UPDATE: Seems Kier 'Re-set' Starmer has resiled from "100% decarbonisation by 2030" already! Now to be 95%, it seems (see prescient comments BTL) Amusingly, his relaunch isn't on the Guardian front page yet. Greg Wallace is, though ... We'll have another post on this shortly
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Something I find depressing is the way so many perfectly well-meaning people have swallowed the deception that renewable energy is cheaper - all the way to "much cheaper" - than fossil fuels. We needn't summarise the arguments or facts. But here's a sad, earnest example from a 'community energy' project:
A staggering 13% of households in England experience energy poverty ... Rising energy prices and inflation have started to affect people’s life quality, health and well-being ... Fortunately, there is a way to counter energy poverty, reduce energy bills, and keep them low going forward. Renewable energy is the cheapest and cleaner option to produce electricity ... The country is reducing its dependence on volatile fossil fuel markets and creating sustainable solutions for energy security. Renewable energy developments are crucial in ensuring more affordable energy for all.
*Sighs*. Not much point in having this lady directed to Prof Dieter Helm**, I guess - the fine essay to which one of our anons directed us BTL on the previous post.
Is there hope? Well, maybe: the Graun seems belatedly to be catching up with reality:
- Will Labour’s 2030 green energy goal cost more than 2035? They should come clean ...costs to the consumer shouldn’t be ignored
- Starmer has discovered a tricky truth about the electric vehicles transition: there’s no gain without pain ... the move to net zero won’t be cheap or simple
The first, by the redoubtable Nils Pratley, is quite punchy as far as it goes (& we may suspect he knows well that he could have gone a lot further). The second (Gaby Hinsliff) is, errr, not really in the Dieter Helm league. otta start somewhere, I suppose.
ND
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** I have often disagreed with Helm on several issues (sometimes to his face in open debate) but his summary of the issues in the first part of this is masterful
29 comments:
But it's all balls. There is no prospect of Heat Death by CO2. The CO2 concentration is already high enough that the effect is saturated - did you pay no sodding attention in your lectures on IR spec? (Boring, weren't they? But I can assure you that using IR spec in the lab is much more fun. How many climate scientists have spent many months using IR spec in the lab to measure CO2 concentrations? Somewhere in the range approximately zero to exactly zero, I suspect. Effing dilettantes!)
So to scare us all they have to build an amplifier into their models and the amplifier of choice is water vapour. The problem with that is that nobody has a clue how to model the transfer of water between the oceans and the atmosphrere given that much of the vapour will end up condensed into an aerosol i.e. clouds. The physics of clouds and their role in purported climate change is a mystery. (How many climate scientists have spent many years writing original models of physico-chemical interactions? Damn few. Effing dilettantes!)
How many climate scientists have substantial experience at measuring temperatures or calculating heat transfer rates? Damn few again. How many have used fluid mechanical modelling in any sense more advanced than bunging parameter values into a program someone else wrote? How many even understand the basic calculation methods that such programs use? Back to near-zero.
It's not just that most of them are crooks and many of them duds, but that they are nearly all bleedin' amateurs.
I liked the DH article, he seems to make a lot of sense. Interesting to know where ND disagrees. I looked at the Graun article and one point sticks out - turning down the boiler flow temperature to save money.
In my very conventional system there are two ways to turn on the boiler, the hot water thermostat and the room thermostat. If you turn down the boiler flow temperature too much the HW stat is never satisfied and will keep turning on the boiler - which will shut down due to flow temperature. Thus you enter a continuous cycle. As a way of saving money - probably not. So I keep the boiler flow a little above the HW requirement. Anyway Mrs J moans if her towels are not toasty.
Then electric cars to my mind suffer from a system problem. Any fool can build an EV but in so doing they are dumping the energy provision and transportation problem on someone else. The electricity suppliers have no incentive to build massive charger car parks. In contrast the petrol companies had plenty of cash and a good incentive to build filling stations - with little or no whining from the planning dept. The 'system' in the round worked for petrol but does not work for leccy.
A read of Isabel Hardman's 'Why we get the wrong politicians' points up another system problem - Parliament. The incentive for parliament is to appear to do something but actually not do it at all. We've had 14 years of that and now Starmer et al are realising that actually doing something about our real problems is either very expensive, very unpopular or impossible. We shall see whether anything useful is ever done or traditional fudge and muddle will continue. Eventually we will find out if Dearieme is right.
If the government were crafty it would redefine its target solely in terms of rates of CO2 emission rather than the nebulous concept of Net Zero.
For then when the population is culled by - say - 2030 by the after effects of the Covid vaxx it will be able to boast of how much the emissions have decreased. :)
Fuel Poverty Awareness Day should be explained in context. FP is defined as energy costing more than 10% of your income. So those in FP get a cash/credit grant paid to them to pay the utility company - who incidentally have financed the grants through ECO. It's the sort of Kafkaesque way we go about things rather than sorting issues like more home insulation or more grid capacity.
DH raises a lot of issues and offers advice but I suspect it's over the heads of those in power (pun) or wilfully ignored as they like the electorate to be given 'freebies' (aka OPM).
We've lost the plot, collectively, in a few public areas.
It's insane. Britain's return to that quaint, pre Brunel, Hobbit's Ville but without nearly enough farm land, with a lot more people and with many of those here to do us great harm.
It won't make a jot of difference to the global temperature either.
What is the point of doing this while outsourcing production and importing so much back to create a fake local net zero ? Or is the intention to make us so poor that we can't pay for imports ?
Did you see the electric car sales figures - Chinese built cars are 76% of global EV sales? Almost white flag time at that point.
Our rulers - of both parties - are imbeciles.
For two days now there's been no live Guardian financial news - I assume they can't afford to have someone at a desk every day.
A pity, I've read it for 50 years, and the Observer, soon to be sold off, was a fixture of Sunday childhood - but how can I support people who can write about "disinformation" with a straight face, and are happy simultaneously to support mass immigration and deplore high house prices?
If we were to consider cutting CO2 by some goodly amount we might consider culling the rich (and fat) for starters. However I feel they might object and cut up rough if we tried. So cull a rather larger number of the poor instead. They won't object so strongly (got no nukes see), but they might have friends who do. So another non runner idea.
ASFAICS there is no likely solution, we will go on as we are until something nasty happens (or not). We can imagine many scenarios along the way, reality will work out differently.
I think EK is on to something in the last para - 'make us so poor'. Any fool can outsource, but finding alternative mass work - not so easy - not even for the PPE grads. So turn the wheel full circle, dark satanic mills, back to back terraces, cheap mass housing, netty boxes, a low wage economy (for some). Sooner or later Miliband will get us there.
@ Jim - Interesting to know where ND disagrees
In this piece, for example, I'm not sure he's right about CBAM. A very tricky issue. His 'coalition of the willing' is suspect, too.
@ dearieme - If the government were crafty it would redefine its target
I'd say we are due for several crafty changes of targets (& not just on energy - see Starmer's big 'reset' today). On this topic specifically, they need to downwards-define '100% decarbonisation by 2030' (I reckon it'll be "on some days we can meet elec demand with zero fossil fuels - just kindly ignore Drax, if you'd be so good as to look the other way: oh, and 90% is almost 100%, don't you agree?'). I have been checking on a few things with DESNZ recently and can confirm there isn't the remotest chance of full decarb by 2030, whatever BS the CCC and NESO come up with, and however much EDF squeezes a couple more years out of its cracked AGR nukes.
Then, "£300 reduction in elec bills for all households". This'll be something like "that's £300 less than it would have been if, errr, the supply of natural gas had run out out, or, errr, ahem ..." . Or, as Fr Dougal used to say in Father Ted "something to do with clouds ..."
I haven't read the articles but what always gets me when they bandy figures around about capacity of eg solar/wind generation is they always assume the maximum forgetting reality entirely.
If they looked on gridwatch they would see that in the real world capacity doesn't figure at all. The actual amount of electricity produced rarely exceeds a few paltry percent as we often have little sun/wind.
The re-launch has blown away the "100% decarb" election promise, in favour of '95%'. It had to come - see above. They are now lying through their teeth about it - see this LabourList piece on how they intend to spin it:
https://labourlist.org/2024/12/plan-for-change-keir-starmer-clean-energy-commitment/.
So, as everyone with any sense already knew, we'll have the cost of hydrocarbons to provide backup power to the grid when the renewables aren't generating, plus the cost of the renewables. How does this make bills cheaper?
Assume interconnects will take up a larger proportion of the backup capacity? The "experts" at the NESO say so is the spin! LOL - what a clown show country.
"dearieme said...
But it's all balls. There is no prospect of Heat Death by CO2. The CO2 concentration is already high enough that the effect is saturated"
Methane (the new terror gas) as well.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2024/12/04/why-are-bbc-verify-spreading-disinformation-about-methane/
"Given that methane breaks down in the atmosphere after ten years or so, it is irrelevant as far as climate change is concerned. (This is even before we consider the fact that the wavelengths affected by methane are already nearly fully saturated)."
jim said...
A read of Isabel Hardman's 'Why we get the wrong politicians' points up another system problem - Parliament.
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Good book. Tho' I would add that a sea change happened in UK politics some while back now; politics became a career rather than a vocation.
Hence the increasing number of MPs who are clearly only there as they are manifestly incapable of productive work.
Could the network rail comms outage be a cyber attack I wonder?
I'm still stunned at the British Library hack - October 2023 and still not restored. My immediate thought was "why not restore from backup?" but apparently it was the backup mech that was targeted. You would still think there should have been some kind of automated testing to ensure backups hadn't been encrypted by third parties...
"Anonymous
Could the network rail comms outage be a cyber attack I wonder?
I'm still stunned at the British Library hack - October 2023 and still not restored. My immediate thought was "why not restore from backup?" but apparently it was the backup mech that was targeted. You would still think there should have been some kind of automated testing to ensure backups hadn't been encrypted by third parties..."
1. Yes.
2. I worked for 25 years for a company supplying high end library systems; amongst our customers, the OU, Trinity College Dublin, and the National Library of Wales and large public libraries.
We negotiated with the BL for their contract, way back, but pulled out as they were a NIGHTMARE to deal with. My experience with a number of public libraries (the academic ones were all fine and very well run) is that they are a shambles.
We ran Somerset CC for a decade or so. Called in one day - power cut. The library machine was in the main computer section. We were back up and running pretty much as soon as the power returned; a journaling system enabled that.
Two days later, the rest of the County systems were finally resurrected.
BLDSC another fine case. British Library Document Service Centre, up in Boston Spa, handling serials, journals and paper. Now and again, we'd get a call - "System having dreadful problems, please deal with it now"
So finish of what you were doing, and call them. If it was a tea break or lunch break - no go. Had to wait till they had finished their allotted time. So, an "emergency" for us, but not for them
The OU had constant attempts to hack it. But they had a very smart team, and the network (huge) never once got breached. I was beyond unsurprised when I hear the BL had been done. And that they had NO fail safe system, no secure physical, off site, inaccessible backup.
And once cannot but recall the Climategate emails from CRU. We, as acompany dealing with public tenders, had to have full QA even to tender. Bureau Veritas I think it was.
CRU. No documentation of code. Hardly ANY comments in the code. NO backup regime. An utter, taxpayer funded shambles.
As a coder, I ran an eye over some of the code that was also leaked. Awful. As noted, very few comments, tho' "I am not sure what I am doing here" by one block of code, stood out. Also, trapping an error. But then dropping back into the main code, as the error was not actually handled.
Climate models will always be hopeless. Many of the many variables are not even catered for, and many (cloud formation an albedo - a MAJOR factor) not handled at all.
https://notrickszone.com/2019/08/29/nasa-we-cant-model-clouds-so-climate-models-are-100-times-less-accurate-than-needed-for-projections/
Public sector IT is a shambles. And always will be, as anyone with real smarts will be working in the private sector
"Hardly ANY comments in the code."
Maybe the author wanted to be the only person who could understand it?
I used to be a fanatic about people commenting tricky or abstruse code, especially if using some snazzy or arcane technique. Others weren't so bothered.
"If it was difficult to write, it should be difficult to understand".
@Anon:11:06
Sure - but it was clear in this case that he really DID not know what he was meant to be doing! And I recall a colleague, who if a bug was found in his code would say "It's there as an interesting academic exercise for others to fix" 😊
"anyone with real smarts will be working in the private sector"
OTOH I've seen vast amounts of dosh wasted in the private sector. I've also seen a sea-change, from the days when the boss could do your job and probably had done, to today when the boss is probably a purely managerial type - an issue comes up, you give them a list of possible options with pros and cons, and their managerial skill chooses one.
I could imagine 30 years back, when housing was affordable and everyone had final salary pensions, that a clever academic type could spend a lifetime in public sector work - what's GCHQ after all? But these days you have to go for the money for your own sake, as I'm always trying to impress on the kids.
The rail problem looking more like a home grown problem than 'external'.
I kept well away from system security - too dangerous, not well paid and too many really ropey systems and ropey Systems Managers around. This guy seems to know what he is about, https://www.schneier.com/. A trawl through his articles gives a lot to worry about. My time in the City revealed some real horror stories, but well covered up.
Re that American shooting. My first thought was 'this guy will not be taken alive - too inconvenient'. But seeing the PR disaster created for/by the insurance industry I feel even the Feds will be chary of a twepping.
'An instruction saved is an instruction earned'. That's from the old school.
"these days you have to go for the money for your own sake, as I'm always trying to impress on the kids." Quite right. I am enormously proud of talking my daughter out of doing a PhD.
@Anon:12:55. Yes indeed, thorledo' what I was noting was the difference between public and private sector IT bods. And in a career starting on 1980, maybe my first boss in the companies I workef for haf an IT nackground. The rest, manager types or worse, accountants.
Of the railway GSM-R nationwide outage ... we were told it couldn't happen.
Under the former radio system we were in permanent outage as it rarely worked. Lineside telephones and often nearby farmhouses "May we use your phone ?" when your intercity train broke down.
We were literally trained as front line fitters (I often changed high tension fuses and did 750dc and 25kv isolations without supervision) before the advent of satellite radios (and therefore help desks) and THAT'S why Richard Branson said "Holy shit !" and doubled our wages on privatisation (BR was actually a bargain for the public.)
I was listening to the DJ Paddy McGuiness the other day and he said "How did we manage before satellite technology ?... BETTER !"
And we did. And we were safer.
Connex thought that train drivers could be replaced as easily as bus drivers and so sacked drivers and the company failed in short time.
The shooting. Very good looking assassin and fearless too. In the coming months those qualities are going to be handy in Britain. A pity we won't have the guns.
"The shooting."
I was just thinking, we are going to see more of this sort of thing. Huge swathes of the economy are now controlled by psychopathic multinational corporations (in that the people who run them are high functioning psychopaths) and behave towards their customers in ways that were it to be a government we would consider it an authoritarian dictatorship. And I suspect that if it turns out that the killer is someone who has been screwed over by the company the victim was CEO of, then the public reaction will be 'Meh, he had it coming'. Ordinary people are fed up of being treated like cattle by mega-corps, and the people running them had better start getting some serious security, because they are going to need eyes in the back of their heads, 24/7.
Start with politicians as that is the root of the problem. Once that is fixed, corporate bullshit will be a doddle to resolve
OT - the unnamed officer in Wesley Clark's 2003 book:
"As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off Iran."
A tragedy for Christians all over the Middle East. Stand by for bombs in Syrian churches. But who cares about that? I note that HTS, the main insurgent force, is ostensibly classed by UK and US as part of ISIS and theoretically sanctioned as terrorist, even as US A10s and Israeli jets support their ground operations.
I'd be very twitchy were I Armenian, but it looks as if their president is wholly owned and presumably has a safe bolthole.
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