Richard Lyon

The Iron Law of Energy

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

THE PREVAILING NARRATIVE in Net Zero ideology is one of a seamless “clean energy transition”. The reality is that their supposedly necessary transition is unlike any in human history because it represents a move down the energy density ladder. Properly understood, the proposal is terrifying.

It’s terrifying because it violates the “Iron Law Of Energy Transition”: successful civilisations always move up the energy ladder toward more concentrated, more reliable power sources. Every historical example of a move down the energy density ladder has been involuntary. And every move down the energy density ladder has produced a mass casualty event.

In a previous essay, we examined the Physics of Net Zero. In this week’s essay, we’ll shift attention to the Physics of Civilisation itself. We’ll look at energy quality, why civilisations require an upward trend in energy quality, and why those that fail to maintain an upward trend in it collapse. Finally, we’ll critique the current proposal.

Let's begin by looking at the Industrial Revolution. It was a transition from wood to coal. Why was this successful? Because of energy density. Coal packs far more energy per kilogram than wood, delivering concentrated power where and when it is needed and removing the need for vast forests near every industrial site, allowing for centralised factories and steam engines.

This leads us to the first pillar of the Iron Law...

Energy density: The Storage Question

Energy density measures how much energy can be stored in a given amount of material or space. Fossil fuels contain about 44 megajoules per kilogram, while the best commercially available batteries manage about 1 megajoule per kilogram. This ~40:1 ratio explains why a combustion engine vehicle’s fuel tank can carry weeks of driving energy, but an electric vehicle requires massive battery packs for much shorter ranges.1

For industrial civilisations like ours, energy density determines how much energy we can stockpile, transport, and deploy as needed. Coal yards and oil reserves contain colossal quantities of energy—enough to power industrial processes continuously for months or years. This creates an inexpensive buffer that allows us to endure disruptions, seasonal variations, and demand variations with ease. The “clean energy transition” has no technology—now, or in prospect—for replicating this capability at civilisation scale.

The next leaps up the energy ladder came with oil and gas, then nuclear. Oil is even more energy-dense and portable than coal, enabling the internal combustion engine, modern transportation, aviation, and fertiliser synthesis. Nuclear is the densest, most powerful energy source ever harnessed by humanity.

This progression reveals the second pillar of the Iron Law...

Power Density: The Land Use Reality

Power density measures energy flow per unit of land area—how much energy we can harvest from a given piece of the Earth’s surface. In energy system design, it’s the crucial, non-negotiable parameter. It’s why so-called “clean energy transition” technologies cannot replace existing facilities.

Why? Hydrocarbon and nuclear plants achieve power densities of about 1,000 watts per square meter of land use. Solar farms under ideal conditions might yield 20-30 watts per square meter. Wind farms, after accounting for spacing requirements, achieve 1-3 watts per square meter. Replacing a single nuclear plant might require “clean transition” installations covering 50 to 1,000 times more land area. There simply isn’t enough suitable land near energy-consuming centres to replace concentrated sources with diffuse ones at scale.

Lack of power density fundamentally cripples “clean transition” technologies. Which leads us to the third pillar of the Iron Law…

The Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) Challenge

It takes energy to produce energy. For any given energy system, a proportion of its output must be reserved to produce the next unit. We express this as the Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI). Fossil fuel sources in their prime provided EROEI ratios of 100:1, meaning that one unit of energy invested in extraction returned 100 units of usable energy.

Today that’s fallen to 20:1. But that is still more than enough to support the construction, maintenance, operation, continuous replacement and growth of industrial infrastructure, feed the earth’s population of 8 billion, and enable civilisational complexity.

When power density falls, the land area required to produce the same quantity of energy increases. When the land area increases, the energy required to produce the energy—the excavating equipment, the concrete, the steel, the access roads, the energy transmission lines—increases. So the astronomical increase in land area entailed in the “clean energy transition” entails also a catastrophic fall in EROEI.

Add in the energy requirements of all of the additional systems needed to smooth out “clean transition” technology intermittency, stabilise grid frequency, and provide redundant backup power, and net energy return drops even further—well below the minimum required to support civilisation.

UPPER: The amount of energy available to us after an energy system meets its own energy requirements falls exponentially with falling energy return. LOWER: This in turn drives an exponential increase in the multiples of the energy system needed to maintain a given supply of energy. This creates an energy cliff and “death zone” in which a civilisation with a low EROEI energy system collapses because it cannot maintain its complexity.

We call this “the net energy cliff”—a cliff because the 1*/x* relationship produces an exponential collapse in net energy with falling EROEI—below which a society cannot maintain the energy overhead to maintain its own complexity.

Power Quality: Why a Joule is not a Joule

Taken together, energy density, power density and EROEI—three pillars of the Iron Law of Energy Transition—determine the ultimate utility of a power source: its quality. High-quality energy is not merely abundant; it is concentrated, controllable, storable, transportable, and versatile.

A high-quality energy source allows a society to perform complex, high-value work—e.g. smelting metals, synthesising fertilisers—with minimal physical and energetic overhead. Conversely, a low-quality, diffuse source demands a far greater investment of materials, land and—crucially—its own energy just to be gathered and made useful.

This concept of quality is the foundation of the Iron Law. Civilisational complexity is built with high-quality energy; attempting to sustain it with low quality sources is like trying to build a skyscraper with straw.

Power quality goes a long way towards explaining why expanding civilisations move toward higher energy and power densities. But when transitioning between energy types, however, there is one additional problem that must always be overcome.

This leads us to the final pillar of the Iron Law…

Why Downward Density Transitions Fail: The “bridge fuel” problem

Each new energy system requires vast infrastructure. Constructing that infrastructure requires vast quantities of additional energy. That additional energy has to be provided while still maintaining the operational fabric of society—it’s like changing an aircraft’s engines out in flight. For example: 4 billion people currently depend on food produced from fossil fuel fertiliser; we can’t stop feeding them while they build their wind turbines.

We call this the “bridge fuel” problem—the additional fuel we need in an energy transition to bridge from the present arrangement to the future one while keeping everything running.

To solve the bridge fuel problem, two conditions have been true of every successful energy transition in human history: there has always been a large surplus of the current energy source remaining; and the future energy source has always been more dense.

History is littered with civilisations that failed to meet these conditions. The Western Roman Empire, for instance, faced a crippling energy crisis after deforesting accessible lands for fuel, forcing a reliance on complex, fragile, and low-return supply lines—a localised move down the energy ladder that coincided with its decline and fragmentation.2

The “clean energy transition” attempts to reverse this pattern. It attempts to use high-quality energy to build low-quality energy infrastructure, hoping the new system can eventually become self sustaining. But the math prohibits it: since you need fossil fuel energy to build renewable capacity, and that renewable capacity returns less net energy than the fossil fuels used to build it, then you can neither maintain current arrangements nor construct new infrastructure. You fail to solve the bridge fuel problem.

And this is before they “Just Stop Oil” and shutter our nuclear plants.

The Modern Gamble: A Wilful Disregard for History and Physics

The public discourse on this transition is often led by experts in policy, social science, and environmental advocacy. While their perspectives on societal goals are occasionally useful, the conversation often prioritises these goals while understating the non-negotiable constraints imposed by physics and engineering. The result is a plan that is socially desirable for some but physically unworkable—a dangerous oversight when civilisational stability is at stake.

From this community of non-experts emerges a continuous stream of unbelievable statements about energy transitions, rooted in techno-optimism and reliance on the magical powers of human ingenuity. These are misplaced. With a sufficiently large surplus of high-quality energy, technology allows human ingenuity to solve an impressive variety of problems. Since technology requires a surplus of energy, the one category of problem it cannot solve is energy contraction.

To conceal the profoundly unattractive nature of a program that will immiserate us and our children, energy contraction ideology is shrouded in euphemisms like “de-growth” and “efficiency”. The simpler term for these euphemisms is “energy rationing”. Historically, energy rationing is never a choice made by prosperous societies and is always a condition imposed by a crisis. When that crisis is not resolved, it leads always to a decline in living standards and social stability and, eventually, to civil and international resource wars.

In the Physics of Civilisation, the Iron Law of Energy Transition—the unbroken historical pattern of upward transitions, and the catastrophic outcomes of reverse transitions—is non-negotiable. The Iron Law reveals to us that the “clean energy transition”—the belief that we can power our complex, high-energy world on fitful sunbeams and occasional puffs of wind—is a hypothesis with no supporting evidence from the real world. Commentators like David Turver and Kathryn Porter provide masterful analyses of the absurdities unfolding daily in our energy system as it unravels. The Iron Law of Energy Transition explains why our energy system is unravelling, and where that will lead us if left unchecked.

The pursuit of this low-density transition, cloaked as it is in euphemism and the virtuous language of sustainability, is a willing defiance of the lessons written into the historical record. It is an attempt to repeal the Iron Law of Energy Transition not through superior technology, but through sheer belief. This belief asks us to ignore that every past journey down the energy ladder was involuntary, and every one ended in a catastrophic loss of complexity. But to believe that this time will be different is not optimism; it is a dangerous fantasy.

In the UK, this fantasy has a name: Net Zero. It is the ideology of repeating the gravest energy mistakes of the past, packaged as progress.

The choice we face is not between “clean” and “dirty” energy, as its advocates claim. The real choice, dictated by the unyielding physics of civilisation, is between a high-energy future of continued prosperity and a low-energy future of inevitable collapse. We must abandon this policy not merely because it is flawed, but because it is a direct and demonstrable path to ruin.

The State of Britain by Richard Lyon is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

There are nuances: the electric motor is more efficient than the combustion engine, allowing it to compensate to some extent for the battery’s appalling energy density. But since the greater majority of industrial civilisation does not and cannot be made to run on electricity, this does not materially alter the argument. ↩
For an alarming survey of collapsed civilisations, see: Tainter, J. A. (1988). The collapse of complex societies. Cambridge University Press. ↩

Charting a New Course for UK Energy Policy

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

IMAGINE a scenario where UK citizens, disillusioned with established political approaches, opted for a government with a fresh perspective on energy—one that directly addresses their hopes for the future and their concerns about the present.

This week’s letter explores a fundamental question: what would a pragmatic and effective UK energy policy entail?

[1] Abandon climate hysteria

A pragmatic UK energy policy would begin by re-evaluating the foundational assumptions that have driven decision-making for decades. It would critically assess the predictive failure of climate models that project catastrophic outcomes, and question their continued role as the primary driver of energy strategy. Consequently, public funding for institutions focused solely on promoting these hypotheses would be terminated, and their influence on public decision-making would be removed.

[2] Reimpose energy realism

Such a policy would acknowledge the fundamental physical differences between diffuse energy sources like solar and wind, and concentrated energy sources such as nuclear and hydrocarbons. It would recognise that advanced industrial economies, by their very nature, depend on uninterrupted, concentrated energy. This is not merely an economic or political preference, but a constraint rooted in physics, meaning that the attempt to power such economies primarily with intermittent, diffuse sources faces inherent and insurmountable challenges and must be abandoned.

[3] Declare energy a national priority

This policy would address a critical, emerging reality: while global gas reserves remain substantial, global oil production may be approaching a point of irreversible decline. This eventuality could trigger an energy price shock potentially more severe than the one preceding the 2008 financial crisis, especially as many traditional economic stabilisation tools have already been deployed. In anticipation, energy strategy would be elevated to a matter of national priority, demanding urgent and decisive action.

[4] Phase out “renewables”

Consistent with this reassessment, public funding and support mechanisms for diffuse energy sources would be phased out. This would involve revoking licenses for new, large-scale diffuse energy projects and renegotiating existing subsidy schemes to minimise public cost and liability. Taxes, levies, and subsidies related to these sources would be removed from energy bills to reduce burdens on businesses and households. Public funding for institutions focused solely on promoting diffuse energy would be terminated, and their influence on public decision-making would be removed

[5] Maximise domestic hydrocarbon production

To enhance domestic energy security, regulations hindering onshore oil and gas development would be reformed, ensuring swift processes while maintaining appropriate community compensation and environmental safeguards. Fiscal incentives would encourage oil and gas companies to maximise the lifespan and output of existing assets. The cost of UK exploration and development would be reduced by streamlining regulations, focusing on essential safety and environmental standards.

[6] Fast track nuclear base load generation

Similarly, regulatory hurdles that have historically impeded nuclear development, often introduced due to anti-nuclear advocacy, would be dismantled while upholding stringent safety and environmental protections. An ambitious program to expand the UK’s nuclear power capacity would be initiated to provide reliable base load electricity.

[7] Integrate with economic and financial policy

Energy policy would be intrinsically linked with economic and financial strategy. It would be understood that a contraction in energy supply—whether by design or by default—inevitably leads to a contraction in the real economy of goods and services, thereby undermining the value of currency and risking severe inflation. A strengthened domestic supply of gas, oil, and nuclear power would be leveraged to revitalise the UK's manufacturing base and service economy. The nation's energy generation capacity could even be considered as a factor in maintaining monetary stability.

Even if implemented immediately, this transition towards a more robust, high-density energy system is significantly delayed. Success is not guaranteed. Failure to adapt could result in a regression to per-capita energy consumption levels not seen since the 19th century, with severe consequences for living standards, public health, and societal stability. This task is therefore of paramount urgency. Every unit of energy and investment directed towards less effective solutions today potentially diminishes our capacity to achieve this vital transition tomorrow. The challenge is immense, but it must be confronted.

Pumbaa, with you, everything's gas

Sun, 18 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

THERE HAVE BEEN many successful energy transitions in human history. In each instance—wood to whale oil, whale oil to hydrocarbon, hydrocarbon to nuclear—the transition has been from a lower to a higher level of energy-per-person.

There are no examples in history that we know about of a successful transition from a higher to a lower level of energy-per-person. None have been voluntary, and each has been accompanied by a mass casualty event driven by cold, starvation, disease, and violence.

“Net Zero” is the first attempt in human history to voluntarily transition from a higher to a lower level of energy-per-person. It is extraordinarily reckless.

The supposed justification for this extraordinarily reckless ideology is the notion that CO2 is a toxin. The origin of this notion is in liberal authoritarian politics of the 1970s. They realised that they will never be able to gain the control of our freedoms that their ideology needs by direct means. So they made a genius move. CO2 is the byproduct of almost every human economic process that generates wealth. Control CO2, and you control all human economic processes. Restricting CO2 would be like sticking a banana in economic freedom’s tailpipe. An obscure hypothesis, regarded as highly eccentric at the time—that human CO2 emissions possessed the power to wipe out life on the planet—was elevated to the status of “settled science” and, well, here we are.

Destroy the hypothesis that CO2 is bad, and you destroy the rationale for Net Zero. In this week’s essay, I thought I might share with you a reply I gave recently on Twitter/X to someone who invited me to explain the irrelevance of CO2 to our energy policies. I’ll quote it with minor corrections for readability—my interlocutor is a scientist so the argument is a little abbreviated, but the gist should be clear enough.

Please tell me: what data convinced you that CO2 is a minor forcing factor?

Sure. To clarify—your hypothesis isn't that climate is changing. This is a trivial observation. Your hypothesis is that humans are changing the climate via CO2. My observation is that human CO2 emission is a minor climate forcing function relative to all others, including natural CO2 emission, and that the variability of other candidate explanatory factors precludes the claim that only human CO2 emission can account for observed variation in the weather with sufficient confidence to justify the extraordinarily dangerous political program it has been created to support.

Schmidt (2010) estimates that CO2 contributes about 20% of the GHG effect. Humans contribute around 5% of gross natural annual CO2 emissions. So humans increase the natural production of a minor greenhouse gas by about 1% annually. In isolation, that 1% (around 1.5% after accounting for change in stock rather than annual flow) produces a beneficial warming effect.

However. This warming effect is combined with a large number of other processes that also alter CO2. Other GHG forcing functions similarly exhibit natural variation. And the GHG forcing function is in turn combined with other forcing functions. Many of these functions are periodic, with periods measured in years, decades, centuries and (as fas as we know) millennia—with the latter being the period relevant to the study of climate change, as distinct from weather change. Many climate forcing functions individually exhibit variability comparable with human emission and, when in phase with others, greatly exceed it both positively and negatively.

All of this takes place within a system that has a number of positive and negative feedback systems. The negative feedback systems—e.g. meridional transport—further moderate the effective contribution of human CO2 as a climate forcing function. We have good reason to suppose that the negative feedback processes dominate, from the simple observation that we are here despite the existence in the paleoclimate record of multiple events in the previous million years that ought to have triggered supposed positive feedbacks and have not.

So I find your hypothesis—that observed variation in weather can, and can only, be explained in terms of human CO2 emission and that, to the extent that this produces warming, this warming is to be prevented—to be unbelievable.

I observe that most predictions produced by this hypothesis that are distinct to it, rather than general observations of the weather as we emerge from a recent ice age, are wrong and that the IPCC in its latest scientific report (as distinct from its political report) finds no connection between human activity and any of the adverse weather phenomena predicted by your hypothesis with the exception of some warming and cooling.

And finally. I find the ideology that your hypothesis is intended to support—the detransition of human civilisation to lower energy per capita energy levels—to be extraordinarily dangerous. Such an extraordinary demand requires extraordinary evidence. And after all of the objections to legitimate criticism of the climate catastrophe hypothesis have been made, one thing will remain true: there is no extraordinary evidence for it.

—ENDS—

The State of Britain by Richard Lyon is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Dim

Fri, 09 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

THE UK LABOUR Government has announced that it’s moving forward with its experiments to dim the sun, an odd goal in a country in which around 16,000 people die each winter because the sun is too dim.1 The initial cost to the taxpayer of this outrageous violation of our right to informed consent is an estimated £50 million, to be overseen by the £450,000 a year CEO of a shadowy taxpayer funded government research outfit called Aria.

To take advantage of the dimmed sun, Labour has also announced that it’s mandating the installation of solar panels on all new-build homes in England by 2027. In this week’s short essay, we ask a penetrating question: “Is this a Good Thing?”.

To answer it, we’ll address it from the perspective of a young couple struggling to finance their first home, and work out how much it will save them.

According to Energy Saving Trust, the average installation size for a modest home is around 3.5 kilowatts peak (kWp). Installing the panels, inverter, mounting system, and wiring and electrical components will cost between £6000 to £8000. They’ll need a battery—that’s around £5000. Let’s assume the builder can do the lot for £10,000.

That increases the purchase price of the home for our young couple by £10,000. Added to a 30 year, 5% mortgage, the total cost to them of their now mandatory solar gadget is £19,324 over the life of the mortgage.

EST tell us how much a 3.5 kWp solar panel installation will save on annual energy bills. It’s between £140 and £340 a year. Let’s be optimistic and assume £340. That gives a payback period on the £19,324 installation cost of 57 years in nominal terms (there are more sophisticated ways of computing this, but it really doesn’t matter).

This is the captured from Money Saving Expert, which shows the savings Energy Saving Trust were estimating earlier in the week when I was preparing this. As I write this now, I note that these savings estimates have significantly increased on the EST site since the Government’s policy announcement. I’ll let you be the judge.

A 57 year payback period is almost twice the period of the mortgage and three times the economic life of the panel. As they enter retirement, our young couple will still be paying for solar panels that went to landfill 40 years earlier.

This cost excludes the regular replacement costs of the inverter and battery when they fail. Meanwhile, the UK’s Royal Society estimates the cost of installing sufficient long term grid storage to prevent Iberian Peninsula style renewables blackouts at around £1 trillion for a hydrogen system—battery storage is an order of magnitude greater.2 That will go on to our young couple’s electricity bills as part of their toxic cocktail of “renewable” energy subsidies, taxes and levies.

All this in a country with a housing affordability crisis, some of the highest renewables-subsidy driven electricity prices in the world, energy price induced industrial contraction, a debt to GDP ratio of 100% and rising, and a budget deficit this year equivalent to 9% increase in the tax rate.

So, no: Not a Good Thing. But you knew that already. It’s “Net Zero”.

The State of Britain by Richard Lyon is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is the so-called “excess winter mortality”: the amount by which UK deaths rise in the winter relative to summer. ↩
Llewellyn Smith, C. (2023) Large-scale electricity storage. The Royal Society. Available at: https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/low-carbon-energy-programme/large-scale-electricity-storage/ ↩

Why taxing oil and gas companies increases energy costs

Fri, 02 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

IF YOU ARE an observer of the greenwash gases emitted continuously by the the Right Honourable Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (sic.), you will have overheard him make some startling claims recently about the relationship between energy company taxes and energy costs. Here in the UK, the Government taxes oil and gas companies on profits from oil and gas at a marginal rate of 78%. “Doesn’t this increase the cost of energy in the UK and make us poorer?”, an incredulous interviewer asks. “No”, the credulous politician replies.

In this post, we’ll look broadly at why he’s wrong.

As with all slightly complex things, the answer is slightly complex. In fact, while high taxation of both oil and gas makes us poorer, it makes us poorer in different ways.

The big difference is transportation cost. Oil is energetically dense—a litre of it contains a lot of high gradient energy. It’s also very stable. You can park a boatload of it near a large city and it can sit there perfectly safely for months. Because it’s dense and stable, it’s cheap to transport around the world in large quantities. And that means there is a global price for oil. If demand in South East Asia goes up, the price goes up. When the price goes up, someone in London fills a big tanker with oil, sails it to South East Asia, and sells it. The price goes down.

To alter the global price of oil, a British oil company would have to produce and sell so much oil relative to all the other oil production that it lowered the global price of oil. The British oil sector isn’t large enough to do that.1

So when an oil company sells its oil, it doesn’t price it like parsnips. When the government raises and lowers the tax rate, it doesn’t raise and lower the price of oil. But something else does happen when they raise taxes that makes us poorer.

An oil company sits on an inventory of reservoirs that contain oil. Depending on the geology and location, some reservoirs are cheap to develop. Some are expensive to develop. When costs—including taxes—are low, the company can extend existing reservoirs and develop new ones, sell the oil and make a profit. So it does. When tax is high, it can’t, so it doesn’t.

So when tax is low, oil from expensive reservoirs is produced, the Government can tax it, and it can spend the money it raises on schools, hospitals, houses, transportation, and energy subsidies. We get wealthier. When tax is high, there is no additional production, and so no additional tax revenue to spend on schools, hospitals, houses, transportation, and energy subsidies. We get poorer.

Things are different with gas. Gas is not energetically dense—a litre of it contains about 0.1% of the energy of diesel oil. It’s also unstable. Park a boatload of liquified gas off a major city and you have about 60 times the energy in the Hiroshima bomb that is only stable for as long as the ship’s cooling systems work. You can transport it in pipelines, but these are expensive to build and easy to blow up—remember the Nord Streams? Because it’s diffuse and unstable, gas is very expensive to transport around. And that means there is a regional price for it. Gas price is low where there is a lot of it. Gas price is high where there isn’t. And Britain has enough gas to lower the regional gas price.

The same economics of production exist for gas as for oil. Raise the tax rate, and companies produce less gas. Lower it, and they produce more. But this time, when they produce more, they affect the gas price by lowering it. Cheaper gas means cheaper electricity. So we benefit two ways: from the tax, and from the reduced energy price.

The biggest reduction we ever enjoyed in our electricity costs was after the newly privatised electricity industry installed gas power stations across the UK. It halved our electricity costs. The biggest increase we’ve ever seen was after the Government imposed “green” ideology on the electricity industry. It has tripled our electricity costs so far.

So as with every statement made by the UK Government about energy, this one is wrong. Shutting down our oil and gas exploration, and increasing taxes on existing production, makes us poorer.

This ideology immiserates us and our children. It has a name—it’s called “Net Zero”. We have to end it.

The State of Britain by Richard Lyon is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Well, OK, it’s a little more nuanced. If the global oil market is very tight, even our modest production might weakly affect it temporarily. There is also some price difference because of quality and transport distance. But not enough to alter the central point—oil, unlike gas, is priced globally. ↩

The Wrong shall fail, the Right prevail

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

In this substack, I write regularly about Britain’s headlong descent into darkness, chaos, and immiseration at the hands of liberal authoritarianism.

It’s as grim to write about as no doubt it is to read. But it is, I think, important. In reflecting on and discussing together the scourge of liberal authoritarianism in Britain, we remind each other that we are not alone. And we contribute to the vital task of rendering it more visible and, therefore, a little easier for us all to take action collectively to resist and reverse it—if only, for now, to say “No. Not in my name”.

But a problem that can emerge when writing and reading about the scale and pace of our descent is that it’s easy to succumb to despair.

We must resist it.

A few days ago, I experienced a powerful reminder that others before us have faced darkness, and have not succumbed to despair.

The occasion was the privilege of singing in a Christmas concert in the US, where I’m spending the winter. In a packed church hall in Georgia, people of different political views and faiths, and of no faith, came together to celebrate a program of popular and classical music inspired by the season.

We closed the program with the carol “Christmas Bells”, based on a poem written by Henry Longfellow. Longfellow was a 57-year-old widowed father of six children. A month before writing this poem, his oldest son Charles was severely wounded in the American Civil War, in which 750,000 soldiers and an unknown but large number of civilians would be killed. If anyone had reason to succumb to despair, he did.

Stepping out of his home on Christmas Day, he heard the Church bells ringing. When he returned home, he wrote: “Hate is strong, and mocks the song of peace on earth, good-will to men”. But, despite his initial despair, his poem concluded on a note of profound hope, affirming—without much evidence but, as it turned out, rightly—that peace would ultimately prevail.

Longfellow was a Christian, and his affirmation of hope—“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep”—is expressed in Christian terms, born of values he shared with other Christians. But his hope is available to all of us. We who oppose this toxic ideology of division, intolerance, dogma, and authoritarian control are equally united in the antithesis of its values: our tolerance for the opinions of others and our willingness to compromise in seeking common arrangements; our respect for evidence and reason and scepticism as a basis for deciding what those arrangements should be; and our recognition of freedom of speech and freedom from coercion as the foundations of our democratic society.

Those values are not dead, nor do they sleep. They live in us and—as my experience 4,000 miles from home reaffirmed—are shared by millions worldwide. The task of reestablishing them as the foundation of British society may be great. But it is not impossible. As long as we refuse to submit to the division, intolerance, dogma and authoritarianism of the wrong, the wrong shall fail, and right prevail.

Thank you for reading my substack. Thank you for sharing with me your comments, insights, and wisdom. May I take this opportunity to wish you and your loved ones peace and happiness.

—Richard Lyon
Athens, Georgia

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

...

And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men."

— Henry Longfellow, 1863

Funny Money

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

DESTROYING OUR AFFORDABLE, productive energy sources and replacing them with ones based on occasional summer breezes, sunbeams, and assorted gizmos for keeping hospitals powered up during our prolonged wind droughts is unimaginably expensive.

McKinsey, a respected management consultancy firm that specialises in estimating the cost of Big Projects, estimates that implementing Net Zero policies by 2050 will cost $275 trillion world wide1. That estimate overlooks the problem that most of the required technologies don’t exist. Assuming they can be invented, adding a conservative 60% to pay for doing so bumps that cost up to $440 trillion.

The UK’s Royal Society notes that Net Zero policies significantly underestimate the unreliability of wind and sun, and therefore long term storage cost. They add another £1 trillion in storage cost to the UK’s Net Zero bill—£40,000 per household.2 Others have done the same for the US, adding $220 trillion to theirs.

A trillion pounds—£1,000,000,000,000—is...a lot of money. At £1 per second, spending a thousands pounds takes 17 minutes; a million pounds takes 278 hours; a billion pounds takes 32 years; and a trillion pounds takes 31,710 years. To fund Net Zero, we’d need more money than God.

The more thoughtful climate catastrophists and unreliable energy enthusiasts are starting to notice a problem: where in God’s name is that amount of money to come from?

Help is at hand, some believe, in the form of an eccentric financial theory called “Modern Monetary Theory” (“MMT”). It won’t work. The details are a little dry, but to understand why it won’t work, we have to understand how it’s supposed to.

In conventional economic theory, the size of a government’s budget is limited by the amount it can raise through taxation, borrowing (public debt), and monetisation (creating money). Those, in turn, are limited by the rate at which the economy can grow: if borrowing and monetisation grow faster than the economy (and therefore taxation) for too long, many problems can occur.

Of those, the one that interests us here is inflation. “Money”, amongst many other things, is a token that represents something of value in the economy. If the number of money tokens rises faster than the number of things of value in the economy then, over time, the money tokens that you own are convertible into fewer and fewer things of value. Another way of saying this is that prices rise. We call this price rise “inflation” and, when it is really bad, “hyperinflation”. Hyperinflation is when a wheelbarrow of money tokens is worth less than the wheelbarrow.

“No no!”, says the Modern Monetary Theorist, “How very old fashioned! My country issues its own currency. The government budget is not limited by taxes or borrowing. For as long as there are idle resources in the economy, and the government chooses the right policies, the government can spend like a drunken sailor. And it doesn’t even have to raise taxes or increase borrowing—it can simply create money as required!”

Sounds fabulous. Sounds, in fact, like a Magic Money Tree. A government could print trillions of pounds and everyone could get wealthier. Needless to say socialists, and the $440 trillion climate catastrophe industry, think Modern Monetary Theory is just the ticket.

But before getting too carried away by how simple it is and wondering why no-one has thought of solving our problems by printing money before, let’s focus for a moment on the key phrase in Modern Monetary Theory: “For as long as there are idle resources in the economy”.

Then let’s remind ourselves of how this is all supposed to work. The government prints trillions of money tokens and dumps them out of helicopters into the streets. Citizens pick these up and convert them into goods and services. The quantity of goods and services rises in proportion to the number of money tokens, giving them value and preventing inflation. The economy grows, tax revenues rise, and a thousand unreliable energy consultancies blossom.

And how are money tokens converted into goods and services? With two things. Idle resources. And high gradient energy. Because to convert idle resources into goods and services, you need high gradient energy.3 The more high gradient energy you have, the more goods and services you can convert idle resources into.

It follows, therefore, that the less high gradient energy you have, the fewer goods and services you can convert idle resources into. With insufficient high gradient energy, or with energy of insufficient gradient, even if you have idle resources, printing money tokens and dumping them out of helicopters won’t produce goods and services. It will produce inflation. Then hyperinflation.

And this is where the wheels fly off the MMT charabanc spectacularly.

For the entire period that economists have been observing economies and making theories about how they work—Adam Smith wrote the foundation of modern economic thought4 here in Edinburgh in 1776—the quantity of energy that drives industrial economies has grown enormously. And that growth has been so consistent and reliable that economists don’t really think about it, any more than fish think about water. To the extent that they do, they imagine it to be a commodity, like rice: just another kind of resource that can be created as needed, and substituted at will.

Not only has the quantity of energy grown, but the gradient of that energy—the rate at which it can be converted into work—has increased. Over the last 2000 years, human society has undergone a series of energy transitions—human labour, to animal labour, to wood, to charcoal, to whale oil, to coal, to oil, to gas, to nuclear. In each transition, an energy source of lower gradient has been replaced by one of a higher gradient.

In fact, that is how we’ve managed to create energy transitions. Building out a new energy infrastructure while keeping everyone alive5 is conditional on having vast amounts of surplus energy. It is only by having large reserves of the current energy sources, and transitioning to a higher gradient one, that allows this condition to be met.

Throughout this time, while all of this energy expansion has been taking place, we’ve been creating money. Modern Monetary Theorists, unaware of the relationship between energy and money, have observed this and concluded that money creation has caused the economy to expand. In fact, expanding the net supply of high gradient energy has allowed the economy, and therefore the money supply, to expand.

In our previous essay we saw that, even without suidicidal “Net Zero” ideology, net energy is no longer expanding.6 The supply of affordable oil—the dominant energy source—has reached the point where it cannot grow any more, and is now contracting. Unless and until we replace it with new volumes of gas and nuclear, contraction of the net output of our energy system will accelerate.

Instead, we’ve responded in the worst way possible: shutting down our oil and gas replacement processes, printing vast quantities of money tokens, and using them to accelerate energy contraction by creating low gradient energy sources (“wind” and “solar”).

Spot the commencement in 2006 of the contraction of our energy system

Have you noticed the vast amount of debt and funny money that’s been created since 2008 as a result? Have you noticed how your money tokens can be converted into fewer and fewer goods and services? Have you noticed wages stagnating, public services deteriorating, and everything becoming shabbier around us?

This is the onset of Modern Monetary Theory colliding with a situation it never imagined, much less accounted for in its theories: net energy contraction.

More and more pundits are claiming that Britain, as an issuer of a sovereign, reserve currency, faces no intrinsic financial constraints on spending, and can print as much of its currency as it likes to fund a lavish welfare state, massive state sector salaries and pensions, and their “Net Zero” ideology.

Ignore them. Economics is a social “science”. Most economists have had no significant education in the physical sciences, and are therefore not even aware that they are unaware of the non-negotiable dependency that money has on our energy system, or of the contraction taking place in that energy system.

Some of them, supposing wrongly that energy is a commodity, even believe that high energy gradient coal, gas, and nuclear power generation plants can be replaced by millions of low gradient sources like wind turbines—like supposing that a steep slope can be created by joining together, end-to-end, lots of shallow slopes.

Economic history is littered with examples of hyperinflation. For example, in the Weimar Republic it caused the destruction overnight of people’s life savings, soaring prices, wage devaluation, food scarcity, and rising infant mortality. In destroying Germany’s middle classes, it ushered Hitler to power and paved the way for the Second World War.

It might be wise to familiarise yourself with that period of history, if you aren’t already. Because that is the kind of future that “Modern Monetrary Theory” will propel us toward, if we let them inflict it on us.

A 100 trillion mark banknote issued in October 1923, at the height of German hyperinflation

The State of Britain by Richard Lyon is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

McKinsey (2022) A net-zero economy: The impact of decarbonization. McKinsey Sustainability. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/sustainability/our-insights/the-economic-transformation-what-would-change-in-the-net-zero-transition ↩
Llewellyn Smith, C. (2023) Large-scale electricity storage. The Royal Society. Available at: https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/low-carbon-energy-programme/large-scale-electricity-storage/ ↩
For an explanation of the difference between high gradient energy and low gradient energy, and why the economy needs high gradient energy to function, see my substack essay Lyon, R. (2024) ‘The physics of Net Zero’, The State of Britain by Richard Lyon, 3 August. Available at: https://richardlyon.substack.com/p/the-physics-of-net-zero ↩
Smith, A. (1776). An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell. ↩
For example. The earth’s population today is around 9 billion people. Of those, the lives of around 4 billion depend on food grown with fertiliser made with hydrocarbon. If we were to take Green billionaire funded “Just Stop Oil” at its word and just stop oil then, within a decade, we would experience deaths from starvation, malnutrition and disease measured in hundreds of millions or billions. That is why energy transitions can only ever take place “upward”. Human history is litered with civilisations that have transitioned “downward”, usually as a result of exhaustion of their energy resources. We call them “collapses”. Net Zero is the attempt to transition “downward”. ↩
Lyon, R. (2024) ‘Peak oil and fake money’, The State of Britain by Richard Lyon, 8 December. Available at: https://richardlyon.substack.com/p/peak-oil-and-money ↩

Peak oil and fake money

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I’LL PUBLISH AN essay shortly on a subject that you will be hearing a lot about soon. It’s called “Modern Monetary Theory” (MMT), an exotic finance scheme supposed by some to allow us to come up with the hundreds of trillions of dollars that replacing affordable, reliable and abundant energy sources with expensive, unreliable and rationed ones will cost, despite us being utterly broke.

To understand MMT—indeed, to understand money—we have to understand the relationship between money and energy. And so, to understand where MMT will take us if we allow it, we have to understand where energy is going.

A few years ago another theory was doing the rounds, one that claimed to predict where energy was going. It was called “Peak Oil”, and it said that the production of oil would soon peak, and that many bad things would follow.

To the untrained eye, the Peak Oil prediction appeared to fail. The production rate of various forms of oil has continued to rise. In this week’s essay, we ask the question: “What happened to Peak Oil”? Spoiler alert: bad things.

I first encountered Peak Oil decades ago when I worked as a Petroleum Engineer at a large oil and gas firm. Someone said: “Lyon. A stupid question keeps coming up at shareholder meetings that oil’s going to peak soon then begin running out. Write me a two pager with the ammunition and I’ll fire it. Shouldn’t be hard”.

I pulled out a few text books, spoke to a few wise people, and wrote the paper. “Yes. Oil is going to peak soon, then begin running out. We should do something about that”.

They asked someone else to write the paper.

Fast forward to 2010. To scratch the itch generated by that essay, I took a masters degree in energy economics. My thesis was called “The Optimism Index: Quantifying the Uncertainty in Energy Policy”.1 It turned out that there was quite a lot of optimism in Energy Policy: about 80% of the oil that official energy forecasts relied on didn’t actually exist, and never would. My Institution, which taught a version of economics in which that isn’t supposed to happen, couldn’t find any holes big enough in my argument to block it and had no option but to award a Distinction.

Doing the Hard Sums for my thesis, I had to work out what oil discovery volumes there would be in the future. I estimated that 2023’s (for example) would be 5 billion barrels. Lo! Oil discovery in 2023 was 5 billion barrels—a record low.2 I mention this, not to boast, but to illustrate a point. At macro scale, the mathematics of systems that are exploited on an “easy first, hard last” basis, and evacuated exponentially, are brutally simple.3

The thesis is a little dry and, embarrassingly, in those days I was persuaded by climate catastrophism, it being before I’d actually read any of its eccentric literature. But it has otherwise withstood the test of time.

To set the scene for Modern Monetary Theory, a quick summary of its account of Peak Oil and subsequent events is helpful.

Briefly. To produce oil you have to discover it. We don’t know with certainty how much oil there is, but we do know (reasonably well) how much we’ve discovered. With a bit of simple statistics, we can work out from the patterns to date of discovery and production how much discoverable oil there is left. It’s quite elegant.

Look at the green curve in the left chart in the figure above. That’s the history of global oil discovery. It started around 1900, paused during war time, then grew strongly. It peaked around 1970, then declined at around 5% per year with a few bumps on the the way down for the last big discoveries (North Sea and Alaska), the recapitalisation of the former Soviet Union, and the development of deepwater technology.4

A cumulative sum of the discovery profile creates an “S” curve (the right chart). The projection of that curve to the end of time tells you the total amount you’ll ever find, unless technology or commercial arrangements change. That amount is about 2 trillion barrels of affordable oil,5 of which we’ve produced about 1 trillion barrels. Official oil forecast estimates assume 3 trillion barrels i.e. around 1 trillion barrels of oil that do not and will never exist.

No technology will now materially alter that projection. 1970 was when we landed on the moon. That produced the largest technology disruptions in our history: electronics and miniaturisation; supercomputers and reservoir modelling and simulation; downhole and orbital remote sensing. None of it delayed the peak of discovery, or altered the underlying decline rate.

Oil discovery peaks because we find the big stuff first and the small stuff last. Each new production well starts strongly, then dies away. For commercial reasons, we produce the easy oil first and the hard oil last. Over time, it gets more and more difficult to replace the oil that has died away with new wells. So production also peaks. The rate at which we produce the oil after it peaks then tells you when oil runs out.

In 2006, following a malfunction in the world’s largest reservoir, the supply of affordable oil peaked.

Like a restriction in your steering wheel going round a bend, even a tiny restriction in the supply of oil is disastrous. After affordable oil silently peaked, the price of energy went through the roof. 24 months later, the financial system broke at its weakest link—the subprime mortgage market. We call that the 2008 Great Financial Crash (GFC). It’s still ongoing.

We responded to the GFC by printing trillions of money tokens, and used some of those to start producing a type of oil that had been ignored until then because it is uneconomic—so-called “tight” oil. Free money tokens subsidised and mobilised that oil, and it has provided almost all of the oil growth since.

“Drill, baby, drill!” notwithstanding, tight oil will go on decline soon and there’s nothing material that I know of to replace it. And it doesn’t matter even if there is. Another feature of “easy first hard last systems” is that the timing of the peak is extraordinarily resistent to gross uncertainty. The hypothetical discovery today of an oil volume equivalent to Saudi Arabia—the largest volume every discovered—would shift peak by around 8 years. And there are no Saudi Arabias out there.

Peak oil never went away. We just delayed it for a little while by printing fake money tokens.

A figure taken from my 2010 masters thesis: “The Optimism Index“

Why does this matter?

Since oil dominates our energy system, once it starts to decline, the entire high gradient energy system (the one that powers the global industrial manufacturing system that produces, amongst other things, low gradient wind and sun energy scavenging devices) starts to decline unless and until we ramp up gas and nuclear.

Goosing our production with funny money is a zero sum game. The more we’ve delayed peak, the faster it will decline on the other side. The faster energy declines, the harder the economic shock. There is a rate of economic shock, above which, the entire financial system collapses.

And now, the scientifically and economically illiterate United Kingdom government is shuttering our oil and gas fields, and using printed money tokens to fund low gradient energy scavenging technologies that accelerate the resulting energy decline even faster.

In the next essay, on the brink of baked-in and accelerated energy decline, we’ll pick up the story of money token printing theory—a.k.a “Modern Monetary Theory”—to see how it is like pouring petrol on inflationary flames.

The State of Britain by Richard Lyon is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Lyon, R. (2010). The Optimism Index: Quantifying the uncertainty of energy policy. Unpublished masters thesis. The Centre for Energy, Petroleum and Mineral Law and Policy, Dundee. Available at https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ii5pl2vfnmjcz0n4ic8z1/Lyon-2010-The-Optimism-Index-Quantifying-the-uncertainty-of-energy-policy.pdf?rlkey=pqlkednziosojiumlovotrmgs&dl=0 ↩
Global Oil and Gas Discoveries Fell to a Record Low in 2023 | OilPrice.com (no date). Available at: https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Global-Oil-and-Gas-Discoveries-Fell-to-a-Record-Low-in-2023.html?t (Accessed: 8 December 2024). ↩
For the curious, systems with dynamics that are governed by processes that start out easy and get hard are described by a type of mathematical function called the logistic growth function which, confusingly, has nothing to do with the management term “logistics”. Its characteristic feature is a peak, created by the point at which the things you have done already begin collapsing faster than the new things you do can replace them. ↩
I’m compressing many important details here for brevity, for example how to reconstruct the discovery profile from annual reserves development records. You could read the thesis. ↩
Cheap energy makes economies grow. Expensive energy makes them contract. There is an oil price at which economic growth is zero. That partitions oil into two kinds: affordable (economic growth), and unaffordable (economic contraction) ↩

MAD

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

TV COMEDIAN VOLODYMYR Zelensky was elected President of Ukraine on April 21, 2019 on a 73% landslide vote. A key element of his campaign was a promise to pursue a peaceful settlement with Russian-backed separatists in Eastern Ukraine.1

In that same month, the influential US military think tank RAND Corporation published a startling report outlining bold policy measures that the US and NATO could implement to destabilize Russia’s government. The report’s remarkably frank recommendations included strategies that could potentially lead to regime change.2

These measures, which contradicted President Zelensky’s election promises to Ukrainian citizens, included supplying lethal weapons to Ukraine to escalate its conflict with Russia, recommitting to Ukraine’s integration into an expanding NATO, repositioning NATO fighters, bombers, tactical and nuclear missiles, and troops along the Russian border to exert pressure on Russia’s military defenses, and interfering in Russian elections to undermine public confidence in the Russian government.

In December 2021, Russia sought security guarantees from the United States and NATO that they would not implement these measures. They refused. Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24 2022.

In March 2022, during initial peace negotiations, Russia reiterated its demand for security assurances from NATO. President Zelensky indicated openness to forgoing Ukraine’s NATO membership aspirations. The United Kingdom, under Boris Johnson, sabotaged the talks.3 An estimated 600,000 Ukrainian men were subsequently killed.

In January 2024, the head of the British Army General Patrick Saunders signalled his enthusiasm for conscripting us into a “citizen army” in readiness for a land war with Russia.4 And in November 2024, UK trained Ukrainian forces began firing UK manufactured and supplied air-launched, long-range, advanced guidance system equipped supersonic cruise missiles deep into the most nuclear-armed country in the world.

Until recently, the most newsworthy aspect of Ukraine was its history of corruption, ultranationalism, neo-Nazism, antisemitism, and its persecution of ethnic Russians and other minorities.5 Since then, the UK as spent £18 billion on it in a proxy war with Russia.

Life happens fast.

During the Cold War, the RAND Corporation—authors of the NATO strategy currently being enacted to destabilise Russia—contributed significantly to the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). The MAD doctrine is a military strategy asserting that if two opposing sides possess the capability to inflict unacceptable damage on each other with nuclear weapons, neither side will initiate a conflict, as it would lead to total annihilation for both.

In a terrifying new book, Annie Jacobsen—drawing on expert testimony and recently declassified information from the US nuclear military program—sets out, minute by minute, the events that would unfold after a hypothetical surprise dual decapitation strike by North Korea on Washington DC and Diablo Canyon nuclear power station in California.6 The scenario, from first detection to the death of the first billion humans, takes a little over 60 minutes. Most of humanity perishes subsequently in the ensuing nuclear winter.

The book reveals critical aspects of the global nuclear system. It highlights that any U.S. missile response to North Korea must traverse Russian airspace. Crucially, Russia’s satellite detection system cannot differentiate between missiles flying over its territory and those targeting it directly. This distinction is vital because both Russia and the U.S. employ a “Launch on Warning” strategy, where nuclear responses are initiated before an actual strike occurs. Furthermore, the Russian system incorporates a “Dead Hand” mechanism: if a nuclear detonation is detected on Russian soil after losing contact with central command, it automatically launches all operational missiles at predetermined targets.

The whole point of Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine is to deter behaviour that could trigger a launch. Jacobsen shows that, when that doctrine fails, every single scenario leads to the launch of all nuclear weapons, and annihilation of the human species.

Russia has reportedly revised its nuclear doctrine, lowering the threshold for nuclear weapon use compared to NATO’s current stance. The absence of a nuclear exchange thus far is therefore attributable only to Russia’s restraint rather than a lack of conditions meeting their criteria. This situation has heightened global nuclear tensions to unprecedented levels.

It is under these circumstances that the UK Prime Minister, who came to power with only 20% of the electoral vote, is now firing missiles at Russia.

NATO’s pivot from a defensive military alliance to an expansionist offensive military force is moving fast. Since this map was created, Finland and Sweden have been subsumed.

As a former Royal Air Force Officer, I underwent NATO military doctrine training. NATO was presented as a defensive military alliance, not an expansionist, offensive military force. Nuclear weapons were portrayed as deterrents, their potential consequences so catastrophic that they theoretically prevented aggression—on both sides. NATO doctrine emphasized the importance of neutral buffer states like Ukraine, Finland, and Sweden in reducing tensions between Western and Soviet blocs and minimizing the risk of nuclear conflict. While acknowledging the potential disappointment of these nations in being denied NATO membership, this was viewed as preferable to the alternative: a nuclear exchange that could render Europe uninhabitable for millennia.

I was prepared to serve in conflicts guided by that doctrine. However, the strategic landscape has changed out of all recognition. I will not participate in General Patrick Saunders “citizen army”. And I’m not alone. The gradual disappearance of Ukrainian flags from social media profiles reveals waning public enthusiasm for this mad war.

The State of Britain by Richard Lyon is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Ukraine’s president elect promises new peace talks (2019) RFI. Available at: https://www.rfi.fr/en/europe/20190421-ukraines-president-elect-promises-peace-talks. “In any case we will act within the Normandy framework, we will continue with the Minsk talks, we will reboot them” ↩
Dobbins, J. et al. (2019) Overextending and Unbalancing Russia: Assessing the Impact of Cost-Imposing Options. RAND Corporation. Available at: https://doi.org/10.7249/RB10014. ↩
Orbán, T. (2023) Official: Johnson Forced Kyiv To Refuse Russian Peace Deal. Available at: https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/official-johnson-forced-kyiv-to-refuse-russian-peace-deal/ ↩
Sheridan, D. (2024) ‘Ukraine conflict shows calling up public can win wars, says UK Army chief’, The Telegraph, 24 January. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/24/head-army-ukraine-citizens-conflict-win-wars/ ↩
The dangers of ignoring Ukraine’s neo-Nazis (2023) The Tufts Daily. Available at: https://www.tuftsdaily.com/article/2023/10/the-dangers-of-ignoring-ukraines-neo-nazis?t ↩
Jacobsen, A. (2024). Nuclear War: A Scenario. New York, NY: Dutton. https://amzn.eu/d/0H8eEnB ↩

Winter is coming

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

NOT LONG AGO, the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) asked an interesting question: how has climate change affected the number of people who die from temperature related effects in the UK?1

Their analysis opened with helpful speculation on scientific topics outside their area of competence: “Climate change is a substantial threat to human health in the UK…Heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, floods and severe storms – accepted to be linked to climate change – have increased globally in recent years. The Met Office found that the period 1991 to 2020 was 0.9 degrees Celsius warmer than the 1961 to 1990 average, while the 10 warmest years recorded occurred since 2002…Mental health is a growing concern linked to climate change”.

Of course, the IPCC have found no such link between human activites and the supposed climate threats they list2, the majority of Met Office weather stations from which the “10 warmest years” claim originate are discovered under international quality classification criteria to produce “junk” and “super junk” data,3 and the mental health crisis is the consequence of institutions like the ONS peddling scientifically illiterate climate misinformation.

Predictably, the results were horrifying—for climate catastrophists (my emphasis).

We found relatively little increase in deaths caused by warmer weather and a reduction in deaths caused by cold winters, leading to a net decrease in deaths

And not just a small decrease. Over the period 2001-2020, which was about 0.9 degrees Celsius warmer than the 1961 to 1990, 555,094 fewer people died from temperature affects.

“ONS!”, said the catastrophists, channelling Michael Caine in The Italian Job, “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”. Errors were declared, and a safer report was published comparing deaths, not changes in deaths, between warm and cold days—irrelevant to the task of examining whether climate change is a good or a bad thing in the UK. It produced the same conclusion.

But for anyone familiar with climate academic literature, the result—that small changes in cold produces large changes in deaths from cold—is not surprising. In one of the largest studies to date on deaths attributable to heat or cold, a large team of collaborators from around the world examined more than 74 million deaths in 13 countries between 1985 and 2012.4

The results are what you would expect as we emerge from the recent mini Ice Age. Overall, cold kills around 17 times more people worldwide than does heat. Perhaps more unexpectedly, one in 15 deaths from all causes were attributable to cold. Only one death in 250 was attributable to heat.

Moreover, even a large increase in temperature didn’t produce a significant increase in deaths. Conversely, by far the largest number of temperature related deaths came from moderate cold, and even a modest further reduction in temperature caused a large increase in deaths.

This makes sense. While direct deaths from hypothermia are rare in the UK, cold temperatures pose significant indirect health risks, particularly for vulnerable populations. Cold weather exacerbates existing health conditions and increases the likelihood of accidents.

The relationship between the death of our most vulnerable citizens and modest temperature decreases is starkly revealed by the End Fuel Poverty Coalition, who have tabulated the number of deaths from cold in recent winters, together with the average temperature in that winter.5

They show that an average winter temperature of 4 degrees Centigrade marks the edge of the death zone for our vulnerable citizens in the UK. 2,439 died in cold damp homes in the relatively mild (5.3 degC) winter of 2019/2020. In the cold (3.5 degC) winter of 2020/21, 14,502 died. And that’s just from the direct effects. ONS estimated the total number of “winter excess deaths” in the winter of 2015-16 to be 24,300. This number has also declined strongly with the modest increase in average temperature over the century, with half as many dying today as did in the 1950s.6

HERE IN THE UK, we are spending trillions of pounds on the reckless and futile attempt to replace our affordable, abundant, and above all reliable energy system with an unaffordable, rationed, blackout-prone system driven occasionally by breezes and sunbeams.

If 100% successful in its aim of eliminating UK carbon emissions, the UK will produce an avoided increase in earth’s temperature in 100 years of less than 0.01 degrees centigrade.7

The cost of that reduction, measured in hundreds of trillions of pounds per tenth of a degree, remains unquantifiable. That stems from the government’s failure to produce a detailed scope definition, implementation plan, or comprehensive cost schedule for “Net Zero”. Moreover, critical technologies required by it, such as long-term energy storage solutions, are not yet developed or available.8

They are imposing unimaginable debt on us and our children to try and prevent natural climate variation that is producing thousands fewer temperature related deaths—here in the UK, and world wide.

The energy policy associated with it has brought to the brink of grid failure and blackout9. In a sub 4 degree winter, even one blackout will be catastrophic for tens of thousands of our most vulnerable citizens. One lasting for several days would be a national emergency, requiring the mobilisation of the armed forces to move them into community halls with space heaters until power could be restored.

Net Zero is killing our country. We can not tolerate it. If you agree, please share this news letter with your friends and family, and make sure your MP knows your views. Together, we can stop it. But time is running out and, for many this winter, it already has.

The State of Britain by Richard Lyon is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Office For National Statistics (2022) Climate-related mortality and hospital admissions, England and Wales: 2001 to 2020 - Office for National Statistics. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/releases/climaterelatedmortalityandhospitaladmissionsenglandandwales2001to2020 ↩
IPCC (2021) ‘Chapter 12: Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment’, Table 12.12 p.1856 in IPCC Sixth Assessment Report: The Physical Science Basis. 1st edn. Cambridge University Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009157896 ↩
‘Poorly Sited Stations Undermine Met Office’s UK Temperature Claims’ (2024) NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT, 27 May. Available at: https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2024/05/27/poorly-sited-stations-undermine-met-offices-uk-temperature-claims/ (Accessed: 20 November 2024). ↩
Gasparrini A, Guo Y, Hashizume M, Lavigne E, Zanobetti A, Schwartz J, Tobias A, Tong S, Rocklöv J, Forsberg B, Leone M, De Sario M, Bell ML, Guo Y, Wu C, Kan H, Yi S, de Sousa M, Stagliorio Z, Hilario P, Saldiva N, Honda Y, Kim H, Armstrong B (2015) Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multicountry observational study, The Lancet, Vol 386 July 25, 2015 ↩
End Fuel Poverty Coalition (2024) ‘4,950 excess winter deaths caused by cold homes last winter’, 4,950 excess winter deaths caused by cold homes last winter, 17 January. Available at: https://www.endfuelpoverty.org.uk/4950-excess-winter-deaths-caused-by-cold-homes-last-winter/ (Accessed: 20 November 2024). ↩
Goklany IM (2009) Deaths and death rates from extreme weather events, 1900 – 2008. J Am Phys Surg 14(4):102–109 ↩
MAGICC: The climate system in a nutshell. https://magicc.org/ ↩
Lyon, R. (2024) ‘UK renewables’ trillion pound energy storage problem.’, The State of Britain by Richard Lyon, 7 September. Available at: https://richardlyon.substack.com/p/uk-renewables-trillion-pound-energy ↩
https://x.com/AndrewOrlowski/status/1843669739287261351 ↩

Confected emergencies and the new world order

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

SPAIN’S MEDITERRANEAN COAST is susceptible to intense autumn rainfall, created by an unfortunate combination of coastal geography and a high-altitude meterological phenomenon called Depresión Aislada en Niveles Altos (“Isolated Depression at High Altitudes”). Disasterous floods have been a recurring problem in the region for centuries, with records of them dating back to the 16th Century.1 Poorly controlled expansion of urban areas in flood prone regions has worsened their effects in recent times.

Scientifically and historically illiterate climate catastrophists cynically intensify the suffering that the flooding creates to promote their “climate emergency”, despite the IPCC finding no evidence of a connection between human emissions and flooding after hundreds of million of dollars of motivated research to find one.2

While flooding in Spain is neither new nor unusual, the recent application of the term ‘lockdown’ to describe routine flood responses is both novel and concerning. This extra-legal measure, originally devised and refined during the Covid-19 period to facilitate the forcible confinement of populations to their homes, has now emerged in a different context.3

Why has it emerged now? This week’s essay asks the question: what links airport security, men in dresses, Covid, and bad weather?

Let’s start with the weather. The “climate emergency” hypothesis is simply stated. We observe large variations in the weather in the short term, and even larger variations in the climate in the long term. Is that variation natural, or can it be explained only by the relatively insignificant emission of a waste gas produced by our energy system?

If it can, then we may have a big problem. But, until a few years ago, that hypothesis was thought widely to be eccentric and impossible to prove.4 The big problem then was believed to be the imminent return to an ice age.

Big problems require big governments to solve. Also: “big government” requires big problems to solve. And this big problem with the climate is now conveniently being claimed at a time when the biggest government conceivable is being created before our eyes—a supranational entity, or world order,5 that demolishes the nation state and its democratic institutions, and arrogates to itself the power to regulate every aspect of the lives, behaviour, speech, and thought of every person on the planet.

Such an extraordinary social project requires extraordinary social transformations. Ubiquitous, omnipresent surveillance. Programmable money, linked to social credit scores, that algorithmically punishes and excludes non-conforming citizens from society. High levels of docility. High levels of tolerance for authoritarian control measures. High levels of tolerance for the suspension and destruction of fragile rights and freedoms of movement, association, and speech that have taken centuries to win from government, and required wars to defend. Destruction of the social bonds between citizens that confer immunity to authoritarianism. Ultimately, the removal from the language of the means even to conceive of, much less express, unauthorised thought.

Transformations of such a viscerally repellant authoritarian nature will not be accepted voluntarily. Citizens must be brought carefully into acceptance of them. A constant, subliminal state of fear is required to provide the permissive mind set in which social re-engineering tasks can be carried out. From time to time, emergencies must be declared that justify and legitimise the irreversible dismantling of freedoms and protections, the extra-legal imposition of instruments of coercion, and the inculcation of alien behavioural changes.

And of emergencies, there is no shortage.

Before the 9/11 emergency, for example, the state’s relatively modest civillian security forces could not have maintained control of an entire population in the event of widespread protest against authoritarian government action. Following the changes introduced in the aftermath, their span of control is now dramatically wider. There is now high acceptance of coercive and intrusive near-paramilitary security arrangements, for example in airports, and the willingness to submit to them. Without any of us authorising it, or even noticing it, the UK is now the most highly surveilled country in the world. Public opinion has shifted notably from defending civil liberties to demanding increased restrictions, as people perceive these measures will reduce their exposure to risks about which they have been deliberately sensitized.

Without the “Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity” (“DIE”) emergency, would we have tolerated the sexualisation, feminisation, and castration of our children? Would we have tolerated men punching women in boxing rings for televised sport? Would we have tolerated gangs of thugs targetting and raping vulnerable young women, or beheading those of us who criticise their beliefs, or the blasphemy laws protecting them? Would we have tolerated the placement of rapists in women’s prisons, or boys in girls’ changing rooms, or men as heads of rape crisis centres? Would we have tolerated men in dresses, with no ability or interest in war fighting or operational readiness, commanding our military forces?

Without the Covid biosecurity emergency, would we have tolerated the imposition of a police state with arbitrary powers of arrest, fines and imprisonment for trivial offences? Would we have tolerated restrictions on our freedoms of movement, association, and speech? Would we have tolerated confinement to our homes under effective house arrest for months? Would we have tolerated the abandonment of society’s duty of care to the welfare of our children? Would we have tolerated the emergency suspension of safety protocols, installed for the purpose of protecting us from untested therapies produced by unethical pharmaceutical corporations? Would we have tolerated the imposition of digital identity papers, or the threat of being excluded from our economy on failure to comply with the conditions for holding them, or on failure to produce them on demand? Would we have tolerated the emergency suspension of fiscal controls that prevent massive fraudulent transfer of wealth from tax paying citizens to tax evading members of the new elite? Would we have tolerated the destruction of our economy and our savings through the suspension of the economy’s functions and the issuance of crippling quantities irredeemable debt? Would we have twitched our curtains and reported our neighbours to the police?

Without a climate emergency, would we have tolerated the willful and catastrophic destruction of an energy system capable of producing abundant, affordable energy, with no detailed and costed plan for its replacement? Would we have tolerated having our energy made first unaffordable, and then unavailable? Would we have tolerated the enslavement of children in developing countries to mine the colossal quantities of resources required to sustain luxury beliefs in developed ones? Would we have tolerated closure of our airports, the suspension of our shipping, the removal from our economy of meat, steel, cement, concrete, mortar, and the halving of the output of our farms?6 Would we have tolerated the war on our cars, or our coerced confinement to “20 minute walking distance” zones around our homes? Would we have tolerated a return to the squalor and life expectancy of pre-industrial per-capita energy levels?

All of these measures polarise us, destroy the bonds of trust between us, immiserate us, desensitise us to outrageous authoritarian state interventions, increase our dependency on the state, increase the power of the state to surveil and control us, remove our freedoms of movement, association and speech, weaken us, and transform our cohesive society into a self-policing, atomised mass that can be directed at will.7

Each of these measures promotes the creation of a supranational entity that demolishes the nation state and its democratic institutions, and arrogates to itself the power to regulate every aspect of the lives, behaviour, thought, and speech of every person on the planet.

This is not a coincidence.

There is no climate emergency.8 The oceans are not boiling. Rather, as we emerge from the recent CO2 famine and mini Ice Age, ten times more people still die each year of cold than of heat.9 But, to carry out its work, the growing supranational world order requires there to be a climate emergency, and many others, so as to continue stealthily under their cover to implement their changes.

And that is why they are now invoking authoritarian instruments, hatched and rehearsed under Covid, to protect people from bad weather.

The State of Britain by Richard Lyon is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

La primera gran riada en la historia de Valencia fue en 1517: derribó tres puentes de cinco y hubo cientos de muertos" [The first major flood in the history of Valencia was in 1517: it destroyed three of the five bridges and left hundreds dead.]. El Español (in Spanish). 30 October 2024. Retrieved 31 October 2024. ↩
IPCC (2021) ‘Chapter 12: Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment’, Table 12.12 p.1856 in IPCC Sixth Assessment Report: The Physical Science Basis. 1st edn. Cambridge University Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009157896. ↩
See, for example: Clarke, L. (2024) Majorca under ‘lockdown’ and braces itself for storm which killed 158 in Spain, Manchester Evening News. Available at: https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/world-news/majorca-placed-lockdown-braces-itself-30275744 (Accessed: 15 November 2024). ↩
CO2 contributes between 10% and 25% of the overall Greenhouse Gas Effect. Humans contribute around 4% of the total annual emission of CO2 from all sources. The 0.4% to 1% human alteration of the Greenhouse Gas Effect is dwarfed by natural variation in other climate drivers, rendering attribution of observed climate variation to humans unsound. ↩
“World order” or “international order” is the term used in academic and policy discussion documents to refer to the arrangement of power and authority that provides the framework for global politics and diplomacy. ↩
Allwood, J. et al. (2019) ‘Absolute Zero’. Available at: https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.46075. ↩
For a chilling explanation of how Nazi Germany produced and exploited the atomisation of German society, see Arendt, H. (1973). ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich ↩
Lyon, R. (2023) ‘Why the UK must end climate catastrophism’, The State of Britain by Richard Lyon, 25 January. Available at: https://richardlyon.substack.com/p/end-climate-catastrophism. ↩
Zhao, Q. et al. (2021) ‘Global, regional, and national burden of mortality associated with non-optimal ambient temperatures from 2000 to 2019: a three-stage modelling study’, The Lancet Planetary Health, 5(7), pp. e415–e425. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(21)00081-4. ↩

UK renewables' trillion pound energy storage problem.

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

THIS WEEK, THE oxymoronically titled Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero announced that he is lowering household energy bills. He’s doing this by locking us for 15 years into a 58% increase in the price that wind generators are guaranteed for their unreliable product, effectively increasing the subsidy we pay them through our energy bills by another £9 billion.1 This is in service, you’ll recall, of his intention to double onshore wind intermittent power generation, triple solar intermittent power generation, and quadruple offshore intermittent power generation in order to avoid a 0.0 degC increase in global temperature.2

“Shit’s gettin’ real!”, as a Climate Industrial Complex lobbyist might say.

They say that, when going broke, nothing seems to happen for a long time, then everything happens at once. Something similar is happening here. In a government of individuals of astonishing intellectual shallowness and technical illiteracy, Miliband adds another characteristic: he believes this nonsense. He’s Rasputin. Unless he’s stopped—and there’s no evidence of Starmer’s willingness or ability to do so—he’s going to run his suicidal deindustrialisation program to failure at breakneck speed.

So as we accelerate towards insolvency, it might be wise to start paying even closer attention to how much it’s going to hurt. In this week’s essay, we take a look at unreliable energy sources’ second biggest technical problem: storage.3

WITH VIABLE FUEL sources, such as nuclear or hydrocarbon, energy is stored in the atoms and chemical bonds of stocks of the fuel. This has a practical advantage: when you take your child to Accident and Emergency with appendicitis, a fuel valve is automatically opened up somewhere and the energy to treat her is instantly delivered.

In a toy system based on scavenging energy from occasional gusts of wind and rays of sunshine, you either have to invite your child to wait until the wind is blowing before she develops appendicitis, or proactively have her healthy one removed on a windy day. The third option is the one we were forced to accept in Victorian times, when net energy levels were at “Net Zero” levels and child mortality was an order of magnitude higher.

Since none of these are politically acceptable, some system has to be devised for dealing with the problem of unreliability. Right now, when the wind stops, we ramp up gas-fired power stations.4 The wind industry’s attitude to the oil and gas industry is rather like the attitude of a sulky live-at-home teenager, who emerges at dinner to be fed and spends the rest of the time in the basement imagining his lifestyle to be entirely sustainable while having no idea what his parents do every day to provide his food, shelter, and warmth.

But say we were to capitulate to “Just Stop Oil” teenagers, and just stop oil. How would the energy system work then, on paper at least?

ONE OPTION MIGHT be to install excess generating capacity. If a system produces only 20% of our requirement on an average windy day, then they might build five times more capacity and throw the excess away on very windy days.

Unfortunately, even if the extravagant cost could be accommodated, that doesn’t work because the wind often doesn’t blow and the sun often doesn’t shine at all. And because, when that happens, it often happens over the whole of Europe, imports cannot be relied upon—chances are, the wind isn’t blowing there either. Naturally, Miliband plans to spend vast sums on wires to connect us to those other windless regions.

So an ‘unreliables’ energy system with no hydrocarbon or nuclear backup is forced to employ some sort of storage. Generation that is excess to demand (say, on a windy night when everyone is in bed) is stored somewhere, and produced back when the wind has stopped. Sounds simple. The quadrillion dollar question is: how much storage is needed?

There are two answer to this: the naïve one that informs current UK energy policy: “a few hours of national demand”; and the one that is arrived at from an engineering study of decadal demand and wind and solar patterns: “a very, very large amount”. Let’s look briefly at an example of the latter.

THE ROYAL SOCIETY, known officially as The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is one of the world’s most prestigious scientific institutions. Founded in 1660, it is a fellowship of many of the world’s most eminent scientists and is dedicated to promoting excellence in science for the benefit of humanity.

Last year, it issued a report quantifying the storage that a fully electrified UK economy would need to avoid catastrophic blackouts.5 I won’t go into the details here—while the report is technical, the management summary is perfectly digestible for a general reader. But a short summary is in order.

To estimate storage, they compare the cumulative difference on an hourly basis between demand and supply, using three decades of historical wind and solar generation data and hypothetical demand data that scales typical annual demand variation by the amount needed for an electrified economy.

At each moment, any generation in excess of demand is diverted to some form of storage; any demand in excess of generation is supplied from that storage. The total quantity of storage is the amount that is needed to prevent unmet demand in the worst case series of demand-higher-than-supply hours.

The analysis is horrifying.

Naïve analysis—Mr Miliband’s—fails to recognise inter-year variation in wind generation. Our weather varies at different scales, most noticeably annually between winter and summer. But it is also driven by the North Atlantic Oscillation, which affects European weather patterns over decades. Even in the thirty seven years of weather data analysed, we observe periods of 3 or 4 consecutive years of wind drought. This is unlikely to be worst case.

The implications of this for storing unreliable energy are devastating. Far from having to store a couple of hours of national electricity demand for a day or two—itself, an unprecedented engineering challenge that has never been achieved anywhere—UK would have to store months of total demand for years to survive multi-year wind droughts.

In the demand scenario investigated, that’s 180 Terra-watt Hours of energy—about 10 Hiroshima nuclear bombs. There is no battery technology—now, or in prospect—that can store that quantity of energy for that duration. There is no battery solution to the Net Zero storage predicament.

All of the alternative “solutions” investigated in the report are unaffordable, and commercially unavailable. The one they identify as the least unworkable is conversion of excess generation into hydrogen, which they propose injecting into the ground in places like East Yorkshire and Cheshire. That in itself is amusing, as converting energy into hydrogen and back to electricity involves throwing half of it away. Which means, all other things being equal, we’d have to double the capacity (and cost) of our energy generation capacity—one for us, and one for the losses in the storage system. Equally amusing is the mental flexibility required to ban gas fracturing operations over concerns about the minor tremors that they occasionally produce, while proposing injecting nuclear weapon quantities of energy into caverns under people’s feet.

All of this is unimaginably expensive. Even the error in the report—it assumes final costs for technologies at the start of a notional project that don’t currently exist and are assumed to get invented and less expensive with time—is around half a trillion pounds. Adding that back in propels costs to a trillion pounds.

That assumes energy demand that is significantly lower than other demand scenarios. Actual costs will be significantly higher. Results in other countries are comparable—energy storage costs in the US for a fully electrified economy are estimated in the region of $220 trillion to $2.2 quadrillion.6

And remember—none of this produces anything of value beside an unmeasurable change in an imaginary malfunction in the weather. It’s pure additional cost that merely gets us back to the reliability we already enjoy with a gas and nuclear system.

Our bovine elected representatives signed into force the environmental legislation motivating all of this without even a debate, much less a vote. Having restated his determination to force it down our throats, technically illiterate and clueless Mr Miliband wrote this week to the Transmission network’s boss for ideas on how to do it. His reply will be interesting.

It is impossible to overstate the scale of how utterly ill-conceived and reckless all of this is.

We must say “No to Net Zero”.

The State of Britain by Richard Lyon is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Homewood, P. (2024) ‘£9 Billion Subsidy Bill For Latest Round Of CfDs’, NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT, 5 September. Available at: https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2024/09/05/9-billion-subsidy-bill-for-latest-round-of-cfds/ (Accessed: 6 September 2024). ↩
Lindzen, R., Happer, W. and van Wijngaarden, W.A. (2024) ‘Net Zero Averted Temperature Increase’. ↩
Unreliable energy sources’ biggest technical problem is that you can’t actually run an advanced industrial economy on them. See: Lyon, R. (2024) The physics of Net Zero. Available at: https://richardlyon.substack.com/p/the-physics-of-net-zero ↩
We also use a quantity of so-called “biofuels” which, being in short supply, environmentally disastrous, and ruinously expensive, cannot be scaled up adequately to replace gas. ↩
Llewellyn Smith, C. (2023) Large-scale electricity storage. The Royal Society. Available at: https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/low-carbon-energy-programme/large-scale-electricity-storage/ (Accessed: 4 September 2024). ↩
Reid, E. (2024) ‘All-Electric Storage’, 30 April. Available at: https://www.therightinsight.org/All-Electric-Storage. ↩

Gustless in Glasgow

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT

It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.

THIS WEEK, SCOTTISH Nationalists are up in arms again. This time, it’s over the regulatory approval and go-ahead for a multi-billion pound subsea cable for transferring electricity generated by wind farms located in Scotland to consumers in England. “It’s oor wind gold!”, they shout, “We should keep it here and get free electricity!”

Copper wire was invented by two Scotsmen fighting over a penny, and a certain lack of enthusiasm for sharing is part of our charm. The problem in this case, though, is that there’s not much to share, and certainly no wind gold. Let’s look.

YOU’VE NO DOUBT seen them. “Warming stripes”, or “Climate stripes”. They’re a data visualisation technique that uses a chronologically ordered series of coloured strips to represent the way that we are encouraged to believe that temperature is changing. It’s coupled with the trick (their term) of making earlier temperatures cooler than measured and recent temperatures warmer than measured1 to intensify the illusion of a weather malfunction.

Climate scientist Ed Hawkins, inspired by knitted woollen hats and scarves, developed the technique. It was deemed to have such a powerful subliminal effect, and to make such a valuable contribution to the process of covert manipulation of public opinion, that he was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 2020 "for services to Climate Science and to Science Communication".

Fig 1

The internet being what it is, there is of course a splendid tradition of mocking it:

Fig 2

But, when used in good faith, the carpet plot (to give it its proper title) is a useful data visualisation tool. We can use it for a little visualisation of our own to figure out how much wind gold the Scots are being robbed of.

IT’S QUITE straightforward. The National Grid helpfully publish UK wind generation at 5 minute intervals all the way back to 2016. We can divide wind generation at any point by the “installed capacity” — the amount that would be produced if every turbine was producing what it was designed to produce — to compute the “capacity factor” of the system. Then we can plot that capacity factor over time, either as a regular graph, or as a carpet plot.

Here’s what that looks like. First, installed capacity, generation, and capacity factor:

Fig 3

Ignore the red verticals in [C] — I’ll explain those in a second. Take capacity factor and render it as a carpet plot. “Wind Stripes”, so to speak, although I doubt we’ll get an OBE for it.

Fig 4

A few things are worth pointing out here.

UK Government Energy policy economics are based on an assumed capacity factor of 25% rising to 45%. Average capacity factor in any year never exceeds 23%. It’s as though we’ve paid for a car capable of 100 mph, and only get 23 mph out of it.

It was about 23% back in 2016 when system capacity was 16 GW. It’s about 23% today when capacity is 30 GW. That claim that efficiency will improve as technology advances and the system gets larger because “the wind is always blowing somewhere” is observably false.

It’s also highly seasonal. You can see the light blue of the stormy winter months, when they still get less half the design output out of them. And you can see the dark blue of the gentle summer months when they are idle. We’ll come back to this wind drought that occurs every year between March and September in a future essay, when we’ll estimate what the cost of battery storage would be to keep the country’s lights on.

In fact, look again at subplot [C] in Fig 3. See the red vertical stripes? Those are all the days where that day’s average output is less that 10% i.e. wind generation is producing almost nothing. It’s worth examining these a little closer. Here’s 2024 so far:

Fig 5

So far this year, Britain’s wind system has produced next to nothing on 34 days — many of them consecutive — and around 21% of capacity on the other days for lack of sufficient wind.

Nationalists are fighting over a penny.

It will be fairly obvious, looking at this, why wind developers are now extorting the Labour government for even more subsidy money to compensate them for the loss they make in unsubsidised wind production. Professor Gordon Hughes at the University of Edinburgh’s Department of Economics notes that the push for larger and larger units is having no impact on capacity factor,2 and we can see that empirically.

Yet Labour intends now to double onshore wind capacity and quadruple offshore wind, adding £15 billion, or £555 per household per year, to our energy costs.3

We have to say No to Net Zero.

The State of Britain by Richard Lyon is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

For a survey of this, see Heller, T. (2024) The 50 PPM Rule For Data Tampering. Available at: ↩
Hughes, G. (2020) Wind Power Economics – Rhetoric and Reality. Available at: https://www.ref.org.uk/ref-blog/365-wind-power-economics-rhetoric-and-reality (Accessed: 25 November 2022). ↩
What shall we do with the drunken sailor? (no date) Net Zero Watch. Available at: https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/miliband-drunken-sailor (Accessed: 17 August 2024). ↩

Five lessons about Net Zero

Sat, 10 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT

THIS WEEK I read about two “eco-adventurers” who embarked last year on a crossing of the North Atlantic in an electrified yacht. They replaced its reliable diesel engine with wind and solar generators, and batteries. “We’re doing everything we can to show that you can travel without burning fossil fuels”, said one of the crew, a poet, musician and reiki healer.1

They died.

I’m a sailor, and sailing is hazardous. The purpose of this week’s essay is not to mock the crew, whose deaths are as tragic as their efforts were misguided. But their eco-adventure, as an analogy of Britain’s misguided eco-adventure to do everything it can to show that you can power an advanced industrial economy without burning fossil fuels, has valuable lessons to offer.

Here are five we can learn from it.

Nature is deadly

Sailing is one of those activities in which everything is lovely, until it’s not. And then nature hands you the unsentimental reminder that it will kill you in a heartbeat unless you take very great care to prevent it from doing so.

Thomas Hobbes, living in a time when energy levels were similar to “Net Zero” conditions, describes what life was like in the resulting constant competition for scarce resources2:

"…the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

Life with abundant, affordable energy is lovely. Without it, it’s solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Billions live in constant competition for scarce resources, and die in their millions each year from cold, hunger, disease, and violence. Nature is deadly. A properly equipped yacht protects its crew from it. Here in Britain, our prolific energy resources have protected us from it.3 Abandoning that protection is reckless, and we do so at our peril.

Complacency kills

The article records the crew as experienced. It’s difficult to imagine how someone who has experienced a storm or equipment failure for which survival depends on a reliable engine would undertake the extremely dangerous experiment of replacing it with a toy.

Very few of us in Britain have experienced life threatening energy shortages. All of our lives, we’ve gone to bed each night and risen each morning under the blanket of protection afforded by a continuously expanding energy supply. Most of us are no more aware of that protection than is a fish aware of water, because a fish has never experienced water’s absence.

It’s that protection that has allowed a “Just Stop Oil” protestor to live long enough to set off in the morning for a spot of leisurely interruption of fire, ambulance, and police emergency services. She survived her seventy winters with heating obtained from hydrocarbon. 50% of the protein and carbohydrate in her taste-the-difference bircher muesli and nut medley compôte was obtained from hydrocarbon. She avoided cholera by flushing away her morning bowel motion and washing her hands in hot, clean water with waste and water systems powered by hydrocarbon. During the day, she’ll demand that oil is replaced by wind turbines with carbon fibre blades made from hydrocarbon, manufactured by a system powered by hydrocarbon. She’ll avoid being killed on the way home by travelling over streets lit by energy from hydrocarbon. At bed time, she’ll take a tranquilliser made from hydrocarbon to help her manage her fear of slightly milder weather.

She is profoundly complacent. It is her complacency that causes her to demand the extremely dangerous, experimental replacement of our energy system. A replacement that will kill her.

Know what you’re doing

Sailing does not lend itself to guesswork, any more than it lends itself to crossing your fingers and hoping that it will be alright. Neither do our energy arrangements.

David Turver, over on his excellent energy substack “Eigenvalues”, catalogues the scale of ignorance and incompetence at every level of the British government and civil service in this area. It is unsafe to assume that they know what they are doing — they don’t. So we must educate ourselves. That’s partly why I write this substack, so that I can make a contribution to that effort.

Before you pointed a boat at New York, you’d want to learn everything you could about how to get there safely. So it is with our energy system. Learn everything you can about it — how it works, how it can fail, the consequences of that failure, and what sensible energy policy looks like. And then, armed with your knowledge, hold them accountable and reject their ideologies.

For most of your life, you’ve never had to. For the rest of your life, you do.

Prepare for the worst

A yacht near the shore is always one snapped rudder linkage away from disaster. In recreational sailing, you hope for the best, but you plan for the worst. You sail downwind from rocks, you maintain escape routes, you inspect and maintain your equipment, you cary spares.

That lesson means that you don’t plan your country’s energy system for when the temperatures are pleasant, the sun is shining, the wind is blowing moderately, and your neighbours are well disposed toward you and inclined to sell you their current surplus energy.

You plan it for 6 weeks of “Beast from the East” baltic temperatures, a synoptic high pressure system causing breathless wind conditions over the entire European continent for weeks, and the recognition that our neighbours sell energy to us because it profits them to, and that they will stop doing so the minute they lack sufficient quantities for their own citizens.

By the way, you might want to enquire after reading this how much it would cost in batteries to store enough electricity to run the UK for six months (the average length of the annual British wind drought). We’ll look at that together in a future essay.

Have a good engine, and make sure it works

I’ve singled this one out for last, because it is so fundamental — to sailing, and to industrial economies. In sailing, the wind is for the fun stuff. The engine is what keeps us out of danger, and gets us out of danger.

So it is with an industrial economy. Our heating system, our food system, our sanitation system, our health system, our security and law enforcement system, our manufacturing system, and countless other systems are not “fun stuff”. They have to be there - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, year after year after year. We will die if they are not. Millions do, every year.

We need a good engine — a high gradient, properly maintained, nuclear and hydrocarbon fuelled power generation system. Anything else is reckless misadventure.

A country blowing its power system up and replacing it with toy windmills is like a yacht replacing its engine with one. And ends the same way.

Net Zero will impoverish us and our children. We must say “No to Net Zero”. Please consider sharing this news letter with your friends.

The State of Britain by Richard Lyon is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Sawer, P. and Coen, S. (2024) ‘British eco-adventurer found dead with husband in lifeboat off Canadian coast’, The Telegraph, 20 July. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/20/british-eco-adventurer-dead-husband-lifeboat-canadian-coast/ (Accessed: 6 August 2024). ↩
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by C. B. Macpherson, Penguin Books, 1985. ↩
Not all of us. Even before Net Zero starts to bite, 26,000 already die every winter in Britain from the effects of cold. More in a future essay. ↩

The physics of Net Zero

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT

\[Clean tech is\] a perfect example of a 10x exponential process which will wipe fossil fuels off the market in about a decade. Ye cannae change the laws of physics, Captain!

Physics, not imagination, or determination, limits what an energy transition can achieve. In this week’s essay, we look at energy’s most important physical property — gradient — to understand why running Britain on “renewable energy” is physically impossible.

THE BELIEF THAT we can power an advanced industrial economy on occasional sunbeams and summer breezes is central to Britain’s “Net Zero” energy policy. This fundamental misconception originates in the confusion in the minds of physically illiterate economists who, observing computer and information technology disruptions in Silicon Valley, fantasise about similar disruptions in the energy sector.

In the abstract world of information, bits and bytes don’t have mass, inertia, or friction. They aren’t limited by gravity, or by thermodynamics. Efficiency can increase exponentially, endlessly driving down size and cost.

The world of wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries, on the other hand, is limited by physics. Those limits are hard, and they are non-negotiable. Of these, the most fundamental limit is energy gradient. It is wind and solar’s very low energy gradient that creates an inherent and insurmountable barrier preventing the replacement of hydrocarbon and nuclear with them.

TO RUN AN advanced industrial economy like Britain’s, we need a vast amount of energy. Enthusiasts of “renewable energy” point out, correctly, that there is a vast amount of energy in wind and sunshine. “It’s a no brainer”, as the consultant would say.

But while energy quantity is necessary, it’s not sufficient.

There’s much less energy in an egg pan of boiling water than there is in a swimming pool.1 After four minutes in the egg pan, useful chemical and physical reactions have taken place. Proteins have denatured and coagulated, unfolding, reforming, and aggregating into new structures. Sugars and proteins have reacted, forming new flavour compounds. Sulphur and hydrogen have combined to create a smell. And the egg’s internal pressure has increased, cracking the shell. Much work has been done.

After a whole day in a swimming pool, we’ll still have a cold, raw egg.

Clearly, something else is going on.

To do work — to carry out operations that have physical value in our economy — we also need an energy gradient. An energy gradient is a change in energy from one place to another. It might be the difference in gravitational energy between the top of a hill and the bottom. Or in chemical energy between a battery and a toy. Or in thermal energy between hot water and an egg.

It is the energy gradient — the difference in energy between two places — that causes work to be done. A skier rushes to the bottom of the mountain. A toy monkey bangs its drum. The chemical and physical structure of an egg changes.

How do we make an energy gradient? By creating a difference in energy density. Energy density is the amount of energy stored per unit of “stuff”. While there is much more energy in our swimming pool than in our egg pan, that energy is spread out through 2,500 cubic meters of water. The energy in our egg pan, although less, is spread through only 200 cubic centimetres. The egg doesn’t “see” the energy at the other end of the pool. It “sees” the energy gradient at its shell. And changes.

Energy density is a property of an energy source, and is what limits the usefulness of that energy source.

Britain’s energy system comprises a large number of energy sources. Each source creates an energy gradient between itself and the things we want to do work in — our factories, our fields, our homes, our hospitals. The total gradient in our energy system is the combination (but not the sum — more in a moment) of the gradients of all of the sources in our system.

These different sources — nuclear, coal, oil, gas, wind, solar — each have very different energy densities.

So if energy density limits the usefulness of each as an energy source, what factors limit their energy density?

THREE FACTORS CREATE differences in density between these generators.

The first density factor is the primary source of the energy. Nuclear and fossil energy has very high energy density. That’s because breaking atoms (in nuclear fuel) and chemical bonds (in fossil fuel) releases a huge amount of previously stored energy. Solar and wind energy has very low energy density. That’s because it’s the radiant energy2 that has been weakened by spreading out as it travels the vast distance from the sun. It’s so weak, in fact, that at the height of summer here in Britain, you can run around all day with your shirt off and still be pale blue at supper time.3

The second density factor is time and space compression. Radiant energy in our environment is diffuse, like the thermal energy in our pool, and is only available to us “in real time”. In the fossil energy in our petrol tank, we’re benefitting from millions of years of sunlight that has been captured over millions of square miles of forest and ocean, and processed, concentrated, and stored for us for free by quintillions of Joules of geological energy. This free compression of time and space vastly increases fossil fuel’s energy density.

The third density factor is net energy. It takes energy to get energy. Gas wells have to be drilled. Solar panels have to be made. The effective density of an energy source is reduced by the quantity of energy required to obtain it. Low density “renewable energy” devices are the high-technology products of the vast, high density hydrocarbon and nuclear powered machine called “the global industrial manufacturing system”. Deducting the manufacturing energy cost from a nuclear or fossil fuel source doesn’t change its net output much. Deducting it from a wind or solar source wipes it out. Where fossil and nuclear sources provide 30 units of energy for every unit of energy we invest obtaining them, wind and solar provide (at best — again, more below) single digits. The result is a much lower density source.

In summary. Fossil and nuclear fuels release energy by breaking atoms and chemical bonds; they “compress time and space”; and obtaining them takes relatively little energy. They are high density, producing high energy gradients.

Solar and (ultimately) wind energy is obtained from radiation; it’s scavenged in real time; and obtaining it requires a huge amount of energy. They are are low density, producing low energy gradients.

So why can’t we just string low density sources together to make high density sources?

THE LARGER THE energy gradient between two places, the more work gets done. The lower the gradient between two places, the less work gets done. Adding lots of low gradient energy sources increases the quantity of energy available to us. It doesn’t increase the gradient of that energy. Our egg didn’t boil in an olympic sized swimming pool. Two olympic sized swimming pools have twice the amount of energy. It won’t boil in them, either.

Both the ski run, and the queue to the ski lift, have an energy gradient. The gradient of the ski run is so large that we try to avoid getting killed falling down it. The gradient of the ski lift queue is so low that we try to avoid falling over while we shuffle along it. The queue has a height difference. If we placed 1,000 of them end to end, we might create the height difference of Mont Blanc. But it’s still a long walk. We can’t ski on a ski lift queue. We can’t ski on 1,000 ski lift queues, either.

A “renewable energy” consultant might say: “But look at all the energy in my swimming pool. I can concentrate it at one end, and boil my egg!”. To which we might say: “Concentrate it with what?”. To which she might say: “With a device that works like the opposite of a fridge”.4 To which we might say: “A device made with, and powered by, energy obtained from where?” To which she’ll say: “...”

And this is where it gets interesting.

We make low gradient energy solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries with high gradient energy from hydrocarbon and nuclear fuels. There’s no other way. The delivery of a low gradient energy wind turbine made using high gradient energy is very much like the delivery of a baby by a stork: a lot of uncomfortable details have been omitted, and it’s all a bit implausible.

If we draw a boundary around two wind turbines that have been delivered by a stork and strung together, an apparently miraculous thing happens: inside the boundary, their combined energy gradient increases. It’s as though we’ve added two ski lift queues together and, instead of getting longer, the queue got steeper! How can this possibly be?

Well, we’ve enough knowledge of the physics of energy gradient and density now to work it out. In building their wind turbine from high gradient nuclear and hydrocarbon energy instead of from low gradient solar panels and wind turbine energy, they’ve in effect used a second, hot (and hidden)5 swimming pool. They’ve boiled an egg. But the energy to boil the egg didn’t come from the weak, diffuse energy in the first swimming pool. It came from split atoms and million year old sunlight in a second one.

But if “Net Zero” was implemented, the energy to build the solar panel and wind turbine would have to come from the solar panels and wind turbines themselves. It would have to come from the only swimming pool we’d have. And then adding windmills together wouldn’t increase their gradient. The ski lift queue would just get longer.6

Net energy. Low gradient. Sadly, with ultra diffuse sources, as with friction in the charlatan’s perpetual motion machine, there’s no avoiding it. A gas fired power station is like the egg pan and ski black run in our thought experiments. A wind turbine built with energy from wind turbines is like the swimming pool and the ski lift queue. String as many windmills as you like together, and you’ll never get the energy gradient of a gas fired power station. Even when the wind is blowing.

WE’VE ARRIVED. WE’RE able now to understand the simple physics of why Britain can’t just string lots of wind turbines and assorted other low energy density gadgets together and hope to power our economy. Which is to say — survive.

The economic processes that our lives literally depend on — mining, refining, heat forming, chemical processing, steel production, cement production, semiconductor manufacture, crop fertilisation, transportation, refrigeration, assembly, operations, maintenance, repair, replacement — all require high energy gradients to create the necessary physical transformations.7 The global industrial manufacturing system — that creates wind turbines and solar panels — requires an extremely high energy gradient.

If we ever foolishly tried to run our country on low density energy sources like sunbeams and summer breezes, then we’d be left looking at the industrial equivalent of a cold, raw egg. I described where that path takes us — specifically, our financial system and pension — in my last essay.8

Note that this has nothing to do with the fact that the wind regularly doesn’t blow, and the sun regularly doesn’t shine.9 Those problems, while astronomically expensive to address are, theoretically, at least, addressable.10 No — this is a problem in the fundamental physics of energy production itself. And, as Scottie wisely said: “Ye cannae change the laws of physics, Captain”.

In Britain, the insane energy policy equivalent of trying to boil an egg in a swimming pool has a name. It’s called “Net Zero”.

We must Say No to Net Zero. But time’s running out. If you agree, please share this email with your friends.

The State of Britain by Richard Lyon is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If this isn’t obvious, then imagine throwing two egg pans of boiling water into the pool. Now there’s at least twice as much. ↩
Wind is not radiant energy, but rather mechanical (kinetic) energy that arises from the interaction between radiant solar energy and the atmosphere. I’m simplifying a little here for brevity using the conservation of energy principle, and the assumption that wind energy can’t exceed solar energy over a sufficiently large area and time period. ↩
A major source of confusion in narratives about renewable energy is that the energy from the sun, being highly ordered and coherent, is an extremely efficient energy source (in the language of physics, it has very low entropy). The problem is that, to be useful, this energy has to be harvested and rendered compatible with the economy’s stringent input requirements—collected, converted, regulated, stored, and transmitted. The average continuous power output of a square meter of land in the UK, taking into account diurnal variation, cloud cover, and conversion factors, is about 17W. The colossal energy cost of the harvesting process demolishes that output, destroying its gradient. ↩
A fridge is just a heat pump. Run it one way, and you move heat out of a box. Run it the other, and you move heat into it. ↩
The “renewable energy” industry uses this trick to manipulate energy calculations to make it appear as though low gradient “renewable energy” devices return energy. It works like this: when the high gradient energy required in the manufacture, operation, maintenance, and endless replacement of their devices and the devices comprising their manufacturing system and the devices that make the devices comprising their manufacturing system and the devices that manufacture those devices is excluded, the energy return ratio of their devices goes up. When it is included, the return ratio goes negative i.e. their devices return less than was used to create them. In every study you will see, they exlude most of the energy not employed directly in the manufacture of the device. ↩
The “renewable energy” consultant will then claim that, as long as low gradient devices return more energy than is required to obtain it, we can simply scale them up and concentrate the difference. But, when this physics-free notion collides with exponential maths, we run quickly out of Britains to mount the devices, and Congo child slave labour to mine the lithium and cobalt. See my essay “On the edge of a cliff" (29 June 2024) ↩
They also require a vast array of materials, such as the advanced composite carbon fibres that made windmill blades possible, that are made from hydrocarbon and, as far as we can tell, can only be. ↩
See my essay “Net Zero and the end of our pensions” (27 July 2024) ↩
Our “renewable energy” consultant might say: “I shall collect all the energy from my wind turbine when I’m not using its energy in a battery, and use it later”. Then she’ll plug her battery factory into her battery, and wonder why there’s nothing left to run her heating system with that evening. ↩
The UK’s prestigious Royal Society tried recently to estimate the cost of long term storage that would be required to prevent blackouts in an electrified UK economy. After correcting for the error in their cost model, it’s around £1 trillion. See: Llewellyn Smith, C. (2023) Large-scale electricity storage. The Royal Society. Available at: https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/low-carbon-energy-programme/large-scale-electricity-storage/ ↩

"Net Zero" and the end of our pensions

Sat, 27 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

TWO RELATED VIDEOS appeared last week, both toe-curling in their own ways.

One was of the UK’s increasingly troubling Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Edward Miliband, plucking at a ukulele and singing a ditty about his insane plan to replace the ultra-dense energy that powers the UK’s economy with ultra-diffuse energy scavenged from occasional sunbeams and gusts of wind.

The other video was of a former Bank Of England economist calmly explaining that the UK state pension scheme will become insolvent as early as 2035.1

This week’s essay explains why the latter is the consequence of the former — unless we do something urgently to prevent it.

This isn’t an essay about the ruinous cost of so-called “renewable” energy. While its cost will immiserate most UK households and plunge many retirees into energy poverty for the rest of their shortened lives, electricity cost is not the reason why the pension system will collapse. If it were, it might be argued — however implausibly — that such a risk could be averted by reducing that cost.

No. The reason “Net Zero” will collapse the pension system lies more fundamentally in basic physics, and in the non-negotiable relationship between our energy system and our financial system (and, therefore, our pension).

To understand why, we need a little bit of scientific and economic theory.

I’m qualified in Neoclassical Economics, which is the framework through which western economies reason about how the world works. That framework is broken in many exciting ways.2 But the area in which it is most spectacularly broken is in its understanding of the relationship between the economy and its energy system: it reverses it.

The thing to understand about neoclassical economics — an oxymoronic “social science” — is that it is physically illiterate. That is to say, the majority of neoclassical economists have no significant education in the physical sciences. I came to economics late in my career, with a previous education in maths, physics, electrical, electronic, power, and petroleum engineering. When Hall and Klitgård wrote that neoclassical economic models were: “also enormously and deeply flawed, in a way and to a degree that is almost inconceivable and even an embarrassment to someone who has a background in natural sciences”,3 I knew what they meant.

That illiteracy creates all sorts of intellectual howlers. For example, the quantity of energy in the world is what neoclassical economists refer to as “an irrelevant, non-binding constraint”.4 Whenever a stock of energy runs low, they believe, human ingenuity kicks in and we create some more of it. So, for example, since the “renewable” industry appears to get some energy out of a wind turbine, then all it has to do is build millions of wind turbines and — voilà — we can replace our existing energy system with them.5

But that only seems plausible to someone who, lacking an awareness of thermodynamics, doesn’t even know that they don’t know about the thermodynamic concept of energy gradient — analogous to gravity gradient — that says that we can no more replace a gas fired power station by stringing together millions of wind turbines than we can replace a ski run by stringing together millions of ski lift queues.

And that matters, because the critical activities within an industrial economy all require the energy gradient equivalent of a black ski run to operate, and it would grind to a halt (much as we would) if fed with the energy gradient equivalent of a 100 mile long ski-lift queue.

So how does this relate to our pension? There are two pieces to the puzzle.

The first piece is how pensions work, and what’s gone wrong with them. In our state pension (I’ll say a little about private schemes at the end), we don’t “save up for our retirement”. When we started the system after the war, we needed to pay retirees immediately. Pensions have therefore always been met each month out of taxes paid by workers that month. At any given moment, there is only a week or two of funds in the government’s “State Pension account”.

While that arrangement solved an immediate problem, it created an enormous structural problem. When the pension scheme was started, life expectancy was about 68. Now it’s about 82. And birth rates started falling in the 1960s, meaning that more and more pensioners incomes are being funded by fewer and fewer workers. The result is that the average person born in 1956 now takes out around £290,000 more in retirement income than she paid over her working life.

The plan for addressing that problem was to grow the economy each year by an amount sufficient to generate enough tax receipts to keep funding the expanding retirement bill. And for most of the 20th century, while we benefitted from a global hydrocarbon and nuclear energy system that for decades doubled in size every 7 years, that plan worked.

“Net Zero” puts an end to that.

The second piece of our puzzle is how different levels within the economy work, and the relationship between energy and money.

The economy is a hierarchy, with three levels:

The level of energy and resources and things made from them — I dig up some coal, melt some iron ore, make a shovel, dig some ground, plant some seed, and eat.
The level of services — I rent my labour and my shovel out to you, dig your ground, and you give me a sheep in return.
The level of money and finance — instead of giving me a sheep, you give me a token, called “money”, and I give that token to someone else in exchange for something. That thing might have physical value. Like a sheep. Or not. Like a Netflix subscription.

The first thing to notice about this hierarchical system is where the things you need to stay alive with — food and energy — are located: the primary level.

In the secondary level, you use the energy you obtain from your food, and the shovel you made, to trade your labour. But what you eat, and the shovel you use, are products of the primary level.

The second thing to note is that not everything in an economy is of real value, and nothing in the tertiary level — the level of money and finance — is. The only physical use for the product of the tertiary level — money tokens — is that you can set fire to them and either stay warm with them or cook a sheep with them. Yes, I can sell you a Netflix subscription. And, yes, you can give me money tokens for it. But if a malfunction takes place in the economy’s primary level — say, if your government wilfully destroys your country’s energy system — well, let’s say there’s not much eating in a Netflix subscription.

Neoclassical economists suppose that you can create sheep and shovels by printing money. Which is true. If you have energy. (This, by the way, is their fatal “reversal” error, caused by their energy blindness). They also suppose that we can solve our energy deficit problem with “technology” — a strategy humans have devised for solving many problems with. But since technology requires a surplus of net energy, the one problem that technology can’t solve is a deficit of energy.6

The third thing to notice about this hierarchical economic system is what controls the quantity of money tokens — i.e. our pensions (amongst other things).

Money tokens “stand in for” goods and services. To do that, the quantity of money tokens has to remain proportional at all times to the quantity of goods and services they stand in for. That’s one reason why we don’t use leaves for money. When the quantity of energy and resources increases, the quantity of goods and services can increase. And when the quantity of goods and services increases, the quantity of money tokens can increase.

This operates in reverse. With no energy and resources, we can’t produce goods or services. So if, for whatever reason, the quantity of energy or resources decreases, then the quantity of goods and services will decrease. And if the quantity of goods and services decreases, then the quantity of money tokens has to decrease.

What happens if the quantity of goods and services decreases, and the quantity of money tokens stays the same? In that scenario, there are more money tokens chasing fewer sheep. So the number of money tokens per sheep increases. We call that “inflation”.

Inflation — the increase in the ratio between money tokens and the goods and services they stand in for — also happens if you hold energy steady and print more money tokens. The UK dumped half a trillion money tokens into its economy during COVID to pay people to sit at home and watch Netflix, instead of going to work to manufacture and sell ballbearings. We’re printing billions more now (over the long run) and giving them to anyone with the power to hold the country to ransom by withholding their labour. You can see the consequences reflected in the supermarket price of sheep.

There are two ways we get poor. By having fewer money tokens. And by having lots of worthless money tokens. When the energy system driving our economy contracts, the only choice available to us is the way in which we get poor.

And so, finally, we have all the pieces assembled to understand what will happen under the “Net Zero” energy policy that Edward Miliband sang so weirdly to us about.

Replacing high gradient energy sources — coal, oil, gas, and nuclear — with low gradient sources — sun and wind — vastly reduces the net amount of energy available to our economy. Reducing the net amount of energy available to the economy reduces the quantity of goods and services that can be produced by the economy. To prevent a catastrophic destruction of the value of money, any government imposing an energy policy that contracts our net energy supply must also impose a policy of controlled withdrawal of money from the economy.

What does “controlled withdrawal of money” look like? For the elderly: reduction in monthly pension; increase in retirement age — ultimately, back to a year or two before death; and withdrawal of state care and medical provision.

But, while necessary, this will not be sufficient to prevent the impoverishment created by the wilful, energy-led contraction of our economy. “Controlled withdrawal of money” will require the removal of services, and everything normally funded by debt that is paid for later by growth — all transport, health, education and energy infrastructure, for example. To see where “Net Zero” energy policy is taking us, all you have to do is research what life — and life expectancy — is like in those countries that already approximate it. Somalia, anyone?

And it gets worse. You will search in vain for Mr Miliband’s estimate of how much Net Zero is going to cost. He doesn’t know. But that doesn’t mean it has not been estimated. McKinsey’s estimate that achieving Net Zero by 2050 will cost $275 trillion globally.7 Adding in a highly conservative 60% cost overrun to account for the fact that most of the required technologies have not been invented increases that estimate to $440 trillion. That’s 15% or so of a country’s GDP, every year, for decades. In the case of the US, around 9 times what it currently spends on its military. Every year. All funded by debt that can never be repaid, because the growth required to repay it is destroyed by the activity funded by the debt.

The government isn’t planning to reduce the number of money tokens to preserve their relationship with the quantity of things of value in the economy. It’s planning to vastly and irreversibly increase them, destroying the value of everything.

And that’s why the State Pension (and much else besides) will crash as early as 2035.

And for those of us with private pensions: don’t imagine that we are immune. The funds in our schemes aren’t sufficient, with inflation, to fund our retirements. To do that, they will have to grow. And to grow, the companies that our pension schemes invest in will have to make more goods, and provide more services. See above.

Meanwhile, anyone with a private pension scheme would be well advised to check if it has “invested” in so-called “green” companies — companies that confect the illusion of profit by recycling printed money tokens into solar and wind rackets subsidised by taxes imposed on us and paid by us with the same printed money tokens that comprise an increasing fraction of our remuneration. Gordon Hughes (formerly of Edinburgh University Department of Economics) shows how UK wind energy projects — now comprising a significant element of the largest UK pension schemes — are sub-economic and destined for taxpayer bailout when the current Ponzi scheme of subsidies runs out.8

It doesn’t have to be this way. Net Zero will eventually collapse under the weight of its own monumental scientific and economic illiteracy. What’s at stake is how soon it collapses, and therefore how much of our economy is left after it does that can be salvaged.

Only 20% of the British electorate voted for this government and its suicidal “Net Zero” energy policy. Most of us understand, instinctively, that you can’t run an industrial economy on rainbows and zephyr breezes.

So let’s accelerate the collapse of Net Zero together. Talk to your friends. Talk on Twitter. Talk on Facebook. Talk on Instagram. Talk in your church. Talk in your school Parent Group. Talk to your MP. Send this email to anyone you think will benefit from it. However you do it, spread the message.

And the message is: “Just say ‘No’ to Net Zero”.

By the way, Mr Miliband: that’s what’s blowing in the wind.

Thanks for reading The State of Britain by Richard Lyon! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Marlow, Maxwell. ‘Up in Flames: The State Pension by 2035’. Adam Smith Institute, 2024. https://www.adamsmith.org/research/up-in-flames-the-state-pension-by-2035. ↩
For a thorough review, see Keen, Steve. Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences. Zed Books, 2001. ↩
Hall, Charles, and Klitgaard, Kent. ‘The Need For A New, Biophysical-Based Paradigm In Economics For The Second Half Of The Age Of Oil’ 1, no. 1 (2006): 19. ↩
“There is no such thing [as an exhaustible natural resource]. The total mineral in the earth is an irrelevant non-binding constraint”. Adelman, M. A. ‘Mineral Depletion, with Special Reference to Petroleum’. The Review of Economics and Statistics 72, no. 1 (February 1990): 1. https://doi.org/10.2307/2109733 ↩
In reality, you only appear to get some energy out of a wind turbine over its economic life if you ignore the vast amount of energy you’ve had to incur to manufacture it. See my previous essay, “On the edge of a cliff” (29 June 2024). ↩
The limitation on the amount of your time I can ask you for in these essays obliges me to treat a number of important claims rather briefly. This is the most important one that I have to simply state, but which you may want to take a moment to think about the consequences of. ↩
McKinsey (2022) A net-zero economy: The impact of decarbonization. McKinsey Sustainability. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/sustainability/our-insights/the-economic-transformation-what-would-change-in-the-net-zero-transition (Accessed: 25 January 2023). ↩
Hughes, Gordon. ‘Wind Power Economics – Rhetoric and Reality’. 11 2020. https://www.ref.org.uk/ref-blog/365-wind-power-economics-rhetoric-and-reality. ↩

Are hot days increasing?

Sat, 20 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

The climate catastrophe industry's core hypothesis and prediction is that an increasing concentration of atmospheric CO2 will produce a catastrophic increase in the earth's temperature.

If that was true, then we would expect to see the frequency of "very hot" days (i.e. days that exceed 95°F) to increase over time. In particular, we would expect to see the frequency rise after the Second World War, when the consumption of hydrocarbon fuels rose exponentially.

The U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) is a dataset of temperature and preciptitation managed by the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It contains daily readings starting around 1880 from 1,800 stations scattered all over the United States---an area of 3.8 million square miles.

We can use this data to evaluate the climate catastrophe hypothesis.

Getting the data

Unfortunately, it's not easy to get hold of it in raw form. That matters, because a huge amount of data tampering goes on in the climate catastrophe industry to create the illusion that temperatures are rising rapidly. We need the raw data.

As it happens, and possibly unintentionally, NOAA publishes the raw data on an obscure server they own in the form of a large number of text files. While it's not possible to analyse this data directly, it is possible to process it and convert it into a form that can be analysed. So I wrote a Rust utility do so. It's available here.

Plotting the data

With that, it's a straightforward task to plot the data. I've written a python script to do it. I remove all of the stations with less than 100 years of data. Then, for each year, I count the number of reports of temperatures that exceed 95°F, 100°F, and 105°F and divide those by the total number of reports in that year to produce a frequency. I then plot the frequency of hot days for each year. If the CO2 hypothesis is predictive, the frequency of hot days will increase. If it isn't, it won't.

Analysing the data

The frequency of hot days doesn't increase. The frequency of hot days reached a maximum in the 1930s---the "dust bowl" period---then returned in the 1940s to the pre-dust bowl frequency, despite the massive increase after the war in fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions.

Excusing the data

Science expands by explaining the world. Pseudoscience expands by explaining why it doesn't explain the world. As you might imagine, there is a huge amount of "dog ate my homework" excuse making in the climate catastrophe industry that attempts to accommodate this falsifying observation. They all revolve around some variation of the claim—based on synthetic temperature datasets generated by partial computer models—that the atmosphere is heating up everywere except in the most densely and extensively instrumented region of the planet.

On the edge of a cliff

Sat, 29 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

WHAT A TIME to be alive in Britain: incontinent immigration and attendant, triumphant cries of “Allahu Akbar!” in our polling stations; the cancerous spread of a sinister sex-based cult in our schools; the corruption of our society by a ruthlessly authoritarian ideology of uniformity, exclusion, and inequality masquerading as “diversity, inclusion, and equality”; ruinously expensive food and energy; collapsing and now frequently non-existent public services and customer care; confiscation of the savings of the hard working for disbursement to the feckless; and everywhere, the signs of a once-thriving nation visibly falling apart.

There’s an election next week. Under normal circumstances, we’d have a chance to put a stop to all of this rot. But these aren’t normal circumstances. On any of these matters, most of us can’t detect any meaningful difference between the main parties. Instead, we’ve a grim choice between “horrifying” and “horrifying”.

And the policy on which there is perhaps the least difference is the one that is the most horrifying. It’s the one that’s going to cause the most damage to us, to our children, and to our children’s children. It’s the determination to shut down, in-flight, the jet engines propelling the 747 of our economy, and to crash-land us in the world of 18th Century energy levels — when cold, poverty, disease, and squalid living conditions produced a life expectancy of around 35.

It’s the energy policy of “Net Zero”.

In this newsletter, I want to show you exactly where this calamitous attempt to replace with sun beams and occasional breezes the abundant, dense, inexpensive energy source with which everything you know has been built will take us. As with many of these matters, it requires a little thought, but not more than high school maths, to understand what’s going on. I think you’ll find it worth the effort.

Subscribe now

The problem is simply stated: it takes energy to get energy. For every hundred units of energy our civilisation produces, some units must be set aside to get the next hundred units. It’s the energy that’s needed to mine, refine, build, operate, maintain, and replace the energy system itself. We live off — literally, we eat, keep warm with, pump clean water with, pump away sewage with, and make medicines with — whatever is left over after we’ve set aside that energy.

Why have you probably never thought about it? Because, with the hydrocarbon and nuclear energy systems that have powered us since the 19th Century, energy is so dense that you haven’t had to. For most of that time, it’s cost about 1 unit of energy to obtain the next 100 units of it. We built and maintained the global energy system and its conjoined twin, the global industrial manufacturing system (more about that in a moment), with that 1 unit. We built the rest of the modern world with the 99 units of energy “profit”.1

All of that changes with unreliable “renewable” energy systems — the catastrophically expensive Heath Robinson collection of diffuse energy scavenging devices proposed by both parties under the so-called “Net Zero” energy policy to relieve us of the risk of a 0.0 degC increase in earth’s temperature in 100 years’ time.2

Wind and solar energy is so diffuse that you have to set aside a much larger fraction of its output to maintain the system. How much more, and with what consequence? Much more and, as we’ll see, with ruinous consequences. But first, a little bit of maths to help you get your eye in on this:

Look at the top graph. It’s just the maths of what happens to our share of energy as we set aside an increasing amount of it for the energy system’s own replacement. The X-axis is the amount of energy returned for a unit of energy spent getting it. Remember I said we used to get 100 units back? Well now it’s around 30 (on average). The Y-axis is the split between us and our energy system. Red is what has to go back to keep the energy system going. The green is what we get to keep for food, warmth, clean water, and medicines.

As you travel right on the graph, you are replacing the fuel source with successively inferior ones. Which is to say, blowing up your cheap, reliable coal fired power stations and replacing them with expensive, unreliable windmills made in China with energy obtained from (…checks notes…) coal fired power stations.

At a return of 30 units, it doesn’t make much difference. In fact, down to a return of around 8 units, not much changes. But below around 8 units, each additional unit of degradation causes an exponentially decreasing amount of energy left over for us. An energy cliff, if you like. To think about it another way. Imagine paying £1 in £30 of your income for food. Now £1 in £8. Now £1 in £7, £6, £5, £4, £3, £2, … £1.

We can’t just let our energy system contract like that. At the most basic level (i.e. ecological), the number of frogs in a pond is proportional to the amount of energy in the pond. Increase the amount of energy, and the population of frogs goes up. Decrease it, and the population goes down.

Today, around 7 billion humans are only here because we inject continuously a vast amount of energy — from oil, gas, coal, and nuclear — into our global frog pond. “Net Zero” is, above everything else, a program entailing the mass die-off of our species. Compassionately, of course. And with an eye fixed sternly on the need to inhibit as much as possible our recovery from the recent ice age.

So. If destroying our reliable, affordable energy system and replacing it with an unreliable, unaffordable one leaves us with a smaller fraction of the energy pie, and we need the original amount of energy to keep everyone (including ourselves) alive — what must we do?

The answer, of course, is that we must build a larger energy system. How much larger? Well, for example, if our net energy halves, and we need the same amount of energy, then we need two energy systems. That’s the bottom of the two graphs in figure 1. If the UK’s energy system gets down to energy returns below 2, we’ll need to build 4 or 5 UK’s worth of energy systems. Just to get back to where we were with a hydrocarbon and nuclear system.

That will collapse our financial system.

And the million (well, multi-trillion)3 dollar question: what can we expect from a “Net Zero” system?

There’s no point in asking your politician, or any of the Civil Servants advising her. They don’t even realise that this problem exists.

When you examine the academic literature produced by well paid “renewables” enthusiasts that attempts to calculate energy returns, you’ll notice that they work very hard to try and show that wind and solar systems produce energy returns higher than 8. Now you understand why. They don’t, and not by a long way. So how do they claim they do? Easily — by excluding vast quantities of the energy required in the manufacturing process.

At the start of the essay, we noted that one of the systems we got for the one unit we reserved from our hundred units of energy was the global industrial manufacturing system. That system is globally extensive, and so fantastically energy intensive that it can only run on hydrocarbon and nuclear. The manufacture, operation, and continuous replacement of “renewable” energy gadgets requires its enormously sophisticated mining, transportation, supply chain and manufacturing subsystems.

That rivet in the side of the container ship carrying the lime for the cement in the wall of the factory refining the oxygen for the smelter producing the steel for the computer on which the windmill’s gearbox was designed? That was made with energy obtained from hydrocarbon. In a factory built 50 years ago with energy obtained from hydrocarbon. That will have to be rebuilt, with energy obtained from hydrocarbon.

The food in the policeman’s lunch, without whom the rule of law collapses and you can’t build a factory or write a contract? 50% of all of the food in the world is produced with industrially manufactured fertiliser — made from hydrocarbon.

They ignore all of that. Their academic papers start with the invisible sentence: “Assume my wind turbine was delivered by a stork and found under a gooseberry bush: the energy returned for every unit supplied is eight”. The more sophisticated ones start: “Assume my global industrial manufacturing system was delivered by a stork and found under a gooseberry bush”, and try and calculate the energy in the components of the turbine.4 And when you press them, they’ll slice and dice it all up in the hope that you don’t notice that, since the global industrial manufacturing system emerged rather than was designed by us, we’ve no idea how it works as a whole, or what energy flows where, or where all of its millions of single points of failure are. And after all their hand waving and misdirection, “renewables” fatal and insurmountable flaw has not changed: the manufacturing system required to produce them is vast, it’s largely uncharted, and critical sections of it can’t be made to run on electricity.

And when you account for the energy required continuously to maintain and replace the global industrial manufacturing system that renewable gadgets are the product of — that a fully “renewable” energy system would have to power — an energy system built around these contraptions doesn’t even appear on our graph. It lies somewhere off to the right, in the region of physically impossible energy systems that require as much or more energy to sustain than they produce. A bit like a power extension cord plugged back into itself.

And where does that leave us, the victims of this policy disaster? Standing on the edge of the net-energy cliff. A cliff that every single vote for one of the mainstream parties will help push us over.

Every successful energy transition in human history has been up that net-energy curve, to energy sources of higher returns. History is littered with dozens of civilisations that fell down the net-energy curve — and collapsed. Rome is a prominent example.5 Almost invariably, their collapse was the result of them exhausting their energy supply. Our country is unusual in that the bovine Islington metropolitan elite and their regional counterparts are inflicting it on us deliberately so that they can enjoy a brief moment of scientifically illiterate virtue signalling.

Happy voting.

Now they're criminalising parents

Tue, 07 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

IN TRANSGENDER PSEUDOSCIENCE, a child’s understanding of himself and the world is dynamic and subject to change—with the exception of his perception of his gender which, it is claimed, is innate. A child is encouraged to believe that his sex is assigned, rather than determined, and that he can change it. At the transubstantive moment of declaration, the male literally becomes female. From that moment forward, he must be given access to spaces reserved for reasons of safety and dignity for females, including toilets, changing rooms, and prisons.

Shortly, if the Scottish Parliament has its way,1 any parent, teacher, health care worker, or pastoral care worker in Scotland who teaches basic biological science to a child with the aim of helping them navigate the insurmountable contradictions that exist between scientific fact and transgender ideology can be sent to prison for up to seven years.

So it’s reasonable to ask—how is such coercively reformative policy even being considered?

One clue is that advocates of such coercively reformative approaches to social change enjoy an especially powerful position in Scottish politics. The imposition by force of new standards and reforms, often at the expense of individual freedoms or traditional values, finds natural resonance with Scotland’s socialist instinct. For a Regional Administration desperate to confect regional difference, to foment identity grievance, and to divert attention away from its legislative incompetence, such policies—repackaged as “socially progressive”—are therefore a political gold mine.

So “socially progressive” lobbying in Scotland is a growth industry. In the period 2021-2024, Scottish taxpayers forked out over £24 million to fund it2 —an astonishing sum, given the catastrophic cuts to services required by a £19 billion deficit in Scotland’s mismanaged public finances. And prominent in the list of recipients of this firehose of money are institutions that advance agendas referred collectively to as “LGBT”.3

There’s no reason to doubt that the majority of people employed in the LGBT industry are upright citizens who mean well. But given the influence that this industry has on public policy, we should not overlook its troubled history in Scotland—or the long shadow its troubled history casts today.

For example. One of its members, Ian Dunn, was a prominent Scottish gay rights campaigner and co-founder of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE). PIE promoted acceptance of adults having sex with children, and campaigned from 1974 to 1984 for the legalisation of sex between adults and children.4 The Ian Dunn Memorial Award for Activism was established after his death in 1998. One notable recipient of the award is Patrick Harvie, an LGBT activist and Scottish Green Party MSP. Another is Tim Hopkins, an LGBT activist and Director of the charity Equality Network, which receives £1,509,852 of Scottish taxpayer money to advance its “LGBTI” agenda.5

Another member, James Rennie, was a prominent Scottish gay rights campaigner, and Chief Executive of the charity LGBT Youth Scotland. In 2009, he was jailed for raping a baby, and for leading one of Scotland’s largest paedophile rings.6 LBGT Youth Scotland receives £863,671 of Scottish taxpayer money to advance its “LGBTQ+” agenda.

Given the scale of LGBT industry funding, and the extent to which Scottish institutions have been infiltrated by its activists, it is not surprising that those institutions are changing. One institution changing particularly rapidly is Scotland’s education system.

A sense of the profound change taking place in schools can be gained from reading the Regional Administration’s “Supporting Transgender Pupils in Schools: Guidance for Scottish Schools”7. This was written for the administration by Stonewall, a charity that advances the LGBTQ+ agenda, and which receives £317,002 of taxpayer money. Here’s a flavour (my emphasis):

There is no law in Scotland which states that only people assigned male at birth can use men’s toilets and changing rooms, or that only people assigned female [at birth] can use women’s toilets and changing rooms. This is instead done by social convention. (p.26)

As a matter of scientific fact, the sex of a human is observed, not assigned, at birth. And the social convention is established on the fact that women are disproportionately the victims of predatory sexual behaviour perpetrated by men, that the risk from such predatory behaviour increases in spaces where women are required to be partially or fully undressed (such as toilets and changing rooms), for which dedicated spaces are a simple and effective remedy.

The Jesuit aphorism “Give me the boy, and I'll show you the man” expressed the power of conversion early in the life of a child to shape their character as an adult. By rejecting science, misleading schoolchildren with the pseudoscientific claim that their sex is arbitrary, and undermining long standing and well-founded social conventions for the safe regulation of relationships between men and women, schools in Scotland are engaging in an insidious form of conversion practice.8

And, as it turns out, the LGBT industry has a lot to say about conversion practices.

In July 2020, the industry submitted petition “PE1817L: End Conversion Therapy”, calling on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to ban the provision or promotion of so-called “LGBT+ conversion therapy” in Scotland*.*9 The petition gained fewer than 6,000 signatures. But as evidence of the power of the LGBT lobby, it was debated by Parliament and passed to the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee—the committee, composed largely of members of Ian Dunn Memorial Award recipient Patrick Harvies’ Green Party, that disbursed £24 million on such matters.

In November 2021, the Scottish Parliament, without any consultation with the public, announced that it had committed to “ending conversion practices as comprehensively as possible”, and was appointing an “expert group” i.e. activists from the LGBT industry, to devise the necessary legislation.10

In October 2022, the activist group published its demands.11 They are nothing if not ambitious. LGBT ideology conversion practices, they claim, are not unlawful. But any effort to protect a child from LGBT ideology conversion practices (this effort confusingly redefined—presumably deliberately—as ‘conversion practice’) should be a criminal act. The definition of ‘conversion practice’ i.e. efforts to protect a child from LGBT conversion ideology—should be as wide as possible, extending to anywhere in the world. Accusation of criminality should extend to associates of the accused. Lack of intention to harm should not be admissible as defence. Procurement of consent from the child should not be admissable as defence. Conviction should attract a prison sentence of up to seven years. Children should be separated from their parents. Health and pastoral care workers should be stripped of their livelihoods. Churches should be stripped of their charitable status. LGBT conversion ideology activists should be given wide reaching powers to discover and criminalise anyone who opposes their ideology.

In an especially Orwellian touch, such coercively reformative legislation does not, in the opinion of LGBT activists, lead to the unlawful restriction of the freedom of speech, religion and belief of parents, health care workers, and pastoral care workers because “a prohibition of the practice is justified and necessary” (ibid. p3).

LGBT activists are well aware of the risks inherent in their bold attempt to legally privilege LGBT conversion practices by criminalising opposition to them, and take active measures to mitigate those risks. In December 2022, the Scottish Parliament’s Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee met to receive the LGBT activist’s demands.12 LGBT activist and Scottish Green Party MSP Maggie Chapman began by confusing her role as an LGBT activist with her role as a Member of the Scottish Parliament sworn to represent all of her constituents. After referring to “our report”—by which she meant, “their report”—she crudely redefined LGBT conversion practices as “affirmative care”, and asked her fellow LGBT activists: “How do we ensure ‘affirmative care’ is still OK? Because we all know it’s important”. LGBT conversion practice is OK, we learned, because—unlike a loving parent’s concern for their child’s wellbeing and happiness—it “validates and supports the identity and lived experience expressed and stated by an individual”.

The hearing makes startling listening.

These people really—really—want unfettered access to your children.

At its core, trans ideology—like many ideologies—is a deception originating in a particle of truth. Is there prejudice in Scottish society towards gay people, or women, or black people, or people who wish to act as members of the opposite sex? Of course. And towards white people, and to boys, and to the ginger haired, and to almost any other group you can define distinguishing attributes for. It’s inherent in human societies.

But is Scottish society as a whole, to use their term, “transphobic”? Outside of the £28-million-a-year LGBT industry of activists that depend for their livelihood on the perception that the claim is true, there is no evidence to support it.

On the contrary. Most people—including me—believe that everyone should be able to live without fear, and to pursue happiness in whatever form that takes—on the condition that it does not interfere with the ability of another to do the same.

So if a man invites me to participate in the fiction that he is a woman then, provided that I am not compelled to do so i.e. to deny scientific truth, and provided that doing so harms neither him nor someone else, I’ll do so. I’ll further stipulate that most people will.

What I cannot do, in participating in that fiction, is legitimise something that would result in harm to others.

Allowing men, by pretending that they are women, to enter spaces where women are vulnerable, harms women. Confusing children about biological science at a time when they are at their most vulnerable, and destroying the barriers we have in place between them and those who would exploit their confusion to violate them, harms children.

We cannot let it stand.

We’ve been here before, and recently. Last year, objections to the Regional Assembly’s attempt—instigated by the LGBT ideology activist community—to place convicted male rapists in women’s prisons were rejected with the naive claim that criminally minded men would not take advantage of misguided legal protections and lowered barriers to women to gain access to them. Within days, they were proven wrong.13

The LGBT ideology activist community that has lobbied for sex between adults and children, and produced a paedophile rapist and group ringleader, now claims that paedophiles will not take advantage of legal privileges and lowered barriers to children to gain access to them.

Do we have to wait for them, through some horrific tragedy, to be proven wrong before overturning these new demands?

If you think we shouldn’t, you might care to write to your MSP or, outwith Scotland, to your MP, to share your concern. The Free Speech Union provides a template that makes doing so as easy as possible. Time is short. Do please use it.

Richard Lyon
Edinburgh, May 2024

Subscribe now

Scottish Government. ‘Ending Conversion Practices’. 2024. 9 January 2024. http://www.gov.scot/news/ending-conversion-practices-1/. ↩
Scottish Government. ‘Equality and Human Rights Fund: Projects Funded’. n.d. Accessed 12 January 2024. http://www.gov.scot/publications/equality-and-human-rights-fund-projects-funded/. ↩
…or “LGBTQ+”, “LGBTI”, “LGBTQIA+”, “LGBTQQIAAP”, etc. For a helpful guide to the rapidly expanding list of of potential components, see e.g. ‘List of LGBTQ+ Terms’. 2020. Stonewall. 28 May 2020. https://www.stonewall.org.uk/list-lgbtq-terms. ↩
‘Paedophile Information Exchange’. 2023. In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Paedophile_Information_Exchange&oldid=1184580963. ↩
No allegation of misconduct by either Mr Harvie or Mr Hopkins is intended or implied. ↩
Carrell, Severin. 2009. ‘Scottish Paedophile Ring Found Guilty of More than 50 Charges’. The Guardian, 7 May 2009, sec. UK news. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/may/07/scottish-paedophile-ring-guilty-child-abuse. ↩
‘Supporting Transgender Young People in Schools: Guidance for Scottish Schools’. 2021. Scottish Government. http://www.gov.scot/publications/supporting-transgender-young-people-schools-guidance-scottish-schools/. ↩
Trans ideology claims an absence of any meaningful relationship between sex and gender, and rejects cultural, traditional, and religious perspectives that conflict with their preferred interpretation of it. ↩
‘PE1817 End Conversion Therapy’. 2020. 16 July 2020. https://www.parliament.scot/get-involved/petitions/view-petitions/pe1817-end-conversion-therapy. ↩
‘Ending Conversion Practices’. 2021. 18 November 2021. http://www.gov.scot/news/ending-conversion-practices-1/. ↩
Behrens, Paul. 2022. ‘Expert Advisory Group on Ending Conversion Practices: Report and Recommendations’. http://www.gov.scot/publications/expert-advisory-group-ending-conversion-practices-report-recommendations/. ↩
Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee. 2022. Scottish Parliament: Scottish Parliament TV. http://www.scottishparliament.tv/meeting/equalities-human-rights-and-civil-justice-committee-december-13-2022. ↩
‘Nicola Sturgeon: Rapist Isla Bryson “almost Certainly” Faking Trans Status - BBC News’. n.d. Accessed 12 January 2024. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-64501436. ↩

Upcoming series: Understanding the energy crisis

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

YOU—MY READER—are one of a self-selecting group of free thinking spirits who are just as able as I am, if not more, to see through the farrago of nonsense on stilts with which malevolent forces are attempting to rewire the foundations of our living arrangements, towards outcomes that we are now beginning dimly to understand.

You therefore don’t require my assistance to notice that the wheels are flying off the clown cars of their many narratives.

Thanks for reading The State of Britain by Richard Lyon! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

On “Covid”, for example, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to conceal the terrifying rise in unexplained deaths in those countries (only) that coercively injected their citizens to the eyeballs with untested, experimental gene therapies designed to disregulate their immune systems in unknown ways in response to a respiratory infection that, for the vast majority of us, produced symptoms no worse than moderate to bad flu.

Similarly with their eccentric hypothesis that the effect of our energy system on a trace gas comprising 0.04% of our atmosphere is producing some sort of climate catastophe. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to reconcile it with its observable lack of any explanatory or predictive power, and with the growing number of eminent Nobel Laureate scientists patiently explaining a mountain of counterfactual scientific and observational evidence.

Finally, the outrage of school “teachers” conspiring to conceal chaps dressed as sex workers indoctrinatating our school children into a state of anxiety about the contents of their own underpants, and peddling experimental medical procedures to render that anxiety surgically and hormonally permanent is rapidly penetrating the awareness of a once too-trusting populace.

These and more are receiving very welcome attention, even in mainstream media. You will notice that the “blob” (whatever it is) is responding to that attention with increasingly panicked and undisguised attempts to suppress our discussion of its failing narratives. Or what it calls “hatred” and “misinformation”.

—

But one crisis that I think is not receiving the attention it needs is, ironically, the one that really is going to kill many of us before our time if we don’t take very great care to prevent it—the unfolding energy crisis, finding expression in various flavours of “Net Zero” ideology.

If you’ve arrived at my newsletter via my writings on Covid, climate, or authoritarianism, you may not know that my professional skills lie in energy where, for many years, I have been a senior operations manager and energy economist in the international upstream oil and gas industry.

You might suppose from this that I am therefore some sort of shill for entrenched oil and gas interests. On the contrary, it is my understanding of the dynamics and trajectory of our oil and gas system—the system that is responsible for keeping us from dying today from some combination of cold, hunger, disease, and poverty—that led me to build Edinburgh’s first “Passive House”—a house which maintains a minimum internal temperature of 18 degrees year round at the 60th parallel in Scotland with no heating system and around 20% of the energy of a house built to current code.

Those dynamics and that trajectory are increasingly dominated by a long predicted malfunction in the global oil system that began to manifest around 2006, produced the (still diverging) 2008 Great Financial Crash, and today is the cause of the United States (for example) having to print $1 trillion dollars of hallucinated debt every hundred days to maintain the illusion that its financial system is solvent.

If that predicament was our only one, avoiding the contingent crash of our economic and financial system would be difficult enough. But to it, with a hubris exceeding even Ovid’s Icarus, we add another: the deliberate contraction of our energy system to satisfy conclusions drawn from pseudo-scientific notions about our climate so divorced from physical reality that they fail even to meet the minimum criteria against which correctness can be determined i.e. that are “not even wrong”.

—

There are many books on energy. A few are useful. But I’ve yet to find one that is short enough to read in a sitting, that doesn’t treat you like a dummy or assumes you have a calculus degree, and that clearly distinguishes the important from the very important. So I’m going to write it. And, in the course of writing it, I’m going to publish an essay on here periodically summarising its main points.

—

Energy isn’t particularly difficult to understand. At its most basic, it’s simple ecology. Increase the amount of energy in a frog pond; frog population increases. Reduce the amount of energy in a frog pond; frog population decreases.

“Net Zero” is the policy of deliberately decreasing the supply of energy in our global frog pond. So you can already predict one of its outcomes. Its advocates rather suppose that they aren’t one of the surplus frogs. They tend to be a little evasive on the subject of your fate under their scheme.

But although relatively straighforward, energy doesn’t lend itself well to guesswork. That’s why so many politicians have been led so far astray by so many charlatans.

Over the course of the essays, we’ll see that there is far more energy in an olympic sized swimming pool than there is in an egg pan of boiling water. After four minutes, useful chemical reactions have taken place in the egg pan. After a whole day in the swimming pool, you’ve still got a cold, raw egg. This is “thermodynamics”. Armed with a little thermodynamics, we’ll understand why claiming that “we’ll keep building wind turbines until we can shut down oil”—which sounds plausible enough—is indistinguishable, physically speaking, from the claim that “we’ll increase the size of our swimming pool until our egg boils.”

We’ll see how throwing away half of the output of an uneconomic wind farm in hydrogen conversion energy loss makes the wind farm twice as uneconomic. (Of all of my degrees, economics was by far the easiest).

We’ll learn that neoclassical economic resource theory—the flavour that drives capitalism, and is the basis of its claim that we can substitute millions of years of solar energy stored in oil and gas with sunbeams and summer breezes in real time—was devised by social “scientists” with no formal training in physical science (or common sense).

We’ll ask ourselves some hard questions: if every energy transition to date has powered itself by using a surplus of the prevailing energy source to move to an even higher density one, what evidence is there that we can power an energy transition moving from a deficit of the prevailing energy source to a lower density one? And if “technology” is the application of a surplus of energy to solve problems, how can it solve the problem of an energy deficit?

The least intuitive property of energy for most is also its most important: that money is energy. Specifically, that all debt is an advance on some future supply of energy. The corollary of this is another consequence of Net Zero: under it, your pension (and more) ceases to exist. After reading my essays, you’ll understand why printing money to fund systems that contract our energy supply is financial suicide (which is to say, civilisational suicide).

With this knowledge, you’ll be able to interrogate wind turbine multi-millionaires about their eccentic schemes to power our hospital intensive care units, food production, water distribution, sewage disposal, and nuclear waste cooling systems on a source of energy that, for a number of weeks each year, and over regionally extensive areas, produces absolutely nothing.

Then we’ll look at solutions. A short and difficult chapter. But an important one.

I hope this will be of interest to you. I hope that we will engage through the comments in lively debate—these will help me gauge the material and undoubtedly will improve the book. And I hope that you will share your knowledge with as many people as possible so that we can, together, put an end to the staggeringly dangerous ideology that is “Net Zero” and get on with the difficult job of solving our energy crisis.

See you soon.

—
New York

Thanks for reading The State of Britain by Richard Lyon! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Now we must resist the Scottish Nationalists' assault on political freedom

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

ON 1ST APRIL 2024—April Fool’s Day—Scotland’s regional administration entered the next phase of its wholesale assault on the political freedom of Scotland’s citizens.

For several years, it has been advancing an ideological program characterised by a deeply troubling obsession with sexualising children, the confection and amplification of social conflict rooted in fictionalised sexual, racial, and religious grievances, and a pre-scientific understanding of mammalian biology.

Given the strength of public opposition to the repellent program of policies generated from this febrile mix, the administration is now directing considerable effort toward the preparation of measures for suppressing popular dissent.

One set of suppressive legislation criminalises opposition by parents, health workers, and pastoral care workers to its ideology of indoctrinating and sexualising school children, and coercing school children without parents’ knowledge into dangerous and irreversible experimental procedures designed to harm their sexual development. Under proposals submitted by the extremist interest group to which the regional authority has outsourced its legislative responsibility, penalties include taking children into state custody, custodial sentences of up to seven years, stripping professionals of their livelihoods, and stripping charitable institutions of their tax privileges.1

Another set strips citizens accused of serious crimes—possibly falsely—of their ancient right to trial by a jury of their peers, subjecting them instead to political trial behind closed doors before a judge selected by the administration and operating to ideologically motivated conviction quotas.2

However, the measures currently passing from preparation into imposition that are the subject of this essay are contained in the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 20213 which came into force on April 1st 2024 (“The Act”, below).

Existing legislation reasonably and adequately protects from prejudice people with characteristics over which they have no control, such as race, and disability. The Act extends and weaponises this legislation to create an instrument through which any legitimate criticism of the administration’s policies and the contested and troubling liberal-progressive ideology that underpins them can be criminalised.

It does so in large part by arbitrarily redefining criticism as “hatred”, thereby bringing mere criticism within the scope of laws intended to combat actual hatred. Then it extends the scope of the law from the public domain into the private domain, criminalising thought and speech expressed in the privacy of a citizen’s own home.

Policing thought and opinion expressed in private is a problem inherent in Fascism, which Fascist states have solved through the mechanism of “citizen surveillance”. The Act establishes a citizen surveillance and reporting network throughout Scotland to encourage and enable suitably motivated citizens to report prohibited speech to the Police. Police Scotland—forced through funding cuts to abandon the detection and investigation of entire categories of actual crime—is nevertheless authorised and instructed to investigate every such report of imaginary crime.4

The police record of anyone so investigated will be amended through a novel instrument callled the “non-hate crime”. Police records are searchable by potential employers, and this provision confers on malicious actors the power to significantly degrade the ability of a Scottish citizen to participate in society even when they fail to secure a conviction for criticism.

Subscribe now

By definition and design, anyone criticising this Law and the ideology it is designed to shield from criticism is exposed to the risk of malicious prosecution for “hatred”. Nevertheless, consider the following arguments, each of which is a legitimate criticism of state ideology from a different perspective:

[1]

Mammalian biology is well understood and non-negotiable. Mammals are sexually dimorphic at the genetic level. A mammal’s sex is determined at the moment of conception, it cannot be altered, and is never observed spontaneously to change. It is expressed in every cell in a mammal’s body and, by inspecting any cell in its body, the sex of a mammal can be determined with a probability approaching 100%.5

Humans are mammals. Since a human’s sex cannot be changed, the administration’s claim that the sex of a human is arbitrary and changeable at will is scientifically meaningless. Therefore, all of its policies that derive from that claim—which is to say, the greater part of its so-called “transgender” ideology—are also meaningless, and should be set aside.6

[2]

The regional administration argues that “criticism” is somehow indistinguishable from “hatred”. It does not argue—because it cannot—that “hatred” is indistinguishable from physical violence, or that the experience of “hatred” is somehow categorically worse than the experience of physical violence. Therefore, where elimination of both cannot be achieved, a policy that prioritised prevention of “hatred” over prevention of physical violence would be absurd.

Women are disproportionately at risk of physical violence from men, and that risk is greatest in spaces in which women are unobserved or in an intimate state. To mitigate this risk, society establishes spaces for women from which men are excluded. Since any physical violence experienced by a woman is self-evidently worse than any “hatred” experienced by a man, the claim that a man so excluded from such a space experiences “hatred”—even if it was meaningful—is irrelevant to the determination of the policy of women-only spaces. And any policy based on that claim is therefore absurd and should be set aside.

[3]

A man enjoying the protection of the Act under one of its fictional sex categories might invite another person to enter into the fiction that he is, in fact, a woman. However, at least one of the religions also protected from criticism by the Act takes a bracingly robust view about such an invitation, for example devoting a considerable amount of theological scholarship—now protected from criticism—to the issue of how best to execute homosexuals.

Contained within the Act, therefore, is the recursive absurdity of plaintiff A, protected under the Act from plaintiff B’s claim that they are “an abomination”, accusing plaintiff B of hatred while plaintiff B, also protected under the act from plaintiff A’s claim that he is a member of an intolerant medieval cult, accuses plaintiff A of hatred, forcing the police to abandon investigation of theft and vandalism to a fruitless investigation of both grievances.

—

These are legitimate and self-evident criticisms of the manifest absurdities and internal contradictions contained in the regional administration’s ill-conceived ideology and related law. There are many others. None of them express “hatred” in any sense that prevailed until recently. Yet it is now possible in Scotland to be prosecuted for these criticisms of the administration’s ideology under the claim that they are.

The rapid transformation of Germany’s Weimar Republic into the the horror of the Nazi regime is a mystery. Until, that is, you understand the mechanism though which Fascism arises and takes hold.7 While the final form that a Fascist states takes varies significantly, they all share one common feature: at an early stage, and as the enabler for subsequent acquisition and consolidation of power, they all actively destroy the bonds of trust that exist between citizens.

It’s these bonds that allow us to sit together at our dinner tables and say: “I don’t agree with this policy. What do you think?”, “Have you heard what they are doing to the [insert group]?”, and “This is repellant. We should organise ourselves to resist these people before it is too late”.

The Act significantly strengthens and emboldens extremist activists who do not wish us or our children well. It erodes our confidence in the rule of law, and in the competence and impartiality of the police. Above all else, it erodes the trust between us upon which the proper functioning of our society, and our immunity from the techniques of fascist manipulation, depends.

You might be tempted to dismiss all of this as “the looney left”, assume that the pendulum of common sense will eventually swing back, and look the other way. I’d like respectfully to suggest that this would be a mistake.

Are the Scottish National Party crypto-fascists? I don’t know, but I doubt it.8 It is true that the hatred of Britain that some SNP members shared with Nazi Germany, and their admiration of its authoritarian methods, led to their regrettable collaboration with it. It’s also true that some of its supporters today would vote for a horse if doing so delivered their political goal. In deciding whether something is cock-up or conspiracy, though, I’m influenced by Napoleon, who claimed that he wasn’t concerned about conspiracy amongst his generals as they were much too incompetent to carry it out. And SNP’s incompetence is breath taking.

But I think that’s the wrong question. Here in Britain, at a terrifying rate, we are installing the mechanisms by which a Fascist entity could seize power in the future. Why would we allow that?

I believe that we should not allow it. How? By saying, collectively: “We withhold our consent to your attempt to remove our freedom”. By taking every opportunity to preserve and strengthen the social bonds between us, and by using that strength daily to expose and ridicule their grotesque ideology. And by never being afraid to speak out publicly—and privately—against Fascism’s precursors.

—
Edinburgh

Behrens, Paul. 2022. ‘Expert Advisory Group on Ending Conversion Practices: Report and Recommendations’. http://www.gov.scot/publications/expert-advisory-group-ending-conversion-practices-report-recommendations/. ↩
Scottish Legal News. ‘Law Society Hits out at Juryless Trials’, 11 September 2023. https://www.scottishlegal.com/articles/law-society-hits-out-at-juryless-trials. ↩
‘Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021’. Text. Statute Law Database. Accessed 30 March 2024. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2021/14/contents. The extent of the over-reach contained in the Act is so unprecedented that it has taken 3 years for Police Scotland to work out how to enforce it. ↩
Sanderson, Daniel. ‘Police Scotland Admits Investigation Policy Risks Helping Criminals’. The Telegraph, 24 March 2024. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/24/police-scotland-aberdeen-crime-investigation-policy/. ↩
Simmons, Michael J., and D. Peter Snustad. 2006. Principles of Genetics. John Wiley & Sons. ↩
I’ve yet to meet a proponent of the notion that I can be free to claim that I know what it feels like to be a woman even though I am physically not one and therefore to declare that I am one who can explain why I am not therefore also free to declare that I am black, or geriatric, or fat, or blue eyed, even though I’m not physically any of those things either. ↩
For excellent and very relevant surveys, see for example: Arendt, H. 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. or Hoffer, E. 1951. The True Believer. ↩
I think that some of the extremist groups that have infiltrated the administration and now direct policy formulation from within it might find Fascism’s authoritarianism highly attractive. ↩

CO2 and the Earth's orbit

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

If you add sine waves together of different frequencies, you get a complicated, periodically varying wave. And you can do this in reverse. Any periodically changing waveform can be "reverse engineered" into a set of sine waves that comprise the frequencies that make it up. It's called the Fourier transform---a mathematical technique that was developed in 1807.

As it happens, the earth's temperature, atmospheric CO2 concentration, sea level, and levels of dust have changed periodically over the last 800,000 years. We know this from ice cores that were obtained by the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) project.

I wrote a simple python script to plot the temperature computed from these cores (Figure 1). The 8 ice ages that have ocurred every 100,000 years in the past 800,000 years are clearly visible.

The script also computes the Fourier transform of the temperature, shown in red in Figure 1. Four frequencies emerge. What are these?

The Milankovitch Cycle

Briefly. The Earth's orbit around the sun is not a perfect circle. Over a period of about 100,000 years, it varies from a circle to an ellipse. That variation sets up a secondary effect with a period of about 75,000 years. Nor is the axis that the earth spins around perpendicular to the plane of the orbit. It tilts, and the angle of the tilt varies over a period of about 41,000 years. And as well as tilting, it rotates over a period of about 26,000 years. The whole thing is called the Milankovitch cycle.

As the Earth's axis wobbles, the amount of sunlight we receive, and therefore the amount of heating we experience, varies. As a result, the Earth's temperature varies over a range of about 8 degrees.

Sea level

Not surprisingly, with the temperature going up and down like a yo-yo, so too does sea level. A lot. It varies over a range of about 100m. And when you run Fourier analysis on that, the same Milankovitch frequencies appear (Figure 2.)

CO2

This is where it gets really interesting. CO2 is a temperature dependent byproduct of various chemical processes taking place within the Earth's biochemical and geological processes. When temperature goes up, CO2 goes up. And when temperture goes down, CO2 goes down. And when you run Fourier analysis on that, the same Milankovitch frequencies appear (Figure 3.)

Dust

The frightening one is dust. We are emerging from a near-extinction level CO2 famine. Optimal CO2 levels for growth are up around 1000 ppm---we are still only at around 430 ppm. Plunging CO2 levels have resulted in mass desertification of the planet, creating vast quantities of dust that have settled at the poles. And when you run Fourier analysis on that, the same Milankovitch frequencies appear (Figure 4.)

The climate catastrophy industry's reaction

Needless to say, this is not a very welcome observation in the climate catastrophe industry. You'll recall that infinitessimable changes in temperature are supposed to be explainable, and only explainable, as the result of our negligible addition to the annual natural production of CO2. To be fair, most I've spoken to are simply unaware of this simple demonstration of the causal relationship between temperature and CO2.

POTSCRIPT. As we immiserate ourselves blowing hundreds of trillions of dollars on the attempt to prevent the weather getting a little milder: the next Ice Age appears to be overdue.

Why the UK must end climate catastrophism

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

THE CLIMATE CATASTROPHE MOVEMENT’s hypothesis is this: carbon dioxide causes the Earth’s temperature to rise; the amount of carbon dioxide we produce is having a significant warming effect on the Earth; to prevent a large number of very unpleasant things from happening, we must significantly reduce our carbon dioxide production.

This hypothesis is unproven. The conclusion that it draws—that we must accelerate the contraction of energy that is already underway—is reckless. Yet this conclusion now informs the official energy policy of the United Kingdom.

In this essay, we’ll examine why it is wrong, and why its policy recommendations must immediately be overturned.

But first, let’s recall a few basics that are often overlooked by climate catastrophists.

The climate catastrophe hypothesis is rooted in science, not religion. In science, all knowledge is provisional. Because all knowledge is provisional, we must be skeptical of every hypothesis that claims to be true. Every hypothesis—even gravity—must survive continuous attempts to falsify it. We aren’t ashamed of being sceptical. In science, the most sceptical party—the party that leads the effort to falsify a hypothesis—is the party that is advancing it. Why? Because surviving continuous falsification attempts is the only way that we can have confidence in scientific theories, or in discovering their defects. “Settled” science is an oxymoron, like “social distancing”. “Denial” is an accusation made by priests. Not by scientists.

Climate catastrophism requests immunity from the scientific method. In this essay, we deny the request.

Climate science is complex. But we don’t need to be experts to be able to interrogate its claims. We don’t need to be able to ride a motorbike to know it won’t go anywhere with a flat tyre—we just need to have ridden a bicycle. With a little study, we can understand well enough the physics, the chemistry, the earth science, the statistical methods, and the computer modeling techniques that climate catastrophism derives its hypotheses from. We’re as well placed as anyone else to look at their evidence, to evaluate their arguments, to ask questions, to make our own conclusions. And to spot a naked Emperor.

This isn’t conceited: extraordinary claims—such as the one that we should immiserate ourselves and our children on the basis of guesses about the distant future temperature of the planet derived from representationally incomplete models of the Earth’s poorly understood climate—demand extraordinary evidence. Whatever evidence they have, it should be extraordinary.

It’s not.

Climate catastrophism falls at the first hurdle: rising carbon dioxide does not produce rising temperature. Specifically, there is no observable relationship (what statisticians call a “correlation”) between the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the temperature of the atmosphere. We know this from ice cores, which allow both atmospheric temperature and carbon dioxide concentration over the last 425 million years to be estimated.1 In that time, there has been every combination of high and low temperature and carbon dioxide, and several occasions when rising carbon dioxide has accompanied falling temperature.

It is true that carbon dioxide affects temperature. But then, it’s also true that a cucumber sandwich affects my weight. Just not very much. That shouldn’t surprise us: carbon dioxide makes up about 0.04% of the atmosphere, and we increase the total annual natural emission of it by only 4%.

There are very many other processes that affect the earth’s temperature, including water evaporation, cloud formation, ocean currents, meridional transport, sunspot activity, and the gravitational effect of the movement of the planets around the sun. Carbon dioxide, and our contribution to it, isn’t a terribly powerful one, relative to others. Have you tried walking the wrong way up an escalator? That’s like carbon dioxide fighting against these oppositional processes. Sometimes it’s with them. Sometimes against. But it’s why there’s no correlation.

Then there is the problem of trying to quantify the effect of our carbon dioxide emissions relative to the 96% of it that is natural. The climate record shows that Earth’s temperature changes naturally over a large range. We’d like to find out how much—if any—of the current change is caused by us. We can’t measure it. So we have to try some other way.

Normally, we’d find out by making a model of the physics, and calculating it directly. That’s how we build highly accurate oil reservoir models, for example.

Climate scientists can’t do that. To make a model, you need to know three things:

(a) all of the things that drive the property you’d like to predict
(b) the physics of all of those things and
(c) how to represent all of that physics in a computer.

I listed some things that drive climate. There are many others. We just don’t know what they are. And if you don’t know what’s causing something, you can’t predict what the state of that something will be in the future.

Many of the things that we know drive the climate, we can’t model. For example, we know that water vapour and cloud formation is a much stronger force than carbon dioxide in affecting heating. But we don’t understand the microphysics of cloud formation—we can’t predict when and where clouds form.

And the whole climate system is an example of what in maths is called a “non-linear” system—one in which small changes in the input create large and unpredictable changes in the output. This is sometimes called “the butterfly effect”—inside the model, a butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo and a thunderstorm breaks out in Edinburgh. We’ve no way of representing non-linear systems in computers. It’s why you don’t get an accurate local weather forecast more than a couple of weeks out. It doesn’t magically become easier when you’re trying to forecast global climate in 100 years time .

So, since they can’t identify all of the things that drive the climate, and they don’t know the physics of many of the things they can identify, and they can’t represent the result in a computer, here’s what they do instead.

You can get almost anything to correlate with anything else. You just need a few knobs to adjust. Fun things to practice on when I was going through modelling school were womens’ skirt length vs. the stock price, and cheese sales vs. Nicholas Cage movie ratings. Climate modellers assume (wrongly, remember) that carbon dioxide and temperature are strongly related. They replace all of the climate physics that they don’t know with a black box with a few knobs on it. Then they tweak the carbon dioxide/temperature knob—what they call “climate sensitivity”—until “things line up”. Whatever the setting that the climate sensitivity knob is at when things line up, is the number they guess is the climate sensitivity. But it’s just a random number.

It’s easy to show that the estimate for climate sensitivity produced by models that wrongly assume that carbon dioxide and temperature are strongly related is a random number.

When you’ve built a model for which you have historical data—say, surface temperatures since 1850—you can initialise it to some time in the past and see if it predicts that historical data. We call it “backcasting”—forecasting the past. If your model can’t predict today from yesterday, it certainly can’t predict tomorrow from today.

The predictions of catastrophe are made by a large number of official models. These are called “Global Circulation Models”, and the climate scientists regularly compare them in an international project called “the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project”. They’ve just published their 6th set of models.

We can divide these official models into three groups: the ones that predict “disaster”; the ones that predict “general unpleasantness”; and the ones you’d want to take a second look at, just to make sure.

When you initialise them all to the climate in 1980, set them running, and see what they say about 2023, the “disasaster” and “general unpleasantness” models produce comedy Hollywood disaster movie temperatures.2 We can throw those away. There will be no catastrophe, or even general unpleasantness.

Official climate models that predict catastrophic future temperatures fail to reproduce historical temperatures. Source: Scafetta (2022) Figure 1

You could stop reading now. But it gets even more interesting.

Next, we can take a second look at the least alarming ones. In the backcast, what we are testing is how well the models fit a record of surface temperatures. It turns out, when you plot that data as a spatial plot of how temperature has changed, you get a beautiful map of all the big cities, airports, industrial centres, and oil and gas regions where you’ve been flaring gas for decades. The temperature in the dataset has risen. It is warming. It’s just not the climate that’s warming.

NOAA’s uncorrected surface temperature dataset supporting the climate catastrophe’s hypothesis that humans have warmed the atmosphere significantly. See if you can spot your favourite city.

As it turns out, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) publishes a checklist of criteria that surface temperature stations must meet to ensure that they aren’t contaminated by heat biases caused by proximity to runways, large heat generating machinery, and buildings. And it further turns out that 96% of monitoring stations in the USA fail to meet the criteria.3 And it further, further turns out that NOAA maintains a temperature data subset based on the 4% that do—the "U.S. Climate Reference Network".4 And it further, further, further turns out that the temperature rise in that dataset is about the rate it’s been rising for centuries as we recover from the recent Ice Age.

And, not surprisingly, when we backcast the models against that dataset, the only ones that match are the ones that assume negligible rate of human warming.

The earth is warming. But our carbon dioxide is not having a significant warming effect on the Earth. We do not have to reduce our carbon dioxide production to try to control it.

This is an incredibly important conclusion.

We don’t reject the climate catastrophe hypothesis because we don’t want a better world, for ourselves, and for our children. All of us hope for that. And many of us who do reject the climate catastrophe hypothesis share with its believers the recognition that increasing energy and resource scarcity presents a very serious threat to that hope, and that we need a new living arrangement.

The question is: how? And the problem is that, to avoid death on an epic scale from cold, malnutrition, disease, and poverty, whatever this new arrangement is will still require an equally epic amount of energy to keep seven billion humans alive. We'll need even more than we're currently using while we build out whatever this new arrangement is. Every energy transition in human history has.

The bulk of that energy is currently provided by oil and gas. The thermodynamically absurd project — "renewable energy" — that strains to replace it with weather dependent, low gradient sources, spawned by the climate catastrophe hypothesis’ claim that we must “reduce our emissions”, is exactly—exactly—the wrong thing to do.

By allocating our precious stocks of remaining high quality energy to building short lived energy scavenging devices, we are accelerating the pace of energy contraction, and robbing viable projects of the energy they need to implement them.

And by extending our production of imaginary money to fund the pointless reduction of an atmospheric trace gas, we are hastening the collapse of our financial system.

To stand any chance of making an orderly retreat to a society built around high grade alternatives to hydrocarbon, we need — immediately — to abandon this reckless “Net Zero” energy policy. Our future, and the future of our children, depends on it.

Subscribe now

See, for example, Davis, W. ‘The Relationship between Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration and Global Temperature for the Last 425 Million Years’. Climate 5, no. 4 (29 September 2017): 76. https://doi.org/10.3390/cli5040076. ↩
Scafetta, Nicola. ‘CMIP6 GCM Ensemble Members versus Global Surface Temperatures’. Climate Dynamics, 18 September 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-022-06493-w. ↩
Watts, Anthony. ‘Corrupted Climate Stations’. The Heartland Institute, 27 July 2022. https://heartland.org/wp-content/uploads/documents/2022_Surface_Station_Report.pdf. ↩
NOAA. U.S. Climate Reference Network. link ↩

The Scottish Government’s "Energy Strategy and Just Transition plan"

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

SUPPOSE THAT SCOTLAND’S CO2 emissions fell tomorrow to zero i.e. that, at midnight, the country ceased to exist. Then according to the “Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Induced Climate Change” (MAGICC), based on the latest IPCC climate models, the reduction in the Earth’s temperature in 2100 would be undetectable.1

Motivated by the moral necessity and urgency of this achievement, the Scottish Government is proposing a novel energy policy—its “Energy Strategy and Just Transition Plan”.2

This newsletter reviews its major themes and their implications, and considers briefly the probability of success of the Scottish Government implementing it.

In 2022, due to an insufficient quantity of wind and sun, Scotland’s current collection of wind and solar energy scavenging devices failed to generate about 70% of their nameplate capacity.3 Recent exhaustive statistical and econometric analysis of wind generation in Scotland by Edinburgh University shows that it is uneconomic, and destined for taxpayer bailout.4 Under the Scottish Government’s novel energy strategy, wind and solar energy scavenging devices are to be greatly expanded.

Hydrogen, an energy carrier that squanders in waste heat a gigawatt of power generation for every gigawatt it carries, is elevated in the Scottish Government’s understanding of energy to the category of a fuel, and also greatly expanded.

Hydrocarbon and nuclear—actual fuels—provide the energy to manufacture and endlessly replace wind turbines and solar panels. They also, in Scotland, provide the power sources that run under all conditions to ensure continuity of energy supply during Scotland’s frequent sunless and windless conditions. These are to be discontinued.

Like all advanced economies, Scotland cannot tolerate even a small measure of power supply fluctuation. Without firm dispatchable thermal standby generation capacity to smooth supply fluctuation, the eventual daily ~40GW amplitude power fluctuation resulting from the proposed expansion of weather dependent electrical generation must be adapted for use in some other way. This will be provided by some form of 180+ day, grid-scale electricity storage system—a technical challenge for which no precedent or candidate exists, and therefore no cost estimate is available.5 It occupies a prominent role in The Scottish Energy Strategy and Just Transition Plan.

Converting surplus energy to hydrogen for storage and use at grid scale is unprecedented, wasteful, and fraught with risk. 50% of Scotland’s proposed new intermittent generation capacity, installed at a capital cost of around £26 billion, will be wasted in converting its output to hydrogen.

Hydrogen embrittles pipework, renders conventional valves ineffective and, unlike domestic gas, self-ignites under catastrophic decompression. Quantifying the risks of transporting it in bulk on Scottish roads and deploying it as a substitute for domestic gas in Scotland’s densely populated housing estates might be an exciting 10 year research project at the UK Government’s Spadeadam industrial hazard testing facility (“...the remoteness of the area is key to their operations” - Wikipedia”).

But, informed by what the Scottish Government claims is the need for “the fastest possible” transition, it will bypass thorough safety testing and impose live hydrogen trials on Scotland’s citizens. Hydrocarbon gas is to be phased out of Scottish homes from 2030.

Energy densities in energy storage sites located next to Scotland’s towns and cities required by the Scottish Government's reckless abandonment of thermal standby generation capacity will be measured in millions of tonnes of TNT—a risk for which 12 feet thick reinforced concrete containment domes are installed around nuclear facilities to manage. These risks are entirely unrecognised by Scotland’s current planning processes (or citizens).

Scotland’s largest power station - Longannet - being blown up.

The wind turbines, which real-world data shows reach the end of their economic life after only 11 years, will be endlessly resupplied from factories in China powered by coal generation plants larger, and very much dirtier, than one Scotland recently blew up.

The cost of adaptive storage, the cost of the new transmission and distribution infrastructure required by dramatically increased electrification of Scotland’s relatively sparsely populated areas, and the cost of Carbon Capture, are not factored into current estimates of Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE). These are vast. Grid scale battery storage, for example, has an implied cost measured in trillions of pounds, and drives LCOE from £50/MWh to over £600/MWh.

Apparently unaware of the role of nuclear and gas in maintaining continuity of supply, and the prohibitive cost of electricity storage as a substitute, the Scottish Government confidently demands that the UK Government “break the link between the price of electricity and the cost of gas to help realise the benefits of the low costs [sic] of renewable electricity”.

The policy proposal cites a number of other benefits that it thinks will accrue in addition to the negligible reduction in the Earth’s temperature.

Electric vehicles can’t plough snow or fields, harvest corn, empty buckets, excavate ore, raise wind-turbine masts, or perform any other economic task for which “grunt” is required. Notwithstanding, from 2030, diesel and petrol engines will be prohibited. Car kilometers are to be “reduced”—possibly, by fining us if we travel from our home more than a permitted distance.6

A child in the Democratic Republic of Congo mining the cobalt needed for the Scottish Government's Just Transition to “clean energy”

The Scottish Government will impose further catastrophic environmental damage on the non-OECD countries where millions of tonnes of toxic water and ores are processed to manufacture the EV batteries it is mandating. It will overlook the human rights violations endemic to China’s “clean energy industry”. These will have the benefit of promoting what it calls “A Just Transition”—supposedly, a socialist framework for ensuring “a fairer, greener future for all”.7

Our security of supply is to be further enhanced by transferring energy generation from domestically produced oil and gas to mechanically unreliable, weather dependent energy scavenging devices containing thousands of points of failure that are contingent on the supply of rare resources controlled by China—which the US states it will declare war on if it invades Taiwan.8

These weather dependent energy scavenging devices require oil for, amongst many other things, the manufacture of their advanced composite materials. A leading energy consultancy records the collapse in 2020 to an 80 year low of replacement oil discovery volumes, and estimates that Western oil firms now have around 15 years of remaining economic oil reserves.9 It is under these circumstances that the Scottish Government is further enhancing the security of Scotland’s energy supply by discontinuing onshore and offshore conventional and unconventional oil and gas exploration.

To reinforce this enhancement, noting “the damage done by the de-industrialisation of central belt communities in the 1980’s”, the Scottish Government is irreversibly disbanding the North East’s oil and gas industry communities and, with them, their 50 years of institutional knowledge of oil and gas operations.

These will be replaced with communities based on livelihoods sustained by a “clean energy industry”. The growth of this imaginary industry is funded with the imaginary capital (a.k.a. “quantitive easing”) excreted in the response—ironically—to the energy contraction that triggered the ongoing 2008 Great Financial Crash. During this time, UK national debt has risen from 60% to over 100% of Gross Domestic Product, exceeded only by the public sector pension deficit (a proxy for the replacement of real industries in the global economy by imaginary ones), which has risen to more than £2 trillion.10

As evidence of the sustainability of the policy of funding imaginary industries through the indefinite expansion of imaginary capital (for which, like much of this policy, no precedent exists in human history), the Scottish Government informs us that it has already allocated £5 billion of its record budget deficit to what it refers to as “the Net Zero Economy”.

Winter excess death in the UK’s cold Northern European climate is already around 25,000 a year.11 Any prolonged interruption of winter energy supply created by the failure of this policy, or further escalation of cost, will plausibly result in the deaths of thousands more of our most vulnerable fellow citizens. The magnitude and uncertainty of the implied costs, coupled to the scale of the energy contraction that this policy deliberately seeks to accelerate, could trigger the collapse of our financial system.

Irreversible impairment of either our energy or financial systems would have a catastrophic impact on the welfare of Scotland’s citizens. Few have expressed any desire, much less informed consent, for risk on the scale proposed for such little benefit.

Yet the project, representing a scope of unprecedented scale, cost, pace, and technical uncertainty, will be overseen by a Government that is currently struggling to procure two relatively modest ferries for less than the cost that other governments can procure 34 ferries—due to cost overruns associated with the attempt to employ novel technologies to reduce CO2 emissions.12

As evidence of the extent to which the Scottish Government and its advisers have become unmoored from physical reality by the climate catastrophe hypothesis, it’s a document that is fascinating to read, and alarming to contemplate.

After reflecting on it, you may care to offer your feedback, either to the department that compiled it, or your political representative,13 or on social media.

I’d welcome your thoughts below, in advance of future essays examining in closer detail the comparably alarming Scottish and UK “Net Zero Energy" policies.

Subscribe now

References

'MAGICC - the climate system in a nutshell'. https://magicc.org/ ↩
Scottish Government. 2023. 'Draft Energy Strategy and Just Transition Plan'. https://www.gov.scot/publications/draft-energy-strategy-transition-plan/documents/ ↩
Elexon. "Balancing Mechanism Reporting Service". https://www.bmreports.com/bmrs/?q=help/about-us ↩
Hughes, Gordon. 2020. ‘Wind Power Economics – Rhetoric and Reality’. https://www.ref.org.uk/ref-blog/365-wind-power-economics-rhetoric-and-reality. ↩
Lyon, Richard. 2023. 'Wind energy is cheaper than fossil fuel! (Batteries not included)'. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/renewable-electricity-now-cheaper-than-fossil-fuel-33-richard-lyon/ ↩
Spiked. 2022. “The madness of the ‘15-minute city’”. https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/10/25/the-madness-of-the-15-minute-city/ ↩
Scottish Government. 2022. “Just Transition Commission”. https://www.gov.scot/groups/just-transition-commission/ ↩
FT. 2022. "Dangerous fatalism about a US-China war". https://www.ft.com/content/457d8f06-a1cf-43d2-944c-90b5a48e66f9 ↩
Rystad Energy. 2021. "Big Oil Could See Proven Reserves Run out in Less than 15 Years as Output Is Not Replaced by Discoveries". https://web.archive.org/web/20210511193735/https://www.rystadenergy.com/newsevents/news/press-releases/big-oil-could-see-proven-reserves-run-out-in-less-than-15-years-as-output-is-not-replaced-by-discoveries/ ↩
Pensions Expert. 2022. "Public sector pension liabilities break £2tn with 16% surge". https://www.pensions-expert.com/DB-Derisking/Public-sector-pension-liabilities-break-2tn-with-16-surge?ct=true ↩
AgeUK. 2016. "Excess winter deaths: a chilling reminder of how the cold affects older people" https://www.ageuk.org.uk/latest-news/archive/excess-winter-deaths-are-a-chilling-reminder-of-how-the-cold-affects-older-people/ ↩
Wikipedia. “Ferry fiasco”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferry_fiasco ↩
Scottish Parliament. “Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs)” https://www.parliament.scot/mspshttps://www.parliament.scot/msps ↩