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The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change has a new problem to contend with.
It seems that Ørsted, the biggest wind turbine profiteer in europe, does not want to proceed with Hornsea 4.
Why Ørsted sees H4 as a dead cat without the bounce, instead of a “cash cow” isn’t fully explained.🎼 There’s a hole in your bucketlist, dear Edward, dear Edward, a hole in your bucketlist dear Edward, a hole 🎼
I do wish people would keep me informed about events like this…_https://davidturver.substack.com/p/orsted-cuts-investment-plans-torpedos-miliband-clean-power-2030
Very interesting DiggerUK.
BBC are keeping quite as are our new Labour Government.
Yesterday, they went Up North for an all day, emergency cabinet meeting, nothing has yet leaked out.
I wouldn’t mind betting that the £22 billion Carbon Capture plan, will be forgotten about.
They must increase the size of the National Grid by four or five times, for this Net Zero stuff, that will cost so much money and take a long time, like a quarter of a century.
The carbon Capture is money wasting nonsense.FJ: It’s been speculated that the fault on the west flank of Cumbre Vieja on La Palma may fracture during seismic activity and slide into the Atlantic with a large displacement, however USGS suggest the risk if overrated.
Glenn: Fitting indeed.
£22 billion for Carbon Capture seems rather a lot of money. I thought the most efficient carbon capture method was to plant trees? They also have the added benefit of releasing oxygen.
Presumably, our government are not going to spend £22bn on trees because that would not boost the mega profits of construction companies.
(Yes, cynical sarcasm is the basis of my comment).
“The first rule of Dunning-Kruger club…
is that you do not know you’re in Dunning-Kruger club.”
The underinvestment in needed electric power supply is extremely serious. With ageing kit coming to it’s use by date and not a lot of replacement being prepared, the dangerous situation we skirted around on January 8th should now be faced up to.
This article explains just how big a problem we face…_
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/the-coming-capacity-crunch
– “The climate is always changing.”
Your bodyweight is always changing; you lose some weight whenever you exhale or sweat. However, starvation, obesity, diarrhoea, constipation and losing a leg can all be serious and are not to be dismissed.
Yes, Digger (Feb 11, 16:23). The preparations should have been being pursued more vigorously for decades. But they haven’t been due to denialism like yours.
The ad hominems don’t work any more.
The calls for investment in nuclear generated electricity have been a consistent part of the denier platform from year zero and still are. We should put all effort in to constructing sufficient nuclear capacity. This would give us a reliable backbone for electricity generation at an adequate level to meet our demands.
The only reliable top up to balance the grid should come from carbon fuels. I would favour gas.I would like to see bio and imports eventually scrapped in favour of gas.
I would also propose that the bio plant and IC connectors remain in place as emergency back up.
Gas, together with hydro, would leave us with guaranteed supplies of electricity and a balanced grid capacity.Pumped hydro should also remain as a safety valve for unwanted excess.
I would annihilate wind and solar as quickly as the contracted subsidies could allow.
The ecopath tomfoolery is in the endgame in the uk. The emerging spat in the Labour Party between Mad Miliband and Rachel from accounts is the beginning of the end…_
Digger, it’s not meant as an insult, it’s just how things are. You’re right about underinvestment but it’s actually worse than you think; see my recent comment to michael norton on the other thread.
As for nuclear, “economically recoverable” deposits of uranium currently stand at fifty years worth, “at current usage rates”. From memory, nuclear currently provides about 10% of electricity, which translates to about 2% to 3% of total energy usage. So if we make all electricity from nuclear, that falls to five years worth, and less than two years to cover all energy usage. Then there’s the half of the world population that use far less energy than us coddled Global Northerners. Nuclear is a stop-gap at best.
Yes, there are less concentrated sources of uranium*, but scaling up production by a factor of ten (for all electricity), thirty (for all energy) or sixty (for global equality) takes us down to the dregs in no time. Poorer, less accessible deposits take more and more fossil fuel to extract them, before we even consider the toxic effects of uranium mining. Then there’s the security state you need to protect a uranium energy economy from weapons proliferation. More mundanely, nuclear is already the most expensive source of electricity.
This is all a shame because I like nuclear technology; I’m particularly fond of Alvin Weinberg’s Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, and the incredible feat of building the Dounraey Experimental Fast Breeder Reactor in under four years, in the 1950s no less. But nuclear power just doesn’t scale up without profound consequences; it’s a bit like burning carbon in that respect.
* (The nuclear advocates are fond of banging on about the extremely low concentrations of uranium in ocean water. Let’s not even get into what processing umpteen cubic miles of seawater per week might do to the base of the food chain and atmospheric oxygen concentrations.)
What I find frustrating is people clutching at easy ‘solutions’ that can’t work or create even bigger problems, to avoid acknowledging the predicament we are in. This is real meaning of ‘denial’, like in psychology; refusing to admit to oneself that there really is a very hard problem and sacrifices are going to have to be made.
I’ve used these two sentences (with minor modification) many times over the last 40 years in limb salvage clinics with smokers whose addiction was the dominant factor in vascular insufficiency. Hard line denialists would carry on regardless whilst others would switch to Silk Cut (or more recently vapes). Nicotine is a vasoconstrictor – which gives the smoker the little high they crave – but prolonged use can permanently narrow the arterial vessels and limit the flow to the extremities. Low tar ciggies might reduce the damage to the lungs, but as with vapes, nicotine is still delivered easily. Even faced with reality – the loss of two legs – many addicts will keep puffing away until a CVA or MI takes them to another level. Usually underground or in an oven.
That may help us understand the behaviour here – but of course, smokers denialism usually only impacts the individual, whilst climate and emissions denialists impact everyone.
Let us imagine the World got two degrees warmer than the little Ice age, so fucking what.
In Britain it is often cold. In, Russia/Canada/Europe/China/Korea it is sometimes very cold.
Yet people live in Africa, which is hot.
Humans evolved in Africa, when it was rather warm.
I do not for a moment believe that the world will end because of Global Warming.
Yes, I think it is possible that human activity is causing some modest warming.
Yes I think humans are causing Carbon dioxide to accumulate in the atmosphere.
Will the modern world end because of some warming – not a chance.
Will some people like Elon Musk, make a fortune, yes, they will, they will fleece the gullible.
That, is human nature, to trick and to deprive others of their money.Michael norton – “…they will fleece the gullible.”
Michael, I actually find you one of the most gullible contributors I’ve ever encountered on this site.
For instance, reflect on Elon Musk for a mo. Yes, he has an electric car manufacturing business, and you happen to personally hate electric cars. But he also says that emissions are a minor problem, probably because his latest rockets burn several thousand of tonnes of methane in the 200 seconds following lift off, and his aim is to be launching twice a day. There’s a discrepancy here that has clearly passed right over your head. Maybe you should think more and preach less, for it seems you know not on whose behalf you preach.
MN: “Let us imagine the World got two degrees warmer than the little Ice age, so fucking what. “
Congratulations! That takes the reward for the most profoundly ignorant, stupid and lazy statements of the entire thread. And that is saying something.
Ignorance is fine – it can be cured. But not with stupidity combined with laziness. For instance, a quick search on “effect of two degree rise in world temperature” would return results such as this one (if you can’t be bothered with primary source sites) :
Myth-buster: Why two degrees of global warming is worse than it sounds
That’s much better than making a fool of yourself by saying something like, “Couple of degrees warmer might be quite nice”.
Some of the effects not mentioned in the myth-buster article stem from disruption to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).
AMOC is sometimes mistakenly called the Gulf Stream; it does what the latter is famous for, i.e. drawing from the tropics heat which then warms parts of northern Europe.
A weakened AMOC means a colder climate in northern Europe. No doubt this will have the effect of feeding grist to the denialists’ mill, but they should consider its full implications first. Heat that no longer reaches northern Europe stays in the south, amplifying temperature increases there.
So there is almost certain to be mass migration from southern and tropical regions to escape, for example, droughts in southern Europe, desertification in Africa, intense heat in India, etc. Many such climate refugees will head for the industrialised nations of northern Europe, increasing the demand there for fuel for heating, transport etc. A demand that is unlikely to be met without burning fossil fuels.
But maybe between the colder north and warmer south there’s a Goldilocks zone that suffers no temperature change? Well, there is – Germany is one such place. It won’t be all rosy for the Germans and their vastly increased refugee population though. It’s predicted that while the average temperature may stay reasonably constant, many more periods of extreme temperature (both hot and cold) will result.
Good point, Mart. There were comprehensive guides led by NASA, but I didn’t think there was even the slightest chance denialists would look at that.
It’s also worth pointing out that the 2 degrees is not referring to being 2°C above “the little Ice age” – it’s 2°C above the global average of the pre-industrial world.
The mini ice age didn’t occur over the entire world, either. The average temperature of the world stayed the same during our localised ice age.
Another common flaw in reasoning is to say “Climate always changes!”. It varies quite a bit on a continent basis, but the average temperature of the Earth does not. This is an extremely ominous, and startlingly sudden new change.
January 2025 was the hottest January on record. (That’s global average, before anyone says they thought it was cold.) It was expected to be cooler. Well done, denialists – we will have a miserable future, but at least you’ve helped keep a few billionaires happy.
“Let us imagine the World got two degrees warmer than the little Ice age, so fucking what.”
How about you answer that question yourself Michael? Go find out the volume of the atmosphere and oceans and calculate the energy required to do that. Go look up specific heat and what it means. Stop thinking in local terms. It’s not about whether there’s a good day’s drying out. As Glenn pointed out it’s global average temperature rise. Go find out how that is calculated.
I’ll help you. The earth’s energy comes from that received from the sun minus what’s radiated back to space. That’s it, more or less, except for minor contributions from tidal forces and the earth’s core. Do the work yourself, it’s not that hard.
ET: (To MN) “Do the work yourself, it’s not that hard.”
He won’t. None of them will. They’re too fucking lazy.
Some excellent graphics here on a bunch of indices, showing targets for reducing emissions and how they are squaring up to reality:
The conclusion is in the title: The world’s best hope to beat climate change is vanishing.
