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
26 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.
Is your Scottish paper mill still there, dearieme ? My place is long gone.
It closed in 2022. Here's a good obituary.
https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/past-times/6780939/stoneywood-paper-mill-history/
OT, but TTK is very keen on the EU pinching Russian deposits in Brussels, something which apparently we didn't do to German deposits in London in WW2. Burn their cities, but touch bank deposits?
Belgium asked for the EU to indemnify them, the EU said 'non' so Belgium refused.
There's reportedly $20bn of Russian state deposits in London. If TTKs so keen, he can do what we didn't do in WW2 and set an example....
"You wait"
"Time passes"
"Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold"
The Spectator had Octopus Energy CEO on.
His thoughts on Carbon Capture and the general ideas of the Labour Party.
https://youtu.be/5WgS-Dsm31E?si=YCVn2gFvekudq6tP
Jackson used to hedge his political bets a lot more (& he wasn't alone, of course) but nowadays he just cuts loose against govt policy. That rogue Dale Vince likewise.
But some of Jackson's throwaway one-liners are very misleading / in need of heavy qualification. E.g. - "the more EVs, the less grid expansion you need" (prob not his exact words but something v similar). This needs very heavy caveating indeed. He means people to come away just believing him & his wild over-simplifications outright. Vince is another. Miliband too - with very careful choices of (weasel-)words. It's not an honest public discourse. But who's surprised?
Surely the more EVs, the more grid expansion needed?
What a pity.
I thought Jackson's piece was a bit one sided and simple minded. Almost as if electricity came from a big cable stuck out the ground somewhere and there was a big gas tap close by with nothing to do but join up the wires and pipes.
The politicians can't get rid of fossil fuels - and neither can China - and no one will be cutting populations. So we are stuck, maybe something will turn up, a new energy revolution - I am not optimistic. Life will become short, brutish and nasty - just look at Croydon.
A friend returned from Australia tells me leccy costs about 20p/Kwh down there, here in Kent my first Kwh is about 84p, the second gulp 32p. Way to go Jackson and Milliband.
All that spend on economical light bulbs and a low consumption telly and computer has achieved nothing except helping Mr Jackson and friends out. The gas boiler and electric cooker makes the meters spin just as merrily as they ever did, real energy costs a fortune.
"The politicians can't get rid of fossil fuels - and neither can China"
You can get rid of them for many things* if you have either amazingly inexpensive nuclear** or vast amounts of hydro and/or geothermal or vast amounts of solar and vast amounts of pumped storage ***
So you're looking at Norway, Iceland and maybe New Zealand, though I was reading just the other day there about a wood pulp plant shutting "because of energy prices"
"Life will become short, brutish and nasty - just look at Croydon."
Not much to do with energy and everything to do with demography. Places like Ealing (and the rest of Betjeman's Metroland) and Croydon were once shorthand for quiet English suburbia - what George Melly described as "the whirring of a million Atcos" on a Saturday morning.
* but not aircraft, ships or HGVs/tanks/APCs
** not yet in existence and not likely to be - see Hinkley Point C
*** also not in existence - could maybe Chile or Peru do it?
Understand that thee are some motorway services stations in Scotland where EV chargers supplies from on site diesel jennies !!!!!
"Understand that thee are some motorway services stations in Scotland where EV chargers supplies from on site diesel jennies"
On a similar note:
https://www.facebook.com/interpartuk/videos/electric-jcb-mini-digger/511656216308338/
Hinkley Point C was first announced in 1981 !!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station#1980s_and_1990s
I think I had some AJA shares, whatever did I do with them?
Cairn Lodge, Lanarkshire. "Green" hydrogen-powered IC engines. It's still all bollocks, anyway :-)
Continuing the perpetual motion impossible machine theme. I see Tugendhat is at it again. 'A new maritime security architecture for UK and her neighbours'. A proper snow job with shiny shoes and absolutely super graphics.
We are going to invent new missile systems - against Russian ships/planes/missiles. A sort of golden dome. All for £5/week on the never never.
We are going to have a strong defence against parliamentary workers/members taking bribes/funding/education/Ann Summers trips, unless we can't due to lawyer shenanigans. A spot of 007 might set the tone.
We are going to develop AI plastic porpoises to chase bad actor submarines bearing great big garden shears, cable snipping for the use of. A lucrative contract if nothing else.
We are going to develop remote hunter film-em boats to gain evidence on any bad actors who accidentally on purpose drag their anchors across data cables or heaven forfend high voltage power cables. Then set our super powered lawyers on 'em, injunctions at dawn.
All done up with left over tinsel from Christmas.
I just checked at IEA - coal burning (just about) at record levels in 2025, and China's burning 2/3 of it ! Enjoy your new electric BYD!
"For 2025, global coal demand is projected to reach 8 845 Mt, setting a new record. The increase of around 40 Mt compared with 2024 is very similar to the forecast we made last year. Meanwhile, China’s coal consumption held steady at 4 953 Mt..."
Turkey now produces 9x as much steel as the UK - 36mt against 4mt. China ? 1000mt.
https://worldsteel.org/data/annual-production-steel-data/?ind=P1_crude_steel_total_pub/CHN/IND
So UK steel production = 0.4% of Chinese production or 4% of Japanese production
Happy and peaceful Christmas to one and all!
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