The British didn’t deserve this miserable summer of 2023. August failed to fulfil its summer promise and it rained virtually every day, while the usual escape to the south of Europe at over 40°C burned the skin and destroyed the desire for a slowly fading tan as we rolled into autumn. If proof be needed of global warming, the oceans are heating up and fail to chill the swimmer. Meanwhile at home, the tides flow out full of shit, courtesy of private water companies who preferred to borrow at low interest rates for their shareholders and executive bonuses rather than actually do their job. Maybe if climate change does its worst, the Gulf Stream will shift south and make the weather steadily closer to that of Siberia. Where the shit will migrate remains unclear.  

As things stand, the Bank of England fights inflation, by deflation. An inflation rate of 2% remains the target in spite of the fact that energy and food prices have sky rocketed as a result of Putin’s ill-advised invasion of Ukraine. Fatefully, for all those salads on middle-class lawns, the price of olive oil has risen by an astonishing 17.3%, while the Bank has wound the interest rate up 13 times to reach 5.25%. Naturally not everybody complains. The rapidly disappearing high street banks have discovered a neat trick. Get everybody on the internet in spite of all those viruses designed to rob you and avoid any unnecessary human contact. Except, of course, to say on the phone that you are “number 375 on the line” and advise you to call again later, when you will hear exactly the same. It will then cut off anyway.

Mind you, if you get people to borrow at 6% – frequently of necessity – and pay the people who save with you less than 2%, you can tuck away quite a profit to enable your senior executives to pay themselves a neat million a year. The genius of the mathematics is there for all to see, even if most of us learnt it in primary school. Who cares if a few of us are making such millions and the streets are increasingly full of beggars, as coins disappears into the ether of the on-line? Cash won’t do nicely, Sir and the £10 note becomes the small change in the bill for restaurants. When did you last see a fiver? Bending over for anything less than a £2 coin isn’t worth the back strain.

Mysteriously, the Labour leadership seems to believe that the Uxbridge by-election loss has doomed any attempt to see cleaning London air as any kind of vote winner, when an alliance with the Greens would have doomed the Conservatives and even a deal with the Liberals – who weren’t really trying – would have done the same. Of course, your car would have to be 17 years old not to comply with the ULEZ standards on nitrous oxide (NOx) and your diesel at least seven for particulate (PM). The PM target of less than 0.0005 grams per kilometre for diesels hardly seems too much to ask. Besides NOx in the air has fallen by 84% since 2001 and PM by 96% since 1993, so ULEZ and Euro standards can be regarded as a triumph.

In any case, the Mayor of London is a believer in the bicycle, whose environmental status is assured. Mind you, pedestrians beware as they nip before, behind and after you in a competing rush with the electric scooters and motorised wheel chairs on and off the pavement. Do not step behind you as you board your bus, for you have been warned of the cycle path behind you. Cyclists never read the Highway Code and see red lights as a kind of challenge. Hurrah! Let us trap our vehicle pollution onto narrower roads so that jams proceed to destroy the value of the car. Yet curiously, one wonders how this might appear in Vietnam, where they have discovered 125cc motor bikes and seem reluctant to trade back down to older forms of locomotion merely to save the planet.

Either way, the reduction of road sizes may doom the electric car, which may not be such a bad thing. After all, as the World Resources Forum is finding out, the electric car requires six times the mineral input – copper, graphite, cobalt and nickel – as the standard gasoline model. Quite what the impact of all this mining is going to be on climate change remains to be seen. The IEA predicts that demand for these metals will quadruple by 2040. Besides nobody seems to be doing some elementary maths. The Gasoline Gallon Equivalent (GGE) in thermal content is roughly 34 kWh per gallon of petrol. In 2023, the UK is using around 12,375,000 gallons a day, or in straight energy terms around 420 GWh of electricity every day. As this is the output of around 17 and a half 1000 MW power stations, we will need to build a lot more of them, if we totally replace all UK gasoline cars. Forget about diesel vehicles and all those trucks. And remember the power has to be from renewable sources, because if it isn’t we will be making little difference to our CO2 output.

Meanwhile the Conservatives now seem determined to regard immigration as the next big vote winner, having seemingly failed to notice that Covid 19 has substantially reduced the available workforce. England has a demography problem. Back in 1986, those aged over 65 accounted for 15.4% of the UK population. Now it is 20% and is hurrying towards 24%. The baby-boomers are evolving into the “Could you just…?” generation; requirements yet unspecified. The lack of available muscle for serving out the porridge to the toothless may soon become a problem, as will driving the buses.

In this regard, Brexit was an idiocy, while the Home Office immigration service moves on to deciding who will leave or who will stay at the speed of a dying galaxy. Not that anybody is leaving any time soon for Rwanda. Did anybody actually ask the 800 inhabitants of Ascension Island if they wanted to host thousands of ill-assorted people fleeing climate change? We may even need all those Albanians pretty soon, these being the only people we seem capable of sending home without enormous expense in air fares. Promising to end “illegal” immigration is like the famous action of King Canute, who sat on his throne as the tide came in, to prove to his overflattering retainers that even he, for all his power, could not prevent his feet getting wet. Perhaps we should threaten to send them all to the moon? Now that would be a true disincentive to risk the waters of the Channel. Surprising that they haven’t mentioned it. Maybe they will.

Meanwhile the electricity regulator has warned those contemplating new offshore wind power that it may take the grid 10 to 15 years before it can connect them up. From 2021 to now, the grid has junked some 6.5 TWh of this source of power and other renewables at huge expense, because it can’t handle the peak generation output. Piclo, the computer boffins, are creating a secondary market for the regional power suppliers to get a focus on the complexity of their current supplies.

Maybe it would be sensible to contemplate breaking up the grid into regional sections anyway. After all, we live in an era of exploding electricity demand. What will all those teenagers do if they can’t charge their mobile phones? At minimum, it might, as my optician informs me, slow down their growing myopia. As for all those electric cars, whose heavy weight damages the roads, they will be trapped by all those bicycle lanes anyway. At least regional power grids would limit the possibility of a nation-wide black-out. No other country tries to incorporate the entirety of its territory into a single electricity network in the way we do

Mind you, the plan is build 24 GWs of new nukes by 2050, a mere 27 years away and we are due to lose 4.8 GW of nuclear capacity by 2028 anyway.  Given that it takes on average about eight years to build a nuke in Britain and at around 1.3 GWs each we will need 18 new ones, we had better start now. Ours are currently run by Electricite de France (EdF) which has plenty of problems at home with ageing reactors and low levels of river cooling water, so they may not be keen on building more on this side of the channel. Better keep on good terms with the Chinese then.  

In the meantime, the greenies are demanding that the Ffos-y-fran and the new Woodhouse coking coal mines be shut down, seemingly unaware that the British steel industry will simply have to import the stuff if it wishes to survive. Sure, you can decarbonise steel, with electric arc furnaces at a billion pounds a shot, or even, as suggested by the University of Birmingham boffins, with crystalline perovskite lattices above the fires, which neatly pumps the CO back into the blaze. So far nobody has built them. As it is, coking coal imports exceeded local supplies way back in 2001, so such local mining will have to be replaced by foreign stuff, if the UK wants to keep a steel industry at all.

Oh well, we have Prime Minister Rishi Sunak for now, following Johnson who proved that lying pays, and Truss whose ignorance of her beloved market forces proved disastrous. Sunak meanwhile made his multi-millions by that neatest of all conceivable means; marriage. Being an enthusiast for AI, he seems to believe that it can save millions on the cost of the National Health Service (NHS), where thousands now wait years for operations. With many doctors on strike, or disappearing to Australia, the iconic NHS is slowly being dismantled. Naturally, while no British politician would admit to wanting to see it disintegrate, it is happening by stealth instead, as the Government refuses to negotiate. Backpain? Ask Alexa for a massage.

As for Labour, its leadership seems to be throwing any new ideas into the shredder and heading, like Ramsay MacDonald in 1931, into promoting the next Great Depression. Hopefully we are not heading for rearmament, courtesy of Mr Putin as the next economic growth solution, as happened way back then. Besides, as a retiring army officer recently told me, the military is losing far more people than it can recruit. Perhaps, like Putin, we should empty the jails, which are full to bursting.

Regrettably, Sir Keir Starmer has all the charisma of a can of beans and modulates his speeches with the sound of a metronome. Oratory needs voices that rise and fall, redolent of quiet promise and intensity of loud anger. And the Nation needs that anger and some promises of a better tomorrow. We need some uplifting voices to tell us who we are; a great and inventive nation seeking renewal for our children’s future. Some policies for this might not come amiss, or at least some aspirations for it. Well, if they wanted a new idea, make it mandatory to put solar panels on all new houses. It is power at the source of its consumption without transmission necessary. It might just be popular…

Still, post-Covid we have found some comfort in that cutest of all companions with a newly born adoration for small dogs to pet and fondle as we scrape their excrement off the pavements into single-use plastic bags. As a nation, we are going to the dogs. Yet as ‘scientists say’ – the opening line of so many newspaper columns nowadays – perhaps canine excrement could be made to power our electricity supplies. It might be worth a trial. It certainly seems renewable. (20/8/2023)