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Haha, absolutely Pete!

It’s 240m from my front door to the bin collection point, why does it matter where they are kept. it’s all this bollox that makes this country an utter shambles.

It takes all sorts - all opinions are good, even wrong ones. Deleted the rest of the comment, it's not worth the effort.

As the number of bins we need goes up the amount of space available to store them becomes a problem. While you both have the room and are concientious plenty of others either can't be arsed or space is an issue and that leads to bins being left in the street. I'd also guess that plenty of 'disgusted of Tunbridge Wells' type complaints about how unsightly bins are even if they aren't cluttering up the pavement. One of those rules that matters greatly to a small plot in a city but seems a bit overkill on a large plot.

@flanagaj are you doing the groundwork yourself or do you have a contractor.

The massive, overwhelming weight of scientific observations is on the side of climate change being real and humans being the main driver. The "naysayers" are in the tiny minority and almost all have major links to the fossil fuel industry. But again, my argument is entirely uncoupled from climate change. Whether you believe the climate isn't changing,or it is changing but it's caused by sunspots or humans are changing thr climate but that's actually a good thing is totally irrelevant to the fact the UK is becoming more and more dependent on a substance we cannot obtain ourselves.

I don't get this bin storage lark. Our bin store is round the back of the house, where it is convenient for us to put rubbish from the house into them. The night before bin day, we wheel the approporiate bin to the front of the house and place it adjacent to the road for collection, then bring it back afterwards. I don't see what relevance this is to the planners where your bins reside when not awaiting collection?

I have a load of old motorcycle magazines. From the 50's and 60's. About when the first Japanese bikes appeared in the UK. Every single review basically commented how the bikes started reliably, didn't leak oil, handled well, were smooth and powerful, excellent value etc and basically superior on every way to the offerings of BSA, Norton, Triumph etc. And every single review ended with something along the lines... "of course no real motorcyclist would choose this over a thoughbred british sports bike" And thus died the British motorcycle industry. Europe risks the same. That said there are some "green shoots". The manufacturers are starting to churn out the volume everyday cars that people actually drive and buy at prices reaching parity or even cheaper than ICE cars.

Shall pop your comments into the conspiracy theory bin.

Same episode that pointed out that in a few years they would be the world leaders. Did BMW, Toyota etc all really think that the only benefit was to themselves. Be interesting to find out how much they have invested in Chinese companies that make car parts or assemble cars, similar to what the Japanese did in the UK car market in the 1990s.

If only that were still true. In today's world academics get monitored and ranked by papers published and citations. Lots of junk journals and journals with biased editors etc. Academics can often engage in mutual back scratching, reviewing, citing, and naming each other on papers for mutual advantage.

I read that as polar bears drying out!

You are one of them. I don't know your educational background, it is not Physics. There is a scientific reason that seemingly small rises in atmospheric can have a disproportionate effect on global temperatures. There is also research that shows global temperatures going going back 1.2 million years. Is that long enough for you. Anthropogenic climate change is happening, whether you wish to believe it or not.

Most western car companies have been (pardon the analogy) asleep at the wheel. Look at the Top Gear episode from around 2012 where they visited China and ripped the piss out of what was being made over there. To be fair, much of it was dreadful, but I remember reading an article from probably that time plus or minus a couple of years where car experts opined that the Chinese wouldn't be able to replicate the complexity of existing supply chains etc in less than a couple of decades. They also said that China were too far behind in metallurgy to make good quality ICE engines. It's quite extraordinary how wrong they were. The Chinese have addressed the supply chains and metallurgy issues in short order, plus focused on EVs where the component count is much lower and the need for super high spec materials and machining is reduced in any event.

I don't need to cite a paper to disprove something. Anthropogenic driven climate change through emmissions of carbon dioxide is a hypothesis which has not been scientifically proven. There are no papers that prove it occurs. All we have is a claimed correlation over 50-100 years between industrialisation and global CO2 emmissions and some average global temperatures. 50-100 years is a short time period - there are plenty of climate variations with no industrialisation - the romans grew grapes in england. It is a theory and correlation is not necessarily causation. Many models are built and used where CO2 driven warming is assumed as input and therefore produce warming output. There are alternative theories and many doubting and questioning scientists that are frequently censored, blocked, and cancelled. Others use their wealth to promote the theory by paying journalists to write anthropogenic climate change propaganda. That doesn't mean it is wrong, but it is certainly unproven and has very considerable doubt and uncertainty. Unfortunately many people do not understand how science works, many people are unable to cope with things being uncertain, many people are content to watch BBC climate propaganda without questioning it, many people want to make political capital out of it, or to make money off the back of it. It is very wrong to be tearing up the UK economy and finances as though it is a climate emergency when it is not. If we get some perspective we can think of many things that we were told 20 years ago would be upon us but are not - from polar bears dying out, coral reefs being no more, the sea lapping at the ankles of the statue of liberty, the earth ''boiling'', the polar ice retreating opening up the arctic seas - none of which has occurred. In the internet age nothing sells like fear, every other piece of clickbait is a scare story.

I was being facetious, but on a serious note coal derived fuels are more expensive and there is a serious bottleneck in terms of production facilities We woikd also need around 100milliom tons of coal per year - a level we haven't seen since the 80's when something happened to the mining industry You would need to argue that restarting the uk coal industry (good luck getting Gen Z down the pits - though they do love Minecraft so maybe not! 😁) and building the largest conversion facility in the world from scratch, twice, is cheaper than upgrading our grid, increacing renewables (and nuclear) and switching to EVs

The site won't allow for the turning of a fire appliance. The council has recently approved an application for a newbuild on a plot with similar access, the application mitigated the lack of access with the sprinkler system so this is why we went down this route. With regards to bins, we need to find out if putting a bin enclosure half way from the proposed new house and the road is possible, dunno what other residents would say. Thanks

Cough SASOL

Yeah, we even did some groundworks in all the mud on Monday. I am calling off any day that has more than a few mm of rain though.

Not how academic peer reviewing works. Rogue reviewers soon get found out, and the consequences are usually pretty severe. There is a big difference between science (as in the method) and opinion. Opinion is not science, it is just thoughts. Worth studying Karl Popper and Paul Feyerabend and how they differed in their approach to quantum physics. It is heavy going philosophy but put the scientific method on a firmer footing. If an opinion is said, heard or quoted, assume that there has been no experiments, data collected, analysis and reviewing. An opinion is not science so cannot be falsified.

We demolished a house to get a building plot. As a result there was already a gas supply but we chose to have it disconnected in the street. Our reasons were: Increased insulation means heating loads are small Solar panels can heat DHW for 2/3 of the year meaning the heat demand is zero - the gas standing charge (something for nothing) is galling As fewer people subscribe to gas heating, the cost of the network is going to be carried by fewer and fewer consumers - best get out early In contrast our ASHP + solar + battery performs very well without emissions or fossil fuel dependency

Aside from my point that "Net zero" policies are neccesary from a security perspective regardless of climate change, I should point out that the people along money from touring the world on jet planes cranking out unscientific lies are the climate change deniers. Have a look how much climate scientists earn and then look how much the scientists who zip about denying climate change are paid.

Trump may keel over tomorrow. But that is to miss the point. The fact that he has been allowed to drive a coach and horses through the old world order, threatening economic and military force to take over Iceland/Greenland with no pushback from the much vaunted "checks and balances" of the US constitution is the problem. He has shown that the institutions that were supposed to keep any madman in check are toothless. The US can no longer be considered a reliable partner. We are just one suoreme court appointment, one special election away from everything being thrown up in the air. I can't remember the source of the quote but "we cannot base our security and prosperity on some voters in Florida every 4 years"

Thank you for proving my point It is a common misconception amongst people such as yourselves that the UK could achive energy independence if only the "greens" would let us drill for more oil and gas. In case you misread my OP the oil and gas industry itself is predicting production will fall even with no restrictions on drilling. Let's take the "Rosebank" field, described as the Uk's largest undeveloped oil and gas field. At it's peak, it's owners predict it will produce in excess of 21 MMSCF of natural gas every day, which sounds impressive until you realise that is about as much as Aberdeen uses per day. That won't make a dent in our imports. There is no way the UK can pull enough oil and gas out of it's territory to satisfy it's current demand for oil and gas That is the considered opinion of all the experts including oil and gas industry. So the only option is to reduce our consumption of oil and gas via things like efficency, reducing journeys by car, electrification of heat and transport. All the "Net zero" things but not for environmental reasons, for purely pragmatic reasons. As for coal, let us assume, for a moment that there are near unlimited coal reserves available to the UK. How do you propose we heat our homes and drive out cars on coal? Go back to coal cellars, and a fire in every room? Rip out out combi boilers for solid fuel boilers? And as for cars.... If you think EV's have too short a range and take too long to charge, wait until you try steam cars! 😁 If you genuinely think the future of UK energy is coal you should be cheering for EVs and pushing for the adoption of Heatpumps alongside the blue haired vegan tree huggers. It's not your fault. The oil and gas companies have a well funded disinformation and lobbying campaign for keeping the UK hooked on oil and gas. After all, drug dealers aren't going to help you kick the habit - not when there are vast profits to be made.

That's your problem of course, not theirs. The rules on such matters are fairly clear, so you should read up on the building reg's and look at similar projects nearby, as their planning applications will be available online. If you can, make a formal proposal of how firefighting can be dealt with. A sprinkler and/or a 10m3 tanks is very expensive. In reality, fire engines are narrow and very manoeuvrable and can bring enough water for most incidents. Can you show a turning space so that they can get out again forwards? If that is on a drawing then the fire authority might simply agree. Bins. Don't let that be an objection. Show a bin enclosure near the entrance. Either available to the collectors or very near so that you can easily wheel them out.