oldkettle

myself 🙂 It's really simple. I make the decision - I pay for it, my kids pay for it. I have skin in the game. I need to make the best one possible. The same applies to everyone.

I don't feel offended at all - I said before that I don't take myself seriously. Thank you anyway. I don't argue with the fact that we the public can make bad decisions. But it's still better than letting "specially chosen people" make these decisions. Technocracy doesn't work, covid has demonstrated it perfectly for anybody who had any doubts. I understand your concerns very well. I obviously have counter-examples but it doesn't matter. You have your vote and I have mine and this is how these issues get resolved. If only those who said "lets lock down" actually paid for the consequences - and those who chose not to protect themselves and ended up in a hospital paid for their treatment. My beef is not with you, it's with "the experts" and even more so with "establishment" and so called professionals, i.e. people who don't actually know much more than you and I but claim that they do and make decisions for us or pressure the government to make such decisions. I read numerous posts by former scientists who left ages ago and moved up the administrative career - it was absolutely pathetic, the only thing they do well is deal with dissent. This is not a covid thread though, I really tried to get back to the energy issue.

I am sure you are right. Clearly all of the above were used during covid campain. And I am sure some of them also use their "networking" power (which may be covered by this framework, I only went and did a brief reading, sorry). What I mean is it's not unheard of for the police and the judiciary to work hand in hand - people know people. I've made a reference to relative limits of what they can do to us. They can try to use all their powers but ultimately a doctor can't tell the police to force me to read a book. :-) Well, not legitimately anyway.

I am sure you replied to me, not @Bitpipe because this was my message you quoted I don't think you fully understand what I am saying, otherwise you'd not give an example of drink-driving laws. I understand the concept of externalities at a basic level, I am not a complete moron.

What I really like about US constitution is it lists right that can't be taken away from people because it's not the bloody state, not any president or a prime-minister who gave these rights to people. If the electoral system fails to deal with what people believe is a real problem sooner or later it will blow up. It may be a populist party, a referendum or worse, but people need to know they are not completely ignored. Losing fairly is not the same as being ignored. Specifically with energy, it may well be a scientific break-through will solve it all for us and I hope it will, but right now the picture is bleak.

Speeding is absolutely terrible everywhere - towns, country lanes, motorways. I am the village idiot who drives at the limit (OK, I allow myself 75 on M25). There is no respect for the rules and only speed cameras help a little bit. And as I said many times, it's entirely up to you. I do hope all of you are still masked everywhere - covid is on the rise. Yet as @Onoff noted people refused to wear masks even when they were actually mandatory. And yes, there were masked people in Costco yesterday and I couldn't care less. I tried and I tried and I will try again. Absolute numpties from Sage have managed to scare the shit out of our government which duly decided to take away people's rights because they think they know better. Of course neither they nor "scientists" like Ferguson did. And you know that they never believed in these rules because they didn't follow them. So yes, it was written into law and this will be another thing I will be lobbing for: proper safeguards written into a proper law to prevent a group of morons from taking away our fundamental rights. Yes, leaving my house to meet my friends in person is my bloody fundamental right. We are old enough to decide for ourselves what's good for us and don't need the state to specify the distance we need to keep. Now, to my point: >>> People saying "you are too stupid to know what's good for you" to an adult may well be right. But adding ".... and this is why we are going to force you" makes them pure evil. Still not clear? What they do is not illegal. It is just evil. I hate evil.

Let's continue your list: using mobile phones while driving. How is compliance? What about prohibition in the US in 1920-30s? People will ultimately only willingly do things that they find reasonable. When they don't agree with the rules compliance drops massively. The state shouldn't interfere where it can't really make a difference, otherwise it ends up hurting the cause and respect for law and law enforcement - as much as I agree with many of the causes. See idiotic covid police actions, non-crime hate incidents, covid masks etc. Indeed. But we also don't allow any of these people more power than is written into law. If a policeman came to my door asking me to switch a TV channel my response wouldn't be very polite. My GP can suggest I do something but can't force me - until I am finally declared mentally incompetent. SAGE can advise the government and the latter can send them to hell like they did in December with Omicron and should have done in summer 2020. In any case, I know how the system is organised I've been here long enough. I will be emaling my MP about repealing any BS green commitments the same way I emailed him about not voting for new covid restrictions. I thought I explained what/who I dislike clearly enough. It's not "change the system", it's not "where is my referendum". I do think though that the way things are going a referendum may turn out to be the only way to deal with "green" madness. We shall see. Right now it seems the same people say "we want net zero" and "government, do something with energy prices". At some point they are going to have to wake up, ideally before we go back to 1970s Britain.

85' TV panels laugh out loud at this statement. Food prices are massively lower relative to incomes than they used to be even 50 years ago. Why hasn't greed raised those to exorbitant levels while world population increased massively? I am not sure whether you imply that "greedy is bad". In reality greed is the source of investment, innovation and general development - not to knock altruism in any way. Can you not imagine for a second that one of probably hundreds of research projects to find cheap(er) energy source will succeed? What are you going to say then? "It was not supposed to happen"? And since you are sure the price will only go up here is an opportunity to prove the market wrong. Settlements for 4+year contracts are way below 2022 prices. https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/energy/crude-oil/light-sweet-crude.settlements.html You can make easy money buying calls at the current level. https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/energy/crude-oil/light-sweet-crude.quotes.options.html#optionProductId=7574 There is an economics professor in the US, his name is Bryan Kaplan (https://betonit.blog/ not to be confused with any actual betting sites!) . One of many points he makes is we people don't want to support our statements with money (i.e. bets) even when we claim that we are "very certain" about something. Here is a wiki of his public bets - he's won over 20 so far, no losses. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qShKedFJptpxfTHl9MBtHARAiurX-WK6ChrMgQRQz-0/ His blog is worth reading, he used to write for econlog.org where a lot of his texts can be easily found (for those who have a lot of free time).

A bit of a good news - maybe. I saw the price of EPS300 jump from <£600 to over 700 in some cases just after New Year, the lowest I could see was 665. Well, yesterday I found the same sites started quoting £571 (inc. VAT) again. It's way more that it used to be but still something.

Have you missed "... this is for your own good" part? Apart from the school which is not for adults (another "conditional" in my statement) the rest of you examples are "we want to you do stuff for us". The states can do a lot in our name and in some cases we even have a choice to vote on these issues. I wonder what the result of a referendum on "going green" would be. Based on what @Bitpipe said about basic numeracy of people - correctly in my view - I wouldn't be too surprised if "real zero (emissions)" (™️Greta) was an option 🙂 The next logical step would be for all those who voted yes to kill themselves ASAP. Seriously, my message was not about "what laws we have". It is about people, often unelected, who believe they are allowed to lie to us (or "ignore any nuances that may make their position look weaker"), claim that there are no other options at all (there usually are), then force us into submission whether we voted for it or not while simultaneously stating they are doing it for us (they aren't).

I fully agree with the second statement (obviously, it includes me). Yet when it comes to the first one... I would not complain about statements missing nuance if only I was not FORCED to do something based on these statements. But I was and I am and this is absolutely infuriating for me. Somebody believes eating meat is wrong? Then stop eating it (and deal with health consequences) and leave me and my kids alone. Someone thinks fossil fuels should not be used or even extracted? Good luck leaving without any plastics - but I won't do this. Somebody wants to self-isolate for 5 years? Knock yourself out. Fifth booster? Be my guest. People saying "you are too stupid to know what's good for you" to an adult may well be right. But adding ".... and this is why we are going to force you" makes them pure evil.

The article is on wsj behind the pay wall. Here is an alternative link to an excerpt. https://m.slashdot.org/story/396007 "The old way is just wrong, we know that," said Andrew Gettelman, a physicist at NCAR who specializes in clouds and helped develop the CESM2 model. "I think our higher sensitivity is wrong too. It's probably a consequence of other things we did by making clouds better and more realistic. You solve one problem and create another." So the upshot is: the old models are certainly wrong (are these not a part of the same models that according to you predict everything pretty well?) The new one is wrong. We are still all going to die and even faster than they thought before. Or maybe it is still just too complicated a problem to make predictions with any certainty. I will just hope I am right 🙂

I did say this. I expected you to reply later but on important points. Since you posted a bit on other issues today I thought you chose to ignore the rest. Right. The imf link talks about producer and consumer subsidies around the world. The first look trivial in comparison to the second but I can't see UK specifically, at least not on the mobile. Somehow I doubt we have producer subsidies for oil, gas and coal. Consumer energy subsidies don't differentiate the source. And petrol is taxed heavily unlike electricity. Almost. The main question is who sells the hedge. Is this the government? If so, it is a subsidy. I said many times already - if you believe it is the cheapest, go ahead and build it, this is great business. Surely you (the producer) don't need to be afraid of the competition from inferior energy sources? And surely they can buy the hedge from another business? Your problem is you will always need a backup source comparable in capacity with wind/solar. You won't be able to guarantee the delivery of a certain number of MWh during say peak hours - well, not unless you install 3, 5 or 10 times the required capacity. So you have to include either storage or an alternative backup source into your calculations. Again, if this still works - great, but I doubt the headline numbers take this into account. This industry seems to want to rip the benefits when things work and let others deal with problems when they don't. I will need to find the link to the cloud research for you to review.

Don't remember the thread but I did link to the latest full IPCC report which is available to everybody. There are no projections in there supporting catastrophic scenarios. Not for flooding, not for draughts, not for the stream. They don't have high level of confidence for anything actually. There is also data (not in the report) that the relative loss from all these events has become lower, not higher over the years. What does it tell you? As we get wealthier we can spend more resources on preparing for and dealing with disruptions. It should have always been a balancing act, what is worth doing and what we can tolerate. Instead it's become a shouting down exercise. We "followed the science" on Covid, have you not noticed anything at all strange in the last two years? Would you insist there was no BS whatsoever presented to us as "settled science"? And if you agree (as I really hope you will) that we were lied to on many occasions and both the scientific establishment and the governments around the globe have repeatedly lied about their level of confidence in certain statements can you think of a similar problem that's been discussed for many years and where we see purely scientific documents saying one thing ("low confidence", "low to medium confidence") yet the message to the population is loud and absolutely confident "do it now or else"? Somebody linked to another "oh-oh" scientific research recently (a month or so ago) - I will describe it briefly but I have no background to say anything of substance on the issue. It was about the formation of clouds which has massive implications on the whole climate science. It turns out (well, apparently, those who looked at the problem knew this all along) the "model" used to describe the process currently is BS. Surely it has no effect on the overall message. Or does it? To be clear: I don't know whether the climate will change a lot if we do nothing. It is not important for my argument. See above. Latest COP was a joke and came up with nothing and based on what is going on now any decisions are hopefully dead. "We don't want net zero, we want zero". Do you? We certainly need to separate scientists that work honestly or relatively honestly trying to analyse physical processes and maybe make predictions based on their imperfect models and establishment turning research into "messages" (AKA propaganda) and "decisions". Those flying around the world telling others not to fly/eat and pretty much live are the brigade. Greta and her handlers is undoubtedly the brigade. Most scientists are not. And "the medicine prescribed" is as idiotic as vaccine mandates and lockdowns. Both you and@SteamyTea chose to ignore a significant part of my previous post. Energy prices? RE subsidies? Flexibility of supplies which you said wasn't great and then mentioned Venezuela. Can we have some resolution to these topics because we clearly will not agree on the climate change and it is off-topic anyway. Short and medium term actions is what we need to be concentrating on, not long-term plans.

🙂 Of course it is This is... not a good logic. We certainly didn't spend 8000 years setting up our systems. Every advance in science and technology let us move the window of opportunity massively. We can grow strawberries in England in winter if we want to, we only have 1% of population working in agriculture. It is only going to get better overall in the world, not worse whether the variation become worse or not. Bingo. The poorest places suffer the most. I certainly remember Ethiopia, I also remember Ukraine in 1932-33. So... don't we agree? As nations and people become wealthier their ability to deal with adverse conditions improve dramatically. As an aside: there is a saying in Russian: "пока толстый сохнет худой сдохнет", while a fat person loses weight a skinny one dies. It also covers the current situation with Russian sanctions BTW: the West is way wealthier than Russia so has more leeway to suffer economically. This is not cherry-peeking. I don't have an explanation OTOH, don't know much about SA, although 2.5 and 3.9% sound not too far off, but I can remind you about "necessary vs sufficient". Yes, even a wealthy nation can have malnourished people, but you won't get >20% like in Sub-Saharan Africa which is clearly very poor on average. China and to a significant extent India have managed to get their massive population out of poverty, no reason why Africa can't do the same. Once done, the danger of famine will disappear the same way it's disappeared in Europe - whatever the climate.

Nope, this won't work. First of all, you chose a single phrase from the whole post to reply to. Second, it seems you are showing me that people die. Does it have much to do with climate change? Or maybe it is the usual : education level, hygiene, wealth? Do people die more than a 100 years ago or less? I have no doubts you know the answers to these questions. So again - please drop the analogy, consider the substance of the argument (in particular Dubai/SA vs the rest). And if you don't have time, I can wait. I took half a day off yesterday taking my total since the beginning of the year to two full days so I am slightly busy and overworked myself.

1) As I mentioned to @SteamyTea 3rd quarter results for wind and solar are... not great. But as long as you build it with no subsidies (like LPG terminals) I am all for it. More competition is good! 2) Planning matters. If the government chooses to do so it can put laws in place to prioritise approval process over any "let's make sure these rabbits/frogs/whatever don't lose their habitat" concerns on an exception basis. This is no normal time. 3) The same as @SteamyTeaplease don't concentrate on electricity only. We need gas for heating and agriculture (IIRC) and we need oil for transportation and chemistry and more. Can't replace it - well, neither short nor medium (5-10 years?) term. Thank you - I am glad this is happening. Are you saying this is good? Bad? Are you simply letting me know that something is being done? I know about all three and this is why I stressed the obvious difference between Venezuela and Iran: I'd not want the latter to get anything, ayatollahs are no better than Putin so giving them more money just creates another massive problem in the near future. Again, I am not quite sure why you are informing me about it: I mentioned this as an option for increasing supply which you said was not easy - am I missing something? Or are you saying this is not enough? UK/EU/USA climate change commitments mean exactly zero to me - and I'd hope to most people who like me and @joe90 are getting emails informing us about the future prices we are going to have to pay. While I appreciate there is a massive number of people (brainwashed graduates come to mind) who are happy to keep their houses at +15 to save the world from... whatever they think is bad I am not one of them and while today I can afford to pay £300/m for gas and electricity this clearly won't last. The upshot is any plants that can be kept afloat need to be kept. Separately, I have to remind you: I made a point that coordination is required between states for a reason. Some countries surely have more plants of a certain type and this can be used. Right now there is a common problem, we need a common solution - ideally. As I said more than once, there are enough smart people who believe that it may well be much easier to deal with the consequences of the rising temperatures in 50 years (if they ever arrive) than to basically destroy the economic growth in the West now for the direct benefit of China. We've all been warned about dependency on Putin and thanks to all the smart people like Merkel, Johnson (everybody says he is an idiot), Biden etc. ignored it - do you really like the consequences? And do you want to ignore the obvious fact that China is the main benefactor of our self-defeating approach to fighting climate change? Maybe you disagree that they are the main benefactor? Please - I really want to know. First sort out cheap energy source. There is no way around it. Same as on a plain: first put a mask on yourself, than on a child, even though we love our children. Yet there is a clear reason why this is the rule. @SteamyTea @Bitpipe Migration only happens if you let it happen. The better alternative is helping people get wealthier where they live - this way they may be able to afford air conditioning and other wonders of civilisation making life bearable. Somehow there is no mass migration from Saudi Arabia and Emirates even though it has always been slightly warmer there than in England - I wonder why, please help me here. I was bourn in Central Asia. Didn't spend much time there unlike my parents and grandparents but +35 wasn't an exceptionally high summer temperature and -30 wasn't exceptionally low in winter. No such thing as air conditioning although central heating was available in multi-storey buildings. How the hell did they survive without climate change brigade? Was somebody running around in London screaming "let's all stop heating our homes to lower summer temperatures in Asia as it's unbearable"? You know the answer. People just lived and got used to what was thrown at them. And this is how it should be. And of course it's both much cheaper and much better to help 100K people move if there is no way to keep their island above sea level than to continue with what was "pledged" now. Not saying "never". Clearly not now.

I agree that there are two separate issues and I agree both are not bad (with caveats). Again, my point is neither can be sorted quickly. And yes, as you said, even LPG can be sourced. Learn to build bloody quickly (terminals?) because the country needs it - this is called priorities. Short term Venezuela has massive reserves which can be used, at least they are not planning to build nukes to annihilate any of their neighbours unlike Iran. Coordinating what is needed (oil/gas/coal/???) for each country and where it comes from is important and can help a lot. Oil supply is relatively flexible and coal likely is as well (need to check). Getting Australia to supply coal to Europe rather than China is hopefully an option. In any case renewable production is not the solution short term. A caveat about "lower our usage" goal. Actually, "unlimited cheap energy" is an amazing way of making people around the world wealthier so hopefully we will not come to rationing energy and/or taxing it even more but rather will work on cutting usage where it's worth doing (i.e. heating) and expanding usage in other areas once we sort the supply side. And plastic is not the enemy. As @pocster quoted above, there are (or may be) good solutions, we just need to give scientists the incentive and time. Solving "single use plastics" issue is not urgent whatever many think and neither is bloody "climate change".

Because you are only looking at electricity ? https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1032260/UK_Energy_in_Brief_2021.pdf page 12 electricity is 24.1/120.9 of what's used (or rather was in 2020 which is not a great reference point by itself) https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1043311/Energy_Trends_December_2021.pdf page 1, about the 3d quarter of the year "Unfavourable weather conditions meant that renewable generation fell to 24.3 TWh, the lowest value in four years and down 17 per cent on the same quarter last year. As a share of total generation, renewable generation fell 4.0 percentage points to 35.9 per cent. Wind generation was particularly affected, down 30 per cent on the same period last year as wind speeds dropped to their lowest level this century. The share of generation attributed to fossil fuels increased to 44.8 per cent, 2.5 percentage points up on the same quarter last year." So - how much more needs to be built to get us to 80%? And how much new infrastructure will be required? And how much are you going to have to replace every year once you get to 80% coverage? And don't get me started on the storage. There is no way whatsoever to replace most of our current usage of fossil fuel with electricity in the next 10 years. This doesn't mean not building renewable generation - but I'd rather it had zero subsidies. We are told it's profitable - well, with these oil/gas/coal prices they bloody should be. No need for us taxpayers topping it up. In the meantime, "drill, baby, drill" and use whatever we can to make sure Russia and similar actors don't rip the benefits of their behaviour.

Short term / medium term / long term. Long term - yes, sure, let's all have passive houses with great cheap storage and PV or whatever will be the latest tech in 30 years. Short term - we can't insulate 10mil properties to a high standard quickly and doing it badly seems to be a waste of resources. So solve the problem of energy dependency short term, then move on to the medium term tasks. Green energy is not a short or a medium term solution, this is my point.

I agree. One of the correct points they make is they have no reason to buy Russian oil in the US. None at all. Every little helps. Yes, we have a problem here (in Europe), we need to make changes now. Zero carbon plans should go where they belong - to hell - until the energy independence is achieved. Greens are Putin's best friends.

Sorry, not quite right again. Fracking is very flexible and given permission US could increase production a lot. So as soon as green delusions give way to the reality this is definitely solvable. https://phys.org/news/2022-03-fracking-cushion-oil-price.html What was the name of this weirdo who tried to get Merkel to build LNG terminals? Anyone remembers? Yes, they have now realised this will have to be done. When the price here is 10x what they pay in the US there is enough reason to invest. But also old and gas are partial substitutes. As long as there is enough reasonably priced oil gas can be spared for the most important purposes. And of course in the short term we will have to pay.

This is not quite correct. There is a limit on what Russia can export any other way but via Europe. A simple physical limit. No alternative pipelines, not enough capacity to export to China. And don't forget China will not be paying the high price - why do this when your seller has nobody else to sell to? There are also limits on deliveries by sea. So the less we buy the less money Putin has. Look at Urals oil price, nobody wants anything to do with it at the moment. I completely agree with your other two points. "Drill, baby, drill" and no fixed price. The only problem is that the current clown POTUS still hasn't lifted any drilling bans on federal land. Keystone XL is likely dead now and is not a short term solution anyway. One important note. Many people owe Trump an apology. He tried hard to convince Merkel that they should not rely on the Russian gas so much and to get NATO countries to finance their fair share of defence. The amount of abuse he got for "bullying" was immense. Well, so much better to be bullied by Putin, right? And of course Merkel was so bloody smart. Or was she?

Thanks For the avoidance of any doubts. The dirty cable on the right over the top of the conduit is disconnected, it's the one that was leaving at the bottom of the old socket to feed sockets on the other wall.

Sorry, I need more info here ? will it do or shall I call in a professional now?