I can't find this mentioned anywhere in the article, but the current imbalance of supply and demand and the resulting high prices is quite beneficial for parts of the real estate lobby which don't focus on building houses but on maximizing value from existing properties.
Approximately one in five Members of UK Parliament are landlords or have investments in the property market.
So while the article is advocating for the removal of "barriers that stop the private sector from doing what it already wants to do", it seems to be blissfully unaware of the powerful forces outside and likely WITHIN the political parties that rather prefer to maintain this imbalance...
I don't know why we call it Parliament House, it should be call the House of Lords.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-16/how-many-properties-d...
There are about 11.1 million residential properties in Australia, 30% of which, some 3.25 million residential properties, are held by investors.[1]
There are 25 million people in Australia, about 17.5 million of those are adults aged 25 years or older, of which about 12.8%, or 2.25 million, own one or more investment properties.[1,2]
Let's assume the majority of investment property owners also own their own home.
So, about 13% of Australian adults own about 60% of the housing.
Does that sound reasonable? I don't know if there's some alternate timeline where housing is more evenly distributed and life is better, or how to get there if we think that's a good idea.
1. https://realtyai.com.au/inside-australias-property-boom-how-...
2. https://realtyai.com.au/inside-australias-property-boom-how-...
It's the same problem as here in the US: a bunch of people who have gotten fat off of not providing an equal or better future for the next generation.
https://www.bigissue.com/news/housing/britains-homelessness-...
Yes, getting rid of private landlords would be great but our housing crisis is far, far bigger than that.
Secondly, having a small amount of rental accommodation is useful. If I switch jobs and move cities then having somewhere to rent while I get on my feet is a good thing. I would agree that it's now gone too far though. Perhaps just having a small amount of government rental locations could solve this.
House prices are also way up. Lots of people who own them really like this, but it makes it harder to become a home owner in the first place.
If you upgrade you pay the margin, which is higher. Legal/admin/moving costs tend to be a percentage of house value, so costs are higher.
When you retire you might downsize and release a lot of equity, but that's not going to be true for most house owners (happy to be proved wrong) - downsizing is for the wealthy, if I ever downsize it will be to a cardboard box.
Most home owners will have children, prices being high negatively effects them, and finances tend to be somewhat shared (from 0% upwards...) so prices being high is a problem here too.
Maybe I'm missing something about the situation. I guess my kids will be happy for the money when I die, but it'll be easily eaten up by their housing debts.
So people without dependents; people who are very wealthy. Apart from those groups I don't really see how house value changing after purchase helps
Indeed.
But psychology: monkey likes seeing number go up.
Because as the population grows, we need an equivalent amount of new housing. Short of that, we compete for limited inventory and prices rise.
In the UK (but also most elsewhere), population no longer grows. If censuses say differently, it's because immigrants are being imported from overseas, not from any organic growth. To believe that this is righteous is a strange thing, one has to accept that British people should suffer so that immigrants can gain.
Another issue is that historically low mortgage rates pushed up the maximum price of house that people could afford, and when rates went back up the market stalled out rather than price correct. I don't know how to fix that.
Ah, the class-based society.
It's simple free market economics!
/s
We get a lot of dead towns because of speculation on land.
This is also a reason that Brexit happened. Arguably the reason, even. There are a lot of working-class people whose families have been in the British Isles for centuries who look at the lack of progress relative to what their ancestors saw during the Empire and postwar eras, and want someone to blame. In this case it was Brussels' migration policies, even though it was providing essential labor that the British economy needs and cannot get from "real British" people because they don't have kids at the necessary rate.
Self-fulfilling prophecy... local populations can't grow when they're starved of housing, energy, and most importantly of all, jobs.
But that'd be silly.
The guy with no housing would be better served even with a large cardboard box, but the police would come and take it away from him if he tried.
Banning the symptoms of the problem doesn't solve the problem.
The government (and this hasn't started with the current government) has a policy of high immigration then makes noise about the need of doing more to solve the "housing crisis"...
France has over 4 million more homes available than the UK, as stated in the report linked in TFA.
> With almost identical population sizes, the UK has under 30 million homes, while France has around 37 million. 800,000 British families have second homes compared to 3.4 million French families.
The population (and this hasn't started with the current population) has a tendency to shag around and then make noise about the need of housing (and food, and education, and...)
[0] https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...
I can't understand this disparaging stance against anyone who brings the issue of immigration up.
It is at the highest level on record and the only cause of increasing population but, no the only issue is that we should build more apparently. And we should also do that while saving the climate and the environment.
There are many contradictions and cognitive dissonance here... And the way my comment is shut down is very telling of that.
All the major metros have somehow become a single real estate market. London, NY, Tokyo.
The real estate properties being made are the ones which generate profit, which happen to be for people with ‘large’ amounts of wealth.
Basically - you can worry about immigrants as much as you like, there still wont be affordable housing.
It’s not profitable.
(Terms and conditions apply)
Look at how many people in their 20s were able to buy homes in the 1990s, then look at immigration levels in that decade.
You and the other person who pointed this out got downvoted. As you say, it's forbidden to bring this up. But it's true. Immigration has benefited the very wealthy and upper-middle classes while screwing the middle- and working-classes.
With deficits it's not just spending but also how much revenue you're raising which is instrumental to understanding the problem, and anyone who tries to tell you it's only one or the other is not a reliable narrator. It is similarly the case that access to housing has every bit as much to do with housing policy as it has to do with population dynamics.
>Immigration has benefited the very wealthy and upper-middle classes
A great reason to make more housing and to make housing more accessible to lower and middle classes. Your comment was so rich with pro housing policy subtext that I just want to bring that to the foreground.
However, the emotional aspect of this question is what needs to be addressed.
Britain is leaving its citizens out to dry. Well - you need to get with your legislators and more importantly neighbours and decide that you are ok with new housing being built, which ISNT for the rich, very rich, and super rich.
Actual middle class housing.
You need a boom in construction to start dealing with the fact that there isn’t enough affordable housing available. Hopefully that will give the UK enough to restart its growth, and then tackle the issue of railways.
Most political problems of today stem from the fact that politicians are unwilling to explain this basic fact to their none-too-bright constituents.
Reality is reality. This is why the fascist-lite Italian PM actually increased immigration from Africa after assuming office and taking one look at the numbers.
It's also way higher than it ever was back when Britain was monoracial.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/gbr/uni...
GDP per capita for the US, EU, and some others: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?end=2023...
The US was & is ahead per capita but you can see the EU and Canada taking a big hit in 2008 and going sideways after that.
Here's full GDP. It tells a different story due to the EU's larger population. There have been several occasions where it actually had a larger economy than the US; but every time it seems to hit a roadblock and go sideways for a decade (1980, 1995, 2008): https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?end=2023...
Am I reading this info right?
>> It's also way higher than it ever was back when Britain was monoracial.
Yes, but the immigration model has changed. It used to be "let the best and brightest from around the world work and live in the UK" now it is "let anybody move here that is willing to work for less money".
"But the working assumption of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the government's independent official forecaster, is still that Brexit in the long-term will reduce exports and imports of goods and services by 15% relative to otherwise. It has held this view since 2016, including under the previous Government."
"And the OBR's other working assumption is that the fall in trade relative to otherwise will reduce the long-term size of the UK economy by around 4% relative to otherwise, equivalent to roughly £100bn in today's money."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrynjz1glpo
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
You even didn't include the paragraph prior to your quote:
"It's also clear UK services exports - such as advertising and management consulting - have done unexpectedly well since 2021."
I realise Brexit was a horrible shock for the middle classes that they are still coming to terms with, but I think long term it will be neutral or positive. Now that we have a more pro-UK president there is even scope of trade deals with the USA replacing some of the "lost" EU trade.
Enjoy the kool-aid.
Stay delusional.
You seem very invested in ignoring evidence that before wasn't a great idea. This suggests you're more interested in ideology than evidence-based reasoning. It's distressing that "free thinking" has become an excuse to ignore evidence and pursue vibes-based policy.
So high immigration now is just kicking the ball down the road while destroying your local culture and people in the process.
But I don't really agree this is the appropriate equivalent at least for the "spirit" of a Ponzi scheme. A pyramid scheme exists only when a pyramid is disguised as something else. When it's designed and presented as an actual pyramid it's not a scheme. In the design of the pension system there's no intention of fraud involved (only lack of education maybe), and the system is constantly and very transparently adjusted to widen the pyramid base and narrow the top (increase retirement age, contributor base, or individual contribution).
And yes, the whole economy and benefit systems, including pensions, assume this. This is why it is difficult to face the fact that population cannot keep growing, and in fact it s forecast that will stop growing at global scale by the end of the century. It is even more unsustainable combined with the objective of solving the climate and environmental crisis.
There is a dishonest incoherency with our governments, and just incoherency with large sections of the public.
I cannot believe this article talks about planning constraints and energy prices and doesn't mention that.
I do wonder who is fermenting this - the obvious place to look here is the fossil fuel industry - they have the means, the motive and a track record of flexible morals.
A lot of currently very rich and powerful people lose in a world where most countries and even people can generate most of the power they require.
People might object to the view of wind farms, but they'll also object to any other new building. There are quite a lot of existing power stations in scenic areas! Torness, Longannet, Cockenzie come to mind in the Lothians/Fife area; any one could be seen from miles around, as they were built on the coast for water access. The latter two have been demolished. There is no way you could build them today without a similar huge level of objection. Similarly there is a spot in the plain of Yorkshire where you used to see three coal-fired power stations in relatively close proximity, dominating the countryside.
And if you look around London, you'll see the (long closed and repurposed) Battersea and Bankside powerstations. Yes, people built several massive coal fired power stations right in the middle of the city! No wonder there was a smog problem worse than 90s Beijing or LA. Again, completely inconcievable that you could build them today.
Once you build it and it exists for a few years, the complaints melt away. Leave it long enough and there will be a society for preserving historic wind farms.
BTW I was talking about offshore farms - they are typically only just visible if you are at the coast on a clear day.
Renewable energy is a route to energy independence for various nations that were previously highly dependent on foreign nations and corporations and there are very powerful fossil fuel interconnected groups / nations that are terrified of that.
Russia wants Germany to buy Russian gas. The U.S. wants Europe to buy their gas’s too. The Saudis want Europe to buy their oil. Wind turbines, solar power and electric vehicles are a direct threat to that hegemony.
The other aligned narrative is nuclear and I consider it to be Trojan horse to continued reliance on fossil fuels at least for the next 25-30 years whilst countries like Germany would argue with NIMBY’s and politics to try and even build just one new power station.
I believe that to be the primary root cause of the geopolitical instability we see today globally.
What Germany has done with its reliance on Russian gas is truly insane. Not only they closed nuclear stations, but they also have been closing coal power stations. They should be pushing electrical vehicles and modernization of coal plants instead as China is doing. Even from green perspective an electrical car that uses electricity from a modern coal plant generates less CO2 than a car running on oil products.
Not true - it's just more prevalent in Europe than oil, especially in Germany. And the CO2 emissions are much worse, which is where all this starts from.
I guess, this is the era for consequences
> Uranium is a naturally occurring element found in low levels in all rock, soil, and water. It is the highest-numbered element found naturally in significant quantities on Earth and is almost always found combined with other elements.[12] Uranium is the 48th most abundant element in the Earth’s crust.[60] The decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium-40 in Earth's mantle is thought to be the main source of heat[61][62] that keeps the Earth's outer core in the liquid state and drives mantle convection, which in turn drives plate tectonics.
> Uranium's concentration in the Earth's crust is (depending on the reference) 2 to 4 parts per million,[11][22] or about 40 times as abundant as silver.[17] The Earth's crust from the surface to 25 km (15 mi) down is calculated to contain 10¹⁷ kg (2×10¹⁷ lb) of uranium while the oceans may contain 10¹³ kg (2×10¹³ lb).[11] The concentration of uranium in soil ranges from 0.7 to 11 parts per million (up to 15 parts per million in farmland soil due to use of phosphate fertilizers),[63] and its concentration in sea water is 3 parts per billion.[22]
> Uranium is more plentiful than antimony, tin, cadmium, mercury, or silver, and it is about as abundant as arsenic or molybdenum.[12][22] Uranium is found in hundreds of minerals, including uraninite (the most common uranium ore), carnotite, autunite, uranophane, torbernite, and coffinite.[12] Significant concentrations of uranium occur in some substances such as phosphate rock deposits, and minerals such as lignite, and monazite sands in uranium-rich ores[12] (it is recovered commercially from sources with as little as 0.1% uranium[17]).
Now, 0.1% uranium is 1000 parts per million, which is a lot more than 0.7 to 11. But that doesn't mean current technology is incapable of recovering uranium from these 300× lower concentrations. It's just that it requires processing 300× as much rock, which is expensive, so it can't compete in the market with more concentrated sources.
There is a danger that if you spend 300x more energy to enrich your uranium then you might achieve netzero - but not in a good way.
I understand that you might randomly spread FUD like this if you haven't bothered to do any calculations at all because you don't care whether what you're saying is true or false. You're off by orders of magnitude. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Nuclear_reactio... says uranium as burned in a breeder reactor yields 80TJ/kg; if your soil contains 10ppm of uranium, you're getting 800MJ per kg of soil. Lignite coal is 10–20MJ/kg, so regular soil yields 40–80 times as much energy as a source of uranium as coal does as a source of carbon.
Or, looking at it a different way, to supply a given amount of energy from uranium, you only have to mine about 2% as much random soil as if you were mining coal from an open-air coal deposit. (Subsequent processing is somewhat different, involving leaching with sulfuric acid.) Since mining coal requires significantly less energy than the coal yields, uranium mining is not close to net-zero on its energy return anywhere in the world.
Nuclear reactors are not economically competitive with solar and PV, but that's a different issue.
Now I freely admit I don't know the costs of enrichment. I just used your numbers - you said you'd just have to mine 300 times as much rock - and obviously that's 300 times more expensive - for something which is already not energy cheap.
ie to convince me you have to show the full costs of mining and enrichment, to the point you actually have a fuel that's reactor ready.
And even if that's net positive energy - I'd suspect you'd be much better in investing in wind, hydro, tidal and solar and a decent storage and grid system.
Sometimes I feel nuclear is fetishised because it's cool science - however I'm more interested in practical solutions, and if that means a simple wind or water turbine - so be it.
Happy to be convinced otherwise - but you need to show the numbers.
In the case of things like coal, the energy cost of mining is significant compared to the energy obtained from it. In the case of uranium, simply because the amount of material processed is so small by comparison, it is not significant. As I showed above, it would not even be significant if you have to mine 300 times as much rock as uranium mining currently does.
Obviously you would be better off investing in wind, solar, and storage than in nuclear energy. (Hydroelectric and tidal are less clear wins.) But that's not because sufficiently concentrated uranium deposits are rare. On the contrary, there's literally nowhere on the planet where uranium is insufficiently concentrated.
> The other aligned narrative is nuclear and I consider it to be Trojan horse to continued reliance on fossil fuels at least for the next 25-30 years whilst countries like Germany would argue with NIMBY’s and politics to try and even build just one new power station.
Nuclear is not a Trojan horse, nuclear proliferation and meltdown fears condemned Europe to energy dependence. It's too late now, the capacity should have been built 30 years ago, but the successful fearmongering meant there was virtually no construction for the last 30 years[1].
The real Trojan horse is natural gas, they greenwashed it, invested and continue to invest in natural gas projects[2].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_reactors_in_Euro... 2. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/06/world/eu-votes-natural-ga...
Nuclear is a distraction to defocus from renewables and battery tech. There’s a reason this kind of nuclear propaganda is all over TikTok amongst right wing social media.
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/veroeffentlichungen/studien...
https://www.unendlich-viel-energie.de/projekte/erneuerbar-st...
In France for example the domestic energy production is virtually free from fossil fuels. [1]
In other parts of Europe, all the capacity that renewables provide has been offset by the shutting down of nuclear reactors. Instead of replacing fossil fuels they replaced nuclear. See Germany's energy mix for example [2].
[1]. https://www.iea.org/countries/france/energy-mix (See the second graph) [2]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:...
P.s. I think you meant to write fomenting
I have asked hundreds of local people what they think of them over the years, and not one of them have ever said anything about them spoiling the view. The farmers love them as they get subsidies for putting them on their land, and generally people think they are doing a good thing and are happy to tolerate them.
I personally dont think this is an issue with spoiling the view .
As a tourist I loved the sight of turbines on the far away hills.
They're a damn site nicer to look at than concrete cooling towers or gasometers.
In my experience off-shore wind, even off a popular tourist beech has very little impact. Often just about visible in the haze in the distance.
The impact of onshore wind is definitely more notable. I personally don't find it that offensive, I find them elegant in the day way as an aircraft might be. Also, the blot on the land could be almost completely eradicated in hours if something better was invented tomorrow. Compared to the decades long process of decommissioning even fossil fueled power plants that seems like a pretty big win.
The logic against them seems to be - can't rely on wind power alone ( true - but nobody is suggesting that ), so we must destroy them all as a symbol of 'netzero'. It makes no sense.
>p.s. I think you meant to write fomenting
Yep. Thanks.
Yeh, maybe. But then there is a certain class of people who live lives of wealth and leisure who like to go boating on their $10 million yachts, for whom windmills "spoil the view". And I think their opinions are somewhat consistent regardless of whether they are heavily invested in fossil fuels or not.
If it were just about windmills, the gigantic oil companies are flush with cash to invest in them and don't much care where the profits come from as long as they keep rolling in.
We can have cheap clean energy, it requires a small amount of change, oh no, let's destroy everything instead.
I'm going to start suggesting that planning should have a local referendum: approve this set of projects and you'll get cheaper electricity. Disapprove and your bill goes up. Democratic choice, but with consequences.
And the switch to zonal energy pricing will likely have a similar effect for other sources of generation.
[0] https://www.dw.com/en/brell-lithuania-latvia-and-estonia-tur...
We will see a return of composure as central element communications culture. If you get emotional or irrational angry, you are considered possessed, ridden by loas and not worthy of communication.
"I say Sir, the rabble seems to be quite in tatters and without a plan, all back and forth on windmills, but ultimately in the dark."
They went a full month with zero coal electricity generation back in 2020 and 2025 will be entirely coal free.
Even natural gas is in decline.
Not directly stated about wind power, but there is this account of why lawsuits might be common, slowing and derailing projects because the damages if you lose in your complaint are capped at a relatively low figure (not low for the average person, but not that expensive either).
I think this is very high for the average person.
There are a lot of rich people in the U.K.
£5k for someone with £2m in assets and fears losing £200k due to the “blight” of a power plant is not a lot.
due to the screwed up energy pricing system, if there's a single watt of electricity in the grid produced by burning gas, we pay for the entire grid output as if it was gas
Such a behavior only happens on artificial markets that have been designed for that purpose to match an ideological vision of how an “ideal market” should behave.
Turns out the “ideal market” is a dystopia instead of the intended utopia.
Why? This market is pretty much ideal and sets the right incentives. You have little to no information asymmetry, you need to strike a price that clears the market because you must balance production and demand.
Why should sellers of renewable energy be forced to sell at their marginal cost when they are selling a commodity where somebody else gets triple the price?
Says whom?
> Why should sellers of renewable energy be forced to sell at their marginal cost when they are selling a commodity where somebody else gets triple the price?
It doesn't make sense to force them to sell at their marginal cost either (which is much less than their operating cost, consisting mostly of fixed costs).
In fact, in real life, for most good or services the marginal price is decreasing with volume (or even zero for most of the supply curve with occasional spikes), pricing at the marginal cost means you're pricing way below the average cost and will drive all businesses to their doom.
In the electricity world, this kind of pricing only makes sense for electricity produced from fossil fuel as the marginal cost represents most the underlying cost, but it makes zero sense for renewable or nuclear where the cost is swallowed upfront and close to zero afterwards.
I do and given the practice is pretty common, it seems like most people would.
To be clear, the incentive is: you make more money when you can produce energy cheaper than everybody else.
> In the electricity world, this kind of pricing only makes sense for electricity produced from fossil fuel as the marginal cost represents most the underlying cost, but it makes zero sense for renewable or nuclear where the cost is swallowed upfront and close to zero afterwards.
Are capital costs not real underlying costs? If I borrow money from a bank I have to return that money plus interest. I would argue that this is a very real cost. Also, renewables do require maintenance. That is not as expensive as the ongoing cost of burning fossil fuel, but it’s still a cost
Definitely not “most people”, only the small number of economists and politicians that designed these scheme.
> To be clear, the incentive is: you make more money when you can produce energy cheaper than everybody else.
Which is a bad incentive for an electricity market, because as I said above, “energy” is free basically free for both renewable and nuclear. What ain't free is “installed power”. And what customers need is “available power”. If you design a virtual market around things that have nothing to do with the underlying physical reality of the actual value being produced, it's simply never going to work well.
> Are capital costs not real underlying costs? If I borrow money from a bank I have to return that money plus interest. I would argue that this is a very real cost.
It is a “real cost” indeed, but it cost you the same whether you produce electricity or not, it's a fixed, upfront, cost, not a marginal cost.
> Also, renewables do require maintenance. That is not as expensive as the ongoing cost of burning fossil fuel, but it’s still a cost
Most of maintenance aren't linked to how much electricity you've produced (for solar, for instance, it only depends on time, and cost you the exact same amount whether or not you've produced any electricity), so it's again not a marginal cost but a fixed one.
And let say you restrict yourself to the maintenance that depends on electricity production (for nuclear, refueling maintenance is like that) you'll end up with a marginal cost that is very low compared to your average cost, and if you price at marginal cost then you're going to go bankrupt.
For illustration say operating your 1GW solar plant cost 200 million a year in fixed costs (including maintenance and the cost of capital) and then it costs 0 to produce a MWh as long as the sun is up. If you price it at marginal cost, then you'll never make any money, so the only hope you have is that in a long enough period the market prices will be high due to the marginal cost of fossil fuel plants, in a way that it ends up covering your fixed costs. But, as a plant owner/manager, you have absolutely no control over that, you aren't being incentivized into doing anything.
Typically what existed in France and other places of Europe before we decided to “liberalize the energy market”.
There isn’t an ideal free market in electricity generation.
In commodities market, the strike price is between the lowest price seller and the highest buyer.
In the goods market, individual buyers buy depending on their elasticity of demand unless the good has inelastic demand (rare).
Neither matches what you seem to say.
The lowest seller price is the highest demanded price among all the sellers. All the sellers bar one would typically be willing to sell for a slightly lower price. As it is said; prices are set on the margins.
Imagine that every seller has a secret price they are willing to sell for and that is some statistical distribution. The market price will be the highest price in that distribution that actually gets sold. Most sellers aren't selling for their secretly acceptable price, but for a higher price determined by the seller with the highest demands. The distribution, if it is ever discovered, becomes the supply curve.
Different energy sources contribute unequally to that second important factor - the stability of the grid - and that has to be factored in somehow. Nuclear, gas, hydro-electric storage and buying from abroad provide that stability in the UK.
How it's done - I've no idea - but it's not just a question of units of electricity.
One way is to bring in more surge pricing however people like the predictability of stable prices.
Your renewable energy is worth 0 if it can't meet that need. No other power supply anywhere works on the principle of "yay maybe!". It's not a fucking game, it's our capacity to heat, to operate industrial processes that are equally worthless if interrupted. I've been involved in ordering steel. The UK-spec was uncompetitive if free, because of the unpredictability in delivery, directly downstream from the unpredictability in power. THERE IS A WAR ON.
The coal or nuclear plant that commits to generating a set amount consistently but never even attempting to meet the actual demand is some kind of hoax?
In reality we're moving from baseload and peaker gas plants to follow demand to renewables and firming (the same gas plants just running at different times). It's a holistic system with parts working together.
The main difference is that renewables are cheaper and cleaner which gets them built faster and displaces more and more coal and gas from the market. With batteries eating the market from the other direction (starting with daily peaks and expanding out from there).
You can see this in carbon intensity of electricity production and the ever increasing share of renewables around the world.
Of course that plan falters a bit if you ban cheap onshore wind across an entire nation for a decade.
Instead there would be electric relay connected to mains in your home and when there is less supply than demand you would get blackout. That would be similar comparison to this.
People would install a battery at home the way most of the world installs solar and they’d see massive reductions in electricity bills more than paying for the battery. The UK is absolutely terrible location for solar, and it’s still installed because UK’s electricity prices are so high.
That said, wind going to absolutely zero nationwide is extremely unlikely but the more people who signed up for such a system eventually just a little power wouldn’t be enough for all of them. So there’s be an economic feedback loop.
That said with a battery and dynamic prices, there are many days where you can charge a battery when the prices are low and use them battery when the prices are high.
Hedges like this are a useful risk mitigation strategy as going bankrupt is a much larger downside than making slightly more money.
So the consumer does not gain anything.
Wholesale prices are really just one aspect of grid manufacturing and paying them doesn’t mean you’re getting the equivalent of a percentage of wind farm productivity.
Tesco doesn't care if the freezers in store run at 04:00-04:15, or 04:30-04:45, and will pick whichever is cheaper.
Open cycles gas turbines are extremely cheap to build and expensive to run. For a green future these can be run on biofuels, hydrogen or hydrogen derivatives.
Therefore they perfectly complement renewables.
Nuclear power on the other hand is an awful companion due to having extremely large fixed costs and acceptable marginal running costs.
1. https://www.amazon.com/Price-Wrong-Capitalism-Wont-Planet/dp...
We get anything from storms to hail few times a year here. My patio roof got holes in it from the ice balls, but the panels are fine. Are you missing some qualifiers on that one?
> get dirty
You clean them every few months or monitor for issues per group of panels.
> require significant maintenance
Just like every other device out in the real world. Coal, gas, wind, solar, nuclear, thermal generators require maintenance.
> they get destroyed by weather
A few of them, every year. It makes a visible dent on their average longevity.
But I don't think distributing them has any impact on this. They just create a risk situation that nobody seems to be insuring and that large farms will self insure without problems. (Anyway, with the price going down the way it is, that will soon become irrelevant.)
> get dirty
Each person stopping to clean their own panels is much less efficient than professional cleaning centralized panels. It does increase your electricity costs.
> require significant maintenance
Home maintenance is an entire other level of inefficiency. That extends to any kind of equipment in your home.
But again, none of those is a big deal. Solar is mostly operation-free, so distribution mostly doesn't matter.
Oh no we have no single point of failure, empower people to invest into the grid and have huge redundancies in the grid... Batteries literally solve most of the problems
https://themarketbull.com.au/2025/02/07/lithium-remains-a-ke...
Nickel-Iron batteries are very good for this purpose: practically unlimited charge-discharge cycles and overcharging/overdischarging won't damage them. They should be dirt-cheap too, but almost there are very few manufacturers so there's not much competition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_United_Kingdom_miners%27_...
E. G. See this article on a Lazarus report. https://reneweconomy.com.au/wind-and-solar-power-half-the-co...
In other words you need to deal with times when the wind isn't blowing, or when people need more (or less) power than you're producing. The way you'd do this is through excessive production during good times, and then storing the surplus in batteries, artificial hydroelectric, or other such means - and then delivering from those sources as necessary. But doing this sends the real cost per unit much higher. The storage process also entails some (to a significant amount - depending on the type of storage) energy loss as well, so you end up needing to produce more than 1 unit of electricity to get 1 unit.
FWIW I'm a huge advocate for solar, so this isn't some random smear on renewables - it's something that needs to be accounted for and which LCOE fails to do.
I find them much more appealing than the power plant near me that dumps columns of soot into my skyline.
> and remarkably bad for wildlife
This talking point is really exaggerated. It's effectively fossil fuel propaganda. The effect on wildlife is downright cuddly compared to the effects of burning fossil fuels. You might have an argument if you're comparing wind to solar.
> low capacity factor power
> "Low capacity factor power" refers to a power source that generates electricity at a significantly lower average output compared to its maximum potential, meaning it doesn't operate at full capacity for a large portion of the time, typically due to factors like weather dependence or intermittent availability; examples include solar and wind power, which experience fluctuations based on sunlight and wind speed respectively, resulting in a lower capacity factor compared to more consistent sources like nuclear power.
Another point: Isn't the purpose of building wind turbines on the open ocean to capture more regular winds (compared to land-based wind turbines)? Wouldn't that improve capacity factor power?
About "soul-crushingly ugly": I never once saw a chemical refinery, nor a large-scale, modern hospital, that was anything other than "soul-crushingly ugly", but we need them in a modern society. So we try to carefully plan where/when/how they are built.
This is what significant investment in nuclear does. Even the countries that invested the most in renewables can't beat it, yet. I'm very curious to see how long it will take the renewable-only countries to catch up, especially considering that emissions accumulate.
> France has way more dirty industry
Unfortunately no, and maybe I should have phrased that with a little more doubt. Still, I think it's very likely true, given the sheer size difference between the two (geographically), and the fact that France has a massive auto industry, while the Netherlands does not.
Intermittent sources are a good way to supplement dispatchable sources of energy like gas plants or hydroelectricity. But as a primary source of energy, they're not feasible without a massive breakthrough in energy storage.
E.g. today in Germany you can buy MWh at 14€ at 13:00 and sell it back at 180€ at 18:00. I didn't look all of Europe but it looked like the biggest spread today... You can make money with crappy storage under those conditions...
Remember, 66.8 TWh of electricity is used daily. Intermittent sources don't just experience daily fluctuations, but seasonal fluctuations lasting days or weeks. Even 12 hours of storage would still leave us with periods of insufficient production multiple orders of magnitude more frequent than the status quo: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
Intermittent sources are baseload, your argument applies to any baseload system, I.e. you always need some additional dispatchable energy source (unless you over build by large amounts). Again if your main energy would be e.g. nuclear you need even higher amount of dispatchable power because if your nuclear plant goes down (planned or unplanned) you need to compensate for a lot of power.
This statement is about as incorrect as it is possible to be, as even a cursory attempt to check this before posting would show.
It is difficult to understand why anyone makes claims such as this, unless they are consciously or unconsciously attempting to redefine a word that already has a well-understood meaning.
For residential uses, heating, cooling, and refrigeration are the main uses.
For commercial electricity use: computing, refrigeration, cooling, and ventilation.
For industrial electricity use: machine drive (lathes, mills, etc.), process and boiler heating, facility heating and cooling, electrochemical process.
The only categories that I guess could be easily shifted is process and boiler heating. But some industrial processes need to run uninterrupted for weeks. Machine drive, perhaps, but then workers would not be able to work a regular schedule. Not to mention, industrial applications in total is less than 25% of electricity use.
Demand shifting is a lot easier said than done. I see it proposed very frequently, but I've yet to see a detailed plan for what electricity uses will be shifted, and how.
Heating and cooling can be offloaded into grid peak availability hours relatively easily with the price serving as a reliable trigger. This assumes proper insulation for the most part, but is viable and using the price as an indicator automatically sets up the right incentives. As for refrigeration, the energy use for that in a private household seems to be overstated.
> For commercial electricity use: computing, refrigeration, cooling, and ventilation
For cooling the same applies as for private households, maybe to a lesser extent. The other loads remain pretty static in their demand, but once a commercial operation has a certain scale building out the own battery storage to optimize for purchasing price (assuming a flexible price that reflects spot pricing) may be a viable strategy.
> For industrial electricity use: machine drive (lathes, mills, etc.), process and boiler heating, facility heating and cooling, electrochemical process.
For boiler heating and facility heating and cooling the same applies as for commercial and residential uses. For other energy intense workloads, demand shift is already frequently happening because the ROI is fairly quick. It’s not easy to assess from the outside because you do need an in depth process understanding that you just cannot provide as an outsider. But I have personally witnessed plenty of examples that demonstrate it is well within the realm of possibility
> For boiler heating and facility heating and cooling the same applies as for commercial and residential uses.
Note that this refers to "process and boiler heating". There's plenty of industrial processes that need to be kept at temperature for long periods of time, otherwise the batch is ruined. Titanium smelting is one example. I've yet to see a breakdown of what specific industrial processes can be shifted.
If you try to offload it otherwise you just waste power heating/cooling yourself at wrong hours.
A boiler in this setup is a thermal battery. These are good, but space consuming and relatively failure prone and expensive to maintain. Inefficient compared to central too.
Tackling climate crisis requires All The Above.
Wind, nukes, solar farms, tidal, whatever, by themselves, aren't silver bullets.
We also need heat pumps, renovations (insulation, air sealing), district heating, etc. That's just for housing.
We could also talk all day about industry and agriculture.
As the saying goes: The opportunities are insurmountable!
The French grid would collapse without 30 GW of fossil based production to manage cold spells.
This is Frances' electricity generation breakdown: https://aleasoft.com/france-leading-european-nuclear-energy-...
Fossil fuels are 7%.
You said:
> Non-intermittent sources of energy don't need to be supplemented by alternative sources of energy.
Like I said the. The French grid would crash during cold spells if not supplemented with 30 GW of fossil fueled power production.
I'd suggest reading people's comments in greater detail, before accusing people of lying.
Lazard expects peakers to run at 10-15% capacity factor because you know, how often do we have cold spells in France or whatever other reason causes them to run? A couple of weeks a year at most. Lets say 15%.
Lets calculate what Hinkley Point C costs when running as a peaker. It has a CFD at $170/MWh for 30 years. Lets assume it runs at a 85% capacity factor and that $20/MWh are O&M costs.
153/0.15 + 20 = $1040/MWh
You want to solve the problem by forcing electricity costs on the consumers at double of the peak of the energy crisis.
All because you view the world in nuclear fanclub fantasy land glasses.
You're right that nuclear is more expensive than continuing to burn fossil fuels. And the reality is nobody has a plan to build fossil fuel free grid based on wind and solar. Absent a miraculous breakthrough in energy storage, solar and wind will always have to be deployed in tandem with fossil fuels. If we're looking at actually eliminating carbon emissions, nuclear is the only viable option besides geographically limited sources like hydropower.
Typical. Let me quote you:
> They could always build more nuclear plants to fill additional demand.
And then
> If you've already provisioned enough nuclear plants to meet peak energy demand, producing less energy has no marginal cost.
If the magic tooth fairy comes with free nuclear plants... Nuclear cult member fantasy land.
So at what capacity factor will the entire fleet run at when built out to manage both outages and cold spells requiring 30 GW of fossil fuels to handle?
France currently run their fleet of 63 GW at a ~70% capacity factor. Add another 30 GW (lets call it 100% reliable when a cold spell hits) and the capacity factors vastly lower due to extremely low utilization factors of the last 30 GW.
You can spread out the lower of capacity factors across the entire fleet or just let the peakers bear them.
But in the end the results are the same because you still need to finance the your fleet now delivering a measly 45% capacity factor.
Lets translate a 45% capacity factor to Hinkley Point C numbers:
Now you are forcing the consumers to pay $355/MWh or 35.5 cents per kWh for all electricity delivered the whole year.
All you have done is take the ~$1000/MWh cost from 15% of the time and spread it out over the whole year.
Do you see the pure insanity of what you keep proposing now?
What's the alternative to nuclear power for reaching a carbon-free grid? No doubt, your plan will assume a breakthrough in energy storage that delivers orders-of-magnitude more scale than existing solutions.
> It is the only viable path to decarbonization for most countries.
The research disagrees with you.
See the recent study on Denmark which found that nuclear power needs to come down 85% in cost to be competitive with renewables when looking into total system costs for a fully decarbonized grid, due to both options requiring flexibility to meet the grid load.
> Focusing on the case of Denmark, this article investigates a future fully sector-coupled energy system in a carbon-neutral society and compares the operation and costs of renewables and nuclear-based energy systems.
> The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources.
> However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour.
> For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
Or the same for Australia if you went a more sunny locale finding that renewables ends up with a grid costing less than half of "best case nth of a kind nuclear power":
https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost2024-25Co...
Or if you want meta analysis have articles like:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
But they are of course all wrong by some tiny insignificant factor you will now pick up and attempt to blow up like it would be the end of the world.
There was a first large scale attempt at scaling nuclear power culminating 40 years ago. Nuclear power peaked at ~20% of the global electricity mix in the 1990s. It was all negative learning by doing.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
Then we tried again 20 years ago. There was a massive subsidy push. The end result was Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto and Flamanville. We needed the known quantity of nuclear power since no one believed renewables would cut it.
How many trillions in subsidies should we spend to try one more time? All the while the competition in renewables are already delivering beyond our wildest imaginations.
China is barely investing in nuclear power. At their current buildout which have been averaging 5 construction starts per year since 2020 they will at saturation reach 2-3% total nuclear power in their electricity mix.
China is all in on renewables [1]() and [2] storage.
Then rounding of with some typical ”SMRs” nonsense!!!
SMRs have been complete vaporware for the past 70 years.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc...
Or just this recent summary on how all modern SMRs tend to show promising PowerPoints and then cancel when reality hits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XECq9uFsy6o
Simply look to:
- mPower: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%26W_mPower
- NuScale: https://oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2024/10/29/the-rise-and-f...
And the rest of the bunch adding costs for every passing year and then disappearing when the subsidies run out.
[1]: https://reneweconomy.com.au/chinas-quiet-energy-revolution-t...
[2]: https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-storag...
The article you posted from sciencedirect supports this. The study points primarily to a changing complex regulation landscape as a primary driver of costs. Meanwhile, France is in an excellent position in the EU in terms of energy in large part because it stuck with nuclear instead of attempting unsuccessfully to transfer to wind and solar like some of it's neighbors (who now burn lignite to meet energy demands).
Solar panels, for instance, are mostly made in places where actual costs of construction are externalized to the environment and workers with depressed wages. Nuclear plants need to be built and decommissioned in the same place - places that are often actively hostile with complex regulation meant to curtail nuclear specifically for the sake of non-proliferation. SMRs help sidestep a portion of this hostile regulation but there are countless reactor designs that are possible that we can't even begin to explore until regulation is made reasonable.
We should of course keep our existing fleet around as long as it is safe, needed and economical.
Then you round of with an endless stream of excuses as to why nuclear power does not deliver.
The only thing hindering nuclear power is its economics. Otherwise less regulated countries would pounce on the opportunity to have cheaper energy. That hasn’t happened.
Where nuclear power has a good niche it gets utilized, and no amount of campaigning limits it. One such example are submarines.
So stop attempting to shift the blame and go invest your own money in advancing nuclear power rather than crying for another absolutely enormous government handout when the competition in renewables already deliver on that said promise: extremely cheap green scalable energy.
Unsubsidized renewables are today cheaper than fossil fuels. Lets embrace that rather than wasting another trillion dollars on nuclear subsidies.
You do know that nuclear power as a share of the Chinese electricity mix is dropping?
> Storage of energy is an important element of 100% RE systems, especially when using large shares of variable sources like solar and wind [14], [40]–[42], and it can take various forms [43]–[45]. Batteries can supply efficient short term storage, while e-fuels can provide long-term storage solutions. Other examples are mechanical storage in pumped hydro energy storage [46], [47] and compressed air energy storage [48], [49], and thermal energy in a range of storage media at various temperature levels [43], [50].
Nowhere do they actually outline how much storage of each system they will provision. How many TWh of batteries? How many TWh of pumped hydro? Totally unanswered. They just mention the existence of storage, and avoid any tangible discussion of scale. Like I said, there's no realistic plans for a grid primarily powered by intermittent sources. The storage required for such a grid is orders of magnitude larger than what can be feasibly provisioned.
This isn't a tiny insignificant detail. It's is a foundational part of a primarily renewable grid. And nobody has a plan to solve it that doesn't amount to "assume some different system, which has never been deployed at scale, can tens of terawatt hours of storage".
In the real world the energy crisis was a cost crisis. But you seem to no care the slightest about massively increasing the ratepayers bills and by that creating a new self made energy crisis. This time fueled by nuclear subsidies.
So you skipped the first two studies. I suppose because you found nothing to complain about in them. Good to know.
Then you go on a meta-analysis on the entire field and demand them to produce a TWH figure for some energy system you can't even specify.
You truly are grasping for the straws.
Here's the quote you missed:
> Much of the resistance towards 100% RE systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible since these energy sources are variable. Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276]. However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]– [282]; storage [40]– [43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]– [92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place.
> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive. Variability, especially short term, has many mitigation options, and energy system studies are increasingly capturing these in their 100% RE scenarios.
With the conclusion based on the meta-analysis:
> The main conclusion of the vast majority of 100% renewable energy systems studies is that such systems can power all energy in all regions of the world at low cost. As such, we do not need to rely on fossil fuels in the future. In the early 2020s, the consensus has increasingly become that solar PV and wind power will dominate the future energy system and new research increasingly shows that 100% renewable energy systems are not only feasible but also cost effective. This gives us the key to a sustainable civilization and the long-lasting prosperity of humankind.
Since the study was released in mid 2022 has it become easier to harder to create 100% renewable energy systems? Easier.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
And don't come and tell me that the Uranium supply chain is cleanest thing known to mankind. It currently is generally outsourced from the west because the enormous amounts of cost managing the externalities adds. Especially the processing steps from raw uranium to fuel rods.
Nowhere in that quote does it list how much of each type of storage is required. Again, they just list a range of storage systems, most of them never deployed at scale, and just don't even bother to lay out a concrete plan. The quotes you're posting are fitting this pattern of vague statements about storage and a total absence of concrete plans.
How many TWh of batteries? How many TWh of pumped hydro? How many TWh of some more exotic storage systems like compressed air or hydrogen? There's a reason why plans for a renewable grid don't go into this detail and stick to vague statement: actually sketching out how much storage would be required would show just how infeasible it really is.
Like I said, proponents of a mostly renewable grid don't have a plan to address intermittency. Or rather their plan is, "assume something solves storage, and don't worry about it".
Trying to frame it like you disprove something when you truly don’t. You can go and read the individual studies it sources the statements from, which are then used to build those arguments arguments.
But I suppose that is too hard when you gotta find any possible straw to grasp instead of accepting reality.
Lets go back to the to studies you’ve decided to completely ignore. Likely because they answer your complaints and you haven’t found any nitpick to paint as the end of the world.
So again:
See the recent study on Denmark which found that nuclear power needs to come down 85% in cost to be competitive with renewables when looking into total system costs for a fully decarbonized grid, due to both options requiring flexibility to meet the grid load.
> Focusing on the case of Denmark, this article investigates a future fully sector-coupled energy system in a carbon-neutral society and compares the operation and costs of renewables and nuclear-based energy systems.
> The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources.
> However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour.
> For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
Or the same for Australia if you went a more sunny locale finding that renewables ends up with a grid costing less than half of "best case nth of a kind nuclear power":
https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost2024-25Co...
No, you have not. The quotes you posted just list various storage systems and don't bother to set specific capacity requirements. I'll ask again:
How many TWh of battery storage are provisioned in your hypothetical 100% renewable world?
How many TWh of pumped hydro?
How many TWh of other storage? And what are these alternative storage systems?
The posts you link only talk about the cost of storage, but not the total capacity requirements. This is important, because 12 hours of storage for global electricity consumption is 30TWh. Only about 1 TWh of batteries are produced each year globally. So actually trying to provision grid scale storage would massively increase battery demand and drive up prices. This is the a reason why nobody wants to talk about the total capacity requirements for a primarily renewable grid.
However lets say that it is 12 hours/30TWh. In 2023, the world produced ~1.1 TWH of batteries. In 2014, the world produced 0.05 TWH of batteries (with steady growth year over year while prices fell by 10x). If you give grid scale batteries a 5 year lifespan (before recycling), that means we need 6TWh/year of grid scale battery production, which at current rates of increase in battery production, we are 5-7 years away from.
For comparison, 5-7 years is roughly the time it takes to build a single nuclear reactor.
> However lets say that it is 12 hours/30TWh. In 2023, the world produced ~1.1 TWH of batteries. In 2014, the world produced 0.05 TWH of batteries (with steady growth year over year while prices fell by 10x). If you give grid scale batteries a 5 year lifespan (before recycling), that means we need 6TWh/year of grid scale battery production, which at current rates of increase in battery production, we are 5-7 years away from.
Even ignoring the fact that 12 hours is insufficient, you're making the following assumptions:
1. The production of batteries will sextuple in the next 5-7 years.
2. 100% (or close to 100%) of battery production will be dedicated to grid storage.
3. Electricity consumption will remain static.
The first one may or may not pan out. Battery production is already bottlenecked by resource extraction, and it's unclear if the rate of extraction can keep up. The nature of extraction is that once easily accessible deposits are exhausted, companies shift to the harder-to-access deposits. This is only economically viable if cost increases enough to incentivize that investment. The HN crowd tends to assume that everything adheres to Moore's law, but that doesn't work in reality. The price of steel, for instance, doesn't exponentially decline.
The second two are certainly not true. EV are predicted to make up the vast majority of battery sales. Redirecting batteries to grid storage would necessitate delaying EV adoption, ultimately increasing emissions. Stationary storage accounts for a small fraction of battery production (https://rmi.org/the-rise-of-batteries-in-six-charts-and-not-...). Electric vehicles only account for a bit under 20% of vehicle sales worldwide. With many countries slated to stop sales of ICE vehicles in the next 5-10 years, we're still looking at most future battery production going to satisfy EV demand even if it grows to 6TWh per year as per your assumptions.
And electricity use will certainly increase. Both as poorer countries develop and start deploying air conditioning and other electricity consumption. And as other sources of primary energy consumption is shifted to electricity. Remember, electricity generation only makes up ~40% of total energy consumption. The remainder will have to be converted to electricity as part of full decarbonization.
Also my battery assumptions were missing the fact that the world already has ~5TWh of hydro which can be used as a battery (even when not pumped hydro by releasing only when you need power).
Why do you keep dodging? Because you truly can't bring yourself to read anything that would disprove your nuclear fanboyism? You truly keep tumbling strawmen instead of disproving the studies.
Pathetic.
I'll add the studies without any picked out quotes:
See the recent study on Denmark which found that nuclear power needs to come down 85% in cost to be competitive with renewables when looking into total system costs for a fully decarbonized grid, due to both options requiring flexibility to meet the grid load.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
Or the same for Australia if you went a more sunny locale finding that renewables ends up with a grid costing less than half of "best case nth of a kind nuclear power":
https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost2024-25Co...
Come one now. Stop dodging! Is accepting that nuclear power is horrifically expensive that scary? Is your income dependent on the nuclear industry?
Labour have pledged to bring it back down to 2030, but when they begin the talks with the motor industry to try to achieve this they will fold like they have done several times so far in this government.
Intermittent sources don't just experience daily fluctuation, but also seasonal fluctuation. Even just 3 days of storage amounts to an impossible amount of batteries to provision, even assuming growing battery production capacity. Not to mention, even modest amounts of battery grid storage would severely hamper EV adoption, which would increase emissions.
There's a reason why most plans for a primarily wind and solar grid assume that there will be some technological breakthrough that solves storage: hydrogen, compressed air, alternative battery chemistries, etc. are really common to see in plans for a primarily renewable grid.
1. https://interactanalysis.com/insight/global-li-ion-battery-s...
There will likely always be some gas peaking but we're talking less than a percent per year (maybe a few single digit percent in some places where solar isn't as good but still not much).
1. https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100pct-renewable-grid-for...
Europe, for example, is the other way around for most of the above.
That's still a gap two orders of magnitude larger than existing standards:
> Meanwhile, reliability standards in industrialized countries are typically very high (e.g., targeting <2–3 h of unplanned outages per year, or ~99.97%17). Resource adequacy planning standards for “1-in-10” are also high: in North America (BAL-502-RF-03)18, generating resources must be adequate to provide no more than 1 day of unmet electricity demand—or in some cases 1 loss of load event—in 10 years (i.e., 99.97% or 99.99%, respectively)19.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
Even leaving 1% of demand unfulfilled amounts to multiple orders of magnitude more frequent electricity production shortfalls. Figures like "fulfill 99% of electricity demand" might sound promising, until you compare against the standards of reliability modern society expects of the electrical grid.
And that's in Australia, quite literally the best-case scenario for renewables. By comparison, in Germany even 12 hours of storage would only satisfy 80-90% of demand.
But some of us are trying to stop, not merely delay, climate change.
The idea that if we can't have a renewable grid identical to the fossil fuel grid, then we may as well stick with the fossil fuel grid even if it means the end of the world is a bit weird.
The UK's biggest energy need is heating, but the housing stock in the UK is famously shitty, 38% of homes were built before 1946 and it's the worst value for money of any developed country[1]. It isn't well insulated, triple-glazed, heat-pump fitted, using local industrial waste heat for home heating.
Heat is harder to move than electricity, but easy and cheap to store - this 2019 pilot project can store 130MWh of heat for up to a week[2], something we couldn't reasonably or cheaply do with 130MWh of electricity.
It's possible that energy and electricity requirements could be reduced meaningfully without dropping quality of life, and that meaningful amounts of energy could be stored in heat and synthetic gas[3] rather than in more expensive electric charge storage.
[Is this used Nissan Leaf at 30kWh for £2,000 the cheapest battery storage I could buy in the UK right now?[4]]
[1] top few results from https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=uk+housing+stock+low+qualit...
[2] https://www.siemensgamesa.com/global/en/home/press-releases/...
[3] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/were-going-to-...
[4] https://www.autotrader.co.uk/car-details/202502289581699
This is such a bullshit argument it really paints the rest of your comment in a bad light. You can get so far by just storing up to 12 hours OF NIGHT TIME on a local level. Who cares about the 5% of times where we have to burn natural gas to stabilise the grid.
95% renewable is orders of magnitude better than today. Anyone saying different is literally a grifter.
Also battery storage cost prognosis is 50% less in 5-6 years. Batteries are already cost effective and there are a lot of grid storage options build right now.
You can find out how much energy Europe stores in gas fields to get through the winter. You can divide that number by what you think is a reasonable sCOP for your heat pump. That number you can put next to total battery capacity ever produced, and I'll even let you add any other convertible energy storage capacity. You will find a gap off by orders of magnitude, and powerwalls in every home are not going to cover it. As you said, they'll cover a day, maybe a few, which leaves us 3 months short in the season where we have virtually no home solar.
That then doubles your storage for gas that you may or may not need to burn depending on the weather.
So really the path to fully renewable just goes through a series of win-wins on the journey to fully phase out fossil fuels.
No one is building a natural gas plant to staff it and let it sit idle for 95% of the time. The natural gas burned is only a fraction of its input costs.
Battery storage is headed in the right direction but the fact almost all articles on the subject can’t even get the units correct as it would betray how ridiculously small the deployments actually are is quite telling in itself.
The grifting are those pretending magic natural gas backing plants are going to pop up out of nowhere and not including that capital or maintenance expense when quoting intermittent power source costs.
Right now those sources have been able to cherry pick the cheap and easy problems to solve since they’ve been using someone else’s power when they can’t meet demand. Eventually you run out of it though.
Cheap intermittent sources have their place, and should be used maximally wherever possible. For example every watt of hydro production should have a watt of solar or wind built on top of it. Store the water for when the intermittent sources can’t keep up with demand.
Serious question: why do you think that’s true? If it costs X per year to run it 5% of the year and you save more than X with this strategy, then the maths is simple and someone will build it. Several energy companies could probably be convinced to each pay a share so no one is left footing the whole bill but everyone benefits from the existence of the facility. If the maths works, potentially even some of the cost could be passed on to the taxpayer.
In the UK we already have a couple of facilities that operate exactly like this, Cruachan for example (it’s not gas, it’s water). Over the years, ways to improve its utilisation have been found, but it’s still sitting there at a relatively low portion of its capacity so that it can black start the grid if it’s ever needed.
Because it has been, at least thus far. Perhaps in the hazy future this will change, and some regulatory/capacity/energy market will evolve into making such things profitable by paying someone to build underutilized power plants. I know of no such market currently.
I'm only somewhat familiar with the US market, not the UK. But a single plant is really not interesting for the discussion at hand. It can be considered a cost of doing business to have such a plant be useful for "black starts" - but that's all a single plant will ever be useful for. If it's ever being used for such a purpose you've already lost the game.
The scale is what matters. A single power plant that is 1% of your grid capacity being utilized 5% of the time is an expense that can probably be justified. Hundreds of power plants that match 100% (or close to it) of your grid capacity used 5% of the time would be an economically unjustifiable expense as you've effectively built your entire generation capacity twice.
Right now that's what we would be talking about building since every regional grid seems to experience week (or longer) periods where intermittent power generation is extremely unreliable due to weather events. It's not 100%, but it's close to it. You need to plan for the 1000 year event for something as critical as a national grid or folks literally start dying and the economic impact is astronomical.
I don't know what the exact capacity factor you'd need to have for a reasonable intermittent:dispatchable ratio, but it's certainly quite a lot higher than most would seemingly believe. Once batteries get to the point of backing the entire grid for a single night while the wind doesn't blow there might be signs of change. In most markets in the US where batteries are considered huge successes they have only recently (in the past year or two) transitioned from providing ancillary services to actual energy production for regular daily usage during the duck curve.
This can all be solved in time and in theory with a number of technologies and additional grid interconnection. But the trends simply are not as positive as one would like to see when you start delving into primary sources.
Maybe, but the UK has 4, and is building another 5 in the next 5 years.
Average grid consumption is somewhere around 30GW, the existing facilities have around 30GWh of storage. The additional 5 should bring around another 100GWh.
So we’re already at 1 hour’s worth of grid capacity stored, by 2030 we’ll be at 4 hours, and that’s assuming absolutely zero energy from other sources (wind, solar, nuclear, fossil fuel, biomass, other countries), although to be fair the existing facilities can only deliver at around 3GW, and the new facilities will only bring that up to 6GW.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever been to the UK, but a whole week without either sun or wind seems a bit unlikely, especially when half of the UKs wind comes from offshore wind farms.
Stick in a few more of these, and keep a couple of the existing fossil fuel plants around in case of emergencies, and I can definitely see how this continues to be just a “cost of doing business”.
I appreciate the situation in the US may be worse.
I responded to a comment stating that excess storage can be stored in batteries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43249008 I'd suggest reading the comments people are responding to before calling them bullshit.
> You can get so far by just storing up to 12 hours OF NIGHT TIME on a local level.
"only" 12 hours of storage is 30 TWh of storage, at the world's current electricity consumption rates. This is an immense amount of storage, amounting to decades worth of global battery production. And that's ignoring the fact that the vast majority of batteries are going to electric vehicles, not grid storage. It's true that battery production is growing, but electricity demand will similarly grow as fossil fuel use in transportation and industrial processes are electrified. Out of all of our fossil fuel use, electricity production is only ~40%. Not to mention, poorer countries are developing and will eventually start deploying refrigeration and air conditioning on similar scales as developed countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_energy_consumption
Let's say it is 30Twh a day in 2030 - you can calculate 50% less energy usage during night making it 20 TWh during daytime and 10Twh during night time. This excludes large wind farms that add to base load if you average over the world. There is always wind somewhere around you.
Realistically if we reach 5Twh storage we are able to be >90% renewable.
Having 5Twh of storage is of course not an easy feat if estimates are correct we will have 6.5TWh battery production in 2030. If we amount for 10% of that used in grid storage we would need a decade for a 90%+ renewable grid. There is no faster method. It is realistic.
From your link:
> The global electricity consumption in 2022 was 24,398 terawatt-hour (TWh)
24,398. / 365 is 66.8 TWh of electricity used per day. And again, that's current electricity consumption. Before industrial processes are electrified. Before poor countries adopt air conditioning at the same rates as rich ones. Before transport is fully switched to EVs.
> Let's say it is 30Twh a day in 2030 - you can calculate 50% less energy usage during night making it 20 TWh during daytime and 10Twh during night time
That's not how th consumption curve works. Even in the summer, the ratio of daytime to nighttime energy use isn't so high. And in the winter it's inverted, with nighttime energy use exceeding daytime use.
https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf suggests 240 TWh of storage is required, but also that that's a realistic target
Ah yeah the magical 107 Twh hydrogen capacity. How far off is that? That's a pipe dream.
This is a plan for anything past 2050. I'm talking right now.
Here are high-ball numbers for going off the grid; 2000 sf house in California:
- 30 panels ~ 10kw: $20K
- batteries ~ 10kwh: $8K.
- permits + labor: $20K (California...)
- 100+kwh EV with v2h bidirectional charging: $50K
- comparable ICE car (offset): -$40K
- heat pump water heater $1.5K
- heat pump furnace: $15K
- induction range: $2K
That adds to: $76.5K. Typical PG&E bills are $500-1000 per month. Budget $200 / month for gas. (Again, California prices.). That’s 63-110 months till break even, which is less than the expected lifetime of the panels + battery.
For another $10-20K, you can add propane backup, but I assume extended storms are rare enough to just charge the car and drive the electrons home a few times a year. A fireplace is about $5k installed.
Not going full off-grid is cheaper. So is scaling up to beyond one house.
You might want to check these, they are way off. You’ll get double these times at least. Not sure why you need the EV plus separate batteries too?
# Comparison of Power Generation Options
## Upfront Capital Cost - *Nuclear*: Very high (£4,000-6,000/kW), with 10+ year construction time - *Natural Gas (CCGT)*: Low to moderate (£500-1,000/kW), with 2-3 year construction time - *Wind + Battery*: Moderate for turbines (£1,000-1,500/kW) plus substantial battery costs - *Solar + Battery*: Moderate for panels (£800-1,200/kW) plus large battery costs, especially for winter
## Plant Lifespan - *Nuclear*: Typically 60 years, with possible extensions; 2+ builds over 100 years - *Natural Gas*: 25-30 years; requires 3-4 rebuilds over 100 years - *Wind + Battery*: 25 years for turbines, 10-15 years for batteries; multiple replacements needed - *Solar + Battery*: 25-30 years for panels (with declining output), 10-15 years for batteries
## Fuel & Operating Costs - *Nuclear*: Low fuel cost, high operating cost (staffing, maintenance, safety) - *Natural Gas*: Major cost is fuel (price volatility), plus potential carbon costs - *Wind + Battery*: No fuel cost, moderate turbine O&M, plus battery replacement costs - *Solar + Battery*: No fuel cost, low panel O&M, plus battery replacement costs
## Levelized Cost (No subsidies) - *Nuclear*: £90-120/MWh - *Natural Gas*: £50-60/MWh (without carbon cost), £100+/MWh with high carbon prices - *Wind + Battery*: Base wind £40-50/MWh, potentially exceeding £100-150/MWh with storage for 90% CF - *Solar + Battery*: Base solar £40-50/MWh, potentially exceeding £150-200/MWh with storage
## Reliability / Capacity Factor - *Nuclear*: ~90% capacity factor, suited for baseload - *Natural Gas*: 80-90% if run as baseload, highly flexible - *Wind + Battery*: 35-50% raw CF for wind alone, requires battery + overbuild for 90% CF - *Solar + Battery*: 10-15% raw CF in UK, requires massive overbuild and storage for 90% CF
## Key Advantages - *Nuclear*: High-capacity 24/7 baseload, low CO₂, stable long-term output - *Natural Gas*: Low upfront capital, flexible/dispatchable, mature technology - *Wind + Battery*: Carbon-free, potentially low marginal wind cost, lower price volatility - *Solar + Battery*: Carbon-free, low operating costs, suitable for distributed generation
## Key Drawbacks - *Nuclear*: Expensive upfront, complex construction, decommissioning burden - *Natural Gas*: Volatile fuel costs, CO₂ emissions unless carbon capture added - *Wind + Battery*: High cost for baseload reliability, weather-dependent, multiple battery replacements - *Solar + Battery*: Very high overbuild and storage needs for 90% CF, seasonal variation
It doesn’t fit their agenda.
If you replaced the ancient figures carved into the chalk in England with wind farms would that be fine because they arent natural features?
It's quite simple: there is none. Moors are created by farming and logging. All woodland has either been planted and managed by humans, or self-seeded on land cleared by humans. Aside from a handful of tiny patches (which are questionable) there is no primeval forest in Britain.
I would like to see more of them on the generic grass/wheat/rape fields that cover much of England. That was prevented by the blanket ban.
Maybe also lighthouses. Sometimes.
Who do you think puts up windmills and solar panels?
Also people who need jobs. And that's just the case you personally know of. Maybe people should retrain instead of pining for jobs of the past. And we should support them in the transition as much as possible .
> only generates reasonable numbers of jobs during initial construction
We're gonna need a lot of initial construction though.
I've always filed mountaintop removal mining as one of those "weird things Americans do" approaches. Probably associated with unusual geology or something.
Maybe it's a geographical/cultural difference, but there are so, so many mountains in the western US. it's a good part of why the game Oregan Trail was made. Before carving roads around and through mountains it was a truly treacherous journey.
US also jury has so much land to begin with. We can certainly afford to retrofit a few mountains without fundamentally disrupting the ecosystem. We're very bad at moderation, sadly.
But you might want to sit down before i tell you how many are killed by cats.
The recent kurzsesagt video is a great intro to the topic ( https://youtu.be/5sVfTPaxRwk)
As opposed to the minimal ecological consequences continuing to burn fossil fuels are currently yielding you mean?
Other attributes the bird may have (wild/bred) or species (rare/common) has no bearing on the pain and kind of death they suffer. The importance of those attributes is lens we see from, it does not change their suffering.
> People who have no problem with eating meat will still not find it OK to kill a pet pig
It doesn't make it acceptable to view life raised for food[2] as a lesser (therefore ok to be tortured) than other life because they are pets, merely because it is common practice.
How is it different than valuing human life was valued differently in age of slavery or even today if you say correlate level of aid, support, news coverage or empathy to simple numbers on human conflict impact[1].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-armed-conflicts...
[2] The argument here is not becoming vegetarian, it is about not torturing needlessly what we need to eat. The human equivalent is akin to not following Geneva conventions in a war not abolish war altogether, while ideal everyone agrees is not practical today.
You're trying to turn "I don't care about that" into "it's logically incorrect to care about that" which is not a game you can win.
Wind/nuclear: 0.3-0.4 birds/GWh
Fossil: 5.2 birds/GWh
[1]: https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/do-wind-turbines-kill-birds
[2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601...
The nuclear source bird death estimates are extrapolated from one bad weather incident over two nights from a single plant on the Florida coast.
This is not a serious or rigorous study. Is there anything more recent?
You can dismiss any source by saying “nuh-uh” but you need to back it up to be taken seriously here.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/poultry-and-poultry...
(but we can; the UK has 30 million homes; if 500,000 of them put up wild bird feeders, that would lead to more wild birds. Again the context of the comment was the shock value of $bignum not a comment on specific species or habitats or desired outcomes).
Okay, something else which affects wild birds: "Bird corpses were counted - and, where possible, identified - at 166 locations throughout Britain during the summer of 1985. The survey covered all roads except motorways. It is the most recent such study, and the most comprehensive. The results were depressing. A minimum of 30 million birds are killed on Britain's roads every year. Depending on the assumptions made in the statistical analysis, the death rate could be even higher: 70 million a year is not impossible."[1] And that's as well as wild rabbits, hedgehogs, badgers, foxes, deer, and so on killed by cars which wind turbines don't affect.
So the wildlife in the UK would be much better off if we built more viable alternatives to driving and road trucking than if we scrapped wind turbines. We can also note that people are working on wind turbines that don't kill birds, e.g. [2]. It's not a fixed fact that all wind turbine designs do the same damage.
In the context of a world where fossil fuel propaganda really does exist[3] and Trump's recent executive order on unleashing energy generation where he tells government departments to look for all kinds of energy sources on their land - geothermal, hydroelectric, oil, gas, anything - except wind or solar - exists, and in the wider climate change context where there isn't a magically perfect answer - and where the UK is uniquely well suited in Europe to wind power - it can't just be left that "sensational $bignum means stop wind turbines" with nothing else mentioned.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/carnage-on-...
[2] https://www.audubon.org/magazine/surprisingly-simple-solutio...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX2aZUav-54 - Climate Town video on how the gas industry sets up groups of 'concerned citizens' which pay social media influencers to post about how great cooking with gas is, and agitate politically while obscuring the source of their funding, among other things.
I find the horrors of industrial animal farming horrendous, while not having a moral problem with the idea of raising an animal in decent conditions for slaughter.
Bringing up bird welfare to oppose wind turbines is bullshit. If people cared about birds or wildlife we wouldn't be in this mess at all.
Likewise, there's the (unproven) connection with noise generated by offshore wind farms disturbing wildlife migration and movement, especially among whales.
It'd be nice to know that we're not replacing one disaster with another, though I'm out of date on my personal research as to whether any of these concerns still warrant further investigation.
The person I replied to was making a quantity-of-birds argument. Not an endangered species argument.
> there's the (unproven) connection with noise generated by offshore wind farms disturbing wildlife migration and movement
Do they make a lot more noise than giant cruise ships? Luxury yachts? I don't see much of a movement to ban those. It's almost like people decide the things they want to have for themselves (undisturbed views), then make up whatever noble-sounding reasons (whales, birds) will preserve those things.
Your comment seems to be a blanket opposition to bird welfare in general, not a limited critique of quantity harmed. I do think the distinction remains important, hence why I made my post.
> Do they make a lot more noise than giant cruise ships? Luxury yachts?
Given that the ships are itinerant and their turbines are much smaller, I do believe the type of noise pollution they generate is qualitatively less harmful. I imagine the scale is something along the lines of:
1. windmills
2. sonar
3. marine vehicle engine and turbine noise
Sonar gets the second for the extreme volume some ships (esp. military) are capable of producing, though there are far fewer of them.
Marine vehicles come last. There's a greater danger of animals being hit by fast moving boats (for example, manatees) than discombobulation from engine and turbine noise.
Do you have sources for this scale?
> Windmills take the top spot for being a constant barrage over a large area.
They're also static, so animals can just avoid them. Their blades spin a hundred feet above the water.
Ships move around so their sounds can be anywhere. Their propellers spin in the water. And there are way more large ships than offshore windmills.
I don't know how you got that. I just think a lot of fake bird lovers come out of the woodwork to oppose wind turbines because of $MADE_UP_REASON. Real wildlife lovers recognize that clean energy is good for wildlife.
[1] https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/wind-power-bird-de... [2] https://abcbirds.org/news/bird-building-collisions-study-202...
“Our central discovery is that wind turbines can act as top predators, by reducing the density and activity of birds, their prey are now released from the typical level of predation. This release causes a range of changes in lizards,” explained Dr Maria Thaker of Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science
https://iisc.ac.in/wind-farms-are-the-new-top-predator-in-th...
This is using "top" in the sense of "apex", because turbines have no natural predators. The paper says you could imagine them as something at the top of the trophic web. The paper explores the impact on their prey populations.
That's opposed to "top" in the sense of "kills more than other predators" or whatever. I mention it because number-of-kills is what the rest of the discussion seems to be about.
Climate change in the subcontinent is going to kill way more birds and wildlife. You think oil and gas drilling or coal mining is better for them?
Your own link further down estimates 4-18 per year. 1 bird per month would be gone before you had a chance to collect it, much less have a chance to “pile up”.
Which part of the world do you live in ? It is possible that the location of the farm was chosen wisely. Are you also sure someone is not clearing the corpses ? There are laws mandating the collection of corpses in many western nations. My personal anecdotal opinion is that data is more honest in the non-Western nations since nobody cares about bird-deaths all that much and so the deaths are not sanitized.
I’ve been hiking in Europe, no dead birds.
Again, where is your citation? If birds are “piling up” they’re should be countless articles on it. Hell BP alone would GLADLY fund studies showing all these birds deaths to justify selling more oil.
that was funny
Aka 0.2% of birds.
How many birds do coal power plants or other power sources kill?
> Climate change is a critical threat to birds. Recognizing this fact, ABC supports renewable energy, including wind energy, and the transition away from fossil fuels. However, not every wind project is proposed in a suitable location.
If you’re trying to save birds, the first place you should be looking is outdoor cats.
https://www.sibleyguides.com/conservation/causes-of-bird-mor...
I don't care about Donald Trump. (How did this even become about him ?) And your second statement is laughably false as even elementary research would tell you.
Do note that there are ~100 million cats and only ~70k wind turbines, if you use US as a reference. Cats are clearly not the top-predators of birds anymore.
You said you “read” about turbines killing birds (shockingly with no citation). There is literally nobody else claiming such stupidity.
> Do note that there are ~100 million cats and only ~70k wind turbines, if you use US as a reference. Cats are clearly not the top-predators of birds anymore.
Do note, a tiny fraction of the 100m cats are outdoor cats. And yes, they are absolutely one of the top predators of birds and have been for decades.
Brexit was the most stupid thing a country ever did to itself, and the full effects are just starting to come to the surface now. I dont think the UK will ever fully recover from it.
From an economic standpoint, brexit was indeed a big L, but I dont think brexiteers were largely voting on economic grounds - a point which is lost on most remainers.
But the UK had substantial influence on those, and it no longer does, while still having to follow them to be able to do business with the EU.
And indeed, the UK has not really diverged from the EU in the last 8 years and voted a new government that wants to tighten the relationship.
It was a generic protest vote "I don't like how things are going and I was happier when I was young". I can empathize, but it was still self-inflicted harm.
- citizen of EU member, not happy with either national or eu parliaments :D
Why should someone elected by the Polish electorate, or the Romanian one, have any say over what the British or Germans do? Especially when it's British & German money funding the project?
The EU is clearly going in a direction the British people do not like, and therefore they did the only thing they could after concessions were refused -leave.
If the EU were only interested in co-operation and trade, this would not be a problem. As it is, apparently it _is_ a problem. Why would that be, except to punish the British for daring to say "this isn't working - we don't want tighter integration"
Meanwhile, the EU continue to fiddle whilst Rome burns. British politics may be boned, but the people now have the ability to sack the lot of them as they did last summer. That is worth far more than a few % of GDP (which the British govt. have no interest in, or they'd be pushing policies that help growth - lower taxes, higher speed-limits, cheaper trains, reduction in gas prices etcetc) : as it is, all the stories we read are about slower roads, more expensive trains and higher taxes.
See Zac Goldsmith for a recent example.
But my biggest gripe with EU institutions is not EU parliament. Commission is much much worse. Especially with how special positions are assigned. It does not matter what is elected into EU parliament, each country sends someone. And that process is usually murky AF. And person being sent seems to not even know area-of-work in many cases. How EC speaker is „elected“ is yet another story. And then stories start to bubble up how this under-the-table formed EC is lobbying EP, all on our own tax money :D It'd be funny to watch if I wasn't a citizen of a member of this mess.
When my boomer dad complains about the Pakistani family he went to sell something to having 2 BMWs it's definitely racist.
But the racism is inflamed by poor economic conditions, and the rationale is "how come these people that aren't even from here have a better life than me?"
Sadly, people seeking power know this and use the racism to get power and don't fix the underlying cause, which was never immigration — it was wealth inequality.
I'm not sure people would vote for it if they knew it comes with an economic meltdown.
Maybe still they would do, though.
As my taxi driver neighbour in Dagenham like saying.
You think remainers missed all the racism from the leave side and thought it was only about economics? Even when Boris Johnson's Vote Leave, Michael Gove and George Osbourne, Labour representatives, Green Party representatives, Nichola Sturgeon, and Unison reps were publicly condeming Nigel Farage and UKIP for their "blatant attempt to incite racial hatred" poster?
America: Hold my beer...
Trump tries very hard to make Brexit the second most stupid thing a country did to itself.
The economy was doing well for some parts of the country, but you can only ignore the rest for so long.
But the solution part is where all populists fail, since actually addressing it and its root causes always has to involve admitting that no, problem is actually much more complex, different etc. than I was voted for. Like trump stop blaming immigrants or its (former) allies for all US woes.
The cure? Nothing easy, intelligent moral population for democratic elections. Swiss have most direct democracy in the world, and they vote sanely even on emotional topics thinking of greater good (ie refusing 6 weeks mandatory minimal paid vacation per year for workers). That's the population bar for true democracy.
It's not hard to understand why, given that choice, someone stuck in a Northern ex-mining town facing zero prospects, poor housing, no local amenities, massive regional unemployment or unstable employment would listen to the one pretending to be listening to their issues. Again, we'd had 30 years before that where FPTP allowed the main parties to more or less ignore huge parts of the electorate.
eh, somewhat.
There are still plenty of emotionally charged decisions being made by Swiss voters, like banning all minarets (in a country that had ... 3 minarets before), blanket granting all pensioneers one additional month of payment per year or routinely wrecking your relationship with the EU.
I agree that on average, the Swiss voters don't do too badly. But it's also easier to vote rationally and for the common good when you're as well off as the Swiss are.
See:
https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/01/31/brexit-four-yea...
which is a source that is not going to be biased towards Brexit success, and instead against it (not that there was any success in it, but still).
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...
I’m sure Brexit hasn’t helped, but it seems that the economic stewardship of the coalition and post-coalition governments was also lacking.
I don’t know what the UK can do about it, but it’s been stuck in a spiral of economic stagnation for over 15 years now.
I don't understand it, I thought these guys were all supposed to have studied economics (is that not the "E" in that Oxbridge "PPE" degree they all have) how are they fumbling the basics so badly
Found George Osborne's account! Seriously though, you're wrong:
- https://www.statista.com/statistics/1370599/g7-country-gdp-g... there is one year (2014) where the UK has a higher GDP growth rate
- https://www.statista.com/statistics/1370625/g7-country-gdp-l... when looking at GDP per-capita it tells a similar story
Bet you're not interested in looking at the three Baltic states I mentioned or Ireland...because it would be another fistful of nails in the coffin of your purely ideological belief that "aUsTeRiTy BaD" (truthfully, some austerity is bad, but the fiscal kind).
- Most developed countries have below-replacement child rates from citizens
- Without larger younger, working age generations, social safety nets and productivity investments are difficult to finance
- Immigration is the only thing fueling that population growth
The real argument should be about rates of cultural assimilation or acculturation, wealth disparities and concentration of poverty, and structural limits to economic prosperity.
Fighting immigration is just shooting oneself in their demographic foot. (See Japan and Russia)
The UK has had increased (net) immigration for decades, including a huge jump in the past few years[0]. The population grew commensurately, likely mostly due to immigration, since as you accurately point out the birth rate is low; there are roughly 13% more people in the UK now than 20 years ago. Why, then, has the GDP per capita flatlined in the same timeframe? Where is the growth that immigration is supposed to fuel?
> Immigration is the only thing fueling that population growth
This is a core neoliberal claim that smacks of "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas".
> The real argument should be about rates of cultural assimilation or acculturation
By all means, let's have that discussion! If immigrants were, by and large, able to acculturate well, there would be much less anti-immigration sentiment.
But the same neoliberalism that supported increased immigration to developed countries on these economic grounds also morphed into a dual prong of claiming that diversity is our greatest strength and that it's racist to expect immigrants to have to conform to their new host culture. Both attitudes are directly at odds with assimilation and acculturation.
Other wealth European nations that took in a lot of immigrants, mostly from grossly incompatible cultures, have seen concerning increases in violent crime and other things deleterious to social cohesion and quality of life.
> (See Japan and Russia)
Japan's population has been shrinking since 2010; its GDP per capita has been treading water for even longer, since the early 90s. Similar story for Russia, whose population has been flip-flopping from growing and shrinking for a few decades, and whose GDP per capita hasn't seen any sustained growth since the late 2000s.
So it's entirely possible to have a stagnant economy, whether or not you receive immigrants.
> Without larger younger, working age generations, social safety nets and productivity investments are difficult to finance
This is about the only unarguably true statement you made. A nation composed of too many nonworking people receiving transfer payments from working people cannot exist in that state for long.
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/283287/net-migration-fig...
What? This isn't remotely true. Anti-immigrant sentiment is deliberately induced, because they're an easy target—it has nothing to do with how well they do or don't acculturate. Although, anti-immigrant sentiment does make acculturation more difficult as well—which hey, makes it even easier to inflame anti-immigrant sentiment!
- More resources
- More people
- More productivity
Which is to say that more technology isn't a solution out of a demographic hole, when you're competing with a country that has the same technology and better demographics.
UK was the only EU member not part of the Schengen Zone as-in it was the only member you couldn't freely immigrate to. As well as it's an island, nobody hoping a boat from Morocco and landing in London.
Pakistani's aren't taking your job. The economy is just stagnating.
Post-Pandemic is a huge anomaly [1] but the article is talking about stuff pre-2019.
[1]: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06...
Aside from not being the only nation outside of Schengen, Schengen only implies freedom from borders checks. As an EU citizen you could still emigrate freely (or as freely as anywhere else in the EU) to a non-Schengen countries. I know I did.
"Uncontrolled" in this context doesn't mean people hopping the border unbeknownst to the authorities. It means immigration at a rate high enough that it's beyond the capacity of the host nation to integrate the newcomers to its culture.
A village of a thousand people can accept one additional person per year indefinitely with no material change to its way of life. But it cannot accept, say, a hundred a year, especially if the hundred immigrants come from a substantially different culture, without fundamentally changing the entire social fabric.
And when such massive changes to society occur without buy-in from a convincing majority of people?[0] Well, only idiots would wonder why people think it's out of control.
[0]: In the UK, Brexit made it clear that in fact the buy-in was in the other direction.
> It means immigration at a rate high enough that it's beyond the capacity of the host nation to integrate the newcomers to its culture.
Making trading slightly harder with 27 non-English speaking countries in a stagnating political experiment (roughly 30-50th percentile of worldwide GDP growth rates)
Making trading easier with 168 other countries, many of them English-speaking nations, and who comprise the largest and most dynamic economies on Earth.
Which is fine if resources were infinite or distribution was equal, but neither are true and the private sector will not safe guard the public sphere of the environment.
In any case, plain as day, the big problem with the UK economy was and is the 2008 financial crisis that chopped 5% of GDP off the economy. Since then every government has been faced with either doing what would be needed to make things right, or doing what is needed to get reelected. They have all picked the second option apart from Boris Johnson's administration through to Truss, who picked electoral destruction through magical thinking (on Northern Ireland and then by raising spending without raising tax to pay for it, precipitating first a crisis of politics and second a crisis of finance).
On top of that there is a part of the private sector which currently benefits tremendously from the imbalance of supply and demand.
Approximately one in five Members of UK Parliament are landlords or have investments in the property market.
So a part of the private sector is ALREADY "doing what it wants to do", and surely supports the political direction in its favor.
In what sense are homes for people to live in not the public sphere of the environment?
What do you expect people to do? Go back to freezing in the dark?
This is (as you flag) a specifically political problem - not a commercial one. There are political fixes which are available, but have not been taken. There are planning reforms, and fiscal reforms, that could change the housing market very significantly - without enabling a free for all that would simply result in the creation of thousands of five bedroom des res's all over the home counties. This would not salve the real social ills that bad and limited housing have created, but it would destroy what's left of the countryside. England is as densely populated as India, and we need to manage what happens to land in our country in a way that Australia and the USA doesn't.
Australia does sort of have a land constraint problem too, insofar as there aren't a lot of places in Australia where anyone would really want to live.
Agriculture in Australia accounts for about 55% of land use.[1]
About 70% of Australian land is arid or semi arid.[2]
About 87% of the population lives within 50 kilometres of the coast.[3]
About 0.5% of Australian land area is used for housing.[4]
About 50% of Australian land area is suitable for and used for grazing.[4]
Dryland cropping, dryland horticulture, irrigated pastures, irrigated cropping, irrigated horticulture, intensive horticulture and animal production, account for about 5.14% of Australia's land area.[4]
New housing development in Australia is largely done by encroaching on some of the best land for growing food, where there used to market gardens, crazing, vegetable cropping, etc, close to towns and cities, that production is being pushed further out.
New housing development is largely captured by businesses and companies that can afford to develop the land and cope with all the regulatory burden. Even in the regional areas, a block of land suitable for building a house goes for about $280,000[5] - about 5 years median income.[6] Then you'll probably want a build a house on that land, and that's going to cost you about $300,000.[7] For a total of about $550,000.
Even in the fairly average, fairly ordinary area I live in, house prices are up about 110% since about 10 years ago.
I don't know if there's some alternate timeline where housing in Australia is more evenly distributed, or if that would result in a better life for the majority of Australians, or how to get there if we think that's good idea.
Also see my other recent comment here[8] for a breakdown of ownership of the housing stock.
Thanks for motivating me to put this comment together, I had been meaning to review this data since the last time I look at it over five years ago.
1. https://www.agriculture.gov.au/abares/products/insights/snap...
2. https://www.dcceew.gov.au/environment/land/rangelands
3. https://soe.dcceew.gov.au/coasts/pressures/population
4. https://www.agriculture.gov.au/abares/aclump/land-use
5. https://hia.com.au/our-industry/newsroom/economic-research-a...
6. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/earnings-and-workin...
7. https://www.residentialattitudes.com.au/building-advice/the-...
In England I believe that low rise apartments are a big part of the solution. Currently almost all apartments in England are one or two bedrooms, and additionally the buildings are aimed at the luxury single market. If planning laws made four distinct rooms at least 3m * 3m mandated in 50% of new build apartments then they would become viable for family living. After Grenfell it's simply impossible for England to use high rise apartments to solve this problem, but I have stayed with friends in Germany who lived in a block of large apartments on four stories in Saarbrücken and they seemed ideal and worked for them as a family.
I wish there were better ways to align incentives here.
I have a crazy idea that might work to hold organizations accountable if they never get anything done.
I am not saying those are the main problem but it contributes to the lack of efficiency.
"This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time."
- Aneurin Bevan, British Labour politician, in a speech at Blackpool, 24 May 1945
If the Soviet Union took over the Sahara, nothing would happen for a few years, and then there would be a shortage of sand.
That doesn't mean it's not an existential problem. You can have a growth forever before the cancer gets bad enough to notice.
The author sneers against regulatory rules to limit suburban sprawl but really none of that has anything to do with a housing shortage.
It is entirely possible to denser and taller buildings, having both compact communities, green space, farms and forest and also addressing housing needs. UK hinders its economy by declining to do so (as do so many other places with housing shortages).
Yes, but you're not allowed those either.
This leads to situations like Oxford where people working in the university that gave the city its current fame can't afford to live in it. Instead they live in suburban towns outside of Oxford's green belt and commute in - through it. Ironically, there is now an incentive for the same number of people to sprawl over a larger area, requiring more railways, roads and parking. Many locals in Oxford's new sprawl expect a non-existent greenbelt to protect their areas and are left disappointed.
The real rub is that England lacks Scotland's right to roam. So protecting all this green land doesn't even give us the right to walk in it. Only to gaze from a passing window.
My lizard brain interprets this in the following way: Elites in response to external competition or in the presence of existential threat experience strong incentives to make "real" progress.
When there's little external competition, leadership are more concerned with maintaining or slightly enhancing their relative status within existing power structures and this leads to stasis as their interest is mainly blocking or slowing any disruption which could change the balance of power.
Projects often fail because the forces of "keep things the same" beat the team that wanted the change to happen.
So on a macro level a progressive or simply sympathetic minority has to fight a conservative majority in order to keep pushing for change.
The only solace here is that the you rarely need a majority to enact change. Apparently movements need a critical capacity of 3.5% in order to start this network effect of people joining in due to popularity bias.
And real (“real”) progress for whom? Your analysis is completely opaque.
Every example I can think of involved rushing through legislation and policy changes that were not looked upon kindly given a moment of retrospection.
The New Deal, Japanese internment camps, the PATRIOT Act, Zero COVID policies, etc. The one exception might be something like the Space Race, but that also had a lot to do with Operation Paperclip, which had its own ethical dilemmas.
> Every example I can think of involved rushing through legislation and policy changes that were not looked upon kindly given a moment of retrospection.
> rushing
Wiki says:
> During Roosevelt's first hundred days in office in 1933 until 1935, he introduced what historians refer to as the "First New Deal", which focused on the "3 R's": relief for the unemployed and for the poor, recovery of the economy back to normal levels, and reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression.
> From 1935 to 1938, the "Second New Deal" introduced further legislation and additional agencies which focused on job creation and on improving the conditions of the elderly, workers, and the poor.
> not looked upon kindly given a moment of retrospection
It's notable that none of these policies were particularly effective. Of the major industrial economies of the period, only France lagged behind America in terms of economic recovery.
In the end, her stint will be what she deserves: a footnote in history, and the answer to the pub quiz question “who managed to beat Johnson as the absolute worst PM in the history of the UK?” Maybe someone will call a variety of lettuce “truss”. That’d be entertaining.
A new report, titled “Foundations,” captures the country’s economic malaise in detail.
Any policy suggestions need to show how they'll urgently remedy the serious issues with energy, housing, and infrastructure detailed in the report -- or make the case that this issues don't matter.
Here's the direct link:
I'm not exactly familiar with buildings from ex-soviet eastern Europe but I'd be surprised if it was a much higher build quality.
What I remember: - small rooms - mould - no insulation - in larger buildings gardens, if any, would be only for ground floor flats - in smaller buildings flats would be split over 3 levels, with each level being rather small - often wired entrance to the flats from outdoor gallery/balcony (in larger buildings) - low ceilings (for my liking)
The rural council housing built in post-war UK was of really high quality: these houses were built for durability and community. They were solid brick or stone construction, and had large gardens to promote self-sufficiency. I grew up in one of these houses, and my parents grew enough vegetables in the enormous garden that we only needed meat and dairy from the store.
The article is an awful jumble of free-market junk, and as others have mentioned, doesn't mention Brexit or privatization as two of the main causes of economic stagnation.
The UK's energy crisis and its BANANA (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone) planning system are very linked.
(credit to the Economist some years ago for that acronym)
That completely ignores that Germany made itself dependent on cheap Russian gas which is not delivered anymore. It's not like nuclear was ever very cheap.
Taxes are too high, there's too much red tape for businesses and successive governments have failed to invest in anything outside of the "south" (e.g. Greater London). I was (half) joking with them that the "north" would be far better off if it seceded and joined Scotland!
Taxes-too-high is a common refrain but income tax + national insurance takes 26% of my 95th-percentile income. Is that so bad?
(for the unfamiliar - the employER has to pay 15% from April - not a typo - of part of your salary in taxes to the government and this is hidden from your payroll taxes as an employee)
What's the % if you include those deductions?
In my case my tax rate is 29% but employers NI is 13% so 42%, going up to 44/45% in April
Employee NI went down by 2pts last year, employer NI is going up by 1.2pts this year.
Most importantly, I don't believe that if employer NI went away tomorrow that money would come to me in increased salary. Including it as a tax on me makes the assumption that it would.
You can see why the government created it in such a way !
In the US, it should be possible to get a 95th percentile household income ($300k, married filing joint) effective federal income tax rate down to 10% to 15%. Including total health insurance costs (employer + employee) plus some amount of deductible/out of pocket maximum for a family of 4 would bump it up to 20% to 25%. And then on top of that would be state + local tax liabilities like property and sales tax.
All in, I bet total proportion spent on taxes is less than 40%, even in California, at 95th percentile income, and 30% in a state without income tax.
Edit: I’m probably understating my numbers by 5% due to forgetting about social security and Medicare taxes.
So that's 42%, not including healthcare costs. Which is gonna be easily another 5%+.
> In the US, it should be possible to get a 95th percentile household income ($300k, married filing joint) effective federal income tax rate down to 10% to 15%.
After standard deduction ($29k), AGI is about $217k. That's the 24% bracket (barely), which adds up to $34,337 + 0.24*$16000 ~= $38,200 federal income tax
$38,200/$300k = 12.7%
You can get even lower with itemized deductions: mortgage interest (might be over $40k) plus SALT ($10k) plus a few donations ($5k) => AGI of $191k => federal tax rate of under 11%
Of course, this is just federal income tax. Most people also pay FICA (medicare+social security) and state and local tax.
Deeper question: Now that you provided a reasonably scenario where a household earning 300K USD combined income can "only" pay 12+% in federal taxes: Does this make sense from a policy perspective? My point: Should it be higher? It seems hard to pay for what a highly developed nation needs to pay for where 300K USD households are paying such measly federal taxes. (To be clear: I very well understand this is one component of total tax burden, but still a worthy discussion.)
Especially when comparing to effective tax rates in countries with universal healthcare and different defined benefit pension schemes. For example, health insurance premiums in the US are a tax, due to the myriad restrictions on how premiums can be priced. Just not collected by the government, but it definitely is young and healthy subsidizing poor and sick.
Also, note that most of the reduction in tax liability is due to setting money aside for later use, so it is akin to deferring taxes, rather than just reducing taxes.
Another way to make sense of policy is that the federal US spend is 60% on defined benefit pensions for old people and healthcare for old or poor people, 17% on military, 13% on interest, and the remaining 10% for the rest of the federal government’s operations.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
Which IMO should be higher! But also I'd want that to include universal healthcare (my employer and I pay combined about $20k/year or another 4% between premiums and deductible+copays) and generally a better social safety net.
At one of my businesses, we remit 4 separate sales taxes to 4 separate governments, and each has to be itemized, so receipts are multiple pages long for no reason.
Then there are myriad possibilities for being exempt from either all or some of the taxes, and those records have to be kept in case of an audit.
There must be enormous amounts of tax evasion too, the attack surface is so great no one can audit it all. The most tax advantaged account, a Health Savings Account, lets people set money aside today, invest it, and let it grow for however long they want, and then withdraw it for healthcare expenses, all tax free.
But the healthcare expenses can be from any point in time in the past. A 30 year old can save their receipts for purchases ranging from over the counter painkillers to childbirth bills from the hospital, and then reimburse themselves when they are 80 years old.
How can it even be possible to audit someone’s healthcare expenses that happened 50 years ago? The counter party will surely no longer have the records to cross reference, so it’s basically the government taking people’s word for it.
And that’s just simple personal taxes.
Not to say that Canada's overall economy is particularly any better than the UK's, and especially Trump's tariff threats will do a number on us.
There will be losers certainly, but I'm not 100% sure that tarrifs for Canada are bad in the long run.
Firstly, there are already reports of Canadians buying local over US goods. If that sentiment hrows, and becomes entrenched that's good.
Secondly, at least gor some goods, suppliers are incentivised to explore other export markets. Again, long term, that diversification is good.
Thirdly, for at least some goods, the US cannot simply ramp up production. So they'll still be buying, but their consumers will pay more. Canadian suppliers can simply increase prices as well, since any US consumer increase will be ascribed to the tarrifs. This though is somewhat balanced by Canadian oversupply.
Fourthly it encourages producers to diversify somewhat to reduce over supply. In the long run a varied economy is better than one dependant on any one sector.
Ultimately Canada and Mexico could come out of this stronger. While the US consumer gets used to higher prices. (Which Canada et al can take advantage of whe tarrifs are removed.)
Increases to employers' National Insurance contributions. It's the equivalent to Social Security in the US. Mostly goes to pensions.
https://www.ft.com/content/8d5f2952-3c17-11e8-bcc8-cebcb81f1... https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/insight/the-housing-act-from...
Fun fact: there's a popular pub question to ask tories - "name one successful Thatcher policy" which on the face of it doesn't have an answer. However her "Enterprise Allowance Scheme" was ironically a big success
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/jul/26/thatcher-ent...
Every British person would probably kill me for saying this.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxe...
You can see two upticks in debt: first was the steady rise after the 2008 crisis (which austerity clearly failed to stem) and the second around 2020 which may be pure Covid or may be also due to a bit of Brexit.
When the UK government talks about "growth", it really means "growth in tax revenues". This means they want you and me to spend more because transactions are the drivers of revenue.
Inflation is generally painful for the public but very useful for a government up to its ears in debt because debt payments do not rise with inflation but revenues do.
And public services are highly toxic to an economy which requires 4-5% growth just to meet its debt payments. Why provide services for free when you can collect VAT receipts for basic essentials like clean water, energy, and medication? Why spend millions on regulatory oversight when the inevitable health issues downstream will result in more private spending and GDP growth?
The article characterises that fact as "energy starvation". Wouldn't "efficiency" be a better analysis? Low energy use per GDP or per capita is surely a thoroughly good thing.
Yikes. Housing is the big issue that gets everyone’s attention, but this is huge. Cheap energy drives economic growth at all levels. It’s incredible that the various British governments have let it get to this level. Maybe it’s time to import a few Chinese or Soviet technocrats?
Italy has a higher % of GDP from manufacturing but way more expensive energy.
I'd be interested to know about specific numbers you're thinking of, if you can share a link or two.
So they should be doing great right? Wrong. They massively struggle and yet live in a "best of both worlds" scenario, they can run the health service, transport, taxation policy and all things that affect regular people without having to worry about the annoying stuff like defence and foreign policy. So why do they still have very poor outcomes? Look at the welsh NHS, it's horrific.
Essentially most of our productivity comes from London and the SE. That means by the way if you're smart and educated but grew up in the welsh valleys, the first thing you do is move to London/SE where all the jobs are. Can Wales attract a google office to Cardiff when all the talent is in London?
*NI is a long story.
Net migration to London from the rest of England and Wales is only positive for those aged 20 to 27
There's plenty of great experienced people outside London, but all the rich (business owners) are openly prejudice to everywhere else. https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cwy57v07gn2o
Not that many.
Let that be a lesson to the US, seeking government efficiency is a non-goal. Good, well-funded public services make productive citizens and a strong economy. Austerity leads to a dead country.
Most Western European nations have a government expenditure as a percentage of GDP of roughly 50%; half the economy is government.
Singapore, a famously productive country, is around 15%.
You really went out of your way to pick the only "country" you could find with both low government spending and high quality of life, despite the data proving a strong correlation between these two in actual countries. Wow.
No worries, they're busy speed-running it to its conclusion..
An "economy" is just a measure of the overall movement of money. If the bulk of that spending is internal, then that is contributing to the economy. Govt workers are consumers, local companies are providing goods to govt etc.
USaid for example spent a lot of money on food. And a lot of that was purchased from US farmers. Killing USaid "saves a lot of money" but also costs a lot of producers their income.
As long as the bulk of spending is local, govt spending is an excellent way of keeping money moving.
Thatcher left office in 1990. The population of Greater London has grown by 44% since then. I don't think there has been a single decade since where the growth of housing stock kept up with the growth of people. Why blame Thatcher for this?
[0]: https://ifs.org.uk/articles/england-has-poor-record-building...
It's not a risk - we actually saw earthquakes in the areas where shale gas extraction had started: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21120-how-fracking-ca... I honestly cannot take this seriously after such a lie.
This article is very thinly-veiled industrialist propaganda, covering a "report" by right-wing think-tankers lobbying the government to relax rules around real estate speculation. It does not deserve the upvotes it got.
The UK has seen unprecedented mass immigration from outside the developed world over the last 25 years.
250,000/yr non-EU migrants in the 2000s, rising to 500,000/yr non-EU migrants by 2022.
In 2023, the UK had 1.2M arrivals, comprising 968,000 non-EU nationals. Illegal immigration (mostly by small boats over the English Channel) is running into the tens of thousands (and those are the ones we know about).
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...
Some of the main source countries have low literacy rates (Pakistan 60%, Nigeria 62%, India 77%, Bangladesh 74%) so it is no surprise that economic productivity has taken a hit due to wage suppression and a growth in the labour supply at the entry level.
Obviously, Bank of England economists suffer from institutional cowardice preventing them from joining the dots, for fear of being branded xenophobic.
But the numbers don't lie.
Obviously it means that on everage immigrants earn less than average (thus bringing productivity down), which is not that surprising with the number you've quoted.
Catastrophic? If I have to pay 33% more for electricity now than in 2010? And if corrected for inflation the electricity costs in Germany are actually going down. There is some obvious spin in this article which is distracting from the real issue:
It's the housing, stupid!
What is really catastrophic also in Germany is the increase of rents and housing prices.
https://etn.news/buzz/germany-emissions-fall-re-dominates-en...
This is obfuscation to the point of dishonesty. The postwar public home-building project was the largest in history, and provided a previously-unbelievable increase in the quantity of cheap, good-quality housing.
> With some spikes and troughs, new homes built as a share of the total housing stock have generally declined over the past 60 years.
Again, very disingenuous wording. It is equivalent to saying "the housing stock grew less than exponentially over the past 60 years". For instance, a constant rate of house building would result in "new homes built as a share of the total housing stock" declining. Note also that 60 years takes us back to 1965, leaving an unmentioned 20-year postwar period.
Incidentally, wtf does planning permission have to do with nationalisation? The US has zoning laws, am I supposed to think they've nationalised their housing market? Does the author think we still have nationalised housing?
Cambridge Analytica > United Kingdom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Channel_4_...
"New Evidence Emerges of Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica’s Role in Brexit" (2018) https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/new-evidence-emerge...
"‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower" (2018) https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistl...
Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana... ($4b FTC fine)
"3.5M Voters Were Purged During 2024 Presidential Election [video]" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047349
They only "won" by like 1.5m votes.
Who's illegitimate? https://www.google.com/search?q=Trump+birthrarism
If that were the case, public transport (which underwent radical privatisation and deregulation across the UK some 40+ years ago), would be the cheapest and most effective in Europe. In fact, it's the most expensive in Europe. It is all currently being wrestled back into public hands through bus and rail fixed franchises, because Stagecoach (they own Greyhound in the US, you might be familiar with their work), have driven public transport into the ground in the name of profits for themselves.
On housing, the Thatcher government in the 1980s gave social housing tenants the right to buy homes, and created laws that prevented local authorities from building new public sector housing projects: the market, after all, would be more effective. That's led to a situation where private developers own land they won't build on until prices rise - they're artificially shortening supply. The houses they do build are small and expensive, and most people actively look for non-new build homes, to the extent that the government had to introduce tax breaks (Lifetime ISA), and incentives (help to buy), for people to buy new builds they didn't really want.
This isn't breaking news. People have been pointing out the problems and obvious drawbacks to the libertarian "private corporations can fix it all" nonsense that drove Thatcherism from the first moments it was conceived in the 1980s, and were hand-waved away as relics of the past by the centre right who took control of the country and destroyed it.
Yes, the public sector has problems too. Nobody is arguing that the right solution is to nationalise everything (except in the case of monopoly markets like public transport and utilities, where the UK is markedly behind the rest of Europe in the sectors which it has left to private sector utilisation). It's about balance. It always was, for many years, and for many years it was successful, as it has continued to be across Europe.
TFA suggests that the real problem is that the private sector has been leashed by red tape, but that's just not true. The government has given the private sector ample opportunity: to build houses, and they've refused to do so; to build nuclear power, and they keep coming back and asking for more money to fix problems of their own making; to run utilities as they wish, and they pollute rivers and raise bill prices.
In most of Europe (with almost identical regulations and rules, thanks to the power of EU frameworks the UK was entirely aligned to until very recently), the public sector has been able to retain a larger part of these critical economic components, and these problems have not arisen to the same extent.
As an aside, it's not lost on most that it is ironic that the French public sector is allowed to invest in UK transport and energy sector companies, but the UK public sector is not, due to EU law that we're still trying to get rid of.
TFA is therefore philosophically, intellectually and factually flawed at every level based on the actual data and lived experiences of the people suffering this - and yes, I am one of those people. I'm sick of this utterly absurd libertarian agenda being pushed like this, claiming that the private sector is somehow a victim. I believe so are most UK citizens who see it for the propaganda it is.
There is an increasing, and deepening sense of unease at private capital in the UK, much of it unfounded. Right-wing libertarian agitprop nonsense like this article doesn't help: it's toxic, and harms the private sector in those areas where it can make a real difference.
So the UK rail network was privatized in the 1990s with tracks and stations remaining under government control and private companies bid for a 'franchise' running train services for whole regions. So basically franchises operate as regional monopolies and meaning passengers don't have any real choice of providers? The competition only existed briefly during the initial bidding process which the gov decided on.
Very similar to Canada's telecom history where they are private corporations on paper but they are state sanctioned local monopolies/oligopolies in functional terms. Or our 'private' highway which was given a 99yr lease for a low one-off payment that charges extremely high tolls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Highway_407
The tracks and stations were also privatised as "Railtrack" but they subsequently went bankrupt and had to be brought back into public ownership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railtrack
> So basically franchises operate as regional monopolies and meaning passengers don't have any real choice of providers?
This is inevitable given many routes operate at the limits of capacity. There are a handful of 'open access' operators outside the franchise system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_operating_tr...
The contracts were periodically retendered (it varied, but typically every 5-10 years). The problem is the competitive process had its own problems because it encourage the bidding companies to be overly optimistic. The East-Coast franchise infamously failed multiple times because the companies kept missing passenger forecasts and going bust.
However the competitive element was only ever for the government (in terms of how much surplus/subsidy would be required to/from the operating company over the contract). Having the branding, pricing (where not a regulated fare) etc. managed by those companies meant that they were at odds with passenger interests a lot of time.
Really privatisation was done from the wrong angle. If passengers don't get a choice in service provider then the concessions model (government pays private operators to run the service) would have made more sense. It would have allowed the government to still gain from competition and outsource management, while taking control of the more important elements. The concessions model has worked reasonably well for transport services in London (Elizabeth Line, DLR, Overground and Buses IIRC)
Also as a side point, originally the tracks and stations (or rather the management of them) was privatised into a private entity, Railtrack, but it had to be renationalised because of a number of massive safety incidents from cost-cutting.
You're also left with the issue of unprofitable stations, which is a lot of them.
If you want an example of what a really privatized, deregulated rail system would look like, read about France in the early 20th century. By the 30s, shareholders were begging the state to nationalize their money-burning companies. And it did.
Rail should be a public service. As one, its benefits to society are immense.
> Rail should be a public service.
No, it should be run for profit but the system put in place well designed so serving more customers better means the company does better.
Japan accomplishes this AFAIK, by letting the train companies buy/own/build other things. For example, the Tokyu company that runs some of the trains that come into Shibuya station owns the building Google's Japan office is in. They also own the famous 109 building (10 = to, 9 = kyu). And 10 or 15 other buildings in Shibuya. They run grocery stores at probably 50% of their stations. They also build apartments.
If their line gets sucky people spread the word "don't live on that line, it sucks, it's too crowded and the trains are late" and all their business suffer and people start moving out. So they have an incentive to keep their lines better than the other lines.
They also compete on destinations. For example Shibuya to Yokohama. You can take a Tokyu line and you can also take a JR line. They go slightly different routes but end up at the same place. Similarly if you're in Kyoto and want to go to Osaka. You can take JR, or Hankyu, or Hanshin, 3 separate train companies all of which run multiple lines. You'll see ads for the multiple different competing trains to get you from downtown Tokyo to Narita and Hanada airports.
And honestly, I think you’re overstating the degree of choice you have as a rider. Different lines carved out their corners and companies avoid each other. Service level is generally high, to the point that it’s a non factor. You take whichever train is cheaper/faster, and that’s it.
The problem is that rail has huge positive externalities that are not captured by the operators. You can address that by letting operators speculate on real estate, or you could do it with taxes.
Also, the OP specifically mentioned Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto. These three cities are special because they have exceptionally high ratio of private train lines. (Yokohama should also be included.) Each of these train lines needed to apply with the Japanese central gov't to have their routes approved. If the competition to the JR national line was deemed too high, the proposal was denied.
Another thing that is frequently overlooked by outsiders who try to explain "rail success" in Japan: For more than 50 years, there was/is a tax deduction where employers buy a monthly rail/bus pass for employees. This was/is not restricted to JR national lines only -- private lines also qualify. As a result, this programme generates huge demand for rail service in Japan. I assume that Switzerland must have something very similar, as the outcome is incredibly similar (rail crazy by any measurement).
One of those has a positive virtuous feedback loop. The other has politicians.
The issue is they only exist where routes are profitable - which is almost none of them.
Many of Britain's railway routes are profitable, but open access operators aren't allowed to compete with franchised TOCs for a slice of those profits. As a prerequisite for approval, the Department of Transport requires open access operators to show that their services would create additional value of their own, not just abstract existing revenue.
Lumo, an open access operator and a part of First group, run trains between London and Edinburgh. They stop at Morpeth for no other reason than to fulfil their requirement to create value, in this case by stopping at a station previously underserved by the DfT franchise of the route. In other words, Lump had to make compromises in return for being allowed to get in on the action on one of the profitable railway lines.
I'd be confident in claiming that there has never been any true free market competition for British passenger rail services since privatization. The existence of private capital doesn't automatically create free markets!
Just to be a pedant, you can. However, the coordination problems are so immense that it is just a totally stupid thing to do.
So yes, rail should be a public service.
Also, with a large discount, so even if new social housing could be built, there wouldn't be the funds to build them. It is effectively a large wealth transfer from the taxpayer to those needing subsidised homes, such that they could later resell that home to release their windfall, sucking the money that could have gone to housing others.
While that is generally the argument, I wouldn't expect it to hold when governments remove subsidies as is often the case with regulated transport systems. The argument is actually one of efficiency.
I had a great argument with someone one time on the classic subject of deregulating roads. The interlocutor made a point that I initially struggled with - that without subsidies there probably wouldn't be many roads. After a bit of reflection it became obvious that in a free market where land was worth a lot of money, the market wouldn't put roads on it. Because of government subsidies, roads were being overbuilt beyond what actually makes sense (denser cities where people can walk from place to place are actually pretty livable). So in the case of deregulating transport higher prices isn't the end of it. If you remove a subsidy, there will be less of a thing. The question is why is that bad? If subsidies were good without drawbacks, we'd subsidise everything.
And land is a famous special case; there should be a land tax to weed out people trying to make money from owning undeveloped land.
> If subsidies were good without drawbacks, we'd subsidise everything.
Many voters are sensitive to what they perceive as wasteful use of public funds, so your claim only makes sense in a sort of idealized, platonic dictatorship. Admittedly, governments do waste funds occasionally so the concerns are not necessarily baseless. However I can easily see a government choosing not to subsidize a 'perfect' project simply because they want to appear frugal to voters - after all, that is a significant reason why the UK has had so many austerity policies that have slowed public investment.
> And land is a famous special case; there should be a land tax to weed out people trying to make money from owning undeveloped land.
Henry George, is that you? I can certainly get behind that argument!
Our societies becoming increasingly more unequal and less functional coincides almost exactly with Raegan's and Thatcher's mandates. Austerity, privatization and deregulation are directly leading us into Gilded Age levels of inequality. And you shouldn't want that, unless you're like in the top 0.01%.
> In fact, it's the most expensive in Europe.
> According to most reports, public transport is most expensive in Switzerland across Europe, with cities like Zurich considered to have the highest individual ticket prices; the Netherlands also ranks very high in terms of expensive public transport costs.
So, yeah, I doubt that anyone can confidently say that UK public transport is the "most expensive in Europe".
The greater farce to me is "privatising" Thames Water. That will go down in history as one of the dumbest moves in UK economic history. It will soon be re-nationalised. So all the gains were privatised, but the losses were socialised. What a tragedy of weak governance.
And then goes on to immediately point out what I would expect to be the most obvious cause.
> Real wages have barely grown for 16 years.
Why would the general populous care to be more productive when they aren't going to see the profits?
When PM Liz Truss tried, it ended with disaster.
The plan Liz Truss proposed was to scrap the top rate of income tax, i.e. giving a tax break to the rich.
And the markets, understanding that it was exactly what the economy needed, reacted accordingly. By crashing.
I'm wildly interested what's your (and hn community's in general) proposed macro policy mix. When accounted for workforce changes (demography+participation), there was absolutely no economic growth in all developed EU economies (+UK) since the GFC. Zero productivity growth.
That's stark difference compared to US. Did Europe over-auster when US massively increased it's debt? But , as above-mentioned example shows, fiscal expansion can be challenging…
We can pretend the problem is all nanny state and neglected shitty council housing - which I agree it partly is - but it's also the creation of a vast class of landlords and property developers milking the population for rent with shoddily built super-expensive apartments. Classical free market thinking would have you believe they'd build enough housing to satisfy demand but they seem more than satisfied with maintaining the status quo so they can continue to charge exorbitant rents for little shitboxes with paper-thin walls, made to look fancy from a distance. These landlords have had a tremendous influence on Tory politicians and on policy.
And with everybody stuck in those high-rent dividend-machines, people under 40 can't afford to outright buy a house or even an apartment. And if you own a house, by means of its value gradually increasing, your mortgage reducing, and your salary hopefully increasing somewhat, you can eventually move on to a bigger/better house making room for the next young family to buy the house you're leaving behind.
Not to mention the absolute scam that is selling people leaseholds on apartments designed to make it prohibitively expensive to buy off the lease. An uniquely devious instrument dreamt up by the rentseeking class to screw over the average middle-class Brit.
The free market, cutting red tape, etc, isn't the answer. The government and the councils could and in my opinion should pick up the slack from the property developers. Build affordable houses, sell them at a reasonable rate with a provision mandating the buyer actually occupies the property for the coming 5 years or so (outside of exigent circumstances like divorce - we can work out the details). Sell them to people who are actually going to live in the house rather than use it as a financial instrument to speculate with or to rent out.
Is that unfair competition to the rentseekers? Yes, it is. Tough luck. You can't demand the government play by free market rules if you've successfully been undermining the free market functioning for at least two decades.
Sadly, with the current Labour government being very 'Tory but change the typeface and make it red,' this isn't going to happen. Cause they're friends with the real estate class too.
Blames privatisation and yet in no way explains why that affected house buildings which was not privatised, talking about an entirely different law.
And then it doesn't mention Brexit once.
This is such an obviously ultra-right wing biased and trash article, I have no idea why it's being upvoted so much.
Did the tankies were in charge back then?
Fixed it for you. I don't understand how people expect "service-based" economies to actually create any long term wealth, growth or prosperity. Unless you're serving increasingly ever more lattes to each other, and increasingly more "banking-services" and rents upon rents somehow are supposed to "grow" the economy and create "prosperity".
The more you de-industrialize your country and outsource everything, to the point that you're failing to meet even your energy needs, and competency to quickly build plants or infrastructure projects dies out, it's bound to result in at best stagnation and going to the shitter eventually, it's a matter of time.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2021/04/26/taxing...
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=ockN
Meanwhile the income tax burden, specifically, has gotten considerably more progressive:
https://www.ntu.org/foundation/tax-page/who-pays-income-taxe...
Looks like NTU also is positing their stance on the ideology that the 1% are the only ones that create jobs but they are the ones to most likely invest in large corporations. There seems no prospect to help the mom and pop shops or small companies that have stronger solutions beyond what large corporate tunnel vision provides.
My personal taxes keep going up with these "Tax Cuts". I don't expect them to come down with the push for tax cuts for the wealthy. Nor has my income gone up.
Wouldn't buying more local would reduce energy used for transportation of goods and services?
I see less Amazon purchases and deliveries as a net benefit for the majority and a net deficit for the wealthy investors. Wealth that stays more in the community versus being shipped to Wall Street.
In Europe? They can just take a train. Young people backpack all over Europe on shoestring budgets.
Another way to phrase shifting baseline is when people apply what they experience with an over weighted value. For example, the cost of living has skyrocketed in the USA compared to older generations, with the cost of a home, healthcare, and basic goods and services. Wages have been stagnant while the wealthy keep gaining more and more of economic power. Economic mobility is also quite low compared to 10 or 20 years ago.
Those trips are most likely more cost effective compared to the 1950s because the technology was new and still evolving. Air travel was a luxury and now it is a commodity. Engineers have improved the technology to craft air plains while finding ways to reduce production cost. Cost savings have not be pushed to the working class and are shifted to the wealthy.
If the wage increase of CEOs was linear with your wage. It would be higher and also be less of an economic for burden the masses.
People over value the rare lucky ones as being the average of all. Kind of how a number of Americans are against taxing the wealthy because they believe they are or will become wealthy. It is rare to become wealthy and often those that are lacking in empathy and morals. Just like my Uncle that worked for Arbys, which is a millionaire because he believes and supports the idea that those below him should not be payed a living wage.
At leas I learned from him that those franchises often run on debt because they try and pull out every last dollar into the owner's pockets. He was looking to become the owner but the debt was too great to buy in, as a millionaire.
[0] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/fee.... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline [2] https://earth.org/shifting-baseline-syndrome/
Government spending was a slightly lower percentage of GDP than today (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S), and a whole lot of that was defense (https://econofact.org/u-s-defense-spending-in-historical-and...).
The 50s were great, let’s do that again.
Assuming you're not a non-white person, or a woman who wants a career. Although getting rid of Medicare would certainly help the budget.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_King...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O7PVEaPh6Fw&pp=ygUUYWRhbSBzbWl...
Or how in the Thatcher era, the government began to privatise and divest the most valuable parts of the company (and arguably a huge amount of British soft power) for little return to the taxpayer?
Notably it sold Mini to BMW, Leyland to DAF, Jaguar and Land Rover to Ford.
Privately-run Ford nearly went bust in the 2000s and famously had to be bailed out by the US taxpayer, but they sold off Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata in the process.
"successful" and "profitably run", taking into consideration the recommendation to Tony Benn that the Wilson gov't provide 1.2 billion pound investment; plus the buyout of existing BL shareholders at 1/5 the value of their shares, plus the pre-existing tariff regime, without even touching the product and manufacturing issues that had dogged them since the Austin-Morris days.
Pigs can fly, if given enough thrust...Labor didn't fix BL, it just kept the shambolic structure upright, albeit canted at a weird angle.
Jaguar was privatized in '84 (and nobody at BL was going to pony up money for new models) and only in '90 did Ford purchase it, for as it turned out, way too much. "Nothing wrong with this that a bulldozer couldn't fix" said a Ford exec after first touring the Jaguar plant on Brown's Lane in Coventry.
Neither BMW nor Ford were ever able to make Land Rover work as a reliably profitable company.
Also, Ford was never bailed out in 2008. Alan Mullaly hocked almost all of the company to get liquidity before the crash, which was prescient. After that, the entirety of the former Ford "Premier Automotive Group" (save for Lincoln) was jettisoned, as it was in the long term a money-loser. Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata, Volvo to Geely, and Aston-Martin to ...some Saudis.
But it was part-nationalised in 1974 following a private-sector failure. It was a big manufacturer, letting it collapse would have led to thousands of jobs lost, but the government went for a 1.2bn buyout instead of simply a cash injection.
It was not badly run in the ‘70s. It had its ups and downs, but ultimately it was very stable. It really started to collapse in the ‘80s. Lots of reasons for this, including a changing market, recession and poor management decisions. Toyota’s lean production processes became a thing and BL failed to evolve, such is the way of business. It was most certainly a mess by the late ‘80s.
Remember, it was part-nationalised: essentially run as a private corporation that the government had a major stake in, not directly run by the government, though of course the govt could not help but meddle and the Thatcher govt was ideologically opposed to such a structure existing.
The 1950s were great for places like the US, Australia and New Zealand because they were initially fairly unregulated (wartime planning was ended and the market took over) and they weren't destroyed by the war.
The UK had rationing into the mid 50s while its empire crumbled. It was not some heavenly place. Millions left the UK for the new world, including my grandparents, because the UK was in a dire state.
Over the next 20-30 years, the anglosphere became progressively more regulated, more taxed, more controlled, and more unionised. You needed a licence to import a new car. You needed a licence to import magazines. Exchange rates and interest rates were controlled by the government and adjusted for political purposes. Large parts of the economy were run inefficiently by the state as make-work schemes to prop up "full employment" policies that were politically popular but very expensive. The oil shock of the 1970s revealed how bad this scheme of economic management was at responding to changing conditions. When you have thea biggest economy in the world and you were untouched by a war that decimated your competitors it is easy to look good. But the system was not capable of responding to changing conditions because it was largely driven from the top down by bureaucrats and politicians for the sake of implementing their preferred social policies and winning elections respectively.
In the 1980s, this came to a breaking point. This was true everywhere, but the clearest example is not the US or the UK but New Zealand. It nearly went bankrupt trying to maintain completely unsustainable exchange rates for political reasons and there was a small consitutional crisis when the outgoing government refused to implement the incoming government's instructions to lower the exchange rate. The economy was dominated by what were called "Think Big" schemes: government infrastructure projects that made no financial sense but looked good on election posters and "created jobs". Large numbers of businesses did entirely pointless things like assembling Japanese cars from components more expensively than could be done in Japan, because car imports were restricted. Many other examples exist. Agriculture was heavily subsidised by the state.
The new governments in the 1980s (I am talking about the West generally now) did away with much of this rubbish. They lowered trade barriers, reduced or eliminated subsidies, and privatised the elements of the public sector that had no reason to be run by the public sector.
Sometimes when privatised these businesses failed. But that wasn't because they were privatised, it was because they had never made any financial sense in the first place.
The fundamental point is that the 1950s system was the same as the 1960s and 1970s system. If you go back to the 1950s, you also go back to the 1970s. The system was the same, the same incentives would exist, and the result would be similar. Give the economy over to the public sector and in a few years all thought of making what customers want and will pay for is substituted with using economic power to achieve social goals and win elections. We had better make sure we hire more Xs, they deserve more representation, and we better put money into Y, people love to hear about Y, and so on. And before long it is a lumbering inefficient mess.
Since, as we all know, the article is about how central planning ruined the UK economy, and the later reforms were not enough to fully unblock it. Particularly, it postulates deregulating housing and making it harder for people to oppose new investments (especially related energy and infrastructure)..
Why would I want to invest in that risk when I have relatively little control over the success of the business, as opposed to investing the same amount of wealth in the market more generally or in assets that counter some of that risk?
Also, generally, why should employees automatically get some part of the company? What have they done to deserve it?
Thatcherism works as long as there are still people receiving state assistance, since their assistance can be reduced even further.
Regarding the immigration, sure, the Conservative voters maybe want less of it, but rich and influential Tories actually like immigration as it allows their businesses to thrive (even more). The UK has more capital going around than her own people.
We didn't leave the EHCR. So there is an argument that we don't have full control of our laws. IANAL and won't pretend to know the specifics.
> Regarding the immigration, sure, the Conservative voters maybe want less of it, but rich and influential Tories actually like immigration as it allows their businesses to thrive (even more).
Not just Conservative voters. Almost 1 in 5 Labour and Lib Dem voters want to see it reduced.
https://public.tableau.com/views/Publicopinion2023/FIGURE9?:...
Generally 52% of the UK want to see it immigration reduced in some capacity according to the migration observatory. This was roughly the Vote Leave percentage.
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/uk...
It used to be the case that we were also tied into the ECHR (and playing nice with the rulings of the ECtHR) because it's required by EU law even though it's not an EU instrument and the ECtHR isn't an EU court. But as we've left that's no longer an issue.
Finally, I'd just say that there's little objectionable about the Convention, and for the most part it tracks very closely with existing British common law (not surprisingly, as it was a Churchill-supported project in the first place and intended to export what was great about the British tradition of liberty as much as to bind us into Europe). There are a few edge cases where politicians and certain newspapers get into enormous flaps about individual cases, but it's really not that constraining a convention: most of the clauses have get-outs for crime, morality and public order and the margin of appreciation is generally quite broad. It's not perfect any more than, say, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is, but the complaints are mostly grandstanding.
That's also not what I said nor implied. The parent comment discussed Conservatives, so I replied to that.
This is because I don't think it is as much of a right/left issue like it is frequently framed.
Wealth and income are not zero-sum. Generally, people produce more than they consume (or we'd all be living in caves). Reducing people reduces output, growth, and wealth.
Plus it was never about immigration, it was always - I think - a classic case of misinformation and greed from many places. Sadly many people fell for it.
It was partly about immigration. According to these surveys 43% of people that voted leave think immigration should be reduced.
https://public.tableau.com/views/Publicopinion2023/FIGURE9?:...
> it was always - I think - a classic case of misinformation and greed from many places. Sadly many people fell for it.
Why do many people assume that if someone thinks differently about a particular political issue they must have fooled somehow? Considering there is data that partially contradicts your belief that it wasn't about immigration, maybe your assessment about their level of understanding of the issues involved is also incorrect.
politicians sometimes lie…?
the £350 million a day bus springs to mind as one example. the amazing trade deals which will unleash our new economy were another.
like, those things sound great. people wanted those promises to become real and believed the people who were saying those things could implement them.
turns out implementation is sometimes a lot harder than waving your hands and making a bunch of promises.
edit —
especially when the advertised numbers are factually wrong, and people know they are wrong — i.e. they lied.
> A study by King's College London and Ipsos MORI, published in October 2018 found that 42 percent of people who had heard of the £350 million claim still believed it was true, whereas 36 percent thought it was false and 22 per cent were unsure.
That isn't a big enough reason to assume everyone's been fooled. Or at least, the people who disagree with you have been fooled. That's possible, but it's also possible you've been fooled. So bringing it up one-sided is a bit grating.
> On 27 May, the UK Statistics Authority chair Andrew Dilnot made a stronger statement against Vote Leave, stating that the continued use of the figure was "misleading and undermine[d] trust in official statistics".
misleading is politics speak for “lying with statistics”.
> A study by King's College London and Ipsos MORI, published in October 2018 found that 42 percent of people who had heard of the £350 million claim still believed it was true, whereas 36 percent thought it was false and 22 per cent were unsure.
two years later, after the claim was repeatedly denounced as being misleading and false multiple times, 42% of people surveyed still thought it was true.
that’s a significant representative proportion of the population, given 52% of people voted to leave.
it’s no wonder that 7 years later “brexit remorse” among leave voters is sitting pretty at around 60% or so (cba to source this, i think it was a yougov poll reported in the independent).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_Leave_bus
> bringing it up one-sided is a bit grating.
i find people who lie, and people who defend liars, grating.
we don’t get to pick our reality. we just have to live in it.
Who here is defending liars?
Most people are quite aware that politicians lie. It is a common trope in movies, tv and media generally. Politicians are quite disliked in the UK generally. So this idea that people blindly believe politicians is nonsense.
> A study by King's College London and Ipsos MORI, published in October 2018 found that 42 percent of people who had heard of the £350 million claim still believed it was true, whereas 36 percent thought it was false and 22 per cent were unsure.
So? People frequently cherry pick information to justify their decisions after they have already made them. I actually looked up the actual report (not the wikipedia summary). While much more people generally believe the 350 million figure voted Leave, there was a decent percentage of people that believed the figure and voted Remain.
People seem to forget that a good portion of the Media and Parliament (including the Prime Minister at the time who won with a majority) were in favour of Remain. What is often ignored is that if you look at UKIP voter percentage before the referendum. It had risen from 3.1% to 12.6%. That was rising well before the bus campaign was a thing.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/election2010/results/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2015/results
The Leave Referendum was about many things. It was partly about immigration, it was partly about sticking it to an entitled political class, part of it was about sovereignty. Making it about a figure on the side of the bus is asinine. I also don't believe Dominic Cummings on how effective it was btw.
But in any event this will probably be my last comment on anything political on here because you get downvoted for simply defending half the people in my country that voted a particular way.
> I actually looked up the actual report (not the wikipedia summary). While much more people generally believe the 350 million figure voted Leave, there was a decent percentage of people that believed the figure and voted Remain.
64% Con/65% Lab leave supporters versus 32% Con/20% Lab remain supporters. so, 65%-ish (hand wavy representative stat) of leave supporters believed the claim, which was misleading / false.
65% x 52% = 34% of all leave voters (very back of a napkin maths here). that’s a sizeable chunk of people who believed the lie. enough people to possibly swing the vote, given there was only 2% in it. that’s enough to swing it if there was no bus claim.
> The Leave Referendum was about many things. It was partly about immigration, it was partly about sticking it to an entitled political class, part of it was about sovereignty. Making it about a figure on the side of the bus is asinine.
i completely agree.
but the bus is a great example of how people get lied to by politicians, who then potentially get their 34% of people convinced. which was the point i was trying to make. politicians lying has a significant impact on the outcome. it’s not solely responsible, but it has an impact. they bear some responsibility for the shit show we currently have now.
interestingly, the ipsos mori / KCL study confirms this somewhat
> you get downvoted for simply defending half the people in my country that voted a particular way.
1) commenting about the voting on comments is something we try to avoid doing here. have a read of the site guidelines to understand why (you’re a new user so i don’t know if you’ve seen them before or not)
2) people on HN generally speaking tend to be pedantic nerds like me who are probably somewhat on the spectrum somewhere and when they see a claim will call people out on it when it is wrong.
> Leave voters are least likely to answer correctly (16%) and most likely to wrongly think that European immigrants contribute less than they take out (42%).
> Leave voters are most likely to hold these incorrect beliefs: European immigration has increased crime; decreased quality of healthcare services; increases unemployment among low-skilled workers.
^ ipsos mori/KCL study
there’s your problem. you’re aligned politically with people who are, to put it plainly, more wrong about this subject than they are right. so when you try and defend your position on here, you are going to get significant pushback on claims because, frankly, a lot of the claims made by other people who voted the way you did are either wrong or misleading when they make their claims.
3) i wasn’t on the site in 2016 (did HN exist then? who knows). imagine what it would have been like back then!
4) i hope you stick around. compared to some commentators, you’re doing a bang up job with actually reading studies (which meant i’ve gone and read the study and learned something now! thanks!).
> So this idea that people blindly believe politicians is nonsense.
bonus round. most people don’t believe politicians. they do, however, vote based on who the sun newspaper tells them to vote for (well, until recently).
My view is it’s actually about people being racist
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/uk...
There is in the section entitled "Preferences for different types of migrant: origin, similarity, skill level". (There doesn't seem to be a way to directly reference it in a document).
> Country of origin is not the only factor that people take into account when considering preferences on immigration. In the European Social Survey 2014, British respondents reported how many immigrants should be allowed based on a question that specified both the country of origin (Poland or India) and the skill level (professional or unskilled labourer). The results revealed that when migrants are professionals, opposition is low, and when migrants are unskilled, opposition is high (Figure 5). Research has shown that people’s general preference for high-skilled over low-skilled migrants is mainly driven by perceptions of their higher economic contribution
> The preference among the British public for highly skilled migrants aligns with previous research indicating that, when questioned about the criteria for incoming migrants, skills are considered more important than other factors such as race/ethnicity and religion.
Direct link to the stats:
https://public.tableau.com/views/Publicopinion2023/FIGURE5?:...
I see no proof, spurious claims of 'racism' do not count as such so it actually was about immigration.
Moreover, time after time the British public are surveyed about their views on immigration and ethnic background is not something that is important to a large portion of the people taking part.
Are there some people that do care? Sure there are, but they are very small minority typically.
From your own data, 25% of respondents agreed with the statement: Allow none/only a few immigrants of a different race/ethnicity to come and live in [the UK]. This isn't a small minority and I can guarantee you the distribution of these attitudes isn't equal between leavers and remainers.
> As a further way of characterising countries, we include a second measure based on the percentage of people saying that immigration ‘makes the country a worse place to live’ On this measure, the UK maintains a similar rank position as one of the more positive countries in the sample, and similar to Switzerland at 18%.
> These two measures can be thought of as capturing opinions on future migration flows and current population stocks. In most of these 13 countries, it appears that people are more negative towards the idea of continuing flows than about the immigrants already present. Finland, for example, is a country where 42% of the public would prefer few/no immigrants of another race coming to live there, whilst, at the same time, just 19% think immigrants make the country a worse place to live.
It is still much better than many other countries in Europe.
> This isn't a small minority and I can guarantee you the distribution of these attitudes isn't equal between leavers and remainers.
Ok sure. I probably shouldn't have said minority. Yeah of course the distribution isn't going to be equal. However people pretend it was all about racism when it clearly wasn't.
From my perspective, even economic concerns are driven by fear of immigration: it's just the same old "immigrants are taking my jobs but also somehow not growing the economy so I am now economically displaced" trope.
? Where does it rank? What is per capita GDP?
Britons do not, actually, wish to carpet their entire island w/ semidetached housing, so each and every immigrant occupying a flat is one less that a native could be living in.
The Tories benefited massively from Thatcher because her policies massively benefited Britain. Without them, Britain would be far poorer today. Britain's problems today are not because of too much Thatcherism but because of far too little. The areas of greatest concern are those areas that they didn't manage to do much with, like local planning.
The idea of the market building housing only works if the market is allowed to do so. It isn't. That isn't a problem with the idea of the market building houses - it manages to do everything else in the economy just fine - but with planning laws.
Our utilities and infrastructure are now drain us for every penny we're worth, and guess what? They're largely owned by other countries now. Our train networks, our energy companies, our communications, and so on, go to pay the French/Chinese/Scandinavian/etc government's. Somehow other countries manage to make profit on state asset; something which Thatcher never had the capacity to do. That's not considering the private industry, which makes £MM in profit, pocketing it instead of reinvesting it in the state which is the primary mandate of public ownership. Individuals abroad or in the 0.1% profit make money from our state, while the rest of the country withers.
Thatcher/Reagan neoliberalism only has to be a failure if you assume the goal was to best serve the general population. This is a POSIWID moment.
Well you had 728,000 people coming in last year. It'll have to be a bit more i fear.
The UK has a lot of wind (shallow waters, strong wind blasts from Atlantic etc) and wind is significantly cheaper, but because there's gas still on the grid everyone pays the higher gas based price even if energy is mostly coming from cheaper wind.
Yes, the renewable cleaner energy is actually cheaper than the fossil fuel it's replacing and in a perfect world should reduce bills.
All markets (not just energy markets) work in this way.
You're describing how a market functions. If the gas plants went offline tomorrow, could the wind turbines produce sufficient energy to power the national grid?
In practice UK electricity prices _are_ much cheaper from wind and solar energy, most of the time, because virtually all of that capacity in the UK was built under what is known as a CFD (contracts for difference) basis. The exact mechanism is a bit subtle [1], but in essence renewables built that way have a fixed price per unit of energy (usually for 20 years after construction). This price is less than what the gas energy producers typically bid in the UK.
The reasons why electricity prices are still on average very high in the UK is because the rest of the energy market is _so_ exposed to gas prices and renewables can't produce electricity a lot of the time (because it's not always windy, and it's not always light outside). Renewable production is highly correlated with itself and not necessarily aligned with demand.
The UK also has other structural problems in the electricity system that have arisen from its exposure to renewables that come with associated costs. For example wind turbines in Scotland often get paid to _turn off_ because their power can't be transmitted to the south of England where it can be used - there are similar constraints with North sea production. Wind turbines and solar panels replacing traditional coal power stations means that the electricity grid has lost a lot of its traditional load balancing and stability mechanisms (conventional power plants provide a lot of stability because large rotational mass synchronised to the grid frequency provides inertia in the entire grid - wind turbine rotation is independent of the grid frequency). ESO now has to have more drastic and expensive mechanisms like demand reduction and rapid response hot reserves in-place. A lot of these issues are transient and will get cheaper over time, but they've become acute in the short-term with the UK's rapid grid decarbonisation.
[1] they get paid directly from the day-ahead, spot, and other markets at the last bidder price. But they either have to refund any amount over their fixed price, or they receive a top-up from the energy companies so that they effectively got the fixed price.
Combine that with high costs of housing (both to purchase but also to rent) and people are, generally speaking, fucked and living paycheck to paycheck. Renters especially live a precarious life where prices regularly go up 10% per year and you might be legally told to leave with not much more than a month's notice leading to much upheaval and associated costs.
No.
What you need to combat climate change is cheap green energy, and "green" is just a different question entirely to "cost".
If you have expensive energy, regardless of how green it is or isn't, you get poverty.
If you have greenhouse-gas-emitting energy, regardless of how cheap or expensive it is, you get climate change.
20 years ago, all the green energy was expensive; now, green energy is the cheapest around.
great to notice, but the overview falls short.. price signals are supposed to trigger conservation yet somehow, that is not discussed. Also note that energy markets have lifecycles.. it takes investment and infrastructure to make and deliver energy. Fossil fuels have done that in the past.
Energy conservation has been discussed my entire life.
When I was a kid, it was things like double glazing, close windows, wear pullovers indoors, turn off lights when you leave a room, CFLs.
Late teen to young adult, increased loft insulation, cavity wall insulation. Energy efficiency standards for consumer goods. Cars getting taxed based on emissions.
More recently, a campaign group literally called "Insulate Britain": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulate_Britain_protests
> Fossil fuels have one that in the past
At first, but the last coal plant has been closed, and renewables are ascendent — just past midnight UK time and still 28.5% renewables, average for last week 33.6%, and for last year 36.8%: https://grid.iamkate.com/
Then, to make killing this political suicide, make sure to mail every man, woman, and dog a check every two weeks called 'CARBON DIVIDEND'.
We effectively did this in Canada and it still became a political albatross.
(Though in practice the cheque was done via direct deposit and a lot of people didn't realize where the money was coming from despite it being clearly labelled. I think cheques in the mail would have been more effective.)
Currently if users as a group demand more power than clean can provide, dirty gets turned on and everyone pays the highest cost.
We need a way for a consumer to be able to commit to only clean power, potentially at a lower cost but with limited supply.
It means there is no way for an individual consumers behaviour to drive (or be driven by) the green energy proportion, as if the collective demand is too high then you pay the market rate for coal anyway.
Though even without that, solar, wind, and batteries are already cheaper.
When a polluting industry poisons the air and the water and people go to the hospital because they are coughing or they have dysentery, who will pay to cleanup the mess? If you frame the discussion as about “price” it is a non-starter.
I would argue it is better to talk about workers and their families. As in let us not shit in the river so our children don’t get sick and can go to school. Let us not poison the air so workers can do their jobs and not go to hospital.
1. You're welcome to argue that, but you haven't here. You've just stated it.
2. You shouldn't supplant one topic with another. High energy prices kill people, because energy drives the cost of everything, and people can direct less value into things that keep them healthy if they're spending a greater proportion of their income on survival. You can say "also air should be clean", fine, but not "Don't think about prices! Look over here instead!"
2. You can have your cake and eat it, if you drop the requirement to buy electricity at the price of the most expensive component in the mix. Spain did just that and they're currently experiencing an industrial revival thanks to comparatively low energy prices.
They're trying to explain in good faith as far as I can tell.
Indeed, and so does air pollution. Having (accurate) prices on both allows the market to reduce pollution and energy costs efficiently.
Adding a separate topic seems like a distraction. Everyone knows about negative externalities. I don't think we need to rehearse the same points to obscure the specific one I'm asking about.
Put another way, in a world where fossil fuels are no longer consumed, there isn't any reason to limit energy consumption for its sake, since the whole point was to encourage adoption of cleaner technologies. There is a case to be made that this isn't true, since even the "clean" technologies have an environmental impact, but that is tangential to the discussion.
We are basically stuck until even those guys realise that coal is a loser just for practical, non carbon priced reasons.
Can you explain exactly what you mean? Say (very made up numbers) coal is $1 per day, and a renewable is $2 per day. I raise the price of coal to $3 per day to make it relatively more expensive. Haven't I just increased the price of energy overall to $2 per day?
This reminds me of that popular "reality" show where they remodel a family's home and surprise them with what is basically a palace. Afterward the families are shattered by energy costs, and eventually exorbitant property taxes. Off camera they are forced into forclosure and end up in debt.
After the first month or so they are forced to seal off most of the house as they desperately try to stay afloat. Lacking financial savvy, most end up mortgaging the home.
The wealthiest people will end up paying more than they receive back, while the poorest will receive a boost. All while incentivizing low carbon alternatives in every sector of the economy.
But unfortunately, even the most liberal political groups have walked back any interest in solving climate change at the margin. You see this with the endless life of the "100 companies cause climate change" misinformation.
Good news, the UK has completely moved away from coal: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/30/end-of-an-e...
China is now consuming record amounts of coal (the globe has not actually even reached peak-coal yet despite claims we'd already passed it going back decades and despite western coal consumption taking a nosedive starting about 20 years ago). Which is strange considering that it has also been an enormous producer and exporter of allegedly much cheaper solar and wind generators for many years.
Something doesn't add up here, and further disadvantaging much cleaner domestic industry and driving production offshore to countries with far higher emissions intensity of production (not to mention many other environmental and humanitraian issues) is not the way to solve climate change. It could be making it even worse.
Without that, the argument is basically "We know that life is barely worth living, but we aren't going to help with that. Instead we want to make your life even worse to save the environment!"
1) we need hire energy prices to match the externalities
2) we need subsidies to make the poor more efficient at using the power they can afford. I heard in England they don't have proper insulation in most homes. Building to passive house standards can completely transform an energy bill.
Good news is the UK government has been increasing, and wants to further increase*, the legal minimum energy efficiency of rental properties.
The bad news is the current* UK requirement is still so low that the 39 m^2 apartment I let out in the UK costs more to heat *badly*, than my 100-ish m^2 new passiv-ish house in Germany costs to be T-shirt temperature inside while watching the snow fall outside. (And that UK apartment is one of the better ones in the building; I used to live in it, one of my requirements when buying was double glazing, not all the apartments in that building had double glazing).
Also bad news is that my agency is telling me to not do anything more than the legal minimum to upgrade it, that I should instead wait for the requirements to get stricter before actually doing anything more.
Of course they absolutely do actually get things upgraded when rules change. In the UK, changing the rules does work.
* https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/improving-the-en...
They already have grants and subsidies that people can apply for.
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/find-energy-grants...
> I heard in England they don't have proper insulation in most homes.
Almost every house and apartment I've lived in had had some sort of insulation and double/triple glazing fitted on the windows. So I found this quite hard to believe so I looked it up.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7c19d040f0b...
Official stats from 12 years ago say that ~70% of properties do have cavity wall and loft insulation as of 2013.
> Building to passive house standards can completely transform an energy bill.
They are plenty of regulations on how new houses are built on how energy efficient they are. However we cannot build enough housing for a number of numerous reasons to meet current demand.
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar4/wg1/global-climate-projection...
Central economic planning - the eternal hope that never works.
That vacant “Paris” also turned out to become populated later.
Ha ha they centrally planned a city and didn’t move people into it before it was done... like what you do when building a house. That’s effectively what you are alluding to as absurd.
[1] But by that time the Western journalists might not care anymore whistles
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-01/chinese-g...
Or via Wikipedia since it’s paywalled:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underoccupied_developments_in_...
Google "critical media analysis".
Gluts and shortages are endemic to centralized economic planning.
There's nothing efficient about that.
They've also built thousands of miles of high-speed rail, many dozens of subway lines and elevated hundreds of millions into the middle class. I don't particularly like the CCP for a variety of reasons, however to downplay their incredible strategic planning starting in the early 1980s in terms of industry and infrastructure is to be frighteningly ignorant of the world outside your borders. If you're an older American, you can probably afford to live out the rest of your days in this blissful ignorance. The rest of us however will have to figure out how the rapid decline of the USA and ascendency of China will affect our lives and plan accordingly.
Did you click the tweet or did just spend thirty minutes looking for a source to support the "ghost cities" claim, then rush to paste it here without looking that closely at it?
https://uschinatoday.org/features/2022/01/11/cities-lost-in-...
And this next one you've sent me is just someone writing a "hey have y'all heard about those 'Ghost Cities' in China?" article. You might as well have just linked to your prior comment saying "google ghost cities china".
For most of the last sixty years, a good idea about how to run an economy should have involved closely scrutinizing what the British were doing. And then not doing that.