Climate change... Much ado about nothing?

Coal station shut downs, well, I'm not an expert but I used to work with GEC engineers and CEGB (remember them) engineers and they told me that boilers come online pretty quickly  in 8 to 24 hours from cold.  But then you can run the boiler just to keep the thing spinning which is pretty low energy using.  Given that we only have 16 of the things still being used and most of them are not used for more than half a day a day tops (go look at the meters I offered earlier).  During that time the are just spinning without "taking a load".  Taking a load is when the rotor of the turbine drives the alternator to produce power.  They are all aimed to phase out in the next few years because they will not get us to reach Paris and frankly they are either too old or too small to be converted to bio-gas, wood chip etc.

The interesting company in this sector to read up about is Drax.  Lead by a very strategic chairwoman they have sought out, found and researched much of the UK's most interesting technologies to remove "fossil CO2" from the system.  The wood chip solution is frankly not without its critics, but as they said at the time, "if we could buy this much wood in Europe we would".  They have now vertically intergrated their supply chain, buying wood chipping plants in the US when they got into financial difficulty.  Good business practise, innovative and sensible.  A real eye-opener in seeing what can be done in a capitalist system to reduce fossil CO2 while keeping the lights on and making money.  Critics they have, I'll let you decide.

If you are looking for other, similar "green" or semi-green companies you might also look at

TRIG; an owner of wind and solar farms across Europe

ITM: a maker of electrolysers to generate H2 from wind and solar energy based in Sheffield

I remember the story that Michael Porter (famous US Economist and business Professor) went to China and saw a 100,000 people building a dam with hand shovels and it was explained to him that this demonstrated what that the Chinese could throw at a project to find work for people.  He asked if they had tried 200,000 people with half sized hand shovels.

Why should we want to pay more to do something we are trying to stop?  The UK, based on the science we understand, has agreed to reduce our CO2 generation in a legally binding agreement backed up by a change to UK law.  That is to reduce our CO2 generation.  Logically, therefore, we should leave the coal in the ground where it is.  Similar arguments exist for North Sea Oil, and will eventually be followed by natural gas.  The future is not CO2, petrol and diesel, the future is battery and hydrogen and the sooner people come to realise it the better for us all. In the same way that the clog factory of Hebden Bridge now turns out only 10 clogs a day, its time has passed and having worked with miners over the years, they would all say "thank god".

That 11 intelligent people have failed to find work some years after a project has finished does really challenge their ability to find work.  In my life I have had to close businesses, I have managed to turn businesses around and I have sold businesses to new interesting owners.  Because of this I have learnt to develop people and to present them to their new employers as employable and to help them start up their own businesses (in many cases with mental health and drug problems).  I have never yet found a person who cannot find work inside 6 months if they have the mind to do so and they have advice to guide them.  The process of one-stop/jobcentreplus etc is well developed to find people work, but not so good at setting up their own business.  However, many colleges florish offering that second idea at very low costs or even for free.  By chance I have our local college details front of me and there are loads of opportunites.

The only two areas where I can see a real struggle is 1) health problems 2) no home to live in, in this second are I believe the UK state is not doing a good job.

The £ has been falling against a basket of currencies since 1945 (really, go look) it is the one certainty of my life that it will continue to do so as the Treasury under all parties understands that the British are pretty awful business people and we need a collapsing currency to have a chance in this world.  Moving capital to re-envigorate coal mines that have a short life span might be a logical thing for idiot Jeremy to do but would just be money taken out of the NHS for the rest of us.  Net affect in the market would just confirm that JC needs to stay out of power but nothing important on that issue alone.

The facts

Coal in the UK - 2017. The UK consumed 14.2 million tonnes of coal in 2017, including 8.7 million tonnes in power stations, 3.2 million tonnes in the steel industry and 1.5 million tonnes in other industry. Coal imports to the UK were 8.5 million tonnes, the same as the previous year.

Legal, natural and "assisted" all seem good to me. The many moorlands we have are unnatural, let's get rid of them.

One of the strange thing that I've discovered as part of a "in-bloom" group is people do not take responsability for public spaces, but instead are afraid to modify or improve them.  They are public spaces and deserve to be kept clean, unspoiled and unless identified as having importance for scientific or natural reasons are open to improvement.  I can think of nothing better than growing a tree.

Ah the pressure from Africa!

I suspect a forcus on asia pacific would be more sensible