Probably for the convenience of the userbase here.

> I live in the north of England where temperature varies from 38F in Jan to 57F in August

38F = 3½C

57F = 14C

Not sure why you used Farenheit, but I live in the north too and it's colder and warmer than that. Currently 22C (61F) here in rainy Manchester.

Better buy some warm clothes. Or otherwise you can always hope for global warming to save the day ;)

Somehow this sounds to me like you would rather support pedophilia than see your precious right to "go where you want" restricted.

Standard hedonism of the typical climate change deniers here. Go on, people, nothing to see ...

Yeah did not expect any different from Labor and Lib Dems, was curious about the 2 candidates. Interesting to see Sunak taking a non "modern conservative" approach, quite different from Grover Norquist school of thought. Wonder if any R candidate from the American side would even be able to take such a stance.

It's not valid to compare the UK to various small countries that have always had renewables in the form of large hydroelectric systems, which the UK's geography simply doesn't have.

My point is that, in the past decade, the UK has transitioned to renewables faster than any other major industrialised nation.

As recently as 2012, nearly 45% of UK electricity still came from coal. This has been cut to around 1% in 2022, and all remaining coal-fired power stations will be closed completely by 2025.

Obviously there is still much more to do, but the UK compares favourably here to, for example, the USA or Germany.

Countries with >90% of electricity from renewables are, almost universally, ones which have unusually good geography for hydropower combined a low enough population and energy demand that this meets their needs. This is not something that the UK or most of the world can replicate.

As an American on holiday in the UK, I appreciate the Fahrenheit.

My impression of the readership is that it depends on the time of day. When I was in Vietnam, I would wake up to US centric posts full of comments. When I wake up early on the East Coast of the US (~6:30 am) I see more comments from Europe/UK. By mid afternoon, most of the posters seem to be from the US or at least the Americas.

I base this on about 5 years of daily HN reading. I infer the posters’ locations from spelling, grammar, but most often their own admission. Nonetheless, this is just anecdata.

None of the situations we face today are remotely close to the difficulty to those faced by the Romans at the end of the western empire

> Also something like 2/3rd of all europeans live in suburbs or rural

European Suburb != American suburb. I live in the suburbs of Paris, and i have two regular train lines (as in 15 minutes cadence in off peak times) within walking distance. The vast majority of commuters in and around Paris use public transit, even when they live in small towns of a few hundred/thousand inhabitants (because even those tend to have train stations). Car trips still exist, but there are massive new projects to improve public transit even more (multiple hundreds of km of new metro lines in the suburbs, multiple new tram lines in the suburbs, etc.).

The US is at great risk of becoming an authoritarian, single-party dystopia in the coming years.

(Yes, I mean the Republicans.)

The Russophobe Eastern Europeans will absolutely stand by the sanctions. Everything is Russia's fault, they should be made to pay instead of us buckling under their blackmail. Pro-Russian elements in those countries will be loud but are IMHO unlikely to win except maybe in Bulgaria and Hungary (where they are already in power).

Western Europe, we'll see. Germany seems the most likely to crack with their appeasement bullshit and shameless ex-politicians. Fingers crossed they don't.

They collectively did far less to the financial industry than some people on the internet buying Gamestop.

A common short sited assumption to make. In no way did the parent suggest he supported it, just an example that the average person cares mostly about things that directly affect their lives regardless of the bigger causes at play.

Have you heard of the plight of an even larger European country? Hint: it rhymes with Burmany.

It's bad in the UK, to imagine it's the worst in the UK vs Europe is to show your ignorance.

The UK didn't magically move on the map just because it left the EU.

If you look at the amount of cars driving around in the UK (similarly priced as all the upgrades combined), probably most homeowners. Also, if someone does not have sufficient capital, there are subsidised lease options for all upgrades.

All of that is still paid for by consumers, and we already tax profits. Where do you think the money (including the profit taxes) comes from? Consumer prices.

While Russia is for sure to blame for taking the final action by launching the war, let's not pretend the US hasn't been meddling in Ukraine for years across multiple administrations. I'd argue that in fact we can do something about "the first." Ukraine is a proxy war between Russia and the US, one that has been brewing since at least 2008.

Only a fool believes a direct confrontation between Russia and NATO/US is a good outcome or would improve the situation. Also let's not fall into the trap of believing propaganda about military performance from either side, it will take years for an honest assessment to come out.

It doesn't sound right to suggest there are criteria for using nukes. The only thing that needs to happen is someone with them decides to use them and does.

> no supply guarantee since we left the EU (we are now "at the end of the pipe")

If anything, the UK is at the head of the pipe with regards to European LNG imports: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-26/britain-n...

I just hope that both sides are sensible: Europe is relying on UK LNG terminals to import gas; the UK is relying on European storage facilities.

I'm curious, do we actually have higher taxes than most other countries and if so in which specific areas?

Personally a well paid individual no dependants I find the Tory focus on cutting taxes ridiculous but I'm aware I'm ignorant of how we compare to other countries.

France really feels like they're building towards serious trouble in the near future. The gap between the discounted electricity costs paid by consumers and the actual underlying wholesale prices is only widening (to the point I think they may even have the lowest consumer costs and highest wholesale prices in Europe, or at least not far off), and that basically all has to be subsidised by the government using debt. They're also part of the Eurozone which is founded on common agreements on government debt, and they're at twice the debt cap and rising. The general consensus is that they cannot stop doing this without serious civil unrest and likely widespread rioting which seems well founded in past events. Energy prices are not the only problem - they have more generous retirement policies than other countries, for example - but changing those other things is just as intolerable.

Privatizing everything is great when things are going well. When the shit hits the fan it's nice for elected representatives to be able to force essential utilities to lose money.

Ah, but what many might not grasp about (British) politics is that when the S.H.T.F it is traditional for the UK to vote in the 'other lot' (be that Labour or Conservatives) since the current lot 'are a useless bunch of twats'. This has the advantage of the 'new' government being able to blame all the current problems on the 'old lot'.

Rinse and Repeat ad infinitum

I suggest you look at how much natural gas is used by the chemical industry, in Germany ~25% of the natural gas consumed is consumed by non-energy related uses as in not heating, electricity production, smelting cooking etc, with ammonia and fertilizer production accounting for about 15% of total consumption alone.

That isn’t a small percentage and those industries have an enormous knock on effect globally there is a reason why the UN put the shortage of chemical fertilizers as one of the top priorities.

Cheaper electricity won’t solve that problem and the gas prices must come down because otherwise food prices would sky rocket world wide and we will be at a severe risk of having famine in developing countries.

And whilst there are other alternatives to natural gas such as gasification which is popular in China that still requires biomass and countries like Germany cannot simply shift their production to gasification for both environmental and practical reasons.

It would be an interesting case study for leaders around the world - confiscate a huge chunk of liberty and you will have a fringe protest, lose a few thousand pounds from chequebooks and you will have blood.

If electricity doesn't come down enough in price, I fear it will take a lot longer than 2040. IF the price of electricity can be brought down below the price of natural gas per unit of energy, many use cases (the low hanging fruits) can be replaced relatively quickly.

Over the last couple of decades, though, the electricity price in Germany seems to have risen sharply, even when not including the last year.

It seems to me that many of the energy related policies in many countries have been focusing way to much on symbolism, instead of minimizing the price while also limiting actual harm to the population and the environment as much as possible. And when the price of electricity doesn't come down, consumers want to use it for as few things as possible.

So we should start increasing capacity now :)

And the first step is to have a realistic plan to make electricity as cheap and abundant as possible, as soon as possible, while still minimizing pollution.

Also, every step helps. If we cut consumption in half, we halve the rate of global warming (at least). It's not like its all-or-nothing.

> Edit: Big power retail companies in the UK are making record profits, and so is generation.

The largest gas provider in UK (British Gas) profits in millions of pounds:

2009 147

2010 226

2011 258

2012 291

2013 153

2014 96

2015 73

2016 43

2017 11

2018 8

2019 -5

2020 27

I couldn't find more recent data but please provide it if you have it. These are in millions of pounds. Suppose their profit jumped to 100 million pounds (4x the 2020 profits). Do you think 100 MILLION pounds would solve the problem? To put this in context, public sector fuel and energy expenditure in 2021 was 456 BILLION. And this is only public sector. Profits aren't even a rounding error.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/521474/centrica-energy-e...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/298887/united-kingdom-uk...

> This is well beyond ‘market prices will fix this’ - market prices will mean a very large chunk of the population will literally be unable to afford to cook dinner and heat their houses.

Advocating for "market prices" doesn't necessarily mean letting everyone fend for themselves. You can provide grants/subsidies for the poor, while still keeping market prices so everyone is still incentivized to save as much energy as possible.

>Edit: Big power retail companies in the UK are making record profits, and so is generation.

Sounds like a great way to discourage investment and make future shortages even worse. The energy industry runs on a boom-bust cycle. Why bother investing for the boom years (ie. right now) when you know the government is going to seize all your profits?

COP is not efficiency. Efficiency is what you did / what you had the resources to do in an ideal world.

That makes thermal chemical heating 20-50% efficient, thermal electric heating 10-30% and heat pumps 50-70% efficient (depending on where you draw the boundaries).

You could also draw the limit at reduced carnot efficiency rather than reversibility, in which case heat pumps can be close to 100%

It's not like this was an earthquake that we idly knew would come one day that just suddenly hit us out of the blue.

NATO made a deliberate decision to bring Ukraine into the fold in 2019 and Russia reacted predictably, but not before giving us an opportunity to back down first: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/02/world/europe/us-nato-resp...

We dove into this knowing full well the dire energy risks that escalation posed to Europe and are now acting shocked that we didnt prepare.

Even now Stoltenburg's official line is basically "suck it up, Europe" which I assume means that NATO leadership is perfectly comfortable with the idea of a European economic disaster this winter.

The solutions you mentioned are all great in theory but the workable ones mostly all have a 5-10 year horizon and we have a problem now.

"Of course foreigners steal your job, but maybe, if someone without contacts, money, or speaking the language steals your job, you're shit." ~ Louis C. K.

But sadly yes, Europeans tend to have better English than the English.

It's not about training, it's about control and low pay. Much like US' h1b, but with a clearer path to citizenship and better rights for workers.

The problem with the approach of "tax this and tax that" is that it often ends up hurting the lower and middle classes the most.

I am very skeptical about any new taxes aiming for wealth distribution that are not very explicit about who should pay that tax.

I think there are phase transitions happening in terms of how much the population can accept. And usually these occurs rather quickly, after a prolonged stalement. Let's see if the current upper class can read the signs before a critical threshold is reaches.

>Tax those who can afford it to help those that can't.

So...tax those whose income is higher than Latty's income - 1 pound? I am sure you can afford it.

A new progressive tax regime requires a lot of research, consultations, political capitals, and most importantly, time. We don't have a lot of time right now.

I can’t say why. But work seems to have no “gravity”.

Like in my brother’s government job, coming into office was a given. You could have serious career repercussions if you were slacking off.

Then the lockdown happened and work moved online. Everyone was slacking off, including the managers.

Now they’ve got in-office mandates again but some of the workers just don’t come in when they don’t fee like it and just log in from home. And no one seems to care or even mind.

Work has started feeling optional, not essential.

General attitude is obvious, people just don't care as much about their jobs as they used to.

The WFH thing is an example - people have started to treat going to work as some sort of optional annoyance.

> It doesn't map to any intuitive understanding, it does not communicate anything about how much heating could be done with that energy

But that's exactly what it does. It's technically wrong, but communicates the understanding that you put 100% of electrical energy into it and get 250-450% of heating energy for your home out of it, as opposed to 100% with resistive heating. That some of the electrical energy comes out of the air outside or from the ground is irrelevant for most people.

What are absurd claims you reference?

That would be shareholders. ie profits accruing from other people's hard work should be taxed heavily.

> Nobody forced NATO to expand to Ukraine either

Cut the Russian propaganda, NATO didn't expand to Ukraine. Ukraine, a sovereign country, wanted to join NATO, as is their every right. Denying Ukraine that right and excusing Russia's war crimes is pretty bad.

In theory, in practice the very rich pay an effective tax rate of around 20%, because they can turn it into capital gains and dividends with lower rates than income tax.

So we need to increase taxes there rather than income tax, and, I would personally argue, begin taxing wealth rather than just income when people have millions of pounds of assets.

Of course, I'd also argue we should have higher bands, once we fix the other problems and people are actually paying those rates. Paying say, 60% over a million pounds of income seems totally reasonable for me. You've already got a huge amount of income at that point taxed at a lower rate. You can afford to pay more, and should want to in order to get a better society to live in.

Denmark's highest income tax rate is 55.90% [1].

Britain had a 95% tax rate in the 1960s, as heard in "Taxman" by the Beatles "There's one for you, nineteen for me" [2].

[1] https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/denmark/individual/taxes-on-per...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxman

The US used to have rates of 70% or higher for the highest brackets[1]. There's plenty of headroom vs. historical norms.

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/historical-income-tax-rates-bracke...

> But it isn't? For e.g. outside sheds (heated to 7°C) the COP can theoretically go up to 27. For solar panels, the highest theoretical efficiency is well below 100% and the bound isn't communicated.

That's just another way of saying that framing it as efficiency and disregarding that you're moving heat from a colder reservoir is incredibly misleading. Now the marketing department can put a giant "1300% efficient*" sticker on the dual use heat pump even though it's worse for heating to 24C. A heat pump is fundamentally moving heat. It's in the name. (Heat created + heat moved) / work in does not map to an intuitive or technical notion of efficiency, and framing it that way is encouraging a mental model which is not just quantitatively off, but fundamentally wrong. It's also a distinction that is subtle enough that it is very hard to see while you are confused. This is the almost worst kind communication failure (maybe just after using a dimensionless number for insulation, or using kilo for kibi) because it's so hard to correct. It leaks into other domains and destroys communication, allowing marketers to lie, and requiring a constant treadmill of new terms to fix.

> For solar panels, the highest theoretical efficiency is well below 100% and the bound isn't communicated.

The absolute bound is carnot efficiency, which is about 80% for coupling to the sun. This is close enough that out/in is fine. Additionally out/in is the correct model because you are converting energy not movng it. 'Simple silicon cells can't exceed about 35% efficiency because they need to pick whether to waste energy in blue light or ignore energy in infrared' is the only other piece of information needed to convert that to a quantitatively and physically complete model. You can even communicate it succinctly by drawing a rectangle on a black body diagram.

> saying in school maths that you can't take the square root of -1.

This is also anti-education and a far worse sin because it is crushing one of the few moments where mathematics might actually be learned in a maths class instead of rote algorithm memorization. A teacher should never ever say this. Far better to say something along the lines of "that's a question that doesn't have an answer when we're talking about numbers on the number line, come talk to me about it later". Or "it's really cool that you're thinking about that, here's the khan academy and wiki pages, write a letter telling me all about it instead of your normal homework". Or even "think about it and tell me what you think the answer should be".

> Alas, the world doesn't operate based on the moral principles you imply, but cold hard realpolitik. Actions have consequences in the great power game between nation states.

If there's anything the Russian invasion of Ukraine isn't, it's realpolitik. Invading a country because "they aren't a real country and they should be ours" is as far as the cold practicality of realpolitik as possible. (Unless you choose to believe Russia's propaganda that it was all due to NATO's expansion, which even if true is even stupider - check Finland and Sweden which joined). Invading with the walking clown of an excuse of an army is also pretty far from practical considerations.

> The Russian economy is doing fine, business with India and China is thriving.

What are you basing this on? Have you checked their official interest rates, inflation rates (of course a bucket of salt is to be applied with those) and the warnings from the central bank governess? Not only is their economy not doing great, they are still yet to feel the effects of being cut off from industrial machinery and electronics they used to rely on. China and India can't replace all their planes, tractors, cars, trucks, phones, computers.

> "Massive losses to their army" I believe is far from accurate

Well thankfully people are actively working on this so we don't have to "believe" into anything. We have cold hard data from the ground in OSINT, compiled by volunteers such as Oryx. The fog of war is certainly obscuring things, but it's plainly obvious to see that Russian losses are massive in absolute and relative terms, in men and matériel. And the Russian army confirms that itself by the type of machines it fields (they've started reactivating obsolete tanks from the reserves) and it's desperate recruitment drives.

> The Russian economy is doing fine, business with India and China is thriving. "Massive losses to their army" I believe is far from accurate. I'll be greatly surprised if at the end of this, Ukraine isn't economically destroyed, geographically devastated. Territories lost will remain lost, and the deaths of so many people will have been for nothing more than furthering the geopolitical and industrial interests of the main instigators.

1,000 tanks and close to 45k soldiers either KIA or WIA is not “massive losses”?. The world thought Russia had years worth of tanks, turns out it only took 6 months before they started breaking out the the 4 man T62s.

Well, we put Georgia on a NATO membership action plan after years of meddling in their politics and that triggered the invasion in 2008.

Ukraine isnt the first time this happened. It's just this time stirring up ethnic conflict along Russia's border is causing us to really suffer.

> What I care about is that when I go to book a driving test, I can get one. I could do that pre-2020. I now can't.

Sounds like a supply and demand problem. The marker solution would be to increase wages for driving testers and attract more candidates to these positions.

The NHS is great. I've lived my life with access to it and in a society provided for by it, and wouldn't trade it for anything. Taxes have paid for it, and should continue to do so.

What alternative are you offering? Not taxing anyone much leaves us with a society that simply doesn't function, we see that right now. FUD about "well, they could tax the wrong people" is pretty irrelevant when we are already in a situation where most people are facing poverty and ruin. If this is all we can expect, then might as well roll the dice on doing it right.

Of course, the idea there is no way to actually tax the rich is absurd, we can do it, we have just had decades of government with no will to do so.

Nah, the alternative was to not close everything down :)

I don't want to go extreme at all; centralising economies has the worst track record of starvation and killing in all of history. I'm just wondering what the plan was :)

An incentive for the wealthy to split their companies up and sell them off, rather than creating giant megacorps with outsize impact on consumers and society?

Oh no, sounds terrible. /s