There's something very deep in human psychology that encourages people to believe in magic swords, universal elixirs, price forecasts, perpetual motion machines etc etc. It's out there - and it just needs that little bit more human ingenuity to bring it to reality.Ed Miliband is (we are told) a human, and clearly suffers from this syndrome. Here are some of the things he believes in:
- a "net zero electricity grid" by 2030
- nuclear fusion as a practical source of power
- "negative CO2 emissions" from burning trees for power and burying the CO2
- hydrogen as a wonder-fuel of very wide practical application
- himself as a dominant force in a post-Starmer UK government
A man can dream: but he's spending our money on the first four of these (and indirectly, one might say, on the fifth). In a harder-headed world, they would disqualify him from the fifth. Sadly, I don't think they do.
ND
3 comments:
If it looks like a village idiot, talks like a village idiot, behaves like a village idiot, chances are it's a village idiot.
No. The real village idiot made him a Secretary of State. He's just an assistant village idiot.
Assuming Climate Change is 'a bad thing' one has a few choices - do nothing, cut the use of fossil fuels or cut the number of consumers.
Do nothing and one's political opponents will all promise to deliver Nirvanah whilst you are too mean/too stupid/too callous/too whatever. Bad for the career.
One could hire bearded academics (m/f) to advise, they will follow the usual science funding path of gimme money and I will deliver lead > gold. After much stroking of beards and rediscovery that Nature cannot be fooled engineering tells us that the windmill/sunshine route does not really add up. Other sources - nuclear and fusion look pretty expensive and we now find ourselves short of tax revenue. Lawyers and accountants don't pay much tax and making coffee/cutting hair and psychoanalysing each other is unproductive and pays practically no tax.
All the world has discovered that fossil fuels are a boon very hard and expensive to replace. Not even Milliband or the very best Balliol or Ivy League types have figured an answer. We could out-Chinese the Chinese, but you might not like it.
Cutting the number of consumers is a bit tricky, they might object. A naive approach is to cut the fat rich ones who drive 6 litre pickups. But they are well armed - guns and congresspersons. Even if you did then poor thin people would move into their places and quickly become fat and rich.
One could consider a dual approach, cut back the poor and thin ones (seems a bit unfair) but makes getting rid of the fat rich ones a bit less hypocritical. But we are not talking trivial numbers here - Covid made almost no difference, orders of magnitude too weak. You would have to dream up something much more effective - and stay elected or at least in the driving seat. And keep up the good work.
Definitely a Two Pipe problem. My advice - do nothing whilst giving some political illusion of action to divert the screamers. Can I have Milliband's chair?
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