Westminster Politics 2024-2029
- Thread starter Pexbo
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Socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Who would've thought that Labour would be like the Democratic party of the US
Yeah but increasing defence spending is a polling issue, no one gives a shit about cutting budgets to most areas or I should say they won't notice the impact for some time. This is a focus group led government.
I find myself agreeing with some of finneh's posts above which might be a first. I'm not convinced you can let loose a political party on running the country anymore. Time for an AI overlord I say.
We're just fecked really. We're going to face an economic sledgehammer from AI in the next decade and then face the fallout of an older and shrinking population. It's going to take real leadership and our choice is focus group Labour or Reform Nazis.
Glad she lost that, I should get about £2k-£3k from that. I plan to send it straight to a billionaire so I don’t know what she’s worried about
Socially liberal? How?
Not wanting to reduce women to breeding house slaves and put foreigners in concentration camps is the new socially liberal.
Check the new generation of carbon capture generators. Not that big. They take c02 from the air and via chemical reactions (cells iirc) they generate electricity. These are only one of a series of new styled generators to come to market in the next few years.That would be some rainforest you'll need on your house to do that!
Going off-grid and being energy self-sustainable is a massive change. One of the few positives in the last 30 years I can think of. The entire economy is based around energy (as commodity it is both the oil, gas, or whatever we use as well as the labour power of the people). Taking away from large energy monopolies and giving people the power to power (no pun intended) their own homes and so forth is a huge shift in citizen-consumer dynamics.
Will be happening at pace. I.e., keep watching the futures market for this sector and then also the legacy sector (as well as new drilling proposals). The return on new leases will not be so high.
Can you link this? I vaguely remember a couple of years ago some American university developed a technology that stored captured carbon as useable fuel . As far as I know all such tech is only efficient if placed in a carbon rich environment though - like a gas power plant. Don't think it can just be put outside your house and grab carbon from the world in general. The atmosphere is too entropic to efficiently extract energy directly and the quantities captured for fuel conversion by a domestic machine would surely be too small to be meaningful.
Was reading about a breakthrough recently. Will link you (gotta find it). The gist was that it isn't ready for outside your house use yet but is moving in that direction.
https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-just-built-a-co2-eating-machine-that-runs-on-sunlight/
Worth the read.
Also, the Chinese just had a massive breakthrough in fusion. 1000 seconds of steady state plasma achieved which is massively ahead of the few seconds only two and half years ago which the Americans managed.
There's just so many options in the novel non-combustive generation of energy now. So many that it is inevitable that people will have generators as we once had computers. Expensive at first but well worth the price (more so than computers, too).
As the report implies, it'd be a great solution for remote and off-grid areas but I'm not convinced about general use. There's a huge advantage to centralised generation (and therefore electric heating etc) which we're seeing now; when newer greener technologies are introduced into the grid people don't need to do anything to convert to renewables.
Having to build infrastructure on a significant proportion of houses now and when it needs replacing either through age or a better technology in 50 years would put the emphasis on people to do something when a lot just don't care. It could possibly used to replace oil tanks in remote areas definitely though.
There's just too many alternative methods to the old combustive.
What is the benefit of centralized grid? I don't see it. Why would I want to pay for electricity, to a company, every month, when I can just buy a generator which is of the new line? One, and this won't be for 15 years or so, that will last? I'd feck the centralized grid completely off and that, I am certain, is what will happen.
De-centralization is power to the people here. Sticking with the government's grid which is not for the people but for profiting against them is madness in the not-too-distant future. And you can use whatever combination of generators (or other solutions) you like. Just getting off that "pay for energy" structure is the key.
If the centalized grid becomes free, then fair enough, otherwise I'd take any of these new generators (and there will be much competition in the next years ahead) over a monthly payment which is akin to serfdom imo.
The benefit to the centralised grid is people who don't care about green energy or how they get their electricity can be forced to use renewables without even asking them. 60-odd million people in the UK and in inner cities aren't going to be moved on-mass to their own generation when a lot don't want to or don't care.
There's also the issue of replacing them every X decades in millions of houses rather than to the central locations.
I do agree that it would be a utopia, but most people wouldn't be onboard and the infrastructure task and maintenance would be huge.
Cheers. I'll have a gander!
Think cost, though. And consider that this is 15 years out. I'm not appealing to altruism so much as I am to cost-efficiency. When there is a tax on the petro and no tax on the sustainable and sustainable becomes available at scale, then it becomes a no-brainer to take one of these styled generators (still out some decade or so to scale) because you save money on your yearly bills (and it's not a small saving over the lifetime of such). I think it'll become a simple cost-benefit calculus. Wouldn't surprise me to the central grid massively downsized or else directed toward industries within 30-50 years (toward industrial production...).
It's a wait and see but I do think it's inevitable based on the sheer number of options and the savings you make. Just a matter of time imo
Cost is exactly the issue most likely. That article doesn't say what the catalysts are made from, how efficient they are, how big the reactor needs to be for a given quantity of syngas output, whether the catalysts contain expensive rare earth metals, or how quickly they degrade. Most of the people who have tried producing hydrogen directly from sunlight and water eventually give up because the reaction is so ineffecient compared to harvesting the sunlight as electricity and then using the electricity to produce the hydrogen from water. It would be superb if it's much easier to do with syngas and air, but I don't know if the world is that kind. I certainly wouldn't bet the world's climate future on it at this point! Bear in mind that atmospheric air is only about 0.04% CO2 so you're going to need a rather large volume of it in order to do anything useful. Large volumes of air either need massive wind cowls and rely on intermittent natural air flow, or they need compressors / blowers of some sort which use lots of energy.
Wind energy is a vital part, but it's very sporadic by region. The third figure includes Scotland which is likely as high as 90+%, but London which is as low as 10-15%.
Building ever more wind farms off the coast of Yorkshire and Scotland will provide diminishing returns as the regions local to the energy generation reach saturation point and the grid can't handle getting the energy to where it's required; which when coupled with businesses effectively being subsidised to stay in the South East at the expense of those areas, means for every % of increased proportion of wind power you start to get far less bang for the buck. Wind turbines being paid not to run whilst at the same time importing fossil fuel energy to feed the South East is the bizarre end result.
The simple solution is to encourage energy intensive businesses to move closer to the areas of power generation via local pricing. If a business knew that on a windy day in Hull they'd be paying 10% of their current energy costs which is tied to gas, they'd not only move in a heartbeat, but you'd see a wave of new businesses that were not viable with previous energy costs opening in the region. You'd also see business operations reflecting the wind (ie running more intensely through the winter and less so in the summer) which is far more efficient than spending quarter of a trillion upgrading the grid and building tens of billions in battery storage (which would also take decades even if the cash was in hand).
The UK is a highly multicultural, tolerant society that is generally moving toward more inclusivity. Labour doesn't have a policy to necessarily accelerate that but generally happy to see that trend continue. Do you view them as socially conservative?
No, your point(s) are definitely taken. It's just the scale. If you follow this, you'll see that it's all expensive but the cost will come down and it's not just going to be CO2 that is used. There are lots of these things in the pipelines which depart from orthodox combustive generation. Only takes one hit from the many which are proving competent (whichever can marry expense with safety and practicality at scale) to change the entire thing. I'm certain we're looking at a done thing -- just a necessary 15 year period between then and now.
Speaking as someone who works adjacent to the carbon capture industry I'm nearly certain it's all a scam from fossil fuel companies to keep polluting, but I admire your optimism and hope you're right. I suspect physics is not on your side though unfortunately.
I don't just mean carbon capture, though, I mean quasi-fusive (not reactor-based) forms of energy generation having to do with electrons and using a kind of synthesis and vacuum pressure. It all sounds exotic and impossible for everyone to own, but these are at the start of their existence.
It's like there's a thousand possible ways toward this future of decentralized energy production and consumption. You only need one of them to hit (like Windows in computing terms). One will hit. This is one of the few areas I have optimism in for the future. The rest looks bleak because states cannot be bothered to spend the necessary money on the core issues which are housing, healthcare, and education. I repeat "housing, healthcare, education" all the time because they really are the three vital areas that have to be solid before you can have a steady society (one that can absorb whatever the shocks of the next century throws at it). Without this, which is where we are now, you get a recipe for disaster. It's as if we went back to the post-War era except I have yet to see anything like the post-war effort emerge.
The only decentralised home energy generation for most people will remain electricity e.g. solar panels. You won't get the economies of scale you need for something like chemical production except for very niche applications, and what government in their right mind would allow decentralised fusion or whatever you're thinking of?
Best bet for a lot of things might be bioengineering e.g. you program an oak tree to grow you a wardrobe or something. Now that is something I hope I live to see even though it sounds fairly terrifying at the same time (programming other things to do nasty stuff to people is an obvious potential misuse of such a technology).
Not nuclear fusion. Just advanced vacuum styled generators. They're already being worked upon. Early days, but it's basically unstoppable (again, not just these either, but the fat there are so many different varieties all of which function: it's "when" not "if").
What government can prevent you? If you adhere to safety protocols you can do what you want. And that comes with scale.
What government can prevent you owning a gun? I've no idea what these vacuum generators are that you're talking about but I think you're in cloud cuckoo land most likely.
Come back in 15 years if either of us are still alive and you'll be saying "that was obvious" (in hindsight).
Is this roughly what you're going on about? I found a Reddit thread from 3 months ago - this is basically what I'm saying, and it doesn't even mention the fact that 100% efficiency is not a thing, not the cost of making these machines, regenerating the filters, turning the carbon into something useful (if that's the intention) etc.
No, I mean all of it. Every last one of these ventures. Take them all at scale. Some will be feasible and the majority won't. The ones which become standard will replace the centralized energy grid as it is currently known.
Basically, every non-combustive engine initiative currently known about.
Yeah but if all of them need more energy than the sun to do, then perhaps none of them are brilliant ideas and they're all just greenwashing gimmicks but to varying degrees. It's a bit like hydrogen, we definitely need green hydrogen but generally not for the things people think. Cars are just fundamentally going to go electric rather than hydrogen in the overwhelming majority of cases because the energy cost of producing and transporting the hydrogen, as well as the inherent danger, just isn't possible to make smaller than a good efficient battery and motor. The bigger you go in scale e.g. ships/trucks the more hydrogen makes sense, and to make chemicals and maybe steel it makes sense, but it won't go in cars on any scale because, well, physics.
There's lots of difficulties that have to be overcome through engineering, goes without saying, but they can be overcome. It isn't just about "green" for me, though the non-combustive is green. It just happens to be the logical conclusion (economically speaking).
Fusion will likely overtake the centralized grid. At what point do you feel comfortable paying for a fusive energy, which will come, when that doesn't belong to any company and is by its "nature" not that which is subject to supply/demand metrics? There would be an infinite supply of the energy at that point, and a non-infinite demand. What should the price be? Free? But will it? That's just fusion but there's a reason, too, I look beyond it.
And the governments, through universities and taxpayer monies, not corporations (for the most part) have paid for it. It would be a scandal if this was given over to any energy company.
It's worth considering just how enormous the shift is here. Supply/demand is pivotal to all economics. Here it doesn't really exist. You cannot price something higher due to inflation, with fusion, whenever it is available, because it will always be available and in a quantity which is infinite. That's almost the death of capitalism (traditional) by itself. An economy is just energy, really; and this is "just" fusion -- there will be more on the way.
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Will be interesting to see if f the NHS figures have any impact with the next poll, or whether actual positive action isn’t enough for them.
I think the energy debate should probaby have it's own thread now, one thing that doesn't seem to get much attention these days is tidal power, that surely has some scope as a renewable source
I take that to be a disapproval rate for the entire UK institution because the Tories/etc. are saying shit they had 15 years to impose through law. Labour are shite, the Tories were shite, and whoever else would take the office would also be shite.
None of them willing to spend the kind of money required to change the nation for the better.
I don’t think it will be enough
Getting to the point of no return with this government. Have to imagine a lot of people have already made their minds up.
Pretty much.
Blair had to invade Iraq to poll that bad (maybe even not as bad? I have to check the history again). Starmer just had to do the sum total of nothing. The most unimpressive, including Liz Truss, PM in the post-War history. Truss at least had a memorable "that was funny" moment which I still laugh about. Starmer is both unprincipled, boring, and frankly, a weak pile of shite.
Only one of those companies, Schroders, is a tax paying British company, the others are all foreign based and owned. Schroders is a wealth management company, and investment growth is very, very different to government economics.
Its like asking Aston MArtin for advice on running a bus company. Technically, they both involve motor vehicles, but that is where it ends.
I can picture the meeting:
Reeves: Don't fret... When I'm through with these CEOs, funding public services won't be a problem *cocks gun*. I can be very persuasive.
Reeves: C'mon increase investment?
CEOs: No
Reeves: Pleeease?
CEOs: No
Reeves: I'll be your friend.
CEOs: No
Reeves: Aw you're mean
I don't really see them as anything because they don't really stand for anything. The kind of society you describe requires active cultivation.
Again, I don't think we disagree at all about the likely direction of travel of technology, I just think you are taking everything to probably-illogical conclusion. Fusion could generate a lot of energy but it's not unlimited, and it certainly won't be free - you need fuel for one thing. And the odds of just casually whacking a fusion plant in your back garden in the next 20 years seem infinitesimal. If and when it happens it will need big companies/institutions to safely run the plants, it's so much more complicated than solar power it's untrue. You'll need a mighty grid to get the vast amounts of power out cheaply to people and industries across the country, and that will bring its own transformations to the economy as a whole, but you'll still have some bastard trying to rip you off for it, and you'll make something using the energy that you try to rip someone else off for. It's called capitalism.
Although engineering and science can constantly improve the efficiency of a "motion machine", no matter what you do and how impressive your endeavours, you can't make a perpetual motion machine. It is a physical impossibility. Making carbon capture to e-fuels economically viable for most applications in my opinion runs into the same problems - better is highly unlikely to ever be good enough compared to other superior options. It will be the valve to something else's transistor.