How the U.K. broke its own economy | Hacker News Reader

How the U.K. broke its own economy

theatlantic.com

291 pointsspeckx733 comments

https://archive.ph/2025.03.03-161011/https://www.theatlantic...

"These problems are obvious to many British politicians. Leaders in the Conservative and Labour Parties often comment on expensive energy and scarce housing. But their goals haven’t been translated into priorities and policies that lead to growth."

I can't find this mentioned anywhere in the article, but the current imbalance of supply and demand and the resulting high prices is quite beneficial for parts of the real estate lobby which don't focus on building houses but on maximizing value from existing properties.

Approximately one in five Members of UK Parliament are landlords or have investments in the property market.

So while the article is advocating for the removal of "barriers that stop the private sector from doing what it already wants to do", it seems to be blissfully unaware of the powerful forces outside and likely WITHIN the political parties that rather prefer to maintain this imbalance...

> Approximately one in five Members of UK Parliament are landlords or have investments in the property market.

Ah, the class-based society.

Everybody wants affordable housing until it’s their housing becoming affordable.

If only those people outside of my window would just "vote with their wallets" and stop demanding a roof to live under, demand would die down and prices would stabilize again.

It's simple free market economics!

It is indeed simple free market economics: far more demand for housing than there is supply.

Mission accomplished, in other words.

Here in Australia, there are 227 sitting Members of Parliament, of those: one in three federal politicians (71) own two properties; one in three (77) own three or more properties, and about one in three (67) own one property. Eleven federal politicians don't own a home, at least not in their name, and of those only one is known to be a renter.

I don't know why we call it Parliament House, it should be call the House of Lords.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-16/how-many-properties-d...

Or Lords of Housing

And somehow this group, in the name of 'affordable housing', keeps coming up with ways to enable people to pay more and more for houses, rather than coming up with ways to make home ownership less expensive. I guess it's just one of those mysteries we may never solve.

Here's some more Recreational Statistics (a branch of Recreation Mathematics):

There are about 11.1 million residential properties in Australia, 30% of which, some 3.25 million residential properties, are held by investors.[1]

There are 25 million people in Australia, about 17.5 million of those are adults aged 25 years or older, of which about 12.8%, or 2.25 million, own one or more investment properties.[1,2]

Let's assume the majority of investment property owners also own their own home.

So, about 13% of Australian adults own about 60% of the housing.

Does that sound reasonable? I don't know if there's some alternate timeline where housing is more evenly distributed and life is better, or how to get there if we think that's a good idea.

1. https://realtyai.com.au/inside-australias-property-boom-how-...

2. https://realtyai.com.au/inside-australias-property-boom-how-...

This is absolutely key. The lobbies are very rich (because they own lots of land) and therefore very influential.

The Normans strike again!

About 70% of the land in the UK will never be built on for various reasons. This leaves 30%. That 30% contains all the towns, cities, suburbs, and various industrial estates, ports, airports and so on. The actual amount of land vaguely available for projects of any sort is rather small, and those projects face heavy headwinds in terms of planning permissions, NIMBYs, and other interests expressed often by people living nowhere near the land in question.

You don't even need lobbies. Anyone who owns a house isn't bothered by this, unless they are particularly fair-minded. It only affects people who don't own their own home, which is a much smaller voting group.

Not only are they not bothered. If they are even slightly aware of the situation they know it's in their financial interest. And if they are not aware of the economics most still have a bias against new construction especially high density in their area, because of the "nuisance" that construction will cause.

Sounds like it's time to make them bothered.

It's the same problem as here in the US: a bunch of people who have gotten fat off of not providing an equal or better future for the next generation.

In the year ending June 2024 the net migration into the UK was 728,000. That is the root cause.

The government (and this hasn't started with the current government) has a policy of high immigration then makes noise about the need of doing more to solve the "housing crisis"...

Coincidentally that's also roughly the birth-rate of the UK 20 years prior (2004: 715,996 [0]), a group of people I assume also arrived on the housing-market by now.

The population (and this hasn't started with the current population) has a tendency to shag around and then make noise about the need of housing (and food, and education, and...)

[0] https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...

Except that with immigration you add adults and families that need housing as soon as they get into the country. Additionally the birth rate has now been below replacement rate for long enough that population would start to decrease without immigration (and the need for housing would obviously decrease with it).

I can't understand this disparaging stance against anyone who brings the issue of immigration up.

It is at the highest level on record and the only cause of increasing population but, no the only issue is that we should build more apparently. And we should also do that while saving the climate and the environment.

There are many contradictions and cognitive dissonance here... And the way my comment is shut down is very telling of that.

UK real estate issues are the same as real estate issues globally.

All the major metros have somehow become a single real estate market. London, NY, Tokyo.

The real estate properties being made are the ones which generate profit, which happen to be for people with ‘large’ amounts of wealth.

Basically - you can worry about immigrants as much as you like, there still wont be affordable housing.

It’s not profitable.

(Terms and conditions apply)

UK's birth rate is 1.44. Someone is going to have to pay for your upkeep in old age.

Most political problems of today stem from the fact that politicians are unwilling to explain this basic fact to their none-too-bright constituents.

Reality is reality. This is why the fascist-lite Italian PM actually increased immigration from Africa after assuming office and taking one look at the numbers.

Lucky then, that immigrants don't age. Otherwise you'd be turning your country into one hell of a demographic Ponzi Scheme...

The are a few more things in the equation. Median age in the UK is ~40 while most immigration is from countries with medians in their 20s. Those families are more likely to have more children especially if they reach a stable and comfortable living situation. So it can be a Ponzi scheme but it can also be an investment.

It is a Ponzi scheme. The Ponzi scheme is that population has to grow forever, which is not sutainable and not possible, and coming to an end globally.

So high immigration now is just kicking the ball down the road while destroying your local culture and people in the process.

"local culture and people" are still very much still alive in the South West of England, where I live.

If this is the reference for the definition of a Ponzi scheme then the pension system in general is a Ponzi scheme by design and immigration is not "turning" it into one like OP said.

But I don't really agree this is the appropriate equivalent at least for the "spirit" of a Ponzi scheme. A pyramid scheme exists only when a pyramid is disguised as something else. When it's designed and presented as an actual pyramid it's not a scheme. In the design of the pension system there's no intention of fraud involved (only lack of education maybe), and the system is constantly and very transparently adjusted to widen the pyramid base and narrow the top (increase retirement age, contributor base, or individual contribution).

You are being unduly pedantic and argumentive. You should understand that the term was clearly used to mean that population must keep growing forever because the next generation must always be larger than the previous one.

And yes, the whole economy and benefit systems, including pensions, assume this. This is why it is difficult to face the fact that population cannot keep growing, and in fact it s forecast that will stop growing at global scale by the end of the century. It is even more unsustainable combined with the objective of solving the climate and environmental crisis.

There is a dishonest incoherency with our governments, and just incoherency with large sections of the public.

By the definition of Ponzi Scheme being used here, is there any capitalist country that is not running a Ponzi?

Someone is going to have to, but currently as much as immigration is raising the UK population, GDP per person is declining.

Declined relative to its peak in the 2010s. It's climbing again. Ironically the decline set in after Brexit.

It's also way higher than it ever was back when Britain was monoracial.

GDP per capita growth [1] has been more or less flat since 2008. The time of the GFC. I think people are starting to forget what productivity growth even feels like it has been so long. Subsequent governments set immigration to infinity to make GDP go up, but this has further exposed the fact that per-capita it is flat.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/gbr/uni...

I remember when Tony Blair was elected and Gordon Brown proudly proclaimed "An end to boom and bust economics". I don't think many people realised this would be continuous bust with no boom ever.

So the graph there shows a huge jump in GDP per capita after Labour took power and opened up the UK to mass immigration in 1997.

Am I reading this info right?

Check out these numbers:

GDP per capita for the US, EU, and some others: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?end=2023...

The US was & is ahead per capita but you can see the EU and Canada taking a big hit in 2008 and going sideways after that.

Here's full GDP. It tells a different story due to the EU's larger population. There have been several occasions where it actually had a larger economy than the US; but every time it seems to hit a roadblock and go sideways for a decade (1980, 1995, 2008): https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?end=2023...

Brexit was around the same time as COVID, so hard to split the two.

>> It's also way higher than it ever was back when Britain was monoracial.

Yes, but the immigration model has changed. It used to be "let the best and brightest from around the world work and live in the UK" now it is "let anybody move here that is willing to work for less money".

Well, no, actually. It's not hard to look at the expected effects of brexit and examine whether they are occurring. For example, decline in small forms exporting to Europe due to trades friction.

"But the working assumption of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the government's independent official forecaster, is still that Brexit in the long-term will reduce exports and imports of goods and services by 15% relative to otherwise. It has held this view since 2016, including under the previous Government."

"And the OBR's other working assumption is that the fall in trade relative to otherwise will reduce the long-term size of the UK economy by around 4% relative to otherwise, equivalent to roughly £100bn in today's money."

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrynjz1glpo

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

You mean the same civil service that was against Brexit from the start, still tries to justify it being a bad idea? Amazing.

You even didn't include the paragraph prior to your quote:

"It's also clear UK services exports - such as advertising and management consulting - have done unexpectedly well since 2021."

I realise Brexit was a horrible shock for the middle classes that they are still coming to terms with, but I think long term it will be neutral or positive. Now that we have a more pro-UK president there is even scope of trade deals with the USA replacing some of the "lost" EU trade.

Right - I included the bottom line on trade. There's plenty more context in the article, and only a small sliver is at all good for the Brexiteer. Everyone agrees it's been between 6-30% worse on the trade front, and the OBR estimate is middle-of-the-road in that regard.

Enjoy the kool-aid.

"Everyone". Everyone said there would be a run on the pound as well.

Stay delusional.

"Would be a run on the pound" is forecasting, just like expecting that Brexit will eventually be neutral or slightly positive. The article reports agreement on past/present facts.

"And the OBR's other working assumption" - Assumptions no more weight than forecasts.

The obr is not the only source here, but one among many.

You seem very invested in ignoring evidence that before wasn't a great idea. This suggests you're more interested in ideology than evidence-based reasoning. It's distressing that "free thinking" has become an excuse to ignore evidence and pursue vibes-based policy.

Are you counting the English, Scottish and Northern Irish under the same racial group?

The root cause of there not being enough homes is our failure to build enough homes, decade after decade.

France has over 4 million more homes available than the UK, as stated in the report linked in TFA.

> With almost identical population sizes, the UK has under 30 million homes, while France has around 37 million. 800,000 British families have second homes compared to 3.4 million French families.

You are correct. Immigration exploded under Blair, and exploded again (from its previous high) under Johnson. That is the root cause of the housing crisis.

Look at how many people in their 20s were able to buy homes in the 1990s, then look at immigration levels in that decade.

You and the other person who pointed this out got downvoted. As you say, it's forbidden to bring this up. But it's true. Immigration has benefited the very wealthy and upper-middle classes while screwing the middle- and working-classes.

I think it's the same issue as with deficits. The issue isn't that it's a forbidden subject but that people are put off by arguments that don't fully address the causality.

With deficits it's not just spending but also how much revenue you're raising which is instrumental to understanding the problem, and anyone who tries to tell you it's only one or the other is not a reliable narrator. It is similarly the case that access to housing has every bit as much to do with housing policy as it has to do with population dynamics.

>Immigration has benefited the very wealthy and upper-middle classes

A great reason to make more housing and to make housing more accessible to lower and middle classes. Your comment was so rich with pro housing policy subtext that I just want to bring that to the foreground.

The article itself points out that this isn’t the cause of the crisis, and that the misunderstanding of the crisis results in this exact argument.

However, the emotional aspect of this question is what needs to be addressed.

Britain is leaving its citizens out to dry. Well - you need to get with your legislators and more importantly neighbours and decide that you are ok with new housing being built, which ISNT for the rich, very rich, and super rich.

Actual middle class housing.

You need a boom in construction to start dealing with the fact that there isn’t enough affordable housing available. Hopefully that will give the UK enough to restart its growth, and then tackle the issue of railways.

A big part of the problem is the UK used to let in about 100 thou immigrants yearly, that figure is now over a million per year. That means putting up a new house every few minutes. Unless you let Lagos or Caracas-style slums flourish, that’s not going to happen.

One of the reasons the Grenfell Tower disaster was so bad, is you had about 130 apartments with about 650 people in them. Illegally sub-let by the official council tenant.

The Grenfell Tower disaster happened because they chose to clad the building in plastic. If the building had in-wall insulation and no cladding or non-flammable cladding like say steel the whole thing would be a minor fire in one apartment.

Is it better to deliver low-quality housing or none at all?

The guy with no housing would be better served even with a large cardboard box, but the police would come and take it away from him if he tried.

Banning the symptoms of the problem doesn't solve the problem.

The problem is high pop growth. If they regulated the growth to a manageable level, the problem would be manageable. As it is they are importing other countries' housing problems. We saw that in the Us in the 1920s where we had slums and boarding houses. At least in the US we have land. Places like the UK and Japan have limited land. Canada, Brazil, Argentine, Libya have lots of land, the UK does not.

If you can't get local population to grow, you have to bring in your labor from somewhere else. And of course, like most wealthy nations, the British birth rate has been in the toilet since the 70s.

This is also a reason that Brexit happened. Arguably the reason, even. There are a lot of working-class people whose families have been in the British Isles for centuries who look at the lack of progress relative to what their ancestors saw during the Empire and postwar eras, and want someone to blame. In this case it was Brussels' migration policies, even though it was providing essential labor that the British economy needs and cannot get from "real British" people because they don't have kids at the necessary rate.

>If you can't get local population to grow, you have to bring in your labor from somewhere else.

Self-fulfilling prophecy... local populations can't grow when they're starved of housing, energy, and most importantly of all, jobs.

If I didn't know any better, I'd say that the current system of capital distribution wasn't providing those things adequately.

But that'd be silly.

That would be silly. Those things are supplied in the required quantities... but there's an oversupply of people to take them. People who don't even have a reason to be in the countries that we're discussing. Implementing marxism won't change anything anyone cares about.

Who said anything about Marxism?

> Those things are supplied in the required quantities

What makes you think that. The UK does not have soviet style socialism. The only supplied products and services come from the free market which right now is dysfunctional

Countries will have to adapt to lower or even declining birth rates and deal with it. The world cannot just keep on growing indefinitely, unless we populate Mars or whatever. The UK, Korea, El Salvador, Israel, Netherlands, Rwanda, etc., will have to learn to make their economies work with a steady state workforce even a shrinking workforce ala Japan.

Definitely, but the economies will likely won't be able to sustain your current style of living. Say goodbye to your electronics (including the one you are reading this comment on). Return to something closer to an agrarian economy until the birth rates go up. Will we agree to do this?

No. Hence, conflict will ensue everywhere

Ironically, once "free" from Brussels, none of the conservatives have actually stop the migration rate or reduce it to nearly zero and they have not been honest about it either

Why is the answer always more real estate, and not private ownership of housing? If you don’t live in it you can’t have it.

UK House ownership rates are pretty high, but they went down right after the global financial crisis, presumably because the banks had tighter lending rules: https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/214874/economics/why-its-...

House prices are also way up. Lots of people who own them really like this, but it makes it harder to become a home owner in the first place.

For most people who own houses it's probably not relevant that the value has gone up?

If you upgrade you pay the margin, which is higher. Legal/admin/moving costs tend to be a percentage of house value, so costs are higher.

When you retire you might downsize and release a lot of equity, but that's not going to be true for most house owners (happy to be proved wrong) - downsizing is for the wealthy, if I ever downsize it will be to a cardboard box.

Most home owners will have children, prices being high negatively effects them, and finances tend to be somewhat shared (from 0% upwards...) so prices being high is a problem here too.

Maybe I'm missing something about the situation. I guess my kids will be happy for the money when I die, but it'll be easily eaten up by their housing debts.

So people without dependents; people who are very wealthy. Apart from those groups I don't really see how house value changing after purchase helps

> If you upgrade you pay the margin, which is higher. Legal/admin/moving costs tend to be a percentage of house value, so costs are higher.

Indeed.

But psychology: monkey likes seeing number go up.

>> Why is the answer always more real estate

Because as the population grows, we need an equivalent amount of new housing. Short of that, we compete for limited inventory and prices rise.

>Because as the population grows, we need an equivalent amount of new housing.

In the UK (but also most elsewhere), population no longer grows. If censuses say differently, it's because immigrants are being imported from overseas, not from any organic growth. To believe that this is righteous is a strange thing, one has to accept that British people should suffer so that immigrants can gain.

You think the population is not growing in China or India? What a weird take.

Also, any resident is part of the population.

I don't at all see how private ownership would help anything.

As a former landlord, I would not compete with buyers on a potential rental property. I'd rather pick it up cheap because it is an investment. So the correlation between ownership and prices is not as clear to me, and landlords may provide some market making service. The connection between supply and prices is very clear, however.

Another issue is that historically low mortgage rates pushed up the maximum price of house that people could afford, and when rates went back up the market stalled out rather than price correct. I don't know how to fix that.

Because of the lack of building, 1 in 200 families are homeless?

https://www.bigissue.com/news/housing/britains-homelessness-...

Yes, getting rid of private landlords would be great but our housing crisis is far, far bigger than that.

Secondly, having a small amount of rental accommodation is useful. If I switch jobs and move cities then having somewhere to rent while I get on my feet is a good thing. I would agree that it's now gone too far though. Perhaps just having a small amount of government rental locations could solve this.

Have we tried just taxing land?

Set tax bands radiating from the centre of a city. The centre gets a higher rate than the edges?

We get a lot of dead towns because of speculation on land.

It does mention a previous instance of the Thatcher government failing because the insider had this exact mindset...

The last government intentionally banned the cheapest source of energy, onshore wind, from being built in England, by making it so that a single complaint could stop a project.

I cannot believe this article talks about planning constraints and energy prices and doesn't mention that.

I hate the large scale turbines. I'm sure small scale or other designs are OK. But screw the large turbines. Where I grew up they outsourced the jobs and then we were left with ugly giants ruining the once beautiful mountains. It's on par with strip mining (aesthetically).

I like em.

They're one of the only pieces of technology that I think often (not always) improve the appearance of a landscape.

Maybe also lighthouses. Sometimes.

Lighthouses have only become aesthetic because of their rarity rendering them as quaint or nostalgic. Modern versions and their impacts would be largely protested.

I suspect the real reason behind objections to technology being visible is basically "It makes me feel old by highlighting that I came from a time before X and now everyone will just become accustomed to X!".

And I'm like "whoa, I'm living in the future!" It's awesome!

People forget that the natural landscape of Britain is forest. The enclosed fields people think are natural countryside are in fact an entirely human creation.

Ecologically, it is basically barren.

What? Pastures? Grassland are actually good for biodiversity.

I'm sorry you're saying people think agricultural fields are natural vegetation?

Yes. The gently rolling fields of grass, sheep, rape and wheat are considered a national symbol of our natural environment in need of protection from dastardly human creations such as wind turbines. This is the 'green and pleasant land' that William Blake wrote about.

I’m not sure anyone consciously thinks that, but the kind of nostalgic “old England” thing is big on fields and grass, not so much forest.

The "natural landscape" is a pretty meaningless concept in Britain. Are moors not natural landscapes because they were formed hundreds or thousands of years ago? Is it natural when animals do something but not when humans do it? Or is it natural when hunter gatherers do something but not when agriculturalists do it? Or is it natural when non-industrial people do it, but not when industrialists do it? And why does your chosen definition matter? Is the natural landscape better than human-modified landscapes? Is a change always fine if the starting point was created by humans?

If you replaced the ancient figures carved into the chalk in England with wind farms would that be fine because they arent natural features?

It's unclear what point you're making with reference to the blanket ban on onshore wind. I wouldn't like to see turbines on Cerne Abbas or Dartmoor. Nobody wants that, as far as I'm aware?

I would like to see more of them on the generic grass/wheat/rape fields that cover much of England. That was prevented by the blanket ban.

> The "natural landscape" is a pretty meaningless concept in Britain

It's quite simple: there is none. Moors are created by farming and logging. All woodland has either been planted and managed by humans, or self-seeded on land cleared by humans. Aside from a handful of tiny patches (which are questionable) there is no primeval forest in Britain.

You can't find a principled stance for a naturalistic fallacy.

I mean on that basis you could say that Milton Keynes is natural because humans did it.

I think the point is more that none of it is really "natural". But also yes? We are animals.

Aren't these also massive mass bird slayers ? The last I read, over half a million birds were killed (official under-estimate) by wind turbines in UK alone every year

And the Exxon Valdez and the Deepwater Horizon were good for birds?

Bringing up bird welfare to oppose wind turbines is bullshit. If people cared about birds or wildlife we wouldn't be in this mess at all.

It's usually the types of birds that are affected that upset people. Many ideal locations for windmills (in particular mountainous regions, dunno about offshore) happen to also be ideal places for threatened or endangered large raptors.

Likewise, there's the (unproven) connection with noise generated by offshore wind farms disturbing wildlife migration and movement, especially among whales.

It'd be nice to know that we're not replacing one disaster with another, though I'm out of date on my personal research as to whether any of these concerns still warrant further investigation.

> Many ideal locations for windmills...happen to also be ideal places for threatened or endangered large raptors.

The person I replied to was making a quantity-of-birds argument. Not an endangered species argument.

> there's the (unproven) connection with noise generated by offshore wind farms disturbing wildlife migration and movement

Do they make a lot more noise than giant cruise ships? Luxury yachts? I don't see much of a movement to ban those. It's almost like people decide the things they want to have for themselves (undisturbed views), then make up whatever noble-sounding reasons (whales, birds) will preserve those things.

> Bringing up bird welfare to oppose wind turbines is bullshit. If people cared about birds or wildlife we wouldn't be in this mess at all.

Your comment seems to be a blanket opposition to bird welfare in general, not a limited critique of quantity harmed. I do think the distinction remains important, hence why I made my post.

> Do they make a lot more noise than giant cruise ships? Luxury yachts?

Given that the ships are itinerant and their turbines are much smaller, I do believe the type of noise pollution they generate is qualitatively less harmful. I imagine the scale is something along the lines of:

    1. windmills
    2. sonar
    3. marine vehicle engine and turbine noise

Windmills take the top spot for being a constant barrage over a large area.

Sonar gets the second for the extreme volume some ships (esp. military) are capable of producing, though there are far fewer of them.

Marine vehicles come last. There's a greater danger of animals being hit by fast moving boats (for example, manatees) than discombobulation from engine and turbine noise.

> Your comment seems to be a blanket opposition to bird welfare in general

I don't know how you got that. I just think a lot of fake bird lovers come out of the woodwork to oppose wind turbines because of $MADE_UP_REASON. Real wildlife lovers recognize that clean energy is good for wildlife.

> I imagine the scale is something...

Do you have sources for this scale?

> Windmills take the top spot for being a constant barrage over a large area.

They're also static, so animals can just avoid them. Their blades spin a hundred feet above the water.

Ships move around so their sounds can be anywhere. Their propellers spin in the water. And there are way more large ships than offshore windmills.

You are going to freak out when you find out how many birds are killed by buildings generally.

But you might want to sit down before i tell you how many are killed by cats.

That number is a heavy under-estimate and deliberately lowered for public consumption. But, you might want to sit down - The real slaughter is well in the millions annually.

And all of those numbers pale in comparison in how we cruelly we treat birds used in the food supply chain (eggs, chicken etc).

The recent kurzsesagt video is a great intro to the topic ( https://youtu.be/5sVfTPaxRwk)

This is completely and utterly irrelevant to the topic at hand. Wild bird populations are potentially at risk, and extinction of a population has massive ecological consequences. Commercially raised chickens and the horrors they are exposed to are completely unrelated to that.

I would hardly call it "utterly irrelevant" that in a discussion about "killing birds is bad" someone mentions that it is not usually considered bad to kill birds for food.

Killing wild birds accidentally is completely different from raising and bucthering birds for food, from virtually any point of view I can imagine. People who have no problem with eating meat will still not find it OK to kill a pet pig, and might still consider sport hunting wild boars to be barbaric.

"completely different" and "utterly irrelevant" are not the same thing. They also aren't completely different. They have things in common (killing and harming birds).

You're trying to turn "I don't care about that" into "it's logically incorrect to care about that" which is not a game you can win.

Life is still life, pain(not only death) caused needlessly whether windmills or in factory farms is still cruel. Birds are intelligent, curious, emotional, they are social animals and get depressed.

Other attributes the bird may have (wild/bred) or species (rare/common) has no bearing on the pain and kind of death they suffer. The importance of those attributes is lens we see from, it does not change their suffering.

> People who have no problem with eating meat will still not find it OK to kill a pet pig

It doesn't make it acceptable to view life raised for food[2] as a lesser (therefore ok to be tortured) than other life because they are pets, merely because it is common practice.

How is it different than valuing human life was valued differently in age of slavery or even today if you say correlate level of aid, support, news coverage or empathy to simple numbers on human conflict impact[1].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-armed-conflicts...

[2] The argument here is not becoming vegetarian, it is about not torturing needlessly what we need to eat. The human equivalent is akin to not following Geneva conventions in a war not abolish war altogether, while ideal everyone agrees is not practical today.

> massive ecological consequences

As opposed to the minimal ecological consequences continuing to burn fossil fuels are currently yielding you mean?

The real issue seems to be that they might kill protected birds more often than buildings or cats, which seem to kill smaller common species (usually of lesser concern).

So, 500,000 birds out of 250,000,000?

Aka 0.2% of birds.

How many birds do coal power plants or other power sources kill?

Real number is well above that. Everyone involved in bird conservation agrees this number is a fraction only reported for public consumption - real number is well into the millions. You can ask organizations like ABC birds.

Everyone agrees? I don't agree.

Corrected.

I doubt everyone agrees on anything. If you have contrary numbers please just save all of us the time and share them.

Ugghh. I meant everyone in bird conservation. The ABC article explains why the official numbers are a heavy underestimate. But this was in 2021 - it has gotten worse since then. This is not unique to the US - my personal experience of this was in India.

https://abcbirds.org/blog21/wind-turbine-mortality/

And the recommendation from those people is: choose the sites more carefully. Not stop or slow down, just:

> Climate change is a critical threat to birds. Recognizing this fact, ABC supports renewable energy, including wind energy, and the transition away from fossil fuels. However, not every wind project is proposed in a suitable location.

I doubt that wind turbines are the only power source that kills birds. Marginal bird deaths per unit of power production is the interesting statistic. This MIT post [1] links to a 2009 study [2] which provides that comparison:

  Wind/nuclear: 0.3-0.4 birds/GWh
  Fossil: 5.2 birds/GWh

So if you’re pro bird you’re pro wind power.

[1]: https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/do-wind-turbines-kill-birds

[2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601...

4.98 birds/GWh in the fossil fuel estimate comes from unrealized climate change expectations. They also only looked at two coal power plants for the remainder of the study.

The nuclear source bird death estimates are extrapolated from one bad weather incident over two nights from a single plant on the Florida coast.

This is not a serious or rigorous study. Is there anything more recent?

> comes from unrealized climate change expectations

Wow.

“I reject your reality and substitute my own.”

You can dismiss any source by saying “nuh-uh” but you need to back it up to be taken seriously here.

I live in an area where there are a lot of wind mills along a nearby range of hills. There is also another taller hill which allows you to look down on the wind mills. In all the times I've driven up there and stopped to look out at the vista there were no birds at the base of the windmills. None. On any of them.

Did you read a Donald Trump tweet? Because no reputable source has ever said wind turbines are a major risk to birds.

If you’re trying to save birds, the first place you should be looking is outdoor cats.

https://www.sibleyguides.com/conservation/causes-of-bird-mor...

> Did you read a Donald Trump tweet? Because no reputable source has ever said wind turbines are a major risk to birds.

I don't care about Donald Trump. (How did this even become about him ?) And your second statement is laughably false as even elementary research would tell you.

Do note that there are ~100 million cats and only ~70k wind turbines, if you use US as a reference. Cats are clearly not the top-predators of birds anymore.

> I don't care about Donald Trump. (How did this even become about him ?)

You said you “read” about turbines killing birds (shockingly with no citation). There is literally nobody else claiming such stupidity.

> Do note that there are ~100 million cats and only ~70k wind turbines, if you use US as a reference. Cats are clearly not the top-predators of birds anymore.

Do note, a tiny fraction of the 100m cats are outdoor cats. And yes, they are absolutely one of the top predators of birds and have been for decades.

Humans in the UK killed and ate over 111,000,000 birds just in January 2025.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/poultry-and-poultry...

They also raised about 110,000,000 birds that otherwise would never have been born. This is completely irrelevant to wind turbines or any other power generation tech - the impact on wild birds is what is of concern, because, by definition, we're not able to raise any number of wild birds we'd like to have.

While indeed irrelevant for the original point. I would encourage you to educate[1] yourself on the life these birds have before you make claims we're doing them a favour by bringing them into existence.

[1] https://www.dominionmovement.com/watch

I made no such claim, I was only mentioning that in relation to the fact that population size of domestic birds is not impacted at all by the massive killing, while population size for wild birds might be dramatically impacted by a much smaller number of deaths.

I find the horrors of industrial animal farming horrendous, while not having a moral problem with the idea of raising an animal in decent conditions for slaughter.

It isn't completely irrelevant; they didn't mention wild birds, or any wider context - the way they commented was as a shock number, the intent of that is "wind turbines kill $bignum, stop wind turbines". The relevance of the much bigger shock number is to put it in context - human activity slaughters a lot of animals.

Okay, something else which affects wild birds: "Bird corpses were counted - and, where possible, identified - at 166 locations throughout Britain during the summer of 1985. The survey covered all roads except motorways. It is the most recent such study, and the most comprehensive. The results were depressing. A minimum of 30 million birds are killed on Britain's roads every year. Depending on the assumptions made in the statistical analysis, the death rate could be even higher: 70 million a year is not impossible."[1] And that's as well as wild rabbits, hedgehogs, badgers, foxes, deer, and so on killed by cars which wind turbines don't affect.

So the wildlife in the UK would be much better off if we built more viable alternatives to driving and road trucking than if we scrapped wind turbines. We can also note that people are working on wind turbines that don't kill birds, e.g. [2]. It's not a fixed fact that all wind turbine designs do the same damage.

In the context of a world where fossil fuel propaganda really does exist[3] and Trump's recent executive order on unleashing energy generation where he tells government departments to look for all kinds of energy sources on their land - geothermal, hydroelectric, oil, gas, anything - except wind or solar - exists, and in the wider climate change context where there isn't a magically perfect answer - and where the UK is uniquely well suited in Europe to wind power - it can't just be left that "sensational $bignum means stop wind turbines" with nothing else mentioned.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/carnage-on-...

[2] https://www.audubon.org/magazine/surprisingly-simple-solutio...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX2aZUav-54 - Climate Town video on how the gas industry sets up groups of 'concerned citizens' which pay social media influencers to post about how great cooking with gas is, and agitate politically while obscuring the source of their funding, among other things.

> "by definition, we're not able to raise any number of wild birds we'd like to have."

(but we can; the UK has 30 million homes; if 500,000 of them put up wild bird feeders, that would lead to more wild birds. Again the context of the comment was the shock value of $bignum not a comment on specific species or habitats or desired outcomes).

I disagree. I think they are rather pleasing to look at. Especially compared to a coal fired power station.

"The cheapest source of energy" trope again. Intermittent energy (electricity) != on demand electricity.

Cheapest source is accurate. It may not eliminate the need for expensive LPG, but reducing the amount needed is still a massive benefit to the economy.

Check out "The Price is Wrong" by Brett Christophers[1]. It explains at length that what matters is not price, but how profitable an investment is. And how wind and PV don't look great without subsidies in various guises.

1. https://www.amazon.com/Price-Wrong-Capitalism-Wont-Planet/dp...

You distribute pv and wind over large areas and they get destroyed by weather, get dirty, require significant maintenance. If individuals want to have wind turbines or pv installations that's great - but these things are a giant mess at grid scale - absolutely awful.

> they get destroyed by weather

We get anything from storms to hail few times a year here. My patio roof got holes in it from the ice balls, but the panels are fine. Are you missing some qualifiers on that one?

> get dirty

You clean them every few months or monitor for issues per group of panels.

> require significant maintenance

Just like every other device out in the real world. Coal, gas, wind, solar, nuclear, thermal generators require maintenance.

What I think the GP is blowing completely out of proportion is:

> they get destroyed by weather

A few of them, every year. It makes a visible dent on their average longevity.

But I don't think distributing them has any impact on this. They just create a risk situation that nobody seems to be insuring and that large farms will self insure without problems. (Anyway, with the price going down the way it is, that will soon become irrelevant.)

> get dirty

Each person stopping to clean their own panels is much less efficient than professional cleaning centralized panels. It does increase your electricity costs.

> require significant maintenance

Home maintenance is an entire other level of inefficiency. That extends to any kind of equipment in your home.

But again, none of those is a big deal. Solar is mostly operation-free, so distribution mostly doesn't matter.

We were originally discussing offshore wind. These things have to function in some of the harshest conditions imaginable. We don't really fully understand how weather patterns will change over time with climate change. The idea that these factors won't represent serious risks to output over 50-year lifespans is delusional. We should be building modern nuclear reactors. Small scale distributed solar in sunny environments is fine - the rest of this stuff is just a massive waste.

That's not a significant issue. O&M costs are a given and not wildly out of step with traditional generation. If you want to talk about cost effectivness the thing that matters is either a)transmission capacity and interconnects for distributed generation b)storage for centralized generation. As long as you're ok investing in 1 of the 2, distributed generation is great.

Yeah of course distributed infrastructure is ... Bad???

Oh no we have no single point of failure, empower people to invest into the grid and have huge redundancies in the grid... Batteries literally solve most of the problems

Don't forget to factor in the possibility of lithium shortages in the next decade. Batteries don't solve anything if you can't build them.

https://themarketbull.com.au/2025/02/07/lithium-remains-a-ke...

Coal and oil also solve nothing when you can't mine it or drill for it… and those who can, refuse:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_United_Kingdom_miners%27_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis

So are we going to ignore Sodium Ion batteries then that are looking to enter mass production?

Call me when they stop looking.

Here's your wakup call: https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/worlds-largest-sodium-io...

Not even close. This is about global needs.

It doesn't need to be lithium.

Nickel-Iron batteries are very good for this purpose: practically unlimited charge-discharge cycles and overcharging/overdischarging won't damage them. They should be dirt-cheap too, but almost there are very few manufacturers so there's not much competition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93iron_battery

This may be true, on a watt basis. It also ignores the physics of a synchronous grid. You need to produce exactly what you use at any given moment. If you fail to do that by a little bit bad things happen. If you fail by a lot, the grid fails. You need to be able to get power when you need it, not when it's convenient to your generation plant. If you want to compare solar or wind to something more dispatchable you should really be using numbers from either a pretty massive distributed overbuild or including storage or both. Otherwise it simply isn't apples to apples. I am an electrical engineer specializing in the design of control systems for renewable generation.

Sounds like an excellent reason to use massive numbers of highly distributed sources that ramp up and down predictably.

That's what over building is. It also requires massive investment in transmission infrastructure because your core assumption is that power in one place get get to load in another. It turns out that transmission costs many many times what the generation does

It's misleading, and those who use it generally know it's misleading. It's used to persuade the layperson that electricity generated by wind turbines is cheaper to the consumer or industry than electricity generated by thermal sources or hydro turbines, when in fact that is only true if you disregard the requirement for said electricity to be available on demand - a fairly important omission.

I often wonder how many people would accept automatic black outs when buying green energy. A process that "happens" here. You can buy for example purely wind powered electricity. But somehow that does not stop being delivered when there is no wind.

Instead there would be electric relay connected to mains in your home and when there is less supply than demand you would get blackout. That would be similar comparison to this.

Assuming you also get closer to wind generation prices not just overall wholesale prices, it would be really popular.

People would install a battery at home the way most of the world installs solar and they’d see massive reductions in electricity bills more than paying for the battery. The UK is absolutely terrible location for solar, and it’s still installed because UK’s electricity prices are so high.

That said, wind going to absolutely zero nationwide is extremely unlikely but the more people who signed up for such a system eventually just a little power wouldn’t be enough for all of them. So there’s be an economic feedback loop.

There is no reason for anyone with a wind park to sell cheap if there are customers willing to pay a high price.

That said with a battery and dynamic prices, there are many days where you can charge a battery when the prices are low and use them battery when the prices are high.

Constant pricing means they make more when wholesale prices tank and less when whole prices rise. I’ll sell you X% of my output for Y$/kWh is a perfectly valid strategy and batteries can absorb output spikes just as they absorb blackouts.

Hedges like this are a useful risk mitigation strategy as going bankrupt is a much larger downside than making slightly more money.

This fine. But from the fact that prices are sometimes high, we can conclude that overlll there is a shortage of windpower. Which will factor into the prices. The owner of the windpark can take the prices for each hour, and compute weighted average with production. And set that as the constant price.

So the consumer does not gain anything.

Curtailment means there’s a different between what wind farms can produce and what the grid is willing to buy.

Wholesale prices are really just one aspect of grid manufacturing and paying them doesn’t mean you’re getting the equivalent of a percentage of wind farm productivity.

Whole blackouts? probably not a lot but for instance https://www.pnmpowersaver.com/overview/frequently-asked-ques... in NM and I assume other places have similar programs

Large users like the supermarkets have agreements with electricity providers that they will reduce their use at certain times in return for a discount.

Tesco doesn't care if the freezers in store run at 04:00-04:15, or 04:30-04:45, and will pick whichever is cheaper.

Most electricity use is not required to be available on demand, there is a high, constant level of demand and the occassions where there is enough wind to exceed demand are rare enough to generate headlines. World Cup final kettles are the exception, not the rule.

There are also interconnections between the UK and Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Netherlands and Norway. Excess supply can be exported, assuming there's demand.

Which completely ignores the differences between investment costs and running costs across different technologies.

Open cycles gas turbines are extremely cheap to build and expensive to run. For a green future these can be run on biofuels, hydrogen or hydrogen derivatives.

Therefore they perfectly complement renewables.

Nuclear power on the other hand is an awful companion due to having extremely large fixed costs and acceptable marginal running costs.

So by this argument all baseload generation prices are a lie too?

The coal or nuclear plant that commits to generating a set amount consistently but never even attempting to meet the actual demand is some kind of hoax?

In reality we're moving from baseload and peaker gas plants to follow demand to renewables and firming (the same gas plants just running at different times). It's a holistic system with parts working together.

The main difference is that renewables are cheaper and cleaner which gets them built faster and displaces more and more coal and gas from the market. With batteries eating the market from the other direction (starting with daily peaks and expanding out from there).

You can see this in carbon intensity of electricity production and the ever increasing share of renewables around the world.

Of course that plan falters a bit if you ban cheap onshore wind across an entire nation for a decade.

the denial of capacity factor makes me want to tear my hair out

Capacity factor is calculated into lcoe, what's your point? Moreover, downtime for wind turbines is much less of an issue for a grid than large power plants (even with a significantly higher capacity factor), because you run into much bigger issues if your GW plant is down, compared to a couple of MW (and no the probabilities of all your renewables mix going down at the same time is very low, unless you're Luxemburg).

Capacity factor is calculated in. But intermittency is not. The issue is that once demand is saturated during periods of peak production, the excess energy is wasted so the effective capacity factor drops as adoption grows. E.g. once you saturate daytime energy demand, further investment in solar energy yields no more useable energy.

Intermittent sources are a good way to supplement dispatchable sources of energy like gas plants or hydroelectricity. But as a primary source of energy, they're not feasible without a massive breakthrough in energy storage.

it's possible (and fairly easy) to build infrastructure that only turns on when there is excess energy

You can see the breakdown of electricity usage here: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect...

For residential uses, heating, cooling, and refrigeration are the main uses.

For commercial electricity use: computing, refrigeration, cooling, and ventilation.

For industrial electricity use: machine drive (lathes, mills, etc.), process and boiler heating, facility heating and cooling, electrochemical process.

The only categories that I guess could be easily shifted is process and boiler heating. But some industrial processes need to run uninterrupted for weeks. Machine drive, perhaps, but then workers would not be able to work a regular schedule. Not to mention, industrial applications in total is less than 25% of electricity use.

Demand shifting is a lot easier said than done. I see it proposed very frequently, but I've yet to see a detailed plan for what electricity uses will be shifted, and how.

This is about the UK. We're now less than 5 years away from when every new car will have a battery. In 10, none of them will have an engine.

The deadline in the UK is currently 2035.

Labour have pledged to bring it back down to 2030, but when they begin the talks with the motor industry to try to achieve this they will fold like they have done several times so far in this government.

> For residential uses, heating, cooling, and refrigeration are the main uses.

Heating and cooling can be offloaded into grid peak availability hours relatively easily with the price serving as a reliable trigger. This assumes proper insulation for the most part, but is viable and using the price as an indicator automatically sets up the right incentives. As for refrigeration, the energy use for that in a private household seems to be overstated.

> For commercial electricity use: computing, refrigeration, cooling, and ventilation

For cooling the same applies as for private households, maybe to a lesser extent. The other loads remain pretty static in their demand, but once a commercial operation has a certain scale building out the own battery storage to optimize for purchasing price (assuming a flexible price that reflects spot pricing) may be a viable strategy.

> For industrial electricity use: machine drive (lathes, mills, etc.), process and boiler heating, facility heating and cooling, electrochemical process.

For boiler heating and facility heating and cooling the same applies as for commercial and residential uses. For other energy intense workloads, demand shift is already frequently happening because the ROI is fairly quick. It’s not easy to assess from the outside because you do need an in depth process understanding that you just cannot provide as an outsider. But I have personally witnessed plenty of examples that demonstrate it is well within the realm of possibility

Heating and cooling can only be offloaded in extremely wellinsulated houses. A lot of the ones in the UK do not make the cut. Even some new EU ones do not.

If you try to offload it otherwise you just waste power heating/cooling yourself at wrong hours.

A boiler in this setup is a thermal battery. These are good, but space consuming and relatively failure prone and expensive to maintain. Inefficient compared to central too.

Are you arguing for or against offshore wind?

Tackling climate crisis requires All The Above.

Wind, nukes, solar farms, tidal, whatever, by themselves, aren't silver bullets.

We also need heat pumps, renovations (insulation, air sealing), district heating, etc. That's just for housing.

We could also talk all day about industry and agriculture.

As the saying goes: The opportunities are insurmountable!

Nuclear power is indeed a silver bullet. France supplied > 85% of its electricity demand with nuclear (with the rest being filled by pre-existing hydroelectricity). As is hydroelectricity and geothermal power for those countries with the appropriate geography. E.g. Norward produces 100% of electricity through hydro. Non-intermittent sources of energy don't need to be supplemented by alternative sources of energy.

Whenever a cold spell hits France 10 GW of fossil production is started and 15 GW of exports turns to 5 GW of fossil based imports.

The French grid would collapse without 30 GW of fossil based production to manage cold spells.

Using absolute units instead of proportional figures is deceptive.

This is Frances' electricity generation breakdown: https://aleasoft.com/france-leading-european-nuclear-energy-...

Fossil fuels are 7%.

Why are you lying then? Why are you attempting to shift the topic?

You said:

> Non-intermittent sources of energy don't need to be supplemented by alternative sources of energy.

Like I said the. The French grid would crash during cold spells if not supplemented with 30 GW of fossil fueled power production.

They could always build more nuclear plants to fill additional demand. Again, non intermittent sources don't need supplemental sources of energy, as long as there's sufficient supply. By comparison, a country cannot possibly run their grid entirely with solar on account of intermittency.

I'd suggest reading people's comments in greater detail, before accusing people of lying.

So now you suggest that we should build peaking nuclear plants in an attempt at covering your previous blunder with pure insanity.

Lazard expects peakers to run at 10-15% capacity factor because you know, how often do we have cold spells in France or whatever other reason causes them to run? A couple of weeks a year at most. Lets say 15%.

Lets calculate what Hinkley Point C costs when running as a peaker. It has a CFD at $170/MWh for 30 years. Lets assume it runs at a 85% capacity factor and that $20/MWh are O&M costs.

153/0.15 + 20 = $1040/MWh

You want to solve the problem by forcing electricity costs on the consumers at double of the peak of the energy crisis.

All because you view the world in nuclear fanclub fantasy land glasses.

If you've already provisioned enough nuclear plants to meet peak energy demand, producing less energy has no marginal cost. Alternatively, you can just keep operating at full capacity, and give energy away for free and use it for energy-intensive tasks like desalination or arc furnaces. The idea that we'd build nuclear plants that only operate a few weeks per year is a strawman of your own construction.

You're right that nuclear is more expensive than continuing to burn fossil fuels. And the reality is nobody has a plan to build fossil fuel free grid based on wind and solar. Absent a miraculous breakthrough in energy storage, solar and wind will always have to be deployed in tandem with fossil fuels. If we're looking at actually eliminating carbon emissions, nuclear is the only viable option besides geographically limited sources like hydropower.

Now you start dodging.

Typical. Let me quote you:

> They could always build more nuclear plants to fill additional demand.

And then

> If you've already provisioned enough nuclear plants to meet peak energy demand, producing less energy has no marginal cost.

If the magic tooth fairy comes with free nuclear plants... Nuclear cult member fantasy land.

So at what capacity factor will the entire fleet run at when built out to manage both outages and cold spells requiring 30 GW of fossil fuels to handle?

France currently run their fleet of 63 GW at a ~70% capacity factor. Add another 30 GW (lets call it 100% reliable when a cold spell hits) and the capacity factors vastly lower due to extremely low utilization factors of the last 30 GW.

You can spread out the lower of capacity factors across the entire fleet or just let the peakers bear them.

But in the end the results are the same because you still need to finance the your fleet now delivering a measly 45% capacity factor.

Lets translate a 45% capacity factor to Hinkley Point C numbers:

Now you are forcing the consumers to pay $355/MWh or 35.5 cents per kWh for all electricity delivered the whole year.

All you have done is take the ~$1000/MWh cost from 15% of the time and spread it out over the whole year.

Do you see the pure insanity of what you keep proposing now?

For the third time, I never said nuclear was cheaper than contuing to burn natural gas. It has the distinction of being the only non-intermittent source of carbon-free electricity besides geographically contrained sources like hydroelectricity and geothermal power. It is the only viable path to decarbonization for most countries.

What's the alternative to nuclear power for reaching a carbon-free grid? No doubt, your plan will assume a breakthrough in energy storage that delivers orders-of-magnitude more scale than existing solutions.

Why do you keep trying to alter what you said? Can't you stick to the truth?

> It is the only viable path to decarbonization for most countries.

The research disagrees with you.

See the recent study on Denmark which found that nuclear power needs to come down 85% in cost to be competitive with renewables when looking into total system costs for a fully decarbonized grid, due to both options requiring flexibility to meet the grid load.

> Focusing on the case of Denmark, this article investigates a future fully sector-coupled energy system in a carbon-neutral society and compares the operation and costs of renewables and nuclear-based energy systems.

> The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources.

> However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour.

> For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...

Or the same for Australia if you went a more sunny locale finding that renewables ends up with a grid costing less than half of "best case nth of a kind nuclear power":

https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost2024-25Co...

Or if you want meta analysis have articles like:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

But they are of course all wrong by some tiny insignificant factor you will now pick up and attempt to blow up like it would be the end of the world.

Again, why are you talking about cost, when the real question is viability? How does the study you linked plan to accommodate intermittency? The answer is just a vague statement about storage mechanisms:

> Storage of energy is an important element of 100% RE systems, especially when using large shares of variable sources like solar and wind [14], [40]–[42], and it can take various forms [43]–[45]. Batteries can supply efficient short term storage, while e-fuels can provide long-term storage solutions. Other examples are mechanical storage in pumped hydro energy storage [46], [47] and compressed air energy storage [48], [49], and thermal energy in a range of storage media at various temperature levels [43], [50].

Nowhere do they actually outline how much storage of each system they will provision. How many TWh of batteries? How many TWh of pumped hydro? Totally unanswered. They just mention the existence of storage, and avoid any tangible discussion of scale. Like I said, there's no realistic plans for a grid primarily powered by intermittent sources. The storage required for such a grid is orders of magnitude larger than what can be feasibly provisioned.

This isn't a tiny insignificant detail. It's is a foundational part of a primarily renewable grid. And nobody has a plan to solve it that doesn't amount to "assume some different system, which has never been deployed at scale, can tens of terawatt hours of storage".

Love that you try to avoid the issue of cost. Yeah, in the land of infinite money and resources you can do anything.

In the real world the energy crisis was a cost crisis. But you seem to no care the slightest about massively increasing the ratepayers bills and by that creating a new self made energy crisis. This time fueled by nuclear subsidies.

So you skipped the first two studies. I suppose because you found nothing to complain about in them. Good to know.

Then you go on a meta-analysis on the entire field and demand them to produce a TWH figure for some energy system you can't even specify.

You truly are grasping for the straws.

Here's the quote you missed:

> Much of the resistance towards 100% RE systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible since these energy sources are variable. Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276]. However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]– [282]; storage [40]– [43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]– [92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place.

> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive. Variability, especially short term, has many mitigation options, and energy system studies are increasingly capturing these in their 100% RE scenarios.

With the conclusion based on the meta-analysis:

> The main conclusion of the vast majority of 100% renewable energy systems studies is that such systems can power all energy in all regions of the world at low cost. As such, we do not need to rely on fossil fuels in the future. In the early 2020s, the consensus has increasingly become that solar PV and wind power will dominate the future energy system and new research increasingly shows that 100% renewable energy systems are not only feasible but also cost effective. This gives us the key to a sustainable civilization and the long-lasting prosperity of humankind.

Since the study was released in mid 2022 has it become easier to harder to create 100% renewable energy systems? Easier.

> Here's the quote you missed:

Nowhere in that quote does it list how much of each type of storage is required. Again, they just list a range of storage systems, most of them never deployed at scale, and just don't even bother to lay out a concrete plan. The quotes you're posting are fitting this pattern of vague statements about storage and a total absence of concrete plans.

How many TWh of batteries? How many TWh of pumped hydro? How many TWh of some more exotic storage systems like compressed air or hydrogen? There's a reason why plans for a renewable grid don't go into this detail and stick to vague statement: actually sketching out how much storage would be required would show just how infeasible it really is.

Like I said, proponents of a mostly renewable grid don't have a plan to address intermittency. Or rather their plan is, "assume something solves storage, and don't worry about it".

I have already given you all that but you keep dodging instead single mindedly focusing on what is outside the scope of a meta studie of the entire field.

Trying to frame it like you disprove something when you truly don’t. You can go and read the individual studies it sources the statements from, which are then used to build those arguments arguments.

But I suppose that is too hard when you gotta find any possible straw to grasp instead of accepting reality.

Lets go back to the to studies you’ve decided to completely ignore. Likely because they answer your complaints and you haven’t found any nitpick to paint as the end of the world.

So again:

> For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...

Or the same for Australia if you went a more sunny locale finding that renewables ends up with a grid costing less than half of "best case nth of a kind nuclear power":

https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost2024-25Co...

> I have already given you all that but you keep dodging

No, you have not. The quotes you posted just list various storage systems and don't bother to set specific capacity requirements. I'll ask again:

How many TWh of battery storage are provisioned in your hypothetical 100% renewable world?

How many TWh of pumped hydro?

How many TWh of other storage? And what are these alternative storage systems?

The posts you link only talk about the cost of storage, but not the total capacity requirements. This is important, because 12 hours of storage for global electricity consumption is 30TWh. Only about 1 TWh of batteries are produced each year globally. So actually trying to provision grid scale storage would massively increase battery demand and drive up prices. This is the a reason why nobody wants to talk about the total capacity requirements for a primarily renewable grid.

12 hours of storage is likely more than needed. With a 20% nuclear, 40% solar, 40% wind generation mix (for a very simplified example), you will have solar producing solid power for 10 hours, with wind and nuclear keeping up overnight.

However lets say that it is 12 hours/30TWh. In 2023, the world produced ~1.1 TWH of batteries. In 2014, the world produced 0.05 TWH of batteries (with steady growth year over year while prices fell by 10x). If you give grid scale batteries a 5 year lifespan (before recycling), that means we need 6TWh/year of grid scale battery production, which at current rates of increase in battery production, we are 5-7 years away from.

For comparison, 5-7 years is roughly the time it takes to build a single nuclear reactor.

This is under current assumptions which hinge primarily on political will and regulation - not on physics or true construction time.

Unfortunately 12 hours of storage is still going to be a shortfall, even with overproduction. Researchers analyze historical weather data and simulate how renewable grids would perform on that historical trends, measuring periods of underproduction. Even with 50% overproduction and 12 hours of storage, we're still looking at an unacceptably unreliable grid: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z

> However lets say that it is 12 hours/30TWh. In 2023, the world produced ~1.1 TWH of batteries. In 2014, the world produced 0.05 TWH of batteries (with steady growth year over year while prices fell by 10x). If you give grid scale batteries a 5 year lifespan (before recycling), that means we need 6TWh/year of grid scale battery production, which at current rates of increase in battery production, we are 5-7 years away from.

Even ignoring the fact that 12 hours is insufficient, you're making the following assumptions:

1. The production of batteries will sextuple in the next 5-7 years.

2. 100% (or close to 100%) of battery production will be dedicated to grid storage.

3. Electricity consumption will remain static.

The first one may or may not pan out. Battery production is already bottlenecked by resource extraction, and it's unclear if the rate of extraction can keep up. The nature of extraction is that once easily accessible deposits are exhausted, companies shift to the harder-to-access deposits. This is only economically viable if cost increases enough to incentivize that investment. The HN crowd tends to assume that everything adheres to Moore's law, but that doesn't work in reality. The price of steel, for instance, doesn't exponentially decline.

The second two are certainly not true. EV are predicted to make up the vast majority of battery sales. Redirecting batteries to grid storage would necessitate delaying EV adoption, ultimately increasing emissions. Stationary storage accounts for a small fraction of battery production (https://rmi.org/the-rise-of-batteries-in-six-charts-and-not-...). Electric vehicles only account for a bit under 20% of vehicle sales worldwide. With many countries slated to stop sales of ICE vehicles in the next 5-10 years, we're still looking at most future battery production going to satisfy EV demand even if it grows to 6TWh per year as per your assumptions.

And electricity use will certainly increase. Both as poorer countries develop and start deploying air conditioning and other electricity consumption. And as other sources of primary energy consumption is shifted to electricity. Remember, electricity generation only makes up ~40% of total energy consumption. The remainder will have to be converted to electricity as part of full decarbonization.

That nature paper is garbage. It's imagining a grid that is 100% solar+wind, which no one is proposing building. Changing that to a grid that has 20% nuclear/geothermal would completely change the figures (in that it would dramatically shift the wind/solar ratios).

Also my battery assumptions were missing the fact that the world already has ~5TWh of hydro which can be used as a battery (even when not pumped hydro by releasing only when you need power).

Dams don't double as energy storage in the same way as batteries. Their rate of recharge is limited by precipitation. You can't run a dam turbine in reverse and fill the dam with excess power (you can with pumped hydro, but we have way less than 5 TWh of that). The best you can do is totally shut them off and let them refill. And in reality, dams have to constantly release a minimum amount of water to avoid creating a totally dry riverbed.

Open the study. It provides a Sankey diagram showing the entire energy flow of the Danish energy system. You know, all those TWh you want.

Why do you keep dodging? Because you truly can't bring yourself to read anything that would disprove your nuclear fanboyism? You truly keep tumbling strawmen instead of disproving the studies.

Pathetic.

I'll add the studies without any picked out quotes:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...

Or the same for Australia if you went a more sunny locale finding that renewables ends up with a grid costing less than half of "best case nth of a kind nuclear power":

https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost2024-25Co...

Come one now. Stop dodging! Is accepting that nuclear power is horrifically expensive that scary? Is your income dependent on the nuclear industry?

The cost of nuclear is primarily from regulation/human decision making that prevents it from externalizing its costs onto the environment (decom costs, waste handling) not physics. Wind and solar are limited severely by physics and they are much more vulnerable to a changing climate. China eating its own dogfood with heavy investments in renewables is meaningful but only illuminates some of what is happening. A significant amount of this stuff is going into the ground in 25 years and it won't be handled with nearly the safety and care as waste streams from nuclear power.

All I see is a bunch of excuses to nuclear power not delivering. Nuclear power has had a negative learning curve throughout its entire life.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

And don't come and tell me that the Uranium supply chain is cleanest thing known to mankind. It currently is generally outsourced from the west because the enormous amounts of cost managing the externalities adds. Especially the processing steps from raw uranium to fuel rods.

You are being purposefully aggravating here because your argument is weak but it's been socially supported for some time now. Nuclear power lagged behind renewables due primarily to proliferation fears and subsequent over-regulation in most of the world, not technical flaws, missing out on innovations like modular reactors. China’s pushing ahead with 150 GW by 2030, leveraging nuclear’s advantages: it’s compact (1-4 sq mi/GW vs. solar’s 10-20), reliable, and resilient to extreme (and simply changing) weather, without reliance on rare earths or massive storage (with their own host externalizations and supply risks). Costs can drop to $50-100/MWh with new tech and long lifespans, rivaling renewables when accounting for their hidden expenses (storage, grid upgrades). Proliferation risks exist but can be managed with oversight. Nuclear remains the best bet for scalable, clean energy.

Nuclear power has famously had negative learning by doing throughout its entire life.

There was a first large scale attempt at scaling nuclear power culminating 40 years ago. Nuclear power peaked at ~20% of the global electricity mix in the 1990s. It was all negative learning by doing.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

Then we tried again 20 years ago. There was a massive subsidy push. The end result was Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto and Flamanville. We needed the known quantity of nuclear power since no one believed renewables would cut it.

How many trillions in subsidies should we spend to try one more time? All the while the competition in renewables are already delivering beyond our wildest imaginations.

China is barely investing in nuclear power. At their current buildout which have been averaging 5 construction starts per year since 2020 they will at saturation reach 2-3% total nuclear power in their electricity mix.

China is all in on renewables [1]() and [2] storage.

Then rounding of with some typical ”SMRs” nonsense!!!

SMRs have been complete vaporware for the past 70 years.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc...

Or just this recent summary on how all modern SMRs tend to show promising PowerPoints and then cancel when reality hits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XECq9uFsy6o

Simply look to:

- mPower: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%26W_mPower

- NuScale: https://oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2024/10/29/the-rise-and-f...

And the rest of the bunch adding costs for every passing year and then disappearing when the subsidies run out.

[1]: https://reneweconomy.com.au/chinas-quiet-energy-revolution-t...

[2]: https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-storag...

It's too costly to build high speed rail in many parts of the world (California for instance). It's not because high speed rail isn't a viable solution, it's regulation.

The article you posted from sciencedirect supports this. The study points primarily to a changing complex regulation landscape as a primary driver of costs. Meanwhile, France is in an excellent position in the EU in terms of energy in large part because it stuck with nuclear instead of attempting unsuccessfully to transfer to wind and solar like some of it's neighbors (who now burn lignite to meet energy demands).

Solar panels, for instance, are mostly made in places where actual costs of construction are externalized to the environment and workers with depressed wages. Nuclear plants need to be built and decommissioned in the same place - places that are often actively hostile with complex regulation meant to curtail nuclear specifically for the sake of non-proliferation. SMRs help sidestep a portion of this hostile regulation but there are countless reactor designs that are possible that we can't even begin to explore until regulation is made reasonable.

Given that Flamanville 3 being 7x over budget and 13 years late on a 5 year construction schedule even the French are wholly unable to build new nuclear power.

We should of course keep our existing fleet around as long as it is safe, needed and economical.

Then you round of with an endless stream of excuses as to why nuclear power does not deliver.

The only thing hindering nuclear power is its economics. Otherwise less regulated countries would pounce on the opportunity to have cheaper energy. That hasn’t happened.

Where nuclear power has a good niche it gets utilized, and no amount of campaigning limits it. One such example are submarines.

So stop attempting to shift the blame and go invest your own money in advancing nuclear power rather than crying for another absolutely enormous government handout when the competition in renewables already deliver on that said promise: extremely cheap green scalable energy.

Unsubsidized renewables are today cheaper than fossil fuels. Lets embrace that rather than wasting another trillion dollars on nuclear subsidies.

Your figures for China's mix are meaningless because you don't bother to mention when you think "saturation" occurs. They are on track to build far more Nuclear than 2-3% of their current mix in the next 20 years - and this is as the world's top manufacturer of solar and wind products.

Love the excuses when apparently China was not building as much nuclear power as your fantasy land imagined.

You do know that nuclear power as a share of the Chinese electricity mix is dropping?

Heating and cooling cannot be easily load shifted. Daily fluctuations in energy production aren't the only forms of fluctuations. Seasonal fluctuations are large, too. And the seasonal variation has the unfortunate tendency to line up with periods of high energy demand. "Just don't heat your house in the winter" is not a viable form of demand shifting.

> For boiler heating and facility heating and cooling the same applies as for commercial and residential uses.

Note that this refers to "process and boiler heating". There's plenty of industrial processes that need to be kept at temperature for long periods of time, otherwise the batch is ruined. Titanium smelting is one example. I've yet to see a breakdown of what specific industrial processes can be shifted.

> Capacity factor is calculated in. But intermittency is not. The issue is that once demand is saturated during periods of peak production, the excess energy is wasted so the effective capacity factor drops as adoption grows. E.g. once you saturate daytime energy demand, further investment in solar energy yields no more useable energy. > > Intermittent sources are a good way to supplement dispatchable sources of energy like gas plants or hydroelectricity. But as a primary source of energy, they're not feasible without a massive breakthrough in energy storage.

Intermittent sources are baseload, your argument applies to any baseload system, I.e. you always need some additional dispatchable energy source (unless you over build by large amounts). Again if your main energy would be e.g. nuclear you need even higher amount of dispatchable power because if your nuclear plant goes down (planned or unplanned) you need to compensate for a lot of power.

>Intermittent sources are baseload

This statement is about as incorrect as it is possible to be, as even a cursory attempt to check this before posting would show.

It is difficult to understand why anyone makes claims such as this, unless they are consciously or unconsciously attempting to redefine a word that already has a well-understood meaning.

"Base load" refers to electricity demand, not sources of electricity. Things that consume electricity are a "load". The "base load" is the level of energy demand that is always present in the grid. E.g. if a grid consumes 5 GW of electricity at peak demand, and 4 GW at minimum demand, then 4 GW is the base load.

The effect of overcapacity is null or negative price, which has the property to make more storage viable (who cares if it only gives back 25% if the input is free or very cheap), so I'd say intermittent sources overcapacity is an enabler of on grid storage.

E.g. today in Germany you can buy MWh at 14€ at 13:00 and sell it back at 180€ at 18:00. I didn't look all of Europe but it looked like the biggest spread today... You can make money with crappy storage under those conditions...

This is precisely why intermittent sources aren't viable without a breakthrough in energy storage. Existing storage mechanisms aren't capable of delivering at the tens to hundreds of terawatt hour scale required to make intermittent sources viable.

Remember, 66.8 TWh of electricity is used daily. Intermittent sources don't just experience daily fluctuations, but seasonal fluctuations lasting days or weeks. Even 12 hours of storage would still leave us with periods of insufficient production multiple orders of magnitude more frequent than the status quo: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z

Wind Energy, like Solar Energy can be stored in Battery Energy Storage Systems to provide reliability to the grid in the event of shortages.

Batteries aren't produced at remotely enough scale to be viable for grid storage. To put this in perspective, the world uses 60 TWh of electricity per day. By comparison global lithium ion battery production was 1.1 TWh [1]. Remember, production capacity is distinct from the actual production figures. It's typical for actual production figures to be ~50% of production capacity.

Intermittent sources don't just experience daily fluctuation, but also seasonal fluctuation. Even just 3 days of storage amounts to an impossible amount of batteries to provision, even assuming growing battery production capacity. Not to mention, even modest amounts of battery grid storage would severely hamper EV adoption, which would increase emissions.

There's a reason why most plans for a primarily wind and solar grid assume that there will be some technological breakthrough that solves storage: hydrogen, compressed air, alternative battery chemistries, etc. are really common to see in plans for a primarily renewable grid.

1. https://interactanalysis.com/insight/global-li-ion-battery-s...

Nobody, really nobody asks for the whole world consumption to be stored in batteries.

This is such a bullshit argument it really paints the rest of your comment in a bad light. You can get so far by just storing up to 12 hours OF NIGHT TIME on a local level. Who cares about the 5% of times where we have to burn natural gas to stabilise the grid.

95% renewable is orders of magnitude better than today. Anyone saying different is literally a grifter.

Also battery storage cost prognosis is 50% less in 5-6 years. Batteries are already cost effective and there are a lot of grid storage options build right now.

Because fuel costs only matter so much. You will still need exactly the same number of natural gas (or similar) plants with 12 hours of battery vs. 1 hour to cover seasonal events in most places on the planet. Until your battery backup can supply a week or more worth of power you have simply created an inevitable disaster in the making.

No one is building a natural gas plant to staff it and let it sit idle for 95% of the time. The natural gas burned is only a fraction of its input costs.

Battery storage is headed in the right direction but the fact almost all articles on the subject can’t even get the units correct as it would betray how ridiculously small the deployments actually are is quite telling in itself.

The grifting are those pretending magic natural gas backing plants are going to pop up out of nowhere and not including that capital or maintenance expense when quoting intermittent power source costs.

Right now those sources have been able to cherry pick the cheap and easy problems to solve since they’ve been using someone else’s power when they can’t meet demand. Eventually you run out of it though.

Cheap intermittent sources have their place, and should be used maximally wherever possible. For example every watt of hydro production should have a watt of solar or wind built on top of it. Store the water for when the intermittent sources can’t keep up with demand.

> No one is building a natural gas plant to staff it and let it sit idle for 95% of the time. The natural gas burned is only a fraction of its input costs.

Serious question: why do you think that’s true? If it costs X per year to run it 5% of the year and you save more than X with this strategy, then the maths is simple and someone will build it. Several energy companies could probably be convinced to each pay a share so no one is left footing the whole bill but everyone benefits from the existence of the facility. If the maths works, potentially even some of the cost could be passed on to the taxpayer.

In the UK we already have a couple of facilities that operate exactly like this, Cruachan for example (it’s not gas, it’s water). Over the years, ways to improve its utilisation have been found, but it’s still sitting there at a relatively low portion of its capacity so that it can black start the grid if it’s ever needed.

> Serious question: why do you think that’s true?

Because it has been, at least thus far. Perhaps in the hazy future this will change, and some regulatory/capacity/energy market will evolve into making such things profitable by paying someone to build underutilized power plants. I know of no such market currently.

I'm only somewhat familiar with the US market, not the UK. But a single plant is really not interesting for the discussion at hand. It can be considered a cost of doing business to have such a plant be useful for "black starts" - but that's all a single plant will ever be useful for. If it's ever being used for such a purpose you've already lost the game.

The scale is what matters. A single power plant that is 1% of your grid capacity being utilized 5% of the time is an expense that can probably be justified. Hundreds of power plants that match 100% (or close to it) of your grid capacity used 5% of the time would be an economically unjustifiable expense as you've effectively built your entire generation capacity twice.

Right now that's what we would be talking about building since every regional grid seems to experience week (or longer) periods where intermittent power generation is extremely unreliable due to weather events. It's not 100%, but it's close to it. You need to plan for the 1000 year event for something as critical as a national grid or folks literally start dying and the economic impact is astronomical.

I don't know what the exact capacity factor you'd need to have for a reasonable intermittent:dispatchable ratio, but it's certainly quite a lot higher than most would seemingly believe. Once batteries get to the point of backing the entire grid for a single night while the wind doesn't blow there might be signs of change. In most markets in the US where batteries are considered huge successes they have only recently (in the past year or two) transitioned from providing ancillary services to actual energy production for regular daily usage during the duck curve.

This can all be solved in time and in theory with a number of technologies and additional grid interconnection. But the trends simply are not as positive as one would like to see when you start delving into primary sources.

> But a single plant is really not interesting for the discussion at hand.

Maybe, but the UK has 4, and is building another 5 in the next 5 years.

Average grid consumption is somewhere around 30GW, the existing facilities have around 30GWh of storage. The additional 5 should bring around another 100GWh.

So we’re already at 1 hour’s worth of grid capacity stored, by 2030 we’ll be at 4 hours, and that’s assuming absolutely zero energy from other sources (wind, solar, nuclear, fossil fuel, biomass, other countries), although to be fair the existing facilities can only deliver at around 3GW, and the new facilities will only bring that up to 6GW.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever been to the UK, but a whole week without either sun or wind seems a bit unlikely, especially when half of the UKs wind comes from offshore wind farms.

Stick in a few more of these, and keep a couple of the existing fossil fuel plants around in case of emergencies, and I can definitely see how this continues to be just a “cost of doing business”.

I appreciate the situation in the US may be worse.

> This is such a bullshit argument it really paints the rest of your comment in a bad light.

I responded to a comment stating that excess storage can be stored in batteries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43249008 I'd suggest reading the comments people are responding to before calling them bullshit.

> You can get so far by just storing up to 12 hours OF NIGHT TIME on a local level.

"only" 12 hours of storage is 30 TWh of storage, at the world's current electricity consumption rates. This is an immense amount of storage, amounting to decades worth of global battery production. And that's ignoring the fact that the vast majority of batteries are going to electric vehicles, not grid storage. It's true that battery production is growing, but electricity demand will similarly grow as fossil fuel use in transportation and industrial processes are electrified. Out of all of our fossil fuel use, electricity production is only ~40%. Not to mention, poorer countries are developing and will eventually start deploying refrigeration and air conditioning on similar scales as developed countries.

12 hours of night time is not 30TWh The world is currently at 26TWh A DAY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_energy_consumption

Let's say it is 30Twh a day in 2030 - you can calculate 50% less energy usage during night making it 20 TWh during daytime and 10Twh during night time. This excludes large wind farms that add to base load if you average over the world. There is always wind somewhere around you.

Realistically if we reach 5Twh storage we are able to be >90% renewable.

Having 5Twh of storage is of course not an easy feat if estimates are correct we will have 6.5TWh battery production in 2030. If we amount for 10% of that used in grid storage we would need a decade for a 90%+ renewable grid. There is no faster method. It is realistic.

Are you including energy usage that's currently not electricity but should be in the future?

https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf suggests 240 TWh of storage is required, but also that that's a realistic target

why should I? I have no idea how fast adaption rate are, we can calculate what it would cost for the current grid to be feasible and work based off of that.

Ah yeah the magical 107 Twh hydrogen capacity. How far off is that? That's a pipe dream.

This is a plan for anything past 2050. I'm talking right now.

> 12 hours of night time is not 30TWh The world is currently at 26TWh A DAY

From your link:

> The global electricity consumption in 2022 was 24,398 terawatt-hour (TWh)

24,398. / 365 is 66.8 TWh of electricity used per day. And again, that's current electricity consumption. Before industrial processes are electrified. Before poor countries adopt air conditioning at the same rates as rich ones. Before transport is fully switched to EVs.

> Let's say it is 30Twh a day in 2030 - you can calculate 50% less energy usage during night making it 20 TWh during daytime and 10Twh during night time

That's not how th consumption curve works. Even in the summer, the ratio of daytime to nighttime energy use isn't so high. And in the winter it's inverted, with nighttime energy use exceeding daytime use.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915

If we are heating with electricity and cannot use gas storage to make up for the seasons, chemical batteries are nowhere near price effective, or even physically or projected to be available.

You can find out how much energy Europe stores in gas fields to get through the winter. You can divide that number by what you think is a reasonable sCOP for your heat pump. That number you can put next to total battery capacity ever produced, and I'll even let you add any other convertible energy storage capacity. You will find a gap off by orders of magnitude, and powerwalls in every home are not going to cover it. As you said, they'll cover a day, maybe a few, which leaves us 3 months short in the season where we have virtually no home solar.

Of course burning that gas to generate electricity for use in heat pumps would get you the same heat for half the gas even before you include any wind power (or hydro etc.)

That then doubles your storage for gas that you may or may not need to burn depending on the weather.

So really the path to fully renewable just goes through a series of win-wins on the journey to fully phase out fossil fuels.

Sure, switching to heat pumps doubles (probably triples) your storage, or, cut the storage energy in the form of gas by 66%. But, I thought we were discussing decarbonzing the storage too. Looking at that amount of energy, (chemical) electrical storage isn't even in the right ballpark yet. And other forms neither.

Modelling in Australia with simulations that multiply up current wind and solar (using real-time data of actual renewable generation) [1] showed that well over 99% of demand can be delivered with only about five hours of storage, so we're not really talking about days.

There will likely always be some gas peaking but we're talking less than a percent per year (maybe a few single digit percent in some places where solar isn't as good but still not much).

1. https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100pct-renewable-grid-for...

> Modelling in Australia with simulations that multiply up current wind and solar (using real-time data of actual renewable generation) [1] showed that well over 99% of demand can be delivered with only about five hours of storage, so we're not really talking about days.

That's still a gap two orders of magnitude larger than existing standards:

> Meanwhile, reliability standards in industrialized countries are typically very high (e.g., targeting <2–3 h of unplanned outages per year, or ~99.97%17). Resource adequacy planning standards for “1-in-10” are also high: in North America (BAL-502-RF-03)18, generating resources must be adequate to provide no more than 1 day of unmet electricity demand—or in some cases 1 loss of load event—in 10 years (i.e., 99.97% or 99.99%, respectively)19.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z

Even leaving 1% of demand unfulfilled amounts to multiple orders of magnitude more frequent electricity production shortfalls. Figures like "fulfill 99% of electricity demand" might sound promising, until you compare against the standards of reliability modern society expects of the electrical grid.

And that's in Australia, quite literally the best-case scenario for renewables. By comparison, in Germany even 12 hours of storage would only satisfy 80-90% of demand.

The thing is you can calculate when there will be short falls and you can amount to that perfectly. We now know the weather pretty much 1 day before it happens. adjusting that 1% of course amounts to maintaining natural gas facilities but it's really not that big of a deal.

Using natural gas means climate change still progresses. Not to mention you'll be paying all of the overhead cost of maintaining natural gas plants, but only use them for a fraction of the time. So net cost per watt hour will be very high.

And it will still be cheaper than any other alternative.

Correct, continuing to emit fossil fuels is cheaper than decarbonization.

But some of us are trying to stop, not merely delay, climate change.

Australia is a hot country, with lots of sunshine, lots of windy coast and not a lot of people per square mile. And peak demand (summer days for AC) corresponds for peak solar irradiation.

Europe, for example, is the other way around for most of the above.

> "Batteries aren't produced at remotely enough scale to be viable for grid storage."

The idea that if we can't have a renewable grid identical to the fossil fuel grid, then we may as well stick with the fossil fuel grid even if it means the end of the world is a bit weird.

The UK's biggest energy need is heating, but the housing stock in the UK is famously shitty, 38% of homes were built before 1946 and it's the worst value for money of any developed country[1]. It isn't well insulated, triple-glazed, heat-pump fitted, using local industrial waste heat for home heating.

Heat is harder to move than electricity, but easy and cheap to store - this 2019 pilot project can store 130MWh of heat for up to a week[2], something we couldn't reasonably or cheaply do with 130MWh of electricity.

It's possible that energy and electricity requirements could be reduced meaningfully without dropping quality of life, and that meaningful amounts of energy could be stored in heat and synthetic gas[3] rather than in more expensive electric charge storage.

[Is this used Nissan Leaf at 30kWh for £2,000 the cheapest battery storage I could buy in the UK right now?[4]]

[1] top few results from https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=uk+housing+stock+low+qualit...

[2] https://www.siemensgamesa.com/global/en/home/press-releases/...

[3] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/were-going-to-...

[4] https://www.autotrader.co.uk/car-details/202502289581699

> Similarly, in the U.K., any individual who sues to stop a new project on environmental grounds—say, to oppose a new road or airport—generally has their legal damages capped at £5,000, if they lose in court. “Once you’ve done that,” Bowman said, “you’ve created a one-way system, where people have little incentive to not bring spurious cases to challenge any new development.”

Not directly stated about wind power, but there is this account of why lawsuits might be common, slowing and derailing projects because the damages if you lose in your complaint are capped at a relatively low figure (not low for the average person, but not that expensive either).

> not low for the average person, but not that expensive either

I think this is very high for the average person.

I'd wager that for the sort of person who has the desire to care deeply about stopping windmills being built (perhaps feeling a need to 'conserve' the old way of doing things), instead of say, worrying about putting food on the table - this is pocket change.

But not for someone thinking their £2m house will “lose value”

There are a lot of rich people in the U.K.

Of course, but I think a country can't survive long term if it's focused on raising the property prices of those with already expansive houses especially given the demographic slowdown/collapse. Or am I crazy?

Of course not. But that’s right change the nimby or indeed banana viewpoint

I don't understand this sort of response. The context is the average person. What do you mean in that context?

It doesn't matter about the average person if it only takes one successful objection to stop a project.

I think you misread it. The context was, _not low_ (ie. high) for the average person. For someone with a higher than average wealth however, £5k isn't all that much, especially if it could potentially protect the value of their assets

I was referring to the "not that expensive".

Maybe I misread it then. I interpreted it as "not low for the average person, but not that expensive _for someone with greater than average wealth_"

Yes, that's how I intended it.

£5k is a lot for the average person on £40k a year.

£5k for someone with £2m in assets and fears losing £200k due to the “blight” of a power plant is not a lot.

wouldn't have mattered

due to the screwed up energy pricing system, if there's a single watt of electricity in the grid produced by burning gas, we pay for the entire grid output as if it was gas

That is how literally everything in a market gets priced. When you buy an X, the price of it naturally trends to match the most expensive X that will be sold. In this case X is a watt of energy. But you can substitute any good or service.

Can you explain this?

In commodities market, the strike price is between the lowest price seller and the highest buyer.

In the goods market, individual buyers buy depending on their elasticity of demand unless the good has inelastic demand (rare).

Neither matches what you seem to say.

> In commodities market, the strike price is between the lowest price seller and the highest buyer.

The lowest seller price is the highest demanded price among all the sellers. All the sellers bar one would typically be willing to sell for a slightly lower price. As it is said; prices are set on the margins.

Imagine that every seller has a secret price they are willing to sell for and that is some statistical distribution. The market price will be the highest price in that distribution that actually gets sold. Most sellers aren't selling for their secretly acceptable price, but for a higher price determined by the seller with the highest demands. The distribution, if it is ever discovered, becomes the supply curve.

No product on a real market ever works like that (otherwise all goods of the same kind would cost the same everywhere in a country, priced at the marginal cost of supplying it to the most remote island community, which everyone can attest is not how markets work).

Such a behavior only happens on artificial markets that have been designed for that purpose to match an ideological vision of how an “ideal market” should behave.

Turns out the “ideal market” is a dystopia instead of the intended utopia.

> Turns out the “ideal market” is a dystopia instead of the intended utopia.

Why? This market is pretty much ideal and sets the right incentives. You have little to no information asymmetry, you need to strike a price that clears the market because you must balance production and demand.

Why should sellers of renewable energy be forced to sell at their marginal cost when they are selling a commodity where somebody else gets triple the price?

> Why? This market is pretty much ideal and sets the right incentives.

Says whom?

> Why should sellers of renewable energy be forced to sell at their marginal cost when they are selling a commodity where somebody else gets triple the price?

It doesn't make sense to force them to sell at their marginal cost either (which is much less than their operating cost, consisting mostly of fixed costs).

In fact, in real life, for most good or services the marginal price is decreasing with volume (or even zero for most of the supply curve with occasional spikes), pricing at the marginal cost means you're pricing way below the average cost and will drive all businesses to their doom.

In the electricity world, this kind of pricing only makes sense for electricity produced from fossil fuel as the marginal cost represents most the underlying cost, but it makes zero sense for renewable or nuclear where the cost is swallowed upfront and close to zero afterwards.

do you have an alternative market design in mind?

Long term contracts (or state monopoly) at price based on average cost.

Typically what existed in France and other places of Europe before we decided to “liberalize the energy market”.

> Says whom?

I do and given the practice is pretty common, it seems like most people would.

To be clear, the incentive is: you make more money when you can produce energy cheaper than everybody else.

> In the electricity world, this kind of pricing only makes sense for electricity produced from fossil fuel as the marginal cost represents most the underlying cost, but it makes zero sense for renewable or nuclear where the cost is swallowed upfront and close to zero afterwards.

Are capital costs not real underlying costs? If I borrow money from a bank I have to return that money plus interest. I would argue that this is a very real cost. Also, renewables do require maintenance. That is not as expensive as the ongoing cost of burning fossil fuel, but it’s still a cost

> I do and given the practice is pretty common, it seems like most people would.

Definitely not “most people”, only the small number of economists and politicians that designed these scheme.

> To be clear, the incentive is: you make more money when you can produce energy cheaper than everybody else.

Which is a bad incentive for an electricity market, because as I said above, “energy” is free basically free for both renewable and nuclear. What ain't free is “installed power”. And what customers need is “available power”. If you design a virtual market around things that have nothing to do with the underlying physical reality of the actual value being produced, it's simply never going to work well.

> Are capital costs not real underlying costs? If I borrow money from a bank I have to return that money plus interest. I would argue that this is a very real cost.

It is a “real cost” indeed, but it cost you the same whether you produce electricity or not, it's a fixed, upfront, cost, not a marginal cost.

> Also, renewables do require maintenance. That is not as expensive as the ongoing cost of burning fossil fuel, but it’s still a cost

Most of maintenance aren't linked to how much electricity you've produced (for solar, for instance, it only depends on time, and cost you the exact same amount whether or not you've produced any electricity), so it's again not a marginal cost but a fixed one.

And let say you restrict yourself to the maintenance that depends on electricity production (for nuclear, refueling maintenance is like that) you'll end up with a marginal cost that is very low compared to your average cost, and if you price at marginal cost then you're going to go bankrupt.

For illustration say operating your 1GW solar plant cost 200 million a year in fixed costs (including maintenance and the cost of capital) and then it costs 0 to produce a MWh as long as the sun is up. If you price it at marginal cost, then you'll never make any money, so the only hope you have is that in a long enough period the market prices will be high due to the marginal cost of fossil fuel plants, in a way that it ends up covering your fixed costs. But, as a plant owner/manager, you have absolutely no control over that, you aren't being incentivized into doing anything.

The incentive is to produce 99 Units at £1 and 1 unit at £100 and sell 100 for £10,000, rather than producing 100 Units at £1

The incentive is to sell all 100 units for £infinity. The incentive for the seller to sell at a high price isn't relevant. They don't have the ability to act on it. If they did, they wouldn't stop at £10,000. I'd pick numbers like £1,000,000,000,000 at a minimum if I was a seller and could truly set my own price based on my incentives.

That’s the beauty. The same company owns both the cheap cost one and can limit the supply just enough to keep the profit maximised.

There isn’t an ideal free market in electricity generation.

If the UK has banned all companies except one from supplying electricity then they will without doubt see eye watering prices. But that has nearly nothing to do with the pricing scheme they use and a lot to do with the one company part of the picture.

It hasn’t, howver the natural state for these companies is to merge and diversify to maximise their profits, and the cost of entry into electicity generation is not like launching a bbc backed startup.

If there's a single watt demanded by the grid and NOT supplied by gas, or coal or nuclear, because there sure as shit aren't batteries within three orders of magnitude of competitive at TWh scale, the entire grid fucking stalls and dies. At best guess, we can restart it, once.

Your renewable energy is worth 0 if it can't meet that need. No other power supply anywhere works on the principle of "yay maybe!". It's not a fucking game, it's our capacity to heat, to operate industrial processes that are equally worthless if interrupted. I've been involved in ordering steel. The UK-spec was uncompetitive if free, because of the unpredictability in delivery, directly downstream from the unpredictability in power. THERE IS A WAR ON.

The war is a very strong reason not to rely on imported gas. We've seen that across Europe. Heck, there's a pipeline through the war zone which is surviving because everyone involved depends on it.

There are two things you are paying for when you buy electricity - the electricity itself and the guarantee that when you flip a switch you get power.

Different energy sources contribute unequally to that second important factor - the stability of the grid - and that has to be factored in somehow. Nuclear, gas, hydro-electric storage and buying from abroad provide that stability in the UK.

How it's done - I've no idea - but it's not just a question of units of electricity.

One way is to bring in more surge pricing however people like the predictability of stable prices.

> I cannot believe this article talks about planning constraints and energy prices and doesn't mention that.

It doesn’t fit their agenda.

what's their agenda? (honest question, I'm not from the UK/US)

As we can see down thread, people have got into a terrible mess of duelling propaganda and gone mad about wind power.

We can have cheap clean energy, it requires a small amount of change, oh no, let's destroy everything instead.

I'm going to start suggesting that planning should have a local referendum: approve this set of projects and you'll get cheaper electricity. Disapprove and your bill goes up. Democratic choice, but with consequences.

There is something poetic, about the last charge of dying ideologies being an attack and defense of windmills.

We will see a return of composure as central element communications culture. If you get emotional or irrational angry, you are considered possessed, ridden by loas and not worthy of communication.

"I say Sir, the rabble seems to be quite in tatters and without a plan, all back and forth on windmills, but ultimately in the dark."

That would not work. Just include a few million in your budget to convince the population of SmallVille and you can start building your coal-fired power station.

The UK is still implementing the Large Combustion Plant Directive ( https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2015/1973/2015-12-31 ), so separate UK level legislation would be required to legalize any new coal plant. Very unlikely scenario.

Coal is dead in the UK, from 30% in 2014 to 0.5% in 2024.

They went a full month with zero coal electricity generation back in 2020 and 2025 will be entirely coal free.

Even natural gas is in decline.

Some people would build a coal power plant in their back yard to own the libs and fight the scurge of rooftop solar pannels destroying the country.

BBQ!!!

This has already been proposed by the current government for wind farms: https://inews.co.uk/news/environment/new-energy-bill-discoun...

And the switch to zonal energy pricing will likely have a similar effect for other sources of generation.

As a resident of Scotland, I'm looking forward to zonal pricing. It might also balance out the London centric nature of the UK, as I expect it to end up with higher prices.

I agree with the incentives for zonal pricing to encourage clean local production. The downside however is that the grid becomes defunded and a tragedy of commons ensues. We invest in common infrastructure precisely because of variance, which in the long run we hope to ameliorate.

Zonal pricing (UK) does not conflict with grid funding, it is the grid funding. It also exposes the economic incentives for allowing new grid infrastructure to be built.

I hope you're right. Incentives both ways and support for national infra is ideal. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia just showed [0] how flexible grids can be at the international level. However I think at the national level some countries aren't that happy to support national grids.

[0] https://www.dw.com/en/brell-lithuania-latvia-and-estonia-tur...

I remember this! I think Germany did something similar, and of course the US with the nuclear phase-out.

Once Solar looked to become the cheapest, Liz Truss gov tried to restrict that too.

She had time for that, before the lettuce wilted?

I see a lot of irrational online hate for wind power - even going as far as wanting to dismantle offshore farms.

I do wonder who is fermenting this - the obvious place to look here is the fossil fuel industry - they have the means, the motive and a track record of flexible morals.

A lot of currently very rich and powerful people lose in a world where most countries and even people can generate most of the power they require.

I’m not sure this is a fossil fuel industry thing. I think there are just people who really dislike the appearance of windmills in the landscape. Onshore, it is often better to put windmills on hills where they will be more prominent and so any one windmill can be ‘local’ to many people. Offshore, wind farms may ‘spoil’ a view out to sea, though they are also harder to oppose.

P.s. I think you meant to write fomenting

I come from Cornwall in the UK, and whenever I go back there I am struck by how many on shore windfarms and turbines there are there. As you drive through the countryside they are everywhere.

I have asked hundreds of local people what they think of them over the years, and not one of them have ever said anything about them spoiling the view. The farmers love them as they get subsidies for putting them on their land, and generally people think they are doing a good thing and are happy to tolerate them.

I personally dont think this is an issue with spoiling the view .

Same in Germany. Farmers (most conservative population group) love renewable energy. Every farmer I know tries to get wind turbines build on their land and have their roofs packed with PV. Yet the conservative parties are the biggest blockers for the energy transition.

Farmers love subsidies. Guaranteed price paid for every kWh they produce. Yet there is remote shutdown implemented in new large PV installations and the love is slowly disappearing.

I used to goto Cornwall regularly back in the 90s. The site of the wind turbines on the drive down always gave my heart a little flutter.

As a tourist I loved the sight of turbines on the far away hills.

They're a damn site nicer to look at than concrete cooling towers or gasometers.

It's also a convenient wedge issue, regardless of the merits in either direction.

> Offshore, wind farms may ‘spoil’ a view out to sea, though they are also harder to oppose.

In my experience off-shore wind, even off a popular tourist beech has very little impact. Often just about visible in the haze in the distance.

The impact of onshore wind is definitely more notable. I personally don't find it that offensive, I find them elegant in the day way as an aircraft might be. Also, the blot on the land could be almost completely eradicated in hours if something better was invented tomorrow. Compared to the decades long process of decommissioning even fossil fueled power plants that seems like a pretty big win.

It's why I specifically mentioned offshore - there has been huge growth in the UK of these - and most of them are so far out to see you'd be lucky to see them even on a clear day.

The logic against them seems to be - can't rely on wind power alone ( true - but nobody is suggesting that ), so we must destroy them all as a symbol of 'netzero'. It makes no sense.

>p.s. I think you meant to write fomenting

Yep. Thanks.

The conservative media (Daily Mail, Telegraph etc - e.g. James Delingpole, climate change denier) are quite capable of formenting this kind of thing all on their own, simply for clicks. The average reader is old and afraid of change. Anything new is scary to them and can easily be magnified into a massive, largely fictitious, horror.

People might object to the view of wind farms, but they'll also object to any other new building. There are quite a lot of existing power stations in scenic areas! Torness, Longannet, Cockenzie come to mind in the Lothians/Fife area; any one could be seen from miles around, as they were built on the coast for water access. The latter two have been demolished. There is no way you could build them today without a similar huge level of objection. Similarly there is a spot in the plain of Yorkshire where you used to see three coal-fired power stations in relatively close proximity, dominating the countryside.

And if you look around London, you'll see the (long closed and repurposed) Battersea and Bankside powerstations. Yes, people built several massive coal fired power stations right in the middle of the city! No wonder there was a smog problem worse than 90s Beijing or LA. Again, completely inconcievable that you could build them today.

Once you build it and it exists for a few years, the complaints melt away. Leave it long enough and there will be a society for preserving historic wind farms.

I think the complaints have also been that people close to the wind farms don't see much economic benefit from them, and only get the negative (noise, loss of countryside, etc.). I believe that's changing though https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-672...

So now I wonder if they could be built if you promised (and delivered) those people cheap electricity.

Take a portion of the profit and send it to the council to reduce everyones taxes?

Are wind farms noisey?

I get your point about a click cycle - but I think papers like the mail and telegraph are a bit more intentional than that.

BTW I was talking about offshore farms - they are typically only just visible if you are at the coast on a clear day.

The same narrative is being pushed on Germany for instance. I think it’s quite simple.

Renewable energy is a route to energy independence for various nations that were previously highly dependent on foreign nations and corporations and there are very powerful fossil fuel interconnected groups / nations that are terrified of that.

Russia wants Germany to buy Russian gas. The U.S. wants Europe to buy their gas’s too. The Saudis want Europe to buy their oil. Wind turbines, solar power and electric vehicles are a direct threat to that hegemony.

The other aligned narrative is nuclear and I consider it to be Trojan horse to continued reliance on fossil fuels at least for the next 25-30 years whilst countries like Germany would argue with NIMBY’s and politics to try and even build just one new power station.

I believe that to be the primary root cause of the geopolitical instability we see today globally.

It is not any fossil fuel, it is specifically oil and gas. Coal is not a problem for energy independence as it is much more evenly distributed on Earth.

What Germany has done with its reliance on Russian gas is truly insane. Not only they closed nuclear stations, but they also have been closing coal power stations. They should be pushing electrical vehicles and modernization of coal plants instead as China is doing. Even from green perspective an electrical car that uses electricity from a modern coal plant generates less CO2 than a car running on oil products.

> Coal is not a problem for energy independence as it is much more evenly distributed on Earth.

Not true - it's just more prevalent in Europe than oil, especially in Germany. And the CO2 emissions are much worse, which is where all this starts from.

It’s insane today. Trade was specifically a way to ensure people learn to work together.

I guess, this is the era for consequences

Voting behaviors will seem strange if you look at things exclusively through the lens of a young-ish worker when you live in a society that is 35% retirees, 5% wealthy, and 5% living off the state.

Note in terms of nuclear - using current technology you still need to dig your fuel out of the ground from very specific places in the world - though a different set of countries ( apart from Russia ).

I don't think that's correct. All you need is to enrich uranium, which is found everywhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium#Occurrence says:

> Uranium is a naturally occurring element found in low levels in all rock, soil, and water. It is the highest-numbered element found naturally in significant quantities on Earth and is almost always found combined with other elements.[12] Uranium is the 48th most abundant element in the Earth’s crust.[60] The decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium-40 in Earth's mantle is thought to be the main source of heat[61][62] that keeps the Earth's outer core in the liquid state and drives mantle convection, which in turn drives plate tectonics.

> Uranium's concentration in the Earth's crust is (depending on the reference) 2 to 4 parts per million,[11][22] or about 40 times as abundant as silver.[17] The Earth's crust from the surface to 25 km (15 mi) down is calculated to contain 10¹⁷ kg (2×10¹⁷ lb) of uranium while the oceans may contain 10¹³ kg (2×10¹³ lb).[11] The concentration of uranium in soil ranges from 0.7 to 11 parts per million (up to 15 parts per million in farmland soil due to use of phosphate fertilizers),[63] and its concentration in sea water is 3 parts per billion.[22]

> Uranium is more plentiful than antimony, tin, cadmium, mercury, or silver, and it is about as abundant as arsenic or molybdenum.[12][22] Uranium is found in hundreds of minerals, including uraninite (the most common uranium ore), carnotite, autunite, uranophane, torbernite, and coffinite.[12] Significant concentrations of uranium occur in some substances such as phosphate rock deposits, and minerals such as lignite, and monazite sands in uranium-rich ores[12] (it is recovered commercially from sources with as little as 0.1% uranium[17]).

Now, 0.1% uranium is 1000 parts per million, which is a lot more than 0.7 to 11. But that doesn't mean current technology is incapable of recovering uranium from these 300× lower concentrations. It's just that it requires processing 300× as much rock, which is expensive, so it can't compete in the market with more concentrated sources.

Mining rock is energy intensive - I think I read somewhere about 15% of the worlds electricity is spent on mining activities.

There is a danger that if you spend 300x more energy to enrich your uranium then you might achieve netzero - but not in a good way.

It doesn't affect the amount of energy required to enrich the uranium once it's been extracted from the rock, just the amount of energy required to extract the uranium from the rock. It just requires leaching the uranium from a larger amount of material.

I understand that you might randomly spread FUD like this if you haven't bothered to do any calculations at all because you don't care whether what you're saying is true or false. You're off by orders of magnitude. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Nuclear_reactio... says uranium as burned in a breeder reactor yields 80TJ/kg; if your soil contains 10ppm of uranium, you're getting 800MJ per kg of soil. Lignite coal is 10–20MJ/kg, so regular soil yields 40–80 times as much energy as a source of uranium as coal does as a source of carbon.

Or, looking at it a different way, to supply a given amount of energy from uranium, you only have to mine about 2% as much random soil as if you were mining coal from an open-air coal deposit. (Subsequent processing is somewhat different, involving leaching with sulfuric acid.) Since mining coal requires significantly less energy than the coal yields, uranium mining is not close to net-zero on its energy return anywhere in the world.

Nuclear reactors are not economically competitive with solar and PV, but that's a different issue.

Your calculations are ignoring the costs of enrichment - you can't just feed soil into your reactor - whereas you can just feed the raw coal into your furnace.

Now I freely admit I don't know the costs of enrichment. I just used your numbers - you said you'd just have to mine 300 times as much rock - and obviously that's 300 times more expensive - for something which is already not energy cheap.

ie to convince me you have to show the full costs of mining and enrichment, to the point you actually have a fuel that's reactor ready.

And even if that's net positive energy - I'd suspect you'd be much better in investing in wind, hydro, tidal and solar and a decent storage and grid system.

Sometimes I feel nuclear is fetishised because it's cool science - however I'm more interested in practical solutions, and if that means a simple wind or water turbine - so be it.

Happy to be convinced otherwise - but you need to show the numbers.

"Enrichment", in the context of nuclear power, doesn't mean extracting uranium from ore or purifying the uranium. "Enrichment" means increasing the percentage of fissionable ²³⁵U in the uranium. This process starts with extremely pure uranium, for example in the form of UF₆, so it's the same process regardless of how dilute the original uranium was. So the energy required for it doesn't depend on the concentration of the original uranium deposit.

In the case of things like coal, the energy cost of mining is significant compared to the energy obtained from it. In the case of uranium, simply because the amount of material processed is so small by comparison, it is not significant. As I showed above, it would not even be significant if you have to mine 300 times as much rock as uranium mining currently does.

Obviously you would be better off investing in wind, solar, and storage than in nuclear energy. (Hydroelectric and tidal are less clear wins.) But that's not because sufficiently concentrated uranium deposits are rare. On the contrary, there's literally nowhere on the planet where uranium is insufficiently concentrated.

It's not Russia, the US and the Saudis, it's Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, etc. honestly Aramco and Gazprom probably have very little influence on decision making in Europe and the US compared to the local interests.

> The other aligned narrative is nuclear and I consider it to be Trojan horse to continued reliance on fossil fuels at least for the next 25-30 years whilst countries like Germany would argue with NIMBY’s and politics to try and even build just one new power station.

Nuclear is not a Trojan horse, nuclear proliferation and meltdown fears condemned Europe to energy dependence. It's too late now, the capacity should have been built 30 years ago, but the successful fearmongering meant there was virtually no construction for the last 30 years[1].

The real Trojan horse is natural gas, they greenwashed it, invested and continue to invest in natural gas projects[2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_reactors_in_Euro... 2. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/06/world/eu-votes-natural-ga...

Fraunhofer Institute did an in depth study into the costs of nuclear. That it is cheaper is a myth.

Nuclear is a distraction to defocus from renewables and battery tech. There’s a reason this kind of nuclear propaganda is all over TikTok amongst right wing social media.

https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/veroeffentlichungen/studien...

https://www.unendlich-viel-energie.de/projekte/erneuerbar-st...

Never said it's cheaper. What I implied was that if the construction of nuclear reactors had continued in the 90s, today we would be in a position where fossil fuels would be a much smaller part of the energy mix.

In France for example the domestic energy production is virtually free from fossil fuels. [1]

In other parts of Europe, all the capacity that renewables provide has been offset by the shutting down of nuclear reactors. Instead of replacing fossil fuels they replaced nuclear. See Germany's energy mix for example [2].

[1]. https://www.iea.org/countries/france/energy-mix (See the second graph) [2]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:...

>I do wonder who is fermenting this - the obvious place to look here is the fossil fuel industry

Yeh, maybe. But then there is a certain class of people who live lives of wealth and leisure who like to go boating on their $10 million yachts, for whom windmills "spoil the view". And I think their opinions are somewhat consistent regardless of whether they are heavily invested in fossil fuels or not.

If it were just about windmills, the gigantic oil companies are flush with cash to invest in them and don't much care where the profits come from as long as they keep rolling in.

It's not as simple as just installing more wind turbines. The grid needs improvement and we need things like regional pricing. See https://wastedwind.energy for example.

Fascinatng that `brexit` isn't mentioned once in that article. Making trading harder with your closest neighbour can't be a great move for the economy.

Brexit is a symptom, not the cause. The people who were most screwed by Britain's prior mistakes voted for it in a vain attempt at fixing the problem by throwing misguided nostalgia at it.

What were those prior mistakes?

Allowing the concentration of wealth solely amongst the super wealthy.

The British economy was doing quite well before Brexit. Now it's absolutely crippled.

I wonder how Napoleon would react to finding out that British voted to impose the continental system on themselves.

Real GDP per capita growth for US vs UK was almost identical until 2008. The last 3 years have been terrible for the UK, but if you're looking for the start of UK's stagnation you have to go much farther back than Brexit.

The problem I see is that although the trend may have started before, Brexit caused the local financial services sector to effectively collapse and move to the Netherlands and Germany. London will never be able to recover that loss in ten generations. Had brexiters not ejected your finance industry, there was probably an opportunity to recover.

As far as I am aware, this is just straight up is not true. Do you have a source for this? Because if the financial sector in the UK halved and moved into the Netherlands and Germany the UK would be doing much, much worse, and Germany much better economically.

See:

https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/01/31/brexit-four-yea...

which is a source that is not going to be biased towards Brexit success, and instead against it (not that there was any success in it, but still).

I looked this up (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_centre#Global_Financ... ) and I think you have got things wrong.

This - the economy rode on financialisation and north sea oil for the two decades before 2008. Since 2008 there has been no real action to resolve the core issue of unlocking the potential of the North of England - everyone knows that that is low hanging fruit (human capital, regional infrastructure etc) but no one will actually take the risk and go for it.

Not really, growth in the UK has effectively stalled since 2008, quite a few years before Brexit.

I’m sure Brexit hasn’t helped, but it seems that the economic stewardship of the coalition and post-coalition governments was also lacking.

I don’t know what the UK can do about it, but it’s been stuck in a spiral of economic stagnation for over 15 years now.

That’s the time the Conservative Party were voted in and imposed “austerity”. This involved scaling back government spending and scratching their heads wondering why growth is stalled.

"Austerity is the idea that the global financial crash of 2008 was caused by there being too many libraries in Wolverhampton." - Alexei Sayle

It is insane that not only has it lasted multiple Conservative governments and appears to be alive and well under Starmer's Labour, but also that the USA has now decided to embrace it too.

I don't understand it, I thought these guys were all supposed to have studied economics (is that not the "E" in that Oxbridge "PPE" degree they all have) how are they fumbling the basics so badly

post '08 and until 2016 the UK economy was the fastest growing in the G7, notably countries that imposed much more severe austerity fared even better - Ireland who are still wedded to the policy continues to thrive, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian economies all grew at a much faster rate than the UK (and by extension the rest of the G7)

> post '08 and until 2016 the UK economy was the fastest growing in the G7,

Found George Osborne's account! Seriously though, you're wrong:

- https://www.statista.com/statistics/1370599/g7-country-gdp-g... there is one year (2014) where the UK has a higher GDP growth rate

- https://www.statista.com/statistics/1370625/g7-country-gdp-l... when looking at GDP per-capita it tells a similar story

Even reading those you can surely see it was the correct approach.

Reading the graphs I can see that you were making stuff up and can be safely ignored

Head in the sand eh? even using your data the picture is very different to what you were claiming and much closer to my assertion, so we use different sources...your conclusion is still incorrect.

Bet you're not interested in looking at the three Baltic states I mentioned or Ireland...because it would be another fistful of nails in the coffin of your purely ideological belief that "aUsTeRiTy BaD" (truthfully, some austerity is bad, but the fiscal kind).

We’d had a decade of zero growth and 30 years of industrial decline in the North. The country was not doing well, that’s the primary reason it was inevitable putting a big button marked “do not press, posh boy David Cameron says he doesn’t want you to but has no other solutions. Ignore the people saying it will fix the country” would result in the button being pressed.

The economy was doing well for some parts of the country, but you can only ignore the rest for so long.

Well now its not doing that well anywhere, bravo. Thats the problem with populists - they easily find some real issue and point to it, blaming all even completely unrelated woes on it. So far so good.

But the solution part is where all populists fail, since actually addressing it and its root causes always has to involve admitting that no, problem is actually much more complex, different etc. than I was voted for. Like trump stop blaming immigrants or its (former) allies for all US woes.

The cure? Nothing easy, intelligent moral population for democratic elections. Swiss have most direct democracy in the world, and they vote sanely even on emotional topics thinking of greater good (ie refusing 6 weeks mandatory minimal paid vacation per year for workers). That's the population bar for true democracy.

Sure, I'm not saying Brexit was the solution to any of it, quite the opposite. But it wasn't a binary choice between X populist saying "Brexit will fix it immediately" and Y mainstream politician saying "here are the complex factors causing this issue, here's how we as a country can address them over so many years". It was a choice between "Brexit will bring sunlit uplands!" and "the country's doing well, don't ruin it!".

It's not hard to understand why, given that choice, someone stuck in a Northern ex-mining town facing zero prospects, poor housing, no local amenities, massive regional unemployment or unstable employment would listen to the one pretending to be listening to their issues. Again, we'd had 30 years before that where FPTP allowed the main parties to more or less ignore huge parts of the electorate.

> Swiss have most direct democracy in the world, and they vote sanely even on emotional topics thinking of greater good

eh, somewhat.

There are still plenty of emotionally charged decisions being made by Swiss voters, like banning all minarets (in a country that had ... 3 minarets before), blanket granting all pensioneers one additional month of payment per year or routinely wrecking your relationship with the EU.

I agree that on average, the Swiss voters don't do too badly. But it's also easier to vote rationally and for the common good when you're as well off as the Swiss are.

It has preformed broadly in line with other western European economics. If you look at GDP numbers over time the big problem was COVID. The UK is richer relative to France or Italy than it was 25 years ago, but no European country has done as well as the US:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...

The old, which have been ‘criminally’ favoured by Britain’s mistakes, have overwhelmingly voted for Brexit. While the young, who have been royally screwed, voted Remain.

Yes that’s really funny. Im not sure how you can write an article like this and never even mention it once.

Brexit was the most stupid thing a country ever did to itself, and the full effects are just starting to come to the surface now. I dont think the UK will ever fully recover from it.

> Brexit was the most stupid thing a country ever did to itself

America: Hold my beer...

> Brexit was the most stupid thing a country ever did to itself

From an economic standpoint, brexit was indeed a big L, but I dont think brexiteers were largely voting on economic grounds - a point which is lost on most remainers.

from a non-economic standpoint it was just as stupid, the idea of "taking back control" is predicated on the concept that the UK was forced to accept rules imposed by others and would be free to stop doing that.

But the UK had substantial influence on those, and it no longer does, while still having to follow them to be able to do business with the EU.

And indeed, the UK has not really diverged from the EU in the last 8 years and voted a new government that wants to tighten the relationship.

It was a generic protest vote "I don't like how things are going and I was happier when I was young". I can empathize, but it was still self-inflicted harm.

It always amused me that people were voting for the clowns in Westminister to have more say. Even before Brexit they were showing how inept they all were so it was crazy to have confidence in them

As if EU parliament is not full of clowns too. At least local parliament has some windows to break close by.

- citizen of EU member, not happy with either national or eu parliaments :D

The EU parliament is elected with a much fairer system than the British one, half of which isn't even elected but nominated in return for bribes or being a bishop.

Hardly, it's full of people that each individual member state had no say on whether they were there or not.

Why should someone elected by the Polish electorate, or the Romanian one, have any say over what the British or Germans do? Especially when it's British & German money funding the project?

The EU is clearly going in a direction the British people do not like, and therefore they did the only thing they could after concessions were refused -leave.

If the EU were only interested in co-operation and trade, this would not be a problem. As it is, apparently it _is_ a problem. Why would that be, except to punish the British for daring to say "this isn't working - we don't want tighter integration"

Meanwhile, the EU continue to fiddle whilst Rome burns. British politics may be boned, but the people now have the ability to sack the lot of them as they did last summer. That is worth far more than a few % of GDP (which the British govt. have no interest in, or they'd be pushing policies that help growth - lower taxes, higher speed-limits, cheaper trains, reduction in gas prices etcetc) : as it is, all the stories we read are about slower roads, more expensive trains and higher taxes.

Common theme in EU parliament seems to be that people send politicians who shit the bed on national level for an expensive vacation to do next to nothing. Or being a celebrity in an unrelated field.

This is still better than the British system, where wealthy politicians who get voted out by their own constituents then get put in the House of Lords. It's then almost impossible to remove them.

See Zac Goldsmith for a recent example.

How much real power does House of Lords have?

But my biggest gripe with EU institutions is not EU parliament. Commission is much much worse. Especially with how special positions are assigned. It does not matter what is elected into EU parliament, each country sends someone. And that process is usually murky AF. And person being sent seems to not even know area-of-work in many cases. How EC speaker is „elected“ is yet another story. And then stories start to bubble up how this under-the-table formed EC is lobbying EP, all on our own tax money :D It'd be funny to watch if I wasn't a citizen of a member of this mess.

It no longer amazes me that people will blindly vote for 'anything different', particularly when whatever that difference might be is so vaguely defined. Indeed, it is even more effective for that 'difference' to remain vague or general winks without anything of substance to evaluate or hold someone to account on.

Brexit was absolutely about Economic conditions. Anti immigration sentiment was one big factor that everyone talks about, but in reality the sentiment itself was a symptom on display for the underlying condition of people having their living standards drop. The second big factor people kept bringing up was that EU was making decisions for UK, which people thought needed to be reversed. Austerity measures, which EU adopted, were the single biggest reason why people felt they needed more control. They also slowed down the post 2008 recovery, which meant people weren’t doing as well anymore. Anti immigration sentiment also rose once people were unhappy and needed someone to take the blame.

Absolutely agree.

When my boomer dad complains about the Pakistani family he went to sell something to having 2 BMWs it's definitely racist.

But the racism is inflamed by poor economic conditions, and the rationale is "how come these people that aren't even from here have a better life than me?"

Sadly, people seeking power know this and use the racism to get power and don't fix the underlying cause, which was never immigration — it was wealth inequality.

If they were of the same race as your dad, the question "how come these people that aren't even from here have a better life than me?" would still be valid.

If he can tell they're not from there, then he'll be mad. If he thinks they are fellow Englishmen he'll be less mad. That's the point, how prejudice often has a ground in economic conditions

It was sold as a win on all fronts. Who wouldn't want a new hospital every year?

I'm not sure people would vote for it if they knew it comes with an economic meltdown.

Maybe still they would do, though.

"We won, you lost, get over it!"

As my taxi driver neighbour in Dagenham like saying.

I attribute much of our malaise to it being a long time since anything was done on 'economic grounds'. I'd love for us to have a fraction of the desire for capitalist principles that former communist countries have.

> "I dont think brexiteers were largely voting on economic grounds - a point which is lost on most remainers."

You think remainers missed all the racism from the leave side and thought it was only about economics? Even when Boris Johnson's Vote Leave, Michael Gove and George Osbourne, Labour representatives, Green Party representatives, Nichola Sturgeon, and Unison reps were publicly condeming Nigel Farage and UKIP for their "blatant attempt to incite racial hatred" poster?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Point_(UKIP_poster)

Whilst brexit was a bad idea —- look forward not backward! Planning reform is a viable opportunity and making it as good as possible is a much better use of energy than moaning about mistakes past.

It’s an article looking back at the last 16 years - hard to do that when you’re looking forward, no?

> Brexit was the most stupid thing a country ever did to itself,

Trump tries very hard to make Brexit the second most stupid thing a country did to itself.

Already achieved, easily.

Electing Trump twice makes Brexit look relatively wise.

The US seems determined to beat that record.

Oh, based on the title I assumed the article was entirely about Brexit.

It's not great, sure, but it's only something like a long-run 2% drag. 2% is a lot, don't get me wrong! But the loss from planning is pretty high double digits, well over 10% in the US, to say nothing about the gains from liberalizing migration

A recent estimation puts the cost of Brexit as 6% of GDP, since 2020 - because that's when the UK actually left. So over 5 full years. That's a lot. And it's not a one-off either.

Oh yeah. Higher than I thought! I still doubt it's as high as housing or migration, but yeah probably the first thing after that.

Brexit.

Making trading slightly harder with 27 non-English speaking countries in a stagnating political experiment (roughly 30-50th percentile of worldwide GDP growth rates)

Making trading easier with 168 other countries, many of them English-speaking nations, and who comprise the largest and most dynamic economies on Earth.

COVID had a bigger impact than Brexit.

“To do so, it need simply remove the barriers that stop the private sector from doing what it already wants to do.”

Which is fine if resources were infinite or distribution was equal, but neither are true and the private sector will not safe guard the public sphere of the environment.

In any case, plain as day, the big problem with the UK economy was and is the 2008 financial crisis that chopped 5% of GDP off the economy. Since then every government has been faced with either doing what would be needed to make things right, or doing what is needed to get reelected. They have all picked the second option apart from Boris Johnson's administration through to Truss, who picked electoral destruction through magical thinking (on Northern Ireland and then by raising spending without raising tax to pay for it, precipitating first a crisis of politics and second a crisis of finance).

> Which is fine if resources were infinite or distribution was equal, but neither are true and the private sector will not safe guard the public sphere of the environment.

On top of that there is a part of the private sector which currently benefits tremendously from the imbalance of supply and demand.

Approximately one in five Members of UK Parliament are landlords or have investments in the property market.

So a part of the private sector is ALREADY "doing what it wants to do", and surely supports the political direction in its favor.

> private sector will not safe guard the public sphere of the environment.

In what sense are homes for people to live in not the public sphere of the environment?

What do you expect people to do? Go back to freezing in the dark?

I don't expect the private sector to fix it spontaneously if left to it's own devices.

This is (as you flag) a specifically political problem - not a commercial one. There are political fixes which are available, but have not been taken. There are planning reforms, and fiscal reforms, that could change the housing market very significantly - without enabling a free for all that would simply result in the creation of thousands of five bedroom des res's all over the home counties. This would not salve the real social ills that bad and limited housing have created, but it would destroy what's left of the countryside. England is as densely populated as India, and we need to manage what happens to land in our country in a way that Australia and the USA doesn't.

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

Australia does sort of have a land constraint problem too, insofar as there aren't a lot of places in Australia where anyone would really want to live.

Agriculture in Australia accounts for about 55% of land use.[1]

About 70% of Australian land is arid or semi arid.[2]

About 87% of the population lives within 50 kilometres of the coast.[3]

About 0.5% of Australian land area is used for housing.[4]

About 50% of Australian land area is suitable for and used for grazing.[4]

Dryland cropping, dryland horticulture, irrigated pastures, irrigated cropping, irrigated horticulture, intensive horticulture and animal production, account for about 5.14% of Australia's land area.[4]

New housing development in Australia is largely done by encroaching on some of the best land for growing food, where there used to market gardens, crazing, vegetable cropping, etc, close to towns and cities, that production is being pushed further out.

New housing development is largely captured by businesses and companies that can afford to develop the land and cope with all the regulatory burden. Even in the regional areas, a block of land suitable for building a house goes for about $280,000[5] - about 5 years median income.[6] Then you'll probably want a build a house on that land, and that's going to cost you about $300,000.[7] For a total of about $550,000.

Even in the fairly average, fairly ordinary area I live in, house prices are up about 110% since about 10 years ago.

I don't know if there's some alternate timeline where housing in Australia is more evenly distributed, or if that would result in a better life for the majority of Australians, or how to get there if we think that's good idea.

Also see my other recent comment here[8] for a breakdown of ownership of the housing stock.

Thanks for motivating me to put this comment together, I had been meaning to review this data since the last time I look at it over five years ago.

1. https://www.agriculture.gov.au/abares/products/insights/snap...

2. https://www.dcceew.gov.au/environment/land/rangelands

3. https://soe.dcceew.gov.au/coasts/pressures/population

4. https://www.agriculture.gov.au/abares/aclump/land-use

5. https://hia.com.au/our-industry/newsroom/economic-research-a...

6. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/earnings-and-workin...

7. https://www.residentialattitudes.com.au/building-advice/the-...

8. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43257766

I understand the points you are making above and can see that they are backed by the data. I was clearly thoughtless identifying Australia as the opposite of England in terms of available land.

In England I believe that low rise apartments are a big part of the solution. Currently almost all apartments in England are one or two bedrooms, and additionally the buildings are aimed at the luxury single market. If planning laws made four distinct rooms at least 3m * 3m mandated in 50% of new build apartments then they would become viable for family living. After Grenfell it's simply impossible for England to use high rise apartments to solve this problem, but I have stayed with friends in Germany who lived in a block of large apartments on four stories in Saarbrücken and they seemed ideal and worked for them as a family.

My own [local government] is so stupid its own massive 7-figure park project got blocked by [local government] planning halfway through. For about a year instead of a park we’ve had two massive holes surrounded by fences. Too many taxes, too much nimbyism. This one really is that simple.

This happens everywhere in enterprise and government because policies and processes are designed to avoid mistakes or embarassment at any cost (because those risks are internalised by the bureacracy and therefore "real") but do not account for the cost of not being able to get anything done, because those are externalised and everyone involved in the various committees and review processes gets paid regardless.

I wish there were better ways to align incentives here.

> I wish there were better ways to align incentives here.

I have a crazy idea that might work to hold organizations accountable if they never get anything done.

Oo! Oo! Is it a free and fair public election?

That mentality is exactly what leads to the problem. You want to hold everyone organization accountable for every perceived failing which leads them to optimize towards a state where they can justify existence but do as little as possible to minimize the potential for any perceived failing.

I was talking about market accountability. Companies that don’t get anything done fail.

The UK (and particularly England) is the among the most centralised countries in Europe. The overwhelming amount of local government funding comes from central government, with local taxation being a small fraction. This means there's very little incentive for local governments to approve development, because they don't see the financial benefits but do have to fund local services, and they're the ones that get blamed by NIMBYs.

There's a TV show called parks and recreation which has that exact premise.

When I was working for various local govs there was a usual remark being made. You cannot fire shitty employees. There are great ones, but some are just getting the pay check and make things worse and there is no way to fire them. It is just not practical.

I am not saying those are the main problem but it contributes to the lack of efficiency.

British economic dysfunction is an old, old story. My favorite quip:

"This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time."

- Aneurin Bevan, British Labour politician, in a speech at Blackpool, 24 May 1945

>British economic dysfunction is an old, old story. My favorite quip:

That doesn't mean it's not an existential problem. You can have a growth forever before the cancer gets bad enough to notice.

I never heard this one before, and made my day... haha Thank you.

If the Soviet Union took over the Sahara, nothing would happen for a few years, and then there would be a shortage of sand.

We have a broken mentality. In the US, they're temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Here, we're temporarily embarrassed landlords. The only ambition that's socially acceptable is a mortgage.

This article is severely tilted nonsense with a weird ideological bent.

The author sneers against regulatory rules to limit suburban sprawl but really none of that has anything to do with a housing shortage.

It is entirely possible to denser and taller buildings, having both compact communities, green space, farms and forest and also addressing housing needs. UK hinders its economy by declining to do so (as do so many other places with housing shortages).

The UK needs to do both. It needs to allow denser development, but that isn't enough. It is also possible to expand the green belt without causing suburban sprawl.

There's not one green belt. There are a number of green belts, typically constricting our biggest economic centres, but the spaces between allow development.

This leads to situations like Oxford where people working in the university that gave the city its current fame can't afford to live in it. Instead they live in suburban towns outside of Oxford's green belt and commute in - through it. Ironically, there is now an incentive for the same number of people to sprawl over a larger area, requiring more railways, roads and parking. Many locals in Oxford's new sprawl expect a non-existent greenbelt to protect their areas and are left disappointed.

The real rub is that England lacks Scotland's right to roam. So protecting all this green land doesn't even give us the right to walk in it. Only to gaze from a passing window.

>It is entirely possible to denser and taller buildings

Yes, but you're not allowed those either.

Nastily anti-state bias that’ll get a heap of upvotes here no doubt. What the uk actually needs is less private companies leeching off the masses and more investment in state support.

Don't get me started on the water companies

To fund state support you need a healthy and prosperous environment for the business to collect taxes. Foreign investment is important, the ability to borrow is essential. Unfortunately there is still ample of red tape, e.g. try building a house for yourself, try opening a business and risk litigation from the customers.

I want to see more discussion from the perspective that the economy and government is not just a process, an institution, but a contest, an arena. Outcomes which are presented as a failure, are not merely a failure, but like a punch in a boxing match that misses its mark, occurs in a wider context, and against deliberate opposition. A failed project might be a failure for most, but for opponents it may be a victory, or even just collateral damage in a wider fight.

Are you referring to the libertarians who like to see government fail so they have a reason to dismantle it?

Not the OP but look at the difference between what governments can do when there is a sense of urgency (i.e it is wartime or one is in recent memory) vs what they do when it's not.

My lizard brain interprets this in the following way: Elites in response to external competition or in the presence of existential threat experience strong incentives to make "real" progress.

When there's little external competition, leadership are more concerned with maintaining or slightly enhancing their relative status within existing power structures and this leads to stasis as their interest is mainly blocking or slowing any disruption which could change the balance of power.

Projects often fail because the forces of "keep things the same" beat the team that wanted the change to happen.

Yeah I argue that's human nature. When you're in danger (or perceived danger) you will make drastic moves to survive. When you're in a good spot, you are less incensed to rush things. And generally, status quo in not-bad times is the majority.

So on a macro level a progressive or simply sympathetic minority has to fight a conservative majority in order to keep pushing for change.

The only solace here is that the you rarely need a majority to enact change. Apparently movements need a critical capacity of 3.5% in order to start this network effect of people joining in due to popularity bias.

> Not the OP but look at the difference between what governments can do when there is a sense of urgency (i.e it is wartime or one is in recent memory) vs what they do when it's not.

Every example I can think of involved rushing through legislation and policy changes that were not looked upon kindly given a moment of retrospection.

The New Deal, Japanese internment camps, the PATRIOT Act, Zero COVID policies, etc. The one exception might be something like the Space Race, but that also had a lot to do with Operation Paperclip, which had its own ethical dilemmas.

    > Every example I can think of involved rushing through legislation and policy changes that were not looked upon kindly given a moment of retrospection.

The New Deal?

    > rushing

Really? This was rushed?

Wiki says:

    > During Roosevelt's first hundred days in office in 1933 until 1935, he introduced what historians refer to as the "First New Deal", which focused on the "3 R's": relief for the unemployed and for the poor, recovery of the economy back to normal levels, and reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression.

Further:

    > From 1935 to 1938, the "Second New Deal" introduced further legislation and additional agencies which focused on job creation and on improving the conditions of the elderly, workers, and the poor.

Next you wrote:

    > not looked upon kindly given a moment of retrospection

Really? Read the intro from Wiki about this programme. Its impact was staggering then, and remains today.

There is a long tradition which views Roosevelt's policies as both ineffective and unjustifiable. In 1933, he confiscated privately-held gold by executive order in 1933. That same year, he instituted a policy paying farmers to slaughter their livestock and leave their fields fallow. The effects of this policy are described (in somewhat flowery language) in John Steinbeck's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. He then attempted to pack the courts in 1937.

It's notable that none of these policies were particularly effective. Of the major industrial economies of the period, only France lagged behind America in terms of economic recovery.

Competition? Like when “old men argue, young men die”?

And real (“real”) progress for whom? Your analysis is completely opaque.

These libertarians are mostly an American phenomenon. In Europe it’s “small-government” conservatives who do this. (They are not really about small government, though, and they never reduce deficits; they are just for upwards wealth redistribution).

The UK tried a mildly libertarian government in 2022. The experiment lasted 50 days.

Indeed. It was a shame that the country suffered in the experiment but it was quite cathartic to watch her faceplant so utterly and publicly, for purely ideological reasons.

In the end, her stint will be what she deserves: a footnote in history, and the answer to the pub quiz question “who managed to beat Johnson as the absolute worst PM in the history of the UK?” Maybe someone will call a variety of lettuce “truss”. That’d be entertaining.

Exactly. I think there's an entire political party that capitalizes on suffering, offering to jump in and rescue the poor victims. Like racketeering: create the problem and sell you the solution "if you just vote for us, we'll fix the devastating problems caused by $BADGUYS". but an absence of problems means you lose your voter base.

An interesting thing about this comment is I have no idea which side of politics you are criticising.

At least in Germany it's clear that it would be the AfD. In the US, you could say republicans, but I'm getting the impression that democrats are prone to this too.

I hope that phrasing it that way focuses on the action and not split into a flame war

Well after about 15 years of governance, the conservatives were voted out of power. Unfortunately the problems in the energy and housing sectors are structural and mostly located in the local government, and I am unsure whether this government has the political clout or even the will to deal with them considering the immense entrenched interests involved.

  A new report, titled “Foundations,” captures the country’s economic malaise in detail.

That 'new' report was discussed here 5 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41600388

The source report is a much better read. The article barely adds anything of value to it, outside of quoting it a dozen times.

It is, but also read the discussion. The initial report keeps cropping up in places where folks hope nobody notices how slanted it was.

Wow, this report is savage. Thank you to share. I was no aware of the original report.

For Brits, Foundations is a must-read report.

Any policy suggestions need to show how they'll urgently remedy the serious issues with energy, housing, and infrastructure detailed in the report -- or make the case that this issues don't matter.

Here's the direct link:

https://ukfoundations.co

This article is plain wrong. It ignores that the largest amount of housing ever built in Britain was council housing post war through to Thatcher.

But the quality of what was built was worse than what the commies built in the Eastern Europe. That's quite an achievement!

> But the quality of what was built was worse than what the commies built in the Eastern Europe.

The rural council housing built in post-war UK was of really high quality: these houses were built for durability and community. They were solid brick or stone construction, and had large gardens to promote self-sufficiency. I grew up in one of these houses, and my parents grew enough vegetables in the enormous garden that we only needed meat and dairy from the store.

The article is an awful jumble of free-market junk, and as others have mentioned, doesn't mention Brexit or privatization as two of the main causes of economic stagnation.

I grew up in council housing built during this period. It's not exactly premium but it was built fairly well and they sold well when many of them eventually made it onto the private market many decades later. Good sized gardens and I remember the council doing necessary repairs and upgrades throughout my time there.

I'm not exactly familiar with buildings from ex-soviet eastern Europe but I'd be surprised if it was a much higher build quality.

This doesn't describe council houses I've seen in London and surroundings (e.g. Milton Keynes/Bletchley).

What I remember: - small rooms - mould - no insulation - in larger buildings gardens, if any, would be only for ground floor flats - in smaller buildings flats would be split over 3 levels, with each level being rather small - often wired entrance to the flats from outdoor gallery/balcony (in larger buildings) - low ceilings (for my liking)

My experience is from the midlands, specifically in council estates that were predominantly terraced and semi-detached houses (small blocks of 4 or so houses at a time). No flats so that might be a big distinguishing factor (as well as not being in London...). Definitely had problems but rarely because of the build quality itself, some issues with neglect in some areas.

The greatest housebuilding period was in the inter-war years, mostly driven by private development. This collapsed after the war with the creation of the post-war planning system that tightly rationed land.

Very derivative of https://ukfoundations.co/ , which is mentioned.

Psst, scroll to the bottom and hit play. Then scroll back up.

Well that is delightful! Especially as I've always really like that song.

The world needs more of that.

I have some friends over there and they (or their employers) are cutting back on their business expenditures, staffing and overall outlook. The new payroll taxes (unemployment insurance?) are going to bite both employers and employees alike.

Taxes are too high, there's too much red tape for businesses and successive governments have failed to invest in anything outside of the "south" (e.g. Greater London). I was (half) joking with them that the "north" would be far better off if it seceded and joined Scotland!

I don't know why you think the north and Scotland would be better off together. The south east would only get richer under such a scenario.

Taxes-too-high is a common refrain but income tax + national insurance takes 26% of my 95th-percentile income. Is that so bad?

if you are an employee and that is direct compensation (not deferred capital gains) then your taxes are lower than California

Is this including the use of tax advantaged accounts like HSAs/401Ks/IRAs/etc?

In the US, it should be possible to get a 95th percentile household income ($300k, married filing joint) effective federal income tax rate down to 10% to 15%. Including total health insurance costs (employer + employee) plus some amount of deductible/out of pocket maximum for a family of 4 would bump it up to 20% to 25%. And then on top of that would be state + local tax liabilities like property and sales tax.

All in, I bet total proportion spent on taxes is less than 40%, even in California, at 95th percentile income, and 30% in a state without income tax.

Edit: I’m probably understating my numbers by 5% due to forgetting about social security and Medicare taxes.

If this is MFJ two similar incomes, then Social security and Medicare is another ~14% (it'll say 7.65% on the tin, but really your wage is lowered to compensate for the 7.65% employer portion, working out to about 14% total). Effective federal income tax on $300k income is 20%+, not including healthcare. State tax is another 8%..

So that's 42%, not including healthcare costs. Which is gonna be easily another 5%+.

State tax is definitely not 8% for many, many states.

That is fair but we are explicitly talking about California here

> if you are an employee and that is direct compensation (not deferred capital gains) then your taxes are lower than California

Roger that, heard. Had my blinders on.

American taxes are so complicated. Let's add another 1-2% for the mental cost of having to know all this stuff, or pay someone else to know it. It's just crazy.

It’s incredible the US has any other economic output, considering the effort spent on taxes.

At one of my businesses, we remit 4 separate sales taxes to 4 separate governments, and each has to be itemized, so receipts are multiple pages long for no reason.

Then there are myriad possibilities for being exempt from either all or some of the taxes, and those records have to be kept in case of an audit.

There must be enormous amounts of tax evasion too, the attack surface is so great no one can audit it all. The most tax advantaged account, a Health Savings Account, lets people set money aside today, invest it, and let it grow for however long they want, and then withdraw it for healthcare expenses, all tax free.

But the healthcare expenses can be from any point in time in the past. A 30 year old can save their receipts for purchases ranging from over the counter painkillers to childbirth bills from the hospital, and then reimburse themselves when they are 80 years old.

How can it even be possible to audit someone’s healthcare expenses that happened 50 years ago? The counter party will surely no longer have the records to cross reference, so it’s basically the government taking people’s word for it.

And that’s just simple personal taxes.

    > In the US, it should be possible to get a 95th percentile household income ($300k, married filing joint) effective federal income tax rate down to 10% to 15%.

I cannot believe it. Do you have a worked example?

$300k income, MFJ, $46k 401k contribution, $8k HSA contribution

After standard deduction ($29k), AGI is about $217k. That's the 24% bracket (barely), which adds up to $34,337 + 0.24*$16000 ~= $38,200 federal income tax

$38,200/$300k = 12.7%

You can get even lower with itemized deductions: mortgage interest (might be over $40k) plus SALT ($10k) plus a few donations ($5k) => AGI of $191k => federal tax rate of under 11%

Of course, this is just federal income tax. Most people also pay FICA (medicare+social security) and state and local tax.

That is impressive. Thanks for the very thoughtful answer. Many times before, I have seen utterly bullshit tax minimisation claims on HN, but rarely an answer as good as this one!

Deeper question: Now that you provided a reasonably scenario where a household earning 300K USD combined income can "only" pay 12+% in federal taxes: Does this make sense from a policy perspective? My point: Should it be higher? It seems hard to pay for what a highly developed nation needs to pay for where 300K USD households are paying such measly federal taxes. (To be clear: I very well understand this is one component of total tax burden, but still a worthy discussion.)

It really isn’t worth discussing just federal tax liability in the US, due to how complicated the various taxing jurisdictions are and how diffuse various governing expenses are throughout those jurisdictions.

Especially when comparing to effective tax rates in countries with universal healthcare and different defined benefit pension schemes. For example, health insurance premiums in the US are a tax, due to the myriad restrictions on how premiums can be priced. Just not collected by the government, but it definitely is young and healthy subsidizing poor and sick.

Also, note that most of the reduction in tax liability is due to setting money aside for later use, so it is akin to deferring taxes, rather than just reducing taxes.

Another way to make sense of policy is that the federal US spend is 60% on defined benefit pensions for old people and healthcare for old or poor people, 17% on military, 13% on interest, and the remaining 10% for the rest of the federal government’s operations.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

You also need to consider Fica (social security and medicare) and state and local taxes. Personally, my partner and I made about $470k last year and (filing MFJ) our combined rate will end up being about 28% ($80k federal tax, $30k CA state tax, $20k fica).

Which IMO should be higher! But also I'd want that to include universal healthcare (my employer and I pay combined about $20k/year or another 4% between premiums and deductible+copays) and generally a better social safety net.

Taxes are a lot higher because the higher brackets kick in at a much lower income while cost of living is similar. A top 5% income is not enough to live a dignified in London where most of those jobs are but it’s high enough that the government won’t let you make more. Very sad situation. Top 5% income in the UK is probably more like top 20% in the USA

I'm in the 45-49 age bracket this year. In BC (Canada), a 95th percentile income for that age is $126,000 (2021 Census). Before any deductions (specifically retirement investments that reduce taxable income) I'd be looking at a 26.85% tax rate, with a marginal rate of 38%. So pretty much the same rate here.

Not to say that Canada's overall economy is particularly any better than the UK's, and especially Trump's tariff threats will do a number on us.

>> especially Trump's tariff threats will do a number on us.

There will be losers certainly, but I'm not 100% sure that tarrifs for Canada are bad in the long run.

Firstly, there are already reports of Canadians buying local over US goods. If that sentiment hrows, and becomes entrenched that's good.

Secondly, at least gor some goods, suppliers are incentivised to explore other export markets. Again, long term, that diversification is good.

Thirdly, for at least some goods, the US cannot simply ramp up production. So they'll still be buying, but their consumers will pay more. Canadian suppliers can simply increase prices as well, since any US consumer increase will be ascribed to the tarrifs. This though is somewhat balanced by Canadian oversupply.

Fourthly it encourages producers to diversify somewhat to reduce over supply. In the long run a varied economy is better than one dependant on any one sector.

Ultimately Canada and Mexico could come out of this stronger. While the US consumer gets used to higher prices. (Which Canada et al can take advantage of whe tarrifs are removed.)

the UK has a 20% VAT as well. I don't think the person you were replying to was taking that into account. Also, they are probably not taking into account employer NICs which are effectively the same in terms of tax incidence as employee NICs but people incorrectly treat them differently because the employer nominally pays them. But if you think about it for a second, your employer makes two payments to the government one of them is called employee NICs and one of them is called employer NICs and both of them are based on the employee's wage so it is silly to treat them differently. Though, I'm guessing Canada probably has employer payroll taxes as well. Employer NICS can get up to almost 14% so it is a significant tax in the UK.

You forgot employers NI

(for the unfamiliar - the employER has to pay 15% from April - not a typo - of part of your salary in taxes to the government and this is hidden from your payroll taxes as an employee)

What's the % if you include those deductions?

In my case my tax rate is 29% but employers NI is 13% so 42%, going up to 44/45% in April

I didn't forget it, it's not a deduction from my salary. You don't pay 42% of your salary.

Employee NI went down by 2pts last year, employer NI is going up by 1.2pts this year.

Employee NICs and employer NICs are effectively the same thing, they just have different names. Your employer has a bucket of money to pay employees with. Some of this money is given to the government and some of this money is given to their employees. Saying the money given to the government is on behalf of the employee or the employer is mostly irrelevant. There are cases where it is relevant if the employee or employer can get tax refunds against the money but mostly it is irrelevant. Who actually pays the burden of tax is a question of tax incidence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence). In theory the burden of income taxes could even be falling on your employer. But it is very likely that most of the burden of income taxes/payroll taxes falls on the employee. But if you are doing cross-country comparisons its much easier to just total up all taxes related to employment in one bucket and compare them under the assumption the incidence burden would be similar across different countries.

I think when doing casual person-to-person comparisons, like on here, it is actually easier to compare payslips.

Most importantly, I don't believe that if employer NI went away tomorrow that money would come to me in increased salary. Including it as a tax on me makes the assumption that it would.

Fair enough if you want to believe you only pay 26% tax. Sounds like you know about it but disagree it's unrealised salary?

You can see why the government created it in such a way !

I don't believe that if employer NI were removed that money would come to me, so I don't personally see it as unrealised salary, but that's just an opinion.

> The new payroll taxes (unemployment insurance?) are going to bite both employers and employees alike.

Increases to employers' National Insurance contributions. It's the equivalent to Social Security in the US. Mostly goes to pensions.

Scotland has higher income tax than England and Wales.

There are too many glaring holes in this article for it to be taken seriously. It's simply not a complete argument if you discuss the UK's current economy and don't mention 1) Brexit 2) Green energy policies

Not so much green energy policies per se as the incoherency of banning onshore wind, due to .. NIMBY planning objections. And objections to the construction of pylons. And objections to the construction of new nuclear. And objections to the construction of batteries. And offshore electricity links.

The UK's energy crisis and its BANANA (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone) planning system are very linked.

(credit to the Economist some years ago for that acronym)

I didn't vote for Brexit, but the thing is it's not really helpful to re-rake the coals on that one - it knocked our GDP, some kind of common market with the EU would clearly be good for trade.. but to what end, we can't change this.. surely better to discuss things we can actually change?

"More than a decade ago, Germany began to phase out nuclear power while failing to ramp up other energy production. The result has been catastrophic for citizens and for the ruling government. In the first half of 2024, Germans paid the highest electricity prices in the European Union."

That completely ignores that Germany made itself dependent on cheap Russian gas which is not delivered anymore. It's not like nuclear was ever very cheap.

Already-built nuclear is cheap to keep running. Constructing new nuclear is what's expensive. Phasing out nuclear means that you already paid the big cost, but don't want to get the benefits

This is a conservative (note small c) bit of agi-prop. "Things were better in the old days" before politicians stuffed up. Sows discontent with no discussion of future action. The comments here are far more interesting and important. Bloody MSM!!

I thought that the article would be investigating how Thatcher's policies caused disastrous results. Her right-to-buy policy led to councils not having an incentive to build housing and encouraged landlords to buy up housing and thus contributed to the over-priced housing we see today

https://www.ft.com/content/8d5f2952-3c17-11e8-bcc8-cebcb81f1... https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/insight/the-housing-act-from...

Fun fact: there's a popular pub question to ask tories - "name one successful Thatcher policy" which on the face of it doesn't have an answer. However her "Enterprise Allowance Scheme" was ironically a big success

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/jul/26/thatcher-ent...

An unpopular opinion, but outsourcing abroad the industry, which wasn't working due to permanent strikes anyway, was probably net positive overall. Of course keeping the industry and fixing somehow the issue would have been better, but it's a bit though in a democratic country where unions exist - just take a look at train drivers now - they keep the whole country hostage, and even though they earn comparatively more than in other countries they demand relatively big pay rises every year.

Every British person would probably kill me for saying this.

The UK is drowning in debt. The Office for National Statistics publishes several datasets charting the sorry story. Here's a good one:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxe...

You can see two upticks in debt: first was the steady rise after the 2008 crisis (which austerity clearly failed to stem) and the second around 2020 which may be pure Covid or may be also due to a bit of Brexit.

When the UK government talks about "growth", it really means "growth in tax revenues". This means they want you and me to spend more because transactions are the drivers of revenue.

Inflation is generally painful for the public but very useful for a government up to its ears in debt because debt payments do not rise with inflation but revenues do.

And public services are highly toxic to an economy which requires 4-5% growth just to meet its debt payments. Why provide services for free when you can collect VAT receipts for basic essentials like clean water, energy, and medication? Why spend millions on regulatory oversight when the inevitable health issues downstream will result in more private spending and GDP growth?

"...energy use per unit of GDP is the lowest in the G7"

The article characterises that fact as "energy starvation". Wouldn't "efficiency" be a better analysis? Low energy use per GDP or per capita is surely a thoroughly good thing.

>Per capita electricity generation in the U.K. is now roughly one-third that of the United States, and energy use per unit of GDP is the lowest in the G7. By these measures, at least, Britain may be the most energy-starved nation in the developed world.

Yikes. Housing is the big issue that gets everyone’s attention, but this is huge. Cheap energy drives economic growth at all levels. It’s incredible that the various British governments have let it get to this level. Maybe it’s time to import a few Chinese or Soviet technocrats?

I think those are intentionally misleading numbers. The UK is a finance power house, not a manufacturing one, so of course it derives a larger share of GDP from less energy.

Italy has a higher % of GDP from manufacturing but way more expensive energy.

Germany and the Netherlands bled off more than half of London's finance industry since Brexit if you look at recent numbers. They still have a finance industry but powerhouse might be a stretch these days.

UK has 10% of the entire world's digital exports: https://www.voronoiapp.com/technology/The-Worlds-Largest-Dig...

Perhaps, but e.g. LSEG had 8B in revenue last year and Euronext had less than 2B.

I'd be interested to know about specific numbers you're thinking of, if you can share a link or two.

I suspect they are confusing "total market capitalization of companies on stock exchange" with "financial industry".

Hmm, I could see the case for energy use per unit of GDP being misleading in some ways. But per capita electricity generation? That’s not related at all.

Nobody wants to see any electricity infrastructure being built. The British media is so inward looking and personality driven nobody will dare to connect "no infrastructure" with "high prices".

From the US (where we have problems of our own, believe me), the UK, and especially England, look like a powerful case for federalism. As far as I can tell, the entire country is run by and for rich Londoners, with no countervailing local power having the opportunity to make sane government decisions.

We do have devolved powers, so Scotland and Wales* have functioning Regional Governments, with devolved funding from a formula that gives them substantially more money than they collect in tax.

So they should be doing great right? Wrong. They massively struggle and yet live in a "best of both worlds" scenario, they can run the health service, transport, taxation policy and all things that affect regular people without having to worry about the annoying stuff like defence and foreign policy. So why do they still have very poor outcomes? Look at the welsh NHS, it's horrific.

Essentially most of our productivity comes from London and the SE. That means by the way if you're smart and educated but grew up in the welsh valleys, the first thing you do is move to London/SE where all the jobs are. Can Wales attract a google office to Cardiff when all the talent is in London?

*NI is a long story.

Then when you need to buy a house you have to leave.

Net migration to London from the rest of England and Wales is only positive for those aged 20 to 27

There's plenty of great experienced people outside London, but all the rich (business owners) are openly prejudice to everywhere else. https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cwy57v07gn2o

The issue is actually that there aren't, let's say I go to derby, how many ML engineers will I find, or infrastructure coders, Biomed researchers or industrial chemists.

Not that many.

60 years of tories and tory-lites slowly but surely cutting "waste", privatizing, deregulating, pushing for austerity...

Let that be a lesson to the US, seeking government efficiency is a non-goal. Good, well-funded public services make productive citizens and a strong economy. Austerity leads to a dead country.

Like 44% of your economy is government spending. lol

This is not as crazy as it sounds at first glance. The % is less important than where they are spending that money.

An "economy" is just a measure of the overall movement of money. If the bulk of that spending is internal, then that is contributing to the economy. Govt workers are consumers, local companies are providing goods to govt etc.

USaid for example spent a lot of money on food. And a lot of that was purchased from US farmers. Killing USaid "saves a lot of money" but also costs a lot of producers their income.

As long as the bulk of spending is local, govt spending is an excellent way of keeping money moving.

Yeah but you can see how the endless British bleating about “austerity” is a little overwrought?

> Good, well-funded public services make productive citizens and a strong economy. Austerity leads to a dead country.

Most Western European nations have a government expenditure as a percentage of GDP of roughly 50%; half the economy is government.

Singapore, a famously productive country, is around 15%.

Can you seriously compare a very wealthy city-state to actual countries? Do you not see why you can't run the UK like you would Monaco?

You really went out of your way to pick the only "country" you could find with both low government spending and high quality of life, despite the data proving a strong correlation between these two in actual countries. Wow.

> Let that be a lesson to the US

No worries, they're busy speed-running it to its conclusion..

There was plenty of housing before the Thatcherite "right to buy". Pretending it was socialist politics that broke it is moronic.

Exactly. Housing is the big cost of living increase. A perfectly unregulated economy with finite land will drive land prices up to the margin of cultivation (the margin at which one would move to a less desirable piece of land). As population and productivity grows this results in ever higher land rents. In the limit rents will be exactly the edge of what people can pay.

Insofar as "socialist politics" make it harder for the supply of housing to rise to match demand, it is not moronic at all. Places in the UK where housing stock grows with population don't have it as bad as places that don't[0], i.e. London.

Thatcher left office in 1990. The population of Greater London has grown by 44% since then. I don't think there has been a single decade since where the growth of housing stock kept up with the growth of people. Why blame Thatcher for this?

[0]: https://ifs.org.uk/articles/england-has-poor-record-building...

Alongside Thatcher's 'Right to Buy' policy that reduced the stock of social housing, there were also restrictions on how much new housing could be bought or built by local councils to replenish the availability of social housing. These restrictions had more or less remained the same until very recently. It was only during the Johnson government that the restrictions started to be lifted. Of course, the current Labour government are attempting to once again build new social housing, but it is easy to see why people look back and see Thatcher as being the cause of those three decades of social housing shortages.

> the U.K. has passed several measures to reduce shale-gas extraction, citing earthquake risks

It's not a risk - we actually saw earthquakes in the areas where shale gas extraction had started: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21120-how-fracking-ca... I honestly cannot take this seriously after such a lie.

This article is very thinly-veiled industrialist propaganda, covering a "report" by right-wing think-tankers lobbying the government to relax rules around real estate speculation. It does not deserve the upvotes it got.

> In February, the Bank of England reported an ongoing productivity slump so mysterious that its own economists “cannot account fully” for it.

The UK has seen unprecedented mass immigration from outside the developed world over the last 25 years.

250,000/yr non-EU migrants in the 2000s, rising to 500,000/yr non-EU migrants by 2022.

In 2023, the UK had 1.2M arrivals, comprising 968,000 non-EU nationals. Illegal immigration (mostly by small boats over the English Channel) is running into the tens of thousands (and those are the ones we know about).

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...

Some of the main source countries have low literacy rates (Pakistan 60%, Nigeria 62%, India 77%, Bangladesh 74%) so it is no surprise that economic productivity has taken a hit due to wage suppression and a growth in the labour supply at the entry level.

Obviously, Bank of England economists suffer from institutional cowardice preventing them from joining the dots, for fear of being branded xenophobic.

But the numbers don't lie.

Indeed. GDP per capita has been decreasing for some years (effective recession) but this is hidden because the overall GDP is stagnant to minimally increasing via mass immigration.

Obviously it means that on everage immigrants earn less than average (thus bringing productivity down), which is not that surprising with the number you've quoted.

Catastrophic? If I have to pay 33% more for electricity now than in 2010? And if corrected for inflation the electricity costs in Germany are actually going down. There is some obvious spin in this article which is distracting from the real issue:

It's the housing, stupid!

What is really catastrophic also in Germany is the increase of rents and housing prices.

Sure, if you don't care about climate change at all you can just activate and build coal power plants.

"Germany's carbon dioxide emissions fell to their lowest in 70 years in 2023, touching levels last seen in the 1950s"

https://etn.news/buzz/germany-emissions-fall-re-dominates-en...

> The housing shortage traces back to the postwar period, when a frenzy of nationalization swept the country. ... Rates of private-home building never returned to their typical prewar levels.

This is obfuscation to the point of dishonesty. The postwar public home-building project was the largest in history, and provided a previously-unbelievable increase in the quantity of cheap, good-quality housing.

> With some spikes and troughs, new homes built as a share of the total housing stock have generally declined over the past 60 years.

Again, very disingenuous wording. It is equivalent to saying "the housing stock grew less than exponentially over the past 60 years". For instance, a constant rate of house building would result in "new homes built as a share of the total housing stock" declining. Note also that 60 years takes us back to 1965, leaving an unmentioned 20-year postwar period.

Incidentally, wtf does planning permission have to do with nationalisation? The US has zoning laws, am I supposed to think they've nationalised their housing market? Does the author think we still have nationalised housing?

The core argument - that the state is getting in the way of the private sector fixing everything - is clearly false, at least in the case of the UK.

If that were the case, public transport (which underwent radical privatisation and deregulation across the UK some 40+ years ago), would be the cheapest and most effective in Europe. In fact, it's the most expensive in Europe. It is all currently being wrestled back into public hands through bus and rail fixed franchises, because Stagecoach (they own Greyhound in the US, you might be familiar with their work), have driven public transport into the ground in the name of profits for themselves.

On housing, the Thatcher government in the 1980s gave social housing tenants the right to buy homes, and created laws that prevented local authorities from building new public sector housing projects: the market, after all, would be more effective. That's led to a situation where private developers own land they won't build on until prices rise - they're artificially shortening supply. The houses they do build are small and expensive, and most people actively look for non-new build homes, to the extent that the government had to introduce tax breaks (Lifetime ISA), and incentives (help to buy), for people to buy new builds they didn't really want.

This isn't breaking news. People have been pointing out the problems and obvious drawbacks to the libertarian "private corporations can fix it all" nonsense that drove Thatcherism from the first moments it was conceived in the 1980s, and were hand-waved away as relics of the past by the centre right who took control of the country and destroyed it.

Yes, the public sector has problems too. Nobody is arguing that the right solution is to nationalise everything (except in the case of monopoly markets like public transport and utilities, where the UK is markedly behind the rest of Europe in the sectors which it has left to private sector utilisation). It's about balance. It always was, for many years, and for many years it was successful, as it has continued to be across Europe.

TFA suggests that the real problem is that the private sector has been leashed by red tape, but that's just not true. The government has given the private sector ample opportunity: to build houses, and they've refused to do so; to build nuclear power, and they keep coming back and asking for more money to fix problems of their own making; to run utilities as they wish, and they pollute rivers and raise bill prices.

In most of Europe (with almost identical regulations and rules, thanks to the power of EU frameworks the UK was entirely aligned to until very recently), the public sector has been able to retain a larger part of these critical economic components, and these problems have not arisen to the same extent.

As an aside, it's not lost on most that it is ironic that the French public sector is allowed to invest in UK transport and energy sector companies, but the UK public sector is not, due to EU law that we're still trying to get rid of.

TFA is therefore philosophically, intellectually and factually flawed at every level based on the actual data and lived experiences of the people suffering this - and yes, I am one of those people. I'm sick of this utterly absurd libertarian agenda being pushed like this, claiming that the private sector is somehow a victim. I believe so are most UK citizens who see it for the propaganda it is.

There is an increasing, and deepening sense of unease at private capital in the UK, much of it unfounded. Right-wing libertarian agitprop nonsense like this article doesn't help: it's toxic, and harms the private sector in those areas where it can make a real difference.

I googled the transportation privatization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail

So the UK rail network was privatized in the 1990s with tracks and stations remaining under government control and private companies bid for a 'franchise' running train services for whole regions. So basically franchises operate as regional monopolies and meaning passengers don't have any real choice of providers? The competition only existed briefly during the initial bidding process which the gov decided on.

Very similar to Canada's telecom history where they are private corporations on paper but they are state sanctioned local monopolies/oligopolies in functional terms. Or our 'private' highway which was given a 99yr lease for a low one-off payment that charges extremely high tolls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Highway_407

You can't have competing companies on rails. Each companies having their own networks would be prohibitively expensive, or they have to share rails between each other which poses significant issues.

You're also left with the issue of unprofitable stations, which is a lot of them.

If you want an example of what a really privatized, deregulated rail system would look like, read about France in the early 20th century. By the 30s, shareholders were begging the state to nationalize their money-burning companies. And it did.

Rail should be a public service. As one, its benefits to society are immense.

> You can't have competing companies on rails.

Just to be a pedant, you can. However, the coordination problems are so immense that it is just a totally stupid thing to do.

So yes, rail should be a public service.

You can, Japan does it and they are considered best in the world. There are at least 10 different train companies in Tokyo, (probably more like 20 but I don't know all the smaller ones). Similarly in Osaka, Kyoto, etc....

> Rail should be a public service.

No, it should be run for profit but the system put in place well designed so serving more customers better means the company does better.

Japan accomplishes this AFAIK, by letting the train companies buy/own/build other things. For example, the Tokyu company that runs some of the trains that come into Shibuya station owns the building Google's Japan office is in. They also own the famous 109 building (10 = to, 9 = kyu). And 10 or 15 other buildings in Shibuya. They run grocery stores at probably 50% of their stations. They also build apartments.

If their line gets sucky people spread the word "don't live on that line, it sucks, it's too crowded and the trains are late" and all their business suffer and people start moving out. So they have an incentive to keep their lines better than the other lines.

They also compete on destinations. For example Shibuya to Yokohama. You can take a Tokyu line and you can also take a JR line. They go slightly different routes but end up at the same place. Similarly if you're in Kyoto and want to go to Osaka. You can take JR, or Hankyu, or Hanshin, 3 separate train companies all of which run multiple lines. You'll see ads for the multiple different competing trains to get you from downtown Tokyo to Narita and Hanada airports.

All of that is only possible because of network effects, and a nationalized JR built most of that network.

And honestly, I think you’re overstating the degree of choice you have as a rider. Different lines carved out their corners and companies avoid each other. Service level is generally high, to the point that it’s a non factor. You take whichever train is cheaper/faster, and that’s it.

The problem is that rail has huge positive externalities that are not captured by the operators. You can address that by letting operators speculate on real estate, or you could do it with taxes.

> You can address that by letting operators speculate on real estate, or you could do it with taxes.

One of those has a positive virtuous feedback loop. The other has politicians.

I’ll take the option without landlords personally

When JR was nationalised, the Japanese central gov't very carefully controlled where private lines could be built. This partly explains why no private lines ran inside of Yamanote line in Tokyo.

Also, the OP specifically mentioned Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto. These three cities are special because they have exceptionally high ratio of private train lines. (Yokohama should also be included.) Each of these train lines needed to apply with the Japanese central gov't to have their routes approved. If the competition to the JR national line was deemed too high, the proposal was denied.

Another thing that is frequently overlooked by outsiders who try to explain "rail success" in Japan: For more than 50 years, there was/is a tax deduction where employers buy a monthly rail/bus pass for employees. This was/is not restricted to JR national lines only -- private lines also qualify. As a result, this programme generates huge demand for rail service in Japan. I assume that Switzerland must have something very similar, as the outcome is incredibly similar (rail crazy by any measurement).

You can, in fact the UK _does_ have competing services via "open access railways".

The issue is they only exist where routes are profitable - which is almost none of them.

Open access operators have generally not been allowed to directly compete with franchised Train Operating Companies (TOCs).

Many of Britain's railway routes are profitable, but open access operators aren't allowed to compete with franchised TOCs for a slice of those profits. As a prerequisite for approval, the Department of Transport requires open access operators to show that their services would create additional value of their own, not just abstract existing revenue.

Lumo, an open access operator and a part of First group, run trains between London and Edinburgh. They stop at Morpeth for no other reason than to fulfil their requirement to create value, in this case by stopping at a station previously underserved by the DfT franchise of the route. In other words, Lump had to make compromises in return for being allowed to get in on the action on one of the profitable railway lines.

I'd be confident in claiming that there has never been any true free market competition for British passenger rail services since privatization. The existence of private capital doesn't automatically create free markets!

Even if they did have their own networks, you'd just get what NTL (now Virgin Media) did in the 90s: build a few tiny networks in the most profitable places. There probably wouldn't even be rail in the Highlands or Wales.

> So the UK rail network was privatised in the 1990s with tracks and stations remaining under government control and private companies bid for a 'franchise' running train services for whole regions.

The tracks and stations were also privatised as "Railtrack" but they subsequently went bankrupt and had to be brought back into public ownership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railtrack

> So basically franchises operate as regional monopolies and meaning passengers don't have any real choice of providers?

This is inevitable given many routes operate at the limits of capacity. There are a handful of 'open access' operators outside the franchise system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_operating_tr...

> The competition only existed briefly during the initial bidding process which the gov decided on.

The contracts were periodically retendered (it varied, but typically every 5-10 years). The problem is the competitive process had its own problems because it encourage the bidding companies to be overly optimistic. The East-Coast franchise infamously failed multiple times because the companies kept missing passenger forecasts and going bust.

However the competitive element was only ever for the government (in terms of how much surplus/subsidy would be required to/from the operating company over the contract). Having the branding, pricing (where not a regulated fare) etc. managed by those companies meant that they were at odds with passenger interests a lot of time.

Really privatisation was done from the wrong angle. If passengers don't get a choice in service provider then the concessions model (government pays private operators to run the service) would have made more sense. It would have allowed the government to still gain from competition and outsource management, while taking control of the more important elements. The concessions model has worked reasonably well for transport services in London (Elizabeth Line, DLR, Overground and Buses IIRC)

Also as a side point, originally the tracks and stations (or rather the management of them) was privatised into a private entity, Railtrack, but it had to be renationalised because of a number of massive safety incidents from cost-cutting.

The train situation is deeply stupid - the franchise companies are empty shells, all that changes is the nameplate. The actual profit taking is ownership of the trains by ROSCOs. They invented landlordism for trains.

> public transport ... would be the cheapest and most effective in Europe.

While that is generally the argument, I wouldn't expect it to hold when governments remove subsidies as is often the case with regulated transport systems. The argument is actually one of efficiency.

I had a great argument with someone one time on the classic subject of deregulating roads. The interlocutor made a point that I initially struggled with - that without subsidies there probably wouldn't be many roads. After a bit of reflection it became obvious that in a free market where land was worth a lot of money, the market wouldn't put roads on it. Because of government subsidies, roads were being overbuilt beyond what actually makes sense (denser cities where people can walk from place to place are actually pretty livable). So in the case of deregulating transport higher prices isn't the end of it. If you remove a subsidy, there will be less of a thing. The question is why is that bad? If subsidies were good without drawbacks, we'd subsidise everything.

And land is a famous special case; there should be a land tax to weed out people trying to make money from owning undeveloped land.

I enjoyed reading your comment but didn't wholly agree with this bit:

> If subsidies were good without drawbacks, we'd subsidise everything.

Many voters are sensitive to what they perceive as wasteful use of public funds, so your claim only makes sense in a sort of idealized, platonic dictatorship. Admittedly, governments do waste funds occasionally so the concerns are not necessarily baseless. However I can easily see a government choosing not to subsidize a 'perfect' project simply because they want to appear frugal to voters - after all, that is a significant reason why the UK has had so many austerity policies that have slowed public investment.

> And land is a famous special case; there should be a land tax to weed out people trying to make money from owning undeveloped land.

Henry George, is that you? I can certainly get behind that argument!

> ...the Thatcher government in the 1980s gave social housing tenants the right to buy homes, and created laws that prevented local authorities from building new public sector housing projects...

Also, with a large discount, so even if new social housing could be built, there wouldn't be the funds to build them. It is effectively a large wealth transfer from the taxpayer to those needing subsidised homes, such that they could later resell that home to release their windfall, sucking the money that could have gone to housing others.

Careful now, free market absolutism is almost a religion around these parts.

Our societies becoming increasingly more unequal and less functional coincides almost exactly with Raegan's and Thatcher's mandates. Austerity, privatization and deregulation are directly leading us into Gilded Age levels of inequality. And you shouldn't want that, unless you're like in the top 0.01%.

    > In fact, it's the most expensive in Europe.

I just Googled and Gemini tells me:

    > According to most reports, public transport is most expensive in Switzerland across Europe, with cities like Zurich considered to have the highest individual ticket prices; the Netherlands also ranks very high in terms of expensive public transport costs.

Also, Norway is super expensive to ride the train.

So, yeah, I doubt that anyone can confidently say that UK public transport is the "most expensive in Europe".

The greater farce to me is "privatising" Thames Water. That will go down in history as one of the dumbest moves in UK economic history. It will soon be re-nationalised. So all the gains were privatised, but the losses were socialised. What a tragedy of weak governance.

Norway recently(ish) privatised its trains too.

This video explains who paid for Brexit and Trump: "Canadian company tied to Brexit and Trump backers" (2019) https://youtube.com/watch?v=alNjJVpO8L4&

Cambridge Analytica > United Kingdom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Channel_4_...

"New Evidence Emerges of Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica’s Role in Brexit" (2018) https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/new-evidence-emerge...

"‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower" (2018) https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistl...

Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana... ($4b FTC fine)

Furthermore,

"3.5M Voters Were Purged During 2024 Presidential Election [video]" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047349

They only "won" by like 1.5m votes.

Who's illegitimate? https://www.google.com/search?q=Trump+birthrarism

https://archive.md/DTkz1

> In February, the Bank of England reported an ongoing productivity slump so mysterious that its own economists “cannot account fully” for it.

And then goes on to immediately point out what I would expect to be the most obvious cause.

> Real wages have barely grown for 16 years.

Why would the general populous care to be more productive when they aren't going to see the profits?

At least the weather is great so they got that going for them.

It is also pleagued with high taxes, something the tory party did nothing to address. And labour seems to think the solution is more taxes, and oh surprise, this hurts the economy further.

> something the tory party did nothing to address

When PM Liz Truss tried, it ended with disaster.

> When PM Liz Truss tried, it ended with disaster.

The plan Liz Truss proposed was to scrap the top rate of income tax, i.e. giving a tax break to the rich.

And the markets, understanding that it was exactly what the economy needed, reacted accordingly. By crashing.

You have a point, I guess.

I'm wildly interested what's your (and hn community's in general) proposed macro policy mix. When accounted for workforce changes (demography+participation), there was absolutely no economic growth in all developed EU economies (+UK) since the GFC. Zero productivity growth.

That's stark difference compared to US. Did Europe over-auster when US massively increased it's debt? But , as above-mentioned example shows, fiscal expansion can be challenging…

Brought to you by endless privatization: https://www.sewagemap.co.uk/

It was lib Dems and labour that blocked going nuclear in 2013, France did it and are doing much better for energy

I can't help but read a strong implication in the article of the problem being with Labour policies. But up until recently, the Conservatives have been in power, for 14 years straight.

We can pretend the problem is all nanny state and neglected shitty council housing - which I agree it partly is - but it's also the creation of a vast class of landlords and property developers milking the population for rent with shoddily built super-expensive apartments. Classical free market thinking would have you believe they'd build enough housing to satisfy demand but they seem more than satisfied with maintaining the status quo so they can continue to charge exorbitant rents for little shitboxes with paper-thin walls, made to look fancy from a distance. These landlords have had a tremendous influence on Tory politicians and on policy.

And with everybody stuck in those high-rent dividend-machines, people under 40 can't afford to outright buy a house or even an apartment. And if you own a house, by means of its value gradually increasing, your mortgage reducing, and your salary hopefully increasing somewhat, you can eventually move on to a bigger/better house making room for the next young family to buy the house you're leaving behind.

Not to mention the absolute scam that is selling people leaseholds on apartments designed to make it prohibitively expensive to buy off the lease. An uniquely devious instrument dreamt up by the rentseeking class to screw over the average middle-class Brit.

The free market, cutting red tape, etc, isn't the answer. The government and the councils could and in my opinion should pick up the slack from the property developers. Build affordable houses, sell them at a reasonable rate with a provision mandating the buyer actually occupies the property for the coming 5 years or so (outside of exigent circumstances like divorce - we can work out the details). Sell them to people who are actually going to live in the house rather than use it as a financial instrument to speculate with or to rent out.

Is that unfair competition to the rentseekers? Yes, it is. Tough luck. You can't demand the government play by free market rules if you've successfully been undermining the free market functioning for at least two decades.

Sadly, with the current Labour government being very 'Tory but change the typeface and make it red,' this isn't going to happen. Cause they're friends with the real estate class too.

This is such a bizarre story, so obviously just an attack on social democracy.

Blames privatisation and yet in no way explains why that affected house buildings which was not privatised, talking about an entirely different law.

And then it doesn't mention Brexit once.

This is such an obviously ultra-right wing biased and trash article, I have no idea why it's being upvoted so much.

Why break your back when the prospect of owning your own home is so remote? Better to drop out.

Brexit. It was Brexit.

>. Postwar Britain had been swept up by the theory that nationalization created economies of scale that gave citizens better outcomes than pure capitalism.

Did the tankies were in charge back then?

I have never heard of these right-wing explanations leading to solving the problems that the poorer segments of the population face.

funny to read this on the day that Trump announces tariffs for... (reasons?)

as a german i do not believe that brexit is actually a root of their problems. it is more that despite advantages thanks to brexit they still fucked it up because their government is a bunch of greedy grifters. eu membership at best takes away some of their power and averages the incompetence and ignorance over several countries (as every member exerts indirectly power over all the other members to some extent). also leaving eu is a long-term project. it's ridiculous to argue that it's a bad thing to do just because the immediate effects are negative. that's always the case if something fundamentally is changed. the eu is a huge bureaucratic self-service shop for the politicians and their minions.

wealth inequality

Everyone who bought into neoliberalism in the 80s is now experiencing economies that are mysteriously failing to thrive. Correlation isn't cause, except when it is.

So what was the alternative? Continue with the disaster of central planning. Which is the actual thing that destroyed British industry.

Go back to what the western world was doing in the 50’s. High tax and high public spending. In 1950 the US had a top marginal tax rate of 91%. The 50s were great, let’s do that again.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2021/04/26/taxing...

Federal receipts as a % of GDP has gone up and down by a few % but is basically unchanged from the 1950’s:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=ockN

Meanwhile the income tax burden, specifically, has gotten considerably more progressive:

https://www.ntu.org/foundation/tax-page/who-pays-income-taxe...

Is figure 4's legend correct from the NTU link? It would seem that the grey is the top 1%, not bottom 50%.

The NTU only goes back to the 1980s and does not actually include any analysis of the 1950s.

Looks like NTU also is positing their stance on the ideology that the 1% are the only ones that create jobs but they are the ones to most likely invest in large corporations. There seems no prospect to help the mom and pop shops or small companies that have stronger solutions beyond what large corporate tunnel vision provides.

My personal taxes keep going up with these "Tax Cuts". I don't expect them to come down with the push for tax cuts for the wealthy. Nor has my income gone up.

Wouldn't buying more local would reduce energy used for transportation of goods and services?

I see less Amazon purchases and deliveries as a net benefit for the majority and a net deficit for the wealthy investors. Wealth that stays more in the community versus being shipped to Wall Street.

The majority definitely benefits from being able to buy cheap Chinese goods and go on cheap Europe trips while $BIGCOMPANY vacuums up money from the rest of the world to prop up the USD. In which other country can a guy cutting hair (out of many examples) afford so many international vacations?

> In which other country can a guy cutting hair (out of many examples) afford so many international vacations?

In Europe? They can just take a train. Young people backpack all over Europe on shoestring budgets.

This sounds like you are applying shifting baseline syndrome. [0] [1] [2]

Another way to phrase shifting baseline is when people apply what they experience with an over weighted value. For example, the cost of living has skyrocketed in the USA compared to older generations, with the cost of a home, healthcare, and basic goods and services. Wages have been stagnant while the wealthy keep gaining more and more of economic power. Economic mobility is also quite low compared to 10 or 20 years ago.

Those trips are most likely more cost effective compared to the 1950s because the technology was new and still evolving. Air travel was a luxury and now it is a commodity. Engineers have improved the technology to craft air plains while finding ways to reduce production cost. Cost savings have not be pushed to the working class and are shifted to the wealthy.

If the wage increase of CEOs was linear with your wage. It would be higher and also be less of an economic for burden the masses.

People over value the rare lucky ones as being the average of all. Kind of how a number of Americans are against taxing the wealthy because they believe they are or will become wealthy. It is rare to become wealthy and often those that are lacking in empathy and morals. Just like my Uncle that worked for Arbys, which is a millionaire because he believes and supports the idea that those below him should not be payed a living wage.

At leas I learned from him that those franchises often run on debt because they try and pull out every last dollar into the owner's pockets. He was looking to become the owner but the debt was too great to buy in, as a millionaire.

[0] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/fee.... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline [2] https://earth.org/shifting-baseline-syndrome/

And then what happened to those nationalised industries?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O7PVEaPh6Fw&pp=ygUUYWRhbSBzbWl...

(Link from the Adam Smith Institute, a neoliberal thinktank)

The story of British Leyland is enough to scare anyone w/ even half a brain away from ever allowing British politicians to have even the least bit of influence over a company that competes anywhere near the consumer space.

You mean how it was successfully and profitably-run for over a decade part-nationalised, following its near-collapse as a private company?

Or how in the Thatcher era, the government began to privatise and divest the most valuable parts of the company (and arguably a huge amount of British soft power) for little return to the taxpayer?

Notably it sold Mini to BMW, Leyland to DAF, Jaguar and Land Rover to Ford.

Privately-run Ford nearly went bust in the 2000s and famously had to be bailed out by the US taxpayer, but they sold off Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata in the process.

successfully and profitably-run for over a decade part-nationalised,

"successful" and "profitably run", taking into consideration the recommendation to Tony Benn that the Wilson gov't provide 1.2 billion pound investment; plus the buyout of existing BL shareholders at 1/5 the value of their shares, plus the pre-existing tariff regime, without even touching the product and manufacturing issues that had dogged them since the Austin-Morris days.

Pigs can fly, if given enough thrust...Labor didn't fix BL, it just kept the shambolic structure upright, albeit canted at a weird angle.

Jaguar was privatized in '84 (and nobody at BL was going to pony up money for new models) and only in '90 did Ford purchase it, for as it turned out, way too much. "Nothing wrong with this that a bulldozer couldn't fix" said a Ford exec after first touring the Jaguar plant on Brown's Lane in Coventry.

Neither BMW nor Ford were ever able to make Land Rover work as a reliably profitable company.

Also, Ford was never bailed out in 2008. Alan Mullaly hocked almost all of the company to get liquidity before the crash, which was prescient. After that, the entirety of the former Ford "Premier Automotive Group" (save for Lincoln) was jettisoned, as it was in the long term a money-loser. Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata, Volvo to Geely, and Aston-Martin to ...some Saudis.

I mean, sure, it failed eventually, obviously.

But it was part-nationalised in 1974 following a private-sector failure. It was a big manufacturer, letting it collapse would have led to thousands of jobs lost, but the government went for a 1.2bn buyout instead of simply a cash injection.

It was not badly run in the ‘70s. It had its ups and downs, but ultimately it was very stable. It really started to collapse in the ‘80s. Lots of reasons for this, including a changing market, recession and poor management decisions. Toyota’s lean production processes became a thing and BL failed to evolve, such is the way of business. It was most certainly a mess by the late ‘80s.

Remember, it was part-nationalised: essentially run as a private corporation that the government had a major stake in, not directly run by the government, though of course the govt could not help but meddle and the Thatcher govt was ideologically opposed to such a structure existing.

>following a private-sector failure. It was a big manufacturer, letting it collapse would have led to thousands of jobs lost,

Those jobs are just as lost now, as they would've been 50 years ago. Wouldn't it have been better to fix that problem earlier?

>It was not badly run in the ‘70s.

I'm sorry, I can't credit that. BL was less efficient in 1973 in terms of cars per worker than Renault, Fiat & VW. Per sales, it was even worse, as Fiat wasn't selling Alfa Romeos, Maseratis and Ferraris at the time. To say nothing of Ford, or Toyota.

>It had its ups and downs, but ultimately it was very stable.

A tossed brick descends from its apogee at a steady 9.8m/s^2; and yet we don't call that flying.

>Remember, it was part-nationalised...the govt could not help but meddle and the >Thatcher govt was ideologically opposed to such a structure existing.

So, as best as I can figure, that £1.2 billion was recouped by: 1.) Privatization of Jaguar in '84: £400 million 2.) Sale of Rover group to British Aerospace in '87: £150 million 3.) Merger of Leyland Trucks w/ DAF in '88: unknown, the merged Leyland DAF went bankrupt four or five years later.

So, by '88, the Government was still out £400 million or so on its investment; how much longer do you think they should've kept it up?

Also-I'd love to know which Anglophone government has a record of success with: 1.) A fully nationalized company 2.) That is highly capital intensive 3.) In the consumer-product or durable-goods space

Does one exist?

> So, by '88, the Government was still out £400 million or so on its investment

Only if you consider its book value as a measure of success, but the aim of public ownership is not just to buy an asset and make a direct profit on share price. Losing all those workers in one go would have been catastrophic for the economy, it would have had to have bailed out the company in some form if it didn't buy it.

BL secured a lot of well-paying jobs for people who pay tax in the UK AND was profitable for much of its tenure. As a major manufacturer, it strengthened exports, bolstered manufacturing expertise within the country and generated soft power. From the government's point of view, this is certainly worth more than the book value alone.

As I said, it was unable to evolve as a business, it languished, and would have needed more investment and modernisation. It happens to private businesses too. The directors and govt chose to sell off the best bits rather than invest or seek more investment.

I understand the business case for this, but I think it was short-sighted: the long-term loss of a major UK manufacturing industry and soft power brands has not been a good thing for the country, in my opinion.

> Also-I'd love to know which Anglophone government has a record of success with: 1.) A fully nationalized company 2.) That is highly capital intensive 3.) In the consumer-product or durable-goods space

Privatised transport and utilities in the UK have been a very obvious and dismal failure. There have been no successes, as far as I'm aware. They cheap out on paying for critical infrastructure. They have to keep getting bailed out by the government, which is much more inefficient use of taxpayer money, and the profits go to shareholders instead of the taxpayer.

British Rail, British Telecom, Thames Water Authority, Post Office... were they more profitable as government agencies? No. Were there examples of mismanagement? Sure. Did they provide better value to the public? Absolutely.

I mean I think most billionaires would welcome the 1950s tax code. The reduction in their bills would be amazing! The only people paying those number would be our new "middle" class doctors, lawyers, etc people who make a lot of income but limited investments.

High tax and high public spending.

Government spending was a slightly lower percentage of GDP than today (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S), and a whole lot of that was defense (https://econofact.org/u-s-defense-spending-in-historical-and...).

The 50s were great, let’s do that again.

Assuming you're not a non-white person, or a woman who wants a career. Although getting rid of Medicare would certainly help the budget.

Is there something intrinsic to the general setup of government spending in the 1950s that makes it incompatible with equal rights for minorities and women? These would seem to be orthogonal issues.

Obviously I’m talking about re-creating the economic policies of the 1950s, not the equality policies.

Nobody paid a 91% tax rate in practice. What a silly thing to focus on, a headline marginal tax rate nobody paid.

The 1950s were great for places like the US, Australia and New Zealand because they were initially fairly unregulated (wartime planning was ended and the market took over) and they weren't destroyed by the war.

The UK had rationing into the mid 50s while its empire crumbled. It was not some heavenly place. Millions left the UK for the new world, including my grandparents, because the UK was in a dire state.

Over the next 20-30 years, the anglosphere became progressively more regulated, more taxed, more controlled, and more unionised. You needed a licence to import a new car. You needed a licence to import magazines. Exchange rates and interest rates were controlled by the government and adjusted for political purposes. Large parts of the economy were run inefficiently by the state as make-work schemes to prop up "full employment" policies that were politically popular but very expensive. The oil shock of the 1970s revealed how bad this scheme of economic management was at responding to changing conditions. When you have thea biggest economy in the world and you were untouched by a war that decimated your competitors it is easy to look good. But the system was not capable of responding to changing conditions because it was largely driven from the top down by bureaucrats and politicians for the sake of implementing their preferred social policies and winning elections respectively.

In the 1980s, this came to a breaking point. This was true everywhere, but the clearest example is not the US or the UK but New Zealand. It nearly went bankrupt trying to maintain completely unsustainable exchange rates for political reasons and there was a small consitutional crisis when the outgoing government refused to implement the incoming government's instructions to lower the exchange rate. The economy was dominated by what were called "Think Big" schemes: government infrastructure projects that made no financial sense but looked good on election posters and "created jobs". Large numbers of businesses did entirely pointless things like assembling Japanese cars from components more expensively than could be done in Japan, because car imports were restricted. Many other examples exist. Agriculture was heavily subsidised by the state.

The new governments in the 1980s (I am talking about the West generally now) did away with much of this rubbish. They lowered trade barriers, reduced or eliminated subsidies, and privatised the elements of the public sector that had no reason to be run by the public sector.

Sometimes when privatised these businesses failed. But that wasn't because they were privatised, it was because they had never made any financial sense in the first place.

The fundamental point is that the 1950s system was the same as the 1960s and 1970s system. If you go back to the 1950s, you also go back to the 1970s. The system was the same, the same incentives would exist, and the result would be similar. Give the economy over to the public sector and in a few years all thought of making what customers want and will pay for is substituted with using economic power to achieve social goals and win elections. We had better make sure we hire more Xs, they deserve more representation, and we better put money into Y, people love to hear about Y, and so on. And before long it is a lumbering inefficient mess.

That environment was directly proceeded by WW2, which required massive capital investment to rebuild Europe[1]. In the UK we were still rationing candy and meat during the early 50s[2]. So, I’m not particularly eager to recreate those conditions.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_King...

I have a lot of issues with the work of Yanis Varoufakis, but he has one idea that I'd like to see tried out - and that is that the workers own 10% of their companies, obviously getting 10% of the profit, etc. At least in Europe it's uncommon to get shares as part of the compensation package, so I'm curious how the Varoufakis' idea would end up working. It's worth giving it a shot.

It doesn't sound like a bad idea. And I really wish the UK was more like the USA with stock options etc

I'm not opposed to employee ownership but there's no reason to think that mandating a certain minimum level will produce better outcomes. The equity dilution will increase the cost of capital, making it harder to start or expand businesses. Most workers have virtually zero ability to impact shareholder returns. And low skilled workers really need cash today, not the possibility of dividends or capital gains tomorrow.

As a worker, I don't want 10% of my business' volatile profit. I would rather have reliable cash, that I can invest in SP500. Or at least that is the case with employees of most businesses.

Why would I want that as a worker? I am already "overexposed" to the fortunes of my employer by virtue of being employed by it. If my employer does well then I get paid better, get a bonus, etc. If my employer does poorly then I risk being laid off.

Why would I want to invest in that risk when I have relatively little control over the success of the business, as opposed to investing the same amount of wealth in the market more generally or in assets that counter some of that risk?

Also, generally, why should employees automatically get some part of the company? What have they done to deserve it?

Central planning is likely going to be a feature of all manners of world-leading governments, whether we're talking about dictatorships, theocracies, or democratic republics. Imagine, for example, a country that wants to get into the chip game at this point.

I have zero doubts everyone commenting has read the article. That makes me even more surprised, that some people seem to have conclusions that are in direct opposition to what the article says.

Since, as we all know, the article is about how central planning ruined the UK economy, and the later reforms were not enough to fully unblock it. Particularly, it postulates deregulating housing and making it harder for people to oppose new investments (especially related energy and infrastructure)..

Turns out Thatcherism only works as long as the state still has assets to sell off. The delusion that assets would stay in the hands of the working and middle class, and not end up with the wealthy inheriting class, has to be one of the biggest political failures of our government on the modern era. It's lead to the possible death of the Conservative Party if they fail to fight off Reform and the Liberal Democrats.

You're surely joking. The IMF isn't bailing out the UK, and there aren't 3 day week debates because of the failing power supply. What's led to the death of the Conservative party is them doing exactly the opposite what a lot of Conservative voters want: bigger economy, and slower immigration.

Didn't they get more independence with Brexit?

Regarding the immigration, sure, the Conservative voters maybe want less of it, but rich and influential Tories actually like immigration as it allows their businesses to thrive (even more). The UK has more capital going around than her own people.

Legal immigrants from the EU were not the only source of migrants to the UK. Many come from elsewhere, legally and otherwise. Guess what: we have Brexit but we still have immigrants - impossible?! </sarcasm>

Plus it was never about immigration, it was always - I think - a classic case of misinformation and greed from many places. Sadly many people fell for it.

> Plus it was never about immigration,

It was partly about immigration. According to these surveys 43% of people that voted leave think immigration should be reduced.

https://public.tableau.com/views/Publicopinion2023/FIGURE9?:...

> it was always - I think - a classic case of misinformation and greed from many places. Sadly many people fell for it.

Why do many people assume that if someone thinks differently about a particular political issue they must have fooled somehow? Considering there is data that partially contradicts your belief that it wasn't about immigration, maybe your assessment about their level of understanding of the issues involved is also incorrect.

> It was partly about immigration

My view is it’s actually about people being racist

Well there is no evidence to back that up. In fact there is plenty that indicates the opposite.

https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/uk...

There is in the section entitled "Preferences for different types of migrant: origin, similarity, skill level". (There doesn't seem to be a way to directly reference it in a document).

> Country of origin is not the only factor that people take into account when considering preferences on immigration. In the European Social Survey 2014, British respondents reported how many immigrants should be allowed based on a question that specified both the country of origin (Poland or India) and the skill level (professional or unskilled labourer). The results revealed that when migrants are professionals, opposition is low, and when migrants are unskilled, opposition is high (Figure 5). Research has shown that people’s general preference for high-skilled over low-skilled migrants is mainly driven by perceptions of their higher economic contribution

> The preference among the British public for highly skilled migrants aligns with previous research indicating that, when questioned about the criteria for incoming migrants, skills are considered more important than other factors such as race/ethnicity and religion.

Direct link to the stats:

https://public.tableau.com/views/Publicopinion2023/FIGURE5?:...

My view is there needs to be a version of Godwin's law related to client of supposed 'racism', i.e. the one who claims ${issue} is caused by/related to 'racism' thereby loses the argument unless he comes with solid proof.

I see no proof, spurious claims of 'racism' do not count as such so it actually was about immigration.

It's disingenuous to pretend Brexit wasn't at least partially motivated by in-group preference. Almost as disingenuous as implying that there's anything wrong with having said preference. I don't open up my house to people I don't know regardless of their potential to contribute to it economically. Why is this treated as immoral when the same reasoning is applied to the immigration system?

I am not pretending anything. I've showed some actual evidence to back to back up my view point.

Moreover, time after time the British public are surveyed about their views on immigration and ethnic background is not something that is important to a large portion of the people taking part.

Are there some people that do care? Sure there are, but they are very small minority typically.

> Sure there are, but they are very small minority typically.

From your own data, 25% of respondents agreed with the statement: Allow none/only a few immigrants of a different race/ethnicity to come and live in [the UK]. This isn't a small minority and I can guarantee you the distribution of these attitudes isn't equal between leavers and remainers.

You have to read the analysis below as well as look at the charts. From the articles I linked

> As a further way of characterising countries, we include a second measure based on the percentage of people saying that immigration ‘makes the country a worse place to live’ On this measure, the UK maintains a similar rank position as one of the more positive countries in the sample, and similar to Switzerland at 18%.

> These two measures can be thought of as capturing opinions on future migration flows and current population stocks. In most of these 13 countries, it appears that people are more negative towards the idea of continuing flows than about the immigrants already present. Finland, for example, is a country where 42% of the public would prefer few/no immigrants of another race coming to live there, whilst, at the same time, just 19% think immigrants make the country a worse place to live.

It is still much better than many other countries in Europe.

> This isn't a small minority and I can guarantee you the distribution of these attitudes isn't equal between leavers and remainers.

Ok sure. I probably shouldn't have said minority. Yeah of course the distribution isn't going to be equal. However people pretend it was all about racism when it clearly wasn't.

> Why do many people assume that if someone thinks differently about a particular political issue they must have fooled somehow?

politicians sometimes lie…?

the £350 million a day bus springs to mind as one example. the amazing trade deals which will unleash our new economy were another.

like, those things sound great. people wanted those promises to become real and believed the people who were saying those things could implement them.

turns out implementation is sometimes a lot harder than waving your hands and making a bunch of promises.

edit —

especially when the advertised numbers are factually wrong, and people know they are wrong — i.e. they lied.

> A study by King's College London and Ipsos MORI, published in October 2018 found that 42 percent of people who had heard of the £350 million claim still believed it was true, whereas 36 percent thought it was false and 22 per cent were unsure.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_Leave_bus

> politicians sometimes lie…?

Most people are quite aware that politicians lie. It is a common trope in movies, tv and media generally. Politicians are quite disliked in the UK generally. So this idea that people blindly believe politicians is nonsense.

So? People frequently cherry pick information to justify their decisions after they have already made them. I actually looked up the actual report (not the wikipedia summary). While much more people generally believe the 350 million figure voted Leave, there was a decent percentage of people that believed the figure and voted Remain.

People seem to forget that a good portion of the Media and Parliament (including the Prime Minister at the time who won with a majority) were in favour of Remain. What is often ignored is that if you look at UKIP voter percentage before the referendum. It had risen from 3.1% to 12.6%. That was rising well before the bus campaign was a thing.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/election2010/results/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2015/results

The Leave Referendum was about many things. It was partly about immigration, it was partly about sticking it to an entitled political class, part of it was about sovereignty. Making it about a figure on the side of the bus is asinine. I also don't believe Dominic Cummings on how effective it was btw.

But in any event this will probably be my last comment on anything political on here because you get downvoted for simply defending half the people in my country that voted a particular way.

i find your comment weird. hopefully my reply clarifies why i find it weird. probably not. i’ve drunk too much coffee today.

> I actually looked up the actual report (not the wikipedia summary). While much more people generally believe the 350 million figure voted Leave, there was a decent percentage of people that believed the figure and voted Remain.

64% Con/65% Lab leave supporters versus 32% Con/20% Lab remain supporters. so, 65%-ish (hand wavy representative stat) of leave supporters believed the claim, which was misleading / false.

65% x 52% = 34% of all leave voters (very back of a napkin maths here). that’s a sizeable chunk of people who believed the lie. enough people to possibly swing the vote, given there was only 2% in it. that’s enough to swing it if there was no bus claim.

> The Leave Referendum was about many things. It was partly about immigration, it was partly about sticking it to an entitled political class, part of it was about sovereignty. Making it about a figure on the side of the bus is asinine.

i completely agree.

but the bus is a great example of how people get lied to by politicians, who then potentially get their 34% of people convinced. which was the point i was trying to make. politicians lying has a significant impact on the outcome. it’s not solely responsible, but it has an impact. they bear some responsibility for the shit show we currently have now.

interestingly, the ipsos mori / KCL study confirms this somewhat

> you get downvoted for simply defending half the people in my country that voted a particular way.

1) commenting about the voting on comments is something we try to avoid doing here. have a read of the site guidelines to understand why (you’re a new user so i don’t know if you’ve seen them before or not)

2) people on HN generally speaking tend to be pedantic nerds like me who are probably somewhat on the spectrum somewhere and when they see a claim will call people out on it when it is wrong.

> Leave voters are least likely to answer correctly (16%) and most likely to wrongly think that European immigrants contribute less than they take out (42%).

> Leave voters are most likely to hold these incorrect beliefs: European immigration has increased crime; decreased quality of healthcare services; increases unemployment among low-skilled workers.

^ ipsos mori/KCL study

there’s your problem. you’re aligned politically with people who are, to put it plainly, more wrong about this subject than they are right. so when you try and defend your position on here, you are going to get significant pushback on claims because, frankly, a lot of the claims made by other people who voted the way you did are either wrong or misleading when they make their claims.

3) i wasn’t on the site in 2016 (did HN exist then? who knows). imagine what it would have been like back then!

4) i hope you stick around. compared to some commentators, you’re doing a bang up job with actually reading studies (which meant i’ve gone and read the study and learned something now! thanks!).

> So this idea that people blindly believe politicians is nonsense.

bonus round. most people don’t believe politicians. they do, however, vote based on who the sun newspaper tells them to vote for (well, until recently).

> politicians sometimes lie…?

That isn't a big enough reason to assume everyone's been fooled. Or at least, the people who disagree with you have been fooled. That's possible, but it's also possible you've been fooled. So bringing it up one-sided is a bit grating.

i’m going to post the quote above again, with more context from another quote, because you’ve avoided quoting the bit which actually demonstrates that this is a big enough reason to assume that enough people were fooled.

> On 27 May, the UK Statistics Authority chair Andrew Dilnot made a stronger statement against Vote Leave, stating that the continued use of the figure was "misleading and undermine[d] trust in official statistics".

misleading is politics speak for “lying with statistics”.

two years later, after the claim was repeatedly denounced as being misleading and false multiple times, 42% of people surveyed still thought it was true.

that’s a significant representative proportion of the population, given 52% of people voted to leave.

it’s no wonder that 7 years later “brexit remorse” among leave voters is sitting pretty at around 60% or so (cba to source this, i think it was a yougov poll reported in the independent).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_Leave_bus

> bringing it up one-sided is a bit grating.

i find people who lie, and people who defend liars, grating.

we don’t get to pick our reality. we just have to live in it.

> i find people who lie, and people who defend liars, grating.

Who here is defending liars?

> Didn't they get more independence with Brexit?

We didn't leave the EHCR. So there is an argument that we don't have full control of our laws. IANAL and won't pretend to know the specifics.

> Regarding the immigration, sure, the Conservative voters maybe want less of it, but rich and influential Tories actually like immigration as it allows their businesses to thrive (even more).

Not just Conservative voters. Almost 1 in 5 Labour and Lib Dem voters want to see it reduced.

https://public.tableau.com/views/Publicopinion2023/FIGURE9?:...

Generally 52% of the UK want to see it immigration reduced in some capacity according to the migration observatory. This was roughly the Vote Leave percentage.

https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/uk...

> Not just Conservative voters.

That's also not what I said nor implied. The parent comment discussed Conservatives, so I replied to that.

I know. I felt like it needed to be pointed out that even on parties that are seen to be more centre-left/left that there is good portion of voters that are opposition to immigration.

This is because I don't think it is as much of a right/left issue like it is frequently framed.

The ECHR is an international agreement like many, many others. It has special status in UK law only because we chose to: that was the purpose of the Human Rights Act. You can also take complaints of breach to the European Court of Human Rights, but they have no enforcement powers (in particular, Russia often decided not to bother complying, and we've avoided enforcing their ruling on prisoner voting rights with their tacit consent).

It used to be the case that we were also tied into the ECHR (and playing nice with the rulings of the ECtHR) because it's required by EU law even though it's not an EU instrument and the ECtHR isn't an EU court. But as we've left that's no longer an issue.

Finally, I'd just say that there's little objectionable about the Convention, and for the most part it tracks very closely with existing British common law (not surprisingly, as it was a Churchill-supported project in the first place and intended to export what was great about the British tradition of liberty as much as to bind us into Europe). There are a few edge cases where politicians and certain newspapers get into enormous flaps about individual cases, but it's really not that constraining a convention: most of the clauses have get-outs for crime, morality and public order and the margin of appreciation is generally quite broad. It's not perfect any more than, say, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is, but the complaints are mostly grandstanding.

> The UK has more capital going around than her own people.

Wealth and income are not zero-sum. Generally, people produce more than they consume (or we'd all be living in caves). Reducing people reduces output, growth, and wealth.

The UK economy is already pretty small per-capita compared to other first-world countries. I'm certainly not one to argue for growth, but what is it about UK's conservatism that demands degrowth? It strikes me as antithetical to the liberalisation that I would think would form the right flank of the spectrum.

From my perspective, even economic concerns are driven by fear of immigration: it's just the same old "immigrants are taking my jobs but also somehow not growing the economy so I am now economically displaced" trope.

> The UK economy is already pretty small per-capita compared to other first-world countries.

? Where does it rank? What is per capita GDP?

There is a finite amount of housing.

Britons do not, actually, wish to carpet their entire island w/ semidetached housing, so each and every immigrant occupying a flat is one less that a native could be living in.

>has to be one of the biggest political failures of our government on the modern era

Thatcher/Reagan neoliberalism only has to be a failure if you assume the goal was to best serve the general population. This is a POSIWID moment.

> Turns out Thatcherism only works as long as the state still has assets to sell off.

Thatcherism works as long as there are still people receiving state assistance, since their assistance can be reduced even further.

Also works if you have North Sea oil revenues that you can use to pay for mass unemployment.

It works as long as you have an economy and eyes to see it worked with her policies in place and didn't work before she was elected.

The Tories benefited massively from Thatcher because her policies massively benefited Britain. Without them, Britain would be far poorer today. Britain's problems today are not because of too much Thatcherism but because of far too little. The areas of greatest concern are those areas that they didn't manage to do much with, like local planning.

The idea of the market building housing only works if the market is allowed to do so. It isn't. That isn't a problem with the idea of the market building houses - it manages to do everything else in the economy just fine - but with planning laws.

Thatcherism is shortermism manifest. It's the same attitude that plagues the corporate world - focusing on next Quarter profits rather than the next 20 years. It leaves nothing left at the end but a broken state and more billionaires than we ever had medieval kings, while the rest of us slide back into Dickensian poverty, be you doctor, engineer, soldier, or social worker. We traded state wealth (sold off massive amounts of passive income generating assets like housing and utilities) for short term economic GDP growth in the 90s and early 00s, and now we brunt the cost of it because our passive income has gone. The Tories were more worried about re-election than they were keeping the middle class alive.

Our utilities and infrastructure are now drain us for every penny we're worth, and guess what? They're largely owned by other countries now. Our train networks, our energy companies, our communications, and so on, go to pay the French/Chinese/Scandinavian/etc government's. Somehow other countries manage to make profit on state asset; something which Thatcher never had the capacity to do. That's not considering the private industry, which makes £MM in profit, pocketing it instead of reinvesting it in the state which is the primary mandate of public ownership. Individuals abroad or in the 0.1% profit make money from our state, while the rest of the country withers.

The article is about how bad land and energy policies (essentially central planning)—dating from the post-war period—are holding back the British economy. Is that neoliberalism?

It is, neoliberalism has been about taking away all the state owned assets and putting everything the country needs into private hands. This is what has stalled the economy and its what is fuelling enormous inequality. Calling for ever more of it falls really flat now after 40 years of the same strategy making things worse for the average person.

In fairness, whilst the article isn't without merit, it's authored by some of the only people in the UK that actually describe themselves as neoliberal. Which is why it's focusing on "green belt" planning policy and ignoring the fact that local government built 150k houses per annum back when we actually built enough houses, something which "neoliberal" policy introduced by Thatcher essentially made impossible, and why the article treats rail privatization as a success story rather than a service British citizens use in increasing numbers despite sky-high prices (and the government subsidising it more than when they owned it!) not least because markets have moved the jobs into London and the affordable housing out of London.

> ignoring the fact that local government built 150k houses per annum back when we actually built enough houses

Well you had 728,000 people coming in last year. It'll have to be a bit more i fear.

Neoliberalism is basically the economic equivalent of "allelopathic medicine" - it is a word used mostly by kooks who are out of the mainstream for damned good reasons.

neoliberalism is strongly against NIMBYism and other restrictions on land that are a big part of the UK's problems from my understanding

To some people, everything is still Thatcher's fault, 40 years later.

As one of those people ... it's not so much that everything is (still) Thatcher's fault. Had she not won in 1979, doubtless the UK would be facing a different mix of problems, some the same, some different. But Thatcher set the ball in motion on the tracks it has been on more or less since her first win, and it is those tracks that are the fundamental source of many of the problems in the UK (not all of them, but the biggest ones).

>Everyone who bought into post-industrial "service-based" economies in the 80s is now experiencing economies that are mysteriously failing to thrive.

Fixed it for you. I don't understand how people expect "service-based" economies to actually create any long term wealth, growth or prosperity. Unless you're serving increasingly ever more lattes to each other, and increasingly more "banking-services" and rents upon rents somehow are supposed to "grow" the economy and create "prosperity".

The more you de-industrialize your country and outsource everything, to the point that you're failing to meet even your energy needs, and competency to quickly build plants or infrastructure projects dies out, it's bound to result in at best stagnation and going to the shitter eventually, it's a matter of time.

At the same time, uncapped growth of physical goods is simply impossible on a finite planet. No matter how you slice it, forever growth is delusional.

How does one reindustrialize, then?

Aren't higher energy prices exactly what we need to combat climate change though?

Not really. We need polluting energy sources to be charged for their pollution, ie stop using the atmosphere and land as a free sewer, which in turn will put renewables on an equal footing.

Though even without that, solar, wind, and batteries are already cheaper.

Isn't that the same? You want to raise the price of energy to make wind etc competitive?

Sound bites drives political discussion.

When a polluting industry poisons the air and the water and people go to the hospital because they are coughing or they have dysentery, who will pay to cleanup the mess? If you frame the discussion as about “price” it is a non-starter.

I would argue it is better to talk about workers and their families. As in let us not shit in the river so our children don’t get sick and can go to school. Let us not poison the air so workers can do their jobs and not go to hospital.

This seems disingenuous twice:

1. You're welcome to argue that, but you haven't here. You've just stated it.

2. You shouldn't supplant one topic with another. High energy prices kill people, because energy drives the cost of everything, and people can direct less value into things that keep them healthy if they're spending a greater proportion of their income on survival. You can say "also air should be clean", fine, but not "Don't think about prices! Look over here instead!"

1. Air pollution kills more.

2. You can have your cake and eat it, if you drop the requirement to buy electricity at the price of the most expensive component in the mix. Spain did just that and they're currently experiencing an industrial revival thanks to comparatively low energy prices.

No, I would argue I am correctly framing externalized costs ie the tragedy of the commons.

The context is "You want to raise the price of energy to make wind etc competitive?"

Adding a separate topic seems like a distraction. Everyone knows about negative externalities. I don't think we need to rehearse the same points to obscure the specific one I'm asking about.

I think Rawgabbit is trying to get at the point that you need to price in the externalities to find the actual value of something.

They're trying to explain in good faith as far as I can tell.

>High energy prices kill people

Indeed, and so does air pollution. Having (accurate) prices on both allows the market to reduce pollution and energy costs efficiently.

No, you just need fossil fuel energy to be relatively more expensive, not for energy to be more expensive overall. It's happened already but we're currently being held hostage by the coal burners while they scramble to extract the last bit of rent they can.

There is no way to make fossil fuel more expensive without making energy more expensive overall, because fossil fuel is included in the category of "energy overall." The effect of making fossil fuels more expensive is that energy prices will rise. The point of the GP ("Not really. We need polluting energy sources to be charged for their pollution, ie stop using the atmosphere and land as a free sewer, which in turn will put renewables on an equal footing.") is that the goal is not to raise the cost of energy as a whole (even though this is the inevitable outcome of higher fossil fuel prices), but instead to price in the negative externalities generated by fossil fuels.

Put another way, in a world where fossil fuels are no longer consumed, there isn't any reason to limit energy consumption for its sake, since the whole point was to encourage adoption of cleaner technologies. There is a case to be made that this isn't true, since even the "clean" technologies have an environmental impact, but that is tangential to the discussion.

I no longer think it's politically possible to charge anybody for climate externalities, since those people own our governments.

We are basically stuck until even those guys realise that coal is a loser just for practical, non carbon priced reasons.

> No, you just need fossil fuel energy to be relatively more expensive, not for energy to be more expensive overall.

Can you explain exactly what you mean? Say (very made up numbers) coal is $1 per day, and a renewable is $2 per day. I raise the price of coal to $3 per day to make it relatively more expensive. Haven't I just increased the price of energy overall to $2 per day?

Wind is competitive already… the price of electricity in the UK is set by the gas fired power generators

Wind isn't going to power the grid by itself.

Only high oil and gas prices specifically. And honestly, low gas prices is good if it helps move away from coal.

But unfortunately, even the most liberal political groups have walked back any interest in solving climate change at the margin. You see this with the endless life of the "100 companies cause climate change" misinformation.

That 100 companies canard is really terrible. It's seeking a villain to blame instead of addressing the system problems and it's second or third order effects such as climate change. I understand it probably motivates some folks but I can't help but roll my eyes.

The deeper problem might be that they gave up on fighting inequality; which would give regular people enough breathing room to make changes on the margin.

Without that, the argument is basically "We know that life is barely worth living, but we aren't going to help with that. Instead we want to make your life even worse to save the environment!"

> And honestly, low gas prices is good if it helps move away from coal.

Good news, the UK has completely moved away from coal: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/30/end-of-an-e...

China now emits almost 2x the carbon per capita than the UK, and alone emits more than all western countries combined including the US. The UK can't solve climate change at the margin or anywhere else with domestic energy policy.

China is now consuming record amounts of coal (the globe has not actually even reached peak-coal yet despite claims we'd already passed it going back decades and despite western coal consumption taking a nosedive starting about 20 years ago). Which is strange considering that it has also been an enormous producer and exporter of allegedly much cheaper solar and wind generators for many years.

Something doesn't add up here, and further disadvantaging much cleaner domestic industry and driving production offshore to countries with far higher emissions intensity of production (not to mention many other environmental and humanitraian issues) is not the way to solve climate change. It could be making it even worse.

Energy costs should probably be progressive. If you need more than the poor your cost starts shooting through the roof.

This reminds me of that popular "reality" show where they remodel a family's home and surprise them with what is basically a palace. Afterward the families are shattered by energy costs, and eventually exorbitant property taxes. Off camera they are forced into forclosure and end up in debt.

After the first month or so they are forced to seal off most of the house as they desperately try to stay afloat. Lacking financial savvy, most end up mortgaging the home.

A carbon dividend solves that problem. Put a price on each ton of carbon released in the atmosphere, then redistribute an equal dividend to each citizen.

The wealthiest people will end up paying more than they receive back, while the poorest will receive a boost. All while incentivizing low carbon alternatives in every sector of the economy.

It's higher energy prices yes, but that means higher everything prices. Even if your energy tariff is a 100% renewable one you still pay the dirty gas price because of the way the market is set up.

Combine that with high costs of housing (both to purchase but also to rent) and people are, generally speaking, fucked and living paycheck to paycheck. Renters especially live a precarious life where prices regularly go up 10% per year and you might be legally told to leave with not much more than a month's notice leading to much upheaval and associated costs.

That's a system that benefits mega-corporations running everything. Housing/cost of living is so expensive it cripples most upward mobility as regular people can't take risks investing/starting a business/switching careers/etc or have savings because they can barely afford rent. The only ones building/buying houses are real estate investors who can afford to navigate the complex market rules, so you'll be stuck working for one and renting from another.

In the UK the energy market is broken, the costs of electricity is based on what the most expensive source is currently on the grid.

The UK has a lot of wind (shallow waters, strong wind blasts from Atlantic etc) and wind is significantly cheaper, but because there's gas still on the grid everyone pays the higher gas based price even if energy is mostly coming from cheaper wind.

Yes, the renewable cleaner energy is actually cheaper than the fossil fuel it's replacing and in a perfect world should reduce bills.

It's based on the most expensive source that is required to meet demand. If there is enough wind to meet demand then gas is not needed or factored in to the price.

All markets (not just energy markets) work in this way.

> because there's gas still on the grid everyone pays the higher gas based price even if energy is mostly coming from cheaper wind

You're describing how a market functions. If the gas plants went offline tomorrow, could the wind turbines produce sufficient energy to power the national grid?

That is a very common and overly simplistic view of the UK's energy market. What you have described is essentially the UK's day-ahead and spot energy markets. The whole point of those markets is to ensure demand is met with near 100% certainty. Setting the price to the last bidder is not unique to the UK for energy pricing, if it were not present then everyone would be speculating what the threshold would be and giving high bids and it would make the market unstable. There are other markets in the UK that behave very differently (such as the ones that green energy companies use to buy 100% renewable energy 6 months ahead of time).

In practice UK electricity prices _are_ much cheaper from wind and solar energy, most of the time, because virtually all of that capacity in the UK was built under what is known as a CFD (contracts for difference) basis. The exact mechanism is a bit subtle [1], but in essence renewables built that way have a fixed price per unit of energy (usually for 20 years after construction). This price is less than what the gas energy producers typically bid in the UK.

The reasons why electricity prices are still on average very high in the UK is because the rest of the energy market is _so_ exposed to gas prices and renewables can't produce electricity a lot of the time (because it's not always windy, and it's not always light outside). Renewable production is highly correlated with itself and not necessarily aligned with demand.

The UK also has other structural problems in the electricity system that have arisen from its exposure to renewables that come with associated costs. For example wind turbines in Scotland often get paid to _turn off_ because their power can't be transmitted to the south of England where it can be used - there are similar constraints with North sea production. Wind turbines and solar panels replacing traditional coal power stations means that the electricity grid has lost a lot of its traditional load balancing and stability mechanisms (conventional power plants provide a lot of stability because large rotational mass synchronised to the grid frequency provides inertia in the entire grid - wind turbine rotation is independent of the grid frequency). ESO now has to have more drastic and expensive mechanisms like demand reduction and rapid response hot reserves in-place. A lot of these issues are transient and will get cheaper over time, but they've become acute in the short-term with the UK's rapid grid decarbonisation.

[1] they get paid directly from the day-ahead, spot, and other markets at the last bidder price. But they either have to refund any amount over their fixed price, or they receive a top-up from the energy companies so that they effectively got the fixed price.

Not necessarily. You could argue that you want coal and gas to be expensive so that people build out renewables. But the places with the cheapest electricity generally have hydro, nuclear or wind, which are all zero carbon.

The issue is there is currently no mechanism for end consumers to moderate their behaviour based on energy related emissions.

Currently if users as a group demand more power than clean can provide, dirty gets turned on and everyone pays the highest cost.

We need a way for a consumer to be able to commit to only clean power, potentially at a lower cost but with limited supply.

Do you not get charged different rates based on usage amounts? This is common across the world - where the first X KWH of usage per month cost a lot less than the next X.

Commercial contracts generally don't work that way, they generally pay the market rate (the current most expensive producer).

It means there is no way for an individual consumers behaviour to drive (or be driven by) the green energy proportion, as if the collective demand is too high then you pay the market rate for coal anyway.

> Aren't higher energy prices exactly what we need to combat climate change though?

No.

What you need to combat climate change is cheap green energy, and "green" is just a different question entirely to "cost".

If you have expensive energy, regardless of how green it is or isn't, you get poverty.

If you have greenhouse-gas-emitting energy, regardless of how cheap or expensive it is, you get climate change.

20 years ago, all the green energy was expensive; now, green energy is the cheapest around.

I assumed they meant higher prices for non-green energy than green energy.

> now, green energy is the cheapest

great to notice, but the overview falls short.. price signals are supposed to trigger conservation yet somehow, that is not discussed. Also note that energy markets have lifecycles.. it takes investment and infrastructure to make and deliver energy. Fossil fuels have done that in the past.

> signals are supposed to trigger conservation yet somehow, that is not discussed

Energy conservation has been discussed my entire life.

When I was a kid, it was things like double glazing, close windows, wear pullovers indoors, turn off lights when you leave a room, CFLs.

Late teen to young adult, increased loft insulation, cavity wall insulation. Energy efficiency standards for consumer goods. Cars getting taxed based on emissions.

More recently, a campaign group literally called "Insulate Britain": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulate_Britain_protests

> Fossil fuels have one that in the past

At first, but the last coal plant has been closed, and renewables are ascendent — just past midnight UK time and still 28.5% renewables, average for last week 33.6%, and for last year 36.8%: https://grid.iamkate.com/

No, if you want to have a stable standard of living, you need higher energy prices for polluting energy sources, and lower energy prices for non-polluting energy sources.

Then, to make killing this political suicide, make sure to mail every man, woman, and dog a check every two weeks called 'CARBON DIVIDEND'.

> Then, to make killing this political suicide, make sure to mail every man, woman, and dog a check every two weeks called 'CARBON DIVIDEND'.

We effectively did this in Canada and it still became a political albatross.

(Though in practice the cheque was done via direct deposit and a lot of people didn't realize where the money was coming from despite it being clearly labelled. I think cheques in the mail would have been more effective.)

> Postwar Britain had been swept up by the theory that nationalization created economies of scale that gave citizens better outcomes than pure capitalism. “There was an idea that if we could rationalize the planning system … then we could build things in the right way—considered, and planned, and environmentally friendly,” ... But the costs of nationalization became clear within a few decades.

Central economic planning - the eternal hope that never works.

Seems to be working extremely well in China, to be honest.

They've built entire cities that are completely vacant.

Like building transport infrastructure to nowhere, hmm? And then they build all the other infrastructure around it.[1] Because with such central planning you don’t need to build around and on top of existing infrastructure—you can build like in Sim City.

That vacant “Paris” also turned out to become populated later.

Ha ha they centrally planned a city and didn’t move people into it before it was done... like what you do when building a house. That’s effectively what you are alluding to as absurd.

[1] But by that time the Western journalists might not care anymore whistles

google "vacant cities in china"

Oh yeah that's a boomer favourite! There are a bunch of articles from the early 2010s of Americans laughing at China for exactly this ... and a handful of more recent ones from the latter part of that decade conceding that actually those "ghost cities" are rapidly filling up. They don't do articles on them any more, it's too embarrassing because they're filling up and just turning out to be normal cities. You can get a nice overview of each on the wikipedia page if you like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underoccupied_developments_in_...

They've also built thousands of miles of high-speed rail, many dozens of subway lines and elevated hundreds of millions into the middle class. I don't particularly like the CCP for a variety of reasons, however to downplay their incredible strategic planning starting in the early 1980s in terms of industry and infrastructure is to be frighteningly ignorant of the world outside your borders. If you're an older American, you can probably afford to live out the rest of your days in this blissful ignorance. The rest of us however will have to figure out how the rapid decline of the USA and ascendency of China will affect our lives and plan accordingly.

From one year ago:

https://x.com/60Minutes/status/1762205898217283781

The link in that tweet leads to an article: U.S. ambassador on why China competition must be managed while keeping "the peace"

Did you click the tweet or did just spend thirty minutes looking for a source to support the "ghost cities" claim, then rush to paste it here without looking that closely at it?

But you don't like that one, though it did talk about massive insolvency in the real estate. Here's another from 2022:

https://uschinatoday.org/features/2022/01/11/cities-lost-in-...

It's not that I "don't like that one" - it was a tweet containing a headline that looked like it linked to an article about Ghost Cities but actually linked to something else entirely, and you didn't realise because you didn't open it. Maybe it hinted at other problems in China, I am certain there are many problems there! But you wanted to make a point about ghost cities, and this article didn't make that point.

And this next one you've sent me is just someone writing a "hey have y'all heard about those 'Ghost Cities' in China?" article. You might as well have just linked to your prior comment saying "google ghost cities china".

Central planning did create ghost cities that persisted for years, and that is extremely inefficient, which is my point.

I guess you would trust Bloomberg:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-01/chinese-g...

Or via Wikipedia since it’s paywalled:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underoccupied_developments_in_...

Google "critical media analysis".

The ghost cities have attracted residents over time, but they're still mostly empty. Constructing buildings that sit vacant for a decade or more is not very efficient - and the buildings depreciate with age whether they are occupied or not.

Gluts and shortages are endemic to centralized economic planning.

You’ve moved the goal post/claims from “completely vacant” to being vacant for a long while and depreciating.

Yes, they were completely vacant for many years.

There's nothing efficient about that.

The reason is simple, straightforward, and the usual answer in these situations: state intervention.

Ireland followed Britain down this disastrous planning hole and now has a matching housing crisis.

For most of the last sixty years, a good idea about how to run an economy should have involved closely scrutinizing what the British were doing. And then not doing that.

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