You can write as long tirades and as expletive filled as you like. But the central point is: do not advocate taking action which will have no effect on a problem in response to it. Do not do things which achieve nothing.

Consequences matter and have to be taken into account when making policy decisions. The only rationale for refusing to take consequences into account is going to be religious dogma.

You may feel that riding that extra trip on the motorcycle is making the problem worse. But in fact this is irrational, it has no effect on it.

If what you are advocating has no effect on global emissions or on the global climate, stop advocating it. Or at least, stop advocating it in the name of climate.

A classic example of the total lack of realism about climate and energy occurred the other day in the UK:
________________________
Greenpeace climate campaigner Maja Darlington has called on the Government to act to stop a 'doomloop of extreme weather', after a summer of wildfires and drought.
She said: 'We've barely cooled off from a summer of blistering heat, and now the first winter storms are battering at the front door.
'While millions of people face the prospect of ruined homes and businesses, oil giants are preparing to announce multi-billion-pound profits next week.'
'The Government must take a stand against this doomloop of extreme weather and corporate impunity,' Ms Darlington added.
_____________________________

Right, the UK Government must do something about the weather. Like what must it do? Oh, it must take a stand. Right, that will really stop the storms. If we can only figure out what it is!

Where do they find these people? And why do they promote them to being Party spokespeople on energy and climate?

Your reaction is perfectly sensible and justifiable and there is no reason to deprive yourself of the pleasure of riding your motorcycle.

We should assess acts and decisions according to their consequences. We should not, in general, do things because they have some vague conceptual connexion to something else, but will have no effect on it.

Take the question of antibiotic resistance. Its a problem, no question, and national level and international level action on it is very desirable. Does that mean I should refuse antibiotic treatment for a family member, even when I know that it is necessary to treat their illness and that its the only treatment that is effective? Of course not. The refusal will make no difference to the global problem, but will risk the life of someone dear to me, to no gain. And there is an elephant in the room: large scale use of antibiotics in agriculture and stock management. Even if we all start refusing them, as long as the use in agriculture persists it will have no effect on the problem. Chinese emissions are analogous to agricultural use. If the US were to ban human use of antibiotics it would have no effect on the problem of resistance. The only thing that will is changing agriculture, and not even doing that at a national level, but at an international level.

As to climate and energy, there is no point doing things on energy which will not, for whatever reason, affect the climate. I do not believe that continued use of fossil fuels will lead to the catastrophes that are so often cited here, and RCP 8.5 (which was always totally unrealistic) has finally been discredited and should not be the basis for any policy decisions. There is nothing special or disastrous about exceeding 1.5C. But even if the extreme scenarios are likely and caused by emissions, the fact is the largest and fastest growing emitters don't believe it, or are deliberately ignoring it. Both China and India are growing their economies as fast as they can, and letting their emissions rise to whatever level this requires. So indeed are all the non-Western countries.

In addition, there are no realistic plans, even were China India and the West prepared to adopt them, that lead to emission levels as low as the alarmists claim are required. Current global emissions are a bit under 40 billion tons. I think most of the alarmed think they have to be got down to well under 10 billion, and within a decade. You cannot do this by building wind turbines and installing solar panels. Even were China and India prepared to try, which they obviously are not.

The rational approach to this is to approach the problem from a different angle, the angle of what is realistically possible. A country may not be able to affect global temperatures or make any dent in global emissions. But it can take more or less effective action to protect its people from the most likely effects of rises in global temperatures - for instance, flood control, housing improvements and similar things.

The Maldives could go to net zero. It will have no effect on global emissions or global temperatures or global sea levels. Better spend the money on flood protection and stop extracting ground water.which produces subsidence.

The poster boy for this at the moment is the UK. They are finding that the attempt to move to net zero by converting generation to wind and solar, while at the same time converting heat to heat pumps and transport to EVs, is not feasible - it is just raising the risk of blackouts while not providing enough energy. And even if the UK could cut its emissions to zero, it only does a bit over 1% and falling of global emissions. Any cuts it makes are eaten by China in a matter of months.

People have to accept that there are some things that cannot be affected by individual action, or in this case not even by national action. If international action is not going to happen, they also have to accept the logical consequence of this when paired with the duty of governments to look after the welfare of their own people. Do not engage in feel goodery or cries of 'what if everyone'. Get on with doing things that will be effective and will help your own people. Because like it or not, that is all that is possible in the world as it is.

And this is what it told me. This is the best the BBC could fine to explain PHP to its viewers? Someone whose main acquaintance with technology has probably been writing literary criticism (nowadays called reporting and jurnalism) in Microsoft Word?

____________________________________

Zoe Kleinman is a British journalist and broadcaster who serves as the BBCâ(TM)s first-ever Technology Editor, a role she took up in 2021. Her background combines a university education in English literature with more than two decades of experience in journalism, digital media and technology reporting.
Royal Television Society

Education
University of Southampton: She graduated in 1998 with a BA in English. Her LinkedIn profile also records that she studied there from 1995 to 1998.

Student journalism:
While at university, she was features editor of the student newspaper, Wessex Scene, gaining early editorial experience.

Early communications experience: During university holidays, she worked in the university press office, writing press releases and helping publicise academic research.

Yes, they are drawing power from the UK grid. Which has, barring subsidies and special deals, the highest prices for power in industrialized economies.

My point is a simple one. Its that the UK current plans are not going to deliver reliable, low cost, dispatchable power on a scale to supply the increased demand that the plans for promoting heat pumps, EVs and data centers require. That given these plans it is not a sensible investment decision to embark on building energy intensive plant in the UK. The stress is showing in the high prices today. It will soon appear in rolling, and perhaps national, blackouts.

And that people who are having to get reliable power for data centers, and who believe they have to go to self generation, do not go to wind and solar, locating it wherever there is space (of course not locally). They are instead turning to gas, and some to mini-nukes, and in stories here, also to reactivating decomissioned big nukes.

The reason is simple: its because neither wind nor solar can supply reliable dispatchable continuous power. Wherever you locate the plant. You don't comment on the Royal Society study. Have you read it? it is way over optimistic on many points, but the bottom line is simple: there is no way of doing this cost effectively with any known existing storage technology.

You don't meet any of the substantive points I make. Where are the plans to make wind and solar in the UK dispatchable? Where are the studies showing that adding wind to a fossil fuel grid, and including total costs, generates enough savings on fuel to pay for the investment and maintenance?

There are none. This is not working, and its not going to work. And by the way, have you seen the forecasts about where the reserve power is going to come from this winter? Do your homework. Not from wind and solar, and not from the UK either.

Calling people who disagree with you trolls just shows you're in the grip of wishful thinking. Because that is all it is. Wishing it was so does not make it so. This is an engineering question, and it has to be handled and discussed like any other engineering issue. Calmly, impersonally, and without substituting abuse for thought. Making energy policy on the basis of how we wish the world was is a recipe for blackouts. Which is where the UK is headed.

I have no idea whether these plans make sense. But the thing that is striking about this and similar stories is that people whose businesses depend on having reliable affordable power never are reported to be planning to install wind or solar.

Everyone on /. believes, or at least claims to believe, that wind and solar are cheaper than fossil or nukes. Some claim a weaker version of this, that if you have a fossil powered network then you can save money by adding wind to it (because the fuel savings will pay for the extra investment).

But when people whose businesses depend on their decisions are confronted with the problem of where to get their reliable and affordable power, the place they never turn to is wind and solar.

In fact Elsham Park in the UK is proposing to install not only their own gas generation but also up to 650 diesel backup engines.

It should tell everyone something about wind and solar technology viability: that its not tech which is fit for the puirpose for which it is being attempted to be used.

But it doesn't seem like anyone is listening.

"You need the wind so you can use less gas. You need the transmission so you can use the wind. Burning fossil fuels is bad in many ways so doing as little of it as possible makes sense. I tried to use small words for you there."

Not what they are trying to do. What they are trying to do is run the country on wind and solar. Without having any provision for the one to two week calms which take place most winters, when wind production falls below, and often well below, 10% of faceplate.

Burning fossil fuel may be bad. But that does not mean that what they are planning will actually work to deliver usable and affordable and reliable power. All the evidence is that it will not. No-one else in the world has done it. No-one else is even trying to do it. You may not like building plumbing pipe out of copper. But that does not mean trying to make it out of wood is sensible. In the present case, nuclear might work. Whatever its problems it does deliver reliable power. Wind does not. Find something else that does if you don't want to use gas. Also solar does not in the UK latitudes. Find something that does. I am sure you object to nuclear too. But that does not make wind any more sensible. Its a technology that is not fit for the purpose for which it is being used.

You say that you need the wind so you can use less gas. I have never seen this demonstrated. When you fill in the gaps in wind production with gas you use CGCT in its most inefficient rapid start mode. Or OGT, even worse. Or standby to cover the random fluctuations, Maybe you save a bit, but where are the studies showing that the amount saved covers the costs of the additional wind equipment and its additional transmission networks?

What you need, and I don't believe anyone has done such a thing, is a comparison in NPV terms of a grid run off CCGT versus one with wind added. Including all the costs, including the transmission build out to places you would otherwise never build a transmission network to, like the north coast of Scotland. I do not believe supplemental wind pays for itself if properly costed, and I am skeptical that it even saves much gas over just running the most efficient gas plant you can build, but if you know a study, point to it.

The point about the UK however is that whatever the merits of such a proposal its not what they are planning on doing. What they are planning on doing is inexorably headed for blackouts, either regional or national because its basically pretending intermittency doesn't exist and isn't a problem. Which anyone who has spent winters in the UK knows that it is, because they will have experienced these periods of a week or two with cold, clear, dead calm days. And gridwatch.co.uk docoments the effects of such periods on wind power generation.

As for storage, read the Royal Society report on that. What they are trying to do cannot be done.

Wishful thinking will not keep the lights on. They are going to go off if they carry on the present path because they are trying to use two technologies which are not fit for the purpose they are trying to use them for.

The problem is UK energy policy. It is to build large amounts of intermittent power generation in places where there is no demand.

The business case for doing this rests on LCOE calculations which omit the costs of remedying intermittency and also the cost of getting the power to where there is demand, in the present case, Essex, but in general in the Midlands and South.

The result is that the UK has to build a hugely expensive new transmission network from the wind farms off the north coast of Scotland to the Midlands and South. It still has no specific problem for how to supply continuous reliable power from wind - the only solution is of course gas fired generation, but that is politically incorrect.

The country has the highest electricity prices in the OECD. Which as inevitable - however you fake the numbers with LCOE, the costs are real and have to be recovered somehow.

The program also involves large amounts of solar. However, the UK is the second worst country in the world for solar power generation (the worst is Ireland). This doesn't help either, and just increases the size of the intermittency problem.

What is coming towards the UK is probably a nationwide blackout, and certainly rolling regional ones. If they are sucessful in the other part of their program they will increase demand substantially by converting heating to heat pumps and transport to EVs. And by persuading companies to install lots of data centers for AI etc. Sooner or later these plans will run into the one or two week period which occurs most years, when there is a blocking high to the southwest and dead calms. Wind generation falls well below 10% of faceplate and stays there for a couple of weeks. At 4pm, this being winter, solar vanishes - there has been negligible amounts anyway even earlier in the day, this being winter at these latitudes. There are no plans to keep supply going when this happens. They need plans to build out masses of new gas - because the old installations they depend on at the moment are reaching end of life. Are there any such plans? Of course not. And if you were building out that much gas, why do you need all that wind and transmission?

You don't!

This cannot work. You would have to be blinkered or silly (or paid off with tax breaks, and even then its not clear these could be big enough) to contemplate investing heavily in a data center operation in the UK till they get this turned around, as in U-turn, abolish the net zero silliness and build reliable low cost generating capacity. And stop building transmission links to nowhere.

As for Global Warming and Climate Change, its irrelevant. Whatever is happening with the climate, there is nothing that UK energy policy can do to have any effect on it. All the current programs can do is make a nationwide blackout more likely. And the world will then, if it happens, watch a world first: a country trying to restart its grid using wind power. Good luck with that one.

Not sure I see the point of the pi any more. For roughly the same price you can now buy a used NUC with a faster processor, enough memory, and SSD storage. Why mess around running stuff from usb sticks? Or even from external extra SSDs? Put the distro of choice on it. And isn't the memory expandable too on the NUC and similar?

Its a predictable sequence and the end point is that interest payments become so high that they crowd out all other government spending. At that point the government is paying interest out of new borrowing. The UK is approaching or maybe has reached this stage now, due largely to out of control public sector wages and employment and welfare payments.. This is the Ponzi stage. Total debt at this point is over 100% of GDP, and the nation is on borrowed time. Its going to stop, but its not all that predictable when. Its not going to go to 200%, but it probably can in most cases make it to 120%. Japan has been holding, just about, at well over 100% for years. But in the end it stops, and it stops when the bond market will not buy either the rollover debt or the new sales.

In this stage there is more debt being offered than there is money available or willing to buy it. Do nothing and interest rates will rise till markets clear, and this will produce recession and defaults. Not electorally nice. So the government via its central bank buys the debt, holds down interest rates. This is essentially printing money.

For a while it seems to work, but the inevitable consequence is that the currency is devalued against fixed assets of value, and you get inflation. At this point there is a vicious cycle. People demand higher coupon rates in order to justify them in putting their money into a shrinking asset. The last time the UK went through this cycle consumer interest rates rose to the high teens. Think what that would mean today. A real crash.

The essential point is that governments are driven to issue more debt than there is willingness to buy. They will not deal with this by raising taxes or reducing expenditure, so they deal with it by printing money, and this postpones but also makes inevitable default.

You think as you read this that the US, UK, France etc cannot possibly default. The great banking families of Europe have thought that too. How could Spain possibly default when it had all the gold and silver of the South American empire? But it could, and it did, and so did Napoleonic France.

Hyman Minsky has described the sequence, and Ray Dalio in his recent books has applied the concepts to present day markets. These are quite technical accounts. Basically however its a very simple matter, if there is more debt than can be serviced or sold then there will be a default. It can be a simple suspension of payments, or it can be inflated to default. But one way or the other the end of exuberance comes and it is followed by austerity.

The great difficulty one has as an individual fracing this coming towards ones society is that the timing is unpredictable. Could bee this autumn. But it could hold up teetering along in semi crisis mode for several more years.

One thing you can watch as an indicator is if the government starts to shorten the term of its bond sales. it does this because long term bonds hav started to get devalued and people demand higher and higher interest rates to buy them. So the government resorts to shorter term issues. But these then have to be rolled over more frequently. Track the rate at which this happens, the changes in the yield curve, and the level of interest rates required, and that will give you an insight into how the crisis is developing.

But what to do? Well, there you are on your own!

No! No! This has nothing to do with Hannibal! Nothing at all!

I know some people are going to say that Hannibal took elephants across the Alps all those years ago. The same people who talk about the Medieval Warm period.

Well I am just telling you, this has nothing to do with Hannibal! There is a reason why the Guardian's coverage of the Climate Crisis and pending Climate Catastrophe doesn't mention Hannibal, its because he has nothing to do with this. So stop criticizing the Guardian for not mentioning him!

Yes, its so tiring, would you people all stop talking about Hannibal, and also you can stop talking about the Medieval and Roman Warm periods too while you are at it. Thank you. I will go back to reading the Guardian now, and its independent journalism, which I really would like to be able to do without being threatened in slashdot with violence from Hannibal and having slashdot made an unsafe place on account of this Hannibalistic Exxon funded denial of the ongoing Climate Crisis and Catastrophe.

Thank you.

You doubt this, look up the Clark County debacle. Just one example, but it shows you the nature of the creature. Are we reporting on the US election? Or are we trying to get the right candidate elected? Or do we even understand the question?

Its another of these endless number of stories slashdot carries now from the UK Guardian. The UK Guardian isn't a trustworthy source of news. It isn't even primarily a news organization. Its an activist organization which publishes an in-house news journal. Its aim is not to report on how the world is, but to change the world to how it should be, and editorial policy and news coverage and reporting are managed with that objective. You can no more expect objective journalism from it than you could from Pravda, and for the same reason.

They have never read Orwell and so with a straight face proclaim this as 'independent journalism'. Independent from journalism maybe.

I know, and it's disheartening, but I still remain optimistic. Even if much of the human population doesn't "get it" -- they at least are starting to, and the manipulation techniques of the past several decades seem to be wearing quite thin, and they don't seem to be able to come up with new ones anymore. Maybe 'cuz they're using AI?

This is just insanity marketing. "AI" doesn't need "safety". That's ridiculous. It's the same argument for censorship that gets trotted out all the time "We can't have kids reading the Anarchist's Cookbook!" In this case it's even more disingenuous: it's a combination marketing ploy (our AI is so good it's scary!) and demand for regulatory capture (Our competitors AI will be even scarier without government stepping in and giving us the only keys!). The fact is that "AI" by which I mean LLMs, has become an actual useful tool in a few niche areas for people who understand how to use tools, and that *always* cuts both ways: for better AND for worse. The niches will expand and the technology will merge with older technologies (reinforcement learning in particular) and life will go on. Pandora's box is already fully open (yet again).

When the bubble pops, and hardware prices crash, if the global economy survives, everyone (that cares to) will roll their own LLM rig and can run whatever models they want with whatever "guardrails" they want, or none at all. People will spend years training their own models, avoiding the "dump in everything!" models we have now. Having been trained on mostly good stuff, they'll be actually good at (some) stuff, and might (or might not) become at least sort of actually intelligent. The sky will not fall, the wolves will not eat all the children, and 12-year-olds will (probably) not build nuclear reactors in their backyard. It'll be fine. At least compared to the status quo (which, to be absolutely clear is DEFINITELY NOT FINE!)

The thing is that the incumbent AI companies *desperately* don't want that to happen and they're operating under the delusion that they can prevent it. Most of them are run by a bunch of high-functioning sociopaths and psychopaths (like most global megacorps) who want nothing but more and more money and power, and they see "AI" as the "One System to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them". Spoiler alert: it probably isn't, but I'll carry the metaphor further anyway:

So the question is: will we willingly accept the nine, the seven and the three, and let them rule until they successfully destroy our co-created Human world (which is exactly what they and the rest of the wannabee trillionaire club are doing, whether they know it or not) that they so desperately want to control? I remain hopeful that at least most of us aren't going to blindly accept that, despite literally every day seeing copious evidence to the contrary...

So finally, the real question: will we collectively create a world in which everyone can have their basic needs met, so no one has to *constantly* scramble for survival in this "dog eat dog" world? The answer isn't needing this or that particular socioeconomic system. That's very 19th/20th century. We need to actually come together as a species and tell the handful of psycho rich fucks that run everything and their propagandists to STFU, then just ignore whatever they do, and decide to just actually live our lives.