Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I was going to say that all the Reform-leaning posters here seem variously disconnected from reality. Climate change denial is one example.
I don’t think a great many people are climate change denialists. But different people place a different emphasis on things. I don’t for example put it in the top 10 of things to worry about, even though it’s pretty obvious to me that anthropogenic carbon releases do impact the climate.
I have found it dropping down my list of priorities, personally.
In part that is because I think we are probably past the point when we will be able to have a meaningful chance of preventing self-reinforcing feedback systems of warning.
In part I think it has been displaced by more immediate priorities: sustaining democracy, national security, inequality, the broken nature of our economic system.
In part I can recognise that concern about climate change is a privileged concern - whilst it is likely to have some fairly catastrophic effects, these only really register if one is right at the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, not least because most of the impacts are still in the future.
I still think it will be the defining historical narrative of the 21st century but am much more fatalistic about it than I used to be.
A more optimistic factor is that many of the key technologies we need to deploy to reduce the scale of the problem (solar and batteries, say) have reached a level of maturity where government intervention is not required to kick-start their development and deployment.
Sure, it would have been better if we could have reached this point earlier, and there's still things government can do to ease and speed the transition, but the very worst-case emissions scenarios are now almost impossible because solar is now cheaper than coal.
It's much harder to anticipate the adaptations we will need to make to deal with the climate change our past emissions have committed us to, because they're hard to predict with the necessary precision and accuracy.
So I'm mainly crossing my fingers and hoping for the best at this stage.
Solar is now the cheapest to install. Solar + battery is approaching that.
China is installing it at an insane rate. They are starting to shift to green steel production as well - while we do nothing.
EV upfront price is now falling below ICE upfront price.
Etc. etc.
Right. We had that whole argument over green steel production a few years ago when the question of that coking mine came up. I believe I'm right in saying that the British choice was to do neither. No coking mine, no green steel production, maybe no steel production at all before long.
Yes, we all got slightly dogmatic about it - and hobbled ourselves- which is hardly helpful.
We need a practical path to emissions balance.
You want practical?
CCS.
In principle, yes, I agree. There's no real alternative.
However, I'm yet to see a pragmatic system at scale that's economically viable.
Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms.
I do beg to differ, here. Demand reduction measures are an admission a country's energy policy has failed. Abundant, affordable energy has long been acknowledged to be a significant economic asset and social good. Now that we have multiple ways of generating power with little environmental impact, that should always be the priority.
Spending money on insulation schemes, to pick the example you mentioned, is, on a macro level, a complete waste of money. It's an extremely expensive way of reducing demand in one very specific area, without having enough scale to give any general benefits.
Spend that money on new generation facilities and overall supply improves, prices go down for everyone (presuming a free market) and it increases reliability in the system. Build enough and you end up with a surplus of supply, which attracts energy-intensive industries, providing jobs, and can bring opportunities to profit by supplying excess to countries with an energy shortfall.
We should be building wind farms, solar and SMRs as fast as possible. Having too much energy is always better than not having enough.
I think we should leave "should" out of it as far as possible when it comes to the precise amount of energy we generate.* I'd just leave it to the market. If it's cheaper to insulate than to build more offshore wind turbines then do that. And the inverse.
Distributional challenges will remain - I suspect that the cost of energy won't come down significantly as demand soars to meet new generation. So people will still continue to want to reduce their consumption where possible. Nowt wrong with that.
*how we generate it is a different question, given the positive and negative externalities of the different options.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I think it's more that the debate is effectively over. Very few people continue to deny it exists, or that humans are responsible for it. You still get people like Casino_Royale who think it's just some culture war game, but the data is becoming metronomic - we're about to declare this year our hottest year on record (again). I think we all understand that with Trump any debate/campaign for mitigation is fruitless until we get a sane Thatcher-type figure on the right again.
At some point we are going to need to have a serious conversation about adaptation. That's what so pathetic about those people who suggest we can't stop it happening - fine, so where's the big plan for 3 degrees+?
On the domestic front, we have nobody building any water infrastructure, and a virtual ban on dredging for the last 20-25 years, due to EU habitat legislation, then we blame the resulting summer droughts and winter floods on climate change.
I don't think it is included in the above - one of our basic planning policies since about 2010 has been that surface water runoff from a development should be no more than the pre-existing site - that's where all our balancing ponds come from. The last one of these I did required a preliminary design as part of Outline Permission, required to establish that the site was suitable for development; it was done by Mott McDonald and came to around £250 per potential housing unit just for the preliminary design.
The Thames Tideway Tunnel, which came online last year, was about £5 billion on its own.
That's all water infrastructure, as is investment in sewerage treatment, canal and river maintenance, and the rest.
That is a fair response to a point I made that included hyperbole but was still an important one.
There have been no major reservoirs built for over 30 years - the last one (there are some being built now) was completed in 1992. At the same time, the population has risen by 11 million.
I find that staggering, and it makes me extremely cynical when people panic about our weather conditions.
In general I'd argue that building more reservoirs should be the last resort, as it is a 'tailpipe' solution. Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms. So for me that means measures such as leak reduction and 100% water meters, which apply the market mechanism and themselves generate a reduction of 10-12% in water usage, before we spend hundreds of millions on new reservoirs.
I think one of the unforeseen problems of the last budget will be caused by the unbundling of insulation etc programmes from energy bills - it can now be seen and will be far easier to target in political debate. The programme has been very successful for 15 years doing basics such as loft insulation, until the current one is under severe question - when the programme has been doing more complex installations (eg external wall insulation) with inadequate standards / supervision.
I am sure you would argue that - I would argue the opposite. Your argument leads to the British economy where it now is - mine leads to the Chinese economy where it now is. Abundant and cheap energy is a pre-requisite for any prosperous society, and is the lifeblood of human progress.
More specifically, having a deliberate policy of failing to build sufficient reservoirs, and instead blame the public for water shortages - encouraging them to water their gardens less, even to shower less (truly revolting) and take other punitive measures to combat 'water shortages' (when Winter floods will be along soon) is simply gaslighting.
I admit I just don't see that as a viable argument. I think you are assuming a zero-sum game, which is not the case. I don't see how a concept of blame applies.
Achieving the same outcome using fewer resources is a simple increase in efficiency. How is that not a benefit.
Why should we want to use 25% more water (or electricity) than necessary? Would you argue against reduced fuel consumption in a motor vehicle on the same basis?
The point about reservoirs is that if water consumption is reduced, fewer reservoirs is not "insufficient"; it changes the definition of "sufficient" to be a smaller quantity.
To turn the question around, why should we waste scarce resources on building unnecessary reservoirs or power stations?
For a specific example on water, current use in Denmark is around 105l per person per day, compared to 130-140l in England. Denmark does not seem to have an economy on its knees, and is noticeably prosperous.
Long term, northern Scotland and the Western Isles are going to be the new tourist places when the Med becomes intolerably hot. There are some fantastic beaches in the Hebrides and along the northern Scottish coast and they will be developed with accompanying infrastructure and transport links over the next century or so.
If I wanted a really long term investment, I’d be looking at South Uist.
As for @IanB2’s friend, I’ve met a few pro punters over the years - it always seemed a miserable existence endlessly watching and researching horse racing. For me, it’s always been fun - I keep a record of my bets - on average for every £1 I bet, I get back 87p over a year so I couldn’t make a living but it’s entertainment, rather like coming on here and doing a little political jousting.
When the Mediterranean and other places become intolerably hot, their populations will need to move elsewhere. Where will they be welcomed?
It's a potential human and humanitarian catastrophe of unbelievable proportions - not just the Med but parts of the Middle East and India and North Africa, parts of central and South America too - indeed, many areas near to the Equator will likely become more marginal for human habiltation and that's before we consider more frequent and violent storms and tides affecting coastal areas.
I can imagine seasonal migrations of people from south to north in summer and back down in winter - perhaps.
Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms.
I do beg to differ, here. Demand reduction measures are an admission a country's energy policy has failed. Abundant, affordable energy has long been acknowledged to be a significant economic asset and social good. Now that we have multiple ways of generating power with little environmental impact, that should always be the priority.
Spending money on insulation schemes, to pick the example you mentioned, is, on a macro level, a complete waste of money. It's an extremely expensive way of reducing demand in one very specific area, without having enough scale to give any general benefits.
Spend that money on new generation facilities and overall supply improves, prices go down for everyone (presuming a free market) and it increases reliability in the system. Build enough and you end up with a surplus of supply, which attracts energy-intensive industries, providing jobs, and can bring opportunities to profit by supplying excess to countries with an energy shortfall.
We should be building wind farms, solar and SMRs as fast as possible. Having too much energy is always better than not having enough.
Could not agree more. This 100% is correct.
If energy is clean, then there's no environmental reason to demand less.
If energy is not clean, then there's no way to get to net zero.
Demand reduction achieves diddly squat and is unscientific gibberish to further hairshirt agendas.
Clean, abundant, cheap and well-used energy is the future.
Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms.
I do beg to differ, here. Demand reduction measures are an admission a country's energy policy has failed. Abundant, affordable energy has long been acknowledged to be a significant economic asset and social good. Now that we have multiple ways of generating power with little environmental impact, that should always be the priority.
Spending money on insulation schemes, to pick the example you mentioned, is, on a macro level, a complete waste of money. It's an extremely expensive way of reducing demand in one very specific area, without having enough scale to give any general benefits.
Spend that money on new generation facilities and overall supply improves, prices go down for everyone (presuming a free market) and it increases reliability in the system. Build enough and you end up with a surplus of supply, which attracts energy-intensive industries, providing jobs, and can bring opportunities to profit by supplying excess to countries with an energy shortfall.
We should be building wind farms, solar and SMRs as fast as possible. Having too much energy is always better than not having enough.
Is that true in all cases: encouraging the use of heat pumps is (a) demand reduction, but also (b) gives people cooling in summer?
Is it demand reduction, or just changing the demand?
Heat pumps supply heat in winter and cooling in summer, which is more being supplied than just heat in the winter.
They change the demand from gas to electricity, but it is not "turn down the thermostat to save energy" hairshirt gibberish.
Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms.
I do beg to differ, here. Demand reduction measures are an admission a country's energy policy has failed. Abundant, affordable energy has long been acknowledged to be a significant economic asset and social good. Now that we have multiple ways of generating power with little environmental impact, that should always be the priority.
Spending money on insulation schemes, to pick the example you mentioned, is, on a macro level, a complete waste of money. It's an extremely expensive way of reducing demand in one very specific area, without having enough scale to give any general benefits.
Spend that money on new generation facilities and overall supply improves, prices go down for everyone (presuming a free market) and it increases reliability in the system. Build enough and you end up with a surplus of supply, which attracts energy-intensive industries, providing jobs, and can bring opportunities to profit by supplying excess to countries with an energy shortfall.
We should be building wind farms, solar and SMRs as fast as possible. Having too much energy is always better than not having enough.
Could not agree more. This 100% is correct.
If energy is clean, then there's no environmental reason to demand less.
If energy is not clean, then there's no way to get to net zero.
Demand reduction achieves diddly squat and is unscientific gibberish to further hairshirt agendas.
Clean, abundant, cheap and well-used energy is the future.
I think efficiency is always a benefit, so I would support improved insulation, LED lighting, air fryers, etc, but when some people talk about demand reduction it sounds like rationing.
"Sweden and Norway rethink cashless society plans over Russia security fears Rise in hybrid warfare and cyber-attacks blamed on pro-Russia groups prompt Nordic neighbours to backpedal"
Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms.
I do beg to differ, here. Demand reduction measures are an admission a country's energy policy has failed. Abundant, affordable energy has long been acknowledged to be a significant economic asset and social good. Now that we have multiple ways of generating power with little environmental impact, that should always be the priority.
Spending money on insulation schemes, to pick the example you mentioned, is, on a macro level, a complete waste of money. It's an extremely expensive way of reducing demand in one very specific area, without having enough scale to give any general benefits.
Spend that money on new generation facilities and overall supply improves, prices go down for everyone (presuming a free market) and it increases reliability in the system. Build enough and you end up with a surplus of supply, which attracts energy-intensive industries, providing jobs, and can bring opportunities to profit by supplying excess to countries with an energy shortfall.
We should be building wind farms, solar and SMRs as fast as possible. Having too much energy is always better than not having enough.
Could not agree more. This 100% is correct.
If energy is clean, then there's no environmental reason to demand less.
If energy is not clean, then there's no way to get to net zero.
Demand reduction achieves diddly squat and is unscientific gibberish to further hairshirt agendas.
Clean, abundant, cheap and well-used energy is the future.
I think efficiency is always a benefit, so I would support improved insulation, LED lighting, air fryers, etc, but when some people talk about demand reduction it sounds like rationing.
Efficiency is great, yes. I love my air fryer, and LED lights and so on and so forth.
But that is embracing newer technologies that are an improvement, not stepping backwards.
My air fryer cooks better than the oven, most days of the year. Christmas Day I cooked with the oven due to the scale of what was being cooked, but most other days the air fryer operates instead, cooking better and cheaper.
When people want to say "don't travel", or "sit in the cold", or "don't consume" then they're not seeking to either help the environment in a scientific manner, or improve matters for people, they're pushing a bonkers agenda.
It's all down to the timing of the AI bubble bursting. If it happens this year, then there is no fig leaf for Republicans. It will be brutal.
In an alternative version of 2026 being a bad one, what if 2026 is the year that emergent consciousness arises in AI labs…
Welcome back Leon, we've missed you
I do for one miss Leon’s perspective. He’s still on X of course but he’s a little more restrained on there.
I think the site has improved immeasurably since he left. He was a bore, and he was relentless. He killed every conversation. Now there is a much healthier ecosystem and the ratio of interesting to annoying is much better.
He was though one of the few Reform backers here as well as being a good writer even if he liked to stir.
We are seriously short of Reform posters on here now given Reform currently lead the polls, if anyone knows any Reform voters who want to post please do suggest it! This site has always been good as it has tended to represent all views, with plenty of Tories, Labour and LDs and even a few Greens and Scots Nats but support for Farage here is very limited
...I made 100k dollars in 2020 because of this place (S&P short)...
The biggest winner on PB by my recollection was @Dromedary who claimed to have won 6/7 figures on Brexit. So your statement of "100k dollars in 2020" gladdens my heart. Consequently I would be grateful if you could expand on your winning bet please. Starting with what the "S&P short" was...
I bought a strip of out the money put options. At the time my financial affairs were split between two countries but I didn’t have a sterling brokerage account. So with my sterling liquidity I did the same trade but with spread bets.
I let the bet run until I hit $100k profit across the two accounts, living US trading hours for the duration of the bet (I had recently taken voluntary redundancy). My timing was fortuitous because the Fed big bazooka was unleashed the very next day.
IG Index then took weeks to honour the bet. At the time I was worried they were suffering a liquidity event, I wrote to their senior management to enquire as such. At it was, I think I raised an AML flag - a British citizen resident overseas that opened an account, turned over a huge profit in a week or two and then immediately closing it.
The shame was that I didn’t have more cash on hand as I would have bet even bigger - my host country had locked off my salary to settle tax obligations the moment I signed my redundancy papers the month or two before.
Which currency were you betting against and what were your reasons for betting against it?
I was betting on US stocks crashing, when they inevitably suffered the same mass panic.
Whatever, that won’t have been from any cogent analysis Leon posted, since he always flailed about making all sorts of wild and often contradictory posts without ever specifically predicting anything you could reliably stake money on. On the rare occasions that he did - for example during the 2017 GE when he claimed to have just sold all of his investments because Corbyn was about to be elected PM - he was probably feeding us made-up BS and in any case proved to be completely wrong. Either you are misremembering, or you were extraordinarily lucky to have acted on one of his posts not having seen all the contradictory ones.
As I remember the pre-Covid economic discussion on here, I was well ahead of Leon (or whatever he traded under back then) in both predicting and acting on the coming stock market downturn, and he only started claiming to have predicted it once it was already underway. The one thing I do remember him predicting is that Covid would be “contagious but essentially benign”
Alastair wrote an excellent header talking about Before Covid and After Covid. Well done if you were ahead of the curve. Leon’s doom posting is what did it for me. I knew all about Covid having been living with its effects since Jan 20 in Asia. I’m pretty sure I caught it in Jan 20 actually.
Before reading the interactions on here, i was operating under the basis that the “nailing doors shut” approach was an obscene overreaction by the Chinese, with the main problem being municipal level corruption collapsing the health system in localised areas.
Leon’s reaction made me realise that everywhere in the world was also going to go bananas with their response, regardless of how severe the problem really was. But I did lean (incorrectly as it turns out) towards it being a highly significant problem.
What I hadn’t squared correctly, was that “killing more than the holocaust” wasn’t as big a deal as it sounded in my head. Whatever, financial markets are mostly about prejudging policy responses, and that’s all that was important for that trade.
You have an uncanny Leonesque writing style.
Since he is a best selling author, I suppose I shall take that as a complement
That's the odd thing. Leon was a bestselling author who used to regale us with his Norweigan and Spanish royalty cheques, but then he stopped for some reason and now goes on holiday for a living.
To be fair to him, he mined two seams very productively (archeological fantasy and psychological thriller) and then they went out of fashion didn’t pivot to a third.
But few authors are successful in one genre let alone two
I’m kind of despairing at the news about Mr Abd El Fattah. It suggests that the entirety of government machinery is perpetuating a hoax on the wider public.
Although I understand Abd El Fattah is a noted dissident from a celebrated family of dissidents, he ought not to have passed the Fit and Proper test for citizenship. And it beggars belief that almost the entire political class, from both legacy mainstream political parties, campaigned so strongly for his release when his social media activity was always publicly available.
It's all down to the timing of the AI bubble bursting. If it happens this year, then there is no fig leaf for Republicans. It will be brutal.
In an alternative version of 2026 being a bad one, what if 2026 is the year that emergent consciousness arises in AI labs…
Welcome back Leon, we've missed you
I do for one miss Leon’s perspective. He’s still on X of course but he’s a little more restrained on there.
I think the site has improved immeasurably since he left. He was a bore, and he was relentless. He killed every conversation. Now there is a much healthier ecosystem and the ratio of interesting to annoying is much better.
He was though one of the few Reform backers here as well as being a good writer even if he liked to stir.
We are seriously short of Reform posters on here now given Reform currently lead the polls, if anyone knows any Reform voters who want to post please do suggest it! This site has always been good as it has tended to represent all views, with plenty of Tories, Labour and LDs and even a few Greens and Scots Nats but support for Farage here is very limited
...I made 100k dollars in 2020 because of this place (S&P short)...
The biggest winner on PB by my recollection was @Dromedary who claimed to have won 6/7 figures on Brexit. So your statement of "100k dollars in 2020" gladdens my heart. Consequently I would be grateful if you could expand on your winning bet please. Starting with what the "S&P short" was...
I bought a strip of out the money put options. At the time my financial affairs were split between two countries but I didn’t have a sterling brokerage account. So with my sterling liquidity I did the same trade but with spread bets.
I let the bet run until I hit $100k profit across the two accounts, living US trading hours for the duration of the bet (I had recently taken voluntary redundancy). My timing was fortuitous because the Fed big bazooka was unleashed the very next day.
IG Index then took weeks to honour the bet. At the time I was worried they were suffering a liquidity event, I wrote to their senior management to enquire as such. At it was, I think I raised an AML flag - a British citizen resident overseas that opened an account, turned over a huge profit in a week or two and then immediately closing it.
The shame was that I didn’t have more cash on hand as I would have bet even bigger - my host country had locked off my salary to settle tax obligations the moment I signed my redundancy papers the month or two before.
Which currency were you betting against and what were your reasons for betting against it?
I was betting on US stocks crashing, when they inevitably suffered the same mass panic.
Whatever, that won’t have been from any cogent analysis Leon posted, since he always flailed about making all sorts of wild and often contradictory posts without ever specifically predicting anything you could reliably stake money on. On the rare occasions that he did - for example during the 2017 GE when he claimed to have just sold all of his investments because Corbyn was about to be elected PM - he was probably feeding us made-up BS and in any case proved to be completely wrong. Either you are misremembering, or you were extraordinarily lucky to have acted on one of his posts not having seen all the contradictory ones.
As I remember the pre-Covid economic discussion on here, I was well ahead of Leon (or whatever he traded under back then) in both predicting and acting on the coming stock market downturn, and he only started claiming to have predicted it once it was already underway. The one thing I do remember him predicting is that Covid would be “contagious but essentially benign”
Alastair wrote an excellent header talking about Before Covid and After Covid. Well done if you were ahead of the curve. Leon’s doom posting is what did it for me. I knew all about Covid having been living with its effects since Jan 20 in Asia. I’m pretty sure I caught it in Jan 20 actually.
Before reading the interactions on here, i was operating under the basis that the “nailing doors shut” approach was an obscene overreaction by the Chinese, with the main problem being municipal level corruption collapsing the health system in localised areas.
Leon’s reaction made me realise that everywhere in the world was also going to go bananas with their response, regardless of how severe the problem really was. But I did lean (incorrectly as it turns out) towards it being a highly significant problem.
What I hadn’t squared correctly, was that “killing more than the holocaust” wasn’t as big a deal as it sounded in my head. Whatever, financial markets are mostly about prejudging policy responses, and that’s all that was important for that trade.
You have an uncanny Leonesque writing style.
Since he is a best selling author, I suppose I shall take that as a complement
That's the odd thing. Leon was a bestselling author who used to regale us with his Norweigan and Spanish royalty cheques, but then he stopped for some reason and now goes on holiday for a living.
To be fair to him, he mined two seams very productively (archeological fantasy and psychological thriller) and then they went out of fashion didn’t pivot to a third.
But few authors are successful in one genre let alone two
I’m not sure they went out of fashion. Indeed, Dan Brown has just published his latest.
Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms.
I do beg to differ, here. Demand reduction measures are an admission a country's energy policy has failed. Abundant, affordable energy has long been acknowledged to be a significant economic asset and social good. Now that we have multiple ways of generating power with little environmental impact, that should always be the priority.
Spending money on insulation schemes, to pick the example you mentioned, is, on a macro level, a complete waste of money. It's an extremely expensive way of reducing demand in one very specific area, without having enough scale to give any general benefits.
Spend that money on new generation facilities and overall supply improves, prices go down for everyone (presuming a free market) and it increases reliability in the system. Build enough and you end up with a surplus of supply, which attracts energy-intensive industries, providing jobs, and can bring opportunities to profit by supplying excess to countries with an energy shortfall.
We should be building wind farms, solar and SMRs as fast as possible. Having too much energy is always better than not having enough.
Could not agree more. This 100% is correct.
If energy is clean, then there's no environmental reason to demand less.
If energy is not clean, then there's no way to get to net zero.
Demand reduction achieves diddly squat and is unscientific gibberish to further hairshirt agendas.
Clean, abundant, cheap and well-used energy is the future.
I think efficiency is always a benefit, so I would support improved insulation, LED lighting, air fryers, etc, but when some people talk about demand reduction it sounds like rationing.
Efficiency is great, yes. I love my air fryer, and LED lights and so on and so forth.
But that is embracing newer technologies that are an improvement, not stepping backwards.
My air fryer cooks better than the oven, most days of the year. Christmas Day I cooked with the oven due to the scale of what was being cooked, but most other days the air fryer operates instead, cooking better and cheaper.
When people want to say "don't travel", or "sit in the cold", or "don't consume" then they're not seeking to either help the environment in a scientific manner, or improve matters for people, they're pushing a bonkers agenda.
Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms.
I do beg to differ, here. Demand reduction measures are an admission a country's energy policy has failed. Abundant, affordable energy has long been acknowledged to be a significant economic asset and social good. Now that we have multiple ways of generating power with little environmental impact, that should always be the priority.
Spending money on insulation schemes, to pick the example you mentioned, is, on a macro level, a complete waste of money. It's an extremely expensive way of reducing demand in one very specific area, without having enough scale to give any general benefits.
Spend that money on new generation facilities and overall supply improves, prices go down for everyone (presuming a free market) and it increases reliability in the system. Build enough and you end up with a surplus of supply, which attracts energy-intensive industries, providing jobs, and can bring opportunities to profit by supplying excess to countries with an energy shortfall.
We should be building wind farms, solar and SMRs as fast as possible. Having too much energy is always better than not having enough.
Could not agree more. This 100% is correct.
If energy is clean, then there's no environmental reason to demand less.
If energy is not clean, then there's no way to get to net zero.
Demand reduction achieves diddly squat and is unscientific gibberish to further hairshirt agendas.
Clean, abundant, cheap and well-used energy is the future.
I think efficiency is always a benefit, so I would support improved insulation, LED lighting, air fryers, etc, but when some people talk about demand reduction it sounds like rationing.
Efficiency is great, yes. I love my air fryer, and LED lights and so on and so forth.
But that is embracing newer technologies that are an improvement, not stepping backwards.
My air fryer cooks better than the oven, most days of the year. Christmas Day I cooked with the oven due to the scale of what was being cooked, but most other days the air fryer operates instead, cooking better and cheaper.
When people want to say "don't travel", or "sit in the cold", or "don't consume" then they're not seeking to either help the environment in a scientific manner, or improve matters for people, they're pushing a bonkers agenda.
Air fryer = small oven
Arguably ‘very small oven’ to be accurate. Very efficient. I have no idea why they are/were marketed as air fryers, as they don’t fry food(at best it’s roasted).
I’m kind of despairing at the news about Mr Abd El Fattah. It suggests that the entirety of government machinery is perpetuating a hoax on the wider public.
Although I understand Abd El Fattah is a noted dissident from a celebrated family of dissidents, he ought not to have passed the Fit and Proper test for citizenship. And it beggars belief that almost the entire political class, from both legacy mainstream political parties, campaigned so strongly for his release when his social media activity was always publicly available.
Brass Eye. Cake.
Nothing has changed - any bandwagon that is superficially attractive will get jumped on.
I’ve mentioned before getting an MP enthusiastic about growing peanuts in Africa to make oil for ZEV. After 10 minutes conversation he was ready to take it to the Minister. Wish I had been there for that.
I’m kind of despairing at the news about Mr Abd El Fattah. It suggests that the entirety of government machinery is perpetuating a hoax on the wider public.
Although I understand Abd El Fattah is a noted dissident from a celebrated family of dissidents, he ought not to have passed the Fit and Proper test for citizenship. And it beggars belief that almost the entire political class, from both legacy mainstream political parties, campaigned so strongly for his release when his social media activity was always publicly available.
Why isn't the checking of social media history commoditized and routinely used? There must be contractors who can do this relatively easily.
Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms.
I do beg to differ, here. Demand reduction measures are an admission a country's energy policy has failed. Abundant, affordable energy has long been acknowledged to be a significant economic asset and social good. Now that we have multiple ways of generating power with little environmental impact, that should always be the priority.
Spending money on insulation schemes, to pick the example you mentioned, is, on a macro level, a complete waste of money. It's an extremely expensive way of reducing demand in one very specific area, without having enough scale to give any general benefits.
Spend that money on new generation facilities and overall supply improves, prices go down for everyone (presuming a free market) and it increases reliability in the system. Build enough and you end up with a surplus of supply, which attracts energy-intensive industries, providing jobs, and can bring opportunities to profit by supplying excess to countries with an energy shortfall.
We should be building wind farms, solar and SMRs as fast as possible. Having too much energy is always better than not having enough.
Could not agree more. This 100% is correct.
If energy is clean, then there's no environmental reason to demand less.
If energy is not clean, then there's no way to get to net zero.
Demand reduction achieves diddly squat and is unscientific gibberish to further hairshirt agendas.
Clean, abundant, cheap and well-used energy is the future.
I think efficiency is always a benefit, so I would support improved insulation, LED lighting, air fryers, etc, but when some people talk about demand reduction it sounds like rationing.
Efficiency is great, yes. I love my air fryer, and LED lights and so on and so forth.
But that is embracing newer technologies that are an improvement, not stepping backwards.
My air fryer cooks better than the oven, most days of the year. Christmas Day I cooked with the oven due to the scale of what was being cooked, but most other days the air fryer operates instead, cooking better and cheaper.
When people want to say "don't travel", or "sit in the cold", or "don't consume" then they're not seeking to either help the environment in a scientific manner, or improve matters for people, they're pushing a bonkers agenda.
Air fryer = small oven
Arguably ‘very small oven’ to be accurate. Very efficient. I have no idea why they are/were marketed as air fryers, as they don’t fry food(at best it’s roasted).
I’m kind of despairing at the news about Mr Abd El Fattah. It suggests that the entirety of government machinery is perpetuating a hoax on the wider public.
Although I understand Abd El Fattah is a noted dissident from a celebrated family of dissidents, he ought not to have passed the Fit and Proper test for citizenship. And it beggars belief that almost the entire political class, from both legacy mainstream political parties, campaigned so strongly for his release when his social media activity was always publicly available.
Why isn't the checking of social media history commoditized and routinely used? There must be contractors who can do this relatively easily.
Of course. HR depts do it, @Malmesbury was discussing it too earlier.
These witless MPs have research teams too who could do it.
They’re keen enough to do it against political opponents.
I’m kind of despairing at the news about Mr Abd El Fattah. It suggests that the entirety of government machinery is perpetuating a hoax on the wider public.
Although I understand Abd El Fattah is a noted dissident from a celebrated family of dissidents, he ought not to have passed the Fit and Proper test for citizenship. And it beggars belief that almost the entire political class, from both legacy mainstream political parties, campaigned so strongly for his release when his social media activity was always publicly available.
Why isn't the checking of social media history commoditized and routinely used? There must be contractors who can do this relatively easily.
It is - plenty of people will quote you a rate for it.
It’s part of due diligence for hiring people for many jobs.
Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms.
I do beg to differ, here. Demand reduction measures are an admission a country's energy policy has failed. Abundant, affordable energy has long been acknowledged to be a significant economic asset and social good. Now that we have multiple ways of generating power with little environmental impact, that should always be the priority.
Spending money on insulation schemes, to pick the example you mentioned, is, on a macro level, a complete waste of money. It's an extremely expensive way of reducing demand in one very specific area, without having enough scale to give any general benefits.
Spend that money on new generation facilities and overall supply improves, prices go down for everyone (presuming a free market) and it increases reliability in the system. Build enough and you end up with a surplus of supply, which attracts energy-intensive industries, providing jobs, and can bring opportunities to profit by supplying excess to countries with an energy shortfall.
We should be building wind farms, solar and SMRs as fast as possible. Having too much energy is always better than not having enough.
Could not agree more. This 100% is correct.
If energy is clean, then there's no environmental reason to demand less.
If energy is not clean, then there's no way to get to net zero.
Demand reduction achieves diddly squat and is unscientific gibberish to further hairshirt agendas.
Clean, abundant, cheap and well-used energy is the future.
I think efficiency is always a benefit, so I would support improved insulation, LED lighting, air fryers, etc, but when some people talk about demand reduction it sounds like rationing.
Efficiency is great, yes. I love my air fryer, and LED lights and so on and so forth.
But that is embracing newer technologies that are an improvement, not stepping backwards.
My air fryer cooks better than the oven, most days of the year. Christmas Day I cooked with the oven due to the scale of what was being cooked, but most other days the air fryer operates instead, cooking better and cheaper.
When people want to say "don't travel", or "sit in the cold", or "don't consume" then they're not seeking to either help the environment in a scientific manner, or improve matters for people, they're pushing a bonkers agenda.
Air fryer = small oven
Arguably ‘very small oven’ to be accurate. Very efficient. I have no idea why they are/were marketed as air fryers, as they don’t fry food(at best it’s roasted).
Because the thing they do best is chips?
Yes but it doesn’t fry them. I also think it does sausages superbly and quickly.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I think it's more that the debate is effectively over. Very few people continue to deny it exists, or that humans are responsible for it. You still get people like Casino_Royale who think it's just some culture war game, but the data is becoming metronomic - we're about to declare this year our hottest year on record (again). I think we all understand that with Trump any debate/campaign for mitigation is fruitless until we get a sane Thatcher-type figure on the right again.
At some point we are going to need to have a serious conversation about adaptation. That's what so pathetic about those people who suggest we can't stop it happening - fine, so where's the big plan for 3 degrees+?
On the domestic front, we have nobody building any water infrastructure, and a virtual ban on dredging for the last 20-25 years, due to EU habitat legislation, then we blame the resulting summer droughts and winter floods on climate change.
I don't think it is included in the above - one of our basic planning policies since about 2010 has been that surface water runoff from a development should be no more than the pre-existing site - that's where all our balancing ponds come from. The last one of these I did required a preliminary design as part of Outline Permission, required to establish that the site was suitable for development; it was done by Mott McDonald and came to around £250 per potential housing unit just for the preliminary design.
The Thames Tideway Tunnel, which came online last year, was about £5 billion on its own.
That's all water infrastructure, as is investment in sewerage treatment, canal and river maintenance, and the rest.
That is a fair response to a point I made that included hyperbole but was still an important one.
There have been no major reservoirs built for over 30 years - the last one (there are some being built now) was completed in 1992. At the same time, the population has risen by 11 million.
I find that staggering, and it makes me extremely cynical when people panic about our weather conditions.
In general I'd argue that building more reservoirs should be the last resort, as it is a 'tailpipe' solution. Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms. So for me that means measures such as leak reduction and 100% water meters, which apply the market mechanism and themselves generate a reduction of 10-12% in water usage, before we spend hundreds of millions on new reservoirs.
I think one of the unforeseen problems of the last budget will be caused by the unbundling of insulation etc programmes from energy bills - it can now be seen and will be far easier to target in political debate. The programme has been very successful for 15 years doing basics such as loft insulation, until the current one is under severe question - when the programme has been doing more complex installations (eg external wall insulation) with inadequate standards / supervision.
I am sure you would argue that - I would argue the opposite. Your argument leads to the British economy where it now is - mine leads to the Chinese economy where it now is. Abundant and cheap energy is a pre-requisite for any prosperous society, and is the lifeblood of human progress.
More specifically, having a deliberate policy of failing to build sufficient reservoirs, and instead blame the public for water shortages - encouraging them to water their gardens less, even to shower less (truly revolting) and take other punitive measures to combat 'water shortages' (when Winter floods will be along soon) is simply gaslighting.
I admit I just don't see that as a viable argument. I think you are assuming a zero-sum game, which is not the case. I don't see how a concept of blame applies.
Achieving the same outcome using fewer resources is a simple increase in efficiency. How is that not a benefit.
Why should we want to use 25% more water (or electricity) than necessary? Would you argue against reduced fuel consumption in a motor vehicle on the same basis?
The point about reservoirs is that if water consumption is reduced, fewer reservoirs is not "insufficient"; it changes the definition of "sufficient" to be a smaller quantity.
To turn the question around, why should we waste scarce resources on building unnecessary reservoirs or power stations?
For a specific example on water, current use in Denmark is around 105l per person per day, compared to 130-140l in England. Denmark does not seem to have an economy on its knees, and is noticeably prosperous.
Because water is not scarce. It is especially unscarce in the UK. It is an abundant resource that is there to be enjoyed and used. The idea of convincing the public that it is running out and that they are showering too long or gardening too much is a despicable perversion of the truth that would mystify and appall our ancestors.
I’m kind of despairing at the news about Mr Abd El Fattah. It suggests that the entirety of government machinery is perpetuating a hoax on the wider public.
Although I understand Abd El Fattah is a noted dissident from a celebrated family of dissidents, he ought not to have passed the Fit and Proper test for citizenship. And it beggars belief that almost the entire political class, from both legacy mainstream political parties, campaigned so strongly for his release when his social media activity was always publicly available.
Brass Eye. Cake.
Nothing has changed - any bandwagon that is superficially attractive will get jumped on.
I’ve mentioned before getting an MP enthusiastic about growing peanuts in Africa to make oil for ZEV. After 10 minutes conversation he was ready to take it to the Minister. Wish I had been there for that.
When Brass Eye was made, it was still generally assumed that while backbench MPs and celebrities might be a bit gullible, there were serious people behind the scenes who knew what they were doing.
Now it seems as though the entire state has been taken in, and to add insult to injury, is directly funding the hoaxters who are busy making fools of us.
I’m kind of despairing at the news about Mr Abd El Fattah. It suggests that the entirety of government machinery is perpetuating a hoax on the wider public.
Although I understand Abd El Fattah is a noted dissident from a celebrated family of dissidents, he ought not to have passed the Fit and Proper test for citizenship. And it beggars belief that almost the entire political class, from both legacy mainstream political parties, campaigned so strongly for his release when his social media activity was always publicly available.
Why isn't the checking of social media history commoditized and routinely used? There must be contractors who can do this relatively easily.
Of course. HR depts do it, @Malmesbury was discussing it too earlier.
These witless MPs have research teams too who could do it.
They’re keen enough to do it against political opponents.
It’s not “the MPs”, it’s the Home Office and Foreign Office.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect MPs to individually research the rights and wrongs of cases like these, unless those cases individual MPs be for eg the PM, FS, or HS.
I’m kind of despairing at the news about Mr Abd El Fattah. It suggests that the entirety of government machinery is perpetuating a hoax on the wider public.
Although I understand Abd El Fattah is a noted dissident from a celebrated family of dissidents, he ought not to have passed the Fit and Proper test for citizenship. And it beggars belief that almost the entire political class, from both legacy mainstream political parties, campaigned so strongly for his release when his social media activity was always publicly available.
Brass Eye. Cake.
Nothing has changed - any bandwagon that is superficially attractive will get jumped on.
I’ve mentioned before getting an MP enthusiastic about growing peanuts in Africa to make oil for ZEV. After 10 minutes conversation he was ready to take it to the Minister. Wish I had been there for that.
When Brass Eye was made, it was still generally assumed that while backbench MPs and celebrities might be a bit gullible, there were serious people behind the scenes who knew what they were doing.
Now it seems as though the entire state has been taken in, and to add insult to injury, is directly funding the hoaxters who are busy making fools of us.
You raise an interesting question about just how much the State itself is funding the legion of charities who then insist on new measures to constrain, emasculate and otherwise siphon more monies from the State.
Indeed it might be be of the main self-perpetuating activities of the “elite”, with both left and right wing flavours.
I’m kind of despairing at the news about Mr Abd El Fattah. It suggests that the entirety of government machinery is perpetuating a hoax on the wider public.
Although I understand Abd El Fattah is a noted dissident from a celebrated family of dissidents, he ought not to have passed the Fit and Proper test for citizenship. And it beggars belief that almost the entire political class, from both legacy mainstream political parties, campaigned so strongly for his release when his social media activity was always publicly available.
Why isn't the checking of social media history commoditized and routinely used? There must be contractors who can do this relatively easily.
Of course. HR depts do it, @Malmesbury was discussing it too earlier.
These witless MPs have research teams too who could do it.
They’re keen enough to do it against political opponents.
It’s not “the MPs”, it’s the Home Office and Foreign Office.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect MPs to individually research the rights and wrongs of cases like these, unless those cases individual MPs be for eg the PM, FS, or HS.
MP - “I’ve been asked to publicly campaign for this chap. Spend 1/2 hour on checking him out online. Do a 1 page summary. Also ask the police and security services if he is on their lists.
Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms.
I do beg to differ, here. Demand reduction measures are an admission a country's energy policy has failed. Abundant, affordable energy has long been acknowledged to be a significant economic asset and social good. Now that we have multiple ways of generating power with little environmental impact, that should always be the priority.
Spending money on insulation schemes, to pick the example you mentioned, is, on a macro level, a complete waste of money. It's an extremely expensive way of reducing demand in one very specific area, without having enough scale to give any general benefits.
Spend that money on new generation facilities and overall supply improves, prices go down for everyone (presuming a free market) and it increases reliability in the system. Build enough and you end up with a surplus of supply, which attracts energy-intensive industries, providing jobs, and can bring opportunities to profit by supplying excess to countries with an energy shortfall.
We should be building wind farms, solar and SMRs as fast as possible. Having too much energy is always better than not having enough.
Could not agree more. This 100% is correct.
If energy is clean, then there's no environmental reason to demand less.
If energy is not clean, then there's no way to get to net zero.
Demand reduction achieves diddly squat and is unscientific gibberish to further hairshirt agendas.
Clean, abundant, cheap and well-used energy is the future.
I think efficiency is always a benefit, so I would support improved insulation, LED lighting, air fryers, etc, but when some people talk about demand reduction it sounds like rationing.
Efficiency is great, yes. I love my air fryer, and LED lights and so on and so forth.
But that is embracing newer technologies that are an improvement, not stepping backwards.
My air fryer cooks better than the oven, most days of the year. Christmas Day I cooked with the oven due to the scale of what was being cooked, but most other days the air fryer operates instead, cooking better and cheaper.
When people want to say "don't travel", or "sit in the cold", or "don't consume" then they're not seeking to either help the environment in a scientific manner, or improve matters for people, they're pushing a bonkers agenda.
Air fryer = small oven
Arguably ‘very small oven’ to be accurate. Very efficient. I have no idea why they are/were marketed as air fryers, as they don’t fry food(at best it’s roasted).
Marketing.
When it was launched as a product it was marketed as frying chips, but without the oil. We got one originally to do chips when it first launched, as an alternative to a deep fat fryer, and quickly realised it could do all sorts of other cooking.
Now they're ubiquitous and used for much more than just chips, but the name has stuck.
I’m kind of despairing at the news about Mr Abd El Fattah. It suggests that the entirety of government machinery is perpetuating a hoax on the wider public.
Although I understand Abd El Fattah is a noted dissident from a celebrated family of dissidents, he ought not to have passed the Fit and Proper test for citizenship. And it beggars belief that almost the entire political class, from both legacy mainstream political parties, campaigned so strongly for his release when his social media activity was always publicly available.
Why isn't the checking of social media history commoditized and routinely used? There must be contractors who can do this relatively easily.
Of course. HR depts do it, Malmesbury was discussing it too earlier.
These witless MPs have research teams too who could do it.
They’re keen enough to do it against political opponents.
It’s not “the MPs”, it’s the Home Office and Foreign Office.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect MPs to individually research the rights and wrongs of cases like these, unless those cases individual MPs be for eg the PM, FS, or HS.
MP - “I’ve been asked to publicly campaign for this chap. Spend 1/2 hour on checking him out online. Do a 1 page summary. Also ask the police and security services if he is on their lists.
Researcher - “OK”
Yes, whether or not one believes MPs should have bothered to do that in this or other cases, it would not have taken much effort if they had cared to do it.
That applies to any number of issues - one of the depressing things twitter has revealed to us is that someone can be an acclaimed academic, a billionaire businessman, a powerful politician, someone with a towering intellect and ability...and they are just as likely as any old idiot to blindly believe something they read online which aligns to their views, or just be too lazy to look at the facts on something.
I don't know how people who believe in an all controlling elite reconcile that with endless evidence the rich and powerful are also damn fools.
Have the Democrats figured out why they keep losing yet?
In November they swept the board in the mini mid terms, they can win now without changing at all from last year as Trump's approval rating has slumped to 42% from the 50% he got last year in the presidential election.
Assuming one can win "without changing at all" is a comforting but dangerous trap to fall into, and this risks fully playing out in 3 years time.
The Democrats should be asking themselves some very hard and searching questions about their appeal to the American electorate.
So far, I see very little evidence they've done so.
If Trump's approval rating was at 45-50% you would have a point, at 40-45% ie Dole 1996 and McCain 2008 voteshare levels who both lost by a landslide the Democrats will win whoever their candidates are
Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms.
I do beg to differ, here. Demand reduction measures are an admission a country's energy policy has failed. Abundant, affordable energy has long been acknowledged to be a significant economic asset and social good. Now that we have multiple ways of generating power with little environmental impact, that should always be the priority.
Spending money on insulation schemes, to pick the example you mentioned, is, on a macro level, a complete waste of money. It's an extremely expensive way of reducing demand in one very specific area, without having enough scale to give any general benefits.
Spend that money on new generation facilities and overall supply improves, prices go down for everyone (presuming a free market) and it increases reliability in the system. Build enough and you end up with a surplus of supply, which attracts energy-intensive industries, providing jobs, and can bring opportunities to profit by supplying excess to countries with an energy shortfall.
We should be building wind farms, solar and SMRs as fast as possible. Having too much energy is always better than not having enough.
Could not agree more. This 100% is correct.
If energy is clean, then there's no environmental reason to demand less.
If energy is not clean, then there's no way to get to net zero.
Demand reduction achieves diddly squat and is unscientific gibberish to further hairshirt agendas.
Clean, abundant, cheap and well-used energy is the future.
I think efficiency is always a benefit, so I would support improved insulation, LED lighting, air fryers, etc, but when some people talk about demand reduction it sounds like rationing.
Efficiency is great, yes. I love my air fryer, and LED lights and so on and so forth.
But that is embracing newer technologies that are an improvement, not stepping backwards.
My air fryer cooks better than the oven, most days of the year. Christmas Day I cooked with the oven due to the scale of what was being cooked, but most other days the air fryer operates instead, cooking better and cheaper.
When people want to say "don't travel", or "sit in the cold", or "don't consume" then they're not seeking to either help the environment in a scientific manner, or improve matters for people, they're pushing a bonkers agenda.
Air fryer = small oven
Arguably ‘very small oven’ to be accurate. Very efficient. I have no idea why they are/were marketed as air fryers, as they don’t fry food(at best it’s roasted).
Because the thing they do best is chips?
Personal preferences may vary, the thing I think they do best is sausages and bacon.
They were certainly originally marketed for chips though.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I think it's more that the debate is effectively over. Very few people continue to deny it exists, or that humans are responsible for it. You still get people like Casino_Royale who think it's just some culture war game, but the data is becoming metronomic - we're about to declare this year our hottest year on record (again). I think we all understand that with Trump any debate/campaign for mitigation is fruitless until we get a sane Thatcher-type figure on the right again.
At some point we are going to need to have a serious conversation about adaptation. That's what so pathetic about those people who suggest we can't stop it happening - fine, so where's the big plan for 3 degrees+?
On the domestic front, we have nobody building any water infrastructure, and a virtual ban on dredging for the last 20-25 years, due to EU habitat legislation, then we blame the resulting summer droughts and winter floods on climate change.
I don't think it is included in the above - one of our basic planning policies since about 2010 has been that surface water runoff from a development should be no more than the pre-existing site - that's where all our balancing ponds come from. The last one of these I did required a preliminary design as part of Outline Permission, required to establish that the site was suitable for development; it was done by Mott McDonald and came to around £250 per potential housing unit just for the preliminary design.
The Thames Tideway Tunnel, which came online last year, was about £5 billion on its own.
That's all water infrastructure, as is investment in sewerage treatment, canal and river maintenance, and the rest.
That is a fair response to a point I made that included hyperbole but was still an important one.
There have been no major reservoirs built for over 30 years - the last one (there are some being built now) was completed in 1992. At the same time, the population has risen by 11 million.
I find that staggering, and it makes me extremely cynical when people panic about our weather conditions.
In general I'd argue that building more reservoirs should be the last resort, as it is a 'tailpipe' solution. Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms. So for me that means measures such as leak reduction and 100% water meters, which apply the market mechanism and themselves generate a reduction of 10-12% in water usage, before we spend hundreds of millions on new reservoirs.
I think one of the unforeseen problems of the last budget will be caused by the unbundling of insulation etc programmes from energy bills - it can now be seen and will be far easier to target in political debate. The programme has been very successful for 15 years doing basics such as loft insulation, until the current one is under severe question - when the programme has been doing more complex installations (eg external wall insulation) with inadequate standards / supervision.
I am sure you would argue that - I would argue the opposite. Your argument leads to the British economy where it now is - mine leads to the Chinese economy where it now is. Abundant and cheap energy is a pre-requisite for any prosperous society, and is the lifeblood of human progress.
More specifically, having a deliberate policy of failing to build sufficient reservoirs, and instead blame the public for water shortages - encouraging them to water their gardens less, even to shower less (truly revolting) and take other punitive measures to combat 'water shortages' (when Winter floods will be along soon) is simply gaslighting.
I admit I just don't see that as a viable argument. I think you are assuming a zero-sum game, which is not the case. I don't see how a concept of blame applies.
Achieving the same outcome using fewer resources is a simple increase in efficiency. How is that not a benefit.
Why should we want to use 25% more water (or electricity) than necessary? Would you argue against reduced fuel consumption in a motor vehicle on the same basis?
The point about reservoirs is that if water consumption is reduced, fewer reservoirs is not "insufficient"; it changes the definition of "sufficient" to be a smaller quantity.
To turn the question around, why should we waste scarce resources on building unnecessary reservoirs or power stations?
For a specific example on water, current use in Denmark is around 105l per person per day, compared to 130-140l in England. Denmark does not seem to have an economy on its knees, and is noticeably prosperous.
Because water is not scarce. It is especially unscarce in the UK. It is an abundant resource that is there to be enjoyed and used. The idea of convincing the public that it is running out and that they are showering too long or gardening too much is a despicable perversion of the truth that would mystify and appall our ancestors.
Chronic mismanagement may get us to water shortages, but it certainly shouldn't be on the cards.
And we really really shouldn't be operating things at the bare minimum level in an any case, that's not very sustainable if any problems ever emerge.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I think it's more that the debate is effectively over. Very few people continue to deny it exists, or that humans are responsible for it. You still get people like Casino_Royale who think it's just some culture war game, but the data is becoming metronomic - we're about to declare this year our hottest year on record (again). I think we all understand that with Trump any debate/campaign for mitigation is fruitless until we get a sane Thatcher-type figure on the right again.
At some point we are going to need to have a serious conversation about adaptation. That's what so pathetic about those people who suggest we can't stop it happening - fine, so where's the big plan for 3 degrees+?
On the domestic front, we have nobody building any water infrastructure, and a virtual ban on dredging for the last 20-25 years, due to EU habitat legislation, then we blame the resulting summer droughts and winter floods on climate change.
I don't think it is included in the above - one of our basic planning policies since about 2010 has been that surface water runoff from a development should be no more than the pre-existing site - that's where all our balancing ponds come from. The last one of these I did required a preliminary design as part of Outline Permission, required to establish that the site was suitable for development; it was done by Mott McDonald and came to around £250 per potential housing unit just for the preliminary design.
The Thames Tideway Tunnel, which came online last year, was about £5 billion on its own.
That's all water infrastructure, as is investment in sewerage treatment, canal and river maintenance, and the rest.
That is a fair response to a point I made that included hyperbole but was still an important one.
There have been no major reservoirs built for over 30 years - the last one (there are some being built now) was completed in 1992. At the same time, the population has risen by 11 million.
I find that staggering, and it makes me extremely cynical when people panic about our weather conditions.
In general I'd argue that building more reservoirs should be the last resort, as it is a 'tailpipe' solution. Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms. So for me that means measures such as leak reduction and 100% water meters, which apply the market mechanism and themselves generate a reduction of 10-12% in water usage, before we spend hundreds of millions on new reservoirs.
I think one of the unforeseen problems of the last budget will be caused by the unbundling of insulation etc programmes from energy bills - it can now be seen and will be far easier to target in political debate. The programme has been very successful for 15 years doing basics such as loft insulation, until the current one is under severe question - when the programme has been doing more complex installations (eg external wall insulation) with inadequate standards / supervision.
I am sure you would argue that - I would argue the opposite. Your argument leads to the British economy where it now is - mine leads to the Chinese economy where it now is. Abundant and cheap energy is a pre-requisite for any prosperous society, and is the lifeblood of human progress.
More specifically, having a deliberate policy of failing to build sufficient reservoirs, and instead blame the public for water shortages - encouraging them to water their gardens less, even to shower less (truly revolting) and take other punitive measures to combat 'water shortages' (when Winter floods will be along soon) is simply gaslighting.
I admit I just don't see that as a viable argument. I think you are assuming a zero-sum game, which is not the case. I don't see how a concept of blame applies.
Achieving the same outcome using fewer resources is a simple increase in efficiency. How is that not a benefit.
Why should we want to use 25% more water (or electricity) than necessary? Would you argue against reduced fuel consumption in a motor vehicle on the same basis?
The point about reservoirs is that if water consumption is reduced, fewer reservoirs is not "insufficient"; it changes the definition of "sufficient" to be a smaller quantity.
To turn the question around, why should we waste scarce resources on building unnecessary reservoirs or power stations?
For a specific example on water, current use in Denmark is around 105l per person per day, compared to 130-140l in England. Denmark does not seem to have an economy on its knees, and is noticeably prosperous.
Because water is not scarce. It is especially unscarce in the UK. It is an abundant resource that is there to be enjoyed and used. The idea of convincing the public that it is running out and that they are showering too long or gardening too much is a despicable perversion of the truth that would mystify and appall our ancestors.
Not true. Shortage of water was a regular concern. Especially as it affected their transport and their food production systems (watermills). temsd
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I think it's more that the debate is effectively over. Very few people continue to deny it exists, or that humans are responsible for it. You still get people like Casino_Royale who think it's just some culture war game, but the data is becoming metronomic - we're about to declare this year our hottest year on record (again). I think we all understand that with Trump any debate/campaign for mitigation is fruitless until we get a sane Thatcher-type figure on the right again.
At some point we are going to need to have a serious conversation about adaptation. That's what so pathetic about those people who suggest we can't stop it happening - fine, so where's the big plan for 3 degrees+?
On the domestic front, we have nobody building any water infrastructure, and a virtual ban on dredging for the last 20-25 years, due to EU habitat legislation, then we blame the resulting summer droughts and winter floods on climate change.
I don't think it is included in the above - one of our basic planning policies since about 2010 has been that surface water runoff from a development should be no more than the pre-existing site - that's where all our balancing ponds come from. The last one of these I did required a preliminary design as part of Outline Permission, required to establish that the site was suitable for development; it was done by Mott McDonald and came to around £250 per potential housing unit just for the preliminary design.
The Thames Tideway Tunnel, which came online last year, was about £5 billion on its own.
That's all water infrastructure, as is investment in sewerage treatment, canal and river maintenance, and the rest.
That is a fair response to a point I made that included hyperbole but was still an important one.
There have been no major reservoirs built for over 30 years - the last one (there are some being built now) was completed in 1992. At the same time, the population has risen by 11 million.
I find that staggering, and it makes me extremely cynical when people panic about our weather conditions.
In general I'd argue that building more reservoirs should be the last resort, as it is a 'tailpipe' solution. Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms. So for me that means measures such as leak reduction and 100% water meters, which apply the market mechanism and themselves generate a reduction of 10-12% in water usage, before we spend hundreds of millions on new reservoirs.
I think one of the unforeseen problems of the last budget will be caused by the unbundling of insulation etc programmes from energy bills - it can now be seen and will be far easier to target in political debate. The programme has been very successful for 15 years doing basics such as loft insulation, until the current one is under severe question - when the programme has been doing more complex installations (eg external wall insulation) with inadequate standards / supervision.
I am sure you would argue that - I would argue the opposite. Your argument leads to the British economy where it now is - mine leads to the Chinese economy where it now is. Abundant and cheap energy is a pre-requisite for any prosperous society, and is the lifeblood of human progress.
More specifically, having a deliberate policy of failing to build sufficient reservoirs, and instead blame the public for water shortages - encouraging them to water their gardens less, even to shower less (truly revolting) and take other punitive measures to combat 'water shortages' (when Winter floods will be along soon) is simply gaslighting.
I admit I just don't see that as a viable argument. I think you are assuming a zero-sum game, which is not the case. I don't see how a concept of blame applies.
Achieving the same outcome using fewer resources is a simple increase in efficiency. How is that not a benefit.
Why should we want to use 25% more water (or electricity) than necessary? Would you argue against reduced fuel consumption in a motor vehicle on the same basis?
The point about reservoirs is that if water consumption is reduced, fewer reservoirs is not "insufficient"; it changes the definition of "sufficient" to be a smaller quantity.
To turn the question around, why should we waste scarce resources on building unnecessary reservoirs or power stations?
For a specific example on water, current use in Denmark is around 105l per person per day, compared to 130-140l in England. Denmark does not seem to have an economy on its knees, and is noticeably prosperous.
Because water is not scarce. It is especially unscarce in the UK. It is an abundant resource that is there to be enjoyed and used. The idea of convincing the public that it is running out and that they are showering too long or gardening too much is a despicable perversion of the truth that would mystify and appall our ancestors.
Chronic mismanagement may get us to water shortages, but it certainly shouldn't be on the cards.
And we really really shouldn't be operating things at the bare minimum level in an any case, that's not very sustainable if any problems ever emerge.
Considering we are operating with no more reservoirs but 11 million more people, then the only mismanagement is the lack of extra reservoirs, not tackling efficiency.
We are already being far more efficient than we were pre-privatisation. What we don't have is reservoir growth to keep up with our humongous population growth.
Reservoirs also serve a function of balancing dry and wet spells. Prolonged periods of lack of rainfall, or excess rainfall, can be better managed with extra reservoirs to balance those peaks and troughs.
I’m kind of despairing at the news about Mr Abd El Fattah. It suggests that the entirety of government machinery is perpetuating a hoax on the wider public.
Although I understand Abd El Fattah is a noted dissident from a celebrated family of dissidents, he ought not to have passed the Fit and Proper test for citizenship. And it beggars belief that almost the entire political class, from both legacy mainstream political parties, campaigned so strongly for his release when his social media activity was always publicly available.
Brass Eye. Cake.
Nothing has changed - any bandwagon that is superficially attractive will get jumped on.
I’ve mentioned before getting an MP enthusiastic about growing peanuts in Africa to make oil for ZEV. After 10 minutes conversation he was ready to take it to the Minister. Wish I had been there for that.
When Brass Eye was made, it was still generally assumed that while backbench MPs and celebrities might be a bit gullible, there were serious people behind the scenes who knew what they were doing.
Now it seems as though the entire state has been taken in, and to add insult to injury, is directly funding the hoaxters who are busy making fools of us.
You raise an interesting question about just how much the State itself is funding the legion of charities who then insist on new measures to constrain, emasculate and otherwise siphon more monies from the State.
Indeed it might be be of the main self-perpetuating activities of the “elite”, with both left and right wing flavours.
Which was partly a policy decision. Partly Thatcherite outsourcing, partly Big Society as a cover for shrinking the state.
It turns out that when you give up control of something, you give up control.
It's all down to the timing of the AI bubble bursting. If it happens this year, then there is no fig leaf for Republicans. It will be brutal.
In an alternative version of 2026 being a bad one, what if 2026 is the year that emergent consciousness arises in AI labs…
Welcome back Leon, we've missed you
I do for one miss Leon’s perspective. He’s still on X of course but he’s a little more restrained on there.
I think the site has improved immeasurably since he left. He was a bore, and he was relentless. He killed every conversation. Now there is a much healthier ecosystem and the ratio of interesting to annoying is much better.
He was though one of the few Reform backers here as well as being a good writer even if he liked to stir.
We are seriously short of Reform posters on here now given Reform currently lead the polls, if anyone knows any Reform voters who want to post please do suggest it! This site has always been good as it has tended to represent all views, with plenty of Tories, Labour and LDs and even a few Greens and Scots Nats but support for Farage here is very limited
...I made 100k dollars in 2020 because of this place (S&P short)...
The biggest winner on PB by my recollection was @Dromedary who claimed to have won 6/7 figures on Brexit. So your statement of "100k dollars in 2020" gladdens my heart. Consequently I would be grateful if you could expand on your winning bet please. Starting with what the "S&P short" was...
I bought a strip of out the money put options. At the time my financial affairs were split between two countries but I didn’t have a sterling brokerage account. So with my sterling liquidity I did the same trade but with spread bets.
I let the bet run until I hit $100k profit across the two accounts, living US trading hours for the duration of the bet (I had recently taken voluntary redundancy). My timing was fortuitous because the Fed big bazooka was unleashed the very next day.
IG Index then took weeks to honour the bet. At the time I was worried they were suffering a liquidity event, I wrote to their senior management to enquire as such. At it was, I think I raised an AML flag - a British citizen resident overseas that opened an account, turned over a huge profit in a week or two and then immediately closing it.
The shame was that I didn’t have more cash on hand as I would have bet even bigger - my host country had locked off my salary to settle tax obligations the moment I signed my redundancy papers the month or two before.
Which currency were you betting against and what were your reasons for betting against it?
I was betting on US stocks crashing, when they inevitably suffered the same mass panic.
Whatever, that won’t have been from any cogent analysis Leon posted, since he always flailed about making all sorts of wild and often contradictory posts without ever specifically predicting anything you could reliably stake money on. On the rare occasions that he did - for example during the 2017 GE when he claimed to have just sold all of his investments because Corbyn was about to be elected PM - he was probably feeding us made-up BS and in any case proved to be completely wrong. Either you are misremembering, or you were extraordinarily lucky to have acted on one of his posts not having seen all the contradictory ones.
As I remember the pre-Covid economic discussion on here, I was well ahead of Leon (or whatever he traded under back then) in both predicting and acting on the coming stock market downturn, and he only started claiming to have predicted it once it was already underway. The one thing I do remember him predicting is that Covid would be “contagious but essentially benign”
Alastair wrote an excellent header talking about Before Covid and After Covid. Well done if you were ahead of the curve. Leon’s doom posting is what did it for me. I knew all about Covid having been living with its effects since Jan 20 in Asia. I’m pretty sure I caught it in Jan 20 actually.
Before reading the interactions on here, i was operating under the basis that the “nailing doors shut” approach was an obscene overreaction by the Chinese, with the main problem being municipal level corruption collapsing the health system in localised areas.
Leon’s reaction made me realise that everywhere in the world was also going to go bananas with their response, regardless of how severe the problem really was. But I did lean (incorrectly as it turns out) towards it being a highly significant problem.
What I hadn’t squared correctly, was that “killing more than the holocaust” wasn’t as big a deal as it sounded in my head. Whatever, financial markets are mostly about prejudging policy responses, and that’s all that was important for that trade.
You have an uncanny Leonesque writing style.
Since he is a best selling author, I suppose I shall take that as a complement
That's the odd thing. Leon was a bestselling author who used to regale us with his Norweigan and Spanish royalty cheques, but then he stopped for some reason and now goes on holiday for a living.
To be fair to him, he mined two seams very productively (archeological fantasy and psychological thriller) and then they went out of fashion didn’t pivot to a third.
But few authors are successful in one genre let alone two
I’m not sure they went out of fashion. Indeed, Dan Brown has just published his latest.
Not out of fashion exactly, but not as in fashion as they were. It has been awhile since he personally has released one, and I don't get the impression 'Dan Brown clones' are being promoted massively the way they would have been in the years after the Da Vinci Code hit it big.
Like how after The Hunger Games was huge, Hollywood began making films out of every YA fantasy and dystopic series they could get their hands on. They don't now, as most bombed, but they do still exist. Or how comic book movies were a licence to print money for 15 years, and now even the successful ones make less money than 5 years ago - fewer will be made, but some successful big ones will still come along.
I’m kind of despairing at the news about Mr Abd El Fattah. It suggests that the entirety of government machinery is perpetuating a hoax on the wider public.
Although I understand Abd El Fattah is a noted dissident from a celebrated family of dissidents, he ought not to have passed the Fit and Proper test for citizenship. And it beggars belief that almost the entire political class, from both legacy mainstream political parties, campaigned so strongly for his release when his social media activity was always publicly available.
Brass Eye. Cake.
Nothing has changed - any bandwagon that is superficially attractive will get jumped on.
I’ve mentioned before getting an MP enthusiastic about growing peanuts in Africa to make oil for ZEV. After 10 minutes conversation he was ready to take it to the Minister. Wish I had been there for that.
When Brass Eye was made, it was still generally assumed that while backbench MPs and celebrities might be a bit gullible, there were serious people behind the scenes who knew what they were doing.
Now it seems as though the entire state has been taken in, and to add insult to injury, is directly funding the hoaxters who are busy making fools of us.
You raise an interesting question about just how much the State itself is funding the legion of charities who then insist on new measures to constrain, emasculate and otherwise siphon more monies from the State.
Indeed it might be be of the main self-perpetuating activities of the “elite”, with both left and right wing flavours.
Which was partly a policy decision. Partly Thatcherite outsourcing, partly Big Society as a cover for shrinking the state.
It turns out that when you give up control of something, you give up control.
Three Russians are claiming a large Ukrainian drone attack on one of Putin's rural palaces, and Trump seems to have accepted the claim as fact, reportedly going as far as to say, "Thank God we didn't give Zelensky Tomahawks."
Trump is simply part of Russian information warfare.
Meanwhile, the Spanish report that a Russian shadow fleet vessel that sunk off the coast of Cartegena about a year ago was carrying nuclear reactors to North Korea (in violation of sanctions) and that the ship shows signs of having been sunk by a supercavitating torpedo. To my knowledge only three navies operate supercavitating torpedoes.
Three Russians are claiming a large Ukrainian drone attack on one of Putin's rural palaces, and Trump seems to have accepted the claim as fact, reportedly going as far as to say, "Thank God we didn't give Zelensky Tomahawks."
Trump is simply part of Russian information warfare.
Trump often appears to believe whatever someone last told him or he saw on TV. I hope for everyone's sake that is just an act - whether this is a real example or not.
I’m kind of despairing at the news about Mr Abd El Fattah. It suggests that the entirety of government machinery is perpetuating a hoax on the wider public.
Although I understand Abd El Fattah is a noted dissident from a celebrated family of dissidents, he ought not to have passed the Fit and Proper test for citizenship. And it beggars belief that almost the entire political class, from both legacy mainstream political parties, campaigned so strongly for his release when his social media activity was always publicly available.
Brass Eye. Cake.
Nothing has changed - any bandwagon that is superficially attractive will get jumped on.
I’ve mentioned before getting an MP enthusiastic about growing peanuts in Africa to make oil for ZEV. After 10 minutes conversation he was ready to take it to the Minister. Wish I had been there for that.
When Brass Eye was made, it was still generally assumed that while backbench MPs and celebrities might be a bit gullible, there were serious people behind the scenes who knew what they were doing.
Now it seems as though the entire state has been taken in, and to add insult to injury, is directly funding the hoaxters who are busy making fools of us.
You raise an interesting question about just how much the State itself is funding the legion of charities who then insist on new measures to constrain, emasculate and otherwise siphon more monies from the State.
Indeed it might be be of the main self-perpetuating activities of the “elite”, with both left and right wing flavours.
Elon has been talking about this for most of 2025 to general heckles and finger wagging.
Have the Democrats figured out why they keep losing yet?
In November they swept the board in the mini mid terms, they can win now without changing at all from last year as Trump's approval rating has slumped to 42% from the 50% he got last year in the presidential election.
The Senate currently has 53 Republicans, so the Democrats need to make 4 gains to take control of the Senate.
To make 4 gains the Democrats would need to win Maine, North Carolina and two from Ohio, Iowa, Alaska, Texas or Florida.
Plus, of course, hold all their existing seats, such as Georgia and Michigan.
The Cook PVIs for the closest Republican defences are: Maine D+4 North Carolina R+1 Ohio R+5 Florida R+5 Iowa R+6 Alaska R+6 Texas R+6
For national generic opinion polls in December 18 polls had the Democrats lead at 4 points, or lower, while 5 polls put the Democrat lead at 5 points, or higher.
It's a bit crude as a prediction - maybe local factors in the relevant States favour Democrats - but at the moment the Democrats are well short of where they would need to be to take control of the Senate.
The Dems as those generic polls show will certainly win back the House, so the only question is can they do the double and win the Senate too.
It will be a tall order, as the polls you show demonstrate they will at least pick up Maine. They need 4 seats for control (given the 2 Independents will also back them). The Cook PVI is not looking at some of the latest polls.
So if the Dems win the above 3 they need just one extra pickup. In Florida incumbent GOP Senator Moody leads potential Dems in the special election polls there.
The pickup therefore could come in Texas if the GOP pick Paxton over incumbent Senator Cornyn. Cornyn leads all Dem opponents but former AG Paxton is tied with state representative Talarico if he is Dem nominee, although Paxton beats US representative Crockett if she is Dem nominee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_Senate_election_in_Texas#Polling_3
Otherwise Joni Ernst is not running again in Iowa which might give the opening needed for a Dem pickup. Alaska too is not out of the question, incumbent GOP Senator Sullivan trails former US representative and declared Dem candidate Mary Peltola in the latest poll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_Senate_election_in_Alaska
Three Russians are claiming a large Ukrainian drone attack on one of Putin's rural palaces, and Trump seems to have accepted the claim as fact, reportedly going as far as to say, "Thank God we didn't give Zelensky Tomahawks."
Trump is simply part of Russian information warfare.
The source of this quote is Russian state media. Should we conclude that LostPassword is simply part of Russian information warfare?
NEW: Yvette Cooper launches urgent review into 'serious information failures' in the case of Alaa Abd El-Fattah: 'It is clear that this has been an unacceptable failure and that long standing procedures and due diligence arrangements have been completely inadequate'
I’m kind of despairing at the news about Mr Abd El Fattah. It suggests that the entirety of government machinery is perpetuating a hoax on the wider public.
Although I understand Abd El Fattah is a noted dissident from a celebrated family of dissidents, he ought not to have passed the Fit and Proper test for citizenship. And it beggars belief that almost the entire political class, from both legacy mainstream political parties, campaigned so strongly for his release when his social media activity was always publicly available.
Why isn't the checking of social media history commoditized and routinely used? There must be contractors who can do this relatively easily.
Of course. HR depts do it, Malmesbury was discussing it too earlier.
These witless MPs have research teams too who could do it.
They’re keen enough to do it against political opponents.
It’s not “the MPs”, it’s the Home Office and Foreign Office.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect MPs to individually research the rights and wrongs of cases like these, unless those cases individual MPs be for eg the PM, FS, or HS.
MP - “I’ve been asked to publicly campaign for this chap. Spend 1/2 hour on checking him out online. Do a 1 page summary. Also ask the police and security services if he is on their lists.
Researcher - “OK”
Yes, whether or not one believes MPs should have bothered to do that in this or other cases, it would not have taken much effort if they had cared to do it.
That applies to any number of issues - one of the depressing things twitter has revealed to us is that someone can be an acclaimed academic, a billionaire businessman, a powerful politician, someone with a towering intellect and ability...and they are just as likely as any old idiot to blindly believe something they read online which aligns to their views, or just be too lazy to look at the facts on something.
I don't know how people who believe in an all controlling elite reconcile that with endless evidence the rich and powerful are also damn fools.
At best, an expert in X is an expert in X. On anything else, they're probably as dumb as the rest of us. Knowing stuff turns out to be the secret sauce... whodathunkit?
(I do have some sympathy for those not checking the details. Given the amount of nonsense that clutters up MP inboxes, there's not the capacity to check all the facts on every case.)
I’m kind of despairing at the news about Mr Abd El Fattah. It suggests that the entirety of government machinery is perpetuating a hoax on the wider public.
Although I understand Abd El Fattah is a noted dissident from a celebrated family of dissidents, he ought not to have passed the Fit and Proper test for citizenship. And it beggars belief that almost the entire political class, from both legacy mainstream political parties, campaigned so strongly for his release when his social media activity was always publicly available.
Brass Eye. Cake.
Nothing has changed - any bandwagon that is superficially attractive will get jumped on.
I’ve mentioned before getting an MP enthusiastic about growing peanuts in Africa to make oil for ZEV. After 10 minutes conversation he was ready to take it to the Minister. Wish I had been there for that.
When Brass Eye was made, it was still generally assumed that while backbench MPs and celebrities might be a bit gullible, there were serious people behind the scenes who knew what they were doing.
Now it seems as though the entire state has been taken in, and to add insult to injury, is directly funding the hoaxters who are busy making fools of us.
You raise an interesting question about just how much the State itself is funding the legion of charities who then insist on new measures to constrain, emasculate and otherwise siphon more monies from the State.
Indeed it might be be of the main self-perpetuating activities of the “elite”, with both left and right wing flavours.
Elon has been talking about this for most of 2025 to general heckles and finger wagging.
Regrettably, and based on my serving of the board of one charity, I’ve come to the conclusion that a great deal of charitable activity is essentially bollocks, if not outright grift.
NEW: Yvette Cooper launches urgent review into 'serious information failures' in the case of Alaa Abd El-Fattah: 'It is clear that this has been an unacceptable failure and that long standing procedures and due diligence arrangements have been completely inadequate'
Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms.
I do beg to differ, here. Demand reduction measures are an admission a country's energy policy has failed. Abundant, affordable energy has long been acknowledged to be a significant economic asset and social good. Now that we have multiple ways of generating power with little environmental impact, that should always be the priority.
Spending money on insulation schemes, to pick the example you mentioned, is, on a macro level, a complete waste of money. It's an extremely expensive way of reducing demand in one very specific area, without having enough scale to give any general benefits.
Spend that money on new generation facilities and overall supply improves, prices go down for everyone (presuming a free market) and it increases reliability in the system. Build enough and you end up with a surplus of supply, which attracts energy-intensive industries, providing jobs, and can bring opportunities to profit by supplying excess to countries with an energy shortfall.
We should be building wind farms, solar and SMRs as fast as possible. Having too much energy is always better than not having enough.
Could not agree more. This 100% is correct.
If energy is clean, then there's no environmental reason to demand less.
If energy is not clean, then there's no way to get to net zero.
Demand reduction achieves diddly squat and is unscientific gibberish to further hairshirt agendas.
Clean, abundant, cheap and well-used energy is the future.
I think efficiency is always a benefit, so I would support improved insulation, LED lighting, air fryers, etc, but when some people talk about demand reduction it sounds like rationing.
Efficiency is great, yes. I love my air fryer, and LED lights and so on and so forth.
But that is embracing newer technologies that are an improvement, not stepping backwards.
My air fryer cooks better than the oven, most days of the year. Christmas Day I cooked with the oven due to the scale of what was being cooked, but most other days the air fryer operates instead, cooking better and cheaper.
When people want to say "don't travel", or "sit in the cold", or "don't consume" then they're not seeking to either help the environment in a scientific manner, or improve matters for people, they're pushing a bonkers agenda.
Air fryer = small oven
Arguably ‘very small oven’ to be accurate. Very efficient. I have no idea why they are/were marketed as air fryers, as they don’t fry food(at best it’s roasted).
Because the thing they do best is chips?
Yes but it doesn’t fry them. I also think it does sausages superbly and quickly.
It's because the niche they were originally marketed for was as an alternative to deep fat fryers. So "air" fryer, as opposed to "deep fat" fryer.
I agree that they're the best way to cook sausages.
I’m kind of despairing at the news about Mr Abd El Fattah. It suggests that the entirety of government machinery is perpetuating a hoax on the wider public.
Although I understand Abd El Fattah is a noted dissident from a celebrated family of dissidents, he ought not to have passed the Fit and Proper test for citizenship. And it beggars belief that almost the entire political class, from both legacy mainstream political parties, campaigned so strongly for his release when his social media activity was always publicly available.
Brass Eye. Cake.
Nothing has changed - any bandwagon that is superficially attractive will get jumped on.
I’ve mentioned before getting an MP enthusiastic about growing peanuts in Africa to make oil for ZEV. After 10 minutes conversation he was ready to take it to the Minister. Wish I had been there for that.
When Brass Eye was made, it was still generally assumed that while backbench MPs and celebrities might be a bit gullible, there were serious people behind the scenes who knew what they were doing.
Now it seems as though the entire state has been taken in, and to add insult to injury, is directly funding the hoaxters who are busy making fools of us.
You raise an interesting question about just how much the State itself is funding the legion of charities who then insist on new measures to constrain, emasculate and otherwise siphon more monies from the State.
Indeed it might be be of the main self-perpetuating activities of the “elite”, with both left and right wing flavours.
Elon has been talking about this for most of 2025 to general heckles and finger wagging.
Regrettably, and based on my serving of the board of one charity, I’ve come to the conclusion that a great deal of charitable activity is essentially bollocks, if not outright grift.
It may be unfair, but I'm much more inclined to focus only on very localised charities - so long as they are not run by scammers, they seem more likely to have a direct impact on an issue, and cannot fall prey to the same risks of massive, professionalised institutions which can and indeed do do a lot of good, but can also go very wrong.
What is your point in posting this article on here? To trigger those who don't like a particular level of melatonin in the skin or for some other reason related to how this might affect the result of the next General Election?
Genuine question.
To be fair to @Andy_JS my understanding was that it was illegal (or possibly against official regulations not law). If charities are giving guidance that is outside the *intention* of the lawmakers which (IIRC was clear at the time) then that should be highlighted.
It’s nothing to do with skin colour (although the Tomes mentions a specific community) but a general issue of charities usurping the role of official bodies to push their own agenda
IIRC the law says that sex is not a lawful grounds for termination. But that doctors get round that by using the patient mental wellbeing grounds.
The patient mental wellbeing grounds are used by most doctors as a catch-all to allow abortion on demand. It's an example of how the implementation of a law regulating a medical procedure can differ markedly in practice from that (probably) intended by Parliament when the law was passed.
It doesn't receive much attention because most people are fine with how the abortion law operates in practice (though it does mean that sometimes a pregnant woman who wants a termination can face extra difficulty if they encounter one of the small number of doctors who don't follow the common practice, which is why BPAS and others have called for the law to be updated).
It's an example much on my mind in relation to the supposed safeguards for assisted dying. How might those actually operate in practice?
You don’t need to worry about that.
The zealots have eliminated most of the safeguards anyway
Far too many still exist like the preposterous six month rule.
The only safeguard that should exist is "do you want to die?"
If no, then don't kill the person. If yes, then do so.
A potential second sensible safeguard could be a cooling off period after which the question is repeated. However again, all that should matter is the patients choice. Nobody else's.
The problem is that, once you are dead, no-one can check with you that it really was your choice to die. So on whose word are you relying that a murder was not committed?
That's why there would have to be safeguards, and why I am concerned about whether those safeguards are implemented as intended.
CCTV is not exactly unheard of.
"Do you wish to die" with a clear and unambiguous "yes" response recorded.
Why do we need any of this six month bullshit? If someone has years of suffering ahead and wishes to end it, then their choice should be respected, not be told to wait through years of suffering until their case is terminal.
Because the rules are established to protect the vulnerable. Yes they may seem clunky to someone like you in good health and of soundish mind but they aren’t there for you
I feel the rules are there to attempt to placate people who oppose the concept in general, more than to protect anyone.
If someone has years of suffering ahead of them and clearly and unambiguously wishes to have their life be terminated in a safe and dignified manner, then should their wish be respected, or should the objections of third parties who oppose free choice be respected instead?
Their wish should be respected, subject to safeguards to ensure there is no coercion (either imposed or self-imposed). A time delay, for example, is not unreasonable.
Indeed, I specifically suggested a time delay as a logical safeguard: A potential second sensible safeguard could be a cooling off period after which the question is repeated.
That makes far, far, far more sense as a safeguard than the asinine six month rule that means that eg people with life-long debilitating conditions that are able to communicate a desire to die, like some of those that took the case to the Supreme Court which ruled that Parliament should decide on this instead, are denied the right to do so safely and with dignity.
6 months makes sense. People change their minds. Prognosises change.
The state being involved in someone’s death is not a step that should be taken lightly
People may change their minds, which is why there should be a cooling off period, perhaps a week or two, to see if they do or don't.
If they don't, their choice should be respected. Whatever their reasons are.
If someone for example is 'locked in', unable to move, unable to go to the toilet by themselves, in constant agony, but able to communicate a clear and unambiguous desire to die, then why should their choice not be respected just because they are not terminally ill?
There are fates worse than death.
A long, drawn out death can be considerably worse than a short, sharp one.
'The state' should have no say in whether a person does or does not die, that should be the person's choice and theirs alone. Any safeguards should be about ensuring that it is the person's considered opinion, not second-guessing it or the state putting in their say.
You and I disagree in principle.
There is little point in continuing this discussion
Circles back to what I said before, this is not about safeguarding to ensure that the person's choice is actually their own, but about satisfying those who object to the very principle.
If you want safeguards to ensure that someone's choice is their own, then I respect that, and a sensible compromise is how we do that. We both have different views, but agree for instance that a cooling off period (my words) or time delay (your words) is logical.
However the six months to death proviso in the proposed law has jack all to do with that. It does absolutely nothing for those trapped in non-terminal conditions that wish to die and can clearly and unambiguously express their own wishes.
It is purely about placating those who oppose the principle of letting people rather than the state choose their own fates.
Laws can’t be written for specific cases. They need to be kept simple and designed to protect the vulnerable.
I certainly very reluctant that governments should get involved in killing citizens or even assisting them in dying. Because it is simply no business of the government to do that, and most powers that the government takes are expanded and abused over time.
What I meant was you can’t design general law to deal with specific edge cases
I agree, but pedantry has overcome me. I nearly posted before but resisted it, but now @bondegezou has I will add to the list and these aren't private members bills:
Equitable Life Payments Act 2010 and presumably an Act to allow the PHSO to investigate as they were barred by statue from investigating GAD and therefore required a change in the law. I am sure there are loads of other Acts for specific purposes.
Still I agree with the principle of the point you are making, but I just can't resist.
Private bills (now called personal bills) are not the same as private members bills…
It’s private vs public as opposed to private member vs government
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I think it's more that the debate is effectively over. Very few people continue to deny it exists, or that humans are responsible for it. You still get people like Casino_Royale who think it's just some culture war game, but the data is becoming metronomic - we're about to declare this year our hottest year on record (again). I think we all understand that with Trump any debate/campaign for mitigation is fruitless until we get a sane Thatcher-type figure on the right again.
At some point we are going to need to have a serious conversation about adaptation. That's what so pathetic about those people who suggest we can't stop it happening - fine, so where's the big plan for 3 degrees+?
On the domestic front, we have nobody building any water infrastructure, and a virtual ban on dredging for the last 20-25 years, due to EU habitat legislation, then we blame the resulting summer droughts and winter floods on climate change.
I don't think it is included in the above - one of our basic planning policies since about 2010 has been that surface water runoff from a development should be no more than the pre-existing site - that's where all our balancing ponds come from. The last one of these I did required a preliminary design as part of Outline Permission, required to establish that the site was suitable for development; it was done by Mott McDonald and came to around £250 per potential housing unit just for the preliminary design.
The Thames Tideway Tunnel, which came online last year, was about £5 billion on its own.
That's all water infrastructure, as is investment in sewerage treatment, canal and river maintenance, and the rest.
That is a fair response to a point I made that included hyperbole but was still an important one.
There have been no major reservoirs built for over 30 years - the last one (there are some being built now) was completed in 1992. At the same time, the population has risen by 11 million.
I find that staggering, and it makes me extremely cynical when people panic about our weather conditions.
In general I'd argue that building more reservoirs should be the last resort, as it is a 'tailpipe' solution. Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms. So for me that means measures such as leak reduction and 100% water meters, which apply the market mechanism and themselves generate a reduction of 10-12% in water usage, before we spend hundreds of millions on new reservoirs.
I think one of the unforeseen problems of the last budget will be caused by the unbundling of insulation etc programmes from energy bills - it can now be seen and will be far easier to target in political debate. The programme has been very successful for 15 years doing basics such as loft insulation, until the current one is under severe question - when the programme has been doing more complex installations (eg external wall insulation) with inadequate standards / supervision.
I am sure you would argue that - I would argue the opposite. Your argument leads to the British economy where it now is - mine leads to the Chinese economy where it now is. Abundant and cheap energy is a pre-requisite for any prosperous society, and is the lifeblood of human progress.
More specifically, having a deliberate policy of failing to build sufficient reservoirs, and instead blame the public for water shortages - encouraging them to water their gardens less, even to shower less (truly revolting) and take other punitive measures to combat 'water shortages' (when Winter floods will be along soon) is simply gaslighting.
I admit I just don't see that as a viable argument. I think you are assuming a zero-sum game, which is not the case. I don't see how a concept of blame applies.
Achieving the same outcome using fewer resources is a simple increase in efficiency. How is that not a benefit.
Why should we want to use 25% more water (or electricity) than necessary? Would you argue against reduced fuel consumption in a motor vehicle on the same basis?
The point about reservoirs is that if water consumption is reduced, fewer reservoirs is not "insufficient"; it changes the definition of "sufficient" to be a smaller quantity.
To turn the question around, why should we waste scarce resources on building unnecessary reservoirs or power stations?
For a specific example on water, current use in Denmark is around 105l per person per day, compared to 130-140l in England. Denmark does not seem to have an economy on its knees, and is noticeably prosperous.
Because water is not scarce. It is especially unscarce in the UK. It is an abundant resource that is there to be enjoyed and used. The idea of convincing the public that it is running out and that they are showering too long or gardening too much is a despicable perversion of the truth that would mystify and appall our ancestors.
Chronic mismanagement may get us to water shortages, but it certainly shouldn't be on the cards.
And we really really shouldn't be operating things at the bare minimum level in an any case, that's not very sustainable if any problems ever emerge.
Yes. A sensible safety margin means that a drought has to be more severe to cause serious difficulties.
Have the Democrats figured out why they keep losing yet?
In November they swept the board in the mini mid terms, they can win now without changing at all from last year as Trump's approval rating has slumped to 42% from the 50% he got last year in the presidential election.
Assuming one can win "without changing at all" is a comforting but dangerous trap to fall into, and this risks fully playing out in 3 years time.
The Democrats should be asking themselves some very hard and searching questions about their appeal to the American electorate.
So far, I see very little evidence they've done so.
If Trump's approval rating was at 45-50% you would have a point, at 40-45% ie Dole 1996 and McCain 2008 voteshare levels who both lost by a landslide the Democrats will win whoever their candidates are
But the next presidential election is 3 years away. If 'it's the economy stupid' is true you can't go by today's polling. You'd need to forecast how the US economy will be looking in 2028 - and if you can do that you're a better man than I, Gunga Din.
Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms.
I do beg to differ, here. Demand reduction measures are an admission a country's energy policy has failed. Abundant, affordable energy has long been acknowledged to be a significant economic asset and social good. Now that we have multiple ways of generating power with little environmental impact, that should always be the priority.
Spending money on insulation schemes, to pick the example you mentioned, is, on a macro level, a complete waste of money. It's an extremely expensive way of reducing demand in one very specific area, without having enough scale to give any general benefits.
Spend that money on new generation facilities and overall supply improves, prices go down for everyone (presuming a free market) and it increases reliability in the system. Build enough and you end up with a surplus of supply, which attracts energy-intensive industries, providing jobs, and can bring opportunities to profit by supplying excess to countries with an energy shortfall.
We should be building wind farms, solar and SMRs as fast as possible. Having too much energy is always better than not having enough.
Could not agree more. This 100% is correct.
If energy is clean, then there's no environmental reason to demand less.
If energy is not clean, then there's no way to get to net zero.
Demand reduction achieves diddly squat and is unscientific gibberish to further hairshirt agendas.
Clean, abundant, cheap and well-used energy is the future.
I think efficiency is always a benefit, so I would support improved insulation, LED lighting, air fryers, etc, but when some people talk about demand reduction it sounds like rationing.
Efficiency is great, yes. I love my air fryer, and LED lights and so on and so forth.
But that is embracing newer technologies that are an improvement, not stepping backwards.
My air fryer cooks better than the oven, most days of the year. Christmas Day I cooked with the oven due to the scale of what was being cooked, but most other days the air fryer operates instead, cooking better and cheaper.
When people want to say "don't travel", or "sit in the cold", or "don't consume" then they're not seeking to either help the environment in a scientific manner, or improve matters for people, they're pushing a bonkers agenda.
Air fryer = small oven
Arguably ‘very small oven’ to be accurate. Very efficient. I have no idea why they are/were marketed as air fryers, as they don’t fry food(at best it’s roasted).
I think the "air fryer" tag is to do with them producing foods which are crispy without traditional frying, and so more healthy, due to a smaller use of cooking fat or oil. And it fills in the weak spots of microwaves.
Though I agree "tiny fan oven" is far more descriptive.
Using one of these, rather than the electric range, is a good example of incremental demand reduction with no loss of utility, as it saved us about £100 per annum on the electricity bill.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I think it's more that the debate is effectively over. Very few people continue to deny it exists, or that humans are responsible for it. You still get people like Casino_Royale who think it's just some culture war game, but the data is becoming metronomic - we're about to declare this year our hottest year on record (again). I think we all understand that with Trump any debate/campaign for mitigation is fruitless until we get a sane Thatcher-type figure on the right again.
At some point we are going to need to have a serious conversation about adaptation. That's what so pathetic about those people who suggest we can't stop it happening - fine, so where's the big plan for 3 degrees+?
On the domestic front, we have nobody building any water infrastructure, and a virtual ban on dredging for the last 20-25 years, due to EU habitat legislation, then we blame the resulting summer droughts and winter floods on climate change.
I don't think it is included in the above - one of our basic planning policies since about 2010 has been that surface water runoff from a development should be no more than the pre-existing site - that's where all our balancing ponds come from. The last one of these I did required a preliminary design as part of Outline Permission, required to establish that the site was suitable for development; it was done by Mott McDonald and came to around £250 per potential housing unit just for the preliminary design.
The Thames Tideway Tunnel, which came online last year, was about £5 billion on its own.
That's all water infrastructure, as is investment in sewerage treatment, canal and river maintenance, and the rest.
That is a fair response to a point I made that included hyperbole but was still an important one.
There have been no major reservoirs built for over 30 years - the last one (there are some being built now) was completed in 1992. At the same time, the population has risen by 11 million.
I find that staggering, and it makes me extremely cynical when people panic about our weather conditions.
In general I'd argue that building more reservoirs should be the last resort, as it is a 'tailpipe' solution. Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms. So for me that means measures such as leak reduction and 100% water meters, which apply the market mechanism and themselves generate a reduction of 10-12% in water usage, before we spend hundreds of millions on new reservoirs.
I think one of the unforeseen problems of the last budget will be caused by the unbundling of insulation etc programmes from energy bills - it can now be seen and will be far easier to target in political debate. The programme has been very successful for 15 years doing basics such as loft insulation, until the current one is under severe question - when the programme has been doing more complex installations (eg external wall insulation) with inadequate standards / supervision.
I am sure you would argue that - I would argue the opposite. Your argument leads to the British economy where it now is - mine leads to the Chinese economy where it now is. Abundant and cheap energy is a pre-requisite for any prosperous society, and is the lifeblood of human progress.
More specifically, having a deliberate policy of failing to build sufficient reservoirs, and instead blame the public for water shortages - encouraging them to water their gardens less, even to shower less (truly revolting) and take other punitive measures to combat 'water shortages' (when Winter floods will be along soon) is simply gaslighting.
I admit I just don't see that as a viable argument. I think you are assuming a zero-sum game, which is not the case. I don't see how a concept of blame applies.
Achieving the same outcome using fewer resources is a simple increase in efficiency. How is that not a benefit.
Why should we want to use 25% more water (or electricity) than necessary? Would you argue against reduced fuel consumption in a motor vehicle on the same basis?
The point about reservoirs is that if water consumption is reduced, fewer reservoirs is not "insufficient"; it changes the definition of "sufficient" to be a smaller quantity.
To turn the question around, why should we waste scarce resources on building unnecessary reservoirs or power stations?
For a specific example on water, current use in Denmark is around 105l per person per day, compared to 130-140l in England. Denmark does not seem to have an economy on its knees, and is noticeably prosperous.
Because water is not scarce. It is especially unscarce in the UK. It is an abundant resource that is there to be enjoyed and used. The idea of convincing the public that it is running out and that they are showering too long or gardening too much is a despicable perversion of the truth that would mystify and appall our ancestors.
Chronic mismanagement may get us to water shortages, but it certainly shouldn't be on the cards.
And we really really shouldn't be operating things at the bare minimum level in an any case, that's not very sustainable if any problems ever emerge.
Yes. A sensible safety margin means that a drought has to be more severe to cause serious difficulties.
Indeed, if you're trying to adapt to a world with more extreme weather phenomenon, then more reservoirs seems about the most sensible possible first step to do for that.
The lack of investment shows that for all the talk, our politicians are not remotely taking the climate seriously.
I’m making myself the Ottolenghi lemon, anchovy, sardine and herb pasta I’ve described here before
When buying the lemons I noticed the Waitrose No1 unwaxed Sorrento lemons and couldn’t resist. They’re at least four inches long and two and a half wide. And they come with leaves
I’m kind of despairing at the news about Mr Abd El Fattah. It suggests that the entirety of government machinery is perpetuating a hoax on the wider public.
Although I understand Abd El Fattah is a noted dissident from a celebrated family of dissidents, he ought not to have passed the Fit and Proper test for citizenship. And it beggars belief that almost the entire political class, from both legacy mainstream political parties, campaigned so strongly for his release when his social media activity was always publicly available.
Brass Eye. Cake.
Nothing has changed - any bandwagon that is superficially attractive will get jumped on.
I’ve mentioned before getting an MP enthusiastic about growing peanuts in Africa to make oil for ZEV. After 10 minutes conversation he was ready to take it to the Minister. Wish I had been there for that.
When Brass Eye was made, it was still generally assumed that while backbench MPs and celebrities might be a bit gullible, there were serious people behind the scenes who knew what they were doing.
Now it seems as though the entire state has been taken in, and to add insult to injury, is directly funding the hoaxters who are busy making fools of us.
You raise an interesting question about just how much the State itself is funding the legion of charities who then insist on new measures to constrain, emasculate and otherwise siphon more monies from the State.
Indeed it might be be of the main self-perpetuating activities of the “elite”, with both left and right wing flavours.
Elon has been talking about this for most of 2025 to general heckles and finger wagging.
Regrettably, and based on my serving of the board of one charity, I’ve come to the conclusion that a great deal of charitable activity is essentially bollocks, if not outright grift.
It may be unfair, but I'm much more inclined to focus only on very localised charities - so long as they are not run by scammers, they seem more likely to have a direct impact on an issue, and cannot fall prey to the same risks of massive, professionalised institutions which can and indeed do do a lot of good, but can also go very wrong.
There is a gravitational affect to large charities: wikipedia already has enough money to run the encylopedia for 150 years, but begs for money each year - all of which goes to the wikimedia foundation, which funds all sorts of things. But of course, most donors think it's to run the encylopedia. But who would give this income stream up?
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I think it's more that the debate is effectively over. Very few people continue to deny it exists, or that humans are responsible for it. You still get people like Casino_Royale who think it's just some culture war game, but the data is becoming metronomic - we're about to declare this year our hottest year on record (again). I think we all understand that with Trump any debate/campaign for mitigation is fruitless until we get a sane Thatcher-type figure on the right again.
At some point we are going to need to have a serious conversation about adaptation. That's what so pathetic about those people who suggest we can't stop it happening - fine, so where's the big plan for 3 degrees+?
On the domestic front, we have nobody building any water infrastructure, and a virtual ban on dredging for the last 20-25 years, due to EU habitat legislation, then we blame the resulting summer droughts and winter floods on climate change.
I don't think it is included in the above - one of our basic planning policies since about 2010 has been that surface water runoff from a development should be no more than the pre-existing site - that's where all our balancing ponds come from. The last one of these I did required a preliminary design as part of Outline Permission, required to establish that the site was suitable for development; it was done by Mott McDonald and came to around £250 per potential housing unit just for the preliminary design.
The Thames Tideway Tunnel, which came online last year, was about £5 billion on its own.
That's all water infrastructure, as is investment in sewerage treatment, canal and river maintenance, and the rest.
That is a fair response to a point I made that included hyperbole but was still an important one.
There have been no major reservoirs built for over 30 years - the last one (there are some being built now) was completed in 1992. At the same time, the population has risen by 11 million.
I find that staggering, and it makes me extremely cynical when people panic about our weather conditions.
In general I'd argue that building more reservoirs should be the last resort, as it is a 'tailpipe' solution. Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms. So for me that means measures such as leak reduction and 100% water meters, which apply the market mechanism and themselves generate a reduction of 10-12% in water usage, before we spend hundreds of millions on new reservoirs.
I think one of the unforeseen problems of the last budget will be caused by the unbundling of insulation etc programmes from energy bills - it can now be seen and will be far easier to target in political debate. The programme has been very successful for 15 years doing basics such as loft insulation, until the current one is under severe question - when the programme has been doing more complex installations (eg external wall insulation) with inadequate standards / supervision.
I am sure you would argue that - I would argue the opposite. Your argument leads to the British economy where it now is - mine leads to the Chinese economy where it now is. Abundant and cheap energy is a pre-requisite for any prosperous society, and is the lifeblood of human progress.
More specifically, having a deliberate policy of failing to build sufficient reservoirs, and instead blame the public for water shortages - encouraging them to water their gardens less, even to shower less (truly revolting) and take other punitive measures to combat 'water shortages' (when Winter floods will be along soon) is simply gaslighting.
I admit I just don't see that as a viable argument. I think you are assuming a zero-sum game, which is not the case. I don't see how a concept of blame applies.
Achieving the same outcome using fewer resources is a simple increase in efficiency. How is that not a benefit.
Why should we want to use 25% more water (or electricity) than necessary? Would you argue against reduced fuel consumption in a motor vehicle on the same basis?
The point about reservoirs is that if water consumption is reduced, fewer reservoirs is not "insufficient"; it changes the definition of "sufficient" to be a smaller quantity.
To turn the question around, why should we waste scarce resources on building unnecessary reservoirs or power stations?
For a specific example on water, current use in Denmark is around 105l per person per day, compared to 130-140l in England. Denmark does not seem to have an economy on its knees, and is noticeably prosperous.
Because water is not scarce. It is especially unscarce in the UK. It is an abundant resource that is there to be enjoyed and used. The idea of convincing the public that it is running out and that they are showering too long or gardening too much is a despicable perversion of the truth that would mystify and appall our ancestors.
Not true. Shortage of water was a regular concern. Especially as it affected their transport and their food production systems (watermills). temsd
An excess of reservoirs would lead to… a number of smallish lakes, full of fish, wildlife. If vaguely well designed.
I'm looking into the differences between water consumption in Britain and Denmark. In Aarhus they claim to lose only 5% of their water to leaks, while in Britain that figure is 19%. (It's 37% in Ireland - I'm glad we have our own well)
NEW: Yvette Cooper launches urgent review into 'serious information failures' in the case of Alaa Abd El-Fattah: 'It is clear that this has been an unacceptable failure and that long standing procedures and due diligence arrangements have been completely inadequate'
So Yvette Cooper joins the Guardian on the extreme alt-right, making something out of non-existent anti-Labour stories?
Three Russians are claiming a large Ukrainian drone attack on one of Putin's rural palaces, and Trump seems to have accepted the claim as fact, reportedly going as far as to say, "Thank God we didn't give Zelensky Tomahawks."
Trump is simply part of Russian information warfare.
The source of this quote is Russian state media. Should we conclude that LostPassword is simply part of Russian information warfare?
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I think it's more that the debate is effectively over. Very few people continue to deny it exists, or that humans are responsible for it. You still get people like Casino_Royale who think it's just some culture war game, but the data is becoming metronomic - we're about to declare this year our hottest year on record (again). I think we all understand that with Trump any debate/campaign for mitigation is fruitless until we get a sane Thatcher-type figure on the right again.
At some point we are going to need to have a serious conversation about adaptation. That's what so pathetic about those people who suggest we can't stop it happening - fine, so where's the big plan for 3 degrees+?
On the domestic front, we have nobody building any water infrastructure, and a virtual ban on dredging for the last 20-25 years, due to EU habitat legislation, then we blame the resulting summer droughts and winter floods on climate change.
I don't think it is included in the above - one of our basic planning policies since about 2010 has been that surface water runoff from a development should be no more than the pre-existing site - that's where all our balancing ponds come from. The last one of these I did required a preliminary design as part of Outline Permission, required to establish that the site was suitable for development; it was done by Mott McDonald and came to around £250 per potential housing unit just for the preliminary design.
The Thames Tideway Tunnel, which came online last year, was about £5 billion on its own.
That's all water infrastructure, as is investment in sewerage treatment, canal and river maintenance, and the rest.
That is a fair response to a point I made that included hyperbole but was still an important one.
There have been no major reservoirs built for over 30 years - the last one (there are some being built now) was completed in 1992. At the same time, the population has risen by 11 million.
I find that staggering, and it makes me extremely cynical when people panic about our weather conditions.
In general I'd argue that building more reservoirs should be the last resort, as it is a 'tailpipe' solution. Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms. So for me that means measures such as leak reduction and 100% water meters, which apply the market mechanism and themselves generate a reduction of 10-12% in water usage, before we spend hundreds of millions on new reservoirs.
I think one of the unforeseen problems of the last budget will be caused by the unbundling of insulation etc programmes from energy bills - it can now be seen and will be far easier to target in political debate. The programme has been very successful for 15 years doing basics such as loft insulation, until the current one is under severe question - when the programme has been doing more complex installations (eg external wall insulation) with inadequate standards / supervision.
I am sure you would argue that - I would argue the opposite. Your argument leads to the British economy where it now is - mine leads to the Chinese economy where it now is. Abundant and cheap energy is a pre-requisite for any prosperous society, and is the lifeblood of human progress.
More specifically, having a deliberate policy of failing to build sufficient reservoirs, and instead blame the public for water shortages - encouraging them to water their gardens less, even to shower less (truly revolting) and take other punitive measures to combat 'water shortages' (when Winter floods will be along soon) is simply gaslighting.
I admit I just don't see that as a viable argument. I think you are assuming a zero-sum game, which is not the case. I don't see how a concept of blame applies.
Achieving the same outcome using fewer resources is a simple increase in efficiency. How is that not a benefit.
Why should we want to use 25% more water (or electricity) than necessary? Would you argue against reduced fuel consumption in a motor vehicle on the same basis?
The point about reservoirs is that if water consumption is reduced, fewer reservoirs is not "insufficient"; it changes the definition of "sufficient" to be a smaller quantity.
To turn the question around, why should we waste scarce resources on building unnecessary reservoirs or power stations?
For a specific example on water, current use in Denmark is around 105l per person per day, compared to 130-140l in England. Denmark does not seem to have an economy on its knees, and is noticeably prosperous.
Because water is not scarce. It is especially unscarce in the UK. It is an abundant resource that is there to be enjoyed and used. The idea of convincing the public that it is running out and that they are showering too long or gardening too much is a despicable perversion of the truth that would mystify and appall our ancestors.
Chronic mismanagement may get us to water shortages, but it certainly shouldn't be on the cards.
And we really really shouldn't be operating things at the bare minimum level in an any case, that's not very sustainable if any problems ever emerge.
Yes. A sensible safety margin means that a drought has to be more severe to cause serious difficulties.
Indeed, if you're trying to adapt to a world with more extreme weather phenomenon, then more reservoirs seems about the most sensible possible first step to do for that.
The lack of investment shows that for all the talk, our politicians are not remotely taking the climate seriously.
And take on NIMBYism? Are you mad?!
Though I appreciate when people transition from 'not in my back yard' (ie, suggesting it may be right elsewhere just not near them) to just 'bugger it, we don't need it anyway'. Feels less dishonest, even if I think it is wrong.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
Thanks for sharing the interview.
I agree with him on it and have raised this point myself many times. It is also (and I would not expect him to mention this) Reform Party policy to cease paying commercial banks interest on their QE holdings.
Listening to the rest of the interview is somewhat frustrating, as I think his narrative about climate change is disingenuous. But that isn't unique to him - it is pretty much across the board with those of like mind.
He also doesn't address the mobility of wealth - or simply its foreign ownership. He raises the case of the Cargill family profiteering from poor cocoa harvests - that family is American. What are we to do about it? The best thing we can really do in this instance is attract their wealth by making Britain a playground for them. But that's so far from the red/green prescription it's in another galaxy.
In turn thanks for giving up your time to listen to it.
Yes very much to your credit imv you have consistently raised BoE QE holdings, I confess until now I have never put in the time to fully understand the mechanisms by which this is costing us money (and I still don't fully understand the implications for our future creditworthiness of ceasing to pay interest).
Agreed on your other points. Though I would note he does better than most left-wing economists in at least acknowledging that, whatever we do with our 2% of global GDP, we need to fit with the economic realities created by the other 98%. I'd also add a critique that he doesn't really offer a coherent solution to the economic problems of the current government.
But, as I'm sure you'll be able to appreciate as a fellow radical, cogent arguments that I agree with are thin on the ground so one has to make the most of slim pickings.
Ceasing to pay interest would only be on the money that the BOE printed and gave the commercial banks, that they then deposited with the BOE. Not on their own deposits with the Bank. This money is basically a bung to the banking industry.
Its withdrawal will have an impact - depriving an industry of £20bn is always going to have an impact, just as tightening up Motability will harm car dealerships. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be done, and done now. That money could be paid off the national debt.
What money did the Bank of England print and “give” to the commercial banks?
There was a programme whereby the commercial banks could sell illiquid assets to the bank in return for money printed. But that’s not the same as “giving”. What it is doing is using the public sector’s balance sheet to preserve liquidity in the market
I think if someone gives you a very large amount of money, in return for something you canot otherwise sell, 'giving' is an appropriate layman's term.
Not really. The assets that they are handing over have a limited lifespan. But because commercial banks need to mark to market they get killed by temporary illiquidity. The Bank of England can deem them as assets held to maturity and will get the full value (including the return) in due course. Now you could argue that the Bank of England should charge a premium for that liquidity service (and they did charge upfront fees in many cases) but you also need to remember thank banks pay 8% higher corporation tax rates than other companies
I’m making myself the Ottolenghi lemon, anchovy, sardine and herb pasta I’ve described here before
When buying the lemons I noticed the Waitrose No1 unwaxed Sorrento lemons and couldn’t resist. They’re at least four inches long and two and a half wide. And they come with leaves
I can’t wait to taste them
Waitrose seem, for some things, to have excellent buyers. Their wine is remarkably good at the various price points, for example.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I think it's more that the debate is effectively over. Very few people continue to deny it exists, or that humans are responsible for it. You still get people like Casino_Royale who think it's just some culture war game, but the data is becoming metronomic - we're about to declare this year our hottest year on record (again).
Er, sod off, old boy.
I've never said anything but climate change is a real thing on here, and have been remarkably consistent in saying that for decades. I also regularly cite Thatcher as one of the first major political leaders to draw attention to the issue, because she understood the science. And a reason why those on the Right shouldn't view climate change as a secret Lefty plot.
Take that back please.
Nope - you suggested that "Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience" - as if caring about the environment is simply a fad for the left. From my experience, concerns for Gaza and the consequences of climate change are both deeply held - and can be at the same time.
I'm sure your personal concern about climate change is sincere - perhaps consider that is also the case for those you would normally consider your political opposites.
People who desire to embrace clean technologies to transition away from dirty ones care about the environment.
People who desire us not to extract domestic oil and gas but to burn as many imports as desired instead do not.
People who wish to prevent others from having holidays or living their lives do not.
People who wish to use the mantra of the environment to further their own agenda, whether it be smashing capitalism or pushing veganism or any other bullshit do not.
There is nothing wrong with caring about the environment and we should seek to transition to clean technologies to do so, the problem is too many with a hate-filled agenda they try to sneak past others in the name of the environment.
Moving past climate change denial to climatr change bargaining:
"Climate change is happenning but we don't need to take serious action, we can carry on much the same"
Embracing clean technologies is taking serious action, which enables us to carry on much the same, yes.
Cutting off our nose to spite our face is not taking serious action and won't impact global emissions as the rest of the world isn't stupid enough to do that.
It's the tragedy of the commons: if everyone else has your attitude, the problem never gets fixed. However, fortunately, by and large, that hasn't happened and we have had good international cooperation with countries working together. Our net zero plans have been pretty similar to other countries'. Until Trump came along and blew a whole in the US position, that is.
I’m kind of despairing at the news about Mr Abd El Fattah. It suggests that the entirety of government machinery is perpetuating a hoax on the wider public.
Although I understand Abd El Fattah is a noted dissident from a celebrated family of dissidents, he ought not to have passed the Fit and Proper test for citizenship. And it beggars belief that almost the entire political class, from both legacy mainstream political parties, campaigned so strongly for his release when his social media activity was always publicly available.
Brass Eye. Cake.
Nothing has changed - any bandwagon that is superficially attractive will get jumped on.
I’ve mentioned before getting an MP enthusiastic about growing peanuts in Africa to make oil for ZEV. After 10 minutes conversation he was ready to take it to the Minister. Wish I had been there for that.
When Brass Eye was made, it was still generally assumed that while backbench MPs and celebrities might be a bit gullible, there were serious people behind the scenes who knew what they were doing.
Now it seems as though the entire state has been taken in, and to add insult to injury, is directly funding the hoaxters who are busy making fools of us.
You raise an interesting question about just how much the State itself is funding the legion of charities who then insist on new measures to constrain, emasculate and otherwise siphon more monies from the State.
Indeed it might be be of the main self-perpetuating activities of the “elite”, with both left and right wing flavours.
Elon has been talking about this for most of 2025 to general heckles and finger wagging.
Regrettably, and based on my serving of the board of one charity, I’ve come to the conclusion that a great deal of charitable activity is essentially bollocks, if not outright grift.
It’s sad to hear that but I suspect you’re right. The safest way is putting the money directly in the hands of the recipient but that’s not practical most of the time.
I'm looking into the differences between water consumption in Britain and Denmark. In Aarhus they claim to lose only 5% of their water to leaks, while in Britain that figure is 19%.
Aarhus is a very, very, very fine hus. With two cats in the yard, life used to be so yard.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I think it's more that the debate is effectively over. Very few people continue to deny it exists, or that humans are responsible for it. You still get people like Casino_Royale who think it's just some culture war game, but the data is becoming metronomic - we're about to declare this year our hottest year on record (again).
Er, sod off, old boy.
I've never said anything but climate change is a real thing on here, and have been remarkably consistent in saying that for decades. I also regularly cite Thatcher as one of the first major political leaders to draw attention to the issue, because she understood the science. And a reason why those on the Right shouldn't view climate change as a secret Lefty plot.
Take that back please.
Nope - you suggested that "Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience" - as if caring about the environment is simply a fad for the left. From my experience, concerns for Gaza and the consequences of climate change are both deeply held - and can be at the same time.
I'm sure your personal concern about climate change is sincere - perhaps consider that is also the case for those you would normally consider your political opposites.
People who desire to embrace clean technologies to transition away from dirty ones care about the environment.
People who desire us not to extract domestic oil and gas but to burn as many imports as desired instead do not.
People who wish to prevent others from having holidays or living their lives do not.
People who wish to use the mantra of the environment to further their own agenda, whether it be smashing capitalism or pushing veganism or any other bullshit do not.
There is nothing wrong with caring about the environment and we should seek to transition to clean technologies to do so, the problem is too many with a hate-filled agenda they try to sneak past others in the name of the environment.
Moving past climate change denial to climatr change bargaining:
"Climate change is happenning but we don't need to take serious action, we can carry on much the same"
Embracing clean technologies is taking serious action, which enables us to carry on much the same, yes.
Cutting off our nose to spite our face is not taking serious action and won't impact global emissions as the rest of the world isn't stupid enough to do that.
It's the tragedy of the commons: if everyone else has your attitude, the problem never gets fixed. However, fortunately, by and large, that hasn't happened and we have had good international cooperation with countries working together. Our net zero plans have been pretty similar to other countries'. Until Trump came along and blew a whole in the US position, that is.
Wrong, if people have your attitude, the problem never gets fixed.
With my attitude, we embrace clean technologies and fix the problems.
Cutting off our nose and saying "turn down the thermostat", "don't travel", "don't eat meat" or any other bullshit does diddly squat to fix the problems.
Embracing clean technologies does. Once the problem is fixed, others can copy our solutions, and we can copy theirs.
Invest in science and technology and research, don't cut consumption.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I think it's more that the debate is effectively over. Very few people continue to deny it exists, or that humans are responsible for it. You still get people like Casino_Royale who think it's just some culture war game, but the data is becoming metronomic - we're about to declare this year our hottest year on record (again).
Er, sod off, old boy.
I've never said anything but climate change is a real thing on here, and have been remarkably consistent in saying that for decades. I also regularly cite Thatcher as one of the first major political leaders to draw attention to the issue, because she understood the science. And a reason why those on the Right shouldn't view climate change as a secret Lefty plot.
Take that back please.
Nope - you suggested that "Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience" - as if caring about the environment is simply a fad for the left. From my experience, concerns for Gaza and the consequences of climate change are both deeply held - and can be at the same time.
I'm sure your personal concern about climate change is sincere - perhaps consider that is also the case for those you would normally consider your political opposites.
People who desire to embrace clean technologies to transition away from dirty ones care about the environment.
People who desire us not to extract domestic oil and gas but to burn as many imports as desired instead do not.
People who wish to prevent others from having holidays or living their lives do not.
People who wish to use the mantra of the environment to further their own agenda, whether it be smashing capitalism or pushing veganism or any other bullshit do not.
There is nothing wrong with caring about the environment and we should seek to transition to clean technologies to do so, the problem is too many with a hate-filled agenda they try to sneak past others in the name of the environment.
Moving past climate change denial to climatr change bargaining:
"Climate change is happenning but we don't need to take serious action, we can carry on much the same"
Embracing clean technologies is taking serious action, which enables us to carry on much the same, yes.
Cutting off our nose to spite our face is not taking serious action and won't impact global emissions as the rest of the world isn't stupid enough to do that.
It's the tragedy of the commons: if everyone else has your attitude, the problem never gets fixed. However, fortunately, by and large, that hasn't happened and we have had good international cooperation with countries working together. Our net zero plans have been pretty similar to other countries'. Until Trump came along and blew a whole in the US position, that is.
Wrong, if people have your attitude, the problem never gets fixed.
With my attitude, we embrace clean technologies and fix the problems.
Cutting off our nose and saying "turn down the thermostat", "don't travel", "don't eat meat" or any other bullshit does diddly squat to fix the problems.
Embracing clean technologies does. Once the problem is fixed, others can copy our solutions, and we can copy theirs.
Invest in science and technology and research, don't cut consumption.
One thing is crystal clear from this conversation, it must be one approach or the other, there is absolutely no chance the two approaches might be complementary.
Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms.
I do beg to differ, here. Demand reduction measures are an admission a country's energy policy has failed. Abundant, affordable energy has long been acknowledged to be a significant economic asset and social good. Now that we have multiple ways of generating power with little environmental impact, that should always be the priority.
Spending money on insulation schemes, to pick the example you mentioned, is, on a macro level, a complete waste of money. It's an extremely expensive way of reducing demand in one very specific area, without having enough scale to give any general benefits.
Spend that money on new generation facilities and overall supply improves, prices go down for everyone (presuming a free market) and it increases reliability in the system. Build enough and you end up with a surplus of supply, which attracts energy-intensive industries, providing jobs, and can bring opportunities to profit by supplying excess to countries with an energy shortfall.
We should be building wind farms, solar and SMRs as fast as possible. Having too much energy is always better than not having enough.
Could not agree more. This 100% is correct.
If energy is clean, then there's no environmental reason to demand less.
If energy is not clean, then there's no way to get to net zero.
Demand reduction achieves diddly squat and is unscientific gibberish to further hairshirt agendas.
Clean, abundant, cheap and well-used energy is the future.
I think efficiency is always a benefit, so I would support improved insulation, LED lighting, air fryers, etc, but when some people talk about demand reduction it sounds like rationing.
Efficiency is great, yes. I love my air fryer, and LED lights and so on and so forth.
But that is embracing newer technologies that are an improvement, not stepping backwards.
My air fryer cooks better than the oven, most days of the year. Christmas Day I cooked with the oven due to the scale of what was being cooked, but most other days the air fryer operates instead, cooking better and cheaper.
When people want to say "don't travel", or "sit in the cold", or "don't consume" then they're not seeking to either help the environment in a scientific manner, or improve matters for people, they're pushing a bonkers agenda.
Air fryer = small oven
Arguably ‘very small oven’ to be accurate. Very efficient. I have no idea why they are/were marketed as air fryers, as they don’t fry food(at best it’s roasted).
They've very small fan ovens. The circulation of the hot air is a crucial part of how they work.
"Altogether, then, 2026 looks like being an important year. China's strength will grow, and its strategy for taking over Taiwan - Xi Jinping's great ambition - will become clearer. It may be that the war in Ukraine will be settled, but on terms that are favourable to President Putin.
He may be free to come back for more Ukrainian territory when he's ready. And President Trump, even though his political wings could be clipped in November's mid-term elections, will distance the US from Europe even more.
From the European point of view, the outlook could scarcely be more gloomy.
If you thought World War Three would be a shooting-match with nuclear weapons, think again. It's much more likely to be a collection of diplomatic and military manoeuvres, which will see autocracy flourish. It could even threaten to break up the Western alliance.
And the process has already started."
Arguably this IS the World War- constant hybrid attacks, sabotage, and provocation. The risks of things getting worse are extremely high.
From the point of view of those in the cross hairs of Russian escalation, there is optimism that the hammering that Russia has received will lead to longer term weakness, and as Tisdall notes, humans are not very good at thinking about things beyond one lifetime, Xi Jinping is 72, Putin, 73, Trump, 79. The immediate context is obviously highly unstable, but there is a growing sense that all of these leaders are failures. I stand by my view that Trump has a very high chance of being politically crippled by the midterms and in any event I am sceptical that he will survive his term, so those betting that he will go for a third term are taking a very extreme risk. Xi clear faces a significant struggle to maintain control over the Party, and there is evidence that he will not maintain his grip for much longer. As for Putin, the disaster he has unleashed on his own country is making Russia unusually politically brittle, and his constant actions to avoid assassination do not speak of a triumphantly confident ruler. These old men cannot imagine that life will go on without them, but it will, and quite soon. We too can imagine life without them, and in all three cases, it is hard to consider that their replacements could be any worse.
As grim as things look today, the night is darkest just before the dawn. And I promise you, the dawn is coming.
Worthless promises. Wasn't the view from Estonia that this would all be wrapped up in a few months and Putin would be back in his box because of EU solidarity.
Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms.
I do beg to differ, here. Demand reduction measures are an admission a country's energy policy has failed. Abundant, affordable energy has long been acknowledged to be a significant economic asset and social good. Now that we have multiple ways of generating power with little environmental impact, that should always be the priority.
Spending money on insulation schemes, to pick the example you mentioned, is, on a macro level, a complete waste of money. It's an extremely expensive way of reducing demand in one very specific area, without having enough scale to give any general benefits.
Spend that money on new generation facilities and overall supply improves, prices go down for everyone (presuming a free market) and it increases reliability in the system. Build enough and you end up with a surplus of supply, which attracts energy-intensive industries, providing jobs, and can bring opportunities to profit by supplying excess to countries with an energy shortfall.
We should be building wind farms, solar and SMRs as fast as possible. Having too much energy is always better than not having enough.
Could not agree more. This 100% is correct.
If energy is clean, then there's no environmental reason to demand less.
If energy is not clean, then there's no way to get to net zero.
Demand reduction achieves diddly squat and is unscientific gibberish to further hairshirt agendas.
Clean, abundant, cheap and well-used energy is the future.
I think efficiency is always a benefit, so I would support improved insulation, LED lighting, air fryers, etc, but when some people talk about demand reduction it sounds like rationing.
Efficiency is great, yes. I love my air fryer, and LED lights and so on and so forth.
But that is embracing newer technologies that are an improvement, not stepping backwards.
My air fryer cooks better than the oven, most days of the year. Christmas Day I cooked with the oven due to the scale of what was being cooked, but most other days the air fryer operates instead, cooking better and cheaper.
When people want to say "don't travel", or "sit in the cold", or "don't consume" then they're not seeking to either help the environment in a scientific manner, or improve matters for people, they're pushing a bonkers agenda.
Air fryer = small oven
Arguably ‘very small oven’ to be accurate. Very efficient. I have no idea why they are/were marketed as air fryers, as they don’t fry food(at best it’s roasted).
They've very small fan ovens. The circulation of the hot air is a crucial part of how they work.
Unless you live in a caravan, I still don’t really see the point in them. Air fryer owners bang on about them but it doesn’t feel like they do anything I can’t already do with my oven
I can't find any statistics on water usage breakdown within the home.
However the top two pieces of advice for reducing water usage are, reducing the length of showers taken (which is asking people to take a rationing approach, which is a bit miserablist) and making sure that faulty toilet flushes are fixed.
I've no idea whether Danish houses are much better maintained than British ones (in which case good for them) or if they've been culturally conditioned to take short, infrequent showers to ration water.
It's all down to the timing of the AI bubble bursting. If it happens this year, then there is no fig leaf for Republicans. It will be brutal.
In an alternative version of 2026 being a bad one, what if 2026 is the year that emergent consciousness arises in AI labs…
Welcome back Leon, we've missed you
I do for one miss Leon’s perspective. He’s still on X of course but he’s a little more restrained on there.
I think the site has improved immeasurably since he left. He was a bore, and he was relentless. He killed every conversation. Now there is a much healthier ecosystem and the ratio of interesting to annoying is much better.
He was though one of the few Reform backers here as well as being a good writer even if he liked to stir.
We are seriously short of Reform posters on here now given Reform currently lead the polls, if anyone knows any Reform voters who want to post please do suggest it! This site has always been good as it has tended to represent all views, with plenty of Tories, Labour and LDs and even a few Greens and Scots Nats but support for Farage here is very limited
...I made 100k dollars in 2020 because of this place (S&P short)...
The biggest winner on PB by my recollection was @Dromedary who claimed to have won 6/7 figures on Brexit. So your statement of "100k dollars in 2020" gladdens my heart. Consequently I would be grateful if you could expand on your winning bet please. Starting with what the "S&P short" was...
I bought a strip of out the money put options. At the time my financial affairs were split between two countries but I didn’t have a sterling brokerage account. So with my sterling liquidity I did the same trade but with spread bets.
I let the bet run until I hit $100k profit across the two accounts, living US trading hours for the duration of the bet (I had recently taken voluntary redundancy). My timing was fortuitous because the Fed big bazooka was unleashed the very next day.
IG Index then took weeks to honour the bet. At the time I was worried they were suffering a liquidity event, I wrote to their senior management to enquire as such. At it was, I think I raised an AML flag - a British citizen resident overseas that opened an account, turned over a huge profit in a week or two and then immediately closing it.
The shame was that I didn’t have more cash on hand as I would have bet even bigger - my host country had locked off my salary to settle tax obligations the moment I signed my redundancy papers the month or two before.
Which currency were you betting against and what were your reasons for betting against it?
I was betting on US stocks crashing, when they inevitably suffered the same mass panic.
Whatever, that won’t have been from any cogent analysis Leon posted, since he always flailed about making all sorts of wild and often contradictory posts without ever specifically predicting anything you could reliably stake money on. On the rare occasions that he did - for example during the 2017 GE when he claimed to have just sold all of his investments because Corbyn was about to be elected PM - he was probably feeding us made-up BS and in any case proved to be completely wrong. Either you are misremembering, or you were extraordinarily lucky to have acted on one of his posts not having seen all the contradictory ones.
As I remember the pre-Covid economic discussion on here, I was well ahead of Leon (or whatever he traded under back then) in both predicting and acting on the coming stock market downturn, and he only started claiming to have predicted it once it was already underway. The one thing I do remember him predicting is that Covid would be “contagious but essentially benign”
Alastair wrote an excellent header talking about Before Covid and After Covid. Well done if you were ahead of the curve. Leon’s doom posting is what did it for me. I knew all about Covid having been living with its effects since Jan 20 in Asia. I’m pretty sure I caught it in Jan 20 actually.
Before reading the interactions on here, i was operating under the basis that the “nailing doors shut” approach was an obscene overreaction by the Chinese, with the main problem being municipal level corruption collapsing the health system in localised areas.
Leon’s reaction made me realise that everywhere in the world was also going to go bananas with their response, regardless of how severe the problem really was. But I did lean (incorrectly as it turns out) towards it being a highly significant problem.
What I hadn’t squared correctly, was that “killing more than the holocaust” wasn’t as big a deal as it sounded in my head. Whatever, financial markets are mostly about prejudging policy responses, and that’s all that was important for that trade.
You have an uncanny Leonesque writing style.
Since he is a best selling author, I suppose I shall take that as a complement
That's the odd thing. Leon was a bestselling author who used to regale us with his Norweigan and Spanish royalty cheques, but then he stopped for some reason and now goes on holiday for a living.
To be fair to him, he mined two seams very productively (archeological fantasy and psychological thriller) and then they went out of fashion didn’t pivot to a third.
But few authors are successful in one genre let alone two
I’m not sure they went out of fashion. Indeed, Dan Brown has just published his latest.
Declined then - it used to be that there were multiple news books in that category but now relatively few
I’m making myself the Ottolenghi lemon, anchovy, sardine and herb pasta I’ve described here before
When buying the lemons I noticed the Waitrose No1 unwaxed Sorrento lemons and couldn’t resist. They’re at least four inches long and two and a half wide. And they come with leaves
I can’t wait to taste them
We had roast lamb tonight, with roast (purple) potatoes, (yellow) carrots, beetroot and parsley root. (The beetroot and parsley root were their regular colours.)
The government doesn't need to do anything to "wean the UK off fossil fuels".
It will happen anyway, on probably a very similar timeframe, if we just leave it to the market.
Things like CCS are fundamentally stupid because they are a massive long term capital commitment for a kind of power than will simply be uneconomic.
The government should get out of the way, simplify planning, and let the market do it's thing.
I'm still waiting for the solar plus battery boom that's been just a few years away for the last decade. It's becoming as elusive as fusion energy.
I think we need to face up to the fact that over the next decade there's going to be intermittent power because our energy policy has been failure for the last 30 years and energy companies like water companies have extracted tens of billions without any minimum investment requirements for every pound taken as dividends or in share buybacks.
Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms.
I do beg to differ, here. Demand reduction measures are an admission a country's energy policy has failed. Abundant, affordable energy has long been acknowledged to be a significant economic asset and social good. Now that we have multiple ways of generating power with little environmental impact, that should always be the priority.
Spending money on insulation schemes, to pick the example you mentioned, is, on a macro level, a complete waste of money. It's an extremely expensive way of reducing demand in one very specific area, without having enough scale to give any general benefits.
Spend that money on new generation facilities and overall supply improves, prices go down for everyone (presuming a free market) and it increases reliability in the system. Build enough and you end up with a surplus of supply, which attracts energy-intensive industries, providing jobs, and can bring opportunities to profit by supplying excess to countries with an energy shortfall.
We should be building wind farms, solar and SMRs as fast as possible. Having too much energy is always better than not having enough.
Could not agree more. This 100% is correct.
If energy is clean, then there's no environmental reason to demand less.
If energy is not clean, then there's no way to get to net zero.
Demand reduction achieves diddly squat and is unscientific gibberish to further hairshirt agendas.
Clean, abundant, cheap and well-used energy is the future.
I think efficiency is always a benefit, so I would support improved insulation, LED lighting, air fryers, etc, but when some people talk about demand reduction it sounds like rationing.
Efficiency is great, yes. I love my air fryer, and LED lights and so on and so forth.
But that is embracing newer technologies that are an improvement, not stepping backwards.
My air fryer cooks better than the oven, most days of the year. Christmas Day I cooked with the oven due to the scale of what was being cooked, but most other days the air fryer operates instead, cooking better and cheaper.
When people want to say "don't travel", or "sit in the cold", or "don't consume" then they're not seeking to either help the environment in a scientific manner, or improve matters for people, they're pushing a bonkers agenda.
Air fryer = small oven
Arguably ‘very small oven’ to be accurate. Very efficient. I have no idea why they are/were marketed as air fryers, as they don’t fry food(at best it’s roasted).
They've very small fan ovens. The circulation of the hot air is a crucial part of how they work.
Unless you live in a caravan, I still don’t really see the point in them. Air fryer owners bang on about them but it doesn’t feel like they do anything I can’t already do with my oven
Then you've not used one.
Unlike an oven it does not need pre-heating, and they cook much quicker too. As they're smaller, they take a tiny fraction of the energy to operate too.
Food cooks considerably quicker, and better quality too, in an air fryer than in an oven.
Yes they're basically ovens, but if you are just cooking a small amount then the oven is generally overkill and much less convenient taking much longer to operate and needing to preheat.
My toolkit has multiple sizes of the same head of screwdriver as sometimes different tools serve best for the same job - why should the kitchen not be the same? Cooking in volume, turn the oven on, small amounts, the air fryer is better.
I'm looking into the differences between water consumption in Britain and Denmark. In Aarhus they claim to lose only 5% of their water to leaks, while in Britain that figure is 19%.
Aarhus is a very, very, very fine hus. With two cats in the yard, life used to be so yard.
Three Russians are claiming a large Ukrainian drone attack on one of Putin's rural palaces, and Trump seems to have accepted the claim as fact, reportedly going as far as to say, "Thank God we didn't give Zelensky Tomahawks."
Trump is simply part of Russian information warfare.
The source of this quote is Russian state media. Should we conclude that LostPassword is simply part of Russian information warfare?
Have the Democrats figured out why they keep losing yet?
In November they swept the board in the mini mid terms, they can win now without changing at all from last year as Trump's approval rating has slumped to 42% from the 50% he got last year in the presidential election.
Assuming one can win "without changing at all" is a comforting but dangerous trap to fall into, and this risks fully playing out in 3 years time.
The Democrats should be asking themselves some very hard and searching questions about their appeal to the American electorate.
So far, I see very little evidence they've done so.
If Trump's approval rating was at 45-50% you would have a point, at 40-45% ie Dole 1996 and McCain 2008 voteshare levels who both lost by a landslide the Democrats will win whoever their candidates are
But the next presidential election is 3 years away. If 'it's the economy stupid' is true you can't go by today's polling. You'd need to forecast how the US economy will be looking in 2028 - and if you can do that you're a better man than I, Gunga Din.
At the moment it is Trump's tariffs increasing inflation and cost of living and lowering his approval rating most and he shows no signs of scrapping them. Nor are they leading to masses of new rustbelt factory jobs
Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms.
I do beg to differ, here. Demand reduction measures are an admission a country's energy policy has failed. Abundant, affordable energy has long been acknowledged to be a significant economic asset and social good. Now that we have multiple ways of generating power with little environmental impact, that should always be the priority.
Spending money on insulation schemes, to pick the example you mentioned, is, on a macro level, a complete waste of money. It's an extremely expensive way of reducing demand in one very specific area, without having enough scale to give any general benefits.
Spend that money on new generation facilities and overall supply improves, prices go down for everyone (presuming a free market) and it increases reliability in the system. Build enough and you end up with a surplus of supply, which attracts energy-intensive industries, providing jobs, and can bring opportunities to profit by supplying excess to countries with an energy shortfall.
We should be building wind farms, solar and SMRs as fast as possible. Having too much energy is always better than not having enough.
Could not agree more. This 100% is correct.
If energy is clean, then there's no environmental reason to demand less.
If energy is not clean, then there's no way to get to net zero.
Demand reduction achieves diddly squat and is unscientific gibberish to further hairshirt agendas.
Clean, abundant, cheap and well-used energy is the future.
I think efficiency is always a benefit, so I would support improved insulation, LED lighting, air fryers, etc, but when some people talk about demand reduction it sounds like rationing.
Efficiency is great, yes. I love my air fryer, and LED lights and so on and so forth.
But that is embracing newer technologies that are an improvement, not stepping backwards.
My air fryer cooks better than the oven, most days of the year. Christmas Day I cooked with the oven due to the scale of what was being cooked, but most other days the air fryer operates instead, cooking better and cheaper.
When people want to say "don't travel", or "sit in the cold", or "don't consume" then they're not seeking to either help the environment in a scientific manner, or improve matters for people, they're pushing a bonkers agenda.
Air fryer = small oven
Arguably ‘very small oven’ to be accurate. Very efficient. I have no idea why they are/were marketed as air fryers, as they don’t fry food(at best it’s roasted).
They've very small fan ovens. The circulation of the hot air is a crucial part of how they work.
Unless you live in a caravan, I still don’t really see the point in them. Air fryer owners bang on about them but it doesn’t feel like they do anything I can’t already do with my oven
Huge time and energy savers. When I'm making beige food for the kids it's just better from the airfryer.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I think it's more that the debate is effectively over. Very few people continue to deny it exists, or that humans are responsible for it. You still get people like Casino_Royale who think it's just some culture war game, but the data is becoming metronomic - we're about to declare this year our hottest year on record (again).
Er, sod off, old boy.
I've never said anything but climate change is a real thing on here, and have been remarkably consistent in saying that for decades. I also regularly cite Thatcher as one of the first major political leaders to draw attention to the issue, because she understood the science. And a reason why those on the Right shouldn't view climate change as a secret Lefty plot.
Take that back please.
Nope - you suggested that "Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience" - as if caring about the environment is simply a fad for the left. From my experience, concerns for Gaza and the consequences of climate change are both deeply held - and can be at the same time.
I'm sure your personal concern about climate change is sincere - perhaps consider that is also the case for those you would normally consider your political opposites.
People who desire to embrace clean technologies to transition away from dirty ones care about the environment.
People who desire us not to extract domestic oil and gas but to burn as many imports as desired instead do not.
People who wish to prevent others from having holidays or living their lives do not.
People who wish to use the mantra of the environment to further their own agenda, whether it be smashing capitalism or pushing veganism or any other bullshit do not.
There is nothing wrong with caring about the environment and we should seek to transition to clean technologies to do so, the problem is too many with a hate-filled agenda they try to sneak past others in the name of the environment.
Moving past climate change denial to climatr change bargaining:
"Climate change is happenning but we don't need to take serious action, we can carry on much the same"
Embracing clean technologies is taking serious action, which enables us to carry on much the same, yes.
Cutting off our nose to spite our face is not taking serious action and won't impact global emissions as the rest of the world isn't stupid enough to do that.
It's the tragedy of the commons: if everyone else has your attitude, the problem never gets fixed. However, fortunately, by and large, that hasn't happened and we have had good international cooperation with countries working together. Our net zero plans have been pretty similar to other countries'. Until Trump came along and blew a whole in the US position, that is.
Wrong, if people have your attitude, the problem never gets fixed.
With my attitude, we embrace clean technologies and fix the problems.
Cutting off our nose and saying "turn down the thermostat", "don't travel", "don't eat meat" or any other bullshit does diddly squat to fix the problems.
Embracing clean technologies does. Once the problem is fixed, others can copy our solutions, and we can copy theirs.
Invest in science and technology and research, don't cut consumption.
We may be talking at cross-purposes then -- my apologies. I'm not saying "turn down the thermostat", "don't travel", "don't eat meat". I am rejecting the idea that we shouldn't do things beause we're a small part of global emissions or because other countries are supposedly not doing the same.
I’m making myself the Ottolenghi lemon, anchovy, sardine and herb pasta I’ve described here before
When buying the lemons I noticed the Waitrose No1 unwaxed Sorrento lemons and couldn’t resist. They’re at least four inches long and two and a half wide. And they come with leaves
I can’t wait to taste them
We had roast lamb tonight, with roast (purple) potatoes, (yellow) carrots, beetroot and parsley root. (The beetroot and parsley root were their regular colours.)
I had chips with the relatives, and now we're watching the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on BBC Four. We are so posh.
I’m making myself the Ottolenghi lemon, anchovy, sardine and herb pasta I’ve described here before
When buying the lemons I noticed the Waitrose No1 unwaxed Sorrento lemons and couldn’t resist. They’re at least four inches long and two and a half wide. And they come with leaves
I can’t wait to taste them
We had roast lamb tonight, with roast (purple) potatoes, (yellow) carrots, beetroot and parsley root. (The beetroot and parsley root were their regular colours.)
I had chips with the relatives, and now we're watching the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on BBC Four. We are so posh.
Relatives and chips.. did they taste a bit like pork?
Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms.
I do beg to differ, here. Demand reduction measures are an admission a country's energy policy has failed. Abundant, affordable energy has long been acknowledged to be a significant economic asset and social good. Now that we have multiple ways of generating power with little environmental impact, that should always be the priority.
Spending money on insulation schemes, to pick the example you mentioned, is, on a macro level, a complete waste of money. It's an extremely expensive way of reducing demand in one very specific area, without having enough scale to give any general benefits.
Spend that money on new generation facilities and overall supply improves, prices go down for everyone (presuming a free market) and it increases reliability in the system. Build enough and you end up with a surplus of supply, which attracts energy-intensive industries, providing jobs, and can bring opportunities to profit by supplying excess to countries with an energy shortfall.
We should be building wind farms, solar and SMRs as fast as possible. Having too much energy is always better than not having enough.
Could not agree more. This 100% is correct.
If energy is clean, then there's no environmental reason to demand less.
If energy is not clean, then there's no way to get to net zero.
Demand reduction achieves diddly squat and is unscientific gibberish to further hairshirt agendas.
Clean, abundant, cheap and well-used energy is the future.
I think efficiency is always a benefit, so I would support improved insulation, LED lighting, air fryers, etc, but when some people talk about demand reduction it sounds like rationing.
Efficiency is great, yes. I love my air fryer, and LED lights and so on and so forth.
But that is embracing newer technologies that are an improvement, not stepping backwards.
My air fryer cooks better than the oven, most days of the year. Christmas Day I cooked with the oven due to the scale of what was being cooked, but most other days the air fryer operates instead, cooking better and cheaper.
When people want to say "don't travel", or "sit in the cold", or "don't consume" then they're not seeking to either help the environment in a scientific manner, or improve matters for people, they're pushing a bonkers agenda.
Air fryer = small oven
Arguably ‘very small oven’ to be accurate. Very efficient. I have no idea why they are/were marketed as air fryers, as they don’t fry food(at best it’s roasted).
They've very small fan ovens. The circulation of the hot air is a crucial part of how they work.
Unless you live in a caravan, I still don’t really see the point in them. Air fryer owners bang on about them but it doesn’t feel like they do anything I can’t already do with my oven
They are more energy efficient than your oven. (That's why @BartholomewRoberts loves them.)
The circulating hot air gives a somewhat different effect than a regular or even a fan oven.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I think it's more that the debate is effectively over. Very few people continue to deny it exists, or that humans are responsible for it. You still get people like Casino_Royale who think it's just some culture war game, but the data is becoming metronomic - we're about to declare this year our hottest year on record (again).
Er, sod off, old boy.
I've never said anything but climate change is a real thing on here, and have been remarkably consistent in saying that for decades. I also regularly cite Thatcher as one of the first major political leaders to draw attention to the issue, because she understood the science. And a reason why those on the Right shouldn't view climate change as a secret Lefty plot.
Take that back please.
Nope - you suggested that "Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience" - as if caring about the environment is simply a fad for the left. From my experience, concerns for Gaza and the consequences of climate change are both deeply held - and can be at the same time.
I'm sure your personal concern about climate change is sincere - perhaps consider that is also the case for those you would normally consider your political opposites.
People who desire to embrace clean technologies to transition away from dirty ones care about the environment.
People who desire us not to extract domestic oil and gas but to burn as many imports as desired instead do not.
People who wish to prevent others from having holidays or living their lives do not.
People who wish to use the mantra of the environment to further their own agenda, whether it be smashing capitalism or pushing veganism or any other bullshit do not.
There is nothing wrong with caring about the environment and we should seek to transition to clean technologies to do so, the problem is too many with a hate-filled agenda they try to sneak past others in the name of the environment.
Moving past climate change denial to climatr change bargaining:
"Climate change is happenning but we don't need to take serious action, we can carry on much the same"
Embracing clean technologies is taking serious action, which enables us to carry on much the same, yes.
Cutting off our nose to spite our face is not taking serious action and won't impact global emissions as the rest of the world isn't stupid enough to do that.
It's the tragedy of the commons: if everyone else has your attitude, the problem never gets fixed. However, fortunately, by and large, that hasn't happened and we have had good international cooperation with countries working together. Our net zero plans have been pretty similar to other countries'. Until Trump came along and blew a whole in the US position, that is.
Wrong, if people have your attitude, the problem never gets fixed.
With my attitude, we embrace clean technologies and fix the problems.
Cutting off our nose and saying "turn down the thermostat", "don't travel", "don't eat meat" or any other bullshit does diddly squat to fix the problems.
Embracing clean technologies does. Once the problem is fixed, others can copy our solutions, and we can copy theirs.
Invest in science and technology and research, don't cut consumption.
We may be talking at cross-purposes then -- my apologies. I'm not saying "turn down the thermostat", "don't travel", "don't eat meat". I am rejecting the idea that we shouldn't do things beause we're a small part of global emissions or because other countries are supposedly not doing the same.
Then we are, because I said we should fix the problems by investing in clean technologies to replace dirty ones, which enables us to carry on as before, but better.
Investing in clean tech has the advantage that once clean tech is developed, others copy it, and we can copy theirs too, so win/win.
Cutting off our nose to spite our face does nothing to fix the actual problems, but is the desired outcome of some people. That things do not go on as before, that we stop consuming, that we stop driving, that we stop travelling. Well that's never happening, what we need is clean travel, clean tech, clean energy, and bountiful amounts of it.
I’m making myself the Ottolenghi lemon, anchovy, sardine and herb pasta I’ve described here before
When buying the lemons I noticed the Waitrose No1 unwaxed Sorrento lemons and couldn’t resist. They’re at least four inches long and two and a half wide. And they come with leaves
I can’t wait to taste them
We had roast lamb tonight, with roast (purple) potatoes, (yellow) carrots, beetroot and parsley root. (The beetroot and parsley root were their regular colours.)
I had chips with the relatives, and now we're watching the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on BBC Four. We are so posh.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I think it's more that the debate is effectively over. Very few people continue to deny it exists, or that humans are responsible for it. You still get people like Casino_Royale who think it's just some culture war game, but the data is becoming metronomic - we're about to declare this year our hottest year on record (again). I think we all understand that with Trump any debate/campaign for mitigation is fruitless until we get a sane Thatcher-type figure on the right again.
At some point we are going to need to have a serious conversation about adaptation. That's what so pathetic about those people who suggest we can't stop it happening - fine, so where's the big plan for 3 degrees+?
On the domestic front, we have nobody building any water infrastructure, and a virtual ban on dredging for the last 20-25 years, due to EU habitat legislation, then we blame the resulting summer droughts and winter floods on climate change.
I don't think it is included in the above - one of our basic planning policies since about 2010 has been that surface water runoff from a development should be no more than the pre-existing site - that's where all our balancing ponds come from. The last one of these I did required a preliminary design as part of Outline Permission, required to establish that the site was suitable for development; it was done by Mott McDonald and came to around £250 per potential housing unit just for the preliminary design.
The Thames Tideway Tunnel, which came online last year, was about £5 billion on its own.
That's all water infrastructure, as is investment in sewerage treatment, canal and river maintenance, and the rest.
That is a fair response to a point I made that included hyperbole but was still an important one.
There have been no major reservoirs built for over 30 years - the last one (there are some being built now) was completed in 1992. At the same time, the population has risen by 11 million.
I find that staggering, and it makes me extremely cynical when people panic about our weather conditions.
In general I'd argue that building more reservoirs should be the last resort, as it is a 'tailpipe' solution. Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms. So for me that means measures such as leak reduction and 100% water meters, which apply the market mechanism and themselves generate a reduction of 10-12% in water usage, before we spend hundreds of millions on new reservoirs.
I think one of the unforeseen problems of the last budget will be caused by the unbundling of insulation etc programmes from energy bills - it can now be seen and will be far easier to target in political debate. The programme has been very successful for 15 years doing basics such as loft insulation, until the current one is under severe question - when the programme has been doing more complex installations (eg external wall insulation) with inadequate standards / supervision.
I am sure you would argue that - I would argue the opposite. Your argument leads to the British economy where it now is - mine leads to the Chinese economy where it now is. Abundant and cheap energy is a pre-requisite for any prosperous society, and is the lifeblood of human progress.
More specifically, having a deliberate policy of failing to build sufficient reservoirs, and instead blame the public for water shortages - encouraging them to water their gardens less, even to shower less (truly revolting) and take other punitive measures to combat 'water shortages' (when Winter floods will be along soon) is simply gaslighting.
I admit I just don't see that as a viable argument. I think you are assuming a zero-sum game, which is not the case. I don't see how a concept of blame applies.
Achieving the same outcome using fewer resources is a simple increase in efficiency. How is that not a benefit.
Why should we want to use 25% more water (or electricity) than necessary? Would you argue against reduced fuel consumption in a motor vehicle on the same basis?
The point about reservoirs is that if water consumption is reduced, fewer reservoirs is not "insufficient"; it changes the definition of "sufficient" to be a smaller quantity.
To turn the question around, why should we waste scarce resources on building unnecessary reservoirs or power stations?
For a specific example on water, current use in Denmark is around 105l per person per day, compared to 130-140l in England. Denmark does not seem to have an economy on its knees, and is noticeably prosperous.
Because water is not scarce. It is especially unscarce in the UK. It is an abundant resource that is there to be enjoyed and used. The idea of convincing the public that it is running out and that they are showering too long or gardening too much is a despicable perversion of the truth that would mystify and appall our ancestors.
Chronic mismanagement may get us to water shortages, but it certainly shouldn't be on the cards.
And we really really shouldn't be operating things at the bare minimum level in an any case, that's not very sustainable if any problems ever emerge.
Yes. A sensible safety margin means that a drought has to be more severe to cause serious difficulties.
Indeed, if you're trying to adapt to a world with more extreme weather phenomenon, then more reservoirs seems about the most sensible possible first step to do for that.
The lack of investment shows that for all the talk, our politicians are not remotely taking the climate seriously.
Yes, all true.
Although there are a variety of different approaches you might want to take. A domestic greywater system - to collect rainwater from your roof to use to flush toilets - seems like a good thing that would improve resilience.
I'm looking into the differences between water consumption in Britain and Denmark. In Aarhus they claim to lose only 5% of their water to leaks, while in Britain that figure is 19%. (It's 37% in Ireland - I'm glad we have our own well)
I'd be interested to know if you turn up anything obscure.
Interesting points are that Denmark has been working on this consistently since the 1980s, and that they have hardly any reservoirs (very flat, Denmark), and a fairly low population density.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I think it's more that the debate is effectively over. Very few people continue to deny it exists, or that humans are responsible for it. You still get people like Casino_Royale who think it's just some culture war game, but the data is becoming metronomic - we're about to declare this year our hottest year on record (again).
Er, sod off, old boy.
I've never said anything but climate change is a real thing on here, and have been remarkably consistent in saying that for decades. I also regularly cite Thatcher as one of the first major political leaders to draw attention to the issue, because she understood the science. And a reason why those on the Right shouldn't view climate change as a secret Lefty plot.
Take that back please.
Nope - you suggested that "Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience" - as if caring about the environment is simply a fad for the left. From my experience, concerns for Gaza and the consequences of climate change are both deeply held - and can be at the same time.
I'm sure your personal concern about climate change is sincere - perhaps consider that is also the case for those you would normally consider your political opposites.
People who desire to embrace clean technologies to transition away from dirty ones care about the environment.
People who desire us not to extract domestic oil and gas but to burn as many imports as desired instead do not.
People who wish to prevent others from having holidays or living their lives do not.
People who wish to use the mantra of the environment to further their own agenda, whether it be smashing capitalism or pushing veganism or any other bullshit do not.
There is nothing wrong with caring about the environment and we should seek to transition to clean technologies to do so, the problem is too many with a hate-filled agenda they try to sneak past others in the name of the environment.
Moving past climate change denial to climatr change bargaining:
"Climate change is happenning but we don't need to take serious action, we can carry on much the same"
Embracing clean technologies is taking serious action, which enables us to carry on much the same, yes.
Cutting off our nose to spite our face is not taking serious action and won't impact global emissions as the rest of the world isn't stupid enough to do that.
It's the tragedy of the commons: if everyone else has your attitude, the problem never gets fixed. However, fortunately, by and large, that hasn't happened and we have had good international cooperation with countries working together. Our net zero plans have been pretty similar to other countries'. Until Trump came along and blew a whole in the US position, that is.
Wrong, if people have your attitude, the problem never gets fixed.
With my attitude, we embrace clean technologies and fix the problems.
Cutting off our nose and saying "turn down the thermostat", "don't travel", "don't eat meat" or any other bullshit does diddly squat to fix the problems.
Embracing clean technologies does. Once the problem is fixed, others can copy our solutions, and we can copy theirs.
Invest in science and technology and research, don't cut consumption.
We may be talking at cross-purposes then -- my apologies. I'm not saying "turn down the thermostat", "don't travel", "don't eat meat". I am rejecting the idea that we shouldn't do things beause we're a small part of global emissions or because other countries are supposedly not doing the same.
Then we are, because I said we should fix the problems by investing in clean technologies to replace dirty ones, which enables us to carry on as before, but better.
Investing in clean tech has the advantage that once clean tech is developed, others copy it, and we can copy theirs too, so win/win.
Cutting off our nose to spite our face does nothing to fix the actual problems, but is the desired outcome of some people. That things do not go on as before, that we stop consuming, that we stop driving, that we stop travelling. Well that's never happening, what we need is clean travel, clean tech, clean energy, and bountiful amounts of it.
I'm looking into the differences between water consumption in Britain and Denmark. In Aarhus they claim to lose only 5% of their water to leaks, while in Britain that figure is 19%.
Aarhus is a very, very, very fine hus. With two cats in the yard, life used to be so yard.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I think it's more that the debate is effectively over. Very few people continue to deny it exists, or that humans are responsible for it. You still get people like Casino_Royale who think it's just some culture war game, but the data is becoming metronomic - we're about to declare this year our hottest year on record (again). I think we all understand that with Trump any debate/campaign for mitigation is fruitless until we get a sane Thatcher-type figure on the right again.
At some point we are going to need to have a serious conversation about adaptation. That's what so pathetic about those people who suggest we can't stop it happening - fine, so where's the big plan for 3 degrees+?
On the domestic front, we have nobody building any water infrastructure, and a virtual ban on dredging for the last 20-25 years, due to EU habitat legislation, then we blame the resulting summer droughts and winter floods on climate change.
I don't think it is included in the above - one of our basic planning policies since about 2010 has been that surface water runoff from a development should be no more than the pre-existing site - that's where all our balancing ponds come from. The last one of these I did required a preliminary design as part of Outline Permission, required to establish that the site was suitable for development; it was done by Mott McDonald and came to around £250 per potential housing unit just for the preliminary design.
The Thames Tideway Tunnel, which came online last year, was about £5 billion on its own.
That's all water infrastructure, as is investment in sewerage treatment, canal and river maintenance, and the rest.
That is a fair response to a point I made that included hyperbole but was still an important one.
There have been no major reservoirs built for over 30 years - the last one (there are some being built now) was completed in 1992. At the same time, the population has risen by 11 million.
I find that staggering, and it makes me extremely cynical when people panic about our weather conditions.
In general I'd argue that building more reservoirs should be the last resort, as it is a 'tailpipe' solution. Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms. So for me that means measures such as leak reduction and 100% water meters, which apply the market mechanism and themselves generate a reduction of 10-12% in water usage, before we spend hundreds of millions on new reservoirs.
I think one of the unforeseen problems of the last budget will be caused by the unbundling of insulation etc programmes from energy bills - it can now be seen and will be far easier to target in political debate. The programme has been very successful for 15 years doing basics such as loft insulation, until the current one is under severe question - when the programme has been doing more complex installations (eg external wall insulation) with inadequate standards / supervision.
I am sure you would argue that - I would argue the opposite. Your argument leads to the British economy where it now is - mine leads to the Chinese economy where it now is. Abundant and cheap energy is a pre-requisite for any prosperous society, and is the lifeblood of human progress.
More specifically, having a deliberate policy of failing to build sufficient reservoirs, and instead blame the public for water shortages - encouraging them to water their gardens less, even to shower less (truly revolting) and take other punitive measures to combat 'water shortages' (when Winter floods will be along soon) is simply gaslighting.
I admit I just don't see that as a viable argument. I think you are assuming a zero-sum game, which is not the case. I don't see how a concept of blame applies.
Achieving the same outcome using fewer resources is a simple increase in efficiency. How is that not a benefit.
Why should we want to use 25% more water (or electricity) than necessary? Would you argue against reduced fuel consumption in a motor vehicle on the same basis?
The point about reservoirs is that if water consumption is reduced, fewer reservoirs is not "insufficient"; it changes the definition of "sufficient" to be a smaller quantity.
To turn the question around, why should we waste scarce resources on building unnecessary reservoirs or power stations?
For a specific example on water, current use in Denmark is around 105l per person per day, compared to 130-140l in England. Denmark does not seem to have an economy on its knees, and is noticeably prosperous.
Because water is not scarce. It is especially unscarce in the UK. It is an abundant resource that is there to be enjoyed and used. The idea of convincing the public that it is running out and that they are showering too long or gardening too much is a despicable perversion of the truth that would mystify and appall our ancestors.
Chronic mismanagement may get us to water shortages, but it certainly shouldn't be on the cards.
And we really really shouldn't be operating things at the bare minimum level in an any case, that's not very sustainable if any problems ever emerge.
Yes. A sensible safety margin means that a drought has to be more severe to cause serious difficulties.
Indeed, if you're trying to adapt to a world with more extreme weather phenomenon, then more reservoirs seems about the most sensible possible first step to do for that.
The lack of investment shows that for all the talk, our politicians are not remotely taking the climate seriously.
Yes, all true.
Although there are a variety of different approaches you might want to take. A domestic greywater system - to collect rainwater from your roof to use to flush toilets - seems like a good thing that would improve resilience.
It is standard in Japan that the sink you wash your hands in after using the toilet has an outlet that goes to fill the cistern.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I think it's more that the debate is effectively over. Very few people continue to deny it exists, or that humans are responsible for it. You still get people like Casino_Royale who think it's just some culture war game, but the data is becoming metronomic - we're about to declare this year our hottest year on record (again).
Er, sod off, old boy.
I've never said anything but climate change is a real thing on here, and have been remarkably consistent in saying that for decades. I also regularly cite Thatcher as one of the first major political leaders to draw attention to the issue, because she understood the science. And a reason why those on the Right shouldn't view climate change as a secret Lefty plot.
Take that back please.
Nope - you suggested that "Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience" - as if caring about the environment is simply a fad for the left. From my experience, concerns for Gaza and the consequences of climate change are both deeply held - and can be at the same time.
I'm sure your personal concern about climate change is sincere - perhaps consider that is also the case for those you would normally consider your political opposites.
People who desire to embrace clean technologies to transition away from dirty ones care about the environment.
People who desire us not to extract domestic oil and gas but to burn as many imports as desired instead do not.
People who wish to prevent others from having holidays or living their lives do not.
People who wish to use the mantra of the environment to further their own agenda, whether it be smashing capitalism or pushing veganism or any other bullshit do not.
There is nothing wrong with caring about the environment and we should seek to transition to clean technologies to do so, the problem is too many with a hate-filled agenda they try to sneak past others in the name of the environment.
Moving past climate change denial to climatr change bargaining:
"Climate change is happenning but we don't need to take serious action, we can carry on much the same"
Embracing clean technologies is taking serious action, which enables us to carry on much the same, yes.
Cutting off our nose to spite our face is not taking serious action and won't impact global emissions as the rest of the world isn't stupid enough to do that.
It's the tragedy of the commons: if everyone else has your attitude, the problem never gets fixed. However, fortunately, by and large, that hasn't happened and we have had good international cooperation with countries working together. Our net zero plans have been pretty similar to other countries'. Until Trump came along and blew a whole in the US position, that is.
Wrong, if people have your attitude, the problem never gets fixed.
With my attitude, we embrace clean technologies and fix the problems.
Cutting off our nose and saying "turn down the thermostat", "don't travel", "don't eat meat" or any other bullshit does diddly squat to fix the problems.
Embracing clean technologies does. Once the problem is fixed, others can copy our solutions, and we can copy theirs.
Invest in science and technology and research, don't cut consumption.
We may be talking at cross-purposes then -- my apologies. I'm not saying "turn down the thermostat", "don't travel", "don't eat meat". I am rejecting the idea that we shouldn't do things beause we're a small part of global emissions or because other countries are supposedly not doing the same.
Then we are, because I said we should fix the problems by investing in clean technologies to replace dirty ones, which enables us to carry on as before, but better.
Investing in clean tech has the advantage that once clean tech is developed, others copy it, and we can copy theirs too, so win/win.
Cutting off our nose to spite our face does nothing to fix the actual problems, but is the desired outcome of some people. That things do not go on as before, that we stop consuming, that we stop driving, that we stop travelling. Well that's never happening, what we need is clean travel, clean tech, clean energy, and bountiful amounts of it.
I think you're railing against a straw man there.
Sadly, I'm not. I'm railing against a view repeatedly expressed here, including earlier by Foxy (not for the first time I might add).
There is sadly an attitude amongst some that believing that technology will solve our problems is somehow wishful or magical thinking and that we need to cut things instead.
Well to invoke Arthur C Clarke, any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic - and that is precisely what we need to tackle climate change. Invest in clean technologies, don't tell people what they can and can't do.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I think it's more that the debate is effectively over. Very few people continue to deny it exists, or that humans are responsible for it. You still get people like Casino_Royale who think it's just some culture war game, but the data is becoming metronomic - we're about to declare this year our hottest year on record (again). I think we all understand that with Trump any debate/campaign for mitigation is fruitless until we get a sane Thatcher-type figure on the right again.
At some point we are going to need to have a serious conversation about adaptation. That's what so pathetic about those people who suggest we can't stop it happening - fine, so where's the big plan for 3 degrees+?
On the domestic front, we have nobody building any water infrastructure, and a virtual ban on dredging for the last 20-25 years, due to EU habitat legislation, then we blame the resulting summer droughts and winter floods on climate change.
I don't think it is included in the above - one of our basic planning policies since about 2010 has been that surface water runoff from a development should be no more than the pre-existing site - that's where all our balancing ponds come from. The last one of these I did required a preliminary design as part of Outline Permission, required to establish that the site was suitable for development; it was done by Mott McDonald and came to around £250 per potential housing unit just for the preliminary design.
The Thames Tideway Tunnel, which came online last year, was about £5 billion on its own.
That's all water infrastructure, as is investment in sewerage treatment, canal and river maintenance, and the rest.
That is a fair response to a point I made that included hyperbole but was still an important one.
There have been no major reservoirs built for over 30 years - the last one (there are some being built now) was completed in 1992. At the same time, the population has risen by 11 million.
I find that staggering, and it makes me extremely cynical when people panic about our weather conditions.
In general I'd argue that building more reservoirs should be the last resort, as it is a 'tailpipe' solution. Reduction of demand should come first, just as reduction of energy demand should come before building more power stations or windmills or solar farms. So for me that means measures such as leak reduction and 100% water meters, which apply the market mechanism and themselves generate a reduction of 10-12% in water usage, before we spend hundreds of millions on new reservoirs.
I think one of the unforeseen problems of the last budget will be caused by the unbundling of insulation etc programmes from energy bills - it can now be seen and will be far easier to target in political debate. The programme has been very successful for 15 years doing basics such as loft insulation, until the current one is under severe question - when the programme has been doing more complex installations (eg external wall insulation) with inadequate standards / supervision.
I am sure you would argue that - I would argue the opposite. Your argument leads to the British economy where it now is - mine leads to the Chinese economy where it now is. Abundant and cheap energy is a pre-requisite for any prosperous society, and is the lifeblood of human progress.
More specifically, having a deliberate policy of failing to build sufficient reservoirs, and instead blame the public for water shortages - encouraging them to water their gardens less, even to shower less (truly revolting) and take other punitive measures to combat 'water shortages' (when Winter floods will be along soon) is simply gaslighting.
I admit I just don't see that as a viable argument. I think you are assuming a zero-sum game, which is not the case. I don't see how a concept of blame applies.
Achieving the same outcome using fewer resources is a simple increase in efficiency. How is that not a benefit.
Why should we want to use 25% more water (or electricity) than necessary? Would you argue against reduced fuel consumption in a motor vehicle on the same basis?
The point about reservoirs is that if water consumption is reduced, fewer reservoirs is not "insufficient"; it changes the definition of "sufficient" to be a smaller quantity.
To turn the question around, why should we waste scarce resources on building unnecessary reservoirs or power stations?
For a specific example on water, current use in Denmark is around 105l per person per day, compared to 130-140l in England. Denmark does not seem to have an economy on its knees, and is noticeably prosperous.
Because water is not scarce. It is especially unscarce in the UK. It is an abundant resource that is there to be enjoyed and used. The idea of convincing the public that it is running out and that they are showering too long or gardening too much is a despicable perversion of the truth that would mystify and appall our ancestors.
Chronic mismanagement may get us to water shortages, but it certainly shouldn't be on the cards.
And we really really shouldn't be operating things at the bare minimum level in an any case, that's not very sustainable if any problems ever emerge.
Yes. A sensible safety margin means that a drought has to be more severe to cause serious difficulties.
Indeed, if you're trying to adapt to a world with more extreme weather phenomenon, then more reservoirs seems about the most sensible possible first step to do for that.
The lack of investment shows that for all the talk, our politicians are not remotely taking the climate seriously.
Yes, all true.
Although there are a variety of different approaches you might want to take. A domestic greywater system - to collect rainwater from your roof to use to flush toilets - seems like a good thing that would improve resilience.
It is standard in Japan that the sink you wash your hands in after using the toilet has an outlet that goes to fill the cistern.
Is it there, or somewhere else, where they have toilets with a hand washing basin *built into* the cistern?
Comments
However, I'm yet to see a pragmatic system at scale that's economically viable.
Distributional challenges will remain - I suspect that the cost of energy won't come down significantly as demand soars to meet new generation. So people will still continue to want to reduce their consumption where possible. Nowt wrong with that.
*how we generate it is a different question, given the positive and negative externalities of the different options.
Achieving the same outcome using fewer resources is a simple increase in efficiency. How is that not a benefit.
Why should we want to use 25% more water (or electricity) than necessary? Would you argue against reduced fuel consumption in a motor vehicle on the same basis?
The point about reservoirs is that if water consumption is reduced, fewer reservoirs is not "insufficient"; it changes the definition of "sufficient" to be a smaller quantity.
To turn the question around, why should we waste scarce resources on building unnecessary reservoirs or power stations?
For a specific example on water, current use in Denmark is around 105l per person per day, compared to 130-140l in England. Denmark does not seem to have an economy on its knees, and is noticeably prosperous.
I can imagine seasonal migrations of people from south to north in summer and back down in winter - perhaps.
Consumption related emissions have fallen a lot and quickly. Nearly 800m tonnes 20 years ago to less than 500m today.
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-kingdom
The government doesn't need to do anything to "wean the UK off fossil fuels".
It will happen anyway, on probably a very similar timeframe, if we just leave it to the market.
Things like CCS are fundamentally stupid because they are a massive long term capital commitment for a kind of power than will simply be uneconomic.
The government should get out of the way, simplify planning, and let the market do it's thing.
If energy is clean, then there's no environmental reason to demand less.
If energy is not clean, then there's no way to get to net zero.
Demand reduction achieves diddly squat and is unscientific gibberish to further hairshirt agendas.
Clean, abundant, cheap and well-used energy is the future.
Heat pumps supply heat in winter and cooling in summer, which is more being supplied than just heat in the winter.
They change the demand from gas to electricity, but it is not "turn down the thermostat to save energy" hairshirt gibberish.
Would solve most of our problems.
But that is embracing newer technologies that are an improvement, not stepping backwards.
My air fryer cooks better than the oven, most days of the year. Christmas Day I cooked with the oven due to the scale of what was being cooked, but most other days the air fryer operates instead, cooking better and cheaper.
When people want to say "don't travel", or "sit in the cold", or "don't consume" then they're not seeking to either help the environment in a scientific manner, or improve matters for people, they're pushing a bonkers agenda.
But few authors are successful in one genre let alone two
I’m kind of despairing at the news about Mr Abd El Fattah.
It suggests that the entirety of government machinery is perpetuating a hoax on the wider public.
Although I understand Abd El Fattah is a noted dissident from a celebrated family of dissidents, he ought not to have passed the Fit and Proper test for citizenship. And it beggars belief that almost the entire political class, from both legacy mainstream political parties, campaigned so strongly for his release when his social media activity was always publicly available.
Indeed, Dan Brown has just published his latest.
Pretty much every thread became hijacked. Sometimes entertainingly, but more often not.
His travel writing was incredibly banal.
I see he is now posting on X about his flat redecoration. Let’s just say that he is safe from the possibility of being featured in World of Interiors.
Nothing has changed - any bandwagon that is superficially attractive will get jumped on.
I’ve mentioned before getting an MP enthusiastic about growing peanuts in Africa to make oil for ZEV. After 10 minutes conversation he was ready to take it to the Minister. Wish I had been there for that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanganyika_groundnut_scheme
These witless MPs have research teams too who could do it.
They’re keen enough to do it against political opponents.
It’s part of due diligence for hiring people for many jobs.
Now it seems as though the entire state has been taken in, and to add insult to injury, is directly funding the hoaxters who are busy making fools of us.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect MPs to individually research the rights and wrongs of cases like these, unless those cases individual MPs be for eg the PM, FS, or HS.
Indeed it might be be of the main self-perpetuating activities of the “elite”, with both left and right wing flavours.
Researcher - “OK”
When it was launched as a product it was marketed as frying chips, but without the oil. We got one originally to do chips when it first launched, as an alternative to a deep fat fryer, and quickly realised it could do all sorts of other cooking.
Now they're ubiquitous and used for much more than just chips, but the name has stuck.
That applies to any number of issues - one of the depressing things twitter has revealed to us is that someone can be an acclaimed academic, a billionaire businessman, a powerful politician, someone with a towering intellect and ability...and they are just as likely as any old idiot to blindly believe something they read online which aligns to their views, or just be too lazy to look at the facts on something.
I don't know how people who believe in an all controlling elite reconcile that with endless evidence the rich and powerful are also damn fools.
They were certainly originally marketed for chips though.
And we really really shouldn't be operating things at the bare minimum level in an any case, that's not very sustainable if any problems ever emerge.
We are already being far more efficient than we were pre-privatisation. What we don't have is reservoir growth to keep up with our humongous population growth.
Reservoirs also serve a function of balancing dry and wet spells. Prolonged periods of lack of rainfall, or excess rainfall, can be better managed with extra reservoirs to balance those peaks and troughs.
It turns out that when you give up control of something, you give up control.
Like how after The Hunger Games was huge, Hollywood began making films out of every YA fantasy and dystopic series they could get their hands on. They don't now, as most bombed, but they do still exist. Or how comic book movies were a licence to print money for 15 years, and now even the successful ones make less money than 5 years ago - fewer will be made, but some successful big ones will still come along.
Won’t be long before this guy is on Newsnight as a parliamentary candidate.
"Cease to give up control". Or something.
Trump is simply part of Russian information warfare.
Meanwhile, the Spanish report that a Russian shadow fleet vessel that sunk off the coast of Cartegena about a year ago was carrying nuclear reactors to North Korea (in violation of sanctions) and that the ship shows signs of having been sunk by a supercavitating torpedo. To my knowledge only three navies operate supercavitating torpedoes.
The Russian, Iranian and German navies.
Now, *that's* a story.
It will be a tall order, as the polls you show demonstrate they will at least pick up Maine. They need 4 seats for control (given the 2 Independents will also back them). The Cook PVI is not looking at some of the latest polls.
In North Carolina the latest polls have former declared Dem candidate Governor Roy Cooper beating all Republican potential opponents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_Senate_election_in_North_Carolina#General_election
In Ohio the special election is tied in polls between GOP incumbent Jon Husted and Democratic declared likely candidate former US Senator Sherrod Brown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_Senate_special_election_in_Ohio#General_election
So if the Dems win the above 3 they need just one extra pickup. In Florida incumbent GOP Senator Moody leads potential Dems in the special election polls there.
The pickup therefore could come in Texas if the GOP pick Paxton over incumbent Senator Cornyn. Cornyn leads all Dem opponents but former AG Paxton is tied with state representative Talarico if he is Dem nominee, although Paxton beats US representative Crockett if she is Dem nominee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_Senate_election_in_Texas#Polling_3
Otherwise Joni Ernst is not running again in Iowa which might give the opening needed for a Dem pickup. Alaska too is not out of the question, incumbent GOP Senator Sullivan trails former US representative and declared Dem candidate Mary Peltola in the latest poll
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_Senate_election_in_Alaska
NEW: Yvette Cooper launches urgent review into 'serious information failures' in the case of Alaa Abd El-Fattah: 'It is clear that this has been an unacceptable failure and that long standing procedures and due diligence arrangements have been completely inadequate'
(I do have some sympathy for those not checking the details. Given the amount of nonsense that clutters up MP inboxes, there's not the capacity to check all the facts on every case.)
I agree that they're the best way to cook sausages.
It’s private vs public as opposed to private member vs government
Though I agree "tiny fan oven" is far more descriptive.
Using one of these, rather than the electric range, is a good example of incremental demand reduction with no loss of utility, as it saved us about £100 per annum on the electricity bill.
The lack of investment shows that for all the talk, our politicians are not remotely taking the climate seriously.
When buying the lemons I noticed the Waitrose No1 unwaxed Sorrento lemons and couldn’t resist. They’re at least four inches long and two and a half wide. And they come with leaves
I can’t wait to taste them
Not exactly the epoxyclipse
Should we do something about her citizenship?
Though I appreciate when people transition from 'not in my back yard' (ie, suggesting it may be right elsewhere just not near them) to just 'bugger it, we don't need it anyway'. Feels less dishonest, even if I think it is wrong.
With my attitude, we embrace clean technologies and fix the problems.
Cutting off our nose and saying "turn down the thermostat", "don't travel", "don't eat meat" or any other bullshit does diddly squat to fix the problems.
Embracing clean technologies does. Once the problem is fixed, others can copy our solutions, and we can copy theirs.
Invest in science and technology and research, don't cut consumption.
However the top two pieces of advice for reducing water usage are, reducing the length of showers taken (which is asking people to take a rationing approach, which is a bit miserablist) and making sure that faulty toilet flushes are fixed.
I've no idea whether Danish houses are much better maintained than British ones (in which case good for them) or if they've been culturally conditioned to take short, infrequent showers to ration water.
I think we need to face up to the fact that over the next decade there's going to be intermittent power because our energy policy has been failure for the last 30 years and energy companies like water companies have extracted tens of billions without any minimum investment requirements for every pound taken as dividends or in share buybacks.
Unlike an oven it does not need pre-heating, and they cook much quicker too. As they're smaller, they take a tiny fraction of the energy to operate too.
Food cooks considerably quicker, and better quality too, in an air fryer than in an oven.
Yes they're basically ovens, but if you are just cooking a small amount then the oven is generally overkill and much less convenient taking much longer to operate and needing to preheat.
My toolkit has multiple sizes of the same head of screwdriver as sometimes different tools serve best for the same job - why should the kitchen not be the same? Cooking in volume, turn the oven on, small amounts, the air fryer is better.
The circulating hot air gives a somewhat different effect than a regular or even a fan oven.
They also cook a bit more quickly.
Investing in clean tech has the advantage that once clean tech is developed, others copy it, and we can copy theirs too, so win/win.
Cutting off our nose to spite our face does nothing to fix the actual problems, but is the desired outcome of some people. That things do not go on as before, that we stop consuming, that we stop driving, that we stop travelling. Well that's never happening, what we need is clean travel, clean tech, clean energy, and bountiful amounts of it.
Although there are a variety of different approaches you might want to take. A domestic greywater system - to collect rainwater from your roof to use to flush toilets - seems like a good thing that would improve resilience.
Interesting points are that Denmark has been working on this consistently since the 1980s, and that they have hardly any reservoirs (very flat, Denmark), and a fairly low population density.
There is sadly an attitude amongst some that believing that technology will solve our problems is somehow wishful or magical thinking and that we need to cut things instead.
Well to invoke Arthur C Clarke, any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic - and that is precisely what we need to tackle climate change. Invest in clean technologies, don't tell people what they can and can't do.