The Telegraph has published an interview with a 32 year-old scientist called Tim Gregory who argues that decarbonisation needs a total rethink in his book Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World. His argument, unsurprisingly, is that nuclear power is the solution to clean and better energy and it’s been staring everyone in the face for decades.
Among the gems are:
“Certainly, for the foreseeable future, nuclear power represents our best shot of sensibly achieving Net Zero and producing all of the electricity that we’re going to need by 2050 when we’re all in electric cars and using heat pumps.”
France showed what was possible – by accident, after the oil crisis of the 1970s:
“They almost decarbonised their entire grid by accident before anyone cared about climate change,” says Gregory, holding up a chip for emphasis. “There’s a real lesson in that. It’s actually possible. The science and technology is there already. We just need to get our act together and deploy it. We’re already at about 30% renewables in a lot of countries. What about 30% renewables, 70% nuclear? Then you’ve done it, and you can all talk about something else and just crack on.”
Germany demonstrates the folly of relying on renewables:
Germany’s Energiewende – its transition away from nuclear and fossil fuels to renewables, which began at the turn of the millennium but accelerated after Fukushima – provides the perfect counterpoint. Nuclear, argues Gregory, provides much better value for money than any of its rivals. For the €500 billion Germany spent on its “failed energy transformation”, Gregory writes, it could have had 40 reactors like the one built in Finland.
“With that much electricity, plus the nuclear it switched off since 2000, Germany could have entirely decarbonised its electricity supply, eliminated the need for unreliable wind turbines and solar panels, electrified all 49 million of its cars, and still have spare electricity to generate 1.7 million tonnes of green hydrogen every year.”
The obstacles are the lack of a will to embark on major long-term infrastructure projects and the disease of despair that has settled in over the West which, as every Daily Sceptic reader knows, has much to do with climate alarmism and its perpetual message of despair:
“In the UK, we used to be world leaders at building nuclear power stations, not just quickly but en masse. The median build time in Europe back in the 1970s and 1980s was about six years, which is about what it is today in China and South Korea,” he says, pointing to the stacks where British scientists took the first steps into the Atomic Age.
“There is a doom and gloom in society, and people are demoralised,” says Gregory. “I don’t want to diminish the very real problems that a lot of people face and the big challenges that the UK faces and the world faces, but we are actually capable of doing some really cool stuff when we put our minds to it.” That’s where his Apollo programme analogy comes in. “A massive, concerted effort on the nuclear power front would solve a lot of our problems. And it’s totally achievable.”
Gregory despairs at the whole mentality of eco activism:
“I’ve read a lot of Greenpeace literature, a lot of Friends of the Earth literature – I haven’t just put myself into an echo chamber. But I came away from the conversation with this guy really disappointed by how weak the arguments were. They’re either based on things that aren’t true, or gut feelings, and energy policy is not something that should be dictated by gut feeling.”
Gregory’s argument is that green technology should be a) cleaner and b) better – the latter concept being something that often seems to escape eco activism, such as the LED bulb:
“That’s exactly the kind of technology that we should be implementing more of. It’s better than what it replaces in its function, and it’s cheaper and it’s better for the environment. It’s perfect. Who can argue with that?”
He is similarly irked by ‘greenwashing’ and uses a brief section of Going Nuclear to interrogate Greta Thunberg’s fabled transatlantic yacht voyage to the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019. While she may not have racked up any air miles getting there, the same cannot be said for a crew of five who had to fly to New York to retrieve the vessel and sail it back to Sweden. “Of all the things in my book that might get me cancelled, the opening to that chapter might be one,” Gregory says.
None of this gets round the facts that EVs are expensive, don’t last, wear out roads more quickly and don’t go far enough on a charge, or that heat pumps use vast amounts of electricity and don’t work very well – or, of course, that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but boosts plant growth and is of net benefit to the planet. But perhaps for those who still believe in the imperative of reducing carbon emissions, scientists like Gregory will lead them down a more sensible and less damaging road – at least until they can be persuaded to abandon the false climate alarmist narrative altogether.
Worth reading in full.
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Well that headline says it all doesn’t it?
What a brain dead heartless chunt!
Forgot to add he’s just a biological robot with motor function but no thought patterns!
Lizard brain only.
“Keir Starmer has shocked observers across the political divide”
Not sure why anyone is shocked. He is doing what he said he would do, and following the path we knew he would follow. Why would he have regrets? It seems like back in the day, Blair and Cameron tried to be subtle in their destruction of this country, in order to get re-elected, but these days the Uniparty just goes hell for leather and couldn’t care less about their popularity.
That is really what has changed.
The contempt for ordinary people and their views is displayed openly.
The Iraq war seemed to me the watershed moment in that respect. The establishment took us to war when the population was clearly against it and there were no consequences. Worse still when it was discovered it was based on lies, still no consequences.
It was the moment the establishment realised it did not need the consent of the population and that it could instead dictate whatever it thought best.
People keep voting.
At least we now have an alternative, hopefully, possibly – Reform.
Reform will be kept out for as long as that’s cheaper than buying it out. And then, it will be bought out. See also The Story of Meloni.
No matter how hard you vote, you don’t control the system.
Until there is evidence to the contrary, it’s hard to disagree.
I’m intrigued at how much of what has been promised the Trump regime will actually accomplish and I stand prepared to correct my opinion on how things work. I really hope I have to take all my words back. But for now I remain highly sceptical.
The Globalists are in a hurry now. They know they’ve been rumbled since the Covid Tyranny and lockdowns and they’re getting considerable pushback …. so they are no longer bothering to act discreetly.
Yup, I think that’s plausible. Also I think they were rattled by setbacks before then – Brexit and Trump 1 being the ones that spring to mind.
I actually don’t think they are working to a specific plan or agenda that they have a timeline to execute
I think they are arrogant, depotically minded people who think they know what’s best, are ideologically wedded to the collectivist approach to everything and they react very badly and with no sense of self doubt when there are set backs or push back.
They just plough on on the assumption that those who oppose them are stupid, evil, dangerous and need to be overcome.
Of course.
It’s the plan.
“Keir Starmer has shocked observers across the political divide after he said he has no regrets about the decisions he has made in the past six months and would do nothing differently.”
He had no choice but to make this statement because to say anything contrary would put him in deep doo doo with his WEF handlers and Kneel is nothing but a spineless order taker.
Yes but count your lucky stars he’s not a woman, or you’d really be up sh*t creek.🙎♀️
Or a Black Lesbian in a wheelchair
😀😀😀
The woman has been put int control of the purse!
The national credit card – always bad news.
Of course TTK would do it all again – he’s serving his globalist masters, not the British people or the British state. And there’s nothing odd about his friend buying knickers for his wife; nothing queer at all. And if OAPs freeze to death, or the WASPIs are treated unfairly, then that’s okay as they’re mainly white people.
That is the technocratic attitude.
What they do is right. Any pain or strife arising is necessary for the greater good. And if it hasn’t worked, it hasn’t been done enough and more of rhe same is needed. Or was correct based on the information at the time and nobody could have known otherwise.
It’s an unassailable position that means that the technocrat is never wrong.
Danny Finkelstein told us all some years ago that Starmer was a Constitutional Marxist and so it has proved. He must deconstruct the Industrial base of Britain and tax the Middle Classes out of existence . The next step will be to increase the Police Force to ensure that we shall be cowed !
I wonder what members of the population will be “recruited” to increase police numbers. Surely not the Calais Yacht Club members?
and it is all downhill from here….by the way he obviously got nothing from his meetings in the US……President Trump doesn’t do deals with losers.
This Government will not last till 2029. They must be removed.
Your average native Briton is very good at complaining, but revolution isn’t really in our DNA. If there were to be a revolution, I would think it more likely to come from the immigrant community, to impose some form of Islamic rule.
No that’s not true. When pushed we can be bloody minded to the other degree.
As sstarmer will find out.
And for exactly that reason, pal, it ain’t gonna happen.
Luckily where I live there may not be a right to bear arms but at least I can own them .
I honestly don’t understand why anybody still lives in the failed UK.
I was going to describe him as an “ostrich”, but that would imply that he cared about what is happening. The truth is, he doesn’t care about how unhappy the populace are. His aim was to get elected, and that’s what he’s done.
He doesn’t care that he told lies to get to where he is. He doesn’t care that people are feeling poorer, not wealthier. He doesn’t care that unemployment will rise and the economy is flatlining. He doesn’t care that all this extra tax is going, not to the people of this country, but to foreign nations or their citizens who have entered this country illegally. He doesn’t care that pensioners are shivering. He doesn’t care that our family farms will be ruined. He doesn’t care that we could well face energy rationing in the near future.
He’s set out to bring the country to its knees, and that’s what his government is doing. The sad thing is that we knew it would happen, but not enough people voted to stop it at the last election.
Hear, hear.
Let’s not forget, he was a barrister (and the most successful DPP the country has ever had) and, as such has no skin in the outcome of any game. As long as he delivers a good speech and looks nice in court, the outcome matters not a jot, he will still be handsomely paid. Project forward and he is now the greatest PM we have ever had, because his majority shows the massive support he enjoys in the country and as long as he keeps making nice speeches, he thinks he is doing a good job. Trouble is, as a member of the legal profession, he became accustomed to arguing on on
Bugger, got to move the comment button, so as I was saying before being so rudely interrupted, he became accustomed to arguing on one side on the Monday and the other side on the Tuesday, so the fact that what he says today makes a lie of what he said yesterday is just standard procedure for a member of the legal profession and nothing to worry about.
What massive support? Never Here Two Tier Kier has the lowest support of the electorate in history with less than 20% once the anti-Tory vote is removed.
Man’s a sociopath.
Dead eyes
Bristles when challenged
Outraged when laughed at (viz. TV audience bursting into laughter at his “Son of a toolmaker” crap
Pathological liar.
I am yet to find ANYONE who admits to voting Labour. Good job – they’d get a mouthful.
At 73 I have never been angrier at the government, and worse, have never been frightened at what the govt might do. Were I 21 and not 73 with Grandkids, I’d have gone before they were elected. Hungary probably. A month in Budapest in 2022 convinced me
Is there a psychiatrist in the house?
Tte man’s barking mad.
It’s important to keep in mind that this is the real Mr COVID, the guy whose unfaltering support for each and every Corona measure enabled all of them to be delivered to be people asking for them. And he’d done much more in this respect hadn’t he forced to cooperate with a nominally Tory prime minister.
He delivered vaccine passports, school closures, permamasking and -swabbing of children, furloughing of the inessential, restrictions on what people were allowed to buy, wholesale abolishment of social life in favor of whole population house arrests and always accepted the collateral damage with a smile, telling people how hard it was for him to be so hard towards others. But it had to be done and he was the tough guy who could.
So, here we Keir again: Starmer, without fear of favor, love, hate or compassion or – for that matter – any emotional involvement at all, delivering. Fiat iustitia et pereat mundus.
Absolutely, had he been in power, it would all have been so much worse. Let’s also not forget, he excoriated any member of the Government who might have been in the slightest breech of the rules, while at the same time running a preplanned curry night for which people had advanced notifications but for which he was not investigated, because it was in an area with a Labour police commissioner and an activist chief constable. He also waved off any criticism of the current Minister of State for Care, who also broke lockdown rules by travelling to deliver food parcels to his parents.
Well, yeah. But what I was trying to get at was that this guy has proven that he has just as much empathy for the objects of his policy choices as one Dr Mengele had for the objects of his experiments and that his decision making is unbeschmirched by either common sense or a conscience. To Starmer, everyone but Starmer is just a pawn which might – regrettably – need to be sacrificed for the benefit of the whole.
Either he is a liar or an idiot.
Probably both, but even more liar than feckin’ imbecile.
These are the words of a programmed automaton and he really is that. Look at everything about him and you will see that everything matches with the behaviour of a programmed automaton. That is what they are looking for and he is the apotheosis. Conformity to the agenda to the point where you don’t even seem human anymore.
Proof that he and his student union government are on a different planet.
Those sorts of people appear to lack the capacity to regret.
Of course he wouldnt change anything, he’s just following “orders”, and no doubt getting richer by the day.
Why would he? He’s doing what he’s been instructed to do ….. it’s deliberate and he knows that in our pretendy-democracy there’s nothing we can do about it.
And the Official Opposition doesn’t want to anyway, since it’s signed up to the same Agenda ….. UN 2030.
He probably won’t survive as Leader until the next General Election but his future is secure and someone else, probably Streeting, will takeover and continue the process of dismantling the UK.
I wish it were hubris , sadly it’s lack of insight
Puppets do as they are told. As you can see. Everyone happy? No, I did not think so.