I would find some way to complain about this. I would suggest searching to see if there are regulations about political bias etc for energy companies. Both Reform U.K. and now the Tories are now anti NetZero.
Odd that they don't realise the irony of their own headings. The Left have a weapon. They call it 'climate change'. Nothing will pry them off this new toy they can use to control people.
As for Octopus - it's making a lot of money out of government market destruction/manipulation. If there were no subsidies, no grifting, no back handers, no money in the climate change scam then they'd not care one jot.
I noted in my own basic research despite Scotland having the world’s largest floating windfarms and the second largest onshore windfarm in Europe with allegedly 95% of our electricity now generated from ‘renewables’ as a consequence we have the highest energy prices in the world!! All so people can virtue signal about saving the planet!
AI must be treated with extreme caution as it will give you the answer derived from some very dodgy sources, many of them the media, most prominently The Guardian.
I spent the best part of a day interrogating Grok over the cost of renewables. Specifically, If humans were to allow for the possibility of just one winter period of no sun and no wind (the infamous Dunkelflaute) whilst using only renewables and no interconnectors from the continent operational, how much would it cost?
It eventually provided an answer in the trillions of GBP but only with me prompting it to include things like renewables build out, grid build out, batteries, CCS, EV's, (neither of the last two making much change) and when we had reached a total I had to point out that It's build out of renewables didn't allow for the batteries we had thrown into the mix. Just one of numerous blunders it made along the way.
The numbers Grok used, however, were only those publically available in popular media sources and some official government figures (which to its credit it found unprompted).
On that basis it eventually concluded that if we switched off fossil fuels, biomass and nuclear tomorrow, and using some credible sources I pointed it to (Francis Foster at The Manhattan Contrarian, for example), it concluded that the UK would be stung for £40Tn - £50Tn over 60 years (the life of a nuclear plant) and 130 Small Medium Reactors would cost between £1Tn - £2Tn over the same period.
The point being, is that AI won't produce answers without a great deal of input from the operator and I know I missed a whole lot of variables and the 'official' numbers are far from accurate.
Never mind, we still have a Paramout theme park being built in Bedford which will keep us all warm. Interestingly the same scheme was proposed for Kent, but it was stymied over 10 years or so by the greens, and the cost was £3.5Bn which has, strangely, ballooned to £50Bn.
Yes, it takes me back a decade or more when I used to trawl (and troll) the environmental pages of the Guardian to try to figure out what makes them tick, until I got banned.
It is just so obvious that Miliband’s dream of decarbonising the grid and using only electricity for heating and transport and industrial applications will lead to a total collapse of the economy. This seems to be what his globalist overlords actually want to happen.
It could happen quite suddenly if left unchecked. Imagine if the Uniparty somehow managed to decarbonise the grid, accompanied by deep deindustrialisation and impoverishment. What happens then when all the windmills, solar panels, heat pumps and EVs start falling to bits and have to be replaced with no fossil fuels and no heavy mining, manufacturing and transportation capabilities?
We need a Donald Trump who is in the process of killing Net Zero stone dead in the USA. The UK general public need to waken up fast but unfortunately most of them are currently suffering from severe TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) and think that everything he does is bad.
I think Labours end game here is quite deliberate. Let's face it, Miliband knows as well as we do that the climate is fine and support for the climate scam is waning. My belief is Labour are now deliberately using it to drive energy costs so high that major industries will go to the wall, and they can nationalise them.
They are planning that with steel today (Saturday) then electricity will be next followed by gas, and they will probably go after nuclear as well. When car manufacturers finally abandon the country and Toyota etc. head off back to Japan, they'll resurrect British Leyland.
I think it’s more malign than that. Don’t forget that globally-coordinated Net Zero is a Lab/Con/Lib Dem Uniparty policy which has never been put to the electorate, ditto the globally-coordinated Covid “plandemic”, ditto the deliberately provoked war in Ukraine, ditto mass immigration, ditto censorship of free speech and two-tier policing and justice, DEI, LGBTQ+ wokery, etc, etc. The Conservatives have recently dropped “Net Zero by 2050” but they haven’t said they are dropping Net Zero.
All these electorate-disenfranchising policies have been primarily aimed at weakening, demoralising and controlling the populace rather than controlling industry and the means of production. The globalist establishment and our Uniparty politicians showed their evil true colours with Covid. I like to think I’ve done society a big favour, if only we could have a collective awakening, by publishing (via my colleague Joel Smalley) a summary of the proceedings of Reiner Fuellmich’s Covid-19 Crimes Against Humanity model trial: https://metatron.substack.com/p/reiner-fuellmichs-grand-jury-court.
I think care needs to be taken when exposing holes in climate change zealots’ publically available research. Exposing the errors/ climate truths in their arguments allows them to fill in the holes or remove them from their carefully crafted papers. Sadly they won’t pick up the lessons good researchers should from the evidence they have identified. Let them shoot themselves in the foot. You make some good points
PS after reading this latest Eigenvalues post, I caught up with Roger Pielke's The Honest Broker (THB) evidence-based substack, and his latest "The Apocalypse Machine Rolls On". I have seen and heard Roger clearly state his view that human emissions of carbon dioxide are driving problematic climate change. Whatever your view, this is not that of a climate sceptic. He has consistently drawn attention to science, positively to the work of the IPCC, and explained clearly how this has been distorted by others for particular ends. He has picked holes in common media claims that, for example, hurricanes are becoming more frequent, by looking at the evidence. He has also raised fears about the quality and subversion of science going forward.
My point: I checked and he appears on Hot Air, so I deem it to be "climate McCarthyism" - a database of people who are bad because they refuse to sing from our song sheet or to think correctly. 'Venus will be particularly bright this month, thanks to Comrade Stalin.'
Claire Coutinho, former Energy Secretary, is also labelled as an heretical 'delayer' for saying stuff like this:
"First Ed Miliband decides to shut down the North Sea, now he’s turning his back on nuclear. You cannot have an energy system based on wind and sun alone. That is total economic insanity. All it will mean is more imports from abroad and higher bills."
It's a religion isn't it. This latest attempt to categorise and chastise climate heretics is transparent in its religious fervour and abandonment of any semblance of rationality or proportion. But what can you expect from a Green Blob ideological outfit like Tortoise Media - who nobody even heard of until they teamed up with the UK's 'most popular energy company', Octopus Energy, set up by full time climate change/renewables grifter Greg Jackson, to try and silence the Unbelievers, but have inadvertently given them a louder voice.
David, congratulations for making it to the big time. I note with wry amusement that the title of my late hero, David Mackay's physics- and arithmetic-based book is 'Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air' (downloadable for free) in which he effectively took a pop at those proclaiming wishy-washy easy answers, who couldn't put a number to anything, and who believed that doing one's bit for the planet was charging one's mobile phone with a solar panel.
I assume you have the whole David MaKay Tribute video by Mark Lynas, but I clipped it for the best bit.... David spells out the UK enrgy reality with days left to live..... He helped me with costing synthetic replacements for hydrocarbons, "must be cheap because the air is free and full of excess carbon and hydrogen - and we need to recycle the CO2", etc.
BTW Have you ever watched early engineering hero Doug Lightfoot's "Nobody's Fuel" movie, another early teller of the engineering and physics truth to people with no idea of either. 50 minutes - available on line. Accessible to all.
Brian RL Catt @catandman (Just made it onto the list, well attacked on De Smog Blog, an early list of people to follow for science and engineering facts.
If you Google David there are a number of recording of his talks on the Sustainable Energy Book, which I have in paperback, rescued from the bookshelf of a former government employee who never read it ad was happy to hand it over..... still available on line of course...
Yes thank you, I found and watched the whole Lynas video and have enjoyed David's TED talks on Youtube - watched a number of times. My favourite quote of his is "I'm not trying to be pro-nuclear, I'm just pro-arithmetic".
I like infamy, it gets the truth to more people, as David points out. Only the facts can tell the truth, appeals to authority are the way of the charlatan. Feyman's "Answers that cannot be questioned" are overtly false, or told by somone with no understanding of them, who has ipso facto never tested them and simplybelieve what they are told. There is only one truth about any thing that can be measured. Brian MIET, MInst P, MBA, BTW. Former electrical design engineer amongst other things.
They can't even spell correctly and presumably they have zero knowledge or appreciation of the significance of eigenvalues in science and mathematics - or the Greek letter Lamda which you have cunningly substituted in place of the 'l' in Values.
Excellent find. Thoroughly enjoyed looking though to find names I knew. Thank you.
I would find some way to complain about this. I would suggest searching to see if there are regulations about political bias etc for energy companies. Both Reform U.K. and now the Tories are now anti NetZero.
Thanks for the article.
How can people/climate scientists be totally blind to the clear indications of minimal human-based climate change?
I know some are paid shills and have dodgy connections, but you really can't say 'two and two are four' and be realistically challenged on it.
Is it a form of derangement, or pure ignorance?
And how much longer do us rational beings have to put up with it?
Does it depend on the Ed Stone being defenestrated, as would have happened months ago if he went this crazy in Russia?
Currently an Octopus customer... are there any suppliers who aren't up to their armpits in this nonsense that I could switch to?
Odd that they don't realise the irony of their own headings. The Left have a weapon. They call it 'climate change'. Nothing will pry them off this new toy they can use to control people.
As for Octopus - it's making a lot of money out of government market destruction/manipulation. If there were no subsidies, no grifting, no back handers, no money in the climate change scam then they'd not care one jot.
It's just weaponised socialism.
Good article thanks. It would be good if you could give contact details for your fellow sceptics so it is easy for everyone to follow
I noted in my own basic research despite Scotland having the world’s largest floating windfarms and the second largest onshore windfarm in Europe with allegedly 95% of our electricity now generated from ‘renewables’ as a consequence we have the highest energy prices in the world!! All so people can virtue signal about saving the planet!
https://biologyphenom.substack.com/p/newscotlands-carbon-footprint1998
This is hilarious.
AI must be treated with extreme caution as it will give you the answer derived from some very dodgy sources, many of them the media, most prominently The Guardian.
I spent the best part of a day interrogating Grok over the cost of renewables. Specifically, If humans were to allow for the possibility of just one winter period of no sun and no wind (the infamous Dunkelflaute) whilst using only renewables and no interconnectors from the continent operational, how much would it cost?
It eventually provided an answer in the trillions of GBP but only with me prompting it to include things like renewables build out, grid build out, batteries, CCS, EV's, (neither of the last two making much change) and when we had reached a total I had to point out that It's build out of renewables didn't allow for the batteries we had thrown into the mix. Just one of numerous blunders it made along the way.
The numbers Grok used, however, were only those publically available in popular media sources and some official government figures (which to its credit it found unprompted).
On that basis it eventually concluded that if we switched off fossil fuels, biomass and nuclear tomorrow, and using some credible sources I pointed it to (Francis Foster at The Manhattan Contrarian, for example), it concluded that the UK would be stung for £40Tn - £50Tn over 60 years (the life of a nuclear plant) and 130 Small Medium Reactors would cost between £1Tn - £2Tn over the same period.
The point being, is that AI won't produce answers without a great deal of input from the operator and I know I missed a whole lot of variables and the 'official' numbers are far from accurate.
Never mind, we still have a Paramout theme park being built in Bedford which will keep us all warm. Interestingly the same scheme was proposed for Kent, but it was stymied over 10 years or so by the greens, and the cost was £3.5Bn which has, strangely, ballooned to £50Bn.
Yes, it takes me back a decade or more when I used to trawl (and troll) the environmental pages of the Guardian to try to figure out what makes them tick, until I got banned.
It is just so obvious that Miliband’s dream of decarbonising the grid and using only electricity for heating and transport and industrial applications will lead to a total collapse of the economy. This seems to be what his globalist overlords actually want to happen.
It could happen quite suddenly if left unchecked. Imagine if the Uniparty somehow managed to decarbonise the grid, accompanied by deep deindustrialisation and impoverishment. What happens then when all the windmills, solar panels, heat pumps and EVs start falling to bits and have to be replaced with no fossil fuels and no heavy mining, manufacturing and transportation capabilities?
We need a Donald Trump who is in the process of killing Net Zero stone dead in the USA. The UK general public need to waken up fast but unfortunately most of them are currently suffering from severe TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) and think that everything he does is bad.
I think Labours end game here is quite deliberate. Let's face it, Miliband knows as well as we do that the climate is fine and support for the climate scam is waning. My belief is Labour are now deliberately using it to drive energy costs so high that major industries will go to the wall, and they can nationalise them.
They are planning that with steel today (Saturday) then electricity will be next followed by gas, and they will probably go after nuclear as well. When car manufacturers finally abandon the country and Toyota etc. head off back to Japan, they'll resurrect British Leyland.
I think it’s more malign than that. Don’t forget that globally-coordinated Net Zero is a Lab/Con/Lib Dem Uniparty policy which has never been put to the electorate, ditto the globally-coordinated Covid “plandemic”, ditto the deliberately provoked war in Ukraine, ditto mass immigration, ditto censorship of free speech and two-tier policing and justice, DEI, LGBTQ+ wokery, etc, etc. The Conservatives have recently dropped “Net Zero by 2050” but they haven’t said they are dropping Net Zero.
All these electorate-disenfranchising policies have been primarily aimed at weakening, demoralising and controlling the populace rather than controlling industry and the means of production. The globalist establishment and our Uniparty politicians showed their evil true colours with Covid. I like to think I’ve done society a big favour, if only we could have a collective awakening, by publishing (via my colleague Joel Smalley) a summary of the proceedings of Reiner Fuellmich’s Covid-19 Crimes Against Humanity model trial: https://metatron.substack.com/p/reiner-fuellmichs-grand-jury-court.
Who gave permission for Octopus energy to become part of the Green Gestapo ?
I think care needs to be taken when exposing holes in climate change zealots’ publically available research. Exposing the errors/ climate truths in their arguments allows them to fill in the holes or remove them from their carefully crafted papers. Sadly they won’t pick up the lessons good researchers should from the evidence they have identified. Let them shoot themselves in the foot. You make some good points
What a useless tool. These people are clearly getting desperate. Sadly, they seem to have more philanthropath financial backing than sense.
Ben Rubin does good takedowns of Tortoise Media, which “does the bidding of the global establishment”: https://riseuk.substack.com/p/when-i-strike-i-strike-hard .
PS after reading this latest Eigenvalues post, I caught up with Roger Pielke's The Honest Broker (THB) evidence-based substack, and his latest "The Apocalypse Machine Rolls On". I have seen and heard Roger clearly state his view that human emissions of carbon dioxide are driving problematic climate change. Whatever your view, this is not that of a climate sceptic. He has consistently drawn attention to science, positively to the work of the IPCC, and explained clearly how this has been distorted by others for particular ends. He has picked holes in common media claims that, for example, hurricanes are becoming more frequent, by looking at the evidence. He has also raised fears about the quality and subversion of science going forward.
My point: I checked and he appears on Hot Air, so I deem it to be "climate McCarthyism" - a database of people who are bad because they refuse to sing from our song sheet or to think correctly. 'Venus will be particularly bright this month, thanks to Comrade Stalin.'
Claire Coutinho, former Energy Secretary, is also labelled as an heretical 'delayer' for saying stuff like this:
"First Ed Miliband decides to shut down the North Sea, now he’s turning his back on nuclear. You cannot have an energy system based on wind and sun alone. That is total economic insanity. All it will mean is more imports from abroad and higher bills."
It's a religion isn't it. This latest attempt to categorise and chastise climate heretics is transparent in its religious fervour and abandonment of any semblance of rationality or proportion. But what can you expect from a Green Blob ideological outfit like Tortoise Media - who nobody even heard of until they teamed up with the UK's 'most popular energy company', Octopus Energy, set up by full time climate change/renewables grifter Greg Jackson, to try and silence the Unbelievers, but have inadvertently given them a louder voice.
David, congratulations for making it to the big time. I note with wry amusement that the title of my late hero, David Mackay's physics- and arithmetic-based book is 'Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air' (downloadable for free) in which he effectively took a pop at those proclaiming wishy-washy easy answers, who couldn't put a number to anything, and who believed that doing one's bit for the planet was charging one's mobile phone with a solar panel.
David Mackay is one of my few heroes. SEWTHA is a tour de force and was one of the inspirations for creating this Substack.
Thank you - that is really good to know.
Ian,
I assume you have the whole David MaKay Tribute video by Mark Lynas, but I clipped it for the best bit.... David spells out the UK enrgy reality with days left to live..... He helped me with costing synthetic replacements for hydrocarbons, "must be cheap because the air is free and full of excess carbon and hydrogen - and we need to recycle the CO2", etc.
Really? Bonkers expensive. Methanol about 5 times petrol at wholesale cost. Like Hydrogen on steroids. Makes renewable leccy look cheap, even more lunatic. Hydrogen levels of fiscal and technical stupidity. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/qfbs99kreluvyioaudf8a/David-MacKay-on-Solar-in-UK.mov?rlkey=nla5edxa3mp6021padu3fdlji&dl=0
BTW Have you ever watched early engineering hero Doug Lightfoot's "Nobody's Fuel" movie, another early teller of the engineering and physics truth to people with no idea of either. 50 minutes - available on line. Accessible to all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOeoXvRQPiI
Brian RL Catt @catandman (Just made it onto the list, well attacked on De Smog Blog, an early list of people to follow for science and engineering facts.
Watched and doubly appreciated - thank you again!
Ian: Just to be sure re the whole of the clipped MacKay video... its here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCyidsxIDtQ&t=4s
He is very clear on the value of renewables in the uK.
Also his Ted talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0W1ZZYIV8o
If you Google David there are a number of recording of his talks on the Sustainable Energy Book, which I have in paperback, rescued from the bookshelf of a former government employee who never read it ad was happy to hand it over..... still available on line of course...
Yes thank you, I found and watched the whole Lynas video and have enjoyed David's TED talks on Youtube - watched a number of times. My favourite quote of his is "I'm not trying to be pro-nuclear, I'm just pro-arithmetic".
Thank you - very much appreciated - all new to me - I shall settle in shortly and view. Congratulations on making it to the Hall of Infamy.
I like infamy, it gets the truth to more people, as David points out. Only the facts can tell the truth, appeals to authority are the way of the charlatan. Feyman's "Answers that cannot be questioned" are overtly false, or told by somone with no understanding of them, who has ipso facto never tested them and simplybelieve what they are told. There is only one truth about any thing that can be measured. Brian MIET, MInst P, MBA, BTW. Former electrical design engineer amongst other things.
Are they going to send you a plaque like the ones YouTube send out?
"Owner of Eigan Values blog."
They can't even spell correctly and presumably they have zero knowledge or appreciation of the significance of eigenvalues in science and mathematics - or the Greek letter Lamda which you have cunningly substituted in place of the 'l' in Values.
Amateurs.