More drilling in the North Sea would do nothing to improve the UK’s energy security, former military leaders have said, as a new analysis finds no fossil fuel importer is safe from chokepoints in the global supply chain.
Therefore MadEd is right etc etc.
Retired R Adm Neil Morisetti, a professor of climate and resource security at University College London, said attempting to eke out the remaining oil and gas from the North Sea was “not the answer” to the challenges facing the UK.
Prof of climate security. Ho, right.
“It needs to include a clear plan to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels to solar, wind, tidal and nuclear power, and a major renewal of the grid, with associated storage, to support the distribution,” he said.
Grid scale batteries to last us through a dunkelflaute. Ho Yus.
and the following November became the United Kingdom’s Climate and Energy Security Envoy.[3] In January 2013 he was appointed as the Foreign Secretary’s interim Special Representative for Climate Change, a position he held for ten months
Deffo an impartial expert. Currently only a CB and therefore gunning for the K……
By this logic we should ban traditional farming in the U.K. to improve our food security. And accelerate a transition to a new and as yet unproven form of food production and storage.
Do these guys even hear their own words?
Hiring more doctors and nurses would do nothing to improve the UK’s medical security
Building more ventilators (remember those) during COVID is a waste of time, because ventilators are sold at market prices.
Experts say.
Studies show.
Analysis suggests.
Fewer idle fat cunts would improve the UK’s medical security. A healthier population requires fewer doctors and nurses, and we’re going to euthanise the oldies, aren’t we?
‘Leaders’? I count ONE ex admiral.
As for “not the answer”; so effing what? Definitely part of the answer.
And it’s not like we have a shortage of admirals and ex-admirals.
“United Kingdom’s Climate and Energy Security Envoy.[3] In January 2013 he was appointed as the Foreign Secretary’s interim Special Representative for Climate Change”.
Outside of the Labour front bench, is there any better evidence that this country is fucked…..
A radicalised, disconnected liberal elite class is intentionally dismantling British culture and institutions while trying to silence those who disagree.
So many British institutions— notably, the universities, the civil service, the armed forces, the BBC, the CofE, the National Trust, museums etc—have been captured by woke ideologues who prioritise diversity over performance and traditional national values.
And yet according to you the solution to these problems is the Conservative Party……..
Not so. Do keep up.
It is obviously not at all important that we should develop our national revenue streams – most people I know are getting pretty pissed off with tripping up over the piles of gold just lying around in the streets.
Looking at his bio such ‘expertise’ as he has is on the security and protection of sea lines of communication. Note he is a ‘professor’ (but I can’t see how he is so qualified) in climate security, not anything climate-related.
He holds a BSc in Environmental Sciences from the University of East Anglia and is a Professor of Climate and Resource Security and Vice Dean (Public Policy) at University College London (UCL)
So not by any means a climate scientist, so much as an activist administrator.
No wonder the Navy has gone to pot with “admirals” like this. Thank goodness he is retired.
Gawd, he’s stupid:
Morisetti acknowledged that the UK would need oil and gas for years to come, but said the turmoil created by the wars in Iran and Ukraine had led to increasing uncertainty over supplies and rising prices
Yes, genius. Uncertainty abroad is why we need supply at home.
The senior orifice to grifting pipeline is real. Not sure even the least impressive of Nelson's successors could fail to understand that, in war time, it's better for the Royal Navy to get fuel – y'know, the ships won't run on windmills – from Grangemouth than rely on somewhere thousands of miles away. Unless his salary depended on it.
No need to worry Steve, the RN’s been reduced to a coastal patrol force – and an unreliable one at that.
Morisetti? Not a good Anglo-Saxon name for an admiral…I hope he doesn’t have dual nationality…
Not to mention George Zambellas…
Theo, if you object to an admiral on the grounds of his name sounding a bit foreign, you lose Admirals Keppel, Vere Beauclerk and de Carteret.
And I really don’t know what we’d make of Admiral Skeffington Lutwidge.
True; but I was musing more about possible dual citizenship…
Not mention Admiral James Saumarez.
BSc in Environmental Sciences from UEA:
The [compulsory] module will consider concepts such as carbon footprints, the circular economy, natural capital, environmental justice and the sustainable development goals.
So a ‘Mickey Mouse’ degree…
The Pol Pot solution is looking better and better isn’t it?
I did one year of an Environmental Science BSc in the 1980s. I don’t remember any rubbish about carbon footprints, sustainable justice bollocks.
My grandmother went to University of London St Mary’s in the 1930s. It’s seriously gone down since then.
University of East Anglia? Isn’t that where the Climate Research Unit is, the one that had the email leak that suggested they were manipulating data?
How much will it cost? Hardening the grid, doubling (at least) power generatin. Fitting electric heating to all the gas and oil-powered homes and business premises, going electric with trucks(!). It’s trillions of our money which we haven’t got, it must be borrowed and interest paid. And what difference will our 1% make to the climate even if their figures are true, which they are not. No chancer revolving-door fake admiral should contribute to this without telling us the likely cost. (And everything always costs several times the figure they tell you.)
Unfortunately, thanks to cunts like him, we can’t “rapidly” build anything. Certainly not nuclear plants.
Oh, yeah. One more thing. Any admiral who went along with the degradation of the RN over the last few years without resigning has no honour.
There was a (not well reported…) “Revolt of the Admirals” around 2015 or so. The then-First Sea Lord, George Zambellas, invoked his right of access to see the Prime Minister, and came in with a pile of tasks and commitments; and a slimmer stack of Royal Navy resources and manpower; and said he wasn’t leaving until the piles were back in balance.
This got… emotional, apparently, but the Royal Navy got formal direction that it was indeed now going to do “less with more”, which addressed what was then a critical manpower crisis (voluntary outflow of nearly 10% a year, absolutely unsustainable).
In less than a year, Zambellas had been eased out (he obviously blew his chance to be CDS, but was also replaced indecently early as 1SL in a clear punishment move), and Cameron reversed course on the measures to fix the Navy’s shortfalls and instead imposed yet more cuts such as laying up our amphibious landing ships – which led to, among others, RAdm Alex Burton resigning in protest.
Which, sadly, achieved nothing, politicians don’t care… the only result was that at least the reduced tasking was held down (Big Z’s successor refused to allow the ratchet to be turned back up on new missions without any new resources) which reduced, but didn’t fully fix, the manpower crisis.
(Disclaimer – I worked with Alex at Staff College, and again when he was ACOS Capability & had decisions like investing in the novel, unproven DragonFire laser concept that potentially worked around some of the usual shortfalls in making a deathray useful)
So, unfortunately, the evidence is that even if seniors right up to 1SL lay down their careers for the good of the Service… it makes pretty much zero difference.
Thanks, Jason. I didn’t know that. Now a question that has been concerning me. If all the ships were available for ops, could they be manned? (Are we even allowed to say manned?)
Just about, maybe, if you squint a bit.
For example, the intent is that with two carriers, one should be at fairly high readiness while the other might be in dry dock for some significant work. With some warning time and lots of money (you can’t entirely substitute money for time, but we have to do a lot of giving up readiness and time to save cash…) you could get both carriers to sea with notionally full crews.
The issue then would be “what does the second carrier do?” since we’ve deferred the full F-35B buy; I’ve seen it being used as a big LPH (landing platform helicopter) similar to how Ark Royal was employed in 2003, in Planned Force wargaming, which actually worked pretty well.
An issue is that it’s not just that we’re short of headcount (though we could definitely do with a bit more) but that, because we’re short of ships and money for maintenance and operation has been “repurposed for other Government priorities” they don’t get out as much as they used to, some trades are short-handed because you need to do the job at sea to stay current. And you can’t surge ships out just to train people because then that’ll reduce immediate readiness…
Big, complicated “wicked problem” where (a) we’ve been cut back a lot, (b) the direction has always been “this is just temporary, it was jam yesterday and there’ll be jam tomorrow, just hold on a little…” followed by “well, actually, there won’t be jam tomorrow, and why are your plans all wrong and expecting the money we said was coming but now isn’t?”
One of the underrated and maligned Defence Reviews was Nott’s 1981 effort, which took an absolutely disastrous situation and tried to find a way ahead that could actually be sustained on the funding known to be available. That it needed deep cuts, was inescapable; but it protected the then-core mission of being prepared to oppose a Red Army Choir tour of Western Europe and began to address some of the easily-hidden shortfalls like empty ammunition bunkers (hence why, in 1982, taking a hundred AIM-9L Sidewinders south with the Task Force was the entire UK stockpile and we had to negotiate with the US that, if necessary, we would draw on their stashes at Alconbury and Bentwaters so we weren’t completely devoid)
Well I know a little of the other services if not the RN. And I have to return to retention as the problem. Senior NCOs who just get fed up with being fucked about and who have wives and families who do not appreciate the long periods away at short or no notice. I have an RAF officer next door who is never there. Always in Australia or the US or Blandford Forum. He’s hanging on til his pension. I don’t think he’s entirely on board with all the DEI.
It’s a mess, and there seems to be little hope of fixing it without a lot of money and the will to spend it sensibly.
Thanks, Jason. It’s good to get this stuff from the horse’s mouth, as it were. Do you know Tom Sharpe, who writes in the Torygraph? He seems quite shrewd.
A retired RN captain told me a few years ago, that most RN warships couldn’t fight because they were under crewed and had little or no ammunition for their main armament be it guns or missiles.
As per Rhoda’s original point:
One or two of them eventually leaving or being squeezed out is not enough.
If they really believe in the RN, and the country, they would all have gone, and all commodores, captains, commanders, and lieutenant commanders as well.
Unlikely, I agree, and illegal if organised rather than spontaneous (and I am certainly not Inciting anyone to Disaffection, merely thinking it through), but other than mutiny (which I obviously also do not endorse) it’s would take something of that level, where you can’t simply promote the next bloke, to force their hand.
Same with the Army and RAF too, of course.
Pretty sick of retired generals going on podcasts saying they told us so.
Easier said than done to chuck your livelihood away on a point of principle when you have a family to feed and house. And where there’s enough people happy with the status quo to stab you in the back even if you tried.
I didn’t say that it was easy (nor likely to happen), but these are blokes who have signed up for services that at involve you agreeing to chuck away your life on a point of principle, if ordered to do so, even if you don’t really agree with the principle.
If they really believe in the RN, and the country, they would all have gone, and all commodores, captains, commanders, and lieutenant commanders as well.
Well, yarp. The patriotic thing is to not join the UK armed forces until things change.
Crap pay, job security and housing and you are more likely to be helping ‘migrants’ reach Britain than do anything to defend Britain. The top brass already threw “white men” under the bus in the RAF recruiting scandal – but did you see any sackings or resignations? Feral terrorist rights lawyers dragging you to court because famous IRA murderer and human rights activist Jimmy O’Scumbag sustained an ingrown toenail in 1993. The British Army opening recruitment directly from African countries. If you do go to war, the plonkers have underfunded it so you might have to buy your own ceramic body armour and will most probably run out of munitions and drones in a few weeks. Years of adverts giving you the impression the Royal Navy is mainly staffed by short brown women who fold their arms a lot.
Pass.
100% – though soldiers have been buying their own kit since forever.
It’s no surprise recruitment and retention are struggles, no? Especially given the expectations of young people these days. They need to improve the offer. Professional level pay, since it’s a professional career as Elvis said. The kind of housing your wife and kids will be happy in. Long term funding commitments to sustaining a guaranteed level of *personnel*, even if they have to retrain. Not salami slicing the headcount with each SDR.
All costs money, but so does losing wars. All the expensive aircraft carriers and wonderplanes and drones are only as good as the people operating them. Much is expected of British soldiers in war, the least we can do is make sure they’re not worried about redundancy after they’ve made that long term commitment to defending the realm, no? Reciprocation, if we want heroes, we must have homes fit for them.
I wonder if Retired R Adm Neil Morisetti has any views on just how defensible things like Rampion actually are? Let alone the cabling back to shore.
“… as a new analysis finds no fossil fuel importer is safe from chokepoints in the global supply chain.”
Except: North Sea gas is piped to GB and has nowhere else to go – it has no “choke point”. 100% of North Sea gas has always come to GB. GB has no gas liquefaction plants so NS gas cannot be turned into LNG and exported. Therefore NS gas is not part of the “global gas market” – which doesn’t exist anyway (LNG prices are set at the point of supply, and vary) and not subject to price volatility.
About 45% of our gas is from the NS, the rest is LNG nearly all from the USA (which has multiple supply hubs – no choke point) at prices which are affected by the supply and demand. Increasing NS gas supply – or Heaven forefend frack for on-shore gas – would reduce amount of imported LNG thereby reducing gas prices and price volatility in the UK.
The only “choke point” is Government energy policy preventing more being extracted.
“Former military leaders”. Good job they are former.
Candidly, the laws of supply and demand don’t apply to supplying fuel or immigration affecting wages, but they do apply when people buy fuel or cigarettes, which is why they must be taxed by 6000%
A rear admiral told me so.
Which is ultimately what makes a low trust, Third World, society no? Not skin colour, not religion, not geography. When people in positions of influence and respect can just brazenly lie about facts such as the price of wind powered electricity, cause enormous damage to other people’s lives, and get rewarded for it.
So…. back to the age of sail for the Royal Navy? One advantage: it takes 50 times as much manpower to rig a sailing destroyer, so bonus reduction of unemployment figures. Drum Drum Drum for the King’s Shilling!
Except the saltpeter industry is very bad for the environment so we’ll fight from the forecastle using bows and arrows.
I’ll believe people are serious about nuclear when They scrap the LNT model of the dangers of low dose-rate radiation. This bit of bollocksy non-science adds God Knows How Much to the cost and time of nuclear developments.
I once attended a lecture by the nun, Dr Rosalie Bertell, supporting the LNT model. Her claims were hysterical. She claimed low-level ionising radiation was a particular threat to women and their breasts. So she was acclaimed by the femiloons present.
It’s funny how often “University College London” crops up in this kind of dross….
Oh wait…. weren’t they the one who actually employed our favourite Fat Comptroller from Ely?
Makes sense then….
You are probably thinking of Spud’s appointment as Professor of Practice in International Political Economy in the Department of International Politics at City University London. He has no connection with UCL, though it is easy to confuse CUL and UCL.
He’s Emeritus Professor of Accounting Practice at the University of Sheffield Management School. He’s also been a visiting fellow at University of Portsmouth Business School, the Centre for Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex, and at the Tax Research Institute at the University of Nottingham.
Just more targets to be designated “Ground Zero” then….
No, he was City. UCL is Mazzucato.
If you drilled in the North Sea (and started fracking again) the UK would no longer be an *importer* though and thus would not be affected by those chokepoints.
This is the quality of your military leaders.
Of course, if we’d kept on drilling in Oz and kept our refineries functioning, we wouldn’t have any petrol panic here either!!
Hasn’t it always been true, when they’re not actually fighting a major war, the UK’s armed forces function as social clubs for their senior officer class?
I think we had to sack a lot of senior officers fairly soon into both world wars usually for utter incompetence, so yes, that seems to be the rule. To be honest its amazing we have ever won any wars, given the quality of the military leadership.