I think I should share this view on carbon capture and storage. It is not for those offended by swearing, even when. it is used appropriately:
This is what Starmer is investing £22 billion in.
Meanwhile, real green infrastructure requirements, from simple things like solar panels onwards, go unfunded.
Now you know why.
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Excellent video, thanks.
But they’re wrong about Electric Vehicles being a “solution”:
There is only enough copper in the Earth’s crust to make enough batteries to replace ICE vehicles once. When those batteries fail we won’t be able to replace them.
Similarly, with “renewable” power, although the source of the power is inexhaustible the infrastructure required to extract the power is most certainly not. They will only delay the inevitable decline.
Which is a good thing because it’s the energy use that’s killing the planet 🙂
Mr Hoare, you are correct about EVs not being the solution (to elec storage). Copper is a component in Li-ion batts – but not the major one – lithium is key – the Norwegians recently discovered a deposit that means they have 50% of global reserves.
Anyway, in the case of CCS, the IEA commissioned Foster Wheeler to produce a report covering CCS (focused on SMR & ATR processes – used to produce H2 (hydrogen) – needed to make ammonia the key precursor for fertilisers). The report is comfortingly technical & totally lacking in the usual politicised nonesense. Anyway, it is a toss-up whether H2 from renewables (electrolysis) and H2 from SMR/ATM is cheaper. All depends on the price of nat gas – the feed stock for SMR/ATR processes. Not surprisingly, the oil n gass mafia want to keep their show on the road – hence the “gizz the money” request – with the come-on “& we will employ lots of people”. It is all nonsense, given the UK’s wind resource & the salt caverns to store H2 – did you know Germany has 270 salt caverns storing 160TWh of nat gas – which they could repurpose for H2. Key point a combo of energy efficiency & renewables should get us to where we need to be. Sadly, most politicos (UK and EU) lack the capacity/knowledge/open-mindeness to see this – oh & the lobbying from vested interests does not help.
Long story, I ended up press ganged as a stoker in the Merchant Navy so learnt a number of ways of saying things like ‘Oh Dear this does not work’ better not used in polite company.
So I have no issues with the language and anyway they are Australians.
Ironic isnt it that the £22billion is exactly the size of the alleged ‘black hole’ in the Government accounts.
Ironic, indeed
Cutting.
PR has taken over genuine policy.
And it will kill us
You’ve got to give to the Aussies though – when they smell bullshit it is straight to plain English.
I think I recall you posting a link to this video some while ago. No less tragically funny now, and the swearing is the icing on the cake, to be honest. Unfortunately, I think we can assume that nobody (i.e. McSweeney) let Starmer of Reeves watch this gem. Then again, even if they had their words and actions to date indicate they are so deeply captured by our corporate overlords that they wouldn’t think of objecting anyway. How deeply, deeply, depressing.
Agreed
The clip is simply brilliant. I don’t mind the swearing at all. And the message is on the money, as it were.
I’d endorse and amplify MTH’s stark post.
EV’s are a romantic diversion, suggesting that we can plan for a future based on ubiquitous personal travel with vehicles and energy consumption to match.
EVs are a useful transitional stage, but only maybe.
Simon Michaux, Finnish Geology Prof, published his analysis of global minerals depletion several years ago now and the headline conclusion was that there are insufficient plentary mineral reserves to substitute for 1.5bn ICE vehicles, even if there was the energy capacity to extract them, which there is not.
Basically, he restated the Limits to Growth analysis of the early 1970s, so nothing really new, except the updated numbers, and his endorsement of the essential requirement for a circular economy.
In energy terms, there are a few nutjobs who reckon we can generate oversupply of renewables to feed continued economic growth.
I suspect these are placemen of the nuclear and oil industries.
Green growth is a chimera, and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen even produced a mathematical proof of the entropy involved.
Renewables are part of the right answer to carbon reduction but this is the wrong question.
(And CCS is the wrong answer completely as all it does is encourage more fossil fuel extraction, so well done NuLabour).
We shouldn’t even be considering how we can perpetuate the growth economy, as that is unachievable anyway, even with renewables.
Renewables development is not even keeping pace with increases in energy consumption. We need to reduce both energy and materials consumption.
We need de-growth, and then a steady state economy in balance with what the Earth can provide, anything more is physically impossible, and the consequences ecocidal, as we have to live in unity with the planet, like it or not.
Without active management of this set of processes, we are headed for collapse of human civilisations, though some consider we’re already well on the path of decline and fall.
There is a need to plan the global economy based on the limitations of the environment, with renewable and non-renewable resources requiring different pathways, and then allocate resources to meet our needs.
It has to include a circular economy for all non-renewable resources, copper, lithium etc., and an economy for renewable resources like timber and rice, in tune with regenerative cycles.
That the current global institutional framework and power balances are ill fitted to deal with survivable objectives is bleedin’ obvious.
Not so much headlong into the abyss, as boiling frogs.
Growth capitalism can be seen as utopian, as it is absolutely unachievable in its consumerist goals and practices.
More accurately, it is a global Ponzi scheme where we carelessly consume with little to no regard for the social and environmental consequences.
I see an awfie lot of random and often self interested speculation in how we get to new institutional frameworks, ones that conform to the essentials of sustainable living, but precious little genuine brainstorming, through forward looking problem solving organisations.
When (if) they come, as long as these are not think tanks, then there might still be hope…
ABSOLUTELY EXACTLY THAT!
CCS – the Crap Captured and Satirised.
We are in a hole and still digging.
Thank you for reminding me of it. I shall send it to my MP.
Let is know if you receive a reply from your MP. I’ll be sending the video to mine too (although currently I’m attempting to get an answer from him on the plans for the NHS that isn’t simply a copy and paste from Streeting’s briefing documents).
Since the 1970s I have endured so much government BS as to be completely BS-ed out. My current MP actually labelled me (before he was an MP) as an alarmist and having extreme views for simply pointing out that the UK has to change radically (let alone the world) for humans to survive, and capitalism is killing us (not the planet, which is indifferent to our little viral existence). As an addendum to all this hilarity, we are the last humans (all other types having gone extinct), and as such, on the way to extinction without hastening it.
A good video! I think Government’s policy on this would be enough to make a saint swear! But would we expect Sir Keir to know or to understand or to care? I think not!
I love the approximate use of the `Coca Cola’ logo/typeface for CCS.
As noted above the figure of £22 billion rings a bell.
This government is transparently very bad. And it doesn’t care.
PS It [this government] doesn’t deign to care It doesn’t think it needs to care.
Maybe someone more skilled in maths than I am, ‘O’ level Arithmetic (failed) 1965, but there surely must be a simple formula available to work out:
Number of petrol/diesel cars on UK roads.
Average fuel consumption
Average miles per year
Therefore how many Kw equivalent energy used.
Assuming we produce just enough for our current consumption of electricity:
How many more power stations would we need to build just to replace all those cars with EVs. I think that’s likely to be a limiting factor more than digging up minerals for the batteries.
I have excluded heavy goods vehicles, industrial, aviation and shipping for simplicity,since these will be heavily involved in the production of batteries before we can start.
I actually don’t think we have a pollution problem, we have a people problem. Too many of us. Why is a falling birth rate in wealthier nations considered a crisis?
EVs are no panacea
They still pollute, heavily
Indeed, they do. And they utilize rare earth minerals that are generally in short supply. We have to think of a new solution. Although, at the moment, it seems to be beyond us.
Richard,
“…EVs are no panacea..”
No they aren’t. You are quite right, but are we conducting the right alternative technologies? Maybe somebody is. We can hope so. Or not.
Liquid air looked good to me some years ago, but where is that now? I simply don’t know. I don’t spend enough time on line to have a clue.
Just think what that £22B could save if it went into Home Insulation. Most of the UK’s 20 odd millions home could be brought up to near Passive house standard, huge CO2 and money savings and an outside chance of keeping to below 2oC…
Instead Labour flunked it and took the ‘carry on with fossil fuels and clean up the mess later’ line.
I despair.
Ovewr £1,000 per household
A lot more if targeted at the most important ones to upgrade