When Middle Eastern wars sparked an oil crisis in the 1970s, tripling energy prices and throwing economies into chaos, some countries looked beyond short-term solutions. The French made nuclear the pillar of their power system. Scandinavians insulated buildings and funnelled waste heat into homes. The Dutch built bike lanes where others wanted motorways. The Danes developed wind turbines.
Which is why, of course, if you want to change the enrgy mix it is prices you should change…..
“Middle eastern wars sparked an oil crisis in the 1970s”.
It wasn’t the wars which sparked an oil crisis, it was OPEC’s response to the war which sparked an oil crisis. And this should have been a wake up call to to the west to wean ourselves off of foreign resources……
Denmark is a lot flatter and less densely populated than the UK – just because wind power works for them doesn’t mean it will work for the UK.
“The Dutch built bike lanes where others wanted motorways”
What? Do people think that salesmen are travelling around the Netherlands on pushbikes?
The biggest groups cycling of the Netherlands is kids going to school, their mothers, and students.
And here’s the issue for Guardian types: to make that work, mothers have to work less. So they have time to ride with the young kids to school, rather than dropping them off on the way to work. Time to ride to a local shop. 70% of Dutch women work part-time, compared to an EU average of 28%, 37% in the UK.
I can recall driving from Paris to Amsterdam in the 70s. Oh what a relief it was to get off that Belgian cart track & get onto the Dutch new stretch of autoroute. And it was just as good all the way to the German frontier heading for Dusseldorf. Odd thing is I don’t remember much in the way of cycle lanes. I’m sure the Dutch invented the concept of cyclists being immune from rules & regulations. In Paris you could still win a prize for knocking one off.
I am a keen cyclist – not one of the twatty ones – and have spent many a happy hour cycling behind ladies on bikes. We should encourage it.
Interested, that reminds me of the car advert for Citroen/renault? Shaking that ass? In my defence, I cannot drive a car so didn’t take any notice of the marque….
A magnificent ad. Allow me to introduce you to perhaps the finest popular music video ever made.
https://youtu.be/Kq4OtRsdXls?si=i3zuq9fWWdmXSY0B
Do you wear lycra?
Ah… the Graun….
Us cloggies never built bicycly lanes because of any “energy crisis” ..
We built them because the streets were increasingly taken over by metal lumps going at speeds the streets were never intended for.
Lotsa dead ‘n injured….
In the late ’70’s having a car over here was a *luxury*. Almost everything local was still getting done on the bicycle. *Far* more than nowadays.
Medium-distance you used a moped. Most of the to-and-fro from work was done on those, actually.. Fotr which those bike lanes were meant too….
As usual the Grauniads are projecting on stuff they haven’t got a clue about…
I got into the history of this, and the Dutch started building cycle lanes as early as the late 19th century. And the big push was about child safety in the 1970s.
Modern places in the UK have them. Milton Keynes has cycle paths, the new parts of Swindon have cycle paths. But no-one uses them much. Why not? Because it’s more than just building a path. Do women feel safe in the dark? Is the distance short enough? Can they easily get a bike repaired? Can they store it securely? Is it practical for them?
Cycling works in Oxford, but Oxford is lots of students. They go to the colleges nearby, they buy a basket of shopping at a time. There’s probably not a lot of chavs around Magdalen College. Bikes work for that. And there’s a lot of cycle shops to get them fixed.
Cycle sho…. Oh wait, those things…..
I’m of the cloggie generation where you weren’t a lad if you couldn’t fix your own bike or moped…Which were typically 2nd or 3rd hand to begin with..
*at least* fix your own tires… Or you were ….well… let’s say that’s nowadays HurtyWords™…
*REAL* cloggy bike shops have parts, a healthy selection of cheap refurbished practical bikes, and *maybe* you can get a new bicycle on order.
Defs can order any part, just not entire bicycles..
Smells of grease, steel, and rubber.
You simply just don’t find them on the High Street…
I’ve heard it said that there are almost as many bikes at the bottom of the Amstel as there are on the streets of Amsterdam.
When I was last in Amsterdam, I saw a barge full of bicycles rescued from the canal….
In MK the underpasses on the segregated cycle lanes and footpaths are the haunt of muggers and rapists. I don’t know if Swindon is similarly ‘enriched’.
Never heard of much like that. A lot of the newer estates went with bridges and pedestrian crossings.
That’s probably a good reason now. Years ago I read that cyclists in MK prefer the roads because cars grind detritus to tiny bits, but on the cycle ways it just sticks around and punctures their tyres
Cycling works better in Cambridge because it is flatter and doesn’t have an industrial city tacked onto the university at its centre. In Oxford I had a bike but I walked, or ran, several times as far as I cycled.
OT
Why am I getting a
popup every time, every comment, none of which are mine?
And the UK explored the North Sea and found oil and gas. Why wouldn’t we do that again? Then we get a benefit when prices go up and a different benefit when prices go down.
I met one of my lefty village mates in the pub last night and he was railing about ‘profiteering’.
I said it may be profiteering, or it may not, but either way if the wider effect is that people buy less of a suddenly-diminishing resource such that there is some of it left when we really need it that’s actually a good thing, and he called me a wanker 🙂
Golly, man-in-the-pub economics still exists.
I’ve decided that what Jesus actually said was: “For ye have the stupid with you always”.
Hmmm, different people tried lots of different things and that was good? Not centrally planned, one size fits all do you say?
The Grauniad. Ah, well.
Scandinavians didn’t insulate their homes before the 1970s? Talk sense. “Waste” heat? From what?
The French started their nuclear programme in the 1960s because they didn’t have much coal or natural gas, not because of the 1970s oil crisis. UK abandoned its nuclear abd phased out oil-fired power stations, because of cheap North Sea gas.
The 59 French reactors were paid for out of the taxpayers’ pockets. Electricity prices were regulated to keep them low, so low there was insufficient revenue to keep the reactors properly maintained – an accumulative problem which came to a head a couple of years ago when nearly half the fleet had to be closed down for repair.
And nuclear is so “cheap” EDF the owner of the French fleet, formerly State-owned but privatised a few years ago, has been renationalised because it cannot raise enough money to replace its aging reactors to comply with the Government’s policy to abandon “renewables” and make nuclear “the pillar” of France’s power supply. So the taxpayers’ will pay again, but electricity will be “cheap” on bills.
So when we hear of all these marvellous schemes to beat rising costs of A by replacing them with spiffing wheeze B…. aren’t we supposed to ask, “At what cost?”
And the Dutch obsession with bikes pre-dates WWII – the Country is small and flat, short journeys with only two small hills!