Those renewables really are so cheap, aren't they?
Trains are a good way to get freight around the place. Better for large volumes of low value materials of course on an island our size. But still, nice and environmental:
Escalating energy costs are holding back electrification of European rail freight, which supply chain insiders warned could force more freight back onto roads.
On Monday, UK operator DB Cargo mothballed its fleet of 24 electric locomotives, CEO Andrea Rossi informing colleagues the decision was based on the “current economic climate”.
He told them: “It simply doesn’t make sense incurring additional cost of running and maintaining the Class 90s when we have an alternative fleet of Class 66 locomotives at our disposal.”
Or as another report puts it:
But those aspirations were dealt a blow last week with the news that DB Cargo UK, one of Britain’s biggest rail freight operators, was pulling its electric trains from service and replacing them with diesel models because the high cost of energy meant they were becoming too expensive to run.
DB Cargo, owned by German state railway Deutsche Bahn, said last week that its 24 class-90 electric engines would either be sold or scrapped and its class-66 diesel locos would be used instead.
If renewables really were cheap electricity then this wouldn’t be happening of course (yes, we do know that trains run on red diesel, lightly taxed).
The actual problem here is that a single unit of power or energy (we failed physics so hard we don’t know the difference there) is indeed cheap. If it arrives at the specific place and time you want to use it that is. But for power that you insist arrives when you need to use it then it’s actually quite expensive. Because not only is there the cost of the renewables generation there also has to be the backup system for when that doesn’t work.
The actual cost of an electricity system with sufficient dispatchable power is the cost of the entire system that makes dispatchable power available. Not the generation cost of the sometimes but not always renewables.
And thus as we grow out the provision of those ever so cheap renewables we have people dropping electricity use simply because it’s too expensive. Here on the grounds that freight trains pausing outside Didcot when the wind stops blowing, no movements at night - well, the unions achieve those things for us already, why would we have a power system that gave us more?
And thus the task for those who tell us that ever more renewables will make electricity cheaper. If this is so then why are hard headed businessmen dropping electric trains for diesel on the grounds of the mounting expense of electricity? After all, a theory must be able to explain the observable facts. Trains are going diesel - why?
It's the little throwaway lines that are so revealing
Our Sam Bowman takes to the Sunday Times to point out how comparatively poor Britain is.
Why has Britain become so poor?
Even eastern Europe is catching up with our sluggish GDP. Our politicians have been slow to act, but economists say there’s still reason for hope
Indeed so. But while we can point out that Britain is poorer than Mississippi - the poorest US state - that doesn’t necessarily hit home with people. But little throwaway lines might, indeed should.
Like this one:
Bilodeau and scores of other women online are bragging about their work setup using the hashtag #lazygirljob. To fans, the ideal lazy-girl job is one that can be done from home, comes with a chill boss, ends at 5 p.m. sharp and earns between $60,000 and $80,000 a year—enough to afford the basic comforts of young-adult life, yet not enough to feel compelled to work overtime. Veterans of such jobs say roles such as “digital marketing associate,” “customer-success manager” and “office administrator” are good bets for achieving the lazy-girl lifestyle.
Clearly, there are a number of comments possible here. One being “In your dreams”. Another being that the money isn’t everything crowd are quite right, people will work less and enjoy other parts of life when given the chance - when their income meets the physical lifestyle they desire.
We can even think of that target income as just that, a target (a target that appears easily achievable working in a Texas supermarket). But think about what that target means. The basics of the young adult life are $60 to $80k. That’s the standard of living they’re expecting.
That’s a rich, rich, country compared to the median pay of £27k or so ($34k, at market FX rates) in Britain. In fact, that lazy girl income, the one defined as covering those young adult basics, is in the top 10% of UK incomes.
Which is the proof of what we are missing by not having that economic growth. The proof of how comparatively poor we are. Even, compared to the US we’re all in relative poverty. In fact, we pretty much are. Median US household income is some $71k. Median UK is £34k. Or £57k to £34k, which means that, given the definition of relative poverty as below 60% of median household income then yes, the median UK household is in poverty by US standards.
That’s what we’re missing out upon. And it’s difficult to start arguing that the UK is more free market, less oppressed by politics and redistribution than the US is. Therefore, logically, to gain that living standard they’ve got we should be more free market and less burdened by politics and redistribution.
Government in the United States takes some 26 to 27% of everything to feed its maw. Here in Britain at present it’s more like 45%. Which gives us that very interesting target - let’s slash government by 20% of GDP so we can all have lazy girl jobs. Wouldn’t that be fun?
The perils of lithium batteries
We do indeed agree that lithium batteries pose fire perils. Yet there’s still something about this suggestion here:
In the first three months of 2023 alone, fires started by battery-powered scooters and bikes killed four people in the UK, according to Electrical Safety First, a charity.
Damage to the batteries leads to rapid heating called thermal runaway, setting fire to the rest of the pack. Flammable gases can be released, hastening the spread of the fire in a home, where scooters are often kept.
The charity said the devices should be more strictly regulated and assessed by a safety authority before being put on sale in a move mimicking rules in New York.
Possibly - although we’re really very unsure about how the sort of inspection that can be carried out on every battery can be detailed enough to find those with cells that might fail. But, a subject for discussion perhaps.
Perhaps our lives have been too sheltered because we didn’t know who Electrical Safety First are. So we had a look:
Total income of £5,624k included the £4,740k share of profit from Certsure LLP, the charity’s Joint Venture with the Electrical Contractors Association.
Certsure offers industry-leading certification services
When this happens in financial markets we call it “talking your own book”. No one thinks very much of it because all do it at some time or another. Bigs up the things one is long of, denigrates those short and so on. But the important point is that no one thinks very much of it. The behaviour is so prevalent that no one does bother to think that anyone’s making a serious suggestion other than talking one’s own book.
Matters political are a little different. For here a charity is suggesting that the law be changed so as to possibly benefit the profit making subsidiary of that charity. Or, if we are to be fair here, that would be a cynical reading of the suggestion.
That then brings us to the only important question in politics - are we being cynical enough?
Discuss
If everyone's so against climate change then why's everyone still flying?
We’ve had the usual burst of airline stock market results recently, they come around every few months. And the results are that, roughly enough, flight numbers are back to what they were pre-pandemic. That’s for short haul flights that is, the ones that take people off for an experience. Business travel is still below those pre-lockdown days. We had that little shock that showed Zoom calls working and so behaviour has changed. As it probably should do, having done it there’s not that much exciting about business travel. I’ve a comfy chair at home and I can mix my own gin - well, the first three or four at least.
But that the population is back to flying again is one of those interesting things. Obviously, interesting in that it enrages all those who think that us proles shouldn’t be allowed to fly. But rather more importantly, in that it’s so obviously against what all the usual polls and surveys tell us.
Everyone’s really, really, against boiling Gaia they tell us, every time they’re asked. And yet the very same people happily get on a ‘plane to the beach. That thing we keep being told is the very act that is boiling Gaia. There’s a disconnect here but what is it?
The answer is as economists have been pointing out for a long time. It’s revealed preferences that matter, not expressed. Or, more colloquially, look at what people do not what they say - and most certainly don’t pay any attention at all to what they say everyone else should be doing. To be slightly more formal again, we really only grasp human motivations, trade offs and decision making by observations of what is done within the constraints the universe throws at us.
Which is all very interesting and describes why people do indeed claim to be very worried about boiling Flipper and then fly off to the beach for sun and sangria. But there’s a larger lesson to be learned here too.
Politicians making decisions for us is near by definition acting upon expressed preferences. The results of the opinion poll, the focus group, even an election is still an expression of opinion. The information flow to those making those decisions is therefore hopelessly flawed. Because we know that what people say isn’t what they really mean. So it isn’t just that politicians are incompetent, or that reality’s too complex to be managed, or that they’re blinded by ideology (although all three are certainly true). It’s that the information flow to them, that they’re basing their decision making upon, is known to simply be wrong.
The implication of this is that political decision making has to be about revealed, not expressed, preferences. As revealed such can only be, umm, revealed by observation of those with the freedom to do those things the correct political stance is that classical liberal world. Consenting adults get to adult consentingly, over economic as well as all other parts of life. Adjustments for significant third party harm and prices for externalities are fine additions to such a system. But we’ve got to have the freedom to do as we wish so that it’s possible to divine what it is that everyone wants to do.
We simply don’t have any other effective information source. As is shown by the way in which everybody says they’re right there with Greta then go fly off to foreign for a long weekend.
If you think Shell's profits are obscene just wait until they stop investing for more oil and gas
Just a little note really. Something about how companies and financial markets work. Something that might be of interest to Greenpeace and the like complaining about “obscene” profits at oil and gas companies like Shell.
If they stop investing in new oil and gas projects their profits will go up.
Which does nicely illuminate this complaint:
Shell has reported profits of just over $5bn (£3.9bn) for the second quarter of the year, prompting outrage among campaigners who called the figures obscene, and a protest at the company’s London headquarters.
Obscenity is one of those undefinables and is really left to the opinion of those who claim to know it when they see it.
But we’d just like to point out that imagine what would happen if Shell did in fact stop exploring for, planning for, investing for, more oil and gas production? Their profits would soar of curse. They’d no longer have to carry the costs of exploring for, planning for, investing for, more oil and gas production. Also, they could fire everyone not specifically producing right now.
Certainly, profits 20 and 40 years out would decline because if there’s no investing now then there won’t be production then. But the effect of not investing now would be that all the returns of the past 20 to 40 years of investing would be available to be paid out to shareholders right now. Instead of some being retained to invest for that future.
Stop spending on the future and there’s more profit now. Profits would truly soar. And then what would Greenpeace have to complain about?
This new Cambridge suburb - so where are you putting the country cottages?
Lots of people - some we like, some we don’t - are getting very excited by this idea of a new planned suburb for Cambridge. We have to tell everyone that this is, sadly but predictably, a disaster of the usual planners’ mistake. One description is that planners don’t know enough to be able to plan. Another is that well, planning, eh? But the problem is summed up in the question of, well, great, but where are all the country cottages going to go?
The background to this is that housing is a technology. A technology is just a way of doing things using a wide definition. So, how we do housing is a technology, it’s a way of doing that thing. But the crucial thing about a technology is that you need all the moving bits to make it work. A steam engine that’s just a pot of boiling water drains no mines, propels no trains. Our long funded cucumber house warming system won’t work without the sunshine as an original input. We must have all the bits of the technology for it to work.
Perhaps it’s growing up in Bath that makes this obvious to this particular eye. But all those images and talks are about building townhouses and mansion flats. Lovely things both of them - but the difference between a townhouse and a house, in English English, is usually the provision of a garden or not. Townhouses don’t need them - because the inhabitants have somewhere else, out in the country, which is their garden. That’s rather why they’re called townhouses, to distinguish them from those proper places out on the rolling acres.
We are, after all, plains apes and like to have a stretch of turf to lay about in. Which is why that townhouse, without the garden, has always been rich man’s housing in this country. Rich enough to have, or at least gain access to, another place out there with that garden. No, parks, communal areas, they’re not the same. This also carries over to those Edwardian mansion flats in London and some other larger cities. Delightful things to live in, absolutely - but they’re not for 100% of living time.
This has been a long running problem with housing planning in Britain. At least 80 years, David Kynaston’s books surrounding Mass Observation contain the same argument. The planners talking about how everyone should live in flats, the actual people asking for the des res with front and back garden, thank you very much. A detached would be nice, a semi is acceptable, a terrace if we must, but front and back please, a place for the roses and one for the kids’ bouncy castle.
To which the planners’ claim has always been that Europeans live in flats, so why not the British. Which is where the painful ignorance comes in. The Europeans do not live in flats. They live in two places. In Russian it’s a dacha, in Polish a dacza, Czech a chalupa. In Southern Europe - places which came off the land much more recently - perhaps a quarter or eighth share in Granny’s cottage out in the boonies. No one observing the periphique on Tuesday is going to suggest that Parisians live only in Paris.
Europeans might live, for much of the time, in a flat. But they near all have access, perhaps in the extended family but still, to that place in the country.
There are those two technologies for housing, each with their own moving parts. Each technology only working if it is complete. The British one, that house with garden. The continental with a flat and that shack - if nothing better - out there in rurale profonde. Yes, even German cities are surrounded by a green belt (no, not Green Belt) of shacks and summer houses.
This new thing in Cambridge. It’s those planners all over again, not grasping the basic technology they’re dealing with. If it’s all going to be town houses and flats then where are those country cottages going to be? And if it’s not flats and townhouses then where are the gardens?
All of which is, of course, the problem with having planners doing this sort of thing. Given that they’re ignorant of what they’re trying to plan the plan isn’t going to be very good, is it?
The actual answer is simply to allow builders to build houses (or flats!) that Britons want to live in where Britons wish to live. This will shock, annoy and outrage the upper middle classes at The Guardian. But what’s the point of a life without a little fun and enjoyment in it?
Rewilding is to blame for Mediterranean forest fires
Or at least, to be acccurate, rewilding is partially to blame for Mediterranean forest fires. Which is darkly amusing as that man most insistent upon rewilding, George Monbiot, is trying to tell us that it’s all about climate change.
Why? Because an increase in number & spread of wildfires was a consistent forecast by climate scientists. Like many other climate science forecasts, it has materialised with a vengeance. Current fire patterns can clearly be attributed to global heating:
The thing everyone’s thinking about now concerning wildfires is those happening around the Mediterranean currently. Sicily, Rhodes, the list goes on.
Now, we know, we’re on most lists of climate deniers (DeSmog actually has one of us so listed because we argue for a carbon tax. Go figure). George keeps telling us we’re fossil fuel apologists and all the rest.
And yet we are in fact right here. Sorry about this but really, we are.
Forest fires - more often scrub fires - are an entirely natural part of the Mediterranean ecology. Been going on for thousands of years. The major determinant for any one fire season is actually how wet the preceding winter was. Rains happen in winter, native vegetation is pretty much dried out and dying back by May. Some climate models do indeed predict more winter rain in these ecologies - so it’s possible that the climate change argument is right.
But it’s also true that summer temperatures make little difference. Dried back grasses and the like are not notably more flammable at 41oC than 40. Or even than 35. And they will be dried back - that’s just the basic pattern here, near no precipitation at all from late April-ish through to October.
To which we must add another factor, rewilding. Which, given Monbiot’s arguments, he seems to like. But which does have the effect of increasing the fire season:
The socioeconomic transformations that occurred in Portuguese society during the second half of the last century have led to a profound change in its age structure, with important repercussions in terms of sectors of activity. This in turn has led to a drastic reduction of workers in the primary sector, due to the rural exodus, a consequence of which was the abandonment of many agricultural areas and their transformation into forested areas.
In turn, the abandonment of the agricultural-forestry-pastoral activity led to an accumulation of large amounts of fuel in the forest which, when weather conditions are favorable, feed forest fires.
“Forest” here is not quite towering oaks and stands of beeches. It’s scrub more than anything. But the point stands. Portugal is a vastly richer country than it was even 30 years ago let alone 50. So, those acre farms out in the wilds where people used to scrape a peasant living are being abandoned. You can actually buy whole villages in some areas for less than the price of a flat in Southern England. A truly rural cottage in many areas is the price of a decent used car.
Because they are being abandoned. The land is rewilding as a consequence. This increases the load susceptible to going up in flames in the normal dry summer.
We’re perfectly happy to agree that climate change might be having an effect. If overheating Gaia is leading to more winter rains which increase the fire load then sure, we’ll accept that as an influence. Summer temperatures make pretty much no difference at all - because summer temperatures always do get to where unattended land might burn. But we would also insist that this is not the only effect at work here. Rewilding is a real thing here as those boonies empty out. That also increases the fire load. On this there is that academic research and we also bothered to ask our local fire brigade - anecdata perhaps but then data is simply the plural of that.
We’d also add one final point. The biggest reduction in forest fires in both Portugal and Greece came a few years back. It used to be that if the hillside went up in flames then there was automatic planning permission for - say - tourist villas. When this was changed to burnt forest being, well, just burnt forest then the number of burnt forests rather went down.
Funny that, but have we mentioned before that incentives matter?
Public provision or public finance
Britain has made the same mistake twice, first in education, and then in health. In both cases the laudable aim was to give everyone access to a valuable service. In 1870 it was the Elementary Education Act, commonly known as Forster's Education Act, which set the framework for schooling of all children between the ages of 5 and 12 in England and Wales.
In 1948 it was the National Health Service Act. Free healthcare at the point of use comes from the core principles at the founding of the National Health Service. The 1942 Beveridge cross-party report established the principles of the NHS which was implemented by the Labour government in 1948.
In both cases the problem was perceived as one in which a lack of means deprived the poorer part of the population from access to what were deemed to be essential services: education and health. In both cases the decision was taken that these services were to be produced and run by the state.
The result has been that state provision has dominated both health and education. The NHS, admirable in many respects, has grown too big to manage. State education has been producer dominated, with parents allocated school places, some of which are clearly delivering a less than adequate preparation for life’s needs or for further education or training.
Choice and completion, the two factors that lead the private sector to improve its output in terms of both quality and efficiency, have been largely absent from state provision. In education, this lack has been redressed to some extent by the spread of academies and free schools that give schools more independence from local authorities and enable them to experiment, but the remaining state schools offer parents little choice.
A more viable model to achieve free healthcare and schooling would be to combine private or independent provision with state finance. In this model, people would choose between schools or different healthcare providers, and in doing so, direct state funding to the providers they have chosen.
The schools would receive their funding, weighted by age group, according to the number of students that parents chose to enroll there. Doctors and hospitals would receive their funding based on the number of procedures they carried out, with patients choosing between them, as happens in Australia, where large numbers of UK-trained doctors are choosing to live and work.
In this way, the choice and competition so little found in state provision, would be incorporated while maintaining the important principle that the services would continue to be free at the point of use.
In retrospect, this should have been done when state education and state health were first introduced. It was not, and because of that, there have been major problems with both services. A change to make it that the money should follow the parent or patient could vastly improve both services. It could correct the mistakes that made both of them under-perform.
Just Stop Stupidity
There is universal agreement that greenhouse gas emissions should be reduced as soon as possible. How that should be achieved lacks consensus.
On 18th July 2022, Mr Justice Holgate ruled:
“the UK government’s plan for reaching net zero emissions was unlawful because it provided insufficient detail for how the target would be met.”
In other words, the government did not have a plan at all. The judge’s ruling that one should be produced by 31st March 2023 produced a flurry of documents from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) labelled “strategy” and “plan”, but none had substance.
On 23rd June, the Public Accounts Committee reported:
“the Department should bring these together in a coherent delivery plan so that it can understand how realistic its ambition is, and coordinate and sequence its interventions to best effect.”
DESNZ does not do arithmetic. It may recognise that almost all energy in 2050 will take the form of electricity and that our growing population will need at least as much as we use now- about 2,000 TwH. The number of days when wind failed to supply 4 GW at some stage of the day or night fell from 196 days in 2020 to 183 days in 2022. So never mind how many renewables they build, about half the year they won’t work.
Their plan should show how the energy shortfall will be covered. That is, how large the baseload of nuclear plus tidal power needs to be and, when that is insufficient to cover demand, how the surplus demand will be covered by fossil fuels (presumably made clean by carbon capture and storage).
The general expectancy is that the baseload provided by renewables will be 30% of electricity demand, meaning that fossil fuel energies will fulfil 70% of electricity demand during dunkelflaute (dark) days.
The DESNZ’s failure in the arithmetic department is matched by HM Treasury’s failure to understand nuclear and tidal energy.
Hinkley Point C was the last nuclear plant approved, but that was nine years ago. Before that was Sizewell B, 27 years earlier.
Modern nuclear plants, called ‘Small Modular Reactors’ (SMRs) are the subjects of similar unjustified hesitancy. In 2015 Chancellor George Osborne recognised SMRs as better value for money, running a selection competition. Yet, eight years later, not a single one has been ordered or built. The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) recommended tidal power to be properly considered, yet DESNZ has ignored that. And when the supply of renewables and nuclear power are inadequate, we maintain the status quo - fossil fuels - proven by the latest interview with the CEO of Shell, Wael Sawan:
“The reality is, the energy system of today continues to desperately need oil and gas”
A related issue is the unnecessarily absolutist thinking that the UK, which causes 1% of global emissions, can solve global warming through unilateral action. This is not only fanciful, but delusory.
To conclude, the DESNZ is failing to do the basic arithmetic on the need for renewable energy to cover the nations’ baseload energy demand; HM Treasury continues to evade commitments to nuclear energy; and activists like Just Stop Oil demand a ludicrous cessation of the mining of fossil fuels. This is a tragic state of affairs, and the responsible institutions would do well to heed the ASI’s advice, and commit to the nuclear agenda. In the meantime, we simply continue burning the fuels destroying our planet.
But why shouldn't climate change be a political issue?
We have an awful lot of people trying to insist that climate change simply should not be a political issue. John Harris is just one of them:
In the UK, unfortunately, the past 48 hours has seen a political story whose parochialist absurdity is off the scale: Conservative voices undermining the fragile cross-party consensus on reaching net zero by 2050 and calling for many of the UK’s tilts at climate action to be either slowed or stopped. The reason? The results of three parliamentary byelections – and, in particular, the views of 13,965 Conservative voters in the outer London suburbs.
But climate change is the very essence of a political issue, something that has to be decided by politics.
No, leave aside the question of whether it is happening, even that of whether anything should be done about it. Stick with just the one point - if we’re to do something what is it that we should do?
Net Zero? A carbon tax at the social cost of carbon? As it happens the science prefers the second rather than the first there. So no one can use “but the science” to decide on the first.
But very much more importantly there’s a big political question here. Britons are being told to carry the cost of lower emissions so that others may gain the benefits of lower emissions. This is something that can only be done with the acquiescence of Britons. Elections are how we decide those things. What we do about climate change is the very essence of what a political issue is. Therefore rather than no politics about climate change we must have lots and lots more.
This is before a rather more sarcastic observation we’d like to make. The same people - largely that is - who argue against this democracy about climate change are those who shout for a “more democratic economy”. Surely that couldn’t be because they think the demos would vote for their economic policies but against their climate ones now, could it?