I’m considering doing the same, but I have a messy roof, with no single large area to place panels. Would need them on three or even four different surfaces, annoyingly.

You specifically said Europe, you disingenous twat.

And Europe didn’t increase imports of coal from the US (and other nations) because it relied on Russian *oil and gas*, but because it banned the use of Russian *coal*. And in the very same year that it banned the use of Russian coal due to the invasion of Ukraine and increased its imports of coal from the US and other nations to replace some of those coal imports, it *also* cut its actual use of coal by 23%, and then another 13% the year after, and a further 2% the year after, and this year is set to see a more significant decline again.

15 European countries have now stopped using coal altogether for electricity generation. Greece and Slovakia will join them this year, France in 2027, Denmark in 2028, Finland, the Netherlands and Hungary in 2029, and Spain and North Macedonia in 2030. More will follow in the years after that.

The large economies dragging their heels are Germany, Poland, Turkiye and Italy. And even there, progress is faster than policy pronouncements suggest: in Germany, coal capacity has fallen from 35GW in 2020 to 23 today, and renewables have risen from 6% in 2020 to more than 60% today, and many more GW of coal are being retired, eg RWE’s exit of Rhineland lignite. In Poland, coal use has fallen by more than 30 percentage points in a decade, and 34GW of renewables had been installed by 2024, meaning that more electricity came from renewables than coal, a much faster pace of change than anyone had anticipated. Italy doesn’t really use coal anyway, only 1.2GW and much of that is backup except for Sardinia, which is being addressed via regasification. And Turkiye hasn’t built a new coal plant since 2022, while solar has tripled in four years. It also has 33GW of storage in the pipeline, because it has mandated all new renewables include that.

The big picture is that in 2015, Europe used 715TWh of coal for electricity, and by 2025, that had fallen to 257, below 10% of the mix. Three quarters of what’s left is in Germany and Poland, and based on the market trends described above, we are going to be below 50TWh by 2030 and close to zero by 2034.

True, but as you yourself describe, net new coal investments are frequently being used as backup / peaker. And as China builds out storage and overbuilds renewables (not just solar), coal use is clearly going to decline and more and more of those plants will sit idle for longer and longer.

Yup

What protections do you imagine are in place for the NHS number and NI number that will not be in place for this? I use the word imagine advisedly

Perhaps the government has some store of all pre 15.5 year old's NINOs, but they don't issue NINOs to individuals till 15.5. But everyone gets an NHS number at birth

Jesus Christ. We already have unique identifiers from birth in the UK in the form of NHS numbers, and a National Insurance (not SSN, because we don't actually live in the states) from 15.5

This reads like it's being written with the full chest of someone who doesn't have kids. I quite like my kids to have a device that holds money, a map, a travelcard for the tube and buses, multiple methods to contact me and others, books, a camera, etc. I don't have a fucking conniption over fucking Insta, and there's more than enough pernicious behaviour that my kids get exposed to whether I want them to or not with or without social media

We already have NI numbers and NHS numbers in the UK, each of which is a unique identifier and a national scheme. This is in no sense an ID card

Well,yes, but also many parts of road haulage are electrifying faster than the consumer market (see also: buses), merchant ships run on heavy fuel oil, not diesel, about 40% of all shipping is to move hydrocarbons, and trains in many places are already electric.

Plus the point was orthogonal to mine. I wasn't making a claim about the comprehensiveness of electrification, I was making a point that purchasers are responding to oil and gas price incentives by seeking to insulate themselves from the shock.

What are you on about? It takes no time at all to find camera modules being sold *to consumers* for only a little more than I said above, so obviously OEM pricing is going to be much lower. Nowhere near the ridiculous thousands of dollars you mentioned.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Unive...

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/204...

https://caraudiocentre.co.uk/p...

I know this sounds incredibly complex as an idea, but you could, in fact, change your provider

Oil adaptation is already starting, although obviously at insufficient scale. But even many consumers can read the room which is why EV interest and sales are spiking across multiple markets.

Hungary demonstrates pretty conclusively that the US admin is not about to persuade anyone of anything anytime soon.

Drones can reach tankers near the “far” side of the Straits, anyway. Trivial for them to do so