Where is the kWh price heading in 2022?

[CotswoldDoItUpper]

Just now, AliG said:

I think LPG is around 70p now.

Yes but I fixed it about a month ago at 34p/l +vat. No idea how I got such a good deal! 

[AliG]

Showing the extremely fluid nature of the situation, the natural gas price in the UK has fallen 30% today and is back to £3.50. Much more bearable. Oil is down over 10%.

 

Either markets consider the banning of Russian oil to be the worst things get, or maybe they think this is what brings Russia round as they will quickly run out of money.

 

Somewhat dangerous reading the papers as they love making things sound worse than they are. The Daily Mail has been saying for days that we have £2 petrol. The current average price is £1.58.

 

 

[SteamyTea]

17 minutes ago, AliG said:

Showing the extremely fluid nature of the situation

We have seen this before, was Gulf War 1 really over 30 years ago.

Year	Average Closing Price	Year Open	Year High	Year Low	Year Close	Annual % Change

 

1991	$21.54	$26.53	$32.25	$17.43	$19.15	-32.76%
1990	$24.53	$22.88	$41.07	$15.43	$28.48	30.40%

Edited March 9, 2022 by SteamyTea

[oldkettle]

6 hours ago, Bitpipe said:

I don't think any infrastructure based energy independence are quickly, nuclear power stations have a long design, approval and build time and require eye watering amounts of capital. Coal and gas would not be far behind. Ironically, renewables such as wind and solar are relatively quick to deploy and connect to the grid.

 

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.

 

6 hours ago, Bitpipe said:

We have fairly recently built LPG terminals and more coming on line in the next few years - here is one by example https://avonmouth.flogas.co.uk

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? 

 

6 hours ago, Bitpipe said:

Both Venezuela and Iran are being courted by the US now and Saudi is coming off the naughty step - Biden rumoured to be visiting soon after giving them the cold shoulder after the journalist execution in Turkey.

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?

 

6 hours ago, Bitpipe said:

The UK has only 3 coal fired plants left, all due to be decommissioned in the next few years. While I suppose these could have their useful life extended, it would be difficult to do while staying aligned with the climate commitments that UK is legally bound to, as would building new ones.

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.

 

7 hours ago, Bitpipe said:

At what cost though? The impact of 'bloody' climate change is globally acknowledged to be real and effects are staring to be felt worldwide. Once that genie is fully out of the bottle you can't put it back in.

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.

[SteamyTea]

8 hours ago, oldkettle said:

How the hell did they survive without climate change brigade?

They are still not surviving.

https://www.gapminder.org

 

What you are doing is counting the wrong things.  To give an aviation example, during WW2, the USAF got people to work out where to put reinforcement on aeroplanes by counting the bullet holes.  The more holes in an area i.e. fuselage, the more reinforcement was needed.

Trouble was, they were not counting the holes in the planes that did not return.

[ToughButterCup]

1 hour ago, SteamyTea said:

...

Trouble was, they were not counting the holes in the planes that did not return.

 

But the added armour was fitted to aircraft on the basis of evidence. Not the lack of it. 

Ah ... the perils of analogy .

[SteamyTea]

21 minutes ago, ToughButterCup said:

But the added armour was fitted to aircraft on the basis of evidence. Not the lack of it. 

Ah ... the perils of analogy .

Except the assumptions were wrong.  Using the same example, if all the returning aircraft had no damage to engine cowlings, one would assume that engines never got hit.

The story was very different when they inspected downed aircraft.

 

So back to the original point, it is no good only counting the survivors of extreme weather events, you have to count the non survivors, that shows the scale of the problem.

Or to pick a building analogy.  It is usual to brace a wall that gets the prevailing wind during construction, but you have to accept that a non prevailing wind can do damage as well.  Saving a few quid by not doing that can have expensive repercussions.  Not that I can think of anyone that would not do that. 

[oldkettle]

1 hour ago, SteamyTea said:

They are still not surviving.

https://www.gapminder.org

 

What you are doing is counting the wrong things.  To give an aviation example, during WW2, the USAF got people to work out where to put reinforcement on aeroplanes by counting the bullet holes.  The more holes in an area i.e. fuselage, the more reinforcement was needed.

Trouble was, they were not counting the holes in the planes that did not return.

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. 

 

 

[SteamyTea]

6 minutes ago, oldkettle said:

Does it have much to do with climate change? Or maybe it is the usual : education level, hygiene, wealth? 

It is multifactorial, so climate change is part of it.

The main problem with climate change is the rapidness of the change.  We has spent the last 8000 years setting up our agricultural systems to come with the usual variation in weather, but as the climate changes, that usual variation is happening more often, and in unexpected places (look at Siberian and Antarctic upper temperatures).  Just last year, we had an extreme heat warning in the SW.  It was hot for a few days, not impossible to cope with (though I had to put tin foil on my upstairs windows to limit the heat coming in, and it worked very well).  The mean temperature over those few days was around 22°C, peaking at 26°C.

Pretty low, even for the UK.  But the difference is that the SW is not used to those temperatures, the peaks are usually damped by the Atlantic Ocean (why we don't get the cold winters as well).

So why was a warning issued when people 200 miles east are used to these extremes.  It was because it was unusual, and lasted for more than a couple of days.

Now extrapolate that to a proper farming area, say the Mid West USA, sudden heat waves, though good for drying crops, puts a strain on the infrastructure i.e. not enough machinery to harvest.  This is where the problems are.

Now rich countries can easily afford to pay a higher price, but poor countries can't, but the shortages are not price led, they are climate led.  And sadly, it is the poorest places that suffer the most, not because they cannot adapt, they can often adapt faster (remember Ethiopia), but they are hampered by international politics and local ideologies.

A quick look on the FOA wed site will show you that the wealthy nations are not always the best at coping.

So taking Saudi Aribia and Spain, and looking at undernourishment, Saudi is at 3.9%, Spain is less than 2.5%.  The UK is the same as Spain.

Now I know you will claim that I am cherry picking data, so here is Morocco's numbers, it is geographically close to Spain. <2.5%, same as the fully developed examples.

[Bitpipe]

14 hours ago, oldkettle said:

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.

 

OK, my understanding of the real risk of climate change is not just it getting a bit warmer than usual each summer and learning to live with it, it's irreversible (on a human timescale) change to the environment. These changes are also known as tipping points.

 

e.g. if the Gulf Stream current slows down due to an increase in fresh water from melting polar ice then UK will shift from a stable moderate climate to North America style summers and winters (we're on the same latitude). Our national infrastructure is not built to deal with that so it will be economically challenging and disruptive to adapt.

 

If extreme weather events, such as storms and flooding, move from being once in 100 years to once a decade or more then that will be extremely disruptive.

 

If ocean levels continue to rise due to warming seas and melting polar ice then costal regions globally will be challenged.

 

Lots more examples out there but they're all connected to a steady rise in temperature and other human activity and  each one has the potential to be very disruptive to our way of life. And history shows that when life becomes untenable in parts of the world, people move en-masse to where it is better.

 

Calling it a 'brigade' is a cute way to discredit a global scientific consensus and I doubt the world would have convened for the latest COP (even though the output was somewhat disappointing) were it just some fringe notion. You may well not like the medicine being prescribed and you may well be right that other nations need to do more but just ignoring it 

 

[SimonD]

14 minutes ago, Bitpipe said:

it's irreversible (on a human timescale) change to the environment. These changes are also known as tipping points.

 

For me the issue is that we actually have no idea what's going to happen. The global climate is so complex, we still don't know how it works and it's impossible to predict which way it's going to swing. Usually, when we humans get involved to try and fix or change something in the environment, we inevitably make it worse through unintended consequences, because we don't understand the systemic complexities of what we're dealing with. In this light, I'm a great believer in that we have to reduce consumption of both energy and resources and develop a mutual relationship with the natural world instead of thepillage we've been undertaking for the last 400 or so years since the enlightenment. In a positive light, there is much happening to develop our knowledge & change this but it's still early days.

[Bitpipe]

53 minutes ago, SimonD said:

 

For me the issue is that we actually have no idea what's going to happen. The global climate is so complex, we still don't know how it works and it's impossible to predict which way it's going to swing. Usually, when we humans get involved to try and fix or change something in the environment, we inevitably make it worse through unintended consequences, because we don't understand the systemic complexities of what we're dealing with. In this light, I'm a great believer in that we have to reduce consumption of both energy and resources and develop a mutual relationship with the natural world instead of thepillage we've been undertaking for the last 400 or so years since the enlightenment. In a positive light, there is much happening to develop our knowledge & change this but it's still early days.

 

Agree with your philosophy.

 

While we can't say for certain, there is a lot of accumulating evidence that does not look good. This article is not climate related but is in relation to human activity.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/07/climate-crisis-amazon-rainforest-tipping-point

 

[SteamyTea]

1 hour ago, SimonD said:

we don't understand the systemic complexities of what we're dealing with.

We do understand the chemistry of combusting carbon based fuels, and the physics of of how the CO₂ molecule traps and releases energy at different frequencies.

By eliminating carbon based combustion, we reduce the physical side, but we will not reduce it so much that we will be plunged into a 'snowball earth'.

So now that the majority of the population are going to be more aware of how reliant on energy we are, if offered two options, find a new source of oil/gas or use proven low carbon technologies, we would be a bit silly to choose the oil/gas route as we have several decades of knowing how volatile the price is.

[ProDave]

19 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

So now that the majority of the population are going to be more aware of how reliant on energy we are, if offered two options, find a new source of oil/gas or use proven low carbon technologies, we would be a bit silly to choose the oil/gas route as we have several decades of knowing how volatile the price is.

But there is no quick way to ramp up renewable generation, so the solution must be a pragmatic ramp up production of available fossils fuels to keep us going while we at the same time speed up renewable AND nuclear generations.

[SteamyTea]

2 minutes ago, ProDave said:

But there is no quick way to ramp up renewable generation

There is no quick way to replace Russian gas production either.

So given the choice, the RE route is favourable.

[SuperJohnG]

Just got this from octopus. 

[Marvin]

1 minute ago, SuperJohnG said:

Just got this from octopus. 

First the carrot...

[AliG]

In designing an experiment like this, you have to be careful of unintended consequences.

 

I could fire up all the ovens for a couple of hours or a fan heater as it would make all the electricity I normally use free. It could be quite difficult to double our usage in a two hour period without wasting energy. But the incentive exists to do exactly that so it would not be representative for actual use of someone paying.

[oldkettle]

10 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

It is multifactorial, so climate change is part of it.

🙂 Of course it is

 

10 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

The main problem with climate change is the rapidness of the change.  We has spent the last 8000 years setting up our agricultural systems to come with the usual variation in weather, but as the climate changes, that usual variation is happening more often, and in unexpected places (look at Siberian and Antarctic upper temperatures).

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.

 

11 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

And sadly, it is the poorest places that suffer the most, not because they cannot adapt, they can often adapt faster (remember Ethiopia), but they are hampered by international politics and local ideologies.

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.

 

11 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

A quick look on the FOA wed site will show you that the wealthy nations are not always the best at coping.

So taking Saudi Aribia and Spain, and looking at undernourishment, Saudi is at 3.9%, Spain is less than 2.5%.  The UK is the same as Spain.

Now I know you will claim that I am cherry picking data, so here is Morocco's numbers, it is geographically close to Spain. <2.5%, same as the fully developed examples.

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.

 

[oldkettle]

8 hours ago, Bitpipe said:

OK, my understanding of the real risk of climate change is not just it getting a bit warmer than usual each summer and learning to live with it, it's irreversible (on a human timescale) change to the environment. These changes are also known as tipping points.

 

e.g. if the Gulf Stream current slows down due to an increase in fresh water from melting polar ice then UK will shift from a stable moderate climate to North America style summers and winters (we're on the same latitude). Our national infrastructure is not built to deal with that so it will be economically challenging and disruptive to adapt.

 

If extreme weather events, such as storms and flooding, move from being once in 100 years to once a decade or more then that will be extremely disruptive.

 

If ocean levels continue to rise due to warming seas and melting polar ice then costal regions globally will be challenged.

 

Lots more examples out there but they're all connected to a steady rise in temperature and other human activity and  each one has the potential to be very disruptive to our way of life. And history shows that when life becomes untenable in parts of the world, people move en-masse to where it is better

 

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.

 

8 hours ago, Bitpipe said:

Calling it a 'brigade' is a cute way to discredit a global scientific consensus and I doubt the world would have convened for the latest COP (even though the output was somewhat disappointing) were it just some fringe notion. You may well not like the medicine being prescribed and you may well be right that other nations need to do more but just ignoring it 

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.

[SteamyTea]

18 minutes ago, oldkettle said:

Both you and@SteamyTea chose to ignore a significant part of my previous post

You said

13 hours ago, oldkettle said:

And if you don't have time, I can wait.

But with reference to 

18 minutes ago, oldkettle said:

Energy prices? RE subsidies?

When it comes to new capacity, RE is now the cheapest on levelized costs.  In the UK subsidies have just about stopped for new developments, though the fossil fuel industry is still claiming them.

https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidies

 

Don't get a 'strike price' mixed up with a subsidy.  A strike price is just a form of price hedging, and we have seen the consequences of not doing that recently.

 

The 

18 minutes ago, oldkettle said:

formation of clouds

is an interesting area, it is what I was studying when I did my Masters.

The models where not BS at all, most where very accurate.  They were local models, glorified weather models and the limitations were very well known and understood.  In the last 15 years, we have collected and analysed much better satellite based data and now, as I understand it, they are proving useful, two recent reports about forest fires and sand particles have confirmed what was already know, and over a greater geographical area.

 

If you think that all models are BS, then I cannot help you understand how they work and the limitation they have.  The fact is though, that even the old model projections are holding up extremely well.

They are not weather models, which you seem to think they are, they are climate models, different things, with different names.

Edited March 10, 2022 by SteamyTea

[oldkettle]

1 hour ago, SteamyTea said:

You said

14 hours ago, oldkettle said:

And if you don't have time, I can wait.

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. 

 

1 hour ago, SteamyTea said:

When it comes to new capacity, RE is now the cheapest on levelized costs.  In the UK subsidies have just about stopped for new developments, though the fossil fuel industry is still claiming them.

https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidies

 

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. 

 

1 hour ago, SteamyTea said:

Don't get a 'strike price' mixed up with a subsidy.  A strike price is just a form of price hedging, and we have seen the consequences of not doing that recently.

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. 

[oldkettle]

1 hour ago, SteamyTea said:

The models where not BS at all, most where very accurate. 

 

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 🙂

[Bitpipe]

11 hours ago, oldkettle said:

 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"?

 

I don't disagree with a lot of what you say - here's the challenge as I see it.

 

'Big science' issues are usually extremely complicated, rely on different models and interpretation of data, expert knowledge and a lifetime in that field of study, funding, competing branches of science and mathematics etc. Lots of nuance and very little absolute certainty.

 

Were the discussion focused on the expansion rate of the universe or the existence of some disputed subatomic particle then that debate could rage on within the confines of the relevant scientific community and Joe and Jane public would be blissfully unaware until some media friendly conclusion or discovery made it onto the 'panda' slot on the news.

 

However when the debate does impinge on normal life, like Covid or Climate Change and 'something needs to be done' then governments need to deliver a simple, understandable and clear message and action to the public. Nuance and uncertainty don't work so statements are often made that may not have 100% certainty but to call them lies is probably a step too far.

 

Bluntly, the vast majority of the population don't have enough education, experience or even inclination to look at the raw data and make their own conclusions, I mean even basic literacy and numeracy in the UK are shocking.

 

Also, when the issue is solved with herculean effort (e.g. Y2K or even Covid so some degree) the reaction is 'what was the big deal'? It's like we need Ukranian levels of devastation for people to say 'Oh - that's bad, we shouldn't have let that happen'.

 

I recently watched the comedy movie 'Don't Look Up' about the discovery of a comet set to impact earth and the superficial media and political engagement until the inevitable happens - while funny it reflected a lot of the issues described above.

 

Also, I'll direct you to this  - more comedy making a serious point.

 

 

 

[oldkettle]

18 minutes ago, Bitpipe said:

However when the debate does impinge on normal life, like Covid or Climate Change and 'something needs to be done' then governments need to deliver a simple, understandable and clear message and action to the public. Nuance and uncertainty don't work so statements are often made that may not have 100% certainty but to call them lies is probably a step too far.

 

Bluntly, the vast majority of the population don't have enough education, experience or even inclination to look at the raw data and make their own conclusions, I mean even basic literacy and numeracy in the UK are shocking.

 

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.