“Civilisations have continually emerged and collapsed throughout history. This is not a new or emergent phenomena. The only choices we have, if there are choices at all, is to grow or collapse. The latter is however inevitable at some point.
…
For those of us alive at this time, the abundance we experience is unparalleled in human history and for that we can be grateful. However, this time also comes with increasing complexity, increasing externalities and the geopolitical tensions downstream if the scarcity mentality. We are entering a period where we will increasingly struggle to generate the energy surplus necessary to maintain the world as we currently know it.”
The central issue here is the body politic is overwhelmingly dominated by PPE graduates with not the merest grasp of physics. All the resultant chaos stems from societal regression from the Enlightenment
Well put David. This has been well understood by many of those qualified to understand it for 2 decades at least.
The simple reality of what works and what cannot energy wise was explained by Sir David MacKay, DECC Chief Scientist, who had written a globally recognised reference work on the subject of what can work to do the job, He dies of cancer at 48 but recorded a interview on the realities with Mark Lynas 10 days before he died, able to tell the truth without consequences for his future employment by givernment or academe.
David makes it clear what can work for the UK, and what cannot. His book is available on line "Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air", also available in print via the website.
Similar realities have been published and presented on the claims regarding climate, but the deceits, whose creation was funded then promoted by the UN, only cause problems when prescriptive measures are taken by sovereign law to fix them. This is something our politicians are entirely unsuited and unqualified to do, most of those seeking ministerial power are short termist liars who simply find ways to pass laws to enrich insiders and themselves at public expense at every opportunity. The rest are lobby fodder who simply legitimise the frauds or loss the whip and and their party's support. So they cannot be trusted to address any issue, real or not, without exploiting it for their primary purposes of extending government reach over the people's economic lives and freedoms, and monetising the supposed problem to profit themselves and their cronies. As they have in the UK to tune of over £100Billion to date appropriated by taxes and subsidies to enrich their capitalist cronies, ministers and civil servants. Legally, because they legalised their crime.
Better to really follow the science and let the market decide..
The problem is the reality of science we measure, as regards climate and enrgy. That only the natural facts of nature control, as regards both climate change and what really causes it, and the unavoidable realities of energy generation and use. As Feynman put it after the Challenger disaster ""For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
The problem is how to explain this natural reality, the only one there is, of legalised crime, in a clear and verifiable way, using the facts and laws of science to expose the lies and deceits, to an unsophisticated public being deliberately defrauded by their treasonous politicians, civil servants and educators - that they mistakenly trust to be decent, honest and truthful. Mistake.
We have experienced a sustained, organised & legalised fraud on the people of the UK by the ruling class, created by the UN for the purposes of global re alignment. Imposed in our name, with our money. Taken by the laws of the fraudulent conspirators who have enriched insider elites and themselves by flat lining our economy, while impoverishing the people they claim to represent and improve the lives of. All in the name of problems which were based on lies on the known facts of climate and enrgy when the laws were imposed in 2008. Why the balanced factual debate of these facts has been systematically suppressed since the laws were imposed.
The facts are that the only effects of change we can measure in nature have been positive for humanity. Climate extremes, agriculture, life expectancy, drought, famine, health, all better Meanwhile our economy has been flat lined in the name of he opposite happening, to enrich those behind the deceit, over £100Billion by now in the UK alone, to no actual benefit to our economy. None of the supposed economic disasters made up in models by Stern et al, used to justify "decarbonisation" of a society that is part of the carbon cycle that gives it life, have actually happened. The opposite has occurred. Things got better, on every measure of the falsely manufactured problem, that anyone numerate and literate can check for themselves.
The fundamental premise of the UN IPCC's claims were always false on the facts and physics blatantly contrived by activist academics who were paid to pretend to know them, rewarded to prove a non-problem, using false attribution of cause and effect and denying natural change to do it, to grossly exaggerrate the real effects of more CO2, which are also measurably positive for human life on earth in fact. IPCC politician's predictions regarding climate are entirely falsifiable by the evidence we measure in nature. Even more so the provably ineffectual and over priced non-solutions to the non-problems of energy generation that arecdestoying the stabiity and intergrity of our dispatcahble enrgy grid supplu an. that would havebeensimply solvedby replacing clean gas with clean nuclear, 24/7 and cheapest lifetime cost of all - if CO2 was even a problem. The politicains fake solutions to a non-problem have cost our economy fortunes that have disappeared into the pockets of politicians, their crony capitalists and civil service bureaucrats, all at the trough they filled with out money, by their law, to no benfit to us, based on their obvious lies.
Net Zero could never deliver the claims made for its phoney solutions, because the laws of physics meant the supposed solutions could never do what politicians claimed for them. Even if there was a problem that required the progressive phasing out of fossil fuels, only nuclear would have solved that while maintaining economic growth. Not weak, intermittent, duplicative energy that cannot maintain a stable enrgy supply at scale. The claims for Net Zero were a simple fiscal con trick, that banks can trade in and profit from. Built on knowing and provable lies from the start.
The people who run our country do not work for us. They have lied to us, to control and exploit the ever fewer in the private sector who generate the real wealth that our politicians, civil service and their NGOs are all parasites upon. By their law. CEng, CPhys, MBA
You say we have less energy supply. Can you evidence this? We may use less energy for a variety of reasons. A focus on less energy intense service industries, Brexit making us poorer and efficiency gains through electrification. What is your evidence we have less available energy?
Figure 3 is energy consumption not energy availability. That was my point. In your text you say we have reduced supply but you have not presented evidence for reduced supply.
I don’t disagree with any of that but there isn’t a reduced energy supply. This has been through choice and efficiency gains.
I would imagine primary energy consumption will continue to fall as we move away from highly inefficient fossil fuels. That’s just the pure maths and reality of a world where more and more is electrifying.
"highly inefficient fossil fuels"....... you just proved to the world that you have no idea what you are talking about. perhaps you should educate yourself on little things like energy density, transportability and scalability.
Seriously. Don’t tell me you have fallen for the primary energy fallacy?
Fossil fuels are extremely inefficient, from drilling/mining for them, transporting and refining them, to burning them. 2/3 of their energy is wasted in those processes hence the primary energy fallacy.
Let’s take an ICE car for example. Just 24% of the original fossil fuel energy ends up moving that car. You couldn’t dream up anything more inefficient if you tried.
We import electricity, oil, gas, what little coal we still use. 25 years ago we were energy self sufficient, in fact net exporters, with higher energy consumption.
Today we are heading back in that direction except with clean energy with zero or close to zero carbon emissions. Technology improvement has enabled that.
Our energy imports as a share of consumption continue to increase. Your "Clean" energy depends heavily on imports to be able to harvest it, increasingly from China. It will continue to depend on imports because of the intermittency of renewables. You have no idea of the data. I doubt you have ever looked at it.
Well clearly previous right wing governments decided we wanted a service industry led country and we lost a lot of energy intensive businesses. Clearly in the long run as we electrify more processes demand will increase. Investment in our grid and renewable generation is a long term positive in my opinion. Not only that essential if we are to avoid more extreme climate change.
What is this extreme climate change and what causes it? There is zero evidence it’s absolutely caused by man made c02 emissions. Net zero is IMPOSSIBLE we cannot live without the 6000+ products derived from oil. The cure is far far worse than the disease.
I have news for you. Net zero isn’t about zero oil. It’s mostly about stopping burning oil and other fossil fuels for energy. Net zero is not zero emissions but balancing emissions with what nature &/or other human interventions can absorb.
As for your denial of climate science I’m not even going to bother wasting my time arguing with you. The science is absolutely clear.
Hahaha what climate science, there is none. So how do we make the 6000+ products used everyday if we don’t burn the oil to produce. Honestly the hypocrisy from you loony greens is ridiculous. Please live without FF if you can? let the rest of normal society use the precious fuels that gave bettered everyone’s life’s for the last 150 years.
How right wing are Labour 1997-2010, the Lib Dems who ran energy policy in the coalition including Huhne and Davey, or any government since? It was the "right wing" Theresa May who introduced net zero. You view the world through red tinted glasses which biases your opinion and excludes rational evaluations.
I’m not particularly left wing. My observation is that it was successive right leaning or obviously right wing governments that promoted moving to a service industry and moving away from heavy industry hence a reduction in our energy needs. I think the evidence supports that view does it not? Feel free to counter that with actual evidence. Blair’s government really wasn’t a left wing government especially when it came to industrial strategy.
You have no idea of my political views. I came here for a balanced discussion on clean vs fossil energy. All I get is despots desperate to keep us on fossil fuels forever attacking clean energy and denying climate change.
Oh look someone who doesn’t fall for the anti clean energy rhetoric of fossil fuel advocates. What is your problem. There is no need to be upset by clean energy.
Oh I have. It’s infinitely better than burning fossil fuels releasing billions of tonnes of carbon emissions cancer & asthma causing pollutants. That’s just fact.
Clearly somebody else who doesn't understand the difference between total energy consumption and electricity consumption. David's Fig. 3 is energy consumption in kWh per capita. 44,000 is a lot. Only a small proportion of that would be electricity (typically 3000KWh for a medium sized HOUSE). So yes, electrifying more things will increase electricity consumption, but our overall ENERGY consumption is destined to decline precipitously if the Net Zero fanatics get their way.
I have not confused anything. My comment was that we do not have a restricted energy supply. Yes ioverall energy use will decrease because most fossil fuel is wasted. It’s so inefficient 2/3 is wasted. Energy consumption will fall through efficiency gains. Why does using clean energy and improving efficiency upset som many people? I have never been able to understand it unless you stand to lose money with declining fossil fuels.
Because it's not 'clean' and the reasons given for switching to clean (not clean) energy are TOTALLY BOGUS. I'm all for efficiency gains. We can use cheap, abundant fossil fuels more efficiently too and not take their relative abundance and low cost so much for granted.
Isn’t this meant to be a serious discussion? Denying human induced climate change and the need to stop it before it causes too much harm isn’t really a serious position given the overwhelming evidence.
"Previous right wing governments..." What do you think Blair's "Education, education, education" was meant to achieve if not a successful service economy? Successive governments have been happily presiding over de-industrialisation in the UK for at least 50 years.
The last UK government which at a stretch could be called right-wing (apart from all the “wets”) was Margaret Thatcher’s in the 1980s which doesn’t show in the graph. Yes, it shut down industries like coal mining and steel works and maybe that was a mistake. It created run-down communities like those in the US which President Trump is at least trying to revive.
The general public uptake of EVs and heat pumps is hopelessly low so ongoing deindustrialisation (Grangemouth, Port Talbot, the car industry, …) could mean that electricity demand continues to fall.
Uptake of green tech and investment in making it here has been challenged by the right at every turn. Not a good strategy in a world clearly committed to a clean energy transition. Contrary to what you say EV sales are doing pretty well in the UK. Heat pumps slower but showing signs of increasing. Whatever right wing governments think the future is in green tech and a clean digitalised flexible grid. It’s about time more got behind it not trying to cling to foreign fossil fuel power. That makes no sense at all. We all see what Trump is doing. He wants the US to be the leading petro state so he can control us through his energy policy and supply. Good job Europe and China isn’t playing his game in my opinion. He’s doomed to failure as fossil fuel demand will fall.
As for berating “foreign fossil fuel power”, we’ve got enough in the UK and the North Sea to last for centuries but our treasonous Uniparty politicians don’t want to use it but are happy to import US LNG at great expense.
The 'Green Lobby is perhaps tens of millions of UK citizens, whereas there are only about 7,700 trans people currently living in the UK who possess a Gender Recognition Certificate. So why does David Turver spoil his otherwise erudite article here, with aimless knee jerk attacks on a vulnerable minority of UK citizens by writing:-
"The very same people who would have us believe a bloke in a dress with a Gender Recognition Certificate is a woman, also try to kid us that a wind turbine with a Renewables Obligation Certificate is a dispatchable power station."
Has Turver been drinking the mainstream media cool aid - funded by far right wing ideologues? The same one's pushing the "renewables will save us" bull shit? So now he uncritically believes their headline message designed ONLY to sew divisions and distractions from Turver's otherwise erudite "politics is downstream of energy" message - with toxic anti-scientific waffle, that "sex in humans is binary" - when a cursory glance at the peer reviewed scientific / biological some journal published research literature that suggests it's a bit more complicated than a simple binary:-
David Turver writes:- "On a societal scale, government borrowing will eventually have to be repaid through taxes generated from work. But as we have seen money is effectively a representation of energy, so if our energy production falls, we will do less work and generate less income to pay the taxes to repay the borrowing."
But a simple logical glance exposes this as mainstream neoclassical economic caca del toro. Where does money come from? Do you David Turver have a money printing press? If you did have a money printing press would you bother with taxing anybody so you could start spending your money? Of course not. Well, news flash: the UK government DOES have a money printing press, its called the Bank of England. Further, since ALL money is created by double entry bookkeeping by banks, if the government were to pay all the money its has created as debt back, it would have to cancel out and guess what? There'd be NO more (gov created) money left in circulation (only private bank loans i.e. private money creation)!
You are doing a great job David at explaining the ludicrous energy policies we are living under. Sadly the bulk of the population will not be learning of the parlous state of our energy systems and the deliberate efforts being made by our government to increase the entropy of the population, until we are returned to an agrarian existence of scavenging from the fields for our fuel and food!
The fact is barely anyone knows what the word entropy means. Plus in my view it does not in any way portray its meaning. Then how you apply that to net zero, again the bulk of the populace do not know a molecule from a mole, nor what kind of mole I may mean! Even our supposed masters (sick joke) refer to carbon reduction as a necessity, surely not realising we ourselves are carbon based, and even with that, they never mention the two oxygen atoms they wish to see the back of along with the ugly carbon they so despise.
Then net zero is a direct descendent of climate change, by which they mean anthropogenic climate change, not the stuff of nature. Here we are asked to believe the ungodly molecule CO2 even in such sparse numbers is capable of rendering the whole planet a hot house, without ever explaining where the extra energy comes from. But like the trajectory of the magic bullet in the Kennedy assassination, this clever molecule is better at re-directing energy in directions you would not expect, even without a surface. So not surprising the populace are confused and led by the nose, by people with an agenda, and an agenda that will do harm.
I like the concept described here by Douglas Brodie for that must surely be our destination.
The problem is the denial of the limits of the planet. As with money you can not keep on pumping out more climate warming gases without a (environmental) reaction. With money it is the limit of the available resources (people to do the work, factories, resources..) otherwise you will create inflation. Most economies have under-employed resources eg unemployment used as a deliberate economic policy to keep down wages, so their is scope for more government money creation. The other downside is revaluation of the currency that would probably make imports more expensive but exports more competitive. Unfortunately 50 years of neoliberal /neoclassical equilibrium economics/politics in favour of the FIRE sector (finance, insurance , real estate) which is a cost of doing business instead of real productive GDP eg industry, infrastructure that adds wealth to the nation, has decimated the industrial base.
By a coincidence of happenstance, the idiosyncratic blogger el gata malo (no caps, cat fetish) has just posted on the same theme of societal degradation. He writes of how Puerto Rico where he lives is plagued with power cuts and is slipping from first world status to what he describes as “second world” status. He also gives horrendous examples of where this is happening in mainland USA.
His thesis is that (caps added) “second world exists as a post first world stage and that you basically cannot get there without first having been first world. It’s not a transitional stage so much as a form of post achievement decline, a sort of senescence and degradation, a once lush garden gone to weeds. The second world is a trap and a truly nasty one from which extrication once caught is very difficult because the second world is, in many ways, the worst of all worlds, it’s first world systems that have fallen into hands and practices under which they cannot function, technology, technocracy, welfare systems, and systems of trust that work (or at least that can be managed at tolerable costs) by a certain sort of society but that become ruinous albatrosses around the necks of everything and everyone once they fall into disfunction, disrepair, and abuse”.
Related to second world state. Train in northern UK. Midday. 2 females talking loudly on phone itemising their one hour ‘shop lifting haul’ in neighbouring town (banned from shops in town where they actually live). No-one raised an eyebrow. No-one challenged them. It’s how they live. I’ve never seen it so blatant. Or felt so depressed.
David, excellent article explaining clearly and succintly just how serious the implications are in the dash for Net Zero, the consequences of which are already being felt. Change needs to happen quickly if we are to avoid the worst.
Well done for a clear and revealing article that ought be sent to every MP. Indeed, I m sure that Mr Farage may be most willing to refer to it in one of his briefings to Parliament, and Hansard
The New Zealand Energy substack has just posted an uncannily similar article on the same theme of increasing energy scarcity: https://newzealandenergy.substack.com/p/biophysical-realities.
“Civilisations have continually emerged and collapsed throughout history. This is not a new or emergent phenomena. The only choices we have, if there are choices at all, is to grow or collapse. The latter is however inevitable at some point.
…
For those of us alive at this time, the abundance we experience is unparalleled in human history and for that we can be grateful. However, this time also comes with increasing complexity, increasing externalities and the geopolitical tensions downstream if the scarcity mentality. We are entering a period where we will increasingly struggle to generate the energy surplus necessary to maintain the world as we currently know it.”
Much is made of how many jobs are created by Net Zero but in essence the more people involved in energy production the poorer we all become.
If its my or my children's standard of living or our lives I know which on I would sacrifice.
The central issue here is the body politic is overwhelmingly dominated by PPE graduates with not the merest grasp of physics. All the resultant chaos stems from societal regression from the Enlightenment
Excellent essay. Not a word out of place.
Well put David. This has been well understood by many of those qualified to understand it for 2 decades at least.
The simple reality of what works and what cannot energy wise was explained by Sir David MacKay, DECC Chief Scientist, who had written a globally recognised reference work on the subject of what can work to do the job, He dies of cancer at 48 but recorded a interview on the realities with Mark Lynas 10 days before he died, able to tell the truth without consequences for his future employment by givernment or academe.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/qfbs99kreluvyioaudf8a/David-MacKay-on-Solar-in-UK.mov?rlkey=nla5edxa3mp6021padu3fdlji&dl=0
David makes it clear what can work for the UK, and what cannot. His book is available on line "Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air", also available in print via the website.
Similar realities have been published and presented on the claims regarding climate, but the deceits, whose creation was funded then promoted by the UN, only cause problems when prescriptive measures are taken by sovereign law to fix them. This is something our politicians are entirely unsuited and unqualified to do, most of those seeking ministerial power are short termist liars who simply find ways to pass laws to enrich insiders and themselves at public expense at every opportunity. The rest are lobby fodder who simply legitimise the frauds or loss the whip and and their party's support. So they cannot be trusted to address any issue, real or not, without exploiting it for their primary purposes of extending government reach over the people's economic lives and freedoms, and monetising the supposed problem to profit themselves and their cronies. As they have in the UK to tune of over £100Billion to date appropriated by taxes and subsidies to enrich their capitalist cronies, ministers and civil servants. Legally, because they legalised their crime.
Better to really follow the science and let the market decide..
The problem is the reality of science we measure, as regards climate and enrgy. That only the natural facts of nature control, as regards both climate change and what really causes it, and the unavoidable realities of energy generation and use. As Feynman put it after the Challenger disaster ""For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
The problem is how to explain this natural reality, the only one there is, of legalised crime, in a clear and verifiable way, using the facts and laws of science to expose the lies and deceits, to an unsophisticated public being deliberately defrauded by their treasonous politicians, civil servants and educators - that they mistakenly trust to be decent, honest and truthful. Mistake.
We have experienced a sustained, organised & legalised fraud on the people of the UK by the ruling class, created by the UN for the purposes of global re alignment. Imposed in our name, with our money. Taken by the laws of the fraudulent conspirators who have enriched insider elites and themselves by flat lining our economy, while impoverishing the people they claim to represent and improve the lives of. All in the name of problems which were based on lies on the known facts of climate and enrgy when the laws were imposed in 2008. Why the balanced factual debate of these facts has been systematically suppressed since the laws were imposed.
The facts are that the only effects of change we can measure in nature have been positive for humanity. Climate extremes, agriculture, life expectancy, drought, famine, health, all better Meanwhile our economy has been flat lined in the name of he opposite happening, to enrich those behind the deceit, over £100Billion by now in the UK alone, to no actual benefit to our economy. None of the supposed economic disasters made up in models by Stern et al, used to justify "decarbonisation" of a society that is part of the carbon cycle that gives it life, have actually happened. The opposite has occurred. Things got better, on every measure of the falsely manufactured problem, that anyone numerate and literate can check for themselves.
The fundamental premise of the UN IPCC's claims were always false on the facts and physics blatantly contrived by activist academics who were paid to pretend to know them, rewarded to prove a non-problem, using false attribution of cause and effect and denying natural change to do it, to grossly exaggerrate the real effects of more CO2, which are also measurably positive for human life on earth in fact. IPCC politician's predictions regarding climate are entirely falsifiable by the evidence we measure in nature. Even more so the provably ineffectual and over priced non-solutions to the non-problems of energy generation that arecdestoying the stabiity and intergrity of our dispatcahble enrgy grid supplu an. that would havebeensimply solvedby replacing clean gas with clean nuclear, 24/7 and cheapest lifetime cost of all - if CO2 was even a problem. The politicains fake solutions to a non-problem have cost our economy fortunes that have disappeared into the pockets of politicians, their crony capitalists and civil service bureaucrats, all at the trough they filled with out money, by their law, to no benfit to us, based on their obvious lies.
Net Zero could never deliver the claims made for its phoney solutions, because the laws of physics meant the supposed solutions could never do what politicians claimed for them. Even if there was a problem that required the progressive phasing out of fossil fuels, only nuclear would have solved that while maintaining economic growth. Not weak, intermittent, duplicative energy that cannot maintain a stable enrgy supply at scale. The claims for Net Zero were a simple fiscal con trick, that banks can trade in and profit from. Built on knowing and provable lies from the start.
The people who run our country do not work for us. They have lied to us, to control and exploit the ever fewer in the private sector who generate the real wealth that our politicians, civil service and their NGOs are all parasites upon. By their law. CEng, CPhys, MBA
I've linked on my CoSy.com/DailyBlog.html , with the quote :
" ... you cannot print energy. "
You say we have less energy supply. Can you evidence this? We may use less energy for a variety of reasons. A focus on less energy intense service industries, Brexit making us poorer and efficiency gains through electrification. What is your evidence we have less available energy?
See Figure 3
Figure 3 is energy consumption not energy availability. That was my point. In your text you say we have reduced supply but you have not presented evidence for reduced supply.
OK. Domestic electricity generation is down, and we became a net importer of hydrocarbons quite a few years ago.
I don’t disagree with any of that but there isn’t a reduced energy supply. This has been through choice and efficiency gains.
I would imagine primary energy consumption will continue to fall as we move away from highly inefficient fossil fuels. That’s just the pure maths and reality of a world where more and more is electrifying.
"highly inefficient fossil fuels"....... you just proved to the world that you have no idea what you are talking about. perhaps you should educate yourself on little things like energy density, transportability and scalability.
Seriously. Don’t tell me you have fallen for the primary energy fallacy?
Fossil fuels are extremely inefficient, from drilling/mining for them, transporting and refining them, to burning them. 2/3 of their energy is wasted in those processes hence the primary energy fallacy.
Let’s take an ICE car for example. Just 24% of the original fossil fuel energy ends up moving that car. You couldn’t dream up anything more inefficient if you tried.
We import electricity, oil, gas, what little coal we still use. 25 years ago we were energy self sufficient, in fact net exporters, with higher energy consumption.
Today we are heading back in that direction except with clean energy with zero or close to zero carbon emissions. Technology improvement has enabled that.
Our energy imports as a share of consumption continue to increase. Your "Clean" energy depends heavily on imports to be able to harvest it, increasingly from China. It will continue to depend on imports because of the intermittency of renewables. You have no idea of the data. I doubt you have ever looked at it.
Why don’t you like clean energy. Come in declare your biases.
Here’s a simple graph of UK electricity demand showing a steady, almost linear decline since 2008 despite the push to adopt electricity-consuming EVs and heat pumps. I would hypothesise that the decline is mostly due to the offshoring of businesses and deindustrialisation: https://www.statista.com/statistics/323381/total-demand-for-electricity-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/
Well clearly previous right wing governments decided we wanted a service industry led country and we lost a lot of energy intensive businesses. Clearly in the long run as we electrify more processes demand will increase. Investment in our grid and renewable generation is a long term positive in my opinion. Not only that essential if we are to avoid more extreme climate change.
What is this extreme climate change and what causes it? There is zero evidence it’s absolutely caused by man made c02 emissions. Net zero is IMPOSSIBLE we cannot live without the 6000+ products derived from oil. The cure is far far worse than the disease.
I have news for you. Net zero isn’t about zero oil. It’s mostly about stopping burning oil and other fossil fuels for energy. Net zero is not zero emissions but balancing emissions with what nature &/or other human interventions can absorb.
As for your denial of climate science I’m not even going to bother wasting my time arguing with you. The science is absolutely clear.
Hahaha what climate science, there is none. So how do we make the 6000+ products used everyday if we don’t burn the oil to produce. Honestly the hypocrisy from you loony greens is ridiculous. Please live without FF if you can? let the rest of normal society use the precious fuels that gave bettered everyone’s life’s for the last 150 years.
How right wing are Labour 1997-2010, the Lib Dems who ran energy policy in the coalition including Huhne and Davey, or any government since? It was the "right wing" Theresa May who introduced net zero. You view the world through red tinted glasses which biases your opinion and excludes rational evaluations.
I’m not particularly left wing. My observation is that it was successive right leaning or obviously right wing governments that promoted moving to a service industry and moving away from heavy industry hence a reduction in our energy needs. I think the evidence supports that view does it not? Feel free to counter that with actual evidence. Blair’s government really wasn’t a left wing government especially when it came to industrial strategy.
You are so far left in the Overton window that you don't even know where you are.
You have no idea of my political views. I came here for a balanced discussion on clean vs fossil energy. All I get is despots desperate to keep us on fossil fuels forever attacking clean energy and denying climate change.
Oh, look, an envirotard.
Oh look someone who doesn’t fall for the anti clean energy rhetoric of fossil fuel advocates. What is your problem. There is no need to be upset by clean energy.
"Clean" energy. You should investigate the pollution created by attempting to harvest it.
Oh I have. It’s infinitely better than burning fossil fuels releasing billions of tonnes of carbon emissions cancer & asthma causing pollutants. That’s just fact.
Clearly somebody else who doesn't understand the difference between total energy consumption and electricity consumption. David's Fig. 3 is energy consumption in kWh per capita. 44,000 is a lot. Only a small proportion of that would be electricity (typically 3000KWh for a medium sized HOUSE). So yes, electrifying more things will increase electricity consumption, but our overall ENERGY consumption is destined to decline precipitously if the Net Zero fanatics get their way.
I have not confused anything. My comment was that we do not have a restricted energy supply. Yes ioverall energy use will decrease because most fossil fuel is wasted. It’s so inefficient 2/3 is wasted. Energy consumption will fall through efficiency gains. Why does using clean energy and improving efficiency upset som many people? I have never been able to understand it unless you stand to lose money with declining fossil fuels.
Because it's not 'clean' and the reasons given for switching to clean (not clean) energy are TOTALLY BOGUS. I'm all for efficiency gains. We can use cheap, abundant fossil fuels more efficiently too and not take their relative abundance and low cost so much for granted.
Isn’t this meant to be a serious discussion? Denying human induced climate change and the need to stop it before it causes too much harm isn’t really a serious position given the overwhelming evidence.
"Previous right wing governments..." What do you think Blair's "Education, education, education" was meant to achieve if not a successful service economy? Successive governments have been happily presiding over de-industrialisation in the UK for at least 50 years.
Exactly
The last UK government which at a stretch could be called right-wing (apart from all the “wets”) was Margaret Thatcher’s in the 1980s which doesn’t show in the graph. Yes, it shut down industries like coal mining and steel works and maybe that was a mistake. It created run-down communities like those in the US which President Trump is at least trying to revive.
The general public uptake of EVs and heat pumps is hopelessly low so ongoing deindustrialisation (Grangemouth, Port Talbot, the car industry, …) could mean that electricity demand continues to fall.
And as I’ve previously posted, you don’t need to worry about alleged man-made global warming or imagined “extreme climate change”. Here’s my debunking of the climate change hoax™ https://metatron.substack.com/p/debunking-the-climate-change-hoax.
Uptake of green tech and investment in making it here has been challenged by the right at every turn. Not a good strategy in a world clearly committed to a clean energy transition. Contrary to what you say EV sales are doing pretty well in the UK. Heat pumps slower but showing signs of increasing. Whatever right wing governments think the future is in green tech and a clean digitalised flexible grid. It’s about time more got behind it not trying to cling to foreign fossil fuel power. That makes no sense at all. We all see what Trump is doing. He wants the US to be the leading petro state so he can control us through his energy policy and supply. Good job Europe and China isn’t playing his game in my opinion. He’s doomed to failure as fossil fuel demand will fall.
What “clean energy transition”? Note the steadily increasing global consumption of fossil fuels which you claim is going to fall: https://x.com/latimeralder/status/1848970578452971810
The make-believe global green energy transition is a propaganda delusion: https://www.city-journal.org/article/energy-transition-green-new-deal
As for berating “foreign fossil fuel power”, we’ve got enough in the UK and the North Sea to last for centuries but our treasonous Uniparty politicians don’t want to use it but are happy to import US LNG at great expense.
You are quoting Latimer Alder at me. Why on earth 🤣
Thank you David. I think this should be compulsory reading for our current very dense government 🤐
The 'Green Lobby is perhaps tens of millions of UK citizens, whereas there are only about 7,700 trans people currently living in the UK who possess a Gender Recognition Certificate. So why does David Turver spoil his otherwise erudite article here, with aimless knee jerk attacks on a vulnerable minority of UK citizens by writing:-
"The very same people who would have us believe a bloke in a dress with a Gender Recognition Certificate is a woman, also try to kid us that a wind turbine with a Renewables Obligation Certificate is a dispatchable power station."
Has Turver been drinking the mainstream media cool aid - funded by far right wing ideologues? The same one's pushing the "renewables will save us" bull shit? So now he uncritically believes their headline message designed ONLY to sew divisions and distractions from Turver's otherwise erudite "politics is downstream of energy" message - with toxic anti-scientific waffle, that "sex in humans is binary" - when a cursory glance at the peer reviewed scientific / biological some journal published research literature that suggests it's a bit more complicated than a simple binary:-
https://www.nature.com/articles/518288a
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-020-0666-3
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2470289718803639
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/lies-and-deception/202412/what-is-biological-sex
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=what+does+%22biological+sex%22+in+humans+mean%3F&ia=web
etc. etc. etc.....
David Turver writes:- "On a societal scale, government borrowing will eventually have to be repaid through taxes generated from work. But as we have seen money is effectively a representation of energy, so if our energy production falls, we will do less work and generate less income to pay the taxes to repay the borrowing."
But a simple logical glance exposes this as mainstream neoclassical economic caca del toro. Where does money come from? Do you David Turver have a money printing press? If you did have a money printing press would you bother with taxing anybody so you could start spending your money? Of course not. Well, news flash: the UK government DOES have a money printing press, its called the Bank of England. Further, since ALL money is created by double entry bookkeeping by banks, if the government were to pay all the money its has created as debt back, it would have to cancel out and guess what? There'd be NO more (gov created) money left in circulation (only private bank loans i.e. private money creation)!
https://www.economania.co.uk/various-authors/where-money-comes-from.htm
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy.pdf
https://gimms.org.uk/
https://www.mmt.works/
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/16/18251646/modern-monetary-theory-new-moment-explained
https://billmitchell.org/blog/?p=41399
https://billmitchell.org/blog/?p=46569
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2014/06/modern-money-theory-basics.html
etc. etc. etc....
You are doing a great job David at explaining the ludicrous energy policies we are living under. Sadly the bulk of the population will not be learning of the parlous state of our energy systems and the deliberate efforts being made by our government to increase the entropy of the population, until we are returned to an agrarian existence of scavenging from the fields for our fuel and food!
The fact is barely anyone knows what the word entropy means. Plus in my view it does not in any way portray its meaning. Then how you apply that to net zero, again the bulk of the populace do not know a molecule from a mole, nor what kind of mole I may mean! Even our supposed masters (sick joke) refer to carbon reduction as a necessity, surely not realising we ourselves are carbon based, and even with that, they never mention the two oxygen atoms they wish to see the back of along with the ugly carbon they so despise.
Then net zero is a direct descendent of climate change, by which they mean anthropogenic climate change, not the stuff of nature. Here we are asked to believe the ungodly molecule CO2 even in such sparse numbers is capable of rendering the whole planet a hot house, without ever explaining where the extra energy comes from. But like the trajectory of the magic bullet in the Kennedy assassination, this clever molecule is better at re-directing energy in directions you would not expect, even without a surface. So not surprising the populace are confused and led by the nose, by people with an agenda, and an agenda that will do harm.
I like the concept described here by Douglas Brodie for that must surely be our destination.
Thanks Brian. Sadly, you are the carbon they want to reduce! https://i.etsystatic.com/41677476/c/2127/2127/471/133/il/f4fbe1/5190995357/il_600x600.5190995357_4mfq.jpg
The problem is the denial of the limits of the planet. As with money you can not keep on pumping out more climate warming gases without a (environmental) reaction. With money it is the limit of the available resources (people to do the work, factories, resources..) otherwise you will create inflation. Most economies have under-employed resources eg unemployment used as a deliberate economic policy to keep down wages, so their is scope for more government money creation. The other downside is revaluation of the currency that would probably make imports more expensive but exports more competitive. Unfortunately 50 years of neoliberal /neoclassical equilibrium economics/politics in favour of the FIRE sector (finance, insurance , real estate) which is a cost of doing business instead of real productive GDP eg industry, infrastructure that adds wealth to the nation, has decimated the industrial base.
See
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q23wwyksdY&t=666s
By a coincidence of happenstance, the idiosyncratic blogger el gata malo (no caps, cat fetish) has just posted on the same theme of societal degradation. He writes of how Puerto Rico where he lives is plagued with power cuts and is slipping from first world status to what he describes as “second world” status. He also gives horrendous examples of where this is happening in mainland USA.
His thesis is that (caps added) “second world exists as a post first world stage and that you basically cannot get there without first having been first world. It’s not a transitional stage so much as a form of post achievement decline, a sort of senescence and degradation, a once lush garden gone to weeds. The second world is a trap and a truly nasty one from which extrication once caught is very difficult because the second world is, in many ways, the worst of all worlds, it’s first world systems that have fallen into hands and practices under which they cannot function, technology, technocracy, welfare systems, and systems of trust that work (or at least that can be managed at tolerable costs) by a certain sort of society but that become ruinous albatrosses around the necks of everything and everyone once they fall into disfunction, disrepair, and abuse”.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-second-world
Related to second world state. Train in northern UK. Midday. 2 females talking loudly on phone itemising their one hour ‘shop lifting haul’ in neighbouring town (banned from shops in town where they actually live). No-one raised an eyebrow. No-one challenged them. It’s how they live. I’ve never seen it so blatant. Or felt so depressed.
David, excellent article explaining clearly and succintly just how serious the implications are in the dash for Net Zero, the consequences of which are already being felt. Change needs to happen quickly if we are to avoid the worst.
The energy graph against GDP says it all really.
Well done for a clear and revealing article that ought be sent to every MP. Indeed, I m sure that Mr Farage may be most willing to refer to it in one of his briefings to Parliament, and Hansard