenwashed taxation eventually you are going to be told to eff off.
What is truly pitiful about this position is that it falsely implies there is zero cost on the other side of the equation. Which works when persuading the uninformed and frankly unintelligent that they should vote against their own interests.
But this isn't GBeebies or the Daily Mail, and we know better.
Exactly. The British public knows better and doesn't want to pay that cost.
As someone who used to live literally on the inner ring road in that London (top of Grays Inn Road) I know exactly what that cost is. Air you can taste. A generation with asthma and worse. Decades of "misery piled on misery" making engines more efficient and less pollutey were followed by ULEZ. And when I go back there now the air is quite clearly cleaner than it used to be. More needs to be done and is being done.
Absolutely. It's called progress. As we get richer (using fossil fuels to do so) we then look at ways of improving our lifestyles. Totally normal. Electric cars might be a rich man's sport atm but it will develop and before too long they will become standard. Just like we don't live in woad huts and burn peat indoors any more.
Nothing to do with climate catastrophising.
I was born, and spent my early childhood, a little over a mile from a coal-fired power station (actually two, an A and a B plant). If the wind was in the wrong direction, mum had to take the washing in as it would soon be covered in little black specks. Those stations closed over twenty years ago; at their peak they produced over 1,400 tonnes of ash a day; most, but not all, was captured.
I think there are at least two aspects in play here.
Firstly, local effects. The various Clean Air acts have probably been the biggest boon for health of any UK regulation ever, and have made local air quality massively better. They plucked the low-hanging fruit. The latest sets of regulations (e.g. on NOx) are just building on these. If you think differently, just remember the 1950s London smogs.
Secondly, regional and global effects. These are much less noticeable, but just as vital.
The thing is, tackling the former also helps the latter. Would anyone want to go back to every town having dozens of tall chimneys belching our smoke? Back to the Black Country being truly black?
We have made tremendous progress on local air quality, and reasonable progress in the UK on regional air quality. There is less to do on the former, but much more needs to be done on the latter.
Let's go fly a kite Up to the highest height! Let's go fly a kite and send it soaring Up through the atmosphere Up where the air is clear
That was in the days before aircraft (other than nannies with umbrellas).
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
This is why I am defeatist on climate change. There are too many with no intention of changing their lifestyles, at least not until we have trashed the planet.
I think you only need to look at the reactions to eg Just Stop Oil - or indeed the M25 at 6pm on any day - to see where the British public is wrt such action to change their lifestyles.
We don't want to.
Someone who doesn't want to change at all has access to all the information that someone who is a passionate Just Stop Oiler. So it can't be information asymmetry. It must be intention.
Oh but then you say that there are a lot of people who don't, how shall we put this, understand the complexities of climate change but then you are left with the elite telling the plebs what to do. Again. And that never usually ends well.
Nonsense.
The public will go along with policies which dont hurt much,
The problem with the current batch of policies is they are all stick and no carrot. When green policies are just misery piled upon misery or greenwashed taxation eventually you are going to be told to eff off.
What is truly pitiful about this position is that it falsely implies there is zero cost on the other side of the equation. Which works when persuading the uninformed and frankly unintelligent that they should vote against their own interests.
But this isn't GBeebies or the Daily Mail, and we know better.
Exactly. The British public knows better and doesn't want to pay that cost.
As someone who used to live literally on the inner ring road in that London (top of Grays Inn Road) I know exactly what that cost is. Air you can taste. A generation with asthma and worse. Decades of "misery piled on misery" making engines more efficient and less pollutey were followed by ULEZ. And when I go back there now the air is quite clearly cleaner than it used to be. More needs to be done and is being done.
Absolutely. It's called progress. As we get richer (using fossil fuels to do so) we then look at ways of improving our lifestyles. Totally normal. Electric cars might be a rich man's sport atm but it will develop and before too long they will become standard. Just like we don't live in woad huts and burn peat indoors any more.
Nothing to do with climate catastrophising.
Then we have the commercial reality. We need oil. It makes all kinds of useful things, so burning it for propulsion is a waste. We're sat on a finite supply of the stuff, and the more we drill the higher the access cost of the next field to be tapped.
What really makes me laugh is that the people most against electric cars have never driven one. ULEZ and urban driving has been a hot topic - an EV driven by an electric motor is massively superior as a driving experience in traffic vs a mechanic car with a gearbox.
With prices dropping and options increasing, it won't be long before choosing a mechanic car in places like Uxbridge will be as minority a choice as diesel now is.
Yes but still an expensive option now. And who's to say that, as with Diesel, the govt/technology won't progress and electric cars are seen as bad things. I mean where does all this lovely electricity come from?
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
It's a fair point, but when one is faced with orbital photos of Australia on fire in 2020 and Mediterranean islands on fire in 2023, one does start wondering if this hug-a-penguin green crap might actually have a bit of a point.
If the UK cut its carbon footprint to zero it would stop precisely nothing,
That's why I always throw my litter in the street, what difference does it make when 99.9% of litter is dropped by other people?
LOL
thats why we burn all that lignite in our coal fired power stations and have 7 of Europes top ten polluters on our land
Weve picked up our litter it would be nice if you Germans could do the same given you produce twice as much carbon as we do.
Deutschland - Spitzenverschmutzer
The German record is terrible. Obviously that is entirely my fault and I will never disagree with you again. Sorry.
Germany's record is terrible.
You lecture the rest of us while chugging out lignite emissions and buying Putins oil and gas. Your green agenda is going backwards because of public resistance to - heat pumps will go tits up here too - and you have closed down all your nuclear .
There are many places one could take a note of the green agenda, but Germany isnt really one of them.
Firstly, I am British. Secondly, I am not lecturing anyone. Thirdly, my comments apply to all countries including Germany, where I live and am far more politically active on these issues than anywhere else.
You want to lecture me about Germany for some reason (the implication seems to be I shouldn't comment because I live in a country that has a worse record than the UK, a truly pathetic 'argument'), why not tell RCS100 he has no right to comment on the issue, as I believe he lives in the US?
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
This is why I am defeatist on climate change. There are too many with no intention of changing their lifestyles, at least not until we have trashed the planet.
I think you only need to look at the reactions to eg Just Stop Oil - or indeed the M25 at 6pm on any day - to see where the British public is wrt such action to change their lifestyles.
We don't want to.
Someone who doesn't want to change at all has access to all the information that someone who is a passionate Just Stop Oiler. So it can't be information asymmetry. It must be intention.
Oh but then you say that there are a lot of people who don't, how shall we put this, understand the complexities of climate change but then you are left with the elite telling the plebs what to do. Again. And that never usually ends well.
Nonsense.
The public will go along with policies which dont hurt much,
The problem with the current batch of policies is they are all stick and no carrot. When green policies are just misery piled upon misery or greenwashed taxation eventually you are going to be told to eff off.
What is truly pitiful about this position is that it falsely implies there is zero cost on the other side of the equation. Which works when persuading the uninformed and frankly unintelligent that they should vote against their own interests.
But this isn't GBeebies or the Daily Mail, and we know better.
Exactly. The British public knows better and doesn't want to pay that cost.
As someone who used to live literally on the inner ring road in that London (top of Grays Inn Road) I know exactly what that cost is. Air you can taste. A generation with asthma and worse. Decades of "misery piled on misery" making engines more efficient and less pollutey were followed by ULEZ. And when I go back there now the air is quite clearly cleaner than it used to be. More needs to be done and is being done.
Absolutely. It's called progress. As we get richer (using fossil fuels to do so) we then look at ways of improving our lifestyles. Totally normal. Electric cars might be a rich man's sport atm but it will develop and before too long they will become standard. Just like we don't live in woad huts and burn peat indoors any more.
Nothing to do with climate catastrophising.
Then we have the commercial reality. We need oil. It makes all kinds of useful things, so burning it for propulsion is a waste. We're sat on a finite supply of the stuff, and the more we drill the higher the access cost of the next field to be tapped.
What really makes me laugh is that the people most against electric cars have never driven one. ULEZ and urban driving has been a hot topic - an EV driven by an electric motor is massively superior as a driving experience in traffic vs a mechanic car with a gearbox.
With prices dropping and options increasing, it won't be long before choosing a mechanic car in places like Uxbridge will be as minority a choice as diesel now is.
Yes but still an expensive option now. And who's to say that, as with Diesel, the govt/technology won't progress and electric cars are seen as bad things. I mean where does all this lovely electricity come from?
Lets put this one to bed - the same place that all the electricity comes from. Increasingly we are using renewables and that will only continue to increase.
But then we have to ask what the electricity is being used for? In an EV it directly drives the vehicle, with 85% energy efficiency. As mechanical cars only get around 40% energy efficiency we're already more than twice as efficient in energy use. Then we have the electricity that is needed to crack oil into things like petrol. Lots of electricity.
This is another one of those arguments where there is a clear inference that there is a zero sum on the other side of the equation. In reality electricity is way more efficient regardless of source.
I somehow suspect it isn't a £1.3m home in Hampshire. Not if you can afford a RR and helicopter and it appears to have a large plot, lake and covered swimming pool.
Date Price Address 22/10/2021 £1,100,000 Three Gables, Stapleford Lane, Durley, Southampton, SO32 2BU
£1.3M sounds about right to me. It's a substantial plot but all a bit disjointed to my mind.
Yep and Zoopla has it valued at under this so conceded @Pulpstar.
I must admit I was rather thrown by the 2 for sale ones you linked to. Wonder what the area is like?
Bloody noisy if this solicitor is using a helicopter. We always used to know when Robert Maxwell was using his helipad on top of the Mirror building.
Most of the helicopter flights round here seem to carry Lord Bamford and his entourage from their Cotswold 'farm' to their north-country factories, frequently interrupting breakfast or tea. I suppose I should console myself that they're actually doing something productive, unlike lawyers.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
It's a fair point, but when one is faced with orbital photos of Australia on fire in 2020 and Mediterranean islands on fire in 2023, one does start wondering if this hug-a-penguin green crap might actually have a bit of a point.
If the UK cut its carbon footprint to zero it would stop precisely nothing,
That's why I always throw my litter in the street, what difference does it make when 99.9% of litter is dropped by other people?
LOL
thats why we burn all that lignite in our coal fired power stations and have 7 of Europes top ten polluters on our land
Weve picked up our litter it would be nice if you Germans could do the same given you produce twice as much carbon as we do.
Deutschland - Spitzenverschmutzer
The German record is terrible. Obviously that is entirely my fault and I will never disagree with you again. Sorry.
Germany's record is terrible.
You lecture the rest of us while chugging out lignite emissions and buying Putins oil and gas. Your green agenda is going backwards because of public resistance to - heat pumps will go tits up here too - and you have closed down all your nuclear .
There are many places one could take a note of the green agenda, but Germany isnt really one of them.
Germany doesn't buy any Russian gas any more, does it? In fact, if you want to be really picky and look at the Enerdata stats, we've bought more Russian gas* than the Germans in 2023.
* Albeit we probably didn't know it was Russian, because we bought if from a UAE broker
You must be fairly desperate today Robert, Germany opened the floodgates on Russian gas many years ago and based its industry on it. It took a war to show the folly of it. Now the industry is looking exposed with even the head of the BDI saying things are looking gloomy.
They didnt base their energy on sustainable "green" under Merkel
I'm just pointing out that your criticism is a year out of date.
After all, you wrote "You lecture the rest of us while chugging out lignite emissions and buying Putins oil and gas".
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
Tosh. First, you're a complete numpty if you think you can forecast populations for the end if this century. Second, they're going to discover relatively soon that they can grow their economies faster without fossil fuels. The point of wealthier countries leading that process is to accelerate the technology development.
You're a conservative Luddite.
Im not forecasting population Im using those provided by a variety of institutions including the United Nations who do this for a living. I suggestt you will find a lot of surprises as indeed I did when you start to go through them.
As for Luddite no. I dont have your big white Bwana approach to other nations, They will do what suits them and what makes them richer. We should do the same.
'They will do what suits them and what makes them richer. We should do the same.'
Probably true, because that is what humans do but it doesn't make it a good argument for what we should do though. You know famine, drought (and ironically) floods, mass migration, unbearable temperatures, possibly tipping us over into a cascading climate event. It isn't a good plan to do just nothing because they do just nothing.
I appreciate it may all be pointless but do you have children?
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
Its not so much the sea ice but the risk that the ice shelf on Antartica is now able to slide off on a massive scale. If that happens Canary Warf becomes Canary ponds.
The rise in sea level will probably become the UK's biggest headache in the future. There is evidence that the sea level during the last interglacial period - the last time temperatures were comparable to now - was around 6 to 9 metres higher than today. It takes a while* for all that water to warm and the ice to melt, so it won't be our problem. It'll be a nasty legacy for our children and grandchildren though.
* Having said that, there have been occasions in the past when tipping points have passed and the Earth's climate has changed very rapidly, as Richard Tyndall has pointed out. It's very difficult to know what these points might be and when they will be passed, but the warming of the Earth is unlikely to remain a smooth process.
I agree about the sudden tipping points and of course that is possible. But your contention that the last time temperatures were this warm was in the last interglacial is simply wrong. In both historical and pre-historical times we have seen temperatures significantly warmer than now. This does not inform what might happen going forward as such but making such obviously refutable errors doesn't help the debate.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
This is why I am defeatist on climate change. There are too many with no intention of changing their lifestyles, at least not until we have trashed the planet.
I think you only need to look at the reactions to eg Just Stop Oil - or indeed the M25 at 6pm on any day - to see where the British public is wrt such action to change their lifestyles.
We don't want to.
Someone who doesn't want to change at all has access to all the information that someone who is a passionate Just Stop Oiler. So it can't be information asymmetry. It must be intention.
Oh but then you say that there are a lot of people who don't, how shall we put this, understand the complexities of climate change but then you are left with the elite telling the plebs what to do. Again. And that never usually ends well.
Nonsense.
The public will go along with policies which dont hurt much,
The problem with the current batch of policies is they are all stick and no carrot. When green policies are just misery piled upon misery or greenwashed taxation eventually you are going to be told to eff off.
What is truly pitiful about this position is that it falsely implies there is zero cost on the other side of the equation. Which works when persuading the uninformed and frankly unintelligent that they should vote against their own interests.
But this isn't GBeebies or the Daily Mail, and we know better.
Exactly. The British public knows better and doesn't want to pay that cost.
As someone who used to live literally on the inner ring road in that London (top of Grays Inn Road) I know exactly what that cost is. Air you can taste. A generation with asthma and worse. Decades of "misery piled on misery" making engines more efficient and less pollutey were followed by ULEZ. And when I go back there now the air is quite clearly cleaner than it used to be. More needs to be done and is being done.
Absolutely. It's called progress. As we get richer (using fossil fuels to do so) we then look at ways of improving our lifestyles. Totally normal. Electric cars might be a rich man's sport atm but it will develop and before too long they will become standard. Just like we don't live in woad huts and burn peat indoors any more.
Nothing to do with climate catastrophising.
I was born, and spent my early childhood, a little over a mile from a coal-fired power station (actually two, an A and a B plant). If the wind was in the wrong direction, mum had to take the washing in as it would soon be covered in little black specks. Those stations closed over twenty years ago; at their peak they produced over 1,400 tonnes of ash a day; most, but not all, was captured.
I think there are at least two aspects in play here.
Firstly, local effects. The various Clean Air acts have probably been the biggest boon for health of any UK regulation ever, and have made local air quality massively better. They plucked the low-hanging fruit. The latest sets of regulations (e.g. on NOx) are just building on these. If you think differently, just remember the 1950s London smogs.
Secondly, regional and global effects. These are much less noticeable, but just as vital.
The thing is, tackling the former also helps the latter. Would anyone want to go back to every town having dozens of tall chimneys belching our smoke? Back to the Black Country being truly black?
We have made tremendous progress on local air quality, and reasonable progress in the UK on regional air quality. There is less to do on the former, but much more needs to be done on the latter.
Let's go fly a kite Up to the highest height! Let's go fly a kite and send it soaring Up through the atmosphere Up where the air is clear
That was in the days before aircraft (other than nannies with umbrellas).
PB pedantry: Mary Poppins is set in Edwardian times - so a number of aero*planes* extant then. But no doubt at all when it comes to air*craft* as that includes aero*stats* such as hot-air and hydrogen balloons and dirigibles.
There's always some bloody pedant on PB ready to ruin a joke.
Seventy seven COVID deaths in the latest week of data. That's the lowest number recorded since the start of the pandemic. Non-COVID deaths running closer to the five-year average too.
Week-ending | 5-year average | COVID deaths | non-COVID deaths | non-COVID deaths in excess of the 5-year average
I somehow suspect it isn't a £1.3m home in Hampshire. Not if you can afford a RR and helicopter and it appears to have a large plot, lake and covered swimming pool.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
It's a fair point, but when one is faced with orbital photos of Australia on fire in 2020 and Mediterranean islands on fire in 2023, one does start wondering if this hug-a-penguin green crap might actually have a bit of a point.
If the UK cut its carbon footprint to zero it would stop precisely nothing,
The problem with that argument is that it means no one ever does anything.
Personally, I think the UK government - under Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, etc - has done a pretty good job on CO2 emissions and global warming.
We've substantially decarbonised our economy, reduced our dependence on imported fuel, and done this without (mostly) negatively impacting living standards.
America, Canada, Australia and the BRICS are far behind us though.
The first three probably about 20-30 years behind us. The latter? 40-50 years, if that.
They both need to accelerate - a lot.
I'm not sure that's true.
The move to renewables in power generation is astonishing, and it's happening everywhere.
Take climate change and America. They're about two years behind us in terms of taking coal out of the generating mix. And they're putting in a hell of a lot of new wind and solar.
At the same time, you're seeing an incredible shift towards electric vehicles. Because the *average* age of a vehicle is 12 years, this means only 4% of the vehicle fleet turns over every year. And that hides underlying trends. But the direction is only one way.
I think that shows everything about our approach vs the USA. THEY (& China) are doing it through carrot and technological innovation & green investment; we are wearing the hair shirt stopping coal, petrol vehicles and gas boilers but also have world leading NIMBYism stopping green energy production. Now which approach is going to bring people along with it ?
It's an extension of the endless hand-wringing over our empire and history?
At some level our leaders all think we deserve to be punished for our success.
October, I think, for the election. There'd need to be a very good reason for earlier or later and I can't see one.
The only reason I can see for an earlier election, in May, is to avoid the extra damage Sunak might take from a bad Local Elections round, defending the height of Johnson's success in 2021. Taking that as a separate hit might leave him going into a GE more weakened.
But it's a marginal call and could well be ancient history by October.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
Its not so much the sea ice but the risk that the ice shelf on Antartica is now able to slide off on a massive scale. If that happens Canary Warf becomes Canary ponds.
The rise in sea level will probably become the UK's biggest headache in the future. There is evidence that the sea level during the last interglacial period - the last time temperatures were comparable to now - was around 6 to 9 metres higher than today. It takes a while* for all that water to warm and the ice to melt, so it won't be our problem. It'll be a nasty legacy for our children and grandchildren though.
* Having said that, there have been occasions in the past when tipping points have passed and the Earth's climate has changed very rapidly, as Richard Tyndall has pointed out. It's very difficult to know what these points might be and when they will be passed, but the warming of the Earth is unlikely to remain a smooth process.
I agree about the sudden tipping points and of course that is possible. But your contention that the last time temperatures were this warm was in the last interglacial is simply wrong. In both historical and pre-historical times we have seen temperatures significantly warmer than now. This does not inform what might happen going forward as such but making such obviously refutable errors doesn't help the debate.
PB Brains Trust: can you think of a loanword from French that ends in unpronounced t and is stressed on the final syllable in normal British pronunciation? (So not beret or debut.)
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
It's a fair point, but when one is faced with orbital photos of Australia on fire in 2020 and Mediterranean islands on fire in 2023, one does start wondering if this hug-a-penguin green crap might actually have a bit of a point.
If the UK cut its carbon footprint to zero it would stop precisely nothing,
The problem with that argument is that it means no one ever does anything.
Personally, I think the UK government - under Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, etc - has done a pretty good job on CO2 emissions and global warming.
We've substantially decarbonised our economy, reduced our dependence on imported fuel, and done this without (mostly) negatively impacting living standards.
America, Canada, Australia and the BRICS are far behind us though.
The first three probably about 20-30 years behind us. The latter? 40-50 years, if that.
They both need to accelerate - a lot.
I'm not sure that's true.
The move to renewables in power generation is astonishing, and it's happening everywhere.
Take climate change and America. They're about two years behind us in terms of taking coal out of the generating mix. And they're putting in a hell of a lot of new wind and solar.
At the same time, you're seeing an incredible shift towards electric vehicles. Because the *average* age of a vehicle is 12 years, this means only 4% of the vehicle fleet turns over every year. And that hides underlying trends. But the direction is only one way.
I think that shows everything about our approach vs the USA. THEY (& China) are doing it through carrot and technological innovation & green investment; we are wearing the hair shirt stopping coal, petrol vehicles and gas boilers but also have world leading NIMBYism stopping green energy production. Now which approach is going to bring people along with it ?
It's an extension of the endless hand-wringing over our empire and history?
At some level our leaders all think we deserve to be punished for our success.
TBF, most of them deserve to be punished for *their* success given the trauma it's causing the rest of us.
So you can see where projection may come into play.
PB Brains Trust: can you think of a loanword from French that ends in unpronounced t and is stressed on the final syllable in normal British pronunciation? (So not beret or debut.)
Trebuchet?
That's stressed on the first syllable, so it would be a bit of a long shot.
I somehow suspect it isn't a £1.3m home in Hampshire. Not if you can afford a RR and helicopter and it appears to have a large plot, lake and covered swimming pool.
Date Price Address 22/10/2021 £1,100,000 Three Gables, Stapleford Lane, Durley, Southampton, SO32 2BU
£1.3M sounds about right to me. It's a substantial plot but all a bit disjointed to my mind.
Yep and Zoopla has it valued at under this so conceded @Pulpstar.
I must admit I was rather thrown by the 2 for sale ones you linked to. Wonder what the area is like?
Bloody noisy if this solicitor is using a helicopter. We always used to know when Robert Maxwell was using his helipad on top of the Mirror building.
Most of the helicopter flights round here seem to carry Lord Bamford and his entourage from their Cotswold 'farm' to their north-country factories, frequently interrupting breakfast or tea. I suppose I should console myself that they're actually doing something productive, unlike lawyers.
Bamford is a good egg, as a maker of capital equipment, much of which gets exported.
He’s generous with the helicopter as well, here’s an automotive journalist who went to visit JCB from the Cotswolds, to discuss a project to make machines which run on hydrogen in the future. https://youtube.com/watch?v=19Q7nAYjAJY
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
This is why I am defeatist on climate change. There are too many with no intention of changing their lifestyles, at least not until we have trashed the planet.
I think you only need to look at the reactions to eg Just Stop Oil - or indeed the M25 at 6pm on any day - to see where the British public is wrt such action to change their lifestyles.
We don't want to.
Someone who doesn't want to change at all has access to all the information that someone who is a passionate Just Stop Oiler. So it can't be information asymmetry. It must be intention.
Oh but then you say that there are a lot of people who don't, how shall we put this, understand the complexities of climate change but then you are left with the elite telling the plebs what to do. Again. And that never usually ends well.
Nonsense.
The public will go along with policies which dont hurt much,
The problem with the current batch of policies is they are all stick and no carrot. When green policies are just misery piled upon misery or greenwashed taxation eventually you are going to be told to eff off.
What is truly pitiful about this position is that it falsely implies there is zero cost on the other side of the equation. Which works when persuading the uninformed and frankly unintelligent that they should vote against their own interests.
But this isn't GBeebies or the Daily Mail, and we know better.
Exactly. The British public knows better and doesn't want to pay that cost.
As someone who used to live literally on the inner ring road in that London (top of Grays Inn Road) I know exactly what that cost is. Air you can taste. A generation with asthma and worse. Decades of "misery piled on misery" making engines more efficient and less pollutey were followed by ULEZ. And when I go back there now the air is quite clearly cleaner than it used to be. More needs to be done and is being done.
Absolutely. It's called progress. As we get richer (using fossil fuels to do so) we then look at ways of improving our lifestyles. Totally normal. Electric cars might be a rich man's sport atm but it will develop and before too long they will become standard. Just like we don't live in woad huts and burn peat indoors any more.
Nothing to do with climate catastrophising.
Then we have the commercial reality. We need oil. It makes all kinds of useful things, so burning it for propulsion is a waste. We're sat on a finite supply of the stuff, and the more we drill the higher the access cost of the next field to be tapped.
What really makes me laugh is that the people most against electric cars have never driven one. ULEZ and urban driving has been a hot topic - an EV driven by an electric motor is massively superior as a driving experience in traffic vs a mechanic car with a gearbox.
With prices dropping and options increasing, it won't be long before choosing a mechanic car in places like Uxbridge will be as minority a choice as diesel now is.
Yes but still an expensive option now. And who's to say that, as with Diesel, the govt/technology won't progress and electric cars are seen as bad things. I mean where does all this lovely electricity come from?
Lets put this one to bed - the same place that all the electricity comes from. Increasingly we are using renewables and that will only continue to increase.
But then we have to ask what the electricity is being used for? In an EV it directly drives the vehicle, with 85% energy efficiency. As mechanical cars only get around 40% energy efficiency we're already more than twice as efficient in energy use. Then we have the electricity that is needed to crack oil into things like petrol. Lots of electricity.
This is another one of those arguments where there is a clear inference that there is a zero sum on the other side of the equation. In reality electricity is way more efficient regardless of source.
"Regardless of source" is just wrong. Electricity comes from coal and oil, among other sources. Oil powered electricity generation is about 37% efficient.* So for the same oil an EV is getting 37 x 85 is 31% efficiency, versus your claimed 40% for ICE. Sure, lots of electric comes from solar and wind, which struggle to make 30% but that doesn't matter because the source is free, but why over egg your case with such an easily refuted claim?
On topic, Sunak will not call an election he expects to lose unless he expects things to get dramatically worse in the remaining period of the parliament.
As he would expect to lose unless the Tory polling recovers to at least near parity, and as he can have some confidence that the economy will improve through 2024 (though it won't necessarily feel like that to mortgage-holders and renters), that all points to Nov 2024 in my book.
Labour has now held a continuous double-digit lead in the polls for 10 months. That's the longest such period since pre-Iraq Blair and a measure of Labour's current dominance (one backed up by strong anti-Con tactical voting). Why on earth would he go early unless some unforeseeable event intervenes strongly to the Tories' advantage?
I somehow suspect it isn't a £1.3m home in Hampshire. Not if you can afford a RR and helicopter and it appears to have a large plot, lake and covered swimming pool.
Date Price Address 22/10/2021 £1,100,000 Three Gables, Stapleford Lane, Durley, Southampton, SO32 2BU
£1.3M sounds about right to me. It's a substantial plot but all a bit disjointed to my mind.
Yep and Zoopla has it valued at under this so conceded @Pulpstar.
I must admit I was rather thrown by the 2 for sale ones you linked to. Wonder what the area is like?
Bloody noisy if this solicitor is using a helicopter. We always used to know when Robert Maxwell was using his helipad on top of the Mirror building.
Most of the helicopter flights round here seem to carry Lord Bamford and his entourage from their Cotswold 'farm' to their north-country factories, frequently interrupting breakfast or tea. I suppose I should console myself that they're actually doing something productive, unlike lawyers.
In the centre of Roccester, right by JCB, were a series of blocky and slightly down-at-heel blocks of lowrise flats. Bamford hated these, as they were clearly visible as he flew in to the helipad (*) at JCB. They're no longer there - I don't know if they were refaced/reroofed or demolished and rebuilt.
Bamfords have a great deal of power in the area, and own a massive amount of land. Thirty-five years ago, they got together with Alton Towers for a new road to be built between Rocester (where JCB's factory is) to Uttoxeter. Then when Alton Towers wanted it extending to Alton, Bamford objected...
(Incidentally, Alton Towers used to take so much cash during the holidays that it used to e flown out by helicopter every evening after the park closed, it being cheaper and safer than transporting it in secure van along the twisting country lanes.)
(*) Directly on the course of the old Uttoxeter to Ashbourne railway line.
PB Brains Trust: can you think of a loanword from French that ends in unpronounced t and is stressed on the final syllable in normal British pronunciation? (So not beret or debut.)
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
This is why I am defeatist on climate change. There are too many with no intention of changing their lifestyles, at least not until we have trashed the planet.
I think you only need to look at the reactions to eg Just Stop Oil - or indeed the M25 at 6pm on any day - to see where the British public is wrt such action to change their lifestyles.
We don't want to.
Someone who doesn't want to change at all has access to all the information that someone who is a passionate Just Stop Oiler. So it can't be information asymmetry. It must be intention.
Oh but then you say that there are a lot of people who don't, how shall we put this, understand the complexities of climate change but then you are left with the elite telling the plebs what to do. Again. And that never usually ends well.
Nonsense.
The public will go along with policies which dont hurt much,
The problem with the current batch of policies is they are all stick and no carrot. When green policies are just misery piled upon misery or greenwashed taxation eventually you are going to be told to eff off.
One caveat to that- timeframes.
Current energy policies everywhere are going to create an awful lot of stick for people a generation or two down the line. (I think we've got past the point where we can plausibly water down that "will".)
So the question is how much misery we are going to pile on them and how much we are going to take ourselves.
Not a cheerful thought, and a hard one to sell on the doorstep. But it doesn't stop it being a necessary one, not helped by those who continue to insist that everything is fine.
Good morning
I have commented before on this but if anyone wants an example of pure zealotry then the SNP/ Green proposal that from 2025 they are to change the energy efficiency criteria so that it is impossible for any home with a gas boiler to meet category C which will be mandated for all home sales
Apparently the cost would be around 33 billion with only 1.8 billion coming from the Scottish government
You do wonder just how anyone could even think of such a stupid proposal, not least because there is not the capacity to fit all the homes with heat pumps or electricity boilers, and whoever thought an attack of this nature on homeowners in a cost of living crisis was good politics is out of touch with reality and has resonance with the ill fated poll tax
Yesterday someone posted a Scottish sub samples with labour 38% SNP 21% conservatives 17% and the question is when will crossover come between the conservatives and the SNP if this is enacted
It will be interesting to see if Starmer rejects this madness and if so how he counters it
We need to address climate change sensibly, and at a cost that the public will accept and anyway, as has been said, with Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and others refusing to take the action demanded by the G20 it is they that need to change
You've posted this quite a few times - I'm sure they have said it, but as a policy its a non-starter. A lot of homes up here would be very difficult to get to Category C. My own house was rated as Category F with the potential to improve to Category D. No government is going to make it illegal to sell granite homes when significant parts of the housing stock are granite.
So its vapourware - stop quoting it. If you want to hit the SNP on zealotry and energy (and why wouldn't you - its fun), lets go after their nonsense about blocking new oil licences. Yes we're moving away from oil. But we still need the stuff. So how does it make more sense to ship oil from the middle east rather than extracting our own?
Why would I stop reporting something which was reported in the Herald two days ago, together with the Scotsman and Times
It is an active proposal and just indicates how extreme some in the Scottish Government are on climate change
However, I do agree the policy the SNP/Greens and UK Labour to block new oil licences is a nonsense
A fair point. Without new oil licences how would Rishi fuel his helicopter rides between London and Birmingham?
I somehow suspect it isn't a £1.3m home in Hampshire. Not if you can afford a RR and helicopter and it appears to have a large plot, lake and covered swimming pool.
Date Price Address 22/10/2021 £1,100,000 Three Gables, Stapleford Lane, Durley, Southampton, SO32 2BU
£1.3M sounds about right to me. It's a substantial plot but all a bit disjointed to my mind.
Yep and Zoopla has it valued at under this so conceded @Pulpstar.
I must admit I was rather thrown by the 2 for sale ones you linked to. Wonder what the area is like?
Bloody noisy if this solicitor is using a helicopter. We always used to know when Robert Maxwell was using his helipad on top of the Mirror building.
Most of the helicopter flights round here seem to carry Lord Bamford and his entourage from their Cotswold 'farm' to their north-country factories, frequently interrupting breakfast or tea. I suppose I should console myself that they're actually doing something productive, unlike lawyers.
Bamford is a good egg, as a maker of capital equipment, much of which gets exported.
He’s generous with the helicopter as well, here’s an automotive journalist who went to visit JCB from the Cotswolds, to discuss a project to make machines which run on hydrogen in the future. https://youtube.com/watch?v=19Q7nAYjAJY
I love JCB, and have a slightly grudging respect for the Bamfords. They're known as paying well, but also being 'tough' employers, and very quick to sack people in a downturn. Having said that, a couple of distant relatives have worked there for decades.
The country is better off for having them and their company; but that does not mean they're perfect. But on the whole I'd call them good. The lefties who *hate* them because Bamford gives money to the Conservative Party are just being utterly stupid.
I somehow suspect it isn't a £1.3m home in Hampshire. Not if you can afford a RR and helicopter and it appears to have a large plot, lake and covered swimming pool.
October, I think, for the election. There'd need to be a very good reason for earlier or later and I can't see one.
The only reason I can see for an earlier election, in May, is to avoid the extra damage Sunak might take from a bad Local Elections round, defending the height of Johnson's success in 2021. Taking that as a separate hit might leave him going into a GE more weakened.
But it's a marginal call and could well be ancient history by October.
My current guess is this. Unless things change and a golden opportunity emerges (like it did for T May in 2017!?!) Rishi will want to be PM for 2 years rather than one and a bit. So after 25th October and after Diwali and well before Christmas. So November.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
This is why I am defeatist on climate change. There are too many with no intention of changing their lifestyles, at least not until we have trashed the planet.
I think you only need to look at the reactions to eg Just Stop Oil - or indeed the M25 at 6pm on any day - to see where the British public is wrt such action to change their lifestyles.
We don't want to.
Someone who doesn't want to change at all has access to all the information that someone who is a passionate Just Stop Oiler. So it can't be information asymmetry. It must be intention.
Oh but then you say that there are a lot of people who don't, how shall we put this, understand the complexities of climate change but then you are left with the elite telling the plebs what to do. Again. And that never usually ends well.
Nonsense.
The public will go along with policies which dont hurt much,
The problem with the current batch of policies is they are all stick and no carrot. When green policies are just misery piled upon misery or greenwashed taxation eventually you are going to be told to eff off.
What is truly pitiful about this position is that it falsely implies there is zero cost on the other side of the equation. Which works when persuading the uninformed and frankly unintelligent that they should vote against their own interests.
But this isn't GBeebies or the Daily Mail, and we know better.
Exactly. The British public knows better and doesn't want to pay that cost.
As someone who used to live literally on the inner ring road in that London (top of Grays Inn Road) I know exactly what that cost is. Air you can taste. A generation with asthma and worse. Decades of "misery piled on misery" making engines more efficient and less pollutey were followed by ULEZ. And when I go back there now the air is quite clearly cleaner than it used to be. More needs to be done and is being done.
Absolutely. It's called progress. As we get richer (using fossil fuels to do so) we then look at ways of improving our lifestyles. Totally normal. Electric cars might be a rich man's sport atm but it will develop and before too long they will become standard. Just like we don't live in woad huts and burn peat indoors any more.
Nothing to do with climate catastrophising.
Then we have the commercial reality. We need oil. It makes all kinds of useful things, so burning it for propulsion is a waste. We're sat on a finite supply of the stuff, and the more we drill the higher the access cost of the next field to be tapped.
What really makes me laugh is that the people most against electric cars have never driven one. ULEZ and urban driving has been a hot topic - an EV driven by an electric motor is massively superior as a driving experience in traffic vs a mechanic car with a gearbox.
With prices dropping and options increasing, it won't be long before choosing a mechanic car in places like Uxbridge will be as minority a choice as diesel now is.
Yes but still an expensive option now. And who's to say that, as with Diesel, the govt/technology won't progress and electric cars are seen as bad things. I mean where does all this lovely electricity come from?
Lets put this one to bed - the same place that all the electricity comes from. Increasingly we are using renewables and that will only continue to increase.
But then we have to ask what the electricity is being used for? In an EV it directly drives the vehicle, with 85% energy efficiency. As mechanical cars only get around 40% energy efficiency we're already more than twice as efficient in energy use. Then we have the electricity that is needed to crack oil into things like petrol. Lots of electricity.
This is another one of those arguments where there is a clear inference that there is a zero sum on the other side of the equation. In reality electricity is way more efficient regardless of source.
"Regardless of source" is just wrong. Electricity comes from coal and oil, among other sources. Oil powered electricity generation is about 37% efficient.* So for the same oil an EV is getting 37 x 85 is 31% efficiency, versus your claimed 40% for ICE. Sure, lots of electric comes from solar and wind, which struggle to make 30% but that doesn't matter because the source is free, but why over egg your case with such an easily refuted claim?
PB Brains Trust: can you think of a loanword from French that ends in unpronounced t and is stressed on the final syllable in normal British pronunciation? (So not beret or debut.)
Cabaret?
I think that's sometimes stressed on the first syllable in Britain. Rapport as above is always the last though.
I only say it as sung by Liza Minnelli, of course.
Bouquet then? Or ricochet?
Bouquet, yes. Ricochet is often stressed on the first syllable AFAIK.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
This is why I am defeatist on climate change. There are too many with no intention of changing their lifestyles, at least not until we have trashed the planet.
I think you only need to look at the reactions to eg Just Stop Oil - or indeed the M25 at 6pm on any day - to see where the British public is wrt such action to change their lifestyles.
We don't want to.
Someone who doesn't want to change at all has access to all the information that someone who is a passionate Just Stop Oiler. So it can't be information asymmetry. It must be intention.
Oh but then you say that there are a lot of people who don't, how shall we put this, understand the complexities of climate change but then you are left with the elite telling the plebs what to do. Again. And that never usually ends well.
Nonsense.
The public will go along with policies which dont hurt much,
The problem with the current batch of policies is they are all stick and no carrot. When green policies are just misery piled upon misery or greenwashed taxation eventually you are going to be told to eff off.
What is truly pitiful about this position is that it falsely implies there is zero cost on the other side of the equation. Which works when persuading the uninformed and frankly unintelligent that they should vote against their own interests.
But this isn't GBeebies or the Daily Mail, and we know better.
Exactly. The British public knows better and doesn't want to pay that cost.
As someone who used to live literally on the inner ring road in that London (top of Grays Inn Road) I know exactly what that cost is. Air you can taste. A generation with asthma and worse. Decades of "misery piled on misery" making engines more efficient and less pollutey were followed by ULEZ. And when I go back there now the air is quite clearly cleaner than it used to be. More needs to be done and is being done.
Absolutely. It's called progress. As we get richer (using fossil fuels to do so) we then look at ways of improving our lifestyles. Totally normal. Electric cars might be a rich man's sport atm but it will develop and before too long they will become standard. Just like we don't live in woad huts and burn peat indoors any more.
Nothing to do with climate catastrophising.
Then we have the commercial reality. We need oil. It makes all kinds of useful things, so burning it for propulsion is a waste. We're sat on a finite supply of the stuff, and the more we drill the higher the access cost of the next field to be tapped.
What really makes me laugh is that the people most against electric cars have never driven one. ULEZ and urban driving has been a hot topic - an EV driven by an electric motor is massively superior as a driving experience in traffic vs a mechanic car with a gearbox.
With prices dropping and options increasing, it won't be long before choosing a mechanic car in places like Uxbridge will be as minority a choice as diesel now is.
Yes but still an expensive option now. And who's to say that, as with Diesel, the govt/technology won't progress and electric cars are seen as bad things. I mean where does all this lovely electricity come from?
Lets put this one to bed - the same place that all the electricity comes from. Increasingly we are using renewables and that will only continue to increase.
But then we have to ask what the electricity is being used for? In an EV it directly drives the vehicle, with 85% energy efficiency. As mechanical cars only get around 40% energy efficiency we're already more than twice as efficient in energy use. Then we have the electricity that is needed to crack oil into things like petrol. Lots of electricity.
This is another one of those arguments where there is a clear inference that there is a zero sum on the other side of the equation. In reality electricity is way more efficient regardless of source.
"Regardless of source" is just wrong. Electricity comes from coal and oil, among other sources. Oil powered electricity generation is about 37% efficient.* So for the same oil an EV is getting 37 x 85 is 31% efficiency, versus your claimed 40% for ICE. Sure, lots of electric comes from solar and wind, which struggle to make 30% but that doesn't matter because the source is free, but why over egg your case with such an easily refuted claim?
Not really relevant to the UK, though? We stopped burning oil for electricity ages ago, have more or less given up on coal, and gas is rather more efficient (as well as releasing less carbon dioxide per joule).
But the general principle is that burning stuff is not ideal, unless heat is the energy output you're actually after.
Also- you have to think carefully about what you're trying to optimise. Is it CO2, NO2, particulates, cash, freedom from dodgy nations, something else or a mix?
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
Its not so much the sea ice but the risk that the ice shelf on Antartica is now able to slide off on a massive scale. If that happens Canary Warf becomes Canary ponds.
The rise in sea level will probably become the UK's biggest headache in the future. There is evidence that the sea level during the last interglacial period - the last time temperatures were comparable to now - was around 6 to 9 metres higher than today. It takes a while* for all that water to warm and the ice to melt, so it won't be our problem. It'll be a nasty legacy for our children and grandchildren though.
* Having said that, there have been occasions in the past when tipping points have passed and the Earth's climate has changed very rapidly, as Richard Tyndall has pointed out. It's very difficult to know what these points might be and when they will be passed, but the warming of the Earth is unlikely to remain a smooth process.
I agree about the sudden tipping points and of course that is possible. But your contention that the last time temperatures were this warm was in the last interglacial is simply wrong. In both historical and pre-historical times we have seen temperatures significantly warmer than now. This does not inform what might happen going forward as such but making such obviously refutable errors doesn't help the debate.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
This is why I am defeatist on climate change. There are too many with no intention of changing their lifestyles, at least not until we have trashed the planet.
I think you only need to look at the reactions to eg Just Stop Oil - or indeed the M25 at 6pm on any day - to see where the British public is wrt such action to change their lifestyles.
We don't want to.
Someone who doesn't want to change at all has access to all the information that someone who is a passionate Just Stop Oiler. So it can't be information asymmetry. It must be intention.
Oh but then you say that there are a lot of people who don't, how shall we put this, understand the complexities of climate change but then you are left with the elite telling the plebs what to do. Again. And that never usually ends well.
Nonsense.
The public will go along with policies which dont hurt much,
The problem with the current batch of policies is they are all stick and no carrot. When green policies are just misery piled upon misery or greenwashed taxation eventually you are going to be told to eff off.
What is truly pitiful about this position is that it falsely implies there is zero cost on the other side of the equation. Which works when persuading the uninformed and frankly unintelligent that they should vote against their own interests.
But this isn't GBeebies or the Daily Mail, and we know better.
Exactly. The British public knows better and doesn't want to pay that cost.
As someone who used to live literally on the inner ring road in that London (top of Grays Inn Road) I know exactly what that cost is. Air you can taste. A generation with asthma and worse. Decades of "misery piled on misery" making engines more efficient and less pollutey were followed by ULEZ. And when I go back there now the air is quite clearly cleaner than it used to be. More needs to be done and is being done.
Absolutely. It's called progress. As we get richer (using fossil fuels to do so) we then look at ways of improving our lifestyles. Totally normal. Electric cars might be a rich man's sport atm but it will develop and before too long they will become standard. Just like we don't live in woad huts and burn peat indoors any more.
Nothing to do with climate catastrophising.
Then we have the commercial reality. We need oil. It makes all kinds of useful things, so burning it for propulsion is a waste. We're sat on a finite supply of the stuff, and the more we drill the higher the access cost of the next field to be tapped.
What really makes me laugh is that the people most against electric cars have never driven one. ULEZ and urban driving has been a hot topic - an EV driven by an electric motor is massively superior as a driving experience in traffic vs a mechanic car with a gearbox.
With prices dropping and options increasing, it won't be long before choosing a mechanic car in places like Uxbridge will be as minority a choice as diesel now is.
Yes but still an expensive option now. And who's to say that, as with Diesel, the govt/technology won't progress and electric cars are seen as bad things. I mean where does all this lovely electricity come from?
Lets put this one to bed - the same place that all the electricity comes from. Increasingly we are using renewables and that will only continue to increase.
But then we have to ask what the electricity is being used for? In an EV it directly drives the vehicle, with 85% energy efficiency. As mechanical cars only get around 40% energy efficiency we're already more than twice as efficient in energy use. Then we have the electricity that is needed to crack oil into things like petrol. Lots of electricity.
This is another one of those arguments where there is a clear inference that there is a zero sum on the other side of the equation. In reality electricity is way more efficient regardless of source.
"Regardless of source" is just wrong. Electricity comes from coal and oil, among other sources. Oil powered electricity generation is about 37% efficient.* So for the same oil an EV is getting 37 x 85 is 31% efficiency, versus your claimed 40% for ICE. Sure, lots of electric comes from solar and wind, which struggle to make 30% but that doesn't matter because the source is free, but why over egg your case with such an easily refuted claim?
You make a reasonable point, but in the UK we don't generate electricity by burning oil at a large scale any more. Depending how you measure it, CCGT (gas) plants have about a 50% effiency.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
This is why I am defeatist on climate change. There are too many with no intention of changing their lifestyles, at least not until we have trashed the planet.
I think you only need to look at the reactions to eg Just Stop Oil - or indeed the M25 at 6pm on any day - to see where the British public is wrt such action to change their lifestyles.
We don't want to.
Someone who doesn't want to change at all has access to all the information that someone who is a passionate Just Stop Oiler. So it can't be information asymmetry. It must be intention.
Oh but then you say that there are a lot of people who don't, how shall we put this, understand the complexities of climate change but then you are left with the elite telling the plebs what to do. Again. And that never usually ends well.
Nonsense.
The public will go along with policies which dont hurt much,
The problem with the current batch of policies is they are all stick and no carrot. When green policies are just misery piled upon misery or greenwashed taxation eventually you are going to be told to eff off.
What is truly pitiful about this position is that it falsely implies there is zero cost on the other side of the equation. Which works when persuading the uninformed and frankly unintelligent that they should vote against their own interests.
But this isn't GBeebies or the Daily Mail, and we know better.
Exactly. The British public knows better and doesn't want to pay that cost.
As someone who used to live literally on the inner ring road in that London (top of Grays Inn Road) I know exactly what that cost is. Air you can taste. A generation with asthma and worse. Decades of "misery piled on misery" making engines more efficient and less pollutey were followed by ULEZ. And when I go back there now the air is quite clearly cleaner than it used to be. More needs to be done and is being done.
Absolutely. It's called progress. As we get richer (using fossil fuels to do so) we then look at ways of improving our lifestyles. Totally normal. Electric cars might be a rich man's sport atm but it will develop and before too long they will become standard. Just like we don't live in woad huts and burn peat indoors any more.
Nothing to do with climate catastrophising.
Then we have the commercial reality. We need oil. It makes all kinds of useful things, so burning it for propulsion is a waste. We're sat on a finite supply of the stuff, and the more we drill the higher the access cost of the next field to be tapped.
What really makes me laugh is that the people most against electric cars have never driven one. ULEZ and urban driving has been a hot topic - an EV driven by an electric motor is massively superior as a driving experience in traffic vs a mechanic car with a gearbox.
With prices dropping and options increasing, it won't be long before choosing a mechanic car in places like Uxbridge will be as minority a choice as diesel now is.
Yes but still an expensive option now. And who's to say that, as with Diesel, the govt/technology won't progress and electric cars are seen as bad things. I mean where does all this lovely electricity come from?
Lets put this one to bed - the same place that all the electricity comes from. Increasingly we are using renewables and that will only continue to increase.
But then we have to ask what the electricity is being used for? In an EV it directly drives the vehicle, with 85% energy efficiency. As mechanical cars only get around 40% energy efficiency we're already more than twice as efficient in energy use. Then we have the electricity that is needed to crack oil into things like petrol. Lots of electricity.
This is another one of those arguments where there is a clear inference that there is a zero sum on the other side of the equation. In reality electricity is way more efficient regardless of source.
"Regardless of source" is just wrong. Electricity comes from coal and oil, among other sources. Oil powered electricity generation is about 37% efficient.* So for the same oil an EV is getting 37 x 85 is 31% efficiency, versus your claimed 40% for ICE. Sure, lots of electric comes from solar and wind, which struggle to make 30% but that doesn't matter because the source is free, but why over egg your case with such an easily refuted claim?
Not really relevant to the UK, though? We stopped burning oil for electricity ages ago, have more or less given up on coal, and gas is rather more efficient (as well as releasing less carbon dioxide per joule).
But the general principle is that burning stuff is not ideal, unless heat is the energy output you're actually after.
Also- you have to think carefully about what you're trying to optimise. Is it CO2, NO2, particulates, cash, freedom from dodgy nations, something else or a mix?
On a point of pedantry:*
Shetland and the Western Isles still burn oil for electricity.
*aka known as 'showing I can still be the biggest pedant around.'
On topic, Sunak will not call an election he expects to lose unless he expects things to get dramatically worse in the remaining period of the parliament.
As he would expect to lose unless the Tory polling recovers to at least near parity, and as he can have some confidence that the economy will improve through 2024 (though it won't necessarily feel like that to mortgage-holders and renters), that all points to Nov 2024 in my book.
Labour has now held a continuous double-digit lead in the polls for 10 months. That's the longest such period since pre-Iraq Blair and a measure of Labour's current dominance (one backed up by strong anti-Con tactical voting). Why on earth would he go early unless some unforeseeable event intervenes strongly to the Tories' advantage?
Agree.
Out of interest do you think he will even if 'he expects things will get dramatically worse'?
What is worse losing power say 6 months or a year earlier or hanging on and losing by a bigger margin. I don't know and suspect the answer is different for different people and what your personal motives are compared to your ambitions for your party or country.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
It's a fair point, but when one is faced with orbital photos of Australia on fire in 2020 and Mediterranean islands on fire in 2023, one does start wondering if this hug-a-penguin green crap might actually have a bit of a point.
If the UK cut its carbon footprint to zero it would stop precisely nothing,
The problem with that argument is that it means no one ever does anything.
Personally, I think the UK government - under Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, etc - has done a pretty good job on CO2 emissions and global warming.
We've substantially decarbonised our economy, reduced our dependence on imported fuel, and done this without (mostly) negatively impacting living standards.
America, Canada, Australia and the BRICS are far behind us though.
The first three probably about 20-30 years behind us. The latter? 40-50 years, if that.
They both need to accelerate - a lot.
I'm not sure that's true.
The move to renewables in power generation is astonishing, and it's happening everywhere.
Take climate change and America. They're about two years behind us in terms of taking coal out of the generating mix. And they're putting in a hell of a lot of new wind and solar.
At the same time, you're seeing an incredible shift towards electric vehicles. Because the *average* age of a vehicle is 12 years, this means only 4% of the vehicle fleet turns over every year. And that hides underlying trends. But the direction is only one way.
I think that shows everything about our approach vs the USA. THEY (& China) are doing it through carrot and technological innovation & green investment; we are wearing the hair shirt stopping coal, petrol vehicles and gas boilers but also have world leading NIMBYism stopping green energy production. Now which approach is going to bring people along with it ?
It's an extension of the endless hand-wringing over our empire and history?
What realistically could Rishi do between now and next year to give the Tories a positive boost ahead of an election?
The sad but probably true answer is that doing nothing probably helps a bit. Make the government as invisible as possible allowing maximum scrutiny to fall on Labour.
There is almost nothing he can afford to give away now the fiscal situation has deteriorated so badly. So tax cuts or big spending boosts are out. He can wait for inflation to fall, as it certainly will, but prices will still be higher than before. “Stopping the boats” is one of those risky policies (like cutting crime) where if you fail your own targets you come off worse than if you’d never set them, and if you meet them everyone forgets the issue.
Finally, getting the economy moving again is great but it probably empowers people to dream of better things and decide it’s time for a change.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
This is why I am defeatist on climate change. There are too many with no intention of changing their lifestyles, at least not until we have trashed the planet.
I think you only need to look at the reactions to eg Just Stop Oil - or indeed the M25 at 6pm on any day - to see where the British public is wrt such action to change their lifestyles.
We don't want to.
Someone who doesn't want to change at all has access to all the information that someone who is a passionate Just Stop Oiler. So it can't be information asymmetry. It must be intention.
Oh but then you say that there are a lot of people who don't, how shall we put this, understand the complexities of climate change but then you are left with the elite telling the plebs what to do. Again. And that never usually ends well.
Nonsense.
The public will go along with policies which dont hurt much,
The problem with the current batch of policies is they are all stick and no carrot. When green policies are just misery piled upon misery or greenwashed taxation eventually you are going to be told to eff off.
What is truly pitiful about this position is that it falsely implies there is zero cost on the other side of the equation. Which works when persuading the uninformed and frankly unintelligent that they should vote against their own interests.
But this isn't GBeebies or the Daily Mail, and we know better.
Exactly. The British public knows better and doesn't want to pay that cost.
As someone who used to live literally on the inner ring road in that London (top of Grays Inn Road) I know exactly what that cost is. Air you can taste. A generation with asthma and worse. Decades of "misery piled on misery" making engines more efficient and less pollutey were followed by ULEZ. And when I go back there now the air is quite clearly cleaner than it used to be. More needs to be done and is being done.
Absolutely. It's called progress. As we get richer (using fossil fuels to do so) we then look at ways of improving our lifestyles. Totally normal. Electric cars might be a rich man's sport atm but it will develop and before too long they will become standard. Just like we don't live in woad huts and burn peat indoors any more.
Nothing to do with climate catastrophising.
Then we have the commercial reality. We need oil. It makes all kinds of useful things, so burning it for propulsion is a waste. We're sat on a finite supply of the stuff, and the more we drill the higher the access cost of the next field to be tapped.
What really makes me laugh is that the people most against electric cars have never driven one. ULEZ and urban driving has been a hot topic - an EV driven by an electric motor is massively superior as a driving experience in traffic vs a mechanic car with a gearbox.
With prices dropping and options increasing, it won't be long before choosing a mechanic car in places like Uxbridge will be as minority a choice as diesel now is.
Yes but still an expensive option now. And who's to say that, as with Diesel, the govt/technology won't progress and electric cars are seen as bad things. I mean where does all this lovely electricity come from?
Lets put this one to bed - the same place that all the electricity comes from. Increasingly we are using renewables and that will only continue to increase.
But then we have to ask what the electricity is being used for? In an EV it directly drives the vehicle, with 85% energy efficiency. As mechanical cars only get around 40% energy efficiency we're already more than twice as efficient in energy use. Then we have the electricity that is needed to crack oil into things like petrol. Lots of electricity.
This is another one of those arguments where there is a clear inference that there is a zero sum on the other side of the equation. In reality electricity is way more efficient regardless of source.
"Regardless of source" is just wrong. Electricity comes from coal and oil, among other sources. Oil powered electricity generation is about 37% efficient.* So for the same oil an EV is getting 37 x 85 is 31% efficiency, versus your claimed 40% for ICE. Sure, lots of electric comes from solar and wind, which struggle to make 30% but that doesn't matter because the source is free, but why over egg your case with such an easily refuted claim?
Not really relevant to the UK, though? We stopped burning oil for electricity ages ago, have more or less given up on coal, and gas is rather more efficient (as well as releasing less carbon dioxide per joule).
But the general principle is that burning stuff is not ideal, unless heat is the energy output you're actually after.
Also- you have to think carefully about what you're trying to optimise. Is it CO2, NO2, particulates, cash, freedom from dodgy nations, something else or a mix?
Yes, hence my qualification about sun and wind power. But the point was very clearly put as an absolute proposition of physics: In reality electricity is way more efficient regardless of source, and it takes an 11 year old's understanding of physics to see this is wrong.
I somehow suspect it isn't a £1.3m home in Hampshire. Not if you can afford a RR and helicopter and it appears to have a large plot, lake and covered swimming pool.
On topic, Sunak will not call an election he expects to lose unless he expects things to get dramatically worse in the remaining period of the parliament.
As he would expect to lose unless the Tory polling recovers to at least near parity, and as he can have some confidence that the economy will improve through 2024 (though it won't necessarily feel like that to mortgage-holders and renters), that all points to Nov 2024 in my book.
Labour has now held a continuous double-digit lead in the polls for 10 months. That's the longest such period since pre-Iraq Blair and a measure of Labour's current dominance (one backed up by strong anti-Con tactical voting). Why on earth would he go early unless some unforeseeable event intervenes strongly to the Tories' advantage?
Agree.
Out of interest do you think he will even if 'he expects things will get dramatically worse'?
What is worse losing power say 6 months or a year earlier or hanging on and losing by a bigger margin. I don't know and suspect the answer is different for different people and what your personal motives are compared to your ambitions for your party or country.
I can't remember who generated it, but there was a bar chart showing that a significant number of Tory MPs expect to win the election (and the rest are already planning their life as ex-MPs).
So if so many Tory MPs are utterly convinced they are right and just, then they will win the election anyway. And the longer they hold on the longer they have had to deliver their winning policies to a grateful electorate...
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
Its not so much the sea ice but the risk that the ice shelf on Antartica is now able to slide off on a massive scale. If that happens Canary Warf becomes Canary ponds.
The rise in sea level will probably become the UK's biggest headache in the future. There is evidence that the sea level during the last interglacial period - the last time temperatures were comparable to now - was around 6 to 9 metres higher than today. It takes a while* for all that water to warm and the ice to melt, so it won't be our problem. It'll be a nasty legacy for our children and grandchildren though.
* Having said that, there have been occasions in the past when tipping points have passed and the Earth's climate has changed very rapidly, as Richard Tyndall has pointed out. It's very difficult to know what these points might be and when they will be passed, but the warming of the Earth is unlikely to remain a smooth process.
I agree about the sudden tipping points and of course that is possible. But your contention that the last time temperatures were this warm was in the last interglacial is simply wrong. In both historical and pre-historical times we have seen temperatures significantly warmer than now. This does not inform what might happen going forward as such but making such obviously refutable errors doesn't help the debate.
Hahahahaha. Bollocks. Not to put it too politiely.
Pure denial. Sad.
Nope. Based on knowledge. Something you obviously lack.
I have cited an article, based on interviews with climate scientists, to back up my assertion. You have cited nothing to back up yours. If you want to have a meaningful discussion, provide some evidence, otherwise there's no point listening to you.
For all the reasons discussed before - no reason to go early, can't leave it to the last second, wishing to be PM for 2 years I suspect the election date will be 24th October 2024....
Excellent, necessary article by @LeorSapir on the growing realization in the US - even among Democrats - that youth “gender affirming care” is not care at all but set to be exposed as a major medical scandal.
Question - I have no idea. The next USA presidential election is 5 November. Will Rishi have any interest, advantage or disadvantage in having our GE before, during or after this?
For all the reasons discussed before - no reason to go early, can't leave it to the last second, wishing to be PM for 2 years I suspect the election date will be 24th October 2024....
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
This is why I am defeatist on climate change. There are too many with no intention of changing their lifestyles, at least not until we have trashed the planet.
I think you only need to look at the reactions to eg Just Stop Oil - or indeed the M25 at 6pm on any day - to see where the British public is wrt such action to change their lifestyles.
We don't want to.
Someone who doesn't want to change at all has access to all the information that someone who is a passionate Just Stop Oiler. So it can't be information asymmetry. It must be intention.
Oh but then you say that there are a lot of people who don't, how shall we put this, understand the complexities of climate change but then you are left with the elite telling the plebs what to do. Again. And that never usually ends well.
Nonsense.
The public will go along with policies which dont hurt much,
The problem with the current batch of policies is they are all stick and no carrot. When green policies are just misery piled upon misery or greenwashed taxation eventually you are going to be told to eff off.
What is truly pitiful about this position is that it falsely implies there is zero cost on the other side of the equation. Which works when persuading the uninformed and frankly unintelligent that they should vote against their own interests.
But this isn't GBeebies or the Daily Mail, and we know better.
Exactly. The British public knows better and doesn't want to pay that cost.
As someone who used to live literally on the inner ring road in that London (top of Grays Inn Road) I know exactly what that cost is. Air you can taste. A generation with asthma and worse. Decades of "misery piled on misery" making engines more efficient and less pollutey were followed by ULEZ. And when I go back there now the air is quite clearly cleaner than it used to be. More needs to be done and is being done.
Absolutely. It's called progress. As we get richer (using fossil fuels to do so) we then look at ways of improving our lifestyles. Totally normal. Electric cars might be a rich man's sport atm but it will develop and before too long they will become standard. Just like we don't live in woad huts and burn peat indoors any more.
Nothing to do with climate catastrophising.
Then we have the commercial reality. We need oil. It makes all kinds of useful things, so burning it for propulsion is a waste. We're sat on a finite supply of the stuff, and the more we drill the higher the access cost of the next field to be tapped.
What really makes me laugh is that the people most against electric cars have never driven one. ULEZ and urban driving has been a hot topic - an EV driven by an electric motor is massively superior as a driving experience in traffic vs a mechanic car with a gearbox.
With prices dropping and options increasing, it won't be long before choosing a mechanic car in places like Uxbridge will be as minority a choice as diesel now is.
Yes but still an expensive option now. And who's to say that, as with Diesel, the govt/technology won't progress and electric cars are seen as bad things. I mean where does all this lovely electricity come from?
Lets put this one to bed - the same place that all the electricity comes from. Increasingly we are using renewables and that will only continue to increase.
But then we have to ask what the electricity is being used for? In an EV it directly drives the vehicle, with 85% energy efficiency. As mechanical cars only get around 40% energy efficiency we're already more than twice as efficient in energy use. Then we have the electricity that is needed to crack oil into things like petrol. Lots of electricity.
This is another one of those arguments where there is a clear inference that there is a zero sum on the other side of the equation. In reality electricity is way more efficient regardless of source.
"Regardless of source" is just wrong. Electricity comes from coal and oil, among other sources. Oil powered electricity generation is about 37% efficient.* So for the same oil an EV is getting 37 x 85 is 31% efficiency, versus your claimed 40% for ICE. Sure, lots of electric comes from solar and wind, which struggle to make 30% but that doesn't matter because the source is free, but why over egg your case with such an easily refuted claim?
Not really relevant to the UK, though? We stopped burning oil for electricity ages ago, have more or less given up on coal, and gas is rather more efficient (as well as releasing less carbon dioxide per joule).
But the general principle is that burning stuff is not ideal, unless heat is the energy output you're actually after.
Also- you have to think carefully about what you're trying to optimise. Is it CO2, NO2, particulates, cash, freedom from dodgy nations, something else or a mix?
Yes, hence my qualification about sun and wind power. But the point was very clearly put as an absolute proposition of physics: In reality electricity is way more efficient regardless of source, and it takes an 11 year old's understanding of physics to see this is wrong.
We may be at crossed-purposes. Yes of course some electricity generation is better than others. My point is that it takes electricity to make petrol to burn in a piston engine, which then is half as efficient as using electric motors.
Even if we generated 100% of our electricity by burning gas, its better to use that electricity to directly drive the car than to use it to crack oil.
I somehow suspect it isn't a £1.3m home in Hampshire. Not if you can afford a RR and helicopter and it appears to have a large plot, lake and covered swimming pool.
Date Price Address 22/10/2021 £1,100,000 Three Gables, Stapleford Lane, Durley, Southampton, SO32 2BU
£1.3M sounds about right to me. It's a substantial plot but all a bit disjointed to my mind.
Yep and Zoopla has it valued at under this so conceded @Pulpstar.
I must admit I was rather thrown by the 2 for sale ones you linked to. Wonder what the area is like?
Bloody noisy if this solicitor is using a helicopter. We always used to know when Robert Maxwell was using his helipad on top of the Mirror building.
Most of the helicopter flights round here seem to carry Lord Bamford and his entourage from their Cotswold 'farm' to their north-country factories, frequently interrupting breakfast or tea. I suppose I should console myself that they're actually doing something productive, unlike lawyers.
Bamford is a good egg, as a maker of capital equipment, much of which gets exported.
He’s generous with the helicopter as well, here’s an automotive journalist who went to visit JCB from the Cotswolds, to discuss a project to make machines which run on hydrogen in the future. https://youtube.com/watch?v=19Q7nAYjAJY
I love JCB, and have a slightly grudging respect for the Bamfords. They're known as paying well, but also being 'tough' employers, and very quick to sack people in a downturn. Having said that, a couple of distant relatives have worked there for decades.
The country is better off for having them and their company; but that does not mean they're perfect. But on the whole I'd call them good. The lefties who *hate* them because Bamford gives money to the Conservative Party are just being utterly stupid.
I think that's fair, on the whole. But I think we'd also be better off if we were to limit the ability of billionaires to give large amounts of money to political causes. It is undemocratic.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
It's a fair point, but when one is faced with orbital photos of Australia on fire in 2020 and Mediterranean islands on fire in 2023, one does start wondering if this hug-a-penguin green crap might actually have a bit of a point.
If the UK cut its carbon footprint to zero it would stop precisely nothing,
That's why I always throw my litter in the street, what difference does it make when 99.9% of litter is dropped by other people?
LOL
thats why we burn all that lignite in our coal fired power stations and have 7 of Europes top ten polluters on our land
Weve picked up our litter it would be nice if you Germans could do the same given you produce twice as much carbon as we do.
Deutschland - Spitzenverschmutzer
The German record is terrible. Obviously that is entirely my fault and I will never disagree with you again. Sorry.
Germany's record is terrible.
You lecture the rest of us while chugging out lignite emissions and buying Putins oil and gas. Your green agenda is going backwards because of public resistance to - heat pumps will go tits up here too - and you have closed down all your nuclear .
There are many places one could take a note of the green agenda, but Germany isnt really one of them.
Germany doesn't buy any Russian gas any more, does it? In fact, if you want to be really picky and look at the Enerdata stats, we've bought more Russian gas* than the Germans in 2023.
* Albeit we probably didn't know it was Russian, because we bought if from a UAE broker
You must be fairly desperate today Robert, Germany opened the floodgates on Russian gas many years ago and based its industry on it. It took a war to show the folly of it. Now the industry is looking exposed with even the head of the BDI saying things are looking gloomy.
They didnt base their energy on sustainable "green" under Merkel
I'm just pointing out that your criticism is a year out of date.
After all, you wrote "You lecture the rest of us while chugging out lignite emissions and buying Putins oil and gas".
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
Tosh. First, you're a complete numpty if you think you can forecast populations for the end if this century. Second, they're going to discover relatively soon that they can grow their economies faster without fossil fuels. The point of wealthier countries leading that process is to accelerate the technology development.
You're a conservative Luddite.
Im not forecasting population Im using those provided by a variety of institutions including the United Nations who do this for a living. I suggestt you will find a lot of surprises as indeed I did when you start to go through them.
As for Luddite no. I dont have your big white Bwana approach to other nations, They will do what suits them and what makes them richer. We should do the same.
Abusive, and demonstrably wrong.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth ... the 2012 report predicted that the population of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, would rise to 914 million by 2100; the 2022 report lowers that to 546 million, a reduction of 368 million...
Sorry been out,
You pays your money and you takes your choice, and there are lots of forecasts out there saying a bigger number than 500 million. Either way the population of Nigeria is due a substantial increase and nobody in Nigeria is thinking they want to stay in poverty.
Question - I have no idea. The next USA presidential election is 5 November. Will Rishi have any interest, advantage or disadvantage in having our GE before, during or after this?
I think that is a mahoosive issue for the political betting fraternity, and irrelevant outside it.
I am always worried about political betting going mainstream and turning into an efficient market. I almost never bet outside of politics, but my impression is solid tips on 10/1 shots (h/t HYUFD, regrettably did not follow) are rare as hen's teeth on the horses and the fitba.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
It's a fair point, but when one is faced with orbital photos of Australia on fire in 2020 and Mediterranean islands on fire in 2023, one does start wondering if this hug-a-penguin green crap might actually have a bit of a point.
If the UK cut its carbon footprint to zero it would stop precisely nothing,
That's why I always throw my litter in the street, what difference does it make when 99.9% of litter is dropped by other people?
LOL
thats why we burn all that lignite in our coal fired power stations and have 7 of Europes top ten polluters on our land
Weve picked up our litter it would be nice if you Germans could do the same given you produce twice as much carbon as we do.
Deutschland - Spitzenverschmutzer
The German record is terrible. Obviously that is entirely my fault and I will never disagree with you again. Sorry.
Germany's record is terrible.
You lecture the rest of us while chugging out lignite emissions and buying Putins oil and gas. Your green agenda is going backwards because of public resistance to - heat pumps will go tits up here too - and you have closed down all your nuclear .
There are many places one could take a note of the green agenda, but Germany isnt really one of them.
Firstly, I am British. Secondly, I am not lecturing anyone. Thirdly, my comments apply to all countries including Germany, where I live and am far more politically active on these issues than anywhere else.
You want to lecture me about Germany for some reason (the implication seems to be I shouldn't comment because I live in a country that has a worse record than the UK, a truly pathetic 'argument'), why not tell RCS100 he has no right to comment on the issue, as I believe he lives in the US?
You can comment as much as you wish. thats what the board is for.
On topic, Sunak will not call an election he expects to lose unless he expects things to get dramatically worse in the remaining period of the parliament.
As he would expect to lose unless the Tory polling recovers to at least near parity, and as he can have some confidence that the economy will improve through 2024 (though it won't necessarily feel like that to mortgage-holders and renters), that all points to Nov 2024 in my book.
Labour has now held a continuous double-digit lead in the polls for 10 months. That's the longest such period since pre-Iraq Blair and a measure of Labour's current dominance (one backed up by strong anti-Con tactical voting). Why on earth would he go early unless some unforeseeable event intervenes strongly to the Tories' advantage?
Agree.
Out of interest do you think he will even if 'he expects things will get dramatically worse'?
What is worse losing power say 6 months or a year earlier or hanging on and losing by a bigger margin. I don't know and suspect the answer is different for different people and what your personal motives are compared to your ambitions for your party or country.
I can't remember who generated it, but there was a bar chart showing that a significant number of Tory MPs expect to win the election (and the rest are already planning their life as ex-MPs).
So if so many Tory MPs are utterly convinced they are right and just, then they will win the election anyway. And the longer they hold on the longer they have had to deliver their winning policies to a grateful electorate...
I think the 'we'll win' respondents knew that they were being polled and the poll would be published, and the optics of admitting you know you're going to lose is a bad look. I'm surprised as many said 'no' as they did, but then there are a disproportionate number of out-and-proud thickos on the blue team these days.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
This is why I am defeatist on climate change. There are too many with no intention of changing their lifestyles, at least not until we have trashed the planet.
I think you only need to look at the reactions to eg Just Stop Oil - or indeed the M25 at 6pm on any day - to see where the British public is wrt such action to change their lifestyles.
We don't want to.
Someone who doesn't want to change at all has access to all the information that someone who is a passionate Just Stop Oiler. So it can't be information asymmetry. It must be intention.
Oh but then you say that there are a lot of people who don't, how shall we put this, understand the complexities of climate change but then you are left with the elite telling the plebs what to do. Again. And that never usually ends well.
Nonsense.
The public will go along with policies which dont hurt much,
The problem with the current batch of policies is they are all stick and no carrot. When green policies are just misery piled upon misery or greenwashed taxation eventually you are going to be told to eff off.
What is truly pitiful about this position is that it falsely implies there is zero cost on the other side of the equation. Which works when persuading the uninformed and frankly unintelligent that they should vote against their own interests.
But this isn't GBeebies or the Daily Mail, and we know better.
Exactly. The British public knows better and doesn't want to pay that cost.
As someone who used to live literally on the inner ring road in that London (top of Grays Inn Road) I know exactly what that cost is. Air you can taste. A generation with asthma and worse. Decades of "misery piled on misery" making engines more efficient and less pollutey were followed by ULEZ. And when I go back there now the air is quite clearly cleaner than it used to be. More needs to be done and is being done.
Absolutely. It's called progress. As we get richer (using fossil fuels to do so) we then look at ways of improving our lifestyles. Totally normal. Electric cars might be a rich man's sport atm but it will develop and before too long they will become standard. Just like we don't live in woad huts and burn peat indoors any more.
Nothing to do with climate catastrophising.
Then we have the commercial reality. We need oil. It makes all kinds of useful things, so burning it for propulsion is a waste. We're sat on a finite supply of the stuff, and the more we drill the higher the access cost of the next field to be tapped.
What really makes me laugh is that the people most against electric cars have never driven one. ULEZ and urban driving has been a hot topic - an EV driven by an electric motor is massively superior as a driving experience in traffic vs a mechanic car with a gearbox.
With prices dropping and options increasing, it won't be long before choosing a mechanic car in places like Uxbridge will be as minority a choice as diesel now is.
Yes but still an expensive option now. And who's to say that, as with Diesel, the govt/technology won't progress and electric cars are seen as bad things. I mean where does all this lovely electricity come from?
Lets put this one to bed - the same place that all the electricity comes from. Increasingly we are using renewables and that will only continue to increase.
But then we have to ask what the electricity is being used for? In an EV it directly drives the vehicle, with 85% energy efficiency. As mechanical cars only get around 40% energy efficiency we're already more than twice as efficient in energy use. Then we have the electricity that is needed to crack oil into things like petrol. Lots of electricity.
This is another one of those arguments where there is a clear inference that there is a zero sum on the other side of the equation. In reality electricity is way more efficient regardless of source.
"Regardless of source" is just wrong. Electricity comes from coal and oil, among other sources. Oil powered electricity generation is about 37% efficient.* So for the same oil an EV is getting 37 x 85 is 31% efficiency, versus your claimed 40% for ICE. Sure, lots of electric comes from solar and wind, which struggle to make 30% but that doesn't matter because the source is free, but why over egg your case with such an easily refuted claim?
Not really relevant to the UK, though? We stopped burning oil for electricity ages ago, have more or less given up on coal, and gas is rather more efficient (as well as releasing less carbon dioxide per joule).
But the general principle is that burning stuff is not ideal, unless heat is the energy output you're actually after.
Also- you have to think carefully about what you're trying to optimise. Is it CO2, NO2, particulates, cash, freedom from dodgy nations, something else or a mix?
On a point of pedantry:*
Shetland and the Western Isles still burn oil for electricity.
*aka known as 'showing I can still be the biggest pedant around.'
I didn't know that, re Western Isles. I thought it was all via the interconnector (which, on googling, seems to be mostly the case, but peak demand from the Stornoway generator.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
It's a fair point, but when one is faced with orbital photos of Australia on fire in 2020 and Mediterranean islands on fire in 2023, one does start wondering if this hug-a-penguin green crap might actually have a bit of a point.
If the UK cut its carbon footprint to zero it would stop precisely nothing,
That's why I always throw my litter in the street, what difference does it make when 99.9% of litter is dropped by other people?
LOL
thats why we burn all that lignite in our coal fired power stations and have 7 of Europes top ten polluters on our land
Weve picked up our litter it would be nice if you Germans could do the same given you produce twice as much carbon as we do.
Deutschland - Spitzenverschmutzer
The German record is terrible. Obviously that is entirely my fault and I will never disagree with you again. Sorry.
Germany's record is terrible.
You lecture the rest of us while chugging out lignite emissions and buying Putins oil and gas. Your green agenda is going backwards because of public resistance to - heat pumps will go tits up here too - and you have closed down all your nuclear .
There are many places one could take a note of the green agenda, but Germany isnt really one of them.
Germany doesn't buy any Russian gas any more, does it? In fact, if you want to be really picky and look at the Enerdata stats, we've bought more Russian gas* than the Germans in 2023.
* Albeit we probably didn't know it was Russian, because we bought if from a UAE broker
You must be fairly desperate today Robert, Germany opened the floodgates on Russian gas many years ago and based its industry on it. It took a war to show the folly of it. Now the industry is looking exposed with even the head of the BDI saying things are looking gloomy.
They didnt base their energy on sustainable "green" under Merkel
I'm just pointing out that your criticism is a year out of date.
After all, you wrote "You lecture the rest of us while chugging out lignite emissions and buying Putins oil and gas".
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
Its the same crisis. Its slow-acting but the effects are starting to get more severe and in greater frequency.
So what ? Nothing our government and environmentalists are suggesting will impact this.
The top ten polluters account for 67% of the carbon produced globally. China India Iran and Indonesia are all developing economies and will shove out more carbon in the next decade than the UK. The UK isnt even a top 10 polluter but number 17 and moving down the rankings.
Net zero is not an appropriate priority for us. We should be focussing policies of bio diversity, reducing plastics and liveability in a changed climate.
That's what everyone says.
Unless everyone starts to act, no one will.
Tosh.
The major economies are shifting to Asia and Africa. Their politicians are not going to recommend to their people they sit in abject poverty. Nigeria alone will have something like 750 million people by the end of this century, that popultaion growth plus a rising standard of living will dwarf anything the UK will do.
Nobody is going to follow the UK as they have their own priorities.
Tosh. First, you're a complete numpty if you think you can forecast populations for the end if this century. Second, they're going to discover relatively soon that they can grow their economies faster without fossil fuels. The point of wealthier countries leading that process is to accelerate the technology development.
You're a conservative Luddite.
Im not forecasting population Im using those provided by a variety of institutions including the United Nations who do this for a living. I suggestt you will find a lot of surprises as indeed I did when you start to go through them.
As for Luddite no. I dont have your big white Bwana approach to other nations, They will do what suits them and what makes them richer. We should do the same.
'They will do what suits them and what makes them richer. We should do the same.'
Probably true, because that is what humans do but it doesn't make it a good argument for what we should do though. You know famine, drought (and ironically) floods, mass migration, unbearable temperatures, possibly tipping us over into a cascading climate event. It isn't a good plan to do just nothing because they do just nothing.
I appreciate it may all be pointless but do you have children?
I have 3 ( all adults ) plus a grand child and another on the way.
Question - I have no idea. The next USA presidential election is 5 November. Will Rishi have any interest, advantage or disadvantage in having our GE before, during or after this?
I think there is potentially an (unfair) equivalency that will be drawn in media narrative, not helped e.g. Badenoch' cosying up to mad GOPers and the whole National Conservative (haha) thing. Trump is very unpopular here, and Rishi runs a risk of the Cons being painted as Trumpite if they go at the same time.
Tl;dr it probably won't have much/any effect, but such that there is will likely be negative for the Conservatives.
That misses the Tory party's earlier rebranding to UKIP and making the middle ground available for Labour to colonize.
If the other lot go totally tonto, there are two strategies you can adopt.
One is to occupy the territory that your rivals have vacated in the centre ground. (see Blair).
The other is to do whatever you damn well please because you have no effective rival (see Thatcher).
I'm Centre-rightist Dad, of course I'm going to prefer the first. But I can't see why, from the point of view of pure politics and winning, the second is Illogical.
And there is a differential fear of losing between the Conservative and Labour parties. Blair's priceless vase on a slippery floor and all that. I can't imagine any Labour leader having the swagger to pull off what Sanchez has in Spain. It's probably understandable, but it may also be unfortunate.
Question - I have no idea. The next USA presidential election is 5 November. Will Rishi have any interest, advantage or disadvantage in having our GE before, during or after this?
I think there is potentially an (unfair) equivalency that will be drawn in media narrative, not helped e.g. Badenoch' cosying up to mad GOPers and the whole National Conservative (haha) thing. Trump is very unpopular here, and Rishi runs a risk of the Cons being painted as Trumpite if they go at the same time.
Tl;dr it probably won't have much/any effect, but such that there is will likely be negative for the Conservatives.
Can't trust Trump not to endorse Rishi, which would be a LOL.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
Its not so much the sea ice but the risk that the ice shelf on Antartica is now able to slide off on a massive scale. If that happens Canary Warf becomes Canary ponds.
The rise in sea level will probably become the UK's biggest headache in the future. There is evidence that the sea level during the last interglacial period - the last time temperatures were comparable to now - was around 6 to 9 metres higher than today. It takes a while* for all that water to warm and the ice to melt, so it won't be our problem. It'll be a nasty legacy for our children and grandchildren though.
* Having said that, there have been occasions in the past when tipping points have passed and the Earth's climate has changed very rapidly, as Richard Tyndall has pointed out. It's very difficult to know what these points might be and when they will be passed, but the warming of the Earth is unlikely to remain a smooth process.
I agree about the sudden tipping points and of course that is possible. But your contention that the last time temperatures were this warm was in the last interglacial is simply wrong. In both historical and pre-historical times we have seen temperatures significantly warmer than now. This does not inform what might happen going forward as such but making such obviously refutable errors doesn't help the debate.
What realistically could Rishi do between now and next year to give the Tories a positive boost ahead of an election?
The sad but probably true answer is that doing nothing probably helps a bit. Make the government as invisible as possible allowing maximum scrutiny to fall on Labour.
There is almost nothing he can afford to give away now the fiscal situation has deteriorated so badly. So tax cuts or big spending boosts are out. He can wait for inflation to fall, as it certainly will, but prices will still be higher than before. “Stopping the boats” is one of those risky policies (like cutting crime) where if you fail your own targets you come off worse than if you’d never set them, and if you meet them everyone forgets the issue.
Finally, getting the economy moving again is great but it probably empowers people to dream of better things and decide it’s time for a change.
He can't but he can sow the seed for a rapid Tory recovery by being sensible and pragmatic, and thus give the next LOTO a credible platform to criticise Starmer upon.
That's why it's so important to lose with honour. It's like the last 18 months of British rule in Hong Kong.
Comments
And he was a Podemos supporter!!!!
A similar trap is majoring on something that most people like but don't much care about. Abolishing IHT probably comes in that category - people like the abolition of any almost any tax, but do they think it should be the top priority? Not really.
As for Luddite no. I dont have your big white Bwana approach to other nations, They will do what suits them and what makes them richer. We should do the same.
I wonder what were Mr Karia's Caen or Market Garden?
It is an active proposal and just indicates how extreme some in the Scottish Government are on climate change
However, I do agree the policy the SNP/Greens and UK Labour to block new oil licences is a nonsense
Though I can't quite remember the then phrase for 'woke madness'.
Meloni in Italy too came to power after her Brothers of Italy party became the main opposition after a grand coalition government in Italy of centre right and centre left.
In Germany the AfD is surging having been in opposition to the grand coalition of CDU and SPD Merkel led governments and now also in opposition to the Scholz led SPD, Green and FDP coalition government. Linke also slightly up
https://www.whiteandguard.com/sites/default/files/brochures/MED_8985_27275.pdf
Last sold:
https://houseprices.io/?q=So32+2bu
Date Price Address
22/10/2021 £1,100,000 Three Gables, Stapleford Lane, Durley, Southampton, SO32 2BU
£1.3M sounds about right to me. It's a substantial plot but all a bit disjointed to my mind.
FTSE CEOs say they need a big payrise
Im sure their workforces would like one too
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/07/25/higher-pay-needed-boost-city-of-london-ftse-chiefs/
The actual policy proposal is here:
"we will introduce regulations requiring that all residential properties in Scotland achieve an Energy Performance Certificate rating of at least equivalent to EPC C by 2033, where technically and legally feasible and cost-effective."
https://www.gov.scot/policies/energy-efficiency/energy-efficiency-in-homes/
The UK already has less fossil fuels usage now than the global average but we can survive climate change better than most nations, although the most low lying areas will face more floods
We could call it a Toenails Tax.
Edit: I think Granny and Mum took a little time to get used to the slightly differtent properties of the oven, but that was about it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth
... the 2012 report predicted that the population of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, would rise to 914 million by 2100; the 2022 report lowers that to 546 million, a reduction of 368 million...
I must admit I was rather thrown by the 2 for sale ones you linked to. Wonder what the area is like?
Up to the highest height!
Let's go fly a kite and send it soaring
Up through the atmosphere
Up where the air is clear
published 1934 and not obviously historical. are you confusing with My Fair Lady?
Secondly, I am not lecturing anyone.
Thirdly, my comments apply to all countries including Germany, where I live and am far more politically active on these issues than anywhere else.
You want to lecture me about Germany for some reason (the implication seems to be I shouldn't comment because I live in a country that has a worse record than the UK, a truly pathetic 'argument'), why not tell RCS100 he has no right to comment on the issue, as I believe he lives in the US?
But then we have to ask what the electricity is being used for? In an EV it directly drives the vehicle, with 85% energy efficiency. As mechanical cars only get around 40% energy efficiency we're already more than twice as efficient in energy use. Then we have the electricity that is needed to crack oil into things like petrol. Lots of electricity.
This is another one of those arguments where there is a clear inference that there is a zero sum on the other side of the equation. In reality electricity is way more efficient regardless of source.
Probably true, because that is what humans do but it doesn't make it a good argument for what we should do though. You know famine, drought (and ironically) floods, mass migration, unbearable temperatures, possibly tipping us over into a cascading climate event. It isn't a good plan to do just nothing because they do just nothing.
I appreciate it may all be pointless but do you have children?
And this time, it isn't even me.
https://tinyurl.com/4kas2sjw
Seventy seven COVID deaths in the latest week of data. That's the lowest number recorded since the start of the pandemic. Non-COVID deaths running closer to the five-year average too.
Week-ending | 5-year average | COVID deaths | non-COVID deaths | non-COVID deaths in excess of the 5-year average
09-Dec-22 | 11,007 | 326 | 11,368 | 361
16-Dec-22 | 11,203 | 390 | 11,999 | 796
23-Dec-22 | 12,037 | 429 | 14,101 | 2,064
30-Dec-22 | 7,925 | 393 | 9,124 | 1,199
06-Jan-23 | 12,037 | 739 | 14,244 | 2,207
13-Jan-23 | 13,749 | 922 | 16,459 | 2,710
20-Jan-23 | 13,098 | 781 | 15,023 | 1,925
27-Jan-23 | 12,562 | 579 | 13,588 | 1,026
03-Feb-23 | 12,108 | 499 | 12,913 | 805
10-Feb-23 | 11,794 | 446 | 12,226 | 432
17-Feb-23 | 11,586 | 416 | 11,766 | 180
24-Feb-23 | 11,444 | 420 | 11,532 | 88
03-Mar-23 | 11,037 | 513 | 11,536 | 499
10-Mar-23 | 11,419 | 533 | 10,877 | -542
17-Mar-23 | 11,200 | 559 | 11,574 | 374
24-Mar-23 | 10,806 | 624 | 11,428 | 622
31-Mar-23 | 10,163 | 634 | 10,950 | 787
07-Apr-23 | 10,130 | 513 | 9,576 | -554
14-Apr-23 | 10,290 | 465 | 9,513 | -777
21-Apr-23 | 10,108 | 538 | 11,882 | 1,774
28-Apr-23 | 10,683 | 459 | 11,693 | 1,010
05-May-23 | 9,674 | 310 | 9,833 | 159
12-May-23 | 10,119 | 309 | 10,058 | -61
19-May-23 | 10,414 | 322 | 11,332 | 918
26-May-23 | 10,090 | 262 | 10,849 | 759
02-Jun-23 | 7,869 | 189 | 8,650 | 781
09-Jun-23 | 10,362 | 211 | 10,729 | 367
16-Jun-23 | 9,692 | 156 | 10,544 | 852
23-Jun-23 | 9,590 | 154 | 10,318 | 728
30-Jun-23 | 9,455 | 129 | 10,244 | 789
07-Jul-23 | 9,524 | 95 | 9,641 | 117
14-Jul-23 | 9,626 | 77 | 9,953 | 327
At some level our leaders all think we deserve to be punished for our success.
But it's a marginal call and could well be ancient history by October.
So you can see where projection may come into play.
He’s generous with the helicopter as well, here’s an automotive journalist who went to visit JCB from the Cotswolds, to discuss a project to make machines which run on hydrogen in the future. https://youtube.com/watch?v=19Q7nAYjAJY
*https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/acaecb98-4430-4395-a4fa-d1a4d5ccb3d3/EnergyEfficiencyIndicatorsforPublicElectricityProductionfromFossilFuels.pdf
As he would expect to lose unless the Tory polling recovers to at least near parity, and as he can have some confidence that the economy will improve through 2024 (though it won't necessarily feel like that to mortgage-holders and renters), that all points to Nov 2024 in my book.
Labour has now held a continuous double-digit lead in the polls for 10 months. That's the longest such period since pre-Iraq Blair and a measure of Labour's current dominance (one backed up by strong anti-Con tactical voting). Why on earth would he go early unless some unforeseeable event intervenes strongly to the Tories' advantage?
Bamfords have a great deal of power in the area, and own a massive amount of land. Thirty-five years ago, they got together with Alton Towers for a new road to be built between Rocester (where JCB's factory is) to Uttoxeter. Then when Alton Towers wanted it extending to Alton, Bamford objected...
(Incidentally, Alton Towers used to take so much cash during the holidays that it used to e flown out by helicopter every evening after the park closed, it being cheaper and safer than transporting it in secure van along the twisting country lanes.)
(*) Directly on the course of the old Uttoxeter to Ashbourne railway line.
The country is better off for having them and their company; but that does not mean they're perfect. But on the whole I'd call them good. The lefties who *hate* them because Bamford gives money to the Conservative Party are just being utterly stupid.
https://twitter.com/smartysue/status/1683750267697627137/photo/1
But the general principle is that burning stuff is not ideal, unless heat is the energy output you're actually after.
Also- you have to think carefully about what you're trying to optimise. Is it CO2, NO2, particulates, cash, freedom from dodgy nations, something else or a mix?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/548943/thermal-efficiency-gas-turbine-stations-uk/
Shetland and the Western Isles still burn oil for electricity.
*aka known as 'showing I can still be the biggest pedant around.'
Out of interest do you think he will even if 'he expects things will get dramatically worse'?
What is worse losing power say 6 months or a year earlier or hanging on and losing by a bigger margin. I don't know and suspect the answer is different for different people and what your personal motives are compared to your ambitions for your party or country.
At some level our leaders all think we de This.
The sad but probably true answer is that doing nothing probably helps a bit. Make the government as invisible as possible allowing maximum scrutiny to fall on Labour.
There is almost nothing he can afford to give away now the fiscal situation has deteriorated so badly. So tax cuts or big spending boosts are out. He can wait for inflation to fall, as it certainly will, but prices will still be higher than before. “Stopping the boats” is one of those risky policies (like cutting crime) where if you fail your own targets you come off worse than if you’d never set them, and if you meet them everyone forgets the issue.
Finally, getting the economy moving again is great but it probably empowers people to dream of better things and decide it’s time for a change.
Although going by my failure on the property valuation you can probably get one for a £5 with change.
So if so many Tory MPs are utterly convinced they are right and just, then they will win the election anyway. And the longer they hold on the longer they have had to deliver their winning policies to a grateful electorate...
For all the reasons discussed before - no reason to go early, can't leave it to the last second, wishing to be PM for 2 years I suspect the election date will be 24th October 2024....
https://twitter.com/BevJacksonAuth/status/1683601439115952129?s=20
https://www.city-journal.org/article/are-gender-ideology-debates-depolarizing
Even if we generated 100% of our electricity by burning gas, its better to use that electricity to directly drive the car than to use it to crack oil.
But I think we'd also be better off if we were to limit the ability of billionaires to give large amounts of money to political causes. It is undemocratic.
You pays your money and you takes your choice, and there are lots of forecasts out there saying a bigger number than 500 million. Either way the population of Nigeria is due a substantial increase and nobody in Nigeria is thinking they want to stay in poverty.
https://www.theworldcounts.com/populations/countries/nigeria
I am always worried about political betting going mainstream and turning into an efficient market. I almost never bet outside of politics, but my impression is solid tips on 10/1 shots (h/t HYUFD, regrettably did not follow) are rare as hen's teeth on the horses and the fitba.
Tl;dr it probably won't have much/any effect, but such that there is will likely be negative for the Conservatives.
One is to occupy the territory that your rivals have vacated in the centre ground. (see Blair).
The other is to do whatever you damn well please because you have no effective rival (see Thatcher).
I'm Centre-rightist Dad, of course I'm going to prefer the first. But I can't see why, from the point of view of pure politics and winning, the second is Illogical.
And there is a differential fear of losing between the Conservative and Labour parties. Blair's priceless vase on a slippery floor and all that. I can't imagine any Labour leader having the swagger to pull off what Sanchez has in Spain. It's probably understandable, but it may also be unfortunate.
"Bollocks" is not a fact based argument.
That's why it's so important to lose with honour. It's like the last 18 months of British rule in Hong Kong.