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How the U.K. broke its own economy

theatlantic.com

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Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#401

Post by moooo99 »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #295
notTooFarGone wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#402

Post by toyg »

> 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.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#403

Post by throwaway2037 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #350
throwaway2037 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minus the last sentence, this is a great point. Do any downvoters have any issue with everything but the last sentence? If anything, the Netherlands is probably Europe's most intensely developed country. There is hardly a square meter that hasn't been carefully planned out over the last 500 years.

The Netherlands still produces 64% more CO2 per capita compared to France, despite having only 45% higher GDP per capita. And France has way more dirty industry, if we looked purely at power generation they would look even better. This is what significant investment in nuclear does. Even the countries that invested the most in renewables can't beat it, yet. I'm very curious to see how long it will take the renewable-…

Many great points. Thank you to reply. I have read a few times calling the UK the "Saudi Arabia of Wind". I must say: They have a metric-ton of great sites, both onshore and offshore for wind. That said, great sites don't automatically become energy production sites unless they get funded, approved, and built.

    > France has way more dirty industry
I'm not here nitpick, but do you have source? I know, this one is very hard to debate. On a per capita basis, the ports of Rotterdam and IJmuiden must have a staggering amount of polluting industry (steel, chemical, etc.) And, while Antwerp (Belgium) port isn't in Netherlands, it is literally right on the border. From Google maps sky-view, you can many, many chemical plants in the area. To be clear for all readers: I'm not here to point the finger specifically at NL/BE as being any worse than other highly developed nations.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#404

Post by mantas »

willvarfar wrote: post #382
riffraff wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 las…

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

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#405

Post by monkey_monkey »

lenkite wrote: post #250
tw04 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven’t, which is why you have no citation just a ridiculous, unproven anecdote. There are literally hundreds of turbines in my area, there are not and have never been “birds piling up under them.” Your own link further down estimates 4-18 per year. 1 bird per month would be gone before you had a chance to collect it, much less have a chance to “pile up”.

I am honestly surprised - you should see dead birds at-least a couple of times a week. Not annually or monthly, but weekly esp for a full wind-farm like what you are stating. Which part of the world do you live in ? It is possible that the location of the farm was chosen wisely. Are you also sure someone is not clearing the corpses ? There are laws mandating the collection of corpses in many western nations. My perso…

> My personal anecdotal opinion is that data is more honest in the non-Western nations since nobody cares about bird-deaths all that much and so the deaths are not sanitized.

that was funny

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#406

Post by yodelshady »

blibble wrote: post #228
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #80

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.

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

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.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#407

Post by randunel »

rich_sasha wrote: post #345
marliechiller wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#408

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

smcl wrote: post #348
Nursie wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#409

Post by howerj »

hadlock wrote: post #321
curo wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#410

Post by littlestymaar »

moooo99 wrote: post #400
littlestymaar wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 el…

> 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.

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