UK Politics Omnishambles: Page 167 - The Arsenal discussion forum and community: One more in the Tolly

UK Politics Omnishambles

Coombs

Mirth except that isn't factually true. The contemporary excess is absolutely originating in China in raw terms. Historically, the US has been worse. The per capita argument does nothing to help the climate - it's a political metric for apportioning blame, but it doesn't help the earth.

JazzG

Mirth ou're citing historic consumption, not installed capacity. Why?

Installed capacity and consumption are two very different metrics. Consumption is what they actually use and installed capacity is a hypothetical number. Then you need to factor in what they actually produce. Renewables are an intermittent source of energy. A 1GW array of Solar panels could produce that much if the sun was shining 24/7 but we all know that doesn't happen, but a 1GW coal, gas or nuclear plant can produce that energy 24/7.

When the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing you need to keep the lights on which is why that baseload is important but if you have spikes then you need either battery capacity or something like gas to meet those needs. This is why in this country they go on about wind and solar but never mention that gas needs to be built along with that to handle any fluctuations.

Now if you want to get really technical Solar/Wind produce little to no inertia, which is what Spain found out the hard way recently when they had a blackout.

China are doing expanding their power capacity like a proper country should. They are increasing every type of energy generation, for them having the energy is more important than how they get it. They have a growing middle class population and a massively growing industrial sector. They don't give a shit how they get their energy and are not going to impose self defeating rules to handicap themselves. They are the worlds 2nd super power and they ambitions of being No 1 and are behaving in that manner.

Coombs No the climate goes around and works out per capita how much you carbon you dump out and fucks the weather up there the most. This is why the UK has shit weather! 😉

Mirth

Coombs You're conflating two separate points. Yes, absolute emissions need to fall everywhere - nobody's disputing that. But per capita isn't a political dodge, it's standard practice when comparing entities of vastly different scale. Comparing China and the US in raw totals is like comparing GDP without adjusting for population and a better way of demonstrating which group is living a life of excess.

And when you look at the numbers, China and India have industrialised far more efficiently than the West did at the same stage and are rapidly building clean energy capacity. On top of that, a chunk of those 'developing country emissions' are manufacturing goods consumed in Europe and North America. We've exported our carbon footprint and are now pointing at the bill.

And ultimately - the CO2 in the atmosphere doesn't care when it was emitted. Everything that has been released over the past 200 years to afford us the standard of living that we have today is still up there, accumulating. The fully industrialised nations of the world spent 200 years burning through fossil fuels to build its wealth, and that cumulative stock is what set the baseline warming trajectory we're all now trying to reverse. The newly developing economies are adding to a problem it didn't start, didn't design, and are arriving late to. Asking a country still lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty to cap energy use that we never capped for ourselves requires a negotiating framework that feels legitimate to them. Dismiss per capita as politics and you don't make the problem go away - you just make the cooperation needed to solve it harder to achieve. FWIW the Paris Agreement factored this dynamic in.

awooga83

JazzG Starmer releasing this late so he can dodge questions! I do kind of get why he bought Mandelson in, as big of a crook he is Mandelson is a very smart political operator. But you can't spend your time in opposition going on about ethics and standards and then bring him in knowing this could blow up. They probably through the Epstein files would never come out and so they'd get away with it.

The other part you missed what better person to engage with the crook trump they were hanging around in the same circles.

Currently there. It's nothing released to say they knew what was in the US files and the information here was already known by the media, opposition issues and public. We'll have to wait to see if anything more substantial actually emerges.

Thanks to the disastrous display by badenoch and Farage showing himself a total sellout and traitor to trump he's actually managed to have a neutral week in the round.

JazzG

awooga83 Currently there. It's nothing released to say they knew what was in the US files and the information here was already known by the media, opposition issues and public. We'll have to wait to see if anything more substantial actually emerges.

Two issues which really expose Starmer is firstly this expedited procedure to get him in when Starmer told the house he was subject to standard vetting. Then classified briefing before the

The Americans are our allies but they will work in their interests first not ours. Something that people on the right don't seem to get. Is it really a good idea to have an ambassador who they have so much dirt on?

awooga83 Thanks to the disastrous display by badenoch and Farage showing himself a total sellout and traitor to trump he's actually managed to have a neutral week in the round.

Those two have had a mare, they could have taken Starmer to the cleaners but neither really focussed in on the issues and too worried about impressing the Americans and grandstanding.

Mirth

JazzG The intermittency point is fair but China's massive investment in battery storage is specifically addressing it. The 50% renewable capacity figure already accounts for the fact that you need to overbuild renewables precisely because of intermittency. More to the point, these are leading indicators on where each dollar of spend is going and better represents the direction of travel vs consumption which is a lagging indicator.

But more fundamentally, you've just made my point for me. China is expanding every type of energy because hundreds of millions of people industrialising - which is exactly why judging them on absolute emissions without any context is absurd. And despite that growth pressure, they've still chosen to build more renewable capacity than the rest of the world combined.

Qwiss

JazzG No the climate goes around and works out per capita how much you carbon you dump out and fucks the weather up there the most.

Does it go around and work it out per country? The argument that per capita doesn't matter is just fucking thick.

JazzG

Good to see the EU finally waking up about Nuclear, I'd also highly recommend clicking on this tweet and viewing the absolutely brutal community note. Ursula was one of the politicians who voted to close down Germany's nuclear power plants.

That process started with Chancellor Schröder. who after leaving as chancellor went on to become a board member of a company controlled by Gazprom. I mean I'm sure getting Germany more reliant on Russian gas/oil and off nuclear is just purely coincidence....

Coombs

Mirth And when you look at the numbers, China and India have industrialised far more efficiently than the West did at the same stage and are rapidly building clean energy capacity.

If they have more people living at a lower standard, industrializing with newer tech, I'm not sure that efficiency is laudable. Efficiency has its costs, too. Shouldn't people in China and India have a higher standard of living, and therefore, higher carbon emissions per capita?

That the effects of carbon emissions are inequitably distributed is not up for debate. Whether that means those inequities justify China emitting twice as much as the US and rising certainly is.

Burnwinter

JazzG Sounds like a great plan, now I just need to figure out who in the government would actually do this!

See, this really lays out the stakes of claims about "political reaction".

When I say Australia has implemented militarised turnbacks of asylum seekers on the way to becoming a national polity that is more racist and more paranoid, all while a succession of its governments have been implementing a delirious wealth transfer through bad tax policy, and stubbornly delaying a sane policy on housing …

… I am offering you a pretty fair-minded Australian history to serve as the result of a simplistic, but at least possible social-scientific enquiry that has already been underway, here, into a hypothesis we can share that would be "unlawful migration is a decisive social and economic problem for the de-industrialising nation-states of the core of the declining United States-led world order" or something like that.

Australia stopped the boats. None of the other political terms we would agree are at stake could be said to have improved as a consequence. Housing is no more affordable. Jobs are no more available or rewarding. The concentration of wealth has not abated. Social cohesion is not a solved problem. Racism is certainly not a solved problem.

The Australian results of the experiment are for the null hypothesis.

To me we disagree with each other on a regular basis, but only one of us seems to perceive our varying orientations to history are at fault. Your lot are still talking about how "communism has been failed wherever it has been tried" as if my lot is full of schematic Marxist-Leninists, while you sit gnashing your teeth in the crumbling edifice of the capitalist empire.

We, together, as in people like you and me despite our differences, do have a great opportunity to evolve our shared thinking.

For example, we could re-frame the claim "unlawful migration is a decisive social and economic problem" not solely in terms of the contents of bordered states—populations, workforces and domiciled businesses among others—but also in the terms of the bordering structure. People and investments crossing borders have effects, but not only the effects the national vantage point is useful to perceive.

JazzG

Coombs People just want to make excuses for them. Just a quick google shows they commissioned approx 110GW energy just from coal in the past two years, that is more than the UK make in total from all sources yet we need to go faster and harder according to our energy secretary.

Just for the record I don't really have an issue with what China are doing, they need to do what is best for their country and that is exactly what they do. They do it ruthlessly which is why they are expanding and growing at the rate they are. However I do have an issue with people in this country who go on about how we need to lead the way and others will follow which is a complete and utter load of bollocks.

Burnwinter Just to let you know I have had a quick read and will respond another time. Not ignoring you!

Coombs

Qwiss that a nation state strategically maintaining a higher population with lower living standards as an economic strategy should also get some sort of carbon benefit for doing so is not at all a given, for me

Mirth

Coombs

China and India haven't 'strategically maintained a lower standard of living'. China lifted 800 million people out of poverty and India another 400 million. Between them, nearly 1.2 billion people in a few decades.

I'm getting bored of repeating myself but the per capita framework isn't a reward for having lots of people, it's just the more accurate way to measure consumption and responsibility at the individual level because meaning is lost in aggregation. A Chinese worker earning $15k a year isn't responsible for the same share of the problem as someone in a rich country on $80k. Aggregating them into a national total and saying 'China/India/Indonesia emits too much' ignores that dynamic entirely. Maybe it's uncomfortable to hear that one group of people have imposed - and continue to impose - a greater burden on the climate than a similar size group of peers in the developing world but it's true.

Also, the people bearing the worst consequences of climate change are overwhelmingly those who did least to cause it. That's not a reason to let the developing world off the hook but it's a reason the burden of moving fastest should fall on those who created the baseline.

And this is exactly why my friends and family living in the developing world find these conversations so frustrating. The industrialised countries built its wealth without constraint (granted this knowledge wasn't widespread till the 70s), exported its dirty industries, then funded organised climate denial for decades. Exxon knew about climate change by the mid-80s and spent the next thirty years bankrolling think tanks to dispute it. You'd be hard pushed to find an equivalent of that in the developing world. And now we're reframing the accounting to avoid bearing the heaviest burden.

It's not a great look.

Burnwinter

Coombs that a nation state strategically maintaining a higher population with lower living standards as an economic strategy should also get some sort of carbon benefit for doing so is not at all a given, for me

The classic case of this for me is Copenhagen's target (now slipped by a year or two) to self-designate as the world's first nett zero capital city.

Not to flog the Danes, but Copenhagen was the nexus of Denmark's century or so contribution to the Atlantic slave trade and many of the headquarters still stand in areas like Christianshavn. Denmark's economic strength has been built on shipping and logistics. Through ventures like Maersk Denmark is to circulation what a nation like Australia or Saudi Arabia is to extraction. What can you say about that? Mainly that circulation has little to say about Scope 1 or Scope 3 emissions and so its contribution to carbon emissions can readily be distorted.

If nation-states can be divided into managers, producers and consumers—because it's not like that's any less valid than Scopes 1, 2 and 3—then the structure given to carbon accounting in terms of the "scopes" favours the managing nations over the mass-producing and mass-consuming nations.

This is what I mean above about the bordering structure and the national vantage point. These virtues of beautiful Copenhagen on carbon emissions are grounded in a very doubtful analytic transvaluation or commensuration of the fetish-values of the market.

By the way, this is not a way of saying "Denmark is bad". One can readily do this kind of investigation for any former colonial power of Europe or many of Europe's former colonies, and many of these in turn lead the world in claiming to reduce carbon emissions or to manifest other epiphenomena of the concentration of power such as "liberal democracy".

The point is not to say definitely that any nation is bad, but to notice that especially since Bretton Woods and "globalisation", a broken-by-accident, unrepaired-by-design internationalism that has been the medium and modus operandi of nationalism. This is what the "international community of nation-states" has referred to: dogma for moronic technocrats that throws a veil over the organising brutality of an inhuman imperial psychosis of which the content is blocs of predatory capital.

Until the world develops an intervention in this internationalism adequate to break up some of its nation-states or drain their blood back into the global body, real progress is on hold.

Qwiss

Coombs strategically maintaining a higher population with lower living standards as an economic strategy

Who has raised living standard for more people as quickly as China? Be serious.

Burnwinter

JazzG Just to let you know I have had a quick read and will respond another time. Not ignoring you!

All good mate 👍️

Coombs

Qwiss what about living standards per capita?

Praising China for polluting and exploiting their own people on the way to economic dominance just as away to stick one in to the West is what is unserious. There are no good lessons to learn, just more imperialism and more necropolitics.

JazzG

Ed Conway with good analysis and mainstream media waking up to the realities of our current energy policies.

Tam

16 minutes and a few snazzy graphics to not say much. All he's said is there's a bit more out there for the Government if they wanted it.

This isn't just energy policy. The ramifications of changing course would require a huge shift in tax policy to facilitate it, and that's opening even more cans of worms.

JazzG

Well maybe those in government should look past those snazzy graphs and get a bit serious about the world we live in right now. Stop worrying about activist groups and start worrying about how the events in the middle east will have some serious ramifications for this country.

If you put aside the fact it would reduce independence on importing this also had net benefits in terms of tax intake and trade deficits. Norway are constantly looking and finding more and more oil/gas so the North sea is not all used up

In Asian countries they are already turning back to coal due to the upcoming LNG shortage.

Tam

JazzG this also had net benefits in terms of tax intake

Interested in your insight into this issue. What's your views and evidence on this point?

Burnwinter

JazzG In Asian countries they are already turning back to coal due to the upcoming LNG shortage.

China has just announced its latest five year plan, and it doubles down on energy transformation. China will go from 50 years behind the UK to 50 years ahead of it in 100 years if drilling the North Sea is supposed to be the plan again.

What's next for populist nostalgia, foment enough civil division in England it starts to feel like it's time to resurrect Alfred the Great?

Burnwinter

JazzG Stop worrying about activist groups and start worrying about how the events in the middle east will have some serious ramifications for this country.

You now: why can't we drill magical oil in the North Sea now that crude is way over $100 a barrel again?

You a day ago: why can't we do something about this war started by our diplomatic ally Israel against international law, that's putting the entire global energy supply at risk?

You a week ago: why can't Starmer bomb targets in the Middle East?

You a year ago: proscribing Palestine Action is good government, we can't have free speech or tins of red paint on our cargo planes.

You two years ago: Israel's got a right to defend itself against terrorists.

You for the last twenty years: renewables aren't ready, just stick with tried and trusted.

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