Well, right in the essentials (here) if not on some details, and of course his overall red-green framing.
Our George is a funny fellow, often the butt of humour even on his 'own side'. Never met the bloke but I take him to be an honest person; thinking, writing & acting in good faith by his own lights. Open to changing his mind in the face of such facts as come to his notice (notwithstanding some major blindspots). Not to be sneezed at in a world full of grifters, charlatans and idle bastards.
The CCS thing is pretty remarkable - the sheer scale of government commitment. As he points out, the £22bn is just Treasury cash for 'investment': there'll be more costs on top. He highlights the extra for anything related specifically to hydrogen: I'd add the costly CfDs related to ongoing 'commercial' CCS ops as currently structured, that will find their way onto our electricity bills - all of this is additional.
We've yet to see the full horror of the hydrogen plans and the budget & bills for that; and of course there is a big decision pending on Drax. All in all, worst case is a 4Q 2024 which marks the transition from the (relatively) Low-Hanging Fruit[1] phase of 'decarbonisation / NZ', to the Seriously Expensive phase. Starting to make the Hinkley Point C nuke look almost moderate by contrast. Green opposition to this heavily 'industrialist' policy will be growing and growing. Subsidy-farming industrialists love it to the same extent.[2]
I hope HMG is leaving itself several off-ramps in all this scheming. Wishful thinking, I know: teams of expensive lawyers on the industry side will be making sure they can't wriggle off any of the contractual hooks that'll be involved.
ND
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[1] I seem to recall a bloke at university called Low-hanging Fruit. I won't explain
[2] I've always worked in honest-to-God make-your-own-way non-subsidised companies: had no idea about subsidy-farming etc. Then I had some business with the revered ICI, doyen of blue-chip British industry, whose attitude was "why do an honest day's work, when you can lobby government instead?". Made me feel ill
21 comments:
"I seem to recall a bloke at university called Low-hanging Fruit" - sorry, that is absolutely begging for an explanation!!
Typical article from Moonbot, IF a load of things that won't work suddenly could work, then we wouldn't need fossil fuels (or concrete or nuclear or anything else a virtue signalling prat doesn't like).
I assume LHF is the guy at closing time in the bar/disco going for the drunkest or ugliest young lady.
Now if it was a girl with that nickname ....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_(slang)
The piece by Aditya Chakrabortty (crazy name, crazy guy as Brenda Slagg would say) isn't too bad either (for the Guardian):
"The authors examine much the same economic dashboard as everyone else – growth, jobs, wages – but over a far longer timeframe. Behind each graph lies the implicit question: are you, your family, your community better off than you were not four years ago, but two, three, four decades ago? And for many people the numbers say: no. Take the biggest one: pay. For teachers, clerical workers, sales reps and the great bulk of US employees, whether white or blue collar, wages have flatlined – not for four or even 20 years – but for most of the past half century. Strip out inflation and average hourly earnings for seven out of 10 US employees have barely risen since Richard Nixon was in the White House. For the average US employee, and their families and their towns, the economy has kept on tanking whoever wins the White House, whichever judges make it to the supreme court, whether the analysts decree it to be boom or bust."
We're back in this territory:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-typical-male-u-s-worker-earned-less-in-2014-than-in-1973/
Has women going out to work merely doubled (or more) house prices?
In the late 70s and early Thatcher years I lived a pretty good life despite having so little cash I went everywhere on a Honda 125 and didn't holiday abroad. OK, being young helped. But I had my little cottage (9.5k and 1.5k of builder work) with roses round the door and quarry tiled floors, the local scrumpy was cheap, my garden had fruit trees, and there seemed to be quite a few other young people around.
I used to get back from the scrumpy house to my village just in time for a lock in at the village pub (one of three) .
Now, the pubs shut at nine, once everyone's finished eating, because there are no young people buying houses. And there's only one pub left in my old village. One is now a small estate, the other's a nursery.
My memory is going. Wasn't there a song with lyrics that involved tossing your scrotum over your shoulder?
LHF: in the Oxford of the 1970s I was told there was a college servant at Trinity known as Bill the Pill, the One With The Three, whose budgie-smugglers (had he ever worn them) would have been snugger than most.
I know!
Do your balls hang low?
Do they swing to and fro?
Can you tie them in a knot?
Can you tie them in a bow?
Do you get a funny feeling
When your knackers hit the ceiling?
Oh you'll never be a sailor if your balls hang low.
We used to refer to "Three in line astern". Weren't student days good fun?
Or more generally isn't being aged 18-30 good fun? I must have been well into my thirties before bus conductors stopped calling me "young man".
"Not to be sneezed at in a world full of grifters, charlatans and idle bastards." The world's problem nailed Mr Drew, we are not slaving away making enough tractors and railway engines, instead we are on jobseekers allowance or in advertising or in the overstaffed media or politiking trade - how many newsreaders or SPADs do you need ffs.
Which may be allied to the question why does our government love CCS so much? Why when any honest assessment is that it won't pay or save our skins. And don't kid ourselves it will create a big export industry in either ironmongery or consultancy or conferences.
So why not pretend at the world conference beanfeasts that we are taking CO2 very very seriously - but actually do and spend very little. Politicians are well used to chicanery and lying so why do they want to spend £22Bn++ on this project when we could find many more uses for the money. Lo and behold, Rachel would not have to make the pips squeak so much. Not as if there would be any visible pile of wealth coming in to justify it. Not as if the RoW is really going to cut back on oil and gas. Not as if the RoW is going to buy our CCS expertise.
Employment stats maybe, or keeping some industries going - steel fabrication, chemical plant construction. Maybe funding some big industries and lobby groups in return for glowing media and party donations. Otherwise just a matter of digging holes and filling them in until the next election. A deeper question is what to do instead, I seem to have mislaid my time machine blueprints, you would be welcome to those.
For afaics there is no 'nice' solution to our energy requirement, we will plough on until something turns up - nice or nasty.
Every now and then Tim Forstall will demolish something written by Aditya Chakrabortty. He claims Mr Smackybotty has a flair for misinterpreting official statistics. Like those stats, perhaps?
I take him to be an honest person; thinking, writing & acting in good faith by his own lights.............People like George wanted longer, harder lockdowns (AKA House Arrests) at the time of Convid & the infliction of experimental medication upon the general populace .... There is no purpose in engaging with the enemy
One assumes that LHF would be a suitable nickname for a flaming queer who was also particularly well endowed.
OT. Anyone seen the trailer for the new film Blitz ? As I predicted the film would be.
OT but worth a read
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-horror-of-the-baby-rooms/
"‘Genevieve was left on the beanbag for 90 minutes and was seen struggling and coughing on CCTV footage. But Roughley did not check on her until she was ‘unresponsive and blue’. Jurors heard Genevieve, the daughter of barrister John Meehan and solicitor Katie Wheeler, died from asphyxiation . . .’ Lord have mercy."
A barrister and a solicitor - and how much were the staff paid who "cared for" their daughter?
I worked with a high-powered, well paid, attractive couple who dropped their baby off at 7.20 am and picked him up at 7.30 pm. My wife earned nothing for eight years, otoh our kids had their mother with them through their childhood, not some minimum wage-slave.
Sorry, Nick - but anyone who likens climate sceptics to Holocaust Deniers (his words) is a nasty piece of work. Self-important, self-righteous prig.
A Daniel come to judgement !
Dale Vince, Labour's favourite Green:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/12/stop-pushing-heat-pumps-backlash-green-energy-magnate-labour-ulez
"The government risks a huge political backlash if it keeps pushing the public to install heat pumps to replace their boilers, one of Britain’s leading green entrepreneurs has warned.
Dale Vince, a major Labour donor and renewable energy advocate, called on Keir Starmer to rethink national programmes, championed by Boris Johnson, pushing the technology. Vince argued that Whitehall should explore alternatives to the devices, which he said were expensive, caused serious disruption and could end up increasing energy bills for some people. Vince, whose criticism of heat pumps has proved divisive among environmentalists, said mass use could bring a bigger political backlash than London’s expanded ultra-low emission zone (Ulez), which led to a surprise byelection defeat for Labour last year in Uxbridge and South Ruislip.
“It’s a Johnson-era policy, and like most Johnson ideas, it wasn’t thought through,” Vince said. “It wasn’t meant for the real world, if you look at the amount of money committed. Electricity energy bills overall in our households will go up unless you assume heroic levels of performance."
Likewise. My wife and I agreed that she should give up her career as Senior Systems Analyst for Unilever in order to raise our twin boys at a cost of literally millions to us.
Vince is quite a piece of work. Maybe a future post ...
Unlike many here, I have met George Monbiot. I may not agree with him, but he did at least strike me as fundamentally honest, however misguided. That is a lot more than can be said for most of his peers in the chattering classes.
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