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I wonder, why it is not allowed to be possible, to let people know, where their electricity comes from?
I imagine if you live next door to a coal fired electricity power station, you assume that almost all the electricity you use, comes from that plant.
I imagine if you live next door to a nuclear power station you assume that almost all the electricity you use, comes from that nuclear plant.
However, for most of us who do not live adjacent to a big plant – we just do not know.
There are firms that pretend, if you buy your electricity through them, you will only get electricity produced by renewables.
I have assumed these “providers” are charlatans?
That’s probably part of the problem, the group you buy your electricity from, probably do not even make electricity.
I think this is shrouded in mystery, on purpose, so you cannot find out the truth, where your electricity actually comes from.
Your smart meter will not tell you, yet it is supposed to be smart.
There are no answers for anything these days, just swirling mist.It comes from the grid, Michael – that’s what your smart meter is connected to.
Where does all the oxygen in the air you breathe come from? Is it the big oak in your garden or the trees and bushes in the park nearby? Probably both plus lots more from all around the world on land and sea.
It’s the same for electricity in a national grid. Why is it important?
Shibbolith
I expect we are consistently lied to about almost everything.
We are certainly lied to about why the war in Ukraine started. We were lied to by Blair about weapons of mass destruction.
We were lied to about Libya.
I expect they are now lying about the war in Palastine.
We are lied to about immigration, about inflation, about covid, about the National Health Service, about how many people are without work, about Novichock, pensioner heating allowances, almost everything is a lie.
They want you, the public, to know very little but they want you to really believe that what they tell you is the truth.
It is getting to be like 1984.I do not think it is too much to ask, if we are constantly fed this government ideology about Carbon Zero,
to know exactly where our electricity comes from.I don’t think anyone has lied to you about electricity, Michael. It’s just high school physics and common sense.
I have been in a Local Conservation Volunteering Group for 28 years, several of our members have PHD, some are retired doctors or are retired scientists.
Nobody knows where our electricity comes from.
We are all bemused.
Ed Milliband, yes him again, wishes us to believe him, that in six years the U.K. will be Carbon Neutral.
Nobody in my group of Volunteers, remotely thinks this is doable. They all think he is a clown.
We discuss this sort of twaddle, most weeks.
Most believe in Global Warming. Most think that our World is slightly warming.
I doubt anybody is shitting themselves over it.
Like most people my friends are just getting on with their lives but they are aware you can not believe a word that comes out of any politicians mouth.Quote Shibboleth
“I don’t think anyone has lied to you about electricity, Michael. It’s just high school physics and common sense.”
The Hoover Dam, was mostly built to give poor people work.
Many lakes were dug in England to give poor people work.
Everything is to do with politics.
The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is bussing with politics.
https://climate-diplomacy.org/magazine/conflict/politics-grand-ethiopian-renaissance-dam
I actually am a firm believer in this dam project, however you would be simple, if you thought that politics was not involved. Politics permeats all aspects of life, in every country.
It is politics first, environment way down the list of priorities.
Do you think the New Labour Party actually give a shit about Global Warming, of course they do not.
Their angle, is hoping to manipulate their populace, to gently bring them along or crush them, if they will not believe.
They are cruel beyond imagining, as are most governments, it is all about power and retaining power, nothing is about saving any planets. We are being misled about almost everything, every day.
They still will not admit that Covid started in the Level Four Lab in Wuhan.
We live in a shadow world, where nothing can be actually known, everything is an illusion.
This is how they want it.
The peasantry kept as underdogs. In ignorance.
They know best and they will direct our lives.Michael, this site has the electricity source information:
http://www.energydashboard.co.uk/api-info
That page advertises their paid APIs (Application Program Interfaces) to access the raw data. Their site also lets you run your own searches on the data they’ve aggregated:
http://www.energydashboard.co.uk/historical
Then there’s this site which I’ve linked to before:
Their ‘Info’ page has a bit of explanation about where the data comes from:
gridwatch.templar.co.uk/about.html
– “Finally after having expressed a desire for anyone to point me at a site for real world data on power generation, I was referred to the BM Reports website, where real-time – or near real-time – data is available on exactly what The United Kingdom’s electricity grid is doing. That was a huge leap forward in actually gathering the data, as it has pages of latest statistics, but the ability to retrieve archived data and perform instant calculations as well its – frankly awful – graphical displays, was a real drawback.”
The ‘Download’ button takes you to a data download tool:
gridwatch.templar.co.uk/download.php
And they have a list of useful links:
gridwatch.templar.co.uk/links.html
Michael, there’s a lot of this these days; information in funny formats sold by obscure commercial websites offering a less informative pre-digested version gratis, and volunteers who try to help. The Admiralty did it with coastal depth maps, and Ordnance Survey offer subscription access. It’s because everything got privatised. There’s a market, so the makers, sellers and buyers of electricity have to make certain information public, but everyone’s a bit cagey about what they mean, and it’s the same with gas. But I think it can all be worked out by anyone who’s sufficiently motivated.
Britain uses a lot of gas, most of it from Norway via the Langeled pipeline I think. There are lots of gas central heating systems, tens of millions of them at a guess, plus cookers small and large, industrial process heat etc. Maybe only a third of UK gas combustion goes on generating electricity, or something like that? And gas-to-electricity is about 50% efficient, whereas burning it at point of use can be much more efficient, 85% or more? But these figures are all off the top of my head; I can’t be bothered searching for them right now.
Sorry, I screwed the italics, should be just one paragraph.
—
[ Mod: Corrected. ]– “Do you think the New Labour Party actually give a shit about Global Warming, of course they do not.”
They’ve just approved a £1.1 billion five year expansion of Stanstead Airport:
http://www.thecanary.co/trending/2024/10/15/stansted-airport-expansion-labour/
– We are pleased to today release details of a £1.1bn investment programme in @STN_Airport over the next five years ✈️
– Announced as part of the Government’s International Investment Summit, our investment will help us attract even more routes to destinations around the world and… pic.twitter.com/HuYgpScFvr
— London Stansted Airport (@STN_Airport) October 14, 2024
– “Most believe in Global Warming. Most think that our World is slightly warming.
I doubt anybody is shitting themselves over it.”The trouble with that is that a load of climate scientists have been shitting themselves over it for years. They’ve been warning, and now they watch it happening, and they’re still warning that it’s getting worse and if we don’t stop burning carbon more and more things will break. Storm Boris broke a load of records. Sea surface temperatures were off the chart this year. Wildfires have been off the charts. There’s concern that the Amazon forest might be flipping to producing more carbon than it consumes. I don’t think you’ll find one single complacent climate scientist, they’re all concerned, a load have been tearing their hair out, and some are even getting themselves arrested.
Michael, really, you don’t think all these climate scientists are putting this on just to get funding, do you? They’ve been sending the same warnings for forty years, and now they’re getting desperate. Surely you’ve noticed governments’ reluctance to act over the decades? CO2 is one of the most biologically active gases in the atmosphere, you can’t just increase it by 50% and not worry, the very thought is preposterous, imagine if it were oxygen or nitrogen or ocean salinity, my mind boggles that so many people have managed to normalise the idea, surely no propaganda can be that pervasive.
Tipping points – climate, biological, agricultural, industrial, socio-economic, political. It is impossible to fully predict how such complex and powerful interlinked systems might react, so disturbing them is likely to be very dangerous. We need to lay off the gas, make less energy go further, live less technologically and financially, and more biologically and socially. War is the worst of all human activities, highly technological and financial, extremely and deliberately destructive to ecology and society.
Arthur Fallowfield
British comedian Kenneth Horne’s radio show “Beyond Our Ken” featured a gardener called Arthur Fallowfield, played by Kenneth Williams. His response to any question was always, “the answer lies in the soil”.Clark – my thoughts exactly. I wonder how much (in monetary terms) the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are costing for arms, munitions, military personnel by Israel and its allies – US, UK and Germany. I suspect it will be in the trillions of dollars. Divide this by the number of casualties and you will have an approximate kill/cost ratio. Perhaps then, the taxpayers in those countries will have a greater understanding of where the loyalties lie with our elected representatives.
The answer did lie in the soil; unfortunately we dug it up and burnt it. It’s like accidentally putting sugar in someone’s tea; takes seconds to do but can’t be undone.
The Earth is in trouble just from the number of humans. Climate is the issue that gets all the attention, but deforestation, species loss, overfishing, destruction from mining, pollution etc etc are all getting increasingly worse.
I’ve debated the problems of wind turbines and PV here before, i.e. more energy is used building them than what they produce in their lifetimes (and they depend on FF for their manufacture, maintenance and disposal).
Anyway…
Here’s a good (year old) article about climate change you might like to read:
https://www.ecosophia.net/riding-the-climate-toboggan/“Soil sequesters 2,500 gigatons (GT) of carbon, which is about 80% of the carbon in terrestrial ecosystems. This makes soil the second largest carbon sink on Earth, after the ocean.”
If you go back to early Medieval times, there were great forests over much of the World, agriculture was modest. Agriculture relied of Bullocks/oxen. The bullocks pulled the ploughs.
The bullocks pulled the carts. Animal doings were dropped on the land. Land was also left fallow. Most trees were coppiced for the small wood, rather than cutting big trees down.
I can imagine that in these times a lot of Carbon was taken back into the soils.We have moved on to Industrial scale farming.
Tractors using Diesel pull the ploughs and carts.
To a very large extent the large animal droppings are now absent from the soils.
Artificial fertillisers are put on the soils.
Spays are used to kill insects.
Monoculture crops are grown.
Essentially, many soils are almost devoid of life.
These soils are probably giving up more Carbon, than they sequester.If it is true that 80% of Carbon in the terrestrial ecosystem is or should be in the soils,
then we have to rethink how we move forward with farming/land use.
Concreting over more and more land to build transport infrastructure is harmful, this even if the vehicle’s motive power is Lithium ion batteries. The soils need to breathe, they need to be allowed to live. It is most important that large animals must, for at least part of the year roam on the land. The urine, urea, blood and body tissue from these creatures is needed to improve the life in the soils and thus the sequestration of Carbon. What we should not be doing is chemical farming.Strips of fruit/nut trees, interdispersed with other crops, which are rotated, could be part of our answer.
James:
– “the problems of wind turbines and PV here before, i.e. more energy is used building them than what they produce in their lifetimes”
This is untrue. EROEI for wind and solar is around 10:1.
Michael, those points are valid, but the major reason atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing is combustion of fossil fuels; this has been researched and quantified in excruciating detail. Even if all those changes were made, atmospheric CO2 would continue to accumulate irreversibly, biospheric heat content would continue to increase, and the oceans would continue to lose alkalinity etc.
You’re right that hundreds of the ways that humanity does things are harmful and should be changed, but you can’t take fossil fuels off the list.
Climate does change!
“ . . . it is these ocean state changes that are
1:02:28 correlated with the great disasters of the past impact can cause extinction but
1:02:35 it did so in our past only wants[once] that we can tell whereas this has happened over
1:02:40 and over and over again we have fifteen evidences times of mass extinction in the past 500 million years
1:02:48 so the implications for the implications the implications of the carbon dioxide is really dangerous if you heat your
1:02:55 planet sufficiently to cause your Arctic to melt if you cause the temperature
1:03:01 gradient between your tropics and your Arctic to be reduced you risk going back
1:03:07 to a state that produces these hydrogen sulfide pulses . . . “
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ako03Bjxv70James Charles, thank you for that quite old lecture.
I have just watched it all through.
The gentleman seems to suggest, that most mass extinction events are caused by bacteria.
Perhaps allowing too much Hydrogen sulfide rising up from the oceans and getting into our atmosphere.
He also seem to think that more than 1500 parts per million of Carbon dioxide is quite dangerous, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_sulfideAlso Methane could be dicey.
What he has also claimed, is in the long run, we will have to make carbon dioxide to keep life going.
Peter Douglas Ward Ph.D.
born 1949
Ward specializes in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, the Permian–Triassic extinction event, and mass extinctions generally. He has published books on biodiversity and the fossil record.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Ward_(paleontologist)Clark:
“EROEI for wind and solar is around 10:1.”When one takes into account *all* the energy required (i.e. the mining of ores, processing, building the machines, getting them in place, maintaining them etc), then ‘renewables’ are nowhere near 10:1.
See here: https://postdoomprimer.substack.com/p/21-the-energy-transitions-inherent
Also here: https://postdoomprimer.substack.com/p/23-but-mainly-the-energy-transition
Clark, Hydrogen does not seem to be a runner for ordinary day life.
Methane is and could be good for transport.
However if you consider Methane as a fossil and you want to immediately remove all fossil fuels, you will cease, almost all transport, world wide, including sea transport and air.
There will never be enough Copper economically recoverable for all vehicles to purely run on electricity/batteries.
The damage that will be done to the earth by attempting to rip out twenty different types of metal is unconscionable.
If we do not have vehicles using liquid fuel how will we do agriculture?
If we do not have vehicles using liquid fuel how will we transport food?
If we do not have boats using liquid fuel how will we catch fish?
If we do not use liquid fuel how will we harvest timber?
If we do not have vehicles using liquid fuel how will we transport steel, concrete, bricks, timber?
You seem to be advocating the end of modern life?
