British Politics

We've reduced our CO2 output in the last 50 years because we don't manufacture much any more. As you point out, most of that production has been moved abroad, and it's hypocritical of the West to blame China alone for this.

Meanwhile this might make you laugh, knowing what a fan of Jenkins you are.

Simon Jenkins, the man that thought Britain should spend zero on defence. That take is ageing like fine wine right now.

Wait a sec, science is pretty clear about climate change impact in the UK, and even the disastrous, exceptionally improbable scenario is... not that big of a deal, in all papers, for UK.

And the median scenario isn't even necessarily negative for aggregate gdp in 2100 lol, again, in peer reviewed literature. We know that already, why are people implying it's possible climate change will be disastrous on aggregate for the UK? we know as a "scientific certainty" (as much as a certainty we can have on such topics) that won't be the case at all.

It's not even about communism or anything.. it's just that people who claim they read science actually don't (or lie at every step in insane ways) when they claim climate change is very dangerous for cold countries. It isn't , there is a big probability on aggregate the effects are actually positive, and even in the bad scenarios modeled it's exceptionally easy to solve the problems, and it costs a very small fraction of what going to net zero does.

So it's about one side lying in grotesque ways, and being "more wrong" than negationists, for what i think at this point i can only call religious reasons. Evidence is completly obvious to anyone, that where it is a lot colder than the optimal temperature for human beings, warming is clearing beneficial, even if it could be accompanied by a purported increase in frequency of extreme events (which is still to be proven btw, for europe).

The amount of CO2 emissions which have been "china-washed" by offshoring is fairly small.

I think it's mainly because we stopped burning coal.

Supposedly, as I may have mentioned, City brokers used to apply the Jenkins Rule -- 'Whatever Simon Jenkins says is going to happen, bet on the opposite' -- and never lost by doing so. I doubt it still goes on, as he has just become 'Old Man Shouting At Cloud.'

Then it's gonna be really fun seeing how we deal with everyone wanting to come here.

Your wider point is accepted though. Canada and Russia are big, and will be much more hospitable. Maybe all the displaced people can live in Greenland, idk.

Restricting your long-term prognosis to temperature changes in the UK is silly when a) the UK is highly dependent on food imports from regions projected to become blast furnaces and re-engineering other economies for agriculture isn't as simple as you probably think it is, and b) many millions of people around the world will have their lives affected and will naturally seek to emigrate, so what you now see as a "solve the boats" problem is nothing compared to the future.

Our current climate debate mostly involves two extreme sides, with both those sides seemingly uninterested in the actual evidence/scientific consensus. I find it disheartening and I think it reflects badly on our politics as a whole. People end up with a distorted view of reality as presented by their political ‘team’ and don’t really bother to question it at all.

That may be true of some areas of politics but isn't of climate change (unless you're still living in the 1980s).

The forecasts given by scientists which were lambasted by deniers for being a proto Project Fear have turned out to be remarkably and (given the complexity of climate science) surprisingly accurate, and they spell disaster for some regions of the planet.

I looked at some numbers from this paper: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/a...

17% of people in UK believe it is false that climate change is mostly caused by human activity.

26% of people in UK either strongly agree or tend to agree with the statement that it’s too late to do anything about climate change.

It does seem that most people have relatively sensible views to be fair, but there’s a substantial minority with extreme (and straightforwardly incorrect) views in both directions.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/06/t...
This article explains why over the top predictions of climate disaster are a problem. Apparently people that were previously climate deniers are switching to claims that it’s too late to do anything anyway.

In the UK we'd need to build a lot of new nuclear plants, given the lack of wind, wave and solar power available in our geographical position, and we show little sign of doing that.

are we no good on wind? there's a big offshore wind farm near where i grew up on merseyside and those things never ****ing stops turning, but i dont know how that compares to the rest of the world or other methods of generation

UK is actually actively good on wind power. I live near to an offshore wind farm (Redcar/Teesside)

British wind energy generation is among the highest in the world if not the highest, as a % of all electricity.

Nuclear can of course help but claiming wind isn't widely available as an electricity source is objectively false for the Uk

That seems very low for Solar. Our system generated 6.5gwh last year, and we sold 4gwh of it.

Should be mandated that any new homes built in the UK have solar as standard.

Well that is clearly where we differ. If that were me then I would be looking for a political party that reflected my views rather than constantly hoping and criticising one which apparently almost never does somehow becomes that party. Personally I'm happy with Labour being a centre left party.

Labour centre left? lol?

I suppose if someone was born in the 80's they might think that privatisation of all public utilities was the only option and therefore a party supporting it could still be on the left if it had progressive social policies... at a pinch.

NW Europe isn't a great place to have solar, for fairly obvious reasons.

Obviously, but it's still cheap, easy to install on houses and more than takes care of our electricity needs for 6 months in the year.

this conversation has confirmed my long held suspicion that we should turn everything north of aberdeen into a wind farm named oor wullie's wind farm. hopefully this is one of starmer's secret policies

"disaster" has to be defined, when you go checking numbers we are talking 15-20% less gdp than in counterfactual in the worst hit areas in the worst case scenarios.

Which looks like a lot until you remember that the counterfactual for all areas in the world is a much higher per capita gdp than today, because of baseline economic growth.

Which means no area in 2100 is expected to have worse life conditions than today because of climate change , like worst in the worst case scenario is still exceptionally better off compare to today.

Is that message conveyed properly to the public? that we aren't discussing something that will make us , or someone else, horribly worse off, rather something that will just make our grandchildren still exceptionally more prosperous than us, just a little less so than they would otherwise ?

I can only call a disaster something that makes things a lot worse than *today*, not a trajectory that still makes future human beings live a lot better than today, but less than they could otherwise.

Then we discuss costs today to avoid the trajectory which is -X% of gdp in 2100. For the UK 2100 isn't even necessarily expected to be worse than today in median climate change scenarios lol.

Why would you ask the public to renounce a great portion of current consumption every year for decades, to try to avoid a scenario which doesn't damage them?

The only way to do so is by lying constantly, claiming, against science, that life in the UK will be far worse if the UK gets 1-2 celsius warmer than today, and that's objectively false.

Try to tell voters the truth:

// we are asking for constantly, yearly, very significant sacrifices, for you and your family and your friends to live worse than you could for decades, so that people in bangladesh in 2100 will be 4x better than today instead of 3x better.

Oh and, even if you do sacrifice immensely, that still won't matter in the slightest for Bangladesh unless China, India, Messico, Indonesia and other places do the same as us. //

That is the objective scientific truth, why aren't we telling people the truth?

Solar electricity production has been fairly stable in the last 5-6 years, while wind generation has increased massively

When, in your opinion, was Labour last centre left or further to the left? When was the last left wing Labour government.

We can exlcude the Corbyn anomaly as a record defeat showed how well that worked out.

Fyp 😀