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
7 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?
What seems a very long while I remember drafting one of our ‘ this is history..pay attention....it might repeat, ‘ type of posts.
I think it was originally to do with the Tudor wood crisis. ( which would certainly have been a latest PM in waiting Miliband foolery inspired piece.)
Doing the research I remember drifting into looking at how previous centuries have evolved their energy industrialisation/deindustrialisation.
The UK, being first into the Industrial Revolution, was also one of the last out of building the coal powered, steam driven factories. Electrification has been available for a very long time.
Why were Uk using steam trains into the early 1960s? Why weren’t the noisy, dirty, dark, inefficient, dangerous, unreliable, clanking, spinning whatnots and widget punching thingamajigs; not replaced with, clean. Quiet. Efficient, brightly lit, cheaper electrical versions, until the time of the demise of the great industries themselves.
The answer was quite simple.
Cost.
The business owner didn’t fancy demolishing the not long built, polluting, Victorian factory with a brand new, more efficient, but far more expensive electrical versions. Losing all the value of the old.
The costs outweighed the gain. To a very large degree. Large enough to delay the decision to modernise again, until necessity required.
You can force change. But it’s rarely advisable.
As
Stalin
Pol pot
Mao
Charles I
Czar Nicholas
Weimar Germany
Reformation England
Gorbachev Russia
Ayatollah Iran.
Robespierre’s Revolution.
And many, many more.
I remember an interview with a group of trade unionists who wanted to run British Leyland back in the time of Tony Benn. It turned out that they really did believe that there were designs of petrol engines that would return 100 mpg but had been suppressed by a conspiracy of capitalists. They would, of course, release these engines and thus revolutionise the car industry.
I concluded that these scum really were as stupid and ignorant as they had always appeared to be.
I wonder whether any of them shared the belief, referred to occasionally in the newspapers, that The Capitalists had also suppressed engines that would run on water rather than petrol.
dearieme - one Seventies summer I worked stamping metal parts for a former household name, now defunct. There were some new American machines (it was that long ago) which were unbelievably fast, and if the metal strip feed jammed, or the feed ran out, the machine stopped at once. Then there were the Brit machines, many of which I'm sure dated back to WW2. They were in wire cages, because if they jammed or malfunctioned there was no auto stop, you'd dive for the big red button on the outside of the cage.
It was a way of life which has almost gone now - the works bus that picked you up, the canteen, the compulsory union (I was a member for that summer). When the heating broke down (it was a cold summer) and the temperature fell below the Factories Act minimum we were bribed with sandwiches and big jugs of tea and coffee to stay at our machines. A skilled worker then could afford not only to buy a house on a single wage, but support a wife and kids at home. All gone.
Fifty years later I was on a school governing body with one of the senior BL guys of the 1960s. He told me how he'd gone to Russia to sell a large amount of equipment to the Togliatti plant, closed the deal, and arrived back at Heathrow to discover sterling had been devalued by 14% while he was flying. BL asked him to go back out and renegotiate, which he did.
@Anon, I spent much of a summer vacation working in a plastics-and-paper plant in New Jersey. Much of our production consisted of two sorts of strong plastic bags. The smaller were for shipping carbines to Vietnam; the larger for bringing back bodies.
Another summer I worked in the labs of a Scottish paper mill. In a locked room forged enemy currency had been printed in The War. The equipment was still maintained just in case it should prove useful again.
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