Mattg4321

The same Germany whose economy is f@&£d due to high energy prices, due to idiotic policy?

It’s a bit like giving away Chagos and paying billions to lease it back. Total madness. These people should be removed from their posts immediately for that sort of treasonous behaviour. The only thing that makes sense is the elites wanting to virtue signal on the world stage or personal monetary gain. There’s no other explanation for half this madness.

Half the problem is the debate at national level is binary. One side is renewables are great, shut everything else down asap, we don’t need it and the planet is ‘on fire’. The other is don’t bother with renewables, keep burning FF. Both are idiotic. I just want the lowest price energy possible. I definitely care about air quality and pollution. I admit that I don’t worry about co2 emissions very much at all. We can’t do anything about it in the U.K. anyway, so I don’t want to be impoverished via virtue signalling. I read today that the government are thinking of forcing blast furnaces producing steel to buy carbon credits on the open market. Currently they effectively get a free pass. Scunthorpe is already losing £1M a day! We obviously need the ability to make virgin steel from a national security pov. Are they insane? I sometimes wonder…

It’s not as simple as that, or it would have been done already. People have been banging on about changing the pricing mechanism for years now. It has to be viable for the gas generation to remain on standby for use in times of dunkelflaute. Renewables can’t be relied upon 24/7/365 yet. So we need to pay for a backup. If the cost per unit to generate don’t take account of it (they don’t), they are false. I’m all for diversifying away from FF for our energy security and cleaner air. On that we totally agree. It has to be done in a sensible way to protect what tiny industrial capacity we have left, not to mention consumer prices. Energy security, cleaner air/less pollution and prices as low as possible are the reasons to change our energy mix, not net zero, which is largely a con.

Here’s the longer version of the argument. It’s interesting to watch and both make good points. A quarter of my family is Arab Muslim and my mum was born in Baghdad and only came here when she was 7 years old. So what does she tick on the form? Probably whatever she feels comfortable with. Is she ‘English’? My friend was born in Kenya to white British parents. He lived there for the first 15 years of his life. Can he call himself ‘Kenyan’? It’s a grey area really and it people can obviously describe themselves as whatever they want, but other people are probably going to judge for themselves. Rishi Sunak is clearly not ethnically English, but if he wants to call himself English I have no problem with that. What this really seems to be about is that Kisin has a different view to you on net zero so you smear him as racist/sexist or some other ‘ist’. It’s been going on for so long now and it doesn’t really work anymore. Play the ball, not the man.

Kisin says himself that he’s ’brown skinned’, so why would be racist towards non whites. Your reasoning is a case of 2+2=5 If English is not an ethnic group then why is it in the census? There are ethnic groups whether you like it or not. If I walked round a city filled with entirely Slavic peoples then I would realise it pretty quickly. Similarly if they were Latin or Asian or whatever. Stating the obvious doesn’t make someone a racist other than in the kind of someone who has already made their mind up.

Open mind not possible for some people. Net zero is a cult.

Does he say later that he’s British in the second clip? I think I would tend to agree that Sunak is not English in the ethnic sense. It depends on how you define it though. If he maintains that someone who is not ethnically English, is British rather than English, so what. That doesn’t mean he’s racist - look up the definition. The guy is an immigrant himself.

What about coal? That’s a pretty serious allegation to make. Have you got any examples of him being racist or lying?

That’s not true. Half the world bases oil prices against the benchmark Brent Crude, which comes from the North Sea. It’s light sweet oil that is perfect for making into transport fuel. There are also heavy oil fields in the North Sea. Some as yet untapped. See the Bentley field. I don’t necessarily disagree with some of this. Neoliberalism has turned out to have a lot of downsides. But the country was in a terrible state in the 70’s. It wasn’t all sunshine and butterflies. That makes little sense if there’s no demand for it then. Perhaps renewables/nuclear or something else will be the future. Or perhaps not. But either way you can’t shut the whole industry down, lose all the experience, skills and infrastructure and expect to just turn it back on in a few decades. Naive in the extreme.

What possible sensible reason is there for leaving it in the ground whilst we import the same product from abroad at additional cost, with no benefit to the treasury and impact on certainty of national supply? In all honesty net zero is not my biggest concern. High energy prices are. We need to reduce them as much as possible and any number of benefits will shortly follow. If the plan is to steal a march on other countries by going renewable early, and it means we can compete then great, but I’m very sceptical. China will keep burning mountains of coal for generations yet imo. Whilst we get poorer.

You make a good point re the price of oil. I stand by my view that there is more there than the booked reserves though. We're kind of arguing over nothing though, as I think we're agreed that we shouldn't leave it in there whilst we import from abroad. Nor should we rely on it long term (decades ahead).

It’s old data, but backs up my point that oil has always been ‘running out’.

I don't agree with that analysis. I'm not an expert, but I do have some experience in the oil and gas sector. UK oil and gas production and to an even greater extent, exploration, has pretty much been taxed and regulated out of existence in the past 15-20 years (maybe more than that, but before my time). You can't book more reserves if you don't drill the wells. And it just hasn't been happening for a long long time now. I still keep in touch with people in the industry and they tell me (perhaps overoptimistically?) that it's out there, there's just the wrong environment in place to go looking for it/extract it. We were all told when we were at school that oil would run out in 20 years, or we're now at or very close to peak oil production. Both predictions have proven to be way way wide of the mark.

I didn't go to those lengths, but one thing I see on site time and again is builders using leftover roofing batten etc to create boxings/batten off walls etc etc. The stuff is usually soaked through with whatever chemical they use when it's tanalised, if not rainwater. Usually both. People thought I was a bit mad only using kiln dried timber for my internal bits. Yet... over a year later and not one crack or popped screw.