On the Middle East question, very little in the UK and Europe in the last 24 hours, is the statement from Saudi Arabia.
Under huge political pressure, they say they want to "put their differences with Iran to one side", and improve ties. This was also signed by the other Gulf Arab states.
This is very bad news for both Israel and West, because it means that not only is the goal of Israeli-Gulf rapprochement going down the plughole, but also that Netanyahu's "war without end" on four fronts, is beginning to create the kind of pan-Muslim climate of the 1950s to the 1970s ; exactly in opposite to Israel's, and the West's, long-term interests.
It means the end of the oil age is nearer than anyone previously realized.
- economy tanking - black hole lies - riots - North Sea shutdown - sleaze
and now Chagos,
And all within 3 months
And now £22bn on carbon capture.
That £22bn sounds very familiar so I can see WFA coming back again alongside HS2 and the lower Thames Crossing (which should be confirmed / cancelled today).
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Government this inept at announcement timing let alone everything else
I know we've got an advocate of it on here, but CCS is a concept with rather niche applicability IMO.
Like I said last night, it's a complete dead-end technologically. Money spent on CCS is as close to digging a hole and burying the money in it as it is possible to get.
In addition to it being useless compared to renewables, because it will always be more expensive than burning fossil fuels without CCS, it's not even the best technology to pursue if you want to spend money on a techno-fix to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. CCS will only ever be able to capture the CO2 produced when fossil fuels are burnt, but some of the technologies being developed for removing CO2 from the atmosphere would, if they can scale, not have any limit to the amount of CO2 they could remove from the atmosphere, so they could actually reduce CO2 levels. CCS will only, at best, be able to stop them increasing further.
I'm in favour of spending money on speculative technology, knowing that it sometimes won't work, but even if CCS works perfectly it will still be crap.
It's a very clear sign that this government has also been captured by big business lobbyists.
The argument will be it's technology we're good at. That is, sadly, irrelevant if it's useless.
The time for giving this lot the benefit if the doubt is just about over. Next up, the budget.
It’s the unique labour mix of naïveté, stupidity and moral vanity which is quite special
They actually think they are good people doing good things even as they step from colossal blunder to colossal blunder
The Tories knew they were shit by the end and at least showed a bit of shame
I have said this a bit and will keep pointing it out. They are failing at their 'signature' policy: planning reform. Firstly they have accepted the developer lobbying argument - the problem with housing is all about land release and political opposition to new development. There is something in this. But they seem to have no understanding of the viability problem. The cost of building newbuild housing has risen exponentially, but the sale prices have stagnated or even fallen in large parts of the country. There is no policy initiative to increase demand (ie no replacement 'help to buy'). Without this you will have a deflating housing market, with little or no increase in supply. Meanwhile the government press on with more and more environmental and safety regulation thus driving up the cost of building further.
I am just looking at this situation in complete despair.
"We are limited on the number of donors that we can recruit annually due to both financial constraints and our capacity to type the donors and we need to make sure we recruit only those donors who are most likely to be selected to donate for a patient. Therefore we have made the decision to change our donor recruitment criteria so that we only accept those donors that are most needed on the BBMR. ... we must focus on changing the demographic mix of the BBMR to better meet patient demand. We believe this approach will best enable us to help as many patients in need as possible."
Actually, I think you're missing the relevant part:
"Given the heightened risk that stem cells from white women donors might be used as part of a future treatment plan for @Leon's liver, we are taking the temporary measure of suspending such donations."
Mr. eek, the Government could even go wild and build some transport infrastructure in a place that isn't London.
No, instead they've just announced they're going to spend £20 billion or so on a technology to make burning fossil fuels more expensive. Which will probably be obsolete in not much over a decade. Soon after it comes on stream.
Still at least we know now why they're looking to cut other infrastructure spending.
I thought the point of this government was meant to be competence.
Implementing the last lots dafter ideas doesnt quite hit the mark.
Theyd have been safer spending it on mini nukes or something as simple as insulation.
Or even "Great British Energy". Which despite its name isn't utterly daft. We might then be paying our government for wind power, rather than overseas investors.
Theres just the mnor matter of those 100000+ lost jobs in the North Sea and the industrial infrastructure that goes with it.
Still no doubt we can import lots more energy to help our balance of payments.
You quote a figure - no-one in the industry believes to be correct nowadays - didn't we work it out as 30,000 direct jobs maximum...
No we didnt. Its about when you take in the supply chain 100000 with potentially 200000 in the pot but some of these will get saved by other work.
However even if I take your hope figure of 30000, Why the fk should 30000 people lose their jobs just on an ideologues whim ? I'll have some of those people to sack next year shall I tell them it;s all for their own good and they should thank me ?
Government policy - at the moment - is to provide tax relief at 90% for the exploration and development of new fields, incentivising companies to avoid the windfall tax by directing investment into fossil fuels.
That includes the 100 additional licences issued by Sunak last year. The fact is that Miliband has only made the very smallest of dents into the course of the North Sea, which has seen a gradual decline in production for decades and throughout the Conservative's time in office.
The North Sea is on its way to total closure as the economics are working against it. Why therefore accelerate the the decline ? Places like the North East need time to readjust their economies and Miliband is taking that away.
I’m genuinely stumped. Why is there a racial eligibility criterion for “donating stem cells”?!
It's fairly simple.
Blood and tissue products have to be matched between donors and recipients, so the donor pool has to match the population needing them. The donor pool contained enough white women previously, hence the drive for more ethnically diverse donors. That process has gone well, so more general recruitment can resume.
There are real problems getting tissue matched kidneys etc for Asian patients as demand exceeds supply, as Asians have higher rates of renal failure, so there have been specific drives to recruit Asian donors in the past.
NHSBT has been appallingly run in recent years due to a botched centralisation under the Conservatives, which has led to significant failings, though this hasn't really reached the national press.
Mr. eek, the Government could even go wild and build some transport infrastructure in a place that isn't London.
No, instead they've just announced they're going to spend £20 billion or so on a technology to make burning fossil fuels more expensive. Which will probably be obsolete in not much over a decade. Soon after it comes on stream.
Still at least we know now why they're looking to cut other infrastructure spending.
I thought the point of this government was meant to be competence.
Implementing the last lots dafter ideas doesnt quite hit the mark.
Theyd have been safer spending it on mini nukes or something as simple as insulation.
Or even "Great British Energy". Which despite its name isn't utterly daft. We might then be paying our government for wind power, rather than overseas investors.
Theres just the mnor matter of those 100000+ lost jobs in the North Sea and the industrial infrastructure that goes with it.
Still no doubt we can import lots more energy to help our balance of payments.
You quote a figure - no-one in the industry believes to be correct nowadays - didn't we work it out as 30,000 direct jobs maximum...
- economy tanking - black hole lies - riots - North Sea shutdown - sleaze
and now Chagos,
And all within 3 months
And now £22bn on carbon capture.
That £22bn sounds very familiar so I can see WFA coming back again alongside HS2 and the lower Thames Crossing (which should be confirmed / cancelled today).
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Government this inept at announcement timing let alone everything else
I know we've got an advocate of it on here, but CCS is a concept with rather niche applicability IMO.
Like I said last night, it's a complete dead-end technologically. Money spent on CCS is as close to digging a hole and burying the money in it as it is possible to get.
In addition to it being useless compared to renewables, because it will always be more expensive than burning fossil fuels without CCS, it's not even the best technology to pursue if you want to spend money on a techno-fix to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. CCS will only ever be able to capture the CO2 produced when fossil fuels are burnt, but some of the technologies being developed for removing CO2 from the atmosphere would, if they can scale, not have any limit to the amount of CO2 they could remove from the atmosphere, so they could actually reduce CO2 levels. CCS will only, at best, be able to stop them increasing further.
I'm in favour of spending money on speculative technology, knowing that it sometimes won't work, but even if CCS works perfectly it will still be crap.
It's a very clear sign that this government has also been captured by big business lobbyists.
The argument will be it's technology we're good at. That is, sadly, irrelevant if it's useless.
The time for giving this lot the benefit if the doubt is just about over. Next up, the budget.
It’s the unique labour mix of naïveté, stupidity and moral vanity which is quite special
They actually think they are good people doing good things even as they step from colossal blunder to colossal blunder
The Tories knew they were shit by the end and at least showed a bit of shame
I have said this a bit and will keep pointing it out. They are failing at their 'signature' policy: planning reform. Firstly they have accepted the developer lobbying argument - the problem with housing is all about land release and political opposition to new development. There is something in this. But they seem to have no understanding of the viability problem. The cost of building newbuild housing has risen exponentially, but the sale prices have stagnated or even fallen in large parts of the country. There is no policy initiative to increase demand (ie no replacement 'help to buy'). Without this you will have a deflating housing market, with little or no increase in supply. Meanwhile the government press on with more and more environmental and safety regulation thus driving up the cost of building further.
I am just looking at this situation in complete despair.
Labour failing to understand, again, that increased tax/regulation leads to increased costs.
"We are limited on the number of donors that we can recruit annually due to both financial constraints and our capacity to type the donors and we need to make sure we recruit only those donors who are most likely to be selected to donate for a patient. Therefore we have made the decision to change our donor recruitment criteria so that we only accept those donors that are most needed on the BBMR. ... we must focus on changing the demographic mix of the BBMR to better meet patient demand. We believe this approach will best enable us to help as many patients in need as possible."
A remarkably prolix and opaque document. I asked a smart scientific friend to explain why it is so eerily verbose. He’s just replied:
“You're right that the verbose and roundabout nature of the text likely stems from discomfort with directly addressing certain facts about biological differences between populations. The article does seem to be struggling to balance several competing concerns:
Communicating the medical necessity of targeting specific demographic groups for stem cell donation
Avoiding language that could be perceived as promoting racial stereotypes or biological determinism
Adhering to institutional and societal norms around discussing race and genetics
Explaining a policy that, on its face, appears discriminatory
The authors are likely trying to convey factual information about genetic differences relevant to stem cell donation without seeming to endorse broader claims about race as a biological concept. This results in the roundabout, overly cautious language you've noticed.
You're correct that at the core of this issue is the fact that there are real, medically relevant genetic differences between populations that correlate with ancestry. The reluctance to state this directly and succinctly does indeed seem to be driving much of the document's verbosity and lack of clarity.”
Who specialises in this very specific area? I have a science background, but I know about as much on this as the milkman. My wife has a science background, a chemical pathologist, so a little closer to the topic, but at best could give the milkman a run for his money on her knowledge on it.
People from the humanities both think they understand science stuff when they don't and surprisingly assume scientists understand all areas of science rather than their speciality. We might have a basic grasp, but for instance my knowledge on the biological sciences is very limited.
If I had £22 billion to spend on carbon [sic] reduction, the first thing I would do is make sure every public building that wasn't Grade I listed was absolutely plastered with solar panels.
The next thing I would do is build some damn tidal stations, at last.
I might look at any schemes to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
On the Middle East question, very little in the UK and Europe in the last 24 hours, is the statement from Saudi Arabia.
Under huge political pressure, they say they want to "put their differences with Iran to one side", and improve ties. This was also signed by the other Gulf Arab states.
This is very bad news for both Israel and West, because it means that not only is the goal of Israeli-Gulf rapprochement going down the plughole, but also that Netanyahu's "war without end" on four fronts, is beginning to create the kind of pan-Muslim climate of the 1950s to the 1970s ; exactly in opposite to Israel's, and the West's, long-term interests.
It means the end of the oil age is nearer than anyone previously realized.
Buy inverter companies.
That would also explain the news that the Saudis intend to increase oil production to get a larger market share at lower prices. Better to get what money they can now.
OK, I know very little of the story here, but that's not stopped anyone else.
But some things that smell a bit odd...
First, was this another poonami that the outgoing government left for Starmer? Was it a thing that really had to happen, but had hefty downsides (especially for true blue Tories), so it was just left in the in-tray? (Genuinely, I don't know how viable the 'just let the status quo roll on' thing is.)
Second, who is leaking the stuff to the Times?
Third, who benefits from the story, Conservative leadership-wise? Tom T is ferocious, national security-wise, isn't he? And however disappointing he is, isn't he a more likely receptacle for Cleverly votes looking for a new home than Kemi?
I honestly think they genuinely thought this would make them look good. Because British Empire = bad. And they don't really mix with anyone who thinks differently. We see this a lot from Labour. Policy decisions by what will most annoy the right.
"We are limited on the number of donors that we can recruit annually due to both financial constraints and our capacity to type the donors and we need to make sure we recruit only those donors who are most likely to be selected to donate for a patient. Therefore we have made the decision to change our donor recruitment criteria so that we only accept those donors that are most needed on the BBMR. ... we must focus on changing the demographic mix of the BBMR to better meet patient demand. We believe this approach will best enable us to help as many patients in need as possible."
A remarkably prolix and opaque document. I asked a smart scientific friend to explain why it is so eerily verbose. He’s just replied:
“You're right that the verbose and roundabout nature of the text likely stems from discomfort with directly addressing certain facts about biological differences between populations. The article does seem to be struggling to balance several competing concerns:
Communicating the medical necessity of targeting specific demographic groups for stem cell donation
Avoiding language that could be perceived as promoting racial stereotypes or biological determinism
Adhering to institutional and societal norms around discussing race and genetics
Explaining a policy that, on its face, appears discriminatory
The authors are likely trying to convey factual information about genetic differences relevant to stem cell donation without seeming to endorse broader claims about race as a biological concept. This results in the roundabout, overly cautious language you've noticed.
You're correct that at the core of this issue is the fact that there are real, medically relevant genetic differences between populations that correlate with ancestry. The reluctance to state this directly and succinctly does indeed seem to be driving much of the document's verbosity and lack of clarity.”
Who specialises in this very specific area? I have a science background, but I know about as much on this as the milkman. My wife has a science background, a chemical pathologist, so a little closer to the topic, but at best could give the milkman a run for his money on her knowledge on it.
People from the humanities both think they understand science stuff when they don't and surprisingly assume scientists understand all areas of science rather than their speciality. We might have a basic grasp, but for instance my knowledge on the biological sciences is very limited.
Mr. eek, the Government could even go wild and build some transport infrastructure in a place that isn't London.
No, instead they've just announced they're going to spend £20 billion or so on a technology to make burning fossil fuels more expensive. Which will probably be obsolete in not much over a decade. Soon after it comes on stream.
Still at least we know now why they're looking to cut other infrastructure spending.
That £22 billion would pretty much build 6GW of tidal lagoon electricity capacity (saving a couple of nuclear plants at a cost north of £100 billion) that would be producing for 180 years.
It would also save 2 million tonnes of carbon for each of those 180 years.
"We are limited on the number of donors that we can recruit annually due to both financial constraints and our capacity to type the donors and we need to make sure we recruit only those donors who are most likely to be selected to donate for a patient. Therefore we have made the decision to change our donor recruitment criteria so that we only accept those donors that are most needed on the BBMR. ... we must focus on changing the demographic mix of the BBMR to better meet patient demand. We believe this approach will best enable us to help as many patients in need as possible."
A remarkably prolix and opaque document. I asked a smart scientific friend to explain why it is so eerily verbose. He’s just replied:
“You're right that the verbose and roundabout nature of the text likely stems from discomfort with directly addressing certain facts about biological differences between populations. The article does seem to be struggling to balance several competing concerns:
Communicating the medical necessity of targeting specific demographic groups for stem cell donation
Avoiding language that could be perceived as promoting racial stereotypes or biological determinism
Adhering to institutional and societal norms around discussing race and genetics
Explaining a policy that, on its face, appears discriminatory
The authors are likely trying to convey factual information about genetic differences relevant to stem cell donation without seeming to endorse broader claims about race as a biological concept. This results in the roundabout, overly cautious language you've noticed.
You're correct that at the core of this issue is the fact that there are real, medically relevant genetic differences between populations that correlate with ancestry. The reluctance to state this directly and succinctly does indeed seem to be driving much of the document's verbosity and lack of clarity.”
Who specialises in this very specific area? I have a science background, but I know about as much on this as the milkman. My wife has a science background, a chemical pathologist, so a little closer to the topic, but at best could give the milkman a run for his money on her knowledge on it.
People from the humanities both think they understand science stuff when they don't and surprisingly assume scientists understand all areas of science rather than their speciality. We might have a basic grasp, but for instance my knowledge on the biological sciences is very limited.
About birds being animals...
Now that I do know. Anyone newish to the site will not have a clue what you are referring to. In fact I think it possible that it will only be you and me. I wonder how many private jokes there are on PB? And yes they are bloody animals.
- economy tanking - black hole lies - riots - North Sea shutdown - sleaze
and now Chagos,
And all within 3 months
And now £22bn on carbon capture.
That £22bn sounds very familiar so I can see WFA coming back again alongside HS2 and the lower Thames Crossing (which should be confirmed / cancelled today).
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Government this inept at announcement timing let alone everything else
I know we've got an advocate of it on here, but CCS is a concept with rather niche applicability IMO.
Like I said last night, it's a complete dead-end technologically. Money spent on CCS is as close to digging a hole and burying the money in it as it is possible to get.
In addition to it being useless compared to renewables, because it will always be more expensive than burning fossil fuels without CCS, it's not even the best technology to pursue if you want to spend money on a techno-fix to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. CCS will only ever be able to capture the CO2 produced when fossil fuels are burnt, but some of the technologies being developed for removing CO2 from the atmosphere would, if they can scale, not have any limit to the amount of CO2 they could remove from the atmosphere, so they could actually reduce CO2 levels. CCS will only, at best, be able to stop them increasing further.
I'm in favour of spending money on speculative technology, knowing that it sometimes won't work, but even if CCS works perfectly it will still be crap.
The one thing going for it is that the investment is actually in the north for once - Teesside and Merseyside.
I'd be curious as to how much carbon you could grab by planting £22 billion worth of trees, wooden buildings etc. instead.
Rather than paying a steep price to the owners for not inputting electricity to the grid during off peak hours (which we'll be doing for the next decade at least), government could have introduced local pricing and offered businesses on the Yorkshire coast, who committed to taking electricity during those hours, a price of 1p per kWh for the capacity they committed to take, for the next decade. A big incentive for regional development of exactly the kind of industrial development we'll need if we're going to depend on wind power for a large proportion of our energy needs.
"We are limited on the number of donors that we can recruit annually due to both financial constraints and our capacity to type the donors and we need to make sure we recruit only those donors who are most likely to be selected to donate for a patient. Therefore we have made the decision to change our donor recruitment criteria so that we only accept those donors that are most needed on the BBMR. ... we must focus on changing the demographic mix of the BBMR to better meet patient demand. We believe this approach will best enable us to help as many patients in need as possible."
A remarkably prolix and opaque document. I asked a smart scientific friend to explain why it is so eerily verbose. He’s just replied:
“You're right that the verbose and roundabout nature of the text likely stems from discomfort with directly addressing certain facts about biological differences between populations. The article does seem to be struggling to balance several competing concerns:
Communicating the medical necessity of targeting specific demographic groups for stem cell donation
Avoiding language that could be perceived as promoting racial stereotypes or biological determinism
Adhering to institutional and societal norms around discussing race and genetics
Explaining a policy that, on its face, appears discriminatory
The authors are likely trying to convey factual information about genetic differences relevant to stem cell donation without seeming to endorse broader claims about race as a biological concept. This results in the roundabout, overly cautious language you've noticed.
You're correct that at the core of this issue is the fact that there are real, medically relevant genetic differences between populations that correlate with ancestry. The reluctance to state this directly and succinctly does indeed seem to be driving much of the document's verbosity and lack of clarity.”
Who specialises in this very specific area? I have a science background, but I know about as much on this as the milkman. My wife has a science background, a chemical pathologist, so a little closer to the topic, but at best could give the milkman a run for his money on her knowledge on it.
People from the humanities both think they understand science stuff when they don't and surprisingly assume scientists understand all areas of science rather than their speciality. We might have a basic grasp, but for instance my knowledge on the biological sciences is very limited.
About birds being animals...
Now that I do know. Anyone newish to the site will not have a clue what you are referring to. In fact I think it possible that it will only be you and me. I wonder how many private jokes there are on PB? And yes they are bloody animals.
"This requires hard thinking – not the Conservatives’ traditional strength. We, like worried Victorians, live in a time when “the lights are all drifting, the compasses all awry, and nothing left to steer by but the stars”. Have the Tories got a potential leader with a broad hinterland, the brains to rethink first principles, a willingness to confront vested interests and courage to speak plainly? I hope they have. But will they choose her?"
On the Middle East question, very little in the UK and Europe in the last 24 hours, is the statement from Saudi Arabia.
Under huge political pressure, they say they want to "put their differences with Iran to one side", and improve ties. This was also signed by the other Gulf Arab states.
This is very bad news for both Israel and West, because it means that not only is the goal of Israeli-Gulf rapprochement going down the plughole, but also that Netanyahu's "war without end" on four fronts, is beginning to create the kind of pan-Muslim climate of the 1950s to the 1970s ; exactly in opposite to Israel's, and the West's, long-term interests.
It means the end of the oil age is nearer than anyone previously realized.
Buy inverter companies.
That would also explain the news that the Saudis intend to increase oil production to get a larger market share at lower prices. Better to get what money they can now.
It does sound like MBS finally answered one of Blinken’s many calls.
Perhaps the best thing that could happen to the world economy in the next year or two, is for the Saudis to start pumping oil like crazy. It will reduce the cost of living in the West, and screw Putin who is reduced to selling his O&G output at a massive discount to the Chinese and Indians.
If I had £22 billion to spend on carbon [sic] reduction, the first thing I would do is make sure every public building that wasn't Grade I listed was absolutely plastered with solar panels.
The next thing I would do is build some damn tidal stations, at last.
I might look at any schemes to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I wouldn't spend a red cent on 'carbon capture.'
It's the present day equivalent of Thatcher deciding to pacify the miners and subsidise UK coalfields for the duration of her premiership.
Mr. eek, the Government could even go wild and build some transport infrastructure in a place that isn't London.
No, instead they've just announced they're going to spend £20 billion or so on a technology to make burning fossil fuels more expensive. Which will probably be obsolete in not much over a decade. Soon after it comes on stream.
Still at least we know now why they're looking to cut other infrastructure spending.
I thought the point of this government was meant to be competence.
Implementing the last lots dafter ideas doesnt quite hit the mark.
Theyd have been safer spending it on mini nukes or something as simple as insulation.
Or even "Great British Energy". Which despite its name isn't utterly daft. We might then be paying our government for wind power, rather than overseas investors.
Theres just the mnor matter of those 100000+ lost jobs in the North Sea and the industrial infrastructure that goes with it.
Still no doubt we can import lots more energy to help our balance of payments.
You quote a figure - no-one in the industry believes to be correct nowadays - didn't we work it out as 30,000 direct jobs maximum...
No we didnt. Its about when you take in the supply chain 100000 with potentially 200000 in the pot but some of these will get saved by other work.
However even if I take your hope figure of 30000, Why the fk should 30000 people lose their jobs just on an ideologues whim ? I'll have some of those people to sack next year shall I tell them it;s all for their own good and they should thank me ?
Government policy - at the moment - is to provide tax relief at 90% for the exploration and development of new fields, incentivising companies to avoid the windfall tax by directing investment into fossil fuels.
That includes the 100 additional licences issued by Sunak last year. The fact is that Miliband has only made the very smallest of dents into the course of the North Sea, which has seen a gradual decline in production for decades and throughout the Conservative's time in office.
Sorry but that is rubbish. The cancellation of projects and the shifting of investment away from the North Sea has turned from a trickle into a tidal wave since Milliband got into power. I had a number of potential contracts where the companies were absolutely clear that they had their plans on hold until they saw if Labour won (and followed through on their promises) and which have now been cancelled. Serica, Hartshead, Harbour, Ithaca and Dana are all reducing North Sea investment and reinvesting in exploration and development elsewhere - many of them in Norway.
Prior to the election Labour had been claiming that increasing the windfall tax would push North Sea tax revenues up from the (OBR) predicted £8.6 billion a year in 2028 to something over £10 billion. The latest prediction based on what Labour has proposed/done since it came to power is that that revenue will fall to £2 billion a year at most by 2028. To be honest, the way companies are now fleeing the North Sea I think they will be lucky to make that.
I see that @JonO is running for Elmbridge Council next week. Best of luck.
We have no fewer than 38 by-elections over the next fortnight. I’d expect a lot of Labour losses.
How many Reform UK gains? Will Reform UK even stand that many candidates? I think that’s an interesting question: can RefUK transform itself into a traditional party that wins seats? That will be a big determiner of the next general election result.
OK, I know very little of the story here, but that's not stopped anyone else.
But some things that smell a bit odd...
First, was this another poonami that the outgoing government left for Starmer? Was it a thing that really had to happen, but had hefty downsides (especially for true blue Tories), so it was just left in the in-tray? (Genuinely, I don't know how viable the 'just let the status quo roll on' thing is.)
Second, who is leaking the stuff to the Times?
Third, who benefits from the story, Conservative leadership-wise? Tom T is ferocious, national security-wise, isn't he? And however disappointing he is, isn't he a more likely receptacle for Cleverly votes looking for a new home than Kemi?
It makes sense once you realise this has nothing to do with the Chagossians and little to do with the UK, but is mainly about the USA wanting to secure its base on Diego Garcia. The international law issues aren't the USA's problem - Britain, you sort that out. Which is why both Biden and Trump seem to think this a good result.
OK, I know very little of the story here, but that's not stopped anyone else.
But some things that smell a bit odd...
First, was this another poonami that the outgoing government left for Starmer? Was it a thing that really had to happen, but had hefty downsides (especially for true blue Tories), so it was just left in the in-tray? (Genuinely, I don't know how viable the 'just let the status quo roll on' thing is.)
Second, who is leaking the stuff to the Times?
Third, who benefits from the story, Conservative leadership-wise? Tom T is ferocious, national security-wise, isn't he? And however disappointing he is, isn't he a more likely receptacle for Cleverly votes looking for a new home than Kemi?
I honestly think they genuinely thought this would make them look good. Because British Empire = bad. And they don't really mix with anyone who thinks differently. We see this a lot from Labour. Policy decisions by what will most annoy the right.
I dunno about that. In this case, I really dunno.
Did the government really choose to do this, or is it putting the best face on something it didn't really have a realistic choice about? Forget Dave's claims of a veto- by the time he became Foreign Secretary, he knew it was an interim gig and his veto was a delay at most.
But the bigger picture is simple. This government will do things that you don't like and that I don't like. Not always because they are seeking to taunt, but because the Conservatives made in utter Horlicks of governing in recent years and so they lost. This is what losing looks like, and it's why sensible parties try to avoid it.
As of now, I don't see much evidence that the Conservatives have recovered their senses.
"We are limited on the number of donors that we can recruit annually due to both financial constraints and our capacity to type the donors and we need to make sure we recruit only those donors who are most likely to be selected to donate for a patient. Therefore we have made the decision to change our donor recruitment criteria so that we only accept those donors that are most needed on the BBMR. ... we must focus on changing the demographic mix of the BBMR to better meet patient demand. We believe this approach will best enable us to help as many patients in need as possible."
A remarkably prolix and opaque document. I asked a smart scientific friend to explain why it is so eerily verbose. He’s just replied:
“You're right that the verbose and roundabout nature of the text likely stems from discomfort with directly addressing certain facts about biological differences between populations. The article does seem to be struggling to balance several competing concerns:
Communicating the medical necessity of targeting specific demographic groups for stem cell donation
Avoiding language that could be perceived as promoting racial stereotypes or biological determinism
Adhering to institutional and societal norms around discussing race and genetics
Explaining a policy that, on its face, appears discriminatory
The authors are likely trying to convey factual information about genetic differences relevant to stem cell donation without seeming to endorse broader claims about race as a biological concept. This results in the roundabout, overly cautious language you've noticed.
You're correct that at the core of this issue is the fact that there are real, medically relevant genetic differences between populations that correlate with ancestry. The reluctance to state this directly and succinctly does indeed seem to be driving much of the document's verbosity and lack of clarity.”
Who specialises in this very specific area? I have a science background, but I know about as much on this as the milkman. My wife has a science background, a chemical pathologist, so a little closer to the topic, but at best could give the milkman a run for his money on her knowledge on it.
People from the humanities both think they understand science stuff when they don't and surprisingly assume scientists understand all areas of science rather than their speciality. We might have a basic grasp, but for instance my knowledge on the biological sciences is very limited.
You mean that possessing a white lab coat, intense looking spectacles and a briar pipe doesn’t make you a universal genius?
Have you any experimental data to backup this remarkable conclusion?
I see that @JonO is running for Elmbridge Council next week. Best of luck.
We have no fewer than 38 by-elections over the next fortnight. I’d expect a lot of Labour losses.
Looked it up and a very close result in 2024 with the LDs just winning. Obviously mixed feelings being a LD because I like @JohnO a lot, both his views and his humour.
It’s like the League of Empire Loyalists here these past 24 hours.
If there's one thing anti-imperialists need to admit, it is that *how* an empire ends and dissolves matters. It is hard to do well, and in places can be disastrous (the Soviet/Russian empire ~1918 and ~1990; the Ottoman empire ~1920, especially with the experience of the Armenians and the Greek/Turkish population 'exchanges'; or the Indian partition in 1947.
This is another little piece of empire that may well be seen as having ended badly in the medium and long term.
Are you really comparing the recent agreement on Diego Garcia to the Partition of India and the Armenian genocide?!
It's the most ridiculous hyperbole so far. Returning an ethnically cleansed population to depopulated islands is not the same as doing ethnic cleansing. It is righting a historic wrong.
I have not noticed the deal returning the Chagos Islanders to the Islands? Just their being handed over to Mauritius
If I had £22 billion to spend on carbon [sic] reduction, the first thing I would do is make sure every public building that wasn't Grade I listed was absolutely plastered with solar panels.
The next thing I would do is build some damn tidal stations, at last.
I might look at any schemes to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I wouldn't spend a red cent on 'carbon capture.'
It's the present day equivalent of Thatcher deciding to pacify the miners and subsidise UK coalfields for the duration of her premiership.
If I'm honest - as somebody who's not a scientist - it looks more like the present day equivalent of massively funding research into perpetual motion machines.
On the Middle East question, very little in the UK and Europe in the last 24 hours, is the statement from Saudi Arabia.
Under huge political pressure, they say they want to "put their differences with Iran to one side", and improve ties. This was also signed by the other Gulf Arab states.
This is very bad news for both Israel and West, because it means that not only is the goal of Israeli-Gulf rapprochement going down the plughole, but also that Netanyahu's "war without end" on four fronts, is beginning to create the kind of pan-Muslim climate of the 1950s to the 1970s ; exactly in opposite to Israel's, and the West's, long-term interests.
Albeit Israel did manage to defeat all its Muslim neighbours in the 1970s and 1950s yes Netanyahu has overreached when he should just have focused on defeating Hamas
Mr. eek, the Government could even go wild and build some transport infrastructure in a place that isn't London.
No, instead they've just announced they're going to spend £20 billion or so on a technology to make burning fossil fuels more expensive. Which will probably be obsolete in not much over a decade. Soon after it comes on stream.
Still at least we know now why they're looking to cut other infrastructure spending.
I thought the point of this government was meant to be competence.
Implementing the last lots dafter ideas doesnt quite hit the mark.
Theyd have been safer spending it on mini nukes or something as simple as insulation.
Or even "Great British Energy". Which despite its name isn't utterly daft. We might then be paying our government for wind power, rather than overseas investors.
Theres just the mnor matter of those 100000+ lost jobs in the North Sea and the industrial infrastructure that goes with it.
Still no doubt we can import lots more energy to help our balance of payments.
You quote a figure - no-one in the industry believes to be correct nowadays - didn't we work it out as 30,000 direct jobs maximum...
No we didnt. Its about when you take in the supply chain 100000 with potentially 200000 in the pot but some of these will get saved by other work.
However even if I take your hope figure of 30000, Why the fk should 30000 people lose their jobs just on an ideologues whim ? I'll have some of those people to sack next year shall I tell them it;s all for their own good and they should thank me ?
Government policy - at the moment - is to provide tax relief at 90% for the exploration and development of new fields, incentivising companies to avoid the windfall tax by directing investment into fossil fuels.
That includes the 100 additional licences issued by Sunak last year. The fact is that Miliband has only made the very smallest of dents into the course of the North Sea, which has seen a gradual decline in production for decades and throughout the Conservative's time in office.
Sorry but that is rubbish. The cancellation of projects and the shifting of investment away from the North Sea has turned from a trickle into a tidal wave since Milliband got into power. I had a number of potential contracts where the companies were absolutely clear that they had their plans on hold until they saw if Labour won (and followed through on their promises) and which have now been cancelled. Serica, Hartshead, Harbour, Ithaca and Dana are all reducing North Sea investment and reinvesting in exploration and development elsewhere - many of them in Norway.
Prior to the election Labour had been claiming that increasing the windfall tax would push North Sea tax revenues up from the (OBR) predicted £8.6 billion a year in 2028 to something over £10 billion. The latest prediction based on what Labour has proposed/done since it came to power is that that revenue will fall to £2 billion a year at most by 2028. To be honest, the way companies are now fleeing the North Sea I think they will be lucky to make that.
So THAT'S where their £20 billion financial black hole comes from....
OK, I know very little of the story here, but that's not stopped anyone else.
But some things that smell a bit odd...
First, was this another poonami that the outgoing government left for Starmer? Was it a thing that really had to happen, but had hefty downsides (especially for true blue Tories), so it was just left in the in-tray? (Genuinely, I don't know how viable the 'just let the status quo roll on' thing is.)
Second, who is leaking the stuff to the Times?
Third, who benefits from the story, Conservative leadership-wise? Tom T is ferocious, national security-wise, isn't he? And however disappointing he is, isn't he a more likely receptacle for Cleverly votes looking for a new home than Kemi?
I honestly think they genuinely thought this would make them look good. Because British Empire = bad. And they don't really mix with anyone who thinks differently. We see this a lot from Labour. Policy decisions by what will most annoy the right.
I dunno about that. In this case, I really dunno.
Did the government really choose to do this, or is it putting the best face on something it didn't really have a realistic choice about? Forget Dave's claims of a veto- by the time he became Foreign Secretary, he knew it was an interim gig and his veto was a delay at most.
But the bigger picture is simple. This government will do things that you don't like and that I don't like. Not always because they are seeking to taunt, but because the Conservatives made in utter Horlicks of governing in recent years and so they lost. This is what losing looks like, and it's why sensible parties try to avoid it.
As of now, I don't see much evidence that the Conservatives have recovered their senses.
Equally I don't see much evidence of this Government having a plan - because their media management is demonstrating that they really don't have one.
I mean they've managed to use £22bn for both the scale of this years budget gap and as a bung for carbon capture (which is by definition short term given where we are towards Net Zero).. That really isn't bright..
OK, I know very little of the story here, but that's not stopped anyone else.
But some things that smell a bit odd...
First, was this another poonami that the outgoing government left for Starmer? Was it a thing that really had to happen, but had hefty downsides (especially for true blue Tories), so it was just left in the in-tray? (Genuinely, I don't know how viable the 'just let the status quo roll on' thing is.)
Second, who is leaking the stuff to the Times?
Third, who benefits from the story, Conservative leadership-wise? Tom T is ferocious, national security-wise, isn't he? And however disappointing he is, isn't he a more likely receptacle for Cleverly votes looking for a new home than Kemi?
It makes sense once you realise this has nothing to do with the Chagossians and little to do with the UK, but is mainly about the USA wanting to secure its base on Diego Garcia. The international law issues aren't the USA's problem - Britain, you sort that out. Which is why both Biden and Trump seem to think this a good result.
Do you think the story about the Americans privately opposing the deal is cobblers then?
"We are limited on the number of donors that we can recruit annually due to both financial constraints and our capacity to type the donors and we need to make sure we recruit only those donors who are most likely to be selected to donate for a patient. Therefore we have made the decision to change our donor recruitment criteria so that we only accept those donors that are most needed on the BBMR. ... we must focus on changing the demographic mix of the BBMR to better meet patient demand. We believe this approach will best enable us to help as many patients in need as possible."
A remarkably prolix and opaque document. I asked a smart scientific friend to explain why it is so eerily verbose. He’s just replied:
“You're right that the verbose and roundabout nature of the text likely stems from discomfort with directly addressing certain facts about biological differences between populations. The article does seem to be struggling to balance several competing concerns:
Communicating the medical necessity of targeting specific demographic groups for stem cell donation
Avoiding language that could be perceived as promoting racial stereotypes or biological determinism
Adhering to institutional and societal norms around discussing race and genetics
Explaining a policy that, on its face, appears discriminatory
The authors are likely trying to convey factual information about genetic differences relevant to stem cell donation without seeming to endorse broader claims about race as a biological concept. This results in the roundabout, overly cautious language you've noticed.
You're correct that at the core of this issue is the fact that there are real, medically relevant genetic differences between populations that correlate with ancestry. The reluctance to state this directly and succinctly does indeed seem to be driving much of the document's verbosity and lack of clarity.”
He seems to have told you something you already knew but using a lot of words to do it. You should have just asked ChatGPT.
I see that @JonO is running for Elmbridge Council next week. Best of luck.
We have no fewer than 38 by-elections over the next fortnight. I’d expect a lot of Labour losses.
Looked it up and a very close result in 2024 with the LDs just winning. Obviously mixed feelings being a LD because I like @JohnO a lot, both his views and his humour.
On the Middle East question, very little in the UK and Europe in the last 24 hours, is the statement from Saudi Arabia.
Under huge political pressure, they say they want to "put their differences with Iran to one side", and improve ties. This was also signed by the other Gulf Arab states.
This is very bad news for both Israel and West, because it means that not only is the goal of Israeli-Gulf rapprochement going down the plughole, but also that Netanyahu's "war without end" on four fronts, is beginning to create the kind of pan-Muslim climate of the 1950s to the 1970s ; exactly in opposite to Israel's, and the West's, long-term interests.
Albeit Israel did manage to defeat all its Muslim neighbours in the 1970s and 1950s yes Netanyahu has overreached when he should just have focused on defeating Hamas
Netenyahu is focussed on defeating the Israeli public prosecutor. Not Hamas.
If I had £22 billion to spend on carbon [sic] reduction, the first thing I would do is make sure every public building that wasn't Grade I listed was absolutely plastered with solar panels.
The next thing I would do is build some damn tidal stations, at last.
I might look at any schemes to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I wouldn't spend a red cent on 'carbon capture.'
It's the present day equivalent of Thatcher deciding to pacify the miners and subsidise UK coalfields for the duration of her premiership.
If I'm honest - as somebody who's not a scientist - it looks more like the present day equivalent of massively funding research into perpetual motion machines.
There's that too.
My analogy was because this is being sold as delivering "good jobs" in the North East. Keeping the mines open would also have been about retaining jobs at the expense of economic common sense.
I see Reeves also calls it a "game-changing technology". In the sense that it's a game losing technology, I guess that's strictly true.
It’s like the League of Empire Loyalists here these past 24 hours.
If only the Conservatives had been in power in the 1950s we should still have most of the empire.
Churchill never wanted to give India independence, Labour Attlee did and that began the end of Empire. It was Liberal Lloyd George who created the Irish Free State and Tory Lord North even fought the US War of Independence to try and keep the American colonies
OK, I know very little of the story here, but that's not stopped anyone else.
But some things that smell a bit odd...
First, was this another poonami that the outgoing government left for Starmer? Was it a thing that really had to happen, but had hefty downsides (especially for true blue Tories), so it was just left in the in-tray? (Genuinely, I don't know how viable the 'just let the status quo roll on' thing is.)
Second, who is leaking the stuff to the Times?
Third, who benefits from the story, Conservative leadership-wise? Tom T is ferocious, national security-wise, isn't he? And however disappointing he is, isn't he a more likely receptacle for Cleverly votes looking for a new home than Kemi?
I honestly think they genuinely thought this would make them look good. Because British Empire = bad. And they don't really mix with anyone who thinks differently. We see this a lot from Labour. Policy decisions by what will most annoy the right.
I dunno about that. In this case, I really dunno.
Did the government really choose to do this, or is it putting the best face on something it didn't really have a realistic choice about? Forget Dave's claims of a veto- by the time he became Foreign Secretary, he knew it was an interim gig and his veto was a delay at most.
But the bigger picture is simple. This government will do things that you don't like and that I don't like. Not always because they are seeking to taunt, but because the Conservatives made in utter Horlicks of governing in recent years and so they lost. This is what losing looks like, and it's why sensible parties try to avoid it.
As of now, I don't see much evidence that the Conservatives have recovered their senses.
It's simpler than that I think. Given the UK was found to be clear breach of international law in splitting Chagos from Mauritius at time of independence and it wants to retain the Diego Garcia base mainly for the Americans without contestation, it has no choice but to deal with the Mauritius government. In those terms it is likely to be a good deal.
We can argue about the rightness of that calculation but it is a serious decision from Starmer when no-one else in politics is being serious.
It’s like the League of Empire Loyalists here these past 24 hours.
If there's one thing anti-imperialists need to admit, it is that *how* an empire ends and dissolves matters. It is hard to do well, and in places can be disastrous (the Soviet/Russian empire ~1918 and ~1990; the Ottoman empire ~1920, especially with the experience of the Armenians and the Greek/Turkish population 'exchanges'; or the Indian partition in 1947.
This is another little piece of empire that may well be seen as having ended badly in the medium and long term.
Are you really comparing the recent agreement on Diego Garcia to the Partition of India and the Armenian genocide?!
It's the most ridiculous hyperbole so far. Returning an ethnically cleansed population to depopulated islands is not the same as doing ethnic cleansing. It is righting a historic wrong.
I have not noticed the deal returning the Chagos Islanders to the Islands? Just their being handed over to Mauritius
"Mauritius will now be free to implement a programme of resettlement on the islands of the Chagos Archipelago, other than Diego Garcia"
OK, I know very little of the story here, but that's not stopped anyone else.
But some things that smell a bit odd...
First, was this another poonami that the outgoing government left for Starmer? Was it a thing that really had to happen, but had hefty downsides (especially for true blue Tories), so it was just left in the in-tray? (Genuinely, I don't know how viable the 'just let the status quo roll on' thing is.)
Second, who is leaking the stuff to the Times?
Third, who benefits from the story, Conservative leadership-wise? Tom T is ferocious, national security-wise, isn't he? And however disappointing he is, isn't he a more likely receptacle for Cleverly votes looking for a new home than Kemi?
I honestly think they genuinely thought this would make them look good. Because British Empire = bad. And they don't really mix with anyone who thinks differently. We see this a lot from Labour. Policy decisions by what will most annoy the right.
I dunno about that. In this case, I really dunno.
Did the government really choose to do this, or is it putting the best face on something it didn't really have a realistic choice about? Forget Dave's claims of a veto- by the time he became Foreign Secretary, he knew it was an interim gig and his veto was a delay at most.
But the bigger picture is simple. This government will do things that you don't like and that I don't like. Not always because they are seeking to taunt, but because the Conservatives made in utter Horlicks of governing in recent years and so they lost. This is what losing looks like, and it's why sensible parties try to avoid it.
As of now, I don't see much evidence that the Conservatives have recovered their senses.
It's simpler than that I think. Given the UK was found to be clear breach of international law in splitting Chagos from Mauritius at time of independence and it wants to retain the Diego Garcia base mainly for the Americans, it has no choice but to deal with the Mauritius government. In those terms it is likely to be a good deal.
We can argue about the rightness of that calculation but it is a serious decision from Starmer when no-one else in politics is being serious.
Clearest indication yet that this was "the right thing to do" is BoZo whining about it on GBeebies
If I had £22 billion to spend on carbon [sic] reduction, the first thing I would do is make sure every public building that wasn't Grade I listed was absolutely plastered with solar panels.
The next thing I would do is build some damn tidal stations, at last.
I might look at any schemes to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I wouldn't spend a red cent on 'carbon capture.'
It's the present day equivalent of Thatcher deciding to pacify the miners and subsidise UK coalfields for the duration of her premiership.
If I'm honest - as somebody who's not a scientist - it looks more like the present day equivalent of massively funding research into perpetual motion machines.
With the storage side there are some real sticking points in the physics which the companies have had a lot of trouble trying to overcome. (Until last year I was involved in planning drilling wells for CCS projects for one of the oil companies involved).
Simple physics. When you are collecting and pumping the CO2 you put it under compression. When you then pump that CO2 down the hole and into the reservoir that pressure is rapidly diminished as the CO2 enters the reservoir. This results in an effect known as Joule-Thomson Cooling. This has a lot of effects, none of them good for the reservoir, but the most immediate is a phase change in the residual water around the well bore. This will block the pore spaces and reduce or prevent injection and also causes thermal stress due to ice formation which can damage the resrvoir around the injection well and reduce injection further or cause a breach of the top of the reservoir.
This has proved rather problematic in trying to get an efficient storage system in place.
OK, I know very little of the story here, but that's not stopped anyone else.
But some things that smell a bit odd...
First, was this another poonami that the outgoing government left for Starmer? Was it a thing that really had to happen, but had hefty downsides (especially for true blue Tories), so it was just left in the in-tray? (Genuinely, I don't know how viable the 'just let the status quo roll on' thing is.)
Second, who is leaking the stuff to the Times?
Third, who benefits from the story, Conservative leadership-wise? Tom T is ferocious, national security-wise, isn't he? And however disappointing he is, isn't he a more likely receptacle for Cleverly votes looking for a new home than Kemi?
It makes sense once you realise this has nothing to do with the Chagossians and little to do with the UK, but is mainly about the USA wanting to secure its base on Diego Garcia. The international law issues aren't the USA's problem - Britain, you sort that out. Which is why both Biden and Trump seem to think this a good result.
Do you think the story about the Americans privately opposing the deal is cobblers then?
Yes. It is cobblers.
No sign of any equivocation here and this is the horse's mouth
Latest update on #Marburg in Rwanda: 37 cases including 11 patients that have died and 5 that have recovered Also impressively more than a thousand tests have been done according to the ministry of health https://x.com/kakape/status/1841959941151813935
If I had £22 billion to spend on carbon [sic] reduction, the first thing I would do is make sure every public building that wasn't Grade I listed was absolutely plastered with solar panels.
The next thing I would do is build some damn tidal stations, at last.
I might look at any schemes to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I wouldn't spend a red cent on 'carbon capture.'
It's the present day equivalent of Thatcher deciding to pacify the miners and subsidise UK coalfields for the duration of her premiership.
If I'm honest - as somebody who's not a scientist - it looks more like the present day equivalent of massively funding research into perpetual motion machines.
With the storage side there are some real sticking points in the physics which the companies have had a lot of trouble trying to overcome. (Until last year I was involved in planning drilling wells for CCS projects for one of the oil companies involved).
Simple physics. When you are collecting and pumping the CO2 you put it under compression. When you then pump that CO2 down the hole and into the reservoir that pressure is rapidly diminished as the CO2 enters the reservoir. This results in an effect known as Joule-Thomson Cooling. This has a lot of effects, none of them good for the reservoir, but the most immediate is a phase change in the residual water around the well bore. This will block the pore spaces and reduce or prevent injection and also causes thermal stress due to ice formation which can damage the resrvoir around the injection well and reduce injection further or cause a breach of the top of the reservoir.
This has proved rather problematic in trying to get an efficient storage system in place.
Excellent, informed and interesting comment.
I've never forgotten the effect of expansion on CO2 ever since seeing the doctor generate a slug of the solid stuff to put on my ingrowing toe when I was a teenager. It cooled so much when being let out of the cylinder that some of it froze - not water ice but CO2 ice.
OK, I know very little of the story here, but that's not stopped anyone else.
But some things that smell a bit odd...
First, was this another poonami that the outgoing government left for Starmer? Was it a thing that really had to happen, but had hefty downsides (especially for true blue Tories), so it was just left in the in-tray? (Genuinely, I don't know how viable the 'just let the status quo roll on' thing is.)
Second, who is leaking the stuff to the Times?
Third, who benefits from the story, Conservative leadership-wise? Tom T is ferocious, national security-wise, isn't he? And however disappointing he is, isn't he a more likely receptacle for Cleverly votes looking for a new home than Kemi?
I honestly think they genuinely thought this would make them look good. Because British Empire = bad. And they don't really mix with anyone who thinks differently. We see this a lot from Labour. Policy decisions by what will most annoy the right.
I dunno about that. In this case, I really dunno.
Did the government really choose to do this, or is it putting the best face on something it didn't really have a realistic choice about? Forget Dave's claims of a veto- by the time he became Foreign Secretary, he knew it was an interim gig and his veto was a delay at most.
But the bigger picture is simple. This government will do things that you don't like and that I don't like. Not always because they are seeking to taunt, but because the Conservatives made in utter Horlicks of governing in recent years and so they lost. This is what losing looks like, and it's why sensible parties try to avoid it.
As of now, I don't see much evidence that the Conservatives have recovered their senses.
It's simpler than that I think. Given the UK was found to be clear breach of international law in splitting Chagos from Mauritius at time of independence and it wants to retain the Diego Garcia base mainly for the Americans without contestation, it has no choice but to deal with the Mauritius government. In those terms it is likely to be a good deal.
We can argue about the rightness of that calculation but it is a serious decision from Starmer when no-one else in politics is being serious.
That's roughly my suspicion as well.
At some point between 2022 and 2024, the previous government just stopped doing stuff that might cost it support. See the great Nimby climbdown, or the refusal to accept that they couldn't win the pay disputes.
Rational with an election coming up, but not especially patriotic. In a parallel universe, Sunak was the PM who went down to a huge defeat because he took on his party and did the unpleasant stuff. He was the dying man who therefore couldn't be killed.
Instead, he trimmed and grovelled and achieved very little. And still went down to a huge defeat.
If I had £22 billion to spend on carbon [sic] reduction, the first thing I would do is make sure every public building that wasn't Grade I listed was absolutely plastered with solar panels.
The next thing I would do is build some damn tidal stations, at last.
I might look at any schemes to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I wouldn't spend a red cent on 'carbon capture.'
It's the present day equivalent of Thatcher deciding to pacify the miners and subsidise UK coalfields for the duration of her premiership.
If I'm honest - as somebody who's not a scientist - it looks more like the present day equivalent of massively funding research into perpetual motion machines.
With the storage side there are some real sticking points in the physics which the companies have had a lot of trouble trying to overcome. (Until last year I was involved in planning drilling wells for CCS projects for one of the oil companies involved).
Simple physics. When you are collecting and pumping the CO2 you put it under compression. When you then pump that CO2 down the hole and into the reservoir that pressure is rapidly diminished as the CO2 enters the reservoir. This results in an effect known as Joule-Thomson Cooling. This has a lot of effects, none of them good for the reservoir, but the most immediate is a phase change in the residual water around the well bore. This will block the pore spaces and reduce or prevent injection and also causes thermal stress due to ice formation which can damage the resrvoir around the injection well and reduce injection further or cause a breach of the top of the reservoir.
This has proved rather problematic in trying to get an efficient storage system in place.
So how many geologists and physicists do you think Ed Miliband had spoken to, before his announcement?
Or does he not give a sh!t about science, and makes decisions based on ideology?
OK, I know very little of the story here, but that's not stopped anyone else.
But some things that smell a bit odd...
First, was this another poonami that the outgoing government left for Starmer? Was it a thing that really had to happen, but had hefty downsides (especially for true blue Tories), so it was just left in the in-tray? (Genuinely, I don't know how viable the 'just let the status quo roll on' thing is.)
Second, who is leaking the stuff to the Times?
Third, who benefits from the story, Conservative leadership-wise? Tom T is ferocious, national security-wise, isn't he? And however disappointing he is, isn't he a more likely receptacle for Cleverly votes looking for a new home than Kemi?
It makes sense once you realise this has nothing to do with the Chagossians and little to do with the UK, but is mainly about the USA wanting to secure its base on Diego Garcia. The international law issues aren't the USA's problem - Britain, you sort that out. Which is why both Biden and Trump seem to think this a good result.
Do you think the story about the Americans privately opposing the deal is cobblers then?
Yes. It is cobblers.
No sign of any equivocation here and this is the horse's mouth
"We strongly condemn the agreement between the Republic of Mauritius and the United Kingdom on the status of the Chagos Archipelago as a strategic blunder that undermines U.S. interests and regional security. Far from being a diplomatic achievement, this deal represents a colossal failure by the British government, which has naively jeopardized the future of one of the most important military assets in the Indo-Pacific.
By conceding sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius, the UK has weakened its control over Diego Garcia, a critical joint U.S.-UK military base. The agreement introduces unnecessary uncertainty and creates potential friction with Mauritius over the long-term status and operations of the base, threatening its ability to function effectively. Given Diego Garcia's central role in supporting U.S. military operations and maintaining regional stability, this move is shortsighted and irresponsible.
Moreover, the British government's willingness to compromise on such a vital strategic asset reflects a profound lack of foresight. By pursuing a deal that appears politically convenient, they have failed to safeguard the long-term security interests of both the UK and the United States. This agreement risks destabilizing the carefully calibrated balance of power in the IndoPacific, potentially creating vulnerabilities in a region already facing significant security threats."
THAT??
Rather than applauding this misguided agreement, we should be deeply concerned about the consequences it will have for U.S. strategic interests and the future of our critical defense partnerships in the region
If I had £22 billion to spend on carbon [sic] reduction, the first thing I would do is make sure every public building that wasn't Grade I listed was absolutely plastered with solar panels.
The next thing I would do is build some damn tidal stations, at last.
I might look at any schemes to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I wouldn't spend a red cent on 'carbon capture.'
It's the present day equivalent of Thatcher deciding to pacify the miners and subsidise UK coalfields for the duration of her premiership.
If I'm honest - as somebody who's not a scientist - it looks more like the present day equivalent of massively funding research into perpetual motion machines.
With the storage side there are some real sticking points in the physics which the companies have had a lot of trouble trying to overcome. (Until last year I was involved in planning drilling wells for CCS projects for one of the oil companies involved).
Simple physics. When you are collecting and pumping the CO2 you put it under compression. When you then pump that CO2 down the hole and into the reservoir that pressure is rapidly diminished as the CO2 enters the reservoir. This results in an effect known as Joule-Thomson Cooling. This has a lot of effects, none of them good for the reservoir, but the most immediate is a phase change in the residual water around the well bore. This will block the pore spaces and reduce or prevent injection and also causes thermal stress due to ice formation which can damage the resrvoir around the injection well and reduce injection further or cause a breach of the top of the reservoir.
This has proved rather problematic in trying to get an efficient storage system in place.
Excellent, informed and interesting comment.
I've never forgotten the effect of expansion on CO2 ever since seeing the doctor generate a slug of the solid stuff to put on my ingrowing toe when I was a teenager. It cooled so much when being let out of the cylinder that some of it froze - not water ice but CO2 ice.
The most obvious example of this is CO2 fire extinguishers. It is why you should never hold the metal cone on them when using them. You can see the ice form around the cone end.
- economy tanking - black hole lies - riots - North Sea shutdown - sleaze
and now Chagos,
And all within 3 months
And now £22bn on carbon capture.
That £22bn sounds very familiar so I can see WFA coming back again alongside HS2 and the lower Thames Crossing (which should be confirmed / cancelled today).
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Government this inept at announcement timing let alone everything else
I know we've got an advocate of it on here, but CCS is a concept with rather niche applicability IMO.
Like I said last night, it's a complete dead-end technologically. Money spent on CCS is as close to digging a hole and burying the money in it as it is possible to get.
In addition to it being useless compared to renewables, because it will always be more expensive than burning fossil fuels without CCS, it's not even the best technology to pursue if you want to spend money on a techno-fix to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. CCS will only ever be able to capture the CO2 produced when fossil fuels are burnt, but some of the technologies being developed for removing CO2 from the atmosphere would, if they can scale, not have any limit to the amount of CO2 they could remove from the atmosphere, so they could actually reduce CO2 levels. CCS will only, at best, be able to stop them increasing further.
I'm in favour of spending money on speculative technology, knowing that it sometimes won't work, but even if CCS works perfectly it will still be crap.
The one thing going for it is that the investment is actually in the north for once - Teesside and Merseyside.
I'd be curious as to how much carbon you could grab by planting £22 billion worth of trees, wooden buildings etc. instead.
Other gov'ts (Well Denmark) seem to take a much more straightforward and simple approach to energy/carbon than ours. £22 Bn seems an enormous amount for uncertain tech, whereas Hornsea 3 or the Gov't paying say £5,000 toward domestic solar panels (Strictly limited to 4.4 million slots) would be much more efficient carbon wise.
If I had £22 billion to spend on carbon [sic] reduction, the first thing I would do is make sure every public building that wasn't Grade I listed was absolutely plastered with solar panels.
The next thing I would do is build some damn tidal stations, at last.
I might look at any schemes to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I wouldn't spend a red cent on 'carbon capture.'
It's the present day equivalent of Thatcher deciding to pacify the miners and subsidise UK coalfields for the duration of her premiership.
If I'm honest - as somebody who's not a scientist - it looks more like the present day equivalent of massively funding research into perpetual motion machines.
With the storage side there are some real sticking points in the physics which the companies have had a lot of trouble trying to overcome. (Until last year I was involved in planning drilling wells for CCS projects for one of the oil companies involved).
Simple physics. When you are collecting and pumping the CO2 you put it under compression. When you then pump that CO2 down the hole and into the reservoir that pressure is rapidly diminished as the CO2 enters the reservoir. This results in an effect known as Joule-Thomson Cooling. This has a lot of effects, none of them good for the reservoir, but the most immediate is a phase change in the residual water around the well bore. This will block the pore spaces and reduce or prevent injection and also causes thermal stress due to ice formation which can damage the resrvoir around the injection well and reduce injection further or cause a breach of the top of the reservoir.
This has proved rather problematic in trying to get an efficient storage system in place.
Excellent, informed and interesting comment.
I've never forgotten the effect of expansion on CO2 ever since seeing the doctor generate a slug of the solid stuff to put on my ingrowing toe when I was a teenager. It cooled so much when being let out of the cylinder that some of it froze - not water ice but CO2 ice.
The most obvious example of this is CO2 fire extinguishers. It is why you should never hold the metal cone on them when using them. You can see the ice form around the cone end.
It all seems quite ridiculous when you could dress agricultural fields with basalt, draw CO2 from the atmosphere that way, with the side benefits of reducing soil erosion, enhancing produce quality, and possibly increasing yield. And it wouldn't cost anything like £22bn.
If I had £22 billion to spend on carbon [sic] reduction, the first thing I would do is make sure every public building that wasn't Grade I listed was absolutely plastered with solar panels.
The next thing I would do is build some damn tidal stations, at last.
I might look at any schemes to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I wouldn't spend a red cent on 'carbon capture.'
It's the present day equivalent of Thatcher deciding to pacify the miners and subsidise UK coalfields for the duration of her premiership.
If I'm honest - as somebody who's not a scientist - it looks more like the present day equivalent of massively funding research into perpetual motion machines.
With the storage side there are some real sticking points in the physics which the companies have had a lot of trouble trying to overcome. (Until last year I was involved in planning drilling wells for CCS projects for one of the oil companies involved).
Simple physics. When you are collecting and pumping the CO2 you put it under compression. When you then pump that CO2 down the hole and into the reservoir that pressure is rapidly diminished as the CO2 enters the reservoir. This results in an effect known as Joule-Thomson Cooling. This has a lot of effects, none of them good for the reservoir, but the most immediate is a phase change in the residual water around the well bore. This will block the pore spaces and reduce or prevent injection and also causes thermal stress due to ice formation which can damage the resrvoir around the injection well and reduce injection further or cause a breach of the top of the reservoir.
This has proved rather problematic in trying to get an efficient storage system in place.
So how many geologists and physicists do you think Ed Miliband had spoken to, before his announcement?
Or does he not give a sh!t about science, and makes decisions based on ideology?
I am sure there are people who could tell him this. The trouble is that lots of them stand to make money out of the projects even if they don't ultimately work. So they are hardly going to shout it from the rooftops. A quiet memo on page 527 of his technical briefing in his 5th red box on a Tuesday night will probably have covered it.
"We are limited on the number of donors that we can recruit annually due to both financial constraints and our capacity to type the donors and we need to make sure we recruit only those donors who are most likely to be selected to donate for a patient. Therefore we have made the decision to change our donor recruitment criteria so that we only accept those donors that are most needed on the BBMR. ... we must focus on changing the demographic mix of the BBMR to better meet patient demand. We believe this approach will best enable us to help as many patients in need as possible."
A remarkably prolix and opaque document. I asked a smart scientific friend to explain why it is so eerily verbose. He’s just replied:
“You're right that the verbose and roundabout nature of the text likely stems from discomfort with directly addressing certain facts about biological differences between populations. The article does seem to be struggling to balance several competing concerns:
Communicating the medical necessity of targeting specific demographic groups for stem cell donation
Avoiding language that could be perceived as promoting racial stereotypes or biological determinism
Adhering to institutional and societal norms around discussing race and genetics
Explaining a policy that, on its face, appears discriminatory
The authors are likely trying to convey factual information about genetic differences relevant to stem cell donation without seeming to endorse broader claims about race as a biological concept. This results in the roundabout, overly cautious language you've noticed.
You're correct that at the core of this issue is the fact that there are real, medically relevant genetic differences between populations that correlate with ancestry. The reluctance to state this directly and succinctly does indeed seem to be driving much of the document's verbosity and lack of clarity.”
It's largely as JJ said - ethnicity is important here (as part of the overall genetics), men are better donors than women (higher yield, fewer complications). For white recipients, the demand was being pretty much met through white men. For non-white recipients, the demand was not being met, so women were invited too.
That's why white women weren't used as donors. What I'm not entirely clear on is why that has now changed, but presumably it's the "New evidence shows that age rather than sex is a more significant factor in the health and efficacy of stem cells. Younger donors provide better transplant outcomes." Probably shows that getting more young white women to donate may be better on balance than existing older men.
If I had £22 billion to spend on carbon [sic] reduction, the first thing I would do is make sure every public building that wasn't Grade I listed was absolutely plastered with solar panels.
The next thing I would do is build some damn tidal stations, at last.
I might look at any schemes to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I wouldn't spend a red cent on 'carbon capture.'
It's the present day equivalent of Thatcher deciding to pacify the miners and subsidise UK coalfields for the duration of her premiership.
If I'm honest - as somebody who's not a scientist - it looks more like the present day equivalent of massively funding research into perpetual motion machines.
With the storage side there are some real sticking points in the physics which the companies have had a lot of trouble trying to overcome. (Until last year I was involved in planning drilling wells for CCS projects for one of the oil companies involved).
Simple physics. When you are collecting and pumping the CO2 you put it under compression. When you then pump that CO2 down the hole and into the reservoir that pressure is rapidly diminished as the CO2 enters the reservoir. This results in an effect known as Joule-Thomson Cooling. This has a lot of effects, none of them good for the reservoir, but the most immediate is a phase change in the residual water around the well bore. This will block the pore spaces and reduce or prevent injection and also causes thermal stress due to ice formation which can damage the resrvoir around the injection well and reduce injection further or cause a breach of the top of the reservoir.
This has proved rather problematic in trying to get an efficient storage system in place.
Excellent, informed and interesting comment.
I've never forgotten the effect of expansion on CO2 ever since seeing the doctor generate a slug of the solid stuff to put on my ingrowing toe when I was a teenager. It cooled so much when being let out of the cylinder that some of it froze - not water ice but CO2 ice.
The most obvious example of this is CO2 fire extinguishers. It is why you should never hold the metal cone on them when using them. You can see the ice form around the cone end.
So Bernoulli and Euler were right then, good to know!
- economy tanking - black hole lies - riots - North Sea shutdown - sleaze
and now Chagos,
And all within 3 months
And now £22bn on carbon capture.
That £22bn sounds very familiar so I can see WFA coming back again alongside HS2 and the lower Thames Crossing (which should be confirmed / cancelled today).
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Government this inept at announcement timing let alone everything else
I know we've got an advocate of it on here, but CCS is a concept with rather niche applicability IMO.
Like I said last night, it's a complete dead-end technologically. Money spent on CCS is as close to digging a hole and burying the money in it as it is possible to get.
In addition to it being useless compared to renewables, because it will always be more expensive than burning fossil fuels without CCS, it's not even the best technology to pursue if you want to spend money on a techno-fix to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. CCS will only ever be able to capture the CO2 produced when fossil fuels are burnt, but some of the technologies being developed for removing CO2 from the atmosphere would, if they can scale, not have any limit to the amount of CO2 they could remove from the atmosphere, so they could actually reduce CO2 levels. CCS will only, at best, be able to stop them increasing further.
I'm in favour of spending money on speculative technology, knowing that it sometimes won't work, but even if CCS works perfectly it will still be crap.
The one thing going for it is that the investment is actually in the north for once - Teesside and Merseyside.
I'd be curious as to how much carbon you could grab by planting £22 billion worth of trees, wooden buildings etc. instead.
Other gov'ts (Well Denmark) seem to take a much more straightforward and simple approach to energy/carbon than ours. £22 Bn seems an enormous amount for uncertain tech, whereas Hornsea 3 or the Gov't paying say £5,000 toward domestic solar panels (Strictly limited to 4.4 million slots) would be much more efficient carbon wise.
I think his problem is again one of timing and ideology. The 2030 deadline means that even though the UK has been one of the leading countries in the world for expaning wind generation over the last couple of decades, it physically can't be built fast enough to make his target. With an election coming in 2028/9 it will be obvious by then that he has missed the targets by a mile. So he is thrashing around trying to come up with ways to force the pace of change beyond what is sensible or practical.
But yes, every new build having solar panels fitted as standard, by law, would be a start.
If I had £22 billion to spend on carbon [sic] reduction, the first thing I would do is make sure every public building that wasn't Grade I listed was absolutely plastered with solar panels.
The next thing I would do is build some damn tidal stations, at last.
I might look at any schemes to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I wouldn't spend a red cent on 'carbon capture.'
It's the present day equivalent of Thatcher deciding to pacify the miners and subsidise UK coalfields for the duration of her premiership.
If I'm honest - as somebody who's not a scientist - it looks more like the present day equivalent of massively funding research into perpetual motion machines.
With the storage side there are some real sticking points in the physics which the companies have had a lot of trouble trying to overcome. (Until last year I was involved in planning drilling wells for CCS projects for one of the oil companies involved).
Simple physics. When you are collecting and pumping the CO2 you put it under compression. When you then pump that CO2 down the hole and into the reservoir that pressure is rapidly diminished as the CO2 enters the reservoir. This results in an effect known as Joule-Thomson Cooling. This has a lot of effects, none of them good for the reservoir, but the most immediate is a phase change in the residual water around the well bore. This will block the pore spaces and reduce or prevent injection and also causes thermal stress due to ice formation which can damage the resrvoir around the injection well and reduce injection further or cause a breach of the top of the reservoir.
This has proved rather problematic in trying to get an efficient storage system in place.
Excellent, informed and interesting comment.
I've never forgotten the effect of expansion on CO2 ever since seeing the doctor generate a slug of the solid stuff to put on my ingrowing toe when I was a teenager. It cooled so much when being let out of the cylinder that some of it froze - not water ice but CO2 ice.
The most obvious example of this is CO2 fire extinguishers. It is why you should never hold the metal cone on them when using them. You can see the ice form around the cone end.
I've got emergency CO2 canisters for my bike tyres, which I carry when racing (*). The canister inflates the tyre almost immediately, but it comes with a rubber sleeve as the canister and the metal attachment become *extremely* cold; enough to get frost forming on them.
It looks like the latest thing is a rechargeable electric mini-pump to do the same thing. It'll be interesting to see how effective they are - though they won't be quite as quick as CO2. Another issue with CO2 is that it leaks out the tyres, so at the end of the day you need to deflate the tyres and inflate them again with good old air.
On the Middle East question, very little in the UK and Europe in the last 24 hours, is the statement from Saudi Arabia.
Under huge political pressure, they say they want to "put their differences with Iran to one side", and improve ties. This was also signed by the other Gulf Arab states.
This is very bad news for both Israel and West, because it means that not only is the goal of Israeli-Gulf rapprochement going down the plughole, but also that Netanyahu's "war without end" on four fronts, is beginning to create the kind of pan-Muslim climate of the 1950s to the 1970s ; exactly in opposite to Israel's, and the West's, long-term interests.
Albeit Israel did manage to defeat all its Muslim neighbours in the 1970s and 1950s yes Netanyahu has overreached when he should just have focused on defeating Hamas
On the Middle East question, very little in the UK and Europe in the last 24 hours, is the statement from Saudi Arabia.
Under huge political pressure, they say they want to "put their differences with Iran to one side", and improve ties. This was also signed by the other Gulf Arab states.
This is very bad news for both Israel and West, because it means that not only is the goal of Israeli-Gulf rapprochement going down the plughole, but also that Netanyahu's "war without end" on four fronts, is beginning to create the kind of pan-Muslim climate of the 1950s to the 1970s ; exactly in opposite to Israel's, and the West's, long-term interests.
Albeit Israel did manage to defeat all its Muslim neighbours in the 1970s and 1950s yes Netanyahu has overreached when he should just have focused on defeating Hamas
However, this kind of dynamic would be a disaster for both Israel and the West in the long-term, though. The Israelis really only stabilised their geopolitical position in the 1970s by breaking off the Egyptians from the pan-Arab alliance, and doing a land-for-peace deal with them, for instance.
The Saudis and Gulf Arab states are now also taking about not allowing any overflights of the territory for any attack against Iran. It's going to take the West a long time to understand how damaging indulging Netanyahu's almost every whim has turned out to be.
OK, I know very little of the story here, but that's not stopped anyone else.
But some things that smell a bit odd...
First, was this another poonami that the outgoing government left for Starmer? Was it a thing that really had to happen, but had hefty downsides (especially for true blue Tories), so it was just left in the in-tray? (Genuinely, I don't know how viable the 'just let the status quo roll on' thing is.)
Second, who is leaking the stuff to the Times?
Third, who benefits from the story, Conservative leadership-wise? Tom T is ferocious, national security-wise, isn't he? And however disappointing he is, isn't he a more likely receptacle for Cleverly votes looking for a new home than Kemi?
I honestly think they genuinely thought this would make them look good. Because British Empire = bad. And they don't really mix with anyone who thinks differently. We see this a lot from Labour. Policy decisions by what will most annoy the right.
I dunno about that. In this case, I really dunno.
Did the government really choose to do this, or is it putting the best face on something it didn't really have a realistic choice about? Forget Dave's claims of a veto- by the time he became Foreign Secretary, he knew it was an interim gig and his veto was a delay at most.
But the bigger picture is simple. This government will do things that you don't like and that I don't like. Not always because they are seeking to taunt, but because the Conservatives made in utter Horlicks of governing in recent years and so they lost. This is what losing looks like, and it's why sensible parties try to avoid it.
As of now, I don't see much evidence that the Conservatives have recovered their senses.
It's simpler than that I think. Given the UK was found to be clear breach of international law in splitting Chagos from Mauritius at time of independence and it wants to retain the Diego Garcia base mainly for the Americans without contestation, it has no choice but to deal with the Mauritius government. In those terms it is likely to be a good deal.
We can argue about the rightness of that calculation but it is a serious decision from Starmer when no-one else in politics is being serious.
I'd have gone with handing the Chagos over to the Chagos islanders and their descendants.
Then give them a referendum on either some kind of UK related status (Chagos would need outside money input to make it viable) or joining Mauritius.
If I had £22 billion to spend on carbon [sic] reduction, the first thing I would do is make sure every public building that wasn't Grade I listed was absolutely plastered with solar panels.
The next thing I would do is build some damn tidal stations, at last.
I might look at any schemes to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I wouldn't spend a red cent on 'carbon capture.'
It's the present day equivalent of Thatcher deciding to pacify the miners and subsidise UK coalfields for the duration of her premiership.
If I'm honest - as somebody who's not a scientist - it looks more like the present day equivalent of massively funding research into perpetual motion machines.
With the storage side there are some real sticking points in the physics which the companies have had a lot of trouble trying to overcome. (Until last year I was involved in planning drilling wells for CCS projects for one of the oil companies involved).
Simple physics. When you are collecting and pumping the CO2 you put it under compression. When you then pump that CO2 down the hole and into the reservoir that pressure is rapidly diminished as the CO2 enters the reservoir. This results in an effect known as Joule-Thomson Cooling. This has a lot of effects, none of them good for the reservoir, but the most immediate is a phase change in the residual water around the well bore. This will block the pore spaces and reduce or prevent injection and also causes thermal stress due to ice formation which can damage the resrvoir around the injection well and reduce injection further or cause a breach of the top of the reservoir.
This has proved rather problematic in trying to get an efficient storage system in place.
So how many geologists and physicists do you think Ed Miliband had spoken to, before his announcement?
Or does he not give a sh!t about science, and makes decisions based on ideology?
I am sure there are people who could tell him this. The trouble is that lots of them stand to make money out of the projects even if they don't ultimately work. So they are hardly going to shout it from the rooftops. A quiet memo on page 527 of his technical briefing in his 5th red box on a Tuesday night will probably have covered it.
The phenomenon of politicians choosing a solution based on what an enthusiast told them....
"We are limited on the number of donors that we can recruit annually due to both financial constraints and our capacity to type the donors and we need to make sure we recruit only those donors who are most likely to be selected to donate for a patient. Therefore we have made the decision to change our donor recruitment criteria so that we only accept those donors that are most needed on the BBMR. ... we must focus on changing the demographic mix of the BBMR to better meet patient demand. We believe this approach will best enable us to help as many patients in need as possible."
A remarkably prolix and opaque document. I asked a smart scientific friend to explain why it is so eerily verbose. He’s just replied:
“You're right that the verbose and roundabout nature of the text likely stems from discomfort with directly addressing certain facts about biological differences between populations. The article does seem to be struggling to balance several competing concerns:
Communicating the medical necessity of targeting specific demographic groups for stem cell donation
Avoiding language that could be perceived as promoting racial stereotypes or biological determinism
Adhering to institutional and societal norms around discussing race and genetics
Explaining a policy that, on its face, appears discriminatory
The authors are likely trying to convey factual information about genetic differences relevant to stem cell donation without seeming to endorse broader claims about race as a biological concept. This results in the roundabout, overly cautious language you've noticed.
You're correct that at the core of this issue is the fact that there are real, medically relevant genetic differences between populations that correlate with ancestry. The reluctance to state this directly and succinctly does indeed seem to be driving much of the document's verbosity and lack of clarity.”
If I had £22 billion to spend on carbon [sic] reduction, the first thing I would do is make sure every public building that wasn't Grade I listed was absolutely plastered with solar panels.
The next thing I would do is build some damn tidal stations, at last.
I might look at any schemes to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I wouldn't spend a red cent on 'carbon capture.'
It's the present day equivalent of Thatcher deciding to pacify the miners and subsidise UK coalfields for the duration of her premiership.
If I'm honest - as somebody who's not a scientist - it looks more like the present day equivalent of massively funding research into perpetual motion machines.
With the storage side there are some real sticking points in the physics which the companies have had a lot of trouble trying to overcome. (Until last year I was involved in planning drilling wells for CCS projects for one of the oil companies involved).
Simple physics. When you are collecting and pumping the CO2 you put it under compression. When you then pump that CO2 down the hole and into the reservoir that pressure is rapidly diminished as the CO2 enters the reservoir. This results in an effect known as Joule-Thomson Cooling. This has a lot of effects, none of them good for the reservoir, but the most immediate is a phase change in the residual water around the well bore. This will block the pore spaces and reduce or prevent injection and also causes thermal stress due to ice formation which can damage the resrvoir around the injection well and reduce injection further or cause a breach of the top of the reservoir.
This has proved rather problematic in trying to get an efficient storage system in place.
So how many geologists and physicists do you think Ed Miliband had spoken to, before his announcement?
Or does he not give a sh!t about science, and makes decisions based on ideology?
I am sure there are people who could tell him this. The trouble is that lots of them stand to make money out of the projects even if they don't ultimately work. So they are hardly going to shout it from the rooftops. A quiet memo on page 527 of his technical briefing in his 5th red box on a Tuesday night will probably have covered it.
There is also possibly an element of pork barrel here - or maybe that's a bit harsh, but a 'this will support X jobs in this area'. But it all adds to the image of a government that doesn't really have a plan and doesn't really know what it's doing.
I've no idea how I'm voting at the next GE yet, but I could well take back my loaned vote and give it to the LD instead. With the right Tory leader*, talking sense, they could be in the frame too (I'm in what should, probably, in normal times be a Lab-Con competitive constituency).
*looks at candidates, sighs - although maybe there will be another leadership election before then (I don't think I'd ever vote for a Jenrick or Badenoch led party; the other two might be possibilities, if they don't do a Sunak)
If I had £22 billion to spend on carbon [sic] reduction, the first thing I would do is make sure every public building that wasn't Grade I listed was absolutely plastered with solar panels.
The next thing I would do is build some damn tidal stations, at last.
I might look at any schemes to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I wouldn't spend a red cent on 'carbon capture.'
It's the present day equivalent of Thatcher deciding to pacify the miners and subsidise UK coalfields for the duration of her premiership.
If I'm honest - as somebody who's not a scientist - it looks more like the present day equivalent of massively funding research into perpetual motion machines.
With the storage side there are some real sticking points in the physics which the companies have had a lot of trouble trying to overcome. (Until last year I was involved in planning drilling wells for CCS projects for one of the oil companies involved).
Simple physics. When you are collecting and pumping the CO2 you put it under compression. When you then pump that CO2 down the hole and into the reservoir that pressure is rapidly diminished as the CO2 enters the reservoir. This results in an effect known as Joule-Thomson Cooling. This has a lot of effects, none of them good for the reservoir, but the most immediate is a phase change in the residual water around the well bore. This will block the pore spaces and reduce or prevent injection and also causes thermal stress due to ice formation which can damage the resrvoir around the injection well and reduce injection further or cause a breach of the top of the reservoir.
This has proved rather problematic in trying to get an efficient storage system in place.
So how many geologists and physicists do you think Ed Miliband had spoken to, before his announcement?
Or does he not give a sh!t about science, and makes decisions based on ideology?
Sucking CO2 from the atmosphere is a form of carbon capture, however it's probably more efficient to do it at point of production than extract it from the air. Seems that there is a resident expert on the storage aspect. Transport from the point of capture to storage site also requires expensive pipelines and potentially bespoke LCO2 ships. In fairness to Ed M, new CO2 producing facilities got approval on the back of a promise of CCS. This is just another turd Labour have been left to bag up.
It’s like the League of Empire Loyalists here these past 24 hours.
If there's one thing anti-imperialists need to admit, it is that *how* an empire ends and dissolves matters. It is hard to do well, and in places can be disastrous (the Soviet/Russian empire ~1918 and ~1990; the Ottoman empire ~1920, especially with the experience of the Armenians and the Greek/Turkish population 'exchanges'; or the Indian partition in 1947.
This is another little piece of empire that may well be seen as having ended badly in the medium and long term.
Are you really comparing the recent agreement on Diego Garcia to the Partition of India and the Armenian genocide?!
I am pointing out that ending 'imperialism' can have very negative and long-lasting consequences. I think there are enough examples out there, including the ones I pointed out, to make that fairly unarguable.
That does not mean that imperialism should not end, especially if local populations want it; just that extreme care needs to be taken to ensure those negative consequences are minimised.
On the Middle East question, very little in the UK and Europe in the last 24 hours, is the statement from Saudi Arabia.
Under huge political pressure, they say they want to "put their differences with Iran to one side", and improve ties. This was also signed by the other Gulf Arab states.
This is very bad news for both Israel and West, because it means that not only is the goal of Israeli-Gulf rapprochement going down the plughole, but also that Netanyahu's "war without end" on four fronts, is beginning to create the kind of pan-Muslim climate of the 1950s to the 1970s ; exactly in opposite to Israel's, and the West's, long-term interests.
Albeit Israel did manage to defeat all its Muslim neighbours in the 1970s and 1950s yes Netanyahu has overreached when he should just have focused on defeating Hamas
On the Middle East question, very little in the UK and Europe in the last 24 hours, is the statement from Saudi Arabia.
Under huge political pressure, they say they want to "put their differences with Iran to one side", and improve ties. This was also signed by the other Gulf Arab states.
This is very bad news for both Israel and West, because it means that not only is the goal of Israeli-Gulf rapprochement going down the plughole, but also that Netanyahu's "war without end" on four fronts, is beginning to create the kind of pan-Muslim climate of the 1950s to the 1970s ; exactly in opposite to Israel's, and the West's, long-term interests.
Albeit Israel did manage to defeat all its Muslim neighbours in the 1970s and 1950s yes Netanyahu has overreached when he should just have focused on defeating Hamas
However, this kind of dynamic would be a disaster for both Israel and the West in the long-term, though. The Israelis really only stabilised their geopolitical position in the 1970s by breaking off the Egyptians from the pan-Arab alliance, and doing a land-for-peace deal with them, for instance.
The Saudis and Gulf Arab states are now also taking about not allowing any overflights of the territory for any attack against Iran. It's going to take the West a long time to understand how damaging indulging Netanyahu's almost every whim has turned out to be.
From Biden and Harris' and Starmer's perspective Saudi not allowing Israeli bombers overflights to attack Iran is a good thing.
It is only Trump who really wants a war with Iran like Netanyahu
If I had £22 billion to spend on carbon [sic] reduction, the first thing I would do is make sure every public building that wasn't Grade I listed was absolutely plastered with solar panels.
The next thing I would do is build some damn tidal stations, at last.
I might look at any schemes to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I wouldn't spend a red cent on 'carbon capture.'
It's the present day equivalent of Thatcher deciding to pacify the miners and subsidise UK coalfields for the duration of her premiership.
If I'm honest - as somebody who's not a scientist - it looks more like the present day equivalent of massively funding research into perpetual motion machines.
With the storage side there are some real sticking points in the physics which the companies have had a lot of trouble trying to overcome. (Until last year I was involved in planning drilling wells for CCS projects for one of the oil companies involved).
Simple physics. When you are collecting and pumping the CO2 you put it under compression. When you then pump that CO2 down the hole and into the reservoir that pressure is rapidly diminished as the CO2 enters the reservoir. This results in an effect known as Joule-Thomson Cooling. This has a lot of effects, none of them good for the reservoir, but the most immediate is a phase change in the residual water around the well bore. This will block the pore spaces and reduce or prevent injection and also causes thermal stress due to ice formation which can damage the resrvoir around the injection well and reduce injection further or cause a breach of the top of the reservoir.
This has proved rather problematic in trying to get an efficient storage system in place.
Excellent, informed and interesting comment.
I've never forgotten the effect of expansion on CO2 ever since seeing the doctor generate a slug of the solid stuff to put on my ingrowing toe when I was a teenager. It cooled so much when being let out of the cylinder that some of it froze - not water ice but CO2 ice.
CO2 doesn't have a liquid phase at 1 atmosphere. So it goes straight from gas to solid and back. Which part of the reason that it is fun to play around with.
I see that @JonO is running for Elmbridge Council next week. Best of luck.
We have no fewer than 38 by-elections over the next fortnight. I’d expect a lot of Labour losses.
How many Reform UK gains? Will Reform UK even stand that many candidates? I think that’s an interesting question: can RefUK transform itself into a traditional party that wins seats? That will be a big determiner of the next general election result.
Good morning
Last night Reform took two seats off Labour in Blackpool and generally Labour are tanking in local elections
There is sufficient evidence to suggest Reform could decimate Labour in the red wall seats
The bigger question is over the next few years is a closer Conservative-Reform possible and if so it will be very interesting
I see that @JonO is running for Elmbridge Council next week. Best of luck.
We have no fewer than 38 by-elections over the next fortnight. I’d expect a lot of Labour losses.
Looked it up and a very close result in 2024 with the LDs just winning. Obviously mixed feelings being a LD because I like @JohnO a lot, both his views and his humour.
Good luck JohnO, you will need it in a by election with the LDs, if you manage a win that will be a big achievement especially in an area the LDs won at the GE
OK, I know very little of the story here, but that's not stopped anyone else.
But some things that smell a bit odd...
First, was this another poonami that the outgoing government left for Starmer? Was it a thing that really had to happen, but had hefty downsides (especially for true blue Tories), so it was just left in the in-tray? (Genuinely, I don't know how viable the 'just let the status quo roll on' thing is.)
Second, who is leaking the stuff to the Times?
Third, who benefits from the story, Conservative leadership-wise? Tom T is ferocious, national security-wise, isn't he? And however disappointing he is, isn't he a more likely receptacle for Cleverly votes looking for a new home than Kemi?
I honestly think they genuinely thought this would make them look good. Because British Empire = bad. And they don't really mix with anyone who thinks differently. We see this a lot from Labour. Policy decisions by what will most annoy the right.
I dunno about that. In this case, I really dunno.
Did the government really choose to do this, or is it putting the best face on something it didn't really have a realistic choice about? Forget Dave's claims of a veto- by the time he became Foreign Secretary, he knew it was an interim gig and his veto was a delay at most.
But the bigger picture is simple. This government will do things that you don't like and that I don't like. Not always because they are seeking to taunt, but because the Conservatives made in utter Horlicks of governing in recent years and so they lost. This is what losing looks like, and it's why sensible parties try to avoid it.
As of now, I don't see much evidence that the Conservatives have recovered their senses.
It's simpler than that I think. Given the UK was found to be clear breach of international law in splitting Chagos from Mauritius at time of independence and it wants to retain the Diego Garcia base mainly for the Americans without contestation, it has no choice but to deal with the Mauritius government. In those terms it is likely to be a good deal.
We can argue about the rightness of that calculation but it is a serious decision from Starmer when no-one else in politics is being serious.
I'd have gone with handing the Chagos over to the Chagos islanders and their descendants.
Then give them a referendum on either some kind of UK related status (Chagos would need outside money input to make it viable) or joining Mauritius.
Or the Maldives - closer and shares a lot of the common interest in the area. The UK and Maldives had spent a lot of time looking at the question of overlapping Economic Zones of Interest over the years.
If I had £22 billion to spend on carbon [sic] reduction, the first thing I would do is make sure every public building that wasn't Grade I listed was absolutely plastered with solar panels.
The next thing I would do is build some damn tidal stations, at last.
I might look at any schemes to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I wouldn't spend a red cent on 'carbon capture.'
It's the present day equivalent of Thatcher deciding to pacify the miners and subsidise UK coalfields for the duration of her premiership.
If I'm honest - as somebody who's not a scientist - it looks more like the present day equivalent of massively funding research into perpetual motion machines.
With the storage side there are some real sticking points in the physics which the companies have had a lot of trouble trying to overcome. (Until last year I was involved in planning drilling wells for CCS projects for one of the oil companies involved).
Simple physics. When you are collecting and pumping the CO2 you put it under compression. When you then pump that CO2 down the hole and into the reservoir that pressure is rapidly diminished as the CO2 enters the reservoir. This results in an effect known as Joule-Thomson Cooling. This has a lot of effects, none of them good for the reservoir, but the most immediate is a phase change in the residual water around the well bore. This will block the pore spaces and reduce or prevent injection and also causes thermal stress due to ice formation which can damage the resrvoir around the injection well and reduce injection further or cause a breach of the top of the reservoir.
This has proved rather problematic in trying to get an efficient storage system in place.
Excellent, informed and interesting comment.
I've never forgotten the effect of expansion on CO2 ever since seeing the doctor generate a slug of the solid stuff to put on my ingrowing toe when I was a teenager. It cooled so much when being let out of the cylinder that some of it froze - not water ice but CO2 ice.
CO2 doesn't have a liquid phase at 1 atmosphere. So it goes straight from gas to solid and back. Which part of the reason that it is fun to play around with.
If I had £22 billion to spend on carbon [sic] reduction, the first thing I would do is make sure every public building that wasn't Grade I listed was absolutely plastered with solar panels.
The next thing I would do is build some damn tidal stations, at last.
I might look at any schemes to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I wouldn't spend a red cent on 'carbon capture.'
It's the present day equivalent of Thatcher deciding to pacify the miners and subsidise UK coalfields for the duration of her premiership.
If I'm honest - as somebody who's not a scientist - it looks more like the present day equivalent of massively funding research into perpetual motion machines.
With the storage side there are some real sticking points in the physics which the companies have had a lot of trouble trying to overcome. (Until last year I was involved in planning drilling wells for CCS projects for one of the oil companies involved).
Simple physics. When you are collecting and pumping the CO2 you put it under compression. When you then pump that CO2 down the hole and into the reservoir that pressure is rapidly diminished as the CO2 enters the reservoir. This results in an effect known as Joule-Thomson Cooling. This has a lot of effects, none of them good for the reservoir, but the most immediate is a phase change in the residual water around the well bore. This will block the pore spaces and reduce or prevent injection and also causes thermal stress due to ice formation which can damage the resrvoir around the injection well and reduce injection further or cause a breach of the top of the reservoir.
This has proved rather problematic in trying to get an efficient storage system in place.
Excellent, informed and interesting comment.
I've never forgotten the effect of expansion on CO2 ever since seeing the doctor generate a slug of the solid stuff to put on my ingrowing toe when I was a teenager. It cooled so much when being let out of the cylinder that some of it froze - not water ice but CO2 ice.
CO2 doesn't have a liquid phase at 1 atmosphere. So it goes straight from gas to solid and back. Which part of the reason that it is fun to play around with.
If I had £22 billion to spend on carbon [sic] reduction, the first thing I would do is make sure every public building that wasn't Grade I listed was absolutely plastered with solar panels.
The next thing I would do is build some damn tidal stations, at last.
I might look at any schemes to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I wouldn't spend a red cent on 'carbon capture.'
It's the present day equivalent of Thatcher deciding to pacify the miners and subsidise UK coalfields for the duration of her premiership.
If I'm honest - as somebody who's not a scientist - it looks more like the present day equivalent of massively funding research into perpetual motion machines.
With the storage side there are some real sticking points in the physics which the companies have had a lot of trouble trying to overcome. (Until last year I was involved in planning drilling wells for CCS projects for one of the oil companies involved).
Simple physics. When you are collecting and pumping the CO2 you put it under compression. When you then pump that CO2 down the hole and into the reservoir that pressure is rapidly diminished as the CO2 enters the reservoir. This results in an effect known as Joule-Thomson Cooling. This has a lot of effects, none of them good for the reservoir, but the most immediate is a phase change in the residual water around the well bore. This will block the pore spaces and reduce or prevent injection and also causes thermal stress due to ice formation which can damage the resrvoir around the injection well and reduce injection further or cause a breach of the top of the reservoir.
This has proved rather problematic in trying to get an efficient storage system in place.
So how many geologists and physicists do you think Ed Miliband had spoken to, before his announcement?
Or does he not give a sh!t about science, and makes decisions based on ideology?
Sucking CO2 from the atmosphere is a form of carbon capture, however it's probably more efficient to do it at point of production than extract it from the air. Seems that there is a resident expert on the storage aspect. Transport from the point of capture to storage site also requires expensive pipelines and potentially bespoke LCO2 ships. In fairness to Ed M, new CO2 producing facilities got approval on the back of a promise of CCS. This is just another turd Labour have been left to bag up.
Carbon Capture Schemes depend for their viability (if it exists at all) on the higher concentrations of the CO2 in the exhaust streams of carbon intensive processes.
Carbon from the plain old atmosphere is much further down the road, in terms of viability.
On the Middle East question, very little in the UK and Europe in the last 24 hours, is the statement from Saudi Arabia.
Under huge political pressure, they say they want to "put their differences with Iran to one side", and improve ties. This was also signed by the other Gulf Arab states.
This is very bad news for both Israel and West, because it means that not only is the goal of Israeli-Gulf rapprochement going down the plughole, but also that Netanyahu's "war without end" on four fronts, is beginning to create the kind of pan-Muslim climate of the 1950s to the 1970s ; exactly in opposite to Israel's, and the West's, long-term interests.
Albeit Israel did manage to defeat all its Muslim neighbours in the 1970s and 1950s yes Netanyahu has overreached when he should just have focused on defeating Hamas
On the Middle East question, very little in the UK and Europe in the last 24 hours, is the statement from Saudi Arabia.
Under huge political pressure, they say they want to "put their differences with Iran to one side", and improve ties. This was also signed by the other Gulf Arab states.
This is very bad news for both Israel and West, because it means that not only is the goal of Israeli-Gulf rapprochement going down the plughole, but also that Netanyahu's "war without end" on four fronts, is beginning to create the kind of pan-Muslim climate of the 1950s to the 1970s ; exactly in opposite to Israel's, and the West's, long-term interests.
Albeit Israel did manage to defeat all its Muslim neighbours in the 1970s and 1950s yes Netanyahu has overreached when he should just have focused on defeating Hamas
However, this kind of dynamic would be a disaster for both Israel and the West in the long-term, though. The Israelis really only stabilised their geopolitical position in the 1970s by breaking off the Egyptians from the pan-Arab alliance, and doing a land-for-peace deal with them, for instance.
The Saudis and Gulf Arab states are now also taking about not allowing any overflights of the territory for any attack against Iran. It's going to take the West a long time to understand how damaging indulging Netanyahu's almost every whim has turned out to be.
From Biden and Harris' and Starmer's perspective Saudi not allowing Israeli bombers overflights to attack Iran is a good thing.
It is only Trump who really wants a war with Iran like Netanyahu
To a certain extent that's true, as an attack on Iran is not anyone's interests except Netanyahu and the Israeli Right.
However, it also means that new bonds of understanding between.previously hostile countries in the region are being formed by Netanyahu's apparently totally free hand to wage war in all areas. This is very bad news for the West.
It’s like the League of Empire Loyalists here these past 24 hours.
If there's one thing anti-imperialists need to admit, it is that *how* an empire ends and dissolves matters. It is hard to do well, and in places can be disastrous (the Soviet/Russian empire ~1918 and ~1990; the Ottoman empire ~1920, especially with the experience of the Armenians and the Greek/Turkish population 'exchanges'; or the Indian partition in 1947.
This is another little piece of empire that may well be seen as having ended badly in the medium and long term.
Are you really comparing the recent agreement on Diego Garcia to the Partition of India and the Armenian genocide?!
I am pointing out that ending 'imperialism' can have very negative and long-lasting consequences. I think there are enough examples out there, including the ones I pointed out, to make that fairly unarguable.
That does not mean that imperialism should not end, especially if local populations want it; just that extreme care needs to be taken to ensure those negative consequences are minimised.
I don't think that this has been done here.
The whole place is going to be under water in 100 years time. Of course it will end badly.
OK, I know very little of the story here, but that's not stopped anyone else.
But some things that smell a bit odd...
First, was this another poonami that the outgoing government left for Starmer? Was it a thing that really had to happen, but had hefty downsides (especially for true blue Tories), so it was just left in the in-tray? (Genuinely, I don't know how viable the 'just let the status quo roll on' thing is.)
Second, who is leaking the stuff to the Times?
Third, who benefits from the story, Conservative leadership-wise? Tom T is ferocious, national security-wise, isn't he? And however disappointing he is, isn't he a more likely receptacle for Cleverly votes looking for a new home than Kemi?
I honestly think they genuinely thought this would make them look good. Because British Empire = bad. And they don't really mix with anyone who thinks differently. We see this a lot from Labour. Policy decisions by what will most annoy the right.
I dunno about that. In this case, I really dunno.
Did the government really choose to do this, or is it putting the best face on something it didn't really have a realistic choice about? Forget Dave's claims of a veto- by the time he became Foreign Secretary, he knew it was an interim gig and his veto was a delay at most.
But the bigger picture is simple. This government will do things that you don't like and that I don't like. Not always because they are seeking to taunt, but because the Conservatives made in utter Horlicks of governing in recent years and so they lost. This is what losing looks like, and it's why sensible parties try to avoid it.
As of now, I don't see much evidence that the Conservatives have recovered their senses.
It's simpler than that I think. Given the UK was found to be clear breach of international law in splitting Chagos from Mauritius at time of independence and it wants to retain the Diego Garcia base mainly for the Americans without contestation, it has no choice but to deal with the Mauritius government. In those terms it is likely to be a good deal.
We can argue about the rightness of that calculation but it is a serious decision from Starmer when no-one else in politics is being serious.
Oddly enough, your view might also be peterninent on the Venezuela / Guyana land grab border dispute. And not one in favour of the Guyanans.
So other questions comes into it: how far back do such 'imperialist' problems have to go back before they can be ignored; what about self-determination; and is removing one imperialist power right if it just gets replaced with another imperialist power, or a power that will ignore the rights of the population in the new area?
I suppose it also applies, in the minds of some at least, to Russia - Ukraine. In both directions:
Whether it is a 'good deal' or not should not be said by people in the UK or Mauritius, or China. It should be said by the people who it most directly effects - the islanders themselves.
It’s like the League of Empire Loyalists here these past 24 hours.
If there's one thing anti-imperialists need to admit, it is that *how* an empire ends and dissolves matters. It is hard to do well, and in places can be disastrous (the Soviet/Russian empire ~1918 and ~1990; the Ottoman empire ~1920, especially with the experience of the Armenians and the Greek/Turkish population 'exchanges'; or the Indian partition in 1947.
This is another little piece of empire that may well be seen as having ended badly in the medium and long term.
Are you really comparing the recent agreement on Diego Garcia to the Partition of India and the Armenian genocide?!
I am pointing out that ending 'imperialism' can have very negative and long-lasting consequences. I think there are enough examples out there, including the ones I pointed out, to make that fairly unarguable.
That does not mean that imperialism should not end, especially if local populations want it; just that extreme care needs to be taken to ensure those negative consequences are minimised.
I don't think that this has been done here.
The whole place is going to be under water in 100 years time. Of course it will end badly.
Very doubtful, for reasons aready discussed yesterday.
I'm not really getting the RefUK line on the Chagos Islands deal - they were against us being an "EU colony" but think we should have colonies in the Indian Ocean! Surely you're either for colonialism or against it. Or does it depend on who is being colonised? Very strange.
If I had £22 billion to spend on carbon [sic] reduction, the first thing I would do is make sure every public building that wasn't Grade I listed was absolutely plastered with solar panels.
The next thing I would do is build some damn tidal stations, at last.
I might look at any schemes to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I wouldn't spend a red cent on 'carbon capture.'
It's the present day equivalent of Thatcher deciding to pacify the miners and subsidise UK coalfields for the duration of her premiership.
If I'm honest - as somebody who's not a scientist - it looks more like the present day equivalent of massively funding research into perpetual motion machines.
With the storage side there are some real sticking points in the physics which the companies have had a lot of trouble trying to overcome. (Until last year I was involved in planning drilling wells for CCS projects for one of the oil companies involved).
Simple physics. When you are collecting and pumping the CO2 you put it under compression. When you then pump that CO2 down the hole and into the reservoir that pressure is rapidly diminished as the CO2 enters the reservoir. This results in an effect known as Joule-Thomson Cooling. This has a lot of effects, none of them good for the reservoir, but the most immediate is a phase change in the residual water around the well bore. This will block the pore spaces and reduce or prevent injection and also causes thermal stress due to ice formation which can damage the resrvoir around the injection well and reduce injection further or cause a breach of the top of the reservoir.
This has proved rather problematic in trying to get an efficient storage system in place.
So how many geologists and physicists do you think Ed Miliband had spoken to, before his announcement?
Or does he not give a sh!t about science, and makes decisions based on ideology?
I am sure there are people who could tell him this. The trouble is that lots of them stand to make money out of the projects even if they don't ultimately work. So they are hardly going to shout it from the rooftops. A quiet memo on page 527 of his technical briefing in his 5th red box on a Tuesday night will probably have covered it.
There is also possibly an element of pork barrel here - or maybe that's a bit harsh, but a 'this will support X jobs in this area'. But it all adds to the image of a government that doesn't really have a plan and doesn't really know what it's doing.
I've no idea how I'm voting at the next GE yet, but I could well take back my loaned vote and give it to the LD instead. With the right Tory leader*, talking sense, they could be in the frame too (I'm in what should, probably, in normal times be a Lab-Con competitive constituency).
*looks at candidates, sighs - although maybe there will be another leadership election before then (I don't think I'd ever vote for a Jenrick or Badenoch led party; the other two might be possibilities, if they don't do a Sunak)
Pork barrel, Tees Cluster, Ben Houchen? Surely not!
OK, I know very little of the story here, but that's not stopped anyone else.
But some things that smell a bit odd...
First, was this another poonami that the outgoing government left for Starmer? Was it a thing that really had to happen, but had hefty downsides (especially for true blue Tories), so it was just left in the in-tray? (Genuinely, I don't know how viable the 'just let the status quo roll on' thing is.)
Second, who is leaking the stuff to the Times?
Third, who benefits from the story, Conservative leadership-wise? Tom T is ferocious, national security-wise, isn't he? And however disappointing he is, isn't he a more likely receptacle for Cleverly votes looking for a new home than Kemi?
I honestly think they genuinely thought this would make them look good. Because British Empire = bad. And they don't really mix with anyone who thinks differently. We see this a lot from Labour. Policy decisions by what will most annoy the right.
I dunno about that. In this case, I really dunno.
Did the government really choose to do this, or is it putting the best face on something it didn't really have a realistic choice about? Forget Dave's claims of a veto- by the time he became Foreign Secretary, he knew it was an interim gig and his veto was a delay at most.
But the bigger picture is simple. This government will do things that you don't like and that I don't like. Not always because they are seeking to taunt, but because the Conservatives made in utter Horlicks of governing in recent years and so they lost. This is what losing looks like, and it's why sensible parties try to avoid it.
As of now, I don't see much evidence that the Conservatives have recovered their senses.
It's simpler than that I think. Given the UK was found to be clear breach of international law in splitting Chagos from Mauritius at time of independence and it wants to retain the Diego Garcia base mainly for the Americans without contestation, it has no choice but to deal with the Mauritius government. In those terms it is likely to be a good deal.
We can argue about the rightness of that calculation but it is a serious decision from Starmer when no-one else in politics is being serious.
I'd have gone with handing the Chagos over to the Chagos islanders and their descendants.
Then give them a referendum on either some kind of UK related status (Chagos would need outside money input to make it viable) or joining Mauritius.
Greater Chagos Republic!
Inspired by: the Laccadive - Chagos Ridge.
Combines: Chagos, the Maldives and India's Lakshadweep.
Area land: 391 sq. km. Area water: 164,000 sq. km. population: 170,000 approx.
It’s like the League of Empire Loyalists here these past 24 hours.
If there's one thing anti-imperialists need to admit, it is that *how* an empire ends and dissolves matters. It is hard to do well, and in places can be disastrous (the Soviet/Russian empire ~1918 and ~1990; the Ottoman empire ~1920, especially with the experience of the Armenians and the Greek/Turkish population 'exchanges'; or the Indian partition in 1947.
This is another little piece of empire that may well be seen as having ended badly in the medium and long term.
Are you really comparing the recent agreement on Diego Garcia to the Partition of India and the Armenian genocide?!
I am pointing out that ending 'imperialism' can have very negative and long-lasting consequences. I think there are enough examples out there, including the ones I pointed out, to make that fairly unarguable.
That does not mean that imperialism should not end, especially if local populations want it; just that extreme care needs to be taken to ensure those negative consequences are minimised.
I don't think that this has been done here.
The whole place is going to be under water in 100 years time. Of course it will end badly.
No, it won't.
Th rate of sea level rise will be small, per actual year. Given the value of the base, it will be trivial to increase the height of atoll in the areas wanted. Indeed, this has already been done by the Americans on portions of the base, in the past.
See the wholesale construction/raising of islands by China.
The bit the Chagos islanders will live on - that's another matter. Why should the Mauritius bother? They will have the fishing rights.
On the Middle East question, very little in the UK and Europe in the last 24 hours, is the statement from Saudi Arabia.
Under huge political pressure, they say they want to "put their differences with Iran to one side", and improve ties. This was also signed by the other Gulf Arab states.
This is very bad news for both Israel and West, because it means that not only is the goal of Israeli-Gulf rapprochement going down the plughole, but also that Netanyahu's "war without end" on four fronts, is beginning to create the kind of pan-Muslim climate of the 1950s to the 1970s ; exactly in opposite to Israel's, and the West's, long-term interests.
Albeit Israel did manage to defeat all its Muslim neighbours in the 1970s and 1950s yes Netanyahu has overreached when he should just have focused on defeating Hamas
On the Middle East question, very little in the UK and Europe in the last 24 hours, is the statement from Saudi Arabia.
Under huge political pressure, they say they want to "put their differences with Iran to one side", and improve ties. This was also signed by the other Gulf Arab states.
This is very bad news for both Israel and West, because it means that not only is the goal of Israeli-Gulf rapprochement going down the plughole, but also that Netanyahu's "war without end" on four fronts, is beginning to create the kind of pan-Muslim climate of the 1950s to the 1970s ; exactly in opposite to Israel's, and the West's, long-term interests.
Albeit Israel did manage to defeat all its Muslim neighbours in the 1970s and 1950s yes Netanyahu has overreached when he should just have focused on defeating Hamas
However, this kind of dynamic would be a disaster for both Israel and the West in the long-term, though. The Israelis really only stabilised their geopolitical position in the 1970s by breaking off the Egyptians from the pan-Arab alliance, and doing a land-for-peace deal with them, for instance.
The Saudis and Gulf Arab states are now also taking about not allowing any overflights of the territory for any attack against Iran. It's going to take the West a long time to understand how damaging indulging Netanyahu's almost every whim has turned out to be.
From Biden and Harris' and Starmer's perspective Saudi not allowing Israeli bombers overflights to attack Iran is a good thing.
It is only Trump who really wants a war with Iran like Netanyahu
Interestingly US Dem Senator Chris Coons suggested that Netanyahu is trying to get Trump elected and that’s why he’s refused any ceasefire in Gaza .
If I had £22 billion to spend on carbon [sic] reduction, the first thing I would do is make sure every public building that wasn't Grade I listed was absolutely plastered with solar panels.
The next thing I would do is build some damn tidal stations, at last.
I might look at any schemes to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I wouldn't spend a red cent on 'carbon capture.'
It's the present day equivalent of Thatcher deciding to pacify the miners and subsidise UK coalfields for the duration of her premiership.
If I'm honest - as somebody who's not a scientist - it looks more like the present day equivalent of massively funding research into perpetual motion machines.
With the storage side there are some real sticking points in the physics which the companies have had a lot of trouble trying to overcome. (Until last year I was involved in planning drilling wells for CCS projects for one of the oil companies involved).
Simple physics. When you are collecting and pumping the CO2 you put it under compression. When you then pump that CO2 down the hole and into the reservoir that pressure is rapidly diminished as the CO2 enters the reservoir. This results in an effect known as Joule-Thomson Cooling. This has a lot of effects, none of them good for the reservoir, but the most immediate is a phase change in the residual water around the well bore. This will block the pore spaces and reduce or prevent injection and also causes thermal stress due to ice formation which can damage the resrvoir around the injection well and reduce injection further or cause a breach of the top of the reservoir.
This has proved rather problematic in trying to get an efficient storage system in place.
Excellent, informed and interesting comment.
I've never forgotten the effect of expansion on CO2 ever since seeing the doctor generate a slug of the solid stuff to put on my ingrowing toe when I was a teenager. It cooled so much when being let out of the cylinder that some of it froze - not water ice but CO2 ice.
CO2 doesn't have a liquid phase at 1 atmosphere. So it goes straight from gas to solid and back. Which part of the reason that it is fun to play around with.
On the Middle East question, very little in the UK and Europe in the last 24 hours, is the statement from Saudi Arabia.
Under huge political pressure, they say they want to "put their differences with Iran to one side", and improve ties. This was also signed by the other Gulf Arab states.
This is very bad news for both Israel and West, because it means that not only is the goal of Israeli-Gulf rapprochement going down the plughole, but also that Netanyahu's "war without end" on four fronts, is beginning to create the kind of pan-Muslim climate of the 1950s to the 1970s ; exactly in opposite to Israel's, and the West's, long-term interests.
Albeit Israel did manage to defeat all its Muslim neighbours in the 1970s and 1950s yes Netanyahu has overreached when he should just have focused on defeating Hamas
On the Middle East question, very little in the UK and Europe in the last 24 hours, is the statement from Saudi Arabia.
Under huge political pressure, they say they want to "put their differences with Iran to one side", and improve ties. This was also signed by the other Gulf Arab states.
This is very bad news for both Israel and West, because it means that not only is the goal of Israeli-Gulf rapprochement going down the plughole, but also that Netanyahu's "war without end" on four fronts, is beginning to create the kind of pan-Muslim climate of the 1950s to the 1970s ; exactly in opposite to Israel's, and the West's, long-term interests.
Albeit Israel did manage to defeat all its Muslim neighbours in the 1970s and 1950s yes Netanyahu has overreached when he should just have focused on defeating Hamas
However, this kind of dynamic would be a disaster for both Israel and the West in the long-term, though. The Israelis really only stabilised their geopolitical position in the 1970s by breaking off the Egyptians from the pan-Arab alliance, and doing a land-for-peace deal with them, for instance.
The Saudis and Gulf Arab states are now also taking about not allowing any overflights of the territory for any attack against Iran. It's going to take the West a long time to understand how damaging indulging Netanyahu's almost every whim has turned out to be.
From Biden and Harris' and Starmer's perspective Saudi not allowing Israeli bombers overflights to attack Iran is a good thing.
It is only Trump who really wants a war with Iran like Netanyahu
Interestingly US Dem Senator Chris Murphy suggested that Netanyahu is trying to get Trump elected and that’s why he’s refused any ceasefire in Gaza .
Putin and Netanyahu both want a Trump win. As Trump would effectively dump backing for Zelansky and push him to make a peace deal with Putin handing over much of Eastern Ukraine to Russia and then shift arms to Israel to support Netanyahu in a full on war with Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran
On the Middle East question, very little in the UK and Europe in the last 24 hours, is the statement from Saudi Arabia.
Under huge political pressure, they say they want to "put their differences with Iran to one side", and improve ties. This was also signed by the other Gulf Arab states.
This is very bad news for both Israel and West, because it means that not only is the goal of Israeli-Gulf rapprochement going down the plughole, but also that Netanyahu's "war without end" on four fronts, is beginning to create the kind of pan-Muslim climate of the 1950s to the 1970s ; exactly in opposite to Israel's, and the West's, long-term interests.
Albeit Israel did manage to defeat all its Muslim neighbours in the 1970s and 1950s yes Netanyahu has overreached when he should just have focused on defeating Hamas
On the Middle East question, very little in the UK and Europe in the last 24 hours, is the statement from Saudi Arabia.
Under huge political pressure, they say they want to "put their differences with Iran to one side", and improve ties. This was also signed by the other Gulf Arab states.
This is very bad news for both Israel and West, because it means that not only is the goal of Israeli-Gulf rapprochement going down the plughole, but also that Netanyahu's "war without end" on four fronts, is beginning to create the kind of pan-Muslim climate of the 1950s to the 1970s ; exactly in opposite to Israel's, and the West's, long-term interests.
Albeit Israel did manage to defeat all its Muslim neighbours in the 1970s and 1950s yes Netanyahu has overreached when he should just have focused on defeating Hamas
However, this kind of dynamic would be a disaster for both Israel and the West in the long-term, though. The Israelis really only stabilised their geopolitical position in the 1970s by breaking off the Egyptians from the pan-Arab alliance, and doing a land-for-peace deal with them, for instance.
The Saudis and Gulf Arab states are now also taking about not allowing any overflights of the territory for any attack against Iran. It's going to take the West a long time to understand how damaging indulging Netanyahu's almost every whim has turned out to be.
From Biden and Harris' and Starmer's perspective Saudi not allowing Israeli bombers overflights to attack Iran is a good thing.
It is only Trump who really wants a war with Iran like Netanyahu
Interestingly US Dem Senator Chris Murphy suggested that Netanyahu is trying to get Trump elected and that’s why he’s refused any ceasefire in Gaza .
Putin and Netanyahu both want a Trump win. As Trump would effectively dump backing for Zelansky and push him to make a peace deal with Putin and then shift arms to Israel to support Netanyahu in a full on war with Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran
I made an initial error it was Chris Coons but yes you’ve hit the nail on the head.
If I had £22 billion to spend on carbon [sic] reduction, the first thing I would do is make sure every public building that wasn't Grade I listed was absolutely plastered with solar panels.
The next thing I would do is build some damn tidal stations, at last.
I might look at any schemes to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I wouldn't spend a red cent on 'carbon capture.'
It's the present day equivalent of Thatcher deciding to pacify the miners and subsidise UK coalfields for the duration of her premiership.
If I'm honest - as somebody who's not a scientist - it looks more like the present day equivalent of massively funding research into perpetual motion machines.
With the storage side there are some real sticking points in the physics which the companies have had a lot of trouble trying to overcome. (Until last year I was involved in planning drilling wells for CCS projects for one of the oil companies involved).
Simple physics. When you are collecting and pumping the CO2 you put it under compression. When you then pump that CO2 down the hole and into the reservoir that pressure is rapidly diminished as the CO2 enters the reservoir. This results in an effect known as Joule-Thomson Cooling. This has a lot of effects, none of them good for the reservoir, but the most immediate is a phase change in the residual water around the well bore. This will block the pore spaces and reduce or prevent injection and also causes thermal stress due to ice formation which can damage the resrvoir around the injection well and reduce injection further or cause a breach of the top of the reservoir.
This has proved rather problematic in trying to get an efficient storage system in place.
Excellent, informed and interesting comment.
I've never forgotten the effect of expansion on CO2 ever since seeing the doctor generate a slug of the solid stuff to put on my ingrowing toe when I was a teenager. It cooled so much when being let out of the cylinder that some of it froze - not water ice but CO2 ice.
CO2 doesn't have a liquid phase at 1 atmosphere. So it goes straight from gas to solid and back. Which part of the reason that it is fun to play around with.
Liquid Nitrogen says hello...
Why?
It's been accused of being cold and is trying to be friendly?
OK, I know very little of the story here, but that's not stopped anyone else.
But some things that smell a bit odd...
First, was this another poonami that the outgoing government left for Starmer? Was it a thing that really had to happen, but had hefty downsides (especially for true blue Tories), so it was just left in the in-tray? (Genuinely, I don't know how viable the 'just let the status quo roll on' thing is.)
Second, who is leaking the stuff to the Times?
Third, who benefits from the story, Conservative leadership-wise? Tom T is ferocious, national security-wise, isn't he? And however disappointing he is, isn't he a more likely receptacle for Cleverly votes looking for a new home than Kemi?
I honestly think they genuinely thought this would make them look good. Because British Empire = bad. And they don't really mix with anyone who thinks differently. We see this a lot from Labour. Policy decisions by what will most annoy the right.
I dunno about that. In this case, I really dunno.
Did the government really choose to do this, or is it putting the best face on something it didn't really have a realistic choice about? Forget Dave's claims of a veto- by the time he became Foreign Secretary, he knew it was an interim gig and his veto was a delay at most.
But the bigger picture is simple. This government will do things that you don't like and that I don't like. Not always because they are seeking to taunt, but because the Conservatives made in utter Horlicks of governing in recent years and so they lost. This is what losing looks like, and it's why sensible parties try to avoid it.
As of now, I don't see much evidence that the Conservatives have recovered their senses.
It's simpler than that I think. Given the UK was found to be clear breach of international law in splitting Chagos from Mauritius at time of independence and it wants to retain the Diego Garcia base mainly for the Americans without contestation, it has no choice but to deal with the Mauritius government. In those terms it is likely to be a good deal.
We can argue about the rightness of that calculation but it is a serious decision from Starmer when no-one else in politics is being serious.
I'd have gone with handing the Chagos over to the Chagos islanders and their descendants.
Then give them a referendum on either some kind of UK related status (Chagos would need outside money input to make it viable) or joining Mauritius.
Or the Maldives - closer and shares a lot of the common interest in the area. The UK and Maldives had spent a lot of time looking at the question of overlapping Economic Zones of Interest over the years.
This is not a matter of preference, it is a matter of law. The UN has determined that the UK broke international law. Either you accept the remedy or you don´t. There is no legal basis to do anything beyond returning the Chagos to Mauritius, in this case conditional on the maintenance of the base at DG which is why the US welcomed the deal. As for the comments re: Guyana, the fact is that the Cooperative Republic of Guyana has its territorial integrity legally recognised by the UN charter, and it is an attack by Venezuela that would be in breach of international law.
It is a serious deal and by hypocritically attacking it, Cleverly has joined Jenrick and Badenoch in the dunces class.
Seems like only Tom Tugendhat got the memo that the Tories need to start behaving like adults.
On the Middle East question, very little in the UK and Europe in the last 24 hours, is the statement from Saudi Arabia.
Under huge political pressure, they say they want to "put their differences with Iran to one side", and improve ties. This was also signed by the other Gulf Arab states.
This is very bad news for both Israel and West, because it means that not only is the goal of Israeli-Gulf rapprochement going down the plughole, but also that Netanyahu's "war without end" on four fronts, is beginning to create the kind of pan-Muslim climate of the 1950s to the 1970s ; exactly in opposite to Israel's, and the West's, long-term interests.
Albeit Israel did manage to defeat all its Muslim neighbours in the 1970s and 1950s yes Netanyahu has overreached when he should just have focused on defeating Hamas
On the Middle East question, very little in the UK and Europe in the last 24 hours, is the statement from Saudi Arabia.
Under huge political pressure, they say they want to "put their differences with Iran to one side", and improve ties. This was also signed by the other Gulf Arab states.
This is very bad news for both Israel and West, because it means that not only is the goal of Israeli-Gulf rapprochement going down the plughole, but also that Netanyahu's "war without end" on four fronts, is beginning to create the kind of pan-Muslim climate of the 1950s to the 1970s ; exactly in opposite to Israel's, and the West's, long-term interests.
Albeit Israel did manage to defeat all its Muslim neighbours in the 1970s and 1950s yes Netanyahu has overreached when he should just have focused on defeating Hamas
However, this kind of dynamic would be a disaster for both Israel and the West in the long-term, though. The Israelis really only stabilised their geopolitical position in the 1970s by breaking off the Egyptians from the pan-Arab alliance, and doing a land-for-peace deal with them, for instance.
The Saudis and Gulf Arab states are now also taking about not allowing any overflights of the territory for any attack against Iran. It's going to take the West a long time to understand how damaging indulging Netanyahu's almost every whim has turned out to be.
From Biden and Harris' and Starmer's perspective Saudi not allowing Israeli bombers overflights to attack Iran is a good thing.
It is only Trump who really wants a war with Iran like Netanyahu
Interestingly US Dem Senator Chris Murphy suggested that Netanyahu is trying to get Trump elected and that’s why he’s refused any ceasefire in Gaza .
Putin and Netanyahu both want a Trump win. As Trump would effectively dump backing for Zelansky and push him to make a peace deal with Putin handing over much of Eastern Ukraine to Russia and then shift arms to Israel to support Netanyahu in a full on war with Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran
If I had £22 billion to spend on carbon [sic] reduction, the first thing I would do is make sure every public building that wasn't Grade I listed was absolutely plastered with solar panels.
The next thing I would do is build some damn tidal stations, at last.
I might look at any schemes to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I wouldn't spend a red cent on 'carbon capture.'
It's the present day equivalent of Thatcher deciding to pacify the miners and subsidise UK coalfields for the duration of her premiership.
If I'm honest - as somebody who's not a scientist - it looks more like the present day equivalent of massively funding research into perpetual motion machines.
With the storage side there are some real sticking points in the physics which the companies have had a lot of trouble trying to overcome. (Until last year I was involved in planning drilling wells for CCS projects for one of the oil companies involved).
Simple physics. When you are collecting and pumping the CO2 you put it under compression. When you then pump that CO2 down the hole and into the reservoir that pressure is rapidly diminished as the CO2 enters the reservoir. This results in an effect known as Joule-Thomson Cooling. This has a lot of effects, none of them good for the reservoir, but the most immediate is a phase change in the residual water around the well bore. This will block the pore spaces and reduce or prevent injection and also causes thermal stress due to ice formation which can damage the resrvoir around the injection well and reduce injection further or cause a breach of the top of the reservoir.
This has proved rather problematic in trying to get an efficient storage system in place.
So how many geologists and physicists do you think Ed Miliband had spoken to, before his announcement?
Or does he not give a sh!t about science, and makes decisions based on ideology?
I am sure there are people who could tell him this. The trouble is that lots of them stand to make money out of the projects even if they don't ultimately work. So they are hardly going to shout it from the rooftops. A quiet memo on page 527 of his technical briefing in his 5th red box on a Tuesday night will probably have covered it.
Labour economic naivety then?
Reeves is in danger of falling for self-interested industry grifters with regard to pension funds:
I'm not really getting the RefUK line on the Chagos Islands deal - they were against us being an "EU colony" but think we should have colonies in the Indian Ocean! Surely you're either for colonialism or against it. Or does it depend on who is being colonised? Very strange.
Of course it does.
Bear in mind that in general cultural discourse the idea that British Empire = enlightened and beneficial vs AN Other Empire = expansionist, dangerous and brutal has been doing the rounds for decades (nay, centuries) now.
I don’t think there’s any doubt that that has permeated into the national psyche, particularly among those of a certain age. Younger groups less so, because a number now won’t even remember something like the HK handover and they are brought up in a world which is much more questioning of colonial legacy and that takes a more “global” view.
Of course as with many things the actual position is very complicated, but that doesn’t suit anyone on the left or right.
This week’s political agreement is subject to a treaty and supporting legal instruments being finalised. Both sides have committed to complete this as quickly as possible.
I see that @JonO is running for Elmbridge Council next week. Best of luck.
We have no fewer than 38 by-elections over the next fortnight. I’d expect a lot of Labour losses.
How many Reform UK gains? Will Reform UK even stand that many candidates? I think that’s an interesting question: can RefUK transform itself into a traditional party that wins seats? That will be a big determiner of the next general election result.
Good morning
Last night Reform took two seats off Labour in Blackpool and generally Labour are tanking in local elections
There is sufficient evidence to suggest Reform could decimate Labour in the red wall seats
The bigger question is over the next few years is a closer Conservative-Reform possible and if so it will be very interesting
The local elections next year in places like Durham may well be interesting as Labour would have, until recently, been expecting to gain control back from the rather hapless coalition.
I have a good independent in my seat that will vote for. Not sure of the other vote at the moment.
This week’s political agreement is subject to a treaty and supporting legal instruments being finalised. Both sides have committed to complete this as quickly as possible.
OK, I know very little of the story here, but that's not stopped anyone else.
But some things that smell a bit odd...
First, was this another poonami that the outgoing government left for Starmer? Was it a thing that really had to happen, but had hefty downsides (especially for true blue Tories), so it was just left in the in-tray? (Genuinely, I don't know how viable the 'just let the status quo roll on' thing is.)
Second, who is leaking the stuff to the Times?
Third, who benefits from the story, Conservative leadership-wise? Tom T is ferocious, national security-wise, isn't he? And however disappointing he is, isn't he a more likely receptacle for Cleverly votes looking for a new home than Kemi?
I honestly think they genuinely thought this would make them look good. Because British Empire = bad. And they don't really mix with anyone who thinks differently. We see this a lot from Labour. Policy decisions by what will most annoy the right.
I dunno about that. In this case, I really dunno.
Did the government really choose to do this, or is it putting the best face on something it didn't really have a realistic choice about? Forget Dave's claims of a veto- by the time he became Foreign Secretary, he knew it was an interim gig and his veto was a delay at most.
But the bigger picture is simple. This government will do things that you don't like and that I don't like. Not always because they are seeking to taunt, but because the Conservatives made in utter Horlicks of governing in recent years and so they lost. This is what losing looks like, and it's why sensible parties try to avoid it.
As of now, I don't see much evidence that the Conservatives have recovered their senses.
It's simpler than that I think. Given the UK was found to be clear breach of international law in splitting Chagos from Mauritius at time of independence and it wants to retain the Diego Garcia base mainly for the Americans without contestation, it has no choice but to deal with the Mauritius government. In those terms it is likely to be a good deal.
We can argue about the rightness of that calculation but it is a serious decision from Starmer when no-one else in politics is being serious.
I'd have gone with handing the Chagos over to the Chagos islanders and their descendants.
Then give them a referendum on either some kind of UK related status (Chagos would need outside money input to make it viable) or joining Mauritius.
Or the Maldives - closer and shares a lot of the common interest in the area. The UK and Maldives had spent a lot of time looking at the question of overlapping Economic Zones of Interest over the years.
This is not a matter of preference, it is a matter of law. The UN has determined that the UK broke international law. Either you accept the remedy or you don´t. There is no legal basis to do anything beyond returning the Chagos to Mauritius, in this case conditional on the maintenance of the base at DG which is why the US welcomed the deal. As for the comments re: Guyana, the fact is that the Cooperative Republic of Guyana has its territorial integrity legally recognised by the UN charter, and it is an attack by Venezuela that would be in breach of international law.
It is a serious deal and by hypocritically attacking it, Cleverly has joined Jenrick and Badenoch in the dunces class.
Seems like only Tom Tugendhat got the memo that the Tories need to start behaving like adults.
I agree about the hypocrisy of Cleverly but strongly disagree with the idea we should hand it over to Mauritius - who never owned it in the first place. We should ahve handed it over to the Islanders themselves and let them decide what was done afterwards. As it is all we have done is compounded the mistakes we made when we originally stole the islands from them. So no, I do not accept the remedy. In this case the (international) law was and is an ass.
If I had £22 billion to spend on carbon [sic] reduction, the first thing I would do is make sure every public building that wasn't Grade I listed was absolutely plastered with solar panels.
The next thing I would do is build some damn tidal stations, at last.
I might look at any schemes to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I wouldn't spend a red cent on 'carbon capture.'
It's the present day equivalent of Thatcher deciding to pacify the miners and subsidise UK coalfields for the duration of her premiership.
If I'm honest - as somebody who's not a scientist - it looks more like the present day equivalent of massively funding research into perpetual motion machines.
With the storage side there are some real sticking points in the physics which the companies have had a lot of trouble trying to overcome. (Until last year I was involved in planning drilling wells for CCS projects for one of the oil companies involved).
Simple physics. When you are collecting and pumping the CO2 you put it under compression. When you then pump that CO2 down the hole and into the reservoir that pressure is rapidly diminished as the CO2 enters the reservoir. This results in an effect known as Joule-Thomson Cooling. This has a lot of effects, none of them good for the reservoir, but the most immediate is a phase change in the residual water around the well bore. This will block the pore spaces and reduce or prevent injection and also causes thermal stress due to ice formation which can damage the resrvoir around the injection well and reduce injection further or cause a breach of the top of the reservoir.
This has proved rather problematic in trying to get an efficient storage system in place.
Excellent, informed and interesting comment.
I've never forgotten the effect of expansion on CO2 ever since seeing the doctor generate a slug of the solid stuff to put on my ingrowing toe when I was a teenager. It cooled so much when being let out of the cylinder that some of it froze - not water ice but CO2 ice.
CO2 doesn't have a liquid phase at 1 atmosphere. So it goes straight from gas to solid and back. Which part of the reason that it is fun to play around with.
Comments
Buy inverter companies.
Firstly they have accepted the developer lobbying argument - the problem with housing is all about land release and political opposition to new development.
There is something in this. But they seem to have no understanding of the viability problem. The cost of building newbuild housing has risen exponentially, but the sale prices have stagnated or even fallen in large parts of the country.
There is no policy initiative to increase demand (ie no replacement 'help to buy').
Without this you will have a deflating housing market, with little or no increase in supply.
Meanwhile the government press on with more and more environmental and safety regulation thus driving up the cost of building further.
I am just looking at this situation in complete despair.
Blood and tissue products have to be matched between donors and recipients, so the donor pool has to match the population needing them. The donor pool contained enough white women previously, hence the drive for more ethnically diverse donors. That process has gone well, so more general recruitment can resume.
There are real problems getting tissue matched kidneys etc for Asian patients as demand exceeds supply, as Asians have higher rates of renal failure, so there have been specific drives to recruit Asian donors in the past.
NHSBT has been appallingly run in recent years due to a botched centralisation under the Conservatives, which has led to significant failings, though this hasn't really reached the national press.
Two season tickets to Sunderland Soccer Team and watching Bruce Springsteen.
Glutton for punishment more like.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz7jr7355jjo#:~:text=A local authority leader has come under fire for accepting
We have no fewer than 38 by-elections over the next fortnight. I’d expect a lot of Labour losses.
People from the humanities both think they understand science stuff when they don't and surprisingly assume scientists understand all areas of science rather than their speciality. We might have a basic grasp, but for instance my knowledge on the biological sciences is very limited.
The next thing I would do is build some damn tidal stations, at last.
I might look at any schemes to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I wouldn't spend a red cent on 'carbon capture.'
We see this a lot from Labour. Policy decisions by what will most annoy the right.
It would also save 2 million tonnes of carbon for each of those 180 years.
Rather than paying a steep price to the owners for not inputting electricity to the grid during off peak hours (which we'll be doing for the next decade at least), government could have introduced local pricing and offered businesses on the Yorkshire coast, who committed to taking electricity during those hours, a price of 1p per kWh for the capacity they committed to take, for the next decade.
A big incentive for regional development of exactly the kind of industrial development we'll need if we're going to depend on wind power for a large proportion of our energy needs.
1) order 1 small nuclear reactor
2) order 1 tidal pond
3) other promising tech
Put the rest in escrow. If some or all of those prove to be cost effective, order more.
"This requires hard thinking – not the Conservatives’ traditional strength. We, like worried Victorians, live in a time when “the lights are all drifting, the compasses all awry, and nothing left to steer by but the stars”. Have the Tories got a potential leader with a broad hinterland, the brains to rethink first principles, a willingness to confront vested interests and courage to speak plainly? I hope they have. But will they choose her?"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/10/04/britain-left-wing-labour-government-tories-opposition/
Perhaps the best thing that could happen to the world economy in the next year or two, is for the Saudis to start pumping oil like crazy. It will reduce the cost of living in the West, and screw Putin who is reduced to selling his O&G output at a massive discount to the Chinese and Indians.
Prior to the election Labour had been claiming that increasing the windfall tax would push North Sea tax revenues up from the (OBR) predicted £8.6 billion a year in 2028 to something over £10 billion. The latest prediction based on what Labour has proposed/done since it came to power is that that revenue will fall to £2 billion a year at most by 2028. To be honest, the way companies are now fleeing the North Sea I think they will be lucky to make that.
Jenrick yes may also lend Tugendhat some supporters to knock out Cleverly and then Badenoch who are more likely to run him close with the membership
Did the government really choose to do this, or is it putting the best face on something it didn't really have a realistic choice about? Forget Dave's claims of a veto- by the time he became Foreign Secretary, he knew it was an interim gig and his veto was a delay at most.
But the bigger picture is simple. This government will do things that you don't like and that I don't like. Not always because they are seeking to taunt, but because the Conservatives made in utter Horlicks of governing in recent years and so they lost. This is what losing looks like, and it's why sensible parties try to avoid it.
As of now, I don't see much evidence that the Conservatives have recovered their senses.
Have you any experimental data to backup this remarkable conclusion?
I mean they've managed to use £22bn for both the scale of this years budget gap and as a bung for carbon capture (which is by definition short term given where we are towards Net Zero).. That really isn't bright..
My analogy was because this is being sold as delivering "good jobs" in the North East. Keeping the mines open would also have been about retaining jobs at the expense of economic common sense.
I see Reeves also calls it a "game-changing technology".
In the sense that it's a game losing technology, I guess that's strictly true.
It was Liberal Lloyd George who created the Irish Free State and Tory Lord North even fought the US War of Independence to try and keep the American colonies
We can argue about the rightness of that calculation but it is a serious decision from Starmer when no-one else in politics is being serious.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/joint-statement-between-uk-and-mauritius-3-october-2024
(I used DuckDuckGo instead of Google to find that)
In 1919, he openly condemned the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, referring to it as "unutterably monstrous".[24]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Winston_Churchill#India
Simple physics. When you are collecting and pumping the CO2 you put it under compression. When you then pump that CO2 down the hole and into the reservoir that pressure is rapidly diminished as the CO2 enters the reservoir. This results in an effect known as Joule-Thomson Cooling. This has a lot of effects, none of them good for the reservoir, but the most immediate is a phase change in the residual water around the well bore. This will block the pore spaces and reduce or prevent injection and also causes thermal stress due to ice formation which can damage the resrvoir around the injection well and reduce injection further or cause a breach of the top of the reservoir.
This has proved rather problematic in trying to get an efficient storage system in place.
No sign of any equivocation here and this is the horse's mouth
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/10/03/statement-from-president-joe-biden-on-the-occasion-of-an-agreement-between-the-republic-of-mauritius-and-the-united-kingdom-on-the-status-of-the-chagos-archipelago/
37 cases including 11 patients that have died and 5 that have recovered
Also impressively more than a thousand tests have been done according to the ministry of health
https://x.com/kakape/status/1841959941151813935
I've never forgotten the effect of expansion on CO2 ever since seeing the doctor generate a slug of the solid stuff to put on my ingrowing toe when I was a teenager. It cooled so much when being let out of the cylinder that some of it froze - not water ice but CO2 ice.
At some point between 2022 and 2024, the previous government just stopped doing stuff that might cost it support. See the great Nimby climbdown, or the refusal to accept that they couldn't win the pay disputes.
Rational with an election coming up, but not especially patriotic. In a parallel universe, Sunak was the PM who went down to a huge defeat because he took on his party and did the unpleasant stuff. He was the dying man who therefore couldn't be killed.
Instead, he trimmed and grovelled and achieved very little. And still went down to a huge defeat.
Or does he not give a sh!t about science, and makes decisions based on ideology?
"We strongly condemn the agreement between the Republic of Mauritius and the United Kingdom on the status of the Chagos Archipelago as a strategic blunder that undermines U.S. interests and regional security. Far from being a diplomatic achievement, this deal represents a colossal failure by the British government, which has naively jeopardized the future of one of the most important military assets in the Indo-Pacific.
By conceding sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius, the UK has weakened its control over Diego Garcia, a critical joint U.S.-UK military base. The agreement introduces unnecessary uncertainty and creates potential friction with Mauritius over the long-term status and operations of the base, threatening its ability to function effectively. Given Diego Garcia's central role in supporting U.S. military operations and maintaining regional stability, this move is shortsighted and irresponsible.
Moreover, the British government's willingness to compromise on such a vital strategic asset reflects a profound lack of foresight. By pursuing a deal that appears politically convenient, they have failed to safeguard the long-term security interests of both the UK and the United States. This agreement risks destabilizing the carefully calibrated balance of power in the IndoPacific, potentially creating vulnerabilities in a region already facing significant security threats."
THAT??
Rather than applauding this misguided agreement, we should be deeply concerned about the consequences it will have for U.S. strategic interests and the future of our critical defense partnerships in the region
That's why white women weren't used as donors. What I'm not entirely clear on is why that has now changed, but presumably it's the "New evidence shows that age rather than sex is a more significant factor in the health and efficacy of stem cells. Younger donors provide better transplant outcomes." Probably shows that getting more young white women to donate may be better on balance than existing older men.
From yours truly, a 'Genuine Scientist'
But yes, every new build having solar panels fitted as standard, by law, would be a start.
It looks like the latest thing is a rechargeable electric mini-pump to do the same thing. It'll be interesting to see how effective they are - though they won't be quite as quick as CO2. Another issue with CO2 is that it leaks out the tyres, so at the end of the day you need to deflate the tyres and inflate them again with good old air.
(*) Along with a mini-pump.
The Saudis and Gulf Arab states are now also taking about not allowing any overflights of the territory for any attack against Iran. It's going to take the West a long time to understand how damaging indulging Netanyahu's almost every whim has turned out to be.
Then give them a referendum on either some kind of UK related status (Chagos would need outside money input to make it viable) or joining Mauritius.
Anyone for some ground nuts?
I've no idea how I'm voting at the next GE yet, but I could well take back my loaned vote and give it to the LD instead. With the right Tory leader*, talking sense, they could be in the frame too (I'm in what should, probably, in normal times be a Lab-Con competitive constituency).
*looks at candidates, sighs - although maybe there will be another leadership election before then
Transport from the point of capture to storage site also requires expensive pipelines and potentially bespoke LCO2 ships.
In fairness to Ed M, new CO2 producing facilities got approval on the back of a promise of CCS. This is just another turd Labour have been left to bag up.
That does not mean that imperialism should not end, especially if local populations want it; just that extreme care needs to be taken to ensure those negative consequences are minimised.
I don't think that this has been done here.
It is only Trump who really wants a war with Iran like Netanyahu
Last night Reform took two seats off Labour in Blackpool and generally Labour are tanking in local elections
There is sufficient evidence to suggest Reform could decimate Labour in the red wall seats
The bigger question is over the next few years is a closer Conservative-Reform possible and if so it will be very interesting
Carbon from the plain old atmosphere is much further down the road, in terms of viability.
However, it also means that new bonds of understanding between.previously hostile countries in the region are being formed by Netanyahu's apparently totally free hand to wage war in all areas. This is very bad news for the West.
So other questions comes into it: how far back do such 'imperialist' problems have to go back before they can be ignored; what about self-determination; and is removing one imperialist power right if it just gets replaced with another imperialist power, or a power that will ignore the rights of the population in the new area?
I suppose it also applies, in the minds of some at least, to Russia - Ukraine. In both directions:
Whether it is a 'good deal' or not should not be said by people in the UK or Mauritius, or China. It should be said by the people who it most directly effects - the islanders themselves.
Surely not!
Inspired by: the Laccadive - Chagos Ridge.
Combines: Chagos, the Maldives and India's Lakshadweep.
Area land: 391 sq. km.
Area water: 164,000 sq. km.
population: 170,000 approx.
Th rate of sea level rise will be small, per actual year. Given the value of the base, it will be trivial to increase the height of atoll in the areas wanted. Indeed, this has already been done by the Americans on portions of the base, in the past.
See the wholesale construction/raising of islands by China.
The bit the Chagos islanders will live on - that's another matter. Why should the Mauritius bother? They will have the fishing rights.
It was like the Battle of Vimy Ridge.
It is a serious deal and by hypocritically attacking it, Cleverly has joined Jenrick and Badenoch in the dunces class.
Seems like only Tom Tugendhat got the memo that the Tories need to start behaving like adults.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/poll-finds-58-of-israelis-would-vote-for-trump-if-they-could-take-part-in-us-election/
Reeves is in danger of falling for self-interested industry grifters with regard to pension funds:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/chancellor-reeves-pension-funds-can-fire-up-the-uk-economy
Bear in mind that in general cultural discourse the idea that British Empire = enlightened and beneficial vs AN Other Empire = expansionist, dangerous and brutal has been doing the rounds for decades (nay, centuries) now.
I don’t think there’s any doubt that that has permeated into the national psyche, particularly among those of a certain age. Younger groups less so, because a number now won’t even remember something like the HK handover and they are brought up in a world which is much more questioning of colonial legacy and that takes a more “global” view.
Of course as with many things the actual position is very complicated, but that doesn’t suit anyone on the left or right.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-mauritius-deal-to-protect-national-security-safeguarding-the-operation-of-strategic-military-base
This week’s political agreement is subject to a treaty and supporting legal instruments being finalised. Both sides have committed to complete this as quickly as possible.
I have a good independent in my seat that will vote for. Not sure of the other vote at the moment.
UK 57.2
Italy 47.8
Germany 41.7
France 37.9
https://www.pmi.spglobal.com/Public/Release/PressReleases