Environmentalism

So, here’s me guessing on hte basis of very little information. How unlike me, eh?

Grids of Portugal, Spain, at least parts of France and Northern Italy went down. And I’m told (by a grid engineer here in P) that Poland did too. I don;t know the truth of all of that, just something that was said to me yesterday. This is all also before I read around the place – now having power again – to find out.

So, my assumption is that it’s renewables and their ability to create grid instability. FR, SP, P etc are all ewll interconnected if not one grid. Southern Italy isn’t…..it’s connected but not so much apparently. So, if N went down and S didn’t then that’s possibly why…..

It’s that claim about Poland that interests. As I say, don;t know whether it’s true, it’s just a claim I’ve heard. But, if true, that to me suggests Germany.

It’s long been true that the surrounding grids have whined bitterly about Germany and – especially – wind power. The fleet spins up and starts to flood the German grid which then exports the stuff in vast waves. At low, zero and sometims negative prices. Which can – obvs – produce instabilities etc. To the point that some peeps have been strongly suggesting that they’ll not accept German power over the interconnectors etc. Just not worth the costs to the grid of doing so.

So, if Fr goes down, well – but if Fr AND PL go down then…..

All pure speculation and you know me, perfectly happy to change my views when the information does. You also know me, perfectly happy to speculate on v little information. But, if true that Poland went down as well then I’d say look at Germany.

Another flashpoint is Cape Town’s three marine outfalls that pump 28m litres of partially treated wastewater into the sea on average daily, about a third of a mile to a mile from shore at depths of 20-40 metres.

This is the municipal water system.

On a clear summer’s day in Cape Town, the Milnerton Lagoon was serene, reflecting the bright blue sky and Table Mountain. But there was an unmistakable stench, and up close, the water was murky.

A few hundred metres away, adults and children played in the water as it flowed into Table Bay. On the boardwalk, a sign read: “Polluted water: for health reasons, swimming and recreational activities are at your own risk.”

“I woke up at midnight from the sewage smell,” said Caroline Marx, who lives in a property overlooking the lagoon and has been campaigning against the pollution since 2013.

“They had this catastrophic pollution [in 2020] where the lagoon went grey, milky, it stank like you can’t believe. And when it finally cleared everything was dead … every time it recovers, there’s another spill.”

Not capitalism…..

Last week Green Party folk called for Luton airport to be restricted, not expanded. Because people who used it would just be spending their money abroad and so not boosting the British economy on their hols. There was even a complaint – Sian whateversheis – that Brighton’s tourism numbers were down.

This week:

Cornish MPs call for ‘Airbnb bill’ to target second-homeowners
Liberal Democrat and Labour MPs tell the housing minister that second-homeowners should have to obtain planning permission for holiday rentals

People must not holiday in Britain because summat.

Stay in your hovels yearound, proles.

Energy supplier Rebel Energy has gone bust after allegedly raiding funds that were supposed to be ring-fenced for paying green levies.

It means about 80,000 domestic customers and 10,000 businesses have been abruptly left without a supplier.

The Bedford-based firm’s collapse followed a compliance order imposed a few weeks ago by Ofgem, the energy regulator, and raises new questions about the watchdog’s ability to protect customers.

Rebel Energy marketed itself as “fighting for fairness in energy” with a website pledging to “battle the injustices that burden our customers and the planet.”

It added: “We do this by tackling the true cost of energy head on. Not by fiddling numbers or buying certificates that let us pretend our energy is green, but by taking direct action to make things better.”

We make things better by running off with all the money.

Hey, works for me….

Only seven countries worldwide meet WHO dirty air guidelines, study shows
Annual survey by IQAir based on toxic PM2.5 particles reveals some progress in pollution levels in India and China

The WHO’s standards are too high, too clean. Not reflecting, that is, the trade offs. Sure, cleaner air is nice – but at what cost? What is it that people cannot do if the air is clean enough for these standards?

Greenpeace Says It’s Facing Bankruptcy From Oil Company Lawsuit Over Dakota Pipeline Protests

One of Britain’s biggest wind farms was handed £65m to slash its output by nearly three quarters last year, amid warnings that the country’s “staggeringly inefficient” power grid is pushing up household bills.

The Seagreen offshore wind farm in the North Sea – the largest of its kind in Scotland – had its output curtailed for 71pc of the time it was due to operate in 2024, grid data show.

This meant that of 4.7 terawatt hours of power its turbines generated, 3.3 terawatt hours were effectively discarded – with owner SSE paid by grid operators each time this happened.

SSE also owns the Viking wind farm in the Shetlands, which had 57pc of its output curtailed last year at a cost of £10m. It was only switched on in August.

The current argument is that this could be solved with zonal pricing. Which is one of those systems that would be worse. Upcoming CapX piece on that…

Though we might find it hard to imagine, we cannot now rule it out: the possibility of systemic collapse in the United States. The degradation of federal government by Donald Trump and Elon Musk could trigger a series of converging and compounding crises, leading to social, financial and industrial failure.

The collapse of the neoliberal hegemon! We will have our raw turnips in the dark and we will be happy!

Just because someone fails to believe in God doesn’t mean they’ve not a millennarian eschatology.

A giant gas field has been discovered under Lincolnshire that could fuel the UK’s entire needs for a decade, reducing dependence on imports and generating tens of thousands of jobs, an energy company has claimed.

Fracking isn’t allowed, see?

Stupid and all that but there it is.

Natural England has been accused of favouring rewilding over saving farmland.

The row centres on rules stipulating that when new homes are built in certain parts of the country, developers must offset any extra water pollution created.

Natural England advises councils on how to do this and runs its own schemes. Most solutions involve taking nearby farmland out of food production and rewilding the land.

Afuera. The whole lot of ’em. And fire Tony Juniper too.

In three years Natural England has designated just two new SSSIs, which protect areas from development

The government’s wildlife watchdog for England is failing to halt the decline of nature after a sharp fall in the number of new places given top protection, according to campaigners.

At some point all the speshul places will be so designated and we’re done.

Logically at least that’s true.

Vehicle tyres found to be biggest source of nanoplastics in the high Alps

EVs are heavier so they produce more particularate than diesels from their tyres. So much so that some claim overall pollution – particularate pollution that is – is greater for EVs.

This is actually the point M’Lud:

The Government’s grey belt rules could see entire fields being concreted over, a peer leading an inquiry into the Government’s planning reforms has suggested.

The very intention.

Sir John, who is chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC), which advises the Treasury, said ministers should consider funding dozens of highway projects up and down the country as a result, rather than seeking to funnel road users on to the railways.

He said: “The continued decarbonisation of road transport removes one of the traditional arguments that you should use a lot more rail because rail is less polluting than roads.

“That will not be the case in the future. I don’t see any great significant growth in rail, and there will be continued pressure on the roads.”

If we’ve non-polluting personal transport then the logic underlying the force in favour of collective transport sorta dies, doesn’t it?

And it would be interesting to see the calculations too. What’s the emission profile of an EV v a train?

Aerial photographs have revealed the extent of coastal erosion in a seaside village over the past two decades.

The images show what residents described as the destruction of the beach and sand dunes at Hemsby, Norfolk, by strong winds and high tides.

The village has lost an estimated 300 metres of coastline over the past 50 years, sending dozens of homes into the sea.

Not a great deal of sympathy there I’m afraid. We all know the story of Dunwich, yes?

Half of England’s waste is now being burned, at astronomical expense to local councils (“Anger at plans for 41 ‘dirty’ incinerators”, News). Yet Defra has, for years, resisted calls for the standardisation of waste materials collected or the separate collection of dry recyclables and organics, but it is now to implement such measures through its “simpler recycling” schemes in March 2025.

The government’s recognition of incinerator overcapacity and its plans for better collection systems is quite a breakthrough but it is not the ambition that is needed to move us to a circular economy. A recycling target of 65% by 2035 will not stop a reliance on incineration. To achieve this, all stages of the waste hierarchy – recycling, reuse and repair, eco-design and extended product lifespans – need to be driven by design.
Jane Green (former director of Zero Waste England)

Why not just burn everything and so save the costs of sorting?

Manufacturers may cut back sales of petrol cars or raise prices in order to pay for discounts on electric models as they scramble to hit stretching government targets, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) warned.

At least 28pc of all cars sold this year must be electric under rules known as the zero emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate. Manufacturers that fall short face fines of £15,000 for every non-electric car sold above the quota.

Car makers have repeatedly warned that the targets do not reflect the true level of driver interest in electric vehicles (EVs). EVs are expected to make up 24pc to 25pc of the market this year, short of the Government’s target.

The SMMT estimated that companies spent £4.5bn on price cuts last year, equivalent to almost £12,000 off each EV, in a desperate effort to stoke demand. Despite the heavy discounting, EVs accounted for just one in 10 vehicles sold to private drivers.

We know there are those who simply hate the idea that the proles have cheap and easy, personal, transport.

Bankrupt the car makers and that takes care of that, eh?

Coker, who grew up in Shaw, said he “100%” expected the researchers to find the presence of parasites in residents’ test samples. He attributed the town’s decades of water problems to white flight that started in the 1960s, and which left Shaw without the tax base to fund infrastructure maintenance.

In 1971, Black residents in Shaw successfully argued before a federal court that local officials practiced discrimination by not providing services like sewage, drainage and water in predominantly Black neighborhoods. The court ordered Shaw officials to submit a planned “program of improvements that will, within a reasonable time, remove the disparities that bear so heavily on the black citizens of Shaw”.

But more than 50 years later, Black communities across the south, including Shaw, have worse access to clean drinking water and functional sanitation systems than wealthier, whiter communities. “The water is brown, people don’t cook with it, they don’t drink it,” said Chiquikta Fountain, executive director of Delta Hands for Hope.

Shaw’s mayor, Evereth Stanton, denied any issues with the tapwater, noting that Shaw’s tested water samples were in compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act, though he acknowledged: “You’ll get a smell when the chlorine runs out.” He added that Shaw officials were upgrading the town’s chlorination system.

The American Society of Civil Engineers gave Mississippi’s wastewater infrastructure a D- on its latest Infrastructure Report Card, citing a $2bn backlog in needed repairs or upgrades. “That increases the possibility of wastewater leaks into the environment, endangering the public,” the authors wrote.

So, so much better than the capitalist bastards, eh?

Huge swathes of “unspoilt” countryside in the heart of Wales are being threatened by Ed Miliband’s clean power plans, campaigners have warned.

A string of high-voltage power lines are set to be built from the north of the country down to the south as part of a major upgrade of the electricity grid.

The project has been identified as critical for handling energy from the wind turbines that Mr Miliband, the Energy Secretary, wants to deliver across Britain by 2030.

Environmentalism isn’t very good for the environment. You’re surprised, right?

A “floating megabomb” cargo ship with links to Russia unnecessarily dumped 300 tons of toxic fertiliser into the North Sea in an act of government-sanctioned “environmental terrorism”, an MP has claimed.

Rupert Lowe, a Reform MP, will tell Parliament that “errors” were made after the ship docked at Great Yarmouth with 300 tons of ammonium nitrate potentially contaminated with fuel.

A confidential Department of Transport (DfT) document, seen by The Telegraph, reveals how the authorities considered evacuating the town fearing a “catastrophic” explosion.

Well, if it’s got derv in it you might well not want it sitting around. That’s how the IRA used to make the bombs – ammonium nitrate and derv.

But toxic, in the sense of poisonous, if dumped in the icean?

Naah.

Probably the best place for it. Not wholly happy about the derv, obvs, but the rest of it will dissolve and disperse. And we’re not going to end up with an algal bloom, not in winter in the North Sea.

On Nov 16, the vessel sailed 10 miles off the Norfolk coast and dumped the 300 tons of potentially contaminated fertiliser at sea.

DfT “modelling” concluded the chemical would “disperse relatively quickly”, but was “toxic to marine life … affecting the gills and overall metabolism of fish” and capable of triggering an algae bloom that can “smother the seabed”, causing “death of marine life”.

Bettrer than “bang” tho’ right?