UK Politics Thread (Part 1)

So trim that group. Less of them helps a lot, yes? QED less people consume less.

If you wiped the first and second worlds off the face of the earth, how long till the current third world is back in this position? Long term.

With male fertility dropping rapidly in developed nations it seems that mother nature is trying to take care of this for us.

Covid is helping to solve our pensions crisis, shit sperm will help solve our climate crisisā€¦

I said ten years, cos thatā€™s roughly what the science is saying the timescale is to make deep cuts. There is no long term when it comes to climate change. If your solution is a gradual scale down of reproduction over the next 30-50 years that really is no solution at all.

Any humane and ethical (and therefore effective) way to reduce population is going to take a long time.

Thatā€™s before we even look at whether it actually solves the problem of emissions, which it probably doesnā€™t.

We need clean electricity now. Itā€™s either expensive, very expensive or ridiculously expensive. People are not going to consume less, the rate of consumption only ever goes up. Taking the country increasingly to electrical dependence means we need gigawatts of power coming online and quickly. Weā€™re either covering the countryside in turbines (sea ones are beyond ridiculously expensive) or building nuclear reactors left right and centre. Coal has to be replaced by high level generation alternatives.

Sadly, ultimately, all the goals will be missed and temps will rise. Invest in high altitude property.

How? Itā€™s just theoretical spam because evn Covid has proven that itā€™s the low end that gets hit the hardest first.

With regard to your last question, not long believe me.

This is exactly what weā€™ve been telling you and hence my belief that it needs a techno breakthrough. Sudden cuts in either population or consumption are either not feasible or just crazy.

I think a trick was missed with Covid. Home working, to some level would cut commuting by some margin. The solution lies in some real radical thinking and big changes

Pay people not to have children :slight_smile: Cheaper in the long run. Wow, thatā€™s actually a very clever idea.

I suspect @cynicaloldgit and his comet would be far more effective.

Birth rates are already falling yet energy consumption is still increasing. Your solution isnā€™t working.

If we manage to have a 10% drop in population, then I think what happens is everyone ends up consuming 10% more.

Because our economy is fundamentally built on consumption. Buying shit you donā€™t need. Expecting stuff our ancestors wouldnā€™t have dreamed of as a human right.

Also, our birth rate is already at the point where we do t have enough people of working age to keep the economy afloat.

So we need more people to consume less.

What colour do you want that bridge? If you donā€™t know the joke Iā€™ll type it out in the jokes thread and tag you.

I always feel a little jealous of those living in the tropics and subtropics. No need for heating of any kind in the winter, and they have a ready supply of free power (solar) when there is actually a need for energy use for cooling in the summer.
If you ever do need power from the grid itā€™s ridiculously cheap compared to UK. At least it was when I was in Australia 18 months ago.

The birth rate is already falling. There was once an assumption that weā€™d hit 10bn global by 2050. Weā€™re now very unlikely to ever reach that. More people isnā€™t on the table.

Letā€™s say we can afford pump x billion tonnes of CO2 into the environment every year. It is irrelevant whether thatā€™s pumped out by 1 billion people or 10 billion.

The bottom line is we need to live within global limits. And we need to have made serious headway into getting there within the next ten years. The only way population reduction can ever be part of that equation is if you start exterminating people. Even your policy of paying people not to have children doesnā€™t work for the problem your trying to solve with it.

The paradox here is that as birth rates fall around the world, itā€™s largely due to pressure to adopt western, urban high carbon lifestyles.

The sad thing is that itā€™s not long since the Tory government ideologically chose to kneecap our domestic solar industry by killing the feed in tariff, just when it was starting to gather momentum. Their statement at the time said something along the lines of domestic solar could be pursued by affluent environmentalist.

Iā€™m fairly certain lobbying from the fossil fuel industry was behind that insanity.

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Yeah, Iā€™m a bit fed up of simple things like this being pushed onto individuals where itā€™s just never going to happen.
Governments need to lead and actively fund this IMO. Who here would be happy to pay something like Ā£8k Before fitting) for a basic solar system on their roof? I would, but I donā€™t have that level of spare cash to inject. I wish I did. From a house budget perspective itā€™s a long way down the list as well. It shouldnā€™t be but it is.

Weā€™ve been a little fortunate here in Wales where we were able to get a new boiler via a WG energy efficiency scheme. That was great because we certainly needed one but many in my local area got solar panels. Great for them. We didnā€™t as the grant only targeted improving the energy efficiency of a house by a certain amount. Iā€™m grateful but also a bit gutted to be honest as we have a good amount of roof space that could have been used for solar. But they obviously had to draw lines somewhere with regard to funding for each property rather than looking at the opportunity that was available at each property.

To my knowledge no such scheme exists in England.

Theyā€™ve also pulled the plug on small hydro schemes as well I believe. Another potential loss but more complex on a environmental perspective.

You know the guy who made millions selling solar in the UK now owns and runs the company thatā€™s suing installers for ā€œoptimisticā€ generation claims?

Go to California, sunny almost all year round. Youā€™ll see wind turbines not solar farms.

Enough solar energy hits the planet every day to provide all the earthā€™s energy use. Wait for itā€¦ā€¦. Ever. Trouble is that we have dreadful current conversion methods. Pun intended.

That is an easy problem to fix though.

Offer energy firms that put genuine and serious R&D into making Solar a viable energy source 10 years of tax breaks.

You would see it being a real solution within 4-5 years, and then the companies that have lead the way will get 5-6 years of using Solar when it is a real option but with massive tax breaks as their reward.

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Canā€™t disagree, sensible :slight_smile:

There are complications of course, most refrigerants currently used in air-conditioning damage the environment in one way or another, with many of them having thousands of times the impact that CO2 has on global warming.

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The two cheapest forms of generating electricity today are photovoltaics and wind. See the graph by noted crunchy green socialist think tank Lazard.

So, some of your premises are questionable.

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Sorry, that is just complete nonsense. PV deployment in California is so extensive that it has generated a unique problem all its own, the ā€˜duck curveā€™, where total PV output is so great in the afternoon that it drives the marginal price for power to zero.

In 2020, PV provided 15.53% of California electricity generation, wind provided 7.18% of in-state generation. Once again, you stumble into the fallacy of turning your impressions into fact. The wind turbines in California are far more visible because they are towers, often along coastal highways. But PV is more extensive and growing faster. California actually imports more wind energy than it produces.

https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/2020-total-system-electric-generation

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I can only go off being there every summer for 20 years and seeing almost zero solar panels. I see more in rainy England on my drive to work than I ever have in CA.