As soon as they blame the current energy crisis on Ukraine you know it is BS. Even Spain blames their price hike on the war in Ukraine even though they do not get any oil or gas from Russia. Britain has increased their fuel prices by 50% but they only got 10% of their oil and gas from Russia. The reason that we have an energy crisis is because we have not discovered a good renewable way to power our cities. Only a few place like Norway who are lucky enough to be covered with great valleys to build hydro in or Morocco which has a good solar source, the rest of the planet has no ability to turn to renewables in any meaningful way. We still need gas for quick response to changes in demand and for things like steel manufacture we still need coal. We still need oil to produce the mountains of plastic we make our solar panels from. We are not there yet.

Forget the new technology until you have a manufacturing base.

It is pure propaganda. Have you ever seen an EV burn? They are wild and extremely dangerous to everyone nearby. Have you ever seen a diesel vehicle burn? Oh, sorry you will not. So they compare one which is unbelievably dangerous with one that can and does so more often and ignore the one that is safest as that does not produce the outcome desired. Do not attempt logic here, it is extremely unpopular.

Wouldn't it be far easier to simply buy gas from Russia? After all, they have a nice new pipeline. It is not as if Germany can point any fingers and given that Ukraine is still buying Russian gas I fail to see what is being achieved by all this propaganda.

There should be a simple term for really dumb people that accuse anyone with a different opinion of being a troll. If you really far too dumb to put an actual reply together that might look intelligent, it would better to keep quiet than make yourself look stupid.

If he had kept to the Minsl accord Donbass would have become an independant section of Ukraine but the Nazis demanded that they murder the people instead. In the past Ukraine has elected pro European and pro Russian governments alternatively and that is the problem. If the people of Ukraine are allowed a truly democratic election there is a 50/50 chance it will vote for a pro Russian government and the Ukrainian government and the Nazis are scared of that. So Azov Brigade set out to murder 2 million ethnic Russian Ukrainians in order to win elections. It shows the lie of the whole thing. The ordinary people of Ukraine do not support Putin but they would happily elect a pro Russian government. Right Sector are another Nazi military group in Ukraine who murdered an entire political party in Odessa simply because they were pro Russian. If Zelensky does not act soon Putin will take Odessa. You can even read Wikipedia to get a different view - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... scroll down to Neo Nazism

I did feel that I had made my case clearly so it is hard to reply. You say "you would be causing MORE emissions" and I ask how? Not because I do not understand what you are saying but because you have not read what I am saying. I am in complete agreement that we need to stop burning fossil fuel. That is not what I am discussing. My 1995 Land Rover would be very happy to live on biodiesel and has no reason to have any fossil fuel enter it. I do only drive it once a month as you suggest but that misses the point. It does not need to use fossil fuels. Biodiesel can be made very easily but for some strange reason it is illegal for me to make my own from waste even though I have access to far more vegetable oil than I need and that has already had one life. This country does not allow the sale of biodiesel or 85% ethanol which many cars can eaily be converted to. I did an oil change on my standard car today and that was synthetic oil rather than fossil. I do not object to people having the choice of EVs or ICE but I do not understand why there has to be so much bull about that choice. Fossil fuel is a completely different part of the discussion and more of a historic reference rather than part of the future. I do think that much of the deception is for a purpose and I do not agree that electric is the best option and as I said, I believe that for several reason hydrogen will be the best option but we are not there quite yet. We are nearer with electric but there are still many hurdles. The ICE remains a valid choice and it is well past all the hurdles including the problems with ethanol although I am far more in favour of biodiesel. Why can't we have choice? You can have your EV and I can have my biodiesel? I do accept that in a city EVs are far more friendly although I do wince when they are called zero emission given that they simply dump their emissions somewhere else. I do think that many cities will impose EV only restrictions and although I do not want an EV I can understand the logic although it does rule out living there if you work outside the city etc. Norway has done very well with EVs but they have a hydro availability that no other country can match. When you mention molten salt I guess you refer to Ouarzazate solar power station in Morocco. That is the way forward and if they realy want a future from that they need to start using that heat to produce clean hydrogen and sell to the world. Hydrogen can run vehicles and power stations cleanly in a way that nothing else can. The only trouble is that it would turn countries like Mali and Libya into very rich countries and our governments do not want that. You worry that biofuels would cause people to choose between fuel and food (I do not see that given that my oil produces food and then runs my car) but the Sahara has no food production.

Very true, the Russians have no interest in that area and the assualt was part of a bluff to distract the Ukrainian forces and weaken the south which is clearly of far more interest to Putin. He has created the land bridge to Crimea which was the most important thing to him, liberated the ethnic Russian areas where Azov Battalion wanted to kill a couple of million to allow a return to democracy. If Zelensky had a brain he would see that now is the time to make a deal but he thinks he has the US backing him (common mistake) so Putin will keep going and take Odessa where the Ukrainian Nazis burnt and entire pro Russian political party to death. If Zelensky still does not do the deal Putin will link through to Transistria which is also ethnic Russian. Putin's causes and objectives are very clear but for some reason the media and western politicians claim ignorance. The idea that Chernobyl is of interest is beyond stupid. The constant anti Russian propaganda about how badly they are doing when the most impressive thing is how well they are doing is almost bad enough to make me end up supporting them. t

Thank you for an interesting reply :) EV manufacture has twice the carbon footprint of ICE manufacture thanks to the battery. Said battery does have a limitted lifespan but if it dies after 4 years it is still economically viable to replace the battery but after 8 years you would throw the car away. So EVs are considered to have a lifespan of 8 years whereas one of my ICE vehicles is already 25 years old. In general, if you do less than 15,000 miles a year you will have a lower carbon footprint driving an ICE car although you still have the ICE car for the next 8 years or more and do not need to increase your carbon footprint by building another one. Public transport should use EVs, that is planned transport that can be run efficiently although for some reason the US went off trams. Rail in Europe is so much better and you go into the city and they have a decent tram system that I find impressive but that is a different issue. There are many areas where I think EVs have a place but that is more about local, regular, planned use like delivery, post etc. The UK used to have fleets of milk delivery trucks 50 years ago that were electric and that made a lot of sense. The problem with nuclear is that it still takes time to change output. The eco options like wind and sun are the worst in that they do not provide power as and when needed. Coal is bad in that it takes time to increase or decrease the output. Nuclear may seem better but it is still way behind gas. Gas can respond fastest to changes in demand just like turning the dial on the cooker. Nuclear is a confidence trick much like EVs. Yes, it sounds great but it costs absurd amounts of money and like EVs they leave production and decomissioning out of the equation when they tell the public how great it is. We still do not have the ability to safely decomission a nuclear reactor. When we started building them we thought that by the time they came to decomissioning we would have worked out how but we did not. We still just dig a very big hole and bury it like we do with everything we want to forget about. Biofuels are the best we have today. Not for power generation but for personal use, i.e. cars. In countries that have accepted that it works well. In Poland you can get 100% ethanol but in Germany they only sell 85% ethanol because they imagine people sticking the filler gun in their mouth and drinking it. F1 racing cars run on 100% ethanol because it is better than regular fuel. In Europe there are 200 hydrogen fuel stations now. 100 of them in Germany, 40 in France and 11 in the UK. You can already buy hydrogen cars and although I still see them as the future given that 200 stations does not count as a valid today, I still see them as the way to go. Batteries are the problem, not electricity. Trains and trams use power lines so they are different. Delivery trucks can use better set ups to have easily changed batteries rather than rely on battery destroying fast charges. Consumers need to be able to refuel and buy fuel and have a longer lasting vehicle which equates to a lower carbon footprint. We need to get away from this throw away society especially in vehicles.

Thank you for telling me that. I used to work at a nuclear power station and every Friday the military used to arrive and take away the tritium that they wanted and now you tell me that they were lying and I am interested to know what they were taking. Maybe if you have time you will tell me because you clearly know more than the military do about this.

BEVs create double the carbon footprint during manufacture and seldom recover that loss due to the short lifespan. ICE has the advantage that it is far easier to switch to better fuel sources like plant based ethanol or rubbish based biodiesel as they do in Germany etc. I do find it strange that in the countries that do it, biofuels do not take up much land but in the US where there is more land, biofuels will take up too much land. I think this is political rather than logical. In the real world the alternatives work now. There will be far better alternatives in the future like hydrogen but the doom and gloom mongers have already started to attempt to make out that because hydrogen may not be perfectly neutral we should not go down that road even if it is clearly far better than any of the options. The basic reality is that although EVs have a place in the future of city transport it would not make sense to base the future of transport on EVs unless your target is to build a lot of nuclear power stations which would allow you to build a lot of nuclear bombs. The only other way to generate the required power would be gas and we are currently seeing the problems with that. Even if we do go down the EV route that would give substantial power to China as they control the majority of lithium mining.

Whereas we support those nice Ukrainian Nazis like Svobda, Red Brigade and Azov Battalion. In fact we funded and armed them to start this war and cause the deaths of all those horrible Russian people. Not sure how you work out that Russia is Nazi but I will run with that. We fund a coup that got our friends into power but in order to stay in power they need to kill a couple of million of the population that would vote in (as kept happening in the past) a pro Russian government who would have sent most of the Ukrainian Nazis to prison and probably executed those that were engaged in the mass murder of people in Donbass. So now we send lots of weapons for them to test and this has turned the Socialist dictatorship into a Nazi dictatorship that is fighting for the people of Ukraine against our Nazi Battalions in Ukraine. Poland etc. send Ukraine all their old rubbish that we had sent them like Humvees etc. in an act of kindness or clearing out the sheds and this helps the Nazis fight the Nazis. Oh, sorry, according to Wikipedia Azov are not Nazis, they are Social Nationalists because Hitler was too soft and they want to be more Nazi than Hitler so we you think Putin is softer than our guys. OK I think I have got it.

We must all buy an electric car to combat volcanoes. I cannot understand the logic but I am assured that if we all drive electric cars it will stop these volcanoes from emitting carbon dioxide into our atmostphere. They do in reality cause as much of a carbon footprint as an ICE car due to battery production but by some magic they can combat everything else. I think it is something to do with having to build lots of nuclear power stations to provide electricity for them and the bombs we will be able to make. Those of you in places like Germany with your biodiesel and ethanol will not be able to understand this of course but you know you will be forced to comply in the long run.

It has always been US policy. The US involved in 2 wars at the moment, Somalia and Yemen. We bomb the fuck out of people yet cry when someone else does. Ethnic Russian people were being killed in Ukraine wereas we had no such justification while we bomb Somalia each night.

The west is no different. Did your newpaper mention the hospital in Donetsk that the Ukrainians blew up last week? No, because it goes against the western propaganda that only evil baby eating Russians do such things. The only intersting part is how stupid people are given the extent of western propaganda. Many people honestly believe that the entire population of Russia woke up one day and said "This looks like a great day to invade Ukraine" without any reason or build up to that. What is Russia doing in Ukraine that the US is not doing in Somalia? Yet the big difference is that the US was not provoked and there are not a large section of the Somalian population that are ethnic US and being persecuted and killed. If anyone had cared about the people of Ukraine why was nothing done to prevent the war? Joe Biden helped start it in 2014 but no one tried to stop it. Once the ethnic cleansing started Russia was 100% guaranteed to respond, it was only a question of time.