The utter hypocrisy of Adrian Ramsey is astounding. The bright side of this is that the Green Nimby is never going to be able to preach at anyone ever again as every time he opens his mouth he will have this thrown in his face.
There is another and more serious point. He and others who airily suggest the burying of these cables have little or no idea of what it involves. Apart from the cost, which is between 4 and 20 times that of overhead cables, is the environmental cost. Anyone who thinks that once buried it is a case of out of sight, out of mind couldn't be more wrong. The burying of these cables involves a swathe of land which is, obviously, the full length of the cable run and is as wide as major road. Once finished the surface must be kept clear,no trees for example and the site must be accessible to vehicles.
Another point is that wherever joints are needed in the cable run, and keeping in mind that we are talking of very high voltage, the joints must be made in substantial buildings on the surface.
Compared with this the overhead option is much more attractive with the loss of land restricted to the concrete bases of the pylons and no restrictions on the use of the land under the cable run.
These Nimby objections have a long history, the canals the railways, the arterial roads and the motorways were all subject to the same objections. The Romans probably had the same problem when they built their roads and Hadrian's wall.
Come to think of it Ramsey's objection could be labelled - Adrian's Wail.
I'm not sure I'd go as far as that, but there might be a time-based element here.
The environmental movements, plural, might have a necessary role to play in raising awareness and concern (and maybe even Extinction Rebellion's theatrics have a place), but once they've raised the fully required degree of panic, some of those movements might be temperamentally or aesthetically unsuited to helping with the solution.
For example, solar panels (photovoltaics, PV) are a Good Thing, but they're technically elaborate things, including materials (the 'rare earth elements' that are integral to the PV process) which need to be mined, which may be complicated to recycle, and some of which have potentially... conflicty supply chains. I don't know _exactly_ how conflicty they are, or just how hard to recycle, and this problem will (have to) be addressed somehow, but the point is that PV (etc) are not straightforward sunshine and puppies. The political/cultural problem has turned into a messy engineering problem, and Greenpeace (to pick an example at random) doesn't have that in its comfort zone.
Possibly the worst damage the climate 'sceptics' have done is to use their stupid and vicious arguments to delay and delay the point where society agrees there is a problem, and starts to confront the practical tradeoffs of the solutions.
Doctrinaire certainty has a role to play before that transition, but is harmful after it.
I agree that some environmental movements seem to be unsuited to help with solutions; being stuck in protest mode is not as useful as some activists perhaps think. However, in fairness to your random example, helping to address aspects of engineering problems used to be within Greenpeace’s comfort zone. As perhaps the recent UK election and the new Government’s preparation for its initial activities highlight, black-v-white campaign communications can obscure the extent to which complexity has been considered. Understandably, Greenpeace’s flamboyant actions in the 1980s attracted more attention than its Trust’s funding of the Quantum Photovoltaic group at Imperial College, whose work led to improved PV efficiency by optimising the wavelength at which the cells absorb sunlight (https://ref2014impact.azurewebsites.net/casestudies2/refservice.svc/GetCaseStudyPDF/42255).
> However, in fairness to your random example, helping to address aspects of engineering problems used to be within Greenpeace’s comfort zone.
I didn't know about the Greenpeace Trust, so thanks for that.
Looking at their 2022 annual report, though [1], there's clearly a certain ...correlation to the things they fund. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and I'm sure they stay on the right side of the 'political campaigning' boundary, as far as the Charity Commissioners are concerned, but I don't imagine many of their grant recipients are very uncertain where on the map their conclusions are expected to land.
I persist in thinking of Greenpeace as basically the Good Guys, at least in their intentions. My mention of them wasn't entirely random, though: I became disillusioned by Greenpeace (in a cancel-the-standing-order way) at the time of the Fukushima accident. Their coverage of that convinced me that their position on nuclear technology was religious, not rational, and I think that's deeply and destructively unhelpful, in many orthogonal ways.
(Sorry: this has all drifted a bit from newly-elected NIMBYs or -- new word! -- SPANs)
I don't think that the recycling of PV is such a problem. Certainly not when compared with decommissioning of a nuclear power station,say. Not that I am opposed to nuclear which can be part of the solution.
The problem of the supply chains can be easily addressed by mining for these elements in developed countries; there are plenty of deposits in these countries but if you suggest mining them who are the first objectors? You've guessed it. the Greens.
Yes, the mining may be where the big problems and headaches emerge.
Mining in developed countries would -- you're right -- avoid giving developing countries a whole new 'resource curse' to look down the barrel of. But (and this is a whole different dimension to the problem) what happens when hydrocarbon-rich developing countries lose a market for that? Perhaps rare earths are a curse they'd currently want. Do they get frozen out of this? (I appreciate I'm partly arguing contra myself now).
Sidenote for those who skipped O-grade chemistry: the so-called rare-earth elements, despite the name, aren't particularly rare. They were the last elements in the periodic table to be identified, because they're hard to isolate from their ores. The problem there is that 'hard' means energetically expensive, which potentially means pollution, and lots of materialised energy.
I'm pessimistic about nuclear having much of a role. And that's frustrating, because most of the problems there, though not to be dismissed, seem fundamentally to be based on superstition or on funding/banking/budget contortions, rather than being technical or arising from sober risk analyses. But that's another bucket of detail, which I must hesitate to be dogmatic about.
I was aware that the rare earths were not in fact rare and that there are deposits in many developed countries. My own view is that the west would be well advised to go ahead and mine them because as well as being sourced from developing countries a lot of it comes from China.
With the world being apparently determined to go down the new cold war route it would make sense to become as independent as possible in this respect. The same goes for micro chips too.
On the nuclear front I wonder if the small reactors being developed may be the answer? I see them at any rate as being more likely to solve the problem than fusion. To my personal knowledge the fusion solution has been just around the corner/ten years down the road since the mid 1950s when the UK had the Zeta project and the US the Theta project. It's been a very long ten years.
> To my personal knowledge the fusion solution has been just around the corner/ten years down the road since the mid 1950s when the UK had the Zeta project and the US the Theta project. It's been a very long ten years.
This is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, unfortunately - the "fusion is 10/20/30 years away, just like it's always been" meme is one of the factors that's kept fusion research funding below the "fusion never" level: https://benjaminreinhardt.com/fusion-never/ Despite this, there has been steady progress in fusion triple product, and recent advances in superconducting magnets and computation have brought fusion reactors within the grasp of well-funded startups. But we're still a long way from a grid-scale production-grade power station.
> I'm pessimistic about nuclear having much of a role. And that's frustrating, because most of the problems there, though not to be dismissed, seem fundamentally to be based on superstition or on funding/banking/budget contortions, rather than being technical or arising from sober risk analyses.
Exactly - and I think much of the blame for that must lie with the environmentalist movement, who have opposed and delayed nuclear projects (massively increasing their cost of capital) since at least the '70s.
Suburban white woman in one of your four swing states here - although overly strict limitations on abortion do concern me, I am far, far more threatened by leftist ideology and authoritarianism that seem to be taking over the world. I never thought I’d live in a country where the ruling political party used the justice system to try to imprison their political opponents. Our media is partisan, all our institutions are captured, our kids are being fed a steady diet of propaganda, and anyone who dares question it will be out of a job. I really don’t like Trump and never thought I’d vote for him, but I will this time. The left has become a far bigger threat to me than the right.
Sorry I tried reading that Alberta link but can’t do it
A missile was deliberately fired at a children’s hospital in Ukraine this week and the guy who did it is backing the campaign and praying but the win of the candidate covered in this article as if it’s normal politics and the campaign tactics are a thing of interest
I know that the latter at least is both obviously true and if interest to people so it’s perfectly fine for it to be written about, probably even necessary but I can’t read that stuff anymore
Tanks crossed a border in Europe in the 2020s, children in hospitals are being deliberately targeted and a President who would legitimise and reward both those things is about to win, I can’t bring myself to treat ties as if it’s normal
As someone who comes from a country cursed with a Greens party (Australia) led me offer some advice, prepare yourself for an avalanche of hypocrisy of the time you refer too
The Greens love nothing more than to complain about not enough houses being built nationally while every single development is opposed by the local Greens, they want housing or solar farms or wind farms just never near them, it’s always somewhere else it should be built
So of you raging hypocrites with a very open feeling of moral self superiority you’re gonna love the Greens
Hang on, I just read the Freedman piece, “Serco are responsible for, among other things, running: … our warning system for incoming nuclear missiles” !?!?!?!
Do you have a British driving license? I am watching Taskmaster and it’s made me aware of how many more Brits live without a license and how much harder the test seems to be. The differences in driving rates, test prep and actual driving tests might make for a good article. Take the US classes and test! I learned as an adult and half of the NYS test (10 of the 20 questions) were about drunk driving and things you could answer without any study.
Regarding "Dorkiest thing": in 1980, I went to the CalTech bookstore in Pasadena and bought an LP called "Let's Advance on Science"; it is a recording of their annual song parodies with lyrics rewritten to be about their areas of research...
God Bless the Internet for making this available to all.
Also, regarding big stars treating themselves as underdogs, I will refer to J Lo's "Jenny on the Block" as another great example.
I thought it humorous to reconfigure the lyrics to this song and put it to the tune of the sea shanty "Chicken on a Raft"...I will not share my recording here for fear of armies of lawyers showing up at my front door in Sacramento.
And you will never find it on soundcloud. There are too many non-me Andrew Alexi there already.
The utter hypocrisy of Adrian Ramsey is astounding. The bright side of this is that the Green Nimby is never going to be able to preach at anyone ever again as every time he opens his mouth he will have this thrown in his face.
There is another and more serious point. He and others who airily suggest the burying of these cables have little or no idea of what it involves. Apart from the cost, which is between 4 and 20 times that of overhead cables, is the environmental cost. Anyone who thinks that once buried it is a case of out of sight, out of mind couldn't be more wrong. The burying of these cables involves a swathe of land which is, obviously, the full length of the cable run and is as wide as major road. Once finished the surface must be kept clear,no trees for example and the site must be accessible to vehicles.
Another point is that wherever joints are needed in the cable run, and keeping in mind that we are talking of very high voltage, the joints must be made in substantial buildings on the surface.
Compared with this the overhead option is much more attractive with the loss of land restricted to the concrete bases of the pylons and no restrictions on the use of the land under the cable run.
These Nimby objections have a long history, the canals the railways, the arterial roads and the motorways were all subject to the same objections. The Romans probably had the same problem when they built their roads and Hadrian's wall.
Come to think of it Ramsey's objection could be labelled - Adrian's Wail.
I'm increasingly convinced that the environmental movement is one of the biggest obstacles to tackling our environmental problems.
I'm not sure I'd go as far as that, but there might be a time-based element here.
The environmental movements, plural, might have a necessary role to play in raising awareness and concern (and maybe even Extinction Rebellion's theatrics have a place), but once they've raised the fully required degree of panic, some of those movements might be temperamentally or aesthetically unsuited to helping with the solution.
For example, solar panels (photovoltaics, PV) are a Good Thing, but they're technically elaborate things, including materials (the 'rare earth elements' that are integral to the PV process) which need to be mined, which may be complicated to recycle, and some of which have potentially... conflicty supply chains. I don't know _exactly_ how conflicty they are, or just how hard to recycle, and this problem will (have to) be addressed somehow, but the point is that PV (etc) are not straightforward sunshine and puppies. The political/cultural problem has turned into a messy engineering problem, and Greenpeace (to pick an example at random) doesn't have that in its comfort zone.
Possibly the worst damage the climate 'sceptics' have done is to use their stupid and vicious arguments to delay and delay the point where society agrees there is a problem, and starts to confront the practical tradeoffs of the solutions.
Doctrinaire certainty has a role to play before that transition, but is harmful after it.
I agree that some environmental movements seem to be unsuited to help with solutions; being stuck in protest mode is not as useful as some activists perhaps think. However, in fairness to your random example, helping to address aspects of engineering problems used to be within Greenpeace’s comfort zone. As perhaps the recent UK election and the new Government’s preparation for its initial activities highlight, black-v-white campaign communications can obscure the extent to which complexity has been considered. Understandably, Greenpeace’s flamboyant actions in the 1980s attracted more attention than its Trust’s funding of the Quantum Photovoltaic group at Imperial College, whose work led to improved PV efficiency by optimising the wavelength at which the cells absorb sunlight (https://ref2014impact.azurewebsites.net/casestudies2/refservice.svc/GetCaseStudyPDF/42255).
> However, in fairness to your random example, helping to address aspects of engineering problems used to be within Greenpeace’s comfort zone.
I didn't know about the Greenpeace Trust, so thanks for that.
Looking at their 2022 annual report, though [1], there's clearly a certain ...correlation to the things they fund. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and I'm sure they stay on the right side of the 'political campaigning' boundary, as far as the Charity Commissioners are concerned, but I don't imagine many of their grant recipients are very uncertain where on the map their conclusions are expected to land.
I persist in thinking of Greenpeace as basically the Good Guys, at least in their intentions. My mention of them wasn't entirely random, though: I became disillusioned by Greenpeace (in a cancel-the-standing-order way) at the time of the Fukushima accident. Their coverage of that convinced me that their position on nuclear technology was religious, not rational, and I think that's deeply and destructively unhelpful, in many orthogonal ways.
(Sorry: this has all drifted a bit from newly-elected NIMBYs or -- new word! -- SPANs)
[1] https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-search/-/charity-details/284934/accounts-and-annual-returns
I don't think that the recycling of PV is such a problem. Certainly not when compared with decommissioning of a nuclear power station,say. Not that I am opposed to nuclear which can be part of the solution.
The problem of the supply chains can be easily addressed by mining for these elements in developed countries; there are plenty of deposits in these countries but if you suggest mining them who are the first objectors? You've guessed it. the Greens.
Yes, the mining may be where the big problems and headaches emerge.
Mining in developed countries would -- you're right -- avoid giving developing countries a whole new 'resource curse' to look down the barrel of. But (and this is a whole different dimension to the problem) what happens when hydrocarbon-rich developing countries lose a market for that? Perhaps rare earths are a curse they'd currently want. Do they get frozen out of this? (I appreciate I'm partly arguing contra myself now).
Sidenote for those who skipped O-grade chemistry: the so-called rare-earth elements, despite the name, aren't particularly rare. They were the last elements in the periodic table to be identified, because they're hard to isolate from their ores. The problem there is that 'hard' means energetically expensive, which potentially means pollution, and lots of materialised energy.
I'm pessimistic about nuclear having much of a role. And that's frustrating, because most of the problems there, though not to be dismissed, seem fundamentally to be based on superstition or on funding/banking/budget contortions, rather than being technical or arising from sober risk analyses. But that's another bucket of detail, which I must hesitate to be dogmatic about.
I was aware that the rare earths were not in fact rare and that there are deposits in many developed countries. My own view is that the west would be well advised to go ahead and mine them because as well as being sourced from developing countries a lot of it comes from China.
With the world being apparently determined to go down the new cold war route it would make sense to become as independent as possible in this respect. The same goes for micro chips too.
On the nuclear front I wonder if the small reactors being developed may be the answer? I see them at any rate as being more likely to solve the problem than fusion. To my personal knowledge the fusion solution has been just around the corner/ten years down the road since the mid 1950s when the UK had the Zeta project and the US the Theta project. It's been a very long ten years.
> To my personal knowledge the fusion solution has been just around the corner/ten years down the road since the mid 1950s when the UK had the Zeta project and the US the Theta project. It's been a very long ten years.
This is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, unfortunately - the "fusion is 10/20/30 years away, just like it's always been" meme is one of the factors that's kept fusion research funding below the "fusion never" level: https://benjaminreinhardt.com/fusion-never/ Despite this, there has been steady progress in fusion triple product, and recent advances in superconducting magnets and computation have brought fusion reactors within the grasp of well-funded startups. But we're still a long way from a grid-scale production-grade power station.
> I'm pessimistic about nuclear having much of a role. And that's frustrating, because most of the problems there, though not to be dismissed, seem fundamentally to be based on superstition or on funding/banking/budget contortions, rather than being technical or arising from sober risk analyses.
Exactly - and I think much of the blame for that must lie with the environmentalist movement, who have opposed and delayed nuclear projects (massively increasing their cost of capital) since at least the '70s.
Just found your Substack recently. Definitely one of my favorite finds of the year. Thank you for all that you do!
Suburban white woman in one of your four swing states here - although overly strict limitations on abortion do concern me, I am far, far more threatened by leftist ideology and authoritarianism that seem to be taking over the world. I never thought I’d live in a country where the ruling political party used the justice system to try to imprison their political opponents. Our media is partisan, all our institutions are captured, our kids are being fed a steady diet of propaganda, and anyone who dares question it will be out of a job. I really don’t like Trump and never thought I’d vote for him, but I will this time. The left has become a far bigger threat to me than the right.
Sorry I tried reading that Alberta link but can’t do it
A missile was deliberately fired at a children’s hospital in Ukraine this week and the guy who did it is backing the campaign and praying but the win of the candidate covered in this article as if it’s normal politics and the campaign tactics are a thing of interest
I know that the latter at least is both obviously true and if interest to people so it’s perfectly fine for it to be written about, probably even necessary but I can’t read that stuff anymore
Tanks crossed a border in Europe in the 2020s, children in hospitals are being deliberately targeted and a President who would legitimise and reward both those things is about to win, I can’t bring myself to treat ties as if it’s normal
As someone who comes from a country cursed with a Greens party (Australia) led me offer some advice, prepare yourself for an avalanche of hypocrisy of the time you refer too
The Greens love nothing more than to complain about not enough houses being built nationally while every single development is opposed by the local Greens, they want housing or solar farms or wind farms just never near them, it’s always somewhere else it should be built
So of you raging hypocrites with a very open feeling of moral self superiority you’re gonna love the Greens
Reminds me of the wonderful Spanish equivalent of NIMBY: SPAN, for " Sí, Pero Aquí No" (Yes, but not here).
Thankyou so much for that, I’m stealing it because that is the Greens in a nutshell
Thankyou!!!
It was that little outing on the 'today' show, that introduced this little Aussie to your fab newsletter.
"The entire experience was—and I say this with love—one of the dorkiest things I have seen in my entire life."
Really....? https://www.science.org/content/page/announcing-annual-dance-your-ph-d-contest
Hang on, I just read the Freedman piece, “Serco are responsible for, among other things, running: … our warning system for incoming nuclear missiles” !?!?!?!
I have never felt less safe 😱
Do you have a British driving license? I am watching Taskmaster and it’s made me aware of how many more Brits live without a license and how much harder the test seems to be. The differences in driving rates, test prep and actual driving tests might make for a good article. Take the US classes and test! I learned as an adult and half of the NYS test (10 of the 20 questions) were about drunk driving and things you could answer without any study.
Regarding "Dorkiest thing": in 1980, I went to the CalTech bookstore in Pasadena and bought an LP called "Let's Advance on Science"; it is a recording of their annual song parodies with lyrics rewritten to be about their areas of research...
God Bless the Internet for making this available to all.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8_xPU5epJdds9a_CkcTSIVABLZTk_lj1
Also, regarding big stars treating themselves as underdogs, I will refer to J Lo's "Jenny on the Block" as another great example.
I thought it humorous to reconfigure the lyrics to this song and put it to the tune of the sea shanty "Chicken on a Raft"...I will not share my recording here for fear of armies of lawyers showing up at my front door in Sacramento.
And you will never find it on soundcloud. There are too many non-me Andrew Alexi there already.
"Bluestockinger"? I dunno, can we workshop this? I guess "bluestocking" is already taken...
[Congrats on the subscriber count!]
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