On Thursday Boris Johnson advocated investment in nuclear power plants. But that is not what the media focused on. Rather, they focused on his comment that if you have an old kettle you can replace for £20, it could save you £10 a year. This clip, taken out of context, quickly did the rounds on social media.
Johnson is right, of course. The fact that Britain does not invest heavily in nuclear energy is a disgrace. Calder Hall, built in 1956, was the first nuclear power station in the world to produce electricity on a commercial basis. Yet since then, for no discernible reason, Britain has let its nuclear sector wane.
But we cannot blame the media for focusing on the kettle analogy. While nuclear power may be a viable solution for Britain in the long-run, in the short-run the British government has no better strategy than to tell the average person to upgrade their kettle. The reason is simple: there is not enough gas.
The plans being floated by the Eurocrats in Brussels highlight this perfectly. Frankly they are gobbledygook. They advocate introducing “a price limit for inframarginal electricity technologies”. What does that mean exactly? Basically nothing.
The proposals look like they were written by some poor economist who has nothing of interest to say and so reverts to spewing esoteric microeconomic language. All the jargon is there – from talk of the “inframarginal electricity price” to bluster about “greater legal certainty”. But in reality, only one statement in the entire leak has any meaning: “mandatory demand reduction for gas”. That is, rationing.
As I have already noted: there is not enough gas. Since there is not enough gas, people must use less. Either the market can ration this scarce gas by increasing its end price for consumers until they use less, or the state can ration the gas by diktat. There is no third alternative – no matter how many times you invoke the “inframarginal electricity price”.
Each approach has advantages and disadvantages. Rationing via increased prices will likely mean that the sectors of the economy that need the gas most will get it. But it also means that the poor will get hit disproportionately. Rationing via state diktat ensures general welfare. But it risks distorting the market and cutting off key industries.
At the end of the day, however, these are secondary considerations. The main point is that there is not enough gas. Gas rationing means blackouts and blackouts mean that economic activity will grind to a halt. There is a real chance that Europe’s economy will collapse this winter, and living standards will fall sharply. Britain is not exempt from this cruel fate.
The only real solution is to get more gas. To do that the Europeans must hold their noses and accept Russian demands to open the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Doing so would overtly flout the sanctions and therefore be an enormous political victory for Russia. But the fact of the matter is that Russia wins either way.
If we do not flout the sanctions then we collapse, our living standards evaporate, and we likely undergo civil unrest and political upheaval. The people in the Kremlin will no doubt look West and laugh. If we break the sanctions, the whole anti-Russia campaign dissolves and we probably move back toward diplomatic normality. That is a big win for the Russians.
So, it is up to us – or rather our leaders. Do we want to stubbornly commit hara-kari to try to make a point – and meanwhile give the Russians a good laugh? Or do we sober up, assess the reality of the situation and hand Russia the victory that they will achieve regardless? Personally, I find ritual suicide distasteful, irrational and primitive.
Philip Pilkington is a macroeconomist and investment professional. You can follow him on Twitter here and subscribe to his Substack newsletter here.
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In reality, the next mini ice age has begun?
We are due one!
Global boiling,..the doom sayers may soon wish it was true!
Could it be all the wind turbines cooling things down like giant fans?
Interesting idea, they must cool the air by the extracted energy. Remember Boyles Law P1*V1/T1 = P2*V2/T2. If the velocity reduces due to energy extraction, and P is constant (as it pretty much is) temperature must also fall!
V1 and V2 are volumes not velocities.
Don’t supposed anyone would like to buy 6 large unopened Damart Thermolactyl vests I bought in preparation for the last ice age scare the scientists forecast in the 70s.
Maybe we’ve gone too far in reducing our CO₂ output? Perhaps we need to burn a bit more coal to help warm the planet?
(joking)
Not joking
historical co2 measurements have always been higher than the current levels!
Joking in that I don’t think burning more coal will help to warm the planet.
Still worth a try
, sooner have a nice fire than a heat pump!
You shouldn’t joke: an ideal level of atmospheric CO2 (for plants and animals, including humans) is probably more like 1000 ppmv, more than twice the current relatively impoverished level.
‘The Science’. ‘Settled’. ‘Act Now’. ‘Tipping points’. Arctic has melted in
2010, 2014, 2017, 2020, okay okay in 2560. All the polar bears aredyingvastly increasing in population….New York will be under water in1995, 2015, well you know whenever.The religion of Science and fake studies and endless propaganda. Follow. That. Money.
I fully expect Labour to be shoved out of office within three years; we are way overdue a bad winter. A fair few dead pensioners will see them off and will also kill the Climate Lie.
In the bottom corner of one of my Windows machines it claims tomorrow will be approaching the hottest ever 28 August. Come on, this is the week my family and I went on holiday when I was a kid and it was always T-shirt and outdoor swimming weather! You’d have to be incredibly stupid and have lived in a dark, dank cave all your life to believe this sort of bullshit.
35 years since the “Winter of discontent”.
Go back a further 5 years and you Eyebrows Healey crawling off to the IMF for a handout to prop up the Labour run UK and yet this morning Two Tier Kier has been blathering that we have never had it so bad as now while our economy outstrips all of Europe and most of the G7. Mind you, he will soon put a stop to that with Robot Reeves and Ranting Rayner.
Unfortunately I don’t think things will be bad enough in 3 years. Parts of the UK will probably have had a few power cuts by then (possibly even causing a few deaths) which will have been blamed on the evil Tories. The lower/middle class Labour voters will still be admiring the efforts being made to increase their wages and blame the soaring inflation including energy/food/services costs on the evil Tories. I think it will take longer for people to realise that worse rather than better is coming down the pipeline ever faster with Sir Keir’s puppet masters in charge.
To an extent people will be right to be blaming the evil Tories. They committed the country to Net Zero when they were the government.
All voted for by Labour, the worst cheek of the same Globalist arse!
And they both use the same orifice for their policy outpourings.
A mate of mine believed in MMCC. Talybont-On-Usk is a small village outside Brecon and has a canal. He said because he remembers the canal frozen as a kid, and not so much these days, that is evidence of MMCC. And he said that a flight to Glasgow shouldn’t be cheaper than by car or Train. That may be something to do with the rail network!
I suppose having Radio 4 on permanently in his Jeep would play a part in his World view.
This really needs the same criticism as the claims from the other camp: Was any of these plunges significantly outside of the expected variability? If not, all these temperature movements in either direction are non-events, ie, temperatures changing up and down and then up again and again down in the way they always do. The second graph indicates a total range of 3.5⁰C, that’s less than the temperature difference between inner London and the countryside outside of the city and that’s something people barely notice, if at all.
The point is – we were told the oceans were heating at an unprecedented rate… It’s worse than we thought! ™️.
The climate realists have been pointing out ocean warming and cooling is not unusual, cyclic, natural so no this doesn’t need the same criticism.
The climate swindlers are following the basic COVID pattern of attaching sensational headlines to occurences which are either non-events or entirely fictional¹. Articles like this implicitly validate this reporting about by employing similar sensational wording to describe other kinds non-events. At least, that’s what I very strongly suspect because neither party provides the necessary data to assess the relevance of the temperature variations it’s highlighting. This is either shoddy science or shoddy science reporting — even J. Random Social Scientist provides information about the standard deviation of the data he employs.
It’s obvious why the climate climacterians do this: They’re trying to subdue a largely mathematically aliterate population with endless and voluminous bullshit barrages. But that’s not an excuse for their critics to engage in the same kind of nothing-slinging, firstly because, as I’ve already hinted at, this suggests that something sensational is going on now and thus, what happened to happen before was equally sensational despite this simply isn’t the case. Secondly, because they should hold themselves to higher standards, ie, educate the uneducated instead of fooling the clueless.
¹ As reported in a German web publication about ‘weather’ yesterday: Current climate simulations predict that, depending on where you are in the Pacific area, it might either rain a lot or not rain at all at times during the course of the 21th century. Therefore, we must … !!!! Not much expertise needed to come up with a prediction like this.
No mention by anyone (not even Chris) of the globally-censored Hunga Tonga undersea volcanic eruption which, by a baffling coincidence, happened just before the unprecedented 2023 warming of the oceans and the unprecedented current spike in global tropospheric temperatures, quite different in magnitude and duration from any recently recorded powerful El Nino, e.g. 1998 and 2016. Just look at it:
.
Chris has mentioned this in a previous article last year entitled “Hunga Tonga Volcano is “Most Likely” Cause of Recent Warm Temperatures”.
Link – https://dailysceptic.org/2024/03/26/hunga-tonga-volcano-cause-of-recent-high-temperatures-says-scientist
You are right to say that it is globally censored – very difficult to find any up to date analysis of the 10-13% volume of water vapour sent into the stratosphere and any sort of expectation as to how that will be returned to the surface of the planet and over what period of time. We need to keep mentioning it. Thank you for doing so.
Ofcourse it isn’t just called global warming now. So temperatures are not so important to warmist’s unless one is recorded on a thermometer near an airport, and ofcourse then temperature is all the rage again and it is evidence we are all going to fry.
— Yes today they call it “climate change” so that anything whatsoever that happens can be blamed on humans whose standard of living needs to drastically reduced by the globalist technocrats no one voted for.
It’s still “climate change” – innit?
So the Jeremiahs will have to switch back to the “new ice age” chestnut
My parents own a house on the north coast of Scotland. I go swimming in the sea when I visit. It is usually pretty damn cold, but not painfully so. This year (and I have swum a few times this month), it has been painfully cold. The lochs aren’t as bad, just their normal coldness, but the sea is really cold this year.
Make sure not to go cold-water swimming alone, because it can cause “Transient Global Amnesia”, as experienced by Dr. Michael Mosely once in Britain while cold-water swimming with his doctor wife, and probably again in Greece, after which his wife mistakenly allowed him to wander off alone in the searing heat.
Sea temperature and thermal expansion is a significant factor in sea level rise. It is thought that 75% of the sea level rise in the 20th century was down to thermal expansion.
If there is now any sort of reduction in sea temperature then presumably there will be a slow down in the rate of sea level rise?
But as others have pointed out this climate change business seems to have moved a long way away from facts and rational analysis, as some dodgy journalist once said, don’t let the facts stand in the way of a good (in this case ludicrous) story.
“Few fear-mongering points will be on offer for drawing attention to this inconvenient news”
They will no doubt focus on something else. They will switch to the man made fires as evidence of MMCC.
That famous line from a Climategate email springs to mind. –“We can’t account for the lack of warming and it is a travesty that we can’t”. —–But ofcourse had those emails not been hacked back in 2009 then the public would never have known that the “scientists” knew the earth was not warming but never told us. The truth is that despite all the claims of “settled science” and projections from failed models of future warming, there are no scientists or experts who know what the climate will be doing in 50 or 100 years, and the “travesty” is that they keep telling that they do know.
They don’t really. They’re extremely careful to stay in the subjunctive all the time (another property shared with COVID propaganda), it’s alway about stuff which could or might happen. Fundamentally, that’s the same appeal to ignorance endlessly overused for the pandemic: Point at something sufficiently complicated that many people don’t understand it and start whispering about the horrible future possibilities this might entail in the hope that people get scared by dangers of the great unknown. In case someone gets called for out that, he can – just like SPI-M – always claim that nobody was making predictions, just highlighting possible future scenarios.
Yes there is plenty of “what if” and “maybe”, but we still get told that what we do as humans can be adjusted to keep the “global temperature” from rising by more than 1.5 C. —-Now that is a pretty accurate piece of “settled science” is it not?——-To control the temperature of the whole world to within the nearest degree. This is not science at all, it is globalist bulls..t
Obviously. Especially considering that this is mostly just western Europe and the USA and nothing anyone does in Europe will have a meaningful influence on global CO₂ emissions. If we’re doomed unless they fall significantly, then, we’re doomed. If the climate show hysterics would really believe in that, they’d be focussing on India and China.
Climate Change caused by our CO2 emissions sounds good to the average person who is too busy with work and family life. They are led to believe this is all about science and scientists warning the government about a dangerous problem, and then the government have no choice but to act. —-It is just like when a very good friend of mine said to me “Why would they say there was global warming if it isn’t true”? —I tried to explain something about why, and the politics involved but propaganda is a very powerful tool and it is hard for my friend and for anyone else to listen to me instead of “all the world’s scientists”.
Ah, ‘…..scientists are seemingly clueless….’
Add that to the ‘doctors are baffled‘ one.
Jim NR Dale cannot hang his head in shame. He has no shame. He makes too much money for such things to get in his way. Appalling, yes, and dangerous man.
When I was in school back in the 60’s it was all about entering another ice age.
So according to the top graph, we have gone from the warmest to the second warmest temperature for the time of year?