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part 2 of the above posted naked capitalism “series”:
Embracing Climate Change to Hurt China
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/04/the-u-s-burn-it-all-down-strategy.htmlone link pulled from that text:
Liquefied natural gas carbon footprint is worse than coal
By Blaine Friedlander, Cornell Chronicle October 3, 2024Never gave a thought to chocolate before, until I read this article just now (from October last year):
The Bitter Truth Behind Chocolate’s Rising Prices
https://countertalk.co.uk/the-bitter-truth-behind-chocolates-rising-prices/Being a chocolate “person” I was reading the FT a year ago predicting higher prices. (Same for coffee this year.)
Of course if one gets real chocolate from real people it has nothing to do with any consumer product or so-called high-end brands from Turin or French “labels”.
Unless you know the people whose plants provide for the chocolate you are in the dark as info on exploitation goes.
The price hike now is totally a profitmaking scheme by commodity trade markets.In Germany the usual consumer products have doubled in price. So-called fair products less but still major increases.
We are soon back in the era when silk, chocolate or vanilla were luxury items.I never thought I would note with approval any activity by Tony Blair, but I do so now. It is only at the base level of support for the “enemy of my enemy”, but I welcome his recent comments.
I am not surprised that he is being presented as ‘walking back’ in one way or another, his criticisms of NetZero. But the truth is he has put the knife in the ecopath lobby.I suspect the timing is not accidental, I also suspect he had another agenda in his back pocket. I’m also sure that he has been pushing more than mere caution on NetZero for some time, been stymied, but has now got attention off the powers that be in the Labour Party hierarchy. Miliband needs to check his pension plan is neat and tidy.
Following on from the Supreme Court decision defining what sex is, this action brings down another ‘woke’ item in the UK. The climate ecopaths need to rewrite their wills and make sure their funeral shrouds are put in the dry cleaners, this is a serious blow to their nonsense…_
Have studied the document from the Tony Blair Institute For Global Change. The first chapter is where all Tony Blair’s current headlines emanate from. He calls it a “foreword” However, it has all the hallmarks that it might be the last word on the NetZero malarkey.
All he is doing is attempting to replace the more deranged supporters of climate crisis, with less deranged activists.
All the old shibboleths are there, it’s just that this time the article has been run past a Marks and Spencer AI bot.
The way this PR exercise has been handled has blown up in his face, the old memes don’t appear to work anymore. It’s been perceived as an attack on NetZero, not a reboot…_Read for yourselves…_
https://institute.global/insights/climate-and-energy/the-climate-paradox-why-we-need-to-reset-action-on-climate-changeDigger, thanks for the link. I got a little bored about half way through reading it but I’ll finish it another day. I’m not sure what I think of it yet but I did note references to as yet undeveloped tech such as carbon capture/storage, nuclear fusion (as opposed to fission) and AI grid management.
I’m enjoying the weather in London today with a few pints. May 1st, the weather “woke” up. 😎
ps. Couldn’t resist…
@ET Yes, it is a bit monotonous, the writing style was also too sincere and sophisticated. I’m convinced they’ve taken some of Milibands old memes, thrown them in an AI bot and pushed the print button. Stick it through.
Anyway, that’s not what I came here to post. I couldn’t remember where it was, or what it was called but here it is.
It is a very prescient article on what I believe we will find out happened with the recent blackouts on the Iberian peninsula.
It was published on Net Zero Watch in July last year. I can’t understand why it isn’t more widely quoted at the moment…_It seems plausible that the ecopaths have breached the safe limits of stupidity.
In Greek mythology, the story of Icarus is a tale of hubris, the catastrophic consequences of defying one’s limits, whilst at the same time wanting to defy gravity. Just as Icarus soared too close to the sun, individuals grappling with their own creed of faith known as the climate crisis, might have just come crashing down to earth.
It could have been a badly executed exercise by Spanish scientists to stress test a renewables only grid, that crashed the system. As plausible as that assertion is to me, let’s wait for the jury to return it’s verdict…_
Drama, eh?
I assert that the majority of the UK population turns their house heating off around about April/May because of the sun. What exactly is your problem with sun energy collection Digger since we all kinda do it seasonally?I have no issue with you deriding government policy on net zero and I’d suggest no one else here has. What is your antipathy to solar energy given that you switch off your heating during the summer months?
I would have dismissed that dailysceptic piece as riding on an increasingly desperate Torygraph article – pure conjecture, fact and reference-free, with a lot of ‘if’s, ‘might’s and ‘maybe’s, and never missing a chance to put the boot in to socialists for good measure.
But then Digger really captured me with the story about Icarus! Cor… stirring stuff indeed. Did you come up with that all by yourself, Digger? Stunning… original… just wow.
Incidentally, I see you’re only looking at the best and most reliable sources, as usual!
dailysceptic: Overall, we rate the Daily Sceptic a far-right biased quackery level pseudoscience website that frequently publishes false and misleading information regarding covid-19 and science in general.
Garbage in, garbage out Digger. And the garbage you take in is 100% grade BS.
What is your antipathy to solar energy My antipathy is based on the simple truth that solar is unreliable, intermittent and an inefficient means of producing electricity.
Modern society needs reliable power supplied on demand. Arguments that propose a rationing system of sorts and a major change in how we live, will find mass resistance from the populous, not overwhelming acceptance…_“Modern society needs reliable power supplied on demand“
Modernity is not only unsustainable, but undesirable if you would like to see a living world in a few decades time. I would suggest Tom Murphy’s excellent series on that very subject, but I fear it may exceed your attention span by a stretch. You may however, care to read this editorial – not so much for the content but the comments regarding the dissonance and stupidity that prevails. Obviously.
For example..
“ I feel the disinformation industry is the problem.
People do not get their information from science but lies and non facts.
As several have pointed out councils with reform majorities are best termed blind and dismissive.
Every country has these science haters.
I live down under and mate the loonies are here in big numbers.
The hatred of wind and solar farms has to be seen to believed.
Sea level rise in Australia is going to damage huge areas just look at the Darling river the ocean will go many many kilometres inland.
This country is very flat with a mountain range down the east coast.
Where I live the house is 25 meters above sea level.
It was a consideration when buying.
I crossed off large areas of the town because in a flood it is cut off for a week or so.
With only a few meters of ocean rise the whole central area will be effected”Is it so simple a truth? Unreliable? It’s difficult to say there will be this many hours of sunshine tomorrow. However, the average hours of sunshine over a longer period, say a year, is predictable and reliably predictable. Especially so in areas nearer the equator.
Yes, it’s intermittent on a day to day basis but over a longer period you can rely on a certain amount of sunshine hours.
What are your criteria for efficiency? An ICE car is at very best 40-50% efficient. Can you explain how you come to that conclusion in numbers and percentages without mentioning intermittency and unreliability.
Digger, I get that it’s impossible for now for renewables to meet the varying grid demand. However, battery and other forms of power storage could meet those criteria. Coal, gas and nuclear power plants are not instant either. Batteries would be as instant as is possible in terms of answering demand fluctuations. They don’t have to be lithium based tech.
If the UK were self sufficient in renewable energy, oil and gas wouldn’t be needed. Relying on other countries for supply and the associated geopolitics would disappear. That is why China is investing so heavily in renewable energy.
“What about batteries? Can’t the grid just store the energy generated from renewable sources for when the wind doesn’t blow? Unfortunately, the numbers don’t add up. NESO wants ‘a major scale-up’ in battery use, from about five gigawatts (GW) in 2023 to between 23 and 27GW in 2030. But this growth is measured in capacity, not electricity delivered. Right now, Britain generates an annual 8GW hours of electricity by battery, with a further 20GWh being built. Given that in 2023 total electricity production in the UK was more than 285,000GWh, this barely scratches the surface. So rationing it is, if we continue to go green”
James Woudhuysen critiques A Financial Times article in Spiked. The fallacy of battery storage being a solution is the real problem. Defying gravity is also how I describe it…_
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/27/are-you-ready-for-net-zero-rationing/“Right now, Britain generates an annual 8GW hours of electricity by battery…
No, it doesn’t. Batteries don’t generate power, they store generated power for later usage.“But this growth is measured in capacity, not electricity delivered.”
WTF does that sentence even mean?
Is this guy deliberately trying to conflate two different things.
We don’t need battery storage capacity to be anywhere near total annual usage. We only need enough to store energy to respond to demand variables. Batteries get charged and discharged, that’s the whole f***ING point of a battery. So why mention a figure for annual usage at all? Is he trying to confuse with moar bigger moar betterer convincing? numbers. Yes, he is.
(The childish language is deliberate).If you take that shit piece of reporting seriously Digger, I have a coal plant to sell you
Batteries storing 8GW hours can deliver 1GW for 8 hours before being depleted, or 8GW for 1 hour before needing to be recharged. It doesn’t constantly produce 8GW per hour.
When put alongside the current demand for 285,000 GW hours per year, the 8 GW hours in battery storage won’t last long.To illustrate, current demand is over 30GW per hour nationally. https://gridwatch.co.uk/
That means current maximum battery time would be about 15 minutes of supply needed from fully charged batteries. The simple truth is that battery storage isn’t anywhere near sufficient to provide backup supplies, should we experience the calamity we witnessed in Spain. The argument that storage is the answer to intermittent renewables is a fallacy.
The total GWH from pumped hydro storage comes in at 32GWH. But like battery storage of 8GWH when it’s gone, it’s gone. That would fulfil the nations needs, on current demand, for one hour, meaning that pumped hydro and battery storage would keep us running for 1 hour 15 minutes.
Just as with battery storage there are ‘lots of projects in development’ but nothing really happening.
https://british-hydro.org/pumped-storage-hydropower/#:~:text=Key%20Statistics&text=There%20is%20a%20considerable%20pipeline,giving%20135%20GWh%20of%20storage.Why do you and others have to be so constantly rude. It’s totally unnecessary…_
Why are you comparing to an annual power usage. Battery storage would be used to help balance the grid and respond to varying minute to minute demands. They would be charged and discharged daily. It makes no sense mentioning the annual demand in that context.
From gridwatch, currently 60% of demand is being supplied by wind, solar and nuclear.
Also, the UK pays some wind farms to shut down when they are producing too much power because the grid can’t handle the power transmission. That excess could be used to charge storage.“Why are you comparing to annual power usage”
To demonstrate how minuscule the amount of existing storage is, it’s ridiculously low, totally inadequate to cover serious shortfalls, even in the here and now.
That’s why I pointed out that based on current demand, the total amount of electricity that could be used from storage in batteries and pumped hydro would provide power for about an hour and a quarter, that’s now, not over a year.“That excess could be used to charge storage”
As true as that is, there is woefully inadequate storage available to store that excess . So it won’t be be of much use in an emergency, because it just won’t be available.
If there aren’t enough lifeboats in the plan, the safety plan won’t work as planned.After a quarter of a century of claims that renewables can have their shortfalls neutralised, we are still waiting for proof that storage, at capacities needed, will be made available any time soon. Certainly not by 2030, possibly not by 2050 at the rate of progress to date…_
D: “Why do you and others have to be so constantly rude. It’s totally unnecessary…_”
Why do you have to be so insufferably patronising?
There is nothing except speculation that renewables had caused the power outage in Spain and Portugal. But that didn’t stop stooges and useful idiots for the fossil-fuel industry immediately start screeching that that was obviously the problem.
As it happens, I was in Spain at the time. Nothing particularly odd about that day, no changes in the weather compared to recent weeks. Portugal – where I had been previously – gets most of its electricity from renewables. They increasingly spend entire months 100% on renewables.
The idea this has made the whole country unstable, and we should all stay away from renewables is laughable. Or it would be, were it not for the coal/gas/oil industry, and their well paid friends, doing such a good job selling this lie to suckers who are so eager to believe it.
glen nothing in your comment attempts to defend the argument that any serious effort has been put in to building storage at scale. I am right that the efforts to date are insignificant.
“Insufferably patronising” is just being used as a refusal to acknowledge arguments that are being accepted more widely. Especially as electricity supplies are getting more expensive after a quarter of a century, not cheaper.
As to Portugals electricity production, it seems you paint a very rosey picture. Even Wikipedia shows that fossil fuels and biomass are major sources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_PortugalThe reasons for the blackouts is unknown for now, somebody will reveal all sooner or later. But the sources confirming that they were indeed experimenting how the grid would react to higher levels of renewable supply are finding a lot of confirmation. Doesn’t prove that caused the meltdown, just highly suspicious for now.
But to paraphrase the admiral, there was something wrong with their bloody power plants that day…_
– “The reasons for the blackouts is unknown for now, somebody will reveal all sooner or later.”
In 2021 electricity companies operating in Spain and Portugal were advised by the European industry regulator to cooperate in making some quite specific changes to their practices, particularly increasing the threshold at which cutouts cut out, to prevent the sort of cascade overloading that recently occurred. Guess what? They ignored the regulator and the predicted cascade failure occurred.
Digger, I don’t think energy storage, whether battery, pumped hydro or other is being considered to provide backup power for days or weeks. My understanding is that it would be used to smooth out variation in supply, keep the grid frequency in sync etc. I don’t think there is any suggestion that it could provide the entire country for any significant length of time.
I am trying to find data on daily renewable generation for say the last 5 years to see what the lowest was, how long not windy and not sunny days lasted etc.
Anyone know where to find it?“In 2021 electricity companies operating in Spain and Portugal were advised by the European industry regulator to cooperate in making some quite specific changes to their practices, particularly increasing the threshold at which cutouts cut out, to prevent the sort of cascade overloading that recently occurred”
This would be a very interesting link to study. Sometimes calamities like this are never down to one specific, usually there are different pieces to the jigsaw. Can you oblige Clark…_
“I don’t think energy storage, whether battery, pumped hydro or other is being considered to provide backup power for days or weeks”
I doubt if such lengthy backup is ever going to be considered either. But as my evidence shows there is only sufficient storage for an hour and a quarter, which would include all the reserves from pumped hydro.
That is not a back up of sufficient resilience to overcome the problems of intermittent renewables. Think middle of the night in the middle of winter, solar would also be absent.
Even if the batteries were fully charged you’d still only get an hour and a quarter.The arguments that battery storage will do the job are beyond wishful thinking. Keep in mind that demand for electricity has not reached peak demand yet.
Nuclear is too clunky to be fine tuned, but excellent for base load. Hydro is as near constant as needs be, but only available in small amounts. Instant access can only really be provided by carbon based fuels.
Renewables are just high maintenance drama queens, guaranteed to cause problems.Something catastrophic tripped the fuses in Iberia, it’s time we had the truth about what happened…_
