Why it’s not the economy, stupid – politicalbetting.com
There’s a poll by YouGov for The Times which shows that even an improving economy will not help the Tories avoid an electoral armageddon which was Sunak’s hope.
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Indeed.
Climate change policy which has been policy of successive governments of all colours from Thatcher onwards.
Climate change was something I was learning about in secondary school, and was already government policy to tackle, in the 1990s. Before the likes of Thunberg were born, let alone famous.
Tesla made their money jumping onto the bandwagon of existing policy. JSO/Thunberg etc are bystanders also jumping on the same bandwagon to get attention for themselves, not to enact any change.
I hear the anti-ULEZ idiots have come up with an actually funny strategy.
Apparently they put up “bat nesting” boxes on the camera poles, which can’t just be (easily) removed due to rules on bat protection.
Or so they think...
Dr Joe Nunez-Mino of the Bat Conservation Trust however disagrees with the legal aspect highlighted by the box’s notice.
He said: “All 18 species of bats and their roosts are protected by law, because of their significant historical decline. You need a licensed bat worker to carry out a check on a bat box, but that does not mean they cannot be legally removed with a correct authority.
“The licensing authority in this case would be Natural England, they have power to make decisions based on the evidence available."
He also said a bat box placed next to a busy road would be highly unlikely to be used by any bat species, so would not be very useful for conservation.
Indeed - but each instance has to be checked out by a “licensed bat worker”, first.
At taxpayer expense, and to check a box which has sod all chance of having a bat in it because it's a brand new box by a busy and polluted road.
It's not an hilarious prank - it's just another way anti-ULEZ cretins are wasting my money with zero impact, either ecologically or to the policy they're campaigning against. They're nothing more than a gammon version of Just Stop Oil.
I'd say Just Stop Oil has more in common with both the aims and the methods of those who erected the Ulez cameras, not those vandalising them.
Methods? Just Stop Oil are unaccountable, unrepresentative vandals, the ULEZ was introduced by someone who won a democratic election. Or is that "seizing power" in your view?
Both of them are thoughtlessly and selfishly disrupting peoples' lives, damaging the economy, and restricting freedom to travel on based on spurious, confected environmental alarmism. In both cases, the decision-makers are cushioned materially from the misery caused by their actions, or benefitting indirectly from them. The fact that one operates within the laws as they now stand doesn't mean they aren't cut from the same nasty cloth.
There was extensive discussion and consideration of ULEZ. It was not introduced "thoughtlessly".
How was it introduced "selfishly"? Who is being selfish here?
Where's your evidence for damage to the economy?
We have solid research evidence that air pollution from vehicles is harmful to people's health. It is neither "spurious" or "confected".
The decision-makers live in London, so I don't see how they are "cushioned" from "their actions".
Coroners are being actively solicited to identity air pollution as a cause of death. That is an Orwellian distortion of the facts to suit a policy push - you couldn't get much more confected.
The econonomical damage of imposing a massive tax on the freedom to travel and make money should not really need explaining. The damage that Just Stop Oil's disruptions do to the economy is not disputed, so why would a lower level but permanent disruption be less damaging? The economy is failing to grow because of the salami slicing effect all the taxes, regulations and responsibilities imposed on businesses over decades that were justified on there being 'no evidence' that they would damage the economy. Yet we are where we are.
The placement of the Ulez boundaries is abritrary - that is thoughtless. It affects those who cannot afford to replace their vehicles disproportionately - that is selfish.
What's your evidence that coroners are being asked to do anything inappropriate? The evidence for the impact of air pollution on mortality was not based on coroners identifying air pollution as a cause of death anyway.
ULEZ does not represent a "massive tax on the freedom to travel". It is a relatively modest scheme that doesn't affect most people. The UK is currently in a recession: I don't believe it's because of ULEZ! You haven't presented any evidence for damage to the economy. If the effect is so obvious, it should be easy to show it.
With a scheme like this, there will always be a degree of arbitrariness with the borders. That is unavoidable. How does that show thoughtlessness? There was lengthy discussion and consultation.
Something that "affects those who cannot afford to replace their vehicles disproportionately" could be called a regressive tax, as Bart said above. How does it demonstrate selfishness? How does ULEZ primarily personally benefit those who introduced it? The idea began with Boris Johnson: how does Boris benefit personally from ULEZ?
Fpt.
The indirect benefit is to the coffers of TFL. I never mentioned a personal benefit.
Ulez will net £300mn in its first year apparently. I'm not sure what to tell you if you're failing to understand that that money then being absent from the pockets of consumers and businesses is, self-evidently, a burden for the economy to bear.
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Not sure that Thunberg has had that big an effect - part of the campaign, sure. But claims of saving the world are over the top.
Tesla was about realising that the car modding outfits in LA could custom convert a car to EV for $250k and could get serious performance.
Scale it up and each time the costs go down. Then attack battery costs by mass production.
The US government was already offering tax credits for ZEVs - that the big companies weren’t using. There was a demand for EVs that no one was bothering with.
Previously, there had been various pushes for ZEVs - including hydrogen. At one point, around 2000, Shell was planning on helping Iceland become the first zero emission country. That plan fell through, due to the non appearance of the hydrogen fuel cells required.
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Indeed.
Climate change policy which has been policy of successive governments of all colours from Thatcher onwards.
Climate change was something I was learning about in secondary school, and was already government policy to tackle, in the 1990s. Before the likes of Thunberg were born, let alone famous.
Tesla made their money jumping onto the bandwagon of existing policy. JSO/Thunberg etc are bystanders also jumping on the same bandwagon to get attention for themselves, not to enact any change.
If I was Tesla I would funnelling as much money towards JSO and other climate activists as possible.
The same goes for heat pump manufacturers. You need these kinds of activists to slice through the lethargy and conservatism (small c). The "just too difficult" crowd are numerous and noisy - Mail Online is huge and riddled with articles about range anxiety, wrong type of pipes etc.
On topic, none of this should surprise and the good news for Starmer is, contrary to the hopes or expectations of some on here, I think he's going to enjoy a prolonged electoral honeymoon.
First of all, there will be a huge relief the Conservatives have been consigned to the outer darkness (except among some Conservatives though by no means all) and new people and a new tone will help.
The lack of expectation will also help - no one is expecting great things so they won't be disappointed. Is there a radical edge to Starmer? Many would say not but often radicalism isn't ideologically driven but the willingness (and a 200 seat majority would help) to consider different solutions to old problems. Labour will be able to be not Labour with such a majority - if 50 backbench MPs rebel, who cares? Many of the new intake will be beholden to Starmer and will be quiescent if new ideas are pushed forward.
There's a nuance between being true to yourself and being open to new ideas - the reinvention of One Nation Conservatism was (and will be) a classic example of practicality and reality supporting principle. It may be Owenite social democracy can also move with the times and the circumstances.
I'll offer an example - local Government finance. I suspect Starmer and his advisers could have radical solutions to social care costs and to the whole financing of councils - land value taxation perhaps? It's 50 years since a fundamental reorganisation of local Government - perhaps it's time for another (abolition of two tier authorities as well?).
Yet first the modern iteration of conservatism has to be buried and a stake driven through its beating heart (possibly too vampire for a Monday afternoon). That's where we are and that will be enormously cathartic for many not least the Conservatives and it will be an exciting time albeit in the irrelevance of Opposition to design a new form of conservatism for the 2030s and beyond.
I hear the anti-ULEZ idiots have come up with an actually funny strategy.
Apparently they put up “bat nesting” boxes on the camera poles, which can’t just be (easily) removed due to rules on bat protection.
Or so they think...
Dr Joe Nunez-Mino of the Bat Conservation Trust however disagrees with the legal aspect highlighted by the box’s notice.
He said: “All 18 species of bats and their roosts are protected by law, because of their significant historical decline. You need a licensed bat worker to carry out a check on a bat box, but that does not mean they cannot be legally removed with a correct authority.
“The licensing authority in this case would be Natural England, they have power to make decisions based on the evidence available."
He also said a bat box placed next to a busy road would be highly unlikely to be used by any bat species, so would not be very useful for conservation.
Indeed - but each instance has to be checked out by a “licensed bat worker”, first.
At taxpayer expense, and to check a box which has sod all chance of having a bat in it because it's a brand new box by a busy and polluted road.
It's not an hilarious prank - it's just another way anti-ULEZ cretins are wasting my money with zero impact, either ecologically or to the policy they're campaigning against. They're nothing more than a gammon version of Just Stop Oil.
I'd say Just Stop Oil has more in common with both the aims and the methods of those who erected the Ulez cameras, not those vandalising them.
Methods? Just Stop Oil are unaccountable, unrepresentative vandals, the ULEZ was introduced by someone who won a democratic election. Or is that "seizing power" in your view?
Both of them are thoughtlessly and selfishly disrupting peoples' lives, damaging the economy, and restricting freedom to travel on based on spurious, confected environmental alarmism. In both cases, the decision-makers are cushioned materially from the misery caused by their actions, or benefitting indirectly from them. The fact that one operates within the laws as they now stand doesn't mean they aren't cut from the same nasty cloth.
There was extensive discussion and consideration of ULEZ. It was not introduced "thoughtlessly".
How was it introduced "selfishly"? Who is being selfish here?
Where's your evidence for damage to the economy?
We have solid research evidence that air pollution from vehicles is harmful to people's health. It is neither "spurious" or "confected".
The decision-makers live in London, so I don't see how they are "cushioned" from "their actions".
Coroners are being actively solicited to identity air pollution as a cause of death. That is an Orwellian distortion of the facts to suit a policy push - you couldn't get much more confected.
The econonomical damage of imposing a massive tax on the freedom to travel and make money should not really need explaining. The damage that Just Stop Oil's disruptions do to the economy is not disputed, so why would a lower level but permanent disruption be less damaging? The economy is failing to grow because of the salami slicing effect all the taxes, regulations and responsibilities imposed on businesses over decades that were justified on there being 'no evidence' that they would damage the economy. Yet we are where we are.
The placement of the Ulez boundaries is abritrary - that is thoughtless. It affects those who cannot afford to replace their vehicles disproportionately - that is selfish.
What's your evidence that coroners are being asked to do anything inappropriate? The evidence for the impact of air pollution on mortality was not based on coroners identifying air pollution as a cause of death anyway.
ULEZ does not represent a "massive tax on the freedom to travel". It is a relatively modest scheme that doesn't affect most people. The UK is currently in a recession: I don't believe it's because of ULEZ! You haven't presented any evidence for damage to the economy. If the effect is so obvious, it should be easy to show it.
With a scheme like this, there will always be a degree of arbitrariness with the borders. That is unavoidable. How does that show thoughtlessness? There was lengthy discussion and consultation.
Something that "affects those who cannot afford to replace their vehicles disproportionately" could be called a regressive tax, as Bart said above. How does it demonstrate selfishness? How does ULEZ primarily personally benefit those who introduced it? The idea began with Boris Johnson: how does Boris benefit personally from ULEZ?
Fpt.
The indirect benefit is to the coffers of TFL. I never mentioned a personal benefit.
Ulez will net £300mn in its first year apparently. I'm not sure what to tell you if you're failing to understand that that money then being absent from the pockets of consumers and businesses is, self-evidently, a burden for the economy to bear.
That revenue source was Grant Shapps' idea. Maybe that is why Reform is so high in the polls?
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Not sure that Thunberg has had that big an effect - part of the campaign, sure. But claims of saving the world are over the top.
Tesla was about realising that the car modding outfits in LA could custom convert a car to EV for $250k and could get serious performance.
Scale it up and each time the costs go down. Then attack battery costs by mass production.
The US government as already offering tax credits for ZEVs - that the big companies weren’t using. There was a demand for EVs that no one was bothering with.
Previously, there had been various pushes for ZEVs - including hydrogen. At one point, around 2000, Shell was planning on helping Iceland become the first zero emission country. That plan fell through, due to the non appearance of the hydrogen fuel cells required.
Elon Musk has, intentionally or not, followed the same mantra as a great many small entrepreneurs: see what the government is subsidising, and get on the gravy train. Tesla and SpaceX. TwiX he was forced into.
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Indeed.
Climate change policy which has been policy of successive governments of all colours from Thatcher onwards.
Climate change was something I was learning about in secondary school, and was already government policy to tackle, in the 1990s. Before the likes of Thunberg were born, let alone famous.
Tesla made their money jumping onto the bandwagon of existing policy. JSO/Thunberg etc are bystanders also jumping on the same bandwagon to get attention for themselves, not to enact any change.
If I was Tesla I would funnelling as much money towards JSO and other climate activists as possible.
The same goes for heat pump manufacturers. You need these kinds of activists to slice through the lethargy and conservatism (small c). The "just too difficult" crowd are numerous and noisy - Mail Online is huge and riddled with articles about range anxiety, wrong type of pipes etc.
If I was Tesla, I would not.
Those activists are counterproductive to the cause.
Climate change policy which has been policy of successive governments of all colours from Thatcher onwards.
Climate change was something I was learning about in secondary school, and was already government policy to tackle, in the 1990s. Before the likes of Thunberg were born, let alone famous.
Tesla made their money jumping onto the bandwagon of existing policy. JSO/Thunberg etc are bystanders also jumping on the same bandwagon to get attention for themselves, not to enact any change.
Margaret Thatcher didn't just see the Greens as a coming political force - she recognised the scientific reality of man-made climate change. She also faced within her own party very strong voices of denial - Lawson and Ridley to name but two.
As climate changes, our politics will change with it. Should we spend vast sums of money on sea defences for our important coastal towns and cities - London is especially vulnerable but far from the only example. Changes to westher patterns (wetter winters) will impact agricultural policy and policy across a vast range of areas.
We already see coastal erosion for example in Norfolk and other places on the east coast - we saw how much replacing the rail line at Dawlish cost when it was destroyed by winter storms. What about other coastal transport infrastructure?
OTOH, what about hotter summers? London above 40c for 10 days isn't a question of if but when. The human cost of prolonged heat especially on the elderly and those with respiratory conditions needs to be considered. We can't afford to be as ill-prepared for the next big heat wave as we were for the smog in the early 1950s when thousands died in London. What about water supply and transport impacts to name but two other issues?
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Indeed.
Climate change policy which has been policy of successive governments of all colours from Thatcher onwards.
Climate change was something I was learning about in secondary school, and was already government policy to tackle, in the 1990s. Before the likes of Thunberg were born, let alone famous.
Tesla made their money jumping onto the bandwagon of existing policy. JSO/Thunberg etc are bystanders also jumping on the same bandwagon to get attention for themselves, not to enact any change.
If I was Tesla I would funnelling as much money towards JSO and other climate activists as possible.
The same goes for heat pump manufacturers. You need these kinds of activists to slice through the lethargy and conservatism (small c). The "just too difficult" crowd are numerous and noisy - Mail Online is huge and riddled with articles about range anxiety, wrong type of pipes etc.
There was a problem air source heat pumps for water - something like a scam that some stupid builders and plumbers did. Installing them in properties without modifying the water system to match the capabilities of the pump.
I’ve seen some installs which were criminal, pretty much.
The newer pumps are more efficient, and you don’t necessarily have to change over to underfloor heating as much as you did.
But reputational damage was done.
Incidently, something that should be pushed more is air source heating/cooling. I’ve got that for my loft conversion, along with solar panels. Don’t need radiators in the loft conversion - between modern insulation and heat rising, went through the winter without doing anything.
The other thing to think about is an opening skylight at the top of the stairwell. Passive ventilation is free to use….
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Not sure that Thunberg has had that big an effect - part of the campaign, sure. But claims of saving the world are over the top.
Tesla was about realising that the car modding outfits in LA could custom convert a car to EV for $250k and could get serious performance.
Scale it up and each time the costs go down. Then attack battery costs by mass production.
The US government as already offering tax credits for ZEVs - that the big companies weren’t using. There was a demand for EVs that no one was bothering with.
Previously, there had been various pushes for ZEVs - including hydrogen. At one point, around 2000, Shell was planning on helping Iceland become the first zero emission country. That plan fell through, due to the non appearance of the hydrogen fuel cells required.
Elon Musk has, intentionally or not, followed the same mantra as a great many small entrepreneurs: see what the government is subsidising, and get on the gravy train. Tesla and SpaceX. TwiX he was forced into.
I think we are all agreeing here - government interventions, whether direct (subsidies) or indirect (lots of worried noise about climate change) have led to a market for EVs. It's finally been met by supply.
The question is whether that noise and subsidies would have existed without climate "activists" - from Thatcher to Thunberg.
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Not sure that Thunberg has had that big an effect - part of the campaign, sure. But claims of saving the world are over the top.
Tesla was about realising that the car modding outfits in LA could custom convert a car to EV for $250k and could get serious performance.
Scale it up and each time the costs go down. Then attack battery costs by mass production.
The US government as already offering tax credits for ZEVs - that the big companies weren’t using. There was a demand for EVs that no one was bothering with.
Previously, there had been various pushes for ZEVs - including hydrogen. At one point, around 2000, Shell was planning on helping Iceland become the first zero emission country. That plan fell through, due to the non appearance of the hydrogen fuel cells required.
Greta Thunberg seems to be a troubled young person and I hope she gets the help she needs.
Assuming that the paradigm of "human emissions = global climate changing for the worse" is accepted as fact, I still don't see how her campaigns can be said to have 'saved' anything, given that the non-Western world seems strangely immune to her sententious chastisements.
She is certainly part of the movement toward the Western world surrendering its global economic leadership, and therefore its leadership full stop, in favour of BRICs. Most here don't seem to want that to happen, but there's a peculiar failure to join the dots. Perhaps it's all the PB shrewdies wanting to prove how clever they are by being so moderate, see OnlyLivingBoy.
I hear the anti-ULEZ idiots have come up with an actually funny strategy.
Apparently they put up “bat nesting” boxes on the camera poles, which can’t just be (easily) removed due to rules on bat protection.
Or so they think...
Dr Joe Nunez-Mino of the Bat Conservation Trust however disagrees with the legal aspect highlighted by the box’s notice.
He said: “All 18 species of bats and their roosts are protected by law, because of their significant historical decline. You need a licensed bat worker to carry out a check on a bat box, but that does not mean they cannot be legally removed with a correct authority.
“The licensing authority in this case would be Natural England, they have power to make decisions based on the evidence available."
He also said a bat box placed next to a busy road would be highly unlikely to be used by any bat species, so would not be very useful for conservation.
Indeed - but each instance has to be checked out by a “licensed bat worker”, first.
At taxpayer expense, and to check a box which has sod all chance of having a bat in it because it's a brand new box by a busy and polluted road.
It's not an hilarious prank - it's just another way anti-ULEZ cretins are wasting my money with zero impact, either ecologically or to the policy they're campaigning against. They're nothing more than a gammon version of Just Stop Oil.
I'd say Just Stop Oil has more in common with both the aims and the methods of those who erected the Ulez cameras, not those vandalising them.
Methods? Just Stop Oil are unaccountable, unrepresentative vandals, the ULEZ was introduced by someone who won a democratic election. Or is that "seizing power" in your view?
Both of them are thoughtlessly and selfishly disrupting peoples' lives, damaging the economy, and restricting freedom to travel on based on spurious, confected environmental alarmism. In both cases, the decision-makers are cushioned materially from the misery caused by their actions, or benefitting indirectly from them. The fact that one operates within the laws as they now stand doesn't mean they aren't cut from the same nasty cloth.
There was extensive discussion and consideration of ULEZ. It was not introduced "thoughtlessly".
How was it introduced "selfishly"? Who is being selfish here?
Where's your evidence for damage to the economy?
We have solid research evidence that air pollution from vehicles is harmful to people's health. It is neither "spurious" or "confected".
The decision-makers live in London, so I don't see how they are "cushioned" from "their actions".
Coroners are being actively solicited to identity air pollution as a cause of death. That is an Orwellian distortion of the facts to suit a policy push - you couldn't get much more confected.
The econonomical damage of imposing a massive tax on the freedom to travel and make money should not really need explaining. The damage that Just Stop Oil's disruptions do to the economy is not disputed, so why would a lower level but permanent disruption be less damaging? The economy is failing to grow because of the salami slicing effect all the taxes, regulations and responsibilities imposed on businesses over decades that were justified on there being 'no evidence' that they would damage the economy. Yet we are where we are.
The placement of the Ulez boundaries is abritrary - that is thoughtless. It affects those who cannot afford to replace their vehicles disproportionately - that is selfish.
What's your evidence that coroners are being asked to do anything inappropriate? The evidence for the impact of air pollution on mortality was not based on coroners identifying air pollution as a cause of death anyway.
ULEZ does not represent a "massive tax on the freedom to travel". It is a relatively modest scheme that doesn't affect most people. The UK is currently in a recession: I don't believe it's because of ULEZ! You haven't presented any evidence for damage to the economy. If the effect is so obvious, it should be easy to show it.
With a scheme like this, there will always be a degree of arbitrariness with the borders. That is unavoidable. How does that show thoughtlessness? There was lengthy discussion and consultation.
Something that "affects those who cannot afford to replace their vehicles disproportionately" could be called a regressive tax, as Bart said above. How does it demonstrate selfishness? How does ULEZ primarily personally benefit those who introduced it? The idea began with Boris Johnson: how does Boris benefit personally from ULEZ?
Fpt.
The indirect benefit is to the coffers of TFL. I never mentioned a personal benefit.
Ulez will net £300mn in its first year apparently. I'm not sure what to tell you if you're failing to understand that that money then being absent from the pockets of consumers and businesses is, self-evidently, a burden for the economy to bear.
That revenue source was Grant Shapps' idea. Maybe that is why Reform is so high in the polls?
Incorrect. It was the brainchild of Michael Green.
I hear the anti-ULEZ idiots have come up with an actually funny strategy.
Apparently they put up “bat nesting” boxes on the camera poles, which can’t just be (easily) removed due to rules on bat protection.
Or so they think...
Dr Joe Nunez-Mino of the Bat Conservation Trust however disagrees with the legal aspect highlighted by the box’s notice.
He said: “All 18 species of bats and their roosts are protected by law, because of their significant historical decline. You need a licensed bat worker to carry out a check on a bat box, but that does not mean they cannot be legally removed with a correct authority.
“The licensing authority in this case would be Natural England, they have power to make decisions based on the evidence available."
He also said a bat box placed next to a busy road would be highly unlikely to be used by any bat species, so would not be very useful for conservation.
Indeed - but each instance has to be checked out by a “licensed bat worker”, first.
At taxpayer expense, and to check a box which has sod all chance of having a bat in it because it's a brand new box by a busy and polluted road.
It's not an hilarious prank - it's just another way anti-ULEZ cretins are wasting my money with zero impact, either ecologically or to the policy they're campaigning against. They're nothing more than a gammon version of Just Stop Oil.
I'd say Just Stop Oil has more in common with both the aims and the methods of those who erected the Ulez cameras, not those vandalising them.
Methods? Just Stop Oil are unaccountable, unrepresentative vandals, the ULEZ was introduced by someone who won a democratic election. Or is that "seizing power" in your view?
Both of them are thoughtlessly and selfishly disrupting peoples' lives, damaging the economy, and restricting freedom to travel on based on spurious, confected environmental alarmism. In both cases, the decision-makers are cushioned materially from the misery caused by their actions, or benefitting indirectly from them. The fact that one operates within the laws as they now stand doesn't mean they aren't cut from the same nasty cloth.
There was extensive discussion and consideration of ULEZ. It was not introduced "thoughtlessly".
How was it introduced "selfishly"? Who is being selfish here?
Where's your evidence for damage to the economy?
We have solid research evidence that air pollution from vehicles is harmful to people's health. It is neither "spurious" or "confected".
The decision-makers live in London, so I don't see how they are "cushioned" from "their actions".
Coroners are being actively solicited to identity air pollution as a cause of death. That is an Orwellian distortion of the facts to suit a policy push - you couldn't get much more confected.
The econonomical damage of imposing a massive tax on the freedom to travel and make money should not really need explaining. The damage that Just Stop Oil's disruptions do to the economy is not disputed, so why would a lower level but permanent disruption be less damaging? The economy is failing to grow because of the salami slicing effect all the taxes, regulations and responsibilities imposed on businesses over decades that were justified on there being 'no evidence' that they would damage the economy. Yet we are where we are.
The placement of the Ulez boundaries is abritrary - that is thoughtless. It affects those who cannot afford to replace their vehicles disproportionately - that is selfish.
What's your evidence that coroners are being asked to do anything inappropriate? The evidence for the impact of air pollution on mortality was not based on coroners identifying air pollution as a cause of death anyway.
ULEZ does not represent a "massive tax on the freedom to travel". It is a relatively modest scheme that doesn't affect most people. The UK is currently in a recession: I don't believe it's because of ULEZ! You haven't presented any evidence for damage to the economy. If the effect is so obvious, it should be easy to show it.
With a scheme like this, there will always be a degree of arbitrariness with the borders. That is unavoidable. How does that show thoughtlessness? There was lengthy discussion and consultation.
Something that "affects those who cannot afford to replace their vehicles disproportionately" could be called a regressive tax, as Bart said above. How does it demonstrate selfishness? How does ULEZ primarily personally benefit those who introduced it? The idea began with Boris Johnson: how does Boris benefit personally from ULEZ?
Fpt.
The indirect benefit is to the coffers of TFL. I never mentioned a personal benefit.
Ulez will net £300mn in its first year apparently. I'm not sure what to tell you if you're failing to understand that that money then being absent from the pockets of consumers and businesses is, self-evidently, a burden for the economy to bear.
That revenue source was Grant Shapps' idea. Maybe that is why Reform is so high in the polls?
Incorrect. It was the brainchild of Michael Green.
Talking about a growing economy during a cost-of-living crisis just comes across as tactless. I think that is possibly part of the reason why the link has been broken to polling, though there are deeper underlying reasons too.
The livelihoods of many people are now almost completely disconnected from the economy, including pensioners and people on Universal Credit, even those who were on furlough during COVID. And for those where there is a connection, a growing economy means nothing if productivity/real wages are not growing. That's why GDP per capita is more important for politics. Or GDP per worker.
On tax - it's not a surprise that the Conservatives have developed a reputation for raising taxes when they have raised taxes.
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Not sure that Thunberg has had that big an effect - part of the campaign, sure. But claims of saving the world are over the top.
Tesla was about realising that the car modding outfits in LA could custom convert a car to EV for $250k and could get serious performance.
Scale it up and each time the costs go down. Then attack battery costs by mass production.
The US government as already offering tax credits for ZEVs - that the big companies weren’t using. There was a demand for EVs that no one was bothering with.
Previously, there had been various pushes for ZEVs - including hydrogen. At one point, around 2000, Shell was planning on helping Iceland become the first zero emission country. That plan fell through, due to the non appearance of the hydrogen fuel cells required.
Elon Musk has, intentionally or not, followed the same mantra as a great many small entrepreneurs: see what the government is subsidising, and get on the gravy train. Tesla and SpaceX. TwiX he was forced into.
I think we are all agreeing here - government interventions, whether direct (subsidies) or indirect (lots of worried noise about climate change) have led to a market for EVs. It's finally been met by supply.
The question is whether that noise and subsidies would have existed without climate "activists" - from Thatcher to Thunberg.
SpaceX wasn’t subsidised anything like ULA or the rest of the Old Space conglomerates. And the subsidies that Tesla got were a tiny fraction of the endless bailouts for the usual suspects. Who couldn’t actually deliver any ZEVs. Because.., something.
NASA simply found that buying from SpaceX was cheaper.
Plus they were prepared to put skin in the game.
Which is why you got angry shouts of “stay in your lane”
The classic Old Space subsidy story was one of the attempts by the US Airforce to get a cheap launch capacity. Boeing bid a spaceplane powered by RS-25 for air-launch. Despite people pointing out that this was insane, Boeing was given the contract. Apparently it wasn’t fair that they weren’t getting development contracts in this area.
They took several hundred million dollars. Delivered nothing - said it was too hard. *Boring* literally terminated the program.
Farage proclaims he will be the go between between Starmer and Trump when Trump is elected
Politics becomes more surreal every day
Does Starmer know this yet?
Perhaps he's trying to goad Starmer into talking about Trump.
Why?
It looks more like Nige on the scrounge again.
Offering his services to Labour? It seems he's happy to dance with any devil who might give him the attention he craves.
Nigel seems to really want to be US ambassador. Why he wants such a bauble is beyond me. A smart Sunak would get it done and eliminate NF from UK politics, but the Americans would kick up an almighty stink, as it would be the UK anticipating a Trump Victory.
Just as many of today's MAGA-maniac GOPers would likely consider Ronald Reagan (if he were still alive) as a RINO = Republican In Name Only, reckon that many of today's Woke-obsessed CUPers would regard a living Margaret Thatcher as a TINO = Tory in Name Only.
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Not sure that Thunberg has had that big an effect - part of the campaign, sure. But claims of saving the world are over the top.
Tesla was about realising that the car modding outfits in LA could custom convert a car to EV for $250k and could get serious performance.
Scale it up and each time the costs go down. Then attack battery costs by mass production.
The US government as already offering tax credits for ZEVs - that the big companies weren’t using. There was a demand for EVs that no one was bothering with.
Previously, there had been various pushes for ZEVs - including hydrogen. At one point, around 2000, Shell was planning on helping Iceland become the first zero emission country. That plan fell through, due to the non appearance of the hydrogen fuel cells required.
Greta Thunberg seems to be a troubled young person and I hope she gets the help she needs.
Assuming that the paradigm of "human emissions = global climate changing for the worse" is accepted as fact, I still don't see how her campaigns can be said to have 'saved' anything, given that the non-Western world seems strangely immune to her sententious chastisements.
She is certainly part of the movement toward the Western world surrendering its global economic leadership, and therefore its leadership full stop, in favour of BRICs. Most here don't seem to want that to happen, but there's a peculiar failure to join the dots. Perhaps it's all the PB shrewdies wanting to prove how clever they are by being so moderate, see OnlyLivingBoy.
"he Western world surrendering its global economic leadership"
I see it very differently. There are great potential economic opportunities in going green. Whether we grasp those opportunities is another matter.
But I have to point out: your comment about BRICS is downright weird, and one I'd expect from someone who reads rather anti-western stuff.
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Not sure that Thunberg has had that big an effect - part of the campaign, sure. But claims of saving the world are over the top.
Tesla was about realising that the car modding outfits in LA could custom convert a car to EV for $250k and could get serious performance.
Scale it up and each time the costs go down. Then attack battery costs by mass production.
The US government as already offering tax credits for ZEVs - that the big companies weren’t using. There was a demand for EVs that no one was bothering with.
Previously, there had been various pushes for ZEVs - including hydrogen. At one point, around 2000, Shell was planning on helping Iceland become the first zero emission country. That plan fell through, due to the non appearance of the hydrogen fuel cells required.
Elon Musk has, intentionally or not, followed the same mantra as a great many small entrepreneurs: see what the government is subsidising, and get on the gravy train. Tesla and SpaceX. TwiX he was forced into.
I think we are all agreeing here - government interventions, whether direct (subsidies) or indirect (lots of worried noise about climate change) have led to a market for EVs. It's finally been met by supply.
The question is whether that noise and subsidies would have existed without climate "activists" - from Thatcher to Thunberg.
SpaceX wasn’t subsidised anything like ULA or the rest of the Old Space conglomerates. And the subsidies that Tesla got were a tiny fraction of the endless bailouts for the usual suspects. Who couldn’t actually deliver any ZEVs. Because.., something.
NASA simply found that buying from SpaceX was cheaper.
Plus they were prepared to put skin in the game.
Which is why you got angry shouts of “stay in your lane”
The classic Old Space subsidy story was one of the attempts by the US Airforce to get a cheap launch capacity. Boeing bid a spaceplane powered by RS-25 for air-launch. Despite people pointing out that this was insane, Boeing was given the contract. Apparently it wasn’t fair that they weren’t getting development contracts in this area.
They took several hundred million dollars. Delivered nothing - said it was too hard. *Boring* literally terminated the program.
I'm far from convinced that either of your statements in your first line are correct; or at least they hide a lot of money.
Musk was having a terrible year in 2007 / 8, as he has frequently admitted. He nearly lost both Tesla and SpaceX. The money he got from the US government helped save those companies.
I hear the anti-ULEZ idiots have come up with an actually funny strategy.
Apparently they put up “bat nesting” boxes on the camera poles, which can’t just be (easily) removed due to rules on bat protection.
Or so they think...
Dr Joe Nunez-Mino of the Bat Conservation Trust however disagrees with the legal aspect highlighted by the box’s notice.
He said: “All 18 species of bats and their roosts are protected by law, because of their significant historical decline. You need a licensed bat worker to carry out a check on a bat box, but that does not mean they cannot be legally removed with a correct authority.
“The licensing authority in this case would be Natural England, they have power to make decisions based on the evidence available."
He also said a bat box placed next to a busy road would be highly unlikely to be used by any bat species, so would not be very useful for conservation.
Indeed - but each instance has to be checked out by a “licensed bat worker”, first.
At taxpayer expense, and to check a box which has sod all chance of having a bat in it because it's a brand new box by a busy and polluted road.
It's not an hilarious prank - it's just another way anti-ULEZ cretins are wasting my money with zero impact, either ecologically or to the policy they're campaigning against. They're nothing more than a gammon version of Just Stop Oil.
I'd say Just Stop Oil has more in common with both the aims and the methods of those who erected the Ulez cameras, not those vandalising them.
Methods? Just Stop Oil are unaccountable, unrepresentative vandals, the ULEZ was introduced by someone who won a democratic election. Or is that "seizing power" in your view?
Both of them are thoughtlessly and selfishly disrupting peoples' lives, damaging the economy, and restricting freedom to travel on based on spurious, confected environmental alarmism. In both cases, the decision-makers are cushioned materially from the misery caused by their actions, or benefitting indirectly from them. The fact that one operates within the laws as they now stand doesn't mean they aren't cut from the same nasty cloth.
There was extensive discussion and consideration of ULEZ. It was not introduced "thoughtlessly".
How was it introduced "selfishly"? Who is being selfish here?
Where's your evidence for damage to the economy?
We have solid research evidence that air pollution from vehicles is harmful to people's health. It is neither "spurious" or "confected".
The decision-makers live in London, so I don't see how they are "cushioned" from "their actions".
Coroners are being actively solicited to identity air pollution as a cause of death. That is an Orwellian distortion of the facts to suit a policy push - you couldn't get much more confected.
The econonomical damage of imposing a massive tax on the freedom to travel and make money should not really need explaining. The damage that Just Stop Oil's disruptions do to the economy is not disputed, so why would a lower level but permanent disruption be less damaging? The economy is failing to grow because of the salami slicing effect all the taxes, regulations and responsibilities imposed on businesses over decades that were justified on there being 'no evidence' that they would damage the economy. Yet we are where we are.
The placement of the Ulez boundaries is abritrary - that is thoughtless. It affects those who cannot afford to replace their vehicles disproportionately - that is selfish.
What's your evidence that coroners are being asked to do anything inappropriate? The evidence for the impact of air pollution on mortality was not based on coroners identifying air pollution as a cause of death anyway.
ULEZ does not represent a "massive tax on the freedom to travel". It is a relatively modest scheme that doesn't affect most people. The UK is currently in a recession: I don't believe it's because of ULEZ! You haven't presented any evidence for damage to the economy. If the effect is so obvious, it should be easy to show it.
With a scheme like this, there will always be a degree of arbitrariness with the borders. That is unavoidable. How does that show thoughtlessness? There was lengthy discussion and consultation.
Something that "affects those who cannot afford to replace their vehicles disproportionately" could be called a regressive tax, as Bart said above. How does it demonstrate selfishness? How does ULEZ primarily personally benefit those who introduced it? The idea began with Boris Johnson: how does Boris benefit personally from ULEZ?
Fpt.
The indirect benefit is to the coffers of TFL. I never mentioned a personal benefit.
Ulez will net £300mn in its first year apparently. I'm not sure what to tell you if you're failing to understand that that money then being absent from the pockets of consumers and businesses is, self-evidently, a burden for the economy to bear.
That revenue source was Grant Shapps' idea. Maybe that is why Reform is so high in the polls?
Incorrect. It was the brainchild of Michael Green.
Just posted by the Telegraph. I've not watched it yet.
Farage says: a large Labour majority is better than a slim one; whether Reform stands is irrelevant; and that Boris did not believe in Brexit.
Boris fibbing? Say it ain't so.
Has Trump offered you a job? I can't remember.
Farage hates postal votes which (he says) benefits Labour in inner cities and Conservatives in the shires.
Farage notes that Grant Shapps is the only Tory on TikTok, where young voters live, though he talks about Gen-Zee.
Farage: Trump to broker peace in Ukraine and did broker peace in the Middle East (the Abraham Accords) and Hamas attacked Israel to stop Saudi Arabia joining.
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Not sure that Thunberg has had that big an effect - part of the campaign, sure. But claims of saving the world are over the top.
Tesla was about realising that the car modding outfits in LA could custom convert a car to EV for $250k and could get serious performance.
Scale it up and each time the costs go down. Then attack battery costs by mass production.
The US government as already offering tax credits for ZEVs - that the big companies weren’t using. There was a demand for EVs that no one was bothering with.
Previously, there had been various pushes for ZEVs - including hydrogen. At one point, around 2000, Shell was planning on helping Iceland become the first zero emission country. That plan fell through, due to the non appearance of the hydrogen fuel cells required.
Elon Musk has, intentionally or not, followed the same mantra as a great many small entrepreneurs: see what the government is subsidising, and get on the gravy train. Tesla and SpaceX. TwiX he was forced into.
I think we are all agreeing here - government interventions, whether direct (subsidies) or indirect (lots of worried noise about climate change) have led to a market for EVs. It's finally been met by supply.
The question is whether that noise and subsidies would have existed without climate "activists" - from Thatcher to Thunberg.
SpaceX wasn’t subsidised anything like ULA or the rest of the Old Space conglomerates. And the subsidies that Tesla got were a tiny fraction of the endless bailouts for the usual suspects. Who couldn’t actually deliver any ZEVs. Because.., something.
NASA simply found that buying from SpaceX was cheaper.
Plus they were prepared to put skin in the game.
Which is why you got angry shouts of “stay in your lane”
The classic Old Space subsidy story was one of the attempts by the US Airforce to get a cheap launch capacity. Boeing bid a spaceplane powered by RS-25 for air-launch. Despite people pointing out that this was insane, Boeing was given the contract. Apparently it wasn’t fair that they weren’t getting development contracts in this area.
They took several hundred million dollars. Delivered nothing - said it was too hard. *Boring* literally terminated the program.
I'm far from convinced that either of your statements in your first line are correct; or at least they hide a lot of money.
Musk was having a terrible year in 2007 / 8, as he has frequently admitted. He nearly lost both Tesla and SpaceX. The money he got from the US government helped save those companies.
Yes - he got a loan for Tesla.
Which was pretty tiny compared to the tidal wave of cash needed to save the big car makers. Which was largely given to them. And they point blank refused to invest in ZEVs in return.
SpaceX was saved by a NASA contract to provide services. Which were actually provided. Instead of doing a Kistler.
Making some assumptions, it appears 41% think taxes will go up whoever wins the election, but 8% think they will only if Labour win. The next question would be whether that 8% think taxes should go up or not! Presuming they don't, then that's 8% for the Tories... yeah, they're not gonna win on 8%.
The subject of the header is also covered on Conservative Home today, in quite a lot more detail. It's a coruscating analysis of the Tories' chances of not getting trounced at the next GE, with those chances assessed as being pretty much zero. For example: Rather than fiddle whilst Rome burns, we plot whilst Britain crumbles. We are far too self-indulgent; we gossip, rather than govern. Sunak will not be happy with it. Worth a read, IMO. https://conservativehome.com/2024/04/08/its-not-just-the-economy-stupid/
The subject of the header is also covered on Conservative Home today, in quite a lot more detail. It's a coruscating analysis of the Tories' chances of not getting trounced at the next GE, with those chances assessed as being pretty much zero. Sunak will not be happy with it. Worth a read, IM humble O. https://conservativehome.com/2024/04/08/its-not-just-the-economy-stupid/
I hear the anti-ULEZ idiots have come up with an actually funny strategy.
Apparently they put up “bat nesting” boxes on the camera poles, which can’t just be (easily) removed due to rules on bat protection.
Or so they think...
Dr Joe Nunez-Mino of the Bat Conservation Trust however disagrees with the legal aspect highlighted by the box’s notice.
He said: “All 18 species of bats and their roosts are protected by law, because of their significant historical decline. You need a licensed bat worker to carry out a check on a bat box, but that does not mean they cannot be legally removed with a correct authority.
“The licensing authority in this case would be Natural England, they have power to make decisions based on the evidence available."
He also said a bat box placed next to a busy road would be highly unlikely to be used by any bat species, so would not be very useful for conservation.
Indeed - but each instance has to be checked out by a “licensed bat worker”, first.
At taxpayer expense, and to check a box which has sod all chance of having a bat in it because it's a brand new box by a busy and polluted road.
It's not an hilarious prank - it's just another way anti-ULEZ cretins are wasting my money with zero impact, either ecologically or to the policy they're campaigning against. They're nothing more than a gammon version of Just Stop Oil.
I'd say Just Stop Oil has more in common with both the aims and the methods of those who erected the Ulez cameras, not those vandalising them.
Methods? Just Stop Oil are unaccountable, unrepresentative vandals, the ULEZ was introduced by someone who won a democratic election. Or is that "seizing power" in your view?
Both of them are thoughtlessly and selfishly disrupting peoples' lives, damaging the economy, and restricting freedom to travel on based on spurious, confected environmental alarmism. In both cases, the decision-makers are cushioned materially from the misery caused by their actions, or benefitting indirectly from them. The fact that one operates within the laws as they now stand doesn't mean they aren't cut from the same nasty cloth.
There was extensive discussion and consideration of ULEZ. It was not introduced "thoughtlessly".
How was it introduced "selfishly"? Who is being selfish here?
Where's your evidence for damage to the economy?
We have solid research evidence that air pollution from vehicles is harmful to people's health. It is neither "spurious" or "confected".
The decision-makers live in London, so I don't see how they are "cushioned" from "their actions".
Coroners are being actively solicited to identity air pollution as a cause of death. That is an Orwellian distortion of the facts to suit a policy push - you couldn't get much more confected.
The econonomical damage of imposing a massive tax on the freedom to travel and make money should not really need explaining. The damage that Just Stop Oil's disruptions do to the economy is not disputed, so why would a lower level but permanent disruption be less damaging? The economy is failing to grow because of the salami slicing effect all the taxes, regulations and responsibilities imposed on businesses over decades that were justified on there being 'no evidence' that they would damage the economy. Yet we are where we are.
The placement of the Ulez boundaries is abritrary - that is thoughtless. It affects those who cannot afford to replace their vehicles disproportionately - that is selfish.
What's your evidence that coroners are being asked to do anything inappropriate? The evidence for the impact of air pollution on mortality was not based on coroners identifying air pollution as a cause of death anyway.
ULEZ does not represent a "massive tax on the freedom to travel". It is a relatively modest scheme that doesn't affect most people. The UK is currently in a recession: I don't believe it's because of ULEZ! You haven't presented any evidence for damage to the economy. If the effect is so obvious, it should be easy to show it.
With a scheme like this, there will always be a degree of arbitrariness with the borders. That is unavoidable. How does that show thoughtlessness? There was lengthy discussion and consultation.
Something that "affects those who cannot afford to replace their vehicles disproportionately" could be called a regressive tax, as Bart said above. How does it demonstrate selfishness? How does ULEZ primarily personally benefit those who introduced it? The idea began with Boris Johnson: how does Boris benefit personally from ULEZ?
Fpt.
The indirect benefit is to the coffers of TFL. I never mentioned a personal benefit.
Ulez will net £300mn in its first year apparently. I'm not sure what to tell you if you're failing to understand that that money then being absent from the pockets of consumers and businesses is, self-evidently, a burden for the economy to bear.
The word "selfish" implies a personal benefit. The OED goes with "concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure."
If ULEZ nets £300m, that is £300m removed from consumers and businesses, but that £300m goes back into TfL, into, for example, keeping fares lower, which is money back to consumers and businesses. It's moving money around, not making it disappear.
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Not sure that Thunberg has had that big an effect - part of the campaign, sure. But claims of saving the world are over the top.
Tesla was about realising that the car modding outfits in LA could custom convert a car to EV for $250k and could get serious performance.
Scale it up and each time the costs go down. Then attack battery costs by mass production.
The US government as already offering tax credits for ZEVs - that the big companies weren’t using. There was a demand for EVs that no one was bothering with.
Previously, there had been various pushes for ZEVs - including hydrogen. At one point, around 2000, Shell was planning on helping Iceland become the first zero emission country. That plan fell through, due to the non appearance of the hydrogen fuel cells required.
Greta Thunberg seems to be a troubled young person and I hope she gets the help she needs.
Assuming that the paradigm of "human emissions = global climate changing for the worse" is accepted as fact, I still don't see how her campaigns can be said to have 'saved' anything, given that the non-Western world seems strangely immune to her sententious chastisements.
She is certainly part of the movement toward the Western world surrendering its global economic leadership, and therefore its leadership full stop, in favour of BRICs. Most here don't seem to want that to happen, but there's a peculiar failure to join the dots. Perhaps it's all the PB shrewdies wanting to prove how clever they are by being so moderate, see OnlyLivingBoy.
"he Western world surrendering its global economic leadership"
I see it very differently. There are great potential economic opportunities in going green. Whether we grasp those opportunities is another matter.
But I have to point out: your comment about BRICS is downright weird, and one I'd expect from someone who reads rather anti-western stuff.
(IMV BRICS might well end up like the CTSO...)
I used it as shorthand for countries (including China and India) who seem fairly determined to cooperate economically (and perhaps in the end militarily) outside of Western power structures. I'm not making a judgement about that, and as you know, I am far more comfortable with the idea of a multi-polar world and Britain's ability to thrive as part of it than 99% of people here. Most here seem to want a US-led Western alliance to prevail, and for Britain to be a strong part of that.
Despite that, I see zero objection here when (for example) we surrender our ability to make virgin steel (the only steel that can be used for armaments production) and all that happens is a load of massive blast furnaces open in India. I see a shade more, but still fairly minimal support for the idea of getting more of our own gas out of the sea (and none for fracking it out of the ground), so as to make us less dependent on the whims of Putin or the Saudis.
Whilst most here will happily jump down my throat and call me 'comrade' for daring to diminish 'PB morale', they are actually the ones who are materially anti-Western, for insisting that the UK must be the poster-child for Net Zero despite its manifold and growingly obvious economic and security downsides. I am more pro-Western in the logical outworkings of my ideas than most of the 'smart moderates' in this corner of the internet.
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Not sure that Thunberg has had that big an effect - part of the campaign, sure. But claims of saving the world are over the top.
Tesla was about realising that the car modding outfits in LA could custom convert a car to EV for $250k and could get serious performance.
Scale it up and each time the costs go down. Then attack battery costs by mass production.
The US government as already offering tax credits for ZEVs - that the big companies weren’t using. There was a demand for EVs that no one was bothering with.
Previously, there had been various pushes for ZEVs - including hydrogen. At one point, around 2000, Shell was planning on helping Iceland become the first zero emission country. That plan fell through, due to the non appearance of the hydrogen fuel cells required.
Elon Musk has, intentionally or not, followed the same mantra as a great many small entrepreneurs: see what the government is subsidising, and get on the gravy train. Tesla and SpaceX. TwiX he was forced into.
I think we are all agreeing here - government interventions, whether direct (subsidies) or indirect (lots of worried noise about climate change) have led to a market for EVs. It's finally been met by supply.
The question is whether that noise and subsidies would have existed without climate "activists" - from Thatcher to Thunberg.
SpaceX wasn’t subsidised anything like ULA or the rest of the Old Space conglomerates. And the subsidies that Tesla got were a tiny fraction of the endless bailouts for the usual suspects. Who couldn’t actually deliver any ZEVs. Because.., something.
NASA simply found that buying from SpaceX was cheaper.
Plus they were prepared to put skin in the game.
Which is why you got angry shouts of “stay in your lane”
The classic Old Space subsidy story was one of the attempts by the US Airforce to get a cheap launch capacity. Boeing bid a spaceplane powered by RS-25 for air-launch. Despite people pointing out that this was insane, Boeing was given the contract. Apparently it wasn’t fair that they weren’t getting development contracts in this area.
They took several hundred million dollars. Delivered nothing - said it was too hard. *Boring* literally terminated the program.
I'm far from convinced that either of your statements in your first line are correct; or at least they hide a lot of money.
Musk was having a terrible year in 2007 / 8, as he has frequently admitted. He nearly lost both Tesla and SpaceX. The money he got from the US government helped save those companies.
Yes - he got a loan for Tesla.
Which was pretty tiny compared to the tidal wave of cash needed to save the big car makers. Which was largely given to them. And they point blank refused to invest in ZEVs in return.
SpaceX was saved by a NASA contract to provide services. Which were actually provided. Instead of doing a Kistler.
It was more than a loan, though.
And the NASA thing was more complex than that. AIUI he did not actually get most of the money immediately (it was money given on completion of certain milestones), but the promise of the money in the future allowed him to unlock a lot more income from investors immediately.
If you really want to get depressed, listen to “The Electric Car Shock” on R4, which fairly accurately describes the oncoming Chinese juggernaut. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001y1yg
Everyone’s talking about Tesla, but as far as the introduction of EVs is concerned, China means that’s largely out of of western hands - unless we want to impose massive trade barriers, which will only end up dooming iur industry anyway.
They already control pretty well all the world’s solar module production. We’ve only a few years to decide whether that going to be true for much of the global vehicle industry too.
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Not sure that Thunberg has had that big an effect - part of the campaign, sure. But claims of saving the world are over the top.
Tesla was about realising that the car modding outfits in LA could custom convert a car to EV for $250k and could get serious performance.
Scale it up and each time the costs go down. Then attack battery costs by mass production.
The US government as already offering tax credits for ZEVs - that the big companies weren’t using. There was a demand for EVs that no one was bothering with.
Previously, there had been various pushes for ZEVs - including hydrogen. At one point, around 2000, Shell was planning on helping Iceland become the first zero emission country. That plan fell through, due to the non appearance of the hydrogen fuel cells required.
Greta Thunberg seems to be a troubled young person and I hope she gets the help she needs.
Assuming that the paradigm of "human emissions = global climate changing for the worse" is accepted as fact, I still don't see how her campaigns can be said to have 'saved' anything, given that the non-Western world seems strangely immune to her sententious chastisements.
She is certainly part of the movement toward the Western world surrendering its global economic leadership, and therefore its leadership full stop, in favour of BRICs. Most here don't seem to want that to happen, but there's a peculiar failure to join the dots. Perhaps it's all the PB shrewdies wanting to prove how clever they are by being so moderate, see OnlyLivingBoy.
"he Western world surrendering its global economic leadership"
I see it very differently. There are great potential economic opportunities in going green. Whether we grasp those opportunities is another matter.
But I have to point out: your comment about BRICS is downright weird, and one I'd expect from someone who reads rather anti-western stuff.
(IMV BRICS might well end up like the CTSO...)
I used it as shorthand for countries (including China and India) who seem fairly determined to cooperate economically (and perhaps in the end militarily) outside of Western power structures. I'm not making a judgement about that, and as you know, I am far more comfortable with the idea of a multi-polar world and Britain's ability to thrive as part of it than 99% of people here. Most here seem to want a US-led Western alliance to prevail, and for Britain to be a strong part of that.
Despite that, I see zero objection here when (for example) we surrender our ability to make virgin steel (the only steel that can be used for armaments production) and all that happens is a load of massive blast furnaces open in India. I see a shade more, but still fairly minimal support for the idea of getting more of our own gas out of the sea (and none for fracking it out of the ground), so as to make us less dependent on the whims of Putin or the Saudis.
Whilst most here will happily jump down my throat and call me 'comrade' for daring to diminish 'PB morale', they are actually the ones who are materially anti-Western, for insisting that the UK must be the poster-child for Net Zero despite its manifold and growingly obvious economic and security downsides. I am more pro-Western in the logical outworkings of my ideas than most of the 'smart moderates' in this corner of the internet.
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Not sure that Thunberg has had that big an effect - part of the campaign, sure. But claims of saving the world are over the top.
Tesla was about realising that the car modding outfits in LA could custom convert a car to EV for $250k and could get serious performance.
Scale it up and each time the costs go down. Then attack battery costs by mass production.
The US government as already offering tax credits for ZEVs - that the big companies weren’t using. There was a demand for EVs that no one was bothering with.
Previously, there had been various pushes for ZEVs - including hydrogen. At one point, around 2000, Shell was planning on helping Iceland become the first zero emission country. That plan fell through, due to the non appearance of the hydrogen fuel cells required.
Elon Musk has, intentionally or not, followed the same mantra as a great many small entrepreneurs: see what the government is subsidising, and get on the gravy train. Tesla and SpaceX. TwiX he was forced into.
I think we are all agreeing here - government interventions, whether direct (subsidies) or indirect (lots of worried noise about climate change) have led to a market for EVs. It's finally been met by supply.
The question is whether that noise and subsidies would have existed without climate "activists" - from Thatcher to Thunberg.
SpaceX wasn’t subsidised anything like ULA or the rest of the Old Space conglomerates. And the subsidies that Tesla got were a tiny fraction of the endless bailouts for the usual suspects. Who couldn’t actually deliver any ZEVs. Because.., something.
NASA simply found that buying from SpaceX was cheaper.
Plus they were prepared to put skin in the game.
Which is why you got angry shouts of “stay in your lane”
The classic Old Space subsidy story was one of the attempts by the US Airforce to get a cheap launch capacity. Boeing bid a spaceplane powered by RS-25 for air-launch. Despite people pointing out that this was insane, Boeing was given the contract. Apparently it wasn’t fair that they weren’t getting development contracts in this area.
They took several hundred million dollars. Delivered nothing - said it was too hard. *Boring* literally terminated the program.
I'm far from convinced that either of your statements in your first line are correct; or at least they hide a lot of money.
Musk was having a terrible year in 2007 / 8, as he has frequently admitted. He nearly lost both Tesla and SpaceX. The money he got from the US government helped save those companies.
Yes - he got a loan for Tesla.
Which was pretty tiny compared to the tidal wave of cash needed to save the big car makers. Which was largely given to them. And they point blank refused to invest in ZEVs in return.
SpaceX was saved by a NASA contract to provide services. Which were actually provided. Instead of doing a Kistler.
SpaceX (and to a lesser extent Tesla) provide a remarkable return on the government’s investment. Without Tesla, the US owned car industry would be far smaller than it will be in a decade’s time. (Also true of Biden’s massive industrial subsidy.)
But SpaceX is a massive return in capability for a relatively small government investment - and the large majority of the huge amount of cash it still requires will come from the private sector.
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Not sure that Thunberg has had that big an effect - part of the campaign, sure. But claims of saving the world are over the top.
Tesla was about realising that the car modding outfits in LA could custom convert a car to EV for $250k and could get serious performance.
Scale it up and each time the costs go down. Then attack battery costs by mass production.
The US government as already offering tax credits for ZEVs - that the big companies weren’t using. There was a demand for EVs that no one was bothering with.
Previously, there had been various pushes for ZEVs - including hydrogen. At one point, around 2000, Shell was planning on helping Iceland become the first zero emission country. That plan fell through, due to the non appearance of the hydrogen fuel cells required.
Greta Thunberg seems to be a troubled young person and I hope she gets the help she needs.
Assuming that the paradigm of "human emissions = global climate changing for the worse" is accepted as fact, I still don't see how her campaigns can be said to have 'saved' anything, given that the non-Western world seems strangely immune to her sententious chastisements.
She is certainly part of the movement toward the Western world surrendering its global economic leadership, and therefore its leadership full stop, in favour of BRICs. Most here don't seem to want that to happen, but there's a peculiar failure to join the dots. Perhaps it's all the PB shrewdies wanting to prove how clever they are by being so moderate, see OnlyLivingBoy.
"he Western world surrendering its global economic leadership"
I see it very differently. There are great potential economic opportunities in going green. Whether we grasp those opportunities is another matter.
But I have to point out: your comment about BRICS is downright weird, and one I'd expect from someone who reads rather anti-western stuff.
(IMV BRICS might well end up like the CTSO...)
I used it as shorthand for countries (including China and India) who seem fairly determined to cooperate economically (and perhaps in the end militarily) outside of Western power structures. I'm not making a judgement about that, and as you know, I am far more comfortable with the idea of a multi-polar world and Britain's ability to thrive as part of it than 99% of people here. Most here seem to want a US-led Western alliance to prevail, and for Britain to be a strong part of that.
Despite that, I see zero objection here when (for example) we surrender our ability to make virgin steel (the only steel that can be used for armaments production) and all that happens is a load of massive blast furnaces open in India. I see a shade more, but still fairly minimal support for the idea of getting more of our own gas out of the sea (and none for fracking it out of the ground), so as to make us less dependent on the whims of Putin or the Saudis.
Whilst most here will happily jump down my throat and call me 'comrade' for daring to diminish 'PB morale', they are actually the ones who are materially anti-Western, for insisting that the UK must be the poster-child for Net Zero despite its manifold and growingly obvious economic and security downsides. I am more pro-Western in the logical outworkings of my ideas than most of the 'smart moderates' in this corner of the internet.
Bullshit, comrade.
Let us take one example: we are using much less gas to generate power than we were, thanks to the increased amounts of wind and solar. This has been costly. But I saw some figures a while back showing how much money had been saved in generation in 2022/3 because of our consequent smaller reliance on gas when the prices spiked. And it was a lot. (I shall try to find it somewhere...)
As another example, we have moved to a large amount of 'green' power in the UK without too much pain. I am staggered that this has happened and remains generally unremarked.
I quite like the modern world we live in. True, it has problems, but I'd rather live now than (say) in 1900 - especially as I'm not a baby, and am getting towards an older age. And one of the reasons there has been a myriad of improvements is technological and social change.
If there are economic opportunities in going green - and I think there are, and so do other countries (including China), then we need to grasp them - even if it causes slight temporary pain.
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Not sure that Thunberg has had that big an effect - part of the campaign, sure. But claims of saving the world are over the top.
Tesla was about realising that the car modding outfits in LA could custom convert a car to EV for $250k and could get serious performance.
Scale it up and each time the costs go down. Then attack battery costs by mass production.
The US government as already offering tax credits for ZEVs - that the big companies weren’t using. There was a demand for EVs that no one was bothering with.
Previously, there had been various pushes for ZEVs - including hydrogen. At one point, around 2000, Shell was planning on helping Iceland become the first zero emission country. That plan fell through, due to the non appearance of the hydrogen fuel cells required.
Greta Thunberg seems to be a troubled young person and I hope she gets the help she needs.
Assuming that the paradigm of "human emissions = global climate changing for the worse" is accepted as fact, I still don't see how her campaigns can be said to have 'saved' anything, given that the non-Western world seems strangely immune to her sententious chastisements.
She is certainly part of the movement toward the Western world surrendering its global economic leadership, and therefore its leadership full stop, in favour of BRICs. Most here don't seem to want that to happen, but there's a peculiar failure to join the dots. Perhaps it's all the PB shrewdies wanting to prove how clever they are by being so moderate, see OnlyLivingBoy.
"he Western world surrendering its global economic leadership"
I see it very differently. There are great potential economic opportunities in going green. Whether we grasp those opportunities is another matter.
But I have to point out: your comment about BRICS is downright weird, and one I'd expect from someone who reads rather anti-western stuff.
(IMV BRICS might well end up like the CTSO...)
I used it as shorthand for countries (including China and India) who seem fairly determined to cooperate economically (and perhaps in the end militarily) outside of Western power structures. I'm not making a judgement about that, and as you know, I am far more comfortable with the idea of a multi-polar world and Britain's ability to thrive as part of it than 99% of people here. Most here seem to want a US-led Western alliance to prevail, and for Britain to be a strong part of that.
Despite that, I see zero objection here when (for example) we surrender our ability to make virgin steel (the only steel that can be used for armaments production) and all that happens is a load of massive blast furnaces open in India. I see a shade more, but still fairly minimal support for the idea of getting more of our own gas out of the sea (and none for fracking it out of the ground), so as to make us less dependent on the whims of Putin or the Saudis.
Whilst most here will happily jump down my throat and call me 'comrade' for daring to diminish 'PB morale', they are actually the ones who are materially anti-Western, for insisting that the UK must be the poster-child for Net Zero despite its manifold and growingly obvious economic and security downsides. I am more pro-Western in the logical outworkings of my ideas than most of the 'smart moderates' in this corner of the internet.
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Not sure that Thunberg has had that big an effect - part of the campaign, sure. But claims of saving the world are over the top.
Tesla was about realising that the car modding outfits in LA could custom convert a car to EV for $250k and could get serious performance.
Scale it up and each time the costs go down. Then attack battery costs by mass production.
The US government as already offering tax credits for ZEVs - that the big companies weren’t using. There was a demand for EVs that no one was bothering with.
Previously, there had been various pushes for ZEVs - including hydrogen. At one point, around 2000, Shell was planning on helping Iceland become the first zero emission country. That plan fell through, due to the non appearance of the hydrogen fuel cells required.
Greta Thunberg seems to be a troubled young person and I hope she gets the help she needs.
Assuming that the paradigm of "human emissions = global climate changing for the worse" is accepted as fact, I still don't see how her campaigns can be said to have 'saved' anything, given that the non-Western world seems strangely immune to her sententious chastisements.
She is certainly part of the movement toward the Western world surrendering its global economic leadership, and therefore its leadership full stop, in favour of BRICs. Most here don't seem to want that to happen, but there's a peculiar failure to join the dots. Perhaps it's all the PB shrewdies wanting to prove how clever they are by being so moderate, see OnlyLivingBoy.
"he Western world surrendering its global economic leadership"
I see it very differently. There are great potential economic opportunities in going green. Whether we grasp those opportunities is another matter.
But I have to point out: your comment about BRICS is downright weird, and one I'd expect from someone who reads rather anti-western stuff.
(IMV BRICS might well end up like the CTSO...)
I used it as shorthand for countries (including China and India) who seem fairly determined to cooperate economically (and perhaps in the end militarily) outside of Western power structures. I'm not making a judgement about that, and as you know, I am far more comfortable with the idea of a multi-polar world and Britain's ability to thrive as part of it than 99% of people here. Most here seem to want a US-led Western alliance to prevail, and for Britain to be a strong part of that.
Despite that, I see zero objection here when (for example) we surrender our ability to make virgin steel (the only steel that can be used for armaments production) and all that happens is a load of massive blast furnaces open in India. I see a shade more, but still fairly minimal support for the idea of getting more of our own gas out of the sea (and none for fracking it out of the ground), so as to make us less dependent on the whims of Putin or the Saudis.
Whilst most here will happily jump down my throat and call me 'comrade' for daring to diminish 'PB morale', they are actually the ones who are materially anti-Western, for insisting that the UK must be the poster-child for Net Zero despite its manifold and growingly obvious economic and security downsides. I am more pro-Western in the logical outworkings of my ideas than most of the 'smart moderates' in this corner of the internet.
Bullshit, comrade.
Let us take one example: we are using much less gas to generate power than we were, thanks to the increased amounts of wind and solar. This has been costly. But I saw some figures a while back showing how much money had been saved in generation in 2022/3 because of our consequent smaller reliance on gas when the prices spiked. And it was a lot. (I shall try to find it somewhere...)
As another example, we have moved to a large amount of 'green' power in the UK without too much pain. I am staggered that this has happened and remains generally unremarked.
I quite like the modern world we live in. True, it has problems, but I'd rather live now than (say) in 1900 - especially as I'm not a baby, and am getting towards an older age. And one of the reasons there has been a myriad of improvements is technological and social change.
If there are economic opportunities in going green - and I think there are, and so do other countries (including China), then we need to grasp them - even if it causes slight temporary pain.
A turgid load of old shite that has absolutely nothing to do with what I argued, but thanks anyway.
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Not sure that Thunberg has had that big an effect - part of the campaign, sure. But claims of saving the world are over the top.
Tesla was about realising that the car modding outfits in LA could custom convert a car to EV for $250k and could get serious performance.
Scale it up and each time the costs go down. Then attack battery costs by mass production.
The US government as already offering tax credits for ZEVs - that the big companies weren’t using. There was a demand for EVs that no one was bothering with.
Previously, there had been various pushes for ZEVs - including hydrogen. At one point, around 2000, Shell was planning on helping Iceland become the first zero emission country. That plan fell through, due to the non appearance of the hydrogen fuel cells required.
Greta Thunberg seems to be a troubled young person and I hope she gets the help she needs.
Assuming that the paradigm of "human emissions = global climate changing for the worse" is accepted as fact, I still don't see how her campaigns can be said to have 'saved' anything, given that the non-Western world seems strangely immune to her sententious chastisements.
She is certainly part of the movement toward the Western world surrendering its global economic leadership, and therefore its leadership full stop, in favour of BRICs. Most here don't seem to want that to happen, but there's a peculiar failure to join the dots. Perhaps it's all the PB shrewdies wanting to prove how clever they are by being so moderate, see OnlyLivingBoy.
"he Western world surrendering its global economic leadership"
I see it very differently. There are great potential economic opportunities in going green. Whether we grasp those opportunities is another matter.
But I have to point out: your comment about BRICS is downright weird, and one I'd expect from someone who reads rather anti-western stuff.
(IMV BRICS might well end up like the CTSO...)
I used it as shorthand for countries (including China and India) who seem fairly determined to cooperate economically (and perhaps in the end militarily) outside of Western power structures. I'm not making a judgement about that, and as you know, I am far more comfortable with the idea of a multi-polar world and Britain's ability to thrive as part of it than 99% of people here. Most here seem to want a US-led Western alliance to prevail, and for Britain to be a strong part of that.
Despite that, I see zero objection here when (for example) we surrender our ability to make virgin steel (the only steel that can be used for armaments production) and all that happens is a load of massive blast furnaces open in India. I see a shade more, but still fairly minimal support for the idea of getting more of our own gas out of the sea (and none for fracking it out of the ground), so as to make us less dependent on the whims of Putin or the Saudis.
Whilst most here will happily jump down my throat and call me 'comrade' for daring to diminish 'PB morale', they are actually the ones who are materially anti-Western, for insisting that the UK must be the poster-child for Net Zero despite its manifold and growingly obvious economic and security downsides. I am more pro-Western in the logical outworkings of my ideas than most of the 'smart moderates' in this corner of the internet.
Bullshit, comrade.
Let us take one example: we are using much less gas to generate power than we were, thanks to the increased amounts of wind and solar. This has been costly. But I saw some figures a while back showing how much money had been saved in generation in 2022/3 because of our consequent smaller reliance on gas when the prices spiked. And it was a lot. (I shall try to find it somewhere...)
As another example, we have moved to a large amount of 'green' power in the UK without too much pain. I am staggered that this has happened and remains generally unremarked.
I quite like the modern world we live in. True, it has problems, but I'd rather live now than (say) in 1900 - especially as I'm not a baby, and am getting towards an older age. And one of the reasons there has been a myriad of improvements is technological and social change.
If there are economic opportunities in going green - and I think there are, and so do other countries (including China), then we need to grasp them - even if it causes slight temporary pain.
I think I rather agree with both of you - which makes me think you're not necessarily disagreeing with each other.
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Not sure that Thunberg has had that big an effect - part of the campaign, sure. But claims of saving the world are over the top.
Tesla was about realising that the car modding outfits in LA could custom convert a car to EV for $250k and could get serious performance.
Scale it up and each time the costs go down. Then attack battery costs by mass production.
The US government as already offering tax credits for ZEVs - that the big companies weren’t using. There was a demand for EVs that no one was bothering with.
Previously, there had been various pushes for ZEVs - including hydrogen. At one point, around 2000, Shell was planning on helping Iceland become the first zero emission country. That plan fell through, due to the non appearance of the hydrogen fuel cells required.
Greta Thunberg seems to be a troubled young person and I hope she gets the help she needs.
Assuming that the paradigm of "human emissions = global climate changing for the worse" is accepted as fact, I still don't see how her campaigns can be said to have 'saved' anything, given that the non-Western world seems strangely immune to her sententious chastisements.
She is certainly part of the movement toward the Western world surrendering its global economic leadership, and therefore its leadership full stop, in favour of BRICs. Most here don't seem to want that to happen, but there's a peculiar failure to join the dots. Perhaps it's all the PB shrewdies wanting to prove how clever they are by being so moderate, see OnlyLivingBoy.
"he Western world surrendering its global economic leadership"
I see it very differently. There are great potential economic opportunities in going green. Whether we grasp those opportunities is another matter.
But I have to point out: your comment about BRICS is downright weird, and one I'd expect from someone who reads rather anti-western stuff.
(IMV BRICS might well end up like the CTSO...)
I used it as shorthand for countries (including China and India) who seem fairly determined to cooperate economically (and perhaps in the end militarily) outside of Western power structures. I'm not making a judgement about that, and as you know, I am far more comfortable with the idea of a multi-polar world and Britain's ability to thrive as part of it than 99% of people here. Most here seem to want a US-led Western alliance to prevail, and for Britain to be a strong part of that.
Despite that, I see zero objection here when (for example) we surrender our ability to make virgin steel (the only steel that can be used for armaments production) and all that happens is a load of massive blast furnaces open in India. I see a shade more, but still fairly minimal support for the idea of getting more of our own gas out of the sea (and none for fracking it out of the ground), so as to make us less dependent on the whims of Putin or the Saudis.
Whilst most here will happily jump down my throat and call me 'comrade' for daring to diminish 'PB morale', they are actually the ones who are materially anti-Western, for insisting that the UK must be the poster-child for Net Zero despite its manifold and growingly obvious economic and security downsides. I am more pro-Western in the logical outworkings of my ideas than most of the 'smart moderates' in this corner of the internet.
Bullshit, comrade.
Let us take one example: we are using much less gas to generate power than we were, thanks to the increased amounts of wind and solar. This has been costly. But I saw some figures a while back showing how much money had been saved in generation in 2022/3 because of our consequent smaller reliance on gas when the prices spiked. And it was a lot. (I shall try to find it somewhere...)
As another example, we have moved to a large amount of 'green' power in the UK without too much pain. I am staggered that this has happened and remains generally unremarked.
I quite like the modern world we live in. True, it has problems, but I'd rather live now than (say) in 1900 - especially as I'm not a baby, and am getting towards an older age. And one of the reasons there has been a myriad of improvements is technological and social change.
If there are economic opportunities in going green - and I think there are, and so do other countries (including China), then we need to grasp them - even if it causes slight temporary pain.
If only Liz Truss had had the courage of her convictions on refusing to subsidise gas, the market signals would have been more effective.
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Not sure that Thunberg has had that big an effect - part of the campaign, sure. But claims of saving the world are over the top.
Tesla was about realising that the car modding outfits in LA could custom convert a car to EV for $250k and could get serious performance.
Scale it up and each time the costs go down. Then attack battery costs by mass production.
The US government as already offering tax credits for ZEVs - that the big companies weren’t using. There was a demand for EVs that no one was bothering with.
Previously, there had been various pushes for ZEVs - including hydrogen. At one point, around 2000, Shell was planning on helping Iceland become the first zero emission country. That plan fell through, due to the non appearance of the hydrogen fuel cells required.
Greta Thunberg seems to be a troubled young person and I hope she gets the help she needs.
Assuming that the paradigm of "human emissions = global climate changing for the worse" is accepted as fact, I still don't see how her campaigns can be said to have 'saved' anything, given that the non-Western world seems strangely immune to her sententious chastisements.
She is certainly part of the movement toward the Western world surrendering its global economic leadership, and therefore its leadership full stop, in favour of BRICs. Most here don't seem to want that to happen, but there's a peculiar failure to join the dots. Perhaps it's all the PB shrewdies wanting to prove how clever they are by being so moderate, see OnlyLivingBoy.
You seem to live in some twisted universe where Britain making use of cheap, clean energy is counterproductive.
Switching imports from the Middle East to tapping our own natural resources like wind etc is not just environmentally sound, it's economically helpful too.
. . . meanwhile, back under the Big Top, Speaker-Preacher Mike at the Crossroads?
Washington Post (via Seattle Times) - Speaker Johnson’s job is on the line as the House returns
House Republicans are dreading their return to Washington on Tuesday [they are NOT alone!] anticipating their deep divisions will jeopardize high-stakes legislation in a way that may end in the ouster of Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and further throw the chamber into dysfunction.
Whether Johnson remains speaker hinges on if the Republican decides to satisfy demands from his furthest right flank — or turns to Democrats, who could ultimately save his speakership, in a bid to pass his priorities.
“He’s gotten himself down to a Catch-22,” said Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), who chairs the largest ideological faction of conservatives, the Republican Study Committee.
The next two weeks are the most critical of Johnson’s nearly six–month tenure atop a very wobbly House with a majority that continues to narrow. His chief priority is passing a bill funding Ukraine that also sends aid to Israel and Indo-Pacific allies. Unlike a national security package that passed the Senate, House Republicans across the ideological spectrum insist that any foreign aid deal must also include measures that strengthen U.S. borders.
But the shape of that package will be fiercely debated and a route to passage is unpredictable and murky. With just a two-vote majority, Republicans have been unable to achieve consensus on such divisive issues, angering a far-right desperate for ideological purity. Choosing a bipartisan route is also complicated: getting lawmakers to agree on anything related to Ukraine and Israel, especially with outrage mounting about civilian casualties in Gaza, is an almost impossible task, given the partisanship and anger in today’s House. . . .
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Not sure that Thunberg has had that big an effect - part of the campaign, sure. But claims of saving the world are over the top.
Tesla was about realising that the car modding outfits in LA could custom convert a car to EV for $250k and could get serious performance.
Scale it up and each time the costs go down. Then attack battery costs by mass production.
The US government as already offering tax credits for ZEVs - that the big companies weren’t using. There was a demand for EVs that no one was bothering with.
Previously, there had been various pushes for ZEVs - including hydrogen. At one point, around 2000, Shell was planning on helping Iceland become the first zero emission country. That plan fell through, due to the non appearance of the hydrogen fuel cells required.
Elon Musk has, intentionally or not, followed the same mantra as a great many small entrepreneurs: see what the government is subsidising, and get on the gravy train. Tesla and SpaceX. TwiX he was forced into.
I think we are all agreeing here - government interventions, whether direct (subsidies) or indirect (lots of worried noise about climate change) have led to a market for EVs. It's finally been met by supply.
The question is whether that noise and subsidies would have existed without climate "activists" - from Thatcher to Thunberg.
SpaceX wasn’t subsidised anything like ULA or the rest of the Old Space conglomerates. And the subsidies that Tesla got were a tiny fraction of the endless bailouts for the usual suspects. Who couldn’t actually deliver any ZEVs. Because.., something.
NASA simply found that buying from SpaceX was cheaper.
Plus they were prepared to put skin in the game.
Which is why you got angry shouts of “stay in your lane”
The classic Old Space subsidy story was one of the attempts by the US Airforce to get a cheap launch capacity. Boeing bid a spaceplane powered by RS-25 for air-launch. Despite people pointing out that this was insane, Boeing was given the contract. Apparently it wasn’t fair that they weren’t getting development contracts in this area.
They took several hundred million dollars. Delivered nothing - said it was too hard. *Boring* literally terminated the program.
I'm far from convinced that either of your statements in your first line are correct; or at least they hide a lot of money.
Musk was having a terrible year in 2007 / 8, as he has frequently admitted. He nearly lost both Tesla and SpaceX. The money he got from the US government helped save those companies.
Yes - he got a loan for Tesla.
Which was pretty tiny compared to the tidal wave of cash needed to save the big car makers. Which was largely given to them. And they point blank refused to invest in ZEVs in return.
SpaceX was saved by a NASA contract to provide services. Which were actually provided. Instead of doing a Kistler.
It was more than a loan, though.
And the NASA thing was more complex than that. AIUI he did not actually get most of the money immediately (it was money given on completion of certain milestones), but the promise of the money in the future allowed him to unlock a lot more income from investors immediately.
Tesla got a loan from the Obama admins “loans to green manufacturing tech” initiative - the idea was that while the banks were stalled, companies might otherwise go under.
The NASA contract was key, as you say, for SpaceX. And unlike a whole barrage of projects since Shuttle became operational, involved paying only for delivered work.
Making some assumptions, it appears 41% think taxes will go up whoever wins the election, but 8% think they will only if Labour win. The next question would be whether that 8% think taxes should go up or not! Presuming they don't, then that's 8% for the Tories... yeah, they're not gonna win on 8%.
I assume you are joking because, of course, many of the 41% who think taxes will go up think that taxes should NOT go up.
Camila Tominey said the education system is indoctrinating young people to be left wing and she worries that they will not become conservative or have conservative values.
Could it be perhaps that the Tories are just a bit...crap?
Camila Tominey said the education system is indoctrinating young people to be left wing and she worries that they will not become conservative or have conservative values.
Could it be perhaps that the Tories are just a bit...crap?
Making some assumptions, it appears 41% think taxes will go up whoever wins the election, but 8% think they will only if Labour win. The next question would be whether that 8% think taxes should go up or not! Presuming they don't, then that's 8% for the Tories... yeah, they're not gonna win on 8%.
I assume you are joking because, of course, many of the 41% who think taxes will go up think that taxes should NOT go up.
This will come as a massive shock to you but a lot of people think taxes SHOULD go up. People who recognise the needs to pay one's way and balance the books, people who think that public services are crap and need to improve, people who believe we should invest for the future.
Camila Tominey said the education system is indoctrinating young people to be left wing and she worries that they will not become conservative or have conservative values.
Could it be perhaps that the Tories are just a bit...crap?
Given that anyone currently at school has had the entirety of their education under a Conservative Prime Minister, clearly so.
Camila Tominey said the education system is indoctrinating young people to be left wing and she worries that they will not become conservative or have conservative values.
Could it be perhaps that the Tories are just a bit...crap?
Well, pay teachers more then and you will get more greedyconservative teachers, instead of ones who want to perform a public service.
Camila Tominey said the education system is indoctrinating young people to be left wing and she worries that they will not become conservative or have conservative values.
Could it be perhaps that the Tories are just a bit...crap?
Given that anyone currently at school has had the entirety of their education under a Conservative Prime Minister, clearly so.
Point of order
In Wales it is under a labour government with a worse performance of all the UK
Camila Tominey said the education system is indoctrinating young people to be left wing and she worries that they will not become conservative or have conservative values.
Could it be perhaps that the Tories are just a bit...crap?
Absolutely not.
Today's Tories are not remotely "a bit" crap.
I think it is fair to say that the education system emphasises the need for empathy, kindness, basic social skills, public service, altruism etc. which tends to encourage kids to dislike "don't give a shit about anyone else laissez faire populists".
There's absolutely no reason those values of empathy, kindness, basic social skills, public service, altruism etc. shouldn't be embodied in Conservatism (as indeed I felt they were/should be when I was a Tory; just with a different means of expression).
But they aren't in the modern Tory party. The fact that a Tory commentator has basically conceded all of that to "Labour" is something of a horror show.
Camila Tominey said the education system is indoctrinating young people to be left wing and she worries that they will not become conservative or have conservative values.
Could it be perhaps that the Tories are just a bit...crap?
If the education was indoctrinating youth to the right I am sure you would complain. The educators should not be pushing kids either way they should be teaching neutrally and teaching kids to make their own minds up
Camila Tominey says you can just add Reform and Tory votes together. Tory majority forever!
Do people pay for this insight?
So, with Reform largely "sitting out" the local and PCC elections, that implies that whatever the Tories get in those elections, the results will flatter them?
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Not sure that Thunberg has had that big an effect - part of the campaign, sure. But claims of saving the world are over the top.
Tesla was about realising that the car modding outfits in LA could custom convert a car to EV for $250k and could get serious performance.
Scale it up and each time the costs go down. Then attack battery costs by mass production.
The US government as already offering tax credits for ZEVs - that the big companies weren’t using. There was a demand for EVs that no one was bothering with.
Previously, there had been various pushes for ZEVs - including hydrogen. At one point, around 2000, Shell was planning on helping Iceland become the first zero emission country. That plan fell through, due to the non appearance of the hydrogen fuel cells required.
Greta Thunberg seems to be a troubled young person and I hope she gets the help she needs.
Assuming that the paradigm of "human emissions = global climate changing for the worse" is accepted as fact, I still don't see how her campaigns can be said to have 'saved' anything, given that the non-Western world seems strangely immune to her sententious chastisements.
She is certainly part of the movement toward the Western world surrendering its global economic leadership, and therefore its leadership full stop, in favour of BRICs. Most here don't seem to want that to happen, but there's a peculiar failure to join the dots. Perhaps it's all the PB shrewdies wanting to prove how clever they are by being so moderate, see OnlyLivingBoy.
"he Western world surrendering its global economic leadership"
I see it very differently. There are great potential economic opportunities in going green. Whether we grasp those opportunities is another matter.
But I have to point out: your comment about BRICS is downright weird, and one I'd expect from someone who reads rather anti-western stuff.
(IMV BRICS might well end up like the CTSO...)
I used it as shorthand for countries (including China and India) who seem fairly determined to cooperate economically (and perhaps in the end militarily) outside of Western power structures. I'm not making a judgement about that, and as you know, I am far more comfortable with the idea of a multi-polar world and Britain's ability to thrive as part of it than 99% of people here. Most here seem to want a US-led Western alliance to prevail, and for Britain to be a strong part of that.
Despite that, I see zero objection here when (for example) we surrender our ability to make virgin steel (the only steel that can be used for armaments production) and all that happens is a load of massive blast furnaces open in India. I see a shade more, but still fairly minimal support for the idea of getting more of our own gas out of the sea (and none for fracking it out of the ground), so as to make us less dependent on the whims of Putin or the Saudis.
Whilst most here will happily jump down my throat and call me 'comrade' for daring to diminish 'PB morale', they are actually the ones who are materially anti-Western, for insisting that the UK must be the poster-child for Net Zero despite its manifold and growingly obvious economic and security downsides. I am more pro-Western in the logical outworkings of my ideas than most of the 'smart moderates' in this corner of the internet.
Bullshit, comrade.
Let us take one example: we are using much less gas to generate power than we were, thanks to the increased amounts of wind and solar. This has been costly. But I saw some figures a while back showing how much money had been saved in generation in 2022/3 because of our consequent smaller reliance on gas when the prices spiked. And it was a lot. (I shall try to find it somewhere...)
As another example, we have moved to a large amount of 'green' power in the UK without too much pain. I am staggered that this has happened and remains generally unremarked.
I quite like the modern world we live in. True, it has problems, but I'd rather live now than (say) in 1900 - especially as I'm not a baby, and am getting towards an older age. And one of the reasons there has been a myriad of improvements is technological and social change.
If there are economic opportunities in going green - and I think there are, and so do other countries (including China), then we need to grasp them - even if it causes slight temporary pain.
If only Liz Truss had had the courage of her convictions on refusing to subsidise gas, the market signals would have been more effective.
Do you think it’s high time for TRUSS to stage a return to the helm, this time with a purer package of policies?
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Not sure that Thunberg has had that big an effect - part of the campaign, sure. But claims of saving the world are over the top.
Tesla was about realising that the car modding outfits in LA could custom convert a car to EV for $250k and could get serious performance.
Scale it up and each time the costs go down. Then attack battery costs by mass production.
The US government as already offering tax credits for ZEVs - that the big companies weren’t using. There was a demand for EVs that no one was bothering with.
Previously, there had been various pushes for ZEVs - including hydrogen. At one point, around 2000, Shell was planning on helping Iceland become the first zero emission country. That plan fell through, due to the non appearance of the hydrogen fuel cells required.
Greta Thunberg seems to be a troubled young person and I hope she gets the help she needs.
Assuming that the paradigm of "human emissions = global climate changing for the worse" is accepted as fact, I still don't see how her campaigns can be said to have 'saved' anything, given that the non-Western world seems strangely immune to her sententious chastisements.
She is certainly part of the movement toward the Western world surrendering its global economic leadership, and therefore its leadership full stop, in favour of BRICs. Most here don't seem to want that to happen, but there's a peculiar failure to join the dots. Perhaps it's all the PB shrewdies wanting to prove how clever they are by being so moderate, see OnlyLivingBoy.
"he Western world surrendering its global economic leadership"
I see it very differently. There are great potential economic opportunities in going green. Whether we grasp those opportunities is another matter.
But I have to point out: your comment about BRICS is downright weird, and one I'd expect from someone who reads rather anti-western stuff.
(IMV BRICS might well end up like the CTSO...)
I used it as shorthand for countries (including China and India) who seem fairly determined to cooperate economically (and perhaps in the end militarily) outside of Western power structures. I'm not making a judgement about that, and as you know, I am far more comfortable with the idea of a multi-polar world and Britain's ability to thrive as part of it than 99% of people here. Most here seem to want a US-led Western alliance to prevail, and for Britain to be a strong part of that.
Despite that, I see zero objection here when (for example) we surrender our ability to make virgin steel (the only steel that can be used for armaments production) and all that happens is a load of massive blast furnaces open in India. I see a shade more, but still fairly minimal support for the idea of getting more of our own gas out of the sea (and none for fracking it out of the ground), so as to make us less dependent on the whims of Putin or the Saudis.
Whilst most here will happily jump down my throat and call me 'comrade' for daring to diminish 'PB morale', they are actually the ones who are materially anti-Western, for insisting that the UK must be the poster-child for Net Zero despite its manifold and growingly obvious economic and security downsides. I am more pro-Western in the logical outworkings of my ideas than most of the 'smart moderates' in this corner of the internet.
Bullshit, comrade.
Let us take one example: we are using much less gas to generate power than we were, thanks to the increased amounts of wind and solar. This has been costly. But I saw some figures a while back showing how much money had been saved in generation in 2022/3 because of our consequent smaller reliance on gas when the prices spiked. And it was a lot. (I shall try to find it somewhere...)
As another example, we have moved to a large amount of 'green' power in the UK without too much pain. I am staggered that this has happened and remains generally unremarked.
I quite like the modern world we live in. True, it has problems, but I'd rather live now than (say) in 1900 - especially as I'm not a baby, and am getting towards an older age. And one of the reasons there has been a myriad of improvements is technological and social change.
If there are economic opportunities in going green - and I think there are, and so do other countries (including China), then we need to grasp them - even if it causes slight temporary pain.
If only Liz Truss had had the courage of her convictions on refusing to subsidise gas, the market signals would have been more effective.
Do you think it’s high time for TRUSS to stage a return to the helm, this time with a purer package of policies?
Making some assumptions, it appears 41% think taxes will go up whoever wins the election, but 8% think they will only if Labour win. The next question would be whether that 8% think taxes should go up or not! Presuming they don't, then that's 8% for the Tories... yeah, they're not gonna win on 8%.
I assume you are joking because, of course, many of the 41% who think taxes will go up think that taxes should NOT go up.
This will come as a massive shock to you but a lot of people think taxes SHOULD go up. People who recognise the needs to pay one's way and balance the books, people who think that public services are crap and need to improve, people who believe we should invest for the future.
Yes of course I know that. Some of the 41% who expect taxes to go up think that they indeed should and some think they should not.
Camila Tominey said the education system is indoctrinating young people to be left wing and she worries that they will not become conservative or have conservative values.
Could it be perhaps that the Tories are just a bit...crap?
If the education was indoctrinating youth to the right I am sure you would complain. The educators should not be pushing kids either way they should be teaching neutrally and teaching kids to make their own minds up
Who says they are - other than some oddball DT writer ?
Camila Tominey said the education system is indoctrinating young people to be left wing and she worries that they will not become conservative or have conservative values.
Could it be perhaps that the Tories are just a bit...crap?
If the education was indoctrinating youth to the right I am sure you would complain. The educators should not be pushing kids either way they should be teaching neutrally and teaching kids to make their own minds up
Agreed. But where is the evidence educators are pushing kids one way or the other?
Legal question - Seeing has how Nigel Farage has (reportedly) publicly accused me, along with millions of other Americans, of casting "corrupt" postal votes, can I sue him for defamation in an English court?
Would give TSE chance to finally earn the (un)massive retainer yours truly (mis)remembers (not) paying him!
Camila Tominey said the education system is indoctrinating young people to be left wing and she worries that they will not become conservative or have conservative values.
Could it be perhaps that the Tories are just a bit...crap?
If the education was indoctrinating youth to the right I am sure you would complain. The educators should not be pushing kids either way they should be teaching neutrally and teaching kids to make their own minds up
It's been indoctrinating them since 2010 since we've had Tory Governments that entire time! Why don't the Tories sort it out if it is such an issue?
Making some assumptions, it appears 41% think taxes will go up whoever wins the election, but 8% think they will only if Labour win. The next question would be whether that 8% think taxes should go up or not! Presuming they don't, then that's 8% for the Tories... yeah, they're not gonna win on 8%.
I assume you are joking because, of course, many of the 41% who think taxes will go up think that taxes should NOT go up.
This will come as a massive shock to you but a lot of people think taxes SHOULD go up. People who recognise the needs to pay one's way and balance the books, people who think that public services are crap and need to improve, people who believe we should invest for the future.
A lot of people do indeed taxes should go up, a lot of those people also assume it won't apply to them. If the state fully funded everything it does I doubt even adding 5% to every tax rate would cover it. The simple fact is when people say just tax the rich they don't realise there aren't enough of them to cover the cost and basic rate tax will also need to rise significantly....those people struggling, having to claim tax credits and use food banks will see more of their pay go on tax
I'm not Bart, but it's a different context, so it can't possibly be the gotcha you want it to be.
And certainly some people might argue it was very low compared to what was possible and desirable.
The fanatics will never be appeased. That is for certain. It could be 90% and it would not be enough.
To listen to the climate extremists you would think we had done nothing and taken no action on the environment.
To that end some fringe youth eco offshoot of Just Stop Oil plans to bring the tube to a halt. Something to do with the enviroment and Palestine now, natch.
"The spokesman said: “New oil and gas licencing is ultimately a genocide, a man-made death. That is the same mentality with the situation in Palestine. It is essential to think of them together and not think of them as individual missions.”"
What they don't seem to realize is that their approach makes climate change more, rather than less, of a danger, because they provoke an enormous reaction.
If you make the necessary changes gradually, and you get buy in from the majority of the population at every stage, and you ensure that people keep getting richer... well, then you'll stop climate change. If you want people to wear hair shirts and be poorer, then you won't get 50.1% of people supporting you, or indeed, any potential action.
Humankind has done an extraordinary job of implementing measures to reduce climate change - and we're just getting started. Ten years ago, I had a Tesla Model S... and that was pretty much it for electric cars on the road. Now some places - like Norway - are 85% electric for new vehicles! Back then China's new coal electricity generation capacity outstripped wind and solar 1,000,000-1. Now, there's far more solar and wind - like 20x - being deployed in China than coal. We've found new ways to heat and cool homes than are dramatically more energy efficient than anything in the past.
All we need - as humanity - is to keep doing what we're doing. Keep electrifying. Keep installing batteries. Keep looking for the million and one marginal improvements. And if we do that, we can keep all getting richer, we can minimize our dependence on parts of the world that hate us, we can improve our balance of payments, and we can keep making the world a cleaner, better place.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the only reason we have taken such measures is because climate activists have kicked up a fuss.
Car manufacturers have been more than happy to continue making ICE vehicles, even while we have understood the greenhouse effect since the 1960s. Musk isn't investing all that time and cash into Tesla out of the goodness of his heart - he's taking advantage of a market created by Greta Thunberg.
Because the technology hasn't existed to wipe out ICE in one step. It still isn't there yet.
Greta Thunberg did nothing to create the market, Musk created his firm before anyone had ever heard of Thunberg. Indeed Thunberg wasn't even born when this began.
It was about 35 years ago that Thatcher spoke about the problems with emissions and cutting emissions became government policy.
Humanity has been working on changing emissions for 35 years, JSO/Thunberg etc have jumped on the bandwagon not the other way around.
Musk didn't create Tesla. He has been responsible for much of its success. But he was not a founder.
That's just another of his many lies...
Well indeed, though Musk did help make it what it is today, if you want to look even further back that just adds to my point.
Tesla was founded in the same year Thunberg was born, so if she was responsible for it then that's seriously impressive.
Thunberg has saved the world. But the main story is true - Tesla's genius/luck was to take advantage of a market disrupted by climate change policy.
Not sure that Thunberg has had that big an effect - part of the campaign, sure. But claims of saving the world are over the top.
Tesla was about realising that the car modding outfits in LA could custom convert a car to EV for $250k and could get serious performance.
Scale it up and each time the costs go down. Then attack battery costs by mass production.
The US government as already offering tax credits for ZEVs - that the big companies weren’t using. There was a demand for EVs that no one was bothering with.
Previously, there had been various pushes for ZEVs - including hydrogen. At one point, around 2000, Shell was planning on helping Iceland become the first zero emission country. That plan fell through, due to the non appearance of the hydrogen fuel cells required.
Greta Thunberg seems to be a troubled young person and I hope she gets the help she needs.
Assuming that the paradigm of "human emissions = global climate changing for the worse" is accepted as fact, I still don't see how her campaigns can be said to have 'saved' anything, given that the non-Western world seems strangely immune to her sententious chastisements.
She is certainly part of the movement toward the Western world surrendering its global economic leadership, and therefore its leadership full stop, in favour of BRICs. Most here don't seem to want that to happen, but there's a peculiar failure to join the dots. Perhaps it's all the PB shrewdies wanting to prove how clever they are by being so moderate, see OnlyLivingBoy.
"he Western world surrendering its global economic leadership"
I see it very differently. There are great potential economic opportunities in going green. Whether we grasp those opportunities is another matter.
But I have to point out: your comment about BRICS is downright weird, and one I'd expect from someone who reads rather anti-western stuff.
(IMV BRICS might well end up like the CTSO...)
I used it as shorthand for countries (including China and India) who seem fairly determined to cooperate economically (and perhaps in the end militarily) outside of Western power structures. I'm not making a judgement about that, and as you know, I am far more comfortable with the idea of a multi-polar world and Britain's ability to thrive as part of it than 99% of people here. Most here seem to want a US-led Western alliance to prevail, and for Britain to be a strong part of that.
Despite that, I see zero objection here when (for example) we surrender our ability to make virgin steel (the only steel that can be used for armaments production) and all that happens is a load of massive blast furnaces open in India. I see a shade more, but still fairly minimal support for the idea of getting more of our own gas out of the sea (and none for fracking it out of the ground), so as to make us less dependent on the whims of Putin or the Saudis.
Whilst most here will happily jump down my throat and call me 'comrade' for daring to diminish 'PB morale', they are actually the ones who are materially anti-Western, for insisting that the UK must be the poster-child for Net Zero despite its manifold and growingly obvious economic and security downsides. I am more pro-Western in the logical outworkings of my ideas than most of the 'smart moderates' in this corner of the internet.
Bullshit, comrade.
Let us take one example: we are using much less gas to generate power than we were, thanks to the increased amounts of wind and solar. This has been costly. But I saw some figures a while back showing how much money had been saved in generation in 2022/3 because of our consequent smaller reliance on gas when the prices spiked. And it was a lot. (I shall try to find it somewhere...)
As another example, we have moved to a large amount of 'green' power in the UK without too much pain. I am staggered that this has happened and remains generally unremarked.
I quite like the modern world we live in. True, it has problems, but I'd rather live now than (say) in 1900 - especially as I'm not a baby, and am getting towards an older age. And one of the reasons there has been a myriad of improvements is technological and social change.
If there are economic opportunities in going green - and I think there are, and so do other countries (including China), then we need to grasp them - even if it causes slight temporary pain.
If only Liz Truss had had the courage of her convictions on refusing to subsidise gas, the market signals would have been more effective.
Do you think it’s high time for TRUSS to stage a return to the helm, this time with a purer package of policies?
Camila Tominey said the education system is indoctrinating young people to be left wing and she worries that they will not become conservative or have conservative values.
Could it be perhaps that the Tories are just a bit...crap?
If the education was indoctrinating youth to the right I am sure you would complain. The educators should not be pushing kids either way they should be teaching neutrally and teaching kids to make their own minds up
Agreed. But where is the evidence educators are pushing kids one way or the other?
I was not making any claim I was merely commenting on the horses whinge that someone was complaining educators were indoctrinating to the left wing.
Off topic (but relevant to any discussion of politics, even those limited to betting): In recent years I have shifted from listening to talk radio and reading newspapers to reading books articles, and statistical studies by the best people and organizations I can find. For example, I am now reading Derek Bok's "Our Underachieving Colleges" -- the 2006 paperback version with the afterword -- for the insight that it gives me on America's troubled colleges and universities. I often reading what Bari Weiss has to say on line. And I regularly look at the "nation's report card", when I want to understand what works -- and what doesn't -- in our public schools. https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/
(At 80, I am old enough to think I don't have time to get much information from slow and inefficient human speech -- however entertaining. Including podcasts.)
Comments
Up with the pace on a thread for a change.
Climate change policy which has been policy of successive governments of all colours from Thatcher onwards.
Climate change was something I was learning about in secondary school, and was already government policy to tackle, in the 1990s. Before the likes of Thunberg were born, let alone famous.
Tesla made their money jumping onto the bandwagon of existing policy. JSO/Thunberg etc are bystanders also jumping on the same bandwagon to get attention for themselves, not to enact any change.
The indirect benefit is to the coffers of TFL. I never mentioned a personal benefit.
Ulez will net £300mn in its first year apparently. I'm not sure what to tell you if you're failing to understand that that money then being absent from the pockets of consumers and businesses is, self-evidently, a burden for the economy to bear.
Tesla was about realising that the car modding outfits in LA could custom convert a car to EV for $250k and could get serious performance.
Scale it up and each time the costs go down. Then attack battery costs by mass production.
The US government was already offering tax credits for ZEVs - that the big companies weren’t using. There was a demand for EVs that no one was bothering with.
Previously, there had been various pushes for ZEVs - including hydrogen. At one point, around 2000, Shell was planning on helping Iceland become the first
zero emission country. That plan fell through, due to the non appearance of the hydrogen fuel cells required.
The same goes for heat pump manufacturers. You need these kinds of activists to slice through the lethargy and conservatism (small c). The "just too difficult" crowd are numerous and noisy - Mail Online is huge and riddled with articles about range anxiety, wrong type of pipes etc.
First of all, there will be a huge relief the Conservatives have been consigned to the outer darkness (except among some Conservatives though by no means all) and new people and a new tone will help.
The lack of expectation will also help - no one is expecting great things so they won't be disappointed. Is there a radical edge to Starmer? Many would say not but often radicalism isn't ideologically driven but the willingness (and a 200 seat majority would help) to consider different solutions to old problems. Labour will be able to be not Labour with such a majority - if 50 backbench MPs rebel, who cares? Many of the new intake will be beholden to Starmer and will be quiescent if new ideas are pushed forward.
There's a nuance between being true to yourself and being open to new ideas - the reinvention of One Nation Conservatism was (and will be) a classic example of practicality and reality supporting principle. It may be Owenite social democracy can also move with the times and the circumstances.
I'll offer an example - local Government finance. I suspect Starmer and his advisers could have radical solutions to social care costs and to the whole financing of councils - land value taxation perhaps? It's 50 years since a fundamental reorganisation of local Government - perhaps it's time for another (abolition of two tier authorities as well?).
Yet first the modern iteration of conservatism has to be buried and a stake driven through its beating heart (possibly too vampire for a Monday afternoon). That's where we are and that will be enormously cathartic for many not least the Conservatives and it will be an exciting time albeit in the irrelevance of Opposition to design a new form of conservatism for the 2030s and beyond.
Politics becomes more surreal every day
12% is more than 13%?
Those activists are counterproductive to the cause.
For a plethora of reasons.
Its not the economy, its time for a change. That is all.
As climate changes, our politics will change with it. Should we spend vast sums of money on sea defences for our important coastal towns and cities - London is especially vulnerable but far from the only example. Changes to westher patterns (wetter winters) will impact agricultural policy and policy across a vast range of areas.
We already see coastal erosion for example in Norfolk and other places on the east coast - we saw how much replacing the rail line at Dawlish cost when it was destroyed by winter storms. What about other coastal transport infrastructure?
OTOH, what about hotter summers? London above 40c for 10 days isn't a question of if but when. The human cost of prolonged heat especially on the elderly and those with respiratory conditions needs to be considered. We can't afford to be as ill-prepared for the next big heat wave as we were for the smog in the early 1950s when thousands died in London. What about water supply and transport impacts to name but two other issues?
I’ve seen some installs which were criminal, pretty much.
The newer pumps are more efficient, and you don’t necessarily have to change over to underfloor heating as much as you did.
But reputational damage was done.
Incidently, something that should be pushed more is air source heating/cooling. I’ve got that for my loft conversion, along with solar panels. Don’t need radiators in the loft conversion - between modern insulation and heat rising, went through the winter without doing anything.
The other thing to think about is an opening skylight at the top of the stairwell. Passive ventilation is free to use….
The question is whether that noise and subsidies would have existed without climate "activists" - from Thatcher to Thunberg.
Assuming that the paradigm of "human emissions = global climate changing for the worse" is accepted as fact, I still don't see how her campaigns can be said to have 'saved' anything, given that the non-Western world seems strangely immune to her sententious chastisements.
She is certainly part of the movement toward the Western world surrendering its global economic leadership, and therefore its leadership full stop, in favour of BRICs. Most here don't seem to want that to happen, but there's a peculiar failure to join the dots. Perhaps it's all the PB shrewdies wanting to prove how clever they are by being so moderate, see OnlyLivingBoy.
It looks more like Nige on the scrounge again.
Offering his services to Labour? It seems he's happy to dance with any devil who might give him the attention he craves.
Talking about a growing economy during a cost-of-living crisis just comes across as tactless. I think that is possibly part of the reason why the link has been broken to polling, though there are deeper underlying reasons too.
The livelihoods of many people are now almost completely disconnected from the economy, including pensioners and people on Universal Credit, even those who were on furlough during COVID. And for those where there is a connection, a growing economy means nothing if productivity/real wages are not growing. That's why GDP per capita is more important for politics. Or GDP per worker.
On tax - it's not a surprise that the Conservatives have developed a reputation for raising taxes when they have raised taxes.
In full: Lunch Hour with Nigel Farage | Exclusive Interview
I blame multitasking.
NASA simply found that buying from SpaceX was cheaper.
Plus they were prepared to put skin in the game.
Which is why you got angry shouts of “stay in your lane”
The classic Old Space subsidy story was one of the attempts by the US Airforce to get a cheap launch capacity. Boeing bid a spaceplane powered by RS-25 for air-launch. Despite people pointing out that this was insane, Boeing was given the contract. Apparently it wasn’t fair that they weren’t getting development contracts in this area.
They took several hundred million dollars. Delivered nothing - said it was too hard. *Boring* literally terminated the program.
Farage notes that Grant Shapps is the only Tory on TikTok, where young voters live, though he talks about Gen-Zee.
I see it very differently. There are great potential economic opportunities in going green. Whether we grasp those opportunities is another matter.
But I have to point out: your comment about BRICS is downright weird, and one I'd expect from someone who reads rather anti-western stuff.
(IMV BRICS might well end up like the CTSO...)
Musk was having a terrible year in 2007 / 8, as he has frequently admitted. He nearly lost both Tesla and SpaceX. The money he got from the US government helped save those companies.
Which was pretty tiny compared to the tidal wave of cash needed to save the big car makers. Which was largely given to them. And they point blank refused to invest in ZEVs in return.
SpaceX was saved by a NASA contract to provide services. Which were actually provided. Instead of doing a Kistler.
Rather than fiddle whilst Rome burns, we plot whilst Britain crumbles. We are far too self-indulgent; we gossip, rather than govern.
Sunak will not be happy with it. Worth a read, IMO.
https://conservativehome.com/2024/04/08/its-not-just-the-economy-stupid/
Do people pay for this insight?
Truly The End Times are upon us.
If ULEZ nets £300m, that is £300m removed from consumers and businesses, but that £300m goes back into TfL, into, for example, keeping fares lower, which is money back to consumers and businesses. It's moving money around, not making it disappear.
Despite that, I see zero objection here when (for example) we surrender our ability to make virgin steel (the only steel that can be used for armaments production) and all that happens is a load of massive blast furnaces open in India. I see a shade more, but still fairly minimal support for the idea of getting more of our own gas out of the sea (and none for fracking it out of the ground), so as to make us less dependent on the whims of Putin or the Saudis.
Whilst most here will happily jump down my throat and call me 'comrade' for daring to diminish 'PB morale', they are actually the ones who are materially anti-Western, for insisting that the UK must be the poster-child for Net Zero despite its manifold and growingly obvious economic and security downsides. I am more pro-Western in the logical outworkings of my ideas than most of the 'smart moderates' in this corner of the internet.
And the NASA thing was more complex than that. AIUI he did not actually get most of the money immediately (it was money given on completion of certain milestones), but the promise of the money in the future allowed him to unlock a lot more income from investors immediately.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001y1yg
Everyone’s talking about Tesla, but as far as the introduction of EVs is concerned, China means that’s largely out of of western hands - unless we want to impose massive trade barriers, which will only end up dooming iur industry anyway.
They already control pretty well all the world’s solar module production. We’ve only a few years to decide whether that going to be true for much of the global vehicle industry too.
Anyway- don't call it "breaking maths". Describe it as "creative economics to boost Britain's future".
Without Tesla, the US owned car industry would be far smaller than it will be in a decade’s time. (Also true of Biden’s massive industrial subsidy.)
But SpaceX is a massive return in capability for a relatively small government investment - and the large majority of the huge amount of cash it still requires will come from the private sector.
Let us take one example: we are using much less gas to generate power than we were, thanks to the increased amounts of wind and solar. This has been costly. But I saw some figures a while back showing how much money had been saved in generation in 2022/3 because of our consequent smaller reliance on gas when the prices spiked. And it was a lot. (I shall try to find it somewhere...)
As another example, we have moved to a large amount of 'green' power in the UK without too much pain. I am staggered that this has happened and remains generally unremarked.
I quite like the modern world we live in. True, it has problems, but I'd rather live now than (say) in 1900 - especially as I'm not a baby, and am getting towards an older age. And one of the reasons there has been a myriad of improvements is technological and social change.
If there are economic opportunities in going green - and I think there are, and so do other countries (including China), then we need to grasp them - even if it causes slight temporary pain.
@RedfieldWilton
Tied lowest % for Conservatives under Sunak.
Highest ever % for Reform.
Westminster Voting Intention (7 April):
Labour 44% (-2)
Conservative 21% (-1)
Reform 15% (+1)
Liberal Democrat 10% (–)
Green 6% (+1)
SNP 2% (-1)
Other 1% (-1)
Changes +/- 31 March
And he doesn't think the American election was stolen but Biden won because of "legal" corrupt postal votes
Switching imports from the Middle East to tapping our own natural resources like wind etc is not just environmentally sound, it's economically helpful too.
Sadly a lot of people take his bullshit seriously.
The spectacle of him brown nosing Trump is pretty repulsive.
Who becomes official opposition if both Con and LDs are on 55? Must be the LDs turn, surely?
Washington Post (via Seattle Times) - Speaker Johnson’s job is on the line as the House returns
House Republicans are dreading their return to Washington on Tuesday [they are NOT alone!] anticipating their deep divisions will jeopardize high-stakes legislation in a way that may end in the ouster of Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and further throw the chamber into dysfunction.
Whether Johnson remains speaker hinges on if the Republican decides to satisfy demands from his furthest right flank — or turns to Democrats, who could ultimately save his speakership, in a bid to pass his priorities.
“He’s gotten himself down to a Catch-22,” said Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), who chairs the largest ideological faction of conservatives, the Republican Study Committee.
The next two weeks are the most critical of Johnson’s nearly six–month tenure atop a very wobbly House with a majority that continues to narrow. His chief priority is passing a bill funding Ukraine that also sends aid to Israel and Indo-Pacific allies. Unlike a national security package that passed the Senate, House Republicans across the ideological spectrum insist that any foreign aid deal must also include measures that strengthen U.S. borders.
But the shape of that package will be fiercely debated and a route to passage is unpredictable and murky. With just a two-vote majority, Republicans have been unable to achieve consensus on such divisive issues, angering a far-right desperate for ideological purity. Choosing a bipartisan route is also complicated: getting lawmakers to agree on anything related to Ukraine and Israel, especially with outrage mounting about civilian casualties in Gaza, is an almost impossible task, given the partisanship and anger in today’s House. . . .
The NASA contract was key, as you say, for SpaceX. And unlike a whole barrage of projects since Shuttle became operational, involved paying only for delivered work.
I assume you are joking because, of course, many of the 41% who think taxes will go up think that taxes should NOT go up.
Could it be perhaps that the Tories are just a bit...crap?
Today's Tories are not remotely "a bit" crap.
Seeing that we will have only 20% partial eclipse . . . with about 0% chance of seeing the sun, eclipsed or not.
In Wales it is under a labour government with a worse performance of all the UK
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/mar/21/pupils-wales-disadvantaged-children-england-ifs-study-vaughan-gething?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
Nigel Farage ‘can’t remember’ if Donald Trump has offered him a job
https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-nigel-farage-cant-remember-us-donald-trump-job-offer/
There's absolutely no reason those values of empathy, kindness, basic social skills, public service, altruism etc. shouldn't be embodied in Conservatism (as indeed I felt they were/should be when I was a Tory; just with a different means of expression).
But they aren't in the modern Tory party. The fact that a Tory commentator has basically conceded all of that to "Labour" is something of a horror show.
Is it her time? Is the time NOW?
TRUSS.
Would give TSE chance to finally earn the (un)massive retainer yours truly (mis)remembers (not) paying him!
(At 80, I am old enough to think I don't have time to get much information from slow and inefficient human speech -- however entertaining. Including podcasts.)