Beelbeebub

That's not actually true. Record readings of any stable system become rarer the longer you take measurements. This is a mathematical fact. If the rate at which you set record measurements increaces then the system you are measuring has changed, again a mathematical fact. The rate at which we are setting temperature records has increaced. All 10 of the hottest years ever recorded occurred in the last 10 years. That means the world is warming. And we should be worried as the world is now hotter than at any time since humans left Africa.

The Met Office lying? I mean I know weather forecasts aren't always accurate but how do you get the idea thr Met Office is lying. Are you going to say that they are literally making up the measurements? 'cos this measurements show the climate is changing.

Reality is analogue rather than binary. But my point remains, much of the policy that comes under the umbrella of "Net zero" Insulating homes Increacing heat pump installs Electrification of road transport Could easily be rebranded "Zero dependance" or "Net Zero Imports" or something else a highly paid marketing team can come up with. Yet there are some politicians and many of their followers who are campaigning vigorously against "Net zero" but also talking of needing to increace energy security - by drilling more. Own up. Were you aware of the state of UK fossil fuels production and *more importantly* that is was down to the geology rather than policy. The impression given by certain politicans is that we could become a net exporter again, if only we weren't held back by policy.

Very much so. Which is worse A) losing storage site/vessel that provides a fuel for a small proportion of your demand and is mainly a backup reserve. B) losing storage site/vessel that provides a fuel you were relying on burning next week. Again, pick one. (you haven't picked which choice from the last time...) (for context the uk currently gets 25% of all it's gas via LNG)

I think it is, though not as expensive as the country going dark! 😁 I wonder how much gas storage is on board a LNG tanker. Could the UK Gov just buy and operate a bunch and use those as a dual use transport /buffer

They were great, and in 1984 it wasn't an unreasonable decision. But by 2001 it was clearly a technogy with no future. Much like gas boilers. Thry are fantastic. A small box on the wall that will provide heating and hot water on demand for an entire house with almost no effort on the occupants part. Brilliant. But their time is coming to a close and in 2035 even more so. I remember when incandescent light bulbs were phased out and lots of people moaned about it. Anyone moaning now? I can light an entire house of about what it cost to run a single light bulb and the (decent) ones last years.

Yes, aside from the clean coal (which is not a viable technology and exists, like hydrogen boilers, purely as a tech fig leaf to keep doing nothing). Personally I think we need much more gas storage and more gas plants as backup for the times when renewables are low. Don't mistake my position for not using a single drop of fossil fuels. We will.meed them for all sorts of things - aviation, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, plastics, certain transport, defence etc. Oil and gas are important resources that are absolutely vital to our modern way of life. Which is why it is absolutely crazy that we take our dwindling supply and set it on fire to heat our houses and pick up the shopping when we could do those things without burning a drop.

There is no ban. The ban was originally mooted by the conservatives for 2025, then extended to 2035, then watered down to 80% phase out by Sunak. Milliband just reiterated that position a few days ago. 'There isn’t going to be a ban because Rishi Sunak, well, they never legislated for the ban and then he said he wasn’t going to do it,' explained Mr. Miliband. He further emphasized Labour’s transparency in their manifesto, which assured that consumers would not be compelled to discard existing gas boilers. So there - no ban an no compelling people to switch. However by 2035 we will be importing even more of our gas so installing a gas boiler in 2035 would be like buying a betamax player in 2001.

I think you are the one missing my point. The decline of UK production is down to geology - the fields we have in our territories are nearly empty. Here is a study commissioned by the FF industry body. Note the decline even if everything goes well. They have even included an "unconstrained" case Which shows that maximum possible extraction and that is only 3x the current (declining) projection, ie still falling, just not as fast. So, given we are running out of our fossil fuels, we have two alternatives A) continue as we are and accept importing an ever increacing amount of our use. B) taken steps to minimise our use of FF by reducing energy demand and substituting, where possible, an energy type we can produce. Which one do you want A or B? Pick.

Ah, there's your problem.....

In before someone says "scientists thought global cooling was a thing in the 70's! How do you explain that?!"

Again, for those at the back Whether or not climate change is happening is totally irrelevant to the fact the UK is rapidly becoming more and more dependant on an energy source we have to import I suspect the continuing invoking of the climate change question is simply a coping mechanism to avoid having to face the inevitable. The numbers on current uk fossil fuel production are not a matter of opinion. The numbers on future uk production are less certain but even using the most optimistic forecasts by the organisations most biased towards continuing fossil fuel dependency the future looks decidedly bleak

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 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.

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

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.

I suspect you give him too much credit for strategic thinking. But some of his courtiers are probably thinking along those lines.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/21/trump-us-stranglehold-eu-uk-energy-supply-lng Rather timely article. Who here thinks that being dependant on the US for heating our homes wouldn't be exploited by Trump?

What could the same unit do to an oil refinery or storage depot? Remember Buncefield? Strangely, the distributed, relatively low density nature of renewables males them more resilient. Many smaller generation units spread over a wide geographical area are harder to disable than fewer larger units. Truck bomb at a nuclear plant - knprobbaky cause a precautionary shutdown and knock out mutliple GW of production. Blow up a solar farm, maybe lose a field, which would be a few MW tops. It feels like you really are grasping for reasons against, whilst not addressing the fundamental issue of our current dependence on oil and gas rapidly becoming unsustainable. How would you approach the coming increace in our reliance on imported fuel?

The UK isn't big enough to vertically integrate everything - almost no nation on earth is except perhaps China (now) and India (eventually). Certainly no European nation. But thr build out phase of renewables is less important than the maintance of renewables. As has been pointed out - renewable infrastructure lasts a long time. It doesn't really.matter if Danish, American or Chinese companies build the turbine as long as you control it and can maintain it. How many of us built our own houses?

You may be right, I was referring to oil supply and this https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2024-07-24/1543/ Realistically we would buy gas from Europe but as 2022 showed it puts us at the mercy of world events. We will almost certainly require gas generation, probaly more than now, to provide backup and supply for winter, so we certainly need to increace our storage. But if the majority of our hearing uses gas boilers, we need gas. Nothing else will do. If it is electric we can heat out homes with wind, nuclear, solar, coal even.

TBF the UK has considerable expertise in designing, building and maintaining large structures offshore in hostile environments. Aberdeen could continue booming by switching to the next energy source rather than trying to sweat every last penny from a declining reserve.

I've got 24 panels in not a great location, but even so they are producing an average of about 4kwh over December - most of an average house demand (sadly not my house) With the battery it was about 10k all in. If built into a new build could be less. Say 7k. For an extra 7k upfront a new build house could have zero elec bills for thr next 2 decades and never habe a power cut.